Off Minor

by John Harvey

  “It was on special offer.”

  “Needing to get shot of it, then. You’re sure it’s okay? Fresh?”

  What did he think she was going to do, pay out over six pounds for fish that wasn’t fresh? “This morning’s catch, his word on it.”

  Michael added a little water to his Scotch, not too much; where was the sense in buying good whisky only to water it down? “You can never believe them,” he said. “Salesmen. Say whatever it takes. Stands to reason, it’s their job, selling. If you have to bend the truth a little, well …” tasting his drink “… you bend the truth.”

  Michael was a salesman, sort of, himself. Machine tools, he had tried to explain in detail once, but gone off in a huff when she’d been slow to understand, accusing her of being thick. She stopped herself thinking about Michael, the occasions when he might be tempted to bend the truth.

  “Anyway,” she said, “he’s not a salesman, he’s a fishmonger.”

  Michael laughed and slipped a little more whisky into his glass. “Wears a striped apron and straw hat, does he?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, he does.”

  Michael leaned over and gave her a kiss; not on the mouth, but a kiss all the same. She wished he wouldn’t patronize her so much.

  “How much was it then, this whole salmon?”

  “Only four pounds. I told you, it was a bargain.” Michael sniffed. “Four pounds. Better be good.”

  After dinner, Michael liked to stretch out in the lounge, swing one of his legs over the side of the armchair. When Lorraine had been growing up, it was something her mother had been forever telling her about, the way it stretched the covers out of shape. Together they would watch TV for a while, once Lorraine had finished in the kitchen. Usually she would have to nudge him awake and then they’d probably watch the headlines on the news and if there was nothing special, like a plane crash or another pile-up on the M1, start to get ready for bed.

  Sometimes, especially at weekends, they lingered downstairs and Michael would put some Chris de Burgh on the CD player, Chris Rea, Dire Straits.

  The first time he had made love to her, in the studio flat he’d moved to after separating from his wife, he had programmed “The Lady in Red” and then pressed the repeat button. This will be our song, Lorraine had thought, but never said.

  Now, there were still times when, as she was getting undressed, moving between the dressing table and the bathroom, Michael would lean on to one elbow, reach out a hand towards her and touch the inside of her leg as she passed, fingers stroking the inside of her thigh.

  Fridays. Occasionally Saturdays, especially if they’d been round for dinner with friends, Michael passing round the third bottle of wine and staring down the front of someone else’s wife’s dress.

  Lorraine remembered once, a month or so back, she had been feeling especially loving, had put a CD on the machine herself and sat, cross-legged, on the carpet near Michael’s chair, resting her head against his knee. When “The Lady in Red” had come on, she had asked, something of a wistful quality in her voice, “Do you remember, Michael, when we first heard this?”

  “No,” Michael said. “Should I?”

  Lorraine sat in front of the mirror, dabbing a ball of mauve cotton wool around her eyes. She could hear Michael urinating in the bathroom, one thing her mother would never have stood for. She would go on and on at Lorraine’s dad, telling him if he couldn’t direct his flow quietly against the sides of the bowl, then please be thoughtful enough to run the cold tap until he was through performing. Michael didn’t even close the bathroom door.

  And as for farting … well, she didn’t think her mother acknowledged that the word existed, never mind the deed. Not in the nice part of Rugeley, where they lived.

  “Tired?” she asked, as Michael rolled into bed alongside her.

  “Knackered!”

  “Poor sweetheart!”

  She reached under the duvet and began, lightly, to stroke his stomach, just gently, but he grunted and rolled over, shrugging her away.

  That was that.

  If she’d been Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Lorraine thought, she wouldn’t allow herself to be so easily dissuaded. She would run her fingers down his back, but firmly, carry on till she was past his buttocks, wait until his legs widened apart.

  As they surely would: if she were Julia Roberts.

  Now Michael curled away on to his side and was beginning to snore.

  “Michael,” she said, nudging him with her toe.

  “I was just getting off to sleep.”

  “What I was going to say before, you know when you were in the shower …”

  “That was hours ago.”

  “I know. Only …”

  “Only what, for heaven’s sake?”

  “That little girl, the one that went missing. You know, it was all over the papers …”

  “What about her?”

  “They found her body. She’d been murdered.”

  Michael turned over sharply, facing her. “Of course she had. What else did you think had happened?”

  When Lorraine awoke, the clock at her side of the bed read 3:28. At first she thought Michael had stirred, disturbing her, either that or she needed to go to the bathroom and relieve her bladder. When she realized it was neither, she slid her legs beneath the duvet and found her slippers on the floor. Her dressing gown was hanging behind the bedroom door.

  Emily lay upside down with one leg hanging over the side of the bed, the other beneath the pillow. Her head was pushed against the wooden base, strands of auburn hair trailing down. Her nightie had become nicked up in the tangle of sheet around her waist and Lorraine, careful not to wake her, eased it back over her legs.

  Since Michael had been forced to take a job almost two hours away, his daughter was frequently in bed before he returned home; the only time he got to see her was forty-five minutes in the mornings and at weekends. It was Lorraine who fetched her from school, who made her tea and listened to her chatter; said, “Ooh! Yes, lovely!” at her paintings—great sploshes of red and purple on gray paper, which later were stuck to the fridge-freezer door.

  It was Lorraine, more often now than not, who dropped Emily off at Diana’s house, her mother, Michael’s first wife; Lorraine who collected her, seven hours later, trying not to notice the older woman’s face, the dark and swollen eyes, the tears.

  Lorraine wasn’t sure how long she stood there in the half-dark, looking down at her stepdaughter, while the images conjured up by the news report nibbled away at the edges of her mind.

  Eleven

  Patel had been out on the street for less than an hour: a dull, run-of-the-mill end-of-year day, the kind that promises nothing, other than sooner or later it will end, when someone spat in his face.

  He was on his way to interview the assistant manager of a building society near the corner of Lister Gate and Low Pavement about a recent robbery; wondering if, while he was there, he might ask about applying for a loan, moving upscale to something a little quieter, less prone to woodworm and suspect drains.

  On the descent past M & S, shaking his head politely, sorry, no, at the part-time market researchers who hovered hopefully with their clip boards and part-time smiles, Patel paused to look down at the painting a young man was reproducing in chalk on the flag stones, a Renaissance madonna and child. A little further on, close by the crossroads, a muscular black mime artist, in singlet and sweat pants despite the temperature, was making slow-motion moves to the taped accompaniment of what Patel understood to be electro-funk. Quite a crowd had gathered in a rough circle, mostly admiring. Patel walked around the outer edge, taking his time. The clock above the Council House had not long sounded the quarter hour and his appointment was for half past. He was reaching into his trouser pocket for a coin to throw down into the performer’s hat, when a blue van, descending Low Pavement towards the pedestrianized cross-street, braked sharply to avoid colliding with a pram.

  The woman, thirties, black L
ycra pants and a fake-fur coat, cigarette trailing from one hand, swerved the pram sharply round, its rear wheel finishing only a foot or so away from the offside wing of the van.

  “Great daft bastard!” she shouted. “What the ’ell d’you think you’re doing? No right to be driving down here any rate. Not like that, you’re sodding not.”

  “Lady …” tried the driver through his partly wound-down window.

  “Nearly ran smack into me, you know that. Right into the effing pram.”

  “Sweetheart …”

  “If I’d not had me eyes about me, you’d have gone right sodding over it, baby an’ all. Then what would you be doing?”

  “Darling …”

  “Up in bloody court on bleeding manslaughter.”

  “Look …”

  “You effing look!”

  Shaking his head, as if to suggest to the crowd deserting the mime show for this new drama that he wasn’t wasting any more of his breath, the driver wound up his window and engaged gear. The woman promptly stepped away from her pram and planted a kick low on the door, hard enough to dent the panel.

  The driver rapidly wound his window back down. “Watch it!”

  “You effing watch it! Who you telling to watch it? You’re the one, came down here, sixty miles an hour. Selfish bastard!” And she kicked the door a second time.

  “Right!” The driver wrenched open the van door and climbed out.

  The crowd fell quiet.

  “Excuse me,” Patel said, stepping forward. “Excuse me,” setting himself between them, “madam, sir.”

  “Fuck off, you!” shouted the woman. “Who asked you to butt your nose in?”

  “Yeh,” said the driver, giving Patel a push in the back, “one thing we don’t need, advice from the likes of you.”

  “All I am trying to do …” Patel tried.

  “Look,” the driver said, moving round him. “Piss off!”

  “I …” said Patel, reaching into his pocket for his identification.

  “Piss off!” said the woman, and, with a quick backward arch of her head, she spat into Patel’s face.

  “I am a police officer,” Patel finished, blinking away phlegm and saliva.

  “Yeh,” said the woman. “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.” Patel let his fingers slide from his warrant card and reached for a tissue instead. The driver got back into his van and the woman reversed her pram around him. Within moments, they were on their respective ways and most of the crowd had gone back to watching the mime or were wandering off to continue window shopping. Only Lynn Kellogg stayed where she was, in the doorway of Wallis’s, doubtful if Patel had spotted her and wondering whether the tactful thing would be to slip away unnoticed.

  It didn’t take her long to decide; he was still in the same position when she touched him lightly on the arm and smiled. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” Patel nodded, tried to smile back. “Try to help and that’s what happens.”

  He screwed up the tissue and pushed it down into his pocket. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Got time for a coffee or something?”

  Patel looked at his watch. “Not really, but …”

  They walked through the ground floor of a small shop dedicated to the sale of pot-pourri, expensive wrapping paper and cardboard cutouts of benign-looking cats, upstairs into a small café largely patronized by women from Southwell or Burton Joyce wearing floral print dresses and good camel coats.

  “Why didn’t you carry through with it?” Lynn asked, stirring sugar into her cup.

  “Warrant card, you mean?”

  Lynn nodded.

  “Didn’t seem a great deal of point. Excuse me interrupting your little confrontation but I am a police officer. Not given their first reaction.” Patel tried the coffee and decided it tasted of very little. “Whatever I had showed them, if I had said I was in CID, a detective, I don’t think they would easily have believed me.”

  Lynn allowed herself a wry smile. “Any consolation, Diptak, I doubt they’d have believed me either.”

  The walk-through sweet store was full of small children tugging at their parents’ hands: “I want! I want! I want!” Lynn chose a small scoop of old-fashioned striped bull’s-eyes, some black liquorice with soft white centers, barley sugars, chocolate limes and a few strawberry fizzes filled with pink sherbet. She could always hand them round to the rest of the office; no law said she had to eat them all herself.

  “How much for these?”

  Sara Prine looked young in her uniform, more a fuchsia than a regular pink; a false apron, striped, at the front, meant to summon up some addled vision of bygone days, where everyone knew their place and kids’ treats weren’t squeezed from single-parent income support and excessive sugar didn’t rot your teeth.

  “One pound forty-eight.”

  Lynn raised an eyebrow, handed over a five-pound note. “Remember me?” she said.

  Of course, she had; those tight little cheeks sucked in tighter still, slight tremor of the hand as she gave Lynn her change.

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Not here.”

  “You’d prefer to come back to the station?”

  Sara’s shoulders tensed as she gave a quick, terse shake of the head.

  “When do you get a break?”

  “I’m on early lunch.”

  “How early?”

  “Eleven-thirty.”

  Early enough to be late breakfast. “I’ll meet you outside. We can find somewhere to sit.”

  Sara nodded again and took the bag from her next customer, setting it on the scale. Lynn popped a bull’s-eye into her mouth and left.

  “And the weapon?” Patel was saying.

  “The gun.”

  “Yes. You. say he took it from his pocket?”

  “His inside pocket, yes. A blue … donkey jacket, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.”

  “Like a work jacket, similar to that?”

  “Smarter. I mean, he didn’t look as if he’d nipped in from a building site. Besides, there was none of that reinforcement they have, real working ones, across the shoulders.”

  Patel nodded, wrote something in his book. The assistant manager had turned out to be an assistant manageress. He had waited at the corner of the inquiry desk until the buzzer sounded and he was waved through, escorted into a narrow, windowless room, barely large enough to hold a desk and two chairs, the chairs on which they now sat, Patel and Alison Morley. When he had asked her name, she had simply pointed to the badge pinned at an angle over her breast.

  “You don’t know, I mean, what kind of gun?”

  “No. Except that it was …”

  “Yes?”

  “Black. It was black.”

  “Long?”

  She shook her head. “Not very.” A pause. “I mean, I suppose it depends what you’re comparing it to.”

  Patel set down his pen and held out both hands, sideways on, approximately eight inches apart.

  “Is that long?” she said.

  “It depends.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen that film, on television. More than once. Clint Eastwood. He can’t get to finish his hamburger on account of this robbery taking place on the other side of the street. Anyway, there’s all this shooting and cars crashing, and then he’s standing there with this gun …”

  “A Magnum,” Patel said.

  “Is that what it is? Anyway, he’s pointing it down at this gangster, bank robber, whatever he is, pretending he doesn’t know if there are any bullets left or not. Which I think, well, it’s funny, but also it’s stupid, because if he’s a policeman, I mean a professional, he must know how many bullets he’s got left in his gun. Don’t you think so?”

  Patel nodded. “I suppose …”

  “I mean, if you were on duty and armed, you’d know how many bullets you had left, wouldn’t you?”

  Patel, who had never been armed on duty and earnestly hoped that he never would, told her that, yes, he hoped that he would.
/>   “Anyway,” Alison Morley said, “that gun was big.”

  “‘A .45 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world,’” Patel said, quoting from the film as accurately as he could remember. “And the weapon the man pointed at you through the glass, it wasn’t that size?”

  “Nothing like. But frightening enough all the same.”

  “You were scared?”

  She looked back at Patel, smiling at the corners of her mouth. “I thought I was going to wet myself,” she said.

  Lynn Kellogg and Sara Prine were sitting on a bench not far from where Sara worked; they were dipping into Lynn’s diminishing bag of sweets as they talked. Lynn chatting to her about her job at first, trying to get her to relax a little, some chance.

  “There isn’t anything else I can tell you,” Sara said, selecting a strawberry fizz. “About finding that poor girl’s body. I’ve been over it again and again in my mind.”

  “I wanted to ask you about your boyfriend,” Lynn said.

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Yes, Raymond.”

  “Raymond isn’t my boyfriend.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought …”

  “That was the first time I’d ever seen him. That evening.”

  “Oh,” said Lynn, looking at her half-profile, Sara less than keen on eye contact, “I thought …”

  “I’d known him longer?”

  “Yes, I suppose …”

  “Because I went with him?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Sara looked at Lynn then, a dart of the head, round and away.

  “We didn’t do anything, you know.”

  “Look, Sara …”

  “I mean, nothing happened.”

  “Sara …”

  “Nothing serious.”

  Just for a moment, lightly, Lynn touched the girl’s arm. “Sara, it’s none of my business.”

  Sara Prine got to her feet, brushing puffs of pink sherbet away from the front of her uniform. Higher up the street, outside C & A, a busker wearing a comic hat and a red nose was singing “There’s a Blue Ridge Round my Heart, Virginia,” accompanying himself on banjo. It wasn’t the version Lynn had heard in the station canteen.

  “Sara,” she said, trying for the intonation of a friend, an older sister.