“Just as soon as the doctor’s had a look at him, Charlie. It’s all in hand.” Resnick turned towards Len Lawrence, the chief inspector, a man who’d once read a novel full of earthy Midlands grit and had believed it.
“Anything special, was it, Charlie?”
Resnick shook his head. “Common or garden interest. Following the trail of blood. You know how it is. Instinct.”
“Thought maybe you were seeing how the other half lives.”
“Pounding the streets, you mean? Out amongst the real folk.”
“Something like that.”
“We get our fair share, you know.”
“CID. Thought it was all white-collar crime for you lot. New technology. Voice prints and visual identification courtesy of the nearest VDU.”
Resnick stepped past the chief inspector, out into the corridor. From one of the cells came a sudden, startled shout, as if someone had woken out of a dream, not knowing where he was.
“My sergeant acquit himself all right this morning?” Resnick asked.
“Loved every minute of it, didn’t he? Had his shoes shining so bright, could’ve trimmed his mustache in them.”
Probably had, Resnick thought on his way up the stairs. Somewhere early in his career, someone influential had told Millington that a smart appearance at all times was the one sure way to the top. In the drawer of his desk he kept, alongside the necessary forms and a copy of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984, a zip-up bag containing shoe-cleaning gear, a needle and thread for sewing back on stray buttons and a pair of nail scissors in a crocodile case. Resnick presumed it was those Millington had been using when he went to the gents and found tiny trimmings of hair trapped against the porcelain of the sink.
It was Graham Millington, too, and not Resnick, who was interested in the uses of computer-based technology. Aside from the superintendent’s, his had been the only name signed up for a weekend seminar at the Home Office Scientific Research and Development Branch down in sunny Hertfordshire.
The door to the CID room was ajar and through the glass panel Resnick could see Mark Divine single-fingering his way through a scene-of-crime report as though the typewriter had only been invented the day before yesterday.
So much for the new technology!
Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were talking energetically about something urgent, over towards the rear of the room. None of them as much as noticed his arrival.
His own office was a partitioned section, a quarter of the room immediately to the right of the main door. He would have taken bets on Millington being behind his desk and he would have won.
“All right for size, Graham?”
Millington flushed, banged his knee on the edge of the desk trying to get up, juggled with the telephone but clung on to it at the third attempt.
“It’s for you, sir,” he said, handing the receiver towards Resnick.
“Thought it might be.”
“Yes, sir.”
Resnick took the phone, making no attempt to speak into it. Millington hesitated by the door.
“Spare me five minutes, Graham, fill me in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Later.”
Millington drew in air, nodded, closed the office door behind him.
“Hallo,” Resnick said into the phone, moving aside some papers so that he could sit on the corner of his desk. “DI Resnick.”
“Tom Parker, Charlie.”
“Morning, sir.” Tom Parker was the detective chief inspector based at the central station and each morning that Resnick was on duty he would call through and discuss what was happening on his patch.
“Thought you were taking time off?”
“An hour, sir. Personal.”
“The house?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’re buggers, Charlie. Never find the one you want and if you do, you can never get shot of it.”
Thanks! Resnick thought. He said nothing.
“You remember that little spate of break-ins, a year back, Charlie? Late spring, was it?”
“March, sir.”
March the second: Resnick had gone to a club in the city to hear Red Rodney, a jazz trumpeter who had worked with Charlie Parker. In his sixties, three months after having surgery on his mouth, Rodney had played long, elastic lines, spluttering sets of notes that cut across the changes; for the final number he had torn through the high-speed unison passages at the start of Parker’s “Shaw ’Nuff’ with a British alto player, unrehearsed, inch perfect.
Resnick had gone into the station the following morning, the sounds still replaying inside his head, to be greeted by Patel with a mug of tea and news of another burglary. Five in a row and that had been the last. Big houses, all of them. Alarms. Neighborhood watch. Money and jewelry and traveler’s checks. Credit cards. Heavy with insurance.
“Out at Edwalton, Charlie. Reported this morning. Same MO. Thought it might be worth your while taking a drive out. Might give us a chance to see if those suspicions of yours were correct.”
Resnick said he’d get on to it first thing, just as soon as he’d had a briefing from his sergeant.
Come on, come on, Graham Millington was thinking, half an eye on his superior through the glass. Don’t make a meal out of it. There’s some of us with a day’s work ahead of us. Himself and young Divine had a Chinaman to talk to concerning an overturned five-gallon container of cooking oil and an inadvertently struck match.
When Resnick opened the door from his office, Millington swung his leg off his desk and stood up.
Three
Jerzy Grabianski had been born within sight of the white cliffs of Dover, but that was never quite enough to make him feel truly English. His family-those of them lacking the scruples or sentiment that would have prohibited them from grabbing an overcoat and a length of smoked sausage and leaving everything else behind-had quit Poland in 1939. Variously, they had walked, run, bicycled (his grandmother and his elder sister sharing a crossbar in front of his father’s strong, pumping legs), clung to sides of already overcrowded cattle trucks, hid beneath the tarpaulin of coal barges, again walked, until the leather of their boots wore through to their socks which wore through to their feet, which bled and blistered and finally hardened but never enough.
They had a strong imperative.
On 1 September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland on three fronts; on the 17th, Russia came through the fourth. By the 28th Warsaw had fallen and on the following day Germany and Russia sat down to divide the country between them.
The Grabianskis left Lodz, where most of them had worked in textile factories, and made their trek west. By way of Czechoslovakia, Austria and Switzerland, they crossed the border into France at La Chaux de Fonds, at the bridge over the Doubs River. Most of them. Waking that last morning, they had realized that Krystyna, Jerzy’s sister, was not huddled beneath her grandmother’s greatcoat, ready to rub the sleep from her eyes.
It took them several hours of circling and retracing their steps before they found her, floating face down near the western shore of Lake Neuchâtel, one arm hooked around the broken oar that someone had thrown adrift. They pulled her on to the land and pressed and pummeled at her thin, breastless chest, but all that happened was that she got colder and stiffer. The broken oar was the shovel with which they dug the shallow grave in which to bury her. She had been eleven years old.
Her father-Jerzy’s father-unclasped the string of wooden beads from around Krystyna’s neck and kept it close until it was lost one black night when he parachuted out over the English Channel. But that was 1944.
The remaining family had split up, some to stay in what soon became Vichy France, others to head for England where they lived as close to the Polish government-in-exile of General Sikorski as was possible. Battersea: Clapham Common: Lambeth. Jerry’s father had joined the air force in France, utilizing his skills as a navigator; when France fell he flew bomber campaigns over Germany with the RAF until the war ended. He was not a man easily deflected from a course once he had set his mind to it, and being spilled into the freezing Channel only made him more determined.