John Harvey - A Darker Shade of Blue

When he looked back, a little further down the hill, the women had gone inside.

Angels, that was what he thought. The way she lay on her back, arms spread wide, as if making angels in the snow. The front of her coat tugged aside, feet bare, the centre of her dress stained dark, fingers curled. A few listless flakes settled momentarily on her face and hair. Porcelain skin. In those temperatures she could have been dead for hours or days. The pathologist would know.

Straightening, Resnick glanced at his watch. Three forty-five. Little over half an hour since the call had come through. Soon there would be arc lights, a generator, yellow tape, officers in coveralls searching the ground on hands and knees. As Anil Khan, crouching, shot off the first of many Polaroids, Resnick stepped aside. The broad expanse of the Forest rose behind them, broken by a ragged line of trees. The city’s orange glow.

‘The woman as called it in,’ Millington said, at his shoulder. ‘You’ll likely want a word.’

She was standing some thirty metres off, where the scrub of grass and the gravel of the parking area merged.

‘A wonder she stayed around,’ Resnick said.

Millington nodded and lit a cigarette.

She was tall, taller than average, dark hair that at closer range was reddish-brown, brown leather boots which stopped below the knee, a sheepskin coat she pulled across herself protectively as Resnick came near. A full mouth from which most of the lipstick had been worn away, eyes like seawater, bluey-green. The fingers holding her coat close were raw with cold.

Still Resnick did not recognise her until she had fumbled in her pockets for a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, the flame small yet sudden, flaring before her eyes.

‘Eileen? Terry’s Eileen?’

She looked at him then. ‘Not any more.’

It had been two years, almost to the day, since the last time he had seen her, trapped out in widow’s weeds. Since then, the seepage that had followed Terry Cooke’s funeral had submerged her from Resnick’s sight. Cooke, a medium-range chancer who had punched his weight but rarely more — aggravated burglary, the occasional lorry hijack, once a payroll robbery of almost splendid audacity — and who had ended his own life with a bullet through the brain, administered while Eileen lay in bed alongside him.

‘You found her.’ Resnick’s head nodded back in the direction of the corpse.

As a question, it didn’t require answer.

‘How come?’

‘She was there, wasn’t she? Lyin’ there. I almost fell over her.’

‘I mean, three in the morning, how come you were here? On the Forest?’

‘How d’you think?’

Resnick looked at her, waiting.

She gouged the heel of her boot into the frozen ground. ‘Business. What else?’

‘Christ, Eileen.’

‘I was here doin’ business.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Why should you?’ For the space of seconds, she looked back at him accusingly.

Resnick had talked to her several times in the weeks before Terry Cooke had died, Eileen seeking a way out of the relationship but too scared to make the move. And Resnick listening sympathetically, hoping she would give him an angle, a way of breaking through Cooke’s camouflage and alibis. Give him up, Eileen. Give us something we can use. Once he’s inside, he’ll not be able to reach you, do you any harm. In the end, Resnick had thought, the only harm Cooke had done had been to himself. Now, looking at Eileen, he was less sure.

‘I’m sorry,’ Resnick said.

‘Why the hell should you be sorry?’

He shrugged, heavy shouldered. If he knew why, he couldn’t explain. Behind, the sound of transport pulling off the road, reinforcements arriving.

‘When you first knew me, Terry too, I was stripping, right? This i’n’t so very different.’ They both knew that wasn’t so. ‘Besides, get to my age, those kind of jobs, prime ones, they can get few and far between.’

She was what, Resnick thought, twenty-six, twenty-seven? Shy of thirty, to be sure. ‘You’d best tell me what happened,’ he said.

Eileen lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. ‘This punter, he said he weren’t going to use a condom, couldn’t understand why an extra twenty didn’t see it right. Chucked me out and drove off. I was walking up on to Forest Road, thought I might pick up a cab, go back into town. Which was when I saw her. Ducked through that first lot of bushes and there she was.’

‘You could have carried on walking,’ Resnick said. ‘Skirted round.’ At his back, he could hear Millington’s voice, organising the troops.

‘Not once I’d seen her.’

‘So you called it in.’

‘Had my mobile. Didn’t take but a minute.’

‘You could have left her then.’

‘No, I couldn’t.’ Her eyes fastened on his, challenging.

The pathologist was driving slowly across the pitted surface towards them, mindful of the paintwork on his new Volvo.

‘I’ll get someone to take you to the station,’ Resnick said. ‘Get a statement. No sense you freezing out here any more than you have to.’

Already he was turning away.

The dead woman was scarcely that: a girl, mid-teens. Below medium height and underweight; scars, some possibly self-inflicted, to her legs and arms; bruising across the buttocks and around the neck. The thin cotton of her dress was stuck to her chest with blood. Scratches to exposed parts of the body suggested that she could have been attacked elsewhere then dragged to the spot where she was found and dumped. No bag nor purse nor any other article she might have been carrying had been discovered so far. Preliminary examination suggested she had been dead not less than twenty-four hours, possibly more. Further tests on her body and clothing were being carried out.

Officers would be out on the streets around Hyson Green and the Forest with hastily reproduced photographs, talking to prostitutes plying their trade, stopping cars, knocking on doors. Others would be checking missing persons on the computer, contacting social services, those responsible for the care and custody of juveniles. If no one had come forward with an identification by the end of the day, public relations would release a picture to the press for the morning editions, push for the maximum publicity on local radio and TV.

In his office, Resnick eased a now lukewarm mug of coffee aside and reached again for the transcript of Lynn Kellogg’s interview with Eileen. As a document in a murder investigation it was unlikely to set the pulses racing; Eileen’s responses rarely rose above the monosyllabic, while Lynn’s questioning, for once, was little more than routine.

In the CID room, Lynn Kellogg’s head was just visible over the top of her VDU. Resnick waited until she had saved what was on the screen and dropped the transcript down on her desk.

‘You didn’t get on, you and Eileen.’

‘Were we supposed to?’

‘You didn’t like her.’

‘What was to like?’

A suggestion of a smile showed on Resnick’s face. ‘She dialled 999. Hung around. Agreed to make a statement.’

‘Which was next to useless.’

‘Agreed.’

Lynn touched her index finger to the keyboard and the image on the screen disappeared. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but what exactly’s your point?’

‘I’m just wondering if we’ve missed something, that’s all.’

‘You want me to talk to her again?’

‘Perhaps not.’

Lynn’s eyes narrowed perceptibly. ‘I see.’

‘I mean, if she sensed you didn’t like her…’

‘Whereas she might open up to you.’

‘It’s possible.’

With a slow shake of the head, Lynn flipped back through the pages of her notebook for the address and copied it onto a fresh sheet, which Resnick glanced at quickly before folding it down into the breast pocket of his suit.