When Resnick came into the CID room, the remains of a toasted ham and cheese sandwich in the paper bag clutched in his left hand, Graham Millington was slumped back in his chair, overcoat on, hat on, feet on his desk, asleep. Even the first two rings of the telephone failed to wake him.
“Resnick. CID.”
Of all the people it might have been, one of the last he would have expected was Rylands.
“No,” Resnick said, after listening for several moments. “No, that’s okay. I’ll come to you. Half-hour to an hour. Yes. Goodbye.”
When he set the receiver down, Millington was stirring, embarrassed to be discovered asleep.
“Sorry, I don’t know what …”
“Doesn’t matter, Graham, one of those days. Why don’t you get off home? Nothing much else any of us can hope for tonight.”
Millington, who, one way and another, had been on duty since before four that morning, didn’t need to be asked twice. “Reg Cossall said to pass on a message, reckoned you know what it was about. Bloke you were talking about the other night, word is, he’s likely to get his parole.”
Well, so Resnick had been wrong.
“Bad news?”
“Maybe not,” Resnick said. “I’m not sure.”
Millington resettled his trilby on his head. “Get back now, might be able to watch a bit of snooker before the wife gets back from Russian.”
“Taken against it, has she?”
“Not that so much. She’ll have me taking off the tiles in the bathroom. Reckons on changing them for that Italian blue.”
“G’night, Graham.”
Resnick rustled around for what remained of his sandwich, listening to Millington’s whistling the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” fading and off-key.
The pub used to be crammed full of medics from the nearby hospital, laughter and large gins and well-honed accents that cut through the ambient sound like scalpels. Now the health authority had shut the place down and sold the site to a consortium of developers whose plans ranged from high-income architect-designed flats to a covered piazza. It not only left the pub quieter, it made it quicker to get in a round of drinks.
Lynn Kellogg’s turn, spotting Naylor enter before she’d finished her order and asking for an extra pint.
“Message for you,” she said, passing Naylor his Shipstone’s. “Lorna Solomon. The building society raid. Will you get back to her. Here, she left her home number as well.”
Struggling not to blush, Naylor took the piece of paper and, without looking, pushed it down into his breast pocket. All he would have had to have done, that lunchtime sharing Chinese in the car, was reach over and she would have slid into his arms. Was that what he wanted to do? The way he’d talked about himself and Debbie, as if there was nothing there, nothing left. What was the truth? He sat forward, moving in on the conversation, trying to forget the slip of paper folded inside his pocket, sipping his pint.
Nineteen
Rylands had vacuumed the house, the landings and the stairs, from top to bottom. The carpet from the hall he had ripped out and temporarily replaced with some lino offcuts he’d been storing in the cellar. He had borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and cleaned the outside windows, scraping away grime which had gathered for years. For a tenner, another neighbor had lent him a five-hundred weight van for long enough to cart seventeen bags of rubbish, mostly old bottles and cans, to the household tip. The hall carpet, sodden and stained, had been hauled away, together with a battered suitcase of old clothes and two cardboard boxes of burned pans, chipped and cracked china, and packets of food long past their sell-by date.
The cleanup had begun half an hour after Keith and Darren had left: too early for Rylands to have begun drinking and he hadn’t had a drink since. Shaving, he observed it was the first time in months the razor hadn’t shaken in his hand and nicked neck or cheek. Before his shave he had taken a bath, long and hot; after it, he dressed himself in clean clothes-a pair of gray trousers that had once belonged to a best suit, a white shirt he ran over with an iron, gray pullover with a V-neck in need of a little darning. Black shoes with leather uppers that he had polished and buffed. His hair he trimmed as best as he could before brushing it flat.
Only when all that had been done did he dial the station and ask for Detective Inspector Resnick by name.
Now he and Resnick sat across from one another in Rylands’s cellar room, Resnick on the slightly sagging easy chair Rylands had dragged down earlier.
“Nearly got shot of that lot today,” Rylands said, pointing at the piles of yellowing music paper on the floor. “Must go back twenty, thirty years. Couldn’t in the end-stupid, isn’t it, what you cling on to?”
Resnick nodded over his mug of coffee, neither as strong nor as dark as he would have liked. Rylands was drinking the same, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, thin as a baby’s finger.
“I recognized you,” Rylands said. “Oh, not exactly who you were, don’t suppose I ever knew that and if I did, well, I’d forgot, but the face-yes-all those nights standing there, close to the band.”
Resnick nodded, remembering.
“Most men just went there for the girls. The beer.”
“I met my wife there.”
Rylands gave a rueful smile. “There you go.”
“Stepped all over her feet.”
“Dancing?”
Resnick shook his head. “Just being clumsy.”
“They say that, don’t they? About coppers. The old joke.”
Resnick was looking at him.
“Big feet.”
Resnick continued to wait, guessing that whatever Rylands had invited him there to hear, it wouldn’t be easy to say. There were things itching at the edges of Resnick’s mind, too, demanding attention; memories he was unwilling to scratch. Leave it alone, his mother had been forever saying to him, you’ll only make it worse. Well, as far as the sundry blemishes of adolescence, that was likely true.
“You still listen to much?” Rylands asked, not ready yet for the conversation to go where it had to go.
“Now and again. When I get the time. Sundays at the Playhouse; the Arboretum, sometimes. Here and there.”
“Some of the old band are still playing …”
Resnick nodded.
“Straight ahead jazz now. R amp;B, thing of the past where they’re concerned.”
“And you?”
Rylands was looking at the snare drums gathering dust on the floor. “No,” he said, and then, “Last night, when you were here, looking for Keith. All what I said … wasn’t necessarily true.”
“No.”
“He had been here, I had seen him. Said he was going to stay. I don’t know-daft really, I know if you wanted him bad enough you’re always going to find him-still, I couldn’t just, you know, say. Would’ve been like … shopping him, I suppose. Grassing your own.”
“Yes,” said Resnick. “I understand.” The mug of coffee, lukewarm now, he set on the floor.
“What I said …”
“Mm?
“About him being better off back inside …”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t mean that …”
“No.”
“Not the way it sounded.”
“No.”
“All the same …” The cigarette had gone out and Rylands relit it, wisps of tobacco sizzling to nothing. “What he’s been in up to yet, cars and that, nothing serious …”
“Serious enough.”
Rylands looked at the floor between his polished shoes. “This bloke he’s running with now, mouth on him like a sewer, treats Keith like shit and all the while Keith looking up to him, lapping it up. I hate to see that.”
When he should be looking up to you, Resnick thought.
“How much of it’s talk, I don’t know. Like I say, the mouth on him. But what he was on about, earlier today, here in the kitchen, what he was talking about was getting a gun. A shooter.”
A moment’s silence wavered between them.
“Did he say what for?” Resnick asked.
“Not right out, but that bank job, today, he was full of that. How they got away with it on account of the gun.” Rylands let the nub end of his cigarette fall into his mug of coffee. “Might all just have been chat, showing off …”