The Graft (3 page)

He pointed a finger in the younger man’s face.

‘You tell me why an otherwise law-abiding citizen should pay for the sins of that little cretin? If Hatcher hadn’t been on those premises with intent to rob he’d be in the pub now as usual, scoring a bit of blow, instead of lying in hospital with his head caved in.’

Rudde didn’t wait for an answer.

‘It’s the law of the jungle, mate. Survival of the fittest. Supposing Leary had been a frail old lady living alone. Wouldn’t you feel sorry about it then? Wouldn’t that make all the difference? It’d be wrong to break into her gaff, wouldn’t it? Yeah, make all the difference to you, that would - but it’s the same bloody crime.’

He laughed sarcastically.

‘
Then
you’d be baying for Hatcher’s blood along with everyone else. Well, fuck
him
, and fuck all the creepers we deal with. Personally, I am sick of them.’

It was quite a harangue and Rudde knew it but he couldn’t stop. He was arguing for every person who had ever been ripped off, attacked or greased by a worthless criminal. He was on a roll and enjoying it.

‘Sonny Hatcher mugged an old man as he was drawing his pension. He was also up in court for threatening an elderly neighbour. This paragon of virtue beat up a pregnant woman, so you tell me why I should cut him some slack?’

Ibbotson couldn’t answer him, he didn’t know what to say.

‘He knew the law. No one knew it like Sonny did,’ Rudde steamrollered on. ‘He knew when he walked in that house armed that he was all but fucked. That if he had a capture he would be looking at an eighteen at least. So fuck him. He came up against someone with more savvy than himself, and not before time neither if I might say. Now get the statements sorted and stop annoying me, OK?’

Ibbotson nodded.

This conversation was closed. He only hoped the CPS would see it differently, but didn’t hold out much hope. His boss’s attitude reflected the whole station house’s. But as Ibbotson had argued earlier on in the canteen, should a boy’s life really be forfeit just because he turned to petty crime? Apparently the local consensus was it should.

The DC left the room sheepishly, aware that everyone thought he was a prize prat and for the first time feeling they just might be right.

 
Tammy was wide-eyed with shock.

’Are you having me on?’

Nick shook his head.

‘Honest, they want me for GMTV in the morning, to get my side of the story.’

As shaken as she was, Tammy unconsciously tidied her hair.

‘Oh, my God! You are going to go, I take it?’

Her voice brooked no refusal and he sighed once more.

‘Because you put your side across, right? You could have been killed, Nick. If they want to charge you, the best thing to do is make sure everyone hears your side of the story.’

‘I don’t know, Tams. I ain’t that kind of person, I hate being in the limelight.’

‘Well, don’t you worry,
I’ll
be right beside you.’

Even in the midst of her shock and horror at what had occurred Tammy was already deciding what she was going to wear and wondering if she could fit in a quick sun bed to take some of the pallor from her skin.

At the end of the day this was for her husband. She wanted them to come across as respectable people with a few quid but a down-to-earth lifestyle.

In her own way, she was doing what she thought was best.

 
Tyrell Hatcher sat on the plane in silence. He was a good-looking man and he knew it, could see the looks he attracted and ignored them. His looks and his personality had always been at odds with each other. His second wife Sally accepted that women liked him but trusted him implicitly. He wasn’t in fact averse to a bit of strange but it was a rare occurrence and usually only happened after they had had a row or some such crisis in their lives.

Sally was a chocolate-coloured queen and he adored her, but sometimes Tyrell needed the anonymity of a strange body. He pondered that thought now, wondering if this kink in his make up had been passed on to his eldest son. Tyrell had nearly destroyed his life for a quick fuck. Sally knew nothing about that. But he had still done it, enjoyed the fear of being caught, enjoyed the danger of it. Had this flair for risk-taking been passed on to his eldest boy?

His two other children were stable, industrious and hard-working, so what exactly was the score with Sonny Boy? Why was he beaten to a pulp inside someone’s home while apparently trying to rob them?

Tyrell wiped a hand across his face. He was so tired but he knew sleep would be a long time coming.

He didn’t want to blame his former wife Jude for their son’s lifestyle but it was hard not to. Tyrell was suddenly remembering the times he had been called out at all hours of the day and night to bail out Sonny or his mother at the local nick. And the times he had bailed Jude out of bad situations as well as police stations. But whatever she was, Jude was also to be pitied. He must remember that now, must not blame her for what had happened. Sonny had always been a handful, always had a chip on his shoulder. Yet he had loved his young half-brothers. Had looked out for them, always asked after them and been pleased to see them.

Now Tyrell had to break the news to them as well, had to brave everyone with the announcement that his first-born, the son he had loved the best, was as good as dead, was a thief. He knew Jude was just waiting for him to give the word to turn off life support. She would never get her head round that. He was expected to shoulder that burden too and he would, he had no other choice.

But it was how Sonny had died that was going to be the hardest part, telling everyone that his son was a gun-carrying thief. That he was everything they were not. Tyrell’s mother would be the hardest hit. She had practically brought the boy up, had always been there for both him and Jude. For some unknown reason Tyrell’s church-going, Jesus-loving mother had taken to poor Jude from the first time she had clapped eyes on her, and the feeling had been mutual. She had seen some need in Jude that had appealed to her motherly instincts. He often thought it was because she was so troubled. Jude was the most troubled person he had ever met. It was also the neediness of her; Verbena needed to be needed, and unfortunately for her none of her own children needed looking after any more. She had brought them up to take good care of themselves, even though she had not left her house for over twenty years.

He wished he could close his eyes and then everything would be back as it was. But he knew that was impossible.

He wished he had taken the boy to Jamaica with them, but that had not really been an option. Sally had tried her best with Sonny but they didn’t exactly hit it off, and four weeks in Jamaica together would have been stronging it for both of them.

Tyrell shook his head angrily, making his dreads slap against his cheek; the stinging sensation was welcome. It brought him back to the present.

He would have given Sonny anything within reason, he had only to ask. But then, Tyrell had been telling him that all his life and the boy had still turned to crime. He’d enjoyed being with the kind of people anyone else would have crossed the road to avoid. He had almost seemed to revel in his growing notoriety. Drugs, drinking, fighting. Nothing was sacred to Sonny. He swore whenever he spoke, would argue relentlessly about nothing, and was almost always fighting the world for what he saw as slights against him, both real and imagined.

Yet through it all, the meetings with the school, the sitting in courts and the helping with paying the fines, Tyrell had never stopped loving this troubled boy who carried his name. And for all his faults he would never have put him down for this, never in a million years. Armed robbery? Because that was what it amounted to. He’d been armed and inside someone’s home.

Their home.

Tyrell imagined what it must have been like to see him standing there with a gun, and shuddered once more.

The terror of it must have been overwhelming. His heart went out to the man who had fought back so furiously. He was sure he would have reacted in much the same way in that position.

But why did his boy do it? That was what Tyrell wanted to know.

Why?

Sonny had been a little sod in the past, but this was big-time skulduggery and Tyrell would have laid money that his son was not so far gone he would do something like this.

It seemed he would have been wrong.

And if he was wrong about this, what else was he wrong about? How could he trust his instincts any more? How was he going to switch off the ventilator and then bury his eldest son? How was he to cope with it all once the plane landed and he was back on solid ground?

He was questioning his whole life now, and finding it lacking.

Distinctly lacking.

 
Verbena Hatcher was tired, but knew she wouldn’t sleep. Instead she picked up her Bible and, clasping it tightly, she prayed for her grandson. All around the room were pictures of her loved ones. Her children, her parents, even her grandparents. Every inch of space on wall or table was covered with smiling faces, and important events in her life and the lives of her family. Christenings, weddings - hers as well as her children’s - graduation photos . . . smiling children and grinning adults. They amounted to a life well lived.

And among all those smiling faces stood a small photograph in a silver frame. It was of Verbena and Jude, with a tiny Sonny Boy asleep on his mother’s lap. It was Jude’s expression that Verbena most loved in that photo, rarely looking at her grandson when she glanced at it. For once Jude looked happy, completely and utterly happy, and Verbena had known it was because at last she had a family of her own in that little boy. Her own arm was around Jude’s shoulders. It looked almost protective, as if she was shielding the girl from the world. She knew Jude kept the same photo in her purse. And in her own way Verbena still tried to protect her, as she had tried to protect her grandson.

Her lips moved silently in the Lord’s Prayer and then she beseeched Him to watch over her grandson. Begged him to make Jude’s grief easier to bear, and offered her own life in exchange for that of the boy she loved more than anyone else in the world.

Her daughter Maureen came in then with a small black rum for her mother.

‘Drink this, you need it.’

Verbena shook her head. She rarely touched alcohol.

‘Please, Mummy.’

She knew then it was not good news and duly took the glass and drank it down. The burn felt surprisingly good and the taste was as she had remembered it. It brought back the smell of new-mown grass, the aroma of sunlight on polished windows, and relay radios playing along the street. It brought back the sounds of summer, hearing the cricket results and listening to Barrington Levy. It brought back the taste of Akee and salt fish, and the laughter of her father when he would allow her a small sip of dark rum from his heavy glass on a Friday night. The sounds of the cicadas and laughter, the sounds of happiness, were replaced by her feeling of dawning despair.

It had been good remembering, but it was ruined forever now, replaced by the bad news she was sure was to come. Why else anaesthetise her?

‘Maureen, has Jude rung?’

The young woman shook her head.

‘Not a word. I am going to the hospital in a minute, Mummy.’

Verbena nodded absently.

She knew it was a lie, a kindly one but a lie all the same. The news had arrived by one of those text things, she guessed, having heard the noise earlier on. The incessant beeping that told the young people of the world they were attached in some way to the rest of their peer group. The rum would give her heartburn, she knew, so she took a couple of Tums. But her heart was heavier now than it had ever been. Her boy, her Sonny Boy, was dying and there was nothing she could do about it.

She looked around the room and pictured him there, lying on the sofa listening to Beenie Man or Bob Marley, singing along to the music, his eyes dancing with happiness and his body flourishing from her love and good cooking. All wasted now. But forever in her mind’s eye, no matter what anyone else thought, he was her heart and always would be.

Verbena braced herself for the bad news she was sure was going to come.

 
Judy Hatcher was holding on to Tyrell. She could smell the distinctive mix of cigarettes, grass and deodorant. He looked as good as he smelled. She was shaking with sadness and hurt and he held her to him gently as they watched their comatose son.

’All right, Jude, everything will be all right.’

It was just something to say, crap, because they both knew nothing would ever be all right for her or him again.

 
Nick Leary looked at the policeman’s face on the monitor and buzzed him in. It seemed an age before the man had driven up the drive and reached the front door. Tammy put the kettle on and smiled half-heartedly at her husband. For the first time in ages she felt protective of him. It was usually Nick protecting her. But seeing the whiteness of his face and the shaking of his hands she wanted to cry for him. In twenty-four hours their lives had been turned upside down, and all because some kid had decided he wanted to take what they had. What they had worked for all their lives.

It was wrong, all wrong, that they might have to fight to defend themselves in court. Their brief had already warned them about that.