Slowly, with extravagant care, she lowered herself back down against the damp pillow, damp and rank from her own sweat. Seven minutes past five. Traffic sounds were already beginning to build up two streets away on the Essex Road. In a little over twenty minutes more, the boiler would kick in, and she would push back the sheets with her long legs and swing them to the floor. For now, she closed her eyes and tried to ignore the painful reverberations inside her head, which felt as if it were being bounced against a hardwood floor.
It had started harmlessly enough, as many of such evenings do: a couple of drinks with colleagues after work; a couple which had somehow, almost without noticing, become a couple more. Someone had suggested moving on to this club she knew,
down at the opposite end of Upper Street from where they were, not really a club, more of a bar, but with a members' policy at the door. Karen well into it by now, cocktails and beer, that good buzzy feeling you get when you're with mates and the pavements are crowded with people out having a good time and every other place you pass is a busy restaurant or bar; sharing a laugh and a joke and letting the tension of the job, the day, float off in a haze of flashing lights and loud voices, the music from a dozen open doorways mingling with the strident sounds of car horns and sirens and amongst the laughter, the occasional scream or angry shout, the sharpened sound of breaking glass.
He had been watching her, she knew, almost from the minute they entered the bar, the place already full to the gills, each trip to the bar the equivalent of a full body search or more; Karen's thong—the fashionable undergarment redesigned as medieval torture instrument—already cutting into her where it hurt.
"Hi." His voice was just the honeyed brown of his skin. "What happened to your friends?"
"You mean you weren't watching them, too?"
"Uh-uh." And then the smile.
Too practised, Karen thought, too smooth by half.
"Taylor," he said.
"Karen."
"Hi, Karen."
"Hi, yourself."
"What're you drinking?"
"Too much?"
He laughed and ran his hand lightly down her arm as he passed through to the bar. "Don't go 'way."
Outside on the street, he took hold of her hand. "You're what? Six foot, right?"
"Five-ten."
"That's all?"
"Uh-hum."
"Bare feet?"
"Bare feet."
"I'd like to see that."
He kissed her then and she leaned into it, kissing him back, her head already a blur, his hand, clear and strong, on her hip.
It took her three attempts to locate the key in the door to her flat.
"Here," he said, "let me." But she shook her head and pushed his hand away.
There were books on the floor, magazines and newspapers on one of the chairs, the new Amerie CD resting up against the stereo; the top she was planning to wear next day was hanging from the doorframe between there and the bathroom.
"You want coffee?" she asked.
"You got anything else?"
There was a third of a bottle of workaday Scotch and they drank it on the settee, her feet, bare, in his lap, his arm stretched between her thighs.
"You picked me out early," he said with a grin—cat not far short of the cream—"That what it was?"
"You were the one, staring at me," Karen said.
He laughed. "Hell, girl. Six-foot-high black woman walks into a bar this side of the river, ain't Hackney, ain't Dalston, what d'you expect?"
What was that Bessie Smith song her mother used to play? A cracked old vinyl album of Bessie's greatest hits that was forever on the record player at home when she'd been growing up.
"Do Your Duty"?
Well, he did his duty that night, Taylor, Karen would say that for him.
Taylor Coombes.
"You're throwing me out?" he asked, sweat still making his body shine in the dim light from the lamp beside the bed. "After that?"
Karen raised her head. "You can usually pick up a cab from the end of the street."
"Why not let me stay?" He edged into a sly smile. "Who knows? Come morning..."
"Come morning I have to be up early."
"That's okay."
"No, I mean really early."
"Yeah? What d'you do, anyway?"
"Come on, Taylor. We've had a nice time. Don't piss me off, okay?"
"Okay, okay." An elaborate sigh. "Can I take a shower first, at least?"
"Help yourself."
She was dozing, half-asleep, when he bent, fully dressed and smelling of her deodorant, and kissed her lightly on the mouth.
"Will I be seeing you again?" he asked.
"Not if I see you first."
The door clicked back into place with a satisfactory snap and Karen rolled onto her side and closed her eyes.
Too many bad movies, he'd written his mobile number with one of her lipsticks on the bathroom mirror and, stepping out of the shower, she took a damp washcloth and wiped it away. One-night stand number whatever. Counting didn't make her feel any better. Nor worse.
"When you goin' to settle down, girl?" her grandmother habitually asked, when she made her Christmas visits home to Spanish Town in Jamaica. "Have some babies of your own?"
"You not gettin' any younger," she had added lately.
Karen looked at herself in the mirror, breasts still high and firm enough for their size, and her belly, considering all she'd had to drink last night, all but disappeared when she stood straight and sucked in her breath.
Even so, Grandma was right; thirty seemed a long time ago.
She dried herself with the towel, rubbing as briskly as she
dared, then used the dryer on her hair, more manageable since she'd had it cut short a few years back and had the sense to keep it that way. Clean underwear, coffee on the stove. No bread for toast and the empty cereal packet had found its way into the recycling box three days before. As her sister said—the one in Southend with the twins—"It's a good job you're a sight more organised at work than you are at home, girl. At least, I hope you are."
So did she.
Just a dribble of milk left for the coffee and this morning, faced with drinking it virtually black, she needed sugar, too. She'd pick up a muffin at the Caffè Nero on Camden Parkway on her way in. SCD1. Homicide and Serious Crime Command.
Two days ago they'd wrapped up a murder investigation with pleasing speed. An argument that had started in a Euston pub had spilled out onto the road outside and from there into the forecourt of the neighbouring mainline station. A chance remark about the Sunderland football team in general and its manager, Roy Keane, in particular, had been overheard by a trio of supporters from Wearside, who had taken exception. Fists, bottles, boots, and shattered glass. The man who'd voiced his opinions less than wisely had legged it across the street and into the station, Wearsiders in pursuit, scattering passengers in all directions as they chased and harried. Trapped against the wall between Burger King and Upper Crust, the man had pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket, levered open the longest blade and stuck it high in the chest of one of his attackers. Despite the best efforts of station staff and the paramedics, the nineteen-year-old was pronounced dead two hours later at the nearby University College Hospital, and the man who killed him had gone on the lam.
A little judicious questioning by Karen Shields's team soon determined that the man they were looking for was a fairly
frequent user of the pub where the incident had started, a frequent traveller, too, up and back to Birmingham and Manchester in the course of his work: a wholesale supplier of stationery to both chains and independent stores. Quite often, he would stop off at the pub for a pint or two before catching the Northern Line south to Collier's Wood. The Swiss Army knife had been given to him by his fourteen-year-old son, a present for his last birthday.
When Karen's number two, Mike Ramsden, and a couple of other detectives went to the house, the man at first started to talk his way out of any involvement, then panicked and, against all the odds, attempted to run, which ended when Ramsden stopped him short with an elbow immediately below the breastbone, winding him completely.
Provocation, self-defence, a good solicitor would encourage him to plead to manslaughter and, if the CPS agreed to that, a sympathetic judge would likely sentence him leniently and he'd be back in the family home before his eldest set off for university.
All of which was of little more than academic interest to Karen and her team. A result was a result.
No sign of Mike Ramsden when she entered the office that morning, nor many others: Alan Sheridan, the DS who functioned as office manager, was sitting, owl-like, behind his computer, for all the world as if he'd been there from the night before.
"A message for you," Sheridan called out. "Urgent."
"Where from?"
"On high."
"Harkin?"
"The very same."
"What now?"
"Another promotion, I wouldn't be surprised." He grinned. "You know how you ethnic-minority types prosper."
"Fuck off, Sherry!"
"Yes, ma'am."
When Karen had been appointed Detective Chief Inspector three, almost four years ago, the accusations of favouritism, of positive discrimination had flown thick and fast. She's a woman, she's black, she earned it on her knees. It took Ramsden to stand up in the canteen and say she'd been promoted because she was a fucking good copper—"only don't anyone tell her I said so."
Assistant Commissioner Harkin's office, Karen thought—not that she'd been there that often—always smelled of air freshener and aftershave. Like a sales rep's car. She half-expected to hear Celine Dion or Chris de Burgh coming from speakers placed discreetly beneath his desk.
"Karen." He looked at her with a sort of brisk surprise, as if she were the last person he'd expected to see and he might just be able to find her five minutes of his time.
"Sir."
His hand was dry, so much so that for a moment Karen imagined tiny flakes of skin rubbing off against her fingers.
"That Euston business, good result."
"Thank you, sir."
"Much outstanding?"
"Not too much, sir."
A father of three, stabbed to death on the upper deck of the 24 bus, when he sought to intervene between two warring groups of Somali youths; an elderly man, yet to be identified, whose partly decomposed body had been found in an abandoned Electricity Board building down by the canal; a young Asian woman, whose fall to her death from the seventh floor of a block of flats in Gospel Oak might not be suicide, as first suspected.
"Nothing that couldn't be shuffled off to somebody else?"
Warning bells sounded inside Karen's head. "Probably not, sir. Only—"
"Good. Good. Something interesting's come up. Nottingham. You know Nottingham at all?"
"Robin Hood, sir?"
"Queen of the Midlands. Little raddled nowadays, but even so. Three women for every man, or so they used to say."
Get to it, Karen thought.
"Female officer, Detective Inspector. Homicide Unit. Shot and killed outside her home, yesterday evening."
A jolt ran through her—sympathy, surprise, there but for the grace of God...
"They want someone to go up there, take charge of the investigation."
"But surely they've got—"
"Right now they're seriously understaffed, too many highprofile cases."
"Even so."
"There are complications. The victim, she was in a relationship with another officer. Serious, long-term. DI. Lifetime on the Force. They need someone from outside. No connection. Easier all round."
"You said complications. Plural."
Harkin blanked her with a smile. "Best from the horse's mouth. You've a meeting with their ACC, Crime. Thirteen thirty. Just time for you to get home, pack a bag. Trains leave from St. Pancras, pretty much two an hour." He glanced at his watch. "You'll not want to hang around."
Resnick had been kneeling beside her when the ambulance arrived. Blood on his shirt, his face, his mouth, his tongue. The first shot had struck Lynn in the chest; the second, fired from closer range, had torn away part of her face, exposing her jaw. Already there were no signs of breathing, no response. After calling emergency services, his voice cracked, wavering, unrecognisable, Resnick had knelt and tilted back her head, pinched her nose, and covered her mouth with his own. Breathed in twice, two seconds, watching for some movement; breathed again, harder, seeing the faintest rising of her chest. Another breath and her head jerked once against his hands, and she coughed blood into his mouth.
"Come on," he said. "Come on!"
Her eyes were open, staring, registering nothing.
Shifting his position and interlacing his fingers, Resnick pressed down on the centre of her chest. Blood oozed out over his hands as if he were leaning on a sponge.
Thirty compressions and then two breaths.
Thirty compressions more and the sound of sirens.
Keep going, keep going.
Sirens loud and louder in his ears, lights that flashed and circled like a fairground around his head; thirty compressions and two breaths, and they had to prise his hands away; halfdrag, half-pull him to his feet and lever him aside so that they could move in with their equipment, begin their work. One of the paramedics—Resnick would always remember this—was young, with a freckled face, freckled around the nose and cheeks even at that time of year, a freckled face and sandy, almost ginger hair—why did he notice that and not the light going from Lynn's eyes as they rolled back in her head?
More people now, more cars; someone pushed a glass of water towards him and it slipped and shattered on the path; someone else put a hand gently on his arm and he brushed it away. Several people spoke words he didn't understand. The paramedics were lifting her up and carrying her towards the ambulance and, stumbling once, Resnick hurried forward, calling after her, calling her name.
One of the paramedics helped him into the back of the ambulance and, breathing ragged and harsh, he sat beside her, leaning forward, her cold hand growing colder in his own.