Forty-five
After meeting Gregan, Resnick had made himself take a long, slow walk, back through the Arboretum and along Mansfield Road as far as the Forest Recreation Ground before cutting through to St. Ann's. The manner in which he'd confronted Daines had been foolish. Juvenile. Sufficiently out of character for him to take the judgement 'unfit for duty' to heart. Unfit? 'Unfit' was too bloody right.
Not now.
Howard Brent was outside his house, touching up the offside front wing of his car where someone had scraped it driving past. He had barely paused to look up as Resnick approached, but when Resnick spoke, he had listened. Listened and replied, his normal hostility tempered by something he would have been hard put to explain. Slowly, he straightened and watched Resnick as he walked away.
Jason Price lived in the upper two rooms of a terraced house in one of the short streets that narrowed out either side of Sneinton Dale; one room had a narrow bed and a spare mattress on the floor, the other an old two- seater settee that had been dragged in from a nearby dump, a couple of wooden chairs and a thirdhand stereo along with, Price's pride and joy, a large-screen plasma TV he had traded for ten grammes of amphetamines and fifty tabs of LSD. There was a microwave in one corner, next to a sink with a small hot-water heater alongside. The lavatory was on the floor below.
When Resnick arrived, Price was in'T-shirt and boxer shorts, having not long got out of bed. It was a few minutes past eleven, Sunday morning. Church bells all over the city were ringing, calling the people to shopping centres and supermarkets, Homebase and B amp; Q.
'What the fuck-?' Price said, opening the downstairs door.
'Marcus here?' Resnick asked. Price nodded. 'Snorin' upstairs, i'n it?'
'Get on some clothes and get lost. And don't wake him. Let him sleep.'
'What's this all about?'
'Just do it.'
Price knew the law when he saw it; knew better than to argue. Thank Christ him and Marcus had smoked the last of his stash before turning in. Five minutes and he was gone.
The upstairs room smelt of dope and tobacco and the slightly sweet, not-unfamiliar stink of two young men who slept with the window firmly closed. Resnick flicked back the catch and levered the top half of the window down and Marcus, angled across the mattress, one bare foot touching the floor, stirred at the sound. Stirred and rolled onto one side and resumed sleeping.
What was he, Resnick asked himself. Eighteen at most? Asleep, he looked younger, his face smooth and his skin the colour of copper. Fragile. Vulnerable. Somebody's son.
'Marcus.' Resnick pushed at the side of the mattress with his shoe. 'Marcus, wake up.'
Another push and the youth spluttered awake, twisting his head towards Resnick and gasping as if seeing something in a dream, except that this, he realised seconds later, was worse.
No nightmare: This was real.
'Get up. Put something on.'
Marcus rolled sideways and pushed himself to his feet. Bollock naked, he reached for his jeans and a V- necked top.
'What the fuck is this? Where's Jason? What's goin' on?'
'I've been trying to figure it out, Marcus, and I'm still not sure. Which was it? Greed or plain stupidity?'
'What? What the fuck you talkin' about?'
'Selling the gun.'
'What? What the-? I dunno what you're on about. What fuckin' gun? I dunno nothin' ' bout no fuckin' gun.'
But the shiver in his eyes said that he did.
'A Baikal semiautomatic, Marcus, remember? I don't know who you bought it from, haven't been able to find that out yet, but I know who you sold it to. A man named Steven Burchill, round the back of the Sands in Gainsborough.'
Marcus bolted for the door and Resnick grabbed his arm and swung him round hard, so that he landed on the floor with a loud thump, then rolled hard against the wall and caught the edge of the skirting board with enough force to open a cut above his left eye.
'Waste of effort,' Resnick said, dismissively. 'You didn't think I'd come here without backup? There's men downstairs, front and back. Cars at the end of the street.'
Marcus shivered, believing Resnick's lie, and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, smearing blood.
'Here.' Resnick took a handkerchief from his pocket. 'Use this.'
He had thought, when he finally found Lynn's killer, when he confronted him face-to-face, that he would be unable to control his anger, that it would need others to hold him back, to stop him from trying to take vengeance into his own hands; but now, in that small sad room, looking down at that skinny youth, not yet twenty, not too bright, not so very different from the scores of similar young men he'd had to deal with over the years, he found the anger draining out of him-the anger at this individual, at least.
'A couple of hundred, that's all you got for it. That's what Burchill said. Not a good price, but then, you weren't in much of a position to bargain.'
'There's no prints,' Marcus blurted. 'You can't prove-'
Resnick shook his head. 'Science, Marcus. Forensic science. What's that programme that's so popular? You've probably seen it? CSI? Of course, it's nothing like that, not in real life. Not over here, at least. But one thing is the same. What they can do, match a recovered bullet to a particular gun. And we have the bullet-two, in fact. And now, since the early hours of this morning, we have the gun.'
Not the brightest apple in the box, Steven Burchill had kept it double-wrapped in plastic inside the cistern of the backyard toilet where he lived. Something he'd seen in a film once somewhere, Resnick didn't doubt, something on the telly.
It had not taken Ryan Gregan long to persuade Burchill to say where it was, Resnick waiting not quite out of earshot till the job was done.
'I don't think I really understood at first why you did it,' Resnick said. 'The specifics. But now I think I do.'
Marcus was sitting on the floor with his legs drawn up towards him, head down, one hand holding Resnick's once-white handkerchief against the wound.
'You and your father had a big row just before he left for Jamaica. The same sort of row you'd had before, I daresay, but this was worse. All you wanted from him, I think, was respect. A little more respect. But it ended up, as it often did, with him telling you were useless, stupid, not worth the time of day. And all the time there was Michael in the background, Michael being held up in comparison, Michael the perfect son.
'And you knew all the things your father had said about Lynn Kellogg, how she was to blame for your sister's death. How he hated her. How much he'd told you all to hate her. How she had to pay. And you thought that would show him, once and for all. Prove to him not just that you were Michael's equal, but that you were better. Braver. So you bought the gun. And you waited. I don't know how many nights you waited. Two? Three? And then there she was.'
He could hear his voice starting to choke, but he made himself carry on.
'There she was walking towards you, and from that range, you didn't even have to be especially skilled with a gun. From that range, it would have been difficult to miss.'
Resnick turned away and willed back tears.
Marcus was crying now, enough tears for both of them: not tears of sorrow for what he'd done, but out of his own fear of what would happen.
'You told him, your father. When he came back to England, you told him what you'd done and, of course, he didn't believe you. 'You wouldn't have the guts,' he said. 'You wouldn't have the balls.' So you told him you didn't care, didn't care what he thought, told him you never wanted to speak to him again and walked out, came
