John Harvey: Cold in Hand

After much coaxing by her grandmother, Andreea's three-year-old daughter, Monica, rising four, came out from behind the settee and stood before Resnick, head down, hands clasped, wearing a green dress with a white sash which was kept for special occasions.

Resnick fetched from his bag the presents he had brought her: a picture book on stiff board with bright illustrations of animals in strong colours, a T-shirt in blue, white and orange stripes and a teddy bear with a large red bow at his neck.

She took each from him solemnly, thanked him haltingly, and then ran to her grandmother and stood, clutching her legs with one hand, while hanging on tightly to the teddy bear with the other.

A plate was passed round with slices of sponge cake filled with jam. More tea. More brandy. Wine. The wake, Resnick thought, before the funeral. One of the cousins, sixteen, quizzed him in near-perfect English about the Premiership and Tottenham Hotspur's chances of breaking into the top four. Ever since Spurs had bought both Ilie Dumitrescu and Gica Popescu following Romania's successes in the 1994 World Cup, they had been a team of special interest.

Resnick's subsequent confession that the team he himself supported was not even Nottingham Forest, formerly winners of the European Cup, but lowly Notts County, was met with bafflement.

After an hour or more, toward the end of which Resnick's eyes kept closing involuntarily, Andreea's father took pity on him and drove him to his hotel, the Intim, which dated back to the late nineteenth century and had previously been called the Hotel d'Angleterre. Someone had thought he would feel at home.

His room looked out past the cathedral towards the Black Sea, which from there, looked not black but grey, the kind of grey he was used to seeing when he gazed east from Mablethorpe or Whitby.

He stripped off his clothes and showered and, after drying himself, stretched out on the clean, slightly worn sheets and fell, almost immediately, asleep.

The funeral service was held in a Roman Catholic church close to the family's home, the church packed, the atmosphere stifling-Resnick, who because of some strange divisions in his own, largely Jewish family, had been brought up as a Catholic, falling automatically into the ritual of signs and observances, prayers and obeisances. The temperature inside and outside the church was close to thirty Celsius.

On the previous evening, Andreea's parents, brushing his protestations aside, had insisted on taking him to dinner in the old Casino, a handsome, almost-baroque building with an arched entrance and huge arched windows, which stood on a promenade overlooking the sea. Black-suited waiters with white aprons tied at the waist brought a succession of dishes in solemn procession: fish soup, carp-roe salad, and then-shepherd's sirloin, according to the translation on the menu-pork stuffed with ham, then covered with cheese and a sauce of mayonnaise, cucumber, and herbs. The wine, Andreea's father assured him, was the best in Romania, Feteasca Neagra, with a rich redness that was close to purple, almost black. A dessert of crisp pastry soaked in syrup and filled with whipped cream was, in every sense, too much.

Head reeling and stomach rolling, when they had left the restaurant-the sky a vivid midnight blue pricked with stars, the moon floating in the darkness of the water-Resnick's only thoughts had been of falling back into bed, but his hosts had insisted on his accompanying them to a piano bar for a glass or two of rachiu, Romanian grape brandy. To settle the stomach, Andreea's father had suggested, with appropriate gestures.

The bar was belowground, a couple of small smoke-filled rooms, neither of them, as far as Resnick could see, containing a piano. The music, piped through overhead speakers, had been, in the main, piano music, however; jazz of a sort, an extended free form extemporising with Monk-ish overtones, which Resnick decided, in different surroundings, could be rewarding.

His head throbbed and his eyes stung.

Harry Tavitian, he was told when he enquired, that was the pianist's name. From there, in Constanta. Famous everywhere. All over the world. Resnick nodded, never having heard of him before.

Finally, he had stumbled up the steps and out into the air. It was still warm, and the sweet sweat of his body made him nauseous.

Here inside the church, the incense was close to overpowering. The congregation rose to sing a hymn, and Resnick stood with them, mouth open, no words forthcoming. He had had enough of funerals, enough of death, enough dying. He closed his eyes and ignored the tears, and waited for it all to end.

Packed and ready, there was an hour still before leaving to catch his plane and there were things he could see. He had read the leaflet in four languages at the hotel. He could go to the top of the minaret above the Mahmudiye Mosque for a panoramic view of the town and harbour, or to the Museum of the Romanian Navy with its photographs of the Russian battleship Potemkin arriving unexpectedly with its crew of mutinous sailors. Instead he walked down through the central square of the old part of the town, named after the poet Ovid, who was exiled there from Rome by the Emperor Augustus for writing The Art of Love, which had somehow offended the emperor's sensibilities.

Poor bastard, Resnick thought, looking up at the statue that was daubed in pigeon droppings and eroded by the weather. Doomed to live out a lonely life in a country that was not his own. There were a few lines of his poetry reprinted in the leaflet, miserable as sin. And cold. As if all the time he was there, he could never get warm, the snow drifting in off the sea.

Resnick walked on down for a final look at the water.

At the airport, Andreea's mother hugged him and held him close, murmuring her thanks; her father shook his hand as heartily as before and wished him well. Monica hid behind her grandmother's skirt and came out only at the last moment to stand, wide-eyed, and wave, her teddy bear clasped tight against her chest.

They were lovely people, Resnick thought, warm and caring. Hurting, too.

Fifteen minutes later, his plane was in the air.

Though it had only been days, the house seemed unlived in, felt alien, cold. That again: cold. As he'd turned his keys in the door, the cats had come running, the familiar sound signalling food, a Pavlovian response, though he guessed the neighbour he entrusted them to would have overfed them, as usual.

There were several messages on the answering machine, one from Karen Shields that said simply: Call me. When he did, she asked if he wanted to come into the station, or whether he'd prefer for her to come to him.

"I'm knackered," Resnick said. "Why don't you come out here? Just give me time to shower and change."

Twenty minutes later, she was there. White vest, red skirt, flat shoes.

"Hot as hell," she said.

"There's water in the fridge. Juice."

"Water would be fine."

The rear of the house was in the shade, so that was where they sat.

"How did it go?" Karen asked.

"All right, I suppose. I was glad I went."

"I'm sure they were, too."

Resnick nodded.

"I'm just about through here," Karen said. "I've been coming up only for odd days, and now there's no need for even that. Anil can handle anything else that crops up before the trial."

"You did a good job."

"I did bugger-all."

Resnick smiled.

"You know," Karen said, "we found the shoe? The Adidas trainers? Marcus had sold them. A friend of a friend. It helps fill in the picture."

Resnick nodded. "How about our pal Daines?"

"Still stonewalling," Karen said.

Lazic had testified that the SOCA man had been in the Zoukas brothers' pockets, evidenced by the fact that both had successfully slipped out of the country avoiding arrest, Viktor using a false passport. He had also provided a blurred video which showed-or seemed to show, Daines's lawyers were strongly disputing it-Daines taking part in a three-way sex session involving, at various times, a riding crop, a large strapped-on dildo, and a woman stretched out on a bed and tied hand and foot.