“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.
Ten
Resnick caught a couple of hours’ sleep in his office, chair pushed back, legs forcing a space for themselves among the reports and memos that littered his desk. When he woke it was to the sound of Graham Millington clattering the kettle and treating the otherwise empty CID room to a muted rendition of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”
Resnick had his first mug of tea in his hand before realizing that the phone had failed to ring: Doris Netherfield had survived the night.
“What’s all this I hear about Serious Crimes?” Millington asked, lighting only his second Lambert and Butler of the day. The expression of unalloyed martyrdom that Madeleine assumed if ever he dared to smoke at home was no longer anything he could bear to watch.
“Going on around us, Graham, all the time.”
Millington narrowed his eyes through the spiraling cigarette smoke: what the hell was the boss doing, cracking jokes at this hour of the morning? He presumed it had been meant as a joke.
“You know what I’m on about,” Millington said, “this new Serious Crimes Unit.”
Resnick sighed. “Yes, and the answer is, I don’t know a whole lot more than you.”
“But if you were to guess?”
“I’d reckon it’ll get as far as finance, someone will throw a fit about resourcing new office space, extra personnel, and it’ll get lost on its way back to the drawing board.”
Even as the words were being spoken, Resnick wasn’t certain how far he believed them; but neither did he want to face the ramifications the establishing of the squad might have for his career. And not solely his own, Millington’s as well.
Divine and Naylor arrived within moments of each other, Divine chirpier than the bags beneath his eyes suggested. “Tea mashed, then, Sarge?” he said, reaching for his favorite mug, decorated with a fading cartoon about rugby players and odd-shaped balls.
As usual, Naylor was quiet, easy even among four people to forget that he was there. It was a characteristic that, in the right circumstances, made him the good detective he could be.
Millington caught Resnick’s glance towards his watch. “Uniform backup?” he asked.
Resnick shook his head. “Let’s not start World War Three, Graham. It’s only one youth, after all.”
A sardonic smile played round the edges of Millington’s mouth. “Well, that’s okay then, i’n’t it? Piece of piss.”
In his panic to get away from the Netherfields’ house, Nicky hadn’t even realized the iron railing was still in his hand. Quickly, he had dumped it in the nearest bin and continued to run. Only when he was within sight of his own home did he stop, chest tight, tears stinging his eyes. Only then did he consider the blood that was splashed across his clothes and staining his face and hands. No way he could go in like that, no way. Backtracking, he climbed into a garden and took two towels from the line, leaned against a wall deep in shadow and rubbed at his skin, his shirt, and jeans. It was still likely that if he went home now someone would be up: Sheena, listening to Blur and looking at some stupid magazine; Shane slumped down in front of a video, Jean Claude Van Damme or Bruce Lee; his mum, sewing buttons back on Shane’s shirts or lost in a world of her own, reading one of her trashy romances, Mills and sodding Bloom.
Keeping clear of main roads, quick to cross away from any passersby, Nicky walked and walked, trying not to think about what might happen, what had happened, what he would do if the man or the old woman died.
When he finally turned his key in the front door, legs aching, it was gone two. All of the lights in the house were out. Quick to slip off his boots, Nicky was on his way to the stairs when he heard a muffled groan from the front room: slowly undulating shapes stretched along the settee; his brother was shagging Sara Johnson yet again.
On another occasion, Nicky would have stayed there and watched, but now there were more pressing things. In the bath-room he locked the door before switching on the light.
Jesus Christ!
He might have thought that black wouldn’t have shown the stains so clearly, but there was no denying them, thick patches that seemed to have been thrown across his shirt and T-shirt as if he had ridden a mountain bike fast through mud. More across the top of his jeans. And the blood was not only smeared across his skin, it was sticking to his hair. Nicky stripped to his underpants and socks; took off the socks. He thought about rinsing the shirt out in the sink, letting the jeans, perhaps, soak in the bath, but realized there was too little time and anyway, it would never work. He fetched a bin liner from the kitchen and bundled the clothes inside. First thing in the morning, he would get them good and lost. Burn them, that was the thing.