The sky at the upper edge of Resnick’s TV set burned with an orange glow.
Elaine stood behind him, hand resting on his shoulder. “Poor Ben,” she said.
He turned to look at her.
“If it happened here you’d be all right. Now. He’d be out there, in the front line.”
Resnick nodded.
“I could never understand,” Elaine said, “why he didn’t move into CID, same time as you.”
“Fondness for regular hours. That and being out on the street.”
Elaine looked past him towards the television. “These days, I should have thought last place anyone’d want to be. Any of you.”
Resnick got up and switched off the set. “Bed?” he said. “Early night?”
“All right.”
Within fifteen minutes, the rhythm of Elaine’s breathing had changed and she was asleep, leaving Resnick to replay the images of the evening. How long before it spreads up here?
On the corners of Hyson Green and Radford groups of men were congregating, hands in pockets, heads down. By the early hours, well before light broke in the sky, the first crates of empty milk bottles had been taken.
Mary MacDonald sat alone in her room, squatting down before the gas fire in her pink candlewick dressing gown, praying that her friend Marie would never have to go through what she had that night; praying that what he had forced out of her would not end up in the papers, be read out in court. Simply praying.
And Rains?
Fast off the moment his head touched the pillow, sleeping the untroubled sleep of the just.
Twenty-Five
“Time to get out, Charlie,” Ben Riley said. “That’s what it is.”
Resnick laughed. “Just see you behind the counter of some pub, running a little newsagent’s somewhere. You’d be in your grave inside a twelvemonth.”
“Better like that than hit over the head by some yob with shit for brains.”
“I don’t know.” Resnick shook his head.
“Christ, Charlie, you saw them. All that talk about police harassment, racism, that was just an excuse. Smashing things for the sake of it, looting. Don’t tell me that’s political. That’s theft. That’s greed.”
Resnick sighed and bit into his bacon sandwich. When Ben’s shift matched, they would meet there at Parker’s, eat breakfast, talk. More often than not about the way Chedozie had run the opposition ragged the week before. But not today.
“I’m serious, Charlie. I’m leaving. Not the force. The sodding country.”
Resnick looked at him. “You’ve never said.”
“Not mean I haven’t thought.”
“But you’d have said. Something anyway.”
“Would I? Don’t you have any pipedreams nestling away in that head of yours? Things you wouldn’t even tell Elaine?”
Resnick shook his head: his problem, where Elaine was concerned, was that he made his dreams all too clear. The day he’d spotted alphabet wallpaper in Texas Homecare and told her it would look just right in the small bedroom; the way he glanced at her expectantly when she came in from the bathroom, those times of the month when he knew her period was due.
Ben Riley folded the slice of thin buttered bread in half, then half again and began, slowly, to wipe it round his plate. “You don’t think there are things she doesn’t tell you?”
“I don’t know.”
Riley looked at him quizzically, not quite believing.
“Well, she’s ambitious at work,” Resnick said, “I know that. Wants things for the house …”
“And that’s all?”
Resnick finished his coffee, too weak as usual, nodded over at Ben Riley’s empty cup. “Another tea?”
“Best not. Time almost, we weren’t here.”
Outside the cafe, the traffic entering the city from the south and west was thickening. Pretty soon the island would be jammed tight. A fireman, wearing a red and white Forest shirt above his uniform trousers, walked past them towards the fire station alongside. The two policemen watched him till he had disappeared through the broad entrance, neither one wanting to be the first to walk away, each sensing there were still things left unsaid without recognizing what they were.
When Resnick finally arrived, the police station was humming with the previous night’s events in London. He had scarcely shown his face in the CID room before being summoned to the inspector’s office. Rains was already sitting there, relaxed in a chair beside Skelton’s desk, one long leg crossed casually over the other.
“Looks as if we’ve a break in the Sainsbury’s job,” Skelton said, pressing the tips of his fingers together in front of his irreproachable ironed shirt. “Witness prepared to swear she heard Prior and another man …”
“Churchill,” Rains interrupted, “Frank Churchill.”
“Heard Prior and this bloke talking about carrying out the robbery, bragging about it.”
“More than that,” Rains prompted.
“Using the gun.”
Resnick looked away from the inspector, staring at Rains hard. Rains recrossed his legs and smiled disarmingly back. “Who was this?” Resnick asked.
Rains shrugged. “Some torn.”
“They spoke about the shooting in front of her?”
“Sure.”
“It seems they were clear which of them had fired the gun,” Skelton said.
Resnick still hadn’t moved his eyes from Rains’s face. “Prior,” Rains said quietly, leaning forward slightly as he mouthed the word. “John Prior, what happened to that poor bastard of a guard, it was down to him.”
“And she’ll swear to that, in court if needs be, the woman?”
“She’ll swear to it all right,” Rains smiled. “On her life.”
Prior lived in a nondescript suburban-looking house overlooking Colwick Wood Park. Some mornings it was quiet enough to hear the kids singing to the teacher’s piano in the nearby Jesse Boot Junior and Infant School. Step across from the house and there were the bowling green, the recreation ground, the reservoir. At the far side of the park lay the greyhound stadium and the racecourse. There were roses here and people quietly walking their dogs; men and women wearing white sitting on the steps of the bowls pavilion comparing notes about the bias of the green.
One car swung round into Ashworth Close and parked, three men to watch the rear of the house. The other cars, two of them, came from opposite directions, slowing to a halt at either side of a milk float making late deliveries.
Skelton waited until the milkman had cleared before giving the order to move in. Prior’s wife was in her dressing gown at the door, bending down to pick up the two pints, when the detectives raced up the path, Rains at their head, Resnick not far behind.
“Just right,” Rains said, pushing past. “Tea all round.”
“John!” Ruth Prior screamed. “John, it’s the police!”
Heavy men shouldered her aside and one of the bottles slipped from her hand, glass shattering to a hundred tiny pieces on the step.
Prior was half out of the bedroom, pulling on a pair of jeans, when Rains charged up the stairs.
“What the fuck’s going on?”
Like the card in a magician’s trick, Rains’s warrant card was in the palm of his hand. “John Edward Prior, I am arresting you in connection with the theft of …”
Already, other officers were starting to search the premises.
“Get out of my house!” Ruth Prior shouted at the man pulling clothing from the hall cupboard. “You bastards, you’ve got no right.”
“I’m afraid that’s not the case,” Jack Skelton said, holding the magistrate’s warrant in front of her eyes.
“Fuck you!” she said, anger contorting her face.