Free Darkness, Darkness by John Harvey Page B

Three years they’d lived together: twice those years now since she’d died.
    He slowed at the roundabout, not wanting to continue home, back to the house they’d shared, but almost nowhere in the city was innocent of their lives, their time.
    ‘What are you frightened of, Charlie?’ she had asked him once.
    The answer, of course, was everything. Scenes that played out in his head. Returning home one evening to find her standing in the hallway, suitcase packed and ready, keys in her hand. A note left on the mantelpiece, his name neatly written.
    Dear Charlie . . .
    A thousand scenes of leaving and never the one chosen.
    From inside the house, the sound of a car backfiring.
    But it had not been a car.
    Not a car at all.
    When he closed his eyes he could see her falling.
    He had never seen her fall.
    By the time he had reached the door and wrenched it open, Lynn’s body lay crumpled on the path, legs buckled beneath her, arm outflung, her blood seeping, unstoppable, into the ground.
    The first shot had struck her in the chest, close to the heart; the second had shredded part of her jaw, torn her face apart.
    Resnick pulled slowly over towards the kerb, shut off the engine and, resting his head against the steering wheel, closed his eyes. Five, ten minutes before his breathing had steadied enough for him to resume his journey.
    The cat was waiting for him on the low stone wall.
    Inside, he shrugged off his coat, walked the house from room to room.
    Made coffee and left it untouched.
    Finally, in the living room, he burrowed through the shelves of albums and CDs, searching, not for something calming, consoling, nothing that might trigger a memory, happy or sad, but this: the Eric Dolphy/Booker Little Quintet
Live at the Five Spot
, New York, 16 July 1961. Track three. ‘Aggression’. Sixteen minutes and forty seconds.
    Resnick in the middle of the room, listening, slowly racking up the volume.
    Louder, then louder.
    Still listening.
    By the time it reaches Dolphy’s solo, the bass clarinet screaming, squawking, keening – the sound so fierce, so intense – he is no longer capable of thought, just feeling.
    Fists clenched tight, absorbing the music’s anger, he takes it for his own: this stuttering explosion of anger and pain.
    Only when the music has stopped do the other sounds of the house slowly start to re-emerge: the central heating switching off and on, soft rattle of water in the pipes, the upstairs windows vibrating as a car goes past too fast; the cat brushing against his legs as it weaves in and out, impatient to be fed.

14
    THERE’D BEEN RUMOURS for days. Weeks. The government had had enough. Time for a showdown. Stop the miners, the striking miners, in their tracks. Break the strike once and for all. Show them who was boss. Tales winding back on the grapevine from London of meetings between government officials, the Home Office and British Coal. Rumours of rumours plucked out of the air.
    Less than thirty miles from where Resnick was stationed, the picketing of the coke works at Orgreave, just south of Sheffield, simmered on. Since the end of May, convoys of lorries, often with a police Range Rover at their head, and protected by police on the ground, had been passing into the works through lines of pickets, loading up, then carrying the coke away to the steelworks at Scunthorpe, some forty miles east.
    Neither side was about to back down.
    The numbers of pickets increased.
    Tony Clement, the assistant chief constable in charge of operations in South Yorkshire, asked the NRC for more support.
    What became increasingly obvious to Resnick and his team was that strike action around the pits in their immediate area had become less and less, as more and more pickets were diverted north to Orgreave: a strategy both the Notts and South Yorkshire police were happy to endorse. If there was going to be a showdown, that, Resnick thought, was where it would be.
    At the end of May, mounted police at Orgreave had