by J M Gregson
He waved the search warrant at them and uttered the formal, official words which he was not sure they understood about what was now going to happen. The phrases were gabbled out so breathlessly that he scarcely followed them himself; he realized in that moment how nervous he was. Then he directed his companions towards the systematic search which was their mission here. It was swifter than he would have anticipated because the furnishings were so minimal. He wondered how long these men had been here and whether the house was merely a temporary base for them. He didn’t know the full picture, but he was not resentful about that. He was much happier supporting Percy Peach than in this complicated, specialist policing. These men were terrorist suspects, and the unit which dealt with terrorism had its own staff and its own methods.
The problem was a mammoth one. There were hundreds of suspects in Brunton alone. But the terrorism unit moved only when an actual plot was suspected and innocent life was considered to be in danger. If they moved too early, they arrested a series of fanatical young men who were prepared to die for the cause, their idealism warped and intensified by their minority, militant branch of the Muslim religion. Unless you had clear proof of their murderous intent, your efforts ended in frustration with their eventual release through lack of evidence. Meanwhile, the major criminals who were orchestrating the violence would move on scot-free to their next intrigue. If you delayed arrests a fraction too late, disasters on the scale of the London bombings of 2007 and perhaps much worse would certainly ensue.
DS Northcott was glad he was only on the periphery of anti-terrorist action. The suspicion here was that arms were hidden in the house, stored there in preparation for use in some major but so far embryonic attack. He rapped out a series of warnings and explanations to the three men who sat resentfully together where he had directed them to sit, on the edge of one of the three single beds in the room. He read understanding in the face of the one he judged to be the eldest, but the man gave him no verbal response.
His men found nothing in the kitchen, nor in the two other rooms on the ground floor. The bathroom and the large bedroom at the front of the house yielded nothing, even when rugs were stripped away and the floors investigated. It was only when he moved the hostile trio from the bed where they sat to one on the other side of the room that he detected a reluctance and a glance from one of them towards the area of the room which he thought might be significant.
Clyde set one of his men to keep careful watch on the men, who had already been searched for guns and knives. They sat reluctantly as he indicated on the third bed and watched him with brown, malevolent eyes. He shifted the bed where they had sat until now and rolled up the tattered strip of matting which was the only floor-covering in this room. He kept one eye on his seated adversaries as he eyed the floor, feeling that they might fly at him like feral animals if he really had located something here.
The floorboards in this room had been here for 120 years. But one at least of them had been raised recently. The tongues and grooves which had anchored it had been broken: the board was loose and noisy beneath his foot as he tested it. He looked at the youngest of the men and read fear in the narrow, mean face.
The floorboard and the ones adjacent to it lifted easily with a screwdriver. The man he had looked at tried to rise, but was pushed roughly back on to the bed by the constable who stood over him. Northcott and his other two companions carefully removed nine dangerous weapons from the shallow space beneath the floorboards.
Armalite rifles, oiled and ready for use. And beyond them, ample supplies of ammunition. Many thousands of pounds worth of armoury. More importantly, the means to kill hundreds of British citizens. He stood looking into the defiant faces of the men on the other side of the room and felt hostility rolling like a cloud of poisoned gas between hunted and hunters.
DS Northcott pronounced the words of arrest and went through the rigmarole about them not having to say anything but needing to be aware that anything they did say might be used in future court proceedings. As he had anticipated, the men said not a word, but stood sullenly defiant whilst they were handcuffed and taken to the police van now waiting outside. Higher minds than theirs had issued them with their orders in the eventuality of arrest.
They were taken to the station and formally charged with the illegal possession of dangerous firearms. They would undergo detailed interrogation in due course. No doubt they would have been warned about that also, and would have the assistance of an expert brief, who would encourage and assist them to be as obdurate and uncooperative as possible.
DS Northcott was relieved to see them taken from his sight and locked into a cell. He was glad that it wouldn’t be he who had to question these three.
A mile away from the dramatic events which were being enacted in that shabby terraced house, Jamie Norris was struggling with quite different problems in the brightly lit aisles at Tesco.
He was on early shift and he’d started at six. The big vans had made their deliveries during the night and he had spent the first two hours of his shift transferring fresh vegetables and fruit to the shelves and replenishing the freezers with hundreds of ready meals. A boon to working mothers, these were; he’d kept his ears open and heard that view expressed repeatedly by the customers.
A knowledge of how customers felt and of the geography of the store were the two things which carried you through public exchanges in the supermarket. People mostly wanted information as to where they could find various products. Those who chose to offer him more than questions and opted to pass the time of day with him wanted their own prejudices reinforced, not challenged. It was far better to agree with them about how convenient and sensible these pre-packed meals were than to reminisce nostalgically about how their mums and grandmas had laboured lovingly to produce balanced meals for them. Customers wanted to feel sensible, not guilty.
These words were provoked by a short exchange he had just had with Mr Jordan during his breakfast break. He now called the manager by his name, rather than ‘sir’, except when there were customers around and he needed to boost the man’s prestige. Mr Jordan had said that he seemed to be developing a good relationship with the customers. They were a curious lot, the manager had implied, and far more difficult to please than most of the public ever knew. Jamie thought it was pretty easy to get on with them, so long as you talked about the weather and took care to reinforce purchasing prejudices which they sometimes didn’t know they possessed. If you looked at what they already had in their trolleys, you were on pretty safe ground.
These easy and rather random thoughts diverted Norris from more serious problems. The first of these was his latest attempt at verse. The iambic pentameter stuff had helped him: he was prepared to admit that, though he had found it humiliating at the time, for he had thought he had moved beyond that stage. But you were never too old to learn, as many people said and few of them practised. Back to basics had reminded him of the advantages of rhythm and of the need for discipline in your writing.
He had produced a sonnet which was quite tight and well-finished, with some trenchant phrases and no padding. It had taken him a while; he had refined it and sharpened it over several days and enjoyed the processes of doing that. It was a love sonnet. It wasn’t addressed to a particular girl, but rather to an amalgam of womanhood, to the best and most desirable in the various girlfriends who had passed through his hands over the last few years. Well, not always through his hands. He’d found it difficult to get his hands on the more delectable parts of the ones he fancied most. But that was life, wasn’t it? Life constantly enticed you and constantly disappointed you. This wasn’t a perfect world: another of those statements which people enunciated philosophically but still resented.
Jamie thought he would keep the sonnet in his secret drawer and produce it when he had his next serious girlfriend. He would call it ‘To Becky’ or whatever the girl’s name might be. It would be easy with a few minor amendments to make it seem quite personal. Girls like poetry much more
than men do; with a bit of luck, this still anonymous girlfriend would be pleased and flattered by his sonnet. Perhaps even pleased enough to pass through his eager hands.
He wouldn’t show it to Alfred Norbury, much as he would have welcomed his mentor’s grudging praise. That was the second of his serious problems. Alfred had taken him over, and Jamie wasn’t comfortable with that. The older man had been generous to him, and he undoubtedly knew a lot about literature. He seemed genuinely concerned to make Jamie a better writer and his advice had been practical and effective. Jamie understood more about the way good poetry worked now, and his own verse had improved as a result of that. The practical exercises Alfred had urged upon him were taxing, but they were productive.
He would like to keep the tuition and advice, but dispense with other Norbury intimacies. But he was becoming aware that he couldn’t do that. You couldn’t pick and choose what you took from Alfred. It wouldn’t be fair. The older man would make him acutely aware that it wasn’t fair. This wasn’t a problem Jamie Norris had needed to deal with before and it made him very uneasy.
But sooner or later, he would need to do something to dispense with the attentions of Alfred Norbury.
Detective Chief Inspector Percy Peach was having a trying day. He was used to trying days in the Brunton CID section, but this one was a belter.
He’d spent most of the morning with a youth who’d crashed his fist into the face of an old lady when she had surprised him during a burglary at her council flat. He’d finally got the seventeen-year-old to admit to his crime. But for almost an hour, the young brute had maintained that the lady had fallen over a chair and hit her face on a corner of the table, whilst his mother had sat beside him and interjected at every opportunity the view that Jason was ‘a good boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly’. Peach pitied the woman in her delusion, but was at the same time intensely irritated by her interruptions.
Her son had been duly charged and would plead guilty. His age and lack of previous criminal convictions meant that he might well escape a custodial sentence. Probably he’d be remanded for psychiatric reports and given a hundred hours of community service, Percy reflected darkly. The Crown Prosecution Service would eventually inform him wearily that it had all been a waste of police time. But an eighty-year-old woman who had kept the law throughout her blameless life would be permanently marked, fearful for the rest of her days, and would probably never come out of care and back to the independent home she had loved. Peach should have been insulated by experience against such things, but they still brought him much pain and depression.
His choice of toad in the hole in the police canteen at lunch time had afforded him another bad experience, less enduring perhaps, but still a source of internal turmoil. He’d forgotten that the regular chef had left and he had suffered for his omission.
And now he was closeted with Chief Superintendent Tommy Bloody Tucker for a pep talk. The end of a perfect January day in CID. ‘I thought we should have a few words together at the beginning of a new year!’ said T.B. Tucker bracingly.
They were now twenty-two days into the new year, but that was par for the course for Tucker. An appropriate metaphor: Tucker was one of the worst golfers as well as undoubtedly the worst chief superintendent Percy had ever encountered. He tried to sound a cheerful note. ‘Another year nearer to pension, sir.’
Tucker bristled. On other days, this would have given Peach some pleasure, especially if he was sure he had provoked it, but on this bleak January afternoon it afforded him no comfort. The bristle became a glower. ‘Are you implying that my pension dominates my thinking, Peach?’
‘No, sir. I’m sure that it is no greater a consideration for you than it has been over the last three years, sir.’
‘I invited you up here for an informal chat, Peach. When I directed you to sit down, it was certainly not an invitation to you to insult me.’
Percy looked round the familiar penthouse office. It had wide views over Tucker’s domain, looking out over the Brunton which constituted the bulk of their criminal patch to the vales and hills of the Ribble Valley beyond the town. He said dully, ‘Sir, it has been your practice to remind me over the last three years at least of the proximity of your pension and of the need to take no action which might possibly endanger your securing of that holy grail.’
‘I remember no such occasions, Peach.’
‘Your capacity for amnesia is one of your more remarkable attributes, sir. I’m sure it has been instrumental in your progress to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent, sir. Along with your multitudinous other qualities, of course, sir. That goes without saying.’
Tucker endeavoured to pin Peach to his chair with the beam of his basilisk chief superintendentorial eye, but he found his junior’s gaze fixed resolutely upon some high point in the corner of the room. ‘We need to go carefully this year. The need for economy has been urged upon us by the Chief Constable.’
‘Economy is always urged by chief constables, sir. It’s part of their job: it’s a nervous reflex to stress the need for economy. Probably built in as part of their training: when you have no useful thoughts to offer, stress the need for economy.’
‘This is more than cynicism, Peach. This is something nearer anarchy. I must warn you that I will not tolerate it in one of my senior officers.’
‘Our overtime claims have been extremely economical, sir. We have hardly disturbed the budget at all over the last three months.’
‘I was planning to congratulate you on that, Percy, had you given me the chance before embarking upon this scurrilous attack on our much-respected Chief Constable.’
The man was using his first name. That was always a danger signal. ‘No personal attack upon our respected leader was intended, sir. I was merely sounding off about the habits of bureaucracy.’
‘You’re claiming that our CC is a bureaucrat?’ Tucker looked as if he had accused the man of fraud or smuggling.
‘All really senior policemen have to be bureaucrats, sir. The more so as they move up the hierarchy. That is why I have never been interested in promotion beyond my present rank. Men like you and me wish to remain near the crime-face, do we not, sir?’
He waited for a reaction from this man who avoided the crime-face at all costs. Tommy Bloody Tucker looked as puzzled as he always looked when he suspected an insult but could not pin it down. He eventually said, ‘That should be “you and I” you know, Percy.’
‘I think you’ll find it’s “you and me”, sir. Following a preposition, you see. And I can’t guarantee that the overtime claims won’t rise steeply over the winter months, sir. The last three months of the year were unusually quiet on our patch. Almost dull, in fact, for a man as interested in nailing villains as you are.’
‘Now look, Peach, we have to be realistic about this. We want to keep our spending within bounds and our clear-up rates high. That is a recipe for success and for congratulations from the CC.’
‘You’re suggesting we should keep our noses clean and not excite too much attention, sir.’
‘If you like, yes. There are virtues in quiet efficiency, Peach. You tend to underestimate the advantages to us of keeping our noses clean. It is much better not to chance your arm, if you wish to get on in the police service, Peach.’
Back to surnames again; Percy felt much safer. ‘Yes, sir, I can see the advantages of that. Especially for any senior officer who is approaching the end of his service and taking care that nothing should jeopardize his pension.’
‘You are impertinent, Peach.’ Another bristle was in the offing.
‘Sorry, sir. I thought I was enunciating your CID policy for the coming year.’
‘You will show respect to your seniors, Peach. And you will exercise a proper control over your juniors.’
‘Not easy, sir, when the DS on whom I place great reliance is summarily removed from my control and sent out on anti-terrorist operations.’ He watched Tucker’s plump features sag towards bewilderment. ‘DS Northcott
, sir. A vital man for me. Deployed against my wishes and without consultation in anti-terrorist arrests at thirty-four Boston Street this morning.’
‘Ah! Yes. I was asked for local expertise in this matter by the anti-terrorist unit. I decided that DS Northcott was the appropriate officer for the task. That is my right, Peach. That is part of my job.’ He waited for the inevitable rejoinder, but Peach offered him nothing to bite on. Tucker decided diversionary tactics were the best option. ‘I’ve never been quite sure about DS Northcott, you know, in view of his record before he was recruited into the police service.’
‘Poacher turned gamekeeper, sir.’ Tommy Bloody Tucker looked as if he’d never heard the expression, but Percy wasn’t going to help him out. They’d had this conversation several times before.
‘He was suspected of murder, you know.’
‘I do know, sir. It was I who decided that Clyde Northcott was not involved. It was I who made the eventual arrest of the guilty party in that case.’
‘Technically, yes. And it was I who subsequently had you promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. You should remember that, Peach.’
‘I remember it, sir,’ said Percy grimly. In order to secure his own promotion to chief superintendent and the fat pension which was now his sole concern, T.B. Tucker had been forced to recommend the elevation of the man who made the arrests and kept the clear-up rates for serious crimes among the best in the north of England. Percy sighed extravagantly. ‘DS Northcott found an illegal cache of arms beneath the floorboards this morning and made the appropriate arrests. Will you be conducting the interrogations yourself, sir?’
Percy enjoyed the look of horror which now suffused the revealing features of his chief – predictable, but satisfying nonetheless. Tucker said sternly, ‘We must leave that to the anti-terrorist officers, Peach. Our job is done in this matter. And now I think you have occupied my day for quite long enough. It is time you were about your business, Peach.’