Read Online Cutting Edge by John Harvey - Free Book Online Page A

Resnick opened a bottle and slowly drank it as he sliced a small onion carefully into rounds and overlapped them along two slices of dark rye bread. He covered these with Polish ham, then cut slivers of Jarlsberg cheese. Backtracking to the fridge, he found one solitary pickled cucumber, set rounds of this on the ham, then added the cheese.
    The grill was gathering heat when he stood the sandwiches, open-faced, beneath it and finished the first beer, rolling his hand across his stomach as he reached for another.
    When the cheese was brown and bubbling, he forked some coleslaw on to a plate, used a slice to lift up the sandwiches and set them down next to the coleslaw, balanced two jars of mustard, Dijon and mixed grain, on the rim, pushed his index finger down into the neck of the Budweiser bottle and headed back for the living room.
    Ben Webster was just beginning his solo on “Cotton Tail,” rolling that phrase over the rhythm section, springy and strong from Blanton’s bass, round and round and rich, like rolling it round a barrel of treacle. Just when it seemed to have become stuck, sharp little phrases from the brass digging it out, and then the saxophone lifting itself with more and more urgency, up, up and into the next chorus.
    Resnick wondered what it must be like, being able to do anything with such force, such grace. Would he see Ed Silver that evening or the next and in what state? You spent half a lifetime striving to reach a point of perfection and then one night, one day, for no reason that any onlooker could see, you opened your fingers and watched as it all slipped away.
    In their two-bedroom, two-story house, Debbie Naylor had fallen back to sleep, mouth open, lightly snoring. Kevin still sat in the chair before the television, watching, soundlessly, as two boxers moved around the square ring, feinting, parrying, never quite connecting.
    Tim Fletcher lay on his back, awake in the half-light, counting stitches, trying to sleep.
    Like a metronome, the even click of Sarah Leonard’s low heels, along the pavement leading from the bridge.

Ten
    Debbie Naylor stood looking down at her sleeping husband, alone save for the blue hum of the TV. The first time she had seen him, a friend had pointed him out, standing at the edge of half-a-dozen men at the bar, neither quite one of them nor alone. It hadn’t been until he was driving her home, oh, three weeks later, home where she still lived with her parents, Basford, that he had told her what he did.
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No. Why?”
    “You just are.”
    She had learned, some of it soon enough, the rest later. After the lunchtime meetings, Sunday afternoons with her family, Kevin embarrassed, wanting to leave; after the jokes from her friends at the office, the wedding with all of Kevin’s friends, tall and short-haired and already three-parts drunk, lining up to kiss her open-mouthed; not above, some of them, trying to cop a feel through the brocade of her wedding dress. Posing for the photographer, one of the bridesmaids had jumped in front of them, slipped a pair of handcuffs over their wrists.
    After the honeymoon, the collision of late nights and early mornings; evenings with dinner in the oven and drying out, dreading the phone call that would, almost inevitably, come. Just a quick half. Wind down. With the lads. You know how it is.
    She knew.
    When Kevin had been accepted for CID it got better and then it got worse. Put your foot down, her mother had said, else he’ll walk all over you.
    Better, Debbie had thought, than walking out.
    She stood there, gazing down at him, asleep in the chair, looking little different at three and twenty than he had at nineteen. She couldn’t believe that after all that had happened in the past four years, he was still the same. When she was so different.
    “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
    Kevin didn’t hear her. She wanted to go down, carefully, to her knees and feel the side of her face