Easy Meat

by John Harvey

  “I don’t think,” Sheena said, doing her best to swerve past. “I know.”

  Norma grabbed the back of the jacket with one hand and swung her round. “So tell me.”

  Sheena gazed, not quite steady, not as steady as she would have liked to be, into her mother’s accusing eyes. “Dee-Dee,” she said. “That’s where. My friend, Dee-Dee, she lent it me. Right?”

  But before Norma could say anything more, Peter was in the doorway, three cans of Kestrel balanced one above the other on the palm of one hand. “Let’s sit down, eh? Have a drink.” Winking at Norma as he pushed one of the cans into her grudging hands; aiming a kiss at Sheena’s cheek, which she only partly managed to evade. “Nice evening, eh, sweetheart? Good time?”

  “I don’t think,” Sheena said, articulating over-carefully, “you should call me sweetheart.”

  “Oh, and why’s that then?”

  Sheena thought about it and after some consideration, decided that she didn’t know. She sat on the arm of the settee and wobbled just a little.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Norma said from the armchair beside the TV, “take that coat off indoors.”

  Sheena tried, but her arm got caught up in the sleeve and inexplicably, couldn’t get it free. Peter, finally, got up and helped her, Sheena starting again to laugh. Not laughing, really, giggling more like. “You’re not to call … you’re not to call …” Losing her balance, she began to topple backwards, legs kicking high in the air, arms flailing, till all she could do was collapse backwards against her father, Peter not strong enough to hold her, the pair of them sprawling on the carpet, sprawling and rolling until they ended up against the side wall, laughing and crying in each other’s arms.

  “For the Lord’s sake, give over, you pair of great nazzleheads!” Norma shouted, but soon she was laughing too, despite herself, wiping her sleeve across her eyes before trying to take too much of the lager down at one time, coughing then so bad she couldn’t see for the tears and Sheena had to hold her hands while Peter patted her back and whispered in her ear for her to get a grip.

  When it was over Sheena wandered off into the kitchen just in case there was any of the ice cream from Tesco left in the freezer, mint and chocolate.

  Peter switched on the TV and switched it back off, springing onto the settee with arms flung wide. “Let me call you sweetheart!” he sang at the top of his reedy voice. “You belong to me!”

  “Sit down, you great gillifer,” Norma called, “before you fall down.”

  Which he did, clean over the back of the settee onto his head. And came up singing. Norma and Sheena hauled him to his feet and pushed him down into a chair, Norma plumping herself in his lap, while Sheena sat across the room and spooned with exaggerated care around the tub of ice cream.

  “Sweetheart,” Peter whispered into Norma’s bosom and she clipped him none too seriously around the ear and told him to behave and anyway, if that was what he was after, he had another think coming.

  Which he did. And when Sheena finally got tired of sitting there, watching the pair of them pretending not to paw at one another, she sashayed out past them, her parting gesture to switch out the light.

  “Peter, not here …” Norma whispered.

  “In that case,” Peter said, “let’s away up to bed.”

  Oh, God, Norma thought, how long’s it been?

  She lay awake, Peter beside her sleeping like a baby, his mouth slightly open close to her breast. Tears that Norma would cry later she had held back for fear of waking him, having to explain what she herself could not understand.

  Whatever the deft magic of Peter’s hands, he had not lost it all this time away. He would tell her little or nothing about the years between, how he had come to look so downtrodden, so ill, so very thin. There was a curving scar, low on his chest, crisscross markings, faint, where the stitches had been removed. A bruise, old and yellow, which clung deep to his left thigh.

  Soft against her, Peter stirred and she stroked his head, what little remained of his hair soft it was, like a baby’s hair. Don’t let me think of Nicky, Norma prayed, don’t let me think of him. Nor of Michael, her lovely baby son.

  Don’t let me think of that.

  Not any of that.

  She turned, careful, onto her side and ran her other hand along Peter’s flank, his skinny buttock, the knobs of spine cresting his curving back. She rested her head towards his and closed her eyes, seeking sleep.

  Twenty-four

  The youth eyed the contents of the plate with suspicion. A sausage cob, more than a little mauled in transit, brown sauce sticking it to the skimpy paper napkin in which it had been wrapped.

  “What?” Divine said, no more yet than a hint of aggression. Push it, Resnick had said, push him a little.

  “What?” the youth said back. He could have been any age between seventeen and twenty-five and already he had admitted to both twenty-one and nineteen. His face was framed by a scrubby haze of beard, a few reddening pustules below his right cheek-bone, whiteheads massing above his nose and across his brow. There was a small gold ring through the upper part of his left ear. He was wearing a combat-type jacket, gray cotton trousers, several T-shirts, one above the other, the uppermost bearing the exhortation, Nuke the Whales!

  Alongside Divine, jacket unbuttoned, top button of his shirt unfastened above the knot of his woollen tie, Millington kept his counsel and said nothing.

  “That’s what you asked for, isn’t it?” Divine asked. “Sausage cob.”

  “Not like that.”

  “You don’t like the sauce or what? Don’t like the sauce, scrape it off.”

  “It’s nothing to do with the sauce, the sauce is fine.”

  “What then?”

  “Onions.”

  “What onions?”

  “Exactly.”

  Leaning forward, carefully using middle finger and thumb, Divine eased back the top half of the roll. “No onions.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Do you think,” Millington said, stirred to action, tapping the end of a Lambert and Butler on the surface of the table, “when all this culinary discussion is through, we could make a start?”

  “You going to eat that?” Divine, pointing at the cob. “Or not?”

  The youth shook his head.

  Sliding the plate towards him, Divine reopened the roll, picked up the folded sausage, dabbled it around in the wash of brown sauce, and, a defiant glint in his eyes, brought it to his mouth. “Last chance?” Too late, the sausage disappeared into his mouth, two, three bites and it was gone, all save for a nodule of gristle which he delicately extracted from between his teeth and deposited back inside the cob, the whole of which, napkin included, he tipped from the plate into the metal bin beside his chair, where it landed with a soft but satisfying thump.

  “This interview,” Millington said, having just switched on the tapes, “timed at two twenty-three. Present are Detective Sergeant Millington, Detective Constable Divine, and Mr. St. John.”

  Out of politeness, Divine stifled a belch.

  Millington leaned in a fraction more towards the youth. “State your full name.”

  “You know my name.”

  Oh God, Divine thought, he’s going to be one of those. Like the onions, all the way through.

  “Full name,” Millington said again.

  “John Anthony Lawrence St. John.”

  Divine choked back a snort.

  “Address?”

  “I have none.”

  “Address?”

  Just for a moment, light shone in the youth’s eyes. “Wherever I lay my hat is home.”

  Smart-arsed bastard, Divine thought.

  “Tell us,” Millington said encouragingly, “about where you laid your hat on Saturday night.”

  Reg Cossall and his team were diligently knocking on doors. So far they had been mistaken for Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, a succession of distant aunts and uncles, and supervisors from the cab
le-laying company who’d called to announce one of the workmen had put his spade through the electric again and the power would be off for the best part of an hour. Once problems of identification had been sorted out, they had generally received surprise, sympathy, a great deal of attention but no definite leads.

  “There was a noise, wasn’t there, Geoff? An awful kerfuffle. I remember we switched off the TV came out to have a look.” A big woman in her fifties, this, Cossall himself the caller, along with a young DC; their house, on the Embankment, backed onto the path near which Aston’s body had been found. “Geoff?” She seemed agitated, her hands in and out of the patch pockets of her red-and-green apron, her mind, maybe, half on whatever she had left simmering on the stove. “When was that, Geoff? Getting on for eleven o’clock is that when it was? About eleven o’clock?”

  Geoff appeared in the hallway, Telegraph splaying over his hand, part of it, glasses tripped to the end of his nose.

  “Yobs, that’s all they are. Plain and simple. It’s the same here every Saturday night now; come tipping out the pub, hooting and hollering and carrying on. And the kind of language they use, it beggars belief. But just yobs, nothing more. The sort your lot let have the run of the streets so the rest of us have to stay inside and lock our doors.”

  What, instead of boogying off down the disco, Cossall thought, swiveling the old lady’s hips around the floor? Couple of cherry brandies and whip her back home for a little of the old adagio on the living room carpet. He doubted if their carpet had seen more than lemon-scented shampoo and a good hoovering since it had first been laid.

  “And the time, sir,” Cossall asked. “Can you be a bit more precise?”

  “Like the wife said, in the region of eleven o’clock. Eleven thirty. You can check your Radio Times or whatever, Match of the Day that’s what was on. That Scottish fellow, Hansen, too much of a know-all for my liking. And you can’t understand half of what he says.”

  It was the same story all along: there had been a rowdy element fooling about on the Embankment between eleven and eleven thirty, but after that they had gone, made off across the playing fields towards the Meadows, several reports suggested. And good riddance. Two households mentioned a sports car revving its engine loudly at around midnight; one other seemed to recall hearing a motor bike with a faulty silencer. It could have been the same thing.

  What this first trawl failed to deliver was anything that tied in with the attack on Bill Aston: but this was only the beginning, Cossall knew that. Once the pubs had been leafleted, the local media had done their work, it would be different, he was certain. A man brutally attacked only a hundred yards from houses, little more than that from a busy main road, someone must have seen or heard something, it stood to reason.

  Suddenly it was warm. In Resnick’s office, at least. A large blue fly, lazy and fat, had woken from its long sleep and now buzzed the corners of the room, bumped with soft, persistent spats against the glass that looked out over nothing much.

  “This is everything? There’s nothing more?” Resnick dropped the last stapled sheaf of papers down among the rest.

  Khan responded to the implicit criticism by tugging at the cuffs of his shirt, sitting straighter in his chair. “The preliminary interviews, yes. Transcribed from tape.”

  “Preliminary? You were planning to interview some of these again?”

  “It was a contingency, sir, yes. If necessary.”

  “And?”

  Khan smoothed the palms of both hands along the tops of his legs; warm in there and he was starting to sweat. Soon, he thought, he would be able to smell it; how he hated that.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t fully understand what it is you’re asking,”

  “What I’m asking,” Resnick trying not to sound irritable, but doing so all the same, “is were there any definite plans, did Inspector Aston intend to speak again, officially, to any of these people?”

  Khan took his time; the fly, which had lain silent for a while, started up again. I shall either have to roll up that copy of the Post and kill it, Resnick thought, or prize open the window and let it out.

  “No sir,” Khan finally said. “Not that I was aware.”

  “No conclusions here as to why Nicky Snape took his life.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And no blame.”

  “Sir?”

  “No culpability attached to any of the staff. No blame.”

  “No, sir. That’s correct.”

  Is it, Resnick wondered? Maybe it is. At the fourth attempt he levered the lower half of the window far enough upwards and used the newspaper to shoo out the fly. “How do you feel about that? Did you feel everyone was being honest, telling the truth? Nothing to cover up?”

  Khan’s briefs were beginning to stick uncomfortably to his skin; he had to stop himself from easing his body up from the chair and pulling them free. “Inspector, I’m not sure …”

  “What I’m getting at?”

  “No, no. I think I understand that. But …”

  “But Bill Aston was a senior officer and he has just been tragically killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want to be thought of as disloyal.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Resnick pushed enough paper aside to make room on the side of his desk and sat looking at the young officer’s face; waiting for Khan to look at him.

  When he did, Resnick said, “In your own words, what this represents is the basis of a preliminary report. There’s nothing here to say that, had he lived, Inspector Aston would not have taken some of this farther. He mentioned to me, for instance, he thought supervision on the night of Nicky’s death might have been considered slack. Paul Matthews and Elizabeth Peck, I believe that’s right.”

  Khan nodded, yes.

  “You were present, at their interviews?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what was your feeling? Did you think they might have had anything to hide?”

  “Matthews, he was nervous. Stuttering all the time, you know. Not stuttering exactly, but stumbling more, over his words.”

  “And the woman? Peck?”

  “Defensive. Yes, that’s what I thought. Resentful, as if we shouldn’t have been questioning her at all.”

  “All right.” Resnick was back on his feet. “What you do is this. Try and find out when the Social Services Inspectorate are planning to publish their report. Given what happened to Inspector Aston, you might be able to get some idea of which way they’re shading, if they think there are any serious causes for concern. Then contact Jardine. Tell him we’ll almost certainly need to come back and talk to his people again. Try not to get his back up, get him alarmed. You could always say that there are a few odds and ends need tidying up. In the circumstances, he should buy that. Okay? You can handle all that?”

  For the first time Khan felt able to smile. “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  “Good lad.” And, as Khan was opening the door: “There may be no connection between the attack on Bill and any of this. Ninety-nine per cent, there is none. None at all. But we have to be sure.”

  Twenty-five

  Resnick noticed that Lynn seemed to be wearing more makeup, a dash of color, blue-green, above the eyes. Lipstick, not heavy, not accentuated, but there. A thin roll-neck top under a light check jacket, comfortable skirt. She took off the jacket once she’d opened the car door and draped it along the rear seat. At the passenger side, Resnick clicked his belt tight. He wondered if she might have started seeing someone again, a man; maybe she was just beginning to feel better about herself. He hoped that was the case. It was no more than she deserved.

  A quick adjustment to the mirror and they were pulling out into traffic, heading down towards the city center, the southbound road out towards the bridge.

  “His wife,” Lynn asked, “Bill Aston’s, what’s she like?”

  Resnick described her: a shortish woman, not especially lively, but a good listener. Those occasions he ha
d met her socially, police functions, she had kept pretty much in her husband’s shadow, but whenever he had been to the house, more relaxed, she had been the one who talked, Bill fading into the background, clearing dishes, making sure the drinks were filled.

  “A nice woman,” Resnick said. “Straightforward, sensible.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two, I think. No, three. Grown up and left home. One somewhere like Canada, Australia.” He seemed to recall that one of them had married, but couldn’t remember which. “You know, I didn’t really know him that well. The family. We’d not had a lot of contact these past few years.”

  Lynn made a slight nod with her head, concentrating on the driver in front, who couldn’t seem to make up his mind which lane he was supposed to be in. Trent Bridge was only a few hundred yards ahead. You could see the spot where Aston’s body had been found, still staked out, cordoned off.

  “We haven’t come up with any kind of weapon?”

  “Not as yet.”

  There was a lot of water down there, flowing quite fast beneath the bridge.

  The young man who came to the door looked enough like his father for Resnick not to wonder who he was. Terry Aston had inherited Bill’s facial expression, the color of his eyes, already the same peaking of the hair; he had enough of his mother’s genes to be shorter, stockier, set four-square on the ground. He had traveled up with his wife and eighteen-month-old son from where they lived outside Bedford: Terry, a computer programmer with sidelines in home brewing and ornithology; his wife, Moira, a legal secretary who still temped at ten pounds an hour, those mornings when Steven was with the nanny.

  Terry Aston shook hands with Resnick, accepting his condolences, nodded a shade awkwardly at Lynn Kellogg, and led the two officers through the house into the living room.

  “I’ll tell Mum you’re here.”

  Resnick had thought Margaret Aston might have been in bed, resting, somewhere out of the light, alone with her thoughts. But through the French windows, he could see her bending to deadhead one of the early roses, her grandson behind her, running and falling, arms akimbo, onto the graveled path. Stifling his squawl of tears, Margaret scooped him into her arms and held him tight against her, ssh-sshhing into his blond hair, until his mother came hurrying and took him from her, hoisting him high into the air and turning tears to laughter. Crushed against Margaret’s chest, the white petals of the rose fell aimless to the ground.