Wasted Years cr-5 Page 23

  Lynn had picked Keith up several blocks away, close to the Portland Leisure Centre where she sometimes went for a morning swim, days it opened at seven thirty, do your lengths in freedom before the first of the school parties arrived. She’d driven round onto the embankment and parked, Keith’s response when she suggested walking little more than an inclination of the head. In the end, she had got out of the car and he had followed, the same as he had when she’d set off towards Wilford Bridge.

  Now and again teams of rowers went past them, water splashing up in their wake, voices of the coxes clear and sharp as they urged them on. Asian families sat on the sloping grass, women together in brightly colored saris, children playing in their midst; the men sat off to the side, dealing cards onto a rug.

  She was surprised how small he was, how young his face: it was like walking with a shame-faced younger brother, a recalcitrant nephew. A son. A child, certainly. And yet she had seen his record, knew the time he had spent in YOIs. She had read the report of his attempted suicide. “A feeble and misguided cry for help.”

  “What’s it like,” Lynn asked, “living with your dad?”

  “S’all right.”

  “Better than living with your mum?”

  “S’pose so.”

  “When I was still living at home,” Lynn said, “my mum, she always meant well, but she was forever fussing at me, why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that?” Lynn laughed, taking Keith by surprise. “There I was, twenty years old, standing in her kitchen, taller than her by half a head, and she’s still wetting the corner of her handkerchief with her tongue and aiming to wipe this bit of dirt I’ve got on my face. Got so I couldn’t stand it at all.”

  “Yes,” Keith said. “I know what you mean.”

  “Listen,” Lynn said, stopping to look back the way they’d come, “why don’t we walk back there to the Memorial Gardens and sit down. Not too many people as a rule. Might be easier to talk.”

  Except that the whole place was under the thrall of a monolithic tribute to Queen Victoria, it was a public garden like many another: beds of flowers carefully tended by council workmen, assorted trees and banks of shrubs, patches of lawn interrupted by gravel paths.

  “You realize,” Lynn said, “nothing that I’ve said’s an absolute promise?”

  “I’ll not go back inside,” Keith said. “I’ll kill myself first.”

  She laid her hand on the bare skin of his forearm and he flinched.

  “Like I said, we’ll do what we can. I’ll do everything I can. I promise you that.” She waited until, for a second, his eyes flickered towards her face. “As long as you keep your side of the bargain.”

  “I’ve told you …”

  “I know. But I have to be sure.”

  Without difficulty, Keith conjured up Darren’s face. That look in his eyes, that blue-gray brightness becoming brighter still as he toyed with the pistol in his hand. Next time, Keith knew, it was going to be real.

  “It’s okay,” Keith said quietly, staring at the ground. “Long as you play straight with me, you’ll get what you want. No mistake.”

  Forty-Three

  He and Elaine had taken holidays here, Northumberland, a succession of rented cottages close to the coast-north from Amble and Alnmouth Bay, through Seahouses and Bamburgh to Berwick-upon-Tweed. The first had been the worst. The flat itself, upper floor of a smallholder’s cottage, had been right enough; where it had fallen down was the panoramic view. An undisturbed vision of caravans at the rear; to the front, cabbage fields as far as the eye could follow. Somewhere beyond those acres of darkening green lay soft dunes and broad beaches, the slow roll of the North Sea.

  “Take it on trust,” the owner had said. “Me and the missus have for years. I’n’t we pet?”

  Resnick and Elaine had returned to other locations. The sands were largely deserted, stopped breathtakingly by castles, impressive in their decay. They had taken a boat out to the Farne Islands to see the puffins and sea birds; had walked the causeway over to Holy Island and had to run full into the wind on the way back so as not to be trapped by the tide.

  They had made love in hired beds, often spurred on by a visit to the local pub, a meal eaten in unspoken anticipation. In part, it was what holidays were for.

  It was difficult for Resnick as he turned east off the main road and headed towards the coast, to recall these things with pleasure.

  The road narrowed and soon he was facing a T-junction with no sign to suggest which way to turn. Stopping to use the map, nevertheless he made the wrong choice and got lost twice more before he found himself driving down the gentle hill with the sea to his left, into the village where Ruth now lived.

  Fishermen’s cottages had been built around a green, making three sides of a square; a low wall dividing land from the beach made the fourth. The buildings were uniform, painted white. He guessed that for the most part now they functioned as holiday accommodation, folk who wanted a week or two away from it all. At the rear end of the square there was a small pub, across from that a shop that seemed to be long closed. There were cars parked outside some of the cottages, but not most. It was far enough into the day for lights to be showing faintly at some of the windows. Smoke trailed upwards from several chimneys. Resnick locked the car and stretched his legs and back: it had been a long enough drive.

  For a few moments he stood near the wicker lobster pots stacked high to one end of the sea wall. South, it was just possible to see Dunstanborough Castle outlined against a darkly reddening sky.

  Ruth’s cottage was at the northern corner, the first passed entering the village. There were neither lights nor smoke. Resnick began to walk towards it. No answer when he rattled at the letterbox, knocked on the door. He would ask in the pub.

  Ruth was sitting in the far corner of the bar, her feet resting on another chair and a book open against the table. There was a glass by her right arm, a half of bitter it looked like, three-quarters down; a cigarette burned on an ashtray to her left. She scarcely looked up as Resnick came in.

  The dog, a large pale retriever that lay curled beneath the table, raised its head and kept Resnick in its sights. When he walked towards the table, a glass of Worthington White Shield in his hand, the dog growled.

  As soon as Ruth reached down and touched it gently between the ears it stopped.

  “Mind if I join you?” Resnick said.

  “What happens if I say yes?”

  Her face had become leaner still, sucked in at the cheeks; the flesh around the eyes seemed somehow to have peeled back. There was barely a trace of red in her hair now; what there were, here and there, were white hairs startlingly strong and thick.

  Resnick pulled round a chair and sat down.

  Ruth continued to read. Charles Dickens. Hard Times. “Decided a bit late in life to get myself an education.”

  Resnick took a long swallow at his beer and waited till she’d reached the end of her chapter. A torn beer mat marked her place.

  “You showing up here like this,” Ruth said. “No accident.”

  “He’s getting parole. Matter of days. I didn’t know if you’d heard.”

  Ruth took a drag from her cigarette; finished her beer and held the empty glass for a moment in the air. The barman fetched her over a fresh one, took the old one away.

  “Not so many customers this time of year,” Ruth said. “Get treated like royalty.” She laughed low in her throat. “Not ours, someone else’s. No,” she said, after taking a drink, “I didn’t know.”

  “Does he know where you are?”

  Ruth shrugged. “What difference? You found me, didn’t you? And don’t tell me it’s your job. He’s got ways of pressurizing people most of your lot only dream about.”

  “You could move on,” Resnick said.

  “Run?”

  “You came here.”

  “That was a fair time back. I like it here. Most people, one week, two, they’re in and out, gone. No one knows who I am, what I was, wh
at I was married to. Those as know bits and pieces, none of their business, they don’t care.”

  “He said a lot of nasty things, at the trial.”

  “He was always saying nasty things. Doing ’em, too. He can’t scare me. Not any more. And even if he could, I’ve stopped running.” She swung her feet to the floor and the dog shifted position. “He tried anything now,” she said, stroking the animal’s fur, “this one’d let him know what for. Wouldn’t you, darlin’?”

  The dog twisted its head to lick her hand.

  “He threatened to get even.”

  “What for? Ten years? He thinks that was down to me? That was never down to me. You had evidence, witnesses-that sorry bastard Churchill turning grass. Christ, you had him cold with a gun in his bloody hands. What did it need me for?”

  Resnick didn’t answer; the truth was, in detail, he didn’t know. How much Rains had wheedled out of the bitter wife, how much from other sources?

  “You must take it serious, driving all the way up here.”

  Resnick nodded. “I do.”

  Ruth laughed again, breaking off midway into a racking cough. “What you going to do,” she said once she’d controlled herself again, “stick around? Be my personal bodyguard?”

  “No. Just wanted you to know, that’s all.”

  She nodded towards his glass. “Now you’ll want to be getting back. Duty tomorrow, most likely.”

  Resnick took a quick drink before pushing the glass aside. “Always sediment at the bottom; no matter how carefully you pour it.”

  “Yeh,” Ruth said, “Bit like life, eh?” She laughed. “Christ, hark at me. Not through one Dickens and I’m talking in symbols.”

  Resnick got to his feet and once more the dog growled, low in his throat. “One thing,” he said.

  “Do I still sing?”

  “When did you last see Rains?”

  What color she had drained from her face. “Not since he dumped me. Best part of ten years. Best part’s been not seeing his lying face.”

  Resnick placed a card with his name and number on the cover of her book. “Any reason. Any time. The station can always raise me.”

  Ruth looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Regular Lazarus, eh? Something in the air, all these blokes coming back from the dead.”

  By the time Resnick had reached the door, she had her feet up and was back reading. A few more of the windows were showing lights and a wind had got up from the northeast. He turned his collar up as he crossed the green towards his car. He would stop at the first place on the main road and get coffee; traffic should be relatively light and it shouldn’t be too long before he was home. Though to the cats who were waiting to be fed it would seem an age.

  The headlights of Resnick’s car raked across the whitewash of the cottages as he swung round, but failed to pick out the figure standing deep in the shadows beside the sea wall, biding his own time.

  Forty-Four

  Millington had been so chipper that morning, the idea had flirted across his wife’s mind that he might be having an affair. It was partly the sparkle in his eye, partly the appetite with which he’d wolfed down his muesli and dried fruit without as much as a pulled face or an offhand reference to the tastelessness of skimmed milk. He had rinsed his bowl, brought her a second cup of tea without being asked, brushed her cheek with a kiss that was forceful enough to make clear he’d trimmed his moustache that morning.

  When she wandered out into the hall, he was brushing the shoulders of his jacket on its hanger and whistling what sounded suspiciously like “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.”

  “See that James Last’s on at Concert Hall again this summer,” Millington said. “Maybe I should get us a couple of tickets?”

  “After last time, Graham, I should hardly thought you’d have wanted to go again.”

  Last time, the woman behind had tapped Millington’s wife on the shoulder and asked her in quite a loud voice if there wasn’t something she could do about her husband’s snoring.

  “Oh, aye, restful, though, weren’t it?” He slipped on his coat and headed for the front door. “Possible, bit on the late side tonight. Pint or three after work. Business, like.”

  “Yes, Graham,” she said, “whatever you say.”

  Blimey, Millington thought, getting into the car, what’s eating her? Face like one of them frozen dinners before it sees the inside of the microwave.

  He was in the CID room, close to the door of Resnick’s office before his superior arrived, loitering with intent.

  “All right, Kevin,” ten minutes later Resnick’s voice audible from the stairs, “first things first. Let’s take a look at last night’s files.”

  “Sir.”

  “Morning, Graham. Bright and early.”

  Naylor had been in since before seven, the early shift, one of his tasks to organize all messages received during the night into national or local, another to ensure the log showing the movement of prisoners was up to date. He carried these files over towards Resnick’s office now and Millington held out his hand.

  “I’ll take those in, lad. You could do worse than set tea to mash. Okay?”

  Naylor shrugged and did as he was told.

  Millington placed the files on Resnick’s desk, then closed the door by leaning his back against it.

  “On to something, Graham?” Resnick asked with a grin. His sergeant could hang on to a secret about as long as a small boy could harbor a fifty-pence piece.

  “This chap I’ve been meeting for the odd pint down in Sneinton. Strictly small time, like I’ve said, but knows a few of the bigger boys. Or likes to let on as he does.”

  “Which is it?” Resnick asked. Up to the present he’d found it hard to take either Millington’s low-grade grass or Mark Divine’s high-flown theories about Eurovillains too seriously.

  “Got a bit cheesed off last night, he were standing there scoring drinks out of me left, right, and center and what he’d offered, so much hot air. I told him, come up with something new, something we can use, or he could find someone else to do his drinking with.”

  “And?” Resnick prompted. Sitting behind his desk and watching Millington’s face, he could taste the anticipation.

  “Rains,” Millington said, unable to prevent himself from smiling.

  “He put up his name?”

  “Along of one or two others.”

  “No doubt about it?”

  By now Millington’s face was positively beatific. “DC Rains, late of this parish.”

  “DC no longer.”

  “A long way from it, so it seems.”

  Initial elation over, Resnick’s mind was racing. “I thought he was abroad?”

  “So he was. Still is, by all accounts. Northern Spain, well away from your hoi polloi. According to my friend, he isn’t above flying over to take care of a little business.”

  “What business is he in these days, our ex-colleague?”

  Millington was enjoying this enormously. “Much the same as before, apparently, only from what would you say, a different perspective.”

  Resnick was on his feet. “Do we know this is anything more than malicious gossip? After all, easy to spread stories about someone a thousand or so miles away.”

  “What made it gel for me,” Millington said, “remember that blagger was mixed up with Prior? More than a passing interest in armed robbery himself, though he played that down at the trial. Did his best to set it all at Prior’s doorstep, planning, shotgun, the lot.”

  “Churchill?” Resnick said.

  “Frank Churchill.”

  “He’s in this as well?”

  “According to what I was told last night, him and Rains’ve stayed in touch more or less ever since.”

  Darren had wasted half the day looking for Keith. First off, he’d waited for him at the usual cafe, but Keith never showed; the best part of an hour hanging around the square, wandering in and out of various amusement arcades. When finally he’d rung his old man to fin
d out what the hell Keith was playing at, Rylands had told him he had no idea where Keith was, he had left the house about half-nine or ten, never saying a word.

  Well, okay. He’d get this done on his own.

  The shop was up Carlton Hill, one of those places piled floor to ceiling with stuff people have no further use for-toasters, radios, steam irons, manual typewriters, video recorders that would neither record nor play; the pavement outside boasted refrigerators and electric fires, cookers with rust-encrusted rings, a wheelchair that was chained to the wall to prevent the local kids commandeering it for joyrides down the hill.

  The owner was a sixty-eight-year-old woman called Rose, whose sister had scarcely been out of the wheelchair the last four years of her life. She viewed Darren with a proper suspicion, uncertain if he was going to try to sell her something stolen or order her to empty the till.

  Darren picked up an antique Teasmade and gave it an exploratory shake. The matron at the home had boasted of owning one of those, though he’d never seen it. There’d been other lads, older and bolder, who claimed they had.

  “You want to buy that?” Rose asked.

  “What I want to buy,” said Darren, “is a shooter.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You know. A gun?”

  The woman opened her arms and pointed around. “Find one among that lot, duck, sell it you with pleasure.”

  Darren reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a thick pile of twenties and tens, “What I was told, anyone wanted something like that, you could arrange it. What’s it called? On commission.”

  Rose pushed her hands down into her apron and sucked her top plate back against the roof of her mouth. “I’ll have to make one or two calls. You come back here in an hour or two.”

  Resnick and Millington were in Skelton’s office. The elements had decided to turn the screw a little and after an oddly humid, muggy morning, rain was now rattling the window panes.

  “What degree of involvement are we talking about here?” Skelton asked. He was standing with his back to the weather, the industrial landscape beyond his shoulders disappearing into mist. “How actively involved are we saying Rains might be? Is he planning these robberies? Difficult if he’s spending more time out of the country than in. Are we meant to assume he’s actually taking part? What?”