Rough Treatment

by John Harvey

  Grabianski wasn’t sleeping. He kept seeing the face of that poor, overweight guy expiring in front of him. Near enough. Before getting a cab out here he had bluffed his way up to the ward and although they hadn’t allowed him through the door, he had talked with the staff nurse. His condition was stable, all that could be expected, he’d had a lucky escape—change his lifestyle, he might live till he was an old man. Well, an older one.

  “What in God’s name did you do that for?” Grice had sniped at him, back in their rented flat.

  How did you answer that kind of a question?

  “You could have had us in all kinds of trouble. You could have had us nicked, five to ten, inside, that what you want?”

  “He was dying,” Grabianski had said.

  “I know he was fucking dying. Whose fault was that? He should never have been there in the first place.”

  In the end it hadn’t been worth arguing, Grabianski had left Grice to drink, his eyes closed, watching some middle-of-the-night TV movie with Angie Dickinson and Telly Savalas, and had leafed through some back issues of the RSPB magazine he’d come across in a second-hand shop on the Mansfield Road. Grice was right about one thing though, he’d thought, the man should never have been there, his property or no. Something about their luck, the quality of the information they were buying, something was changing.

  Then—stirring, grazing the inside of his lips against Maria’s pliant skin—all the luck he’d had hadn’t been bad.

  Neither of them heard the car, but there was no avoiding the peremptory knocking at the front door, the finger hard down on the bell. Maria’s first thought was Harold again, but, as they knew, Harold was likely to use his own key. Grabianski’s assumptions were of a different nature.

  “We’d better get some clothes on,” he said, rising from the bed.

  “Wait here,” Maria said, “whoever it is, they’ll go away.”

  Grabianski, reaching for his trousers, bent down and kissed her softly on the mouth. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Resnick was standing alone on the doorstep. No other officers in attendance; even the car had been left out of sight on the street, rather than deliberately blocking the drive. Maria Roy stood back to let him in, causing Resnick to wonder whatever she would have worn if housecoats had not been invented.

  Grabianski was in the kitchen, standing between sink and table, jacket already on and ready to go, if that was the way it was going to be.

  “Inspector.”

  Resnick nodded, fought back an impulse to shake the man’s hand.

  “Aren’t we at least entitled to some kind of explanation for this?” Maria began, walking around the table to Grabianski’s side.

  “It’s okay, Maria,” Grabianski said, patting his hand back against her arm.

  “Like hell it is. This is my house. I …”

  “Maria, hush.”

  “You wouldn’t like to make us some coffee,” Resnick said.

  Grabianski caught himself wanting to smile—so that was the way it was going to be. “D’you mind?” he said to Maria, who glared at the pair of them but moved towards the coffee-maker all the same.

  “Have a seat?” Grabianski said, for all the world as though it were his own house.

  Resnick shrugged off his topcoat and folded it across the back of one chair before sitting on another. “Your partner,” he said to Grabianski, making a point of checking his watch, “Grice, he’s been in police custody for the best part of an hour.”

  Very little else was said before the coffee was brewed and in front of them. It wasn’t strong enough for Resnick’s palate but better than he might have expected.

  “I don’t know,” Grabianski said. “The answers you want, I don’t know them. Names or faces, connections. It was part of the deal. The less we were both involved the better.” He half-grinned at Resnick over his cup. “In case of eventualities like this.”

  But Resnick was already shaking his head. “That’s not what we want from you. Not what we need to know.” He drank some of the coffee. “Most of it we have already, just a matter of corroboration.” He glanced across at Maria, who scowled and looked away. “Asking a few people to reconsider statements they may have made a touch, er, rashly.”

  Grabianski leaned back in his chair, one foot resting against a leg of the table; his cup was cradled in both hands. The inspector could have been stringing him along, though somehow he didn’t think so. Which left him precisely where?

  “It’s the drugs then, isn’t it?”

  “What drugs?” exclaimed Maria, staring across at Grabianski; knowing, almost before the words had left her lips, knowing all too well which drugs they were talking about.

  “On the button,” Resnick said.

  “That’s the name you’re after. The bloke who’s dealing.”

  Resnick’s turn to smile. “Too late, Jerry. We know that, too.”

  Grabianski’s face showed that he was impressed. “I can’t see, then,” easing his chair back down, “just what I can do to help.”

  Still smiling, enjoying himself, Resnick took his time. “Think about it some more. While we’re enjoying the coffee—think about it.”

  The room seemed airless, neither windows nor ventilation. Not wishing to take the chance of bumping into Grice, they had taken Grabianski to the central police station. Resnick and Norman Mann sat on the usual anonymous chairs, Grabianski with his elbows resting on the usual scarred table. As the day had progressed, his enjoyment of it had grown less.

  “He’s put you in for it, Grice.” Norman Mann tipped ash from the end of his cigarette on to the carpetless floor. “Really putting you in for it. Time he’s finished with you, all it’d need is an airmail stamp and you could send it straight to some studio. Sort of thing they love—stud who was a criminal mastermind. Climbing into his best suit to screw a few safes; out of ’em again to screw a few women. Stallone. What’s his name? Schwarzenegger. Be fighting over it.”

  Grabianski wasn’t so keen on the idea of Schwarzenegger. That film where he played a Russian cop—he could picture him trying for some kind of Polish accent and missing by a mile. No, as he’d always thought, it was a shame Cary Grant grew old too soon.

  “You hear what I’m saying to you?” Norman Mann asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t react.”

  “Tell me how.”

  “I don’t know. A little anger, what do you think, Charlie? If it was me getting stiffed by my partner, I’d show a little anger, eh?”

  Resnick was thinking about Jeff Harrison, not that they’d ever been partners or anything like, but all the same he couldn’t help wondering how much Harrison had heard on the grapevine, whether or not he was showing a little heartfelt anger.

  “You hungry, Jerry?” Norman Mann asked. “Want something to eat?”

  Grabianski shrugged. Anything that would break the relentless-ness of the questioning would suit him fine. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

  “Later.”

  Funny, Grabianski thought. Very funny.

  “First I want to know if you’re pissed off that your friend’s stitching you up for as much of this as he can. Any more and he’ll have it that all he did was drive the getaway car, keep watch. And that’s not true, right?”

  “You know it’s not true.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “What can I do?”

  “Maybe you don’t believe us? What Grice is saying about you?”

  Grabianski believed it: Grice would have had his grandmother boiled down for soup if he thought the time–profit ratio was favorable.

  “What you can do,” Mann said, “is make sure we put him inside for a long time. Tit for tat, right?”

  “Yes,” Grabianski said. “Sure. Right. Tit for tat.”

  “Okay!” Norman Mann scraped back his chair, clapped his hands. “You’re not saying this to get your choppers into the meat pie and mash? Three courses and then change your mi
nd?”

  Grabianski shook his head.

  Anything ever goes wrong, Grice had said, really fucking wrong, it’s every fucking man for himself, you remember that. Grabianski was remembering.

  “Whatever you need,” Grabianski said. “If I know the answers … if I can help, fine.”

  “That’s good. That’s great. Eh, Charlie? Cause now we can go feed our faces knowing we’ve got that far along the line.” He rested a hand on Grabianski’s shoulder, close to the neck, and squeezed. “Then we can talk about the rest.” He squeezed harder. “I’ve got to be honest, when I first heard this one, when Charlie tried it out on me, I never thought you’d go for it. Honest. Not that it isn’t a good deal; for you, I mean. It is. What it was, I didn’t think you’d have the bottle. Someone who gets his kicks turning places oven like he’s dressed for a Masonic dinner. But, no—” He leaned his face close to Grabianski’s “—you’ve got the bottle, all right.” He straightened and stepped away. “Bollocks like a bleedin’ rhinoceros.”

  Thirty-three

  Loscoe Miners’ Welfare Silver Band. the bottom edge of the poster, yellow over-printed in black, curling away now, catching in the shrill wind. Last concert of the previous summer. The sun was out, January warm for the time of year didn’t have to mean warm, not when you were sitting on a bench facing the deserted bandstand, waiting for somebody who might never show.

  It had taken forty-eight hours to set up the meeting and there hadn’t been one of those in which Grabianski hadn’t felt his mind changing, regretted what he’d agreed to do.

  Wearing a wire, wasn’t that what they called it?

  He remembered a television program, documentary, two detectives leaning on a prisoner to give them information, neither of them knowing of the hidden tape recorder, evidence against them spooling unseen. A film, also, more than one, TV again, Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, the cop pretending to be the bad guy, going in with a microphone taped to his chest. Sometimes they were found out, sometimes got away with it. A .45 Magnum in the face on a citation from the commissioner, a medal—the way it went depended on status, who was playing you this time around. Whether you were needed for the next episode or not. Exactly who you were in this story: hero or villain.

  Late morning and there weren’t too many people around. An elderly man in a raincoat sitting, hands in pockets, at the other side of the circle, staring off into nothing that was there. Two girls from one of the nearby offices taking an early lunch, baked potatoes forked from pale plastic boxes. A ragged crocodile of primary-school kids was making its way along the steeply angled path towards the castle; pieces of paper flapped back from their hands, duplicated questions about Mortimer’s Hole, a space to make a sketch plan of the moat and bailey. The teacher was hanging back, discouraging one of the boys from digging up the early crocuses with his foot.

  Look at it this way, Resnick had said, people like Stafford, you don’t want them out on the streets any more than we do.

  “Look at it this way …” Resnick was standing behind the chair, hands in pockets, waiting until Grabianski did just that, looked at him at least. “People like Stafford, they’re as close to vermin as you can get; you don’t want them out on the streets any more than we do.”

  “Who’s arguing?” Grabianski said. It was the same dim room, the same claustrophobia. Gray smoke collected beneath the low ceiling in coils: Norman Mann chain-smoking now, lighting one from the nub of the other. “You’re right. What you’ve told me, he should be put away …”

  “He’s a piece of shit,” put in Norman Mann.

  “Arrest him,” Grabianski said. “Lock him up.”

  “We need your help.” Resnick lifted one leg, set his foot down on the seat of the chair, holding Grabianski with his eyes. Grabianski knew what he was trying to do, this Polish cop with the edges of an East Midlands accent; trying to make him feel guilty, that’s what he was doing, wanting to get him involved. What was it to be? Solidarity? Poles apart?

  “You’ve got the cocaine,” Grabianski said. “Harold Roy, Maria, they’ll testify Stafford was selling the stuff, that he’d been supplying them.” He looked from one detective to the other. “I don’t see your problem.”

  “Problem is,” said Norman Mann, “if we go that way, the only thing likely to stand up is letting this Harold have a few grams here and there and maybe, if we’re lucky, possession of a kilo.”

  “So?”

  “So what’ve we got to sit on Stafford and squeeze him? Next to nothing. He comes across as strictly small time, pleads guilty and waits for his parole. What do we learn?”

  The drugs-squad detective used his middle finger and thumb to make an emphatic zero. He ground his cigarette out beneath his shoe and headed for the door. “I’m going for a piss,” he said.

  Strange how one person saying it, thought Grabianski, makes you want to go yourself.

  “The cocaine that comes into the country,” said Resnick, “the shipments that matter, two to three hundred kilos at a time, they’re broken down and spread out, city to city, broken down again. Someone like Stafford, in that process he’s not major, but we think he is big enough to know names, contacts, procedures. Putting him away for a few years isn’t enough. Nobody that matters will get touched. As far as they’re concerned there’s a hundred Staffords each way you turn; they’ll sacrifice him as soon as spit on the street. They can trust him not to talk and as long as we’ve nothing more on him, they’re right.”

  Grabianski didn’t like the way Resnick was looking at him, expecting some response; he wasn’t comfortable with it. He’d look away, but whenever his head swung back again there was Resnick, staring, waiting.

  “I don’t see it,” Grabianski said. His hands should have been sweaty, but they were dry, the palms were dry circles, beginning to itch. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t see what I can do.”

  “If we could help you with that …?”

  “Help?”

  “Find a way where you could help.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Forget it.”

  Resnick moved close and Grabianski rose to his feet: two men, big men, tall. Less than an arm’s length apart. “All we need is proof that Stafford’s part of something big. Not unwittingly, knowingly. That’s all.”

  “Proof?”

  “A tape.”

  “No.”

  Resnick touched Grabianski on the arm. “Jerry, you said you don’t want him on the streets any more than we do. Vermin. Worse.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me it’s my duty.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “As an honest citizen,” Grabianski laughed.

  “Why not?”

  Grabianski could feel Resnick’s breath on his face, feel the inspector’s hand on his arm, increasing the pressure. “You’re already helping us with a large number of previously unsolved crimes; if you were instrumental in a major drugs arrest …”

  “I’d have my face razored before I’d been inside an hour.”

  “Then we must do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “Once I’m in there, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “I meant, to make sure time isn’t what you do.”

  Grabianski held a breath, turned slowly away, released it. From somewhere there was a dull humming in his ears, making it difficult to think.

  “You’re serious?”

  Resnick didn’t need to answer.

  Still Grabianski shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s not just Stafford. There’s people behind him making millions. You’ve got no more time for them than I have. You’d feel good, knowing they were locked away.”

  “Stop accusing me of morality.”

  “Why else jump in front of an ax for a woman you’ve never seen before? Why risk prison giving artificial respiration to a perfect stranger?”

  “Because I didn’t think about it. I was there, in the situation. I did what I did. What you
’re asking, it’s different.” Grabianski looked past Resnick towards the door. “I need the toilet,” he said.

  “Right.” Resnick opened the door and nodded at the young constable standing there. He had escorted Grabianski out of sight when Mann came back in.

  “He going to do it?”

  “He hasn’t said so yet, not definitely, but yes, I think he’ll do it.”

  “’Course he will. He’s banking on being convicted of nothing less than a public-service award. He’s down there now, taking a slow piss, betting the judge is going to fall in love with his conscience.”

  What Grabianski was hoping was that Stafford wouldn’t keep him waiting much longer, stand him up altogether. What he was praying was that the whole business would get done without delay, without any trouble, without anyone getting hurt.

  “Any sign?” Resnick asked.

  Norman Mann shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Officers wearing dark blue overalls were stretched flat on the roof of People’s College opposite; more were stationed behind the turrets of the Castle’s East Terrace. Either side of the bandstand, where Grabianski was sitting, they were looking down through high-powered field-glasses, stills cameras on tripods, ready to catch anything and everything at a hundredth of a second.

  Resnick and Norman Mann were hunched together in a temporary workman’s hut beneath the bridge at the center of the Castle grounds. Although they were less than a hundred meters away, their view of the scene came via a video camera, also on the terracing, played out to them on a twelve-inch black-and-white monitor. Whatever was picked up by the microphone beneath Grabianski’s shirt was relayed to them through a single speaker: so far there had been a certain amount of rustling, a lot of strong breathing.

  “Bloke’s got the heart of an ox,” Norman Mann remarked.

  “And the balls of a rhino?”

  “The woman obviously thought so. Mary?”

  “Maria.”

  “Couldn’t get enough.”

  “You going to charge him? Harold?”

  “You going after her? Obstructing the course of justice?”