The Kill (20 page)

‘Yeah.’ Derwent pushed his soaking hair back off his forehead with his wrist. He was still knee-deep in mud. Years of practising high-level sarcasm ensured he achieved exactly the right tone when he added, ‘Lucky for us.’

Chapter 13

‘You have to admit, though, you were lucky,’ Rob said.

I raised my head to give him an evil look. Our new flat was open plan, so Rob had been able to throw that remark at me from the kitchen, a safe distance away.

‘That’s what everyone says and it’s bull.’

‘But it
was
just luck that you found Gibney.’

‘Don’t you start. It was good old-fashioned legwork. That was the third gun club we’d been to ourselves, and other officers had been to check out the others around London. Godley had people looking into hundreds of leads. Statistically speaking, one of them was going to turn out to be worthwhile eventually.’

‘Yeah, but—’

I was ahead of him, talking fast. ‘Yes, it was lucky that Hardy gave us Gibney’s name, but someone else would have given him up. Everyone who knew him knew about what he had in his secret stash. With all the public appeals, someone would have lifted the phone.’

‘But you got there before that happened.’ Rob padded towards the sofa, barefoot, looking like he’d stepped out of an ad for the jeans he was wearing. I thought of Derwent’s crack about him being a male model and suppressed a smile.

‘You’re like a bloodhound.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sorry. An Irish wolfhound.’

‘That’s even worse.’ I threw a cushion at him, which involved getting it out from behind my head since I was lying down. It wasn’t worth the effort. He batted it away without blinking and I went back to staring at the ceiling.

‘It was the only useful thing I’ve done so far in this whole investigation and I didn’t even do it. Derwent was the one who terrified Hardy into talking. He was the one who impressed the gun-club members with his shooting – they could not have been more helpful once the word got out. Every person on the list Gibney gave us had heard about it, and every one of them was happy to talk to us.’

‘He was good, was he?’

‘Brilliant. Apparently.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t get the whole shooting thing, to be honest. I don’t really know what he was trying to achieve. A bull’s eye, I suppose.’

‘Ask.’

‘I can’t ask him. He won’t talk about it. And I can’t ask the gun-club people because they already think I’m a moron.’ I coughed. ‘I think I’m getting a cold.’

‘You’ve been doing too much talking. Too many interviews,’ he clarified as I raised my eyebrows at him.

‘Most of which were a total waste of time. Except for the daughter’s ex-boyfriend. That was absolutely worth the petrol.’

‘Was he helpful?’

‘Not even a little bit. He has no experience of shooting and his hands shake anyway because he’s permanently hung-over. I don’t think he’d have the nerve to kill anyone, or the skill to organise it. He was a total no-mark. No, it was just funny. Derwent hated him so much I thought he was going to lamp him. Instant dislike. Obviously the guy felt the same way. It was more of a slanging match than an interview.’

‘Derwent doesn’t make a good first impression,’ Rob said, lifting my feet so he could sit down at the other end of the sofa. He put them back down on his lap and started rubbing them. ‘Or a good second impression.’

‘I think the boy reminded Derwent of himself when he was a teenager. He was a right little turd, apparently, and that’s according to him. I can’t imagine.’ I wriggled, trying to get comfortable. ‘You’re tickling me.’

‘It’s supposed to be relaxing.’

‘I don’t really do relaxing.’

‘I had noticed.’ He stopped playing with my feet though, and stared into space, frowning a little. I watched him, endlessly fascinated by the line of his cheek and the cut of his jaw and the shape of his mouth. I could never get tired of looking at him, of learning him all over again every time I saw him. That was what I held on to when, as now, the conversation stuttered to a halt, or when a careless remark from either of us hit the wrong note. We were a little out of practice, that was all. Out of the habit of being together.

It wasn’t for want of trying. Different shift patterns meant that I was often out when Rob was at home. A big case like a police shooting absorbed my time and energy. He was on the Flying Squad, dealing with commercial robberies. A big case for him meant endless hours in surveillance vans, clocking up the overtime. In between times, we were exhausted. That placed too much importance on an evening like this, when the rest of the world finally left us alone and we could turn around to one another and say what we really thought, like—

‘Shall I put the news on?’ He had the remote control in his hand already.

‘Yeah, why not.’ I wasn’t going to pick a fight with him for watching television. The news would be short, and then we could get back to talking. Or we could do something else. Something together. I had some ideas in mind.

I only half-listened to the headlines, which were mainly about politicians squabbling and unemployment rates rising. Terence Hammond had dropped off the news agenda days before. There was no new information that we could share with the public. We had no suspects for them to spot. Anything we’d turned up in evidence was too scientific to be of general interest or too important to the case to reveal it at this stage. But really, the trouble was that there were no dramatic revelations to show off. There was nothing but the slow chipping away at the mechanics of how Hammond had died. Ballistic tests on the expended rounds at Gibney’s range had positively identified his gun as the murder weapon, although we hadn’t traced the actual gun yet. We didn’t know who had stolen it. We didn’t know who had fired it. We didn’t have a single suspect or a hint of a motive. We didn’t know who Hammond had been with in the car.

Basically, we had nothing to shout about.

I watched the screen without seeing the images on it, thinking about our plans for the next day and the next round of interviews. The news rolled on, as teachers complaining about changes to the national curriculum gave way to a clampdown on benefits cheats. A shoe factory was to close down in Birmingham with the loss of 200 jobs. Personal tragedies. National problems. International catastrophes. The usual.

And then the newsreader frowned and put his finger to his ear, looking away from the camera briefly.

‘If you’ll bear with me for a moment, we have reports just coming in of a shooting in London.’ He hesitated as the graphic behind him disappeared and a Breaking News caption replaced it. ‘Initial reports say it is a police vehicle that has been shot at.’

I dropped my feet to the floor, pivoting so I was sitting on the edge of the sofa. I was aware of Rob leaning forward, as I was, the two of us concentrating on the television.

‘We don’t have any confirmation of casualties at the moment, or a location.’ He looked down at the pages in front of him and shuffled them nervously, listening to whatever was coming through his earpiece. ‘It’s a north London location, I’m told, but I can’t be more specific than that. Obviously, we’ll bring you more on that story as we get it. Now the sport, with Karen.’

Karen launched into her intro and Rob muted the television just as a mobile phone started ringing in the flat.

‘Yours or mine?’ Rob asked as the two of us got up, fast.

‘Mine.’ I hurried into the hall. My handbag was on the floor by the door and I wasted a couple of seconds rummaging through it before turning it upside down and tipping everything out on to the floor. I picked the phone off the top of the pile and checked it. Godley.

‘Boss?’

‘Have you heard?’ His voice crackled a little; he was in his car.

‘Another shooting?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was on the news. Fatal?’

There was a tiny pause. ‘Yes.’

‘A police officer?’

‘I’m not going to talk to you about it over an open line.’

His tone had been faintly incredulous. I felt my face go warm. ‘Is it our guy?’

‘I don’t know yet. But in case it is I don’t want local CID hoofing all over the crime scene, or anyone else except us. If we get this third hand or fourth hand, we’ve got no chance.’

‘Where am I going?’

‘Tottenham. The location is one of the big housing estates, so watch your back. The residents are going to be difficult to handle.’

‘What’s the address?’

‘The Maudling Estate. Derwent is picking you up. He should be with you soon. I rang him first. Everyone else is coming too. Everyone I could get hold of, that is.’

I registered that of all of us I was the last person he’d called, and tried not to mind. ‘Okay.’

‘I’ll see you there.’ He cut the connection before I could say goodbye.

My pulse was fluttering. I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm myself enough to think about what I needed to take with me to the scene. I’d been off duty, my mind in neutral. I wasn’t ready for this.

And I wasn’t dressed for work either, I thought, looking down at the skinny jeans and vintage Stone Roses sweatshirt that had been ideal for a night in. I pulled the sweatshirt off as I went into our bedroom and opened the wardrobe. It took me seconds to find a suit, still in its dry-cleaner’s bag, and a crisp white top, and another minute to get out of the old clothes and into the new, including my freshly polished boots. Suited and booted. It was as if I had known I would need to make myself presentable at short notice. I tied my hair back, despairing of making it look neat otherwise. Small earrings. Minimal make-up.

In the mirror I looked tall, professional, a little severe. Worried, if you knew me. Tense, even if you didn’t.

I went back to the sitting room, where Rob was frowning at his phone.

‘What?’

‘According to Twitter it was a van, on an estate in Tottenham.’

‘A borough van?’

He shook his head. ‘TSG.’

I went cold. The TSG were the Territorial Support Group, a standing body within the Met who dealt with public order offences. They were the ones who took charge of marches and demonstrations, who were front line when it came to quelling riots and civil disobedience. They tended to be big, fit, male and intimidating. When they didn’t have a riot to deal with, they patrolled the places where trouble seemed likely to flare. A TSG van typically contained six officers and a sergeant and it made a very efficient deterrent if anyone was considering causing trouble. It also made a large target.

Rob glanced up, then looked me up and down. ‘Off out?’

‘Godley wants us to be there.’

Rob narrowed his eyes very slightly at that and I knew he was frustrated to be left behind. He’d left the team because of me, because Godley would not allow personal relationships between his officers. I felt the guilt hit and tried not to let it show on my face.

‘Does he think it’s connected to Hammond?’

‘I suppose so, or we wouldn’t be there. Not yet, anyway.’

‘But he didn’t say specifically.’

‘He was in the car. He didn’t say much about anything.’

‘According to the ever-reliable Twitter, it’s multiple casualties.’

‘Seriously?’ I went across to look over his shoulder. He scrolled up, pausing every so often to read a tweet that looked useful.

‘It says here there’s footage on Sky News now. Someone filmed it on a mobile phone.’

‘And they’ve got it already?’

He was changing the channel. ‘They pay big money for video. You know how it is. Pictures or it didn’t happen. Oh, here we go.’

The screen had a ‘breaking news’ flash across the bottom, and a warning in the top right:
GRAPHIC CONTENT
. That always felt like advertising to me, not a warning.
Keep watching for the good stuff
.

It was poor quality footage; that was obvious from the first few seconds we saw, which were jerky and difficult to interpret. A figure disappeared between two anonymous buildings, too far from the camera to be identifiable. The picture was orange-tinged because of the harsh security lights on the estate, and the video was shot from somewhere high up – a balcony, probably. The footage cut out in a couple of places. I couldn’t tell if the news channel had edited it or if the camera itself had failed. They were playing the clip on a loop, though, so while we’d come in more than halfway through it wasn’t long before it started again.

The camera was focused initially on the white TSG van as it turned into the car park of the estate. The driver was going slowly. It was all about showing we had a presence in the estates, proving that we weren’t scared to go there and tackle whatever the residents could throw at us. Literally, in this case. Something flashed as it hit the windscreen of the van and the brake lights went on. Then the screen lit up as the object exploded.

‘A firework,’ I said.

‘Listen to the guy filming. He’s laughing.’

On screen the van door opened and two officers jumped out. They pounded across the car park, lit up by the ultra-bright alley light on the van. I couldn’t see who they were chasing at first, but after a moment of darkness the film resumed with the two officers walking back towards the van, a small figure between them. He had a shambling, uncertain walk, and his head was down.

‘A kid.’

‘Looks like it,’ Rob said.

The three of them stopped near the van, the two tall officers blocking the camera’s view of the suspect they were questioning. Another officer got out of the vehicle. As his foot touched the tarmac of the car park there was a loud crack and he crumpled to the ground. The other two turned and went down in the same moment, both of them sprawling as they fell. I could hear nothing but swearing on the soundtrack.

‘See that?’ Rob pointed as the small suspect appeared in the top right of the screen, running fast, bent double. ‘He knew something was coming.’

‘It was a trap,’ I said.

‘Who’s this?’ Rob leaned forward. ‘What’s he up to?’

This figure was taller and moved with total confidence. He came from the bottom left of the screen and walked along the side of the van that was further from the camera. He didn’t appear to be hurrying, and as he walked he fired through the windows, two shots each time, as the glass shivered to pieces and the camera jerked as if the man filming was having a fit. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.