Cutting Edge (7 page)

“Where is she?”

“At my mother’s.”

Kevin Naylor sighed and looked away.

“Is that wrong? Is it? Well? What’s wrong with that, Kevin? What’s so terrible about that?”

He got up and crossed the room, opening drawers, closing them.

“Well?”

“What’s wrong,” he said, facing her, fighting to keep his voice calm, “is that’s where she was this morning, yesterday, the day before.”

“So?”

Kevin made a sound somewhere between a snort and a harsh, humorless laugh.

“She is my mother, Kevin. She is the baby’s grandmother. It’s only natural …”

“That she should look after her all the time?”

“It isn’t all the time.”

“Good as.”

“She’s helping …”

“Helping!”

“Kevin, please! I get tired. You know I get tired. I can’t help it. I …”

He stood at the end of the bed, staring down at her in disgust, waiting for the tears to start. There. “If want to see my own child,” he said, “I have to make a phone call, make sure she isn’t sleeping, get back into the car and drive half-way across the fucking city!”

He slammed the door so that it shook against its hinges. Switched on the radio so that he couldn’t hear the sound of her sobbing. On either side of them, television sets were turned up in direct retaliation. At least, Kevin thought, when their kids cry I can sodding hear them.

There were tins of baked beans in the cupboard, packets of soup, chicken and leek, chicken and asparagus, plain chicken; four or five slices of white bread inside the wrapper but outside the bread bin. Eggs. Always too many of those. He could send out for a pizza, drive off for a take-away, curry or Chinese.

On the radio someone was pontificating about mad cow disease, the effects it might have on children, force-fed beefburgers for school dinners. Kevin switched it off and instantly he could hear Debbie, bawling. He switched back on, changed stations. Del Shannon. Gem-AM. Poor sod who shot himself. Well …

There was one can of lager left in the back of the fridge and he opened it, tossing the ring pull on to the side and taking the can into the living room. If Debbie’s mother were there, she’d be tut-tutting, Kevin, you’re not going to drink that without a glass, surely? But she wasn’t there, was she? Back in her own little semi in Basford, caravan outside the front window and his bloody kid asleep in her spare room.

He scooped the remote control from beside the armchair and pressed Channel Three. Might as well have the whole street watching together, synchronized bloody viewing. Nothing on he wanted till the football at half past ten, bit of boxing.

Thinking of going over the side
, Lynn had said in the canteen. Maybe, he thought, over the side and never coming back.

When Tim Fletcher woke he saw the roses and then he saw Sarah Leonard and he knew something wasn’t right. She was standing at an angle to the bed; her staff nurse’s uniform had been exchanged for a long, beige cotton coat, broad belt loosely tied and high epaulettes. Maybe she was still wearing the uniform underneath, but he didn’t think so.

“Karen …” he said.

“She went a long time ago.”

Fletcher nodded.

“Girls her age,” Sarah said, “they get restless. Haven’t the patience.”

She was, Fletcher thought, what, all of twenty-seven herself, twenty-eight.

“I just popped in,” she said, “to see how you were getting on.”

“How am I?”

She smiled. “You’re the doctor.”

He glanced down at his pillows. “You couldn’t …”

“Prop you up a bit? I expect so.”

She leaned him forward against her shoulder as she plumped and patted the pillows, the inside of his arm pressing against her breast. “Overtime, this.” Her face was close and he could feel her breath. Sarah leaned him back into the pillows and stood back.

“Thanks.”

“There’s nothing else you want?”

Fully awake now, the pain was back in his leg, not sharp the way he might have imagined, but dull, persistent, throbbing. A nerve twitched suddenly in his hand and he winced, twice, biting down into his bottom lip. At least there was still a nerve there to twitch. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

She raised her head. “I’ll look in tomorrow.” She was almost out of earshot when his voice brought her back.

“You off home now?”

“Soon.”

“Walking?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful.”

Resnick arrived home to find the front door open on the latch and Miles pressing his nose against it while Pepper nervously kept watch. His immediate thought was that the house had been burgled, but a quick check proved this not to be so. Bud was lying on the top step of the stairs, ready for flight. Dizzy and Ed Silver were neither of them to be seen, off about their business, hard into the night.

Ed’s note was propped against the edge of the frying pan,
Out for a quick one, back soon
. He had washed the plate but not the knife and fork, rinsed out his cup and left the tea stewing dark and cold inside the pot. Three tea bags. The bacon and the sausage he had found in Resnick’s fridge, the oven chips he would have had to fetch from the grocer’s on the main road. Also, the half-bottle of cheap Greek brandy, empty between the cats’ bowls.

Resnick picked up Bud and nuzzled him, conscious of the animal’s ribs like something made from a kit, balsa wood and glue. He dropped his coat over the back of a chair and, carrying the cat with him, pulled an Ellington album from the shelf. “Jack the Bear,” “Take the A Train,” “KoKo.” His friend, Ben Riley, twelve years in the job before he left for America, had sent him a card from New York.
Charlie-Finally got to take the “A” train. Head-to-toe graffiti, inside and out, and anyone white gets off below 110th Street. Stay home. Stick to the music
. Ben, he’d stayed there: Resnick hadn’t heard from him in more than two years, four.

Ed Silver had scorned the Czech Budweiser and Resnick opened a bottle and slowly drank it as he sliced a small onion carefully into rounds and overlapped them along two slices of dark rye bread. He covered these with Polish ham, then cut slivers of Jarlsberg cheese. Backtracking to the fridge, he found one solitary pickled cucumber, set rounds of this on the ham, then added the cheese.

The grill was gathering heat when he stood the sandwiches, open-faced, beneath it and finished the first beer, rolling his hand across his stomach as he reached for another.

When the cheese was brown and bubbling, he forked some coleslaw on to a plate, used a slice to lift up the sandwiches and set them down next to the coleslaw, balanced two jars of mustard, Dijon and mixed grain, on the rim, pushed his index finger down into the neck of the Budweiser bottle and headed back for the living room.

Ben Webster was just beginning his solo on “Cotton Tail,” rolling that phrase over the rhythm section, springy and strong from Blanton’s bass, round and round and rich, like rolling it round a barrel of treacle. Just when it seemed to have become stuck, sharp little phrases from the brass digging it out, and then the saxophone lifting itself with more and more urgency, up, up and into the next chorus.

Resnick wondered what it must be like, being able to do anything with such force, such grace. Would he see Ed Silver that evening or the next and in what state? You spent half a lifetime striving to reach a point of perfection and then one night, one day, for no reason that any onlooker could see, you opened your fingers and watched as it all slipped away.

In their two-bedroom, two-story house, Debbie Naylor had fallen back to sleep, mouth open, lightly snoring. Kevin still sat in the chair before the television, watching, soundlessly, as two boxers moved around the square ring, feinting, parrying, never quite connecting.

Tim Fletcher lay on his back, awake in the half-light, counting stitches, trying to sleep.

Like a metronome, the even click of Sarah Leonard’s low heels, along the pavement leading from the bridge.

Ten

Debbie Naylor stood looking down at her sleeping husband, alone save for the blue hum of the TV. The first time she had seen him, a friend had pointed him out, standing at the edge of half-a-dozen men at the bar, neither quite one of them nor alone. It hadn’t been until he was driving her home, oh, three weeks later, home where she still lived with her parents, Basford, that he had told her what he did.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Why?”

“You just are.”

She had learned, some of it soon enough, the rest later. After the lunchtime meetings, Sunday afternoons with her family, Kevin embarrassed, wanting to leave; after the jokes from her friends at the office, the wedding with all of Kevin’s friends, tall and short-haired and already three-parts drunk, lining up to kiss her open-mouthed; not above, some of them, trying to cop a feel through the brocade of her wedding dress. Posing for the photographer, one of the bridesmaids had jumped in front of them, slipped a pair of handcuffs over their wrists.

After the honeymoon, the collision of late nights and early mornings; evenings with dinner in the oven and drying out, dreading the phone call that would, almost inevitably, come. Just a quick half. Wind down. With the lads. You know how it is.

She knew.

When Kevin had been accepted for CID it got better and then it got worse. Put your foot down, her mother had said, else he’ll walk all over you.

Better, Debbie had thought, than walking out.

She stood there, gazing down at him, asleep in the chair, looking little different at three and twenty than he had at nineteen. She couldn’t believe that after all that had happened in the past four years, he was still the same. When she was so different.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

Kevin didn’t hear her. She wanted to go down, carefully, to her knees and feel the side of her face against the warmth of his neck. Instead she left the room, puffing the door to but not closing it, not wanting to disturb him.

Alone, Kevin stirred and, waking, heard the soft thunk of the freezer door; Debbie, he thought, sneaking out for another pigging midnight feast.

The cats heard the phone moments before Resnick himself, jumping down from the bed and scuttling towards the bedroom door. Resnick blinked and groaned, lifting the receiver at only the second attempt.

“Yes?” he said, scarcely recognizing his own voice. “What is it?”

He listened for less than a minute then set down the receiver. He had sat up for too long, hoping that Ed Silver might return, chasing the Budweiser with shots of vodka brought back by a friend from Cracow, the real thing. Setting his feet to the floor gingerly, he pushed himself up and padded to the kitchen. Miles and Bud had beaten him to it and were sniffing at their empty bowls expectantly. Pepper, who had taken to sleeping in an old plastic colander, yawned a greeting and reclosed his eyes, forgetting to put the red tip of his tongue back inside his mouth.

Knowing he was unlikely to get back to sleep, Resnick made coffee, drank half and put the remainder into a flask which he carried out to the car. Overhead lights shone a dull orange along the empty street. He went straight across the lights at the Forest, keeping the cemetery to his right. One last prostitute lingered against the wall near the next junction, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, face pale in the glow of her last cigarette.

When he began driving Resnick hadn’t known for certain where he was going, but now he did.

Large blocks of brick and glass, by day the hospital didn’t have enough character to be ugly. By night, most of its lights extinguished, some of them burning here and there, it was more inviting, mysterious. Resnick went slowly around the one-way system and parked fifty yards short of the medical school entrance.

A few swallows of black coffee and he took a torch from the compartment alongside the dash, locked the car and started to walk towards the bridge. It was a good hour later than the time Fletcher had been attacked, the flow of traffic was sporadic, there was no one else on foot. A short avenue of bushes and trees separated the hospital from the road. He flicked the torch on and shone it up the metal spiral before beginning to climb. Whoever had followed the houseman had either come directly after him from the hospital, or taken this route up from the road. This way, Resnick reasoned, pausing as his head came level with the glass above. Less likely to create suspicion, loitering about; easier to wait for your victim, pick him out.