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.
