Silent as the Grave

by Paul Gitsham

  “Well it stands to reason,” Warren hedged. “I find it hard to imagine that Sheehy was able to get hold of the gun from Reggie Williamson and plant it in that raid without anyone else helping him. He was only a rookie DC after all.”

  Sutton nodded, apparently taking Warren’s dodging of the question at face value. “You’re probably right, which raises an even more intriguing question—if Sheehy was a junior officer, then who was the senior officer orchestrating everything?” He inclined his head towards the paper strewn across the desk. “I don’t know about you, but I’d love to know who authorised that drugs raid.”

  Monday 2 April

  Chapter 16

  Billy Obsanjo was awaiting trial at the Mount Prison on the outskirts of Bovingdon Village. Gaining access to him had been easier than Warren expected. He’d simply contacted the prison and asked for permission to visit him. Obsanjo, through his lawyer, had agreed immediately. When asked for the reason for his visit, Warren had been vague, saying that he wanted clarification of a few points and the solicitor had immediately stressed how Obsanjo was willing to help the police in any way necessary. Warren found himself wondering just what sort of incentives had already been offered to the man for his co-operation.

  After activating the car’s door locks remotely, Warren crossed the car park, heading for the squat, nondescript building. Now that he was here, his gut was tight with nerves. Warren knew that what he was doing could potentially result in his suspension, or even worse. On the face of it, there was no legitimate reason for him to be here and Professional Standards would take a very dim view of his visit at the very least. They would probably regard it as potential interference with an ongoing investigation. For that reason, Warren had spent the previous night agonising about his approach. Having Obsanjo’s solicitor present and making certain that everything was recorded would hopefully show that he hadn’t acted improperly, but he still felt sick.

  Tony Sutton knew nothing of Warren’s trip. The man already had a cloud hanging over him and the last thing Warren wanted was for his name to be drawn to the attention of Professional Standards again. Besides, he was due to appear at Sheehy’s trial and any attempt on his behalf to speak to Obsanjo would at best invalidate his testimony and at worst could well be regarded as an attempt to interfere with a witness. Warren’s visit would be logged—he just hoped that nobody in Professional Standards would think to check that log in the immediate future. He’d deal with Sutton’s disapproval later.

  Visitor hours for inmates were not due to start for a few hours and so processing Warren was quick and straightforward. Although a police officer, no special courtesy was afforded him and he was searched before his belongings were taken off him and locked away just like any other visitor; prisons were rife with drugs, mobile phones and other contraband and it all had to get in there somehow. Finally, with only a digital voice recorder and a notepad, he was escorted to an interview room.

  The prison was surprisingly quiet. The inmates had already had their breakfast and showers that morning and were now back in their cells watching TV or staring at the four concrete walls that defined their daily existence, waiting for their lunch to appear. For Warren, the crushing, lonely boredom was probably the biggest disincentive for getting locked up, he had long ago decided.

  Billy Obsanjo was much as Warren had expected from his file. A slightly built man, verging on gaunt, his dark skin had an unhealthy pallor, his jowls darkened with several days’ stubble. His plain, red T-shirt revealed detailed tattoos that were more pornographic than artistic.

  The file had been a case study in a life gone wrong. Born twenty-six years ago to a second-generation Nigerian mother still in her teens and an unknown father, he’d been a persistent absentee from his third year of junior school. By the time he started secondary school, he was bouncing between his maternal grandmother and, when she was sober enough, his mother. His first brush with the law came before his fourteenth birthday for criminal damage to a boarded-up shop. By the time he was seventeen he had multiple convictions for shoplifting, joyriding and drug possession.

  His first conviction for assault came in his early twenties after he resolved a disagreement in a nightclub using a headbutt. By this point, he had been unemployed since finally leaving school at sixteen with no qualifications to speak of—his only legitimate work experience had been from his court-ordered community service and a failed attempt at a work scheme.

  Despite this, he never seemed short of cash and pretty soon his unaccountable financial solvency drew the attention of the authorities and he became a person of interest to the police.

  “So what can we help you with, Detective Chief Inspector?” Obsanjo’s solicitor was a slightly portly, middle-aged man with a squint and a receding hairline that he kept on running his hand through, as if checking that it hadn’t shrunk any more. Despite the man’s apparent openness, his body language clearly telegraphed his reluctance to be there.

  “I wondered if you could help clarify a few details about the alleged tip-offs you received.”

  “Ain’t nothing alleged about it. I given all of the stuff to you already.” Despite being brought up in Hertfordshire and not even owning a passport, Obsanjo’s inflection was a bad pastiche of US movie gangster speak. The TV series The Wire had a lot to answer for, Warren decided.

  He smiled tightly. “Of course, as I said, though, I need to clarify a few details. First, can you tell me who your contacts were within the police?”

  Obsanjo puffed his cheeks out. “For fuck’s sake, how many times you going to go over this?”

  “Indulge me.” Warren kept his smile in place, but his tone was stony.

  “OK. No I can’t tell you who my contact was. He forgot to leave his business card behind.”

  Warren ignored the sarcasm. “So there was just the one person?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “And who came up with the idea for your little…arrangement? Who approached whom?”

  “He approached me.”

  “So you met him. Can you describe him?”

  Obsanjo shrugged. “It was in a pub car park. I didn’t see him clearly; he just stepped out of the shadows. There was a streetlight behind him and he wore a hoody, so I couldn’t see his face.” Obsanjo snorted. “I thought he was trying to mug me. Nearly put a blade in him.” Obsanjo’s solicitor cleared his throat loudly.

  “Or I would of if I’d had one,” Obsanjo finished lamely.

  “So a total stranger approaches you in a pub car park and asks for money for information. And you went along with it?” Warren was sceptical.

  Obsanjo shrugged. “I didn’t believe him either, but he knew stuff about me. Stuff that only the pigs know. He offered me a ‘show of good faith’, to prove he was legit. Told me that there was a raid due on one of my factories, five a.m. the next morning. That if he was right, I should call this number and we should talk.

  “I didn’t believe him, but I figured it best to move stuff out and not be around. Next morning a whole vanload turned up, just like he said, and kicked the door in.”

  “So you rang the number?”

  “What do you think?”

  Sheehy had been right. The man really wasn’t that smart. He’d accepted the man’s corruption at face value. It had never occurred to him that Sheehy might have been working undercover, gaining his trust, to make it easier to arrest him. Obsanjo had just assumed that his contact was bent—in this case he’d been correct, but that was more luck than judgement.

  “So how did it work? Did you pay him directly? Was it a monthly arrangement? What?”

  “He gave me his bank details and I set up a standing order—how do you think I fucking paid him?” Obsanjo was clearly sick of repeatedly answering the same questions; no doubt Professional Standards had gone over his story several times, checking for inconsistencies.

  His solicitor was also clearly bored. Nevertheless he touched his client’s arm gently. “Just answer his questions, William. Y
ou know that they have to check everything out fully.”

  Obsanjo settled into a brooding silence, his arms folded.

  Warren tried again.

  “How much did you pay him?”

  “Two grand. Every time he sent me information.”

  “And how many times did that happen?”

  Obsanjo shrugged. “I dunno. Ten or twelve times.”

  Twenty thousand pounds or more paid in bribes. A large sum of money, but it meant that Obsanjo could keep on earning many times that. It was the cost of business and a pretty small cost at that. If Obsanjo had been a legitimate businessman, the taxman would have taken a far bigger slice of his earnings than he’d paid in bribes.

  “So you met him a dozen times—can you describe him?”

  Obsanjo kissed his teeth. Warren ignored the insult, pretending he didn’t recognise the gesture.

  “No, I only met him once. We used disposable phones. He would call me when he had more information. I would stick the money in an envelope and leave it somewhere. When I dropped the money off, I’d pick up whatever he had left.”

  “And what sort of information did he leave you?”

  “You seen it. I gave it to you all the first time.”

  “Remind me.”

  “Memos, lists of times and dates that they were going to raid, places to avoid.”

  “And in all that time, you never saw him clearly?”

  “No, like I said. He had his back to a streetlight.”

  “Was he tall, short? Old, young? What did you notice about him?”

  Obsanjo huffed and again his solicitor told him to co-operate.

  “He was normal height. Not too fat, but his hoody was baggy. He was white; I saw his hands.”

  “What about his age?”

  Obsanjo screwed his eyes up. “Not young—his voice was a bit raspy.” Suddenly his voice picked up. “I remember now, he had a beard. I could just see the shadow.”

  Warren’s heart beat faster. “What sort of beard? A goatee? Was it dark or light?”

  “A full beard, I think. Scruffy, grey or white.”

  Sheehy had a beard.

  Chapter 17

  Warren and Sutton were meeting in the back of a different pub this time.

  “I just don’t know what to think.” Warren had concluded his summing up of his meeting with Obsanjo. “On the one hand, the only real description that they had to go on was that of a middle-aged white man. But once they zeroed in on Sheehy, there’s so much more to go on. The money, the SIM card and the information that Obsanjo handed over.”

  Sutton glared at his pint. The room they were meeting in may have been tucked out of the way, but Warren had worried that the landlord might come in to see what all the shouting was about. Sutton hadn’t taken the news that Warren had gone behind his back to meet Obsanjo very well.

  Still, true to form, once he’d said—or rather yelled—his piece, Sutton had gone back to moody contemplation of the matter at hand.

  “It does add up. It’s like Gavin said, we just could not catch a break with this guy. I lost count of the number of times the door-kickers went in, all fired up, and returned empty-handed. Somebody must have been feeding him information. You’ve met the guy; did he strike you as some great criminal strategist?”

  Warren shook his head. “No, quite the opposite in fact. I see a chancer who fell and landed with his bum in the butter and ran with it until it all went wrong. Hell, he’s probably amazed it lasted as long as it did.”

  “So we’re left with several possibilities.” Sutton spread his fingers. “First, Gavin is being framed. Somebody else was feeding Obsanjo that information and when it all came crashing down, they stitched up Gavin by planting the evidence. Obsanjo never did see his contact and so it wasn’t too difficult to point the finger Gavin’s way and have it stick.”

  “That implies that Obsanjo wasn’t in on the stitch-up and that he’s just been used.”

  “Not impossible. The second possibility is that the whole thing is a complete fabrication—that somebody saw Obsanjo’s arrest and decided to use it to their advantage. They contacted Obsanjo and worked with him to plant the evidence to frame Gavin.”

  Warren frowned. “I don’t like that one. It implies that the whole thing was done retrospectively; there’s too much chance involved. As soon as Obsanjo was arrested—which they probably couldn’t predict ahead of time—they’d have had to go and plant the money in Gavin’s house. Then they would have to somehow collate convincing leaked evidence and put it somewhere that Obsanjo could send Professional Standards to so they could discover it. Then somehow produce a SIM card, which contacted Obsanjo’s phone on a regular basis. And all of this would have to be coordinated with Obsanjo as he waits in prison—which realistically would require it to be done via privileged conversation between Obsanjo and the most corrupt brief in the profession.”

  “I agree. Which leaves only the third possibility—that Gavin is guilty as charged and this whole thing is a last, desperate attempt to save his own skin.”

  It was clear where Sutton’s suspicions lay. He drained his pint and stared moodily into the empty glass.

  “Well for the time being, I have to operate on the assumption that Gavin was framed, which realistically only leaves the first possibility. The question is how can I prove it, one way or the other?”

  The two men were silent for several minutes, before Sutton spoke up again.

  “Something has just occurred to me, but I’m not sure how or if it helps us.”

  “At this stage, Tony, I’m all ears.”

  “What if Obsanjo’s arrest wasn’t entirely an accident? Presumably Obsanjo was caught because he wasn’t tipped off in time, or the information he was given wasn’t correct. What if that was deliberate—that all of the pieces were in place to bring Gavin down and it was decided that next time we planned a raid there’d be no warning. Obsanjo ends up inside, facing a long stretch, and he gets thinking—it wouldn’t take long for a genius like Obsanjo to figure out that he might get some leniency if he squealed.”

  Warren thought about it. “It’s certainly a possibility. And it could be useful to us. If we tell Obsanjo that his contact failed him deliberately, he’s going to be pretty pissed off. If he is in on a conspiracy to frame Sheehy, then it might be enough to make him give up who was really behind it all. And if it was Sheehy, or he genuinely doesn’t know, then what have we lost?” Warren’s enthusiasm was infectious and even Sutton was smiling.

  “You might just have come up with a way out of the conundrum.”

  “Let’s not get too carried away; this might not work. Besides which, it means visiting him again and lying to him on tape.”

  Sutton’s face fell. “Good point. It’ll be hard for this not to come back on you when he tells Professional Standards. You’re already batting on a sticky wicket after visiting him today without telling them—or me,” he added pointedly.

  Warren sighed. The elation he’d felt a few moments ago had gone completely. Another thought occurred to him. “It’s quite possible that he’s being fed information on the inside.”

  “What do you mean? How can you know that?”

  “Well, up until now his description of his contact has been frustratingly vague, a middle-aged white man, of average build and height, his face not visible.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well suddenly today he remembers more details and what a surprise they match Sheehy. Either somebody has been feeding him information, perhaps showed him a photograph, or Sheehy is guilty and Obsanjo really did suddenly remember what his mysterious contact looked like.”

  Sutton breathed out, a frustrated hiss. They were going around in circles.

  “We need more.”

  Warren nodded his agreement. The question was: what was the next step? It was time to follow Susan’s advice. “There’s something I haven’t told you. That I haven’t told anyone.”

  Warren suddenly felt nervous; he’d been rehea
rsing what he was going to say for the past hour and he still didn’t know how he was going to do it.

  Sutton’s face remained carefully neutral until Warren finished, before taking a deep breath and puffing out his cheeks.

  “Shit.” Sutton shook his head. “I’m not sure what to say.”

  Warren waited expectantly, his fingers toying nervously with the beer glass in front of him.

  “I knew the story about your father—it’s all in the records and when you were confirmed in post, I did a bit of research.” Sutton was unapologetic. He’d already been quite open in the past about how he’d made it his business to investigate his new commander.

  “I admit I was curious to meet you—I guess I wanted to see if it had any effect on you as a copper—none that I can see.”

  “Glad I passed the test.”

  Sutton ignored the forced flippancy. “The thing is, even if Sheehy is telling the truth, when he says he planted that gun to stitch up Delmarno, is there any evidence that he even knew your father? I haven’t seen anything.”

  Warren shook his head. “No, but it’s a hell of a story.”

  “That’s exactly my point. No offence, Chief, but it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to work out that your father’s suicide is your Achilles’ heel. Gavin is in deep shit—he’s desperate and he’s on the outside now. If he wants somebody on the force to do his dirty work, he’s going to need to give them a hell of a bloody incentive. I think he’s playing you.”

  Sutton sat back. His expression resolute, his arms folded.

  Warren didn’t like the implication that he was being taken for a fool and said so.

  Sutton remained adamant. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see anything here to convince me. You said that he gave you information as a show of good faith, but so far it’s just words. Sure, the records surrounding Delmarno’s conviction are patchy, but I’m seeing cock-up not conspiracy at the moment. I want more.”

  Warren opened his briefcase. “This is what he gave me when we met.” He passed over the results of the investigation into Anton Liebig’s death, annotated with Mag Richardson’s notes.