‘What did it say?’
‘B.’
‘And you think Rudkin had altered it?’
‘Maybe, I don’t…’
‘When you were over there the last time?’
‘No, no. He went over after we got Joan Richards.’
‘But why would he want to change it? What would be the point?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m just saying it looked wrong. And one way or another he knows it’s wrong.’
Maurice takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and says, ‘This is serious, Bob.’
‘I know.’
‘Really bloody serious.’
He picks up the phone:
‘Yes. I’d like a check on two files, both Morrison, initial C. First one is 23rd August 1974, Caution for Soliciting 1A. Second one is 22nd December 1974, Witness Statement 27C, Murder of GRD initial P.’
He puts down the phone and we wait, him cleaning his specs, me biting a nail.
The phone rings, he picks it up, listens and asks:
‘OK. Who by?’
The Owl is staring at me as he speaks, unblinking:
‘When was that?’
He’s writing on the top of his Sunday paper.
‘Thanks.’
He puts down the phone.
I ask, ‘What did they say?’
‘A DI Rudkin signed them out.’
‘When?’
‘April 1975.’
I’m on my feet: ‘April 1975? Fuck, she wasn’t even dead.’
Maurice stares down at his newspaper, then looks up, eyes rounder and wider and larger than ever:
‘GRD-P,’ he says. ‘You know who that is?’
I slump back down in my chair and just nod.
‘Paula Garland,’ he says to himself, the mind behind the glasses off and scuttling along the corridors down to his own little hells.
I can hear the Cathedral bells.
Palms up, I ask, ‘What are we going to do?’
‘We? Nothing.’
I start to speak, he raises a hand and gives me a wink: ‘Leave it to your Uncle Maurice.’
For the second time in a week I park between the lorries of the Redbeck car park, though I can’t remember much about the last time I was here.
Just the pain.
Now I just feel hungry, starving.
That’s what I’m telling myself it is.
I go into the cafe, buy a sausage and chip sandwich and two cups of hot sweet tea.
I take them out and round to Room 27.
I open the door and go inside.
The air is old and cold, the smell of sweat and fear, death everywhere:
I stand in the dark centre of the room and I want to rip the soiled grey sheets down, pull the mattress from the window, burn the photos and the names from the walls, but I don’t.
I sit on the base of the bed and think about the dead and the missing, the missing and the dead:
Missing the dead.
I drive back to Leeds with a splitting headache, the sandwich cold and uneaten on the passenger seat.
I switch on the radio:
I think about what I want to say to Rudkin, think about all the weird shit he’s said that now makes sense, think about all the shit I think he’s done, all the shit I know he’s done.
I park and walk into Millgarth -
into running bodies, shouts and boots, jackets on and tearing off, thinking:
JANICE.
‘Fraser! Thank fucking Christ,’ shouts Noble.
‘What?’
‘Get over to Morley, Gledhill Road.’
‘What?’
‘There’s been another.’
‘Who?’
‘Another fucking post office.’
‘Shit.’
And bang, just like that I’m back on Robbery.
Mr Godfrey Hurst looks like someone’s sewn oranges into his skin, all the holes in his face swollen shut.
‘Heard the knock,’ he’s trying to say. ‘Came down the stairs and I opened the back door and thwack! Reckon they must have shoved door back in my face. Next news I’m on the floor then thwack! Reckon they must have kicked me in the head.’
‘That’s when I came down,’ says Mrs Doris Hurst, bird-thin, sheet-white, still stinking of piss. ‘I screamed and then one of them slapped me right hard across my face and then he put bag on my head and tied me up.’
Around us, parents are bringing in children with broken limbs and bleeding skins, nurses leading the injured and the worried back and forward through Casualty, everyone crying.
‘Believe it or not,’ I say as I take down what they’re saying. ‘Believe it or not, you’re both very lucky’
Mr Hurst squeezes his wife’s hand and tries to smile, but he can’t, he can’t because of the stitches, all thirty- five of them.
I ask, ‘How much did they get away with?’
‘About seven hundred and fifty quid.’
‘Is that a lot for you?’
‘We never used to have anything at all over weekend, but Post Office they’ve stopped collecting on Saturdays.’
‘Why’s that then?’
‘Cuts, I suppose.’
I turn back to Mrs Hurst. ‘You get a look at them?’
‘Not really, they were wearing masks.’
‘How many were there?’
She shakes her head and says, ‘I just saw two, but I had feeling there were more.’
‘Why did you think that?’
‘Voices, the light.’
‘This was about what time?’
Mr Hurst says, ‘About seven-thirty. We were getting ready for Church.’
‘And you said there was something about the light, Mrs Hurst?’
