by John Harvey
There was a light burning on the landing, another in the back room, and Eileen stood for a full minute on the step, key poised, running over her excuses in her head. She’d half expected to get back and find her bags on the pavement, clothes flung all over the privet hedge. Thought, when she got inside, that he might be waiting with a knotted towel in his hand, wet, she’d known men do that; at least his fist. But he was sitting, Terry, in the old round-backed chair that was usually his mother’s, cup of tea cold in his hand.
Terry, I…’
‘You get on,’ Terry said. ‘Time you’ve had your shower and that, I’ll be up.’ He didn’t look her in the face.
Twenty minutes later, when he slid into bed beside her, the backs of her legs were still damp from the shower and he shivered lightly as he pressed against her.
Terry?’
‘Yes?’
‘Put out the light.’
Resnick and Millington were in the shop when Terry Cooke arrived, not yet ten-thirty and Millington poised to buy a nearly-new book club edition of Sense and Sensibility for his wife, while Resnick was thumbing through the shoebox of CDs, looking for something to equal the set of Charlie Parker Dial sessions he’d bought there once before.
Terry’s nephew, Raymond, stood in the middle of the room like a rabbit caught in headlights.
‘Ray-o,’ Terry said, ‘get off and see a film.’
They don’t open till gone twelve.’
Then wait.’
‘You know why we’re here?’ Resnick asked once Raymond had gone.
‘Maybe.’
‘We’ve heard one or two whispers,’ Millington said, making himself comfortable on a Zanussi washing machine. ‘Concerning a certain nasty incident the other night.’
‘Not down to me,’ Terry said hastily.
‘Of course not,’ Resnick assured him. ‘We’d never believe that it was. But others, maybe known to you…’
‘You see, we’ve heard names,’ Millington said. ‘Confirmation, that’s all we need.’
‘Though if you give us more…’
‘Confirmation and more…’
Terry felt the muscles tightening along his back; he ought never to have missed his morning swim. ‘These names…’
‘We thought,’ Resnick said, ‘you might tell us.’
‘Remove,’ Millington said, ‘any suggestion that we put words into your mouth.’
Terry felt the pressure of Coughlan’s hand hard on his shoulder, remembered the sick leer on his huge face when he had talked about sharing Eileen. ‘Coughlan,’ he said. ‘Him for certain.’
‘And?’
‘Breakshaw. Norbert Breakshaw.’
‘Thank you, Terry,’ Resnick said, letting a Four Seasons anthology fall back into the box; just so many times, he thought, you could enjoy ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’.
‘Here,’ Millington said. ‘How much for this?’
‘There’s something else,’ Terry said, ‘something else you’ll want to know.’
When Norbert Breakshaw parked the van close to the back entrance to Terry Cooke’s business premises, he wasn’t alone; Francis Farmer and Francis’s brother-in-law, Tommy DiReggio, were with him. Norbert had brought them along, partly for the company, partly to help him shift the gear; they had been with Norbert and Coughlan at the original break-in. Francis had hung back once Norbert had started swinging the sledgehammer and things got a little out of hand, but Tommy had enjoyed the chance to let fly with an iron bar, get the boot in hard. There’s a light on,’ Norbert said. ‘He’s waiting for us.’ Not quite right. What was waiting for them was a team of some twenty officers, two of them, Millington included, having drawn arms just in case.
Burdened down by boxes of expensive electricals, Francis and Tommy had no chance to run; Norbert’s retreat back to the van was cut off by a phalanx of men and women eager to try out their newly issued long-handled truncheons.
‘Just like the military in the Gulf,’ Millington explained in the canteen later. ‘Not so often you get a chance to give the hardware a try, battle conditions and all.’
Resnick had taken Vincent and Naylor for back-up, but left them downstairs, watching over Coughlan’s wife as she offered them a choice of Ceylon or Darjeeling. Resnick read Coughlan his rights as the big man dressed, hesitating for longer than was strictly necessary over the striped tie or the plain blue. Either way, the custody sergeant would never let him take it with him into the cells.
‘Some bastard fingered me, I suppose,’ Coughlan said, walking ahead of Resnick out of the room.
‘Your mistake,’ Resnick said, ‘doing a job with Breakshaw, letting him wade into those officers the way he did.’
‘It wasn’t Cookie, was it?’ Coughlan stood facing Resnick at the foot of the stairs.
‘Terry? No,’ Resnick said. ‘Besides, I thought the two of you were close. Family, almost. Last thing I should have thought he’d want to drop you in it. Unless you’ve given him reason, of course.’
‘Whatever time is it?’ Eileen asked. The faintest glow from the streetlamp, orange, filtered through the curtain of the room.
Terry picked up the clock and brought it closer to his face. ‘Half three.’
‘What you doing still awake?’
‘Can’t sleep.’
She turned towards him, careful not to let the cold air into the bed. ‘You’re not worried, are you?’
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know. I thought maybe the other night…’
‘Shush.’ Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly on the mouth. ‘It’s happened. Done.’
‘I won’t do it again.’
‘You said.’
Again he stopped her, this time with his hand. ‘Don’t. Don’t promise. There isn’t any need.’
She moved her mouth so that first one, then two of his fingers were between her lips. Terry reached down and hooked his thumb inside the top of his boxer shorts, easing them lower till he could kick them away to the end of the bed.
‘I don’t deserve you, you know,’ Eileen said, reaching for him, his tongue for that moment where his fingers had been.
‘Yes,’ he said, when he could speak again. ‘Yes, sweetheart, you do.’ This had to be a better way, Terry thought, of relieving stress. No matter what the doctor said.
About John Harvey
John Harvey is best known for his richly praised sequence of ten Nottingham-based Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was recently chosen by The Times as one of the '100 Best Crime Novels of the Century'. He is also a poet, dramatist and broadcaster.After living in Nottingham for a good number of years, he has now returned to London to live with his partner and their young daughter.
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