Easy Meat (33 page)

“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.

“The cuts to the face were pretty much as you’ve seen; he took quite a few stitches and he isn’t going to be looking in any mirrors for a while, but other than that it’s not too serious. There is evidence, though, of quite severe bruising on the neck.”

“Finger marks?” Resnick interrupted to ask.

The doctor shook his head. “More like some kind of bar, I don’t know, something hard, some sort of stick, you know, like a walking stick. Pulled back against the neck below the a dam’s apple.”

“Forcing back the head?” Resnick asked.

“Yes, quite possibly. We’ll know better once the bruises’ve come out more. But yes, it could be.” He cleared his throat and looked up into the brightness of the light and then at the floor beneath his feet. “Look, I’m sorry, I seem to be avoiding the issue here.”

“It’s all right,” Maureen said, “take your time.”

Resnick caught himself wondering, would he be so reluctant if this were a woman he’d just seen?

“There was penetration,” Maureen prompted him.

“Yes. Without any doubt. But not …” For an instant, he caught Resnick’s eye. “I mean it was sexual, clearly, but I think what was used was some kind of … well, instrument.”

“What, you mean a vibrator?” Maureen asked. “A dildo, what?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nothing that appropriate. It probably would have been better for him if it were. No, this was quite large, two to three inches in diameter at the end and solid, probably not tapered towards any kind of a point. Not sharp-edged, though, or the damage would have been even worse than it is. But whatever it was had been used with a lot of force. There’s quite a bit of tearing of the sphincter muscles and around the orifice itself, and considerable rupturing of blood vessels along the anal canal.” He shook his head again. “Poor bastard,” he said.

The story Declan Farrell had told Maureen Madden was this: he had needed to use the toilet on his way home from the pub and shinned over the gate. Easy, he’d done it before. The man was there when he went in; inside the cubicle, so Declan didn’t see him. But he had followed Declan out, jumped him from behind. Hit him across the face with some kind of club. Almost knocked him out. Forced him to kneel down on the grass, pulled down his trousers and his pants. Told him he was going to give him what he wanted. His words: this is what you want. And then … and then at that point Declan’s voice had choked and Maureen had held his hand and said, “Okay, now. It’s all right. Declan, it’s okay.”

“I’m going to have to talk to him, Maureen,” Resnick said.

“Tonight?”

“Sooner it’s done.”

She nodded. “I suppose so. You want me with you?”

“Please.”

“Let’s take him back to the rape suite, then. Not here.”

Resnick agreed.

“And his wife?” Maureen asked.

Resnick looked back at her, unblinking.

“All right,” Maureen said, “I’ll speak to her before we leave.”

Skelton was at the station when they arrived, waistcoat unfastened, no tie; like the reformed non smoker he was, cigarette never far from his hand.

“So, Charlie, this little effort, we’re not thinking there’s any kind of link with the attack on Bill Aston?”

“Bit early yet to know what we’re saying.”

“But this—nancy boy pick-up gone sour, that’s what we’re dealing with surely?”

Nicely put, Resnick thought. “Sexual, certainly,” he said. “Of a kind. Victim’s wallet was still on him, nothing stolen. But to what degree there was ever consent …”

“I thought we were talking rape?”

“I mean, whether or not there was anything between them beforehand …”

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine, that sort of thing? Bit of hanky-panky up and down the stalls.”

“Something like that, sir, yes.”

“Scarcely matters, does it, one way or another? Bit of flashing in the Gents not that much different from walking into the pub with half your tits hanging out—provocation, not an issue any more where rape’s concerned.”

Resnick was far from certain that was true, when it came to juries at least. “I’m interviewing him, sir, now. I’ll bring you up to speed soon as I can.”

“That’s it, Charlie.” Skelton winked. “Get to the bottom of it, eh?”

“Bastard asked for it, didn’t he,” Divine said, finally tracked down after one of those rare Friday nights when he had failed to pull. “No question. Went out looking for a bit of rough and got more than he bargained for. Now he wants us to say there, there and hold his hand. Well, not bloody me and that’s a fact. Kev, while you’re over there, be a mate will you and fetch us a tea.”

Declan Farrell had refused tea or coffee, didn’t want anything to drink at all; he sat there, between Resnick and Maureen, unmoving in the hushed quiet of the room. Numb. Except that’s what he wasn’t, numb: only what he wished to be.

“The man who attacked you,” Resnick asked for the third time, “what can you tell us about him?”

Eleven minutes past two.

“His voice, his appearance …”

“I didn’t see him.”

“You heard his voice. He spoke to you at least once, you said.”

Nervous, Farrell touching the stitches scissoring above his eye, the worst cut and the deepest, fingers going back to it like a tongue unable to stop itself probing a bad tooth. Farrell sitting in hastily borrowed clothes, his own carefully labeled, packaged, and shipped off to forensic.

“Semen?” Resnick had asked the doctor.

“Not really. None around the area of penetration. A trace inside his clothing, probably his own.”

His own?

“Why don’t you try and concentrate,” Resnick said, “on the voice?”

As if he could ever forget it, Declan thought. As if there’d ever be a night again when he wouldn’t hear it:
This is what you want, you bastard. You fucking cunt!

“The voice,” Resnick asked, “was it young or old?”

“Young,” Farrell said, so quietly that both officers had to lean forward to hear him. “At least, I think … Oh, God, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“An accent? Did he have an accent?”

An age before Farrell answered and then, “Yes, maybe.”

“Local?”

“Sort of. I mean, around here, yes, but not strong.”

“Is there anything else,” Maureen asked, “that you can help us with, about the voice?”