Started Early, Took My Dog (17 page)

They had been on the same table, the Winfields, the Eastmans, Len and Alma Lomax and some councillor called Hargreaves who was on the transport committee. Len Lomax had leaned across Margaret and in an undertone had said to Ray, ‘You know that the woman with Hargreaves isn’t his wife?’ Margaret made a point of pretending he was invisible. The woman in question – more grey than scarlet – was self-consciously staring at her empty plate.

‘He’s very rude, your friend,’ Kitty Winfield said reprovingly to Ray, inhaling deeply on her cigarette. ‘I felt for that poor woman. So what if they’re not married? It’s 1975 for heaven’s sake, not the Dark Ages.’

‘Well, technically it’s still 1974,’ Ray said, looking at his watch. Oh God, Ray, he thought to himself. Lighten up. Kitty Winfield made him into a dullard.

Everything a mess now at the table, the cloth stained with food and wine, dirty plates that the waitresses were still clearing. A lone pink prawn curled like an embryo on the cloth. It turned his stomach again.

‘Are you all right?’ Margaret asked. ‘You look pale.’

‘Call a doctor,’ Kitty Winfield laughed. ‘You haven’t seen him, have you?’ she asked Ray.

‘Who?’ He had no idea what she was talking about.

‘My husband. I haven’t seen him for yonks. I think I’ll go looksee. You two should dance,’ she said, rising gracefully from the ruins of the table.

‘Should we?’ Margaret said when Kitty Winfield had disappeared into the mêlée. ‘Dance?’

‘I’m feeling a bit queasy, to be honest,’ he admitted. ‘Too much of the old firewater.’

Then Eastman came over again and said, ‘Ray, there’s some people I want to introduce you to.’ Turning to Margaret, he said, ‘You don’t mind if I borrow your husband, do you?’ and she said, ‘As long as you bring him back in one piece.’

He went to the Gents and then got lost in a corridor somewhere. He hadn’t realized how drunk he was. He kept bouncing off the walls as if he was in a ship ploughing a choppy sea. He had to stop a couple of times and lean on the wall, once he found himself slumped on the floor, just trying to concentrate on breathing. Buzzing, everything buzzing, he wondered if someone had slipped him a Mickey Finn. Waiting staff going up and down the corridor ignored him. When he finally got back to the ballroom Margaret grabbed hold of him and said, ‘There you are, I thought you’d been kidnapped. You’re just in time for the bells.’

The singer from earlier was counting down, ‘. . . five, four, three, two, one – Happy New Year, everyone!’The room erupted. Margaret kissed and hugged him and said, ‘Happy New Year, Ray.’ The band broke into ‘Auld Lang Syne’, no one knew the words beyond the first two lines, except for Margaret and a couple of drunk, mouthy Scots. Then Eastman and some of his pals came over and pumped his hand up and down.

‘Here’s to 1975,’ Rex Marshall said. ‘May all your troubles be little ones,’ and out of the corner of his eye Ray caught Margaret flinching. Stupid bugger.

The men all kissed Margaret and he could see her trying not to shrink away from their stinking breath. The Winfields reappeared, Kitty had managed to find her husband apparently, although he looked even more the worse for wear than Ray felt. There was more shaking of hands and kissing, Kitty offering her lovely pale cheek in a way that made them all want to behave better. But not for long.

‘Gentlemen, to the bar!’ Len Lomax shouted, holding his arm out in front of him as if he were about to lead them in the charge of the Light Brigade.

Both Ray and Ian Winfield demurred but Kitty Winfield laughed and said, ‘Oh, shoo, go on, shoo,’ pushing her husband away. She hooked her arm through Margaret’s and said, ‘Come on, Maggie, these men are here for the duration. I’m calling a taxi, I’ll give you a lift.’

‘Good idea,’ Margaret said affably. ‘You have a good time,’ she said to Ray, patting him affectionately on the cheek.

‘Boys will be boys,’ he heard Kitty Winfield murmur as the two women walked away.

Men didn’t deserve women.

‘We don’t deserve them,’ he said to Ian Winfield as they rolled their way to the bar.

‘Oh God, no,’ he said. ‘They’re far superior to us. Wouldn’t want to be one though.’

Ray had to dodge and weave his way back to the Gents where he threw up every last bit of prawn, chicken and trifle. Eastman came bustling in like a man in a hurry and took up a stance at a urinal. He unzipped himself in an expansive manner as if he was about to release something that would be admired.

‘Pissing like a horse,’ he said proudly. He zipped up again, ignored sink, soap and water and, patting Ray on the back, said, ‘Good to go again, lad?’

God knows how much later. 1975 already eaten into, lost time never to be found again. Back in the Gents, leaning against a stall, trying to remain conscious. Wondered if he was going to end up in the hospital with alcoholic poisoning. He imagined how disappointed his mother would be if she could see him now.

Somehow he found himself in the kitchen. The kitchen staff were having their own kind of celebration. They were all foreign, he could hear Spanish, he’d taken Margaret to Benidorm last year. They hadn’t liked it much.

A man in chef’s whites set fire to a bowl of alcohol and the whole bowl became one great blue flame, ethereal, like a sacrifice to ancient gods. Then the man took a ladle and started lifting it from the bowl, leaving a trail of blue flame behind. He kept doing it again and again, higher and higher. It was hypnotic. Stairway to heaven.

He’d fallen. He’d had an affair with a girl in clerical – Anthea, a snappy modern sort, always going on about women’s rights. She knew her own mind, he would give her that. She didn’t really want anything from him but sex and it was a relief to be with someone who wasn’t in permanent mourning for an empty womb. ‘Fun,’ she said, ‘life’s supposed to be fun, Ray.’ He’d never thought of life like that before.

They went at it anywhere and everywhere, cars, woods, back alleys, the thin-walled bedroom in the flat she shared with a friend. It had nothing in common with what he and Margaret did in bed, where he always felt he was imposing an indignity on her and she was trying to pretend he wasn’t. Anthea did things that Ray had never even heard of. It was certainly an education. Len Lomax covered for him all the time. Lying came to Len as easily as breathing. The education was over now, Anthea said she didn’t believe in long-term relationships, was worried that he would ‘become emotionally dependent’ on her. Part of him was relieved beyond measure, he’d lived in terror that Margaret would find out, but another part of him ached for the simplicity of it all. ‘Ah, the uncomplicated fuck,’ Len said appreciatively. ‘Right,’ Ray said, although he hated the crudity of such a word being applied to his own life. ‘You’re an old woman, really, Ray,’ Len laughed.

Ray thought maybe he’d passed out on his feet because the next moment the kitchen staff were all fighting, yelling God knows what at each other. One of them threw a huge cooking pot across the kitchen that made a terrific clatter when it landed.

Staggered out, back into the bar. Bumped into Rex Marshall. ‘Fucking hell, Strickland,’ Marshall said, ‘you look far gone. Have a drink.’

If he put a match to himself he would catch fire. Burn with a blue flame. He put his head down on the bar. He wondered where Len Lomax was.

‘Have to go home,’ he whispered when Walter Eastman came over to him. ‘Before I die. Get me a taxi, will you?’ Eastman said, ‘Don’t waste money on a fucking taxi. Call the police!’ Raucous laughter from the bar. Eastman used the phone on the bar top to make a call and some time later – it could have been ten minutes, it could have been ten years, Ray had no relationship to the normal world any more – a young constable entered the bar and said, ‘Sir?’ to Eastman.

Those were the days.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ Tracy said.

‘Chauffeur for the night,’ Barry Crawford said. ‘Eastman asked me to pick up a legless DC, take him home.’

‘You’re a real brown-nose.’

‘Yeah, well, beats staying in with me mam and watching New Year crap on TV.’ He was leaning casually on the car, smoking. It was freezing out here. She should have put a thermal vest on. Every time someone came out of the Metropole they brought a wash of noise and light out with them. ‘It’s like a Roman orgy in there,’ Barry said.

‘You think?’ Tracy wondered what Barry knew about either Romans or orgies. Precious little, she suspected. They’d been through police training college together and from that she’d gathered that he was both ambitious and lazy so he would probably do well. He ‘fancied’ a girl called Barbara, a nippy girl who teased her hair into a big old-fashioned beehive and worked on a cosmetics counter in Schofields, but he was too scared to ask her out.

‘What about you?’ Barry said to Tracy.

‘On shift. Obviously,’ she said, indicating her uniform. ‘Been called to a disturbance. Some kind of brawl in the kitchen. I think they just found out they weren’t getting overtime for working after midnight or something.’ How had Barry got his hands on a panda car? Tracy had applied to do the driver’s course and heard nothing.

‘You on your own?’ he asked her.

‘I’m with Ken Arkwright. He’s off to the toilets. Who’s this DC you’re driving then?’

‘Strickland.’

‘Speak of the devil, Barry, here comes your fare for the night. Jesus, look at the state of him. You’re going to be spending the first day of 1975 cleaning up vomit.’ Ray Strickland was being manhandled out of the Metropole, supported by a couple of burly CID blokes.

‘Fuck off,’ Barry said amiably to Tracy, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out with his foot.

Ken Arkwright shambled up. ‘Ey up,’ he said to Tracy, ‘Third World War’s breaking out in there. These Mediterranean types, they don’t half know how to get worked up. We’d better get in there and call a truce before they kill each other.’

‘Well,’Tracy said to Barry, ‘you carry on being a taxi service, Barry, and we’ll get on with some real policing.’

‘Sod off.’

‘Same to you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Happy New Year.’

‘Yes, Happy New Year, lad,’ Arkwright said.

When Tracy looked back over her shoulder she saw DCS Eastman lean in to the driver’s window and heard him give Strickland’s address to Barry. Then he slipped him something else, Tracy couldn’t see what, money or drink probably.

‘What a twat,’ Arkwright said.

‘Barry Crawford?’

‘No. Ray Strickland.’

‘Home then, boss?’ Barry said.

‘No,’ Ray said.

‘No?’

‘No.’ Strickland leaned forward and slurred an address in Lovell Park and Barry said, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’ Strickland fell back against the seat and closed his eyes.

When they arrived in Lovell Park he almost fell out of the car. Barry watched him weave his way unsteadily towards the front doors. You had to hope for the poor bastard’s sake that the lifts were working.

Halfway there, Strickland turned and held a half-bottle of Scotch aloft as if in triumph. ‘Happy New Year!’ he shouted. He stumbled on another few yards and then turned again and shouted, louder this time, ‘What was your name?’

‘Crawford,’ Barry shouted back. ‘PC Barry Crawford. Happy New Year, sir.’

Jeopardy

Thursday
Tracy was woken by a cry, an inchoate sound in the dark. Half comatose, she thought it was the foxes who visited the garden most nights and who made mating sound like murder. She heard the cry again and it took several seconds before she remembered that she was not alone in the house.

Courtney!

Clambering out of bed, she stumbled drowsily to the spare bedroom where she found the kid sound asleep on her back, breathing heavily, her mouth slack. As Tracy turned to go Courtney cried out again, a cawing noise that seemed to indicate distress. She flailed an arm suddenly as if she was trying to ward off an attack but the next second she was so deeply asleep that she could have been a corpse. Tracy felt compelled to give her a little poke and was relieved when she twitched, making a whimpering noise, like a dog dreaming.

Tracy sat on the bed, waiting to see if the kid was going to wake again. No wonder Courtney’s sleep was disturbed – she didn’t know where she was, who she was with. Tracy felt a pang of guilt at having subtracted her from her natural habitat, but then she recalled the murderous expression on Kelly Cross’s face as she dragged Courtney through the Merrion Centre. Tracy had seen enough bashed-up, beat-up kids that social workers had kept in families you wouldn’t give a dog to. Families weren’t always such great places to be, especially for kids.

*

She must have fallen asleep because the next time she woke up Tracy found herself sprawled uncomfortably across the foot of the narrow bed while daylight washed the ugly woodchip. Of Courtney, there was no sign and Tracy experienced an unexpected moment of panic as if a giant hand had clutched at her heart. Perhaps the kid’s rightful mother had appeared under the cloak of night and stolen her back. Or perhaps a stranger had climbed in through the window and spirited her away. Although what were the odds against a kid being abducted twice in twenty-four hours? Probably not as long as you imagined.