John Harvey - Rough Treatment

Resnick shrugged off his topcoat and folded it across the back of one chair before sitting on another. “Your partner,” he said to Grabianski, making a point of checking his watch, “Grice, he’s been in police custody for the best part of an hour.”

Very little else was said before the coffee was brewed and in front of them. It wasn’t strong enough for Resnick’s palate but better than he might have expected.

“I don’t know,” Grabianski said. “The answers you want, I don’t know them. Names or faces, connections. It was part of the deal. The less we were both involved the better.” He half-grinned at Resnick over his cup. “In case of eventualities like this.”

But Resnick was already shaking his head. “That’s not what we want from you. Not what we need to know.” He drank some of the coffee. “Most of it we have already, just a matter of corroboration.” He glanced across at Maria, who scowled and looked away. “Asking a few people to reconsider statements they may have made a touch, er, rashly.”

Grabianski leaned back in his chair, one foot resting against a leg of the table; his cup was cradled in both hands. The inspector could have been stringing him along, though somehow he didn’t think so. Which left him precisely where?

“It’s the drugs then, isn’t it?”

“What drugs?” exclaimed Maria, staring across at Grabianski; knowing, almost before the words had left her lips, knowing all too well which drugs they were talking about.

“On the button,” Resnick said.

“That’s the name you’re after. The bloke who’s dealing.”

Resnick’s turn to smile. “Too late, Jerry. We know that, too.”

Grabianski’s face showed that he was impressed. “I can’t see, then,” easing his chair back down, “just what I can do to help.”

Still smiling, enjoying himself, Resnick took his time. “Think about it some more. While we’re enjoying the coffee-think about it.”

The room seemed airless, neither windows nor ventilation. Not wishing to take the chance of bumping into Grice, they had taken Grabianski to the central police station. Resnick and Norman Mann sat on the usual anonymous chairs, Grabianski with his elbows resting on the usual scarred table. As the day had progressed, his enjoyment of it had grown less.

“He’s put you in for it, Grice.” Norman Mann tipped ash from the end of his cigarette on to the carpetless floor. “Really putting you in for it. Time he’s finished with you, all it’d need is an airmail stamp and you could send it straight to some studio. Sort of thing they love-stud who was a criminal mastermind. Climbing into his best suit to screw a few safes; out of ’em again to screw a few women. Stallone. What’s his name? Schwarzenegger. Be fighting over it.”

Grabianski wasn’t so keen on the idea of Schwarzenegger. That film where he played a Russian cop-he could picture him trying for some kind of Polish accent and missing by a mile. No, as he’d always thought, it was a shame Cary Grant grew old too soon.

“You hear what I’m saying to you?” Norman Mann asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t react.”

“Tell me how.”

“I don’t know. A little anger, what do you think, Charlie? If it was me getting stiffed by my partner, I’d show a little anger, eh?”

Resnick was thinking about Jeff Harrison, not that they’d ever been partners or anything like, but all the same he couldn’t help wondering how much Harrison had heard on the grapevine, whether or not he was showing a little heartfelt anger.

“You hungry, Jerry?” Norman Mann asked. “Want something to eat?”

Grabianski shrugged. Anything that would break the relentless-ness of the questioning would suit him fine. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

“Later.”

Funny, Grabianski thought. Very funny.

“First I want to know if you’re pissed off that your friend’s stitching you up for as much of this as he can. Any more and he’ll have it that all he did was drive the getaway car, keep watch. And that’s not true, right?”

“You know it’s not true.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“What can I do?”

“Maybe you don’t believe us? What Grice is saying about you?”

Grabianski believed it: Grice would have had his grandmother boiled down for soup if he thought the time-profit ratio was favorable.

“What you can do,” Mann said, “is make sure we put him inside for a long time. Tit for tat, right?”

“Yes,” Grabianski said. “Sure. Right. Tit for tat.”

“Okay!” Norman Mann scraped back his chair, clapped his hands. “You’re not saying this to get your choppers into the meat pie and mash? Three courses and then change your mind?”

Grabianski shook his head.

Anything ever goes wrong, Grice had said, really fucking wrong, it’s every fucking man for himself, you remember that. Grabianski was remembering.

“Whatever you need,” Grabianski said. “If I know the answers … if I can help, fine.”

“That’s good. That’s great. Eh, Charlie? Cause now we can go feed our faces knowing we’ve got that far along the line.” He rested a hand on Grabianski’s shoulder, close to the neck, and squeezed. “Then we can talk about the rest.” He squeezed harder. “I’ve got to be honest, when I first heard this one, when Charlie tried it out on me, I never thought you’d go for it. Honest. Not that it isn’t a good deal; for you, I mean. It is. What it was, I didn’t think you’d have the bottle. Someone who gets his kicks turning places oven like he’s dressed for a Masonic dinner. But, no-” He leaned his face close to Grabianski’s “-you’ve got the bottle, all right.” He straightened and stepped away. “Bollocks like a bleedin’ rhinoceros.”

Loscoe Miners’ Welfare Silver Band. the bottom edge of the poster, yellow over-printed in black, curling away now, catching in the shrill wind. Last concert of the previous summer. The sun was out, January warm for the time of year didn’t have to mean warm, not when you were sitting on a bench facing the deserted bandstand, waiting for somebody who might never show.

It had taken forty-eight hours to set up the meeting and there hadn’t been one of those in which Grabianski hadn’t felt his mind changing, regretted what he’d agreed to do.

Wearing a wire, wasn’t that what they called it?

He remembered a television program, documentary, two detectives leaning on a prisoner to give them information, neither of them knowing of the hidden tape recorder, evidence against them spooling unseen. A film, also, more than one, TV again, Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, the cop pretending to be the bad guy, going in with a microphone taped to his chest. Sometimes they were found out, sometimes got away with it. A.45 Magnum in the face on a citation from the commissioner, a medal-the way it went depended on status, who was playing you this time around. Whether you were needed for the next episode or not. Exactly who you were in this story: hero or villain.

Late morning and there weren’t too many people around. An elderly man in a raincoat sitting, hands in pockets, at the other side of the circle, staring off into nothing that was there. Two girls from one of the nearby offices taking an early lunch, baked potatoes forked from pale plastic boxes. A ragged crocodile of primary-school kids was making its way along the steeply angled path towards the castle; pieces of paper flapped back from their hands, duplicated questions about Mortimer’s Hole, a space to make a sketch plan of the moat and bailey. The teacher was hanging back, discouraging one of the boys from digging up the early crocuses with his foot.

Look at it this way, Resnick had said, people like Stafford, you don’t want them out on the streets any more than we do.