by John Harvey
“And no suggestion,” Resnick asked, “of him being involved with guns?”
Fowles shook his head. “Credit cards, watches, jewelry, that’s more his mark.”
“Kevin,” Millington said, “you’ve got some more?”
Naylor took a quick swallow from his mug of lukewarm tea. “Our Gary’s twenty-eight. Finally moved out from his mum’s, February of this year. Bought himself a place near Corporation Oaks. Three bedrooms, garage, newish, nothing fancy. Paid close to sixty thousand, all the same. Round about the same time, he started seeing this Vanessa Parlour. Some kind of model. Promotions, the odd commercials, nothing too high-powered.” He grinned. “Pulled a couple of photos of her from the Post’s files. Pretty classy stuff.”
“I wonder what she sees in Prince?” Millington asked.
Sharon smiled. “Perhaps our Gary’s got hidden charms.”
“Like the guy in The Full Monty,” Ben Fowles suggested. “Whips off his Y-fronts and there’s this thud as the end of his dick hits the ground.”
“The woman,” Resnick said, “maybe she’s the one responsible for Prince finding a little more ambition? Moving himself up in the world?”
“Guns,” Sharon said. “It’s possible. For some women there’s something very sexy about guns.”
Fowles laughed. “Tell us about it, Sharon.”
“In your dreams.”
“One other thing,” Naylor said. “He’s got this lock-up garage, near his mum’s place in Sneinton. Still uses it, as far as I can tell.”
“Be nice to get a look around inside,” Millington said wistfully.
Resnick scraped back his chair as he rose to his feet. “Bit more patience, Graham, maybe we will. I’ll have a word with the boss, see if he can’t stir up a warrant.”
Coming up out of the underground into Brixton, Evan thought, was like stepping out into another country. Not simply the preponderance of black faces, he was used enough to that where his mother lived, after all; here, the air, the whole atmosphere, were different. In Dalston, no matter how many there were, black or Asian, it was as if they were living, cuckoo-like, on sufferance in a white world. But here, these people with their dreadlocks and multicolored woolen hats and that lazy, strutting way they walked, no, they owned this place, these streets. And Evan, blinking to readjust his eyes after traveling below ground, he was the stranger in a foreign land.
“Hey, man!” And there was Wesley pushing through the crowd, grinning, holding out his hand.
First time in his life Evan had known Wesley pleased to see him. Half a dozen calls it had taken before the man would agree to meet him at all.
“How you doin’? Okay? No problem gettin’ here?”
Evan nodded, fine, fine.
“Di’n’t forget your passport, right?” Wesley laughing at Evan’s discomfort. “Come on.” Nodding his head up toward the Ritzy cinema at the foot of Brixton Hill. “Let’s get something to eat. Famished, yeah?”
Evan followed Wesley along the broad pavement and into one of the entrances to the covered market.
“Where we going, anyway?”
“Franco’s. Best pizza in town. Best pizza anywhere.” And he laughed again. “What? You think all we eat is jerk chicken and sweet potato? Curried goat? Anyway, look around, you’ll feel at home.”
There was a line of tables clustered close together out front, all occupied. Most of the customers were white, youngish, casually dressed, sitting there with acres of newsprint spread out before them.
“Yuppie types,” Wesley said. “Think it’s cool, hang outside Franco’s, watch the world go by. We’ll go inside, quieter there.”
They took a table near the back and Wesley ordered a Coke, Evan a beer. The menu was long and seemed to include every pizza topping Evan had heard of and several he hadn’t thought possible.
“So,” Wesley said, “what’s up?”
Evan shrugged, temporarily lost for words.
“Something’s bugging you, the way you was on the phone.”
“No, it’s just …”
“Just this Michael Preston shit, right?”
“I suppose so, I …”
“Listen, man, if it’s what happened to me, getting cut an’ all, okay, I was plenty mad at you at the time, but I’m through that now. It’s cool. Nothing to reproach yourself for, okay? Evan, okay?”
Evan nodded uncertainly. “Yeh, okay.”
“Good. Now let’s order us some food, I’m starvin’.”
Evan played safe with the basic pizza, ham, mozzarella cheese, and tomato; Wesley tucking into aubergine, anchovy, and pepperoni sausage.
“How is it, anyway?” Evan asked between mouthfuls. “Where he cut you? Still giving you any pain or what?”
Wesley shook his head as he chewed. “Once in a while, maybe. Just, you know, a little niggle. But, hey, like I told you, you got to quit worryin’ ’bout it.”
“I just feel guilty, that’s all.”
“Weren’t none of your fault, man. Well, not exactly none of your fault, but, you know, what’s done’s done. That crazy fucker, Preston, he’s the one to blame, he’s the one cut me, right? An’ he sunnin’ hisself right now on some beach in Spain or Greece, stickin’ his finger up at the world. You think he care about us, spare us a second thought? Okay, so you don’t waste your mind on him. Forget him, right? Get on with your life.”
“This inquiry …”
“Inquiry be fine. Stay cool, chill out. You see.”
Evan cut off another strip of pizza-every bit as good as Wesley’d said it would be, no more contented evenings in Pizza Hut after this-and washed it down with a swig of beer.
“What it is, Wesley,” he said, leaning forward a little, lowering his voice, “all this stuff about him buying false papers, getting on some flight abroad, I don’t believe none of it.”
Wesley laid down his knife and fork and looked at him, curious.
“I reckon that’s all bollocks. A blind.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know how come, just a feeling. But I can’t, you know, shake it. I think he’s still there, where we took him.”
“What?” Laughing. “Camped out in some field alongside the motorway?”
Evan shook his head. “Back in the city.”
“Easiest way to get caught, he’d know that better’n anyone.”
“Maybe,” Evan said, not really meaning it. “Anyhow, I reckon I might take a trip up there, you know. Look around.”
“Look around?” Wesley echoed, amazed. “What the hell for?”
Evan cut away a piece more pizza. “See if I can’t find him.”
Wesley staring at him now, open-mouthed. “Find him, you sayin’? Find him? Evan, man, you crazy or what? You think the police didn’t try to find him? You think you can do somethin’ they can’t?”
“No.” Evan shaking his head. “I don’t think they give a monkey’s about Michael Preston. I don’t think they care.”
“And you do?”
“Yes, what’s wrong with that? My responsibility, right? You said yourself, down to me more than you. So, okay, I’ll find him.”
Wesley laughing except that it wasn’t funny, it was pathetic, that’s what it was. Evan as Batman, the Lone Ranger.
“What? What’s the big joke?”
“You, you’re the joke. You think you are, some kind of vigilante?”
Evan looked back at him and didn’t say anything.
“Suppose you do find him, right, what then?”
“Bring him back.”
“You …” Wesley pointing at him with his knife. “You a little soft in the head, you know that, don’t you?”
“Okay,” Evan said. “Okay.” He was this close to standing up and walking out of there. “I wish I’d never said anything, right? You made your point. Now I don’t want to hear any more about it. Okay? Yeh, Wesley, okay?”
Wesley rattled the last of the ice cubes round in his glass, sucked on the slice of lemon, lifted up
a sliver of anchovy between forefinger and thumb, and deposited it on his tongue. “Evan,” he said a few moments later. “You are one crazy fucker, you know that, don’t you?”
What Evan knew was what his father had taught him, if you want to earn respect in this world, you have to be responsible for your own actions; and if you want to be able to respect yourself, you have to acknowledge your mistakes and then do everything in your power to set them right.
Fowles was standing pretty much to attention in front of Resnick’s desk, hands clasped behind him. The list of Gold Standard employees lay between them.
“Tell me again how you got hold of this,” Resnick said.
Fowles told him.
“You realize if we wanted to use this, needed to, in court, Cassady’s brief could most likely get it thrown out?”
Fowles was avoiding Resnick’s eye. “Yes, sir.”
Resnick let him stew a little longer.
“The names, sir. I’ve been running a check on them as and when I could. Cassady, we could have him over a barrel if we wanted. Three men he’s employed, got criminal records as security guards, two with convictions for aggravated assault. And this one …” Fowles jabbed a finger down on to the list. “Bloke been done for house burglary, out patrolling this estate nights, Wilford way.”
“Write it up,” Resnick said. “And next time, think before you pull a stunt like this.”
“Yes, sir.” Fowles didn’t move.
“There’s more?”
“Yes, sir. Three of our lot, moonlighting. Couple of uniforms and a sergeant out the Drug Squad.”
“Name?” Resnick asked sharply. “The sergeant.”
“Finney, sir. Paul Finney.”
Resnick half remembered a thirtyish man with strong, dark hair and an open face. He’d met him a few times in the company of Norman Mann and others; Finney mostly quiet, friendly. Spoke only when he was spoken to.
“Right,” Resnick said. “Leave this with me.”
Fowles closed the door quietly behind him and Resnick eased forward in his chair. Finney, Finney. There was something about him he couldn’t put his finger on and then he could. Greyhounds. Wasn’t Finney part of a syndicate that owned a couple of greyhounds? Raced them. Norman Mann had tried to talk him into going along one evening, Resnick remembered. Colwick. One of those occasions he’d said maybe and then stayed home. He thought about calling Mann and dialed Siddons’s number instead.
Twenty-two
The youth with a ring through his nose was sitting cross-legged on sheets of cardboard in the estate agent’s doorway, a sandy-haired dog coiled close alongside. As Resnick approached, he held out a hand and pleaded for change.
You and the rest of us, Resnick thought. There were a couple of pound coins in the side pocket of Resnick’s coat, a smattering of silver. “Here.”
The dog growled, low in its throat, and the youth wished Resnick a good night.
The restaurant was at the other end of the pedestrianized street and Resnick had passed it many times without being tempted inside. The menu, attached discreetly to the wall, had faded to the point where it was difficult to read. Antipasto … risotto … pesca-tore. Resnick climbed the lean flight of stairs and found himself in an almost empty room with an extravagant mural along one wall, somewhere Mediterranean where the sea was always blue and the sun never set. Vines, presumably plastic, dangled from a trellis overhead. On each table, empty chianti bottles sat garlanded in dusty candle wax.
By one of the windows, a couple, married but not, Resnick instinctively felt, to each other, maintained a silent vigil over their linguine al alfredo. Near the far wall, a middle-aged man sat toying with his spaghetti and reading from a fat book he seemed almost to have finished. The night’s other customers had long gone.
A waiter wearing regulation black and white, his apron, unstained, tied high above his waist, moved to intercept Resnick and addressed him by name. “Your friend, she is already here.”
Resnick followed him past the entrance to the kitchen, along a little dog-leg corridor and up another short set of stairs into a second room.
Chairs were stacked on all the tables save one.
“Charlie, good. You found it, then. I was just beginning to wonder.” Helen Siddons, hair pinned up, little makeup, a shirt buttoned to the neck, gestured toward the empty chair and as Resnick was sitting, filled his glass. “Barolo. Not bad for the price.”
Resnick nodded and, shrugging off his suit jacket, hung it from the back of his chair.
“It was good of you to ring me.”
He shrugged. “I thought it was the way you wanted it played.”
“Even so …” Half smiling, she swiveled the single menu in Resnick’s direction. “Why don’t we order first? It’s all pretty much your bog-standard Italian. But if you value your lower bowel, steer clear of the prawns.”
Once the waiter had disappeared, Resnick told her about Valentine and Gary Prince.
“That’s it?” she said when he’d finished. “Beginning to end, that’s all you’ve got?”
“So far.”
Siddons shook her head. “Rumor and conjecture, Charlie. And not a lot of either.”
“But if we can link Valentine through Prince to the gun …”
“If. If. The last I heard, the gun was still missing.”
Resnick leaned closer. “We have to work with what we’ve got.”
“You’ll turn Prince over?”
“First thing.”
Siddons lifted her wineglass. “You might strike lucky.”
“If we can link Valentine to the weapon that shot Johnson …”
“Big if, Charlie.”
“Johnson’s just about fit enough to answer questions.”
“And you think he might dump Valentine right in it?”
“If someone had just put a bullet through my head, I think I would, don’t you?”
Siddons cut into her veal. “That would depend if I thought he was going to do it again.”
For some minutes, they ate in silence.
“Those two girls,” Siddons said, “Jason’s sister and her mate, did you ever get anything out of them?”
“A lot of abuse, not much else.”
“They’re not still in custody?”
Resnick shook his head. “Didn’t seem a lot of point.”
Siddons pushed her plate aside and lit a cigarette. “There’s more?”
Resnick drank some more wine and told her about Paul Finney. She liked what she was hearing, he could tell. A Drug Squad officer on Cassady’s payroll and Cassady providing security for clubs where so much illegal drug activity went down: it was a start, a way in, a weak link in the chain.
“Anything else, Charlie? Coffee, dessert?”
“I’ll have an espresso, double. Thanks.”
“Join me in a brandy?”
Resnick shook his head.
Fifteen minutes later, Helen Siddons slid her credit card between the folded halves of the bill. “Your shout next time, Charlie, okay?”
The youth and his dog were curled against each other, sleeping in the doorway.
“Poor bastard,” Siddons said, nodding in the boy’s direction.
“Amen to that.”
“Got your car, Charlie?”
Resnick shook his head.
“Come on then, mine’s just round the corner. I’ll give you a lift.”
As they turned on to the Woodborough Road, Siddons leaned a little to the left and rested her hand on Resnick’s knee. “I know you could have gone elsewhere with this. Norman Mann, for instance. You’re pals. I know that. And I’m grateful. I’ll not forget it.”
Resnick sat there wondering exactly what his friend Norman would think of this particular evening’s work. Siddons changed gear sharply, signaling right. Maybe it was the brandy, but whatever the reason, she was driving too fast. Probably she always did. In just a few minutes, they were pulling up outside Resnick’s house, its shape bulked dark against the
night sky.
Resnick opened the door and got out on to the pavement and, with a pert trill, Dizzy jumped down off the stone wall and trotted toward him.
“A sight more than some of us get,” Siddons said wryly, “someone to greet us at the front door when we get home of a night. Even if the first thing they do is stick their arse in our face.” She laughed. “Sweet dreams, Charlie. Have one on me.”
Resnick raised a hand as the car pulled away from the curb and then, bending low, he listened until the sound of the engine had faded beneath Dizzy’s insistent purr.
Twenty-three
Gary Prince was awake early, as it happened, needing the lavatory shy of five and then deciding to stay up for a while, fancying a cup of tea and a smoke; something distinctly savory about sitting up to the breakfast bar he’d had installed in his own kitchen, while the gorgeous woman he’d been shagging less than half a dozen hours before lay upstairs sleeping in his bed. Though in truth, technically speaking, it had been Vanessa who’d been shagging him. Now he was a little older, Gary found he liked it that way. Preferred it even. One of those welcome signs of maturity, he reckoned, along with his first gray hair and moving out from his mum’s.
Yes-Gary stubbed out his cigarette and, without thinking, lit another-about the best thing he’d ever done, buying this place. Nothing fancy, not one of those fake Tudor places out at Edwalton some he knew aspired to as soon as they’d got a quid or two in their pocket, a few TESSAs in the bank. This place was nothing flash, discreet even, unlikely to draw the unwelcome attentions of Resnick and the like, well within his means.
Though if things progressed with Vanessa the way he thought they might, there’d have to be improvements made, money spent.
Vanessa was currently sharing a flat in the Park with two pals in the same line as herself, corporate videos, a little photographic modeling, sales promotion. Gary had first met her, in fact, when she was using her leopard skin bikini to show off the lines of the new Sierra in the forecourt of the Broad Marsh Centre. Gary himself there on security duty thanks to his pal, Cassady; stop any bastard scratching the paintwork, kids running off with scads of brochures, only to toss them over the balcony like overweight confetti. They’d struck up a conversation over something Gary couldn’t remember and before you could say prawn cocktail, steak and chips, he’d been asking her out to dinner.
