by John Harvey
“Young man.”
Patel jumped, despite himself. Turning, he was face to face with a shrunken woman with tightly curled white hair. She was wearing a thick coat that might once have fitted her, but was now several sizes too large, heavy brown wool with an astrakhan collar. On her feet were gym shoes, murky white.
“Are you the police?”
She spoke like a schoolmistress of the old-fashioned kind; Patel had read of them in books, smelling of camphor and with pear-drop breath; when they asked for silence you could, of course, hear the imperial pin drop. For himself, back in Bradford, most of his teachers had worn jeans and ill-fitting sweaters held together with badges for Anti-Apartheid, Ban the Bomb.
“Because you’re either from the police or the public health department. You haven’t come about that rat I reported, have you?”
Patel smiled and shook his head; showed her his warrant card.
“Good,” she said emphatically. “Then you’ve come about that awful man.”
“Which man is this?”
“That man. The one who lives up there.” She was looking past Patel towards the house he had been detailed to watch. “That pervert. That dreadful peeping Tom!”
“Excuse me,” said Lynn, fingers on the girl’s sleeve, “I’ve reason to believe …”
The girl twisted fast, kicking her heel hard against Lynn’s shin and then jabbing a knee towards her groin. She flailed her arms and screamed in Lynn’s startled face.
“Lemmego! Lemmego! Lemmego!”
Lynn clung on as nails clawed at her face.
“Just look,” said a passer-by to her friend, both carrying boxes of cream cakes from Bird’s, neatly tied around with a bow at the top.
“All right,” said Lynn, fending off the blows. “This isn’t getting you anywhere.”
The girl ducked low and swiveled hard and the next thing Lynn was standing there with the coat in her hands and the girl was legging it away as fast as she could along the upper aisle.
Lynn hooked her left hand firmly inside the collar of the coat and gave chase. Suddenly the passage between the railings and the shop fronts seemed to be full of elderly shoppers, moving slowly, dragging carriers or pushing wicker trolleys before them.
“Excuse me, police!” Lynn called out. “Keep back, police!”
The girl was thirty yards ahead of her, weaving in and out, tossing stolen goods this way and that; the surprised shoppers must have thought they were in the middle of a TV commercial, another episode of Hard Cases.
“Stop that girl!” shouted Lynn. “Stop her!”
The girl pushed herself off one of the pillars, swinging sharp left as if to go down the stairs, breaking right again, sprinting along a clear patch of the opposite aisle, the direction that would take her to the bus station, out on to the street.
Lynn, the coat streaming out behind her like a gray flag, dug into her reserves and gained ground. A bunch of youths, lounging against a music shop window, clapped and cheered sarcastically. Ahead the girl changed direction again, making for the escalators. She was barging her way past people standing on the moving stairs as Lynn jumped past an astonished woman and baby and leaped down the up escalator. Plunging on, shouts ringing around her, close enough to reach across and grab at the girl’s jumper, but the jumper tore at the neck and they were both running still, almost at the bottom.
“Hey! Watch where you’re going!”
Lynn ducked under a man’s angry arm and dived for the back of the girl’s legs. They struck the hard polished floor and started to slide. A foot kicked Lynn alongside the head, numbing her ear. She tugged at the waistband of the girl’s skirt, ignoring the blows to her own head, the clamor all round.
“Lemmego, you bitch, you fucking cow!”
Lynn took hold of the girl’s hair and yanked it back, dragging her to her knees. A gold bracelet tumbled away from somewhere inside the girl’s clothing and rolled in a slow curve before wobbling to a halt.
“You’re under arrest,” Lynn said.
The girl spat in her face.
Twenty-five
Whoever had started to redecorate the room had run out of paint or enthusiasm a third of the way down the end wall. Elsewhere more than one shade of blue had been rolled on to chipboard paper, fading blue fingerprints attached to floor and ceiling. Three sections of unmatched carpet had been interlocked across the floor. One man, overweight by as much as fifteen pounds, leaned back against the end of a moquette settee, watching a program about mathematics for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. Another, cross-legged on the floor near the window, was reading Leon Uris. Norman Mann was close against the lowered blinds, binoculars in hand.
Resnick nodded briefly towards the two other officers as he came into the room.
“Not too early for you, Charlie?” asked Norman Mann pleasantly.
Resnick shook his head. He’d been awake since 4.25, Dizzy marauding underneath his bedroom window; gone back to bed but known it for a waste of time, finally up around half five, waiting for the sky to clear, the watery sun to rise.
He walked over to the window and Norman Mann obliged him by easing down one of the blinds. Resnick found himself looking out on another low block of flats, similar to the one he was in now. A curving walkway, its once-white wooden sides scattered with graffiti, led down to a paved area rich in dog shit and takeaway cartons from last night’s homeward trawl from the pubs along Alfreton Road.
Mann handled Resnick the glasses and pointed to one particular door. “Not exactly Crack City, but it’s our own little contribution.” Traces of his Edinburgh accent still clung to the back of his voice like shadows on an X-ray.
“Factory?” Resnick asked.
Mann shook his head. “Doubtful. More your out-workers. Cottage industries of old come back to haunt us. Cut the cocaine with baking powder, mix in a little water, bang it in the oven and then leave to dry. Easy as making a pie. Except what you get is a rock of crack that’ll change hands for twenty-five, thirty, forty pounds.”
“You’re not going in?”
“Not till we’ve got a better idea who’s inside. No.” Moving away from the window, he offered the glasses to the officer watching the TV. “You know how it is in this lark, Charlie, awful amount of waiting around, filling in time. Still …” he nodded towards the other officers, “… makes for a more cultured class of chaps.”
The two men laughed; one took his sergeant’s place at the window, the other turning a page of his book, then turning back again, couldn’t remember whether he’d read that page or not.
Norman Mann steered Resnick into the tiny oblong kitchen. The gas cooker looked as if it had been wrenched away from the wall and then left, blocking access to the sink. Something sat moldering in the corner, wrapped in damp newspaper. Better not to ask.
“Someone living here?” Resnick asked.
“Not any more. It was squatters last. Better here than out on the streets. Still, someone flushed them out a week or so back. Uniforms, probably, doing the council a favor. Useful for us though.” He shook out a packet of cigarettes and, when Resnick declined, lit one with the lighter from his back jeans pocket. “So, Charlie, something urgent.”
“Alan Stafford.”
Norman Mann angled his head back slowly, smoke easing from the edges of his mouth. “Bit higher class than this.”
“How high?”
“Connections all over. Newcastle, Southampton, Dover, Liverpool. Middle-man mostly, biggest profit for the lowest risk. By my reckoning he keeps some clients for himself, probably likes to keep the feel of the streets in his feet. Besides, gives him the chance to break and shake with the hoi polloi.”
“Television,” said Resnick, helpfully.
“Those wankers!” snorted Mann. “All they need is a few cans of Red Stripe to be falling arse-over-tip into each other’s Filofaxes. I’m talking money here, Charlie, real money. Power and influence. They don’t call cocaine your champagne drug for nothing.”
�
��You’ve got a watch on him, then?”
Norman Mann looked at him archly. “Now and again.”
“If he’s so important …”
“He’s as like got himself a bit of protection, all salted away against the inevitable rainy day. Oh, we’d like him, right enough. I’d love the bastard. But this lot here, peddling two-minute highs to schoolkids who hustle for it on the Forest, let’s face it, Charlie, we’re more likely to fetch up with one of them, more likely to get a result.”
“Which doesn’t mean you’re not interested?”
“It does not.”
Resnick nodded, wafted away the smoke that was collecting under the low ceiling in a blue-gray cloud. “He’s hanging round the edges of something pretty strange. A few things that won’t stay still long enough yet to tie down, see how they all fit. But he’s in there somewhere. I’ll bank on that.”
“Boss,” called one of the officers from the other room, “something’s moving.”
Norman Mann made his hand into a fist and set it against Resnick’s upper arm, tapping punches. “Anything we can do, Charlie.”
“Right. I’ll keep you up to the mark.”
Mann was back by the window, peering out. “Do that. Oh, and Charlie … check him out with NDIU, Stafford, they’ll have him pretty up to date.”
Resnick raised an arm. “Thanks.”
“Careful on your way out,” Norman Mann warned. “No one’s going to mistake you for your average squatter.” Grinning. “Not at second glance, anyway.”
Back inside his car, Resnick checked with the station, nothing to prevent him from moving on. He’d already had words with the DCI that morning, the request for information from the National Drugs Intelligence Unit would be on its way.
“One other thing,” Tom Parker had said. “Jeff Harrison, I thought the pair of you had some history together?”
“Not too much,” Resnick had replied.
“Only something’s ruffling his feathers and he seems to think you’re back of it.” Resnick had said nothing and waited. “Says he’s tried to talk to you, but you won’t answer his calls. Says you’ve had a couple of your lads over there, leaning on his men, ferreting around behind his back.”
“I came to you first, sir,” Resnick reminded him.
“Maybe it wasn’t clear to me what you were getting up to.”
“Like I said. Trying to fit that burglary in with our other inquiries. Nothing more than that.”
“If it was nothing more than that, d’you really think Harrison would be hopping like a blue-assed fly?”
“Maybe not, sir.”
“Your favorite word, isn’t it, Charlie? Maybe.”
Saying maybe inside his head, Resnick smiled.
“He’s been a bit naughty, that’s what you’re angling for, eh? That’s your suspicion. And don’t, don’t say maybe. Don’t say anything. Not till you’re this side of ready. And then I want it, Charlie. All of it. It’ll be out of your hands then. You know that, don’t you?”
Resnick had nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.
That had been first thing, before his meeting with Norman Mann. Now Resnick was slowing to turn in past the gate at Midlands TV, identify himself to the security guard on duty.
Suzanne Olds was easing her beige Honda out of the visitors’ car park. Seeing Resnick, she stopped.
“Your client,” Resnick said, braking, leaning across towards her. “You did us a favor.”
“Buy me dinner.”
“Anything but Chinese.”
“Polish, then. Isn’t there supposed to be a good Polish restaurant in the city?”
They dressed up in traditional costume and each meal began with a full glass of vodka. “Yes, there is.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
“What are you doing here?” Resnick asked. “Another client?”
Suzanne Olds removed her glasses for a moment, the kind with lenses that are sensitive to changes in the level of light. “Mackenzie’s an impatient man. He was worried you weren’t taking his alleged assault seriously. Now that you’re here, I can see his fears were groundless.”
“I’m surprised the company are letting him proceed. I’d have thought they’d have preferred the whole thing hushed up.”
Suzanne Olds considered before speaking, tapped one end of the spectacle frame against the dip of her upper lip. “I didn’t say this, but I don’t think a punch on the nose …”
“The mouth.”
“Wherever. I don’t think that’s the concern. I think they’re using it.”
“What for?”
“To lean on Harold Roy. Exert pressure? I’m only guessing.”
“Sounds as if he should be your client, not Mackenzie.”
She slipped her glasses back into place, the car into gear. “Don’t forget,” she said, “Gobtaki, isn’t it?”
“Gotabki,” corrected Resnick, stuffed cabbage in a garlic-and-tomato sauce, but she was already passing the gate and signaling right.
Mr. Mackenzie was in the editing suite with Mr. Freeman Davis and had left a clear message that he was not to be disturbed. As far as the receptionist knew, Mr. Roy was not in the building. Miss Woolf? He could try the canteen.
Diane Woolf didn’t appear to be there, but Resnick recognized somebody who was. Robert Deleval was sitting alone in a corner, staring out through the glass and watching the grass grow.
Perhaps, thought Resnick, he was searching for inspiration. Wasn’t that what writers did?
“Mind if I join you?”
Deleval flapped a hand vaguely in the direction of the empty chairs. He looked like a man who had just written The Great Gatsby and discovered that his only copy of the manuscript had been lost in the post.
“Seen better days?”
Deleval cut one corner from a solid-looking portion of cheesecake; then another, and another. Don’t play with your food, Resnick’s mother had told him. It’s not a toy that you should play with.
“You know what they used to say,” Deleval began, still dismembering the cheesecake, “anything vaguely gynecological, anything below the feminine belt. Women’s problems. What’s wrong with Aunt Sophie? Women’s problems. Okay, so that’s what it is with me.”
Resnick looked at him with new interest. “Women’s problems?”
“Writers’ problems.”
“They’re the same?”
“No, just equally inexplicable to anyone who isn’t suffering from the same things.”
It was going to be, Resnick realized, one of those less than fascinating conversations. Why had he always assumed that writers must be interesting people to talk to?
“So have you come to arrest him?”
“Arrest who?” Resnick said. At the back of his mind, something was nagging at him-shouldn’t that have been arrest whom? What it was, you sat down with a writer for five minutes, miserable bugger or not, and that was enough to have you questioning your own grammar.
Either way, Deleval didn’t seem to have noticed. “Our esteemed director, of course.”
“For taking a swing at Mackenzie?”
“Bang on the button. Bust that mouth of his wide open.” Deleval seemed to have cheered up. “Butterfly stitches, pain killers, the whole works.” His expression soured again. “Only thing, he should have hit him harder. More. What was missing from that little scenario, a couple of good low blows.”
“Last time we spoke,” Resnick reminded him, “you were issuing death threats to Harold Roy, not Mackenzie.”
“That was before Harold became a hero of the unofficial confederation of shafted screenwriters.”
“He was ruining your script.”
Deleval made the final incision into the cheesecake. “Better than stealing it.” He let the knife fall against the edge of the plate. “A couple of years ago I approached Mackenzie with this idea, a series about an ordinary family that wins a lot of money, gambling, lottery, football pools, it didn’t matter. Mackenzie’s interested, excited e
ven. We work our way through the whole gamut of lunches, breakfasts, afternoons in leather armchairs that become the first of several drinks before the taxi home. Ideas are jotted down on serviettes and menus, backs of cigarette packets. Let me have an outline. Mackenzie says, we’ll talk it up. Another month and I’m working on a rough treatment. Channel 4 are interested, Mackenzie and I, we’re forming our own company, the funding’s promised. Do it that way, he says, we get to keep control. You, he says, you develop that treatment the way you see it. Your baby.”
Deleval glanced around, suddenly aware that the level of his voice had risen and that others were beginning to pay attention.
“Almost a year along the line,” he went on, more subdued, “Channel 4 are out the window, the Beeb are interested, really interested. If there was some way I could restructure the treatment so it could be shown to Felicity Kendal, they’d be positively slavering. So, fine. There’s still no money around, nothing up front, but I do it anyway. After all, like the man said, it’s my baby and you don’t let your baby starve for lack of effort, right? At this point the entire series and serials department of the BBC gets sucked down one end of the corporation vacuum-cleaner and blown out the other. Nobody seems to know if they’re on their heads or their heels. That treatment’s out, Felicity Kendal’s out, Mackenzie’s bringing our cherished, now slightly aging infant here into the heartland of independent television drama. Suddenly my idea has become something else, someone else’s idea. Ideas. Now it’s some many-headed hydra, trying to run in half a dozen directions at once, desperate to be all things to all people and almost none of those things that I had in mind in the first place.”
“But,” said Resnick, “it was your idea.”
Robert Deleval threw back his head and laughed. “Signed, sealed and delivered, sold along the dotted line to the highest bidder. Hey, even writers have to eat. Your baby? Here’s the adoption papers. Of course we’ll bring him up right. Oh, we might need to slap him around a little, bring him into line. A little rough treatment, but then, who did that ever hurt?”
