Flesh And Blood

Contents

About the Book

Fifteen years ago Susan Blacklock disappeared. Although Detective Inspector Frank Elder has taken early retirement, the case still plagues his mind. Prime suspects, Shane Donald and Alan McKeirnan, were convicted a year later of the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, and now that Shane has been granted parole, Elder feels compelled to revisit the past.

Then Shane disappears and another young girl is murdered. Elder’s involvement is now crucial. Taunted by postcards from the killer, an increasingly desperate Elder battles to keep his estranged family from being drawn into the very heart of the crime…

About the Author

John Harvey is the author of the richly praised sequence of eleven Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which,
Lonely Hearts
, was named by
The Times
as one of the ‘100 Best Crime Novels of the Century’. His first novel featuring Detective Inspector Frank Elder,
Flesh and Blood
, won the CWA Silver Dagger in 2004, and a Barry Award for the Best British Crime Novel published in the US in 2004. In 2007 John Harvey was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence, and in 2009 he was awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters, by the University of Nottingham.

For more about the author please visit
www.mellotone.co.uk

In a True Light

Nick’s Blues

Gone to Ground

Far Cry

Ash and Bone

Darkness and Light

Lonely Hearts

Rough Treatment

Cutting Edge

Off Minor

Wasted Years

Cold Light

Living Proof

Easy Meat

Still Water

Last Rites

Cold in Hand

Now’s the Time

Minor Key

A Darker Shade of Blue

Ghosts of a Chance

Bluer Than This

Blue Lightning

Men From Boys

For Patrick:

Geezer
Extraordinaire

Charles Dickens:
David Copperfield

William Shakespeare:
King Lear

Soft and insinuating, the cat brushed against his face and Elder, still three-parts asleep, used his arm to push it away. Moments later, it was there again, nudging itself against him, its purr loud inside his head. Sharp, the cat’s claws kneaded the soft flesh at the top of his shoulder, the back of his neck. Beneath him, the pillow was rank with sweat. With an effort he turned and lifted the animal clear, its thick coat matted and damp, skin flaccid and loose across its meagre ribs. The bright slits of its eyes yellow in the almost dark.

As Elder struggled himself upright, the cat twisted inside his grasp and bit deep into the base of his thumb. With a curse, he dropped it down on to the bed and it jumped, hissing, to the floor. When he brought his hand to his mouth, the taste of blood was sour and bright.

And now there were other cats, close in groups of two or three, emerging from the shadow round the edges of the room. Elder could hear the faint rasp of their feral breathing, ragged and low. Throwing back the sheet, he began to pull on his clothes, the cats close about him now, rubbing against his ankles, running over his bare feet.

When he held the door open and tried to urge them out, they slithered back between his legs and moved in a softly undulating mass towards the stairs.

In the room above, eyes stared back at him, unblinking, and, as he stepped forward, something pliant and smooth gave beneath the bones of his foot. Hairless, a swathe of newborn kittens writhed, mewling and blind, along bare boards. Vomit caught in his throat. From somewhere close above his head, a full-grown cat launched itself towards him, claws unsheathed. A ribbon of blood fell from his upper arm, another laced across his cheek. The door he had come through stood closed.

Shaking, Elder crossed towards a further set of stairs. At the top, the tread gave way beneath his weight and he had to brace himself against the walls before jumping clear.

Through gaps in the roof, light spilled, weak, across the floor.

Nothing moved.

On the far side of the room was a narrow bed. Not empty. Quite. Beneath a blanket, grey and threadbare, something lay curled. The skin on Elder’s legs and arms seized with cold. His body cramped. He knew, or felt he knew, what lay beyond his sight. The cats, almost silent now, had followed him into the room and massed about him, quiescent, waiting. The space between the bed and where he stood was vast, a pace or so away; the blanket rough and cold between finger and thumb. When he pulled it back, it shredded in his grasp.

The girl’s legs were pulled up tight towards her chest, her breasts small and empty, bone of her buttocks breaking through blotched skin. The stench fouled his mouth and filled his nose. One side of her face, the face of a girl, a young woman of sixteen or maybe seventeen, had all but disappeared. There were bite marks, small and deep, around the socket of the eye.

As Elder bent forward, one of her arms reached suddenly towards him, hand outstretched and feeling for his own. Seized him and would not let him go.

From his position atop the rough stone wall, Elder tracked the progress of the bus as it trailed around the road’s high curve, the rough-hewn moor above, the fertile bottom land below. Today the sky was shade on shade of blue, and palest where it curved to meet the sea, the horizon a havering trick of light on which the outline of a large boat, a tanker, seemed to have been stuck like an illustration from a child’s book. Elder knew there would be lobster boats, two or three, checking their catch close in against the cliff and out of sight from where he stood.

He watched as the bus stopped and Katherine got down, standing for a moment till the bus had pulled away, a solitary figure by the road’s edge and, at that distance, barely recognisable to the naked eye. Even so, he knew it was her: the turn of the head, the way she stood.

With a quick movement, Katherine hoisted her rucksack on to one shoulder, hitched it into position and crossed the road towards the top of the lane that would bring her, eventually, down to the cottage where Elder lived.

Dropping from the wall, he hurried across the field.

♦

The cottages were three in a line, built for the families of labourers who, in earlier days, had worked the land. Beyond these stood a single house and studio belonging to a local artist, a pleasant enough woman who kept herself largely to herself, merely nodding at Elder when they passed on the path that led down towards the sea, rarely bothering to speak.

‘You’re not a writer?’ the owner had asked when Elder paid over his deposit, the first month’s rent.

‘No. Why d’you ask?’

She had smiled. ‘Oh, we get ’em sometimes, hoping something’ll rub off. D. H. Lawrence, you know, he lived there with Frieda, his wife. One of the cottages. Katherine Mansfield, too, for a while.’

‘Yes?’ Elder had said. ‘Right, right.’

Well, he had heard of Lawrence, at least.

That had been something over two years ago, early spring and little enough in bud. One day Elder had been an officer in the Nottinghamshire force, a detective inspector with thirty years in, a marriage that had endured more than half that time, a daughter of fourteen – and the next, or so it seemed, he had resigned, retired, walked out on them all.

He had gone almost as far as it is possible to go in England without running out of land, seen this place by chance and here he had stayed. Two up, two down, and little more; flagged floors, stone walls; light that when it struck right seared through the house from front to back. The occasional postcard aside, he did not write; and, after a while, not even that. He read. Tried Lawrence, but soon cast him aside. He found a small cache of dampening paperbacks beneath the stairs: Priestley, du Maurier, Dornford Yates. When they ran out he picked up cast-offs at church sales and the like. Sea stories, he found he liked those, Forester, Reeman and Alexander Kent. More recently, he’d taken a shine to H. E. Bates.

It fascinated him, he who’d scarce picked up a book in two score years or more, the way the tale would draw you out of yourself, pull you in.

Evenings, some evenings, he played the radio loud, anxious for the sound of voices. Knowing there was no need to answer back.

♦

From just beyond the last cottage, he watched now as Katherine stepped into view around the last curve in the lane.

She was wearing light walking boots, socks folded back over pale green tights, a cord skirt in a darker shade, knee-length, a borrowed anorak, several sizes too large, unzipped. When she saw Elder and ran the last dozen yards towards him, her hair, brown and slightly curled, streamed out behind much as her mother’s would once have done.

‘Dad!’

‘Kate.’

He had wondered about this, some awkwardness or hesitation after what, six months? More. The previous summer, it had been, back in Nottinghamshire, and brief. But no, she hugged him and he felt, beneath the layers that she wore, the relative smallness of her bones. Her face, below his, pushed high against his chest, and slowly, with closed eyes, he pressed his own face down against the top of her head, remembering the smell of her hair when she had been two or three or four.