Verwandte Artikel zu Cradle Song

9780385605748: Cradle Song
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385605749 ISBN 13: 9780385605748
Verlag: Doubleday, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The first in a trilogy of contemporary crime novels set in the city of Hull, and told in the wry tones of the troubled Private Investigator Leo Rivers, Robert Edric's new departure into Noirish fiction is reminiscent of Chandler and Mosley, and yet remains uniquely British. Against the backdrop of a world of pornography and child murder, this dark and intense novel reads like a game of chess where every piece is invested with a deceptive significance. Edric's trademarks of vivid characterisation and delicious prose are as seductive as ever.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (James Tait Black Prize winner 1986), A New Ice Age (runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize 1986), The Book of the Heathen (winner of the WH Smith LIterary Award 2000), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light (shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010). His most recent novel is Sanctuary. He lives in Yorkshire.

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1
Two years ago, in the empty warehouse directly beneath my office, three teenage girls robbed and then killed a 63-year-old man. They beat him unconscious with lengths of timber, and then continued kicking him as he lay on the ground. The girls had lured him into the building with the promise of sex; it was what the man had come looking for and what he had found. The girls told him they worked together or not at all, and he quickly agreed to the price they asked him. He was attending a business seminar at the Holiday Inn on the marina, and had come across the dock to Humber Street because one of the barmen there had told him where to start looking for what he wanted.

The man's body was found at four the following morning by one of the fruit wholesalers opening up his store.

The oldest of the girls was fifteen; another fourteen years and two months; the third only just thirteen.

The fifteen-year-old was already working as a prostitute and was known to the police. The two younger girls, while admitting to offering sex to the man, swore that it had only ever been their intention to rob him, and from the start their stories conflicted, creating the fissures on to which their individual lawyers worked themselves. The older girl said she had not undressed in front of the man and that he himself had not even taken off his jacket. The youngest said she had exposed herself to him and that she had allowed him to fondle her. It was the role of the two others, she insisted tearfully, to encourage the man with lascivious comments and promises of their own. The older girl continued to insist that nothing sexual had taken place and that the attack had started as soon as the man was alone with them in the warehouse.

All this happened in the summer, before nine in the evening, and the high, empty room was dry and warm and filled with dusty light. The whole building was being slowly and intermittently renovated. It had once been a warehouse and a ship-chandler's, and a narrow lane opposite its entrance had run directly to the wharfs and waiting vessels, also long gone, on the river.

The names of the three girls were not revealed until after their conviction, but Hull was a small city and everyone knew who they were.

A picture of the murdered man was shown on the front page of the Hull Mail. It was an old, poor photo, and in it he looked much younger than sixty-three and was grinning broadly, wearing a dark suit and a tie pulled tight into his collar. An appeal was made for the members of his family to contact the Hull Police. Most of the other delegates at the Holiday Inn professed to know him, or something of him, and most referred to him as their 'colleague' or 'business associate', thereby conveniently distancing themselves from him. Respected, well-liked, good at what he did. Complete disbelief at what was already being suggested concerning the circumstances surrounding his death.

I forget his name, and remember only that he had no living family – parents dead, one ex-wife, also dead, no children, no brothers or sisters. Not even any of those distant cousins who might have known him when they were all children together, but whose affection, familiarity and contact had long since evaporated. He was a man completely alone in the world. The three girls could not have chosen a better target, and except for the uncontrollable rage which infected all three of them on that summer's night two years ago, they might afterwards have disappeared just as easily and as completely as they had appeared to him, and as his own salacious imagining had begun.

The Mail called them savages. The oldest girl boasted afterwards that she had been working as a prostitute since she was thirteen and that her services were in great demand. The police and the CPS pushed her to reveal the names and addresses of her clients, but she refused to do this, as though – like any child with a secret – she believed that in this precious confidentiality might somewhere lie her distant salvation.

The defence of the two younger girls was more straightforward. Though denying it, their lawyers worked secretly in tandem. Their argument was simple: their own clients were the gullible and impressionable friends of the older girl and they had accompanied her on the night of the murder only because she had implored them to, and because she had promised them a share of the night's proceeds. Neither of the two girls, the lawyers insisted, had any notion of what was about to happen. The prosecuting lawyer expressed his scepticism at this and was supported by the judge in his summing-up.

The 63-year-old man was left for dead, and died between four and six hours after the attack took place. Cause of Death was considered to have been a blow by a brick to his skull. The pathologist considered it likely that he was already unconscious when this occurred, and that the brick was more likely to have been dropped on him where he lay than for him to have been struck by it during his struggles. At their trial, both younger girls insisted that this final act had been performed by the fifteen-year-old.

Humber Street was sealed off for a day while the body was examined and removed, but this seemed not to concern the wholesalers and market men, who drew up on Queen Street and then moved everything to and from their stores by trolley.

I had arrived there less than a year earlier, three months after John Maxwell's retirement and my decision to continue working alone. Our old office off the West Dock Road was scheduled for demolition six days after our departure. It was what had helped John Maxwell to make up his mind. We went together to watch the building come down. It crumpled beneath the swinging lead weight as though it were made of cloth, and 120 years of existence was flattened in less than an hour. John Maxwell said, 'Good riddance,' as we finally turned away from it and brushed the dust from our shoulders.

The fifteen-year-old girl was sentenced for an indefinite period to a Young Offenders institution in Bedfordshire, where, as part of her Court Order, she was to undergo a lengthy process of psychological assessment.

The two younger girls were separated and sent to institutions in Northumbria and Hampshire. The judge was less convinced of their guilt, though by this he meant only the true extent of their intent on the night of the killing. None of the three girls had a father who still lived with them. The mother of the oldest girl had worked as a prostitute herself, and though it could never be revealed in court, this information as much as her daughter's own confession determined that the girl would be treated differently from the others, and that the crime and the outrage it provoked would have its proper focus.

I remembered all of this now for two reasons. Firstly because of the man I was about to meet and his reason for wanting to see me. And secondly because several weeks after the murder in the warehouse, I saw that a small Cellophane-wrapped bouquet of red and yellow stems had been laid close to where the man had been killed. Little remained of the rubble-strewn floor and exposed brickwork of the room in which he had died – the floor was now sheeted and the walls plaster-boarded – but sufficient of the room's stark and unwelcoming character remained to suggest to anyone with even the vaguest recollection of what had happened there, that here was a room which would for ever bear some faint but undeniable echo of that night's events.

It intrigued me to see the flowers, knowing that the murdered man's relatives had been sought but never found. My curiosity was satisfied several weeks later, and long before the girls' trial began, upon the appearance of a fresh bouquet – yellow and blue this time, but equally small and unimpressive in anything other than its...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385605749
ISBN 13 
9780385605748
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar