Authors: John Harvey
That last a confidence Jack Waites had imparted the night before, when he and Resnick had met for a pint to chew over old times, Jack once a young PC, stationed at Canning Circus under Resnick’s command.
‘He was never the easiest bloke to get on with,’ Jack said, ‘the best of times. My old man.’
Resnick nodded. ‘Maybe not.’
They were drinking at the Black Bull in Bolsover, the local pub in Bledwell Vale long boarded up; the village itself now mostly derelict, deserted: only a few isolated buildings and the terrace of former Coal Board houses in which Peter Waites had spent most of his adult life still standing.
‘You should’ve lived with him,’ Jack Waites said. ‘Then you’d know.’
‘You didn’t come out of it so bad.’
‘No thanks to him.’
‘That’s harsh, lad. Now especially.’
Jack Waites shook his head. ‘No sense burying truth. It was my old lady pushed me on, got me to raise my sights. God rest her soul. He’d’ve dragged me down the pit the minute I got out of school, else. And then where’d I be? Out of work and drawing dole like every other poor bastard these parts. That or working in a call centre on some jerry-built industrial estate in the middle of bloody nowhere.’
Less than twenty-four hours back and you could hear the local accent resurfacing like rusted slippage in his voice.
No sense arguing, Resnick raised his glass and drank. There was truth, some, in what Jack Waites was saying, his father obdurate and unyielding as the coalface at which he’d laboured the best part of thirty years until, after strike action that had staggered proudly on for twelve months and come close to tearing the country apart, the pit had finally been closed down.
Resnick had first met Peter Waites in the early days of the strike, and somehow, despite their differences, they’d gone on to become friends. Waites’ one of the strongest voices raised in favour of staying out, one of the loudest at the picket line, anger and venom directed towards those who would have gone back to work.
‘Scab! Scab! Scab!’
‘Out! Out! Out!’
Recently made up to inspector, Resnick had been running an intelligence gathering team, its function to obtain information about the principal movers and shakers in the strike, assess the volume of local support, keep tabs, as far as possible, on any serious escalation. Right from the earliest days, the first walkouts, the Nottinghamshire pits had been the least militant, the most likely to drag their feet, and Peter Waites and a few others had shouted all the louder in an attempt to bring them into line.
Around them, tempers flared: fists were raised, windows broken, things were thrown. Resnick thought it was time he had a word.
‘Bloody hell!’ Waites had exclaimed when Resnick – battered trilby, raincoat belted tight; wet enough outside to launch the ark – had walked into his local and sought him out. ‘Takin’ a bit of a risk, aren’t you?’
‘Know who I am, then?’
‘Not the only one wi’ eyes in their backside.’
‘Good to hear it.’ Resnick stuck out his hand.
The men, five or six, who’d been standing with Waites by the bar, watched to see what he would do, only relaxing when he met that hand with his own.
‘My shout then,’ Resnick said.
‘Shippos all round in that case,’ said the man to Waites’ left. ‘Skint, us, you know. Out on strike. Or maybe you’d not heard?’
‘Fair enough,’ Resnick said.
One of the miners spat on the floor and walked away. The others stood their ground. Some banter, not all ill-humoured, and after another round bought and paid for, Waites and Resnick moved to a table in the corner, all eyes watching.
‘It’ll not work, tha’ knows.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You and me, heads together. Makin’ it look like I’m in your pocket. Some kind of blackleg bloody informer, pallin’ up with a copper. That what this is about? Me losing face? ’Cause if it is, your money’s gone to waste an’ no mistake.’
Resnick shook his head. ‘It’s not that.’
‘What then?’
‘More a word of warning.’
‘Warning!’ Waites bristled. ‘You’ve got the brazen balls …’
‘The way things are going, more and more lads coming down from South Yorkshire, swelling your picket line …’
‘Exercising their democratic right …’
‘To what? Put bricks through folks’ windows? Set cars alight?’
‘That’s not happened here.’
‘No, maybe not yet. But it will.’
‘Not while I’ve a say in things.’
‘Listen.’ Resnick put a hand on Waites’ arm. ‘Things escalate any more, pickets going from pithead to pithead mob-handed, what d’you think’s going to happen? Think they’re going to leave all that for us to deal with on our own? Local? Reinforcements enough from outside already and either you back off some or they’ll be shipping ’em in from all over. Devon and Cornwall. Hampshire. The Met.’ He shook his head. ‘The Met coming in, swinging a big stick – that what you want?’
Waites fixed him with a stare. ‘It’s one thing to walk in here, show your face – that I can bloody respect. But to come in here and start making threats …’
‘No threat, Peter. Just the way things are.’
Light for a big man, Resnick was quick to his feet. Waites picked up his empty glass, turned it over and set it back down hard.
As Resnick walked to the door the curses fell upon him like rain.
The church interior was chilly and cold: distempered walls, threadbare hassocks and polished pews; a Christ figure above the altar with sinewed limbs, a crimped face and vacant, staring eyes. ‘Abide with Me’. The vicar’s words, extolling a man who had loved his community more than most, a husband and a father, fell hollow nonetheless. A niece, got up in her Sunday best, read, voice faltering into silence, a poem she had written at school. The former miner who’d ridden with Resnick in the car remembered himself and Peter Waites starting work the same day at the pit, callow and daft the pair of them, waiting for the cage to funnel them down into the dark.
Resnick had imagined Jack Waites would bring himself to speak but instead he remained resolutely seated, head down. With some shuffling of feet, the congregation stood to sing the final hymn and the pall-bearers moved into position.
As they stepped outside, following the coffin out into the air, it was the dead man’s voice Resnick heard, an evening when they’d sat in his local, not so many years before, Waites snapping the filter from the end of his cigarette before stubbornly 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 grave, I don’t give a toss.’
That bloody woman: Margaret Thatcher. The one person, in Peter Waites’ eyes, most responsible for bringing the miners down. After the strike had been broken, he could never bring himself to say her name. Not even when he raised a glass in her hated memory the day she died.
‘Says it all, eh, Charlie? Dead in her bed in the fuckin’ Ritz.’
Resnick’s feet, following the coffin, left heavy indentations in the snow.
A blackbird, unconcerned, pecked hopefully at the frozen ground close by the open grave. Out beyond the cemetery wall, the land offered no angles to the sky.
As the coffin was lowered, a small group of men who’d kept their own company since before the service began to unfold a banner, the red, black and gold of the NUM, the National Union of Mineworkers.
‘What’s all this?’ Jack Waites said angrily. ‘What the bloody hell d’you think you’re doing?’
‘What’s it look like?’ one of the men replied.
‘You tell me.’
‘Honouring a comrade.’
‘Honouring be buggered! Not here, you’re bloody not.’
‘Dad,’ Waites’ eldest said, pulling at his sleeve. ‘Dad, don’t.’
Waites shrugged him off. ‘Wanted to honour him, should’ve done it when he was still alive. Out of work thirty years near enough, poor bastard, after your union helped bring the industry to its bloody knees …’
‘Don’t talk so bloody daft.’
‘Daft? Course you bloody did. You and Scargill, arrogant bastard that he was, delivering up the miners on a sodding plate and you were all too blind to see.’
‘I’d watch my mouth if I were you,’ another of the union men said, showing a fist.
‘Yes? Where is he now, then, Scargill, tell me that? In the lap of luxury in some fancy flat in London while your union pays out more’n thirty thousand a year for his rent, and has done since God knows when. And my old man, all that time, scraightin’ out a living in some one-time Coal Board house as was fallin’ apart round his ears. And you want to raise a fucking banner in his honour …’
‘Jack,’ Resnick said, moving towards him, ‘let it be.’
‘I can only thank Christ,’ the union man said, spitting out his words, ‘your father’s in his grave, ’cause if he weren’t, hearing you’d make him shrivel up and die of shame.’
‘Fuck off!’ Waites said, his voice shaking. ‘Fuck right off, the lot of you!’ There were tears in his eyes. Both his sons had turned aside.
The union men stood their ground before backing away and resting their banner against the cemetery wall, some small distance off; the snow falling only fitfully now, sad moultings curling slowly down.
Resnick weighed a handful of earth carefully against his palm, then opened his fingers and let it darkly fall.
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