Cold in Hand

by John Harvey

  Karen listened for a few moments, head cocked towards the speakers. ‘Who’s this?’

  He told her.

  ‘Not exactly restful.’

  ‘No. I can turn it off if you want.’

  ‘No, leave it. It’s good.’ She grinned. ‘At least, I think it is.’ She cast her eye along the lines of albums and CDs. ‘Always been into jazz?’

  ‘Pretty much. One of the things that keeps me sane. Least, it used to.’

  ‘Lynn was another.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You must be finding it hard.’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Lying bastard.’

  Resnick sniffed and smiled and poured two good measures of Scotch.

  ‘My grandfather, you know,’ Karen said, ‘he was a bit of a jazz musician. Calypso, too. Trumpet, that’s what he played. Trumpet and piano. When he came over to England from Jamaica it was to join this band, King Tim’s Calypso Boys. It didn’t work out too well, I don’t know why. He did go on one tour, I know, to New Zealand, with a band called the Sepia Aces.’ Karen shook her head and gave a wry smile. ‘The All-Black Sepia Aces – that’s how they were advertised. But after that, I think he more or less gave it up, the trumpet. He worked as a carpenter, a joiner, that was his trade. I only ever remember hearing him play a few times.’

  She caught Resnick with a look.

  ‘Andreea Florescu, they found her body.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Leyton, not so far from where she’d been staying. Her throat had been cut.’

  Resnick hung his head. ‘It doesn’t get better, does it?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  Resnick got up and walked to the window, whisky glass in his hand. So far he hadn’t bothered to pull the curtains across and his reflection stared back at him dumbly from the darkness.

  A jerky ascending phrase from Monk’s piano, a rapid tumbling arpeggio and then two quick final notes stabbed out from the keyboard. ‘Sweet and Lovely’. There and gone.

  ‘Lynn used to talk about it,’ Resnick said, turning back into the room. ‘The danger Andreea was putting herself in by coming forward, agreeing to be a witness. She’d promised her that nothing would happen, that she’d be all right. It got to her, the fact she’d been lying.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have felt guilty.’

  Resnick hunched his shoulders. ‘Maybe yes, maybe no. But she did.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the guy who’s handling the investigation, someone I know. Butcher. Chris Butcher. He’s good. I’m going to meet with him and the SIO from the Pearce shooting. Sometime in the next couple of days.’

  ‘When’s the post-mortem?’

  ‘Tomorrow sometime, I think. Early, probably.’

  ‘I’d like to go down.’

  ‘Charlie . . .’

  ‘Oh, not to interfere. Nothing official.’

  ‘I seem to have heard that before.’

  ‘No, I mean it. I’d just like to see her. See the body.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I’m probably not going to be able to explain it very well, but . . . it’s for Lynn, somehow, what she would have wanted. What she would have done.’

  The distrust, the disbelief were clear on Karen’s face.

  ‘Look . . .’ He moved back and sat down, facing her. ‘I won’t say anything, I won’t interfere. The only other thing I might do when I’m down is go and see Bucur, just to see how he’s bearing up, express my sympathy. But that’s all. You have my word.’

  ‘Your word?’ Karen raised an eyebrow appropriately.

  ‘Yes.’

  She tasted a little more Scotch. ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do.’

  For a while, they managed to talk about other things, but after not too long they’d run out of what to say.

  Resnick walked her to the door. When would he ever be able to open it without seeing what he had seen before, the night Lynn had died?

  ‘This operation Daines is involved in,’ Karen said, ‘what I hear – what my bagman hears – I reckon it’s coming to a head any day. Rumours flying round all over the place apparently. Officers in Operational Support have had their leave cancelled, armed response teams, too.’

  ‘Likely read about the rest in the papers.’

  Karen smiled. ‘I dare say.’

  She turned her head at the end of the path. ‘I’ll get back to you about viewing the body.’

  ‘Okay.’ He raised a hand and hesitated momentarily before going back into the house.

  41

  What was the phrase? He had read it somewhere: a cask once used for storing living things. Andreea Florescu – what had once been Andreea Florescu – lay on the stainless-steel table, cold and open eyed. The places where her body had been opened up had been meticulously sewn back, neat stitches, a mother would have been proud. First, she would have been photographed fully clothed, then photographed again as each layer was removed, a slow striptease till she was ready for the pathologist’s loving care, the bone cutters, the scalpel, the saw. All external marks and stains would have been noted, samples taken from her hair, scrapings from beneath the fingernails before they were carefully clipped, swabs from here and there, all this labelled and stored. Before opening the chest cavity, the pathologist would have followed the track of the killer’s knife blade across her neck with his scalpel, centimetre by centimetre, inch by inch.

  Resnick looked down and saw all of this: saw nothing.

  How many such bodies had he seen? How many lives rubbed out?

  Another expression floated past, not quite right: somebody’s mother, somebody’s child.

  Andreea’s daughter, how old had Lynn said she was?

  Three? Four?

  Jesus, Charlie! What was I doing? Making promises like that. Promises I can’t keep.

  Lynn’s voice, a burr inside his head.

  I put her in danger, Charlie.

  He turned away.

  Alexander Bucur had hardly been able to stay inside the flat since he had heard what had happened. Not that that was where he imagined Andreea had been killed, but, in staying there, he saw her everywhere. Resnick knew how this felt.

  They walked, scarcely talking at first, along the High Road and then down towards the River Lea and Hackney Marshes, an expanse of flat open land where goalposts grew like trees and, on bad days, the wind razored sharp into your eyes. Today, despite the water levels being high, the wind had dropped and what few clouds there were hung immovable, like barrage balloons in the greying sky.

  A group of lads, eight or ten of them, young enough they should have been in school, were playing an impromptu game around one of the goal mouths, shouting, arms raised, as they ran. ‘Here! Here! Give it! Give it now! Oh, fuckin’ hell!’

  As the ball was booted back from behind the goal, a kid wearing knee-length shorts and a claret-and-blue shirt with the name Tevez on the back went on a mazey run that ended only when two of the others clattered into him and he went sprawling, the ball running free and across to where Resnick and Bucur were walking, and Bucur, with nice economy of movement, flicked it up on to his instep and kicked it precisely back.

  ‘Could do with you in Notts,’ Resnick said, impressed. ‘Control like that.’

  Bucur smiled. ‘I had a trial once. Back in Romania.’

  ‘Dynamo Bucharest?’ It was the only Romanian team Resnick knew.

  ‘No. Farul. From my home town, Constanta. FC Farul. They are in Liga 1. Not so great. Finish thirteen, fourteen.’ He smiled again. ‘The Sharks, that’s what we call them. The Sharks. Constanta, it is by the sea.’

  They walked on a little further.

  ‘You’ve spoken to Andreea’s family?’ Resnick asked.

  Bucur’s expression changed. ‘Yes. Her mother. The police, they had told her already what happened, but she did not understand. “How can this be?” she kept saying to me. “How can this be?” I did not know what to say. She only knows Andreea was s
tudying here, working in her spare time as a cleaner. She did not know about this other . . . this other work she did, how she would meet such people. It was too difficult to explain.’

  Resnick nodded. They walked on, crossing paths with several people out with their dogs, for the most part bull terriers or similar, short-haired and muscular with flattish heads and broad shoulders, much like their owners.

  ‘Andreea’s body,’ Bucur asked, ‘what will happen?’

  ‘It will be held on to for a while at least, while the investigation continues. Once a suspect has been arrested and his defence team have had the chance to examine the body, then it can be released.’

  ‘Back to Constanta?’

  ‘I imagine so, yes.’

  The ground here was damp and gave easily to the tread. The river wound in front of them, making its way down from Tottenham Hale and the Cook’s Ferry Inn, a famous jazz pub of the fifties and sixties, home for years to a fiery trumpeter called Freddy Randall. Resnick had never been.

  ‘She told me,’ Bucur said suddenly, ‘this man Lazic, what he did. Why she was always so afraid. He took her, with another man, by night to this . . . this place full of rubbish. Refuse – is that the word?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He took her there and made her kneel and then he put a knife against her throat and told her what he will do. He will cut her from here to here.’ Bucur made the gesture with the forefinger of his right hand. ‘He came once to the flat, you know, I told your colleague, your friend, he came asking for her and we fought. Andreea was not there. I tried to be there as much as I could after that, you know, in case, but I could not always and . . .’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Resnick said. ‘You did what you could.’

  ‘No, no. I should have done more, I . . .’

  ‘If their minds were made up,’ Resnick said, ‘you couldn’t protect her all the time.’

  ‘But you, the police, your friend, the inspector, she knew his name and the other policeman also. I told him, that evening . . .’

  ‘Wait. Which other policeman?’

  ‘The one Inspector Kellogg came with the first time.’

  ‘Daines?’

  ‘Yes, Daines.’

  ‘Why did you tell him?’

  ‘Because . . . because when I was worried about Andreea and called Inspector Kellogg on my phone there was no reply, so then I call this Daines – Andreea had his number, both numbers in her room. From Daines there is no answer also, so I leave a message for him to ring back and then when I try Inspector Kellogg’s number again she is there and she agreed to come.’

  ‘But you said you gave Daines the man’s name?’

  ‘Yes. But later. He called back not long after the inspector has gone. I tell him about Lazic then.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He says not to worry. He knows this Lazic, he is watching him. And Andreea, he thinks she will be fine.’

  ‘Did you tell him anything else?’

  Bucur gave a slow, uncertain shake of the head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Nothing about Inspector Kellogg?’

  ‘Only that she had been here, of course. And that he had just missed her, but she had left to catch her train.’

  ‘Her train, you mentioned that?’

  For a moment, Bucur looked puzzled. ‘Yes, her train home.’

  The three detectives met at a service station on the motorway, Leicester Forest East: a small accommodation this for Euan Guest, travelling down from Doncaster, and almost in Karen’s current back yard, but Butcher happy to go the extra yard as long as it was clear the primacy of roles in the investigation was his. Guest was prepared to accept this for now and argue later, whereas Karen, a transplanted Met officer herself and aware of the Met’s resources, thought it was fine.

  Chris Butcher had put on a few pounds since she’d last seen him, faded blue shirt straining just a little over his chinos, jacket buttons left undone. His hair, always dark, seemed to have taken on the first few strands of grey and could have done with a trim; whenever he’d shaved last, it hadn’t been that morning, maybe not even the morning before. Going for the swarthy, Mediterranean look, Karen thought: Italian waiter slash Premier League footballer. For a man of what? – forty? forty-one or -two? – he wasn’t in bad condition.

  His smile when he saw her was quick and, she thought, genuine; quickly in place and quickly gone.

  Euan Guest in the flesh was something of a surprise: younger than she’d imagined from his voice and tall, four or five inches above six foot, a willowy build with a stooped head topped by a thatch of fair hair.

  All three had coffee; Guest a Danish pastry, Butcher burger and chips, Karen abstained.

  ‘Watching your figure?’ Butcher suggested.

  ‘No,’ Karen said. ‘That’s you.’

  Butcher laughed, caught out. He hadn’t been meaning to stare, but the top Karen was wearing acted as a powerful tool to the imagination, and, he would have had to admit, she’d crossed the lascivious part of his mind more than once in the eighteen months or so since they’d worked together on a double murder in Rotherhithe – a father and son shot down in the rear car park of a pub, payback for some back-street philandering, first the father, then the son, then both together, tupping the wife of a former boxing club owner turned scrap merchant and making the mistake of posting their endeavours on YouTube.

  Messy business.

  ‘So,’ Butcher said emphatically, ‘what’ve we got?’

  Guest swallowed down a piece of Danish pastry. ‘The ballistics came in at last on the gun that killed Kelvin Pearce. Same model as the one used in the Kellogg shooting, similar ammo, but definitely not the same weapon. Sorry.’

  ‘Shit!’ Karen said.

  ‘Both shootings,’ Butcher added. ‘Different MO altogether. Not that that rules out other connections.’

  ‘To Zoukas, you mean?’

  Butcher reached into the worn leather briefcase he’d carried in with him and extracted a grey card file; from this he drew four photographs, ten by eights, and laid them on the table.

  ‘Ivan Lazic. One was taken almost eight years back now, the others are more recent. This one here . . .’ he pointed to a slightly blurry shot of two men on a pavement in conversation, probably taken from a passing car, ‘. . . Lazic and Valdemar Zoukas, Wood Green, North London, a year ago.’

  ‘Where d’you get this?’ Karen asked.

  ‘SOCA. Their Intelligence Directorate. Most obliging. At least, an ex-colleague was. Apparently Customs got interested in Lazic when he first came into the country in ’99, claiming asylum, another refugee of the war in Kosovo. Whatever the truth of that is, God knows. There was some supposition, according to the officer I spoke to, that he’d been a member of the Serbian security services, though he claimed to have been with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Who knows? Since being here he seems to have nailed his cloth to the Albanians, so maybe he was telling the truth.’

  ‘Wait up,’ Guest said, raising a hand, ‘this Liberation Army, they’re Albanian?’

  ‘Correct. Fighting for independence from the Serbs.’

  ‘And they were what? The good guys in all this?’

  Butcher made a face. ‘Depends. Both sides accused the other of atrocities, ethnic cleansing, the whole bit. If the KLA was any better or worse than the Serbs who’s to say?’

  ‘And Lazic could have been either.’

  ‘Or both. Exactly.’

  ‘But his connection to these Zoukas characters, that’s confirmed?’

  ‘According to SOCA, he’s been doing their dirty work for some little time. Not that they’re above a bit of nasty themselves, but Lazic, it seems, enjoys it more than most.’

  ‘Then why not lift him?’ Guest said.

  Butcher shrugged. ‘Evidence, probably. Lack of.’

  ‘What we know,’ Guest said, ‘he threatened both Pearce and Florescu before they died. The link to your shooting,’ he added, looking at Karen, ‘seems to me it’
s less clear.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘What we don’t yet have, though,’ Guest continued, ‘any more than, presumably, SOCA do, is enough evidence to be certain if we arrested him we could make it stick.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Butcher loudly, with the air of a magician about to pull a rabbit from the hat, ‘perhaps we do.’

  Karen smiled ruefully. What was it with men, this need to stage a grandstand finish, wait until the last minute of injury time to slot the ball into the net?

  ‘Skin,’ Butcher said, ‘under the fingernails. Andreea Florescu, she put up a fight.’

  ‘We know it’s Lazic’s?’

  ‘Not yet we don’t. But if we bring him in now and there’s a DNA match, that’s Ivan Lazic looking at life inside.’

  ‘Perhaps one of us should go to Wood Green,’ Karen said, ‘wherever it is he hangs out. Excuse me, Mr Lazic, but could you oblige me with a sample?’

  ‘You ask him,’ Butcher said, ‘he probably would.’

  All three dissolved into laughter, Karen as much as the others.

  On the way back down to the car park, Butcher steered her a little to one side. ‘When you’ve finished up in Nottingham, maybe you and me could get together? Drink, something to eat? What d’you think?’

  Karen shot him a look that said, in your dreams, which, as far as Chris Butcher was concerned, was probably true.

  42

  By the time Resnick got back to Nottingham it was dark. Not late, but dark. The last commuters had been travelling with him on the London train, using their mobiles to let their spouses know they would be back within the next half-hour. All journey he’d been tugging at it in his mind, pulling and knuckling it into shape. Daines – Zoukas – Andreea – Lynn. Each time he pushed, some piece would slip out of place and he would worry at it again. In the end it was still imperfect, conjecture not proof, but the basic shape now held.

  A lone busker was still hopefully plying his trade on Lister Gate, a song Resnick barely recognised – Bob Dylan? they often were – sung harshly over the rough chords of a guitar. A couple in a doorway, hip to hip. On the edge of the square, a woman was waiting, pacing slowly up and down in front of the left lion; as Resnick approached, she glanced up at him expectantly then disappointedly looked away. He turned left to walk through the centre of the square and a group of men, laughing loudly, crossed ahead of him between Yates’s and the Bell, shirt tails to the wind.