Little Doubt

by Little Doubt (epub)

  Ormond had begun his career almost forty years ago, in Birmingham in 1979. He’d been a bobby for seven years with no significant issues to note. In 1986 he’d transferred to Glasgow and been promoted quickly. By 1995, he was a chief inspector, and he moved to Penrith in 2000. It was a distinguished service history and there were links to various medals and awards he’d won. She clicked on some of them, hoping to find something more. The local press tended to turn up at various public events supported by the police to fill their column space. She rifled through various charity occasions and studied the faces of the philanthropists smiling into the camera. Ormond was there to shake the hands of several of them. He was quite handsome in his younger years, she noted: tall and commanding, with piercing eyes.

  And then her blood froze.

  She looked at the date on the photo on the screen: 2013. It showed two local businessmen flanking Ormond. They were all holding a cheque for the better part of half a million quid, made payable to a children’s home. She read the accompanying article in detail. She knew the names well. One of the men had died in prison, banged up while seriously ill with cancer, guilty of smuggling, supplying children for the purposes of sexual services, and money laundering. The other had died before he faced charges, in a poky hotel room in Ambleside, straddled by a prostitute, in control of a multimillion-pound laundering racket that supplied women, weapons and drugs to the whole of the UK. They were both predators, exploiting anything with value – mainly sex and drugs – for personal gain.

  Kelly should know: she’d been the one who’d exposed them. Ormond was the superintendent when she’d investigated the case. She clicked on a link below the article.

  Charity gala raises £200,000 for underprivileged children.

  Another photo. The date was 2012. This time Ormond had his arms around the pair, and was laughing at some no-doubt hilarious joke told by one of them. She stared into their faces.

  A quick check of the children’s home and the charity that benefited from the alleged funds revealed that were both registered in Workington, and it didn’t take Kelly long to make further inquiries into who owned or ran the institutions. On the board of directors was another name she recognised, and this time the hairs on her arms stood on end.

  The Tombday case had unveiled a Europe-wide trafficking and money-laundering racket run by Colin Day and Barry Crawley, the two men who’d posed with Ormond almost a decade ago, smiling, embracing and parading as chums. Back then, they’d have been at the height of their influence over vulnerable groups of people here and abroad. The question was: how much did Ormond know?

  Chapter 28

  Jackson was working on a Carrera Vanquish. All the kids had them, no matter their income. If it couldn’t be bought, it could be nicked. It didn’t take long to change seats, handlebars and spoke covers to make over a hot bike so it looked brand new. He never asked questions. Morality didn’t pay. All that mattered was survival. He listened to music in the garage, and worked alone.

  He was gradually creating his own gym in there, and one of his many plans was to train local kids to keep them out of trouble. He’d managed to clear a space big enough for two boxing bags and a climbing rope. He made barbells and dumb-bells out of old axles donated to him by mechanics who knew he used junk, weighting them with sand or concrete.

  He heard a noise behind him and turned round, away from his bike rack. The Cotton brothers stood inside his garage, flanked by several followers. Jackson knew them all. They were a mixture of races, sexes, violent proclivities, and status. Mostly addicts and dealers. He looked at the younger ones and felt helpless to steer them away from what was inevitable. They took seats dotted around the garage and Jackson waited to see what they wanted. It wasn’t a social call, and he reckoned they didn’t want a bike fixing.

  Maybe they wanted their gear back. The package that Tyrone had given him had come from Jason Cotton. That much he knew. Over the years, he’d been given all sorts of items to dispose of, but in reality, he kept everything. More than that, he’d kept a record of every one of them: where it was exchanged, the time, date and description of the package. The bag given to him by Tyrone contained bloody clothes and a knife. It was small enough to peel vegetables, but big enough to kill. It was clean, but Jackson knew that evidence stuck to blades like rabbit shit to fur. He also knew that it was, in all probability, the weapon that had killed Keira.

  ‘What happened to your face, Adam?’ he asked. He assumed he’d been in a dispute, and lost.

  ‘He needed teaching a lesson, fam.’ Jason clarified the situation and Jackson pieced together what had happened. Adam had gone out on a limb, taking a new member’s initiation into his own hands, and his brother was pissed. But it was curious. Why would Jason give two fucks about his brother killing someone?

  Jackson looked at Adam, who had his hands in his pockets and wore a hood that masked most of his wounds. It was standard attire. Two females fawned over him. The Cotton brothers were of different ethnic descent from one another, but no one ever mentioned the fact that their mother was a junkie who shagged around. Adam was black, Jason was white. What mattered was power, not creed.

  Jason folded his arms. He was taller than his brother and had the brains. Adam was slimmer, but a mean motherfucker. He stood just behind Jason. Jackson was impressed by the damage Jason had caused: he was a mean bastard too. He guessed Adam must be in a lot of pain. What a refreshing change.

  ‘’Sup, bruv?’ he asked Jason directly. He played the game, and adjusted his tone and word choice for his audience.

  ‘You been visited by two pigs, innit.’ Jason leaned forward as if to intimidate Jackson. The only thing that intimidated him was the number of arseholes in front of him, not any of them individually. He sized them up. There were five males in total. Each one he’d personally witnessed visit grievous harm on young lads on the estate. Each had passed the threshold for the type of violence requiring zero empathy for the victim. There was no doubt about what they carried under their hoodies. These guys were always tooled up. There was also no doubt in his mind that one of the young men standing in his garage had been Adam Cotton’s protégé on Wednesday morning in Potton Park. Most of them looked as though they were stoned, except Jason, who was switched on, as usual. That was a worry. They were evenly matched physically, but he’d never known Jason go into a fight on his own; he always had accomplices and weapons.

  If they were tooled with intent, then Jackson stood no chance and had to plan an exit fast.

  ‘So what? I said nuffin’. You know they use me like they use you, it’s no different. They’re bent, bruv, and worried about the killin’ of the rich woman in the park. She was important.’

  Jason looked at his brother, who bit his lip and walked away, sitting down heavily and lighting a pre-rolled zoot. There was a coolness between them, and Jackson noticed that, whoever this woman was, her death was a problem. He’d seen one of the officers on TV this morning, sitting with the family of the murdered woman. Maybe the heat was as a result of the woman being respectable and not from the estate. It was a random attack, all right, but the wrong one. Adam Cotton was in trouble and he knew it. But what did they want with Jackson?

  ‘How do we know you’re not lyin’, fam?’

  ‘You known me long enough, Jason. I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘What you do with what we gave you?’ Adam asked.

  The girls grew bored and one sauntered over to a sofa and promptly fell asleep.

  ‘I did what you said, like I always do. Why would I do anything else? I’m not stupid!’

  ‘He’s fucking lying, Jason!’ Adam was a loose cannon.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Adam, you ain’t got nuffin’ to say.’

  Adam slunk back and shut up, glaring at Jackson, obviously desperate to find a way back into to his brother’s trust. One way would be to divert interest from himself to Jackson.

  ‘You’ve got a short memory, Adam,’ said Jackson. ‘Like when I saved your pussy at l
east the last three times you were knifed. Barrow? Lancaster? Glasgow?’

  Jason nodded and laughed at his brother. ‘He’s got a point, fam. Come on, let’s smoke sometin’.’ He spoke like a Caribbean Rasta star; it was the language of the street. They all did it, even Jackson. Even though he didn’t have black skin and he wasn’t from Jamaica. He had no idea where or when he’d begun to talk like that: it was around age ten, he guessed. He just did it because everyone did. They all looked up to the years above them in school and the vocab developed from there. It drove the teachers nuts, and they kept correcting their linguistic mistakes, to no avail.

  ‘Turn that music up,’ Jason ordered.

  Jackson did so and went back to the bike he was working on. His palms were sweaty and his hands shook. He swallowed hard and turned the bike slightly so he had them all in his peripheral vision. He didn’t want to be caught off guard. For now, there was nothing more he could do. He’d defused a situation and he had to roll with it. He had to stay sober and alert.

  Two of the men began undressing the sleeping girl and she stirred. They didn’t stop. Jackson went to the fridge in the corner for beers and tried to drown out the noises coming from the girl as she was toyed with by the two men. It was commonplace. Sometimes the girls resisted, sometimes they didn’t. This time, she wasn’t interested in sex, but that was of no concern to the two men on top of her. A third helped hold her. The other girls goaded them on, nervous shock spilling over into bravado. But all of them moved in slow motion, fried by drugs. Even their language was dopey.

  It didn’t take long for Adam to lie down with two of the girls, stoned, and fall asleep. The girl who’d been degraded was toking on joints like they were going out of business, and was soon reduced to an unconscious mess. But she hadn’t tried to leave. She was resigned to her existence within this family, and that was probably the saddest realisation for Jackson.

  He finished working on the Carrera and went to wash his hands. He walked past a coil of rope that he used to tie bikes up on his wall, and stopped. He went closer and examined the black twine. The weave and texture of the fibres looked just like the ones he’d been given by the coppers. Holy shit.

  He calmed his nerves and pushed away panic. It gave him an idea.

  ‘I think you should really get your hands dirty, Guns,’ Jason said. Everybody else was high or unconscious. Jackson knew that Jason using his nickname meant he was forgiven for now.

  ‘You need somebody clean, man. They’d be on me, you know that. You need someone untouchable.’

  ‘I don’t like untouchable no more. I need you to come in the crew. You could play both sides and I’d never know. I see you, Guns, dreaming of leaving and starting a new life. I’m not fucking stupid.’

  ‘I never said you were stupid, man. But I’d be shit at it. I don’t like drugs, I ain’t raping no girls, Adam hates my guts. If something ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We’ve got history. You know me better than anyone.’ He wasn’t too proud to try flattery. It worked.

  A smile spread slowly across Jason’s face.

  ‘There’s too much heat at the moment and we need a courier tonight. You know me and Adam can’t do it, and Tyrone has got to keep out of the way. I don’t trust no one else. That little shit over there’ – he pointed to a young lad who was wasted and mid-blackout – ‘he was the one who stabbed that woman with my brother. He said she bled like a fucking pig. Between you and me, fam, he fucked up. I got shit breathing on me from all sides. He got me in the shit, Guns. She was the wrong one.’

  ‘The wrong one?’

  ‘Long story. It was supposed to be Keira and one other, but not a proper spoilt bitch like that.’

  ‘What can I do? The coppers found two knives in the pond.’ Jackson had heard it on the radio. That was part of the problem with the Cotton brothers: they lived in a bubble.

  ‘What?’ Jason’s face changed.

  ‘Divers were in there yesterday, you didn’t hear? The police released the photographs on TV today. They’ve sent them for forensic testing.’

  ‘But the water would have washed them clean.’ Jason tried to convince himself.

  ‘Not so apparently, bruv. They can still lift oils and shit left by fingers. Tell me they were wearing gloves?’ He nodded towards Adam and the young lad who was his partner in the crime. Jason looked at his brother.

  ‘Fucking liability,’ he said. ‘Guns, I’ve got a proposition for you.’

  Not another one, Jackson thought.

  Chapter 29

  Sharon Bradley checked on the women who’d gathered at the barricades. The female copper who’d told her about Keira had called her to negotiate a police presence at the makeshift blockade. At first she’d almost told her to fuck off, but then she realised that the woman was serious, and she felt important. There had been an increased police presence on the estate as a result of the stabbings, but they’d kept themselves to themselves, no doubt embarrassed about yesterday. There was a clear difference between the police involved with the murder case, run by the Porter woman, and those involved in the raids yesterday.

  Unlike last night, the rapport with the coppers sent this morning had been cordial, entertaining even. They’d taken their hats off and brought cups of tea to people who’d drifted there in search of shelter. Sharon reckoned the whole of Penrith’s homeless had found their way to what was now a refuge of sorts. People had donated food to be handed out, not that anyone around here could afford it. She realised that a bit of common ground brought the best out in people.

  Last night, scores of people had helped construct two barriers across the two main entrances and exits to and from the estate. Tents were erected and electrical wires ran from homes. Now, fires had been lit and food had been cooked on stoves, and it looked as though they’d been protesting there for months. Home-made banners read JUSTICE FOR KEIRA, MOTHERS UNITED and STOP KNIFE CRIME NOW. It was a peaceful protest and the detective had told her that the police were compelled to allow them their freedom of association, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that forceful eviction of the peaceful protesters would gain huge national attention and make the police look like thugs – again – especially with children involved. Now, journalists were turning up and asking people to pose with the coppers, which they did happily, except for a few kids who should have been at school and didn’t want to get caught skipping lessons.

  News travelled quickly, and a steady trickle of residents appeared, as well as people from elsewhere in Penrith and even neighbouring towns, armed with blankets, food, chairs and toys. They greeted Sharon like some kind of well-known figure, and it was clear that she was gaining a status that gave her leverage among her peers. Grief had given her power and she intended to use it wisely. She marched around with a purpose and she looked different too. Her face was fresher, her eyes alive. The attention suited her.

  ‘You need to get some sleep, Shaz,’ a woman said.

  ‘I can’t sleep. No use. I don’t wanna sleep until I get the bastard who did it. Anyone heard from that boyfriend of hers yet? He’s a skanky coward, that one.’

  ‘Reckon it’s him?’

  ‘I dunno. Guns don’t think so. The pigs’ll find someone, but they need evidence.’

  The identity of Keira’s recent alleged boyfriend had been confirmed by several estate members coming forward purely because of Sharon’s appeal.

  ‘He don’t wanna be found, does he? Cowardly little bastard. Police were in his flat all afternoon yesterday. I wanna know why he’s hiding and who he’s protecting.’

  ‘I heard about him. He’s in with the Cotton brothers, ain’t he?’

  ‘Ain’t everyone?’

  It was a worrying development. No one had called out the Cotton brothers before. Sharon knew that regardless of all her shouting and cursing, some people just wouldn’t snitch on them, even for two hundred grand.

  ‘If he is, fuck ’em. Come on, let’s get these kids fed.
What’ve you got there?’ Sharon asked.

  ‘Pancakes from Tesco, already filled with Nutella.’

  ‘Bloody lovely.’

  Tired and jubilant faces beamed at the prospect of treats. It was akin to a non-uniform day at school: indulgent and lawless. It broke the monotony. The day was still dewy from the morning, and ice had formed on the top of waterproof sheets, and dripped off onto the road as it melted. The smell of damp bodies had formed a cloud at the entrance of the shelter.

  The women swapped anecdotes about their experiences of the local authority and the law: they complained of mistreatment, neglect, being the ‘forgotten ones’.

  ‘There’s another banner in that.’

  Sharon agreed.

  ‘We’re like fucking Grenfell,’ another woman said. ‘A disaster waiting to happen. I complained about my gas again yesterday. What if it went up when the kids are asleep?’

  ‘Right so. We’re not budging until something changes.’

  Sharon shouted across the street to two coppers in uniform. ‘Morning, lads! Fancy a cuppa? Looks like we’ll be staying a while longer.’

  Chapter 30

  ‘You’ve got to hand yourself in, bruv. They’re gonna find you soon enough, and it looks bad.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Tyrone said.

  ‘I know, man,’ Jackson said. ‘The Cotton brothers will make sure you take the heat for it, though.’

  ‘How can they do that?’

  Tyrone was naïvety personified and it touched Jackson.

  ‘Bruv, they can do what they want, just like the police. Anyone can be framed. We’ve got to make sure they don’t pull it off. I’ll take care of it. What happened?’

  Growing stir-crazy, Tyrone had dared to leave the flat used for drug deals and substance use, and they sat in one to which Jackson had access. They were alone and would remain undisturbed. If the police ever came into possession of the network of addresses that were used across the estate, there would always be ones that remained anonymous and untraceable.