Cold in Hand

by John Harvey

  No, she swore, she didn’t know where he was, where he’d been phoning from, but wherever it was she didn’t think he’d stray far. Doncaster, perhaps, used to have a good mate up in Donny, did Kelvin.

  Lynn emptied the laundry basket, sorting the whites from the coloureds, pushed the latter into the machine, added liquid, selected the right programme and pressed the button. The whites she could do later.

  She was contemplating a slow walk down to the corner shop for a fresh loaf of bread, fancying a slice of toast and marmalade, when the phone rang.

  ‘The other day,’ Daines said, ‘I think I might have been a little unfair. Shutting you out like that.’

  No intention of making things easy, she held her tongue.

  ‘I thought maybe we should meet up. Then I could fill you in. As far as I can, at least. What do you say?’

  A pause, and then: ‘All right.’

  ‘Good. Excellent. Why don’t we meet for a drink this lunchtime? Somewhere quiet.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Surely . . .’

  ‘They didn’t give you an office?’

  ‘Yes.’ A small laugh. ‘We have an office.’

  ‘Fine. Then let’s meet there.’

  ‘Okay. Twelve o’clock? Twelve thirty?’

  ‘How about eleven?’

  ‘All right, eleven.’

  He gave her the address. One of those streets of Georgian houses off Wellington Circus that are now mostly offices for solicitors or the better class of architect, the ones for whom kitchen extensions are a thing of the past.

  Lynn dressed carefully: a dark brown trouser suit that gave little concession to shape, court shoes with a low heel, minimal make-up, her hair pulled back from her face.

  Daines’s office was as anonymous as a room in a Travelodge motel but better proportioned, furniture that had come flat-packed and in need of assembly, the surface of his desk empty save for a laptop computer and mobile phone. Blue and grey files were shelved at the far side of the room. The windows were double glazed to keep out the sound of traffic and the air was somehow limp and odourless, save for the faint taint of air freshener.

  ‘Welcome. Such as it is.’

  Daines was wearing grey suit trousers and a white, open-necked shirt that was turned back once above the wrist. Lynn accepted his handshake and sat on a metal folding chair facing the desk.

  The indistinct sounds of other voices came from other rooms.

  She wondered how many SOCA staff there were in the building, what size budget and how many personnel had been allocated to this part of the operation. Whatever the operation was.

  ‘Until the machine arrives,’ Daines said, ‘the only coffee I can offer you is instant. Or I could send someone down to the Playhouse bar.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Lynn said.

  ‘Water then, or—’

  ‘Viktor Zoukas,’ Lynn said.

  Daines smiled. ‘No time for pleasantries.’

  ‘You were going to explain . . .’

  ‘As far as I can, yes. Some things, of necessity, I’m afraid, are still under wraps.’

  Lynn nodded.

  ‘One more thing,’ Daines said, ‘before we start. That bag . . .’ He indicated the leather shoulder bag that was resting now on the floor beside her chair. ‘You wouldn’t have a recorder of some kind in there?’

  Lynn picked it up and held it out towards him. ‘You want to check?’

  She was beginning to feel as if she’d wandered into an episode of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One that she’d missed.

  Daines smiled again. ‘It’s okay. This job, it’s making me slightly paranoid. But one or two things leaking out at the wrong time . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, Viktor Zoukas, let me tell you a little about him you still might not know. A little background. He came over from Albania in ’99 under the guise of being a Kosovar refugee, though that may not have been strictly true. He’s got family here, a brother, cousins, mostly settled in North London, Wood Green. There’s a whole bunch of them there, mostly from Northern Albania. One or two, quite respectable. One who’s a doctor, working at the Royal Free. He was the one who stood surety for Viktor’s bail.

  ‘Viktor and his cousins though, prostitution, that’s their thing. A younger brother, too. Valdemar. Brothels. Massage parlours. Trafficking women from Eastern Europe and then forcing them to work in the sex trade. Girls as young as fifteen, sixteen, some of them. You probably know how that works, in principle at least. They make a lot of false promises, charge a small fortune to bring the girls into the country, often via Italy, and then keep them as virtual prisoners while they pay back what they supposedly owe.

  ‘Either they put them to work themselves or sell them on. Someone like Nina Simic, the girl who was killed, she could have been bought and sold for a few thousand pounds and a hundred cartons of cigarettes.’

  Daines paused as someone approached the door, thought better of it and walked away.

  ‘Tobacco smuggling, that’s how I first made contact with these people. When I was still working for Customs and Excise. It was a big thing, still is. Since then, the Albanians have moved on to cannabis and they’d like a chunk of the heroin trade as well, but the Turks have got that pretty much sewn up and are keeping it to themselves. So now, this last year or so, they’ve shown every sign of adding another string to their bow. Broadening their portfolio, I guess you could say. Guns. Guns and ammunition. Big time.’

  ‘And that’s what SOCA’s interested in?’

  ‘Principally, yes.’

  ‘I still don’t see why it was so important to have Zoukas released on bail.’

  Daines sighed. ‘Timing. That as much as anything.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Lynn said.

  ‘You know those games – I think they’re supposed to be for kids. Jenga, something like that. A tower made out of little strips of wood placed diagonally across one another in sets of three. The skill is to pull one out and reposition it on the top without making the whole tower fall down. That’s Zoukas, one of those little pieces.’

  ‘And the tower?’

  Daines drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk, a neat little pattern, the reverberations of which turned his mobile phone through a quarter-circle.

  ‘Anything else I say now, it doesn’t go beyond this room. Is that understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ Lynn said. If she were still a child, she might well have had her fingers crossed behind her back.

  ‘Okay. Our information is this. Some enterprising free-marketeer in Lithuania has been buying up large quantities of relatively low-powered pistols – alarm pistols, that’s what they call them over there – okay for scaring off the neighbour’s pet Dobermann, but not a lot else – and remodelling the barrels so as to take regular 9mm ammo. He sells them for a few hundred quid each and by the time they reach the UK they’re fetching upward of fifteen hundred a piece.

  ‘We’ve intercepted several small consignments over the past few years, Customs and Excise that is, most usually in vehicles that have been fitted with hidden compartments, so no more than a couple of dozen at a time. But now, according to our information, a far larger consignment is on its way. As many as seven hundred weapons, maybe, fourteen thousand rounds of ammunition. We’re just not sure yet when. Nor which route they’re taking. But you can imagine what it would mean if they got through, that lot get into the wrong hands and out on to the streets. After what happened, you especially.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ Lynn said. ‘But I still don’t see the connection. These men, the guns, everything, you say they’re Lithuanian.’

  ‘Correct. And the guys over here are shitting themselves because they think, after that last arrest especially, we’ve got their number. Better, then, to sell on to somebody else and take a smaller profit than run the risk of fetching up behind bars.’

  ‘Which is where Zoukas comes in.’

  ‘Absolutely. Viktor and his brother, ye
s, we think so. We’ve been watching, waiting. Liaising with the Office of Organised Crime and Corruption in Lithuania. Letting them get everything into place. Our best guess, Valdemar was set to handle the London end, Viktor anything further north. Here, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow. Once Viktor was in custody and taken out of the equation, everything was put on hold, which made the Lithuanians jumpy. According to our information, they’ve been threatening to take the guns elsewhere. The Turks, maybe. Last thing Valdemar and his pals want. The whole deal’s on the verge of falling to pieces and if that happens we’re back to square one and left having to start all over again. Months of work, God knows how many man hours down the drain. But if we can keep it in play and strike at the right time, we get the buyers, the sellers, the pistols, the works. Once we heard there was a chance of Zoukas being released on bail, that gave us our chance.’

  A frown set on Lynn’s face. ‘Heard? Heard how?’

  Daines tried for what was meant to be a disarming smile. ‘We’ve been interested in the outcome of the case, naturally enough. Frankly, it had always seemed to us there was a strong possibility of Zoukas being acquitted. But then, once one of your main witnesses opted to run for cover—’

  ‘Is that what he’s done?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know. But it seems possible, don’t you think?’

  ‘And convenient. For you, anyway.’

  Daines’s smile broadened. ‘A little good luck never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Nina Simic’s throat,’ Lynn said, ‘was cut practically from ear to ear.’

  ‘I know. I know. And if he’s found responsible, Zoukas will pay. Just later rather than sooner. What possible harm is there in that?’

  ‘Come on,’ Lynn said. ‘Don’t be naive. If someone managed to find one witness and put the fear of God into him, what’s to stop them finding the other? A month for us to track down Pearce, but a month also for Zoukas or whoever’s looking out for him to find the only other good witness we have. Result: Viktor Zoukas walks free.’

  She fixed him with a look. ‘Perhaps that’s what you want all along.’

  ‘Perhaps in a way it is.’

  Lynn’s eyes widened. ‘That young woman,’ she said, quick to her feet, ‘was bought and sold like fresh meat. From what we can tell, she was systematically beaten, almost certainly raped, then forced to have sex with anyone and everyone, twelve, fourteen hours a day. And then she was slaughtered, butchered—’

  ‘Whoa, whoa! Don’t you think you’re getting a bit emotional?’

  ‘Butchered, that’s the word I chose. Butchered, and if you have your way, she’ll get no justice, no justice at all. And emotional? Yes, okay, I’m emotional. I saw her laying there dead, with her blood soaking into a rotting carpet that was sticky with men’s come. Of course I’m bloody emotional.’

  She turned away and headed for the door.

  ‘Time of the month, I dare say,’ Daines said. ‘Probably doesn’t help.’

  Lynn spun round. Quite how she stopped herself from going over and slapping the supercilious smile from his face she didn’t know.

  ‘Fuck you!’ she said.

  ‘You know,’ Daines said, grinning, ‘you never did thank me for the flowers.’

  Lynn slammed the door hard in her wake.

  Furious with herself, Lynn walked – no, strode – she strode across the city centre, past the refurbishments of the Old Market Square and up Smithy Row, in the middle of which a short, wiry-haired man, stripped to the waist, was entertaining the early lunch crowd by wrapping himself, Houdini-like, in chains. Not so many months before, the same man, or one just like him, had been forced to call emergency services when he’d been unable to set himself free.

  She sat in Lee Rosey’s, facing the window, leafing through a local lifestyle magazine that had been left on the counter: bars, restaurants, nightclubs, fine wines, promotional drinks nights, bottled beers, a contemporary and relaxed environment, cool music for cool people.

  Cool.

  Well, no one had ever accused her of being that.

  Cold, maybe, even though it had never really been true.

  But cool . . .

  Any claims she might once have pretended to cool had been jettisoned once and for all inside Daines’s office. Pissed off first of all by his disregard for one woman’s rights to justice if they stood counter to his master plan, and then – God! What was the matter with her? – allowing herself to get wound up by the kind of juvenile remark that, as a young officer, she had shrugged off a thousand times.

  She closed her eyes and willed herself to relax, but when she opened them again the same strained face was looking back at her, faintly reflected in the glass.

  Four or five years ago she tried yoga.

  Maybe it was time to give it another go.

  She still hadn’t quite shaken her anger from her system – anger at Daines, anger at herself – when she met Resnick in the Peacock early that evening, just around the corner from the Central Police Station.

  ‘Sounds to me,’ Resnick said, after listening carefully, ‘as if Mr Daines’s a bit of a fool.’

  ‘He’s worse than that.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And I’m the fool for letting him get under my skin.’

  Resnick nodded to two other plain-clothes officers who had just come into the bar.

  ‘Happens,’ he said. ‘Take me with Howard Brent. So close to thumping him, I could practically feel him on the other end of my fist.’

  ‘So what’s happening?’ Lynn said, finding a smile. ‘Am I getting more like you or are you getting more like me?’

  ‘Heaven forbid it’s the former. Overweight and about to be put out to pasture, wouldn’t suit you at all. Anyway, maybe it’s the job that’s changing, not the likes of us.’

  ‘You think I should jump ship before it’s too late? Retrain? My mother always thought I should be a nurse.’

  Resnick sank a little more of his pint.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll adjust. As for me, the sooner I’m out of here the better.’

  ‘Now you’re talking daft.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Where would you go, Charlie? What would you do? You’d be lost without all this.’

  ‘No. A nice little smallholding somewhere. Up in the Dales, maybe. Couple of donkeys and a few dozen chickens for company.’

  Lynn laughed at the thought. ‘Donkeys! You’re the donkey. Any more than a couple of weeks in the country and you come out in hives.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  They picked up two portions of cod and chips on the way home, together with an extra portion of fish for the cats. Lynn did a necessary amount of ironing while Resnick watched part of the Monk DVD she’d bought him for Valentine’s Day. After watching the ten o’clock news, they decided to call it a night.

  This time it was her hand sliding across his chest, her legs pressing up against his, and he did nothing to push them away.

  14

  As senior investigating officer into the Kelly Brent murder, Bill Berry was both being harassed by the media and leaned on by the powers that be, and he, in turn, was leaning on Resnick hard. Resnick’s troops harried and scurried, but to no great effect; their street-level informers, now including Ryan Gregan, came up with next to nothing. Pretty soon, Resnick knew, the likely course was for someone fresh to be brought in to look over his shoulder and scrutinise what had been done, decisions taken, avenues left unexplored. If the force had not still been so short of experienced officers of senior rank, this could well have happened already, sending Resnick, with a certain ignominy, back to supervising street robberies until he drew his pension.

  Well, he told himself, there’s nothing dishonourable about that.

  In a move that smacked, almost, of desperation, they had Billy Alston in again for questioning and again let him go.

  No sooner were Alston’s feet back on the pavement, it seemed, than Howard Brent was ba
ck to rant and rave and lodge another complaint on behalf of his family. At least this time Resnick avoided speaking to him directly.

  The older son, Michael, was interviewed by one of the local television channels, a serious young man, sombrely dressed, talking in reasoned tones of how his sister’s death had torn the family apart and how desperately they needed the closure that conviction of her murderer alone would bring.

  ‘As it is,’ he said, with a barely veiled reference to Lynn, ‘the police seem more preoccupied with protecting their own than they do with unearthing my sister’s killer. And let us be in no doubt, had this murder occurred, not in the inner city, but out in Edwalton or Burton Joyce, had my sister been white and not a young woman of colour, the police, the predominantly white police, would not be dragging their heels as they are.’

  Impressive, Resnick thought, watching. Not just Malcolm X, but a touch of Martin Luther King too. As if Michael Brent had been listening to their speeches on tape, or watching them on DVD. He would make a good solicitor, Resnick was sure, perhaps even a barrister.

  The point he neglected to make, however, Resnick thought, was that Edwalton and Burton Joyce were not so steeped in drugs and guns as the Meadows or Radford or St Ann’s – or if they were, it was a better quality cocaine served as an after-dinner treat, along with the brandy and the chocolate-covered mints, and licensed shotguns used for potting the occasional rabbit in the fields and not turf wars on the streets. Which didn’t mean that colour wasn’t a big part of the difference: colour, race, expectation, employment, education.

  If there were answers, solutions, he didn’t begin to know what they were.