Read Online This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham - Free Book Online Page B

as alien to him now as the first explorer on Mars.
    ‘It’s cleaner than I thought,’ he says. ‘I thought the tenants would have trashed the place. Always assumed they would.’
    He rests his hand on a radiator, which is somewhat warm. In the kitchen, he swings open the fridge door. There’s milk there. Fresh milk. And butter, cheese, bacon, some orange juice. In the cupboard, fresh boxes of cereal, bread, tinned beans, a few bits and pieces. Beers.
    His face turns to me, looking more pained than happy.
    ‘I’ve been in when I can,’ I say. ‘Cleaning up and stuff.’
    ‘You didn’t have a . . .’ he says, then remembers that I once burgled the place anyway, that I don’t always need keys.
    And then he just slumps down on a kitchen stool, face in hands. He cries silently, but his shoulders heave through his faded purple sweatshirt. I wonder if I’m meant to put my hands to him. Rest a hand on his neck, knead his shoulder muscles, something like that.
    I don’t. Just find a bottle opener, open a beer, push it his way. Go out to the car, get a joint from the boot.
    When I come back in, he’s stopped crying. He’s halfway down his first bottle. He holds a second out to me.
    ‘I don’t drink,’ I tell him. Show him my joint.
    He laughs. I light up.
    And then we sit there, in the cloister of his kitchen, him drinking, me smoking, and neither of us talking much.
    I ask him what he’ll do now.
    ‘Security work of some kind, I suppose. Don’t know if anyone will want to hire me, but being on the inside does give you a perspective. It does teach you stuff.’
    ‘Ask Watkins for a reference,’ I say. ‘She might give you one.’
    ‘Really?’
    The inquiry where Penry helped me from the inside was one of Watkins’s. She’s got fierce views about bent coppers, but this particular bent copper showed a fair bit of heroism in helping us out that time.
    ‘Worth a try.’
    We chat. Him about prison, me about my cases. Plas Du and Dunthinking’s damn Chicago.
    He drinks another beer, then goes up to shower. Comes down in a different pair of jeans, a different top.
    I’ve finished my joint and I’m getting bored.
    I say, ‘Brian, let’s just say you were a copper again. Say you’d never been to prison, that none of that stuff had ever happened.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘And let’s say you were on a case. A serious one. Murder, rape, something like that. If you started to believe that the investigation, although properly conducted, would never result in a successful prosecution, would you do anything about it? I don’t mean anything awful particularly, just – I don’t know – entering premises without a warrant, tracking a car, stuff like that.’
    ‘That stuff used to happen a lot. Half the time, it wasn’t even all that clever. First time I worked on a big case, they had this suspect in custody, bastard was definitely guilty but saying nothing. When I came in the next morning, the guy had a fractured cheekbone and we had a full confession in writing.’
    ‘Yes, but now. If it were you. And I’m not talking about hitting people.’
    ‘Now? But look, I have been to prison. That stuff changes you.’
    I leave it there.
    Don’t stay much longer. Drive out to Gower. To the churchyard where the security guard, Derek Moon, lies buried. A stone church with a low tower. Gravestones sloped against the wind. Grass shaggy in the spaces between.
    Moon’s grave is a good one. Simple carving. Welsh sandstone. Moss and lichens already claiming it. A deep fingernail’s worth of growth already in the cleft of that M, the curl of the Os. Someone has left a clutch of daffodils here at the graveside. Out of water and with an elastic band pinching the stems.
    I get a knife from my car – an ordinary kitchen knife, nothing special – and cut away the elastic band, take a couple of inches off the stems. Near the entrance to the churchyard, there’s a little set of open shelves, holding a few plastic vases, some basic