John Harvey - Cold in Hand

"Not as far as I know. No, haven't seen him in a while, tell the truth. Good couple of weeks it must be."

"You remember when? I mean, when exactly?"

Sally gave it some thought. "No, but two weeks is about right. That was when Amira arrived." She gestured towards one of the women on the settee. "Brought her up with him in the car. Two weeks, can't be more. I tell you what, around the time that policewoman was shot, that's when. All over the news, weren't it?"

"You're positive that's when he was here?" Michaelson asked.

"Yes, pretty much." Sally flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. "You ever catch anyone for that?"

"Not yet."

Sally leaned back in her chair. "She was in here, you know. The night that Nina was killed. Sat talking to her, just like I am to you now. Terrible, something happening like that. Young, weren't she?"

Michaelson placed his card on the counter. "If you do see him-Lazic-if he comes back, I'd like you to phone me."

Sally glanced down at the card. "All right," she said.

Michaelson told himself not to look over towards the settee on his way out and almost succeeded.

"He'll be back," Sally said with a grin and pushed his card down into the top of her bra.

As soon as Karen heard that Lazic had probably been in the city at the time of Lynn Kellogg's murder, she phoned Euan Guest in Doncaster to pass on the news. Guest sounded somewhat hassled, a rough throaty voice that lost some of its impatience when he heard what Karen had to offer.

"I was talking to Rachel Vine earlier," Guest said. "Notts CPS. She told me there was another witness."

"Andreea Florescu. She was in London. No one's seen hide nor hair of her for a couple of weeks now."

"Not good."

"No."

"We'll keep in touch, yes?"

"Absolutely."

It was no more than an hour after her conversation with Guest that Karen's phone rang again. Not Doncaster this time, but Leyton. News she'd anticipated, but didn't want to hear.

It was not the police who found her, but kids playing chase, a couple of eleven-year-old boys running from six or seven more, mostly older-something that had started off as a game and was on the verge of becoming altogether more vicious, less controlled. They'd raced full tilt down the main street, weaving in and out between adults as best they could, barging into others and forcing them from the pavement, ricocheting off shop windows and doors, swerving away into the entrance to the overground station and running hard up the narrow stairs towards the platform, only to realise once they were there that they were trapped, and, turning fast, bounding down again three steps at a time, knocking an old lady almost off her feet, spinning her round, and jumping, one of them, at the last moment, over the head of a startled toddler clinging to his mother's hand.

At the bottom of the steps they hesitated, caught their breath, no more than seconds than they heard, above the squall and grind of traffic on the main road, the sounds of their pursuers, raised voices chanting, angry and shrill, and they doubled back, clambering over onto a piece of fenced-off open land beside the railway that had long since become a dumping ground, a favourite place for people to unload their rubbish illegally.

One boy gripped the iron railings and bent his back, making a platform for the other to climb onto, then clamber over, catching his jeans on one of the blunted spikes and swearing as they tore. Once there, he balanced less than safely and grabbed his companion's hands as he scaled upwards, then hauling him over precariously, the pair of them rolling and stumbling over an accumulation of garden waste and broken furniture, stained mattresses and shattered glass, diving finally down between a long-discarded washing machine, the front ripped off, and an old chest freezer angled sharply down into the compressed debris.

Their hearts were racing.

Just out of sight, two or more of the gang ran sticks along the railings in a clanging carillon.

Others shouted their names.

Shouts that drew closer, then faded, only to come closer again. They were up on the platform now, some of them, looking down.

The boys flattened themselves as best they could, burrowing down alongside washing machine and freezer into what was dank and festering.

"It stinks," one boy whispered.

"Shut up!" hissed the other.

"It does, it stinks."

"Shut the fuck up!"

A rat, curious, showed itself in the space between them then sprang sideways, its feet taking purchase for a moment on one boy's shoulder, before scuttling from sight.

The shouting seemed to have stopped. Cautiously raising their heads, they could see the backs of people strung along the platform above them, waiting for the next train. The heads and shoulders of others, in silhouette, were visible inside the small covered shelter. No boys, save for a solitary primary school kid astride the low wall.

"Come on," one urged. "They've gone."

"No, wait."

"It stinks here!"

"You said."

"Well, I'm not stoppin'. You comin' or what?"

The second boy had pushed his body so far down beside the freezer that it was almost resting on top of him, and in his effort to free himself, it leaned even farther against him, so that he had to ask for help. It took the pair of them to lever it back and send it rolling over, the door at the top swinging open.

"Fuck!" the first boy cried. "What the fuck is that?"

But they knew, they both knew and they ran, heedless, scrambling over the mounds of waste, scrambling and falling, losing their footing, so desperate to get away that once they'd vaulted the railings they ran, blind, regardless of one another, just running, until the first of them collided with an ambulance driver going off duty, still wearing his uniform, who seized the lad by the collar, and held him fast, and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. The boy pointed back towards the railway, wide-eyed, and stumbled out the words, "A body. There's a body."

Andreea Florescu had been folded, concertina-like, into three, before her dead body had been jammed into the freezer, head pushed down hard between her knees. She was still wearing the same clothes she had on when she had left Alexander Bucur's flat sixteen days before. Her skin, where it was visible, had taken on the aspect of greenish marble; the veins in the backs of her hands and at the side of her neck stood out like dark twists of thickish wire. Blood had congealed in a black treacly film across her chest and along her thighs, sealing those parts of her together.

The smell was close to overpowering.

The area was cordoned off and ladders brought in to give easier access to the site, boards being laid across the surface of the waste, creating a single route for the crime scene manager and his team and for the Home Office pathologist to make his initial examination. Photographs were taken, measurements noted, detailed sketches drawn.

Scores of people, travellers and nontravellers both, stood on the railway platform above, gazing down.

The two boys were taken to the local police station, their parents contacted, social workers summoned. Chris Butcher, one of the more experienced detectives in Homicide and Serious Crime Command, was designated Senior Investigating Officer, and an Incident Room was established at the Francis Road police station.

It was from there that one of the officers thought to phone Karen Shields. "That woman you were enquiring about, I think maybe we've found her."

Alexander Bucur was summoned for the purposes of identification.

It was nine o'clock that night before Karen got to talk to Butcher, a detective she knew by more than reputation, having worked with him on a previous investigation. Decisive, thorough, given to occasional flashes of temper, twice divorced and somehow, with the help of grandparents and a succession of European au pairs, bringing up two teenage daughters in Tufnell Park.