by John Harvey
By four it was pretty much coming into place. The carpet fibres found beneath Kate Marston’s finger nails matched the floor covering throughout the upstairs of the house off Westdale Lane. And traces of blood, both on the carpet and in the bathroom, were identical with that on the girl’s clothing.
The house had been let a little over two years back to a Mr and Mrs Sadler, Philip and Dawn. None of the neighbours could recall seeing Dawn Sadler for a good six months and assumed the couple had split up; since then Philip Sadler had been sharing the place with his brother, John. John Sadler was known to the police: a suspended sentence for grievous bodily harm eight years before and, more recently, a charge of rape which had been dropped by the CPS at the last moment because some of the evidence was considered unsafe. Unusually, the rape charge had been brought by a prostitute, who claimed Sadler had threatened her with a knife and sodomised her against her will. What made it especially interesting – the arresting officers had been Burford and Lyons.
Lyons was still in the city, Khan confirmed, working with a security firm which provided bouncers for night clubs and pubs; rumour was that he and Burford were still close. And Lyons had not been seen at work since the night Kate Marston had been killed.
Resnick crossed to the deli on Canning Circus, picked up a large filter coffee and continued into the cemetery on the far side. Burford and Lyons or Burford and Sadler, cruising the Forest in the van, looking for a likely girl. Finally, they get her back to the house and somewhere in the midst of it all things start to go awry.
He sat on a bench and levered the lid from his cup; the coffee was strong and still warm. It had to be Burford and Lyons who had sex with the girl; Sadler’s DNA was likely still on file and no match had registered. So what happened? Back on his feet again, Resnick started to walk down hill. Burford and Lyons are well into it when Sadler takes it into his head to join in. It’s Sadler who introduces the knife. But whose blood? Jimmy Lyons’ blood. He’s telling Sadler to keep out of it and Sadler won’t listen; they argue, fight, and Lyons gets stabbed, stumbles over the girl. Grabs her as he falls.
Then if she doesn’t do the stabbing, why does she have to die?
She’s hysterical and someone – Burford? – starts slapping her, shaking her, using too much force. Or simply this: she’s seen too much.
Resnick sits again, seeing it in his mind. Is it now that she struggles and in desperation fights back? Whose skin then was caught beneath her nails? He sat a little longer, finishing his coffee, thinking; then walked, more briskly, back towards the station. There were calls to make, arrangements to be put in place.
Burford spotted Sharon Garnett the second she walked into the bar, dark hair piled high, the same lift of the head, self-assured. It was when he saw Resnick behind her that he understood.
“Hello, Jack,” Sharon said as she crossed behind him. “Long time.”
Some part of Burford told him to cut and run, but no, there would be officers stationed outside he was certain, front and back, nothing to do now but play it through.
“Evening, Charlie. Long way off your turf. Come to see how the other half live?”
“Something like that.”
“Get you a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sharon?”
Sharon shook her head.
“Suit yourself.” Burford lifted the shot glass from the counter and downed what remained of his scotch in one.
Without any attempt to disguise what he was doing, Resnick picked up the glass with a clean handkerchief and deposited it in a plastic evidence bag, zipping the top across.
“Let’s do this decent, Charlie,” Burford said, taking a step away. “No cuffs, nothing like that. I’ll just walk with you out to the car.”
“Suit yourself,” Resnick said.
“Decent,” said Sharon. “That word in your vocabulary, Jack?”
Millington was outside; in the car park, Anil Khan.
“You know I’m not saying a word without a solicitor,” Burford said. “You know that.”
“Shut up,” Resnick said, “and get in the car.”
When Lynn Kellogg hammered on the door of Jimmy Lyons’ flat near the edge of the Lace Market, Lyons elbowed her aside and took off down the stairs smack into the arms of Kevin Naylor. Blood had already started to seep through the bandages across his chest.
John Sadler had skipped town and his brother, Philip, claimed no knowledge of where he might be. “How about Mrs Sadler?” Millington asked. “Been a while, I understand, since anyone’s clapped eyes on her.” Philip Sadler turned decidedly pale.
Under questioning, both Burford and Lyons agreed to picking up Kate Marston and taking her back to the house for sex. They claimed they had left her alone in the upstairs room, which was where Sadler, drunk, had threatened her with a knife and then attacked her. By the time they’d realised what was going on and ran back upstairs, he had his hands round her throat and she was dead. It was when Lyons tried to pull him off that Sadler had stabbed him with the knife.
Burford claimed he then used his own car to take Lyons back to his flat and tended his wound. Sadler, he assumed, carried the dead girl out to the van and left her on the Forest, disposing of the van afterwards.
Without Sadler’s side of things, it would be a difficult story to break down and Sadler wasn’t going to be easy to find.
About a week later, media interest in the case beginning to fade, Resnick left the Polish Club early, a light rain falling as he walked back across town. Indoors, he made himself a sandwich and poured the last of the scotch into a glass. Billie’s voice was jaunty and in your face, even in defeat. Since the time she had sat across from him in his chair, slipped into his bed, he had never quite managed to shake Eileen from his mind. When he crossed the room and dialled again the number she had given him, the operator’s message was the same: number unobtainable. The music at an end, the sound of his own breathing seemed to fill the room.
Coda
Some of you will have recognised the provenance of the titles of these stories: they are mostly culled from the Charlie Parker Songbook; titles of tunes he composed and recorded. It began with ‘Now’s the Time’ and, thereafter, seemed a good idea. Sometimes the story came before the title, as with, say, ‘Cheryl’ or ‘Work’; in other instances – ‘My Little Suede Shoes’ or ‘Bird of Paradise’ – it was the title that suggested the content. Either way, the Parker references helped to stake out the territory and underlined Charlie Resnick’s – and this writer’s – musical predilections.
But Charlie, it must be remembered, was not always a jazzman, a jazz fan, pure and simple; in the novel, Wasted Years, we learn how, a young man, he first met his wife, Elaine, at the Boat Club on the banks of the River Trent, drawn there by the hot soul and blues approximations of whichever local bands were squeezing out their versions of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs.
Music has always been important for Charlie, you fancy – as background and as entertainment, as a way of easing a stressful life, papering over emptiness, and more positively, helping him to measure and assess emotion, helping him to understand. And where had it begun for him, this musical affiliation, this need? A tailoring uncle, returned from the States with a pile of chipped and scratched 78s and Charlie, in his early teens, open-minded and keen-eared, set loose amongst them. Bing Crosby. The Ink Spots. Sinatra. Dick Haymes. The Mills Brothers. Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ and ‘Stone Cold Dead in the Market’. Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra with Billie Holiday (vocal refrain).
This, as it had been for me, a couple of decades earlier, except he was the uncle of a friend and we would spend hours foraging through his collection, slipping roundels of shellac off and on the gramophone, assessing and reassessing the worth of this jazzier stuff against our more poppy favourites of the time – Johnny Ray, probably, or Frankie Laine; Guy Mitchell and Doris Day.
And whereas my personal tastes have always ranged pretty wide – last night, for ins
tance, as well as the Stan Getz bossa novas and some Mozart, I was listening to Dave Alvin, Dusty Springfield, Big Bill Broonzy and Charlie Feathers (some might call that eclectic taste, others would say no taste at all) – Charlie is pretty much locked into jazz whose roots and style are found in the ’40s and ’50s, the years of classic bop and swing. Lester Young. Ben Webster. Milt Jackson. Parker, of course. Thelonious Monk.
Certain artists have been important for certain novels; in Lonely Hearts it was Billie Holiday with Lester Young; Milt Jackson began Still Water with flow and swing. Overall, however, it’s Monk whose music I’ve returned to again and again when writing both the books and the stories; Monk whose broken rhythms have underscored the emotional landscape of Resnick’s journey and helped to suggest their form.
John Harvey, London, 1999.
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Published by Arrow Books in 2002
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Copyright © 1999 John Harvey
‘Billie’s Blues’ copyright © 2002 John Harvey
John Harvey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Slow Dancer Press
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