‘How soon can we talk to Jahmall, I wonder?’ Resnick said.
‘He’s most likely still in surgery. Mid-morning, I’d say. The earliest.’
‘You want me to do that?’
‘No, it’s okay. I’ve asked them to call me from Queen’s the minute he’s out of recovery. There’s an officer standing by.’ She moved from the desk where she’d been sitting, stretching out her arms and breathing in stale air. ‘Maybe you could talk to the family?’ She smiled. ‘They’re on your patch, Charlie, after all.’
There were bunches of flowers already tied to the post into which the car had crashed, some anonymous, some bearing hastily written words of sympathy. More flowers rested up against the low wall outside the house.
The victim support officer met Resnick at the door.
‘How they holding up?’ he asked.
‘Good as can be expected, sir.’
Resnick nodded and followed the officer into a narrow hall.
They’re in back.’
Clarice Faye sat on a green high-backed settee, her youngest daughter cuddled up against her, face pressed to her mother’s chest. The middle daughter, Jade, twelve or thirteen, sat close but not touching, head turned away. Clarice was slender, light-skinned, lighter than her daughters, shadows scored deep beneath her eyes. Resnick was reminded of a woman at sea, stubbornly holding on against the pitch and swell of the tide.
The room itself was neat and small, knick-knacks and framed photographs of the children, uniform smiles; a crucifix, metal on a wooden base, hung above the fireplace. The curtains, a heavy stripe, were still pulled partway across.
Resnick introduced himself and expressed his sympathy; accepted the chair that was offered, narrow with wooden arms, almost too narrow for his size.
‘Jahmall — have you heard from the hospital?’
‘I saw my son this morning. He was sleeping. They told me to come home and get some rest.’ She shook her head and squeezed her daughter’s hand tight. ‘As if I could.’
‘He’ll be all right?’
‘He will live.’
The youngest child began to cry.
‘He is a good boy, Jahmall. Not wild… Not like some. Not any more. Why would anyone…?’ She stopped to sniff away a tear. ‘He is going to join the army, you know that? Has been for an interview already, filled in the forms.’ She pulled a tissue, screwed and damp, from her sleeve. ‘A man now, you know? He makes me proud.’
Resnick’s eyes ran round the photographs in the room. ‘Shana’s father,’ he ventured, ‘is he…?’
‘He doesn’t live with us any more.’
‘But he’s been told?’
‘You think he cares?’
The older girl sprang to her feet and half-ran across the room.
‘Jade, come back here.’
The door slammed hard against the frame.
Resnick leaned forward, drew his breath. ‘Jahmall and Shana, last night, you know where they’d been?’
‘The Meadows. A friend of Jahmall’s, his eighteenth.’
‘Did they often go around together like that, Jahmall and Shana?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’
‘They were close then?’
‘Of course.’ An insult if it were otherwise, a slight.
‘And his girlfriend, she didn’t mind?’
‘Marlee, no. She and Shana, they were like mates. Pals.’
‘Mum,’ the younger girl said, raising her head. ‘Shana didn’t like her. Marlee. She didn’t.’
‘That’s not so.’
‘It is. She told me. She said she smelled.’
‘Nonsense, child.’ Clarice smiled indulgently and shook her head.
‘How about Shana?’ Resnick asked. ‘Did she have any boyfriends? Anyone special?’
The hesitation was perhaps a second too long. ‘No. She was a serious girl. Serious about her studies. She didn’t have time for that sort of thing. Besides, she was too young.’
‘She was sixteen.’
‘Too young for anything serious, that’s what I mean.’
‘But parties, like yesterday, that was okay?’
‘Young people together, having fun. Besides, she had her brother to look after her…’ Tears rushed to her face and she brushed them aside.
The phone rang and the victim support officer answered it in the hall. ‘It’s Jahmall,’ he said from the doorway. ‘They’ll be taking him back up to the ward any time.’
‘Quickly,’ Clarice said to her daughter, bustling her off the settee. ‘Coat and shoes.’
Resnick followed them out into the hall. Door open, Jade was sitting on one of the beds in the room she and Shana had obviously shared. Aware that Resnick was looking at her, she swung her head sharply towards him, staring hard until he moved away.
Outside, clouds slid past in shades of grey; on the opposite side of the narrow street, a couple slowed as they walked by. Resnick waited while the family climbed into the support officer’s car and drove away… a good boy, Jahmall. Not wild… Not any more. The crucifix. The mother’s words. Amazing, he thought, how we believe what we want to believe, all evidence aside.
On the Ilkeston Road, he stopped and crossed the street. There were more flowers now, and photographs of Shana, covered in plastic against the coming rain. A large teddy bear with black ribbon in a bow around its neck. A dozen red roses wrapped in cellophane, the kind on sale in garage forecourts. Resnick stooped and looked at the card. For Shana. Our love will live for ever. Michael. Kisses, drawn in red biro in the shape of a heart, surrounded the words.
Resnick was putting the last touches of a salad together when he heard Lynn’s key in the lock. A sauce of spicy sausage and tomato was simmering on the stove; a pan of gently bubbling water ready to receive the pasta.
‘Hope you’re good and hungry.’
‘You know…’ Her head appearing round the door. ‘…I’m not sure if I am.’
But she managed a good helping nonetheless, wiping the spare sauce from her plate with bread, washing it down with wine.
‘So — how was it?’ Resnick asked between mouthfuls.
‘All right, I suppose.’
‘Not brilliant then.’
No, some of it was okay. Useful even.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, ways of avoiding tunnel vision. Stuff like that.’
Resnick poured more wine.
‘I just wish,’ Lynn said, ‘they wouldn’t get you to play these stupid games.’
‘Games?’
‘You know, if you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be? If you were a car, what car?’
Resnick laughed. ‘And what were you?’
‘Vegetable or car?’
‘Either.’
‘A first-crop potato, fresh out of the ground.’
‘A bit mundane.’
‘Come on, Charlie, born and brought up in Norfolk, what do you expect?’
‘A turnip?’
She waited till he was looking at his plate, then clipped him round the head.
Later, in bed, when he pressed against her back and she turned inside his arms, her face close to his, she said, ‘Better watch out, Charlie, I didn’t tell you what kind of car.’
‘Something moderately stylish, compact, not too fast?’
‘A Maserati Coupe 4.2 in Azuro Blue with full cream leather upholstery.’
He was still laughing when she stopped his mouth with hers.
The bullet that had struck Jahmall’s shoulder was a 9mm, most likely from a plastic Glock. Patched up, replenished with blood, Jahmall was sore, sullen, and little else. Aside from lucky. His girlfriend, Marlee, had twenty-seven stitches in a gash in her leg, several butterfly stitches to one side of her head and face and bruises galore. The BMW was found on open ground near railway tracks on the far side of Sneinton, burned out. No prints, no ejected shell cases, nothing of use. It took the best part of a week, but thirty-seven of the fifty or so people who had been at the party in the Meadows were traced, tracked down and questioned. For officers, rare and welcome overtime.
The Drug Squad had no recent information to suggest that Jahmall was, again, dealing drugs, but there were several people at the party well known to them indeed. Troy James and Jason Fontaine in particular. Both had long been suspected of playing an active part in the trade in crack cocaine: suspected, arrested, interrogated, charged. James had served eighteen months of a three-year sentence before being released; Fontaine had been charged with possession of three kilos of amphetamine with intent to supply, but due to alleged contamination of evidence, the case against him had been dismissed. More recently, the pair of them had been suspected of breaking into a chemist’s shop in Wilford and stealing several cases of cold remedies in order to manufacture crystal meth.