"Just one or two things," Karen said, almost casually. "Background, really."
"Of course, anything I can do you think might help. What happened, it was terrible. I mean, I didn't know her that well, but she seemed committed to what she was doing. Efficient. A
good officer." He leaned forward a little in his chair. "Like I say, I didn't really know her well at all."
"You didn't send her flowers?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Flowers. You sent her flowers."
"Oh, yes, of course. I'd forgotten. There was this incident, not so many weeks back, a girl was killed."
"Kelly Brent?"
"Yes. Kellogg had somehow got involved, ended up stopping a bullet herself, but, thank God, she'd been wearing a vest. Nothing too serious in the end."
"You said you didn't know her well," Karen persisted.
"That's right."
"Then...?"
Daines smiled. "We'd met on a SOCA course I'd helped to organise. I'd been kidding her about jumping ship, throwing in with us. A new challenge, I suppose. She hadn't been keen. The flowers, they were just a way of—I don't know—building bridges. Then we met again over this Zoukas business, the trial—you know about that?"
Karen nodded. "After the trial was adjourned, you went down with her to London, I understand? To talk to one of the witnesses?"
"Andreea Florescu, yes. I thought she might have been able to identify one or two people we're interested in."
"In what connection?"
"A long-term investigation. Ongoing. Just looking for confirmation, really." Another smile, there and then gone.
"And could she help?"
"She said not."
"Which sounds as if you didn't believe her."
"She was frightened. She might have thought keeping quiet the best policy."
"But you didn't take it any further?"
Daines crossed his legs, one ankle over the other. "Like I said, it wasn't crucial, more a case of dotting i's, crossing the t's."
"Did you know about this last visit DI Kellogg made, the evening she was killed?"
Daines looked puzzled. "Visit where?"
"To London. To where this Andreea had been staying. The man whose flat she'd been living in was worried about her. Seems to have thought she might take off, disappear."
"These people," Daines said, "they do."
"These people?"
"You know. Migrants. Asylum seekers. Keeping one step ahead of the authorities if they can."
"It's my understanding she was here legally, a student visa."
"Even so."
"You don't sound too concerned."
Daines shrugged. "Bigger fish to fry, I'm afraid."
"And, just to be clear, you had no idea that's where DI Kellogg had been the evening she was killed?"
Daines shook his head impatiently. "I can't see it matters, but no. I thought I said."
Karen got to her feet. "There's nothing else you can think of that might be relevant?"
"No, I don't think so. Nothing. I'm sorry. If anything does occur to me, then of course..."
Karen gave him a perfunctory smile and turned towards the door.
"The investigation," Daines said, "you're making progress?"
"Oh, you know," Karen said, "slow but sure."
"Good luck with it, anyway." He was back to his computer before she'd left the room.
Outside, it was promising a better day. Karen walked on down the hill and took a seat outside the Playhouse café, opposite a
concave sculpture in shiny metal that reflected large sections of sun and cloud. Other than a woman in an expensive-looking black suit, busily working her BlackBerry, she had the place to herself. When the waiter came out, she ordered an Americano with a little cold milk on the side, considered some kind of muffin or maybe a chocolate brownie—to die for, the waiter said, just this side of overfriendly and ever so slightly camp—but finally rejected both. The sight of herself in the mirror that morning, the beginnings of a tummy more obvious than she liked, enough to bring about restraint.
When the coffee came, she wished, as she sat there gazing at the metal sheen of sky, that she still smoked. A good few years now since she'd given up, and yet, on occasions like this, there was the same faint but insistent need, niggling away. The woman with the BlackBerry—some kind of marketing whiz from the conversation she'd just been having—chose that moment to light up and the nicotiney smell floated across, insidious, on the air.
Karen poured a little milk into her cup. No one, she thought, no man, at least, sent flowers to a woman who wasn't a close relative without there being some kind of sexual or, at least, romantic undertone. And Daines would be the kind of man who would have reckoned himself quite a player where women were concerned—the way he'd looked her over when she'd entered his office—not lecherous, exactly, but not disguising it either, his eyes gliding down from her breasts and back again, the beginnings of a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.
So had there been anything between himself and Lynn Kellogg? Not impossible, Lynn some little time into a relationship with a somewhat older, staider man. And, if so, did it matter? Matter as far as the investigation was concerned?
She couldn't immediately see how. Unless Resnick had found out and, jealous, taken matters into his own hands. Othello and Desdemona. Somehow she couldn't believe it.
She had the number of the DS she knew from the Met's Operation Trident on her mobile, and by some small miracle he answered straight off. "Karen," he said cheerily, "long time no see."
"I wonder if you could find your way to doing me a small favour."
"One good turn, why not?"
She told him what she wanted.
"Yeah," the DS said. "I can do that. Make a few calls. We've got someone stationed out there more or less permanently. But how urgent we talkin' here?"
"Soon as you can?"
"Okay. I'll get back to you."
Karen thanked him, promised to meet for a drink when she was back in London, and broke the connection.
"Can I get you anything else?" The waiter appeared at her shoulder.
Karen shook her head. "Just the bill, thanks."
She left the coins on the table.
If she remembered the layout correctly, it would take her only ten minutes or so to get to the Central Police Station on foot from where she was, a thought nagging her every inch of the way—two shootings, two attempts on the same person's life within what? A month? How much of a coincidence was that?
She bumped into Khan as she was entering the building. "Anil, thought you were down in London."
"So I was, boss. Drew a blank."
"How d'you mean?"
"Went to the address, nobody there. Talked to the neighbours, one of them said they saw the man who lived there leaving two days back, some kind of duffel bag over his shoulder. Haven't seen him since."
"And the woman?"
Khan shook his head.
"You don't think—"
"Inside the flat? I went round the local police station, one of the lads came back with me and forced a window. Nobody inside. A few signs the woman had been living there, but not much to say she still was. The man—Bucur—he left a pile of books, clothes—shaving gear, though, toothbrush, that had all gone."
Karen breathed out slowly. "All right, get what descriptions you can. Have them circulated—witnesses wanted for question-ing—you know the drill."
"Right, boss."
"Oh, and Anil—the man charged with Kelly Brent's murder, Williams, is it?"
"Lee Williams, yes."
"Who interrogated him?"
"DI Resnick, I think. Catherine was with him part of the time. And Michaelson—or maybe it was Pike."
"Thanks."
It took the office manager scarcely any time to locate the tapes of the interview and a pair of headphones so that she could listen uninterrupted. Resnick had been thorough and methodical, forceful when necessary. Williams was adamant, the only reason he'd gone armed was his own protection, the word having come down that several of the St. Ann's gang would be carrying. What else was he supposed to do? And Kelly Brent? The bitch, she got what was coming to her, didn't she? Like all them black bitches. Got no respect. Not a hint of regret in his voice, not even any real sense of what he had done.
"The police officer," Resnick said. "She was shot, too."
"Should've kept her nose out of it, shouldn't she?" Williams replied. "That way she wouldn't've got hurt."
Resnick had pressed the point a little, but it was obvious that Kelly Brent had been Williams's sole target. Lynn Kellogg had simply paid the price for doing her job and putting herself in harm's way.
Karen listened to the tape through to the end: other than the fact Kellogg was the victim in both instances, she could find nothing to link the two shootings.
Karen had only just returned the tapes when Mike Ramsden came looking for her, flourishing the morning paper, his face set in a scowl.
"You seen this?" he demanded, slapping his hand against the offending page. "Kid stabbed to death in south London. Lewisham. Running fight along the high street with thirty or more involved. Kicked this one kid in the head and then stabbed him fourteen times. Fourteen fucking times."
He dropped the paper onto the nearest desk.
"That girl who was shot a few days back, outside some bar in Leeds. Chatting up the wrong feller. Died last night. Never regained consciousness. It's in there, same paper, couple of lines at the bottom of page nine. Fucking country! Going out of fucking control!"
"Take a deep breath, Mike. Count to ten."
"Okay, okay. It's just sometimes—"
"I know."
"The whole bloody world seems to be going to hell in a handcart."
"Meantime—"
"Meantime what, exactly?"
"Meantime we do our job as best we can."
"You think it makes one scrap of difference?"
"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?"
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 clichÉs, 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."