Now's the Time

by John Harvey

  “Tea’s cold,” called Sheena from the kitchen.

  “Then mash some more.”

  Shane Snape was known. One conviction for aggravated burglary and with the next one he would do time. Serious though, Shane, about some things – money in his pockets, Special Brew, screwing Sara Johnson, supporting Mansfield Town, politics of a sort. Responsibilities, he was serious about those too. Norma didn’t ask him where he was going, didn’t want to know, although, of course, she knew.

  Shane hammered on the Rogers’ front door until Bev came down.

  “Trevor, I want to see him.”

  “It’s past one in the morning.”

  “I don’t care if it’s past Monday. Get him down here now.”

  The two men stood, uneasy, in the cold back room; Bev, too nervous to go back to bed, sat on the stairs behind the closed door. Trevor old enough to be the other’s dad.

  “Pete Turvey,” Shane said, “he was round ours earlier tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “’Bout something you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, I think he must’ve heard you wrong.”

  Trevor Rogers looked into Shane’s eyes and remembered what he’d been told. How Shane had put this bloke in hospital for letting his dog piss on Shane’s foot while he was waiting in the betting shop. Two weeks in intensive care. Definitely touch and go. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. What mattered, he believed it, Trevor, staring into Shane’s unsmiling face, his unfaltering grey eyes.

  “Yes,” Trevor said, “he must’ve got, you know, wrong end of the stick.”

  At the door, Shane turned: “I was you, Trevor, I’d see Turvey got his CD-player back.”

  So Cheryl said goodbye to the most prized part of her stereo without ever having heard it; Trevor bunged Pete Turvey an extra twenty and mumbled something about one bloody kid looking much like another, must’ve made a mistake. “Right,” said Turvey, copping the player and the twenty and gobbing full in Trevor’s face, “that’s what you did all right.”

  “You,” Shane said, wrenching Nicky’s arm up high behind his back. “Next time you shit on your own shoes, you can wipe it off yourself.”

  “I hope you realize,” his mum said, “just how lucky you are.”

  Nicky did: and he thought it was never going to change. He lay low for a couple of weeks, swapping comics, playing the same old computer games, bunking off school and nicking stuff from shops, nothing out of the way. Then he broke into the Turvey house again and stole their CD-player for the second time.

  Pete Turvey did something he thought he’d never see himself do – he went to the police.

  “What you goin’ to do about it, that’s what I want to know. What you goin’ to fuckin’ do?”

  From the door to his office, Resnick looked across the CID room to where Kevin Naylor, seated at his desk, was trying to calm an irate Pete Turvey into being rational. About thirty years, thought Resnick, and three bites at the education system too late.

  “Kevin,” Resnick said from near Turvey’s shoulder, “anything I can do?”

  “This gentleman . . .” Naylor began.

  “What you can do,” Turvey said, “is get that little arsehole Snape up in court and this time, instead of feedin’ him with lollipops and promises and pats on the head, stick him inside so the rest of us can step out the house without comin’ back and findin’ anything not bolted down’s been nicked.”

  “This isn’t Shane?” Resnick said. “This is Nicky?”

  “Christ!” exclaimed Turvey. “I must’ve come to the wrong place. Someone who knows what he’s on about.”

  “Why don’t you,” Resnick said, “let DC Naylor have an accurate list of dates, what’s been taken, anything else that’s useful? I’ll go along and have a word with the Snapes myself. OK?”

  “Yeh,” said Turvey. “Right. Yeh, right.” And, wind from his sails, he took a seat at Naylor’s desk.

  Resnick had known the family for a long time, through a whole catalogue of case conferences and supervision orders, periods for all three of the kids in local authority care. He knew Norma and liked her well enough, though he would never have been as foolish to think that she liked him. Why would she? From where Norma was standing, trouble came in shiny suits and waving warrant cards.

  Like him or not, she made him a cup of tea. Pointed at the best chair for him to sit down in.

  “How’s Sheena?” Resnick asked, balancing the cup on one raised knee. At one side of the room, the television was switched on, an Open University broadcast on engineering. Resnick doubted anyone was following.

  “Is it her you’ve come about, then?” Norma asked. Resnick shook his head.

  “It’s those Turveys, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “Putting in their spoke where it’s not wanted. Stirring trouble.”

  “They’re making it up, then? About Nicky?”

  Norma’s expression changed, sour, as if she had found something floating on the surface of her tea. She sighed. “What’s the caufhead done now?”

  Resnick voiced the complaint: the constant break-ins, the CD-player stolen twice.

  Norma shook her head. “Even our Nicky wouldn’t be that daft.” Resnick let it ride. He knew there was no evidence, only Turvey’s suspicions, though for himself, he thought they were probably correct. But if the machine had been taken it would have been off loaded within hours; the one risk Nicky would have kept to a minimum was being caught with it on his person.

  As Resnick sipped the strong tea, he could feel it forming a lining inside his stomach. Silent, Norma lit one cigarette from the butt of another.

  “You can see where it’s heading, Norma. Clear as I can myself.”

  She shook her head and tilted it back, eyes closed. “You think I haven’t told him till I’m blue in the face? Eh? Pleaded with him, belted him, tried shutting him in his room? Doesn’t do a ha’p’orth of good.”

  Resnick doubted Norma was old enough ever to have seen a halfpenny. “Do you want me to talk to him? D’you think that might help?”

  Norma let herself slump forward. “If you can find him, why not? One thing’s sure, it can’t make nothing worse.”

  Nicky was in town, standing with a crowd of youths in the amusement arcade on the north side of the square.

  “Let’s go outside, Nicky,” Resnick said. “Sit in the car.”

  “Fancy me, then, do you?” Nicky grinned, adding a slight lisp to his voice. “How much is it worth?”

  Ignoring the laughter, Resnick took hold of his arm. “I’ll not ask twice.”

  Leaving the arcade, the boy turned back to his friends and laughed, miming masturbation with his hand.

  He listened to Resnick for ten minutes, biting his already too-short nails and fidgeting with the ring in his left ear. All of the time his attention seemed to be outside the car, watching whoever was passing by; Resnick doubted if he’d heard one word in ten and was certain he didn’t care.

  “Nicky, have you heard what I’ve been saying?”

  “Course,” Nicky smiled. “Not stupid, you know. I can listen.”

  Yes, Resnick thought, but not to me. “OK,” he said, “you can go.”

  Through the mirror, Resnick saw the boy stick two fingers high in the air before going back into the arcade.

  “You’ve talked to him?” Turvey said incredulously. “What sort of soddin’ good’s that supposed to do?”

  His complaint would still be looked into, Resnick explained, the details of the missing property would be logged and if it turned up, of course, Turvey would be informed.

  “And Snape?”

  “We’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “What you mean,” Turvey said, “you’re not goin’ to do a bare-arsed thing.”

  Resnick shook his head. “We’ll do what we can.”

  “Well, then,” said Turvey, puffing out his chest. “I know someone who’ll do a whole lot more.”

  “I ha
ve to warn you,” Resnick said, “about taking the law into your own hands.”

  “Yeh?” Turvey said. “Yeh? The law? What’s that then, round here? The law? What’s that? You, that what it is?” He laughed. “Look around you. What d’you think?”

  Resnick couldn’t remember who it was had told him the best place to keep vodka was in the freezer, Russian vodka, at least. Whoever it had been, he was grateful. It was close to midnight, but somehow he didn’t want to go to bed. In the living room, he turned off the central light and sat with one of the cats curled in his lap, another stretched out, long and slim, along one of the arms. The vodka glass was cold against his hand. He thought about Norma Snape, struggling to bring up three kids against all the odds. Then he tried not to think about it. There was a ballad track on the Dial set and he played it now, only the occasional flutter of notes embellishing the melody, the sharp edge of Parker’s tone cutting all but the smallest residue of sentimentality away. When it came to an end, Resnick cued it again. ‘Don’t Blame Me’.

  Nicky knew he was late and his mum would give him a thorough bollocking and he didn’t care. The rhythm that tore through his headphones was fast and ragged and it seared his mind clear of everything else but the warmth of the cigarette he lifted to his mouth as he walked towards his home. He didn’t hear the car approaching, didn’t hear Pete Turvey’s angry shout, the whoosh of the bottle as it sped, flaming, through the air, nor the crash of glass as it shattered at his feet.

  What Nicky saw was the burst of flame as the petrol bomb exploded, and all he knew beneath his screams was the pain which claimed his hands and face and which clung to his legs like blistering skin.

  She Rote

  She wrote Ray-O on her arm, scratching the letters with the blunted point of a compass she’d borrowed from one of the girls in Maths class. Scratched them and then went over the outline in blue biro, painstakingly slow.

  She wrote SARAH 4 RAY-O one hundred and twenty-seven times in felt-tip on the inside of the toilet door. Only the persistence of two of the older girls, anxious to get in and light up, stopped her writing it one hundred and twenty-eight, one hundred and twenty-nine, one hundred and thirty.

  She wrote a letter to the problem page of Just Seventeen: “my boy frend wont use a condom he says theres no need cos I’m only 13. Please will you tell me if this is true. I need to no.”

  But by then it was too late; by the end of the month she was bleeding but not enough, not the right kind.

  Ray-o was nineteen, rising twenty. His real name was Raymond, Raymond Cooke, but everyone called him Ray-o. The longest job he’d held down before going with his Uncle Terry had been in the wholesale butchers, down by the abattoir on Cattle Market Road. Hefting carcasses from the hooks of the conveyor belt, emptying tubs of tripes and offal into the incinerator bins; blood under his fingernails, gristle in his hair; the smell of it insidious on his skin.

  Terry had saved him from all that. “How ’bout it, Ray-o? How’d you fancy working for me?” His uncle had taken a lease on a shop in Bobber’s Mill, just to the north of the bridge. Second-hand stuff, that’s what they’d be selling. Refrigerators, cookers, stereos, the odd bit of furniture – there was always a call.

  “There’s a couple of rooms over the top, an’ all. Could live there if you want. Shan’t charge you no more’n you’re paying now. What d’you say? You and me, workin’ together, eh?”

  Raymond hadn’t needed asking twice. A chance to get away from that poxy little room he had in Lenton, turn his back on all the shit and guts he’d been up to his elbows in. And besides, Terry, he was like a father to him really, more than his own father, that was sure; a father and a mate, both at the same time. Terry would take him out drinking, buy more than his fair share of pints, have a laugh about women, you know, doing it, having it away. “Now then, Ray-o, how d’you fancy sinking your teeth into that lot? Need a pair of flippers and a bleedin’ snorkel!”

  And Terry knew what he was talking about – ever since that cow of a wife of his had left him, he had new girl friends all the time. Raymond didn’t know how he did it: forty if he was a day. And that one he was going with now, Eileen, she couldn’t have been much older than Raymond himself. Great looking, too. Really gorgeous. If ever she came round to the shop, Raymond couldn’t look at her without blushing.

  Off duty, Mark Divine and Kevin Naylor were propping up the bar in the Mason’s Arms, a little removed from their normal stalking grounds, but Divine had half a mind he might set eyes on one of his snouts who’d been avoiding him. Three pints and a couple of shorts down the road, so far he had had no luck.

  “Another?” Naylor asked, hoisting a crisp new twenty in the barman’s direction.

  “Go on,” Divine said. “Why not?”

  Naylor’s wife, Debbie, was off to her mum’s, hatching plans for her sister’s wedding; underskirts enough to bandage a battalion and more sequins than Come Dancing. Divine’s on-again, off-again relationship with a staff nurse from the Queen’s was decidedly off-again, and all he had to go home to was a video of Baddiel and Skinner’s Fantasy Football League and the remains of last night’s king prawn biriyani, adhering to its aluminium container in the fridge.

  “This,” Divine said, at the end of a copious swallow, “tastes like piss.”

  “Yes,” Naylor said, licking the residue of froth from where he was considering growing a moustache. “Agreed.”

  Over to the far side of the room, in what would, before these democratic days, have been partitioned off as the public bar, a group of a dozen or so lads were in increasingly party mood. A good score of jokes, sexist, of course, ribald laughter, angry words, a bit of informal karaoke, spilt beer, a few choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’, a slight accident in the passageway outside when one of them didn’t make it all the way to the bogs.

  “Nice to see,” Divine said.

  “How’s that?”

  “People enjoying themselves.”

  Naylor nodded. He had personally felt the collars of at least two of them in the past eighteen months, one a suspected burglary, the other for being in possession of a controlled substance. Neither case had gone to court.

  “Hey up!” Divine said, nudging Naylor in the ribs. “Catch a look at that.”

  The young woman who had come into the bar had long red hair, shading towards chestnut, and it hung loose past the collar of the oversize beige raincoat she was wearing. Aside from the hair, and the brightness of her lipsticked mouth, what marked her out most clearly was the policewoman’s cap she wore at a jaunty angle on her head. A moment to take in the room and then she strode purposefully to where the lads were sitting.

  “You don’t think there’s been a complaint?” Naylor said.

  “Not yet.”

  First the table, then the whole pub fell quiet.

  “Which one of you is Darren Matthews?” the young woman asked, not a tremor in her voice.

  A few shouts and jeers, pointed fingers and sniggering behind hands and the aforementioned made a passable attempt at getting to his feet, pale face and tie askew, speech slurred. “Who wants to know?”

  Before you could say Robert Peel, the woman had her raincoat unfastened and whisked away; she had obviously done this before. She was wearing police uniform skirt and tunic, black tights and three inch heels. “Darren Matthews,” she said. “You’re nicked.”

  In the resulting uproar, Divine caught the barman’s attention and got in another couple of whiskies, doubles. Someone had switched on the pub stereo and Janet Jackson was breathing encouragement to the woman, as, on the table now, she danced and swayed in front of the birthday boy’s face, removing her uniform piece by piece as she moved. With a semblance of unison, the others around the table clapped encouragement.

  “Debbie do that for you this year, Kev?” he asked.

  “Did she, heck as like. Set of socket wrenches and a pair of Paul Smith socks.”

  The redhead stepped out of her skirt and revealed a pair of handcuffs tuc
ked into the elastic of high-sided silk briefs with Go to Jail in tasteful red lettering over the crotch.

  The object of her attentions did his best to make a bolt for it, but his mates grabbed him and pushed him back down.

  “Only kind of arrest that poor sod’s about to have,” Divine said, “is of the cardiac variety.”

  With a professionalism that many of Divine’s and Naylor’s colleagues would have envied, the woman cuffed Matthews’ wrists to the arms of the chair. So many were on their feet then, crowding round, it was difficult to see exactly what happened next, but what flew in the air above their heads was clearly Matthews’ trousers.

  “Jesus!” Divine exclaimed, shifting along the bar for a better view. “She’s only going to do the business.”

  “She’s never.”

  “Want to bet?”

  Naylor grabbed Divine by the arm. “Then we’re leaving.”

  “You’re bloody joking!” He could no longer see the swaying head of red hair and he guessed she must be down on her knees.

  “You want to get in there and put a stop to it?” Naylor demanded.

  “No, I bloody don’t.”

  Naylor pulled at the front of Divine’s shirt. “Then we’re out of here. Now, Mark, now.”

  Divine drove with almost exaggerated care; he didn’t want to get pulled over and be ordered to blow into a plastic bag.

  “What d’you reckon she gets for that?” he asked. “Side from a nasty taste in the mouth.”

  Naylor shrugged. Ever since leaving the pub, he’d been hoping against hope Debbie would be back from her mum’s by the time he got in. “Fifty, hundred.”

  Divine whistled appreciatively. “Only need to do that a few times, pull in more than you or me.”

  “You fancy it then?”

  “What? Spot of the old Chippendales? Why not? Might as well make some use of that old uniform, eh?” He laughed. “You read about that bloke, did this act dressed as a copper, strip-o-gram, like. Poor bastard only got three years, didn’t he? On account these women he stripped for complained how he’d – what was it? – humiliated and degraded them.”