Wasted Years

Thirty-Three

Ruth climbed out of the bath, water streaming down her thighs. She’d lain in there too long, idling with her thoughts, the skin on her fingers ridged and puckered. Reaching for a towel, she rubbed a circle on the steam-covered mirror with her fist. Jesus! Like waking up and discovering you’d turned overnight into your mother. She wound a white towel about her head, began to pat her legs dry with another. How’s it feel, then, after all that time, not being able to sing? Cocksure bastard with his hands round the glass, nails even and smooth like they’d been manicured, long fingers. How’s it feel?

“Ruthie, you going to be all night?”

The look in his eyes when he took her hand and pressed it against him. Bastard! Excited, she hated him for that.

“Ruthie!”

Every night I’m kept waiting, she started singing to herself, face blurred in the mirror, gaunt and unfocused. All those dreams and wasted tears …

Prior knocked loudly on the door. “There’s other people in this house, you know.”

“Couple of minutes.”

“You better be.”

There’d been other people, right enough, same old faces along with a few new ones; conversations that petered out the minute she walked into the room. Phone calls that would be terminated at the least chance of being overheard. Something new was in the offing, something big, and he wouldn’t say anything about it till it was over. Then there’d be the bragging-“Ought to’ve seen their faces” or “Like a bleeding dream, Ruthie, clockwork wasn’t bloody in it”-the celebrations with champagne swilled down like water and holidays to exotic places. The lies. “Papers. Ruthie, you know what they’re like, blow it all up out of proportion. Hardly laid a finger on them.” And last time: “All an accident, never should’ve happened. Wouldn’t’ve done if he hadn’t took it into his head to be a sodding hero. Me? Ruthie, come on! When did you ever know me as much as touch a gun?” God! The lies. How she hated the same old, senseless lies.

“Ruth!”

“All right!” She wrenched the door open and moved quickly past, into the bedroom, Prior’s voice trailing behind her.

“Jesus! What you been up to in here? Like a bloody sauna!”

Ruth closed the door and unwound the towel from her body, draping it over the end of the bed. In the full-length mirror her breasts were getting smaller, the flesh over her hips and around her thighs was thickening. Sighing, she closed her eyes. All those lonely wasted years. Rain’s face, wide-eyed with honesty even as he lied. I like you. Talking to you. The beginnings of a well-trained smile edging his face. You deserve better, that’s all. Well, she wasn’t going to get it if she stayed where she was now with Prior forever breathing down her neck.

Resnick was to be in the lead car with three others, Hallett and Sangster and a new lad called Millington. Skelton would be in car two with Maddoc and McFarlane and Terry Docker. “Your show this, Charlie, I’m just along for the ride.” The third car contained Rains and Cossall and Derek Fenby. Uniforms were providing extra backup, sealing off the area around the Prior house once the time was ripe. Resnick had asked for Ben Riley and got him. One officer in each car was armed.

The first car alone would stand close watch on the pub, where two plainclothes officers were already stationed, borrowed from outside the city so there was less chance of them being recognized. As soon as the deal had gone down, the other cars would close in.

“All right,” Skelton said, “nobody loses their head. We want a result here, not gunfight at the OK Corral.”

A couple of officers politely laughed.

“Charlie? Last thoughts?”

Resnick was on his feet. “Thanks, sir. I don’t think so. We all know what we’ve got to do.”

“Yes,” said Reg Cossall, “make sure that bastard Prior goes down for a long time.”

There were cheers for that.

“Ruth?” He’d changed into light blue slacks, dark crew neck sweater under a brown leather coat. Tan shoes with tassels. Where’s the gold chain, Ruth thought? “I’m off out. Shan’t be long.”

She swung her legs down from the settee. On the TV an off-duty surgeon was performing an emergency operation with the assistance of one of the night cleaners and a hastily sterilized Swiss army knife.

“Going to the club?”

“No,” Prior said and winked. “See the well-known man about the well-known dog.”

Ruth looked back at the screen. “Is this the dog that takes a.38 caliber bullet or the one that prefers shotgun shells?”

Prior laughed as he closed the door; over the sound of the TV she could hear him doing a really bad Presley impression down the hall. Now or never, Ruth thought, might be just about right.

The pool tables in the side room were crowded round with onlookers, the occasional shout at a lucky shot or a bad miss rising above the general noise. At the back of the main bar a woman in a floral dress was plying coins into the electronic fruit machine as if feeding a long-lost child. The juke box cut in with a sudden burst of eighties’ techno-pop, fighting it out with the landlord’s tape of Western theme tunes which was playing through the speakers above the bar.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Prior asked as Finch made his second return from the gents in fifteen minutes. “Got the runs or what?”

“This ale,” Finch said, holding up the glass. “Goes through me like nobody’s business.”

“So stop bloody drinking it,” said Prior, who was sticking to Scotch and water, nibbling his way through a packet of nuts, shells overflowing the metal ashtray. “Anyway,” he said, puffing back his jacket sleeve to see his watch, “almost time we weren’t here. Got the wife to get back to, know how they are.”

“Give her one,” Finch laughed nervously.

Prior scowled and pushed back his chair. Coins spilled from the fruit machine so liberally that the woman couldn’t hope to catch them in her hands. “Parked round the back?”

“Yes,” Finch said. “Hang about while I finish this.”

Prior took the glass from his hand and set it down. “In your own time. Let’s do this now.”

They walked out past the pool players, half of them sixteen at best. There’d been something in the Mirror that morning about underage alcoholics, Esther Rantzen or Anneka Rice or one of them setting up a telephone helpline. “Any kid of mine …” Prior had started over his scrambled eggs, but the look on Ruth’s face had shut him up. Far as the pair of them knew any kid of his hadn’t been born yet.

“Just left the pub,” the detective said into his two-way radio. “Rear car-park, the pair of them.”

The shotgun was wrapped in a length of wool blanket, sheathed inside thick plastic; the notes were in fifties, rolled tight and held in place with a rubber band. The exchange took less than forty seconds. “Okay,” Resnick said into the handset. “We’re on.”

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.