Cold in Hand cr-11

by John Harvey

  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 had 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 plainclothes 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 found 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 drank 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 break 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.

  Fourteen

  As Senior Investigating Officer into the Kelly Brent murder, Bill Berry was both being harassed by the media and leant on by the powers that be, and he, in turn, was leaning hard on Resnick. 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 back 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 measured 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 afterdinner 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.

  Scrub it all out and start again?

  Increasingly bored and listless, Lynn persuaded the medical officer to declare her fit to resume work and, rather than being assigned to the hunt for Kelvin Pearce, she was pulled in to help out on an investigation into a double murder that had stalled: a twenty-nine-year-old woman and her four-year-old daughter, the daughter smothered with a pillow as she slept, the mother stabbed with a kitchen knife eleven times. To the Senior Investigating Officer, it had looked straightforward, open and shut: the woman and her partner had split up acrimoniously eight months before, since which time she had started a new relationship with another man.

  There was ample evidence to suggest that the father, who had moved out of the family home when the split occurred, had made several attempts at reconciliation, all of which had been rebuffed. Neighbours were aware of numerous rows between the pair, and on two occasions-once in the aisles of the local supermarket and once on the street outside-he had been heard to threaten violence: "If I can't fucking have you, no other bastard will!"

  As the SIO had said, open and shut.

  Except that the father-the obvious suspect-had been on a friend's stag weekend to Barcelona when the murders had occurred. Friday night through to Sunday afternoon. Witnesses from amongst the men he had travelled with, staff at the various clubs and bars they had visited, hotel staff and airline personnel, accounted for practically every minute of his time.

  As accurately as the pathologist had been able to pinpoint it, mother and daughter had been killed in the early hours of Sunday, somewhere between 2:00 and 4:00 A.M.

  When the father had been informed of what had happened on his return, he had broken down, visibly shocked, and wept.

  The only other person potentially involved-the new boyfriend, a fitness instructor at one of the city's health clubs-had been visiting his family in Newcastle upon Tyne; all of them had been out celebrating a sixtieth birthday till late on the Saturday, midnight and beyond.

  Open, but far from closed.

  Lynn read through written statements, watched taped interviews, talking to the detectives working on the investigation. She went out to the house where the murders had taken place, a nea
t semidetached within sight of Bestwood Country Park, and spent time standing silently in the girl's bedroom-an abundance of toys and Miffy posters and cards from her last birthday-and then downstairs in the neat MFI kitchen, traces of blood high in the ceiling corner and across the slats of the window blind.

  Sometimes, visiting the scene, standing there in the silence alone, walking slowly from room to room, gave a sense of what might have occurred. It was something she'd learned from Resnick when she was still a young DC and adopted as her own. But this time there was nothing aside from the obvious, the already known, no shadows stepping away from the walls.

  Her next step would be to reinterview the two men, though, more and more, she was convinced someone else had been involved. A stranger, another lover, a friend.

  She was on her way back to the office when she all but bumped into Stuart Daines as he was leaving the building.

  At first, she thought he was going to walk past, with scant acknowledgement at all, but instead he stopped and turned and smiled hesitantly.

  "Why is it," he said, "whenever I see you, I always seem to be apologising?"

  "Because you're such an arsehole?"

  Daines laughed. "That could be it. There's an ex-wife and two Jack Russells somewhere who'd agree. Marry in haste and repent at leisure, isn't that what they say?"

  "Is it?"

  "You married?"

  Lynn shook her head.

  "But you're… you're with somebody, right?"

  "That's right."

  "Someone here on the Force. I think that's what I heard."

  "Look, I don't see-"

  "How long?"

  "What?"

  "How long have you been together?"

  "That's none of your business."

  "It's just… you know… if you've been together quite a while and still not hitched-" He grinned. "I thought I might have a chance."

  "You're joking!"

  A little self-consciously, Daines laughed. "Yes, I suppose I am."

  "Thank God for that."

  She started to walk away.

  "The girl-" Daines said to her back.

  "Which girl?" Turning.

  "The witness. Andreea?"

  "Andreea Florescu, yes."

  "I'd like to talk to her sometime."

  Lynn's face tightened. "Whatever for?"

  "As I understand it, she worked for Viktor Zoukas for quite a while."

  "So?"

  "So I'd like to show her some photographs, people Zoukas might have met."

  "Here? At the sauna?"

  Daines shrugged. "It's possible."

  "Seems a long shot."

  "They often are."

  "She won't be happy. She might well not even agree."

  "If you asked her-"

  "I don't know."

  "It could be important."

  "Another piece of-what was it? — Jenga?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  Lynn still hesitated.

  "You do know how to get in touch with her?" Daines said.

  "Yes, I know."

  "All right, then. Perhaps you'll give me a call? The next couple of days?"

  Without waiting for an answer, he moved off, leaving Lynn to her thoughts.

  Back home that evening, she and Resnick watched as the bulk of Michael Brent's speech was repeated on Newsnight, followed by a discussion between the head of the Metropolitan Police's Operation Trident, which investigates gun crime within black communities in London, a representative of the Campaign for Racial Equality and the Labour member of Parliament for Nottingham South.

  "Talks a lot of sense, that one," Lynn said. "For an MP."

  "How about Michael Brent? What did you think of him?"

  "Bit different from his father. Doesn't go flying off at the handle. Much more controlled. More articulate, too. Better educated."

  Resnick nodded. "He's articulate, certainly. More so than his brother. But then so's his old man, in his way. Michael just seems, like you say, more in control. As if maybe going off to university or wherever's made a difference."

  "Made him less black, is that what you mean?"

  "No, not really, it's not that. Being black's at the heart of what he's saying."

  "Less ghetto, then? Farther from the stereotype."

  "Maybe," Resnick said. "Maybe he's our best hope. For the future."

  "Michael Brent?"

  "People like him."

  Lynn wasn't sure.

  At a quarter past three, both were awoken by the telephone. Bleary-eyed, Resnick answered first. The Alston house in Radford was ablaze. Two adults and one child were on their way to hospital suffering from second-degree burns and smoke inhalation. Billy Alston had sustained a suspected broken arm and broken leg after falling from a second-floor window.

  Fifteen

  Resnick knew the watch commander well. Terry Brook. They'd first encountered one another ten or twelve years before, the commander then a leading firefighter in charge of the rescue tender, Resnick the DI on call, the fire engulfing several of the old warehouse buildings along the canal-something bizarre about the ferocity and seemingly unstoppable speed of the flames so close to so much water, their reflection on the lightly moving surface of the canal a compulsive arsonist's delight.

  It had been the fourth such fire in nine months, all of them amongst industrial buildings long abandoned by British Waterways or what would then have been British Rail. The first was put down to carelessness: kids, most likely, or dossers sleeping rough, a fire started for warmth and allowed to get out of control. After the second incident, the Fire Investigation Officer detected a shape and purpose, a characteristic burn pattern along the edges of the boards, the presence of petrol vapour in the air, a charred box of matches close to the point where the fire had begun.

  It had been Terry Brook who had spotted the youth first, a gangly fourteen-year-old with glasses and the slightest of stutters; the lad hanging around near the tender, asking questions, telling Brook how he'd like to join the Fire and Rescue Service when he'd finished college, either that or become one of those investigators employed by the big insurance companies.

  "A gas chromatograph, is that what they use to figure out what made it all go up so fast? GC/MS, is that what it's called? Something like that?"

  Brook said he wasn't sure, but he could introduce the lad to someone who was.

  When they'd searched the boy's room, they'd found a battered history of the British Fire Service, purchased from some local charity shop or car-boot sale, and a nearly new copy of Images of Fire, borrowed from the central library and never returned.

  Brook turned now from where he was standing and shook Resnick's hand, the front of the Alston house on its way to being little more than a charred shell, residents on both sides evacuated and standing, some of them, with blankets round their shoulders, watching, as if it were all part of some reality-TV show.

  "Everyone got out okay?" Resnick asked.

  "Far as we know."

  "Accidental, you think?"

  "Always possible. Too early to tell." He looked Resnick in the face. "You got reason to think otherwise?"

  "I might."

  The two men had met not infrequently over the intervening years, shared a jar in this or that pub or bar. Terry Brook-originally Brok-had come over from Poland with his family in the early seventies, several decades after Resnick's own parents, who had been driven out of their homeland in the early years of the War. This back when Poles were still a relative novelty in Britain and signs in supermarket windows advertising POLISH goods sold here were yet unthinkable.

  Brook supported the other one of the city's two soccer teams, couldn't stand jazz, and his ideas of adventurous cuisine didn't extend much beyond having sauce as well as mustard with his pie and chips, but somehow he and Resnick found a quiet ease in one another's occasional company, each of them still, to some small degree, strangers in a now-familiar land.

  Resnick told him about Billy Alston and his pr
esumed connection to the death of Kelly Brent, about the possibility of her father or some member of the family taking the law into their own hands.

  "Well, I tellin' you, this gonna get sorted. One way or another. You know that, yeah? You know?"

  "Be a while," Brook said, "before we can get in there, take a proper look around."

  "Soon as you turn up anything, you'll let me know?"

  "First thing."

  They shook hands again and Resnick went back to his car. At that time of the morning, not yet properly light, St. Ann's was no more than minutes away. Mist hung low over the Forest Recreation Ground as he drove past, the trees along the upper edge darker shapes amidst the prevailing grey.

  Howard Brent came to the door in a T-shirt and a pair of hastily pulled-on jeans.

  "What the fuck now?"

  "There's been a fire in Radford. Where Billy Alston lives. I thought perhaps you knew?"

  Brent shook his head.

  "Billy's in Queen's. Broke his leg jumping from an upstairs window to escape the blaze. Arm, too."

  "Shame."

  "Yes?"

  "Shame the bastard didn't burn."

  Nice, Resnick thought. "You can account for your whereabouts between midnight and three A.M.?"

  "Yeah, I was down Radford chuckin' petrol bombs." Brent laughed. "No, man, I was home here in my own bed." He cupped his genitals and squeezed lightly. "Ask Tina an' she tell you. Know what I'm sayin'?"

  The news of the fire and Billy Alston's injury seemed to have improved his mood considerably.

  "Got to thank you," Brent said, as if reading Resnick's mind. "No matter what pass between us before. Ain't every mornin' the police knock me outta bed with good news."

  This cheery, Resnick thought, no way his alibi isn't going to hold.

  And so it would prove.

  Anil Khan and Catherine Njoroge went round later that morning and took statements. Friends had called at the house on their way back from the pub and had stayed, drinking and, as Brent admitted, passing round a little weed, until close to one o'clock. Later, maybe, than that. Not so long after the friends left, Brent and his wife had gone to bed, if not immediately to sleep.