by John Harvey
She woke less than an hour later; threw the uneaten toast into the bin, poured cold chocolate down the sink and swilled out the mug; swallowed down two Ibuprofen with water; swiftly showered; changed. She thought twice about waking Carla, who was still sleeping, out to the world, and finally decided against it. Left her a note instead. Later in the day, she’d seize a minute, phone or text, arrange for her to come in and make a statement, make sure she was okay.
Less than an hour later, she and Mike Ramsden were in her office, going over what they knew, what they needed to know, what needed to be done.
The vehicle used, most witnesses seemed to agree, was a black BMW X5, the registration less certain, save an agreement on the numbers 233. CCTV was being monitored, a selection of possible registrations had been sent to DVLA in Swansea; high-end hire-car firms were already being checked.
The individual responsible for the deaths of both men — the gunman, the shooter — had been variously described as shortish, tall, of medium height, slim and stockily built. Dark haired, save for one witness who had him wearing a beret and another who swore blind he was bald, and dark skinned. You mean black? No, not black. Asian. Not Asian? Middle Eastern, then? No, not that either. Swarthy, that was the word. Dark skinned, like I said before. White, but dark skinned. European.
The man shot dead on the pavement alongside Carla had been identified from the contents of his wallet as Aaron Johnson. The second victim had no ID on him whatsoever: no credit cards or driving licence, no mobile phone — all of that suspicious in itself.
Aaron Johnson, forty-three years old, an address in Lewisham: one of the half-dozen or so names Tim Costello had come up with when he was checking out Terry Martin’s associates.
Killed with a single shot to the head.
A gang hit, had to be.
Yet, according to his record, Johnson had served only a couple of brief spells inside, neither more than eighteen months, petty thieving, robbery; one charge of unlawful wounding had been shunted aside before it came to court, another of aggravated burglary was dropped when both witnesses suffered a convenient amnesia. Nothing that suggested heavy gang involvement, the kind of retribution that had been meted out here.
Perhaps, Karen thought, he was stepping up. Out of his league.
She called Gerry Stine, the Intelligence Support officer who’d proved so useful in helping identify Petru Andronic’s body at the beginning of the year. After listening for several minutes, Stine cut across what Karen was saying. ‘Afraid you’re priming the wrong man. Little off my field of expertise. But if you want a better suggestion, I can field a few names.’
The one Karen lighted on first was Warren Cormack, a DCI within the Project Team of Serious and Organised Crime Command, SCD7, which dealt, according to the rubric, with multi-dimensional crime groups, ethnically composed gangs and proactive contracts to kill. She’d heard one or two good things about him in the past; now was the time to see if they were true.
His office phone directed her to his mobile, which instructed her to leave a message, the voice just this side of brusque. Give him a couple of hours, Karen thought, then move down to the next name on the list.
Less than an hour later, Cormack called her back. He’d heard about the Camden shooting; thinking it almost certainly gang related he had started making a few preliminary inquiries himself.
‘Still no ID on the second hit?’ he asked.
‘Not so far.’
‘Description?’
‘Caucasian male, aged between thirty and thirty-five, medium height, dark hair, blue-grey eyes. That’s about all.’
‘No identifying marks? Scars? Tattoos?’
‘Not a one.’
‘Dental records?’
‘Nothing so far.’
‘Innocent bystander.’
‘Could be.’
‘Lived a clear and blameless life.’
‘Why run?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
She could hear faint traffic sounds, as if Cormack were standing near an open window. Run?Yes, she’d run. Run, duck, hide. But would the gunman risk identification and possible capture if his prime target was already down?
‘Tell you what,’ Cormack said, ‘send across some pictures, head and shoulders, full face, profile, you know the kind of thing. I’ll get them fed into the system, see what emerges.’
‘How long?’
‘Check that through? Might strike lucky. This time tomorrow? Don’t come up with anything by then, I’m probably not going to be able to help.’
‘Thanks, anyway,’ Karen said. But he’d already rung off.
24
Twenty-four hours. Warren Cormack was as good as his word. They met, at his suggestion, in Victoria Tower Gardens, just beyond the Houses of Parliament and overlooking the Thames. Tide out, gulls scavenged along a narrow strand of muddy bank strewn with discarded rubbish. New Scotland Yard was no more than a brisk stroll away, pleasant enough beneath a wash of wispy cloud, a patina of palish blue.
Cormack proved to be younger than he’d sounded on the phone, younger than she’d anticipated, less abrupt. Slim features, neatly suited, off-white shirt, pearl grey tie, still the right side of thirty-five.
‘This okay by you?’ He gestured towards a bench facing out towards the river, Lambeth Palace and St Thomas’ Hospital on the opposite bank.
‘Fine.’
‘Not usually too many people around.’
‘Bolt-hole, then?’
‘Something like that.’
Sitting, he loosened his tie just a little; one arm, crooked, along the back of the bench. Making her wait. One of a brace of ragged crows hopped hopefully close, then hopped away.
‘Jamie Parsons,’ Cormack said, finally. ‘The pictures you sent over. A definite match.’
‘He’s known?’
‘Only tangentially. That’s why he wouldn’t have shown up on your radar. Bottom-feeder stuff, really. Does a lot of footwork for a guy called Gordon Dooley, who we certainly do have an interest in.’
‘Dooley?’
‘A dealer, fairly big-time, contacts all along the south coast, Margate, Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton. Main source of supply was through the Netherlands, Rotterdam, but since Border Agency and Customs seem to have succeeded in stemming that particular flow, for now at least, he’s been having to look elsewhere.
‘There’s no definite proof, but we think he’s behind a spate of raids on cannabis farms across the south-east. Most recent was in Essex, the outbuildings of a disused farm close to Manningtree; before that, a deconsecrated chapel just outside Great Yarmouth. Just those two raids, upwards of two thousand plants stolen, that’s going to yield around fifty metric tons of cannabis for illegal sale.’
‘And these farms, who’s behind them?’
‘Difficult to say. Precisely. The workers at both premises were mainly Chinese, illegally trafficked into the country, very little English. They’d been badly beaten, some of them, during the raids, tied up with baling wire. Terrified out of their wits. They’re not going to give us a great deal, even if they wanted to. But most of that trade — what isn’t still in the hands of Dooley and his ilk — it’s the province of organised gangs originating in Eastern Europe. Turkey. Albania.’
A pleasure boat went past them downriver, heading towards Tower Bridge and beyond that to the Thames Barrier, hardy souls on deck wrapped in scarves and fleeces, the voice of the tour guide torn by the breeze.
‘Dooley,’ Karen said, ‘if he is involved, presumably he’s not going to be carrying out these raids single-handed.’
Cormack shook his head. ‘South London, that’s his stamping ground. Home patch. Recruiting, that’s where he’d look. No shortage of possibles, keen for a ruck. Especially if there’s a good chunk of cash at the end of it. A couple of known associates with more than a propensity for violence. A few hangers-on.’
‘Parsons being one.’
‘Parsons being one.’
‘And Aa
ron Johnson another.’
‘Maybe. A reasonable assumption. But we don’t know for sure. As it stands, nothing to say they knew one another before Camden. Not much to link them together aside from a liking for Ronny Jordan.’
‘How about Terry Martin?’
‘You looking for a connection?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Any special reason?’
She told him about Petru Andronic’s murder, her suspicions that Martin might have been involved.
‘Well, it’s a name we know, more through the company he keeps than anything else.’
‘Company?’
Cormack smiled, shifted his position on the bench. ‘How about this? One of Dooley’s hard men got out of the Scrubs just a month before the raid in Manningtree. Went inside for going after some guy Dooley reckoned had been holding back on his payments; left him with a ruptured spleen and more broken ribs than you could easily count.’
‘Let me guess, Carter.’
‘Mad Mike himself.’
‘The link, you think, between Martin and Dooley?’
‘One of them, I’d say.’
‘So how involved in all of Dooley’s dirty work do you think Martin might be?’
‘Difficult to say. Anywhere between not at all and very. As muscle, maybe. More than that …?’ He shrugged his shoulders, dipped his head.
‘He’s not dealing himself, I suppose?’
‘Not as far as we know. There was a suggestion a while back that he might have been smuggling in drugs along with his shipments from the Baltic. Couple of containers were opened and searched — nothing but plastic wraps of cheap clothing on their way to small-scale shops and market stalls up and down the country.’
Karen sat back, starting to run the possibilities, the variables, through her mind. ‘How do you want to play this?’ she asked.
‘You run with your investigation, let your team know as much as you think they need. We’ll keep up our surveillance on Dooley, maybe widen it to take in a couple of the others. Anything important starts to show, I’ll put you in the frame.’
‘Likewise.’
‘Okay, good.’ He got to his feet and Karen followed. A scattering of scruffy pigeons made as if to take flight but their hearts weren’t in it.
Karen thanked him, meaning every word, shook hands, and set off towards Westminster Tube station. The protesters she understood to have been moved on from Parliament Square still seemed to be present in quite large numbers. No tents any more, no one sleeping rough, but banners a-plenty. Capitalism STILL isn’t Working. Stop the War in Afghanistan. Bring Our Troops Home Now. And alongside that last, writ large, the ever-increasing numbers of fatalities from what some general or politician, without irony, had named Operation Enduring Freedom, the total growing, growing, growing, year on year.
Compared to that, she thought, crossing against the slowly moving traffic, what she had to deal with, serious in its way, was small beer indeed.
25
The cemetery was just south of the road that separated Heamor from Penzance proper, an expanse of land protected by trees and closely studded with markers in marble and stone. Late afternoon, the winds that had earlier scoured the day had all but died and the light was fading in the sky. Cordon’s own father was here, had been here for some little time; his grave, as he would have wanted, plain and largely unadorned. Three lines from Robert Louis Stevenson, cleanly carved …
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die.
Cordon had found them in a book of verse that had lain beside his father’s hospice bed, uneasily underlined.
Three plots away lay the grave of an unknown French merchant seaman, a victim of the First World War, who for some reason had washed up on this part of the coast. There were other sailors buried there, too, Cordon knew; they had learned about it at school. Seventeen of the crew of the trawler Wallasea, killed in an attack by German surface craft down in Mounts Bay in January 1944. In his primary class they had made drawings, heavy the lurching blue of the heaving sea, the sky above erupting with the scarlet crash of exploding shells. The teacher had taken them to the causeway that leads, at low tide, across the edge of the bay towards St Michael’s Mount and had them stand there, silent, staring out, thinking the unthinkable. His fingers had been cold, Cordon remembered, the first inklings of returning water pooling around the thin soles of his plimsolls.
Only the smaller of the two chapels was in use today, Maxine’s friends a staunch but motley crew: some who’d known her from the streets, the squats and sleeping rough, those who’d survived; others she’d known from the Churches Breakfast Project or Addaction Community Support; a few neighbours from the street where latterly she’d lived, one of whom had invited mourners back to her house after the ceremony for sandwiches and tea.
Of Maxine’s immediate family, there was no sign.
No Clifford Carlin.
No fostered children.
No Letitia: no Rose.
Seated on hard wood, knees pressed against the pew in front, Cordon struggled to concentrate on the clergyman’s words, the benign platitudes, the elisions that skated over a misplaced life. An irregular death.
Behind him, an elderly man’s suit exuded an almost overpowering smell of mothballs. Heads bowed, tears here and there were sniffed or coughed away.
When the organist wheezed out the introduction to the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, Cordon turned smartly and pushed his way outside.
She was standing immediately opposite the double doors, pale raincoat unbuttoned over a black dress, her mouth a dark red gash across her bloodless face.
Startled, Cordon stopped in his tracks.
‘Not a ghost,’ Letitia said. ‘See.’ She plucked at the skin tight on her cheek. ‘It’s real.’
The lines, the gauntness made her somehow more attractive, Cordon thought, not less. Then banished the thought as quickly as it came.
‘Been a while,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. Years.’
‘Too long, that’s what you’re meant to say.’ Mocking him with her eyes. ‘You don’t look any different — that too.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Is it, bollocks.’
‘We all get a bit older.’
‘Not you. You were always fucking old.’ She reached into her bag for a cigarette.
‘Now you’re running some hotel in the Lake District.’
‘Anything wrong with that?’
‘Bit slow for the likes of you, I’d’ve thought.’
‘Gets too quiet we go down the Pencil Museum for a bit of a laugh.’
‘We?’
‘Me an’ anyone else who’s around.’ She glanced towards the doors. ‘Let’s shift before we get knocked down by the crowd.’
They stood by a section of stone wall, yew trees to either side. Car headlights hollowed yellow and amber along the road at their backs. Fifty metres away, the upturned earth of a freshly dug grave.
‘She came to see you,’ Cordon said, ‘in London. Maxine.’
‘Silly cow.’
‘She was worried.’
‘Because I didn’t want to spend time listening to my dad’s old records while he tells me what I could’ve done with my life?’ She flicked ash towards the ground. ‘I changed my mind, didn’t I? No fuckin’ crime.’
‘But you did see her? In London?’
‘Jesus, what’s with all the questions?’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No, I never saw her. Didn’t know she was there, did I?’
‘She had an address, Finsbury Park.’
‘So?’
‘She would have gone looking for you there.’
‘And not found me.’ Letitia turned towards the doors. ‘They’re coming out now, we better move. See her — what is it? — committed to the earth.’
; Cordon fell in step beside her, rested his hand on the crook of her arm. ‘Maxine. The train. You really think she fell?’
She knocked him angrily away. ‘She’s dead, right? Inside that soddin’ box. A closed bloody coffin ’cause of what the train …’
She ran an arm across her face, her eyes.
‘You want to play the fucking policeman, don’t do it with me. We understood?’
Fragments of earth showered against the coffin lid, small stones bounced once and slid off to the sides. The trowel passed from hand to hand. Ignoring it, Letitia reached down and scooped up raw dirt from the ground, then, leaning out over the graveside, let it fall between her fingers till there was nothing but air.
There should have been rooks cawing at the sky, Cordon thought, but instead there was silence, a moment of almost true silence, and then the awkward shuffling of feet, a few mourners already, hands in pockets, moving away. He had been thinking of his father, the meticulous way he would plan each step, each journey, each and every trip they made to this or that bird sanctuary or wildlife refuge; the small notebooks in which he would record everything they had seen. A meticulousness that had driven the young Cordon close to distraction.
If a thing’s worth doing …
He did hear a bird then, rook, crow or jackdaw — his father would have known in an instant — but when he raised his eyes to look the bird was not there but in the past.
Shoulders brushed by him as he stood unmoving, remembering the last time he had bent to kiss his father’s cheek, the roughness of the older man’s unshaven face, the smell of something slowly rotting on his breath. Leaving, he had stepped out into a failing light much like this.
Gradually, he realised someone was standing beside him.
‘Are you all right, love?’ A woman, round faced, bundled in black. He didn’t know who she was.