A Darker Shade of Blue

BILLIE’S BLUES

Angels, that was what he thought. The way she lay on her back, arms spread wide, as if making angels in the snow. The front of her coat tugged aside, feet bare, the centre of her dress stained dark, fingers curled. A few listless flakes settled momentarily on her face and hair. Porcelain skin. In those temperatures she could have been dead for hours or days. The pathologist would know.

Straightening, Resnick glanced at his watch. Three forty-five. Little over half an hour since the call had come through. Soon there would be arc lights, a generator, yellow tape, officers in coveralls searching the ground on hands and knees. As Anil Khan, crouching, shot off the first of many Polaroids, Resnick stepped aside. The broad expanse of the Forest rose behind them, broken by a ragged line of trees. The city’s orange glow.

‘The woman as called it in,’ Millington said, at his shoulder. ‘You’ll likely want a word.’

She was standing some thirty metres off, where the scrub of grass and the gravel of the parking area merged.

‘A wonder she stayed around,’ Resnick said.

Millington nodded and lit a cigarette.

She was tall, taller than average, dark hair that at closer range was reddish-brown, brown leather boots which stopped below the knee, a sheepskin coat she pulled across herself protectively as Resnick came near. A full mouth from which most of the lipstick had been worn away, eyes like seawater, bluey-green. The fingers holding her coat close were raw with cold.

Still Resnick did not recognise her until she had fumbled in her pockets for a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, the flame small yet sudden, flaring before her eyes.

‘Eileen? Terry’s Eileen?’

She looked at him then. ‘Not any more.’

It had been two years, almost to the day, since the last time he had seen her, trapped out in widow’s weeds. Since then, the seepage that had followed Terry Cooke’s funeral had submerged her from Resnick’s sight. Cooke, a medium-range chancer who had punched his weight but rarely more — aggravated burglary, the occasional lorry hijack, once a payroll robbery of almost splendid audacity — and who had ended his own life with a bullet through the brain, administered while Eileen lay in bed alongside him.

‘You found her.’ Resnick’s head nodded back in the direction of the corpse.

As a question, it didn’t require answer.

‘How come?’

‘She was there, wasn’t she? Lyin’ there. I almost fell over her.’

‘I mean, three in the morning, how come you were here? On the Forest?’

‘How d’you think?’

Resnick looked at her, waiting.

She gouged the heel of her boot into the frozen ground. ‘Business. What else?’

‘Christ, Eileen.’

‘I was here doin’ business.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Why should you?’ For the space of seconds, she looked back at him accusingly.

Resnick had talked to her several times in the weeks before Terry Cooke had died, Eileen seeking a way out of the relationship but too scared to make the move. And Resnick listening sympathetically, hoping she would give him an angle, a way of breaking through Cooke’s camouflage and alibis. Give him up, Eileen. Give us something we can use. Once he’s inside, he’ll not be able to reach you, do you any harm. In the end, Resnick had thought, the only harm Cooke had done had been to himself. Now, looking at Eileen, he was less sure.

‘I’m sorry,’ Resnick said.

‘Why the hell should you be sorry?’

He shrugged, heavy shouldered. If he knew why, he couldn’t explain. Behind, the sound of transport pulling off the road, reinforcements arriving.

‘When you first knew me, Terry too, I was stripping, right? This i’n’t so very different.’ They both knew that wasn’t so. ‘Besides, get to my age, those kind of jobs, prime ones, they can get few and far between.’

She was what, Resnick thought, twenty-six, twenty-seven? Shy of thirty, to be sure. ‘You’d best tell me what happened,’ he said.

Eileen lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. ‘This punter, he said he weren’t going to use a condom, couldn’t understand why an extra twenty didn’t see it right. Chucked me out and drove off. I was walking up on to Forest Road, thought I might pick up a cab, go back into town. Which was when I saw her. Ducked through that first lot of bushes and there she was.’

‘You could have carried on walking,’ Resnick said. ‘Skirted round.’ At his back, he could hear Millington’s voice, organising the troops.

‘Not once I’d seen her.’

‘So you called it in.’

‘Had my mobile. Didn’t take but a minute.’

‘You could have left her then.’

‘No, I couldn’t.’ Her eyes fastened on his, challenging.

The pathologist was driving slowly across the pitted surface towards them, mindful of the paintwork on his new Volvo.

‘I’ll get someone to take you to the station,’ Resnick said. ‘Get a statement. No sense you freezing out here any more than you have to.’

Already he was turning away.

The dead woman was scarcely that: a girl, mid-teens. Below medium height and underweight; scars, some possibly self-inflicted, to her legs and arms; bruising across the buttocks and around the neck. The thin cotton of her dress was stuck to her chest with blood. Scratches to exposed parts of the body suggested that she could have been attacked elsewhere then dragged to the spot where she was found and dumped. No bag nor purse nor any other article she might have been carrying had been discovered so far. Preliminary examination suggested she had been dead not less than twenty-four hours, possibly more. Further tests on her body and clothing were being carried out.

Officers would be out on the streets around Hyson Green and the Forest with hastily reproduced photographs, talking to prostitutes plying their trade, stopping cars, knocking on doors. Others would be checking missing persons on the computer, contacting social services, those responsible for the care and custody of juveniles. If no one had come forward with an identification by the end of the day, public relations would release a picture to the press for the morning editions, push for the maximum publicity on local radio and TV.

In his office, Resnick eased a now lukewarm mug of coffee aside and reached again for the transcript of Lynn Kellogg’s interview with Eileen. As a document in a murder investigation it was unlikely to set the pulses racing; Eileen’s responses rarely rose above the monosyllabic, while Lynn’s questioning, for once, was little more than routine.

In the CID room, Lynn Kellogg’s head was just visible over the top of her VDU. Resnick waited until she had saved what was on the screen and dropped the transcript down on her desk.

‘You didn’t get on, you and Eileen.’

‘Were we supposed to?’

‘You didn’t like her.’

‘What was to like?’

A suggestion of a smile showed on Resnick’s face. ‘She dialled 999. Hung around. Agreed to make a statement.’

‘Which was next to useless.’

‘Agreed.’

Lynn touched her index finger to the keyboard and the image on the screen disappeared. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but what exactly’s your point?’

‘I’m just wondering if we’ve missed something, that’s all.’

‘You want me to talk to her again?’

‘Perhaps not.’

Lynn’s eyes narrowed perceptibly. ‘I see.’

‘I mean, if she sensed you didn’t like her…’

‘Whereas she might open up to you.’

‘It’s possible.’

With a slow shake of the head, Lynn flipped back through the pages of her notebook for the address and copied it onto a fresh sheet, which Resnick glanced at quickly before folding it down into the breast pocket of his suit.

‘She’s a tart, sir. A whore.’

If, on his way to the door, Resnick heard her, he gave no sign.

It was a two-up, two-down off the Hucknall Road, opening into the living room directly off the street: one of those old staples of inner-city living that are gradually being bulldozed from sight, some would say good riddance, to be replaced by mazes of neat little semis with miniature gardens and brightly painted doors.

Eileen answered the bell in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, hair tied back, no trace of make-up on her face.

‘Lost?’ she asked caustically.

‘I hope not.’

She stood back and motioned him inside. The room was neat and comfortably furnished, a framed photograph of herself and Terry on the tiled mantelpiece, some sunny day in both their pasts. Set into the old fireplace, a gas fire was going full blast; the television playing soundlessly, racing from somewhere, Newmarket or Uttoxeter, hard going under leaden skies.

‘Nice,’ Resnick said, looking round.

‘But not what you’d’ve expected.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Terry, leaving me half of everything. You’d have reckoned something posh, Burton Joyce at least.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Yes, well, half of everything proved to be half of nothing much. Terry, bless him, all over. And by the time that family of his had come scrounging round, to say nothing of all his mates, Frankie Farmer and the rest, oh, Terry owed me this, Terry promised me that, I was lucky to get away with what I did.’

‘You could always have said no, turned them down.’

‘You think so?’ Eileen reached for her cigarettes, bent low and lit one from the fire. ‘Farmer and his like, no’s not a word they like to hear.’

‘They threatened you?’

Tilting back her head, she released a slow spiral of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘They didn’t have to.’

Nodding, Resnick began to unbutton his overcoat.

‘You’re stopping then?’ Almost despite herself, a smile along the curve of her mouth.

‘Long enough for a coffee, maybe.’

‘It’s instant.’

‘Tea then.’ Resnick grinned. ‘If that’s all right.’

With a short sigh, Eileen held out her hand. ‘Here. Give me your coat.’

She brought it through from the kitchen on a tray, the tea in mugs, sugar in a blue-and-white Tate amp; Lyle bag, three digestive biscuits, one of them chocolate-faced.

‘You did want milk?’

‘Milk’s fine.’

Eileen sat opposite him in the second of matching chairs, stirred two sugars into her tea, leaned back and lit another cigarette.

‘The last thousand I had left-’ she began.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Resnick said.

‘What was I doing, out on the Forest, your question.’

‘You still don’t have-’

‘Maybe I do.’

Resnick sat back and listened.

‘The last thousand from what Terry left me — after I’d bought this place, I mean — this pal of mine — least, I’d reckoned her for a pal — she persuaded me to come in with her on this sauna she was opening, Mapperley Top. Money was for the deposit, first three months’ rent, tarting the place up — you know, a lick of paint and a few posters — buying towels and the like.’ She rested her cigarette on the edge of the tray and swallowed a mouthful of tea. ‘Vice Squad raided us five times in the first fortnight. Whether it was one of the girls refusing a freebie or something more — backhanders, you know the kind of thing — I never knew. Either way, a month after we opened we were closed and I was left sorting out the bills.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘Maybe it’s true.’

‘And maybe it’s you.’

‘How d’you mean?’

She gave a little snort of derision. ‘It’s what you do. Your way of getting what you want. Kind word here, little smile there. All so bloody understanding. It’s all bollocks, Charlie. You told me to call you that, remember? When you were buttering me up before, trying to use me to get Terry locked away.’

Resnick held his tea in both hands, fingers laced around the mug, saying nothing.

‘Well, I didn’t. Wouldn’t. Never would. But Terry didn’t know that, did he? Saw you and me together and thought the worst. If you’d been screwing me, it wouldn’t’ve been so bad, he could have coped with that, I reckon, come to terms. But no, he thought I was grassing him up. And that was what he couldn’t live with. The thought that I was betraying him. So he topped himself.’

Both of them knew it hadn’t been that simple.

Tears had appeared at the corners of Eileen’s eyes and with the back of her hand she brushed them away. I reckon there was a lot of unsolved business written off that day, eh, Charlie? Anything that Terry might’ve had his hand in and a lot more besides. A lot of your blokes lining up to pat your back and buy you a drink and help you spit on Terry’s grave.’

Resnick waited until the worst of the anger had faded from her eyes. ‘I deserve that. Some of it.’

‘Yes, you bastard, you do.’

‘And I am-’

‘Don’t.’ She stretched a hand towards his face, fingers spread. ‘Just don’t bother with sorry. Just tell me what you’re doing here, sitting there in my front room, taking all that shit from me.’

Resnick set his mug down on the tray. ‘The girl,’ he said, ‘the one whose body you found. I think there’s something about her you’re still keeping back.’

‘Christ!’ Up on her feet, she paced the room. ‘I should’ve left her, shouldn’t I? Poor stupid cow. Minded my own bloody business.’

Resnick followed her with his eyes. ‘Stupid, Eileen. What way was she stupid?’

‘She was a kid, a girl, I doubt she was old enough to have left school.’

‘You did know her then?’

‘No.’

‘A kid, you said…’

‘I saw her lyin’ there, didn’t I.’

‘And that was all?’

Eileen stood at the window, her breath warming circles on the glass. A heavy bass echoed faintly through the side wall, the same rhythm over and again. Traffic stuttered in and out of the city along the Hucknall Road.

‘I saw her a few nights back,’ Eileen said. ‘Corner of Addison Street. Skirt up to her arse and four-inch heels. She must’ve been freezing.’ Her back was still to Resnick, her voice clear in the small room. ‘This van had been up and down, two, maybe three times. Blue van, small. Post office van, that sort of size. Just the one bloke inside. He’d given me the once-over, going past real slow, the girl too. Finally he stops alongside her and leans out. I thought she was going to get in, but she didn’t. To and fro about it for ages they was before he drives off and she goes back to her stand. Fifteen, twenty minutes later he’s back, straight to her this time, no messing, and this time get in is what she does.’

Eileen turned to face him, hands behind her pressed against the wall.

‘A few nights back,’ Resnick said. ‘Is that three or four?’

‘Three.’

‘Monday, then?’

‘I suppose.’

‘The driver, you knew him?’

‘No.’ The hesitation was slight, slight enough that Resnick, going over the conversation later, couldn’t be certain it was his imagination.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Course.’

‘And the van?’

She shook her head.

‘The driver, though. You’d recognise him again?’

‘I don’t know. I might.’

Resnick set the mug down on the tray, tea barely touched. ‘Thanks, Eileen. Thanks for your time.’

She waited until he was at the door. ‘When the van came back the second time, I can’t be sure, but I think there were two of them, two blokes, the second one leaning forward from the back. Like I say, I can’t be sure.’

The temperature seemed to have dropped another five degrees when Resnick stepped out from the comparative warmth of the house on to the street and clouds hung low overhead, laden with snow.

The pathologist was a short, solid man with stubby fingers that seemed unsuited to his daily tasks. Despite the cold, they stood at one corner of the parking area to the building’s rear, Resnick and himself, allowing the pathologist to smoke.

‘Weather, eh, Charlie.’

Resnick grunted in reply.

‘All right for you, up off the Woodborough Road; where I am, down by the Trent, bloody river freezes over, soon as the bugger thaws you’re up to your ankles in floodwater and bailing out downstairs like the place has sprung a leak.’

‘The girl,’ Resnick nudged.

The pathologist grinned. ‘Hamlet, Charlie. Act one, scene two.’

‘Come again?’

‘Had you down as a bit of a scholar. On the quiet at least. “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.” That poor kid, stretched out in the snow, clothes stuck to her with blood, jumped to the same conclusions, you and me, I’ll wager. Cut. Stabbed. Sliced.’ He sucked noisily on the end of his cigar. ‘Not a bit of it. Not her blood. Different type altogether. No, she was strangled, Charlie. Throttled. Bare hands. Likely passed out within minutes, that’s one mercy. Bruising in plenty elsewhere, mind you, some consistent with being struck by a fist and some not. Something hard and narrow. Old-fashioned poker, something similar. And semen, Charlie, generous traces of, inside and out.’

For a moment, without his willing it, Resnick’s eyes shut fast.

‘Marks round her wrists,’ the pathologist continued, ‘as if at some point she’d been tied up. Tight enough to break the skin.’

‘Rope or metal?’

‘Metal.’

‘Like handcuffs?’

‘Very like.’

Unbidden, instinctive, the scene was beginning to play out in Resnick’s mind.

‘One person’s or more?’ he asked. ‘The semen.’

‘I’ll get back to you.’

Resnick nodded. ‘Anything else?’

‘Fragments of material beneath her fingernails. Possibly skin. It’s being analysed now.’

‘How close can you pin down the time of death?’

‘Likely not as close as you’d like.’

‘Try me.’

‘Twenty-four hours, give or take.’

‘So if she was killed elsewhere and then dumped…’

‘Which everything else suggests.’

‘She’d likely been on the Forest since the early hours of yesterday morning, Wednesday.’

‘Where she was found, not unfeasible.’ The pathologist stubbed out the last smoulderings of the cigar on the sole of his shoe. ‘Noon tomorrow, Charlie, I’ll have more for you then.’

Resnick cupped both hands together and lifted them to his face, breathing out warm air.

Back upstairs in the CID room, Lynn Kellogg was talking to a Mrs Marston from a village just north of Melton Mowbray, arranging for her and her husband to be picked up and driven into the city, there to assist in the identification of the body of a fifteen-year-old girl who corresponded to the description of their missing daughter.

Her name was Clara. She’d run away twice before without getting further than Leicester services on the Ml. The usual things: clothes, boys, forever missing the last bus home, the silver stud she’d had put through her nose, the ring she wanted through her navel. Fifteen years and three months. Pills. Sex. Her father ran a smallholding, found it hard; four mornings a week her mum worked in a newsagent in Melton, cycling the seven or so miles so she could open up first thing. Weekends they helped out at the local nature reserve, her mum made scones, coffee and walnut cake, the best.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Resnick had said, ‘if it is her, don’t tell them any more than they need to know.’

Ashen faced, Ted Marston held his wife by the shoulders as she beat her fists against his chest, her screams of denial tearing the sterile air.

The morning papers were full of it. Schoolgirl sex. Prostitution. Murder. An ordinary family grieves. Photographs of Clara in her school uniform vied for space with close-ups of her parents, stolen with a telephoto lens. The police are seeking to trace the driver of a blue van, seen in the vicinity of Addison Street and Forest Road East.

The pathologist beat his deadline by close on an hour. DNA samples taken from the girl’s body confirmed that the semen came from two different men, one of whom was the source of the blood that had soaked her dress. Scrapings of skin found beneath her fingernails were from the second man. Filaments of a muddy green synthetic material, also taken from under her nails, seemed to have come from cheap, generic carpeting.

Two men, one young girl. A room without windows, a locked door. Do they take it in turns, one watching through a peephole while the other performs? A video camera? Polaroids? When she screams, as Resnick assumes she must, why are those screams not heard? And the handcuffs — is she cuffed to a bed or somehow to the floor?

Anil Khan took Eileen to Central Station and watched while she went through book after book of mugshots, barely glancing at each page. Resnick was there on the spread of pavement when she left.

‘Don’t go out tonight, Eileen. Stay close to home.’

He turned and watched as she continued on down Shakespeare Street towards the taxi rank on Mansfield Road.

Back in his own kitchen, the cats winding between his legs, anxious to be fed, Resnick poured himself a generous shot of Scotch and drank it down, two swallows then a third. Blood on the walls. Was there blood on the walls? He forked tinned food into four bowls, poured water and milk. Officers had contacted accident and emergency at Queen’s and the other hospitals, the only serious stab wounds seemingly the result of drunk and disorderly or domestics, but these were all being checked. He rinsed his hands beneath the tap before assembling a sandwich on slices of dark rye, grinding coffee. Skin beneath the girl’s fingernails. Fighting back. Had she somehow got hold of a knife, seized it when, for whatever reason, the cuffs were undone? Or had there been a falling-out between the two men? Jealousy? Fear?

The front room struck cold, the radiators likely in need of bleeding; switching on the light, Resnick pulled across the curtains, thankful for their weight. Why strangle her? Take her life. A fit of anger, irrational, unplanned? A response to being attacked? Somehow, had things gone too far, got out of hand? He crossed to the stereo where a CD still lay in place: Billie Holiday on Commodore. ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’. ‘Strange Fruit’.

Less than forty minutes later, sandwich and coffee long finished, Billie’s voice still ringing in his head, he prised the smallest cat from his lap, switched off the amplifier, lifted down his topcoat from the pegs in the hall, and went out to where the elderly Saab was parked alongside the house. Slowly, doubtless looking like a punter himself, he drove around the Forest, doubling back through a succession of interlocking streets until he was sure Eileen was not there. When, later, he passed her house, lights were burning upstairs and down.

His sleep was patchy and by five he was fully awake, listening to the breathing of the two cats entwined near the foot of his bed, the faint fall of snow against the pane.

They would have known, wouldn’t they, that Eileen had seen the girl getting into their van.

Next morning, the snow on the streets was just a memory. Sunshine leaked, pale and weak, through clouds smeared purplish-grey. At the obligatory press conference, Resnick made a brief statement, responded to questions without ever really answering, showed a right and proper concern for the Marstons in their bereavement. ‘Good job,’ said the public relations officer approvingly as they left the platform. Resnick scowled.

The job was being done in the CID office, the incident room, men and women accessing computer files, crosschecking messages, transcripts of interviews. So easy to let things slip, fail to make the right connection, wrongly prioritise. In addition to the sex offenders’ register, they would check through the Vice Squad’s list of men stopped and cautioned trawling the red light district in their cars. Married men. Businessmen. Men who were inadequate, law-abiding, lonely, unhinged. Men with a record of violence. Men who cuddled up to their wives each night in the matrimonial bed, never forgot an anniversary, a birthday, kissed the children and wished them happiness, sweet dreams.

Neither of the DNA samples taken from Clara Marston’s body found a positive match. Follow-up calls relating to reported stab wounds yielded nothing.

Time passed.

Four days after the inquiry had begun, the burned-out skeleton of a blue Ford Escort van was found at the end of a narrow track near Moorgreen Reservoir, some dozen miles north-west of the city centre.

Late on that same Sunday evening, as Resnick was letting himself back into the house after a couple of hours at the Polish Club, accordions and reminiscence, bison grass vodka, the phone rang in the hall. The sergeant out at Carlton wasted few words: name’s Eileen, sir, hell of a state, asking for you.

Within minutes, driving with particular care, Resnick was heading south on Porchester Road, cutting through towards Carlton Hill.

She was pale, shaken, huddled inside a man’s raincoat, the collar upturned. There were grazes to her face and hands and knees, a swelling high on her right temple; below her left cheekbone, a bruise slowly emerging like soft fruit. A borrowed sweater, several sizes too large, covered the silver snap-front uplift bra and matching G-string: she had got a job stripping after all. Her feet were bare. She had climbed out of the bathroom window of a house off Westdale Lane, jumped from the roof of the kitchen extension to the ground and fallen heavily, run through the side gate on to the road, throwing herself, more or less, in front of the first car which came along. The duty sergeant had calmed her down as best he could, taken a brief statement, provided tea and cigarettes.

Eileen saw Resnick with relief and tugged at his sleeve, her words tumbling over one another, breathlessly. ‘It was him. I swear it. At the house.’

‘Which house? Eileen, slow down.’

‘Someone called, set up this private session, his brother’s birthday. Half a dozen of them there, all blokes. Just as I was getting into it, he showed himself, back of the room. I don’t know if he meant to, not then. Anyhow, I just panicked. Panicked and ran. Shut myself in the bathroom and locked the door behind me.’

‘And it was him, the driver from the van? You’re certain?’

‘Not the driver,’ Eileen said. ‘The other man.’

‘This address,’ Resnick said, turning towards the sergeant, ‘off Westdale Lane, you’ve checked it out?’

‘No, sir. Not as yet.’

‘Why in God’s name not?’

‘Way I saw it, sir, seeing as she’d asked for you, I thought to wait, just, you know, in case-’

‘Get some people out there now. I doubt you’ll find anyone still inside, but if you do, I want them brought in so fast their feet don’t touch the ground. And get the place sealed. I’ll want it gone over tomorrow with a fine-tooth comb. Knock up the neighbours, find out who lives there, anything else you can. Whatever you get, I want it passed through to me direct. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then snap to it.’

Resnick turned towards Eileen. ‘Whoever made this booking, did he leave a name?’

‘Phil.’

‘That was it?’

‘Yes.’ Instead of looking at him now, she was staring at the floor. ‘There’s something else,’ she said, her voice so quiet he could only just make out the words.

‘Go on.’

‘Not here,’ she said, glancing round. ‘Not here.’

Taking her arm, Resnick led Eileen outside to where the Saab was parked at the kerb. ‘I’ll take you home. We can talk there.’

‘No.’ Fear in her eyes. ‘He knows, doesn’t he? He knows where I live.’

‘Okay,’ Resnick said, holding open the car door. ‘Get in.’

Less than ten minutes later they were standing in the broad hallway of Resnick’s house, a small commotion of cats scurrying this way and that.

‘Charlie…’

‘Yes?’ It still took him by surprise, the way she used his name.

‘Before anything else, can I have a bath?’

‘Of course. Follow the stairs round and it’s on the left. I’ll leave you a towel outside the door.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And that trick with the bathroom window,’ he called after her. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it twice in the same evening.’

Taking his time, he grilled bacon, sliced bread, broke eggs into a bowl; when he heard her moving around in the bathroom, the water running away, he forked butter into a small pan and turned the gas up high, adding shavings of Parmesan to the eggs before they set.

Eileen appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing an old dressing gown he scarcely ever bothered with, a towel twisted around her head.

‘I thought you should eat,’ Resnick said.

‘I doubt if I can.’

But, sitting across from him at the kitchen table, she wolfed it down, folding a piece of the bread in half and wiping the last of the egg from her plate.

Uncertain, Pepper and Miles miaowed from a distance.

‘Don’t you feed them, Charlie?’

‘Sometimes.’

Eileen pushed away her plate. ‘You know what I need after that?’

‘A cup of coffee?’

‘A cigarette.’

She stood in the rear doorway, looking out across the garden, a few stunted trees in silhouette and, beyond the wall, the land falling away into darkness.

Resnick rinsed dishes at the sink.

When she came back inside and closed the door behind her, her skin shone from the cold. ‘He’s one of yours,’ she said.

Resnick felt the breath stop inside his body.

‘Vice, at least I suppose that’s what he is. The sauna, that’s where I saw him, just the once. With one of the girls. Knocked her around. Split her lip. It wasn’t till tonight I was sure.’

‘You scarcely saw him in the van. You said so yourself.’

‘Charlie, I’m sure.’

‘So the description you gave before…’

‘It was accurate, far as it went.’

‘And now?’

‘He’s got — I don’t know what you’d call it — a lazy eye, the left. It sort of droops. Just a little. Maybe you’d never notice at first, but then, when you do… The way he looks at you.’

Resnick nodded. ‘The driver, did you see him there tonight as well?’

Eileen shook her head. I don’t know. No. I don’t think so. I mean, he could’ve been, but no, I’m sorry, I couldn’t say.’

‘It’s okay.’ Now that the shock had faded, Resnick caught himself wondering why the allegation was less of a surprise than it was.

‘You don’t know him?’ Eileen asked. ‘Know who he is?’

Resnick shook his head. ‘It won’t take long to find out.’

In the front room he sat in his usual chair and Eileen rested her back against one corner of the settee, legs pulled up beneath her, glass of Scotch balancing on the arm.

‘You’ll go after him?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘On my word?’

‘Yes.’

She picked up her drink. ‘You’ll need more than that, Charlie. In court. The word of a whore.’

‘Yes. Agreed.’

The heating had clicked off and the room was slowly getting colder. He wondered why it didn’t seem stranger, her sitting there. Refilling both their glasses, he switched on the stereo and, after a passage of piano, there was Billie’s voice, half-broken, singing of pain and grieving, the pain of living, the loving kiss of a man’s hard hand.

‘Sounds like,’ Eileen said, ‘she knows what she’s talking about.’

Less than ten minutes later, she was stretching her arms and yawning. ‘I think I’ll just curl up on here, if that’s the same to you.’

‘No need. There’s a spare room upstairs. Two.’

‘I’ll be okay.’

‘Suit yourself. And if any of the cats jump up on you, push them off.’

Eileen shook her head. ‘I might like the company.’

It was a little after two when she climbed in with him, the dressing gown discarded somewhere between the door and the bed. Startled awake, Resnick thrashed out with his arm and only succeeded in sending the youngest cat skittering across the floor.

‘Budge up, Charlie.’

‘Christ, Eileen!’

Her limbs were strong and smooth and cold.

‘Eileen, you can’t-’

‘Shush.’

She lay with one leg angled over his knee, an arm across his midriff holding him close, her head to his chest. Within minutes the rhythm of her breathing changed and she was asleep, her breath faint and regular on his skin.

How long, Resnick wondered, since he had lain with a woman like this, in this bed? When his fingers touched the place between her shoulder and her neck, she stirred slightly, murmuring a name that wasn’t his.

It was a little while later before the cat felt bold enough to resume its place on the bed.

‘Is there anywhere you can go?’ Resnick asked. ‘Till all this blows over.’

‘You mean, apart from here.’

‘Apart from here.’

They were in the kitchen, drinking coffee, eating toast.

‘Look, if it’s last night…’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘I mean, it’s not as if-’

‘It’s what you said yourself, at the moment everything’s hanging on your word. It just needs someone to make the wrong connection between you and me…’

‘Okay, you don’t have to spell it out. I understand.’

The radio was still playing, muffled, in the bathroom. Politics: the same evasions, the same lies. As yet the outside temperature had scarcely risen above freezing, the sky several shades of grey.

‘I’ve got a friend,’ Eileen said, ‘in Sheffield. I can go there.’ She glanced down at what she was now wearing, one of his shirts. A morning-after cliche. ‘Only I shall need some clothes.’

‘I’ll drive you round to your place after breakfast, wait while you pack.’

‘Thanks.’

Resnick drank the last of his coffee, pushed himself to his feet. ‘You’ll let me have a number, in case I need to get in touch?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

She took one more mouthful of toast and left the rest.

They were gathered together in Resnick’s office, the clamour of the everyday going on behind its closed door: Graham Millington, Anil Khan and Sharon Garnett. Sharon had been a member of the Vice Squad before being reassigned to Resnick’s team and had maintained her contacts.

‘Burford,’ Sharon said once Resnick had relayed the description. ‘Jack Burford, it’s got to be.’

Millington whistled, a malicious glint in his eye. ‘Jack Burford — honest as the day is long.’

It wasn’t so far from the shortest day of the year.

‘How well do you know him?’ Resnick asked.

‘Well enough,’ Sharon said. ‘We’d have a drink together once in a while.’ She laughed. ‘Never too comfortable in my company, Jack. A woman who speaks her mind and black to boot, more than he could comfortably handle. No, a bunch of the lads, prize fights, lock-ins and lap dancers, that was more Jack’s mark. Gambling, too. In and out of Ladbroke’s most afternoons.’

‘These lads, anyone closer to him than the rest?’

She gave it a few moments’ thought. ‘Jimmy Lyons, if anyone.’

‘Left the force, didn’t he?’ Millington said. ‘About a year back. Early retirement or some such.’

‘There was an inquiry,’ Sharon said. ‘Allegations of taking money to turn a blind eye. Massage parlours, the usual thing. Didn’t get anywhere.’

‘And they worked together?’ Resnick asked. ‘Burford and Lyons?’

Sharon nodded. ‘Quite a bit.’

‘Lyons,’ Resnick said. ‘Anyone know where he is now?’

Nobody did.

‘Okay. Sharon, chase up one or two of your contacts at Vice, those you think you can trust. See what the word is on Burford. Anil, see if you can track down Lyons. He might still be in the city somewhere, in which case he and Burford could still be in touch.’

Millington was already at the door. ‘I’d best get myself out to Carlton, see how they’re getting on. You’ll not want them dragging their feet on this.’

By four it was pretty much coming into place. The carpet fibres found beneath Clara Marston’s fingernails matched the floor covering throughout the upstairs of the house off Westdale Lane. And traces of blood, both on the carpet and in the bathroom, were identical with that on the girl’s clothing.

The house had been let a little over two years back to a Mr and Mrs Sadler, Philip and Dawn. None of the neighbours could recall seeing Dawn Sadler for a good six months and assumed the couple had split up; since then Philip Sadler had been sharing the place with his brother, John. John Sadler was known to the police: a suspended sentence for grievous bodily harm eight years before and, more recently, a charge of rape which had been dropped by the CPS at the last moment because some of the evidence was considered unsafe. Unusually, the rape charge had been brought by a prostitute, who claimed Sadler had threatened her with a knife and sodomised her against her will. What made it especially interesting — the arresting officers had been Burford and Lyons.

Lyons was still in the city, Khan confirmed, working with a security firm which provided bouncers for nightclubs and pubs; rumour was that he and Burford were still close. And Lyons had not been seen at work since the night Clara Marston had been killed.

Resnick crossed to the deli on Canning Circus, picked up a large filter coffee and continued into the cemetery on the far side. Burford and Lyons or Burford and Sadler, cruising the Forest in the van, looking for a likely girl. Finally, they get her back to the house and somewhere in the midst of it all things start to go awry.

He sat on a bench and levered the lid from his cup; the coffee was strong and still warm. It had to be Burford and Lyons who had sex with the girl; Sadler’s DNA was likely still on file and no match had registered. So what happened? Back on his feet again, Resnick started to walk downhill. Burford and Lyons are well into it when Sadler takes it into his head to join in. It’s Sadler who introduces the knife. But whose blood? Jimmy Lyons’ blood. He’s telling Sadler to keep out of it and Sadler won’t listen; they argue, fight, and Lyons gets stabbed, stumbles over the girl. Grabs her as he falls.

Then if she doesn’t do the stabbing, why does she have to die?

She’s hysterical and someone — Burford? — starts slapping her, shaking her, using too much force. Or simply this: she’s seen too much.

Resnick sits again, seeing it in his mind. Is it now that she struggles and in desperation fights back? Whose skin then was with those carpet fibres, caught beneath her nails? He sat a little longer, finishing his coffee, thinking; then walked, more briskly, back towards the station. There were calls to make, arrangements to be put in place.

Burford spotted Sharon Garnett the second she walked into the bar, dark hair piled high, the same lift of the head, self-assured. It was when he saw Resnick behind her that he understood.

‘Hello, Jack,’ Sharon said as she crossed behind him. ‘Long time.’

Some part of Burford told him to cut and run, but no, there would be officers stationed outside he was certain, front and back, nothing to do now but play it through.

‘Evening, Charlie. Long way off your turf. Come to see how the other half live?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Get you a drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Sharon?’

Sharon shook her head.

‘Suit yourself.’ Burford lifted the shot glass from the counter and downed what remained in one.

Without any attempt to disguise what he was doing, Resnick picked up the glass with a clean handkerchief and deposited it in a plastic evidence bag, zipping the top across.

‘Let’s do this decent, Charlie,’ Burford said, taking a step away. ‘No cuffs, nothing like that. I’ll just walk with you out to the car.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Resnick said.

‘Decent,’ said Sharon. ‘That word in your vocabulary, Jack?’

Millington was outside in the car park, Anil Khan.

‘You know I’m not saying a word without a solicitor,’ Burford said. ‘You know that.’

‘Shut up,’ Resnick said, ‘and get in the car.’

When Lynn Kellogg hammered on the door of Jimmy Lyons’ flat near the edge of the Lace Market, Lyons elbowed her aside and took off down the stairs smack into the arms of Kevin Naylor. Blood had already started to seep through the bandages across his chest.

John Sadler had skipped town and his brother, Philip, claimed no knowledge of where he might be. ‘How about Mrs Sadler?’ Millington asked. ‘Been a while, I understand, since anyone’s clapped eyes on her.’ Philip Sadler turned decidedly pale.

Under questioning, both Burford and Lyons agreed to picking up Clara Marston and taking her back to the house for sex. They claimed they had left her alone in the upstairs room, which was where Sadler, drunk, had threatened her with a knife and then attacked her. By the time they’d realised what was going on and ran back upstairs, he had his hands round her throat and she was dead. It was when Lyons tried to pull him off that Sadler had stabbed him with the knife.

Burford claimed he then used his own car to take Lyons back to his flat and tended his wound. Sadler, he assumed, carried the dead girl out to the van and left her on the Forest, disposing of the van afterwards.

Without Sadler’s side of things, it would be a difficult story to break down and Sadler wasn’t going to be easy to find.

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.