Blood At The Root

sliding out the tray on which the body lay.

Banks watched the Foxes. They weren’t touching one another at all, not holding hands or clutching arms the way many couples did when faced with such a situation. Could there really be such distance between them that even the possibility of seeing their son dead at any second couldn’t bridge? It was remarkable, Banks had often thought, how people who no longer have any feelings for one another can keep on going through the motions, afraid of change, of loneliness, of rejection. He thought of Sandra, then pushed the thought aside. He and Sandra were nothing like the Foxes. They weren’t so much separate as independent; they gave one another space. Besides, they had too much in common, had shared too much joy and pain over the years simply to go through the motions of a failed marriage, hadn’t they?

The attendant pulled back the white sheet to reveal the corpse’s face. Josie Fox put her hand to her mouth and started to sob. Steven Fox, pale as the sheet that covered his son, simply nodded and said, “It’s him. It’s our Jason.”

Banks was surprised at what a good job the mortuary had done on the boy’s face. While it was clear that he had been severely beaten, the nose was straight, the cheekbones aligned, the mouth shut tight to cover the shattered teeth. The only wrong note was the way that one eye stared straight up at the ceiling and the other a little to the left, at Mr. and Mrs. Fox.

Banks could never get over the strange effect looking at dead people had on him. Not bodies at the crime scene so much. They sometimes churned his guts, especially if the injuries were severe, but they were essentially work to him; they were human beings robbed of something precious, an insult to the sanctity of life.

On the other hand, when he saw bodies laid out in the mortuary or in a funeral parlor, they had a sort of calming effect on him. He couldn’t explain it, but as he looked down at the shell of what had once been Jason Fox, he knew there was nobody home. The pale corpse resembled nothing more than a fragile eggshell, and if you tapped it hard enough it would crack open, revealing nothing but darkness inside. Somehow, the effect of all this was to relieve him, just for a few welcome moments, of his own growing fear of death.

Banks led the dazed Foxes out into the open air. They stood on the steps of the hospital for a moment, silently watching the people come out of the small Congregationalist church.

Banks lit a cigarette. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

After a few moments, Steven Fox looked at him. “What? Oh, sorry,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, there’s nothing. I’ll take Josie home now. Make her a nice cup of tea.”

His wife said nothing.

They walked down King Street, still not touching. Banks sighed and turned up toward the station. At least he knew who the victim was now; first, he would let his team know, and then they could begin the investigation proper.

III

Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley would normally have enjoyed nothing more than a pub crawl any day of the week, any hour of the day or night, but that Sunday, all he wanted to do as he walked into his fifth pub, the Jubilee, at the corner of Market Street and Waterloo Road, was go home, crawl into bed and sleep for a week, a month – nay, a bloody year.

For the past two weeks, his daughter April, named after the month she was born because neither Hatchley nor his wife Carol could agree on any other name, had kept him awake all night, every night, as those bloody inconvenient lumps of calcium called teeth bored their way through the tender flesh of her gums with flagrant disregard for the wee bairn’s comfort. Or for his. And he hadn’t been well-enough prepared for it. In fact, he hadn’t been prepared for it at all.

The first year or so of April’s life, you would never have known she was there, so quiet was she. At worst, she’d cry out a couple of times when she was hungry, but as soon as Carol’s tit was in her mouth she was happy as a pig in clover. And why not, thought Hatchley, who felt exactly the same way about Carol’s tit himself, not that he’d been getting much of that lately, either.

But now April had suddenly turned into a raging monster and put paid to his sleep. He knew he looked as if he’d been on the piss every morning he went into work – he could see the way they were all looking at him – but if truth be told, he hadn’t had a drink in weeks. A real drink in a pub, that was.

He remembered some story, an old wife’s tale, probably, about rubbing whiskey on a teething baby’s gums to quieten it down. Well, Carol wouldn’t let him do that – she said she had enough on her plate with one boozer in the family – so he had rubbed it on his own gums, so to speak, or rather let it caress them briefly and gently on its way down to his stomach. Sometimes that helped him get a ten-minute nap between screaming sessions. But he never had more than two or three glasses a night. He hadn’t had a hangover in so long that not only had he almost forgotten what they felt like, he was actually beginning to miss them.

So it was with both a sense of nostalgia and a feeling that he’d rather be anywhere else, especially asleep in bed, that Sergeant Hatchley entered the Jubilee that Sunday lunch-time.

Contrary to rumors around the station, Hatchley didn’t know the landlord of every pub in Eastvale. Apart from the Queen’s Arms, the station’s local, he tended to avoid the pubs near the town center, especially those on Market Street, which always seemed to be full of yobs. If there was trouble on a Saturday night, which there often was these days, you could bet it would be on York Road or Market Street.

The Jubilee was also a chain pub: all fruit machines, theme nights, trivia and overpriced food. Overpriced ale, too. Rock bands played there on Friday and Saturday nights, and it had a reputation for getting some of the best up-and-coming bands in Yorkshire. Not that Hatchley gave a toss about rock music, being a brass-band man himself. The Jubilee was also reputed to be a fertile hunting ground for birds and drugs.

On Sunday lunchtimes, though, it became a family pub, and each family seemed to have about six children in tow. All of them screaming at once.

Hatchley leaned over the bar and presented his warrant card to the barmaid as she pulled someone a pint.

“Any trouble here Saturday night, love?” he asked.

She jerked her head without looking up at him. “Better ask His Nibs over there. I weren’t working.”

Hatchley edged down the bar and shoved his way through the drinkers standing there, getting a few dirty looks on the way. He finally caught the barman’s attention and asked for a word. “Can’t you see I’m rushed off my feet?” the man protested. “What is it you want?” Like everyone else behind the bar, he wore black trousers and a blue- and-white-striped shirt with THE JUBILEE stitched across the left breast.

When Hatchley showed his card, the man stopped protesting that he was too busy and called one of the other bar staff to stand in for him, then he gestured Hatchley down to the far end of the bar where it was quiet.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I hate bloody Sunday lunchtimes, especially after working a Saturday night.” He scratched his thinning hair and a shower of dandruff fell on his shoulders. How bloody hygienic, Hatchley thought. “My name’s Ted, by the way.”

“Aye, well, Ted, lad,” Hatchley said slowly, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but we all have our crosses to bear. First off, was there any trouble in here on Saturday night?”

“What do you mean, trouble?”

“Fights, barneys, slanging matches, hair-pulling, that sort of thing.”

Ted frowned. “Nowt out of the ordinary,” he said. “I mean, we were busy as buggery, so there was no way I could see what were going on everywhere at once, especially with the bloody racket that band were making.”

“I appreciate that,” said Hatchley, who had had the same conversation five times already that morning and was getting steadily sick of it. He slipped the sketch from his briefcase. “Recognize him?” he asked.

The barman squinted at the drawing, then passed it back to Hatchley. “Could be any number of people, couldn’t it?”

Hatchley wasn’t sure why, but he felt the back of his scalp prickle. Always a sign something wasn’t quite right. “Aye, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s an amateur artist’s reconstruction of a lad’s face, a face that were booted to a bloody pulp after closing time last night. So any help you could give us would be much appreciated, Ted.”