A Darker Shade of Blue

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.

Most of this information Lynn Kellogg amassed over the following days and weeks, piecing together local evidence with what could be gleaned from national records and HM Customs and Excise. And long before that, before the end of that first attenuated conversation, she realised she had seen Eileen before.

‘Charlie,’ she said, phoning him at home. I think you’d better get over here after all.’

The first time Resnick had set eyes on Eileen, she’d been sitting in a basement wine bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking Bacardi and Coke, her hair redder then and falling loose around her shoulders. The harshness of her make-up, in that attenuated light, had been softened; her silver-grey top, like pale filigree, shimmered a little with each breath she took. She knew he was staring at her and thought little of it: it was what people did. Men, mostly. It was what, until she had taken up with Terry Cooke, had paid her way in the world.

The sandwich Resnick had ordered arrived and when he bit into it mayonnaise smeared across the palm of his hand; through the bar stereo Parker was stripping the sentiment from ‘Don’t Blame Me’ — New York City, 1947, the closing bars of Miles’ muted trumpet aside, it’s Bird’s alto all the way, acrid and languorous, and when it’s over there’s nothing left to do or say.

‘You bastard!’ Eileen had yelled later. ‘You fucking bastard! Making out you’re so fucking sympathetic and understanding and all the while you’re screwing me just as much as those bastards who think for fifty quid they can bend me over some car park wall and fuck me up the arse.’

A nice turn of phrase, Eileen, and Resnick, while he might have resisted the graphic nature of her metaphor, would have had to admit she was right. He had wanted to apply pressure to Terry Cooke and his burgeoning empire of low-grade robbers and villains, and in Eileen, in what he had misread as her weakness, he thought he had seen the means.

‘Leave him,’ he’d said. ‘Give us something we can make stick. Circumstances like this, you’ve got to look out for yourself. No one would blame you for that.’

In the end it had been Terry who had weakened and whether it had been his fear of getting caught and being locked away that had made him pull the trigger, or his fear of losing Eileen, Resnick would never know. After the funeral, amidst the fallout and recriminations, she had slipped from sight and it was some little time before he saw her again, close to desperate and frightened, so frightened that he had offered her safe haven in that same big sprawling house where he now lived with Lynn, and there, in the long sparse hours between sleeping and waking, she had slid into his bed and fallen fast asleep, one of her legs across his and her head so light against his chest it could almost have been a dream.

Though his history of relationships was neither extensive nor particularly successful, and though he prized honesty above most other things, he knew enough never to have mentioned this incident to Lynn, innocent as he would vainly have tried to make it seem.

He stood now in the doorway, a bulky man with a shapeless suit and sagging eyes, and waited until, aware of his presence, she turned her head.

‘Hello, Eileen.’

The sight of him brought tears to her eyes. ‘Christ, Charlie. First Terry and now this. Getting to be too much of a fucking habit, if you ask me.’

She held out a hand and he took it, and then she pressed her head against the rough weave of his coat, the too-soft flesh beneath, and cried. After several moments, Resnick rested his other hand against her shoulder, close to the nape of her neck, and that’s how they were some minutes later when Lynn looked into the room through the open door, then looked away.

‘What did she have to say for herself?’ Lynn asked. They were high on the Ropewalk, the light breaking through the sky, bits and pieces of the city waking south and west below them.

‘No more, I dare say, than she told you,’ Resnick said.

‘Don’t tell me all that compassion went for nothing.’

Resnick bridled. ‘She’d just seen her bloke shot dead alongside her, what was I supposed to do?’

Lynn gave a small shake of the head. ‘It’s okay, Charlie. Just teasing.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Though I do wonder if you had to look as if you were enjoying it quite as much.’

At the end of the street they stopped. Canning Circus police station, where Resnick was based, was only a few minutes away.

‘What do you think?’ Lynn asked. ‘A paid hit?’

‘I doubt it was a couple of local tearaways out to make a name for themselves. Whoever this was, they’ll be well up the motorway by now. Up or down.’

‘Someone he’d crossed.’

‘Likely.’

‘Business, then.’

‘Whatever that is.’

Lynn breathed in deeply, drawing the air down into her lungs. ‘I’d best get started.’

‘Okay.’

‘See you tonight.’

‘Yes.’

She stood for a moment, watching him walk away. Her imagination, or was he slower than he used to be? Turning, she retraced her steps to where she’d parked her car.

Much of the next few days Lynn spent accessing and exchanging information on the computer and speaking on the telephone, building up, as systematically as she could, a picture of Mikhail Sharminov’s activities, while forensic staff analysed the evidence provided by Scene of Crime.

At the start of the following week, Lynn, armed with a bulging briefcase and a new Next suit, went to a meeting at the headquarters of the Specialist Crime Directorate in London; also present were officers from the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, as well as personnel from HM Customs and Excise, and observers from the Interpol team that was carrying out a long-term investigation into the Russian Mafia.

By the time the meeting came to a halt, some six hours and several coffee breaks later, Lynn’s head was throbbing with unfamiliar names and all-too-familiar motivations. Sharminov, it seemed, had been seen as an outsider within the Soviet diaspora; as far as possible he had held himself apart, relying instead on his contacts in the Far East. But with the increased capability for downloading not only CDs but now DVDs via the Internet, the logistics of his chosen field were changing, markets were shifting and becoming more specialised. There was a burgeoning trade in hard-core pornography which certain of Sharminov’s former compatriots were keen to further through the networks he’d established. For a price. It wasn’t clear whether he had resisted on moral grounds or because the price wasn’t right.

Eileen was questioned at length about Sharminov’s business partners and shown numerous photographs, the faces in which, for the most part, she failed to recognise. One man, middle-aged, with dark close-cropped hair and eyes too close together, had been to the house on several occasions, hurried conversations behind closed doors; another, silver-haired and leonine, she remembered seeing once, albeit briefly, in the rear seat of a limousine. There were others, a few, of whom she was less certain.

‘Did he seem worried lately?’ they asked her. ‘Concerned about business?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not especially.’

Perhaps he should have been. The silver-haired man was Alexei Popov, whose organisation encompassed drugs and pornography and human trafficking in a network that stretched from the Bosporus and the Adriatic to the English Channel, and had particularly strong links with the Turkish and Italian Mafia. Tony Christanidi was his go-between and sometime enforcer, the kind of middle-management executive who never left home without first checking that his two-shot. 22 Derringer was snug alongside his mobile phone.

The line back through Christanidi to Popov was suspected of being behind three recent fatal shootings, one in Manchester, one in Marseilles, the other in Tirana.

‘Would they carry out these shootings themselves?’ Lynn had asked.

‘Not usually. Sometimes they’ll make a deal with the Turks or the Sicilians. You do one for me, I’ll do one for you. Other times, they’ll simply contract it out. Usually overseas. Someone flies in, picks up the weapons locally, junks them straight after, twelve hours later they’re back on the plane.’

‘So they wouldn’t necessarily be English?’

‘Not at all.’

‘The two men who shot Sharminov, the only witness we have swears they were English.’

‘This is the girlfriend?’

‘Eileen. Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why they didn’t kill her too.’

‘You don’t think she could have been involved?’

‘In setting him up? I suppose it’s possible.’

They questioned Eileen again, pushed her hard until her confidence was in shreds and her voice was gone.

‘I don’t think she knows anything,’ the National Crime Squad officer said after almost four hours of interrogation. ‘She was just lucky, that’s all.’

She wasn’t the only one. Good luck and bad. In the early hours of the morning, almost two weeks and two days after Mikhail Sharminov was murdered, there was a shooting in the city. At around two in the morning, there was an altercation at the roundabout linking Canal Street with London Road, a Range Rover cutting across a BMW and causing the driver to brake hard. After a lot of gesturing and angry shouting, the Range Rover drove off at speed, the other vehicle following. At the lights midway along Queen’s Drive, where it runs beside the Trent, the BMW came alongside and the man in the passenger seat leaned out and shot the driver of the Range Rover five times.

The driver was currently in critical condition in hospital, hanging on.

Forensics suggested that the shots had been fired from one of the same weapons that had been used to kill Mikhail Sharminov, a snub-nosed. 38 Smith amp; Wesson.

‘It could mean whoever shot Sharminov was recruited locally after all,’ Lynn said. ‘Didn’t see any need to leave town.’

They were in the kitchen of the house in Mapperley, Saturday afternoon: Lynn ironing, a glass of white wine close at hand; Resnick putting together a salad with half an ear cocked towards the radio, the soccer commentary on Five Live.

‘Well, he has now,’ Resnick said, wondering why the bottle of walnut oil was always right at the back of the cupboard when you needed it. Neither the driver nor passenger of the BMW had so far been traced.

‘You think it’s possible?’ Lynn said.

Resnick shook a few drops of the oil over rocket and romaine and reached for the pepper. I think you’re on safer ground following the gun.’ He broke off a piece of lettuce to taste, scowled, and began ferreting for the Tabasco.

‘Don’t make it too hot, Charlie. You always do.’

‘Assume they’ve flown in. Birmingham, Leeds-Bradford, East Midlands. There’s a meeting with whoever’s supplying the weapons, prearranged. After the job, either they’re dumped or, more likely, handed back.’

‘Recycled.’

‘I could still tell you which pub to go to if you wanted a converted replica. A hundred in tens handed over in the gents. But this is a different league.’

‘Bernard Vitori,’ Lynn said. ‘He’s the best bet. Eddie Chambers, possibly. One or two others. We’ll start with Vitori first thing.’

‘Sunday morning?’ Resnick said. ‘He won’t like that.’

‘Disturbing his day of rest?’

‘Takes his mother to church. Strelley Road Baptists. Regular as clockwork.’ Resnick ran a finger round the inside of the salad bowl. ‘Here. Taste this. Tell me what you think.’

They followed Vitori and his mum to church, thirty officers, some armed, keeping the building tightly surrounded, mingling inside. The preacher was delighted by the increase in his congregation. Sixty or so minutes of energetic testifying later, Vitori reluctantly unlocked the boot of his car. Snug inside were a 9mm Glock 17 and a Chinese-made A15 semi-automatic rifle. Vitori had been taking them to a potential customer after the service. Faced with the possibility of eight to ten inside, he cut a deal. Contact with the Russians had been by mobile phone, using numbers which were now untraceable, names which were clearly fake. Vitori had met two men in the Little Chef on the A60, north of Arnold. Leased them two clean revolvers for twenty-four hours, seven hundred the pair. Three days later, he’d sold one of the guns to a known drug dealer for five hundred more.

No matter how many times officers from Interpol and NICS showed him photographs of potential hit men, Vitori claimed to recognise none. He was not only happy to name the dealer, furnishing an address into the bargain, he gave them a likely identity for the driver of the car. Remanded in custody, special pleading would get him a five-year sentence at most, of which he’d serve less than three.

‘Bloody Russians, Charlie,’ Peter Waites said, sitting opposite Resnick in their usual pub. ‘When I was a kid we were always waiting for them to blow us up. Now they’re over here like fucking royalty.’

Sensing a rant coming, Resnick nodded non-committally and supped his beer.

‘That bloke owns Chelsea football club. Abramovich? He’s not the only one, you know. This Boris, for instance — what’s his name? — Berezovsky. One of the richest people in the fucking country. More money than the fucking Queen.’

Resnick sensed it was not the time to remind Waites that as a dedicated republican, he thought Buckingham Palace should be turned into council housing and Her Majesty forced to live out her remaining years on her old age pension.

‘You know how many Russians there are in this country, Charlie? According to the last census?’

Resnick shook his head. Waites had been spending too much time in Bolsover library, trawling the Internet for free. ‘I give up, Peter,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

‘Forty thousand, near as damn it. And they’re not humping bricks for a few quid an hour on building sites or picking cockles in Morecambe fucking Bay. Living in bloody luxury, that’s what they’re doing.’ Leaning forward, Waites jabbed a finger urgently towards Resnick’s face. ‘Every third property in London sold to a foreign citizen last year went to a bloody Russian. Every fifteenth property sold for over half a million the same.’ He shook his head. ‘This country, Charlie. Last ten, twenty years, it’s turned upside fucking down.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Another?’ Resnick said, pointing to Waites’ empty glass.

‘Go on. Why not?’

For a good few minutes neither man spoke. Noise and smoke spiralled around them. Laughter but not too much of that. The empty trill of slot machines from the far side of the bar.

‘This soccer thing, Charlie,’ Waites said eventually. ‘Yanks buying into Manchester United and now there’s this President of Thailand or whatever, wants forty per cent of Liverpool so’s he can flog Steven Gerrard shirts and Michael Owen boots all over South-East Asia. It’s not football any more, Charlie, it’s all fucking business. Global fuckin’ economy.’ He drank deep and drained his glass. ‘It’s the global fucking economy as has thrown me and hundreds like me on to the fucking scrapheap, that’s what it’s done.’Waites sighed and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Charlie. You ought never to have let me get started.’

‘Stopping you’d take me and seven others.’

‘Happen so.’

At the door Waites stopped to light a cigarette. ‘You know what really grates with me, Charlie? It used to be a working-class game, football. Now they’ve took that from us as well.’

‘Some places,’ Resnick said, ‘it still is.’

‘Come on, Charlie. What’s happening, you don’t think it’s right no more’n me.’

‘Maybe not. Though I wouldn’t mind some oil billionaire from Belarus taking a fancy to Notts County for a spell. Buy ‘em a halfway decent striker, someone with a bit of nous for midfield.’

Waites laughed. ‘Now who’s whistling in the dark?’

For several months Customs and Excise and others did their best to unravel Sharminov’s financial affairs; his stock was seized, his shops closed down. A further six months down the line, Alexei Popov would buy them through a twice-removed subsidiary and begin trading in DVDs for what was euphemistically called the adult market. He also bought a flat in Knightsbridge for a cool five million, close to the one owned by Roman Abramovich, though there was no indication the two men knew one another. Abramovich’s Chelsea continued to prosper; no oil-fed angel came to Notts County’s rescue as they struggled against relegation.

Lynn began to wonder if a sideways move into the National Crime Squad might help to refocus her career.

Resnick saw Eileen one more time. Although most of the money belonging to the man she knew as Michael Sherwood had been confiscated, she had inherited enough for new clothes and an expensive makeover, new suitcases which were waiting in the taxi parked outside.

‘I thought I’d travel, Charlie. See the world. Switzerland, maybe. Fly round some mountains.’ Her smile was near to perfect. ‘You know the only place I’ve been abroad? If you don’t count the Isle of Man. Alicante. Apart from the heat, it wasn’t like being abroad at all. Even the announcements in the supermarket were in English.’

‘Enjoy it,’ Resnick said. ‘Have a good time.’

Eileen laughed. ‘Come with me, why don’t you? Chuck it all in. About time you retired.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

For a moment her face went serious. ‘You think we could ever have got together, Charlie?’

‘In another life, maybe.’

‘Which life is that?’

Resnick smiled. ‘The one where I’m ten years younger and half a stone lighter; not already living with somebody else.’

‘And not a policeman?’

‘Maybe that too.’

Craning upwards, she kissed him quickly on the lips. ‘You’re a good man, Charlie, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’

Long after she had gone, he could feel the pressure of her mouth on his and smell the scent of her skin beneath the new perfume.