Wasted Years cr-5

by John Harvey

  The atmosphere in the CID room was tense, simmering, waiting, if not to explode, at least to let off a head of steam. The workmen had finally got the central heating system working again, floor boards had been replaced, furniture dragged from corridors and odd corners; Resnick had his office back to himself. Space to think, plan, enjoy a deli sandwich without being looked at askance. He was polishing off a salami and gorgonzola on light rye when the phone rang.

  “Resnick. CID.”

  “Neil Park.”

  Neil was a senior probation officer, a fair-weather County fan, a man whom Resnick trusted and might have liked had not the ambivalent relationship between the police and the probation service stood between them.

  “You were interested in who’s been assigned to Prior.”

  Resnick waited.

  “Pam Van Allen. D’you know her?”

  Resnick had an unclear picture of a woman in her midthirties, not tall, darkish hair-not worn long, he remembered, cut quite close to her head. “I think so,” Resnick said. “Who she is, anyway. I don’t recall speaking to her.”

  “She’s good,” Neil Park said. “Reliable. Doesn’t take any pushing around.”

  “Will she talk to me?”

  A hesitation at the end of the line, longer than Resnick liked.

  “She might.”

  “But you’ll not suggest that she does?”

  “That’s right.”

  Thanks a lot, Resnick thought. “Didn’t see much of you this season,” he said.

  Neil Park laughed. “Work’s bad enough without suffering on my day off and paying for the pleasure.”

  Resnick thanked him and rang off. Twenty minutes later, shuffling through the past few days of incident reports, he remembered that Pam Van Allen’s hair wasn’t really dark at all: it was that shade of gray that in some lights looks almost silver.

  What must he had been thinking of?

  Prior hadn’t reacted to her name. Sat there and answered her questions, briefly, not impolitely, never avoiding her eye. His face was sallow, lines curved from his mouth, his cheeks were lightly sunken in. The accent wasn’t local, Pam thought. Oh, there was an overlay, words and phrases; but below all of that it was harsh, southern, London or close.

  “You appreciate it’ll be difficult,” she said. “Readjusting.”

  He glanced up at her quickly, keeping his head angled down. It was almost mischievous, that look wrinkling his eyes.

  Pam hurried on. “Being in here, it’s hard not to get …”

  “Institutionalized.”

  “Yes.”

  He spread one hand upon the table, the other resting, loosely clenched, upon his knee. “You’ll help me.”

  She nodded. “Yes. As far as I can.” The room was suddenly small and short of air. Sweat ran in a single line along Prior’s face, running from his short hair to his close-shaven chin. “Certainly, we’ll find you somewhere to live. At first. While you get sorted.”

  “Somewhere?”

  “A hostel. A place in a hostel, that’s the most likely.”

  Prior looked round at the walls. “I thought I was getting out? Released.”

  “On parole.”

  “’Course.”

  “The hostel,” Pam said, “it probably won’t be as bad as you think. Not too many rules. Only common sense. Anyway …” Was that her perspiration she could smell or his? “… it’s only temporary.”

  “You said.”

  “While you find your feet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Find work.”

  Almost lazily, Prior shifted position, leaning one shoulder towards her. “You’ll help with that too.”

  “Of course. Yes. As far as we can. There are contacts we’ve built up and if they don’t pan out, there are workshop places. Retraining. Learning new skills.”

  Prior fixed her with his gaze. “Sounds great. Can’t wait.”

  Pam began to push her papers together, putting them back in her case. “Well,” she said, rising to her feet, “I shall come and see you again. With any luck I’ll have more definite news about the hostel place. And we’ll have a chance to talk in more detail about your plans.”

  “Good,” Prior said flatly. “I’d like that.”

  As she made a move to leave, he stood quickly and offered her his hand.

  Thirty-Six

  Keith had to hand it to his dad-ever since the day he’d decided to stop drinking stop was what he’d done. If Ladbroke’s had been offering odds, Keith would have been down there with every penny he could muster, happy to put it all on his old man to be back on the bottle before the week was out. After all, hadn’t he grown up hearing his parents lob promises like hand grenades between them? Listen, you’ve got my word … That’s the last time, I swear … I’ll never ever … Cross my heart and hope to die. “Promises,” his gran had said once, her sour commentary on the whole affair, “are like pie crusts-meant to be broken.”

  But here it was, not yet ten in the morning, his father had already stripped the paper from three of the walls in the bathroom and was moving in on the fourth. Consistently, the house was being transformed. The last of his dodgy lodgers had found his belongings, such as they were, stacked against the front wall. Instead of stale beer and puke, it smelled of disinfectant and fresh paint.

  “Set the tea to mash,” Rylands called from the bathroom door. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  In the kitchen, Keith delved his hand into a packet of Honey Nut Cheerios and started eating them dry.

  “Why don’t you sit down, have a proper breakfast?” Rylands said, rinsing his hands beneath the tap.

  “Not hungry.”

  “There’s plenty of bread. You could make yourself some toast.”

  “I said …”

  “Okay, okay.” The kettle coming to the boil, Rylands made the tea himself, swilling hot water round the inside of the brown earthenware pot and emptying it out before dropping in two tea bags, thinking about it, adding a third. “What you going to do today?” he asked.

  Keith pushed the cereal packet back in the cupboard and shrugged.

  “I could use a hand in the bathroom. Those tiles …”

  “No thanks.”

  None of the cups and saucers seemed to match and all of the mugs were chipped or cracked: he would have to chuck them out, get himself to the market and get them replaced.

  “How about work?” he asked, pouring the milk.

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you said this week you were going to look for a job?”

  “There are no bloody jobs.”

  “Pork Farms, they need people on the night shift.”

  “Don’t think I’m working in some factory, coming home stinking of meat.”

  Rylands poured the tea. “Suit yourself.”

  “If you don’t like it, I’ll move back out.”

  “That wasn’t what I said.”

  “Well …”

  Rylands passed Keith his tea, sat at the kitchen table and started to leaf through the Mirror. “Sure you don’t want any toast?”

  “Sure. Have some yourself, I’m not stopping you.”

  “Had mine a couple of hours ago.”

  “What d’you want, a medal?”

  Rylands looked at his son, sipped his tea; all that belligerence in the boy’s face, clenched fists, his stance. A young lifetime on the defensive, warding off those who were bigger, older, stronger. From the first day Keith had stepped into the secondary school playground he had been bullied, made fun of, an easy mark. The few friends he had were usually lower on the pecking order than he was himself: a timid boy, part-Indian, part-Chinese, with silky skin and long dark eyelashes that curved; an asthmatic lad with glasses thick as the bottoms of half-pint mugs. Either that, or they were using him for their own ends.

  “Seeing that Darren today?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rylands nodded and turned to the sports pages.

  “Why d’you want to know?”<
br />
  “No reason.”

  Keith was standing close against his father’s elbow. “Don’t like him, do you?”

  “Do you?”

  “What sort of a stupid question is that?”

  Rylands took hold, not roughly, of his arm. “One it wouldn’t hurt for you to think of an honest answer to.”

  Keith shook him free and stood away. “I’m off out.”

  “All right,” Rylands said. “I’ll be here.”

  Darren had been watching her, Lorna. Nothing regular or consistent, not methodical, just whenever it came into his head, if he was at a loose end, didn’t have anything better to do. So he knew the route she took to work, the corner shop where she would stop off to buy a paper and occasionally a packet of cigarettes, more often than not some magazine; he knew the way she walked back, sidetracking sometimes to call at the minimarket and pick up something for her supper-frozen calorie-counter meals and Slimma soups, she went in for a lot of that. Not that Darren could see why.

  He’d sneaked up close to the house once, the one where she had her flat; shinned over the wall and stood in the back garden, not really a garden, more of a yard. Leaned against the flimsy shed and watched her undress. Not all the way, not before she’d crossed the room to switch out the light, but far enough to see the last thing she had to worry about was being overweight.

  Maybe he should tell her, casual like, in the newsagent’s when she was picking up her copy of Today. Helpful words from a friend. No. Let it wait until he was ready to put right what went wrong before. Drift in off the street and saunter over to the counter. Lorna Solomon? You’ve got a really good body, you know that? Oh, and while you’re doing nothing, just empty all of that cash you’ve got there into this sack.

  Real cool: he liked that.

  Standing in front of the boarded-up shop down the arcade from the building society, he looked at his reflection in the darkened glass and grinned at himself as he repeated the words. Practice makes perfect.

  Taking his time, Darren wandered towards the building society office and looked through the glass door. Fat woman who worked there-now if anyone needed her calories counting, she did-explaining something to this old couple, expression on her face suggesting that she was going through it for at least the third time. And Lorna alongside her, laughing suddenly at something the man in front of her had said; counting the bank notes out carefully before passing them under the glass. For an instant she looked towards the door and in that instant Darren instinctively dodged back so that neither of them was ever sure-Darren whether he had been spotted, Lorna if she had seen who she had thought she’d seen.

  The square was riddled with bikers and hippies and punks with swastikas tattooed onto their faces with blue Biros or shaved into the top of their close-cropped hair. The same old woman stood amidst the same grubby pigeons and scattered them with bird seed and stale crumbs.

  Keith and Darren sat on the low stone wall, sharing a piece of flabby pizza, Darren taking drags from a bummed cigarette. What Keith wanted to do was walk into the Park Estate and nick a car, one of those Ferraris or Mercs with personalized number plates that were always so invitingly there. Get onto the motorway going north and see what it really could do.

  But Darren wasn’t having any. Stupid, he reckoned, to take the risk. Get caught over a bit of fun when they had serious plans. Keith kicked his heels, unable to extract from Darren precisely what these plans were.

  “You don’t worry. You’ll know what you need to know soon enough.”

  He would never have dared say so, but there were times when Keith doubted Darren had any real plans at all. Except for the gun. That was the one thing it always came back to, almost the only thing he ever talked about now, aside from that woman who worked in the building society and how he wouldn’t mind giving her one, how any day now he was going to get hold of a gun. The look on Darren’s face when he said it, as though somehow that was going to change everything, change the world.

  “Got any cash?” Darren asked. “I fancy a Coke.”

  Keith shook his head.

  “Jesus!” Darren said, flicking away the butt of his cigarette as he stood clear of the wall. “I hate that. Not even enough between us for a drink when you want one.” He jerked his head in the direction of the nearest underpass. “Come on,” he said.

  Thirty-Seven

  Millington was peering at the screen of the VDU, chewing at the bottom of his moustache and pondering the wonders of modern technology, the overlap between what he’d gleaned from his informant and the facts as known. He still couldn’t decide if he were being taken for a ride.

  “Anything to go on, Graham?” Resnick said, pausing at the sergeant’s desk.

  Millington scowled. “Sometimes reckon we’d be as well off with crystal balls.”

  Across the room a phone rang and Kevin Naylor picked it up. “CID, DC Naylor speaking.”

  Resnick remembered there was a call of his own he wanted to make; he went into his office and closed the door. Down through the window, he could see the track-suited figure of Jack Skelton jogging past the lock-up garages below the main road.

  “Yes, of course I know who it is,” Naylor was saying. With a half-guilty glance across the room, he angled his chair towards the wall.

  “I called before,” Lorna Solomon said. “Left messages. You never phoned back.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Things have been busy.”

  “I thought …” she hesitated.

  “What?”

  “You were avoiding me.”

  “Like I said, it’s been busy.”

  There was an uneasy silence between them and Kevin sensed rather than heard her breathing at the other end of the phone. He wondered where she was calling from, work or home? Behind him, one of the other officers swore lightly and slammed shut a drawer. Graham Millington was whistling something vaguely classical, the music from some advert or other.

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you were still there.”

  He was thinking of sitting close alongside her in the front of the car, the warmth of her arm whenever she moved it accidentally against his, Chinese food and perfume.

  “That youth, I’ve seen him again.”

  “The one from the robbery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Right outside. Just today.”

  Naylor swiveled the chair back round towards his desk. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. At least I think so.”

  “It couldn’t have been someone else? I mean, a bit like him? After what happened …”

  “He was outside the door, staring in. When I saw him he jumped away.”

  “He didn’t come in?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause and then Lorna said, “Kevin, it’s not the first time. I’m sure I’ve seen him before.”

  “He spoke to you, on the pavement outside.”

  “No, other times. And not just at work, here at the flat. Kevin, I think he’s watching me.”

  Naylor reached for a ball point and flicked open the pad on his desk. “You at home now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Best let me have the address.”

  It wasn’t a place that Resnick knew, not the inside of anyway, a wine bar-cum-restaurant on Barker Gate, across the street from the snooker club. The entrance was down a flight of steps off the pavement, the room that you stepped into had a bar away to the left, a few small tables pressed against the right-hand wall, plenty of space to stand in between. Through an archway there appeared to be a second room for more serious eating.

  Most of the people near the bar seemed to have strayed in for a drink after work and stayed. Gray suits and cigarette smoke and braying conversation. Pam Van Allen was sitting at the first table, a white wine spritzer in front of her, reading a paperback book. In that light her hair was a metallic gray.

  Her eyes lifted from the book as Resnick came towar
ds her.

  “Hello. Charlie Resnick.”

  “Pam Van Allen.”

  She held out her hand and her grip was brief but firm.

  “Can I get you another drink?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine.”

  He went to the bar for a glass of house red and she read another page of her book, a novel about college friends who spend a summer together in middle age, the first time some of them have seen one another in ten or more years. Pam could only think of two people she still knew from university, none from school. All those friendships you’re sure will be so important the rest of your lives.

  “It’s good of you to meet me.”

  She gave a slight shrug and waited for him to settle down. He was a big man, bulky, the kind who could do with all the exercise he didn’t get. A roundish face with serious eyes. Dressed like that, he’d be less conspicuous in the side bar of a pub.

  “If you’re hungry,” Pam said, making conversation, “the food’s pretty good. Snacks. Hummus. Things like that.”

  “Maybe later.”

  She glanced at her watch, then folded down the corner of the page and closed the book.

  Resnick drank some wine. “John Prior. You’ve been to see him.”

  Pam said nothing, waited.

  “You’re happy about the fact that he’s going to be released?”

  “You don’t expect me to answer that.”

  “All right, then. Let’s put it this way. How much do you know about the circumstances of his arrest and trial?”

  She turned her glass around on the table. “A little.”