Cold in Hand

by John Harvey

  Lynn had first met her briefly in the line of duty, and then, after she and Resnick had started living together, Jackie had come up to Nottingham on a couple of occasions and stayed, once for a conference on community policing, and once for a meeting of the Lesbian and Gay Police Association, of which Jackie was a member.

  Although she would have been loath to admit it, it had unsettled Lynn when she’d found out Jackie was gay, picturing someone who would be either outlandishly butch or femme the minute she was off duty. Butch, most likely, Lynn thought – she couldn’t picture Jackie in pink frocks and lots of girlie make-up. But when she realised neither to be the case – and found – her other fear – that Jackie was not in the least bit predatory, she’d been able to relax and enjoy her company.

  At Jackie’s suggestion, they met in the Assembly House, a large old-fashioned boozer in the north end of Kentish Town, which, like so many, but with less disastrous results, had modishly reinvented itself by virtue of knocking down a few internal walls and sanding the floors, then adding a decent kitchen where the chef laboured in full view of the clientele.

  At shortly after six, the place was still uncrowded and they sat at a corner table with their backs to the tall, broad windows and the slow-moving rush-hour traffic.

  ‘Sorry about earlier,’ Lynn said, as soon as they were settled. ‘Overtaken by events.’

  Jackie waved a hand dismissively. ‘It happens.’

  ‘Too often.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Jackie took a good pull from her glass. ‘So,’ she said. ‘How’s Charlie?’

  ‘Oh, you know . . . Charlie’s Charlie.’

  ‘Looking forward to retirement?’

  ‘He keeps watching those documentaries about elephants, the ones who, when they know their days are numbered, lumber off into the jungle to die.’

  Jackie laughed. ‘Get out of it, he’ll be fine.’

  ‘You think? I’m not so sure. I can’t see him taking one of those security jobs, like so many do – but I can’t see him being happy just sitting around either. Mind you, with our staffing levels the way they are, they’ll be begging him to stay on.’

  ‘No, get out while the going’s good. Reinvent yourself. That’s what I’m going to do when my turn comes.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What as?’

  ‘A trapeze artist. You know, high wire. Get a job with one of those little touring circuses. Hampstead Heath, Clapham Common, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You are kidding?’

  ‘No, I’m not. In fact, I’ve already started taking lessons.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Yes, from this Hungarian woman who used be in a circus in Russia. She and her partner, they were the Flying Karamazovs. Until he fell and broke his back.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘She’s sixty if she’s a day but still got an amazing body.’

  ‘You sure this is about learning the trapeze?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the older, more experienced lover.’

  ‘You should know.’

  ‘Bitch.’

  Jackie laughed again. ‘So,’ she said, lifting her glass, ‘what was this business you wanted to see me about?’

  Without going into too much detail, Lynn explained as best she could.

  ‘You don’t think there’s any doubt the girl – Andreea? – could be mistaken?’ Jackie asked.

  ‘She seemed pretty certain.’

  ‘And the reason you gave her for his being there, the Customs and Excise guy, that he was simply working undercover – you don’t think that’s right?’

  ‘If the rest of what she says is true, it’s difficult to swallow.’

  ‘I don’t know. If he is undercover and in the place as some kind of punter, he’s got to play along. He can hardly – what did they used to say in the papers in the old days? – make his excuses and leave.’

  ‘I suppose not. But what Andreea said about the girl . . .’

  ‘Hurting her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jackie sighed. ‘Maybe he let himself get carried away, it could happen. Especially if you had leanings that way in the first place. Or maybe she had her own reasons for exaggerating, not telling strictly the truth.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘But not what you want to believe?’

  With a wry smile, Lynn shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Jackie finished her drink and held up the empty glass. ‘Your shout.’

  Lynn made her way to the bar. The pub was busier now, a mixture of people dropping in on their way home from work, old fogeys for whom the place was still a home from home, albeit with new decor, and women who looked as if they’d spent the bulk of the day getting their legs waxed and their highlights retouched, to say nothing of taking on an extra few degrees of tan. Music – there must be, she thought, some kind of ska revival – meshed with the increasingly dizzy conversation.

  The barman who served her was Mediterranean-looking, with dark hair only a touch too long and eyes which brought butterscotch disconcertingly to mind: white T-shirt and blue jeans, neither of which, as far as she could see, left a great deal to the imagination. Fit, wasn’t that the modern term for it? Tasty, some would say.

  ‘Lust at first sight?’ Jackie Ferris said, with a nod towards the bar, when Lynn returned.

  ‘A girl can dream, can’t she?’

  ‘Long as you don’t talk in your sleep.’

  Lynn laughed and spilt beer from her glass as she set it down. She was enjoying Jackie’s company. Enjoying, for a change, being out of the confines of Nottingham and in the big city. The Smoke, did anyone still call it that? Charlie aside.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Jackie asked.

  ‘About Daines?’

  ‘That’s his name?’

  ‘Yes, Stuart Daines. And I just don’t know. If I come out and face him with it, he’ll simply deny it, brazen it out, her word against his. Maybe I’ll ask around. On the quiet.’

  ‘You don’t trust him, that’s pretty clear.’

  ‘He makes me uneasy.’

  ‘Like the guy behind the bar.’

  ‘No, definitely not like the guy behind the bar.’

  Jackie was smiling. ‘I’ll ask around, too. If anything, it’s easier for me than you. Anything I get, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thanks, Jackie.’

  ‘Now, what exactly can we do to get you off with this feller . . . ?’

  20

  On the Monday of that week, a few days before, at approximately fifteen minutes after nine in the morning, a black Vauxhall Astra swung into the lay-by outside the post office on the Loughborough Road and two men – Garry Britton and Lee Williams – jumped out, leaving a third behind the wheel. Britton was black, Williams white; both were carrying guns, a shotgun with sawn-off barrels and a pistol, which they pointed at the line of ten or so mostly elderly customers, ordering them to the floor.

  Britton, wielding the shotgun, shouldered his way through the narrow shop towards the counter, where one of the two staff on duty had already pushed the panic button linking them with the police station less than half a mile away on Rectory Road. Pressing the gun up against the strengthened glass, he ordered both clerks to hand over the money from the cash drawers where they were standing.

  A man in workman’s overalls started to push open the door from the street, saw what was happening, and ducked away.

  ‘Quick! Quick! Be fucking quick!’

  The shotgun smacked against the glass and one of the clerks screamed. Outside, the Astra’s driver was sounding his horn.

  Several of the customers, huddled between the floor and the side wall, were crying; one, a woman in an old-fashioned tweed suit, her grey hair tied back in a bun, was praying loudly.

  ‘Shut it!’ Williams yelled in her face. ‘Fuckin’ shut it!’

  She began to sing instead, a hymn.

  Williams drew back his arm and swung the pistol towards he
r face.

  The car horn was louder now, more insistent, and beneath it the first sounds of police sirens could be heard.

  ‘Out! Out! Get the fuck out!’ Britton snatched an envelope containing some couple of hundred pounds and ran towards the door. Turning to follow him, Williams tripped and half-fell, stumbling out on to the street as the Asian proprietor of the newsagent’s several doors away made a grab at his arm.

  ‘Fuckin’ hero!’ Williams said and fired his pistol from close range, before jumping into the back of the already moving car.

  The Asian collapsed back against the post-office window, blood already staining his white shirt where the bullet had torn through the flesh at his side.

  The exit at the end of the parade of shops was partially blocked and the Astra jumped across a swathe of pavement, narrowly missing a group of children straggling late to school, and skidded out on to the Loughborough Road as a police car approached fast from the opposite direction. The driver threw the Astra into reverse, swerved and, panicking, headed into a side road that would only lead into the Asda car park, the police car following close behind.

  At that hour of the morning, less than a quarter of the places in the car park were taken and the Astra accelerated hard towards the green plate glass of the supermarket front, tyres squealing as it made a tight right turn, hoping to swing back round towards the exit, but now there was a second police car blocking its path and the driver braked again, yanked hard at the wheel and lost control, the side of the Astra bouncing off a parked delivery van and then burying itself, bonnet first, into the side of a lorry loaded with frozen foods.

  Automatic air bags saved the lives of the two men in the front, but held them fast. The third man – Williams – was thrown forwards against the driver, his head striking the side window as he rebounded, jolting the pistol from his hand. He was half out of the door when two police officers grasped his arms and pulled him free, spinning him round and pushing him flat against the side of the car, legs kicked apart and arms stretched wide.

  Nicked, as the saying goes.

  It was Catherine Njoroge who first spotted that the gun used in the raid was similar to that responsible for Kelly Brent’s shooting – a Brocock ME38 Magnum – and alerted Resnick; Resnick who got in touch with the Forensic Science Services lab at Huntingdon and, leaning on past favours, requested that comparisons with the marks on the bullets and cartridge cases from the murder scene be pushed through with all possible speed.

  Meantime, Catherine went meticulously back through the CCTV footage from St Ann’s. There was Lee Williams, clearly visible in one frame, at the inner edge of the crowd just before the shooting started. Williams, beyond a doubt, wearing Radford colours. Together with Anil Khan, she went back to their original sources: Williams was confirmed by three different witnesses as having been in Cranmer Street at the time of the shooting.

  The FSS checks, when they finally came through, late on Friday, showed that the striation marks on the sides of both sets of bullets, the scratches made when the spent cartridges were ejected and the dents in the metal cover caused by the firing pin, were all identical. The weapon used in Kelly Brent’s murder and the post-office raid was one and the same.

  Not only that, a comparison against outstanding marks showed that the gun had been used in two previous incidents: a drive-by shooting in Birmingham the previous year and a post-office robbery in Mansfield just eight weeks before.

  Williams himself had minor juvenile offences against his name; one charge of possessing a firearm that was dismissed. He would have a hard time, Resnick thought, walking away from this.

  Resnick went to the Brent house on Saturday morning, just shy of eleven. This time he had left Catherine Njoroge behind and come on his own. Even with just the three of them there, the room still felt small. The low ceiling and the single, small window didn’t help, nor the furniture, crowded close together.

  The photograph of Kelly Brent on the mantelpiece had been reframed and a piece of dark purple ribbon fastened across one corner; the other family photographs had been placed elsewhere and some of the many cards the family had received stood on either side of Kelly’s picture. There were flowers, slightly faded now, in two tall vases in the empty hearth. Messages of condolence had been pasted in a large, fake-leather bound scrapbook which rested, open, on the low table in front of the TV.

  Despite signs of normal wear and tear, there were no special markers of poverty here, nor affluence either. Normal people, normal lives: one son away at university, one at college, one daughter dead.

  The shadows were dark around Tina Brent’s eyes and her fingers plucked at a stray thread that had come loose from the arm of the chair where she sat.

  Howard Brent – silver-grey sweatshirt, loose-fitting, wide-bottomed trousers, new silver-grey trainers with the distinctive red Nike marking at the sides and a black band around the upper sole – looked at Resnick and then his daughter’s photograph and then the floor.

  It was several minutes since anyone had spoken; since Resnick had said what he had come to say. Brent, for once, not quick with words, taken aback perhaps, surprised, uncertain what response to make, the anger, the wind, knocked out of him by the news, incomplete as it still was.

  ‘I just wanted you to know,’ Resnick said, ‘because of what may have happened, because of what you may have thought before, that Billy Alston was not directly involved in Kelly’s death. We’re confident of that.’

  ‘And this youth now,’ Brent said, ‘in custody. He confess?’

  ‘No,’ Resnick shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But he’s been charged, yeah?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘With murder?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Murderin’ our daughter.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tina Brent let out a sob and her hands went to her face.

  ‘He say why, you know why, Kelly, why he shot her? Why? Why her?’

  Resnick shook his head again. ‘No.’

  ‘But he is guilty, yeah? No doubt?’

  ‘That’s for the courts to decide.’

  ‘Court! Decide!’ Pushing back his chair hard against the wall, Brent rocked to his feet. ‘Some time this year, next year, yeah, we go, me and Tina, each day, listen to some fancy barrister talkin’ ‘bout this an’ that extenuating circumstance, and all the while he sittin’ there, the one who shot her, fired the gun, not sayin’ nothing, smilin’ ‘cause he know the worst can happen he go to prison for what? Fifteen years? Fifteen years and he’s out on parole after ten. Ask you, man, what’s that? Ten years? He what? Not twenty yet? Out here, on the street, free again, not thirty. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and our daughter she ten years dead. Ten years in the cold, hard fuckin’ ground!’

  Fingers in her mouth, Tina Brent made a strangled cry.

  ‘You know how that feel, Mr Resnick? Mr Policeman. You know how that feel?’

  ‘No,’ Resnick said. ‘No.’

  ‘Then hope to Christ you never do!’

  Resnick levered himself up from the settee. ‘An officer will keep in touch. You will be informed of developments, the arrangements for the trial and so on as they occur.’

  He held out his hand and Brent turned away.

  Tina Brent was staring at the wall, tears drying on her face.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Brent,’ Resnick said, and headed for the door.

  Brent followed him outside. Two kids were kicking a ball back and forth along the pavement, making it cannon every now and then off the tightly parked cars.

  ‘You know,’ Brent said, ‘that’s only half of it.’

  Resnick turned.

  ‘Whoever pulled the trigger – Williams, Alston – there was only one person grabbed hold of my Kelly and used her as a shield.’

  Colour showed on Resnick’s face. ‘That’s not . . .’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Not worth the time of day.’

  ‘She’s still gonna pay.’

 
‘She what?’

  ‘You heard. One way or another, she’s gonna pay for what she’s done.’

  ‘Threats against a police officer, that’s a serious business.’

  Brent held out both his arms, underside of his wrists uppermost. ‘Okay, arrest me, why don’t you? Take me in.’

  He laughed as Resnick walked away.

  21

  After a slow start, for Lynn at least, Monday was turning out to be a good day. One of the night staff at the Holiday Inn in Newcastle-upon-Tyne had remembered something he had failed to mention when first questioned: he had seen Dan Schofield – or someone very like Dan Schofield – driving his car back into the hotel garage as he himself was leaving work. Somewhere between six fifteen and six thirty. While he couldn’t be one hundred per cent positive about Schofield, he was certain about the car. One door panel, front offside, a slightly different shade of green than the rest, where at some point it had either been resprayed or replaced.

  ‘Course, by rights,’ the SIO running the investigation told Lynn Kellogg later, ‘I should be more than a bit pissed off at you for making my team look like a bunch of rank amateurs. Not seeing what was under their bloody noses.’

  ‘Just luck,’ Lynn said, though they both knew it wasn’t that.

  ‘Any road, let me buy you a drink after work. If you’re not driving, that is.’

  ‘Schofield’s still to put his hand up. You sure you don’t want to wait till he does?’

  ‘No. He will and when he does we’ll throw a proper party. This is just you and me, quiet, my way of saying thanks.’

  Resnick was at the other end of the bar, standing with Pike and Michaelson and Anil Khan; Anil, Lynn noticed, sticking to his usual lime and soda. She sat with a half of lager, making it last, while the SIO’s conversation moved from speculation as to what might have pushed Schofield over the edge on to considerations of his daughter’s coming wedding, the state of his allotment, and matters in between. When he asked her, nodding towards the bar, what Resnick thought about his impending retirement, she said, ‘Ask him, why don’t you? Ask him yourself.’