Cold Light

by John Harvey

  The phones were still ringing. Resnick pushed open the door to his office, ready to shout an order, and realized there was no one there. A filing cabinet with the drawer not pushed fully back, mugs of tea staining deeper and deeper orange, typewriters and VDUs all unattended. Resnick picked up the nearest receiver, identified himself and asked the caller to hold while he dealt with the second. A postman had been cycling to work at the sorting office off Incinerator Road when a taxi had turned past him, heading for the bridge; he’d got a pretty good sight of the two youths in the back. A woman on her way back from the garage shop with a packet of cigarettes and a carton of milk had nearly been knocked off her feet by two lads rushing past. Resnick made a note of their names and addresses, was still arranging for the postman to come into the station, when Lynn Kellogg came backwards through the door.

  When she turned to face him she had two sandwiches in her hands, two cups of filter coffee, one of them black. Medium height, hair medium brown, red-faced, stocky, Detective Constable Lynn Kellogg, back from her parents’ poultry farm in Norfolk, byway of the deli across the street.

  “Mozzarella and tomato,” Lynn said, handing Resnick a brown paper bag already leaking French dressing. “I thought you might not have eaten.”

  “Thanks.” He prized the plastic lid from the coffee and drank. “I thought you weren’t due in till this afternoon?”

  Lynn widened her eyes and moved to her desk.

  “Things at home not so good?” Resnick asked.

  Lynn shrugged. “Not so bad.” She shook some loose pieces of lettuce from the paper bag and pushed them back inside her sandwich.

  “I found the turkey,” Resnick said, nodding in the direction of his office.

  “Good.” And then, suddenly grinning, “It’s a duck.”

  “I was just wondering,” Divine said. He was on his way out of the ward, interview over, and he’d timed his move to perfection, coinciding with Staff Nurse Bruton’s purposeful walk towards the drugs trolley. Lesley Bruton—tall, her height accentuated by the mass of dark hair untamed by her nurse’s cap … it was there on her badge, printed out for all to see. “Like I say, Lesley, I was wondering …”

  “Yes?”

  “What time you got finished? You know, came off shift.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “So?”

  She gave him a look that would have scuppered a more sensitive man and lifted a clipboard from the side of the trolley.

  “Look, it’s not a chat-up, you know. No way.”

  Amusement flirted across her eyes. “Help you with your inquiries, can I? Something like that?”

  What? Divine thought. Give me half the chance!

  “No,” he said, “not official …”

  “I thought perhaps not.”

  “See, what it is, I’ve got to stay here till he gets back on the ward. Raju. Could be—well, what?—hours.”

  “Could be.”

  “Thing is, there’s this present I’ve got to get. You know, for tomorrow.”

  “Special, is it?”

  Divine nodded, looked sincere.

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Underwear, then?”

  Divine treated her to his lop-sided grin; he was starting to sweat more than just a little.

  “Black and sexy?”

  “Could be. Why not?”

  She looked at him, saying nothing. Waiting.

  “There’s this place,” Divine said. “That arcade back of the Council House. Real posh.”

  “I know it,” Lesley Bruton said. “My boyfriend buys me stuff there all the time.”

  Jesus! Divine thought. His eyes slithered down her uniform, wondering if she was wearing any of it now.

  Lesley slid her hands along the rail of the trolley. “And you’d like me to pop in there when I finish?” she said. “Pick up something for you. For your girlfriend. A bra and pantie set. Maybe a camisole top. One of those teddies.”

  “Yes,” said Divine, “that sort of thing.” Wondering if a teddy was what he hoped it was, one of those all-in-one jobs like a swimsuit made out of lace.

  “Maybe try them on for you while I’m there?”

  “Why not?” Divine said, not quite able to believe his luck.

  “Why not?” Lesley said, fixing him with her eyes. “For you?”

  “Well, I …”

  For a moment, voice lowered, she leaned towards him. “In your dreams,” she said. And without a second glance, she walked away.

  Gary had been working on the door the best part of two hours, more, if you included the time it had taken him to walk up the street to his mate Brian’s house and borrow a decent-sized screwdriver and a rasp. Michelle had finished a second lot of washing, fed Natalie, given Karl fish fingers and beans, and made herself some toast. Gary had said he wasn’t hungry. Her mum had asked her to take the kids round some time that afternoon so she could give them their presents and even though it meant carting the pushchair off and on two buses, Michelle thought she’d better make the effort. First thing in the morning, her parents would be off up the Al to Darlington to have their Christmas dinner with Michelle’s older sister, Marie, and her family. Three-bedroom semi, that’s what they had. Picked it up dirt cheap after it was repossessed.

  “Michelle!” Gary’s voice from the back.

  “Yes?”

  “Lend us a hand, will you?”

  “Be there in a minute.”

  “No, now.”

  The kettle was coming to the boil, Natalie was getting into a right old grizzle, Karl was calling something from the front room and she couldn’t tell what; she’d thought while the tea was mashing, she’d see if there was mincemeat enough left to make some more mince pies. Last she’d made were almost as good as you could buy in the shop.

  “Michelle! You coming or what?”

  Michelle sighed and pushed the teapot to one side. Through the open front-room door, she could see Karl painstakingly climbing on to the settee so he could roll back off.

  “You be careful now,” she called at him on the way past. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  “Here,” Gary said, pointing. “Steady that for me there.”

  “Where?”

  “Jesus Christ, girl! There!”

  Michelle pushed two fingers against the top of the hinge, her thumb against the bottom.

  “Okay, now budge over, give me room to get the screwdriver to it.”

  She could hear his breathing clearly, loud and slightly ragged beneath his shirt. He hated doing jobs like this.

  “Right. Whatever you do, don’t let go. Hold it firm. Push.”

  There was a shout, sudden and loud, from inside the house and she knew that Karl had fallen and hurt himself.

  Gary sensed her move and stopped it. “I’ll be done in a minute. Hang on.”

  “It’s Karl, he …”

  “I said bloody hang on!”

  Gary gave a final turn and the screw splintered sideways through the wood of the frame, jerking the screwdriver from his hand. The hinge fell away from Michelle’s fingers and the whole door slid sharply outwards, wrenching the bottom hinge away with it.

  “Fuck!” Gary yelled. “Sodding bastard fuck!”

  “Gary!” Michelle called. “Don’t.”

  From somewhere, blood seemed to be running between her fingers, collecting inside her hand.

  Karl was standing close by the doorway, fists jammed against his eyes, mouth widening through a succession of screams.

  “Fuck!” Gary swore again, kicking at the frame. “And you,” he said, grabbing Karl by both arms and lifting him into the air. “You want something to bloody cry about!” He dropped his son towards the floor and before he could land, had cracked his hand, hard as he could, back across Karl’s face.

  Three

  “Crying out for it, she was?

  Meal time in the canteen and Divine, relieved from his duties at the hospital, was telling Kevin Naylor ab
out his encounter with Staff Nurse Bruton over the drugs trolley. A year or so back, Naylor would have been impressed; now his expression was, to put it mildly, skeptical.

  “No, she was. Straight up.”

  “Told you, did she?” Naylor asked. “I mean, you know, came right out and said it?”

  Divine dipped one of his chips into the pool of brown sauce spreading across his plate. “Don’t need to say, do they? Know what’s what, you can tell.” He pointed his fork across at Naylor, sprinkling the table with sauce. “Lot of your problem, you and Debbie …”

  “Debbie and I don’t have a problem.”

  “For now, maybe.”

  “We don’t have a problem.” Naylor’s voice getting louder, attracting attention.

  “All I’m saying,” Divine went on blithely, spearing another chip, “all the evidence shows, you know bog all about bloody women.”

  “Whereas you,” Lynn Kellogg leaned over from the next table, “expert by now, aren’t you, Mark?”

  Sarcastic cow! Divine thought. “Don’t believe me,” he said, “catch me in action, this do tonight. The man who made pulling an art form.”

  “I can’t wait!”

  “No?” Divine forked up a piece of meat pie. “Well, shame but you just might have to. I mean, I’d like to help out, but there’s just so many others in line before you.”

  Lynn pushed back her plate and stood up. “What do I have to do to keep it that way? Wear a cross round my neck? Eat garlic?”

  Divine gave her a swift appraisal. “No need. Just keep looking the way you do.”

  He leaned back and winked across at Naylor, as Lynn walked away, muffled laughter from some of the other officers flushing her face.

  “You didn’t need to say that,” Kevin Naylor said quietly.

  “Nobody asked her to stick her nose in. Any road, it’s no more’n true. I mean, would you fancy it? Be honest.”

  Naylor looked back down at his plate and made no reply.

  “That prick,” Lynn said to herself on the stairs, “knows as much about women as the average five-year-old.” She remembered him picking a magazine off her desk once, attention drawn by blonde hair and bright red lips and the headline, Shere Hite and the Clitoral Tendency. Divine had thought they were a new pop group.

  Gary James had been waiting close to two hours and there were still five people in front of him, two of them Pakis. Turn a place over to them and the next thing it’d be swarming, aunts and uncles, sisters and cousins, floor to ceiling like bugs. He’d seen it happen. Next to them, this couple lolling all over one another, tongues in each other’s ears half the time, looked as though they should still be at school, not in the bloody Housing Office. Tattoos all up their shoulders and necks, her with enough little rings in her nose to open a shop; bloke with his hair twisted round like some Rasta, though he was white as Gary himself. Down the row from Gary there was this West Indian woman the size of a sodding house herself, three kids clinging to her and another one on the way.

  Jesus! Gary didn’t have a watch and the clock on the waiting room wall had been at twenty-five past seven the past three times he’d been there.

  “Hey, mate,” he said, tapping the nearest Paki on the shoulder, then pointing to his own wrist in case the bloke didn’t understand. “What time you got?”

  “Very nearly a quarter to four,” the man said politely and smiled.

  Don’t smile at me, you smarmy bastard, Gary thought as he sat back down, save that for when you get in there. And then, Christ, that’s nearly three hours, never mind two.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you!” He pulled one of the metal-frame chairs out of line and pushed it hard towards the wall. “Think I’m going to sit here all bloody day? I want to see somebody and I want to see them bloody now!”

  “Sir,” the receptionist said. “Sir, if you’ll just go back to your seat, you’ll be seen as soon as possible.” All the while her fingers moving towards the panic button underneath the counter top.

  Resnick had gone to talk to Mavis Alderney himself. Mavis thankful for the chance to catch a fag out back from the laundry off Trent Boulevard where she worked.

  It had been Mavis who had come close to being sent flying by two youths that morning. “Arse over tip,” was how she put it. “Someone wants to get hold of the like of them and give them a good thrashing. Well, don’t you think? Should’ve been done to ‘em long time back. Then happen they’d not be the way they are now.”

  Resnick had grunted something noncommittal and pressed for her to be more specific with her descriptions. “A pair of them tearaways, you know, them boots and jeans, no respect for anyone, not even themselves,” wasn’t quite going to do it.

  Now he was in the market, upstairs in the Victoria Centre, all the seats around the Italian coffee stall taken and having to stand to drink his espresso, listening to an animated discussion about why both the city’s soccer teams were languishing near the bottom of their respective leagues.

  “Ask me,” someone said, “best thing could happen, bloody managers ship ’emselves either side of Trent, swop jobs.”

  “Now you’re talking rubbish, man.”

  “Well, they couldn’t do a lot worse.”

  “No,” put in somebody else, “I’ll tell you what. Best present they could have, both clubs. Christmas morning, chairmen of directors gets ’em both, Cloughie and Warnock on the phone, wishes them a Merry Christmas and tells them they’re both sacked.”

  “What? They’ll not sack Cloughie, they’d never dare. They’d have a full-scale bloody riot on their hands.”

  “Aye, maybe. But not as much as if they go down.”

  Resnick smiled and reached between two of the men, setting his cup and saucer back on the counter. On his way out of the market he’d buy a little Polish sausage to go with his duck, a chunk of Gruyère and some Blue Stilton, a good slice of apple strudel and some sour cream to take the place of a Christmas pudding.

  Down below, crowds were pushing their way from store to store and last-minute shoplifting was in full swing. Even more people than usual were gathered around the Emmett clock, holding up small children to see the fantastic metal animals revolve and laugh with wonder as streams of water splashed off its gilded petals as they opened. Again, again, again.

  Suspended from the high ceiling, a Santa on a bright red sledge chased polypropylene reindeer through stale air.

  Resnick was out on the street when he heard the first siren.

  Nancy Phelan had emerged from her office at the sound of shouting, curious to know whoever it was making all that noise. Besides, she could do with a break from her present assignment, explaining to a couple with an eighteen-month-old kid that by leaving the damp basement room for which the girl’s mother had been charging her a robbery of a rent, they had made themselves voluntarily homeless.

  “Voluntarily sodding homeless,” the man kept saying. “What in buggery is that?” Not loud, not even angry, simply swearing by rote.

  What it bloody is, Nancy had thought, and not for the first time, was an almost meaningless form of words dreamed up by some official to get the housing authority off the hook.

  That hadn’t been what she’d said to her client; what she’d said was, “Sir, I’ve already explained it to you several times.”

  Several? Haifa hundred.

  Whatever disturbance was going on outside, it had to be more interesting than that. A little light relief.

  Wrong.

  Gary James—Nancy thought she recognized him, thought he might even be one of hers, though she could never have put a name to him—was standing pretty much in the middle of the corridor, both hands holding a chair above his head. The metal kind with the canvas seat and back. The receptionist, Penny, was cowering against one wall, bent forward, arms folded up in front of her face. He’d either hit her with the chair or was about to.

  Howard, the security guard, was down at the far end of the corridor, squinting hopefully in their direction. Nancy
knew for a fact he could scarcely see his own hand in front of his face without his glasses on.

  “You!” Gary called over one shoulder.

  “Me?”

  “It’s you I want to see.”

  Oh, God, Nancy thought, it would be. Her second application to join a TEFAL course, train to teach English to polite, suited businessmen in Hong Kong or Japan, had just been turned down. This morning she’d been convinced—though it was difficult to tell—that one of her stick insects had died. And if that wasn’t enough she was three days late.

  Now this.

  “You’re the one me and Michelle saw before, right? About getting us out of that dump you moved us into.”

  “I said I’d try yes …”

  “Look! I’m telling you. You’d better do more than fucking try. And you, just stay where you fucking are or I’ll take this tart’s head off her fucking shoulders.”

  Penny flinched and stifled a scream and Howard retreated a few feet more than he had advanced.

  “Do you have an appointment?” Nancy asked, keeping her voice as normal as possible.

  Gary shot her another glance. “What do you think?”

  “Well, if you’ll wait till I’ve finished with my present clients, which shouldn’t take long, I’ll be happy to review your situation.” Nancy, thinking all the while she was speaking that she’d picked up so much official gobbledegook, she sounded as if she’d learned English as a second language herself.

  Gary swung the chair through a half-circle and brought it crash against the wall, close enough to Penny’s head to make her hair curl.

  “All right,” Nancy said. “Why don’t we talk now?”

  “Yeh?” said Gary, panting just a little. “What about Clint Eastwood down there?”

  “Howard,” Nancy said. “It’s okay. I’ll see Mister …” She looked at Gary hopefully.

  “James.”

  “I’ll see Mr. James in my office. There’s no need to be concerned. But you might look after Penny here, see that she’s all right.”