by Neil White
Losing both parents had toughened me up, perhaps too much. When I looked at Laura, saw her smile or heard her laugh, or whenever I caught her in an unguarded moment, vulnerable and soft, unlike the tough cop I knew she could be, I felt a need to hold her, to be the strong man. But most times I stopped myself; something inside of me held me back, as if I was waiting for the rejection.
So maybe losing both parents hadn’t toughened me up at all. Maybe it had made me too fragile, so that I was scared of the knockbacks.
I turned the key in the ignition.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I whispered, ‘but I’m going to have to sell the car.’ Then I laughed at myself. Not really for talking to myself, but because it was about something as trivial as a car. It wasn’t that simple though. My father had owned that car throughout my childhood. It was how I remembered Sunday mornings, my father with a sponge in his hand, washing it down. I had friends at school whose fathers owned better cars than a 1973 Triumph Stag in Calypso Red, but to my father it was a reward for his police work, the drives on sunny days his escape from the humdrum of family life.
I let my words hang there for a minute or so, just giving him a chance to hear them, to know that I wasn’t being disrespectful. It was my last real connection with my father and somehow I wanted him to know that I was doing it for the right reason, not because I was trying to dim his memory.
My thoughts were interrupted by my phone ringing. I took a couple of deep breaths before I answered.
‘Hello?’
‘I’ve got some material for you.’
I smiled. It was Tony Davies.
‘What like?’
‘Just the archive stuff we used for the Gilbert anniversary edition. I’ve done you copies. I’ll drop them off later.’
I thanked him and hung up. I gave a quick salute to the lines of headstones. At least I was making progress.
Chapter Thirteen
Mike Dobson closed his eyes as he lay back on the sofa. It was one of those summer evenings when the heat never really disappears and the neighbourhood children seem to play too late, the laughs and shrieks drifting in through the open windows.
The television was on in the corner of the room, but he couldn’t concentrate. Why was it that the memories came back to him so strongly? He could go for months when there was nothing, but then it took just a small thing, like the sight of his naked wife, frigid and cold, or the flowery sweetness of the scent of Chanel. He was swept more than two decades back, and the images assaulted him, mixed up the past with the present, as if she was in the room with him.
Summer nights like these were the worst, when the sun took all evening to set over the lavender bushes in the garden, their delicate smell drifting in through the open window. And with the smells came the sounds, the sensations. He felt her touch for a moment, that spark, that excitement, her hand in his, her fingers soft and light, sitting together in the park. Then he remembered those other moments. His mouth on her breast, soft murmurs, loud moans, two bodies together.
But then came the blood, as always. He could feel it on his hands, and his eyes shot open as he heard the thumps, the knocking, like a desperate drumbeat, the shouts, the muffled cries.
Mary was watching him. He glanced over quickly and he thought he saw a shadow behind her, someone moving through the door. He blinked and it was gone, and all he could see were Mary’s cold eyes.
He clambered to his feet to go to the fridge. When he got there, he leant against the door for a moment, his forehead damp, before reaching for a beer.
When he walked back into the room, Mary looked pointedly at the bottle. ‘Do you think you should?’ she said.
‘I feel like I want to,’ he replied, taking a long swig. When she shot a stern look at him, he added, ‘I’ve had a long day. No one’s buying, and I’m hot.’
He went outside, to wait for the sun to drop lazily behind the houses, catching the duck and dive of evening birds and the buzz of midges over the laurel bush in the corner of his garden.
He closed his eyes for a moment and let the scents creep back in again, and he was taken back to stolen hours, a country drive, the weight of her in his arms, laughing, his mouth on hers, the caress of her fingers in his chest hairs, the summer of innocence.
He heard a sound, like a thump on wood; as he looked up, he saw Mary step away from the window. She had been watching.
He took another pull on his beer. He knew he shouldn’t think of it, but then he felt that burn, that familiar need.
He went back into the house and took his car keys from the hook by the door.
‘I’m going for a drive,’ he said, and he was met by silence as he slammed the door.
Chapter Fourteen
I was sitting in my garden as I flicked through the newspaper articles Tony had dropped through my door. I had views over Turners Fold to distract me, the strips of grey terraced houses and small fingers of chimneys sitting between the slopes, and towards the jagged lines of drystone walls dividing up the hills, black and white dots of cattle sprinkled as far as I could see.
I took a sip from my wine glass and noticed how Claude Gilbert’s house looked different in the old black and white photographs, the garden slightly overgrown, less formal. I smiled as I held up a photograph of Claude, the one that had spread to the nationals, his dark hair thick, a superior smirk. Did he really want to come home? I plucked an article from the bottom of the pile and saw that the picture used was the full photograph, with Nancy Gilbert sitting next to him, an austere look on her face. The photographs used later were more relaxed shots, showing her laughing and happy, as if they were meant to prick the general conscience—the public wouldn’t warm to the hunt if she was some uptight rich bitch.
As I read the articles, I saw nothing new, just stuff that had been rehashed countless times since. I slipped the cuttings back into the envelope when I heard the hum of car tyres and watched as Laura’s charcoal-grey Golf crunched onto the gravel outside our gate. As she stepped out of the car, her white shirt open at the neck, I raised my wine glass. ‘It’s open,’ I said.
‘So I see,’ she replied, and gave me a weary smile. When she joined me at the table, a glass in one hand, she put her arm around my neck and her head on my shoulder. I could feel the collar of her stiff white shirt, and, as I reached behind and felt her legs, my hands brushed over the coarse regulation black trousers and my fingers crackled with static.
‘It still seems strange, seeing you in your uniform,’ I said, as I got the waft of her perfume mixed in with the sweat of the cells. I had put Bobby to bed, but from the shouting I could hear drifting through the open window he must have heard the car. ‘I’ll go say goodnight in a minute,’ she said sleepily. ‘I just need to slow down for five minutes.’
‘Life tough at the top?’
‘I’ll tell you when I get there,’ she said, and stretched out a yawn. ‘I’ll need to do some revision soon though. It feels like I’ve forgotten how to study. I wasn’t the best at it in university, but I must have done it at some point.’
‘I was a crammer,’ I said. ‘Go out until Easter, and then just rush it through at the end.’
‘But you were younger then. So was I. This is a sergeant’s exam. I’m supposed to know the stuff already.’
‘You’ll do it easily,’ I said. ‘It’s just about staying cool enough to remember what you already know.’
She sighed. ‘I’m already the old stager.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was holding the hand of a new one today,’ Laura said. ‘He didn’t look old enough to be crossing the road on his own.’
‘I’m sure someone said that about you once,’ I said.
Laura grimaced. ‘That’s why I don’t like it. It just feels like it’s all slipping by too fast.’ She squeezed me and then murmured in my ear, ‘Will you still love me when I pass my exams?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll have to stay in this uniform for a while long
er,’ she said, ‘at least until I can go back into CID.’
I turned to face her, and sneaked a soft kiss. ‘I like it,’ I said, and then I raised my eyebrows mischievously. ‘Could we, you know, just once, in the uniform?’
‘And the handcuffs?’ She tapped my nose playfully. ‘I’ll try not to make them too tight,’ she said, and then she peeled away from me. ‘I’m going to say goodnight to Bobby.’
I grabbed her hand. ‘Before you go, I’ve got a scenario for you,’ I said. ‘Think of it as revision.’
Laura turned and looked at me. ‘Go on.’
‘Someone is wanted by the police. If there was a sighting of him, would I be obliged to report it?’
‘Who is it?’
I shook my head. ‘No names.’
She paused at that and tapped her lip with her finger. ‘I’m trying to think of what crime it would be if you didn’t.’ After a few more seconds, she said: ‘It would depend on what you did with the information. If you alerted him to help him get away, or gave him shelter, then yes, but if you just failed to report it, I’m not sure we could do much.’
I nodded to myself. ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said quietly, and let go of her hand.
As I took a sip of wine, I realised that Laura was staring at me.
‘Is it something to do with the woman who was here this morning?’ she said.
‘I don’t reveal my sources, you know that,’ I replied.
‘I don’t need to pass my sergeant’s exam to work out that she’s connected,’ she said. ‘But is it anything that will get you into trouble?’
I raised my glass and smiled. ‘I’ll tell you when I find out more. There is one thing I have to do though.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Go to London,’ I said.
‘And what will you do when you get there?’
Laura looked at me strangely when I said, ‘Hopefully, make us rich.’
Frankie stared through his binoculars from behind a stone wall, his knees in long grass.
He had ridden into Turners Fold and asked questions about the reporter in the old red sports car. He got lucky, because the third person he asked knew where Jack Garrett lived.
It had been a long time since he had been in Turners Fold. It had once been on his cycle route, the long pull out of Blackley, and then a fast green run into Turners Fold, freewheeling along a road bordered by straggly grass verges and drystone walls until he hit the fringes of the town, as the country views turned into small-town huddles. He used to like sitting by the canal and eating ice cream as the barges drifted past, and the people on board always waved back at him as he sat by the bridge, dipping his feet into the water as he rested his legs.
But that had been a long time ago, when his mother had been alive. She would run him a bath for when he got back, sweaty and tired, always hungry, and he would tell her what he had seen. He missed that more than anything. It was all part of her being around, more than just someone to clean for him or make his meals. He’d had someone to share his secrets with, the things he could see from his window, who wouldn’t laugh at him for thinking like he did.
It was an easier ride now. His Vespa purred up the hills, and so he was able to take in the views as he got higher and the air became fresher.
Frankie had seen the car before he reached the house, the red Triumph parked on a small patch of pink gravel at the front of a grey cottage, its stones large and worn, the old slates on the roof jagged and uneven. He had pulled into a small track by a farm gate and then switched off the scooter’s engine and clambered over the gate, binoculars in his hand. He had walked along the wall until he could get a good view of the house, to see who else was there before he spoke to the reporter.
He knelt down so that the lenses just peeked over the wall. He saw the reporter, a glass of wine in his hand, but then Frankie was jolted when he saw who else was there.
He ducked down quickly. She was a police officer—he could tell that from the stiff trousers and the white shirt—and that scared him. He didn’t want the police at his house.
But she had looked pretty, and so he got to his knees and looked again towards the house.
He liked the way she smiled as she leant over the reporter and then gave a giggle. She was just back from work and it had been a warm day. She would be taking a shower soon. He scanned the house with his binoculars, looking for the bathroom, and then he found it. There was frosted glass in the window, but the top pane was partly open and he could see the clear glass of a shower cubicle.
His hand scrambled around in his bag as he nudged the notepads and yesterday’s newspapers aside, until he found his camera. It felt hot in his hand. He closed his eyes for a moment and apologised. To his mother. To the policewoman at the cottage. And to himself. He knew he shouldn’t, that it was wrong to look at naked women, his mother had told him that. But he wanted to see her. As long as she didn’t know he was there, where was the harm in that?
He watched as she went inside and then, as the light went on in the bathroom, he trained his camera on the window, waiting.
Chapter Fifteen
Mike Dobson drove slowly around the Mill Bank area of Blackley, an eye on his mirror for the police. The streets ran through mainly open spaces now, from which rows of terraces had long since been cleared, ready for the urban regeneration that had never happened. The grass grew long and wild, nature reclaiming the land, fluttering through those piles of bricks and grit that hadn’t been taken away by the diggers, security fences stretching along their edges, protecting the tyre-fitters and builders’ merchants with jagged silver spikes.
There were still some rows of houses, but the windows were mostly blocked by steel shutters, awaiting the attention of the bulldozers. Water trickled onto the street from one, the pipes ripped away by scrappers, and the walls hosted the garish scrawls of graffiti artists.
The streets were busy with women though, the balmy weather making it easier to work, but the roads were quiet, traffic still too light. Mike’s car bounced into the potholes as he crawled along and the women peered into his car, smiling, their teeth browned by drug use and decay.
But he didn’t want them. He was looking for someone else.
He did a couple of circuits before he saw her, standing on a corner, well away from the other girls. He felt a small tremor of anticipation. It had been a couple of months now, but whenever he went looking she was the one he sought out. She was different from the rest—nicely spoken, almost polite, a couple of wrong turns in her life bringing her to this point—but it was her looks that drew him. Her hair was long and dark and she had an easy smile, but it wasn’t just that. She looked like Nancy and, whenever Mike saw her, it was like Nancy was back, from the way she tossed her hair as she walked, to the provocative rise of her eyebrows when she smiled.
He slowed down as he reached her. She bent down to peer into his car and he leant across the passenger seat, puffing slightly as his stomach strained against the seatbelt.
‘Looking for business?’ she drawled, as she pulled her hair back over her ears. Nancy used to do that.
‘Don’t you remember me?’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘That’s okay,’ he said, and then opened the car door. ‘Get in.’
She climbed in and put her bag on her knees. It was gaping open and Mike could see the packet of cigarettes squeezed in next to the baby wipes, her tools for the evening.
As he set off towards his usual place, the site of an old factory, now reduced to a concrete patch and dark shadows by the redbrick viaduct that overshadowed the town, he said, ‘I just thought you might remember me, that’s all.’
‘Why would I?’
‘Because I treated you nicely,’ he said.
She paused for a few seconds, and then she asked, ‘How many times?’
‘With you?’ He blushed. ‘Not many.’
She didn’t respond to that, and he guessed that she wasn’t interested in idle talk. As
the car crunched slowly to a halt, just the dark walls ahead of him, she asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘Something more than this,’ he said quietly.
‘What do you mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter.’ And then, ‘Who are your regulars?’
‘Taxi drivers mainly,’ she said. ‘And men like you, who don’t like their wives any more.’
He looked down at that, suddenly ashamed, and picked at his fingers. ‘Take off your top,’ he said quietly.
‘An extra fiver for that.’
He nodded. ‘I know.’
‘Full sex?’
He nodded again, his cheeks red.
‘Thirty quid,’ she said.
‘It was forty last time.’
‘Call it a loyalty discount,’ she drawled.
He got out of the car to sit in the back. She clambered in there with him, climbing between the gap in the front seats, and slipped off her T-shirt. She looked thin and pale, her skin mottled, her bones too visible in her shoulders. Her fingers were grubby and her nails bitten short.
The leather car seat was cold on his backside as he pulled down his trousers. He felt ridiculous, exposed, his eyes darting around, watching out for the police. The car was filled with the noise of the condom wrapper being torn open, and then he gasped and closed his eyes as her hands worked it onto him.
She climbed on top of him and tears squeezed out between his eyelids, part shame, part relief. Then she started to move up and down quickly, functional, passionless, getting him from start to finish, her hair brushing against his face, the seat creaking beneath him.
He ran his hands along her back, felt her naked skin under his fingers, the ridge of her spine, the fine hairs in the small of her back, and then he leant forward to kiss her. She moved her mouth out of the way and shook her head, going faster, and then it came at him in a rush…just a release, nothing more.
