Fed up with TV, Ruth had climbed onto a dining chair, scrabbled about in a box on the top shelf in the alcove, above Prior’s Brian Ferry albums, his Rod Stewart and his Elvis Presley. Paperback books by Wilbur Smith and Jeffrey Archer. The corners of the cover had got bent, one of the edges torn. 1972. She could remember going into the recording studio still. Manchester. Driving up there with Rylands, through the Peak and along the Buxton Road. Four tracks and it had taken them the best part of a day. Cold in the studio and she’d found it difficult to pitch in key, sent Rylands scurrying out from behind his drum kit to buy a quarter-bottle of brandy.
Ruth wiped away dust with the side of her hand and set the record down. Play it now before he came home. The rawness of the sound took her by surprise, the echo, her voice. Well before the first song was over, she lifted up the stylus, slotted the record back in its sleeve. That moody, soft-focused picture, head down by the mike like she was Janis Joplin. Well, lighting a cigarette, she wasn’t Janis; she was alive. Just. Without bothering to get back onto the chair, she tossed the record back up into the box.
Ruth James amp; the Nighthawks RIP.
Hallett drove, enjoying this part of the job, good at it. Followed a stolen Sirocco once, all the way from Exeter to Chesterfield, five different motorways, never spotted once. Now he ghosted eighty yards behind Prior’s car as it swung down Southdale Road, turning south through Bakers Field towards Colwick Wood park. In the back Graham Millington began to whistle, tuneless and unrecognizable, until the others stared at him and he shut up.
The other cars were slowly closing, east and west.
The palms of Resnick’s hands were dry and, beginning to itch. Since making his call several hours before, he had not thought of Elaine once.
Ruth had intended to be in bed before Prior arrived back, but she had switched the set back on and a program about prisoners’ wives had caught her attention. Talking to camera, some of their faces had been electronically distorted to avoid recognition. Story after story of impossible journeys by bus and train, often with kids in tow. Month after month, year after year. Stand by your man. If mine gets nicked, Ruth thought, he can sod that for a lark!
Above the television sound she heard the car draw up outside, switched off and went quickly up the stairs.
“Ruth? Ruthie?”
No reply. Prior switched on the TV and flicked through the channels. Highlights from tonight’s top-of-the-table promotion battle. He broke off a piece of mature cheddar with his fingers, popped open a can of beer. If this is the top of the table, he thought after a few minutes, God help the rest of them.
He was lolling back against one corner of the settee, feet resting on the coffee table, when Sangster swung a sledgehammer at the door, the second time enough to splinter the hinges clean away.
Resnick was first inside, calling, “Police!”, Hallett and Millington on his heels. Prior raced from the front room, shouting Ruth’s name as he passed the stairs. “Charlie!” Hallett yelled. “Go! Go!” Prior wrenched open the kitchen door and slammed it shut behind him. Ruth, pulling on a robe over her nightclothes, stepped out of the bedroom into a chaos of chasing feet and harsh voices. Prior leaned his weight against the kitchen table and rammed it against the door; through the window he could see the shadowy figures of men at close intervals between the roses.
“Bastards!”
Rains looked up at Ruth from the well of the stairs and winked.
Hallett shoulder-charged the kitchen door and his ankle turned under him, but the door budged back far enough for Resnick to squeeze through. A quick look towards the rear windows, which were still closed. He guessed the side door led into the garage and he was right.
The offside door to the car was open and so was the boot. Prior partly screened behind it, bending low. The only light was that which came through the kitchen but it fell across Prior’s back and face.
“CID,” Resnick said breathlessly. “DS Resnick. I …”
Prior moved to his right as he straightened and when he did he had the double-barreled shotgun in his hands. Something banged against the garage door outside, but the hands didn’t falter; they were holding the gun quite steady, angled towards the upper part of Resnick’s chest.
Peripherally aware of other voices, outside and behind, Resnick could only concentrate on Prior’s eyes as they narrowed down, the slight tightening of the finger behind the trigger guard.
The breathing of both men was ragged.
Resnick took a pace forward and cautiously, very slowly, began to open the fingers of his empty right hand.
Something inside Prior changed, like a switch being thrown; his eyes widened and blinked and he began to reverse the shotgun, the barrels towards his own head. Christ! Resnick thought, he’s going to kill himself. But the swiveling movement didn’t stop until the stock was pointing towards Resnick and he went quickly forward, hand reaching across the roof of the car, to take the weapon from Prior’s loosening grasp.
The garage doors slid quickly up into the roof and Ben Riley stepped out of car headlights, concern on his face. Hallett and Millington moved either side of Resnick, turning Prior around, reading rights and warnings as they fastened cuffs about his wrists.
“Did well, Charlie. Star performance.”
Resnick turned at the sound of Rains’s voice and there he was, grinning from the kitchen doorway, Ruth at his side. Rains had a police-issue pistol in his right hand.
“Thought for a minute there I was going to have to use this.”
Resnick pushed past them, back inside the house, Ben Riley following him through.
Thirty-Four
Summer in the cities.
Prior was refused bail, on the grounds that he might skip the country or attempt to interfere with potential witnesses, and jailed on remand. Martin Finch was persuaded to testify that in addition to the shotgun Prior had surrendered to Resnick, he had supplied the weapon that had seriously wounded the Securicor guard and that Frank Churchill had told him it was to be used in a robbery Prior was organizing.
When Churchill stepped off the Manchester train, officers were waiting to arrest him.
Resnick was officially commended for bravery and the object of several late-night celebrations in the local force. He found himself celebrating again when the soccer season ended and County were promoted to the First Division of the Football League for the first time in fifty-five years.
He sat in front of a television set with Ben Riley, watching Spurs’ other Argentinian, Ricky Villa, plough his way through a maze of players in the Manchester City penalty area and score the winning goal in the FA Cup Final replay. When it was over, Ben told him that he’d written an exploratory letter to the Montana State Police.
One of Prior’s fellow prisoners came up to him in the exercise yard and told him his wife was getting her leg over with a copper. It took four men to prize Prior away; by the time they’d succeeded, the other prisoner had a broken nose and a ruptured spleen.
Resnick and Elaine were talking again, being civil at least; she said she had stopped seeing Gallagher, needing to think things through. There was still a great deal that went unspoken, neither of them willing to prize open what each, in their different ways, was apprehensive to examine.
In June there was more rioting in London and in July the attempt by police to arrest a black youth for stealing his own motor bike resulted in violent confrontations which lasted for three days. Petrol bombs were hurled at a beseiged police station in Manchester and riots threatened to tear apart the decaying hearts of many other inner-cities: Birmingham, Blackpool, Bradford, Cirencester, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds, Nottingham, Preston, Reading, Sheffield, and Wolverhampton. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, refused to accept either swingeing unemployment or bad housing as causes, putting the violence and looting down to criminal greed.