A Darker Shade of Blue (16 page)

Most of this information Lynn Kellogg amassed over the following days and weeks, piecing together local evidence with what could be gleaned from national records and HM Customs and Excise. And long before that, before the end of that first attenuated conversation, she realised she had seen Eileen before.

‘Charlie,' she said, phoning him at home. I think you'd better get over here after all.'

*

The first time Resnick had set eyes on Eileen, she'd been sitting in a basement wine bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking Bacardi and Coke, her hair redder then and falling loose around her shoulders. The harshness of her make-up, in that attenuated light, had been softened; her silver-grey top, like pale filigree, shimmered a little with each breath she took. She knew he was staring at her and thought little of it: it was what people did. Men, mostly. It was what, until she had taken up with Terry Cooke, had paid her way in the world.

The sandwich Resnick had ordered arrived and when he bit into it mayonnaise smeared across the palm of his hand; through the bar stereo Parker was stripping the sentiment from ‘Don't Blame Me' – New York City, 1947, the closing bars of Miles' muted trumpet aside, it's Bird's alto all the way, acrid and languorous, and when it's over there's nothing left to do or say.

‘You bastard!' Eileen had yelled later. ‘You fucking bastard! Making out you're so fucking sympathetic and understanding and all the while you're screwing me just as much as those bastards who think for fifty quid they can bend me over some car park wall and fuck me up the arse.'

A nice turn of phrase, Eileen, and Resnick, while he might have resisted the graphic nature of her metaphor, would have had to admit she was right. He had wanted to apply pressure to Terry Cooke and his burgeoning empire of low-grade robbers and villains, and in Eileen, in what he had misread as her weakness, he thought he had seen the means.

‘Leave him,' he'd said. ‘Give us something we can make stick. Circumstances like this, you've got to look out for yourself. No one would blame you for that.'

In the end it had been Terry who had weakened and whether it had been his fear of getting caught and being locked away that had made him pull the trigger, or his fear of losing Eileen, Resnick would never know. After the funeral, amidst the fallout and recriminations, she had slipped from sight and it was some little time before he saw her again, close to desperate and frightened, so frightened that he had offered her safe haven in that same big sprawling house where he now lived with Lynn, and there, in the long sparse hours between sleeping and waking, she had slid into his bed and fallen fast asleep, one of her legs across his and her head so light against his chest it could almost have been a dream.

Though his history of relationships was neither extensive nor particularly successful, and though he prized honesty above most other things, he knew enough never to have mentioned this incident to Lynn, innocent as he would vainly have tried to make it seem.

He stood now in the doorway, a bulky man with a shapeless suit and sagging eyes, and waited until, aware of his presence, she turned her head.

‘Hello, Eileen.'

The sight of him brought tears to her eyes. ‘Christ, Charlie. First Terry and now this. Getting to be too much of a fucking habit, if you ask me.'

She held out a hand and he took it, and then she pressed her head against the rough weave of his coat, the too-soft flesh beneath, and cried. After several moments, Resnick rested his other hand against her shoulder, close to the nape of her neck, and that's how they were some minutes later when Lynn looked into the room through the open door, then looked away.

‘What did she have to say for herself?' Lynn asked. They were high on the Ropewalk, the light breaking through the sky, bits and pieces of the city waking south and west below them.

‘No more, I dare say, than she told you,' Resnick said.

‘Don't tell me all that compassion went for nothing.'

Resnick bridled. ‘She'd just seen her bloke shot dead alongside her, what was I supposed to do?'

Lynn gave a small shake of the head. ‘It's okay, Charlie. Just teasing.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.'

‘Though I do wonder if you had to look as if you were enjoying it quite as much.'

At the end of the street they stopped. Canning Circus police station, where Resnick was based, was only a few minutes away.

‘What do you think?' Lynn asked. ‘A paid hit?'

‘I doubt it was a couple of local tearaways out to make a name for themselves. Whoever this was, they'll be well up the motorway by now. Up or down.'

‘Someone he'd crossed.'

‘Likely.'

‘Business, then.'

‘Whatever that is.'

Lynn breathed in deeply, drawing the air down into her lungs. ‘I'd best get started.'

‘Okay.'

‘See you tonight.'

‘Yes.'

She stood for a moment, watching him walk away. Her imagination, or was he slower than he used to be? Turning, she retraced her steps to where she'd parked her car.

Much of the next few days Lynn spent accessing and exchanging information on the computer and speaking on the telephone, building up, as systematically as she could, a picture of Mikhail Sharminov's activities, while forensic staff analysed the evidence provided by Scene of Crime.

At the start of the following week, Lynn, armed with a bulging briefcase and a new Next suit, went to a meeting at the headquarters of the Specialist Crime Directorate in London; also present were officers from the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, as well as personnel from HM Customs and Excise, and observers from the Interpol team that was carrying out a long-term investigation into the Russian Mafia.

By the time the meeting came to a halt, some six hours and several coffee breaks later, Lynn's head was throbbing with unfamiliar names and all-too-familiar motivations. Sharminov, it seemed, had been seen as an outsider within the Soviet diaspora; as far as possible he had held himself apart, relying instead on his contacts in the Far East. But with the increased capability for downloading not only CDs but now DVDs via the Internet, the logistics of his chosen field were changing, markets were shifting and becoming more specialised. There was a burgeoning trade in hard-core pornography which certain of Sharminov's former compatriots were keen to further through the networks he'd established. For a price. It wasn't clear whether he had resisted on moral grounds or because the price wasn't right.

Eileen was questioned at length about Sharminov's business partners and shown numerous photographs, the faces in which, for the most part, she failed to recognise. One man, middle-aged, with dark close-cropped hair and eyes too close together, had been to the house on several occasions, hurried conversations behind closed doors; another, silver-haired and leonine, she remembered seeing once, albeit briefly, in the rear seat of a limousine. There were others, a few, of whom she was less certain.

‘Did he seem worried lately?' they asked her. ‘Concerned about business?'

‘No,' she said. ‘Not especially.'

Perhaps he should have been. The silver-haired man was Alexei Popov, whose organisation encompassed drugs and pornography and human trafficking in a network that stretched from the Bosporus and the Adriatic to the English Channel, and had particularly strong links with the Turkish and Italian Mafia. Tony Christanidi was his go-between and sometime enforcer, the kind of middle-management executive who never left home without first checking that his two-shot .22 Derringer was snug alongside his mobile phone.

The line back through Christanidi to Popov was suspected of being behind three recent fatal shootings, one in Manchester, one in Marseilles, the other in Tirana.

‘Would they carry out these shootings themselves?' Lynn had asked.

‘Not usually. Sometimes they'll make a deal with the Turks or the Sicilians. You do one for me, I'll do one for you. Other times, they'll simply contract it out. Usually overseas. Someone flies in, picks up the weapons locally, junks them straight after, twelve hours later they're back on the plane.'

‘So they wouldn't necessarily be English?'

‘Not at all.'

‘The two men who shot Sharminov, the only witness we have swears they were English.'

‘This is the girlfriend?'

‘Eileen. Yes.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘What?'

‘Why they didn't kill her too.'

‘You don't think she could have been involved?'

‘In setting him up? I suppose it's possible.'

They questioned Eileen again, pushed her hard until her confidence was in shreds and her voice was gone.

‘I don't think she knows anything,' the National Crime Squad officer said after almost four hours of interrogation. ‘She was just lucky, that's all.'

She wasn't the only one. Good luck and bad. In the early hours of the morning, almost two weeks and two days after Mikhail Sharminov was murdered, there was a shooting in the city. At around two in the morning, there was an altercation at the roundabout linking Canal Street with London Road, a Range Rover cutting across a BMW and causing the driver to brake hard. After a lot of gesturing and angry shouting, the Range Rover drove off at speed, the other vehicle following. At the lights midway along Queen's Drive, where it runs beside the Trent, the BMW came alongside and the man in the passenger seat leaned out and shot the driver of the Range Rover five times.

The driver was currently in critical condition in hospital, hanging on.

Forensics suggested that the shots had been fired from one of the same weapons that had been used to kill Mikhail Sharminov, a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson.

‘It could mean whoever shot Sharminov was recruited locally after all,' Lynn said. ‘Didn't see any need to leave town.'

They were in the kitchen of the house in Mapperley, Saturday afternoon: Lynn ironing, a glass of white wine close at hand; Resnick putting together a salad with half an ear cocked towards the radio, the soccer commentary on Five Live.

‘Well, he has now,' Resnick said, wondering why the bottle of walnut oil was always right at the back of the cupboard when you needed it. Neither the driver nor passenger of the BMW had so far been traced.

‘You think it's possible?' Lynn said.

Resnick shook a few drops of the oil over rocket and romaine and reached for the pepper. I think you're on safer ground following the gun.' He broke off a piece of lettuce to taste, scowled, and began ferreting for the Tabasco.

‘Don't make it too hot, Charlie. You always do.'

‘Assume they've flown in. Birmingham, Leeds-Bradford, East Midlands. There's a meeting with whoever's supplying the weapons, prearranged. After the job, either they're dumped or, more likely, handed back.'

‘Recycled.'

‘I could still tell you which pub to go to if you wanted a converted replica. A hundred in tens handed over in the gents. But this is a different league.'

‘Bernard Vitori,' Lynn said. ‘He's the best bet. Eddie Chambers, possibly. One or two others. We'll start with Vitori first thing.'

‘Sunday morning?' Resnick said. ‘He won't like that.'

‘Disturbing his day of rest?'

‘Takes his mother to church. Strelley Road Baptists. Regular as clockwork.' Resnick ran a finger round the inside of the salad bowl. ‘Here. Taste this. Tell me what you think.'

They followed Vitori and his mum to church, thirty officers, some armed, keeping the building tightly surrounded, mingling inside. The preacher was delighted by the increase in his congregation. Sixty or so minutes of energetic testifying later, Vitori reluctantly unlocked the boot of his car. Snug inside were a 9mm Glock 17 and a Chinese-made A15 semi-automatic rifle. Vitori had been taking them to a potential customer after the service. Faced with the possibility of eight to ten inside, he cut a deal. Contact with the Russians had been by mobile phone, using numbers which were now untraceable, names which were clearly fake. Vitori had met two men in the Little Chef on the A60, north of Arnold. Leased them two clean revolvers for twenty-four hours, seven hundred the pair. Three days later, he'd sold one of the guns to a known drug dealer for five hundred more.

No matter how many times officers from Interpol and NICS showed him photographs of potential hit men, Vitori claimed to recognise none. He was not only happy to name the dealer, furnishing an address into the bargain, he gave them a likely identity for the driver of the car. Remanded in custody, special pleading would get him a five-year sentence at most, of which he'd serve less than three.

‘Bloody Russians, Charlie,' Peter Waites said, sitting opposite Resnick in their usual pub. ‘When I was a kid we were always waiting for them to blow us up. Now they're over here like fucking royalty.'

Sensing a rant coming, Resnick nodded non-committally and supped his beer.

‘That bloke owns Chelsea football club. Abramovich? He's not the only one, you know. This Boris, for instance – what's his name? – Berezovsky. One of the richest people in the fucking country. More money than the fucking Queen.'

Resnick sensed it was not the time to remind Waites that as a dedicated republican, he thought Buckingham Palace should be turned into council housing and Her Majesty forced to live out her remaining years on her old age pension.

‘You know how many Russians there are in this country, Charlie? According to the last census?'

Resnick shook his head. Waites had been spending too much time in Bolsover library, trawling the Internet for free. ‘I give up, Peter,' he said. ‘Tell me.'

‘Forty thousand, near as damn it. And they're not humping bricks for a few quid an hour on building sites or picking cockles in Morecambe fucking Bay. Living in bloody luxury, that's what they're doing.' Leaning forward, Waites jabbed a finger urgently towards Resnick's face. ‘Every third property in London sold to a foreign citizen last year went to a bloody Russian. Every fifteenth property sold for over half a million the same.' He shook his head. ‘This country, Charlie. Last ten, twenty years, it's turned upside fucking down.' He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.