by John Harvey
Despite herself, Lynn smiled. “Interrogation? Is that what this is?”
“Yeh. What else d’you call it?”
“It’s just a chat.”
“You mean, I could get up and go?”
“No.”
“Then I should have someone here, right?”
“Social services’ve been informed.”
“Bollocks to that. I want a brief.”
“As soon as one can be found.”
“Then I’m not sayin’ another thing till he comes.”
“Just tell me about the money.”
“What about it?”
“Where it came from?”
Martin squinted up his eyes. “You know where you found me, right?”
“You got it on the Forest?”
“Yeh, grows on trees.”
Caught her! Lynn sat on her hands, staring at the ceiling. Grinning, Martin let his chair rock forward and then slowly folded his arms across the table and lowered his head. Fourteen, Lynn thought, fourteen and he must have been in this situation half a hundred times. She tried to think of the worst thing she might have done, growing up on her parents’ poultry farm in Norfolk, by the time she was fourteen. The front of Martin’s hair had fallen forward across his wrist and she could see the back of his neck, narrow and exposed. She wondered whereabouts along the line the caring had stopped, the real caring; how long it had been since anyone, any adult, had held him, touched him in anything other than anger or sexual need? From the shift in his breathing she thought he might be asleep.
It was less than ten minutes later that he stirred and opened his eyes. “Ambergate, you’re goin’ to send me back there, right?”
Lynn nodded. “Right.”
Resnick had spoken briefly to the senior registrar in neurosurgery; Doris Netherfield was still in the operating theater and it was impossible to determine with any certainty which way it would go. Up to the present, Doris was just about holding her own, that was the best she could say. They had contacted her immediate family, who were on their way.
Resnick thanked the registrar and went down to the ward.
Sitting beside Eric Netherfield’s bed, Divine was browsing through the pages of yesterday’s Today.
“Spark out, boss,” Divine said, on his feet and gesturing down.
“Did he say anything?”
“Kept asking about his missus, that were all.”
“Okay, get along home. I’ll want you in first thing.”
“You’re sure, ’cause I don’t mind …”
“No, hop it. I’ll just hang on here a minute, have a word with the doctor, whoever’s on duty.”
Divine didn’t need telling a third time.
It was the staff nurse who was in charge, a bright-eyed young woman in a bright-blue uniform, to Resnick’s eyes, improbably young. “We gave him something for the pain,” she said, “poor old boy. I’m hoping he’ll sleep as long as he can.”
“I’ll not disturb him,” Resnick said.
There was a bandage round Eric Netherfield’s head, light patches around it where the hair had been shaved away. The arm that poked from the end of borrowed pyjamas was shiny and gray. Resnick was thinking about the last time he had seen his own father alive.
“Did you want a cup of tea?” the staff nurse said from behind him.
Resnick took it and sat beside the bed, listening to the old man’s halting, stubborn breath. He had sat, virtually alone, in a side ward with his father, thirty-six hours, watching the occasional movement of the older man’s mouth, each gasp of air into his damaged lungs like rust scraping against rust. “Go home,” the sister had said. “Get some rest. We’ll call you if there’s any change.” When the phone rang somewhere between four and five, the change had been that his father was dead. It was the hour those calls had come ever since.
Resnick was finishing the tea, about to leave, when Netherfield spoke. “Doris,” he said, his voice barely audible, little more than a croak.
“She’s all right,” Resnick said. “She’s being looked after. She’ll be fine.”
“She did it for me,” Eric said. “She were protecting me.”
“I know.”
The man stretched out the fingers of his hand and Resnick placed his own between them, leaning close over him, smelling his old man’s smell.
“The person who did this …” Resnick began.
“A lad, nothing but a lad.”
Resnick was about to ask more, but Netherfield’s head had slipped a little to one side and his eyes were closed. His fingers, long and bony, were tight around Resnick’s hand. As the sound of the old man’s breathing steadied down, Resnick continued to sit, arm at an awkward angle, unable to move.
After several minutes the staff nurse came along and freed Resnick’s hand, slipping the old man’s fingers beneath the edge of the sheet.
“You can go now.” She smiled.
Resnick hesitated, waiting for her to add, we’ll call you if there’s any change.
The litter of half-smoked cigarettes in the ashtray at Brian Noble’s side had grown to the edge of overflowing, though, in truth, he didn’t smoke. Rarely, at least. Occasionally, after a meal. He looked at his watch and, again, counted the patches on the opposite wall where the paint had begun to flake away. Shifted awkwardly on the hard seat. Got up, sat down.
“Surely you aren’t intending to charge me?” he asked, and Sharon stared back at him, eyebrow raised.
“But whatever with?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “It’s difficult. So many possibilities, you know what I mean?” She shrugged. “Gross indecency, that’s the usual, isn’t it? That’d be a start.”
“Look, my wife …”
“Oh, yes.” Sharon grinned. “There’s usually one of those.” He demanded to make a phone call and dialed his own number, hanging up at the first ring.
“No one else you want to try?”
“No. Thank you.”
And then they kept him sitting there, looking in from time to time, uniformed officers mainly, once to offer him a hot drink, once a sandwich that was stale, occasionally a head would poke round the door and stare and disappear.
When Sharon came back it was with a lamb kebab inside pita bread. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s been a busy night.”
Noble said nothing.
Sharon held out the kebab towards him but Noble shook his head.
“Not hungry?”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
She looked at him quizzically. “You don’t like meat?”
“That’s right.”
She was still looking at him, a smile at the comers of her mouth. “You surprise me.” Sharon picked up a cube of lamb with her fingers and lifted it to her mouth.
“Please,” Noble said, “tell me …?”
“What?”
“What you’re … what you’re going to do?”
“With you?”
Noble looked up at her and then away; he couldn’t stand the mixture of contempt and mockery in her eyes.
“Did you read,” Sharon asked, “about that boy? They found him in a wood down near Bristol, a week or so ago? What was left of him. It was on the news, remember? Nine, wasn’t he? Nine years old.”
“Look,” Noble said, alarmed, “I don’t know why you’re telling me this. That’s nothing to do with me. Nothing at all. There’s no …”
“Comparison?”
“No.”
Sharon sat on the corner of the table and crossed her legs, one high above the other. “You’re not a pedophile, is that what you’re saying?”
“Of course I’m not!”
“No,” Sharon said. “You just like sex with young boys.”
Resnick had driven back to the station by way of the Netherfield house. So far, there was no indication that any of the adjacent properties had been broken into. It had been a one-off.
Back in his office, coffee brewing, he was placing a call to the hospit
al when Lynn Kellogg knocked on his door.
“Not quite ready yet,” Resnick said, indicating the coffee machine.
Lynn smiled, a tired smile, there for a moment and then gone.
“The Hodgson youth,” Resnick said, “you’ve got him back in custody.”
She nodded.
“Well done.”
“Earlier this evening, he was hanging out with Aasim Patel and Nicky Snape.”
Resnick’s interest quickened. He knew the Snape family well. Shane, the eldest, he’d arrested on a charge of aggravated burglary; the last time he had talked to Norma it had been about Nicky, just a day or two before the lad had been fire-bombed in a vigilante attack.
“Nicky wasn’t with him then, up on the Forest?”
“Apparently not. There was some kind of argument by the sound of it. Last he saw of Nicky, he was setting off for home.”
Resnick didn’t even need to look at the map. If you drew a straight line from the Forest Recreation Ground to Radford, it would pass right through where the Netherfields lived.
First light was filtering up above the rooftops when Millington and Naylor arrived, Graham Millington, with a broad grin, holding aloft a narrow object secured inside two plastic bags.
“Kevin here found it. Dustbin, two streets off.”
It was the length of iron railing from beside Eric Netherfield’s bed.
Ten
Resnick caught a couple of hours’ sleep in his office, chair pushed back, legs forcing a space for themselves among the reports and memos that littered his desk. When he woke it was to the sound of Graham Millington clattering the kettle and treating the otherwise empty CID room to a muted rendition of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”
Resnick had his first mug of tea in his hand before realizing that the phone had failed to ring: Doris Netherfield had survived the night.
“What’s all this I hear about Serious Crimes?” Millington asked, lighting only his second Lambert and Butler of the day. The expression of unalloyed martyrdom that Madeleine assumed if ever he dared to smoke at home was no longer anything he could bear to watch.
“Going on around us, Graham, all the time.”
Millington narrowed his eyes through the spiraling cigarette smoke: what the hell was the boss doing, cracking jokes at this hour of the morning? He presumed it had been meant as a joke.
“You know what I’m on about,” Millington said, “this new Serious Crimes Unit.”
Resnick sighed. “Yes, and the answer is, I don’t know a whole lot more than you.”
“But if you were to guess?”
“I’d reckon it’ll get as far as finance, someone will throw a fit about resourcing new office space, extra personnel, and it’ll get lost on its way back to the drawing board.”
Even as the words were being spoken, Resnick wasn’t certain how far he believed them; but neither did he want to face the ramifications the establishing of the squad might have for his career. And not solely his own, Millington’s as well.
Divine and Naylor arrived within moments of each other, Divine chirpier than the bags beneath his eyes suggested. “Tea mashed, then, Sarge?” he said, reaching for his favorite mug, decorated with a fading cartoon about rugby players and odd-shaped balls.
As usual, Naylor was quiet, easy even among four people to forget that he was there. It was a characteristic that, in the right circumstances, made him the good detective he could be.
Millington caught Resnick’s glance towards his watch. “Uniform backup?” he asked.
Resnick shook his head. “Let’s not start World War Three, Graham. It’s only one youth, after all.”
A sardonic smile played round the edges of Millington’s mouth. “Well, that’s okay then, i’n’t it? Piece of piss.”
In his panic to get away from the Netherfields’ house, Nicky hadn’t even realized the iron railing was still in his hand. Quickly, he had dumped it in the nearest bin and continued to run. Only when he was within sight of his own home did he stop, chest tight, tears stinging his eyes. Only then did he consider the blood that was splashed across his clothes and staining his face and hands. No way he could go in like that, no way. Backtracking, he climbed into a garden and took two towels from the line, leaned against a wall deep in shadow and rubbed at his skin, his shirt, and jeans. It was still likely that if he went home now someone would be up: Sheena, listening to Blur and looking at some stupid magazine; Shane slumped down in front of a video, Jean Claude Van Damme or Bruce Lee; his mum, sewing buttons back on Shane’s shirts or lost in a world of her own, reading one of her trashy romances, Mills and sodding Bloom.
Keeping clear of main roads, quick to cross away from any passersby, Nicky walked and walked, trying not to think about what might happen, what had happened, what he would do if the man or the old woman died.
When he finally turned his key in the front door, legs aching, it was gone two. All of the lights in the house were out. Quick to slip off his boots, Nicky was on his way to the stairs when he heard a muffled groan from the front room: slowly undulating shapes stretched along the settee; his brother was shagging Sara Johnson yet again.
On another occasion, Nicky would have stayed there and watched, but now there were more pressing things. In the bath-room he locked the door before switching on the light.
Jesus Christ!
He might have thought that black wouldn’t have shown the stains so clearly, but there was no denying them, thick patches that seemed to have been thrown across his shirt and T-shirt as if he had ridden a mountain bike fast through mud. More across the top of his jeans. And the blood was not only smeared across his skin, it was sticking to his hair. Nicky stripped to his underpants and socks; took off the socks. He thought about rinsing the shirt out in the sink, letting the jeans, perhaps, soak in the bath, but realized there was too little time and anyway, it would never work. He fetched a bin liner from the kitchen and bundled the clothes inside. First thing in the morning, he would get them good and lost. Burn them, that was the thing.
Oh, shit! Footsteps on the stairs. The door handle turned but didn’t give.
“Hang on a minute,” Nicky said.
“Nicky?” Shane’s voice. “That you?”
“Yeh, I shan’t be long.”
“What the fuck you doin’ in there?”
“What d’you think?”
Nicky waited until his brother had walked away before returning to the sink. At least the water was still hot. He found an old scrubbing brush beside the bath and lathered it with soap. He would have to wash his face, clean between his fingers, beneath his nails, shampoo his hair. As he looked into the reddening water, he saw the woman’s gray head breaking below him, felt the impact of the blows reverberating back along his arms. Who’d have thought the old girl had as much blood in her as this?
Why didn’t he run? Take whatever money was in the house, what he had himself and run. A bus to Manchester, Glasgow, London, anywhere. He could lose himself in London, knew kids who had. Kids who came back with stories of money and crack, of picking up punters on Victoria Station or at Funland in Leicester Square. Doing the kind of stuff Martin Hodgson would have been out doing last night. At the back of his throat, Nicky felt himself beginning to retch. The sensible thing was to stay here. Bugger off and they’ll take that as telling them, fair and square, sticking two and two in their hands and saying, right, what’s that? No, the thing to do was stay cool, get rid of the clothes, go to school.
Just as his mum was getting up, Nicky fell fast off, sucking at his thumb.
Norma was down in the kitchen when the cars arrived, two of them, Naylor and Divine, hurrying round to the back to cut off any possible escape. If she heard them, taking the carton of milk from the fridge, she gave no sign. Sitting down here with a cigarette, quiet, a fag and a cup of tea was the best part of the day.
First up the path, Resnick stood aside, allowing Millington to ring the bell and knock. The sergeant paused, then rang the bell again.
>
“Bloody hell! Who’s this?” But Norma, padding to the front door in her slippers, knew whoever it was, the news would not be good. Seeing the two men standing there, Resnick, whom she recognized, Norma felt a sudden pain fire, sharp, across her chest.
“Your Nicky,” Millington said. “Is he in?”
“Of course he’s bloody in.” But she was not looking at Millington, but at Resnick, trying to read the expression in his eyes.
“You can see where it’s heading, Norma. Clear as I can myself.” Resnick’s words, the last time he had been to her house.
“What d’you want him for?” Norma asked.
“One or two questions,” Millington told her, “about what he was up to last night.”
“Last night he was here,” Norma said, “along of me, all evening.” It was a response as automatic as drawing breath.
“I think we’d best ask him that,” Millington said.
Norma stood her ground, not knowing what to do.
Resnick shifted half a pace towards the doorway. “Norma, I think maybe you should let us in, don’t you?”
Millington wandered off into the front room and then the kitchen, while Resnick stood with Norma near the foot of the stairs.
“He’s still in bed, then?”
“’Course he bloody is.”
Resnick set his hand upon the banister and she took hold of his wrist. “You call him, then, Norma. Fetch him down.”
At the edge of his eyeline, Millington had reappeared, slowly shaking his head.
“Norma,” Resnick prompted.
Heavy, she turned and called Nicky’s name; set her foot upon the stairs and called again.
In his room, Nicky was instantly awake and throwing back the clothes.
“Nicky, it’s the police.”
He grabbed a pair of old jeans and was still pulling them on as he threw up the window and scrambled out onto the sloping roof above what had once been the outside lavatory.
“Nicky!”
First Resnick, and then Millington, elbowed past Norma and took the stairs at a run.
Nicky slithered down the steeply angled roof, dislodging tiles as he went. One of his hands caught at the old iron guttering and it broke. Twisting as best he could, Nicky half-jumped, half-fell and then he was away, jumping the old rabbit hutch and vaulting the gate, straight into Divine’s arms where the detective waited behind the wall.
