Easy Meat

Nine

“Why did you run away from the home, Martin?” Lynn asked.

From under the fall of dark hair, Martin Hodgson squinted back at her in disbelief.

“Why, Martin?”

“Why d’you think?”

“I don’t know, I’m asking you.”

“If you don’t know, you must be thick.”

“And if I were you, I’d watch my mouth.”

Leaning back in his chair, Martin contorted his face and peered downwards. “All I can see is me top lip.”

She controlled the urge to slap him hard across the face, kick the chair out from under him, cocky little sod, and see him sprawling on the floor. For a moment she wondered whether if someone had done that to him sooner, and hard enough, he would still have turned out the way he had; or was he like he was because that had happened too many times?

“When we brought you in,” Lynn said, “you had over a hundred pounds in your pockets.”

“So?”

“So where did it come from?”

Martin shook his head; the same expression was back on his face again, sullen and hard. “Where d’you think?”

“Tell me.”

“You shouldn’t be doin’ this, interrogating me on me own. You know how old I am, you know the rules.”

Despite herself, Lynn smiled. “Interrogation? Is that what this is?”

“Yeh. What else d’you call it?”

“It’s just a chat.”

“You mean, I could get up and go?”

“No.”

“Then I should have someone here, right?”

“Social services’ve been informed.”

“Bollocks to that. I want a brief.”

“As soon as one can be found.”

“Then I’m not sayin’ another thing till he comes.”

“Just tell me about the money.”

“What about it?”

“Where it came from?”

Martin squinted up his eyes. “You know where you found me, right?”

“You got it on the Forest?”

“Yeh, grows on trees.”

Caught her! Lynn sat on her hands, staring at the ceiling. Grinning, Martin let his chair rock forward and then slowly folded his arms across the table and lowered his head. Fourteen, Lynn thought, fourteen and he must have been in this situation half a hundred times. She tried to think of the worst thing she might have done, growing up on her parents’ poultry farm in Norfolk, by the time she was fourteen. The front of Martin’s hair had fallen forward across his wrist and she could see the back of his neck, narrow and exposed. She wondered whereabouts along the line the caring had stopped, the real caring; how long it had been since anyone, any adult, had held him, touched him in anything other than anger or sexual need? From the shift in his breathing she thought he might be asleep.

It was less than ten minutes later that he stirred and opened his eyes. “Ambergate, you’re goin’ to send me back there, right?”

Lynn nodded. “Right.”

Resnick had spoken briefly to the senior registrar in neurosurgery; Doris Netherfield was still in the operating theater and it was impossible to determine with any certainty which way it would go. Up to the present, Doris was just about holding her own, that was the best she could say. They had contacted her immediate family, who were on their way.

Resnick thanked the registrar and went down to the ward.

Sitting beside Eric Netherfield’s bed, Divine was browsing through the pages of yesterday’s Today.

“Spark out, boss,” Divine said, on his feet and gesturing down.

“Did he say anything?”

“Kept asking about his missus, that were all.”

“Okay, get along home. I’ll want you in first thing.”

“You’re sure, ’cause I don’t mind …”

“No, hop it. I’ll just hang on here a minute, have a word with the doctor, whoever’s on duty.”

Divine didn’t need telling a third time.

It was the staff nurse who was in charge, a bright-eyed young woman in a bright-blue uniform, to Resnick’s eyes, improbably young. “We gave him something for the pain,” she said, “poor old boy. I’m hoping he’ll sleep as long as he can.”

“I’ll not disturb him,” Resnick said.

There was a bandage round Eric Netherfield’s head, light patches around it where the hair had been shaved away. The arm that poked from the end of borrowed pyjamas was shiny and gray. Resnick was thinking about the last time he had seen his own father alive.

“Did you want a cup of tea?” the staff nurse said from behind him.

Resnick took it and sat beside the bed, listening to the old man’s halting, stubborn breath. He had sat, virtually alone, in a side ward with his father, thirty-six hours, watching the occasional movement of the older man’s mouth, each gasp of air into his damaged lungs like rust scraping against rust. “Go home,” the sister had said. “Get some rest. We’ll call you if there’s any change.” When the phone rang somewhere between four and five, the change had been that his father was dead. It was the hour those calls had come ever since.

Resnick was finishing the tea, about to leave, when Netherfield spoke. “Doris,” he said, his voice barely audible, little more than a croak.

“She’s all right,” Resnick said. “She’s being looked after. She’ll be fine.”

“She did it for me,” Eric said. “She were protecting me.”

“I know.”

The man stretched out the fingers of his hand and Resnick placed his own between them, leaning close over him, smelling his old man’s smell.

“The person who did this …” Resnick began.

“A lad, nothing but a lad.”

Resnick was about to ask more, but Netherfield’s head had slipped a little to one side and his eyes were closed. His fingers, long and bony, were tight around Resnick’s hand. As the sound of the old man’s breathing steadied down, Resnick continued to sit, arm at an awkward angle, unable to move.

After several minutes the staff nurse came along and freed Resnick’s hand, slipping the old man’s fingers beneath the edge of the sheet.

“You can go now.” She smiled.

Resnick hesitated, waiting for her to add, we’ll call you if there’s any change.

The litter of half-smoked cigarettes in the ashtray at Brian Noble’s side had grown to the edge of overflowing, though, in truth, he didn’t smoke. Rarely, at least. Occasionally, after a meal. He looked at his watch and, again, counted the patches on the opposite wall where the paint had begun to flake away. Shifted awkwardly on the hard seat. Got up, sat down.

“Surely you aren’t intending to charge me?” he asked, and Sharon stared back at him, eyebrow raised.

“But whatever with?”

“That’s just it,” she said. “It’s difficult. So many possibilities, you know what I mean?” She shrugged. “Gross indecency, that’s the usual, isn’t it? That’d be a start.”

“Look, my wife …”

“Oh, yes.” Sharon grinned. “There’s usually one of those.” He demanded to make a phone call and dialed his own number, hanging up at the first ring.

“No one else you want to try?”

“No. Thank you.”

And then they kept him sitting there, looking in from time to time, uniformed officers mainly, once to offer him a hot drink, once a sandwich that was stale, occasionally a head would poke round the door and stare and disappear.

When Sharon came back it was with a lamb kebab inside pita bread. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s been a busy night.”

Noble said nothing.

Sharon held out the kebab towards him but Noble shook his head.

“Not hungry?”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

She looked at him quizzically. “You don’t like meat?”

“That’s right.”

She was still looking at him, a smile at the comers of her mouth. “You surprise me.” Sharon picked up a cube of lamb with her fingers and lifted it to her mouth.

“Please,” Noble said, “tell me …?”

“What?”

“What you’re … what you’re going to do?”

“With you?”

Noble looked up at her and then away; he couldn’t stand the mixture of contempt and mockery in her eyes.

“Did you read,” Sharon asked, “about that boy? They found him in a wood down near Bristol, a week or so ago? What was left of him. It was on the news, remember? Nine, wasn’t he? Nine years old.”

“Look,” Noble said, alarmed, “I don’t know why you’re telling me this. That’s nothing to do with me. Nothing at all. There’s no …”

“Comparison?”

“No.”

Sharon sat on the corner of the table and crossed her legs, one high above the other. “You’re not a pedophile, is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course I’m not!”

“No,” Sharon said. “You just like sex with young boys.”

Resnick had driven back to the station by way of the Netherfield house. So far, there was no indication that any of the adjacent properties had been broken into. It had been a one-off.

Back in his office, coffee brewing, he was placing a call to the hospital when Lynn Kellogg knocked on his door.

“Not quite ready yet,” Resnick said, indicating the coffee machine.

Lynn smiled, a tired smile, there for a moment and then gone.

“The Hodgson youth,” Resnick said, “you’ve got him back in custody.”

She nodded.

“Well done.”

“Earlier this evening, he was hanging out with Aasim Patel and Nicky Snape.”

Resnick’s interest quickened. He knew the Snape family well. Shane, the eldest, he’d arrested on a charge of aggravated burglary; the last time he had talked to Norma it had been about Nicky, just a day or two before the lad had been fire-bombed in a vigilante attack.

“Nicky wasn’t with him then, up on the Forest?”

“Apparently not. There was some kind of argument by the sound of it. Last he saw of Nicky, he was setting off for home.”

Resnick didn’t even need to look at the map. If you drew a straight line from the Forest Recreation Ground to Radford, it would pass right through where the Netherfields lived.

First light was filtering up above the rooftops when Millington and Naylor arrived, Graham Millington, with a broad grin, holding aloft a narrow object secured inside two plastic bags.

“Kevin here found it. Dustbin, two streets off.”

It was the length of iron railing from beside Eric Netherfield’s bed.