Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(52)
And maybe, Resnick was thinking, he’s inside there now, unconscious, taken an overdose or worse. “Check back downstairs, Graham, see if there’s a spare key.”
There was, at least there was in theory; Divine himself had borrowed it, having lost his own, and it had never been returned.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Millington asked, eyeing the door.
“Likely, Graham.”
It only took one shoulder charge to soften it up, and then a foot, flat and hard, close to the lock.
The interior stank of rotting food, stale beer and cigarettes, unflushed urine but, thankfully, nothing worse. Of Divine there was no sign.
“Not scarpered, look. Not ’less he’s leaving all this stuff of his behind.”
Resnick scribbled a note, asking Divine to get in touch. Once again, he left his own numbers and Hannah’s as well. Millington, meantime, used the butcher’s phone to call a locksmith he knew and arranged to have the door fixed before the end of the day.
“I’ll keep an eye,” the butcher said. “Do me best to make sure no bugger slips up there, fills the place with needles and worse.”
“Right,” Resnick said, “thanks. And if you do spot him coming back himself, you might let us know. Graham here, or myself.”
“’Course. Can’t do you a deal on some nice chump chops, can I? Seeing as you’re here. Take one of these home,” he said to Millington, “put a smile on your missus’s face and no mistake.”
“Thanks,” said Resnick, shaking his head. “Not right now.”
Unwrap one of those within sniffing range of Madeleine, Millington was thinking, she’d get a look on her face, turn milk sour over a five-mile radius.
Twenty-eight
At first sight, he had taken it for a kestrel, but as it came closer, hovering above the shimmer of grass, the reddish underside and rounded wings marked it clearly as a young sparrowhawk.
Up here, from one of a number of wooden benches strategically placed around the area of some ancient burial ground, Grabianski could look down across a swathe of land that had been left to grow like meadow; the drying tops of grass blurred orange to bluish-brown and back again and, as Grabianski watched, alert, the sparrowhawk marked out its territory between an irregular triangle of oaks, firm against the occasional forays of crows.
At Grabianski’s back, purple foxgloves twined out of the sparse undergrowth, and two benches to his right a young woman with almost white hair lay on her back, eyes closed, a copy of Emily Dickinson open on her naked chest. The engraving on the bench against which Grabianski himself leaned read: Ethel Copland Campbell 1897-1987. Vegetarian. Socialist. Pacifist. It was that kind of a place.
He was trying not to think about paintings, forged or otherwise, not to think about his dealings with Vernon Thackray, Eddie Snow. And Resnick, a man whose word he trusted, who, on certain levels, he admired—someone whom, had their lives but shaken down differently, Grabianski might have been pleased to call a friend—how seriously did he have to take the threat of being fitted into a frame and locked in tight?
He watched as the hawk rode the air with the smallest movement of wings and then dropped, almost faster than he could follow, down into the grass and away, a vole or some such fast in its grasp.
Marvellous, Grabianski thought, as the bird was lost to sight between the branches of the farthest tree, how life did that, offered up those little scraps, parables for you to snack on, inwardly digest.
The lower reaches of Portobello were lined by barrows selling fruit and vegetables at knockdown prices, stripy watermelons sliced open, lemons tumbling yellow inside blue tissue. The same black guy, wearing a wide white shirt with a gathered yoke, winked at Grabianski from the doorway of the Market Bar and stepped aside to let him through.
Moving slowly toward the bar, letting his eyes become adjusted to the filtered light, Grabianski saw Eddie Snow seated in the far corner, talking earnestly to a youngish man with shoulder-length hair. The woman Grabianski had seen him with before, the model, was perched on a stool close by, flawless, bored.
Grabianski ordered his pint of beer and waited, certain Snow would have seen him; now it was a matter of form, of etiquette, waiting to see when and how that recognition would be acknowledged.
What happened was that the young woman leaned forward at a sign from Snow’s beckoning finger and after a brief discussion, got down from her stool and came to where Grabianski was standing, one arm against the surface of the bar.
“I’m Faron,” she said, and Grabianski nodded pleasantly, wondering if some of the things he’d read about her were true. He hadn’t recognized her before, not really, a face, thin and feral, like so many that stared out at him, big-eyed, from the fronts of glossy magazines. She was wearing shiny silver tights, clumpy thick-heeled shoes, and either a dress that was really a petticoat or a petticoat that was really a dress.
“Eddie says he’s busy.”
“I can see.”
“It’s important he says, like business. Is it okay for you to wait?”
Grabianski assured her that was fine; she made no move to walk away and when he offered her a drink she asked for an Absolut with ice and tonic and a slice of lemon not lime. According to her press releases she had been born and brought up in Hoxton, East London, one of five children, none of them named Faron nor anything like; the fashion editor for British Vogue had noticed her behind the till at a garage in Lea Bridge Road when she called in for petrol on her way back from a photo shoot in Epping Forest. Wearing one of those awful pink overalls, of course, oil and the Lord knows what underneath her fingernails, but those eyes, those tremendous waiflike eyes.