ashtray high across the face, close to taking out an eye. She hadn’t bothered waiting for her cards.
She’d been managing a sauna, close to the city centre, when Michael had found her. In at seven, check the towels, make sure the plastic had been wiped down, bottles of massage oil topped up, the come washed from the walls; once the girls arrived, first shift, ready to catch the early punters on their way to work, she’d examine their hands, ensure they’d trimmed their nails; uniforms they took home and washed, brought back next day clean as new or she’d want the reason why.
‘Come on,’ Michael had said, ‘fifty minutes down the motorway. It’s not as if I’m asking you to fucking emigrate.’ Emigration might have been easier. She had memories of Nottingham and none of them good. But then, looking round at the tatty travel posters and old centrefolds from Playboy on the walls, he’d added, ‘What? Worried a move might be bad for your career?’
It hadn’t taken her long to pack her bags, turn over the keys.
Fifty minutes on the motorway.
A house like a barn, a palace, real paintings on the walls.
When he came home earlier than usual one afternoon and found her sitting in the kitchen, polishing the silver while she watched TV, he snatched the cloth from her hands. ‘There’s people paid for that, not you.’
‘It’s something to do.’
His nostrils flared. ‘You want something to do, go down the gym. Go shopping. Read a fucking book.’
‘Why?’ she asked him later that night, turning towards him in their bed.
‘Why what?’
‘Why am I here?’
He didn’t look at her. ‘Because I’m tired of living on my own.’
He was sitting propped up against pillows, bare-chested, thumbing through the pages of a climbing magazine. Eileen couldn’t imagine why: anything more than two flights of stairs and he took the lift.
The light from the lamp on his bedside table shone a filter of washed-out blue across the patterned quilt and the curtains stirred in the breeze from the opened window. One thing he insisted on, one of many, sleeping with at least one of the windows open.
That’s not enough,’ Eileen said.
‘What?’
‘Enough of a reason for me being here. You being tired of living alone.’
After a long moment, he put down his magazine. ‘It’s not the reason, you know that.’
‘Do I?’ She leaned back as he turned towards her, his fingers touching her arm.
‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said. ‘Snapping at you like that. It was stupid. Unnecessary.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does.’
His face was close to hers, too close for her to focus; there was a faint smell of brandy on his breath.
After they’d made love he lay on his side, watching her, watching her breathe.
‘Don’t,’ she said.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t stare. I hate it when you stare.’ It reminded her of Terry, her ex, the way his eyes had followed her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking; right up until the night he’d slipped the gun out from beneath the pillow and, just when she’d been certain he was going to take her life, had shot himself in the head.
‘What else am I supposed to do?’ Michael said.
‘Go to sleep? Take a shower?’ Her face relaxed into a smile. ‘Read a fucking book?’
Michael grinned and reached across and kissed her. ‘You want to know how much I love you?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mocking.
After a little searching, he found a ballpoint in the bedside-table drawer. Reaching for the magazine, he flicked through it till he came to a picture of the Matterhorn, outlined against the sky.
‘Here,’ he said, and quickly drew a hasty, childlike approximation of the sun, moon and stars around the summit. That’s how much.’
Smiling, Eileen closed her eyes.
Resnick had spent the nub end of the evening in a pub off the A632 between Bolsover and Arkwright Town. Peter Waites and himself. From the outside it looked as if the place had been closed down months before and the interior was not a lot different. Resnick paced himself, supping halves, aware of having to drive back down, while Waites worked his way assiduously from pint to pint, much as he had when he’d been in his pomp and working at the coalface, twenty years before.
Whenever it came to Waites’ round, Resnick was careful to keep his wallet and his tongue well zipped, the man’s pride buckled enough. He had lost his job in the wake of the miners’ strike and not worked steady since.
‘Not yet forty when they tossed me on the fuckin’ scrapheap, Charlie. Me and a lot of others like me. Nigh on a thousand when that pit were closed and them panty-waist civil bloody servants chucking their hands up in the air on account they’ve found sixty new jobs. Bloody disgrace.’
He snapped the filter from the end of his cigarette before lighting up.
‘Lungs buggered enough already, Charlie. This’ll not make ha’porth of difference, no matter what anyone says. Besides, long as I live long enough to see the last of that bloody woman and dance on her bloody grave, I don’t give a sod.’
That bloody woman: Margaret Hilda Thatcher.
In that company especially, no need to speak her name.
When they stepped outside the air bit cold. Over the carefully sculpted slag heap, now slick with grass, the moon hung bright and full. Of the twenty terraced houses in Peter Wakes’ street, fourteen were now boarded up.
‘You’ll not come in, Charlie?’
‘Some other time.’
‘Aye.’ The two men shook hands.
‘Look after yourself, Peter.’
‘You, too.’
Resnick had first met the ex-miner when his son had joined the Notts force as a young PC and been stationed for a while at Canning Circus, under Resnick’s wing. Now the boy was in Australia, married with kids, something in IT, and Resnick and Waites still kept in touch, the occasional pint, an odd Saturday at Bramhall Lane or down in Nottingham at the County ground, a friendship based on mutual respect and a sense of regret for days gone past.
Eileen would never be sure what woke her. The flap of the curtain as the window opened wider; the soft tread on the carpeted floor. Either way, when she opened her eyes there they were, two shrouded shapes beyond the foot of the bed. Beside her, Michael was already awake, pushing up on one elbow, hand reaching out towards the light.
‘Leave it,’ said a voice.
Already the shapes beginning to flesh out, take on detail.
‘We don’t need the fucking light,’ the shorter one said. A voice Eileen didn’t recognise: one she would never forget.
Michael switched on the light and they shot him, the tall one first and then the other, the impact hurling Michael back against the headboard, skewing him round until his face finished somehow pressed up against the wall.
Moving closer, the shorter of the two wrenched the wire from the socket and the room went dark. Too late to prevent Eileen from seeing what she had seen: the taller man bareheaded, more than bare, shaven, bald, a child’s mask, Mickey Mouse, covering the centre of his face; his companion had a woollen hat pulled low, a red scarf wrapped high around his neck and jaw.
Some of Michael’s blood ran, slow and warm, between Eileen’s arm and her breast. The rest was pooling between his legs, spreading dark across the sheets. The sound she hadn’t recognised was her own choked sobbing, caught like a hair-ball in her throat. She knew they would kill her or rape her or both.
‘You want it?’ the shorter one said, gesturing towards the bed.
The tall one made a sound like someone about to throw up and the shorter one laughed.
