John Harvey: A Darker Shade of Blue

Michaels knew he was right.

‘You want another?’ he said, eyeing his empty glass.

Malkin shook his head. ‘Let’s get this sorted first.’

The money,’ Michaels said, ‘I don’t see how…’

‘Borrow it,’ Malkin said. ‘Building society. The bank. Tell them you want to extend. I don’t know. Add on a conservatory. Put in a loft.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘It is if you want it to be.’

For several minutes neither man spoke. Whoever had been the centre of all the police attention at the court had been taken in under close guard and now, indeed, there was a helicopter making slow small circles above their heads.

‘That bastard Silver,’ Michaels said. ‘He’s going to make a fucking fortune out of this.’

‘Yes.’

‘Smelling of fucking roses won’t be in it.’

‘That’s true.’

‘All right, all right. But listen, I’m going to need a few days. The cash, you know?’

Malkin laid a hand on his arm. ‘That’s okay. Within reason, take all the time you need. Silver’s not going anywhere quite yet. Meantime, I’ll ask around, make a few plans.’

‘We’ve got a deal, then?’

The skin around Malkin’s grey eyes creased into a smile. ‘We’ve got a deal.’

What was it they said about converts? They were always the strictest adherents to the faith? Since he’d turned away from a thirty-a-day habit two years ago, Will had been that way about smoking. Just about the only thing he found hard to take about Helen was the way her breath smelled when she’d come in from outside, sneaking a cigarette break at the rear of the building. Not so long back he’d given her a tube of extra-strong mints and she’d handed them back, saying they were bad for her teeth.

It was the day after Fraser’s body had been found.

Careful examination of the scene had found little in the way of forensic evidence; no stray hairs or fingerprints, no snatches of fabric snagged by chance on ladder or doorway. A series of footprints, fading in the slow-melting snow, had been traced across two broad fields; at the furthest point, close in against the hedge, there were tyre tracks, faint but clear. A Ford Mondeo with similar patterned tyres, stolen in Peterborough the day previously, was discovered in the car park at Ely station. Whoever had killed Fraser could have had another car waiting or have caught a train. South to Cambridge and London; east towards Norwich, west to Nottingham and beyond.

It was an open book.

‘Fraser,’ Will said. ‘I’ve been doing some checking. Fifty-two years old. Company director. Divorced five years ago. Two kids, both grown up. Firm he was running went under. Picked himself up since then, financially at least, but it seems to have been pretty bad at the time.’

‘That was when the wife left him?’

‘How d’you know she was the one who left?’

Helen touched her fingertips to her temple. ‘Female intuition.’

‘Bollocks!’

‘Excuse me, is that a technical term?’

‘Definitely. And you’re right, she walked away. What with that and the business thing, Fraser seems to have fallen apart for a while, started drinking heavily. Two charges of driving with undue care, another for driving when over the limit. Just under three years ago he lost control behind the wheel, went up on to the kerb and hit this eight-year-old. A girl.’

Pain jolted across Helen’s face. ‘She was…’

Will nodded. ‘She was killed. Not outright. Hung on in hospital for five days more.’

‘What happened to Fraser?’

‘Fined six thousand pounds, banned from driving for eighteen months…’

‘Eighteen months?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And that was it?’

‘Two years inside.’

‘Of which he served half.’

Will nodded. ‘Two-thirds of that in an open prison with passes most weekends.’

‘That’s justice?’

Will shook his head. ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

Helen drew breath. ‘What time’s the post-mortem?’

‘An hour from now?’

She nodded. ‘My car or yours?’

Malkin showed the appropriate credit card and booked a room at the Holiday Inn under an assumed name. It was a city he knew, though not well, and it was doubtful that anyone there knew him. Average height, average build, he was blessed with one of those faces that were instantly forgettable, save possibly for the eyes.

At the central library he read through the coverage of Silver’s appeal and then the reporting of the original shooting and trial. Aside from Silver’s own faded celebrity, much was made of the delinquent lifestyle of Wayne Michaels and his companion that evening, Jermaine Royal. Both young men had been in trouble with the police since their early teens; both had been excluded, at various times, from school. An accident, one compassionate reporter said of Wayne Michaels, just waiting to happen.

Malkin found a cut-and-paste biography on the shelves. The Fall and Fall of Alan Silver. He took it to one of the tables on the upper floor to read; just himself and a bunch of students beavering away at their laptops, listening to their iPods through headphones.

Silver’s mother had been a chorus girl, his father a third-rate comedian in music hall and a pantomime dame; Alan himself first appeared on stage at the age of six, learning to be his father’s stooge. A photograph showed him in a sailor suit, holding a silver whistle. By the age of seventeen he was doing a summer season at Scarborough, complete with straw hat and cane, Yorkshire’s answer to Fred Astaire. There were spots on popular radio shows, Variety Bandbox and Educating Archie; even some early television, Cafe Continental with Helene Cordet.

Three marriages, but none of them stuck; no children, apparently. A veiled suggestion that he might be gay. In the eighties, he had something of a comeback in the theatre, playing a failed music hall performer in a revival of The Entertainer, the part originally played by Laurence Olivier. Asked how he did it, Silver replied, ‘I just close my eyes and think of my old man.’

Soon after this he was featured on This is Your Lift and had some brief success with ‘Mama Liked the Roses’. Somehow he kept working into his sixties, mostly doing pantomime, trotting out his father’s old routines at the likes of Mansfield and Hunstanton.

Oh, no, it isn’t!

Oh, yes, it is!

He bought an old farmhouse between Newark and Nottingham. Retired, more or less.

Malkin phoned Michaels that evening, wanting to make sure he was still on board; asked a few questions about Wayne’s friends. Something Wayne’s pal, Jermaine, had claimed at the trial, that they’d been out to Silver’s place before and he’d told them come back any time. Did Michaels think there was any truth in that?

Michaels had no bloody idea.

‘Besides,’ Michaels said, ‘what difference if there was?’

None, Malkin told him. None at all.

‘Too bloody right,’ Michaels said. ‘Dead is fucking dead.’

The phone rang and before Will could reach it, Helen had snatched it up. Coat buttoned up against the cold, she had just come in from outside.

‘Lorraine,’ she said, passing the phone swiftly across.

Will’s throat went dry and his stomach performed a double somersault, but all his wife wanted was to remind him to pick up an extra pint of milk on his way home if possible. Will assured her he’d do what he could.

‘No news?’ Helen asked, once he’d set down the phone.

‘No news.’

‘Well, I’ve got something.’

‘You’re not pregnant, too?’

‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

Will stood back and looked her over. ‘You want to get pregnant?’

‘You’re offering?’

He grinned. It was a good grin, took maybe ten years off his age and he knew it. ‘Not today.’