Rough Treatment

by John Harvey

  “Yes, sir.” Anxious to be away.

  “All right, Kevin.”

  Out of there like the proverbial clockwork rabbit. Resnick shook his head, gave himself a few moments to ponder whether he should have taken a place on that course in man-management, then picked up the phone and dialed Midlands TV.

  “Mr. Roy is out on location,” announced a voice like high-gloss makeup. “I can put you through to the production secretary if you wish.”

  Resnick wished.

  “Engaged, will you hold?”

  Resnick held.

  Seven

  Harold Roy’s father had named him after a bandleader, who specialized in comic songs and second-rate, searing clarinet. After thirteen years of alternately bullying or buying young Harold into spending his evenings and weekends practicing a number of instruments—piano, violin, clarinet (of course), even, for a particularly uncomfortable three months, the tuba—he had given in. His son would never emulate his namesake: he would not be a musician. Even Harold’s one attempt at a comic song—wearing a gingham tablecloth to entertain a Christmas gathering with “I’m Just a Girl who Can’t Say No”—had ended in failure. There had been muted applause and an aunt saying loudly, “Can’t carry a tune for his life, bless him!”

  Aware of disappointing his parents and seeking to make amends, Harold had shown an interest in drama school. Sure enough, they had clapped their hands and given him all the encouragement he had needed. That is to say, money in his bank account and a tilting end-terraced house on the borders of Lewisham and New Cross.

  Almost from the first, Harold knew that he had made a mistake. Classes in improvisation reduced him to a stuttering wreck; movement and dance brought back all those afternoons wasted with the metronome, only this time it was his feet and not his fingers that refused to obey the rhythm. A one-line part as an attendant lord in Macbeth made it clear to him that the only person who survived the entire experience without humiliation was the director.

  So a career was born.

  Harold knew he could ill afford to be proud and he espoused those projects no one else considered. A black comedy involving a legless man trapped in a cellar with twelve radios, each tuned to different stations; an autobiographical piece by a fiery working-class lad whose mother was a drudge, whose father was dying from pneumoconiosis and whose sister was selling herself on the streets of Cardiff; a wordless epic, thirteen hours with intervals, about Vietnamese peasants, for which the props included twenty-seven hoes and a gallon bucket of pigs’ blood nightly.

  Well, this was the sixties and Harold Roy knew better than to look back. Before the bubble burst he went into rep. Salisbury, Lancaster, Derby; Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest, Charley’s Aunt. For every four Agatha Christies he put on a John Osborne revival.

  This was how he met Maria. Hard-bitten, attractive, opinionated, coldly sexy, Maria was perfect as the best friend who encouraged Jimmy Porter’s wife to leave him and then stays on to share his bed and do his ironing. When the curtain rises for the second act, she is in her slip at the ironing board and Harold took to secreting little notes between the folds of the creased shirts. Maria found this charming; she was at a loose end and, in Chester, Harold seemed the acme of sophistication. She hitched her wagon to someone she thought was going to make her a star and all he did was make her pregnant.

  All right, Maria thought, coming round from the anesthetic, the least you can do is make money.

  Harold’s first work in television was directing live drama for Granada. He waved his arms a lot, called actors of any sex “love”; most importantly, he got on first-name terms with the crew and saw to it that the cameramen were never in need of a drink after the unit had wrapped. He hung an expensive lens from his neck and was forever squinting through it, always looking for angles. He said yes to everything, no to nothing, he was always in work. His agent put him up for the latest Dennis Potter, the new John Mortimer; what he got was another Emmerdale Farm, an Eastenders, a Grange Hill.

  Now he was working on a series for Midlands Television about a working-class family who win a fortune on the pools.

  Dividends.

  Resnick parked his car in the forecourt of the pub, hoping that his cats would forgive him for not calling home first to feed them. But he didn’t think this would take very long. A double-decker bus, fitted out with narrow tables between the seats, stood alongside the location catering van. The remnants of the evening’s salads clung to the edges of large bowls; trays of fruit and cheese stood close to urns of tea and coffee. Jam roly-poly said the board by the serving hatch, bread-and-butter pudding. There was the unmistakable smell of chip fat over everything.

  Resnick tapped on the window of a transit van bearing the Midlands TV logo. The driver lifted the open pages of the Sun from his face and wound the window down.

  “Harold Roy,” Resnick said. “I’m looking for him.”

  There was something familiar about the driver, but he couldn’t place what it was.

  The man squinted out towards the close streets of the Broxtowe Estate. “In there.”

  “Thanks,” said Resnick and waited while the window was raised and the newspaper returned to its previous position. He stepped over the low fencing and across the main road. The constable in his uniform overcoat, diverting traffic, recognized Resnick by sight and stepped clear of the four or five small children who were hanging round him.

  “Evening, sir. Didn’t know you were out this way.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Hope they’re paying your overtime for this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Resnick left him entertaining his kindergarten. The oldest of them wasn’t more than ten and most would be there until the pubs had closed.

  Two more vans were parked at the curb, inside which the artists played cards, filled in crosswords, read, waited their calls. Thick cables ran to and from a third van, close to the corner. Arc lights had been set up on stands and just outside their beam, groups of men stood around in donkey jackets, rubbing their gloved hands together, smoking. Resnick was reminded of photographs he’d seen of the general strike.

  A young woman wearing a harassed expression and a violent blue bomber jacket bounced past Resnick in red baseball boots with white stars at their sides. Embroidered on to the center of the jacket’s back was a fist with the middle finger thrusting skywards.

  “Naomi!” she spat in the walkie-talkie in her hand. “I want Laurence here and I want him now!”

  There was a squawked reply that Resnick failed to understand.

  “You!” she said, pointing hard at Resnick. Each finger of her glove was a different, bright color. “Get back behind the van. Back!”

  “I’m looking for …”

  “Back!”

  Resnick raised an eyebrow and turned towards the van. As he did so, the man he had seen earlier behind the wheel of the red Citroën threw back the sliding door and jumped out. Harold Roy was wearing a waist-length blue jacket and brown leather boots beneath his designer jeans. A white scarf spiraled round the collar of a red wool shirt.

  “Chris, would you mind telling me what in God’s name we’re waiting for? This shot’s been lit and ready for the last fifteen minutes.”

  “Laurence,” said the girl, the evenness of her voice scarcely disguising her antagonism.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s changing his costume.”

  “Now? Now he’s changing his costume? Half an hour after he’s been called?”

  “We didn’t have any choice. Continuity.”

  “Well, if costumes didn’t spend the entire day with their heads up each other’s arses, they might have noticed that sooner.”

  “It’s being taken care of, Harold. It’s in hand.”

  “I don’t want him in hand, I want him here, now.”

  “On his way.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Har
old Roy took a couple of steps back and looked around; some of the crew and the extras had been watching the exchange, most were carrying on with their conversations or simply standing motionless, leaning against something, bored.

  “Next thing we know,” Harold announced to everyone and no one, “Mackenzie’s going to be asked why we’re behind schedule again. And I’m going to make sure the blame for that goes where it belongs.”

  Chris turned her back on him and walked away, letting her embroidered finger make her reply.

  She came back towards the lights a few moments later with an actor Resnick recognized from a coffee commercial. A slim man with a ponytail, wearing a shiny black jumpsuit, bustled behind them, pulling stray threads from the back of the actor’s jacket.

  “All right everybody, positions please.”

  Harold Roy slid the van door shut behind him. Resnick didn’t think it was the best moment to go and talk to him about his house being burgled.

  “Hallo,” said the voice at the other end of the phone.

  “Hallo.” Maria was watching Dallas on TV. Why didn’t her precious Harold ever get anything like that to work on?

  “Hallo,” the voice repeated.

  “Who is this?” Maria asked. The voice was familiar and she wondered if it was somebody from the studio, maybe even the producer. “Is that Mac?” she asked. Theodore James Mackenzie was the producer and originator of Dividends; when he was in a good mood he liked to be called Mac.

  “No.” A pause. “You know who this is.”

  Then she did. She spun around and leaned her head back against the wall. “You’ll never keep John Ross from me!” Sue Ellen was screaming at JR from the heart of their rented twenty-four-inch FST Sony.

  “You do know, don’t you?”

  Her hand less than steady, Maria set down the receiver.

  Laurence had to walk ten yards along the pavement, look at his watch under the streetlight, walk another five yards, look up towards the bedroom windows of the semi-detached brick house and say: “Cheryl, you’re going to wish you’d never turned me out of your bed, so help me!”

  It wasn’t Dallas, but it was trying, just not very hard.

  He seemed to be required to repeat this a great many times and after the first few, Resnick wandered back to have a word with the constable on traffic duty.

  “How much longer?” Resnick asked.

  The officer checked his watch. “Won’t be above an hour, sir, you can be pretty sure of that.”

  “Work to time, do they?”

  “On the dot. Five, four, three, two, one, someone pulls the plug.”

  “Not like some then,” said Resnick with a faint smile. “In need of a little time and half to ease the mortgage payments.”

  “Bought a caravan with mine, sir—miners’ strike. Over at Ingoldmells. Get up in the morning and pull back the curtain and the only thing in view is the sea. Unless there’s a mist.”

  “But not here?” Resnick persisted.

  “Don’t think it’s so much the cash, sir. More a case of good will.”

  “Good will?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be a lot of it about.”

  Resnick nodded and took a couple of paces away. Two of the undernourished kids who’d been tugging at the constable’s uniform trousers and trying to dribble spittle down on to his boots without him noticing were shifting their attention.

  “You on telly?” one of them asked Resnick. He had a bright, liverish flare on one cheek, burn or birth mark, it was impossible to tell which.

  Resnick shook his head.

  “Told you!” said his friend, whose hair had been cropped so short it was possible to see the scabs across his scalp.

  “He’s lying! You’re lying, aren’t you, mister? I’ve seen you.”

  “No,” said Resnick, turning away.

  “Go on,” shouted the boy with the blemish, “tell us.”

  “I should watch out if I were you,” said the constable. “He’s a police officer. Detective inspector.”

  Resnick gave him a quick look that said, thanks very much.

  “He your boss, is he?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Bet he is. Hey, mister, order him about, tell him what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do and that’s clear off from here. Scram.” The constable shooed the lads away with his hands and they skipped out of his reach, off to where the crew were standing around, to scrounge cigarettes.

  “I suppose it’s naïve to ask where their parents are,” said Resnick, “why they’re letting them run the streets.”

  “Better here in sight,” said the constable, “than nicking the radio from somebody’s car or shinning up the drainpipe and in through some old dear’s bathroom window.”

  Which was when Resnick knew why the driver asleep under the Sun was familiar.

  Maria Roy had drunk the first whisky too quickly, the second she had forced herself to sip slowly. Not that that was such a good idea. Hadn’t she read somewhere that sipping alcohol only made you drunker faster? Or was that only if you sipped it through a straw?

  She paced the downstairs of the house from room to room, telling herself that when he rang back she was going to be ready, she was going to be calm. This time she would be reasonable, ask him what he thought he was playing at, what he wanted.

  There were three telephones in the house and none of them would ring.

  “Alf?”

  He was no longer catching forty winks in the van. Instead, he was standing by the rear of the catering vehicle, talking to a man in a white apron who was slicing open four dozen soft bread rolls.

  “Alfie?”

  He was built like a whippet on two legs; so much so that it was difficult not to keep peering behind him, looking for the curled end of skinny tail that should have been poking out from beneath his coat.

  “Sergeant.”

  “Inspector.” Resnick corrected him.

  “Didn’t think you’d made me.”

  “Wasn’t sure at first.” Resnick stepped back and refocused. “It was the hair.”

  “How about it?”

  “You didn’t used to have any.”

  Alf Levin brushed a hand across his head. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Modern technology.”

  “You’re not telling me that’s all the result of a transplant?”

  “No. False as evidence, isn’t it? Wig job. Toupee. It’s since I’ve been working for Midlands. Got to know a few of the boys in makeup. Measured me up, color samples, the works; I must be the only driver working for this company with a hundred percent guaranteed, architect-designed head of hair. Stand in front of a force-nine gale in this and all that’ll happen is it flicks up a bit at the ends.”

  “Let’s talk, Alfie,” said Resnick, with a glance towards the caterer, who was now severing the links between large numbers of sausages.

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “Over there,” said Resnick.

  Alf Levin only hesitated for long enough to light a cigarette and toss the used match out across the forecourt. “If I’m not back for my sausage cob,” he said, “call my brief for me.”

  Maria was sitting on the lavatory in the downstairs bathroom: the seat was down and her skirt was spread wide across her legs. The empty glass was being slowly rolled between the fingers of both hands, back and forth.

  “Come on, you bastard,” she said aloud. “Pick up the phone.”

  Eight

  “Your DI not still around, I suppose?”

  Millington jumped at the sound of the superintendent’s voice; his knee caught the edge of the table and, though he held on to the mug at the second attempt, most of its contents splashed over his hands, the magazine he’d been reading, the floor.

  “No, sir. Not seen him since this afternoon.”

  Skelton nodded and surveyed the room: halfway between a grammar school staffroom and the men’s locker facilities at the private squash club where he was due on court i
n twenty minutes.

  “Any message, sir?”

  A curt shake of the head, dismissive. “’Night, Sergeant.”

  Graham Millington forced out his polite reply, watching the super turn back through the doors, sports bag in his hand. Five games with some sweaty barrister and then a couple of G and T’s before he drives home to whatever his wife’s keeping warm for him. All right for some. Millington’s own wife would be at her second-year Russian class and he’d stop off at the chippy on the way back, either that or a toasted ham-and-cheese in the pub, couple of quick halves.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the desk top, wiped between his fingers. That the superintendent should find him the only one left in the office, working late, was fine—but why did he have to come in when Millington was drinking half-stewed tea and browsing through the copy of Penthouse he’d found in Divine’s in-tray?

  “Know about your form, do they?”

  “Midlands,” said Alf Levin, “they’re an equal-opportunity employer.”

  They were sitting at a corner table in the lounge, keeping as much distance as possible between themselves and a bunch of extras who were boasting about how many times they’d worked with Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins.

  “How long?”

  “Eighteen months, no, getting on two years, must be.”

  “Sounds like a sentence.”

  Levin lifted his pint, flicked away the beer mat that had stuck to the underside of the glass. “That was a twelve.”

  “Out in nine.”

  “Less.”

  “Good behavior.”

  “Overcrowding.”

  Resnick leaned forward, one elbow resting close to his Guinness, largely untouched. “Nice to see that it works sometimes. Sets you back on the straight and narrow.”

  “Wasn’t the nick.”

  “You’re not going to tell me you found religion?”

  “No. A good probation officer.”

  “Needle in a haystack.”

  “Sharp as one. Found me a place to live, made sure I kept the appointments, even got me along to a couple of meetings, counseling sessions.” His thin face wrinkled brightly; with that wig he looked a lot less than his forty-odd years. “Me, counseling sessions!”