Last Rites (30 page)

Vincent was getting a round of drinks when Norman Mann pushed through the crowd and spun Resnick round by the shoulder. “If anyone had told me, you of all people, setting up one of my team behind my back. Not got the guts to tell me to my face.”

Resnick stood his ground, kept his silence: there wasn’t a great deal he could say.

“Well? What’s the matter, Charlie? Run out of halftruths, lies?”

“DCI Siddons,” Resnick said. “If there are questions you think need answering, maybe you’d be best off speaking to her.”

“What? You what?” Mann’s face contorted. “You shiftless bloody coward, hiding behind that tart’s skirts. You …” And he swung a fist.

Off balance, Resnick took the force of the blow high on his arm and it sent him stumbling back. Mann moved in for another punch, and Vincent and Millington grabbed him by the arms and held him fast.

“All right, all right. Okay. Let me go. Let me go.”

Millington glanced toward Resnick, and Resnick, straightening himself, nodded.

Freed, breathing heavily, Mann stood there a moment longer before turning on his heel and stalking away.

“Ought to control that temper of his,” Millington said. “Man of his age, overweight, drinks a bit, I dare say. Past forty.”

Resnick grinned.

“You okay?” Millington asked.

“Yes. Yes, thanks, Graham. I’m fine.”

“The way you took that shot, let him hit you, you know, sapping his strength. It was good to see.”

“Yes, well. Maybe next time I’ll try to duck.”

“Maybe next time he’ll punch straight.”

Resnick accepted Carl Vincent’s offer of a malt whisky and settled for a Laphroiag, more peaty than he was used to, but warm enough to burn away not the pain, more the embarrassment and the surprise. He tried to convince himself that Mann had been drinking too, an early belt from the bottle in his desk drawer. Something to explain a reaction so uncharacteristic, over the top. Resnick wanting to believe that rather than some more sinister implication: Norman blustering to cover up something he didn’t want to admit to, something to which he’d turned a blind eye for too long.

When he arrived home, an hour or so later, Lynn Kellogg’s car was parked in his drive, Lynn herself curled sideways across the driver’s seat, asleep.

Resnick let himself into the house, did his duty by the cats, set the kettle on to boil, and went back outside. Looking down at Lynn through the dusty glass, Resnick remembered the first time he had set eyes on her, six, almost seven years before. Lynn, redder of face, stockier, her native Norfolk burr more evident in her voice. He remembered another night, later than this, she and Naylor had been called out to a house not so many yards from where Hannah now lived. A young mother, out for the evening with a man she scarcely knew, the children, two of them, left with their grandmother across town. It was Lynn who had found—almost stumbled across—the body, the moon sliding out from the cloud in time for her to see the woman, partly clothed, stretched out beside the garden path, drying blood for ribbons in her hair.

The first dead body Lynn had seen.

Talking to her in the victim’s living room soon after the discovery, concerned to know how she was feeling, Resnick had caught her as she fell, a cup of sweet tea spilling from her hands. One side of her face had pressed, momentarily unconscious, against his chest, the fingers of one hand catching against one corner of his mouth.

A long time ago.

And now?

He realized she was stirring and took a pace away.

Rubbing her fists across her eyes, yawning, Lynn lowered the window. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to go back to the flat. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

Resnick nodded. “You’d best come on inside.”

“Are you sure it’s no bother?” But she was already getting out of the car.

They stood in the kitchen, Resnick between fridge and stove, Lynn close to the center of the room, one of the cats, curious, twisting in and out between her legs, occasionally nudging his head against her shins, the caps of her shoes. She was wearing a long cardigan, charcoal-gray, a pale-gray cotton top; navy-blue chinos, a pair of lace-up DMs that had once been bottle-green but had faded now to a chalky shade of black. Her hair was fudged up at one side where she had been sleeping.

“Do you want to talk?” Resnick said.

“No. Not yet.”

“Coffee, then? Kettle’s boiling. I can have it ready in a few minutes.”

Wanly, she smiled. “You know what I’d really like?”

“Tell me.”

“A bath. A nice, hot bath.”

Resnick smiled back, more a grin than a smile. “Wait here. Well, not here. I mean you don’t have to. Sit down. The front room. Over there. Anywhere. I’ll run the water now.”

Upstairs he checked the temperature from the taps, tipped in Radox and swirled it round, found a towel that was both dry and clean. Stepping out on to the landing, he heard music from below and, when he eased open the door to the living room, Lynn was sitting with her legs pulled up in one of the armchairs, Bud lying full length, belly up, along the crack between her chest and thigh, and the Mills Brothers were singing “Nevertheless.” He had left the CD on the machine.

This time, she woke up almost at once.

“Your bath’s running now. It won’t take very long.”

“Okay.” Lynn stretched and Bud moaned, and she rubbed her fingers along the length of his tummy and tickled his neck. His bones seemed impossibly fragile, impossibly close to the skin. “I just pressed play on the stereo, I hope you don’t mind?”

“Oh. No, of course not.” He nodded in the direction of the speakers. “Nevertheless” had become “I’ll Be Around.” “Funny old sound. Old-fashioned.”

“I like it.” Depositing Bud back on the chair, she headed for the door.

“You know where it is? It’s just along the first landing and …”

“I’ll find it, don’t worry.”

Resnick fidgeted around for a while, not knowing quite what to do. The Mills Brothers were starting to get on his nerves, too much of a good thing, and he replaced them with the Alex Welsh Band, changing them almost immediately—too bright and loud—for Spike Robinson playing Gershwin, nice melodic tenor sax.

He made coffee anyway, two cups, and carried one upstairs.

“Lynn?” He knocked softly on the bathroom door.

“Yes?”

She answered immediately. He’d thought the warm water might have lulled her back to sleep. “I’ve brought you up some coffee. I’ll leave it outside the door.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

From the hall, he heard the door open and then close. In the kitchen, he peeled and chopped first an onion, then a potato, the latter into pieces no bigger than the tip of his little finger. Butter and a splash of olive oil hissed in the pan and he dumped in both potato and onion, gave them a stir, and turned up the heat. From the fridge, he took a piece of chorizo and sliced it into rounds the thickness of a ten-pence piece. Eggs he broke into a basin and whisked, adding salt and pepper and the last inch from a pot of cream. By now, the potatoes were starting to stick, so he gave the pan an energetic shake. The bits he didn’t think the cats would eat from the floor, he shooed in the direction of the bin with last night’s paper.

“Something smells good.” Her hair was still wet and shone. Her gray top hung loose over her belt and her feet were bare.

“How was the bath?”

“Great. Perfect. If it hadn’t been for the thought of the water getting cold, I could have stayed there for hours. Soaked.”

“Then you’d have missed this.”

He added the sausage to the potato and onion, and cut an edge of butter into a second, smaller pan.

“Can I do anything?”

“Watch.”

When the surface was close to smoking, he gave the omelet mixture a final whisk, then poured it in. With a wooden spoon, he moved it around a little, let it settle, starting to pull it away from the edges when it threatened to set; a couple of good shakes and he added the contents of the first pan.

“You should be on television,” Lynn said.

Resnick grinned. “Radio, more like.”

She laughed. It was a good sound.

“There is something you can do,” he said. “Knives and forks, in that drawer over there.”

“Right. Plates?”

“That cupboard. About level with your head. You could put them just here.”

He divided the omelet into two and served it out.

“There’s bread,” he said, “in that bin. I forgot.”

“Butter?”

“On the side.”

They sat at the kitchen table, facing one another, Resnick’s face flushed from standing over the stove, Lynn’s from her bath.

“We should have some wine,” he said.

Lynn was already attacking her omelet with a fork. “Later. We don’t want this to spoil.”

“No, you’re right.”

There was a bottle of red in the cupboard, he thought, something Hannah had brought round and they’d never drunk. He didn’t know what it was, but guessed it would be okay.

Rarely, there was no music in the room. The curtains were still pulled back and though the light was starting to go, it was far from dark. They sat in the same easy chairs that Resnick and Elaine had bought, second-hand, at the start of their marriage, too comfortable to replace. The wine, indeed, was fine, though neither of them had so far gone beyond the first glass.

“I think,” Lynn said, “what I think now, although they never said, not outright, when they let him come home before, it was because there wasn’t anything more they could do for him. The cancer, it had spread too far.” She was sitting quite upright, legs tucked under her, running her fingers through the smallest cat’s fur as she talked. “But then—I don’t know—the pain got so much worse, suddenly, and they took him back in. His skin, it had become really yellow again, this kind of murky, bilious color; the thing they put in, inside him, to clear the obstruction to his liver, maybe it wasn’t working. Not properly.”

Reaching down, she took a sip of wine.

“When I got there, Mum was just sitting beside the bed, crying. Not making any sound, hardly, just crying. Dad was hooked up to all this stuff and he had a mask over his face. To help him breathe. One of those hard plastic masks.

“I don’t know how much anyone had said to Mum, if they’d said anything at all. She was so upset, confused, I doubt if she would have taken it in if they had. After a while, I went off and found a nurse and she told me as well as his liver, he was suffering from kidney failure. They’d made him as comfortable as they could. She didn’t think he was in too much pain. She said if I could stay a while longer the doctor would come and see me, explain.”

The clock across the room seemed unnaturally loud. Resnick moved the wineglass around in his hand, but didn’t drink.

“The doctor, when he came, he looked so young. Too young to be doing what he was doing. But he was nice, nice to Mum especially. There must be something you can do, she said, and he patted her hand. All we can do now, he said, is make sure he’s comfortable, not suffering any pain. I’m still not sure she understood what he was saying, what it meant. She kept on at him, you will do something, operate. He’d been sitting with her, on the edge of the bed, and got up and looked down at Dad, who’d been sleeping all the way through this. He’s lived a good life, he said, let him go in peace. No heroic measures. It wouldn’t be right, believe me. It wouldn’t do any good.”

“I’m sorry,” Resnick said.

Lynn sighed and rubbed a hand across her eyes as if to brush away tears, but for now there were none there.

“I sat with him, holding his hand. Talked, just a little, but I don’t know whether he heard. The sound of my voice, perhaps. Maybe he recognized that. Once or twice, he moved his head as if he wanted to try and say something and I leaned over and lifted away the mask, but all he could do was make these sounds, sort of low in his throat. His mouth, it was all dry; the skin flaking back from his lips.

“I do think he knew that we were there, Mum and me. The nurse said, why don’t you go? Go home for a while, get some sleep. But I couldn’t.” She sniffed and fumbled a tissue from inside her pocket. “Just before the end, he squeezed my hand, tried to. He …”

She stopped and looked, helpless, across the room. Resnick moved and, half-kneeling, held her till her face dropped forward on his shoulder and she cried. Sobbed.

And when the worst of it was over, her skin warm against him, his shirt wet from her tears, he kissed her on the neck and she twisted up her face and kissed him close alongside his mouth where her fingers had caught years before. “Lynn.” He said her name and she kissed him again, lips moving over his, the first touch of her tongue. “Lynn.” She wriggled her mouth away and he said, “I’m getting a cramp in my leg, I’ve got to move.” And then she laughed and so did he, and they were sprawled, half on the chair, half on the floor, the cat clambering between them.

“My wine,” she said, still laughing, though there were tears smudging the corners of her eyes. “I don’t think I can reach it from here.”

Resnick could, just, and he leaned across and handed it to her and they both drank, from the same glass, until it was empty. Then Lynn looked at him squarely and said, “I should go” and he said, “You don’t have to, you know,” and she said, “1 know. Thank you. But I think I will,” and she started to disentangle her legs from his until they were standing face to face, the dark around them, not quite touching.

At the door, he checked she was okay to drive and she assured him she’d be fine. He asked when was the funeral and she told him three days’ time. He almost said, did she want him to come, but held his tongue.

“Thanks.” She had the car keys in her hand.

“What for?”

She smiled. “Supper. The bath.”

“Take care.”

“You, too.”

He stood there watching as the tail-lights of her car faded around the curve in the road, and longer than that, trying to recapture the feeling of her mouth on his, Dizzy watching him reproachfully from his perch on the stone wall beside the path.

Forty-one

Cassady had cleared out his safety deposit box at the bank, transferred five thousand from his personal account into the one he shared with his wife and withdrawn the rest. Walking back to where he’d parked the car, he punched a number on his mobile phone. “Jacky. Yes, it’s me. On the way now. Right. Yes, love you too.”