by John Harvey
‘What … what are you doing here?’
‘I’m here because I need to let you know you were wrong. You were wrong about a lot of things, Blagden, but most of all you were wrong about me. You thought I was nothing. A shifty private eye, with one foot already in the grave and one in the cess pit of other people’s lives. Well, you were right about the second part but you were way out on the first. I’m a long way off from being finished. I may not look much and I may not be very bright, but there’s one thing I don’t do; I don’t give up. I’m not prepared to lie down and let you or any of your strongarm boys walk all over me. What you thought you were buying with those few notes you passed me across the table in that pub was a dupe, a nobody you could use as you liked and that wouldn’t kick back.
‘You were wrong, Blagden. All the way down the line. You were wrong today when you didn’t believe me when I said what I’d do to you if you went after Anna again.
‘You were so wrong.’
The pulse against his forehead was racing enough to break through the skin. He huddled back into the settee, trying to get away from my hands as they reached down for him. But there wasn’t any way out.
I lifted him up on to his feet and he just stood there, arms down by his sides, looking at me.
At the last moment, he started to say something but it never got out … I’d already started hitting him, I hit him a lot. At first it was random, a mixture of temper and frustration finding an outlet in my fists. After that I became more methodical.
If he fell down, I picked him up and started over again. If he cried out too loudly, I struck his mouth with my open hand.
I thought about the dead girl with a flayed face.
I thought about the young man with a bullet between the eyes.
I thought about the musician with smashed fingers and torn mouth.
I thought about Anna; the thing she saw in her eyes: the coldness of her hands.
And I hit him again and again and again.
I was still hitting him when they came into the room and pulled me away.
I was sitting on the same settee that Blagden had been on earlier. But now it was later. Blagden was on his way to hospital and I was staring at a pair of hands that were wrapped up in two towels. They were my hands.
Hankin was sitting on the smaller chair now, but he wasn’t straddling it either. Occasionally one or other plain clothes officer would come into the room. Sometimes they spoke to Hankin in quiet, guarded tones. Sometimes they busied themselves with other things.
I was trying hard to think. Right from the first I had nursed the idea that Hankin had been involved; that he had been on the take from Blagden or someone else with a connection, an interest. Now he was here and he had been through my story three times already. Hadn’t said anything, I shown any emotion save the usual one of tiredness. At least, he hadn’t slapped me this time. Though now he had reason enough.
Even if he had been involved, I guessed that things had got to the stage where he couldn’t avoid moving in. If Blagden laid a complaint against him and tried to take Hankin down with him, then he would have to prove it to A.10’s satisfaction.
I was still worried about the gun.
Finally I thought the only thing to do was ask him about it.
‘A grass came in with it. A put-up job, of course. Whoever stole it from your office and later used it to kill Warren wanted to set you up for it. From what you’ve said, Blagden or whoever pulled his strings, must have started getting panicky about the way you’d begun poking your nose where they didn’t appreciate it.
‘They tried warning you off but that didn’t work. So they thought up the business with the gun. They realised they would almost certainly have to get rid of Warren, who knew too much for his own good. It was a way of killing the proverbial two birds …’
He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in a lazy curve across the space between us.
‘You said, Blagden or whoever pulled his strings … ?’
‘Right. Blagden’s big but he’s not the one at the top. We wanted to wait a little longer, find out more. Pull in the really juicy one. But after your caper down in the country we couldn’t very well wait around any longer, could we?’
‘You got the big guy all right?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘We had to chase him over a couple of fields, but in the end he came quietly.’
There should have been the glimmer of a smile as he said that last phrase, a wrinkle at the edges of the mouth even. But there was nothing.
He held the cigarette between the middle two fingers of his hand, so that when he stuck it in his mouth the whole of the lower half of his face was covered.
I found myself thinking idly what big hands a lot of people had. Hands and rings.
Hankin stood up.
‘Your friend, Tom Gilmour, seems to think you’re worth bothering about, Mitchell. I think he’s wrong. You’re just a nothing running round in circles sending yourself dizzy. You didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on in this case, did you? Not a clue. I told you that if I let you run about for long enough you’d stir up a lot of shit.’
‘But not enough to suffocate in,’ I told him.
‘Not yet, Mitchell. Not yet.’
I could have said a few more things. I could have said what about the couple of murders I’d sorted out for him, what about the drug smuggler I’d brought out from under cover. But I thought he’d only say that they could have done those things themselves any time they’d wanted to.
So I said nothing.
Hankin turned on his way to the door. ‘Get home and get some sleep, Mitchell. Come in first thing in the morning and make a full statement.’
He hesitated a moment or two. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say thanks. I didn’t. He stopped waiting and left. I arched back my head and closed my eyes: I was feeling tired, tired, tired.
I drove back to the flat very carefully. I was in a hurry right enough but I didn’t trust my reactions and this night—this morning—was the last one on which I wanted to wrap myself round a convenient lamp post.
I even waited a couple of minutes at a red light that seemed to have jammed, although there was no other traffic and no one walking the streets.
I slid the car into the kerb at minus miles an hour. My hands were aching from holding the wheel. I looked at my watch. It was too early to be late and too late to be early.
I pushed my body out of the car and locked it. As I was walking across the grass I started to sense the tiredness falling away from me with every step.
It was going to be all right. It might even, with luck, be more than that. I remembered the glow that the flames from the fire shot across her body and how her skin tensed when I touched it.
I was almost knocking on the door when I realised that I said I’d phone first. If I didn’t do that, she’d wake up and start to get scared all over again.
I found a coin in my pocket and walked the fifty yards to the nearest phone box. I dialled the number and waited. No answer. She must be asleep. I put down the receiver and tried again. She’d been pretty whacked too; it would take a lot to wake her.
But the phone was by the bed.
I was half-way through dialling a third time when my finger froze in the middle of a curve. I could see her right inside my head. Only she wasn’t warm in front of the fire. She was cold. Cold.
I jumped out of the box and started running. I pounded my legs down on to the pavement but it was like racing through water. I could see her eyes now, staring the way they had when I took the gun away from her. Staring at nothing I had been able to see.
I thought that now maybe I knew what it was.
Hammering on the door wasn’t any use. I pulled off my shoe and smashed its heel against the frosted glass of the high window alongside. In my haste I must have cut myself as I reached throu
gh but I didn’t notice at the time. I just wanted to get into that room.
The bed was empty, the covers thrown back.
I checked the living room, the kitchen.
Nothing.
The bathroom door was locked from the inside. I kicked it down. My eyes jammed shut and I could feel something climbing up my throat and at the last moment I realised I was going to throw up. I leant my hands on the edge of the bath and watched the vomit hit the white porcelain and splash back up the sides. When I was sure I’d finished I wiped my mouth and my eyes and then, only then, did I look at Anna.
She was sitting on the toilet. Her nightdress was hoisted up almost to her waist and you could see the long fall of dark hair down between her thighs. Her legs were spread quite wide; wide enough for her arms to be pushed down between them. Her fingers were curled into the water at the bottom of the toilet bowl. Only the water was red because she had cut her wrists. The razor blade floated on the top, where she had dropped it.
Her head had fallen sideways, against the wall and the way her hair hung across it I couldn’t see her face. I was glad. I didn’t want to see her face.
I thought I might throw up again, but I didn’t.
When I got out into the living room I found the note. It was written on the back of a plain post card. It said: ‘I didn’t think I’d ever feel 25 again.’
That was all.
I went and sat on the bed and looked at the telephone. I knew I should pick it up but I didn’t. Not for a long time. I sat there and thought about Anna. I thought about George Anthony waiting down in Devon for me to find her, waiting and worrying.
I thought it was all right for George Anthony: at least he’d be able to write a fucking poem about it!
After a while I did pick up the phone.
About the Author
John Harvey (b. 1938) is an incredibly prolific British mystery writer. The author of more than one hundred books, as well as poetry and scripts for television and radio, Harvey did not begin writing professionally until 1975. Until then, he was a teacher, educated at Goldsmiths College, London, who taught literature, drama, and film at colleges across England. After cutting his teeth on paperback fiction, Harvey debuted his most famous character, Charlie Resnick, in 1989’s Lonely Hearts, which the English Times called one of the finest crime novels of the century.
A police inspector noted for his love of both sandwiches and jazz, Resnick has starred in eleven novels and one volume of short stories. The BBC has adapted two of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment (1990), for television movies. Both starred Academy Award–nominated actor Tom Wilkinson and had screenplays written by Harvey. Besides writing fiction, Harvey spent over twenty years as the head of Slow Dancer Press. He continues to live and write in London.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by John Harvey
Cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-5040-3885-0
This edition published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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