“Sod off, granny!” Darren yelled back.
“Yeh,” said Keith, “sod off.”
They walked together across the road, ignoring the traffic, forcing it to stop or swerve around them.
“Gum?” Keith said, holding out a pack of Wrigley’s.
“Yeh, ta.”
They sat on the wall near the gents’ toilets, kicking their heels against brickwork that was covered in graffiti and pigeon shit.
“Your old man said you was down the Job Centre.”
“’S’right.”
“Anything there?”
“Don’t bloody joke.”
“This car,” Darren said.
“Which one?”
“The one you’re going to nick.”
“What about it?”
“Friday.”
“Why Friday?”
“Cause more people take money out Fridays, bird brain. Lot more cash there waiting.”
“We going to do another building society?” Keith asked.
“Yes,” Darren said. “And this time we’re going to do it fucking right!”
“On the M1, boss. Heading north.” Divine was monitoring Millington and Naylor’s progress as they followed Churchill’s Ford Granada. “Reckon he’s heading for a meet with Rains?”
“Any luck,” Resnick said, “he’s doing exactly that. Keep me in the picture.”
“Right.”
Resnick went into his office and dialed a number, asked to speak to Pam Van Allen.
Frank Churchill was sticking to the outside lane, keeping the speedometer between seventy-five and eighty, moving over only when some salesman, flogging his company car, came fast up behind him, flashing his lights.
Naylor kept several vehicles between himself and their quarry, alternately moving up and falling back, doing everything he could to make sure his wouldn’t be the vehicle Churchill habitually saw in his rearview mirror.
“He’s slowing down,” Millington said. “Pulling over.”
Naylor had noticed already, dropped behind a lorry carrying pharmaceutical goods north from the Continent.
“Service station,” Millington said. “Just up ahead.”
Naylor checked in his own mirror and signaled to leave the motorway.
“I don’t want you to think,” Resnick said into the phone, “that I’m pestering you about this …”
There was a silence, out of which Pam Van Allen said, “I’m trying hard not to.”
“I was interested to know how you think he’s taking to being out, settling into the hostel, whatever.”
“Pretty much the way you’d expect somebody to do when they’ve been excluded from society for ten years. He’s tense, apprehensive …”
“Angry?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know. But I’m concerned …”
“For his wife’s safety.”
“Yes.”
There was another pause, longer, and Resnick could almost hear the probation officer thinking. Through the glass at the top of his door he could see Divine’s head, bobbing a little as he spoke into the telephone.”
“After what you said,” Pam Van Allen said cautiously, “I talked to him about his wife, his feelings towards her. Everything he said suggested he sees that relationship as being very much in the past. He showed no inclination to open it up again, get back in touch. Certainly he expressed nothing like anger towards her.”
“And you believed him?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Good.”
“Goodbye, inspector.” Resnick had a sudden image of her as she set down the receiver, one hand pushing up through her cap of silver-gray hair, the other pinching the bridge of her nose as she closed her eyes.
“Boss!”
Alerted by Divine’s shout, Resnick hurried into the main office.
“Graham,” Divine explained, holding out the phone. “Wants to talk to you.”
Resnick identified himself down what was clearly a wavery connection.
“Good news is, it’s Rains right enough. No mistaking him anywhere. Standing in line in the cafeteria waiting for Churchill to join him over chicken, chips, and peas.”
“What’s the bad?” Resnick said.
“Where they’ve sat themselves, bang in the middle of the place, can’t get near ’em without getting spotted. Tried getting Kevin on to table behind, but what with all the chatter and the background bloody muzak and the cutlery, you’d need to be leaning over them with a hearing trumpet to know what they were talking about.”
“Lynn’s on her way in a car. Rendezvous outside. When they leave, you take Rains, let her tag along with Churchill.”
“What if she don’t get here?”
“Stick to the plan, follow Rains.”
“Right,” Millington said and then quickly, “They’re moving, got to go.”
Naylor walked down the steps from the cafeteria and ahead of him Rains and Churchill separated, neither one of them in any obvious hurry to go back to their vehicles. Churchill browsed the magazines in the shop; Rains spent a pound or so on the games machines near the exit. Churchill went into the gents and locked himself into a cubicle. Millington didn’t think they’d been spotted, though there was no way of knowing for sure. What they were observing could simply be careful practice, nothing more. At least, it gave Lynn Kellogg more time to arrive. He had no way of knowing the northbound carriageway had been temporarily blocked by an accident involving a lorry and a fifteen-year-old youth joyriding in a stolen Fiesta.
Suddenly Churchill was hurrying across the parking area towards his Granada and that diversion was enough to give Rains a vital start back up the steps towards the bridge linking the two sides of the motorway.
The three blue saloons left the service area heading south in a virtual convoy and between them Millington and Naylor got the registration of one and a half. And they couldn’t be sure which of the three Rains had been driving.
Frank Churchill, meanwhile, had continued his journey northwards and they could only hope that a sense of filial duty would take him back to Mansfield so that they could pick up his trail again.
“A balls-up, Charlie. A regular balls-up, I don’t know what else to call it,” Skelton said after Resnick had made his report.
Alone in the CID room, smarting still, Graham Millington thought after that day’s work he’d be fortunate to retain his sergeant’s stripes, never mind promotion.
Fifty
Lorna didn’t know why it was, but ever since Kevin Naylor had stopped returning calls something appalling had happened to her appetite. Instead of settling down to watch Neighbours with a Linda McCartney low-calorie broccoli and cheese bake, she found herself reaching for the telephone and waiting, tummy impatiently rumbling, until the Perfect Pizza delivery man appeared on her doorstep. Her lunch had progressed from two crisp-breads and a piece of celery to lasagna and chips at the local pub. Breakfast was no longer a single shredded wheat, it was porridge with maple-type syrup and cream, several slices of toast and marmalade, and instant coffee with two spoonsful of sugar.
She had overheard Becca yesterday whispering to Marjorie in a voice that could have been heard up and down the street. “You don’t suppose, do you, that our Lorna’s got herself pregnant?”
Fat chance!
“I’m sorry,” Kevin Naylor had said when she’d finally raised him on the phone, “but there’s another officer handling that now. I’ve been shifted on to something else.”
Shifted back to his wife, Lorna thought. She still hadn’t forgotten that in the midst of their one and only night of passion, Kevin had etched a particular moment forever on her mind by digging his fingers sharply into her shoulders and shouting, “Yes, Debbie! Yes, Debbie! Yes, Debbie, yes!”
Lorna ran her finger round the inside of her breakfast bowl, scooping up the last of the syrup and cream, before rinsing it under the tap. Oh God, she thought, next thing I’ll be running out of things I can wear, having to go out and buy myself a whole new wardrobe. The one saving grace was the example of Marjorie, huffing and puffing and perspiring her way through every working day. The minute Lorna found herself rivaling Marjorie, she was enrolling in Weight Watchers, withdrawing her savings, and booking two weeks on a health farm.