Winscale chuckled. “Best thing as could happen, far as I’m concerned, bastard thing gets wrapped around a tree somewhere, written off. Insurance can buy me some kind of van, four-wheel drive.”
“Don’t count your chickens,” Resnick said.
“Christ!” Winscale laughed. “Don’t tell me the bugger’s had them away as well.”
“Seems to be snapping out of it well enough,” Resnick observed, “considering.”
They were standing outside the front door of the cottage, the skies brightening around them, mist still waiting to be burned off the ground.
“Told me he was trapped beneath ground once,” Mary Clive said, “working down at the face. Some sort of cave-in, apparently. Sixty-two hours before anyone tunneled through wide enough to drag them out. This would have been a picnic compared to that.”
Resnick glanced round at the close rows of vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, arched sticks of runner beans, tomatoes under a cold frame, the ragged gaggle of hens. He’d noticed a sign propped inside, ready to set out on the road: Fresh Farm Produce, Free Range Eggs. “Bought this with his redundancy money, I dare say. Put it to better use than some.”
“His wife left him after the strike. He bought this place soon after. Just enough for one, or so he says.”
Resnick smiled. She was a plain-faced young woman in her late twenties, stockily built; she had a ready smile and twice the confidence of her colleague.
“You seem to have got on with him pretty well,” Resnick said, nodding in the direction of the cottage. “Life story, almost.”
“Glad for someone to talk to after what he’s been through.”
“See if you can’t talk him into going to accident and emergency, have that wound checked out. Put a call through for an ambulance; better still, drive him yourself. He should have an X-ray, at least.”
She smiled back with her eyes. “I’ll see what I can do.” Contacts, Resnick thought, tinted blue.
Carl Vincent was standing a short way off, talking to Rothwell. He broke off what he was saying and walked across toward Resnick. “What d’you think, sir? Our man or not?”
“Could well be.”
“But why make his move when he does? Why not wait till he’s farther down the motorway, closer to London?”
Resnick had been thinking about that. “Not so far from East Midlands Airport. Maybe fancies his chances of getting out of the country more from there, rather than getting caught up in all that extra security at Gatwick or Heathrow.”
“Need a passport, though, just the same.”
“Not so difficult,” Resnick said. “Even inside. Couple of thousand, that was the last price I heard quoted. Get you a passport so well put together you’d be hard put to tell the difference.” He smiled wryly. “No need to stop there, either. National Insurance number, credit account, invent yourself a new life for the right money. University degree, if it’s what you fancy.”
“And you think Preston would’ve been able to lay his hands on that kind of money?”
“I think he might. From what little I know, he could be the careful sort, keep a little stashed away.”
“He’d need help, then. Someone on the outside he could trust.”
“No doubt.” Resnick scuffed at the ground with the toe of his shoe, checked his watch. “Not a lot more we can do here. And no sense hanging around till Scene of Crime’ve tipped themselves out of bed. Too much like waiting for the kettle to boil. If they come up with anything, they’ll be in touch soon enough. We’d be best occupied closer to home.” He grinned. “Move now, we should have time to stop for a bit of breakfast on the way.”
Vincent smiled back, thinking, is that the motorway services, then, or the Little Chef on the A49? Two Early Starters, bacon crispy and well done, coffees, brown toast.
Fifteen
They were six miles short of the city when a message came through on Resnick’s mobile: meet Sharon Garnett at Queen’s Medical as soon as possible. Resnick was getting to feel more like a hospital consultant every day.
Vincent dropped him by the main entrance. Sharon was waiting just inside the doors, tired skin pouched around her eyes. “Getting to be a habit,” she said.
Resnick nodded. “Fill me in.”
They started walking along the central corridor.
“Forest Recreation Ground,” Sharon said, “early hours. Jason Johnson drove in there with his girlfriend, Sheena Snape. Jason’s sister, Diane, along with them. They’d been there a while when this fire-red Porsche convertible drives up, parks nearby. Just the one person inside.” Sharon took a beat. “None other than Anthony Drew Valentine. Not just a Premier League pimp but, if the rumors are to be believed, a major drug dealer of this parish.”
Resnick steadied his pace. “What happened?”
Sharon smiled. “The details are still open to question. But the net result’s this-Johnson’s in Intensive Care with a bullet wound to the neck and Valentine’s in a private room on the floor below, a stab wound in the groin.”
“Weapons?”
“The knife was easy enough to find; one of the paramedics took it out of Valentine’s leg. No sign of the gun. There’ll be a search party in there now.”
They walked on toward the lifts. “Jason’s been on the critical list since they brought him in,” Sharon said. “They rate his chances as sixty-forty. He lost a lot of blood, but I don’t know if it’s just that. Maybe there’s some infection. They’re being cagey, not saying.”
“Any possibility of talking to him?”
Sharon shook her head. “They’ll page me if it looks like he’s rallying round.”
“And Valentine?”
Sharon laughed and rolled her eyes. “Fat bastard! I know him from when I was working vice. The kind who’ll piss all over your boots and tell you it’s raining.”
“What’s his story about putting a bullet in Jason Johnson’s neck?”
Sharon laughed. “According to him, he’d driven in there looking for a bit of peace and quiet. I think the actual phrase he used was ‘nocturnal meditation.’” She laughed again, caustically. “Talk about a little education being a dangerous thing. Specially for a nigger like Drew Valentine.”
Resnick looked at her sharply; he knew that if he’d used the word himself, Sharon would, at best, have reported him, at worst, taken a punch and then reported him.
“So according to this particular story,” she went on, “he’s chilling out under the stars, Jason and these two girls are up to who knows what in the comfort of their Sierra and then this other guy suddenly appears …”
“Other guy?”
“Exactly. This other guy appears through the trees-you’ll like this, it gets better-runs toward Jason’s car and bangs on the window. There’s a mess of shouting before Jason slides down his window and pow! Stranger pulls a gun and shoots Jason at close range.”
“Valentine have any suggestions as to what all this was about?”
Sharon shook her head. “He’s still figuring that out. What he does say, soon as he hears the shot, he jumps out of his car, the gunman runs off, and then, humane character that he is, Valentine hurries over to see if he can be of any assistance. Maybe he did St. John Ambulance when he was a kid in the Meadows. What he gets for his trouble is stabbed in the leg. I told him, Drew, that’s all the thanks you get for coming to the rescue like a good citizen.”
“And Jason, at the moment he’s in no position to give his version?”
“Not a word.”
“How about the girls?”
“So far, not saying a thing. Maybe a night in the cells will loosen their tongues. There were drugs in the car and Diane’s already got one charge of possession. We might be able to hold that over her, force some kind of a deal.”
The lift emptied out and Resnick and Sharon got in.
“Diane,” Sharon said. “You know Jason turned her out on the street when she was fourteen?”
“His own sister?”
“I asked him about that, one time when I had him in for pimping. Starts singing at me, ‘Family Affair’-you know that?”