Wasted Years (17 page)

Resnick sighed and bit into his bacon sandwich. When Ben’s shift matched, they would meet there at Parker’s, eat breakfast, talk. More often than not about the way Chedozie had run the opposition ragged the week before. But not today.

“I’m serious, Charlie. I’m leaving. Not the force. The sodding country.”

Resnick looked at him. “You’ve never said.”

“Not mean I haven’t thought.”

“But you’d have said. Something anyway.”

“Would I? Don’t you have any pipedreams nestling away in that head of yours? Things you wouldn’t even tell Elaine?”

Resnick shook his head: his problem, where Elaine was concerned, was that he made his dreams all too clear. The day he’d spotted alphabet wallpaper in Texas Homecare and told her it would look just right in the small bedroom; the way he glanced at her expectantly when she came in from the bathroom, those times of the month when he knew her period was due.

Ben Riley folded the slice of thin buttered bread in half, then half again and began, slowly, to wipe it round his plate. “You don’t think there are things she doesn’t tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

Riley looked at him quizzically, not quite believing.

“Well, she’s ambitious at work,” Resnick said, “I know that. Wants things for the house …”

“And that’s all?”

Resnick finished his coffee, too weak as usual, nodded over at Ben Riley’s empty cup. “Another tea?”

“Best not. Time almost, we weren’t here.”

Outside the café, the traffic entering the city from the south and west was thickening. Pretty soon the island would be jammed tight. A fireman, wearing a red and white Forest shirt above his uniform trousers, walked past them towards the fire station alongside. The two policemen watched him till he had disappeared through the broad entrance, neither one wanting to be the first to walk away, each sensing there were still things left unsaid without recognizing what they were.

When Resnick finally arrived, the police station was humming with the previous night’s events in London. He had scarcely shown his face in the CID room before being summoned to the inspector’s office. Rains was already sitting there, relaxed in a chair beside Skelton’s desk, one long leg crossed casually over the other.

“Looks as if we’ve a break in the Sainsbury’s job,” Skelton said, pressing the tips of his fingers together in front of his irreproachable ironed shirt. “Witness prepared to swear she heard Prior and another man …”

“Churchill,” Rains interrupted, “Frank Churchill.”

“Heard Prior and this bloke talking about carrying out the robbery, bragging about it.”

“More than that,” Rains prompted.

“Using the gun.”

Resnick looked away from the inspector, staring at Rains hard. Rains recrossed his legs and smiled disarmingly back. “Who was this?” Resnick asked.

Rains shrugged. “Some torn.”

“They spoke about the shooting in front of her?”

“Sure.”

“It seems they were clear which of them had fired the gun,” Skelton said.

Resnick still hadn’t moved his eyes from Rains’s face. “Prior,” Rains said quietly, leaning forward slightly as he mouthed the word. “John Prior, what happened to that poor bastard of a guard, it was down to him.”

“And she’ll swear to that, in court if needs be, the woman?”

“She’ll swear to it all right,” Rains smiled. “On her life.”

Prior lived in a nondescript suburban-looking house overlooking Colwick Wood Park. Some mornings it was quiet enough to hear the kids singing to the teacher’s piano in the nearby Jesse Boot Junior and Infant School. Step across from the house and there were the bowling green, the recreation ground, the reservoir. At the far side of the park lay the greyhound stadium and the racecourse. There were roses here and people quietly walking their dogs; men and women wearing white sitting on the steps of the bowls pavilion comparing notes about the bias of the green.

One car swung round into Ashworth Close and parked, three men to watch the rear of the house. The other cars, two of them, came from opposite directions, slowing to a halt at either side of a milk float making late deliveries.

Skelton waited until the milkman had cleared before giving the order to move in. Prior’s wife was in her dressing gown at the door, bending down to pick up the two pints, when the detectives raced up the path, Rains at their head, Resnick not far behind.

“Just right,” Rains said, pushing past. “Tea all round.”

“John!” Ruth Prior screamed. “John, it’s the police!”

Heavy men shouldered her aside and one of the bottles slipped from her hand, glass shattering to a hundred tiny pieces on the step.

Prior was half out of the bedroom, pulling on a pair of jeans, when Rains charged up the stairs.

“What the fuck’s going on?”

Like the card in a magician’s trick, Rains’s warrant card was in the palm of his hand. “John Edward Prior, I am arresting you in connection with the theft of …”

Already, other officers were starting to search the premises.

“Get out of my house!” Ruth Prior shouted at the man pulling clothing from the hall cupboard. “You bastards, you’ve got no right.”

“I’m afraid that’s not the case,” Jack Skelton said, holding the magistrate’s warrant in front of her eyes.

“Fuck you!” she said, anger contorting her face.

“Why don’t you get yourself in the kitchen, love?” said one of the detectives. “Mash tea.”

“And fuck you, too!”

Aside from the fact she was older, her hair had darkened into chestnut brown, there’d been some thickening around the waist and legs, she wasn’t so very different from when, as Ruth James, she had flailed her arms in front of the band at the Boat, moaned and sung the blues.

They hurried Prior up the steps and into the station, laces of his brown shoes still undone. “I’m not opening my fucking mouth till I’ve seen my solicitor.”

“’Course not,” the custody sergeant said agreeably. “As it should be. Now if you’ll just empty your pockets out onto there.”

Ruth walked into the bedroom without expecting anyone to be there and found Rains feeling through the contents of the chest of drawers that had been tipped across the double bed.

“I thought you bastards had all gone.”

“Clearly not.” Straightening, smile curling from one corner of his mouth. “Some of us bastards are still here.”

She watched his hands smooth across the pale shades of her underwear, almost delicate.

“Does something for you, does it?”

Rains’s smile became a question.

“Women’s knickers?”

“Depends who’s inside them.”

“Go round pinching them from washing lines?”

“I said …”

“I heard what you said.”

He lifted a pair of her pants, white, lace at the front, plain and shiny at the back; all the while he was fingering them he was looking at her.

“Still appreciates you, does he? Touches you? Like this? After all these years?”

She grabbed a bottle of moisturizer from the dressing table and threw it at his head; tore the garment from his grasp and hurled it back across the room; aimed a blow at his leering face and he caught her wrist as her fingers were only inches from his cheek.

“Got to be compensations, though, married to a villain. Second-hand excitement. Holidays in Malta, the Costa de Sol. Never knowing where he is at nights. Who he’s with. Jumping every time the doorbell rings.”

She pulled hard and he let her go and she stood there close to him, her breathing loud in the quiet room. Car doors slammed in the street outside. A voice calling Rains’s name.

“You know,” Rains said softly, “I did you a misservice. Took you for a slag. But I was wrong. You’re not that at all. Here.”

And before she knew what he was doing, he had seized her hand and pressed it between his legs, laughing when the surprise jumped in her eyes.

“Not many women,” Rains said, stepping round her, around the end of the bed towards the door, “can make me feel that way. Not without even trying.”

Ruth was still standing there, staring across at her reflection in the dressing table mirror, when she heard the front door slam shut, the last car drive away.

“What I’d like to do,” Skelton said, “is ask you to take us through it once again.”

“No way.”

“To be certain we have the details …”

“No.”

“No room for any doubt …”

“No!”

“I think, inspector, my client has answered your every question as fully as you could wish. I’m afraid I can really see no further purpose being served here, other, of course, than an attempt at intimidation.”

“Investigation,” Skelton corrected him mildly.

“Investigate my arse!”

Just perceptibly, Jack Skelton flinched. Sitting beside him, Resnick leaned forward, drawing Prior’s attention. “What can you tell us about Frank Churchill?” he asked.

Prior shrugged and shook his head.

“Does that signify a no?” Resnick asked.

“It means I’ve got a dose of Parkinson’s—what d’you think?”

In his notes, the young DC wrote: Prior gestured no, nothing.

“How about Frank Chambers?” Resnick asked.

Prior turned aside in disgust and a look from his solicitor told him to respond. “No,” Prior said.

“Frank Church?”

“Never heard of him.”

“What about,” asked Skelton, apparently studying the marks on the tabletop with interest, “Mary MacDonald?”

“Was she there?”

“Where?”

“Up that supermarket, wherever? That’s what you’ve got me here for, isn’t it? So I want to know, what’s she got to do with it, this … Mary whatever-her-name-is?”

“Miss MacDonald,” Skelton said, “was present on an occasion when you and Frank Churchill …”

“I told you, I don’t know any …”

“Ssh!” Prior’s solicitor said, raising a hand in warning. He knew from experience it was when they lost their temper that his clients gave it all away.

“When you and Frank Churchill,” Skelton was saying, “talked about the raid on the security van, openly admitted taking part …”

“Don’t waste your breath!” Prior said with scorn, leaning his chair back on to its rear legs.

“And when you admitted being the one in possession of the gun which seriously injured one of the guards.”

Prior’s chair rocked forwards fast and he was on his feet, arms braced against the table’s edge, glaring into Skelton’s face.

“Mr Prior,” his solicitor said, alarmed, half out of his seat. “John.”

Resnick and the DC had moved near enough simultaneously, closing on Prior from either side, the constable’s notebook spilling on to the floor. Skelton blinked and little more, his hair still brushed back and perfectly in place, tie knotted with deft correctness at the neck of his cream shirt.

By whatever mechanism Prior brought himself under control, it took forty, possibly fifty seconds to work. Time-a-plenty, Resnick thought, to have squeezed back on the trigger of a gun.

“My client would like a break,” the solicitor said. “A drink.”

No one seemed to hear him.

“If you’re going to talk about firearms,” Prior said, once he had sat back down, “people getting shot, I’ve got nothing further to say.”

But when neither Skelton nor Resnick responded, he said, “This woman, fetch her down here. Let her say that to my face. Stick me up in an identity parade. Anything. ’Cause I tell you this, either one of you’s made her up or she’s lying.”

When Rains and two other officers arrived at the furnished room in Tennyson Street, all the signs were that Mary MacDonald had gone. The clothes, the personal knick-knacks, even the sheets from the bed had all disappeared, leaving a thin stained mattress and a box of kitchen matches close by the gas fire.

One of the postcards of Mary and her friend Marie had slithered almost from sight, wedged against the cracked lino by the door.

For the best part of two hours they knocked on doors, rang bells, came no nearer to knowing where Mary MacDonald might have gone. All they could do now was show the picture of Marie to the Vice Squad in the probability that Marie was also on the game, hoping against hope that she hadn’t done a bunk at the same time.

The CID room was oddly quiet, the click and hiss of cigarette lighters, irregular sounds of men breathing. Jack Skelton sat on one of the desks, shirt sleeves rolled evenly back upon his wrists. “House, garage, garden—we turned up nothing. The only witness we might have had has disappeared. We don’t seem to be any further along with Prior in this business than we were a week ago.”

Rains lifted his head as though to intervene, but, under the inspector’s eyes, ducked it back down and continued examining his shoes.

“We’re going to have to kick him loose.”

“Any point hanging on to him till morning, sir?” one of the detectives asked.

“If you can give me one,” Skelton responded.

He could not. Nobody could.

“Right,” said Skelton, levering himself to the floor, “Release him. Now.”

Twenty-Six

Resnick had returned home around seven that evening to find Elaine engrossed in the spreadsheets she had on the dining-room table, the radio defiantly tuned to Radio Two. Computerized figures and Barry Manilow: for Resnick an eminently resistible combination.

“Anything to eat?” Resnick said over her shoulder.

She didn’t look round. “Cold chicken in the fridge.”

“You?”

“I had lunch.”

“It’s supper.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Resnick opened a pot of Dijon mustard and dipped pieces of three-day-old chicken into it, eating absentmindedly as he scanned the local paper, the urban ghetto scare stories in the
Mail.
In the front room he put a record on the stereo, realized he wasn’t listening and switched off.

“How about the Club? I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

Elaine turned slowly. “The Polish Club.”

“Where else?”

“I thought you’d allowed your membership to lapse?”

Resnick shrugged. “A chance to rejoin.”

“You go. I ought to finish this.”

For some moments Resnick struggled to summon up the interest to ask what this was. “Maybe meet me there later?” he said.

“Maybe.”