Cold in Hand

Forty-six

It was high summer. Resnick had left London in, what was, to him, almost sweltering heat, twenty-eight degrees Celsius, the low eighties Fahrenheit, his shirt sticking to his back as he stood in one seemingly interminable line after another, waiting first at the check-in and then, finally, the slow zigzag shuffling towards the X-ray machines and the officials with their wands and blank expressions. In between, there were the protracted dealings with Customs, the careful scrutinising of the death certificate and the certificate of embalming, the necessary authorisation to remove the deceased's body from the country for burial overseas.

A clear and definite DNA match linking Ivan Lazic with the skin sample found under Andreea's fingernails had resulted in his being charged with her murder, and once a second postmortem had been carried out for the benefit of his defence, Andreea's body had been released. On the evidence so far available, the CPS had opted not to charge Lazic with the murder of Kelvin Pearce.

After several conversations with Andreea Florescu's parents, using Alexander Bucur as translator, Resnick had arranged to accompany Andreea's coffin on its journey, knowing that it was what Lynn would have wanted, what she would have done herself had she been able.

Three hours and a little more to Bucharest, and then a change of plane onto a smaller Russian-made aircraft that would take him the relatively short distance to Constanta.

As he stepped out on to the tarmac at Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport, the heat hit him again like a slap across the face.

Andreea's parents were waiting to greet him: her mother, small and fair-haired, her face dissolving into tears the moment she saw him; her father, stocky and dark as his wife was fair, crushing Resnick's hand in both of his and then kissing him on both cheeks.

"Thank you," he said in heavily accented English. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Behind them, Andreea's zinc-lined coffin was being slowly unloaded from the hold.

The journey south from the airport took them first along a motorway, which led to the beginnings of the town itself and a wide boulevard which swept, rather incongruously, past a succession of flat-fronted houses, small shops, and garages, several crumbling apartment blocks, and then a large park busy with families picnicking and chasing brightly coloured footballs, many of them-the younger ones-in swimming costumes, the older men with their shirtsleeves rolled back and the women with summer dresses raised up along pale thighs.

"A lake," Andreea's father informed him, jabbing his finger. In the middle of the park there was a lake. Also, if Resnick had understood correctly, a dolphinarium. Even with the windows wound down, inside the car it was uncomfortably hot.

Not so much farther along, they turned left, leaving the Bulevard Tomis-Resnick had read the sign-and drove a short distance down a narrow, dusty road and then turned again, into a run-down housing estate of the kind Resnick knew only too well from his years on the beat in Nottingham. Low-rise blocks joined by a succession of walkways and arranged around central areas that on the architect's plans had doubtless been enticingly green open spaces bordered by trees, where mothers could sit nursing their babies and children could safely play. Except that the grass had soon turned to mud and was festooned with dog shit, broken glass, and discarded needles, and the trees had been uprooted while they were still saplings and not replaced. A brave new world.

In Nottingham, places like this had been knocked down, demolished and replaced by social housing that was more thoughtful, more appropriate to people's needs.

Here in Constanta, some-this estate, at least-remained.

A pack of dogs, some ten or a dozen strong, came running towards them, snarling, and the father chased them off with kicks and shouts and pieces of rubble picked up from the ground and hurled into their midst.

The Florescus' flat was on the fourth floor, reached, the lift being out of order, after climbing heavily graffitied stairs and walking along a balcony with numerous cracks of several centimetres' width.

Both living room and kitchen were overrun by an extended family of cousins, uncles, and aunts, all anxious to shake his hand and offer thanks.

"Our Andreea's murderer," said one man with a white streak running up through his hair, "you have brought him to justice."

"Not me," Resnick said. "Somebody else."

But that was not what they wanted to hear and chose not to understand. Someone thrust a mug of sweet tea into his hand, while someone else plied him with plum brandy. Soon the room, despite the windows being open, was thick with cigarette smoke. Everyone, save for the youngest, seemed to be smoking. In one corner of the room, the television was tuned to CNN, the volume turned down low. There seemed to be forest fires in parts of Spain and Portugal, floods in Southeast Asia with thousands losing their homes; several European aid workers had been kidnapped in Baghdad and in Islamabad a suicide bomber had detonated the explosives taped to his stomach in a local market, killing fourteen and wounding more than thirty, some of them children.

After much coaxing by her grandmother, Andreea's three-year-old daughter, Monica, rising four, came out from behind the settee and stood before Resnick, head down, hands clasped, wearing a green dress with a white sash which was kept for special occasions.

Resnick fetched from his bag the presents he had brought her: a picture book on stiff board with bright illustrations of animals in strong colours, a T-shirt in blue, white and orange stripes and a teddy bear with a large red bow at his neck.

She took each from him solemnly, thanked him haltingly, and then ran to her grandmother and stood, clutching her legs with one hand, while hanging on tightly to the teddy bear with the other.

A plate was passed round with slices of sponge cake filled with jam. More tea. More brandy. Wine. The wake, Resnick thought, before the funeral. One of the cousins, sixteen, quizzed him in near-perfect English about the Premiership and Tottenham Hotspur's chances of breaking into the top four. Ever since Spurs had bought both Ilie Dumitrescu and Gica Popescu following Romania's successes in the 1994 World Cup, they had been a team of special interest.

Resnick's subsequent confession that the team he himself supported was not even Nottingham Forest, formerly winners of the European Cup, but lowly Notts County, was met with bafflement.

After an hour or more, toward the end of which Resnick's eyes kept closing involuntarily, Andreea's father took pity on him and drove him to his hotel, the Intim, which dated back to the late nineteenth century and had previously been called the Hotel d'Angleterre. Someone had thought he would feel at home.

His room looked out past the cathedral towards the Black Sea, which from there, looked not black but grey, the kind of grey he was used to seeing when he gazed east from Mablethorpe or Whitby.

He stripped off his clothes and showered and, after drying himself, stretched out on the clean, slightly worn sheets and fell, almost immediately, asleep.

The funeral service was held in a Roman Catholic church close to the family's home, the church packed, the atmosphere stifling-Resnick, who because of some strange divisions in his own, largely Jewish family, had been brought up as a Catholic, falling automatically into the ritual of signs and observances, prayers and obeisances. The temperature inside and outside the church was close to thirty Celsius.

On the previous evening, Andreea's parents, brushing his protestations aside, had insisted on taking him to dinner in the old Casino, a handsome, almost-baroque building with an arched entrance and huge arched windows, which stood on a promenade overlooking the sea. Black-suited waiters with white aprons tied at the waist brought a succession of dishes in solemn procession: fish soup, carp-roe salad, and then-shepherd's sirloin, according to the translation on the menu-pork stuffed with ham, then covered with cheese and a sauce of mayonnaise, cucumber, and herbs. The wine, Andreea's father assured him, was the best in Romania, Feteasca Neagra, with a rich redness that was close to purple, almost black. A dessert of crisp pastry soaked in syrup and filled with whipped cream was, in every sense, too much.

Head reeling and stomach rolling, when they had left the restaurant-the sky a vivid midnight blue pricked with stars, the moon floating in the darkness of the water-Resnick's only thoughts had been of falling back into bed, but his hosts had insisted on his accompanying them to a piano bar for a glass or two of rachiu, Romanian grape brandy. To settle the stomach, Andreea's father had suggested, with appropriate gestures.

The bar was belowground, a couple of small smoke-filled rooms, neither of them, as far as Resnick could see, containing a piano. The music, piped through overhead speakers, had been, in the main, piano music, however; jazz of a sort, an extended free form extemporising with Monk-ish overtones, which Resnick decided, in different surroundings, could be rewarding.

His head throbbed and his eyes stung.

Harry Tavitian, he was told when he enquired, that was the pianist's name. From there, in Constanta. Famous everywhere. All over the world. Resnick nodded, never having heard of him before.

Finally, he had stumbled up the steps and out into the air. It was still warm, and the sweet sweat of his body made him nauseous.

Here inside the church, the incense was close to overpowering. The congregation rose to sing a hymn, and Resnick stood with them, mouth open, no words forthcoming. He had had enough of funerals, enough of death, enough dying. He closed his eyes and ignored the tears, and waited for it all to end.

Packed and ready, there was an hour still before leaving to catch his plane and there were things he could see. He had read the leaflet in four languages at the hotel. He could go to the top of the minaret above the Mahmudiye Mosque for a panoramic view of the town and harbour, or to the Museum of the Romanian Navy with its photographs of the Russian battleship Potemkin arriving unexpectedly with its crew of mutinous sailors. Instead he walked down through the central square of the old part of the town, named after the poet Ovid, who was exiled there from Rome by the Emperor Augustus for writing The Art of Love, which had somehow offended the emperor's sensibilities.

Poor bastard, Resnick thought, looking up at the statue that was daubed in pigeon droppings and eroded by the weather. Doomed to live out a lonely life in a country that was not his own. There were a few lines of his poetry reprinted in the leaflet, miserable as sin. And cold. As if all the time he was there, he could never get warm, the snow drifting in off the sea.

Resnick walked on down for a final look at the water.

At the airport, Andreea's mother hugged him and held him close, murmuring her thanks; her father shook his hand as heartily as before and wished him well. Monica hid behind her grandmother's skirt and came out only at the last moment to stand, wide-eyed, and wave, her teddy bear clasped tight against her chest.

They were lovely people, Resnick thought, warm and caring. Hurting, too.

Fifteen minutes later, his plane was in the air.

Though it had only been days, the house seemed unlived in, felt alien, cold. That again: cold. As he'd turned his keys in the door, the cats had come running, the familiar sound signalling food, a Pavlovian response, though he guessed the neighbour he entrusted them to would have overfed them, as usual.

There were several messages on the answering machine, one from Karen Shields that said simply: Call me. When he did, she asked if he wanted to come into the station, or whether he'd prefer for her to come to him.

"I'm knackered," Resnick said. "Why don't you come out here? Just give me time to shower and change."

Twenty minutes later, she was there. White vest, red skirt, flat shoes.

"Hot as hell," she said.

"There's water in the fridge. Juice."

"Water would be fine."

The rear of the house was in the shade, so that was where they sat.

"How did it go?" Karen asked.

"All right, I suppose. I was glad I went."

"I'm sure they were, too."

Resnick nodded.

"I'm just about through here," Karen said. "I've been coming up only for odd days, and now there's no need for even that. Anil can handle anything else that crops up before the trial."

"You did a good job."

"I did bugger-all."

Resnick smiled.

"You know," Karen said, "we found the shoe? The Adidas trainers? Marcus had sold them. A friend of a friend. It helps fill in the picture."

Resnick nodded. "How about our pal Daines?"

"Still stonewalling," Karen said.

Lazic had testified that the SOCA man had been in the Zoukas brothers' pockets, evidenced by the fact that both had successfully slipped out of the country avoiding arrest, Viktor using a false passport. He had also provided a blurred video which showed-or seemed to show, Daines's lawyers were strongly disputing it-Daines taking part in a three-way sex session involving, at various times, a riding crop, a large strapped-on dildo, and a woman stretched out on a bed and tied hand and foot.

"He's claiming," Karen said, "any involvement was justified in terms of the information it allowed him to obtain. And the information he passed on was pretty damn useful-there's no getting around that."

"You think he's going to walk away?"

"Who knows? Right now, he's suspended on full pay, while SOCA's Professional Standards Department carry out an investigation. I reckon he'll be lucky if they don't turn it over to an outside force."

Whatever was decided, Resnick thought, it looked as if Lynn's instincts had been right all along.

"How about you?" Karen asked.

"How about me?"

"You know what I mean."

One of the other messages on his answering machine had been from the police surgeon, wanting to know when Resnick, who had cancelled two appointments in the past month, felt able to come in and see him for a checkup and an all clear to go back to work. The truth was, he was unsure if he wanted to go back at all.

"I've got my thirty years in," Resnick said. "I could retire."

"And do what?" Karen said incredulously. "Take an allotment, grow your own fruit and veg?"

"Why not?"

Karen laughed. "You'd go crazy."

Resnick shrugged. Maybe she was right, maybe he would. But he wasn't sure if he had the taste for it anymore. Not after all that had happened. And besides, maybe an allotment wasn't all that ridiculous an idea. Plus, he could read all those books he had never found time for, visit those places he had never been. And how many jazz festivals were there? Wigan, Brecon, Appleby, North Sea. And those were just for starters. He could even go and see his pal, Ben Riley, who'd moved out to the States more years ago that either of them cared to remember, and who had almost tired of inviting him to come and stay.

He shook his head; he didn't know.

"You'll sort something out," Karen said. "Maybe you just need a little more time."

Reaching down into her bag, she took out the box set of CDs she'd borrowed, back when it had all started.

"Thanks," she said. "Now I'll have to get my own."

He walked with her to the door.

"Watch out for that Catherine Njoroge," Karen said with a wink. "She'll have her eye on you now you're single."

"You're joking?"

"Probably." She tapped a fist against his shoulder. "Though you never know."

When Karen had gone, he went into the kitchen and stood for a moment staring into an almost-empty cupboard. Time to restock. The smallest cat nudged against him, and he picked it up and felt the soft fur of its head against his neck, the quick beat of its heart against his hand.

What would Lynn say, he wondered. Jack it in or carry on?

He thought about poor bloody Ovid, mired now in bird shit, stranded and alone.

Later that evening, curtains partly drawn, glass of good Scotch at his side, he put the first of the Bessie Smith CDs on to play, Bessie's voice full and raw and strengthened, it seemed, by adversity. "After You've Gone," "Empty Bed Blues," and Resnick's especial favourite, "Cold in Hand," the young Louis Armstrong's muted cornet shadowing her phrase for phrase and note for note.

Cold in hand.

How had Ovid put it? Freezing his balls off in Constanta. Something about the snow?

One drift succeeds another here.

The north wind hardens it, making it eternal;

It spreads in drifts through all the bitter year.

Bitter. That wasn't going to be him. Old and bitter. He smiled. Lynn would never forgive him for that.