Right to Kill

by John Barlow

The voicemail was brief, the tone clipped and efficient. A press statement had been released stating that DS Joe Romano was no longer Senior Investigating Officer on the current investigation, but that he would remain on the team until all details of the situation were known.

  The message ended with a number of suggestions, which were repeated in the email, in the inevitable bullet-point form:

  do not use Twitter or any other social media

  do not frequent any licenced premises

  do not speak to the press (under ANY circumstances)

  electronic correspondence with unknown parties should only be entered into after clearance from Corporate Communications (District Officer).

  Up ahead Kathy’s Hot Butties was open for business. Running a hand briefly down his midriff, he decided a bit of bacon might perk him up. As he got out of the car, a lorry swept past, a great whoosh of wind knocking him back against the door. The air was cold and bitter with diesel fumes, and suddenly the world felt heavy with thoughtless cruelty. Heavy enough to drown out the small things, the insignificant deaths, a couple of low-lifes. They meant nothing at all.

  Shaw’s killer had driven down a road just like this. It was the last sighting of the Toyota. He tried to imagine the sequence of events. Was Shaw already dead at that stage? Either way, it took some guts, driving the car of your recently murdered victim, his body right beside you, still warm, or still dying. What kind of person can handle a situation like that without making some sort of mistake? For one thing, you’d need a pretty good idea of where the CCTV cameras were, and more importantly, where they weren’t.

  A man in a charcoal suit was standing at the counter of the small, brick-built café waiting to be served. The suit was slightly too small for him, and he wore it badly, as if he should never have been wearing a suit in the first place. Inside, a woman talked over her shoulder as she worked at the hot plate.

  ‘Bacon’s coming. You after a butty, love?’

  ‘Please,’ Joe said.

  There was a copy of the Yorkshire Post on the counter. The Graphite Assassin took up the top half of the front page. He felt a strange flicker of disappointment to discover that his picture wasn’t on it; the Twitter revelations had come too late for the morning edition. On his phone, though, the Post’s website was full of him:

  Yorks detective drinks as Graphite Assassin strikes for second time.

  He decided to take a quick sounding of the vox populi. Holding his phone up close to his face, he squinted at the small picture of him and Chris smiling into the camera.

  ‘Crikey, it does look like me!’

  The man next to him appeared to be only marginally interested.

  ‘The detective in this Assassin business,’ Joe explained. ‘People have been telling me all morning. I’m a dead-ringer.’

  ‘Coffee, is it?’ the woman asked Joe as she handed a large bread roll filled with bacon to the man in the suit.

  ‘Yes, black, please.’

  The guy opened up his sandwich and squeezed so much ketchup onto it that the bacon disappeared from view.

  ‘He does it with a pencil!’ he said, grinning.

  ‘I think the second one was also bludgeoned with a hammer,’ Joe said, pretending to consult his phone to confirm the fact.

  ‘Leave him to it. Let’s have a couple more!’

  ‘You reckon?’

  He shrugged, holding the sandwich up to his mouth.

  ‘Who gives a shit about scum like that? Good on him!’

  There was a TV on the wall at the back of the café. The sound was muted, but Joe could see someone giving the weather forecast.

  He looked at his watch. Good timing.

  ‘Would you mind turning that up for a minute, please?’

  She glanced at the screen.

  ‘It’s gonna rain, love,’ she said, as she turned up the sound, then piled three large, grease-dripping rashers into a white tea cake and handed it to him.

  The national news had just finished, and the BBC now switched to its regional bulletins. Look North’s lead story was the Graphite Assassin. A double image of Shaw and Beverage flashed onto the screen as the case was summarized in half a dozen sentences.

  The sound of traffic made it difficult to hear what was being said, but all three of them watched footage of Rita speaking to the press. Then another face: Danny Cullen. He was exactly where Rita had stood, on the steps outside Kirklees HQ. He was wearing a dark blue blazer and an open-neck white shirt. And he was surrounded by supporters, all of them male.

  ‘Right according to plan,’ Joe muttered to himself.

  He didn’t even bother listening to what the leader of the English Patriot League had to say. It didn’t matter. They’d got their publicity. And what was the phrase? The camera loved him. There was no denying it. Cullen looked the part: respectable, authoritative, intellectual even.

  ‘They’ve got him, then?’ the woman asked, casting a suspicious glance at Joe.

  ‘Got someone, by the looks of things.’

  ‘Should’ve bloody let him go,’ the man in the suit said.

  With that he nodded to the woman behind the counter, turned, and made his way back to his Vauxhall Mokka.

  They both watched him go.

  ‘You all right, Sergeant?’

  ‘Yeah. How’s it going, Kath?’

  ‘Same old. Nice photo, by the way,’ she said with the beginnings of a smile that never quite materialized.

  About nine months ago, Joe had investigated a fire that had gutted Kathy’s Hot Butties. There hadn’t been any evidence of arson, and the fact that she’d spent the insurance money on a refit with identical equipment hardly suggested criminal conspiracy on a grand scale.

  Since then he’d kept on good terms with her, not least because the bacon was so good. She was about his age, thin and pale-faced, with heavy make-up around her eyes.

  ‘What next, friggin’ death squads?’ she said, still watching as the bloke got into his car. ‘Any kids that’ve been in a bit of bother, their mums’ll be shittin’ the’sens.’

  He nodded as he handed over a fiver, noting that her face was more pinched than normal, that the thin hint of irony which normally ran through her voice was missing.

  ‘The murders are getting absolute priority.’

  ‘They’ve got him, have they?’

  ‘Dunno. We’ll see.’

  He wanted to say more, to convince her that everything was being done to catch the killer. He wanted to convince the mothers of all wayward sons that this would stop, that a death is a death, whatever people took it upon themselves to say as they tapped away at their bloody mobile phones, that no one has the right to kill. He couldn’t think of anything more worthwhile, more sacred, than honouring a commitment to that.

  As he walked back to his car, she watched him, then reached for her phone and found the picture on Twitter: DS Joe Romano and an unknown woman, both of them smiling, their heads touching, their eyes wide open and happy.

  ‘Lucky bitch.’

  He sat in his car and made a start on his butty. He glanced at his phone. A WhatsApp from Chris. His hands were greasy, and the phone fell to the floor. But when he picked it up, his thumb swiped the ‘call’ button by mistake.

  ‘Shit!’

  He looked for the stop button, but it was too late.

  ‘Hello? Joe? Is that you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, swallowing a mouthful of bacon as fast as he could. ‘Wrong button.’

  ‘Oh. I’m just about to start a class.’

  ‘Right, yes. Sorry. Have you seen the news?’

  ‘The photo on Twitter? I just told everybody at work that it was a joke in bad taste, and that the photo was from months ago.’

  ‘And did they believe it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess.’

  She sounded confused, distracted.

  ‘We need to do that follow-up interview,’ he said. ‘Are you free after school?’

  ‘I have to call in at the libra
ry on my way home. We could meet there?’

  ‘Fine. I’ll ring.’

  ‘OK. Goodbye, Joe.’

  He put down his grease-streaked phone and tucked into the bacon.

  36

  There wasn’t any point going back to Elland Road, so he drove to Cleckheaton, taking a circuitous route, as many country lanes as he could find, doubling back on himself, noting how few cameras there were, and wondering how far you might get untracked in this part of the world.

  It was already mid-afternoon when he parked in the centre of the town, just across the road from the Bull’s Head. He’d met Rita there, when was it, Friday? Jesus, it seemed like weeks ago.

  He walked up the main street, stopping to look in the window of Pet’s Corner, attracted more by the rogue apostrophe than the animals. Further along was a hairdresser’s, several charity shops, a florist and two bakeries, including the inevitable Greggs. Not a bad assortment of places. But very few people. He thought about how Leeds city centre would be right now, with its constant hordes of shoppers, food stands, buskers and beggars.

  Then he saw it up ahead. Metcalf’s Beef & Pork. The famous pie shop. He’d been here before, years ago, on the way to a gig with the Romanos. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. They’d stuffed themselves on pork pies, washed down with cans of 7 Up, then played at a wedding reception in a hotel near the motorway junction. He didn’t remember much about the music, but the evening’s food had been pretty good.

  Apart from the Greggs on the corner, Metcalf’s was the only shop doing any business. As he picked up his step, he felt his hand wavering lightly over his stomach once more. Then he stopped. The warm, fatty smell of pork pies was already in his nostrils, but something familiar caught his eye: the word Lobster. There it was again, Turner’s poster, pasted to a lamppost:

  The Lobster Pot

  Modern society: A fresh view

  How many things are you not allowed to do or say anymore?

  He asked himself, but couldn’t think of anything obvious.

  We’re becoming an endangered species: the Great White Male (GWM)…

  He imagined Turner at home, looking out across the majestic valleys of Yorkshire, as he penned his paean to conservative outrage.

  …Let’s build an alternative view of society, one based on decency, honesty and common sense.

  Turner was being questioned now. Had he manufactured the whole thing? The first kill might have been opportunistic, but the second one chimed pretty well with Turner and his half-arsed vigilantes. Or a more sinister version of them. Could Turner have provoked it, or somehow encouraged it? Was it the kind of murder a lawyer might devise, a lawyer motivated by rage? Rage or indignation? Hatred? Loathing?

  His mind slipped a gear. Two killers? The thought had been dancing around at the back of his mind all day. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about it too much. But now it felt right, and Rita was sure to have considered the possibility as well. Where did that leave Megan’s suggestion that there’d be a third kill, and soon?

  He looked up the street at the butcher’s window, perhaps hoping that the neat rows of pies would give him a clue. The siren call of hog-soaked piecrust was strong, but the knowledge that he was so close to the site of Craig Shaw’s murder took the edge off his appetite.

  ‘Great White Male?’ he said, turning on his heels. ‘Perhaps it’s a not-so-great white male I need to talk to.’

  The light was just beginning to fade when he got up to the library. He was about to drive into the car park when he saw two youngish men in suits coming out of the building. He pulled up at the side of the road and watched them. The main doors were about twenty yards away, but even at that distance he could tell they were coppers.

  They walked as far as the corner of the building, then stopped. Joe got out of the car and leant on the wall, phone pressed to his ear, shielding his face as best he could, pretending to talk. There was a bicycle against the side of the library building. The officers were giving it a pretty good going-over, taking pictures, heads nodding as they spoke. They examined the crossbar in detail, bending down until their noses almost touched it.

  Then his attention was taken by a subtle shift in the light reflected off the main doors. The young librarian poked his head out of the entrance. Joe couldn’t make out whether there was a scowl on his face or something more troubled. Whichever it was, he dithered in the doorway, not sure what to do, before eventually disappearing back inside.

  ‘Mark Sugden,’ he whispered.

  He shifted position, edging halfway behind a bush in case the Kirklees men happened to look in his direction. He considered his options. He couldn’t very well go and give the librarian a poke now. But Sugden was most definitely a person of interest. He was one of the individuals that Joe had ordered background material on last night. Now Rita’s men also had him in their sights. Perhaps whatever they were looking for was in that file, which was now on the back seat of the car with the others, where they’d been all day.

  Last night. Something about the library. It had been niggling him. What was it? The librarian? No, something else, something he hadn’t worked out, but which he knew was there, waiting for him, staring at him. He looked across at the building. It was where he’d met Chris. She’d been putting up a poster for Job Club. He got out his phone, found the photos of the posters. Last night? Just before his brain stopped working, he’d flicked through the photos. Job Club… Living with Bereavement… Building with Lego…

  Living with Bereavement. What was it? There was something familiar about the poster, its layout, the unfussiness, so different from most of the others, with their jazzy fonts and excessive use of exclamation marks. It reminded him of her. Of Chris Saunders. He zoomed in, found the contact number, then grabbed his notebook, flicking through it clumsily with one hand until he came to the right page. It was her. The same number. Chris Saunders ran that group too: Living with Bereavement.

  He leant on the wall, crushed by the sense of someone else’s suffering, and by the thought of his own weakness. To life’s setbacks his response had always been to wallow in self-pity. Yet here was a woman who gave her time to others, that they might suffer less. She’d lost someone, she must have done. And her response had been to help those who were suffering through their own grief.

  ‘Jesus, you poor woman.’

  A frenzy of competing ideas raced through his mind, colliding with one another, refusing to let him form a cogent line of thought. Then the library’s doors opened again. Instinctively he pulled back, until he was further out of view. And there she was. He looked at his watch. Shit, he was supposed to ring her. What time did teachers knock off these days?

  She emerged, stopped and took a couple of breaths, as if to steady herself. Her eyes were wide open, and there was an angularity to her body, her senses sharpened. She was guarded, on edge.

  Joe stood dead still and watched. After a brief pause, she turned to her right and made her way to the corner of the building. As she went, she got out a phone and pressed it to her ear. Her movements were careful, alert. She ignored the two besuited men crouched over a bike. Up the drive she came, towards him, moving fast now, her strides long and deliberate. She’d seen him.

  ‘Joe? Are you skulking in the shadows?’

  Her tone was friendly but forced. Her smile was painfully unconvincing, anxious, her eyes just a touch red, he thought.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m… working.’

  As he spoke, he realized that he was also tense. When they’d met in the pub yesterday, they’d kissed each other spontaneously. Now it felt like one of those ghastly social niceties you’d do anything to avoid.

  Meanwhile, the two detectives disappeared into a car a little way beyond the bike and drove off.

  ‘Could you wait just a minute? I need to check something.’

  He left her there, unkissed, and walked down the drive, taking photos of the bike as he went, the flash from his phone lighting up the near side of the lib
rary building, turning it a sickly, anaemic yellow.

  The bike was similar to the one he’d seen on Saturday morning, chained up in exactly the same place. The same bike? He couldn’t be sure, but it certainly looked similar, a racer, but slightly sturdier than a speed bike, more of a general-purpose model.

  He took a few close-ups, as many angles of the back view as he could.

  ‘Do you mind? That’s private property.’

  He didn’t need to look up. He carried on, took one final shot, then slipped his phone into his jacket pocket.

  ‘You mean this,’ he said, pointing to the bike.

  He ran his finger very lightly over the crossbar, failing to find any tell-tale signs of where plastic tape might have been stuck.

  ‘Keen cyclist, Mr Sugden?’

  ‘Don’t you lot ever leave folk alone?’

  ‘I’m sure my colleagues have already asked you, but last Tuesday evening, were you here when the Lobster Pot group met? Were you the one who locked up after they finished?’

  ‘Am I being questioned again?’

  ‘Well, it is a question. And as you can see I’m waiting for an answer.’

  ‘I was here on Tuesday ’til about nine. We open late on Tuesdays.’

  ‘And you came by bike?’

  Sugden shifted on his feet. Joe could imagine the clichés that were now swirling about in the young man’s mind: the police state, the repressive forces of power, smash the status quo with a big bowl of hummus.

  ‘Do you really need to ask? Again? I thought you’d got CCTV cameras everywhere.’

  ‘Yep. It’s impossible to go anywhere without being spotted these days. But, y’know, it’s sometimes better just to ask a person where they’ve been. Call me old-fashioned.’

  He waited patiently, relishing the thick shroud of awkwardness that hung between them.

  ‘I told them, and I’ll tell you. The bike’s not mine.’

  Joe waited. He didn’t believe it. Or, perhaps, he didn’t want to believe it. Sugden fit the bill so perfectly. It was no surprise that Rita’s men were sniffing around. The Shaw killing? Perhaps it had been a mistake, a moment of madness when he was buying something, or an argument that got out of hand. Whatever, the key was Craig Shaw.