A Darker Shade of Blue

by John Harvey

  ‘You’ll not come in, Charlie?’

  ‘Some other time.’

  ‘Aye.’ The two men shook hands.

  ‘Look after yourself, Peter.’

  ‘You, too.’

  Resnick had first met the ex-miner when his son had joined the Notts force as a young PC and been stationed for a while at Canning Circus, under Resnick’s wing. Now the boy was in Australia, married with kids, something in IT, and Resnick and Waites still kept in touch, the occasional pint, an odd Saturday at Bramhall Lane or down in Nottingham at the County ground, a friendship based on mutual respect and a sense of regret for days gone past.

  Eileen would never be sure what woke her. The flap of the curtain as the window opened wider; the soft tread on the carpeted floor. Either way, when she opened her eyes there they were, two shrouded shapes beyond the foot of the bed. Beside her, Michael was already awake, pushing up on one elbow, hand reaching out towards the light.

  ‘Leave it,’ said a voice.

  Already the shapes beginning to flesh out, take on detail.

  ‘We don’t need the fucking light,’ the shorter one said. A voice Eileen didn’t recognise: one she would never forget.

  Michael switched on the light and they shot him, the tall one first and then the other, the impact hurling Michael back against the headboard, skewing him round until his face finished somehow pressed up against the wall.

  Moving closer, the shorter of the two wrenched the wire from the socket and the room went dark. Too late to prevent Eileen from seeing what she had seen: the taller man bareheaded, more than bare, shaven, bald, a child’s mask, Mickey Mouse, covering the centre of his face; his companion had a woollen hat pulled low, a red scarf wrapped high around his neck and jaw.

  Some of Michael’s blood ran, slow and warm, between Eileen’s arm and her breast. The rest was pooling between his legs, spreading dark across the sheets. The sound she hadn’t recognised was her own choked sobbing, caught like a hair-ball in her throat. She knew they would kill her or rape her or both.

  ‘You want it?’ the shorter one said, gesturing towards the bed.

  The tall one made a sound like someone about to throw up and the shorter one laughed.

  Eileen closed her eyes and when she opened them again they had gone.

  Welcoming the rare chance of an early night, Lynn had been in bed for a good hour by the time Resnick returned home. Through several layers of sleep she registered the Saab slowing into the drive outside, the front door closing firmly in its frame, feet slow but heavy on the stairs; sounds from the bathroom and then his weight on the mattress as he lowered himself down. More than two years now and she still sometimes felt it strange, this man beside her in her bed. His bed, to be more precise.

  ‘God, Charlie,’ she said, shifting her legs. ‘Your feet are like blocks of ice. And you stink of beer.’

  His mumbled apology seemed to merge with his first snore.

  His feet might be cold, but the rest of him seemed to radiate warmth. Lynn moved close against him and within not so many minutes she was asleep again herself.

  Short of four, the phone woke them both.

  ‘Yours or mine?’ Resnick said, pushing back the covers.

  ‘Mine.’

  She was already on her feet, starting to pull on clothes.

  ‘Shooting,’ she said, when she’d put the phone back down. ‘Tattershall Drive.’

  ‘You want me to come?’

  Lynn shook her head. ‘No need. Go back to sleep.’

  When they’d started living together, Lynn had transferred from Resnick’s squad into Major Crime; less messy that way. Her coat, a hooded black anorak, windproof and waterproof, was on a hook in the hall. Despite the hour, it was surprisingly light outside, not so far off a full moon.

  The body had not yet been moved. Scene of Crime were taking photographs, measuring, assiduously taking samples from the floor. The pathologist was still on his way. It didn’t need an expert, Lynn thought, to see how he’d died.

  Anil Khan stood beside her in the doorway. He had been the first officer from the Major Crime Unit to arrive.

  ‘Two of them, so she says.’ His voice was light, barely accented.

  ‘She?’

  ‘Wife, mistress, whatever. She’s downstairs.’

  Lynn nodded. When she had been promoted, three months before, detective sergeant to detective inspector, Khan had slipped easily into her shoes.

  ‘Any idea how they got in?’

  ‘Bedroom window, by the look of things. Out through the front door.’

  Lynn glanced across the room. ‘Flew in then, like Peter Pan?’

  Khan smiled. ‘Ladder marks on the sill.’

  Eileen was sitting in a leather armchair, quilt round her shoulders, no trace of colour in her face. Someone had made her a cup of tea and it sat on a lacquered table, untouched. The room itself was large and unlived in, heavy dark furniture, dark paintings in ornamental frames; wherever they’d spent their time, Lynn thought, it wasn’t here.

  She lifted a high-backed wooden chair and carried it across the room. Through the partly open door she saw Khan escorting the pathologist towards the stairs. She set the chair down at an angle, close to Eileen, and introduced herself, name and rank. Eileen continued to stare into space, barely registering that she was there.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Lynn said.

  No reply.

  ‘I need you to tell me what happened,’ Lynn said. For a moment, she touched Eileen’s hand.

  ‘I already did. I told the Paki.’

  ‘Tell me. In your own time.’

  Eileen looked at her then. ‘They killed him. What more d’you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ Lynn said. ‘Everything.’

  His name was Michael Sherwood: Mikhail Sharminov. He had come to England from Russia fifteen years before. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Russo-Armenian parents, as a young man he had quickly decided a life devoted to the production of citrus fruits and tung oil was not for him. He went, as a student, to Moscow, and by the time he was thirty he had a thriving business importing bootlegged rock music through East Germany into Russia, everything from the Beatles to Janis Joplin. Soon, there were video tapes, bootlegged also: Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, E.T. By the standards of the Russian black economy, Mikhail was on his way to being rich.

  But then, by 1989 the Berlin Wall was crumbling and, in its wake, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was falling apart. Georgia, where his ageing parents still lived, was on the verge of civil war. Free trade loomed.

  Go or stay?

  Mikhail became Michael.

  In Britain he used his capital to build up a chain of provincial video stores, most of whose profits came from pirated DVDs; some of his previous contacts in East Berlin were now in Taiwan, in Tirana, in Hong Kong. Truly, a global economy.

  Michael Sherwood, fifty-eight years old. The owner outright of property to the value of two million five, together with the leases of more than a dozen stores; three bank accounts, one offshore; a small collection of paintings, including a small Kandinsky worth an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds; three cars, a Lexus and two BMWs; four. 38 bullets, fired from close range, two high in the chest, one to the temple, one that had torn through his throat.

  Most of this information Lynn Kellogg amassed over the following days and weeks, piecing together local evidence with what could be gleaned from national records and HM Customs and Excise. And long before that, before the end of that first attenuated conversation, she realised she had seen Eileen before.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, phoning him at home. I think you’d better get over here after all.’

  The first time Resnick had set eyes on Eileen, she’d been sitting in a basement wine bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking Bacardi and Coke, her hair redder then and falling loose around her shoulders. The harshness of her make-up, in that attenuated light, had been softened; her silver-grey top, like pale filigree, s
himmered a little with each breath she took. She knew he was staring at her and thought little of it: it was what people did. Men, mostly. It was what, until she had taken up with Terry Cooke, had paid her way in the world.

  The sandwich Resnick had ordered arrived and when he bit into it mayonnaise smeared across the palm of his hand; through the bar stereo Parker was stripping the sentiment from ‘Don’t Blame Me’ — New York City, 1947, the closing bars of Miles’ muted trumpet aside, it’s Bird’s alto all the way, acrid and languorous, and when it’s over there’s nothing left to do or say.

  ‘You bastard!’ Eileen had yelled later. ‘You fucking bastard! Making out you’re so fucking sympathetic and understanding and all the while you’re screwing me just as much as those bastards who think for fifty quid they can bend me over some car park wall and fuck me up the arse.’

  A nice turn of phrase, Eileen, and Resnick, while he might have resisted the graphic nature of her metaphor, would have had to admit she was right. He had wanted to apply pressure to Terry Cooke and his burgeoning empire of low-grade robbers and villains, and in Eileen, in what he had misread as her weakness, he thought he had seen the means.

  ‘Leave him,’ he’d said. ‘Give us something we can make stick. Circumstances like this, you’ve got to look out for yourself. No one would blame you for that.’

  In the end it had been Terry who had weakened and whether it had been his fear of getting caught and being locked away that had made him pull the trigger, or his fear of losing Eileen, Resnick would never know. After the funeral, amidst the fallout and recriminations, she had slipped from sight and it was some little time before he saw her again, close to desperate and frightened, so frightened that he had offered her safe haven in that same big sprawling house where he now lived with Lynn, and there, in the long sparse hours between sleeping and waking, she had slid into his bed and fallen fast asleep, one of her legs across his and her head so light against his chest it could almost have been a dream.

  Though his history of relationships was neither extensive nor particularly successful, and though he prized honesty above most other things, he knew enough never to have mentioned this incident to Lynn, innocent as he would vainly have tried to make it seem.

  He stood now in the doorway, a bulky man with a shapeless suit and sagging eyes, and waited until, aware of his presence, she turned her head.

  ‘Hello, Eileen.’

  The sight of him brought tears to her eyes. ‘Christ, Charlie. First Terry and now this. Getting to be too much of a fucking habit, if you ask me.’

  She held out a hand and he took it, and then she pressed her head against the rough weave of his coat, the too-soft flesh beneath, and cried. After several moments, Resnick rested his other hand against her shoulder, close to the nape of her neck, and that’s how they were some minutes later when Lynn looked into the room through the open door, then looked away.

  ‘What did she have to say for herself?’ Lynn asked. They were high on the Ropewalk, the light breaking through the sky, bits and pieces of the city waking south and west below them.

  ‘No more, I dare say, than she told you,’ Resnick said.

  ‘Don’t tell me all that compassion went for nothing.’

  Resnick bridled. ‘She’d just seen her bloke shot dead alongside her, what was I supposed to do?’

  Lynn gave a small shake of the head. ‘It’s okay, Charlie. Just teasing.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Though I do wonder if you had to look as if you were enjoying it quite as much.’

  At the end of the street they stopped. Canning Circus police station, where Resnick was based, was only a few minutes away.

  ‘What do you think?’ Lynn asked. ‘A paid hit?’

  ‘I doubt it was a couple of local tearaways out to make a name for themselves. Whoever this was, they’ll be well up the motorway by now. Up or down.’

  ‘Someone he’d crossed.’

  ‘Likely.’

  ‘Business, then.’

  ‘Whatever that is.’

  Lynn breathed in deeply, drawing the air down into her lungs. ‘I’d best get started.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘See you tonight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stood for a moment, watching him walk away. Her imagination, or was he slower than he used to be? Turning, she retraced her steps to where she’d parked her car.

  Much of the next few days Lynn spent accessing and exchanging information on the computer and speaking on the telephone, building up, as systematically as she could, a picture of Mikhail Sharminov’s activities, while forensic staff analysed the evidence provided by Scene of Crime.

  At the start of the following week, Lynn, armed with a bulging briefcase and a new Next suit, went to a meeting at the headquarters of the Specialist Crime Directorate in London; also present were officers from the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, as well as personnel from HM Customs and Excise, and observers from the Interpol team that was carrying out a long-term investigation into the Russian Mafia.

  By the time the meeting came to a halt, some six hours and several coffee breaks later, Lynn’s head was throbbing with unfamiliar names and all-too-familiar motivations. Sharminov, it seemed, had been seen as an outsider within the Soviet diaspora; as far as possible he had held himself apart, relying instead on his contacts in the Far East. But with the increased capability for downloading not only CDs but now DVDs via the Internet, the logistics of his chosen field were changing, markets were shifting and becoming more specialised. There was a burgeoning trade in hard-core pornography which certain of Sharminov’s former compatriots were keen to further through the networks he’d established. For a price. It wasn’t clear whether he had resisted on moral grounds or because the price wasn’t right.

  Eileen was questioned at length about Sharminov’s business partners and shown numerous photographs, the faces in which, for the most part, she failed to recognise. One man, middle-aged, with dark close-cropped hair and eyes too close together, had been to the house on several occasions, hurried conversations behind closed doors; another, silver-haired and leonine, she remembered seeing once, albeit briefly, in the rear seat of a limousine. There were others, a few, of whom she was less certain.

  ‘Did he seem worried lately?’ they asked her. ‘Concerned about business?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not especially.’

  Perhaps he should have been. The silver-haired man was Alexei Popov, whose organisation encompassed drugs and pornography and human trafficking in a network that stretched from the Bosporus and the Adriatic to the English Channel, and had particularly strong links with the Turkish and Italian Mafia. Tony Christanidi was his go-between and sometime enforcer, the kind of middle-management executive who never left home without first checking that his two-shot. 22 Derringer was snug alongside his mobile phone.

  The line back through Christanidi to Popov was suspected of being behind three recent fatal shootings, one in Manchester, one in Marseilles, the other in Tirana.

  ‘Would they carry out these shootings themselves?’ Lynn had asked.

  ‘Not usually. Sometimes they’ll make a deal with the Turks or the Sicilians. You do one for me, I’ll do one for you. Other times, they’ll simply contract it out. Usually overseas. Someone flies in, picks up the weapons locally, junks them straight after, twelve hours later they’re back on the plane.’

  ‘So they wouldn’t necessarily be English?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘The two men who shot Sharminov, the only witness we have swears they were English.’

  ‘This is the girlfriend?’

  ‘Eileen. Yes.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why they didn’t kill her too.’

  ‘You don’t think she could have been involved?’

  ‘In setting him up? I suppose it’s possible.’

  They questioned Eileen agai
n, pushed her hard until her confidence was in shreds and her voice was gone.

  ‘I don’t think she knows anything,’ the National Crime Squad officer said after almost four hours of interrogation. ‘She was just lucky, that’s all.’

  She wasn’t the only one. Good luck and bad. In the early hours of the morning, almost two weeks and two days after Mikhail Sharminov was murdered, there was a shooting in the city. At around two in the morning, there was an altercation at the roundabout linking Canal Street with London Road, a Range Rover cutting across a BMW and causing the driver to brake hard. After a lot of gesturing and angry shouting, the Range Rover drove off at speed, the other vehicle following. At the lights midway along Queen’s Drive, where it runs beside the Trent, the BMW came alongside and the man in the passenger seat leaned out and shot the driver of the Range Rover five times.

  The driver was currently in critical condition in hospital, hanging on.

  Forensics suggested that the shots had been fired from one of the same weapons that had been used to kill Mikhail Sharminov, a snub-nosed. 38 Smith amp; Wesson.

  ‘It could mean whoever shot Sharminov was recruited locally after all,’ Lynn said. ‘Didn’t see any need to leave town.’

  They were in the kitchen of the house in Mapperley, Saturday afternoon: Lynn ironing, a glass of white wine close at hand; Resnick putting together a salad with half an ear cocked towards the radio, the soccer commentary on Five Live.

  ‘Well, he has now,’ Resnick said, wondering why the bottle of walnut oil was always right at the back of the cupboard when you needed it. Neither the driver nor passenger of the BMW had so far been traced.

  ‘You think it’s possible?’ Lynn said.

  Resnick shook a few drops of the oil over rocket and romaine and reached for the pepper. I think you’re on safer ground following the gun.’ He broke off a piece of lettuce to taste, scowled, and began ferreting for the Tabasco.

  ‘Don’t make it too hot, Charlie. You always do.’

  ‘Assume they’ve flown in. Birmingham, Leeds-Bradford, East Midlands. There’s a meeting with whoever’s supplying the weapons, prearranged. After the job, either they’re dumped or, more likely, handed back.’