Cold in Hand (9 page)

"Have you any idea why Alston might have mentioned your name?" Michaelson asked.

"Because he's a stupid twat?"

"Besides that."

Gregan could think of at least one, possibly two, neither of which he wanted to divulge. "No," he said. "I can't."

"I really think," the duty solicitor said, speaking for the first time, "that to take, as it seems, the uncorroborated assertion of one individual, as against an alibi which my client has provided and which he assures us—"

"Well," Michaelson interrupted, "there is always the other thing."

"The other thing?"

"The matter of a handgun and some 750 rounds of ammunition, found in a holdall in Mr. Gregan's bedroom."

Gregan's face at that moment, Resnick thought, watching, was a picture of despairing realisation.

"I should like," Gregan said, his voice just a little shaky, "a few words with my solicitor in private."

There was to be no denial, no passing off, no sleight of hand. No, that's not my bag, never seen it in my life, someone must have planted it there; no, I was just minding it for a friend, no idea what was inside. Gregan, as his solicitor had confirmed, was looking at a mandatory sentence of five years. Five years, minimum.

He knew enough about prison to realise it was the last place he wanted to go.

"If my client can furnish you with information that is helpful in your investigation into this unfortunate recent shooting, how willing would you be to disregard the contents of the bag?"

"Disregard?"

"Yes."

"As in pretend it was never there?"

The solicitor turned his head aside and coughed, once and then again; he hoped he wasn't coming down with a cold. "What my client is looking for is a marked degree of leniency."

"I'll bet he is," Pike said.

"I shall have to take this to my superior," said Michaelson.

"So be it," the solicitor said, and readjusted his glasses on his nose.

"Tell him we need to check his alibi," Resnick said, after speaking to Michaelson. "Then we'll listen to what he has to say. But Frank, no promises, okay?"

Karen Evans scarcely looked up when Michaelson and Pike came into the shop. Time enough to register that one of them was unusually tall and that they were both police officers of one kind or another; the amount of shoplifting that went on, there
were officers in and out all the time, sometimes seeming to take it seriously, sometimes not doing a whole lot more than joking around with one or other of the security staff, while pretending not to be noticing which women were taking exactly what garments into the changing rooms—fuel, she thought, for their own little fantasies when they got home. Ryan had talked her into playing that game a time or two: You're in the changing room, stripped down to your bra and panties, and the door swings open just enough ... Panties, she hated that word.

She was just finishing rearranging the sweaters on the shelf when the manager came over and said the two policemen wanted to speak with her. As long as it didn't take too long, they could use the office.

Michaelson would have been lying if he'd said he hadn't hoped it would be her. Small—petite, was that the word?—but not like those models they were forever getting exercised about, so sticklike, they looked as though they'd break the moment they were touched. This one looked tougher than that, her brown hair cut short with reddish streaks, a pale top that fitted nicely and then a short little skirt, brown with large white dots, over a pair of dark tights going down to ankle-length red boots.

"Your tongue," Pike said.

"What?"

"It's mopping the floor."

The office was small, the three of them close together, Michaelson bending forward uncomfortably, as if his head might graze the ceiling. He could smell the girl's perfume—how old was she? eighteen? nineteen?—and something else that he hoped wasn't his own sweat but probably was.

Karen looked at them expectantly. "This is about last week," she said, "when those four guys steamed the shop?"

"Ryan Gregan," Pike said.

Karen blinked.

"You know him?"

"Yes." She nodded and blinked again.

"He's your boyfriend?"

"Yes, I suppose." She glanced up at Michaelson. "Has something happened? To Ryan?"

Michaelson shook his head. "He's okay."

"Really? I thought, maybe, there'd been an accident."

"Nothing like that," Michaelson said, and saw her body relax. "Can you remember where you were on Valentine's Day?" he asked.

"Of course. Can't you?"

Michaelson blushed. On Valentine's Day evening, sitting across from his girlfriend of eighteen months in Hart's poncey restaurant—an arm and a leg that had cost him—he'd asked if she didn't think it was time, maybe, they got engaged or something, and she'd laughed, thinking he was making a joke, and Michaelson, despite himself, had laughed along, too, covering his embarrassment.

"Where were you?" Pike asked Karen.

"In Skegness with Ryan, freezing my arse off."

"All day?"

"More or less."

"What time did you get back?"

"I don't know. Six, seven, something like that."

"Not sooner."

"No. Why? What's all this about?"

"And Ryan was with you the whole time?"

"Yes. I mean, not every single second. But, yes, we were there together. Valentine's, you know? I had to book it off six months in advance."

As well as the red streaks in her hair, Michaelson realised, there were a few flecks of silver that became noticeable only when she moved her head as she did now. "Ryan," she said, "he's in some kind of trouble, isn't he?"

"Yes," Michaelson said.

Karen turned away from the pair of them, towards the schedule on the wall.

"This boyfriend of yours," Pike said, "any idea what he does for a living?"

"Of course," Karen said. "He's a supervisor out at Northern Foods."

They checked that out before returning to the station. Ryan Gregan had been temporarily employed as a sandwich filler on the night shift and had packed it in after just two weeks.

Resnick talked it through with Bill Berry, what they might legitimately offer, what they should expect in return.

"We're certain he's not in the frame for this himself?" Berry asked.

"Girlfriend could be lying, but no, looks unlikely."

"Play him carefully then, Charlie. Talk to the CPS. If we're going to recruit him, let's have it done properly. All by the book."

Not the same book, presumably, that Resnick had seen Bill Berry using on a suspect back at the fag end of the seventies, the local phone directory smacked hard around the back of the lad's head. "A few more whacks like that," Berry had joked, watching the suspect clamber shakily back to his feet, "he'll have the bloody lot memorised, imprinted on his sad excuse for a brain."

Happy days!

Resnick sent Pike off to check Gregan's possible contacts and took Michaelson in with him.

Gregan was sitting with his chair propped back on its rear legs, hands behind his head, and, only when Resnick had taken the seat opposite, did he let the chair come slowly forward until it was upright, hands resting now on the table edge.

"We're going to want to know about the gun," Resnick said. "That and the ammunition. Then about the shooting—"

Gregan started to say something, but a look from Resnick stopped him short.

"Billy Alston, Kelly Brent's murder, anything and everything you know."

"And if I do?"

"If you do, and if what you tell us checks out, then, and only then, we'll see what we can do to help you."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"And I'm supposed to give you everything on a plate without a single promise being made?"

"Correct."

"In a pig's ear."

"Okay." Resnick was on his feet. "Take him down to the duty sergeant. See he's charged. Illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition under section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and the Violent Crime Reduction Act of 2006."

"All right, all right, all fucking right!"

"Mr. Gregan?"

"I said, all right."

Lynn had spent the afternoon watching
Singin' in the Rain,
the DVD bought from Tesco Metro for the princely sum of £4.99. It had been one of her mother's favourites and Lynn had bought her a video copy for her birthday one year, back when videos were the thing. On visits home they would sit together watching, her mother so familiar with the lines that at key moments she would say them along with the actors, Lynn bored by then with so much of it and willing the plot along to the next manic dance number, the next small explosion of action.

Gene Kelly, whom her mother adored, Lynn found far too smarmy and self-satisfied, always cheering at the moment when the young Debbie Reynolds punctures his complacency, at least temporarily, and brings him down to earth. Until, of course, he does the dance. The dance with the umbrella, in the rain. For that, Lynn thought, he could be forgiven more or less anything.

She had managed the walk into the city centre without any great discomfort, her ribs still a little sore, but her breathing relatively easy and untroubled. At the market she'd bought six small chorizo sausages in a vacuum pack and, from another stall, onions and celery and a flourish of parsley; at Tesco, DVD
aside, she'd picked up a tin of crushed tomatoes to go with the one in the cupboard back home and another of chickpeas. And a small pot of sour cream.

If she managed to carry that lot back up the hill without aggravating her injury, she was well on the way to recovery.

Early evening she stood in the kitchen, half-listening to Radio 4, chopping onions and crying, wiping the tears away with her sleeve. Run the cold-water tap, that was her mother's remedy; Charlie favoured fresh air on his face from the open window; as far as Lynn was concerned there was no way round it, if you wanted onions you got tears.

She was just stirring in the pieces of sausage, the juices at the bottom of the pan slowly oozing orange, when she heard Resnick's key in the lock.

He stood for a moment inside the kitchen door, savouring the smell. "I could get used to this, you know."

"What's that?"

"You home here, doing the cooking."

"Meal waiting for you after a hard day at the office."

"That kind of thing."

"How about everything dusted and Hoovered, the ironing done, shirts on their hangers?"

"Bloody perfection."

"Here." She slapped the wooden spoon down into the palm of his hand. "Get stirring. I need a wee."

Resnick fiddled with the tuner on the radio, searching for something other than educated chatter; the only alternatives seemed to be opera, what he believed was now called urban music, or garrulous oiks in love with the sound of their own voices. He switched off and concentrated on the stew.

"How's this?" he asked when Lynn returned, offering her a liberal tasting from the end of the spoon.

"You've added something."

"Just a little paprika."

"Hmm..."

"Too much?"

"I'm not sure."

"By the time the sour cream's stirred in, it'll be fine."

"If you say so."

Resnick had bought a bottle of wine, which he opened now, reaching down for two large glasses from the shelf.

"Aren't you supposed to let it breathe?"

"Probably."

They sat at the kitchen table, the cats weaving hopefully around their feet. The meal a far cry, Lynn was thinking, from what she had grown up with, her mother's scarcely varying rotation: roast chicken or a joint of lamb or beef at the weekend, cold meat or shepherd's pie on Monday; Wednesdays and Thursdays, cauliflower cheese or jacket potatoes, Fridays a nice bit of fish.

When Lynn had left home to live alone, she had existed on pasta and delivery pizza and supermarket salads shaken straight out of the packet and onto the plate. Living with Resnick had broadened her horizons in that area, at least. That and being able to tell Billie Holiday apart from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan; sometimes she could even distinguish Ben Webster from Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young.

"How did it go today?" she asked. "Any progress?"

"Some."

She listened with interest while he told her about Ryan Gregan.

"The gun," she said. "It's not the same."

"As was used on you and Kelly Brent? No. It's a semiautomatic, 9mm. Heavy bloody thing. Swiss, Gregan reckons. Swiss police or army. But odds are it's a Croatian copy."

"And Gregan had it why?"

"Well"—Resnick speared a piece of chorizo with his fork—"the trouble with people like Gregan, so much of their life is
spent lying, they can make more or less anything sound plausible. But what he says, he went back up to Newcastle for New Year's, see some mates, celebrate. He'd lived there for a while before moving down. New Year's Day, they were out having a quiet drink in this club, so they thought, and it all sets off. Gregan claims he doesn't know what started it, but the next minute everyone's getting stuck in. Pell-mell. One of his pals gets glassed in the face and Gregan smashes a bottle on the bar, wades in after the bloke who did it and takes out his eye. Like a soft-boiled egg, was how Gregan put it, right there inside an empty bottle of Newcastle Brown."

Lynn lowered a mouthful of stew back onto the plate, uneaten.

"Next thing, the police are on their way and everyone scarpers, Gregan's back down here on the morning train. Couple of days later, one of his friends gets in touch. The blokes they clashed with know where he is, and they're out to get him back. Evil bastards, his pal says. So Gregan thinks he'd better get some protection. Goes out and buys a gun."

"Just like that?"

Resnick shrugged. "Not difficult. As you know."

"A gun and—what was it?—seven hundred rounds of ammunition?"

"Give or take."

"What's he want to do? Start a small war?"

"He says that was the deal. All or nothing."

"And this was how long ago? The beginning of the year?"

"Yes." Resnick broke off a piece of bread to wipe round his plate, mopping up the juice. "Gregan says he tried to trade it back to the bloke he bought it from, but he'd disappeared. Done a bunk. That was when he started putting the word out he might be willing to sell."