John Harvey - Easy Meat

“Yes,” Resnick said. “I know what you mean.”

“But you don’t?”

He gave a slow shake of the head. “No, in a way I think I do. It’s not the kind of thing I’d’ve reckoned him for at all.”

“You don’t think it could have been somebody else? I mean, with him?”

“That’s not what he’s saying.”

“I see.”

Below them, homecoming traffic was slowing to a crawl. “I should be going,” Hannah said.

“Me, too.”

Neither one moved.

“What will happen to him?” Hannah asked. “Now, I mean?”

“Oh, most likely he’ll be taken into local authority care. Secure accommodation somewhere. Until the trial.”

“And then?”

Resnick shook his head and stepped away.

Hannah’s keys were in her hand. “Be seeing you.” It was one of those things you said; it didn’t mean anything.

“Yes,” Resnick said.

From the window of her car she watched him, shoulders more hunched than they should be, head a little bowed. She sat a moment longer, wondering without reason if he might turn back, find something more to say. When he didn’t, she turned the key in the ignition, backed the car round, and headed down to join the traffic. She had one final glimpse of Resnick as he drove off in the opposite direction. That young detective, she thought, so full of himself, the one who had almost asked her out-why was it never the ones to whom you might have said yes?

The investigation went pretty much as Resnick had anticipated; Hannah read the reports in the newspaper the next day, though for legal reasons Nicky’s name was omitted. Nicky was remanded into the care of the local authority awaiting trial. Hannah got on with her teaching, poems and book reports, Break Point, What About It, Sharon? , and Macbeth. For Resnick, other things came pressing in, the way things do. A suspected arson attack on a cafe specializing in Caribbean food; a youth of thirteen who stole a delivery van and drove it into a bus queue, leaving one person dead and four more seriously injured; one doctor who was accused of illegally prescribing drugs, another of procuring an illegal abortion; a gang of teenage girls rampaging through the underpasses around the city center, mugging two women and a twenty-seven-year-old man. A little shy of six in the morning, a Sunday, Resnick had a call from the social services emergency duty team: Nicky Snape had been found hanging from the shower in the children’s home where he was being held.

The building was separated from the road by a parade of tightly packed firs. Its brick-and-concrete fascia and high barred windows told of decades of institutional use: children’s home, assessment center, now secure accommodation that was less than secure. There were plans to sell it into private hands; a certain amount of modification and a coat or two of paint and it would make a perfect old people’s home. Resnick recognized the police surgeon’s car at the curb; the ambulance was parked on the curve of the drive, tight to the front door. He rang the bell. Six thirty: out of the east the sky leaked a stubborn light.

The door was opened by a man in his early thirties, slightly built with thinning hair. “Paul Matthews, I …” He glanced at Resnick’s identification and stepped away. “Mr. Jardine’s busy with the Director of Social Services, on the phone, er … he asked me to show you where … where it happened and then he would like to talk to you later. Before you go.”

Resnick stepped onto the worn parquet flooring of the hall. The death of a minor in custody: he thought it would be a long time before he-he and those officers who came after him-would be taking their leave.

“It’s the bathroom on the second floor.”

Resnick nodded and followed him towards the stairs. Voices echoed faintly, back and forth along cold corridors; the interior smelled of disinfectant and waste. Several yards short of the bath-room, Matthews stopped and stared at the floor.

In the moment before he went inside, Resnick had an image, clear and defined, of what he would see. For neither the first time nor the last. He turned the rounded handle and went in.

Nicky Snape lay on a sheet of thick polyethylene, which had been doubled beneath him on the bathroom floor. He was naked to the waist and his soiled pajamas had been lowered below his buttocks to midway down his thighs. Across the cage of his ribs and taut between his hips, his skin stretched opaque and milky white. The bruising at his neck and underneath his chin had already darkened to a color that was neither black nor purple. Old burn marks stood out kidney red in the bright overhead light. In death his face was that of a child.

“Charlie.”

Resnick heard the police surgeon’s voice, but continued to stare. So small and broken there.

“Asphyxiation, Charlie. Dead, what? Couple of hours, hour and a half.” Parkinson offered Resnick a mint and when the inspector refused, popped one into his own mouth. “You see the way the lips have turned that shade of blue? And there, the nail beds of the hand.”

Bending, Resnick saw the skin around the fingers chewed raw, nails bitten down to the quick.

“There was a towel by the body, wet and twisted tight. What he used, Charlie, most like.”

Resnick could see it, coiled against the edge of the shower stall, white with a faint blue stripe.

“Your boys’ll find fibers a-plenty, like as not.” The mint cracked between the surgeon’s teeth.

“You didn’t take him down?” Resnick asked.

Parkinson shook his head. “He was propped up against the wall there, back against the tiles. Staff, I suppose.”

Resnick squatted close to the body, wondering if, when he’d been discovered, Nicky’s eyes had already been closed. An illusion he allowed himself for a moment, if he stayed there close the boy would wake.

“What was he, Charlie?” Parkinson asked, fidgeting things back into his case. “Sixteen?”

“Not that.”

Not ever, Resnick thought. He rose to his feet. Millington would be here soon, roused from his blissful bed, and then Scene of Crime, bemoaning the disruption of their Sunday, even as they counted the overtime. Others, too. Senior social workers in once-good suits engaged in damage limitation, anxious to offload the blame.

“Nasty burn marks,” Parkinson observed. “Not above a year old. Caught in a fire or some such, I suppose.”

“Fire bomb,” Resnick said. “A little surprise as he was walking home. Local vigilantes out to teach him a lesson.”

“Tearaway, then, was he?”

“Fond of what wasn’t properly his own.”

“Well,” Parkinson said, snapping the case shut, “not so different from the rest of us there. But now, if you’ll allow me, no excuse for not getting on the green bright and early this morning, at least.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You don’t play, do you, Charlie?” The surgeon voiced it as a matter of regret.

Resnick shook his head.

“Ah, well. I’ll give Jack Skelton your regards.”

Paul Matthews was waiting in the corridor. “Mr. Jardine-if you’re ready, I’ll show you the way to his office.” Resnick looked at him carefully; understood that it was more than tiredness lining his eyes.

“You were the one that found him,” Resnick said.

Matthews flinched and looked away.

“What time was that?”

“Five, it would’ve been … not long after five.”

“You were the member of staff on duty?”

“Yes.”

“Just you?”

“No, my colleague, Elizabeth, she … It was routine, you see, I was just checking the bathroom. Routine.” His words were beginning to collide again, haphazard; at his sides, his hands were never still. “As soon as I went in there I could see, Nicky, I mean, I could see what had happened, what he’d done. The towel, he’d fastened it around the pipe to the shower. Behind the … behind the rose … he …”