A Darker Shade of Blue (13 page)

‘You did know her then?'

‘No.'

‘A kid, you said …'

‘I saw her lyin' there, didn't I.'

‘And that was all?'

Eileen stood at the window, her breath warming circles on the glass. A heavy bass echoed faintly through the side wall, the same rhythm over and again. Traffic stuttered in and out of the city along the Hucknall Road.

‘I saw her a few nights back,' Eileen said. ‘Corner of Addison Street. Skirt up to her arse and four-inch heels. She must've been freezing.' Her back was still to Resnick, her voice clear in the small room. ‘This van had been up and down, two, maybe three times. Blue van, small. Post office van, that sort of size. Just the one bloke inside. He'd given me the once-over, going past real slow, the girl too. Finally he stops alongside her and leans out. I thought she was going to get in, but she didn't. To and fro about it for ages they was before he drives off and she goes back to her stand. Fifteen, twenty minutes later he's back, straight to her this time, no messing, and this time get in is what she does.'

Eileen turned to face him, hands behind her pressed against the wall.

‘A few nights back,' Resnick said. ‘Is that three or four?'

‘Three.'

‘Monday, then?'

‘I suppose.'

‘The driver, you knew him?'

‘No.' The hesitation was slight, slight enough that Resnick, going over the conversation later, couldn't be certain it was his imagination.

‘You're sure?'

‘Course.'

‘And the van?'

She shook her head.

‘The driver, though. You'd recognise him again?'

‘I don't know. I might.'

Resnick set the mug down on the tray, tea barely touched. ‘Thanks, Eileen. Thanks for your time.'

She waited until he was at the door. ‘When the van came back the second time, I can't be sure, but I think there were two of them, two blokes, the second one leaning forward from the back. Like I say, I can't be sure.'

The temperature seemed to have dropped another five degrees when Resnick stepped out from the comparative warmth of the house on to the street and clouds hung low overhead, laden with snow.

*

The pathologist was a short, solid man with stubby fingers that seemed unsuited to his daily tasks. Despite the cold, they stood at one corner of the parking area to the building's rear, Resnick and himself, allowing the pathologist to smoke.

‘Weather, eh, Charlie.'

Resnick grunted in reply.

‘All right for you, up off the Woodborough Road; where I am, down by the Trent, bloody river freezes over, soon as the bugger thaws you're up to your ankles in floodwater and bailing out downstairs like the place has sprung a leak.'

‘The girl,' Resnick nudged.

The pathologist grinned. ‘Hamlet, Charlie. Act one, scene two.'

‘Come again?'

‘Had you down as a bit of a scholar. On the quiet at least. “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.” That poor kid, stretched out in the snow, clothes stuck to her with blood, jumped to the same conclusions, you and me, I'll wager. Cut. Stabbed. Sliced.' He sucked noisily on the end of his cigar. ‘Not a bit of it. Not her blood. Different type altogether. No, she was strangled, Charlie. Throttled. Bare hands. Likely passed out within minutes, that's one mercy. Bruising in plenty elsewhere, mind you, some consistent with being struck by a fist and some not. Something hard and narrow. Old-fashioned poker, something similar. And semen, Charlie, generous traces of, inside and out.'

For a moment, without his willing it, Resnick's eyes shut fast.

‘Marks round her wrists,' the pathologist continued, ‘as if at some point she'd been tied up. Tight enough to break the skin.'

‘Rope or metal?'

‘Metal.'

‘Like handcuffs?'

‘Very like.'

Unbidden, instinctive, the scene was beginning to play out in Resnick's mind.

‘One person's or more?' he asked. ‘The semen.'

‘I'll get back to you.'

Resnick nodded. ‘Anything else?'

‘Fragments of material beneath her fingernails. Possibly skin. It's being analysed now.'

‘How close can you pin down the time of death?'

‘Likely not as close as you'd like.'

‘Try me.'

‘Twenty-four hours, give or take.'

‘So if she was killed elsewhere and then dumped …'

‘Which everything else suggests.'

‘She'd likely been on the Forest since the early hours of yesterday morning, Wednesday.'

‘Where she was found, not unfeasible.' The pathologist stubbed out the last smoulderings of the cigar on the sole of his shoe. ‘Noon tomorrow, Charlie, I'll have more for you then.'

Resnick cupped both hands together and lifted them to his face, breathing out warm air.

Back upstairs in the CID room, Lynn Kellogg was talking to a Mrs Marston from a village just north of Melton Mowbray, arranging for her and her husband to be picked up and driven into the city, there to assist in the identification of the body of a fifteen-year-old girl who corresponded to the description of their missing daughter.

*

Her name was Clara. She'd run away twice before without getting further than Leicester services on the Ml. The usual things: clothes, boys, forever missing the last bus home, the silver stud she'd had put through her nose, the ring she wanted through her navel. Fifteen years and three months. Pills. Sex. Her father ran a smallholding, found it hard; four mornings a week her mum worked in a newsagent in Melton, cycling the seven or so miles so she could open up first thing. Weekends they helped out at the local nature reserve, her mum made scones, coffee and walnut cake, the best.

‘For Christ's sake,' Resnick had said, ‘if it is her, don't tell them any more than they need to know.'

Ashen faced, Ted Marston held his wife by the shoulders as she beat her fists against his chest, her screams of denial tearing the sterile air.

The morning papers were full of it. Schoolgirl sex. Prostitution. Murder. An ordinary family grieves. Photographs of Clara in her school uniform vied for space with close-ups of her parents, stolen with a telephoto lens. The police are seeking to trace the driver of a blue van, seen in the vicinity of Addison Street and Forest Road East.

The pathologist beat his deadline by close on an hour. DNA samples taken from the girl's body confirmed that the semen came from two different men, one of whom was the source of the blood that had soaked her dress. Scrapings of skin found beneath her fingernails were from the second man. Filaments of a muddy green synthetic material, also taken from under her nails, seemed to have come from cheap, generic carpeting.

Two men, one young girl. A room without windows, a locked door. Do they take it in turns, one watching through a peephole while the other performs? A video camera? Polaroids? When she screams, as Resnick assumes she must, why are those screams not heard? And the handcuffs – is she cuffed to a bed or somehow to the floor?

Anil Khan took Eileen to Central Station and watched while she went through book after book of mugshots, barely glancing at each page. Resnick was there on the spread of pavement when she left.

‘Don't go out tonight, Eileen. Stay close to home.'

He turned and watched as she continued on down Shakespeare Street towards the taxi rank on Mansfield Road.

*

Back in his own kitchen, the cats winding between his legs, anxious to be fed, Resnick poured himself a generous shot of Scotch and drank it down, two swallows then a third. Blood on the walls. Was there blood on the walls? He forked tinned food into four bowls, poured water and milk. Officers had contacted accident and emergency at Queen's and the other hospitals, the only serious stab wounds seemingly the result of drunk and disorderly or domestics, but these were all being checked. He rinsed his hands beneath the tap before assembling a sandwich on slices of dark rye, grinding coffee. Skin beneath the girl's fingernails. Fighting back. Had she somehow got hold of a knife, seized it when, for whatever reason, the cuffs were undone? Or had there been a falling-out between the two men? Jealousy? Fear?

The front room struck cold, the radiators likely in need of bleeding; switching on the light, Resnick pulled across the curtains, thankful for their weight. Why strangle her? Take her life. A fit of anger, irrational, unplanned? A response to being attacked? Somehow, had things gone too far, got out of hand? He crossed to the stereo where a CD still lay in place: Billie Holiday on Commodore. ‘I'll Be Seeing You'. ‘Strange Fruit'.

Less than forty minutes later, sandwich and coffee long finished, Billie's voice still ringing in his head, he prised the smallest cat from his lap, switched off the amplifier, lifted down his topcoat from the pegs in the hall, and went out to where the elderly Saab was parked alongside the house. Slowly, doubtless looking like a punter himself, he drove around the Forest, doubling back through a succession of interlocking streets until he was sure Eileen was not there. When, later, he passed her house, lights were burning upstairs and down.

His sleep was patchy and by five he was fully awake, listening to the breathing of the two cats entwined near the foot of his bed, the faint fall of snow against the pane.

They would have known, wouldn't they, that Eileen had seen the girl getting into their van.

*

Next morning, the snow on the streets was just a memory. Sunshine leaked, pale and weak, through clouds smeared purplish-grey. At the obligatory press conference, Resnick made a brief statement, responded to questions without ever really answering, showed a right and proper concern for the Marstons in their bereavement. ‘Good job,' said the public relations officer approvingly as they left the platform. Resnick scowled.

The job was being done in the CID office, the incident room, men and women accessing computer files, crosschecking messages, transcripts of interviews. So easy to let things slip, fail to make the right connection, wrongly prioritise. In addition to the sex offenders' register, they would check through the Vice Squad's list of men stopped and cautioned trawling the red light district in their cars. Married men. Businessmen. Men who were inadequate, law-abiding, lonely, unhinged. Men with a record of violence. Men who cuddled up to their wives each night in the matrimonial bed, never forgot an anniversary, a birthday, kissed the children and wished them happiness, sweet dreams.

Neither of the DNA samples taken from Clara Marston's body found a positive match. Follow-up calls relating to reported stab wounds yielded nothing.

Time passed.

Four days after the inquiry had begun, the burned-out skeleton of a blue Ford Escort van was found at the end of a narrow track near Moorgreen Reservoir, some dozen miles north-west of the city centre.

Late on that same Sunday evening, as Resnick was letting himself back into the house after a couple of hours at the Polish Club, accordions and reminiscence, bison grass vodka, the phone rang in the hall. The sergeant out at Carlton wasted few words: name's Eileen, sir, hell of a state, asking for you.

Within minutes, driving with particular care, Resnick was heading south on Porchester Road, cutting through towards Carlton Hill.

*

She was pale, shaken, huddled inside a man's raincoat, the collar upturned. There were grazes to her face and hands and knees, a swelling high on her right temple; below her left cheekbone, a bruise slowly emerging like soft fruit. A borrowed sweater, several sizes too large, covered the silver snap-front uplift bra and matching G-string: she had got a job stripping after all. Her feet were bare. She had climbed out of the bathroom window of a house off Westdale Lane, jumped from the roof of the kitchen extension to the ground and fallen heavily, run through the side gate on to the road, throwing herself, more or less, in front of the first car which came along. The duty sergeant had calmed her down as best he could, taken a brief statement, provided tea and cigarettes.

Eileen saw Resnick with relief and tugged at his sleeve, her words tumbling over one another, breathlessly. ‘It was him. I swear it. At the house.'

‘Which house? Eileen, slow down.'

‘Someone called, set up this private session, his brother's birthday. Half a dozen of them there, all blokes. Just as I was getting into it, he showed himself, back of the room. I don't know if he meant to, not then. Anyhow, I just panicked. Panicked and ran. Shut myself in the bathroom and locked the door behind me.'

‘And it was him, the driver from the van? You're certain?'

‘Not the driver,' Eileen said. ‘The other man.'

‘This address,' Resnick said, turning towards the sergeant, ‘off Westdale Lane, you've checked it out?'

‘No, sir. Not as yet.'

‘Why in God's name not?'

‘Way I saw it, sir, seeing as she'd asked for you, I thought to wait, just, you know, in case—'

‘Get some people out there now. I doubt you'll find anyone still inside, but if you do, I want them brought in so fast their feet don't touch the ground. And get the place sealed. I'll want it gone over tomorrow with a fine-tooth comb. Knock up the neighbours, find out who lives there, anything else you can. Whatever you get, I want it passed through to me direct. Understood?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Then snap to it.'

Resnick turned towards Eileen. ‘Whoever made this booking, did he leave a name?'

‘Phil.'

‘That was it?'

‘Yes.' Instead of looking at him now, she was staring at the floor. ‘There's something else,' she said, her voice so quiet he could only just make out the words.

‘Go on.'

‘Not here,' she said, glancing round. ‘Not here.'

Taking her arm, Resnick led Eileen outside to where the Saab was parked at the kerb. ‘I'll take you home. We can talk there.'