by John Harvey
A Darker Shade of Blue
John Harvey
John Harvey
A Darker Shade of Blue
INTRODUCTION
‘Crime seldom pays,’ wrote James Crumley, ‘love seldom works. Thankfully stories, like fishing, occasionally work. In ways inexplicable.’ I don’t know about the fishing; but about stories, as he was about a number of things, Jim had it right. ‘Inexplicable.’
I remember reading one of the earlier Charlie Resnick stories at a short story seminar somewhere in the States and being confronted by a puzzled writing student afterwards: I loved your story, she said, but it did all the things we’ve been taught not to do.
Well, yes.
If I lined up a bunch of my favourite writers of short fiction and tried to use their work to make a template for the perfect story, it just wouldn’t happen. How to match Hemingway with Katherine Mansfield; Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore with the Socrates Fortlow stories of Walter Mosley or the evocations of mining life in D. H. Lawrence; the southern Ireland of John McGahern with the Wyoming of Annie Proulx — for that matter, the Raymond Carver stories before they were heavily edited by his mentor, Gordon Lish, or after?
I think, in a way, short stories are like poems. Not in some airy-fairy, self-indulgent, fancy word and obscure metaphor kind of way (of course, no really good poems are like that, either) but like poetry in that they depend on the right, if often surprising, choice of word or phrase, upon exactness and the creation of atmosphere, upon the ability to make relatively few words carry more meaning than the page count suggests. Inference rather than explication.
I know I get a great deal of pleasure from writing them, something that wasn’t always the case. They used to terrify me. Admirable, I thought, but out of reach. It wasn’t until I’d been writing for almost twenty years — fiction, television, radio — that I allowed myself to be cajouled into doing my first ever story. A piece about Charlie Resnick, as it happened, Resnick and jazz — ‘Now’s the Time’; it ends with him making a visit to Ronnie Scott’s. Now, there’s (almost) nothing I like better. If I could make a comparable living out of writing short stories as opposed to the longer stuff, that’s what I’d do. Someone gets in touch and wonders if you’d like to contribute to this or that collection, an email comes from Piacenza, or St Louis, Mo… and you know one of the best things about it? Allowing for time later to polish and refine, it can be done and dusted inside a couple of weeks. Compare that to setting out on a new novel, all those months stretching into the distance with rarely an end in sight. That’s what I find terrifying now.
In this collection, which brings together all of the short fiction I’ve written since the William Heinemann edition of Now’s the Time in 1999, there are four stories featuring Charlie Resnick, seven featuring my north London-based private detective, Jack Kiley, and one — ‘Trouble in Mind’ — in which they both appear, though Kiley is perhaps the major player.
The Resnick stories I’ve often used to give a little more space to some of the characters and relationships that received somewhat short shrift in the novels — Eileen Cooke, who turns up in both ‘Billie’s Blues’ and ‘The Sun, the Moon and the Stars’ is a case in point. They also served as a way of letting dedicated readers know what Resnick himself was up to in the wilderness years between Last Rites and Cold in Hand.
Jack Kiley, before turning private eye a copper in the Met and, briefly, a professional footballer, has never set foot in a novel, nor do I think he ever will. As I see him, he’s best suited to the short form — quick, generally small investigations, in and out. As a writer and a bit of a crime fiction aficionado (well, I was), Kiley gives me the chance to hark back to Hammett and Chandler, Ross Macdonald and the rest, letting him loose, angry and incorruptible, in the mean streets of Kentish Town. When Kiley’s in his office and a woman’s footsteps are heard approaching his door, you know things are going to get worse before they get better. These are the stories I think Jim Crumley would have liked best.
Short stories can also be invaluable for the opportunity they provide for trying out characters and situations you are unsure of — ‘walking them round the block’, as I believe Elmore Leonard once described it. I wrote “Karen Makes Out”,’ Leonard said, ‘to see if I’d like Karen Sisco enough to develop a novel around her as a federal marshal.’ Clearly, he did, and Out of Sight was the result; first the novel, and then the movie.
Frank Elder first saw the light of day in ‘Due North’ and went on to be the main protagonist in three novels, Flesh and Blood, Ash and Bone and Darkness and Light, while police officers Will Grayson and Helen Walker, who make a belated appearance in ‘Snow, Snow, Snow’, on the trail of a prolific hit man who has so far eluded capture, handled most, but not all, of the detection in Gone to Ground and Far Cry.
Tom Whitemore, the leading character in ‘Sack O’ Woe’, one of the most recent stories included here, had a walk-on part in the third Elder novel, Darkness and Light, and I remembered him as someone I wanted to return to. Now that he’s been around his particularly difficult block a little more, who’s to say he won’t appear again?
‘Drummer Unknown’, which, as was pointed out to me, is the only piece I’ve written in the first person, was a relatively early attempt to write about the world of London’s Soho between the late 50s and the mid-60s — a world of jazz clubs, street corner vice and petty crime (some not so petty) and a particularly British kind of bohemia that I skirted round and began tentatively to explore in my late teens and early twenties. The two stories towards the end of the book, ‘Just Friends’ and ‘Minor Key’, take this further, both revolving, as they do, around a central group of characters who might, one day, be dealt with at fuller length in the novel set in and around Soho I’ve been threatening to write for so long neither my editor nor my agent believe I’ll ever actually do so. The stories are there, though — they’re among my favourites in the collection — and the characters are starting to take shape, so you never know.
It’s true to say that all of these stories exist because someone asked me to write them. Seba Pezzani, for instance, one of my Italian translators (and organiser of the rather wonderful blues and fiction festival, Dal Mississippi al Po) wanted something for a series in the Italian newspaper, Il Giornale, hence ‘Ghosts’. My publisher in Finland, Otava, requested a Resnick piece to distribute at the Helsinki Book Fair, thus ‘Well, You Needn’t’.
Certain editors and compilers of short story collections have been assiduous and kind — Maxim Jakubowski, Otto Penzler, Robert J. Randisi come immediately to mind. Without them, this book would be a meagre thing, indeed. Ross Bradshaw, at Nottingham’s Five Leaves, has been a consistent supporter, as have Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg in the States. But perhaps the final thank you — on behalf of so many writers of crime stories as well as myself- should go to the estimable Janet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, who has published many of my stories through the years, filtering out most of the extreme profanities but leaving the heart intact.
SACK O’ WOE
The street was dark and narrow, a smear of frost along the roofs of the occasional parked car. Two of a possible six overhead lights had been smashed several weeks before. Recycling bins — blue, green and grey — shared the pavement with abandoned supermarket trolleys and the detritus from a score of fast-food take-aways. Number thirty-four was towards the terrace end, the short street emptying onto a scrub of wasteland ridged with stiffened mud, puddles of brackish water covered by a thin film of ice.
January.
Tom Whitemore knocked with his gloved fist on the door of thirty-four. Paint that was flaking away, a bell that had long since ceased to work.
He was wearing blue jeans
, T-shirt and sweater, scuffed leather jacket, the first clothes he had grabbed when the call had come through less than half an hour before.
January twenty-seventh, three seventeen a.m.
Taking one step back, he raised his right leg and kicked against the door close by the lock; a second kick, wood splintered and the door sprang back.
Inside it was your basic two-up, two-down house, a kitchen extension leading into the small yard at the back, bathroom above that. A strip of worn carpet in the narrow hallway, bare boards on the stairs. Bare wires that hung down, no bulb attached, from the ceiling overhead. He had been here before.
‘Darren? Darren, you there?’
No answer when he called the name. A smell that could be from a backed-up foul water pipe or a blocked drain.
The front room was empty, odd curtains at the window, a TV set in one corner, two chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Dust. A bundle of clothes. In the back room there were two more chairs, one with a broken back, and a small table; a pile of old newspapers, the remnants of an unfinished oven-ready meal, a child’s shoe.
‘Darren?’
The first stair creaked a little beneath his weight.
In the front bedroom a double mattress rested directly on the floor; several blankets, a quilt without a cover, no sheets. Half the drawers in the corner chest had been pulled open and left, miscellaneous items of clothing hanging down.
Before opening the door to the rear bedroom, Whitemore held his breath.
A pair of bunk beds leaned against one wall, a pumped-up Lilo mattress close by. Two tea chests, one spilling over with children’s clothes, the other with toys. A plastic bowl in which cereal had hardened and congealed. A baby’s bottle, rancid with yellowing milk. A used nappy, half-in half-out of a pink plastic sack. A tube of sweets. A paper hat. Red and yellow building bricks. Soft toys. A plastic car. A teddy bear with a waistcoat and a bright bow tie, still new enough to have been a recent Christmas gift.
And blood. Blood in fine tapering lines across the floor, faint splashes on the wall.
Tom Whitemore pressed one hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.
He had been a member of the Public Protection Team for almost four years: responsible, together with other police officers, probation officers and representatives of other agencies — social services, community psychiatric care — for the supervision of violent and high-risk-of-harm sex offenders who had been released back into the community. Their task, through maintaining a close watch, pooling information, getting offenders, where applicable, on to accredited programmes, assisting them in finding jobs, was to do anything and everything possible to prevent reoffending. It was often thankless, frequently frustrating — What was that Springsteen song? Two steps up and three steps back? — but unlike a lot of police work, it had focus, clear aims, methods, ambitions. It was possible — sometimes — to see positive results. Potentially dangerous men — they were mostly men — were neutralised, kept in check. If nothing else, there was that.
And yet his wife hated it. Hated it for the people it brought him into contact with, day after day — rapists, child abusers — the scum of the earth in her eyes, the lowest of the low. She hated it for the way it forced him to confront over and over what these people had done, what people were capable of, as if she feared the enormities of their crimes might somehow be contaminating him. Creeping into his dreams. Coming back with him into their home, like smoke caught in his hair or clinging to the fibres of his clothes. Contaminating them all.
‘How much longer, Tom?’ she would ask. ‘How much longer are you going to do this hateful bloody job?’
‘Not long,’ he would say. ‘Not so much longer now.’
Get out before you burn out, that was the word on the force. Transfer to general duties, traffic, fraud. Yet he could never bring himself to leave, to make the move, and each morning he would set off back into that world and each evening when he returned, no matter how late, he would go and stand in the twins’ bedroom and watch them sleeping, his and Marianne’s twin boys, safe and sound.
That summer they had gone to Filey as usual, two weeks of holiday, the same dubious weather, the same small hotel, the perfect curve of beach. The twins had run and splashed and fooled around on half-sized body boards on the edges of the waves; they had eaten chips and ice creams and, tired of playing with the big coloured ball that bounced forever down towards the sea, Tom had helped them build sandcastles with an elaborate array of turrets and tunnels, while Marianne alternately read her book or dozed.
It was perfect: even the weather was forgiving, no more than a scattering of showers, a few darkening clouds, the wind from the south.
On the last evening, the twins upstairs asleep, they had sat on the small terrace overlooking the promenade and the black strip of sea. ‘When we get back, Tom,’ Marianne had said, ‘you’ve got to ask for a transfer. They’ll understand. No one can do a job like that for ever, not even you.’
She reached for his hand and as he turned towards her, she brought her face to his. ‘Tom?’ Her breath on his face was warm and slightly sweet and he felt a lurch of love run through him like a wave.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
But by the end of that summer, things had changed. There had been the bombings in London for one thing, suicide bombers on the Tube; an innocent young Brazilian shot and killed after a bungled surveillance operation; suspected terrorists arrested in suburbs of Birmingham and Leeds. It was everywhere. Security alerts at the local airport; rumours that spread from voice to voice, from mobile phone to mobile phone. Don’t go into the city centre this Saturday. Keep well away. Stay clear. Now it was commonplace to see, fully armed in the middle of the day, a pair of uniformed police officers strolling down past Pizza Hut and the Debenhams department store, Heckler amp; Koch sub-machine guns held low across their chests, Walther P990 pistols holstered at their hips, shoppers no longer bothering to stop and stare.
As the Home Office and security services continued to warn of the possibility of a new terrorist attack, the pressures on police time increased. A report from the chief inspector of constabulary noted that in some police areas surveillance packages intended to supervise high-risk offenders were now rarely implemented due to a lack of resources. ‘Whether it is counter-terrorism or a sex offender,’ explained his deputy, ‘there are only a certain number of specialist officers to go round.’
‘You remember what you promised,’ Marianne reminded him. By now it was late September, the nights drawing in.
‘I can’t,’ Tom said, slowly shaking his head. ‘I can’t leave now.’
She looked at him, her face like flint. ‘I can, Tom. We can. Remember that.’
It hung over them after that, the threat, fracturing what had held them together for so long.
Of necessity, Tom worked longer hours; when he did get home, tired, head buzzing, it was to find her turned away from him in the bed and flinching at his touch. At breakfast, when he put his arms around her at the sink, she shrugged him angrily away.
‘Marianne, for God’s sake…’
‘What?’
‘We can’t go on like this.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Then do something about it.’
‘Jesus!’
‘What?’
‘I’ve already told you. A hundred times. Not now.’
She pushed past him and out into the hall, slamming the door at her back. ‘Fuck!’ Tom shouted and slammed his fist against the wall. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ One of the twins screamed as if he’d been struck; the other knocked his cereal to the floor and started to cry.
The team meeting was almost over when Bridget Arthur, one of the probation officers, mid-fifties, experienced, raised her hand. ‘Darren Pitcher, I think we might have a problem.’
Tom Whitemore sighed. ‘What now?’
‘One of my clients, Emma Laurie, suspe
nded sentence for dealing crack cocaine, lives up in Forest Fields. Not the brightest cherry in the bunch. She’s taken up with Pitcher. Seems he’s thinking of moving in.’
‘That’s a problem?’
‘She’s got three kids, all under six. Two of them boys.’
Whitemore shook his head. He knew Darren Pitcher’s history well enough. An only child, brought up by his mother, who had given birth to him when she was just sixteen, Pitcher had only met his father twice: on the first occasion, magnanimous from drink, the older man had squeezed his buttocks and slipped two five-pound notes into his trouser pocket; on the second, sober, he had blacked the boy’s eye and told him to fuck off out of his sight.
A loner at school, marked out by learning difficulties, readily bullied, from the age of sixteen Pitcher had drifted through a succession of low-paid jobs — cleaning, stacking supermarket shelves, hospital portering, washing cars — and several short-term relationships with women who enjoyed even less self-esteem than himself.
When he was twenty-five he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for molesting half a dozen boys between the ages of four and seven. While in prison, in addition to numerous incidents of self-harming, he had made one attempt at suicide.
Released, he had spent the first six months in a hostel and had reported to both his probation officer and a community psychiatric nurse each week. Since which time, supervision had necessarily slackened off.
‘Ben?’ Whitemore said, turning towards the psychiatric nurse at the end of the table. ‘He was one of yours.’
Ben Leonard pushed a hand up through his cropped blonde hair. ‘A family, ready-made, might be what he needs.’
‘The girl,’ Bridget Arthur said, ‘she’s not strong. It’s a wonder she’s hung on to those kids as long as she has.’
‘There’s a father somewhere?’
