Authors: Jane Casey
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Women Sleuths, #General, #Suspense
The Kill
Contents
Glossary of Police Terminology
About the Book
THEIR JOB IS TO INVESTIGATE CRIME – NOT BECOME THE VICTIMS …
A killer is terrorising London but this time the police are the targets.
Urgently re-assigned to investigate a series of brutal attacks on fellow officers, Maeve Kerrigan and her boss Josh Derwent have little idea what motivates the killer’s fury against the force.
But they know it will only be a matter of time before the killer strikes again.
About the Author
‘All my criminal elements have some basis in reality, no matter how awful they may be. Nothing is completely farfetched’
Jane Casey
Crime is a family affair for Jane Casey. Married to a criminal barrister, she has a unique insight into the brutal underbelly of urban life, from the smell of a police cell to the darkest motives of a serial killer.
This gritty realism has made her books international bestsellers and critical successes; while D.C. Maeve Kerrigan has quickly become one of the most popular characters in crime fiction.
She has been shortlisted for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award three times as well as the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Jane has been recently longlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award.
Follow Jane on Twitter
@JaneCaseyAuthor
For Mary Brennan
with love and thanks
Glossary of Police Terminology
Cell site analysis
: a method of establishing where a mobile phone was when it made or received a call, by reference to the mast (or ‘cell site’) that connected the phone to the network.
CPS
: Crown Prosecution Service; responsible for assessing the evidence gathered during police investigations and deciding what, if any, offence a suspect should be charged with. Also responsible for the prosecution of defendants in the criminal courts.
CRB
: Criminal Records Bureau; responsible for carrying out criminal records checks on those wishing to work in sensitive fields.
DPS
: Department of Professional Standards (officially the ‘Directorate of Professionalism’); unit of the Metropolitan Police responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct against officers and civilian staff.
IPCC
: Independent Police Complaints Commission; responsible for overseeing or conducting investigations into incidents where there may be police misconduct.
MIT team
: Murder Investigation Team; operational units of the Met’s Homicide and Major Crime Command; responsible for the investigation of murder, manslaughter and attempted murder as well as other serious and complex incidents. Each MIT has about thirty members and is led by a senior detective.
PC
: Police Constable; the lowest rank in the British police.
PCSO
: Police Community Support Officer; uniformed civilian staff employed to provide an additional uniformed presence and gather intelligence at a local level.
PM
: Post Mortem examination; medical examination of a body intended to establish, among other things, a cause of death.
Public order offence
: an offence contrary to one of the Public Order Acts involving offensive behaviour in public places, including serious public disorder.
QC
: Queen’s Counsel; a senior barrister with a high degree of experience and professional competence, instructed to prosecute and defend in the most serious criminal cases.
Response Officer
: uniformed police officer attached to a team that responds to 999 calls from the public.
SNT
: Safer Neighbourhoods Team; a local police unit covering one local government ward, typically consisting of one uniformed sergeant, several PCs and a number of PCSOs.
SOCO
: Scenes of Crime Officer; civilian police staff who gather forensic evidence. Officially known as Forensic Practitioners in the Metropolitan Police.
Specials
: Special Constables; volunteer police officers who have the same powers as full time officers but are unpaid.
TSG
: Territorial Support Group; uniformed unit mainly tasked with preventing and responding to incidents of public disorder. TSG units are routinely used to support local officers dealing with large-scale violence.
Warrant card
: photocard identifying the holder as a police officer.
Here are the cops of London town
Hardworking, brave and true.
They drink their tea,
Stay up til three,
And take good care of you.
Cops and Robbers
, Janet & Allan Ahlberg
Richmond Park
Sunday 22 September 2013
00.43
The cold was like a living thing. It had sunk its teeth through the layers of clothing Megan wore, sliding through her skin to get to her bones. They ached. They hurt even more than the muscle cramping in her calf. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands and tucked her arms under her body. Slowly, she let her head sink down too, so her face was pillowed on the grass. She wanted to sleep so much. Her eyes kept closing. Maybe it would be easier to stay awake if she paid attention to the sounds of the night: Hugh’s breathing beside her, the wind in the trees, a rustle in the undergrowth, the music of the stars …
‘See that?’
The voice was little more than a whisper but it stabbed through the lovely, soft darkness that had wrapped around Megan like a blanket.
‘Hm?’ She jerked her head up and looked keenly into the night at absolutely nothing.
‘Ten o’clock.’
It took her a second to work out what Hugh meant, and by the time she’d looked where she was supposed to, there was nothing to see. Beside her, Hugh’s leg twitched in what she guessed was irritation.
‘What was it?’
‘Great big sow. Lovely lady.’
‘I missed it.’
‘Shh. She might be back.’
Megan rubbed her eyes and peered at the featureless undergrowth again. All she needed was one flash of black and white, one sighting that she could take home like a trophy to prove that she’d been right to spend Saturday night sprawled in the mud in Richmond Park. She couldn’t shake the unworthy thought that she’d missed
The X Factor
for this. Bloody Ruby would have watched it, hours ago, curled up on the sofa in their flat. Ruby, who’d be asleep now. Ruby, who’d suggested she was only going out looking for badgers with Hugh because she fancied him. Megan had thought he was cute, but in an abstract, on-the-television-and-therefore-attractive way. She wouldn’t even kiss him, never mind anything more. Even the thought made Megan gag a little, but she turned it into a cough, just in case Hugh asked her what was wrong. She was no good at lying and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. That good deed earned her a glare from Hugh, and a twitch that made his beard move in a very disconcerting way. Badgers were shy, he’d told her. They had to be quiet and still. With the two of them there, they’d be lucky to see anything at all.
And now she’d missed the only thing to happen for hours. Who knew when Hugh would give up?
The silence settled around them again. Megan made herself concentrate. She would make the best of this. She would see a beautiful badger in the wild, and have an experience to remember for ever, and she would never, ever do this again.
The bang was shatteringly loud. It echoed around them and rolled out across the dark open spaces below, and as it faded Megan wasn’t altogether sure she hadn’t imagined it, until the second one came a moment later.
‘What the eff was that?’ Hugh abandoned any attempt to be stealthy, sitting up, bristling with outrage. He was still too conscious of his image to do anything as uncouth as proper swearing, Megan noted. Minor television personalities did not swear.
‘It sounded like a gun,’ she said timidly.
‘It can’t have been. Must have been a car backfiring.’
‘I don’t think it was a car.’
‘Must have been.’ Hugh was older than Megan by at least ten years, and he didn’t like it when she offered opinions, she’d noticed. He liked it when she listened to him and agreed with what he was saying. But she knew what she’d heard.
‘We should call the police.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not being ridiculous.’ But she let her phone slide back into her pocket anyway, recalling that there was no signal where they were. ‘Look, I don’t like it. Let’s go.’ She stood up, assuming that adventures in badger-watching were over for the night since Hugh was practically shouting.
‘Get down!’ He grabbed her leg, just above her knee.
‘If it was a car, it doesn’t matter if I stand up.’
Cowardice fought a battle with superiority and won. ‘All right. You might be right. It might have been a gun. So stop drawing attention to yourself.’
‘They weren’t shooting at us.’
‘How do you know?’ She could see the whites of his eyes gleaming in the darkness. ‘They could be extremists. People who hate animal-lovers like us.’
‘Now that really is ridiculous.’ Megan began to walk away, taking long strides to get through the tangled grass. A flurry of movement behind her was Hugh, rushing to catch up.
‘Meg! Wait!’
Megan absolutely, one hundred per cent loathed being called ‘Meg’. She went faster, concentrating on where she put her feet rather than the swearing and fussing behind her.
‘Megan! Get down! There’s a car!’
The road skirted the bumpy hillside where Hugh had said there was a badgers’ sett, where they had waited for hours. She crouched and watched the car pass below them. It was just a shape, little more than a shadow, driving without lights. Its engine seemed noisy in the stillness of the night. Beside her, Hugh was trying to hide in the grass. The tiny spark of attraction flared and died forever.
‘It’s okay, Hugh. They’ve gone.’
‘Christ … I mean, crikey …’
She gave him a minute to recover himself. ‘Let’s get back to the car park.’
‘I’m going to call the police.’
‘Okay. Good idea.’
It was a good idea five minutes ago when I suggested it, too.
Megan hoped he was on a different network, but in the blue light of the phone’s screen, Hugh’s face was grim.
‘Damn. No signal.’
He hurried past her, not waiting to see if she was following. She stuck her hands in her pockets and trudged after him, trying to remember the car and whether she’d seen anything of the driver, or if there’d been a passenger. The police would want to know. If it was connected with the shooting.
If there had even
been
a shooting.
They were following a different route back, she realised after a while, across the flank of the hill.
‘Why are we going this way?’
‘This is the quickest way,’ Hugh threw over his shoulder, not stopping. ‘And I don’t want to walk along the road in case they come back.’
Megan considered the long, winding walk they had taken at the start of their expedition, over uneven ground that required a lot of arm-holding and hands-on guiding to navigate. She’d wondered about it, but she hadn’t minded. She minded now, now that she was cold and her feet were wet from the dew and fear prickled across her skin like an electrical charge. She didn’t think they had been targeted, or even noticed, but she didn’t like being out there in the dark when something strange was going on.
Woodland crowned the top of the hill. Megan was glad that Hugh didn’t lead them through it – the trees grew close together and the darkness under the canopy seemed impenetrable. Going around the edge wasn’t much less hazardous. Hugh tripped over a log half-hidden in the grass.