here.'
Marcus cried, sobbing, rocking himself back and forth. 'I don't care what he fuckin' thinks. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!'
Resnick stood back and reached into his pocket for his mobile phone.
'Karen, sorry to disturb your Sunday. But you'd better get yourself out here. Rustle up your bagman. One or two others.'
He gave her the address.
Forty-six
It was high summer. Resnick had left London in, what was, to him, almost sweltering heat, twenty-eight degrees Celsius, the low eighties Fahrenheit, his shirt sticking to his back as he stood in one seemingly interminable line after another, waiting first at the check-in and then, finally, the slow zigzag shuffling towards the X-ray machines and the officials with their wands and blank expressions. In between, there were the protracted dealings with Customs, the careful scrutinising of the death certificate and the certificate of embalming, the necessary authorisation to remove the deceased's body from the country for burial overseas.
A clear and definite DNA match linking Ivan Lazic with the skin sample found under Andreea's fingernails had resulted in his being charged with her murder, and once a second postmortem had been carried out for the benefit of his defence, Andreea's body had been released. On the evidence so far available, the CPS had opted not to charge Lazic with the murder of Kelvin Pearce.
After several conversations with Andreea Florescu's parents, using Alexander Bucur as translator, Resnick had arranged to accompany Andreea's coffin on its journey, knowing that it was what Lynn would have wanted, what she would have done herself had she been able.
Three hours and a little more to Bucharest, and then a change of plane onto a smaller Russian-made aircraft that would take him the relatively short distance to Constanta.
As he stepped out on to the tarmac at Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport, the heat hit him again like a slap across the face.
Andreea's parents were waiting to greet him: her mother, small and fair-haired, her face dissolving into tears the moment she saw him; her father, stocky and dark as his wife was fair, crushing Resnick's hand in both of his and then kissing him on both cheeks.
'Thank you,' he said in heavily accented English. 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.'
Behind them, Andreea's zinc-lined coffin was being slowly unloaded from the hold.
The journey south from the airport took them first along a motorway, which led to the beginnings of the town itself and a wide boulevard which swept, rather incongruously, past a succession of flat-fronted houses, small shops, and garages, several crumbling apartment blocks, and then a large park busy with families picnicking and chasing brightly coloured footballs, many of them-the younger ones-in swimming costumes, the older men with their shirtsleeves rolled back and the women with summer dresses raised up along pale thighs.
'A lake,' Andreea's father informed him, jabbing his finger. In the middle of the park there was a lake. Also, if Resnick had understood correctly, a dolphinarium. Even with the windows wound down, inside the car it was uncomfortably hot.
Not so much farther along, they turned left, leaving the Bulevard Tomis-Resnick had read the sign-and drove a short distance down a narrow, dusty road and then turned again, into a run-down housing estate of the kind Resnick knew only too well from his years on the beat in Nottingham. Low-rise blocks joined by a succession of walkways and arranged around central areas that on the architect's plans had doubtless been enticingly green open spaces bordered by trees, where mothers could sit nursing their babies and children could safely play. Except that the grass had soon turned to mud and was festooned with dog shit, broken glass, and discarded needles, and the trees had been uprooted while they were still saplings and not replaced. A brave new world.
In Nottingham, places like this had been knocked down, demolished and replaced by social housing that was more thoughtful, more appropriate to people's needs.
Here in Constanta, some-this estate, at least-remained.
A pack of dogs, some ten or a dozen strong, came running towards them, snarling, and the father chased them off with kicks and shouts and pieces of rubble picked up from the ground and hurled into their midst.
The Florescus' flat was on the fourth floor, reached, the lift being out of order, after climbing heavily graffitied stairs and walking along a balcony with numerous cracks of several centimetres' width.
Both living room and kitchen were overrun by an extended family of cousins, uncles, and aunts, all anxious to shake his hand and offer thanks.
'Our Andreea's murderer,' said one man with a white streak running up through his hair, 'you have brought him to justice.'
'Not me,' Resnick said. 'Somebody else.'
But that was not what they wanted to hear and chose not to understand. Someone thrust a mug of sweet tea into his hand, while someone else plied him with plum brandy. Soon the room, despite the windows being open, was thick with cigarette smoke. Everyone, save for the youngest, seemed to be smoking. In one corner of the room, the television was tuned to CNN, the volume turned down low. There seemed to be forest fires in parts of Spain and Portugal, floods in Southeast Asia with thousands losing their homes; several European aid workers had been kidnapped in Baghdad and in Islamabad a suicide bomber had detonated the explosives taped to his stomach in a local market, killing fourteen and wounding more than thirty, some of them children.
After much coaxing by her grandmother, Andreea's three-year-old daughter, Monica, rising four, came out from behind the settee and stood before Resnick, head down, hands clasped, wearing a green dress with a white sash which was kept for special occasions.
Resnick fetched from his bag the presents he had brought her: a picture book on stiff board with bright illustrations of animals in strong colours, a T-shirt in blue, white and orange stripes and a teddy bear with a large red bow at his neck.
She took each from him solemnly, thanked him haltingly, and then ran to her grandmother and stood, clutching her legs with one hand, while hanging on tightly to the teddy bear with the other.
A plate was passed round with slices of sponge cake filled with jam. More tea. More brandy. Wine. The wake, Resnick thought, before the funeral. One of the cousins, sixteen, quizzed him in near-perfect English about the Premiership and Tottenham Hotspur's chances of breaking into the top four. Ever since Spurs had bought both Ilie Dumitrescu and Gica Popescu following Romania's successes in the 1994 World Cup, they had been a team of special interest.
Resnick's subsequent confession that the team he himself supported was not even Nottingham Forest, formerly winners of the European Cup, but lowly Notts County, was met with bafflement.
After an hour or more, toward the end of which Resnick's eyes kept closing involuntarily, Andreea's father took pity on him and drove him to his hotel, the Intim, which dated back to the late nineteenth century and had previously been called the Hotel d'Angleterre. Someone had thought he would feel at home.
His room looked out past the cathedral towards the Black Sea, which from there, looked not black but grey, the kind of grey he was used to seeing when he gazed east from Mablethorpe or Whitby.
He stripped off his clothes and showered and, after drying himself, stretched out on the clean, slightly worn sheets and fell, almost immediately, asleep.
The funeral service was held in a Roman Catholic church close to the family's home, the church packed, the atmosphere stifling-Resnick, who because of some strange divisions in his own, largely Jewish family, had been brought up as a Catholic, falling automatically into the ritual of signs and observances, prayers and obeisances. The temperature inside and outside the church was close to thirty Celsius.
On the previous evening, Andreea's parents, brushing his protestations aside, had insisted on taking him to dinner in the old Casino, a handsome, almost-baroque building with an arched entrance and huge arched windows, which stood on a promenade overlooking the sea. Black-suited waiters with white aprons tied at the waist brought a succession of dishes in solemn procession: fish soup, carp-roe salad, and then-shepherd's sirloin, according to the translation on the menu-pork stuffed with ham, then covered with cheese and a sauce of mayonnaise, cucumber,
