John Harvey: Easy Meat

She was waiting for him in a small room on the first floor, the only light coming from a long, high window through which he could see bricks and sky. Two of the walls were lined with shelves, sets of tatty books with fraying covers, some of which didn’t seem to have been moved for a long time. Wasn’t there supposed to be a shortage of books? Divine thought. Hadn’t he heard that somewhere? So what was wrong with all these?

“Miss Campbell?”

“Hannah.”

Divine showed her his identification as he introduced himself and sat down across from her, a narrow table in between.

He could see right off he’d got it wrong. She was younger than he’d imagined, for a start. Middle thirties, maybe; possibly even younger. Scrub the glasses, too. Her hair was longer than he’d pictured, bushing out a little at the sides and back. Light brown. Under a tan jacket she was wearing a lilac top, three buttons to the neck. Lilac or purple, he could never be certain which was which. A black skirt, calf-length, and comfortable shoes on her feet.

“I spoke with two officers already,” Hannah said. “Explained to them what happened, as best as I know.”

“Uniform, yes. Routine.”

“And you’re a detective, isn’t that right? CID, that’s what it means?”

Divine nodded, resisting the idea that, ever so slightly, she might be sending him up.

“And you’d like me to tell you what happened?”

“Yeh, that’s right.”

She looked at him, the natural cockiness of his face offset by the tiredness round his eyes.

“Aren’t you going to take notes?” Hannah asked.

Only when Divine had taken out his notebook and pencil did she begin.

“So do you think you’ll catch him?”

“Nicky Snape?”

“That’s who we’ve been talking about, isn’t it?” They were walking along the bottom corridor, Hannah escorting him off the premises, out of school.

“You seem pretty certain it was him,” Divine said.

Hannah shrugged. “My purse disappeared, Nicky disappeared, both at the same time. Added to which, he does seem to have a penchant for this sort of thing.”

“A what?” Divine wondered again if she were sending him up.

“Stealing. He’s been in trouble before.”

The laugh lines crinkled around Divine’s mouth. “Just once or twice.”

“And you didn’t catch him then?”

“We caught him right enough, courts bounced him off out again. Can’t hold ’em, you see. Not that young. Twelve when he started, thirteen.” Divine looked around them, windows and doors. “You must know what it’s like, mixing with them every day.”

Hannah didn’t say anything, carried on walking until they had passed beyond the office and were standing on the shallow steps outside. The building was sending shadows long across the tarmac and there was a bite still in the spring air. Hannah was conscious of Divine looking at her, her neck and breasts.

“You make it all sound pretty much a waste of time,” she said.

“Catch him with any of your property still on him, credit cards, say, someone might actually have the nous to stick him away.”

“And is that likely? Catching him like that, I mean?”

Divine pushed out his chest a little, stood an extra inch taller. “Best detection figures in the country this year past, you know, Notts.”

“Really?”

“Clear-up rate per officer of fourteen cases a year.”

“That doesn’t seem,” Hannah said, “an awful lot.”

“Better’n anybody else, though, isn’t it?”

“Statistics.” Hannah smiled. “To get a real sense of it, you’d need to set that figure against the one for the amount of crime that took place. You know, to see it in the right perspective.”

“Yes, well,” Divine said, gazing away, “I can’t bring to mind what that was, not exactly.” It was 148 crimes per 1000 of the population, the second highest after Humberside, he knew it by heart. He said, “I’d better be going, then.”

“All right.” She hesitated a moment longer before turning back into the school.

“Look, I don’t suppose …” Divine began, a light flush on his cheeks.

“No,” Hannah said. “I’m sorry, not a chance.”

“You’d think,” Skelton said, “when you get something right, the last thing anyone would want to do is mess about with it and run the risk of losing everything you’d gained.”

From the chair opposite the superintendent’s desk, Resnick grunted something which might be taken for agreement.

“You know and I know, Charlie,” Skelton went on, “most forces in the country would give their eyeteeth for figures like these.”

Nodding, Resnick shifted his weight from left buttock onto right. The idea of a Serious Crimes Unit in the county had been mooted before, but now, with changes in the Police Authority, it looked as though it might actually be going to happen.

Skelton was toying with a pencil, daring to disturb the symmetry of his desk. “You know what it’ll mean, don’t you? Two-tier policing, that’s what it’ll mean. All the highfliers and bright boys stuck in together where they can polish one another’s Ph.Ds and the rest of us left penny-antying about with stolen mountain bikes and traffic offenses.”

Resnick wondered if in a way that wasn’t happening already. Helen Siddons, for instance, the bright young DI who had paused at the station long enough to set a seismograph beneath the crumbling structure of Skelton’s marriage. She had been made up to inspector at an age when Resnick had still been shy of sergeant; now here he was in his mid-forties, inspector still, and where was she? Holding down a chief inspector’s post in Somerset. As Reg Cossall had put it a few nights back in the pub, “If that self-seeking cow’d had the luck to be black as well as female, she’d’ve been superintendent by now, never mind fucking chief inspector!”

“No, Reg,” Graham Millington had laughed. “It were better’n inspector she was fucking, it was our Jolly Jack.”

Looking across at Jack Skelton now, Resnick wondered if that had been true. Oh, Skelton had fancied her, Siddons, clearly enough, and she had turned that to her advantage. But whether it had gone beyond the lingering glances and the barely covert looks, Resnick didn’t know. And besides, it hardly mattered: what mattered was what Alice Skelton thought had happened. Adultery in the mind is as hard to shake as love stains on the sheets. The last time Resnick had been round to the Skelton house, it had been like watching bear baiting between barely consenting adults.

“Still, with any luck, Charlie,” Skelton said, “we’ll both be up and gone, the pair of us, before it happens. Put out to grass with a pension and whatever they give you nowadays in place of a gold watch.”

Resnick didn’t think so. Skelton, maybe, but as far as he himself was concerned, retirement was something lurking in the last gray hours before morning; one of those beasts like cancer of the prostate that stalked you in your sleep.

“Lynn Kellogg, Charlie.” He had waited until Resnick was almost at the door. “Okay, is she?”

Resnick was slow to answer, wondering if there were something he should have noticed, something he’d missed. “Fine. Why d’you ask?”

“Oh, no reason.” Skelton looked at Resnick across the broad arch of his fingers. “She’s started seeing that therapist again, that’s all.”

No reason then, Resnick thought, as he headed back along the corridor towards his own office, was not exactly true. As he well knew, there were reasons enough.

Fifteen or so months ago, Lynn had been kidnapped by a man Resnick and his team were tracking down. The man had killed twice before, women whom he had tantalized with the prospect of freedom, before brutally ending their lives; it was a game that he played, and he had played it with Lynn, alternately being kind to her and then threatening her, keeping her cold and in chains. By day he was capable of speaking to her in the soft tones of romance, and at night, in the cramped blackness of the caravan, he would masturbate over her as she feigned sleep.