Easy Meat

by John Harvey

  She looked at him, dull eyes sharpened by deceit.

  “But that wasn’t it, was it? That wasn’t it.”

  He thought that she would cry then, but if there were tears there they were still to come. The drilling had started up again outside. She had said what she had to say and now it was done. Resnick sat across from her, trapped in that closed room, willing himself to be patient, trying not to notice that the undersides of his thighs were growing numb.

  POLICE MURDER: GAY SEX LINK? the headline suggested. Startling revelations revealed exclusively to our reporter today … There were photographs of Bill Aston in uniform; one, poorly taken, of Margaret’s startled face as she turned outwards from her front door. A family portrait, paid for or purloined, of Declan Farrell with his wife and child. Detective Superintendent Jack Skelton would today neither confirm nor deny that one of the detective constables under his command …

  Hannah phoned Resnick at home, but of course he was not there; she left a message for him at the police station that he should ring her that evening if he found time. She would be home.

  “What amazes me,” Divine said, troughing through pie and double chips in the canteen, “is any of that lot being queer at all. Thought they were all so busy fostering the old myth, our black brothers, that they’re all hung like a fuckin’ horse, the last thing any of ’em’d do’d be own up to having a limp wrist.”

  “Reckon that’s what it is, then, Mark?” said one of the constables, winding him up. “Big dicks. All a myth?”

  “How the bloody hell’d I know?”

  “Play your cards right,” the PC said, “this could be your big chance to find out.”

  Sometimes, in Diane’s flat, Sheena would sit with the baby, Melvin, for so long she would forget everything else. Times they’d been smoking dope especially. The others, not Sheena, they were popping all those pills too. Sheena was happy to stick to the spliffs Dee-Dee had taught her to roll—one of the skills Dee-Dee’s Pentecostal father had never taught her. The stuff, though, it came from Diane’s brother—Jamaican. That was what he said and who was she to deny it? Uum, wherever it came from, it was good. Sheena leaning against the sofa, sitting back alongside it, head against the wall. Little Melvin with his thumb stuck in the corner of his mouth, slobbering just a little, eyes closed and Sheena rocking him. That music that was playing, a tape Irena had boosted from one of the stores. Moldy? No, Moby, that was it. Moby with his funny little pixie face, black eyes staring out of the blue. Orange robes on him like he was one of those Krishnas or something. And water: that’s what all that blue was around him. Water. Moby in the middle of it, slowly drowning. Sheena wondered what it would be like, lying there. Drowning. Slowly drowning. A girl’s voice singing: When it’s cold I’d like to die.

  “Come on! Get a fuckin’ move on!” Sheena could hear Janie’s voice, shouting from across the room. Janie in black leggings, DMs, black leather jacket, a bottle of Absolut in her hand.

  And Lesley, close alongside her, boots and a black miniskirt that stopped halfway up her thighs. Irena squatting in a corner, searching for something in the black-and-purple rucksack she always carried, taking everything out and spreading it over the carpet, then stuffing it back. Tracey was still pulling up her jeans as she came out of the loo.

  “Diane!” Janie shouted over the sound of the ghetto blaster on the table, the music faster now, more like dance music, every time you touch me it feels like I need more. Diane listening, lost in it, starting to shimmy, a dip of her hips and she’s shaking it, the other girls starting to laugh and Diane playing up to them, pretending.

  “Diane, will you stop that shit? I ain’t waitin’ too much fuckin’ longer!”

  Diane just wafting her arms now and smiling, her eyes a little out of it; Dee-Dee finally catching hold of her and pressing her wrists down to her sides, telling her to get it together. Diane nodding, right, girl, right.

  Dee-Dee then, going over to where Sheena was sitting, her mouth moving lazily with the music, the girl’s reedy voice singing, the joint dead between her fingers. Melvin dribbling onto her skimpy T-shirt, the shadow of her childish breast.

  “Sheena, you wake up now. You look after him, right? Melvin. You keep your eye on him. Feed him when he wakes. Girl, you hear what I saying?”

  “Yeh, yeh, no problem. Sure.”

  “Better not be, that’s all.”

  Dee-Dee straightening, then pulling down the hem of her denim skirt. With Diane out of it as much as she was, it was just as well she was there to look out for little Melvin, make sure he was going to be okay.

  “She all right?” Janie asked, looking over towards Sheena. The other girls were bundling through the door.

  “Her?” Dee-Dee said. “Just asked her, she fine.”

  Janie laughed. “Looks like warmed-over shit to me.” And she slammed the door closed and followed the others down the landing towards the lift that would not be working again.

  Norma had picked up a paper on her way home, only glanced at the front page while she fumbled for her keys at the front door.

  “Peter? Hey up, Peter, love! Clap your eyes on this.”

  But Peter wasn’t there, not upstairs or down. His mug and the plate he liked to use for his toast, the one with three concentric yellow rings and cracks, faint, across the center, had been rinsed under the tap and left to dry.

  “Peter?”

  He had brought nothing with him so it was no use checking to see if his things had gone.

  Norma set the kettle to boil, changed her mind, and took one of Shane’s cans of Tennents from the fridge. Warm, she opened the back door to the whining of the dog. There were turds in neat, whitening piles near the gate. Norma sat down with her newspaper, lager, and a cigarette and began to read.

  Supper-time, Peter would be back, she was sure.

  What Gerry Hovenden liked to do, work the weights at least an hour each afternoon. Oh, he’d make a change once in a while: rowing machine, one of the bikes; he’d even tried the aerobics once, but felt a fool, jumping around with all those women with their headbands and little water bottles, two-tone leotards disappearing up the cracks in their arse. No, it was the weights, then the steam room, after that a shower, cold and then hot, hot and then cold. Toweling down.

  Some days, like this afternoon, he’d persuade Shane to come along. Cost sod all as long as you were on the dole. Shane in a torn T-shirt and a borrowed pair of shorts, sweat pouring off him, stinging his eyes. Shane, he always overdid it, didn’t know when to stop.

  “Here,” Gerry said, still moving, press and lift. “You hear about that bloke as got raped on Lenton Rec?”

  “Looking for it, wasn’t he?” Shane said.

  “Prob’ly.”

  “Well, then, cunt got what he deserved.”

  “Yeh,” Hovenden agreed. “Most likely.” Watching the way the sweat ran down across the flat of Shane’s belly, making the skin glisten, the downward curve of tiny hairs shine gold.

  The assistant manager of the audio department assured his would-be customer there was no problem at all: once in a while the machines backed up and it wasn’t possible to get immediate clearance from the card company, and she could see why, with an amount that size, close to six hundred pounds for a state-of-the-art, wide screen television receiver, twenty-six-inch screen, well, company policy dictated and so on and so on.

  Sally Purdy stood there in an old air force jacket that smelled of port wine and a dress that swept the floor when she walked, hiding old tennis shoes on her feet. Sally, certain that if she could just get a decent TV into the place she was squatting, that’d make all the difference, fuck all this time spent sitting out with a lot of old alkies on benches, she was going to get to grips with herself start a new life.

  Only without a poll-tax form or something similar to verify her address, hire purchase was out of the question; she knew enough people out there on the street who would get her a set cheap, but it wasn’t going to be one like this.

>   Sally saw herself sitting round all summer, watching Wimbledon and Ascot in all their glory, those hats they got themselves up in at Ascot, Ladies’ Day, something to dream about. And musicals, she loved musicals, the old ones, not rubbish like Grease, but really old: How to Marry a Millionaire, It’s Always Fair Weather. She was sure she’d got the signature right, times she’d practiced it, over and bloody over.

  “Yes, madam.” Bloke returning now, suit and striped shirt, staff tie, all smiles. “Please accept my apologies for the delay.” Smarmy bastard, Sally thought. “Now, if I can explain how to get to our Despatch department in the basement, by the time you’ve collected your car and driven round there, your set will be packed up and ready for you to take.”

  Car? What fucking car was this? “I thought,” Sally said, “you’d deliver it, right?”

  “Certainly, madam. That would be Tuesday or Thursday of next week.”

  No way, Jose! “How about this,” she said, “a cab. I’ll get a cab, take it home in that. Easy, right?”

  “Absolutely.” Smiling his unctuous smile, he gave her the directions to Despatch.

  The extra time it took Sally Purdy to walk to the nearest rank, meant that by the time she drove up to the door marked Despatch the two uniformed officers were waiting for her inside.

  “Sorry, mate,” one of them said to the cab driver, while his oppo was hauling a reluctant Sally to the marked car, “want to collect on your fare, you’ll need to nip over to the station, fill in a voucher.”

  When they were booking her, Sally Purdy cursed them all from there to perdition, the custody sergeant downwards.

  It was the sergeant, going through Sally’s possessions, in particular the small pile of credit cards she’d been carrying in a purse velcroed to the inside of her dress, who had spotted the name and signature of William Aston on one of them.

  Lynn Kellogg picked up the call. Inside fifteen minutes she and Kevin Naylor had Sally sitting across from them in an interview room, tapes identified and rolling, stolen credit cards spread out before them like a hand of patience.

  “This one, Sally,” Lynn said. “Aston. Tell us where you got that, we might go easy on you for the rest.”

  “How easy?”

  “Easier,” Naylor said, “than you deserve.”

  She didn’t have to think about it for too long. “Shane. I got it offve Shane.”

  “Shane Snape?” Lynn asked, almost unable to believe her luck.

  “No. Alan fucking Ladd, who d’you think?”

  Forty-one

  “This interview,” Resnick stated, “timed at five twenty-seven.”

  They had picked up Shane a couple of streets from his home, winnings that he’d collected from the bookies stuffing out his back pocket. “One lucky lad, Shane, and no mistake,” the man behind the counter had said, smiling grimly as he counted out the notes. “One lucky bastard.”

  Divine and Naylor had been in the lead car, Millington with Carl Vincent fifty yards behind. Two squad cars were waiting at the house, a couple of uniformed officers in the alley out back. Norma Snape on the front step, cursing them out to the world.

  Shane had slammed his bag into Naylor’s chest, Naylor staggering back winded against a garden wall, while Divine moved in close, hands outstretched. “Come on, then, pal. You want to try it? Come on.” Fingers beckoning him, let’s go for it. Divine so clearly wanting it: the pair of them about equal height, Divine maybe an inch taller, certainly heavier; Shane probably the fitter, despite another season for Divine in and out of the first fifteen.

  “Don’t be daft, lad.” Millington from the edge of the curb. “Look about you. You’ll not get anywhere but hurt.” A third squad car was arriving fast from the opposite end of the street, siren wailing.

  And Shane had stood there, not ever really taking his eyes from Divine, thinking about it, wanting it too, but feeling that first rush of adrenaline start to drain out of him, knowing that he could have taken him, cocky bastard, that someday he would, he’d have him right enough, he was certain of that, but knowing that moment wasn’t now.

  The instant he had lowered his hands towards his sides, Divine had been in on him fast, spinning him round, cuffs at the ready, propelling him hard towards the side of the nearest car.

  “Together, behind your back! Hands together!”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Now! Do it now!” Divine bending him forward over the car roof, while Naylor, recovered and standing alongside, read Shane his rights.

  The metal of the cuffs was biting into Shane’s wrists, yet somehow he managed to twist the upper half of his body until his face was inches from Divine’s, eyes brittle as ice glaring into his face. “One of these days, I’ll fuckin’ kill you!” Spittle lacing Divine’s mouth and cheek.

  “Mark!” Millington in fast, seizing Divine’s shoulder seconds before Divine would have head-butted Shane in the face.

  “Mark, leave it. Let it be.”

  And Divine, with a final stare, had stepped away. Millington had pushed Shane into the back of the car between Naylor and himself and ordered Vincent to drive off sharpish. Divine could follow on his own.

  “I hear,” the solicitor’s clerk on call said wearily, “my client was subject to physical intimidation in the course of his arrest.”

  “Your client,” Millington told him, face close enough for the clerk to smell peppermint fresh on the sergeant’s breath, “came within a virgin’s tit of being charged with assaulting a police officer in the course of his duty. Maybe you should suck on that.”

  Resnick and Millington would handle the questioning, interview room A. The same scratched table scored with cigarette burns, the same stale smoke lingering in corners, the stickiness of the floor that tugged at the soles of your shoes, the faint crackle of thin cellophane as it slipped reluctantly from around the pair of audio cassettes: the words, the same or similar. “This interview …”

  Just over an hour in, the solicitor’s clerk leaned forward and asked for a break. “My client …”

  “Not now.”

  “My client …”

  “Not yet.” Resnick’s voice raised to the edge of irritable, weary of Shane’s persistent stonewalling.

  “Where did you get the card?”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about, which card?”

  “Inspector Aston’s credit card. Sally Purdy says she bought it from you in the back room of a pub on the Boulevard.”

  “Well, she’s mistaken. Either that, or she’s lying.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Slag. It’s what she does.”

  “What?”

  “Look at her, the state of her. Pissed out of her brain. Wouldn’t know the truth if it crawled out of her arse.”

  “Not like you, then, Shane, eh?” Millington taking over from Resnick, lighting another Lambert and Butler and leaning towards Shane, almost smiling, a definite twinkle in his eye. “Expert on the truth.”

  Shane looking back at him, defiant. Where were we going now?

  “Two Saturdays ago, for instance, you and your pal, Gerry. All cozy at home with your old lady and her fancy man, watching videos and kicking the family cat.”

  “What about it?”

  “Pack of lies.”

  Sneering, Shane turned his face away.

  “Lies, Shane, beginning to end.” Millington grinned. “Pork Farm pies.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “Exactly.” Millington triumphant.

  “Where you were, Shane,” Resnick said forcefully, “that Saturday, was out drinking with Gerry Hovenden and some of his dubious friends. Doing the pubs between London Road and the bridge, already a bit of excitement on the way, few fists flying, and then on the Embankment, pissed the lot of you, that’s where you came across Inspector Aston, out walking his dogs, and you went for him. The pack of you. Stole his wallet, cash, credit cards, this credit card, and left him for dead. That’s where you were on that Saturday night.”

/>   Unblinking, Shane stared Resnick square in the eye. “Bollocks,” he said quietly.

  “For someone who’s not exactly an idiot,” Millington said, “your conversation tends towards the boring.”

  “Then why not stop all this crap and let me go? I don’t know nothing about any credit card, nothing about no bloke beaten up on the Embankment, nothing about any of it, right?”

  “My client …”

  “All right.” Resnick quickly to his feet. “Twenty minutes. No more.”

  “Surely he’s entitled to a meal?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “This interview,” Millington said, “suspended at six thirty-nine.”

  “You think he’s lying, Charlie?” Skelton was pacing the length of his office between door and desk, conscious of being harassed from above, harassed from below, the local media, national press.

  “Sure of it,” Resnick said. “But I’m not sure about what.”

  “Christ, Charlie, don’t play games. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Resnick was standing also, conscious he had already been sitting too long and likely would do again. “I put it to him straight, the whole business, Aston, everything. He never as much as blinked. I know he’s cool; one of those as can hold it all in tight until something goes and he explodes. But a dead copper, he must know we’re not going to mess around. But Shane, he could’ve been holding a razor blade to his own throat and there’d not have been as much as a nick.”

  “Then why’s he lying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This credit card business, we’ve enough to charge him?”