Easy Meat

Eleven

Resnick watched her walk across the playground, hair moving lightly in the freshness of the wind. Despite all the forecasts, the temperature had dipped a further five degrees and, in the CID room that day, Millington had been mithering on about having to take his geraniums in again, safe out of the frost.

“Hannah Campbell,” the school secretary had said, “she’s taking a drama group in the main hall. Should be through any time in the next half-hour.”

In no hurry to return to the station, Resnick had elected to wait.

Nicky Snape’s interrogation had been careful and slow. For the best part of the first hour, his mother sitting alongside him, a solicitor just behind, Nicky had said nothing, then, after continued questioning, Resnick and Millington alternating, he had admitted to spending the first part of the evening with Martin Hodgson and another friend. Where? Cinema. What did you see? Nicky told them. Had he been near the Netherfield house? No, he had not been near the Netherfield house. Didn’t know what they were on about. Didn’t know where it was.

“Nicky,” Resnick had said, “listen to me. We’re doing tests now. They’re going on while we’re talking here. The blood on the clothes we found underneath your bed, blood around the sink in your bathroom at home, blood on a length of iron railing we found near the house-whose blood, Nicky, do you think that is? Do you think it belongs to that woman lying up at Queen’s in intensive care, just about hanging onto her life? Do you think that’s what we’re going to find?”

Nicky had stared at the table, his hands clenched together. Beside him, with very little noise, Norma had started to cry.

“Whatever you know about this, Nicky,” Resnick had said. “Anything at all, I think you should tell us now. Let’s talk about it now, you and me, while we’re here. While we can.”

Norma had turned away, unwilling to look at her son, afraid to, and Resnick had leaned, almost imperceptibly, forward. “Nicky, this house we’re talking about, where all of this happened, were you there?”

Nicky’s reply was so quiet it was almost as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

“Sorry, Nicky what did you say? Could you just say that again for us please?”

“I said, yes. Yes.”

Norma hid her face in her hands and began to sob.

“But all I did was break in, right? I never touched nobody, never hit no one. I never even saw nobody, none of that stuff you said. All I did was get in downstairs at the back. I never even went upstairs.”

“All right, Nicky, one thing at a time. We’ll get to that later.” And when the solicitor requested a break for his client, Resnick was happy to accede. He had wanted to get out of the station, clear his head, find something else, undemanding, to do. He had come here.

Hannah was wearing a cotton jumper beneath her jacket, pale blue, and she had white-and-blue trainers on her feet. He liked the way she walked, purposefully but not hurrying, a leather bag slung over one shoulder, another, an old briefcase, packed and battered, tight against her side. She slowed to speak to two boys who were engaged in one of those arguments young boys are forever into, a push here, an angry word there, and only when they had shuffled grudgingly away did she carry on towards where her car was parked, a Volkswagen Beetle, painted red.

Resnick got out of his own car and moved to intercept her.

“Hannah Campbell?”

With a slight jump, she turned.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“That’s all right.” She was trying to place him-one of the parents, another teacher she had met somewhere at a conference and forgotten?

“Charlie Resnick. Detective inspector, CID.” He held up his identification for her to see.

“My,” she said, eyes widening. “I am going up in the world. Last time it was only a-what do you call them?”

“Detective constable. DC.”

“An odd sort of a name …”

“Divine.”

Hannah smiled. “He should have gone to ecclesiastical college, become a priest.”

Resnick grinned at the thought and she saw something in his eyes that had not been there before.

He watched her place the briefcase on top of the car and turn back to face him. With the light as it was, he thought he could see traces of red, faint in the brown of her hair.

“Don’t tell me you’ve recovered my purse?”

“Not exactly.”

“Just the money and the credit cards.”

“I wish I could say we had.”

Hannah smiled. It had been a long day and the extra session she’d just had should have left her exhausted but instead it had picked her up, renewed her energy. And here was this shaggy man, hair askew, fawn trousers too baggy, brown jacket unbuttoned or it would have been too tight. She couldn’t decide if the top button of his shirt were missing, or if, shielded by the knot of his tie, it were simply undone.

“So what is it?” Hannah asked. She liked the way his eyes stayed focused on her instead of wandering off as so many people’s did. It gave the impression he was honest and she wondered if that were true.

Resnick took her library card from his wallet.

“Where did you find that?” she asked.

He told her, light on the details of the injuries the Netherfields had suffered, but making sure she understood the seriousness of what had happened. The skin prickled at the back of her neck when he mentioned Nicky Snape. When he had finished, she stood a while saying nothing, fiddling with a tissue, blowing her nose.

“When you spoke to DC Divine,” Resnick said, “you said you thought it was Nicky Snape who stole your purse.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Somehow, absurdly, Hannah wished that she had not.

“When we brought Nicky in, he had some money on him, though not a lot. As yet it’s unclear where he got it from. No sign of your credit cards, I’m afraid.”

“That’s okay. It’s not exactly important, is it? I mean, not after what’s happened.” She looked at him. “I don’t see why you’re bothering with this at all.”

“The card, if he did take it from you, if it was in your purse that morning, well, it places him there, in the house.”

“I see.”

“And it would have been in your purse?”

Hannah nodded, yes.

“As it turns out, it likely isn’t crucial. There’s other evidence enough.”

Hannah looked away from Resnick towards the Boulevard and saw men walking their dogs on the sparse green of the Forest, the slow blur of cars. “Of course I knew he was always bunking off school, getting into trouble, but this …” She turned back to face him. “It’s difficult to believe.”

“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.