Wasted Years (9 page)

Millington shook his head. “Not so far.”

What they did have was an artist’s impression, a narrow-faced young man with a mass of tightly curled hair: it would be in the evening editions of the
Post,
screened on both
Central News
and
East Midlands Today.
Not exactly
Crimewatch,
but it might yield results.

“Nothing on file about this Rylands’s known associates?” Resnick asked.

“Doesn’t sound as if he had any. Pathetic little bugger.”

“Okay,” Resnick said, pushing back his chair, “I’ll get Lynn to drive me out there. See what’s what. Sooner that than hanging around here without a place to call my own. Mooching about the corridors. Starting to feel like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“Okay, okay,” Darren called. “Stop the car, stop the car. That’s it. Here, right here.”

Keith had driven the Cavalier into the NCP car park near the Rutland Square Hotel and swopped it for a silver-gray Honda Accord with a rusted rear offside wing and two pairs of walking boots wrapped in old newspaper down by the back seat.

Keith wriggled himself up to his full height. “Hey, this is …”

“I know where it is.”

“You’re not going to try knocking it over again?”

Darren gave him a look that warned Keith there was such a thing as having too much to say—what he ought to do, stick to the driving and leave the thinking to him.

“Then why are we …?” Keith persisted.

“Shut it!” Darren hissed and pointed at the clock on the car’s dashboard. “That working? That right?”

“Far as I know.”

Twenty-eight minutes past five.

“Right, then.” Darren said, opening the car door. “Wait here.”

The office was due to close at five thirty—ten, fifteen minutes for sorting stuff out, finishing up, they ought to be coming out. Darren remembered the slight hesitation when he’d spoken her name, but nothing more, real cool—“How may I help you?” Looking back at him through those big glasses, blue-framed. He’d liked that. “This gentleman has a query. Perhaps you should deal with it yourself.” Took nerve, that. Not a sign of wobble in her voice. Different situation, Darren thought, she and him would get along. Him and Lorna. He’d wondered sometimes what it’d be like, going with a tart as stood up for herself, not just someone to be poked and pushed around.

Resnick was pleased to sit back, let Lynn Kellogg get on with the driving. When he’d been younger, not long joined the force, he’d evinced an interest in cars because it had seemed the thing to do. What you talked about in the canteen when it wasn’t how many pints you’d swilled down the night before, how many times you’d got your leg over. As he’d got older, got promoted, he’d gradually felt able to let it drop. It was a while now since he’d talked about all three.

“Called round to see Rebecca Astley this afternoon,” Lynn was saying. They were heading down Canton Hill, about to pass St Paul’s school.

“Bit of a wasted visit, I hear,” Resnick said.

Lynn smiled. “Don’t know what they think they’re doing, giving her branch office to manage. Couldn’t even manage to get out to the kitchen, fetch a glass of water to take these pills. Expected me to do it for her.”

Resnick laughed, imagining the expression that would have been on Lynn’s face when she’d walked back into the room, handed her the water.

“On and on about this migraine. That was the way she said it—mee-graine. As though it was some rare disease. Instead of a posh name for a headache.”

Lynn slowed behind a self-drive van, signaled to turn left into Gedling Road.

“All she was interested in talking about was what a shock it had been. That and the bunch of flowers been sent to her from head office. ‘I don’t want to brag,’ she said, lying there on the sofa, ‘but it does show what a lot they think of me.’”

“Didn’t tell her what you thought of her?” Resnick asked.

“Tempted,” Lynn grinned. “Wouldn’t have been worth wasting my breath.”

Twenty-nine Albert Avenue had a newly fitted wooden door with a circle of bottle glass at normal head height. The windows poked out from the front of the roof; a satellite dish was attached to the wall.
Stuart Bird,
read the sign to the side of the small front garden,
Painter & Decorator—Estimates Given Without Obligation.

“You must want my husband,” Christine Bird said. “He’ll not be back while seven, maybe later. He’s got a job on over Newark way.”

Resnick assured her she was the one they wanted to see and she showed them into a front room that smelled of furniture polish and Windolene. A small boy lay on his stomach in front of the TV, watching a cartoon video, pausing it every time the black cat went flying into an old-fashioned kitchen dresser, swallowing plates and bowls and cups before crashing to the ground with them inside him.

“This is Jason,” Christine Bird said.

Jason rolled on to his side, stuck out his tongue, then rewound the tape and played the section through again. Christine went over and turned down the sound, turned up the flame behind the fake log fire, and took a cigarette from the packet of Players Extra Mild which lay on the marble shelf above the stone surround.

“It’s your other son we’re interested in,” Resnick said.

It took her five attempts to light her cigarette. “He’s not here,” she said.

“Do you know where Keith is?” Lynn Kellogg asked.

“I haven’t seen him, not for a couple of days.”

“And you don’t know where he might be?”

“I didn’t say that,” tapping away ash nervously with her finger.

“We have reason to believe …” Resnick began.

“Don’t,” Christine Bird interrupted him. “I don’t want to know what it is he’s done. Not this time. Not any more.”

“You don’t happen to know where Keith was yesterday afternoon?” Lynn asked.

Christine Bird got to her feet and crossed the room. Reaching down she switched off first the television set, then the video, and when her five-year-old started to whine and complain she gave him a look that said, not this time, and he read it well. “Why don’t you go out into the garden?” she said. “Or upstairs to your room?”

“If I do, can I …?”

“One,” she pronounced emphatically. “One only. Go on. You know where they are.”

“Twix,” she explained, as Jason left the room.

Neither Resnick nor Lynn Kellogg said a thing.

Christine Bird fidgeted with the blinds, the kind that have scalloped edges. She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately took another from the packet, sliding it back before she could light it.

“My husband …” she started.

“Stuart, he’s been very good …” she tried.

“Keith …” she began.

This time she lit the cigarette, pushed a hand up through her hair. There were lines tracking away from the corners of her eyes, slender pouches of skin below them; the eyes themselves were gray, narrowed against the plume of smoke that coiled upwards past her face.

“When we started going together, Stuart and me … you see, he’d been married himself, still was, legally. I mean, their divorce, it hadn’t come through. One of the things he felt bad about was the thought of leaving his kids. That was the way he saw it, though I don’t think it really was like that. Not as if, anyway, she’d have agreed to let him take them with him and even if she had, well, it’s difficult to see how he would have managed. Three of them, you see. The youngest just eighteen months, much younger than his other two.” She drew on the cigarette deeply; stared at her hands. “They had her as a way of trying to sort things out, keep them together.”

Rings. Clear polish on her nails.

“When it became clear that we were going to live together, get married, I know—I know, though he never, not in as many words, although he never said it—I know what he wanted was the two of us living together. Starting fresh. Room for his kids to come over, stay weekends or whatever, of course. But nothing more. What he didn’t want was, well, what he didn’t want, though again he never came right out and said it, was Keith. Living with us. Here.”

Three people’s breath in the double-glazed room.

“Apart from anything else, he could never understand, you see, why Keith’s dad didn’t want him there, why Keith didn’t want to live with him. To be fair, I think he would have kept him, been happy enough to, but by then they were having these awful rows, Reg was drinking more and more, no real job, and Keith just kept on at him, on and on, prodding away till, of course, Reg—his dad—struck out and, I mean, they just couldn’t go on that way, so I said to Stuart, Stuart, after we’re married and we’ve moved into the new house, he’s got to come and live with us. Keith. Till he’s old enough, maybe, to have a place of his own.”

Ash drifted towards the pleats of her skirt and, absentmindedly, she brushed it away.

“Keith hadn’t been in any really serious trouble by then. Oh, there’d been, you know, silly little incidents, shoplifting, sweets and things, nothing to write home about. Just the way kids do. And truanting. One term he’d skipped off almost as much as he was there. On account of bullying, that’s what he said. He’s small you see, Keith, small for his age. Not that he used to be, not when he was little; well, they all were then, little. Around ten or eleven, though, when the other lads started shooting up, Keith, he seemed to stay the same.

“And they teased him for it, beat him up, you know what they’re like. Keith, he found the only way to get them on his side was act the fool, make everyone laugh, clown around in class. Which meant, of course, getting in trouble with the teachers instead. Clever, he’d been, back in the juniors. All his reports, lively, that’s what they say. Bright. That all changed.”

She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the mantelpiece; stayed for some moments, staring at the wall.

“When we came here and we asked Keith if he wanted to live with us, he jumped at it like a shot. Stuart was very good with him, took him off to one side and talked to him about how it was important to turn over a new leaf, do well at school.”

She glanced at the door before going on.

“When Jason came along, he was lovely with him. Keith, at first; playing with him, parading him up and down. I think it changed when Jason was able to get out of his pram, his cot, move about. Crawl and then walk. Stuart was working more, farther and farther away, having to, no choice about that, and I was busy with the house, one thing and another. Little Jason, he was really quick, into everything; and before either of us knew it Keith was up to all sorts, only this time it was serious. Cars and the like. Always mad about cars. First we knew, three o’clock one afternoon, I go to the door, two policemen standing there; in uniform, not like the two of you.

“’Course, when Stuart heard about it he went wild, really lost his temper. Hit him. After that it was never the same. I think Keith would have moved back with his dad, but Reg was having troubles enough of his own.

“Last time, when Keith was sentenced, Stuart said if he gets in trouble once more after this, I’m not having him back inside the house. No matter what.”

Christine’s fingers fumbled out another cigarette.

“‘Even it means the end of us?’ I asked him and he just stands there, you know, looking me flush in the face and says, ‘Yes, even if it means that.’”

Resnick noticed, as if for the first time, the even ticking of the clock.

“He’ll be with his dad,” Christine Bird said. “Over in the Meadows.”

Keith sat hunched forward in the Honda, fidgeting with the tuning of the radio. Five minutes back, he’d caught a snatch of M. C Mell’O’, but since then it was Gem-AM or static, difficult to decide which was worse. Darren was still leaning against the wall opposite the small parade of shops, shifting his weight every now and then from one foot to the other.

Keith watched him now, stepping away from the wall suddenly, getting ready to move. And there, back across the street, the building society door opened and the girl with the blue-framed glasses, the one they’d tried to hold up, stepped out on to the pavement.

Fourteen

“I did think that was nice of Mr Spindler, didn’t you?” Marjorie said. “Considerate. Calling round in person, to make sure we were all right.”

“About the least he could do,” Lorna replied, watching the older woman turn the key in the lock once, then twice.

“He is a busy man,” Marjorie said.

“And we just saved several thousand pounds of his company’s money.”

“You know, Lorna,” Marjorie said, dropping the keys down into her bag, “you really ought to do something about your attitude.”

“My att—’

“I sometimes think it’s the only thing holding you back.”

Lorna half-turned, vaguely aware of someone walking towards them across the street. Where the hell’s it got you, Marjorie? she felt herself wanting to say. All those years of backpedaling and going out of your way to be nice?

“Look at Becca, for instance.”

“What,” asked Lorna, more than a little steel in her voice, “has Becca got to do with it?”

“Look at the way she’s got on as fast as she has. I know she’s intelligent, degree and all, but why do you think she’s got where she has?”

Lorna stared at Marjorie’s doughlike face, waiting to be told.

“It’s because she knows how to behave towards people; especially people like Mr Spindler. She’s nicely spoken and she’s always well-turned out …”

“And if it would help her career, she’s not above taking Spindler into the back office and giving him a quick wank.”

“Lorna, really!” Marjorie flushed bright red from the nape of her neck to the roots of her hair. “I can’t imagine what you … I can’t believe … I’m going to pretend I never heard you say that.”

“Fine,” Lorna said. “Believe what you like.” And, turning fast on her heel, she came close to colliding with Darren, who had slowed his pace on hearing raised voices, but continued, nonetheless, towards them.

“I’m sorry, I …”

“’S’okay,” Darren said, chirpily. “No harm done, eh?” For a moment they were stationary, Darren close enough to see his new face reflected in the curved lenses of Lorna’s glasses. Lorna looking at him, this tall, skinny youth with the shorn head and the beaklike nose and those protruding gray-blue eyes.