“Hey! Watch where you’re going!”
Lynn ducked under a man’s angry arm and dived for the back of the girl’s legs. They struck the hard polished floor and started to slide. A foot kicked Lynn alongside the head, numbing her ear. She tugged at the waistband of the girl’s skirt, ignoring the blows to her own head, the clamor all round.
“Lemmego, you bitch, you fucking cow!”
Lynn took hold of the girl’s hair and yanked it back, dragging her to her knees. A gold bracelet tumbled away from somewhere inside the girl’s clothing and rolled in a slow curve before wobbling to a halt.
“You’re under arrest,” Lynn said.
The girl spat in her face.
Twenty-five
Whoever had started to redecorate the room had run out of paint or enthusiasm a third of the way down the end wall. Elsewhere more than one shade of blue had been rolled on to chipboard paper, fading blue fingerprints attached to floor and ceiling. Three sections of unmatched carpet had been interlocked across the floor. One man, overweight by as much as fifteen pounds, leaned back against the end of a moquette settee, watching a program about mathematics for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. Another, cross-legged on the floor near the window, was reading Leon Uris. Norman Mann was close against the lowered blinds, binoculars in hand.
Resnick nodded briefly towards the two other officers as he came into the room.
“Not too early for you, Charlie?” asked Norman Mann pleasantly.
Resnick shook his head. He’d been awake since 4.25, Dizzy marauding underneath his bedroom window; gone back to bed but known it for a waste of time, finally up around half five, waiting for the sky to clear, the watery sun to rise.
He walked over to the window and Norman Mann obliged him by easing down one of the blinds. Resnick found himself looking out on another low block of flats, similar to the one he was in now. A curving walkway, its once-white wooden sides scattered with graffiti, led down to a paved area rich in dog shit and takeaway cartons from last night’s homeward trawl from the pubs along Alfreton Road.
Mann handled Resnick the glasses and pointed to one particular door. “Not exactly Crack City, but it’s our own little contribution.” Traces of his Edinburgh accent still clung to the back of his voice like shadows on an X-ray.
“Factory?” Resnick asked.
Mann shook his head. “Doubtful. More your out-workers. Cottage industries of old come back to haunt us. Cut the cocaine with baking powder, mix in a little water, bang it in the oven and then leave to dry. Easy as making a pie. Except what you get is a rock of crack that’ll change hands for twenty-five, thirty, forty pounds.”
“You’re not going in?”
“Not till we’ve got a better idea who’s inside. No.” Moving away from the window, he offered the glasses to the officer watching the TV. “You know how it is in this lark, Charlie, awful amount of waiting around, filling in time. Still …” he nodded towards the other officers, “… makes for a more cultured class of chaps.”
The two men laughed; one took his sergeant’s place at the window, the other turning a page of his book, then turning back again, couldn’t remember whether he’d read that page or not.
Norman Mann steered Resnick into the tiny oblong kitchen. The gas cooker looked as if it had been wrenched away from the wall and then left, blocking access to the sink. Something sat moldering in the corner, wrapped in damp newspaper. Better not to ask.
“Someone living here?” Resnick asked.
“Not any more. It was squatters last. Better here than out on the streets. Still, someone flushed them out a week or so back. Uniforms, probably, doing the council a favor. Useful for us though.” He shook out a packet of cigarettes and, when Resnick declined, lit one with the lighter from his back jeans pocket. “So, Charlie, something urgent.”
“Alan Stafford.”
Norman Mann angled his head back slowly, smoke easing from the edges of his mouth. “Bit higher class than this.”
“How high?”
“Connections all over. Newcastle, Southampton, Dover, Liverpool. Middle-man mostly, biggest profit for the lowest risk. By my reckoning he keeps some clients for himself, probably likes to keep the feel of the streets in his feet. Besides, gives him the chance to break and shake with the hoi polloi.”
“Television,” said Resnick, helpfully.
“Those wankers!” snorted Mann. “All they need is a few cans of Red Stripe to be falling arse-over-tip into each other’s Filofaxes. I’m talking money here, Charlie, real money. Power and influence. They don’t call cocaine your champagne drug for nothing.”
“You’ve got a watch on him, then?”
Norman Mann looked at him archly. “Now and again.”
“If he’s so important …”
“He’s as like got himself a bit of protection, all salted away against the inevitable rainy day. Oh, we’d like him, right enough. I’d love the bastard. But this lot here, peddling two-minute highs to schoolkids who hustle for it on the Forest, let’s face it, Charlie, we’re more likely to fetch up with one of them, more likely to get a result.”
“Which doesn’t mean you’re not interested?”
“It does not.”
Resnick nodded, wafted away the smoke that was collecting under the low ceiling in a blue-gray cloud. “He’s hanging round the edges of something pretty strange. A few things that won’t stay still long enough yet to tie down, see how they all fit. But he’s in there somewhere. I’ll bank on that.”
“Boss,” called one of the officers from the other room, “something’s moving.”
Norman Mann made his hand into a fist and set it against Resnick’s upper arm, tapping punches. “Anything we can do, Charlie.”
“Right. I’ll keep you up to the mark.”
Mann was back by the window, peering out. “Do that. Oh, and Charlie … check him out with NDIU, Stafford, they’ll have him pretty up to date.”
Resnick raised an arm. “Thanks.”
“Careful on your way out,” Norman Mann warned. “No one’s going to mistake you for your average squatter.” Grinning. “Not at second glance, anyway.”
Back inside his car, Resnick checked with the station, nothing to prevent him from moving on. He’d already had words with the DCI that morning, the request for information from the National Drugs Intelligence Unit would be on its way.
“One other thing,” Tom Parker had said. “Jeff Harrison, I thought the pair of you had some history together?”
“Not too much,” Resnick had replied.
“Only something’s ruffling his feathers and he seems to think you’re back of it.” Resnick had said nothing and waited. “Says he’s tried to talk to you, but you won’t answer his calls. Says you’ve had a couple of your lads over there, leaning on his men, ferreting around behind his back.”
“I came to you first, sir,” Resnick reminded him.
“Maybe it wasn’t clear to me what you were getting up to.”
“Like I said. Trying to fit that burglary in with our other inquiries. Nothing more than that.”
“If it was nothing more than that, d’you really think Harrison would be hopping like a blue-assed fly?”
“Maybe not, sir.”
“Your favorite word, isn’t it, Charlie? Maybe.”
Saying maybe inside his head, Resnick smiled.
“He’s been a bit naughty, that’s what you’re angling for, eh? That’s your suspicion. And don’t, don’t say maybe. Don’t say anything. Not till you’re this side of ready. And then I want it, Charlie. All of it. It’ll be out of your hands then. You know that, don’t you?”