by Jane Casey
‘Talk to witnesses, collect evidence, analyse the evidence, find the killers. Sir.’
‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘It is. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.’
I could see Williams wavering. There was something very tempting about letting Godley take charge, especially since no one else would volunteer to take it on. ‘I’m not sure about this, Charles.’
‘I am.’
And just like that, he had his permission to proceed. Godley walked Williams away from us, towards his car, and Pettifer shook his head admiringly.
‘Godley’s a genius. He knows how to get what he wants, doesn’t he?’
Derwent grunted. ‘I’d feel better about that if I thought he knew what was good for him.’
‘It’s not your business to second-guess the superintendent,’ Una Burt said. Her eyes were cold. ‘And I thought your remarks to Geoff Armstrong were inappropriate. You inserted yourself into the conversation to insult him.’
‘I wanted to give the boss time to regroup. He was getting upset.’
‘He was in complete command of himself and the situation,’ Burt snapped.
Godley had many fans in the Met, but the biggest was almost certainly Una Burt. I thought it was because he had always treated her with respect instead of mocking her appearance and manner. If it was hard to be a woman in the Met, it was doubly hard to be a plain one. I could shrug off the comments about my looks and my sex life. They were irritating but I’d learned not to let them bother me. And they may have been unwanted but the comments I got were mostly positive. Una Burt came in for nothing but abuse.
Derwent looked singularly unimpressed. ‘You must have been listening to a different conversation then. I thought he was about to blow his stack.’
‘Whether he did or not was none of your business.’
‘He’s my boss.’
‘And mine.’ Her voice was quivering. Derwent heard it too and went in for the kill.
‘And where were you when he was facing up to that twat Armstrong? Listening to Glen Hanshaw’s voicemail message?’
‘I knew it wasn’t my place to intervene.’
‘What exactly did you come over to do then? Stare at the boss adoringly while he shot himself in the career?’
‘That’s enough.’ Godley pushed into the circle that had formed around Derwent and Burt. ‘We had one dead police officer and now we have six. We are working in front of the borough’s response teams, local CID, the TSG’s superintendent and the world’s media, and need I remind you, there are hundreds of residents watching you from the towers. They are waiting for us to do our jobs and frankly so am I. Watching the two of you bickering was deeply unimpressive – and I don’t care to ask what you were arguing about, so don’t tell me.’
‘A misunderstanding, sir.’ Derwent’s back was ramrod straight, his arms by his sides. Some time I would laugh at him for standing to attention when he was in trouble. Some time very far in the future, I thought.
‘DCI Burt was just explaining a few things to me. Very helpful,’ Derwent said through gritted teeth.
‘I meant what I said, Josh. No details.’ Godley looked up at the towers, his face drawn and pale. ‘We need to get moving. We need witnesses and we need weapons. Una, you need to coordinate the door-to-door enquiries. Josh, find me the guns.’
‘They’ll have taken them away with them,’ Belcott said.
‘Maybe,’ Derwent said. ‘But if they’re professionals they might dump them instead. It’s bloody risky to carry them round if they don’t have to.’ To Godley, he said, ‘A couple of dogs would help.’
‘You can have whatever you need.’ Godley turned, scanning our faces. ‘I want to get a result on this one, ladies and gentlemen. I want to find the kid who threw the firework, and the two shooters. I want to do it quickly. Start now. Stop when you get a result.’
He turned and walked away, leaving a rising hum of conversation behind him. Una Burt’s voice cut through it.
‘Maeve, you’ll be working on the door-to-door enquiries.’
I knew I looked surprised. I had been expecting to work with Derwent. And Derwent had been expecting the same thing. His head snapped up. ‘I need her for the guns. She’s good at searching.’
‘You heard Godley. You’ll have dogs.’
‘Not the same.’
‘I should hope not.’ She smiled at me, but there was no warmth in it. I was a pawn to her and I knew it.
‘This is stupid,’ Derwent said. ‘Kerrigan works with me.’
‘Not on this occasion.’
‘But—’
‘Do you want me to remind you that I outrank you?’
That got his attention. ‘Is that what this is about? Is this supposed to make me respect you?’
‘It’s about effective deployment of resources. Maeve is going to be more useful to me than to you.’
Derwent’s eyes narrowed and he took a step closer to Una Burt. ‘You and I both know that’s not true.’
My face was flaming. Chris Pettifer cleared his throat. ‘There’s a few others on the team. Kerrigan aside, what do you want us to do?’
Una Burt took charge instantly, issuing orders to six of us and leaving the remainder to Derwent. He was staring at the ground, refusing to look in my direction, more like a sulky teenager than a senior detective. I waited to catch his eye until it became apparent he was never going to look back at me.
‘Why are you hanging about, Kerrigan?’ Una Burt demanded. ‘Get a move on.’
I did as I was told, walking across to the nearest tower block after the other team members. As I passed through the door Dave Kemp was holding open for me, I glanced back to see Derwent walking in the opposite direction, his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. Una Burt was watching him go. The expression on her face was pure malevolence and I felt a little jolt of unease for Derwent, and for myself. I knew she was a good police officer. I was increasingly convinced she would make a bad enemy.
Chapter 15
Stop when you get a result.
It had not been a throwaway remark of Godley’s. We spent the night knocking on doors, standing in echoing hallways asking the same questions over and over again.
Did you see the shooting?
Did you recognise the shooters?
Did you see the person apprehended by the police officers before they were shot?
Did you recognise him or her?
Can you name the person who threw the firework and caused the van to stop?
Did you see anything strange before the shooting?
Did you notice anything unusual after the shooting?
Did you hear anything about a threat to the police?
Why do you think this happened here? And now?
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about the shooting?
Is there anything else that you think might be useful for us to know?
The questions stayed the same and the answers, dispiritingly, likewise. ‘No’ came in a variety of accents and languages, it being London, but it wasn’t hard to understand anyone. They hadn’t seen anything, even if they had seen it all. They wouldn’t tell us anything useful, even if they could. Black, white or any colour in between, they didn’t trust us and they didn’t like us. Most importantly, they didn’t want their neighbours to think they’d helped us. I spent a lot of time in draughty hallways, my feet aching from standing for hours. The only positive aspect of the situation was that we had plenty of officers to help us knock on every door in the estate. That meant it only took an eternity to get through them all. We worked through the night, ordered to knock on doors regardless of how late it got. No one in the estate was sleeping anyway. The night was alive with the sounds and lights of a major incident investigation, with cars and heavy vehicles manoeuvring in the car park and the occasional whoop of a siren or shout from below.
I took a break at six in the morning – not my first, but this one was long overdue. I had wa
nted to finish the corridor I was on, although I had very little to show for my efforts. I walked back past the closed doors, smelling the peculiar blend of pot, urine and bleach that I’d come to associate with the Maudling Estate. The stairwell at the end was made of concrete perforated at random to allow in light and air. I went down three steps to where there was a gap so I could see the car park. I stood huddled in my long camel coat, shivering, as the crippled van was hoisted on to the back of a flatbed truck. White-suited crime-scene technicians steadied it, lowering it with exquisite care to settle on the truck. It had been covered with plastic sheeting, disguising the full horror of what lay inside it, but I wouldn’t be able to forget the blood smearing the upholstery and running in rivulets across the floor. I wouldn’t forget the big men stiffening into their death poses, awkward and outraged. You could read in their expressions that they felt it wasn’t how their stories were supposed to end.
A movement on the right caught my attention. Brooding, his head down, Derwent strode across the tarmac. He didn’t acknowledge the SOCOs, shouldering past as if they were in his way. It was such a typically Derwent attitude, when he had deliberately chosen to walk through their crime scene. I watched until he passed out of sight, seeing frustration in the line of his shoulders and the angle of his head. No weapons, I deduced. No luck anywhere.
Every instinct told me not to go anywhere near Derwent. Experience had taught me I would get the abuse he wanted to direct at Una Burt. As he himself had put it, more than once, ‘Shit rolls downhill, Kerrigan.’ That didn’t mean I had to stand in its way.
I waited until the truck had left with its sad burden, then trudged down the rest of the steps to the ground floor. Someone had propped open the door at the bottom and I was glad. It took the edge off the smell of old rubbish and wee that filled the hallway. I was just passing the lift when the doors rattled open. Una Burt was standing in it, alone. She looked out at me, showing absolutely no surprise at finding me there.
‘Maeve. Any luck?’
‘No, ma’am. Not as such. Did you do any better?’
‘No.’ She came out of the lift and stood for a second as if she was trying to decide what to do next. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I was just going to have a break.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
Please don’t, I thought, aware that the one thing that would send Derwent completely over the edge was if I appeared to be enjoying the chief inspector’s company. There was nothing I could do to shake her off, though: she kept pace with me across the tarmac, hurrying to keep up with my longer stride.
There were still plenty of officers hanging around. It was almost the only sign by now of what had happened, since the SOCOs had cleared away the blood and broken glass.
‘Do you think there’s anywhere around here to get a coffee?’ Una Burt asked me, her tone abrupt rather than conversational.
‘I was going to ask one of the local response officers.’
She looked past me and her expression brightened. ‘Charlie will know.’
‘Charlie’, or as I knew him, ‘Superintendent Godley’. It was an excuse for the chief inspector to get to talk to him – that I saw straight away. He was standing by a police Land Rover, leaning over a large sheet of folded paper that was spread out across the bonnet. It looked like a plan or a map of some kind. A tired-looking man in uniform stood beside Godley, gesturing at whatever was written on it. Derwent was on the opposite side of the car, looking down at the paper. Even as I spotted him his eyes flicked up and rested on me for an uncomfortable second before his attention switched to Una Burt. He gave her the briefest of inspections before looking back down at the bonnet of the Land Rover, concentrating as hard as if he had twenty minutes and no more to decipher the Rosetta Stone.
‘Do you think the boss will have had time to find a place for coffee?’ I asked. ‘I’d have thought he was too busy.’
Burt’s jaw jutted out. ‘He’ll know. Look, he’s got a cup.’
He did, and I’d seen it already. I was trying to think of any reason not to go over to the little group around the Land Rover, though. No good could come of it.
‘Maybe someone got it for him. More than likely he got someone to fetch it. I can just ask this sergeant.’ I started to move towards the officer in question, but Una Burt ignored me. She headed straight for Godley. I considered going the other way but curiosity won out. It always did, for me.
‘What’s going on?’ She stopped between Godley and the uniformed man, who on closer inspection was a superintendent himself. I drifted up and looked over her shoulder. The paper on the bonnet of the car was a plan of the estate with all the drains and access points marked on it. Someone had inked in the location of the van, with an X for each body and a star for each of the two survivors. A line showed the path one of the shooters had taken through the estate to make his getaway. On either side of that line, every hole and corner on the plan had a pencil mark through the centre. Derwent’s work. Potential dumpsites investigated and found wanting.
‘Una, this is Bryan Enderby,’ Godley said. ‘He’s the superintendent who runs the TSG.’ It was no wonder he looked exhausted given that five of his men were on slabs in Dr Hanshaw’s morgue.
She shook hands with Enderby, murmuring condolences. I hung back, making sure it didn’t look as if I was trying to be introduced to him.
‘Thanks for all your work. I was just saying to Charles, it’s a relief to me to know you’re all working so hard on it. I was able to say as much to the families, which was a help.’ His voice made me think of seaside holidays and Blackpool illuminations: warm Lancashire tones.
‘We haven’t made much progress so far.’ Burt wheeled around and delivered a brief report to Godley, who didn’t look surprised.
‘We’re not going to get a lot of cooperation here. We knew that coming in. It’s still worth trying.’
‘Of course,’ Burt said. ‘Maybe if we’re here for a while they’ll get used to us. They might even start to trust us.’
‘Watch yourselves,’ Enderby said. ‘This is not a safe place for police officers at the moment, if it ever was. My men were never happy about this estate.’
‘Why was that?’ Godley asked. ‘Intel or just a bad feeling?’
‘Mainly the latter,’ Enderby admitted. ‘But you have to consider the history with the teenager who was shot. There’s a lot of resentment in a place like this about that sort of thing, especially since he was only a kid. They want to feel his life had a value. There have been loads of rumours flying around that the police investigation is going to go nowhere and Cole is just going to be forgotten about. I don’t think it’s true, but it’s all about what the community believes, isn’t it? They already feel they’re on a scrapheap. They want to remind the world that they still matter.’
‘And what better way than by lashing out at the police?’ Burt said.
‘It was always a possibility. My men felt they were being pushed in here to keep the lid on the estate. They were never happy about patrolling this area. The sergeant, Mark Greyson, actually told me he felt like a target here.’
‘But they hadn’t seen anything overt to make them think there might be a genuine threat,’ Godley said. ‘There was nothing in the files.’
‘Not anything worth reporting. Rumours and looks.’
Derwent cleared his throat. ‘So what you’re saying, if I’m right, is that your men were made to come in here to show the community the police were watching them. You were discouraging protests before they even began.’
‘That’s essentially how it was.’
‘It wasn’t that they had a remit to come into the estate and hassle people, then. It wasn’t that they were supposed to find the troublemakers and provoke them into a public order offence at the very least, so you could take them into custody and get them out of the community.’
Enderby looked pained. ‘Hassle people? I don’t think—’
‘You provoked them. Lots of patr
ols. Lots of heavy-handed attention. You wanted to get a reaction. You bothered the residents and came down like a ton of bricks on any sign of dissent.’
‘Where did you get that idea?’
‘It’s obvious.’ Derwent’s eyes were cold. ‘No one got out of the van until they absolutely had to. No one looked surprised about the firework hitting the van and from what I’ve heard it wasn’t the first time. Your guys were unpopular and they behaved accordingly. Public order arrests have been way above the London average on this estate in the last few months. I had a word with some of the local bobbies and they said it was typical TSG stuff – assault on an officer but the officer has a graze and the arrestee ends up in hospital.’
‘What’s your point?’ Enderby demanded.
‘I don’t have one. Except that you’re making them out to be victims, and maybe they were, but you sent them here to do a particular job and they did it.’
Enderby’s expression darkened. ‘It’s easy for you to come in here and judge them after the fact. Are you saying they deserved what happened here?’
‘If I was saying that, I’d say it.’ Derwent had tilted his head back just a little, that extra inch that made the difference between neutral and arrogant. In his own way he was just as critical as Geoff Armstrong had been, but he wasn’t angry with the dead men. He was livid about the superior officers who’d sent them into harm’s way. The phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ came to mind. And Derwent was never one to hold back just because he was talking to someone who outranked him by a long way.
‘I’ve spent the last few hours with the families of the officers who were killed here this evening,’ Enderby said. ‘You don’t even know their names, do you?’
‘Would their names help me find the weapons? No? Thought not.’
‘That’s enough.’ Godley sounded drained. His voice had no force to it. ‘Josh, there’s a time and a place for analysing why this happened.’
‘That wasn’t what I was trying to do.’ Derwent stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘This might be all about the teenager who got shot. It might be about something else completely. Too early to tell. What we can tell is that the community turned a blind eye to whoever was planning this, and make no mistake, it was planned. They may even have helped. That kid who threw the firework was local, I’ll bet. Your policy here created an environment where it was possible to kill a handful of police officers in one go, and no one tried to stop them. That’s on your shoulders.’