Easy Meat

Thirty-two

The first thing Resnick recognized, warm, soft, and resting close against his ear, was a cat’s paw. The second, moments after, close and strangely muted, was the sound of a telephone ringing. And the third, realized with painful accuracy as he lifted Bud cautiously clear and gingerly lowered his own feet towards the floor, was that for the first time in many months he had a hangover of king-sized proportions. He blinked at the clock: six forty-nine. He should have already been up. Louder now, the telephone continued to ring and fearing the worst, without knowing exactly what that worst was, he lifted it towards his ear.

“Yes. Hello.”

“Charlie, is that you?”

“I think so.”

“Did I wake you?”

“Not really, no.”

“Are you okay?”

“Um, why?”

“You sound as if you’re at the bottom of the sea.”

“I slept a little heavily, that’s all.”

“Look, Charlie, can I see you today? Not for long; lunchtime, maybe. Just for twenty minutes, half an hour. I think we need to talk.”

No reply.

“I could meet you somewhere.”

Resnick wished his head didn’t feel like a sack of gently swaying cement. “Look, let me call you … No, I will. This morning. Soon. How long are you around? … All right, I’ll phone before then. Probably in the next half-hour.”

In the shower, water streaming across the folds and plains of his body, he kept wondering what had prompted Hannah to phone so early, what it was she needed to talk about so urgently, lathering shampoo into his hair now and wincing as he did so, once more fearing the worst.

He hadn’t been the only person tying one on last night. The entrance to the police station was crowded with people in various stages of sobriety, many of them adorned with quite spectacular cuts and bruises, most talking at once. Loudly. A uniformed sergeant and two of his minions were patiently trying to sort them out.

Resnick pushed his way through, careful not to slip on the blood. From the corridor to his right came the voice of the custody sergeant, giving one of his overnights a good bollocking for throwing up in his cell. A reedy version of “Little Brown Jug” from the stairs alerted Resnick to the possibility that Millington was embarking on one of his unbearably jolly days; and sure enough there he was, descending the stairs, smile in place around his mustache, happy to share with the world choice moments of that old Glenn Miller magic. As Divine had announced to the CID room moments before, someone had got his leg over this morning and no chuffin’ mistake!

“Boss’s been asking for you,” Millington said breezily. “That new lad in there with him. Least, I reckon that’s who it is. Oh, and I’ve set up a meeting. Eleven. With that feller from soccer unit, all right?”

Resnick continued on his way upstairs. In the men’s room he ran the cold tap and sloshed water repeatedly in his face, before heading along the corridor for Skelton’s office.

“Charlie, come in, come in.” Skelton exuded neatly suited bonhomie from behind his desk. “This is DC Vincent.” Resnick’s first impression was of a tallish man in his late twenties, around five eleven, slim, clean-shaven, his dark hair cut quite short; he was wearing a light-colored suit, creased, but unlike Resnick’s, fashionably meant to be that way, an olive-green shirt and black knitted tie.

“This is Detective Inspector Resnick. Day to day, you’ll be working to him.”

The two men shook hands, Vincent’s grip cool and comfortable, not giving it too much.

“Carl Vincent, sir. Good to know you.”

Resnick nodded and stepped back, Vincent still looking him clear in the eye.

“As you know, Charlie, Carl here’s joining us from Leicester. Up a division, eh, Charlie. In a manner of speaking.”

Only if you’re a Forest supporter, Resnick thought. “I’ve filled him in on the Aston murder, Charlie, basic details. I know you’ll want to bring him up to speed.”

“Sir.”

There was a smile in Vincent’s eyes now as he watched him, interested to see how Resnick operated with his superior, sizing him up.

“Anything new there, Charlie? Anything I can pass on to Headquarters? These soccer hooligans in Reg Cossall’s report, still the most likely candidates?”

Resnick wondered if he should mention his suspicions surrounding Elizabeth Peck, but opted to wait until he had more evidence, one way or another.

“Seems so, yes. There’s a meeting with the Football Intelligence Unit this morning, we’ll see if that takes us anywhere closer.”

“You’ll let me know?”

“First thing.”

Vincent fell into step beside Resnick in the corridor. “Found anywhere to stay yet?” Resnick asked.

“Not as yet. Figured I’d travel up from Leicester for a bit, give myself time to look around. Not such a bad journey long as you get the timings right.”

“You might want to have a word with our admin officer, she’s usually got her ear to the ground.”

“Right, thanks. I will.”

“Morning briefing any minute. I’ll introduce you, find you something to get started.”

“Right,” Vincent said again and then he smiled. “Never easy are they? Beginnings. First days. Feeling your way.”

“You’ll handle it okay.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Outside the CID room Vincent hesitated. “I was wondering, what do I call you? Guv? Sir? Boss?”

“Whatever feels right.”

It fell quiet as they entered the room.

Divine settled for a bacon cob, brown sauce, toast, tea with two sugars, and a Lion bar for later. Naylor and Lynn Kellogg were already sitting at a table by the window, near the rear of the canteen. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and talk.

“Right,” Divine said, decanting cup and plate onto the table, propping the tray against the leg, from where it fell onto the floor. “What’s going off, that’s what I’d like to know?”

“We’re talking about last night’s EastEnders,” Naylor said pleasantly. “What d’you want to know?”

“Conspiracy of silence then, is it, or what?”

“How d’you mean?”

“You know what I bloody well mean.”

“How’s that?”

Divine jerked a hand back round in the direction of the door. “This bloke. Vincent. Why’s nobody said a sodding thing about the fact he’s black?”

“He is?” Lynn said innocently.

“Never thought you’d notice, Mark,” Naylor said, amused. “Reckon that’s why.”

“Anyway,” said Lynn, “he’s not really black. More a sort of light chocolatey brown.”

Naylor nodded. “Milky Way.”

“That’s it,” Divine said through a mouthful of bacon roll, “make a bloody joke out of it.”

“Oh, Mark,” Lynn said, “come on.”

“Look.” Voice getting louder by the minute. “If it were anything else, anything else at all, as marked him out of the ordinary …”

“Such as?” Naylor asked.

“I don’t know, anything. All right, suppose he wasn’t a bloke, he was a woman …”

“Transvestite, you mean?”

“No, you pillock, a proper woman …”

“Well, that would be out of the ordinary, true enough,” Lynn said, “Just look around.”

“Right. Exactly. Anything from a club foot to a man with two heads, we’d talk about it, yeh? But, no, not this, this is different. No one’s supposed to notice, not a blind thing. So there’s the boss, introducing him, welcome to the team. And that’s it.”

“Well, what d’you expect?” Naylor asked. “This is Carl Vincent and in case you haven’t noticed, he’s black.”

“Why not?”

“Jesus!”

“Because, Mark,” Lynn said, leveling her voice, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Bollocks!”

“What?”

“You heard, bollocks. Of course it bloody matters.”

“Mark,” Lynn said, “you’re so full of crap sometimes.”

“Yeah?” Divine on his feet now, leaning towards her, finger in her face. “Well, listen up. It matters to him, you can bet your life on that. And I’ll tell you something else, it fucking matters to me.”

There was sudden hush around them at the scarcely suppressed anger in Divine’s voice, and through it Carl Vincent walked blithely, carrying a cup of coffee and two pieces of buttered toast. “Mind if I join you?”

“Please,” Lynn said.

“Yes, sure,” said Naylor. “Pull up a pew.”

Divine had a quick swallow of his tea and grabbed what was left of his bacon roll. Sitting in the vacated chair, Vincent turned his head to watch Divine go.

“There’s one in every station,” he said with a slow shake of the head.

“Only one?” Lynn smiled. “Things must be looking up.”

The Football Intelligence Unit had been at its busiest in the Eighties, when self-styled firms of young men could afford to invest considerable time and money in promoting violence in and around major soccer grounds. Often they would eschew the match itself in order to ambush unsuspecting groups of visiting fans at railway stations before or after the game. Officers went underground, spending months establishing solid cover before infiltrating the more dangerous of the firms-the Chelsea Headhunters, Arsenal, Oxford, Portsmouth, Millwall.

When a move to all-seater stadiums thwarted one of the most popular pastimes-a sudden vicious charge to take the home supporters’ “end”-and with spiraling admission charges ensuring lots of youngsters stayed away, hard-core fans intent upon trouble followed the national flag abroad. And the Unit went with them. Information about known troublemakers was passed on to other national police forces, and although the violence was to a degree curtailed, it didn’t stop. Wrecked bars and cafés, water cannon and baton charges testified to that.

“Here,” Trevor Ulman said, “take a look at this.”

Resnick and his team watched the monitor as, on somewhat bleached-out video tape, a mob of chanting youths, mostly in shirtsleeves, Union Jacks to the fore, erupted from a curbside café and charged across a broad square, despite the attempts of heavily outnumbered uniformed police to stop them. Even mounted officers, swinging their long truncheons, could not deter the English supporters as they raced over cobblestones and tram lines, intent upon catching any local fans with fists or feet or both.

“Now watch this,” Ulman said, as the camera closed in on a group of five young men as they chased, tripped, and then proceeded to punch and kick-especially kick-the single youth who had been their quarry. Ulman paused the video a few frames before a boot made contact with the victim’s head.

“Here,” he said, pointing. “The lad with the footwork. Chelsea Headhunter, close links with Combat 18. I’ll say a bit more about that in a minute. But look here, this bloke with belly, over to the left-Leicester Baby Squad. And this one here, leaning over to throw a punch-more local, Forest Executive Crew.”

Ulman stubbed out his Silk Cut and lit another, using a slim gold lighter with a dangerously high flame.

“That was two years ago, Rotterdam. But this second clip’s more recent. February of this year. Most probably, I don’t have to tell you where it’s from.”

“Dublin,” Divine said, with an edge of disgust.

“Correct. One friendly international between the Republic and ourselves abandoned thanks to scenes like this.”

The screen, in color this time, showed a man in the upper tier, his face, save for the eyes, hidden inside a dark balaclava; he stood and turned away from the camera, back towards the crowd, and signaled with his arm. Immediately, the rioting began. Arms were thrust skywards, Union Jacks waved, mouths open with the shouts of “No surrender! No surrender to the IRA!” and then pieces of guttering were torn away and hurled down upon the unguarded crowd below.

“Combat 18?” Resnick asked.

“Precisely.”

“But you’re not saying,” Millington asked, “that everyone in that upper stand at Dublin, those yobos you showed us running wild in Holland, that they’re all political?”

“Well,” Ulman said, “I doubt they’re all fully paid-up members of the British National Party. But that’s not the way it works.” Arching back his head a moment, he released an almost perfect smoke ring towards the ceiling. “Combat 18, no matter how much the BNP might now try to deny it, are enforcers. Write a letter to the Post complaining about a Fascist rally, stick an Anti-Nazi League poster in your window, and the lads from C18’1I be round to pay you a call.

“Now as far they’re concerned, soccer grounds are breeding grounds; they use football as a way of spreading propaganda, gaining converts who’ll stay interested just long enough to let them pull off some stunt like Dublin, Rotterdam, Oslo. Then C18 have got maximum publicity and they can rattle on in The Order-that’s their magazine-about getting a good result.

“The difference is, their racism is real: they believe it. To the rest, most of them, it’s unthinking. The kind that’ll throw bananas at the visiting team’s black players, jump up and down and make monkey noises, but not apparently notice they’ve got-what? — three or four black players of their own. Most likely they don’t think of themselves as racist at all. And when you get down to it, they’re probably not a whole lot more so than the rest of us. It’s ingrained. Difficult to shake.”

Millington leaned his chair back onto its hind legs. “This anti-Irish thing, that’d fit in with what the landlord told us, out at this pub we’re interested in.”

“It would indeed. Though, I have to say, we’ve no record of that particular pub being a meeting place for the kind of nice young character we’re talking about. However, habits change. It’s possible. What I can’t do, at least until you can provide me with some kind of visual identification, a name, is tell you whether these youths who were creating a disturbance the night Aston was killed are known to us already.”

“Details about locals who might fit the profile, though,” Resnick began. “We can go at it that way.”

“Absolutely. No problem.” Ulman took two large envelopes from his case and passed them across to where Resnick was sitting. “The quality of some of these is a little suspect, they’ve been blown up from video, but the rest, ones we’ve taken ourselves, they’ll be fine. You’ve got brief descriptions here too, known associates and addresses, though those do tend to slip out of date pretty fast.”

“And will some of these,” Resnick asked, “be Combat 18?”

“A few. You want to talk to Special Branch. They’ll have this area well sussed.”

Resnick nodded and thanked Ulman for all his help. Making contact with the local office of the Branch was already high on his list. But not until after lunch.