Wasted Years by John Harvey Read Free Book Online Page A

newspapers and magazines, yellowing copies of the NME. An old Ferguson record player with only one speaker: a radio without a back. Two snare drums, not on stands, but lying side by side, skins patched and slack. A pair of wire brushes, bent and tangled at the ends.
    “Yeh,” Keith said. “Yes, sure. Drink’d be fine.” He looked quickly at his father from the corner of his good eye. “You might have to pay.”

Eight
    Resnick had arrived back at the station in time to find three uniformed officers hauling a seventeen-stone West Indian up the steps and backwards through the double doors.
    “Argument with a taxi driver, sir. Reckoned he was charging him over the odds. Jumped on the roof and dented it. Stuck his boot through the rear windscreen. Driver tried to pull him down and got a kick in the head for his trouble.”
    Resnick held one of the doors open as, finally, they succeeded in lifting him inside. A good bollocking from the custody sergeant, a night in a cold cell, and an agreement to pay restitution to the cab driver and that would likely be an end to it. Summary justice: there no longer seemed to be a lot of it about. Back when Resnick and his friend, Ben Riley, had been walking the beat, so much could be settled with a warning look, a word, the right intervention at the right time. All too often now, the first sign of police intervention brought about an immediate escalation of trouble. A violent response. Unthinking.
    A WPC, out of uniform, on her way home from the cinema, stops near a fiercely quarreling couple, the man shouting at the top of his voice, the woman yelling back through her tears. When the police officer goes closer, asking them to calm down, asking the woman if she was all right, the pair of them rounds on her, the woman spitting in her face.
    A young constable, six months on the job, steps between two groups of youths squaring up to one another on the upper floor of the Broad Marsh Centre. Set upon, forced back towards the top of the escalator, he calls for help which only comes when he has tumbled to the bottom. Three cracked ribs, a dislocated pelvis, he would suffer intermittently from severe back pain for the rest of his life.
    “Call for you, sir,” said Naylor, passing Resnick on the stairs. “Dl Cossall. Left the message on your desk.”
    “Thanks, Kevin.”
    “Couple of us going over the road for a pint if …”
    “Yes, maybe. Later.”
    Resnick squeezed past the furniture that had been moved out into the corridor and pushed open the door to the CID room. Loose boards were still stacked against the wall, and from the temperature nothing had been achieved setting the heating to rights. A lamp burned over Lynn Kellogg’s desk, her coat still hung from the rack in the corner, but there was no sign of her. Divine would be in the pub already, getting them in.
    Scarcely a time in the last months, Resnick had walked into that office and his eyes had not flicked towards the far wall where Diptak Patel used to sit. Now there was a space, a gap in the floor, lengths of piping running through, shadow. Coldness. What was it Millington had said about Patel and death? Scatter rose petals and sit around wailing where he comes from, don’t they?
    Well, wailing there had certainly been, that cold Saturday when the wind had whipped off the Bradford hills and cut across Resnick’s back like a stick. Flowers, too. Roses. Patel’s father had shaken his hand gravely, thanked Resnick for attending, never looked him in the eye. Never understood. No. What was there to understand?
    “Don’t,” Patel’s girl friend had begged, that evening in the city center. “Please don’t get involved.”
    “I have to,” Patel had said.
    Moments later, the blade with which one youth had been attacking another was turned on him. Another fucking Paki. Another fucking Saturday night. Blood from the artery spread wide and the best you could say, the only good thing, the only consolation you could find: it had