by Jo Bannister
“Yes, sir,” she said, and wondered at the firmness in her own voice. “I think it’s necessary.”
“All right.” He sat back, broad shoulders slumping. “On your own head be it.”
CHAPTER 15
IT STARTED almost immediately.
No one spoke an unkind word to her. No one spoke to her at all, unless it was strictly necessary, when they said what they had to in as few words as possible and then moved away. Their faces remained expressionless. None of them could have been accused of intimidating her by word, deed, or manner. But oh, the power of silence.
Hazel was determined to see it through. It wasn’t as if these people were her friends. Not really, not yet. They were colleagues, and they could go on working together whether or not they liked one another. She had done nothing wrong. She kept reminding herself of that. Others would decide if her suspicions were warranted, but even if they weren’t, she’d had no choice but take them to someone with more experience, more seniority than she. Maybe those who’d known Sergeant Murchison since he was directing traffic onto the Ark would be proved right. That still wouldn’t make what Hazel did wrong.
So if her colleagues at Meadowvale Police Station wanted to keep her at arm’s length until the truth could be established, fine. Unnecessary, Hazel thought, and unkind, and maybe even cowardly, but fine. Sooner or later, whatever transpired, they would have to deal with her, and she’d still be here. She wasn’t about to plead stress and go on gardening leave.
But for the first time since joining the police she couldn’t wait for the end of her shift. When she went into the women’s locker room to change that Saturday morning, everyone who was already there left. One left in her bra, pulling her shirt on as she stalked down the corridor.
Okay, thought Hazel Best, and just for badness she paused at the drinks machine in the foyer, bought a strong coffee, and took her time drinking it. Only then did she leave the building.
At first she drove around aimlessly, torn between thinking and trying not to think. Then she noticed the looks she was getting from people on the street, whom she’d passed three times, and realized they thought she was curb crawling. She left the car by the park gates and walked as far as the war memorial.
The urns had been restored to their proper positions, the uprooted shrubs replanted, the granite steps swept clean. Robert Barclay’s blood on the obelisk had been washed away.
Why? she found herself wondering. Why had he wanted to head-butt it? Barking Mad or not, he must have known he’d hurt himself much more than the monument. Whatever was there about a granite war memorial to make him so angry? Hazel bent closer to read the inscriptions. But they were just names. The names of young men, and a few young women, who’d lived in Norbold and died on foreign fields in conflicts from World War I to present-day Iraq and Afghanistan.
There were even a couple of Bests. No relation. As far as she knew she had no family in Norbold, but that didn’t stop the discovery from giving her a little jolt. In a way it didn’t matter if they were close kin or not. They were all one. They’d come from roots like hers, and grown up in this place, expecting to be teachers and plumbers and, yes, policemen, and they hadn’t had the chance. Some of them had died bravely, and some of them had died with their arms over their heads, crying for their mothers, but all of them had been trying to do a good thing and it had cost them their lives. Their loss had been felt in hearts and homes in every street in the town.
And Robert Barclay had found their monument so offensive that he tried to rip it down with his bare hands and indeed his bare head. Why?
Or maybe it didn’t matter why. Maybe she was looking for some sort of logic where none existed. It wasn’t what Barclay did here that was important; it was what he did in cell five at Meadowvale.
Unless Gabriel Ash was right when he suggested—it had been little more than an off-the-cuff idea, and they hadn’t pursued it because they’d started talking about something else—that someone else had used Barclay to do his dirty work. Used him as a weapon, Ash had said—primed him and pointed him and stood well back to wait for the explosion. Mickey Argyle, perhaps, whose interest in Ash suggested he was in some way involved in Jerome Cardy’s life, if not his death. A man like that, a serious player on the organized-crime scene—one of the last serious players in Norbold, thanks to Johnny Fountain—might have the nous to manipulate smaller thugs like Barclay if he also had the need. Hazel couldn’t imagine why he would go to so much trouble to launch a stealth attack on a law student, but it wasn’t necessary for her to know in order to find out if there was any mileage in the idea. To go back through Barclay’s night, and possibly the previous day, to see if she could discover what made him do what he did that got him arrested.
The war memorial. He could have attacked any of the bus shelters on the way here, any of the shop fronts, or the art installation in front of the Town Hall, which had made Hazel reach for her truncheon more than once. He hadn’t. He’d come into the park in order to attack the war memorial. She leaned forward, scanning the names. Not far up the long list from where she’d found the Bests, she found a Barclay. Lance Corporal E. M. Barclay of Second Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, died 1979 in Northern Ireland. Barking Mad’s dad? She could check the custody records, but the man she’d tried to arrest looked to be around forty, making it perfectly feasible. Perhaps as a small child this big, violent man had stood on a railway station and waved good-bye to a soldier father he was never going to see again.
Was that enough? To make him put a brick through the window of the recruiting office maybe, but to attack the monument? Hazel couldn’t see it.
As she backed away, nodding a tiny salute, someone was watching her. A dog walker, she supposed, waiting on the edge of the spinney while his charge investigated the fascinating aroma of something dead in the leaf mold. But there was no dog. As she moved, his shoulders moved to follow her.
Hazel turned toward him.
She thought he was going to hurry off—something about the way his body gathered itself in balance over his feet. But he resisted the urge and let her approach.
He was about sixteen, thin and pinched in the face, none too clean even for a teenager and wearing clothes too light for the April weather and trainers with holes over the toes. She thought he was sleeping rough, or the next best thing.
“Were you looking for me?” she asked, keeping her tone friendly.
He answered with a question, and a note of challenge. “Are you a cop?”
That surprised her. She was out of uniform, and hadn’t lived around here long enough for everyone to know who she was and what she did. “That’s right.” She nodded. “Do you need some help?”
He disdained to answer that. “You were here three nights ago. After the nut with the dog got beat.”
Hazel ignored his choice of words. “What do you know about that?”
The boy shrugged inside his thin clothes. “Nothing.”
“You knew it was me dealing with it. You must have seen me.”
“Nothing to do with me.” Another moment and he really was going to run.
“He was all right, you know,” said Hazel. “A bit bruised, nothing more. Which is a minor miracle, when you think about it.”
“Yeah,” muttered the boy.
“Yes.” Hazel pretended not to notice the shiftiness of his demeanor. She thought she knew what this was about. “He said somebody helped him. That he’d have been hurt much worse if somebody hadn’t taken the risk of helping him.”
“Yeah?”
“By letting the dog go.”
Saturday shot her a sideways glance from under overlong hair, half wary, half pleased. “They were going to kill him.”
“Yes,” agreed Hazel, “I think they were.”
“It was the dog run them off. Cracking good dog, that.”
“She couldn’t have done it if you’d held on to her.”
“He never done them any harm. Why’d they want to kill him?”
>
Hazel shook her head. “I don’t know. They’re not my friends.”
“They’re not mine, neither! They’re…” He didn’t finish the sentence. It was as if he was accustomed to being cut short. As if never being listened to had freed him from the mental discipline of having to think things through to a conclusion.
But Hazel was listening to him now, politely, her head tipped a little to one side like a curious bird’s. “What, then?”
Like forcing a rusty hinge, like hand-cranking an unused engine, the boy made the feelings in his head shape molds for the underused words to flow into. At first they flowed like treacle. “Just, people I know. People like me. Wasters. No jobs, no money. Time to kill. You end up doing stupid things just to fill the day. Beating up on harmless idiots. Hanging out with people who beat up on harmless idiots.”
“Why don’t you do something else?”
His eyebrows rocketed. “Like what? Airline pilot? Bit of brain surgery? There’s no jobs going for people much better qualified than me.”
“That’s not actually true,” she chided him gently. “I know these are difficult times. But however tough the conditions, there are always some people who do better than others starting from the same place. The trick is to try to be one of them.”
Saturday stared at her as if he really, genuinely thought she might have come from another planet. And, at least metaphorically, she had. A world where effort was by and large rewarded, and where people were motivated by the general expectation that it would be. Trucker’s crew would have laughed the very idea to bitter scorn. Saturday suddenly felt jealous. He had no middle-class aspirations. He didn’t even have any working-class aspirations. He knew, at a bone-deep level—the way he knew that if you aren’t with the pack, you’re the quarry—that he had no future beyond this daily drift toward the void.
He was never going to starve. They made sure you didn’t starve, made a point of saving you from that. They never explained what it was they were saving you for. So far as Saturday could see, it was a kind of cosmic joke—to give you nothing to do, nothing to hope for, and make sure you’d all the time in the world to do it in. These days he didn’t look very far ahead, not if he could help it, but when it sneaked up on him in the middle of a cold, unsleeping night, he knew with a cruel certainty that there was nothing ahead of him that was any better than what he had right now. Or any different. He was sixteen. Excepting violence, he might expect to live into his sixties. That meant there was three times as much living still to be done as he’d done already, and it was all going to be just like this. Just as pointless as this.
He felt his eyes grow hot on her smooth, nicely brought-up, and, above all, clean face—just a touch of makeup, long fair hair tied back neatly, wouldn’t Mummy be proud, bet she’s got a photo on the fireplace of Plodette in her lovely blue uniform and kick-ass hat—and somehow it mattered to him, more than making a fool of himself, more than making himself memorable to a police officer, which was not generally recommended for people in Saturday’s position, that he jolt that smug self-confidence, that inbred knowledge of her own worth that informed her view of how the world worked. Maybe it worked like that for people like her, girls with nice accents and ponies and foreign holidays, but most of the world was more like him than it was like her and the least she could do was bloody well recognize the fact!
“Lady,” he said roughly, “who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think I am—Little Orphan Annie? Do you think that’s all I need—a bit of motivation? That a Christmas cracker motto’s all it’ll take to turn me into a model citizen?” He gave a bleak laugh that made him sound far older than his sixteen years.
“I am not like you. Trucker and his crew, they’re not like you. We don’t do things because there’s a good reason for it. We do things because we can—because you can’t stop us. We take things, and scare people, and hurt people, because you can’t stop us. Most of the time you can’t even catch us, and when you do, the worst that happens is we get a warm bed and an extra meal every day for six months.
“I’m trash,” he spat. “We’re all trash. You know what makes us strong? Knowing it. Knowing we were born trash, and we’ll die trash, and everything between is trash as well. Knowing that nothing you can do to us will make it any worse.”
“And that nothing you do will make it any better,” said Hazel softly. “That’s what you think, isn’t it? Not that you’re strong, but that you’re too weak to make things any better for yourself. And you don’t try because the only thing that would be worse than staying where you are would be trying to leave and failing. As long as you don’t try, you can tell yourself there’s no alternative. But if you tried—if you pulled yourself far enough out of the gutter to see where the road leads—and then slipped back, you’d never again have the comfort of thinking that way. You’d know that I’m right. That if you tried hard enough, you might succeed.”
The boy blinked at her. He was used to the blame-free approach of well-meaning social workers who’d been taught that poverty is a misfortune, which it certainly is, and largely beyond the ability of the victim to change, which Hazel had been taught it was not. Now that she had his full attention, she pressed home her point.
“Hard is the operative word. You want something in this world, you have to work for it, and I don’t think that’s a concept you’re entirely familiar with. Taking, yes; being given, maybe; earning, not so much. But you’re worth more than this, and that’s how you get it. I’m not here to motivate you. Self-respect should be motivation enough.”
Saturday stared at her in astonishment. It was like being savaged by a kitten. He’d thought she was soft and fluffy. He’d thought to bring a blush of shame to her middle-class cheek, and instead he felt himself growing hot and awkward. “You know nothing about it,” he mumbled resentfully.
“Of course I do,” Hazel retorted briskly. “I see it every day. I see more than you do—I also see the people who start off with nothing and end up with something. I’ll tell you something you don’t know. You’re one of the people who could do it. I don’t think Trucker is, I don’t think any of his crew are, but you are. You’re smarter and you’re tougher.”
A part of him didn’t want to believe her. “I’m the same as them.…”
“No, you’re not. While they were kicking nine bells out of a man on the ground, you were looking for a way to stop it. You didn’t have to do that. You stuck your neck out doing it. You did it because you didn’t like what was happening and you were willing to take a risk to stop it. Take another risk. Stop”—she looked him up and down, critically—“this.”
The others weren’t like this. They brought you soup at Christmas, and new socks and little homilies, but they didn’t tell you that, essentially, it was your own fault you were living like this. That you could change it if you tried. Of course, new socks only lasted so long.
“Where do you live?”
“Up the Flying Horse.” He indicated the direction of the estate with a wary jerk of his head.
“With family?”
“In a squat.”
“With friends, then.”
“I told you, I don’t—”
“Have any friends,” she said, finishing his sentence impatiently. “Except that you have. You’ve got at least two. Like it or not, I’m one. And the other”—Hazel’s eyes narrowed as a train of thought that should probably have been shunted into a siding for inspection first went barreling through the points—“would probably like to meet you again, would like to thank you, and might be persuaded to make lunch for the three of us.”
“I don’t need feeding up, either,” growled Saturday, as if there was something patronizing in the suggestion.
“Maybe you don’t need to eat,” said Hazel, ignoring the testimony of his gaunt young body, “so much as he needs to cook. And I need the company of people who aren’t police officers. Come on, the car’s this way.”
He’d been right about one thing: sh
e’d been nicely brought up. She resisted the urge to spread newspapers before letting him onto the front seat. “If we’re going to be friends, we should probably know each other’s names. I’m Hazel.”
“Saturday,” he responded in a low voice.
She looked surprised. “Really?”
He scowled. “No, not really. It’s a street name.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Like Acacia Avenue?”
The boy grinned and leaned back in his seat with his hands laced behind his head. Unaccountably he was starting to feel comfortable in this woman’s presence. “My name’s Saul Desmond. My family’s Jewish, so the kids at school called me ‘Excused Saturdays.’ All right? Now, are we going to eat or what?”
CHAPTER 16
THEY ARRIVED AT the house in Highfield Road as Ash was letting himself in. Hazel lowered her window. “Everything all right?”
He hardly looked surprised anymore to see her. “Fine. Though Detective Inspector Gorman had no idea what Mickey Argyle might want with me, either.”
“Nye Jackson was right, then—they were Argyle’s goons?”
Ash nodded. “DI Gorman called them ‘known associates.’ I picked them out of some photographs he showed me.” Belatedly, he noticed that she was not alone. “Er…”
“Yes,” said Hazel, getting out of the car and beckoning her passenger. “This is Saul. Also known, apparently, as Saturday. You have actually met.”
There was a silence that stretched to perhaps a minute. Long enough for Hazel to wonder if she’d done the right thing bringing the boy here. Long enough for Saturday to wonder if he should run. Even long enough for him to remember that on the other side of that door was a dog with the speed of a greyhound and the jaws of a mantrap, so that a head start of anything less than about a quarter of an hour wasn’t worth taking. He stood his ground. But his eyes were wary and his body tense.
Finally Ash said quietly, “Yes, I remember.”