Rough Treatment Read Online Free PDF Page B

palm of his hand at the horn and found the indicator, swore, tried again and swerved around one vehicle and cut across another to make the roundabout.
    “What’s pissing you off?” Grabianski asked.
    Grice depressed the accelerator and laughed. “This is pissed off?”
    “You tell me.”
    “Eleven thirty this morning, that was pissed off.”
    “Your day got better?”
    “Better beyond belief.”
    “I’m glad.”
    Grice measured the distance between a milk truck and the central bollard almost to perfection.
    “Whatever it is,” said Grabianski, both hands tight against the dash, arms tensed, “do you have to celebrate this enthusiastically?”
    “’S’he doing delivering milk this time of day, anyway? Gone three in the afternoon. He early or late or what?” He glanced over at Grabianski, who was just easing back in his seat and starting to breathe more freely. “You know what’s the best way to break your arms, don’t you? We hit anything, seat belt’s not going to do your arms one bit of good, you got them braced like that. Snap!”
    Grice lifted his hands from the steering wheel long enough to clap them together loudly in front of his face.
    “How far are we going?” Grabianski asked. Unless he sat well down in the seat, the upholstery of the roof touched against his head.
    “Relax,” Grice said, “we’re almost there.”
    Grabianski nodded and looked through the side window. Super-save Furnishings were offering a 40 percent discount on all beds, settees and three-piece suites, free delivery: green and blue plaid moquette or dimpled red plastic with a fur trim seemed to be the popular styles.
    They found a parking space between a Porsche and a gleaming red Ferrari with personalized number plates. The house was four stories, broad and glowering Victorian gothic. High above the arched front doorway, panes of stained glass caught at what was already late-afternoon light.
    “I didn’t know we were working,” Grabianski said, looking up towards a pair of circular turrets at either end of the roof.
    “We’re not.”
    Grice slipped off his glove, took a ring of keys from his pocket and used one to open the front door.
    The entrance hall was harlequin-tiled and marble-edged; the stairs broad and thickly carpeted, and there were dying pot plants on each landing. Outside one of the doors two bottles of milk were turning to a creamy green. Grice fingered a second key into the lock of flat number seven, top floor.
    “We’ll have to get that changed,” he said, pushing the door open over a collection of free newspapers and amazing offers from Reader’s Digest. “Anyone who fancied it could get through there easy as breathing.”
    He walked along a short corridor and into a long room with high windows on one side and a slanting roof on the other.
    “Servants’ quarters,” he said, pointing towards the windows. “Never wanted them to see the light of day, did they?”
    Grabianski poked at a dark ridge in the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “What are we doing?” he said.
    “Moving in.”
    Resnick had tried the number three times without getting a response. He had driven out to the house and knocked on the door, rung the bell. For twenty minutes he had parked on the opposite side of the road, leaning back with a copy of the local paper spread across the wheel. A woman with a shopping basket on wheels walked past him, slowly, twice; up along the opposite pavement, back down this one. Finally, a man in his sixties, wearing a blue track suit and leading a small Yorkshire terrier, tapped on the window.
    Resnick folded his paper, wound the window midway down and smiled.
    “I don’t like to bother you, but …”
    “Mrs. Roy,” said Resnick, nodding in the direction of the detached house across the road.
    “Yes, I believe she’s …”
    “She’s out.”
    “Yes.”
    The man stood there, gazing in. The dog was probably cocking its leg at the wheels of Resnick’s car.
    “I think she left at