by Ian Mayfield
‘Morning,’ they said, faking brightness.
‘Could have another go at the inventory from her room,’ Marie said, after he’d gone by.
Kim exhaled through pursed lips. ‘Yeah, s’pose. Summink we’ve missed.’ She reached for the list. Marie brought her chair round and looked over Kim’s shoulder. They read in silence for a few minutes.
‘Fuck all,’ Marie said eventually. ‘Nothing you wouldn’t expect in any kid’s room her age.’
‘Hang on a minute.’ Kim was flicking backwards and forwards through the stapled sheets. ‘Here. Don’t you think this is weird?’
She pointed. Marie squinted at her own appalling handwriting. ‘“Newspapers”,’ she read. ‘“Pile of old Daily Telegraphs”. Is that weird? Tory household if ever I was in one.’
‘Did you see the room?’ Kim said. ‘Not a great reader, our Debs. Hardly a book in sight, apart from one or two school textbooks she must’ve never gave back. So what’s she want with old newspapers?’
‘Maybe she did some redecorating.’
‘She’s still got My Little Pony wallpaper.’
‘Press cuttings then. For a project or something.’
‘Maybe.’ Kim wavered, then a new resolve slipped into her eyes. ‘There were cuttings taken out of one or two, I’m sure.’
‘Gut feeling?’
She thought for a moment. ‘First thing we should do, go back to the house and get them papers; then we can find out... Library’ll have a back file, won’t they?’
‘Just look online.’
‘Hard copy. Online edition ain’t gonna tell us what she cut out.’
‘Long shot,’ Marie said.
‘Got any other ideas?’
‘Finish my cereal first.’ She dipped into it. By now it was soggy.
They returned to their notes and their breakfast.
‘Hey,’ Marie said suddenly. ‘There’s a really peculiar one here. What’s this, “thrall”? Can you read that?’ She pushed the diary across, finger on the page.
‘Looks like “thrall”,’ Kim agreed. ‘Her writing ain’t that desperate. Looks like there was a number, but it’s been scribbled out.’ She held it up to the light and shook her head. ‘Pretty thoroughly and all.’
‘Like she didn’t want anybody to be able to read it.’
‘Maybe Forensic can do summink.’ Kim was still squinting at it.
‘What does thrall mean anyway?’
‘You say Thrall?’
They turned. Gary Harper was standing behind them, plate of eggs and bacon in hand, a look of keen interest directed at the diary.
Kim said, ‘You know what this is?’
‘Not a what,’ Gary said, ‘so much as a who. Name came up in connection with a job I worked a few years back. Your Sandra Jones was on the investigation as well, I seem to recall.’
‘And?’
‘They’re an extremist neo-Nazi group.’ He saw Kim’s expression and added, ‘That’s to say extremist even by those standards. It’s an acronym: stands for - let me think – something something Racial Action.’
Marie wrinkled her nose. ‘See what you mean,’ she said. ‘How were they involved?’
Gary hesitated. ‘Young black guy knifed and kicked to death outside his parents’ house in Battersea. Word on the street was this Thrall lot did the deed, but the one bloke we collared was peripheral at best. He never put his hands up to it, never named names, case was about as watertight as a rusty bucket, and the jury acquitted.’
There was a long silence.
‘Doesn’t make Debbie look too good, does it?’ Marie tapped the name on the page.
‘Your guv’nor should know about this.’ Gary glanced ruefully down at his breakfast. ‘Better get Gloria to stick this on a warming plate. Finish your Weetabix and let’s go.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Kim said, hand on his arm. Beside her, Marie saw it trembling. ‘What else can you remember?’
‘Kim?’
‘This was Mark Watkins, right?’
‘You remember it?’ Gary sounded surprised.
‘I’m black,’ she retorted with sudden vehemence. ‘Course I fucking remember it, and Carruth. The slag what got off.’ She was shaking all over now. ‘And I tell you another thing I remember. Mark Watkins was tarred and feathered.’
‘Oh...’ Gary said quietly.
Marie asked, ‘What’s tarred and - ’
‘Summink else they used to do to black men in the American South,’ Kim cut her off. ‘The ones they weren’t putting burning crosses outside their houses. Gary,’ she said, after pausing for some deep breaths, ‘you’re brilliant. I love you.’
He looked at her. She was ashen-faced, but there was a glint in her eye. He picked up the mood shift and grinned. ‘That mean you’re buying me lunch?’
‘If this ain’t a coincidence,’ Kim said, grabbing the diary, leaping up and taking his arm, ‘I’ll get you a seat at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Come on.’
Slowly, Larissa Stephenson raised a hand. A polite, not diffident hand.
Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Summerfield regarded her with a mixture of approval and weariness. So many new aides started out timid as mice, so afraid even to twitch that they’d sit on what might - sometimes, not often - be a vital contribution. Not this one, though. Trouble was, this one was Special Crime and that, in his estimation, meant lippy cows. Summerfield’s view of women in the police was not an emancipated one. He yearned for the not so long gone days when he’d been able to reach for a WPC to deal with a child, or a difficult female witness or suspect, or a difficult any kind of witness or suspect. Now they’d even dropped the W from WPC and what was that all about? Equality? That was a laugh. Catch a woman kicking in the door of a crack house or bringing down a scrote with a running tackle; real policework. Support. Making the tea. That, as far as Summerfield was concerned, was a plonk’s place, not shuffling in as a CID bloody aide, if you please. The addition of this one meant Special Crime now had eight of the bitches. He wouldn’t mind except that they had a tendency to nick investigations right when they got interesting, and for some god-unknown reason Heighway almost always went along with it. As a result, Special Crime weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms at the CID morning briefing and generally stood at the back out of glaring range.
He picked her out in the shadows and said, ‘Yes, constable?’
‘Doesn’t make sense, sir.’
Summerfield resisted the temptation to make a crushing remark, largely because of DI Schneider’s presence. Special Crime usually sent two people to the briefing, one being the on-call officer from the previous night and the other either Schneider or DCI Beadle. He was relieved Beadle wasn’t there but on the other hand, Zoltan Schneider had a way with his tongue, when he wished, that was the verbal equivalent of a deep paper cut. With him were Detective Sergeant Wallace and this new plonk. Summerfield had forgotten her name already.
‘Can we enlighten you?’ he asked her, regretting the sarcasm as he sensed Schneider staring at him from behind his glasses.
She stood up straighter and his gaze shifted automatically to her bust. Bit young for him, this one, but a nice pair of tits on it. She said, ‘Chomba lives on the other side of the estate, right?’
‘So we’re told.’
‘And he was in his flat when it was raided five minutes after the exchange?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘That’s what I can’t understand, sir. We’re charging him with dealing based on what’s on the CCTV. I’ve done car patrols on Shrublands, so I reckon with these timings he could just about’ve made it if he was driving, but he’d’ve had to go past the cameras. How come they didn’t see him?’ She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t add up.’
‘I don’t know, constable,’ Summerfield said. ‘Maybe the clock’s off. There was crack found in his rubbish bin is all I’m saying. As we speak, minds greater than yours are pondering this same mystery. If they resolve it, I’ll make sure you’re among the first
to know.’
For a moment, as her eyes flicked downwards, he thought he’d achieved the demolition without Schneider’s intervention. But she recovered quickly. She looked him in the eye, said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and looked down at her notes, indicating she’d said her piece.
Schneider remained impassive, but Summerfield was annoyed to catch the surreptitious wink shot to the young plonk by DS Wallace. An annoyance dwarfed by the horrid realisation that the low buzz of conversation among the assembled detectives had been triggered by her contribution. Coppers don’t exactly appreciate it when one of their own gives their favoured suspect a free alibi, but neither do they want a case that won’t stand up in court.
Hardly daring to look, he cast his eye towards the back of the room, where Zoltan Schneider stood smiling humourlessly at him.
‘Sorry if I spoke out of turn in there, sir,’ Lucky said to Zoltan as they waited for the lift.
The DI tilted his head. ‘Out of turn, Larissa?’
‘CID briefing’s like an up-market version of parade, am I right?’ She looked away. ‘It’s not meant to be a debating society. I should’ve realised.’
‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘If we didn’t say what we thought, we’d never get anywhere.’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I think Mr Summerfield will have taken your remarks on board.’
Lucky, not reassured, gulped.
‘Don’t worry.’ The hand on her shoulder belonged to Detective Sergeant Helen Wallace. ‘What Zoltan’s trying to say, and won’t because he’s a DI, is sod Summerfield. You did well.’
They exchanged grins. ‘I didn’t hear that,’ Zoltan said.
Lucky blinked, glancing uncomfortably from one to the other. She was beginning to feel overdressed. The man who’d turned out to be her DI was kitted out more like a college lecturer, with a hairdo to match. Thick, black and unruly, with strands of it jutting out in all directions like solar prominences, the hair went some way towards cushioning the shock of the open-necked blue and grey cotton shirt, brown corduroys and Hush Puppies he wore, but not far. He was small for a copper, just clearing five eight in her estimation, and slight of build. Zoltan Schneider didn’t even look like a policeman, much less an inspector. With most detectives, however outlandish they looked, Lucky had always just about been able to picture them back in uniform. Not this one.
But the authority he sacrificed by his appearance was more than made up for by the man himself. He had a way of looking through his thick glasses, a dry, sardonic way with words, and a strange half-smile through his wiry beard that made Lucky unsure whether he was laughing with or at her. The minimal research she’d been able to do through the grapevine had revealed his reputation as a brilliant interrogator of suspects. She guessed that to get at all close to him you needed the thickest of skins.
Any idea Lucky might have formed that Zoltan Schneider could only be one of a kind was quickly dispelled. None of the team looked like coppers. For a start, most of them were women. There was only one other man in the room, a tall, rangy individual with a big nose and a set of face that suggested someone had put cold rice pudding in his shoes. He wasn’t wearing a tie either. The women, similarly, seemed to have dressed for comfort or according to personal whim. They were all preoccupied. An anaemic-looking blonde in her thirties sat, headphones in ears, hammering away two-fingered at a computer keyboard as she transcribed an interview. At a corner desk a young black woman had her head down, phone in one hand and flipping through what looked like an archived case file with the other. Two women, one pale and exotic, one small and dumpy with a sharp nosy face, were talking intently; whether about work or not it was hard to tell. Distracted by their entrance, the pale one glanced over and held Lucky’s gaze just long enough to make her uncomfortable.
The woman Zoltan led them over to was short but massive, almost impossibly so even for a copper, her rotund form stretching the material of her dark green dress. She turned at their approach and pushed shut the drawer she’d been rummaging in. As it had during the interview process, her smile brought Lucky up in a more direct way than Zoltan’s sarcasm ever would. Sophia Beadle’s eyes were the purest, deepest blue she’d ever seen that didn’t belong to a baby, but there was nothing babyish about the way the smile stopped before it reached them. Lucky understood, abruptly and unmistakeably, that she, not Zoltan, was the guv’nor.
‘How’d it go?’
‘Fine,’ her DI replied in a laconic way which conveyed that he would tell her more when Lucky wasn’t listening. ‘Made her mark.’
Again the smile. ‘Welcome to the team, Larissa.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘“Guv” will do. We’re pretty informal around here, as you may have gathered.’
Before she could stop herself Lucky blurted out, ‘At Gipsy Hill people called me Lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘’Cause I’m usually the one nearest to a 999 shout five minutes before end of shift.’ She deflated mentally. She’d had a job and a half living the nickname down, and it seemed she wasn’t going to get away with it here either. Oh, well. Handles had a knack of following you around in the Job; she’d merely pre-empted the inevitable.
Reading her discomfiture, Sophia smiled again, this time with real warmth. ‘Well, we’ll put “Larissa” on the duty board for now. If people want to call you something else and you’re OK with it that’s up to you. Right - Helen.’
The DS looked up. ‘Guv?’
‘Anything major on?’
‘I can save the world any time.’
‘Good.’ Sophia indicated Lucky with an open palm. ‘Can you show Larissa the ropes? Introduce everyone, take her through procedures and our current caseload, a guided tour of the office, the building and then hop in a car and whizz round the ground. That should occupy you both for most of the morning, barring a crisis.’
Helen made a face. ‘Some hopes.’ She grinned at Lucky. ‘Come on. This over here’s where the magic happens.’
‘Go back and do a thorough search of that bedroom again,’ Sophia had decreed. ‘Don’t take no for an answer. I’ll think up some excuse for a warrant if necessary, but I want to know what Debbie’s involvement with these people is.’
‘What about Carruth?’
‘Since Sandra is familiar with that case, I’ve put her onto trying to track him down.’ Sophia’s faint frown conveyed that Kim’s disappointment was noted. ‘You two have an in with the Clarkes, so I’d like you to stay on them for now.’
And so Kim and Marie were back at Ballards Way. Andrew Clarke wasn’t there. He’d gone to work ‘to keep occupied’, leaving strict instructions to his wife to ring him if there was any news. ‘Nice. Leave her to do all the worrying,’ had been Marie’s opinion, expressed without too much consideration as to whether Charlotte Clarke was out of earshot. Kim had been careful to persuade Mrs Clarke that they were on her side, and had obtained her acquiescence to the search without difficulty. To their secret relief, she’d declined the offer to bear witness to their actions.
Which was probably just as well. Kim and Marie conducted their new search with a vigour and thoroughness that would have astonished DCI Summerfield. They rummaged again through drawers, cupboards and the wardrobe. They shook out the bedclothes and felt the duvet and the mattress for suspicious lumps. They tapped walls, the ceiling and the window frame looking for concealed niches. Shifting the furniture piece by piece, they checked behind, under and if necessary on top of it. Finally, with the aid of a claw hammer, they turned back the rug and lifted floorboards. There, in a dark, dusty space between the joists, they found what they were looking for.
In an old square biscuit tin was stashed what could have passed as Hitler’s junk mail. There were books and magazines bearing apoplectic titles like White Rage and Manifest Destiny, covers splashed with violent graphic images of fists and flags and marching feet and idealised studies of white male youths. There were badges and booklists and printed lists of web addresses, posters adverti
sing rallies and a talk by a notorious right wing revisionist historian.
There were also a large number of press cuttings.
‘Looks like our Debbie’s a right little Nazi,’ Marie said.
Kim said nothing. She held her teeth clenched as she searched through the tin, handling the contents as though they were crawling with maggots. Suddenly she stopped and pulled something out. It was a small thin red notebook, spiral bound, the sort you could pick up in WH Smith’s for a quid. Kim glanced at it and handed it to Marie.
At first it looked empty. But, a third of the way through, a folded piece of newspaper fell out. The subject of the clipping didn’t surprise them, but two of the three words written in biro along the top margin meant nothing.
THRALL Porter Quaife
They arrived back just as Gary Harper was leaving. Catching sight of them, he looked like the man whose lottery scratchcard is about to make him extremely popular in the pub.
‘Those cuttings from the Torygraph,’ he said, grinning. ‘I think we’ve got something. They’re all - ’
‘We know,’ Marie said, walking straight past. Kim smiled, patted him on the shoulder and followed her.
‘ - to do with the Watkins murder,’ he finished, limply and to himself. ‘Well,’ he added, watching them disappear inside. ‘Thank you, Gary. Not a Cumberland sausage.’
Lucky had lived most of her life in the London Borough of Croydon, and all her working career had been spent at Gipsy Hill just over the boundary in Lambeth, so she already had a good knowledge of the ground the team had to cover. But Helen Wallace used the tour wisely. Like any good copper charged with looking after a new recruit, she showed her the places she’d have call to be familiar with, introduced her to people she would, in one capacity or another, get to know well. They spent time at hostels and sheltered housing, at the council social services department, at a Hindu luncheon club, at the Women’s Centre at Woodside Green, which Lucky had never before had occasion to visit but from where, after wary beginnings, many of the team’s calls and leads now came.