Darkness, Darkness (4 page)

Picard could appreciate that, the cold case unit, in his eyes, a bunch of superannuated has-beens who switched on
New Tricks
each week, thinking it was the biography of their own sad little lives.

Even so, he wasn’t convinced, and it showed.

‘What’s up?’ Hastings asked. ‘Thought you’d be snapping my hand off for a go at this.’

Picard shook his head. ‘All the same with you, I’d like to give it a bit of thought.’

‘Think on, then. Just don’t take too bloody long.’

The way Picard saw it, if the Independent Police Complaints Commission did get the go-ahead to follow up their investigation into the Hillsborough disaster with a detailed look at the Miners’ Strike – Battle of Orgreave and all – things could start getting decidedly dicey. Especially if, as was rumoured, they were given new powers to compel any or all police officers and staff involved to testify under oath.

What would come crawling out of the paperwork then, he could only imagine. Not a lot that was blameless and shiny, he thought. Go looking for dirt and dirt’s likely what you’ll find. So no matter he’d been barely going to school when the strike had started, if the police came out of things badly, chances were, carrying out an investigation in the same area, he’d end up well and truly tarred with the same brush.

Anyone other than Hastings, he might have thought he was being dangled over the shit on purpose, but Hastings, he was sure, didn’t have a Machiavellian bone in his body.

Or did he?

Maybe he was a lot cleverer than he looked.

No, Picard thought, I’ll pass. Pass the job on to somebody else.

Catherine Njoroge was at her desk, scanning the reports thus far in on the death of a seventy-two-year-old man who’d been found wandering close to his home with what turned out to be severe injuries to head and body. Three days later, he’d died in hospital. His sons, twins, both of whom had lived with him in the same house, both unmarried, had been arrested and questioned: so far, ‘No comment’ was the most either of them had said.

‘Patricide,’ Picard said, glancing down over her shoulder. ‘That the word?’

‘We don’t know that yet, do we, sir?’

‘Course we bloody do. Anyway, let it go, no longer any concern of yours.’

She looked up at him, surprised.

‘Open and shut, after the old man’s cash, something of the sort. Let that team of yours handle it. Ex-team. You’ve got bigger fish to fry.’

Catherine closed the file.

‘Jenny Hardwick,’ Picard said. ‘Know the name?’

Catherine nodded. ‘That’s the woman whose body was found, north of the county. Reported missing – what was it? Eighty-four? Nothing heard of her till now.’

‘Right. Not till she turned up more or less in her own back yard.’

Catherine cleared her throat; the beginnings of a cold. ‘Sorry, but I’m not clear what you’re saying. I’m going to be assisting you in the investigation?’

Picard smiled. Picture perfect, Catherine thought.

‘More than that,’ he said.

She took a breath. ‘Why me?’

‘Here long enough to get your feet under the table, feel your way around. Time to get stuck into something more than a walk in the park, show us what you can do. Live up to all those references. Commendations.’

Catherine bridled, bit her tongue.

‘Andrew and I discussed it, of course. Something for me, he thought, potentially high profile, media interest. Only natural, I suppose. But I thought, no, why not Catherine? Time to get that light out from under its bushel.’

The smile again, slimier than before.

You bastard, she thought. I can see what you’re up to. You either think this is going to fizzle out in a mess of false trails and dead ends, or else it’s going to blow up in someone’s face. Mine. No way you’d be delegating this otherwise. Designed to fail.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it. The vote of confidence. Just as long as you’re sure.’

‘Of course.’ He held out a hand. ‘I’ll be keeping a watching eye, naturally. You’ll report directly to me. That way, if there’s anything you’re uncertain of . . .’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Look around, pick your own team. Someone experienced, not go amiss. Couple of young DCs, keen enough to do the legwork. B Division, you might look up there. Local knowledge, that kind of thing.’

‘Yes, sir, thank you,’ she said again, the words ‘poisoned chalice’ ringing in her ears.

It was a good hour before she thought of Charlie Resnick, languishing now, she believed, in the bowels of Central Station. Not so many minutes more before she gave him a call.

THE FIRST TIME
Catherine Njoroge had encountered Resnick she had been newly made up to sergeant and assigned to the City Division’s Robbery Squad, where he had recently been made senior officer in charge. Something of an unlikely move for him it had seemed, sideways at best, Resnick, for a good number of years, having run the CID team out of Canning Circus, dealing with major crimes up to and including murder. But the force, not for the first time, had been in the throes of reorganisation, and though, rumour had it, Resnick had been offered a further promotion that would have kept him in the thick of things, for whatever reasons, he had declined.

‘Charlie?’ one of his contemporaries had told Catherine when she’d enquired. ‘Seen writing on bloody wall. Seen the future and it’s bright young things like you with university degrees comin’ out their backsides, not the likes of him an’ me. Dinosaurs, that’s what we are. Least that’s what top brass think. Charlie’s just takin’ hisself out the firing line afore they stick him in front of it blindfold.’

‘Charlie,’ said another. ‘Cosyin’ up with that young woman out of Homicide, lucky sod. Someone to look after him in his old age.’

It hadn’t worked out that way. On her way home late from a meeting in London, Lynn Kellogg had been shot and fatally wounded outside the house she and Resnick latterly had shared. Catherine had been attached to the team that had investigated her murder.

Whenever she had seen Resnick around that time, he had seemed like a husk, empty and dry, scoured out. Only more recently, on the few occasions they’d met, had the life seemed to have bled slowly back into him, the light behind his eyes fired with the occasional spark.

‘Charlie,’ she said when she called, ‘you wouldn’t have time for a coffee, I suppose?’

They sat, cradling takeout cups from the Pelham Street deli, on one of the benches overlooking the Old Market Square. The square remodelled like so much else now, redesigned.
A fluid and relaxing public area whose organic form echoes the classic formality . . .
To Resnick’s eyes, they had stripped it of whatever had made it interesting – the flower beds, the fountains, the bandstand – and left a vast flat open space without character or distinction.

But the toddlers splashing their way in wellies across the shallow, flowing water terrace at one end of the square seemed happy enough, despite the cold. And the people, young and old, sharing the benches that spread out in either direction, were content, apparently, to sit there and eat their lunch, chat, or simply stare. Crotchety, that’s what he was getting. Even Lynn had said that. Old before his time.

‘You okay, Charlie?’ Catherine asked.

‘Fine, why?’

‘You seemed lost in thought.’

There had been a brass band Resnick was remembering – years back now – youths mostly, a scattering of old heads to keep them in line. The conductor standing out front, occasionally taking up his cornet to solo. The odd march, a bit of light classical, songs from the shows. Two youngsters, the only ones not in uniform, a boy and a girl, had sat huddled together in the back row; the pair of them scanning the music, waiting their turn. At the crucial moment, instruments to their lips, the wind had whipped the girl’s music from its stand, and she had sat there, numbed and silent, while the lad had scrabbled for it on the floor.

‘Some Enchanted Evening.’

Resnick, soft bugger, had sat watching, tears in his eyes.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Not important.’

‘And the job? How’s the new job?’

Resnick forced a wry smile.

‘I was wondering if you might fancy something a little more challenging?’

He looked at her. ‘Such as?’

‘A woman’s body found, long buried . . .’

‘Bledwell Vale, you mean?’

‘The inquiry, it’s gone to our unit. I’m SIO.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Picard handed it to me on a plate.’

‘He’ll have his reasons. Good ones, I don’t doubt.’

Catherine’s turn to smile. ‘I’m going to need help, Charlie.’

‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘Real help. I think – I don’t know why – but I think they might just be hanging me out to dry.’

‘Who, Picard?’

‘Picard, Hastings. Who knows? It’s all politics, anyhow. All that stuff coming to light about the Miners’ Strike. The IPCC.’

‘Maybe what they want’s a clean pair of hands.’

‘And if it all goes tits up, I’m the one takes the blame.’

Resnick grinned. ‘Tits up – Kenyan expression, is it?’

‘Fuck off, Charlie.’

He laughed and drank the last of his coffee. There were trams criss-crossing at the foot of Beastmarket Hill. From just beyond the square, on Angel Row, he could hear the usual saxophone player doodling over a soundtrack of ‘Winter Wonderland’.

Busk early for Christmas.

‘Let’s walk,’ he said.

They made a strange couple for anyone with time to notice. Resnick tall, though with the beginnings of a stoop that threatened to take an inch from his height; bulky still inside that grubby raincoat, a man, one might think, who liked his food, a glass or two of ale. Who spent too much time behind a desk, sitting in a chair. Fifteen, twenty years before, he would have looked much the same.

Catherine Njoroge was tall also, not so far off Resnick’s height, and she walked with a certain stateliness, accentuated by her long neck, the way she held her head. She wore a black trouser suit, trousers with a slight flare, boots with a low heel; her hair tied back with purple ribbon; a silver ring on her right hand aside, no accessories, no ornamentation; almond eyes.

‘Who else,’ Resnick asked, ‘have you got on board?’

‘Just you so far. Assuming you say yes.’

‘God help us then.’

‘Charlie, come on. Don’t start doing yourself down.’

‘You think they’ll wear it? Picard and Hastings. Me tagging along.’

‘I don’t see why not. As far as they’re concerned, you’re going to be doing the same as you do here. Interviewing witnesses, taking statements. Just travelling a bit further to work, that’s all.’

‘And as far as you’re concerned?’

They stopped short of the pavement edge.

‘You were there, Charlie, weren’t you, during the strike?’

‘Running an intelligence gathering team, yes. Out of Mansfield. Half a dozen officers in the field, undercover, mix and mingle – letting on they were local, journalists maybe – not that that made them all that welcome. All the while keeping their eyes open, eyes and ears. Cameras, sometimes, those little video recorders. Anything useful – a new face giving instructions, passing on orders, plans for a new picket – we’d pass it along to headquarters. From there, on down to London. Special Branch, the NRC.’

She looked at him questioningly, not recognising the acronym.

‘National Reporting Centre, Room 1309, New Scotland Yard.’

‘You were running spies, then, Charlie. Espionage.’

‘I was doing what I could to stop this part of the country breaking apart. Civil bloody war. At least, that’s what I thought.’

‘And now?’

He didn’t answer. They turned left along Cheapside, a trajectory that would take them back past the Victoria Centre and so to the Central Police Station.

‘There was a lot of what we did that wasn’t right,’ Resnick said eventually. ‘A lot we should’ve done differently or not done at all. And a great deal of what happened locally, well, that was taken out of our hands. Not much of an excuse, maybe, but there it is. But I met some good people, no mistaking that. Either side of the picket line. Helped bury one of them not so long back.’

‘You feel all right about going back up there, though? After all this time?’

‘Find out, won’t we? Soon as you get the go-ahead.’

CAT AND MOUSE,
that’s what it was, except a sight more serious. Striking miners from Yorkshire, the more militant areas like Barnsley and Doncaster in particular, targeting the more northern of the Notts pits at first – Harworth, Welbeck, Bledwell Vale – and then, when they’d succeeded, temporarily at least, in persuading large numbers not to cross the picket line, moving their attentions further south – Warsop, Thoresby, Shirebrook; Sherwood, Rufford, Ollerton. All of this activity in the purview of Resnick’s intelligence team, the information they passed on meshing with that from other sources, including, increasingly, the tapping of telephones, before being rationalised into the Nottinghamshire force report that would be sent each morning to the NRC in London.

From that, and reports from other areas concerned, a briefing would be prepared for senior officers from ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, and F4, the division of the Home Office with a responsibility for public order.

Areas were designated as Peaceful, Hostile or Violent.

Up-to-date charts were kept monitoring police involvement, serious injuries and arrests.

There were twenty-five pits in Notts in all and not many more than two thousand or so police to ensure that those miners who wanted to report for work – still a majority, if a wavering one – could do so and the pits remain open.

It was never enough.

By early March, not long after the strike had started, some three thousand officers from nearby forces had been brought in to help, many of these in small, specially trained Police Support Units – PSUs – with experience of using riot shields and batons. Army camps were commandeered to provide temporary housing.

Realising that issuing instructions by telephone was no longer safe, union officials organising the picketing began sending out orders in sealed envelopes, often switching their targets at the last moment. Even then, there were ways and means of obtaining information; one of Resnick’s team had a grubby arrangement with a driver who would pass on details as to where the pickets were heading in exchange for a few back-handed fivers.