Wasted Years (23 page)

Ruth wiped away dust with the side of her hand and set the record down. Play it now before he came home. The rawness of the sound took her by surprise, the echo, her voice. Well before the first song was over, she lifted up the stylus, slotted the record back in its sleeve. That moody, soft-focused picture, head down by the mike like she was Janis Joplin. Well, lighting a cigarette, she wasn’t Janis; she was alive. Just. Without bothering to get back onto the chair, she tossed the record back up into the box.

Ruth James & the Nighthawks
RIP.

Hallett drove, enjoying this part of the job, good at it. Followed a stolen Sirocco once, all the way from Exeter to Chesterfield, five different motorways, never spotted once. Now he ghosted eighty yards behind Prior’s car as it swung down Southdale Road, turning south through Bakers Field towards Colwick Wood park. In the back Graham Millington began to whistle, tuneless and unrecognizable, until the others stared at him and he shut up.

The other cars were slowly closing, east and west.

The palms of Resnick’s hands were dry and, beginning to itch. Since making his call several hours before, he had not thought of Elaine once.

Ruth had intended to be in bed before Prior arrived back, but she had switched the set back on and a program about prisoners’ wives had caught her attention. Talking to camera, some of their faces had been electronically distorted to avoid recognition. Story after story of impossible journeys by bus and train, often with kids in tow. Month after month, year after year. Stand by your man. If mine gets nicked, Ruth thought, he can sod that for a lark!

Above the television sound she heard the car draw up outside, switched off and went quickly up the stairs.

“Ruth? Ruthie?”

No reply. Prior switched on the TV and flicked through the channels. Highlights from tonight’s top-of-the-table promotion battle. He broke off a piece of mature cheddar with his fingers, popped open a can of beer. If this is the top of the table, he thought after a few minutes, God help the rest of them.

He was lolling back against one corner of the settee, feet resting on the coffee table, when Sangster swung a sledgehammer at the door, the second time enough to splinter the hinges clean away.

Resnick was first inside, calling, “Police!”, Hallett and Millington on his heels. Prior raced from the front room, shouting Ruth’s name as he passed the stairs. “Charlie!” Hallett yelled. “Go! Go!” Prior wrenched open the kitchen door and slammed it shut behind him. Ruth, pulling on a robe over her nightclothes, stepped out of the bedroom into a chaos of chasing feet and harsh voices. Prior leaned his weight against the kitchen table and rammed it against the door; through the window he could see the shadowy figures of men at close intervals between the roses.

“Bastards!”

Rains looked up at Ruth from the well of the stairs and winked.

Hallett shoulder-charged the kitchen door and his ankle turned under him, but the door budged back far enough for Resnick to squeeze through. A quick look towards the rear windows, which were still closed. He guessed the side door led into the garage and he was right.

The offside door to the car was open and so was the boot. Prior partly screened behind it, bending low. The only light was that which came through the kitchen but it fell across Prior’s back and face.

“CID,” Resnick said breathlessly. “DS Resnick. I …”

Prior moved to his right as he straightened and when he did he had the double-barreled shotgun in his hands. Something banged against the garage door outside, but the hands didn’t falter; they were holding the gun quite steady, angled towards the upper part of Resnick’s chest.

Peripherally aware of other voices, outside and behind, Resnick could only concentrate on Prior’s eyes as they narrowed down, the slight tightening of the finger behind the trigger guard.

The breathing of both men was ragged.

Resnick took a pace forward and cautiously, very slowly, began to open the fingers of his empty right hand.

Something inside Prior changed, like a switch being thrown; his eyes widened and blinked and he began to reverse the shotgun, the barrels towards his own head. Christ! Resnick thought, he’s going to kill himself. But the swiveling movement didn’t stop until the stock was pointing towards Resnick and he went quickly forward, hand reaching across the roof of the car, to take the weapon from Prior’s loosening grasp.

The garage doors slid quickly up into the roof and Ben Riley stepped out of car headlights, concern on his face. Hallett and Millington moved either side of Resnick, turning Prior around, reading rights and warnings as they fastened cuffs about his wrists.

“Did well, Charlie. Star performance.”

Resnick turned at the sound of Rains’s voice and there he was, grinning from the kitchen doorway, Ruth at his side. Rains had a police-issue pistol in his right hand.

“Thought for a minute there I was going to have to use this.”

Resnick pushed past them, back inside the house, Ben Riley following him through.

Thirty-Four

Summer in the cities.

Prior was refused bail, on the grounds that he might skip the country or attempt to interfere with potential witnesses, and jailed on remand. Martin Finch was persuaded to testify that in addition to the shotgun Prior had surrendered to Resnick, he had supplied the weapon that had seriously wounded the Securicor guard and that Frank Churchill had told him it was to be used in a robbery Prior was organizing.

When Churchill stepped off the Manchester train, officers were waiting to arrest him.

Resnick was officially commended for bravery and the object of several late-night celebrations in the local force. He found himself celebrating again when the soccer season ended and County were promoted to the First Division of the Football League for the first time in fifty-five years.

He sat in front of a television set with Ben Riley, watching Spurs’ other Argentinian, Ricky Villa, plough his way through a maze of players in the Manchester City penalty area and score the winning goal in the FA Cup Final replay. When it was over, Ben told him that he’d written an exploratory letter to the Montana State Police.

One of Prior’s fellow prisoners came up to him in the exercise yard and told him his wife was getting her leg over with a copper. It took four men to prize Prior away; by the time they’d succeeded, the other prisoner had a broken nose and a ruptured spleen.

Resnick and Elaine were talking again, being civil at least; she said she had stopped seeing Gallagher, needing to think things through. There was still a great deal that went unspoken, neither of them willing to prize open what each, in their different ways, was apprehensive to examine.

In June there was more rioting in London and in July the attempt by police to arrest a black youth for stealing his own motor bike resulted in violent confrontations which lasted for three days. Petrol bombs were hurled at a beseiged police station in Manchester and riots threatened to tear apart the decaying hearts of many other inner-cities: Birmingham, Blackpool, Bradford, Cirencester, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds, Nottingham, Preston, Reading, Sheffield, and Wolverhampton. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, refused to accept either swingeing unemployment or bad housing as causes, putting the violence and looting down to criminal greed.

Police used water cannon, CS gas, and plastic bullets to quell the disturbances. And Ben Riley applied to the American Embassy for his visa.

The fag end of July, Resnick, with four days’ leave and time hanging wide on his hands, bought white gloss paint and set to work on the skirting boards in the unoccupied top bedroom.

The first time Elaine came up the stairs she brought biscuits and a mug of tea; the second she stood, arms folded, and said: “Charlie, we need to talk. Charlie, I want a divorce.”

1992

Thirty-Five

“Pam Van Allen?” people would say. “What kind of a name is that?”

“My husband’s.”

“Your husband’s called Pam?” same old jokes.

Either that, or it was assumed she’d got herself married to a Dutchman, like, you know, that detective on television.

Truth to tell, his name had been one of the most attractive things about him, just the right amount of seriousness and mystery; so much more interesting than her own name, the one she’d be born with, born into, which was Gold. Pam Gold: it didn’t exactly have a ring to it. It made her sound, Pam thought, like the wife of a dentist or a lawyer or a psychotherapist, spending her days listlessly shopping for things she already had.

All right, she knew that was a stereotype.

But that was the way people thought. If she weren’t careful, she caught herself falling into the same trap—despite the fact that her dentist was called Adams and the lawyer she’d consulted about the divorce had been Mitchell of Haywood, Turner, and Mitchell. She had never, knowingly, met a psychotherapist. Though her husband had suggested it on numerous occasions towards the end of their five-year marriage.

Five years, two months, thirteen days. After the usual healthy mudslinging, she’d walked away with fifty percent of the resale value of the house and its contents and her husband’s name.

“It doesn’t make sense,” her friends at work said, disappointed. “All that’s over. You should go back to who you really are.”

But Pamela Van Allen was who she felt she was; it didn’t make her think of him at all. Little did. Dandruff and
Mastermind
and pee stains round the toilet bowl. And Pam Gold was a stranger who had once bopped around to Paul McCartney and 10CC, believed in silly love songs and the things we do for love.

Pam Van Allen was a probation officer in the city, thirty-five years old, six years’ experience, responsible single woman with a responsible job, showing her identification as she slowed to a stop at the prison gates.

She had worked out a strategy for visits like these. Next to no makeup, just a touch around the eyes, loose cotton jumper under a check wool jacket, plain skirt, three-quarter length. Female, but not flaunting it, no kind of a come-on; clearly feminine, not a dyke. Careful about gesturing with the hands, crossing legs, being over-generous with the smiles. Know what you wanted to say, questions you had to ask. Firm, not overfriendly, but all the same, what you wanted was their trust.

The first doors rang shut behind her and an internal clock automatically switched on, counting the minutes till she would walk back out again. The man she was going to see had been imprisoned for a decade of his life.

Since that night he’d last called on Rylands and they had talked about the prospect of Prior being released, Resnick had tried to push it to the back of his mind. With the burglary rate taking a steep hike and a spate of quick and savage underpass muggings, that wasn’t so difficult. And, of course, the investigation into the highly organized series of armed robberies was, as the phrase went, ongoing. In this connection, Divine had taken to flexing his muscles at a health club in the Lace Market, swopping confidences afterwards with a pair of likely lads who seemed to have more disposable cash than four nights a week as club bouncers would account for. Graham Millington was doing his drinking in Sneinton, hobnobbing with a snout who’d put some good tips his way in the past and just might be about to do so again if the price was right.

The atmosphere in the CID room was tense, simmering, waiting, if not to explode, at least to let off a head of steam. The workmen had finally got the central heating system working again, floor boards had been replaced, furniture dragged from corridors and odd corners; Resnick had his office back to himself. Space to think, plan, enjoy a deli sandwich without being looked at askance. He was polishing off a salami and gorgonzola on light rye when the phone rang.

“Resnick. CID.”

“Neil Park.”

Neil was a senior probation officer, a fair-weather County fan, a man whom Resnick trusted and might have liked had not the ambivalent relationship between the police and the probation service stood between them.

“You were interested in who’s been assigned to Prior.”

Resnick waited.

“Pam Van Allen. D’you know her?”

Resnick had an unclear picture of a woman in her midthirties, not tall, darkish hair—not worn long, he remembered, cut quite close to her head. “I think so,” Resnick said. “Who she is, anyway. I don’t recall speaking to her.”

“She’s good,” Neil Park said. “Reliable. Doesn’t take any pushing around.”

“Will she talk to me?”

A hesitation at the end of the line, longer than Resnick liked.

“She might.”

“But you’ll not suggest that she does?”

“That’s right.”

Thanks a lot, Resnick thought. “Didn’t see much of you this season,” he said.

Neil Park laughed. “Work’s bad enough without suffering on my day off and paying for the pleasure.”

Resnick thanked him and rang off. Twenty minutes later, shuffling through the past few days of incident reports, he remembered that Pam Van Allen’s hair wasn’t really dark at all: it was that shade of gray that in some lights looks almost silver.

What must he had been thinking of?

Prior hadn’t reacted to her name. Sat there and answered her questions, briefly, not impolitely, never avoiding her eye. His face was sallow, lines curved from his mouth, his cheeks were lightly sunken in. The accent wasn’t local, Pam thought. Oh, there was an overlay, words and phrases; but below all of that it was harsh, southern, London or close.

“You appreciate it’ll be difficult,” she said. “Readjusting.”

He glanced up at her quickly, keeping his head angled down. It was almost mischievous, that look wrinkling his eyes.

Pam hurried on. “Being in here, it’s hard not to get …”

“Institutionalized.”

“Yes.”

He spread one hand upon the table, the other resting, loosely clenched, upon his knee. “You’ll help me.”

She nodded. “Yes. As far as I can.” The room was suddenly small and short of air. Sweat ran in a single line along Prior’s face, running from his short hair to his close-shaven chin. “Certainly, we’ll find you somewhere to live. At first. While you get sorted.”