Gallowstree Lane

by Kate London

  He was looking at her directly and she was unsettled by the sudden intensity of his gaze. It was almost as though he was waiting for her to say or do something and she wished she could fish whatever it was out of the air.

  She said, ‘You all right, Ryan?’

  He shook his head as if he was saying no, but the words said that came out were, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  How to get past that? He had that street armour that wouldn’t let you close. She said, ‘You don’t seem fine.’ He scuffed the ground with his trainers. ‘I’d offer you a ciggie, but I’m not allowed.’

  He said, ‘Bit of a goody-two-shoes, aren’t you? For a fed, I mean.’

  That made her smile. Her phone buzzed with a text. She fished it out of her bag. It was the childminder.

  Sorry, can’t do it tonight.

  She put the phone back in her bag. Her face must have given her away, because Ryan said, ‘Problem?’

  She barely moved. ‘No, it’s nothing.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like nothing.’

  The rules were: never tell them anything about your life. Never show weakness.

  After a brief silence, he said, ‘Give me a drag anyway. I won’t tell.’

  She sighed, distracted, and handed him the cigarette. What the hell.

  He inhaled. ‘You should be more careful, miss.’ He nodded towards the CCTV cameras. ‘I’m on film.’ He was deadpan, and momentarily she was worried – why take these stupid risks just to get some information? But then he grinned and was likeable again, just a mouthy kid. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said. ‘I’m messing with you.’

  The wide grin was still there, softening his face and cracking it open. She saw a row of even white teeth, regular little pearls. Only a youngster had such healthy teeth. She wanted to help. It felt so possible to help. She said, ‘What’re you gonna do, Ryan?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘What’re you gonna do with your life? Tell me it’s not going to be all fights and drugs and stuff. That’s a shitty life.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll be all right, miss.’

  She thought of his home. The dirty sofa opposite the TV. The empty cupboards in the kitchen. He wasn’t going to be all right.

  ‘Gonna be a footballer.’

  ‘OK, well that’s a good start.’ Even she could hear how unconvincing her enthusiasm sounded. ‘You could play for a local club. I could find one for you—’

  He interrupted, immediately dismissive. ‘Nah.’

  He offered her back the cigarette. She put up her hand to refuse it. ‘You may as well finish it now.’

  ‘Scared of germs, is it?’ He inhaled again, holding the cigarette between thumb and index finger.

  She scanned around, trying to think of people who might help him. Where was his dad? she wondered. She said, ‘Who do you go to? For help with stuff, I mean.’

  He looked at her hard then, and for a moment it was like he was bursting with something, as if a dam was about to break inside him, but then he sort of twitched his head, as if he was avoiding an insect.

  ‘I know you lot. You want me to tell you stuff but you ain’t sharing.’

  She smiled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What was that text then?’

  Oh Christ, yes, the text: she needed to sort that out.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I’d forgotten about that. I need to crack on. My childminder can’t pick my son up. I need to sort something out.’

  ‘You’ve got a son?’

  She thought of Connor with his elephants. She wished she was home with him right now, instead of facing a late shift.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘He’s just a baby still.’

  ‘Can’t his dad—’

  ‘I’m a single parent.’ She thought this might reach him. They had more in common than he might think. She almost reached out a hand to him but didn’t. ‘Like your mum, actually.’

  But it didn’t have the desired effect. Instead he screwed up his face and threw the cigarette on the floor, then started walking away towards the ID suite door. She had to walk quickly to keep up with him, could only just catch his words.

  ‘Yeah, well. Whatever. Let’s get on with it.’

  Lizzie and Ash were not allowed to have any part in the recording of the ID video, and so, after she had booked Ryan in, Lizzie moved through into the separate waiting area. Ash had pulled a plastic chair in front of him and had his feet up and his nose buried in a tatty-looking paperback.

  ‘What you reading?’

  He tipped the book and she saw, briefly, a boring-looking mosaic of some Romans at a party.

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘It’s Juvenal.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ She smiled. ‘Page-turner, is it?’

  He sighed with theatrical despair and got up. Holding his place in the book with his finger, he stooped over the vending machine with an air of contemplation. ‘Want some freeze-dried soup? I’ve already had three. They’ve got Italian tomato or – yum, yum, this sounds tasty – farmhouse vegetable.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  They sat, side by side, looking ahead, both with their feet on the plastic chairs. Ash said, ‘Mr Big give you any info, then?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Ash opened the book again and started to read. Lizzie said, ‘You’re not cross, are you?’

  He turned to her with a studious air. ‘About what, my dear?’

  ‘Me teasing you about the book?’

  He cast his eyes heavenward. ‘Oh, don’t be silly. I’m back in first-century Rome. It’s heaven.’

  Lizzie got up and moved to the corner of the room. Facing the window, she pressed the speed dial. It went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Detective Inspector Kieran Shaw. Leave a message.’

  She hesitated, then spoke.

  ‘Yeah, uh, Kieran. It’s Lizzie. I’ve got a prisoner and it looks like I’m going to be off late. Any chance you could pick Connor up?’

  9

  The phone in the inside pocket of Detective Inspector Kieran Shaw’s jacket buzzed with a voicemail. The call must have come in when he was underground. He didn’t check it. This wasn’t a place to be answering his phone.

  He didn’t like using Victoria station – too many coppers – but the meeting had been called last minute and at least it was bigger and more anonymous than St James’s. The concourse was thick with police. You could spot them easily enough; after a year or so of service, even the women gave themselves away. Kieran aimed to camouflage any hint of his profession as criminal rather than law enforcement. His jacket was a bit too stylish for a copper. He smiled. Peng: that’s what those kids would call it.

  He moved out of the station and along the wide, busy street, swimming upstream through a current of scrubbed business folk clutching takeaway coffees. He checked out the missed call: Lizzie. With a shiver of irritation he returned the phone to his pocket.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Baillie was waiting for him on the fifth floor of New Scotland Yard. He wasn’t looking forward. NSY was too brightly lit, and the considerations there were importantly different to those that governed his own life. Through their years of service Baillie and he had come across each other from time to time. The last time Baillie had been a detective chief inspector and the senior investigating officer into the deaths of one of Kieran’s officers, PC Hadley Matthews, and a teenage girl, Farah Mehenni. Kieran had been serving time as a uniformed inspector to make up his rank before returning to the covert world, where he moved more comfortably. Lizzie had been one of his officers, on the roof of Portland Tower when Hadley and Farah fell, and caught up in the investigation like him.

  Before that happened, he’d been finding himself absorbed and charmed by Lizzie, so young both in age and in service. She’d been heartbreakingly vulnerable but also fiercely up for it all: the foot chases, the fights, the difficult crime scenes, the aggressive suspects. Standing with her weight
on one leg and her head tilted while she agonized about policing decisions. One day a rip in the knee of her uniform trousers from where she’d tackled a robber after a chase. Another time – so transparent in her attraction to him – standing in his office holding his Met vest ready while he directed a firearms incident over the radio, and then accompanying him down to the yard, standing watching while he drove out to the call on blue lights.

  Being around Lizzie had been like being an animal in one of those wildlife programmes, called irresistibly across the air by some pheromone. He’d wanted to fuck her so badly! Schooling himself that he wasn’t a wild animal, he’d tried to be more than his younger self. When he’d gone back to uniformed policing Kieran had promised himself that putting on the uniform would be symbolic of a change within. He would be visible. He would be what he seemed to be. Although she had always agreed to look away, he knew his wife hoped for that too.

  While he was resisting Lizzie, there had been a certain delicious agony to being around her. But it wasn’t long before resisting her had come to feel like being not more than himself, but less. It might be silly, the hunger of an older man for a young woman, but God, we are a long time dead. He’d known well enough what he was about when he drove her home from a team drinks. He could imagine the David Attenborough narrative. ‘The male offers to take the young female home and suggests a drink at his flat. The female accepts.’ There’d been no preamble once the door to the flat was shut. They hadn’t even made it to the bedroom. The first time he’d fucked her on the sitting-room floor, jammed up against the coffee table. Then they’d done it again in his bed. He’d felt so alive.

  Lizzie was a runner and had the understated discipline of someone who’d competed at a decent level. Sometimes, while he’d pretended to be asleep, she’d slipped out of bed early, pulling on an old T-shirt and jogging pants. When he heard the door shut, he stood at the window and watched her running down the street, her stride stretching out effortlessly.

  She could not be possessed.

  Kieran, believing in the separateness of people, admired the few other people who knew the score on that front. They were part of a small club who were able to face the truth about life. Though she might not know it yet, Lizzie was surely one of those too. He had always known in his heart that one day she would leave him. She was young: she would move on. It made him sad, but it was inevitable. He wasn’t a cynic, he just couldn’t abide bullshit. Of course they were involved, entangled even. Things had happened and he cared for Lizzie, maybe even loved her. When she was stabbed, he had sat by her bed in intensive care and risked his marriage to be with her. He’d told her then that he loved her. But even that didn’t change anything. She was young. He was married. All fires burn themselves out. They would always be friends.

  But then, still lying in her hospital bed, she had told him she was pregnant.

  It was more of a betrayal than if she had left him. In an instant she was no longer the simple thing – the vulnerable female on heat calling him across the wind – but rather something that tugged at him and confused him. He told her he would prefer a termination but that it was her body and her decision. When she did just as he had advocated – made up her own mind – he could hardly bear to look at her. This was a different story to the one he had envisaged.

  Her runner’s body had changed, her stomach swelling if she had swallowed something that belonged to him. He’d been angry. Angry with her fertility, or perhaps with her ability to change and become something utterly different. He was diluted and muddied too. There had been a discussion – her with her arms folded across her chest, him standing in the doorway of her flat. Should he attend the birth? It had felt like a four-way conversation, both of them both for and against. In the end, her sister had been with her and he’d received a text message with a picture. The baby was a boy: Connor, they’d agreed, after another series of texts. Then he’d held Connor and felt the strong flicker of life that already directed this little scrap of human who couldn’t yet lift his own head. His son. He’d watched Connor’s eyes travel over him as the baby studied and learned his face. Now he and Lizzie could never really leave each other.

  Here on Victoria Street, one of London’s runners jolted him back to the present, sprinting at him, earphones in her ears, breathing hard and breaking sweat. Kieran had to step out of the way. He turned and watched her flying away up the street.

  He was at the small turning towards NSY and had covered the distance from the station in a dream. His distraction came at him as a scalding reproof. The arrest phase of the operation was fast approaching. It was a nervous time; the weapons were already in the UK. It was a considered risk delaying their seizure, but still, he needed to focus! He steadied his breath and became someone different.

  Crossing the forecourt in front of the sixties tower block and past the revolving sign, Kieran Shaw did not quicken his pace. Rather he became a nondescript figure on his way to somewhere else. It would have been easy to miss the moment when he slipped into the side door and showed his warrant card. Positioning himself well back from the glass panes, he stood at the security check and betrayed no impatience while the guards passed their wand over him. He waited for the lift, not making eye contact with the others – uniforms, lanyards, smart clothes – willing himself to be as visible as a ghost that leaves no mark on the photographic plate.

  The landing was deserted, the door beyond the lift foyer firmly locked against those without the specific authorization. Although within the airlock of the fifth floor Kieran was protected from prying eyes, he still felt contaminated by being in a police building, as if the place would enter his soul and betray him and those he worked with.

  He swiped his warrant card and made his way along the deserted corridor to the corner office.

  Half silhouetted by the windows behind him, Baillie was at his desk: a thin man with flaxen hair, pale eyebrows, skin dusted with sandy freckles. The top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was unravelled on the desk. The look was relaxed but the shirt was tailored and the tie was silk. Shelves behind the desk carried the obligatory family photos: a boy smiling at the camera and holding a fish, a group of people including Baillie gathered around a bride and groom in a sunny garden. There was also the usual senior officer memorabilia. Framed commendations. A newspaper cutting – Judge jails head of £70 million cocaine gang. A photo of Baillie standing with a large black police officer in front of a mural. It was the wall of the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica. Kieran recognized the place and the uniform of the officer because he’d been there himself.

  A few years ago he would have thought of Baillie as a kindred spirit: they had both worked the real criminals. But they were not the same. They were like two parts of a Venn diagram, and Kieran was cautious as to the exact size and nature of the ellipsis they shared. He respected Baillie, but respect is not the same as trust.

  Chief inspector to chief superintendent in less than two years? Baillie was moving quickly, and that made Kieran suspicious. Did the speed of his advance demonstrate a taste for more? Was he eyeing the commissioner ranks?

  When Kieran had learnt Baillie was going to be gold commander for Operation Perseus, he’d googled him. There he was, speaking fluently on a BBC documentary about the impact of crime on communities, the interweaving of social, economic and psychological problems, the enduring harm that rippled out from acts of violence. He had that look on his face: the senior officer expression. It might all be true, but it wasn’t policing.

  That sort of talk, it had its own agenda. Baillie had greeted him warmly in the graveyard on the day of Hadley’s funeral – there had been daffodils among the gravestones, he remembered. But the warmth of the greeting had not wiped Kieran’s recollection of how, before the investigation had exonerated him, Baillie had hovered at an amicable distance, ready, Kieran had understood perfectly, to throw him under the bus without a thought should that prove to be necessary.

  Baillie had stood up and was offer
ing his hand. It was a firm handshake, just as Kieran would have expected. He said, ‘Sorry to call you in here like this. Know you don’t like it.’

  Kieran took a seat without commenting. He stretched out his legs.

  Baillie’s expression betrayed a moment of keen appraisal before he said, ‘Murder last night in Perseus’s operational area. Hear about it?’

  Kieran spoke without inflexion. ‘Spencer Cardoso, fifteen years old. Knife wound to the femoral artery. No suspects identified yet.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the police summary. I’m familiar with that. I meant can you tell me what the word on the street is.’

  Kieran had been here before. Whenever senior officers finally got the balls to form a specialist unit to tackle a specific problem, they always ended up trying to widen its remit to deal with everything that landed on their desk. This latest murder had probably been mentioned this morning at some meeting on a higher floor, and Baillie was feeling the heat. At his rank it was like ninepins: last officer standing gets the promotion.

  Kieran said, ‘Nothing’s come in under its own steam. If we get anything, I’ll make sure it’s filtered through.’

  Baillie said, ‘The DAC’s put out a request for information. There was a boy with the victim who might be key.’

  Key. Kieran smiled at the word. It suggested sophistication way beyond these adolescent acts of violence. It had been a tap on a car window maybe and some poor kid dead because he was in the wrong postcode. That was how much lay behind most of those murders.

  He said, ‘I read the crime report this morning. It doesn’t look as though it’s got anything especially to do with us. It looks rather more like the usual shit. One disrespects the other. The other’s got a knife. Boom. It’s you get into a stupid fight and you die territory, not serious and organized crime. The homicide team should be more than up to it.’

  ‘The deputy assistant commissioner disagrees. His view is that with Perseus in place we should have more information about what’s happening on the ground. The boy the MIT team’s looking for is probably a witness. If we identify him—’