Cold in Hand (11 page)

"Michaelson and Pike? No, who?"

"Little and Large, remember them?"

"Not often," Resnick said.

"Little and Large without the laughs."

Hard to imagine, Resnick thought.

"Focus," he said into Michaelson's earpiece. "Get to the point."

This just as Pike was saying, "Two days before the Kelly Brent shooting, you tried to buy a gun."

"I did?"

"Trouble with St. Ann's, that's what you said."

"Yeah?"

"You needed a gun. Protection, that what it was?"

Alston shook his head.

"Two days before it happened, Billy. Trouble with St. Ann's, like you said." Pike slammed the flat of his hand down fast against the table. "One girl dead."

Alston blinked.

"Kelly Brent, you know her, Billy?"

"No."

"You didn't know her?"

"I knew, like, who she was. Seen her around, yeah."

"She was what? Fifteen, sixteen?"

"I dunno, man. Didn't really know her, like I say."

"You got sisters, Billy, that right?"

"They got nothin' to do with this."

"How old are they, Billy? Your sisters?"

"I don't see the relevance," the solicitor began.

"Come on, Billy, how old?"

"Eleven an' seven, i'n it?"

"Eleven and seven."

"Yeah. But that ain't—"

"Suppose it had been one of them?" Michaelson said. "How would you feel then?"

Alston stared back at him.

"Easy happen, Billy. Split second, someone out there with a gun."

Alston shifted on his seat, hitched his shoulders and let his arms fall down by his side, long fingers, big hands.

"This little confrontation with St. Ann's," Pike said. "This meeting you had. There was always going to be trouble, right?"

Alston shrugged.

"Billy, you thought there'd be trouble?"

"Nothin' we couldn't handle, i'n it?"

"Nothing you couldn't handle."

"Yeah, 's'right."

"Because you had a gun."

"I never had no gun."

"Two days before, you were out trying to buy one."

"No."

"Pub car park out at Carlton. Half-eleven."

"I don't know no pub out Carlton. I don't never go to no Carlton."

"We've got a witness, Billy."

"Yeah? Well, he's lyin'. Whoever it is, I'm tellin' you, he's lyin'."

"You're not listening, Billy," Michaelson said. "We know you were there and we know why. You were there to buy a gun."

"Bullshit!"

"One hundred and fifty pounds for a handgun and ammunition, that was the deal."

Alston started to say something, then sat back, the beginnings
of a smile on his face. "Say, just say, right, I was there, like you say—"

His solicitor reached out a hand, as if to intervene.

"An' lessay, jus' for the sake of argument, right, I was thinkin' 'bout buyin' this gun."

"Billy," the solicitor said, "I really don't think—"

"Then if you got someone was there, you know I didn't buy no gun, right?"

"Billy—"

"Could be, I was tempted to buy a piece, but then I realise, like you all always tellin' me, that's not such a cool thing to do. So I jus' walked away. Far as I know, ain't no law 'gainst thinkin' 'bout doin' somethin' an' if that's all I'm here for, you wastin' my time an' your own. Aw'right, Mr. Bond?"

"Fuck's sake, Charlie," Bill Berry said. "Little bastard's running 'em round in circles."

Resnick told Michaelson to suspend the interview and allow Alston to take a break. Forty-five minutes later, he went back in there himself, taking Anil Khan with him, still hoping for something positive from the scene-of-crime officers searching the house.

According to Alston, the reason he backed out of the deal over the gun was that he realised it was stupid, get caught with a firearm in your possession, you were looking at serious time. And, no, he still maintained, as far as he knew, none of his crew had gone up to St. Ann's that day strapped. As for the identity of the shooter, he had no idea. No more than the police did themselves.

Resnick knew the clock was ticking down.

Charge him or let him go.

Resnick had been back at his own desk for twenty minutes or so when one of the duty officers rang up from below. "Howard Brent, sir. He's down here now. Wants to see you if he can."

Resnick sighed and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. "I'll come down."

Today Brent was wearing his blue Converse trainers with black jeans and a suede jacket, a white T-shirt with two overlapping gold chains, a gold ring in place of the diamond stud in his ear.

"Mr. Brent, what can I—?"

"You arrest someone for my daughter's murder, and I have to learn this when someone phone me from the paper."

"Mr. Brent—"

"This is my daughter we talkin' about."

"Mr. Brent, if you hadn't been so hostile towards officers engaged in this investigation—"

"Hostile? That's good comin' from you. You callin'
me
hostile."

"If you hadn't persistently refused to have anything to do with the Family Liaison Officer appointed, then you would have been informed in the proper way, using the proper channels. As it is, I can confirm, yes, a suspect has been arrested and is currently being questioned at this station."

"Alston, right?"

"Mr. Brent—"

"What everyone's sayin', Billy Alston. That's what everyone's sayin' on the street."

"A statement—"

"Hey, man!" Brent jabbed a finger towards Resnick's face. "Don't fuck with me. Alston, he here 'cause he killed my daughter, I got a right to know."

Wearily, Resnick shook his head. "Mr. Brent, all I can tell you is this. We are speaking to someone in the course of our enquiries and nothing more. No charges concerning your daughter's murder have been made."

Brent made a tight scoffing sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh.

"If and when that happens," Resnick continued, "you will
be informed. Now please go home. There's nothing you can do here."

"You think? That's what you think, eh? Well, I tellin' you, this gonna get sorted. One way or another. You know that, yeah? You know?"

Resnick turned and walked away.

At four o'clock that afternoon, the report came through from the team that had been searching the Alston house: a small quantity of cannabis aside, nothing illegal had been found. No firearms, no other drugs, no ammunition.

At a quarter past six that evening, Billy Alston was released.

The closer the trial date came, the more it played on Lynn's mind.

She'd been in court to give evidence on more occasions than she could remember: sworn the oath and told, despite the attempts of the defending barrister to throw her off course, the whole truth and nothing but.

She felt nervous, nevertheless.

Always had, always did.

The fear that she might trip up, throw away the case with a careless word, a slip of the tongue, some misremembered fact, let herself and everyone down. As if she were being tested: as if, somehow, she were the one on trial.

"All relative, isn't it?" a colleague had once argued, a young DC who'd taken a philosophy course as part of his criminology degree. "Your truth, another man's falsehood. A matter of perception. Prisms. Nothing's absolute." He'd left the Force after four years and taken a lecturing post at the University of Hertfordshire.

Those who can't hack the real world, teach, Lynn thought. The rest of us dig in our heels and get on with it as best we can. But then, when she heard the stories coming out of the local
schools and academies, she reckoned that kind of teaching was probably real enough.

This was real, too.

Viktor Zoukas, charged with murder.

Culpable homicide. The arcane language was imprinted on Lynn's mind: where a person of sound memory and discretion unlawfully killeth any reasonable creature in being, under the Queen's peace, with malice aforethought, either express or implied, the death following within a year and a day.

It had been a Saturday night, nine months before, an emergency call at close to half past two, the Force already stretched by the usual array of running fights and mass brawls and sudden, singular acts of violence, as the clubs started to disgorge their customers and began the arduous task of counting the weekend's profits and swabbing down the floors.

The call was to a sauna and massage parlour above a sex shop on one of the seedier side streets in the old Lace Market, the caller an alarmed customer who, unsurprisingly, had refused to give his name. When the two uniformed officers arrived only minutes later, despatched from a disturbance they had been attending at an Indian restaurant on the same block, they found several young women sitting on the pavement outside, another slumped, bewildered, against the sex-shop window. A young man in a stained dress shirt and the still-smart black trousers of a dress suit sat on the stairs with his head in his hands. At the top of the stairway, a woman with dyed reddish hair, wearing the same short pink overall as the rest, mascara smeared across her face, was leaning back against the wall, cigarette in her shaking hand.

As the officers moved past her along the narrow corridor, one of the doors near the far end opened abruptly and a man lurched out, stumbled two paces forward, and stopped. He was a little above medium height, broad-shouldered, solid, muscle
turning to fat, a purple shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist, the purple at the left shoulder darkened almost to black. There were splashes of what looked like blood on his face and neck and caught in the dark hairs of his chest. In his eyes, a mixture of anger and surprise. His right hand held a knife, a short, straight blade close against his leg.

"Drop it," the first officer said. "Drop the knife. Now. On the floor. Put it down."

The man's muscles tensed, and in the dim light of the single bulb overhead, the officers could see the movement in his eyes as he looked beyond them towards the stairs, as if seeking a possible way out.

"Down," the first officer said again. "Drop the knife down now."

The man's fingers tightened further around the handle, then gradually opened and the knife landed with a quick, dull sound on the meagre carpet covering the floor.

"Kick the knife over here, towards me. Now, with your foot. Not hard. Towards me, that's it. Okay, now clasp your hands behind your head. No, clasp, clasp, fingers together, like this. Good. Now, get down on the floor. Down. Down, that's right. Now don't move. Don't move until you're told."

The officer nodded to his companion and began to call for backup, and the second officer moved towards the doorway from which the man had emerged.

The room was narrow, little more than a cubicle, with a high, narrow bed to one side, the kind you find in doctors' surgeries, a thin yellowed sheet hanging half on, half off towards the floor. On a small circular table at the head were several pots and plastic tubes of lotion and a single transparent latex glove, pulled partly inside out. Poking out from beneath the corner of the sheet where it brushed the floor was a woman's foot with a fine-meshed gold chain above the ankle and chipped red polish on the toes.

The officer squatted down and used finger and thumb to lift away the sheet.

The woman was on her back, face turned towards the wall, and even in the dim light available, the officer could see that her throat had been cut.

Vomit hit the back of his throat and he swallowed it away.

Steadying his breathing, he let the sheet fall back into place.

Lynn was the first senior detective at the scene, anxious to ensure it was contaminated as little as possible and that vital evidence was preserved intact.

The body.

The presumed assailant.

The knife.

She could conjure up, even now, the mixture of smells in that narrow trenchlike room: cheap baby lotion and stale sweat, spent jism and fresh blood.

Before the man who had been holding the knife was taken away under police guard for treatment, Lynn had established his identity. Viktor Zoukas. Originally, he said, from Albania. The premises were licensed in his name.

Of the five female workers, two were local, two recently from Croatia, their legal status doubtful, one, a student, from Romania. Mostly they were frightened, unwilling to talk, in various stages of shock. One of the local women, Sally, a sometime stripper, some ten or fifteen years older than the rest, was paid extra to take bookings, collect the cash from the customers, keep a weather eye on the girls.

Lynn quickly separated her off from the rest.

"There's not much I can tell you," Sally said.

Lynn waited, patient, while the woman lit a cigarette.

She had heard voices raised, Sally told her, an argument between the dead girl and one of the customers—not unusual with the dead girl, Nina, especially. She'd been about to go and see what was happening when Viktor had stopped her. He
wasn't that often on the premises, not that early, usually only came around to collect at the end of the night, but this time he was. He would go and sort things out, he said. The next thing she knew there was this awful screaming and one of the girls—Andreea Florescu, the Romanian—came running into the reception area, shouting that Nina was dead.

Pandemonium. Customers not able to get out fast enough. Which of them might have phoned the police, she'd no idea. Surprised, to be honest, that anyone did.

Viktor, Lynn had asked, Viktor Zoukas, when all this was going on, people leaving, shouting and screaming, where was he?

Sally didn't know. She hadn't seen him. Still in the room with Nina, perhaps? Who could say?

Lynn had talked then to the other women who worked there, several, she suspected, feigning a worse command of English than was actually the case, but she had got little from them. Andreea, who had raised the alarm, kept her eyes averted when Lynn spoke to her, head mostly angled away.

"Just tell me," Lynn said quietly. "Just tell me what you saw."

Andreea did look at her for a moment then, and the shadow of what she had seen passed across her eyes.

"It's okay," Lynn said. "Later. Not here." And briefly, she touched the back of the young woman's hand.