A Darker Shade of Blue

by John Harvey

  ‘It’s okay.’ Now that the shock had faded, Resnick caught himself wondering why the allegation was less of a surprise than it was.

  ‘You don’t know him?’ Eileen asked. ‘Know who he is?’

  Resnick shook his head. ‘It won’t take long to find out.’

  In the front room he sat in his usual chair and Eileen rested her back against one corner of the settee, legs pulled up beneath her, glass of Scotch balancing on the arm.

  ‘You’ll go after him?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘On my word?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She picked up her drink. ‘You’ll need more than that, Charlie. In court. The word of a whore.’

  ‘Yes. Agreed.’

  The heating had clicked off and the room was slowly getting colder. He wondered why it didn’t seem stranger, her sitting there. Refilling both their glasses, he switched on the stereo and, after a passage of piano, there was Billie’s voice, half-broken, singing of pain and grieving, the pain of living, the loving kiss of a man’s hard hand.

  ‘Sounds like,’ Eileen said, ‘she knows what she’s talking about.’

  Less than ten minutes later, she was stretching her arms and yawning. ‘I think I’ll just curl up on here, if that’s the same to you.’

  ‘No need. There’s a spare room upstairs. Two.’

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Suit yourself. And if any of the cats jump up on you, push them off.’

  Eileen shook her head. ‘I might like the company.’

  It was a little after two when she climbed in with him, the dressing gown discarded somewhere between the door and the bed. Startled awake, Resnick thrashed out with his arm and only succeeded in sending the youngest cat skittering across the floor.

  ‘Budge up, Charlie.’

  ‘Christ, Eileen!’

  Her limbs were strong and smooth and cold.

  ‘Eileen, you can’t-’

  ‘Shush.’

  She lay with one leg angled over his knee, an arm across his midriff holding him close, her head to his chest. Within minutes the rhythm of her breathing changed and she was asleep, her breath faint and regular on his skin.

  How long, Resnick wondered, since he had lain with a woman like this, in this bed? When his fingers touched the place between her shoulder and her neck, she stirred slightly, murmuring a name that wasn’t his.

  It was a little while later before the cat felt bold enough to resume its place on the bed.

  ‘Is there anywhere you can go?’ Resnick asked. ‘Till all this blows over.’

  ‘You mean, apart from here.’

  ‘Apart from here.’

  They were in the kitchen, drinking coffee, eating toast.

  ‘Look, if it’s last night…’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘I mean, it’s not as if-’

  ‘It’s what you said yourself, at the moment everything’s hanging on your word. It just needs someone to make the wrong connection between you and me…’

  ‘Okay, you don’t have to spell it out. I understand.’

  The radio was still playing, muffled, in the bathroom. Politics: the same evasions, the same lies. As yet the outside temperature had scarcely risen above freezing, the sky several shades of grey.

  ‘I’ve got a friend,’ Eileen said, ‘in Sheffield. I can go there.’ She glanced down at what she was now wearing, one of his shirts. A morning-after cliche. ‘Only I shall need some clothes.’

  ‘I’ll drive you round to your place after breakfast, wait while you pack.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Resnick drank the last of his coffee, pushed himself to his feet. ‘You’ll let me have a number, in case I need to get in touch?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  She took one more mouthful of toast and left the rest.

  They were gathered together in Resnick’s office, the clamour of the everyday going on behind its closed door: Graham Millington, Anil Khan and Sharon Garnett. Sharon had been a member of the Vice Squad before being reassigned to Resnick’s team and had maintained her contacts.

  ‘Burford,’ Sharon said once Resnick had relayed the description. ‘Jack Burford, it’s got to be.’

  Millington whistled, a malicious glint in his eye. ‘Jack Burford — honest as the day is long.’

  It wasn’t so far from the shortest day of the year.

  ‘How well do you know him?’ Resnick asked.

  ‘Well enough,’ Sharon said. ‘We’d have a drink together once in a while.’ She laughed. ‘Never too comfortable in my company, Jack. A woman who speaks her mind and black to boot, more than he could comfortably handle. No, a bunch of the lads, prize fights, lock-ins and lap dancers, that was more Jack’s mark. Gambling, too. In and out of Ladbroke’s most afternoons.’

  ‘These lads, anyone closer to him than the rest?’

  She gave it a few moments’ thought. ‘Jimmy Lyons, if anyone.’

  ‘Left the force, didn’t he?’ Millington said. ‘About a year back. Early retirement or some such.’

  ‘There was an inquiry,’ Sharon said. ‘Allegations of taking money to turn a blind eye. Massage parlours, the usual thing. Didn’t get anywhere.’

  ‘And they worked together?’ Resnick asked. ‘Burford and Lyons?’

  Sharon nodded. ‘Quite a bit.’

  ‘Lyons,’ Resnick said. ‘Anyone know where he is now?’

  Nobody did.

  ‘Okay. Sharon, chase up one or two of your contacts at Vice, those you think you can trust. See what the word is on Burford. Anil, see if you can track down Lyons. He might still be in the city somewhere, in which case he and Burford could still be in touch.’

  Millington was already at the door. ‘I’d best get myself out to Carlton, see how they’re getting on. You’ll not want them dragging their feet on this.’

  By four it was pretty much coming into place. The carpet fibres found beneath Clara Marston’s fingernails 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 nightclubs and pubs; rumour was that he and Burford were still close. And Lyons had not been seen at work since the night Clara 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 downhill. 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 th
e 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 with those carpet fibres, 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 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 Clara 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.

  THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE STARS

  Eileen had done everything she could to change his mind. Michael, she’d said, anywhere else, okay? Anywhere but there. Michael Sherwood not his real name, not even close. But in the end she’d caved in, just as he’d known she would. Thirty-three by not so many months and going nowhere; thirty-three, though she was still only owning up to twenty-nine.

  When he’d met her she’d been a receptionist in a car showroom south of Sheffield, something she’d blagged her way into and held down for the best part of a year; fine until the head of sales had somehow got a whiff of her past employment, some potential customer who’d seen her stripping somewhere most likely, and tried wedging his podgy fingers up inside her skirt one evening late. Eileen had kneed him in the balls, then hit him with a solid glass ashtray high across the face, close to taking out an eye. She hadn’t bothered waiting for her cards.

  She’d been managing a sauna, close to the city centre, when Michael had found her. In at seven, check the towels, make sure the plastic had been wiped down, bottles of massage oil topped up, the come washed from the walls; once the girls arrived, first shift, ready to catch the early punters on their way to work, she’d examine their hands, ensure they’d trimmed their nails; uniforms they took home and washed, brought back next day clean as new or she’d want the reason why.

  ‘Come on,’ Michael had said, ‘fifty minutes down the motorway. It’s not as if I’m asking you to fucking emigrate.’ Emigration might have been easier. She had memories of Nottingham and none of them good. But then, looking round at the tatty travel posters and old centrefolds from Playboy on the walls, he’d added, ‘What? Worried a move might be bad for your career?’

  It hadn’t taken her long to pack her bags, turn over the keys.

  Fifty minutes on the motorway.

  A house like a barn, a palace, real paintings on the walls.

  When he came home earlier than usual one afternoon and found her sitting in the kitchen, polishing the silver while she watched TV, he snatched the cloth from her hands. ‘There’s people paid for that, not you.’

  ‘It’s something to do.’

  His nostrils flared. ‘You want something to do, go down the gym. Go shopping. Read a fucking book.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked him later that night, turning towards him in their bed.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘Because I’m tired of living on my own.’

  He was sitting propped up against pillows, bare-chested, thumbing through the pages of a climbing magazine. Eileen couldn’t imagine why: anything more than two flights of stairs and he took the lift.

  The light from the lamp on his bedside table shone a filter of washed-out blue across the patterned quilt and the curtains stirred in the breeze from the opened window. One thing he insisted on, one of many, sleeping with at least one of the windows open.

  That’s not enough,’ Eileen said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Enough of a reason for me being here. You being tired of living alone.’

  After a long moment, he put down his magazine. ‘It’s not the reason, you know that.’

  ‘Do I?’ She leaned back as he turned towards her, his fingers touching her arm.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said. ‘Snapping at you like that. It was stupid. Unnecessary.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  His face was close to hers, too close for her to focus; there was a faint smell of brandy on his breath.

  After they’d made love he lay on his side, watching her, watching her breathe.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t stare. I hate it when you stare.’ It reminded her of Terry, her ex, the way his eyes had followed her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking; right up until the night he’d slipped the gun out from beneath the pillow and, just when she’d been certain he was going to take her life, had shot himself in the head.

  ‘What else am I supposed to do?’ Michael said.

  ‘Go to sleep? Take a shower?’ Her
face relaxed into a smile. ‘Read a fucking book?’

  Michael grinned and reached across and kissed her. ‘You want to know how much I love you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mocking.

  After a little searching, he found a ballpoint in the bedside-table drawer. Reaching for the magazine, he flicked through it till he came to a picture of the Matterhorn, outlined against the sky.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and quickly drew a hasty, childlike approximation of the sun, moon and stars around the summit. That’s how much.’

  Smiling, Eileen closed her eyes.

  Resnick had spent the nub end of the evening in a pub off the A632 between Bolsover and Arkwright Town. Peter Waites and himself. From the outside it looked as if the place had been closed down months before and the interior was not a lot different. Resnick paced himself, supping halves, aware of having to drive back down, while Waites worked his way assiduously from pint to pint, much as he had when he’d been in his pomp and working at the coalface, twenty years before.

  Whenever it came to Waites’ round, Resnick was careful to keep his wallet and his tongue well zipped, the man’s pride buckled enough. He had lost his job in the wake of the miners’ strike and not worked steady since.

  ‘Not yet forty when they tossed me on the fuckin’ scrapheap, Charlie. Me and a lot of others like me. Nigh on a thousand when that pit were closed and them panty-waist civil bloody servants chucking their hands up in the air on account they’ve found sixty new jobs. Bloody disgrace.’

  He snapped the filter from the end of his cigarette before lighting up.

  ‘Lungs buggered enough already, Charlie. This’ll not make ha’porth of difference, no matter what anyone says. Besides, long as I live long enough to see the last of that bloody woman and dance on her bloody grave, I don’t give a sod.’

  That bloody woman: Margaret Hilda Thatcher.

  In that company especially, no need to speak her name.

  When they stepped outside the air bit cold. Over the carefully sculpted slag heap, now slick with grass, the moon hung bright and full. Of the twenty terraced houses in Peter Wakes’ street, fourteen were now boarded up.