Darkness, Darkness (28 page)

Across the street, the Bar Italia was still in business, best cappuccino in Soho before the coffee boom and possibly still was. He signalled behind the counter and took a seat outside.

The last time he had been inside Ronnie’s was a little over twenty years before; one of his favourite tenor players, Spike Robinson, fragile looking and stoop shouldered, doing beautiful things to George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern. Before the final number, Resnick remembered, Robinson had dedicated it to the memory of another musician, the alto saxophonist Ed Silver, who had died earlier that week.

SILVER, Edward Victor. Suddenly at home, on 16 February 1993. Acclaimed jazz musician of the bebop era. Funeral service, Friday 19 February at Golders Green Crematorium, 1.45 p.m.

Silver and Resnick had been friends, up to and beyond the point when the musician had become a near-helpless alcoholic, unable to stand, unable to blow, threatening to take his own life if his liver didn’t do it for him. Now Robinson was dead himself, and others too: Ronnie, of course, Max Roach, Stan Getz, Tony Burns.

He remembered Ed Silver standing in his kitchen, the night he had talked him out of taking off his own foot with a butcher’s cleaver, looking mournfully round while they listened to the late Clifford Brown.

‘They’re all dying, Charlie.’

‘Who?’

‘Every bugger!’

And, of course, it was true.

Resnick shuddered involuntarily as if a shadow had passed over his grave. ‘Now’s the Time’, that was the final number Spike Robinson had played.

Except you rarely knew.

He finished his coffee and continued south on to Shaftesbury Avenue; a taxi towards Victoria and to hell with the expense.

You only live once.

The hotel was in one of those largely unexplored streets behind the Catholic cathedral, old stone on the outside, plastic, glass and
faux
marble within. Matthew Prior was seated in a booth between the restaurant and the bar. At first sight, he seemed to Resnick hardly to have aged at all, but then, shaking hands, Resnick saw the lines around the eyes, the loose flap of skin beneath the chin. Still a full head of hair, some magic potion fending off the grey.

‘Charlie, long time no see.’

His grip was still firm. Still a brightness in the eyes. His suit, dark grey with a faint stripe, custom made, and sombre tie suggested something successful in the City. Banking? A hedge fund manager, perhaps.

Resnick knew that for the past twenty years or so he had been a senior-level officer in British Intelligence. M15.

‘Good trip down?’

‘Fine.’

‘Didn’t mind trawling all the way over here? Lot on right now and at least this gives me a chance to stretch the legs. Would have suggested lunch otherwise.’

‘It’s good of you to take the time.’

A waiter was hovering at the entrance to the booth.

Prior placed a hand over the glass already in front of him, sparkling water, ice and lemon.

‘Charlie?’

Resnick shook his head.

The waiter went away.

‘So,’ Prior said, ‘the Miners’ Strike. Funding of same. There’s a novel there, Charlie, still to be written.’

‘Perhaps just the outline, then.’

‘Do what I can.’

A group of half a dozen diners went by on their way to the restaurant, chatting amiably, quite loudly, oblivious to others.

Out of habit, Prior held his tongue till they’d gone past.

‘Basic facts, you’ll know. I can fill you in a little more. In September of eighty-four, responding to an action that had been brought by two working miners, a High Court judge ruled the strike unlawful. As far as Mr Scargill was concerned, of course, this was a red rag to a bull. Denial of democratic rights and so on. It probably didn’t take too much to persuade the national executive of the union to agree. Scargill was charged to appear in court and refused. Result, the NUM were hit with a two-hundred-thousand-pound fine. When that went unpaid, on the twenty-fifth of October in the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholls ordered the sequestration of the union’s funds. Assets, property, everything. Which meant, quite simply, no more money in or out. Everything was to be under the legal control of an official receiver appointed by the court.’

Prior paused for a mouthful of water.

More people went past on their way to early lunch.

‘Now the union had already been moving some of its funds around – the Isle of Man, Dublin, Jersey, Switzerland, Luxembourg – but once it was out of the country, without the connivance of the banks it would be difficult to bring back in now without having it fall into the hands of the receiver. Same applied to the money they’d been drumming up from sympathisers overseas. The most obvious case being Russia, where, by dint of deducting a day’s pay from all its working miners, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party was sitting on a gift of a million roubles, getting on for one and a half million pounds, with no sure way of getting it into the NUM’s hands.’

‘So what happened?’

Prior’s face coasted into a smile. ‘Who knows? Possibly some of that money eventually made its way here, possibly none. What I do know, the government moved heaven and earth to ensure it stayed where it was. Pressure from the Foreign Office to the Soviet Embassy. Through top-level channels to Gorbachev himself.

‘And then, of course, there was the Libyan fiasco, the less said about which the better.’

‘But money was coming in,’ Resnick said. ‘Even if only in dribs and drabs. We picked up rumours about it, locally, all the time.’

‘Where’s there’s a will, Charlie. People prepared, for whatever reason, to turn a blind eye. So, yes, of course, it happened. Sixty thousand pounds in hard cash, for instance, we know made its way into the country from Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, the last leg of the journey by train to the NUM’s headquarters in Sheffield. And, for quite a while, members of the CGT, the largest of the French unions, would come over to Folkestone regularly on the ferry carrying the maximum amount of permitted currency, hand it over to some courier or other and hop back again across the Channel on the same boat.’

‘While you did what? Sat back and watched?’

A quick shake of the head. ‘We passed on what information we had. Names, places. Times and dates when we had them, which wasn’t so often. We had people placed to give us the inside track, but whoever was organising the money grew canny, didn’t make it easy. And what the NUM had on their side was an almost endless supply of volunteers. Carrying round suitcases and cardboard boxes, some of them, containing more money than they could hope to earn in a lifetime. If it all reached its destination, who’s to say? No one was exactly keeping accurate records and with all that money sloshing round . . . Well, I leave it to your imagination.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘Is that what you’re doing, Charlie, following the money?’

‘Not exactly.’

He told him their suspicions about Jenny Hardwick couriering union funds; picking up donations in London from person or persons unknown and carrying them back to north Notts, where, in all likelihood, they would be handed over to a third party who would convey them the remainder of their journey.

‘Eminently possible, Charlie. Probable, I’d say. Sitting in second class with anything up to ten thousand in a suitcase that last got used on a day trip to Skegness.’

‘And if it didn’t arrive . . .?’

‘Who was to say?’ Prior raised a well-turned eyebrow. ‘If money went missing en route, they weren’t exactly going to go to the police.’

BACK HOME, RESNICK
fixed himself a sandwich, made coffee, fed the cat, found the CD of Spike Robinson playing Gershwin and set it to play while he relaxed in the armchair. He’d phoned Catherine from the train and it had been engaged; tried again after returning home and been shuffled on to voicemail both times. For whatever reason, she was lying low. No matter, nothing that couldn’t wait till morning.

Somewhere in the middle of ‘Somebody Loves Me’ he closed his eyes. By the time ‘How Long Has This Been Going On’ had come to an end, the saxophone’s breathy obligato sliding down over a bank of strings, coffee or no coffee, he was asleep.

Waking to silence other than Dizzy’s gentle snoring, and mindful of the cat’s arthritic bones, he lifted him from where he lay curled in his lap and placed him carefully back on the chair, switched off the CD and took himself to bed. No sense fighting the inevitable.

At three in the morning – five minutes past by the bedside clock – he woke with a start.

A car backfiring?

The same dream.

Nightmare.

His breathing was loud in the room. Adrenalin pumping. Face, shoulders slippery with sweat.

How much longer would this go on?

Barefoot, he crossed the room.

Outside, it was as dark as city centres deigned to get. Something moving in the street light’s shadow; a fox trotting along the far side of the road, tail bushed out, oblivious to whoever might be watching.

Resnick let the curtain fall back into place.

Went back to bed.

After thirty minutes of twisting and turning, he got up again and went downstairs; poured away the unfinished coffee from the night before and made fresh. When he’d retired he’d been given a fat book of photographs by William Claxton,
Jazzlife
. Propping it across his lap, he turned the pages. Gerry Mulligan, in deep shade, at the piano, only his baritone saxophone, temporarily set aside, picking out the light. Donald Byrd, travelling uptown on the A train towards Harlem, touching the mouthpiece of his trumpet to his lips, while behind him in the carriage, a middle-aged white man, wearing an extravagantly banded trilby hat, turns to watch.

Looking in the wrong places, is that what they’d been doing? Himself and Catherine? Thinking to find a motive for Jenny Hardwick’s murder in high emotion; an outburst of anger, lust, love. Maybe it was not that at all. Something colder, more calculating instead.

What had Matthew Prior said?
More money than they could hope to earn in a lifetime
.

Is that what you’re doing, Charlie, following the money?
He’d said that, too.

They hadn’t – not pre-eminently – but maybe they should.

Bank accounts, credit card records stretching back thirty years – were they still available? It seemed doubtful and, even if they were, it would take more than just a phone call to access them, he knew that well enough. Nothing straightforward or simple, channels to go through, but worth the effort all the same.

But this was what he’d missed, he realised, the sniff of something catching fire, an idea, a new avenue to explore.

Restless, he showered, dressed and paced the floor.

Left with the first leavening of light.

McBride was in the office before him. ‘Bit of luck last night.’

‘Don’t tell me. The Jags got the winning goal under floodlights, second minute of injury time?’

‘Geoff Cartwright – RCMP have finally tracked him down. Place called Humboldt. Near Saskatoon? Recently retired from working for the city’s compost-collecting programme. Officer I spoke to asked me to email over a list of questions. They’ll set up an interview on Skype from the local RCMP station. Just a matter of fixing a time. Could be as early as this afternoon.’

‘Our afternoon or theirs?’

‘Theirs, our evening.’ McBride treated Resnick to his crooked grin. ‘Bloody Mounties. Always get their man, eh?’

‘So it seems.’

Resnick had known an inspector in the Notts force who’d gone out to Canada and joined the RCMP. Brzozowski. Polish descent like himself. Good policeman, good detective. Resnick had liked him. Would have bet good money he’d more often than not got his man, too.

Good money . . .

‘John, there’s one more thing . . .’

He intercepted Catherine in the car park, enjoying a cigarette before the start of her day.

‘I tried calling you last night . . .’

‘I know, I’m sorry. Met a girlfriend and went to Sinatra’s. Probably drank a little too much wine. Fell fast asleep almost as soon as I got home.’

‘Me, too, more or less. And without the wine.’

‘So how did it go? Meeting up with your spook friend?’

Resnick filled her in.

‘Casts a new perspective,’ Catherine said. ‘Worth exploring, certainly. Tends to rule Barry Hardwick out, though, rather than in. Not exactly big-spender material.’

‘Depends how much was involved.’

‘Have to be enough to kill somebody for, if what you’re suggesting is correct.’

‘Ten thousand pounds – let’s suppose, for sake of argument, that’s what Jenny might have been carrying. That’d be worth – I don’t know – two and a half times that now, possibly three. Worth taking a risk for, thirty thousand. Back then, especially.’

‘But murder?’

‘I’ve known people killed for a lot less and so have you. A bottle of cider or the price of a wrap.’

Catherine stepped away from the car.

‘Derek Harmer, from the Swann investigation, the guy in Hull. He was in Full Sutton between eighty-three and eighty-nine. So that rules him out. Persons of interest passed on from the Donna Crowder inquiry, we’ve now got whittled down to four. It would be nice if whatever names Cartwright can give us were to match, but I’m not holding my breath.’

‘This remove, he might not be able to remember names at all.’

Catherine smiled. ‘Thanks, Charlie. Always on the bright side. What I like about you.’

‘I knew there had to be something.’

She aimed a mock punch at his shoulder and together they went into the building.

Geoff Cartwright had weathered well; something in the Canadian climate or way of life had left him, even in the less-than-perfect Skype image, looking fit and healthy, a good few years younger than his actual age. His native accent, when he spoke, only occasionally breaking through that of his adopted country.

In response to McBride’s emailed request, he’d earlier supplied a list of people he could remember working with him at 20 Church Street. Five names – after all that time it was all he could remember, all he could dredge up from a long-forgotten past.