Cold in Hand

by John Harvey

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Harvey

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Two

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Two teenage girls are victims of a bloody Valentine’s Day shooting; one survives, the other is less fortunate…

  It’s one of a rising number of violent incidents in the city, and DI Charlie Resnick, nearing retirement, is hauled back to the front line to help deal with the fallout.

  But when the dead girl’s father seeks to lay the blame on DI Lynn Kellogg, Resnick’s colleague and lover, the line between personal and professional becomes dangerously blurred.

  As Lynn, shaken by this very public accusation, is forced to question her part in the teenager’s death, Resnick struggles against those in the force who disapprove of his maverick ways. But when the unimaginable occurs, an emotional Resnick takes matters into his own hands. No one could have foreseen where this case would lead, and this time Resnick will need all his strength to see justice done…

  About the Author

  John Harvey is the author of the richly praised sequence of eleven Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the ‘100 Best Crime Novels of the Century’. His first novel featuring Detective Inspector Frank Elder, Flesh and Blood, won the CWA Silver Dagger in 2004, and a Barry Award for the Best British Crime Novel published in the US in 2004. In 2007 John Harvey was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence.

  He is also a poet, dramatist and occasional broadcaster. For more about the author please visit www.mellotone.co.uk

  Also by John Harvey

  In a True Light

  Nick’s Blues

  Gone to Ground

  Far Cry

  The Elder Novels

  Flesh and Blood

  Ash and Bone

  Darkness and Light

  The Resnick Novels

  Lonely Hearts

  Rough Treatment

  Cutting Edge

  Off Minor

  Wasted Years

  Cold Light

  Living Proof

  Easy Meat

  Still Water

  Last Rites

  Short Stories

  Now’s the Time

  Minor Key

  A Darker Shade of Blue

  Poetry

  Ghosts of a Chance

  Bluer Than This

  As Editor

  Blue Lightning

  Men From Boys

  For more about the author visit www.mellotone.co.uk

  COLD IN HAND

  John Harvey

  For

  Robin Gerry, Charles Gregory

  David Kresh and Angus Wells

  All gone too soon

  PART ONE

  1

  It was that curious time, neither day nor night, not even properly dusk, the light beginning to shorten and fade, the headlights of a few overcautious drivers raising a quick, pale reflection from the slick surface of the road, the main route back into the city. Past Ezee-Fit Tyre Change & Exhaust. Quality Decking. Nottingham Building Supplies. Carpet World. The occasional small parade of shops set back to one side: newsagents, florists, Chinese takeaways, bookies, Bargain Booze.

  Lynn Kellogg was driving an unmarked saloon that jolted slightly when she changed down from fourth to third, the force radio whispering sweet nothings through a field of static. She was wearing blue jeans and a pair of scuffed Timberlands, her bulletproof vest still fastened beneath a red-and-black ski jacket, unzipped.

  There were school kids all along both sides of the street, spilling over the pavements, pushing, shoving, shirts hanging loose, rucksacks slung over their shoulders, sharing, some of them, the headphones from their MP3s and iPod nanos; a covey of girls, no older than thirteen or fourteen, skirts barely covering their skinny behinds, passing a joint between them. Another day, Lynn might have pulled over, stopped, delivered a lecture. Not today.

  The fourteenth of February, Valentine’s Day, a little after four p.m. and she wanted nothing as much as to get home at a reasonable time, strip off these clothes and soak in a hot bath. She’d bought a present, nothing fancy, a DVD, Thelonious Monk, Live in ’66, but it still needed to be wrapped. The card she’d left propped up against the toaster where she thought it might get found. When she glanced in the mirror, the tiredness was all too clear in her eyes.

  She had been sitting with her second cup of coffee that morning, half-listening to the early news: another fifteen-year-old had been shot in Peckham, South London, the third in almost as few days. Payback. Bravado. Respect. Some part of her thinking, at least this time it isn’t here. She knew the number of senior detectives currently investigating gun-related incidents in the Nottingham area and around was such that the Homicide Unit were having to consider bringing in officers from outside.

  As the newsreader moved on to the prospect of more job losses in the industrial sector and she reached for the off switch, the phone cut in.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she called through to the other room. ‘It’s probably for me.’

  It was. A man holding his wife and children prisoner in Worksop, north of the county, threatening them harm. Almost certainly armed. Lynn swallowed another mouthful of coffee, poured the remainder down the sink, and grabbed her coat from where it was hanging in the hall.

  ‘Charlie, I’ve got to run.’

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, hurrying to the door.

  ‘You better.’ Her kiss just missed the side of his mouth.

  ‘The table’s booked for eight.’

  ‘I know.’

  A moment and she was gone.

  Nine months earlier, Lynn had finished her training as a hostage negotiator, ancillary to her main role as detective inspector on the Homicide Unit, and since that time she had been called out twice, both incidents being peacefully resolved. In the first, a fifty-five-year-old man, forcibly retired, had held his previous employer captive for eighteen hours, under the threat of trepanning his skull with a sharpened scythe; Lynn had eventually talked him into setting his weapon aside and releasing his prisoner with promises of a hot meal, a probable maximum of seventy-two hours’ community service and a personal interview at the local jobcentre. Her second call-out had been to a twenty-four-hour grocery store, where an attempted robbery had resulted in one youth being arrested as he tried to flee the scene, leavin
g another inside with a Stanley knife to the throat of the terrified Somali shopkeeper. Against Lynn’s advice, the incident commander had allowed the youth’s mother to talk to the boy directly and her pleas for him to surrender had succeeded where Lynn’s had so far failed. Bad practice but a good result, the shopkeeper unharmed, the youth walking out in tears into his mother’s arms.

  This particular morning it was a thirty-four-year-old engineer who’d returned from a six-month stint in Bahrain the previous evening to find his wife in bed with his ex-best mate, the three kids all downstairs, clustered round the television watching Scooby-Doo. The mate had legged it, leaving his trousers dangling from the bedpost and the wife to face the music. Neighbours had registered a lot of banging and shouting, but not thought too much of it, until, in the early hours, the oldest of the children, barely seven, had shinnied through the bathroom window and gone running to the nearest house. ‘My dad’s gonna kill my mum. He’s gonna kill us all.’

  By the time Lynn had arrived, the street had been cordoned off, the house surrounded, anyone with a close knowledge of the interior and the family debriefed, both the layout and the names and ages of those inside clear in their minds. Firearms officers were already in position, ambulances ready and waiting. What the boy had told them was halting and confused; some of the time he seemed to be saying that his father had a gun and sometimes not. They weren’t about to take any chances.

  The incident commander was Phil Chambers, a detective superintendent Lynn had worked with once before, a murder-suicide out at Ollerton: a husband and wife who’d been together for forty-seven years and wanted it to end the same way. Ben Fowles was the senior firearms officer at the scene, a good thirty pounds heavier than when Lynn had first known him, the pair of them young CID officers working out of Canning Circus station; Fowles moonlighting most weekends, fronting a band called Splitzoid that somehow never seemed to have made the grade.

  There was telephone contact with the house, but after the briefest of conversations – little more than grunts and curses – the connection had been broken and the man had so far refused to pick up again. Lynn was forced to resort to a loudhailer, self-conscious despite herself, knowing that all of the assembled officers would be hearing what she said, how she handled the situation, listening and judging.

  The man had stepped into clear sight several times, once with what looked like a kitchen knife held against the side of his wife’s throat, not an easy shot but possible, nine times, maybe, out of ten. Not a risk they were anxious to run. Not yet, anyway. Lynn had seen Chambers and Ben Fowles several times in close conversation, weighing up the pros and cons, the decision to shoot theirs and not hers. Neither of the remaining children, a girl of five and a three-year-old boy, had been seen for some little time.

  ‘Let the children go,’ Lynn said, her voice echoing across the late morning air; the sun up there somewhere, trapped behind a bank of cloud. ‘Let them come outside. Their gran’s here. She can look after them. Let them come to her.’

  The grandmother was standing off to the left of the cordon with other members of the family, agitated, distraught, chain-smoking Silk Cut; a deal had already been struck with a local reporter who was a stringer for one of the nationals – My Little Angels: a Grandmother’s Anguish. Should the worst happen.

  ‘Let me see them,’ Lynn said. ‘The children. I just want to be sure they’re all right.’

  A short while later, he held them up awkwardly to the window, both crying, the boy squirming in his hands.

  ‘Let them go now,’ Lynn said. ‘Let them out and then we can talk this over. Nobody’s hurt yet. Nothing’s happened. You should let them go.’

  Half an hour later, the front door opened just wide enough for the girl to squeeze through; for a moment, out there on a square of cracked paving, she froze, before running towards a female officer, who scooped her up and carried her off to where her grandmother was waiting. Another minute and the little boy followed, running, falling, scrambling to his feet and then falling again.

  The mother’s face showed, anxious, at the upstairs window, before she was pulled away.

  ‘Let your wife out now,’ Lynn said. ‘Then you and I can talk.’

  The window was thrown suddenly open. ‘The only way she’s coming out’s in a fuckin’ box!’

  And the window slammed shut.

  ‘Could’ve taken him then,’ Ben Fowles said softly at Lynn’s shoulder. ‘Back home in time for a spot of lunch.’

  ‘Not my call.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What’s the thinking on the gun?’ Lynn asked. ‘He armed or not?’

  ‘No sign.’

  ‘Maybe the boy was wrong.’

  ‘Seven, isn’t he? Six or seven? Old enough to know what a gun looks like, I should say.’

  ‘He must have been frightened out of his wits, poor kid.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he made a mistake.’

  Lynn shook her head. ‘I think if he had a gun we’d have seen it by now. His situation, he’d have made sure we did.’

  ‘And if you’re wrong?’

  She looked at him squarely. ‘Either way, unless you and Chambers have got something cooked up between you, we carry on waiting.’

  Fowles smiled. ‘Till what? He sees the hopelessness of his position? Walks out with his hands above his head?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Chambers checking his watch and wondered what calculations he was making.

  Not so many minutes later, the man picked up the phone. Lynn was pliant but firm, letting him have something to hold on to, something that could lead to a way out. Little by little, bit by bit. She shook her head, some old song ringing like tinnitus in her ears. Retro nights at the Lizard Lounge. Some white soul singer, she couldn’t remember the name. Back when she was a young DC. Before she’d met Charlie. Before everything.

  It was close to two and a slow rain was starting to fall.

  ‘Let your wife out through the front door. Once she’s outside she should turn to the right where she’ll see a female police officer in uniform. She should walk towards her with her hands well away from her body. Is that understood?’

  Come on, come on.

  The front door budged open an inch or so, then swung wide and the woman stumbled out, blinking as if emerging from the dark. As she began to walk, less than steadily, towards the waiting officer, the door behind her slammed shut.

  Lynn gave the man time to get back to the phone.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you have a weapon, I want you to throw it out now. Then, once that weapon is secured, you can come out yourself. Walk towards the uniformed officer with your hands in the air and follow his instructions. Lie down on the ground when you are told.’

  Moments later there was the sound of a gunshot, muffled, from inside the house.

  ‘Shit!’ Lynn said beneath her breath and for a split second she closed her eyes.

  Fowles looked across at Chambers and Chambers shook his head. Instead of sending the troops charging in like some SWAT squad on late-night TV, the incident commander was content to bide his time. The man was alone in the house now and a danger only to himself. Assuming he was still alive.

  Time was on their side.

  When the man failed to pick up the phone, Lynn used the loudhailer instead. Firm but fair. If he could hear her, this is what he had to do.

  She repeated it again, unflustered and clear.

  Nothing happened.

  And then it did. The door opened gradually and a handgun was thrown out on to the grass.

  ‘All right,’ Lynn said, ‘now step outside slowly with your hands in the air . . .’

  Halfway across the patchy square of lawn he stopped. ‘Couldn’t even do that,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Couldn’t even do fucking that.’

  ‘Pathetic,’ Ben Fowles remarked.

  There was a scorch mark on one side of his face; at the last moment he had p
ulled his head away.

  One of the children tried to run towards him, but the grandmother held him back.

  Not for the first time, Lynn caught herself wishing that she still smoked.

  Chambers came over and shook her hand.

  Fowles nudged her on the shoulder with his fist. ‘Good job,’ he said.

  Lynn did her best not to smile. Dusty Springfield, she said to herself on the way back to the car, that’s who it was. Dusty, the one and only.

  She tried Charlie’s office number but there was no reply; his mobile seemed to be switched off. No matter, she’d be home now soon enough. A table for two at Petit Paris on King’s Walk. Paris, Nottingham, that is. Moules, steak frites. A decent bottle of wine. Try to leave room for dessert.

  Lucky?

  Her hands were still shaking a little when they touched the wheel.

  Like a tooth you couldn’t stop probing with the tip of your tongue, the song was still nagging away at her as she made a turn on to the Woodborough Road and eased into the outside lane. She heard the call over the force radio nonetheless: disturbance on Cranmer Street, near the junction with St Ann’s Hill Road. Only moments away.

  ‘Tango Golf 13 to Control.’

  ‘Control to Tango Golf 13, go ahead.’

  ‘Tango Golf 13 to Control. I’m on Woodborough Road, just turning into Cranmer Street now.’

  Lynn swung sharp left across the traffic, cutting off a mud-spattered four-by-four and causing it to brake sharply. Cranmer Street was only narrow, barely a two-car width, vehicles parked down the left-hand side making it narrower still. A builder’s van with fading Forest stickers in its rear windows made to pull out in front of her and then thought better of it.

  ‘Control to Tango Golf 13. Response units are attending. Advise await their arrival.’

  There were several small blocks of new-build flats high on the right and beyond those an old municipal building that was now student accommodation. Behind fencing along the near side, the ground was being cleared, deep holes being dug; council housing demolished and replaced. Just opposite the intersection with St Ann’s Hill Road, a crowd of youths, many of them wearing hoodies – what else? – had gathered in a rough circle that spread out across the street.