A Darker Shade of Blue

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Resnick was unable to sleep. All those years of living alone, just the weight of the cats, one and occasionally more, pressing lightly down on the covers by his feet or in the V behind his legs, and now, with Lynn away for just forty-eight hours, he was lost without her by his side. The warmth of her body next to his, the small collisions as they turned from their respective dreams into a splay of legs, her arm sliding across his chest. ‘Lay still, Charlie. Another five minutes, okay?’ Musk of her early-morning breath.

He pushed away the sheet and swivelled round, then rose to his feet. Through an inch of open window, he could hear the slight swish of cars along the Woodborough Road. Not so many minutes short of two a.m.

Downstairs, Dizzy, the oldest of the four cats, a warrior no longer, raised his head from the fruit bowl he had long since appropriated as a bed, cocked a chewed and half-torn ear and regarded Resnick with a yellow eye.

Padding past, Resnick set the kettle to boil and slid a tin of coffee beans from the fridge. A flier announcing Lynn’s course was pinned to the cork board on the wall — ‘Unzipping the Agenda: A Guide to Creative Management and Open Thinking’. Lynn and forty or so other officers from the East Midlands and East Anglia at a conference centre and hotel beside the Al outside Stevenage. Promotion material. High fliers. When she had joined the Serious Crime Unit a little more than two years ago, it has been as a sergeant; an inspector now and barely thirty, unless somehow she blotted her copybook, the only way was up. Whereas for Resnick, who had turned down promotion and the chance to move on to a bigger stage, little more than a pension awaited once his years were in.

While the coffee dripped slowly through its filter, Resnick opened the back door into the garden and, as he did so, another of the cats slithered past his ankles. Beyond the allotments, the lights of the city burned dully through a haze of rain and mist. Down there, on the streets of St Ann’s and the Meadows, armed officers patrolled with Walther P990s holstered at their hips. Drugs, of course, the cause of most of it, the cause and the core: all the way from after-dinner cocaine served at trendy middle-class dinner parties alongside squares of Green and Black’s dark organic chocolate, to twenty-five-pound wraps of brown changing hands in the stairwells of dilapidated blocks of flats.

Bolting the door, he carried his coffee through into the living room, switched on the light and slid a CD into the stereo. Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Los Angeles, nineteenth January 1957. Pepper only months out of jail on drugs offences, his second term and still only thirty-two. And worse to come.

Resnick had seen him play in Leicester on the British leg of his European tour; Pepper older, wiser, allegedly straightened out, soon to be dead three years shy of sixty, a small miracle that he survived that long. That evening, in the function room of a nondescript pub, his playing had been melodic, and inventive, the tone piping and lean, its intensity controlled. Man earning a living, doing what he can.

Back in ’57, in front of Miles Davis’ rhythm section, he had glittered, half-afraid, inspired, alto saxophone dancing over the chords of half-remembered tunes. ‘Star Eyes’, ‘Imagination’, ‘Jazz Me Blues’. The track that Resnick would play again and again: ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’.

For a moment Pepper’s namesake cat appeared in the doorway, sniffed the air and turned away, presenting his fine tail.

Just time for Resnick, eyes closed, to conjure up a picture of Lynn, restlessly sleeping in a strange bed, before the phone began to ring.

It was the sergeant on duty, his voice stretched by tiredness: ‘… ten, fifteen minutes ago, sir. I thought you’d want to know.’

That stretch of the Ilkeston Road was a mixture of small shops and residential housing, old factories put to new use, student accommodation. Police cars were parked, half on the kerb, either side of a black Ford Mondeo that, seemingly, had swerved wildly and collided, broadside-on, into a concrete post, amidst a welter of torn metal and splintered glass. Onlookers, some with overcoats pulled over their night clothes and carpet slippers on their feet, stood back behind hastily strung-out police tape, craning their necks. An ambulance and fire engine stood opposite, paramedics and fire officers mingling with uniformed police at the perimeter of the scene. Lights flashing, a second ambulance was pulling away as Resnick arrived.

Driving slowly past, he stopped outside a shop, long boarded-up, ‘High Class Butcher’ in faded lettering on the brickwork above.

Anil Khan, once a DC in Resnick’s squad and now a sergeant with Serious Crime, came briskly down to meet him and walked him back.

‘One dead at the scene, sir, young female; one on his way to hospital, the driver. Female passenger, front near side, her leg’s trapped against the door where it buckled in. Have to be cut out most likely. Oxyacetylene.’

Resnick could see the body now, stretched out against the lee of the wall beneath a dark grey blanket that was darker at the head.

‘Impact?’ Resnick said. ‘Thrown forward against the windscreen?’

Khan shook his head. ‘Shot.’

It stopped Resnick in his tracks.

‘Another car, as best we can tell. Three shots, maybe four. One of them hit her in the neck. Must have nicked an artery. She was dead before we got her out.’

Illuminated by the street light above, Resnick could see the blood, sticky and bright, clinging to the upholstery like a second skin. Bending towards the body, he lifted back the blanket edge and looked down into the empty startled eyes of a girl of no more than sixteen.

Fifteen years and seven months. Shana Ann Faye. She had lived with her mother, two younger sisters and an older brother in Radford. A bright and popular student, a lovely girl. She had been to an eighteenth birthday party with her brother, Jahmall, and his girlfriend, Marlee. Jahmall driving.

They had been on their way home when the incident occurred, less than half a mile from where Shana and Jahmall lived. A blue BMW drew up alongside them at the lights before the turn into Ilkeston Road, revving its engine as if intent on racing. Anticipating the green, Jahmall, responding to the challenge, accelerated downhill, the BMW in close pursuit; between the first set of lights and the old Radford Mill building, the BMW drew alongside, someone lowered the rear window, pushed a handgun through and fired four times. One shot ricocheted off the roof, another embedded itself in the rear of the front seat; one entered the fleshy part of Jahmall’s shoulder, causing him to swerve; the fourth and fatal shot struck Shana low in the side of the neck and exited close to her windpipe.

An impulse shooting, is that what this was? Or a case of mistaken identity?

In the October of the previous year a gunman had opened fire from a passing car, seemingly at random, into a group of young people on their way home from Goose Fair, and a fourteen-year-old girl had died. There were stories of gun gangs and blood feuds in the media, of areas of the inner city running out of control, turf wars over drugs. Flowers and sermons, blame and recriminations and in the heart of the city a minute’s silence, many people wearing the dead girl’s favourite colours; thousands lined the streets for the funeral, heads bowed in respect.

Now this.

Understaffed as they were, low on morale and resources, policing the city, Resnick knew, was becoming harder and harder. In the past eighteen months, violent crime had risen to double the national average; shootings had increased fourfold. In Radford, Jamaican Yardies controlled the trade in heroin and crack cocaine, while on the Bestwood estate, to the north, the mainly white criminal fraternity was forging an uneasy alliance with the Yardies, all the while fighting amongst themselves; at either side of the city centre, multiracial gangs from St Ann’s and the Meadows, Asian and Afro-Caribbean, fought out a constant battle for trade and respect.

So was Shana simply another victim in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or something more? The search for the car was on: best chance it would be found on waste land, torched; ballistics were analysing the bullets from the scene; Jahmall Faye and his family were being checked through records; friends would be questioned, neighbours. The public-relations department had prepared a statement for the media, another for the Assistant Chief Constable. Resnick sat in the CID office in Canning Circus station with Anil Khan and Detective Inspector Maureen Prior from Serious Crime. His patch, their concern. Their case more than his.

Outsides, the sky had lightened a little, but still their reflections as they sat were sharp against the window’s plate glass.

Maureen Prior was in her early forties, no nonsense, matter-of-fact, wearing loose-fitting grey trousers, a zip-up jacket, hair tied back. ‘So what do we think? We think they were targeted or what?’

‘The girl?’

‘No, not the girl.’

‘The brother, then?’

‘That’s what I’m thinking.’ The computer printout was in her hand. ‘He was put under a supervision order a little over two years back, offering to supply a class A drug.’

‘That’s when he’d be what?’ Khan asked ‘Fifteen?’

‘Sixteen. Just.’

‘Anything since?’

‘Not according to this.’

‘You think he could still be involved?’ Resnick said.

‘I think it’s possible, don’t you?’

‘And this was what? Some kind of payback?

‘Payback, warning, who knows? Maybe he was trying to step up into a different league, change his supplier, hold back his share of the cut, anything.’

‘We’ve checked with the Drug Squad that he’s a player?’ Resnick asked.

Maureen Prior looked over at Khan, who shook his head. ‘Haven’t been able to raise anyone so far.’

The detective inspector looked at her watch. ‘Try again. Keep trying.’

Freeing his mobile from his pocket, Khan walked towards the far side of the room.

‘How soon can we talk to Jahmall, I wonder?’ Resnick said.

‘He’s most likely still in surgery. Mid-morning, I’d say. The earliest.’

‘You want me to do that?’

‘No, it’s okay. I’ve asked them to call me from Queen’s the minute he’s out of recovery. There’s an officer standing by.’ She moved from the desk where she’d been sitting, stretching out her arms and breathing in stale air. ‘Maybe you could talk to the family?’ She smiled. ‘They’re on your patch, Charlie, after all.’

There were bunches of flowers already tied to the post into which the car had crashed, some anonymous, some bearing hastily written words of sympathy. More flowers rested up against the low wall outside the house.

The victim support officer met Resnick at the door.

‘How they holding up?’ he asked.

‘Good as can be expected, sir.’

Resnick nodded and followed the officer into a narrow hall.

They’re in back.’

Clarice Faye sat on a green high-backed settee, her youngest daughter cuddled up against her, face pressed to her mother’s chest. The middle daughter, Jade, twelve or thirteen, sat close but not touching, head turned away. Clarice was slender, light-skinned, lighter than her daughters, shadows scored deep beneath her eyes. Resnick was reminded of a woman at sea, stubbornly holding on against the pitch and swell of the tide.

The room itself was neat and small, knick-knacks and framed photographs of the children, uniform smiles; a crucifix, metal on a wooden base, hung above the fireplace. The curtains, a heavy stripe, were still pulled partway across.

Resnick introduced himself and expressed his sympathy; accepted the chair that was offered, narrow with wooden arms, almost too narrow for his size.

‘Jahmall — have you heard from the hospital?’

‘I saw my son this morning. He was sleeping. They told me to come home and get some rest.’ She shook her head and squeezed her daughter’s hand tight. ‘As if I could.’

‘He’ll be all right?’

‘He will live.’

The youngest child began to cry.

‘He is a good boy, Jahmall. Not wild… Not like some. Not any more. Why would anyone…?’ She stopped to sniff away a tear. ‘He is going to join the army, you know that? Has been for an interview already, filled in the forms.’ She pulled a tissue, screwed and damp, from her sleeve. ‘A man now, you know? He makes me proud.’

Resnick’s eyes ran round the photographs in the room. ‘Shana’s father,’ he ventured, ‘is he…?’

‘He doesn’t live with us any more.’

‘But he’s been told?’

‘You think he cares?’

The older girl sprang to her feet and half-ran across the room.

‘Jade, come back here.’

The door slammed hard against the frame.

Resnick leaned forward, drew his breath. ‘Jahmall and Shana, last night, you know where they’d been?’

‘The Meadows. A friend of Jahmall’s, his eighteenth.’

‘Did they often go around together like that, Jahmall and Shana?’

‘Sometimes, yes.’

‘They were close then?’

‘Of course.’ An insult if it were otherwise, a slight.

‘And his girlfriend, she didn’t mind?’

‘Marlee, no. She and Shana, they were like mates. Pals.’

‘Mum,’ the younger girl said, raising her head. ‘Shana didn’t like her. Marlee. She didn’t.’

‘That’s not so.’

‘It is. She told me. She said she smelled.’

‘Nonsense, child.’ Clarice smiled indulgently and shook her head.

‘How about Shana?’ Resnick asked. ‘Did she have any boyfriends? Anyone special?’

The hesitation was perhaps a second too long. ‘No. She was a serious girl. Serious about her studies. She didn’t have time for that sort of thing. Besides, she was too young.’

‘She was sixteen.’

‘Too young for anything serious, that’s what I mean.’

‘But parties, like yesterday, that was okay?’

‘Young people together, having fun. Besides, she had her brother to look after her…’ Tears rushed to her face and she brushed them aside.

The phone rang and the victim support officer answered it in the hall. ‘It’s Jahmall,’ he said from the doorway. ‘They’ll be taking him back up to the ward any time.’

‘Quickly,’ Clarice said to her daughter, bustling her off the settee. ‘Coat and shoes.’

Resnick followed them out into the hall. Door open, Jade was sitting on one of the beds in the room she and Shana had obviously shared. Aware that Resnick was looking at her, she swung her head sharply towards him, staring hard until he moved away.

Outside, clouds slid past in shades of grey; on the opposite side of the narrow street, a couple slowed as they walked by. Resnick waited while the family climbed into the support officer’s car and drove away… a good boy, Jahmall. Not wild… Not any more. The crucifix. The mother’s words. Amazing, he thought, how we believe what we want to believe, all evidence aside.

On the Ilkeston Road, he stopped and crossed the street. There were more flowers now, and photographs of Shana, covered in plastic against the coming rain. A large teddy bear with black ribbon in a bow around its neck. A dozen red roses wrapped in cellophane, the kind on sale in garage forecourts. Resnick stooped and looked at the card. For Shana. Our love will live for ever. Michael. Kisses, drawn in red biro in the shape of a heart, surrounded the words.

Resnick was putting the last touches of a salad together when he heard Lynn’s key in the lock. A sauce of spicy sausage and tomato was simmering on the stove; a pan of gently bubbling water ready to receive the pasta.

‘Hope you’re good and hungry.’

‘You know…’ Her head appearing round the door. ‘…I’m not sure if I am.’

But she managed a good helping nonetheless, wiping the spare sauce from her plate with bread, washing it down with wine.

‘So — how was it?’ Resnick asked between mouthfuls.

‘All right, I suppose.’

‘Not brilliant then.’

No, some of it was okay. Useful even.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, ways of avoiding tunnel vision. Stuff like that.’

Resnick poured more wine.

‘I just wish,’ Lynn said, ‘they wouldn’t get you to play these stupid games.’

‘Games?’

‘You know, if you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be? If you were a car, what car?’

Resnick laughed. ‘And what were you?’

‘Vegetable or car?’

‘Either.’

‘A first-crop potato, fresh out of the ground.’

‘A bit mundane.’

‘Come on, Charlie, born and brought up in Norfolk, what do you expect?’

‘A turnip?’

She waited till he was looking at his plate, then clipped him round the head.

Later, in bed, when he pressed against her back and she turned inside his arms, her face close to his, she said, ‘Better watch out, Charlie, I didn’t tell you what kind of car.’

‘Something moderately stylish, compact, not too fast?’

‘A Maserati Coupe 4.2 in Azuro Blue with full cream leather upholstery.’

He was still laughing when she stopped his mouth with hers.

The bullet that had struck Jahmall’s shoulder was a 9mm, most likely from a plastic Glock. Patched up, replenished with blood, Jahmall was sore, sullen, and little else. Aside from lucky. His girlfriend, Marlee, had twenty-seven stitches in a gash in her leg, several butterfly stitches to one side of her head and face and bruises galore. The BMW was found on open ground near railway tracks on the far side of Sneinton, burned out. No prints, no ejected shell cases, nothing of use. It took the best part of a week, but thirty-seven of the fifty or so people who had been at the party in the Meadows were traced, tracked down and questioned. For officers, rare and welcome overtime.

The Drug Squad had no recent information to suggest that Jahmall was, again, dealing drugs, but there were several people at the party well known to them indeed. Troy James and Jason Fontaine in particular. Both had long been suspected of playing an active part in the trade in crack cocaine: suspected, arrested, interrogated, charged. James had served eighteen months of a three-year sentence before being released; Fontaine had been charged with possession of three kilos of amphetamine with intent to supply, but due to alleged contamination of evidence, the case against him had been dismissed. More recently, the pair of them had been suspected of breaking into a chemist’s shop in Wilford and stealing several cases of cold remedies in order to manufacture crystal meth.

James and Fontaine were questioned in the street, questioned in their homes; brought into the police station and questioned again. Jahmall spent as much as fourteen hours, broken over a number of sessions, talking to Maureen Prior and Anil Khan.

Did he know Troy James and Jason Fontaine?

No.

He didn’t know them?

No, not really.

Not really?

Not, you know, to talk to.

But they were at the party.

If you say so.

Well, they were there. James and Fontaine.

Okay, so they were there. So what?

You and Fontaine, you had a conversation.

What conversation?

There are witnesses, claim to have seen you and Fontaine in conversation.

A few words, maybe. I don’t remember.

A few words concerning…?

Nothing important. Nothing.

How about an argument… a bit of pushing and shoving?

At the party?

At the party.

No.

Think. Think again. Take your time. It’s easy to get confused.

Oh, that. Yeah. It was nothing, right? Someone’s drink got spilled, knocked over. Happens all the time.

That’s what it was about? The argument?

Yeah.

A few punches thrown?

Maybe.

By you?

Not by me.

By Fontaine?

Fontaine?

Yes. You and Fontaine, squaring up to one another.

No. No way.

‘There’s something there, Charlie,’ Maureen Prior said. ‘Something between Jahmall and Jason Fontaine.’

They were sitting in the Polish Diner on Derby Road, blueberry pancakes and coffee, Resnick’s treat.

‘Something personal?’

‘To do with drugs, has to be. Best guess, Fontaine and James were using Jahmall further down the chain and some way he held out on them, cut the stuff again with glucose, whatever. Either that, or he was trying to branch out on his own, their patch. Radford kid poaching in the Meadows, we all know how that goes down.’

‘You’ll keep on at him?’

‘The girlfriend, too. She’s pretty shaken up still. What happened to Shana. Keeps thinking it could have been her, I shouldn’t wonder. Flaky as anything. One of them’ll break sooner or later.’

‘You seem certain.’

Maureen paused, fork halfway to her mouth. ‘It’s all we’ve got, Charlie.’

Resnick nodded and reached for the maple syrup: maybe just a little touch more.

The flowers were wilting, starting to fade. One or two of the brighter bunches had been stolen. Rain had seeped down into plastic and cellophane, rendering the writing for the most part illegible.

Clarice Faye came to the door in a dark housecoat, belted tight across; there were shadows still around her eyes.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ Resnick said.

A slight shake of the head: no move to invite him in.

‘When we were talking before, you said Shana didn’t have any boyfriends, nobody special?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Not Troy James?’

‘I don’t know that name?’

‘How about Jason? Jason Fontaine?’

The truth was there on her face, a small nerve twitching at the corner of her eye.

‘She did go out with Jason Fontaine?’

‘She saw him once or twice. The end of last year. He came round here in his car, calling for her. I told him, he wasn’t suitable, not for her. Not for Shana. He didn’t bother her again.’

‘And Shana…?’

‘Shana understood.’ Clarice stepped back and began to close the door. ‘If you’ll excuse me now?’

‘How about Michael?’ Resnick said.

‘I don’t know no Michael.’

And the door closed quietly in his face.

He waited until Jade was on her way home from school, white shirt hanging out, coat open, skirt rolled high over dark tights, clumpy shoes. Her and three friends, loud across the pavement, one of them smoking a cigarette.

None of the others as much as noticed Resnick, gave him any heed.

‘I won’t keep you a minute,’ Resnick said as Jade stopped, the others walking on, pace slowed, heads turned.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘You and Shana, you shared a room.’

‘So.’

‘Secrets.’

‘What secrets?’

‘Jason Fontaine, was she seeing him any more?’

Jade tilted back her head, looked him in the eye. ‘He was just a flash bastard, weren’t he? Didn’t care nothin’ for her.’

‘And Michael?’

‘What about him?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He loved her, didn’t he?’

Michael Draper was upstairs in his room: computer, stereo, books and folders from the course he was taking at City College, photographs of Shana on the wall, Shana and himself somewhere that might have been the Arboretum, on a bench in front of some trees, an old wall, Michael’s skin alongside hers so white it seemed to bleed into the photo’s edge.

‘She was going to tell them, her mum and that, after her birthday. We were going to get engaged.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The boy’s eyes empty and raw from tears.

Maureen Prior was out of the office, her mobile switched off. Khan wasn’t sure where she was.

‘Ask her to call me when she gets a chance,’ Resnick said. ‘She can get me at home.’

At home he made sure the chicken pieces had finished defrosting in the fridge, chopped parsley, squashed garlic cloves flat, opened a bottle of wine, saw to the cats, flicked through the pages of the Post, Shana’s murder now page four. Art Pepper again, turned up loud. Lynn was late, no later than usual, rushed, smiling, weary, a brush of lips against his cheek.

‘I need a shower, Charlie, before anything else.’

‘I’ll get this started.’ Knifing butter into the pan.

It cost Jahmall a hundred and fifteen, talked down from one twenty-five. A Brocock ME38 Magnum air pistol converted to fire live ammunition, 22 shells. Standing there at the edge of the car park, shadowed, he smiled: an eye for an eye. Fontaine’s motor, his new one, another Beamer, was no more than thirty metres away, close to the light. He rubbed his hands and moved his feet against the cold, the rain that rattled against the hood of his parka, misted his eyes. Another fifteen minutes, no more, he’d be back out again, Fontaine, on with his rounds.

Less than fifteen, it was closer to ten.

Fontaine appeared at the side door of the pub, calling out to someone inside before raising a hand and turning away.

Jahmall tensed, smelling his own stink, his own fear; waited until Fontaine had reached towards the handle of the car door, back turned.

‘Wait,’ Jahmall said, stepping out of the dark.

Seeing him, seeing the pistol, Fontaine smiled. ‘Jahmall, my man.’

‘Bastard,’ Jahmall said, moving closer. ‘You killed my sister.’

‘That slag!’ Fontaine laughed. ‘Down on her knees in front of any white meat she could find.’

Hands suddenly sticky, slick with sweat despite the cold, Jahmall raised the gun and fired. The first shot missed, the second shattered the side window of the car, the third took Fontaine in the face splintering his jaw. Standing over him, Jahmall fired twice more into his body as it slumped towards the ground, then ran.

After watching the news headlines, they decided on an early night. Lynn washed the dishes left over from dinner, while Resnick stacked away. He was locking the door when the phone went and Lynn picked it up. Ten twenty-three.

‘Charlie,’ she said, holding out the receiver. ‘It’s for you.’