John Harvey - Easy Meat

“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 hospital 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.

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.