Last Rites

Eighteen

It was early enough still for Resnick to rub his hands together for warmth as he walked. Mist was wreathed faintly around the trees edging the grounds of the university and, off to the east of the city, the sun showed only as an orange smear above the waters of the Trent. He had considered wearing a topcoat, before deciding against it, and the material of his gray suit was feeling not only shiny but thin.

Parker’s café was facing him now across the boulevard and he waited for a pause in the traffic swishing off the Dunkirk roundabout before hurrying toward it. In younger days, Parker’s had been an informal meeting place for Resnick and a clutch of his fellow officers, and for Norman Mann it seemed it still was.

There was steam on the insides of the windows and the heat struck Resnick, not unpleasantly, as he entered. Heat and cigarette smoke, the savory smell of bacon frying. For several moments, he wondered why he had stayed away so long.

Mann was on his feet, leaning over one of the other tables, joking with two men in dark overalls. As usual, there were a number of fire officers from the station next door, uniform jackets unbuttoned, celebrating the beginning or end of a shift with oversized mugs of tea.

“Charlie.” Breaking off his conversation, Mann greeted him with a strong handshake and slap on the shoulder. “Let’s sit over here. This corner. I’ve already ordered mine. Sort out your poison and we’ll talk.”

At the counter, old habits quarreled with new-fangled ways, his own leanings toward moderation linked to Hannah’s lectures about healthy eating and coronary failure. In addition to coffee, no sugar, no milk, he settled for a sausage sandwich with brown sauce and grilled tomatoes on the side. Set against Mann’s full breakfast with black pudding and fried bread, it looked positively frugal. But then, Resnick told himself, it wasn’t his stomach that was straining shirt buttons to the last thread, or needing a strongly buckled belt to hold it aloft.

“Cutting down, Charlie?” Mann asked, pointing across the table with his knife.

Resnick shrugged.

“Only live once, Charlie. Enjoy it. That’s my motto. And bollocks to anyone who says different. Present company always excepted.”

For several minutes, they ate and said nothing, the blur of conversation rising and falling around them. How many wives was it now, Resnick wondered? The third Mrs. Mann or possibly the fourth? Each of them, those Resnick had seen, no taller than Norman’s shoulder, dark-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken; submissive, seemingly, until the day those eyes were opened and they packed their bags and walked away. He didn’t change and neither did they.

Mann balanced his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray and broke off a piece of fried bread with his fingers. “Siddons, Charlie, I know she’s been on to you as well as me. You and Jack. Getting her knickers in a rare old twist about this business with Valentine. Looking to poke her skinny nose in.” He broke the surface of his egg with a corner of the bread, dipping it first in tomato sauce, then mustard, before lifting it to his mouth.

“Fucking Valentine, we’ve been after that black bastard for fucking months. Run a tap on his phones, stripped that fancy Porsche of his down to the chassis, got more intimate with the inside of his house than a fucking death-watch beetle. Never come up with anything more than a couple of spliffs and a packet of Neurofen.”

A sliver of reddish yellow slid, unimpeded, round the side of Mann’s chin.

“He is dealing?” Resnick said.

Mann laughed and wiped a paper napkin across his face. “’Course he’s bloody dealing. Even he can’t live that way on social bloody security. But, try as we may, we’ve never been able to lay a hand on him. Not one that counts.”

Resnick sipped his coffee. “So what? Lucky? Clever? What?”

“Fuck knows, Charlie. I don’t.” Mann speared a circle of black pudding. “Best thing could’ve happened, that youth’d been a bit more on target with his knife, lopped Valentine’s tackle off and slung it out to the dogs. As it is, he’ll get patched up good as new and that’ll be the end of it.”

“He shot somebody in the head.”

“According to who? You’ve got witnesses, reliable? A couple of tarts with less brains between them than the average cockroach. And how about the weapon? Even if it does turn up, which I tend to doubt, you reckon it’s going to have our man’s prints all over it, nice and sharp? No, Charlie, it’s a waste of time. My way of thinking, let Siddons flap around like she’s running the show, keep her sweet. Comes up empty-handed, it’s her bloody fault and not yours or mine.”

Resnick cut the remaining half of his sausage sandwich into quarters and chewed thoughtfully.

“Moved, Charlie, don’t know if I ever told you. Place out the other side of Arnold. New. You must come out some time. Bring that woman of yours. Teacher, isn’t she? Gloria’d like that. Someone new to show it off to, rabbit with. You know what they’re like.”

Resnick nodded and not so many minutes later Mann looked at his watch. “Time I wasn’t here.” He scraped back his chair, slurped down a last mouthful of tea, and started toward the door. “Drop you anywhere?”

Resnick shook his head. “I’ll walk.”

“Got you under the thumb, has she? This woman of yours. Lose weight. Exercise. Have you down the gym next. One of them standing bicycles. Treadmill. Waste of energy, Charlie. All that effort and it never gets you anywhere.”

Diane Johnson was having problems bringing the cigarette to her mouth. Her hands were shaking so much that after the fourth attempt Sharon Garnett reached across the table and steadied them with her own. For a moment, Diane looked Sharon in the eye before blinking away.

There were four of them in the interview room: Sharon and Carl Vincent, Diane and her solicitor. A wooden table, a metal ashtray, stackable chairs. Attached to the wall was a tape machine with a twin deck and, above that, a clock. The duty solicitor, dandruff, spectacles, bored, angled away from his client, legs crossed, crosshatching doodles on his pad. Sharon sat up to the table, facing Diane, Vincent alongside her, his chair pushed back, taking the secondary role.

The only window was the small square of frosted glass reinforced with wire that was set into the door. Above their heads, the single strip of neon gave off a low, off-key hum. The air was stale and second-hand.

There were lines around Diane’s eyes, small scab marks close to her mouth, dark on her dark skin. Her hair was a tangle of tight curls. It had been a long time since she had slept, slept well; a night on the skimpy mattress of the police cell hadn’t helped.

Sharon handed Diane a box of matches and she snapped the first two, finally managed to light her cigarette from the third. She drew down hard and, eyes closed, let the smoke drift from her nose. After several more drags, her hands were still shaking, but not quite as much.

“I need my medicine,” she said, a crack in her voice.

“You mean your drugs,” Sharon said.

“My medicine.”

“For which you’ve got a prescription.”

“’Course I’ve got a fuckin’ prescription.”

Sharon’s eyebrow rose.

“Temazepam, i’n’it? For my fuckin’ nerves.”

“One hundred and five capsules,” Vincent said, speaking for the first time.

“What?”

“Jellies, Diane,” Sharon said. “Over a hundred of them stuffed into a plastic bag under the front seat of the car. That’s to say nothing of the hash in the glove compartment.”

“What compartment? What car?”

“The one you and your mate, Sheena, were in when your brother got himself shot.”

Diane screwed up her face and folded her arms tight across her chest. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”

“The Temazepam or the shooting?”

“Neither.” There were goosebumps down Diane’s arms and her fingers rubbed her skin below her T-shirt sleeves.

Vincent eased forward. “Come on, Diane. You were there when it happened.”

“Yeh, well, I was out my fuckin’ head, right? No use asking me anythin’. Just forget it, right? Forget it.”

“Diane …”

“An’ I want to see my brother.”

“Jason can’t see anybody at the moment,” Sharon said. “He’s in no fit state.”

“I don’t care. I want to see him.”

“As soon as the hospital says it’s okay for him to have visitors, then you can. But for now, you know, I’ve told you, he’s still in intensive care. He’s not seeing anyone.”

“He’ll see me.”

“Diane, will you ever listen?”

“I’m his next of fuckin’ kin.”

There were tears close to her eyes. Sharon reached out for her hand and Diane pulled it away. The solicitor lifted his head from his doodling long enough to give both officers a warning glance.

“There.” Sharon took her pager from her pocket and placed it on the table between them. “The hospital, they’ve promised they’ll call me the moment Jason comes round. And when he does we’ll go straight there, you and me. You can be the first to see him, Diane, okay?”

Diane was staring at the cigarette, burning down in her hand.

“Diane? Is that okay?”

Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Yeh, I suppose so.”

“I think perhaps,” the solicitor said, leaning forward, “it would be a good idea if my client had a drink, a cup of tea.”

“Diane,” Sharon said, “would you like something to drink?”

“No,” Diane said.

Diane Johnson had been excluded from school for much of her final year-and-a-half: open insolence, bullying, bringing alcohol onto the school premises; finally, slapping her home economics teacher round the face and calling her a jumped-up white whore. She had been cautioned by the police on several occasions for suspected shoplifting, before being brought up in front of the juvenile court and given a conditional discharge on two counts of theft, another of receiving stolen goods. As she’d entered in her defense at the time, round where she lived what other kinds of goods were there?

Diane’s mother had gone off the day before her daughter’s thirteenth birthday, leaving a five-pound note in an envelope and a greeting card on which she’d scratched out Merry Christmas and scrawled Happy Birthday in its place. Two phone calls aside, during one of which her mother had seemed so wrecked by alcohol and remorse it had scarcely been possible to understand a word she’d said, Diane had had no contact with her since.

Her father, who had been pushing drugs with only moderate success for years, never close enough to the top of the chain, spending too much of the profit feeding habits of his own, was doing fifteen in Lincoln for shooting a rival dealer in the face in a dispute over territory.

Apart from Diane’s older sister, the only person in the world she had been close to, growing up, was her friend Dee Dee. And when Dee Dee fell pregnant, her father, a devout Christian, beat her with a strap, then prayed for her soul, while her mother took her to the hospital to arrange a termination. In sympathy, Diane had unprotected sex with several men until she, too, became pregnant, only to miscarry after two months. A while later, she was more successful and the baby-healthy, coffee-skinned, and strong-was named Melvin. Now Diane’s sister looked after him most of the time; it was either that or hand him over to social services. Foster parents. Children’s homes.

“While we’re waiting to hear from the hospital,” Carl Vincent said, “how about telling us whatever you can?”

“What is it?” Diane scoffed. “You an’ her together. Pair of black coppers. S’posed to make me feel better, is it. Trust you, like?” Diane laughed. “Talk about fuckin’ obvious. You must think I’m stupid or something. Mental.”

Vincent rested one forearm on the edge of the table. “Would you prefer to talk to a white officer, Diane, is that what you’re saying? I’m sure we could arrange it, if that’s what you’d prefer. Of course, what with people being busy and everything, it may take a little time, but if that’s what you really want …”

“Shove it,” Diane said. “What’s the difference? You’re all the fuckin’ same.” She took a final pull on her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

“How’s the baby, Diane?” Sharon asked. “Melvin, isn’t that his name?”

Diane stared back at her, saying nothing.

“He must be nearly walking by now.”

“What’s it to you?”

Sharon smiled. “Just trying to be pleasant, that’s all.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Wondering what would happen to him, the baby, if you went to jail.”

“I i’n’t goin’ to no fuckin’ jail.”

“Diane,” the solicitor said half-heartedly, “it won’t help if you allow yourself to get excited.”

“Look, Diane,” Sharon said, “that amount of drugs in your possession …”

“They wasn’t in my possession …”

“As good as. And no court’s going to believe that was all for personal use. Which means dealing, you understand that, Diane. That’s serious. You’d be in breach of your conditional discharge. This time, you could go to prison, you really could. Which might mean Melvin being taken into care.”

“That’s not right,” Diane said. “They’re not taking no kid of mine into care.” She looked at them defiantly, biting her bottom lip.

Sharon offered her another cigarette, and this time Diane got it lit without a problem. “Okay,” she said, “start at the beginning and tell us as much as you can about what happened. From when you drove on to the Forest to when Jason was shot. There’s no rush. Take your own time.”

The story, when it came, was not so very different from the one Millington dragged slowly, faltering syllable by faltering syllable, from the mouth of Sheena Snape.

After an evening that had begun in the pub and moved on to a club, they had fetched up, the three of them, in Jason’s flat, smoking hashish and drinking vodka and Pepsi Cola. Around one in the morning, Jason had decided to call on some mates who lived north of Gregory Boulevard, but when they’d arrived there was nobody home. So they’d driven up on to the Forest instead.

“What for?”

“A bit of a laugh.”

After smoking a few spliffs, Diane had curled up on the back seat and pretty much fallen asleep; Sheena and Jason had fooled around a little, nothing too heavy; all of them pretty much out of it when someone started hammering on the car window.

Whoever it was shot Jason in the face, neither girl had the least idea. It had been sudden and dark. One thing they were careful not to do was point the finger at Drew Valentine. If Jason had stuck a knife into him, and neither of them was saying that he had, then it had to be because he was confused, mistaken. Of any argument between the two men, any exchange of words, neither Sheena nor Diane remembered a thing.

Perhaps Norman Mann had been right, Resnick thought after listening to the reports, maybe the best thing was to chuck it all at Helen Siddons and let her make of it what she could. But the thought of stepping aside still stuck in his craw and what he didn’t understand was the ease with which Mann was prepared to do the same. Was there less, then, Resnick thought, than met the eye, or was there more?

He dialed the number for Major Crime Unit and asked to speak to Sergeant Lynn Kellogg.