“Harold …?”
Maria stepped in front of him, blocking his path to the front door. The look he gave her was harder, more strained than she could recall seeing before. Maybe this, all of this, was pushing him too far.
“Harold …”
“What?”
“When you, go, I mean, to talk to him … It is going to be all right?”
“Are you going to stand there in that thing all day?” he asked. “Or is there a chance you might get as far as the bathroom and swab down?”
“Milton Keynes,” Grabianski was saying, “the kind of deals they were offering, it would have been stupid to stay put. Brand new premises, low rates, corporation grants, credits—as against that there was this factory in Leicester, ventilation problems, heating, it would have taken us so far into the red putting it right, I doubt we’d ever have got out again.”
“So you relocated?”
“Lock, stock and machinery. Down to the land of the concrete cows.”
“Regrets?”
Grabianski shook his head. “The walking’s not what it was, but aside from that …”
“Walking?”
Grabianski settled back in the chair the inspector had offered him; relaxing into this, enjoying it. Another fifteen minutes or so and he would be in the car and on his way out to see Maria. Less than an hour and they’d be in bed. “Rambling, I suppose you’d call it. Hiking. Up the M1 from Leicester and you’d be in Monsal Dale before the mist had burnt off the hills.”
“That’s not what you’re here for now, here in the city?”
Grabianski smiled. “Wish it was. No: business, I’m afraid.” He sat forward again, an elbow resting on his knee. “We’ve still got connections up here, outlets. Sheffield, Manchester. Every so often I have to make the trip.”
“You do it all yourself? The traveling?”
“My partner or myself, depending.”
“You’ve got a partner?”
“Since I started, more or less.”
“Not the man you were with in the restaurant?”
“Last night? Yes.”
“You were both here, then? This time.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you said …”
“It depends. There was a lot to do, people to see.”
“Wholesalers.”
“That’s right. Sometimes it’s easier to spread the load.”
“While the factory runs itself in sunny Milton Keynes.”
“Like silk. Well, more like cotton. To be accurate.”
“Look,” said Resnick, “I mustn’t keep you.”
“No problem,” smiled Grabianski. “It’s good to talk.”
“Not many people,” said Resnick, standing, showing Grabianski towards the door, “would have got involved.”
“To be honest,” Grabianski had turned again, one shoulder almost resting against the door’s edge as he held it open, “if I’d thought about it, neither would I. But I suppose, I don’t know, something triggers you off and before you know it …” His smile broadened and he stepped out of the room, Resnick following.
“What d’you think it was?” Resnick asked, side by side in the corridor. “The trigger?”
“Oh, the girl, I suppose.”
“The waitress?”
“Yes.”
Resnick paused at the head of the stairs. “Nice to know the age of chivalry is being nurtured in the industrial heart of Milton Keynes.”
“Ah,” said Grabianski, “I’ve always been too much of a romantic. Friends say it’ll be my downfall.”
“Part of our national heritage,” Resnick suggested. “Yours and mine.”
“Facing up to invading tanks with the cavalry.”
“Something like that.”
They descended to the ground floor and Resnick turned the lock on the door that would let them into the entrance. Traffic sounded heavy on the road outside, the last build-up of the morning.
“I suppose it’s a hotel when you’re making these trips?” Resnick said. They were outside, on the top step.
“Afraid so.”
“Any one better than another?”
“King’s Court—at least the service is good.”
“If not the restaurant.”
“Sorry?”
“I meant, not so good it stops you eating out.”
Grabianski offered Resnick his hand. Two big men, standing together, wearing suits; tired, when you saw them close, around the eyes; they were both tired. For both of them it had been a long night: an early morning.
“This business,” Grabianski said, “I hope you get it sorted out.”
“Oh, we will. Eventually.”
“Take care.”
“You, too.”
Resnick watched as Grabianski walked along the pavement, turning left at the pedestrian lights and then right again opposite the entrance to the cemetery and what had once been a gents’ urinal.
“Patel,” he said, as soon as he was back into the CID room, “get on to the King’s Court Hotel. Mansfield Road, somewhere. A copy of their guest list, the last ten days.”
Harold Roy sat at the center of the control panel, the production secretary at his left. Diane Woolf, the vision mixer, on his right.
The bank of monitors in front of them showed three cameras at the ready, three different angles on a living room decorated in lavish bad taste, the house the
Dividends
family had moved to after their stroke of fortune. One of the cameras swung suddenly sideways, following a makeup girl’s tightly jeaned rear.
“Eye on the job in hand, John,” said Diane into the microphone.
“It was,” came the reply over talk-back.
“Can we go for this?” asked Harold on the floor.
“You don’t want to rehearse?”
“What was that we just did?”
There was a pause, squeaks of static and then: “Once more for sound, Harold, please.”
“Shit!” said Harold.
“You won’t say that if we get a boom shadow,” commented the sound engineer from the adjacent booth.
“It’s exactly what I’ll say.”
“We could be rehearsing this while we’re arguing,” said the floor manager.
Harold jammed both hands over his ears. “Do it,” he said. “Do it!”
The first actor made his entrance and immediately there was a gigantic boom shadow, smack across the back wall.
“Don’t anyone dare say I told you so.” Harold glared through the glass panel to where the sound engineer was busy relaying instructions to his operators.
“Lighting’s coming down, Harold.”
“In God’s name, what for now?”
“Just a tweak,” came the lighting man’s voice through one of the mikes.
“Jesus!” whispered Harold and looked at the clock.
“Here.” Diane Woolf prised back at the silver paper from another roll of extra-strong mints and passed them towards him. Harold took two, and crunched them both.
“Would you like some aspirin?” asked the production secretary, a manicured hand on his arm.
“I’d like to get something, just something, recorded before we break for lunch.”
“Harold?” It was Robert Deleval, querulous from the doorway. “Since we’ve stopped anyway, I was wondering if we could just change a couple of these lines?”
“Robert.”
“Yes?”
“Die!”
Resnick’s interview with the superintendent had been brief and strangely inconclusive; Skelton had seemed abstracted, his mind on other things.
“Chao’s not without friends in the city, Charlie. Wouldn’t hurt to bear that in mind.”
“Member of the golf club, is he, sir?”
“Charlie?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Only you know what Millington can be like if he feels stymied. If they’re all sitting there, playing stum. Might be a red rag to a bull.”
Red flag, Resnick thought.
“I’ll see he keeps the lid on it, sir.”
“Do that, Charlie.”
Skelton had sat there, looking at him; Resnick thinking, there are other people I have to see, things to do. “Anything else, sir?” said Resnick. “Only …”
“No. No, Charlie.” A deft sideways movement of the head; Lawton deflecting the ball into the net. “That’s all.”
Resnick had already passed Rees Stanley on to Divine, with instructions to his DC to pacify the man, find out whether any of his neighbors knew of the family’s plans to return early, suggest that he joined his local neighborhood watch. Jeff Harrison had phoned a third time and Resnick shuffled it to the back of his mind. Somehow he wasn’t anxious to talk to Jeff—especially if it were about what he feared it might be.
“Sir?”
Patel was waiting outside Resnick’s office, shoulders straightening a little more as the inspector approached. The constable was wearing a jacket with a fine check, slacks that had been staprest when they were last cleaned.
“King’s Court, sir. All their records are kept on computer.”
“And?”
Patel shook his head. “Some problem with it, apparently. Won’t print out.”
Resnick sighed. “I’ll drop by.”
The Barry Manilow record that Maria had put on when she went to the bathroom was little more than a muffled noise, a subdued thunk of amplified bass beneath occasional piano. Cigarette smoke smudged the light, surprisingly bright through the decorated lace at the bedroom window.
“You like that stuff?”
“Mmm. Don’t you?”
Grabianski didn’t know. He felt about music the way his partner felt about birds, large ones and small ones; with music it was slow ones and fast ones. Mostly these were slow ones.
“Hey!” cried Maria. “Yes?”
“That.”
“What?”
“What you’re doing.”
“That?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“Where did you learn to do that?”
Grabianski managed to maneuver himself on to his side without disturbing his right arm, the fingers of his right hand. He flicked his tongue a couple of times against the auricle of her ear and Maria seemed to shiver without moving. He did it some more and this time she moaned. He could remember clearly where he had learned to do that: and when. He had been fifteen and she had been the daughter of the caretaker, a skinny sixteen-year-old who wore spectacles and thick cotton knickers. There was a doorway, recessed into the rear wall of the building, deep enough to take both of their bodies, pressed close together. Aside from the girl’s parents, her aunts at Christmas and on her birthday, Grabianski didn’t think anyone had ever kissed her before. Not anywhere. Not with their tongue: certainly not against, around, inside her ear.
“Jerry.”
“That’s my name.”
“No, it’s not. Not really.”
“It’s close.”
“I know.”
“Close enough?”
“Mmm,” crooned Maria. “Mmmm.”
“After all,” Grabianski grinned, “what’s in a name?”
The King’s Court Hotel had been converted from a double-fronted family house with cellars and attics for the menials and menial tasks and out-buildings for the coach and horses. Now it catered for a new generation of computer-software salesmen, parents up for the weekend to visit their student offspring, Americans or Germans on thirty-day tours anxious to be photographed by the statue of Robin Hood. The receptionist assured Resnick there were no vacancies, pursed her lips at the sight of his warrant card and pushed at the edges of her perm with one hand, hoping there was a camera somewhere and they were on
Crimewatch.
She was in her indeterminate thirties, wearing a tight-fitting black jacket with significant shoulder pads and a badge that read Lezli. Not, Resnick guessed, the way it had been spelt on her baptismal certificate. Unless they had been blessed with a dyslexic vicar.
“You’re having problems with your computer,” Resnick said.
“I thought you were from the police?”
“That’s right.”
“Then what are you doing, coming out to service our computer?”
“I’m not.”
“Moonlighting, that’s what it’s called, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
But Lezli was having a quick fantasy about Bruce Willis, easy enough to slip into when you did the kind of job that kept her sitting hours on end, either talking to the wrong end of the telephone or talking to idiots. What on earth that Maddie reckoned she was doing keeping him at arm’s length for a couple of series, she couldn’t imagine. Her, she would have taken him down on the executive carpet before the first episode was halfway over. But then, that would have been real life, not television.
“Hello,” Resnick said.
“Yes?”
“About this computer I haven’t come to service.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance it’s working yet?”
Lezli shook her head and bit the end of her pencil. Five calls she’d made that morning and each time the same snot-nosed voice had promised her somebody would be out within the hour. Which hour, that was what she’d like to know.
Resnick decided to try another line—anything less and he’d lose her again. “How long ago did you make the switch?” he asked.
“Switch?”
“Putting all of your records on to disc.”
“Oh, let me see, that’d be about a year ago. Yes, somewhere around there. A year.”
“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.