Darkness, Darkness (18 page)

‘Who’s this?’ the man called Abbas says.

‘Never mind,’ Catherine says. ‘Just go.’

‘You’re taking a turn for older men, perhaps? A change from the real thing.’

‘Abbas, you’re making a scene. Please go.’

‘We need to talk.’

‘We have nothing to say.’

His fingers are still around Catherine’s wrist. Resnick puts a hand on his elbow and he knocks it away. One of the two uniformed officers has started to walk cautiously towards them. Two small children and a teenager in a grey hoodie, who may be in charge of them and may not, make their way along the opposite pavement, oblivious. One of the children points at the old man’s shopping trolley and laughs. The woman with the buggy is still where she was, rooted to the spot, agog.

Resnick takes hold of the man’s arm again and this time he doesn’t let go.

The man stares at him, their faces close. Something aromatic on his breath.

Nothing else is said.

The man lets go of Catherine’s wrist and turns away.

Pale marks like bone against her skin.

Something has passed between the man and Resnick in the moment before he released his grasp. A moment of recognition? A warning?

He has turned on his heel and walked away, the old man with the shopping trolley pulling it aside to let him pass.

‘Everything okay?’ the police constable enquires.

‘Are you all right?’ Resnick asks.

In response to both she nods her head. Determined, even though he can no longer see, not to let her former lover have the satisfaction of somehow knowing she is rubbing her wrist to ease the pain.

They found a pub near the town centre, open early, breakfast still being served, the smell of toast and bacon, cooking oil that had been used too many times, unchanged; a table outside, wrought-iron painted white, the kind you find in a garden centre; not warm out, no sun, but this was so that Catherine could smoke. Which she did, two cigarettes almost down to the filter, one after the other, no conversation. She’d asked for, and was halfway down, a large glass of white wine, while Resnick had opted for coffee and almost immediately regretted it, returning for a bottle of pale ale, an approximation, he supposed, of the old Worthington White Shield that bar staff more often than not had asked you to pour yourself, leery of its volatility.

‘Abbas,’ she said suddenly. ‘I met him when I was at university. I was in my final year and he was doing an MBA. Secondment of some kind from the City bank where he’d been working. His family, they’re Iranian. Some of them came over to this country after the revolution; some stayed. Abbas and his two brothers, they were all educated here. His older brother, he’s a doctor, he went back to Iran. The youngest, like Abbas, stayed here. He’s some kind of lawyer, solicitor, barrister by now, I’m not sure.’

She reached for her cigarettes, reconsidered, drank some more wine instead.

‘I’m not used to men hitting on me. Not, you know, out of the blue . . .’ A quick smile. ‘Apparently men find me intimidating. Some men. Anyway, Abbas just came up to me – I was with some friends drinking coffee – came up and asked me out. As if it never occurred to him I might refuse.’

‘So you didn’t?’

‘I didn’t. And it was like that. Suddenly we were in a relationship. From nowhere. He’d seen me – one of his friends told me this later – he’d seen me walking across the campus and asked who I was. Decided he was going to have me. Marry me, that’s what his friend said. He was going to marry me.’

‘And did he?’

Catherine shook her head. ‘No, but it all moved along so fast, there was a time when it just might have happened. One minute we were dating, spending practically every minute when he wasn’t studying for his precious exams in one another’s company. The next we were flying out to Tehran to meet that side of his family. My exams, my finals – looking back, it was as if they didn’t matter. That I got the good result I did was up to all the work I’d done previously as much as anything.’

‘So what went wrong?’ Resnick asked.

A single-decker bus slowed to a standstill a stone’s throw from where they were sitting, cloaking them in a fug of diesel.

‘I saw the light – or, rather, I had some friends who saw it for me – realised I’d hardly made a decision of my own in months. Where to go, what to think, what to wear.’

‘Doesn’t sound like you.’

‘It wasn’t. That’s the point. I broke it off. Tried to. He wasn’t having it, of course. At first, he simply refused to believe me. Then did everything he could to change my mind. Maybe he thought he could buy me, I don’t know. When it finally clicked that I was serious, he told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life and I’d regret it for ever.’

‘And did you?’

‘Sometimes. Yes, if I’m honest, there were things about him I missed. But now I had my degree and, of course, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with it. Made the usual half-hearted journey around the capitals of Europe, my gap year I suppose. Came back and joined the police. Shock horror from my parents. Why are you throwing away a good education, the usual sort of thing.’

‘Abbas, what had they felt about him?’

‘Well, of course, they thought he was marvellous. Well-to-do, beautifully mannered, rich and likely to get richer. A good family. A family of doctors and lawyers and bankers. They must have thought it was a perfect fit. Although, when we stopped seeing one another, I think – although they’ve never said it – I think secretly they were pleased. No, relieved.’

‘Something about him they didn’t like? Didn’t trust?’

‘Perhaps. I think, also, in some way they feared I was a little out of my depth.’

Resnick drank some more of his beer; asked Catherine if she wanted any more wine but she shook her head.

‘All of that,’ Resnick said, ‘seems to have been quite a long time ago.’

‘It was.’

‘And now, suddenly, he’s started calling, wanting to see you?’

Another smile, grudging this time. ‘Not exactly. Abbas can be persuasive, as you can imagine. All he needs to do is catch you at a weaker moment and . . .’ She gestured with her hands. ‘I’ve seen him – I mean, we’ve been together, a couple, on several occasions since. Once for as little as three weeks, once, the last time, almost a year. It was not long after . . . not long after the investigation into Lynn’s murder. I was feeling, I don’t know, a bit low, I suppose, and Abbas did his usual thing of sweeping you into his orbit. You go along, and why not? It’s fun, exciting. For a time you stop asking questions, and then, gradually, you do.’

She looked at Resnick, drank the last of her wine, looked away. Traffic sidled past. A young man of no more than twenty, face the parchment pale of the perpetually poor, came, hand out towards their table, mumbling something about needing his fare to Derby. Resnick gave him a handful of change and sent him on his way.

‘This time he was nasty, threatening. Accused me of using him, telling lies. What was it? Spreading my legs for money like any other high-class tart. The last time I saw him, before today, he made one more effort to get me to change my mind, and when I wouldn’t he called me a black whore and punched me here.’

She indicated a spot at the centre of her chest, a few inches below her breasts.

Resnick recalled the look that had passed between them, Abbas and himself.

‘What will he do now?’

‘I don’t know. Try phoning again. Try to intercept me. Maybe nothing at all.’

‘Does he know where you live?’

‘Now? I don’t think so. Otherwise he would have been unlikely to have come here.’

‘He found that out somehow.’

‘I imagine, if he gave a good enough reason, they’d tell him at HQ where I was stationed. But they’d never let him have my home address.’ She looked at her watch. ‘We should be getting going. Don’t want to give Picard any more ammunition than we have to.’

A couple of sooty, ragged-tailed pigeons waddled towards their table as they left and went away disappointed.

THE MEETING HAD
been called for Monday 8 October, speakers from the Kent coalfield, from Scotland and from Wales. Jenny had travelled down to Mansfield with Peter Waites, Edna Johnson and others. Five hundred striking miners in the hall, standing round the edges of the room some of them with all seats taken. Following the Labour Party’s annual conference the previous week, at which Arthur Scargill had asked for and been given an overwhelming vote of support, morale was high.

‘I condemn the violence of the stone throwers and the battering ram carriers,’ Neil Kinnock, the Party leader, had said from the platform, ‘and I condemn the violence of the cavalry charges, the truncheon groups and the shield bangers.’

Those who wanted heard the last part of what he had said, ignored the first; fed on the rumours that NACODS, the union of pit overseers, was on the verge of joining the strike. If that happened – as the speaker from Scotland told the meeting – then without overseers to ensure that proper safety procedures were in place and being followed, by law no pit could remain open. So what would the NCB do then?

‘The people of this country,’ the Welsh speaker said, rising to his feet, ‘the ordinary people of this country are on our side. No matter what the government says . . .’ Cheers. ‘No matter what MacGregor says . . .’ Cheers. ‘No matter what Maggie says . . .’ Louder cheers. ‘We have the popular support and we will win.

‘And not only have we got the people on our side,’ he continued, truly hitting his stride, ‘we have God, too. God’s spokesman, no less, the Bishop of Durham, you heard him, last week at his enthronement, calling for MacGregor – what did he call him? that elderly imported American – calling for him to go. Calling this Tory government to task for embarking on a war at the other end of the world rather than spending that money on the poor and the elderly in their own country. Calling them to task for spending more and more money on the police at a time when they are being used as a blunt instrument of government policy, in an attempt to force this movement, this union, into submission.’

Near uproar; he waited for it to subside.

‘You will have heard,’ he continued, ‘the NUM’s false promises, heard MacGregor, this unwanted old man from the other side of the ocean, who has already decimated the steel industry in this country, claim there will be new jobs within the industry for any miner whose colliery is closed, which we all know is a lie.’

‘Yes!’

‘Claim there will be no compulsory redundancies, which I know and you all know is another lie.’

‘Yes!’

‘Promise that for those who do voluntarily accept redundancy, their increased payments will be full and fair.’

‘No! No!’

‘Because we know, to echo the words of the Bishop one more time, that while redundancy payments may be all very well, what redundancy means is no more jobs for those who have been made redundant and no more jobs for their children.’

Loud and prolonged acclaim. Jenny and Edna exchanged excited glances. The palms of Jenny’s hands were damp with sweat.

While the applause was still ringing round the hall, the Kentish speaker rose to his feet.

‘Comrades, I may not have always agreed with everything Arthur Scargill has done during the course of this strike . . .’ Murmurs of disapproval, scraping of chairs. ‘I may not have agreed with everything he’s said . . .’ Scattered shouts of protest, calls for him to sit down. ‘But I wholeheartedly endorse, and call upon all of you gathered here to do so too, Arthur’s words from the month just gone.

‘“Our members,” he said, “will not submit to the butchery of their livelihoods and their communities. There was only one course of action: to fight.”’

Cheers of agreement, raised fists, banging of chairs.

‘And . . .’ the speaker continued, shouting above the crowd, ‘“That fight has been an inspiration to working people around the world.”’

Anything else was lost in a tumult of sound.

In the car, heading home, Peter Waites leaned across to Jenny in the back seat.

‘Don’t you wish that’d been you up there? All that acclamation. All that applause.’

‘Me? In front of all those people – you must be joking.’

He patted her hand. ‘Can’t keep putting it off, you know. No need to start with hundreds, not at first. Thirty or so will do.’

The headlights cut through the gathering mist, lighting the road ahead.

A BOTTLE OF
single malt aside, and that destined for McBride’s bottom drawer, Sandford and Cresswell came back from north of the border empty-handed. The address in Fort William turned out to be a one-room flat above a pizza restaurant close to the station. Single bed, sink, two-ring cooker, one easy chair, pint-sized television, shared bathroom one floor down. Danny Ireland had been there a little over three months, firstly doing manual work at the Lochaber Smelter north of the town, after that picking up odd jobs here and there, including a spell in the restaurant kitchen, washing pots.

Those few who had met him described him as distant, not exactly unfriendly, but the kind who liked to keep himself to himself; reliable, though, a good worker, not afraid to roll up his sleeves, muck in. Ask him to come for a drink after work and the answer was always a shake of the head.

One of the men Cresswell spoke to, someone who’d worked with Ireland at the aluminium smelter, said he’d come across him once, quite high on the hills to the west of Glen Nevis.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ the man, who was out walking the West Highland Way, had asked, surprised.

‘Keeping the fuck away from the likes of you,’ had been the reply.

The restaurant proprietor, who also owned the lease on the flat, told them Ireland had just disappeared, no warning. One evening he was there, the next morning gone.

‘Sneaked off in the night, then?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Any rent owing?’

‘Gonna pay it, are you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Anyway, only kidding. Left what he owed, tucked under the corner of the TV. Correct to the penny.’

‘Any idea where he was headed?’

‘Not a one. But aside from what he stood up in, everything he owned fitted into a duffel bag he could sling over his shoulder. Could have gone anywhere. Tell you one odd thing about him. Even though he had a bed in his room, far as I could make out he chose to sleep on the floor. Like he was camping out. Some people, eh?’