by Alex Howard
‘It was open?’ said Hanlon in surprise. She’d have expected it to be at least pushed to, more of an attempt at concealment made. It was as if someone had intended the body to be discovered.
Forrest nodded. ‘Open. The chain was cut with bolt cutters. It was lying on the ground. It’s bagged and back at the lab.’
‘How long’s she been in there?’ asked Hanlon.
‘Not long,’ said Forrest. ‘One of your lot told me the dog walker comes by every day and yesterday the door was chained and padlocked. I’ll know more when I’ve got back to the lab.’
Hanlon nodded and Forrest’s assistant appeared through the doorway of the bunker, carrying lights and cabling. Thomas stood blinking in the afternoon light, staring at the slim, controversial figure that was Hanlon.
During the London riots a police community support officer had found himself, through a mixture of bad luck and unfortunate timing, caught up on the fringes of the Tottenham riots. When he’d started his beat patrol, alone, as his partner had called in sick, everything was more or less normal. Elsewhere in the borough, sporadic acts of vandalism, like Brownian motion in a lab, were coalescing into what eventually turned into the most alarming street violence in living memory. To James Brudenell, the hapless PCSO, it was like being trapped on a mudflat by a tide racing in, as the flood of lawlessness bore down on him from all sides, leaving him bobbing around like a piece of helpless driftwood. It was the speed of it all that was maybe the most frightening thing. One minute the shopping parade had been a picture of normality. Five minutes later the street was full of noise, rampaging masked youths shouting, normal people caught up in it running for cover or in flight, the strident, deafening wails of alarms from businesses and cars, shopkeepers frantically pulling down security screens if they had any, sirens in the distance, news and police helicopters overhead, shouting and screaming, breaking glass.
The PCSO had stood bewildered, paralysed with indecision, feeling ridiculously conspicuous in his uniform, very much alone. He had never imagined anything like this happening. He felt he couldn’t have been much more of a target if he’d tried.
It was then that he felt a blow strike him from behind. He wheeled round to confront his assailant and found himself looking at a group of about ten youths. One of them had thrown a half-empty can of Red Stripe at him, which had splashed him with beer as it hit him and now lay at his feet. He could smell it. The faces of the kids suddenly seemed very adult, very hostile as they stared at him. Brudenell thought with a sudden, terrible clarity: they want to kill me. They threw more things at him. Various missiles struck the PCSO: stones, a half-brick, a bottle and a full can of Coke which hit him on the forehead, breaking the skin. Blood coursed down his face and the sight of it was like a signal to the group, who surged forward towards him.
There were police officers in an adjacent street who had been ordered not to engage with the crowd, even though there were reports that an officer was under attack nearby. They stood around helplessly, trying to look purposeful. The truth was that nobody really knew what to do. The helicopter overhead had called the situation in but they were impotent. They were not to ‘inflame’ the situation or ‘escalate’ tension. They were to contain it. No one was quite sure exactly what that meant. Hanlon had been with them.
Ignoring orders, she had taken a baton from one of the PCs, walked away from the police line and strode through the rioters, round the corner, just in time to see the fallen PCSO surrounded by half a dozen figures, all kicking and stamping. Hanlon didn’t weigh up the risks of what she was doing. She didn’t calculate the odds. She just acted.
Accounts didn’t differ as to what happened next. What caused the argument was the legality of Hanlon’s actions. The police federation lawyers argued that Hanlon had identified herself as a police officer and that it was all by the book. Civil rights lawyers claimed that Hanlon, not in uniform and not readily recognizable as a police officer, had attacked innocent members of the public. It was unprovoked assault by a dangerous thug hiding behind a police badge. The PCSO’s blood on their clothing and shoes was proof of proximity, but not of guilt. The CCTV cameras that could have caught the action had been damaged by this time and no one came forward as an eyewitness on either side. What was uncontestable was that, on the one hand, Hanlon had hospitalized three men aged between seventeen and thirty-two and, on the other, had saved the life of a fellow officer. Several doctors had testified to the fact the PCSO would have probably died had the attack continued for very much longer. The list of his injuries was extensive, from skull fractures to broken wrists to smashed cheekbones to ruptured kidneys. One of the rioters had stamped on his face so hard you could see the imprint of the sports shoe manufacturer embedded on his skin from the sole of the trainer.
Throughout the following investigations and enquiry by the IPCC, apart from when directly questioned Hanlon had preserved an enigmatic silence.
It was a tricky problem for the Met. She was certainly guilty of disobeying orders, flagrantly so, but then again, to discipline her or sack her would make them look ridiculous. Not only ridiculous, but unpopular and out of touch with public opinion, which was in a vengeful mood. People wanted the rioters punished. Society wanted an eye for an eye. Prosecuting Hanlon would have been a PR disaster. They’d compromised on a medal and a decision to sideline her from front-line duties. In an ideal world, and heavy hints were dropped, Hanlon would resign through some unspecified stress- or health-related problem and would be handsomely paid off, pension intact. Irritatingly, she showed no signs of wanting to do this. She’d spent about three months in limbo in the system and no one really knew what to do with her, no one wanted her, until Corrigan had taken her under his wing.
Thomas thought she looked disappointingly ordinary. She was tall and slim with a long, unsmiling face and bleak, grey eyes. She didn’t fit his warrior princess preconceptions. There was no glamour. She was wearing dark clothes and they made her face even more pallid. There were smudges under her eyes as if she habitually slept badly and her shoulder-length black hair was slightly greasy and ragged-looking.
As if suddenly aware of Thomas’s scrutiny, she turned her eyes on him again and he blushed and started busying himself securing the halogen lights away in the van. She had hard eyes, cold, unfriendly.
Forrest bent down to help Thomas stow the lights in the back of the van, then he turned back to Hanlon. ‘There is one thing. It might be important.’ He took an iPad out of the van and scrolled through images until he found one he was looking for.
‘Here,’ he said and passed the tablet to Hanlon.
She took it and found herself looking at an image of a section of rough concrete wall next to a ruled mark that showed the distance in centimetres from the floor. There was a downward slash and next to it an inverted V. She looked at Forrest and shrugged.
Forrest said, ‘I went to Morocco on holiday last year and I learnt some Arabic, including the way they write numerals. That,’ he indicated the twin marks, ‘says “eighteen”. This mark means “one”.’ His finger pointed to the downward stroke. ‘And this one “eight”, here.’ This time he pointed to the inverted V. ‘Written in pencil. Whoever left the body, left that. The pencil mark runs through some of the carbon deposit on the wall from the girl’s body, so it’s post-mortem, post-burning. I just thought you’d better know.’
Hanlon handed the tablet back. Eighteen. The unspoken thought, just in case someone’s keeping count, hung in the salty estuary air.
2
He had just finished unloading the contents of the shopping trolley on to the conveyor belt at the checkout when Reyhan, his four-year-old daughter, looked up at him suddenly and said, ‘Papa, I need to go to the toilet.’
Mehmet sighed out loud and scratched his beard in irritation. He looked down in exasperation at the little girl. She tugged at one of her pigtails and the morning sun, flooding through the huge, long, low front window of the supermarket, shone brightly on the small, gold ear
rings she wore. Three times earlier in maybe the past hour, he had checked, at the restaurant where he worked, at the library where they had gone to change books and get a DVD, and, as they’d walked in to the supermarket at the entrance, now thirty checkouts away, ‘Do you want the toilet?’ The answer to which, each time, had been a definitive, ‘No, Papa.’
‘I need to go to the toilet.’ It was a form of shorthand. Mehmet knew from past experience that what it really meant was, ‘I’m going to the toilet any second now.’ He looked around him for inspiration.
The supermarket in Wood Green in North London offered him little obvious help. It was huge. Mehmet was from Nevs¸ehir in the centre of Turkey, which is a fairly large city, but it had nowhere that was anything like the size of this monolithic shop. Mehmet had been initially daunted by the supermarket’s vastness, but not any more. He’d become a regular. Familiarity had tamed the enormous retail space. He came here, without fail, with his two children every Thursday at 11.30 a.m. Nur, Mehmet’s wife, found the place intimidating. Nevs¸ehir is not a multicultural city, and the black and Asian faces surrounding her when she went shopping were unfamiliar, frightening and unsettling, even though she’d been in London for over a year. So it was that the weekly bulk shop passed to Mehmet.
Mehmet, like more or less everyone in the supermarket, staff and customers alike, had a strict routine. He himself used the place largely for non-food items. He was here mainly for Baby Ali, his eighteen-month-old son, to buy Pampers, wet wipes, nappy sacks, the kind of things that toddlers need. He hardly ever bought food there. Vegetables, Nur bought at the local market where many of the stallholders were Turkish and she felt more at home, for her English was practically non-existent, and meat came from the Halal butchers near their small flat. Again, she could speak Turkish to them. The stallholders were mainly Northern Cypriots, who make up most of the four hundred thousand Turks in London, and their Turkish sounded strange to her ears, but it was Turkish nevertheless.
Ali was sitting in the baby seat at the front of the trolley, his legs in their romper suit poking out in front of him, little blue boots laced on his feet. His small face was solemn. He was a very self-possessed child, one hand holding on to the front of the trolley for balance, the other holding Grey Rabbit, his favourite toy. Grey Rabbit went everywhere that Ali went. They were inseparable.
‘Papa, please!’ said Reyhan desperately.
Mehmet had pushed the trolley to the farthest end of the supermarket where the queues were the shortest. The toilets were at the entrance to the shop, now maybe a hundred metres away. Today there was no one else at checkout thirty and checkouts twenty-nine to twenty-seven were closed. Checkout thirty was self-service. Its fellow self-service checkouts stood clustered together near the entrance to the shop, in a semicircular huddle, but this one stood alone as though it had been exiled to the end for some unknown reason. Maybe it had been a prototype, but it worked well enough. It also meant he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Mehmet didn’t like speaking to people, even at checkout. Mehmet rarely spoke to anyone, even in his own language. He was a very shy person. His own English was extremely limited. He hardly ever had a chance to practise, though it was unlikely he’d have taken it if the opportunity arose. He spoke Turkish at work and at home. He lived in a self-created Turkish bubble. When he had the chance to go to a mosque he went to the Turkish Suleymaniye Mosque in Hackney.
He was in the UK illegally and he half expected, even though he knew it unlikely, the police to descend on him at any time. He was a worrier by nature and if he didn’t have anything concrete to fret about his mind would invent lurid, frightening scenarios. Right now, his mind was fully occupied with the fear that Reyhan was going to relieve herself on the shop floor. He could imagine the puddle spreading outwards beneath her on the non-absorbent tiles of the floor, wider and wider. People would stare and point. Maybe he’d be banned from the supermarket. Management would shout at him in English and he wouldn’t understand. He felt himself beginning to panic. Then there was the problem of his shopping. Half of his goods were in the trolley, the rest still on the black rubber of the conveyor belt.
Mehmet’s desperate gaze was met by a woman – he guessed she was a manageress – who he took to be Muslim, wearing a headscarf. She was standing near the checkout. Her staff name tag pinned to her top said Aisha. It was a comforting name. It was nice and traditional. There were several Aisha’s, or Ayse in Turkish spelling, in his own family. This one was in her late twenties, Mehmet guessed. He noticed she had a small horseshoe-shaped scar between her eyebrows. This slight blemish made her pleasant face seem even more trustworthy.
Mehmet was very tired. He worked a six-day week, fourteen hours a day, split shifts, in his cousin’s restaurant, and when the girl smiled at him and said, ‘I’ll look after him and the trolley for you,’ he barely hesitated. In Mehmet’s world, women looked after children, men worked; it was the natural order of things.
Maybe if he hadn’t been so exhausted, if he hadn’t been so convinced that Reyhan was about to go all over the supermarket floor, if the woman hadn’t been so transparently trustworthy, he wouldn’t have done what he did.
He smiled his thanks, picked up Reyhan and strode quickly back down the long line of checkouts to the toilets. Ali watched them go, his head cocked to one side, a quizzical expression on his small face. His small fingers curled around Grey Rabbit.
About five minutes later, not much more, Mehmet and Reyhan were returning to checkout thirty. At checkout twenty-five Mehmet felt a terrible constriction start in his stomach as if a giant invisible hand had begun to squeeze the life out of the core of his being. He picked his daughter up in his arms. She could feel the sudden tension in her father’s body and his grip tighten round her and she put her arms around his neck for comfort. His stride lengthened and then became a run. He stopped short by the self-service checkout.
Checkout thirty was now deserted. There was no sign of his shopping. The manageress was gone. His trolley was gone. His son was gone. He gently put Reyhan down and stared around him in bewildered disbelief. His heart was racing and his mouth very dry. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. Momentarily he thought he was going to faint. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his heart started racing.
He looked around him, at the orderly shelves, the other customers. Surely, he thought, there has been some kind of mistake, some kind of mix-up. They must be round here somewhere. He gently put Reyhan down on the floor.
He thought: Where is he?
He thought: This can’t be happening.
He thought: I don’t believe this.
He stood there, stupidly, his head swivelling left and right. Outside the huge, glass window of the supermarket, cars and people came and went, life continued, while Mehmet stood as if frozen in some kind of aquarium.
Reyhan stared at her father and then bent down and picked something up that had fallen out of Mehmet’s line of sight under the lip of the checkout. She could sense the tension in her father but wasn’t sure why. Perhaps this would help.
‘Look, Papa,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s Grey Rabbit.’
It was then Mehmet felt despair and fear hit him harder than he could ever have imagined. His son would never have been separated from his toy. He knew then with a terrible clarity that Ali was gone.
3
If you looked out of the window of Assistant Commissioner Corrigan’s office you could see the iconic sight of the Thames on one side and the green of St James’s Park stretching away to Buckingham Palace on the other. It was typical of Corrigan, thought Hanlon, that he had managed, while professing no interest at all in the matter, to install himself in a room with one of the most spectacular views that the twenty-storey glass, concrete and granite building that was New Scotland Yard could provide.
People often underestimated Corrigan, usually to their cost. His enormous size (he was six foot five), shovel-like hands and builder’s-slab face made people think he was a stree
t copper promoted way above his ability, maybe to fulfil some kind of quota. He looked that way. He looked anachronistic. People seemed to expect senior police these days to behave and sound like management consultants. Corrigan didn’t. He had the face of the old-fashioned Irish navvy that his grandfather had been. He also shared his grandfather’s strength. The old man had reputedly been able to straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands. Corrigan couldn’t do this, but he looked as if he could give it a bloody good go.
In fact the AC had a highly attuned grasp of politics allied with an almost feminine sensitivity to mood and thought and nuance. It suited him down to the ground to be thought thick. You usually only got one chance to underestimate Corrigan; he was adept at slipping the knife in. He’d ended several rivals’ careers, fellow officers who’d underestimated him, who now sat shuffling paper or reading their emails in disappointing dead-end jobs in Hendon or Basingstoke.
Another of the AC’s survival skills was the ability to smell the way the wind was blowing. It had brought him promotion in the past and he was hoping it would do so again. Currently he was steering a delicate path between multi-ethnic policing and a rising backlash against it from critics citing police unwillingness to tackle difficult issues in case they were branded as racist. It was a difficult juggling act.
Framed citations, decorations and awards were hung over the walls of the office. Most of these had been assiduously and discreetly lobbied for by the assistant commissioner. While on the surface he claimed that such things were meaningless to him, that what counted was getting the job done, he enjoyed the celebrity part of his job. He liked being recognized, enjoyed being feted. He was a great one for backing into the limelight. There were photos too. Corrigan sharing a joke with the home secretary, Corrigan waggling a pair of handcuffs at the prime minister. Corrigan with the mayor. There was a gap in the wall where Corrigan had taken down Ken Livingstone. As soon as the results were in and Ken was yesterday’s man, down he had come. Hanlon noted as she sat down opposite him that the home secretary’s photo too had gone now, to be replaced by a smiling Arab in white robes and a headdress. Corrigan obviously had little faith in her future. That boded ill for the politician. Corrigan had a finely tuned nose for that kind of thing.