by Carl Goodman
She had returned to Southampton after the incident, even though the commanding officers at the station hadn’t really wanted her there. Not so much a problem with her as an admission of their abject failure, although by that point Eva had realised the failure was not theirs. They did their best to keep her away from the investigation into Lynch, but somehow Eva kept coming up with leads where they again failed. Hardly surprising, she thought as she watched a traffic warden put a ticket on a car. By that point her surveillance methods were no longer of the sort that would have been admissible in court.
What do you do when the law is corrupt? When there is no doubt, no ambiguity. When the state and those who administer the law are clearly working for their own purposes, not those of the people they were duty-bound to protect? Lynch was a monster. Eva knew that for a fact. She had evidence, even though she couldn’t use it. So when the opportunity to end him had presented itself, she had taken it.
It hadn’t been hard to contact Semion Razin’s organisation, no harder than it had been to sniff out Warren Muir’s pub. She followed emails and instant messages and found her way to the people who could make decisions, at a local level at least, and had presented them with a plan. Who are you? they had asked. Someone who wants Colin Lynch dead, she had told them. What else do you need to know?
She had visited the remains of Winter’s Gate Farm herself, while fires still burned in wheat fields and scene of crime officers scoured the blackened earth for body parts. Despite the stench and smoke the air felt cleaner than it had in a long time.
* * *
It was raining by the time she met Alastair Hadley outside Kingston station. This time she made him come to her. Rain soaked her hair and ran down her face, but it felt cool, invigorating. It chilled her thoughts. Her mind was clearer now than it had been in nearly two years.
Hadley was as irascible as ever, though. ‘So you got your killers,’ he sneered, ‘good for you. Now you can get back to the task of finding Razin’s fixer.’
Eva didn’t feel the need to bother with any kind of expression. Her face was immobile. The only movement came from her lips when she uttered a single syllable. ‘No,’ she told him.
For a moment Hadley didn’t seem to know how to react. He searched her face for clues but she gave him none, so he defaulted to threats and bluster. ‘I hope you’re not messing me around Harris because if you are, you’re going to be enjoying the comforts of HM Prison Bronzefield. I want to know who’s on the shortlist you made of officers who could be Razin’s fixer. I want the names, right now.’
He took a step towards her. He was trying to physically threaten her, she realised, but after Harred it hardly counted for much. Gangly Alastair Hadley, rain-soaked hair plastered to the side of his face. When she looked at the waspish strands she became fairly certain he dyed them. A fake then, through and through.
‘No,’ she said again as she too took a step closer to show she was not intimidated any more. It was time for her own exit strategy. ‘I don’t need the shortlist. I know who Razin’s fixer is. So should you,’ she added before he could speak. ‘You would know, if you got off your lazy arse and actually did some work instead of manipulating people to do it for you. You’re not a very good cop are you, Alastair? Then again, there are people around here who don’t think you’re really a cop at all.’
For a moment she thought he was going to slap her. Just try it, she thought, fingering the grip of Odie’s stun gun, which was concealed in her pocket. Then Hadley seemed to have enough sense to realise something had changed and he backed off, just a little.
‘Semion Razin is a threat to national security,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘He is a major supplier of class-A drugs and he launders hundreds of millions of pounds through the UK. When you reach Razin’s level you stop thinking in terms of crime and start thinking in terms of economic terrorism. It is imperative that we shut him down.’
‘And that justifies Colin Lynch, does it?’
‘And does that justify what you did to Colin Lynch?’ He spat the words at her. ‘You killed Lynch. You set him up. A cop who conspired with a drug dealer to murder his competition. They’re going to have a field day inside with you, Harris. You’ll end up as some twenty-stone bitch’s whore doing tricks in the showers at Bronzefield just so as not to get another beating. I told you. I own you. Now give me what I want.’
‘No,’ she insisted, but this time she smiled. ‘I have something else for you, though.’ Eva reached further into her pocket, past the stun gun, and took out what she had come to think of as her deadlier weapon. She held it between thumb and forefinger and showed it to Hadley. It was a memory stick.
‘Here you go,’ she said as she gave it to him. He took it in a gloved hand, stared, and didn’t know what to do with it. ‘It’s the unencrypted copy of all the email exchanges you had with Colin Lynch. Every last one. I know you were being careful, Alastair, but Lynch wasn’t. There are hundreds of emails there. Lynch incriminates you in about thirty of them. There’s enough to prove that Lynch was being run as an unsanctioned operation between the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Security Services. Lynch was your bid to break Razin’s organisation in the UK. Lynch was supposed to break the back of Razin’s operation so then you’d own Lynch and everything would be back under control again, right? But Lynch had other ideas. Lynch didn’t want to be controlled. When you realised Lynch was out of control, that’s when you should have shut him down. You didn’t, though. You kept stringing him along in the hope he’d do enough damage to Razin. Instead he killed PC Carrie Brenner and DI Dominic Bradley, and you still tried to cover him up.’
She took another step towards him and put her face just in front of his. ‘It was you who Lynch was going to meet at Winter’s Gate Farm the night Dom was murdered. You set the whole thing up. You knew Lynch would try and break the surveillance but you stood by and did nothing, because Lynch was too damned valuable to you. You protected a drug dealer’s operation and still tried to conceal information about it, even after he murdered two police officers. So tell me. Which of us is going to get the harsher sentence?’
Hadley looked as though he wanted to shove the memory stick down her throat. ‘I’ve got this now,’ he said after a moment. ‘I can get any other copies you’ve made too.’
She laughed then. She rolled her head back and barked a laugh at the rain, opened her mouth so she could taste the drops on the back of her throat. God, it felt good.
‘Don’t be so fucking naive, Alastair. I have copies of those emails stashed on servers halfway around the planet. You and your thumb-fingered clowns will never track them down because I am seriously good at this stuff. If anything happens to me those emails get automatically forwarded to practically everyone you can think of, police, press and politicians. They will chuck you in a cell somewhere and throw away the key. Don’t mess with me, Alastair,’ she warned him, ‘because I am so tempted to just hit send anyway. You know I’m right. You know Lynch was as devious as he was stupid. You know this stuff has been sitting in a sealed evidence locker just beyond your reach. Not beyond mine though, Alastair,’ Eva hissed. ‘I have friends in low places.’
She could see his chest rise and fall as his breath came in short gasps. She knew she had him then. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded eventually.
‘To never see you again. I don’t want you near me. I don’t want you near my career. I want you gone. If you ever see me again, even by chance, you turn and walk the other way.’ She kept her face close to his, watched his eyes as he processed her words.
‘And Razin’s fixer?’ Hadley said after a while. He didn’t say yes. But then he didn’t need to.
She dismissed him. ‘Don’t worry about them,’ she told Hadley. ‘They’re next on my list.’
* * *
She stood under the shelter of the porch and slammed the brass knocker against it, once. The wood had been varnished recently, she noticed. Everything about Jeffrey Cowan’s house seemed immacul
ate. No stray specks of paint, no scratches on the red tiles that covered the front step. Cowan was fastidious, she thought as she waited. He took care of things.
After a minute Cowan opened the door. ‘Eva,’ he said, clearly surprised to see her. ‘I thought you’d be getting some rest after last night.’
‘You heard about it?’ She noticed he didn’t seem to want to invite her in again.
‘Word gets around, especially when it involves an old case. Two killers for the price of one?’
‘Something like that,’ Eva agreed. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I can’t stop.’ It seemed academic as he was clearly not going to let her through the door, but she said it anyway. ‘I only dropped by to say that I found out who Semion Razin’s fixer inside the station is, and that I’m passing files to the Crown Prosecution Service and the Independent Office for Police Conduct. I thought it best to inform two separate agencies you see, so the information can’t be suppressed or go astray.’
She saw his hand slip slightly on the door. ‘Who is it?’ Cowan asked.
Eva waited for him to say something else. He didn’t, but by then they both knew the answer. ‘Well, obviously it’s you, Jeffrey. I know you’re going to refute that but the paper trail back to Phillip Jennings and his business is clear enough when you know the starting point. I don’t think you’re going to be in any position to deny it. I know you’ll say you’re retired but I also know you still have a small network of contacts at the station. And anyway, Razin’s people will know, right?’
She wondered if he would try to repudiate her claim. Instead he said: ‘You can’t prove that.’
An interesting response, Eva thought. ‘I can,’ she said, ‘with Warren Muir’s help. Oh, not literally,’ she added when he looked as though he were about to interrupt. ‘Arranging for Muir to take a nosedive off a prison balcony isn’t going to improve the situation. It’s Muir’s retirement plan that provides the other half of the story. But then you know that too, Jeffrey,’ she said as she watched the wheels turning inside his head. ‘It’s why you tried to screw up the investigation with anonymous leaks to the press. It’s also why you tried to kill me by setting fire to my apartment.’
He backed away from the door. ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ he told her.
She shrugged. ‘You shouldn’t have become a bent copper then. What was it? Your daughter? I heard her last time I was here. She sounded…’ she watched his face, ‘needy. At a guess I’d say a recovering drug addict. Is that how Razin’s people got their claws into you, or were you always corrupt?’
‘You can’t prove any of this,’ he insisted.
‘I think I can, but it’s down to the CPS to decide. Warren Muir’s little box though; did you know he had copies of your bank statements? Not the ones in your name. The ones from the catering business your ex-wife supposedly owned.’
Eva watched Cowan’s face as fear turned to anger. ‘You’re no bloody cop,’ he spat. ‘No cop would do this to a fellow officer. You’re some sad bloody geek who put on a uniform. Why don’t you go back to your computers and your spotty friends if you’ve got any and let the real cops get on with their jobs?’
‘Like larceny and attempted murder? I don’t think most of the cops I know would take you up on that offer.’
A rolling wave of tiredness and disillusionment swept over her then. It didn’t matter what Jeffrey Cowan thought of her. She knew she had got the job done. So did Sutton. Some of it had been luck, some of it had been by the skin of her teeth, but the one thing she could do without equivocation was look herself in the mirror and say: I did not give up.
‘I’m not like you, Jeffrey,’ she said as she turned to walk away. ‘I may have broken some rules but I always knew which side I was on. It wasn’t me who got an innocent man burned to death on the A3. I’m not like you at all. I’ve always known what I was doing was right.’
Whether it was legal or not was another question, she thought to herself as she watched Cowan quietly close his front door, but then Fredrick Huss, wherever he was, had made the point. Natural justice or perhaps natural law, objective and universal, existing independently of human understanding.
It might have been tiredness, sheer exhaustion, but a phrase from university seeped back into her mind then. Aristotle had called it ‘corrective justice’: to serve to redress the violation of an individual’s rights. Well, she had done her god-damnedest to redress the violation of Dominic Bradley’s rights. Colin Lynch had deserved everything he got, whether a jury said so or not. And as to Jeffery Cowan, she left the choice entirely up to him.
She climbed into her car and drove away. She didn’t know if he would use a gun, or open a vein in the bath, take pills or face the full force of the law. That was down to him.
Whatever he chose to do, Eva thought as she joined the snarl of traffic on the way back to the station, natural justice would be served.
A letter from Carl
The idea for 20/20 came from personal experience. After an operation went wrong, I started researching the refractive lens exchange industry in a way I probably should have done before having eye surgery. What I discovered both shocked and fascinated me. Thanks to the sheer brilliance of surgeons and staff at Moorfields NHS eye hospital, and half a dozen operations later, I found I could look back on the whole episode fairly dispassionately. My fascination for the subject remained though.
I tried to imagine someone who could go toe-to-toe with authority figures in that world, who would not only have the guts to stand up to them but who also wouldn’t be intimidated by the complexities of ophthalmic surgery. Someone with the nerve to take them on, because in their own life they had already experienced far worse things. Somebody relentless, dogmatic but ultimately courageous, which is how Eva Harris came about. As soon as she did though the story started to develop a life of its own. I think the thing that surprised me most about writing 20/20 was just how quickly the characters took over.
Mathew Harred’s art seemed like the other side of the coin to Robin Chatham’s science, and felt like proof that however dark science gets, art can always get darker. Harred’s fascination with Eva also took on a life of its own, and I don’t think that can end with 20/20. I think there’s a lot more that Eva has to say, from her unique perspective formed from a combination of violence and deceit. She’s more than just a survivor, her sense of natural justice makes her vengeful too. Fortunately she’s surrounded by other characters, Wren, Moresby, Sutton, and her team, who for the most part keep her on the straight and narrow.
I do hope you enjoyed 20/20, because I had an awful lot of fun writing it. If you want to talk about any of the details, or even just chat around what you should think about before letting people with sharp implements get too close to your eyes, you can get in touch through all the usual suspects:
www.twitter.com/Carl201010
www.instagram.com/carl201010
www.facebook.com/carl201010
[email protected]
Thanks for reading 20/20. I hope you enjoy the next one.
Acknowledgements
I need to say a huge thank you to Sandra Sawicka at Marjacq for getting 20/20 published. It’s had some other really great input as well, so thanks also to Harriet Poland, Victoria Haslam, Alice Morgan and Louise Brealey. Extra special thanks to editor Sophie Wilson for great suggestions and absolutely forensic attention to detail. In particular though, thanks to Keshini and Lindsey at Hera for taking 20/20 on.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Hera
Hera Books
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London, E5 8NS
United Kingdom
Copyright © Carl Goodman, 2021
The moral right of Carl Goodman to be identified as the creator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, inclu
ding photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781912973606
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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