Cold in Hand

by John Harvey

  Ramsden groaned and headed for the bar.

  36

  At first glance, Detective Chief Inspector Graeme Dixon was as anonymous as the concrete-and-glass building in which his office was housed. Dark suit, pale shirt, plain tie, hair neither too long nor too short, no beard, no moustache, no tattoos or other distinguishing marks, his only adornment the gold band on the third finger of his left hand. The kind of man, seen up close on the tube, or behind the wheel of the car alongside at the traffic lights, who would be briefly noticed and then immediately forgotten. One of the reasons, perhaps, when he had spent more time on the streets, he’d been so effective at his job.

  Karen had come down to London on her own, leaving Mike Ramsden with the squad; her meeting at the Central Task Force aside, it had given her the chance to go back to her flat and check her mail, pick up some new clothes.

  ‘Karen,’ Dixon said, holding out a hand. ‘Graeme. Come on in. Sorry to keep you kicking your heels.’

  There was a recognisable Essex edge to his voice, a brisk professionalism in his manner; his handshake quick and firm and dry.

  He waited until she’d settled into a chair.

  ‘Out on loan, aren’t you? Wild and woolly provinces?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Going okay?’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Did that once,’ Dixon said. ‘When I was a DI. Manchester. Spent as much time watching my back as anything else.’

  Karen smiled. ‘This lot aren’t too bad.’

  ‘Murder investigation, isn’t it? One of ours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  Karen nodded.

  Dixon said. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you? Something to do with that North London operation, your bagman said.’

  ‘Stuart Daines, he was one of the Customs and Excise people involved?’

  ‘Stuart, yes. SOCA now. Why d’you ask?’

  Karen smiled again, almost apologetically this time. ‘I’m fishing around a bit here, and of course you don’t have to answer, but was there ever any suggestion he was less than kosher? Anything about him that gave you any doubts, made you stop and think?’

  ‘Whoa!’ Dixon said, and raised both hands. ‘Wait up, wait up. Just what are we getting into here? This isn’t the time or the place.’

  ‘Bear with me,’ Karen said. ‘Let me try and explain.’

  Dixon listened patiently and, for a moment, when she’d finished, he was quiet.

  ‘Seems to me whatever you’ve got linking Daines to your inquiry is limited at best. In fact, I’d say you had jackshit and were pretty frantically flailing around trying to stop yourself from drowning.’

  ‘As I understand it,’ Karen said, continuing regardless, ‘one of the traffickers arrested walked free without charge.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘One of Daines’s informants?’

  Dixon ventured a quick smile. ‘You don’t expect me to answer that.’

  ‘So, what then? Daines put in a word on his behalf? Maybe something more than that? Some piece of evidence against him getting contaminated, lost?’

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Doesn’t make it right.’

  ‘Look,’ Dixon pushed his chair back from the desk. ‘Don’t get sanctimonious with me, okay? We got a good result. Several dozen weapons taken out of commission, practically a thousand rounds of ammunition. The men arrested went down for a good thirty years between them.’

  ‘And that justifies—’

  ‘You know it fucking does!’

  Karen slowly released a breath before rising to her feet. ‘Thanks for your time. Anything I’ve said – implied – about any impropriety – I know it won’t leave this room.’

  She stood away from her chair.

  Dixon hesitated before he spoke. ‘You may know this or not. From your questions I’ll assume that you do. There’s an operation SOCA and ourselves are currently running together, down here and up in Nottingham. Daines is involved. The whole thing’s on a bit of a knife edge at the moment. Eighteen months watching and waiting, keeping the lines open between ourselves and our colleagues in the Baltic. We think there might be as many as three hundred, three hundred and fifty weapons, several thousand rounds of ammunition. Move at the right time and we get the goods, the suppliers, the middlemen, the whole kit and caboodle. Get it wrong and we stand to lose pretty much everything. All those hours of police work down the drain and another batch of guns out on the open market. A month from now and they could be in the hands of some serious villain taking down a security van on the Ruislip by-pass or a pumped-up fifteen-year-old in South London or Manchester who wants to earn a little respect by putting a bullet in some other kid’s head. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘It seems to me, as far as your murder investigation’s concerned, anything regarding Daines is just so much whistling in the wind. But if things change, if you feel impelled to act in any way that might throw this current operation off course, I’d ask you to let me know first. Give us fair warning.’

  ‘And after?’

  ‘After’s a different matter.’ He held out his hand. ‘You know where to find me.’

  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.’

  37

  The television news was showing pictures of rivers in flood further 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. Row boats, 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 some kind of 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 on to 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 C
ity 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 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 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.

  38

  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 disguised at first 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, face down, 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 said, herself 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.’

  ‘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 Hickock.’ 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 per cent.’

  ‘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 look-in?’

  ‘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 said, grinning 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 nick. 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.’
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br />   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 said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘All right.’ Bucur pulled round 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, the sixth of March.’

  ‘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.’