John Harvey: Last Rites

“Yes, go on, the pair of you.” Derek waved the knife in the direction of the door. “Get yourselves back in the other room and let us have a bit of peace.”

“Oh, Dad …”

“And see you’re careful with those clothes. You don’t want to be getting in a mess now, we’ll be leaving soon.”

“Mum …” Sandra said, eyes widening. “This top, is it okay?”

Lorraine had been looking at her daughter, not so far off twelve now and springing up, starting to fill out. Sandra had put on her bottle-green skirt, wearing it for a change with the waistband not rolled up, her almost new shiny blue sandals, the light-gray CK sweatshirt she’d bought in the market with her own pocket money. Sean was wearing black jeans, trainers, a clean white Umbro T-shirt with a blue band around the collar and along the sleeves. He looked as though he’d borrowed some of his sister’s gel before combing his hair.

“Perfect,” Lorraine said. “You look really perfect. I’m proud of you.”

Sean tried to pinch his sister’s arm as they squeezed back through the door and Sandra settled him with a quick kick to the shins.

“Remember what I said now,” Derek called after them and turned toward Lorraine with the plate of buttered toast, Lorraine standing there with tears rolling down her face.

Derek touched her arm lightly on his way to the sink. “I’m still not sure, you know. How good an idea it is. Michael.” Lorraine dabbed at her eyes. “She was his mother.” “Yes,” Derek said. “Like your dad was his father, I suppose?”

The motorway traffic was slow, slower than usual Evan thought, even allowing for the fact they were scarcely out of London. In truth, they were barely a mile from the North Circular Road. “Will you look at that?” he said, angling his head round toward Wesley, who was sitting, indifferent, cuffed to their prisoner in the back seat.

Wesley grunted something, not really paying attention. He was busy working out his money, how much he could realistically say was left after seeing to his bills each month, making calculations in his head. Just the other night in the pub, Jane had been getting on to him again, how paying out two different lots of rent for two separate flats, each the size of a postage stamp, didn’t make sense. Not any more. What with him sleeping over at her place three or four nights a week and Jane staying with him weekends when he wasn’t pulling duty at the prison. But even pooling all their income, Wesley worried, getting the kind of place Jane was talking about wasn’t going to be easy; a maisonette, maybe, something in one of those old houses that had been divided up round Camberwell, Coldharbour Lane, Brixton Hill.

“See what I mean?” Evan said again.

“What?”

“All those cars, nose to tail. See how many just got one person in. Not a single passenger. One car, one driver. You imagine doing that, in and out every day, morning and evening. Crazy. A nightmare.”

“Yes,” said Wesley. “Right.” Hoping that was enough to shut Evan up; not a bad bloke, he supposed, but Jesus, wasn’t he one to rattle on? Even if they could find somewhere to rent, Wesley thought, that wasn’t really what Jane was after. In reality, her reality, he knew that she was thinking five per cent down payment, she was thinking mortgage, she was thinking the whole ninety minutes plus penalties after extra time.

“How about you, Preston?” Evan asked, nodding his head backward in the direction of the prisoner. “Traffic-you got any thoughts on that?”

From the way Preston continued to sit, staring blankly through the car window, one arm folded across his lap, the other, the one that was attached to Wesley, resting by his side, Evan supposed he had not.

Twelve years into the man’s sentence, Wesley was thinking, at least another twelve to go, he didn’t see the overall transport situation as being high on the list of the man’s concerns.

Evan Donaghy, at twenty-seven, three years in the Prison Service only, and Wesley Wilson, two years his senior, but with one year’s less experience, the pair of them detailed to escort Michael Preston, convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of his father, Matthew, in 1986 and currently serving a life sentence, to the funeral of his mother, Deirdre, there and back in the day, the prison governor grudgingly agreeing to the visit on compassionate grounds.

Ben Fowles was the most recent recruit to Resnick’s squad. A local lad-made-good from Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Fowles had been brought in when Mark Divine, victim of a life-shattering assault, had been forced to take early retirement on grounds of ill health.

Fowles was twenty-six and just inside the height requirement for the force at five foot eight. An open-faced young man with an outlook to match, ambitious, the hobbies section on his application form had read rock climbing, music, and soccer. When he wasn’t inching his way at weekends, handhold by handhold, up some slab of sheer granite in the Peak District, Fowles’s energies were divided evenly between playing in a band called Splitzoid, and harrying his opponents’ ankles in the busy and aggressive midfield mode pioneered by Nobby Stiles and kept to the fore more recently by the likes of David Batty and Paul Ince. After the heady days of trials for Chesterfield, Mansfield, and Notts County, Ben now practiced this particular brand of artistry for Heanor Town reserves.

“Splitzoid,” Graham Millington had asked, “whatever kind of a band is that?”

“Ah, well,” Fowles explained, “we used to be thrash metal with a trace of dub, right, but now we’re getting more into trip-hop and garage with a touch of techno on the side. Maybe we ought to change the name to match the new image, Serge, what d’you think?”

Millington’s reply went unrecorded.

Fowles gave him free passes to an upcoming gig in a pub on the Derby ring road and Millington promised to check with the wife, see what Madeleine had on her calendar. He had an idea it might be rehearsals for Carousel ; if it wasn’t her University open access night-currently engaged in a survey of Magic Realism and the Mid-Century Novel, if Millington wasn’t very much mistaken.

Jimmy Peters was an entrepreneur of the old school, a failed rock-’n’roller with angina and a face like crumpled paper. He’d gone into management when a touring American singer-a minor celebrity with two top-fifty hits-had seized Peters’s guitar during a late-night session at the Boat Club and hurled it into the Trent. Jimmy Peters could take a hint. Within six months, he was managing more bands than he had fingers to count and poised to take over the license of his first premises. Take away the ballooning and the beard, and a low-rent Richard Branson was born.

“So, Jimmy,” Ben Fowles said, not for the first time, “from where you were standing, you couldn’t see exactly how the fight started?”

Peters scowled and rolled his eyes.

“But it was this lot as come in late …” From force of habit, Fowles checked his notebook. “… Ellis and his mates, they were the ones that started it?”

“If I’ve told you once …”

“And you knew them? They were what? Regulars?”

Peters lit a fresh Silk Cut from the nub of the old. Ash shone like glitter from the velvet lapels of his jacket. “They might’ve been here once or twice, it’s difficult to keep track.” He glanced round at the interior, shabby and stained in the daylight. Over by the entrance to the toilets, a cleaning woman was swabbing away listlessly with a mop and listening to local radio on a small receiver propped against the bucket. “Most nights it’s busy,” he said hopefully, “folk come and go.”

“But members, Jimmy?”