Gallowstree Lane

by Kate London

  But she’d walked out of the post-mortem to more bad news.

  Turned out there would be no grieving parent making an appeal for Spencer, dead at fifteen, because he’d been a ward of the local authority. There’d been attempts to place him for adoption when he’d been taken from his mother at the age of seven, but they’d all failed. And now his mother was dead and the identity of his father never known. So there would be no appeal from the family. And there was also no parent to give up his friends and his mobile number.

  They’d recovered one phone from Spencer’s bedroom. They’d already done an emergency trace on its activity, but the only number it ever called was Spencer’s key worker. He’d maybe had another phone, but if he had, it was gone.

  So there were all the usual leads and the lucky breaks used up. It would be dig, dig, dig. Try to persuade people to talk to them – good luck with that, she thought as she worked through her summary of the investigation to date.

  CCTV: she drew up the parameters for the trawl. With no chink of light, she made them wide in both geographical area and time – sixty-four hours before and after the murder. It would be terabytes of data – impossible to view all of it – and would piss off the team with its scope, but she couldn’t pass up any opportunity. Anything not recorded would be lost for ever. She couldn’t possibly know yet what was going to be important. She didn’t even know yet what to look for.

  She got up from her desk and stretched out her back, considering yet another coffee from the machine on her windowsill. It was certainly tempting – her brain was turning to glue – but as soon as she finished off the report she would head home to snatch some sleep, and she didn’t want to risk lying in bed, eyes wide open, buzzing with caffeine. She’d have to be back in by seven for the debrief with the DCI.

  She pulled the pile of dispatches over that related to the call to the scene and the emergency response that followed, tracing her finger down the printout:

  22:42:07

  E: Emergency.

  22:42:10

  CHS: young male stabbed Caller name: WITHHELD.

  22:43:01

  CHS: informant gives victim name, SPENCER. GALLOWSTREE LANE: Opposite YILMAZ SUPERMARKET.

  22:43:09

  UNITS dispatched: QZN26 QZN23 QZN24.

  22:43:15

  CHS: informant states off-duty paramedic on scene. Subject conscious and breathing. Life at risk. Reports arterial bleed.

  22:43:21

  Duty officer: CRITICAL INCIDENT DECLARED.

  22:44:01

  CHS: informant states HEMS required. Subject no longer conscious.

  22:44:22

  Duty officer: noted. Request situation report from first unit on scene. Request CHS obtain description of suspects.

  22:44:37

  CHS: informant not responding to questions. Still on the line.

  22:44:41

  LAS: HEMS en route.

  22:44:59

  QZN26: on scene. With LAS. Looking for ID for victim.

  22:45:07

  Duty officer: unit at each end of road and alleyway to close off.

  22:45:21

  QZN26: fingerprint machine required to ID victim.

  22:45:28

  Duty officer: units to identify witness.

  22:45:32

  QZN24: forensic tent required Duty officer: QZ has none available. Pass to neighbouring boroughs to assist.

  22:45:42

  QZN26: victim is in cardiac arrest.

  22:45:57

  SB: unable to assist with tent.

  And so it rolled on. The fight for Spencer’s life simultaneous with the usual police struggle to assemble the resources and preserve the evidence. She looked back at the 999 call summaries. These were the traces of the young man who had been with Spencer before anyone else, who had been there probably for the stabbing. He had to be the most important person to identify.

  Caller name: WITHHELD …

  Informant not responding to questions …

  Sometimes you got more from a recording of a call than the transcript. Sometimes you could pick something up that would be a significant help. She phoned the communications command and asked them to play the call to her.

  The recording hissed and then cut into life. The operator was female, soft Yorkshire accent.

  ‘Caller, what’s your emergency?’

  After a pause, another voice: distinctly London, young, male, probably black from the accent, distressed.

  ‘He’s been stabbed.’

  ‘What’s your location?’

  No reply.

  ‘Caller, where are you?’

  ‘Spencer … he’s been stabbed.’

  Sarah scribbled: Names him. ‘Spencer.’ *Caller knows victim.

  ‘I’ve got that. I need to know where you are so I can send an ambulance. Where are you, caller?’

  ‘Uh, Gallowstree Lane.’

  ‘OK. Gallowstree Lane. Give me a landmark for the ambulance.’

  ‘There’s a minimarket. Yilmaz.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Silence.

  ‘OK. Never mind about that. Tell me about Spencer.’

  ‘We need the helicopter. The air ambulance. Hurry up.’

  ‘Tell me about Spencer. How is he? Where’s he been stabbed?’

  ‘In the leg. He’s bleeding. A lot.’

  ‘Is he conscious and breathing?’

  She heard sobbing.

  ‘All right, caller. Take a breath. Keep talking to me—’

  ‘He said to say arterial bleed.’

  ‘OK, arterial bleed. I’ve got that. Who said to say that?’

  ‘The guy. He says he’s a paramedic.’

  ‘The ambulance is on its way.’

  ‘They better FUCKING HURRY.’

  ‘They’re on their way.’

  More sobbing.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  No reply, just breathing. Then sobbing again.

  ‘Caller, they’re on their way.’

  A long silence.

  ‘Just fucking get here.’

  And the drawn-out tone of the 999 call ending.

  Sarah gave up and slipped two pods, one after the other, into the machine. Even the smell of the coffee made her feel better. She stood at the window and read through the work that had been done on the mobile the witness had stolen from the paramedic. It had made, she saw, two calls: the 999 call and then, after the theft, one more. There was no further activity. The phone had been switched off; thrown away, even.

  There was already a cell site for the second call. The location wasn’t precise – a circle drawn on a map – but it was in the area of the canal. Her eyes flicked between the murder scene and the cell site. It was a workable supposition that the witness had fled the scene via the canal. He’d moved relatively quickly too – nine minutes to get to the canal through winding streets.

  She created an urgent action for her team to view any cameras in the vicinity of the canal exits within a ten-mile radius of the call. Perhaps they’d get an image. They were due some luck.

  She thought back to the 999 call. The witness had called the victim by his first name, his voice desperate. She could hear it still. Spencer … he’s been stabbed. Almost as though, panicking in the unforgiving night, he believed that everyone knew Spencer; as though the call handler would say, ‘Oh no, not Spencer. Surely not Spencer.’ Still, whoever he was, this sobbing boy, however much he had cared, he hadn’t stayed. She wondered about that detail too. What deep instinct ran through him powerful enough to make him leave his dying friend?

  She turned to her notes from talking to Owen, the paramedic who had tried to save Spencer. She’d written down his description of the witness verbatim: Mixed race, about five foot eight, sort of a wide face. About fifteen, I guess. No older. Black hoody, Superdry logo across the chest, black trackies. Shaved line through his left eyebrow.

  She closed her eyes. This she could see; the hoody pulled up and the
boy walking quickly away clutching the phone of the man who was trying to save his friend’s life.

  She wondered about that too. He’d said to the paramedic that he didn’t have a phone. Was that true? Or, knowing that the police would scrutinize any call for aid from the scene, had he had the presence of mind not to use his own phone? From the panic and distress it didn’t sound to her like he’d been capable of making that sort of decision. He’d been so desperate to get help. So, if he hadn’t had a phone on him, why not? Was it teenage fecklessness? He’d lost his phone, broken it, had it stolen? Or was it something else? The witness was up to no good when his friend came to harm and he was either sufficiently experienced or tutored to know that when you were up to no good it was a good idea not to have your phone on you?

  So there he was, running, alone now, the paramedic’s phone in his hand. Then he’d paused somewhere on the canal and made a call.

  The one call he’d made after he’d stolen the phone. Whoever it was, it was someone important to him. Or someone he knew could help.

  The call had lasted barely three minutes.

  The results from an urgent subscriber’s check on the number he’d called were already in. It had come back as prepaid and unregistered. A burner probably. She fired back an urgent request for a full investigation of the phone.

  Her own phone buzzed and she looked down. The screen-saver picture of her girlfriend, Caroline, broken by a text from her.

  Coming home?

  During the week, Caroline liked to be in bed early and up early, in school long before her students arrived. Sarah swiped the phone and replied.

  Don’t wait up xx

  Two kisses for Caroline before she turned back, utterly engrossed in the search for the witness.

  The paramedic had said the boy looked fifteen at best. In a hoody, on his own late at night: most cops would notice him. Someone might have stopped him, if only to talk, to ask him what he was doing. She opened the stop-and-search database, but there was nothing matching the description for the previous night or the early morning. Ten years ago there would have been more stops – officers taking the opportunity for a bit of disruption – but now a boy could move freely through the night.

  She put the victim, Spencer, into the combined intelligence search. Plenty of hits. Unconfirmed intelligence that he was linked to the Eardsley Bluds. But it was all supposition – he’d been seen with so-and-so or at a gig or on the edges of a fight. If he was hanging with the Bluds then he was on the periphery. The link could be key or it could just be a part of a life that had put him at risk. She scanned through his arrests. A lot for robbery, nearly all of them NFA – no further action – but on four occasions he had been arrested with the same boy: Ryan Kennedy.

  Kennedy went into the database. The screen filled with a long list of references. Come-to-notice reports to social services. Once a Section 46 when, aged seven, he’d been taken temporarily into police protection. Then, as he got older, petty crime.

  Turned out Kennedy had been nicked only this morning. Sarah scanned the report quickly. A GBH from three days ago. The victim, Robert Nelson, hadn’t wanted to know.

  The officer investigating, she noticed, was someone she’d come across before – Lizzie Griffiths. When she’d worked at the Department of Specialist Investigations, she’d investigated Lizzie’s possible involvement in the deaths of a uniformed officer, Hadley Matthews, and a teenage girl, Farah Mehenni. She’d come across her more recently too, when Lizzie was stabbed in the line of duty. She’d kind of saved her life, but strangely felt no real pride in that. It was disagreeable: something about Lizzie always made Sarah feel confused and awkward and not wise enough.

  Well, no point thinking about that now.

  She ran a quick intel search on the victim. Robert Nelson was at it but at a low level, just like Spencer – a bit of robbery, some violence and a possible link to the Bluds’ rivals, the Soldiers.

  Who knows, maybe the murder was payback for this?

  And then suddenly she felt overwhelmed by the intelligence chain. You could search and search for ever and follow and follow and follow and still end up none the wiser. She thought of Caroline, head on the cotton pillows, reading before she stretched out and flicked the switch on the light. She longed to be with her, to put an arm round her and rest a hand on her stomach.

  But still she stayed at her desk and took a last pass at Spencer’s possible associate, the main suspect in the GBH, Ryan Kennedy. She scanned the details of the report: Ryan was wearing a Superdry jacket in the CCTV of the assault. That was interesting. She pulled up the custody image from his most recent arrest. The clothes were wrong – he was wearing a black hooded jacket with white trim – but physically he was right. A small, light-skinned young man, sporting a shaved left eyebrow.

  15

  The night was cold. Since Shakiel had dropped him, Ryan had been walking. It felt like the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Walk and walk. Like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Till God puts me where he wants me to be. Him and Spence, they knew all the lines from that film. You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese … All that shit and the two of them arguing about who had to be Travolta. He smiled but then, hard on that memory, a different thought whistled through his head; that it was him who’d got Spence involved. He’d been the one in the beginning asking Shaks if Spence could tag along. It was hard to escape the accusation and harder if he stayed still. So he walked and tried not to think and every time he did think he walked faster.

  The streets were mostly empty, the shops shuttered. Gradually the cold had been building inside him, hollowing him out. Seeing a guy curled up asleep in a dirty old sleeping bag in the doorway of a shop, he found himself wondering how those homeless people did it. In the end, although he didn’t want to go home, he turned his steps.

  The Deakin estate was lit up: the walkways and the open spaces brighter than daylight. Ryan wasn’t one of the new people. He had always lived here. He knew his way round, how the different levels worked, where the walkways took you. The estate was brightly lit but he knew where the dark corners could be found. He knew the location of the CCTV cameras and which ones were broken. A couple of them he’d broken himself. New people had moved in, bought flats on the top floors. You could always tell who the newcomers were; it wasn’t difficult. There was a residents’ association now. They put their notices up in steel noticeboards. Everyone welcome! They’d planted one of the concreted areas up with flowers. The meadow, they called it. Some people had been cross about it – they’d used that area to park their cars. But him and Spence liked the meadow. They texted each other: Going to the meadow, fam? It was pretty: blue flowers, red flowers, all sorts. They used to sit there on a summer evening and smoke a joint.

  The new people could be annoying, but you had to take it the right way. His mum got a notice to clear his old bikes from the stairway. At first she’d thrown it in the bin, but then the housing officer – a fat African woman with bad breath and nothing better to do – knocked on the door and gave his mum some sort of notice and made her sign it. ‘A contract, do you see?’ Stupid cow. They didn’t know who was responsible for that but for sure it was one of the people who sat in the community hall eating biscuits and talking about paint colours. He knew about them because him and Spence had gone to one of the meetings once and sat at the back stuffing biscuits into their faces until it stopped being funny and just got boring. His mum had shouted at him a bit about the bikes and so they’d got rid of them, and then him and Spence had tagged the walls of the stairway to give the residents’ association something new to worry about and some new colours to decide.

  That was the way to handle stuff: see it differently. Like the foxes in London. You wouldn’t catch them moaning about no fields and shit. They helped themselves to the bins. If God gives you lemons, all that.

  The walkway had a view over the train tracks. A red and silver tube train was paused at a red light, and he stopped and looked at
the people waiting in the carriages. The little train with its blunt silver face so calm and patient. It looked like a train for children. He wished himself sitting next to Spence, riding the line into town. That was how they bunked off in the early days, slipping through open ticket barriers. Or mugging off the ticket controller, who was looking at his phone screen and couldn’t give a shit anyway.

  ‘Sorry, mate, I lost my Zip card.’

  That was already a long time after his dad’s funeral.

  He didn’t know if he was real but he had a strong picture of the man and woman who had come to the door with the news. Thin and suited – that was how he remembered them. Neat and tidy. Later, he’d learned their names: Edward and Jennie. Except for a brief phrase that had stuck in his memory, any words they might have said were just noises to him now, like trying to hear underwater. The man – Edward – had looked across at him from the sofa and said, ‘Are you Ryan?’ He remembered that because it had shocked his five-year-old self; how had this stranger known his name?

  He remembered the funeral in snapshots too. He’d sat with his mum in the back of a black limousine. They’d given him a cushion to lift him up. He’d opened and closed the window until his mother told him to stop. He had new clothes and his sister and his mum had had their nails painted and their hair done. His mum had had hers straightened. Tia had braids. They were behind the horses and the carriage with the coffin. It looked like something Snow White might get carried in when everyone still thought she was dead. The horses had feather plumes on their heads and about eight of his dad’s crew walked in front of the hearse. Flowers on top of the casket: Daddy. There were four or five of the same cars all in a long line, and people on the streets stood and stared at them like they were royalty.

  Most of the people in the church he didn’t know, but he did know Shakiel because he was like an uncle. Shakiel sat at the front, in the same pew as him and his mum. People kept telling him his dad would be proud of him. He knew he wasn’t supposed to cry and he didn’t. Fact was he didn’t really get it. His eyes kept travelling to the white box at the front and wondering if his dad was really in there or if it was some sort of weird joke. Later, he did miss his dad. Even though he hadn’t seen him much, all his brief memories were happy. He’d always brought presents – trainers, footballs, a PlayStation, a leather jacket.