John Harvey - Rough Treatment

“Maria?”

Unnervingly, she stared right back at him, not answering.

“Maria?”

So pale.

Her eyes, dark and large, widened.

“The cocaine-did they find it?”

She bit her teeth down into the flesh of her lower lip and nodded.

“Shit!”

He brushed past her and banged his leg against the side of the drinks trolley, hands steadying himself and the shaking bottles.

“I suppose they stole the vodka, too?”

“We’re out of vodka.”

Harold grabbed a bottle of gin and locked himself in the bathroom, refusing to open the door until almost an hour later. By then the bottle was a third empty and he was sitting on the floor with his back against the side of the bath, one foot resting on the bidet. Talcum powder dusted the grooves of his cream cords.

Maria hitched her skirt up by some inches and sat on the bath, one arm around his shoulders. She was in danger of feeling genuinely sorry for him, but it passed.

“I suppose it wasn’t such a good idea,” she said after a while, choosing her words with care.

Harold drank some more gin before offering her the bottle.

“It seemed okay at the time,” she said. “All we had to do was keep it locked away safely.” She sighed. “It was a favor.”

“He was taking advantage.”

“He wasn’t expecting us to help him out for nothing.”

“A couple of weeks’ free supply.”

“That’s not to be sneezed at.”

Harold glanced up at her to see if she was making a joke; he ought to have known better.

“What are you going to tell him?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he’ll believe the truth?”

“Do you?”

Maria reached down for the bottle. “You think we ought to phone the police?”

“And report a missing kilo of cocaine?”

“Is that how much there was?”

“That’s what the man said.”

Maria wriggled her skirt a little higher and pushed her knees out sideways. “Let me have another drink and then I’ll call them.”

Harold gave her back the bottle and grunted.

“Is it still 999?”

Harold didn’t know: neither did he know how long he could stall the man for whom he was taking temporary care of a sizeable quantity of illicit drugs nor what he would tell him when he could do that no longer.

The police officer who finally came to the house was polite and spoke with a West Country accent; he was wearing a sports coat from British Home Stores and printed his notes quickly in black Biro. “Easier to read back in court,” he had explained. Maria had felt one of her rare flushes of maternal feeling: the constable looked all of seventeen.

He had looked all over the house, paying particular attention to the main bedroom and the rear patio where the burglars had gained entry; the loose wires from the alarm, no longer attached to anything.

“You will be careful not to touch things,” he had said. “We’ll have someone round in the morning to dust for prints. Not that I suppose we’ll find any that will be of much use.”

Wonderful! thought Harold. “Shouldn’t that be done tonight?” he asked.

The constable had shaken his head: scene-of-crime wouldn’t be available until the next day. He asked them to make a complete list of everything they thought was missing, especially anything they thought might be traced. Good night.

For the first time in years, Maria came into the bathroom as her husband was getting out of the bath and toweled his back. She made cups of Milo and brought them to the bedroom. With the light out, she turned on to her side and stroked his shoulder, his chest, the muscle at the side of his neck.

“Maria?”

“Mmm?”

“These two … they didn’t, you know, touch you at all, did they? I mean, if they had, if anything funny had gone on, you’d have told me about it, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would.” Maria’s voice was muffled by the duvet cover.

“Yes,” said Harold, “of course.”

Beneath the bedding, her face pressed against the slack of her husband’s pot belly, Maria was thinking about the tall Grabianski, the way he had looked at her when she’d been wearing her robe. It had been enough to make her feel, well, damp.

“Maria?”

“Mmm?”

Harold’s fingers slid through her hair.

After some moments he closed his eyes. Out of sight, Maria waited for the change in his breathing that would tell her Harold was asleep.

Maria sat with her half-grapefruit and her cup of weak tea and jostled the pages of the Daily Mail. At the opposite side of the table, Harold looked away from Screen International for long enough to shake bran flakes on to his muesli. Since his last birthday he’d been troubled by constipation; since that and starting work on his present series for Midlands TV.

“Would you believe this?” he said, chewing steadfastly.

“What’s that?”

“The forty-fifth version of Jekyll and Hyde.”

One for each year of your life, Maria said to herself.

“Anthony Perkins,” Harold said.

“Which part?” asked Maria, reaching for the teapot.

“Huh?”

“Which one’s he playing?”

Harold set his spoon down in the bowl and pushed it aside.

“You’re not going to leave that?” said Maria, glancing up.

“Why not?”

“You’ll suffer.”

“I’m suffering enough already.”

She watched him lift his camera script from the table and snap open his briefcase.

“It’s not going any better?” she asked.

“Worse.”

“What’s the problem?”

Harold stood between the table and the sink and stared at her. Maria turned a page of her newspaper. “I haven’t got the time,” he said. “And anyway, you’re not interested.”

“Harold, that simply isn’t true.”

He switched the case to his other hand as he walked through to collect his coat. Thirty-six hours since the burglary and still she hadn’t reverted to her old ways. If she wasn’t exactly slavering all over him (thank God!), she wasn’t moaning on at him either. The other night he was sure she was about to go down on him and he’d had to pretend to be asleep to put her off. He tucked a scarf inside the collar of his padded blouson and opened the front door.

“Bye,” he called before pulling the door to behind him.

“Bye!”

What niggled Harold was that he couldn’t work out what she had to be feeling so guilty about-unless she’d faked the break-in and taken all the stuff herself. He smiled at the thought and turned out of the drive so fast that the rear wheels spun on the pebbles and he nearly ran into that nosy old bastard with the track suit and the yappy bloody dog that was always hanging about. Probably him, Harold thought, who was pilfering Maria’s best knickers.

There was no reason for him to have recognized Resnick driving along in the opposite direction.

Resnick was not the only officer in CID whose sleep patterns were disturbed. Not in the station for half an hour, Kevin Naylor had rounded on Patel and torn him off several highly colored strips for allegedly taking a pen from his desk and not returning it. Even for a gold-nibbed Mont Blanc, it would have been inappropriate. And for Kevin Naylor …

His colleagues had stared in disbelief, as if Bambi had turned without warning on the nearest rabbit and savaged it for nibbling at the wrong blade of grass. Anyone other than Patel would have taken it less calmly; but he had not survived in the force without developing a certain stoicism towards the insults a darker skin is sadly heir to.

Naylor had finished his tirade with a poorly aimed kick at the nearest filing cabinet and headed for the door.