John Harvey: Cold Light

“Okay, Gary?” she asked, glancing round.

When she turned the key and pushed the door wide, they were inside in a flash: Bailey and Hennessey and two others, grabbing Gary as he tried to move, hands, arms, swinging him hard about and forcing him up against the wall, feet kicked wide, legs spread, arms yanked back and round, the cuffs as they went on biting at his wrists.

“Are you all right?” Resnick asked, touching Nancy lightly on the shoulder.

“I kept telling you, didn’t I? I’m fine.” She stood aside, arms folded across her chest, her breathing going ragged now and seeking to control it, turning her head as Gary was hauled out into the corridor, no longer wanting to look into his face, see his expression as they bundled him away.

“Things not so good at home,” was that what Resnick had said? Lynn smiled grimly, changed down, and indicated that she was taking the next left. Not so good could be measured by the way her mother had stood, tight-lipped and close to tears, still stirring the last of her Christmas puddings with only days to go. Other years, there would have been at least three of them, fat in their white basins, ready in the cupboard by the end of October.

“It’s your dad, Lynnie,” all she had said.

Lynn had found him mooching between the hen houses, an unlit cigarette loose between his lips, fear in his eyes.

“Dad, whatever is it?”

The electrical equipment used to stun the birds before slaughter had malfunctioned and, at the height of the busiest season, forty-eight hours and several thousand pounds had been lost before it was set to rights. Worse for her father, before the fault was discovered, some hundred force-fed capons had been doused alive in scalding water, their throats slit, feathers plucked-he would wake at four, against all logic, reliving their screams. “Come on, Dad,” Lynn had said, “there’s nothing you can do about it now.”

She should have known there was something more. On the morning she left, she found him in the kitchen at first light, hand round a mug of well-brewed tea. “It’s the doctor, Lynnie. He says I’ve to go to the hospital, see this consultant. Something here, in my gut.” He had stared at her along the table and Lynn had hurried from the room before he could see her cry.

It was a little after four in the afternoon and the dark was starting to close in. Still you could read, graffitied in two-foot-high letters on the Asian shopkeeper’s wall, Keep Christmas White - Fuck Off Home . Lynn glanced at the street atlas again and readied herself for another three-point turn.

Michelle had not been home long. The buses had been overloaded with shoppers and those whose working day had finished in the lunchtime pub; sporadic bursts of carol singing, most often with the words changed to crude parody, drifted down from the upper deck. A ginger-haired man, still wearing his postman’s uniform, sat with his legs out into the aisle, performing conjuring tricks with a deck of cards. As they were veering across the roundabout at the end of Gregory Boulevard, a businessman, wearing a gray pin-stripe suit and a red and white Christmas hat, had leaned wide from the platform of the bus and lost his lunch beneath the wheels of the oncoming traffic.

Natalie had fallen asleep, rocked by the vehicle’s motion, and Karl had sat close, clinging to the sleeve of Michelle’s coat, wrapped in the wonder of what was going on around him. When the postman leaned across and magicked a shiny ten-pence coin from behind Karl’s left ear, the small boy squealed with delight.

“Whatever’s happened to him, poor lamb?” Michelle’s mother had asked, pointing to the swelling puffing out the side of Karl’s face.

“He fell,” Michelle had said quickly. “Always rushing at everything. You know what he’s like.”

“Aye,” her mum had said. “Bit of a madcap, like his dad.”

There were Christmas lights in some of the windows as they walked back up the street towards home; tiny red and blue bulbs glinting from plastic trees. A neighbor called out a greeting and Michelle felt a sudden rush of warmth run through her. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad place after all. If they could just see off the winter, it really could be a new start.

She had called out opening the front door, expecting Gary to be back; the queue at the Housing must have been even longer than he’d thought. Quickly, she’d got the children changed, shipped Karl off in front of the TV with some bread and jam while she spooned rice and apple in and around the baby’s mouth. Once fed, she’d put her down and tend to the fire, get it going before Gary returned, settle down to watch Neighbours with a fresh pot of tea.

The knock on the door was clipped and strong and though her first thought was that Gary had mislaid his key, it didn’t sound like his knock at all.

“Michelle Paley?”

“Yes.”

“Detective Constable Lynn Kellogg. I’d like to talk to you a minute, if I could.”

Michelle took in the warrant card, the neat dark hair, the sureness of the stance, cheeks that showed red in the light spilling from the house.

Lynn glanced past Michelle into the room and saw the beginnings of a fire, a cartoon Dracula on the television, volume turned low. On a carpet that had seen better days, a mousy little kid with both legs in the air behind him, squinted round.

“You’ll be letting in the cold,” Lynn said. Michelle nodded and stood aside, closing the door behind Lynn as she walked in, pushing the folded square of rug back against it to keep out the draught.

Lynn unbuttoned her coat but made no move to take it off.

“What’s happened?” Michelle said, sick to her stomach, fearing the worst. “It’s Gary, isn’t it? Is it Gary? Is he all right? Tell me he’s all right.”

“Why don’t we sit down?” Lynn said.

Michelle swayed a little as she felt her legs starting to go.

“Nothing’s happened to him,” Lynn said. “You don’t have to worry. Nothing like that.”

Michelle did sit, uneasily on to the sofa, reaching for the arm to steady herself down. “He’s in trouble, then,” she said.

“He’s at the station,” Lynn said. “Canning Circus. He was arrested earlier this afternoon.”

“Oh, God, what for?”

Lynn was conscious of the small boy, leaning back against the legs of the TV set, paying them all his attention. “There was a disturbance, at the Housing Office …”

“A disturbance? What kind of …?”

“It seems he threatened the staff, physically. At one point he locked himself in a room with one of them and refused to let her out.”

Michelle’s face had drained of what little color it had.

“I don’t know yet,” Lynn said, “if he’ll be held overnight. It’s possible. We thought you ought to know.”

“Can I see him?”

“Later. I’ll give you a number you can ring.”

Upstairs, the baby began crying and then, just as abruptly, stopped.

“Did he hit anyone?” Michelle asked.

“Apparently not. Not this time.”

“What d’you mean?”

“He’s done it before, hasn’t he? He’s on probation.”

“That was ages ago, what happened.”

“A year.”

“But he’s changed. Gary’s changed.”

“Has he?”

Karl was rocking backwards and forwards as, on the screen above him, a fading football manager vouched for the splendors of British Gas.

“That’s your little boy?” Lynn asked.

“Karl. Yes.”

“What happened to his face?”

Divine thanked the sister from Intensive Care and replaced the receiver: Mr. Raju had returned from Recovery, was sleeping, sedated, his condition critical yet stable. It was unlikely he would be strong enough to speak with anyone until the morning.