Chapter 42
DC Emma Hide entered the main lobby of Eden House and greeted the weekend staff downstairs. During a murder inquiry, the incident rooms upstairs were usually busy at the weekend, but today was different: DI Porter was visiting the barricades on the Beacon Estate, and everybody else on duty except Emma herself was occupied with the hunt for the Cotton brothers. A total of seven addresses had been checked, but the pair remained elusive and it was beginning to look embarrassing for the force.
Emma had felt a mixture of sadness and disappointment when she was told that Will Phillips was leaving the team. She had no idea why, apart from it being personal. She’d worked with Will for three years. He was a decent, ordinary bloke. She’d met Katrina, his wife, when they’d gone out in Penrith to celebrate Will’s promotion to DS. It had come on the back of a tough case, as it always did, but Will had never struck her as anything but straight.
Going to London with DI Porter earlier in the year had given her a new insight into her boss. She’d found that she wasn’t as hard as her exterior would have people believe. The moment she’d met Matt Carter, the DCI in London in charge of the case, Emma had known that something had gone on between the two of them. She saw it in his eyes and his body language when Kelly was around. He was an old flame for sure.
She liked having a context for the enigmatic Kelly Porter. She had renewed respect for the woman when she saw her as real, like other people, with failed relationships, bad choices in men, a vulnerable heart and a complicated past. When she found out exactly why Kelly had left London, it had added sympathy to the growing list of emotions she felt towards her boss. Publicly, the Met claimed that sexism, misogyny, favours and favourites were a thing of the past, but everyone knew that was bollocks. As long as women had wombs – despite new targets for promotion – they’d stay on the back foot. Real status was won on the street.
The Coryn Boulder murder case had been a fuck-up from the start. Carter had been in charge; not in name – Kelly Porter was equal in rank – but for the purposes of those in the know, because his uncle was a superintendent. He had cut corners that Porter never even knew about. When the suspect in the case committed suicide by jumping off a multistorey car park, the finger was pointed at Kelly. But it was Carter who’d suppressed the information from a witness that Coryn’s boyfriend was seen dumping black bags in the bins behind her flat a day after her death. The information was ignored because they were so close to nailing the other suspect.
In the event, Porter was thrown under the bus. Carter claimed she was the one who’d handled the witness statements. The inquiry was internal – not deemed serious enough to involve third parties – and put in a drawer. Carter was promoted. Porter was told the ‘mistake’ would be overlooked if she agreed to look at other constabularies. A good Cumbrian granny might say that she’d been stitched up like a kipper.
Emma returned her attention to her current inquiries. She’d called the lab and they’d told her that they would have news for her around ten o’clock. It was Kate Umshaw’s day off. The office buzzed with a low hum and she was glad that she was able to concentrate on her screen in peace.
She heard a noise and looked behind her. Kelly’s door was open, so she got up to close it. Will was sitting at the boss’s desk.
There was a moment between them where Emma didn’t know what to say and Will simply looked at her. Time stood still.
‘The boss said you’re leaving. Is that true?’
‘Yes, I’m being moved.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you start!’ He was short with her and it took her by surprise. He sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I was getting some information on Jackson Akers and Tyrone Fenton. I just…’
He was nervous. Emma thought it was because he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
‘If you’re leaving the team, why do you need information about the case?’
‘You’re right. Old habits.’ He got up and walked past her.
‘Will?’
He ignored her and left.
Emma rang her boss, but her call went unanswered. She went back into DI Porter’s office and logged onto her computer. The first thing she did was check recent activity. Will wasn’t a fool; whatever he’d been doing, he could easily erase the record. He was a nerd like her. But she knew ways around all the tricks.
It didn’t take long to unpick what he’d done.
He’d been looking at DI Porter’s recent searches. One was his own career profile and the other was Ormond’s.
More worryingly, there had been a recent download of data to a removable USB stick. It left DI Porter wide open.
Her mobile phone made her jump and she answered. It was the lab.
Neither of the knives retrieved from the lake in Potton Park matched Tyrone Fenton’s prints. They’d had positive results, though, from the Police National Computer database. The prints on the smaller blade belonged to Adam Cotton, and they also had a match for the larger blade: a known accomplice of the Cotton brothers. The clothes supplied by Jackson Akers last night had been tested urgently, and three chestnut hairs had been found with the same follicle profile as one found on Keira Bradley. Emma knew from his photograph that Jason Cotton had chestnut hair. The sweater had tested positive for Keira’s blood, and the small knife had a single usable print that matched to none other than Jason Cotton. If neither brother had had a police record, it could have taken months, if not years, to find matches. The past had a nasty habit of catching up.
The semen found inside Keira tested positive for Tyrone Fenton, but they’d expected that. The clothes taken from the raid on Tyrone’s flat yielded no physical evidence of a violent event. They found a hair matching Keira’s follicle profile and skin cells matching her DNA, but the pair were lovers, so again, no surprise.
She tried Porter once more. This time she answered. Emma told her the lab results first.
‘That is fantastic news. Bloody brilliant! Listen, I need you to get on to the counter-corruption intelligence unit to find out how to whistle-blow.’
‘Whistle-blow?’
‘I don’t believe the reporting of such a senior officer would be handled sensitively enough unless I’m anonymous.’
‘Good point. It should be on their website.’
‘And there’s a solicitor in Manchester I want you to call to see if we can get Keira’s file.’
‘She was seeing a solicitor?’
‘Yes. I want to know why. You’ll have to get a police production order.’
‘Guv, Will was in your office, on your computer, looking at your recent searches.’ She didn’t know how else to say it, so she just blurted it out.
‘What? Shit.’
Chapter 43
Neil Ormond teed off the tenth and felt the stretch in his spine. He planned to play the back nine.
His mobile phone vibrated in his pocket and it irritated him. The swing was good, and followed the correct line, but the wind gusted at the wrong moment and took it fifty yards to the left, into a tree.
Damn!
He looked at the caller and knew he had to take it. It could be the information he was seeking. He’d been requesting intel on DI Kelly Porter for months, and had slowly been gathering material on her. She was simply too good. He couldn’t be seen to stand out, and Porter was attracting attention from HQ for her outstanding detective work. She’d put away more criminals in the last three years than the rest of the serious crime department over the previous decade. It made him look incompetent. If she could waltz in here and flip the stats on their heads, then what had the rest of them been doing before?
The caller was his best contact in the Met. He was solid, reliable and prompt. He’d been a rookie under Ormond many moons ago and they kept each other up to date about any anomalies that might pop up in day-to-day policing.
‘Yes,’ he said loudly into his phone, as if the increased volume would bring welcome news. The knot in his stomach, however, told him otherwise.
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‘There’s been some digging around the employment files of two of your boys.’
Ormond waited.
‘The searches came from a fixed computer station at Eden House. This morning, one of them confirmed they were done from the computer of DI Porter. There’ve also been questions asked at the Preston depot by a DC Emma Hide. In addition, a police production order has been requested to acquire a file at a solicitor’s in Manchester regarding Keira Bradley. It has been granted.’
Neil ended the call. He slammed his driver into his new Ping golf bag, and set the caddy to auto. It set off like R2-D2 and trundled alongside him towards where he thought he’d fucked up his shot. He fiddled with his glove and looked up to the sky, as if the heavens might provide an answer as to why a junior upstart might be checking on his business. She was even better than he’d thought.
He was ashamed of his behaviour last night, but only because it had probably alienated Tom. He’d made a fool of himself. He should have got Porter on board when she first came to Cumbria, but he knew that was an impossibility due to her incorruptible damn morals. That was why he’d planted Will: to keep an eye on her. But the young officer had grown soft and warmed to his new boss. He could see it and it was time to do something about it.
For anything to come back to him, she had to prove it. But he had no idea how to get around the Manchester solicitor; that was impossible even for him. They were independent legal experts and untouchable. Sometimes Neil couldn’t figure out how he’d got embroiled in all of this. It was days like today when he wanted to collect his passport from home and disappear to some remote village on a foreign island in the sun.
The frustration welled up inside him and threatened to bubble over into anger. He saw two groups of old-timers, and they waved from the ninth fairway. He’d been invited to join them but had declined. Sometimes he just needed to be alone and concentrate on his strokes. Today was one of those days, but now it’d been spoiled. Greed. It ruined everything eventually. He’d been too greedy, but he searched around for something else to blame.
Female police officers. They were a nightmare: into everything, desperate to prove themselves worthy, as if making up for not having a dick. They’d ruined the force. He harked back to the days when men sat in boardrooms thick with cigarette and cigar smoke, making decisions and plans, only interrupted by the odd skirt bringing them tea or brandy. He shook his head: how times had changed. Now everything was transparent and it was frankly dull.
Conditions were becoming tighter and tighter. Everything was documented, checked and accounted for. Leakage was a thing of the past. Well, almost. He needed to get out of the gig, he knew that much, and he wondered if he could hold on until retirement.
He calmed a little and remembered when he’d first met Colin Day. In those days, coppers weren’t either straight or bent; they used their intuition. Sometimes people got hurt and sometimes contraband went missing. It all added to the flavour. One thing was for sure: they formed bonds with the crims and it garnered results. Nowadays, with instinct dead in a sterile textbook somewhere, hawked over by lawyers and journos, coppers daren’t even take a piss without logging it on a time sheet.
His stint with Merseyside Police had shaped him in many ways. They’d dealt with some of the worst criminals in recent British history. People thought gangs were a modern phenomenon. They knew very little. In Liverpool, in the seventies, without mobile phones, computers or the Internet, gangs ruled the streets with impunity. It was brutal. He’d cut his teeth pursuing people like the Cotton brothers, until he saw – plain as day – that he was banging his head against a brick wall. As with anything in life, it was good to talk, and talking to crims was no different. An agreement; that was what was needed. And that was what was needed now, on the Beacon Estate. But Kelly Porter was on a mission to turn the whole place upside down. Righteous, self-assured pussy was going to be his downfall.
Tombday had been a code word made up by Colin Day and covering a huge operation, beginning with betting and tanning shops in Workington and Liverpool, and ending in recruiting traffickers from Sarajevo. It was only a matter of time until they got caught: they’d simply become too big. But it was Kelly Porter who’d dug them out, like a terrier after a fox: she hadn’t let up until she had the lot of them behind bars, or so she thought. And now he remembered where he’d heard the name Emma Hide before. She was so cosy with Porter, she might as well be up her backside. The young detective had been Porter’s sidekick in London earlier in the year. It made sense: she was a computer whizz. A bright spark in Kelly’s team.
He needed to think clearly, and whistled as he followed his automated caddy. He corrected its trajectory, but for the most part it sensed where he was and adjusted itself. It had cost the best part of a thousand pounds, but it was his treat. Much of the money laundered by Tombday had needed someone to look after it. He reached the treeline and looked for his ball. It was a matter of principle. He could easily have got out a brand-new one and dropped it on the fairway, but he’d only berate himself for it for the rest of the day. He had to find it. Eventually he spotted it, in deep grass underneath a silver birch. He commanded the caddy to halt and decided to play a wedge to get out of the rough.
On the next hole, he realised that it was no use. These damn women had messed up his swing. He couldn’t get his shoulders to relax and the ball kept pinging this way and that. He hit trees, he couldn’t pitch, and he chose the wrong irons. He set the trolley to auto and made his way sulkily back to the clubhouse.
He left his kit outside and changed his shoes, then went into the bar area to grab some lunch. Once his belly was full, he’d make a decision on what to do next. DI Porter and her team were dealing with some pretty nasty criminals right now, and it was part of the risk of the job that one occasionally crossed paths with peril.
The huge TV in the bar was up loud and the tables were busy. He greeted old pals but couldn’t help but be drawn to the screen. The bulletin was live from the Beacon Estate, and he watched in shock as the scenes unfolded. There were thousands of people there, marching, singing, chanting, waving banners and demanding social reform. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Politicians, experts and celebrities were all giving opinions and bemoaning inequality.
He was about to roll his eyes and order a beer when the image on the screen switched to an interview with Sharon Bradley, who was appealing for information regarding the death of her daughter. Sitting next to her, nodding her head like a lapdog, was Millie Watson, holding a banner that read JUSTICE FOR ELLA AND KEIRA.
Dear God.
But it was the background that caught his attention: DI Kelly Porter, deep in conversation with Thomas Watson.
He walked out of the club without ordering his drink.
Chapter 44
Adam Cotton was playing FIFA on an old Xbox 360.
He and his brother had been lying low in a warehouse just north of the Beacon Estate, staying out of trouble while the police sorted out the mess. Only a select few knew where they were. The room at the top of the warehouse was furnished with sofas, tables and chairs, a fridge, and a small TV set connected to the Xbox. No one had any interest in watching events unfold on the Beacon Estate; their only concern was staying away from the heat. Jason had a widespread network of garages, flats and warehouses across Penrith, but relied on others to make sure plans were executed, and goods received and sold on time and to the right person. He didn’t trust Adam with that side of the business; he was merely a hired thug.
The game was tense, with Adam just losing out on a sitter. He punched the boy next to him and threw the console towards the screen. Then he got up and kicked a chair, which flew across the concrete floor.
‘Calm down, bro. You’re proper shit at that game, man. For real. What is the point of you throwing your toys around?’ Jason admonished from his seat in the corner, where he was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and contemplating his future. He shook his head. He’d lost all respect for his br
other. It had been a long time coming, but now he saw him merely as baggage. He had to cut loose, and he needed quiet to get his thoughts straight. Adam was fucking up his head space.
‘Shut up, brah!’ Adam spread his hands and confronted him; they were all growing jumpy. Being holed up together, not able to go out, had given them a serious case of cabin fever.
Jason laughed at him. Adam looked around and noticed that others were smirking along. He lunged at one boy, but he was too slow and the boy moved in time, escaping towards the door.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’ Adam shouted.
‘Fuck you, brah. I’m going out.’
Adam went to follow him.
‘Leave it!’ Jason barked the order and Adam stopped, turning back. Anger burned into his dark skin, though it was difficult to tell where the bruises ended and the high colour started. The brothers stared at one another and the others in the room thought there might be another fight, a more even one. Last time, Adam had been proper stoned and didn’t stand a chance. He seemed more with it now, and he was fuelled by humiliation.
‘Fuck him, brah, you can’t go out, you know that. It only takes one sighting and we’re all fucked.’
Jason had given Adam a reason not to bite, and it was a sensible and respectable one. It restored some of his pride. The dynamic inside the warehouse had shifted and Jason saw that now: those not identified by the police had no reason to stay there, and the Cotton brothers had become too reliant upon them. Leaving the building was a defiant act, and it wouldn’t take long for others to follow, either from sheer boredom, or, more sinisterly, because they recognised their new power.
Either way, the brothers had to get out.
Adam used to be alert, funny and strong. Now, when Jason looked at him, all he could see was a withered body and a wasted mind. Chemicals of all kinds, snorted, smoked, injected, rubbed, inhaled and consumed, had conspired to ravage a young body to a state where he was beyond salvage. And he’d done it to himself. That was why the posh woman was dead: because Adam had been snorting ketamine. The two stabbings were supposed to take place around the same time – one to cover the other – but Adam, bolstered by chemicals, had got ahead of himself.
Little Doubt Page 22