He finished taking down the takeaway order. ‘Ya. 14. 27. Two 58s. Fangyou – yes. Chop chop. Express. Burrbye.’
Tucking the cordless into his smock pocket he stuck the order on a metal spike on the hob. He made no attempt to start cooking but took ostentatious care in extricating three beers from the cold cabinet and bringing them to Dryden’s table.
He opened his own, took an impressive draught and burped. ‘Wicked,’ he said, making a mental note to ask his eldest what it meant. ‘Humph well?’ he asked, as if the cab driver wasn’t sitting ten feet away, double-glazed against the world of personal contact. They watched him holding a long conversation with his cousin Manuel who didn’t exist.
Dryden sniffed. They sat in easy silence. Gary shook his beer and directed the plume of spray when he pulled the tab into the back of his mouth. Dryden idly pictured Sia’s customer expecting the feverish activity normally associated with the expression ‘Chop, chop, express’.
He scanned the dark street outside and watched a yellow plastic child’s football roll past in the east wind followed by a few pages from last week’s edition of The Crow.
Without turning his head he asked the usual question: ‘Any luck?’
Sia was a regular gambler, a pastime he had picked up from the officers’ mess rather than from his forebears, a fact he was sensitive about. For Gary’s sake he made the point. ‘There is a difference between being born with a genetic disposition to gambling and enjoying the intellectual challenge of betting on horses.’
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Dryden.
‘About ten thousand a year.’
Gary wasn’t listening. His jaw, normally slack, had become dislocated in a spectacular slump. He raised a single hesitant finger of alarm.
Cherry Street, a cul-de-sac, was directly opposite the façade of the Peking. It ran out towards the fen where bollards stood preventing incursions by marauding gypsies who had been on the land several generations longer than the residents. Despite this, the locals delighted in telling them to ‘fuck off home where they came from’.
The local council mirrored the sentiment if not the precise wording.
But there was no gypsy in sight. What was in sight, advancing steadily up Cherry Street towards the Peking, was a platoon of riot police. The street lighting glinted on their black perspex helmets.
Dryden stood and squinted through the Peking’s steamy windows.
The police, in full public disorder gear, held their plastic shields expertly in an unbroken wall at the front while those behind held them aloft to form what any Roman general would have recognized as a perfect illustration of the defensive stratagem known as the ‘tortoise’. A sublime comic effect had been achieved by an order to advance in silence. They were tip-toeing up Cherry Street like the chorus line from some modern military ballet.
Dryden took his seat and placed it closer to the window. It looked like Stubbs was going to get his arrest in time to impress the disciplinary tribunal. Presumably the fact that the Lark victim had been shot justified the military response. But the body language indicated a certain lack of tension. It looked more like a training exercise than the arrest of an armed killer.
A police car, with standard jam-sandwich markings, drew up and blocked off the top end of the street. Its blue light flashed silently.
Meanwhile, in the back kitchen of No. 29 Cherry Street, George Parker Warren was placing his second egg in the frying pan and considering with some satisfaction the fact that the teapot had now been brewing for nearly eight minutes. Perfect. Or nearly so. Another minute perhaps? The local water was hard and the tea needed time to brew. He lit a cigarette.
The tip-toeing police tortoise had stopped immediately outside.
In the kitchen George Parker Warren, retired car thief and occasional mechanic, poured his tea and reflected that despite the recent death of his beloved wife, Rebecca – there had been little hope after she had started drinking the Brasso – he could still look after himself.
It was just the loneliness really. Company. That’s what he missed. Nobody ever seemed to drop round now Rebecca had gone. He’d had a few days in hospital recently to fix his bladder and he’d rather enjoyed it. Surrounded by people, even if they were sick people. He stared at the clock they’d bought together on their honeymoon at Skegness. It ticked and echoed in the empty house.
‘Company,’ he said out loud, and sipped his tea. He even missed prison – at least the food was good.
The phalanx of padded policemen wheeled expertly with miniature Japanese steps to face George’s front door.
There was a silence in which George sensed something. Had someone knocked? He went out into the hall. Silence. Imagination was a funny thing, he thought, feeling better.