by John Harvey
Cut to footage, taken from a distance and slightly blurred, of an officer breaking down the door and others pushing past into the building.
‘The question we must ask ourselves is to what extent police actions such as these serve to alienate the very communities they are empowered to serve.’
The camera tightened on the reporter’s finely made-up face and well-groomed hair.
‘This is Robyn Aspley-Jones on the streets of—’
Bill Berry silenced her with the remote, blanking the picture from the screen.
‘Public-relations disaster, Charlie.’
‘I didn’t think,’ Resnick said, ‘public relations were our main concern.’
‘Fuck off, Charlie! Where’ve you been the last fifteen fucking years?’
Resnick chose his words with care. ‘With respect, sir, I think I’d consider this morning’s operation a success. The man we were after was taken into custody without a shot being fired and is currently being questioned. A detailed search of the premises is still being carried out and, despite Robyn what’s-her-name, it’s far too early to say what we might find.’
Berry uttered a long, heartfelt sigh. ‘All right, Charlie, okay. Only for God’s sake don’t start calling me sir. We’re both of us too long in the tooth for that.’
Alston had been given a pair of jeans that were several sizes too large in the waist and an abandoned Nike top with a broken zip. His solicitor was wearing a pinstripe skirt that covered her knees and a neat little jacket over a pale pink blouse. Every now and again, she made a brisk note in the spiral-bound book open on the table before her.
‘Casino Royale?’ Michaelson said.
‘What?’
‘The new Bond.’
‘You what?’
‘You didn’t see it? Daniel Craig, the new James Bond?’
Alston stared back at him, bemused.
‘That’s what it reminded me of,’ Michaelson said. ‘You jumping across rooftops and that. I thought maybe you’d seen it, wanted to give it a try.’
‘Takin’ the piss, i’n’it?’ Alston said.
‘Shame about the fall at the end, bit of a tumble, but otherwise, you ever want to apply for any stunt work . . .’
Resnick and Bill Berry were watching on a monitor in an adjoining room.
‘You know who this pair remind me of?’ Berry said.
‘Michaelson and Pike? No, who?’
‘Little and Large, remember them?’
‘Not often,’ Resnick said.
‘Little and Large without the laughs.’
Hard to imagine, Resnick thought.
‘Focus,’ he said into Michaelson’s earpiece. ‘Get to the point.’
This just as Pike was saying, ‘Two days before the Kelly Brent shooting, you tried to buy a gun.’
‘I did?’
‘Trouble with St Ann’s, that’s what you said.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You needed a gun, protection, that what it was?’
Alston shook his head.
‘Two days before it happened, Billy. Trouble with St Ann’s, like you said.’ Pike slammed the flat of his hand down fast against the table. ‘One girl dead.’
Alston blinked.
‘Kelly Brent, you know her, Billy?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t know her?’
‘I knew, like, who she was. Seen her around, yeah.’
‘She was what? Fifteen, sixteen?’
‘I dunno, man. Didn’t really know her, like I say.’
‘You got sisters, Billy, that right?’
‘They got nothin’ to do with this.’
‘How old are they, Billy? Your sisters?’
‘I don’t see the relevance—’ the solicitor began.
‘Come on, Billy, how old?’
‘Eleven an’ seven, i’n’it?’
‘Eleven and seven.’
‘Yeah. But that ain’t—’
‘Suppose it had been one of them?’ Michaelson said. ‘How would you feel then?’
Alston stared back at him.
‘Easy happen, Billy. Split second, someone out there with a gun.’
Alston shifted on his seat, hitched his shoulders and let his arms fall down by his side, long fingers, big hands.
‘This little confrontation with St Ann’s,’ Pike said. ‘This meeting you had. There was always going to be trouble, right?’
Alston shrugged.
‘Billy, you thought there’d be trouble?’
‘Nothin’ we couldn’t handle, i’n’it?’
‘Nothing you couldn’t handle.’
‘Yeah, ’s right.’
‘Because you had a gun.’
‘I never had no gun.’
‘Two days before, you were out trying to buy one.’
‘No.’
‘Pub car park out at Carlton. Half eleven.’
‘I don’t know no pub out Carlton. I don’t never go to no Carlton.’
‘We’ve got a witness, Billy.’
‘Yeah? Well, he’s lyin’. Whoever it is, I’m tellin’ you, he’s lyin’.’
‘You’re not listening, Billy,’ Michaelson said. ‘We know you were there and we know why. You were there to buy a gun.’
‘Bullshit!’
‘One hundred and fifty pounds for a handgun and ammunition, that was the deal.’
Alston started to say something, then sat back, the beginnings of a smile on his face. ‘Say, just say, right, I was there, like you say . . .’
His solicitor reached out a hand as if to intervene.
‘An’ lessay, jus’ for the sake of argument, right, I was thinkin’ ‘bout buyin’ this gun . . .’
‘Billy,’ the solicitor said, ‘I really don’t think . . .’
‘Then if you got someone was there, you know I didn’t buy no gun, right?’
‘Billy . . .’
‘Could be, I was tempted to buy a piece, but then I realise, like you all always tellin’ me, that’s not such a cool thing to do. So I jus’ walked away. Far as I know, ain’t no law ’gainst thinkin’ ‘bout doin’ somethin’ an’ if that’s all I’m here for you wastin’ my time an’ your own. Aw’right, Mr Bond?’
‘Fuck’s sake, Charlie,’ Bill Berry said. ‘Little bastard’s running ’em round in circles.’
Resnick told Michaelson to suspend the interview and allow Alston to take a break. Forty-five minutes later, he went back in there himself, taking Anil Khan with him, still hoping for something positive from the Scene of Crime officers searching the house.
According to Alston, the reason he backed out of the deal over the gun was that he realised it was stupid, get caught with a firearm in your possession, you were looking at serious time. And, no, he still maintained, as far as he knew, none of his crew had gone up to St Ann’s that day strapped. As for the identity of the shooter, he had no idea. No more than the police did themselves.
Resnick knew the clock was ticking down.
Charge him or let him go.
Resnick had been back at his own desk for twenty minutes or so when one of the duty officers rang up from below. ‘Howard Brent, sir. He’s down here now. Wants to see you if he can.’
Resnick sighed and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘I’ll come down.’
Today Brent was wearing his blue Converse with black jeans and a suede jacket, a white T-shirt with two overlapping gold chains, a gold ring in place of the stud in his ear.
‘Mr Brent, what can I—?’
‘You arrest someone for my daughter’s murder and I have to learn this when someone phone me from the paper.’
‘Mr Brent—’
‘This is my daughter we talkin’ about . . .’
‘Mr Brent, if you hadn’t been so hostile towards officers engaged in this investigation—’
‘Hostile? That’s good comin’ from you. You callin’ me hostile.’
‘If you hadn’t persistently refused to have anything to do with the family liai
son officer appointed, then you would have been informed in the proper way, using the proper channels. As it is, I can confirm, yes, a suspect has been arrested and is currently being questioned at this station.’
‘Alston, right?’
‘Mr Brent—’
‘What everyone’s sayin’, Billy Alston. That’s what everyone’s sayin’ on the street.’
‘A statement—’
‘Hey, man!’ Brent jabbed a finger towards Resnick’s face. ‘Don’t fuck with me. Alston, he here ’cause he killed my daughter, I got a right to know.’
Wearily, Resnick shook his head. ‘Mr Brent, all I can tell you is this. We are speaking to someone in the course of our inquiries and nothing more. No charges concerning your daughter’s murder have been made.’
Brent made a tight scoffing sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh.
‘If and when that happens,’ Resnick continued, ‘you will be informed. Now please go home. There’s nothing you can do here.’
‘You think? That’s what you think, eh? Well, I tellin’ you, this gonna get sorted. One way or another. You know that, yeah? You know?’
Resnick turned and walked away.
At four o’clock that afternoon, the report came through from the team that had been searching the Alston house: a small quantity of cannabis aside, nothing illegal had been found. No firearms, no other drugs, no ammunition.
At a quarter past six that evening, Billy Alston was released.
10
The closer the trial date came, the more it played on Lynn’s mind.
She’d been in court to give evidence on more occasions than she could remember: had sworn the oath and had told, despite the attempts of the defending barrister to throw her off course, the whole truth and nothing but.
She felt nervous, nevertheless.
Always had, always did.
The fear that she might trip up, throw away the case with a careless word, a slip of the tongue, some misremembered fact, let herself and everyone down. As if she were being tested: as if, somehow, she were the one on trial.
‘All relative, isn’t it?’ a colleague had once argued, a young DC who’d taken a philosophy course as part of his criminology degree. ‘Your truth, another man’s falsehood. A matter of perception. Prisms. Nothing’s absolute.’ He’d left the force after four years and taken a lecturing post at the University of Hertfordshire.
Those who can’t hack the real world, teach, Lynn thought. The rest of us dig in our heels and get on with it as best we can. But then, when she heard the stories coming out of the local schools and academies, she reckoned that kind of teaching was probably real enough.
This was real, too.
Viktor Zoukas, charged with murder.
Culpable homicide. The arcane language was imprinted on Lynn’s mind: where a person of sound memory and discretion unlawfully killeth any reasonable creature in being, under the Queen’s peace, with malice aforethought, either express or implied, the death following within a year and a day.
It had been a Saturday night, nine months before, an emergency call at close to half past two, the force already stretched by the usual array of running fights and mass brawls and sudden, singular acts of violence, as the clubs started to disgorge their customers and began the arduous task of counting the weekend’s profits and swilling down the floors.
The call was to a sauna and massage parlour above a sex shop on one of the seedier side streets in the old Lace Market, the caller an alarmed customer who, unsurprisingly, had refused to give his name. When the two uniformed officers arrived only minutes later, dispatched from a disturbance they had been attending at an Indian restaurant on the same block, they found several young women sitting on the pavement outside, another slumped, bewildered, against the sex-shop window. A young man in a stained dress shirt and the still-smart black trousers of a dress suit, sat on the stairs with his head in his hands. At the top of the stairway, a woman with dyed reddish hair, wearing the same short pink tunic as the rest, mascara smeared across her face, was leaning back against the wall, cigarette in her shaking hand.
As the officers moved past her along the narrow corridor, one of the doors near the far end opened abruptly and a man lurched out, stumbled two paces forward and stopped. He was a little above medium height, broad-shouldered, solid, muscle turning to fat, a purple shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist, the purple at the left shoulder darkened almost to black. There were splashes of what looked like blood on his face and neck and caught in the dark hairs of his chest. In his eyes, a mixture of anger and surprise. His right hand held a knife, a short, straight blade close against his leg.
‘Drop it,’ the first officer said. ‘Drop the knife. Now. On the floor. Put it down.’
The man’s muscles tensed, and in the dim light of the single bulb overhead the officers could see the movement in his eyes as he looked beyond them towards the stairs, as if seeking a possible way out.
‘Down,’ the first officer said again. ‘Drop the knife down now.’
The man’s fingers tightened further around the handle, then gradually opened and the knife landed with a quick, dull sound on the meagre carpet covering the floor.
‘Kick the knife over here, towards me. Now, with your foot. Not hard. Towards me, that’s it. Okay, now clasp your hands behind your head. No, clasp, clasp, fingers together, like this. Good. Now, get down on the floor. Down. Down, that’s right. Now don’t move. Don’t move until you’re told.’
The officer nodded to his companion and began to call for back-up, and the second officer moved towards the doorway from which the man had emerged.
The room was narrow, little more than a cubicle, with a high, narrow bed to one side, the kind you find in doctor’s surgeries, a thin yellow sheet hanging half on, half off towards the floor. On a small circular table at the head were several pots and plastic tubes of lotion and a single transparent latex glove, pulled partly inside out. Poking out from beneath the corner of the sheet where it brushed the floor was a woman’s foot with a fine-meshed gold chain above the ankle and chipped red polish on the toes.
The officer squatted down and used finger and thumb to lift away the sheet.
The woman was on her back, face turned towards the wall, and even in the dim light available, the officer could see that her throat had been cut.
Vomit hit the back of his throat and he swallowed it away.
Steadying his breathing, he let the sheet fall back into place.
Lynn was the first senior detective at the scene, anxious to ensure it was contaminated as little as possible and that vital evidence was preserved intact.
The body.
The presumed assailant.
The knife.
She could conjure up, even now, the mixture of smells in that narrow trench-like room: cheap baby lotion and stale sweat, spent jism and fresh blood.
Before the man who had been holding the knife was taken away under police guard for treatment, Lynn had established his identity. Viktor Zoukas. Originally, he said, from Albania. The premises were licensed in his name.
Of the five female workers, two were local, two recently from Croatia, their legal status doubtful, one, a student, from Romania. Mostly they were frightened, unwilling to talk, in various stages of shock. One of the local women, Sally, a sometime stripper, some ten or fifteen years older than the rest, was paid extra to take bookings, collect the cash from the customers, keep a weather eye on the girls.
Lynn quickly separated her off from the rest.
‘There’s not much I can tell you,’ Sally said.
Lynn waited, patient, while the woman lit a cigarette.
She had heard voices raised, Sally told her, an argument between the dead girl and one of the punters – not unusual, with the dead girl, Nina, especially. She’d been about to go and see what was happening when Viktor had stopped her. He wasn’t that often on the premises, not that early, usually only came around to cash up at the end of the night, but this
time he was. He would go and sort things out, he said. The next thing she knew there was this awful screaming and one of the girls – Andreea Florescu, the Romanian – came running into the reception area, shouting that Nina was dead.
Pandemonium. Punters not able to get out fast enough. Which of them might have phoned the police she’d no idea. Surprised, to be honest, that anyone did.
Viktor, Lynn had asked, Viktor Zoukas, when all this was going on, people leaving, shouting and screaming, where was he?
Sally didn’t know. She hadn’t seen him. Still in the room with Nina perhaps? Who could say?
Lynn had talked then to the other women who worked there, several, she suspected, feigning a worse command of English than was actually the case, but she had got little from them. Andreea, who had raised the alarm, kept her eyes averted when Lynn spoke to her, head mostly angled away.
‘Just tell me,’ Lynn said quietly. ‘Just tell me what you saw.’
Andreea did look at her for a moment then and the shadow of what she had seen passed across her eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ Lynn said. ‘Later. Not here.’ And briefly, she touched the back of the young woman’s hand.
They met next morning in the Old Market Square, Andreea wearing a grey short-sleeved jacket over a yellow vest, blue jeans that bagged at the knees, white sneakers like old-fashioned school plimsolls, make-up heavy around her eyes.
Lynn took her to one of the few cafés in the city centre that the coffee conglomerates had yet to take over. Somewhere anonymous where she thought they were less likely to be noticed or disturbed.
There were sauce bottles on the tables and small foil containers that had previously held pies and pasties serving as ashtrays: only a few months till the smoking ban came into force and most of the customers were taking full advantage.
Lynn ordered tea, asked questions, listened.
Andreea lit one Marlboro from the butt of another.
Through the window Lynn could see the usual panoply of men and women walking past, talking into their mobile phones, some smartly, even fashionably, dressed, others in the camouflage of cheap sportswear, young women who looked as if they should still be at school pushing prams or gripping unsteady toddlers by the hand.