“Just off to have words with the chap you arrested,” Resnick said.
“Tried to kid me he was from Visionhire,” Ben Riley laughed. “People had complained about trouble with their picture; he’d gone out to sort out the aerial.”
“Four in the morning without a ladder?”
“All part of the service, he reckoned. That was before I got him to turn out his pockets. Three picklocks, a chisel, and a six-inch metal rule.”
Resnick grinned and continued up the stairs.
“Pint later?” Ben Riley called after him.
“Doubt it.”
“You’ll be at the match Saturday?”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t bloody try. Be there.”
Melvyn Rossi was a shortish man with a weepy left eye and skin like chalk. Son of an Italian father and a Scottish mother, he had fetched up in the Midlands by default. Seven years of hard graft in his father’s ice-cream business in Dawlish had ended when his father had discovered he was unsystematically skimming off the top. His mother, who had returned to her native Inverness long since, had never had much time for him anyway. Melvyn had met a man on a long-distance coach who had told him you could pick up women in the city like fruit from the trees. True, Melvyn discovered, though his fellow-traveler had neglected to point out that you were expected to pay for them.
Rossi would break into the back of a house in St Anne’s or by the Arboretum, steal what cash he could find, fifteen minutes later hand it over for the dubious pleasure of taking his clothes off in an upstairs room with a single-bar electric fire, a narrow bed, and a red light bulb.
It was the crabs that cured him of that particular habit. Now he spent his money on horses and beer and an ever-growing pornographic video collection. There were times he wished he’d never turned his back on the world of 99s and Orange Zooms and water ices in five identical flavors and this was one of them.
When Resnick entered the interview room, Melvyn Rossi was sitting at the plain wooden table, Rains standing close behind him, patting Melvyn benevolently on top of the head.
“Melvyn’s decided to be a good boy,” Rains said. “Melvyn’s going to tell us everything we want to know.”
Which wasn’t exactly true. As Resnick had suspected, what he told them in the space of almost four hours didn’t amount to a great deal. Aside from the burglaries that Rossi had carried out single-handed, the rest was a mixture of insinuation and evasion. Rumor and counter-rumor, most of which could not be substantiated, none of which would have stood up in court, always assuming Rossi would have agreed to repeat his allegations under oath, which was almost certainly not the case.
And if he had, what judge, which jury would believe him?
Melvyn Rossi leaned first on that elbow, then on this, dabbed at his weeping eye with the corner of a handkerchief, smelled his own sweat.
“The Sainsbury’s robbery,” Rains prodded again, “where the guard got shot. You know the driver.”
“I told you.”
“Tell us again.”
Melvyn had been in a pub on Alfreton Road when the landlord locked the doors from the inside and proceeded to throw a party. Melvyn had almost certainly got himself invited by accident. Some time later he was squashed up in a corner with a red-headed woman he knew was on the game, feeding her gin and thinking she was better-looking by the minute. He had one hand on her leg, the other fingering her fleshy shoulder like it was Plasticine when she started telling him about the time she’d been paid for a foursome by two real villains, hard nuts the pair of them, flyers all over the bed, the one of them bragging about how he’d taken close to ten thousand from a security van outside a supermarket.
“Name?” Resnick asked.
“That’s what I can’t remember.”
“Name!” Rains shouted, leaning hard into Melvyn’s face.
“Honest, I can’t remember. Maybe she never said.”
“And the woman?”
“Mary, Margaret, I don’t know.”
“Perhaps,” Rains said slowly, looking across at Resnick, “you could let Melvyn and me have a few words in private. See if that wouldn’t help his memory to come back.”
Resnick stared back at him. “Not such a good idea.”
“In that case, why don’t we push him back in the cells and let him stew? All right, Melvyn, you decide you’ve got something more to say to us, something serious, you let us know. Otherwise …”
Rains made a gesture of wiping his hands clean down the lapels of his jacket and moved towards the door.
“Look,” Rossi said, “I’m doing my best.”
Resnick nodded. “The trouble is, Melvyn, it isn’t good enough.”
An hour later Rains had a quick word in the custody sergeant’s ear and let himself into Rossi’s cell. Less than a quarter of an hour after that, he was back in the CID room, hovering close to Resnick’s desk, waiting for the sergeant to get off the phone.
“Frank Churchill, otherwise know as Chambers, also Frank Church. Address in Basford.”
Resnick looked at the smile toying at the corners of Rains’s mouth. “Funny thing, isn’t it,” Rains said, “memory? Way it comes and goes.”
Frank Churchill had gone, too. “Manchester,” the woman who came to the door said. “Hope the bastard gets washed down the drains where he belongs.”
“You’ll not mind if we come in, love?” Rains said. “Take a look around.”
“Help your bloody selves.”
They found several pairs of Y-fronts, odd socks, a striped tie that looked as if it had been used as a belt; a plastic tube of hair gel and an empty deodorant spray; a ticket stub from the Odeon; several dog-eared western paperbacks written by an ex-postman from Melton Mowbray.
“If you find him,” the woman called out on to the street after them, “tell him not to bother coming back bloody here!”
“We could phone Manchester CID,” Resnick said. “Ask them to keep an eye out. Chances are he might be known up there, too.”
Rains nodded, checking the rearview mirror as he backed the car away from the curb. “Vice Squad, I’ll see what they know about a red-headed torn called Mary.”
“Or Margaret.”
“Whatever. See who else was taking part in this little foursome, who else had reason to celebrate. Working it back, I’d say it couldn’t have been more than a couple of days after the Sainsbury’s job went down.”
Twenty-Four
Mary MacDonald had been out since eight o’clock that evening. Short black skirt, black tights, high heels that pinched, a once-white blouse that hung open over the tops of her breasts. The fake fur, hip-length, she wore unfastened. By ten, Mary had been approached seven times, the car slowing as it neared the curb, window wound down, face-always white, usually middle-aged-leaning towards her.
“Looking for business, duck?”
It was as far as the transaction had progressed. Head withdrew, window up, the car puffing sharply away, looking for what? Someone younger, slimmer, sexier, closer to their damp and furtive little dreams?
Mary watched the same cars driving round and round the circuit, some of them never going beyond the first exchange, discussion of terms-“Any place to go? Strip? How about the night? Have you got a friend?” Mary lit a cigarette although she was supposed to be giving it up, leaned back against the stones of the high wall, paced slowly up and down.
From the corner of Gedling Grove along Waverley Street, hang about on the edge of Raleigh Street, then back again, heels clicking on the pavement as she climbed back up the hill. Across Waverley Street, the trees of the park were dark and losing shape and through them she could just see the lights of the Arboretum Hotel. Some nights the landlord would let her sit at a table near the bar, sipping at a rum and black, slipping off her shoes, now and again reaching down to rub her feet. Other times, the look on his face would be enough and if she were thirsty enough, fed up enough, she would walk the other direction, up on to the Alfreton Road, where the publicans were less fussy about their trade.