Easy Meat (21 page)

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to be thought of as disloyal.”

“That’s correct.”

Resnick pushed enough paper aside to make room on the side of his desk and sat looking at the young officer’s face; waiting for Khan to look at him.

When he did, Resnick said, “In your own words, what this represents is the basis of a preliminary report. There’s nothing here to say that, had he lived, Inspector Aston would not have taken some of this farther. He mentioned to me, for instance, he thought supervision on the night of Nicky’s death might have been considered slack. Paul Matthews and Elizabeth Peck, I believe that’s right.”

Khan nodded, yes.

“You were present, at their interviews?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what was your feeling? Did you think they might have had anything to hide?”

“Matthews, he was nervous. Stuttering all the time, you know. Not stuttering exactly, but stumbling more, over his words.”

“And the woman? Peck?”

“Defensive. Yes, that’s what I thought. Resentful, as if we shouldn’t have been questioning her at all.”

“All right.” Resnick was back on his feet. “What you do is this. Try and find out when the Social Services Inspectorate are planning to publish their report. Given what happened to Inspector Aston, you might be able to get some idea of which way they’re shading, if they think there are any serious causes for concern. Then contact Jardine. Tell him we’ll almost certainly need to come back and talk to his people again. Try not to get his back up, get him alarmed. You could always say that there are a few odds and ends need tidying up. In the circumstances, he should buy that. Okay? You can handle all that?”

For the first time Khan felt able to smile. “Yes, sir. Of course.”

“Good lad.” And, as Khan was opening the door: “There may be no connection between the attack on Bill and any of this. Ninety-nine per cent, there is none. None at all. But we have to be sure.”

Twenty-five

Resnick noticed that Lynn seemed to be wearing more makeup, a dash of color, blue-green, above the eyes. Lipstick, not heavy, not accentuated, but there. A thin roll-neck top under a light check jacket, comfortable skirt. She took off the jacket once she’d opened the car door and draped it along the rear seat. At the passenger side, Resnick clicked his belt tight. He wondered if she might have started seeing someone again, a man; maybe she was just beginning to feel better about herself. He hoped that was the case. It was no more than she deserved.

A quick adjustment to the mirror and they were pulling out into traffic, heading down towards the city center, the southbound road out towards the bridge.

“His wife,” Lynn asked, “Bill Aston’s, what’s she like?”

Resnick described her: a shortish woman, not especially lively, but a good listener. Those occasions he had met her socially, police functions, she had kept pretty much in her husband’s shadow, but whenever he had been to the house, more relaxed, she had been the one who talked, Bill fading into the background, clearing dishes, making sure the drinks were filled.

“A nice woman,” Resnick said. “Straightforward, sensible.”

“Kids?”

“Two, I think. No, three. Grown up and left home. One somewhere like Canada, Australia.” He seemed to recall that one of them had married, but couldn’t remember which. “You know, I didn’t really know him that well. The family. We’d not had a lot of contact these past few years.”

Lynn made a slight nod with her head, concentrating on the driver in front, who couldn’t seem to make up his mind which lane he was supposed to be in. Trent Bridge was only a few hundred yards ahead. You could see the spot where Aston’s body had been found, still staked out, cordoned off.

“We haven’t come up with any kind of weapon?”

“Not as yet.”

There was a lot of water down there, flowing quite fast beneath the bridge.

The young man who came to the door looked enough like his father for Resnick not to wonder who he was. Terry Aston had inherited Bill’s facial expression, the color of his eyes, already the same peaking of the hair; he had enough of his mother’s genes to be shorter, stockier, set four-square on the ground. He had traveled up with his wife and eighteen-month-old son from where they lived outside Bedford: Terry, a computer programmer with sidelines in home brewing and ornithology; his wife, Moira, a legal secretary who still temped at ten pounds an hour, those mornings when Steven was with the nanny.

Terry Aston shook hands with Resnick, accepting his condolences, nodded a shade awkwardly at Lynn Kellogg, and led the two officers through the house into the living room.

“I’ll tell Mum you’re here.”

Resnick had thought Margaret Aston might have been in bed, resting, somewhere out of the light, alone with her thoughts. But through the French windows, he could see her bending to deadhead one of the early roses, her grandson behind her, running and falling, arms akimbo, onto the graveled path. Stifling his squawl of tears, Margaret scooped him into her arms and held him tight against her, ssh-sshhing into his blond hair, until his mother came hurrying and took him from her, hoisting him high into the air and turning tears to laughter. Crushed against Margaret’s chest, the white petals of the rose fell aimless to the ground.

“Inspector Resnick?”

The girl who came towards him from the doorway had to be nineteen, possibly twenty, but looked younger, fair hair pulled loosely back, wearing a cream shirt under faded dungarees; the eyes with which she regarded Resnick were alert and half-amused; the hand she offered was smooth and small-boned inside his.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

Resnick looked at her again. “You’re Stephanie?”

“Not a bad try. Actually it’s Stella. But I still don’t think you really remember.”

Resnick shook his head.

“You came here with Dad. I think I was eleven, something like that. Maybe twelve. I remember pestering you about how you got to be a policewoman. On and on. It’s all I wanted to be at the time, all I could think of, and Dad, well, he wouldn’t talk about it. Said it was the last thing in the world I should do. No job for a girl, that’s what I remember him saying, it’s not a job for a girl.” She looked across at Lynn. “Do you think he was right?”

“It depends.”

“What on?”

Lynn realized she wasn’t certain. If there was an easy answer, she couldn’t call it to mind. “I suppose it depends what kind of a woman you are. But then we all have different ideas, don’t we? About what work should be.”

“And women,” Stella said.

Lynn looked back at her, saying nothing. There was a clear smile at the sides of Stella’s mouth, the corners of her eyes.

“But you do like it?” Stella asked. “You enjoy what you do?”

“Most of the time, yes.”

“Good. It must be terrible, stuck in some job you can’t stand. Boring, nine to five.”

“Well,” Lynn smiled. “This certainly isn’t that.”

“Is it something you’re still considering?” Resnick asked. “Coming on the Job?”

Stella laughed. “I think all my dad’s propaganda must have worked.” Almost apologetically, she looked at Lynn. “He thought it was man’s work, I’m afraid. Men of six foot and over.” She smiled a little wistfully. “Bit of a traditionalist, Dad, where gender roles are concerned.”

Resnick looked into her face for a sign of what she was feeling, talking about her father as she was; she was forcing herself to do so, he thought, making herself talk that way in order to keep him alive.

“What are you doing?” Lynn asked.

“I’m at agricultural college.”

“You’re going to be a farmer?”

Stella shook her head. “Trees. That’s what I’d like to do eventually. Get into forestry. Grow trees. Hundreds of them. Thousands.”

Lynn was grinning broadly.

“What?” Stella asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering where that came on the list of traditional women’s jobs. Not very high, I don’t suppose.”

“Dad said I’d grow out of it.” Stella laughed again. “A phase I was going through. Bless him, he didn’t really understand. Not that or a lot of other things.”

She was smiling at Lynn as her mother walked into the room. “All that jollity,” Margaret Aston said, “I wondered what on earth was going on.”

Stella stepped back, guiltily silent; the smile disappeared. As Resnick moved forward to greet her, Margaret’s good intentions evaporated and her brave front collapsed in tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said, again and again, as Resnick hovered, uncertain, awkward, offering her a handkerchief which she refused. “I kept telling myself I wouldn’t do this, create a scene.”

“Mum,” Stella said, “it’s okay to cry.”

Her mother dabbed at her eyes with a wad of damp tissue, blew her nose, pushed automatically at the ends of her hair. “Time enough for that later. It’s not what Charlie’s here for, is it, Charlie?” She sniffed. “I’m sure there are questions to be asked, isn’t that right. Work to be done.”

“Mum …” Stella started.

“No. It’s what your father would have wanted. Eh, Charlie? It’s what Bill would have wanted done.”

They had gone out into the garden, the house too cramped for Margaret, too confining, too full of her husband’s memory, her grandson’s shrill laughter and sudden tears. She had told them all that she could remember, most of what they wanted to know. Bill’s early-morning swim, the journeys they had made together to the supermarket and then to the garden center, later in the day. The letter from Nuneaton, inviting Bill to preach on Sunday fortnight; the phone calls from Stella and from their middle child, the son out in Australia, and the call that Bill had taken in the hall, somebody who’d rung him and he’d phoned them back, talked for quite a while, something else to do with his Church work, she supposed, Bill hadn’t said.

Standing now near the bottom hedge, the three of them, Margaret, Resnick, and Lynn, they were for that moment a silent tableau, while around them, the electric hum of an unseen lawn-mower rose up and merged with the dulled roar of a passing plane.

“He was angry, Charlie, you can understand that. These last few years. He felt he’d been passed over; he’d given them everything he had and they didn’t want any more, so they hid him away in that wretched place. Offices with closed doors.” She smiled. “You knew him, Charlie, better than most. He wanted to be out there, doing things. Real things. Work that mattered. That’s what he believed in. He thought that it mattered, what he did. That it made a difference.” She half-turned away, shaking her head. “That doesn’t mean anything though, does it? Not any more. Not now. What you feel. That’s old-fashioned. Belief. Values. He was a dinosaur, Bill. That’s what he was; he embarrassed them.”

“Margaret, no …”

“He embarrassed them and that’s why they shut him away and waited for him to die.”

“Margaret …”

“And now this …”

“Of course, we …”

“All this …” She was facing him again, eyes raw not with loss but anger. “All this performance, this great paraphernalia, all of you like headless chickens running around. Who did this? Who did this? Isn’t it tragic? Terrible? Of course, it’s terrible. He was my husband. But it’s what you wanted all along.”

“Margaret, you know that’s not true.”

“Isn’t it? Not you, maybe. You personally. But the rest of them, all those smart young men—and women—with their smart young attitudes and sociology degrees. They don’t care about him, none of them. Not a one.”

“Mrs. Aston,” Lynn said, “we’ll catch whoever did this, we will.” Margaret Aston looked at her long and hard, this young woman who could almost have been her daughter, so earnest, believing what she said. “And if you do,” Margaret said, “what difference will that make? What difference will that make now?”

Resnick waited till they were back in the car. “That call, the one unaccounted for. Have it checked out, the number. Just in case.”

Twenty-six

It turned out that John Anthony Lawrence St. John had walked away from a place on the second year of an undergraduate course in applied mathematics at Bristol University—outside of Oxford and Cambridge, one of the most difficult to get into. His tutor had been convinced John Anthony Lawrence was on his way to a first; one year for his masters and then the Ph.D. A research fellowship for the asking. Before that, he had left his secondary school in Buckinghamshire—a grammar school, that county being just about the only one in which they still had a right to exist—with four high-grade A levels and ten Os. Glory, glory all the way.

“What buggers me,” Divine said, “he’s got all that going for him, all those brains, what’s he doing, chucking it all away?”

Divine was in the canteen with Graham Millington, tucking into bacon, double egg and chips, and beans, his earlier purloined sausage having sharpened his appetite more than a touch. Opposite him, Millington was slowly forking his way through a meat-and-potato pie that had spent too long in the microwave and whose contents now bore a startling affinity to slurry.

“Fancy it yourself, then, do you?” Millington asked. “Groves of Academe?”

“Bollocks.”

“Well,” Millington said. “I suppose that’s a point of view.”

Divine dashed a large mouthful of egg and beans down with a quick swill of tea. “The way I see it, he’s so much sodding cleverer than me, he should be out there using it, making a whole lot more money, right? Sight more’n you or me. Instead of which, here am I, bringing in little enough as it is, all those deductions, national insurance, tax, some of which is going to keep him on the dole ‘cause he’s too fucking lazy to work.”

“His choice,” Millington said.

“Live off you and me? Yeh, thanks a lot!”

Millington pushed his plate aside and reached for a cigarette; one of life’s little miracles, he was thinking, no matter how much radiation or whatever you zap those pies with in the microwave, there were always those few bits of gristle left intact, like pearls. “Only thing need interest us,” he said, “what he told us about finding Aston, it all holds up. Thank him for his help and kick him free.”

“Aye.” Divine nodded his head. “More’s the sodding pity.”