Wasted Years

by John Harvey

  The car came round again, maroon, she’d noticed it before, gliding slowly past the railings, slowing down, smoothly accelerating away.

  This time it stopped.

  No movement.

  Then the window winding down.

  Whiteness of a face.

  Mary MacDonald walked across the street.

  “Charlie, have you seen this?”

  “What?”

  “On the box. Right now. The news.”

  Resnick wriggled awkwardly backwards and withdrew his head from beneath the sink: if anything was guaranteed to make him feel incompetent it was being bent over double with a full set of washers and an adjustable spanner.

  “Charlie!”

  “All right.” Resnick rinsed his hands beneath the tap, looked for the towel, couldn’t find it; he was wiping his hands down his trousers as he stepped into the living room. On the screen an overturned bus had been set ablaze and was blocking a city street; the lights of other, similar, fires burned in the background. A youth, scarf half-masking his face, ran towards the camera and hurled a bottle. The microphone picked up the crash of glass, the whoosh of flame.

  “Belfast?” Resnick asked.

  Elaine shook her head. “Brixton.”

  Resnick moved closer to the set and sat down.

  Mary MacDonald rented a room on Tennyson Street: three-quarter bed and wardrobe, melamine table, chair, fixed unsteadily to the wall a gas fire that made a small explosion whenever she bent towards it with a match. On the tiled shelf above it were a couple of buckled postcards sent by an aunt in Deny, a plastic flower in a slender china vase, a photograph of herself and her friend Marie at Yarmouth, holding up ice creams and wearing funny hats, laughing so much they were forced to cling on to one another so as not to fall down.

  “Mary, is it?” the man said.

  “I never said …”

  He was younger than the average punter, not fat either, tall, not bad looking. What did he want with her?

  “Mary, then?”

  “I never …”

  “I know, you never said.”

  “Then how …”

  “Do I know? Well …” smiling “… you look like a Mary to me. Good Catholic girl. Perhaps we met at mass.”

  “I never go.”

  “Nor me.”

  Mary’s throat was strangely dry. “I don’t understand.”

  “No need. Now, why don’t you take off those clothes?

  She held out a hand. “Pay me first. You’ve got to pay me first.”

  “Oh, yes, don’t you worry. I know the rules. Rituals. Better than most.” Reaching into his coat pocket for his wallet. “Now what did we agree? Fifteen?”

  “Twenty.”

  The pink of his tongue showed at his mouth as he smiled. “All right, then, Mary. Twenty it is.”

  Police in uniform, some still wearing their blue jackets, others down to shirt sleeves, stood in the otherwise deserted street, amazed. A young officer, twenty-one or -two, looked up into the camera’s lens and one side of his face was dark with blood. Stones, half-bricks, and bottles continued to land. Sirens and fire engines could be heard, overlapping, continuous. Smoke filled the edges of the screen.

  “I can’t believe it’s happening here,” Elaine said.

  “Here?”

  “This country?

  Resnick nodded. London seemed far more than a hundred and twenty miles away.

  The telephone rang and Elaine picked it up, listened for a moment, and held the receiver out. “For you.”

  “Are you watching?” Ben Riley asked at the other end of the line.

  “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “How long,” Ben Riley said, “before it spreads up here?”

  On the screen, police were holding shields over their faces, slowly advancing down a tree-lined street under a hail of missiles. “Hold your line!” a hoarse voice shouted. “Hold your line!” A man Resnick’s age, who had already lost his helmet, staggered back, struck on the side of the head, and the line broke. Youths, black and white, surged through.

  The newsreader’s voice tolled over the scene. “Our community relations are as good as can be expected,” said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir David McNee.

  Backed away by the fire, Mary held her tights bunched up in one hand. Aside from the shoes he had told her to put back on her feet, she was naked. The man had removed his jacket, hung it over the back of the chair; loosened his tie.

  “Don’t want to get over-personal, Mary, but that body of yours, bit of a bloody disaster area if you ask me. What I mean, must’ve seen better days.”

  She was beginning to wonder whether any of the other girls had seen her get into the car, if any of them knew the man and might have had good reason to have noted his number. Wondering whether, naked or not, she could get past him and out of the door, down the stairs, and into the street. Wondering how much she would get hurt.

  “What I think, Mary, way I look at it, what we’re here for, looks don’t so much matter. If they did, well, they wouldn’t come trolling out here, would they? They’d be back in the middle of town in some hotel, waiting for the discreet knock on the door. None of your cheapskate twenty-pound job there.” He pinched the loose flesh of her arm between finger and thumb. “No, bloke comes out here, all he wants, something to slop around in.”

  “Bastard!” she spat at him, automatically flinching from his reply.

  What he did was smile. “Frank,” he said. “Frank Churchill, that how it was with him?”

  She blinked and stuttered her feet. The fire was starting to burn the backs of her legs. A piece of her skin was still tight between index finger and thumb.

  “You remember Frank? The night of the party. Just the four of you. Pissed on cheap champagne.”

  She remembered her and Marie giggling so hard they liked to have wet themselves. The blokes hollering and grabbing and finally one of them fishing out some cocaine and insisting on sniffing it off Marie’s backside, sniffing it up through a fifty-pound note. Her and Frank and Marie and …

  “Who was he, Mary?”

  “Who?”

  Finger and thumb twisted just a little, not too much, enough. Tears came to her eyes and the backs of her legs were red and tender and the insides of those bloody shoes biting into her ankles.

  “Who, Mary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t make me …”

  “Swear to God, I don’t know.”

  “Mary!”

  “Ow!”

  “Mary.”

  “He never said, I …”

  “All that time, you must’ve heard his name. Must’ve called him something. Frank. He must’ve …”

  “John.”

  “What?”

  “John. I think that’s what he called him.”

  “John.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I think …”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes. Yes. John.”

  “John Prior.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s who it was.”

  “If you say so. I said, I don’t know. He never said his other name. I don’t know.”

  “John Prior, that’s who it was.”

  “You know already.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why all this …?”

  “Confirmation, nothing more.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “What?”

  “Shit!”

  “What now?”

  “You’re police, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “Police, you rotten bastard!”

  “Steady.”

  “Pig!”

  She thought he was going to punch her in the breast but the fist opened up and he stroked his fingers around the deep brown of her nipple. “Maybe later, we can have some fun, eh? For now, why
don’t you get over on the bed, take the weight of your feet, take a look at these pictures, see who you recognize. Okay, Mary? Okay?”

  Resnick was in the front room, transfixed by the ten o’clock news. A half-cup of coffee sat close by him, cold. A virtual no-go area had been hewn out of that part of South London, roads blocked off by vehicles overturned and set on fire. Rubble and glass were strewn across the streets. All along Brixton High Road, shop windows had been smashed through, allowing youths to loot at will. Discarded as too heavy, the settee from a three-piece suite lay on its back across the curb.

  The sky at the upper edge of Resnick’s TV set burned with an orange glow.

  Elaine stood behind him, hand resting on his shoulder. “Poor Ben,” she said.

  He turned to look at her.

  “If it happened here you’d be all right. Now. He’d be out there, in the front line.”

  Resnick nodded.

  “I could never understand,” Elaine said, “why he didn’t move into CID, same time as you.”

  “Fondness for regular hours. That and being out on the street.”

  Elaine looked past him towards the television. “These days, I should have thought last place anyone’d want to be. Any of you.”

  Resnick got up and switched off the set. “Bed?” he said. “Early night?”

  “All right.”

  Within fifteen minutes, the rhythm of Elaine’s breathing had changed and she was asleep, leaving Resnick to replay the images of the evening. How long before it spreads up here?

  On the corners of Hyson Green and Radford groups of men were congregating, hands in pockets, heads down. By the early hours, well before light broke in the sky, the first crates of empty milk bottles had been taken.

  Mary MacDonald sat alone in her room, squatting down before the gas fire in her pink candlewick dressing gown, praying that her friend Marie would never have to go through what she had that night; praying that what he had forced out of her would not end up in the papers, be read out in court. Simply praying.

  And Rains?

  Fast off the moment his head touched the pillow, sleeping the untroubled sleep of the just.

  Twenty-Five

  “Time to get out, Charlie,” Ben Riley said. “That’s what it is.”

  Resnick laughed. “Just see you behind the counter of some pub, running a little newsagent’s somewhere. You’d be in your grave inside a twelvemonth.”

  “Better like that than hit over the head by some yob with shit for brains.”

  “I don’t know.” Resnick shook his head.

  “Christ, Charlie, you saw them. All that talk about police harassment, racism, that was just an excuse. Smashing things for the sake of it, looting. Don’t tell me that’s political. That’s theft. That’s greed.”

  Resnick sighed and bit into his bacon sandwich. When Ben’s shift matched, they would meet there at Parker’s, eat breakfast, talk. More often than not about the way Chedozie had run the opposition ragged the week before. But not today.

  “I’m serious, Charlie. I’m leaving. Not the force. The sodding country.”

  Resnick looked at him. “You’ve never said.”

  “Not mean I haven’t thought.”

  “But you’d have said. Something anyway.”

  “Would I? Don’t you have any pipedreams nestling away in that head of yours? Things you wouldn’t even tell Elaine?”

  Resnick shook his head: his problem, where Elaine was concerned, was that he made his dreams all too clear. The day he’d spotted alphabet wallpaper in Texas Homecare and told her it would look just right in the small bedroom; the way he glanced at her expectantly when she came in from the bathroom, those times of the month when he knew her period was due.

  Ben Riley folded the slice of thin buttered bread in half, then half again and began, slowly, to wipe it round his plate. “You don’t think there are things she doesn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Riley looked at him quizzically, not quite believing.

  “Well, she’s ambitious at work,” Resnick said, “I know that. Wants things for the house …”

  “And that’s all?”

  Resnick finished his coffee, too weak as usual, nodded over at Ben Riley’s empty cup. “Another tea?”

  “Best not. Time almost, we weren’t here.”

  Outside the café, the traffic entering the city from the south and west was thickening. Pretty soon the island would be jammed tight. A fireman, wearing a red and white Forest shirt above his uniform trousers, walked past them towards the fire station alongside. The two policemen watched him till he had disappeared through the broad entrance, neither one wanting to be the first to walk away, each sensing there were still things left unsaid without recognizing what they were.

  When Resnick finally arrived, the police station was humming with the previous night’s events in London. He had scarcely shown his face in the CID room before being summoned to the inspector’s office. Rains was already sitting there, relaxed in a chair beside Skelton’s desk, one long leg crossed casually over the other.

  “Looks as if we’ve a break in the Sainsbury’s job,” Skelton said, pressing the tips of his fingers together in front of his irreproachable ironed shirt. “Witness prepared to swear she heard Prior and another man …”

  “Churchill,” Rains interrupted, “Frank Churchill.”

  “Heard Prior and this bloke talking about carrying out the robbery, bragging about it.”

  “More than that,” Rains prompted.

  “Using the gun.”

  Resnick looked away from the inspector, staring at Rains hard. Rains recrossed his legs and smiled disarmingly back. “Who was this?” Resnick asked.

  Rains shrugged. “Some torn.”

  “They spoke about the shooting in front of her?”

  “Sure.”

  “It seems they were clear which of them had fired the gun,” Skelton said.

  Resnick still hadn’t moved his eyes from Rains’s face. “Prior,” Rains said quietly, leaning forward slightly as he mouthed the word. “John Prior, what happened to that poor bastard of a guard, it was down to him.”

  “And she’ll swear to that, in court if needs be, the woman?”

  “She’ll swear to it all right,” Rains smiled. “On her life.”

  Prior lived in a nondescript suburban-looking house overlooking Colwick Wood Park. Some mornings it was quiet enough to hear the kids singing to the teacher’s piano in the nearby Jesse Boot Junior and Infant School. Step across from the house and there were the bowling green, the recreation ground, the reservoir. At the far side of the park lay the greyhound stadium and the racecourse. There were roses here and people quietly walking their dogs; men and women wearing white sitting on the steps of the bowls pavilion comparing notes about the bias of the green.

  One car swung round into Ashworth Close and parked, three men to watch the rear of the house. The other cars, two of them, came from opposite directions, slowing to a halt at either side of a milk float making late deliveries.

  Skelton waited until the milkman had cleared before giving the order to move in. Prior’s wife was in her dressing gown at the door, bending down to pick up the two pints, when the detectives raced up the path, Rains at their head, Resnick not far behind.

  “Just right,” Rains said, pushing past. “Tea all round.”

  “John!” Ruth Prior screamed. “John, it’s the police!”

  Heavy men shouldered her aside and one of the bottles slipped from her hand, glass shattering to a hundred tiny pieces on the step.

  Prior was half out of the bedroom, pulling on a pair of jeans, when Rains charged up the stairs.

  “What the fuck’s going on?”

  Like the card in a magician’s trick, Rains’s warrant card was in the palm of his hand. “John Edward Prior, I am arresting you in connection with the theft of …”

  Already, other officers were starting to search the premises.

  “Get out
of my house!” Ruth Prior shouted at the man pulling clothing from the hall cupboard. “You bastards, you’ve got no right.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not the case,” Jack Skelton said, holding the magistrate’s warrant in front of her eyes.

  “Fuck you!” she said, anger contorting her face.

  “Why don’t you get yourself in the kitchen, love?” said one of the detectives. “Mash tea.”

  “And fuck you, too!”

  Aside from the fact she was older, her hair had darkened into chestnut brown, there’d been some thickening around the waist and legs, she wasn’t so very different from when, as Ruth James, she had flailed her arms in front of the band at the Boat, moaned and sung the blues.

  They hurried Prior up the steps and into the station, laces of his brown shoes still undone. “I’m not opening my fucking mouth till I’ve seen my solicitor.”

  “’Course not,” the custody sergeant said agreeably. “As it should be. Now if you’ll just empty your pockets out onto there.”

  Ruth walked into the bedroom without expecting anyone to be there and found Rains feeling through the contents of the chest of drawers that had been tipped across the double bed.

  “I thought you bastards had all gone.”

  “Clearly not.” Straightening, smile curling from one corner of his mouth. “Some of us bastards are still here.”

  She watched his hands smooth across the pale shades of her underwear, almost delicate.

  “Does something for you, does it?”

  Rains’s smile became a question.

  “Women’s knickers?”

  “Depends who’s inside them.”

  “Go round pinching them from washing lines?”

  “I said …”

  “I heard what you said.”

  He lifted a pair of her pants, white, lace at the front, plain and shiny at the back; all the while he was fingering them he was looking at her.

  “Still appreciates you, does he? Touches you? Like this? After all these years?”

  She grabbed a bottle of moisturizer from the dressing table and threw it at his head; tore the garment from his grasp and hurled it back across the room; aimed a blow at his leering face and he caught her wrist as her fingers were only inches from his cheek.