Now's the Time

by John Harvey

  “I thought Ced Petchey . . .”

  “Ced Petchey coughed to a break-in out at the University Science Park which netted a couple of outmoded Toshibas and three cartons of double-sided three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks.”

  “Ah. I thought we’d already charged the Haselmere youth with that one.”

  “Precisely.”

  It was that time of the day when Resnick’s energy was at its lowest and his need for a quick caffeine injection at its most pronounced. “Look at it this way, Graham. What we’ve done today, clear out the dead wood. Tomorrow, we’ll strike lucky.”

  “We bloody better.”

  Resnick thought there was no harm in giving luck a helping hand. He left his car on the lower floor below the Victoria Centre and took the lift up to the covered market. Doris Duke was winding sprigs of greenery into a bouquet in which pink and white carnations featured prominently.

  “Three of these for your mates out at the hospital this morning, Mr Resnick. By the sound of it, fortunate they wasn’t wreaths.”

  Resnick slid a ten-pound note along the surface where she worked. “If you’ve a customer for that already, Doris, you could make me up another.”

  “Fifteen, Mr Resnick. Got to be worth that, at least.”

  “Prices going up, Doris? I didn’t see a sign.”

  Doris pushed the bouquet away and sat straighter on her stool, hooking the heels of her shoes over the lower rungs. “Special orders, special price; you know how it goes.” She lifted a pack of ten Embassy from the breast pocket of her pink overall, leaned sideways and slid a lighter from the side pocket of her jeans.

  Resnick set five pound coins, each neatly balanced on top of the other, down on the centre of the ten-pound note.

  “Word is it’s Coughlan. He was the one carrying.” Doris’s voice could only just be heard.

  “Whoever that was,” Resnick said, “didn’t do the beating.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Resnick,” Doris said, “this time of the year they’re scarce, good blooms. That’s the best I can do for now.”

  Resnick nodded. “Look after yourself, Doris.”

  “You too.”

  Somehow, when he walked away in the direction of the Italian coffee stall, Resnick forgot to take his bouquet.

  “Coughlan,” Millington said sceptically. “Bit of a change of pace for him, isn’t it?”

  “Self-improvement, Graham. Most likely comes from listening to his probation officer.”

  Resnick and Millington were in the left-side bar of the Partridge, what would have been called the Public in more openly divided times. Their fellow drinkers – and it was not crowded – were either single men staring morosely into pints of mixed, or students wearing slimming black and sporting silver rings.

  “You think it’s true?” Millington asked. He was trying not to stare at a skinny seventeen-year-old, the largest of whose three noserings was decorated with three emerald stones and from whose left eyebrow a tiny crucifix hung from a loop of chain.

  “About Coughlan?” Resnick said.

  “They get themselves pierced all over? All over their bodies?”

  “I don’t know, Graham. No idea.” He knew the superintendent’s daughter had come back from her first term at university with a gold stud in the side of her ear and a plaited ring through her navel.

  “Blokes, too.” Millington shook his head, eyes close to watering at the prospect of a pierced foreskin.

  “Coughlan, Graham.”

  “It’s good information?”

  “More often than not.”

  “Go wading in, all we’re like to do is warn him off. Come up empty handed.”

  Resnick nodded. Coughlan had been involved in maybe a dozen break-ins in the past two years, but each foray to turn over the council house he lived in off Bracknell Crescent had found the neat three-bedroom semi as clean, in Millington’s words, as a pair of Julie Andrews’ knickers. A shotgun, though; for Coughlan that was a step in a dubious direction. Why go armed to do an empty shop in the wee small hours? Maybe he was trying to get the feel of it, readying himself for bigger things.

  “No word who he was working with?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “What’s that cousin of his called? Barker? Breaker?”

  “Breakshaw. Norbert Breakshaw.”

  “Didn’t he go down for five last time?”

  “Carrying a weapon with criminal intent.”

  “Maybe the shotgun was his.”

  “Then what was Coughlan doing carrying it?”

  “Norbert likely give it him to hold, leave his hands free for belting McFarlane and the girl. He’s a nasty bastard. Certificate to prove it.”

  “One thing, Graham, isn’t he still inside? Lincoln?”

  “I’ll check first thing. If he’s out and we can put the pair of them together, Breakshaw and Coughlan . . .”

  “Confirmation, Graham, that’s what we need. Confirmation.”

  “Right,” said Millington. “Sup up and we’ll have another before I get home to the missus. Chicken chasseur tonight, unless I’m much mistaken. Say what you like about Marks, you know, can’t fault ’em for reliability.”

  Resnick’s quip about Karl or Groucho remained frozen on his lips.

  Terry Cooke had fallen asleep with the Mail open on his lap and orchestral versions of Burt Bacharach’s hits lilting out of the stereo. When he opened his eyes with a start, Eileen was framed in the living-room mirror and the violins were just cascading into the theme of ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’. There were times, Terry thought, life could be pretty nearly perfect.

  “I was just going,” Eileen said. She was wearing a red dress, tight at the hips, high black heels, and her red hair was pinned high above her head. A camel coat was slung over one arm.

  “Without saying goodbye?” Terry smiled.

  “You looked so peaceful.”

  “So?”

  Smiling, she crossed the room and he turned to greet her, Eileen bending to plant a red-lipped kiss on the oval of thinning hair where the scalp showed through.

  “What time’ll you be back?”

  “Late.”

  “Why don’t you let me meet you?”

  She took a step away. “Terry, let’s not start all that again, eh?”

  When they had first started living together he had insisted upon picking her up outside whichever hotel or club she had been working, but Eileen had insisted it was bad for business and finally convinced him it was true. No birthday boy for whom she’d just table-danced in a g-string and policewoman’s hat would enjoy the sight of her being whisked away by her live-in lover, likely back home to a bowlful of hot cereal and his and hers mugs of Ovaltine. “It won’t do, Terry, it’s bad for the image. You’ve got to see that?”

  Terry knew she was right; knew, too, what she wasn’t quite saying: picked up by some bloke old enough to be my father. Most nights now, unless he had to go out on a bit of business himself, Trevor stayed home, television turned low so he’d hear the cab pulling up outside, the clatter of Eileen’s heels up to the door.

  “What is it tonight?” he asked.

  “A stag night and two twenty-firsts.”

  “OK, see you later. Have fun.”

  Eileen hated lying to him, but sometimes he didn’t leave her any choice. If Terry knew she’d gone back to working the pubs – not often, and then only when the landlord had organised a lock-in, which meant bigger tips and less chance of the punters getting out of control – he would not be happy. But that was what Eileen missed, working an audience, feeling all their eyes on you and knowing if you played it right you could keep them there, glued. That feeling of control.

  For tonight, she’d been brushing up one of her old routines with a banana and half a dozen ping-pong balls; if that didn’t put at least a couple of hundred quid in the pot, she didn’t know what would.

  No chicken chasseur for Resnick to go home to; no wife. A predatory black cat to greet him, hungry, at th
e front door and three others, more docile, waiting inside. After seeing to them, he fixed himself a sandwich from gorgonzola and smoked ham, forked two pickled cucumbers from a jar and snapped open a bottle of Pilsner Urquel. In the front room, he fished out an old vinyl album, Eddie Condon’s Treasury of Jazz, bought a hundred years ago, and set it to play. When Billy Butterfield was taking the introduction to ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’, trumpet and piano with the verse to themselves, Resnick recalled seeing Butterfield in person: the seventies it would have been, down the M1 at a club in Leicester, a portly old boy wearing stay-pressed flannels and a blue wool blazer. The number was coming to an end, Ralph Sutton filigreeing under the final chords, when the telephone rang. Resnick recognised Ronnie Rather’s voice right away.

  Ronnie was in the downstairs bar of the Old Vic. “Get your skates on, Charlie, and you’ll just catch the last set.”

  The band were into something modal, bluesy; sax and rhythm set up on a low stage deep to the rear of the low-ceilinged room. Maybe half the tables were taken, couples mostly, caught up in quiet conversation. Ronnie Rather was sitting midway between the door and the stand, his white hair resting back against the wall, eyes closed, listening.

  Resnick went over to the bar, and when the girl had solved seven across she got to her feet and served him a bottle of Worthington White Shield, which she left him to pour for himself, and a large brandy with a touch of lemonade. Dropping his change back into his suit pocket, he stayed there listening: all of the musicians he recognised, was on nodding terms with; he had seen them playing in everything from pubs like this to the pit band at the theatre: they were of an age. Second Nature was what they were calling themselves now; the last time he had seen them it had been something else. The pianist, Resnick thought, had likely been with Billy Butterfield when he had seen him in Leicester.

  As the number came to an end, a tenor cadenza over bowed bass, Resnick walked back across the room and placed the brandy down alongside Rather’s empty glass.

  “Cheers, Charlie.”

  “Pleasure.”

  Ronnie nodded in the direction of the band. “Heard Mel Thorpe do his Roland Kirk, have you?”

  “Not recently.”

  Ronnie tasted his brandy and lemonade and smiled. “Considering he’s not black or blind, he does a pretty fair job.”

  On flute now, the soloist sang, hummed and grunted as he blew, spurring himself along with intermittent shouts and hollers which raised the temperature of the playing to the point that one or two of the audience began drumming on their tabletops and the barmaid set aside her crossword puzzle in favour of polishing glasses. The applause was sustained and earned.

  “I saw him, you know, Charlie. Roland Kirk. St Pancras Town Hall. Nineteen sixty-four.”

  Resnick nodded. He had seen Kirk once himself, but later, not more than a year before the end of his life – Birmingham, he thought it had been, but for once he wasn’t sure. The musician had already suffered one stroke and played with one side of his body partially paralysed; it had been like watching a tornado trapped in a basket, a lion shorn and bereft in a cage.

  “This business with the copper, Charlie. The girl . . .”

  “Mary Duffy.”

  “If you say so. I don’t like it, treating women like that.”

  Resnick allowed himself a smile. “One of nature’s gentlemen, that what you’re saying, Ronnie?”

  “Oh, I’ve known a few in my time, Charlie. Young women, I mean.”

  “I’ll bet you have.”

  “And never raised a finger, not to any of them. Not one.”

  Resnick nodded again, drank some beer. The band were playing a ballad, medium tempo, ‘The Talk of the Town’.

  “Bumped into Terry Cooke,” Ronnie said, “café by the market, Victoria Park. Soon as I mentioned it, the break-in and that, he turned all pale and couldn’t wait to be on his way.”

  “You don’t think he was involved?”

  “Terry? Not directly, no. Have a heart attack minute anyone said boo to him in the dark.”

  “What then?”

  “Mates with Coughlan, isn’t he?”

  “And this was Coughlan’s job?”

  “Word is, on the street.”

  “I didn’t know,” Resnick said, “Cooke and Coughlan were close.”

  “Who Cookie was close to,” Ronnie explained, “was Coughlan’s wife.”

  “Second or third?”

  “Third. Marjorie. Cookie was having it away with her the best part of a year. That was before he cottoned on to this young bit of skirt he’s got now. Anyway, while all this was going on, he got himself into a card school with Coughlan. Poker. Dropped a lot of money there on occasion, so I heard. His way of paying for it, I suppose.”

  “Coughlan didn’t know?”

  “Some blokes,” Ronnie said, leaning a shade closer to Resnick as if letting him into a greater confidence, “get off on the idea their bird’s fresh from shagging someone else. Whether Coughlan’s one of those, it’s difficult to tell. But him and Cookie, still speaking. Doing business.”

  “You think Coughlan’s going to be looking to his old pal Terry, then, to help him offload from the other night?”

  Ronnie paused to applaud a particularly nice piece of piano. “Wouldn’t you, Charlie? What friends are for.”

  Resnick bought another large brandy, nothing for himself. “Any word Breakshaw might have been involved?”

  “Norbert? Not so’s I’ve heard. But it’d make sense. Evil bastard. When he kicked inside his old lady’s womb, he’d have been wearing steel-capped Doc Martin’s.”

  The hand Resnick slipped down into Rather’s jacket pocket held three twenty-pound notes. “Look after yourself, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie nodded and leaned back, closing his eyes.

  When Terry Cooke arrived, waved through the lock-in on Coughlan’s say-so, Eileen was down on all fours on the bar, waving an unzipped banana above her head and asking, should she put it in, if there was anyone there man enough to eat it out.

  When Coughlan had phoned, the last thing Terry had wanted to do was be seen drinking with him so soon after the break-in and what had followed, but Coughlan had assured him it was a private party. Mates. No prying eyes. He hadn’t said anything about Eileen. Maybe he hadn’t known. Maybe he had.

  Now Coughlan gripped Terry firmly by the upper arm and led him into a corner, some distance from the core of the chanting crowd.

  “You’ll not be bothered,” Coughlan said, “not seeing the show. Nothing you won’t have seen before.”

  Terry looked into Coughlan’s face but, heavy and angular, it gave nothing away. In a wedge of mirror to his right, Terry could see the shimmer of Eileen’s nearly nude body as she lowered herself into a squatting position, facing out. The banana was nowhere to be seen.

  “What’s up, Terry? Nothing the matter?”

  Terry shook his head and tried to look away.

  “Come over all of a muck sweat.”

  “Bit of a cold. Flu, could be.”

  “Scotch, that’s what you need. Double.”

  The crowd, grinning, egging one another on, clapped louder and louder as Eileen arched backwards, taking her weight on the palms of her hands, the first brave volunteer being pushed towards her by his mates.

  “Not hungry yourself, Terry?” Coughlan enquired, coming back with two glasses of Bells. “Had yours earlier, I daresay.”

  “What’s going on?” Terry asked, feeling his own perspiration along his back and between his legs, smelling it through the cigarette smoke and beer. “What’s all this about?”

  “Marjorie sends her love,” Coughlan said. “Told her I’d be seeing you tonight.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Coughlan!”

  “Exactly.” Coughlan’s hand was back on his shoulder, like a vice, and Terry, the glass to his lips, almost let it slip from his hand. “Bygones be bygones, eh, Terry? So much shafting under the bridge. Besides, things change, move on . . .” There w
as a loud roar from the jubilant crowd and then cheers. “. . . Musical beds, you might say. Keeps things fresh. Revives the appetite.” Coughlan looked pointedly towards the mirror, turning Terry so that he was forced to do the same. “Lovely young girl like that, Terry, shouldn’t take much persuading to get her round my place of an evening. Once in a while.” His face twisted into a smile. “Genuine redhead, natural. I like that.”

  Terry held his glass in both hands and downed the scotch.

  “I could have let Norbert loose on you, Terry. He’d have loved that. But no, this way’s best. Pals. Pals, yes, Terry?”

  Terry said nothing.

  “And then there’s the stuff from the other night. ’Course I don’t expect you to take it all. Dozen sets, say? Sony? VCRs? Stereo? Matt black, neat, you’ll like those. I’ll have them round your place tomorrow night. One, one-thirty. Norbert, I expect he’d like to make delivery himself.”

  Terry Cooke looked at the floor.

  “I shouldn’t wait around, Terry, to take her home. Someone’ll see she gets a lift, you don’t have to fret.”

  Back on her feet and shimmying along the bar to ‘Dancing Queen’, Eileen caught sight of Terry for the first time as he pushed through the door, spotted him and almost lost her step.

  There was a light burning on the landing, another in the back room, and Eileen stood for a full minute on the step, key poised, running over her excuses in her head. She’d half expected to get back and find her bags on the pavement, clothes flung all over the privet hedge. Thought, when she got inside, that he might be waiting with a knotted towel in his hand, wet, she’d known men do that; at least his fist. But he was sitting, Terry, in the old round-backed chair that was usually his mother’s, cup of tea cold in his hand.

  “Terry, I . . .”

  “You get on,” Terry said. “Time you’ve had your shower and that, I’ll be up.” He didn’t look her in the face.

  Twenty minutes later, when he slid into bed beside her, the backs of her legs were still damp from the shower and he shivered lightly as he pressed against her.

  “Terry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Put out the light.”

  Resnick and Millington were in the shop when Terry Cooke arrived, not yet ten-thirty and Millington poised to buy a nearly-new book club edition of Sense and Sensibility for his wife, while Resnick was thumbing through the shoebox of CDs, looking for something to equal the Charlie Parker he’d bought there once before.