Trombone, Ronnie had played; first or second chair with every dance band ever to grace Mayfair and the West End or tour the provinces, where, according to Ronnie, so many women would throng round the stage door it often needed the police to clear them away. If he had really done all the things he claimed, played with all those people in all those places, Terry figured Ronnie Rather had to be the wrong side of eighty if he was a day. Which was just about right.
‘Here, Terry…’ Ronnie began, and Terry waited for the night the Prince of Wales came into the Savoy and insisted that everyone else was sent packing so that he and Mrs Simpson could dance alone. Or the time at the Queensbury Club just before the end of the war, when Glen Miller recognised him in the audience and insisted that he step up and sit in with the band.
But no, it was ‘Terry, you hear about them two poor bloody coppers, got their heads smashed in?’
Terry nodded; he had heard it on the news driving to the pool. A gang of four masked men, heavily armed, disturbed while carrying out a burglary-well, he reckoned he could fit names to at least two of those hidden faces, possibly three, and it wouldn’t surprise him if by the time he got out to the shop there hadn’t been a call enquiring, in the most roundabout of terms, if he might be interested in enlarging his stock to the tune of a couple of dozen state-of-the-art wide-screen, digital-sound TVs.
‘One of ‘em a woman, an’ all, that’s what sticks in my craw. The bloke, copper, I mean, whatever’s comin’ to him, fair deal. But not the woman-only a kid, too.’ Ronnie Rather shook his head in disgust and a piece of undigested toast reappeared at one corner of his mouth. ‘Call me old-fashioned, if you like. Don’t hold with hitting women, never have.’
‘No, no,’ Terry said. ‘I agree with you there. Ninety-nine per cent.’ And he did. ‘Listen, Ronnie,’ he said, checking what remained of his tea was too cold to drink, ‘like to stick around and chat, but you know how it is, got to run. Business. See you soon, yes?’
Ronnie nodded and watched as Terry scooted out through the door and hurried off to where his car was parked on a meter outside the leisure centre doors. Ulcer, Ronnie thought watching him, that’s what he’s going to get if he doesn’t watch out. An ulcer at least.
Millington and his merry team had stuck the proverbial pin in Lynn Kellogg’s list of likely candidates and, backed up by a crew of eager uniforms, each and every one of them anxious to avenge their fellow officers, had gone knocking on doors and feeling collars on the Bestwood and Broxtowe estates and in those all-day pubs and twenty-four-hour snooker halls where villains of like minds were wont to congregate. Great sport, but to little longterm avail.
‘Anything, Graham?’ Resnick asked.
It was late enough in the afternoon for any pretence at daylight to have given up the ghost, and the sergeant’s moustache was drooping raggedly towards his upper lip. ‘Bugger all!’
It would have taken Petula Clark herself to have walked into the CID room and given out with ‘The Other Man’s Grass (Is Always Greener)’-a perennial favourite of Millington’s-to bring the smile back to his eyes.
‘I thought Ced Petchey…’
‘Ced Petchey coughed to a break-in out at the University Science Park which netted a couple of outmoded Toshibas and three cartons of double-sided three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks.’
‘Ah. I thought we’d already charged the Haselmere youth with that one?’
‘Precisely.’
It was that time of the day when Resnick’s energy was at its lowest and his need for a quick caffeine injection at its most pronounced. ‘Look at it this way, Graham. What we’ve done today, clear out the dead wood. Tomorrow, we’ll strike lucky.’
‘We bloody better.’
Resnick thought there was no harm in giving luck a helping hand. He left his car on the lower floor below the Victoria Centre and took the lift up to the covered market. Doris Duke was winding sprigs of greenery into a bouquet in which pink and white carnations featured prominently.
‘Three of these for your mates out at the hospital this morning, Mr Resnick. By the sound of it, fortunate they wasn’t wreaths.’
Resnick slid a ten-pound note along the surface where she worked. ‘If you’ve a customer for that already, Doris, you could make me up another.’
‘Fifteen, Mr Resnick. Got to be worth that, at least.’
‘Prices going up, Doris? I didn’t see a sign.’
Doris pushed the bouquet away and sat straighter on her stool, hooking the heels of her shoes over the lower rungs. ‘Special orders, special price; you know how it goes.’ She lifted a pack of ten Embassy from the breast pocket of her pink overall, leaned sideways and slid a lighter from the side pocket of her jeans.
Resnick set five pound coins, each neatly balanced on top of the other, down on the centre of the ten-pound note.
‘Word is it’s Coughlan. He was the one carrying.’ Doris’s voice could only just be heard.
‘Whoever that was,’ Resnick said, ‘didn’t do the beating.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Resnick,’ Doris said, ‘this time of the year they’re scarce, good blooms. That’s the best I can do for now.’
Resnick nodded. ‘Look after yourself, Doris.’
‘You too.’
Somehow, when he walked away in the direction of the Italian coffee stall, Resnick forgot to take his bouquet.
‘Coughlan,’ Millington said sceptically. ‘Bit of a change of pace for him, isn’t it?’
‘Self-improvement, Graham. Most likely comes from listening to his probation officer.’
Resnick and Millington were in the left-side bar of the Partridge, what would have been called the Public in more openly divided times. Their fellow drinkers-and it was not crowded-were either single men staring morosely into pints of mixed, or students wearing slimming black and sporting silver rings.
‘You think it’s true?’ Millington asked. He was trying not to stare at a skinny seventeen-year-old, the largest of whose three noserings was decorated with three emerald stones and from whose left eyebrow a tiny crucifix hung from a loop of chain.
‘About Coughlan?’ Resnick said.
‘They get themselves pierced all over? All over their bodies?’
‘I don’t know, Graham. No idea.’ He knew the superintendent’s daughter had come back from her first term at university with a gold stud in the side of her ear and a plaited ring through her navel.
‘Blokes, too.’ Millington shook his head, eyes close to watering at the prospect of a pierced foreskin.
‘Coughlan, Graham.’
‘It’s good information?’
‘More often than not.’
‘Go wading in, all we’re like to do is warn him off. Come up empty handed.’
Resnick nodded. Coughlan had been involved in maybe a dozen break-ins in the past two years, but each foray to turn over the council house he lived in off Bracknell Crescent had found the neat three-bedroom semi as clean, in Millington’s words, as a pair of Julie Andrews’s knickers. A shotgun, though; for Coughlan that was a step in a dubious direction. Why go armed to do an empty shop in the wee small hours? Maybe he was trying to get the feel of it, readying himself for bigger things.
‘No word who he was working with?’
“Fraidnot.’
‘What’s that cousin of his called? Barker? Breaker?’
‘Breakshaw. Norbert Breakshaw.’
‘Didn’t he go down for five last time?’
‘Carrying a weapon with criminal intent.’
‘Maybe the shotgun was his.’
‘Then what was Coughlan doing carrying it?’
‘Norbert likely give it him to hold, leave his hands free for belting McCrory and the girl. He’s a nasty bastard. Certificates to prove it.’