Wasted Years (8 page)

“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.”

Twelve

When Lorna saw Kevin Naylor come through the door of the building society office something inside her gave a clear and definite lurch. Mind you, something like that had been happening pretty much every time anyone came in, right from when they’d first opened. Her mum had told her last evening when they’d talked on the phone, take a few days off, you shouldn’t go straight back, not after what happened; her friend, Leslie, when she’d called round, see how Lorna was, she had said more or less the same. Even Mr Spindler had wondered if she oughtn’t to take one of her statutory sick days.

But, no, she’d felt all right, no bad dreams, nothing like that. After all, it wasn’t as if anything terrible had actually happened.

Still, there it was, this roll of her insides whenever she heard the door ring open, whenever she saw it begin to swing back. It was just that, well, when she realized it was Kevin her insides gave it that little extra. Nothing wrong with that: only natural

“I was wondering,” Kevin had said, “if you could spare a little more time.”

It had been Lorna’s idea to stop off on the way and pick up some lunch.

“We have to eat, don’t we? I mean, no law against that.”

She suggested the Chinese takeaway just across from the lights on Alfreton Road, more or less opposite the garage. From there it was easy for Kevin to double-back around the block, park on the Forest, the broad swathe of concrete where weekends they did Park and Ride.

This time there were no more than a dozen or so cars there, mostly close together. Funny how people tended to do that, as if there was safety in company. Kevin had drawn up away off from the others, facing up towards the trees.

“This is nice,” Lorna said. “How’s yours?”

Chewing, Kevin mumbled something that might have been, “Fine.”

Lorna had chosen prawn crackers, sweet and sour pork; Kevin the spare ribs. She leaned a little against the inside of the car door now, watching him lick the sauce from his finger ends.

“We should do this properly some time.”

“What’s that?” Kevin asked.

“Eat Chinese. You like it, don’t you? Chinese food?”

“I like this.”

“That’s what I mean. Only one evening, in a restaurant, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean because of your wife?”

Kevin shook his head. “She doesn’t like Chinese. Says it’s too salty. Makes her ill.”

Lorna was lifting a piece of pork towards her mouth with a plastic fork, grinning.

“What?”

“I wasn’t thinking of asking her,” Lorna said.

Kevin looked up through the windscreen towards the cluster of trees; someone in an off-white sheepskin coat was walking a pair of Sealyhams, holding their leads unnaturally high, the way he’d seen owners do on television, at Cruft’s Dog of the Year Show.

“Where do you go?” Lorna asked.

“You mean to eat?”

“With your wife, yes.”

“I don’t know as we do, much.”

“But, like, something special?”

“Like what?”

“Anniversary.”

For their last anniversary, their third, Kevin had sent a card, bought flowers, stood in line at Thornton’s for one of those little pink boxes for which you chose your two special chocolates before the assistant ties it up with pink ribbon. The lights had been off at Debbie’s mother’s house when he’d arrived, all save for the one that was always left on in the porch to put off burglars. After waiting three-quarters of an hour, Kevin had left the flowers on the doorstep with the chocolates, gone home and taken a bacon and egg pie from the freezer, sat down in front of
EastEnders
and eaten it out of the foil, not quite warmed through.

“Nothing special,” he said.

Inside the car it was getting warm, the windows beginning to take on a film of steam. Lorna offered him the last of the prawn crackers and when he shook his head, broke it in two with her teeth, biting with a light crunch, slowly. A fragment of cracker, white, stuck to a corner of her mouth, white against the fine, dark down of hair.

She was looking at his hands, resting on his lap. “You ever take it off?” she asked. “You wear it all the time?”

She was staring at the wedding ring on his hand.

“Sometimes,” he said.

Lorna nodded. “My sister’s husband—they’ve been married eleven years—she’s quite a lot older than me—would you believe it, I’m the youngest?—anyway, he claims, her husband, he’s never removed his wedding ring since they got married. Not for one second. D’you believe that?”

“I suppose …”

“But you, you said sometimes. Meaning …?”

“It’s a little loose. Not quite as tight as it should be. Sometimes if I’m washing my hands … in the shower …”

She thought about Kevin taking a shower, standing there, his back towards her, water splashing over him. His backside.

“We ought to get going,” Kevin said, looking at his watch.

Lorna raised an eyebrow the way she’d seen Julia Roberts do it once, that movie.

“To the station,” Kevin said.

“Look at some photos, that’s what you said.”

“That’s right.”

“If it’s there, I’ll know it. I mean, the way he came over to me first off, not a care in the world. The look on his face when he pushed through the bin bag and told me to fill it. No way I’m going to forget that.”

Kevin switched on the engine, but Lorna wasn’t through talking,

“You know what gets me?” she said. “What really gets me?”

He looked at her: no.

“When Spindler came in this morning, that’s the area manager, oh, he was nice enough to Marjorie and me, good job well done, all the flannel—not that he was going to give us any money for it, no bonus, nothing like that. All the thousands we saved them. But, no, what’s he droning on about all the time is Becca, poor Becca and what a terrible shock she had, how it’s affected her. Makes me sick. It’s not as if anything happened to her. Wasn’t her that got a hammer aimed at her head. No, there she is hopping up and down on one leg, practically weeing herself.” She stopped, reading the expression on his face. “Sorry, I’m boring you, rattling on.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just …”

“We ought to be going.”

“Afraid so.”

Kevin released the hand brake and slipped the car into gear.

“What you ought to tell your wife,” Lorna said, as they were turning right on to Forest Road West, “next time she goes Chinese, ask them to leave out the monosodium glutamate. You can do that, you know. Tastes a lot less salty.”

Thirteen

By midway through that afternoon, they had what looked like a breakthrough. Forensics had finally come up with a couple of prints, index finger and thumb, plumb on the hand brake of the abandoned car. Whoever had been driving had known enough to wipe around the steering wheel with a cloth—probably the one smeared with engine oil stuffed beneath the front seat—had thought of the gear handle too, but somehow missed the brake. There were a couple of partials on the chrome handle, driver’s side, one of which was a near match for those inside, the other from a different hand altogether.

Even better, scene of crime had found a beauty smack in the middle of the side wall of the building society where the flat of the hand had gone slap against it. The officer, dusting it down, had scarcely been able to believe his luck. Three fingers, close to perfect, almost as clear as if whoever left them had been in custody—“Now roll it lightly, one side to the other, even pressure. Good.”

Somewhere short of six o’clock the match came through, faxed back up the line. Keith Rylands: eighteen years of age, five feet five and a half, nine stone six pounds. Six months, youth supervision order, 1988–9, theft from a motor vehicle; four months on remand, 1990, taking and driving away without the owner’s consent; six months, Young Offenders Institution, Glen Parva, two more charges of TDA, one associated charge of stealing from a vehicle dismissed through lack of evidence. Last known address: 29 Albert Avenue, Gedling.

Divine showed Rylands’s picture to Marjorie Carmichael, who tutted and sweated and finally agreed, yes, it could be him, could be the one. Lorna Solomon wasn’t a great deal more definite. “Thing was, you see,” she told Kevin Naylor, “I never saw him much more than out the corner of my eye. It’s the other one I was looking at, the one with the hammer.” Becca Astley was sorry but she had a terrible headache, a migraine really, she couldn’t concentrate at all, no way she could be sure.

“What d’you reckon?” Millington asked. They were sitting in an otherwise unoccupied interview room, Resnick’s office, as he had suspected, resembling a YTS convention of young plumbers.

“No trace on the other print, the one on the door?”