‘I’m sorry, Mum, but it’s still all so raw . . .’
His voice trailed off.
‘No, I’m sorry, son, I should know when to shut me trap. But I can’t believe anyone would do that to me or mine. If I’d have got my hands on him . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Let’s hope he don’t die anyway. Let him live and go to prison. Though they don’t put them in prison now, do they? He’ll probably end up on holiday in bleeding Africa or somewhere. You know what them bleeding bleeding hearts are like!’
Nick would have laughed if he’d had a laugh left in him. Angela made the tea and carried on ranting and raving at the world but he had tuned her out now.
The boy was alive.
That was all Nick could think about.
The boy was still alive.
‘Your son is very ill, Mrs Hatcher.’
The doctor’s voice was quiet and she looked into his face steadily.
‘I ain’t surprised, are you? His head was caved in with a baseball bat.’
She laughed, a nervous high sound, and the doctor’s heart went out to her.
‘You really should think about what I said. Organ donation can be very comforting to some relatives. It’s as if a part of a person lives on . . .’
She turned on the doctor then, her eyes bright and her voice harsh with emotion.
‘I ain’t turning nothing off! He’ll be all right. A fighter, my Sonny, a strong boy.’ The tears spilled over on to her cheeks. ‘He’ll be all right, love him. He just needs a bit of sleep, that’s all.’
The doctor shook his head at the nurse sitting beside the distraught woman and sighed.
She grabbed her son’s hand once more and said gaily, ‘My Sonny Boy will be awake soon. He’s only seventeen. They never get up before five in the afternoon, do they, teenagers?’
She nodded at the nurse for confirmation of what she’d said. The absolute misery in the woman’s eyes made the nurse feel like crying herself.
‘I’ll get you some more tea.’
She left the room with the doctor. Both of them knew that Sonny Hatcher would never open his eyes again. He was brain dead.
Judy Hatcher closed her eyes and tried to stem the tears. Her face was haggard, but these days it always was. Drink and drugs had seen to that. Her blond hair was greasy and scraped back off her face. Her blue eyes were listless, almost as dead as her son’s, and her naturally slim body emaciated from too much vodka and a liking for weekends devoted to cocaine and amphetamines though heroin was her drug of choice. She was supposed to be trying to get off it but methadone didn’t have the same kick, the same way of obliterating all her troubles and thoughts.
She leaned over and opened her bag, taking out the photos once more.
‘Here, look at this one, Sonny, you and me in Yarmouth. You was only two, remember that?’
There was hope in her voice, but in truth she hardly remembered it herself; she had been drunk and stoned for most of that holiday. Tyrell, Sonny’s dad, had still been around then. He’d been so handsome; still was. She gazed sadly at the photo. Sonny was the image of him except his skin wasn’t as dark.
She had left a message with Tyrell’s mother and hoped he would come to see Sonny before . . . She wouldn’t think about it. She wasn’t turning nothing off, no matter what they said. Deep inside she wanted Tyrell to come and make the decision for her. But he was in Jamaica with his second wife and their two kids, so he had a long journey back.
Tyrell’s mother was in a right state, bless her. She loved this boy but was housebound now, too scared to leave it. Jude would ring her again soon, let her know how he was. She was a good woman, old Verbena, a star really. She was the nearest thing to a mother Jude had ever had, and she adored her eldest grandson. But then she would. She had practically brought him up.
Verbena had been good to his mother as well. She had always made sure Jude ate and tried to help her take care of herself. In fact, over the years Jude did not know what she would have done without this help.
Verbena was someone she could go to. No matter what Jude did, or more to the point didn’t do, Verbena was always there for her, the only constant in her constantly changing world. She had never judged the mother of her beloved grandson, instead she had tried to understand her.
Which was no mean feat as Jude Hatcher had never really understood herself.
She wished Verbena was here now, wished Tyrell was here, wished someone, anyone, would come and take this burden from her shoulders. She had never been very good at decisions; she always made the wrong ones.
Jude rested her head on the pillow next to Sonny’s and cried. She didn’t know what else to do.
‘He’s a little bastard, it was bound to happen to him sometime.’
Detective Inspector Rudde’s voice was bored-sounding. Once they had realised it was Sonny Hatcher lying broken on the study floor police interest had waned. He was a known creeper, with a string of offences as long as his arm, and was also a mouthy, uneducated little fucker who had been done for practically everything you could be done for bar murder. And by the looks of it, if Nick Leary hadn’t jobbed him he would be up for that now and all.
‘He is still a human being, and there’s nothing to say he was actually going to harm anyone . . .’
Peter Rudde rolled his eyes to the ceiling in annoyance, his big fat face incredulous at the inanity of what he was hearing.
’A loaded fucking gun, a farmhouse with more antiques in it than Sotheby’s, and you think he had it for a laugh? Use your fucking loaf! No, I’m recommending to the CPS that no action be taken. Sonny Hatcher was an accident waiting to happen. Fuck me, that geezer Leary just cut our crime rate by forty per cent. They should give him a fucking medal.’
DC Ibbotson sighed. It was a waste of time trying to reason with his boss who didn’t know the meaning of the word.
‘What, I ask you, would Sonny Boy know about antiques?’ he tried, changing tack.
‘Fuck all, I should imagine. Knowing him, he would just have nicked the ashtrays. But that ain’t the point. He thought there was swag there and that would be good enough for him.’
Ibbotson persisted.
‘Maybe someone else sent him to the house . . . someone who knew what was in there?’
Rudde shrugged his enormous shoulders.
‘I don’t give a flying fuck, I ain’t taking this no further. As far as I am concerned he done us a right favour. If, and it’s a big if, he was sent in there, we’ll never get to the bottom of it, though I would like to know where he got that gun from. That would be worth knowing anyway. But when I present this case to the CPS I’m going to make it plain it’s a waste of police resources chasing this up. We can only wait and see if they agree with me, though I think they will. Sonny Boy Hatcher was on the road to destruction sooner rather than later, unfortunately. As it happens, he picked on the wrong person tonight.’
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 - graduat
ion 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.