by John Harvey
“Thanks,” he said, finishing copying the details into his notebook and passing back the diary.
“A waste of time, though,” Mary said, defiantly. “That’s not where he’ll be.”
Kiley nodded. Why was it mothers insisted on knowing their sons better than anyone, evidence to the contrary? He remembered his own mother-”Jack, I know you better than you know yourself.” Occasionally, she’d been right; more often than not so wide of the mark it had driven him into a frenzy.
His gaze turned to the pictures on the wall. “Terry’s father…”
“Cancer,” Mary said. “Four years ago this March.” She gave a slow shake of the head. “At least he didn’t live to see this.”
After a moment, Jennie got to her feet. “I’ll make a fresh pot of tea.”
Further along the balcony a door slammed, followed by the sounds of a small dog, excited, yelping, and children’s high-pitched voices; from somewhere else the whine of a drill, someone’s television, voices raised in anger.
Kiley leaned forward, the movement focussing Mary’s attention. “Jennie said your son had been acting, well, a bit strangely…”
He waited. The older woman plaited her fingers slowly in and out, while, out of sight, Jennie busied herself in the kitchen.
“He couldn’t sleep,” she said eventually. “All the time he was here, I don’t think he had one decent night’s sleep. I’d get up sometimes to go to the lavatory, it didn’t matter what time, and he’d be sitting there, in the dark, or standing over by the window, staring down. And then once, the one time he wasn’t here, I was, well, surprised. Pleased. That he was sleeping at last. I tiptoed over and eased open the door to his room, just a crack. Wanted to see him, peaceful.” Her fingers stilled, then tightened. “He was cross-legged on top of the bed, stark naked, staring. Staring right at me. As if, somehow, he’d been waiting. And that gun of his, his rifle, he had it right there with him. Pointing. I shut the door as fast as I could. I might have screamed or shouted, I don’t know. I just stood there, leaning back, my eyes shut tight. I couldn’t move. And my heart, I could feel my heart, here, thumping hard against my chest.”
Slowly, she released her hands and smoothed her apron along her lap. Jennie was standing in the doorway, silent, listening.
“I don’t know how long I stayed there. Ages, it seemed. Then I went back to my room. I didn’t know what else to do. I lay down but, of course, I couldn’t sleep, just tossing and turning. And when I asked him, in the morning, what kind of a night he’d had, he just smiled and said, ‘All right, Mum, you know. Not too bad. Not too bad at all.’ And drank his tea.”
Jennie stepped forward and rested her hands on the older woman’s shoulders.
“You will find him, won’t you?” Mary said. “You’ll try. Before he does something. Before something happens.”
What was he supposed to say?
“I can’t pay very much, you know. But I will, what I can.” She rummaged round in her bag. “Here. Here’s twenty pounds left over from my pension. I can give you more later, of course.”
Kiley took ten and gave her the other ten back.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure.”
“Bless you.”
***
“Terry,” Jennie said. “What do you think?”
They were walking along the disused railway line that ran east from Crouch Hill towards Finsbury Park, grassed over now to make an urban footpath, the grass itself giving way to mud and gravel, the sides a dumping ground for broken bicycles and bundles of free newspapers no one could be bothered to deliver.
“I think he’s taken a lot of stress,” Kiley said. “Seen things most of us wouldn’t even like to consider. But if he stays away there’s always the risk of arrest, dishonourable discharge. Even prison. My best guess, he’ll get himself to a doctor before it’s too late, take whatever time he needs, report back with a medical certificate and a cartload of pills. That way, with any luck, he might even hang on to his pension.”
“And if none of that happens?”
A blackbird startled up from the undergrowth to their left and settled again on the branches of a bush a little further along.
“People go missing all the time.”
“People with guns?”
Kiley shortened his stride. “I’ll go out to Harpenden first, make sure they’re not still there. Terry could have been in touch, doing the same thing.”
“I met her once,” Jennie said. “Rebecca.” She made a face. “Sour as four-day-old milk.”
Kiley grinned. They walked on, saying little, just comfortable enough in each other’s company without feeling really at ease, uncertain how far to keep walking, when to stop and turn back.
***
The house was to the north of the town, take a left past the golf club and keep on going; find yourself in Batford, you’ve gone too far. Of course, he could have done the whole thing on the phone, but in these days of so much cold calling, conversations out of the blue were less than welcome. And Kiley was attuned to sniffing around; accustomed, where possible, to seeing the whites of their eyes. How else could you hope to tell if people were lying?
The house sat back, smug, behind a few straggly poplars and a lawn with too much moss in it for its own good. A mud-splashed four-wheel drive sat off to one side, the space in front of the double garage taken up by a fair-sized boat secured to a trailer. How far, in God’s name, Kiley wondered, were they from the sea?
The doorbell played something that sounded to Kiley as if it might be by Puccini, but if he were expecting the door itself to be opened by a Filipino maid in a starched uniform, or even a grim-faced au pair, he was mistaken. The woman appraising him was clearly the lady of the house herself, a fit-looking fiftyish with a fine tan and her hair swept up into what Kiley thought might be called a French roll-or was that twist? She was wearing cream trousers, snug at the hips, and a grey marl sweater with a high collar. There were rings on most of her fingers.
“Mr. Kiley?”
Kiley nodded.
“You’re very prompt.”
If he were a dog, Kiley thought, she would be offering him a little treat for being good. Instead she held out her hand.
“Christina Hadfield.”
Beneath the smoothness of her skin, her grip was sure and firm.
“Please come in. I’m afraid my husband’s not here. Some business or other.”
As he followed her through a square hallway busy with Barbour jackets, green Wellingtons, and walking boots, the lines from one of his favourite Mose Allison songs came to mind.
I know her daddy got some money
I can tell by the way she walks
The room they went into sported two oversized settees and a small convention of easy chairs and you could have slotted in most of Mary Anderson’s flat with space to spare. High windows looked out into the garden, where someone, out of sight, was whistling softly as he-or she-tidied away the leaves. Presumably not Mr. H.
Photographs of the two grandchildren, more recent than those on Mary Anderson’s wall, stood, silver-framed, on the closed lid of a small piano.
“They’re adorable,” she said, following his stare. “Perfectly sweet. And well-behaved. Which is more than you can say for the majority of children nowadays.” She pursed her lips together. “Discipline, in our society, I’m afraid, has become a dirty word.”
“How long did they stay?” Kiley asked.
“A little over a week. Long enough to help undress the tree, take down the decorations.” Christina Hadfield smiled. “Twelfth Night. Another old tradition gone begging.”
“Terry, their father, he was home on leave while they were here.”
“If you say so.”
“He didn’t make any kind of contact?”
“Certainly not.”
“No phone calls, no…”
“He knows better than to do that after what happened.”
“What did happen?”
&nb
sp; “When Rebecca first said she was leaving him he refused to believe her. And then when he did, he became violent.”
“He hit her?”
“He threatened to. Threatened her and the children with all manner of things. She called in the police.”
“He was back in England then, when she told him?”
“My daughter is not a coward, Mr. Kiley, whatever else. Foolish, I grant you. Slow to acknowledge her mistakes.” Reaching down towards the low table beside her chair, she offered Kiley a cigarette and when he shook his head, lit one for herself, holding down the smoke before letting it drift up towards the ceiling. “What possessed her to marry that man I was always at a loss to understand, and unfortunately, circumstances proved my reservations correct. It was a mismatch from the start. And a shame it took the best part of four years in noncommissioned quarters-bad plumbing and condensation streaming down the walls-to bring her to her senses.”
“That’s why she left him? For a better class of accommodation?”
Christina Hadfield’s mouth tightened. “She left him because she wanted a better life for her children. As any mother would.”
“His children, too, surely?”
“Is that what you’re here for? To be his apologist? To plead his cause?”
“I explained when I called…”
“What you gave me to understand on the telephone was that the unfortunate man was having some kind of a breakdown. To the extent that he might do himself some harm.”
“I think it’s possible. I’d like to find him before anything like that happens.”
“In this, you’re acting for his mother?”
“Yes.”
“Poor woman.” Smoke drifted from the corners of her mouth. “After speaking to you, I telephoned Rebecca. As I suspected, she’s heard nothing from him. Certainly not recently.”
“I see.” Kiley got to his feet. Whoever had been whistling while they worked outside had fallen silent. Christina Hadfield’s gaze was unwavering. What must it be like, Kiley thought, to entertain so little doubt? He took a card from his pocket and set it on the table. “Should Terry get in touch or should your daughter hear from him… unlikely as that might be.”
No call to shake hands again at the door. She stood for a few moments, arms folded, watching him go, making good and sure he left the premises.
***
Was it the fact that his grandfather-his father’s father-had been an engine driver that left Kiley so susceptible to trains? The old man-that was how he had always seemed to Kiley, though he could not have been a good deal older than Kiley himself was now-had worked on the old London and Midland Railway, the LMS, and, later, the LNER. Express trains to Leeds and Newcastle, smuts forever blackening his face and hair. Kiley could see him, home at the end of a lengthy shift, standing by the range in their small kitchen, sipping Camp coffee from the saucer. Rarely speaking.
Now, Kiley, who didn’t own a car, and hired one from the local pay-as-you-go schemes when necessary, travelled by train whenever possible. A window seat in the quiet coach, a book to read, his CD Walkman turned low.
His relationship with Kate, a freelance journalist whom he had met when working security at an Iranian film festival on the South Bank and who, after some eighteen months, had cast him aside in favour of an earnest video installation artist, had left him, a sore heart and a taste for wine beyond his income aside, with a thing for reading. Some of the stuff that Kate had off-loaded on him he couldn’t handle-Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan-while others-Graham Greene, the Chandlers she’d given him as a half-assed joke about his profession, Annie Proulx-he’d taken to easily. Jim Harrison, he’d found on his own. The charity shop below his office, where he’d also discovered Hemingway-a dog-eared Penguin paperback of To Have and Have Not with the cover half torn away. Thomas McGuane.
What he was reading now was The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, which, when he’d been scanning the shelves in the Kentish Town Oxfam, he’d first taken for yet another celebrity cookery book, but which had turned out to be an odd kind of crime novel about Mario Balzic, an ageing cop trying to hold things together in a dying industrial town in Pennsylvania. So far, more than half the book was in dialogue, a lot of which Kiley didn’t fully understand, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter.
For a few moments, he set the book aside and gazed out of the window. They were just north of Bedford, he guessed, the train gathering speed, and most of the low mist that had earlier been clinging to the hedgerows and rolling out across the sloping fields had disappeared. Off to the east, beyond a bank of threadbare trees, the sun was slowly breaking through. Turning down the Walkman a touch more, Mose Allison’s trumpet quietly essaying “Trouble in Mind,” he reopened his book and began chapter thirteen.
Nottingham station, when they arrived, was moderately busy, anonymous and slightly scruffy. The young Asian taxi driver seemed to know where Kiley wanted to go.
Travelling along London Road, he saw the floodlights of the County ground where he had once played. Had it been just the once? He thought it was. Then they were crossing the River Trent with the Forest pitch away to their left-the Brian Clough stand facing towards him-and, almost immediately, passing the high rows of white seats at one end of Trent Bridge, where, in a rare moment of recent glory, the English cricket team had sent the Australians packing.
It was a short street of smallish houses off the Melton Road, the number he was looking for at the far end on the left, a flat-fronted two-storey terraced house with only flaking paintwork to distinguish it from those on either side.
The bell didn’t seem to be working, and after a couple of tries he knocked instead. A flier for the local pizza parlour was half-in half-out of the letterbox and, pulling it clear, he bent down and peered through. Nothing moved. When he called, “Hello!” his voice echoed tinnily back. Crouching there, eyes growing accustomed to the lack of light inside, he could just make out a toy dog, left stranded, splay-legged, in the middle of the narrow hall.
“I think they’re away,” a woman’s voice said.
She was standing at the open doorway of the house alongside. Sixties, possibly older, spectacles, yellow duster in hand. The floral apron, Kiley thought, must be making a comeback.
“Most often I can hear the kiddies of a morning.” She shook her head. “Not today. Quiet as the grave.”
“You don’t know where they might have gone?”
“No idea, duck. You here for the meter or what?”
Kiley shook his head. “Friend of a friend. Just called round on the off chance, really.”
The woman nodded.
“She didn’t say anything to you?” Kiley asked. “About going away?”
“Not to me. Keeps herself to herself, mostly. Not unfriendly, but you know…”
“You didn’t see her leaving? Her and the children?”
“Can’t say as I did.”
“And there hasn’t been anybody else hanging round? A man?”
“Look, what is this? Are you the police or what?”
Kiley tried for a reassuring smile. “Nothing like that. Nothing to worry about.”
“Well, you could try next-door the other side, they might know something. Or the fruit and veg shop back on Melton Road, I’ve seen her in there a time or two, chatting like.”
Kiley thanked her and rang the next-door bell, but there was no one home. Between serving customers, the fruit and veg man was happy enough to pass the time of day, but could provide nothing in the way of useful information.
There was a narrow alley running down behind the houses, mostly taken up with green wheelie bins; a low gate gave access to a small, square yard. The rear curtains were pulled partway across.
Through the glass Kiley could see the remains of a sliced loaf, left unwrapped beside the sink; a tub of Flora with no lid; a pot of jam; a wedge of cheese, unwrapped. A child’s coat lay bunched on the floor; a chair on its side by the far wall. Signs of unseemly haste.
The back door seemed not to be sitting snug in its frame. When Kiley applied pressure with the flat of his hand it gave a few milli-metres, loose on its hinges, rattled, then stuck. No key, Kiley guessed, turned in the lock, but bolted at the top. A swift kick would have it open.
He hesitated, uncertain what to do.
Dave Prentiss’s number was in his mobile; Prentiss, whom he’d worked with as a young DC when he’d first made it into plain clothes, and now in line for commander.
“Dave? Hi! It’s Jack. Jack Kiley… No, fine, thanks. Yes, grand… Listen, Dave, you don’t happen to know anyone up in Nottingham, do you? Someone you’ve worked with, maybe? Might be willing to give me the time of day.”
***
Resnick had been up since before five, Lynn heading up some high-powered surveillance and needing to be in place to supervise the changeover, a major drugs supplier their target and kudos all round if they could pull it off. Resnick had made them both coffee, toast for himself, a rye loaf he’d picked up on the way home the day before, Lynn crunching her way through Dorset muesli with skimmed milk and a sliced banana.
“Why don’t you go back to bed?” she’d said. “Get another couple of hours.”
She’d kissed him at the door, the morning air cold against her cheek.
“You take care,” he’d said.
“You too.”
One of the cats wandered in from outside, sampled an early breakfast, and, despite the presence of a cat flap, miaowed to be let out again.
Instead of taking Lynn ’s advice, Resnick readied the smaller stovetop pot and made himself fresh coffee. Easing back the curtains in the living room, the outside still dark, he sat thumbing through the previous night’s Evening Post, listening to Lester Young. Would he rather have been out there where Lynn was, the heart of the action, so called? Until recently, yes. Now, with possible retirement tapping him on the shoulder, he was less sure.
He was at his desk by eight, nevertheless, breaking the back of the paperwork before it broke him. Dave Prentiss rang a little after eleven and they passed a pleasant enough ten minutes, mostly mulling over old times. There was a lot of that these days, Resnick thought.