“Jesus, what are the buses for? Haven’t they got a car?”
“Schools, that’s the thing. One kid in secondary, another in the last year of primary, little girl about to graduate from the infants come September. Not that she’s got anything against ethnic minorities, the mother said, but if her sweetheart was outnumbered by Asians eight to one, what sort of a start was she going to get?”
“I hope you told her,” Resnick said with more than a trace of anger.
“I smiled my nice professional smile and told her, should they reconsider, be sure to call me.”
“But she won’t.”
A pause. “No.”
Resnick glanced at his watch. “Okay. Thanks for keeping me in the picture.”
“No problem. Look … it may be nothing, I mean, you may not like it, but I’ve got this idea.”
“About the house.”
“Of course.”
“Go ahead.”
“See, I’d rather talk to you about it, you know, face to face so to speak.”
Resnick didn’t say a thing.
“You’re not in this evening, I suppose?”
Charlie. Oh, Charlie! “Yes,” he said, “later.”
“Around nine?”
“Fine.”
“Great. Red or white? I’ll bring a bottle.”
“I thought this was …”
“Some propositions, they’re best made when you’re not quite sober.”
“Look …”
“Joke. Joke. Hey, I was joking, okay?” “Yes. Sure.”
“But I will bring the wine. It’s good to unwind after a long day, don’t you think?”
When Lynn Kellogg finally got back to the station and wrote up her report of another largely wasted day, her stomach was beginning to send warning signals that must have been audible twenty yards away.
She was halfway along the canteen queue when she noticed Kevin Naylor. He was sitting at a corner table, close against the far wall. He was slumped well forward, one arm hanging down towards the floor; his face was in his bread and butter and a lock of his hair curling into his soup.
Twenty-one
Lynn Kellogg’s flat was in the old Lace Market area of the city: finely proportioned Victorian factories built by philanthropic entrepreneurs who thoughtfully provided chapels on the premises. A little uplift for the soul before a sixteen-hour day. Most of these tall brick buildings were still in existence and were gradually being restored, at least to a state of better repair. There were also a number of car parks and, angled between three of these, the housing-association development where Lynn lived.
She led Naylor across the interior courtyard and up the stairs towards the first floor. The post inside the door was the usual collection of unwanted solicitations, glossy offers to lend her money; the usual letter from her mother, Thetford postmark, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days she went shopping.
“Take off your coat, Kevin. I’ll put the kettle on.”
The living room was small, not poky, a haven for pot plants and paperback books left face down and open, a uniform shirt and a towel draped over the radiator.
“Tea or coffee?”
“Whatever’s easiest.”
“Kevin.”
“Tea.”
“Coffee might keep you awake better.”
“Okay, then. Coffee.”
By the time she carried the mugs through from the kitchen, he was keeled over in the high-backed armchair she had bought at the auction by Sneinton Market, asleep.
The best part of an hour to fill, Harold Roy had wandered into a wine bar in Hockley. All he knew was that he wanted somewhere quiet to sit, a couple more drinks, something, maybe, to eat; think things through. What he was going to say.
It wasn’t the place.
The lighting was right, subdued enough to give the table candles relevance; neither was it crowded. But the music was amplified to the point of rendering conversation difficult, meditation impossible. He made a brief pretence of looking for somebody who wasn’t there and left. In-what? — he checked his watch-fifty minutes now he would be face to face with Alan Stafford.
“Look, Alan, Alan, the way I see it is this …”
He went into a corner pub, ordered a large vodka and tonic, yes, thanks, ice and lemon (there didn’t seem to be any point in asking for fresh lime), and sat on a long bench-seat towards the fire. There was a smattering of other drinkers, a few kids who looked like they might be students, a man in a brown three-piece suit talking earnestly to somebody else’s wife, a dog roaming from table to table in search of crisps. Retriever, Labrador, he could never tell the difference.
His first reactions to Maria’s infidelity had been expected and unthinking: anger, disillusion, shock, rage. Hours later he was beginning to see it in a different light. After all, if someone else wanted to get his jollies humping that tired old body, where did that leave him except off that particular hook? And what was so great about what they had going for them that it was worth keeping together, even regretting? The way to go, the light at the end of what had seemed an infinitesimally long tunnel, let him take her off his hands, see what waking up with the back of that pushed up against you every morning did for romance. Let him. This guy. This Grabianski.
Extraordinary.
Extraordinary fellow.
Like his suggestion about what Harold now realized was a mutual problem. Knowing that, somehow, made Harold feel stronger; gave him a sense of, almost, solidarity. He’d been worried about meeting Stafford, afraid the whole situation might turn against him, turn nasty. Whatever else, Harold hadn’t forgotten the knife that had been in Stafford’s hand. But, as Grabianski had pointed out, when it came down to it, what Alan Stafford was was a businessman. And this was business. Nothing personal. Business.
He looked at his glass, surprised to find it empty.
On the way back to the bar he stooped down and patted the dog. He hadn’t as much as stroked a cat since he didn’t know when. He was feeling good: liberated. He bought another large vodka and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps to share with his new-found friend.
Lynn couldn’t put it off any longer. Kevin was still sleeping and she had already ironed her shirt, sorted through the next day’s washing, cleaned the top of the gas cooker, dusted-what was she doing? — the spaces on the kitchen shelves. Dear Lynnie, it would start, the last thing I want to do is moan, it isn’t as though you haven’t enough on your own plate, I realize that…
But …
But since her aunt had moved to Diss, it wasn’t as though there was anyone close she could talk to; since that last time at the doctor’s nothing she did or took seemed to rid her of those pains at the top of her head which came and went, some of them, Lynnie love, like a red-hot poker pressing against the inside of my skull, you wouldn’t believe, and there wasn’t anything she could do other than go and sit in the dark until they were over.
Lynn used the handle of a spoon to tear along the top of the envelope, her mother’s less-than-steady writing, blue Bic Biro on Woolworth paper.
Dear Lynnie …
She cast a glance at Kevin Naylor, possibly the longest undisturbed sleep he’d had in weeks. It was, she realized, the first time a man had been in her flat since the one she had lived with had up and pedaled away. Somewhere in the back of a drawer there was a puncture outfit he’d left in his haste and which she had been meaning to throw out with the rubbish, but somehow had failed to get round to.
Lynnie, it’s your father. Ever since he had to slaughter all those birds, the whole twelve hundred …
She could picture him, a brittle-boned man in a plastic raincoat and wellington boots, back and forth between hen houses, pushing at the ground with his stick.
Christ, Kevin! she thought, wake up!
Harold Roy was feeling so good he was late for his appointment. Negotiating his way to the rendezvous as Alan Stafford had described, his head swam with ideas of liberation. Fuck the business! Fuck Maria! (Well, no, let Grabianski do that-him being so great at it anyhow.) He would invest his money in something solid, buy a cottage in the Forest of Dean, write a book, maybe; get a dog.