Judgement Call (12 page)

The next few minutes were spent trying to put his feet into a pair of trainers.

He hit the door jamb on the way out and slammed against the wall opposite. At the top of the stairs he gripped the handrail tightly and looked at the steep, narrow steps, realizing that he could not safely walk down them. He lowered himself carefully onto his bottom, going for the safe option, one step at a time.

Whilst still working this out, the door to his housemate's bedroom creaked open and Henry blinked. For the second night in a row, the landlady stepped out naked. She spotted Henry, who stared fuzzily at her. She came to the banister and leaned over, allowing her breasts to sway a couple of feet away from his face. Their graceful movement hypnotized him for a moment.

His right hand dithered, wanting to reach out and touch them.

‘Henry Christie,' she cooed. ‘What's going on?'

‘Uh … dunno … gotta do summat,' he slurred.

This time she deliberately made her breasts hover above him by leaning a little further forward. His jaw sagged. She giggled.

‘What about us?' she asked.

Henry, who could hardly keep his head from lolling like a nodding dog on the back shelf of a car, muttered something incomprehensible, pushed himself off the top step and shot down the stairs like he was riding a toboggan. He hit the hallway with a heavy thump and crumbled before sitting up, groaning.

‘Hell fire, you idiot!' the landlady shrieked.

‘I'm all right.' He took a few breaths, then forced himself up to his feet and headed to the front door, exiting with a crash.

Outside, the night was cool. Henry stood in the middle of the street and said, ‘Right,' and set off down the uneven cobbles to the main road. He had left his car in the pub car park. He knew he had to get to it, needed to drive it and, very urgently, see Kate.

In his extremely inebriated state, this all seemed eminently logical to him.

A
t three in the morning the roads of Rossendale were virtually bereft of other vehicles, including prowling or parked-up cop cars. This was a fortunate statistic for Henry as he raced through the valley at the wheel of his beat-up ten-year old Morris Marina coupé with the exhaust blowing, concentrating hard – as only a drunk driver could – and getting it completely wrong almost every foot of the way.

He truly believed he was driving just under the speed limit for whichever stretch of the highway he was travelling along. Twenty-eight in a thirty zone, thirty-nine in a forty. In truth he exceeded the limit all the way, but his dreamy drunken state slowed everything down for him. Once or twice he did try to read the speedo but found it hard to focus, though he was certain the needle hovered around the correct speed.

He was also certain he drove correctly and accurately, positioning his car perfectly in the straights and in the corners, but he did wonder what the bang was at one point when he – unwittingly – drifted wide on a bend and skimmed the kerb. He ricocheted off and the steering wheel was ripped out of his grasp, but the incident registered only vaguely.

That he completed his fairly short journey without demolishing roadside furniture or powering headfirst into a lamppost and killing himself was little short of a miracle.

But such is often the case with drunk drivers.

Unless they got stopped, either by a police patrol or something harder than their car, they usually managed to complete their journey in one piece and either experienced guilt-ridden reflection or the opposite and wondered what all the fuss was about.

However, Henry made it unscathed, didn't kill anyone or damage anything, pulling up outside Kate's house in a leafy avenue in Helmshore, a village on the eastern edge of Haslingden. He thought he had parked magnificently, not realizing he had put three wheels on the grass verge.

Moments later he was pounding desperately on the front door with tears streaming down his face, sobbing uncontrollably as he hammered away.

Sequentially, the house lights came on.

Kate lived with her parents, Bert and Elsie, in a big detached house and her mother and father slept in the front, bay-windowed bedroom. That was the first light that came on, followed by a twitch of the curtains and a white face at the window. Kate's mum looked down fearfully, knowing that an early hours knock rarely brought good news. She moved out of the way and allowed her husband to look down at the pathetic figure below, who he recognized instantly.

‘What the hell's he doing?' he said.

Bert Marsden had met Henry on a few occasions and had no particular affection for him. Intuitively he fixed him as a fickle young man with questionable social skills, no charm whatsoever, and clearly nowhere near good enough for his one and only daughter. She deserved someone better. A banker or an accountant, he had suggested reasonably to Kate, rather than a rough-edged, overconfident and rude cop with probably no chance of any career advancement and only after one thing: his daughter's body.

‘He'll never make a detective as long as he's got a hole where the sun don't shine,' he guffawed when Kate had revealed Henry's aspirations to him. ‘And I know people,' he said, sticking a finger in his own chest. ‘Not remotely impressed,' he added, lips curled with condescension.

Henry staggered back from the door and looked up at the figures in the window.

Bert opened one and leaned out. ‘What do you want? Do you know what time it is?'

‘Kate, Kate, I wanna see Kate,' Henry babbled. Unfortunately looking upwards and tilting his head back caused him to lose his balance.

He teetered backwards even further, uncoordinated, and the back of his knees hit the lip of a large terracotta flower pot and he tipped over spectacularly, ending up splayed out on the lawn like a huge beached starfish.

‘He's pissed,' Bert said. ‘Would you believe it, he's bloody pissed.'

Kate's room was at the back of the house. Her light, followed by the landing light, came on. She had been roused by the knocking and general commotion and, pulling her dressing gown around tightly, she came into her parents' bedroom, still drowsy with sleep.

‘What's going on, Dad?'

Mr Marsden spun aggressively. ‘What's going on? There's a bloody drunken imbecile at the front door, that's what.'

‘Dear, it's Henry,' Kate's mother interceded. Unlike her husband, she had a bit of a soft spot for him.

‘Henry? Let me see.'

Kate pushed past her mother and nudged her father out of the way in order to lean out of the window to see Henry still flat on his back on the lawn. The overturned plant pot explained the scenario.

‘Henry?'

He raised his head and pathetically said, ‘Yes.'

With a mutter and shake of her head, Kate moved back into the bedroom and rushed past her parents.

‘I told you he was no good,' her father called smugly, as if all his dreams had come true and Henry was acting in the way he knew was the real Henry.

‘Dad,' Kate shot back despairingly, ‘he might've hurt himself.'

‘We can but hope,' he muttered.

The three nightwear-clad members of the family trooped downstairs to the front door. Kate let herself out to tend to Henry, who was attempting to sit up, but somehow his hands kept slipping from under him on the damp grass, and he thudded back to earth.

Kate swooped down next to him.

‘Henry, are you all right?'

‘Kate, is that you?'

‘Yes, it's me, Henry.' She leaned over and wafted away the reek of alcohol on his breath and also glanced at his car, parked at an acute angle on the grass verge. ‘Have you driven here?'

‘I … I don't know … have I?'

‘Oh God,' she moaned. ‘Come on, let's get you up, come on …' She took an arm and pulled him upright, then limb by limb up onto his feet, catching him as he lost balance again and almost went over. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I dunno … I just thought,' he said. ‘Something … I thought …'

Kate realized that nothing coherent was going to leave Henry's mouth. She took a firm grip of his bicep and steered him up to the house where her father waited at the door scowling, as though she was bringing in a dead rat, and her mother watched wide-eyed.

Henry greeted them in an avuncular way, warmly and with the misplaced courtesy of a drunk.

‘You're not bringing
that
in here, are you?' Kate's father demanded.

She stopped Henry, but whilst his feet came to a standstill, the top half of his body swayed dangerously. ‘Yes I am,' she said firmly and the older man backed off. ‘He's my boyfriend.' Her right hand delved into Henry's jeans pocket and found his car keys which she handed with aplomb to her father. ‘He's had a spot of bother parking. Can you just straighten up his car for him? It's a bit skew-whiff.'

‘I'm in my pyjamas.'

‘And?'

Henry wavered precariously. Kate caught him and propelled him past her parents. He grinned lopsidedly at them and said, ‘Hi, Mum and Dad, mister and missus … thingy …'

Kate kept him going, down the hallway and up the stairs. Getting him up them was a gruelling event in itself and, almost exhausted by heaving and manoeuvring him, Kate eventually managed to drag him into the main bathroom.

He stood stupidly in front of her, his head lolling, his mouth snarling a terrifying grin as though he had no control of his facial features and had been injected with a muscle relaxant. In some ways, he had.

‘Kaaaaate,' he said.

‘Let's get you in the shower,' she said, business-like.

‘Right – good idea.'

He suddenly leaned forwards and planted a messy wet kiss on her cheek. ‘I think I'm a bit drunk.'

‘Really?' She nodded and pushed him away.

He tried to focus on her, but her face, rather like the door handle he'd tried to stare at earlier, kept rising upwards in a hazy cloud.

‘I really, really, really, love ya,' he said. ‘I mean, sherioushly love yeh.'

Then his stomach heaved.

Kate saw it coming, whirled him around and forced him down onto his knees by the toilet and, more or less, caught all the vomit.

‘I love you too,' she said quietly, ‘you daft big lug.' She rubbed his back tenderly as he threw up once more, then farted. Kate giggled.

It wasn't a great sleep. Some of it was the darkest he had ever been in. A swirling black hole, unsettled and uncomfortable, and he shifted about on the bed remorselessly, sometimes blabbing, other times just moaning until eventually, as the alcohol was broken down by his overworked liver, sleep came proper.

His eyes flickered open as his head started to pound densely and then a searing pain volleyed up behind his eyeballs as though someone was performing an ice-pick lobotomy on the frontal lobe of his brain.

He held the soft part of his hands against his eyes then gradually peeled them away to check out exactly where he was. For a moment, he was unsure, then his memory came back – and he groaned with shame. Henry was never one to claim he could not remember what had happened when drunk. He knew more or less what had happened up to the point where he had been led, staggering, out of the bathroom into Kate's bedroom … it was only then that things got unclear.

He knew he was now in Kate's bed. Naked. He lifted the duvet and looked down at his body, slim, muscled, tanned from a recent week in Majorca, but as he wafted the cover he could tell he hadn't had the shower that had been mentioned. The body odour was not great.

He allowed the duvet to fall back into place and then lay unmoving, terrified that if he lifted his head, the back of his skull would fall off.

When the bedroom door opened he kept staring at the ceiling until the person who had entered the room came into his arc of vision.

Kate loomed over him.

‘Morning,' she said quietly, ‘or should I say, afternoon?'

‘You're joking.'

‘No – it's twelve-thirty. PM.'

‘Oh God – work!'

‘Don't worry, fixed it. I got Terry to report you sick. Bad tummy.' Terry was one of Henry's partners on the crime car.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘What about you? Shouldn't you be at work?'

‘I'm sick, too. Bad tummy,' she fibbed.

‘You shouldn't have.'

Kate perched on the edge of the bed and touched Henry's face with cool fingertips.

‘Sorry,' he said weakly.

‘My dad, bless him, is outraged.'

‘So he should be. What an arse. Me, not him.'

Kate looked at him. ‘What was it all about?'

Henry snorted a laugh. ‘Sudden, overwhelming realization, I guess.'

‘Magnified a hundred times by drink,
I
guess.'

‘There's always that,' he conceded.

She leaned over and kissed him, then drew away with her lovely nose screwed up. ‘You whiff,' she said. ‘I was going to dunk you in the shower but it seemed like too much hard work, so I bundled you into bed instead.'

‘And stripped me naked.'

‘I liked that bit.'

‘I might have done, too, but the memory's a bit blank from the toilet fart onwards.'

‘Do you want that shower now? I think you need it. Then some food and drink down you?'

‘Yeah, yeah.'

Henry had not spent much time in Kate's parents' house. Occasional evenings watching TV and that was about it. Because he could keenly sense her dad's disapproval of him, he didn't ever feel comfortable or welcome, so most of his private courting of Kate took place back at his rented house or in the car, or in pubs in the Rossendale area. He had certainly never spent the night – or any time – in her bed and had never been in the shower.

Which was amazing. The most powerful, hottest shower he had ever stood under, putting the weedy electrical trickle thing in his own bathroom to shame.

He stood under it for a long time, revelling in the force of the jets drilling against his skin, whilst at the same time cringing inwardly at his recall of the night before.