Wasted Years cr-5 Page 8

  “Closed up?” Darren jerked his head sideways towards the door.

  “Half-five.”

  “Well,” Darren shrugged, “call in another time, eh?” And he was walking on down the street, hands in his jeans pockets, whistling.

  “You don’t know him,” Marjorie said. “Do you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lorna said, watching as Darren began to cross back to the other side of the pavement, lower down. But, somewhere inside, she felt that, yes, she did.

  Resnick contacted the station, told Graham Millington to get Divine and Naylor down to the Meadows sharpish. If Keith Rylands was there, no sense letting him slip away because nobody was watching the back door. The sky seemed to darken abruptly as Resnick and Lynn Kellogg passed over the railway bridge on London Road, the carriage lights of short sprinter trains standing out clearly-commuters waiting to be shuffled back to Langley Mill, Attenborough, Alfreton, and Mansfield Parkway. Ahead of them the traffic slowed almost to a standstill. In the car alongside, a thirtyish executive in a white shirt, sleeves rolled back just above the wrist, added another Benson Kingsize to the pollution levels and listened to the up-to-the-minute traffic report on the local radio, confirming where he was and why.

  “Heart attack before he’s fifty,” Lynn said caustically, glancing sideways.

  “Maybe he takes long healthy walks,” Resnick said. “Off into Derbyshire. Couple of squash games a week and visits to the health club.”

  “And I’m about to get put up to sergeant,” Lynn responded.

  “You will. All in good time.”

  “Meanwhile I’m still at the bottom of the pecking order, counting through my check stubs each time I go to Safeway.”

  “You’re not doing so bad.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “You’re still only twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “You’ll get there.”

  Lynn eased the car forward a whole fifteen yards. “How old were you, when you made sergeant?”

  Resnick could remember being summoned to the old man’s office, stomach bowling googlies all the way along the corridor, not being able to get the grin off his face afterwards, so that four hours later when Elaine opened the door to him she knew. “Nigh on thirty,” he said.

  “And that was CID?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Transferred back into uniform to get the promotion.”

  “Can’t see me doing that. Rather stay where I am.”

  “It wasn’t so bad. Good experience, really. And I was back in CID inside two years. Jack Skelton had just got bumped up as well; he was my Dl.”

  Lynn laughed. “I can just see him, briefings every morning, checking how you were all turned out.” She shot Resnick a quick look. “Smart suit, well-ironed shirt, and tie.”

  Resnick joined in with the laughter. “He tried.”

  A gap appeared ahead in the traffic and Lynn accelerated smartly into it.

  Divine was hard up against the back door, hoping against hope the suspect would try and do a runner; a strained groin had kept him out of the rugby squad for the past three games and he’d dearly love an excuse for landing a couple of good right-handers. Naylor sat behind the wheel of the second car, end of the alley. Resnick pulled on his raincoat and headed for the front, Lynn half a pace behind.

  Before Resnick could try the bell, or use the knocker, the door opened and a bald man stumbled out, ripe with the smell of ammonia which comes from clothes steeped in stale urine and alcohol.

  “Hey up!” Resnick stepped sideways swiftly, halted him with the flat of one hand.

  “Wha-?”

  “Reginald Rylands?”

  “Na.”

  “He does live here?”

  The man’s head moved forward and back as his eyes tried to focus. “Downstairs. Try down … stairs.”

  But, by then, Rylands was in the hallway, the head of the cellar steps, and walking forward. “You looking for me?”

  Resnick showed his warrant card, identified himself and Detective Constable Kellogg.

  “You’d best come in,” Rylands said.

  “Be on m’way,” slurred the bald man, stepping between Resnick and Lynn Kellogg and on to the street.

  “Is he okay?” Resnick asked.

  Rylands nodded. “Long as nobody stands too near him with a lighted match.”

  Inside the kitchen, Resnick turned down the offer of tea, took in the empty quart cider bottles on the floor, several days of unwashed pots and plates. Lynn hung back in the doorway, careful for the sounds of anyone making a dash for the front door.

  “Something about the house?” Rylands asked. “One of the lodgers? I’m properly registered, you know, approved. Least, till the EEC start in on toilet bowls and sinks.”

  “It’s not that.” Resnick shook his head.

  “Then it’s Keith.”

  “You tell me.”

  Rylands eased a finger inside his mouth, scraped away at something stuck between his teeth with a nail. “Got to be, hasn’t it?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Always in trouble, isn’t he? This thing and the other.”

  “And recently?”

  Rylands shook his head. “No idea. ‘Less it’s motors, is it? Cars. Can’t keep away from them. That what it is?”

  From one of the upstairs rooms came the strangulated tenor of Josef Locke and Resnick grimaced: popular films sometimes had a lot to answer for.

  “You do know where your son is?” Lynn asked.

  “No.”

  “We understood that you did.”

  Someone of similar musical tastes to Resnick opened a door above, shouted loudly, and then slammed it shut. Josef Locke faded back into insignificance.

  Rylands looked with interest at the white fiber from the heart of last night’s chicken tikka, suspended from his finger end. “And who’d that be from?” he asked.

  “We’ve just been speaking to Keith’s mother.”

  “Oh, yes, the former Mrs Rylands, light of my life.”

  “She seemed certain that Keith was here, staying with you.”

  “And I thought he was staying with her and old Stuart, the handy man par excellence. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “She said she hadn’t seen Keith for a couple of days.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “You heard right.”

  “Since when?”

  Rylands shrugged. “Thursday, Friday last week. You sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea?”

  Resnick’s expression suggested that he was.

  “Well, I’ll just make one for myself, if you don’t mind.”

  He was on his way towards the sink with the empty kettle, but Resnick was standing in front of him, blocking his way.

  “We have reason to believe your son might have been involved in a serious matter.”

  “I daresay. Now if you’ll …”

  Resnick took the kettle from his hand and set it down. Lynn stepped to one side in the doorway to let Divine through. “Sorry, boss, getting dead bored out there. Thought I’d get to where the action was.” Reading the question in Resnick’s face, he added, “Kev’s out back, not to worry.”

  Rylands had retrieved the kettle.

  “Tea up, then, is it?” Divine grinned.

  “No,” Resnick said. “It’s not. Not till we’ve got a few more answers.”

  “Well, that’s it then, standoff. Afraid I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

  Resnick could just smell the alcohol on his breath, not insistent, but there. Steady drinker now, he thought, controlled. Likely doesn’t start till eleven, eleven-thirty of a morning, no acceleration till late on, eight or nine at night.

  “You know it’s an offense,” Divine was saying, “withholding information.”

  “How can it be an offense if I don’t know anything?”

  “You’ll not mind,” Resnick said, almost casually, “if we search the house.
”

  “Should I?”

  “We’ll see, shan’t we?” Divine smiled.

  “If you’ve a warrant. You did think to bring a warrant?”

  “Too cocky by half, boss,” Divine said, nodding towards Rylands. “Been here before.”

  “Have you ever been in trouble with the police?” Resnick asked.

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “Recently?”

  Lynn Kellogg responded to footsteps on the stairs and moved out into the hallway; a man wearing stained khaki trousers and a Fair Isle jumper two sizes too tight was carrying a nondescript brown dog towards the door, one hand round the animal’s mouth. Before his objective was reached, the dog wriggled out of his arms and barked.

  “No animals,” Rylands said to Resnick. “It’s in the rules. Plain. So daft he thinks I don’t know he’s smuggling it in and out.”

  “This trouble …” Divine began.

  “Let’s get back to your son,” Resnick said.

  Rylands’s shoulders slumped and this time Resnick allowed him to fill the kettle, set in on the gas. “You any of your own?” he asked Resnick. “Kids?”

  Resnick gave a quick shake of the head.

  “If you had, maybe you’d understand. I don’t suppose you ever stop caring for them, feeling something, but … the rest of it, the day to day, the way they’re fucking up their lives.” He stood with his eyes closed for as much as twenty seconds. “If I knew where he was I’d tell you. Time inside, real time, he might learn a lesson. If not, least happens, he’ll be out of harm’s way. Not able to do anything stupid.”

  “You think he might?”

  “Only every sodding day.”

  “Then you would tell us where he was?”

  “If I knew,” Rylands said. “Like a shot.”

  “You’ll not mind, then, if we take a look around?” Divine said. “Warrant or not?”

  “Forget it, Mark,” said Resnick, beginning to turn away. “He’s not here, it’s okay.” And to Rylands, turning in the kitchen doorway, “If you do see him, what you might do, persuade him to come in. Own accord, go better for him.”

  Rylands nodded.

  “Barring that, give me a call. Resnick. Detective Inspector.”

  Rylands nodded again. “I’ll remember.”

  Behind him, the kettle was starting to boil.

  “You get a whiff of him?” Lynn asked. They were outside on the pavement, the opposite side of the narrow street, looking back at the house. “Like he worked in a brewery.”

  “Starting to feel a bit sorry for him,” Divine said, “way he was going on about his lad.”

  “You and Kevin,” said Resnick. “I want you keeping the place under surveillance. All night if necessary. My guess, the youth’s been staying here and he’ll be back.”

  Fifteen

  He hadn’t recognized him at first, not for certain; only later, watching Rylands fake his way through sincere parenting, had Resnick been able to slip the younger face over the old. A trick of memory. Tighter, eyes screwed up against the smoke, the lights. Sweat that slid down the channels of Rylands’s face, sprayed from nose and forehead as he jerked his head from side to side. Slow smile that would glide into place, when on the stage in front of him, either tenor or guitar would strike a serious groove. The way he would arch back on his stool, sticks a blur as patterns and paradiddles grew from his hands.

  Drinking even then, but didn’t they all?

  Pints of best bitter slopping across the boards: quarter bottles of scotch or vodka passed from hand to hand.

  Pills.

  Without effort of imagination, Resnick was there, too many bodies crammed fast, rhythmic thump of dancing feet, sweat that seemed, like raindrops on a windscreen, to rise directly up the walls. Girls you walked back along the Trent, whose interest waned when finally you told them what you did, whose hands eased free from yours, who moved a pace apart.

  Walking all over me like that. It’s a wonder I didn’t go flying back down the stairs.

  Elaine.

  Resnick had looked for her again, other evenings when the band was playing “In the Midnight Hour,” “My Girl,” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Scanning the crowd for that half-serious face, angry, mocking eyes. When next he did encounter Elaine, it would be another place, another circumstance.

  The music had changed, too. Instead of soul, rhythm and blues, it was slim young men decked out with purple eyeliner, stars glittering on their cheeks, songs about ancient forests or stars in the skies. Resnick stopped going.

  Rylands had beaten him to it: one week Resnick had walked in, together with Ben Riley, and there had been someone else behind the drums.

  Rumor was a name band had made Rylands an offer, a group, and he was back on the road, up and down the Ml more times than Peter Withe and Tony Hateley combined. There was talk of a record that should have been a hit. To the best of his knowledge, Resnick had never heard it.

  He wondered how many years Rylands had been back in the city, if he still played? A pub, maybe, on the outskirts, requests from customers, keyboard and drums. Draw for the raffle, roll on the snare and a cymbal crash. Blokes pushed up on stage, half-pissed, by their mates, dropping the mike midway through some half-remembered song.

  Wondered what Rylands really thought about his son.

  Any of your own? Kids?

  Without realizing what he was doing, Resnick had climbed the stairs to the top of the house.

  All those times I’d walk in here and see the expectation rise and fall in your eyes. Fancy a cup of tea, Charlie? Not what you wanted to hear. What you wanted was for me to walk in and say I was pregnant.

  Through windows that needed cleaning, Resnick looked down on muted streetlights, the road that curved away in front of the house, the road not taken, not by him.

  What Elaine had finally said when she had walked in: Charlie, we need to talk. He knew then-the tone of her voice, the look in her eyes-that she was leaving him. Just not when.

  Downstairs he checked with the station: Divine and Naylor were still on obs, no sign of Keith. It was a little shy of eleven p.m.

  Resnick realized that his instincts could have been wrong. He set aside the idea of going back out there and mooched into the kitchen, began opening and closing cupboard doors. Appetites excited, cats pushed at his ankles, slid their sleek heads across his feet. It wasn’t simply finding himself face to face with Rylands for the first time in-how many? Twenty? — years. It was more. Other bits and pieces of the past were nudging their way back into his consciousness, rubbing themselves against the back of his mind.

  Rylands.

  The Boat Club.

  Ben Riley.

  Elaine.

  Prior.

  Ruth James.

  In the front room he rooted through the shelves of records, albums he’d collected since he was in his teens. After a first, and a second search he still hadn’t found it, wondered if he could have lent it to someone long ago, if maybe Elaine had taken it, memories of that first time they had met.

  He doubted that.

  He finally found it inside the sleeve of another record, Serge Chaloff’s Blue Serge-not bad, Resnick thought, for an impromptu overcoat. A four-track EP with a laminated cover, soft-focus picture of the singer, head bent, before the microphone. Ruth James amp; the Nighthawks. 1972.

  Resnick slid the record onto his hand: a memory of her hand struggling to push back the air. The pallor of her face, auburn of her hair. He dispensed the worst of the dust and set it on the turntable, changed the speed. The stylus stuck near the start and when Resnick eased it gently on the vocal had already begun.

  All those dreams and wasted tears,

  Every minute, every second,

  The worst of all my fears

  He had been called to a burglary, January seventy-four, one of those big houses off the Mansfield Road, divided into flats and then divided again. A warren of rooms in which clothes hung drying in front of a two-bar electric fi
re and every squeak of conversation came through the partition wall. Cooker behind a screen in one corner, the bathroom down the hall-only hot water enough to cover your knees, the plughole circled round with other people’s pubic hairs. A rusting fire escape that climbed up from the overgrown garden at the side. Too many windows with a faulty catch. One man, working alone; he had got through four rooms before Elaine came out of hers to go to the toilet and there he was, trying the door across the hall.

  “What the hell d’you reckon you’re about?” she’d shouted, grabbing at his arm.

  The burglar-dark shirt, jeans, wearing gloves-had bolted for the stairs, out through the main door, the lock of which he’d slipped as soon as he’d got inside.

  “Sure you’re okay?” Resnick had asked, self-conscious inside her room, Elaine sitting on the only chair.

  “Oh, yes, I’m fine. Fine.”

  “You were lucky.”

  She looked at him then, questioning.

  “When you reached for him, that he didn’t react.”

  “He ran.”

  “I know. What I meant, he might have felt provoked. He might have hurt you.”

  She smiled. “Like you, you mean?”

  Resnick’s eyes had smiled back. “I didn’t know if you’d remembered?”

  “Someone your size? All over me? I had a bruise on my instep that lingered for weeks. Not to mention my big toe.”

  “Bruised, too?”

  “Worse.”

  He gave her an inquiring look.

  “It came off.”

  “The toe?”

  “The nail.”

  “Oh.”

  She continued to sit there and he continued to stand where he was, watching. Somewhere above, a cistern was noisily refilling,

  “Shouldn’t you be looking for clues?” she finally said.

  “That fire escape,” Resnick said, embarrassed, “it’s like an open invitation.”

  She smiled again; it was a good smile, strong, not ingratiating. “Sooner burgled than burned.”

  “What I was thinking, window locks …”

  “We’ve been on to the landlord for months.”