Hands in his pockets, Resnick shrugged his heavy shoulders.
“You all right?” Ben Riley was craning back his neck, looking at Resnick keenly. “Okay?”
Under his friend’s gaze, Resnick looked away. “Fine. Why?”
“You look dreadful.”
“Thanks.”
“All the more reason for lunch,” Ben urged him.
Resnick shook his head, glanced towards the station. “I can’t.”
“I’m paying.”
“I’ve got things to do.”
“And you have to eat lunch.”
“I’ll get a sandwich.”
“And indigestion.”
“Sorry, Ben.” Resnick stepped into the street. “Some other time.” Ben Riley’s hand reached for his shoulder, holding him back. “Work, Charlie. This is work. Believe me. This is stuff you’ll want to hear.”
“Excuse me, sweetheart. Love. Miss. Another couple of pints, please.” Ben Riley beamed and offered the waitress his glass.
Resnick flattened his palm over his and shook his head.
“Half?” the waitress asked.
“Thanks.”
They were in Ben Bowers at the top of Derby Road; if you angled your head round sharply enough it was possible to see Canning Circus police station through the window. Ben Riley was eating his way through a steak, T-bone, medium rare, french fries, broccoli, new season’s peas. Resnick had ordered the lemon sole, saute potatoes, salad. The only other diners were on expense-account lunches from the insurance company offices along the road.
“So picture this,” Ben Riley was saying between mouthfuls, “there we are, eleven fifteen, eleven thirty, whatever, on our way out of the pub, taxi waiting, all of a sudden there’s this commotion across the street. Two couples, blokes in their Friday-night suits, women wearing dresses so thin you can see the goose pimples on their arms from where we’re standing …”
He broke off as the waitress set the glasses on the table; used the blade of his knife to dab English mustard on to the reddish end of his steak.
“Where are we?” Resnick asked. “This pub?”
“Woodborough. You know, the country and western nights.”
Resnick didn’t like to think about it. He had never understood how a grown man, otherwise fully in control of his faculties, could break down and cry at the sound of Hank Snow singing “Old Shep.”
“Anyroad, there I am, few more sheets to the wind than rightly I care for, looking over there, hoping it’ll all calm itself down, storm in a biryani, when one of these blokes knees the other one right in the groin. Woman I’m with, instead of hauling me off, she’s all for a bit of action. ‘Go on, then. You can’t turn your back. Go over and get them sorted.’” He cut off a wedge of meat and chewed at it thoughtfully. “I get halfway across the road, bloke who’s been hit, unlocks the boot of this car parked at the curb and comes up with a gun.”
If he didn’t have all of Resnick’s attention before, he had it now.
“Bloody shotgun!”
Resnick set knife and fork quietly down and pushed away his plate.
Ben Riley grinned. Two insurance executives across the aisle were hanging on his every word. “Where there’d been a lot of shouting and commotion, everyone was suddenly quiet. Three of them staring at this shotgun and the chap with it looking ready to take the other bloke off at the knees.”
By now the entire restaurant was silent, wanting to know how it had worked out.
“He was so engrossed in what he was doing, didn’t seem to hear me at all. Got right up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder. Jumped half a foot in the air, dropped the gun.” Ben Riley was smiling broadly, enjoying the audience. “Got a foot on it, showed him my warrant card, that was about that.”
You could hear breath being released around them on all sides, click of utensils on china, conversations resumed.
“Seemed the car he was driving wasn’t taxed, his driving license had been withdrawn six months previous and, of course, he didn’t have a license for the gun. I get the names and addresses of the others, make sure my woman gets a taxi, me and him go back inside the restaurant-pretty fair tandoori, by the way, specially when it’s on the house-anyway, we get to talking, he’s worried about this motor thing, needs it to get around, can’t believe he was so stupid as to threaten this bloke with the gun. Been mates-what? — four years, but that’s not what’s really putting the shits up him, what is, he had that gun earmarked for somebody else. One of the things he’s into, a little buying and selling on the side. It’s in police custody, how can he sell the gun?”
Resnick could feel the small vein vibrating at the side of his skull. “Did he say who he was going to sell the shotgun to?” Hoping against hope, not really believing what Ben’s reply was going to be, but knowing all the same.
Ben Riley leaned forward across the table and lowered his voice. “Prior. John Prior.”
Resnick picked up his knife and fork and cut across the fleshy section of lemon sole. His appetite had come back.
The man’s name was Finch, Martin Finch, and they didn’t talk to him in one of the interview rooms at the station; they talked to him in Ben Riley’s Vauxhall, parked in a lay-by on the Kimberley-Eastwood by-pass, east of Junction 26. The temperature was such that the windows were steaming over, three men in that confined space the best part of an hour, Finch’s sweat holding his shirt flat and wet to his back, running into his groin. Finch wanted to reach down and scratch, wriggle and set himself to rights. Except for small movements with his hands, he sat quite still, leaning back into the rear corner of the car, gray tongue dabbing at his drying lips. Softly, the four-speaker stereo was playing one of Ben Riley’s compilations of Country hits.
“The gun that was used in the Sainsbury’s job,” Resnick asked, “did that come from you?”
Finch mumbled something that could have been yes or no.
“Again,” Resnick said.
Audible this time, Finch staring at the condensation on the window as traffic, like blurred ghosts, swished by outside. “Yes.”
“You knew what it was for?”
“No.”
“You must have had an idea?”
“No. Never.”
“The person you sold it to, that was Prior?”
“Not direct.”
“Explain.”
Over the whine of a steel guitar, George Jones was preparing to get hurt all over again.
“I met up with Frank …”
“Frank Churchill?”
“Yes. Through him I met Prior. After the deal’d gone through.”
“They talked about the robbery?”
“Course not.”
“But you knew?”
“No.” Resnick wiped his hands along his thighs. “You thought they were going out to shoot rabbits?”
“Maybe.” A flick of the tongue. “Why not?”
“You know now,” Ben Riley said from behind the wheel. “After last time, no way you can’t know.”
Finch lowered his face into his hands. Count to five hundred in tens and when you look they’ll all have gone away.
Resnick leaned closer along the back seat. “This time, Prior contacted you himself?”
“Yes.”
“Why not Churchill?”
Finch shrugged. “Maybe he’s not around. Who knows?”
“When,” Resnick said, “were you supposed to make delivery of the gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie.”
“Honest to God …”
“Yes?”
Finch’s eyes left Resnick and found Ben Riley instead. His temples were beginning to throb; it was increasingly difficult to breathe. “Tomorrow, day after. He’s supposed to get in touch.”
“How?”
“Phone.”
Resnick glanced towards Ben Riley, who gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod. “Go through with it. Go through with the deal. Soon as Prior’s in touch, arrangements are in place, you call us.”
An articulated lorry went past so fast along the bypass it made the car vibrate. Sweat dropped from Finch’s nose onto his mouth and chest. Tanya Tucker asked to be laid down in a field of stone; Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahachee Bridge. “All right,” Finch breathed eventually. “Okay. Yes. Yes.”