Cold in Hand

by John Harvey

  Karen poured a little milk into her cup. No one, she thought, no man, at least, sent flowers to a woman who wasn’t a close relative without there being some kind of sexual or, at least, romantic undertone. And Daines would be the kind of man who would have reckoned himself quite a player where women were concerned – the way he’d looked her over when she’d entered his office, not lecherous exactly, but not disguising it either, his eyes gliding down from her breasts and back again, the beginnings of a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.

  So had there been anything between himself and Lynn Kellogg? Not impossible, Lynn some little time into a relationship with a somewhat older, staider man. And, if so, did it matter? Matter as far as the investigation was concerned?

  She couldn’t immediately see how. Unless Resnick had found out and, jealous, taken matters into his own hands. Othello and Desdemona. Somehow she couldn’t believe it.

  She had the number of the DS she knew from the Met’s Operation Trident on her mobile and by some small miracle he answered straight off. ‘Karen,’ he said, cheerily, ‘long time no see.’

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you could find your way to doing me a small favour.’

  ‘One good turn, why not?’

  She told him what she wanted.

  ‘Yeah,’ the DS said. ‘I can do that. Make a few calls. We’ve got someone stationed out there more or less permanently. But how urgent we talkin’ here?’

  ‘Soon as you can?’

  ‘Okay. I’ll get back to you.’

  Karen thanked him, promised to meet for a drink when she was back in London, and broke the connection.

  ‘Can I get you anything else?’ the waiter asked, appearing at her shoulder.

  Karen shook her head. ‘Just the bill, thanks.’

  She left the coins on the table.

  If she remembered the layout correctly, it would only take her ten minutes or so to get to the Central Police Station on foot from where she was, a thought nagging her every inch of the way – two shootings, two attempts on the same person’s life within what? A month? How much of a coincidence was that?

  She bumped into Khan as she was entering the building. ‘Anil, thought you were down in London?’

  ‘So I was, boss. Drew a blank.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Went to the address, nobody there. Talked to the neighbours, one of them said they saw the man who lived there leaving two days back, some kind of duffel bag over his shoulder. Haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘And the woman?’

  Khan shook his head.

  ‘You don’t think . . .’

  ‘Inside the flat? I went round the local nick, one of the lads came back with me and forced a window. Nobody inside. A few signs the woman had been living there, but not much to say she still was. The man – Bucur – he left a pile of books, clothes – shaving gear, though, toothbrush, that had all gone.’

  Karen breathed out slowly. ‘All right, get what descriptions you can. Have them circulated – witnesses wanted for questioning – you know the drill.’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  ‘Oh, and Anil, the man charged with Kelly Brent’s murder, Williams, is it?’

  ‘Lee Williams, yes.’

  ‘Who interrogated him?’

  ‘DI Resnick, I think. Catherine was with him part of the time. And Michaelson – or maybe it was Pike.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  It took the office manager scarcely any time to locate the tapes of the interview and a pair of headphones so that she could listen uninterrupted. Resnick had been thorough and methodical, forceful when necessary. Williams was adamant the only reason he’d gone armed was his own protection, the word having come down that several of the St Ann’s gang would be carrying. What else was he supposed to do? And Kelly Brent? The bitch, she got what was coming to her, didn’t she? Like all them black bitches. Got no respect. Not a hint of regret in his voice, not even any real sense of what he had done.

  ‘The police officer,’ Resnick said. ‘She was shot too.’

  ‘Should’ve kept her nose out of it, shouldn’t she?’ Williams replied. ‘That way she wouldn’t’ve got hurt.’

  Resnick had pressed the point a little, but it was obvious that Kelly Brent had been Williams’s sole target and that Lynn Kellogg had simply paid the price for doing her job and putting herself in harm’s way.

  Karen listened to the tape through to the end: other than the fact that Kellogg was the victim in both instances, she could find nothing to link the two shootings.

  She had only just returned the tapes when Mike Ramsden came looking for her, flourishing the morning paper, his face set in a scowl.

  ‘You seen this?’ he demanded, slapping his hand against the offending page. ‘Kid stabbed to death in South London. Lewisham. Running fight along the high street with thirty or more involved. Kicked this one kid in the head and then stabbed him fourteen times. Fourteen fucking times.’

  He dropped the paper down on to the nearest desk.

  ‘That girl who was shot a few days back, outside some bar in Leeds. Chatting up the wrong feller. Died last night. Never regained consciousness. It’s in there, same paper, couple of lines at the bottom of page nine. Fucking country! Going out of fucking control.’

  ‘Take a deep breath, Mike,’ Karen said. ‘Count to ten.’

  ‘Okay, okay. It’s just sometimes . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The whole bloody world seems to be going to hell in a handcart.’

  ‘Meantime . . .’

  ‘Meantime what, exactly?’

  ‘Meantime we do our job as best we can.’

  ‘You think it makes one scrap of difference?’

  ‘I think maybe it keeps hell at bay just that bit longer.’

  Ramsden cocked his head. ‘Know your trouble, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘You’re just a hopeless bloody optimist. Fucking great storm, thunder and lightning, pitch bloody dark and you’ll be standing there under this pathetic little umbrella – it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s just a shower.’

  Karen laughed. ‘All right then, give me something to be optimistic about.’

  ‘Not easy.’

  ‘But try.’

  Ramsden perched on the edge of a desk. ‘We’ve been going back through investigations Kellogg was involved in, a couple worth looking at twice, but nothing that leaps out and hits you. Otherwise, the shoe, the make of trainer, that’s confirmed, but it gets us exactly bloody nowhere. Cigarette ends, the same, probably been there several days before the shooting, thrown from a car, blown in off the road, whatever.’

  Karen made a face. ‘Anything yet back from Forensics?’

  Ramsden shook his head. ‘Backed up.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘They’re saying tomorrow.’

  ‘Without fail?’

  ‘Just tomorrow.’

  ‘And the missing Sierra?’

  ‘Possible Sierra.’

  ‘All right, possible Sierra.’

  ‘Still missing.’

  ‘But we’re checking?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Karen uttered a deep sigh. ‘Jesus, Mike. Where are we?’

  Ramsden shrugged, smiling. ‘Nottingham?’

  30

  Graham Millington had brought a bottle of good Scotch with him, a Springbank single malt, not cheap. After an awkward quarter of an hour or so, he and Resnick sat and chatted easily enough about old times and how things were going now down in Devon, Millington enjoying the police work, but quite vociferous about the perils of living so close to his in-laws, Madeleine’s mother at full throttle, as he put it, being more dangerous than a Kawasaki and sidecar coming at you the wrong way down a one-way street. A jibe based on old-fashioned prejudice and out-of-date mother-in-law clichés, Resnick might have thought, had he not once met the good lady in question, the very thought of it now causing him to duck.


  ‘When she first came to us, you know,’ Millington said,‘Lynn . . .’the bottle far enough down for him to broach the subject without embarrassment, ‘. . . I’ll be honest, I was never sure she was going to make it. Not in CID. Bright, certainly, she was always that. Keen, too. Never one to shirk. But quiet, turned in on herself. Country girl, of course, up from the sticks. And the way the squad room was in those days, before this political-correctness bollocks really took hold, not easy for a woman back then – only one in the team especially, which she was. But then there was that time she stood up to Divine, you remember?’

  Resnick remembered well enough. Mark Divine, now no longer on the force, had been a thickset rugby-playing DC of the unreconstructed kind, never shy when it came to shooting off his mouth, and on this occasion he had been airing his views on the wife of a colleague who’d been suffering badly from post-natal depression. Divine’s callous lack of understanding had reached the point where Lynn had felt compelled to intervene, whereupon he had upped the stakes with a few badly chosen remarks about her love life or the lack of it, the implication being the only way any bloke would fancy her would be if it were pitch dark or if she pulled the proverbial bag down over her head.

  Without hesitation, she had slapped him round the side of the face with force enough to rock him back on his heels, the marks of her fingers standing out clearly on his cheek.

  It had taken Resnick and one of the other officers to stop Divine from retaliating and a strong lecture afterwards to keep him in line. But Lynn had made her point. And more. Maybe it shouldn’t have taken that for her to be accepted, but it had.

  ‘You were a lucky man, Charlie,’ Millington said, ‘you know that, don’t you? Not now, of course, I’d not wish what happened to you on a worst enemy, but back when she took up with you first. A lucky man.’

  Resnick nodded, knowing it for the truth.

  ‘You were a miserable old bugger sometimes,’ Millington said. ‘All those years of living on your own after that wife of yours pulled up sticks and left. Not at work, true, not so much then, but after, standing sour-faced over a pint and then off home with your tail between your legs to feed the bloody cats and listen to some old crone moaning on, one of them jazz singers you’re so fond of, Billie what’s-her-name.’

  He laughed. ‘I could never tell what Lynn saw in you, but she did, and that put something of a smile back on your cheeks, a bit of snap in your walk. Gave you a second chance, Charlie, that’s what she did. Second chance at a bit of happiness. So be grateful. Not now, it’s all too close, too raw, but later. When you can, when you’re able. She was a grand lass and she loved you something rotten, though I’m still buggered if I can see why.’

  He tipped a little more Scotch into Resnick’s glass and then his own.

  ‘There’s a match tomorrow, you know. Thought you might fancy it, ’fore I go back. Be a bit like old times, me and you at Meadow Lane, watching the buggers lose.’

  Maybe, Resnick thought, maybe. Football had been far from his mind. And he was still thinking about what Millington had said – lucky, is that what he was?

  Well, yes, he thought, taking a sip from his glass. Lucky and unlucky both.

  After Elaine had left him for that slippery bastard of an estate agent and argued her way to a divorce, there’d been a couple of short-lived relationships but nothing more and he’d none too fondly imagined keeping his own company for the rest of his life. Cats aside. But then there was Lynn, looking at him now in a different way, and like Millington, he’d wondered what it was she saw in him that was so special. Marvelled at it. Gloried. Spent the first six months in a kind of daze, half-terrified that one morning she would wake up with a start and realise the mistake she’d made, pack her bags and be out the door. And when that didn’t happen, he’d allowed himself to relax, to accept that it was all right, it was real, she was here to stay.

  In seconds everything had changed.

  A moment and she was gone.

  He felt cold again and then warm. At least he hadn’t burst into tears without warning, not in the last few hours he hadn’t. With a sigh, he lifted and drained his glass. Good Scotch or not, he’d have a head like nobody’s business come the morning.

  Out in the kitchen, he made them both cheese on toast with mustard and Worcester sauce, feeding offcuts of the cheese to the cats. Millington insisted on having his with a pot of tea, strong enough to stand a spoon upright in the cup. The spare bed was already made up. He shunted Millington up ahead of him and pottered around the kitchen for a while, clearing up. He entertained the thought of sitting a while longer on his own, listening to – what had Millington called them, one of those old crones? But, finally, he went upstairs instead. If he slept much past four he’d be thankful.

  For the first time in a long while, Resnick’s heart failed to lift as he neared the ground, Graham Millington and himself part of the small crowd turning off London Road and crossing the canal, a bright sky but the air suddenly cold enough to catch their breath. Once inside, Millington, more a creature of habit even than Resnick himself, stood in line for cups of Bovril and a brace of meat-and-potato pies. Their seats were close to the halfway line, some ten or twelve rows back, the grass an almost luminous green, promising something special, almost magical.

  The first fifteen minutes of mistimed tackles and misplaced passes soon gave a lie to that, the crowd saving most of their invective – officials aside – for the perceived shortcomings of their own team. Never bad enough to occasion a chorus of ‘You’re Not Fit to Wear the Shirt’, but close. Not that the visitors were a whole lot better, a mixture of superannuated cloggers and earnest youngsters, none of them showing much wit or ambition, until, the interval not far off, they went close with a twenty-five-yard volley which the Notts goalkeeper did well to tip over the bar.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Millington said. ‘That was a near thing.’ And then, glancing sideways, ‘Come on, Charlie, they’re not playing that badly.’

  Resnick was sitting there, shoulders hunched, tears running soundlessly down his face.

  The second half was better, the team talk seemed to have worked. Instead of being endlessly booted high up into the heart of the defence, the ball was played out wide to the wings and then whipped across, Jason Lee making his presence felt in the goal mouth, elbows and experience counting equally. It seemed as if they must score – a Lee header bounced back off the post, a shot just cleared by an outstretched boot – and then, with less than five minutes to go, there was a melee in the home-goal mouth following a corner, and the ball squeezed over the line.

  Visiting supporters, collected behind the far goal, chanted and jeered. A few of the home fans jeered and gesticulated back, while others, heads down, started to leave. Resnick and Millington, stoics both, waited till the bitter end.

  ‘Nice to know some things don’t change,’ Millington said, as they were walking away from the ground. ‘Still know how to throw three points away just this side of the final whistle.’

  At the station they shook hands. Millington was catching a train down to Leicester, meeting up with another old colleague before travelling back to Devon the following day.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ he said.

  Resnick nodded, forcing a smile. ‘Do my best.’

  Instead of taking one of the waiting taxis, he opted to walk.

  31

  Resnick couldn’t understand the volume of traffic noise drifting off the main road, nor the fact that the light making its way through the curtains was so bright – not until he checked the bedside clock and found it was a few minutes short of eleven o’clock. The first decent sleep he’d had in ages.

  And he was hungry, too.

  After a brisk shower he laid strips of bacon along the grill, whisked eggs in a basin with pepper and salt and a couple of shakes of Tabasco, and while the omelette pan was heating, set the coffee pot on the stove.

  Breakfast over – or had that been lunch? – he called to ask about the release of
Lynn’s body for burial. Given the circumstances and the fact that the cause of death was scarcely open to question, the coroner said he would be happy to arrange for a second post-mortem himself, after which the burial could go ahead. All he needed was an okay from the senior investigating officer, confirming that no arrest was imminent.

  Resnick thanked him and dialled the Central Police Station to speak to Karen Shields, but had to content himself with leaving a message. Bill Berry took his call next, but sounded so awkward and ill at ease that Resnick made an excuse and rang off.

  Nothing for it but to walk into town.

  The indoor market in the Victoria Centre had been in danger of being closed down several times, half of the stalls having fallen empty or changed hands, until a last-minute effort and a lick of paint had just prevented the whole enterprise from collapsing completely. The coffee stall which Resnick had patronised for more years than he cared to remember had an air now of being abandoned and the few customers sitting disconsolately around it looked like passengers stranded at an airport from which flights no longer departed.

  He drank his espresso slowly and read the report of the match in yesterday evening’s paper. Notts’ misery at the last. He could remember when it hadn’t always been like that, but that memory was fading fast.

  His mobile rang so rarely that he failed to realise at first that it was his. Karen Shields was returning his call: if he wasn’t doing anything special why didn’t he come in to the station and she’d bring him up to speed?

  Walking into the building, he felt like a man with the plague. Officers he knew by sight and who knew him at least by name, turned their backs when they saw him approaching and busied themselves elsewhere; others shook his hand and offered condolences without ever once looking him in the eye. Only Catherine Njoroge made a point of seeking him out and asking how he was coping, then listening to the answer as if she cared.

  Karen Shields, he noticed, had pinned a photograph above her desk of a woman he took, from the resemblance, to be her mother, alongside a grainy picture of Bessie Smith downloaded from the computer.