“However long you stand here waiting, watching, he’s not going to come.”
Leaning forward, Lorraine closed her eyes.
“Not now. You know that, don’t you? Lorraine, sweetheart, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Her voice so faint that, even close, he wasn’t certain she had spoken at all.
“Lorraine?”
“Yes. Yes, I said, yes.”
Derek stroked her hair. “Sooner or later, you’ve got to face it, love. The kind of man he is. He didn’t come to your mother’s funeral out of respect for her. Affection. He didn’t even come to see you. He came because it was his chance; his chance to escape and that’s what he’s done.”
There were tears running down Lorraine’s face and she was starting to shake. Before she dropped it, Derek took the empty glass from her hand.
“I’m your husband, Lorraine. Those children upstairs, they’re yours and mine. This is our family. Ours. And I love you, remember that. I love you, no matter what.”
Twenty-one
“Are you planning to stay there all morning or what?”
At the sound of his mother’s voice, Evan woke, blearily breaking out of a dream in which he was somehow back home again in his old room, until he realized it wasn’t any dream.
“It’s almost ten o’clock. There’s tea downstairs in the pot. I’m just off out to the shops.” A pause, then: “You make sure you’re out of there by the time I get back.”
Evan lay listening to his mother’s footsteps receding along the narrow passageway and down the stairs, just as he had for so many years, all of the years he had been at school. After the front door had clicked shut, he threw back the sheet he’d been sleeping under and swung his legs round toward the floor. He’d opened the window last night before getting into bed, but not enough; his hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat. The pillow wasn’t merely damp, but wet.
When he’d moved back home, not so many weeks before, he hadn’t told any of the people he worked with, for fear of what they might say. But the place Evan had been renting, a second floor out by Hackney Marshes, had become a liability. The bloke he’d been sharing with, another officer from the prison, had proved congenitally unable to deal with money. Bills had rolled in and either remained unpaid or Evan had stretched what little he had and settled the whole thing from his own account. Having the phone cut off hadn’t been too bad, he could have lived with that, but then the landlord took to pushing all those notes through the door, threatening to take them both to the small claims court for nonpayment of rent, and the crux had come when Evan had stumbled down into the communal hall one morning to find a gas board official searching for the mains so he could cut off their supply.
“You know you can always come back here for a bit,” his mother had said, “that old room of yours isn’t doing anything but collecting dust. Just till you get sorted, mind. You cluttering up the place all hours, getting under my feet, that’s the last thing I want.”
So Evan had agreed, a couple of weeks while he looked around for something else. He wouldn’t expect his mum to do it for nothing, of course, he’d see her right; a few extra quid in her purse would more than likely not go amiss and besides, most probably she’d welcome having somebody else about the place, living on her own there since his dad had died. “There” being a flat-fronted two-story terraced house with a raised ground floor in east London, Clapton; Evan’s folks had moved in not so far short of thirty years back and now theirs were the only white faces on the street.
Evan padded downstairs in his boxer shorts and into the kitchen, where the cat, a ginger-and-black tom with a nasty temper and one badly chewed ear, was busily scratching round in its tray, spraying gray cat litter over the floor in its efforts to cover up what it had just left behind. Jesus! Evan thought. Why is it with a garden out there, at least one open window, to say nothing of a cat flap, you still have to crap in the house? Unlocking the rear door, he shooed the animal down the metal steps leading to the narrow strip of grass, the flower beds his mum was clearly letting go, a stumpy fruit tree that bore no fruit.
He poured himself a mug of tea, strong enough by now for the spoon to stand up in, tipped some cornflakes into a bowl with sugar and milk, and sat down with his mum’s Express. Thumbing through twice, he could see nothing about Michael Preston’s escape. Yesterday’s news, and even then, down there in the smoke, it had rated no more than a couple of paragraphs, Murderer Escapes After Mother’s Funeral, convicted killer still on the loose.
He had tried ringing to find out how Wesley was getting along, now that he’d been released from the hospital, and someone with a voice like ready-mixed concrete, one of Wesley’s brothers he supposed, had told him in no uncertain terms to keep his face out of Wesley’s business unless he fancied getting it rearranged. As if it were his fault Wes had lost a liter or so of blood and was sporting a neat line in stitches. All right, he’d been the one who’d actually patted Preston down, but he hadn’t exactly been acting on his own. Wesley had been there all along. And who’d let his attention wander sufficiently in the back seat of the car that his prisoner was able to transfer the razor blade from wherever he’d been hiding it out into his hand?
“You stand up for yourself, Evan,” his mother had said, when he told her there was going to be an internal inquiry. “Don’t always be so keen to take the blame. Soft, you are, that’s your trouble, like your dad. And see where it got him, God bless him. No, you want to look out for yourself for once in your life. Don’t let them push you around.”
Suspended from duty on full pay. “All you can expect,” his union delegate had said. “Sod off down the coast for a couple of days, why don’t you? No family hanging round you. Me, I’d get in a bit of fishing.”
Evan looked across at the clock on the cooker, quarter to twelve. He’d go up and throw some water on his face, clean his teeth, pull on some clothes, and go for a walk to clear his head, maybe along by the filter beds.
When he stepped on to the pavement twenty minutes later, the black guy who lived to the right was outside again, tinkering with his motor, doors flung wide open, radio blaring-the man himself not doing a thing but leaning back against his front railings, stripped to the waist save for the gold chain round his neck, so heavy you’d have to wonder he could hold his head straight. “Morning,” Evan said, walking past him. “Nice again.” No harm in being friendly. The man silent behind his shades, as if Evan had never opened his mouth.
Maybe a bit later I’ll give Wesley a bell, Evan was thinking, see if he hasn’t calmed down a little.
Sitting on the end of one of the desks in the CID room, Resnick and Millington, Naylor and Sharon Garnett as audience, Ben Fowles flipped open his notebook and cleared his throat. Millington had put Kevin and himself on to checking out Gary Prince.
“Past form’s pretty much what you’d expect,” Fowles began. “Small-time thieving as a kid, truanting, suspended from school for what they called persistent anti-social behavior; one care order, too many last warnings. Young offenders’ center by when he was sixteen. Celebrated his eighteenth with a six-month stay at Lincoln. Various bits and pieces of probation. Longest sentence so far, eighteen months for handling stolen goods, of which he served just about half. That was almost two years ago. As far as records go, he’s been clean since.”
“And no suggestion,” Resnick asked, “of him being involved with guns?”
Fowles shook his head. “Credit cards, watches, jewelry, that’s more his mark.”
“Kevin,” Millington said, “you’ve got some more?”
Naylor took a quick swallow from his mug of lukewarm tea. “Our Gary’s twenty-eight. Finally moved out from his mum’s, February of this year. Bought himself a place near Corporation Oaks. Three bedrooms, garage, newish, nothing fancy. Paid close to sixty thousand, all the same. Round about the same time, he started seeing this Vanessa Parlour. Some kind of model. Promotions, the odd commercials, nothing too high-powered.” He grinned. “Pulled a couple of photos of her from the Post’s files. Pretty classy stuff.”