Wasted Years cr-5 Page 6

  The letter lay on the small table alongside the easy chair, beside the telephone, resting on the cover of the Spike Robinson he was now playing. The stamps, the air mail sticker, he could only think of a couple of people who might be writing to him from the States, but neither of them from-where was it? — Maine? Pete Barnard was a jazz fan he knew, a dermatologist who was now working in Chicago, and Ben, Ben Riley, he hadn’t heard from Ben in ages, seemed to have lost touch, but when he had, Ben had been out in Montana somewhere, wearing a deputy’s hat and driving a jeep. Surely that wasn’t Ben Riley’s writing?

  Of course, it was.

  Here I am, Charlie, out in Ellsworth, Maine, enjoying the good life and working none-too-hard for the County police department.

  The first of the Polaroids Ben had enclosed showed him with his hat and badge and holstered gun and, those aside, it wasn’t only the handwriting that the intervening years had changed. Ben was a lot fuller in the face, something akin to jowls hanging down towards a neck that showed a tendency to spread over his shirt collar. Gun belt and trouser belt served to support a sagging stomach that would have been more alarming had it not been for the expression of contentment on Ben Riley’s face.

  Getting myself across to the east of the country has worked out fine, especially since I met Ali, my second wife.

  Resnick wasn’t sure that he had known about the first. Mentally, she’s made me face up to a few things, knuckle down, cut back on the drinking, and learn to take myself more seriously. Of course, young Max has had a lot to do with that.

  Alison was a broad-faced blonde who stared straight at the camera lens as if daring it to talk back. She looked thirty-four or — five, ten years younger than Ben, arms folded across her chest, wearing a check shirt and blue jeans. Max had her hair, his father’s eyes and looked pretty steady on his feet for the two years Ben assigned to him elsewhere in the letter.

  Put together some of that holiday time you’re never using and get out here and see us, Charlie. There’s this little restaurant right by the Grand cinema, serves the best Thai food outside the Pacific. I guess, whatever else has happened to you, you do still enjoy your food.

  The music clicked off and the cat that had wandered onto Resnick’s lap jumped down again and ate the fragments of ham that had dropped to the floor. Resnick slid the letter and the photographs back into their envelope and walked across the room, poured himself a drink. In 1981, when Resnick had been standing in that garage, staring into Prior’s face, reaching out to take his gun, Ben Riley had been the first officer through the door.

  Eleven

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing. What d’you mean?”

  “I hardly recognized you.”

  They were in the cafe on West End Arcade, opposite the bottom of the escalator, Darren and Keith, the place in the city where they met, mornings, table close against the window. Every now and then there’d be some woman, short skirt, ascending in front of their eyes.

  Keith was still staring at Darren, gone out. “How much’t cost, get it done?”

  Darren ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Nothing.”

  “How d’you mean, nothing?”

  “Got someone to do it for me.”

  “What someone?”

  “Some girl.”

  There was an old boy in the corner, chewing his way through two of toast, careful to break off the ends of brittle crust rather than risk his teeth. A young mum with a tired face was dipping her baby’s dummy into sweet tea and pushing it against the child’s squalling face. Couple of retro-punks waiting for the record shop back down the arcade to open, rifle through the racks of rare singles they couldn’t afford to buy.

  “’Nother tea?”

  Keith nodded. “Yeh, ta.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  Keith shook his head. “Skint.”

  “I’m buying.”

  While they were waiting for the sausage cobs, Keith marveled at the difference Darren’s haircut made to his face. Suddenly it was sharper, harder, his nose seemed larger, jutting out from the center of his face; and the eyes … Keith didn’t think he’d ever noticed them before, not really, blue-gray but bright, dead bright, as if for the first time they’d been let out from under a cloud.

  “So what d’you think? Suit me?”

  “Yeh. Yes. It’s good. Really is.”

  “But you didn’t recognize me, right?”

  “Well, I …”

  “When I come in, you said …”

  “I knew, but not straight off.”

  “It’s the hair, right?”

  “Yeh, of course …”

  “Anyone as saw me before, just saw me, that’s what they’d pick on, what they’d say-hair, he’s got all this curly hair.”

  “Yes.”

  “That girl yesterday …”

  “The one you got to cut it off?”

  “The one in the building society. Lorna.”

  “’S’that her name?”

  “Lorna Solomon.”

  “What about her?”

  “I was wondering …”

  “Yeh?”

  “If she walked in here now …”

  “Which she won’t.”

  “But if she did.”

  “What about it?”

  “If she’d know who I was.”

  Keith watched Darren lift the top off his cob and smear the pieces of sausage with mustard, shook tomato sauce over his own until it lay in it, like a puddle. Darren had been likely to go off at half-cock before, quick fits of temper: dangerous, though he hadn’t looked it. Now he did. As Darren bit down into his cob and grinned across at him, Keith saw again that newfound glint in his eyes and felt a chill slide over his skin because he knew then that Darren was capable of anything.

  Anything.

  “Shouldn’t take that long,” the workman said at the door to Resnick’s office. “Hour or two at most.”

  Resnick nodded and picked up a cluster of files from his desk, resigned to losing the use of the room for the rest of the day.

  “Just got a call from forensic,” Millington called over the noise of furniture being dragged across bare floorboards.

  “And?”

  “Seems there’s some kind of logjam. Lucky to get anything this side of teatime.”

  “Managed to dig out three more witnesses, boss,” said Divine. “Out at Sandiacre. Couple stuck their heads out after they whacked into the road sign, nothing new there, but this … Marcus Livingstone … had his motor nicked from outside a newsagent’s less than quarter of a mile away. Heard this engine revving like crazy, realized it was his own. Got to the door in time to see them driving off down Longmoor Lane.”

  “And we’re certain it’s the same pair?”

  “Likely.”

  Resnick nodded. “Which direction, Longmoor Lane?”

  “South.”

  “Double back this side of the rec,” said Millington, “Junction 25. Once they’re on the motorway, any place from Chesterfield down to Leicester in half hour.”

  “’Less they carry on going,” Kevin Naylor said, “swing round Chilwell and Beeston and back into the city.”

  “This car,” Resnick asked, “it’s been reported missing?”

  “Yes, boss. Vauxhall Cavalier, D reg. Not turned up as yet.”

  Resnick nodded. “Let’s put some pressure on. Have a word with Paddy Fitzgerald, Graham, make sure uniform patrols keep their eyes skinned.”

  “Right.”

  Resnick turned back to Naylor. “That witness yesterday …”

  “Lorna,” Naylor said. “Lorna Solomon.”

  Divine sniggered.

  “How good a description could she give of the youth who threatened her?”

  “Pretty good, sir. Detailed.”

  “It agreed,” said Lynn Kellogg, “with what I could get from Marjorie Carmichael. Not that I’d like to rely on her in court.”

  “But from the pair of them-if w
e needed to-there’s enough to bring an artist in, get a composite?”

  Naylor and Kellogg glanced at one another before answering. “Yes, sir,” said Naylor.

  “Yes,” said Lynn.

  “Kevin, this, er, Lorna …”

  “Solomon, sir.”

  “Did you take her through the pictures we’ve got on file?”

  “Not really, sir. Wasn’t time. And I thought anyway, you know, by now we’d likely have prints and …”

  “Bring her in. Sit her down. Can’t do any harm.”

  “Specially,” whispered Mark Divine behind Naylor’s head, “if you can get her to sit on your face.”

  “Something else, Mark?” Resnick said.

  “No, boss,” Divine said, wiping the smirk from his face.

  “Anybody?”

  “I thought I’d see if I can talk to the manageress,” Lynn Kellogg said. “If she’s not turned in at work, I’ve got her home address.”

  “Right. And Mark, call the hospital, check the situation with Harry Foreman. Long as he’s out of immediate danger, find out when we might be able to have a word. We still don’t know conclusively which one it was clobbered him.”

  Harry Foreman’s X-rays suggested several hairline fractures of the cranial cavity and damage to the ossicles of the middle ear. He was sedated, mostly sleeping, being fed by means of an IV drip. In one rare moment of apparently clear consciousness he asked a student nurse what had won the 3:30 at Southwell; in another asked why his wife, Florrie, wasn’t there to see him. When the ward social worker made inquiries, she discovered that Florence Foreman had died in 1973, having contracted pneumonia after a fall in which she had dislocated her hip.

  Rebecca Astley had been prescribed an anxiolytic by her doctor, which she had purchased in the form of Diazepam from her local Boots. Now she was lying on the settee in the living room of the flat she shared with a management trainee from Jessops, a duvet wrapped around her to keep her from getting cold as she alternately watched an old John Garfield film on Channel 4 and re-read the Barbara Taylor Bradford she’d bought for the flight to Orlando. She didn’t think anyone from head office would be round to see her so soon, but just in case they did, she had put a little makeup on her face and made sure her best dressing gown, the one with the lavender braiding, was close to hand. She only hoped that neither Marjorie nor Lorna had taken the opportunity to make her look bad; Marjorie she could trust, but Lorna … she made it a rule never to speak ill of anyone, but Lorna Solomon-it wasn’t just that she was common, that wasn’t altogether her fault, what she didn’t have to be was such a bitch.

  “Where d’you get it all?” Keith asked.

  “All what?”

  “All this money, what d’you think?”

  After spending the best part of an hour and more change than Keith could count on video games in the place above Victoria Street, they were sitting in Pizza Hut, waiting for the waitress to bring their order.

  Darren winked. “Got it from the girl, didn’t I?”

  “The one you picked up in Michael Isaacs?”

  “Which other girl is there?”

  “What’d she want to give you money for? She cut your hair, you should have paid her.”

  Darren reached under the table and cupped his crotch in his hand. “She got paid all right. Couldn’t get enough.”

  The waitress, trying not to notice the way Darren seemed to be fondling himself, put down their Meat Feast Supreme and left them to it.

  “Then you wouldn’t know a lot about that, eh, Keith?”

  Keith made a face and lifted a slice of pizza on to his plate, reached for a tomato from the help-yourself salad Darren had piled high as he could, gluing the ingredients together with blue cheese dressing.

  “Day comes, you get your cock out of your hand and up some slag’s twat she’ll think she’s been stung by a gnat and start to scratch.”

  “I’d be pleased if you’d moderate your language,” said a woman in a red hat, turning round from the booth behind. “There are young children here who don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Darren, on his feet to get a better look at the family scene, mother and grandma and a couple of kids under ten wearing school uniform. “And where d’you think they came from, then, if it wasn’t some bloke slipping a paper bag over your head, getting you bent over the bed, and fucking you rotten?”

  The trainee manager was keen, only her second week in the job, there in a flash. “Sit down, please, sir. If there’s some kind of a problem …”

  “What it is, Delia,” Darren said, reading her name off her badge, smiling, “my friend and I, we ordered two portions of garlic bread to go with the pizza, the garlic bread with the cheese topping. Seems to be a long time coming.”

  Twelve

  When Lorna saw Kevin Naylor come through the door of the building society office something inside her gave a clear and definite lurch. Mind you, something like that had been happening pretty much every time anyone came in, right from when they’d first opened. Her mum had told her last evening when they’d talked on the phone, take a few days off, you shouldn’t go straight back, not after what happened; her friend, Leslie, when she’d called round, see how Lorna was, she had said more or less the same. Even Mr Spindler had wondered if she oughtn’t to take one of her statutory sick days.

  But, no, she’d felt all right, no bad dreams, nothing like that. After all, it wasn’t as if anything terrible had actually happened.

  Still, there it was, this roll of her insides whenever she heard the door ring open, whenever she saw it begin to swing back. It was just that, well, when she realized it was Kevin her insides gave it that little extra. Nothing wrong with that: only natural

  “I was wondering,” Kevin had said, “if you could spare a little more time.”

  It had been Lorna’s idea to stop off on the way and pick up some lunch.

  “We have to eat, don’t we? I mean, no law against that.”

  She suggested the Chinese takeaway just across from the lights on Alfreton Road, more or less opposite the garage. From there it was easy for Kevin to double-back around the block, park on the Forest, the broad swathe of concrete where weekends they did Park and Ride.

  This time there were no more than a dozen or so cars there, mostly close together. Funny how people tended to do that, as if there was safety in company. Kevin had drawn up away off from the others, facing up towards the trees.

  “This is nice,” Lorna said. “How’s yours?”

  Chewing, Kevin mumbled something that might have been, “Fine.”

  Lorna had chosen prawn crackers, sweet and sour pork; Kevin the spare ribs. She leaned a little against the inside of the car door now, watching him lick the sauce from his finger ends.

  “We should do this properly some time.”

  “What’s that?” Kevin asked.

  “Eat Chinese. You like it, don’t you? Chinese food?”

  “I like this.”

  “That’s what I mean. Only one evening, in a restaurant, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mean because of your wife?”

  Kevin shook his head. “She doesn’t like Chinese. Says it’s too salty. Makes her ill.”

  Lorna was lifting a piece of pork towards her mouth with a plastic fork, grinning.

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of asking her,” Lorna said.

  Kevin looked up through the windscreen towards the cluster of trees; someone in an off-white sheepskin coat was walking a pair of Sealyhams, holding their leads unnaturally high, the way he’d seen owners do on television, at Cruft’s Dog of the Year Show.

  “Where do you go?” Lorna asked.

  “You mean to eat?”

  “With your wife, yes.”

  “I don’t know as we do, much.”

  “But, like, something special?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anniversary.”

&nbs
p; For their last anniversary, their third, Kevin had sent a card, bought flowers, stood in line at Thornton’s for one of those little pink boxes for which you chose your two special chocolates before the assistant ties it up with pink ribbon. The lights had been off at Debbie’s mother’s house when he’d arrived, all save for the one that was always left on in the porch to put off burglars. After waiting three-quarters of an hour, Kevin had left the flowers on the doorstep with the chocolates, gone home and taken a bacon and egg pie from the freezer, sat down in front of EastEnders and eaten it out of the foil, not quite warmed through.

  “Nothing special,” he said.

  Inside the car it was getting warm, the windows beginning to take on a film of steam. Lorna offered him the last of the prawn crackers and when he shook his head, broke it in two with her teeth, biting with a light crunch, slowly. A fragment of cracker, white, stuck to a corner of her mouth, white against the fine, dark down of hair.

  She was looking at his hands, resting on his lap. “You ever take it off?” she asked. “You wear it all the time?”

  She was staring at the wedding ring on his hand.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  Lorna nodded. “My sister’s husband-they’ve been married eleven years-she’s quite a lot older than me-would you believe it, I’m the youngest? — anyway, he claims, her husband, he’s never removed his wedding ring since they got married. Not for one second. D’you believe that?”

  “I suppose …”

  “But you, you said sometimes. Meaning …?”

  “It’s a little loose. Not quite as tight as it should be. Sometimes if I’m washing my hands … in the shower …”

  She thought about Kevin taking a shower, standing there, his back towards her, water splashing over him. His backside.

  “We ought to get going,” Kevin said, looking at his watch.

  Lorna raised an eyebrow the way she’d seen Julia Roberts do it once, that movie.