Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘So why don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Know how you feel about him.’ Spelling it out for the hard-of-understanding.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum, don’t give me this bullshit!’

  ‘Lennie, please don’t talk to me like …’

  ‘I know you, remember? You always know what you think, you’re not all … crap and indecisive.’

  ‘Well then, if you want the truth, I think it’s because I’d never thought of him like that till it happened. He kissed me one night, and it all … It took me by surprise. But I like him. I do.’ It was true.

  ‘Right.’ Finally, an answer. ‘But.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But. You’re still being all weird about it, sneaking out of the house. Even when I asked you straight out the other night, you didn’t admit it.’

  ‘Because I don’t know if it’s going anywhere – I didn’t want you to think—’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ said Lennie. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. You can’t be straight about it because you’re still all hung up about what happened with Samir.’

  Robin opened her mouth to remonstrate but she hadn’t finished.

  ‘You’ve got to sort it out, Mum. It was nearly twenty years ago and yes, I know you’ve had a lot on, but it’s time now – really time. You’ve got to move on or you’re never going to have a real relationship.’ She paused. ‘And it’s not fair on other people.’

  She was talking about Adrian, Robin knew, her last boyfriend back in London. He’d asked her to marry him, and though she’d never told Lennie, he’d wanted to adopt her formally, for the three of them to be a proper family. Len would have loved it, she loved Ade, but Robin hadn’t been able to do it. But.

  ‘You can’t get involved with people only to string them along. It’s cruel.’

  Cruel? ‘I don’t get involved only to … I would never do that.’

  ‘I think you should talk to someone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A therapist. A shrink. Being a commitment-phobe doesn’t make you all cool and independent, if that’s what you think, it turns you into a … a human hand-grenade. Anyone gets too close, you blow up in their face.’

  For the second time of the evening, Robin felt like she’d been punched.

  ‘I’m not a grenade,’ she said ridiculously. ‘I don’t want to be a grenade.’

  ‘So do something about it. Unless,’ Lennie turned her face away, ‘you don’t want to.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Maybe you don’t want to get over what happened.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Because if you do, it’ll mean you’ve finally accepted it, won’t it? That it’s done and dusted. Actually over.’

  *

  Robin closed her bedroom door and got back into bed. She’d drunk two thirds of a bottle of wine the moment they’d got home, then two large glasses of water to counteract it, and she’d already been up twice to pee. Yet another reason she couldn’t get to sleep.

  She pulled the duvet around her shoulders and turned on to her side, catching the lingering scent of Kevin’s hair from the other pillow. She reached across and laid her hand over the empty space on the mattress. Did she wish he was here? No reason why he couldn’t be at this point – that cat was well and truly out of the bag; there was no one to hide it from now. Well, apart from her mother but it wasn’t Kev she’d wanted to keep hidden from her, just the embarrassment of the story in the paper. Christine cared so much what other people thought, people she didn’t even know; she’d feel the shame at a deep level. And of course, loads of her friends did read the Herald so it would be people she knew.

  No, the hand resting out there where Kev had slept was an apology. It said sorry – sorry you were pulled into this, that they dragged your dad’s past up again. And sorry I’m apparently a human hand-grenade. Was she, though? Was that fair? Lennie didn’t know she was going to blow up in Kev’s face – she didn’t even know if she was going to. People were allowed time, weren’t they, to see how things went, to decide? You couldn’t always know straight away.

  Streetlight glowed through the curtains. She’d kept her mouth shut because she didn’t want to fight with Lennie – and Len had enough to worry about herself, with her grandmother in hospital and her mother splashed across the news snogging her new boyfriend – but alone in the semi-darkness she acknowledged that she was angry with her. She wasn’t cruel – she’d never consciously gone into something and let someone start liking her while knowing it was doomed. She wouldn’t do that.

  Maybe not consciously, no, said the small voice in her head. But perhaps not so subconsciously, either.

  Oh, for God’s sake – now she was too hot. She got out of bed again, went to the window and shoved up the sash. Lovely cool air moved around her bare legs and she leaned her forehead against the cold glass before imagining some scrote photographer with a long lens trained on her. She’d checked the street earlier, looking in all the parked cars down both sides, but it didn’t mean there was no one there now lying in wait for Kev to roll up for another ‘tryst’.

  For a moment she wished he would. She’d like that, to go down to the car and chat with the lights of the city as their audience, it would be comforting, and if they came back up here, to bed, they’d have sex and he’d make her forget everything for a little while.

  But it would only be for a little while and afterwards, when he fell asleep, she’d be alone again.

  Alone. Back in bed, duvet kicked all the way off now, she examined the word as if it was a shell she’d picked up on the beach. She wasn’t alone, she was surrounded by people, more now than for years – Lennie, her parents, Luke and Natalie, Kev, Samir, her team at work. Between the lot of them, she barely got a minute’s peace.

  But when it came down to it, like today, she was alone. Her parents were wrapped up in their own fears, of course (though her mother still had the disk-space to worry about Luke) and Samir, whom she’d thought was on her side, had frozen her out the second Kilmartin left the room. Even Lennie thought she was a nutter. A cruel nutter. Well, maybe she was right – what did it say about you when your own daughter thought other people needed protecting from you?

  But on the other hand, said the voice in her head, there were also people who needed her protection and support – Luke, according to her mother; Lennie herself; the women in her case.

  God, all this protection, all this care – who protected her?

  Samir.

  His name arrived in her head before she could stop it. She batted it away but it was true. He’d protected her from Kilmartin before, and he’d done it again today, even when he was furious with her. Alongside Maggie, he’d saved Lennie’s life, and he’d asked her to apply for her job here before he knew the Met had offered her old one back. And, she could see now, if she squinted at it from the right angle, that he’d tried to protect her – albeit moronically – by breaking up with her.

  She felt the truth of it glow behind her ribs. Well, they were friends, she told herself briskly, that’s what friends did. She was trying to protect him from Kilmartin’s wrath by solving this case and proving he’d been right to hire her.

  And maybe it was why she was fond of Kev, too. Kev was a care-taker – he looked after his parents, he doted on his girls and, she realized, he was taking care of her as well, as far as she’d let him, coming with her to get Luke, checking she was okay when she didn’t reply to his texts, trying to take her out to dinner somewhere proper. But if that was what she wanted, protection, his protection, why had she felt a chime of guilty recognition when Lennie said she was going to blow up in his face?

  Chapter Twenty-four

  ‘Mum!’

  She opened her eyes to find Lennie standing over her, shaking her by the shoulder. ‘What? What’s the matter?’ The room was light – shit, what time was it? Had she overslept? She reached for her phone in it
s spot on the bedside table but it wasn’t there. Then, a chill hand round her heart, she remembered her mother.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the phone?’ Len was saying. ‘The landline – it rang twice. I thought you were going to get it. Here.’ She thrust the handset at her.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Samir.’

  She peered at it – muted, thankfully. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past six.’

  Robin sat up, cleared her throat then hit ‘unmute’. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Where are you? I’ve been calling your mobile but it’s going straight to voicemail. Have you turned it off?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ But evidently she’d forgotten to plug it in overnight. It must be out of battery. ‘What is it? What’s going on?’

  ‘Dhanesh Gupta’s dead.’

  *

  Three quarters of an hour later, she let herself into his office. ‘Fuck, Samir – fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  He was at his desk, fingertips pressed against his lips, face expressionless. Nothing was on – the computer was silent, the desk lamp, which he almost always kept on ‘for atmosphere’ was dark.

  ‘We still made the right decision,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She recoiled.

  ‘We questioned a man, believed him to be innocent – had incontrovertible proof of it in one case – then released him. We did the right thing.’

  ‘We released him so that he could be hunted down and killed.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We released him. What was the alternative? Keep him in custody with no justification? Charge him with something he didn’t do? His murder is his killer’s fault. It’s the fault of Ben Tyrell and his crowd, saying he must have done it.’ He hesitated then glanced at the door, making sure it was shut. ‘And it’s the fault of the person who announced,’ he said quietly, ‘after we’d published the CCTV picture, that we’d arrested a suspect.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Not that he’ll see it like that. In fact, there’s a good chance he’ll try and throw it back on us – we shouldn’t have arrested him in the first place, we told him he was a suspect—’

  ‘We didn’t – we were clear on that. We told him.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘We should have offered Gupta protection, Samir – that was the alternative. We knew Tyrell was firing up his mob, waving his picture around, and who knows how many other maniacs were thinking about it? There could be fifty who’d had the same idea – protect the “womenfolk”, the white womenfolk, clean the streets yourself because the police are incompetent.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I failed him,’ she said. ‘I hung him out to dry. I knew there was a chance something like this could happen.’ She shook her head in despair. ‘We had the city centre crew keeping an eye out for him, but he’d gone to ground. I should have done more – we should have had everyone out looking for him.’

  Samir rubbed his mouth, looking sick. ‘We just don’t have that sort of manpower.’

  ‘He must have been terrified.’

  Strangely, it had been the rows of men in the gloom of the Ford Transit she’d thought of first when she heard, their eyes wide with fear. They’d seen police and been afraid of being stopped – stopped getting paid peanuts to work twelve hours a day to pick food for a country too lazy to pick its own. Of being deported away from that privilege.

  And Gupta’s face when the arrest team had lifted him to his feet. He’d definitely been afraid but she’d seen resignation, too. He hadn’t been stunned when Varan told him he was being arrested on suspicion of murder: that was the kind of thing that happened to him here. He’d been lied to, defrauded of tens of thousands of pounds, reduced to sleeping in a derelict factory, then in shop doorways; being falsely accused of murder can’t have seemed much of a stretch.

  And now he’d been murdered.

  Amit Kapoor had seen it happen from his shop. Gupta had arrived before the van, he’d told Response, and was waiting for it in the usual spot, usual clothes, same cap and rucksack, when a man had calmly walked down the pavement and stopped. At first Kapoor thought he was talking to him, asking him the time or directions, but then he’d guessed they must know each other because Gupta had bent forward as if to hug him. Only several seconds later, when the other man strode away and Gupta collapsed to the pavement had he understood that it had been an attack. He’d raced outside to find Gupta pumping blood from knife wounds in his stomach. He’d died in his arms, before the ambulance could reach them, before Tom Peterson had arrived to pick him up for work.

  ‘I’m giving the case to Webster,’ Samir said.

  Robin stared. ‘You can’t. That’s—’

  ‘Wait,’ he held up his hand. ‘Gupta, not the women. Unless – did he say anything in his interviews that would give their killer reason to kill him? Did he see him at Gisborne’s? Could he have identified him?’

  She shook her head. ‘He had no information at all. He was asleep next door, oblivious. The first time he knew something was wrong was when he got back from work on Sunday and found police there.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Which makes it much more likely it’s a separate case. Linked now, after the fact, but separate.’

  ‘Just because he didn’t know anything doesn’t mean the Gisborne Girl’s killer knew he didn’t. We can’t assume that. I want to do it, Samir. Please let me do it. I owe him that – the least I can do for him is—’

  ‘Rob, what you can do for him is give us the best shot of catching his killer, and that is not you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How can you give it your full attention?’ he demanded. ‘How? There’s no way. You’ve got two active murders already, you’re being hounded by the media and Kilmartin, and on top of all that, your mother’s in hospital. Let someone else help him.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You don’t have to do everything, Robin, I thought you’d learned that lesson. In fact,’ his eyebrows went up, ‘thinking you do is more than slightly arrogant, don’t you reckon? You’re the only one who can do it? Come on, allow other people some oxygen.’

  Smarting, she said nothing.

  He sighed. ‘Webster has the bandwidth at the moment, that’s all I’m saying. If anyone asks much more of you, you’re going to combust.’

  The Robin of old would have argued but this one knew he was right.

  ‘He’ll be SIO on Gupta but obviously we’re all in this together. This is going to be teamwork big time, total transparency, every whisker of potentially significant information shared right away.’

  She nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘And we’re going to need a united front. Because the media are going to be all over this – all over you, given your history. And Kilmartin’s going to be breathing fire, so we’ve got to be ready for that as well. He likes Webster, as we know, another reason for him to handle it.’

  Likes him because he’s a man, Robin thought, and unchallenging. Webster was good police, reliable, but he was never going to come steaming up the career ladder to threaten him.

  ‘Right now,’ said Samir as if he’d read her mind, ‘Kilmartin’s going to be feeling vulnerable. He’s made a big mistake and he’ll be pedalling like hell to spin it, not least to himself. I haven’t heard from him yet but he’ll be on the phone as soon as he’s worked out his angle, and we need to be ready. On balance, I don’t think he’ll have the gall to try to pin it on you and say you told him Gupta was a suspect …’

  ‘Wouldn’t he love that, though?’

  He tipped his head, conceding. ‘Probably. But he knows I know the truth, so my guess is he’ll have “forgotten”. I saw him do that once, before you joined – it wasn’t as bad as this but he dissociated so thoroughly that, after a while, he literally didn’t even remember what had happened. It was kind of impressive in a disturbing way. Trump-like. Anyway, if that’s the way it goes – however it goes – we’re not going to say anything about what he did. Zero
.’

  ‘A man’s dead, Samir!’

  He held up his hand again. ‘We’re not going to say anything yet. What’s done is done, Gupta’s dead and beyond help. Our priority is catching his killer, and whoever killed the two women, and for us to do that, I need you to be running the case.’

  ‘We’re going to sweep it under the carpet, you mean?’ she said, incredulous.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. But much as it’ll hurt, for now we’re going to keep our mouths shut about Kilmartin’s part in it. We’ll see what myth we’re playing along with and then tolerate it long enough that he’ll allow us to catch these bastards.’

  ‘God, Samir.’ She shook her head in wonder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If the policing doesn’t work out, you should really consider international diplomacy.’

  ‘Me and Henry Kissinger,’ he said, holding up crossed fingers. ‘How’s your mother this morning? Any word?’

  ‘I called Dad from the car. The same, he says. No improvement.’

  Gupta’s death had acted on the incident room like a nerve agent through the air-conditioning. People who’d heard the news before arriving carried it in with them; Robin could tell who knew by their posture as they walked through the door, and she watched it act on those who were hearing now, the energy they’d brought from hectic family breakfasts, school runs and commutes disappearing in seconds, as if the carpet were sucking it out through the soles of their shoes.

  Local social media accounts were on fire and by nine o’clock, several journalists had managed to weasel their way past the switchboard. ‘Anyone gets through, send ’em straight to the press office,’ she’d told the team. ‘Don’t engage, don’t even tell them what you’re doing; just hit the button.’

  They gathered in front of her for the briefing, every face sombre. They’d done nothing wrong, any of them, and yet, like her, they felt responsible. Her chest surged with what she thought was pity until she identified it as empathy and gratitude. They didn’t think they’d screwed up or that she’d screwed up; they were full of sorrow and they wanted to know how to deal with it. They wanted comfort in the form of action. Direction. What do we do now? Tell us how we can make this better.