'You do know how to get in touch with her?' Daines said.
'Yes, I know.'
'All right, then. Perhaps you'll give me a call? The next couple of days?'
Without waiting for an answer, he moved off, leaving Lynn to her thoughts.
Back home that evening, she and Resnick watched as the bulk of Michael Brent's speech was repeated on Newsnight, followed by a discussion between the head of the Metropolitan Police's Operation Trident, which investigates gun crime within black communities in London, a representative of the Campaign for Racial Equality and the Labour member of Parliament for Nottingham South.
'Talks a lot of sense, that one,' Lynn said. 'For an MP.'
'How about Michael Brent? What did you think of him?'
'Bit different from his father. Doesn't go flying off at the handle. Much more controlled. More articulate, too. Better educated.'
Resnick nodded. 'He's articulate, certainly. More so than his brother. But then so's his old man, in his way. Michael just seems, like you say, more in control. As if maybe going off to university or wherever's made a difference.'
'Made him less black, is that what you mean?'
'No, not really, it's not that. Being black's at the heart of what he's saying.'
'Less ghetto, then? Farther from the stereotype.'
'Maybe,' Resnick said. 'Maybe he's our best hope. For the future.'
'Michael Brent?'
'People like him.'
Lynn wasn't sure.
At a quarter past three, both were awoken by the telephone. Bleary-eyed, Resnick answered first. The Alston house in Radford was ablaze. Two adults and one child were on their way to hospital suffering from second-degree burns and smoke inhalation. Billy Alston had sustained a suspected broken arm and broken leg after falling from a second-floor window.
Fifteen
Resnick knew the watch commander well. Terry Brook. They'd first encountered one another ten or twelve years before, the commander then a leading firefighter in charge of the rescue tender, Resnick the DI on call, the fire engulfing several of the old warehouse buildings along the canal-something bizarre about the ferocity and seemingly unstoppable speed of the flames so close to so much water, their reflection on the lightly moving surface of the canal a compulsive arsonist's delight.
It had been the fourth such fire in nine months, all of them amongst industrial buildings long abandoned by British Waterways or what would then have been British Rail. The first was put down to carelessness: kids, most likely, or dossers sleeping rough, a fire started for warmth and allowed to get out of control. After the second incident, the Fire Investigation Officer detected a shape and purpose, a characteristic burn pattern along the edges of the boards, the presence of petrol vapour in the air, a charred box of matches close to the point where the fire had begun.
It had been Terry Brook who had spotted the youth first, a gangly fourteen-year-old with glasses and the slightest of stutters; the lad hanging around near the tender, asking questions, telling Brook how he'd like to join the Fire and Rescue Service when he'd finished college, either that or become one of those investigators employed by the big insurance companies.
'A gas chromatograph, is that what they use to figure out what made it all go up so fast? GC/MS, is that what it's called? Something like that?'
Brook said he wasn't sure, but he could introduce the lad to someone who was.
When they'd searched the boy's room, they'd found a battered history of the British Fire Service, purchased from some local charity shop or car-boot sale, and a nearly new copy of Images of Fire, borrowed from the central library and never returned.
Brook turned now from where he was standing and shook Resnick's hand, the front of the Alston house on its way to being little more than a charred shell, residents on both sides evacuated and standing, some of them, with blankets round their shoulders, watching, as if it were all part of some reality-TV show.
'Everyone got out okay?' Resnick asked.
'Far as we know.'
'Accidental, you think?'
'Always possible. Too early to tell.' He looked Resnick in the face. 'You got reason to think otherwise?'
'I might.'
The two men had met not infrequently over the intervening years, shared a jar in this or that pub or bar. Terry Brook-originally Brok-had come over from Poland with his family in the early seventies, several decades after Resnick's own parents, who had been driven out of their homeland in the early years of the War. This back when Poles were still a relative novelty in Britain and signs in supermarket windows advertising POLISH goods sold here were yet unthinkable.
Brook supported the other one of the city's two soccer teams, couldn't stand jazz, and his ideas of adventurous cuisine didn't extend much beyond having sauce as well as mustard with his pie and chips, but somehow he and Resnick found a quiet ease in one another's occasional company, each of them still, to some small degree, strangers in a now-familiar land.
Resnick told him about Billy Alston and his presumed connection to the death of Kelly Brent, about the possibility of her father or some member of the family taking the law into their own hands.
'Well, I tellin' you, this gonna get sorted. One way or another. You know that, yeah? You know?'
'Be a while,' Brook said, 'before we can get in there, take a proper look around.'
'Soon as you turn up anything, you'll let me know?'
'First thing.'
They shook hands again and Resnick went back to his car. At that time of the morning, not yet properly light, St. Ann's was no more than minutes away. Mist hung low over the Forest Recreation Ground as he drove past, the trees along the upper edge darker shapes amidst the prevailing grey.
Howard Brent came to the door in a T-shirt and a pair of hastily pulled-on jeans.
'What the fuck now?'
'There's been a fire in Radford. Where Billy Alston lives. I thought perhaps you knew?'
Brent shook his head.
'Billy's in Queen's. Broke his leg jumping from an upstairs window to escape the blaze. Arm, too.'
'Shame.'
'Yes?'
'Shame the bastard didn't burn.'
Nice, Resnick thought. 'You can account for your whereabouts between midnight and three A.M.?'
'Yeah, I was down Radford chuckin' petrol bombs.' Brent laughed. 'No, man, I was home here in my own bed.' He cupped his genitals and squeezed lightly. 'Ask Tina an' she tell you. Know what I'm sayin'?'
The news of the fire and Billy Alston's injury seemed to have improved his mood considerably.
'Got to thank you,' Brent said, as if reading Resnick's mind. 'No matter what pass between us before. Ain't every mornin' the police knock me outta bed with good news.'
This cheery, Resnick thought, no way his alibi isn't going to hold.
And so it would prove.
Anil Khan and Catherine Njoroge went round later that morning and took statements. Friends had called at the house on their way back from the pub and had stayed, drinking and, as Brent admitted, passing round a little weed, until close to one o'clock. Later, maybe, than that. Not so long after the friends left, Brent and his wife had gone to bed, if not immediately to sleep.
