Easy Meat

Thirty-four

Days into the inquiry, the photographs of Bill Aston’s beaten body had been in danger of becoming little more than part of the incident room decor, scarcely deserving a second glance. But now with some concrete information from Special Branch and the Football Intelligence Unit to work on, potential suspects to target, the adrenaline was pumping again, spirits were high, voices boisterous and loud. Aside from the regular squad assigned to the murder inquiry, there were six officers from Special Branch, a further six from the Support Department, a dozen more drafted in from other duties-among these, two out of Vice, one of them Sharon Garnett.

The map showing a thirty-mile radius out from the city had been newly marked with pins in three distinct colors: blue for the Mansfield area to the north, green for Ilkeston to the west, red for addresses within the city boundary itself. Along with Lynn Kellogg, Sharon would be working with Reg Cossall in the green team, Graham Millington was supervising red; Chesney Woolmer, invited in by Resnick to assist with the briefing, would be running blue.

“Some of these people we’re going to interview,” Woolmer said, “may surprise you. Some will look like nice law-abiding insurance salesmen with a wife who works part-time and the regulation two point-whatever kids. Likely not what you’re expecting at all. That doesn’t mean they haven’t got regular subscriptions to a magazine with step-by-step instructions on how to construct a letter bomb and ideas of where to send it. Other times, you’ll open the door to three bloody great Alsatians and a bloke with a tattooed beer-gut hanging over his jeans and you’ll think, okay, stupid fat sod, I know where I am here. Don’t be fooled. These are people-some of them-capable of running a network of like-minded souls that takes in not just this country, but most of mainland Europe as well. Don’t underestimate them. And don’t turn your back on the sodding dogs.”

Resnick stepped forward into the ensuing laughter. “Remember we haven’t got warrants here, we’re not going barging in. What we’re doing is asking questions, establishing links-where were they the night of Aston’s murder, where did they go drinking, where were their mates?”

“But if you do get inside,” Woolmer again. “If you are invited in, be aware, keep your eyes skinned, anything that might be of potential interest to the Branch, I want to know.”

“All right,” said Resnick, “any more questions?”

There were none: within three minutes the room had cleared. What questions there were snagged in Resnick’s mind: he knew much of the circumstantial evidence pointed to a vicious, random attack-the spiraling pattern of footprints, the nature of the blows-and it seemed certain there had been a gang of probably drunken, possibly violent youths in the vicinity at the appropriate time, and yet … And yet … he could not let go of the idea that what had happened to Bill Aston had its roots in something more specific, more personal than a random attack in which he was a victim solely by chance and circumstance.

Resnick looked again at the blurred black-and-white images on the wall. Was it only a kind of sentimentality that urged him to see Aston’s death as having had reason and purpose, that and nothing more? He looked at his watch: Khan and Naylor should be making contact with Paul Matthews at any time. There were other avenues still open.

Khan and Naylor had spent the night in a B amp;B in Swansea, close by the old docks, now a smart new marina surrounded by brightly painted rows of flats and a heritage trail. Their landlady had insisted on serving them eggs and bacon accompanied by lava bread. “It’s a delicacy, see. Local.” Whatever it was, Kevin Naylor thought, it wasn’t bread. Black and somewhat slimy, it tasted suspiciously of whelks. As soon as they stepped outside the front door into the bright spring day, they could clearly see both hills and sea. Rhossili Bay was little more than fifteen miles along the Gower Peninsula.

Paul Matthews’s aunt didn’t disappoint. Her cottage was at the end of a rutted lane outside Llangennith, on the north edge of the Rhossili Downs. Two rusted cars lay on their sides, the new year’s nettles growing up around them. A van, unlicensed, but apparently still running, sat by the side gate, a black-and-white collie growling at the two detectives through bared teeth.

The aunt walked out into the yard, scattering chickens from around her slippered feet. Face brown and lined beyond her years, hair falling thinly away from a wispy bun, she was wearing an apron with a small floral print and muttering in Welsh.

“It’s not lost you are, is it?” she asked, lapsing into English.

When they assured her they were far from lost and explained why they were there, she insisted on sitting them down and making them tea. Paul, she said, had gone off early, down towards the bay most likely; that was what he’d done most days since he’d come.

“Something wrong with that boy,” she told them. “Not right in the head. Oh, I don’t mean he’s crazy, mind. Not like that. But troubled.” She smiled at them hopefully. “Anything you can do now, to ease his mind.”

They found him on a high reach of cliff, gulls riding the currents above his head and wheeling down to where they were nesting on the almost sheer face of rock.

For a fearful moment Naylor thought that he was poised to jump, but he was simply standing, staring out at the dark smudge of a tanker slow-sliding down the horizon, north to south.

“Mr. Matthews,” Khan said, speaking quietly, not wishing to startle. “Paul.”

He didn’t seem surprised to see Khan there, simply nodded towards him and Naylor and went back to looking out to sea. The wind was beginning to whip the tops of the waves into crescents of foam. On the horizon, the ship seemed scarcely to have moved.

“Paul? Paul, this is my colleague, Detective Constable Naylor. We need to talk.”

“But we’ve already …”

“We need to talk some more.”

“About Nicky?”

“Yes.”

Matthews looked out beyond the cliff edge towards the pencil-thin line bisecting sea and sky. “Mr. Jardine, does he know?”

“That we’re here?”

Matthews nodded.

“No. Anything you say, it’s just between us. You have my word.”

“Because he warned me, all of us, we weren’t to say anything, anything at all, not without him or a solicitor being there. He …”

“But he’s not here, Paul,” Khan said reassuringly. “Look around you. He need never know.”

Mathews took them to a place that stood alone, with white peeling paint, little more than a hut, an owner who had retired there from southeast London, Camberwell, and now sold cans of drink with names neither Naylor nor Khan had ever heard of, and tea from a large and battered silver pot.

They sat outside on rickety bench seats, sheltering from the freshness of the wind.

“I can’t stop thinking about him,” Matthews said. “Seeing him everywhere I look.”

“Nicky, you mean? Nicky Snape.”

“I found him, you see. It was me, I was the one.”

“I know,” Khan nodded.

“I should’ve took him down. The towel, I should have loosened it from round his neck. Took him down.” His eyes were like the wings of small dark birds, never still. “I was frightened. Afraid. I don’t suppose you can understand.”

“Yes, Paul,” Khan said. “We can.”

Matthews looked at him and read the lie. “It doesn’t matter, not now.”

“Paul,” Naylor began, “we wanted to ask you …”

“I held him, you see. I did that. I held him. Against me, like this.” He spread his arms from his body and then folded them back carefully through space, enfolding the imaginary boy with tenderness to his chest. “He was still warm.”

Naylor glanced across at Khan. “He was still alive?” he asked.

Sobs choked from Matthews’s mouth and nose as he shook his head from side to side more and more vigorously, rhythmically, as if dangling from a rope. “I don’t know,” repeating over and over. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Embarrassed, Naylor fished out a pocket-sized pack of Kleenex and gave one to Matthews, then another, Khan inside ordering more tea, sweet this time, three sugars.

Ten minutes later they were walking, Khan alongside Matthews, Naylor several paces behind. This is the sort of place I should come with Debbie, Naylor was thinking, get her mum to baby-sit one weekend somewhere like this, right away from everything, it’d be different here. Relaxed.

“Elizabeth Peck, she was on duty that evening?” Khan was asking. “The two of you together, right?”

“Yes, of course. We went through all of this. You know.”

“And she was the one who called emergency services, I think that’s what you said?”

Matthews nodded, yes, yes.

They were starting to climb again, the path well-trodden, earth at the field edge almost white.

“You haven’t any idea, Paul, have you, why she might have got in touch with Inspector Aston? At home. Privately, you know.”

Matthews had stopped walking and Naylor, still partly day-dreaming, almost bumped into him from behind.

“Elizabeth, you don’t know what she would have wanted to talk to him about?”

Matthews seemed dazed, out of focus. Off to the west a group of gulls was noisily baiting a lone crow. “She did that?”

“Yes. Quite a conversation, apparently. Whatever it was, they found a lot to say. We wondered if you had any idea what she might have talked to him about?”

“I think,” Matthews said, “I should go back now. I can’t walk too far. I’m not well, you understand, I’ve not been well. The doctor … that’s why I’m here. My aunt …”

He started to walk, back the way they had just come; Naylor standing there, not hurrying to move aside.

“What did she know, Paul? About what happened to Nicky? Something she hadn’t told anyone before, that’s what it must have been.”

Matthews shook his head and made an ineffectual attempt to move past, but sharp to his left there was the cliff edge and the other way was Khan, arms folded, smiling.

“Paul?”

“What? I …”

“You can tell us. Whatever Elizabeth would have talked to Inspector Aston about-tell us now, Paul. What would she have said? What did she know?”

Matthews stepped back, back towards the sea. One foot skidding the coarse grass, arm flailing, he was arching over as Naylor caught him, low about the waist and swinging him inland, snatching him, almost out of the air, the pair of them falling, bodies awkwardly intertwining across the edge of the path, the first stubby growth of the year.

“Good catch,” Khan said to Naylor, and then, to Matthews, helping him gingerly to his feet, “You okay? You need to be a bit more careful, narrow paths like these. One foot in the wrong place and then …”

There were tears in Matthews’s eyes again, clinging there, refusing to fall.

“Come on,” Khan said. “What d’you say? Why don’t we go back down?”

It was, as Reg Cossall would say later over a pint of Shippos, one of those fine spring days when to describe the stink of stale farts and cheap lager breath which greeted them in every doorway would have beggared even the sodding poet laureate’s invention.

Exactly so.

Their questions were answered with deviousness, vulgarity, polite lies, numberless requests for them to fuck off out of it and mind their own bleedin’ business, and, on one occasion, by a bucket of what startlingly resembled warm piss descending from an upstairs window in a virulent stream.

At least Chaucer could have dealt with that one.

Or Divine.

Divine, who suffered a long harangue from an out-of-work twenty-one-year-old, living with a seventeen-year-old woman and their two kids in a council house in Kirkby-in-Ashfield. “You,” he said, jabbing a finger towards Divine’s face, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself, you know that? Goin’ round, roustin’ blokes just ‘cause they show a bit of patriotism, right? Not afraid to stick up for their fuckin’ country, right? You know what I’m saying? I mean, you look around you, look around you, okay? Every fuckin’ business, who owns it? Pakis, right? Pakis and niggers everywhere you fuckin’ look. And the Irish … honest to Christ, I hate the fuckin’ Irish. Treacherous, murderin’ bastards. I mean, look, this country, this country used to be great, right? Look at a map, look at a fuckin’ map some time, we used to own half this soddin’ world, three-quarters of it and now we’re nothing. Less than nothing. And me, blokes like me, we’re the only ones standing up, makin’ ourselves fuckin’ heard. ’Cause we care, right? About this fuckin’ country. It’s your fuckin’ pride, okay? We care and we ain’t afraid to let it show and you, you and your mates, as should be standing up with us, side by side, make this country what it once was, what it could be, without all the nignogs and the Pakis and the jews, all you do is come round hassling us, right? Ought to be fuckin’ ashamed!”

Eyes alight, he hawked up a thick gob of spit and unleashed it on the ground some yards wide of Divine’s feet. Divine listening, thinking, though he wasn’t about to say so, that one way or another, the bloke had a point.

Lynn Kellogg and Sharon Garnett had almost given up trying to rouse anyone from this house, the last but one in the road, what remained of the front lawn blackened with engine oil. Sharon was giving Lynn the thumbs down and turning away, when there were footsteps and a muffled voice from the other side of the front door.

It was a runty little man in a singlet and jeans, scratching himself and yawning, blinking at the light.

“Sorry to wake you,” Sharon said, identifying Lynn and herself. “We’re looking for Gerry Hovenden. That wouldn’t be you, by any chance.”

Unaware, possibly, that he was now standing there scratching energetically between his legs, the man shook his head. “Not by any chance. That’s the boy you’re wanting and he’s away.”

“Away where?

“Buggered if I know.”

But the sound of a motor bike approaching provided all the answer they needed, Hovenden, moments later, swinging his leg over the rear of the machine, Shane already standing there, helmet in hand, thinking fucking law, what in fuck’s name they after now?

It was soon clear.

“Can you tell us, Gerry,” Lynn asked, “where you were last Saturday evening?”

“Home,” he replied, without hesitation.

“Last Saturday,” his father said dismissively. “I never saw hide nor hair of you all evening.”

Colored brightly from his neck, Hovenden shook his head. “Home round Shane’s, that’s what I mean. Couple of videos and a curry, eh, Shane?”

“That’s right,” Shane said. “All evening.”

“You’re sure about that?” Lynn said, moving a touch closer and fixing him with her best stare.

But Shane was not about to be intimidated. “I said, didn’t I? Sure.” Those hard, brittle eyes, daring Lynn to call him a liar.

“Well, in that case,” Lynn said, “we’d best have your name and address, too. You never know when we might want to check.”

“Shane Snape,” Resnick said, “that’s interesting.” Lynn and Sharon had reported back to Reg Cossall initially and then to Resnick direct. The three of them were in his office, the sky through the window slowly darkening towards evening.

“Came up on the back of the bike, large as life,” Lynn said.

“Yes,” Sharon said. “Gave this Gerry Hovenden his alibi.” Resnick looked at the two officers, one to another. “And you didn’t believe him?”

Sharon shook her head.

“Not Hovenden, certainly,” Lynn said. “Lying to his back teeth, if you ask me. Covering up about something, I’d bet on that.”

“And he’s on the Branch list? Political?”

Lynn made a face. “Marginal, really. Not a member of any extremist group, as far as is known. Hangs about with them, that’s all. Spotted up a couple of times at rallies. Nothing criminal recorded.”

“Right, let’s follow it up. Once we’ve got some more information in, check Hovenden’s contacts with the rest, see if he fits in with anyone else that looks interesting.”

“And Shane Snape?” Lynn asked. “Do you want us to process him as normal, or …”

“I might go round myself,” Resnick said. “Have a word.”

“Right.” Lynn hesitated at the door after Sharon Garnett had passed through. “About the other night,” she said quietly. “All those things I was saying … I know it’s difficult, I’ve probably made it difficult, but it’s not going to get in the way … I mean, we can work together, it hasn’t stopped that?”

“No,” Resnick said, “of course not, it’s fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure.”

Resnick’s phone rang and as he reached towards it, Lynn slipped out through the door and closed it behind her.