Last Rites cr-10

by John Harvey

  Resnick waited long enough to say well done and shake Fowles’s hand, then he was back out on the street and on his way to the center of town.

  In the back room of the Bell, the usual musicians were into their final set. “King Porter Stomp,” “Clarinet Marmalade,” “Way Down Yonder In New Orleans.” Resnick nodded to a few familiar faces, bought a pint of Guinness, and leaned against the corner of the bar.

  When the band launched into “Dippermouth Blues,” and the trumpeter played, note for note, the same three muted choruses that Joe “King” Oliver had first played in 1923, Resnick knew, if he wasn’t exactly in heaven, at least, for those moments, all was right with the world.

  “What the hell are you doin’ here?” Norma Snape asked, back from her normal Sunday lunchtime session at the pub.

  Her daughter Sheena was stretched out on the sofa, watching the EastEnders omnibus on TV. “I live here, don’t I?” she replied, not lifting her eyes from the set.

  “Not so’s I’ve noticed,” Norma said, glancing at the screen a moment before heading for the kitchen.

  “Mum …”

  “What?”

  “Make us a cup of tea.”

  Out in the back garden, the dog was digging a large hole, with the apparent intent of burying the axle and rear wheel of an old pram someone had tossed over the back wall. Norma fished two mugs from the cold, scummy water in the sink and wiped them with a tea towel. She wished she’d splashed out on the half-ounce of Skunk she’d been offered an hour before, Teddy Eyles making it all too plain he was prepared to take payment in kind. And now the scuttering dog had realized she was back and was barking at the door. Jesus H. Christ! A nice fat joint was what she needed to get her through the rest of the afternoon.

  Grudgingly, Sheena swung her legs round to let her mum sit down.

  “I’ve had the police round again,” Norma said.

  “So?”

  “So they were asking about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “You and that mate of yours …”

  “Diane?”

  “I don’t know what she’s called. Both of you mixed up in some business out on the Forest, some bloke getting shot.”

  “That weren’t nothin’ to do with us.”

  “You were there, weren’t you? You telling me they’re lying? Telling me you weren’t?”

  Sheena tossed her head.

  “You want to be careful, my girl, hanging out with people like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know.”

  “Christ,” Sheena exclaimed, “you wonder I never come home? Nag, nag, nag. You’re on to me the minute I walk in the fuckin’ door.”

  “And mind your language.”

  “Yeh, fuckin’ right.” Sheena reached for her tea and cursed again as she spilt some of it down her leg. If only her mother’d stop moaning on and let her watch telly. Not that she knew much about what was going on. Same old faces saying the same old things. What was exercising Sheena’s mind was what was wrapped in a couple of soiled towels underneath Diane’s sink, the souvenir the pair of them had smuggled back from that night on the Forest, the gun with which Drew Valentine had shot Diane’s brother in the head.

  Resnick had pottered his way through the afternoon: mowed what he half jokingly referred to as the lawn; chatted to his friend Marian Witczak on the phone; made tea; taken a nap; glanced through the glossy booklet advertising jazz CDs. He knew that Hannah had driven over to her mother’s for lunch, dreading a meal that would inevitably be soured by the news of her father’s imminent remarriage.

  So when the doorbell rang in the early evening he assumed it would be Hannah, back from performing her unwanted duty and in need of a little rest and relaxation.

  But it was Lynn Kellogg smiling at him weakly from the doorstep, hoping that she wasn’t disturbing him, but if there was any chance of a cup of coffee.

  Lynn picked up Bud and cradled the small cat in her arms, stroking him while he purred and pushed his head against her neck, the underside of her chin. Resnick ground coffee beans and made an offer of a sandwich that was gratefully accepted.

  They sat in easy chairs that had been old and in need of replacement when Resnick and his ex-wife Elaine had sat in them sixteen years before.

  “No music?” Lynn said with a smile.

  Resnick pulled something calming from the shelves, Bud Shank and Laurindo Almeida playing bossa novas, used and worn and comforting. Midway through the first side, Lynn set her plate aside and began to talk about the hospital, her father’s illness, her mother’s state of mind. When she broke off to sniff back tears, Resnick waited, silent, for her to regain control; and when the tears came again, unstoppable this time, he crossed the room and held her, Lynn’s face tight against his shoulder.

  Neither of them heard Hannah’s VW approach as far as the curve in the road, Lynn’s car clearly visible beneath the street light. Hannah switched off her headlights, opened the car door, but didn’t get out. Minutes later, she reversed back toward the main road, turned, and headed for home.

  Twenty-nine

  The morning was beautiful: the sky was a flat, bright blue, cloudless and seemingly pure, and the sun, when he stepped out through the back door, was instantly warm on Resnick’s face. Here and there, the shrubs that bordered three sides of the garden were showing pink and white and shiny red, and the cherry tree was still clinging to much of its bloom. Only the shed in which he kept the aging mower, tins of crusted paint, and his small array of garden tools was an eyesore. Past the stage of easy repair, what it needed was demolishing and burning, a new one purchased in its place. Bonfire night, perhaps, Resnick thought, he’d drag the planks off and add them to some communal blaze.

  Away to the south, he could see the two sets of floodlights at either side of the Trent, Forest and County, and then, closer at hand, the tip of the clock tower marking the old Victoria railway station, the dome of the Council House catching the light at one end of the Old Market Square.

  Standing there on the back step, he caught himself thinking about Lynn Kellogg, the sadness, the slow anticipation of grief that had hovered behind her eyes. He remembered his own father’s passing, lingering and slow, the richly sweet smell of dying that had permeated the room. Skin like graying paper, nails like horn. The priest’s words. The sacrament. His mother’s prayers. The rest of his father’s family had been Jews, practicing, devout. He had never properly understood the circumstances that had led to his father’s Catholic upbringing, a catalog of changing homes, of largely faceless uncles and forbidding aunts.

  Turning back into the house, he thought about ringing Hannah. By the time he had poured himself a second cup of coffee, he had thought better of it; if she’d wanted to talk to him about the visit to her mother’s, she would have called.

  There was an uneven slice of pepper salami lurking near the back of the fridge and he folded it around a chunk of ripe Blue Stilton, dipping them both into a jar of mayonnaise before popping them into his mouth and washing them down with apple juice from a carton whose best before date had long gone. He would walk to work: the exercise would do him good.

  Lynn was in the CID room when Resnick arrived and his first impulse was that something had happened at home in Norfolk, but she stood chatting easily enough with Kevin Naylor, laughing even, and he realized it was probably something to do with the ongoing investigation. “Checking a few leads on Finney,” she said. “These links with Cassady. I thought I might call round on Cassady, come at it sideways, see if I can weasel anything out of him.” She gave him a quick smile. “I thought you should know.”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Anil, he’s on to Finney himself. Likely report to you direct.”

  “After Siddons.”

  Lynn grinned. “Of course.”

  “Any news about your dad?” Resnick asked.

  Lynn shook her head. “Not really, no.”

  “Okay. You’ll let me know? If anything …�
�

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” And she was on her way, out through the door.

  As she turned into the landing, Sheena fought to hold her breath against the usual stink of stale piss and vomit, and even worse. Though there hadn’t been as much as a breeze down on the street, a wind cut along the eighth floor and she pulled the zip of her leather jacket up to the collar as she sidestepped the sheets of old newspaper and broken polystyrene food containers, hurrying on past three boarded-up flats, another with the door kicked in and hanging from a single hinge, fresh graffiti up and down the hall. When finally she got to Diane’s, the top half of the door was reinforced with hardboard, a sheet of which had also been nailed to the wall alongside. The time before last the place had been burgled, unable to break through the actual door, whoever it was had simply smashed a hole in the wall and crawled through. Though, as Diane said, what the fuck they thought there was left to steal after they cleared her out five times this side of Christmas already, fuck only knows.

  Sheena hammered and yelled, and after an eternity Diane, bleary-eyed, opened the door to let her in.

  “What the hell d’you look like?” Sheena said.

  “Fuck you, too.”

  Sheena followed her through into the living room, a single light bulb burning bare from the ceiling, old sheets tacked across the window. Butt ends and beer cans cluttered the stained carpet; piles of old magazines and free newspapers littered the corners. Aside from a sagging two-seater settee, the only items of furniture were a green plastic milk crate topped with a cushion and a television set Diane had bartered from one of the blokes who lived on the floor above, who’d almost certainly nicked it from the old lady on the floor below.

  Diane’s little boy, Melvin, was wobbling around precariously, face smeared with jam, dummy sticking from his mouth, nappy hanging low.

  “Who’s in there?” Sheena asked, nodding toward the kitchen.

  “Just Lesley,” Diane said. “Shooting up.”

  Sheena reached for her cigarettes, lit up, then wandered into the other room. Lesley was just lifting the heated spoon away from the gas ring.

  “Here, fuckin’ hold this.”

  Sheena steadied the spoon while Lesley, eyes narrowing in concentration, bit down into her bottom lip and drew the contents up into the syringe. With her free hand, she lifted up her skirt and, still squinting, slid the needle into a vein high in her bruised inner thigh.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she cried, eyes closing. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, yes. Oh, oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck! Oh, sweet fuck!”

  She pulled the needle out and tossed it in the sink, a thin ribbon of blood running down her leg.

  Great, thought Sheena, now that’s over perhaps we can get round to sorting out what we’re going to do about this fucking gun.

  It had been chaos: bloody chaos. Blood down the side of her skirt and top, smeared across her face-and Diane freckled with it, gobs of it tangled in her hair. Jason and Valentine cursing and moaning.

  Valentine had dropped the gun when Jason stabbed him and it had fallen inside the car; Sheena, not thinking, not thinking clearly, scrabbling on the floor to pick it up. Pushing the door open, one foot on the ground, she had been about to fling it out into the dark when she realized her prints were now plastered all over it. The toilet block was less than fifty meters away. Running hard, almost losing her footing not once but twice, she barged open the outer door and lunged into the dark. Whenever the council replaced the overhead bulbs, they were smashed within the hour.

  Sheena kicked off her shoes and tugged down her tights, wrapping them around the gun before jamming it behind the cistern in the last cubicle, where it had remained, undiscovered, until Lesley, alerted by a phone call, had slipped in to collect it.

  Now all Sheena wanted to do was get rid of it-but at a price.

  Sheena knew Raymond Cooke through her younger brother, Nicky, who had used Raymond as a fence for much of the stuff he burgled round the neighborhood, Raymond ever eager to replenish the stock of his shop at knock-down prices. The shop, a single-story place in Bobber’s Mill, with a storeroom up above and a flat over that where Raymond lived, had belonged to Terry. But in the terms of Terry’s will, both shop and flat were Raymond’s for as long as he wanted. And Raymond, whose only previous work experience had been hauling great tubs of offal and bone around an abattoir, had very much wanted to stay where he was.

  So on that Monday afternoon, when Sheena pushed open the shop door and went in, it was Raymond who glanced up from behind his copy of the Mirror and wondered if he didn’t recognize her from somewhere.

  “Look around,” he said, ever the smooth businessman, “take your time. Any questions, be only too happy to oblige.”

  Sheena surveyed the array of electrical goods piled high, everything available for a small down payment, easy terms, generous discounts for cash. There were car radios, mobile phones, microwave cookers, binoculars, cameras, laptop computers; CDs arranged alphabetically from Abba and Aphex Twin, by way of Oasis to The Verve and Warren Zevon.

  Sheena fidgeted with the hem of her halter top, several inches of bare flesh between it and the belt that ran round her little black skirt. What she’d do, next chance she got, have her belly-button pierced like Diane. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” she said.

  Raymond set down his paper and smiled. “Should I?”

  “Ray-o, that’s what Nicky used to call you. Used to be dead skinny, didn’t you? You’ve filled out; grown up, I suppose. Handsome.”

  Sheena was standing close to the chair, almost within reach, but not quite. Raymond, with his check shirt loose outside his jeans, a thin band of sweat darkening the faint mustache along his upper lip.

  “Sheena, right? Sheena Snape?”

  Sheena nodded and smiled.

  “How is Nicky?” Raymond began, then realized. “Oh, no, look, I’m sorry. I forgot, I …”

  “S’all right.”

  “Shane, then. Is he …?”

  “Still inside, yeah.”

  Raymond looking at her, starting to weigh up his chances, no bra beneath that top, he was sure of that. Eighteen’d she be now? Maybe not that. A year or so younger than he was himself. “So,” he said, “you just happen to pop in by accident, like, or was there something, you know, you wanted?”

  Not looking at her now, staring; the end of his tongue like a bit of lamb’s liver flopping between his lips. If one of us has got to fuck him, Sheena was thinking, I’m buggered if it’s going to be me. Besides, she remembered, if what Nicky had said was true, Raymond only fancied them really young; rumor was he’d knocked up his cousin when she was not long out of junior school.

  “I might have something,” Sheena said, “you’d be interested in.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Something to sell.”

  “Oh, yeh?”

  “Only, you know, I’d have to be certain.”

  “How’s that, then?”

  “You could handle it, of course.” She gave him one of those smiles and thought poor Raymond was going to wet himself there and then.

  “Try me,” he said. If Sheena came any closer, she’d be sitting in his lap.

  “Okay.” She slipped the bag off her shoulder and snapped it open before holding it toward him.

  “Fuckin’ hell!”

  “Exactly.”

  The pistol lay among lipstick-smeared tissues, a foil-wrapped condom, sticks of sugar-free chewing gum, a strip of instant photos of Sheena and Jason they’d had taken in a booth down by the bus station. A chromed Beretta; most likely, Raymond thought, a.38. He reached his hand toward it and Sheena swung the bag away.

  “So? You interested or what?”

  “I might be, yeh.”

  “Might’s not good enough.”

  “Okay, then, say I am.”

  “How much?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  Raymond shrugged. “Where it’s come from, how hot it is.”

  “I don’t kno
w nothin’ ’bout that.”

  “Say it’s been used, right? Some blag? Shooting, even. Got to be worth a lot less’n if it’s clean, nothin’ the law can tie it into. See what I mean?”

  “So?”

  “So where’d you get it?”

  “It ain’t mine. Belongs to a friend.”

  “Where’d they get it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s have a look at it again.”

  This time when she stood next to him, Sheena let her hip brush against his upper arm.

  “Seventy-five,” Raymond said.

  “Bollocks!”

  “Hundred, then. Here y’are.” Leaning forward, he slid a roll of notes from his back pocket and peeled off five twenties, holding them toward her. “Take ’em, go on.”

  “Two hundred,” Sheena said and Raymond laughed and shook his head. “It’s gotta be worth at least that much.”

  “Not to me.”

  “How much, then?”

  “I told you, a hundred. Tops.”

  “Ray-o.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile and touched his shoulder with her hand. Through the thin material of his shirt, his skin was slippery and damp.

  “Okay,” Raymond said, shifting less than easily, “I tell you what I’ll do. You give me till tomorrow, let me ask around.” He broke off, reading the expression on Sheena’s face. “Don’t worry, I won’t use no names, nothin’ like that. But if I can come up with a buyer, anything over the hundred I’ll split it with you, fifty-fifty. How’s that sound?”

  Sheena wasn’t sure how it would sound to Diane or Lesley. But the last thing she wanted to do was go traipsing around all over town with a bloody gun in her bag, chatting up every crooked bastard in the city.

  “Let us have the hundred now,” she said, “and it’s a deal.”

  Grinning, Raymond put down two twenties, one on each knee. “There. Forty. Gesture of faith. For now. Less maybe you want to figure out some other way of earning the rest?”