Gallowstree Lane

by Kate London

  Sarah smiled and said, ‘You made me a bit nervous there, the way your hand moved.’

  ‘There’s nothing there.’

  What was it? A knife? Only a fool didn’t fear a knife. She remembered Lizzie Griffiths’ ashen face, and her shirt soaked with blood. Lee had been right to take his harness. She wished she had her own. And that they were both wearing stab vests. She’d taken a stupid risk.

  Lee was speaking, ‘Come on. Show us what’s in your waistband, mate.’

  ‘I’m not your mate.’

  Ryan’s weight had moved backwards onto his heels. This was a different person to the one who had laughed at her girlfriend troubles. He said, ‘I invited you in. You said I wasn’t in any trouble.’

  There it was: the betrayed trust that could justify anything. Lee was gesturing with his head towards the ashtray where the two roaches lay.

  ‘Weed, is it, you’ve got there?’ he said.

  The threat was clear: a search under the Misuse of Drugs Act to cover the search for a knife. Lawful inside a dwelling. But Sarah didn’t think Ryan was in the mood to allow any searches, lawful of not. This was getting nasty. The room was small and they were hemmed in.

  Sarah spoke quickly. ‘Ryan, do you know what? You’re right. You asked us in. We’re here to talk to you, to find out what you know. You’ve just made us nervous, that’s all. I don’t think it’s drugs. I think it’s a knife, actually. I hope I’m wrong, but if it is, then it’s not against the law for you to have it in here. You’re in your own home. I’d just feel better if it was somewhere out in the open. Would that be OK? I think we’d all feel better.’

  Ryan glanced between the two of them. He spoke without any friendliness. ‘Good cop, bad cop, is that it?’

  For a minute Sarah still didn’t think he was going to hand it over, but then he gave a disheartened shrug and reached behind him. Lee’s hand went again to his asp, but Sarah forgave him because already she saw the knife resting in Ryan’s palm. Even folded, it was an evil-looking thing. She could make out two of the words engraved down the handle.

  Zombie Hunter.

  She said, ‘Can I take it?’

  He nodded, and she reached out. It was warm from his body but its essence was coldness. Something about the knife made you want to clench your fist around its handle. There was a button, and she knew that if she touched it, even lightly, the blade would flick out on a lethal spring. She wondered about that blade, its sharpness, its edge. There was something essential about these knives, as if they carried a different order of truth. The cops showed them to each other with something like awe. Had Cain used a knife to slay his brother? The Bible wasn’t clear, but she had always imagined a whetted blade raised for that first murder.

  She passed the knife to Lee, aiming for a nonchalant gesture and failing entirely. The knife was too serious for that. She said, weakly, ‘Can you hold onto that?’

  He turned it in his hand – the movement she had resisted. She knew exactly what he was thinking, and although she wished it weren’t so, she agreed. No way could they give that knife back. She looked at Ryan and saw that he knew it too. She could see that it mattered, losing the knife, and that he’d never talk to her about Spencer now.

  21

  The door had shut. The two cops had gone. Ryan had lost the knife and what had he got in return? A stupid card.

  Detective Inspector Sarah Collins, Homicide Command.

  ‘Call me any time, twenty-four seven,’ she’d said. Stupid woman. He lit the corner of the card with his lighter and watched the flame curl up. Didn’t she know that he could never carry a card like that? Everyone would think he was a snitch.

  The cop had explained it to him. She hadn’t realized the knife was going to be a zombie knife. Turned out that was illegal after all. Some act or other. Blah blah. They weren’t going to arrest him but they couldn’t let him keep it. He knew it was police bullshit but arguing looked like it would only make things worse. There hadn’t seemed to be any way to resist, and he’d watched the man stuff it in one of their clear plastic bags and signed the pocket book like they told him to and now he didn’t have the knife. It was the knife he’d bought with Spencer: the weapon that had been fated to avenge his friend’s death.

  He kicked the bin in the kitchen a few times.

  Tia came down and said, ‘What the fuck, Ryan?’ She’d got a stupid face mask on. She was such a know-all.

  He said, ‘Fuck you,’ and she said, ‘Loser.’

  ‘FUCK YOU,’ he said again, grabbing his jacket and slamming the front door behind him.

  He moved swiftly along the walkway, searing heat behind his eyes that made him cry with no emotion. He didn’t know nothing. Didn’t know if it was the Soldiers. Didn’t know whether Shakiel knew neither. Or cared. Everyone was taking the piss. It wasn’t so hard to get a knife, but you gotta know who to hit. He went to the store and fetched his bike.

  There was one person who would probably have the answer, and she worked on Gallowstree Lane.

  22

  Lexi was sitting bent over on the loo, waiting for the strength to get up and clean herself. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, but she was sweating too, as if in tropical heat.

  They had a phrase for it, didn’t they, when you wanted two things that were mutually exclusive. Horns of Charybdis – was that a thing? No, that wasn’t it. She wasn’t sure. Who cared anyway? These were the tiresome dregs of her mind, the tatters, the bits of wallpaper that hadn’t fully peeled away from the flaking wall. Main thing was she needed the drugs but was too frightened to go and get them.

  She pulled on her pants, then leggings, a T-shirt over her scrawny chest.

  In the ashtray was a dog-end that had a few drags left in it. She rubbed her cheekbone with an anxious knuckle, lit and inhaled, trying to think straight. She was standing by the window now, pressing her forehead against the cold pane, and she saw herself, back in a different time when she was still going to be someone. Even then, standing in some class in her drama school on the edges of London, wearing that long black practice skirt they made all the girls buy, she could never make sense of who was who or who was related to who and whose side they were on. Those boring old histories by Shakespeare – all declamatory speeches and alliances and reversals. Catesby, Hastings, Bardolph and Nym. Who the fuck were they all? And why? The red and the white roses – no real distinction in fact, all the characters muddled up and indistinguishable but just like those boys out on Gallowstree Lane: bloody and determined for power, prepared to kill for it. The goodies’ goodness was always hollow-sounding. Only the baddies had ever been convincing.

  Her hands were shaking. There was moisture under her nails and she saw darkness there. She put her fingers to her mouth and tasted salt. She’d made herself bleed with her scratching.

  It had been a silly lie, all that prancing around on black plastic floors dreaming of a life that would never happen. In her real life she’d ended up with one of the really shit roles. Very few lines. She wrapped her arms around her waist and doubled over. When the spasm passed, she ran to the toilet, pulling off her leggings and pants just in time. How the body kept doing its stuff was a complete and utter mystery.

  Her skin was being peeled back, leaving her skull exposed and her teeth long in her receding gums. It wasn’t Shakespeare, it was Beckett. Or Alien. The addict locked inside her own body, devouring itself. It would pop out of her chest any second.

  She climbed hesitantly into the bath and showered herself with shaking hands.

  Call an ambulance maybe, say she was withdrawing. But she couldn’t see beyond the dark agony of waiting in A&E, the doctor bored and sceptical, writing up his clipboard, reluctantly recommending her for a treatment programme. There’d be no beds. She’d have to come home with a script for methadone. It wouldn’t solve the problem. The dogs of all varieties would be back.

  What about the cops? Useless. She rubbed her hand compulsively across her front teeth and imagined trying to get th
rough to some bored-looking judgemental tosser that she wasn’t making it up and that she wasn’t stupid either and that her talking to them really did mean that she wasn’t safe.

  She got out of the bath, towelled herself dry, pulled on her pants and leggings. She moved over to the chair by the window and folded herself into it. Her copy of the paper was on the floor beside her, Spencer’s luckless face staring out.

  When she had the energy, she hated herself for his death. But mainly she didn’t have the energy. Mainly she needed a solution to her problem.

  It’s a two-horse race … and as they approach the finish line, Needs-the-Fucking-Drugs is neck and neck with Trying-the-Fuck-to-Stay-Alive.

  So what then? Gallowstree Lane was a battlefield. She couldn’t work there. Shakiel’s boys would want to kill her for setting up their guy, and because she was a witness, Kingfisher too might prefer her dead. Anyway, she had no faith in his baby crew to protect her.

  What the little people must do, she remembered from the plays, was to find a patron so that they could live. What else must they do? Anticipate which way the wind will blow. Show respect but feel no loyalty. And when the wind changes they must form new alliances and serve new masters without compunction.

  She thought of the Soldiers. Might they be a haven? She had Michelle’s number in her phone and she knew Michelle had had dealings with them in the past.

  23

  Lizzie stood alone on the stairs of Caenwood police station and hesitated. Trask’s staff officer had told her he was in a meeting. He’d be back later. Perhaps she should just go home. You weren’t supposed to do this kind of thing. You were only supposed to bring good news to the borough commander.

  But she imagined the phone call Kieran had made to Trask: the shared history, the unsaid but understood. Had Trask thought she would be pleased to be handed around without consultation? Had he even given her wishes any thought at all? She had to say something.

  Aiming to keep out of sight, she slipped down to the room the uniformed officers used to write their reports. She settled herself in front of a computer in the far corner, tucked in beneath the window.

  The duplicate CCTV disc of the GBH was still in her bag. Kieran’s prohibition came to mind: she wasn’t to let Sarah know about Perseus. But her natural curiosity was stirring. Who knew, the fight might hold the answers to Spencer’s murder. And examining the CCTV wasn’t exactly betraying Perseus; it was just working on her own investigation into the GBH. She slipped the disc into the computer.

  The multiple cameras were laid out on a grid, each showing a frozen frame of time. Young people milling around in a shopping centre before a gig. Events of no obvious importance that might hold the key to a death that was still to come. It was the same footage she had watched last night, before she’d been posted to Perseus, but now, with her knowledge of the operation, it might hold a more comprehensible narrative. She went to Camera 11 and fast forwarded to 21:34 hours. There they were, the three men talking on a fire escape, but now the tall, heavy black guy was instantly recognizable to her as the man she had seen through the fish-eye lens that looked into the lobby of a block of flats: Shakiel Oliver, Perseus’s main target.

  And there was Ryan, skipping across the landing like a boxer. Anxious to please, she thought. Had the punch he had thrown later by the escalator been on Shakiel’s instructions? That was a thing, she knew: initiating yourself with a gang by committing an act of violence.

  She scrubbed back and paused the frame. She studied the other guy, the one standing next to Shakiel, thinner, paler, his hair standing up like a brush. Perhaps she could identify him too. She clicked on her shortcut to Perseus’s restricted drive. Someone had created a folder, Targets. There was a column of thumbnails. There he was! She clicked and saw a custody image, beneath it the target’s name: Ujal JARRAL. She scribbled it in her daybook.

  Her mobile was ringing. It was Trask’s staff officer. He was able to see her now.

  ‘Thank you. On my way.’

  She ejected the disc and slipped it back into her bag.

  Trask was behind his desk, pulling his ear. He wasn’t wearing his usual wise-stupid expression but something rather less friendly.

  ‘I hadn’t expected to see you back here quite so soon.’

  She said, ‘The posting to Op Perseus?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well … sir. I’m worried.’ She met his eyes and smiled but his expression did not change. She soldiered on. ‘Worried that I’ve been tasked to Perseus because of my association with Detective Inspector Kieran Shaw.’

  Trask put his large hands on the desk. ‘All my postings are made based on merit. I’m a bit surprised you might think otherwise.’

  This was a much less friendly gorilla. And she realized – too late – that she hadn’t thought through the implications of what she would be saying. She was impugning his integrity too.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Of course, sir. Thank you.’

  He waited. All she could think of now was the door and how to get out of it. She wished she was a braver person and better able to stand up for herself. And she realized, pathetically, that she was still ambitious.

  ‘Just that I wanted to be clear about something, sir. That I had no idea who was running Perseus until I arrived there this morning.’

  ‘And is that a problem for you now that you know?’ When the answer to this did not come instantly, he added with a smile, ‘Because I can still rescind the posting if you like and send someone else. Not a problem.’

  Something inside her powerfully didn’t want to forfeit Trask’s good opinion. If only she could think of a way of saying what she needed to say that was funny. But nothing came to her. She wrinkled her face and hated herself.

  ‘Well, sir, I’d hoped for some proper police work, but they’ve just got me typing.’

  ‘Ah.’ He leant back in his chair, intertwined his fingers. What was it that had passed fleetingly across his face? Was it sympathy? Or amusement? His reply in any case was irreproachably professional. He hadn’t got where he was without knowing the score.

  ‘Perseus will have certain jobs that it needs officers to do. You will have to comply with that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  God, she hated herself. How many times had she used the word sir since she’d been in the damn room?

  Trask continued. ‘But I can mention to Detective Inspector Shaw that I have posted you there because I also expect the operation to develop you professionally.’

  Lizzie deciphered both a warning and some encouragement from this. But hard on a fleeting sensation of achievement came the shameful fear that she had done herself more harm than good by protesting; she had perhaps placed herself outside the informal circle where things were done unofficially to everyone’s benefit. In any case, Trask was looking at her with some impatience. It was clear the meeting was over. She got up and smiled. ‘Thank you for your time, sir.’

  He offered his hand. ‘Any time. Now go and do the borough proud, Lizzie.’

  Lizzie slipped down the stairs.

  Go and do the borough proud.

  What a ridiculous statement!

  She walked quickly towards the back door, hoping to avoid Ash or anyone else from CID. She thought of the huge office in which they all worked – stained coffee cups, the filthy microwave, case papers piled up on desks coated in sticky grey dust. The detectives like tiny swimmers in Met-issue silicone hats, bobbing on London’s dirty river, their arms moving desperately against the impossible swell of their workloads. They would all have been grateful to be given this opportunity to escape.

  Fuck Kieran.

  In the yard the guys from the property store were cataloguing the pile of bikes that were stacked against the wall. They smiled and waved at her.

  ‘All right, Lizzie!’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  In the shadow of the nick the market stallholders were packing away for the day. Parked vans with double doors open. Clothing ra
ils on wobbly wheels. Weaving through, Lizzie texted Kieran. Going home. Book me off, please. She zipped her phone into her jacket and walked quickly, her hands in her pockets and her head down.

  24

  When Lexi answered the door, one of the two boys was impatiently jangling some keys against his thigh. She saw the key ring before she really saw him – a trident symbol with an arrow in the middle. Little bit phallic, tastefully done but legible enough. Maserati – that was it. If you could give them all a sports car maybe they’d all piss off and be happy. But they wouldn’t, because they’d always need a better one and a bigger one.

  They weren’t twins, but they might as well have been. Same height – not tall, five nine maybe – same uniform: hoodies pulled over baseball caps, dark baggy trousers. One had acne.

  Fucking Comedy of Errors.

  ‘’Sup?’ Acne said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You ready then?’

  ‘I need a hit first. Can you help me out?’

  They exchanged looks. This decision was clearly beyond their pay grade. The less spotty one reached into his pocket and produced a wrap. He had that look about him. Fancied himself. She thought: Good complexion don’t make you Jamie Foxx, sunshine.

  He said, ‘You gotta pay back.’

  She took it off him, bored by his pushy innocence, and moved into the flat. ‘I know.’

  There was that interval. Xanadu. Then she was sitting on the leather back seat of a hatchback BMW. The boys were way too excited about it. Beats were hammering out of the sound system. The whole car vibrated. You could tell a lot from the cars they drove. What had she been thinking, buying from Kingfisher in that ridiculous enormous SUV? Shakiel had been different: never anything flashy. She should have stuck with his crew. Stupid. All kinds of stupid.