The Kill (28 page)

‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Fox.’ Derwent held out his hand to her and after a moment she shook it. ‘I’ll tell the boss he needs to get his arse in gear, all right?’

She gave a half-smile, reluctant to be charmed. ‘You tell him.’

‘It’s a promise.’

Derwent waited until we had gone past the two constables and were walking down the corridor. ‘Did you recognise the name?’

‘Isn’t Tony Larch one of John Skinner’s men?’

‘He sure is. Last time he was in London he was doing Skinner’s dirty work for him. Remember the Lithuanians?’

I did remember them, and the small terraced property that had become a charnel house. I flashed on an image of a body on a kitchen floor, a naked young man sprawled on a bed, a giant of a thug with the back of his head blown off. ‘They would be hard to forget.’

‘Niele Adamkuté,’ Derwent said and sighed. ‘I still think about her sometimes.’

‘I bet you do. I don’t want to know the details, though.’

Derwent glowered. ‘Not like that. Anyway, I’ve had a grudge against Tony Larch ever since. Not that I could prove that he was the one who killed them. But if you want a gunman to do a big job, Tony is the first number you’d call.’

‘If you can get hold of him.’

‘Yeah. Well, we may not know where he is, but someone has his contact details. Dangerous little fucker that he is. I know of nine unsolved murders that I’d say are definitely his and another seven or eight that he could have done.’ Derwent unwrapped some chewing gum and stuck it into his cheek, chewing rapidly, more agitated than usual. ‘He’s never been convicted of anything big. That picture is fifteen years old. He got picked up in a Flying Squad round-up after a big armed robbery. He wasn’t actually involved in it and they couldn’t hold him.’

‘But if the picture is old, Fox could be wrong.’

‘Yeah. He came back to it, though. He didn’t say it was definitely Tony Larch either, which I appreciate, because Larch would look different now. I’d have been worried if he’d been sure.’

‘You still seem worried.’

‘I am worried. John Skinner has a life sentence and he’s not going to get out, ever, unless he gets cancer and gets out on compassionate grounds. Last I heard, his whole crooked business empire was in the shit. He’s the last person who should be out there looking for trouble by killing coppers. When the boss hears about this he’s going to do his nut. You know they go back a long way. A long, long way.’ Derwent was shaking his head.

I did know. I knew that Derwent had first worked with Godley on gang crime. I knew that Skinner had been unfinished business for both of them until his personal life unravelled and brought him back from voluntary exile in Spain. I knew that Skinner had no principles whatsoever. I knew that being in prison didn’t stop him from being an active criminal.

And I knew what Derwent didn’t: that Godley had been in Skinner’s back pocket for years.

I was still walking, but on auto-pilot. For once, I wasn’t listening to a word Derwent was saying. I was thinking about Godley sending us to the hospital to interview Tom Fox, when really Kelly was right and it should have been him who called to see him. I was thinking about the superintendent’s mood, so brittle it splintered into anger at the slightest knock. I was thinking about the strain in his face and the black dog that was riding him.

I was thinking about a message I hadn’t been meant to see.

A warning.

And I was thinking about six dead police officers.

I was miles away when Derwent grabbed my arm and swung me around to face him.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing.’ I blinked at him, shaking myself free from my thoughts.

‘It’s not nothing. You’ve gone quiet.’

‘Sorry.’

He waited, letting the silence lengthen. It was a trick I knew he used, and I didn’t fall for it. When he was sure I wasn’t going to speak, he started walking again. ‘It’s unusual, that’s all. Generally, all I get is chatter chatter chatter. Takes a lot to get you to shut up. If there’s an off switch I want to know about it.’

‘Right.’

‘
Right
. Is that it? Is that all I get?’

‘Sorry,’ I said again.

‘Fuck’s sake, Kerrigan, if that’s the quality of repartee I’m getting I’m not going to bother either.’ He walked away, head down, the dark cloud over his head more obvious than usual.

I watched him go. I couldn’t worry about Derwent being pissed off.

I had bigger problems than that.

Chapter 19

I didn’t get a chance to challenge Godley about John Skinner and the message I’d seen on his phone over the next few days. In all honesty, I didn’t try that hard to create an opportunity. I was heavy-eyed from lying awake wondering what I should do. Mealtimes passed me by. I couldn’t eat for the knot in my throat that was tension and lingering anger about the teenagers’ attack on me. I wanted to do something – anything – to make sense of the murders, but actually saying as much to Godley seemed impossible. All I had was an instinct that Godley was struggling with something more than the responsibility for investigating these crimes. That and a once-seen text message wouldn’t convince any of the bigwigs that Godley was bent. Then there was the fact that he was my boss, and that I was a very junior member of his team. I’d worked hard to establish some kind of relationship with him that skirted around the reality of his lucrative sideline. I’d come very close to leaving his team a few times now, sometimes of my own volition – often because I felt he wanted me to go. Talking to him about Skinner was guaranteed to open old wounds. Tying it in with the deaths of six police officers would pour handfuls of salt on top.

But I didn’t believe in coincidences. And when it came down to it, I’d rather be right than sensible. Good for my integrity.

Bad for my career.

Anyway, I had a cast-iron excuse for not confronting him: he was never in his office. He was fully occupied on the front line of a battle we looked like we were losing. The first night after the TSG unit were shot up, response officers across the Met reported sporadic incidents of violence. It was like the first hints of a forest fire in the making: dry tinder smouldering here and there, flaring into flames with the least provocation. Fed-up young people on miserable high-rise estates. Gangs who had something to prove to each other and themselves. High-flying rhetoric about the Met’s institutional racism on the television and the radio and all over the newspapers. A sudden, unwelcome awareness on the part of our adversaries that behind the uniforms were people, and that people could be intimidated, or hurt, or sent running for cover.

The incidents were too scattered to amount to riots, or anything like the disorder that had spread across the country in 2011. But the first night, there were twenty or so assaults on police officers, trouble on a small scale. The second night, there were seventy-three. The third night, the Met control room logged over two hundred individual incidents and all leave was cancelled.

‘Get off my television, you ranting fuckstool.’ Derwent flicked a paperclip at the TV in the corner of the office, where Geoff Armstrong was holding forth from the safety of the Westminster studio.

‘The commissioner has requested permission to use water cannon against the civilian population for the first time in British history—’

‘Although it has been used in Northern Ireland,’ the interviewer chipped in.

‘Yes, in very specific circumstances.’

And who cares about the Paddies anyway?
I filled in silently. As usual, what was perfectly acceptable in Belfast or Derry would be an outrage in Southwark.

Armstrong was still going on. ‘Water cannon have never been used on the mainland in a public-order situation and it’s a sign that these communities are out of control. They are full of bored youths who have nothing better to do than get into trouble. They have no reason to work. We hand them whatever they want and then we’re surprised when they feel they’re entitled to take whatever they like.’

‘But the riots in 2011 caused two hundred million pounds worth of damage and harmed London’s reputation worldwide. The protestors or rioters or whatever you want to call them disrupted people’s businesses, their homes, their livelihoods – isn’t the commissioner bound to try to avoid the same situation occurring again?’

‘The commissioner is looking for a magic solution to a problem of his own making. His men are too scared to do their jobs because of politically correct nonsense about human rights. This all comes back to Levon Cole.’

‘Oh, here we go,’ Derwent said softly.

‘Levon ran from the police. He didn’t do what he was told. He behaved in a suspicious manner and he paid the price. Now, I am aware the matter is under investigation by various bodies so I shan’t comment in detail, but I think it is common knowledge that if he had done as he was told he would still be alive. There have to be consequences for not obeying the police, or there’s no point in having a police force and we should all be armed so we can defend ourselves.’

The interviewer was struggling to keep up. ‘But—but Levon Cole was an innocent teenager. Even the Metropolitan Police have admitted his death was a mistake and a tragedy.’

‘You say innocent. I’m not so sure.’ Armstrong smiled, as if to imply he knew the truth about Levon Cole. The truth was that he
had
been innocent, but you couldn’t slander the dead. Armstrong could say what he liked. ‘The fact is, this debate has been hijacked by Claudine Cole and her supporters who have their own agenda. We need to deal with the reality of the privileged poor who are costing hard-working taxpayers billions every year. We need to look at why they are choosing to engage in antisocial behaviour. We need to talk about what they need rather than what they want.’

The interviewer sounded shocked. ‘Claudine Cole is surely in a unique position to comment on this issue, though.’

‘She’s personally involved. Do not imagine that Mrs Cole can stand outside this situation as an impartial observer.’

‘Go back to university and concentrate on daydreaming about shagging your students, you prick.’ Belcott looked across at Derwent when he’d finished, transparently hoping for a nod of approval. He didn’t get it, but that was more because Derwent was lost in a trance of rage than because he disagreed with what Belcott had said. He was shifting from foot to foot like a lion preparing to spring.

‘I’m losing patience with this git.’

Una Burt paused on her way through the office. ‘We should count ourselves lucky that you didn’t hit him when you met him. That’s your usual technique, isn’t it?’ It was a nasty little dig, a reference to Derwent punching an attention-seeking advocate for fathers’ rights in front of television cameras.

‘Only when I’m provoked.’ Derwent gave her a thin smile that I recognised as trouble.

‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

‘You’re safe. I don’t hit women.’ His attention was back on the screen.

There was a quick whisper followed by a stifled laugh. I didn’t have to look at Belcott to know that he had been making a comment about Una Burt and her femininity to whoever was standing nearest him. She knew it too. She was outwardly serene but her ears betrayed her, turning scarlet as if someone had poured boiling water over them.

‘I didn’t think that you’d be tempted to hit me, Josh. I like to think you have more sense than that.’

‘Do you?’ He turned to look at her for a long moment, then laughed, with that sudden easy charm that could be so devastating. ‘I don’t think I have much sense at the best of times, but I promise you, you’re in no danger. I’m not so sure I can say the same for Armstrong if I ever run across him again.’

‘Then we’ll have to try to keep you apart.’

‘Can we turn it off?’ I slid off the desk where I’d been sitting. ‘Who’s got the remote?’

‘I do.’ Derwent unfolded his arms, revealing that he’d been holding it all along.

‘Why are you torturing us like this?’ I asked.

‘Know your enemy.’ Derwent muted the volume but kept staring at the screen. ‘The best thing about Armstrong is that he’s such a twat. No one could take him seriously. And the kind of things that are coming out of the woodwork to throw things at us don’t give two shits for him and his rigorous intellectual debate. They only want to cause trouble.’

‘It’s just a question of whether they outnumber us, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t even say that.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘We’ve got to win, every time, or we lose the game for ever. They have to stay scared, whatever it takes. If that’s water cannon, so be it. Personally, I’d use flamethrowers, but that’s why I’m not the commissioner.’

‘That’s one reason.’ Godley had come in without me noticing. He didn’t wait for Derwent to respond, but disappeared into his office and shut the door behind him. I went two steps after him and stopped. All of the very good reasons why I couldn’t and shouldn’t tackle him started spinning around my head. Now probably wasn’t a good time. Besides, everyone was loitering in the office. They would see me knock on the door, and go in, and shut it behind me. There were enough rumours doing the rounds without me deliberately adding to them.

Eventually, I was going to have to acknowledge to myself that I was just being a big coward.

Armstrong disappeared from the screen, replaced with a shot of a boarded-up house streaked with smoke damage. Derwent turned away from the earnest reporter who was standing in front of it and walked over to look at the noticeboard that filled one wall of the room. I went to join him. He was staring at the pictures of the five policemen who had died. They were pinned up beside the map of the estate he had used to search for the guns, still covered with annotations and angry crosses. Tony Larch’s picture was further along, with a couple of others that I’d dug out of the archives and a description. There was an alert out for him across the UK but so far we had no confirmed sightings. He had come out of the shadows to kill and then faded away.

‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’

‘Yep.’ Derwent rubbed his chin absent-mindedly. ‘The boss still isn’t convinced we should be concentrating on Larch.’