by Jane Casey
Derwent set off towards the screen. Rather than call after him and be ignored I ran and grabbed his arm. He swung around, ready for a fight.
‘You’ll need these.’ I held out some spare shoe covers and a pair of blue latex gloves.
A smirk. ‘I knew there was a reason I brought you along.’
‘Just take them.’
He did as he was told, for once. The two of us passed inspection by a short, pretty SOCO who had pushed the hood back on her white boiler suit. Her hair was a shock of dark corkscrew curls. I wondered how she got it all to stay inside her hood when she was working.
Derwent smiled at her. ‘I like curly hair.’
‘Then why don’t you get a perm?’ the SOCO snapped.
‘That’s not what I meant.’ He watched her walk off, then turned to me. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘She knows that.’
‘Does she? Then why can’t she take a compliment?’
‘Because she’s working, not hanging out in a bar, and she doesn’t need to deal with comments on her appearance while she’s doing her job.’ If I explained it often enough, one day it might sink in. ‘Stop trying to distract yourself.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The flirting? It’s your way of taking your mind off what you’re about to see. Like the gum chewing and the car talk.’
Derwent glowered. ‘Don’t analyse me.’
‘I’m just saying what I see.’
‘Well, don’t.’
He headed past me through the screens that shielded the car from view. I followed, almost losing my balance as a couple of white-suited SOCOs brushed past me. It was quiet inside the tent, and hot from the lights that stood around the car. Colin Vale was deep in conversation with the crime-scene manager. The SOCOs had mostly finished with the car – a shattered Ford Mondeo – and its occupant, so we had it to ourselves. Derwent stalked towards the car, nodding to Pete Belcott, who stood to one side with his arms folded. I didn’t even bother to acknowledge Belcott. He routinely ignored me, after all. Anyway, I had better things to do, like keeping up with Derwent. The animal side of his personality was in abeyance, temporarily, while the incisive investigator took control, and he’d expect me to be just as focused as he was. So I stopped looking at him and looked at the victim instead.
More precisely, I looked at what was left of him. He was a mess, slumped in the seat like a blood-soaked rag doll, his arms limp by his sides. His face had slid down, unmoored by the damage to the top of his skull, and I couldn’t actually tell how he would have looked in life. I could see he had been wearing a fleece over his uniform, as most uniformed officers did after a shift. Police officers weren’t allowed to wander around in uniform off duty, but there was no point in changing out of it when you were going home to bed.
Bed. I imagined Hammond’s wife, safe under the covers. She was probably asleep. She wouldn’t have noticed yet that Hammond’s side of the bed was empty, the sheets cold. She wouldn’t know that he was never coming home. Once or twice, when Rob had been late home after a surveillance job had dragged on, I’d woken and wondered where he was, if he was all right. Worry had soured my relationships before now as boyfriends discovered I might not be on time, I might come home injured, or I might not come home at all. It was extremely unusual for police officers to die in the line of duty, but it happened. It was a possibility for all of us, all the time. And maybe that was why I had been hanging back. It was all too easy to see myself, or a friend – someone I loved – in the blood-soaked car. I felt the need to know kick in, like a long-suppressed craving. Finding out what had happened to Hammond suddenly seemed like the only thing that mattered.
‘Two shots.’ It was the familiar corncrake voice of the pathologist, Glenn Hanshaw. His face was drawn in the bright lights that shone on the car. Tall and thin, he was never exactly robust, but he looked ill. Then again, no one looked their best at that time in the morning. ‘The weapon was probably a rifle, but ballistics will be able to tell you more about it. The first shot hit him in the chest. The other took the top of his head off, but he was already dead.’
You didn’t need a medical degree to know that the fist-sized hole in the man’s chest would have been a fatal wound. I didn’t say that, though. Dr Hanshaw took himself too seriously for that.
‘Overkill,’ Derwent said. ‘Maybe it’s personal.’
He peered in through the shattered windscreen at the body slumped in the passenger seat. The second shot had effectively exploded Hammond’s skull, showering the inside of the car with bone fragments and pink matter that had once been his brain – everything that had made him who he was. It made a fine old mess when it was splattered across glass and upholstery, all the same. I went to the driver’s side where someone had left the door hanging open. I crouched down and played the beam of my torch over the seat, the steering wheel, the floor of the car. There was plenty to see and more to think about, and I stayed there for a couple of minutes before I became aware of movement behind me. I glanced around to see Godley, with Chris Pettifer and Dave Kemp standing beside him.
‘Nice of you to join us,’ Derwent said, grinning at Pettifer. He looked deeply chagrined to be the last to get there.
‘Some of us drive with due care and attention.’
‘Careful. The boss got here first. You don’t want to accuse him of being a dangerous driver, do you?’
Pettifer squirmed. ‘Obviously not.’
‘Obviously,’ Derwent agreed.
We were gathered around the body of a dead police officer and maybe an outsider wouldn’t have got it, but that made it more likely we would crack jokes, not less. The humour got you through when reality was hard to take.
Godley looked down at me. ‘What have you found, Maeve?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then why are you still down there?’ Derwent was frowning.
‘Knows her place,’ Belcott said under his breath, and caught a glare from Derwent for his trouble. It was fine for the inspector to be a misogynist prick towards me, I’d noticed, but he took offence on my behalf at the slightest provocation.
‘There’s nothing here, but it’s interesting that there’s nothing. There’s a void here.’ I pointed with a gloved finger to the area of the car that had remained pristine. ‘Someone was in the driver’s seat when he died.’
‘The SOCOs already said there was a void.’ Belcott sounded bored. ‘But look at the seat back. It’s saturated. There wasn’t anyone sitting there. More likely there was something on the seat. Whoever killed him took it before they locked the car.’
‘No,’ I said, keeping my voice level. ‘I can see why you might think that, but I don’t agree.’
‘Why, Maeve?’ Godley leaned down to get a closer look.
‘There’s no blood on the front of the seat, or in the driver’s foot well, or on the handbrake. There was someone in this seat, but they were leaning sideways when Hammond was shot. They were leaning towards him.’
Derwent suddenly snapped his fingers. ‘I get it.’
‘I don’t, I’m afraid.’ Godley looked at me expectantly. Beside him, Dave Kemp was frowning. Pettifer jangled the change in his pockets, his expression blank.
I was going to have to spell it out for them, I could see, and I wasn’t going to get any help from a grinning Derwent. ‘Sergeant Hammond was in the front passenger seat, which is odd because it was his car. The person in the driver’s seat was leaning across. I’d suggest that person had his or her head in the sergeant’s lap, probably performing oral sex.’
‘The dirty so-and-so,’ Pettifer said.
‘He was married.’ Dave Kemp looked around at us, wondering if he was pointing out the obvious. ‘It would have to be a woman.’
‘How little you know.’ Derwent’s grin was even wider. ‘Go on, Kerrigan.’
‘They’d swapped seats because the steering wheel got in the way otherwise.’ I shone my torch into the back of the car, wh
ich was full of boxes, a ladder and some tins of paint. ‘Hammond seems to have been quite keen on DIY. No room to push the driver’s seat back to allow for … access.’
Belcott had his own torch out and he shone it on Hammond’s crotch. ‘His trousers are done up.’
I pointed. ‘Yes, and the area at the front of his trousers is clean. If they were undone, he’ll have blood spatter inside them. The second shot would have done it, even if someone’s head was in the way for the first shot.’
‘Check,’ Godley said, nodding to Dr Hanshaw.
He leaned in and unzipped the trousers carefully, pulling the material instead of handling the zip, to preserve any microscopic traces of DNA we might recover. He spread them wide. On black material, the blood looked black too but it reflected a dull brown in the light of Belcott’s torch.
Chris Pettifer shook his head. ‘Who would shoot a man on his way home from work, getting a quiet blowjob in a public park? That’s just cruel.’
‘At least he died happy,’ Derwent said. ‘The lady – or gentleman – must have got a bit of a shock, though.’
‘Or she knew exactly what was going to happen.’ I stood up. ‘She took the keys, didn’t she? Maybe she was driving when they parked here. Maybe she chose this spot because it was the right place for an ambush.’
‘Risky,’ Derwent commented. ‘She’s relying on someone to be able to shoot straight. If I knew someone with a rifle was going to shoot at a car, I wouldn’t want to be within twenty yards of the target.’
‘Maybe she didn’t know how dangerous it was. I’m going to guess the reality of it was worse than she had expected. She must have been covered in blood, for one thing, and the noise would have been pretty disconcerting. I think that’s why she took the keys with her. Dazed, shocked, in a hurry, she goes on autopilot. Grabs her stuff, grabs the keys, locks the car and runs for it.’
‘On the road we’ve all been tramping up and down all night.’ Derwent swore. ‘No chance of getting any evidence from it.’
‘We might get something from the nearest car park,’ I said. ‘She’d have had to have her own transport for a getaway. She couldn’t have left the car on the road because you can’t park on the verge. And she wouldn’t have wanted to be too far from it because it wasn’t that late and there might have been people around to hear the shot.’
‘We have some witnesses,’ Godley said. ‘The couple who reported the shooting. You can speak to them later, Josh. But from what I’ve heard, they didn’t see anything conclusive.’
‘Sounds like a good way to waste our time when we should be chasing the lady who was sitting in the driver’s seat,’ Belcott said.
‘We do need to find her, but there is also the chance that she didn’t know anything about it,’ I said quietly. ‘Running away doesn’t prove anything. She might have been scared. She might have been afraid of being identified. Maybe she has a family too. She definitely shouldn’t have been doing what she was doing with a happily married man. There are lots of reasons why she might have wanted to avoid talking to us.’
‘So we find her and find out what her problem was.’ Derwent turned and looked at the trees behind him. ‘Have they found where the shooter was waiting?’
‘Not yet. But it’s getting light. It should be easier in daylight.’ Godley’s phone beeped and he checked it. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. Hammond’s superintendent is here. He’s going to deliver the news to the family. I said I’d go along too.’
Derwent pulled a face. ‘Rather you than me.’
‘It’s never fun,’ Godley agreed. ‘Right. It seems to me we need to know if Terence Hammond was killed because of something he did or because of what he was. Because I’m not discounting the fact that he was a police officer yet. There are plenty of people who don’t like us.’
‘But we’re so lovable,’ Derwent murmured.
Godley ignored him. ‘Chris and Dave, I want you to talk to Hammond’s colleagues. Find out if he was behaving oddly in recent times. Find out if there was any gossip about him sleeping with someone other than his wife. Find out if he’d had any threats made against him.’
Pettifer looked mournful. ‘Boss, you know what you’re asking us to do. The guy is dead. We’re going to get punched. A lot.’
‘Stand behind Dave. He’ll protect you.’ Godley turned to Colin Vale. ‘Feel like watching a few hundred hours of CCTV?’
‘Can’t wait.’
‘Try to get footage from near the gates of the park so we can link any suspect vehicles back to this spot. We can be fairly accurate about timings because of the witnesses, so that should narrow it down for you.’
‘But there are five gates that allow vehicles out of this park and six pedestrian gates and it wasn’t that late and … I’m going to be watching a lot of footage,’ Colin finished. He actually sounded happy about it.
Godley turned to Belcott. ‘Pete, I want you to dig into Hammond’s past. See if there’s any reason why someone would have a grudge against him. Check his personnel files, his old cases, any complaints made against him – the works.’
‘What about me and Kerrigan?’ Derwent asked, as if we had to work together.
‘I want Maeve to come with me.’
Around the circle, I was aware of eyebrows going up, of meaningful looks being exchanged. I couldn’t seem to kill the rumour that Godley and I were having a secret relationship. If only they knew the secret we shared, they would know there was nothing romantic about it. Godley had been passing information to a major criminal, John Skinner, for years. And I was the only one who knew about it. Derwent’s expression was neutral, unreadable. He knew Godley better than most, and I thought he probably didn’t believe there was anything going on between me and the superintendent, but I wasn’t sure.
Apparently oblivious, Godley went on, ‘Josh, you stay here. Glenn’s going to move the body soon and I want someone on the spot in case there are any surprises. Talk to the witnesses. Talk to the SOCOs. Get hold of the local Safer Neighbourhoods Team and find out if this was a regular spot for couples. Maybe Hammond was a regular. I want you to concentrate on this end of the investigation, Josh. With your background in the army you know more than anyone else here about shooting.’
‘But Kerrigan knows more about giving blowjobs than anyone else.’
It was a mutter but Derwent didn’t miss it. He rounded on Belcott, who actually took a step back. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. Just a joke.’
‘And well up to your usual standards,’ I said, unruffled. There was very little Belcott could say that would genuinely annoy me. I had no need to impress him.
‘Let’s get moving.’ Godley headed off in the direction of his car. The others followed, Belcott glaring at me as he passed. I smiled sweetly until he turned away. I hung back for a moment, reluctant to walk down the hill with him.
Derwent came to stand beside me. ‘What did you ever do to Belcott?’
‘Nothing at all. Except for being cleverer than him, and better at the job, and taller than he is, and whatever else it is that chafes his nuts.’
‘Whatever that may be.’ Derwent was smiling to himself. The smile died as he turned to look at the car, with its nightmarish passenger. The sky was starting to change colour, the darkness lifting, the birds tuning up for dawn. It was cold and my spirits plummeted again. Around us, London would be starting to wake up on a clear Sunday morning. Terence Hammond’s family would be waking up to a tragedy.
And nothing I could do would change that.
Chapter 4
When I got to his car, Godley was listening to the news, frowning.
‘… found dead in Richmond Park in south-west London. Police have not yet named him. There are unconfirmed reports that the man was a police officer, shot in his car in the early hours of this morning as he returned from work. Several roads are closed within the park and traffic in the area will be subject to diversions for the rest of the day.’ The calm, measured voice paused fo
r a moment. ‘An eight-year-old boy has died in a house fire …’
Godley turned the radio off.
‘They got hold of that quickly.’ I put on my seatbelt.
‘They always do now. One of the witnesses tweeted about it.’ Godley shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do. As soon as it gets light there’ll be a helicopter or two filming the scene.’
A silver Volvo slid past us and Godley followed it. ‘That’s Superintendent Lowry, Hammond’s boss. He’s got Hammond’s inspector with him, Dan West. Do you know either of them?’
‘No. Never met them.’
‘I don’t know anything about West but don’t judge John Lowry by this morning. He’s not usually so tense. Hammond had two kids, apparently. Fourteen and sixteen. Tough age to lose a father.’
‘I’m not sure there’s a right age for that to happen. It’s good of Superintendent Lowry to break the news to Mrs Hammond himself.’
‘I’d do the same. I’ve never had to, thank God.’ He looked sideways at me. ‘I’ve come close a couple of times, as you know.’
I did know, since I’d been the one hovering between life and death on at least one occasion. It was a weird thing to be embarrassed about but I was embarrassed.
‘No one ever thinks it will be them.’
‘The odds are against it,’ Godley agreed. He was staying close to Lowry’s car, following him through the quiet streets. ‘It’s still the sort of job that makes you a target. Like that PC in Lambeth a couple of weeks ago. What was his name?’
I knew who he meant. ‘Gregory. Philip or Peter or something.’
‘Crossing the road, in uniform, on duty and he gets hit by a car. A walking target. He was lucky.’
‘He jumped,’ I said, remembering some of the details. ‘I think he broke an arm or a leg though. Did they get anyone for that?’
‘They haven’t even got a suspect. It was a residential street. No CCTV. No witnesses. He didn’t get more than a quick look at the car himself and he was single-crewed.’ Godley shook his head. ‘I don’t think they’ll get whoever did it. My guess is that someone attacked the uniform, not the man. It was the day after Levon Cole was shot. You don’t have to look too far for reasons for us to be unpopular at the moment.’