Last Rites cr-10

by John Harvey

  “Talk to them,” Preston said. “Whoever it is. Tell them the kids are coming out. Tell them if they try anything, someone will get shot.”

  The children were at the foot of the stairs, on either side of Derek, listening.

  “Come here,” Preston said.

  Hesitantly, Derek walking close behind them, they did as they were told. They had coats on, Sandra had her school bag on her shoulder.

  “Come here,” Preston said again and Sandra knew he was talking to her.

  She went forward half a dozen paces, then stopped. He could reach out to touch her and he did. Touched his fingers to the side of her face, her cheek, and she flinched.

  “You know who I am?” he said.

  Sandra nodded, eyes downcast. “Yes.”

  For a moment, his hand rested on her shoulder. “Tell them,” he said to Lorraine, “they’re coming out now.”

  “Go with them,” he said to Derek, who was bending down, adjusting Sean’s laces.

  “I can’t.” He was trying to see Lorraine’s face, read her expression.

  “Go,” Preston said.

  “I’ll be all right, Derek,” Lorraine said. “Go on.”

  Siddons leaned forward and jabbed a finger at the screen. “It’s Preston, he’s coming out.”

  Resnick shook his head. “It’s the husband.”

  Siddons was already on her feet. “Myra, come with me. Let’s talk to him, find out what’s going on.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Claydon ponderously. “And then there were two.”

  But Resnick was still staring at the front door, wondering what was going on in Michael Preston’s mind, what was going on inside.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any?” Lorraine said, and when Preston shook his head, she poured gin into a tumbler, sipped at it, poured in a little more. Ten minutes since he’d spoken anything more than the occasional word. She carried her drink around the table to where he was sitting and stood close behind him, one hand resting high on his shoulder, fingers splayed. He leaned his head sideways against her arm. His breathing was ragged as cloth caught in the wind.

  “It would never have worked, Michael. You know that, don’t you?”

  It was a while before she realized he was crying.

  “You remember that time,” Lorraine said, “we were on holiday with Mum, a caravan. Filey, I think it was. You were just sixteen.”

  “Bridlington. It was Bridlington.”

  “We made that kite, well, you did. Flew it along the beach, from the dunes.” She paused. “That was the first time.”

  “Don’t.” He half turned, red-eyed.

  “Why not? Isn’t it what this is all about?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  He turned away, reached up for her hand. “You said you loved me, Lo.”

  “I did.”

  “We’ll always be together, that’s what you said.”

  “We were kids.”

  “No. Your two, they’re kids. We were older, knew what we were doing.”

  “Did we?”

  Standing, he touched her arms, the nape of her neck, kissed her hair.

  “Don’t.” She pushed away but he caught hold of her wrist and pulled her back; held her tight, tighter.

  “You know I want you.”

  “No.”

  “All I’ve thought about …”

  “Michael, no.” She wrenched herself away and moved again till the corner of the table was between them, the shotgun still lying there, blunt and inviting. “It’s not the same; I’m not the same. I know it’s been different for you and I’m sorry, but you’ve got to see …”

  “See what?”

  “This … this person you’ve been, you’ve been dreaming about, fantasizing about, whatever-it isn’t me. I’ve got all this, a home. Kids. Michael, I’m married now, don’t you understand?”

  He laughed, harsh and ugly. “That’s not a fucking marriage, it’s a sham.”

  Lorraine pushed a hand up through her hair, swallowed down some gin. “It’s not a sham, Michael. It’s what marriages are.”

  His fingers brushed the shiny stock of the gun. She was beautiful, beautiful to his eyes. “That night …”

  “No.”

  “That night it happened …”

  “Michael, please …”

  “Listen, you got to listen.”

  “Michael …”

  He lifted the shotgun and slammed it down, gouging the table. “Listen to me.”

  “All right,” she breathed, “all right.” So many years she had gone without exactly knowing; anxious to keep it that way. The evidence Michael had refused to give in the dock, the plea in mitigation; the expression in his eyes when they took him down, the last thing she saw.

  “He caught me,” Preston said. “Sneaking out of your room. Laughed. Slapped my face. Snatched hold of my hand. Pressed my fingers up against his nose, sniffing. “Lovely, isn’t she? Choice. Ripe. I was wonderin’ when you’d start getting yours.” And he laughed again and winked. “Keeping it in the family.”

  Tears were running down Lorraine’s face, unstopped.

  “I hit him,” Preston said. “Kept hitting him. Dragged him downstairs and into the shop. Kept hitting him till he was dead. Our fucking father!”

  She held him then and kissed him and, not looking him in the eye, she said: “He’d come into my room, after I’d gone to bed; the way most dads, I suppose, do. Tuck me in, tell me a story. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy … It was just tickling at first and then he started, you know, down there, his fingers, down between my legs. Still tickling. Later on, when I was older, it would be when he came back from the pub, then it was more, he … When I got my first period, he stopped. Never came near me, not again. Not after that.”

  Michael’s voice was far off, strange. “You didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Not till today, now.”

  He looked at her. “How could you? I mean, let him. Without saying?”

  “Oh, Michael, I was a child.”

  “But later …”

  “Later it was you came, oh so softly, to my room. I could hardly confess one without the other now, could I?”

  He flinched. “That was different.”

  “A matter of degree.”

  “You loved me.”

  “I loved him.”

  “Even after …”

  “He was my father.”

  “He fucking abused you.”

  “I know, I know. But it’s not that simple, nothing is.” She stepped away and said, “We have to finish this. We must.”

  After a long moment, he nodded and told her to dial the number taped to the phone. “I’m coming out,” he said, when they had the connection. “We’re both coming out.”

  “Throw the shotgun out first.” Siddons’s voice.

  “Right.” Preston looked at Lorraine and handed her back the phone.

  “What d’ you think?” Siddons asked, turning away from the screen toward Resnick.

  “I think he’s going to do as he says.”

  “We’ll soon see,” said Claydon, pointing.

  Derek was sitting at the rear of the van, the children had been driven off by one of the officers to be with Maureen. He leaned forward as the front door slowly opened, there was a quick glimpse of a face, an arm and then the shotgun spiraled through a curve and landed with a dent near the middle of the lawn.

  “Good boy,” Claydon breathed.

  They stepped, Lorraine and Michael, through the front door together and the spotlight from the helicopter lit them up like stars. He took her hand and they began to walk along the path, Lorraine lifting an arm to shield her eyes from the light.

  “Keep going,” Preston said to her, several yards along.

  “What?”

  “Keep walking.”

  She hesitated, uncertain, took three more steps forward, stopped again. Preston took one pace, then another, back toward the door.<
br />
  “What the hell’s happening now?” Siddons asked.

  Preston reached beneath his shirt.

  “He’s got another gun,” Derek cried out. “A handgun.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you say?” Siddons yelled.

  “Watch up, watch up,” Claydon said into the harnessed mike. “He may still be armed.”

  The pistol in Michael’s hand was aimed at everything, at nothing.

  “No!” Lorraine screamed and began to run toward him.

  “Take him,” Claydon said into the mike, and three high-powered rifles opened fire.

  For what seemed to Lorraine an eternity, but was only seconds, Michael seemed to be dancing from unseen strings: then the strings were cut and he folded at the center, fell to earth, blood pumping from his neck, one side of his face, the side where his face had been.

  She crawled across the ground toward him, men running past her, shouting, reaching down. She had just touched his arm when they lifted him away to where the paramedics with the stretcher were waiting.

  Resnick started to walk across the grass toward her, till Derek stumbled past him and sank down on his knees beside her, holding her against him, sobbing, both of them sobbing, Derek repeating her name over and over, “Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorraine …”

  Forty-three

  The media rubbed its hands. Special news bulletins, network specials, analysis, speculation. The Jacobs’ house was besieged: Lorraine and Derek took the children out of school and went to stay with an aunt in Rochdale. Maureen sold her story to the Sun. Helen Siddons bought a new Donna Karan suit for her appearance on Newsnight, a round-table discussion with the Home Secretary and a former Chief Constable of Manchester. Jacky and Jean made the arrangements together for Liam Cassady’s funeral.

  In the middle of a slow afternoon, Resnick picked up the phone and it was Eileen Cooke. “Sheena,” she said, “she was in the pub last night with her mates, pissed. I talked to her. About Ray-o. She’d given him this gun, to sell. Been used in a shooting, she reckoned. Out on the Forest. She thinks maybe that’s why Ray-o had gone to see this Valentine.” Eileen hung up.

  Resnick talked it over with Millington and the rest of the team. Variously, they would interview Sheena Snape and her friends, Diane and Lesley; they would speak again to Drew Valentine and Leo Warner. They would do what they could. All the other information suggested that Planer’s death had left a vacuum in the region’s drug trade and Valentine was one of those working hard to fill it; if there was a perfect time to bring him down, this was it.

  The Major Crime Unit, meantime, continued its investigation into the activities, personal and otherwise, of Paul Finney. Other officers from the Drug Squad, including Norman Mann himself, were called in.

  For the best part of three days, Helen Siddons sat across a table from Finney, the tape deck softly whirring, question after question meeting the same response.

  “What was your relationship with Roland Planer?”

  “No comment.”

  “You were aware that, in addition to gambling, Roland Planer’s other principal business activity was the distribution of illegal drugs?”

  “No comment.”

  “How about Gold Standard Security? Liam Cassady? In what capacity did you receive payments from them totaling several thousands of pounds?”

  Finney’s Police Federation lawyer coughed and leaned forward: “Detective Chief Inspector,” he said in the East London accent he found it useful to affect, “my client has made it clear it is not his intention to respond on these matters. As is his right.”

  “Jesus, Charlie!” Siddons said, when she bumped into him in the corridor. “Why the hell take the right to silence away from every other sod and leave it with the likes of Finney? You know what’s going to happen as well as I do. The bastard’ll drag the investigation out as long as he can, get signed off with stress. Couple of years from now, he’ll get himself invalided out on a pension and there won’t be a bloody thing we can do about it.”

  Resnick went to a dinner party with Hannah, some friends of hers from school, a couple with a house in West Bridgford, looking across open land toward the river. There was a psychotherapist there also, a graphic designer, a worker for the National Council for Single Parent Families. In between talking about their jobs and the wine and plays they’d read about but not actually seen, they discussed the apparent breakdown in law and order, the alarming rise in the use of guns.

  “What’s your view, Charlie,” the therapist asked, forking up some asparagus. “This guy who was shot and killed. The police, your chaps, they didn’t need to take such extreme measures, surely?” He looked across at Resnick earnestly. “I’d love to know what you think.”

  Resnick thought it was time he left. He touched Hannah’s shoulder as he passed and did exactly that. Tense in the car, angry, he thought he was driving home, but that wasn’t where he was heading.

  Lynn opened the door to her flat, her hair pulled back, no makeup, a man’s white shirt torn at the collar, baggy jeans. “Something’s the matter,” she said.

  “No.”

  She closed the door behind him and he looked around the cluttered room; surfaces covered with boxes of old papers, photographs.

  “The funeral?” he asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  He nodded.

  “I could put the kettle on, some tea …”

  But he was already reaching for her and she could never remember, nor could he, the path by which they made their way, clumsily, from settee to floor and floor to bed.

  “This was my dad’s,” she said later. The shirt had somehow wound between them and Lynn tugged it free and shook it out, bringing it to rest like a flag across the pale-blue patterned quilt.

  When she leaned forward, Resnick kissed her back, her side where it dipped between hip and ribs, her breast.

  “I think’, she said brightly, “we could have that tea now, don’t you?”

  He looked at the clock: it was past one, nearer to two.

  When she stood in the doorway minutes later, naked, posing almost, a large mug in each hand, he felt-what? — excited? Proud?

  “The funeral,” he said when she was back in bed, the pair of them sitting back against the pillows. “How was it?”

  “Oh, strange. As if it wasn’t happening somehow, not to me. My mum, she was in a right state. You know, carrying on. I was so busy fretting about her … It’ll hit me in a few days, I expect.” Dipping her head, she kissed Resnick’s shoulder. “I was glad for him, I suppose. My dad. That he went when he did. Better than dragging on.”

  He thought she was going to cry, but she sniffed and squeezed his arm, and reached again for her tea.

  When he noticed the clock again, it was a quarter to three.

  “Do you want to go?” Lynn asked.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Waking again later, hunched up against him, Lynn said, “Charlie, why does this feel so comfortable?”

  There was no reply: he was asleep.

  When finally they woke, the pair of them, it was beginning to be light outside and Lynn was holding her father’s white shirt close against her face.

  The Crown Prosecution Service informed Resnick that on the strength of what they’d seen so far, in the matter of illegally purchasing, carrying, or discharging a firearm in a public place with the specific purpose of causing injury, there was insufficient evidence for proceeding against Drew Valentine.

  For receiving stolen goods and dishonestly assisting in their disposal, Gary Prince was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, automatically reduced to eighteen months. Vanessa immediately took a job as hostess on a cruise ship to the Azores.

  At the inquest into the death of Evan Donaghy, the coroner returned a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.

  Paul Finney rose early, for a Sunday; the questioning had been going on now, one way and another, for almost two weeks. Siddons niggling away, bringing in his colleagues, friends,
on and on, always holding the charge of bigamy over his head.

  He made himself a cup of tea and sat for a while in the kitchen, scanning the sports pages. Notts all out for a hundred and twenty. What sort of a performance was that? The kids were down now, two of them anyway, in watching TV, and he made a big pot of tea for everyone, took a cup up to his wife, along with bits and pieces of the papers.

  “Just off out for a spell. Back in an hour.”

  Laura was painting the old cottage scullery, bright yellow daubed all over her hands and in her hair, and in Adam’s hair, too. “Let me just finish this bit here,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  “Why don’t we go for a walk first?”

  They wandered down the lane and back, taking their time, Adam riding on Finney’s shoulders much of the way, kicking him with his heels, tugging at his hair.

  He said no to a drink, said he had to be getting on.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Laura said.

  “I hope so, love.”

  Finney drove south to Loughborough station, bought a KitKat in the little newsagent’s kiosk, and crossed the bridge to the southbound platform. “Please stand well back,” said the announcer, “the next train is the Midland Main Line express to London, St. Pancras, not stopping at this station.” Near the end of the short platform, Finney closed his eyes and stepped out into space.

  He had posted letters to his wives and children; a letter, too, to Helen Siddons, a packet really, fat, registered. Like the good officer he had once been, Finney’s documentation was thorough, cross-referenced. Times, dates, places. Within an hour of reading through the material, photocopying it for safety, Siddons sought, and was granted, a meeting with the Chief Constable. Less than an hour after that, three Drugs Squad officers were arrested on charges ranging from the illegal possession of controlled drugs to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Norman Mann was placed under suspension pending the results of these and other inquiries.

  Resnick had not spoken to Hannah since he walked out of her friends’ dinner party. He had phoned twice and left messages, but she had not returned his calls. Now he bumped into her, almost literally, crossing Upper Parliament Street, Hannah heading in the direction of the Theatre Royal, Resnick, hands in pockets, going the other way.