Robin texted Samir: ??
“The public,” he replied, “will derive an extra measure of reassurance from hearing it from the top.”
Unbelievable.
And yet, came his response, always completely predictable.
Chapter Thirty-six
The day got off to a decent start. She had breakfast with Lennie who reported that Austin was out of bed – ‘Eating all the granola and hogging the iPad, Ash says’ – and she was still at her desk in time to have an action list ready and waiting when people got in. Standing in front of Hannah’s board, which was now half-covered with what they knew about Miriam and “Brother Phil” as the team was calling him with dripping scorn, Robin told her silently, We’re making progress. We’re going to get justice for you, too.
She put five people on calling the church-group families she’d already located and tracing the ones she hadn’t. Another seven researched charities in South America and the UK and scoured the Net. Varan had updated the DVI with Interpol, and as soon as the working day started there, they’d put in calls to police in Salvador, Rio and São Paulo.
At about ten thirty, Varan appeared in the doorway, holding a piece of paper. ‘She was drugged,’ he said.
‘Who was?’
‘Hannah. The labs are back. Tramadol – enough to keep her knocked out for a couple of days, apparently.’
‘But not quite enough,’ Robin said, thinking of the hand and its slack fingers, ‘to keep her under while she was stabbed to death.’
Some time mid-morning, Malia had disappeared. When she returned, she came straight to Robin’s office door, eyes bright.
‘What’s up?’ Robin asked.
‘Lara Meikle. I was thinking about the poor response to the CCTV. If there was a local Boo Radley figure who matched the physical description, we would have heard about it, don’t you think? We’d have had calls: “You should talk to that lanky oddball who lives two doors down, he’s a right weirdo, I bet it’s him.” His height makes him pretty distinctive.’
‘Go on.’
‘So I thought what if he isn’t weird? What if she did know him? Remember when she speaks in the tape?’
‘We couldn’t be sure about that, though, could we? And none of her friends or family recognized him.’
‘No, and he’s not on her social media, either, I had another look last night. Apart from a couple of Internet celebrity-types, all her friends on there are people she knows in real life, too – childhood friends, school-friends, her boyfriend’s friends, etc. But that made me notice something else: she’s collected all these people from different areas of her life but there aren’t that many of her work friends, comparatively. I wondered if it was deliberate – if she wanted some separation.’
‘Interesting.’
‘So, I’ve just been back to the insurance company. Her colleagues, desk-mates, they didn’t know anything so I spoke to her boss again. He hadn’t seen the CCTV so I brought it up on his computer. At first he didn’t know him but then he did this kind of startle, like someone had woken him up.’
‘So he did know him?’
‘Not know but he said that at the end of last year, November, Lara had gone with him to a conference in London and one of the other delegates had been very friendly with her – flirty – and she’d flirted back. He evidently felt bad about telling me, he knew she was already with David Pearse and he didn’t want to hurt him or speak ill of the dead, but he’d thought at the time that she and this guy might have had a bit of a thing, you know, a one-nighter, conference fling? It was the height – the way he walked. He said he remembered thinking he was gangly.’
‘So who he is?’
‘Well, that’s it. Ian – her boss – doesn’t know his name or where he worked.’
‘Is he local?’
‘He doesn’t know that either.’
‘But he was definitely at this conference?’
‘Yes. As a delegate. So I’ll get on that now, details of the conference, full list of attendees, etc.’
‘Get Niall to help you.’
She nodded and turned to go, already thinking.
‘Malia?’ Robin called after her. Malia stopped and looked back. ‘Brilliant,’ Robin said.
Locked up or not, Ben Tyrell was having a day in the sun. Around noon, a handful of poorly punctuated Tweets had demanded West Midlands Police #FreeBenTyrell then #FreeWhiteVoices. The timing corresponded neatly with breakfast on the East Coast of the US, and some prominent American bigot had picked up the story and retweeted three of the posts to his 157,000 followers. A virtual bun-fight ensued, and while sanity prevailed thanks to an answering wave of people pointing out that, in fact, on the evidence available, Tyrell was exactly where he should be, enough momentum had accrued that a man called Steven Taggart had started calling on #TyrellsTribe to gather at five o’clock to protest against West Midlands Police’s ‘rampant bias against white people and their right to voice an opinion’.
She’d rolled her eyes, envisaging a straggling bunch of losers outside headquarters on Colmore Circus trying to avoid getting mown down by three lanes of rush-hour traffic – should have thought that one through – but Varan had corrected her. ‘No, guv,’ he said, holding up his phone, ‘they know Tyrell was brought to Harborne when he was arrested. Taggart’s telling them to come here.’
A few minutes before five, they came.
Up in the incident room, the first thing they heard was chanting, quiet to start then suddenly louder – they’d rounded the corner – a call-and-response between a voice on a megaphone, ‘We will not be silenced,’ and a group of low male voices, ‘We will not be silenced.’ It was restrained, almost monk-like; Robin felt the hairs go up on her arms. She glanced at Malia and Varan who abandoned their desks and went with her to the window, where the rest of the team quickly joined them.
Outside on Rose Road thirty men came to a halt directly outside the station gates and formed ranks around the man with the loudhailer. Was that Taggart? All eyes were trained forward, all their bodies held still. Their ages varied, twenties to fifties, but they were all dressed the same: white T-shirts and combat trousers, Doc Martens.
‘We will not be silenced.’
‘We will not be silenced.’
This wasn’t an army put together in a day, that much was obvious. They were organized, disciplined. And fit. Again, in her prejudice, Robin had imagined a group of chubby discontents chiselled off their sofas by a motivated handful but this lot looked like they’d been training at Lee Donnelly’s muscle gym. In fact, she realized, some of them probably had. Wherever they’d done it, they’d got results: powerful shoulders, thick necks, big arms.
Shit – Hideous Billy. She scanned the rows of faces but didn’t find him. Thank Christ, that was the last thing she needed.
‘They’re like Orcs,’ Varan said at her left shoulder.
‘Orcs who all go to the same barber,’ said someone else behind her, maybe Niall. ‘The one with the shaver stuck on “skinhead”.’
Robin expected a laugh at that but the response was surprisingly frail. These men weren’t Orcs, and they could all see it. The power out there wasn’t just brute force but mental strength, too, however misguided, and real anger. The joke had been an attempt to minimize it, put it back in its box, and it had failed.
An email had gone round at four to say that, ‘to err on the side of caution’, the station gates would be locked and Rose Road closed to traffic. From the window now, they could see the backs of the officers stationed along the outside of the fence, some of them eye to eye with protestors only ten feet away. By her earlier assessment, she’d thought full riot gear was a bit of an over-reaction but she saw now that she’d been woefully naive. She didn’t envy them stuck out there. Thinking of Austin, she wondered briefly if any of them would rather have been on the opposite side.
‘We will not be silenced.’
‘They’re giving me the actual heebie-jeebies,’ Malia said, shivering.
‘It’s like that Bible story – the walls of Jericho. The stillness.’
More people were coming now, in twos and threes, largely men but here and there some women, too. These weren’t the crack troops but enthusiastic supporters who surrounded the core squad, quickly taking up the chant and magnifying it. They punched the air with signs that declared #ForQueen&Country, England 4 the English, White Lives Matter, White Power.
Robin felt movement and turned to see Samir. Malia gave him room at the window and he took her spot, close enough for Robin to feel his body heat.
‘Well, these look like some very fine people,’ he said.
‘Yes, wouldn’t Oswald Mosley be proud?’
The crowd had now doubled in size, and while the base note of the chant was the same, it had grown much louder and cacophonous, far less disciplined. In an upstairs window in a house across the road, Robin saw two children appear, boys, not yet teenage. What could they make of all this? They were probably terrified – she was.
‘We will not be silenced.’
‘And we thought we’d shut this lot down,’ said Niall.
‘It’ll take more than arresting that piece of shit,’ Malia told him. ‘It’s like Medusa – you cut off one snake-head and another two grow in its place.’
More people – more and more. ‘How many are down there, do you reckon?’
‘At least a hundred,’ said Samir. ‘A hundred and twenty, maybe.’
Where were they all coming from? And at five on a Tuesday afternoon. Had they taken time off work specially, half-day holiday?
Suddenly, from the other end of the street, came a competing sound, equally loud. Air horns, several of them at once. Thrown off their stride, Tyrell’s Tribe hesitated and the horns sounded again, drowning them out.
From behind the wing of the station, a new group came into view. It was about equal in size, a hundred or more people, and judging by their ages and clothes, Robin guessed they were students. Unlike Tyrell’s Tribe, white to a man, they were diverse, a mix of black and brown and white, and their leader was a woman, brunette hair in a high topknot, a checked shirt tied round the waist of black jeans. She had a megaphone, too.
‘Silence racist voices,’ she called, and her crew shouted it back to her: ‘Silence racist voices.’
‘Stop the hate.’
The air above them was fairly bristling with signs. They were at a ninety-degree angle, facing the original crowd rather than the station, but Robin could make out a few: Justice for Dhanesh Gupta, Power In Unity, End White Supremacy.
‘We will not be silenced.’
‘Have they got any other lines, do you think?’ Malia asked.
‘If they do, I don’t want to hear them,’ said Varan.
The new crowd was still advancing, and the nearest edge of Tyrell’s lot had turned to confront them. Six officers immediately ran into the space between the two groups.
‘Stop the hate,’ yelled the woman again.
Taggart had pushed his way to the new front. Megaphone in his left hand, he raised his right arm straight out until his hand, palm down, was six inches above shoulder height.
It was lighter fuel, pure incendiary. The two groups surged together like rivers meeting, the officers in the middle instantly swallowed up, visible only here and there when the melee of arms and heads and signs subsided long enough to reveal the rounded shine of a helmet. The officers who’d been lining the gates charged in.
From chanting and shouting to physical fighting in a matter of seconds – shoving, grabbing, hitting. The air above the press of bodies was filled with flailing arms and fists and phones – phones everywhere. And the noise – air horns, shouting, screams, the clatter of signs. Lined with its two facing terraces, the street was an amplifier, the individual sounds bouncing off the walls to become a roar that reminded Robin bizarrely of the piped-in Viking battle sounds at the Yorvik Centre. Even here, two storeys up, behind glass, it drowned out everything else.
One of Tyrell’s mob pulled his arm back, fist aimed at a male student’s head while another man screamed him on. A woman recorded them on her phone, righting herself every couple of seconds as the crush of bodies nearly pushed her off her feet. The crowd was a thing of its own now, more than the sum of its parts.
Robin watched a young black guy get right in the face of a muscular man in a balaclava, yelling at full volume. The man grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt, pulled him in and nutted him. Next to her, Samir winced. She’d thought the guy would be out of action but after four or five seconds he came to himself, brought his fist up and punched balaclava man hard in the throat. Balaclava staggered, and the student took aim again but, just in time, Balaclava’s mate snatched another man’s sign and thrust it at him, the edge straight in his face. The student reeled away, clutching his eyes, and the mate turned to Balaclava, his expression a mix of astonishment – Look what I did! – and horrified disbelief.
In her own horror, it took Robin a moment to understand she was looking at Luke.
‘Look after your brother.’ Her mother’s words rang in her ears as she plunged down the stairs, missing steps twice, barely recovering her balance. She heard quick footsteps overhead, the incident-room door. ‘Robin!’ She ignored him.
On the ground floor, a new group of officers in full gear were getting ready to go. Samir called her name again and she pushed past them to the front door and spun out into the yard.
Two uniforms were posted at the gate. ‘Open it,’ she ordered.
They looked at each other, uncertain.
She had seconds before Samir caught her up. ‘Open it,’ she yelled again, ‘I’m a fucking DCI.’
As soon as she was through, it clanged shut behind her. She threw herself into the crowd as she heard a final, ‘Robin, don’t you dare …’ The rest was lost as a wave of noise closed over her head.
She’d never had to police any serious unrest when she was in uniform and thank God because it was horrendous. As she pushed her way towards where she’d seen Luke, she was fighting every moment to stay on her feet, let alone move forward. Bodies hit her one after the next, knocking the wind out of her, frequently pushing her backwards into the column of sweating, furious human flesh behind. Dodging fists, she fought claustrophobia, understanding viscerally now how people got trampled, how if you got knocked down, you might never get back up through the stamping, kicking feet, the thicket of legs, the press of constantly jostling bodies. ‘Luke,’ she shouted pointlessly, the word lost even before it reached the man being pushed back against her by a pair of women shoving each other.
Glancing back, she saw Samir three or four people behind her. He saw her, too, and tried to push forward but a man in front turned in outrage. ‘Where’re you going, fucking Paki!’
Where was Luke? She had to find him. She’d lost track of the man he’d hit with the sign – after he’d reeled away, he’d vanished into the crowd. What if Luke had really hurt him? Blinded him? Sick to her stomach, she pushed on, fearing for her own eyes, trying to shield them and getting her elbow in the snarling face of one of the skinheads. ‘The fuck …?’ he shouted, breath hot.
She pushed him aside. ‘Fuck off! Luke!’
A yell of pain from the far side of the crowd, near the low front walls of the facing terrace – a man’s yell. It sounded like her brother – shit, had the other side retaliated? She plunged on, forced more or less over the back of a man who’d stumbled in front of her. On the far side, a collective gasp went up.
‘Man down! Man down here!’
Please, Robin was praying now, please don’t let it be him. Pushing again, she was hit in the face by the corner of a plywood sign and was stunned by the pain above her eye. She opened it to find herself half-blind and in that terrifying moment, she caught sight of a black girl who looked like Asha, her face stretched in horror. Robin blinked, vision smeared and chequering: the girl was gone. She got her hand to her face, saw blood.
People were throwing things now, plastic bott
les and cans spinning through the air overhead. She pressed on towards the source of the shout. How could it be so hard to cross a residential street? It was twenty feet wide.
But finally more light, a little more space, and then, as if she’d been spat from the mouth of an enormous beast, she reached the far side. She braced her hands on her knees and took a shuddering breath. Gingerly she touched her face and felt a cut under her eyebrow. She pressed her cuff against it to stop the blood then stood straight.
The man was lying half on the pavement, half up the short length of someone’s front path, and it wasn’t Luke, thank God – thank God – but one of the storm troopers, a bloody gash on the crown of his shaven scalp.
A helmeted officer knelt over him. ‘Unconscious,’ he yelled, then pointed at her face.
‘Just cut.’ She turned back to the crowd, trying to focus her good eye on the faces that flashed in front of her then disappeared. Where was he?
In spots here and there, the uniforms had started to get some traction. The four in the middle had found each other again and formed a line to push the students back, making the gap between the two factions wide enough in places that flailing punches missed.
A sudden burst of activity on the side that had belonged to Tyrell’s lot then another shout of pain. Robin craned, but then, as quickly as it had started, the fight was over. Word rolled through the crowd, people who moments before had looked like they’d fight to the death scattering as if the street had filled with toxic gas.
She wiped her eye and looked but soon wished she hadn’t.
Lying on the tarmac was an officer in riot gear. Standing over him was Lennie.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Her face was white with shock. ‘He’s hurt, Mum – he’s really hurt.’
Robin knelt on the tarmac, her eyes going immediately to the man’s groin, where blood was spreading across his assault suit. The material was slashed – a knife had been angled in over the top of his thigh guard, driven hard enough to plunge deep into the flesh underneath. She knew where the wound was but she couldn’t see it, there was too much blood. It was throbbing – pulsing: the knife had caught an artery.
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