by John Harvey
“And then there was that bastard, hands all over me, like he couldn’t get enough.” She finished her cigarette, nipped the end between finger and thumb and opened the last of the paper, scattering shards of tobacco towards the ground. “I knew he was using me, though, of course, he denied it. Knew and I never cared. I thought, Prior’s going down for a long time and what that means to me he doesn’t care, he doesn’t give a shit. I’m just this thing that he’s lived with and used to cook and clean and wipe between his legs. I felt that low.” She looked at Resnick and made a gesture with her hand as if she were holding something minute. “And what Rains did, he stopped me feeling like that. Oh, Christ alone knows, not for long. But when he did …”
Ruth began to walk and Resnick moved into step beside her. All the while she had been talking he’d shut out the constant roll of the sea and now that she was quiet it came back the more strongly, accompanying them home.
“You haven’t got any coffee,” Resnick called from the kitchen. The past five minutes he’d been through every drawer, every cupboard.
“That’s right.”
He made more tea.
“What I’ve got,” Ruth said, wandering in followed by a still dazed-looking dog, “is a stomach lining I’m going to leave to medical science. They’ll use Xrays of it in years to come, illustrating the dangers of tannin.”
For all the jokes, she still looked lined and drawn, still jumped at the first strange sound.
They sat at the table, the dog beneath it, asleep again, snoring faintly.
“Rains,” Resnick said, “he didn’t give any indication of where he was staying, anything like that?”
Ruth shook her head. “You’d go and talk to him? I mean, officially?”
“I daresay.”
“What for? What could you prove?” She drank some tea. “What did he do, aside, I suppose, from breaking in?”
Resnick leaned towards her. “There’s more.”
“With Rains?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of more?”
“We’re not sure, but … one or two things, we think he might be involved.”
“What kind of things?”
Resnick leaned back. “When you were seeing him, did he ever talk about Frank Churchill?”
“Only questions. The usual things. Meetings, places, and times. All the usual things.”
“He didn’t give the impression they might be close?”
“Rains and Churchill!” Ruth gave a derisory laugh. “Fine bloody couple they’d make! Only person Frank Churchill’s ever been close to’s his mother. Rains’d never got that sort of close to anything unless it was a mirror. Anyhow, why d’you want to know?”
Resnick’s turn to shake his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“No? That’s what Rains’d say. Every time. We’d be lying there, you know, after making love, I’d be waiting and sure enough they’d come, the questions, on and on and if either I wouldn’t answer or ask him why he wanted to know, that’s what he’d say-doesn’t matter. Ten, fifteen minutes later, he’d be asking the same thing. One thing I’ve never done, knowingly, give that bastard anything that’d push my husband deeper into the shit. Never. And if that’s what Rains was saying, to you lot or anyone else, he was lying. He was covering up.” She released his arm and the marks of her fingers were left, pale, on Resnick’s skin. “Maybe what you were suggesting was right, maybe he did have something going with Churchill, more than was thought. As far as jobs was concerned, I shouldn’t think there was anything I knew as Frank Churchill didn’t. Less.” She got up and carried the two mugs, hers and Resnick’s, to the sink.
“I ought to be going,” Resnick said, looking at his watch.
“Thanks,” Ruth said.
“What for?”
“Being bothered. Coming.”
“Just one thing,” Resnick said.
“What’s that?”
“Why did you stop singing?”
“Fuck right off,” Ruth said, grinning.
Forty-Nine
Darren pressed his finger full force against the bell and kept it there until Rylands, flushed in the face with anger, threw it open.
“What in God’s name d’you think you’re at?” Rylands demanded.
“Keith,” Darren said, ignoring his reaction. “He in?”
“Out.”
“Out where? Been walking all over the city center past couple of hours, looking for him.”
“He went to the Job Centre,” Rylands said.
“Job Centre!” Darren was incredulous “What the fuck’s he want to go there for?”
“Here you go, sarge,” Naylor said, shutting the car door with a clean thunk. “Jumbo sausage and chips.”
Millington’s eyes lit up. Go anywhere near his wife with a jumbo sausage and you risked a lecture on harmful additives and carcinogenics. “Get the mustard?” he asked.
Naylor fished a sachet containing a vibrant yellow from his breast pocket.
“Good lad!”
Naylor had fetched himself cod and chips. Or was it haddock? For the best part of fifteen minutes both men ate, neither spoke.
Millington was dipping the last few inches of his sausage into the puddle of mustard when the door to Number 11 opened and Frank Churchill came out. Without looking around, he unlocked the door of the Granada and climbed in.
“Probably off to see his mum,” Naylor suggested.
“Goes there,” Millington said, screwing up the wrappings of his lunch, “he walks.”
“Maybe he’s taking her for a drive?”
“And maybe I’ve just been eating prime beef.” Naylor fired the engine and waited while Churchill backed out across the road and headed away from them at a good speed.
“Just make sure you don’t get too close,” Millington said. “Last thing we need, him spotting us.”
Naylor nodded, indicated right, and changed down for the bend.
“Where the fuck’ve you been?” Darren grabbed hold of Keith by the shoulder, swinging him round so fast that Keith lost his balance and ended up on his knees.
“Get up, you prick! You look fucking pathetic!” Keith scrambled to his feet, aware that several passersby were looking round at him and sniggering. That’s it, lady, laugh your tossing head off, why don’t you? He shook Darren’s hand clear and said nothing.
“You avoiding me or what?” Darren demanded.
“Leave him alone, you great bully,” called an old woman with what looked like a year’s supply of papers in a pram. “He’s only little.”
“Sod off, granny!” Darren yelled back.
“Yeh,” said Keith, “sod off.”
They walked together across the road, ignoring the traffic, forcing it to stop or swerve around them.
“Gum?” Keith said, holding out a pack of Wrigley’s.
“Yeh, ta.”
They sat on the wall near the gents’ toilets, kicking their heels against brickwork that was covered in graffiti and pigeon shit.
“Your old man said you was down the Job Centre.”
“’S’right.”
“Anything there?”
“Don’t bloody joke.”
“This car,” Darren said.
“Which one?”
“The one you’re going to nick.”
“What about it?”
“Friday.”
“Why Friday?”
“Cause more people take money out Fridays, bird brain. Lot more cash there waiting.”
“We going to do another building society?” Keith asked.
“Yes,” Darren said. “And this time we’re going to do it fucking right!”
“On the M1, boss. Heading north.” Divine was monitoring Millington and Naylor’s progress as they followed Churchill’s Ford Granada. “Reckon he’s heading for a meet with Rains?”
“Any luck,” Resnick said, “he’s doing exactly that. Keep me in the picture.”
“Right.”
Resnick went
into his office and dialed a number, asked to speak to Pam Van Allen.
Frank Churchill was sticking to the outside lane, keeping the speedometer between seventy-five and eighty, moving over only when some salesman, flogging his company car, came fast up behind him, flashing his lights.
Naylor kept several vehicles between himself and their quarry, alternately moving up and falling back, doing everything he could to make sure his wouldn’t be the vehicle Churchill habitually saw in his rearview mirror.
“He’s slowing down,” Millington said. “Pulling over.”
Naylor had noticed already, dropped behind a lorry carrying pharmaceutical goods north from the Continent.
“Service station,” Millington said. “Just up ahead.”
Naylor checked in his own mirror and signaled to leave the motorway.
“I don’t want you to think,” Resnick said into the phone, “that I’m pestering you about this …”
There was a silence, out of which Pam Van Allen said, “I’m trying hard not to.”
“I was interested to know how you think he’s taking to being out, settling into the hostel, whatever.”
“Pretty much the way you’d expect somebody to do when they’ve been excluded from society for ten years. He’s tense, apprehensive …”
“Angry?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know. But I’m concerned …”
“For his wife’s safety.”
“Yes.”
There was another pause, longer, and Resnick could almost hear the probation officer thinking. Through the glass at the top of his door he could see Divine’s head, bobbing a little as he spoke into the telephone.”
“After what you said,” Pam Van Allen said cautiously, “I talked to him about his wife, his feelings towards her. Everything he said suggested he sees that relationship as being very much in the past. He showed no inclination to open it up again, get back in touch. Certainly he expressed nothing like anger towards her.”
“And you believed him?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Good.”
“Goodbye, inspector.” Resnick had a sudden image of her as she set down the receiver, one hand pushing up through her cap of silver-gray hair, the other pinching the bridge of her nose as she closed her eyes.
“Boss!”
Alerted by Divine’s shout, Resnick hurried into the main office.
“Graham,” Divine explained, holding out the phone. “Wants to talk to you.”
Resnick identified himself down what was clearly a wavery connection.
“Good news is, it’s Rains right enough. No mistaking him anywhere. Standing in line in the cafeteria waiting for Churchill to join him over chicken, chips, and peas.”
“What’s the bad?” Resnick said.
“Where they’ve sat themselves, bang in the middle of the place, can’t get near ’em without getting spotted. Tried getting Kevin on to table behind, but what with all the chatter and the background bloody muzak and the cutlery, you’d need to be leaning over them with a hearing trumpet to know what they were talking about.”
“Lynn’s on her way in a car. Rendezvous outside. When they leave, you take Rains, let her tag along with Churchill.”
“What if she don’t get here?”
“Stick to the plan, follow Rains.”
“Right,” Millington said and then quickly, “They’re moving, got to go.”
Naylor walked down the steps from the cafeteria and ahead of him Rains and Churchill separated, neither one of them in any obvious hurry to go back to their vehicles. Churchill browsed the magazines in the shop; Rains spent a pound or so on the games machines near the exit. Churchill went into the gents and locked himself into a cubicle. Millington didn’t think they’d been spotted, though there was no way of knowing for sure. What they were observing could simply be careful practice, nothing more. At least, it gave Lynn Kellogg more time to arrive. He had no way of knowing the northbound carriageway had been temporarily blocked by an accident involving a lorry and a fifteen-year-old youth joyriding in a stolen Fiesta.
Suddenly Churchill was hurrying across the parking area towards his Granada and that diversion was enough to give Rains a vital start back up the steps towards the bridge linking the two sides of the motorway.
The three blue saloons left the service area heading south in a virtual convoy and between them Millington and Naylor got the registration of one and a half. And they couldn’t be sure which of the three Rains had been driving.
Frank Churchill, meanwhile, had continued his journey northwards and they could only hope that a sense of filial duty would take him back to Mansfield so that they could pick up his trail again.
“A balls-up, Charlie. A regular balls-up, I don’t know what else to call it,” Skelton said after Resnick had made his report.
Alone in the CID room, smarting still, Graham Millington thought after that day’s work he’d be fortunate to retain his sergeant’s stripes, never mind promotion.
Fifty
Lorna didn’t know why it was, but ever since Kevin Naylor had stopped returning calls something appalling had happened to her appetite. Instead of settling down to watch Neighbours with a Linda McCartney low-calorie broccoli and cheese bake, she found herself reaching for the telephone and waiting, tummy impatiently rumbling, until the Perfect Pizza delivery man appeared on her doorstep. Her lunch had progressed from two crisp-breads and a piece of celery to lasagna and chips at the local pub. Breakfast was no longer a single shredded wheat, it was porridge with maple-type syrup and cream, several slices of toast and marmalade, and instant coffee with two spoonsful of sugar.
She had overheard Becca yesterday whispering to Marjorie in a voice that could have been heard up and down the street. “You don’t suppose, do you, that our Lorna’s got herself pregnant?”
Fat chance!
“I’m sorry,” Kevin Naylor had said when she’d finally raised him on the phone, “but there’s another officer handling that now. I’ve been shifted on to something else.”
Shifted back to his wife, Lorna thought. She still hadn’t forgotten that in the midst of their one and only night of passion, Kevin had etched a particular moment forever on her mind by digging his fingers sharply into her shoulders and shouting, “Yes, Debbie! Yes, Debbie! Yes, Debbie, yes!”
Lorna ran her finger round the inside of her breakfast bowl, scooping up the last of the syrup and cream, before rinsing it under the tap. Oh God, she thought, next thing I’ll be running out of things I can wear, having to go out and buy myself a whole new wardrobe. The one saving grace was the example of Marjorie, huffing and puffing and perspiring her way through every working day. The minute Lorna found herself rivaling Marjorie, she was enrolling in Weight Watchers, withdrawing her savings, and booking two weeks on a health farm.
In the bathroom she cleaned her teeth with care, applied the finishing touches to her makeup. At least it was Friday, another week nearly over. Maybe tonight she’d go down the Black Orchid, let her hair down; dance enough she might even lose a few pounds.
The senior officers involved in Kingfisher had been in closed session ever since Jack Skelton came back from his early morning run. The consensus was this: Rains was back in circulation and his meeting with Churchill was enough to suggest Millington’s information had at least a patina of truth. Rains, moreover, was aware of the possibility he and Churchill might be being watched. There was no certain way of knowing whether their tail had actually been spotted or if they were merely taking precautions. But then, as Reg Cossall suggested, you don’t waste time fiddling around with a condom if all you’re interested in’s a quick wank. Even as he said it, Cossall thought he might get an earful from Helen Siddons, but all she did was compliment him on his awareness of the need for safe sex. All you need do, darling, Cossall thought, is carry on looking like that. What he did was smile and keep his mouth shut.
Finally it was agreed that they would maintain a careful w
atch on Churchill for another day, Frank having obligingly returned to his Mansfield home in time for tea. Meantime, extra officers would be assigned to the search for Rains. If nothing had developed within twenty-four hours, Frank Churchill could be brought in for questioning. If they moved quick enough, rattled him enough, they might squeeze some answers out of him before he was able to shelter behind his brief.
“Fetch us another tea, Keith. Make sure it isn’t stewed, eh? More like gravy, this last cup.”
Keith could tell from the tone of Darren’s voice that he was seriously on an up. Sitting by the back wall of the Arcade cafe, finishing his cooked breakfast, and looking so sodding full of himself. At least his cropped hair had started to grow out a little, he didn’t look so weird any more. Like one of them skinheads you saw sometimes round the city center, lace-up Doc Martens and Levis and swastika tattoos.
“Better treat yourself to something more than that,” Darren said, watching Keith with his two of toast.
“How come?”
Darren winked. “Big day today, can’t afford for you to be feeling queasy.”
“What’s on, then?”
“What’s on? Day trip to Skeggy, what d’you think? You and me, we’ve got some unfinished business to do, right?”
Keith looked at him sharply, the unnatural gleam in his too blue eyes. “You’re not serious? I mean, not after what happened last time, it’s not …?”
“Jesus Christ!” Darren had one of Keith’s hands tight inside his own and was squeezing hard. “You know what, I reckon I’d’ve done us both a favor if instead of cutting you down inside that cell, I’d let you swing. You’re about as much good as a foreskin in a Force Ten gale.”
Tears were forming in the corners of Keith’s eyes as his face grimaced with pain.
“All you got to do, be out front with the car, ready to get us out of there. I’ll go in on my own.” He snorted with derision. “Worked a bloody sight better without you last time, why not this?” And he gave Keith’s hand a final squeeze before letting it go. “Now don’t take too long,” Darren said, “it’s time we were out of here.”
Keith pushed half a slice of half-cold toast into his mouth and almost choked.