A Darker Shade of Blue (15 page)

*

About a week later, media interest in the case beginning to fade, Resnick left the Polish Club early, a light rain falling as he walked back across town. Indoors, he made himself a sandwich and poured the last of the Scotch into a glass. Billie's voice was jaunty and in your face, even in defeat. Since the time she had sat across from him in his chair, slipped into his bed, he had never quite managed to shake Eileen from his mind. When he crossed the room and dialled again the number she had given him, the operator's message was the same: number unobtainable. The music at an end, the sound of his own breathing seemed to fill the room.

THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE STARS

Eileen had done everything she could to change his mind. Michael, she'd said, anywhere else, okay? Anywhere but there. Michael Sherwood not his real name, not even close. But in the end she'd caved in, just as he'd known she would. Thirty-three by not so many months and going nowhere; thirty-three, though she was still only owning up to twenty-nine.

When he'd met her she'd been a receptionist in a car showroom south of Sheffield, something she'd blagged her way into and held down for the best part of a year; fine until the head of sales had somehow got a whiff of her past employment, some potential customer who'd seen her stripping somewhere most likely, and tried wedging his podgy fingers up inside her skirt one evening late. Eileen had kneed him in the balls, then hit him with a solid glass ashtray high across the face, close to taking out an eye. She hadn't bothered waiting for her cards.

She'd been managing a sauna, close to the city centre, when Michael had found her. In at seven, check the towels, make sure the plastic had been wiped down, bottles of massage oil topped up, the come washed from the walls; once the girls arrived, first shift, ready to catch the early punters on their way to work, she'd examine their hands, ensure they'd trimmed their nails; uniforms they took home and washed, brought back next day clean as new or she'd want the reason why.

‘Come on,' Michael had said, ‘fifty minutes down the motorway. It's not as if I'm asking you to fucking emigrate.' Emigration might have been easier. She had memories of Nottingham and none of them good. But then, looking round at the tatty travel posters and old centrefolds from
Playboy
on the walls, he'd added, ‘What? Worried a move might be bad for your career?'

It hadn't taken her long to pack her bags, turn over the keys.

Fifty minutes on the motorway.

A house like a barn, a palace, real paintings on the walls.

When he came home earlier than usual one afternoon and found her sitting in the kitchen, polishing the silver while she watched TV, he snatched the cloth from her hands. ‘There's people paid for that, not you.'

‘It's something to do.'

His nostrils flared. ‘You want something to do, go down the gym. Go shopping. Read a fucking book.'

‘Why?' she asked him later that night, turning towards him in their bed.

‘Why what?'

‘Why am I here?'

He didn't look at her. ‘Because I'm tired of living on my own.'

He was sitting propped up against pillows, bare-chested, thumbing through the pages of a climbing magazine. Eileen couldn't imagine why: anything more than two flights of stairs and he took the lift.

The light from the lamp on his bedside table shone a filter of washed-out blue across the patterned quilt and the curtains stirred in the breeze from the opened window. One thing he insisted on, one of many, sleeping with at least one of the windows open.

That's not enough,' Eileen said.

‘What?'

‘Enough of a reason for me being here. You being tired of living alone.'

After a long moment, he put down his magazine. ‘It's not the reason, you know that.'

‘Do I?' She leaned back as he turned towards her, his fingers touching her arm.

‘I'm sorry about earlier,' he said. ‘Snapping at you like that. It was stupid. Unnecessary.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Yes, it does.'

His face was close to hers, too close for her to focus; there was a faint smell of brandy on his breath.

After they'd made love he lay on his side, watching her, watching her breathe.

‘Don't,' she said.

‘Don't what?'

‘Don't stare. I hate it when you stare.' It reminded her of Terry, her ex, the way his eyes had followed her whenever he thought she wasn't looking; right up until the night he'd slipped the gun out from beneath the pillow and, just when she'd been certain he was going to take her life, had shot himself in the head.

‘What else am I supposed to do?' Michael said.

‘Go to sleep? Take a shower?' Her face relaxed into a smile. ‘Read a fucking book?'

Michael grinned and reached across and kissed her. ‘You want to know how much I love you?'

‘Yeah, yeah.' Mocking.

After a little searching, he found a ballpoint in the bedside-table drawer. Reaching for the magazine, he flicked through it till he came to a picture of the Matterhorn, outlined against the sky.

‘Here,' he said, and quickly drew a hasty, childlike approximation of the sun, moon and stars around the summit. That's how much.'

Smiling, Eileen closed her eyes.

Resnick had spent the nub end of the evening in a pub off the A632 between Bolsover and Arkwright Town. Peter Waites and himself. From the outside it looked as if the place had been closed down months before and the interior was not a lot different. Resnick paced himself, supping halves, aware of having to drive back down, while Waites worked his way assiduously from pint to pint, much as he had when he'd been in his pomp and working at the coalface, twenty years before.

Whenever it came to Waites' round, Resnick was careful to keep his wallet and his tongue well zipped, the man's pride buckled enough. He had lost his job in the wake of the miners' strike and not worked steady since.

‘Not yet forty when they tossed me on the fuckin' scrapheap, Charlie. Me and a lot of others like me. Nigh on a thousand when that pit were closed and them panty-waist civil bloody servants chucking their hands up in the air on account they've found sixty new jobs. Bloody disgrace.'

He snapped the filter from the end of his cigarette before lighting up.

‘Lungs buggered enough already, Charlie. This'll not make ha'porth of difference, no matter what anyone says. Besides, long as I live long enough to see the last of that bloody woman and dance on her bloody grave, I don't give a sod.'

That bloody woman: Margaret Hilda Thatcher.

In that company especially, no need to speak her name.

When they stepped outside the air bit cold. Over the carefully sculpted slag heap, now slick with grass, the moon hung bright and full. Of the twenty terraced houses in Peter Wakes' street, fourteen were now boarded up.

‘You'll not come in, Charlie?'

‘Some other time.'

‘Aye.' The two men shook hands.

‘Look after yourself, Peter.'

‘You, too.'

Resnick had first met the ex-miner when his son had joined the Notts force as a young PC and been stationed for a while at Canning Circus, under Resnick's wing. Now the boy was in Australia, married with kids, something in IT, and Resnick and Waites still kept in touch, the occasional pint, an odd Saturday at Bramhall Lane or down in Nottingham at the County ground, a friendship based on mutual respect and a sense of regret for days gone past.

Eileen would never be sure what woke her. The flap of the curtain as the window opened wider; the soft tread on the carpeted floor. Either way, when she opened her eyes there they were, two shrouded shapes beyond the foot of the bed. Beside her, Michael was already awake, pushing up on one elbow, hand reaching out towards the light.

‘Leave it,' said a voice.

Already the shapes beginning to flesh out, take on detail.

‘We don't need the fucking light,' the shorter one said. A voice Eileen didn't recognise: one she would never forget.

Michael switched on the light and they shot him, the tall one first and then the other, the impact hurling Michael back against the headboard, skewing him round until his face finished somehow pressed up against the wall.

Moving closer, the shorter of the two wrenched the wire from the socket and the room went dark. Too late to prevent Eileen from seeing what she had seen: the taller man bareheaded, more than bare, shaven, bald, a child's mask, Mickey Mouse, covering the centre of his face; his companion had a woollen hat pulled low, a red scarf wrapped high around his neck and jaw.

Some of Michael's blood ran, slow and warm, between Eileen's arm and her breast. The rest was pooling between his legs, spreading dark across the sheets. The sound she hadn't recognised was her own choked sobbing, caught like a hair-ball in her throat. She knew they would kill her or rape her or both.

‘You want it?' the shorter one said, gesturing towards the bed.

The tall one made a sound like someone about to throw up and the shorter one laughed.

Eileen closed her eyes and when she opened them again they had gone.

Welcoming the rare chance of an early night, Lynn had been in bed for a good hour by the time Resnick returned home. Through several layers of sleep she registered the Saab slowing into the drive outside, the front door closing firmly in its frame, feet slow but heavy on the stairs; sounds from the bathroom and then his weight on the mattress as he lowered himself down. More than two years now and she still sometimes felt it strange, this man beside her in her bed. His bed, to be more precise.

‘God, Charlie,' she said, shifting her legs. ‘Your feet are like blocks of ice. And you stink of beer.'

His mumbled apology seemed to merge with his first snore.

His feet might be cold, but the rest of him seemed to radiate warmth. Lynn moved close against him and within not so many minutes she was asleep again herself.

Short of four, the phone woke them both.

‘Yours or mine?' Resnick said, pushing back the covers.

‘Mine.'

She was already on her feet, starting to pull on clothes.

‘Shooting,' she said, when she'd put the phone back down. ‘Tattershall Drive.'

‘You want me to come?'

Lynn shook her head. ‘No need. Go back to sleep.'

When they'd started living together, Lynn had transferred from Resnick's squad into Major Crime; less messy that way. Her coat, a hooded black anorak, windproof and waterproof, was on a hook in the hall. Despite the hour, it was surprisingly light outside, not so far off a full moon.

The body had not yet been moved. Scene of Crime were taking photographs, measuring, assiduously taking samples from the floor. The pathologist was still on his way. It didn't need an expert, Lynn thought, to see how he'd died.

Anil Khan stood beside her in the doorway. He had been the first officer from the Major Crime Unit to arrive.

‘Two of them, so she says.' His voice was light, barely accented.

‘She?'

‘Wife, mistress, whatever. She's downstairs.'

Lynn nodded. When she had been promoted, three months before, detective sergeant to detective inspector, Khan had slipped easily into her shoes.

‘Any idea how they got in?'

‘Bedroom window, by the look of things. Out through the front door.'

Lynn glanced across the room. ‘Flew in then, like Peter Pan?'

Khan smiled. ‘Ladder marks on the sill.'

Eileen was sitting in a leather armchair, quilt round her shoulders, no trace of colour in her face. Someone had made her a cup of tea and it sat on a lacquered table, untouched. The room itself was large and unlived in, heavy dark furniture, dark paintings in ornamental frames; wherever they'd spent their time, Lynn thought, it wasn't here.

She lifted a high-backed wooden chair and carried it across the room. Through the partly open door she saw Khan escorting the pathologist towards the stairs. She set the chair down at an angle, close to Eileen, and introduced herself, name and rank. Eileen continued to stare into space, barely registering that she was there.

‘Can you tell me what happened?' Lynn said.

No reply.

‘I need you to tell me what happened,' Lynn said. For a moment, she touched Eileen's hand.

‘I already did. I told the Paki.'

‘Tell me. In your own time.'

Eileen looked at her then. ‘They killed him. What more d'you want to know?'

‘Everything,' Lynn said. ‘Everything.'

His name was Michael Sherwood: Mikhail Sharminov. He had come to England from Russia fifteen years before. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Russo-Armenian parents, as a young man he had quickly decided a life devoted to the production of citrus fruits and tung oil was not for him. He went, as a student, to Moscow, and by the time he was thirty he had a thriving business importing bootlegged rock music through East Germany into Russia, everything from the Beatles to Janis Joplin. Soon, there were video tapes, bootlegged also:
Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, E.T.
By the standards of the Russian black economy, Mikhail was on his way to being rich.

But then, by 1989 the Berlin Wall was crumbling and, in its wake, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was falling apart. Georgia, where his ageing parents still lived, was on the verge of civil war. Free trade loomed.

Go or stay?

Mikhail became Michael.

In Britain he used his capital to build up a chain of provincial video stores, most of whose profits came from pirated DVDs; some of his previous contacts in East Berlin were now in Taiwan, in Tirana, in Hong Kong. Truly, a global economy.

Michael Sherwood, fifty-eight years old. The owner outright of property to the value of two million five, together with the leases of more than a dozen stores; three bank accounts, one offshore; a small collection of paintings, including a small Kandinsky worth an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds; three cars, a Lexus and two BMWs; four .38 bullets, fired from close range, two high in the chest, one to the temple, one that had torn through his throat.