John Harvey - Easy Meat

Naylor fidgeted uneasily on the step. “None come forward, sir, as yet.”

“Chances are this wasn’t the only house broken into. Get yourself about, find out what you can. We’ll organize a proper house-to-house first thing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Think he’ll ever break the habit?” Millington asked, watching Naylor in sports jacket and khaki trousers walking towards the next-door house.

“Which habit’s that?”

“Calling you sir.”

Resnick didn’t bother to reply. He was looking at the turmoil in the small back room, like one of those newspaper photographs showing the spread of damage some distance from the epicenter of an earthquake. A small world turned upside down.

“Something got him in a rare snit,” Millington said.

“Him?”

“Them. Maybe.”

Resnick surveyed the shattered ornaments, broken picture frames, the shards of mirrored glass. In his mind’s eye it was the work of one man, one pair of hands, a sudden unleashing of bewildered rage. Which was not to say that others had not been present, looking on.

“It happened up here,” Millington said, close by the foot of the stairs.

Resnick nodded, cast his eyes around one last time before going up. Shielded by the seat of a fallen chair, something caught his eye, shiny and plastic, a library card, computerized. Gloves already on, he bent down and picked it up carefully between forefinger and thumb.

The moment Resnick entered the bedroom it was like stepping back in time. The way the blood seemed to have spun, spiraling around the walls, across the bedspread and the wardrobe face. And the smell of it. The smell he could never clear from his mind.

“Looks like they got trapped somehow,” Millington said, “between here and the end of the bed.”

“Yes.”

Behind Resnick’s temple the same nerve triggered again, a pulse of memory. If he closed his eyes he knew he would hear, along with the cries of those who had been attacked where he now stood, the screams of Rachel Chaplin, jagged and sharp, echoing from the upper bedroom of his own house. Would see the dead man’s savagely self-mutilated body lodged between floor and wall.

“Think he was trying to knock it out of ’em, where they were hiding whatever he were after?”

“I don’t know, Graham.” Stretching his leg across the perimeter of blood, Resnick moved to the far side of the bed. “I don’t know if whoever did this was being that rational.”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How come she came off so much the worse for wear?”

Resnick was staring at the space, the floor. “Whatever damage was done, it was done there. She must have been leaning over him, protecting him in some way. Whatever way she could.”

Naylor called up from below and a few moments later appeared at the door. “People two doors down, sir, friends of the Netherfields …” Netherfield, Resnick thought, up to that moment he had not known their name. “… seems the husband, Eric, always kept this piece of iron railing beside the bed. In case of burglars, that’s what he always said.”

“Right,” said Resnick, “find that and I wouldn’t mind betting we’ve found the weapon that did this.”

Sounds from below informed him that the Scene of Crime team had arrived and while they photographed and dusted, employed the proverbial fine-tooth comb, Resnick and Millington could make themselves scarce, make themselves useful elsewhere.

“You’ll be wanting to get out to Queen’s, I reckon,” Millington said by the front door. “I’ll just hang on and give Kevin a hand here. Get a start on the morning.”

Crossing the street towards his car, Resnick checked his watch: morning had already started.

“Why did you run away from the home, Martin?” Lynn asked.

From under the fall of dark hair, Martin Hodgson squinted back at her in disbelief.

“Why, Martin?”

“Why d’you think?”

“I don’t know, I’m asking you.”

“If you don’t know, you must be thick.”

“And if I were you, I’d watch my mouth.”

Leaning back in his chair, Martin contorted his face and peered downwards. “All I can see is me top lip.”

She controlled the urge to slap him hard across the face, kick the chair out from under him, cocky little sod, and see him sprawling on the floor. For a moment she wondered whether if someone had done that to him sooner, and hard enough, he would still have turned out the way he had; or was he like he was because that had happened too many times?

“When we brought you in,” Lynn said, “you had over a hundred pounds in your pockets.”

“So?”

“So where did it come from?”

Martin shook his head; the same expression was back on his face again, sullen and hard. “Where d’you think?”

“Tell me.”

“You shouldn’t be doin’ this, interrogating me on me own. You know how old I am, you know the rules.”

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.”