by Jane Casey
‘It’s fine,’ I said.
‘It’s bloody not,’ Derwent said.
Hugh leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Derwent. ‘You know, you made a good point just then about Miss Kerrigan doing her job. Now I suggest you go and do yours and try to catch this guy before he kills someone else.’
‘What a great idea. I would never have thought of that.’ Before the situation could deteriorate even further, Derwent’s phone started ringing and he took it out. ‘I have to take this.’
‘Don’t let me keep you.’ Hugh was talking to thin air; Derwent had already gone through the hall and out the front door. To me, he said, ‘He’ll be lucky if I don’t make a formal complaint against him.’
‘Oh, he means well,’ I lied. ‘We’ve been up all night and this is a big case. He’s under a lot of pressure. He’s a good police officer.’
‘If you say so.’ Hugh sniffed. ‘If you need to come back, don’t bring him with you.’
‘Definitely not.’ Although I would bring someone, I thought. Preferably someone male and large. The more I saw of Hugh, the more I felt Megan had been lucky to stumble across a murder the previous night. I’d take a ringside seat at a violent death over a date with him any day.
I stumbled through a quick goodbye as I gathered my things and pulled on my boots, trying to be charming to make up for Derwent’s demeanour. I really hoped Hugh would forget about his complaint. As I ran through the conversation in my mind, I couldn’t think of anything that had been too awful. On the other hand, that might just have been because I was used to Derwent and I’d forgotten how normal people behaved.
I found him on the doorstep, ending his call.
‘You got out all right, then.’
‘He’ll hear you,’ I whispered.
‘I don’t care,’ Derwent whispered back.
‘Who was on the phone?’
‘Ballistics. I asked them to get in touch as soon as they had any information on the ammo.’
‘And?’
‘Not a .22 or anything like it. American ammunition, illegally imported.’
‘As you thought.’
‘Yeah.’ His face was bleak, even though he’d been right. ‘He’s got a good weapon, top-of-the-range ammunition and the skill to use them. You’d have to hope this was personal so it’s just a one-off. Make no mistake, Kerrigan, this guy was shooting to kill.’
Chapter 8
At five to six on a Sunday, the office was almost completely deserted. I threaded through the empty desks, heading for the conference room where a murmur of voices told me I would find my colleagues.
Godley looked up as I walked in, and frowned. ‘Where’s Josh?’
‘On his way.’ I slid into a seat and looked around. ‘What’s new?’
‘We’re about to find out.’ Godley made a note on the pad in front of him. There was a greyish undertone to his skin, as if he was ill. The atmosphere in the room was funereal. While Godley wasn’t looking I caught Colin Vale’s eye and he shrugged, very slightly.
The outer door banged and quick, confident footsteps came towards the conference room. Derwent swung through the door. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘Just sit down.’ Again, there was that edge to Godley’s voice that was unfamiliar and unsettling. Derwent caught it immediately and did as he was told.
‘Terence Hammond. Who wants to begin?’
‘Me.’ Pettifer leaned over his notes. ‘Dave and I went to Isleworth and got a list of his colleagues. We’ve spoken to about half of them so far. We keep getting the same story. Decent bloke, good copper.’
‘Get the feeling that’s true?’
‘No.’ Dave Kemp sounded definite. ‘Not the whole story, anyway.’
‘Why’s that?’ Godley asked.
‘A couple of things. The younger ones, the ones who hadn’t worked with him for as long, they weren’t all that keen. They said he was hard to get on with. He’d pick on small things and never let them forget it. Liked to put other people down. Inclined to lose the rag when provoked. Bit of a bastard.’
‘He’s not the only sergeant to behave that way,’ I said. ‘I had one of those when I was in uniform.’
Pettifer grunted. ‘There might be a bit more to it than him getting lairy because he’s a sergeant. We spoke to one PC who told us, off the record, about a row one night with a lad they were nicking for fighting. He ended up in hospital with a fractured skull. They said he gave Hammond a lot of backchat when he was being arrested, and Hammond was the one who brought him in to custody. He was fine on the street – walking and talking. He’d collapsed by the time he got to the nick.’
‘Head injuries can be like that,’ Derwent commented.
‘Or Hammond was teaching the boy a lesson. It got covered up. The boy didn’t remember anything that had happened to him since the previous week and no one looked too hard to implicate Hammond.’
‘So he broke the rules at least once. Anyone know anything about a girlfriend?’
‘It wasn’t anyone from the team.’ Pettifer grinned. ‘Three female officers and all of them as butch as they come. I didn’t even bother asking them.’
‘Too scared of getting beaten up,’ Dave Kemp said.
‘Too right.’ Pettifer shook his head. ‘One of them was bigger than me.’
It was a cheap laugh. I kept my expression neutral, but I was thinking about our colleague Liv, who was delicate and lovely and a committed lesbian. Pettifer still hadn’t grasped that you couldn’t define someone’s sexuality just by looking at them. Nor did he understand that women didn’t have to be pretty and feminine just because he preferred them that way.
‘What about someone from a different team at Isleworth?’ Godley asked.
‘No one thought that was likely. And I think they’d have told us.’ Pettifer looked to Dave, who nodded.
‘They told us what they did know, which wasn’t much. He had two phones, one a cheapie pay-as-you-go job. He never let it out of his sight.’
‘Classic cheater’s trick,’ I said. ‘A lot easier than trying to delete texts and messages you don’t want your wife to see.’
‘Did we recover two phones?’ Derwent asked.
‘I don’t think so.’ Godley flipped to the list of personal effects he’d received from the morgue. ‘One phone. It’s gone off to the lab.’
‘If they download the address book for me I’ll check the numbers,’ Colin Vale offered. ‘She might be in there under a different ID. I had one once who put his girlfriend in as Home Insurance Helpline, which was fine until the bathroom flooded and his wife tried to call an emergency plumber.’
‘Now that’s bad luck,’ Derwent said, grinning.
‘It got worse. They had a fight and she “fell” down the stairs. Survived so she was able to give evidence against him at his trial for attempted murder. He’s got another two years left before he can apply for early release.’
‘So the moral of the story is, always carry a second phone,’ Belcott said.
‘Well, you’d need to have a bird to cheat on first, Pete, so in your case it’s not strictly necessary.’ Pettifer beamed at him. I hid a smirk.
‘We can assume the second phone is gone,’ Godley said. ‘We can try cell site analysis and see if we can track all the phones in use in the area – there can’t have been many.’
‘Not too many masts nearby,’ Colin Vale said, sounding dubious. ‘It’ll be a big area to cover.’
It was a good point. Cell site analysis worked by collecting data from mobile phone masts and calculating the location of the phone according to which signal was strongest. In the sprawling wilderness of the park we would be lucky to narrow it down to a general area.
‘If she was savvy enough to recover the phone, she might have ditched it by now,’ I said. ‘No reason to keep it. In fact, every reason to get rid of it as quickly as possible.’
Godley nodded. ‘I’ll get a team of uniformed officers to search drains and bins near the park for the SIM c
ard and the phone itself, or some bits of it anyway. It hasn’t rained since Hammond died, so if we have any luck at all we’ll find it where she left it. Colin, have you any idea which area we should be looking at? Any luck on the CCTV?’
‘Yes and no. I’ve been trying to get hold of anything useful before it’s deleted so I haven’t had time to review much of the footage. The bad news is that quite a few of the cameras nearest the park weren’t in use.’
It was a perennial problem. The cameras themselves were the deterrent to crime – no one except the owners could tell if they were working or not. Repairing them was expensive. London was full of cameras, but that didn’t help when they were out of action.
‘What’s the good news?’ Godley asked.
‘I’ve got three suspect vehicles coming out of the park just after the shooting, two using one gate in particular, one on its own. I’m going to need a bit more information about the car, if we can get it, to work out which is my favourite.’
‘What can you see on the footage?’ Derwent asked.
‘Not a great deal, unfortunately. The two cars were picked up by a camera on a house near the main gate. Right time of night, moving fast, looks to be a Ford Mondeo followed by a BMW coupe. The camera got the cars but not the occupants.’
‘Did they have their lights on?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Our witnesses said the lights on the suspect car were off.’
‘But that’s going to draw more attention to you on the road. Easiest way in the world to get stopped,’ Belcott said.
‘They also said it was one car that drove away from the area, not two,’ Derwent pointed out.
‘They could have met up by the gate. One car for the shooter, one for the girl. And Pete’s right.’ I hated to admit it, but it was true. ‘They wouldn’t have wanted to get stopped. Even if they had a quick clean-up they’d have been covered in blood or mud. We should look for a car driving carefully. Slowly, even.’
‘Well, that fits in with the other car I’ve got on camera,’ Colin Vale said. ‘The only problem is that I can only see one wheel and a bit of the front bumper. The footage is black and white. It’s off a petrol station forecourt so the camera wasn’t pointing at the road and it’s just in one corner of the screen. Gives us something to work on – we’ve identified makes and models from less. But it’s not as easy as checking a licence plate this time.’
‘We’ve got two witnesses.’ Godley flipped through the notes, distracted. ‘Josh, did you get a description of the car from either of them?’
‘Yep. For what it’s worth.’
‘Not sure about it?’ Godley rubbed a hand over his forehead. ‘Great.’
‘We just thought that one of the witnesses could have been overstating what he’d seen,’ Derwent said. ‘Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.’
‘I think he saw something.’ I was struggling to be fair. ‘I just think he wanted to tell us what we wanted to hear.’
‘He was trying to tell us things that made him look good. Attention-seeking little prick.’
‘Hugh Johnson.’ Colin was reading over Derwent’s shoulder. ‘As in Animal Neighbourhood?’
‘One and the same.’
‘Wow. I love that programme.’
Derwent laughed. ‘I hate to break it to you, but Hugh Johnson is an arse.’
‘You think everyone is an arse.’ Colin looked at me. ‘What’s he really like?’
‘An arse,’ I confirmed. ‘Sorry, Colin. But I think it was still worth talking to him. The first witness didn’t see a lot. He had picked up a lot more detail.’
‘Whether that’s accurate or not is another question,’ Derwent said.
‘There’s no such thing as a reliable eye-witness,’ Godley said. ‘Maeve, how do the two accounts compare?’
‘Megan O’Kane and Hugh Johnson were on the hillside to the left of the crime scene, too far away to be able to see it directly. Megan told us she saw a car with its lights off, shortly after the shooting. So did Hugh. Megan couldn’t be specific about the colour. Hugh thought it was dark grey. Megan said it had a noisy engine. Hugh thought it was a diesel, possibly Japanese, but couldn’t give us an exact make. He thought it was an old Toyota. It was boxy, apparently. Megan couldn’t see the driver or any passengers because it was so dark. Hugh said there was someone in the back seat. He said the driver was quite short and could have been a female.’
‘How did he see all this when she didn’t?’
‘Superior eyesight,’ Derwent said. ‘According to him.’
‘He’s used to spending hours in the dark,’ I explained. ‘He can spot things that ordinary people might miss.’
‘Even though Megan said he had his head buried in the grass when the car went by, in case they shot him.’ Derwent rocked back on his chair at a dangerous angle, his hands in his pockets, unconsciously emphasising the difference between himself and Hugh. Risk-taking for no apparent reason came easily to Derwent. Hugh was cautious to the point of immobility.
‘It’s a place to start,’ Godley said. ‘Colin, see if any of that helps you narrow down our suspect cars. What else did you find out, Josh?’
‘I got a report on the ballistics. Still waiting for it to come through on email but I’ll send it round when it comes.’ Derwent gave the others the same lecture on illegal firearms and gun clubs that I’d had in Richmond Park.
‘Right,’ Godley said when he’d finished. ‘Josh, you seem to be the best person to concentrate on the weapon. We need to make a list of gun clubs in the greater London area and the home counties.’
‘Done.’ I slid it out of the back of my notebook. ‘We can expand the search if we don’t turn up anything useful.’
‘Throw in a request for information on firearms at the next press conference, boss,’ Derwent said.
‘I was going to.’ Godley leaned back in his chair. ‘What else? Pete?’
‘I’ve put in a request for Hammond’s personnel file but obviously it’s going to take a while to get it. Before Isleworth he worked in south-west London and he started off in Bethnal Green as a probationer. I’m trying to get hold of people who knew him way back when.’ He looked around at all of us. ‘It’s hard, on a Sunday. I keep hitting dead ends.’
‘You should make more progress tomorrow.’ Godley rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
‘So what do we think? Was this personal?’ Derwent asked. ‘Or was it because he was a copper?’
When Godley replied, his voice had that edge to it I’d heard before. ‘It’s far too early to say. We don’t know anything about Hammond yet.’
‘We need to talk to the family again,’ I said. ‘Find out what Hammond was like behind closed doors, if we can.’
‘You handle that, Maeve. The wife is going to be tricky. Try to talk to the daughter without her.’
‘I’ll find out when she’s going back to school. I bet it’s sooner rather than later. Somehow I don’t think Mrs Hammond is going to want to keep her nearest and dearest at home at this difficult time.’
‘You got that impression too, Maeve?’ To the rest of the table, Godley explained, ‘Not a great mother–daughter relationship.’
‘That doesn’t mean she won’t keep us away from Vanessa. Especially if the family has something to hide.’
‘All families have something to hide.’ Godley’s face was sombre.
‘Any surprises at the PM?’ Derwent asked.
‘No. Not about Hammond, anyway. He was fit and healthy until he was shot, and the injuries he sustained are consistent with the kind of ammunition you were talking about, Josh. Nothing we weren’t expecting. But I’ve got some bad news. It’s not really my news, but I have permission to share it with you.’ Godley took a moment before he went on. ‘I talked to Glenn Hanshaw at the PM. He’s been diagnosed with cancer. They don’t know where it started but he has secondary tumours on his spine and in his brain.’
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Pettifer said.
>
‘It isn’t. Six months.’
There was a murmur around the table. Hanshaw wasn’t the most popular person we worked with, or the easiest to get to know, but he was a brilliant pathologist. And what would it be like, I wondered, to work with death every day and know that your own time was coming? Maybe for Hanshaw there was no mystery to it, so there would be less fear. Or maybe it was worse that he knew what was in store for him.
‘Is he going to keep working?’
‘For the moment.’
‘I’d jack it in straightaway,’ Pettifer said. ‘Sorry, boss, but if I’ve got six months left I’m going to spend the time living, not working.’
‘That is life for Glenn. It’s what he loves. When he can’t do the job effectively any more, he’ll stop, but until then it’s business as usual.’ Godley’s jaw was tight and I remembered that he and the pathologist were friends. Maybe this was why Godley was in such a rank mood. Maybe it had nothing to do with the text message I’d seen.
‘Does he know we know?’ Derwent asked.
‘Yes. He wanted you to understand what was going on but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Please, don’t commiserate with him. Treat him as you would usually.’
Which, as Godley knew, was far from easy. We all nodded, however, and Godley pushed his chair back.
‘If that’s everything, then, go home. Get some rest. Tomorrow is another day.’
‘But you’re not going home.’ Derwent was watching Godley closely.
‘I’ve got to organise the search teams for the area near the park and record another interview for the evening news. Bits and pieces. I won’t be long.’
There was a general upheaval as everyone else stood up and made for the door. I shuffled my notes together and followed more slowly. I knew better than to assume I’d be going home just because Godley had told us we were finished for the night. Derwent would find some reason to keep me at work if I looked as if I was keen to leave.
He himself seemed to be in no hurry. He was still watching Godley. ‘I’ll wait for you.’
‘There’s no need,’ Godley said shortly.
‘It’s no trouble.’