Wasted Years

Two

1992

“Espresso, inspector?”

“Please.”

“Full, yes?”

Resnick nodded and unfolded the early edition of the local paper, thumbing through the pages in search of hard news, knowing he wouldn’t like what he found. Fifteen-year-old youth wounded by four girls in knife attack; old woman of eighty-three robbed and raped; Asian shopkeeper driven from estate by racist taunts and threats of violence. In the magistrates’ court, a man explaining why he pushed a petrol bomb through his neighbor’s letter box-“Night and day they had this music playing, night and day. I asked them to turn it down but they never took no notice. Something inside me just snapped.”

Setting the newspaper aside, Resnick sipped the strong coffee and, for a moment, closed his eyes.

The Italian coffee stall was located among the market stalls on the upper level of one of the city’s two shopping centers. Vegetables, fruit, and flowers, fish and meat and bread, Afro-Caribbean and Asian specialties; the two Polish delicatessen stalls where Resnick did much of his shopping, replying to greetings offered in his family’s language with the flattened vowels of the English Midlands. His stubborn use of English was not a slight; merely a way of saying I was born here, this city, this is where I was brought up. These streets. Eyes open, Resnick scanned the other customers sitting round the U-shaped stall: middle-aged shoppers whose varicose veins were giving them gyp; mums with kids who couldn’t make up their minds which flavor milk shake and would never sit still; old men with rheumy eyes who sat for hours over the same strong tea; the photography student from the Poly who drank two cappuccinos back to back and whose fingers smelt of chemicals; the solicitor who could eat a doughnut without getting as much as a granule of sugar on the skirt of her power suit; the tramp who waited till someone bought him a drink, then skulked off by the photo machine to finish it, legs visible through the rags of his trousers. These people.

Angled across from where Resnick was sitting, Suzanne Olds licked her finger ends clean with the fastidious delicacy of one of his cats. Lifting her leather briefcase from the floor, she slid from her stool and approached. The last time they had spoken, one of the solicitor’s clients had been up on five charges under sections 18 and 47 of the Offenses Against the Person Act, shuffling alibis like a dog-eared pack of cards.

“Inspector.”

“Ms Olds.”

“I was at dinner with a new colleague of yours a few nights ago. Helen Siddons. Very bright. Sharp.” Suzanne Olds smiled. “Aware of the issues.”

“I thought crime was the issue: solving it, preventing it.”

Suzanne Olds laughed. “Come off it, Inspector, you’re not as naive as that.”

Resnick watched her walk away, incongruously elegant and somewhat intimidating as she passed between local-grown spinach and pink and white shell suits, the latter greatly reduced, council clothing vouchers welcomed. He had met Helen Siddons a number of times since she joined the local force; transferred from Sussex, detective inspector at twenty-nine, eighteen months and she would have moved on. A graduate with a degree in law, she was being propelled by the Home Office along a fast track towards the highest ranks. She should be looking at Assistant Chief Constable by the time she was forty. Resnick could see how well she and Suzanne Olds would have got along; serious conversations between courses about the sexism endemic in the force, racism, the errors-careless or malicious-in police evidence which had led to conviction after conviction being so publicly overturned.

Why was it, when he agreed, at heart, with most of the beliefs women like Helen Siddons and Suzanne Olds held, he found it so hard to give them his support? Was it simply that he found them a threat? Or the almost certain feeling that the support of men like himself, career coppers for more than twenty years, would not be welcomed?

“Another?” asked the stall owner, whisking his cup into the air.

Tempted, Resnick checked his watch and shook his head. “Got to be off. Important meeting. Maybe see you later. Cheers.”

And he ambled away, shoulders hunched, a wave at the man from the fish stall forever on at him about giving a bit of a talk to the Church Fellowship, a bulky man in a shiny suit that had been beautifully tailored by his uncle more than fifteen years before-for somebody else and not for him.

Reg Cossall was standing on the steps of the central police station, swopping tales of arson with the senior officer from the fire station alongside.

“Hey up, Charlie,” Cossall said, falling into step with Resnick as he pushed through the front door. “Heard the latest?”

Resnick was sure he was going to, any minute.

“They only reckon Grafton’s going to get Tom Parker’s spot. Can you believe that? Malcolm bloody Grafton a chief inspector. Over the likes of you and me.”

Resnick grunted noncommittally and started on the stairs.

“Tell you what, Charlie. That bastard’s done so much sucking up, must have a gullet like anyone else’s large intestine. Not to mention wearing through three sets of kneecaps.”

Resnick opened the door and waved Cossall through ahead of him. Most of the other officers were already present, a round dozen, inspector and above. Maps marked with colored pins and tape hung from the walls; memos and computer printouts lay in plastic wallets on tables of walnut veneer. The overhead projector was in place, screen pulled down. Jack Skelton, Resnick’s superintendent and heading up this particular task force, stubbed out one of his rare cigarettes, poured a glass of water from the jug, cleared his throat, and called the meeting to order.

“Operation Kingfisher, let’s see what we’ve got.”

Eighteen months previously, five men, masked and wearing track suits, had forced their way into a bank in Old Basford right on closing time. The two remaining customers had been told to lie on the floor, the cashiers bound and gagged; one of the weapons the gang had been carrying, a shotgun with sawn-off barrels, had been placed against the assistant manager’s head. They had got away with close to forty thousand pounds, changing cars three times in making their escape.

Driving in to open a newly refurbished supermarket at Top Valley five months later, the manageress had her Orion forced off the road and a pistol flourished in her face. Only after she had facilitated the opening of the safe was the gun withdrawn from sight. All the manageress could tell the police about the person threatening her was that he was average height and wearing a Mickey Mouse mask.

Mickey was on hand when the Mansfield branch of the Abbey National was held up one busy Saturday. It was Goofy, though, who placed a suitcase beside the protective screens on the counter and informed the nearest cashier that it contained a bomb. None of the staff felt like testing the possibility that it was just a bluff. Nor did they appreciate suggestions that the whole thing was a publicity stunt on behalf of EuroDisney.

The most recent robbery, three weeks ago now, took place in the inner city, Lenton Boulevard, just as the sub-post office was opening for the day. The door was locked from the inside and, while a line of grumbling customers grew along the pavement, the staff were tied to one another, shut inside a cupboard and warned that if they tried to get out or raise the alarm, shots would be fired through the door.

Four robberies: close on half a million pounds.

Five men: all wearing gloves, instantly disposable clothing, masks. All armed.

Between three and five cars, stolen days in advance, used on each occasion.

Threats of violence, so far not carried out.

Some of the stolen money had surfaced in places as far apart as Penzance and Berwick-on-Tweed; most of it, it was assumed, had already been laundered abroad for a fat commission.

Operation Kingfisher had been set up after the second incident; between thirty-five and fifty officers had been involved. All of the information gathered had been entered by civilian operatives on to disk and checked against the Home Office’s central computer. Possible links were being followed up in Leeds, Glasgow, Wolver-hampton. Known criminals implicated in similar raids were being tracked down and interviewed. Comparisons with similar robberies in Paris and Marseilles were being made. Flight manifests at East Midlands and Birmingham airports had been checked.

Sooner or later, somebody would make a mistake; so far, no one had. Resnick hoped it wouldn’t be some building society clerk or bank teller acting out of bravery or panic, a misplaced sense of loyalty to his employers.

“You know what, don’t you, Charlie?” Cossall said as they were leaving, best part of two hours later.

“What’s that, then, Reg?”

“What this lot reminds us of. That bloody business-when was it? — ten year ago.”

But Resnick didn’t want to be reminded. Not then or ever. Refusing Cossall’s offer of a quick pint in the Peacock, he slipped into a pub on High Pavement he rarely used and where he was unlikely to be known. That bloody business ten years ago. Never one to drink in the middle of the day, Resnick surprised himself with two large vodkas, one sharp after the other, with the tonic he had bought to dilute them still open and unused when he pushed his way back on to the street.