Now's the Time

by John Harvey

  Terry’s nephew, Raymond, stood in the middle of the room like a rabbit caught in headlights.

  “Ray-o,” Terry said, “get off and see a film.”

  “They don’t open till gone twelve.”

  “Then wait.”

  “You know why we’re here?” Resnick asked once Raymond had gone.

  “Maybe.”

  “We’ve heard one or two whispers,” Millington said, making himself comfortable on a Zanussi washing machine. “Concerning a certain nasty incident the other night.”

  “Not down to me,” Terry said hastily.

  “Of course not,” Resnick assured him. “We’d never believe that it was. But others, maybe known to you . . .”

  “You see, we’ve heard names,” Millington said. “Confirmation, that’s all we need.”

  “Though if you give us more . . .”

  “Confirmation and more . . .”

  Terry felt the muscles tightening along his back; he ought never to have missed his morning swim. “These names . . .”

  “We thought,” Resnick said, “you might tell us.”

  “Remove,” Millington said, “any suggestion that we put words into your mouth.”

  Terry felt the pressure of Coughlan’s hand hard on his shoulder, remembered the sick leer on his huge face when he had talked about sharing Eileen. “Coughlan,” he said. “Him for certain.”

  “And?”

  “Breakshaw. Norbert Breakshaw.”

  “Thank you, Terry,” Resnick said, letting a Four Seasons anthology fall back into the box; just so many times, he thought, you could enjoy ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’.

  “Here,” Millington said. “How much for this?”

  “There’s something else,” Terry said, “something else you’ll want to know.”

  When Norbert Breakshaw parked the van close to the back entrance to Terry Cooke’s business premises, he wasn’t alone; Francis Farmer and Francis’s brother-in-law, Tommy DiReggio, were with him. Norbert had brought them along, partly for the company, partly to help him shift the gear; they had been with Norbert and Coughlan at the original break-in. Francis had hung back once Norbert had started swinging the sledgehammer and things got a little out of hand, but Tommy had enjoyed the chance to let fly with an iron bar, get the boot in hard.

  “There’s a light on,” Norbert said. “He’s waiting for us.”

  Not quite right. What was waiting for them was a team of some twenty officers, two of them, Millington included, having drawn arms just in case.

  Burdened down by boxes of expensive electricals, Francis and Tommy had no chance to run; Norbert’s retreat back to the van was cut off by a phalanx of men and women eager to try out their newly issued long-handled truncheons.

  “Just like the military in the Gulf,” Millington explained in the canteen later. “Not so often you get a chance to give the hardware a try, battle conditions and all.”

  Resnick had taken Vincent and Naylor for back-up, but left them downstairs, watching over Coughlan’s wife as she offered them a choice of Ceylon or Darjeeling. Resnick read Coughlan his rights as the big man dressed, hesitating for longer than was strictly necessary over the striped tie or the plain blue. Either way, the custody sergeant would never let him take it with him into the cells.

  “Some bastard fingered me, I suppose,” Coughlan said, walking ahead of Resnick out of the room.

  “Your mistake,” Resnick said, “doing a job with Breakshaw, letting him wade into those officers the way he did.”

  “It wasn’t Cookie, was it?” Coughlan stood facing Resnick at the foot of the stairs.

  “Terry? No,” Resnick said. “Besides, I thought the two of you were close. Family, almost. Last thing I should have thought he’d want to do, drop you in it. Unless you’ve given him reason, of course.”

  “Whatever time is it?” Eileen asked. The faintest glow from the streetlamp, orange, filtered through the curtain of the room.

  Terry picked up the clock and brought it closer to his face. “Half three.”

  “What you doing still awake?”

  “Can’t sleep.”

  She turned towards him, careful not to let the cold air into the bed. “You’re not worried, are you?”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe the other night . . .”

  “Shush.” Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “It’s happened. Done.”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “You said.”

  “I pr—”

  Again he stopped her, this time with his hand. “Don’t. Don’t promise. There isn’t any need.”

  She moved her mouth so that first one, then two of his fingers were between her lips. Terry reached down and hooked his thumb inside the top of his boxer shorts, easing them lower till he could kick them away to the end of the bed.

  “I don’t deserve you, you know,” Eileen said, reaching for him, his tongue for that moment where his fingers had been.

  “Yes,” he said, when he could speak again. “Yes, sweetheart, you do.” This had to be a better way, Terry thought, of relieving stress. No matter what the doctor said.

  Bird of Paradise

  It was still surprisingly cold for the time of year, already well past Lent, and Sister Teresa kept her topcoat belted but unbuttoned, so that the lower part of it flared open as she strode through the stalled traffic at the corner of Radford Road and Gregory Boulevard, revealing a knee-length grey wool skirt and pale grey tights which Grabianski, watching from the window of the Asian confectioner’s, thought were more than pleasingly filled.

  He popped something pink and sugary into his mouth and smiled appreciatively. One of life’s natural observers, he never failed to enjoy those incidental pleasures that chance and patience brought his way: a brown flycatcher spied on the edge of Yorkshire moorland, the narrow white ring around its eye blinking clear from its nest; a chink of light just discernible through the blinds of a bedroom window, four storeys up, suggesting the upper window may have been left recklessly unfastened; the stride of a mature woman, purposeful and strong, as she makes her way through the city on an otherwise unremarkable April day.

  Casually, Grabianski stepped out on to the street. He was a well-built man, broad-shouldered and tall, no more than five or six pounds overweight for his age, somewhere in the mid-forties. His face was round rather than lean and freshly shaved; the dark hair on his head had yet to thin. His eyes were narrowed and alert as he angled his head and saw, away to his right, the woman he had noticed earlier, passing now between two youths on roller blades, before rounding the corner and disappearing from sight.

  Dressed in civilian clothes as Sister Teresa was, Grabianski would have been surprised to have learned that she was a nun.

  The Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help were dedicated to the deliverance of succour and salvation to the needy, those who were, for whatever reason, less fortunate than their neighbours. Or, as Sister Teresa’s fellow worker, Sister Bonaventura expressed it, the more economically challenged members of the urban underclass. Sister Bonaventura was a Guardian reader through and through.

  Originally, the Sisters had continued to wear their traditional vestments while working in the community, and could often be seen setting up their late-night soup stall in the Market Square or ascending the steps towards the old General Hospital, for all the world like sumptuous magpies denied the power of flight. But with the decline of the city into an awkwardly romanticised version of its former self, fake minstrels and archers on every street corner and working models of everything from flour mills to four-loom weaving, no one gave credence to the belief that nuns perambulating in their proper habit were real nuns at all. Resting actors employed by the city council to entertain the tourists, drama students supplementing their grants in ecclesiastical drag, that was what people assumed. So now Sister Teresa and the others wore their simple white shifts and coarse grey wool only when they knelt to prayer each morn
ing at six in the small community house where they lived, changing into civilian clothing before stepping out into the jostling world.

  Most of what they wore came to them as a result of charitable donations or after-hours visits to the nearest Oxfam shop, though rumour, of necessity unsubstantiated, had it that Sister Marguerite’s underwear was silk and had been ordered on approval from one of the boxed advertisements at the back of the Sunday Times.

  The three of them, Sister Teresa, Sister Bonaventura and Sister Marguerite, had been working together now for almost two years and in the summer they were due to return to their convent outside Felixstowe for six months of silent contemplation and spiritual healing. As Sister Bonaventura put it, an enforced visit to the health farm without any of the benefits of whirlpools or colonic irrigation.

  The house they lived in was attached to the community centre in Hyson Green, itself a former church which had fallen on agnostic times. Deconsecrated, it was home to a variety of worthy enterprises, from a twice-weekly mother-and-toddler club, through yoga and enabling sessions for recovering alcoholics to the evening youth club and disco. Fridays, Saturdays and alternate Thursdays, Sister Marguerite, whose room was closest to the dividing wall, was lulled to sleep by the insistently sampled bass lines of Jazzmatazz and the near-ecclesiastical pleading of black rappers whose every third injunction included the words ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker’ or both.

  These and other highly colourful expressions had been tagged on the walls and stairwells of the low block of flats Sister Teresa was now entering, no longer even bothering to try the lift, but walking instead up to the third floor balcony, where cat shit and used works shared space with several tubs of late daffodils and bright purple pansies and washing hung from lines diagonally stretched from wall to railing, railing to wall.

  Teresa rang the bell of number thirty-seven and waited while Shana Palmer turned down the television, hushed the baby, pushed aside the three-year-old and paused to light another Embassy Filter on her way to the door.

  “Sister . . .”

  “Shana, how are we today? The little one, she got over her cough, did she?” Teresa said nothing about the bruise that was thickening around the young woman’s left eye. Eighteen, nineteen? For certain she had not reached twenty-one.

  “Cup of tea, sister?”

  “That’d be lovely, thanks.”

  Teresa followed her through the narrow hallway, jammed with pushchair and tricycle, free newspapers, unopened junk mail and broken toys, into the kitchen where the three-year-old pulled at the legs of her mother’s jeans and whined for whatever she couldn’t have. Waiting for the kettle to boil, Teresa looked out through the postage stamp window at the block of flats opposite, almost identical save that more of them were boarded up.

  “Biscuit, sister?”

  “No, thanks.”

  They went into the living room and sat at either end of the sofa that served as the three-year-old’s bed, the baby cosseted in blankets and sucking on its dummy in half-sleep. In the corner, on TV, a modishly efficient woman in a floral print dress and that morning’s makeover, explained how to choose the best cuts of lamb from your local organic butcher.

  Teresa waited until she had finished her first mug of tea and declined a second before leaning towards Shana and touching her lightly on the forearm. “Don’t you think it’s time, Shana, we had another talk about finding you and the children a place in a refuge?”

  Grabianski had waited several minutes more before heading east along the Boulevard, his meeting with Vernon Thackray timed for the quarter hour and Thackray, like himself, was a stickler for punctuality. And sure enough there was the car, a dark blue Volvo estate, pulled in at the upper corner of the space on the Forest Recreation Ground allotted to drivers wishing to Park & Ride.

  Grabianski skirted the parking area, so as to approach the vehicle from the driver’s side. Thackray was behind the wheel, head resting back against the padded extension to the seat, eyes closed, the music seeping out through the inch of lowered window something Grabianski recognised as baroque and nothing more. Albinoni, Pergolesi, one of those. Vivaldi, he was certain, Thackray would have considered too common by half.

  He was three strides away from the car when Thackray opened his eyes and smiled. “Jerzy. Good to see you again. Come on, get in why don’t you? We’ll take a drive.”

  The interior smelt of leather polish and astringent, doubtlessly expensive cologne. Anyone else who knew Grabianski well enough to greet him by his first name would have used the Anglicised Jerry.

  As they pulled out on to the main road, Thackray made a vague circling gesture with his head. “Find things much changed?”

  Grabianski’s response was noncommittal, vague.

  “Three years, is it?”

  “Four.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t been back before.”

  Beneath his coat, Grabianski was aware of his shoulders tensing. “I’m surprised I’m here now.”

  Thackray laughed and swerved inside a Jessop’s van that was signalling right ahead of the Clarendon roundabout. “Clumber Park. I thought we’d take a quick trip out to feed the ducks.”

  When he had last been in the city, those four years before, Grabianski had been partnered up with a skinny second-storey artist named Grice, an individual of notably limited imagination, save where gaining illegal access was concerned – there he was almost second to none.

  Jewellery, that was their speciality, that and the few antiques Grabianski recognised as not only genuine but likely to fetch a good return; the baubles they sent Red Star to a silversmith with premises on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, the eventual proceeds making their discreet way into a pair of pseudonymously held accounts a safe interval later.

  All had been going well until they had the misfortune to come across a sizeable quantity of almost pure cocaine in someone’s bedroom safe and Grabianski had allowed Grice to convince him it was a good plan to sell it back to the owner, a television director of decidedly moderate stature. Unfortunately, he turned out to be only holding the coke for one of the local suppliers, after which things not only got complicated but nasty. And that was without Grabianski falling in lust with the director’s wife.

  In the end the only way Grabianski could avoid a lengthy prison term was to help the police with their enquiries, set up the aforementioned dealer and turn Queen’s evidence on his partner. The result, a suspended sentence and an invitation from the local constabulary to get out of town. And now he was back.

  No wonder his neck muscles were uncomfortably tight.

  There was the usual selection of mallards and pintails, along with a small flock of shovellers, consisting entirely of flat-headed, blue winged drakes. Lower down, at the far, northern, end of the main lake, a clamour of Canada geese stalked the two men incessantly, greedy for anything they might have in their pockets and be prepared to throw away. The water looked grey and cold, its surface turning in the wind.

  “I’ve had it checked four weeks out of the last five,” Thackray was saying. “Leaves the house between seven and seven-twenty and never back before eleven-fifteen.”

  “Theatre? Cinema?”

  “Bridge club. Up on Mansfield Road. Duplicate. Quite good, seemingly. Plays a modified Acol.”

  “Hmm.” Grabianski nodded, unimpressed. He was a straightforward never-mess-with-a-minor-suit, four-no-trumps-is-strong-and-asking-for-aces kind of player himself.

  “Here.” Thackray took a sheet of graph paper from his inside pocket and the nearest dozen geese started honking in earnest.

  The plan of the house interior had been neatly drawn in violet ink, the position of the alarm in red, the paintings marked clearly in green, one angled above the other on the drawing room wall, their exact dimensions noted at the bottom right corner of the sheet. Neither so large that they could not be fitted into a large holdall.

  “And the alarm, it’s not connected directly through to the police?”

  Tha
ckray shook his head and they walked on, turning into a stiffening breeze. “Not any more.”

  “Any idea how she got hold of them?” Grabianski asked. “Dalzeils. Hardly ten a penny.”

  “Handed down, apparently. In the family for a couple of generations. Gambling debt originally.”

  “Sentimental value, then. Seems a shame.”

  Thackray fingered a three-inch cigar from his breast pocket and let the cellophane wrapping waft out across the lake. “Look at it this way, Jerzy, what we’re doing, it’s a public service. Liberating art for the nation.”

  “At least there’ll be insurance.”

  “Not so, apparently. Let the policy lapse, last day in March. Cost of the premiums, I suppose. Works of art like that in private hands, can’t be cheap.”

  “So if she loses them she’s left with nothing.”

  “Social work now, is it? Distressed gentlefolk?”

  Grabianski growled and continued walking.

  “At least,” Thackray went on blithely, “they’re going to a good home, so that’s one thing you don’t have to fret about. Japanese banker, anniversary present for his second wife.” Thackray’s face broke into a rare smile. “Just the kind of sentimental gesture, Jerzy, I should have thought you would have appreciated more than most.”

  Resnick had been woken that morning soon after four, without being sure the reason why. The smallest of the cats nestling near the edge of his pillows, he had lain there aware of a vague sense of foreboding, listening to the birds outside the window and watching the steadily brightening light.

  At half-five, certain now he would not fall back to sleep, he had risen and padded to the bathroom and the shower. By the time he had pulled on some clothes and reached the kitchen, the other cats had joined him, all save Dizzy content to wait patiently by their bowls while Resnick opened a fresh can of food and found milk in the fridge. The six o’clock news summary told of slaughtered cattle and bankrupt British beef farmers, bombs in the Lebanon, first reports of a police officer being shot dead in Liverpool, more details promised as they became known. The magnolia tree that leaned across the low wall from his neighbour’s garden had started, at last, to unfold into bloom. When he stood for a moment at the back door, staring out, he felt the first fall of rain against his face, faint and indefinite as if it too would not last.