Rough Treatment (26 page)

There it goes, bottle of perfume hidden for a moment beneath the over-long sleeve of her coat, and then lost in that capacious pocket. Keep out of sight, well back. That’s it, show an interest in some eyebrow pencil, fifteen shades of purple. Now move, move it!

The girl drifted around the end of the counter and at first Lynn didn’t think she had taken anything but when she looked again Lynn was ready to take bets there had been more silk scarves than that on display.

Where to now? Out beyond the store and the danger was she’d do a runner and that was the last Lynn would see of her, until the next time. But if her suspicions were correct, the girl wouldn’t be satisfied with so small a haul. Lynn doubled back on herself, feigning a sudden enthusiasm for a cherry red beret. Put that on her head and walk out into the street, people would mistake her for beetroot soup on legs.

Without hesitation, the girl walked up the shallow steps and back into the center, only this time Lynn was keeping with her.

“Mrs. Roy?”

“What is it now?”

“I was just talking to your husband …”

“Congratulations.”

“You may know, a complaint’s been filed against him …”

“For punching that Mackenzie in the mouth. Not before time. I can’t imagine what got into him, but it’s the best thing Harold’s done for years.”

“What I wanted to talk to you about, though, was something different.”

“I have an appointment. I have to get ready.”

“You don’t think I could step inside?”

“No.”

“It might be easier.”

“I told you, I’ve things to do.”

“The neighbors …”

“D’you think I care about the neighbors?”

Divine didn’t suppose she did. He was wondering what it must be like, married to an overweight woman with a voice like a handsaw and a temper to match.

Maria Roy glanced down at the opening at the top of her robe, but did nothing about it. “Well,” she said, “are you going to stand there gawping at my tits all morning, or can we get this over with?”

Divine could take that kind of language from the girls who scurried and giggled their way from pub to pub, bar to bar every Friday evening, but when the woman was old enough to be his mother, he had problems.

“Well?” Maria repeated, making a show of shutting the door in the DC’s face.

“This statement you made about the burglary,” Divine said. “We have reason to believe you identified the wrong men.”

Sometimes when he was bored, Patel worked his way through the counties of England, with their county towns, the states of the American union, the capitals of the Eastern bloc countries, the winners of the world squash championship since 1965, the year in which he had been born. At others, he struggled to clear his mind of all such ephemera, facts and figures, empty it of everything save the rhythm of his own breathing and the sounds around him. Here, close to the heart of the city, it was amazing how many different natural sounds there were. Bird calls, for instance.

“Young man.”

Patel jumped, despite himself. Turning, he was face to face with a shrunken woman with tightly curled white hair. She was wearing a thick coat that might once have fitted her, but was now several sizes too large, heavy brown wool with an astrakhan collar. On her feet were gym shoes, murky white.

“Are you the police?”

She spoke like a schoolmistress of the old-fashioned kind; Patel had read of them in books, smelling of camphor and with pear-drop breath; when they asked for silence you could, of course, hear the imperial pin drop. For himself, back in Bradford, most of his teachers had worn jeans and ill-fitting sweaters held together with badges for Anti-Apartheid, Ban the Bomb.

“Because you’re either from the police or the public health department. You haven’t come about that rat I reported, have you?”

Patel smiled and shook his head; showed her his warrant card.

“Good,” she said emphatically. “Then you’ve come about that awful man.”

“Which man is this?”

“That man. The one who lives up there.” She was looking past Patel towards the house he had been detailed to watch. “That pervert. That dreadful peeping Tom!”

“Excuse me,” said Lynn, fingers on the girl’s sleeve, “I’ve reason to believe …”

The girl twisted fast, kicking her heel hard against Lynn’s shin and then jabbing a knee towards her groin. She flailed her arms and screamed in Lynn’s startled face.

“Lemmego! Lemmego! Lemmego!”

Lynn clung on as nails clawed at her face.

“Just look,” said a passer-by to her friend, both carrying boxes of cream cakes from Bird’s, neatly tied around with a bow at the top.

“All right,” said Lynn, fending off the blows. “This isn’t getting you anywhere.”

The girl ducked low and swiveled hard and the next thing Lynn was standing there with the coat in her hands and the girl was legging it away as fast as she could along the upper aisle.

Lynn hooked her left hand firmly inside the collar of the coat and gave chase. Suddenly the passage between the railings and the shop fronts seemed to be full of elderly shoppers, moving slowly, dragging carriers or pushing wicker trolleys before them.

“Excuse me, police!” Lynn called out. “Keep back, police!”

The girl was thirty yards ahead of her, weaving in and out, tossing stolen goods this way and that; the surprised shoppers must have thought they were in the middle of a TV commercial, another episode of
Hard Cases.

“Stop that girl!” shouted Lynn. “Stop her!”

The girl pushed herself off one of the pillars, swinging sharp left as if to go down the stairs, breaking right again, sprinting along a clear patch of the opposite aisle, the direction that would take her to the bus station, out on to the street.

Lynn, the coat streaming out behind her like a gray flag, dug into her reserves and gained ground. A bunch of youths, lounging against a music shop window, clapped and cheered sarcastically. Ahead the girl changed direction again, making for the escalators. She was barging her way past people standing on the moving stairs as Lynn jumped past an astonished woman and baby and leaped down the up escalator. Plunging on, shouts ringing around her, close enough to reach across and grab at the girl’s jumper, but the jumper tore at the neck and they were both running still, almost at the bottom.

“Hey! Watch where you’re going!”

Lynn ducked under a man’s angry arm and dived for the back of the girl’s legs. They struck the hard polished floor and started to slide. A foot kicked Lynn alongside the head, numbing her ear. She tugged at the waistband of the girl’s skirt, ignoring the blows to her own head, the clamor all round.

“Lemmego, you bitch, you fucking cow!”

Lynn took hold of the girl’s hair and yanked it back, dragging her to her knees. A gold bracelet tumbled away from somewhere inside the girl’s clothing and rolled in a slow curve before wobbling to a halt.

“You’re under arrest,” Lynn said.

The girl spat in her face.

Twenty-five

Whoever had started to redecorate the room had run out of paint or enthusiasm a third of the way down the end wall. Elsewhere more than one shade of blue had been rolled on to chipboard paper, fading blue fingerprints attached to floor and ceiling. Three sections of unmatched carpet had been interlocked across the floor. One man, overweight by as much as fifteen pounds, leaned back against the end of a moquette settee, watching a program about mathematics for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. Another, cross-legged on the floor near the window, was reading Leon Uris. Norman Mann was close against the lowered blinds, binoculars in hand.

Resnick nodded briefly towards the two other officers as he came into the room.

“Not too early for you, Charlie?” asked Norman Mann pleasantly.

Resnick shook his head. He’d been awake since 4.25, Dizzy marauding underneath his bedroom window; gone back to bed but known it for a waste of time, finally up around half five, waiting for the sky to clear, the watery sun to rise.

He walked over to the window and Norman Mann obliged him by easing down one of the blinds. Resnick found himself looking out on another low block of flats, similar to the one he was in now. A curving walkway, its once-white wooden sides scattered with graffiti, led down to a paved area rich in dog shit and takeaway cartons from last night’s homeward trawl from the pubs along Alfreton Road.

Mann handled Resnick the glasses and pointed to one particular door. “Not exactly Crack City, but it’s our own little contribution.” Traces of his Edinburgh accent still clung to the back of his voice like shadows on an X-ray.

“Factory?” Resnick asked.

Mann shook his head. “Doubtful. More your out-workers. Cottage industries of old come back to haunt us. Cut the cocaine with baking powder, mix in a little water, bang it in the oven and then leave to dry. Easy as making a pie. Except what you get is a rock of crack that’ll change hands for twenty-five, thirty, forty pounds.”

“You’re not going in?”

“Not till we’ve got a better idea who’s inside. No.” Moving away from the window, he offered the glasses to the officer watching the TV. “You know how it is in this lark, Charlie, awful amount of waiting around, filling in time. Still …” he nodded towards the other officers, “… makes for a more cultured class of chaps.”

The two men laughed; one took his sergeant’s place at the window, the other turning a page of his book, then turning back again, couldn’t remember whether he’d read that page or not.

Norman Mann steered Resnick into the tiny oblong kitchen. The gas cooker looked as if it had been wrenched away from the wall and then left, blocking access to the sink. Something sat moldering in the corner, wrapped in damp newspaper. Better not to ask.

“Someone living here?” Resnick asked.

“Not any more. It was squatters last. Better here than out on the streets. Still, someone flushed them out a week or so back. Uniforms, probably, doing the council a favor. Useful for us though.” He shook out a packet of cigarettes and, when Resnick declined, lit one with the lighter from his back jeans pocket. “So, Charlie, something urgent.”

“Alan Stafford.”

Norman Mann angled his head back slowly, smoke easing from the edges of his mouth. “Bit higher class than this.”

“How high?”

“Connections all over. Newcastle, Southampton, Dover, Liverpool. Middle-man mostly, biggest profit for the lowest risk. By my reckoning he keeps some clients for himself, probably likes to keep the feel of the streets in his feet. Besides, gives him the chance to break and shake with the
hoi polloi.
”

“Television,” said Resnick, helpfully.

“Those wankers!” snorted Mann. “All they need is a few cans of Red Stripe to be falling arse-over-tip into each other’s Filofaxes. I’m talking money here, Charlie, real money. Power and influence. They don’t call cocaine your champagne drug for nothing.”

“You’ve got a watch on him, then?”

Norman Mann looked at him archly. “Now and again.”

“If he’s so important …”

“He’s as like got himself a bit of protection, all salted away against the inevitable rainy day. Oh, we’d like him, right enough. I’d love the bastard. But this lot here, peddling two-minute highs to schoolkids who hustle for it on the Forest, let’s face it, Charlie, we’re more likely to fetch up with one of them, more likely to get a result.”

“Which doesn’t mean you’re not interested?”

“It does not.”

Resnick nodded, wafted away the smoke that was collecting under the low ceiling in a blue-gray cloud. “He’s hanging round the edges of something pretty strange. A few things that won’t stay still long enough yet to tie down, see how they all fit. But he’s in there somewhere. I’ll bank on that.”

“Boss,” called one of the officers from the other room, “something’s moving.”

Norman Mann made his hand into a fist and set it against Resnick’s upper arm, tapping punches. “Anything we can do, Charlie.”

“Right. I’ll keep you up to the mark.”

Mann was back by the window, peering out. “Do that. Oh, and Charlie … check him out with NDIU, Stafford, they’ll have him pretty up to date.”

Resnick raised an arm. “Thanks.”

“Careful on your way out,” Norman Mann warned. “No one’s going to mistake you for your average squatter.” Grinning. “Not at second glance, anyway.”

Back inside his car, Resnick checked with the station, nothing to prevent him from moving on. He’d already had words with the DCI that morning, the request for information from the National Drugs Intelligence Unit would be on its way.

“One other thing,” Tom Parker had said. “Jeff Harrison, I thought the pair of you had some history together?”

“Not too much,” Resnick had replied.

“Only something’s ruffling his feathers and he seems to think you’re back of it.” Resnick had said nothing and waited. “Says he’s tried to talk to you, but you won’t answer his calls. Says you’ve had a couple of your lads over there, leaning on his men, ferreting around behind his back.”

“I came to you first, sir,” Resnick reminded him.

“Maybe it wasn’t clear to me what you were getting up to.”

“Like I said. Trying to fit that burglary in with our other inquiries. Nothing more than that.”