Resnick knew the clock was ticking down.
Charge him or let him go.
Resnick had been back at his own desk for twenty minutes or so when one of the duty officers rang up from below. "Howard Brent, sir. He's down here now. Wants to see you if he can."
Resnick sighed and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. "I'll come down."
Today Brent was wearing his blue Converse trainers with black jeans and a suede jacket, a white T-shirt with two overlapping gold chains, a gold ring in place of the diamond stud in his ear.
"Mr. Brent, what can I-?"
"You arrest someone for my daughter's murder, and I have to learn this when someone phone me from the paper."
"Mr. Brent-"
"This is my daughter we talkin' about."
"Mr. Brent, if you hadn't been so hostile towards officers engaged in this investigation-"
"Hostile? That's good comin' from you. You callin' me hostile."
"If you hadn't persistently refused to have anything to do with the Family Liaison Officer appointed, then you would have been informed in the proper way, using the proper channels. As it is, I can confirm, yes, a suspect has been arrested and is currently being questioned at this station."
"Alston, right?"
"Mr. Brent-"
"What everyone's sayin', Billy Alston. That's what everyone's sayin' on the street."
"A statement-"
"Hey, man!" Brent jabbed a finger towards Resnick's face. "Don't fuck with me. Alston, he here 'cause he killed my daughter, I got a right to know."
Wearily, Resnick shook his head. "Mr. Brent, all I can tell you is this. We are speaking to someone in the course of our enquiries and nothing more. No charges concerning your daughter's murder have been made."
Brent made a tight scoffing sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh.
"If and when that happens," Resnick continued, "you will be informed. Now please go home. There's nothing you can do here."
"You think? That's what you think, eh? Well, I tellin' you, this gonna get sorted. One way or another. You know that, yeah? You know?"
Resnick turned and walked away.
At four o'clock that afternoon, the report came through from the team that had been searching the Alston house: a small quantity of cannabis aside, nothing illegal had been found. No firearms, no other drugs, no ammunition.
At a quarter past six that evening, Billy Alston was released.
Ten
The closer the trial date came, the more it played on Lynn's mind.
She'd been in court to give evidence on more occasions than she could remember: sworn the oath and told, despite the attempts of the defending barrister to throw her off course, the whole truth and nothing but.
She felt nervous, nevertheless.
Always had, always did.
The fear that she might trip up, throw away the case with a careless word, a slip of the tongue, some misremembered fact, let herself and everyone down. As if she were being tested: as if, somehow, she were the one on trial.
"All relative, isn't it?" a colleague had once argued, a young DC who'd taken a philosophy course as part of his criminology degree. "Your truth, another man's falsehood. A matter of perception. Prisms. Nothing's absolute." He'd left the Force after four years and taken a lecturing post at the University of Hertfordshire.
Those who can't hack the real world, teach, Lynn thought. The rest of us dig in our heels and get on with it as best we can. But then, when she heard the stories coming out of the local schools and academies, she reckoned that kind of teaching was probably real enough.
This was real, too.
Viktor Zoukas, charged with murder.
Culpable homicide. The arcane language was imprinted on Lynn's mind: where a person of sound memory and discretion unlawfully killeth any reasonable creature in being, under the Queen's peace, with malice aforethought, either express or implied, the death following within a year and a day.
It had been a Saturday night, nine months before, an emergency call at close to half past two, the Force already stretched by the usual array of running fights and mass brawls and sudden, singular acts of violence, as the clubs started to disgorge their customers and began the arduous task of counting the weekend's profits and swabbing down the floors.
The call was to a sauna and massage parlour above a sex shop on one of the seedier side streets in the old Lace Market, the caller an alarmed customer who, unsurprisingly, had refused to give his name. When the two uniformed officers arrived only minutes later, despatched from a disturbance they had been attending at an Indian restaurant on the same block, they found several young women sitting on the pavement outside, another slumped, bewildered, against the sex-shop window. A young man in a stained dress shirt and the still-smart black trousers of a dress suit sat on the stairs with his head in his hands. At the top of the stairway, a woman with dyed reddish hair, wearing the same short pink overall as the rest, mascara smeared across her face, was leaning back against the wall, cigarette in her shaking hand.
As the officers moved past her along the narrow corridor, one of the doors near the far end opened abruptly and a man lurched out, stumbled two paces forward, and stopped. He was a little above medium height, broad-shouldered, solid, muscle turning to fat, a purple shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist, the purple at the left shoulder darkened almost to black. There were splashes of what looked like blood on his face and neck and caught in the dark hairs of his chest. In his eyes, a mixture of anger and surprise. His right hand held a knife, a short, straight blade close against his leg.
"Drop it," the first officer said. "Drop the knife. Now. On the floor. Put it down."
The man's muscles tensed, and in the dim light of the single bulb overhead, the officers could see the movement in his eyes as he looked beyond them towards the stairs, as if seeking a possible way out.
"Down," the first officer said again. "Drop the knife down now."
The man's fingers tightened further around the handle, then gradually opened and the knife landed with a quick, dull sound on the meagre carpet covering the floor.
"Kick the knife over here, towards me. Now, with your foot. Not hard. Towards me, that's it. Okay, now clasp your hands behind your head. No, clasp, clasp, fingers together, like this. Good. Now, get down on the floor. Down. Down, that's right. Now don't move. Don't move until you're told."
The officer nodded to his companion and began to call for backup, and the second officer moved towards the doorway from which the man had emerged.
The room was narrow, little more than a cubicle, with a high, narrow bed to one side, the kind you find in doctors' surgeries, a thin yellowed sheet hanging half on, half off towards the floor. On a small circular table at the head were several pots and plastic tubes of lotion and a single transparent latex glove, pulled partly inside out. Poking out from beneath the corner of the sheet where it brushed the floor was a woman's foot with a fine-meshed gold chain above the ankle and chipped red polish on the toes.
The officer squatted down and used finger and thumb to lift away the sheet.
The woman was on her back, face turned towards the wall, and even in the dim light available, the officer could see that her throat had been cut.
Vomit hit the back of his throat and he swallowed it away.
Steadying his breathing, he let the sheet fall back into place.
Lynn was the first senior detective at the scene, anxious to ensure it was contaminated as little as possible and that vital evidence was preserved intact.
The body.