Inside Straight (25 page)

When we got to the flat, I went straight to the bedroom and dropped to the bed. I heard him moving around outside. He was looking at stuff, sizing me up, judging me. I felt like curling into a ball. Instead, I slowly stripped off my trousers. My thighs were clammy with sweat and urine and purple with bruises. I grabbed some comfortable clothes and peeked round the bedroom door. Then I rushed – or tried to rush – to the bathroom, where I locked the door and set about cleaning myself. When I turned off the water, I heard him speaking.

"... coffee?"

I unlocked the door. "I don't have any. I don't drink it."

He came out of the kitchen and looked at me. "Just the hot chocolate?"

"You're welcome to help yourself."

"No, thanks. You want one?"

I was about to say no, then nodded. "Two minutes for the milk in the microwave, then put two teaspoons in and stir well."

I closed the bathroom door and rested my head against it. I heard the microwave going, the clink of spoon against mug. I turned and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. My legs and torso were a purple patchwork, as if I'd been dipped in birthmark. I no longer felt every bump and bruise – I think my body had shut down the nerves or something – but the look of them was enough to make my knees watery. I was stupid, puffy and pale of face. I looked liked a twelve-year-old version of myself, scared and trouserless, beaten and raw, knowing full well that the worst was about to happen and that there was nothing I could do about it.

So I washed my face, struggled into a T-shirt and joggers, then took it slowly as I left the bathroom.

Kennedy was in the living room, looking at my collection of action figures. The hot chocolate sat on a coaster on the coffee table. I moved to my chair and let out an involuntary groan on the way down. If Kennedy heard it, he didn't let me know.

"How much are these worth, d'you think?"

"I don't know."

"You don't care?"

"No." I shrugged. "Doesn't matter."

"Collecting for the love of it."

I picked up my hot chocolate and sipped it. It was lukewarm. He hadn't put it in the microwave for long enough. "Yes."

"There's a bloke at work collects stuff like this."

"I know him."

"Do you?"

"No."

"No. Right. Thought that would be weird, like. He doesn't have many friends."

I gave him a sick little smile. "That's the way it normally goes."

"You don't have many either, then?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. This colleague of mine, he says he's a geek, but I don't believe him."

"Why not?"

"Not unless the word changed its meaning. When I was at school, the geeks were the clever ones."

I smiled. "Don't have to be clever anymore."

"And they
liked
stuff. He collects shit like this and he watches all the shows and that, but he never seems to like any of it much. He's always moaning about some irrelevant shite, pardon my French. Tell the truth, I think he watches it all because he likes to feel superior to people who haven't watched as much as him. Like him wasting his life is an achievement or something." He turned to me. "What do you think?"

"I think you don't like him and you're looking for an excuse to upgrade that dislike to hatred."

"Maybe you're right." He stared at me. "I asked around about you, you know. About the friends thing."

"I'm new."

"I know."

"And it's not the sort of job where you make friends easily."

"You're not the sort of person, either."

"You could say that."

"It's been tough recently, has it?"

"Apart from the robbery, you mean? Yes, it's been tough. Transfers always are."

"A whole load of new people to deal with, new people to manage."

"Yes."

"Jacqui Prince seems to think you're an excellent pit boss."

"I am an excellent pit boss."

"Yeah, we talked a lot about you." He moved to the settee, but didn't sit down. He started inspecting my DVD collection. "Apparently you're very much a company man."

"I've been in the business long enough. People think that."

"So why did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Why'd you set the place up?"

I breathed out, looked into my hot chocolate. "What makes you think I had a choice?"

"There's that, certainly. Barry Pollard has a way of asking a question so there's only one answer. What did he threaten you with?"

"Does it matter?"

He turned to look at me now, a concerned expression on his face. No doubt he practised it twice a day. "I don't want to be the bad guy here, Graham. That's not the way I like to do things. There's blokes I work with, they'd have carted you down the station and made you eat the floor by now."

"So I should be grateful, is what you're telling me?" I couldn't resist a smile at that. "I'm so lucky. I'm luckiest man alive."

"You are. And you know you are. And maybe I would've picked you up outside. I was planning to. But then I saw you and I reckoned that maybe you'd had a shitty day of it so far and why make matters worse by locking you up?"

"You're all heart."

"You want to tell me what happened?"

"No."

"You want to make this easy on yourself?"

"Oh, yes." I looked up at him. "How do I do that, Inspector?"

"You tell me what happened."

"You already know. Hearing it from me isn't going to make any difference."

"Someone shook you up. I'm guessing it's Pollard or one of his lot. Maybe that Jez lad. I hear he's a bit handy."

"You hear a lot. Maybe you should tell me a few things."

"Like what?"

"Like what happens now?"

"Well, that all depends on you, doesn't it, Graham?"

I laughed. He sat down on the settee and leaned forward. He looked like a counsellor I had once, all sympathetic and wanting to listen, but I knew that whatever I had to say would be held in confidence about as long as it took to slip the cuffs onto my wrists.

"I don't want you. You're just the wrong bloke in the wrong place at the wrong time. You're a little fish, Graham. I could bring you in now and after a while you'd talk my ear off and then you'd probably go away for a bit, but that wouldn't be the end of it, would it? I don't like arresting civilians. Doesn't feel right. I arrest a no-mark like you, what am I doing? I'm putting someone behind bars who made a mistake, that's all. From the look of you, you already know that, and you've already been punished enough. You'll probably carry what you did with you for the rest of your life and you won't give yourself a break the whole time. So what good would locking you up do?"

"None whatsoever."

He nodded. "None whatsoever. But you know I can't let it go, don't you? Because at the end of the day, I've got to bring in the numbers or else they'll wonder why they promoted me. So what do you suggest I do?"

"I don't know. Sounds like a lose-lose situation."

"Not quite." He put his hands together and lowered his head. It looked as if he was about to launch into the Lord's Prayer. "I like to think I'm a fair man, Graham. I didn't bring Sergeant Hammond with me today because of that. I wanted to hear your side of things. You've been pretty open so far, so I'm going to do you the same courtesy. I want Pollard. That's all I want. Now I can get him with or without your help, but it'll be a lot easier if you cooperate."

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"And that's what got you here, I can understand that." His smile was supposed to match mine, but it looked patronising from this angle. "You were stuck between a rock and a hard place the first time round, and nothing's changed here except ..." He moved his head from side to side. "Except this time you know what the right thing is."

A part of me hoped he'd wanted the money. If he'd wanted the money, it would have been an easy decision. It would have been prison for me. I couldn't get the money, I never
would
get the money.

But he didn't want the money. He wanted Pollard. And as much as I didn't want to help him, I wanted to help Pollard even less.

I sighed. "What do you want me to do?"

He told me. It was way worse than I ever could've anticipated.

There were things a man had to do in this life. There were things that would make him feel used and tired and all sorts of dirty, but he had to do them in order to survive. It was part of growing up; you had to make tough decisions. You had to be a man and realise that it wasn't all going to work out the way you wanted it to. In fact, most of the time your luck was destined to bounce once off the cement before it trundled into the drain like a lost penny.

When I was a kid, my dad gave me a job. He knew I liked the detective books and TV and all that, so he said he had a mission. It was a very special mission, he said, because it required a great deal of secrecy and, more than any of that, it required we get out of our pits early in the morning, because it turned out that some thieving so-and-so had been nicking the morning papers from outside the shop before my dad managed to get in. The monetary value of the papers was low, but it was embarrassing not to have papers for his customers, and it had happened enough times that it was starting to gnaw at my dad's soul. So he was going to do something about it, and that something involved me. We were going to sort this together.

Truth of the matter was I felt a bit sorry for him. He worked most of the time. I never saw him. I didn't know him. I knew he liked ham and pease pudding. I knew he liked golf and books about politicians. I knew he didn't trust accountants and that he used to come at lunchtime one afternoon a year to watch the Budget and shout at the television. I knew he used to pack out our dining room with toys and games for the Christmas club every year and I wasn't allowed to play with them but I did anyway and just made sure to cover my tracks. I knew he used to come home every Saturday night with a half-pound of Northumberland Fudge – it was chocolate-covered fudge with bits of nuts in it – along with whatever papers or magazines the Ellis family wanted for the week. He thought that was enough to keep him in our good books. He was almost right. But he was still little more than a friendly stranger.

This little mission was his way of spending time together, father and son bonding over their mutual hatred of newspaper thieves. So we got up for four in the morning and got dressed and went down to the car and drove out to the newsagents, where we parked across the street and waited. My dad had a flask of coffee and I had some chocolate milk that he'd brought for me. I didn't really like chocolate milk – I preferred strawberry – but I drank enough of it to be polite.

About thirty minutes after we got settled in, the truck arrived with the papers. We watched it stop, the engine running, and a lanky, hairy man – he reminded me of a gibbon for some reason – jumped down from the passenger side of the cab. He loped round to the back of the van where he hauled out a couple of bundles of papers. The papers bounced against the string holding them together as the gibbon ran up towards my dad's shop, where he dumped the two loads and went walking back to the van, pausing only to light a stubby cigarette.

My dad's voice came out of nowhere and sounded loud in the silence of the car. "Okay, then."

I looked at him, and then back at the street.

We didn't have to wait for long. Half an hour later, a red Cavalier turned into the street with its lights off, even though it was still dark in the mornings. I knew it was a Cavalier because my dad used to have one, back before the Mazda. It was blue and when the windscreen wiper snapped off in a storm, him and my mum almost went off the motorway. They bought me a Spectrum shortly after that, the 128k +2 with the built-in tape recorder. It was amazing what a near-death experience could do to the quality of a boy's birthday presents.

"Here they are."

Dad was smiling. He showed a gold tooth and when he breathed out he smelled like cigars. He nodded at the windscreen. I followed his gaze. The Cavalier had parked outside the entrance to the shopping centre. A large Asian man got out. He was wearing a jumper that looked like it was a Christmas present from ages ago. He dropped a smoking cigarette and headed for the papers.

"I knew it. Thieving Paki bastard."

I looked at my dad again. That word was used a lot when I was a kid, but I'd never heard my dad use it. He always said the lads that used language like that belonged in the flats. It wasn't right most of the time, anyway. Chances were, the Asian guy out there wasn't a Paki, he was Indian. That he was a thieving bastard was another matter entirely, and to be fair my dad had evidence to back that up. But the Paki thing bothered me. "Actually, I don't think that's right, Dad."

He didn't hear me. He was too busy watching the Asian man run back to the Cavalier with the bundles of papers. The Asian man slung the two bundles into the back seat and then got in. The car peeled away from the kerb and my dad started the engine of the Mazda, fell in behind.