Wasted Years

Nineteen

Rylands had vacuumed the house, the landings and the stairs, from top to bottom. The carpet from the hall he had ripped out and temporarily replaced with some lino offcuts he’d been storing in the cellar. He had borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and cleaned the outside windows, scraping away grime which had gathered for years. For a tenner, another neighbor had lent him a five-hundred weight van for long enough to cart seventeen bags of rubbish, mostly old bottles and cans, to the household tip. The hall carpet, sodden and stained, had been hauled away, together with a battered suitcase of old clothes and two cardboard boxes of burned pans, chipped and cracked china, and packets of food long past their sell-by date.

The cleanup had begun half an hour after Keith and Darren had left: too early for Rylands to have begun drinking and he hadn’t had a drink since. Shaving, he observed it was the first time in months the razor hadn’t shaken in his hand and nicked neck or cheek. Before his shave he had taken a bath, long and hot; after it, he dressed himself in clean clothes-a pair of gray trousers that had once belonged to a best suit, a white shirt he ran over with an iron, gray pullover with a V-neck in need of a little darning. Black shoes with leather uppers that he had polished and buffed. His hair he trimmed as best as he could before brushing it flat.

Only when all that had been done did he dial the station and ask for Detective Inspector Resnick by name.

Now he and Resnick sat across from one another in Rylands’s cellar room, Resnick on the slightly sagging easy chair Rylands had dragged down earlier.

“Nearly got shot of that lot today,” Rylands said, pointing at the piles of yellowing music paper on the floor. “Must go back twenty, thirty years. Couldn’t in the end-stupid, isn’t it, what you cling on to?”

Resnick nodded over his mug of coffee, neither as strong nor as dark as he would have liked. Rylands was drinking the same, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, thin as a baby’s finger.

“I recognized you,” Rylands said. “Oh, not exactly who you were, don’t suppose I ever knew that and if I did, well, I’d forgot, but the face-yes-all those nights standing there, close to the band.”

Resnick nodded, remembering.

“Most men just went there for the girls. The beer.”

“I met my wife there.”

Rylands gave a rueful smile. “There you go.”

“Stepped all over her feet.”

“Dancing?”

Resnick shook his head. “Just being clumsy.”

“They say that, don’t they? About coppers. The old joke.”

Resnick was looking at him.

“Big feet.”

Resnick continued to wait, guessing that whatever Rylands had invited him there to hear, it wouldn’t be easy to say. There were things itching at the edges of Resnick’s mind, too, demanding attention; memories he was unwilling to scratch. Leave it alone, his mother had been forever saying to him, you’ll only make it worse. Well, as far as the sundry blemishes of adolescence, that was likely true.

“You still listen to much?” Rylands asked, not ready yet for the conversation to go where it had to go.

“Now and again. When I get the time. Sundays at the Playhouse; the Arboretum, sometimes. Here and there.”

“Some of the old band are still playing …”

Resnick nodded.

“Straight ahead jazz now. R amp;B, thing of the past where they’re concerned.”

“And you?”

Rylands was looking at the snare drums gathering dust on the floor. “No,” he said, and then, “Last night, when you were here, looking for Keith. All what I said … wasn’t necessarily true.”

“No.”

“He had been here, I had seen him. Said he was going to stay. I don’t know-daft really, I know if you wanted him bad enough you’re always going to find him-still, I couldn’t just, you know, say. Would’ve been like … shopping him, I suppose. Grassing your own.”

“Yes,” said Resnick. “I understand.” The mug of coffee, lukewarm now, he set on the floor.

“What I said …”

“Mm?

“About him being better off back inside …”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t mean that …”

“No.”

“Not the way it sounded.”

“No.”

“All the same …” The cigarette had gone out and Rylands relit it, wisps of tobacco sizzling to nothing. “What he’s been in up to yet, cars and that, nothing serious …”

“Serious enough.”

Rylands looked at the floor between his polished shoes. “This bloke he’s running with now, mouth on him like a sewer, treats Keith like shit and all the while Keith looking up to him, lapping it up. I hate to see that.”

When he should be looking up to you, Resnick thought.

“How much of it’s talk, I don’t know. Like I say, the mouth on him. But what he was on about, earlier today, here in the kitchen, what he was talking about was getting a gun. A shooter.”

A moment’s silence wavered between them.

“Did he say what for?” Resnick asked.

“Not right out, but that bank job, today, he was full of that. How they got away with it on account of the gun.” Rylands let the nub end of his cigarette fall into his mug of coffee. “Might all just have been chat, showing off …”

“The reason we want to talk to Keith,” Resnick said, “there was an attempted robbery, branch office of a building society. Two youths, one, armed with a hammer. Something happened, all went wrong; ran off without getting a penny. We found Keith’s prints-what might be his-on the car they used to get away.”

“A hammer,” Rylands said thoughtfully.

“Like to have broken this old boy’s head for getting in the way.”

Rylands nodded. “If it was this Darren, I’d believe it. The way he looked at me, just for a second, today. If he’d had a gun in his hands then …”

The rest lay between them, unsaid. Resnick thinking about walking in on Prior, shotgun in his hands.

“Keith knows where he lives?” Resnick asked.

“I suppose so.”

“And he’s coming back here tonight?”

“Keith?”

“Yes.”

“Probably. As far as I know.”

“We could pick him up, charge him …”

But Rylands was shaking his head. “There’s got to be another way.”

Resnick leaned back, crossed one leg over the other, and waited to hear what that was.

At the top of the cellar steps, Resnick said: “Last night, after I’d been here, I found an old record of ‘Wasted Years.’”

“Ruthie …”

“Yes.”

“Great voice.”

“Agreed.”

“Not still in touch, I suppose?”

Rylands shook his head. “Haven’t seen Ruth in years. Scarcely since that bloke of hers got sent down. What was it? Twelve years?”

“Fifteen.”

“Jesus,” Rylands said softly.

“Rumor has it,” Resnick said, “he’s on his way back out.”

“Prior?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” Rylands breathed again.

“I’d best be off,” Resnick said, moving away. “What I heard, you know, back then, be a few scores to settle when he’s back on the street.”

Resnick nodded. “Possible.” He stopped close to the front door. “Ever hear anything, where Ruth is now, give us a ring, okay?”

“Yes, right. Though, like I say, don’t suppose …”

“This other business, your Keith, let me have a think about it. One way or another, I’ll be back in touch.” Resnick held out his hand. “Be good if we could work something out, between us, old times’ sake.”

His eyes held Rylands’s for a long moment, not wanting him to escape his meaning.

“Yes,” Rylands said. “Sure. I’ll do what I can.”

“Good.”

Rylands stepped back and watched the inspector out on to the street; when he had closed the door, he leaned his head against the hardness of the wood, eyes clenched shut. He would stay there, exactly as he was, until the urgency to find a drink had passed.

The night was clear and the moon three-quarters full, Resnick needed to walk. Ten, fifteen minutes he would be in Slab Square and could pick up a cab if he wished. Hands in pockets, coat collar pulled up, Resnick walked away.