Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(4)

The risotto was followed by pork loin with red cabbage and sweet potatoes, crème br?lée, and a plethora of cheeses.

“Do you cook yourself, Charlie?” Alex asked, helping himself to more wine. “Master of the nouvelle cuisine?”

“Can’t say as I get much of a chance.”

“Lucky to find a woman then who can. Who can do it as well as this.” Alex raised his glass. “Hannah, we owe you a vote of thanks.”

Jane reached over and squeezed her hand and Resnick wondered why he should be feeling embarrassed on Hannah’s behalf when she obviously seemed so pleased.

“And now,” Alex said, “if you could pass me a smidgen more of that delicious cheese. Yes, that’s it, the Vignote.”

They took their coffee through into the living room and Hannah surprised Resnick by playing the Billie Holiday compilation he had given her for her birthday and which she seemed to have ignored ever since.

“This doesn’t sound like you,” Jane remarked with a smile, Billie stalking her way through “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”

“Charlie gave it to me.”

“Educating you, is he?” said Alex.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I like it anyway,” Jane said. “Don’t you, Alex?”

Alex jinked his cup against its saucer. “All right for selling lipstick to, I suppose, Italian cars. Modishly moody. Just a shame she can’t really sing.”

Resnick bit his tongue.

Hannah had lit candles, three of them in glass holders, and they burned with a thick vanilla scent. The bed was in the center of the attic room, low between rugs, two pine chests of drawers. A cloud of orange city light spun down from twin skylights, angled toward each other from either side of the sloping roof.

Resnick had washed the dinner things, Hannah had dried and put away. They had sat ten minutes longer in the front room, enjoying the silence, the virtual dark. Now Hannah was on her side, knees pulled up under the hem of the oversize T-shirt she wore in bed, and Resnick lay close in behind her, one arm running along the pillow between Hannah’s shoulder and chin.

“So?”

“So what?”

“Was it as awful as you thought?”

“Who said I thought it would be awful?”

“Oh, Charlie, come on! Your face, your voice, everything about you. You were mooching around downstairs before they came like someone waiting for—I don’t know—something dreadful.”

“Like waiting for the dentist, you mean.”

“Funny!”

Resnick edged forward a touch more and angled his arm downward so his hand could cup one of Hannah’s breasts.

“Seriously,” she said, “what did you think of them?”

“They were okay. I liked her. Quiet, but she seemed nice enough. She’s fond of you. Alex, I’m not so sure. Small doses, maybe.”

“And together, as a couple?”

“I don’t know … they seemed to get on well enough, I suppose.”

Hannah turned over to face him, dislodging his hand from her breast. “He’s a bully, Charlie. He bullies her. It upsets me to see it, it really does.”

Slowly, she rolled away from him and when Resnick reached out for her he felt her tense against his hand.





Three

At a quarter to six that morning, the air was raw; mist silvered across the flat expanse of the park and the Asian taxi-driver waiting for Resnick at the corner of Gloucester Avenue sat rubbing gloved hands.

“Why don’t you leave some of your things here?” Hannah had suggested once. “There’s plenty of room. Then you could go straight to work without having to get us both up at the crack of dawn. You could walk it in ten minutes.”

But there had been the cats—there were always, for the foreseeable future, the cats. So whenever Resnick stayed over the alarm was set for five thirty and, one of his older jackets he’d forgotten aside, Hannah’s wardrobe remained her own. Despite his assurances that she didn’t need to get up with him, she persisted in doing so, making coffee for him and tea for herself; once Resnick left, taking a second cup back to bed and reading and dozing her way through the next hour.

Resnick’s return was always greeted with preening disdain by the largest of his four cats, Dizzy presenting him with a proud backside and running ahead of him along the length of stone wall that skirted the drive, jumping down and waiting with studied impatience by the front door.

By the time Resnick had showered, changed, fed the cats, made toast and more coffee for himself, and driven the short distance across town to the Canning Circus station, it was close to half past eight. Carl Vincent had more or less finished getting the night’s files ready for Resnick’s inspection and was wolfing down a bacon and egg sandwich he’d fetched from the canteen. In the corner of the CID room, on the cabinets alongside Resnick’s partitioned office, the kettle was simmering, ready to make tea for the assembling officers.

“Much activity?” Resnick asked.

Vincent swallowed too hastily and came close to choking. “Not really,” he finally managed. “Quiet. One thing, though. Those paintings we thought someone was trying to lift a few months back. One of those big houses in the Park. April, was it? May?” He opened the file and pointed. “Here. Someone broke into the place last night. Had them both away.”