by Ian Mayfield
‘Yeah, but like I said, before anyone knew we were after them. Monday, Tuesday, have to check my logs to be sure, which of course I can’t as they’re locked up back at Guildford somewhere.’
‘Afternoon, you said?’
‘Pretty sure it was the Tuesday afternoon, thinking about it.’ The kettle boiled and switched itself off and Lee set about pouring water on their tea bags. ‘Mid-afternoon. Round about school chucking-out time.’
Zoltan listened to Anne’s voice on the other end of the line and with his free hand, pulled a notepad towards him and scribbled very precise instructions in what he hoped was a legible fashion. Spotting Jasmin looking more or less in his direction, he beckoned her over and handed her the paper. She read it, nodded, went back to her desk and picked up the phone.
Hanging up, Zoltan immediately lifted the receiver again. Sophia was still at Lewisham so he dialled her mobile number from memory. She waited while he relayed what Anne had told him. After a pregnant silence she said, ‘Today just gets better. So if this Chivers is right, which I hope to God he isn’t, he’s just given Porter and Quaife an alibi for the Bentons?’
‘If the day and time are right, no way they could have got from Dorking to Croydon in time to transfer to a van and get over to Chapel View,’ Zoltan said.
‘No.’ There was another long pause. ‘So if not them, who in hell did this?’
‘I have a feeling you’re thinking the same thing I am.’
‘Probably,’ Sophia sighed. ‘And under the circumstances the first thing we need to do, if Jasmin can confirm the timeline, is re-arrest Debbie Clarke.’
‘That also,’ Zoltan said drily, ‘I was thinking.’
An hour later, Jasmin got off the phone with the DC at Guildford who’d been yanked from whatever it was he’d been doing to review the recordings from the dashboard and rear window cameras of the traffic patrol car driven by PC 272 Chivers during the late shift of the Tuesday in question. The DC had confirmed that a stop of a dark blue Vauxhall Astra had been conducted that afternoon, that the index number visible in the video matched Quaife’s, and that as far as he could tell, the two men who could be seen in the front seats answered the descriptions of Michael Quaife and Edward Porter. According to the time stamp on the video, the stop had commenced at 3.01 p.m. and concluded at 3.07, around the same time that Debbie Clarke had arrived back at the Bentons’ house with Robin.
At eleven o’clock that morning, nine tall men in their early twenties lined up behind a one way glass screen at Gipsy Hill police station. On the other side of the glass, accompanied by a sergeant, Miranda Beckett walked slowly back and forth along the line. After much deliberation she identified man number three, Michael Robert Prosser a.k.a. Bayliss, as one of the youths who’d raped, sexually assaulted and robbed her on that Sunday night long ago.
With Zoltan Schneider in the next room were Mrs Beckett’s counsellor, a grey-haired New Zealander called Anne Davies, and Lucky, whom DCI Summerfield had given special permission to attend. When Zoltan had finished taking Mrs Beckett’s statement, the three women escaped without him to the restaurant over the road. No-one but themselves ever knew what was said there.
Michael Prosser was driven back to Croydon and formally charged with the rapes of Miranda Beckett, née Hargreaves, and Larissa Stephenson. As possible further charges were pending in the cases of Denise Cole, Lisa Harkness, Violet McMinn and two other unsolved sexual assaults, Prosser was taken at once before the magistrates and remanded in custody for a week.
Zoltan was in no hurry. Even if one investigation seemed to be going pear-shaped, a result in another one, on the same day, wasn’t to be begrudged.
As soon as the all clear had been given at 289 Ladywell Road, Helen Wallace, Jeff Wetherby, Marie Kirtland and half a dozen bobbies off the early turn at Lewisham had piled in. They’d found Malcolm Kavanagh and his girlfriend in an upstairs bedroom. In one of the downstairs rooms, the one Quaife had been occupying, they found a large Union flag and an army kitbag full of, among other things, fascist literature, some of which Marie had seen copies of before. Kavanagh confirmed that Quaife was booked to accompany the band to Germany and had moved in about a month ago to make things easier. He professed ignorance of the fact that his housemate was on parole and subject to travel restriction, and said he knew he was ‘partial to the odd Heil Hitler’. Asked about Edward Porter, he simply looked blank.
A side pocket of the kitbag contained an iPhone on which was very little of interest apart from some texts, received at various times over the last ten days from an unknown number, suggesting where Quaife might be able to find Philip Meredith, Billy Scofield and Jayne Mansfield. At the bottom of the wardrobe, Marie found a plastic bag from B&Q containing a hammer and an opened box of long nails. There was also a receipt showing that these items, together with three metres of timber and two cans of white spirit, had been purchased with a credit card, the last four digits of which did not match the one in Quaife’s wallet.
The other downstairs room was full of band equipment and amplifiers. Behind a stack of these they found, propped up in a corner, a man. The long matted hair led one of the uniforms to suggest that he must be a homeless guy who’d found a good place to doss and had then popped his clogs. The first two detectives to enter the room, Helen and Jeff, nixed that theory by pointing out the large knife-induced hole over the man’s heart, but it was the third, Marie, who took one look at the Bob Marley tattoo on his left forearm and confirmed that Philip Meredith had finally turned up again.
By noon, a crowd of nearly a hundred neo-Nazis had gathered outside Lewisham police station with placards and chants, accusing the police into any news microphone pointed in their direction of murdering a hero and a patriot. All the police would say in reply was that an official investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission was under way.
The news from Croydon University Hospital that Robin Benton had undergone a first successful skin graft operation received a mention at the end of the local lunchtime bulletin.
At one-thirty p.m., officers of the British Transport Police at St Pancras International responded to a report that a man answering Edward Porter’s description had booked a ticket on a Eurostar service to Brussels. They boarded the train, but the seat was empty and a thorough search revealed nothing. The train was allowed to depart on time.
By half past four, tension between the protesting neo-Nazis and more recently arrived counter-demonstrators had risen to an ugly pitch. Watching television crews somehow failed to record the first move, but suddenly missiles were being thrown and sections of the crowd were attempting to make rushes at each other. For a long few minutes, the hundred and fifty riot shielded coppers keeping the two sides apart were in danger of caving. The chief superintendent appeared on the steps of the police station with a loudhailer and appealed for calm. Just as abruptly, the counter-demonstrators withdrew behind the cordon. It took another three hours, but eventually the neo-Nazis realised their enemies weren’t going to play and dispersed, leaving a dozen diehards to keep vigil at the foot of the station steps. Encouraged by members of Mark Watkins’s family, Grace Carmichael among them, the counter-protesters began in their turn to go home, drifting off in the opposite direction down streets full of strobing blue lights and the red glint of the evening sun on helmet visors.
When a police officer shoots a suspect dead, it is proper that a rigorous investigation should ensue. Citizens of a civilised society enjoy the basic right not to be shot by police officers, so when it happens it follows that society demands clear and thorough reassurance that the deed was necessary in the interest of public safety. It is in this same interest that a cop, though his gun may be burning a hole in its holster, must be mindful of the consequences of pulling the trigger.
In Britain, whose police service is one of the few in the world that does not routinely arm its officers, the procedures that swing into motion following a fatal shooting border on the obsessive. The officers concern
ed, along with any of their colleagues who might have had the remotest sniff of the incident, are hauled in and questioned about events until they can picture them with their eyes closed. The actions of the dead suspect, aggressive and life-threatening though they might have been, are cruelly scrutinised for alternative interpretations. The remotest possibility that lethal force might not have been necessary is brought into the open and left there until its last remnant of plausibility is gone. However murderous the suspect’s character or behaviour, it is the police who have taken a life; the officers involved who must answer first for their actions. Any of them who might have passed off lightly the discharging of a firearm will come away from this inquisition with such illusions rudely disrupted.
These, among numerous others, were the reasons why Sophia Beadle’s top priority had to wait until the evening. She made it her business to be the one personally to inform Luke Benton of what had happened, but because she’d been present at the death of Michael Quaife she, along with every other member of the team who’d been in Lewisham - even those at the back of the house who’d seen nothing - had been put through the mill by detectives from Professional Standards. Even Sophia’s written, signed, witnessed statement had been examined with a fine-toothed comb. She was beginning to appreciate the gruesome canteen talk there’d been of armed operations being routinely videoed, cameras mounted on guns or lapels, just to leave no room for question.
Luke must have watched her park, for he opened the front door as she walked up the path. He wore a nervous smile and an expression in his eyes she couldn’t for the moment define. He led the way through to the living room, where a short, cheerful woman in her fifties sat knitting in a chair by the fireplace. She beamed a greeting. Luke introduced her as Nick’s mother. She stood and shook Sophia’s hand. ‘You’ll be wanting to talk alone,’ she said, and excused herself.
‘The Lynotts’ve said they’ll put me up as long as I need,’ Luke said when she’d gone. ‘They’re being really great.’
‘No Nick today?’ Sophia smiled.
‘Upstairs revising,’ Luke said. ‘Exam tomorrow.’
‘Of course. That time of year.’ Sophia stopped short of bringing her eldest’s first year exams into the conversation. ‘How are you managing with yours?’
‘Next week, mine start. I’ll do ‘em, but God knows what grades I’ll get. Doesn’t seem that important.’ He changed the subject, avoiding her eyes. ‘Nick’s dad’s handling the probate for me. Way above my head, all that. He reckons the insurance should be more than enough for us to buy our own place. Me and my brother, I mean, when he gets out of hospital.’
Sophia nodded, sensing the coming shadow Luke didn’t want to acknowledge. Robin, when and if he came home, would need constant care.
Luke said, as if reading her mind, ‘Not something I really want to think about, right now.’
‘You don’t expect to be saddled with all this, at your age.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he said, with sudden bitterness.
He seemed to want to talk about today, but Mrs Lynott came in with tea and biscuits. She fussed around them for a few minutes before withdrawing again. Luke sat anxiously on the edge of his chair.
‘I saw what happened on the telly,’ he said.
Sophia nodded. ‘I gathered you might have.’
‘Is it true? What those fascists are saying?’
‘That Quaife was killed in cold blood?’
‘Some bloke on the news, s’posed to be an eyewitness, said they shot him in the back as he was running away.’
‘Luke,’ Sophia said, ‘the incident’s still under investigation.’
‘Sub judice?’
‘In a manner of speaking. I was directly involved, so officially I can’t say much at the moment.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘and unofficially?’
‘Unofficially,’ Sophia said with an edge to her voice, ‘you deserve the truth. Porter and Quaife, while they have both committed some serious crimes and fully justify the amount of manpower that’s gone into trying to apprehend them…’
Luke frowned, seeming to sense that she was about to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. ‘What?’
‘They didn’t kill your mother.’
An almost luminous flash of anger crossed Luke’s face, superseded by a waxlike blankness.
‘Technically, no, I know that,’ he said after a long silence. ‘But Debbie… they didn’t give her a choice.’
‘Luke,’ Sophia said, kindly but firmly, and told him about the alibi. She also told him about the B&Q receipt they’d found at the Ladywell Road house, the credit card that had been used traced to a stockbroker who’d reported it lost a month ago after a visit to the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, known to be one of Philip Meredith’s preferred panhandling haunts. She told him about Helen Wallace and Jeff Wetherby’s conversation that afternoon with Corin Rice-Newman, live-in boyfriend of Grace Carmichael and sometime solicitor providing legal guidance to the Watkins campaign. About how Rice-Newman had admitted exploiting his contacts with other law firms to give Meredith inside information on Michael Quaife and his connection to Edward Porter and Thrall. How the last time he’d seen him was right before meeting Grace for lunch a couple of weekends ago, when Meredith had abruptly broken off their conversation and run away as if the hounds of hell were after him.
She told him about the working theory she, Zoltan and the team had put together, their best educated guess based on what they knew for sure; about how Meredith and his cronies had decided that if they couldn’t bring Porter and Quaife to justice for Mark Watkins, they’d create something they could bring them to justice for. How Debbie’s passionate teenage rhetoric had perhaps inspired them, had given one of them, Billy or Jayne or most likely Philip Meredith, the idea to use her as a stooge. How it had blinded them to the reality that their chosen targets were the very last people they ought to fuck with. It was a blindness soon lifted by the rapidity with which Porter had identified them and tracked them down to the Paragon Road squat, later underlined by the message the attempted murder of Nina Tyminski had sent.
‘And Debbie knew about this?’ Luke half-whispered.
‘She was complicit,’ Sophia said. ‘We’ve interviewed her again. She still denies she knew the full extent of what Meredith and his crew were planning. She’s sticking to her original story that she was supposed to phone your mum to warn her to get out. But she was well aware that Porter and Quaife were being set up.’
‘And they got Meredith back for it? It was actually them who killed him and not somebody else again?’
Sophia studied him thoughtfully for a few moments before answering. Natural, perhaps, that Luke should want Porter and Quaife to be guilty of something, even if it wasn’t his mother’s murder. How must he feel now that he knew it was them who’d meted out retribution to her true killer? She said, ‘Whether Meredith didn’t know where Quaife lived and it was just a coincidence that he’d arranged to meet Mr Rice-Newman in Ladywell Road, or whether he actually was stupid enough to try to stake him out, we’ll probably never know. From the CCTV, what it looks like happened is that Quaife saw them talking, almost immediately saw Grace and her sister on the other side of the street, assumed the two must be connected and made the threat. We know Meredith managed to give him the slip, because we interviewed him at Charing Cross police station the following day, but of course they did eventually catch up with him again.’ She chose to leave out the part about the large patch of dried blood in the backyard of 289 Ladywell Road, where sometime last week, according to the ME’s initial guesstimate, Philip Meredith had presumably met his end in the same way that it had been intended Nina would.
‘Jesus,’ Luke said, his eyes flicking to the doorway, perhaps in fear that Mrs Lynott, who wouldn’t approve of his blasphemy, might be earwigging. ‘Debbie’s lucky they didn’t do her in and all.’
Yes, Debbie Clarke was ironically fortunate, Sophia thought, to have a former neo-Nazi for a dad.
A father who had successfully though possibly in ignorance interceded for his daughter’s life and safety. Anglo-Saxon blood, as far as Edward Porter was concerned, apparently was thicker than water.
‘What’s going to happen to her?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ Sophia told him. ‘The mastermind of all this, the man we probably would have charged with your mother’s murder, being out of the picture, it will depend on what Scofield and Mansfield have to say when we find them.’
‘If you find them.’
‘We will,’ she smiled, hoping Luke was more reassured than she felt. ‘Being the kind of people they are, they will have gone to ground, but they’ll turn up soon enough. The lifestyle they lead, they cross paths with the law quite regularly. And since every police station in the country now has a description of them, it’s really just a matter of time.’
Luke said, as if in answer to Sophia’s earlier wondering, ‘I don’t know how to feel about this. I just wish… shit, I don’t know what I wish.’
Except for my mum to still be alive, was the unspoken qualifier they both knew hung in the air.
‘I can’t tell you how to feel, Luke,’ Sophia said.
‘You know what I wish?’ he cut across whatever else she might have been about to add. ‘I wish you’d tell me he fucking deserved it. To get shot. That those Nazis are wrong.’
Sophia considered. ‘I can tell you what I told you before,’ she said. ‘That trained firearms officers shot Quaife while he was trying to evade arrest, believing him to be a danger to colleagues and to the public.’
‘But you were there! Can’t you give me anything extra?’
‘Quaife’s dead, Luke,’ she said softly. ‘Are the circumstances important?’
‘They’re holding him up as a fucking martyr!’ he shouted, flinging a finger at the blank screen of the TV. ‘By the time the investigation’s finished the truth won’t matter. They’ll’ve milked this for all it’s worth.’ He stood up, shaking with impotent anger. ‘Some fucking hero! What about me? What about my family? What about Mark? We’re the victims, thanks to the likes of fucking Quaife. We matter. That excrement just got what was coming to him.’