"Oh, shit!"
"Leyton, not so far from where she'd been staying. Her throat had been cut."
Resnick hung his head. "It doesn't get better, does it?"
"No, I'm afraid not."
Resnick got up and walked to the window, whisky glass in his hand. So far he hadn't bothered to pull the curtains across and his reflection stared back at him dumbly from the darkness.
A jerky ascending phrase from Monk's piano, a rapid tumbling arpeggio, and then two quick final notes stabbed out from the keyboard. "Sweet and Lovely." There and gone.
"Lynn used to talk about it," Resnick said, turning back into the room. "The danger Andreea was putting herself in by coming forward, agreeing to be a witness. She'd promised her that nothing would happen, that she'd be all right. It got to her, the fact she'd been lying."
"She shouldn't have felt guilty."
Resnick hunched his shoulders. "Maybe yes, maybe no. But she did."
"I've spoken to the guy who's handling the investigation, someone I know. Butcher. Chris Butcher. He's good. I'm going to meet with him and the SIO from the Pearce shooting sometime in the next couple of days."
"When's the postmortem?"
"Tomorrow sometime, I think. Early, probably."
"I'd like to go down-"
"Charlie!"
"Oh, not to interfere. Nothing official."
"I seem to have heard that before."
"No, I mean it. I'd just like to see her. See the body."
"What for?"
"I don't know. I'm probably not going to be able to explain it very well, but… it's for Lynn, somehow, what she would have wanted. What she would have done."
The distrust, the disbelief were clear on Karen's face.
"Look"-he moved back and sat down, facing her-"I won't say anything. I won't interfere. The only other thing I might do when I'm down is go and see Bucur, just to see how he's bearing up, express my sympathy. But that's all. You have my word."
"Your word?" Karen raised an eyebrow appropriately.
"Yes."
She tasted a little more Scotch. "All right, I'll see what I can do."
For a while, they managed to talk about other things, but after not too long they'd run out of what to say.
Resnick walked her to the door. When would he ever be able to open it without seeing what he had seen before, the night Lynn had died?
"This operation Daines is involved in," Karen said, "what I hear-what my bagman hears-I reckon it's coming to a head any day. Rumours flying round all over the place apparently. Officers in Operational Support have had their leave cancelled, armed response teams, too."
"Likely read about the rest in the papers."
Karen smiled. "I daresay."
She turned her head at the end of the path. "I'll get back to you about viewing the body."
"Okay." He raised a hand and hesitated momentarily before going back into the house.
Forty-one
Andreea Florescu-what had once been Andreea Florescu-lay on the stainless-steel table, cold and open-eyed. The places where her body had been opened up had been meticulously sewn back, neat stitches, a mother would have been proud. First, she would have been photographed fully clothed, then photographed again as each layer was removed, a slow striptease till she was ready for the pathologist's loving care, the bone cutters, the scalpel, the saw. All external marks and stains would have been noted, samples taken from her hair, scrapings from beneath the fingernails before they were carefully clipped, swabs from here and there, all this labelled and stored. Before opening the chest cavity, the pathologist would have followed the track of the killer's knife blade across her neck with his scalpel, centimetre by centimetre, inch by inch.
Resnick looked down and saw all of this: saw nothing.
How many such bodies had he seen? How many lives rubbed out?
Another expression floated past, not quite right: somebody's mother, somebody's child.
Andreea's daughter, how old had Lynn said she was?
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…"