Cold in Hand (36 page)

"Yes, pretty much." Sally flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. "You ever catch anyone for that?"

"Not yet."

Sally leaned back in her chair. "She was in here, you know. The night that Nina was killed. Sat talking to her, just like I am to you now. Terrible, something happening like that. Young, weren't she?"

Michaelson placed his card on the counter. "If you do see him—Lazic—if he comes back, I'd like you to phone me."

Sally glanced down at the card. "All right," she said.

Michaelson told himself not to look over towards the settee on his way out and almost succeeded.

"He'll be back," Sally said with a grin and pushed his card down into the top of her bra.

As soon as Karen heard that Lazic had probably been in the city at the time of Lynn Kellogg's murder, she phoned Euan Guest in Doncaster to pass on the news. Guest sounded somewhat hassled, a rough throaty voice that lost some of its impatience when he heard what Karen had to offer.

"I was talking to Rachel Vine earlier," Guest said. "Notts CPS. She told me there was another witness."

"Andreea Florescu. She was in London. No one's seen hide nor hair of her for a couple of weeks now."

"Not good."

"No."

"We'll keep in touch, yes?"

"Absolutely."

It was no more than an hour after her conversation with Guest that Karen's phone rang again. Not Doncaster this time, but Leyton. News she'd anticipated, but didn't want to hear.

It was not the police who found her, but kids playing chase, a couple of eleven-year-old boys running from six or seven more, mostly older—something that had started off as a game and was on the verge of becoming altogether more vicious, less controlled. They'd raced full tilt down the main street, weaving in and out between adults as best they could, barging into others and forcing them from the pavement, ricocheting off shop windows and doors, swerving away into the entrance to the overground station and running hard up the narrow stairs towards the platform, only to realise once they were there that they were trapped, and, turning fast, bounding down again three steps at a time, knocking an old lady almost off her feet, spinning her round, and jumping, one of them, at the last moment, over the head of a startled toddler clinging to his mother's hand.

At the bottom of the steps they hesitated, caught their breath, no more than seconds than they heard, above the squall and grind of traffic on the main road, the sounds of their pursuers, raised voices chanting, angry and shrill, and they doubled back, clambering over onto a piece of fenced-off open land beside the railway that had long since become a dumping ground, a favourite place for people to unload their rubbish illegally.

One boy gripped the iron railings and bent his back, making a platform for the other to climb onto, then clamber over, catching his jeans on one of the blunted spikes and swearing as they tore. Once there, he balanced less than safely and grabbed his companion's hands as he scaled upwards, then hauling him over precariously, the pair of them rolling and stumbling over an accumulation of garden waste and broken furniture, stained mattresses and shattered glass, diving finally down between a long-discarded washing machine, the front ripped off, and an old chest freezer angled sharply down into the compressed debris.

Their hearts were racing.

Just out of sight, two or more of the gang ran sticks along the railings in a clanging carillon.

Others shouted their names.

Shouts that drew closer, then faded, only to come closer again. They were up on the platform now, some of them, looking down.

The boys flattened themselves as best they could, burrowing down alongside washing machine and freezer into what was dank and festering.

"It stinks," one boy whispered.

"Shut up!" hissed the other.

"It does, it stinks."

"Shut the fuck up!"

A rat, curious, showed itself in the space between them then sprang sideways, its feet taking purchase for a moment on one boy's shoulder, before scuttling from sight.

The shouting seemed to have stopped. Cautiously raising their heads, they could see the backs of people strung along the platform above them, waiting for the next train. The heads and shoulders of others, in silhouette, were visible inside the small covered shelter. No boys, save for a solitary primary school kid astride the low wall.

"Come on," one urged. "They've gone."

"No, wait."

"It stinks here!"

"You said."

"Well, I'm not stoppin'. You comin' or what?"

The second boy had pushed his body so far down beside the freezer that it was almost resting on top of him, and in his effort to free himself, it leaned even farther against him, so that he had to ask for help. It took the pair of them to lever it back and send it rolling over, the door at the top swinging open.

"Fuck!" the first boy cried. "What the fuck is that?"

But they knew, they both knew and they ran, heedless, scrambling over the mounds of waste, scrambling and falling, losing their footing, so desperate to get away that once they'd vaulted the railings they ran, blind, regardless of one another, just running, until the first of them collided with an ambulance driver going off duty, still wearing his uniform, who seized the lad by the collar, and held him fast, and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. The boy pointed back towards the railway, wide-eyed, and stumbled out the words, "A body. There's a body."

Andreea Florescu had been folded, concertina-like, into three, before her dead body had been jammed into the freezer, head pushed down hard between her knees. She was still wearing the same clothes she had on when she had left Alexander Bucur's flat sixteen days before. Her skin, where it was visible, had taken on the aspect of greenish marble; the veins in the backs of her hands and at the side of her neck stood out like dark twists of thickish wire. Blood had congealed in a black treacly film across her chest and along her thighs, sealing those parts of her together.

The smell was close to overpowering.

The area was cordoned off and ladders brought in to give easier access to the site, boards being laid across the surface of
the waste, creating a single route for the crime scene manager and his team and for the Home Office pathologist to make his initial examination. Photographs were taken, measurements noted, detailed sketches drawn.

Scores of people, travellers and nontravellers both, stood on the railway platform above, gazing down.

The two boys were taken to the local police station, their parents contacted, social workers summoned. Chris Butcher, one of the more experienced detectives in Homicide and Serious Crime Command, was designated Senior Investigating Officer, and an Incident Room was established at the Francis Road police station.

It was from there that one of the officers thought to phone Karen Shields. "That woman you were enquiring about, I think maybe we've found her."

Alexander Bucur was summoned for the purposes of identification.

It was nine o'clock that night before Karen got to talk to Butcher, a detective she knew by more than reputation, having worked with him on a previous investigation. Decisive, thorough, given to occasional flashes of temper, twice divorced and somehow, with the help of grandparents and a succession of European au pairs, bringing up two teenage daughters in Tufnell Park.

"Karen," he said, the vestiges of a Scottish accent that came out more strongly after a drink or three now barely noticeable, "apologies for not getting back to you sooner."

"No problem."

"What exactly's your interest here?"

Succinctly as she could, she told him.

"Maybe you, me, and what's-his-name up in Yorkshire."

"Guest."

"Aye, Guest. Maybe the three of us should get together, see what there is, if anything, by way of common ground."

Karen agreed. "One thing, the victim, Andreea, how did she die?"

"Her throat was cut," Butcher said. "Practically from ear to ear."

Resnick was sitting in semidarkness when Karen called, listening to some recordings Thelonious Monk had made for Prestige Records in the fifties, his piano accompanied by bass and drums; Monk as ever going his own way, sounding, Resnick thought, like a cantankerous old man who, every now and then, surprised himself and those around him with flashes of good humour.

Would he mind, Karen had asked, if she popped round? She wouldn't disturb him for long.

He would not.

Earlier in the day, he read again the few cards and letters he'd had from members of Lynn's family, stilted most of them, tripping over themselves not to give offence, to find the right words. Taking a pad, he had begun to draft replies but time and again he had been overcome and, finally, he had pushed pad and pen aside; another task left for another day.

He had promised Lynn's mother that he would go through her things, some bits and pieces of jewellery Lynn had had since a teenager, a watch her father had given her for her twenty-first birthday, a box she kept crammed with old photographs: Lynn as a chubby thirteen-year-old in school uniform, smiling self-consciously at the camera; Lynn, a little younger, on the bike she'd been given when she started secondary school; younger still, with her parents on holiday in Cornwall—one especially he remembered her showing him with pride, a girl of no more than eight or nine, hair in pigtails, triumphantly holding up a pair of crabs she had caught off the quay, one in each hand.

Some of these her mother wanted; others he would keep.

***

Karen Shields was at the door, a bottle of whisky wrapped in white tissue in her hand.

"I didn't know what you liked," she said, pulling away the tissue and holding up the bottle.

Resnick found a smile. "That's fine."

Johnnie Walker Black Label: not Springbank, but good enough. He found a pair of glasses and she followed him through into the front room. Monk was still playing: "Bemsha Swing."

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 postmortem?"

"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 daresay."

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