Off Minor

by John Harvey

  “All right,” Patel said, taking hold of the nearest youth by the arm and pulling him away. “Put a stop to this.”

  “Fuck off, Paki!” the youth shouted and punched Patel’s shoulder.

  “Yeh, fuck off!” And they swarmed round him.

  “I’m a police officer,” Patel just had time to call out, before Raymond jumped towards him, the force of the attack knocking him back, knocking him down, the blade of the knife that was still in Raymond’s hand severing the carotid artery alongside Patel’s chin.

  Within moments all the youths were gone. Only Patel lay there, Alison gazing helplessly down, blood across her trousers and her shoes beginning to run between the paving stones. On the edge of the crowd that was slowly forming, Sara picked herself up from grazed knees and turned away, vomiting into her hands.

  Forty-eight

  Resnick was still numb. Even though he had seen the body, it was difficult to belief. CONSTABLE KILLED IN KNIFE ATTACK. POLICEMAN SLAIN IN CITY BRAWL. The headlines were there behind him, Sunday tabloids bunched on the back seat of the car. Detective Constable Diptak Patel was stabbed and fatally wounded when he sought to intervene in a vicious fight between armed youths late last night. Constable Patel, who was off duty at the time … Since the early editions, the front pages had been changed, reports that Stephen Sheppard had been charged with murder relegated to page two. On the feature pages articles charting the rise of violence and the decline of the inner cities vied with psychologists profiling the kind of man most likely to engage in pedophilia.

  “Why? Why? Why?” Patel’s mother had cried in the hospital, over and over again. “Why would anyone do this to my son?”

  “Stop this!” His father had interrupted, stilling her with the fierceness of his anger. “Stop this now! We know, all of us, the reason why.”

  No, Resnick thought, none of it is that simple: not what happened to Patel, what happened to Gloria Summers, neither what made Sheppard the person he became, nor the youth who lashed out in ignorance and fear, a knife blade in his hand. He saw that he had missed his turning, drove to the end of the street and doubled back, the pebble-dash bungalow one block along to the right.

  He was sitting with Edith Summers on the promenade, staring out over the North Sea, gray as the folds of an old man’s neck. What they sold on the front was daylight robbery, Edith had said, and anyway, at that time of the year most of the places would be closed. So they sat there, drinking tea from a Thermos, wrapped up against the cold.

  “It was good of you to come and tell me,” Edith said. “Good of you to come and talk. It’s not everyone as would.”

  Suddenly, Resnick had to turn his head aside, afraid of tears.

  “When he’d done what he’d done,” Edith said falteringly, “to Gloria, did he tell you why he had to … to take her life as well?”

  … all of a sudden there was this screaming and at first I didn’t realize, I mean I hadn’t meant to, the last thing in all the world, I hadn’t meant to hurt her, but she was staring at me and screaming and, oh, God, I hadn’t meant to hurt her, I promise, I promise, I tried to get her to be quiet, I was frightened someone would hear but she went on and on and …

  “I think he got carried away,” Resnick said, “this time. I think with girls before he’d only looked, perhaps touched, but nothing, you know, nothing too serious. This time, when he realized what had happened, I think he was shocked, ashamed; scared of what Gloria would say and do, who she might tell.”

  “You sound almost as if you feel sorry for him,” Edith said.

  “Do I?” said Resnick. “I don’t think that was what I meant.” Though there were times, he thought, with someone like Sheppard, when perhaps I might. Oh, less than for Gloria, or for you, but a little, a residue of sympathy. But not today: today all the sorrow that I have is used up.

  “They won’t hang him, will they?” Edith said. “They don’t do that anymore. They’ll put him in some place instead, Broadmoor, look after him with doctors, keep him locked away. People will write to him, it’s what happens. Say it’s not really his fault, let on they understand.”

  Resnick reached out and took her hand. An elderly woman, gray-haired, walking her dog, looked at them compassionately as she passed, how nice to see, she thought, a couple like that still acting so affectionately towards one another after all those years.

  “Okay, if I take him a tea?”

  The custody sergeant looked up from his desk and nodded Millington through.

  Sheppard was sitting on the edge of the bed, arms between his legs in that now familiar position. He was muttering to himself, something Millington couldn’t make out, falling silent as the cell door closed.

  “My wife …” Sheppard began.

  “We spoke to her yesterday, said she didn’t want to see you. Since then nothing’s changed.”

  “Can’t you ask …?”

  “She knows where you are.”

  “Please ask her again.”

  “We’ll see.”

  You self-pitying bastard, Millington thought, I’d like to wipe your face with the wall. “Interested in this,” he said, indicating the mug. “Tea?”

  Sheppard reached out a hand.

  “There’s two people waiting on you,” Millington said. “Desperate. Emily Morrison’s mum and dad. Waiting for you to tell them what you did with their daughter, where she is.”

  “I told you,” Sheppard moaned. “So many times. I haven’t any idea.”

  Millington hurled the contents of the mug high above Sheppard’s head and let himself out of the cell fast, fearful of the damage he might cause.

  The blade passed like fire across the throat and, as if opening a tap, the blood poured down, splashing back up boot-high, chasing in circles down the drain. Raymond turned and pressed the sheet to his face and the sheet stank sweet with his sweat. The body of the calf continued to shake. A cut the length of the underside and the guts fell out. He had locked the door and run the chest against it, flush. For what seemed hours now he had been dimly aware of movement, voices below. The second cut opened the animal from the rear legs to the sternum. Sweat and urine: sweat and shit. Tubs of coiled pink guts, pink and gray. Raymond crying, frightened his mother would find out and tell him off, didn’t know how it had happened, hadn’t done it on purpose, honest, he hadn’t meant to mess the bed. He felt between his legs. The last he’d seen of Sara, she’d been on her knees and crying. Stupid bitch! Serve her right, should have listened, done what he’d said. He could feel himself beginning to harden in his hand. Intestines sliding along a stainless steel chute, slithering down. On the news last night, they’d caught the bloke that had that girl, the one he’d liked to watch. Two-ball. Kiss chase.” Laughing at him from across the street. “Ray-o! Ray-o! Ray-o! Ray!” Legs kicking up beneath her little skirt. When he’d got her off on her own, what had he done? Raymond pulled the sheet up over his face and closed his eyes. Sweet stink. He spat into his hand and brought it back down to his cock.

  Resnick got back to the station late afternoon. Millington looked up at him from where he was sitting and slowly shook his head. “Sheppard’s solicitor’s been on the phone again,” Lynn Kellogg said. “Been trying to get in touch with Sheppard’s wife. Won’t pick up the phone or come to the door.”

  “Get the keys,” Resnick said.

  She’d hoovered the house and dusted, later than usual, but still it had been done. Her bedtime drink she’d made for herself, rinsing out the saucepan and the cup and leaving them on the side to drain. She had poured a glass of water and taken it upstairs to bed. The two medicine bottles were empty on the cabinet.

  Lynn looked at Resnick and went back down to the phone.

  She hadn’t left a note. Instead, on the pillow next to her, where her husband’s head more usually would have lain, there was a yellow wallet, Stephen Sheppard’s final batch of photographs, the last few taken almost exactly a week ago: blurred but recognizable, Emily with her doll’s pram, waving from her
front lawn.

  Forty-nine

  The detective sergeant who met Resnick at the airport was stocky and bald, bundled into a dark green anorak, black and white trainers below heavy cotton trousers.

  “Good flight?” he asked, leaving Resnick to open the passenger door.

  “Short,” Resnick said.

  They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  The house was beyond the edge of the village, high on the headland. “Let me out here,” Resnick said.

  “I’ll take you right up …”

  “Here. And wait.”

  Hands in pockets, he walked past low stone walls and the dark massed green of rhododendron bushes. Here and there the sea was visible through the mist; somewhere out there was Ireland. The house had been built from iron-gray stone, turrets pointing towards the flat gray of the sky: someone’s idea of a castle.

  Geoffrey Morrison, a heavy Aran sweater over green cords, was leaning on his putter near the foot of the large, sloping garden, talking into a radio phone. His wife, Claire, was higher up, near the conservatory, kneeling in a padded leisure suit to tie off some new growth on the loganberry bushes. Between them, cheeks puffed out and red from the wind, Emily was working herself back and forth on a bright green metal swing.

  Happy family, Resnick thought.

  Geoffrey Morrison broke off his call. He had only seen Resnick once before but recognized him immediately. In the back of his mind he had been waiting for Resnick to walk around the corner, pass through that gate, Resnick or someone like him.

  “How did you know?” Morrison asked.

  “What you do,” Resnick said, “you and your wife. You get Emily ready. No fuss. I don’t know what you’ve said to her already, but all she needs to know for now, the holiday’s over, her mum and dad are coming to take her back. They’ll be over on the next flight. Right?”

  There were half a hundred things Morrison wanted to say and he said none of them.

  Resnick held out a hand. “The phone,” he said.

  Morrison gave it to him and turned towards where his wife was slowly walking towards him, holding Emily’s hand.

  There had been five photographs of Emily altogether, taken by Stephen Sheppard as he jogged past the Morrison house, the Sunday afternoon that he came close to colliding with Vivien Nathanson. In one of these all that could be seen of Emily was a gloved hand, continuing to wave. At the far side of that picture, visible just inside the frame, the number plate of a car, a Ford Orion otherwise unaccounted for. A computer check had shown it as a hire car, based at Birmingham Airport, less than an hour and a half away. The rest of the details had been simple to obtain.

  Geoffrey Morrison sat in one of the leather armchairs, waiting for his brother and sister-in-law to arrive. Emily was upstairs with Claire, excited, packing her things. Every now and then, a peal of laughter would invade the quiet of the L-shaped room, one wall of which was double-glazed and looked out across the garden to the sea.

  “He’s a loser,” Geoffrey said, “Michael, always has been. Marriage in tatters, Diana likely to spend the rest of her life in and out of bloody loony bins, any chance he ever had of a career, earning real money, down the bloody toilet. Can’t hold a thing together, act like a bloody man, why else does he go and marry some kid half his age? Nobody else’d give him an ounce of respect, that’s why. Poor bloody Lorraine, doesn’t know any better, but, mark my words, she’ll learn if she hasn’t already.”

  He ignored Resnick’s disapproving look and refilled his brandy glass.

  “You want to see what’s possible, look at this. Place like this, any idea what it cost? Just to keep it up’s a sight more than Michael’s pathetic little mortgage. Two fortunes I’ve made in my lifetime, two. And what’s he got to show? That wonderful brother of mine. It’s not as if I haven’t asked him, begged him. Come in with me. The two of us together, family. He wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t bloody listen. The blue-eyed boy. What’s he ended up with? Nothing.”

  “Not quite,” Claire Morrison said from the doorway, one hand holding a new suitcase, the other Emily’s hand. “Not exactly.”

  Geoffrey swallowed his brandy and glared.

  “You couldn’t have children,” Resnick said.

  Claire squeezed Emily’s band. “Ironic, isn’t it? Everything else money could buy. Oh, we had the advice, the treatment, hormone injections. And there’s Michael and Diana, half-way round the twist and one step from a pauper’s grave …”

  “For God’s sake stop running off at the mouth,” Geoffrey said.

  “Bingo!” said Claire. “Pregnant first time.”

  “Shut up!” Geoffrey threatened, standing in front of the chair.

  “Course, we could have adopted, heavens, we could have bought a child. But, no, that wasn’t good enough, not for Geoffrey, that wasn’t family, and even though poor Michael wasn’t apparently good for much else, it seemed the boy could be counted on in the sperm stakes …”

  He rushed at her and Resnick grabbed his arm and held him back, but Claire stood her ground.

  “I told you …” he began, but his heart was no longer in it.

  “Geoffrey,” Claire said, “you’ve told me what to do for the last time. Come on, sweetheart, let’s go down to the road, see if we can see Mummy and Daddy’s car.” And she ushered Emily from the room.

  Resnick released Geoffrey and watched as he subsided into his chair like yesterday’s balloon.

  “I don’t know,” Resnick said, “if you ever really thought you could get away with this, or for how long. If all the money’s blinded you to the point where you think you can do whatever you want: take over a child like you would anything else, and bugger the rules. Anything to teach Michael a lesson, exact some kind of revenge.”

  Morrison wasn’t looking at him, but Resnick knew he was listening all the same.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “if you have the remotest idea what you’ve been responsible for, the amount of unnecessary pain.”

  Resnick moved closer, willing Morrison, if only for a moment, to look him in the face. “Geoffrey Morrison,” he said, “I am arresting you in connection with the abduction of Emily Morrison. I must warn you that you do not have to say anything at this time, but if you choose to do so, anything that you say will be written down and may be given in evidence against you.”

  Standing outside the house, clouds shuttling across the graying sky, Resnick watched Emily beyond the bottom of the path, holding Claire Morrison’s hand. When Claire bent towards her and pointed into the distance, Emily began to jump up and down and then ran a few paces towards the approaching car, cries of excitement rising on the winter air.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The lines on page 209–210 are from “Infinite Beasts” by RhonaMcAdam, collected in The Hour of the Pearl, Thistledown Press Saskatchewan Canada, 1987, and are reprinted here with permission

  copyright © 1991 by John Harvey

  This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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