John Harvey - Off Minor

Raymond spent almost as long in his room that morning as he usually did in the bathroom, standing in front of the tacky little wardrobe, drawers of the chest half out. It was the kind of occasion he wasn’t sure what you wore. In the end he plumped for a gray shirt with a pinkish tinge, courtesy of the launderette; the brown jacket, too long in the sleeves, his uncle had given him for his interview at the butcher’s.

“Why don’t I go down the shops,” Raymond had said, straight-faced, “buy a couple of pounds of pig’s liver, squeeze it out all over your old decorating overalls, go along in those.”

“Ray-o,” his uncle Terry had said, “this is serious.”

Wrong. This was serious.

He hadn’t arranged it, seeing Sara climbing into a police car in the early hours to be driven home, but Raymond figured he would get back to the station before their eleven o’clock appointment, hang around, talk to her before they went in. Other considerations aside, he wanted to make sure she wasn’t pissed off with him about last night, dragging her off to some place where there were dead bodies, for fuck’s sake; he’d liked the way her eager little hand had found its way inside his flies, the way she hadn’t complained afterwards when he’d shot his load.

That was the other thing, he didn’t want her rabbiting on to the detectives about too many details. At least, let them use their imaginations. Let them think he’d got her in there and given her one, proper, not some weasely little hand-job.

Two officers came out in uniform, pausing for a moment at the top of the short flight of steps, and Raymond turned away, wandering down towards the bus stop, the spiritualist church in the basement alongside it. When he looked again, there she was, hurrying over the pedestrian crossing as the little green man flashed its warning, head down and legs moving fast, almost as if she were running. Though he knew her the minute he saw her, she wasn’t the same. Trotting along in this little pink suit, low black heels, black leather handbag dangling from one crooked arm.

“Sara.”

“Oh. Ray.”

“Hi.”

“Am I late?”

“No, you’re early.”

“I thought I was late.”

He showed her his watch, still only ten to. “So,” Raymond said, “what’re you going to say?”

The way she looked at him made Raymond think she might be short-sighted. Though not as bad as his auntie Jean: one Christmas his uncle Terry had come into the room in the middle of The Sound of Music with his thing hanging out, a piece of colored ribbon tied round the end of it in a bow. “Terry,” his aunt had said, reaching for another Quality Street, “whatever’s the matter with you? Your shirt’s still hanging out.”

“What d’you mean?” Sara asked.

“About last night.”

“I’ll tell them what happened, of course. What we saw.”

“That’s all?”

“You can wait here if you want,” she said. “I’m going to get it over.”

From the foot of the steps Raymond asked: “You’re not going to go shooting your mouth off about, you know, what we …?”

The look she gave him was enough to stop him in his tracks, keep him there after Sara had pushed open the main door, let it swing closed behind her.

“This is it,” Mark Divine had announced, making sure that everyone else in the CID office heard him, “your big chance. Half an hour from now, follow me to one of those secluded rooms along the corridor and do me the ultimate favor.”

A roar went up from the half-dozen in the room, all eyes now, eager to see how Lynn Kellogg would react. On one legendary occasion she had stopped Divine’s mouth with a punch and ever since the whole of CID had been waiting for her to throw another. “Next time,” Divine had sworn, “I’m going to thump the stupid cow back.”

“Lynn,” winking into the body of the room, “what d’you say?”

Lynn was typing up a report of visits she made before the weekend. An old man in his eighties had been collected by ambulance for his three-monthly check-up and one of the nurses had noticed bruising around the lower back, high on the inner arm; the former was consistent with a fall, but the rest …? At first the man’s daughter, close to her sixties herself, had refused Lynn permission to talk to him, and when she had he had been so confused it had been difficult to get much sense out of him. The social worker had made a face, pointed at the case files overflowing her desk; she had last visited the home some five months ago, an application by the daughter for hand rails tube fitted to the bath. Yes, as far as she’d been able to tell, the old man had been fine.

“Lynn?”

Divine was a pain in the arse, incorrigible, ineducable-though he had used the word ultimate, jeans adverts obviously having more going for them than recycling old Motown numbers.

“The couple who found the girl’s body, you want me to take one of their statements?”

“Yes.”

Lynn whipped the sheet of paper from the machine, pushing back her chair as she stood up. “Why the fuck didn’t you say so?” She left the room without bothering to give Divine another look, this time the office roar solidly with her, for all that Mark Divine was giving her the finger behind her disappearing back.

Lynn Kellogg was late twenties, the kind of build that would have had Betjeman in paroxysms of desire. Thighs like flour sacks was Divine’s description, but then he was no poet. Her last, and only, live-in lover had spent more time trying to get her on to the front of a tandem than anything else. In the end, she hadn’t been able to cope with a man who shaved his legs more than she did herself.

Getting into CID had not been easy, staying there twice as hard. The perennial question: all the sexist jokes, the constant innuendo, was it best to laugh along, show that she wasn’t a prude, prepared to be one of the lads, or did she make a stand? That’s offensive. It offends me. Cut it out. Like others, like, in a similar way, Patel, she supposed she wobbled uneasily between the two, reining in what she was truly feeling until, as sometimes happened, it went too far. One thing seemed true, the better she did her job, the less conspicuous the remarks: which didn’t exactly prevent Lynn from regretting that to gain what respect she had, it had been necessary to try twice as hard.

“Sara Prine?”

“Mm.”

“I’m Detective Constable Lynn Kellogg. Why don’t you have a seat?”

“Oh. No, you’re all right, I …”

Lynn smiled, put the witness at ease, wasn’t that what it said in the handbooks, those who’ve come in voluntarily to make a statement. “We’re going to be here for quite a while.”

“Oh, I thought, you know, I’d be through by lunchtime.”

“Then we’d best get started, shall we?”

When the girl did sit, Lynn noticed, it was almost primly, knees under the hem of her suit skirt drawn tight together. Her handbag she rested in her lap, hands, at first, clasped across it.

“What I want you to do, Sara, is tell me what happened last night leading up to you finding the body …”

“I already …”

“Do it in your own way, take your own time; when you’ve finished I might ask you a few questions, in case any part of it seems unclear. Then I’m going to write down what you’ve told me on one of these forms. Before you go, I’ll ask you to read it through, and sign it once you’re happy that it’s all correct. Now is that okay?”

The girl looked a little stunned. Ten years back, Lynn was thinking, what would I have been like in her position? Little more than Saturday shopping trips into Norwich to broaden my horizons, holidays at Great Yarmouth.

“Okay, then, Sara, in your own time …”