Wasted Years

by John Harvey

  In the kitchen, he felt the smoothness of coffee beans in the small of his hand. He knew already which album he would pull from the shelves, slide on to the turntable from its sleeve.

  The purple postage stamp on the cover, Monk’s face in profile at its center, trilby hat sloping forward, angled away, the thrust of his goatee beard rhyming the curve of the hat’s brim. Riverside 12–209: The Unique Thelonious Monk. “If only they’d take away the blindfold and the handcuffs,” Elaine had used to say of Monk’s playing, “it might make all the difference.” Resnick would smile. Why play the right notes when the wrong ones will do?

  Resnick set his coffee on the table by the chair and cued in the second track.

  Monk picks the notes from the piano tentatively, as if it were a tune he once heard long ago and then, indistinctly, through an open window from an apartment down the street. There is more than uncertainty in the way his fingers falter, sliding between half-remembered chords, surprising themselves with fragments of melody, with things he would have preferred to have remained forgotten. “Memories of You.”

  Moments when it is easy to imagine he might get up from the piano and walk away—except that you know he cannot, anymore than when the solo is finally through he can let it go. When you’re sure it’s over, probing with another pair of notes, a jinking run, a fading chord.

  At the track’s end, he seems to hear her feet walk across the floor above: door to dressing table to wardrobe, wardrobe to dressing table to bed. If he went now and pushed open the door into the hallway would he hear her voice?

  “Charlie, aren’t you coming up?”

  The final weeks when they lay beneath the same sheets, not speaking, not touching, catching at their breath, fearful that in sleep they might be turned inward by some old habit or need.

  “Christ, Charlie!” Ben Riley had exclaimed. “What the heck’s the matter with you? You got a face like bloody death!”

  And in truth he had—because in truth that’s what it had been like: dying.

  A long death and slow, eked out, a little each day.

  Fragments.

  “Don’t you see, Charlie?”

  Once the blindfold had been taken away, it made all the difference.

  1981

  Twenty-One

  “That the post, Charlie?”

  “Mm?”

  “I said, is that …? Oh, never mind. I’ll get it.” Resnick slurped down more coffee, half an ear on the local news report, mother and her two children narrowly escaping a house fire out in Bilborough, half on what Elaine was shouting from the hall.

  “That lad,” Elaine said accusingly, coming down the steps into the kitchen.

  “Which one?”

  “The boy who delivers the paper.”

  “I thought it was the postman?”

  Elaine shook her head. “The paper.”

  “What about it?”

  “Him. It’s him. Rides that bike of his right up to the door, hardly time to stuff the paper through the flap and he’s off again. Four times out of five, see what happens.”

  She dropped the Mail on to the table where Resnick was sitting. On a torn and buckled front page he glimpsed something more about the new princess.

  “Why not have a word?” Resnick said. “At the shop.”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  She pointed at the newspaper. “You can see for yourself how much good that did.”

  “What d’you reckon, then?” Resnick grinned. “Lurk in the shrubbery, flash my warrant card at him? Performing wheelies in a confined space?”

  “Go on, make a joke out of it.”

  “I don’t see what else I can do.”

  “You don’t pay for it, that’s why.”

  “I don’t read it.”

  “You don’t read anything. Aside from the back pages.”

  “Better than page three.”

  “The Mail doesn’t have page three.”

  “Shouldn’t mind missing bits of page one as well, then.”

  “God! Something has got into you this morning.”

  Resnick reached for her hand. “Part of my new image.”

  “Oh, yes?” Allowing herself to be pulled gently towards him. “What’s that then?”

  “Ooh, you know. Light-hearted, silver-tongued.”

  “Yes?” A smile brightening Elaine’s face. “Well, I don’t want to disappoint you, but you’ve still a way to go. And, no, I am not going to spend the next few minutes dallying on your lap.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s way past time I finished getting ready for work.”

  “You look ready to me.”

  “I said for work.”

  Resnick’s kiss missed her mouth and landed between neck and cheek.

  “Do you know how long I spent putting on that makeup?”

  “To the second.”

  “Then you know I haven’t got time to do it over again.”

  Resnick grinned.

  “Charlie!” She wriggled to her feet and stood over him, trying hard to look annoyed. “If that’s what you’re interested in, you should have said so an hour ago.”

  “I did.”

  For a moment Elaine’s expression changed. “Why didn’t I hear you?”

  Resnick shook his head and looked away. “I don’t know,” he said.

  The news had finished and Neil Diamond was sounding beefily cheerful in its place. Elaine walked across the room and switched off the radio. Resnick bit into cold toast. There were times when this house they had bought could feel strangely barren and still.

  “Can you drop me off?” Elaine asked.

  “Sure. I’m in court first thing. Shirehall.”

  “How long’ve I got?”

  Resnick looked at his watch. “Ten minutes.”

  “Fine.”

  Toast in hand, he turned to watch her go and in the doorway she swung back towards him, a smile slipping back to her face.

  “Be careful, Charlie.”

  “What?”

  But before he could follow the direction of her gaze, the marmalade had slid from the edge of the crust down on to the welcoming width of his tie.

  A little under six months ago, Elaine had taken a new job with an advertising agency which had opened new offices in one of the Victorian factories in the old Lace Market. Open-plan premises, green plants, partners with turned-back cuffs who encouraged everyone to call them by their first names. “It’s a good opportunity, Charlie. They’ve got big plans for expansion and they’re really keen to promote from inside.”

  Her desk was close to one of the beautifully proportioned arched windows and, aside from her keyboard and printer and VDU, held a pair of trailing ivies, a scarlet geranium, a photograph of herself and Resnick at the party celebrating his promotion to detective sergeant, a small furry animal she had had since a baby, a pocket calculator, and a large glass ashtray—not that she smoked herself—but her boss did and since quite often he stopped by her desk rather than calling her over to his, it was only sensible to be accommodating.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with the way you dress,” her boss, the sales director, had said, tapping ash from the end of his cigarette, “but if we saw our way to giving you an advance on your first bonus, d’you think you might see your way clear to spending it on something a little more, well, something with a little more flair?”

  She hadn’t said anything about the conversation to Resnick. She’d taken the money, spent it, lied about the cost, cutting it by more than fifty percent, and still had to live with the look of incredulity on his face. “What? You spent how much? On that? To sit around at work in?”

  Clothes, Resnick thought, were what you put on so as not to appear naked. They were what you covered with paper suits before stepping into a scene of crime.

  For that much money they could have hired someone to repaint the outside of the house, replaced the carpet on the stairs, booked that holiday in New Orleans instead o
f spending a week in a self-catering cottage in Northumbria or risking coming face to face with half the rest of the local force on Majorca.

  “This do you?” Resnick asked, drawing into the curb on the corner of High Pavement and Stoney Street.

  “Fine.” She leaned across the front seat to kiss him deftly on the cheek. “You’re not going into the witness box in that?” she asked, looking askance at the stain on his tie.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll hold my notebook in front of it.”

  Elaine kissed him again and slid from the car. Resnick watched her in the wing mirror, a crisp-looking woman with good legs and brown hair, small leather bag swinging from one shoulder. When it was clear she wasn’t going to turn and wave, Resnick pulled away from the curb and continued along High Pavement towards the Shirehall.

  An hour and a half later he was giving evidence against a nineteen-year-old who had walked into a second-hand jeweler’s on Castle Gate and tried to negotiate a price for a dozen items which were on the list regularly circulated by the police. The jeweler requested time to give an accurate estimate, asked the youth to come back within the hour. When he did so, Resnick and DC Rains had been waiting in the back.

  “Good stuff,” Rains had said, examining a diamond clip through the jeweler’s glass. “Shame to let it go to waste. Owner’s likely claimed on the insurance already.”

  Resnick chose not to hear.

  “And at any time, sergeant, when you and Detective Constable Rains were taking my client into custody, were you aware of the detective constable threatening my client?”

  “No, I was not.”

  “You neither saw nor heard the officer propositioning my client at all?”

  “I’m not sure what you …?”

  “You were not in the police vehicle when Detective Constable Rains said to my client, There’s half a dozen more down to you and you’re going to cough for them or I’ll see how your balls fit inside a pair of garden shears’?”

  “Those exact words?”

  “Did you hear your colleague utter those words, sergeant?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Not anything like them?”

  “Not to the best of my knowledge.”

  “But Detective Constable Rains and yourself did question my client about other alleged offenses?”

  “In the course of our interview with him, yes.”

  “This interview, sergeant, would this have been held in the police station?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in the car?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The police car taking my client back to the station, the interview did not take place there?”

  “I told you, the …”

  “What was said to my client in the car?”

  “I’m not sure, I mean, not exactly. But very little of consequence. As far as I remember.”

  “Perhaps you would like time to refer to your notes?”

  “Thank you, but there’s nothing in my notebook about any such conversation.”

  “It was silent, then, the journey?”

  “For the most part, as I recall, yes.”

  “You were driving?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Detective Constable Rains?”

  “Was in the passenger seat alongside me.”

  “Leaning over that seat to talk to my client, who was handcuffed in the back?”

  “He may have, I don’t …”

  “You don’t recall, yes, sergeant, we’re getting used to your convenient lapses of memory …”

  “I …”

  “I put it to you, however, that you must have been aware that your colleague was leaning over towards the rear seat in which my client was traveling, both his wrists handcuffed behind his back, leaning over and telling him in no uncertain terms that if he refused to own up to at least six other cases of burglary, he would personally emasculate him?”

  “I have no recollection of any such conversation.”

  “Nor of the detective constable reaching into the rear of the vehicle and grasping my client’s testicles in his hand and twisting them so viciously that my client cried out and kicked the back of the seat and, finally, almost lost consciousness.”

  “No.”

  “You were not aware of any of these things I have described taking place?”

  “No.”

  “In which case, sergeant, my client must be lying?”

  “It seems possible …”

  “And the doctor who examined my client at the police station and found signs of severe bruising on and around the area of his testicles, he was lying too?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “You are not saying very much at all, are you, sergeant?”

  “I am giving evidence as to what happened as best I remember …”

  “So you keep saying. And, as the court is becoming distressingly aware, your memory, sergeant, is not of the best. Neither, apparently, are your powers of observation.”

  Smarting, standing there in the witness box in his slightly shabby suit and his freshly stained tie, looking neither directly at the barrister questioning him nor at the judge, but directly in front of him, Resnick made no reply.

  “You were in the vehicle?” the barrister asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Driving,” Resnick said. “I was driving. My attention was on the road, the other traffic. I was concentrating on what was going on outside the car, rather than the inside.”

  “How convenient!” The barrister made no attempt to contain his sarcasm.

  “Well,” Resnick said, “it meant that we reached the station without accident.”

  “In which case, sergeant, I suppose we should congratulate you on a job well done. I’m sure that after this, your superiors will look favorably on any request you might make to continue your career in traffic control.”

  Resnick’s eyes narrowed and, behind his back, his hands clenched and unclenched several times.

  “Thank you, sergeant. I have no further questions. You may step down.”

  Half an hour later, Resnick was across the road in the County Tavern, washing down a cheese and onion cob with a pint of draught Guinness. He’d already had two whiskies at the bar to catch his nerves and his head was still throbbing. Rains was the last man he wanted to see coming through the door and there he was, bouncing up the steps to where Resnick was sitting, flashing a smile to match the watch strapped to his wrist.

  “Owe you one, Charlie. Several, in fact.” His open hand pounded Resnick on the back. “Word is you stonewalled in there like the best. Place in the next Test if you don’t watch out.”

  He held out his hand and Resnick ignored it, bit down into what was left of his cob.

  “So, then, Charlie, I’m buying. What’s it to be?”

  “Nothing.”

  Rains pressed both hands together flat, as if praying, raised them till they were resting against his mouth: a familiar gesture. “Okay, have it your own way.” He took a step back. “That supermarket blag—we’ve got a meet tonight, half-seven.”

  Resnick watched him go, a tall man, an inch under six foot, slim-hipped, expensive suit, dark hair professionally styled and cut, twenty-nine years old.

  What Rains had actually said to the terrified youth in the car was: “There’s half a dozen more down to you, you pathetic little arsewipe, and if you don’t cough for the lot of them, I’ll whip your grungy little bollocks off with a pair of secateurs.”

  Twenty-Two

  The gang had robbed a Securicor van of eight thousand pounds, give or take the small change. They had driven a Transit into its path in the loading area outside the new Sainsbury’s superstore and three men with stocking masks had jumped out of a BMW which had skewed to a halt hard behind it. Shoppers had scattered towards safety, leaving laden trolleys abandoned. If the youngest of the security guards had not taken it into his head to be a hero, it would all have gone as smoothly as
the two similar raids the gang had carried out in the preceding months.

  But, for whatever reason, misguided or noble, the twenty-five-year-old part-time archeology student had hurled himself at the legs of the nearest robber, bringing him down, the money sack that he’d been carrying tumbling clear.

  In the confusion and clamor that followed only these things are certain: the robber who was rugby tackled suffered a damaged kneecap, which, when the atmosphere was damp, bothered him to this day; the money sack somersaulted into the path of a small girl, little more than a toddler, who was running from her mother, stopping her in her tracks, causing her, in fact, to topple against it, her young body keeping it secure and reducing the gang’s haul by approximately one-fifth; the nearest of the other masked men to the incident, immediately and without hesitation, brought the sawn-off shotgun he was carrying to his shoulder and fired both barrels into the guard’s face and body. Several hours of surgery succeeded in removing almost all of the Double Nought pellets from his neck and cheek, shoulder and chest, and he was deemed fortunate to be left alive.

  Fourteen detectives and numerous uniformed officers had been devoting most of their waking hours ever since to tracking the gang down. A lot of overtime and a lot of shoe leather and, for those of them with wives or lovers, a lot of broken promises and recriminations.

  “Elaine, look, I’m sorry …” Resnick said into the phone.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to be back late.”

  “Why are you telling me, Charlie? Late’s what you always are.”

  “This might be later.”

  She made no attempt to suppress the sigh. “If you’re any later than quarter to eight in the morning, I’ll have left for work.”

  Resnick saw Reg Cossall watching him as he set down the receiver. “Bastard, i’n’t it, eh, Charlie?”

  Resnick slowly shook his head.

  “After my third time,” Cossall said, lighting another Silk Cut, “I thought as how I’d got it sussed. Never give ’em a reason to expect owt, they won’t be disappointed.” He blew smoke at the ceiling and laughed low in the back of his throat. “Cow shoved off anyhow. Took one of my suits, that good Crombie coat I had, shirts, socks, trousers, piled ’em all up in the back garden, chucked a can of paraffin over, and burned the bloody lot. Women! Different bloody race, Charlie, and it don’t pay to forget it.”