Thirty-seven
The television news was showing pictures of rivers in flood farther north and in South Yorkshire and out along the Humber estuary, people were trapped in their homes. In East Anglia, the small market town of Louth was nearly swept out past Saltfleet and into the sea. Helicopters rescued the aged and infirm, winching them precariously to hospital. Rowboats, many extemporised from containers or plastic baths, ferried people to safety. Families camped out on roofs. Cats were drowned. Cars abandoned. Houses and shops looted. An off-duty ambulance man, by all accounts a strong swimmer, lost his footing, fell into a normally placid river that had burst its banks, and was swept helplessly away. A bemused toddler celebrated turning three with his parents and two hundred others in a leisure centre, water lapping up the walls as, en masse, they sang 'Happy Birthday.' The bloated body of Kelvin Pearce was found floating in a flooded used-car lot on the A1 south of Doncaster and went unidentified for three days.
The morning of Lynn's funeral was marked by more heavy rain, relentless, from a leaden sky. The procession of cars heading east from Nottingham was slowed by winds that gusted across open fields and lifted standing water from the surface of the road. Detours, caused by flooding, slowed them further still.
Some twenty miles short of their destination, the rain was replaced by sudden, blinding sun, so that the church, when they first saw it, stood out like a beacon on the hill, its flint-fronted walls reflecting a kaleidoscope of greys and whites and browns.
A low wooden gate with a single iron arch opened onto a gravelled path which led to the church entrance in the west wall of the nave.
Inside, the walls were surprisingly plain, painted a flat greyish white beneath the hammer-beam roof. A pointed arch, the shape and size of the whale's jawbone that Resnick knew well from Whitby's west cliff, separated the body of the church from the choir stalls and the simplest of altars: light filtering through the high window beyond.
Opposite the pulpit, Resnick sat ill at ease in black: black suit, black shoes, black tie, the collar of his white shirt straining against his neck. The wood of the pews had been polished smooth by use and was properly hard and unforgiving against his bones as he sat, cramped and uncomfortable. Across the aisle, Lynn's mother leaned against an elder sister for support, the extended family ranged behind her: a brother scarcely seen in years, aunts and uncles, nephews and cousins-great glowering lads with large feet and hands and awkward eyes-nieces in hand- me-down frocks and borrowed cardigans worn against the cold.
Behind Resnick, the Divisional Commander for Nottingham City and the head of the Homicide Unit talked in low tones, and the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime), present as the representative of the Chief Constable, forbore from looking at his watch. Behind them, filling the pews, sat men and women with whom Lynn had worked-Anil Khan, Carl Vincent, Kevin Naylor-now a Detective Sergeant in Hertfordshire and recently divorced-Sharon Garnett, Ben Fowles. Graham Millington had sent sincere regrets and a wreath of lilies. Catherine Njoroge sat a little to one side, hands folded one over the other, a black shawl covering her head. Jackie Ferris had phoned at the last minute with her apologies.
The vicar was new to the parish, young and earnest and possessed of a slight stammer. He spoke of a life of dedication and service cut short too soon. He spoke of God's untrammelled love. Resnick's eyes wandered to the stained-glass angels, red and green and purple, perched in small lozenges above the east window. Lynn's mother cried. Two officers-Khan and Naylor-along with two of the family, shouldered the coffin, Resnick walking behind.
The ground was sodden underfoot.
As they reached the open grave, the first drops of new rain began to fall.
The vicar's stumbling words were torn by the wind.
Lynn's mother clasped Resnick's hand and wept.
The open sides of the grave began, here and there, to slip away.
More words and then the coffin was lowered into place.
Unprompted, one of the women began to sing a hymn which was taken up by a few cracked voices before petering out to uneasy silence.
When Resnick was given the trowel of fresh earth to throw down upon the coffin, he turned away, blinded by tears.
The family had arranged for a wake in the parish hall, more often used by Cubs and Brownies. Curled sandwiches and cold commiserations, warm beer. He couldn't wait to get away. That night the police would hold a wake back on their own turf and Resnick would show his face, accept sympathy, shake hands, leave as soon as decency allowed.
The first time they had made love, himself and Lynn, it had been the day after her father's funeral, a collision of need that had taken them, clumsily at first, from settee to floor and floor to bed, finishing joyful and surprised beneath a pale blue patterned quilt. After making love again, they had slept, and when Resnick had finally woken, Lynn had been standing by the window in the gathering light, holding one of her father's old white shirts against her face.
Now father and daughter were buried side by side.
The house struck cold when he entered; the sound, as the door closed behind him, unnaturally loud. There was perhaps a third remaining of the Springbank Millington had brought, and Resnick poured himself a healthy shot then carried both bottle and glass into the front room, set them down and crossed to the stereo.
'What Shall I Say?': Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra with vocal refrain by Billie Holiday. He had fought shy of playing this before, but now he thought he could.
The song starts with a flourish of saxophone, after which a muted trumpet plays the tune, Roy Eldridge at his most restrained; tenor saxophone takes the middle eight, and then it's Eldridge again, Teddy Wilson's piano bridging the space jauntily before Billie's entry, her voice slightly piping, resigned, full of false bravado. The ordinariness, the banality of the words only serving to increase the hurt. The clarinet noodling prettily, emptily behind.
As the music ended, tears stinging his eyes, Resnick hurled his whisky glass against the facing wall, threw back his head, and howled her name.
Thirty-eight
At first, the assumption, natural enough, was that Kelvin Pearce had drowned, another victim of the floods. But the pathologist found no trace of water in his air passages or his stomach and the lungs did not appear to have become unduly swollen, and so he concluded that Pearce had almost certainly been dead when his body entered the water. The swelling and the badly wrinkled skin that came from prolonged immersion had at first disguised the gunshot wound at the base of the skull. Though much of the area around the wound had been washed clean, there were enough stippled burn marks around the point of entry to suggest Pearce had been shot with a small-calibre bullet at close range.
His sister from Mansfield carried out the formal identification.
The friend with whom Pearce had been hiding out, in a mid-terrace former council house in Doncaster, told South Yorkshire police that Pearce had seemed almost permanently frightened, forever looking over his shoulder. On one occasion he had ducked out of a nearby pub when two men had entered, legging it across the car park and shinning over a wall to get away.
The men?
One of them had been bearded, he was certain of that; not a big beard, not long, but full, dark. He might have had some kind of scar on his face, but it had all been so quick it was difficult to be certain.
Which side was the scar? Left or right? No, sorry, he couldn't say.
It was Thursday, almost a week after Kelvin Pearce's body had first been found, facedown, butting up against the side of a partly submerged Nissan Bluebird, before the news of his death filtered down to Karen Shields.
'The Zoukas trial, Mike,' she and Ramsden in conversation as they walked towards the Incident Room. 'More and more it seems to revolve around that. First Kellogg and now one of the key witnesses dead, and the other
