Family Business

by Mark Eklid

  Janet was beyond comfort and he was incapable of offering any.

  A third weighty thump rocked them and then a fourth, this one followed by the splintering of the door as it was ripped from its frame.

  ‘Police! Police! Police! Police!’

  The yell seemed to come from five, six, seven different mouths, adding to the chaotic noise of a flow of heavy-booted bodies storming inside.

  Graham grabbed his dressing gown off the suitcase at the bottom of the bed and dragged it on as he opened the bedroom door.

  The house lights were on and three officers, in riot helmets and black stab vests, were stamping up the stairs towards him, yelling.

  ‘Police! Stay where you are!’

  He froze, as still as a statue, and feebly put up his hands in submission. The first officer up the stairs peeled off to the left towards where more boxes and bags had been put in temporary storage in a second bedroom. The next policeman closed in on Graham and barked at him, unnecessarily loudly.

  ‘Anthony Verity!’

  Graham had no idea how to respond. The words were delivered like an order but it was clearly a name.

  ‘What? Who?’ he stuttered.

  ‘Anthony Verity. Where is he?’ the officer demanded, the short peak of his helmet so close to Graham’s forehead that it was almost touching. His expression was meant to intimidate and had served its purpose. His tone was so loud that, even if he had put the visor of his helmet down, he could still have been clearly heard several streets away.

  Janet had put on her dressing gown and grasped hold of her husband for security in the same way as someone might take hold of a bridge support to avoid being swept away by a raging torrent. There was terror in her eyes.

  ‘I’ve never heard of anybody called Anthony Verity.’

  The officer turned his attention to two other officers at his shoulder.

  ‘You, search the bedroom. You, that room at the end of the corridor.’

  They bustled past to fulfil their assignments.

  ‘I have a warrant to search this property and a warrant for the arrest of Anthony Verity. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘I’ve no idea who he is. There’s only me and my wife in the house. We’ve only just moved in.’

  The officer took a short step back and bowed his head, then muttered ‘shit’. He paused for a moment, contemplating his next move and turned to go back downstairs, turning briefly at the top step to stab a finger at the traumatised couple in dressing gowns and issue another order.

  ‘Stay where you are. I’ll be back.’

  He stopped midway on the stairs to allow a dog, which was pulling its handler behind it so keenly that the leash was taut, to rush by. The dog stopped on the upper landing and looked back with absolute eagerness in awaiting direction. Its short tail wagged with unrestrained enthusiasm. The handler caught up and released the leash before pointing to the spare bedroom.

  ‘Go on then, in you go.’

  No second invitation was needed and the dog set off to nuzzle through, around and between the boxes and bags.

  Janet pulled herself even closer.

  ‘What the hell is going on, Gray?’

  He glanced into their bedroom, where the policeman had stripped off all the bedding and was lifting the mattress to look beneath it.

  ‘I have no idea. Must be some sort of mistake.’

  The officer was coming back up the stairs, this time behind someone in a fluorescent yellow jacket and the police cap of a senior officer. He was an older man, deeply into his forties, and wore the expression of someone who had just been told bad news.

  ‘Do you live here?’ he asked, as if it was a regular occurrence for him to come across a couple in their nightclothes who did not actually inhabit the house he had just broken into.

  ‘Yes. Yes we do. We moved in today – well, yesterday. What is going on here? Why are all these policemen going through our things?’

  The senior officer turned to his more junior colleague.

  ‘Tell your men to go through everything but make it brief, Sergeant. We need to wrap this up quickly.’

  ‘Sir.’ He turned to go back downstairs, leaving the senior officer with the huddled suspects.

  ‘We’re acting on information that an Anthony Verity lives at these premises but you say you don’t know who this man is.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The officer unzipped the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a notebook.

  ‘Could you tell me your names please?’

  The policeman who had been searching the master bedroom squeezed past on the landing, giving his superior the signal of a short shake of the head.

  ‘Graham Hasselhoff.’

  The officer peered at him by raising his eyes without lifting his head.

  ‘Hasselhoff.’ He made no attempt to hide the scepticism of his tone.

  ‘H, A, double S, E, L, H, O, double F,’ added Graham, helpfully, he thought.

  The officer wrote it down, reluctantly, it seemed, and then turned to Janet.

  ‘And I suppose you must be Pamela Anderson.’

  Janet let out a small sob. Graham looked down at her but could only see the top of her head as she bowed and burrowed it into his dressing gown. Normally, he would have expected her to stand up for herself but the situation was too much for her this time.

  He had never been the type to carry unnecessary baggage into interactions with authority figures and had grown so used, over the years, to people making stupid, unoriginal remarks about his surname but he wasn’t prepared to let it go this time. Once anyone dragged Janet into it, they had gone a step too far. No-one was allowed to upset his wife. It was time to take a stand.

  ‘This is my wife Janet and I’ll thank you to keep your sarcasm to yourself. Isn’t it bad enough that you break into our home in the middle of the night like the bloody Gestapo, scare us both out of our wits and then riffle through our stuff without taking the piss as well? We don’t know who Anthony Verity is and whoever the hell he is, it should be bloody obvious to you that he’s not here, so I suggest you get all your men out of my house and start working on the apology you’re going to have to make because, I promise you, I’m going to put in a complaint about this to your superiors and the bloody prime minister if I have to. This is not acceptable. I want everything put back where your men found it, I want a new front door and if there are any other breakages I want them paid for as well. So if you’re done here, I suggest you leave. Now.’

  Graham regretted the Gestapo reference as soon as it left his mouth but he felt better about getting that off his chest. It had cleared all feelings of confusion and alarm as effectively as a strong sudden gust of wind clears fallen leaves off a path. He had certainly caught the attention of the man in front of him, not to mention several of the other officers who had been momentarily distracted from their searches. The expression of the officer remained unflustered but the dynamic of the conversation had shifted significantly.

  ‘I must ask you to calm down, sir. I apologise for the upset this must have caused you and your wife but we were acting on reliable information in attempting to apprehend a known criminal. It appears he is no longer here but we acted in good faith. I’m sure a formal apology will be issued to you both very soon and suitable compensation will be arranged. In the meantime, we still need to continue our investigation to find out where Verity now is, so could I ask, have you bought this property or are you renting?’

  ‘Renting. Well, sort of. The house actually belongs to my son, Andreas Johnson, and he’s letting us live here.’

  The officer wrote down the name.

  ‘In that case, we will need to talk to Mr Johnson. I need to tell my men to start getting ready to leave but, in the meantime, could you get me the contact details?’

  ‘Yes. I can do that.’

  The policeman gave a half-smile and turned to go downstairs.

  Graham and Janet pulled each other closer in a consoling hug.
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br />   ‘Soon be over now, love. Andreas will sort this out.’ He kissed her forehead.

  ‘This is just horrible, Gray.’ She was plainly utterly unnerved by the whole experience. ‘Did you see how all those policemen were dressed, like they were going into a war zone? Who’s this man they were looking for? He must be a really nasty piece of work for them to do this because they don’t break into houses at this time of night for people whose library books are overdue – and what if he comes back? We might be in danger here, Gray. I don’t know if I can stay here anymore. And the neighbours – what will they be thinking? We’ve not been in 10 minutes and they’ll be thinking the mafia’s moved in. In a small village like this, they’ll all be talking. I can’t stop here another night, Gray. I want to go home.’

  There was nothing he could do or say. He held her tight because that was what both of them needed right now, but there was nothing to be gained from offering a promise that it would all be all right or from fuelling her instinctive reaction of wanting to get back to the familiar sanctuary of home.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  9

  Graham had quickly learned to read the signs. When the sounds from the next office indicated that Rebecca was about to stomp into the main reception area, it was the signal that everyone should attempt to look like they were in the middle of concentrating on something important. The warnings were very easy to pick up. For a woman you would not describe as anything other than average height and weight, she was remarkably heavy-footed.

  The reception was the hub of the depot. It was busily functional and certainly not a sleek space designed to impress new clientele. It was the place where drivers about to set out on jobs, just back from completing jobs or between jobs would file in and out in an almost constant stream to pick up delivery notes, drop off proof of delivery notes, check their schedules, download their tachograph records and attempt to out-banter young Zoe. They rarely got the better of those exchanges.

  She was at her computer screen, making the most of a rare moment when her attention was not needed elsewhere, with her broken foot up on an improvised stool of catalogues with a cushion on top and her crutches propped against the desk. Graham was a few yards away, also behind the reception partition, with his back to Zoe and with two screens in front of him. Even though this was only day six in the job, the environment and his duties were already feeling less alien.

  ‘Graham, I need you to arrange agency cover for the first week in September. We’ve got two drivers off.’

  Rebecca was not one for small talk. She also had an irritating habit of cutting across conversations if she had something to say and always spoke with an edge of urgency in her delivery, which left the impression she felt her words were far more important than anyone else’s could possibly be. You could tell the drivers didn’t like her and it was obvious, too, that she didn’t have a great deal of affection for the drivers. Graham picked up on that on his first morning.

  ‘Don’t take any shit from the drivers,’ she told him. ‘They’ll try it on with you all the time if they think they can manipulate you. They’ll complain that other drivers are getting the better trucks, they’ll complain about the runs they have been allocated, they’ll complain about everything. They’re like children. They want their hands holding all the time. Just tell them to stop whingeing and if they’ve got an issue they’re to take it up with me.’

  That was an option very few were likely to exercise. All the exchanges between Rebecca and the drivers he had witnessed so far could be described as businesslike, at best. Curt would be a less generous but no less accurate description.

  ‘Already sorted, Rebecca. I’ve been on to Bainbridge’s and they’ve confirmed.’

  ‘Oh!’ The reply had a rare double impact, in that it both stilled and silenced Rebecca. She clearly had not anticipated that Graham had the capacity for initiative.

  ‘Good,’ she responded at last. ‘That’s all right then.’

  She turned quickly to stomp back to her office but then stopped and turned back, as if remembering there was something else a good manager should do in situations such as this, according to the manual.

  ‘Well done, Graham. That’s good work.’

  She was away again without waiting for the potential embarrassment of a further positive inter-colleague interaction.

  Graham spun round on his chair to look at Zoe, who was already pulling a face intended to portray mock amazement at what she had just witnessed. He responded by raising his eyebrows and smiling.

  He and Janet had decided it would be better to go into work that day, as they reflected on and recovered from the shock of their early morning visit from the police.

  Graham had called Andreas to tell him what had happened and, within the half-hour, Andreas was fully launching himself into berating the officer who had been left in charge after the rest returned to the station to reflect on an operation that had not gone to plan. They could hear his raised voice downstairs from the bedroom, happy to leave him to a role he clearly felt comfortable in while they re-made the bed together and felt their emotional state gradually return to normal.

  After he had supplied relevant details to the policeman and vented some more, Andreas came upstairs to offer profuse apologies, though there was no question of them holding him personally responsible. He said someone was on their way to make the front door secure again, promised he would take up the issue of the intrusion further and offered them the chance to take the day off to recover.

  It was Janet who declined the offer on behalf of them both and took the lead on reassuring Andreas that they were fine. That pleased Graham. It had unsettled him to hear Janet sound so vulnerable when she talked about wanting to pack up and go back to Derby because that was not like her. She was his rock. She was the rational one through the time they wrestled with the anguish of not being able to produce a baby. She made it easier for him to come to terms with his own sense of inadequacy. She helped him readjust his expectations and accept that their life together would not include raising a child. That was the way it was meant to be.

  She didn’t mention anything about being unable to spend a further night at the house again, as they got ready to go into work, and he didn’t mention it either. He knew she regretted saying it. It wasn’t like her to talk like that. She had just been spooked, that’s all. They were both spooked.

  He thought about her as he sat at his desk, plotting and updating the progress of the drivers out on the road on the transport management system, and wondered how she was getting along on her first morning of the new job.

  The telephone on his desk rang; the continuous tone of an internal call.

  ‘It’s Andreas. Can you come through?’ He hung up again without waiting for a reply.

  ‘I’ve just got to pop in to see Andreas,’ he told Zoe. She nodded an acknowledgement.

  His office was down the corridor which also led to the back door of the warehouse. Graham hesitated at the closed door to the office, but then decided it was appropriate to knock and wait to be invited in. Son or not, he was still the boss.

  ‘Have a seat, have a seat.’

  Andreas gestured with a sweep of his arm to the chair on the other side of his desk while the thumb of his other hand glided furiously over the keypad of his phone.

  The office was cluttered and badly overdue a repaint. A single, neglected pot plant on the sill of the sole small window seemed to be gazing out, longing for the companionship of other plants. It was the closest thing in the whole office to a token effort to make more homely a room which otherwise appeared reconciled to the gloom cast by an insufficient ceiling strip light. The walls were largely covered; with framed certificates, free calendars and a large year planner, all fixed randomly with no apparent concern over whether or not they were put up straight. The centrepiece of the most open wall space, opposite banks of battered filing cabinets, was a large framed black and white photograph which showed a grimy 1940s flatbed truck, heavily
laden with sacks of coal, beside which three men with grimy faces, all wearing flat caps and heavy aprons, stood impassively, waiting for their image to be captured. Behind the truck was the entrance to a yard with the words ‘H Johnson Coal Merchant’ showing on a painted sign above it.

  Andreas finished prodding at his phone and looked up to see Graham, still standing and studying the large photograph.

  ‘Great picture, isn’t it?’

  Graham nodded. It was alive with a depth of character that only old black and white images of bygone eras were able to possess.

  ‘The one in the middle is the company founder, Harry. He returned from fighting in the war in Europe to set up the business in 1946 and I believe that photo was taken around then.’

  Graham studied the face of the figure at the centre of the picture. Whenever he came across old images of people who had gone to war, as he often had in his previous role as a librarian and family history researcher, he was always drawn to their faces, compelled by the thought that he might see and understand a little of what they must have gone through.

  ‘And this is my pappa, Harry.’

  Andreas had picked up a framed picture from his desk to show Graham, turning it from where it was set to face him.

  It was a portrait of a smartly dressed and dignified man, his hair almost completely silver yet whose lightly lined and tanned face suggested he was no older than 60. The mouth carried the hint of an upward turn at the corners, just enough to depict the total confidence of a man who knew he was in control. He looked calm, trustworthy.

  ‘And this, this is my beautiful mama.’

  He turned around the picture, in an identical frame, which had been beside the other on the desk, and then handed it over.

  Graham could recognise her features; her eyes, the broad unconditional smile on her full red lips which made her look so content. Her complexion had not yet recovered from the damage of teenage years when they were at university together but there was no sign of that now. Her hair, straight and still dark as varnished ebony, her olive skin firm and uncreased – she had, indeed, matured to become a beautiful woman. Looking at the picture, he was glad she had found happiness after the hardship he must have, unwittingly, made her go through and was also sad that her life had ended so suddenly and prematurely.