John Harvey - Off Minor

It didn’t take her long to decide; he was still in the same position when she touched him lightly on the arm and smiled. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” Patel nodded, tried to smile back. “Try to help and that’s what happens.”

He screwed up the tissue and pushed it down into his pocket. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Got time for a coffee or something?”

Patel looked at his watch. “Not really, but …”

They walked through the ground floor of a small shop dedicated to the sale of pot-pourri, expensive wrapping paper and cardboard cutouts of benign-looking cats, upstairs into a small café largely patronized by women from Southwell or Burton Joyce wearing floral print dresses and good camel coats.

“Why didn’t you carry through with it?” Lynn asked, stirring sugar into her cup.

“Warrant card, you mean?”

Lynn nodded.

“Didn’t seem a great deal of point. Excuse me interrupting your little confrontation but I am a police officer. Not given their first reaction.” Patel tried the coffee and decided it tasted of very little. “Whatever I had showed them, if I had said I was in CID, a detective, I don’t think they would easily have believed me.”

Lynn allowed herself a wry smile. “Any consolation, Diptak, I doubt they’d have believed me either.”

The walk-through sweet store was full of small children tugging at their parents’ hands: “I want! I want! I want!” Lynn chose a small scoop of old-fashioned striped bull’s-eyes, some black liquorice with soft white centers, barley sugars, chocolate limes and a few strawberry fizzes filled with pink sherbet. She could always hand them round to the rest of the office; no law said she had to eat them all herself.

“How much for these?”

Sara Prine looked young in her uniform, more a fuchsia than a regular pink; a false apron, striped, at the front, meant to summon up some addled vision of bygone days, where everyone knew their place and kids’ treats weren’t squeezed from single-parent income support and excessive sugar didn’t rot your teeth.

“One pound forty-eight.”

Lynn raised an eyebrow, handed over a five-pound note. “Remember me?” she said.

Of course, she had; those tight little cheeks sucked in tighter still, slight tremor of the hand as she gave Lynn her change.

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“Not here.”

“You’d prefer to come back to the station?”

Sara’s shoulders tensed as she gave a quick, terse shake of the head.

“When do you get a break?”

“I’m on early lunch.”

“How early?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

Early enough to be late breakfast. “I’ll meet you outside. We can find somewhere to sit.”

Sara nodded again and took the bag from her next customer, setting it on the scale. Lynn popped a bull’s-eye into her mouth and left.

“And the weapon?” Patel was saying.

“The gun.”

“Yes. You. say he took it from his pocket?”

“His inside pocket, yes. A blue … donkey jacket, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.”

“Like a work jacket, similar to that?”

“Smarter. I mean, he didn’t look as if he’d nipped in from a building site. Besides, there was none of that reinforcement they have, real working ones, across the shoulders.”

Patel nodded, wrote something in his book. The assistant manager had turned out to be an assistant manageress. He had waited at the corner of the inquiry desk until the buzzer sounded and he was waved through, escorted into a narrow, windowless room, barely large enough to hold a desk and two chairs, the chairs on which they now sat, Patel and Alison Morley. When he had asked her name, she had simply pointed to the badge pinned at an angle over her breast.

“You don’t know, I mean, what kind of gun?”

“No. Except that it was …”

“Yes?”

“Black. It was black.”

“Long?”

She shook her head. “Not very.” A pause. “I mean, I suppose it depends what you’re comparing it to.”

Patel set down his pen and held out both hands, sideways on, approximately eight inches apart.

“Is that long?” she said.

“It depends.”

“I mean, I’ve seen that film, on television. More than once. Clint Eastwood. He can’t get to finish his hamburger on account of this robbery taking place on the other side of the street. Anyway, there’s all this shooting and cars crashing, and then he’s standing there with this gun …”

“A Magnum,” Patel said.

“Is that what it is? Anyway, he’s pointing it down at this gangster, bank robber, whatever he is, pretending he doesn’t know if there are any bullets left or not. Which I think, well, it’s funny, but also it’s stupid, because if he’s a policeman, I mean a professional, he must know how many bullets he’s got left in his gun. Don’t you think so?”

Patel nodded. “I suppose …”

“I mean, if you were on duty and armed, you’d know how many bullets you had left, wouldn’t you?”

Patel, who had never been armed on duty and earnestly hoped that he never would, told her that, yes, he hoped that he would.

“Anyway,” Alison Morley said, “that gun was big.”

“‘A.45 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world,’” Patel said, quoting from the film as accurately as he could remember. “And the weapon the man pointed at you through the glass, it wasn’t that size?”

“Nothing like. But frightening enough all the same.”

“You were scared?”

She looked back at Patel, smiling at the corners of her mouth. “I thought I was going to wet myself,” she said.

Lynn Kellogg and Sara Prine were sitting on a bench not far from where Sara worked; they were dipping into Lynn’s diminishing bag of sweets as they talked. Lynn chatting to her about her job at first, trying to get her to relax a little, some chance.

“There isn’t anything else I can tell you,” Sara said, selecting a strawberry fizz. “About finding that poor girl’s body. I’ve been over it again and again in my mind.”

“I wanted to ask you about your boyfriend,” Lynn said.

“Boyfriend?”

“Yes, Raymond.”

“Raymond isn’t my boyfriend.”

“I’m sorry, I thought …”

“That was the first time I’d ever seen him. That evening.”

“Oh,” said Lynn, looking at her half-profile, Sara less than keen on eye contact, “I thought …”

“I’d known him longer?”

“Yes, I suppose …”

“Because I went with him?”

“I suppose so.”

Sara looked at Lynn then, a dart of the head, round and away.

“We didn’t do anything, you know.”

“Look, Sara …”

“I mean, nothing happened.”

“Sara …”

“Nothing serious.”

Just for a moment, lightly, Lynn touched the girl’s arm. “Sara, it’s none of my business.”

Sara Prine got to her feet, brushing puffs of pink sherbet away from the front of her uniform. Higher up the street, outside C amp; A, a busker wearing a comic hat and a red nose was singing “There’s a Blue Ridge Round my Heart, Virginia,” accompanying himself on banjo. It wasn’t the version Lynn had heard in the station canteen.

“Sara,” she said, trying for the intonation of a friend, an older sister.

Sara sat back down.

“Where you and Raymond went, the sidings, did you get the impression he’d been there before?”

She thought it over, nibbling at a hangnail on her little finger. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but, yes, I suppose … He knew where he was taking me, yes. I mean, he wasn’t stumbling around in the dark.”

“And the building itself?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He could’ve. Yes. Though we didn’t really go far in, you know, not at first.”