Living Proof (The Charlie Resnick Mysteries 7) Read online

  An Asian family sat off on its own, near the door, the man in a brown suit, bandage lopsided about his head, his wife in a sari, pale blue and green, carpet slippers on her feet, a small child, little more than a baby, sleeping fitfully inside her arms. Close to Resnick, a middle-aged man with tight gray hair and lined face, wearing someone’s cast-off Fair Isle pullover pocked with holes and small burns, sat smoking a cigarette, after each drag carefully tapping the ash into the empty can of Strongbow cider clenched between his knees.

  The nurse Resnick intercepted was wearing a sister’s uniform and the badge on its lapel told him her name was Geraldine McAllister. Almost certainly she was older, but all she looked was twenty-five or -six.

  “Excuse me,” Resnick said. “But you had somebody brought in earlier, a stab wound …”

  “We had several.”

  “This one …”

  “Three, to be exact.” Resnick had expected Irish and what he got was Scots, not broad but unmistakable, musical.

  “The one I’m interested in …” he began.

  She was looking at the warrant card he held out in one hand. “That would be John Smith, then, I expect.”

  “Is that his name?”

  She smiled. “Probably not. But we had to call him something. He refused to give a name.” The smile was still there, broader if anything. “Not very inventive, is it?”

  “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”

  “Than be inventive? I doubt that. Not round here.”

  “Gerry,” a male nurse called from round a curtain, “can you take a look at this a minute?”

  “You,” she said to Resnick. “Inspector. Don’t go. Two shakes now and I’ll be back.”

  One small emergency extended into another and it was not so far short of half an hour before they were sitting in a cramped office behind the receptionist’s desk. A polystyrene cup of lukewarm gray coffee sat, unwanted, between Resnick’s feet.

  Gerry McAllister held an x-ray in her hand, slanted up towards the light. “You can see, the wound isn’t very deep, a couple of inches at most. Even so,” she shook her head, “a little bit higher and to the left …”

  Her hair was not chestnut as Resnick had first supposed, but auburn, redder at the ends than at the roots. And she was older, a cross-hatch of worry lines around her eyes. Thirty-four or -five?

  “Was it consistent with, I mean, did it seem to have been made with a knife?”

  “Rather than what? A knitting needle, something like that?”

  It hadn’t been precisely what Resnick had in mind.

  “A couple of weeks back,” Gerry McAllister said, “we had this woman come in. She’d flagged down a taxi on the road; didn’t have any money, but the driver brought her here just the same. There was a knitting needle sticking out from the corner of her eye.”

  Automatically, Resnick cast his mind back, trying to recall whether the incident had been reported.

  “There’d been a row at home, apparently. Things had got out of hand.”

  Resnick nodded. “Boyfriend or husband?”

  The sister shook her head firmly. “Mother. Should they go to the bingo or stay in and watch Blind Date.” She smiled. “Alarming, isn’t it, the way things get blown up out of all proportion? Arguing like that over something like Blind Date.”

  “Our Mr. Smith,” Resnick said. “He didn’t say anything about how he came to be stabbed?”

  “My hand slipped a little on the needle,” Gerry said, “when I was giving him his injection. Punctured the skin more than I’d intended. He didn’t even open his mouth then.”

  Resnick grinned and got to his feet.

  “I’ve checked up on the ward, it’s okay for you to go up and see him. Maybe he’ll talk to you,” she said.

  Resnick doubted that were true, but thanked Gerry McAllister and followed her out of the room. Immediately, three voices were calling her from three different directions, each as urgent as the next.

  The anonymous victim had been put into a side ward, which he shared with two men way past pensionable age and a nervous-looking youth whose bed was marked “Nil by Mouth.”

  He was lying on his side, face towards the wall, a tray of barely browned toast and soggy cereal on the bedside cabinet, untouched.

  “Not hungry?” Resnick asked, pulling out a chair and setting it down close to the bed.

  The man raised his head enough to look into Resnick’s eyes, then rolled away.

  “Whatever happened,” Resnick said, “you were lucky. Lucky someone found you, brought you to us; lucky to be here. That whoever did this wasn’t stronger.”

  He reached out and, without force, rested his hand on the upper edge of the sheet, bone and flesh of the man’s shoulder beneath. At his touch, the man flinched but nothing more.

  “Listen,” Resnick said, “if there’s somebody out there attacking men, men who put themselves in a vulnerable position—we need to bring them in. If we don’t, well, you understand what I’m saying. The next person might not get off as easy as you.” His voice was soft beneath the squeak of passing trolley wheels, the muffled inanities of breakfast television from the main ward. “You wouldn’t want to be responsible for that, would you? Someone dying?”

  Beneath his hand, Resnick felt the muscles tighten through the loose flesh of the man’s arm.

  “Whatever you were up to, last night, no reason that shouldn’t remain your business. No need to broadcast it around. Time to time, we all do things we’d rather nobody else knew. Family. Friends. It’s something I can understand.”

  For an answer, the man shuffled farther across the bed, shrugging off Resnick’s hand; sheet and blanket he pulled up until they half-covered his head.

  Resnick leaned low across him, close enough to sense the damp ripeness of the man’s sweat. His fear.

  “Think on what I’ve said. Talk to us. Cooperate. You’ll find it easier all around.” Resnick raised his head and then, almost as an afterthought: “There is a charge, you know, obstructing the police in the course of their duties.”

  He took a card from his wallet and slipped it between the man’s reluctant fingers.

  “I’ll be waiting for you to call me. Don’t leave it too long.”

  Five

  “Yes, madam,” the uniformed PC was saying to the old lady at Enquiries, “of course I can arrange for the Crime Prevention Officer to call round. If you’ll just let me have your name and address and phone number, then he’ll get in touch with you and agree a time.”

  Resnick stepped around the woman as she fumbled in her handbag for the scrap of paper on which she had scribbled all the details down. “I’ve just moved, you see, and I forget …”

  Off to the right of the stairs, a repetitive yelling came from the direction of the police cells, the same two words, over and over, deadened of all meaning. “Hold it down in there,” came the custody sergeant’s voice. “I said, hold it down!”

  Resnick grinned into the silence that followed. The newly appointed custody sergeant had been transferred from Central CID; six foot three, boots that shone whenever he was on duty, and shirts that were always freshly ironed. Most Saturdays he played alongside Divine in the Force’s first XV and when he said hold it down, only the most drunken or foolish disobeyed.

  Resnick turned left at the head of the stairs, towards the birdlike clamor of phones.

  “CID. DC Kellogg speaking …”

  “CID. DC Naylor …”

  “CID …”

  “Graham,” Resnick raised a hand in greeting as he threaded his way between the rows of desks towards his office. “Any chance of a cup of tea?”

  “Kev,” Millington said, looking across at Naylor. “Mash for us, will you?”

  Naylor drew the telephone away from his face, one hand clamped across the mouthpiece. “Mark, you’re not doing anything.”

  “Lynn,” Divine began, noticing that she was on her feet, “while you’re up …”

  “Don’t,”
Lynn shook her head, “as much as think about it.”

  “Chuffin’ hell!” Divine moaned, heading for the kettle. “At least when Dipak was still here, you could count on him to fall for it.”

  Overhearing, Lynn treated him to a look that would have stripped several layers of wallpaper. Although off duty, DC Dipak Patel had intervened in a brawl in the city center and been fatally stabbed for his trouble: he had been a close colleague and a good friend.

  “What I meant,” Divine grinned, seizing his chance to wind her up, “one good thing about encouraging all these minorities into the Force, they’re so grateful to be here, they don’t mind doing a few chores.”

  “Yes?” Lynn was out from behind her desk, blocking his path. “All these minorities? Take a look, Mark. How many can you see?”

  “Aside from you, you mean?”

  “All right,” Millington said, setting himself between them. “Shut it. The pair of you.”

  “The pair …” Lynn began.

  “Enough!” Like a referee about to issue a yellow card, Millington raised a hand in the air and glared. Lynn held his gaze for ten, twenty seconds, before turning aside, and grudgingly resuming her seat.

  Blowing her a kiss over Millington’s shoulder, Divine wandered across towards the kettle.

  “And you,” Millington said quietly, coming up behind Divine as he was flipping tea bags into the pot, “don’t be so quick with your mouth. That way you might give what you call a brain a bit more of a chance.”

  There were three Home Office circulars waiting on Resnick’s desk for him to read, initial, and pass on; a subscription renewal form for Police Review; and information about a forthcoming course on the computer analysis of fingerprints at Bramshill College. Resnick pushed these to one side and shuffled through his drawer, searching for the flier from the newly refurbished Old Vic—the Stan Tracey Duo were playing that season and, if at all possible, he didn’t want to miss them.

  “Boss?” Millington knocked and entered, two mugs of tea precariously balanced in his one hand.

  Resnick reached out and relieved him of one of the mugs, found a space to set it down; was it Millington or his wife, he wondered, who’d selected that particular shade of olive green from the suit rack in Marks and Spencer’s?

  “Ram raiding,” Millington said, helping himself to a seat. “Buggers have come up with a new twist.”

  Resnick sipped his tea and waited; over the past eighteen months there’d been a dramatic increase in the number of robberies carried out with the aid of stolen cars. As a method it was bog simple: drive the car fast through the front window of a city center shop, jump out, grab what you can, either slam the car into reverse and drive back out or run like fuck.

  “Bloke out at Wollaton, just back in from tending his begonias—holly-leafed, apparently, not so easy to grow … anyway, sat himself down to watch a spot of racing, wife about to do the honors with the biscuit barrel and a pot of Earl Grey, when this four-year-old Ford Escort comes steaming up his front drive, detours across the lawn, smack into the conservatory at the side of the house.”

  “After his prize blooms, then, Graham?” Resnick asked. But Millington was not to be diverted.

  “Old boy grabbed the fire tongs and went off to repel boarders, while his missus phoned us. These three youths were into the house through the side door, knocked him flying, concussion, had the old lady tied up with the telephone wire, and went out of there in five minutes flat. Half a dozen cups gone from his trophy cabinet, silver medals, jewelry box from the bedroom, her fur coat, watch, thirty-five-piece ruby wedding dinner service, didn’t as much as bother with the VCR.”

  “The couple, how’re they doing?”

  “Shook up, who wouldn’t be? Keeping him in Queen’s for a few days’ observation. She’s got a daughter, come to stay.”

  “Leads?”

  “Car was stolen the day before, shopping center out at Bulwell. Found abandoned a few hours later, not so far short of Cinder-hill.”

  “Wouldn’t be much left of it, then.”

  “Four wheels and a chassis.”

  Resnick had a mouthful more tea. “Didn’t Reg Cossall have something going over that way somewhere?”

  “Broxtowe, yes. Still has. Urban Youth Initiative, that’s the official name for it. Won’t tell you what Reg calls it.”

  “Have a word, then, Graham. Might tie in with something, someone he’s got tabs on.”

  “Right.”

  “Meantime, description of what’s missing …”

  “On its way round today. Long as we can keep forgetting the photocopy budget.”

  There was a knock and in response to Resnick’s “Come in,” Divine’s head and shoulders appeared round the edge of the door.

  “Kev and me are just off up the Forest. I was wondering, bloke in the hospital, anything useful?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Not as much as a name. How about Vice? Anything from them?”

  “Low profile last night, as it happens. Promised to put the word out today, though. Turn up anything, they’ll let us know.”

  “Okay, Mark. Oh, and if Lynn’s still there …”

  But Lynn Kellogg was already in the doorway. “Break-ins in the Park. Five in total. Close enough to be the work of the same team. Several reports of an old post office van in the area, could have been using it to haul the stuff away in.”

  Resnick nodded. “Cool your heels on that for an hour, will you? Fellow who was stabbed last night, he’s out at Queen’s, refusing to say a word. Get yourself down there, see what you can do.”

  “Right, sir, will that be Mata Hari, then, or Florence Nightingale?”

  Resnick looked at her carefully and she was a long way from smiling.

  “Don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask any more if it’s the time of the month?” Millington said, after Lynn had closed the door.

  “No, Graham. You’re not.”

  Millington shrugged inside his olive-green suit and sucked on his upper lip. “This party I’m getting up to go to Trent Bridge, first Saturday of the Test, you’ve not changed your mind?”

  But Resnick was already shaking his head. Watching County of a Saturday afternoon through the winter was one thing—all the speed and excitement of plant germination, but at least it was over in an hour and a half. Whereas cricket …

  “Oh,” Millington said, a last thought as he left Resnick’s office. “Skelton wants to see you. Something about shots in the park?” And he was off, wandering in the direction of the teapot, lips puckered together as he whistled thoughtfully through the opening verse of “Sailor.” An early hit of Petula’s, but a good one.

  Six

  When Resnick knocked and entered, Skelton was standing behind his desk, looking at the first of several sheets of fax paper which were curling around his hand.

  “Charlie, come on in.”

  Resnick recognized neither of the other people in the room, a man and a woman rising to greet him, the man stepping forward with an uncertain smile.

  “Charlie, this is David Tyrell, Program Director of Shots in the Dark. Detective Inspector Resnick, CID.”

  Tyrell was tall, taller than Resnick by an inch or more, bespectacled, his already slim body made slimmer by a suit that Resnick wagered cost more than a season ticket to County plus change.

  “Inspector, good to meet you.”

  Tyrell’s handshake was strong, the eyes behind the glasses unblinking, but his skin had the pallor of someone who has spent too long out of the light.

  “This is Mollie,” Tyrell said. “My assistant.”

  “Mollie Hansen. Assistant Director, Marketing.” Her grip was quick and cool and those five words enough to mark her as a Geordie, strayed from home. She stood there a moment longer, taking in Resnick with slate-gray eyes, the pinch of blood where he had nicked himself shaving, the speck of something yellow crusted to his lapel. A widening of her mouth, not yet a smile, and she stepped back—scarlet T-shirt, Doc Martens, jeans.


  “You know this festival, Charlie? The one Mr. Tyrell’s responsible for.”

  “Not really.”

  Over by the side wall, Mollie Hansen sighed.

  “Why don’t we all sit down?” Skelton suggested. “See what we’ve got.”

  Tyrell crossed his legs, drew a cigarette packet from his pocket, and, almost in the same gesture, pushed it back from sight. “Shots has been running four years. It’s a crime and mystery festival, films mainly, TV more recently, books as well. Each year we invite special guests, stars, I suppose you’d call them, to some extent built the program around them. You know, Quentin Tarantino, Sara Paretsky, people like that.”

  Knowing neither of them, Resnick nodded. He felt the strength of Mollie Hansen’s gaze, weighing him up for what she thought he was.

  “This year,” Tyrell continued, “we’ve got Curtis Woolfe. The director. His first public appearance in fifteen years.”

  “Sixteen,” Mollie said quietly.

  Tyrell ignored her and carried on. “For the book side of things, we’ve managed to get Cathy Jordan to come over from the States. Which is great.”

  “Except …” began Mollie.

  “Except she’s been receiving threatening letters.”

  “Which is why we’ve come to you.”

  Cathy Jordan, Resnick was thinking. Jordan. He wondered if he should know the name, wondered if he did. The last crime novel he’d tried to read had been an old Leslie Charteris found inside a chest of drawers he’d bought in an auction at the Cattle Market. He had never finished it.

  Skelton was holding the faxed copies out towards him and Resnick stood and took them from his hand. The words were typed and faint, not easy to read.

  You know, I really do think you’ve been allowed to pursue what is after all a very limited talent altogether too far.

  It’s one thing, of course, for people who should know better to be taken to the point where they will award you prizes, quite another for you to have the brazen effrontery to accept them.