Wasted Years cr-5

by John Harvey

  Divine took the proffered five-pound note and headed for the door.

  “How’s it going?” Resnick asked, pausing alongside Lynn and Marjorie.

  “Slowly,” Lynn replied. And feeling Marjorie’s sagging disappointment, added, “But I think we’re getting there.”

  “Good.”

  Resnick opened the door to the partitioned section that formed his own office and willed the phone not to ring until Divine had come back with his sandwiches, at least until he had got as far as sitting down. He had his second wish by as much as five seconds. Graham Millington was calling in from somewhere between Staple-ford and Sandiacre where what might have been the getaway car had been found abandoned.

  “If wrapped around a Keep Left sign constitutes being abandoned,” Millington added.

  “Hang fire,” Resnick said into the phone. “I’ll be right out.”

  “Got myself a packet of crisps,” Divine grinned when Resnick intercepted him on the stairs.

  “Your money, not mine,” said Resnick, taking hold of the bag containing his sandwiches, pocketing his change. “Come on, you’re driving. I’ll eat these as we go.”

  Six

  Graham Millington had been Resnick’s sergeant for a little over five years and was beginning to think that six would be too long. Not that he had anything against his immediate superior, far from it. When some of the others started grumbling into their pints and calling Resnick for being too soft by half, too airy-fairy in his ideas, Millington always squashed them with a firm word. Any reflections he might have about Resnick’s appearance-surely someone of his rank and salary could afford at least one decent suit that seemed to fit, one white shirt with all of its buttons intact? — or his eating habits-if Millington saw him fumbling his way through one more overstuffed sandwich, he might just go out and buy his boss a voucher for the nearest Berni Inn, prawn cocktail, nice bit of steak, and Black Forest gateau to finish, that was what you called a meal-like the loyal sergeant he strove to be, Millington kept them to himself.

  No, it wasn’t six years in Resnick’s shadow that weighed heavily upon him, it was the prospect of six years beneath anybody.

  Especially when a vacancy had come up and before Millington had been able to dust off his CV or fill in his application form, they’d whisked that woman in without her feet touching the ground this side of landing.

  “Tough luck,” Resnick had commiserated. “She’s on her way to a Top Apco post and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”

  “Another time,” Skelton had said, scarcely stopping to speak, “you’re still a young man.”

  Not, Millington had replied soundlessly to the super’s back, for much bloody longer.

  “Assert yourself more, Graham,” his wife had said. “Let them know if you don’t get promotion next time, you’ll put in for a transfer.”

  In his more paranoid moments, Millington imagined Jolly Jack Skelton writing him a glowing reference and offering to pack his bags, shipping him east to Cleethorpes with an engraved tankard and a digital watch that would stop the second he crossed the Lincolnshire border.

  “Not inspector by the time you’re forty,” Reg Cossall had said, “might as well curl up your toes and crawl into the body bag.”

  “You know what they say about water,” Malcolm Grafton had smirked, “finding its own level.”

  Maybe his wife was right, the thing to do was march into Skelton’s office with an ultimatum and if the result was moving somewhere else, well, why not? Except, for all her talk, he knew the last thing his wife wanted to do was move from where they’d settled. The local WEA group had just voted her on to the steering committee, the amateur dramatic and choral society had promised her something big in next season’s lolanthe, and she was just getting to grips with the new border they’d put in alongside the Caryopteris. And that was without Level Two Russian.

  He re-angled the interior mirror and checked his moustache. Annoying the way those little hairs at the top kept poking themselves into his nostrils. He was using his fingernails to tweak one or two away when Divine brought the unmarked Ford to a halt behind him and Resnick climbed out of the passenger seat, brushing the last of his sandwich down the front of his raincoat.

  “Right across there,” said Millington, pointing towards the intersection. “Tow truck’s on its way.”

  Directions had scarcely been necessary. The stolen car had three wheels on the pavement, one several inches above the surface of the road. The street sign seemed to have bent to meet it, scoring a deep groove through the roof and buckling the near-side rear door, shattering the window.

  “What makes you think it’s the one we’re looking for?” Resnick asked.

  Millington gestured towards the motor supplies shop along the street. “Bloke in there, heard the crash and saw two white youths haring up that side road, round the back of that building. One tall, he thinks maybe curly hair, the other either a runt or just a kid.”

  “Any other description?”

  “Taller of the two had this loose coat on, apparently. Brown, possibly gray, anorak-type of thing. Jeans, the pair of them. Couldn’t give us a lot else.”

  Resnick shrugged. “Other witnesses?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Cut along and knock on a few shop doors,” Resnick said to Divine. “Before they all lock up for the night. Someone else must have heard what happened. Take a statement from the bloke Graham spoke to; might come up with a little more this time.”

  Divine nodded and hurried away.

  “Checked the registration,” Millington said. “Reported stolen from that car-park out at Bulwell, sometime between twelve and two.”

  “Doesn’t sound as if they bothered with gloves at the robbery,” Resnick said. “If this is down to them, likely be prints on the car as well.”

  “I’ll make sure they go careful shifting it, see it gets checked thoroughly soon as it gets back.”

  Resnick had stepped away and was staring down the narrowing street. “Ought to be a reason they came this way.”

  “Throw us off the scent?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Everything we know about them this far, that kind of thinking seems a bit out of their league.”

  “Heading for home, then?”

  “Could be.”

  “Run it through the computer. Likely got a bit of form anyway. Live round here, shouldn’t be too difficult to find.”

  Resnick pushed his hands down into his pockets. Evenings like this, the temperature dropped as soon as the light began to fade. “Hope you’re right, Graham. Quick result here’d be a good thing. Concentrate our energies where they’re more needed.”

  “Back among the big boys.”

  Resnick nodded. “It needs sorting, Graham. Before somebody gets killed.”

  Seven

  The way Keith felt about his old man, one of those old jossers get on the bus in the morning and suddenly you’re staring out the window, hoping against hope they won’t lurch over, sit down next to you. Clothes that reek of cider and cheap port wine. Open their mouths to speak and the next you know, they’re dribbling uncontrollably.

  An exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. The way his dad had gone since the divorce, starting his drinking earlier and earlier in the day, not finishing till the money or the energy to lift the bottle failed him. Last time Keith had called at the house, two in the morning, unannounced, his father was curled asleep on the kitchen floor, arms cradled around the legs of an upright chair.

  It hadn’t always been like that. As a young kid, Keith remembered his dad getting smartened up of an evening, loading his gear into the van, swinging Keith round by his arms till he screamed with excitement. Early hours of the morning, Keith would wake to the sound of car doors slamming in the street outside, called farewells, his dad’s footsteps, less than steady, on the stairs, his mother’s warning voice, “Don’t wake the boy.”

  His father would sleep till two or three, wander down for a sausa
ge-and-egg sandwich and pots of tea. Wash, shave, do it all again.

  He had been drinking, Keith realized, even then; more, probably, than had been clear at the time. Clear to Keith, at least, though he could still hear his mother’s shrill sermons echoing up and down the narrow house. And as the work had dried up, the bottles and the cans had appeared on every surface, lined the chair where his dad would sit, not watching the TV. “One thing,” he would say, over and over, “one thing, Keith, I regret-you never knew me when I was big, really big. Then you might’ve felt different.”

  Keith fished the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. Found the light switch without thinking. Strange how long this had been home.

  “Keith, that you?”

  No, it was Mick jagger, Charlie Watts’d finally decided to jack it in, old Mick couldn’t think of anyone better to take his place.

  Around when Keith had been twelve and thirteen and you didn’t have to be a genius to see how far things had fallen apart, that was the kind of guff his dad would sit him down, make him listen to. How he could have played with the Stones, back in the early days, Eel Pie Island, before Mick started on the eye makeup, all that poncing about. Back when they were playing real music.

  Playing the blues.

  “Keith?”

  “Yeh, it’s me. Who d’you think?”

  All the bands his old man could have played with if things had only fallen right: the Yardbirds before Jeff Beck, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Graham Bond, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. The night he should have depped for Mickey Wailer with the Steampacket, some big festival-instead of sitting behind the drums, his dad had popped too many pills and spent the set in the St John Ambulance tent throwing up.

  “Keith, you’re coming down here, fetch us a beer.”

  As far as Keith knew, his father’s only substantiated nights of near-glory had been back in sixty-four when he gigged with Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, joining them in Nottingham when they were on the Mecca circuit and sticking it out until they were hired to back Chuck Berry on his British tour. First rehearsal, Chuck stopped short in the middle of his duck walk and asked who the motherfucker was trying to play the drums. That was it: beginning and end of his old man’s big career. For sale, one pair of Zildjian cymbals, one mohair suit, scarcely worn.

  “Keith, I thought I asked you to …”

  “Here. Catch.”

  The can bounced out of Reg Rylands’s hands and rolled across the basement floor.

  “What you doing down here?” Keith asked, snapping open the Carlsberg he’d fetched for himself.

  “Oh, you know, pottering around.”

  Keith grunted and snapped open his can.

  “What’s that you’ve done to your eye?”

  “That?” Keith said, gingerly touching the swelling, the bruise. “That’s nothing.”

  The house was two-story, flat-fronted, an end-terrace in the Meadows-one of those streets the planners overlooked when they ordered in the bulldozers on their way to a new Jerusalem. Keith had been born here, brought up; his mum had moved out when she divorced, lived now in a semi in Gedling with a painter and decorator and Keith’s five-year-old stepbrother, Jason. Keith’s father had stayed put, letting out first one room, then another, sharing the house with an ever-changing mixture of plasterers and general laborers and drinking mates who dossed down for free whenever their Social Security ran out

  “What’s this?” Keith asked, pointing at the Z-bed opened out along the wall. “You sleeping down here now?”

  “Just for a bit. Coz’s got my room.” He drank some lager. “You remember Cozzie. Some woman with him this time. Tart.”

  Keith didn’t know any Cozzie, but he could guess what he would look like: tattoos across his knuckles and scabs down his face. “Hope he’s paying you.”

  “’Course.”

  Which meant that he was not.

  “So what you doing here?”

  Keith shrugged. “Come to see you, didn’t I?”

  “You weren’t thinking of staying?”

  “Thought I might.”

  “What’s wrong with your mum’s?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Haven’t had a row?”

  “No more’n usual.”

  “So?”

  “Change, that’s all. Couple of nights.”

  “You’re not in trouble?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cause if it’s anything like before …”

  Keith hurled his half-full lager can at the floor and stormed towards the door.

  “No, Keith, Keith, hold on, hold on. I’m sorry, right?”

  Keith stopped, feet on the cellar steps.

  “You want to stay, that’s fine. Got a mattress I can bring down here, you take the bed.” Keith turned and came back inside. “Just for tonight. Bloke up top, moving out next couple of days. I’ll explain. Give him a nudge. It’ll work out, you see. Here …” He bent down and picked up the Carlsberg and handed it back to his son. “Like old times, eh?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Might go out later, couple of pints. What d’you think?”

  Keith sat down on the Z-bed and it rattled and squeaked. In an old chest opposite, fronts missing from two of the drawers, were his father’s clothes-those that weren’t draped anyhow across a succession of cardboard boxes or hanging from the back of the cellar door. A pile of shoes from which it might be difficult to find a decent pair. Bundles of old newspapers and magazines, yellowing copies of the NME. An old Ferguson record player with only one speaker: a radio without a back. Two snare drums, not on stands, but lying side by side, skins patched and slack. A pair of wire brushes, bent and tangled at the ends.

  “Yeh,” Keith said. “Yes, sure. Drink’d be fine.” He looked quickly at his father from the corner of his good eye. “You might have to pay.”

  Eight

  Resnick had arrived back at the station in time to find three uniformed officers hauling a seventeen-stone West Indian up the steps and backwards through the double doors.

  “Argument with a taxi driver, sir. Reckoned he was charging him over the odds. Jumped on the roof and dented it. Stuck his boot through the rear windscreen. Driver tried to pull him down and got a kick in the head for his trouble.”

  Resnick held one of the doors open as, finally, they succeeded in lifting him inside. A good bollocking from the custody sergeant, a night in a cold cell, and an agreement to pay restitution to the cab driver and that would likely be an end to it. Summary justice: there no longer seemed to be a lot of it about. Back when Resnick and his friend, Ben Riley, had been walking the beat, so much could be settled with a warning look, a word, the right intervention at the right time. All too often now, the first sign of police intervention brought about an immediate escalation of trouble. A violent response. Unthinking.

  A WPC, out of uniform, on her way home from the cinema, stops near a fiercely quarreling couple, the man shouting at the top of his voice, the woman yelling back through her tears. When the police officer goes closer, asking them to calm down, asking the woman if she was all right, the pair of them rounds on her, the woman spitting in her face.

  A young constable, six months on the job, steps between two groups of youths squaring up to one another on the upper floor of the Broad Marsh Centre. Set upon, forced back towards the top of the escalator, he calls for help which only comes when he has tumbled to the bottom. Three cracked ribs, a dislocated pelvis, he would suffer intermittently from severe back pain for the rest of his life.

  “Call for you, sir,” said Naylor, passing Resnick on the stairs. “Dl Cossall. Left the message on your desk.”

  “Thanks, Kevin.”

  “Couple of us going over the road for a pint if …”

  “Yes, maybe. Later.”

  Resnick squeezed past the furniture that had been moved out into the corridor and pushed open the door to the CID room. Loose boards were stil
l stacked against the wall, and from the temperature nothing had been achieved setting the heating to rights. A lamp burned over Lynn Kellogg’s desk, her coat still hung from the rack in the corner, but there was no sign of her. Divine would be in the pub already, getting them in.

  Scarcely a time in the last months, Resnick had walked into that office and his eyes had not flicked towards the far wall where Diptak Patel used to sit. Now there was a space, a gap in the floor, lengths of piping running through, shadow. Coldness. What was it Millington had said about Patel and death? Scatter rose petals and sit around wailing where he comes from, don’t they?

  Well, wailing there had certainly been, that cold Saturday when the wind had whipped off the Bradford hills and cut across Resnick’s back like a stick. Flowers, too. Roses. Patel’s father had shaken his hand gravely, thanked Resnick for attending, never looked him in the eye. Never understood. No. What was there to understand?

  “Don’t,” Patel’s girl friend had begged, that evening in the city center. “Please don’t get involved.”

  “I have to,” Patel had said.

  Moments later, the blade with which one youth had been attacking another was turned on him. Another fucking Paki. Another fucking Saturday night. Blood from the artery spread wide and the best you could say, the only good thing, the only consolation you could find: it had not taken Patel long to die.

  “Sir?” Lynn Kellogg said quietly.

  Resnick had failed to hear her come in behind him.

  “You all right?”

  He turned his head and looked at her, slowly nodded. “I sometimes think,” she said, “that he’s-well-that he’s still here.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he isn’t … He’s …”

  For the briefest of moments, Resnick put his hand on her shoulder and she rested her cheek sideways against it and closed her eyes. Resnick’s breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the darkening room. And then she got her bag and her coat and said good night and Resnick said see you in the morning and after the door had closed he went into his office and read the note.