Just give us a name. Somebody we can pull. A name, Bobby.
Don’t remember anything. Remember going home, latish. Nothing after that. Sorry, Mike. Sorry.
Mike. Mike Beattie.
Maiden instinctively lying to Beattie — Riggs’s man. Of course he remembered. Even in and out of consciousness, he remembered about black-eyed Suzanne and the pictures and the offer. And Parker and Riggs and the filigree of corruption stitched so tightly into the fabric of the town that undoing it would leave the fabric itself in shreds.
Parker and Riggs. Or was it, in fact, Riggs and Parker? Had Riggs simply sat back and thought about it and decided reliable old Tony was, on balance, the best man to handle drugs and other essential service industries in Elham? Was Riggs, in some way, the contractor?
Whatever, Maiden seemed to have been offered a ticket for the gravy train on a climb aboard or be found dead on the tracks basis.
Dead. Been there. Been into the big tunnel, come out the other side. Crawled out, sick and scared. What happens now, back down the slime-trails of downtown Elham?
After a while, Maiden let the whole mess — Lower Severn Ward, Suzanne, Parker, Riggs and the certainty of the grave — seep sluggishly out of his mind like dirty water down a drain, and went into his black, swampy sleep.
Awakening unable to move again. Convinced at first that he was on a trolley in the mortuary, his consciousness like a bird caged in his corpse and it would only be free when the electric saw took off his cranium.
Death again. He could only ever dream about aspects of death. Dead people, dead sheep. Violence. Brutality.
He actually sobbed with relief when the grey world babbled in.
‘So you’re a snooker man, Tom?’ the TV said, some daytime quiz programme. ‘And how many kids? Blimey, Sharon, he must keep his cue well chalked …’
Maiden jerked in the bed, wrapped the hard hospital pillow around his head.
‘So you’re awake, lad.’ The voice coming down like an oak truncheon.
Maiden opened and closed and opened his eyes.
‘Papers said you was in a bad way. Don’t look that bad to me. Bloody sight better than I did, by God, the night I had Harry Skinner and his lads cornered in the old paint warehouse at Wilmslow. Heh. Tell you this much. They di’n’t look so pretty neither, when I’d finished wi’ ‘em.’
‘Hello, Dad,’ Maiden said.
‘Two trains it took, getting here. Had to change at Shrewsbury.’
Norman Plod, boots gleaming, fusewire hair Brylcreemed flat, stood in the centre of the ward, glaring up and down the lines of beds as if he was scouring a pub for under-age drinkers.
‘Bugger of a place, Shrewsbury,’ said the Sporting Life bloke.
‘Had to get hisself transferred down here to get away from me,’ Norman Plod said, dead accurate for once. ‘Not fit to be let out, this lad. Heh. Can’t be trusted to cross the bloody road without getting hisself flattened.’
As usual, it had taken Norman Plod less than a minute to collect an audience. Presence, he used to say. You have to have presence. Halfway to respect.
‘Bet you didn’t get his number either, did yer?’
‘No, Dad,’ Maiden said wearily. ‘Busy dying. You know how it is.’
‘Bloody detective, this,’ Norman Plod told the ward. ‘Bloody detective.’
He could have been a detective, could Norman. CID had been on their knees to him. But the public didn’t have the same respect for detectives, slinking, nosing and drinking on duty. The public liked a policeman to look like a policeman. To have presence.
Maiden noted the absence of grapes, sweets, bottles of Lucozade. Not even a newspaper. His old man never saw the point of little gifts for the sick. Their duty to get well, back to work, stop the drip, drip, drip of taxpayers’ money into their arms.
‘Nice of you to come all this way, Dad.’
‘I’m retired, lad. Garden’s winding down for winter. Nowt else on the go. They got any leads, your clever colleagues? Poor bloody do, you ask me. Got to be a motor somewhere wi’ a busted front end. Listen …’
Norman leaned in, just the way he’d always done, as if he was about to confide the Secret of Life.
‘I don’t know the background, don’t know what villains you’ve put away lately, who’s got a grudge. An’ I don’t want to. I’m retired. All I’m sayin’, word to the wise …’ Tapping his veiny nose. ‘Just don’t, whatever you do, don’t let this one bloody well go. Don’t ever write it off. Make sure the bugger gets nailed to the bloody wall. Eh? Know what I’m sayin’?’
Maiden said, before he could stop himself, ‘You’re thinking about Mum.’
‘I’m thinkin’ nowt!’ Norman lurched back as if his only son had struck him. Amazing to see the old hostility in his eyes, the look that said, You never got the car number then either, did you, lad? Even though Bobby had been not yet three years old when he toddled off the kerb in his pyjamas, seven in the morning, pushing Bonzo, the dog on wheels.
He stared at his dad. Had Norman ever cried?
He’d told Maiden once, and once only, what must have happened that day while he was on the early shift and the road at the end of the garden was no more than a country lane — not much traffic, but no excuse for the paper lad or the milkman (although neither would put his hand up to it) to leave the gate open, so that the child could get out.
The inquest had decided the mother must have rushed into the road and pushed the kid out of the way. And the vehicle hit her instead, ran over her. Whoever it was never stopped. No other drivers in the area, until the farmer on his tractor who found the woman dead, the child sitting silent and white-faced in the road beside her, hugging a white dog on wheels.
His hands clenched under the bedclothes. Everything seemed interconnected. Two explosive moments in time, two hit-and-run incidents over thirty years apart, two deaths. Runs in the family, getting knocked down. As though the same impetus that took away his mother on the outskirts of a scrappy village in Cheshire had carried on through time until another Maiden had crossed its path in Old Church Street.
He saw, blurred by sudden tears, the struggling colours of Norman Maiden pulsing through the stocking mask of February. Felt momentarily closer to the concrete-faced old cop than he could ever recall.
There’d been no pictures of his mum in the house; Norman got rid of them all. Nan, who looked after him until she died, would bring out a precious photo album when he was older. Maiden’s mother had thin, brown hair around a pale, sweet face. Small and slender as a waif. Tiny bones, crushed under the wheels of … a van, it was speculated. She was ten years younger than Maiden was now.
They’d never caught the driver, which left only one person for Norman Plod to hang the blame on. Finally conveying, with his usual iron-bar subtlety, that joining the police was the least the lad could do for his mother. Too many other drivers out there ready to kill and speed away. Get ‘em nailed.
The guilt factor. Bobby praying, at the age of eighteen, for something to get him out of this. Solitary kid, no good at team games. Down on his knees, Please God, I don’t want to be a copper. Don’t want to be like him …
Always the feeling that the old man also had some secret guilt. Something he had to make up to her but there was no chance now because the bloody kid ran out into the lane and got her killed.
‘Dad, listen …’ If any old mysteries were to be solved, if anything was going to be said, any healing process begun, it would have to be now.
‘No, you listen, lad …’
The peace process was probably doomed, but it never got started anyway, because that was when Riggs walked in.
X