Cold in Hand (40 page)

"You're playing games with me, aren't you?" Daines said.

"Not at all. If you want a report of Lazic's medical condition, that can be arranged. As soon as he's fit enough to be moved down to London, you'll be informed. You've got my assurance he won't be questioned while he's here, and I'm sure you can liaise with SCD once he's in their care." She took a step up and moved to go round him. "Now that about sorts it, don't you think?"

He stepped across into her path and his face was pressed close to hers; his breath warm on her face. Even in the subdued light of the stairs, she could see the green glimmer at the corner of his eye.

"If I thought you were fucking with me—"

"Yes?" She held his gaze. Not for the first time, she wondered if he were armed.

"If you are—"

"Then what?"

He stared at her and then, as if making a sudden decision, he stepped away. "Just wanted to add my congratulations," he said, with a quick, almost apologetic shrug. "Job well done."

"Thank you."

Karen waited until he was out of sight, his footsteps fading down the stairs, before letting herself into the apartment and securing the door behind her.

When Resnick had got home, some time earlier, he had made himself a sandwich—all that beer, more than he was used to, making him hungry—and put a pot of coffee on the stove. Chet Baker somehow suited the mood. It was a while before he thought to check his phone: three messages from Ryan Gregan, the most recent an hour before.

After meeting Gregan, Resnick had made himself take a long, slow walk, back through the Arboretum and along Mansfield Road as far as the Forest Recreation Ground before cutting through to St. Ann's. The manner in which he'd confronted Daines had been foolish. Juvenile. Sufficiently out of character for him to take the judgement "unfit for duty" to heart. Unfit? "Unfit" was too bloody right.

Not now.

Howard Brent was outside his house, touching up the offside front wing of his car where someone had scraped it driving past. He had barely paused to look up as Resnick approached, but when Resnick spoke, he had listened. Listened and replied, his normal hostility tempered by something he would have been hard put to explain. Slowly, he straightened and watched Resnick as he walked away.

Jason Price lived in the upper two rooms of a terraced house in one of the short streets that narrowed out either side of Sneinton Dale; one room had a narrow bed and a spare mattress on the floor, the other an old two-seater settee that had been
dragged in from a nearby dump, a couple of wooden chairs and a thirdhand stereo along with, Price's pride and joy, a large-screen plasma TV he had traded for ten grammes of amphetamines and fifty tabs of LSD. There was a microwave in one corner, next to a sink with a small hot-water heater alongside. The lavatory was on the floor below.

When Resnick arrived, Price was in'T-shirt and boxer shorts, having not long got out of bed. It was a few minutes past eleven, Sunday morning. Church bells all over the city were ringing, calling the people to shopping centres and supermarkets, Homebase and B & Q.

"What the fuck—?" Price said, opening the downstairs door.

"Marcus here?" Resnick asked. Price nodded. "Snorin' upstairs, i'n it?"

"Get on some clothes and get lost. And don't wake him. Let him sleep."

"What's this all about?"

"Just do it."

Price knew the law when he saw it; knew better than to argue. Thank Christ him and Marcus had smoked the last of his stash before turning in. Five minutes and he was gone.

The upstairs room smelt of dope and tobacco and the slightly sweet, not-unfamiliar stink of two young men who slept with the window firmly closed. Resnick flicked back the catch and levered the top half of the window down and Marcus, angled across the mattress, one bare foot touching the floor, stirred at the sound. Stirred and rolled onto one side and resumed sleeping.

What was he, Resnick asked himself. Eighteen at most? Asleep, he looked younger, his face smooth and his skin the colour of copper. Fragile. Vulnerable. Somebody's son.

"Marcus." Resnick pushed at the side of the mattress with his shoe. "Marcus, wake up."

Another push and the youth spluttered awake, twisting his head towards Resnick and gasping as if seeing something in a dream, except that this, he realised seconds later, was worse.

No nightmare: This was real.

"Get up. Put something on."

Marcus rolled sideways and pushed himself to his feet. Bollock naked, he reached for his jeans and a V-necked top.

"What the fuck is this? Where's Jason? What's goin' on?"

"I've been trying to figure it out, Marcus, and I'm still not sure. Which was it? Greed or plain stupidity?"

"What? What the fuck you talkin' about?"

"Selling the gun."

"What? What the—? I dunno what you're on about. What fuckin' gun? I dunno nothin' ' bout no fuckin' gun."

But the shiver in his eyes said that he did.

"A Baikal semiautomatic, Marcus, remember? I don't know who you bought it from, haven't been able to find that out yet, but I know who you sold it to. A man named Steven Burchill, round the back of the Sands in Gainsborough."

Marcus bolted for the door and Resnick grabbed his arm and swung him round hard, so that he landed on the floor with a loud thump, then rolled hard against the wall and caught the edge of the skirting board with enough force to open a cut above his left eye.

"Waste of effort," Resnick said, dismissively. "You didn't think I'd come here without backup? There's men downstairs, front and back. Cars at the end of the street."

Marcus shivered, believing Resnick's lie, and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, smearing blood.

"Here." Resnick took a handkerchief from his pocket. "Use this."

He had thought, when he finally found Lynn's killer, when he confronted him face-to-face, that he would be unable to control his anger, that it would need others to hold him back, to
stop him from trying to take vengeance into his own hands; but now, in that small sad room, looking down at that skinny youth, not yet twenty, not too bright, not so very different from the scores of similar young men he'd had to deal with over the years, he found the anger draining out of him—the anger at this individual, at least.

"A couple of hundred, that's all you got for it. That's what Burchill said. Not a good price, but then, you weren't in much of a position to bargain."

"There's no prints," Marcus blurted. "You can't prove—"

Resnick shook his head. "Science, Marcus. Forensic science. What's that programme that's so popular? You've probably seen it?
CSI?
Of course, it's nothing like that, not in real life. Not over here, at least. But one thing is the same. What they can do, match a recovered bullet to a particular gun. And we have the bullet—two, in fact. And now, since the early hours of this morning, we have the gun."

Not the brightest apple in the box, Steven Burchill had kept it double-wrapped in plastic inside the cistern of the backyard toilet where he lived. Something he'd seen in a film once somewhere, Resnick didn't doubt, something on the telly.

It had not taken Ryan Gregan long to persuade Burchill to say where it was, Resnick waiting not quite out of earshot till the job was done.

"I don't think I really understood at first why you did it," Resnick said. "The specifics. But now I think I do."

Marcus was sitting on the floor with his legs drawn up towards him, head down, one hand holding Resnick's once-white handkerchief against the wound.

"You and your father had a big row just before he left for Jamaica. The same sort of row you'd had before, I daresay, but this was worse. All you wanted from him, I think, was respect. A little more respect. But it ended up, as it often did, with him telling you were useless, stupid, not worth the time of day. And
all the time there was Michael in the background, Michael being held up in comparison, Michael the perfect son.

"And you knew all the things your father had said about Lynn Kellogg, how she was to blame for your sister's death. How he hated her. How much he'd told you all to hate her. How she had to pay. And you thought that would show him, once and for all. Prove to him not just that you were Michael's equal, but that you were better. Braver. So you bought the gun. And you waited. I don't know how many nights you waited. Two? Three? And then there she was."

He could hear his voice starting to choke, but he made himself carry on.

"There she was walking towards you, and from that range, you didn't even have to be especially skilled with a gun. From that range, it would have been difficult to miss."

Resnick turned away and willed back tears.

Marcus was crying now, enough tears for both of them: not tears of sorrow for what he'd done, but out of his own fear of what would happen.

"You told him, your father. When he came back to England, you told him what you'd done and, of course, he didn't believe you. 'You wouldn't have the guts,' he said. 'You wouldn't have the balls.' So you told him you didn't care, didn't care what he thought, told him you never wanted to speak to him again and walked out, came here."

Marcus cried, sobbing, rocking himself back and forth. "I don't care what he fuckin' thinks. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!"

Resnick stood back and reached into his pocket for his mobile phone.

"Karen, sorry to disturb your Sunday. But you'd better get yourself out here. Rustle up your bagman. One or two others."

He gave her the address.

It was high summer. Resnick had left London in, what was, to him, almost sweltering heat, twenty-eight degrees Celsius, the low eighties Fahrenheit, his shirt sticking to his back as he stood in one seemingly interminable line after another, waiting first at the check-in and then, finally, the slow zigzag shuffling towards the X-ray machines and the officials with their wands and blank expressions. In between, there were the protracted dealings with Customs, the careful scrutinising of the death certificate and the certificate of embalming, the necessary authorisation to remove the deceased's body from the country for burial overseas.

A clear and definite DNA match linking Ivan Lazic with the skin sample found under Andreea's fingernails had resulted in his being charged with her murder, and once a second postmortem had been carried out for the benefit of his defence, Andreea's body had been released. On the evidence so far available, the CPS had opted not to charge Lazic with the murder of Kelvin Pearce.

After several conversations with Andreea Florescu's parents, using Alexander Bucur as translator, Resnick had arranged to
accompany Andreea's coffin on its journey, knowing that it was what Lynn would have wanted, what she would have done herself had she been able.

Three hours and a little more to Bucharest, and then a change of plane onto a smaller Russian-made aircraft that would take him the relatively short distance to Constanta.

As he stepped out on to the tarmac at Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport, the heat hit him again like a slap across the face.

Andreea's parents were waiting to greet him: her mother, small and fair-haired, her face dissolving into tears the moment she saw him; her father, stocky and dark as his wife was fair, crushing Resnick's hand in both of his and then kissing him on both cheeks.

"Thank you," he said in heavily accented English. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Behind them, Andreea's zinc-lined coffin was being slowly unloaded from the hold.

The journey south from the airport took them first along a motorway, which led to the beginnings of the town itself and a wide boulevard which swept, rather incongruously, past a succession of flat-fronted houses, small shops, and garages, several crumbling apartment blocks, and then a large park busy with families picnicking and chasing brightly coloured footballs, many of them—the younger ones—in swimming costumes, the older men with their shirtsleeves rolled back and the women with summer dresses raised up along pale thighs.

"A lake," Andreea's father informed him, jabbing his finger. In the middle of the park there was a lake. Also, if Resnick had understood correctly, a dolphinarium. Even with the windows wound down, inside the car it was uncomfortably hot.

Not so much farther along, they turned left, leaving the Bulevard Tomis—Resnick had read the sign—and drove a short distance down a narrow, dusty road and then turned again, into a run-down housing estate of the kind Resnick knew only too well from his years on the beat in Nottingham. Low-rise blocks joined by a succession of walkways and arranged around central areas that on the architect's plans had doubtless been enticingly green open spaces bordered by trees, where mothers could sit nursing their babies and children could safely play. Except that the grass had soon turned to mud and was festooned with dog shit, broken glass, and discarded needles, and the trees had been uprooted while they were still saplings and not replaced. A brave new world.

In Nottingham, places like this had been knocked down, demolished and replaced by social housing that was more thoughtful, more appropriate to people's needs.

Here in Constanta, some—this estate, at least—remained.

A pack of dogs, some ten or a dozen strong, came running towards them, snarling, and the father chased them off with kicks and shouts and pieces of rubble picked up from the ground and hurled into their midst.

The Florescus' flat was on the fourth floor, reached, the lift being out of order, after climbing heavily graffitied stairs and walking along a balcony with numerous cracks of several centimetres' width.

Both living room and kitchen were overrun by an extended family of cousins, uncles, and aunts, all anxious to shake his hand and offer thanks.

"Our Andreea's murderer," said one man with a white streak running up through his hair, "you have brought him to justice."

"Not me," Resnick said. "Somebody else."

But that was not what they wanted to hear and chose not to understand. Someone thrust a mug of sweet tea into his hand, while someone else plied him with plum brandy. Soon the room, despite the windows being open, was thick with cigarette smoke. Everyone, save for the youngest, seemed to be smoking. In one corner of the room, the television was tuned to CNN, the
volume turned down low. There seemed to be forest fires in parts of Spain and Portugal, floods in Southeast Asia with thousands losing their homes; several European aid workers had been kidnapped in Baghdad and in Islamabad a suicide bomber had detonated the explosives taped to his stomach in a local market, killing fourteen and wounding more than thirty, some of them children.