by Jane Casey
I was preparing a riposte as I followed him, but I didn’t get to use it. A small boy was running towards us, laughing, pursued by a grey-haired man. Outpaced and winded, he called, ‘Kian, stop.’
As the boy hurtled past him, Derwent put out a hand and fielded him. ‘Where are you running off to?’
‘Nowhere.’
Derwent squatted down to be at eye level with him. ‘Just running?’
The boy nodded. He’d gone from giddy to serious. I thought he was five or six – young enough to need to run around a lot just to stay sane. The elderly man reached us and took the boy’s arm.
‘He’s bored, I’m afraid. He’s been here all day yesterday and today. It’s no place for a child but his mother won’t let us take him home.’
The boy looked up at us. He had a lot of dark hair and an impish face. ‘I should be in school but Daddy’s sick.’
‘Poor Daddy,’ Derwent said. He looked up at the man. ‘Is Daddy Tom Fox, by any chance?’
He nodded. ‘My son.’
I showed my warrant card. ‘We’re here to talk to him.’
‘I thought you might be. He’s in room 412.’
Derwent stood up. I hadn’t seen him so much as move his hand towards his pocket, but when I glanced down at Kian the boy was holding the lollipop.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered.
‘Be good for your granddad.’ Derwent actually ruffled his hair. I raised my eyebrows as we walked away and got a very discouraging look: one more thing never to mention again, I gathered. Derwent was always most ashamed of what other people would consider his good points.
We passed an elderly woman who was sitting on a chair in the corridor, watching the boy and his grandfather. I assumed she was Tom Fox’s mother. She looked exhausted, and worried, and more than a little fed up. I knew how she felt. I’d sat in enough hospitals waiting for something to happen to be very familiar with the combination of stress and boredom that made it a particularly torturous experience.
Derwent paused at the door of room 412, which was standing open, and rapped on it. ‘Sorry to bother you. Mind if we come in?’
‘Depends on what you want.’ Tom Fox was lying back against a stack of pillows, his face grey and, at that moment, unwelcoming. A large bandage covered his shoulder. He looked too tall for the bed and too wide, his arms bulging with muscle. His wife was standing by the bed, worrying at her nail varnish. She looked fragile, with big shadows under her eyes. She was wearing high-heeled boots and pale pink skinny jeans with a low-cut cream jumper – very clinging and feminine. Her hair was elaborately curled. I guessed she was the kind of person who put on her make-up to put out the bins. The near-death of her husband was no reason to let her standards slip.
‘DI Josh Derwent and DC Maeve Kerrigan. We’re investigating the deaths of your colleagues.’
Fox swallowed. ‘All right. Come in.’
‘Not for too long,’ his wife said sharply. ‘You don’t want to get too tired, Tom.’
‘I’m not doing anything else.’
‘Talking is tiring.’ She put a hand out and rested it on top of her husband’s. He shook it off.
‘Stop it, Kells.’
‘Sorry.’ Her eyes welled up. ‘I’m only trying to look after you.’
‘I don’t need you to do anything. Look, just go and have a coffee, okay? Or take Kian home. You don’t have to be here.’
‘I want to be here.’
‘You’re driving me mad.’ His jaw was clenched.
Derwent cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Fox, I promise we won’t keep your husband talking too long. We really need to talk to him about the shooting. We’ve tried to give you as long as possible.’
‘Not that long. He had an operation yesterday. A general anaesthetic. He’s still recovering.’
‘Kelly, for God’s sake. I can talk for myself. I’m fine.’ To us, Fox said, ‘Before you ask your questions, tell me what’s going on with Stokesy.’
‘William Stokes? He’s still unconscious.’
‘Shit,’ Fox said. ‘That’s not good.’
‘Don’t read too much into it,’ I said. ‘They’re keeping him under at the moment. They have to wait to see how he gets on in the next few days.’
Fox shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it. All the guys. One minute everything was totally normal. Then I see Wadey’s head snap back and I’m thinking to myself, that’s a bit odd, and I haven’t noticed the windscreen is shattered too because I’m so busy staring at Wadey and wondering why he isn’t moving and why his head looks so strange. They blew his face off.’ He said it in a wondering tone, as if he still couldn’t take it in.
‘Martin Wade was driving,’ Derwent said.
‘Yeah. He always drove. They did him first. Then Makers when he was jumping out to help Brods and Stokesy.’
I was keeping track without too much difficulty. Makers, I had guessed was Jordan Makepeace. Brods was Stuart Broderick. And Stokesy was William Stokes. I would have bet a week’s wages that Fox’s own nickname among his colleague was Foxy.
‘Then the shooter came up close to the van for the rest of us. He went along the side, shooting. He was so deliberate. No nerves. Professional.’ Fox was sweating now. He moved restlessly against the pillows, trying to get comfortable. ‘Makers was still alive for a while. He bled out. If I could have got to him I could have helped him. I could have saved him.’
‘No point thinking like that,’ Derwent said. ‘You’ll drive yourself mental second-guessing what you did or didn’t do.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘I know.’ Derwent waited for a moment, respectful. ‘You said the gunman came up close to the van. Did you get a look at him? Can you tell us anything at all about him?’
‘I can’t tell you his height. I was inside the van so I’d only be guessing.’
‘We can estimate that quite accurately from the mobile-phone footage someone took of the shooting,’ I said. ‘Our problem is the quality of the recording is bad. We can’t see much more than his height and build. Did you notice anything else? His colouring, or his hair?’
‘I didn’t get long to look at him,’ Fox said, thinking about it. ‘He was white. He had a hat pulled down low so I couldn’t really see anything but his eyebrows. They were light brown but they could be darker than his hair. He could be fair.’ He swallowed a couple of times. ‘Could I have some water?’
His wife held out a cup with a straw in it and he drank a little.
‘Could you see his face clearly?’ Derwent asked.
‘He had his jacket zipped up all the way, to just under his mouth. I could see his mouth, nose and eyes. No chin, no jawline.’
‘And did you get a good look at the features you could see?’
‘Only for a second. Enough to recognise him again, I think.’
‘What about looking at some pictures for us?’ Derwent nodded to me and I handed him a folder. He flipped it open to reveal a stack of mug shots.
‘Have you got suspects? Already?’ Fox asked.
‘Not exactly,’ Derwent said. He was shuffling through the pile, discarding anyone who didn’t fit the correct description.
‘Who are they, then?’ He stretched to pick up one of the pictures Derwent had taken out and stared at it.
‘Gunmen. People who shoot people for a living. We’re not looking for someone starting out, are we? This isn’t the kind of thing you’d do unless you were pretty confident about your abilities. You said it yourself, the way he went through you was professional.’ Derwent began to lay out the pictures on the table, as if he was setting up for a game of solitaire.
Fox struggled to sit up. His wife bent to help him and he snapped, ‘Leave it. I’m fine.’
His attention was on the pictures so he didn’t notice the look on his wife’s face. It was anger more than upset. I had always found it harder to worry about someone in hospital than to be the patient myself, pain and frustration notwithstanding. Kelly Fox might have looked
like sugar and spice with a French manicure but there was more to her than that.
‘Not him. Not him.’ As Fox went through the pictures, Derwent slid them off the table and replaced them with another.
‘He’s a possible.’ Fox tapped one image. ‘That’s quite like him.’
Derwent went very still for a moment, his expression unreadable, even to me. ‘Okay. Keep looking.’
‘Not him. Not him. Not him.’ Fox went back to the one he’d indicated before and held it up in front of his face. He was frowning with concentration. ‘I really think this could be him. Who is he?’
‘A guy called Tony Larch.’ Derwent was sounding deceptively calm. I looked sideways at him, noting the muscle that had gone tight in his jaw.
‘Does he seem like the type?’ Fox asked.
Derwent tried to smile. ‘Not a very nice person. It would certainly be well within his powers. And he shaves his head. That might explain why you didn’t see his hair.’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s any of the others.’ Fox slumped back against the pillows. ‘That’s all I can say.’
‘You’ve been a big help.’ Derwent shuffled all the pictures back into his folder and handed it back to me. ‘Look after yourself, mate. Try not to stress about what happened.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about it.’
‘You’ll get counselling.’ Derwent grinned. ‘Of course, that’s generally a complete waste of time unless you get a good-looking woman counsellor. At least then you can distract yourself. Let your mind wander.’
Fox glanced sideways at his wife, pulling a naughty-boy face. She didn’t look amused.
‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Of course, Mrs Fox.’ Derwent put his hands behind his back, so polite it was almost a parody.
‘These shootings are a big deal, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, very much so. They’re getting all the resources we can throw at them.’
‘So how come you’re the ones who are here to talk to Tommy? Why isn’t anyone important here? Why hasn’t that superintendent been here?’
Much more than sugar and spice. Pure steel, when you got down to it. Derwent didn’t answer her straightaway and she waited, hands on her hips, her expression a challenge.
Fox groaned. ‘Come off it, Kelly. It’s not a big deal. He’s busy.’
‘And you’re the only witness who was anywhere near the gunman. I’d have thought it was worth his while to come and talk to you. Every time I switch the telly on he’s there going on about finding the gunman and keeping London safe and he doesn’t even have the courtesy to come and see you himself. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t get it.’
Derwent stood up a little straighter. ‘The superintendent is running the whole investigation, Mrs Fox. He delegates the different jobs to people like me and her.’ He pointed at me. ‘That’s how it works. He can’t do everything himself or it would take too long.’
‘I understand that. I’m not stupid.’ She had gone pink. ‘But you pick and choose what you do, don’t you? You prioritise the important things. Isn’t Tommy important?’
‘Of course he is,’ I said. ‘I know the superintendent will want to talk to him himself soon. But just at the moment—’
‘I think I can live without seeing the great Superintendent Godley in person,’ Fox said, rolling his eyes. ‘You just fancy him, Kelly.’
‘That’s not true. That’s not what I was saying.’ The tears that had filled her eyes started to overflow. She shoved her knuckles under her eyes, desperately trying to save her make-up. I hoped she’d had the foresight to use waterproof mascara.
‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Fox.’ Derwent held out his hand to her and after a moment she shook it. ‘I’ll tell the boss he needs to get his arse in gear, all right?’
She gave a half-smile, reluctant to be charmed. ‘You tell him.’
‘It’s a promise.’
Derwent waited until we had gone past the two constables and were walking down the corridor. ‘Did you recognise the name?’
‘Isn’t Tony Larch one of John Skinner’s men?’
‘He sure is. Last time he was in London he was doing Skinner’s dirty work for him. Remember the Lithuanians?’
I did remember them, and the small terraced property that had become a charnel house. I flashed on an image of a body on a kitchen floor, a naked young man sprawled on a bed, a giant of a thug with the back of his head blown off. ‘They would be hard to forget.’
‘Niele Adamkuté,’ Derwent said and sighed. ‘I still think about her sometimes.’
‘I bet you do. I don’t want to know the details, though.’
Derwent glowered. ‘Not like that. Anyway, I’ve had a grudge against Tony Larch ever since. Not that I could prove that he was the one who killed them. But if you want a gunman to do a big job, Tony is the first number you’d call.’
‘If you can get hold of him.’
‘Yeah. Well, we may not know where he is, but someone has his contact details. Dangerous little fucker that he is. I know of nine unsolved murders that I’d say are definitely his and another seven or eight that he could have done.’ Derwent unwrapped some chewing gum and stuck it into his cheek, chewing rapidly, more agitated than usual. ‘He’s never been convicted of anything big. That picture is fifteen years old. He got picked up in a Flying Squad round-up after a big armed robbery. He wasn’t actually involved in it and they couldn’t hold him.’
‘But if the picture is old, Fox could be wrong.’
‘Yeah. He came back to it, though. He didn’t say it was definitely Tony Larch either, which I appreciate, because Larch would look different now. I’d have been worried if he’d been sure.’
‘You still seem worried.’
‘I am worried. John Skinner has a life sentence and he’s not going to get out, ever, unless he gets cancer and gets out on compassionate grounds. Last I heard, his whole crooked business empire was in the shit. He’s the last person who should be out there looking for trouble by killing coppers. When the boss hears about this he’s going to do his nut. You know they go back a long way. A long, long way.’ Derwent was shaking his head.
I did know. I knew that Derwent had first worked with Godley on gang crime. I knew that Skinner had been unfinished business for both of them until his personal life unravelled and brought him back from voluntary exile in Spain. I knew that Skinner had no principles whatsoever. I knew that being in prison didn’t stop him from being an active criminal.
And I knew what Derwent didn’t: that Godley had been in Skinner’s back pocket for years.
I was still walking, but on auto-pilot. For once, I wasn’t listening to a word Derwent was saying. I was thinking about Godley sending us to the hospital to interview Tom Fox, when really Kelly was right and it should have been him who called to see him. I was thinking about the superintendent’s mood, so brittle it splintered into anger at the slightest knock. I was thinking about the strain in his face and the black dog that was riding him.
I was thinking about a message I hadn’t been meant to see.
A warning.
And I was thinking about six dead police officers.
I was miles away when Derwent grabbed my arm and swung me around to face him.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing.’ I blinked at him, shaking myself free from my thoughts.
‘It’s not nothing. You’ve gone quiet.’
‘Sorry.’
He waited, letting the silence lengthen. It was a trick I knew he used, and I didn’t fall for it. When he was sure I wasn’t going to speak, he started walking again. ‘It’s unusual, that’s all. Generally, all I get is chatter chatter chatter. Takes a lot to get you to shut up. If there’s an off switch I want to know about it.’
‘Right.’
‘Right. Is that it? Is that all I get?’
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘Fuck’s sake, Kerrigan, if that’s the quality of repartee I�
�m getting I’m not going to bother either.’ He walked away, head down, the dark cloud over his head more obvious than usual.
I watched him go. I couldn’t worry about Derwent being pissed off.
I had bigger problems than that.
Chapter 19
I didn’t get a chance to challenge Godley about John Skinner and the message I’d seen on his phone over the next few days. In all honesty, I didn’t try that hard to create an opportunity. I was heavy-eyed from lying awake wondering what I should do. Mealtimes passed me by. I couldn’t eat for the knot in my throat that was tension and lingering anger about the teenagers’ attack on me. I wanted to do something – anything – to make sense of the murders, but actually saying as much to Godley seemed impossible. All I had was an instinct that Godley was struggling with something more than the responsibility for investigating these crimes. That and a once-seen text message wouldn’t convince any of the bigwigs that Godley was bent. Then there was the fact that he was my boss, and that I was a very junior member of his team. I’d worked hard to establish some kind of relationship with him that skirted around the reality of his lucrative sideline. I’d come very close to leaving his team a few times now, sometimes of my own volition – often because I felt he wanted me to go. Talking to him about Skinner was guaranteed to open old wounds. Tying it in with the deaths of six police officers would pour handfuls of salt on top.
But I didn’t believe in coincidences. And when it came down to it, I’d rather be right than sensible. Good for my integrity.
Bad for my career.
Anyway, I had a cast-iron excuse for not confronting him: he was never in his office. He was fully occupied on the front line of a battle we looked like we were losing. The first night after the TSG unit were shot up, response officers across the Met reported sporadic incidents of violence. It was like the first hints of a forest fire in the making: dry tinder smouldering here and there, flaring into flames with the least provocation. Fed-up young people on miserable high-rise estates. Gangs who had something to prove to each other and themselves. High-flying rhetoric about the Met’s institutional racism on the television and the radio and all over the newspapers. A sudden, unwelcome awareness on the part of our adversaries that behind the uniforms were people, and that people could be intimidated, or hurt, or sent running for cover.