A Darker Shade of Blue

by John Harvey

  ‘Recycled.’

  ‘I could still tell you which pub to go to if you wanted a converted replica. A hundred in tens handed over in the gents. But this is a different league.’

  ‘Bernard Vitori,’ Lynn said. ‘He’s the best bet. Eddie Chambers, possibly. One or two others. We’ll start with Vitori first thing.’

  ‘Sunday morning?’ Resnick said. ‘He won’t like that.’

  ‘Disturbing his day of rest?’

  ‘Takes his mother to church. Strelley Road Baptists. Regular as clockwork.’ Resnick ran a finger round the inside of the salad bowl. ‘Here. Taste this. Tell me what you think.’

  They followed Vitori and his mum to church, thirty officers, some armed, keeping the building tightly surrounded, mingling inside. The preacher was delighted by the increase in his congregation. Sixty or so minutes of energetic testifying later, Vitori reluctantly unlocked the boot of his car. Snug inside were a 9mm Glock 17 and a Chinese-made A15 semi-automatic rifle. Vitori had been taking them to a potential customer after the service. Faced with the possibility of eight to ten inside, he cut a deal. Contact with the Russians had been by mobile phone, using numbers which were now untraceable, names which were clearly fake. Vitori had met two men in the Little Chef on the A60, north of Arnold. Leased them two clean revolvers for twenty-four hours, seven hundred the pair. Three days later, he’d sold one of the guns to a known drug dealer for five hundred more.

  No matter how many times officers from Interpol and NICS showed him photographs of potential hit men, Vitori claimed to recognise none. He was not only happy to name the dealer, furnishing an address into the bargain, he gave them a likely identity for the driver of the car. Remanded in custody, special pleading would get him a five-year sentence at most, of which he’d serve less than three.

  ‘Bloody Russians, Charlie,’ Peter Waites said, sitting opposite Resnick in their usual pub. ‘When I was a kid we were always waiting for them to blow us up. Now they’re over here like fucking royalty.’

  Sensing a rant coming, Resnick nodded non-committally and supped his beer.

  ‘That bloke owns Chelsea football club. Abramovich? He’s not the only one, you know. This Boris, for instance — what’s his name? — Berezovsky. One of the richest people in the fucking country. More money than the fucking Queen.’

  Resnick sensed it was not the time to remind Waites that as a dedicated republican, he thought Buckingham Palace should be turned into council housing and Her Majesty forced to live out her remaining years on her old age pension.

  ‘You know how many Russians there are in this country, Charlie? According to the last census?’

  Resnick shook his head. Waites had been spending too much time in Bolsover library, trawling the Internet for free. ‘I give up, Peter,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Forty thousand, near as damn it. And they’re not humping bricks for a few quid an hour on building sites or picking cockles in Morecambe fucking Bay. Living in bloody luxury, that’s what they’re doing.’ Leaning forward, Waites jabbed a finger urgently towards Resnick’s face. ‘Every third property in London sold to a foreign citizen last year went to a bloody Russian. Every fifteenth property sold for over half a million the same.’ He shook his head. ‘This country, Charlie. Last ten, twenty years, it’s turned upside fucking down.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘Another?’ Resnick said, pointing to Waites’ empty glass.

  ‘Go on. Why not?’

  For a good few minutes neither man spoke. Noise and smoke spiralled around them. Laughter but not too much of that. The empty trill of slot machines from the far side of the bar.

  ‘This soccer thing, Charlie,’ Waites said eventually. ‘Yanks buying into Manchester United and now there’s this President of Thailand or whatever, wants forty per cent of Liverpool so’s he can flog Steven Gerrard shirts and Michael Owen boots all over South-East Asia. It’s not football any more, Charlie, it’s all fucking business. Global fuckin’ economy.’ He drank deep and drained his glass. ‘It’s the global fucking economy as has thrown me and hundreds like me on to the fucking scrapheap, that’s what it’s done.’Waites sighed and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Charlie. You ought never to have let me get started.’

  ‘Stopping you’d take me and seven others.’

  ‘Happen so.’

  At the door Waites stopped to light a cigarette. ‘You know what really grates with me, Charlie? It used to be a working-class game, football. Now they’ve took that from us as well.’

  ‘Some places,’ Resnick said, ‘it still is.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie. What’s happening, you don’t think it’s right no more’n me.’

  ‘Maybe not. Though I wouldn’t mind some oil billionaire from Belarus taking a fancy to Notts County for a spell. Buy ‘em a halfway decent striker, someone with a bit of nous for midfield.’

  Waites laughed. ‘Now who’s whistling in the dark?’

  For several months Customs and Excise and others did their best to unravel Sharminov’s financial affairs; his stock was seized, his shops closed down. A further six months down the line, Alexei Popov would buy them through a twice-removed subsidiary and begin trading in DVDs for what was euphemistically called the adult market. He also bought a flat in Knightsbridge for a cool five million, close to the one owned by Roman Abramovich, though there was no indication the two men knew one another. Abramovich’s Chelsea continued to prosper; no oil-fed angel came to Notts County’s rescue as they struggled against relegation.

  Lynn began to wonder if a sideways move into the National Crime Squad might help to refocus her career.

  Resnick saw Eileen one more time. Although most of the money belonging to the man she knew as Michael Sherwood had been confiscated, she had inherited enough for new clothes and an expensive makeover, new suitcases which were waiting in the taxi parked outside.

  ‘I thought I’d travel, Charlie. See the world. Switzerland, maybe. Fly round some mountains.’ Her smile was near to perfect. ‘You know the only place I’ve been abroad? If you don’t count the Isle of Man. Alicante. Apart from the heat, it wasn’t like being abroad at all. Even the announcements in the supermarket were in English.’

  ‘Enjoy it,’ Resnick said. ‘Have a good time.’

  Eileen laughed. ‘Come with me, why don’t you? Chuck it all in. About time you retired.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  For a moment her face went serious. ‘You think we could ever have got together, Charlie?’

  ‘In another life, maybe.’

  ‘Which life is that?’

  Resnick smiled. ‘The one where I’m ten years younger and half a stone lighter; not already living with somebody else.’

  ‘And not a policeman?’

  ‘Maybe that too.’

  Craning upwards, she kissed him quickly on the lips. ‘You’re a good man, Charlie, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’

  Long after she had gone, he could feel the pressure of her mouth on his and smell the scent of her skin beneath the new perfume.

  DUE NORTH

  Elder hated this: the after-midnight call, the neighbours penned back behind hastily unravelled tape, the video camera’s almost silent whirr; the way, as if reproachful, the uniformed officers failed to meet his eye; and this especially, the bilious taste that fouled his mouth as he stared down at the bed, the way the hands of both children rested near the cover’s edge, as if at peace, their fingers loosely curled.

  He had been back close on two years, long enough to view the move north with some regret. Not that north was really what it was. A hundred and twenty miles from London, one hour forty minutes, theoretically, by train. Another country nonetheless.

  For weeks he and Joanne had argued it back and forth, reasons for, reasons against, two columns fixed to the refrigerator door. Cut and Dried, the salon where Joanne worked as a stylist, was opening branches in Derby and Nottingham and she could manage either one she chose. Derby was out of the questi
on.

  On a visit, Katherine trailing behind them, they had walked along the pedestrianised city centre street: high-end fashion, caffe latte, bacon cobs; Waterstone’s, Ted Baker, Cafe Rouge.

  ‘You see,’ Joanne said, ‘we could be in London. Chiswick High Road.’

  Elder shook his head. It was the bacon cobs that gave it away.

  The empty shop unit was just off to one side, secluded and select. ‘Post no Bills’ plastered across the glass frontage, ‘Sold Subject to Contract’ above the door. Joanne would be able to hire the staff, set the tone, everything down to choosing the shade of paint on the walls.

  ‘You know I want this, don’t you?’ Her hands in his pockets as she pulled him back against the glass.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So?’

  He closed his eyes and, slow at first, she kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘God!’ Katherine exclaimed, whacking her father in the back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Making a bloody exhibition of yourselves, that’s what.’

  ‘You watch your tongue, young lady,’ Joanne said, stepping clear.

  ‘Sooner that than watching yours.’

  Katherine Elder: eleven going on twenty-four.

  ‘What say we go and have a coffee?’ Elder said. ‘Then we can have a think.’

  Even a casual glance in the estate agent’s window made it clear that for the price of their two-bedroom first-floor flat off Chiswick Lane, they could buy a house in a decent area, something substantial with a garden front and back.

  For Katherine, moving up to secondary, a new start in a new school, the perfect time. And Elder…?

  He had joined the police as a twenty-year-old in Huddersfield, walked the beat in Leeds; out of uniform, he’d been stationed in Lincolnshire: Lincoln itself, Boston, Skegness. Then, married, the big move to London, this too at Joanne’s behest. Frank Elder a detective sergeant in the Met. Detective inspector when he was forty-five. Moving out he’d keep his rank at least, maybe push up. There were faces he still knew, a name or two. Calls he could make. A week after Joanne took charge of the keys to the new salon, Elder had eased himself behind his desk at the headquarters of the Nottinghamshire Major Crime Unit: a telephone, a PC with a splintered screen, a part-eaten Pork Farms pie mildewing away in one of the drawers.

  Now, two years on, the screen had been replaced, the keyboard jammed and lacked the letters R and S; photographs of Joanne and Katherine stood beside his in-tray in small frames. The team he’d been working with on a wages hijack north of Peterborough had just brought in a result and shots of Scotch were being passed around in polystyrene cups.

  Elder drank his down, a single swallow, and dialled home. ‘Jo, I’m going to be a bit late.’

  A pause in which he visualised her face, a tightening around the mouth, the corners of her eyes. ‘Of course.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s the end of the week, the lads are raring to go, of course you’ll be late.’

  ‘Look, if you’d rather-’

  ‘Frank, I’m winding you up. Go and have a drink. Relax. I’ll see you in an hour or so, okay?’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘All right. All right. I’m going.’

  When he arrived home, two hours later, not so much more, Katherine was closeted in her room, listening to music, and Joanne was nowhere to be seen.

  Barely pausing to knock, he pushed open his daughter’s door.

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re supposed to knock.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  Reaching past her, he angled the volume control of the portable stereo down a notch, a half-smile deflecting the complaint that failed to come.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out.’

  Cross-legged on the bed, fair hair splashed across her eyes, Katherine flipped closed the book in which she had been writing with a practised sigh.

  ‘You want something to eat?’ Elder asked.

  A quick shake of the head. ‘I already ate.’

  He found a slice of pizza in the fridge and set it in the microwave to reheat, opened a can of Heineken, switched on the TV. When Joanne arrived back, close to midnight, he was asleep in the armchair, unfinished pizza on the floor close by. Stooping, she kissed him lightly and he woke.

  ‘You see,’ Joanne said, ‘it works.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘You turned into a frog.’

  Elder smiled and she kissed him again; he didn’t ask her where she’d been.

  Neither was quite in bed when the mobile suddenly rang.

  ‘Mine or yours?’

  Joanne angled her head. ‘Yours.’

  Elder was still listening, asking questions, as he started reaching for his clothes.

  Fourteen miles north of the city, Mansfield was a small industrial town with an unemployment rate above average, a reputation for casual violence and a soccer team just keeping its head above water in Division Three of the Nationwide. Elder lowered the car window a crack, broke into a fresh pack of extra-strong mints and tried not to think about what he would find.

  He missed the turning first and had to double back, a cul-de-sac built into a new estate, just shy of the road to Edwinstowe and Ollerton. An ambulance snug between two police cars, lights in the windows of all the houses, the periodic yammering of radios. At number seventeen all of the curtains were drawn closed. A child’s scooter lay discarded on the lawn. Elder pulled on the protective coveralls he kept ready in the boot, nodded to the young officer in uniform on guard outside and showed his ID just in case. On the stairs, one of the Scene of Crime team, whey-faced, stepped aside to let him pass. The smell of blood and something else, like ripe pomegranate on the air.

  The children were in the smallest bedroom, two boys, six and four, pyjamed arms outstretched; the pillow with which they had been smothered lay bunched on the floor. Elder noticed bruising near the base of the older boy’s throat, twin purpling marks the size of thumbs; he wondered who had closed their eyes.

  ‘We were right to call you in?’

  For a big man, Saxon moved lightly; only a slight nasal heaviness to his breathing had alerted Elder to his presence in the room.

  ‘I thought, you know, better now than later.’

  Elder nodded. Gerry Saxon was a sergeant based in the town, Mansfield born and bred. The two of them had crossed paths before, swapped yarns and the occasional pint; stood once at the Town ground, side by side, as sleet swept near horizontally goalwards, grim in the face of a nil-nil draw with Chesterfield. Elder thought Saxon thorough, bigoted, not as slow-witted as he would have you believe.

  ‘Where’s the mother?’ Elder asked.

  Lorna Atkin was jammed between the dressing table and the wall, as if she had been trying to burrow away from the pain. One slash of a blade had sliced deep across her back, opening her from shoulder to hip. Her nightdress, once white, was matted here and there to her body with stiffening blood. Her throat had been cut.

  The police surgeon…?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ Saxon said. ‘Few preliminaries, nothing more. Didn’t like to move her till your say-so.’

  Elder nodded again. So much anger: so much hate. He looked from the bed to the door, at the collision of bottles and jars across the dressing-table top, the trajectory of blood along the walls. As if she had made a dash for it and been dragged back, attacked. Trying to protect her children or herself?

  ‘The weapon?’

  ‘Kitchen knife. Least that’s what I reckon. Downstairs in the sink.’

  ‘Washed clean?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

  There were footsteps on the landing outside and then Maureen Prior’s face in the doorway, eyes widening as she took in the scene; one slow intake of breath and she stepped into the room.

  ‘
Gerry, you know DS Prior. Maureen, Gerry Saxon.’

  ‘Good to see you again, Gerry.’ She scarcely took her eyes from the body. The corpse.

  ‘Maureen, check with Scene of Crime. Make sure they’ve documented everything we might need. Let’s tie that up before we let the surgeon get to work. You’ll liaise with Gerry here about interviewing the neighbours, house to house.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You’ll want to see the garage next,’ Saxon said.

  There were two entrances, one from the utility room alongside the kitchen, the other from the drive. Despite the latter being open, the residue of carbon monoxide had yet to fully clear. Paul Atkin slumped forward over the driver’s wheel, one eye fast against the windscreen’s curve, his skin sacking grey.

  Elder walked twice slowly around the car and went out to where Saxon stood in the rear garden, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Any sign of a note?’

  Saxon shook his head.

  ‘A note would have been nice. Neat at least.’

  ‘Only tell you what you know already.’

  ‘What’s that then, Gerry?’

  ‘Bastard topped his family, then himself. Obvious.’

  ‘But why?’

  Saxon laughed. ‘That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.’ He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last and as he did Elder noticed Saxon’s hands had a decided shake. Probably the night air was colder than he’d thought.

  There was no note that came to hand, but something else instead. Traced with Atkin’s finger on the inside of the misting glass and captured there by Scene of Crime, the first wavering letters of a name — ‘CONN’ and then what might have been an ‘I’ trailing weakly down towards the window’s edge.

  Mid-afternoon the following day, Elder was driving with Maureen Prior out towards the small industrial estate where Atkin had worked, head of sales for Pleasure Blinds. Prefabricated units that had still to lose their shine, neat beds of flowering shrubs, no sign of smoke in sight. Sherwood Business Park.

  If someone married’s going over the side, chances are it’s with someone from where they work. One of Frank Elder’s rules of thumb, rarely disproved.