The Reckoning (45 page)

‘I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. I’m not asking you for anything.’

‘Maybe that’s the reason I don’t want to do it.’

‘Look, what do you want, Maeve? The truth?’

The word landed between us like a grenade. The room was so silent I could hear my watch ticking. Maeve had gone very still. She pushed her hair back and I could tell she was steeling herself for what I was about to say. ‘Of course.’

‘You could have fooled me. Don’t blame me if you don’t like it, though.’ I took a deep breath.
Cards on the table
. ‘The truth is, I want you to live with me so I can spend every minute with you. I want you to be there in the evening, all night long and in the morning when I wake up, and if we ever have a day off, I want to spend it with you without even having to think about it. I don’t want to waste a single minute worrying about where you are and what’s happening to you. I know it’s not what you want, so I’ll take what I can get, which in this case is peace of mind. I’m not asking you to make a commitment; I’m asking you to be with me because it’s safer that way. And you can go whenever you like, if that’s what you want.’

‘All right.’

‘What?’

‘All right, I will come and live with you. But on my terms.’

‘I’d expect nothing else.’ I waited, resigned, to hear the conditions. It was enough, I told myself, that she had agreed to the basic idea.

‘No half measures. If we’re moving in together, it’s for real.’ The colour had come back into her face. ‘I was going to suggest it anyway. Before this came up.’

‘You were?’ I said stupidly.

‘It’s just that I’ve been thinking. About us. And I’ve realised that being with you isn’t the worst thing I can imagine. The worst thing I can imagine is being without you.’

All I could think to say was, ‘When were you going to tell me?’

‘I was waiting for the right time.’

Time. I checked my watch. ‘Oh, shit. I have to go.’

She laughed shakily. ‘Now this is romantic.’

‘I really want to kiss you but the blinds are open.’ The entire team had a grandstand view of us through the meeting-room windows and shutting the blinds was the only thing more likely to draw everyone’s attention than sweeping her into my arms.

‘Save it for later.’

‘Your place or mine?’

‘Yours, obviously. I have to work out where I’m going to put my stuff.’

I couldn’t leave her without touching her; I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards me so the solid wood of the door hid both of us from view. It was a brief kiss but it had all of the weight of a promise fulfilled.

I held on to her for a moment, my cheek against her hair. ‘Stay safe until I get back.’

‘You too. Don’t get shot.’

I had the greatest difficulty in keeping the grin off my face as I left the interview room, and I was certainly the only person in the locker room to be whistling as I pulled on my stab vest.

‘Are those yellow feathers I see poking out of your mouth?’ Derwent had just come into the locker room, even later than me, and was ripping his tie off, preparatory to getting changed into something a little less formal than a suit for kicking-in-doors purposes.

‘Sorry?’

‘You look like the cat that got the canary. What’s up?’

‘Oh, nothing. I just really enjoy arresting people.’

He gave that the look it deserved. ‘Don’t kid yourself. You’re not going to get close to Drew Bancroft unless it’s because you’re holding the boss’s coat.’

‘Fine by me,’ I said serenely. Derwent pulled his shirt off, revealing a torso corrugated with muscle. I was pretty sure he was sucking his gut in to get that effect, though.

‘Well, whatever’s making you so happy, take it elsewhere.’ He hauled a navy-blue T-shirt over his head. ‘Godley’s waiting for you.’

I finished getting ready in a hurry and made it to the car park on the stroke of eleven, to find the superintendent already in the passenger seat of his car. I jumped into the driver’s seat and fumbled for my seatbelt.

‘You’re late.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ I risked a look at the dashboard clock. ‘Technically, though, I am still on time. And DI Derwent hasn’t come out yet.’

‘Josh is a law unto himself and it’s one minute past the hour.’ He shook his head. ‘Just drive.’

I did as I was told and made time on the journey with some moves that had the boss grabbing for the fuck-me handle above the door, so-called because that’s what’s going through your mind when you’re hanging on to it for dear life.

‘I want to get there in one piece, if that’s okay with you,’ Godley said mildly as we had a bit of a close encounter with a lorry.

‘I thought you wanted fast driving.’

‘So did I, but I’ve changed my mind.’

I pretty much ignored him. Driving recklessly was the only way I had to let off steam. Godley’s car was a sleek Mercedes that knew what I was thinking before I did and had the horsepower to back it up. We had a temporary blue light stuck to the roof and I took full advantage. I almost wished the rendezvous point was twice as far away; I was having a blast. From the look on Godley’s face after I cruised to a stop, though, I was unlikely to be behind the wheel on the way back.

He was out of the car before I’d switched off the engine, conferring with the head of the CO19 team who were waiting to put in the door. I joined them at a more leisurely pace and listened in to the final discussions. We were standing around the corner from Bancroft’s address, about a couple of hundred yards away, and the boys in boiler suits toting large semi-automatic weapons attracted a fair number of worried looks from the neighbours.

‘We’ll run the van into the street so the boys can use it for cover. We don’t want your guy to know we’re here until we’re ready for him.’

‘Good.’

‘Any info on weapons?’

‘Firearms are unlikely. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Well, we’ll try for non-lethal force initially.’

‘Send the guys with the Tasers in first?’

‘That’s about it.’ The two men laughed, a momentary relief from the tension that always built up before a raid.

Bancroft’s maisonette had its own front door so we didn’t have to worry about running across a neighbour in the hall. The plan was to go in fast, zap him into submission with fifty thousand volts if he showed any signs of not cooperating, and then search the place for any trace of the missing woman. Simple. And as Derwent had said, I would be doing nothing more taxing than standing around.

It was sort of hard not to envy the CO19 guys their firepower. I joined a little group of our lot who were cooing over the MP5s. Moving to CO19 would be fun, I thought, doing my fair share of perving. Spending all day kicking in doors and taking down targets had its good points.

Since the main thing we had to remember was not to get in the way, Godley and I hung back a bit once the order came to move, watching the scene from a distance. The CO19 team had the procedure refined to an art: they slid around the corner, invisible in their unmarked van, and slipped out to their positions without anyone so much as twitching a curtain in Bancroft’s road. I heard rather than saw the moment when they put the door in: one shouted warning and a single blow that sent the door crashing back. They wouldn’t be used to doors that weren’t reinforced, I reflected. It was probably in bits.

The silence stretched for an uncomfortable minute while I wondered what was going on. I wasn’t the only one.

Godley was patting his pockets, looking for something. ‘I left my radio in the car,’ he said at last.

‘Me too.’

‘What use are you?’

‘You didn’t say I had to bring one. You just said I had to drive.’

Maitland was behind us and he had his earpiece in. He reached forward and tugged on Godley’s arm.

‘Boss. Something’s wrong.’

‘What is it?’

‘It sounds as if they’ve found a body.’

We started to run at the same moment, pounding down the street hampered by our heavy, unwieldy stab vests. Godley was fast; I only had to hold back a little bit to let him get there first. He almost collided with the CO19 team leader in the doorway.

‘What’s going on?’

‘There’s a DB in the bedroom. Looks like your target. The rest of the place is clean. No sign of any other occupants.’ The officer was pale and he rubbed a gloved hand over his mouth before he went on. ‘He was shot. Afterwards.’

‘After what?’ I asked, but Godley didn’t wait to hear. He shouldered through the gang of armed officers in the narrow hallway and pushed into the bedroom. I was right behind him, reckoning that if I didn’t step on it I would never get inside.

‘Ah, Christ.’ Godley sounded disgusted and as I came around the door I saw why. Drew Bancroft – at least, I presumed it was him – was spread-eagled on the bare white-painted floorboards of his bedroom, naked, and very dead. His face was a mass of injuries, the product of a beating as determined as any I’d ever seen. The pictures I had seen of him showed a handsome, cocksure man with white, even teeth. All of that was gone, obscured by blood that was still fresh enough to be bright red. His knees were slightly bent, his elbows too so that his hands lay by his shoulders, and his limbs were held in that position by the nails that had been hammered through his palms and feet. His mouth sagged open, presumably because whoever shoved a gun into it and shot the back of his head off hadn’t bothered to close it again afterwards. The splatter of blood and brain and bone fragments fanned out from the top of his skull like a Jackson Pollock knock-off.

‘Smell that?’ I turned to Godley. ‘Cordite. This is recent.’

He was still staring at the floor, too much in command of himself to react by retching, as Chris Pettifer was behind me, but unable to tear himself away from the somewhat surreal dismantling of the body that was lying in front of us, the unmaking of what had been close to physical perfection.

‘Skinner.’ It was said almost to himself.

‘Huh?’

He made himself look at me with a palpable effort. ‘This is John Skinner in action. What did he say? There’d be a reckoning?’ He pointed. ‘There’s your reckoning. Justice, Skinner-style.’

Maitland, crowding in the doorway behind Pettifer, got there a second before I did. ‘What about the other one?’

‘The other one?’

‘Lee Bancroft,’ I said, already starting to move, anticipating what the boss’s reaction would be. ‘If they started with Drew …’

‘Lee would be next. And Josh was running late.’ He checked his watch as he strode towards the door. ‘His team won’t have got started yet.’

But when they did, there was a good chance they’d be walking into an ambush.

‘Harry, see if you can get through to the CO19 commander – tell him what’s going on here.’ Godley took his phone out and started looking for Derwent’s number. I made a path for him through the armed officers who were clogging up the hall, watching where he was going so he didn’t have to.

‘Do you want me to get the car?’

‘We’ll both go.’ He had the phone to his ear. ‘He’s not picking up.’

The two of us went flat out to get to the car, and this time I decided getting there as quickly as possible was more important than being diplomatic. I’d left my radio on the dashboard tuned to the main set, the force-wide channel. It was a habit I’d picked up in uniform so I could keep track of serious incidents running on my patch, mainly so I didn’t blunder into the way. It was always good to know what else was going on.

What was going on currently, I discovered when I picked it up and tucked the earpiece in, was bedlam. At first, all I could hear were odd words, the rest drowned out by background noise and a flat, repeated crack that could have been fireworks. The voices were loud which was both unusual and worrying: sounding like you were bothered was something most coppers tried to avoid, and it was a fairly clear indication that the shit was hitting the fan somewhere.

Then, at last, something that made sense.

‘Trojan four two alpha, urgent assistance, urgent assistance, shots fired at police on Hampstead High Street.’

I looked across the roof of the car to Godley, who had just got there. He didn’t bother groping for his own radio, which was off.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Shots fired at the other team. The CO19 commander has just given permission to fire back. It sounds fucked.’ There was no other word for the chaos that was coming over the radio.

‘Anybody hit?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Go.’

I ducked into the car, aware of Godley doing the same on the other side. He appropriated my radio and ripped off the earpiece, turning the volume up so we could both hear what was going on. The siren wailed as I punched through the traffic towards Hampstead. On the radio, the air was alive with increasingly senior officers trying to take control of the situation, local units working out which roads to close, and the armed officers yelling updates over the rapid, loud popping that was a full-on shoot-out in progress.

Godley was completely silent beside me and I had to concentrate on the road so I couldn’t risk a look at him.

‘Are you okay?’

‘That rather depends on what happens.’ I could hear the edge in his voice. He had the ultimate responsibility for the operation. If someone was hurt – if someone died – he was the one who would have to explain it to the bosses, the squad, the police complaints commission and the officer’s family. He was entitled to be a little bit tense.

‘Chances are they’re outnumbered and outgunned. The Armed Response lads do this all the time. It won’t take long to get them under control.’

‘Maybe not.’ Godley was silent for a second. ‘How did he know, Rob?’

‘Who? Skinner?’

‘Who tipped him off? Or his boys, anyway. We didn’t even know until an hour ago.’

It had to be someone on the team – that was the obvious answer. I knew Godley would have worked that out too, so I didn’t bother to say it.

‘Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s not you.’ Godley sounded a little more like himself. ‘Where do I start to look for the leak?’

‘You don’t. Let the DPS handle it. Whoever’s done it needs kicking off the force.’