Thin Men, Paper Suits

by Tin Larrick

  “Where to?”

  “The railway station.”

  I didn’t question him, and carried on round to Ashford Road. I pulled into the wide apron of the coach set-down and parked in a taxi rank.

  We stood outside the car.

  “This is where we met,” said Kevin, with mock-wistfulness.

  “Funny.”

  He fished around in his pocket, and brought out a single key attached to a plastic disc, with ‘124’ embossed on it. He held it up, then moved it out of my grasp as I reached for it.

  “I wondered why you were on him so closely,” he said.

  I swallowed.

  “If your only job was to help him move house twice in ten years, then you spent a lot more time with him than was really necessary, wouldn’t you say? I couldn’t work it out – and then I realised. That bloody rucksack he lived out of. He took it everywhere. The only thing he took when he ran out on Junior and his mum.”

  He gave me the key.

  “Took you by surprise, did it?” he said. “You left the estates, trying to better yourself, and the life caught you by surprise. New Ford Scorpio, nice semi-detached in Rodmill or somewhere, half your cash going on the wife to keep her hanging around, yeah? Not free, though, is it?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He shrugged.

  “You think we want it? That’s blood money, man. Literally. We don’t want it, and we don’t need it.”

  He turned to go. After a few steps he turned.

  “Take care of yourself, Peter. We may be a lot of things, but at least we’re free.”

  He walked down to the concourse, alongside the blue railings separating us from the platforms. He paused briefly to light a cigarette with my lighter, and disappeared from view.

  I looked down at the key, and followed him inside.

  It was still early. The concourse was deserted. Kevin was nowhere to be seen.

  I looked away down the empty platforms. The railway lines converged towards a point under Cavendish Bridge a mile or so in the distance, over which the sky was beginning to take on a pinkish tinge in the east as the sun thought about emerging properly. A wisp of steam rose from a vent behind a railway shed.

  I walked onto the concourse and headed for a bank of lockers, my feet echoing around the concourse as I walked. I passed the Inn on the Track, where I’d picked up Kevin. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Rows of silver chairs had been stacked on top of silver tables.

  I found the left-luggage area, and walked up and down the rows of lockers until I found 124.

  The rucksack was inside. I opened it. Bundles of dirty, crumpled notes, stuffed in the bag in no discernible order. I looked closer – Kevin hadn’t been lying. Several of the notes were covered in the dark brown spatter of what looked like dried blood.

  I thought of Junior collapsing backwards in a heap, dead before the bullet had exited his head. I thought of Kevin, noble in his rejection of wealth. I thought of his four cronies, each with their own resolute loyalty to their roots and their friends. I thought of DC Paul Hope and all my other colleagues, none of whom had any idea about the black dog on my shoulder, and I thought – no one really knows anyone.

  Then I thought of Claire, and, despite everything else, my heart skipped when I thumbed through the notes and made a rough estimate.

  I walked back to the car and flung the rucksack in the boot. I sat in the driver’s seat, my fist pushed up against my mouth, trying to concentrate, but concentrating on the wrong things. Even though it was all but futile, I was trying to convince myself that I hadn’t yet made my decision, that I had not yet taken a step down a road I could not return from.

  I lit another cigarette with the spare disposable lighter from the glove box, and coughed as the dry tar caked on my throat. I imagined of the faces of Claire and the girls when I told them we had a bit of spare cash.

  I stared for a moment at the sky. The clear pink dawn was sullied only by the final wisps of black smoke curling away in the distance from the remnants of the Cannon.

  I started the engine.

  ****

  The Sergeant by Tin Larrick

  “Has this happened before?”

  The sergeant is young, but not so young that she feels any kind of maternal tendencies towards him. His voice is soft but insistent, like the quiet cascade of sugar into a tin.

  “I mean, I know we’ve never been here before – I checked – but has this ever happened before? To you?”

  He is sitting next to her on the sofa. Her eyes drop to where his hand is resting on his thigh. The wedding ring is brightly polished. It looks new. There is a small white stain by his knee, next to where his fingers are spread. Shaped like a star, it is stark against the black cloth.

  He sees where she is looking.

  “My son. Lobbed his dessert over me before I came to work. I didn’t have time to change.” The sergeant adjusts his body armour and belt. They look bulky and uncomfortable. “He’s just turned eighteen months,” he adds.

  The absurdity of learning about this young stranger’s family life – and the irony with which it counters her current situation – causes a scoff to leave her. It comes out like a cross between a cough and a sob. The sound is like a glass overflowing.

  She shuts her eyes and takes some deep breaths, the handkerchief still pressed against her throbbing mouth, and tries to get herself under control.

  She isn’t yet calm, but she is in a considerably better place than she had been twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes ago, two constables with arms like iron girders had been walking all over the house – kicking at the broken glass in the kitchen, examining the upended chair, talking into their radios. Blue lights had strobed through the lounge window from outside on Kings Drive, and with the background noise of clipped stereo chatter from their radios she had thought she might become hysterical.

  The constables had given her leaflets:

  DON’T SUFFER IN SILENCE

  DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IS A CRIME – REPORT IT

  YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO A LIFE WITHOUT FEAR

  The leaflets have phone numbers on them. Support groups. Websites that have ‘panic buttons’ you can click in case you are discovered browsing such things. Illicit, like pornography. The leaflets make her feel exposed, like a statistic, just another problem on a conveyor belt of problems.

  The constables have gone now. It is just her and the sergeant. He has turned his radio off, and has presumably parked his car away from the house. The quiet is helping. His voice is helping. But now her mouth hurts.

  “Listen, I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

  She can feel his eyes on her, but she is not looking at him. She is looking at her reflection in the glass of the dresser door. Her lip is swollen and bloody, her face streaked with tears black from make-up, her hair a curious dichotomy – twisted and wild on one side of her head, still neatly styled on the other.

  The sergeant can smell her, she knows that. He can smell her perfume, the two glasses of claret she drank earlier in the evening, maybe even her blood on the carpet.

  She wants to listen to him, to believe him, but can’t. She feels manipulated, unsure, reluctant to yield to a sales pitch – or any other kind of commitment. It was commitment that got her here in the first place.

  She is embarrassed. She wants to say It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have called but realises that this will sound like denial, even though she knows it isn’t that. She just feels that she is not the type to call the police, not with her expensive wine collection and Laura Ashley soft furnishings and Mercedes 4x4. Calling the police is for other women to do. This was a poor woman’s service. Rich people address their violence in private. She expects a high standard of customer service, and this isn’t personal.

  Another hiccuped laugh escapes her. She has never thought of herself as a snob, but at this moment it seems she has little else to cling to.

 
The sergeant smiles, misunderstanding her laughter, and she realises she has barely said a word to him.

  “Look, I’ll leave now. But think about what I said, okay? You don’t have to live like this. Here’s my number.”

  He passes her a small white card. It has a blue crest on the top, with a string of block-printed words underneath – email addresses, job title, the station phone number.

  “I’ve put my number on the back. My mobile number,” he adds. “If you change your mind, you can give me a call. Or a text. Any time.”

  He gets up to go, leaving her looking at the card. The mobile number is written in biro, and questions flash through her mind.

  Does he give his mobile number to all the women he meets?

  Is it his personal number? Or a work mobile?

  Should I call it?

  Will I call it?

  Suddenly it is personal. She looks up to speak. She wants to apologise for being rude, but he has gone.

  *

  The phone rings three hours later. Her husband is in a cell, sleeping off the effects of two bottles of wine and a large brandy. They will keep him in till the morning and interview him, but if she doesn’t give a statement, they’ll have to kick him out.

  Kick him out. The caller’s exact words.

  The caller is not the sergeant that visited earlier. This one is a custody sergeant. She doesn’t want to give him a statement.

  She fingers the card he gave her, running options over in her mind. Should she call? What if he’s finished his shift? What if he is home, making love to his wife, his phone on the bedside cabinet, an alien number flashing on the screen?

  - Who’s that, darling?

  - Just some victim of domestic violence I spoke with earlier.

  - Another one? Don’t answer it, come here…

  The likelihood of this eventuality galvanises her into some kind of action. She goes upstairs and packs a small overnight bag – red leather, Louis Vuitton – and returns downstairs where she retrieves her coat from a hook in the hallway.

  She takes the keys to the Mercedes, unsure if she has drunk too much to drive, quietly thrilled by the realisation that she doesn’t care.

  The business card is on the hall table, printed side down. She stares at it for a moment, the scrawl of the mobile number curiously childlike, then switches off the lights and leaves the house, locking the card and the bloodstains and broken glass in the house behind her.

  *

  Three days pass. The swelling on her lip subsides. She doesn’t work – hasn’t had to for years – and finds herself curiously aimless without the anchor of domestic duty to shape her day.

  Charlotte is an old schoolfriend. Their lives growing up have run parallel, but have only sporadically touched. Charlotte also has a Mercedes, and although she provided sanctuary in her new cottage in Ratton without hesitation, the faintest hint of disdain was apparent in her face when she saw the injury.

  She rises early so as not to disturb the household or provoke counsel from Charlotte about what to do next, and walks around Gildredge Park and the Arndale Centre, punctuating her time with lattes and bagels.

  Her phone rings constantly, of course, and she surprises herself when she drops it in a bin without hesitation. Her daily meandering feels like a vacuum between one life and another, and the surreal light draping this halfway-state helps with dramatic new-chapter gestures like tossing her mobile phone. She buys herself a new one, infusing the empty contacts directory with meaning. It is the blank canvas upon which she can paint a new life.

  She is in Boots, staring at the perfumes, when she sees the sergeant. He is clearly off-duty – he wears a denim jacket and woollen scarf, and is saddled with industrial-sized packs of nappies. He seems to be in a rush – his stubbled cheeks are red – and he does a double-take as he hurries past.

  He stops to say hello, she knows, before he has fully placed her. A smile breaks out across his face, which then falters ever so slightly.

  “Hello,” he says. “How… how are you?” The question is obviously fatuous, but what else could he say?

  “Okay,” she says, managing the smile she did not award him when they first met. She looks over his shoulder for anyone with him. He seems to be alone. “I’m doing okay.”

  His eyes flit momentarily to the scab on her lip, and she is suddenly acutely aware of the powerful lighting in the store, and the spaceship-white walls and ceiling in the perfume department that leave no room for shadow.

  “Did you… what happened?” he asks.

  “I’m in the process of leaving him,” she says, feeling conflicted even as she says it – she would disclose such private information to no one else, not even Charlotte, and especially not someone she was only meeting for the second time.

  “They had to release him without charge,” he says. “I wondered if…You didn’t phone.”

  Despite her attempts to regain her status as something other than a complete wreck, there is a fluttering in her chest. Was she meant to phone? Maybe he had been expecting her to. Maybe he didn’t give his number out to everyone.

  “I’m okay,” she says again, achieving, she feels, a facsimile of the confidence and dignity she is so used to portraying. “Thank you for your concern. It’s nice to see you.”

  She turns on her heel and leaves the store, knowing he is still standing there, knowing his eyes are on her back.

  *

  The wind on the promenade is cruel, like the worst kind of abuser. The Redoubt stronghold provides little shelter. Her eyes tear, and her cheeks are numb. The chiffon scarf is barely keeping her hair in check; she sniffs, knowing the cold may make her nose run.

  Standing opposite her, the sergeant looks uncomfortable. He is again off-duty, still wearing his denim jacket and scarf, but he has shaved, and the wind has scraped red cold against his skin. He keeps looking around him – in case, she presumes, anyone sees them.

  The mint-green barriers on the promenade are caked with rust. Sporadic sheets of drizzle whip across their faces, while the white surf lashes at the stanchions of the pier in the distance. The golden lights of the hotel lounges lining the seafront behind them are warm and peaceful and inviting.

  The sergeant drills his hands down into his pockets.

  “Nice place to meet,” he says. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Are you?”

  He doesn’t answer, but directs the question back at her with his eyes – Why did you call?

  “I’m going to leave him,” she says. “I… I just don’t know how.”

  “What about the prosecution?” he asks.

  She just bites her lip and shakes her head. How can she?

  “Where are you staying?” he asks.

  “With a friend, but she… I don’t want to impose, you know?”

  He nods.

  “So how can I help?” he says.

  How can I help? The words are colder than the wind; formal, as if he is wearing his uniform – but then, what else had she been expecting? Reading, naming and interpreting implicit signs – real or imagined – demanded more of her than her current state allowed.

  “I need to get some things. I want to make sure that… I need someone there. In case, you know.”

  I need someone to protect me.

  She's been back, of course – she went to get the card with the sergeant's number on; slinking in on a Monday evening when he was either in the pub or playing squash. She knows when he isn't home, but...

  “I just don’t want him to… try anything. You don't have to do anything, just be there. I couldn't call the station, I just couldn't. And besides..."

  He raises a finger and presses it gently to her lips. It is soft and warm against her cold mouth. Electricity fires through her veins. He is no longer looking around for witnesses – his eyes are fixed on hers.

  "You don't have to worry. I'll help. I'll protect you."

  He withdraws his finger. She sees a faint white band where he has removed his wedding
ring.

  *

  The poor weather continues, and the sergeant’s wife – clearly no more than thirty-five – walks from the open boot of their Volvo estate to their front door, laden with Tesco bags. The sergeant's wife is attractive, she can see that, but weighed down by motherhood – something she has never had to concern herself with – and slowly passing years. She wears a shapeless black duffle coat, and, although her honey-coloured hair is a pleasant contrast against the bleakness of the day, it is tousled and scruffy from the wind.

  No doubt the sergeant's wife scrubs up beautifully, she thinks, but – make-up or no – the happiness in her face is patently obvious. It is tired, sure, but it is a face free of fear, of worry, of lies.

  She bought it. Driven by the memory of his flesh against her lips, she walked into the police station in Grove Road and announced her desire to give evidence for the prosecution in the case against her husband. A rather grandiose statement, as it happened, because without her statement there was no case against her husband. She nearly changed her mind again when she learned that providing a statement now, nearly a week after the fact, would entail her husband being arrested again at the marital home, but another touch of the seconds would have made her feel more ridiculous than she already did, and so she went through with it. Besides, she could still feel his hands on her mouth.

  She feels like she is on a rapidly-descending escalator, but the very bottom, where she would have to get off and walk, is invisible in a sea of darkness.

  The sergeant works shifts with extended periods of days off, so it has been necessary to watch his house for several days to catch him going to work. At five in the evening – an hour after the shopping has been unloaded; time enough for them to make love and wash – the sergeant leaves the house, his uniform concealed by a bulky ski jacket. He doesn’t take the Volvo, but a small Peugeot.

  She follows him to the station, where the watch becomes more difficult. Patrol cars fly out at regular intervals, blue lights flaring, and it is difficult to know which is his. In the end, after waiting nearly an hour, she has to take a chance, and she resolves to follow the next car that leaves.