by Kate London
Jarral swallowed, like he had something distasteful in his mouth that he was too polite to spit out.
‘You can’t trick me with that shit. Go fuck yourself—’
His lawyer – a balding man in a dirty baggy suit and no tie – intervened. ‘I remind you of my advice.’
Jarral flicked his hand impatiently and Sarah wondered not for the first time at the patience of lawyers. Jarral, indifferent to this, folded his arms across his chest and stuck his chin out.
‘No fucking comment.’
Elaine closed her notebook thoughtfully.
‘OK, Jarral. We’ll stop the interview there. Give you a chance to talk to your lawyer. As I see it, whatever the nonsense talked on the street, it’s neither wise nor noble for you to take the rap. But up to you. At the end of the day you decide whether it’s a trick or not and how much time you want to serve for someone who calls you his dog.’
62
Through the door of the interview room, Sarah saw Shakiel. He had pushed the chair away from the table and leant back, spreading his legs and tipping his head to study the ceiling as if it held more interest than anything else in this room. His lawyer, sitting next to him, looked too young, too prim, too much like a well-behaved schoolgirl to be qualified, but Sarah was not deceived. She had read her card – Shabnam Qasim LLB MA (Oxon). Nobody in this room was anyone’s fool.
There was nothing dramatic about this interview, no clever approach that would persuade Shakiel to speak. It was strictly for the record. We asked him questions. We gave him the opportunity to defend himself. He chose not to because he had no defence. That being so, Sarah allowed herself to ask the question she really wanted to know the answer to.
‘What kind of man gives a loaded firearm to a child?’
Shakiel held her steadily in his gaze.
‘No comment.’
It was only afterwards, in the corridor, when she and Elaine were returning him to his cell, that he said, ‘I’ve got a question for you.’
‘OK.’
‘You asked me how anyone could give that boy a gun. What I want to know is how did he end up in a flat with a police officer who’d been cheating him for months?’
It was Elaine who answered. She was furious.
‘Don’t you dare compare us with you. Not today. What we do, we do to protect people – innocent people, bystanders, vulnerable people like Ryan.’
‘Is that why you do it? Really?’
‘That’s why I do it. Yes. That’s why I’m still a cop, getting up early and working late for a shitty wage. And you? Why do you do it?’
‘What do you know?’
‘I know enough. I know we have to stop you. You ask Ryan’s mother what she thinks about you. You guys aren’t the law, much as you want to be.’
‘You ask Loretta what she thinks of you.’
‘Do you know what? Stupid of me. Who cares what Loretta thinks? I wasn’t the one who got her son selling drugs. I didn’t give him a gun.’
Sarah walked away from the argument.
Jarral had indicated through his lawyer that he was willing to help. Queen’s Evidence. With a following wind, they might even be able to charge the Soldiers who had told Shakiel where Lexi would be standing when she was hit by that car. They would have to hold it all together. Try to join as many of the charges as they could so that the jury could see the whole picture and how the offences were linked. Still, whichever way you cut it, the weight of the evidence was overwhelming.
At any other time this would have been a moment of triumph, one, unbelievably, shared with her old adversary Kieran Shaw. Between them they had nailed Shakiel for the importation of firearms, the organization of a criminal network and the murder of Lexi Moss.
Sarah texted Baillie.
Any news?
63
Connor was sleeping. Lizzie, lying on the bed with him, had fallen asleep too, but her dead arm woke her. For a moment she didn’t remember, and then, all in a rush, she did and felt sick and wished it wasn’t true and then hoped it would be all right and then wished she didn’t hope. Some sound had escaped her and Connor stirred. She shifted his weight and stretched out her fingers, feeling the blood pulsing back. Her mum had arrived and done the things she did to hold the world together, as if there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be mended by housework. There was food, more food than they could ever eat – and Lizzie felt she never wanted to eat again. Clear plastic trays of couscous and pasta. Pots of yoghurt. Bananas. And chocolate.
Lizzie’s phone screen was filled with missed texts. Her colleagues – Ash, Arif. Trask.
Her sister, Natty.
Thinking of you.
I can come down to help. Henry can have the kids. Let me know.
Love you.
Strangely, although Talulah had gone, Julia the firearms officer was still here. In this netherworld of outcomes pending, she was part of the family now. The nurses were solicitous but you could see they were curious too about the strange group that was waiting. It had probably made the papers. Lizzie felt nauseated at the thought. They would have got hold of pictures. They always did. Later, whatever happened, people who knew nothing of the affair would write convincing expositions of what had gone wrong. Only those who were close to the events would have no answers. The entire world, it seemed to Lizzie, had to be different. People too, different.
Could it really have been Ryan who had torn this hole? The first time she met him, standing at the top of the stairs in his flat, he’d seemed younger than his fifteen years, and slight, too. His clothes – a street uniform of jogging pants and hoody – had been too big and her heart had gone out to him. And then, in interview, when they’d all had to introduce themselves, he’d made a joke. ‘Ryan Kennedy,’ he’d said. ‘I’m the criminal.’ They’d all laughed and his mum, Loretta, had caught her eye as if to say, What is he like? But it had turned out that the joke was that he was a criminal, a proper one.
She wriggled out from underneath Connor. He was hot, his face still puffy but deflating like a peach ripening in a bowl. All the news was good. The scans were fine. IV antibiotics. Periorbital cellulitis apparently. The doctors had been worried about the sight in his right eye but now they said he would be OK. Thank you, NHS. She kissed his hot cheek. Then fumbled in the plastic bag her mum had given her, taking out the elephants for when Connor woke and lining them up on the table by the bed, next to the plastic jug of water.
She walked over to the window. There was a view of London. A trail of car lights queuing their way north. A Victorian neighbourhood climbing like a painting beside a park, the sunset streaked by purple jet trails.
No news about Kieran. That was good, surely? No news is good news. She caught Julia’s eye and smiled for her to come over.
She was a beautiful young woman, Lizzie thought. Short hair. Health and youth and a face that seemed untroubled. A runner probably, like her. Living the dream, as they all liked to say, as if they were speaking ironically when it was, really, if they were honest, how they felt about their job. AFOs were living the dream – super-fit and cool and catching the bad guys. Lizzie could have been one herself, if. If.
‘Shouldn’t you have gone off duty by now?’
Julia shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Don’t they need to release you?’
‘I’ve asked to stay.’
‘Well, thank you.’ A pause. ‘Is there any news?’
‘He’s in theatre.’
Lizzie pressed her lips together. ‘Any chance I could go there? My mum can stay with Connor.’
‘I’ll find out what’s happening.’
Lizzie wondered about that. Was it because Kieran’s wife was there? Or was there some other reason? She tried to be upbeat, to show that she could be trusted to be by Kieran’s bedside.
‘Great. I’ll stay with Connor until you’ve heard back.’
Connor was stirring. She stood and watched him. Those precious moments when he didn’t know he was obs
erved. He had found the elephants and he hesitated and then picked one up and turned and said, ‘Mummy!’
She went over to him and sat by his side on the bed. She said, ‘Feeling better?’ He smiled and picked up the elephants and they started to walk across the cover. And then she turned and saw Steve Bradshaw at the end of the ward, and knew.
64
Sarah was leaving the custody suite to submit the charging report for Shakiel Oliver. There was a lot. Importation of firearms and supply. Numerous drug offences. Conspiracies. Threats with menaces. The big one was the murder charge for Lexi. Mandatory life with a minimum term. His reign was finished.
King, too: the young pretender’s rule cut short before it had even started, if not before he had killed.
If only she could find some pleasure in it. If only they would hear good news.
She was keying in the code to the door when she heard the noise. It took a moment for her to identify what it was: the cry of a woman. And then more noise. Shouting. She turned back to the suite and moved towards the sound. Other officers were rushing ahead of her towards the cell. Standing behind them she saw, through their massed bodies, Ryan kicking and writhing on the cell floor.
‘No! No!’
His mother, in the corner: ‘Ryan, it’s going to be all right. I love you, son. It’s going to be all right.’
An officer in uniform – small, neat, young in service by the look – was standing in the corridor with a blue evidence book in his hand.
Sarah said, ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nicked him for murder, didn’t I? Custody sergeant’s instructions. Fucking sorry now, isn’t he?’
Ryan was face down on the cell floor, legs being strapped, wrists cuffed. There was blood on his arm. Somehow he had cut himself. The custody sergeant she had seen earlier was behind her and he told her to get the fuck out of the way.
‘Last thing we need is for this murdering little shit to die on us.’
They needed to get Ryan to a hospital and they didn’t need some fucking detective getting in the way. The nurse was standing by. And Sarah thought the thing that everyone thinks. It can’t be true.
AFTERWARDS
FRIDAY 4 NOVEMBER
The wait had been too long and obedience in the church was flagging. The chubby boy in the blazer drove metal cars along the stone floor and made the appropriate vroom vroom noises. The girl in the apricot taffeta dress that made her look more like a bridesmaid than a mourner stood on one of the pews. She turned her back to the altar and waved at the congregation. The gesture was answered by a billowing laugh and the girl smiled. Clearly she enjoyed an audience, and was about to repeat the gesture, or perhaps move on to something else – a song or a dance perhaps? – but her mother, with a blush and an apologetic smile, grabbed her and pulled her to sit beside her. Sarah looked at their backs, the mother’s arm tightly round the daughter, and saw the sweet passed from hand to hand. What it was like to be that mother? she wondered. All that effort. All that patience. All that straw sought out and carried in the beak to make the best possible nest. All those wriggling worms flown back to the insatiable chorus of hungry mouths. Such vulnerability to the life of another.
She thought of Caroline, who had always said she wanted children. Returning home after that longest October day, there had been flowers in a glass jar on the kitchen table. Gypsophila, roses, hydrangeas russet and green, and autumn chestnut leaves, red as fire. A card was propped against the jar.
No recriminations, only an explanation. Things just weren’t working out. In her heart, Sarah would know that too. Caroline was sorry. She hoped they could be friends.
Sarah, too tired to build a fire, had sat in her chair by the cold hearth, subdued by the fairness of Caroline’s words and stilled by the boy’s cries that rang so recently in her head.
No! No!
Even now, although she hated him for what he’d done, she couldn’t help the ragged pity that also stirred.
God bless the child that’s got his own.
In the church, whispers carried. Sarah looked up.
Lizzie had entered. She was pale, and though her clothes were respectable, she was untidy too, as though she had slept in her jacket. She carried Connor, who clutched an elephant, and by her side was another woman, willowy and elegant. Sarah recognized her from a glimpse through a window years ago: Kieran’s wife, Rachel. The two women moved together up the aisle. Was it a show of solidarity or just a coincidence that they walked together. A tight phalanx followed just behind. A girl – Kieran’s daughter, Sarah guessed – and two older women. Another woman of Lizzie’s age. Her sister, perhaps. Another couple of children. God knows who they belonged to. A man in a suit. It was that thing: a family doing its best on a difficult day.
They made their way into the pews at the front. Connor started wriggling and dropped his elephant, and Rachel’s head bobbed down as she bent to reach it for him. His hand stretched out and he took it from her.
Sarah cleared her throat.
And then the anticipation that had seemed endless stilled. The church doors opened and everyone turned to see the funeral’s usual revelation. Death was real after all. No one had been pretending.
There were no uniforms, but Sarah guessed the coffin bearers were all police, their arms linked round each other’s shoulders as if in brotherhood. Steve Bradshaw was one of them.
Mrs Shaw, handsome like her son, delivered the eulogy, but Sarah, normally the most rational of people, found she could not really hear the words. Fragments only filtered in. Two children without their father … died a hero … doing the thing he loved …
She hated it.
Even though she barely knew him, these clichés did not do justice to the man who had stood in the lift with her at Scotland Yard and tricked her into betraying who had given her Jarral’s name. He’d been a bastard, and he’d been cunning, and he’d been a bloody good cop partly because he’d been a cunning bastard. In the end he had died a hero, but she couldn’t help but think of Hamlet hesitating to kill the king while he was at prayer and so send him straight to heaven. Goodness and mischief run through us like the veins in marble. And she couldn’t help feeling too that it was her own probity that had killed him. It was she, in the end, who had pushed Ryan to the edge by refusing to protect him and his family with a lie. She couldn’t make sense of it. She was crying as she heard his mother’s last words.
‘Once,’ she said, ‘there was a boy who wouldn’t be told, who played out too late and whose mother stood on the doorstep and called his name out into the twilight. Time to come in now.’
The officers stepped back to carry the coffin. Lizzie and Connor and Rachel and Samantha got into place behind it.
Everyone was standing, and Sarah, getting to her feet a little late, heard the halting wheeze of the little organ like a three-legged dog trying to gather speed, and the voices of the congregation swelling, carrying the moment with all their strength.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sara O’Keeffe, Margaret Stead and Alice Lutyens, who have supported this book from start to finish. Thanks to everyone at Corvus, especially Will Atkinson, Susannah Hamilton, James Pulford, Kate Straker, Poppy Mostyn-Owen, Sophie Walker, Karen Duffy and Jamie Forrest.
Thanks to Dick Gladman for sharing his expertise as a road traffic collision investigator and to Sergeant Harry Tangye for firearms information. It is customary at this point for the writer to say that all errors are her own. I add to this that readers should not look to find reality in this book. Gallowstree Lane is a work of fiction. It inhabits a parallel universe and is a product of my imagination. Nevertheless, to quote Graham Greene, who was himself quoting Hans Andersen, ‘out of reality are our tales of imagination fashioned’.
Many friends have helped: Chris Bilton and Tom Hall deserve special mention (they may guess why), and my friends Paul Needley, Jules McRobbie and Kate Hardie. To my former colleagues, my respect and affection, as always. Thanks to Jane Robinson and An
n Sutcliffe and to my boys, Daveed and Yoni, who have to endure their mother not hearing a word they say when she’s at her desk. And finally love, thanks and apologies to Uri, my port in a storm.