Free Rough Treatment by John Harvey

bugger’s bleeding inscrutable.”
    “You don’t need an interpreter?”
    “Bloody mind-reader, more like.”
    “Want me to have a go at him?”
    “No disrespect, sir, but I was wondering if Lynn might have any luck?”
    “Feminine wiles, Graham?”
    “Not exactly, sir. Thought he might not find it so easy to stare at her and play dumb. Respect women in their culture, don’t they?”
    What they did, Resnick thought, was bind their feet.
    “Mean taking her out of the center,” Resnick said.
    “No more than an hour, sir.”
    “Okay.”
    Millington nodded and rose to go.
    “Fire officer’s report, Graham—got that now, have we?”
    “Came through earlier, sir.”
    Resnick made a point of looking at his desk. “Not to me.”
    “I’ll pass it through, sir.”
    “Good.”
    Jesus! Millington thought as he shuffled papers around on his desk, I’ve just got to leave him one loophole and he gets me through it every time. Straightening with the report, he saw Patel smiling gently at him from across the room. You’re the one I should let loose on him, Millington said to himself, turning away, then you could have a high old time being sly and devious to one another. In for a racist penny, in for a pound.
    The jewelry was sent Red Star to a highly respectable Glasgow silversmith, who, some short time later, made a transfer of funds under an assumed name, equally into two accounts. These accounts, needless to say, were also held under pseudonyms. At intervals which coincided with the determining of interest, money from these accounts was filtered through to the Isle of Man.
    It was Grice’s idea and his particular pleasure, annually, to fly over to Douglas, ostensibly to check on their financial affairs; in reality his cherished ambition, so far in vain, was to be present when one of the TT riders came off his bike going into a hairpin bend.
    Once a year, Grice and Grabianski had what Grice liked to call a financial summit. Aside from those periods when they were “working,” this was the only occasion the two men met. They took their equal share of any proceeds and used it only in such ways as would not compromise the operation or increase the risk of discovery. Grice had purchased a small villa in the north of Portugal, well clear of any riff-raff (by which he meant the British or German varieties), and occasionally indulged himself on a flight to visit an old friend in Australia, via a number of Far Eastern brothels and massage parlors.
    Grabianski had a time-share in a Forestry Commission cabin in the Scottish Highlands and one of the smaller houses in Macclesfield, a location that put him within easy each of both the Peaks and the Pennines. Each year he traveled overseas with the Ramblers Association—so far, he had walked Turkey, Crete, the Himalayas, New Zealand and was working himself up to Peru.
    They were two men with little or nothing in common, aside from a shared trade or craft. They didn’t like one another, but then they didn’t have to. What they both were was careful. Contacts they cultivated assiduously; usually Grabianski softened them up and then Grice took over and kept their spirits keen and their pockets never quite full enough. Cities they treated as provident farmers did their fields—every so often, they were left to lie fallow.
    “I’ve been thinking about this kilo,” Grice said.
    “Mm?”
    “I think we’ll give them the chance to buy it back.”
    Resnick ate his last piece of pastrami and washed it down with a mouthful of cold tea. He could see Naylor moving around in the outer office and knew he should call him in and have a talk—trouble with sleeping? Debbie still experiencing difficulties? Not to worry, happens to the best regulated of families. But if you’d like to talk about it …
    Resnick knew that that was just about the last thing, right then, he wanted to do. He picked up Millington’s preliminary report and scanned it through. The man he was interviewing owned