He was older than Resnick had first judged, mid-thirties he now would have said, wearing black jeans with patches of dirt down one side and below the knees, a collarless black shirt spotted with blood, white Nike Air trainers with a blue stripe.
“Here.” Hannah coming towards him with a dampened cloth to wipe away some of the blood, the man sitting up to her kitchen table, blinking at the light.
Resnick stopped her with her name, not loud but firm, and she looked across at him, head tilted in a question. “Gloves,” Resnick said. “Kitchen gloves, something like that. Use them. Just in case.”
Hannah hesitated on the verge of questioning him, challenging, then did as he said. While she cleaned the man up, Resnick made tea.
“What’s your name?” Hannah asked, and when he didn’t reply, said, “I’m Hannah. Hannah Campbell, this is my house.”
“Declan,” he said, so quietly they had to strain to hear. “Declan Farrell.”
“Would you like to tell us, Declan,” Resnick said, sliding a mug across the table towards him, “just what happened?”
Farrell stirred sugar slowly into his tea, eyes flicking from one to the other, never still in his seat, forever shifting, forward and back, crossing and recrossing his legs, tugging at his jeans, not making any attempt to lift the cup to his mouth.
“You were going to tell us,” Resnick said, “how this happened.”
Farrell started, stopped, started again. “This man … This man …” He closed his eyes, began, almost silently, to sob. There was a wedding ring, Resnick noticed, broad and dull, on his hand.
“Go on,” Resnick said gently when the crying had ceased. “This man …”
Farrell sniffed loudly, wincing, rubbing tenderly at his eyes. “I was in the park,” he began, then stopped a second time.
“Isn’t it locked up at night?” Hannah asked. “The park.”
He nodded, fidgeting again on his seat. “You can get in, it’s easy. Over the fence. People do.”
Resnick nodded, sitting forward; he knew what people did. “I think you should tell us what happened,” he said.
“I was in the park, walking, cutting across like, you know. On my way home from the pub. I was caught short. Needed to use the Gents.” He paused and looked at the floor. “I was just coming out when this bloke, he … he just come at me with this thing, this-I don’t know what it was-bat, I suppose.”
Resnick thinking, remembering: mud and grass stains on the dead man’s clothes, a smear of earth thick on the fleshy palm of his right hand, a varnished implement, a bat of some kind, baseball seemed the more likely.
Farrell continuing, saying, “He just started hitting me, here, you can see. I yelled at him, tried to get away but he wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t run any more, all I could do was lie down on the ground and cover my head until … until he stopped.”
“He just stopped, no reason?”
“One minute he was hitting me, shouting, you know, bastard, things like that. Then he ran off. I heard him going, but I was too frightened to look up. Not for ages. And then, when I did, well, that was when I met you.”
“He didn’t take your wallet, ask for money, nothing like that?”
Farrell shook his head, not able to look at Resnick for more than moments at a time, squirming on his chair.
Resnick leaned a little towards him and Farrell flinched. “Would you like a cushion?” Resnick said. “You don’t seem comfortable at all.”
“No, no, no, it’s okay. I really ought to-my wife, she’ll be worried, you know …” Half out of his seat now, the wooden chair on which he had been sitting patched with blood.
Watching Farrell all the while, Resnick beckoned Hannah to the doorway between the two rooms. “Phone the ambulance,” he said. “Then the police. Tell them to bleep Graham Millington, have him call Maureen Madden and then contact me here. Tell them assault and suspected rape.”
In the quiet of her house, shock leaped from Hannah’s eyes. Resnick touched her hand and held it for a moment, the fingers unnaturally cold. Farrell was sitting with his eyes tight shut, arms clenched across his chest as if it were the only way to hold himself together.
Quietly Hannah rose and went to the telephone and when Declan Farrell started to cry, tears that would never stop, Resnick sat and held him till the ambulance arrived.
Thirty-eight
Maureen Madden was the sergeant who ran the rape suite, an attempt, largely successful, to make rape victims-the ones that came forward-feel more at ease than in the functional brusqueness of the normal police station. Comfortable chairs, subdued lighting, carpet, pictures on the walls; the facilities for medical examination all present. In the three years or so that Maureen had been working there, she had not had one victim to deal with who was male.
And this had begun differently, at the hospital, no time for anything but the most rudimentary counseling before the doctor on duty carried out his examination. Maureen was uncertain whether Declan Farrell would have been relieved to discover the doctor was male, or whether by that stage he even cared; she had no clear idea how he would respond to talking to her rather than to a man about what had happened. It crossed her mind to contact one of the members of the Lesbian and Gay Police Association, but then she had no way of knowing if Farrell himself were gay. A married man, two kids apparently, she wondered if he knew himself. He had pleaded with them, when they informed his wife of where he was, not to give her the details of what had happened.
Now Mrs. Farrell was pacing the waiting area, chewing stick after stick of Dentyne, dropping coins into the vending machine for lukewarm cups of tea, and Declan was unburdening himself little by little as Maureen, patient, trained, won his trust.
Millington had rousted out Naylor and Vincent, but found Divine impossible to track down. No surprise. “Round midnight of a Friday,” as Millington had pointed out, “state Mark’ll be in, likely neither use nor ornament.”
The toilet was in one corner of the recreation ground, close to the gate on the southern edge and in the shadow of the church. They checked the interior, a short stand of unseparated urinals and one cubicle, careful not to disturb anything forensic might turn to good use later. The small, low building was ripe with the stink of stale urine, its walls festooned with barely decipherable graffiti and gouged here and there with slogans: MUFC Rule! Colleymore Walks On Water (from which someone had erased the I and substituted an n) and Niggers Out!
Lights were still showing in a good number of the houses in Church Street and Church Grove, as well as along the Promenade, so they began the slow and diligent business of knocking on doors. Uniformed officers, using emergency lighting, made an initial search of the mainly grassed area between the toilet and where Farrell had climbed the fence onto the path where he had been found. At first light, the same process would be gone through more thoroughly, taking in the thick area of shrubs along the church wall.
“Charlie,” Hannah had asked, face still pale, “how did you know?”
“I didn’t at first.” Resnick had shrugged. “Not for definite. Not till I saw the blood.”
“Oh, Christ! It’s horrible.”
“Yes.” Holding her now, hair across his mouth, one hand to his chest. “Yes, I know.” Except I don’t, he thought, not really. I can’t. And hope to God I never do.
The doctor was young, Australian, working on a short-term contract he didn’t expect to be renewed, though that was due to a lack of funding rather than any fault of his own. The room in which he spoke to Resnick and Maureen Madden was small and white-walled, the overhead lighting so strong it discouraged you from raising your eyes. His voice was occasionally slurred and Resnick might have thought he had been drinking if he were not so obviously tired.