Dryden strolled back to Humph’s cab. The cabbie was awake. Dryden was in need of a good meal and a drink. ‘Let’s eat. The Peking I think – all expenses spared.’
16
The Jubilee Estate stood on the edge of town and most of its streets petered out into the fen. Built by the Victorians it had been abandoned by the New Elizabethans in the 1950s. Now it was a sink estate – a concrete cesspit for the people society couldn’t flush away. In bad weather wild ponies wandered in off the fields to nuzzle the warm air vents at the council waste disposal unit. It was the kind of place that the statistics said didn’t exist.
The Peking House Chinese restaurant stood in a shopping parade alongside a newsagent, washeteria, ladies’ hairdressers, pet shop, a corner minimarket, with its windows obscured by Day-Glo posters advertising cut-price everything, and a pub called the Merry Monk, which enjoyed a reputation for civil disorder of Wild West proportions.
Humph parked outside – right outside, with Dryden’s passenger door aligned exactly with the restaurant’s plate glass entrance. Humph was a symphony in time and motion – other people’s.
Dryden didn’t even ask if Humph was coming in. He turned to his friend. ‘It’s rude you know – sitting outside. He’s a friend of yours too.’
Humph pressed the tape-deck button and the silky voice asked him what the weather was like in Barcelona. Humph told the silky voice.
Sia Yew, proprietor of the Peking, was a one-time Hong Kong short-order chef. He’d spent the last five years of colonial rule in the kitchens of the officers’ mess – Royal Artillery. He emigrated to the UK equipped with a letter of recommendation from the governor general and a perfectly modulated upper-middle-class English accent. He had adapted this into pidgin English to meet the prejudices of his new clientele.
Dryden took his usual table by the window – an honour he had never been denied largely due to lack of demand. He folded his legs beneath the plastic bucket seat and began to fiddle with the toothpicks. Gary, summoned to the free meal by mobile, fingered his spots and the plastic menu card.
‘Yο, people,’ said Sia. He had two teenage sons and enjoyed picking up the latest slang. He swung a blood-stained cleaver with one hand while the other held a cordless white telephone. The high-pitched tin voice of a hungry customer could just be heard.
He finished taking down the takeaway order. ‘Ya. 14. 27. Two 58s. Fangyou – yes. Chop chop. Express. Burrbye.’
Tucking the cordless into his smock pocket he stuck the order on a metal spike on the hob. He made no attempt to start cooking but took ostentatious care in extricating three beers from the cold cabinet and bringing them to Dryden’s table.
He opened his own, took an impressive draught and burped. ‘Wicked,’ he said, making a mental note to ask his eldest what it meant. ‘Humph well?’ he asked, as if the cab driver wasn’t sitting ten feet away, double-glazed against the world of personal contact. They watched him holding a long conversation with his cousin Manuel who didn’t exist.
Dryden sniffed. They sat in easy silence. Gary shook his beer and directed the plume of spray when he pulled the tab into the back of his mouth. Dryden idly pictured Sia’s customer expecting the feverish activity normally associated with the expression ‘Chop, chop, express’.
He scanned the dark street outside and watched a yellow plastic child’s football roll past in the east wind followed by a few pages from last week’s edition of The Crow.
Without turning his head he asked the usual question: ‘Any luck?’
Sia was a regular gambler, a pastime he had picked up from the officers’ mess rather than from his forebears, a fact he was sensitive about. For Gary’s sake he made the point. ‘There is a difference between being born with a genetic disposition to gambling and enjoying the intellectual challenge of betting on horses.’
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Dryden.
‘About ten thousand a year.’
Gary wasn’t listening. His jaw, normally slack, had become dislocated in a spectacular slump. He raised a single hesitant finger of alarm.
Cherry Street, a cul-de-sac, was directly opposite the façade of the Peking. It ran out towards the fen where bollards stood preventing incursions by marauding gypsies who had been on the land several generations longer than the residents. Despite this, the locals delighted in telling them to ‘fuck off home where they came from’.
The local council mirrored the sentiment if not the precise wording.
But there was no gypsy in sight. What was in sight, advancing steadily up Cherry Street towards the Peking, was a platoon of riot police. The street lighting glinted on their black perspex helmets.
Dryden stood and squinted through the Peking’s steamy windows.
The police, in full public disorder gear, held their plastic shields expertly in an unbroken wall at the front while those behind held them aloft to form what any Roman general would have recognized as a perfect illustration of the defensive stratagem known as the ‘tortoise’. A sublime comic effect had been achieved by an order to advance in silence. They were tip-toeing up Cherry Street like the chorus line from some modern military ballet.
Dryden took his seat and placed it closer to the window. It looked like Stubbs was going to get his arrest in time to impress the disciplinary tribunal. Presumably the fact that the Lark victim had been shot justified the military response. But the body language indicated a certain lack of tension. It looked more like a training exercise than the arrest of an armed killer.
A police car, with standard jam-sandwich markings, drew up and blocked off the top end of the street. Its blue light flashed silently.
Meanwhile, in the back kitchen of No. 29 Cherry Street, George Parker Warren was placing his second egg in the frying pan and considering with some satisfaction the fact that the teapot had now been brewing for nearly eight minutes. Perfect. Or nearly so. Another minute perhaps? The local water was hard and the tea needed time to brew. He lit a cigarette.
The tip-toeing police tortoise had stopped immediately outside.
In the kitchen George Parker Warren, retired car thief and occasional mechanic, poured his tea and reflected that despite the recent death of his beloved wife, Rebecca – there had been little hope after she had started drinking the Brasso – he could still look after himself.
It was just the loneliness really. Company. That’s what he missed. Nobody ever seemed to drop round now Rebecca had gone. He’d had a few days in hospital recently to fix his bladder and he’d rather enjoyed it. Surrounded by people, even if they were sick people. He stared at the clock they’d bought together on their honeymoon at Skegness. It ticked and echoed in the empty house.
‘Company,’ he said out loud, and sipped his tea. He even missed prison – at least the food was good.
The phalanx of padded policemen wheeled expertly with miniature Japanese steps to face George’s front door.
There was a silence in which George sensed something. Had someone knocked? He went out into the hall. Silence. Imagination was a funny thing, he thought, feeling better.
The order to make a forced entry into No. 29 was given by hand signal and by the time they hit George’s front door they really had built up quite a speed. They saw the splinters fly from the Peking.
Dryden winced. ‘Hope they got the right address.’
After a brief attempt to break the world record for the number of uniformed police officers crammed into a terraced house, a group of three PCs appeared with George. He had been restrained – a procedure that had broken both his china teacup and his nose in about the same number of places.
‘Here we go,’ said Dryden, ripping the ring-pull off another can of beer. ‘They’ve been watching those repeats of The Sweeney again.’