safer ground following the gun.’ He broke off a piece of lettuce to taste, scowled, and began ferreting for the Tabasco.
‘Don’t make it too hot, Charlie. You always do.’
‘Assume they’ve flown in. Birmingham, Leeds-Bradford, East Midlands. There’s a meeting with whoever’s supplying the weapons, prearranged. After the job, either they’re dumped or, more likely, handed back.’
‘Recycled.’
‘I could still tell you which pub to go to if you wanted a converted replica. A hundred in tens handed over in the gents. But this is a different league.’
‘Bernard Vitori,’ Lynn said. ‘He’s the best bet. Eddie Chambers, possibly. One or two others. We’ll start with Vitori first thing.’
‘Sunday morning?’ Resnick said. ‘He won’t like that.’
‘Disturbing his day of rest?’
‘Takes his mother to church. Strelley Road Baptists. Regular as clockwork.’ Resnick ran a finger round the inside of the salad bowl. ‘Here. Taste this. Tell me what you think.’
They followed Vitori and his mum to church, thirty officers, some armed, keeping the building tightly surrounded, mingling inside. The preacher was delighted by the increase in his congregation. Sixty or so minutes of energetic testifying later, Vitori reluctantly unlocked the boot of his car. Snug inside were a 9mm Glock 17 and a Chinese-made A15 semi-automatic rifle. Vitori had been taking them to a potential customer after the service. Faced with the possibility of eight to ten inside, he cut a deal. Contact with the Russians had been by mobile phone, using numbers which were now untraceable, names which were clearly fake. Vitori had met two men in the Little Chef on the A60, north of Arnold. Leased them two clean revolvers for twenty-four hours, seven hundred the pair. Three days later, he’d sold one of the guns to a known drug dealer for five hundred more.
No matter how many times officers from Interpol and NICS showed him photographs of potential hit men, Vitori claimed to recognise none. He was not only happy to name the dealer, furnishing an address into the bargain, he gave them a likely identity for the driver of the car. Remanded in custody, special pleading would get him a five- year sentence at most, of which he’d serve less than three.
‘Bloody Russians, Charlie,’ Peter Waites said, sitting opposite Resnick in their usual pub. ‘When I was a kid we were always waiting for them to blow us up. Now they’re over here like fucking royalty.’
Sensing a rant coming, Resnick nodded non-committally and supped his beer.
‘That bloke owns Chelsea football club. Abramovich? He’s not the only one, you know. This Boris, for instance — what’s his name? — Berezovsky. One of the richest people in the fucking country. More money than the fucking Queen.’
Resnick sensed it was not the time to remind Waites that as a dedicated republican, he thought Buckingham Palace should be turned into council housing and Her Majesty forced to live out her remaining years on her old age pension.
‘You know how many Russians there are in this country, Charlie? According to the last census?’
Resnick shook his head. Waites had been spending too much time in Bolsover library, trawling the Internet for free. ‘I give up, Peter,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
‘Forty thousand, near as damn it. And they’re not humping bricks for a few quid an hour on building sites or picking cockles in Morecambe fucking Bay. Living in bloody luxury, that’s what they’re doing.’ Leaning forward, Waites jabbed a finger urgently towards Resnick’s face. ‘Every third property in London sold to a foreign citizen last year went to a bloody Russian. Every fifteenth property sold for over half a million the same.’ He shook his head. ‘This country, Charlie. Last ten, twenty years, it’s turned upside fucking down.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Another?’ Resnick said, pointing to Waites’ empty glass.
‘Go on. Why not?’
For a good few minutes neither man spoke. Noise and smoke spiralled around them. Laughter but not too much of that. The empty trill of slot machines from the far side of the bar.
‘This soccer thing, Charlie,’ Waites said eventually. ‘Yanks buying into Manchester United and now there’s this President of Thailand or whatever, wants forty per cent of Liverpool so’s he can flog Steven Gerrard shirts and Michael Owen boots all over South-East Asia. It’s not football any more, Charlie, it’s all fucking business. Global fuckin’ economy.’ He drank deep and drained his glass. ‘It’s the global fucking economy as has thrown me and hundreds like me on to the fucking scrapheap, that’s what it’s done.’Waites sighed and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Charlie. You ought never to have let me get started.’
‘Stopping you’d take me and seven others.’
‘Happen so.’
At the door Waites stopped to light a cigarette. ‘You know what really grates with me, Charlie? It used to be a working-class game, football. Now they’ve took that from us as well.’
‘Some places,’ Resnick said, ‘it still is.’
‘Come on, Charlie. What’s happening, you don’t think it’s right no more’n me.’
‘Maybe not. Though I wouldn’t mind some oil billionaire from Belarus taking a fancy to Notts County for a spell. Buy ‘em a halfway decent striker, someone with a bit of nous for midfield.’
Waites laughed. ‘Now who’s whistling in the dark?’
For several months Customs and Excise and others did their best to unravel Sharminov’s financial affairs; his stock was seized, his shops closed down. A further six months down the line, Alexei Popov would buy them through a twice-removed subsidiary and begin trading in DVDs for what was euphemistically called the adult market. He also bought a flat in Knightsbridge for a cool five million, close to the one owned by Roman Abramovich, though there was no indication the two men knew one another. Abramovich’s Chelsea continued to prosper; no oil-fed angel came to Notts County’s rescue as they struggled against relegation.
Lynn began to wonder if a sideways move into the National Crime Squad might help to refocus her career.
Resnick saw Eileen one more time. Although most of the money belonging to the man she knew as Michael Sherwood had been confiscated, she had inherited enough for new clothes and an expensive makeover, new suitcases which were waiting in the taxi parked outside.
‘I thought I’d travel, Charlie. See the world. Switzerland, maybe. Fly round some mountains.’ Her smile was near to perfect. ‘You know the only place I’ve been abroad? If you don’t count the Isle of Man. Alicante. Apart from the heat, it wasn’t like being abroad at all. Even the announcements in the supermarket were in English.’
‘Enjoy it,’ Resnick said. ‘Have a good time.’
Eileen laughed. ‘Come with me, why don’t you? Chuck it all in. About time you retired.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
For a moment her face went serious. ‘You think we could ever have got together, Charlie?’
‘In another life, maybe.’
‘Which life is that?’
Resnick smiled. ‘The one where I’m ten years younger and half a stone lighter; not already living with somebody else.’
‘And not a policeman?’
‘Maybe that too.’
Craning upwards, she kissed him quickly on the lips. ‘You’re a good man, Charlie, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’
Long after she had gone, he could feel the pressure of her mouth on his and smell the scent of her skin beneath the new perfume.
DUE NORTH
Elder hated this: the after-midnight call, the neighbours penned back behind hastily unravelled tape, the video camera’s almost silent whirr; the way, as if reproachful, the uniformed officers failed to meet his eye; and this especially, the bilious taste that fouled his mouth as he stared down at the bed, the way the hands of both children
