Good Bait by John Harvey Read Free Book Online

yourself, girl, and to hell with the expense.
    Back at the flat, she poured herself a generous glass of wine, arranged the food on a tray and settled down to watch one of the Swedish Wallanders she’d recorded from BBC4. Angst and murder on the shores of the Baltic. As long as she could divorce it from reality, her reality – and here the subtitles really helped – she could enjoy the somewhat ramshackle way in which the Ystad police were able, week in week out, to wrap up a case within a mere ninety minutes. And her feelings about Wallander himself, or, rather, the actor who played him, Krister Henriksson, had gone from sheer exasperation – as head of a murder squad he could be about as organised as a sack of kittens – to a resigned pleasure in the way he moved from anger and confusion towards a kind of resolution.
    Except where his love life was concerned.
    There, she knew how he felt.
    A night’s clubbing, a fit body, a good-looking face in a crowded bar, the slip and slither that moved from the dance floor to the taxi to the final fuck, slow and generous or quick and hard, that was no longer enough. As if, since she’d been in her teens and early twenties, it ever really was.
    She pushed away the tray, drank down the last of the glass, switched off the TV. Stood at the window for a few moments, staring out. Saw her own reflection imprinted on a terrace of houses opposite, the darkened tree line that marked the edge of Highbury Fields. Along the street, a quick flicker of light from the interior of a parked car illuminated, for the briefest of moments, the shape of a man hunched behind the wheel.
    All day now, all through the evening, the scenes which showed Wallander trying with some desperation to bridge the gulf between himself and his grown-up daughter – trying and failing – she had fought to keep her own father at bay. His birthday – late January – little more than a week away. Seventy-three. Seventy-three he would have been had he lived. The car outside, headlights burning, pulled slowly away from the kerb and passed from sight. He had been running, her father, across the street towards where a group of teenage boys was hassling a single, frightened girl. The boys white, the girl light-skinned, mixed race. Jostling, pushing, grabbing, calling names. The girl, her face besmirched with tears, stumbling to her knees and Karen’s father, with a roar of righteous anger, rushing out towards her, towards the surrounding youths, unable, in his haste, to see or hear the van that swung, at that moment, around and into the road, accelerating hard.
    Her father’s body, as she had never seen it, other than in her imagination, lifted – hurled – into the startled emptiness of the night air, only to fall, broken, torn, by the pavement’s edge.
    Three days in hospital he lived on, unconscious, sustained by drips and tubes and prayer. Her mother scarcely left his bedside till there was only prayer left and then he died.
    Karen came and went, just thirteen and unable to withstand the pain.
    Her father dead, her mother had gone back to Jamaica. Unlike her sister, Lynette, who had agreed to go, only to return three years later, Karen had dug in her heels, refused. Not wanting to leave her school, her friends. Already close, her aunt and uncle agreed to take her in. Now, they too, distressed by a city that was no longer, in their eyes, the same place where they had chosen to live most of their adult lives, were back in Spanish Town, retired, resigned.
    Karen pulled the curtains closed.
    Her father’s face flickered like a passing light, then disappeared.
    â€˜Cry, Baby, Cry’ and then ‘Good Night’, from Ramsey Lewis’s version of the Beatles’ White Album , piano and strings, accompanied Karen as she removed her make-up and undressed for bed. After just three pages, the book she was reading slipped from her hands and she was