The Man at Rest was owned and run by the licensee, Douglas Reginald Swainson. It said so above the door to the street. It was furnished and decorated entirely to Douglas’s taste. There was no Mrs Swainson behind the bar to purse her lips and disapprove of the mixture of styles. In the Man at Rest a spindly cottage suite shared space with heavy oak tables and chairs he’d bought from a closed-down library. The walls and the ceiling were nicotine brown. Holiday postcards from regulars were crammed on the shelves behind the bottles and glasses. The rose-patterned carpet was stained with years of spillage. Douglas Swainson didn’t like juke boxes or slot machines and he regarded pub food as an affectation.
Ken pushed the street door open and went into the one-roomed pub, and up to the bar. He put his foot on the tarnished brass rail and ordered a pint of mild and a whisky chaser from Douglas, who looked behind the beer pumps like a large pale ghost. Douglas disliked sunlight and kept it out of his pub. The curtains were permanently drawn. Ken nodded at the other regulars: Thin Bob, Fat Stan, Daft Arthur and Raj. Raj could get you anything: a joint of beef, a wedding suit, an engine for a car, anything, half price, no questions asked.
“What’s up?” asked Douglas, observing that Ken didn’t look himself. Ken soon had the regulars’ full attention as he recounted his recent visit to the hospital and his suspicions about Crackle. His friends swore quietly to themselves as they listened to Ken’s description of Storme’s injuries. Douglas pushed another double whisky in front of Ken. “On the house,” he said.
“I wish that fuckin’ Crackle would walk in here right now,” said Thin Bob. “I’d love to put my fist down his throat.”
“I want to kill him,” said Ken, throwing the whisky down the back of his throat.
“Anybody who hurts a baby like that deserves to die,” said Arthur. “If one of mine was harmed…” the other men nodded their agreement. “I’d gladly do bird,” said Stan, whose grandchildren irritated him on the rare occasions he was to be found at home.
Douglas said, “Scum like that Crackle shouldn’t be allowed to breed. In fact,” he said, “if I was a dictator I’d make people pass a test before they could have a baby. They’d have to pay to get one; they’d need a licence.”
Ken was drunk, but not falling-over drunk when he left the Man at Rest and went out into the afternoon gloom. Raj caught up with him on the pavement, gripping him on the top of his arm. Ken swivelled around, ready to fight, only relaxing when he saw who it was. Raj bent his big-toothed brown face to Ken’s ear and said, “If you want that Crackle seeing to, I know somebody who’ll do it for you.”
Ken staggered to the pub wall and leaned against it. The cold air was making his head spin. “Seeing to?” he said.
“Fifty quid for a good kicking,” said Raj. “And two hundred and fifty quid to put him out, permanent.”
“Kill him, you mean?”
Raj was scandalised by the directness of Ken’s query. “Now they ain’t the words I used, Ken,” said Raj, looking away and shaking his head.
“Sorry,” said Ken, aware now that he had breached some kind of criminal etiquette.
“Two hundred and fifty quid, though, that’s cheap isn’t it?”
Ken had thought that contract killing was something only the rich could afford.
“There’s a lot of guns around,” said Raj. “And a lot of crack heads desperate for money.”
“So I could put him away, for ever for a week’s wages?” Ken was on the sick with his nerves, but he’d be going back to work soon. He thought hard for a moment, trying to imagine a world without Crackle. “It sounds good,” he said to Raj. They walked around the corner to Raj’s car repair workshop, and Raj got one of his mechanics to make Ken a black coffee in an attempt to sober him up before he went to the police station.
♦
PC Billings put the phone down, then sat at the desk she shared with four colleagues and breathed in deeply, trying to calm herself. She’d rung home to check that Carole, the baby-sitter, had picked the kids up from school as arranged, but throughout their brief conversation she’d heard her boys, five-year-old Mark, and seven-year-old James, arguing. She heard Mark shout in his shrill voice, “It wasn’t me, tell him.” Then James’s whine, “Tell him.”
She promised Carole she would be home soon after her shift finished at eight o’clock, and reminded her that there were fish fingers and oven chips in the deep freeze, and that when she gave Mark his bath she mustn’t forget to put the anti-eczema oil in the water, else he’d be scratching all night. And another thing, would Carole make sure that James went to the loo before going to bed. He’d wet the bed again the night before.
She lifted her head and looked around the office. She was certain that none of her male colleagues had given a thought to the pre-bedtime rituals of their children. She got up and picked up the folder marked ‘Storme Natas’. She’d thought it a peculiar surname, foreign sounding. Suddenly she realised that it was Satan spelled backwards. She was surprised the authorities had allowed them to use it. The whole case depressed her. She couldn’t get the sight and smell of that cot mattress out of her mind. At ten past four the internal phone rang and the desk sergeant told her that there was a Mr Kenneth Dixon and a Mrs Tamara Natas at the front desk.
When they met at the police station Ken saw that Tamara had bought herself a loose black dress with a long skirt that swept the floor. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind at all. He’d wanted her to buy something pretty, something motherly. I’ve wasted forty quid, he thought. A black leather thong with a pewter beast’s head pendant hung between the swell of her breasts.
“Take that bleddy thing off,” he ordered, offended by the beast’s green-eyed look of evil. Tamara did as she was told, slipping it off and stuffing it into the side pocket of the dress. She didn’t want to upset her dad. He was already drunk.
She looked up each time one of the three doors leading into the front office opened. She knew that Crackle was somewhere in the police station, and she was desperate to see him, and tell him that she was sorry for running away from him. She looked at Ken, whose eyelids were drooping. He stank of drink. She slid along the plastic-covered bench and distanced herself from him. Without her physical support his head dropped back and he fell asleep with his mouth open, displaying the wire bridge-work on his teeth. Tamara had known he would let her down. She took the pendant from out of her pocket and hung it around her neck again. When PC Billings came to fetch her they had both tried to wake her dad, but he had been unable to get to his feet without falling, so they had left him sitting on the bench with his head in his hands.
It was eight o’clock in the evening when Crackle and Tamara were allowed to leave Interview Room One at the police station. PC Billings was reluctant to let them go. But she had to get home to put her children to bed. She didn’t know which of them she found the most despicable, Crackle for his martyred protestations of innocence, or Tamara for her mindless worship of Crackle. PC Billings thought she would go mad if she ever heard the phrase ‘She fell out of her cot’ again.
She had often felt murderous towards her own children, especially James, who whined in the day and wet the bed at night. Once, when he’d had a bad cold and she’d seen him surreptitiously wipe his nose on the sleeve of his clean school sweatshirt, she’d been so enraged that she had hit him hard on the side of his head, and knocked him off balance. She had found herself screaming at him, that if he wet the bed that night he would have to wash all his bed linen by hand.
She switched the recorder on to check the tape and heard Crackle say, “You look shit in that dress; your belly sticks out,” and Tamara saying, “I won’t wear it again.” She then heard her own voice saying, “Tamara, social services are going in front of a judge tomorrow morning to make Storme a ward of court.”
Tamara’s voice on the tape sounded muffled. “What’s that mean?” Crackle shouted, “It means the bastards will take our kid off us.”
“How long for?” said Tamara.
“For ever. If you stay with him you’ll never get her back.”
“I didn’t touch that kid!” said Crackle. “She fell out of her cot!”
PC Billings turned down the volume knob and quietened the rest of his tirade, then turned it up again to hear Tamara say, “I’m sorry Crackle, but I want the baby back.”
Crackle shouted, “What you saying, Tam? You saying we’re finished?”
“I’ll go and live with dad until it’s sorted,” she said, placatingly.
PC Billings heard herself say, “Your dad’s sobered up now. Go home with him and forget about this scumbag, eh?” Then the tape came to the end of its reel, and there was silence.
As PC Billings drove home she saw her ex-husband drive past her in his patrol car. He flashed his headlights in recognition and she flashed back.
Her son, James, came downstairs when he heard her key in the lock. She could see from the puffiness around his eyes that he’d been crying.
“You’re late!” he shouted. “You said you’d be home by eight o’clock, and it’s ten past nine!”
Carole already had her coat on. PC Billings could tell by the set of her mouth that it wouldn’t be long before she would have to advertise for another baby-sitter again. When she’d paid her and closed the door on her she took James upstairs and tucked him into bed. But he came downstairs three times, seemingly oblivious to her mounting anger. She gave him water, she escorted him to the toilet. For what seemed like the hundredth time that week she read James and the Giant Peach to him through half-clenched teeth, turning the pages with a crack. At eleven o’clock when he’d been in his bed for ten minutes, she ran a bath and lay in it in a stupor of tiredness. Then she heard his bedroom door open and his feet on the stairs, and his shrill cry from downstairs when he couldn’t find her.
“Mummee! Mummee!”
As she got out of the bath and wrapped a towel around her, she wished that James had never been born. She pictured herself grabbing him by the lapels of his pyjama jacket, dragging him up the stairs, throwing him into the scented bath water and pushing his head under water until air bubbles stopped coming out of his mouth and nose. However, when she saw him, skinny and frightened, she drew him to her tenderly and promised that he could sleep with Mummy, again.