Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

came tottering into the room carrying his shopping basket of cleaning products and dragging his Henry vacuum behind him with the wheels squeaking. He hit the light switch, squinting indifferently across the room, and then dropped his basket when he saw me perched on the windowsill.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he cried, almost spitting his dentures as spray bottles went rolling over his wide, orthopaedic shoes. ‘You trying to finish me off, Rook?’

‘Sorry, Ernie,’ I said, pocketing the phone.

‘What the hell are you thinking, sitting up here in the dark like …’ He scrunched his nose, sniffed somewhat distastefully, and then started gathering his spilled wares from the rug. ‘You know, Stubbs would have your guts for garters if he caught you doing that up here.’

‘I’m quite sure Rupert will be off sharing his excellent company with a Scotch of some fine vintage by now. What concerns me more is whoever else you might let into my room while I’m not around.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He straightened at once, frowning indignantly until he figured out where I was going and conceded a dry, bashful smile. ‘Barnes.’

I nodded. ‘Barnes.’

He shuffled over to my wastepaper basket, readying a black bag from the pocket of his overalls, and tipped the papers from inside. ‘Won’t happen again, if it’s a problem.’

‘It’s not really. I was thinking of letting her have her own key.’

Ernie had been working weekday mornings and nights in chambers for more than thirty years, changing light bulbs, cleaning lavatories and replacing screws in those curious places where screws tended to unwind. During that time, he had made only one demand: for the first months of my solo residency on the third floor, he had refused to clean my room. I didn’t blame him, considering the mountains of clutter I’d built during my former nosedive into neglect.

We were quiet for a moment; old colleagues of a sort, old friends of another.

‘Well.’ I got to my feet. ‘I’ll get out of your hair …’

‘What’s left of it.’

I clipped the papers into my briefcase and paused on the way out. ‘Hey, Ernie, what would you recommend for cleaning carpets?’

‘Carpets? Depends what you got on ’em.’ He looked me up and down. ‘Red wine, knowing you lot.’

‘Urine, actually.’

‘Ah!’ He nodded, lowering to a whisper. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of, Mr Rook. Whiskey does the exact same thing to me …’

I could only shake my head.

7

We were walking south along St James Street in Walthamstow, passing through the yellow glow of lamp posts, when Zara asked me about my time in prison.

‘Whatton Detention Centre,’ I told her. ‘Wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘Whatton?’ She coughed nervously. ‘Isn’t that a …?’

‘Prison for male sex offenders? It wasn’t back in 1983.’

‘Thank God. How come they remanded you in custody? Seems extreme for a man who emptied fruit machines.’

‘Doesn’t matter if it’s fruit machines or bank vaults, once you’re a few grand up they tend to notice. Remember me telling you that I’d let a few other blokes in on my method?’

‘And they did the same, right? That’s why it was conspiracy to defraud?’

‘Correct. The problem was that the police still hadn’t nicked them at the time of my arrest. They applied to the court for a remand in custody to make sure I couldn’t tip any of the others off, and the magistrates didn’t need much persuading.’

‘And how was it?’

‘Prison?’ As we walked through the wonders of Walthamstow’s high street – chicken shops, bookmakers, a pharmacy with a mattress dumped outside – I did my best to recall a time I’d tried hard to forget. ‘Lousy food. A lot of concrete. It’s a peculiar feeling, losing control. In life, you often think you can’t walk out of a situation. A job or a relationship, an awkward moment – but you can. All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. In prison, for the first time in your life, you actually can’t.’

‘Sounds grim.’

‘It was enough to scare me straight. That’s why I understand your client’s frustration. Being held on remand is so maddening because you have no countdown. You see, a convicted inmate is always counting down. Another decade, another six months, another week. But being remanded in custody until trial, I had no idea how long it would go on for. The thought of being convicted was terrifying. The hope for acquittal was perhaps even worse.’ Hearing that realisation leap unguarded from my throat made me feel extraordinarily stupid for taking so many chances of late.

‘I guess you don’t blame Andre for offering information then?’

‘No. Pride goes before destruction, but so does being labelled a snitch. We have to be very careful in choosing who we speak to about this.’

‘And who exactly are we going to speak to now?’

‘Mark Patchett. He was my room-mate in 1987, if you could call a couple of sleeping bags lined with cardboard any sort of a room. We both used to hunker down with the homeless crowd at the Bullring near Waterloo Station. He’s not the sort of person you’d keep on a Christmas card list, mostly because he rarely kept a postal address back then, but throughout the nineties I’d often come here to meet him for a drink. Charli Meadows lives five minutes away from here. A mile further south is Leyton, the E10 area. If these Cutthroats are genuine, this man is likely to know of them.’

‘And he was in the Scrubs,’ she said, wary. ‘Is he violent?’

‘Violent? No, but I’d keep a tight grip on that bag of yours.’

‘And for some reason you think he’ll be sitting here in this pub, even though you haven’t spoken to him in how long? I don’t see why we couldn’t have just messaged him on Facebook.’

‘It’s a generation thing. Men like Patch are defiant to change. That’s why he’s been caught so many times. It’s eight o’clock on a Monday. That means he’s either in the pub on this corner ahead, or in a cell somewhere.’

‘All right,’ she