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
