Easy Meat (12 page)

Setting down the espresso, the assistant tapped the paper. “Good riddance, no?”

“No. Not at all.”

The assistant shrugged, uncomprehending, took Resnick’s money, and turned away to serve an attractive young mother, well-built, bright-eyed, kids fidgeting on stools at either side of her, taking the occasional kick at one another behind her back. “Cut it out, you two. I’ll not tell you again.” Automatically, Resnick’s eyes went to her left hand, third finger. No dad at home, presumably, whom she could offer as a threat. A good thing or bad? He wasn’t sure.

“Another, Inspector?”

Resnick pushed the empty cup away. “No thanks, not today.”

He was almost out of the market when he saw her, in the center row near the exit, buying flowers.

Hannah Campbell had left her VW in the underground car-park and taken the lift to Tesco’s, where she had compromised her usual healthy purchases with a Sarah Lee ready-baked Pecan Nut Danish Pastry, an impulse for which she had felt more than a twinge of guilt at the checkout. The two bags of groceries she had locked into the boot of her car, before going up to the market for vegetables, salad stuff, and cheese. It was the sign announcing wreaths and floral tributes that stopped her in her tracks.

Of course, what had happened to Nicky—rumors, innuendo, the story imperfectly patched together piece by piece—had been all over the school the entire day. Shock and genuine sympathy in the staff room had been shot through with a malicious righteousness which had made Hannah heave. Smug elegies of the I-told-you-so variety. At least one overheard remark about Nicky’s positive contribution to classroom overcrowding.

Floral tributes and wreaths: Hannah asked the aproned woman in charge of the stall about the price of a bouquet. Lilies, those nice carnations, daffs, they’re lovely this time of the year. Resnick stood at the end of the aisle, watching her, hair falling across her face as she bent forward towards the flowers; if he went to speak to her, what would he say? Far easier to walk away.

He was downstairs, hesitating outside HMV and considering a quick foray through their meager jazz section, when Hannah spotted him.

“Inspector Resnick?”

Seeing her reflection in the shop window, he smiled.

“It sounds silly,” Hannah said when he was facing her, “calling you inspector like that. Like something out of a play. J. B. Priestley. You know,
An Inspector Calls.
”

Vaguely, Resnick thought that he might. “Charlie, then,” he said.

“That’s your name? Charlie?”

He nodded—“Yes”—and shifted the bag he was carrying from hand to hand.

“Somehow I never think of policemen doing their own shopping.”

“Someone has to.”

“I suppose so.” She smiled. “I know.”

He looked at the flowers she was carrying; didn’t know what more to say. “Well …” A lurch to the left, not really a step away.

“I nearly phoned you,” Hannah said, “earlier today.”

“How come?”

“What happened to Nicky. I just …” She pushed a hand up through her hair and stepped back, almost into a pushchair that was being steered past. “I don’t know, I wanted to talk about it, I suppose.”

“To say what exactly?”

She just smiled, just the eyes this time. “That’s it, I don’t really know. That’s why in the end I didn’t phone.”

“There probably isn’t a great deal I could tell you …”

“No, of course not. I understand.”

“But if …”

“Yes?”

For the first time he smiled, his whole face relaxing into it, opening wide.

“You haven’t got a few minutes now?” Hannah asked.

Resnick shrugged, glanced towards his watch without registering a thing. “Why not?”

She led him to the food court, where they bought cappuccinos in waxed paper cups and carried them towards the raised section of seating at the center. He found it strange to be in the company of this woman he scarcely knew, a good-looking woman, casually but nicely dressed, a large bouquet of flowers in her hand. For no discernible reason, a phrase from “Roseland Shuffle” sprang into Resnick’s head, Lester Young soloing against Basie’s sprightly piano.

“Is this okay?” Hannah asked, looking round.

“Fine.”

She set the flowers down carefully on the seat alongside. “I was going to take them to Nicky’s mother,” she said. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“I didn’t realize you knew him that well.”

“I didn’t. Not really. To be honest I don’t think anyone at the school did, not in the last couple of years anyway. He was scarcely there.” She sipped at her coffee and cradled it in her hands. “It’s awful to say it, but I’d go into my English class, the one Nicky was supposed to be in, and if I saw he wasn’t at his desk I’d be relieved. It’s not that he was disruptive exactly. Not all the time anyway. Mostly, he’d just sit there and let it wash over him. Never say a word. But occasionally he’d latch onto something, some idea of his own, at a complete tangent from what the rest of the class were doing, and keep on and on about it, question after question, till it was all I could do to get the lesson back on track.”

Hannah stopped and drank a little coffee, looked across into Resnick’s patient face, the skin that wrinkled past the corners of his eyes. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have let that matter. The plan for my precious lesson, I mean. Aim, method, conclusion. Perhaps there were more important things.”

“My guess, by the time he got to you, there’d not have been a great deal you could do.”

Hannah gave a wry smile. “Give me a child until he’s seven, isn’t that what the Jesuits say? Or is it nine? Either way, they’re probably right, don’t you think? Or in your book, are criminals born and not made? Nature or nurture, Charlie, which are you?” Even as she said it, she was surprised at the ease with which she used his name.

He had noticed a green fleck in her right eye, close to the iris, and was trying not to stare. “Some people,” he said, “they’ll engage in criminal behavior no matter what. Maybe it’s psychological, something in their genes, deep in their childhood, who’s to say? But average, run-of-the-mill crime, you just have to look at the figures. Unemployment, housing …” Resnick gestured with the palm of one hand. “… worse those problems are, higher the rate of crime.”

“Tell that to the government,” Hannah said sharply.

Resnick tasted his coffee; despite the paper cup, it was better than he’d thought. “This last election,” he said, “local. How many? Sixteen Conservatives kicked out. For Labour almost a clean sweep. Fifty seats on the council now to one Tory, couple of the other lot. I’ll be interested to see, by the year’s end, how much difference it’s made.”

“You don’t think that’s a little too cynical?”

“How about realistic?”

“And kids like Nicky, you don’t think there’s anything that can be done? Not with things as they stand?”

He sighed. “If it can, I’m buggered if I know what it is.”

“Locking them up, though? Prison. Short, sharp shocks. Boot camps, isn’t that what they’re called? Do you really think that’s the answer?”

“I doubt it puts them on the straight and narrow; figures disprove that.”

“But still you carry on, shutting them away.”

Resnick shifted a little awkwardly on his seat. “No. The courts lock them up. Or they don’t, whatever. What we do, what I do, if I can, is arrest those who’ve broken the law. Not my laws, not my punishment either.”

“But you must agree with them, the courts, what they do, or you wouldn’t carry on doing it.”

Resnick pushed back his chair, crossed his legs. “Are we having a row?”

Hannah smiled. “No, it’s a discussion.”

“That’s all right, then.”

“But is this your way,” she asked, “of avoiding the question?”

Resnick grinned and shook his head. “Youths Nicky’s age and younger, persistent offenders, they might get arrested—what?—thirty or forty times in a year. More in some cases. They’re too young to be put in prison. Bail, supervision orders, none of that does a scrap of good.”

“You think they should be shut away.”

“I think society needs protecting, yes …”

“And Nicky?”

“Look.” Resnick was conscious of his voice being louder than it should, louder than the space allowed. “I saw that old woman after she’d been beaten about the head, the old man. I’m not saying what happened to Nicky, whatever the reasons, is right, of course I’m not. But he was accused of a serious crime, he had to be kept in custody. Surely you don’t think he should have been let back on the streets?”

“If it were a choice between that and him ending up dead, yes, I do. Don’t you?”

Resnick glanced around at the people at other tables, just about pretending not to listen to their conversation. The coffee was beginning to grow cold.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”

“You’re not.” Resnick shook his head. “I’m sad about what happened. Sad for Nicky’s mother. Nicky himself. But what I don’t feel is guilt.”

“I do,” Hannah said quietly. “I do.”

“I don’t suppose I can give you a lift anywhere?” she asked. They were standing in front of the telephones, near the glass doors that opened out onto the Mansfield Road.

“Thanks, no. I’m fine.”

“Okay, ’bye then.” She started to walk away. “The flowers,” Resnick said, “shall you be taking them or not?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good. I think Norma’ll be pleased.” He stood his ground as she walked off in the direction of the lift, plastic bag of shopping swinging lightly from his fist.

When Hannah turned round moments later, before the lift doors closed in front of her, he had gone.

Sixteen

A social worker from the Youth Justice Team had called twice and on each occasion the door had been slammed in her face. A reporter from the local BBC radio station had her DAT Walkman hurled back into the street and the crew from Central TV had buckets of water emptied down on them and a spade taken to one side of their van. Shane threw a punch at a stringer for several national tabloids when he came across the man quizzing neighbors in the local pub. “We’d not said a thing to him, had we, duck?” Hard-eyed, Shane had stared them in the face, smashed an empty bottle against the bar and slammed out: all that rage and nowhere, so far, to bleed it out.

Norma’s friend Rosa arrived mid-afternoon with a bottle of white port and a dozen roses, convinced Norma to go into the bathroom and wash her face, put on some makeup, and change her clothes. With the afternoon racing from Market Rasen as whispered commentary, the two of them sat on the settee while Rosa plied her friend with glass on glass of port, seizing Norma’s wrists in her sudden, flailing fits of anger, holding her tight whenever she gave way to tears. Norma’s body shaking inside Rosa’s stubborn arms. “The stupid, stupid geck! Why ever did he want to go and do a thing like that?”

Sheena hovered at the edges of the room, watching the two women, riven by the force of her mother’s tears, which she could not hope to replicate. She went into the kitchen and made tea she never drank, smeared slices of bread with jam she never ate. In her room, she turned her radio up high to drown the sounds of mourning: Lisa I’Anson in the afternoon. Blur. Oasis. Nirvana. Pulp. Take That.

As the racing gave way to
Terrytoons
and
All American Girl
, Norma slept in Rosa’s arms, twitching suddenly with the vividness of her dreams. “Michael. Oh Michael,” she moaned.

“Ssh, now.” Rosa gently stroked her head. And then, as Norma opened her eyes, “Who’s Michael? You kept saying Michael.”

“The baby I lost.”

Rosa squeezed her hand. “That was Nicky, sweetheart. You’re confused, that’s all.”

But Norma knew what she had meant. “No, it was Michael. My little Michael.” And felt again the final thrust and tear, saw him small and bloodied in the midwife’s hands.

When Hannah arrived outside the Snape house there were twenty bunches of flowers lining the pavement, others leaning beside the front door. She hesitated, thinking it through, uncertain what she might actually say; she was bending to place her bouquet with the others, turn away, when Sheena came out into the street. Hannah knew her, had taught her in her last year at school, the same school where she had taught Nicky.

“Hello, Sheena, I’m Miss Campbell. I don’t know if you remember me.”

She had been a feckless girl, easily led. Left to her own devices she would fidget with her biro, pull at her lank hair, decorate the name of whichever boyfriend she aspired to along the edges of her desk, across the front of her notebook, the back of her arm.

“Sheena, I’m sorry about your brother. I really am.” From her reaction, Hannah couldn’t tell if the girl remembered her or not, though she supposed she did. “I brought these flowers for your mum,” Hannah said.

Without speaking, Sheena pushed open the front door and waited for Hannah to step inside.

“Mrs. Snape?”

Hannah found them in the kitchen, Norma and Rosa, hunched over the small table, cigarettes and tea.

“Sheena let me in. I’m … I was Nicky’s teacher, one of Nicky’s teachers.” Neither woman looking at her, she stumbled on. “I wanted to say I was sorry. And to bring you these.” For a few moments longer she held onto the flowers, before laying them down on the table.

“These from the school then?” Rosa asked.

“Yes. I mean, no, not exactly. I brought them myself.”

“So there’s nothing from the school?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Bastards, not a sodding word.”

“Look,” Hannah said, “I think I’d better go. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Yes,” Rosa said. “I think you better had.”

She was at the door when she heard Norma’s voice. “You his special teacher, then? Class teacher, whatever it was.”

“No.” Hannah turned back into the kitchen. Norma’s eyes were raw and finding it difficult to focus. “Not really. I was his English teacher, that’s all.” Norma blinked and blinked again. “He was a nice lad, cheerful. I liked him.”

The room expanded to accept the lie, lifted it to the ceiling wreathed in smoke.

“I will go now,” Hannah said.

As she shut the front door behind her, Hannah leaned back against it and closed her eyes. The backs of her legs were shaking, her arms burned cold.
All my pretty ones?
All she could think of were Macduffs words when Malcolm told him that his children had been killed. And what, Hannah, she asked herself, what bloody good is that?