“What’s pissing you off?” Grabianski asked.
Grice depressed the accelerator and laughed. “This is pissed off?”
“You tell me.”
“Eleven thirty this morning, that was pissed off.”
“Your day got better?”
“Better beyond belief.”
“I’m glad.”
Grice measured the distance between a milk truck and the central bollard almost to perfection.
“Whatever it is,” said Grabianski, both hands tight against the dash, arms tensed, “do you have to celebrate this enthusiastically?”
“’S’he doing delivering milk this time of day, anyway? Gone three in the afternoon. He early or late or what?” He glanced over at Grabianski, who was just easing back in his seat and starting to breathe more freely. “You know what’s the best way to break your arms, don’t you? We hit anything, seat belt’s not going to do your arms one bit of good, you got them braced like that. Snap!”
Grice lifted his hands from the steering wheel long enough to clap them together loudly in front of his face.
“How far are we going?” Grabianski asked. Unless he sat well down in the seat, the upholstery of the roof touched against his head.
“Relax,” Grice said, “we’re almost there.”
Grabianski nodded and looked through the side window. Super-save Furnishings were offering a 40 percent discount on all beds, settees and three-piece suites, free delivery: green and blue plaid moquette or dimpled red plastic with a fur trim seemed to be the popular styles.
They found a parking space between a Porsche and a gleaming red Ferrari with personalized number plates. The house was four stories, broad and glowering Victorian gothic. High above the arched front doorway, panes of stained glass caught at what was already late-afternoon light.
“I didn’t know we were working,” Grabianski said, looking up towards a pair of circular turrets at either end of the roof.
“We’re not.”
Grice slipped off his glove, took a ring of keys from his pocket and used one to open the front door.
The entrance hall was harlequin-tiled and marble-edged; the stairs broad and thickly carpeted, and there were dying pot plants on each landing. Outside one of the doors two bottles of milk were turning to a creamy green. Grice fingered a second key into the lock of flat number seven, top floor.
“We’ll have to get that changed,” he said, pushing the door open over a collection of free newspapers and amazing offers from Reader’s Digest. “Anyone who fancied it could get through there easy as breathing.”
He walked along a short corridor and into a long room with high windows on one side and a slanting roof on the other.
“Servants’ quarters,” he said, pointing towards the windows. “Never wanted them to see the light of day, did they?”
Grabianski poked at a dark ridge in the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “What are we doing?” he said.
“Moving in.”
Resnick had tried the number three times without getting a response. He had driven out to the house and knocked on the door, rung the bell. For twenty minutes he had parked on the opposite side of the road, leaning back with a copy of the local paper spread across the wheel. A woman with a shopping basket on wheels walked past him, slowly, twice; up along the opposite pavement, back down this one. Finally, a man in his sixties, wearing a blue track suit and leading a small Yorkshire terrier, tapped on the window.
Resnick folded his paper, wound the window midway down and smiled.
“I don’t like to bother you, but …”
“Mrs. Roy,” said Resnick, nodding in the direction of the detached house across the road.
“Yes, I believe she’s …”
“She’s out.”
“Yes.”
The man stood there, gazing in. The dog was probably cocking its leg at the wheels of Resnick’s car.
“I think she left at lunchtime,” the man offered. “When I took Alice for her midday walk the car was there in the drive-the Mini, that’s hers-but then as we came back I couldn’t help noticing that it was gone.” He paused, gave a short tug on the lead. “I’ve no idea when she might be back.”
Resnick took his warrant card from his pocket and opened it under the man’s nose.
“Oh. Oh. Of course, there was a burglary. Just the other day.” He shook his head. “It still happens, doesn’t seem to matter how vigilant you are, they still get away with it. I mean, I know you do your best, but, then, there’s only so much you can do. I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? More of them than there are of you. A measure of the way things have changed. That and other things.” He leaned a little closer. “Do you know they were three weeks after the last bank holiday before they came and emptied our dustbins and only then after I’d telephoned each morning at eight sharp; four mornings on the trot, that’s what it took. And, of course, when they did finally come, it was the usual torrent of bad language and litter and such left scattered the length of the drive.”
Resnick rewound the window, switched on the ignition and put the car in gear; if he waited until the good neighbor got to his conclusion about the way the country was going to rack and ruin, he might have felt obliged to ask him which way he’d voted at the last couple of elections.
He would call in at Jeff Harrison’s station on the way back and see if the PC who’d spoken to Maria Roy had returned. If not, there was plenty to attend to back on his own patch, and little about this to suggest it was urgent.
As he turned the car around and headed back the way he had come, he was wondering why the alarm system at the Roy house had apparently failed to function.
“Took me till twelve o’clock to screw an extra hundred out of this imbecile in the showroom and even then, God is my witness, I had to walk almost to the door twice. So, by a little after 12.30 I’ve had a couple of halves and a scotch and without really knowing why, I’m inside this estate agent’s, pretending to look at properties between forty and sixty thousand, when what I’m really doing is looking round the edge of the desk at this woman in red boots.”
Grice was sitting on a reversed wooden chair, with his heels tucked into the rungs at the side. He had a can of Swan Light in his hands and the rest of the six-pack was behind him on the table. “Get something non-alcoholic,” he’d told Grabianski. “One thing I can’t stand, failing asleep in the middle of the day.” It was somewhere between four and five and Grabianski, who wasn’t drinking anything, was in the only easy chair in the room, staring back at Grice and trying hard to seem interested.
“She comes over and asks if she can help and I point at a few things and joke about mortgages and so on and then I’m telling her I’m probably only going to be in the city for a few months and buying anything’s really out of order. ‘Work?’ she asked and I nod. ‘Short-term contract?’ I nod again and mumble something and I don’t know if she mishears me or guesses or what, but she says, ‘Oh, you’re working out at the television studio,’ and I say, ‘Yes, that’s right,’ and she gets this bright little look in her eye and asks me if I’d mind waiting there a minute, which, of course, I don’t, so, she goes off and when she comes back five minutes later she’s got these papers fastened to her clipboard and she asks if I’d be interested in renting somewhere on an agreed temporary basis.”
Grice swallowed some 1 percent lager and belched. “I sit down at her desk and she explains they’ve had this flat on the market for over a year and no way can they sell it. Half the people who look at it say it’s too dark, and the ones that don’t care about that all pull out when their surveys show them there’s damp coming through from the roof above the kitchen and the bathroom, and half a dozen attempts to patch it up haven’t done a scrap of good. Seems the only answer is to take off the whole roof and have it renewed and there’s no way of that happening because it would need all the other flat owners to kick in with five hundred and they’re not listening. ‘Why don’t you take over the tenancy for three months? That way, at least we’re getting something back for the owner.’ I can see she’s on a hiding to nothing and it takes me less than ten minutes to knock fifty a month off the rent.”