Cold in Hand (35 page)

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.

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 at first disguised 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, facedown, 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 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 Hickok." 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 percent."

"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 piece of it?"

"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 grinned 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 police station. 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."

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 suggested. "Tell me what happened."

"All right." Bucur pulled up 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, March 6."

"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."

"Where did you go?"

Sweat was beading Bucur's forehead. "To stay with some friends first, in north London. Kilburn. But then I went to Cornwall. Andreea has a friend there, you see, from our country, Nadia. She works in a hotel. Andreea had spoken of working there also. I thought that was where she might have gone."

"And had she?"

"No. Nadia had heard from her, though. A phone call. The same day she left here. Saying she was coming to see her."

"When? Did she say when?"

"Soon. She said soon. In a day or two. But she never arrived. And when Nadia tried her mobile, there was no reply." He shrugged. "With me it is the same ever since she left. No signal. Nothing."

"And you've no idea where else she might have gone? No other friends?"

Bucur shook his head. "I have asked—people at the hotel where she worked, a few others. No one knows anything."

"Could she have gone home?"

"Home to Romania?"

"Yes."

"I don't think so. Her mother telephoned here three, no, four days ago. Her little girl—she has a daughter, Monica—she wanted to speak to her. I said Andreea had gone away for a short while with a friend. A holiday. I did not know what else to say."

"Her mother hadn't heard from her either?"

"Not for some time." Bucur pushed back his chair. "I am worried something terrible has happened to her. One of the men who came looking for her—the Serb—he had threatened to kill her. That's why she was so afraid."

"You said 'the Serb'?"

"Yes."

"Why do you call him that? How do you know that's what he was?"

Bucur leaned forward. "When I was describing him to Inspector Kellogg, she knew him. I don't know where from, of course, but she knew him. I think she said he was Serbian. Lazic. Ivan Lazic. I'm sure that was the name."

"Lazic? L-A-Z-I-C?"

"Yes. He has a beard. Dark. And scar on his face. Here." With his finger, Bucur drew a line slowly down the left side of his face.

Khan made a quick sketch in his book.

"If we want to get in touch with you again?"

"I shall be here." He smiled. "Running, it is no good."

Let's hope you're right, Khan thought. He offered Bucur his hand. "Thank you for all your help. If Andreea does get in touch, or if you hear anything, you'll let us know?"

"Of course."

Khan gave him a card. "Good luck with the model."

Bucur smiled, more readily this time. "Yes, thank you." He shrugged. "I'm afraid I am not very good with my hands. All—what do you say?—thumbs and fingers?"

"Fingers and thumbs."

Khan was barely back on the street before he was talking to the Incident Room on his mobile.

Outside, the wind was whistling tunelessly around street corners, whipping up last night's debris and throwing it into the faces of passersby. Karen sat in her office, Mike Ramsden and Anil Khan standing at either side of her chair, all three of them looking at the computer screen on Karen's desk. The South Yorkshire Force had just put out a description of someone they wanted to interview in connection with the murder of Kelvin Pearce. No name, but it fitted what they now knew of Ivan Lazic to a T.

"Get in touch with Euan Guest, Anil," Karen said. "He's the SIO up there. Tell him we think we know his suspect's identity. Fill him in as best you can. And while you're on to him, find out if anything more's come through on the gun that killed Pearce."

"This Lazic," Ramsden asked when Khan had gone. "He's what? Czech? Russian?"

"Serbian, apparently."

"Tough bastards, the Serbs."

Karen raised an eyebrow. "You'd know, I suppose."

"Saw this programme the other night, the History Channel. Fall of Berlin."

"Your trouble, Mike, one of many, too much television."

"What else'm I going to do, two in the morning?" Karen didn't want to go there.

"If the Zoukas crew are using Lazic as an enforcer, as looks likely," Ramsden said, perching on the edge of Karen's desk, "keeping Viktor Zoukas's sorry arse out of jail, it's got to be a good bet his finger was on the trigger when Kellogg was gunned down."

Karen swung round in her chair, rose swiftly to her feet, and pushed open the door to the Incident Room. Michaelson was just on the way back to his desk from the coffee machine.

"Frank—"

"Yes, boss?"

"The sauna Viktor Zoukas used to manage, somewhere in the city centre."

"Hockley. Closed down for a time and then reopened. Fresh coat of paint, same business."

"Get yourself down there, ask about an Ivan Lazic. Mike'll fill you in."

"Right, boss."

If it turned out Lazic was in Nottingham at the time of Lynn Kellogg's death, the odds on Ramsden's wager would be shortened considerably.

Michaelson had never been into a sauna before; at least, not the kind that were more generally found on seedier streets and offered sensual and relaxing full-body massage, though he knew of several colleagues who were not above paying unofficial visits and availing themselves of the occasional freebie. Neither had he been in the sex shop that occupied the ground floor of the building, offering sex toys and marital aids, adult videos and DVDs, saucy T-shirts and, as the poster put it, dildos to fit every purse. But then, as his sometime girlfriend had pointed out when he'd expressed distaste at the prominence of 35p-a-
minute chat lines on which young women promised to help you unzip and unload, in some situations he could be a prude of the first magnitude—especially when he was in training for a big race. Conservation of bodily fluids, as he had tried to explain.

How much this had to with her breaking off their relationship, he had never been sure.

He pressed the bell and, walking in, climbed the stairs.

Neither of the two young women sitting on a dilapidated settee in the first room paid him more than scant attention. To the left, seated behind an L-shaped counter, an older woman with a head of brittle curls and the reddest lipstick Michaelson could recall seeing outside of a billboard advertisement treated him to a professional smile.

A word from her and the couple on the settee livened themselves up and showed interest: one, darker skinned, had longish hair held back with a broad red band; her companion was petite and blonde and showed ragged teeth when she smiled. They were both wearing slightly grubby button-through tunics with, as best as Michaelson could judge, little else underneath. Without wishing it, he could feel himself becoming aroused.

Turning quickly back to the counter, he took out his warrant card.

"I'm Sally," the lipsticked woman said. "Can I help?"

"It's just a few questions," Michaelson said.

The young women sat back down and resumed thumbing through old copies of
Grazia
and
Hello!

Sally lit a cigarette and offered one to Michaelson, who shook his head.

"Ivan, yes," she said in answer to his question. "He comes up once in a while. From London. Ever since Viktor ... you know. Hangs around for a day or so. Checking I'm not fiddling the books." She shivered involuntarily. "Nasty bastard. I don't like him. Gives me the creeps."

"He's not here now? Nottingham, I mean?"

"Not as far as I know. No, haven't seen him in a while, tell the truth. Good couple of weeks it must be."

"You remember when? I mean, when exactly?"

Sally gave it some thought. "No, but two weeks is about right. That was when Amira arrived." She gestured towards one of the women on the settee. "Brought her up with him in the car. Two weeks, can't be more. I tell you what, around the time that policewoman was shot, that's when. All over the news, weren't it?"

"You're positive that's when he was here?" Michaelson asked.