Delaney didn't smile. 'We're about to put her uncle away for a long, long time, Diane. That's all I care about.' He leaned across the table and gripped his ex-boss's hand. His grip was firm, uncompromising, but she neither flinched nor sought to release herself from his hold. 'Just tell me what you've heard about my wife's death.'
She nodded, and Delaney released his grip. She resisted the temptation to rub her hand but held Delaney's gaze as he took another long pull on his pint of Guinness.
'Kevin Norrell.'
Delaney put his glass down, his voice arctic. 'What about him?'
The water fell like hard rain. The kind of powerful, punching rain you get in a tropical downpour. Kevin Norrell put his hand against the cool white tiles of the prison shower and felt it pound his body, the jets of water like needles. He bared his teeth. If he had his way the man who had put him in this prison was very shortly going to get him out. The water sounded like rain too as it spattered and puddled around his feet. He'd never liked the sound. It reminded him of his father, Sean Norrell. The memory, as ever, making his hand form involuntarily into a hamlike fist as his mind wandered back to his childhood, the summer of 1977 and the first time he was ever incarcerated.
The Hunter's Moon was a spit-and-sawdust pub halfway between West Harrow and Harrow on the Hill, set in a concrete housing development built in the sixties, complete with a small, built-in shopping precinct. The pub was at the end of a row of shops including a laundromat, a convenience store, an off-licence and a chemist. Three floors of council flats rose above the shops and pub, and were echoed on the opposite side of the street by four floors of similarly grey, utilitarian boxes. The Labour government's vision of utopian, urban living on the architect's drawing board may well have looked like a sunny vision of an ideal future; but whereas his green ink had imagined trees and benches and contented people, the stark concrete reality was inked in far more abrasive colours. The graffiti, though distinctly urban, certainly wasn't art, and couldn't be considered political, unless 'Jane fucks Ted' counted. You could lay money on the fact that the romantic dauber wasn't referring to Edward Heath and Jane Fonda.
It was raining. The kind of constant, wind-blown, swirling, miserable rain that clogged up drains and sewers, and it went with the soulless, plastic signboards above chain-link shutters, the sick, yellow light that leaked from the street lamps, and the garbage that floated on the street like rats go with sewage, or pigeons go with shit.
Half past eight on a cold November's night and the reality of the place was as far removed from the architect's sunny vision as Sean 'The Coat' Norrell was from a working grasp of quantum physics.
Inside the Hunter's Moon, the smoke hung heavy in the air, like a pale cloud. The lino on the floor was colourless and faded, but had once been red, presumably to hide bloodstains. The lights behind the bar were bright, though, as were the coloured lights in the jukebox that was pumping 'Float On' through crackling speakers that, like the rumpled person standing at the bar, had long since seen better days. He was a long-haired, fifty-year-old man with a knee-length, black leather coat. He scowled as he ran filthy, dirt-stained fingers through his greasy locks of hair and winked at the barmaid as he sang along with the record. He cupped his crotch with the other hand and bucked his hips forward in a crude, suggestive motion.
The barmaid had been in the job for well over thirty years and hadn't been impressed by much in the last twenty-nine years of it. Her low-cut top revealed a chest as smooth as corrugated cardboard, and her rasping voice held as much affection as a wheel clamp. 'I wouldn't touch your fucking cock, Sean, if I was wearing asbestos gloves.'
Norrell leered at her and gave a final thrust. 'Your loss, darling.'
'Sit down, and shut the fuck up, Norrell,' came a voice beside him.
Sean Norrell turned to say something but, when he saw who was standing next to him, the words died on his lips. He nodded a deferential smile and sat back on his stool, fumbling a cigarette nervously from a stained packet. He took a sip of his lager and scowled. Harp, thirty-two pence a pint now and it still tasted like cat's piss.
The man stood next to him was dressed in denim jeans, with a denim jacket, short blond hair and piercing, blue eyes. Mickey Ryan, thirty years old with a heart as cold as a Norwegian whore working al fresco. He looked at Norrell now with the kind of approval usually reserved for faecal matter discovered on footwear.
'You got my money?'
'It's in hand.'
Ryan's voice was level, dispassionate as he leaned down and glared in his eyes. 'Your dick will be in my left hand and I'll cut your fucking balls off with a rusty knife you haven't got it by Friday.' The barmaid smiled, approvingly.
'You take my gear you pay me for it.'
'I'm good for it, Mickey. You know that,' Norrell muttered.
But Mickey had already turned back to the barmaid. 'Double vodka.'
She fluttered her spider-leg eyelashes at him and smiled seductively. 'On the house.'
Ryan looked back at Norrell, his eyes like flint. 'You still here?'
Norrell hastily swallowed his lager as Mickey Ryan picked up his drink and headed back to the pool table where a couple of nineteen-year-olds, in skintight hot pants and platforms shoes, waited for the territorial pat of his hand on their young backsides, marking ownership. He'd have liked to pick up a pool cue and smash it across Ryan's smug face. But as the blue-eyed man turned back to look at him pointedly, Norrell put his empty glass on the counter and scurried for the door. You didn't mess with Mickey Ryan. Not ever. Sean Norrell knew where to pick his fights and it wasn't at the Hunter's Moon.
He stepped out from the pub, blinking as the driving rain lashed his face and made his way across the street to the block of flats where he lived. He stumbled into the stairwell and held his hand against a concrete pillar to steady himself, and shake water rain from his long hair. He grunted and walked up the steps to his flat and fumbled his key into the lock of the faded red door of 13 Paradise Villas. They got that about right. Paradise in neon and street lamp. Nirvana by substance abuse. Heaven and hell in a fucking handcart.
He fumbled the door open and stumbled inside to domestic bliss. The theme tune to The Good Life was playing on the television, his runt of a son curled up on the stained, brown velour sofa watching it, his eyes fixed, not even glancing at him. Norrell's nose wrinkled at the smell of charred food.
'For fuck's sake, Linda. How fucking hard is it to cook a sausage?'
His wife, Linda Norrell, glared at him from the kitchen set off the small lounge. She was thirty-two but looked fifty, a sick fifty at that. Rail-thin, with straggly mousy hair that had, at some time, been dyed blonde, she was wearing a pair of tight, drainpipe jeans that made her legs look like sticks, a mauve shirt and a white tank top. The make-up on her face was applied with the delicacy of roadworks and did little to hide the bruising, or the emptiness, around her eyes. A cigarette dangled from tightly pursed lips as she flipped some sausages in a smoking pan, she looked across at her husband, expressionless for a moment, and then a light flickered somewhere in her eyes. 'Fuck you, Sean.'
On the sofa Kevin Norrell tensed. He knew what was about to happen next. On the television screen Barbara Good was telling her husband off for not wiping his wellies before coming into her kitchen. In his kitchen his father was slapping his wife openhanded across the mouth, opening up her lip to bleed afresh. Her screams of abuse mingled with his father shouting back at her, slapping the side of her head like a contrapuntal melody. And suddenly Kevin Norrell had had enough. Tom and Barbara Good might not have a television, but he did, and all he wanted to do was watch it.