Easy Meat

Three

Nicky had a grin that left room for him to eat his pizza slice and speak at the same time. “Roland, you’re lucky I bumped into you, right? Just the thing you’ve been looking for. Exact.”

Roland tipped sugar into his coffee, two sachets, and then a third; the last occasion he had bought something from Nicky, a pair of Marantz speakers for thirty quid, he had ended up paying twice that amount to get them repaired after only ten days.

“Here,” Nicky said, sliding what looked at first glance like a glasses case across the table.

“What the fuck’s that, man? Polaroids or shit?”

“Look at it, here. Look.”

Roland shook his head. “You got to be joking, man, wha’do I want with that?”

Nicky couldn’t believe it. How could Roland be so thick? “Business appointments, that’s what this is for. Business. You’re the one, always telling me how you’ve got to be this place or that place, meeting someone here, somebody there, doing some deal or other. And sometimes you forget, right? You’ve told me. Sat there and told me. Well, now if you had this …” Experimentally, Nicky fingered a few of the tiny buttons. “See, this is perfect, right? Neat. What d’you call it? Compact. Slips into your top pocket, inside pocket, anywhere. But everything you want to know, Roland, okay-phone numbers, addresses, appointments-you can store it right in here, yeah? SF-835O. Do anything you want except send a fax or e-mail and there’s probably some way you can adapt it to do that. And look, look here, look-how about this? — it can only translate stuff into nine languages. Nine. You believe that? Bet you didn’t know there were nine fucking languages.”

Roland picked up the digital organizer and stared at the word mercredi, blinking faintly back at him from the top of the oblong screen. “Fuck, man. Why you fussin’ me with this shit?”

“Gonna do you a deal, aren’t I?”

Roland laughed and bit into his cherry pie, coming close to burning his tongue. “Shit! Why’s the stuff in these things always so bleedin’ hot?”

“Thirty quid,” Nicky said, easing the last piece of mushroom away from his pizza and scraping it onto the side of his paper plate. Never could stand mushrooms, they made him sick. “Come on, Roland, yeah? Thirty quid.”

Roland pressed a button and the screen went blank. “Nothing, man. Not interested, okay?”

“Twenty-five.”

Roland shook his head.

“Okay, twenty.”

“Nicky, how many times I got to tell you? Now get this piece of junk out of my face.”

Shit! Nicky dropped the pizza crust onto the table, screwed up the paper plate, snapped the organizer shut, and pushed it down into the back pocket of his jeans as he got to his feet. “See you, Roland.”

“Yeh.”

Fifteen meters short of the door, Nicky spun round on the heels of his Reeboks and hastened back. “Here,” leaning over Roland from behind. “Fifteen. You can sell it for twice that.”

“Ten.”

Nicky balanced the machine across Roland’s cup. “Done.”

Roland laughed and laid the note in the palm of Nicky’s hand.

Ten, Nicky was thinking as he headed back for the street, ten and the fifty that was in old Campbell’s purse, I can get myself something decent for my feet instead of this old crap I’m wearing now.

If Mark Divine noticed the few daffodils that remained unpicked or untrampled on the wedge of green beside the school entrance, he gave no sign. Four hours’ sleep was the most he’d caught last night. How many pints of bitter? Six or eight, and then the woman he’d been stalking round from bar to bar had only laughed in his face as she’d climbed into a cab. Two o’clock it must have been before he’d stumbled into bed. No, nearer three. And this morning there’d been Graham Millington, lip curling up beneath his mustache as he delivered a bollocking over some petty bit of paperwork Divine had somehow neglected to get done. “What are you now?” Millington had asked. “Twenty-seven, is it? Twenty-eight? Ask yourself, maybe, why it is you’re still stuck at DC when there’s others, give you three year or four, shooting past like you’re standing still?”

It had been on the tip of Divine’s tongue to say, “What about you, Graham? Sergeant since before I bloody joined and about as like to move on as one of them statues stuck round the edge of Slab Square.” But he’d said nothing, had he? Bit his tongue and sulked around the CID room till this call came through, some teacher who’d got her purse nicked from her bag in class. Serve her right, most like, Divine had thought, for taking it in with her in the first place. But it gave him a reason for getting out and about, at least. Hannah Campbell, he could picture her now. Short frizzy hair and flat-chested, blinking at him from behind a pair of those bifocals. Hannah, anyway, what sort of a name was that? Somewhere on the back shelf of his memory, Divine remembered an Aunt Hannah, the kind with whiskers on her chin.

“Can I help you?” The woman in the office looked up from her typewriter and regarded Divine with suspicion.

“DC Divine,” he said, showing her his card. “CID. It’s about the incident this morning. Hannah, er, Campbell. You’ll know about it, I reckon.”

“Please take a seat.”

Why was it, Divine wondered, he only had to set foot inside a school, any school, to feel the cold compress of failure shriveling his balls, packing itself around his heart?

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.”