John Harvey: Last Rites

“Sure.” Sharon smiled. “Mine’s coffee, black.”

Evan had been running over the events in his mind, deliberating how much of the story he should tell, how much it was wise to hold back. Decisions he’d taken that at the time … well, he wasn’t stupid, he could imagine how they might sound to anyone outside, anyone who hadn’t been in the actual situation. Think on your feet, son, his dad had liked to say, judge each case on its merits, that’s what you’ve got to learn in this world. Which was what Evan had done, only he’d landed flat on his face from the edge of a high cliff.

In the cubicle earlier, waiting for the doctor to come and stitch up Wesley’s wrist, Evan had asked him if they shouldn’t agree beforehand on a version of events.

“Events, Evan? Only one event anyone’s gonna give Jack shit about is we lost our prisoner. Okay? Far as the rest of it goes, you do the talking, right? You been doing it pretty good so far.” And Wesley had turned his face away to the wall.

Gratitude, Evan thought, after me leaping out into that bloody motorway, risking life and limb flagging somebody down to get you to the hospital, instead of chasing off across the fields after sodding Preston. He supposed that had been wrong, too.

“Okay,” Resnick said, having secured a table in the corner of the visitors’ canteen. “Tell me what happened.”

And, of course, Evan did. Every move in such detail that the party still hadn’t left the chapel when Sharon arrived and slid into the vacant seat.

By the time Evan had finished, his voice was little more than a whisper and Resnick’s receptive listener’s expression seemed to have frozen, immovable, to his face.

“Just one thing, er, Evan,” Sharon said, breaking the silence. “Before you put the prisoner into the car for the last part of the journey, you didn’t search him or anything?”

Evan succeeded in looking hurt. “Of course I did. We did. Wesley held him on the cuffs and I patted him down.”

“Patted him down.”

“All right, it wasn’t a strip search, I agree. But then I didn’t see any need. But it was thorough, I did a proper job.”

“Yet he had a blade,” Resnick said.

“Yes.”

“A razor blade.”

“Yes.”

“When you searched him. Thoroughly.”

There were tears welling at the back of Evan’s eyes. “Okay, Evan,” Resnick said, pushing himself to his feet.

“If we need to talk to you again, we’ll be in touch.”

The sun was surprisingly bright for so late in the afternoon and angling steeply in toward them as they crossed the car park, forcing Sharon to squint up her eyes while she fished her sunglasses from her bag.

“So what did he do?” Sharon asked. “This Michael Preston.”

“Strangled his father with his bare hands, then beat him round the head with a car jack for good measure.”

Sharon was quiet till they arrived at the car.

They were turning at the Derby Road roundabout, trailing a pair of green City buses, when she asked Resnick what else he knew about Preston.

“Hard man. Villain. Father ran a bookie’s, one of the few independents left. Been taken over now, like everything else. Preston started out doing a bit of collecting for him. Got a taste. Graduated to armed robbery. Couple of post offices, building societies and the like. Served a little time, but not as much as he should. Liked him for a big wages job, I remember, but he was alibied up and no one was prepared to drop him in it.”

Sharon grinned. “Guilty, though?”

“As sin.” Resnick laughed.

“What he did today, Preston, you wouldn’t say it was out of character?”

Resnick shook his head. “Sounds as if he was pretty much in control. He’s cool, certainly. Used to be.”

“Odd thing to say about someone who’s killed his father.”

Resnick nodded. “That was impulsive, irrational … not his normal pattern at all.”

“Twelve years inside, it changes a man.”

Resnick nodded. “A man like Preston, makes him harder.”

They were passing the Three Wheatsheaves and about to drive over the railway bridge this side of Lenton Recreation Ground. Resnick had a glimpse of teams in white, men and women, playing crown bowls; kids on the roundabouts and swings; Asian families sitting in abstract circles on the grass, women with the children, the men a way off, playing cards.

“Still seeing your lady?” Sharon asked.

“Mmm,” Resnick said, uncertain. “Sort of. Both been kind of busy lately. You know how it is.”

Hannah Campbell lived in one of the Victorian terraced houses toward the end of the promenade overlooking the recreation ground from the other side. Sharon had met her on a number of occasions now, formal and informal, and quite liked her, enjoyed talking to her, more laid-back than most of the teachers she’d had at school. A good companion for Resnick, she thought, while wondering why it was they never seemed quite at ease in one another’s company. Still, maybe that was just the way they were and anyway, who was she to judge? Stand the other halves of my relationships side by side, Sharon thought, one early sad marriage included, and you’d have enough for a basketball team and some to spare. Too much brawn and too little brain, that was what it came down to; too much concern with good pecs and muscle tone. A great body, though-oh God! — hormones in the ascendant, that could be difficult to resist. But right now she was sticking to volleyball, the ladies’ league, and sweating her way through a single life.

“How long is it now, anyway,” she asked, “you and Hannah?”

“Oh,” said Resnick, “must be a year or more.”

“You don’t know?”

“Not exactly, no.” Which wasn’t quite the truth.

Sharon laughed. “How d’you go on about anniversaries then, stuff like that?”

Resnick shook his head. Hannah had surprised him with rack of lamb for dinner, champagne, a three-CD set by Stan Getz she’d seen reviewed in the Guardian, a card showing a painting by a black American painter named William H.Johnson, on which she’d written Twelve months, two days, who’s counting? Love, Hannah. The next day he had gone to one of the stalls in the market and bought a large mixed bouquet of flowers, but by then it had been too late.

Sharon turned right off Derby Road and down the slope in the police station car park. “What d’you think?” she asked, sliding the vehicle into a vacant space. “Preston-you reckon we’ll catch him?”

Resnick shook his head. “Ask me again this time tomorrow.” Releasing his seat belt, he swiveled out of the car. “He’s a career criminal, dangerous-nobody’s fool. If he’s still around, not made a run for it, we’d best get him and fast.”

Lorraine Jacobs’s address was in a part of the city Carl Vincent didn’t yet know well, a newish development tucked away to the west of the Hucknall Road. Three- and four-bedroom houses set back from a hilly maze of winding streets, lined with newly planted trees; some of the houses beginning to look shabby, no longer wearing the glossy sheen of the three-color brochures that had graced estate agents’ offices. Well, Vincent mused, this close to the city center you could do a lot worse.

The Jacobs’ house was number twenty-four, situated at the end of one short street, another branching off from it at a right angle and running up a steady slope toward the southwest. Its position meant a larger than average front garden, set to lawn with low shrubs at the edges and a tall hedge separating it from number twenty-two. One path, paved, led to the front door, another, graveled over, ran to the garage on the farther side. Through the garage door, which was partly raised, Vincent could see the lower half of a Volkswagen Polo, color blue. Ten to fifteen meters past the garage was a metal fence and beyond that, unlikely as it seemed, an expanse of open ground, more or less a regular field, in which a pair of horses stood, necks bent, grazing, occasionally flicking their tails at what Vincent assumed were importuning flies.