Wasted Years cr-5 Page 10
“Keith …” Rylands started.
“’S’all right, I’ll be fine.”
Rylands turned back to where he was washing dishes at the sink. The water was already turning cold, the surface swimming in grease. Bits of bacon rind and fragments of eggshell nudged against his fingers. If that was the sort Keith was knocking round with, no wonder he was in trouble.
“Did you hear what happened at that bank?” Marjorie Carmichael said to Lorna as she was unlocking the front door after lunch. “Shotguns and everything. We were lucky that didn’t happen to us.”
It was only then that Lorna realized who it was had come up to her the previous evening, asking if they were still open, promising that he would be back.
Eighteen
“You weren’t serious, were you? What you said before?”
“Before what?” Darren was concentrating on getting his score over eleven thousand, his previous best on this machine.
“You know, about … well, you know.”
“Look, either spit it out or stop going on and on. You’re putting me off.”
“I meant,” Keith said, “about the gun.”
“Hey! Why not yell it out a bit louder, might be a couple of blokes over the back never heard what you said.” Concentration shot, game over, Darren had been well and truly zapped. “There, see. See what you done?”
Back on the pavement, blinking at the light, Darren ran a hand across the top of his head; his hair had a nice feel to it now, not brittle but soft, a soft fuzz less than half an inch thick.
“Something you got to understand,” he said, “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life just hanging round, pulling jobs for a few quid. That’s what you want you better say so now. Me, I’m going to do something with my life. Get some money, real money, get noticed.”
With a quick hunch of his shoulders Darren headed off towards Slab Square and, after a few moments’ hesitation, Keith hurried after him.
“So what do you think, Marjorie? Do you think I should get in touch with the police and tell them or what?”
It had to be the fourth time Lorna had asked-more or less the same question, more or less the same words-fourth or fifth time in the last hour. Lorna, not wanting to appear too anxious, too nervous either. “Lorna,” Marjorie had said, “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but you don’t think you’re being a little paranoid?”
Is that what she was? Or was it the opportunity to spend some more time with Kevin Naylor that had her seeing the would-be robbery merchant in otherwise innocent people?
“It’s a shame Becca isn’t here,” Marjorie said. “She’d know what to do.”
Becca knew what to do all right: stay home, send in a sick note, and work hard for the sympathy vote. Good riddance, Lorna thought; she and Marjorie could manage the branch fine without her pernickety assistance.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t conjure up the youth’s face, not exactly-the hair and the nose and the eyes but not a whole face. The walk, though, she could picture that, the slow, cocky strut along the pavement-wasn’t that the same walk as the one towards her counter, only the day before?
Here, fill that. Don’t keep me waiting.
Well, call in another time, eh?
“I’m going to do it,” Lorna said, and reached for the phone. The number was on the card that Kevin Naylor had given to her.
“I’m sorry,” Lynn Kellogg said, responding to the call. “He’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message?”
“Yes,” Lynn said, when Lorna had finished. “I’ll be sure that he gets it. I can’t promise when he’ll be able to get back to you, though. It’s pretty hectic here today.”
Lorna put down the receiver, looked into Marjorie’s fleshy, inquiring face, and forced a smile. “Well, that’s that. Nothing else I can do now.”
Naylor had been thinking about his conversation with Divine, Mark sitting there in the car, giving advice for all the world as if, where relationships were concerned, he knew something about it. And then parading this scuzzy list of one-night stands and knee tremblers as some kind of proof that he understood women. What Divine knew about women could be written on the inside of a toilet door and usually was.
“Be hard,” Divine had said. “Stand firm, it’s the only way. Whatever you do, don’t let on you care.”
Yes, Naylor thought, and see where that’s got you.
The longest relationship Divine had ever had with a woman came in short of ten minutes.
It seemed likely that after abandoning the Volvo and the Granada, the gang had doubled back on themselves, possibly using as many as four other vehicles. The only one not wearing a mask was variously described as a slim male, aged between eighteen and twenty-five, and an attractive young woman wearing rather heavy eye shadow and with the faintest suggestion of a moustache. The masks the others had worn had been stolen from a party wear and fancy dress shop the night before and comprised Mickey Mouse, Michael Jackson, the Amazing Spiderman, and the Sheriff of Nottingham. The charred remains of what appeared to be several track suits and trainers, together with what could previously have been polystyrene masks, had been found on a patch of waste ground close to the A60, north of Loughborough. The ashes were on their way to the forensic laboratory without a great deal of hope attached.
The possible identity of the young villain not averse to disguising himself as a woman was currently testing the resources of the Home Office computer.
When Resnick came into the CID room, the remains of a toasted ham and cheese sandwich in the paper bag clutched in his left hand, Graham Millington was slumped back in his chair, overcoat on, hat on, feet on his desk, asleep. Even the first two rings of the telephone failed to wake him.
“Resnick. CID.”
Of all the people it might have been, one of the last he would have expected was Rylands.
“No,” Resnick said, after listening for several moments. “No, that’s okay. I’ll come to you. Half-hour to an hour. Yes. Goodbye.”
When he set the receiver down, Millington was stirring, embarrassed to be discovered asleep.
“Sorry, I don’t know what …”
“Doesn’t matter, Graham, one of those days. Why don’t you get off home? Nothing much else any of us can hope for tonight.”
Millington, who, one way and another, had been on duty since before four that morning, didn’t need to be asked twice. “Reg Cossall said to pass on a message, reckoned you know what it was about. Bloke you were talking about the other night, word is, he’s likely to get his parole.”
Well, so Resnick had been wrong.
“Bad news?”
“Maybe not,” Resnick said. “I’m not sure.”
Millington resettled his trilby on his head. “Get back now, might be able to watch a bit of snooker before the wife gets back from Russian.”
“Taken against it, has she?”
“Not that so much. She’ll have me taking off the tiles in the bathroom. Reckons on changing them for that Italian blue.”
“G’night, Graham.”
Resnick rustled around for what remained of his sandwich, listening to Millington’s whistling the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” fading and off-key.
The pub used to be crammed full of medics from the nearby hospital, laughter and large gins and well-honed accents that cut through the ambient sound like scalpels. Now the health authority had shut the place down and sold the site to a consortium of developers whose plans ranged from high-income architect-designed flats to a covered piazza. It not only left the pub quieter, it made it quicker to get in a round of drinks.
Lynn Kellogg’s turn, spotting Naylor enter before she’d finished her order and asking for an extra pint.
“Message for you,” she said, passing Naylor his Shipstone’s. “Lorna Solomon. The building society raid. Will you get back to her. Here, she left her home number as well.”
Struggling not to blush, Naylor took the piece of paper and, without looking, pu
shed it down into his breast pocket. All he would have had to have done, that lunchtime sharing Chinese in the car, was reach over and she would have slid into his arms. Was that what he wanted to do? The way he’d talked about himself and Debbie, as if there was nothing there, nothing left. What was the truth? He sat forward, moving in on the conversation, trying to forget the slip of paper folded inside his pocket, sipping his pint.
Nineteen
Rylands had vacuumed the house, the landings and the stairs, from top to bottom. The carpet from the hall he had ripped out and temporarily replaced with some lino offcuts he’d been storing in the cellar. He had borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and cleaned the outside windows, scraping away grime which had gathered for years. For a tenner, another neighbor had lent him a five-hundred weight van for long enough to cart seventeen bags of rubbish, mostly old bottles and cans, to the household tip. The hall carpet, sodden and stained, had been hauled away, together with a battered suitcase of old clothes and two cardboard boxes of burned pans, chipped and cracked china, and packets of food long past their sell-by date.
The cleanup had begun half an hour after Keith and Darren had left: too early for Rylands to have begun drinking and he hadn’t had a drink since. Shaving, he observed it was the first time in months the razor hadn’t shaken in his hand and nicked neck or cheek. Before his shave he had taken a bath, long and hot; after it, he dressed himself in clean clothes-a pair of gray trousers that had once belonged to a best suit, a white shirt he ran over with an iron, gray pullover with a V-neck in need of a little darning. Black shoes with leather uppers that he had polished and buffed. His hair he trimmed as best as he could before brushing it flat.
Only when all that had been done did he dial the station and ask for Detective Inspector Resnick by name.
Now he and Resnick sat across from one another in Rylands’s cellar room, Resnick on the slightly sagging easy chair Rylands had dragged down earlier.
“Nearly got shot of that lot today,” Rylands said, pointing at the piles of yellowing music paper on the floor. “Must go back twenty, thirty years. Couldn’t in the end-stupid, isn’t it, what you cling on to?”
Resnick nodded over his mug of coffee, neither as strong nor as dark as he would have liked. Rylands was drinking the same, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, thin as a baby’s finger.
“I recognized you,” Rylands said. “Oh, not exactly who you were, don’t suppose I ever knew that and if I did, well, I’d forgot, but the face-yes-all those nights standing there, close to the band.”
Resnick nodded, remembering.
“Most men just went there for the girls. The beer.”
“I met my wife there.”
Rylands gave a rueful smile. “There you go.”
“Stepped all over her feet.”
“Dancing?”
Resnick shook his head. “Just being clumsy.”
“They say that, don’t they? About coppers. The old joke.”
Resnick was looking at him.
“Big feet.”
Resnick continued to wait, guessing that whatever Rylands had invited him there to hear, it wouldn’t be easy to say. There were things itching at the edges of Resnick’s mind, too, demanding attention; memories he was unwilling to scratch. Leave it alone, his mother had been forever saying to him, you’ll only make it worse. Well, as far as the sundry blemishes of adolescence, that was likely true.
“You still listen to much?” Rylands asked, not ready yet for the conversation to go where it had to go.
“Now and again. When I get the time. Sundays at the Playhouse; the Arboretum, sometimes. Here and there.”
“Some of the old band are still playing …”
Resnick nodded.
“Straight ahead jazz now. R amp;B, thing of the past where they’re concerned.”
“And you?”
Rylands was looking at the snare drums gathering dust on the floor. “No,” he said, and then, “Last night, when you were here, looking for Keith. All what I said … wasn’t necessarily true.”
“No.”
“He had been here, I had seen him. Said he was going to stay. I don’t know-daft really, I know if you wanted him bad enough you’re always going to find him-still, I couldn’t just, you know, say. Would’ve been like … shopping him, I suppose. Grassing your own.”
“Yes,” said Resnick. “I understand.” The mug of coffee, lukewarm now, he set on the floor.
“What I said …”
“Mm?
“About him being better off back inside …”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t mean that …”
“No.”
“Not the way it sounded.”
“No.”
“All the same …” The cigarette had gone out and Rylands relit it, wisps of tobacco sizzling to nothing. “What he’s been in up to yet, cars and that, nothing serious …”
“Serious enough.”
Rylands looked at the floor between his polished shoes. “This bloke he’s running with now, mouth on him like a sewer, treats Keith like shit and all the while Keith looking up to him, lapping it up. I hate to see that.”
When he should be looking up to you, Resnick thought.
“How much of it’s talk, I don’t know. Like I say, the mouth on him. But what he was on about, earlier today, here in the kitchen, what he was talking about was getting a gun. A shooter.”
A moment’s silence wavered between them.
“Did he say what for?” Resnick asked.
“Not right out, but that bank job, today, he was full of that. How they got away with it on account of the gun.” Rylands let the nub end of his cigarette fall into his mug of coffee. “Might all just have been chat, showing off …”
“The reason we want to talk to Keith,” Resnick said, “there was an attempted robbery, branch office of a building society. Two youths, one, armed with a hammer. Something happened, all went wrong; ran off without getting a penny. We found Keith’s prints-what might be his-on the car they used to get away.”
“A hammer,” Rylands said thoughtfully.
“Like to have broken this old boy’s head for getting in the way.”
Rylands nodded. “If it was this Darren, I’d believe it. The way he looked at me, just for a second, today. If he’d had a gun in his hands then …”
The rest lay between them, unsaid. Resnick thinking about walking in on Prior, shotgun in his hands.
“Keith knows where he lives?” Resnick asked.
“I suppose so.”
“And he’s coming back here tonight?”
“Keith?”
“Yes.”
“Probably. As far as I know.”
“We could pick him up, charge him …”
But Rylands was shaking his head. “There’s got to be another way.”
Resnick leaned back, crossed one leg over the other, and waited to hear what that was.
At the top of the cellar steps, Resnick said: “Last night, after I’d been here, I found an old record of ‘Wasted Years.’”
“Ruthie …”
“Yes.”
“Great voice.”
“Agreed.”
“Not still in touch, I suppose?”
Rylands shook his head. “Haven’t seen Ruth in years. Scarcely since that bloke of hers got sent down. What was it? Twelve years?”
“Fifteen.”
“Jesus,” Rylands said softly.
“Rumor has it,” Resnick said, “he’s on his way back out.”
“Prior?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” Rylands breathed again.
“I’d best be off,” Resnick said, moving away. “What I heard, you know, back then, be a few scores to settle when he’s back on the street.”
Resnick nodded. “Possible.” He stopped close to the front door. “Ever hear anything, where Ruth is now, give us a ring, okay?”
“Yes, right. Though, like I say, don’t suppose …”
His eyes held Rylands’s for a long moment, not wanting him to escape his meaning.
“Yes,” Rylands said. “Sure. I’ll do what I can.”
“Good.”
Rylands stepped back and watched the inspector out on to the street; when he had closed the door, he leaned his head against the hardness of the wood, eyes clenched shut. He would stay there, exactly as he was, until the urgency to find a drink had passed.
The night was clear and the moon three-quarters full, Resnick needed to walk. Ten, fifteen minutes he would be in Slab Square and could pick up a cab if he wished. Hands in pockets, coat collar pulled up, Resnick walked away.
Twenty
In the square, a fifty-year-old man, trousers rolled past his knees, was paddling in one of the fountains, splashing handfuls of water up under the arms of his fraying coat. A young woman with a tattooed face was singing an old English melody to a scattering of grimy pigeons. Resnick stood by one of the benches, listening: a girl in denim shorts and overlapping T-shirts, razored hair, leather waistcoat with a death’s head on the back, standing there, oblivious of everything else, singing, in a voice strangely thin and pure, “She Moved Through the Fair.”
When she had finished and Resnick, wishing to say thanks, tell her how it had sounded, give her, perhaps, money, walked purposefully towards her, she turned her back on him and moved away.
On the steps, in the shadow of the lions, couples were kissing. Young men in shirt sleeves, leaning from the windows of their cars, slowly circled the square. Across from where Resnick was standing was the bland brick and glass of the store that twenty years before had been the Black Boy, the pub where he and Ben Riley would meet for an early evening pint. The glass that ten years ago was smashed and smashed again as rioters swaggered and roared through the city’s streets.
No way to hold it all back now.