Resnick leaned back in the chair to listen and when the smallest of the cats jumped up on to his lap he let it stay.
HOME
Resnick was unable to sleep. All those years of living alone, just the weight of the cats, one and occasionally more, pressing lightly down on the covers by his feet or in the V behind his legs, and now, with Lynn away for just forty-eight hours, he was lost without her by his side. The warmth of her body next to his, the small collisions as they turned from their respective dreams into a splay of legs, her arm sliding across his chest. ‘Lay still, Charlie. Another five minutes, okay?’ Musk of her early-morning breath.
He pushed away the sheet and swivelled round, then rose to his feet. Through an inch of open window, he could hear the slight swish of cars along the Woodborough Road. Not so many minutes short of two a.m.
Downstairs, Dizzy, the oldest of the four cats, a warrior no longer, raised his head from the fruit bowl he had long since appropriated as a bed, cocked a chewed and half-torn ear and regarded Resnick with a yellow eye.
Padding past, Resnick set the kettle to boil and slid a tin of coffee beans from the fridge. A flier announcing Lynn’s course was pinned to the cork board on the wall — ‘Unzipping the Agenda: A Guide to Creative Management and Open Thinking’. Lynn and forty or so other officers from the East Midlands and East Anglia at a conference centre and hotel beside the Al outside Stevenage. Promotion material. High fliers. When she had joined the Serious Crime Unit a little more than two years ago, it has been as a sergeant; an inspector now and barely thirty, unless somehow she blotted her copybook, the only way was up. Whereas for Resnick, who had turned down promotion and the chance to move on to a bigger stage, little more than a pension awaited once his years were in.
While the coffee dripped slowly through its filter, Resnick opened the back door into the garden and, as he did so, another of the cats slithered past his ankles. Beyond the allotments, the lights of the city burned dully through a haze of rain and mist. Down there, on the streets of St Ann’s and the Meadows, armed officers patrolled with Walther P990s holstered at their hips. Drugs, of course, the cause of most of it, the cause and the core: all the way from after-dinner cocaine served at trendy middle-class dinner parties alongside squares of Green and Black’s dark organic chocolate, to twenty-five-pound wraps of brown changing hands in the stairwells of dilapidated blocks of flats.
Bolting the door, he carried his coffee through into the living room, switched on the light and slid a CD into the stereo. Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Los Angeles, nineteenth January 1957. Pepper only months out of jail on drugs offences, his second term and still only thirty-two. And worse to come.
Resnick had seen him play in Leicester on the British leg of his European tour; Pepper older, wiser, allegedly straightened out, soon to be dead three years shy of sixty, a small miracle that he survived that long. That evening, in the function room of a nondescript pub, his playing had been melodic, and inventive, the tone piping and lean, its intensity controlled. Man earning a living, doing what he can.
Back in ’57, in front of Miles Davis’ rhythm section, he had glittered, half-afraid, inspired, alto saxophone dancing over the chords of half-remembered tunes. ‘Star Eyes’, ‘Imagination’, ‘Jazz Me Blues’. The track that Resnick would play again and again: ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’.
For a moment Pepper’s namesake cat appeared in the doorway, sniffed the air and turned away, presenting his fine tail.
Just time for Resnick, eyes closed, to conjure up a picture of Lynn, restlessly sleeping in a strange bed, before the phone began to ring.
It was the sergeant on duty, his voice stretched by tiredness: ‘… ten, fifteen minutes ago, sir. I thought you’d want to know.’
That stretch of the Ilkeston Road was a mixture of small shops and residential housing, old factories put to new use, student accommodation. Police cars were parked, half on the kerb, either side of a black Ford Mondeo that, seemingly, had swerved wildly and collided, broadside-on, into a concrete post, amidst a welter of torn metal and splintered glass. Onlookers, some with overcoats pulled over their night clothes and carpet slippers on their feet, stood back behind hastily strung-out police tape, craning their necks. An ambulance and fire engine stood opposite, paramedics and fire officers mingling with uniformed police at the perimeter of the scene. Lights flashing, a second ambulance was pulling away as Resnick arrived.
Driving slowly past, he stopped outside a shop, long boarded-up, ‘High Class Butcher’ in faded lettering on the brickwork above.
Anil Khan, once a DC in Resnick’s squad and now a sergeant with Serious Crime, came briskly down to meet him and walked him back.
‘One dead at the scene, sir, young female; one on his way to hospital, the driver. Female passenger, front near side, her leg’s trapped against the door where it buckled in. Have to be cut out most likely. Oxyacetylene.’
Resnick could see the body now, stretched out against the lee of the wall beneath a dark grey blanket that was darker at the head.
‘Impact?’ Resnick said. ‘Thrown forward against the windscreen?’
Khan shook his head. ‘Shot.’
It stopped Resnick in his tracks.
‘Another car, as best we can tell. Three shots, maybe four. One of them hit her in the neck. Must have nicked an artery. She was dead before we got her out.’
Illuminated by the street light above, Resnick could see the blood, sticky and bright, clinging to the upholstery like a second skin. Bending towards the body, he lifted back the blanket edge and looked down into the empty startled eyes of a girl of no more than sixteen.
Fifteen years and seven months. Shana Ann Faye. She had lived with her mother, two younger sisters and an older brother in Radford. A bright and popular student, a lovely girl. She had been to an eighteenth birthday party with her brother, Jahmall, and his girlfriend, Marlee. Jahmall driving.
They had been on their way home when the incident occurred, less than half a mile from where Shana and Jahmall lived. A blue BMW drew up alongside them at the lights before the turn into Ilkeston Road, revving its engine as if intent on racing. Anticipating the green, Jahmall, responding to the challenge, accelerated downhill, the BMW in close pursuit; between the first set of lights and the old Radford Mill building, the BMW drew alongside, someone lowered the rear window, pushed a handgun through and fired four times. One shot ricocheted off the roof, another embedded itself in the rear of the front seat; one entered the fleshy part of Jahmall’s shoulder, causing him to swerve; the fourth and fatal shot struck Shana low in the side of the neck and exited close to her windpipe.
An impulse shooting, is that what this was? Or a case of mistaken identity?
In the October of the previous year a gunman had opened fire from a passing car, seemingly at random, into a group of young people on their way home from Goose Fair, and a fourteen-year-old girl had died. There were stories of gun gangs and blood feuds in the media, of areas of the inner city running out of control, turf wars over drugs. Flowers and sermons, blame and recriminations and in the heart of the city a minute’s silence, many people wearing the dead girl’s favourite colours; thousands lined the streets for the funeral, heads bowed in respect.
Now this.
Understaffed as they were, low on morale and resources, policing the city, Resnick knew, was becoming harder and harder. In the past eighteen months, violent crime had risen to double the national average; shootings had increased fourfold. In Radford, Jamaican Yardies controlled the trade in heroin and crack cocaine, while on the Bestwood estate, to the north, the mainly white criminal fraternity was forging an uneasy alliance with the Yardies, all the while fighting amongst themselves; at either side of the city centre, multiracial gangs from St Ann’s and the Meadows, Asian and Afro-Caribbean, fought out a constant battle for trade and respect.
So was Shana simply another victim in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or something more? The search for the car was on: best chance it would be found on waste land, torched; ballistics were analysing the bullets from the scene; Jahmall Faye and his family were being checked through records; friends would be questioned, neighbours. The public-relations department had prepared a statement for the media, another for the Assistant Chief Constable. Resnick sat in the CID office in Canning Circus station with Anil Khan and Detective Inspector
