Darkness, Darkness (27 page)

Jenny slows her pace, then quickens it.

Two men jump out of the van.

She tenses, relaxes, tenses again.

‘Hey!’ Danny says. ‘Thought we’d missed you.’

We?

The man with him, the one who’d been driving, is around the same age as Danny, possibly younger. Slim face with quite a prominent nose, skinny build; hair pushed up out of sight under a woollen hat with badges attached; pale eyes, rabbit-grey.

‘This is Steve,’ Danny says.

Steve cocks his head to one side, winks.

‘Been looking for you all over,’ Danny says. ‘Tried the Welfare but you’d gone.’

He’s cut his hair really short – done it himself, by the look of things, or had a mate do it for him – and on top of that, either starting to grow a beard or in sore need of a shave. For a moment, Jenny imagines the roughness of it against her skin.

From the state of their clothes, the pair of them, she thinks they’ve come straight from the picket line somewhere. Danny, she knows, taking a risk simply by being there.

‘Thought maybe,’ Danny says, nodding in the direction of the van, ‘you’d like to come for a ride.’

Steve laughs at the word ‘ride’. Looks at Jenny and slowly and deliberately pokes out his tongue and rolls around his open mouth.

‘Pig!’ Jenny says and pushes between them, pushes past.

Steve laughs even more, a raw dirty laugh, and Danny tells him to fucking shut it and comes hurrying after her.

‘Jenny! Wait! Wait up!’

He catches hold of her arm and she shakes if off.

‘Jenny . . .’

‘What?’

‘Don’t go off like that.’

‘No?’ But she stops.

‘He didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘Like hell he didn’t!’ She moves closer, lowers her voice. ‘You told him, didn’t you?’

‘Course not.’

‘You bloody liar! Of course you did. Him and how many others? Talk of the bloody coalfield, am I? Standing joke?’

‘No, no.’

He slips his fingers round her wrist and this time she lets them stay.

‘I had to say something. He’d not’ve come here otherwise.’ Desperate, he looks over his shoulder. Steve’s still where he left him, whistling, rolling a cigarette. ‘Look, we’ll just go for a pint, eh? Me and Steve. Have to now he’s here. Only fair. Then I’ll come back. Your old man, he’s on nights this week, right?’

How does he know that, Jenny thinks? But he’s right.

‘I’ll come by later.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. No one’ll see.’

‘Danny, you can’t.’

Stooping towards her, he lowers his head for a kiss, just missing her mouth as she turns aside.

Moments and he’s back at the van, climbing in, Steve poking his head through the window and giving her a broad wink before driving away.

She’s trembling, praying that there’s no one there to notice, but no one is. No one she can see.

At home, after checking the children are all asleep, easing Brian’s thumb from his mouth, she changes into her nightie and, instead of getting into bed, curls up on the settee downstairs, half an ear towards the door, waiting. But he doesn’t come.

THE INTERVIEW WITH
Barry Hardwick over, Catherine had said she needed some fresh air to clear her head; Resnick had taken this to mean she needed a cigarette. Picking up coffee on the way, he tagged along, their direction towards the same piece of green space where they’d sat before, within reach of the canal.

The temperature had shifted upwards a degree or two since earlier, but it was cold enough still for their breath to be seen on the air when they spoke. Steam rose from Resnick’s coffee when he prised off the lid. At the far side of the trees, the flour mills were shrouded in mist.

‘These trips she made down to London – Jenny – you think there might be something relevant there?’

‘Difficult to say. But whatever it was, I doubt she’d have gone without good reason.’

‘A meeting, then? A rally of some kind?’

‘Likely. But from what Linda Stoneman said, arrangements seemed to have been made pretty much last moment.’

‘Filling in for another speaker somewhere?’

‘Possible, I suppose.’

‘But that’s not what you think.’

‘No way to be sure, of course, but I’m wondering if it could have been something to do with the movement of money. Cash money.’ He shook his head in annoyance. ‘I should’ve thought of that before.’

A dog walker went past, tailed by a Border Collie/German Shepherd cross doing its best to carry a branch three times as big as itself.

‘You’d best explain,’ Catherine said.

‘Simple enough, really. Quite early on in the strike the union had its funds frozen. Just at the same time it was getting more and more dependent on financial support from outside. Other unions, you know, and not just in the UK. France, Russia, all over. Most of it smuggled into the country one way or another. As far as they were concerned, a case of having to. All secret, of course. Secret as can be. Surreptitious meetings, midnight assignations, banknotes hidden in the hollowed-out bottoms of suitcases. Like something out of what’s-his-name?
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier
man?’

‘Le Carré?’

‘Le Carré. And, of course, rumours were rife. Officers from my team would pick up a hint here, a hint there. Misinformation, some of it, of course. Throw us off the track. Not all. A matter of sifting through. Keith Haines, I remember – he had his nose to the ground as well – passed on some useful information a time or two.

‘We had a tip-off once, might even have come through Keith in the first place, I’m not sure now. But anyway, we followed it up – a money shipment on its way from the Continent to Harwich by ferry, making its way from there to NUM headquarters in Yorkshire. We tracked it, intercepted it just outside Newark. Six thousand pounds under a blanket in the back of a Ford Granada. And that was just one we knew about, knew for certain. If even half the tales that came through to us turned out to be true, there’d have been that kind of money and more coming in all the time. A lot more. And heaven knows where some of it ended up.’

‘So you think that’s what Jenny might have been doing? Those trips to London? Acting as a sort of courier?’

Resnick hunched his shoulders. ‘It’s possible. I could have a word with Edna Johnson. She and Peter Waites were close, she might have an inkling. Other than that, there’s someone I used to know quite well back then, worked for a while at the NRC. He’d be able to fill me in on a bit of background, if nothing else.’

Catherine stubbed out her second cigarette. ‘You do that, Charlie. I’ll see how things are back at Potter Street.’

At Potter Street, things were in a state of barely subdued excitement. Rob Cresswell, recently back from A & E, bandage around his newly shaven head, was sitting in the one good chair, basking in universal, if temporary, approval, not least from Vanessa and Gloria – Gloria, in particular – both women hovering close by in the expectation that he might suffer a sudden relapse and need their comforting attentions. Whatever checks they’d been making on the suspects thrown up by the earlier Donna Crowder investigation temporarily in abeyance.

Alex Sandford, meanwhile, was in the act of retelling the events of the morning for the benefit of John McBride and an assortment of officers from elsewhere in the building.

What it amounted to, Catherine discovered, was this. Having made two unsuccessful attempts to locate Joe Willis – a name passed down to them from the Swann investigation – at his last-known address in Kirkby, on both occasions with uniformed police from the local station in support, Sandford and Cresswell, acting on a whim and against McBride’s instructions, had called back that morning without back-up, hoping to catch Willis sleeping. Which they had, persistent knocking and bell-ringing bringing a tired-looking Willis to the door, a Leeds United sweatshirt hanging over a pair of droopy boxers.

No sooner had he recognised the two detectives for what they were than Willis had ducked back inside, hurling the door shut behind him, only Sandford’s outstretched boot preventing it actually closing.

Grabbing a pair of trousers from the end of the bed, Willis had half-run, half-hopped towards the stairs, moving with surprising agility for a man of his age, and reaching the first-floor landing before Cresswell caught up to him; Willis lashing out and catching Cresswell hard enough to send him backwards down the stairs and head first into the wall.

Sandford had stopped to check that his partner was all right, giving Willis the chance to exit through a third-floor window and out on to the roof. When Sandford next spotted him, he was climbing down a rusty fire escape into a narrow ginnel that ran between the houses.

As long as he remained within sight, Sandford was confident of overhauling him. All that marathon training had to count for something.

When he finally caught up with him, just where the alley opened out on to the main road, Willis was no longer really running, more like jogging on the spot, shoulders and chest heaving, breath ragged and wheezing, mouth open. In danger, Sandford thought, of a heart attack.

From the sound of a police car approaching, Sandford knew that Cresswell had successfully called it in. Maybe they’d need an ambulance as well.

‘All we wanted,’ he told Willis, ‘was to ask a few questions.’

‘’Bout that post office robbery . . . Basford . . . yeah, I know.’

‘No,’ Sandford told him, ‘not that at all. Something that happened thirty years ago.’

Willis, still struggling to recover his breath, had looked at him with a mixture of dismay and disbelief. And when questioned later, he had not been able to assist in the investigation into Jenny Hardwick’s murder by one jot.

Police had since found a cash box taken from the post office in the house where Willis had been staying, however, and had arrested a second man under suspicion of being Willis’s accomplice, the pair of them having carried out the robbery armed with a replica pistol and a hammer.

‘Good work,’ Catherine said. ‘And think yourself fortunate you’ve only got one sore head between the two of you.’

Once the euphoria had died down she would take the pair of them aside and remind them of what had happened not so long ago to two female officers who were lured into a trap by a wanted criminal and shot down in cold blood. On that occasion there had been nothing to suggest it was anything more than a routine incident they had been called to; no need, as far as they could judge, to call for back-up. But both Sandford and Cresswell had been explicitly told not to approach Joe Willis unless support was in place.

This time they had been lucky.

Next time, Catherine would make good and clear, they should obey orders to the letter or the outcome might be tragically different.

Home, for Edna Johnson, was a small ground-floor apartment in sheltered accommodation. A banner – white lettering on a maroon background, WOMEN AGAINST PIT CLOSURES – leaned against one wall. Photographs were dotted here and there, grandchildren vying for space with groups of jubilant, angry women, marching, singing, linking arms, holding hands.

‘So,’ Edna said, once they were settled, ‘to what do I owe the honour?’

‘Jenny Hardwick, just trying to fill a few gaps, plug a few holes.’

‘Do what I can.’

‘Last time we spoke, at the funeral, you mentioned visits Jenny might have made to London . . .’

‘No might about it. London. Cardiff. A few more, I dare say. Union business, speeches. Never hurt to have a pretty woman on the platform.’

‘And that’s all it was?’

She looked back at him, saying nothing.

‘Is it possible, I wonder, that she could have been acting as a courier? Collecting sums of money and delivering them up here to the Midlands? On up to Yorkshire?’

Edna took her time before answering. ‘It’s possible.’

‘But likely?’

‘Like I say, it’s possible. There was money, right enough, and I doubt they were sending it through the post. Nor putting it in the bank, neither. Not the regular accounts, for certain.’

‘Peter Waites, you and he were close.’

‘We were.’

‘You think he would have trusted Jenny sufficiently to send her on that sort of mission, what with the sums of money involved?’

Edna shook her head. ‘If you’d known Jenny, you’d not’ve needed to ask that question.’

‘He would, then?’

‘He would. Which is not to say that he did. Not to best of my knowledge, at least. And if it did happen, I doubt Peter himself would have known too much about it. Whatever details Jenny might’ve been given, they’d’ve been for her eyes only. As far as I could tell, that’s the way it was.’

A resigned expression on his face, Resnick nodded thanks.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Resnick . . .’

‘Charlie.’

‘I’m sorry, Charlie, but that’s all I can tell you.’

Resnick thanked her again, happy to spend another thirty minutes or so in conversation; he didn’t know how many visitors Edna had on a regular basis, now that it was no longer so easy for her to get around, but he suspected, it was growing fewer with time.

Thirty minutes became forty and then an hour. Somewhere in the middle, Edna made her way into the kitchen and returned with two glasses of port and lemon.

‘Not trying to lead me astray, are you, Edna?’

She laughed. ‘I might, if I thought I could get away with it.’

As he was leaving, she touched him on the shoulder. ‘Jenny’s killer, are you any closer to finding him?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘And this business with the money, you think that could be part of it?’

‘It might.’

‘Don’t give away much, do you?’

Resnick planted a quick kiss on her cheek. ‘Look after yourself, Edna.’

‘You, too, Charlie.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Not a bad bloke for a copper, I always said.’

A LITTLE OVER
an hour to spare before his appointment, Resnick cut across Euston Road from the station, walked up Judd Street and through Russell Square, past the British Museum and on into Soho. Rain drifted lightly through the air.

Collar up, he entered Frith Street at its northern end, Ronnie Scott’s two-thirds of the way down on the right-hand side. Ronnie’s. Where he had seen Dizzy Gillespie; failed to see Thelonious Monk. Of the names on the bill now there were few that he recognised; few that he would have associated with the word ‘jazz’.