Wasted Years by John Harvey Read Free Book Online Page B

not taken Patel long to die.
    “Sir?” Lynn Kellogg said quietly.
    Resnick had failed to hear her come in behind him.
    “You all right?”
    He turned his head and looked at her, slowly nodded. “I sometimes think,” she said, “that he’s—well—that he’s still here.”
    “Yes.”
    “But he isn’t … He’s …”
    For the briefest of moments, Resnick put his hand on her shoulder and she rested her cheek sideways against it and closed her eyes. Resnick’s breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the darkening room. And then she got her bag and her coat and said good night and Resnick said see you in the morning and after the door had closed he went into his office and read the note.
    Reg Cossall was standing at the bar—no, more leaning—face round and broken-veined and wreathed in smoke. Angled above his head the highlights of a women’s soccer match were being played out, rise and fall of the commentator’s voice barely audible beneath the whir of the cash register, blur of voices.
    Other faces Resnick recognized, greetings offered and shared.
    “Message got through to you, then?”
    Resnick bought him a pint of Kimberley and a large Bell’s, shaking his head at the offer of ice. For himself, a ginger ale.
    “Not drinking, Charlie?”
    “Not tonight.”
    “Bad news, then, is it?”
    “Likely. You tell me.”
    One word had been written on the slip of paper, other than the details of where and when Cossall wanted to meet.
    Prior.
    “Up for parole, Charlie. Two-thirds of his sentence down the pan.”
    Resnick glanced up at the screen. A woman with fair hair pinned close to her head was writhing on the ground, tackled from behind. Some things changed, some remained the same.
    “He’ll not get it,” Resnick said. “He’ll be turned down.”
    “Not what I’ve heard. Not this time.”
    “Offenses like his. Violence …”
    “Not automatic, but like I say …”
    Resnick swallowed down the ginger ale and before the glass had been set back on the bar, Cossall had beckoned the barman, ordered him a vodka, double. The bank of video games beside the entrance jingled and hummed. From the adjoining bar, the click of pool balls and a juke box recycling the Jam.
    “How long, Charlie? Ten years?”
    “Nearer eleven.”
    I have no doubt that the reaction of the public to these offenses of which you have been convicted is one of the gravest horror and disgust. Motivated solely by greed and with an absolute lack of compunction towards anybody who stood in your way, prepared to threaten and use violence with a callous disregard for the safety of others, you and the men convicted with you terrorized sections of the community in the pursuit of personal gain. As the undisputed ringleader of these men, I have no alternative other than to punish you with the full force of law at my disposal.
    The public had been so disgusted that sales of the Sunday paper to whom one of his accomplices sold his story showed an increase of twenty-three percent. Prior’s mother, convalescing in a nursing home after a stroke, was interviewed by both major television news programs; a photograph that showed him as a child, receiving his school’s annual prize for good citizenship and endeavor, was widely syndicated. A prostitute, who claimed to have been his lover, auctioned her kiss-and-tell exposé to five bidders.
    “You think he’ll come back here?”
    “Would you?”
    “No,” Cossall said, chasing his whisky with a long swallow of beer, “but then I’m not a nutter.”
    “That what you think he is?”
    “Don’t you?”
    Face to face in the garage, the two of them, himself and Prior, both near to breathless, the garage doors partly open, the car ready to go. Resnick had followed him through the house, the side door from the kitchen, Prior’s hands disappearing behind the open boot of the car and when next Resnick saw them, they were holding the shotgun steady, angled towards his chest and face.
    Outside were voices,