John Harvey: Trouble In Mind

Riley smoothed the page across his desk and read it again: A survey conducted by Littlewood Pools had concluded that of all ninety-two Premiership and Football League soccer teams, the one most likely to cause its supporters severe stress was Notts County. Notts County! Sitting snug, the last time Kiley had looked, near the midpoint of the League Two table and in immediate danger neither of relegation nor the nail-biting possibilities of promotion via the play-offs. Whereas Charlton Athletic, in whose colours Kiley had turned out towards the end of his short and less than illustrious career, were just one place from the bottom of the Premiership, with only four wins out of a possible twenty-two. Not only that, despite having sacked two successive managers before Christmas, this Saturday just past they had been bundled out of the FA Cup by Nottingham Forest, who had comprehensively stuffed them at the City ground, two-nil.

Stress? Stress didn’t even begin to come close.

Kiley looked at the clock.

12:09.

Too late for morning coffee, too early for lunch. From his office window he could see the traffic edging in both directions, a pair of red 134 buses nuzzling up to one another as they prepared to run the gauntlet of Kentish Town Road on their way west towards the city centre, the slow progress of a council recycling lorry holding up those drivers who were heading-God help them-for the Archway roundabout and thence all points north.

His in-tray held a bill from the local processing lab, a begging letter from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and a polite reminder from HM Revenue & Customs that the final deadline for filing his tax return was the thirty-first of January-for more details about charges and penalties, see the enclosed leaflet SA352.

His pending file, had he possessed such a thing, would have held details of a course in advanced DNA analysis he’d half-considered after a severe overdose of CSI ; a letter, hand-written, from a Muswell Hill housewife-a rare, but not extinct breed-wanting to know what Kiley would charge to find out if her husband was slipping around with his office junior-as if-and a second letter, crisply typed on headed notepaper, offering employment in a prestigious security firm run by two former colleagues from the Met. Attractive in its way, but Kiley couldn’t see himself happily touching his peaked cap to every 4x4 driver checking out of a private estate in Totteridge and Whetstone on the way to collect Julian and Liberty from private school or indulge in a little gentle shopping at Brent Cross.

Early or not, he thought he’d go to lunch.

The Cook Shop was on the corner of Fortess Road and Raveley Street, a godsend to someone like Kiley who appreciated good, strong coffee or a tasty soup-and-sandwich combo, and which, apart from term-time mornings, when it tended to be hysterical with young mums from the local primary school, was pretty well guaranteed to be restful and uncrowded-the owner’s abiding penchant for Virgin FM Radio aside.

“The usual?” Andrew said, turning towards the coffee machine as Kiley entered.

“Soup, I think,” Kiley said.

Eyebrow raised, Andrew glanced towards the clock. “Suit yourself.”

Today it was mushroom and potato, helped along with a few chunks of pale rye bread. Someone had left a newspaper behind and Kiley leafed through it as he ate. Former Labour Education Minister takes her child out of the state system because his needs will be better served elsewhere. Greater transparency urged in NHS. Unseasonably warm weather along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Famous celebrity Kiley had barely heard of walks out of Big Brother house in high dudgeon.

An item on the news page caught his eye, down near the bottom of page six. Roadside Bomb Kills British Soldier on Basra Patrol … The death of the soldier, whose name was not immediately released, brings the number of British military fatalities in Iraq, since the invasion of 2003, to 130.

Iraq, Afghanistan -maybe some day soon, Iran.

Kiley pushed the paper aside, used his last piece of bread to wipe around the inside of the bowl, slipped some coins onto the counter, and walked out into the street. Not sunbathing weather exactly, but mild for the time of year. The few greyish clouds moving slowly across the sky didn’t seem to threaten rain. When he got back to his office, Jennie was sitting on the stairs; he didn’t recognise her straight off, and when he did he couldn’t immediately recall her name.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Really?” A smile crinkled the skin around her grey-green eyes and he knew her then.

“Jennie,” he said. “Jennie Calder.”

Her hair, grown back to shoulder-length, was the same reddish shade as before.

Jennie’s smile broadened. “You do remember.”

The last time Kiley had seen her she had been standing, newly crop-haired, cigarette in hand, outside a massage parlour on Crouch End Hill, ready to go to work. Two years back, give or take.

“How’s your little girl?”

“ Alice? Not so little.”

“I suppose not.”

“She’s at school. Nursery.”

Kiley nodded. Alice had been clinging to her mother, screaming, wide-eyed, when he had last seen her, watching as Kiley set about the two men who’d been sent by Jennie’s former partner to terror-ise them, mother and daughter both. Armed with a length of two-by-four and a sense of righteous indignation, he had struck hard first and left the questions for later. Some men, he’d learned, you could best reason with when they were on their knees.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“Yellow pages.” Jennie grinned. “Let my fingers do the walking.”

She was what, Kiley wondered, early thirties? No more. Careful makeup, more careful than before; slimmer, too: black trousers with a flare and a grey-and-white top beneath a long burgundy cardigan, left unfastened.

“You’d best come in.”

The main room of the second-floor flat served as living room and office both: a wooden desk rescued from a skip pushed into service by the window; a swivel chair, secondhand, bought cheap from the office suppliers on Brecknock Road; a metal shelf unit and filing cabinet he’d ferried over from his previous quarters in Belsize Park. For comfort, there was an easy chair that had long since shaped itself around him. A few books, directories; computer, fax, and answer phone. A Bose radio/CD player with an eclectic selection of music alongside: Ronnie Lane, Martha Redbone, Mose Allison, Cannonball Adderley, the new Bob Dylan, old Rolling Stones.

One door led into a small kitchen, another into a shower room and lavatory and, beyond that, a bedroom which took, just, a fourfoot bed, a chest of drawers, and a metal rail from which he hung his clothes.

Home, of a kind.

“You haven’t been here long,” Jennie said.

“Observation, or have you been asking around?”

Jennie smiled. “I spoke to the bloke in the charity shop downstairs.”

“A couple of months,” Kiley said. “The rent in the other place…” He shrugged. “Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee? I think there’s some juice.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”

“This isn’t a social call.”

“Not exactly.”

Kiley sat on one corner of his desk and waved Jennie towards the easy chair. “Fire away.”

A heavy lorry went past outside, heading for the Great North Road, and the windows shook. The Great North Road, Kiley thought, when had he last heard someone call it that? Seven years in the Met, four in uniform, the remainder in plain clothes; two years of professional soccer and the rest spent scuffling a living as some kind of private investigator. All the while living here or hereabouts. The Great North Road -maybe it was time he took it himself. He’d been in that part of London for too long.