Taking Pity

by David Mark

  “There’s no doubt,” she says. “Our boys. Our bastards.”

  Breslin nods and sucks his cheeks. Gives her some twinkle.

  “I believe you refer to them as the Headhunters?”

  Pharaoh meets his expression. Manages a smile in return.

  “One of my officers came up with it. It kind of sums them up. That’s what they do. They talent-spot. They look for people on the up and they recruit them. It’s run like a business. Like a consultancy.”

  Breslin nods again. Looks down at the folder in front of him and makes a note with a ballpoint pen.

  “To use your corporate analogy, it seems they have their eyes on a lot of hostile takeovers.”

  Pharaoh wonders if he wants a gold star. Of course they’re fucking expanding. They’re branching out, moving up, and taking over. That’s why she and all the other poor bastards are here.

  She looks around the long, high-ceilinged function room. Narrows her eyes at the other senior officers who have been dragged away from catching killers and rapists to sit eating cookies and drinking coffee in a hotel she could never afford to stay in. They all look similarly wrung out. All soaked through and pissed off. They have better things to be doing. They all run CID units the way they choose to and have been around long enough to remember when a meeting such as this would have been conducted through a fog of blue cigarette smoke and to the sound of whiskey glasses hitting stained desks. To Pharaoh, this all feels too polished. Too anodyne. Too far removed from the nature of what they do. She wants somebody to swear or shout or break wind and laugh about it. She wants to feel like she’s in a room full of coppers who use words like “bastards” when talking about the bad guys and “poor bitch” to describe a victim.

  Breslin steeples his fingers and looks at the dozen men and women who sit around the oval table. He beams like a politician. Turns to his left and whispers something in the ear of the woman sitting next to him. She hadn’t introduced herself when they were doing the meet and greet at the start of the session. Breslin had simply said that “Anne” was here to help. She had a “watching brief.” She was a “great asset.”

  Pharaoh considers her. Young. Short brown hair. Looks classy and sexless in a round-neck, long-sleeve shirt and cream jacket. Her scarf looks expensive. Her jewelry, too, though it’s subtle and not designed to catch the eye. There’s an intelligence to her, and Pharaoh fancies that this is somebody she wouldn’t want to be playing poker against.

  Breslin looks down at his notes again. “Arthur. You had something you think may be relevant?”

  A stocky, fifty-something man with luxuriant white hair and a blue suit gets to his feet. He gives a nod and a civilian officer clicks a button on the laptop in front of her. The image on the screen changes. It shows a strip of shingly beach on which a male forearm, wrapped in cling film, is sitting next to a yellow evidence marker.

  “This is Lloyd Moore,” says Detective Superintendent Arthur Blowers in a broad North East accent. “Or, it used to be. Lloyd’s been the face of villainy in Newcastle for the best part of twenty years. His dad, Dermot, had the honor before him. Crime family in the proper sense. Old-school. Didn’t court the media, but those in the know knew his name. Lloyd had a bit about him. Relatively fair man, provided you didn’t upset him. Done a few minor stretches but it was always a bitch to pin anything on him. Witnesses tended to scarper or lose their bottle. Evidence would disappear. Plenty of other people intruded on his turf over the years but they never lasted long.”

  “Muscle?” asks a short, stocky woman with a gray perm and glasses, whose accent ensured she hadn’t needed to tell anybody she was from Birmingham during the introductions.

  Blowers sucks on his lower lip. Gives a smile that suggests a grudging respect and affection for the man he is about to describe.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” he says. “Lloyd may have been the public face, but those with long memories may remember this chap.”

  A new image flashes up on the screen. It’s a shot from the 1960s. Black-and-white. It shows a squat, bulldog-looking man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit and a flat cap. He’s been captured on camera coming out of a brightly lit building with two tall, intimidating men in black suits and ties. The two men look so similar they could almost be twins.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  Blowers gives that grudging smile again. “Yep. You know all those stories and urban myths about the Geordie gangsters turning away the London boys at Newcastle Station? It’s bollocks. This man let them in. Then he did a deal with them. And he’s been top dog ever since.”

  “And he is?”

  “Francis Nock. He’s eighty-one years old now, and we haven’t had anything tying him to organized crime since the seventies, but that may well be because he’s very good at it. We’ve had people in his operation before. We had one in Lloyd’s outfit until recently. And from what we can tell, Nock has been the man who says yes or no, live or die, since the sixties. For all intents and purposes, he’s a retired property developer. Suffers with arthritis and diabetes. Looks forward to his daughter’s visits from Spain. Holidays in Panama when he’s well enough. But he’s the one who Lloyd has been reporting to all these years.”

  “And you think the Headhunters bumped Lloyd off to send a message to this old boy?”

  Blowers shakes his head. “No, I think your Headhunters approached Lloyd and offered to back him. They wanted him to turn against the old man. I think they offered to give him the crown. And I think Mr. Nock found out about it. And Lloyd ended up an arm on a beach.”

  There are exhalations from around the table.

  “And who does Nock’s dirty work?”

  Blowers chuckles. He clicks a button on the laptop and nods appreciatively as the screen fills with a prison mug shot. It shows a handsome man in his late twenties, with thick hair swept back from a face with cheekbones so sharp they could slice the breeze. He’s looking at the camera with soft, inquisitive eyes, and has the appearance of a big man afraid he might hurt somebody by accident. It’s a look that Pharaoh recognizes.

  “This was Raymond Mahon in his prime. He was arrested in the late sixties following an incident in a pool hall, for which no charges were brought. Handsome devil, isn’t he?”

  Blowers clicks the laptop. Enjoys the change on everybody’s faces as the image on the screen morphs into something new.

  “This is the same man in 1976, when he began a lengthy stretch for blowing the face off a man in a Denton pub with a double-barreled shotgun.”

  The assembled officers give a chorus of curses and grimace at the image on the screen.

  “He served seventeen years. Other pictures were taken but we don’t have them anymore. You can probably thank Mr. Nock for that. Further images were taken upon his release and during his interactions with his probation officer, but they, too, are no longer in our possession. He’s clearly camera shy. You can see why.”

  The image is hideous. One whole half of Mahon’s face looks as if it has been torn away. A glass eye pokes out from inside a cave of tangled, livid skin. His hair looks like it has been burned off on one side and grows patchy on the other. His lower lip is missing a chunk and his teeth are exposed in a grisly mockery of a smile.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Blowers shrugs. “Lots of urban myths. We’ve heard he did it to himself while strung out on LSD. Another story goes that it was done to him in prison by some southern gangster while he was asleep. We know he’s alive. He’s not such a mess now, but you won’t see him on the cover of Men’s Health anytime soon. We know he’s a killer. And we know that, at the moment, we can’t locate him or Francis Nock.”

  “And you want to talk to them both about Lloyd?”

  Blowers looks at Breslin as though he’s a toddler. “Yes, sir, that would be very helpful.”

  Breslin waves Blowers back to his seat. He flic
ks through his notes again. Tries to find the right facial expression. Leans over to Anne and gets no reaction to whatever it is he whispers in her ear this time.

  “Fucking hell,” says Pharaoh under her breath, but with enough gusto for it to be heard by all.

  “So, just to recap . . .” says Breslin, looking at each of the officers in turn. His focus lingers on a haggard, round-bellied detective chief inspector from Nottingham. The man is still sweating off last night’s ale. He’s an unhealthy green around the edges and has a whole spaghetti loop crusted onto the lapel of his supermarket suit. His name’s Melvyn Eades and he’s a bloody good thief taker. He’s also a man with a temper, a limited vocabulary, and a pathological hatred for southerners. Pharaoh likes him. His presentation to the other officers had been quick, and to the point. Two bodies on his patch. Both tortured almost to death. Hands nailed to their knees and a blowtorch used on their bare chests. Finished off with a nail to the temple. The bodies were thrown from a moving vehicle in the early hours of the morning. Dumped, like rubbish, on a cobbled street near the entrance to the city’s castle. Both men had ties to Andy Hadrian, who had been looking after the city’s cocaine and firearms needs for as long as anybody could remember. Hadrian had played the hard man in the interview room. Given them nothing. But Eades had a man on the inside and a bug in the bastard’s phone. Hadrian wasn’t just rattled. He was fucking terrified.

  Despite his presentation being cut short by an unhappy Breslin, Eades had at least managed to give the little symposium its first bit of positive news. Something was causing the Headhunters a little disquiet. Rumor was that they had recruited someone to the firm who was doing things very much his own way. Somebody was refusing to follow instructions. They had stopped listening to the voice at the other end of the line. They were causing the organization a little upset. And that could only be a good thing.

  Eades rolls his round head on his fat neck and sniffs noisily.

  “To recap, sir, you’re on the money. They’re taking over existing firms. They’re looking at which outfits make money, and then they’re telling the man at the top that he now works for them. He can pay them a cut of his profits, or they’ll go to his number two and make the same offer. They’ll give demonstrations of what they can do. Andy Hadrian’s not an old man. He’s got years ahead of him. He’s got kids. He wants to live to have grandkids. He can keep his lifestyle and his life if he just bows his knee. I think he’ll do it. He’d rather have these people on his side than against him.”

  Breslin whispers to Anne yet again. Nods. Turns back to Pharaoh.

  “And we’re certain they started out in Humberside?”

  “East Yorkshire, actually, Nick.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No such place as Humberside.”

  “But you’re with Humberside Police . . .”

  “Yeah. Stupid, isn’t it?”

  Damp, tired, hungry, and hungover, Pharaoh wants this meeting to be over. She wants to tip the rest of the Jammie Dodgers into her handbag and run for the train. She wants to get home. Back north. Back to her four daughters and semidetached house. Back to catching killers and putting an arm around those who need it. Back to her shitty bloody life and all the things she’s good at.

  “We don’t think that perhaps they were operating elsewhere but your team was just the first to come into contact with them?” asks Breslin with a little more steel to his voice.

  Pharaoh sighs. Takes a handful of her hair and wrings it out onto the carpet.

  “It started in Hull. Or at least that’s where they got good. We reckon it was no more than a year ago. Couple of blokes turned up at a cannabis plant run by the Vietnamese. Held a phone to the foreman’s ear and he got the message from their boss that he now worked for somebody else. Next thing, every dealer who got their supply from anybody else was finding themselves on the wrong end of a nail gun. The new firm recruited. Picked some rising stars. Couple of serving dealers. Some muscle. Even got a big name in the traveler community to join them. We had some successes. Put some away. But we haven’t scratched the surface. They’re too well-connected—”

  Breslin holds up a hand. Looks down at the papers in front of him.

  “I understand one key prosecution had to be dropped following allegations of assault by one of your senior officers.”

  Pharaoh bites her cheek but can’t keep the sneer from her face.

  “That’s not strictly true, Nick. DCI Colin Ray was suspended following an accusation from a suspect. The prosecutors were still debating the merits of bringing charges when the other incident took place. Fortunately for all concerned, that suspect is no longer an issue. Or a person.”

  Pharaoh keeps her eyes on Breslin’s. Forces him to look down. Counts to ten in her head as she waits for the next question.

  “The suspect in question is now dead, yes?”

  Pharaoh rubs a hand across her face. Takes a sip of tea then a swig of cold coffee. Remembers the phone call that shattered everything.

  “Yes, Nick, he’s dead. So’s a civilian. One of my officers may never come back. A good man lost everything that mattered. But yeah, the little bastard’s dead. We’ll miss him.”

  Pharaoh throws herself back in her chair. She’s breathing hard. Thinking of Roisin McAvoy. Of Helen Tremberg. Of the poor dead bitch who took the full force of a hand grenade blast to the chest. Of her sergeant and friend, Aector McAvoy. Of what he has become in the three months since he left the hospital and returned home to charred masonry, broken timbers, and dried blood.

  Breslin seems about to speak when the woman beside him leans in. Her lips brush his ear as she speaks. He seems to like it.

  Through an awkward expression, Breslin suggests they adjourn for a short break. It’s met with considerable enthusiasm from the assembled cops.

  Pharaoh is first out the door, reaching into her handbag for her little black cigarettes and lighter. She thunders down the wide spiral staircase, knocking over ornamental tea lights with her clumsy feet. She’s already inhaling nicotine as she barrels across the broad, tasteful lobby and out through the revolving door into the rain and smog of a city that doesn’t give a shit if she lives or dies.

  She leans against black railings and watches two black cabs try to nudge a bus into a bicycle lane. Listens to the British flag flutter damply above her head as it drips water onto the feet of the homeless man in the sleeping bag curled up by the wall. Watches pedestrians skip through puddles and between cars, clutching takeaway coffees and mobile phones. Watches the commuters pour in and out of Charing Cross Station. All individuals. No conversation. All headphones and iPads and paperback books. No new friends. No neighbors.

  Christ, she wants to go home . . .

  “Trish. Could I borrow you?”

  Pharaoh spins and finds herself facing the mysterious woman from the meeting room. The woman’s not panting. Not damp. She looks poised and cool, and appears to be holding back a laugh. She gives off the impression of having followed Pharaoh through the revolving door and emerged first.

  Pharaoh turns her head to avoid blowing smoke into the woman’s face. Gives her a wary look.

  “Don’t worry,” says the woman. “Breslin. I think he’s a prick as well.”

  Pharaoh leaves it a whole half second before letting her emotions show. “He’s just so . . .”

  The woman whom Breslin had called “Anne” finishes the sentence for her. “So oily?”

  “Oily,” says Pharaoh, mulling it over. “Yeah, that would do it. I’m sure he’s very good, but . . .”

  “He’s not,” says Anne dismissively. “Not good at what you do, anyway. He’s good at the media and public appearances and coming up with information-sharing working groups like this bullshit, but I can’t imagine him holding back a dozen rioting Millwall fans, can you?”

  Pharaoh gives Anne a more considered appraisal. “You’r
e a cop?”

  Anne shrugs. “Sort of.”

  Pharaoh runs her tongue around her mouth. “SOCA?”

  “I’m on secondment.”

  Anne nods in the direction of the Thames, vaguely indicating the general direction of Westminster and the politicians who hold the Serious Organized Crime Agency’s leash.

  “Home Office?”

  Anne smiles. “Can I have one of those?”

  Pharaoh is about to retrieve a cigarette from her bag when Anne takes the one from Pharaoh’s lips. She sucks on it deep and breathes out with a wince.

  “Gasping,” she says by way of explanation.

  Pharaoh pushes her wet hair back from her face. Lights herself another cigarette.

  “I think I like you,” says Pharaoh, nodding.

  Anne shakes her head. “You won’t soon.”

  “No?”

  “We need a favor.”

  “We?”

  Anne uses her left foot to point tiredly in the direction of Westminster again. In the direction of Parliament. In the direction of a viper’s nest full of people like Breslin.

  Pharaoh holds Anne’s gaze.

  “I thought you were here for Breslin’s symposium,” she says. “Thought you were making sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious, like bodies on the lawn or a surge in nail-gun purchases.”

  Anne sucks half an inch off the cigarette and lets her smile drop.

  “No, I’m here for you. You and McAvoy.”

  Pharaoh seems to freeze. Every protective instinct in her being comes rushing to the surface.

  “He’s on sick. Will be for as long as he wants to be. What he’s been through. What he’s done . . .”

  Anne nods. Looks at the ground.