Like Terry, Ronnie Rather was a creature of routine. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he would push his olive-green shopping trolley sedately from stall to stall, before treating himself to tea and toast and a small cigar that burned like anthracite and had a similar flinty smell. On alternate Fridays, he splashed out on beans as well.
Since Ronnie had been adhering to this particular routine longer than Terry himself, and had made a habit, when it was vacant, of sitting at the window table, Terry could hardly object when-as today-the old man parked up his trolley against the table edge and joined him.
‘Ron.’
Terry.’
There would be no more said until Ronnie had cut his slices of toast into thin strips-soldiers, Terry’s mum would have called them, when she had been readying them for the young Terry to dip into his boiled egg-which Ronnie would then sprinkle with salt before chewing methodically. Two or three pieces despatched into the gurgles and groans of Ronnie’s antique digestive system and Terry’s breakfast companion would lean forward across the table, resting on one elbow, and engage him in conversation.
Which usually meant, as was the way with those old jossers well above the pensionable age, talking about the dim and distant past when a pint of beer was a pint of beer and the sound of a horse-drawn cart approaching along the road outside was enough to send every self-respecting householder running for his dustpan and broom. Or, in Ronnie Rather’s case, when there was a dance hall on every corner, each of them keeping a dozen or more musicians in fulltime employment, and when names like Joe Loss and Jack Hylton were enough to quicken the pulse and set up a tremble at the back of the knees.
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?’