“Then anything prior to that …”
“Those little cards.”
“And you threw them out, once they’d been transferred.”
“You’re joking. That’s what I wanted to do, would have done if I’d had my way, but, no, the manager he said five years you’ve got to keep them, five years.” She leaned across the desk towards him and Resnick could clearly see the hard edges of the contact lenses on her pupils. “That’s not a law, is it? Five years?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“See. I told him. Not that he listens to anything I say, apart from no and even that I have to shout.”
“They’re accessible?” Resnick asked.
“What?”
“If it was important, you could get at them easily?”
“Is it important?”
“Very.”
She blinked at Resnick, not wanting to go scrabbling about in the office, manager staring at her backside, dragging out a lot of old filing cabinets, dust up her nose and under her fingernails.
“It would be a great help,” Resnick said encouragingly.
Lezli made a show of sighing and went away, returning over five minutes later with three six-by-four card cabinets, balanced uneasily one on top of another. She set them on the counter and went in search of some tissues to dust them down with.
“That’s not all five years?” Resnick asked.
“Three,” she said as if defying him to demand the rest.
Resnick wasn’t one to push his luck unless he was sure it was likely to pay off. He leafed through a tourist brochure for the county while Lezli shuffled the cards. The information came to hand with surprising ease.
“You want me to write this all down?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Grabianski had given as his address the registered offices of G amp; G Textiles and Leisurewear, Milton Keynes; he had stayed at the hotel twice before in the last three years, several weeks each time and only on this current occasion had he cut short his visit.
Resnick looked at the receptionist with renewed interest. “He checked out today?”
She shook her head. “I could have told you that without going through all this palaver. Three days ago. Something urgent had cropped up. He didn’t say, but I reckon it was at home, wife taken ill or something.”
“He’s married then?”
Lezli nodded emphatically. “He’s never said, but you can always tell. I can.” To my cost, she thought.
Resnick took the sheet of hotel notepaper with the dates; he was pretty certain that one period coincided with the previous run of break-ins they were investigating, overlapped at least.
“Thanks,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
Lezli watched him go with some interest; she still couldn’t get it out of her head there might be a camera hidden somewhere. That was how they did it, wasn’t it? Those programs. Through the glass of the doors she saw Resnick climbing into his car. She didn’t think it could have been for the telly, otherwise they’d have made him smarten himself up a bit, surely? Done something about the heavy creases in his clothes, that dreadful tie.
One thing she was certain of-unlike that Mr. Grabianski, Inspector Resnick didn’t have a wife at home looking after him.
Nineteen
It was the key scene of the episode. Having won in excess of a million pounds and taped expensive sticking plaster over his festering marriage, the principal male character is returning from a board meeting of the pizza chain he has set up with part of his new fortune. His fellow directors have turned on him and taken control of everything from his expense-account BMW to his plans to launch a new fruit-and-salami takeaway special. Distressed and close to violence, he arrives home at the mock-gothic paradise in which he has installed his family to find his wife in flagrante delicto in the swimming pool with the newspaper delivery boy. It was a tense and marvelous dramatic moment and Harold couldn’t seem to get it right.
“I’m coming down!” he screamed into his microphone and leaped from his control-room chair.
“Harold’s coming on to the floor,” relayed the floor manager.
“Oh, shit,” came a voice over somebody’s talk-back, resigned.
The actress playing the wife was having the straps at the back of her bikini top retied and a little more body cosmetic applied to tone down the goose-bumps. The husband was pacing the studio floor, trying to retain the mood, remember the awful lines he had been given. The delivery boy, a youthful twenty-year-old with a gold earring and the residue of serious acne, was feeling up one of the makeup girls beneath her shiny blue overall.
“Trouble, Harold?” Mackenzie strolled on to the set with all the natural instincts of a shark sensing blood.
“Nothing that can’t be sorted.”
Mackenzie wasn’t about to be easily convinced. Harold threw an arm around the leading actor’s shoulders and drew him further to one side. “Listen, love, what you’re doing, it’s working beautifully for me, only it’s just the tiniest bit too-what can I say? — internalized.”
The actor looked at him in disbelief.
“You come home, you’ve been shafted, you feel shattered, you’re seeking consolation and what do you find instead? I know all that rage you’re feeling, the shock, absolute desolation; it’s there for me, but I think you’ve got to give us a little more. Outside. Show it.”
“What you mean, Harold, is you want ham, three inches thick.”
“Energy, that’s what I want” Harold gave the actor’s shoulders an encouraging squeeze. “Think what’s happening here. You see her, dripping water from the pool you bought her, the pool she’s been cuckolding you in, and you want to kill her. I don’t just want to see that, I want to feel it, smell it. Okay?”
“Yes, Harold. Understood.”
“Great! Terrific!” Harold spun away and clapped his hands. “Okay,” he called to the floor manager. “Soon as I get back upstairs.”
“Ready to go again, everyone,” cried the floor manager. Today her baseball boots were emerald green with blue numbers over the ankles; her sweatshirt expressed faded support for the Washington Redskins. “Quiet, please! Be still!”
“Right,” said Harold, flinging himself at his chair and turning back the pages of his camera script to the top of the scene. “This is the one!”
“All I’m saying is,” said Robert Deleval with hushed urgency, “if this scene isn’t made to work, the whole thing falls apart.”
Sitting next to the writer in the glass-paneled box behind the control room, the trainee design assistant switched her gum from one side of her mouth to the other and feigned interest.
“Without this,” hissed the writer, “nothing else really makes sense.”
“Nothing?”
“Exactly. It’s central to an understanding of what the piece is about.”
“Well, I suppose I can see it’s …”
“No, it is the script. The core.” Robert Deleval had one knee on the upholstered bench seat, both hands waving in the trainee’s face. “This is where the whole narrative comes together.” He jumped to his feet and carried on waving his arms. “The primary drive of the story, the themes of money and betrayal, all that stuff that’s been swimming around in the subtext, this is where it all comes to the surface. Right there in that confrontation by the pool. Don’t you see?”
She was staring up at him, slowly shaking her head. In about half an hour they should be breaking for lunch.
Deleval punched his fists against his thighs. “On one level, it’s pool as in football pools, on the other, pool as in undercurrent. If fucking Harold can’t make this work …”
“Yes?”
“We’re sunk.”
“Ready?” Harold asked.
Alongside him, Diane Woolf ran her tongue across her lower lip, hands over the buttons of the console; somehow she was managing to look at the colored annotations she had made to her script at the same time as all three camera monitors before her.
“Now or never,” she replied.
“Before we go,” Harold said into his mike.