Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(2)
Resnick nodded. “Doctor not here yet?”
Millington finished lighting a cigarette. “Parkinson. On his way.”
“I don’t suppose we’ve any idea who she is?”
Millington shook his head.
Resnick left them standing there and walked to where Lynn Kellogg was still talking to the kids who’d reported the body. He listened for a few moments, not interfering, moving on to where Naylor was still standing guard, the young DC’ s face yellow and strained. Some came to think little more of a corpse than roadkill; for others it was new every time.
“You could have a word with some of that lot standing round gawking,” Resnick said. “Get Carl to give you a hand. One of them might have seen something, you never know.”
Resnick lowered himself onto one knee and folded back the sheet: the face had lost much of its definition, the skin was puckered fast in some places, loose in others as an ill-fitting glove. There were marks—what might have been tiny bite marks—around the sockets of the eyes. High on the right temple, a gash opened, raw and washed deep into the bone. After or before, Resnick wondered, straightening? After or before?
“At least it’s not four in the morning, Charlie,” said a voice from behind him. “You’ll be grateful for that.”
“Maybe,” Resnick said, lowering the plastic carefully into place. “And maybe not.” He imagined the impeccable flow of notes from Jackson’s vibraphone, their rise and fall stretching out across the becalmed evening air.
Parkinson smiled benevolently over his half-moon spectacles and unfastened the center button of his suit. “Bridge, that’s what this saved me from. Going two off in four clubs, what’s more. Four clubs, idiotic call.”
“I dare say,” said Resnick, for whom card games were as enticing as Gilbert and Sullivan or a quick game of croquet.
“Time and cause,” Parkinson said, “I’ll do what I can. But don’t hold your hopes. Not yet awhile.”
There was enough water in the lungs for death to have been caused by drowning, though the blow to the head was severe and would have caused considerable trauma and loss of blood. A contributory factor, then, though whether the blow had been administered before or soon after the body had been introduced into the water, remained unclear. As for the exact nature of the instrument which had delivered the blow—something heavy, probably metallic, sharp but not pointed and traveling, at the moment that it met the head of the deceased, with considerable speed, propelled with considerable force.
She was a young woman, twenty-four to twenty-seven years of age, of average size and build. She had had an appendectomy in her late teens, a pregnancy terminated within the past eighteen months. One of her front teeth was capped with a chrome crown, a procedure normally carried out only in Eastern Europe. Her clothing—denim shirt and cotton trousers, underwear—was of a type obtainable in chain stores in most major and medium-size cities of the world. Her feet had been bare. The silver ring on the little finger of her left hand had no idiosyncratic marks or features of design. The inexact photograph taken after basic reconstruction and forwarded to police forces throughout the United Kingdom and Europe resulted in no positive identification. Attempts to link the death to those of three others, two female, one male, whose bodies had been discovered in canals in the preceding seven years—two in the East Midlands, one in the North East—proved inconclusive.
Nothing happened.
After three months, the file was marked Pending.
Media references to the Canal Murders were spiked or stillborn. Resnick knew from occasional comments overheard in the canteen that the victim was referred to as the Phantom Floater, the Woman Who Went for an Early Bath. But for Resnick it was always the night he missed hearing Milt Jackson; the night Milt Jackson came to town.
Two
“Charlie, is it tarragon or basil you don’t like? I can never remember.”
Resnick was sitting in the downstairs front room of Hannah’s house, dark even though it was shy of seven on this late September evening, dark across the park that faced the small terrace through shrubs and railings, and Resnick sitting close by the corner table lamp, glossing through Hannah’s back copies of the Independent’s Sunday magazine.
“Tarragon,” he called back, “but it’s not that I don’t like it. A bit strong sometimes, that’s all.”
In the kitchen, Hannah laughed quietly. From a man who regularly crammed sandwiches with everything from extra strong Gorgonzola to garlic salami, she thought that was a bit rich. “You could open the wine in a few minutes,” she called back.
“What time are they coming?”
“Half-seven. Which probably means not till eight. I thought we could have a glass first.”
Or two, Resnick thought. He hadn’t met these particular friends of Hannah’s before, but if the rest were anything to go by, they would be artsy, Labour-voting liberals with a cottage they were slowly rebuilding somewhere in southern France, a couple of kids called Ben and Sasha, a Volvo estate, and a cleaner who came twice a week; they would laugh at their own jokes and the cleverness of their cultural references, be perfectly amiable to Resnick, and at the end of the evening try not to appear too resentful that his presence was keeping them from skinning up and passing round a spliff. He suspected they had cast him as one of Hannah’s passing idiosyncrasies—like taking her holidays in Scarborough or eating fish fingers mashed between two slices of white bread. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”