by Harvey, John
‘And then, of course, there was the Libyan fiasco, the less said about which the better.’
‘But money was coming in,’ Resnick said. ‘Even if only in dribs and drabs. We picked up rumours about it, locally, all the time.’
‘Where’s there’s a will, Charlie. People prepared, for whatever reason, to turn a blind eye. So, yes, of course, it happened. Sixty thousand pounds in hard cash, for instance, we know made its way into the country from Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, the last leg of the journey by train to the NUM’s headquarters in Sheffield. And, for quite a while, members of the CGT, the largest of the French unions, would come over to Folkestone regularly on the ferry carrying the maximum amount of permitted currency, hand it over to some courier or other and hop back again across the Channel on the same boat.’
‘While you did what? Sat back and watched?’
A quick shake of the head. ‘We passed on what information we had. Names, places. Times and dates when we had them, which wasn’t so often. We had people placed to give us the inside track, but whoever was organising the money grew canny, didn’t make it easy. And what the NUM had on their side was an almost endless supply of volunteers. Carrying round suitcases and cardboard boxes, some of them, containing more money than they could hope to earn in a lifetime. If it all reached its destination, who’s to say? No one was exactly keeping accurate records and with all that money sloshing round . . . Well, I leave it to your imagination.’
He glanced at his watch.
‘Is that what you’re doing, Charlie, following the money?’
‘Not exactly.’
He told him their suspicions about Jenny Hardwick couriering union funds; picking up donations in London from person or persons unknown and carrying them back to north Notts, where, in all likelihood, they would be handed over to a third party who would convey them the remainder of their journey.
‘Eminently possible, Charlie. Probable, I’d say. Sitting in second class with anything up to ten thousand in a suitcase that last got used on a day trip to Skegness.’
‘And if it didn’t arrive . . .?’
‘Who was to say?’ Prior raised a well-turned eyebrow. ‘If money went missing en route, they weren’t exactly going to go to the police.’
49
BACK HOME, RESNICK fixed himself a sandwich, made coffee, fed the cat, found the CD of Spike Robinson playing Gershwin and set it to play while he relaxed in the armchair. He’d phoned Catherine from the train and it had been engaged; tried again after returning home and been shuffled on to voicemail both times. For whatever reason, she was lying low. No matter, nothing that couldn’t wait till morning.
Somewhere in the middle of ‘Somebody Loves Me’ he closed his eyes. By the time ‘How Long Has This Been Going On’ had come to an end, the saxophone’s breathy obligato sliding down over a bank of strings, coffee or no coffee, he was asleep.
Waking to silence other than Dizzy’s gentle snoring, and mindful of the cat’s arthritic bones, he lifted him from where he lay curled in his lap and placed him carefully back on the chair, switched off the CD and took himself to bed. No sense fighting the inevitable.
At three in the morning – five minutes past by the bedside clock – he woke with a start.
A car backfiring?
The same dream.
Nightmare.
His breathing was loud in the room. Adrenalin pumping. Face, shoulders slippery with sweat.
How much longer would this go on?
Barefoot, he crossed the room.
Outside, it was as dark as city centres deigned to get. Something moving in the street light’s shadow; a fox trotting along the far side of the road, tail bushed out, oblivious to whoever might be watching.
Resnick let the curtain fall back into place.
Went back to bed.
After thirty minutes of twisting and turning, he got up again and went downstairs; poured away the unfinished coffee from the night before and made fresh. When he’d retired he’d been given a fat book of photographs by William Claxton, Jazzlife. Propping it across his lap, he turned the pages. Gerry Mulligan, in deep shade, at the piano, only his baritone saxophone, temporarily set aside, picking out the light. Donald Byrd, travelling uptown on the A train towards Harlem, touching the mouthpiece of his trumpet to his lips, while behind him in the carriage, a middle-aged white man, wearing an extravagantly banded trilby hat, turns to watch.
Looking in the wrong places, is that what they’d been doing? Himself and Catherine? Thinking to find a motive for Jenny Hardwick’s murder in high emotion; an outburst of anger, lust, love. Maybe it was not that at all. Something colder, more calculating instead.
What had Matthew Prior said? More money than they could hope to earn in a lifetime.
Is that what you’re doing, Charlie, following the money? He’d said that, too.
They hadn’t – not pre-eminently – but maybe they should.
Bank accounts, credit card records stretching back thirty years – were they still available? It seemed doubtful and, even if they were, it would take more than just a phone call to access them, he knew that well enough. Nothing straightforward or simple, channels to go through, but worth the effort all the same.
But this was what he’d missed, he realised, the sniff of something catching fire, an idea, a new avenue to explore.
Restless, he showered, dressed and paced the floor.
Left with the first leavening of light.
McBride was in the office before him. ‘Bit of luck last night.’
‘Don’t tell me. The Jags got the winning goal under floodlights, second minute of injury time?’
‘Geoff Cartwright – RCMP have finally tracked him down. Place called Humboldt. Near Saskatoon? Recently retired from working for the city’s compost-collecting programme. Officer I spoke to asked me to email over a list of questions. They’ll set up an interview on Skype from the local RCMP station. Just a matter of fixing a time. Could be as early as this afternoon.’
‘Our afternoon or theirs?’
‘Theirs, our evening.’ McBride treated Resnick to his crooked grin. ‘Bloody Mounties. Always get their man, eh?’
‘So it seems.’
Resnick had known an inspector in the Notts force who’d gone out to Canada and joined the RCMP. Brzozowski. Polish descent like himself. Good policeman, good detective. Resnick had liked him. Would have bet good money he’d more often than not got his man, too.
Good money . . .
‘John, there’s one more thing . . .’
He intercepted Catherine in the car park, enjoying a cigarette before the start of her day.
‘I tried calling you last night . . .’
‘I know, I’m sorry. Met a girlfriend and went to Sinatra’s. Probably drank a little too much wine. Fell fast asleep almost as soon as I got home.’
‘Me, too, more or less. And without the wine.’
‘So how did it go? Meeting up with your spook friend?’
Resnick filled her in.
‘Casts a new perspective,’ Catherine said. ‘Worth exploring, certainly. Tends to rule Barry Hardwick out, though, rather than in. Not exactly big-spender material.’
‘Depends how much was involved.’
‘Have to be enough to kill somebody for, if what you’re suggesting is correct.’
‘Ten thousand pounds – let’s suppose, for sake of argument, that’s what Jenny might have been carrying. That’d be worth – I don’t know – two and a half times that now, possibly three. Worth taking a risk for, thirty thousand. Back then, especially.’
‘But murder?’
‘I’ve known people killed for a lot less and so have you. A bottle of cider or the price of a wrap.’
Catherine stepped away from the car.
‘Derek Harmer, from the Swann investigation, the guy in Hull. He was in Full Sutton between eighty-three and eighty-nine. So that rules him out. Persons of interest passed on from the Donna Crowder inquiry, we’ve now g
ot whittled down to four. It would be nice if whatever names Cartwright can give us were to match, but I’m not holding my breath.’
‘This remove, he might not be able to remember names at all.’
Catherine smiled. ‘Thanks, Charlie. Always on the bright side. What I like about you.’
‘I knew there had to be something.’
She aimed a mock punch at his shoulder and together they went into the building.
Geoff Cartwright had weathered well; something in the Canadian climate or way of life had left him, even in the less-than-perfect Skype image, looking fit and healthy, a good few years younger than his actual age. His native accent, when he spoke, only occasionally breaking through that of his adopted country.
In response to McBride’s emailed request, he’d earlier supplied a list of people he could remember working with him at 20 Church Street. Five names – after all that time it was all he could remember, all he could dredge up from a long-forgotten past.
‘Come out here, you make a new life, that’s what it’s all about. Why you’ve come. Try hanging on to the past and somehow it’s like you’re marooned, you know. I’ve met people out here like that, Brits, a few – like they’re in some kind of limbo. Easier for me in a way, I guess, no close family, not left alive, never married, no kids. Friends, I suppose, a few I missed, at first, anyway – Howard, for instance – look, you’ll pass on my best – Howard and Megan, is it? – but you make new ones, don’t you? It’s what you do.’
There were three of them sitting round the screen: Catherine, Resnick, McBride.
Catherine asked him about each of the names he had provided; names that had already been passed into the system, were being checked against the National Police Computer. Cartwright added what detail he could, but it was precious little.
‘Barry Hardwick,’ she said. ‘You knew him, I suppose?’
‘Barry, yeah. From the pit. Jenny’s husband. Gutted when I heard what’d happened to her. Lovely girl, she was. And the circumstances – course I never heard anything about it, never made the papers over here, first I knew was when the sergeant told me. Gave me a chill, I don’t mind telling you, thinking when I was laying that last lot of concrete what was underneath. Jeeze! Doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘Barry, though, did he ever lend you a hand? The work you were doing?’
‘Church Street? No. No, never.’
‘And you don’t have any recollection of him hanging round the property at all?’
‘No. Hey, listen, you don’t think . . .’
‘He and Howard, they weren’t particular friends?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
Someone behind him said something they couldn’t properly hear, watching, and Cartwright turned his head to reply.
‘Geoff,’ Resnick said, ‘there’s something I wanted to ask.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘When I was talking to Howard, he said he and his family went away over the Christmas period, is that right? Is that how you remember it?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Megan’s folks, was it? Something like that.’
‘And you stayed home, at the Vale? Worked on the extension?’
‘Most of the time, yeah.’
‘Most of the time?’
‘Went up to see my old man. Just for the day. My mother, she’d already passed. He was living up in Seaton Carew, outside Hartlepool. Ended up staying over. Christmas Eve, it would have been, when I got back.’
‘You’re sure of that? It’s all a long time ago.’
‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Last Christmas I saw my old man. Not likely to forget.’
‘And the work on Church Street, was that finished before you left to visit your father?’
‘Not quite. I’d promised myself I’d get everything done and dusted before going, but in the event, never quite made it. Hard core down okay, insulation, and I ran out of time. Left boards across it overnight, reckoned I’d lay the concrete when I got back next day. Which I did.’
‘And nothing had been interfered with while you were away?’
‘Not as far as I could see.’
‘But it could have been?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Would it have been possible, for instance, for someone else to have removed the insulation, dug up the hard core and then replaced it in such a way as you’d never know?’
Cartwright shrugged, pulled a face. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. Yes. As long as they knew what they were doing. Not difficult. And you think . . .’ He shook his head. ‘God, doesn’t bear too much thinking about, does it?’
Catherine took her time. ‘One final thing, Geoff, and thank you for your patience, but we have a list of names of our own. Only short, don’t worry. I’d appreciate it if you could take a look at them, see if they ring any bells.’
‘In relation to the building work, you mean?’
‘That especially, yes.’
She typed in the names, pressed enter, and they appeared in the message box at the bottom of Geoff Cartwright’s screen.
They followed his expression as he scanned the list quickly, then looked again at each one, giving it some thought before dismissing it and moving on. Thinking again, not quite decided, looking back.
‘This name here, down at the bottom. Steven Rowland. There was a Steve put in a couple of shifts, I remember. Didn’t think of him before.’
‘But you think that could be him? Rowland?’
‘Could be. Don’t suppose I ever knew his last name. Just one of the lads out on strike, you know, looking for a bit of cash.’
‘And he was what? Local?’
Cartwright shook his head. ‘From the Vale? No? Sheffield way, maybe. Down from Yorkshire, certainly. Picketing, you know. Palled about with a ginger-headed lad, I remember. Can’t summon up his name for love nor money.’
‘And this ginger-headed lad,’ Catherine asked, keeping her expectations under control, ‘did he help out at Church Street, too, along with his mate?’
‘May have done. Might well. I remember him being around, like I say, but any more than that . . .’ He smiled. ‘All a long time ago.’
Ginger-haired lad from Sheffield way: they could summon up a name even if Cartwright couldn’t. Danny Ireland, had to be. How many red-headed Yorkshire miners were there likely to be in Bledwell Vale at the same time, after all? Danny Ireland, who had – how had Edna Johnson put it? – trailed round after Jenny like a needy dog.
Danny and Steve.
Catherine allowed herself a smile.
Steve Rowland had been brought in for questioning as part of the Donna Crowder investigation, initially because he’d been seen with Donna’s boyfriend of the time, Wayne Cameron, driving him around town the evening she was murdered. When it turned out that he’d gone out with Donna himself previously, and that he’d once been named in an alleged assault against another former girlfriend, he had come into consideration as a possible suspect. But there had been no forensic evidence to link him to the crime, no proof that his car had been used again later that evening, and an alibi placing him at a lock-in at one of the local pubs till the early hours had proved difficult to break.
Maybe now it was time to look again.
It didn’t take Vanessa so many minutes to come up with an address. He’d moved, but not moved far. The Rivelin Valley area of Sheffield. McBride made a quick call to the local nick: person of interest in an ongoing murder inquiry living in their area. Thirty minutes or so away along the A57.
50
TWO DAYS A week they run a luncheon club for the elderly and Jenny helps out when she can; hurrying home to collect Brian from Linda’s and then maybe getting a bit of washing done before Colin and Mary get back from school; Mary, like as not, with Nicky in tow. Then it’s setting her thoughts to what they were all going to eat later; seeing what kind of a mood Barry is in before letting him know there’s a meeting at the Welfare that evening, will he just keep an eye on the kids before going out for a
pint himself later? She’ll get back as soon as ever she can.
Turns out, everything’s fine. Hunky-dory.
Mary’s got a gold star for a drawing she’s done of a cat in class: big and black and beautifully shaded; so good, in fact, Jenny can scarce bring herself to believe Mary’s done it all herself, except she swears that she has. Cross my heart and hope to die. And if Colin’s scored even half the goals he claims, kicking around in the playground, Leeds United scouts will be knocking on the door any time soon.
Even Barry’s in a good mood for once, talk of a Christmas bonus that might be wishful thinking on someone’s part, but might almost as well be true. God knows, he thinks, they’re due something for all the grief they’ve been taking, day in and bloody day out, months now. It’s not been so bad for him, because of Jenny, he’d be the first to admit that. But some of his workmates – car tyres slashed, bricks through the windows, rotten eggs and worse stuffed through the letter-box. Got so he thinks scab might just as well be his middle name.
‘Go on, duck. You go. Set world to bloody rights, eh?’
She needs no second bidding.
The meeting seems to go round in circles, Jenny feels, the same niggling points being argued about over and over. Not that there’s been any doubt about the main items. Hasn’t been for some time now. The kids’ party will be held on the afternoon of Saturday the 22nd, starting at 3.30. Peter Waites has agreed to dress up as Santa, one of the others on the committee has promised to borrow his wife’s fancy dressing gown and come as a Middle Eastern magician – more bad conjuring tricks, Jenny reckons, than Tommy Cooper – and two of the lads are down to run the disco. Then it’s Christmas dinner there at the Welfare on the day itself.
Thanks to the almost overwhelming generosity of others there’ll be food and presents enough to go round.
Danny’s standing just across the street when she emerges, duffel-coat collar up, cigarette cupped in the hand down by his side, street light just catching the colour of his hair.
Jenny hesitates for a moment, before turning sharply away.
