'I think maybe it keeps hell at bay just that bit longer.'
Ramsden cocked his head. 'Know your trouble, don't you?'
'I'm sure you're going to tell me.'
'You're just a hopeless bloody optimist. Fucking great storm, thunder and lightning, pitch-bloody-dark, and you'll be standing there under this pathetic little umbrella-'It's okay, it's okay, it's just a shower.''
Karen laughed. 'All right, then, give me something to be optimistic about.'
'Not easy.'
'But try.'
Ramsden perched on the edge of a desk. 'We've been going back through investigations Kellogg was involved in; a couple worth looking at twice, but nothing that leaps out and hits you. Otherwise, the shoe, the make of trainer, that's confirmed, but it gets us exactly bloody nowhere. Cigarette ends, the same, probably been there several days before the shooting, thrown from a car, blown in off the road, whatever.'
Karen made a face. 'Anything yet back from Forensics?'
Ramsden shook his head. 'Backed up.'
'Still?'
'They're saying tomorrow.'
'Without fail?'
'Just 'tomorrow.''
'And the missing Sierra?'
'Possible Sierra.'
'All right, possible Sierra.'
'Still missing.'
'But we're checking?'
'Oh, yes.'
Karen uttered a deep sigh. 'Jesus, Mike. Where are we?'
Ramsden shrugged, smiling. 'Nottingham?'
Thirty
Graham Millington had brought a bottle of good Scotch with him: a Springbank single malt, not cheap. After an awkward quarter of an hour or so, he and Resnick sat and chatted easily enough about old times and how things were going now down in Devon, Millington enjoying the police work, but quite vociferous about the perils of living so close to his in-laws, Madeleine's mother at full throttle, as he put it, being more dangerous than a Kawasaki and sidecar coming at you the wrong way down a one-way street. A jibe based on old-fashioned prejudice and out-of- date mother-in-law clichEs, Resnick might have thought, had he not once met the good lady in question, the very thought of it now causing him to duck.
'When she first came to us, you know,' Millington said, 'Lynn'-the bottle far enough down for him to broach the subject without embarrassment-'I'll be honest, I was never sure she was going to make it. Not in CID. Bright, certainly, she was always that. Keen, too. Never one to shirk. But quiet, turned in on herself. Country girl, of course, up from the sticks. And the way the squad room was in those days, before this political-correctness bollocks really took hold, not easy for a woman back then-only one in the team, especially, which she was. But then there was that time she stood up to Divine, you remember?'
Resnick remembered well enough. Mark Divine, now no longer on the Force, had been a thickset rugby- playing DC of the unreconstructed kind, never shy when it came to shooting off his mouth, and on this occasion he had been airing his views on the wife of a colleague who'd been suffering badly from postnatal depression. Divine's callous lack of understanding had reached the point where Lynn had felt compelled to intervene, whereupon he had upped the stakes with a few badly chosen remarks about her love life or the lack of it, the implication being the only way any bloke would fancy her would be if it were pitch-dark or if she pulled the proverbial bag down over her head.
Without hesitation, she had slapped him round the side of the face with force enough to rock him back on his heels, the marks of her fingers standing out clearly on his cheek.
It had taken Resnick and one of the other officers to stop Divine from retaliating and a strong lecture afterwards to keep him in line. But Lynn had made her point. And more. Maybe it shouldn't have taken that for her to be accepted, but it had.
'You were a lucky man, Charlie,' Millington said, 'you know that, don't you? Not now, of course, I'd not wish what happened to you on a worst enemy, but back when she took up with you first. A lucky man.'
Resnick nodded, knowing it for the truth.
'You were a miserable old bugger sometimes,' Millington said. 'All those years of living on your own after that wife of yours pulled up sticks and left. Not at work, true, not so much then, but after, standing sour-faced over a pint and then off home with your tail between your legs to feed the bloody cats and listen to some old crone moaning on, one of them jazz singers you're so fond of, Billie What's-Her-Name.'
He laughed. 'I could never tell what Lynn saw in you, but she did, and that put something of a smile back on your cheeks, a bit of snap in your walk. Gave you a second chance, Charlie, that's what she did. Second chance at a bit of happiness. So be grateful. Not now, it's all too close, too raw, but later. When you can, when you're able. She was a grand lass, and she loved you something rotten, though I'm still buggered if I can see why.'
He tipped a little more Scotch into Resnick's glass and then his own.
'There's a match tomorrow, you know. Thought you might fancy it, 'fore I go back. Be a bit like old times, me and you at Meadow Lane, watching the buggers lose.'
Maybe, Resnick thought, maybe. Football had been far from his mind. And he was still thinking about what Millington had said-lucky, is that what he was?
Well, yes, he thought, taking a sip from his glass. Lucky and unlucky both.
After Elaine had left him for that slippery bastard of an estate agent and argued her way to a divorce, there'd been a couple of short-lived relationships but nothing more, and he'd none too fondly imagined keeping his own company for the rest of his life. Cats aside. But then there was Lynn, looking at him now in a different way, and, like Millington, he'd wondered what it was she saw in him that was so special. Marvelled at it. Gloried. Spent the first six months in a kind of daze, half-terrified that one morning she would wake up with a start and realise the mistake she'd made, pack her bags and be out the door. And when that didn't happen, he'd allowed himself to relax, to accept that it was all right, it was real, she was here to stay.
In seconds everything had changed.
A moment and she was gone.
He felt cold again and then warm. At least he hadn't burst into tears without warning, not in the last few hours he hadn't. With a sigh, he lifted and drained his glass. Good Scotch or not, he'd have a head like nobody's business come the morning.
Out in the kitchen, he made them both cheese on toast with mustard and Worcestershire sauce, feeding ends of the cheese to the cats. Millington insisted on having his with a pot of tea, strong enough to stand a spoon upright in the cup. The spare bed was already made up. He shunted Millington up ahead of him and pottered around the kitchen for a while, clearing up. He entertained the thought of sitting a while longer on his own, listening to-what had Millington called them, one of those old crones? But, finally, he went upstairs instead. If he slept much past four, he'd be thankful.
For the first time in a long while, Resnick's heart failed to lift as he neared the ground, Graham Millington and himself part of the small crowd turning off London Road and crossing the canal, a bright sky but the air suddenly cold enough to catch their breath. Once inside, Millington, more a creature of habit even than Resnick himself, stood in line for cups of Bovril and a brace of meat-and-potato pies. Their seats were close to the halfway line, some ten or twelve rows back, the grass an almost luminous green, promising something special, almost magical.
The first fifteen minutes of mistimed tackles and misplaced passes soon gave a lie to that, the crowd saving most of their invective-officials aside-for the perceived shortcomings of their own team. Never bad enough to occasion a chorus of 'You're Not Fit to Wear the Shirt,' but close. Not that the visitors were a whole lot better, a
