John Harvey: Cold in Hand

Three? Four?

"Jesus, Charlie! What was I doing? Making promises like that. Promises I can't keep."

Lynn's voice, a burr inside his head.

"I put her in danger, Charlie."

He turned away.

Alexander Bucur had hardly been able to stay inside the flat since he had heard what happened. Not that that was where he imagined Andreea had been killed, but, in staying there, he saw her everywhere. Resnick knew how this felt.

They walked, scarcely talking at first, along the High Road and then down towards the River Lea and Hackney Marshes, an expanse of flat open land where goalposts grew like trees and, on bad days, the wind razored sharp into your eyes. Today, despite the water levels being high, the wind had dropped and what few clouds there were hung immovable, like barrage balloons in the greying sky.

A group of lads, eight or ten of them, young enough they should have been in school, were playing an impromptu game around one of the goalmouths, shouting, arms raised, as they ran. "Here! Here! Give it! Give it now! Oh, fuckin' hell!"

As the ball was booted back from behind the goal, a kid wearing knee-length shorts and a claret and blue shirt with the name Tevez on the back went on an evasive run that ended only when two of the others clattered into him and he went sprawling, the ball running free and across to where Resnick and Bucur were walking, and Bucur, with nice economy of movement, flicked it up onto his instep and kicked it precisely back.

"Could do with you in Notts," Resnick said, impressed. "Control like that."

Bucur smiled. "I had a trial once. Back in Romania."

"Dynamo Bucharest?" It was the only Romanian team Resnick knew.

"No. Farul. From my hometown, Constanta. FC Farul. They are in Liga 1. Not so great. Finish thirteen, fourteen." He smiled again. "The Sharks, that's what we call them. The Sharks. Constanta, it is by the sea."

They walked on a little farther.

"You've spoken to Andreea's family?" Resnick asked.

Bucur's expression changed. "Yes. Her mother. The police, they had told her already what happened, but she did not understand. 'How can this be?' she kept saying to me. 'How can this be?' I did not know what to say. She only knows Andreea was studying here, working in her spare time as a cleaner. She did not know about this other… this other work she did, how she would meet such people. It was too difficult to explain."

Resnick nodded. They walked on, crossing paths with several people out with their dogs, for the most part bull terriers or similar, short-haired and muscular with flattish heads and broad shoulders, much like their owners.

"Andreea's body," Bucur asked, "what will happen?"

"It will be held on to for a while, at least, while the investigation continues. Once a suspect has been arrested and his defence team have had the chance to examine the body, then it can be released."

"Back to Constanta?"

"I imagine so, yes."

The ground here was damp and yielded easily to the tread. The river wound in front of them, making its way down from Tottenham Hale and the Cook's Ferry Inn, a famous jazz pub of the fifties and sixties, home for years to a fiery trumpeter named Freddy Randall. Resnick had never been there.

Bucur said suddenly, "She told me, this man Lazic, what he did. Why she was always so afraid. He took her, with another man, by night to this… this place full of rubbish. 'Refuse'-is that the word?"

"Yes."

"He took her there and made her kneel and then he put a knife against her throat and told her what he will do. He will cut her from here to here." Bucur made the gesture with the forefinger of his right hand. "He came once to the flat, you know, I told your colleague, your friend, he came asking for her and we fought. Andreea was not there. I tried to be there as much as I could after that, you know, in case, but I could not always and…"

"It's okay," Resnick said. "You did what you could."

"No, no. I should have done more. I-"

"If their minds were made up, you couldn't protect her all the time."

"But you, the police, your friend, the inspector, she knew his name and the other policeman also. I told him, that evening-"

"Wait. Which other policeman?"

"The one Inspector Kellogg came with the first time."

"Daines?"

"Yes, Daines."

"Why did you tell him?"

"Because… because when I was worried about Andreea and called Inspector Kellogg on my phone, there was no reply, so then I call this Daines-Andreea had his number, both numbers, in her room. From Daines there is no answer also, so I leave a message for him to ring back, and then when I try Inspector Kellogg's number again she is there and she agreed to come."

"But you said you gave Daines the man's name?"

"Yes. But later. He called back not long after the inspector has gone. I tell him about Lazic then."

"What did he say?"

"He says not to worry. He knows this Lazic, he is watching him. And Andreea, he thinks she will be fine."

"Did you tell him anything else?"

Bucur gave a slow, uncertain shake of his head. "I don't think so."

"Nothing about Inspector Kellogg?"

"Only that she had been here, of course. And that he had just missed her, but she had left to catch her train."

"Her train, you mentioned that?"

For a moment, Bucur looked puzzled. "Yes, her train home."

The three detectives met at a service station on the motorway, Leicester Forest East: a small accommodation this for Euan Guest, travelling down from Doncaster, and almost in Karen's current backyard, but Butcher happy to go the extra yard as long as it was clear the primacy of roles in the investigation was his. Guest was prepared to accept this for now and argue later, whereas Karen, a transplanted Met officer herself and aware of the Met's resources, thought it was fine.

Chris Butcher had put on a few pounds since she'd last seen him, faded blue shirt straining just a little over his chinos, jacket buttons left undone. His hair, always dark, seemed to have taken on the first few strands of grey and could have done with a trim; whenever he'd shaved last, it hadn't been that morning, maybe not even the morning before. Going for the swarthy, Mediterranean look, Karen thought: Italian waiter slash Premier League footballer. For a man of what? — forty? forty-one or — two? — he wasn't in bad condition.

His smile when he saw her was quick and, she thought, genuine; quickly in place and quickly gone.

Euan Guest in the flesh was something of a surprise: younger than she'd imagined from his voice, and tall, four or five inches above six foot, a willowy build with a stooped head topped by a thatch of fair hair.

All three had coffee; Guest a Danish pastry, Butcher a burger and chips. Karen abstained.

"Watching your figure?" Butcher suggested.

"No," Karen said. "That's you."

Butcher laughed, found out. He hadn't been meaning to stare, but the top Karen was wearing acted as a powerful tool to the imagination, and, he would have had to admit, she'd crossed the lascivious part of his mind more than once in the eighteen months or so since they'd worked together on a double murder in Rotherhithe-a father and son shot down in the rear car park of a pub, payback for some back-street philandering, first the father, then the son, then both together, tupping the wife of a former boxing-club owner turned scrap merchant and making the mistake of posting their endeavours on YouTube.

Messy business.

"So," Butcher said emphatically, "what've we got?"

Guest swallowed a piece of Danish pastry. "The ballistics came in at last on the gun that killed Kelvin Pearce. Same model as the one used in the Kellogg shooting, similar ammo, but definitely not the same weapon. Sorry."

"Shit!" Karen exploded.

"Both shootings," Butcher added. "Different MO altogether. Not that that rules out other connections."