The Kill (22 page)

‘I’m not going anywhere. This is a free country and I’m not doing anything illegal. You do your job – properly, this time – and let me do mine.’

‘You know, the cameras are down there. That end of the street.’ Derwent pointed. ‘Isn’t that where you want to be, really? On every news bulletin? In every front room across the country?’

Armstrong moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘I resent the implication.’

‘And I resent the way you’re determined to make this about the police being incompetent,’ Derwent said. ‘Those coppers were doing their jobs, and they got killed. Don’t try to put the boot in just because they were paid for by taxpayers.’

‘Mr Godley can handle this,’ Una Burt said, her tone reproving.

‘Mr Godley has enough to be getting on with.’ Derwent turned back to Godley and the expression in his eyes was pure puppy-dog, so hopeful I had to look away.

Godley ignored him. ‘Mr Armstrong, I consider this conversation to be at an end. Now, I’m asking you to leave. If you refuse, I will ask some of my officers to remove you.’

‘Are you going to arrest me?’

‘Only if there’s a reason to do so. I don’t particularly want to tie up good police officers with pointless paperwork just because you want to make yourself part of the story.’

‘That’s an insult.’

‘File a complaint.’ There was something in Godley’s tone that made Armstrong take a step back. I didn’t blame him.

The acting commissioner flagged down a couple of passing uniformed officers. ‘Mr Armstrong needs an escort back to the cordon. Make sure he doesn’t get held up along the way.’

‘I can manage by myself.’ Armstrong looked left and right as the response officers took up positions on either side of them. They both happened to be big men, made more substantial by the stab vests they wore. I wouldn’t have wanted to have a disagreement with either of them.

‘It’s no trouble,’ Williams said. ‘Thanks for your interest, though.’

Armstrong moved away with enormous reluctance. Williams waited until he was out of earshot. ‘Charles, you need to be very careful with this. I appreciate that you’re under pressure, but—’

‘It’s nothing to do with being under pressure, sir. It’s the fact that I had to waste time dealing with him when there are more important issues at hand.’

‘I appreciate you feel strongly about investigating this, Charles. But I think we should allow the DPS boys to handle it, along with the local MIT team. You have enough to handle with the Terence Hammond case.’

‘Sir, this is my plan.’ Godley had pulled himself together – back to normal, I would have said, except that I thought it was taking a huge effort for him to maintain his composure. ‘My team and I are going to run this investigation alongside the Terence Hammond case, because there is a possibility that there may be a connection between them. The local MIT team doesn’t want this one. I do. I want the local response officers to concentrate on keeping the residents out of our way. I want the SOCOs to report to me. I want Kev Cox to manage the scene. And I want Glenn Hanshaw to do the PMs.’

‘He’s not answering his phone,’ Una Burt chipped in.

‘Really?’ Godley faltered for a moment, concern knocking him off balance. ‘Okay. Well, keep trying to get hold of him. In the meantime we need to get these men off the street. Find me a pathologist to sign off on moving the bodies and they can go to Glenn’s hospital. It’s not ideal but I want to get this tidied up, now.’

‘What else?’ Williams asked.

‘Talk to witnesses, collect evidence, analyse the evidence, find the killers. Sir.’

‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘It is. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.’

I could see Williams wavering. There was something very tempting about letting Godley take charge, especially since no one else would volunteer to take it on. ‘I’m not sure about this, Charles.’

‘I am.’

And just like that, he had his permission to proceed. Godley walked Williams away from us, towards his car, and Pettifer shook his head admiringly.

‘Godley’s a genius. He knows how to get what he wants, doesn’t he?’

Derwent grunted. ‘I’d feel better about that if I thought he knew what was good for him.’

‘It’s not your business to second-guess the superintendent,’ Una Burt said. Her eyes were cold. ‘And I thought your remarks to Geoff Armstrong were inappropriate. You inserted yourself into the conversation to insult him.’

‘I wanted to give the boss time to regroup. He was getting upset.’

‘He was in complete command of himself and the situation,’ Burt snapped.

Godley had many fans in the Met, but the biggest was almost certainly Una Burt. I thought it was because he had always treated her with respect instead of mocking her appearance and manner. If it was hard to be a woman in the Met, it was doubly hard to be a plain one. I could shrug off the comments about my looks and my sex life. They were irritating but I’d learned not to let them bother me. And they may have been unwanted but the comments I got were mostly positive. Una Burt came in for nothing but abuse.

Derwent looked singularly unimpressed. ‘You must have been listening to a different conversation then. I thought he was about to blow his stack.’

‘Whether he did or not was none of your business.’

‘He’s my boss.’

‘And mine.’ Her voice was quivering. Derwent heard it too and went in for the kill.

‘And where were you when he was facing up to that twat Armstrong? Listening to Glen Hanshaw’s voicemail message?’

‘I knew it wasn’t my place to intervene.’

‘What exactly did you come over to do then? Stare at the boss adoringly while he shot himself in the career?’

‘That’s enough.’ Godley pushed into the circle that had formed around Derwent and Burt. ‘We had one dead police officer and now we have six. We are working in front of the borough’s response teams, local CID, the TSG’s superintendent and the world’s media, and need I remind you, there are hundreds of residents watching you from the towers. They are waiting for us to do our jobs and frankly so am I. Watching the two of you bickering was deeply unimpressive – and I don’t care to ask what you were arguing about, so don’t tell me.’

‘A misunderstanding, sir.’ Derwent’s back was ramrod straight, his arms by his sides. Some time I would laugh at him for standing to attention when he was in trouble.
Some time very far in the future
, I thought.

‘DCI Burt was just explaining a few things to me. Very helpful,’ Derwent said through gritted teeth.

‘I meant what I said, Josh. No details.’ Godley looked up at the towers, his face drawn and pale. ‘We need to get moving. We need witnesses and we need weapons. Una, you need to coordinate the door-to-door enquiries. Josh, find me the guns.’

‘They’ll have taken them away with them,’ Belcott said.

‘Maybe,’ Derwent said. ‘But if they’re professionals they might dump them instead. It’s bloody risky to carry them round if they don’t have to.’ To Godley, he said, ‘A couple of dogs would help.’

‘You can have whatever you need.’ Godley turned, scanning our faces. ‘I want to get a result on this one, ladies and gentlemen. I want to find the kid who threw the firework, and the two shooters. I want to do it quickly. Start now. Stop when you get a result.’

He turned and walked away, leaving a rising hum of conversation behind him. Una Burt’s voice cut through it.

‘Maeve, you’ll be working on the door-to-door enquiries.’

I knew I looked surprised. I had been expecting to work with Derwent. And Derwent had been expecting the same thing. His head snapped up. ‘I need her for the guns. She’s good at searching.’

‘You heard Godley. You’ll have dogs.’

‘Not the same.’

‘I should hope not.’ She smiled at me, but there was no warmth in it. I was a pawn to her and I knew it.

‘This is stupid,’ Derwent said. ‘Kerrigan works with me.’

‘Not on this occasion.’

‘But—’

‘Do you want me to remind you that I outrank you?’

That got his attention. ‘Is that what this is about? Is this supposed to make me respect you?’

‘It’s about effective deployment of resources. Maeve is going to be more useful to me than to you.’

Derwent’s eyes narrowed and he took a step closer to Una Burt. ‘You and I both know that’s not true.’

My face was flaming. Chris Pettifer cleared his throat. ‘There’s a few others on the team. Kerrigan aside, what do you want us to do?’

Una Burt took charge instantly, issuing orders to six of us and leaving the remainder to Derwent. He was staring at the ground, refusing to look in my direction, more like a sulky teenager than a senior detective. I waited to catch his eye until it became apparent he was never going to look back at me.

‘Why are you hanging about, Kerrigan?’ Una Burt demanded. ‘Get a move on.’

I did as I was told, walking across to the nearest tower block after the other team members. As I passed through the door Dave Kemp was holding open for me, I glanced back to see Derwent walking in the opposite direction, his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. Una Burt was watching him go. The expression on her face was pure malevolence and I felt a little jolt of unease for Derwent, and for myself. I knew she was a good police officer. I was increasingly convinced she would make a bad enemy.

Chapter 15

Stop when you get a result.

It had not been a throwaway remark of Godley’s. We spent the night knocking on doors, standing in echoing hallways asking the same questions over and over again.

Did you see the shooting?

Did you recognise the shooters?

Did you see the person apprehended by the police officers before they were shot?

Did you recognise him or her?

Can you name the person who threw the firework and caused the van to stop?

Did you see anything strange before the shooting?

Did you notice anything unusual after the shooting?

Did you hear anything about a threat to the police?

Why do you think this happened here? And now?

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about the shooting?

Is there anything else that you think might be useful for us to know?

The questions stayed the same and the answers, dispiritingly, likewise. ‘No’ came in a variety of accents and languages, it being London, but it wasn’t hard to understand anyone. They hadn’t seen anything, even if they had seen it all. They wouldn’t tell us anything useful, even if they could. Black, white or any colour in between, they didn’t trust us and they didn’t like us. Most importantly, they didn’t want their neighbours to think they’d helped us. I spent a lot of time in draughty hallways, my feet aching from standing for hours. The only positive aspect of the situation was that we had plenty of officers to help us knock on every door in the estate. That meant it only took an eternity to get through them all. We worked through the night, ordered to knock on doors regardless of how late it got. No one in the estate was sleeping anyway. The night was alive with the sounds and lights of a major incident investigation, with cars and heavy vehicles manoeuvring in the car park and the occasional whoop of a siren or shout from below.

I took a break at six in the morning – not my first, but this one was long overdue. I had wanted to finish the corridor I was on, although I had very little to show for my efforts. I walked back past the closed doors, smelling the peculiar blend of pot, urine and bleach that I’d come to associate with the Maudling Estate. The stairwell at the end was made of concrete perforated at random to allow in light and air. I went down three steps to where there was a gap so I could see the car park. I stood huddled in my long camel coat, shivering, as the crippled van was hoisted on to the back of a flatbed truck. White-suited crime-scene technicians steadied it, lowering it with exquisite care to settle on the truck. It had been covered with plastic sheeting, disguising the full horror of what lay inside it, but I wouldn’t be able to forget the blood smearing the upholstery and running in rivulets across the floor. I wouldn’t forget the big men stiffening into their death poses, awkward and outraged. You could read in their expressions that they felt it wasn’t how their stories were supposed to end.

A movement on the right caught my attention. Brooding, his head down, Derwent strode across the tarmac. He didn’t acknowledge the SOCOs, shouldering past as if they were in his way. It was such a typically Derwent attitude, when he had deliberately chosen to walk through their crime scene. I watched until he passed out of sight, seeing frustration in the line of his shoulders and the angle of his head. No weapons, I deduced. No luck anywhere.

Every instinct told me not to go anywhere near Derwent. Experience had taught me I would get the abuse he wanted to direct at Una Burt. As he himself had put it, more than once, ‘Shit rolls downhill, Kerrigan.’ That didn’t mean I had to stand in its way.

I waited until the truck had left with its sad burden, then trudged down the rest of the steps to the ground floor. Someone had propped open the door at the bottom and I was glad. It took the edge off the smell of old rubbish and wee that filled the hallway. I was just passing the lift when the doors rattled open. Una Burt was standing in it, alone. She looked out at me, showing absolutely no surprise at finding me there.

‘Maeve. Any luck?’

‘No, ma’am. Not as such. Did you do any better?’

‘No.’ She came out of the lift and stood for a second as if she was trying to decide what to do next. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I was just going to have a break.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

Please don’t
, I thought, aware that the one thing that would send Derwent completely over the edge was if I appeared to be enjoying the chief inspector’s company. There was nothing I could do to shake her off, though: she kept pace with me across the tarmac, hurrying to keep up with my longer stride.

There were still plenty of officers hanging around. It was almost the only sign by now of what had happened, since the SOCOs had cleared away the blood and broken glass.