"Listen," he told her, "what happened, it wasn't your fault."
"No? Then who was it who ran off and left her there? Off round the corner for a packet of fags? Who?"
There must be days, Resnick had thought, when it was all she could do to stop herself walking out across the expanse of greying sand and on into the cold waters of the North Sea.
The first time Resnick had visited, Lynn's father had proudly walked him round the henhouses, sucking away at the pipe which served to keep the worst of the stench at bay. Resnick, polite and wanting, if not to impress, then, for Lynn's sake, not to antagonise, had kept his counsel, held his breath for as long as he could.
Back indoors, Lynn's mother could not bring herself to address him directly. "Does he take sugar?" she had asked Lynn, even though Resnick had been sitting there at the kitchen table, fully able to answer for himself. Only when her husband had been dying, his cancer unstoppable, had she softened towards him. "Look after her," she'd said, clutching at his hands. "She's all I've got now."
The chicken farm had been sold, swallowed up by some giant conglomerate, and Mrs. Kellogg had bought a small flat in the market town of Diss and shored herself up with the Methodist Church and the Women's Institute, book talks in the local library once a month and, in June, two local choirs in "A Celebration of English Song."
She had bought a lemon cake for Resnick's visit, made sandwiches with ham and cucumber, put on a clean apron, set the kettle to boil the minute she heard his footsteps approach the door.
She had made up her mind: she wasn't going to cry. She was not. The moment she saw his face, her own broke apart. Resnick held her while she sobbed, small bones hard and brittle against his hands, the front of his shirt damp with her tears.
He finished making the tea and carried everything through from the kitchen, best plates on a tray, the size of the rooms making him feel awkward and overlarge.
"She told me," she said, cup and saucer unsteady in her hand, "the young woman who came, she said it was all very sudden. That Lynn… that she wouldn't really have known what was happening."
"No," Resnick said, "that's right."
"She wouldn't have suffered, then?"
He saw again the bottom half of Lynn's face, torn open to the bare bone of her jaw, and smelt the blood again. "No. I don't think so."
"That's a blessing, then, at least."
They sat with their tea and cake and sandwiches, a clock somewhere striking the quarter hour and then the half.
"I've been trying to think about the funeral," she said abruptly. "I just don't know what's for the best."
Resnick nodded, noncommittally. He knew it would be a while, at best, before the body would be released. Having opened the inquest and established the cause of death, the coroner would adjourn it again while the investigation continued. If there were an arrest reasonably soon, the accused's defence team would have the option of a second postmortem; failing that, and with no arrest in sight, the coroner could arrange for a second, independent post-mortem himself and then release the body, but with a burial certificate only, barring cremation.
"I'd like her to be lain next to her dad," Lynn's mother said. "I think she'd have wanted that, don't you?"
"I'm sure that would be fine," Resnick said.
"Please," she said, reaching towards the table, "have a piece more cake. I bought it specially for you."
It tasted like ashes in his mouth.
On the way home, he dozed fitfully, the dark coming in to meet him across the fields. Crossing from the station, he walked into the nearest pub, an old travellers' hotel, ordered a large Scotch, and carried it to a table, delaying the moment when he would turn the key in the lock and step back through the door.
"You ought to sell that place of yours," Lynn's mother had said as he was leaving. "Get yourself somewhere like this. It'll be easier to manage, now you're on your own." Her kiss, dry and quick on his cheek.
He bought a second whisky and stood drinking it at the bar. A large television screen, high in one corner, was showing a soccer match from the Spanish Liga, with a commentary running across the bottom of the screen in Arabic. Seated at a table immediately below it, but not watching, unconcerned, a grey-haired man in an ageing three-piece suit sat nursing a pint of Guinness and speaking, at intervals, to someone opposite who was no longer there.
The bank of slot machines on the far wall was going full swing.
Farther along the bar, two coach drivers, still in their uniforms, were conducting an earnest conversation in Polish, not close enough for Resnick to understand every word, but it seemed to revolve around the poor facilities on the autobahn east of Hanover.
"Another?" the barman asked.
Resnick shook his head. "Best not."
He walked past the bus station and along the underpass that would take him on to Lister Gate and from there up towards the Old Market Square.
A Big Issue seller Resnick had once arrested for breaking and entering accosted him as he was crossing Upper Parliament Street, close by the restaurant where he and Lynn were to have celebrated Valentine's Day. In a city this size, she was everywhere.
" Big Issue? " The man smiled broadly through broken teeth. "Help the homeless. Just these left."
Resnick bought all three.
A dozen young women in varying stages of undress came cavorting down the street towards him, blowing kisses and shrieking loudly, someone's girls' night off to an early start.
"I don't fancy yours much," one of them shouted with a laugh, as a blonde in a silk top and skintight pants collided with Resnick and caught hold of his arm so as not to lose her balance altogether and go sprawling.
When she'd gone, stumbling after her mates, there was powder on his sleeve.
As he turned off the main road and into the narrow, poorly paved road that led to his house, a chill settled over his bones. When he was no more than thirty metres off, he thought he saw something move in the shadow at the side of the building, just a few paces from the front door, exactly where Lynn's killer would have stood. Resnick stopped, the backs of his legs and arms like ice, his breath caught in his throat. Imagination, he thought, like so much else? Two, three steps, and then he quickened his pace, breaking almost into a run, slowing again when he reached the gate.
"Charlie-"
He recognised Graham Millington's voice before he saw him, his former sergeant stepping forward to greet him, hand outstretched. "Charlie. Thought I'd best come by, see how you were getting on."
Twenty-nine
That Friday morning, the day Resnick was making his reluctant journey east to visit Lynn's mother, Karen had an appointment to see Stuart Daines.
It was an easy walk from her apartment, down towards Wellington Circus, the building anonymous, only the number to identify it. Daines had assured Karen he would be at his desk by eight thirty, nine at the latest, and he was true to his word, busy at his laptop when she arrived and begging a moment before saving whatever was on the screen. He was quick then to shake her hand, pull out a chair and make her welcome, Karen briefly returning his smile, noting the crisp pink shirt with the cuffs turned back, the TAG Heuer watch, the fleck of green in the corner of one eye.
"DI Kellogg's murder," Daines said pleasantly, "there was something you wanted to ask."
"Just one or two things," Karen said, almost casually. "Background, really."
"Of course, anything I can do you think might help. What happened, it was terrible. I mean, I didn't know her that well, but she seemed committed to what she was doing. Efficient. A good officer." He leaned forward a little in his chair. "Like I say, I didn't really know her well at all."