Cold in Hand (15 page)

"We've intercepted several small consignments over the past few years, Customs and Excise that is, most usually in vehicles that have been fitted with hidden compartments, so no more than a couple of dozen at a time. But now, according to
our information, a far larger consignment is on its way. As many as seven hundred weapons, maybe, fourteen thousand rounds of ammunition. We're just not sure yet when. Nor which route they're taking. But you can imagine what it would mean if they got through, that lot get into the wrong hands and out onto the streets. After what happened, you especially."

"Yes. Yes, of course," Lynn said. "But I still don't see the connection. These men, the guns, everything—you say they're Lithuanian."

"Correct. And the guys over here are shitting themselves because they think, after that last arrest especially, we've got their number. Better, then, to sell them to somebody else and take a smaller profit than run the risk of fetching up behind bars."

"Which is where Zoukas comes in."

"Absolutely. Viktor and his brother, yes, we think so. We've been watching, waiting. Liaising with the Office of Organised Crime and Corruption in Lithuania. Letting them get everything into place. Our best guess, Valdemar was set to handle the London end, Viktor anything farther north. Here, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow. Once Viktor was in custody and taken out of the equation, everything was put on hold, which made the Lithuanians jumpy. According to our information, they've been threatening to take the guns elsewhere. The Turks, maybe. Last thing Valdemar and his pals want. The whole deal's on the verge of falling to pieces and if that happens we're back to square one and left having to start all over again. Months of work, God knows how many man-hours down the drain. But if we can keep it in play and strike at the right time, we get the buyers, the sellers, the pistols, the works. Once we heard there was a chance of Zoukas being released on bail, that gave us our chance."

A frown set on Lynn's face. "Heard? Heard how?"

Daines tried for what was meant to be a disarming smile. "We've been interested in the outcome of the case, naturally enough. Frankly, it had always seemed to us there was a strong
possibility of Zoukas being acquitted. But then, once one of your main witnesses opted to run for cover—"

"Is that what he's done?"

"I really wouldn't know. But it seems possible, don't you think?"

"And convenient. For you, anyway."

Daines's smile broadened. "A little good luck never hurt anyone."

"Nina Simic's throat was cut practically from ear to ear."

"I know. I know. And if he's found responsible, Zoukas will pay. Just later rather than sooner. What possible harm is there in that?"

"Come on, don't be naive. If someone managed to find one witness and put the fear of God into him, what's to stop them finding the other? A month for us to track down Pearce, but a month also for Zoukas or whoever's looking out for him to find the only other good witness we have. Result: Viktor Zoukas walks free."

She fixed him with a look. "Perhaps that's what you want all along."

"Perhaps in a way it is."

Lynn's eyes widened. "That young woman," she said, quick to her feet, "was bought and sold like fresh meat. From what we can tell, she was systematically beaten, almost certainly raped, then forced to have sex with anyone and everyone, twelve, fourteen hours a day. And then she was slaughtered, butchered—"

"Whoa, whoa! Don't you think you're getting a bit emotional?"

"'Butchered,' that's the word I chose. Butchered, and if you have your way, she'll get no justice, no justice at all. And emotional? Yes, okay, I'm emotional. I saw her lying there dead, with her blood soaking into a rotting carpet that was sticky with men's come. Of course I'm bloody emotional!"

She turned away and headed for the door.

"Time of the month, I daresay," Daines said. "Probably doesn't help."

Lynn spun round. Quite how she stopped herself from going over and slapping the supercilious smile from his face, she didn't know.

"Fuck you!" she said.

Daines grinned. "You know, you never did thank me for the flowers."

Lynn slammed the door hard in her wake.

Furious with herself, Lynn walked—no, strode—she strode across the city centre, past the refurbishments of the Old Market Square and up Smithy Row, in the middle of which a short, wiry-haired man, stripped to the waist, was entertaining the early lunch crowd by wrapping himself, Houdini-like, in chains. Not so many months before, the same man—or one just like him—had been forced to call emergency services when he'd been unable to set himself free.

She sat in Lee Rosey's, facing the window, leafing through a local lifestyle magazine that had been left on the counter: bars, restaurants, nightclubs, fine wines, promotional-drinks nights, bottled beers, a contemporary and relaxed environment, cool music for cool people.

Cool.

Well, no one had ever accused her of being that.

Cold, maybe, even though it had never really been true.

But cool...

Any claims she might once have pretended to cool had been jettisoned once and for all inside Daines's office. Pissed off first of all by his disregard for one woman's rights to justice if they stood counter to his master plan, and then—God! What was the matter with her?—allowing herself to get wound up by the kind of juvenile remark that, as a young officer, she had shrugged off a thousand times.

She closed her eyes and willed herself to relax, but when she opened them again, the same strained face was looking back at her, faintly reflected in the glass.

Four or five years ago, she had tried yoga.

Maybe it was time to give it another go.

She still hadn't quite shaken her anger from her system—anger at Daines, anger at herself—when she met Resnick in the Peacock early that evening, just around the corner from the Central Police Station.

"Sounds to me," Resnick said, after listening carefully, "as if Mr. Daines's a bit of a fool."

"He's worse than that."

"Maybe."

"And I'm the fool for letting him get under my skin."

Resnick nodded to two other plainclothes officers who had just come into the bar.

"Happens," he said. "Take me with Howard Brent. So close to thumping him, I could practically feel him on the other end of my fist."

"So what's happening?" Lynn found a smile. "Am I getting more like you, or are you getting more like me?"

"Heaven forbid it's the former. Overweight and about to be put out to pasture wouldn't suit you at all. Anyway, maybe it's the job that's changing, not the likes of us."

"You think I should jump ship before it's too late? Retrain? My mother always thought I should be a nurse."

Resnick drank a little more of his pint.

"You'll be fine," he said. "You'll adjust. As for me, the sooner I'm out of here, the better."

"Now you're talking daft."

"Am I?"

"Where would you go, Charlie? What would you do? You'd be lost without all this."

"No. A nice little smallholding somewhere. Up in the Dales, maybe. Couple of donkeys and a few dozen chickens for company."

Lynn laughed at the thought. "Donkeys! You're the donkey. Any more than a couple of weeks in the country, and you break out in hives."

"We'll see."

"I doubt it."

They picked up two portions of cod and chips on the way home, together with an extra portion of fish for the cats. Lynn did a necessary amount of ironing while Resnick watched part of the Monk DVD she'd bought him for Valentine's Day. After watching the ten o'clock news, they decided to call it a night.

This time it was her hand sliding across his chest, her legs pressing up against his, and he did nothing to push them away.

As Senior Investigating Officer into the Kelly Brent murder, Bill Berry was both being harassed by the media and leant on by the powers that be, and he, in turn, was leaning hard on Resnick. Resnick's troops harried and scurried, but to no great effect; their street-level informers, now including Ryan Gregan, came up with next to nothing. Pretty soon, Resnick knew, the likely course was for someone fresh to be brought in to look over his shoulder and scrutinise what had been done, decisions taken, avenues left unexplored. If the Force had not still been so short of experienced officers of senior rank, this could well have happened already, sending Resnick, with a certain ignominy, back to supervising street robberies until he drew his pension.

Well, he told himself, there's nothing dishonourable about that.

In a move that smacked, almost, of desperation, they had Billy Alston in again for questioning and again let him go.

No sooner were Alston's feet back on the pavement, it seemed, than Howard Brent was back to rant and rave and lodge another complaint on behalf of his family. At least, this time Resnick avoided speaking to him directly.

The older son, Michael, was interviewed by one of the local television channels, a serious young man, sombrely dressed, talking in measured tones of how his sister's death had torn the family apart and how desperately they needed the closure that conviction of her murderer alone would bring.

"As it is," he said, with a barely veiled reference to Lynn, "the police seem more preoccupied with protecting their own than they do with unearthing my sister's killer. And let us be in no doubt, had this murder occurred, not in the inner city, but out in Edwalton or Burton Joyce, had my sister been white and not a young woman of colour, the police, the predominantly white police, would not be dragging their heels as they are."

Impressive, Resnick thought, watching. Not just Malcolm X, but a touch of Martin Luther King, too. As if Michael Brent had been listening to their speeches on tape, or watching them on DVD. He would make a good solicitor, Resnick was sure, perhaps even a barrister.

The point he neglected to make, however, Resnick thought, was that Edwalton and Burton Joyce were not so steeped in drugs and guns as the Meadows or Radford or St. Ann's—or if they were, it was a better-quality cocaine served as an afterdinner treat, along with the brandy and the chocolate-covered mints, and licensed shotguns used for potting the occasional rabbit in the fields and not turf wars on the streets. Which didn't mean that colour wasn't a big part of the difference: colour, race, expectation, employment, education.

If there were answers, solutions, he didn't begin to know what they were.

Scrub it all out and start again?

Increasingly bored and listless, Lynn persuaded the medical officer to declare her fit to resume work and, rather than being assigned to the hunt for Kelvin Pearce, she was pulled in to help out on an investigation into a double murder that had stalled: a
twenty-nine-year-old woman and her four-year-old daughter, the daughter smothered with a pillow as she slept, the mother stabbed with a kitchen knife eleven times. To the Senior Investigating Officer, it had looked straightforward, open and shut: the woman and her partner had split up acrimoniously eight months before, since which time she had started a new relationship with another man.

There was ample evidence to suggest that the father, who had moved out of the family home when the split occurred, had made several attempts at reconciliation, all of which had been rebuffed. Neighbours were aware of numerous rows between the pair, and on two occasions—once in the aisles of the local supermarket and once on the street outside—he had been heard to threaten violence: "If I can't fucking have you, no other bastard will!"

As the SIO had said, open and shut.

Except that the father—the obvious suspect—had been on a friend's stag weekend to Barcelona when the murders had occurred. Friday night through to Sunday afternoon. Witnesses from amongst the men he had travelled with, staff at the various clubs and bars they had visited, hotel staff and airline personnel, accounted for practically every minute of his time.

As accurately as the pathologist had been able to pinpoint it, mother and daughter had been killed in the early hours of Sunday, somewhere between 2:00 and 4:00
A.M.

When the father had been informed of what had happened on his return, he had broken down, visibly shocked, and wept.

The only other person potentially involved—the new boyfriend, a fitness instructor at one of the city's health clubs—had been visiting his family in Newcastle upon Tyne; all of them had been out celebrating a sixtieth birthday till late on the Saturday, midnight and beyond.

Open, but far from closed.

Lynn read through written statements, watched taped interviews, talking to the detectives working on the investigation. She went out to the house where the murders had taken place, a neat semidetached within sight of Bestwood Country Park, and spent time standing silently in the girl's bedroom—an abundance of toys and Miffy posters and cards from her last birthday—and then downstairs in the neat MFI kitchen, traces of blood high in the ceiling corner and across the slats of the window blind.

Sometimes, visiting the scene, standing there in the silence alone, walking slowly from room to room, gave a sense of what might have occurred. It was something she'd learned from Resnick when she was still a young DC and adopted as her own. But this time there was nothing aside from the obvious, the already known, no shadows stepping away from the walls.

Her next step would be to reinterview the two men, though, more and more, she was convinced someone else had been involved. A stranger, another lover, a friend.

She was on her way back to the office when she all but bumped into Stuart Daines as he was leaving the building.

At first, she thought he was going to walk past, with scant acknowledgement at all, but instead he stopped and turned and smiled hesitantly.

"Why is it," he said, "whenever I see you, I always seem to be apologising?"

"Because you're such an arsehole?"

Daines laughed. "That could be it. There's an ex-wife and two Jack Russells somewhere who'd agree. Marry in haste and repent at leisure, isn't that what they say?"

"Is it?"

"You married?"