John Harvey - Easy Meat

Hovenden scrambled to his feet, knocking back his chair, face thrust forward. “I’d say you were a lying cunt!”

Vincent clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth twice. “That’s no way to speak to a lady.”

“Fuck you!”

Resnick was standing now, time to move on. “Had all you want of this tea, Gerry? Or d’you want to finish it before we leave for the station?”

“Turn off,” Frank Miller had shouted, “that fucking noise!”

“Worried about the neighbors, Frank?” Millington said. “That’s nice. World could do with a few more like you.”

“Saxon, though,” Divine said, flicking open the drawer and removing the CD, “always did like them. DeMontfort Hall, oh, must be six or seven years back now. Go down and see them, did you? My ears were ringing for days.”

Miller turned to stare at him: what the fuck was all this about?

“But then that’s the way you like ‘em, isn’t it? In the ears? Fact, I think we might’ve found a tape of yours a while back. That had quite a bit of Saxon on it, good too.”

“I don’t suppose,” Miller said, zipping up his jeans, “there’s any way you lot of comedians’d crawl back out the way you crawled in?”

“’Course, Frankie,” Millington agreed. “Just as soon as you’re ready.”

Miller snorted and scratched his left armpit energetically. “Oh, yeh? What is it now?”

“Someone’s been putting themselves about among our friends in the gay community,” Millington said. “Looking at your record, you’ve done a bit of that in your time.”

“Poofs? Yeh, why not? It’s what they fuckin’ deserve.”

“You don’t need a coat,” Millington said, leading the way, “but if I were you I’d lock this back door. Never know who might come waltzing in.”

Khan had woken that morning with Jill’s leg hooked over one of his own, her hip pressed against his. It had been light enough in the room to see the inward curve of her spine, the swell of her buttocks when he slipped back the sheet. Fifteen minutes before he had to be getting ready for work, twenty at a push. Experimentally, he tensed himself against her body and felt pressure in return. He knew there were two things he could do and one of them was to bend forward and kiss her lightly between the shoulder blades, slide his leg free, and swing out of the bed. He looked at the way she was stretching, legs parted, and knew how warm she would feel if he were to move his hand a little higher along her thigh. She gave a sleepy, satisfied moan when he did this and that was that. Twenty minutes, he thought, would be fine.

In fact, it was closer to fifteen. Khan stood buttoning his pale-blue shirt, fading a shade now, the one his last girlfriend had bought him at Next.

“I swear,” Jill said, sitting up higher in the bed, “you only wear that to annoy me.”

Reaching for his tie, silver with a blue stripe, Khan laughed. “Have to get some kind of reaction, don’t I?”

She threw a pillow and he ducked low, reaching for the end of the duvet.

“No!” Jill shouted. “Don’t you dare!”

Which was when the phone rang and Khan, chuckling, went to answer it. Paul Matthews’s voice was nervous yet unmistakable, a smile broadening across Khan’s face as he listened. “All right,” he said finally, “give me twenty minutes and I’ll be there.”

Back in the bedroom, he kissed Jill languorously on the mouth: five minutes, he was thinking, more than I gave you.

Given the seriousness of the crimes concerned, the weight of evidence, circumstantial at best, had been enough to argue the necessary search warrants. They had twenty-four hours, plus a possible extra twelve, within which either to charge Miller and Hovenden or let them go. Under new regulations, they were allowed to take samples from all suspects in order to establish their DNA; these samples would then be checked against the new national database in Birmingham. Comparisons with the DNA from the blood found on Aston’s body would be crucial. But it would not be quick.

“This can’t be right,” Frank Miller had said to his solicitor. “There’s no way they can make me agree to this.”

The solicitor was sorry, but under the new law indeed they could.

“And if I won’t stand for it?”

“We’ll have to find ways,” Divine had grinned hopefully, “of taking your legs from under you. Nothing to stand on.”

Miller had shaken his head. “Know what this means, don’t you? This DNA business, it’s like a fingerprint, right? Once you’re in their books, they’re gonna come chasin’ after you every chance they get.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Naylor said, “the only times we hang onto the samples is if you’re actually convicted, or officially cautioned for a recordable offense. Otherwise, they’re destroyed.”

Miller threw back his head and laughed. “Believe that, you believe the moon’s made of fuckin’ green cheese!”

“Don’t tell me,” Divine said, disappointed, “that it’s not?”

The first thing the search team did at Miller’s house was to bag and label carefully the boots in the shed. There was a car ready and waiting to whisk them off for analysis. The house itself, though, proved a disappointment. True, there were back issues of The Order and a few other bits of right-wing paraphernalia, but nothing to get Special Branch worked up into a sweat. In a tatty address book, they found a few phone numbers that would ring bells with Trevor Ulman and the Football Intelligence Unit, but again, there were no major surprises. The collection of top-shelf porn devoted to women with abnormally large breasts was well-thumbed, but compared to some of the stuff that was routinely confiscated this was very small beer indeed. And they turned up no likely weapons; nothing resembling a baseball bat.

Once you got beyond the main downstairs rooms, the house Gerry Hovenden shared with his father was indeed a shitheap of the first degree. Hovenden senior was a classic hoarder and the only prerequisite for being an object saved seemed to be that whatever it was, it was covered in dirt. There was a layer of grease along the banister rail, on all the shelves and surfaces, over everything they touched. Engine parts, old clothes, yellowing newspapers, fuse wire, cycle blocks, quarter heels for sticking on shoes, bottles of oil gone rancid, copies of paperback Westerns with the pages bent back, rusty tools. And, in the midst of all of this, the glove-the one that Gerry had hurled there, back among the recesses of that upstairs back room, thrown there among the cobwebs and the musty boxes, the rat droppings and the silver fish-the leather motor cycle glove which matched the one found on the Embankment near Bill Aston’s body. Its identical opposite. Its partner. Its twin.

Paul Matthews’s mother sat at her kitchen table, picking crumbs from around a piece of seed cake and lifting them absentmindedly to her mouth. “Be gentle with him, won’t you? He’s never meant any harm.”

Matthews was upstairs in a bedroom that had scarcely changed in the last fifteen years. Scouting certificates hung on the wall beside a color photograph of the Forest team from 1981 and a map of South Wales; framed on the window ledge was a picture of a smiling Paul, newborn lamb in his arms, in the lane alongside his aunt’s house.

“How was the rest of the visit?” Khan asked. “Are you feeling any better?”

Tears at the edges of his eyes, Matthews turned away.

“I’m glad you phoned,” Khan said gently. “I think it was the right thing.” A pause, then: “You’ll feel better, after you’ve talked. Got it off your chest.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, it’s all right. You can.”