Wasted Years

Eleven

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Nothing. What d’you mean?”

“I hardly recognized you.”

They were in the cafe on West End Arcade, opposite the bottom of the escalator, Darren and Keith, the place in the city where they met, mornings, table close against the window. Every now and then there’d be some woman, short skirt, ascending in front of their eyes.

Keith was still staring at Darren, gone out. “How much’t cost, get it done?”

Darren ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Nothing.”

“How d’you mean, nothing?”

“Got someone to do it for me.”

“What someone?”

“Some girl.”

There was an old boy in the corner, chewing his way through two of toast, careful to break off the ends of brittle crust rather than risk his teeth. A young mum with a tired face was dipping her baby’s dummy into sweet tea and pushing it against the child’s squalling face. Couple of retro-punks waiting for the record shop back down the arcade to open, rifle through the racks of rare singles they couldn’t afford to buy.

“’Nother tea?”

Keith nodded. “Yeh, ta.”

“Anything to eat?”

Keith shook his head. “Skint.”

“I’m buying.”

While they were waiting for the sausage cobs, Keith marveled at the difference Darren’s haircut made to his face. Suddenly it was sharper, harder, his nose seemed larger, jutting out from the center of his face; and the eyes … Keith didn’t think he’d ever noticed them before, not really, blue-gray but bright, dead bright, as if for the first time they’d been let out from under a cloud.

“So what d’you think? Suit me?”

“Yeh. Yes. It’s good. Really is.”

“But you didn’t recognize me, right?”

“Well, I …”

“When I come in, you said …”

“I knew, but not straight off.”

“It’s the hair, right?”

“Yeh, of course …”

“Anyone as saw me before, just saw me, that’s what they’d pick on, what they’d say-hair, he’s got all this curly hair.”

“Yes.”

“That girl yesterday …”

“The one you got to cut it off?”

“The one in the building society. Lorna.”

“’S’that her name?”

“Lorna Solomon.”

“What about her?”

“I was wondering …”

“Yeh?”

“If she walked in here now …”

“Which she won’t.”

“But if she did.”

“What about it?”

“If she’d know who I was.”

Keith watched Darren lift the top off his cob and smear the pieces of sausage with mustard, shook tomato sauce over his own until it lay in it, like a puddle. Darren had been likely to go off at half-cock before, quick fits of temper: dangerous, though he hadn’t looked it. Now he did. As Darren bit down into his cob and grinned across at him, Keith saw again that newfound glint in his eyes and felt a chill slide over his skin because he knew then that Darren was capable of anything.

Anything.

“Shouldn’t take that long,” the workman said at the door to Resnick’s office. “Hour or two at most.”

Resnick nodded and picked up a cluster of files from his desk, resigned to losing the use of the room for the rest of the day.

“Just got a call from forensic,” Millington called over the noise of furniture being dragged across bare floorboards.

“And?”

“Seems there’s some kind of logjam. Lucky to get anything this side of teatime.”

“Managed to dig out three more witnesses, boss,” said Divine. “Out at Sandiacre. Couple stuck their heads out after they whacked into the road sign, nothing new there, but this … Marcus Livingstone … had his motor nicked from outside a newsagent’s less than quarter of a mile away. Heard this engine revving like crazy, realized it was his own. Got to the door in time to see them driving off down Longmoor Lane.”

“And we’re certain it’s the same pair?”

“Likely.”

Resnick nodded. “Which direction, Longmoor Lane?”

“South.”

“Double back this side of the rec,” said Millington, “Junction 25. Once they’re on the motorway, any place from Chesterfield down to Leicester in half hour.”

“’Less they carry on going,” Kevin Naylor said, “swing round Chilwell and Beeston and back into the city.”

“This car,” Resnick asked, “it’s been reported missing?”

“Yes, boss. Vauxhall Cavalier, D reg. Not turned up as yet.”

Resnick nodded. “Let’s put some pressure on. Have a word with Paddy Fitzgerald, Graham, make sure uniform patrols keep their eyes skinned.”

“Right.”

Resnick turned back to Naylor. “That witness yesterday …”

“Lorna,” Naylor said. “Lorna Solomon.”

Divine sniggered.

“How good a description could she give of the youth who threatened her?”

“Pretty good, sir. Detailed.”

“It agreed,” said Lynn Kellogg, “with what I could get from Marjorie Carmichael. Not that I’d like to rely on her in court.”

“But from the pair of them-if we needed to-there’s enough to bring an artist in, get a composite?”

Naylor and Kellogg glanced at one another before answering. “Yes, sir,” said Naylor.

“Yes,” said Lynn.

“Kevin, this, er, Lorna …”

“Solomon, sir.”

“Did you take her through the pictures we’ve got on file?”

“Not really, sir. Wasn’t time. And I thought anyway, you know, by now we’d likely have prints and …”

“Bring her in. Sit her down. Can’t do any harm.”

“Specially,” whispered Mark Divine behind Naylor’s head, “if you can get her to sit on your face.”

“Something else, Mark?” Resnick said.

“No, boss,” Divine said, wiping the smirk from his face.

“Anybody?”

“I thought I’d see if I can talk to the manageress,” Lynn Kellogg said. “If she’s not turned in at work, I’ve got her home address.”

“Right. And Mark, call the hospital, check the situation with Harry Foreman. Long as he’s out of immediate danger, find out when we might be able to have a word. We still don’t know conclusively which one it was clobbered him.”

Harry Foreman’s X-rays suggested several hairline fractures of the cranial cavity and damage to the ossicles of the middle ear. He was sedated, mostly sleeping, being fed by means of an IV drip. In one rare moment of apparently clear consciousness he asked a student nurse what had won the 3:30 at Southwell; in another asked why his wife, Florrie, wasn’t there to see him. When the ward social worker made inquiries, she discovered that Florence Foreman had died in 1973, having contracted pneumonia after a fall in which she had dislocated her hip.

Rebecca Astley had been prescribed an anxiolytic by her doctor, which she had purchased in the form of Diazepam from her local Boots. Now she was lying on the settee in the living room of the flat she shared with a management trainee from Jessops, a duvet wrapped around her to keep her from getting cold as she alternately watched an old John Garfield film on Channel 4 and re-read the Barbara Taylor Bradford she’d bought for the flight to Orlando. She didn’t think anyone from head office would be round to see her so soon, but just in case they did, she had put a little makeup on her face and made sure her best dressing gown, the one with the lavender braiding, was close to hand. She only hoped that neither Marjorie nor Lorna had taken the opportunity to make her look bad; Marjorie she could trust, but Lorna … she made it a rule never to speak ill of anyone, but Lorna Solomon-it wasn’t just that she was common, that wasn’t altogether her fault, what she didn’t have to be was such a bitch.

“Where d’you get it all?” Keith asked.

“All what?”

“All this money, what d’you think?”

After spending the best part of an hour and more change than Keith could count on video games in the place above Victoria Street, they were sitting in Pizza Hut, waiting for the waitress to bring their order.

Darren winked. “Got it from the girl, didn’t I?”

“The one you picked up in Michael Isaacs?”

“Which other girl is there?”

“What’d she want to give you money for? She cut your hair, you should have paid her.”

Darren reached under the table and cupped his crotch in his hand. “She got paid all right. Couldn’t get enough.”

The waitress, trying not to notice the way Darren seemed to be fondling himself, put down their Meat Feast Supreme and left them to it.

“Then you wouldn’t know a lot about that, eh, Keith?”

Keith made a face and lifted a slice of pizza on to his plate, reached for a tomato from the help-yourself salad Darren had piled high as he could, gluing the ingredients together with blue cheese dressing.

“Day comes, you get your cock out of your hand and up some slag’s twat she’ll think she’s been stung by a gnat and start to scratch.”

“I’d be pleased if you’d moderate your language,” said a woman in a red hat, turning round from the booth behind. “There are young children here who don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

“Oh, yes,” said Darren, on his feet to get a better look at the family scene, mother and grandma and a couple of kids under ten wearing school uniform. “And where d’you think they came from, then, if it wasn’t some bloke slipping a paper bag over your head, getting you bent over the bed, and fucking you rotten?”

The trainee manager was keen, only her second week in the job, there in a flash. “Sit down, please, sir. If there’s some kind of a problem …”

“What it is, Delia,” Darren said, reading her name off her badge, smiling, “my friend and I, we ordered two portions of garlic bread to go with the pizza, the garlic bread with the cheese topping. Seems to be a long time coming.”