What happened, Resnick thought, was they turned into Bill and Margaret Aston; or they turned into you.
“And I’d figured him for a decent lad, Vincent,” Skelton said.
“So he is,” Resnick said, earning himself an old-fashioned look.
Skelton fidgeted with papers on his desk, no longer as meticulously ordered as it used to be. “You really think, Charlie, this radically changes things?”
“I think what it does, maybe, it helps to make more sense of things that up to now never felt quite right. Aston’s murder as a mugging. One thing, however drunk you are, if you’re looking for an easy victim, why pick someone strongly built, close on six foot? And then there’s the degree of force. Way more than necessary, even assuming Bill was fighting back. Those blows to the face and head, that isn’t greed, not even ordinary anger, that’s rage.”
“Queer-bashing, then? That’s where we are.”
Resnick sighed. “It looks likely, given what we now know. If Bill wasn’t above a bit of occasional cottaging, it might have started off that way. You’d have to say, if he had been that way inclined, he’d have had opportunity galore. All those times he went out last thing with his dogs; little dogs like that you can leave in the car.”
“Come on, Charlie, this is conjecture, nothing more.”
“We know he went to Leicester, socializing, picking up men. Maybe other places, too.” The expression on Skelton’s face, listening, was that of someone who has just bitten into a peach to find the inside rotted and sour. “But closer to home-if he got the urge, where would he go? Not to one of the pubs or clubs here, too great a risk. But somewhere more anonymous, in the dark? He just might. Toilets at Ollerton roundabout, Titchfield Park in Mansfield, Sherwood Library maybe. Where then?”
“Any sodding where nowadays!”
“Closest to where he lives, Gents on the Embankment. Maybe one of them as attacked him saw him there, inside or just hanging about.”
“Even if that were true-and I’m not for one minute agreeing that it is, I don’t know what I think about the kite you’re flying here-it doesn’t prove a link with last night. What happened to Bill, thank Christ, wasn’t the same.”
“The anger was,” Resnick said. “The rage. What happened to them both, it was punitive. Sexuality aside, it was about the same things: power and pain.”
Skelton rose to his feet and half-turned towards the window: the same buildings, same vehicles, same people walking the streets, but underneath the world had turned upside down. “Once the press get hold of this, Charlie …”
“I know.”
“His poor wife and family …”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, Charlie! I went to church once when he was preaching, Billy Aston was up there in the pulpit, rabbiting on about the wages of sin.”
And the one about throwing the first stone, Resnick thought, was that one of his favorites as well?
Resnick’s briefing was coming to an end: the revelations about Aston had been greeted with shock and loud disbelief. Resnick had let it diminish and moved on. Nothing as good as definite, but some of the boot marks taken from the Rec were at least a partial match with those lifted, more clearly, from the Embankment; and the weapon-it was within the realms of possibility that the implement used, both to strike Farrell and to violate him, was the same baseball bat that had killed Aston.
“Lateral thinking, isn’t that what they call it?” Divine muttered, “making the most of both ends.”
“So we’re going to be double-checking back on our files, all reported homophobic incidents, attacks, complaints made and followed up, anything that can be checked against our nationalist friends. Okay? And now, before you disperse, DC Vincent has something he wants to say.”
When Carl Vincent stepped forward, Resnick could see his right hand, trembling at his side. But his voice was level and clear. “Especially in view of these cases we’re investigating, I think it’s important that you all know that I am homosexual.” Just for one second, he almost smiled. “I’m gay.”
Forty
They sat in the near silence of the cloistered room, curtains once more pulled tightly together, soft patterns in which brown and gold leaves drifted carefully down. From out along the street, muted, came the intermittent rattle of a road drill as workmen dug trenches to lay cable, bringing in a wider world. Margaret Aston sat small in her favorite Parker Knoll chair, bought when real wood and solid craftsmanship were virtues to be praised and admired. Stella-no smile for him today-had left the moment he arrived and Resnick had waited for Margaret to negotiate the stairs, the slow passage-refusing his arm-into what she would always call the lounge.
Abruptly the drilling stopped and all he could sense in the room were loss and regret, the broken reed of her breath. In less than two weeks she had aged ten years.
“Margaret …”
When she spoke it was not to him, yet she knew he was there, and whenever he moved, no matter how little, she paused, her fingers plucking at the thread that had come unraveled from the beading on the chair’s arm.
“It was after the boys had left home. Stella, she was still here, but …” Margaret sighed the first of many sighs “… she had this boyfriend and she would find reasons for not coming home. Simply excuses, I knew that’s what they were; anything so that she could spend the night with him.” Another sigh, pluck and sigh. “She had discovered sex, my daughter, as we all do, and it was all that she could think of. They used to come round here in the afternoons, when Stella should have been in school, upstairs with the door locked and then running off, giggling and smirking the minute I came home. No shame. Even with a father like Bill, my Stella knows nothing of shame.” She looked up. “I wonder, Charlie, if that’s such a bad thing?”
A pause before she went on. “I would go sometimes then and stand in her room. Instead of throwing open the window, I would lock it closed. Keep in the smell. Do you know how it makes you feel, Charlie? When the children you nursed and carried are old enough to enjoy sex?”
Curtly, Resnick shook his head.
“No, no, of course, Charlie. You wouldn’t. Perhaps you never will. So I’ll tell you-it makes you feel old, used up. But it does something else, too. It makes part of you, that part of you, come alive again. Pictures of them wrapped there-am I shocking you, Charlie? — those young girl’s legs that had once held tight around this pathetic body of mine, they had been wrapped around him, that feckless youth, there on that bed.”
Resnick looked at the leaves, still trapped mid-fall, the long, tapering slice of light.
“I had a body again, Charlie, my daughter had given me back my body and what was I going to do with it now? Bill and I, we had not had relations for years. Scarcely since after Stella had been born. And during all that time I had lain down next to him every night and never once had I minded. But now …” Her fingers moved more nervously at the thread. “… I did all the things a woman, even a woman like me, old and fat, is supposed to do. I went to the hair salon, the beauty parlor, I was-what’s the word? — made over. I bought new clothes, satin nightdresses and silk underthings in which I felt and looked a fraud. I begged him, Charlie, pleaded with him. I had no dignity. I needed him-needed someone-to make love to me.” The thread that she was twisting snapped in her hand. “I could see in his eyes the thought of touching me made him feel sick. He told me he was moving across the corridor, into one of the empty rooms. He was having difficulty getting to sleep and he thought if he had his own bed it might be better. For both of us.”
She shriveled a little more inside her chair.
“It was then that he started going out. Not so frequently at first, and then more and more. Swimming every night. Or so I thought. Twice, sometimes at weekends. He just needs, I thought, to get out of the house, get away from me, what I’ve been putting him through.” She glanced up at Resnick hastily. “I was feeling guilty, you see, thought I’d been unfair. Making demands.” She found a new end of thread and worried it with finger and thumb. “After a while he started going out late at night too, walking the dogs. I did think, it did cross my mind once or twice that he might be having an affair with one of those fine-minded women from the church. And then when you came here asking questions about that woman who called, I thought, yes, yes, it’s all right, that’s it.”