by John Harvey
“Bloody dole,” Jackie said, standing behind his mother’s chair. “That’s the only place that poor git’s fit for movin’ on to.”
“Come on, Jackie,” Ethel said, rising. “We’re through here. You can give me a lift home.” And to Eileen, almost without pause for breath. “Seeing as you’re babysitting my granddaughter’s money, Miss High and Mighty, you’d best find out from her what we already agreed between us. Before you spend it all for her.”
Resnick waited around the corner until Raymond had unlocked the metal shutters guarding the shop front and heaved them from sight. Time enough for him to become absorbed in a familiar routine. The youth was midway through rocking a king size fridge-freezer out on to the pavement, when he saw Resnick walking towards him and nearly let go of the appliance, narrowly avoiding blackening several toes.
“Now then, Ray-o,” Resnick said, adopting the avuncular approach. “Anything I can do to give you a hand?”
“No way, Mr Resnick. I’m fine. Thanks all the same.”
“Just so long as you’re sure. Not want to see you causing yourself an injury. Not now you’re nicely settled.”
“Settled, Mr Resnick?” Sweat was palpable on Raymond’s upper lip.
“Uncle Terry. Fond of you he was. You’ll have done nicely out of the will, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Raymond stammered and invited Resnick inside; he didn’t fancy talking family business out there, arse to the wind. Within twenty minutes, Resnick knew it all. All there was to know. When Terry Cooke had moved into Ethel’s house, he had taken over responsibility for the mortgage and paid it off eighteen months back, but in his own name; the premises they were standing in, shop and flat above, were owned outright, and the two lock-up garages held firm on a ninety-nine year lease. At the accountant’s final reckoning, the cash value accruing from Terry Cooke’s various accounts was close to the seventy-five thousand mark after death duties and tax. Pounds, Raymond? Not ECU?”
“Eh?”
“Forget it.” Resnick picked up a Black and Decker power drill and surveyed the bit. “Who was it said, Raymond, crime didn’t pay?”
“Crime?”
“Just a figure of speech, think nothing of it.” Resnick pushed past Raymond on his way towards a wayward pile of old 78s, balanced on top of a Zanussi washing machine, which, unlike the records, had the appearance of being alarmingly new. “How’s your dad taken all this, then?” Resnick asked. “Put out a shade, I shouldn’t wonder. And then there’s all the old crowd him and Terry used to run with. Norbert, of course. Tommy DiReggio. Coughlan, too.” Resnick smiled benignly. “Nasty temper, Coughlan. I doubt he’s the kind who’d take well to being left out in the cold.”
Raymond was shifting his weight from one foot to the other like someone whose Y-fronts have suddenly shrunk several sizes too tight. “Coughlan,” he tried, “I don’t think him and me Uncle Terry spoke for months.”
“At the funeral, though, wasn’t he, Ray-o. There to pay his respects. Collect his due.”
“I don’t know, I . . .”
“This lot here, Raymond,” Resnick said, lifting the uppermost disc towards him and blowing a skein of surface dust carefully away. “Kettelby. ‘In a Monastery Garden’. You’ll not get much of a price for this kind of thing, I’ll wager.”
“Take them, Mr Resnick,” Raymond exclaimed gratefully. “Take them all. The lot. Yours for free.”
Smiling, Resnick reached inside his overcoat and brought out his wallet. “Can’t do that, Raymond. Generous as it is. I mean, just imagine how it might look. Senior police officer accepting gifts. Just not on.”
Peeling off a pair of fivers, he pushed them into Raymond’s unwilling hand. “If there’s some kind of a box you could put them in, maybe you’d not mind carrying them out to the car.”
Where Raymond was concerned, it was destined to be that kind of a day. No sooner was he back from the local café with a can of Coke and a sausage bap, removing the ‘Back in Ten Minutes’ sign from the window, than Frankie Farmer and Tommy DiReggio arrived, the pair of them, seeking to establish that as far as Ray-o was concerned, if they should lay their sticky hands on anything movable from lead piping all the way up the line to a score of boxed and unbooted Dell Dimension XPS P133 computers with an extra 16 megabytes of SDRAM memory, then he would be happy to oblige them at the same competitive rates as before.
Raymond assured them that he would. No chance, he asked, of you offloading a couple of those computers this side of Christmas?
One of the Malloy brothers was next – Raymond thought it was the prizefighter, but he wasn’t sure and didn’t like to ask – stopping by to ask more or less the same question. Raymond guessed he wouldn’t be the last. For himself, he couldn’t see why they were all getting so wound up, business as usual, surely they could all see the sense in that? But it irked him, the way each and every one of his uncle’s old mates were getting in these little digs at one another, expecting him to favour one of them over the rest. Even his dad had been round to slip in his ten pence worth, offering advice where it wasn’t wanted. Best thing they could do, Raymond thought, was grow up, the lot of them. Start acting like businessmen instead of extras from some rip-off Tarantino movie – Mr Crap and Mr Shite. Chill out.
It was Sarah last, something bright and agitated about her as if she’d dropped an E before leaving the house. All over Raymond, wanting to know what he was doing after closing. Why didn’t he shut up shop now, he was his own boss, wasn’t he? No one looking over his shoulder. How about a drink, Ray-o? Let’s go up the pub. A curry. Clubbing later. How about it, Ray-o, eh? Eh? Her tongue was quick between his teeth and she had only to reach inside his jeans for him to come in her hand.
They paid court to Eileen, too. Norbert Breakshaw sent flowers, Frankie and Tommy a bottle of pink champagne. Coughlan was waiting for her when she left work, a private party in the conference room of some small hotel on the Mansfield Road, the kind with ideas above its station. A couple of hundred for an hour’s work, schoolgirl first and then the nurse; uniforms, they went down a treat. She picked out Coughlan straight off, leaning against a Jag like it was rightfully his.
“Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.”
Eileen pointed at the waiting taxi. “I’m all right, thanks.”
“Hop in.”
She opened the cab door. “No, it’s fine.”
Coughlan reached into the rear of his car and when he straightened there was a sawn-off shotgun in his hands. The taxi driver found first faster than Damon Hill and Eileen was left standing, make-up bag in one hand, weekend case holding her costumes in the other.
He didn’t take her straight home; first one drinking club and then another. When she asked for mineral water, he brought her a large gin. When he caught her pouring the bulk of it into a plastic plant pot, he slapped her round the face and no one in the place, crowded as it was, moved to stop him.
“Scared?” he asked, hand high up on her thigh. “Frightened?”
“No.”
“You stupid tart, you fucking should be.”
Outside the house, Terry’s house, as she still thought of it, Eileen waited to see if Coughlan would switch off the engine, follow her in, weighing up in her mind what she would do if he did. But what he did was light a cigarette and sit there, smelling faintly of drink.
“Your Terry,” he said finally, “I suppose you think he was pretty big?”
Eileen pushed open the car door and swung one foot on to the pavement.
“I’ll tell you this, he was nothing. No ambition. Small time. Terry and all those arsewipes he wasted his time with. You and me, we can do better.” He had hold of her arm this time, fingers digging in. “Stuff he would have shat himself silly just thinking about. You know what I’m saying? My connections. Your money. That bundle he left you, eighteen months we’ll double it. Treble. You got my word.” Still holding her arm with one hand, he reached across with the other and squeezed her breast.
Eileen star
ed back into his face and gave him nothing, no expression, no word. “Run along,” he said.
Eileen closed the car door quietly, made herself walk slowly to the front door, reaching for her keys. Halfway up the stairs, she leaned against the bannister and hugged herself till the blood ceased to flow, head resting forward against the smooth paleness of polished wood.
Outside, enclosed in the darkness of his brother-in-law Frankie’s Sierra, Tommy DiReggio watched it all unfold. Coughlan and Eileen, he could see the way it was going to be. Unless he and Frankie took steps of their own.
What he didn’t see, at the opposite end of the street, binoculars trained through the rear windows of a battered transit van, were Khan and Naylor, watching him.
Resnick took Ronnie Rather half of his family size Melton Mowbray pie, a few bottles of Worthington White Shield, Ronnie’s favourite, and the remaining third of the Bushmills. He also took a present, wrapped in bright green paper peppered with crimson Santas and silver stars. It was a little after eight o’clock on Christmas Eve.
The last he’d heard from Kevin Naylor, on obs near the Cooke house, there seemed to be a party going on inside. Late that afternoon, one of the florists from the market had delivered a couple of dozen roses, followed swiftly by a baker’s and confectioner’s van, from the back of which a ginger-haired youth in a white apron carried a cake thick with pink and white icing. And candles. There was a lull then till early evening, when Sarah and her mother made a run for the corner shop and returned with several six-packs of lager. After that it was Eileen, carrying what might have been wine, Jackie Cooke with a giant card in a pale blue envelope and finally Raymond, hands in pockets, whistling.
Perhaps, Resnick thought, they’d finish up with a family excursion to midnight mass.
He poured Ronnie a beer, careful not to tip in the sediment lurking at the bottom of the bottle, set a generous slice of pie on a plate, adding a pickled onion from the bottle in Ronnie’s cupboard and a forkful of Branston pickle. He was glad to see Ronnie wasn’t living by meals on wheels alone, although from the light that came into his one good eye whenever he mentioned Cheryl, who delivered his pre-cooked lunches wearing one of a selection of brightly coloured leisure suits, Resnick could tell they were playing an increasingly important part in his life.
After a while, Resnick pointed at the parcel he had placed on the table. “Open it for me, Charlie, will you?”
So Resnick cut the string and folded back the paper, revealing the half a dozen gems he had uncovered amongst the recordings of Joan Hammond and Josef Locke, ‘Count Your Blessings’ by the Luton Girls Choir and Flanagan and Allen crooning ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’.
“By God, Charlie. Where ever d’you turn up these?”
One by one, Resnick settled the prize 78s on to the old gramophone and together they sat back and listened to the music of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey, ‘Clarinet a la King’, ‘Begin the Beguine’ and ‘Getting Sentimental Over You’, Ronnie Rather playing along with the trombone parts inside his head. He was sliding through ‘Opus One’, note by note with Dorsey, when Resnick’s mobile sounded. Khan’s voice was clear and to the point. Shots had been heard from inside the house, people were injured, the armed response unit was on its way. Not Midnight Mass then, Resnick thought, after all.
The roads were icy and Resnick drove quickly but with care. By the time he arrived, the street was cordoned off at both ends, the Cooke house spotlit and surrounded, armed officers kneeling in front gardens and stretched out along the rooftops opposite. Tommy DiReggio, bleeding heavily from a shotgun wound to the groin and barely conscious, was being stretchered to a waiting ambulance by paramedics. Frankie Farmer was being treated inside a second ambulance, having received a glancing flesh wound to the shoulder. Somehow, in the fracas, Raymond had stabbed himself in the hand with a knife. On the far side of the street, Sarah and her mum were pleading with another of the paramedics for tranquillizers. Jackie Cooke sat on the kerb, numbed, drinking tea.
Khan and Naylor were standing to the rear of one of several police vehicles, hands jammed down into pockets, breath bright and silvery on the air. Close beside them, the officer in charge of the Armed Response team was communicating with his marksmen, a negotiator with a man’s uniformed topcoat belted over her ball gown, was talking over a mobile telephone to someone in the house.
“Who’s still inside?” Resnick asked.
“Coughlan,” Naylor said. “Locked himself in one of the bedrooms, upstairs, front. Injured, we don’t know how bad.”
“Anybody else?”
“The old lady and Eileen. That’s her we’re talking to now.”
Resnick looked across at the house and nodded. “Fill me in on what happened.” “Ten thirty,” Naylor began, “thereabouts, Farmer and DiReggio drove up and went inside. They were carrying what looked like bottles, so we thought, you know, they were there for the party.”
“We now have reason to believe,” Khan said, “what one of them was carrying was a gun. One at least.”
“Go on.”
“How long,” came the negotiator’s voice from behind them, “since you heard his voice?”
“Just past eleven,” Naylor said, “Coughlan arrived. Jackie Cooke came to the door and tried to stop him getting in. After that, it all happened pretty fast. Farmer and DiReggio got in on the act and there were punches left and centre. Eileen comes out and takes Coughlan to one side, reasoning with him. Looks like she’s calmed him down, because he’s walking back to his car. Eileen ushers the rest back inside. Only Coughlan doesn’t drive away. Instead he comes up with a shotgun, fires at the front of house and then he’s in through the front door.”
“Three more shots after that,” Khan said. “Possibly four.”
The negotiator took a pace towards Resnick, telephone held against her side. “Eileen’s spoken to Coughlan. He wants to give himself up.”
Resnick and the Armed Response officer exchanged glances.
“Have your men got him covered?” Resnick asked.
“Three times over.”
“Eileen,” the negotiator said into the telephone, “tell him to open the window wide, hand the weapon outside, holding it by the barrel, and drop it down into the garden. By the barrel, okay?”
There was silence as the curtain across the street moved a fraction to one side, fell back, then moved again; abruptly, a side window jerked open and a moment later the shotgun appeared, butt end first.
“Chuck it,” Khan said, to no one but himself.
Coughlan let the weapon fall and before it had reached the ground the first armed man was through the door.
What extra personnel could be spared from supervising the celebrations in the city centre were helping to take statements, recover physical evidence. Oblivious or exhausted, Ethel Cooke had retired to her bed.
Resnick found Eileen in the back garden, wearing no coat despite the icy cold. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll have to make a statement later.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“You did well. Kept your head.”
An orange glow dulled the night sky that was otherwise bright with stars.
“Why don’t you come back inside?” Resnick asked. “You’ll catch a chill.”
Eileen shook her head. “Sarah told me something, earlier. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.” Turning, she looked him in the eye. “I think I do,” she said. And then she told him what it was.
Resnick slipped off his coat and put it around her shoulders and she trembled lightly at his touch. Then he called in Khan and Naylor and issued new instructions. Made a call for reinforcements.
After almost two hours of shifting heavy furniture, stripping wallpaper, prising up boards, one of the officers called Resnick’s name. The tiny skeleton, less than a foot long, had been buried beneath the back room floor, wrapped in swathe after swathe of newspaper, then tied around with string.
There was a light still shining in Ethel Cooke’s room and Resnick knocked and waited, wondering what he might say. Happy birthday? Merry Christmas? The words froze on his lips.
My Little Suede Shoes
“So what do you think about it, Charlie?”
“What?”
“The Millennium.”
“Not a lot.”
What Resnick thought: I shall be two years older.
They were heading back from lunch at the house of some friends of Hannah’s in Southwell, a former art teacher who’d jacked it all in to restore furniture and support his partner who made batik wall hangings. Resnick’s stomach was still celebrating the collection of tofu lasagna and home-made parsnip wine. Hannah was driving. Her friends, Dermot and Belinda, were convinced the Millennium would bring about a positive change in the way people felt about the world’s ecology; they could already sense it in the atmosphere.
“I was talking to Trevor Lynton about it,” Hannah said. “You know, from Leisure Services.”
Resnick didn’t think he did.
“Seems there’s all kinds of plans – fireworks in the Old Market Square, decorated barges on the Trent, lasers lighting up the sky from a dozen high points all around the county. The one I liked best, though, a giant hologram of Robin Hood across the top of Colwick Wood.”
“Lottery funding, all this then?” Resnick asked. “Or straight out the Council Tax?”
Hannah, for whom the idea of celebration, almost any kind of celebration, was a positive thing, accelerated into the centre lane, rounding a maroon Rover towing a caravan and ducking back not so many feet short of a Ford Sierra heading in the opposite direction. Resnick managed not to say a thing.
“I wonder,” Hannah said, several miles closer to the city, “what we’ll be doing, that New Year, Charlie? I wonder if we’ll be seeing it in together.”
“Can see Colwick Wood, you know,” Resnick said, trying for a smile. “Patch of waste ground at the end of the street.”