Cold in Hand (27 page)

"Daines—it's possible. Likely." A wry smile crossed Resnick's face. "He sent her flowers. Lynn. When she came out of hospital. The Kelly Brent business."

"He knew her well, then?"

"They'd met, some conference or other."

Karen looked at him, another question on her lips, but let it ride.

"I had better go," she said.

"You'll keep in touch," Resnick said. "Let me know."

"Of course."

Her mobile rang as she was getting into the car. Howard Brent had caught a Virgin Atlantic flight from London Gatwick to Jamaica on Sunday, March 4, two days before Lynn Kellogg was murdered.

Karen had called Catherine Njoroge over that afternoon, Catherine one of several detectives who had been reviewing the CCTV footage and pleased at any excuse to take a break.

"Howard Brent, you've been to the house, right?"

"Once, yes. With DI Resnick."

"Good. This time you can come with me."

Tina Brent took her time coming to the door, and when she did, she took one look and shook her head. "If you're selling bibles, I've got one already."

Tina wearing loose sweatpants with a broad stripe down the sides and a V-necked short-sleeved top. If she recognised Catherine, she gave no sign.

"We're here to talk about your husband," Karen said, identifying herself.

"Again? I told one of your lot already. I got no idea where he is."

"Fine," Karen said. "Now you can tell me."

They followed her inside. From the look of things, Tina had taken it into her head to give the house a bit of a spring cleaning and run out of steam partway through. The room into which
she led them was airless and smelled of too many cigarettes. Karen noticed the photograph of the dead girl on the mantelpiece and flowers close by it that were starting to droop and fade, petals in the hearth.

"This is all about that policewoman who was shot, yeah?" Tina said, a definite edge to her voice.

Karen said that yes, it was.

"All I can say, it's a shame you never took as much trouble when my Kelly was killed. Didn't put yourself out then, did you?"

"Mrs. Brent," Catherine Njoroge said, "I don't think that's true."

Tina looked at her as if she were beneath contempt.

"Your husband," Karen said, "according to what you've said, he just left, no excuse or explanation, no note, nothing?"

"Yeah. Right."

"He didn't give you any indication—"

"Jesus! How many more times? That's Howard, right? The way he is. He's done it before and he'll do it again." She reached for the packet of cigarettes resting on the arm of the nearest chair. "One time he didn't come back for five fucking years."

"You're not worried, then? About where he might be?"

Tina sneered. "If I worried about everything that bastard got up to, I'd've killed myself long ago."

She lit up and drew hard on the cigarette, holding the smoke down in her lungs.

"Your husband, he's originally from Jamaica?" Karen asked.

Tina gave her a look. "What of it?"

"He's still got contacts there, then? Friends? Family?"

"Friends, yes, 'course he has. Family, but I don't think they've spoke in years."

"And you think that's where he might be? Visiting these friends in Jamaica?"

"Visiting friends in bloody Timbuktu, for all I know."

"According to our information," Karen said, "your husband boarded a flight to Jamaica last Sunday. Montego Bay."

"Then you already know, don't you? Why keep pesterin' me about it?"

"We thought you might be able to tell us exactly where he was. Where he might be staying. So that we could make contact."

"You're joking, right?"

"A number where he could be reached."

Tina's laugh splintered into a brittle cough. "I'm the last person he'd give any bloody number to. Out there with some sodding baby's mother, most likely, never mind his own kids back here. Spent more time with Kelly, brought her up proper, set some kind of example, she might not be fuckin' dead."

Anger twisted her tight little face.

Karen thought she wasn't going to get any further; aside from maybe jolting Tina Brent a little, she wasn't sure if she'd got anywhere at all.

"If, by any chance," she said, "you do speak to him—if, for whatever reason, he gets in touch, please tell him we want to talk to him. If he wasn't involved in any way in DI Kellogg's death, then we can eliminate him from our enquiries and move on. Okay?"

Tina sucked in her cheeks still farther.

"Tina, okay?"

"Yeah, okay."

They were on their way to the front door when Catherine thought to ask Tina whether or not Marcus was at college that day.

"Not this afternoon," Tina said. "He's fillin' in at his dad's shop in Hockley. But you'll be wastin' your time askin' him anything. He knows even less'n I do."

"Catherine, you go and talk to him," Karen said once they were outside. "I ought to get back to the office."

The shop was in one of the narrow streets leading off Goose Gate, not far from the sauna and massage parlour where Nina Simic had been murdered the year before. The door was open
out on to the pavement and Catherine recognised the music that was playing: Augustus Pablo's
King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown.
A few years back, she had gone out with a teacher on a graduate-training programme who had played it all the time.

The interior was dark and crowded: row after row of albums and 12-inch singles along both side walls, CDs racked at the centre. Posters on the walls. Marcus stood behind the counter wearing an oversize T-shirt with the logo will fuck for drugs writ large in white letters.

Appealing, thought Catherine.

There were no other customers.

Marcus looked at her with the beginnings of a smile.

A moment later, he cut the volume on the stereo enough to hear the sound of his own voice.

"Like this, yeah? King Tubby? How 'bout this? You seen this?" He lifted a CD from where it lay on the counter. "New. Essential Dub. Fourteen tracks, i'n it? Traditional, fusion, hardcore. Virgin, HMV, cost £6.99. Minimum. Yours for a fiver. Okay?"

Head cocked a little to one side, he held it towards her.

"I don't think so. But thank you."

"No? What you lookin' for, then?"

"Benga, you have any of that?"

"Bangra?"

"No, no. Benga. It's from East Africa, where I come from. Kenya. Suzzana Owiyo, she's one of my favourites. Jane Nyambura, too—Queen Jane."

Marcus looked at her, uncertain.

"Your father," Catherine said, "we'd like to get in touch with him."

Marcus's face screwed up into a frown.

Catherine held out her warrant card, but he scarcely gave it a glance. "Your father, we thought you might know where he was."

"What's this all about, then? This about Kelly gettin' shot?"

"In a way."

"Thought that was all sorted," Marcus said.

"It is. Mostly."

She looked at him and he looked away, turning the stereo down, then up again so that the sound filled the shop, the bass reverberating off the walls.

Catherine continued to stare at him, unperturbed, until he turned the music back down.

"Thank you," she said.

Marcus shuffled nervously behind the counter.

"Do you know where he is? Your father? It's quite important that we speak to him."

"Jamaica, i'n he?" Marcus said.

"You know where? Where he might be staying?"

"Jokin', right? How should
I
know?"

"You're his son."

Marcus snorted. "Ask Michael, why don't you? Tell anyone, that's who he's gonna tell. Not me. He don't trust me with anythin'."

"I'm sure that's not true."

"No?"

Catherine looked around. "He trusts you with this."

"Yeah? I'll tell you how much he trusts me. End of the day, weekend, say, I've been workin' here, he'll come in, ask if I've cashed up, and when I say yeah an' tell him what it is, the total, right, he opens the cash desk, this in front of me, right in front of my mates, shamin' me, and counts it all again himself, every one fuckin' p. And you think he's gonna tell me where he is when he don't want no one to know?"

"I'm sorry," Catherine said.

Marcus gave her a hard stare. "What you got to be sorry about?"

Early evening, Karen went to the pub with Michaelson and a few more of the team, stood a round, left some money behind the bar, and set off with Mike Ramsden to get something to eat.
Someone had recommended an Indian restaurant close to the square, unprepossessing enough from the outside for Ramsden to compare it to the Wimpy Bars of his pimply youth. "Fat plastic tomatoes full of dodgy sauce on all the tables, you'll see."

Thankfully, he was wrong in just about every respect.

True, the setting was plain, the walls largely unadorned, no fuss or furbelows, the service without pretension, but the food ... the food, they both agreed, was excellent.

Ramsden waved a popadom. "Best Indian since I was last down Brick Lane."

She eyed him sceptically. "When were you ever down Brick Lane?"

Ramsden grinned. "You don't know, do you? The kind of cosmopolitan life I lead. Hobnobbing with our Muslim brothers."

Sometimes, when he and Karen were together, he would adopt the tones and prejudices of a dyed-in-the-wool Cockney oik. It was a tricky line to tread, and there had been times, one or two, when he had veered dangerously close to overstepping the mark.

"Shut up," Karen said, "and pass me the spinach."

Earlier in the day, Ramsden had joined Frank Michaelson in reinterviewing the taxi driver who had driven Lynn Kellogg home from the station.

There had been no one else on the street when he had dropped Lynn Kellogg off; he was certain of that. No one outside the house. As soon as she was out of the cab he'd driven off. A fare waiting, Mapperley Plains.

"Time's money," he said. "You know what I mean?"

"What about the shots?" Ramsden had asked. "Two shots, close together. Surely you'd heard those?"

The cabdriver shook his head. "If I did, I thought it was a car backfiring. Didn't give it any mind."

Pressed, he confirmed there had been a car parked down on the right, dark, he thought. Dark blue or black. Sierra? So many
cars nowadays, they all look the same. But he thought it was a Sierra.

"You think?" Ramsden had pushed him. "You think or you're sure?"

"It was dark."

"I know. We know."

"I couldn't swear to it."

"You don't have to swear. All you have to do is be certain. Certain about what you saw."

"All right, then, it was a Sierra."

"You're sure?"

The danger was, as Karen reminded Ramsden later, push too hard and what the witness gives you is what they think you want to hear. But, in the absence of a great deal else, they would go with the Sierra. The new number-plate-recognition software that was linked to Traffic would help them to trace any such vehicles that had been in the vicinity thirty minutes either side of the murder.

Recanvassing the neighbours had yielded little new.

The Peugeot had been struck off their list as a possible getaway car when one of the youths who'd borrowed it for a little joyriding came reluctantly forward after watching the news, anxious to clear himself of any involvement in a fatal shooting.

The partial shoe print that had been lifted had a quite distinctive studded sole—an Adidas trainer, almost certainly, the oddly named ZX 500 Animal—but knowing that and having nothing yet to match it to didn't get them very far at all.

FSS were still running tests on the bullets and cartridge cases, but the promised report had yet to arrive.

Progress was slow.

"Brent's old lady," Ramsden asked, tearing off a piece of naan to wipe round his plate, "that kid of hers—you believe them about not knowing where he is?"

Karen sighed. "Who knows?"

They had tried contacting Michael Brent in London, but so far to no avail.

"But on balance?" Ramsden persevered.

"I don't know, Mike, I really don't."

"You haven't got any contacts out there yourself?"

"Not the kind that'd be useful, no. Operation Trident, though, back in the Met, their Intelligence Section's got pretty good contacts with the Jamaican police. I can pull a couple of favours from this DS I know."

"I'll bet."

"Shut it!"

Ramsden laughed and raised his hands in surrender. "Wouldn't hurt to ask if they've flagged anyone likely coming into the country round about the time of the shooting." He winked. "Always assuming your favours go that far."

"Your mouth's going to get you in a lot of trouble one day."

Ramsden winked. "I wish."

Treading the line, treading the line.

Karen's serviced apartment was in a converted hospital building on The Ropewalk, overlooking the centre of the city, and not much more than a five-minute walk from where she and Mike Ramsden had had dinner. Sand-coloured walls, neutral carpeting, everything just this side of pristine. In the living room there was a pair of wicker chairs that seemed, oddly, to have strayed in from a conservatory, and a two-seater settee, upholstered in black, that looked smart rather than comfortable. On a low table in front of the settee, the management had left a bottle of red wine and two glasses, the second glass in case, presumably, she struck it lucky. The bed, she was pleased to see, was a decent size and furnished with white linen; a single, deep-red cushion to match the twin lamps at either side. The bathroom was serviceable but small, the kitchen area likewise.

Karen found a corkscrew and opened the wine, an Aussie Shiraz rich enough to live with the aftertaste of her Indian meal. For some little time she stood at the window, glass in hand, looking out, letting the thoughts of the day jostle for space in her mind, the faint hum of the city pierced every now and again by the urgency of a police siren or the sound of an ambulance hurrying to an emergency. She wondered about Resnick and whether he was alone and assumed that he was, picturing him wandering heavily, lost, from room to room. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have the person you loved shot down more or less in front of your eyes and failed. What was that song Bessie Smith used to sing? Something about waking up lonely, cold in hand.