by John Harvey
As soon as she'd left the building she called Ramsden on her mobile phone. "Mike? Any luck, I'll be back around seven. Meet me, okay? The office will be fine."
Thirty-seven
The television news was showing pictures of rivers in flood farther north and in South Yorkshire and out along the Humber estuary, people were trapped in their homes. In East Anglia, the small market town of Louth was nearly swept out past Saltfleet and into the sea. Helicopters rescued the aged and infirm, winching them precariously to hospital. Rowboats, many extemporised from containers or plastic baths, ferried people to safety. Families camped out on roofs. Cats were drowned. Cars abandoned. Houses and shops looted. An off-duty ambulance man, by all accounts a strong swimmer, lost his footing, fell into a normally placid river that had burst its banks, and was swept helplessly away. A bemused toddler celebrated turning three with his parents and two hundred others in a leisure centre, water lapping up the walls as, en masse, they sang "Happy Birthday." The bloated body of Kelvin Pearce was found floating in a flooded used-car lot on the A1 south of Doncaster and went unidentified for three days.
The morning of Lynn's funeral was marked by more heavy rain, relentless, from a leaden sky. The procession of cars heading east from Nottingham was slowed by winds that gusted across open fields and lifted standing water from the surface of the road. Detours, caused by flooding, slowed them further still.
Some twenty miles short of their destination, the rain was replaced by sudden, blinding sun, so that the church, when they first saw it, stood out like a beacon on the hill, its flint-fronted walls reflecting a kaleidoscope of greys and whites and browns.
A low wooden gate with a single iron arch opened onto a gravelled path which led to the church entrance in the west wall of the nave.
Inside, the walls were surprisingly plain, painted a flat greyish white beneath the hammer-beam roof. A pointed arch, the shape and size of the whale's jawbone that Resnick knew well from Whitby's west cliff, separated the body of the church from the choir stalls and the simplest of altars: light filtering through the high window beyond.
Opposite the pulpit, Resnick sat ill at ease in black: black suit, black shoes, black tie, the collar of his white shirt straining against his neck. The wood of the pews had been polished smooth by use and was properly hard and unforgiving against his bones as he sat, cramped and uncomfortable. Across the aisle, Lynn's mother leaned against an elder sister for support, the extended family ranged behind her: a brother scarcely seen in years, aunts and uncles, nephews and cousins-great glowering lads with large feet and hands and awkward eyes-nieces in hand-me-down frocks and borrowed cardigans worn against the cold.
Behind Resnick, the Divisional Commander for Nottingham City and the head of the Homicide Unit talked in low tones, and the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime), present as the representative of the Chief Constable, forbore from looking at his watch. Behind them, filling the pews, sat men and women with whom Lynn had worked-Anil Khan, Carl Vincent, Kevin Naylor-now a Detective Sergeant in Hertfordshire and recently divorced-Sharon Garnett, Ben Fowles. Graham Millington had sent sincere regrets and a wreath of lilies. Catherine Njoroge sat a little to one side, hands folded one over the other, a black shawl covering her head. Jackie Ferris had phoned at the last minute with her apologies.
The vicar was new to the parish, young and earnest and possessed of a slight stammer. He spoke of a life of dedication and service cut short too soon. He spoke of God's untrammelled love. Resnick's eyes wandered to the stained-glass angels, red and green and purple, perched in small lozenges above the east window. Lynn's mother cried. Two officers-Khan and Naylor-along with two of the family, shouldered the coffin, Resnick walking behind.
The ground was sodden underfoot.
As they reached the open grave, the first drops of new rain began to fall.
The vicar's stumbling words were torn by the wind.
Lynn's mother clasped Resnick's hand and wept.
The open sides of the grave began, here and there, to slip away.
More words and then the coffin was lowered into place.
Unprompted, one of the women began to sing a hymn which was taken up by a few cracked voices before petering out to uneasy silence.
When Resnick was given the trowel of fresh earth to throw down upon the coffin, he turned away, blinded by tears.
The family had arranged for a wake in the parish hall, more often used by Cubs and Brownies. Curled sandwiches and cold commiserations, warm beer. He couldn't wait to get away. That night the police would hold a wake back on their own turf and Resnick would show his face, accept sympathy, shake hands, leave as soon as decency allowed.
The first time they had made love, himself and Lynn, it had been the day after her father's funeral, a collision of need that had taken them, clumsily at first, from settee to floor and floor to bed, finishing joyful and surprised beneath a pale blue patterned quilt. After making love again, they had slept, and when Resnick had finally woken, Lynn had been standing by the window in the gathering light, holding one of her father's old white shirts against her face.
Now father and daughter were buried side by side.
The house struck cold when he entered; the sound, as the door closed behind him, unnaturally loud. There was perhaps a third remaining of the Springbank Millington had brought, and Resnick poured himself a healthy shot then carried both bottle and glass into the front room, set them down and crossed to the stereo.
"What Shall I Say?": Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra with vocal refrain by Billie Holiday. He had fought shy of playing this before, but now he thought he could.
The song starts with a flourish of saxophone, after which a muted trumpet plays the tune, Roy Eldridge at his most restrained; tenor saxophone takes the middle eight, and then it's Eldridge again, Teddy Wilson's piano bridging the space jauntily before Billie's entry, her voice slightly piping, resigned, full of false bravado. The ordinariness, the banality of the words only serving to increase the hurt. The clarinet noodling prettily, emptily behind.
As the music ended, tears stinging his eyes, Resnick hurled his whisky glass against the facing wall, threw back his head, and howled her name.
Thirty-eight
At first, the assumption, natural enough, was that Kelvin Pearce had drowned, another victim of the floods. But the pathologist found no trace of water in his air passages or his stomach and the lungs did not appear to have become unduly swollen, and so he concluded that Pearce had almost certainly been dead when his body entered the water. The swelling and the badly wrinkled skin that came from prolonged immersion had at first disguised the gunshot wound at the base of the skull. Though much of the area around the wound had been washed clean, there were enough stippled burn marks around the point of entry to suggest Pearce had been shot with a small-calibre bullet at close range.
His sister from Mansfield carried out the formal identification.
The friend with whom Pearce had been hiding out, in a mid-terrace former council house in Doncaster, told South Yorkshire police that Pearce had seemed almost permanently frightened, forever looking over his shoulder. On one occasion he had ducked out of a nearby pub when two men had entered, legging it across the car park and shinning over a wall to get away.
The men?
One of them had been bearded, he was certain of that; not a big beard, not long, but full, dark. He might have had some kind of scar on his face, but it had all been so quick it was difficult to be certain.
Which side was the scar? Left or right? No, sorry, he couldn't say.
It was Thursday, almost a week after Kelvin Pearce's body had first been found, facedown, butting up against the side of a partly submerged Nissan Bluebird, before the news of his death filtered down to Karen Shields.
"The Zoukas trial, Mike," she and Ramsden in conversation as they walked towards the Incident Room. "More and more it seems to revolve around that. First Kellogg and now one of the key witnesses dead, and the other witness missing."
&nbs
p; "Right," Ramsden said. "And from everything we know, this Zoukas family, they're not just crooks, they're fully fledged gangsters. Bandits. Not so long back, they were shooting up the hills of northern bloody Albania like Wild Bill Hickok." He laughed. "So much for the benefits of the multicultural society."
"What's that got to do with it?"
Ramsden scoffed. "Wholesale bloody immigration. Thought the economy of this poor benighted country depended on it. Making us richer all round."
"For God's sake, Mike!"
"Well, it's not the bloody Krays out there, is it?"
"No, but it could be."
"Christ!" Ramsden shook his head angrily. "You just don't see it, do you? Or rather, you do see it, but you don't want to admit it."
Karen started to walk away.
"No, wait," Ramsden said. "Come on. Look at the facts." She stopped again and turned. "Mike, save me the lecture, okay?"
Ramsden would not be deterred. "Who's running heroin in this country? London anyway? Turks. Turkish Kurds. Ninety percent."
"Oh, Mike!"
"Crack cocaine, Hackney, Peckham, it's your brothers from Jamaica. Extortion, people smuggling, gambling, mostly down to the Chinese. Hong Kong Chinese. And prostitution, trafficking in girls, it's the bloody Albanians. There. That's your multicultural fucking society."
Karen was furious, blazing. "So what's wrong, Mike? Your poor average white British villain can't get a proper piece of it?"
"Yeah, right."
"Bloody asylum seekers, come over here, take our houses, take our jobs and now they're preventing us from making a decent criminal living. That the picture, as you see it?"
"You got it." Ramsden grinned broadly. "On the button."
Karen whirled away, through the Incident Room and into her office. A few moments later, he was there, leaning forward across her desk.
"Fuck off, Mike."
"You've said that before."
"And I'll say it again."
"Just had a call from Leyton police station. Alexander Bucur, Esquire, back in residence. They think most probably since yesterday, but they're not sure."
Karen's eyes brightened. "You've told Anil?"
Ramsden straightened. "He's on his way."
Alexander Bucur opened the front door of the house nervously and then only after Khan had identified himself; he had a tube of glue in his left hand and glasses on the end of his nose, which he adjusted to examine Khan's warrant card.
"Please," Bucur said, "come in. Come upstairs."
At the centre of the table was a model Bucur was in the early stages of making: the framework of a building with a long, sloping roof. Around the table edge were several cutting tools and pieces of balsa wood, with matchsticks, pipe cleaners, cellophane, and tissue paper in open boxes.
"What's all this?" Khan asked pleasantly.
Bucur smiled. "My architecture project. It should have been finished weeks ago."
"You've been away."
"Yes."
"We've been trying to find you."
"Yes, I'm sorry. I was afraid. I-" He shook his head, as if it were difficult to explain.
"Why don't you sit down?" Khan suggested. "Tell me what happened."
"All right." Bucur pulled up a chair and Khan followed suit.
"I'm not sure where to start," Bucur said.
"Detective Inspector Kellogg," Khan said, "she came here on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 6."
"Yes. I telephoned her. Two men had been to the flat looking for Andreea. Andreea Florescu. I think they were the same men who'd threatened her before. She panicked when I told her and she was going to run away without really knowing where, and that's why I called the inspector. To talk to her, make her see reason. But by the time she arrived, Andreea had gone."
"I see." Khan made a note. "So DI Kellogg never got to speak to her?"
"No. But she took it seriously; I could tell. She was worried about what these men might do. She made me promise to call her if I saw them again-" Bucur broke off and looked at Khan. "The next thing I knew, she had been killed. Shot. I was sitting there, where you are now, early the next morning, watching the television news. I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to do. Andreea was missing, and the inspector was dead. I was frightened for my own life. I should have gone to college, as usual, but instead I just packed some things and left. As soon as I could."
"Where did you go?"
Sweat was beading Bucur's forehead. "To stay with some friends first, in north London. Kilburn. But then I went to Cornwall. Andreea has a friend there, you see, from our country, Nadia. She works in a hotel. Andreea had spoken of working there also. I thought that was where she might have gone."
"And had she?"
"No. Nadia had heard from her, though. A phone call. The same day she left here. Saying she was coming to see her."
"When? Did she say when?"
"Soon. She said soon. In a day or two. But she never arrived. And when Nadia tried her mobile, there was no reply." He shrugged. "With me it is the same ever since she left. No signal. Nothing."
"And you've no idea where else she might have gone? No other friends?"
Bucur shook his head. "I have asked-people at the hotel where she worked, a few others. No one knows anything."
"Could she have gone home?"
"Home to Romania?"
"Yes."
"I don't think so. Her mother telephoned here three, no, four days ago. Her little girl-she has a daughter, Monica-she wanted to speak to her. I said Andreea had gone away for a short while with a friend. A holiday. I did not know what else to say."
"Her mother hadn't heard from her either?"
"Not for some time." Bucur pushed back his chair. "I am worried something terrible has happened to her. One of the men who came looking for her-the Serb-he had threatened to kill her. That's why she was so afraid."
"You said 'the Serb'?"
"Yes."
"Why do you call him that? How do you know that's what he was?"
Bucur leaned forward. "When I was describing him to Inspector Kellogg, she knew him. I don't know where from, of course, but she knew him. I think she said he was Serbian. Lazic. Ivan Lazic. I'm sure that was the name."
"Lazic? L-A-Z-I–C?"
"Yes. He has a beard. Dark. And scar on his face. Here." With his finger, Bucur drew a line slowly down the left side of his face.
Khan made a quick sketch in his book.
"If we want to get in touch with you again?"
"I shall be here." He smiled. "Running, it is no good."
Let's hope you're right, Khan thought. He offered Bucur his hand. "Thank you for all your help. If Andreea does get in touch, or if you hear anything, you'll let us know?"
"Of course."
Khan gave him a card. "Good luck with the model."
Bucur smiled, more readily this time. "Yes, thank you." He shrugged. "I'm afraid I am not very good with my hands. All-what do you say? — thumbs and fingers?"
"Fingers and thumbs."
Khan was barely back on the street before he was talking to the Incident Room on his mobile.
Thirty-nine
Outside, the wind was whistling tunelessly around street corners, whipping up last night's debris and throwing it into the faces of passersby. Karen sat in her office, Mike Ramsden and Anil Khan standing at either side of her chair, all three of them looking at the computer screen on Karen's desk. The South Yorkshire Force had just put out a description of someone they wanted to interview in connection with the murder of Kelvin Pearce. No name, but it fitted what they now knew of Ivan Lazic to a T.
"Get in touch with Euan Guest, Anil," Karen said. "He's the SIO up there. Tell him we think we know his suspect's identity. Fill him in as best you can. And while you're on to him, find out if anything more's come through on the gun that killed Pearce."
"This Lazic," Ramsden asked when Khan had gone. "He's what? Czech? Russian?"
"Serbian, apparently."
"To
ugh bastards, the Serbs."
Karen raised an eyebrow. "You'd know, I suppose."
"Saw this programme the other night, the History Channel. Fall of Berlin."
"Your trouble, Mike, one of many, too much television."
"What else'm I going to do, two in the morning?" Karen didn't want to go there.
"If the Zoukas crew are using Lazic as an enforcer, as looks likely," Ramsden said, perching on the edge of Karen's desk, "keeping Viktor Zoukas's sorry arse out of jail, it's got to be a good bet his finger was on the trigger when Kellogg was gunned down."
Karen swung round in her chair, rose swiftly to her feet, and pushed open the door to the Incident Room. Michaelson was just on the way back to his desk from the coffee machine.
"Frank-"
"Yes, boss?"
"The sauna Viktor Zoukas used to manage, somewhere in the city centre."
"Hockley. Closed down for a time and then reopened. Fresh coat of paint, same business."
"Get yourself down there, ask about an Ivan Lazic. Mike'll fill you in."
"Right, boss."
If it turned out Lazic was in Nottingham at the time of Lynn Kellogg's death, the odds on Ramsden's wager would be shortened considerably.
Michaelson had never been into a sauna before; at least, not the kind that were more generally found on seedier streets and offered sensual and relaxing full-body massage, though he knew of several colleagues who were not above paying unofficial visits and availing themselves of the occasional freebie. Neither had he been in the sex shop that occupied the ground floor of the building, offering sex toys and marital aids, adult videos and DVDs, saucy T-shirts and, as the poster put it, dildos to fit every purse. But then, as his sometime girlfriend had pointed out when he'd expressed distaste at the prominence of 35p-a- minute chat lines on which young women promised to help you unzip and unload, in some situations he could be a prude of the first magnitude-especially when he was in training for a big race. Conservation of bodily fluids, as he had tried to explain.
How much this had to with her breaking off their relationship, he had never been sure.