Easy Meat (34 page)

Making him play it back, again and again, six seconds on repeat. “It was rough.”

“Rough?”

“Sort of rasping.”

“As if he had a cold, that sort of sound?”

Farrell leveled his gaze and stared. “As if he was excited,” he said.

Seventeen minutes to three.

“Declan,” Resnick said, “no one’s judging you here, you know that. Maureen and I, we’re not passing judgment on what you do. Whatever you’ve done. That’s not what this is about.”

“Then what is it about?” Farrell asked, a sudden unsuspected shout. “Why can’t I just go home? That’s what I want.”

“What this is about,” Maureen said, “part of it, is making sure that whoever it was did this to you won’t do it again to somebody else.”

Farrell was leaking tears again; they came and went so frequently now he scarcely bothered wiping them away.

“You’re sure you didn’t know him, Declan? This man?”

“I told you, I told you I never even saw him. How can I know if I’ve seen him before?”

“But you have been there before,” Resnick asked. “Those toilets?”

“Of course I have.”

“I mean, to meet someone. For the purposes of sex?”

“No.”

“Declan …”

“No! I’ve told you, I’m not queer, I’m not gay, not any of the things you think I am.”

“Declan, please …”

He was on his feet now and making for the door, Maureen looking quickly across at Resnick, wanting to know should she stop him.

“Declan,” Resnick said, “I think you had been there before, after closing, around the same time. I think sometimes you were lucky, met someone you fancied, sometimes you didn’t, gave it up and went on home. I think whoever was shut in the cubicle tonight you thought had gone there for the same reason as you. Now I don’t know what you did, whether or not there was some signal between you, whether you showed yourself to him through a hole in the door, hole in the wall. But when you went out onto the Rec I think you thought he would follow you and he did. And Declan, I don’t care about any of that, I honestly don’t. But what happened next, that’s what I care about. This person, whoever it was, viciously assaulted you, assaulted you in the most terrible way imaginable. And as Sergeant Madden said, we want to ensure he doesn’t remain free to do this again. To someone else. And because you know what it’s like, Declan, you must want that too. So 1 am asking you, please, to help us as much as you can.”

After several seconds’ hesitation, Declan Farrell opened the door and walked out. Maureen looked across at Resnick and slowly shook her head, closed her eyes.

When Carl Vincent came into Resnick’s office he was looking a little tired, a man who had been up all night and only snatched a half-hour’s sleep, slumped across a table in the canteen. There were a couple of marks on the sleeve of his lightweight suit, picked up during the search, and his collar was somewhat awry, but otherwise he didn’t look much the worse for wear.

A sight better than Resnick himself. “Carl, what can I do for you?” he asked.

“This business last night, the talk is you’re not making any connection with the Aston murder.”

“That’s pretty much right.”

Vincent drew a deep breath. “Look, sir, maybe I should’ve said before, but I saw him a year ago, Aston, in a gay club in Leicester.”

For a second, the pulse beating at the side of Resnick’s head seemed to stop. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying Bill Aston was gay.”

Thirty-nine

Not even minutes, Resnick seemed to have been sitting there for a small eternity.

A year ago … a club in Leicester … gay.

It was not only tiredness, but anxiety in Vincent’s eyes. “This club,” Resnick said eventually, “you were there on duty?”

Fleetingly, the eyes closed and when they looked at Resnick again there was no avoidance, no guile. “No, sir.”

Resnick breathed through his mouth. He said, “You’d best sit down.”

Vincent crossed one leg over the other, uncrossed it, sitting with his hands resting just above his knees.

“And Inspector Aston,” Resnick said, “there’s no way he wasn’t there on duty either?”

Vincent shook his head.

“You’re sure? Positive?”

“He left with somebody,” Vincent said.

Resnick was seeing Aston’s wife, her plumpish little body ill-fitting in black, her voice fierce against the afternoon.
You knew him, Charlie, better than most.

“And you couldn’t have been mistaken? Misinterpreted the situation?”

But Vincent was already shaking his head.

“A year ago,” Resnick said.

“The reason I remember, someone pointed him out to me. Someone I knew there, in the Job. He’d seen him at some course, I think. Aston. Knew he was from up here, this force. Said he’d come across him before, you know, in Leicester, once or twice.”

“You didn’t speak to him?”

For a moment, Vincent smiled. “Not my type.”

“But you are gay?”

“It doesn’t mean we fancy everyone, you know.”

“I know,” Resnick said. “But what you’re saying is you’re gay but you’ve not gone public about it.”

“That’s right.”

Resnick shook his head. “What’s really worrying me is why you didn’t tell me about Aston before?”

Vincent didn’t respond right away. “Because I wasn’t sure. I mean, I hadn’t known his name. And the photograph …” Resnick staring at him, waiting for all of the truth. “No, all right, I thought I recognized him, the connection was made, but then, it seemed to have nothing to do … I couldn’t see the relevance to what had happened. Gay or not gay, sexuality didn’t seem to be an issue.”

“Except for yours.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Except for yours. Your sexuality.”

“Look …”

“No, you look.” Resnick leaning forward now, head slightly to one side, fingers beginning to point. “The reason you didn’t come forward with this information sooner was personal. To do with you. Give up Aston and you’re giving up yourself. In keeping silent, you were protecting yourself.”

Slightly muffled through the door, the constant, shifting sound of telephones, their call and response. Someone knocked on Resnick’s door and receiving no answer, turned away.

“It was an issue for me, yes,” Vincent finally said.

“
The
issue.”

“No, sir. If that was the case I’d never have come forward now. I’d have kept my silence, prayed it didn’t matter, or if it did it’d come out some other way. But as soon as I heard, you know, last night, what happened to the guy in the park, there was no way I could keep quiet then.”

“Even though it means exposing yourself like this?”

Vincent shook his head. “I’m a copper, just like you.”

Not just like me, Resnick thought. “Carl,” Resnick said, “I don’t care what you do in bed or who you do it with.” Not even sure if that were true. “The only place it affects me is here, when you let it affect you, how you do your job. And what prevented you from acting as you should, it wasn’t the fact of your being gay, it was that you’ve kept that fact a secret. That’s what was wrong.”

Vincent stifled a laugh. “You think I should come out?”

“That’s up to you.”

“But that’s what you’re saying.”

A shake of Resnick’s head. “What I’m saying, as long as you don’t, there’ll be other incidents like this, judgment calls you feel you have to make. And they’ll be to do with protecting yourself, your secret, and not your job.”

“I’m sorry,” Vincent said, “I’m finding this a little difficult to take in.”

“That I want you to be honest about yourself? Tell the truth.”

“That here’s my senior officer, telling me I have a duty to come out as being gay.”

“I don’t think I shall be able to trust you, your judgment, not fully unless you do.”

“And if I did?”

“Your instincts are good, you seem to talk to people well, work hard. You’re clearly bright.” He shrugged. “No reason you shouldn’t make a good detective.”

“You’d keep me on your team?”

Resnick thought for longer than probably he should. “Yes, why not?”

Vincent smiled, pleased like a kid that’d been handed a prize, confused; he touched his hands together and rocked back in his chair. “I don’t know …” Openly, this time he laughed. “You think it isn’t difficult enough, getting on in the Job being black, without having to stand up for being gay as well?”

Skelton had not been having a good twenty-four hours. His daughter had telephoned him in the middle of dinner to tell him she was thinking about dropping out from university to become part of a medical outreach team in Zaire; his wife, whose only recent communication with him had been by means of grunts or notes stuck to the door of the fridge, had launched into a diatribe about setting up a new regime which seemed to be going to start with Skelton laundering his own underpants; and then there had been the call-out on account of that poof who’d been raped on Lenton Rec.

Now this.

“Jesus, Charlie! They’re everywhere.”

Resnick offered no comment.

“You can’t switch on the television nowadays without there’s some clever little bastard smarming on about equal rights for gays. Strikes me, we’ll soon be the ones needing extra rights. Blokes on
East Enders
holding hands and dying from AIDS; lezzies all up and down
Brookside.
And the BBC—the BBC, mind, not Channel 4—have started this—what is it?
Gaytime TV.
As though it was all a big laugh. Whatever happened to normal, eh, Charlie? Normal blokes with normal families, that’s what I’d like to know.”

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.