Peter Robinson - Innocent Graves

Pubs were where fights started-and he had a couple of scars from his beat days to prove that-they were where crooked deals took place, dodgy goods traded hands, places where drugs were openly sold, where prostitutes plied their filthy trade, spreading disease and misery. Close all the pubs and you’d force the criminals into the open, right into the waiting arms of the police. At least that was what DI Barry Stott thought as he turned up his nose in the Nag’s Head that lunch-time.

Sergeant Hatchley, on the other hand, looked quite at home. He rubbed his ham-like hands together and said, “Ah, this is better. Nowt like a bit of pub grub to take away the chill, don’t you think, sir?”

“Let’s make it quick, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. Alf! Over here, mate. Let’s have a bit of service. A person could die of thirst.”

If there were a landlord Hatchley didn’t know by name in all of the Eastvale-nay, all of Swainsdale-Stott would have been surprised.

When Alf finally turned up, Stott waited while he and Hatchley exchanged a few pleasantries, then ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. Alf raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

“I’ll have one of those bloody great big Yorkshire puddings full of roast beef, peas and gravy,” said Hatchley. “And a pint of bitter, of course.”

This seemed to please Alf more.

Pint in hand, Hatchley marched over to a table by the window. Through the streaked glass, they could see the rain-darkened trees in the park and the walls of St. Mary’s church across the intersection, square tower poking out above the trees.

The drizzle hadn’t kept the ghouls away. Here and there along the six-foot stone wall, people would jump up every now and then and hold themselves up by the fingertips for a glimpse into the graveyard.

A group of about ten people stood by the Kendal Road entrance. Journalists. One of them, a woman, stood talking into a microphone and looking into a video camera wrapped in a black plastic bag to protect it from the rain. Someone else held a bright light over her head. Yorkshire Television, Stott thought. Or BBC North. And newspaper reporters. Pretty soon they’d be doing re-enactments for “Crimewatch.” Banks was right; the vultures had come.

“We haven’t had much of a chance to get to know one another since you got here, have we, sir?” said Hatchley, lighting a cigarette. “And I always find it helps to know a bit about one another if you’re going to work together, don’t you?”

“I suppose so,” said Stott, inwardly grimacing, trying to sit downwind of the drifting smoke. It didn’t work. He thought it must be one of those laws, like Sod’s and Murphy’s: wherever a non-smoker sat, the smoke was going to come his way, no matter which way the draft was blowing.

“Where are you from, sir?” Hatchley asked.

“Spalding, Lincolnshire.”

“I’d never have guessed it. Not from the accent, like.”

“We moved away when I was just a boy.”

“Where?”

“All over the place. Cyprus, Germany. My father was in the army.” Stott remembered the misery of each move. It seemed that as soon as he had made friends anywhere, he had to abandon them and start all over again. His childhood had consisted of a never-ending succession of new groups of strangers to whom he had to prove himself. Cruel strangers with their own initiation rights, just waiting to humiliate him. He remembered the beatings, the name-calling, the loneliness.

“A squaddie, eh?”

“Major, actually.”

“Pretty high up, then?” Hatchley swigged some beer. “Where does he live now?”

“ Worthing. He retired a few years ago.”

“Not a dishonorable discharge, I hope, sir.”

“No.”

“Look, sir,” said Hatchley, “I’ve been wondering about this here inspector’s exam. I’ve been thinking of giving it a go, like. Is it easy?”

Stott shook his head. All promotional exams were tough and involved several stages, from the multi-choice law test and the role-playing scenarios to the final oral in front of an assistant chief constable and a chief superintendent. How Hatchley had even passed the sergeant’s exam was a mystery to Stott.

“Good luck,” he muttered as a pasty-faced young woman delivered their food and Stott’s pot of tea, which was actually just a pot of lukewarm water and a teabag on a string to dunk in it. And they were stingy with the ham, too. “About one in four get through,” he added.

How old was Hatchley? he wondered. He couldn’t be older than his mid-thirties. Maybe five or six years older than Stott himself. And just look at him: unfit, a bulky man with hair like straw, piggy eyes, freckles spattered across his fleshy nose, tobacco-stained teeth. He also seemed to own only one suit-shiny and wrinkled-and there were egg stains on his tie. Stott could hardly imagine Hatchley going up before the chief for his formal promotion dressed like that.

Stott prided himself on his dress. He had five suits-two gray, two navy blue and one brown herring-bone-and he wore them in rotation. If it’s Thursday, it must be herring-bone. He also wore his father’s old striped regimental tie and, usually, a crisply laundered white shirt with a starched collar.

He always made sure that he was clean shaven and that his hair was neatly parted on the left and combed diagonally across his skull on each side, then fixed in place with spray or cream if need be. He knew that the way his ears stuck out still made him look odd, especially with his glasses hooked over them, just as they had when he was a young boy, and that people called him names behind his back. There was an operation you could have for sticking-out ears these days, he had heard. Maybe if it wasn’t too late he’d have his ears done soon. A freakish appearance could, after all, be detrimental to one’s career path. And Barry Stott felt destined for the chief constable’s office.

Hatchley tucked into his Yorkie with great relish, adding a gravy stain to the egg on his tie. When he had finished, he lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke with a sigh of such deep satisfaction as Stott had never encountered before over a mere physical function-and an unpleasant one at that. One of nature’s true primitives, Sergeant Hatchley.

“We’d better be getting along, Sergeant,” he said, pushing his plate aside and standing up.

“Can’t I finish my fag first, sir? Best part of the meal, the cigarette after, if you know what I mean.” He winked.

Stott felt himself flush. “You can smoke it outside,” he said rather harshly.

Hatchley shrugged, slurped down the rest of his pint, then followed Stott towards the door.

“Bye, Alf,” he said on the way to the door. “I hope our lads didn’t catch you serving drinks after hours last night.”

“What lads?” said Alf.

Hatchley turned and walked towards the bar. “Police. Didn’t they come and ask you questions last night? Whether you’d seen any strangers, that sort of thing?”

Alf shook his head. “Nah. Nobody in last night. I shut up at ten o’clock. Filthy weather.”

By the time Stott got to the bar, Hatchley seemed to have magically acquired another pint, and his cigarette had grown back to its original length.

Stott swallowed his anger.

“Were you open earlier?” Hatchley asked.

Alf snorted. “Aye, for what it were worth.”

“Any strangers?”

“We get a lot of strangers,” he said. “You know, commercial travelers and the like. Tourists. Ramblers.”

“Aye, I know that,” said Hatchley. “But how about yesterday, late afternoon, early evening?”

“Nah. Weather were too bad for driving.”

“Anyone at all?”

Alf scratched his stubbly cheek. “One bloke. He had nobbut two pints and a whisky and left. That were it.”