Bailey turned the one good eye on Ryan. It looked a trifle sad, if not a little frightening, staring at him on its own like that.
‘We take it in turns. Her place, she cooks, mine, I do. Only we seem to have lost the knack. Not much taking of turns these days.’
It was as close to a confidence as he would get and Ryan saw the signal to change the conversation. Besides in the aftermath of Christmas and this raw January day, he did not want gloom on the brink of a holiday. He rubbed his hands together.
‘Never mind. Bramshill. Day after next. Get away from all this. Don’t we deserve it? Can’t be bad.’
They were both going on extended courses at the police training college. Ryan said his was for reading and writing; Bailey’s was for senior command. They’d get him talking to hostages next.
‘Not bad today, either, was it?’ Ryan continued, still rubbing his hands in a way Bailey found irritating. ‘Last day’s active duty, five arrests. You put a really good sprint on there, sir, you really did. Never knew you could run so fast.’ He means pretty good for a man of my age, Bailey thought.
‘No, you didn’t know I could run, and you didn’t know that the man was waiting round the corner, with his fist out either, did you? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have just run into a wall and got it over with.’
They both shook with laughter. Ryan eyed the nurse who came towards them. There’d be women at Bramshill, surely. Time to get the old man out of himself.
‘Listen,’ he said to the nurse. ‘When you’ve done with Mr Bailey here, would you mind putting a patch on that eye to make it look worse? Only he’s got a woman waiting at home. He’ll need sympathy.’
Waiting. Helen felt the emptiness of Bailey’s flat as soon as she put the key in the door. Late again, always late, but she couldn’t even criticise him for it because she had been so herself, often enough. For the grosser occasions of his lateness, she usually managed to pay him back by not turning up at all some other time. The games they played, so childish. The light on his answering machine winked at her. It might have contained a message of explanation since he was scrupulous about such courtesies, but, mindful of his privacy so that he would be mindful of hers, she did not stop to listen. They had a rule that although each possessed the key to the other’s house, that was not quite the same thing as being entirely at home in it. Helen craved a sensation of righteous indignation and knew she did not deserve it. Geoffrey was a policeman: he did not have a timetable like other men. They had chosen to have a relationship that was both uncommitted and committed at the same time. It had been bound to bristle with difficulties and it was she who insisted on this awkward format. Living together had not worked particularly well either. Helen never quite knew whether Bailey’s professed willingness to try again, or indeed to marry her, worked as a comforter to their impermanent arrangements, or an irritant. Perhaps they were just stale. Like the bread in his bread-bin. He would have forgotten food. There was rice, tinned shrimps, cartons of soup and more than sufficient wine to dull the day. Not a feast, perhaps. She could have gone out again from this warehouse top floor which was so much cooler than her own cluttered basement and found the late-night shop on the corner to improve on their provisions, but she didn’t. Instead she waited for a quarter of an hour and then went home.
It was dark down the street where Logo lived and darker still in the alleyway between his house and Granny’s. Neither owned their small houses, impossible on their incomes, even in a street like this where no-one in their right mind would want to buy a house. That’s what Logo thought anyway. The estate agents may have disagreed as their signs festooned five dwellings over the road. Attempts had been made to gentrify Legard Street, but those who tried with the bravery and optimism of youth tended to move after a year or so. Artisans’ dwellings, mostly privately owned now, a few left like his and Gran’s with sitting tenants. The sitting tenants were old, an endangered and truculent species who did not band together, but jeered at the private owners with their new front doors. All were threatened by the proximity of the football ground. Every second week in season and plenty of other times besides, their street was blocked by cars, their gardens trodden by the thousands on foot who came to worship the team. As the team’s fortunes prospered, so the fortunes of the street were endangered. Young Mrs Jones in number seventeen had left after her first baby because she could not stand the prospect of keeping a fixture list in the kitchen so she would know on which Saturday she would be able to get out to the hospital and produce the next. In comparison to the hazards of the football stadium, Logo’s singing was a minor irritation.
He sang in a light tenor, his voice blending with the persistent rain, increasing the eeriness, but not diminishing the triumph of the sound.
‘Come let us join the Church above
The martyr’s praise to sing,
The soldier true who gave today
His life blood for his king …’
Tan ter ah! he finished, lost for the words of the next verse. A door slammed. There was the sound of scurrying footsteps in the wet, another door slamming, someone putting out rubbish. Logo did not look round. It wasn’t a convivial street. He dived into the alley, feeling for his door key. As if there was any need. All anyone in the world had to do was kick it and they could come in if they wanted, but somehow, they didn’t.
‘Mother!’ he yelled as he pushed the door. Beyond the broken fencing which flanked the alley as it grew into a mossy backyard, light poured from the glass door of the next-door kitchen. Logo stepped over and rapped on the glass. She might not have heard with the rain, but now she would and he wanted someone to talk at. Although she would resent it, just as she hated being addressed as his mother or gran when she was nothing of the kind, it usually took her less than three minutes to come across. Old Mrs Mellors was victim to her own desire for company. Logo was her lifeline. She was also the only one in the street who continued to like his singing long after the novelty had worn off.
‘I may as well be your bloody mother,’ she grumbled, heaving herself through the battered door he had left ajar. ‘What do you want now?’
‘Nothing,’ he said indignantly. ‘When did I ever want anything from you? But it’s a wet night and I thought you might like a drink.’
She sighed. ‘Well, don’t you know me well, but you could have saved me getting wet and brought it in to me. You’re wet already. I was doing my knitting.’
‘Nobody calls me wet.’ He adopted a boxer’s stance and squared up to her, the aggression diminished by the smile on his face. Margaret sat down heavily.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Obviously, you got on all right today. No wonder you’re celebrating. Oh I do wish they’d stop picking on you like that, all those police. It isn’t fair. Not that prison would do you harm. You’d get fed, put on a bit of fat.’ She chuckled.
‘Is that what you want for me, you ungrateful old cow? Is that what you want?’ From one misshapen jacket pocket he took a half-bottle of whisky and from the other, a bottle of dry ginger. Posh. Margaret Mellors found the sight of the whisky brought saliva to her mouth. She looked down at her own legs stretched across the rotten lino floor in front of her with her stick running parallel. Margaret was waiting for a new hip, felt as if she had been waiting for ever. She was pretty mobile with the old one, but by this time of day, she ached.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘That’s not what I want at all and well you know it. I just wish you’d behave. But you’re good to me, Logo. I’d rather have you alive than dead. Are you going to be all night pouring this drink, then?’
He tossed a pack of cigarettes from one of the bottomless pockets in her direction. She caught them nimbly in both palms. Margaret’s hands and her mind were unaffected by more than seventy years’ hard labour with no great expectations of life even at the beginning. Blessed are they who expect nothing, she was wont to say, for they will not be disappointed. Logo and Logo’s family had given her much of the joy she had ever had. He looked
at her with that smile which wooed magistrates and said softly, ‘Good to you, Mother? Other way round, isn’t it? I don’t know what I’d have done without you, but it’s fat thanks we get, eh?’ She shook her head, not anxious to follow this line of conversation, but he was determined.
‘What would I have done with a wife like mine, eh? And a daughter to raise with a wife like that? I don’t know. You were mother to us all, Mother, you and Jack, God rest him. And what happens after all that loving kindness, eh? Wife runs off with someone else, and the daughter can’t give her father the time of day. Never mind you, Granny.’
Margaret shrugged, still hoping the conversation would die away. She had no real doubt she deserved the accolades but it did not follow she wanted to hear them, and the thought of the missing daughter, as well as that pretty wife, still filled her with anguish sharper than any physical pain. She was accustomed to it and told herself that since Logo was talking about his own blood she might not understand his obsession, having no kids of her own to throw into the balance. She had taken Logo’s child instead but she knew she had no right to her now.
‘You haven’t seen them, I suppose?’ he asked wistfully. For a moment she thought he might mean the neighbours who hated him most, the landlord of their identical houses and his wife, but that wasn’t what he meant at all.
‘Seen who? Oh, I know who you mean. No, you daft thing, of course I haven’t. Not in four years. Don’t be silly. Why do you always ask?’
The whisky, which she drank sparingly but greedily, was already in the system, dulling the pain, though not the regret and the guilt. ‘I did what I could was all,’ she said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on asking. I’ve never seen your daughter or your wife since soon after Jack died, and you’d be the first to know if I had. Will you let up, you mad son of a bitch?’
Logo threw back his head and laughed with a sound as glorious as the best of his singing. The sombre mood, as quick and flimsy as the rest of him was light and spry, seemed to have fled. Oh, you had to love him: he was a character, rising like a cork over all his difficulties, holding down a job no-one else wanted: she admired him for that. Who else would be a road sweeper and trundle that big old trolley around all day, picking up rubbish? She felt as loyal to Logo as she had always felt, as protective as if he had been a son and just as worried. None of the other old souls in the street had a son half as attentive as this one.
‘I’ve got some nice soup, if you want some,’ Margaret said. ‘But whether you do or you don’t, I think I’ll just have another of these,’ and the pain in her chest, that premonition of tears, eased with the sound of liquid.
‘No I won’t have another, thanks. Two’s plenty.’
‘You’re joking. We haven’t even started. One more?’
‘No, thanks. Look, do you mind if I leave you to it? I think I’ll just go round to her place and see if she’s in. It’s not like her …’
‘Sir, Geoff, it’s just like all women.’ Ryan was upset, more to the point, enraged. He’d seen sir home to find no-one there at all, not even a burnt meal or a cup of soup, just a scarf on a chair to show she’d visited and left sweet all else behind. Man could not live on a waft of perfume. The answerphone had been blinking and winking like some creature with a cast in its eye and no sign of a lit fire or a petticoat. Welcome home our conquering hero, amen. Ryan, who could stand anything but another man’s discomfiture at the hands of a woman, placed the patched, black-eyed hero in his motor and shuffled him off elsewhere. In his own experience, if you were late, you might as well be very late and very pissed. The later you left it, the more relieved they were to see you and the anger was the same after two hours as it was after six.
‘All right. Listen, I’ll take you there. Then I have to go, OK?’
‘Yes, of course. You’ve been very kind.’ There was a strange chill in this return to formality. Bailey never lost control, whether punch drunk or plain drunk, he could be colder and more dangerous than black ice and all of a sudden, Ryan did not envy Helen West, whom he liked and admired, if only she’d learn to behave like a woman.
They pulled up outside the large old house which contained her flat. Ryan knew the route from the pub, the way he always did. Even though he lived outside London, he’d knocked around it like a cabbie. From the door of the pub, turn right, cut down Legard Street past the football stadium, left at the park, over the lights and into respectability. Not exactly Ryan’s stamping ground, but Bailey was familiar with it, because the woman lived there, God help him.
Ryan waved and revved the car even while sir was stepping out. Then, two doors down, he cut the engine, got out and walked back. Helen West had a handsome front door to her basement and the lights were on. Ryan stood in the darkness and watched sir ring the bell. ‘Where were you, Helen?’ he was saying to her as the door opened. ‘Where were you? Couldn’t you wait?’ He watched the older man push inside, heard her words. ‘I’m sorry,’ she was saying. ‘I’m sorry. Oh, what have you done? Not again …’
That was more like it. Ryan was glad about Bailey wearing a patch. Made him look hurt but still like a pirate.
He cut back up through Legard Street on the way to the motorway. What did anyone mean by late? It wasn’t late at all by his standards. He wondered about stopping off on his way home. Down, boy, down: he remembered. Bramshill the day after next, be good and get home by ten. His wife knew better than to call that late. Swinging right, enjoying the speed and the sensation of righteousness which came from being sober, Ryan dimly recognised a familiar face in a car he passed, weaving its way through the double-parking of those dubious streets round the stadium. Do you know, he was thinking to himself, I thought I could predict the way this evening might go. I thought I’d get him pissed and I shall yet. He’d taken bets on it.
Rose Darvey had known exactly the way the evening was going to go, but she was still disappointed to find it quite as predictable as it was. There was a price to be paid for any escort away from the office. Exacted now and all for a ride in a beaten-up Ford Cortina, the best a rookie police constable could afford. He’d taken her to a pub for three rounds of drinks and three of crisps, then, more reluctantly, to a McDonald’s, where they had sat in silence, munching the best of the menu under the kind of light which transfixed her into silence, and all as the prepayment for dessert. Rose Darvey, with her knickers round one ankle and the tights which had bagged at the knee now hidden under the bed where she lay in a police section house. With Constable Williams working his way between her thighs before leaving for the night shift, and making a great deal of noise about it. Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose, as if the name mattered while he still had his shirt on, thrusting between her legs with his face all trembling. She watched him, uninterested, as he towered above her. Her hands were on his thin buttocks, kneading as she might have kneaded dough: men were dangerous when roused, you had to behave as if you enjoyed it. Rose was stretched and sore: he was taking his time to the tune of her artificial groans and the scluck, scluck of the sound, while her eyes gazed at the artex ceiling. Just when she thought he never would, he finished and collapsed. Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose. Shut up, she thought, but she remembered to keep on stroking. Ten minutes later they were back in the Cortina, he on his way to work and her to bed. They went down Northchurch Street, where Rose knew Ms West lived, because she knew all those things. Lights on down there: I expect she’s drinking her cocoa. Her eyes at this point were fixed straight ahead, like they were most of the time. Paul began to doubt her silence, but he knew better than to question his luck.
‘Which number is it again?’ he said when they were two miles beyond the stadium.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ said Rose pertly, the tights now more or less in place, but a disturbing stickiness between her legs. ‘Just drop us at the corner, it’s easier. See you.’
He obeyed, his mind elsewhere, building up his concentration for the night shift, wishing he’d slept more by day. She walked down the street slowly for as long as he w
as in sight and then she began to run.
Oh Lord, save me from admitting I am frightened of the dark.
CHAPTER TWO
The offices of the Crown Prosecution Service did not look any more dignified in the early afternoon than they did after dark, but Brian Redwood, lord of all he surveyed, comforted himself with the thought that the visual irritations were at least unusual. He had always wanted a huge office if only to reflect status, though he now recognised it was a myth since he was a king without a crown. The room he occupied was large enough for a potentate to sit like a pea on a throne at one end, but the splendour was that of a ruined Russian palace and offered all the comforts of a cave. When forced into these premises the year before, in pursuit of the ever-cheaper lease, Redwood could not believe his eyes and although his incredulity had diminished, the disappointment had not. It was all part of the humbling process and he was never sure whether that process was deliberate. The only feature of the building he liked was the magnificent railings outside, which surrounded the place on three sides, standing tall and close-ranked with lethal tips at the end of each elegant fleurde-lis, a barrier against the world. Redwood vaguely approved of these as a means of keeping his staff in, rather than keeping others out, defying the truant and the escapee, but he hated the rest of the building. He was an unmemorable man, one of the grey brigade, uncoloured by humour but far from stupid. He had never found problems with the letter of the law; which was why he had chosen it, but human beings were a different matter.
On this afternoon, he was conducting an exercise in better communication with his professional staff. An excruciating management course had informed him this was not only long overdue but imperative, since staff morale was his responsibility. In vain he had tried to explain that no single chief marooned in a building like this could remove the dust of ages and make the Indians happy unless he increased their wages. The response to this from above was derisory: he was supposed to win their hearts and minds and make them tolerate the intolerable. The end result was monthly meetings for the lawyers only, held at teatime. They sat in his room on a medley of chairs, and ate the jam doughnuts he had paid for out of his own pocket. Redwood had a very old-fashioned idea of a treat and did not see why a waste of time should be expensive.
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