Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(15)
“And keep him out of prison? I doubt it.”
Suzanne Olds shifted her weight from one foot to the other, back perfectly straight. In her teens, Resnick knew, she had been a prize ice-skater, county champion. “Divine’s attitude might well have made him friends in the police canteen, but not many places else. Sexist, racist: just the kind the powers-that-be would love to see being held up as an example. Cleaning the Augean stables before the shit gets too high off the floor.”
Resnick sighed. “You’ll represent him all the same?”
“He needed to be taught a lesson, but not like that. I’ll do what I can.”
The number Vernon Thackray had left with Miriam Johnson was in Aldeburgh and was unobtainable. “Something must be wrong with the line,” the BT official finally told him, having left Resnick to listen to endless repetitions of “Greensleeves.” “We could have it checked.”
Carl Vincent came back from his tour of the local auction houses empty of information, but carrying a nicely framed watercolor to give to his new boyfriend. Lynn’s face showed every sign of an afternoon spent listening to people shouting abuse to and about their neighbors. Kevin Naylor had discovered two empty petrol cans on a piece of waste ground near the torched lock-up and submitted them for analysis. Only Graham Millington seemed due to end the day with optimism lightening his tread: a meeting with his informant arranged at the Royal Children for half-nine and every hope that names would be produced in exchange for a few pints and a nice little backhander.
Resnick was about to jack it all in and head home when Sister Teresa made her return call: another card from Grabianski had arrived, still without a return address—although this one did suggest a place in London where, if she ever traveled down, they might easily meet.
Eight
“You’ve got all this, all this tightness up here, the upper part of your body. The shoulders and … there, feel that. Can you feel that?”
Grabianski could feel it right enough, pointy tips of her fingers driving into him like sticks, the heel of her hand.
“Feel that now?”
It was all he could do not to call out.
“It’s all seized up, blocked; all that energy blocked and we have to find a way of letting it out. It’s because of what you do, the way you’re always having to use your imagination, the creative part of you.”
He had never told her what he did, not a thing.
“And here, of course. Down here. Feel that, in the chest? This is where it all stems from. See? That tension? Stiffness. That’s where the source of the trouble is, that’s where you’re all clenched up. There, around the heart.”
She tapped him on the shoulder and he could feel her leaning back from him, sliding away.
“Turn over now, okay?”
At first when he’d met her, Holly, met her on the street, Grabianski had thought she was just another pretty girl—that area he was now living in so full of them, sometimes he had to remind himself to look. But there she’d been, backing away from the window of this place selling second-hand designer clothing, Grabianski with his mind set on how he was going to find a buyer for a brace of nicely engraved solid silver pieces, eighteenth century, and the pair of them had collided, surprise and apologies. Holly wearing royal blue crushed velvet trousers, a cerise top that stopped several inches short of the plain gold ring in her navel. A delicate oval face with brown eyes and browner hair. Not English, not entirely. Eurasian? They were yards away from the wicker chairs and tables set up outside the Bar Rouge.
“How about some coffee?” Grabianski had said.
Holly smiling; guarded, but smiling just the same. “I’m picking my daughter up from school.”
Grabianski put her at late twenties, possibly thirty-one or thirty-two.
“Some other time,” she said and he forbade himself from watching her walk away, crushed velvet tight over that neat little behind: Grabianski, a natural voyeur, practicing self-control.
He didn’t see her for weeks and then he did, coming out of the post office across the street. Wearing a white dress today, simple and straight, hair pinned high, bare legs. Let it go, Grabianski had told himself, she won’t remember you anyway.
She called to him from the pedestrian crossing, raised her hand and waved.
She ordered herb tea, camomile, and the waiter, recognizing Grabianski, brought him a café au lait. It was then that she told him her name, Holly, and, making conversation, he asked her what she did.
“Massage.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
The elderly lady from the fruit and vegetable shop alongside where they were sitting was carefully arranging bundles of asparagus and Holly leaned toward her and lifted a plum between forefinger and thumb.
“Pay you later?”
“Like usual.”
Grabianski watched her teeth bite into the yellow flesh. “What kind of massage?”
“Shiatsu. Shiatsu-do.”
“Oh.”
He was aware of her looking at him appraisingly, bulky beneath a pale blue shirt open at the neck. “You should come some time, it would do you good.”
Whenever she saw him after that, every few weeks on average, differing times of the day, she would smile and remind him about the massage. Once she had her daughter with her, a freckle-faced child of no more than five who didn’t look Eurasian at all.