Wasted Years

by John Harvey

“Got to be compensations, though, married to a villain. Second-hand excitement. Holidays in Malta, the Costa de Sol. Never knowing where he is at nights. Who he’s with. Jumping every time the doorbell rings.”

  She pulled hard and he let her go and she stood there close to him, her breathing loud in the quiet room. Car doors slammed in the street outside. A voice calling Rains’s name.

  “You know,” Rains said softly, “I did you a misservice. Took you for a slag. But I was wrong. You’re not that at all. Here.”

  And before she knew what he was doing, he had seized her hand and pressed it between his legs, laughing when the surprise jumped in her eyes.

  “Not many women,” Rains said, stepping round her, around the end of the bed towards the door, “can make me feel that way. Not without even trying.”

  Ruth was still standing there, staring across at her reflection in the dressing table mirror, when she heard the front door slam shut, the last car drive away.

  “What I’d like to do,” Skelton said, “is ask you to take us through it once again.”

  “No way.”

  “To be certain we have the details …”

  “No.”

  “No room for any doubt …”

  “No!”

  “I think, inspector, my client has answered your every question as fully as you could wish. I’m afraid I can really see no further purpose being served here, other, of course, than an attempt at intimidation.”

  “Investigation,” Skelton corrected him mildly.

  “Investigate my arse!”

  Just perceptibly, Jack Skelton flinched. Sitting beside him, Resnick leaned forward, drawing Prior’s attention. “What can you tell us about Frank Churchill?” he asked.

  Prior shrugged and shook his head.

  “Does that signify a no?” Resnick asked.

  “It means I’ve got a dose of Parkinson’s—what d’you think?”

  In his notes, the young DC wrote: Prior gestured no, nothing.

  “How about Frank Chambers?” Resnick asked.

  Prior turned aside in disgust and a look from his solicitor told him to respond. “No,” Prior said.

  “Frank Church?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “What about,” asked Skelton, apparently studying the marks on the tabletop with interest, “Mary MacDonald?”

  “Was she there?”

  “Where?”

  “Up that supermarket, wherever? That’s what you’ve got me here for, isn’t it? So I want to know, what’s she got to do with it, this … Mary whatever-her-name-is?”

  “Miss MacDonald,” Skelton said, “was present on an occasion when you and Frank Churchill …”

  “I told you, I don’t know any …”

  “Ssh!” Prior’s solicitor said, raising a hand in warning. He knew from experience it was when they lost their temper that his clients gave it all away.

  “When you and Frank Churchill,” Skelton was saying, “talked about the raid on the security van, openly admitted taking part …”

  “Don’t waste your breath!” Prior said with scorn, leaning his chair back on to its rear legs.

  “And when you admitted being the one in possession of the gun which seriously injured one of the guards.”

  Prior’s chair rocked forwards fast and he was on his feet, arms braced against the table’s edge, glaring into Skelton’s face.

  “Mr Prior,” his solicitor said, alarmed, half out of his seat. “John.”

  Resnick and the DC had moved near enough simultaneously, closing on Prior from either side, the constable’s notebook spilling on to the floor. Skelton blinked and little more, his hair still brushed back and perfectly in place, tie knotted with deft correctness at the neck of his cream shirt.

  By whatever mechanism Prior brought himself under control, it took forty, possibly fifty seconds to work. Time-a-plenty, Resnick thought, to have squeezed back on the trigger of a gun.

  “My client would like a break,” the solicitor said. “A drink.”

  No one seemed to hear him.

  “If you’re going to talk about firearms,” Prior said, once he had sat back down, “people getting shot, I’ve got nothing further to say.”

  But when neither Skelton nor Resnick responded, he said, “This woman, fetch her down here. Let her say that to my face. Stick me up in an identity parade. Anything. ’Cause I tell you this, either one of you’s made her up or she’s lying.”

  When Rains and two other officers arrived at the furnished room in Tennyson Street, all the signs were that Mary MacDonald had gone. The clothes, the personal knick-knacks, even the sheets from the bed had all disappeared, leaving a thin stained mattress and a box of kitchen matches close by the gas fire.

  One of the postcards of Mary and her friend Marie had slithered almost from sight, wedged against the cracked lino by the door.

  For the best part of two hours they knocked on doors, rang bells, came no nearer to knowing where Mary MacDonald might have gone. All they could do now was show the picture of Marie to the Vice Squad in the probability that Marie was also on the game, hoping against hope that she hadn’t done a bunk at the same time.

  The CID room was oddly quiet, the click and hiss of cigarette lighters, irregular sounds of men breathing. Jack Skelton sat on one of the desks, shirt sleeves rolled evenly back upon his wrists. “House, garage, garden—we turned up nothing. The only witness we might have had has disappeared. We don’t seem to be any further along with Prior in this business than we were a week ago.”

  Rains lifted his head as though to intervene, but, under the inspector’s eyes, ducked it back down and continued examining his shoes.

  “We’re going to have to kick him loose.”

  “Any point hanging on to him till morning, sir?” one of the detectives asked.

  “If you can give me one,” Skelton responded.

  He could not. Nobody could.

  “Right,” said Skelton, levering himself to the floor, “Release him. Now.”

  Twenty-Six

  Resnick had returned home around seven that evening to find Elaine engrossed in the spreadsheets she had on the dining-room table, the radio defiantly tuned to Radio Two. Computerized figures and Barry Manilow: for Resnick an eminently resistible combination.

  “Anything to eat?” Resnick said over her shoulder.

  She didn’t look round. “Cold chicken in the fridge.”

  “You?”

  “I had lunch.”

  “It’s supper.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Resnick opened a pot of Dijon mustard and dipped pieces of three-day-old chicken into it, eating absentmindedly as he scanned the local paper, the urban ghetto scare stories in the Mail. In the front room he put a record on the stereo, realized he wasn’t listening and switched off.

  “How about the Club? I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

  Elaine turned slowly. “The Polish Club.”

  “Where else?”

  “I thought you’d allowed your membership to lapse?”

  Resnick shrugged. “A chance to rejoin.”

  “You go. I ought to finish this.”

  For some moments Resnick struggled to summon up the interest to ask what this was. “Maybe meet me there later?” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I shan’t be late,” he called from the hall.

  If Elaine responded, he failed to hear.

  Somewhere in his teens, for reasons he would have found difficult now to clearly remember or define, Resnick had turned against his parents’ Polish culture. Perhaps it was no more than what teenagers did. The young Resnick as James Dean. He recalled seeing the film, Rebel Without a Cause, most of his sympathies flowing to Dean’s father, poor Jim Backus, wearing an apron and embarrassed, standing mortified upon the stairs, flinching from the anger of his son’s tirade.

  For Resnick it had been less dramatic, more gradual; little by little he had stopped answering his parents in their native
tongue, speaking in his own instead. The boys at school had rechristened him Charlie long since and Charlie he had been happy to become.

  Sitting now with an iced glass of lemon vodka, he felt he was visiting a strange country, stranded in the past. Photographs on the walls of men in uniform, decorations for lost wars. The bartender in his neat white jacket looked along at him and smiled. At round tables heads were lowered in desperate conversation. Suddenly standing, he swallowed down the remainder of his vodka and pushed through the doors into the street.

  The city was soft red brick, broken by green trees. For more than an hour he walked it aimlessly, nodding to people whenever they passed.

  The phone rang a little shy of four a.m. and Resnick reached mistakenly for the alarm. By the time he had propped himself on one elbow and lifted the receiver, Elaine was awake as well, looking at him reproachfully from her side of the bed. Resnick listened, grunted a few times in agreement and broke the connection.

  “What is it?” she asked as he swung his feet towards the floor. “This time of night.”

  “Morning,” Resnick said, beginning to assemble his clothes. “It’s morning, more or less. They found a woman, Mapperley Plains, out on the golf course.”

  Resnick read the question in her eyes.

  “No,” he said. “She’s alive. Pretty badly beaten, apparently. They’ve taken her to Queens.”

  “Why phone you?”

  Without looking in the mirror, Resnick was fastening his tie. “Case I’m involved in. Some chance there’s a connection.”

  “Charlie,” she said, when he was at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. You’d better go.”

  Car headlights cut soft channels through the slight mist; the surface of the grass was bright with dew. Unseen, birds stirred up the day. There was still an indentation where the body had been found, midway to the seventh hole, nestling the edge of the rough. Yellow tape marked off the spot.

  The uniformed officer who had found her was still there, peaked cap circling round and round between his fingers, Panda car parked close with the others, static and occasional voices from its radio spilling out across the green.

  “Caretaker rang in,” he told Resnick, “reckoned how he’d heard this car. Couple of break-ins past month or so. Worried this might be another. Drove out and checked around like. Just on my way when I heard this sound.” His gaze flickered away to the markings on the ground. “It were the girl.”

  Resnick nodded, understanding the startled expression that survived at the back of the young officer’s eyes. He and Ben Riley had been that young once, stumbling upon their first assault victims, pretending that it didn’t affect them, needing to show they didn’t care.

  “No doubt who she is?”

  The constable shook his head. “Bag was off in the bushes. Must’ve got thrown, no telling who by.”

  Versions of the scene were already playing themselves out in Resnick’s mind.

  The handbag was plastic, creased shiny black. Inside were several tissues, crumpled and used, a lipstick labeled Evening Rose, three Lillets, a packet of condoms with two remaining, a small tan diary in which little had been written—entries Resnick recognized as the names of pubs, a handful of names—at the front, on the page headed Personal Details, she had written Marie Jacob, five foot three, brown eyes, brown hair, no birth date, an address in Arnold.

  Resnick remembered the photograph Rains had brought in from Mary MacDonald’s empty room, two women on the front at Great Yarmouth, smiling, squinting their eyes against the sun. Mary and Marie.

  “She’d been cut,” the constable said. “Across the face. Here.”

  With the tip of his index finger he drew a line diagonally down from below the lobe of his ear, almost to the cleft of his chin.

  “And beaten. Knocked around pretty bad. Time I found her, this eye, it were good as closed.”

  Resnick nodded, picturing it clearly. “No sign of any weapon?”

  The young PC shook his head.

  “Give the light half an hour, maybe a little more. Then get a search organized. Thorough. Every blade of grass. If the weapon’s here, we want it found.”

  They could wash away the caked blood and the dirt, replace the blood, lessen the pain; what they could not do was remove the fear.

  “I don’t know,” Marie said in an accent so soft that Resnick had to lean over her face to hear. “I don’t know who he was.”

  Her lips were swollen and cracked.

  “I met him, earlier, you know. We were on the golf course for a bit of business when he started in hitting me, no reason at all.”

  She motioned that her mouth was dry and Resnick lifted the glass from the bedside table, was gentle as he could be, one hand raising her head so that she could drink through a bendy straw.

  “No,” she said, voice fading near to nothing. “I never knew him. Never saw him before.”

  When Resnick held photographs before her she blinked her eyes and barely shook her head. She cried. Resnick sat there till the staff nurse tapped him on the shoulder and then he left.

  “Believe her, Charlie?”

  “No, sir. Not really. Could be telling the truth, of course, but no, I don’t think she’s giving us all she knows.”

  “Just a feeling, or have you got something more?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  Skelton stood by the window, looking out. Below, a line of lockup garages, factories with raised roofs, and a few neat streets of council houses beyond. In the middle distance the floodlight towers of both soccer grounds pushed up against the sky. Farther still, the green of a solitary hill. “Prior,” he said, turning back into the room. “You think Rains could have been right.”

  Right as Rains: it didn’t even raise a smile.

  “Don’t want to, do you, Charlie?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “No more your methods than mine.”

  “No.”

  “But within hours of us lifting him, both women Rains says might have dropped him in it …” Skelton shook his head. “One’s in hospital, terrified half out of her wits, and the other … Well, we don’t know where she is at all, do we?”

  “Manchester,” Resnick said. “They’re still checking.”

  “Let’s hope with some success.”

  Resnick thought about Marie Jacob’s face and prayed the inspector was right.

  “Couple of uniforms checked her address,” Skelton said. “Nothing useful there at all. But then, they wouldn’t look with your eyes.”

  “I’ll get out there,” Resnick said. “Poke around.”

  Skelton nodded, giving each of his shirt cuffs a little tug before turning back to the window. When he had applied for the transfer, accepted the promotion, he had failed to realize how different it would be, less than a hundred miles north and close to the Trent. How hard to slot in. He hoped that, as his wife was in the habit of suggesting, he had not perpetrated one of the major miscalculations of his life.

  Twenty-Seven

  Resnick spent forty minutes with a sixty-eight-year-old man who was convinced he had come about his stolen bike. “Locked the bugger up in the entry an’ everything. Right t’the bloody fence. Side entry along of the house. Safe enough you’d say, aye, so did I. But it weren’t, you see. Some clever sod’s snuck round there with bolt clippers, right through bloody lock, less time than it takes to crack an egg. Wouldn’t mind so much, but I’ve had that bike—Raleigh, good ’un, made good ’uns in those days—had that bike, must be—what?—well, dozen year at least. Maybe more. Who’d want to steal a bike like that? Spite, that’s what I put it down to. Spite or cussed-ness, ’cause they’ll not get much for it. All them fancy colored jobs with half-assed handlebars and great thick frames, that’s what they want nowadays. Not solid and dependable, like mine.”

  He looked across his back kitchen at Resnick, a wiry man with a shiny bullet head and a neat graying moustache, braces hanging down either si
de of his trousers.

  “Got so,” he said, “you can’t leave anything out your sight more’n a minute or it’s gone. Thieving bastards’d have the shirt off your back if they thought as they’d get away with it.” He shook his head. “That bike, my lifeline were that. Now it’s bloody gone.”

  Resnick phoned through and checked the crime number, established that no progress had been made. Truth was, though they might catch the thief, the bike would already have been sold intact or stripped down for parts.

  He accepted several cups of tea, each stronger than the last, sipping from a thick china cup, the inside of which was stained with overlapping rings of orangey brown. Trying hard not to look at his watch, he listened while the man talked about his son in Australia, the grandchildren he had never seen, the stroke that had taken his wife—God rest her—early from the world. Agreed that Tommy Lawton was the best center forward this country had ever had—bits of kids nowadays with these flash cars, won’t as much as kick a ball without there’s someone there fanning ’em with a check.

  Resnick had seen players in the County side the past few seasons, would have found it difficult to kick anything without the aid of an on-the-pitch injection.

  “I don’t want you to think,” the man said, showing Resnick to the door, “as I’m one of those who can’t keep up with the times, forever rattling on about how much better everything was when they were young, ’cause I’m not. Not by a long chalk. But I’ll say one thing and I know you’ll bear me out, folk were a lot more honest in them days, folk round here, ordinary folk I’m talking of now, like you and me. Why, twenty year back, I’d gone off down the shops, I’d not so much’ve bothered to’ve locked this front door, never mind bike. Now—well, you know about now well as I do.”

  Resnick thanked him for the tea and walked past the bushes of roses that needed pruning, out of the gate and on to the street. The house was three doors down from Marie Jacob’s address and the old man thought he might have seen her once or twice, but couldn’t be sure. “Time I might have looked at a bit of skirt,” he’d said, “now you are going back a fair while. Not that I wasn’t above a thing or two when wind were in right direction.” And he’d winked and grinned and Resnick had grinned back, men together, talking the way men did, in the old days and now.