The Kill (23 page)

‘Do you think there’s anywhere around here to get a coffee?’ Una Burt asked me, her tone abrupt rather than conversational.

‘I was going to ask one of the local response officers.’

She looked past me and her expression brightened. ‘Charlie will know.’

‘Charlie’, or as I knew him, ‘Superintendent Godley’. It was an excuse for the chief inspector to get to talk to him – that I saw straight away. He was standing by a police Land Rover, leaning over a large sheet of folded paper that was spread out across the bonnet. It looked like a plan or a map of some kind. A tired-looking man in uniform stood beside Godley, gesturing at whatever was written on it. Derwent was on the opposite side of the car, looking down at the paper. Even as I spotted him his eyes flicked up and rested on me for an uncomfortable second before his attention switched to Una Burt. He gave her the briefest of inspections before looking back down at the bonnet of the Land Rover, concentrating as hard as if he had twenty minutes and no more to decipher the Rosetta Stone.

‘Do you think the boss will have had time to find a place for coffee?’ I asked. ‘I’d have thought he was too busy.’

Burt’s jaw jutted out. ‘He’ll know. Look, he’s got a cup.’

He did, and I’d seen it already. I was trying to think of any reason not to go over to the little group around the Land Rover, though. No good could come of it.

‘Maybe someone got it for him. More than likely he got someone to fetch it. I can just ask this sergeant.’ I started to move towards the officer in question, but Una Burt ignored me. She headed straight for Godley. I considered going the other way but curiosity won out. It always did, for me.

‘What’s going on?’ She stopped between Godley and the uniformed man, who on closer inspection was a superintendent himself. I drifted up and looked over her shoulder. The paper on the bonnet of the car was a plan of the estate with all the drains and access points marked on it. Someone had inked in the location of the van, with an X for each body and a star for each of the two survivors. A line showed the path one of the shooters had taken through the estate to make his getaway. On either side of that line, every hole and corner on the plan had a pencil mark through the centre. Derwent’s work. Potential dumpsites investigated and found wanting.

‘Una, this is Bryan Enderby,’ Godley said. ‘He’s the superintendent who runs the TSG.’ It was no wonder he looked exhausted given that five of his men were on slabs in Dr Hanshaw’s morgue.

She shook hands with Enderby, murmuring condolences. I hung back, making sure it didn’t look as if I was trying to be introduced to him.

‘Thanks for all your work. I was just saying to Charles, it’s a relief to me to know you’re all working so hard on it. I was able to say as much to the families, which was a help.’ His voice made me think of seaside holidays and Blackpool illuminations: warm Lancashire tones.

‘We haven’t made much progress so far.’ Burt wheeled around and delivered a brief report to Godley, who didn’t look surprised.

‘We’re not going to get a lot of cooperation here. We knew that coming in. It’s still worth trying.’

‘Of course,’ Burt said. ‘Maybe if we’re here for a while they’ll get used to us. They might even start to trust us.’

‘Watch yourselves,’ Enderby said. ‘This is not a safe place for police officers at the moment, if it ever was. My men were never happy about this estate.’

‘Why was that?’ Godley asked. ‘Intel or just a bad feeling?’

‘Mainly the latter,’ Enderby admitted. ‘But you have to consider the history with the teenager who was shot. There’s a lot of resentment in a place like this about that sort of thing, especially since he was only a kid. They want to feel his life had a value. There have been loads of rumours flying around that the police investigation is going to go nowhere and Cole is just going to be forgotten about. I don’t think it’s true, but it’s all about what the community believes, isn’t it? They already feel they’re on a scrapheap. They want to remind the world that they still matter.’

‘And what better way than by lashing out at the police?’ Burt said.

‘It was always a possibility. My men felt they were being pushed in here to keep the lid on the estate. They were never happy about patrolling this area. The sergeant, Mark Greyson, actually told me he felt like a target here.’

‘But they hadn’t seen anything overt to make them think there might be a genuine threat,’ Godley said. ‘There was nothing in the files.’

‘Not anything worth reporting. Rumours and looks.’

Derwent cleared his throat. ‘So what you’re saying, if I’m right, is that your men were made to come in here to show the community the police were watching them. You were discouraging protests before they even began.’

‘That’s essentially how it was.’

‘It wasn’t that they had a remit to come into the estate and hassle people, then. It wasn’t that they were supposed to find the troublemakers and provoke them into a public order offence at the very least, so you could take them into custody and get them out of the community.’

Enderby looked pained. ‘
Hassle
people? I don’t think—’

‘You provoked them. Lots of patrols. Lots of heavy-handed attention. You wanted to get a reaction. You bothered the residents and came down like a ton of bricks on any sign of dissent.’

‘Where did you get that idea?’

‘It’s obvious.’ Derwent’s eyes were cold. ‘No one got out of the van until they absolutely had to. No one looked surprised about the firework hitting the van and from what I’ve heard it wasn’t the first time. Your guys were unpopular and they behaved accordingly. Public order arrests have been way above the London average on this estate in the last few months. I had a word with some of the local bobbies and they said it was typical TSG stuff – assault on an officer but the officer has a graze and the arrestee ends up in hospital.’

‘What’s your point?’ Enderby demanded.

‘I don’t have one. Except that you’re making them out to be victims, and maybe they were, but you sent them here to do a particular job and they did it.’

Enderby’s expression darkened. ‘It’s easy for you to come in here and judge them after the fact. Are you saying they deserved what happened here?’

‘If I was saying that, I’d say it.’ Derwent had tilted his head back just a little, that extra inch that made the difference between neutral and arrogant. In his own way he was just as critical as Geoff Armstrong had been, but he wasn’t angry with the dead men. He was livid about the superior officers who’d sent them into harm’s way. The phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ came to mind. And Derwent was never one to hold back just because he was talking to someone who outranked him by a long way.

‘I’ve spent the last few hours with the families of the officers who were killed here this evening,’ Enderby said. ‘You don’t even know their names, do you?’

‘Would their names help me find the weapons? No? Thought not.’

‘That’s enough.’ Godley sounded drained. His voice had no force to it. ‘Josh, there’s a time and a place for analysing why this happened.’

‘That wasn’t what I was trying to do.’ Derwent stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘This might be all about the teenager who got shot. It might be about something else completely. Too early to tell. What we can tell is that the community turned a blind eye to whoever was planning this, and make no mistake, it was planned. They may even have helped. That kid who threw the firework was local, I’ll bet. Your policy here created an environment where it was possible to kill a handful of police officers in one go, and no one tried to stop them. That’s on your shoulders.’

Enderby looked pinched. ‘I take responsibility for my men. I’ve been doing that all day.’

‘And you’re still trying to sell the “poor us” line when you talk about it.’

Even if Derwent was right that the circumstances had been set up for a disaster, he was showing off and I didn’t like it. I looked away, across the car park, and saw a small figure walking fast towards one of the tower blocks. His hood was up and his shoulders were hunched against the cold morning air. Something about his size and his wiry build reminded me of the fireworks thrower. He disappeared through a doorway before I got more than a glimpse of him. Without saying anything to anyone, I stepped away from the little group around the Land Rover and headed in the same direction.

I was expecting him to have disappeared before I got to the door of the tower, and so he had. The door was closed but the lock was broken and I was able to slip inside easily. The door shut behind me. Somewhere in the building another door closed, like an echo. I stood for a second, listening to the silence. The light was out in the hallway, a broken casing split and shattered on the floor. I moved forward, orientating myself. It was a twin of the tower I’d been working in, except a mirror-image, with the lift on my right instead of my left. The smell was the same. The doors looked the same. The paint was green instead of blue, but equally scratched and graffitied.

There was nothing to show me where the figure had gone. The lift stood empty; he had taken the stairs, if he’d gone up. I went to the end of the hallway and pushed through the door at the end to check the stairwell for any signs of life.

It was a mistake; I understood that straight away. There wasn’t one figure in the stairwell. There were four. I had no sooner pushed the door ajar when one of them grabbed hold of it and slammed it back against the wall. I was still holding on to the handle so I fell against it, off balance. Another moved to block the open doorway and my line of escape. The remaining two came towards me, one sliding down the banisters and jumping off the end, the other low to the ground. They were teenagers, anonymous in hooded sports jackets, with scarves across their mouths and noses. Two black, two white. All male. Two lean and graceful, one bulky with muscle, one short. None was the person I’d seen outside. For the second time in a few hours, he’d done his job as bait and then faded away.

Because I wasn’t under any illusions about what had happened. I had sprung a trap, and now I was well and truly caught.

One of them pulled me away from the door so the big one could close it. He leaned against it, massive and forbidding. I wasn’t going that way, if I ran.

‘Get her bag.’ The order came from the smallest one, who carried himself like a boxer and scared the life out of me. His eyes were blue and utterly without emotion. He looked me up and down as one of the black teenagers made a grab for my bag. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

I ignored him, pressing my bag against my side with my elbow so the teenager couldn’t get a good grip on it. They were young. This didn’t have to be serious. ‘You’d better step back, all of you. The only thing you’re getting out of this is trouble.’

There wasn’t even a moment of doubt before they laughed.

‘You’re the one in trouble.’ The words came out muffled through the scarf, but their menace was undeniable. The short one stepped closer and used a finger to pull the neck of my coat apart. My stab vest was tight and uncomfortable around my torso but I had never been happier to be wearing it. ‘What are you? A plainclothes cop?’

‘A detective.’

‘What do you detect?’

‘Murders,’ I said, refusing to act as if I was intimidated. Someone would notice I was gone. Someone would come and find me.

‘So you’ve seen a lot of bodies.’ It was the muscled one who spoke, the one who was blocking the door.

‘A fair few.’

‘What’s the worst way to die?’ the taller white one said. ‘In your opinion?’

‘I know,’ the short one said before I could answer. ‘If you were raped first. A few times. And tortured. If you really suffered.’

‘That would be bad.’ Muscles.

‘Terrible.’ The other white kid.

They were passing the idea around like a joint, high on the power they knew they had over me. I was scared, even if I wouldn’t show it. I generally felt invincible on the street, but it was a fallacy. Being a police officer didn’t make me invulnerable. In these circumstances, it made me a legitimate target.

‘We could do that, you know. Rape you. Burn you. Cut you up.’ The short one blinked a couple of times as he spoke. He was getting excited and that was properly terrifying. He leaned in so he could get good and close for the next bit. ‘Cut your titties off. Slit your gash, end to end. Throw you off a balcony when we were done with you.’

He dug his hand between my legs, his fingers probing, and I twisted to get away from him. I was backed up against the wall with nowhere to go. Instinctively I shoved him away. More by luck than skill I caught him off balance and he fell back.

‘Fuck, man.’ The leaner of the two black teenagers shook his head. ‘This is sick.’

‘She’s shitting herself.’

‘No,’ I said, proud that my voice was completely calm. ‘But I think I’m going to have to leave you gentlemen now.’

‘You’re not going anywhere.’ The taller white boy yanked my bag away from me and started going through it. ‘Radio, Ste—’

‘No names.’ The short one took my radio and stared at it. ‘Looks like a shit phone.’

‘That’s basically what it is.’ I sounded as if I was doing community outreach. Anything to drag the situation back from the edge of the unthinkable, where we seemed to be teetering. ‘It uses a mobile signal.’

‘What does this do?’ His finger hovered over the red button near the top, the one that overrode all other transmissions and acted as an immediate SOS for an officer in distress.

‘Press it and see,’ I said.

He thought about it. He almost did it.

Almost.

He threw the radio down on the cement floor of the stairwell and I swallowed my disappointment, the crushing weight of abandoned hope making it hard to breathe.

‘Ma— Meeve Care-again.’ The lanky one was reading my driver’s licence, slowly, with difficulty. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

‘Mine.’ I pulled the card out of his hand and slid it into my pocket, then took hold of the bag and tugged it gently. He let go. So he wasn’t committed, and neither was the lean and agile boy who was swinging one foot as if he’d rather be playing football. That left Muscles and the one I didn’t want to think about, the terrifying one, the one who would, of course, be the leader. I didn’t want to give him time to regroup.