London Large: Blood on the Streets (7 page)

H was lost and disoriented
but there was something he had to do. It couldn’t wait, and only he could do
it.

‘Give me five minutes’, he
said, as he disappeared to the gents. His hand shook as he searched for the
name on his phone and pressed the call icon.

When he returned she saw the
tears in his eyes and understood immediately who he had been speaking to.
Despite the impending storm, the mayhem and the meltdown he had found the
courage and presence of mind to make what must have been the hardest phone call
of his life.

Where does character like
that come from
?

On the way up to the seventh
floor in the lift she straightened his tie and brushed his jacket down. She
looked him in the eye, and saw with relief that someone was home.

‘Ready?’

‘As I’ll ever be’, said H.

Fuck this for a game of
soldiers.

They emerged into a scene of
barely controlled chaos. A blur of frenzied activity, of comings and goings, of
gadgets buzzing and pinging, of barked commands.

Not much different from
that load of bollocks in the park then.

‘Not one word, H?’ One voice
was emerging, loud and clear, from the squall - and silencing it.

‘Not one word? Do you have
any way at all of explaining what just happened in the park? In the full glare
of the global media? With four butchered, mangled bodies still warm and oozing
their blood into the ground just out of camera shot? At a time when we are
being accused of losing control of the city, and with panic beginning to grip -
I mean really grip - the streets? You cannot find one single word of
reassurance, of authority, of… ’

Amisha had been right; Hilary
Stone had already binned H’s old arsehole, and was now furiously tearing him a
new one in front of colleagues new and old, some of whom he had known for
thirty years.

The room fell silent.

‘Not like you to be lost for
words, Detective Inspector Hawkins. My office. Now.’

It was to be the inner
sanctum, then. Stone, H and Amisha in procession, with Graham Miller-Marchant -
known variously around the office as ‘the drone’, ‘the little manbot’ and, in
H’s formulation, ‘that utter, utter wanker’ - following on.

Stone closed the door behind
them. She seemed to have regained something of her composure.

‘Talk me through it H.
Please, just talk me through it.’

‘Um…I lost the plot maam’,
said H.

‘You lost the plot’, said
Stone.

‘You. Lost. The. Plot’ she
repeated, seeming to savour the words. ‘And this is what, an explanation? A
justification? For failing entirely to discharge your normal duties in the most
basic manner?’

H said nothing.

‘H’, Stone continued, ‘work
with me here, please. I need to understand what just happened. We’ve got you
shambling around the park looking like you’ve just fallen out of an all-nighter
at Ronnie Scott’s, a crime scene that looks like a chimp’s tea party gone wrong
and an encounter with the media about which…I’m lost for words. Much like you
were.’

H stared into space.

‘Maam’, said Amisha, ‘perhaps
I can shed a little light on the matter.’

‘I wish someone would’, said
Stone.

‘Detective Inspector Hawkins
was acting under considerable duress this morning, maam. Two of the victims in
the park were known to him; one a former colleague, one an old and close
personal friend. I would suggest that this was not a normal crime scene, nor a
normal morning’s work. I think Inspector Hawkins was, for a time, in shock. Or
in a temporary dissociative state, to be more precise.’

‘Interesting. Am I correct in
understanding that you are now, Ms. Bhanushali, an accredited police
psychologist?’ said Miller-Marchant.

At
this
H stirred. He
straightened up and began to move towards Miller-Marchant; his fists were
clenched and his jaw was working. Miller-Marchant backed up, until the door of
the office left him with nowhere to go.

The speed and ferocity of H’s
next movement astonished Stone and Amisha alike. How could that bulk be moved
with such speed, such precision?

H’s hands were around
Miller-Marchant’s throat, and were forcing him down, down…

‘H!’, cried Assistant
Commissioner Stone, ‘Inspector Hawkins!’

While he waited out the
five-minute silence imposed by Hilary Stone following the release of his grip
on the throat of Miller-Marchant, H mused on his contempt for this man, this
opposite of himself. The two had never liked one another. That much was obvious
to anyone who’d had to endure two minutes in a room with them.

But it went deeper than that.

H was sitting - he knew this
because Olivia had spent years telling him, and even Amisha was now beginning
to pipe up - on a seething mass of anger, resentment and frustration ‘of
volcanic proportions’. Olivia had even tried, back in the days before she
really grasped what kind of man he was, to get him into some sort of
counselling.

But Harry Hawkins didn’t need
counselling; he understood very well where his rage came from.

From seeing good friends and
comrades blown to pieces in a bleak, windswept shithole. From risking life and
limb in the service of his country and getting little thanks for it on his
return.

From being the Met’s Golden
Boy, with an unequalled homicide clear up rate, to yesterday’s man in twenty
years. Because he wouldn’t play by the new rules. But
he
hadn’t changed,
the world around him had.

He understood bad men, wanted
to prevent them from making good people suffer, and he had an old school moral
compass: capture-convict-punish, and punish hard. Force must be met with force.
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Leopards do not change their spots.
Somebody has to wield uncompromising authority, or things will fall apart and
the law of the jungle will prevail. That was what he’d learned coming up on the
streets of South London.

H remained what the first
couple of decades of his life had made him: independent, self-directed and
nobody’s yes-man.
You can take the boy out of Bermondsey...
As far as he
could tell the constant parade of young graduate coppers too scared of
villains to be of any actual use on the street was destroying the police force.

His career had bottomed - or
ceilinged - out. He was kept on because nobody could deal with villains like he
could, and his clear up rate was off the charts, but he was not and would never
be part of the new regime. His path up the greasy pole was well and truly
blocked. And it was blocked by men like Graham Miller-Marchant.

H loathed Miller-Marchant’s
smarmy Oxbridge tones and double-barrelled name; he loathed his sharp suit,
pointy shoes and immaculate hair; he loathed his phones, his tablets and his
Powerpoint presentations; he loathed his team meetings and workshops, conducted
in a babbled code that no normal person over forty could understand; he loathed
his fast-track rise and his oily ‘yes maam’ routine; he loathed his ignorance
of the street and real people and his habit of bringing in sushi for lunch
every other fucking day; he loathed, when it came to it, everything about him.

H snapped out of his reverie
and looked across the room at the object of his loathing, still slumped in a
heap against the door.

‘It’s not him you hate,
really, guv’, the increasingly bold Amisha had ventured to tell him recently in
the car, ‘you’re projecting your own bad emotions and issues onto him. That’s
what it’s called:
projection.
’

‘Yes, well I’ll project him
out of a fucking window one day soon if he keeps on… He’s doing my nut.’

And here they were, now, in
this becalmed room. Himself, Amisha sitting quietly, Miller-Marchant still
regulating his breath and trying not to meet H’s eye and Hilary Stone,
glowering at all and sundry like a school governess from a 1930s film.

‘OK, Ladies and gentlemen,
are we ready to resume?’, she said, ‘There is, you may all remember, the small
matter of London burning down around our ears to contend with.’

‘I suggest we…’

Bang! The door flew open, no
knock. An underling surged in, wildly excited and breathless.

‘Excuse me, maam’, he
shouted, almost out of control, ‘but you need to see this. Something’s happened
south of the river. Something big.’

This time they were not
getting it second hand from social media. They had an officer on the ground,
streaming images from his experimental lapel camera to the incident room in
which they were now huddled. Images of what looked like more bad news.

The call had come in about
ten minutes before. Shots fired in Bermondsey, in and around the illegal
caravan site known locally as ‘The Island’. Not much was clear at the moment,
except that shots had been fired into the caravans, apparently from automatic
weapons, and that the wire fence around the site had largely caved in.

‘Get an armed response unit
down there, now’, barked Stone at the room.

‘Constable, hang back outside
the fence and set up a perimeter, wait until the armed guys arrive. Are there
any witnesses?’

‘Yes maam. We’ve got three
people saying a black van drove up and smashed through the fence. Whoever was inside
threw something out and sprayed the whole place with bullets as they backed out
and drove away. They were shouting something, but the eye witnesses didn’t
recognise the language.’

‘That’ll be Russian or
Albanian I should think, maam’, said H.

But she did not reply. She
was sitting now, and holding her head in her hands. H pulled a chair up close
to hers.

‘Hilary, you alright?’ he
said.

‘What now, H? More dead
bodies, another bloodbath? When’s it going to end? How are we going to stop
it?’

These were rhetorical
questions, H understood. Her focus was all on the screen, waiting for
confirmation that the armed response unit had arrived and for someone to start
to tell her what the hell was going on down there. Down there, south of the
river.

‘Always trouble down there in
your patch H’, she said. ‘I need you to be straight with me. Are you up to
this? I can’t send Miller-Marchant down there; they’ll have him for breakfast.
I’ll put him on the St James’ thing. We need to find out if they’re connected.
I want my best man down there. Are you up to it?’

‘Only one way to find out’,
said H, pulling on his coat.

He motioned to Amisha to
follow him.

‘Where we off to, guv?
Bermondsey?’, she asked.

‘Yep, by way of the boozer.
This can wait five minutes; whoever’s been shot down there’s not going
anywhere. I could strangle a pint.’

They hit the street and
headed for the car. As they were crossing the road Amisha’s gadgets exploded,
pinging and zinging for all they were worth. She handed her phone for the
second time that day to H. It was Hilary again, shouting, and sounding like she
was on the verge of losing control.

Welcome to my world.

‘H…it’s…heads down there.
Severed heads wrapped in blankets. They’re finding severed heads in blankets.’

The kid’s lapel camera
had not done it justice - seen up close, The Island was an absolute mess. Some
of the caravans had practically been demolished, shot to pieces and left
hanging in bits, their interiors on display. Like something straight out of a
war zone. H had not seen a place so shot up since he’d left the army. Not in
his twenty years of coppering in the metropolis.

Fuck me, what sort of
weapons are these bastards using?

All was quiet now. The scene
was secure, and they knew the tally: two dead and half a dozen injured, most of
them inside the caravans. And to top it all off, two heads, each in its own
wrapping. On their way now to forensics. Eye witnesses, from both on and off
the site, were being gathered at the local nick. Interpreters had been called
for to help with the former, but H knew that would lead nowhere: they would all
play mute.

‘Well, there’s not much we
can do here for the minute, Ames. Let’s go and see if Confident John can help
us start to pick the bones out of this fucking mess.’

‘Guv, you’ve never really told
me why you insist on calling him “Confident John” all the time’, Amisha asked
in the car. ‘That’s not what it says on his birth certificate, is it?’

‘Because that’s his name
Ames. Has been for years. When I was a kid there were a lot of Johns about round
here. As we got older we had to find ways of distinguishing them. So we had
John the Plumber, John the Mechanic, Postman John, Sex-Case John, John the
Scaffold Murderer, and Confident John. Actually he was called Shy Nervous John
for a long time, but then in his thirties he fell in love with a bird and
changed. Became more confident.’

They found the man himself
plotted up at the bar in the Crown and Anchor, studying the racing form in his
paper. His usual pitch, this time of the day.

‘What’s happening, John?’,
said H, patting him on the back.

‘Hello H. Long time no see. I
wondered how long it’d take you to get down here. What you drinking?’

‘I’ll have a large scotch.
She’ll have orange juice’, said H, motioning to Amisha with a nod of his head.
‘We’ll be over at the corner table.’

Settling down into her chair,
Amisha realised how she’d come to love these sessions. It was like being an
anthropologist, getting to know some exotic tribe. These guys had their own
history, their own way of behaving, their own way of understanding the world,
their own language. It was the language she really liked, and she’d noticed
lately that it was beginning to rub off on her.

‘Mark my card for me, John.
What the fuck is going on here? What was that turnout at The Island all about?’
asked H.