Last Rites

Twenty

Lorraine had gone in to work earlier, thinking she needed at least to show her face; stay, at most, half the day. But after a couple of hours listlessly flicking through ledgers, pulling out the most overdue bills and passing them through for payment, making a call or two chasing paper supplies, she went into the general manager’s office and told him she was sorry, she just couldn’t carry on. Her concentration was shot. She’d try again after the weekend. He nodded sympathetically and assured her he understood: things like that-meaning her mother’s funeral-sometimes they hit you harder than you think. Take all the time you need, come back when you’re good and ready. Someone of Lorraine’s experience, motivated by more than the decidedly average wage he paid her, he knew she wouldn’t be easy to replace.

Insofar as she’d thought at all, Lorraine had reckoned on going back home, settling into a bath, occupying herself with another bout of mindless housework, tidying up the garden. As she was backing the car out on to the road that wound through the center of the industrial estate, she realized that wasn’t what she was going to do at all.

Wollaton Park was reasonably close to the city center, just the other side of Derby Road from the university. Turning off the ring road, past that sixties pub that looked like a great goldfish bowl, she drove slowly through the main entrance and along the narrow, uneven track, headed toward the ornate pile at the center. A mass of stairways and statues, high-arched doorways and elongated turrets, the Hall had long since been turned into a museum, and Lorraine remembered herself and Michael as children, pointing with momentary curiosity at stuffed birds behind dusty glass, before running off and sliding after one another down broad banisters and along polished floors.

Now she skirted the building itself to stroll through the gardens, winding back and forth along the geometrically arranged paths with their precise sets of shrubs and flowers. Everything in its place. Perfect. Crossing the trench that ran around the grounds, she sat on a bench and looked down over the broad swathe of grass toward the lake at the bottom of the slope.

How old had Michael been when he fell in? Eight? Nine? Chasing a ball their father had kicked, punted high and heedless into the air, calling, “Catch it! Catch it! Catch!”

In those moments that followed, everyone but Michael had seen what was about to happen. Only Michael, head tilted upwards, eyes fixed on the white blur of plastic, had not noticed how close he was running to the edge until, oblivious to the shouts of warning, his legs had carried him over and into the water-a sudden splash that had scattered unsuspecting ducks and reduced Lorraine to screaming. Shrill screams of fear as her father threw off his jacket, pulled at his shoes, and jumped in through the reeds to where Michael’s arms were flailing, his head appearing, then disappearing, till finally he was lifted clear, water streaming off him, and held high above his father’s head. Lorraine’s screams faded to tears then, her body shaking as she watched the smile broaden on her father’s face as he waded back toward the shore, triumphant, Michael safe in his arms.

How she loved them then, at that moment: loved both of them. Without question.

Feeling a shiver run through her, Lorraine looked up to the sky, but it was still an unblemished blue, echoing the unbroken water below. Rising to her feet, arms wound tight across her chest, she shivered again. She had been so certain, when she heard he had escaped, that Michael would find a way of coming to her. Not for long, she understood that, but once at least, before he ran. She had been convinced of it. You don’t love him, do you? She had been wrong about so many things.

The Pentecostal church in which former robber and general ne’er-do-well Arthur Forbes found salvation was primarily of Afro-Caribbean descent in its congregation; its spiritual leader was a white-haired Antiguan who had first heard the calling on a windswept boat threatened with forty-foot waves crossing the Windward Passage between Haiti and Santiago, Cuba. In truth, the man’s hair had not been white until that transforming experience, rather, jet-black, a happening from which he had been known to extract the maximum symbolic resonance at the pulpit. Macon, Georgia; Charlotte, Virginia; Chattanooga, Tennessee-the minister learned his preaching in the best, the steamiest of circles, his oratory suffused with a richness of Southern gospel traditions. So that now, when he threw back his head and raised his voice to praise the Lord in accents which mingled the East Midlands and the West Indies with the American South, those gathered together in the makeshift breeze-block building in Sneinton found it easy to believe it was indeed the Holy Ghost descending on their bowed heads, rather than dust and dirt dislodged from the ceiling by a passing train.

Arthur Forbes, forever lamenting his past ways, had chosen public avowal and humiliation as his penance. Wearing a discarded head waiter’s frock-coat and a pair of striped trousers several sizes too large and held together by staples, he paraded the streets and public places of the city center, preaching the word, singing psalms, and bearing a sandwich board which he used to fend off the sour fruit and empty lager cans that were propelled in his direction by the Godless youth of the city.

Forbes was easing off his boots, prior to immersing his feet in the waters of one of the Old Market Square fountains, when he saw Millington approaching.

“Oh, where were you, brother,” Forbes began singing, “when they crucified my Lord? Where were you, oh sinner, when they nailed him to a tree?”

“Never laid a hand on him,” Millington said, “and if he says anything different, he’s a liar.”

“Is that in your notebook, sergeant?”

“Gospel.”

“Aah,” Forbes exclaimed, sliding his right foot down into the bubbling water. “Isn’t that blissful?”

“It’s probably contravening several bylaws. Polluting a public place, for one.”

“But you’re not here to arrest me?”

Millington lit a Lambert and Butler and pushed the rest of the packet down into Forbes’s jacket pocket.

“What you’re after,” Forbes said, rubbing an index finger down between his toes, “will cost you more than that.”

“And what would that be? This thing that I’m after.”

“You want to know if I’ve seen hide or hair of Michael Preston. Even though they have it on the news that he’s away.”

“And you’re saying they’re wrong?”

Forbes changed feet. “I’ve not had so much as a smell of him. He’s not been near. What was in the paper, for all I can tell you otherwise, it’s true.”

“Shame, Arthur.” Millington patted the wallet inside his jacket pocket. “Might’ve found a little something for the collection box.”

Forbes’s eyes sparkled. “How little?”

“Depends on what you had to sell.”

Easing himself back on the stonework, Forbes began to dry his feet on a large and grubby handkerchief. “Rumor has it you’ve been looking for a gun. Something to do with Anthony Valentine.”

Millington stood closer. “You know where it is?”

Forbes shook his head. “Just where it came from.”

Millington folded two ten-pound notes and pressed them down into Forbes’s outstretched hand.

“You know a boy name of Gary Prince?” Forbes said.

Millington’s mind was racing. The only Gary Prince he knew was a small-time crook with little ambition and less talent-for thieving or anything else. Maybe he’d been going to night school. Extra lessons. Not, in all probability, Byron and the Late Romantics.

“What’s that little toe-rag got to do with anything?”

“The man’s growing, got responsibilities.”

“And he’s peddling guns, that what you’re saying?”

Forbes squeezed his feet back into his boots and tied careful double knots in his string laces. “I’m saying what Valentine was carrying that night, our Gary’s where it come from. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way. The Lord’s work, you know, it’s never done.”

No more’s bloody mine, Millington thought as he headed back through the square. Jason Johnson was still not talking, Valentine himself was hiding behind his well-paid brief; all of their efforts to uncover a witness who could identify the Burger King shooter had proved fruitless. Gary Prince might not be much of a lead, but it was a start.

At a little past two that morning, Lorraine had found herself in her dressing gown looking at the children. Sandra had thrown both the pillows out of her bed and was lying in a perfect diagonal, covered only by the sheet, a frown crossing her sleeping face as Lorraine watched. Sean had twisted himself almost upside down, one leg sticking out over the edge of the mattress, the other pushed up against the wall. Like a cat’s paw, one arm rested across his face, covering his eyes.

Whatever else, Lorraine thought, I have these.

Careful to avoid the boards that squeaked, she padded downstairs. Probably on purpose, Derek had not replaced the empty bottle of gin. She remembered a bottle of vodka, Russian, in the freezer. Standing at the French windows, glass cold between her fingers, she stared out into the almost dark. She was still there when she heard Derek’s feet on the stairs, saw his reflection coming slowly closer. His hand, warm on her arm.

“Can’t sleep?”

She shook her head.

For some moments, he didn’t speak and Lorraine could feel his breath against her neck, his hand moving lightly above and below her elbow, tips of his fingers pushing down into her palm.

“However long you stand here waiting, watching, he’s not going to come.”

Leaning forward, Lorraine closed her eyes.

“Not now. You know that, don’t you? Lorraine, sweetheart, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Her voice so faint that, even close, he wasn’t certain she had spoken at all.

“Lorraine?”

“Yes. Yes, I said, yes.”

Derek stroked her hair. “Sooner or later, you’ve got to face it, love. The kind of man he is. He didn’t come to your mother’s funeral out of respect for her. Affection. He didn’t even come to see you. He came because it was his chance; his chance to escape and that’s what he’s done.”

There were tears running down Lorraine’s face and she was starting to shake. Before she dropped it, Derek took the empty glass from her hand.

“I’m your husband, Lorraine. Those children upstairs, they’re yours and mine. This is our family. Ours. And I love you, remember that. I love you, no matter what.”