‘We have a number of active lines of enquiry, but our most valuable resource is the eyes and ears of the public, which is why –’
‘So you want the people of Southampton to do your job for you?’
‘No, I want them to help us –’
‘Do you have any idea where the suspects are now?’
‘They were last seen in Portswood –’
‘Where are they now?’ a journalist from The Times pressed.
‘We don’t know, but we have dozens of officers combing the city, not to mention several mobile Armed Response Units –’
‘So what you’re saying is that you’ve got two shooters at large,’ another journalist chipped in, ‘and no idea where they are or when they might strike next?’
‘It is a developing situation.’
‘What are you actually doing to keep the people of Southampton safe?’
‘Should you be imposing a curfew? Bringing in the army?’
‘In my view, that would be premature,’ Helen replied forcefully, raising her voice to be heard above the hubbub. ‘Every officer on this force has been recalled to duty. We have two dozen highly trained armed officers who can be scrambled at a moment’s notice, not to mention support from the police helicopter and our colleagues in Hampshire Transport Police. We are doing everything in our power and will not rest until the perpetrators are apprehended. But our best weapon is the vigilance of the public, which is why I am appealing for your help in sharing this crucial image and raising public awareness of these crimes.’
Helen spotted a journalist about to jump in, but got in first:
‘That’s all I have for you now. As I’m sure you can imagine, I am needed back in the incident room.’
This didn’t stop the questions of course – they poured down on Helen now. But she didn’t wait around to hear them, rising and heading for the door instead. She didn’t need to be lectured or shamed – she had enough on her plate without a public crucifixion. As she pushed through the throng, her anger levels slowly rose. With her bosses for landing these media duties on her, and with the journalists who came here to point the finger, rather than report the news. Their panicked tone, their indignation, their aggressive accusations – it was so depressingly familiar and predictable. Indeed, the only aspect of this public lynching that had surprised Helen was the absence of one persistent, long-standing critic.
Emilia Garanita.
38
12.04
Her phone was buzzing insistently, but Emilia ignored it. Gardener had tried to get her three times already, but she had let all his calls go to voicemail. He was either going to bollock her for deserting the newsroom or quiz her as to what she was up to. Either way, Emilia had decided to let him stew in his own juice a little while longer. She had always had a flair for the dramatic and she would let him get to fever pitch before delivering her little scoop and silencing him once and for all.
Her replacement on the crime desk was a wet blanket. Simmons was probably at the police briefing now, dutifully taking notes, while she was ahead of the story. She had a positive fix on the number of casualties, plus an eyewitness interview (albeit brief) with the sole survivor and dramatic photos of the young mum and her baby being rushed to safety by armed officers. In the era of 24/7 news, in which everybody with a cameraphone was a journalist, exclusivity mattered. And nobody else had images of Melissa Hill’s dramatic rescue.
Would they be on the front page of the Southampton Evening News tonight? Emilia still hadn’t made up her mind. Her gut instinct was to contact the national papers, as this story was going to be big news. But she had had her fingers burnt before by the London papers and her reputation was still tarnished, following the hatchet job she’d done on Helen Grace. Her instinct for once was to stay local and milk it for all that it was worth. But could she be sure that Gardener would play ball? He had no time for Emilia – indeed she suspected he had little interest in women generally, and he was known to be stubborn and aggressive. Would he ever sanction promoting her over Simmons, or even dismissing her replacement, given that it would inevitably make his decision-making look suspect? Would he ever admit that he’d been wrong?
But Emilia was getting ahead of herself. First things first: she had to write her article. She was tucked away in a café that overlooked Portswood’s pedestrianized shopping precinct. From her elevated vantage point she could see Meredith Walker and the forensics team plying their trade in and around the pharmacy – she had even taken a few photos of them at work to add colour to her article. Opening up her laptop, she began to compose the first few paragraphs in her head, as she waited for it to boot up. To her surprise, however, her old article sprang up on screen and she realized belatedly that she had forgotten to power down before leaving the newsroom. She cursed herself for her stupidity – the battery was running low now and there wasn’t a plug within striking distance in the café – and was about to minimize her article angrily when suddenly she paused.
Her half-finished article was a classic piece of middle-class moralizing, bemoaning a recent spate of graffiti in Southampton. It wasn’t particularly interesting or new, but it would get the local mums and dads going. Now, however, Emilia looked at her article with new eyes, for tucked away by the side of her copy were a few photos of the graffiti in question. One of them, a striking image of a snake devouring its own tail painted on to a drab office building, leapt out at her now.
Because she had just seen exactly the same image spray-painted on the back wall of Sansom’s pharmacy.
39
12.37
‘I’m going to show you five faces. I want you to study them closely, then tell me if you recognize the man who threatened you this morning.’
Melissa Hill was sitting at her kitchen table, her baby balanced in the crook of her arm. Her husband, Gary, was present, having rushed back from work. He had urged her on several occasions to let him take Isla for a while. But Melissa wouldn’t have it, hanging on to her child for dear life, even when faced by DC McAndrew on official police business.
Gary hovered in the background, looking on nervously as McAndrew pulled five mugshots from a slim file and slid them on to the table. McAndrew placed the last one down on the table and lifted his head to find Melissa staring intently at her baby.
‘I’m going to need you to look at them, Melissa. I appreciate this may be unnerving for you, but you are safe now, nothing is going to happen to you.’
Melissa raised her eyes, taking in McAndrew, but avoiding the photos on the table. To McAndrew’s mind, she was clearly still in shock. She should be resting, possibly even sedated, but she refused to relax, refused to let her guard down.
‘Please, Melissa. Our best chance of catching this guy is if we have a positive ID. Without that it’s very hard to know where to look. Once we know who he is, we can put his name out in the press, his photo too –’
‘Ok, ok, there’s no need to bully me,’ Melissa cut in quickly, her voice shaking as she spoke.
Slowly she lowered her eyes to the mugshots. As she scanned the five faces, McAndrew ran her own rule over them. Three of them were their ‘J’s, the other two were control photos plucked from the system. Two of the ‘J’s had tattoos and Melissa seemed to be scrutinizing them now. McAndrew watched her closely as her eyes flicked back and forth between them.
Finally, Melissa exhaled, long and heartfelt, before reaching out and pointing to one of them.
‘That’s him.’
McAndrew nodded.
‘How sure are you?’
‘Hundred per cent.’
‘Why so sure?’
‘Because of the tattoo on his neck. I remember … it kind of bulged as he spoke to me. I’d recognize that disgusting thing anywhere.’
McAndrew thanked Melissa profusely, then hurried from the house, pulling her phone from her pocket.
At last, they had a name.
40
12.48
‘Our prime suspect is Jas
on Swift.’
As soon as Helen had got McAndrew’s call, she’d pulled everyone off their tasks, corralling them into the briefing room. McAndrew was the only absentee – everyone else was crushed inside the cramped room, hungry for new information. Helen pulled up Swift’s mugshot – unshaven, sandy-coloured hair, with a distinctive skull tattoo on the right side of his neck – and alongside it his charge sheet.
‘He’s twenty-four years old. Plenty of cautions for vandalism, shoplifting, affray, but only one conviction – for aggravated assault with a weapon. He has, however, been questioned about a number of incidents in which ethnic minorities or foreigners have been threatened or attacked. Southampton’s had its fair share of hate crimes recently and Jason Swift seems to be in the vanguard of these attacks. He is unemployed, has links to other troublemakers and has been questioned specifically about three attacks – one on an Asian shopkeeper, one on a young black male and one on a Polish waiter –’
‘So this is about racism, about hatred?’ DC Edwards asked.
‘Possibly. Sonia Smalling was born Sonia Wojcik. She’s from Poland and came to this country ten years ago. Despite marrying and having kids here, she never lost her accent and was proud of her heritage. Alan Sansom was born and raised here, after his parents fled to England from Germany during World War Two. He is very prominent in the Jewish community in Southampton and orthodox in his religious views. We all know that attacks on synagogues have been on the rise since the referendum –’
‘Because, of course, we all know they were responsible for Brexit …’ Edwards drawled wryly, shaking his head.
‘Organizations like Britain First and the English Defence League,’ Helen continued, ‘have stepped up their rhetoric against Muslims, Jews and others, with fairly predictable consequences.’
‘So why hasn’t he been charged? If he’s been linked to three attacks –’
‘Because the victims wouldn’t press charges. They were scared, didn’t want any trouble …’
This silenced the room – Helen’s answer was as depressing as it was predictable. Sensing the energy levels in the room dropping, she pressed on:
‘Three months ago, Swift threatened his social worker with a nailgun. He lives with his mum and survives on benefits, and his case worker obviously caught him on a bad day. He should have done jail time for it, but his lawyer managed to wangle a Community Payback sentence – which is where he came into contact with Sonia Smalling. True to form, Jason stopped turning up after the first couple of days.’
‘And – let me guess – nobody followed it up?’ Edwards chipped in.
‘Doesn’t look like it. He’s registered as living at an address in Woolston. I’ve sent McAndrew there with an armed unit, though I doubt he’d choose such an obvious bolt-hole. We’ve tried to contact his mother, but she’s not picking up.’
‘Could she be a victim too? The trigger for all this?’ Osbourne asked.
Helen ignored the uncomfortable gnawing feeling in her stomach: ‘Let’s hope not. We’ll keep trying her, but so far we’ve had no joy. I have, however, asked media liaison to pass on Jason Swift’s name to the press, so hopefully his mother will get wind of it and be in touch. I have drafted in extra operators for the comms room – be prepared to field a lot of leads in the next few hours. Some will be cranks, some will be mistaken, but some may prove useful, so we’ll have to chase them all down.’
Helen rose now, handing photocopied files on Swift to the individual officers, who opened them and greedily read the contents.
‘Any particular areas we should concentrate on?’ DC Bentham asked.
‘We’ve no addresses other than his mum’s, so check out friends, family, but also the girl. Is she a girlfriend? A school friend? Could she be shielding him? Jason Swift has no place of work, only claims benefits once a week, so it’s ground up on this one.’
Helen paused briefly, before concluding:
‘We have to find Jason Swift.’
41
13.01
He sat on the cheap plastic seat, his eyes glued to the screen in the corner of the room. The TV was tuned to Sky News, which was majoring on the murders in Southampton. In days gone by, a breathless reporter would have filled the screen, rattling out the details, but nowadays viewers wanted pictures, not people. So a montage of shots played out, of the quiet country lane, of the suburban pharmacy, while a rolling ticker tape of headlines jogged along the bottom of the screen. There were images of harassed police officers, tearful members of the public and then the money shot – snatched footage of a body bag being wheeled out of the pharmacy towards the awaiting ambulance.
The images were meat and drink to him. They were everything he’d been hoping for. He loved the fear, the distress, the sheer chaos. Nothing like this had ever been visited on Southampton before.
‘Fucking hell …’
His companion had looked up from her burger and Jason heard her swear quietly as she took in a new image on the TV. A close-up of his police mugshot filled the screen, leering out at the other customers in the down-at-heel café. He looked drawn, a bit demented … but kind of cool. Jesus Christ, he had made the news …
As he stared at the screen, Jason thought about the things that had brought him to this point. The sneering, the accusations, the harassment. He remembered all the people who’d said he would never amount to anything – the teachers, the kids, his own fucking mother. What would they think now? Still, at least his mother had been present, which was more than he could say for his dad. What would that little prick think? What would he say when he found out that he had spawned a devil? He suddenly wished that he could visit all his tormentors in turn, ramming their insults back down their throats, rubbing their noses in his deeds. He had done more in a few hours than they would do in a lifetime.
‘We should go, Jason.’
‘Shut up, will you?’ he replied, distracted and irritable. ‘I’m trying to listen to what they’re saying –’
‘We need to go. We shouldn’t have come here,’ she persisted, rising suddenly and abandoning her burger.
He turned to her, ready to continue the argument. But her anxious expression silenced him. She was right. However much fun he was having, it wouldn’t do to linger. So, reluctantly, he rose, following her to the door, allowing himself just enough time for one last look at the screen. He saw his own face staring back at him and swallowed a smile. No question about it, this was the happiest day of his life.
And he intended to enjoy it to the full.
42
13.16
McAndrew stood in the small room, breathing in the scent of failure.
Jason Swift lived with his mother in a two-bedroom flat in Woolston. They were on the top floor of a tower block which showed all the signs of the recent cutbacks. This was austerity Britain writ large – peeling paint, cracked windows and wall-to-wall graffiti. No one even pretended to maintain the property any more. The one small mercy was that the lift was working, saving McAndrew eight flights of stairs.
Predictably the lift had stunk to high heaven and the flat wasn’t much better. It wasn’t that the place was a bombsite – the washing-up was done, clean clothes were drying on a clothes horse – it just had a deep, lingering odour that was hard to place, but unpleasant to experience. Ingrained dirt? Dodgy sanitation? Whatever it was, it had a profoundly depressing effect on McAndrew and she thanked the Lord that she had managed to rise above her own humble beginnings.
Armed police had barrel-charged the door to the flat, but emerged empty-handed shortly afterwards, having checked the flat from top to bottom. They were packing up now in the car park below, leaving McAndrew behind to sift the evidence. She wasn’t by nature a fearful or superstitious person, but she wished they had remained a little longer. It wasn’t that she felt in danger, just that there was an atmosphere in the place that got to her. She sensed that there had been a lot of unhappiness within these four walls.
Pulling herself together, McA
ndrew continued her examination of the flat. She had explored the lounge and kitchen but had found little of interest, nothing out of place, so had moved on to the master bedroom. There appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary here either – a double bed with a tired old duvet, a wardrobe full of discount jeans and fleeces, a few bits of make-up, headache pills, a well-thumbed library book. This was presumably the mother’s room and McAndrew was struck by how bare it was. A testament perhaps to a life barely lived, to a woman scraping by.
Jason’s bedroom was of more immediate interest and McAndrew hurried there now. The aroma of cannabis was strong, but other than that it could have been any young man’s bedroom – dirty washing on the floor, the bed unmade, an ashtray with cigarette butts. By the side of the bed, however, was a small bookcase that was loaded with books, both old and new. McAndrew took in the titles, growing ever more depressed as she read the spines. There were books on white supremacy, fat tomes by well-known Holocaust-deniers, as well as biographies of Hitler and Anders Brevik, and even a former SS officer’s book on race theory and mate selection. Nestled in among all of these were various homespun pamphlets and booklets, advertising demonstrations and marches and in one case outlining the threat posed by militant Islam.
Moving away from the bookshelves, McAndrew approached the small desk by the window. A battered laptop lay on top of it and, having slipped on some latex gloves, she flicked it open. To her surprise, it was not password-locked and in fact a video was running. Sitting down at the desk, she took in the images – it was a clip that had been uploaded to YouTube and was on a loop. McAndrew instantly recognized Swift, who was playing to the camera. He was framed by trees and fields and was wielding a sawn-off shotgun, pressing it to his shoulder and firing it once, twice, before turning it directly on his unseen companion, pointing the barrels directly down the lens. Turning up the volume, McAndrew could hear a young woman protesting, telling him not to point the gun at her.
Love Me Not: DI Helen Grace 7 (formerly titled Follow My Leader) (Detective Inspector Helen Grace) Page 8