'About Daines?'
'That's his name?'
'Yes, Stuart Daines. And I just don't know. If I come out and face him with it, he'll simply deny it, brazen it out, her word against his. Maybe I'll ask around. On the quiet.'
'You don't trust him, that's pretty clear.'
'He makes me uneasy.'
'Like the guy behind the bar.'
'No, definitely not like the guy behind the bar.'
Jackie was smiling. 'I'll ask around, too. If anything, it's easier for me than you. Anything I get, I'll let you know.'
'Thanks, Jackie.'
'Now, what exactly can we do to get you off with this feller?'
Twenty
On the Monday of that week, a few days before, at approximately fifteen minutes after nine in morning, a black Vauxhall Astra swung into the lay-by outside the post office on the Loughborough Road and two men-Garry Britton and Lee Williams-jumped out, leaving a third behind the wheel. Britton was black, Williams white; both were carrying guns, a shotgun with sawn-off barrels and a pistol, which they pointed at the line of ten or so mostly elderly customers, ordering them to the floor.
Britton, wielding the shotgun, shouldered his way through the narrow shop towards the counter, where one of the two staff on duty had already pushed the panic button linking them with the police station less than half a mile away on Rectory Road. Pressing the gun up against the reinforced glass, he ordered both clerks to hand over the money from the cash drawers where they were standing.
A man in workman's overalls started to push open the door from the street, saw what was happening, and ducked away.
'Quick! Quick! Be fucking quick!'
The shotgun smacked against the glass and one of the clerks screamed. Outside, the Astra's driver was blowing his horn.
Several of the customers, huddled between the floor and the side wall, were crying; one, a woman in an old- fashioned tweed suit, her grey hair tied back in a bun, was praying loudly.
'Shut it!' Williams yelled in her face. 'Fuckin' shut it!'
She began to sing instead, a hymn.
Williams drew back his arm and swung the pistol towards her face.
The car horn was louder now, more insistent, and beneath it the first sounds of police sirens could be heard.
'Out! Out! Get the fuck out!' Britton snatched an envelope containing some couple of hundred pounds and ran towards the door. Turning to follow him, Williams tripped and half-fell, stumbling out onto the street as the Asian proprietor of the newsagents several doors away made a grab at his arm.
'Fuckin' hero!' Williams said and fired his pistol from close range, before jumping into the back of the already-moving car.
The Asian collapsed back against the post-office window, blood already staining his white shirt where the bullet had torn through the flesh at his side.
The exit at the end of the parade of shops was partially blocked and the Astra jumped across a swath of pavement, narrowly missing a group of children straggling late to school, and skidded out onto the Loughborough Road as a police car approached fast from the opposite direction. The driver threw the Astra into reverse, swerved, and, panicking, headed into a side road that would only lead into the Asda car park, the police car following close behind.
At that hour of the morning, fewer than a quarter of the places in the car park were taken and the Astra accelerated hard towards the green plate glass of the supermarket front, tyres squealing as it made a tight right turn, hoping to swing back round towards the exit. But now there was a second police car blocking its path, and the driver braked again, yanked hard at the wheel, and lost control, the side of the Astra bounc- ing off a parked delivery van and then buried itself, bonnet first, into the side of a lorry loaded with frozen foods.
Automatic air bags saved the lives of the two men in the front, but held them fast. The third man-Williams- was thrown forward against the driver, his head striking the side window as he rebounded, jolting the pistol from his hand. He was half out of the door when two police officers grasped his arms and pulled him free, spinning him round and pushing him flat against the side of the car, legs kicked apart and arms stretched wide.
Nicked, as the saying goes.
It was Catherine Njoroge who first spotted that the gun used in the raid was similar to that responsible for Kelly Brent's shooting-a Brocock ME38 Magnum-and alerted Resnick; Resnick who got in touch with the Forensic Science Services Lab at Huntingdon and, leaning on past favours, requested that comparisons with the marks on the bullets and cartridge cases from the murder scene be pushed through with all possible speed.
Meantime, Catherine went meticulously back through the CCTV footage from St. Ann's. There was Lee Williams, clearly visible in one frame, at the inner edge of the crowd just before the shooting started. Williams, beyond a doubt, wearing Radford colours. Together with Anil Khan, she went back to their original sources: Williams was confirmed by three different witnesses as having been in Cranmer Street at the time of the shooting.
The FSS checks, when they finally came through, late on Friday, showed that the striation marks on the sides of both sets of bullets, the scratches caused when the spent cartridges were ejected, and the dents in the metal cover made by the firing pin were all identical. The weapon used in Kelly Brent's murder and the post-office raid was one and the same.
Not only that, a comparison against outstanding marks showed that the gun had been used in two previous incidents: a drive-by shooting in Birmingham the previous year and a post-office robbery in Mansfield just eight weeks before.
Williams himself had minor juvenile offences against his name; one charge of possessing a firearm that was dismissed. He would have a hard time walking away from this, Resnick thought.
Resnick went to the Brent house on Saturday morning, just shy of eleven. This time he had left Catherine Njoroge behind and come on his own. Even with just the three of them there, the room still felt small. The low ceiling and the single small window didn't help, nor the furniture, crowded close together.
The photograph of Kelly Brent on the mantelpiece had been reframed and a piece of dark purple ribbon fastened across one corner; the other family photographs had been placed elsewhere and some of the many cards the family had received stood on either side of Kelly's picture. There were flowers, slightly faded now, in two tall vases in the empty hearth. Messages of condolence had been pasted in a large, fake-leather-bound scrapbook which rested, open, on the low table in front of the TV.
Despite signs of normal wear and tear, there were no special markers of poverty here, nor affluence either. Normal people, normal lives: one son away at university, one at college, one daughter dead.
The shadows were dark around Tina Brent's eyes, and her fingers plucked at a stray thread that had come loose from the arm of the chair where she sat.
Howard Brent-silver grey sweatshirt, loose-fitting, wide-bottomed trousers, new silver grey trainers with the distinctive red Nike logo at the sides and a black band around the upper sole-looked at Resnick and then his daughter's photograph and then the floor.
It was several minutes since anyone had spoken, since Resnick had said what he had come to say. Brent, for once, not quick with words, taken aback perhaps, surprised, uncertain what response to make, the anger, the wind knocked out of him by the news, incomplete as it still was.
'I just wanted you to know,' Resnick said, 'because of what may have happened, because of what you may have thought before, that Billy Alston was not directly involved in Kelly's death. We're confident of that.'
'And this youth now,' Brent said, 'in custody. He confess?'
