Cold in Hand (41 page)

After much coaxing by her grandmother, Andreea's three-year-old daughter, Monica, rising four, came out from behind the settee and stood before Resnick, head down, hands clasped, wearing a green dress with a white sash which was kept for special occasions.

Resnick fetched from his bag the presents he had brought her: a picture book on stiff board with bright illustrations of animals in strong colours, a T-shirt in blue, white and orange stripes and a teddy bear with a large red bow at his neck.

She took each from him solemnly, thanked him haltingly, and then ran to her grandmother and stood, clutching her legs with one hand, while hanging on tightly to the teddy bear with the other.

A plate was passed round with slices of sponge cake filled with jam. More tea. More brandy. Wine. The wake, Resnick thought, before the funeral. One of the cousins, sixteen, quizzed him in near-perfect English about the Premiership and Tottenham Hotspur's chances of breaking into the top four. Ever since Spurs had bought both Ilie Dumitrescu and Gica Popescu following Romania's successes in the 1994 World Cup, they had been a team of special interest.

Resnick's subsequent confession that the team he himself supported was not even Nottingham Forest, formerly winners of the European Cup, but lowly Notts County, was met with bafflement.

After an hour or more, toward the end of which Resnick's eyes kept closing involuntarily, Andreea's father took pity on him and drove him to his hotel, the Intim, which dated back to the late nineteenth century and had previously been called the Hotel d'Angleterre. Someone had thought he would feel at home.

His room looked out past the cathedral towards the Black Sea, which from there, looked not black but grey, the kind of grey he was used to seeing when he gazed east from Mablethorpe or Whitby.

He stripped off his clothes and showered and, after drying himself, stretched out on the clean, slightly worn sheets and fell, almost immediately, asleep.

The funeral service was held in a Roman Catholic church close to the family's home, the church packed, the atmosphere stifling—Resnick, who because of some strange divisions in his own, largely Jewish family, had been brought up as a Catholic, falling automatically into the ritual of signs and observances, prayers and obeisances. The temperature inside and outside the church was close to thirty Celsius.

On the previous evening, Andreea's parents, brushing his protestations aside, had insisted on taking him to dinner in the old Casino, a handsome, almost-baroque building with an arched entrance and huge arched windows, which stood on a promenade overlooking the sea. Black-suited waiters with white aprons tied at the waist brought a succession of dishes in solemn procession: fish soup, carp-roe salad, and then—shepherd's sirloin, according to the translation on the menu—pork stuffed with ham, then covered with cheese and a sauce of mayonnaise, cucumber, and herbs. The wine, Andreea's father assured him, was the best in Romania, Feteasca Neagra, with a rich redness that was close to purple, almost black. A dessert of crisp pastry soaked in syrup and filled with whipped cream was, in every sense, too much.

Head reeling and stomach rolling, when they had left the restaurant—the sky a vivid midnight blue pricked with stars,
the moon floating in the darkness of the water—Resnick's only thoughts had been of falling back into bed, but his hosts had insisted on his accompanying them to a piano bar for a glass or two of rachiu, Romanian grape brandy. To settle the stomach, Andreea's father had suggested, with appropriate gestures.

The bar was belowground, a couple of small smoke-filled rooms, neither of them, as far as Resnick could see, containing a piano. The music, piped through overhead speakers, had been, in the main, piano music, however; jazz of a sort, an extended free form extemporising with Monk-ish overtones, which Resnick decided, in different surroundings, could be rewarding.

His head throbbed and his eyes stung.

Harry Tavitian, he was told when he enquired, that was the pianist's name. From there, in Constanta. Famous everywhere. All over the world. Resnick nodded, never having heard of him before.

Finally, he had stumbled up the steps and out into the air. It was still warm, and the sweet sweat of his body made him nauseous.

Here inside the church, the incense was close to overpowering. The congregation rose to sing a hymn, and Resnick stood with them, mouth open, no words forthcoming. He had had enough of funerals, enough of death, enough dying. He closed his eyes and ignored the tears, and waited for it all to end.

Packed and ready, there was an hour still before leaving to catch his plane and there were things he could see. He had read the leaflet in four languages at the hotel. He could go to the top of the minaret above the Mahmudiye Mosque for a panoramic view of the town and harbour, or to the Museum of the Romanian Navy with its photographs of the Russian battleship
Potemkin
arriving unexpectedly with its crew of mutinous sailors. Instead he walked down through the central square of the old part of the town, named after the poet Ovid, who was exiled there from Rome by the Emperor Augustus for writing
The Art of Love,
which had somehow offended the emperor's sensibilities.

Poor bastard, Resnick thought, looking up at the statue that was daubed in pigeon droppings and eroded by the weather. Doomed to live out a lonely life in a country that was not his own. There were a few lines of his poetry reprinted in the leaflet, miserable as sin. And cold. As if all the time he was there, he could never get warm, the snow drifting in off the sea.

Resnick walked on down for a final look at the water.

At the airport, Andreea's mother hugged him and held him close, murmuring her thanks; her father shook his hand as heartily as before and wished him well. Monica hid behind her grandmother's skirt and came out only at the last moment to stand, wide-eyed, and wave, her teddy bear clasped tight against her chest.

They were lovely people, Resnick thought, warm and caring. Hurting, too.

Fifteen minutes later, his plane was in the air.

Though it had only been days, the house seemed unlived in, felt alien, cold. That again: cold. As he'd turned his keys in the door, the cats had come running, the familiar sound signalling food, a Pavlovian response, though he guessed the neighbour he entrusted them to would have overfed them, as usual.

There were several messages on the answering machine, one from Karen Shields that said simply: Call me. When he did, she asked if he wanted to come into the station, or whether he'd prefer for her to come to him.

"I'm knackered," Resnick said. "Why don't you come out here? Just give me time to shower and change."

Twenty minutes later, she was there. White vest, red skirt, flat shoes.

"Hot as hell," she said.

"There's water in the fridge. Juice."

"Water would be fine."

The rear of the house was in the shade, so that was where they sat.

"How did it go?" Karen asked.

"All right, I suppose. I was glad I went."

"I'm sure they were, too."

Resnick nodded.

"I'm just about through here," Karen said. "I've been coming up only for odd days, and now there's no need for even that. Anil can handle anything else that crops up before the trial."

"You did a good job."

"I did bugger-all."

Resnick smiled.

"You know," Karen said, "we found the shoe? The Adidas trainers? Marcus had sold them. A friend of a friend. It helps fill in the picture."

Resnick nodded. "How about our pal Daines?"

"Still stonewalling," Karen said.

Lazic had testified that the SOCA man had been in the Zoukas brothers' pockets, evidenced by the fact that both had successfully slipped out of the country avoiding arrest, Viktor using a false passport. He had also provided a blurred video which showed—or seemed to show, Daines's lawyers were strongly disputing it—Daines taking part in a three-way sex session involving, at various times, a riding crop, a large strapped-on dildo, and a woman stretched out on a bed and tied hand and foot.

"He's claiming," Karen said, "any involvement was justified in terms of the information it allowed him to obtain. And the information he passed on was pretty damn useful—there's no getting around that."

"You think he's going to walk away?"

"Who knows? Right now, he's suspended on full pay, while SOCA's Professional Standards Department carry out an investigation. I reckon he'll be lucky if they don't turn it over to an outside force."

Whatever was decided, Resnick thought, it looked as if Lynn's instincts had been right all along.

"How about you?" Karen asked.

"How about me?"

"You know what I mean."

One of the other messages on his answering machine had been from the police surgeon, wanting to know when Resnick, who had cancelled two appointments in the past month, felt able to come in and see him for a checkup and an all clear to go back to work. The truth was, he was unsure if he wanted to go back at all.

"I've got my thirty years in," Resnick said. "I could retire."

"And do what?" Karen said incredulously. "Take an allotment, grow your own fruit and veg?"

"Why not?"

Karen laughed. "You'd go crazy."

Resnick shrugged. Maybe she was right, maybe he would. But he wasn't sure if he had the taste for it anymore. Not after all that had happened. And besides, maybe an allotment wasn't all that ridiculous an idea. Plus, he could read all those books he had never found time for, visit those places he had never been. And how many jazz festivals were there? Wigan, Brecon, Appleby, North Sea. And those were just for starters. He could even go and see his pal, Ben Riley, who'd moved out to the States more years ago that either of them cared to remember, and who had almost tired of inviting him to come and stay.

He shook his head; he didn't know.

"You'll sort something out," Karen said. "Maybe you just need a little more time."

Reaching down into her bag, she took out the box set of CDs she'd borrowed, back when it had all started.

"Thanks," she said. "Now I'll have to get my own."

He walked with her to the door.

"Watch out for that Catherine Njoroge," Karen said with a wink. "She'll have her eye on you now you're single."

"You're joking?"

"Probably." She tapped a fist against his shoulder. "Though you never know."

When Karen had gone, he went into the kitchen and stood for a moment staring into an almost-empty cupboard. Time to restock. The smallest cat nudged against him, and he picked it up and felt the soft fur of its head against his neck, the quick beat of its heart against his hand.

What would Lynn say, he wondered. Jack it in or carry on?

He thought about poor bloody Ovid, mired now in bird shit, stranded and alone.

Later that evening, curtains partly drawn, glass of good Scotch at his side, he put the first of the Bessie Smith CDs on to play, Bessie's voice full and raw and strengthened, it seemed, by adversity. "After You've Gone," "Empty Bed Blues," and Resnick's especial favourite, "Cold in Hand," the young Louis Armstrong's muted cornet shadowing her phrase for phrase and note for note.

Cold in hand.

How had Ovid put it? Freezing his balls off in Constanta. Something about the snow?

One drift succeeds another here.
The north wind hardens it, making it eternal;
It spreads in drifts through all the bitter year.

Bitter. That wasn't going to be him. Old and bitter. He smiled. Lynn would never forgive him for that.

Much-needed editorial help aside, the biggest debt of gratitude I owe is to Peter Coles, formerly a Detective Superintendent with the Nottinghamshire Police, who has done his utmost to keep me to the straight and narrow as I falteringly navigated the changes in current police nomenclature and procedure. All failings, it should go without saying, are down to me alone.

Romania I visited under the auspices of the British Council, and I am grateful to them and, especially, to the people I met in Constanta—teachers and students—for their kindness and hospitality. Anyone wishing to explore the avant-garde world of jazz pianist Harry Tavitian should begin at
www.harrytavitian.ro
.

And for those seeking a more salubrious side of the fair city of Nottingham than the one presented in these pages, any of the following would be a good place to begin:
www.visitnottingham
.com,
www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk
, or
www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham
. And, of course,
www.nottscountyfc.co.uk
. Come on, you Pies!