Thief Taker

by Alan Scholefield

  Why the hell did she have to scream?

  They’d charged him with attempted rape but he hadn’t wanted to rape her. He’d only wanted her to watch. Like the woman on Wimbledon Common. She hadn’t screamed even though he’d held a knife to her. She’d watched and he’d seen the fear in her eyes. That was what he really wanted according to the doctors at Granton. They’d made him admit it. Power. OK, so they were right. Didn’t change anything.

  All she had had to do was watch and be afraid and give him the power.

  The Black Knight in full armour.

  Instead the bitch had screamed and the copper had come.

  He could still feel the blows on his face even now. He could feel the bone go. He could hear the kind of cracking noise nuts make in a nutcracker.

  He’d nearly lost his eye.

  He put his finger up to the concave scar. When he was little his mother had always called him her beautiful boy. But in ten seconds that had been destroyed. Veronica bloody Lake. Always hiding behind long hair.

  Well, the time had come to repay the debt.

  Der Tag.

  He got out of bed and reached on to the top of his wardrobe for the box. He unwrapped the gun from its yellow duster. Unpacked the bullets and spread them on the bed.

  Browning automatic.

  A handgun.

  He loved that phrase. Not a big gun. Not one of those bloody great things the coppers used. But big enough. It was what came out of the spout that mattered.

  He put the gun up to his nose and smelled the oil. Lovely. He’d never fired a gun before. He wondered how it would feel. He held it out straight ahead of him, clamping his left hand on his right wrist.

  Rock steady.

  Squeeze.

  He put down the gun and tiptoed into his mother’s room. She was lying on her back with her mouth open, breathing hoarsely. Carefully he lifted her clock from the bedside table and advanced the time by two hours. He opened the curtains a little. It was barely light outside. The TV set had been on all night, the screen was a shower of static snow.

  He shook her by the shoulder.

  “Wha — ?” she came slowly to consciousness, swimming upwards through the sherry layers. “What?”

  “It’s waking-up time,” he said.

  “Never.”

  “It is.”

  She turned and pulled the sheet up to her neck.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  It came out whassamattawisyou because her teeth weren’t in.

  “I told you. Look at the time.”

  He was pretending this was not abnormal. In fact he never woke her. He always wanted her to sleep as long as possible. “And I was having such a lovely dream.”

  He had also had lovely dreams. Of golden sand, bucket and spade, mum and dad, the blue sea.

  Then the reality. Old Crowhurst muttering in his sleep, and the grey light of day against the bars of the window.

  “You gotta wake up.”

  “You mad? Let me sleep!”

  “You know what day it is?”

  “What?”

  “I gotta see my parole officer. If I don’t then it’s back to the nick and you’re on your own.”

  That woke her.

  “Today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you went yesterday.”

  “They was too busy.”

  She pulled herself up on the pillows. Sleep was gone now.

  “And what about the day before? You’re always going out. Always leaving me. How can I manage?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back. You want some breakfast?”

  “Why are you asking? What’s all this anyway? Oh, I know. You want the car. Well, you’re not having it!”

  “I’m asking you nicely. You want some breakfast or not?”

  “Breakfast! You couldn’t make breakfast. You can’t do anything right!” She put in her teeth and said suspiciously, “You never asked before.”

  “Well, I’m asking you now. You better hurry though ‘cause I’m off.”

  “Not in the car!”

  “You want to go to the bathroom?”

  He helped her up and took her along the passage. In the bedroom he began to search for the car keys. Every time he used the car she made him return the keys to her. Where the hell could she have put them? He looked under her pillows, under the mattress, among the sheets.

  He began to panic.

  “Ronald!”

  He went to fetch her. In his hand he carried a partly full sherry bottle. Sometimes she would knock that off at lunchtime. The sun went down early in this part of London.

  “What you doing with that?” she said angrily.

  “I’ll show you.”

  He began to pour the sherry into the washbasin.

  “Ronnie! Ronnie! No!”

  “I want the keys.”

  “Oh God, stop!”

  The golden liquid with its rich grapey smell was gurgling down the plughole.

  “And there won’t be any more,” Ronnie said. “I’m not going out to get any more. OK? I’d rather go back to the nick than live like this.”

  “All right! Just stop!”

  He stopped. She pulled the keys from her dressing-gown pocket. He took them from her and helped her back to bed.

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “What?”

  “Leave me?”

  Suddenly he felt the power. Black Knight. Darth Vader.

  “Shut your fucking face,” he said to her.

  He went to his own room to collect the gun.

  “Ronnie! Ronald! Darling!”

  He stopped in the passage. “The bottle’s in the bathroom. You want it, you get it.”

  Then he was out of the house in the grey dawn and into the car and away.

  He drove across London to Pimlico. The streets were dead. He parked. Leo Silver’s white Golf was in a resident’s bay on the opposite side of the road. He leaned back in his seat and waited. He wanted to tell someone what he was doing. But who? Barbara? He’d like to phone her. He’d felt the power in his conversations with her. Real power. He’d like to talk her and tell her that this thing that had haunted him for so long was about to be resolved.

  But he couldn’t leave the car in case the bloody copper came down and drove away. If he’d had a car phone it would have been different.

  One day, when he was rich, he’d have a car phone and he’d be able to phone anyone and everyone. He would have the whole world at the end of a telephone.

  “Are you all right, missus?”

  “Yes.”

  It was early morning. Rawley had woken to see her looking at him.

  “That’s my husband’s bunk,” she said. “You shouldn’t have slept there.”

  “I didn’t put my head on the pillow. Not on the pillow. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You must go out now. I’m going to get dressed.”

  Rawley, in his two coats and with his plastic bags in his hands, a single complete world, nodded his agreement, rose from the bunk and went out into the forest.

  “You can get a fire going and boil some water and I’ll bring out the coffee. Have you got a mug?”

  He put his hand in one of the plastic bags and brought out an old tin enamel mug, chipped and stained. He held it up so she could see it.

  “All right.” She wasn’t giving him one of hers again.

  He broke sticks and used some of the wood he had chopped and got a good fire going. He poured water from a jerrycan into a smoke-blackened kettle and hung it over the fire. Soon it was boiling. Rachel came out in her long flowered dress with a cardigan around her shoulders and made the coffee.

  “How many sugars?” She knew from the day before but made him say it anyway.”

  “Four! I’ve a sweet tooth, missus.”

  They stood on either side of the fire in the grey morning. It was chilly after the rain.

  She felt strange. Light. Airy. She could sense a painting spell coming on and her tho
ughts raced from one corner of her mind to the other as she probed for a subject. She no longer wanted to paint the red rabbit. That was finished for ever.

  “I’m an artist,” she said. “A painter. Can you paint?”

  “Rooms.”

  “Is that what you were? A painter and decorator?”

  He shrugged.

  “I like you, Rawley. You make a good fire. But you can’t stay in the caravan. Not like last night. Do you understand that?”

  “Oh, yus.”

  “Were you frightened last night?”

  “Not when I knew. Oh, no.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I had a brother. He had the asthma. Died of it.”

  “What am I going to do, Rawley?”

  “Missus?”

  “I mean, I can’t stay here for ever. I’ll become part of the forest. Like you. Where do you live, Rawley?”

  “Live?”

  “You must have had a house sometime. A wife. Children.” He smiled inwardly.

  “A mother and father? A home? You had a brother.”

  “And a mother.”

  “You must have had a father!” She was irritated.

  “He was a sailorman. He went to sea and never came back.”

  “What did your mother say then?”

  “Good riddance.”

  “You’re like a troll. You live in the wildwood.”

  “What’s a troll, missus?”

  “Look in a mirror. There are gingerbread houses in the forest and woodcutters who send their children away. Is that what happened to you? Were you sent away to become a troll?”

  She sat on the steps of the caravan nursing the hot mug of coffee in both hands.

  “Rawley…Rawley…Jackanory…Would you like me to tell you another story?”

  His slatey eyes shone and he sat on the damp ground near her.

  “It’s a story about a princess. You like them, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yus.”

  Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess and she married a handsome prince and they were happy.

  …happy…

  And they pretended to be ordinary people and travelled in a land where no one knew them. They journeyed slowly along the little roads of this kingdom. They slept under the stars and washed in crystal streams and lay in soft scented grass.

  Eventually they came to a great wildwood. It was then that the prince changed.

  Do you know what the humpbacked beast is Rawley?

  No, missus.

  It’s a game two people play. A man and a woman when they’re alone.

  And the prince wanted to play this game with the princess but she did not want to play. She wanted to be his friend. He was so kind.

  I loves people who are kind.

  That’s when the princess became sick again and the prince said what could he do?

  And the princess said that a spell had been cast upon her by the evil Dragon of the North and she asked the prince to kill the Dragon — only then would she feel free to play the humpbacked beast with him.

  Rachel began to cry. Rawley was embarrassed.

  She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, picked up the small hand-axe and began to split a log into kindling.

  Rawley waited. The story could not be over. It was like an unresolved phrase in music. He felt jangled and tense. “What happened, missus?”

  “He shouted at her. He called her mad. Then he took the horse and left her alone in the wildwood. Don’t you think that’s a sad story?”

  “A sad story. Oh yus, a sad story.”

  She threw out the coffee dregs and rinsed the mug. “It’s time for prayers,” she said. “Come along.”

  Macrae was feeling frightful. The general debilitating and nauseous effect of the whisky he had drunk the night before combined with the gloomy certainty that he had made a bloody fool of himself with Linda.

  He dressed as he made himself coffee. He’d run out of sugar and it tasted foul but at least it was hot.

  His thoughts kept on returning to the conversation he had had with Linda. She had changed. That’s what he couldn’t understand. Going out with a bloody writer! It wasn’t like her. She wasn’t the sort of person writers took out.

  He thought of her in bed with Leitman and to the gloom, headache, sore eyes and belief that death was just around the corner, was added a sullen rage. Part of that rage was focused on himself for ever having let her go, being stupid enough not to see her potential.

  The phone rang.

  “Macrae you bastard!”

  It was his second wife’s voice.

  “For God’s sake, Mandy, whatever it is not now?”

  “Your effing cheque bounced!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t give me that! You knew when you signed it!”

  “Listen I thought- — ”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet. You thought a little roll in the sack would make up for it. Well it doesn’t. I told you before, the kids are growing up. They need things. And listen, Macrae, in case you don’t know it, there’s a new law going through that gives me the right to have child support taken off your salary before you even see it. Think about that while you’re signing the next cheque!”

  “Mandy!”

  But she slammed down the phone at her end and Macrae was left looking at the black mouthpiece of his.

  And so it was with a mixture of feelings, all of them dark, that he reached Cannon Row. It was then that he remembered that Silver wasn’t there, that he’d gone swanning off in the middle of a case — forgetting, for the moment, that it was he who had pressed him to go.

  All he could think of now was that he was lumbered with additional work and a strange assistant. Macrae did not take lightly to organisational change, and especially not this morning when what he really felt like doing was creeping back to his house and getting into bed.

  “Morning, sir.”

  “Morning, Mr Macrae.”

  “Morning, guv’nor.”

  He nodded briefly at the faces who were greeting him. The desk sergeant said, “There’s a message for Leo Silver.”

  “He won’t be in today. Is it about the Healey business?”

  “It’s about some villain called Purvis. Wanted me to check on his whereabouts.” He gave Macrae the message sheet.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson came into the room and said, “George, have you seen the Deputy Commander yet?”

  “No.”

  He took Macrae aside and said softly, “Get it over with. It’ll only make things worse postponing it.”

  “I’m not in any mood to see Scales.”

  He brushed past Wilson and went down the corridor to the incident room which had been set up to investigate the abrupt and permanent departure of Robson Healey.

  More than twenty detectives were at their desks working on the case.

  He said to the sergeant in charge, “Where’s this young genius Geddes who’s supposed to work with me?”

  “I haven’t seen him this morning, guv’nor.”

  “Christ. Listen I’m going to get some coffee then I think we must do something about friend Harris. I want him brought in. Put the frighteners on a bit. Did Silver say anything about this?” He gave him the message sheet. “Has it got anything to do with Healey?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me. Purvis…Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Wilson, who had followed Macrae into the incident room, said, “Purvis and Silver. It rings some sort of bell. What’s his first name?”

  “Ronald

  “Mr Macrae!” The voice rang down the aisles between the desks. Macrae turned and saw the Deputy Commander standing in the doorway. Scales’ face was pink. “I’d like to see you in my office.”

  He turned. Macrae looked at Wilson, who dropped his eyes. Various detectives held their phones to their cheeks and looked at him too. They knew.

  Macrae flushed, then followed Scales down the corridor to his office. It wasn’t like last time. There wa
s no George this and George that. Not even an invitation to sit down. Scales sat behind his desk leaving Macrae standing.

  Scales let the silence grow. Then he began to fiddle with his ball-point pen. Click…Click…

  Macrae thought: The little prick’s been reading psychology manuals.

  Slowly he took out his packet of cigars and lit one.

  Scales looked on appalled, then, leaning back, pointed with his thumb at the no-smoking sign on the wall behind his chair.

  “Do you mind!” he said.

  Macrae feigned total surprise. “No, I don’t mind.”

  He looked round saw an ashtray filled with paperclips, emptied them on to the desk and ground out the panatella. It made a nasty, smelly mess.

  Scales got out of his chair, picked up the ashtray, took it over to the window. He opened it and tipped the contents out.

  An angry voice rose on the morning air. “Watch what you’re doing, you silly fucker!”

  Scales pretended not to hear and regained his seat. “Communications are everything in police work,” he said. “Would you agree?”

  Macrae was host to two warring voices; one told him to take Scales by the scruff of his neck and throw him into the Thames. The other, the voice of survival, said, “Cool it!”

  He cooled it.

  “Aye, sir.” This time he did not accentuate the word “sir” but gave it a texture of subservience.

  Scales looked up, startled.

  He gathered himself and said, “And communication between senior officers is vital. I thought I’d made myself clear last time about Twyford. I said he was no longer to be your driver. Do you agree with that?”

  “With what, sir?” Macrae’s voice was mild.

  “That that’s what I said.”

  “Yes, sir, I agree.”

  “OK, then.”

  Click…click…went the pen…

  “But the communications seem to have broken down.”

  “It won’t happen again, sir.”

  “What? Oh. Yes…well…

  Click…click…

  Scales changed tack in the face of Macrae’s attitude.

  “You see, George, I can’t let you have a driver if no one else has one. You do see that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, I see it.”

  “OK…then…It isn’t right. I mean Twyford’s got his own work to do.”