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
