Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  And that was how Thomas Carson was arrested.

  2: Guns and Gangs

  “WELCOME TO MANCHESTER,” the sign had said. Underneath, someone had written “FUCK OFF” in red paint. I hadn’t been anywhere near the place for a decade, I hadn’t missed it, and I wouldn’t have bothered going back for another decade or two if Roarkes hadn’t called.

  “I’m in Manchester,” he’d said, and I’d pictured him standing there in the cold hard rain, glaring at some suspect or unfortunate detective constable. Every lawyer has one cop who doesn’t hate him as much as the rest do, and Detective Inspector Gideon Roarkes was mine. Roarkes was supposed to be based in London, a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, but he’d been popping up all over the place lately, Cornwall, Lincolnshire, even Wales, his long, tired face caught in the background in a newspaper shot or a TV report into a murder or a kidnapping or a particularly significant drugs bust. A couple of months back I’d asked him who he was really working for, and he’d just grunted and shaken his head, not even bothering with a lie. This time I waited for him to tell me what was so special about Manchester, but instead he’d come up with the last thing I expected.

  “I need you up here, Sam,” he’d said. Roarkes could get away with calling me Sam, or Williams, or whatever the hell he wanted, but only someone who wanted his head handed to him would call Roarkes Gideon. I’d laughed and waited for him to join in, and found the silence lengthening. Roarkes had got me out of some tight spots in the past, so maybe I owed him. But not enough to go running up to Manchester on a whim.

  “It’s about Carson,” he’d said, and all those witty little barbs I’d been planning had disappeared faster than the free drinks at a wedding. He hadn’t been too forthcoming with the details. A place, a time, and it was “about Carson”, that was all I knew. Carson had been arrested nearly a week earlier and charged not many hours after that, and since then he’d slipped off the news radar, but not mine. I was still interested, even if there was nothing new to be interested in. I’d probably be swearing at Roarkes in a pub in a few hours’ time for dragging me up to this cold wet shithole for no good reason at all, but if it was Carson, it was worth a shot.

  There was work to do at home, of course. There was Hasina Khalil, my solitary client, who was seeking asylum in the United Kingdom on the basis of her views on sexual orientation, which were about as popular in her native Egypt as a clown act at a funeral. I’d met Hasina Khalil just once, in the visitors’ area at the detention centre she’d been in for two months. I’d been expecting a bold young firebrand with piercing eyes, a shaved head and tattoos in unusual places. Instead I’d found a middle-aged lady with fluent, heavily accented English and perfectly groomed hair, shivering and pulling her coat tight around her despite the heat blowing out of the cheap, noisy fan heater pointing right at her. Something about Hasina Khalil didn’t quite add up, but she was the only client I had, and the closest thing to a real human rights case I’d worked on in as long as I could remember.

  There was Claire’s story, too, which I was supposed to be helping with, which I’d promised I’d help her with as soon as I got finished with whatever I happened to be doing at the time and still somehow not got round to it. Five dead girls, and a gang of people traffickers who’d smuggled them into England to be abused, beaten, and murdered. The three different killers were all looking forward to a lifetime of beatings in the comfort of their maximum security prisons. But the traffickers were still out there, and Claire’s files were growing, with new pieces slipped into the jigsaw on a weekly basis. She’d been asking me to take a look at those new pieces and see how they might fit in. I was going to struggle doing that two hundred miles away from the files, but my fault for putting it off so long.

  There was also the strong possibility of a job, and if I landed it, it would be the first time I’d been able to rely on a regular income since I’d got myself fired from Mauriers, but it was a job that ran against everything I stood for, or at least everything I’d stood for back when I claimed to stand for anything at all. I hadn’t so much as mentioned the job to Claire because I knew that was what she’d tell me.

  Atom Industries, my potential future employer, was a large multinational chemicals company whose management thought the idea of invoking European human rights legislation to defend themselves against zealous regulators was a wonderfully clever wheeze, and they were waiting for me to get back to them to arrange a date for an interview. And the remains of the cold were stubbornly clinging on like the smell of week-old fish. But the interview could wait, and I wasn’t sure I wanted the job anyway, the cold was just a cold, not malaria, there was nothing urgent going on with the case, and it was the only case I had. The hard-pressed, institutionally-abused citizens of London weren’t exactly beating a path to my door. There were lists out there, rankings, a league table of human rights lawyers, and I still harboured dreams of making the top ten. I needed something new. Some attention, a client, some money. Maybe Manchester would be something new.

  Manchester was like I’d walked straight into a gritty seventies TV series set on some northern estate full of shoplifters and pregnant fourteen-year-olds. And it was raining, of course. I swallowed painfully past a lump in the back of my throat, shivered, and started walking a little faster. There were a bunch of kids, seven or eight of them, kicking a ball around on the pavement and not really caring if it hit a car or a house. They’d glanced at me as I’d parked my Fiat, and I’d caught glimpses of sharp noses, narrowed eyes, smirks, one set of rodent features among the whole lot of them. The street looked sad and washed-out and somehow like I was seeing it in black and white. I was less than a hundred yards from a police station but I didn’t feel comfortable.

  The police station was different, though. Bright, modern, all shiny veneers and functioning coffee machines. It was a police station, so it wasn’t somewhere you’d go for fun, but from the little I’d seen you’d rather hang around in there than outside. When I asked for Detective Inspector Roarkes the huge, bald guy at the enquiry desk looked at me like I’d asked for a quarterpounder with cheese and said “Haven’t got one of them ’ere, lad.”

  I checked the message Roarkes had sent me. Folgate Police Station, it read, and an address in a suburb of Manchester I’d never heard of before now. This was the right place, this was the right time. I texted him: I’m here. Where the fuck are you? The reply came thirty seconds later: Turn around, so I did, and there he was, grinning at me like he’d done something clever. I nodded at him and turned back to the sergeant at the desk.

  “That’s DI Roarkes,” I said.

  He glanced towards Roarkes and fixed me with a stare. “I’m sorry,” he replied, with exaggerated courtesy. “How could I have forgotten?” Roarkes might have been a hotshot back home, but he didn’t seem to have made much of an impression in Manchester.

  Two minutes later we were sitting in a cold room with dirty white walls and battered furniture that looked like it had been dragged in off one of the skips outside. The whole room had a sense of having been left behind by the rest of the station, and I was reminded of all those shabby, tired rooms I’d met Roarkes in before. Maybe Roarkes was drawn to rooms like this. Maybe he did this to them, accelerated the aging process with his grey hair and his yellow teeth and his general air of weariness. Three chairs, a side table, a desk. The table and the desk were covered in notebooks, scraps of paper, torn-up envelopes. Roarkes indicated one of the chairs and I brushed some crumbs off it before I sat down. He might be a long way out of his territory, but this room had Roarkes written all over it.

  “Hello, Sam. Journey OK?” he asked, genially enough, when we were both seated.

  “What the hell am I doing here?” I replied. I wasn’t feeling very genial.

  “We’ve got nothing.”

  “You’ve got Carson.”

  “Yup. But no motive. Nothing on the forensics. Nothing except his car there when it all kicked off, and no one else to point the finger at.”r />
  I was a little surprised. Not on the forensics. No doubt they’d just screwed up, or not looked close enough, and they’d come up with something useful when they had to. But the lack of a motive threw me. Sure, he was a “normal guy”, Carson, or at least he’d seemed that way when the press were screaming his name from the front page, but now they’d had enough time to dig something up, if there was anything there to dig. You never knew what might piss a man off enough to turn him from regular Joe into a murderer. Tax demand. Speeding fine. Row with the wife. I’d seen prosecution lawyers get motive for a shooting out of a lukewarm coffee from Starbucks, and it turned out they were right, too. If they couldn’t get motive for Carson then maybe the guy was too regular to be true.

  “What’s this got to do with me, then? Come to think of it, what the hell’s it got to do with you?”

  He shrugged, the beginnings of a smile twitching at one corner of his mouth.

  “You know me, Sam. There’s a dozen Chief Constables with my number on speed dial. I go where the interesting stuff is.”

  I’d asked the question hoping for better than that, but as usual Roarkes was telling me precisely what he wanted to and no more. For a moment I toyed with the idea of asking him again, directly, Who do you really work for, what do you really do, but only a moment. If I ever got an honest answer out of him he’d have me lost in a quagmire of police bureaucracy within minutes. I settled for a gentle dig instead.

  “Because you’re so clever, right?”

  He fixed me with a weary glare, a look of near-infinite patience run dry. After a moment, I laughed. He was a miserable bastard and on a good day he looked like he had a year or two left in him at best, but he was clever. If I had to choose a cop for my corner, I’d choose Roarkes. I could see why a dozen Chief Constables might do the same.

  “And me?” I asked.

  “You’re here to advise me. You can be my psychological adviser.”

  I bit back a line about Roarkes needing more help in that area than he could get from me, and just said “What?”

  “It’s either that or guns-and-gangs.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t look like he was joking. I waited for him to go on.

  “Guns-and-gangs. Special advisers into gun and gang crime. It’s a London thing.”

  “This isn’t London.”

  “You’re telling me. But if I want to get you helping me here, it’s either psychology, or guns-and-gangs.”

  Helping me. We were, I felt, edging slowly towards an answer.

  “Why can’t you get one of the locals to help?”

  “They don’t like me, Sam,” he said, bluntly.

  I thought back to the bald giant at the enquiry desk. He’d acted as though he didn’t know who Roarkes was, but then he’d looked up and seen him and acted like he knew precisely who Roarkes was and would have been happier if he didn’t. The way I’d have acted if Brooks-Powell had strolled past right then. Roarkes had swooped in and taken over their investigation, which was liable to make him unpopular. But not that unpopular, surely? There had to be something more to it.

  He was still talking.

  “And I don’t trust them, either.”

  He looked away, shutting down a subject I’d have been interested in exploring.

  “What about your guys at the Met? What about a psychologist, a real one, if that’s what you need?”

  I was pushing here, with Roarkes’ foot hard against the door. But he’d called me up and asked me to drive two hundred miles in the rain. The least he could do was to tell me why. He gave a long, slow, impatient sigh, without any real malice behind it.

  “The unit’s gone, Sam. My old unit, at the Met. They disbanded it, gave everyone new jobs, I was travelling so much it didn’t make sense having a bunch of people answering to me when I was only there one week in four.”

  “And the psychologists?”

  “I don’t like psychologists.”

  I nodded. He didn’t like psychologists. Topic closed. He continued.

  “So I’ve got you instead. You’re my adviser. I’ll get you in to speak to people, if I can, but remember: you’re not a cop. While you’re here, you’re not even a lawyer.”

  Not being a cop suited me down to the ground. Not being a lawyer wasn’t the end of the world. But adviser was vague, even for me.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  Roarkes smiled.

  “You need to meet someone, Sam.”

  Serena Hawkes was young, black, more like the rest of the police station than Roarkes, more London than Manchester. Maybe more New York than London, I thought, as I took in the Vera Wang glasses and the Prada shoes and the cheekbones that could cut glass. She smiled at me and shook my hand. Angular. Intense. Unusual.

  Carson hadn’t appointed a solicitor. Carson hadn’t said a thing since he was arrested, except his name and his address and whether his wife and son were OK, which he’d asked a dozen times a day for the first three days, and then gone silent. The family didn’t have any preference, they didn’t know any criminal solicitors, they’d never had the need, so when Serena Hawkes had been appointed to represent him nobody had objected.

  Thing was, he hadn’t said a word to her, either. Nothing to the police, nothing to his lawyer, and eventually the local police had realised they were out of their depth and needed a specialist in getting people talking. Someone had called in Roarkes and Roarkes, for reasons he still hadn’t fully explained, had called in me, even though it was clear Carson already had a solicitor and from what she was saying, Serena Hawkes had no intention of giving him up.

  “I told Serena you were good at this sort of thing.”

  “And what sort of thing is that?”

  “Don’t be modest. You know what I mean. The old Sam Williams magic. You get people talking.”

  I started to laugh, and then I realised he wasn’t joking. I’d had some luck in the past, cases cracked, silences broken, lies untangled. A decade back I’d had a photographic memory, a great job at a great firm, a passion for justice, and ambition to match the passion, but a lot can change in a decade. I still had the photographic memory, when it felt like working. Maybe Roarkes was mistaking luck and the remains of a freak-show act for talent. If I was half as good as he thought I was I wouldn’t have been sitting at home waiting for him to call and summon me to Manchester. And if he expected me to snap my fingers and get Carson spilling his guts, he was going to be disappointed. I stared at him, and he stared back, unreadable.

  Maybe he was right. It hadn’t just been luck. I’d been good at this, in the past. Good at sniffing out that one key fact that unlocked a man, that put him in a place where he was better off talking to me than lying or keeping his mouth shut. Good at getting under his skin. And certainly better than the blunt and aggressive Roarkes.

  I’d been feeling quite positive about myself and my abilities for all of three seconds when I noticed that twitch at the corner of Roarkes’ mouth again, and the truth hit me. Roarkes knew precisely how good I was and where my limits lay. Roarkes also knew the state of my client list and how significant a case like this could be. Roarkes was doing me a favour, I decided. All this bullshit about “getting people talking” was for the benefit of Serena Hawkes, who probably needed a better reason for another dog in her kennel than Roarkes feeling tender-hearted.

  “Fact is,” she said, “we’ve got nothing to lose.”

  You might not, I thought. I’d just driven two hundred miles into the rain and the cold and my car had probably been stolen or separated into a thousand little pieces by now. I bit back the words and tried being polite instead.

  “You really don’t mind this, Ms Hawkes?”

  “Not a bit. As long as you don’t forget this guy’s my client you and I are going to get along fine. Do your thing.”

  If I can remember how, I thought. And then something more pressing came to mind.

  “So who’s paying me?”

  They looked at one another, the
ageing DI and the sharp young lawyer. They hadn’t thought of that. Maybe money wasn’t an issue for a jetsetting police officer and a designer solicitor, but it was a burning one for me. Even a big-name case had to bring some cash with it, because Claire couldn’t go on funding my less-than-extravagant lifestyle forever. Fuck it. I stood up and looked around for my coat before I remembered I hadn’t taken it off.

  “Sit down.”

  Roarkes had an authority that came from decades of dealing with crooks and bullshitters. I sat down. I couldn’t have driven back to London anyway. I’d shoved two days’ worth of painkillers and cold remedies down my throat on the journey up, and now whenever I looked in the same direction for more than a few seconds, things started moving around.

  “We’ll sort something out,” said Roarkes. “Won’t we, Serena?”

  She nodded. She didn’t look happy about it, but she nodded. The nod was good enough for me. I didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to run up much of a fee.

  The corridors might have been stuffed full of the same uniforms you saw all over the country, but I was getting the feeling this wasn’t your usual police station. Carson’s cell, for a start. It had a slab of smooth, authentic-looking wood instead of the regular door with a hole in it and a metal slider to slam shut when you wanted to scare the living shit out of some teenager who’d passed out on the street with half an ounce of damp weed and a stupid grin. There was a bed in there, sheets, a pillow. And we were looking at the guy through a glass window which, Roarkes assured me, was a one-way thing. I needed the assurance, because Carson didn’t stop staring at the window he couldn’t see through the whole time I was watching him. Average height, blond hair, that weather-beaten look that comes from spending all your spare time on a bike or chopping wood, good-looking enough in an everyday sort of way. Apart from the fact that he was in a cell charged with the murder of two police officers, there was nothing unusual about Thomas Carson. And he kept staring at me, so long and so intent I had to ask Roarkes, again, if he could see me. Roarkes rolled his eyes and shook his head and I believed him, but that didn’t make me feel any less nervous. Something about this guy didn’t add up. Carson might not be talking, but he wasn’t dumb.