But he could already hear Divine's shout and raucous laughter as the two detectives entered the outer office. It didn't take long for them to make their report.
'We could have one last try tonight,' Naylor suggested.
Resnick nodded.
'Keep in touch with Vice, let them know you're around.'
'Reminds me, boss,' Divine said.
'One of theirs this morning, one we spoke to, real looker, Afro-Caribbean.' His tongue negotiated the term with exaggerated care, as if stepping across a minefield.
'Wanted to be remembered to you, Sharon Garnett.'
A memory flicked across Resnick's face. He had first met Sharon early in the year: a cold January morning, the ground rimed with frost, a body buried in a shallow grave. One of the victims of the man who had held Lynn Kellogg prisoner.
Resnick glanced over towards Lynn's desk, wondering if she might have picked up on the name. But, directory open before her, Lynn was talking intently into the phone.
'All right, Mark,' Resnick said.
'Thanks.'
Sharon, as she had made clear, was keen to move across to CID; he would have a word with the inspector in Vice, find out how she was settling in, couldn't do any harm.
'D'you know,' Millington said later. It was already well past six and Resnick had been considering cutting his losses, calling it a day.
'D'you know, for the price of a seat at the Test, good one, mind you, up behind the bowler's arm, you could see three films at the Showcase, nip into the bowling alley for a couple of games and still have cash left over for Chicken McNuggets and fries.'
Resnick was sure he was right.
'You read a bit, don't you. Graham?' he said.
'I like the odd Ken Follett, Tom Clancy. Why d'you ask?'
'Here.' He pulled Cathy Jordan's book from his pocket. 'Have a go at this. Might just be your kind of thing.'
Millington took the book, looked at the cover, shrugged, tossed it on to his desk.
'Thanks. You coming over the road for a quick pint?'
'Another night.'
'Suit yourself.'
It was the same old routine they went through most 37 evenings. Unless there was a special reason, Resnick preferred to let the team have the bar to themselves. Oh, he'd stop by for a quick Guinness now and again, buy a round and be on his way. Fancied a drink later, he would stroll over to the Polish Club, elbows on the table with a bottle of Czech Budweiser or Pilsner Urquell, listen to the. gossip about who was in hospital, who had died, what Sikorski had said to Churchill in 1941.
Nine Millington didn't stay long in the pub. Somehow he had managed to get himself wedged between Divine, making the usual extravagant claims about his sex life, and one of those ritual bores with a four-hundred thousand-pound house in the Park. Sooner multiple orgasms, he thought, than a voice that spoke from generations of cold showers and good breeding, boring on and on about the way the working class was intent upon undermining the country's manufacturing base.
Millington wanted to tell him we hardly had a manufacturing base any longer, and most of that was due to the government or bad management most likely by people like him. Most of the factories Millington knew that shut their doors never got round to opening them again. To say nothing of the pits. Hell and hullabaloo there'd been above a year back, marchers on the streets and speeches in the Square, whole bloody communities on the dole. Arnold Bennett! It was almost enough to make you vote Labour.
'Another?' Divine tapped his empty glass. Embellishing the story of his night out with a couple from Annesley, mother and daughter, had left Divine with quite a thirst.
'No, you're all right. Off home any minute.'
'Come on. Early days yet, just a half.'
Millington flattened his palm across the top of his glass and shook his head.
'Suit yourself,' Divine grinned and let out a low belch to get the barman's attention.
'Hey up!' he called, 'how 39 about some service? ' Divine, anxious not to lose his ^audience, hadn't even got to the bit about the snake yet.
A cos lettuce and half a cucumber were waiting for him in the salad spinner, a Marks and Spencer lasagne in the microwave. Millington guessed from the spoons on the dining room table there'd be dessert, like as not that Greek yoghurt with honey.
Madeleine called down from the bedroom to say she'd not be many minutes, wouldn't he like to make them a nice cup of tea? While the kettle was coming to the boil, he wandered off into the garden; this time of the year, all you had to do was turn your back and the bloody grass wanted cutting.
Trills and worse wafted down from the upstairs window; auditions for the local amateur operatics were in the offing and Millington could sense this year his wife was nurturing ambitions beyond the chorus.
'What would you think, Graham,' Madeleine asked a while later, showing the jar of Hellmann's low-calorie mayonnaise to her salad, 'if I said I were going to try out for the lead? '
'I'd say good luck to you,' said Millington, poking around in his lasagne.
'You don't think I might be, well, wrong for it? The part, I mean.'
'Depends what it is.'
'The Merry Widow. I'm sure I told you.'
'And that's the part? The one you're after? The merry, er, widow?'
Madeleine set down her fork and knife and prepared to look hurt.
'Yes.'
Beneath his moustache, Millington smiled.
'Not trying to tell me something, are you, love?'
What? Oh, Graham, no. For heaven's sake! '
'Not been slipping down to the garden centre for the odd half gallon of weed killer A little arsenic in the salad dressing?'
'Graham! Don't say things like that. Not even in jest.'
Millington went back to his lasagne, wondering what had happened to good old meat pie and chips.
'What I meant was,' Madeleine began. It was later and she was spooning yoghurt into two bowls.
'The character, the one I'd like to play, she's meant to be gay…'
Gay? '
'Lively. Sort of sparkling, you know. Full of joy.' Madeleine paused, scraping stray yoghurt from the back of the spoon on to the edge of the carton.
'Sexy.'
'Well, that's all right, then.'
'What?'
'For the part. Sexy.'
Madeleine pushed her bowl away.
'That's what I mean.'
'What?'
'It's just a joke.'
'It'snot a joke.'
'It is.'
Millington stood up from his chair, leaned across the table and kissed her on the mouth. When he eased away, some few moments later, there were honey and yoghurt in his moustache and neither he nor Madeleine knew who was the more surprised.
'I was wondering' Millington said, turning away from a woefully unfunny situation comedy on the TV, 'if you fancied an early night? '
