“What the …”
The man nearest to Valentine smacked the barrels of the shotgun hard across his head and Valentine cannoned off the wall and sank down to his knees, spitting blood.
At the back of the room, the Dutchman moved his hand carefully away from the handle of his semi-automatic and stood to attention.
“Okay,” one of the men said, his voice strong but muffled. “The money. Who’s holding?”
First the Dutchman and then Leo emptied their pockets: close to thirty thousand between them. With the eight hundred Raymond had scattered across the floor and what the others were carrying, there was close to thirty-two all told.
“That’s it,” Leo said. “That’s all there is.”
“Is it fuck!” one of the men said and the other one lifted the suitcases, one at a time, up from the floor. They took one each and backed toward the door.
“Stick your head out too soon, you’ll get it shot off.”
Nobody moved, not till they’d heard the roar of a powerful engine, the squeal of tires. And all the while, Raymond’s blood spread slowly across the stained and pitted floor.
Thirty-eight
They were in Helen Siddons’s office, Resnick, Norman Mann, and Siddons herself. Despite the relative warmth outside, the windows were closed tight and the air was thickening with blue-gray smoke.
“So what we’ve got,” Siddons said, “this sorry article, Raymond Cooke, shot to pieces for no reason anyone can think of. A penny-ante restaurant raided in the early hours of the morning by two heavily armed men who got away with a couple of hundred from the till, a couple of Rolexes, and small change. That’s the cock-and-bull story they’re offering us?”
Drew Valentine, Leo Warner, and two others had been questioned by teams of officers since first light and so far none of them had deviated from their prearranged story. The interior of the Cassava had been searched and photographed by Scene of Crime. Raymond Cooke’s body had been shipped out in a heavy-duty plastic bag to the morgue.
Before the police had arrived, there had been time for Valentine and his crew to effect a minimum of salvage work, if not as much as they would have liked. First off, the Dutchman and his brother had been bustled into their car and clean away; by now, they were safely out of the country. Second, the Beretta had been stashed out back in a bin of vegetable peelings and old bones, from where it had been taken, wrapped and weighted, and thrown into the River Trent. If Valentine had had his way, and the time, that was where Raymond’s body would have been, too. Less to explain away.
“You knew him, Charlie. This Cooke. His being there, that time of night, it make any sense to you?”
Resnick shook his head. “Not right now, no.”
“Not dealing then, working for Valentine.”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Norman?”
“Cooke, I don’t see as he matters a toss one way or another. No, this was serious, a rip-off. Some other gang’s come in, taken Valentine for everything he’s got.” He shook his head, cleared his throat. “Christ knows what they got away with, thousands, probably, cash or kind.”
Siddons picked up her coffee cup, but it was already empty. “Any idea who might have been responsible?”
Mann laughed. “Too many. Could be someone lightweight, chancing his arm, looking to move up. I might’ve reckoned Jason Johnson for it, if he’d not already been nursing a sore head. If it’s not that, it’s one of the big boys, out to keep Valentine in line, make a tidy profit on the side.”
“Come on, Norman,” Siddons said. “Get off the bloody fence. You’re the one supposed to have your finger on the pulse. Or is that just so much bullshit?”
The look in Mann’s eyes was smarting and dangerous. “Bullshit, nothing. You want to know what I think, the way this was planned, executed, I’d say this was a major player, confident, not afraid.”
“Names?”
“Planer, that’s where my money’d be. Not that he’d risk dirtying his hands himself. No one too close to him, either. He’d bring somebody in from outside. Manchester, London. Whoever it was, they’ll be well home by now, late breakfast, celebration. Champagne. Bastards.”
“And it’s not worth picking him up? Planer?”
“Not unless you want him laughing in your face.”
Siddons scraped back her chair and walked to the window, stared out. “Charlie, you go along with that?”
“Norman’s area, not mine.”
“Listen,” Mann said. “Either Valentine knows who ripped him off, or he’s got a pretty good idea. And he’s not about to sit around and do nothing about it. We might not be able to lay a hand on Planer, but that’s not to say Valentine won’t find a way himself.”
Siddons knotted her hands tight. “That’s the one thing, the one thing I dreaded, the likes of Valentine taking the law into their own hands.”
“Bread-and-butter stuff,” Norman Mann said with a smile. “Slag-on-slag. Long as they stick to shooting themselves, why not keep our heads down, let ’em get on with it?”
“And if another Raymond Cooke gets in the way?” Resnick asked.
“Own up, Charlie,” Mann sneered. “Who the fuck cares about an arsewipe like that?”
Resnick didn’t recognize her at first, sitting close against the wall adjacent to his office door. Save for a few stray wisps, her red hair was hidden beneath a dark beret, the only makeup careful around the eyes. She was wearing a plain, button-through dress and flat shoes. Terry Cooke’s former common-law wife.
“Eileen, come in. Come on inside.” Holding the door, he let her precede him. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?”
She shook her head and he motioned toward a chair, sat down himself.
“I’m sorry about Raymond.”
Eileen bit down into her lower lip. “I’ve just come from seeing the body.”
Ray-o’s mother had run off when he was four, his father had not been seen in years, his uncle dead by his own hand; Resnick supposed Eileen, in a manner of speaking, was his next of kin.
“They pulled back this sheet,” Eileen said, not looking at Resnick, but at the floor. “They pulled it back and he was just laying there like … like meat. Something they’d hunted and shot down, that’s what I kept thinking. Meat.”
When Resnick had first run across Raymond, the lad had been working at the abattoir close by the County ground, up to his elbows in tubs of guts, intestines, blood, and bone. The stink of it had clung to his hair, his body, had followed him everywhere, rank, like a second skin.
“I’m sorry, Eileen. Sorry you had to see him like that.”
“Whatever he’d done, whatever he was like, he never deserved that.”
She fumbled for a tissue and Resnick waited, patient. Noisily Eileen blew her nose. “Nobody’ll tell me, not really, tell me what happened.”
Resnick leaned slowly forward. “There was an armed robbery at the restaurant. Some shooting. Raymond, as far as we can tell, just happened to be there at the wrong time. Unfortunately he got in the way, the line of fire. Of course, we’re making inquiries, but for now that’s all we know.”
“It’s not right.”
“No.”
“You’re not going to bother, are you? Over Ray-o, I mean. You’re not going to be pulling out all the stops because of him.”
“Eileen, I assure you. We’re taking it very seriously.”
“Yeah? And so far you’ve got nothing, right? You go on about how he just happened to be there. I don’t think Ray-o’d set foot in that place in his life. I know him. I don’t think he would, not without a reason.”
Resnick bent toward her. “There’s nothing you can think of that would help, like you say, give us a reason for why he was there?”
“No.”
“Maybe if you thought about it …”
“I told you, I don’t know …”
“Okay.” He sat back again. “I’m sorry there isn’t any more I can tell you. Not now, anyway.”
Pushing the tissue down into her bag, Eileen got to her feet. “Don’t hold my breath, right?”