by Harvey, John
Never much of a cinema-goer, early in his retirement Resnick had taken to watching films of an afternoon, careful to leave the room during the adverts for stairlifts and health insurance, lest they cause his anger to run over; returning with a fresh cup of tea – coffee now more strictly rationed – to watch Columbo solve the crime in the final reel, or John Wayne, in some aged western, walk heroically into the technicoloured sunset. His favourite of these – he had managed to watch it three times between Christmas and Easter – was She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, towards the end of which, Wayne, as Captain Nathan Brittles, is riding off into unwanted retirement when the army send a galloper after him, begging him to come back and take up a position as chief of scouts with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Only in the movies.
For Resnick himself, resuscitation had been less glamorous.
A phone call that had come as he sat, sandwich lunch over, listening to Monk at the piano, prising every strange angle possible from the melody of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. An abrupt young HR person from force headquarters informing him that, following his previous enquiry, there was now a vacancy, part-time, for a civilian investigator based at divisional HQ – Central Police Station on North Church Street in Nottingham city centre. Which was where, for some months now – three days a week at first, then four, now practically full-time – Resnick had been busy interviewing witnesses, taking statements, processing paperwork, all the while forcing himself to remember he no longer had any real status, no authority, no powers of arrest.
From time to time, an officer pursuing an investigation would stop by and filch some fact or other from his memory, go so far as to ask his advice. For the rest, he kept his head down, got on with the task, however menial, in hand. Whatever kept the stairlifts at bay.
Currently, he was providing the underpinning to an incident in the city centre, a late-night fracas in which a twenty-two-year-old student had been seriously injured. Coming across a loud and potentially violent argument between a local man and his girlfriend, the student, asking the girl if she needed assistance, had attempted to intervene. Whereupon the pair of them had turned on him, and, joined by their mates, clubbed the student to the ground and given him a good kicking, with the result that he was currently in Queen’s Medical Centre in a coma. So far, two men and one woman had been charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm, charges that could escalate if circumstances changed.
That day, Resnick was due to re-interview some of the dozen or so witnesses who had come forward, each with a slightly different view of what had happened, a different opinion as to who had been responsible.
Biting down into his second piece of toast, he looked at the clock. Another five minutes, ten at most, and he should be on his way. Unless the weather was truly dreadful, his habit now was to walk from where he lived into the city centre, the twenty or so brisk minutes down the Woodborough Road enough to get the circulation going, perk up the old heart, keep his limbs in good working order.
‘Exercise, Charlie, that’s what you need,’ a divisional commander had insisted, buttonholing Resnick at his retirement do, a Pints and Pies night in the Masson Suite at Notts County’s ground on Meadow Lane. ‘Mind and body . . .’ Poking a finger against his chest. ‘Body and bloody mind.’
Five years younger than Resnick, the poor bastard had dropped dead a short month later, a cerebral aneurysm cutting off the blood to his brain.
The clock now showing 8.07, Resnick paused in buffing his shoes to turn up the volume on the radio. Newly appointed, the local police commissioner was answering questions about the effects of a further twenty per cent cut in the force’s budget.
‘Isn’t this going to leave the people of the county without adequate protection?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Make them more vulnerable? Lead to an increase in burglary and other crimes?’
‘Not if I have my way,’ huffed the commissioner.
‘Which is?’
‘Making more positive use of existing personnel, the resources at our disposal. Hoiking some of the time-servers out from behind their desks and putting them back on the front line.’
Good luck with that, Resnick thought.
Checking he had everything he needed – wallet, spare change, keys – he remembered he’d left his reading glasses upstairs beside the bed, a biography of Duke Ellington he’d been making his way through, a few pages each night before falling asleep.
Glasses recovered, he made sure the back door was locked and switched off the kitchen light; the radio he left on, deterrent against burglars, company for the cat. Stepping outside, he closed the front door firmly behind him and turned the key. Pulled his coat collar up against the wind. Rain forecast later, spreading from the west.
‘Bit late this morning, Charlie, not like you.’ Andy Dawson, the DS in charge of the investigation, was waiting just inside the main entrance, manila folder in hand. Resnick had stopped off at the coffee stall in the Victoria Centre Market for a double espresso and to hell with the consequences.
‘New witness,’ Dawson said, ‘just come forward.’
‘Took their time.’
‘Holiday booked in Florida. More important than some poor sod on life support. Be here around ten.’
He passed the folder into Resnick’s hand. An old-school copper who’d joined the force not so long after Resnick, he didn’t trust anything unless it was committed to paper. Preferably in triplicate.
‘By the way, Charlie, Bledwell Vale – didn’t you used to have a pal up that way? Lad of his in the force for a spell?’
‘Used to is right. Why d’you ask?’
‘Knocking the whole place down, thought maybe you’d heard. Not before time, either. Any road, seems they found a body. Back o’ one of the houses. Poor bastard been down there a good while, they reckon, whoever it were.’ He shrugged. ‘Thought you might be interested, that’s all. Post-mortem’s set for tomorrow afternoon.’
Resnick nodded and pushed open the interview-room door. Dust and stale air. He opened the window out on to the street and sounds of traffic travelling too fast along Shakespeare Street towards the Mansfield Road.
Poor bastard been down there a good while, they reckon, whoever it were.
Too many dying, Resnick thought. Too many dead. There was a good chance he might know who this particular poor bastard might be.
3
ALL TOO AWARE that his short-term memory was going – he was quite capable of making the short journey to Tesco Metro and, by the time he’d arrived, forgetting what he had set out for thirty minutes earlier – as yet, Resnick’s long-term memory still thrived. Without hesitation, he could call to mind the names and faces of every officer who’d worked with him at Canning Circus and after; every senior officer – good and bad – he’d served under from the morning he pulled on his first uniform until the moment he retired. He could reel off the cream of the Notts County side promoted to the top division under Neil Warnock in ’91 – Steve Cherry, Charlie Palmer, Alan Paris, Craig and Chris Short, Don O’Riordan, Paul Harding, Phil Turner, Dave Regis, Mark Draper and Tommy Johnson – and, further back, the full personnel of the Duke Ellington Orchestra he’d travelled across country to see and hear at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in November 1969 – the same year, a raw recruit, he first started pounding the beat. And he could remember the name of the woman who’d gone missing at the heart of the Miners’ Strike, 1984: Jenny Hardwick.
He recalled seeing her on two occasions, the first relatively early on in the strike, a community meeting at the local Miners’ Welfare he’d attended in some vain hope of de-escalating an increasingly acrimonious and violent situation.
Tensions between striking miners and the police, between the families of men in villages like Bledwell Vale who continued, despite intimidation, to turn up to work and those who jeered and taunted them every step of the way, were stretched to breaking point and sometimes beyond. When Resnick attempted to speak at the meeting, he was shouted down, despite ang
ry appeals from Peter Waites that he should be heard.
Waites had introduced him to Jenny afterwards, along with several others. It was Jenny who’d stood out. Dark haired, medium height, her features sharp rather than pretty – bright, quite intense, blue-grey eyes – she’d not been shy of giving Resnick a piece of her mind.
The second time was an open-air meeting in Blidworth, late enough in the year for her breath to be visible on the air when she spoke. Earlier there’d been talk of hardship and want; cutting their losses and accepting, maybe, whatever deal the Coal Board was currently offering. But when Jenny Hardwick spoke she had little truck with conciliation: aiming her words at the wives and mothers present, telling them in no uncertain terms it was their duty as women to persuade any of their menfolk still working to down tools and join the strike.
Buoyed up by cheers of encouragement, she was just hitting her stride when one of the working miners, the dust from a day’s shift still etched into his face, had lurched towards the platform, yelling at her to shut her bloody trap and get back home where she belonged.
‘This is where I belong,’ Jenny Hardwick had responded. ‘And this is where I’ll stay till this strike is over and the miners have won!’
Amongst jeers, head down, her heckler had limped away, leaving Jenny to relish the applause.
Resnick never set eyes on her again; scarcely heard tell of her until almost the year’s end, when rumours came through from one of his undercover officers that she had disappeared. Done a runner, some reckoned, and perhaps no great surprise; she and her husband on opposite sides in the dispute and hardly speaking – at least that was what folk said. Eventually, when, after too long an interval, she was officially reported missing, an inquiry was launched, local, low-key. There were other things more urgent, more pressing. Nothing was found. No sign.
Fucked off and good riddance, her husband is supposed to have said in the local pub. But he’d been well into his cups by then, not to be taken too seriously.
The kids, three of them, all under eleven, had stayed with their dad for a while, then gone to live with their nan on the North Sea coast near Mablethorpe: ice creams when they behaved, donkeys on the beach, fresh air; on a good day you could even glimpse the sea itself.
A few scattered sightings, none verified, aside, there was no clear indication of where Jenny might have gone, where she might be.
Until now? Resnick wondered. Until now?
He would keep his own counsel, keep shtum: wait and see.
The work at the autopsy was painstaking and slow: no matter. After all those years beneath the ground, no need to hurry now at all. From the size and shape of the hips and pelvic girdle, they assessed the gender; from the thigh bone, the height; from the shape and size of the skull, the ethnicity; from the incomplete fusing of the collarbone and the absence of any spikes around the edges of the vertebrae, they assessed the age.
According to the forensic pathologist’s report, the skeleton was that of a female Caucasian between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-eight, approximately 1.65 metres or five feet, five inches tall: it had been beneath the ground in the region of twenty-five to thirty years.
There were signs of two separate fractures of the radius, the lower arm, the first of which had most likely taken place in childhood. Also, and more tellingly, there was evidence of considerable damage to the back of the skull, the pathologist confirming this to have occurred when the woman was still alive, rather than post-mortem, live bone breaking in a different way from dry.
A blunt-force injury, the pathologist concluded, most likely the result of being struck by a heavy object at least once, if not several times, and, in all probability, the cause of death.
Even so, supposition and circumstantial evidence aside, no clear identification was yet possible. Forensic examination of the teeth showed evidence of root canal treatment and a porcelain crown, but Jenny’s dental records were hard to come by. Of the three dental surgeries in the immediate and surrounding area, one had closed down fifteen years before, the building now privately occupied, with no indication of whether any records had been placed in storage or destroyed; one had moved across the county to the other side of Retford, their records, since the awkward process of transferral, only complete as far back as 1998; the third surgery was still operational, though now part of a wider consortium that welcomed private patients and promised, in a glossy brochure, teeth whitening, invisible braces and porcelain veneers, all the things that modern cosmetic enhancements can do to provide a perfect smile.
‘Oh, no,’ the receptionist said when asked. ‘Thirty years ago? No, I shouldn’t think so. All our records are computerised.’ Anything that much older than herself, her expression suggested, was difficult to imagine.
One of the partners, Chinese, an impeccable accent, public school and then the University of Buckingham, was more accommodating. Everything relating to the previous practice had been boxed up and was in storage in the basement. Of course, there could be no guarantees . . .
After several hours of searching they found a faded file, smelling of mildew and damp to the touch: a set of dental records barely legible, amongst them an X-ray showing several fillings and some root canal treatment on the first molar in the right half of the lower dental arch.
A match.
The name and address at the top of the file in neat but badly faded ink: Jennifer Elizabeth Hardwick, 7 Station Row, Bledwell Vale, Notts.
Jennifer Hardwick.
Jenny.
Lost and then found.
It gave Resnick not one shred of pleasure to learn that his educated guess as to the identity of the body had been correct. Far rather Jenny Hardwick had followed the bright lights as some had suggested, fetched up in another town, another city – another country, even – with a new identity, new family perhaps, a new life.
Hauling his mind back to the task in hand, he double-checked the list of witnesses against the statements already processed; made a note of those he thought might usefully be seen again. The couple who’d been holidaying in Florida had provided what at first had seemed like positive identification, a brace of photographs taken from across the street on their mobile phone showing one of the accused kicking the student in the head as he lay against the kerb; the range and focus, however, were such that any competent barrister appearing for the defence would challenge them successfully in court. Meanwhile, the family were discussing with medical staff at the hospital the prospect of their son’s life-support system being switched off.
Where Jenny Hardwick was concerned, the coroner would have been informed and arrangements made for an inquest to be opened and then adjourned while an inquiry would be set up to investigate the circumstances of her death; that responsibility, Resnick imagined, passing either to the cold case unit based out near Hucknall, or the now regionalised Serious Organised Crime Unit, comprising officers from four counties – Notts, Leicestershire, Derby and Northants – its local headquarters a brisk walk away through Forest Fields and down into Hyson Green.
Either way, it was no concern of his.
4
ANXIOUS NOT TO wake him, Jenny started to squeeze slowly out from beneath the weight of her husband’s arm. She was almost free when, with a grunt, he turned his face towards her, mouth open, the stink of beer stale on his breath. Lifting his arm quickly then, and sliding away to the edge of the bed, she pulled the T-shirt she wore as a nightgown briskly up over her head.
‘Where you offta?’ he asked blurrily.
‘Nowhere. Go back to sleep.’
‘Whatever time is it?’
‘Five, somewhere round there. A quarter past.’
‘Come on back, then. Come back to bed.’
‘I can’t. You sleep.’
Falling back with a grunt, he closed his eyes.
The boards were cold beneath her feet.
She pulled on jeans, sweaters, one over another, a pair of thick socks. She could hear footsteps passing by outside, muffled
voices, the first of the men setting off for the pithead, the day’s picket.
By the time she’d found her boots and pulled them on, her husband was beginning to snore. In the back room, all three kids were still fast off, the youngest, Brian, making small sucking sounds around his thumb; Mary, the girl, clinging to a ratty old bear by its one remaining ear. Colin lay on his back, mouth open, snoring lightly, a perfect version of his father in miniature.
Jenny went quickly down the stairs and out of the house.
Frost glistens on the tops of the cars parked further along the street. Her soft grey breath swirls on the air. Ahead of her a door opens and a man steps out, his face illuminated for a moment by the light from the hall – no one she knows. A dozen or more of the Yorkshire pickets have been billeted in the village for a week now, others in the villages around; some are camping out, it’s said, in the fields close by. Since the police had begun blocking the roads and turning back vehicles heading south, the strategy had changed; stopping the movement of coke and coal, forcing the Notts pits to close, still a priority. Over fifty per cent of Nottinghamshire miners, closer to sixty, are as yet refusing to support the strike, continuing going into work. Despite any arguments Jenny has so far been able to muster, her husband still one of them.
There are more bodies now, falling into step around her, men mostly but a good scattering of women; faces amongst them she recognises, local, faces she knows from evenings in the pub, the Welfare, the gates of the school.
A woman with a scarf wound close around her head veers in her direction, touches her arm.
‘Jenny, that you?’
‘Either that or me ghost.’
‘Not seen you out before.’
‘No, well, thought maybe it was time.’
‘Your Barry . . .?’
‘Don’t ask.’
It is the best part of a mile from the village, the road winding gradually uphill; forty or fifty of them by now, others joining, stragglers; a few in cars, but mostly on foot. Up ahead, the pithead lights show clearly, and beneath them, in silhouette, a line of uniformed police stretched across the entrance, shoulder to shoulder, waiting.