Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Fuck it, Max, I’m telling the truth. I know there’s some dealing goes on down there, charlie and all that, but that’s about it.’

  They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I slowed right down and stared straight into his. But the windows were dirty and I couldn’t tell whether he was bullshitting or not.

  ‘That’s all I know, I swear to you. Look, Max, I’m sorry. I really am. I was just trying to help.’

  I let go of his arm, and managed a brief smile, though God knows what there was to smile about. ‘Well, it’s a brand of help I can do without in the future. And remember, say nothing about seeing me to anyone. OK? Including Elaine Toms.’

  ‘No problem. My lips are sealed.’ He gave me a concerned look. A mate to a mate. ‘Everything’s all right, though, isn’t it, Max?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I told him, turning away. ‘Tickety-fucking-boo. See you around, Johnny.’

  Gallan

  I didn’t have to work that night but with my home life being as non-existent as it was, I decided to stay late in the incident room and catch up on paperwork. Berrin wasn’t so keen and took off bang on five-thirty, something I duly noted. There was an all-units out on the car I’d spotted with the bullet holes in it. Two of the station’s uniforms had stopped it and there’d been an altercation with the driver, who’d fled the scene on foot, having assaulted and injured both officers. Suspected bloodstains had been found in the vehicle, which was registered in the name of Max Iversson, an ex-soldier with no previous record, who matched witness descriptions of the driver. Thankfully, it was nothing to do with me any more, but I was pleased that my observance had paid off, even if the uniforms who’d done the stopping and who were now off sick probably weren’t.

  It was ten to nine when I left the station. I went to a cheap Italian off Upper Street I occasionally frequent and had a bowl of pasta and some garlic bread, washed down with a couple of welcome bottles of Peroni now that I was off duty. I suppose you could say it was a lonely way to spend a Friday evening, and you’d be right, it was, but I was beginning to get used to it. This time barely a year ago, it had all been a lot different. I’d been a DI at another station south of the river, heading up through the ranks in the direction of the DCI slot, with three commendations under my belt. Crime down there was bad, the hours were tough … Paradise it wasn’t. But it wasn’t a bad life and, unlike a lot of my colleagues, I still had a stable domestic situation. A wife of fifteen years, an eleven-year-old daughter, a decent house in an area where the weekly mugging tallies were still in single figures …

  Then, on the night they brought in Troy Farrow, it all changed.

  Troy Farrow was a seventeen-year-old street robber who specialized in making victims of schoolkids my daughter’s age, relieving them of their mobile phones and pocket money, and old ladies, who he liked to pick off on pension day, sometimes breaking a few frail bones in the process. He had nine convictions altogether but had only spent a total of three months inside, so the law didn’t exactly have him shaking in his Nike trainers. He was shouting and cursing and threatening all sorts as the arresting officers booked him in for what was likely to be his tenth conviction: the violent removal of a mobile phone from the ear of a young secretary foolish enough to have been walking down a busy street early evening without keeping her wits about her. Unfortunately for him, the street was under surveillance by officers in plain clothes and he was caught within minutes. I was detailed to interview him, along with a DC, because we were interested in getting information from him regarding the near gang rape of an eleven-year-old by a group who’d also robbed her of her mobile and the bag of sweets she was carrying. We didn’t think Farrow had been involved – it wasn’t his style to molest his victims, and the suspects had been described as being aged between twelve and fourteen – but we were pretty sure he would know who was. There wasn’t much that went on in Farrow’s estate, crime-wise, that he wasn’t aware of, and kids like that would almost certainly have bragged about what they’d done.

  Farrow calmed down as he was taken down to the interview room by two of the arresting officers, with me and the DC following a few yards behind. What happened next is still something of a mystery. As Farrow and the arresting officers turned and entered the room, he turned and said something to one of them that I didn’t quite catch but which I was told later went along the lines of ‘You pussies can’t do nothing with me’. The officer had then made a fatal mistake. He’d let his frustration with the legal system and the cocky criminals who frequented it get the better of him, and had apparently called Farrow ‘a black bastard’, causing a further, much more violent struggle to ensue. We’d hurried into the interview room at just the moment when one of the officers slammed Farrow’s head into the wall. Not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to open a nasty cut across his forehead. ‘Assault! Assault!’ he’d screamed. ‘They’re killing me! Get me a fucking brief! Now!’ The two arresting officers had let go, and we’d helped Farrow, who was handcuffed behind his back, into one of the chairs. ‘Get my brief,’ he’d said, all calm now, blood oozing out of the wound. ‘I want to make a formal complaint. I ain’t saying another word until I’ve seen my brief.’ And he didn’t. Not a word.

  The formal complaint made, all four of us who’d been in the interview room were later questioned by representatives of the Police Complaints Authority, and all of us stuck to the same story: that Troy Farrow had stumbled during the struggle and had accidentally knocked his head against the wall. The arresting officer who Farrow claimed had racially abused him denied the charge but did admit calling him a bastard, and I couldn’t comment on this because I hadn’t heard the exchange. I know that a lot of people would think it was wrong for me not to say what I saw but at the time I thought no lasting harm had been done. Farrow was patched up by the station’s doctor and needed two stitches, and anyway, it was no more than he deserved. Plus, I didn’t want to be the whistleblower. The police get enough flak as it is, and sometimes when you’re a copper it does feel like the whole world’s against you, so you don’t want to be putting the knife into your own side. In the end, I was never going to be the one who ruined a colleague’s career (which is what I would have done) over one second’s stupidity and hotheadedness. I just couldn’t justify it to myself.

  And, at first, it looked like we might have got away with it. I don’t think the people from the PCA believed us but it was our word against that of a known criminal, and we weren’t budging, so eventually they had little choice but to conclude that the incident was accidental, and that Farrow had misheard what the arresting officer had said.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. A couple of months later the second arresting uniform, the one who hadn’t pushed Farrow’s head into the wall, admitted what had happened to a bloke in his local pub after one beer too many, only to find out afterwards that the bloke was a local investigative journalist, doing an exposé of racism in the Force. With the conversation recorded, the story appeared two days later in the local paper, and the case was suddenly reopened. I found the local media and even London Tonight parked on my doorstep, asking me if I was a liar and a racist. I might occasionally be the one, but I’m definitely not the other. The whole thing was a nightmare and, although my boss, DCI Renham, a guy I’d worked for for getting close to five years, fought to keep me in my position, the tide of attention was overwhelming, and in the end, with the story refusing to go away, the Brass were forced to act. Both arresting officers lost their jobs; the DC, with me, was put back in uniform; and I was demoted to DC.

  It was a shameful episode, the whole thing, and for a long time I found it difficult to come to terms with. You see, in my eyes, I hadn’t done a lot wrong. I’d made a mistake but I thought the punishment far outweighed the crime. I took it out on my wife, made life difficult for her, and maybe things between us hadn’t been quite as strong as I’d thought, because three months later, after one argument too many, we separated. It turned out she’d been having an affair. I
suppose this would have been understandable were it not for the fact that the other man happened to be the intrepid journalist who’d broken the story in the first place. The cheeky bastard had gone round to interview her about what effect the story was having on her and the family, and clearly it was having quite a big one because somehow, not long afterwards, maybe even that day, they’d ended up in the sack.

  What do you do in that sort of situation? What can you do? Nothing except pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and remember that what goes around comes around. There is justice in this world, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long time before it bothers to show itself. I had no choice but to cling to that fact as I gathered up my possessions, put in for a transfer, and headed north of the river for the first time in my career, ending up at probably the most controversial station in the entire Met, a place still haunted by the betrayal of one of its most senior detectives.

  DS Dennis Milne was without doubt Britain’s most corrupt police officer: a valued and long-standing member of CID by day, a hired killer with God knows how many corpses to his credit by night. His shadow still hung over the station like a noxious cloud, even though it had been close to two years since his grim secret had been uncovered and he’d disappeared into thin air. It didn’t matter. Time would be a slow healer here, and there were a number in CID, including DCI Knox, who’d be forever tainted by their long association with the station’s most infamous son. Mud sticks, and maybe that was why I’d settled in so easily there.

  Since my arrival, I’d rented myself a half-decent flat in Tufnell Park, and had managed to pull myself back up to the rank of detective sergeant. A far cry from the old days, and I was still waiting for justice (my ex and the journalist were now shacked up together and my daughter even claimed that she quite liked him), but things could always have been worse. I still had a job and, against all the odds, I still got something out of it.

  I left the restaurant at five past ten and headed round the corner to the Roving Wolf, a pub used by the station’s CID, to see if there was anyone in there. It was busy, but I spotted a couple of DCs I knew vaguely standing near the bar and joined them for a couple of pints. They were both interested in how the Matthews case was going but I couldn’t tell them a lot. Slowly was the word that about best described it. Conversation drifted on to other things and I left them at eleven, wandering down onto Upper Street in search of that elusive late-night creature, the black cab.

  Upper Street was buzzing as usual, its constant stream of pavement cafés and trendy bistros bustling with custom as people of all ages, and pretty much every race under the sun, took advantage of the balmy evening. Strains of jazz, mamba, flamenco and half a dozen other musical styles drifted out of the open doors and windows of a dozen different establishments, giving the place a pleasant, continental feel. It almost felt like being on holiday and, for one who’d travelled up Upper Street a few times back in the 1980s, the transformation was incredible. Once a barren, dark place of nasty drinking hovels and little else where only the adventurous and the foolish came after dark, it had now become Islington’s version of Paris’s Left Bank. If you weren’t careful, you might even forget to watch your back.

  Incredibly, I managed to hail a cab near Islington Green after only five minutes, which had to be some sort of record for that time of night. I thought about heading home but for some reason I wasn’t that tired. Instead, I asked the driver to take me to the Arcadia nightclub. He gave me a funny look in the mirror but did as he was told and we made our way in silence up to the Highbury Corner roundabout, and then left onto the less continental and more menacing Holloway Road. I was hoping to catch Roy Fowler in residence and collar him for a few minutes since I felt confident that if he didn’t have anything to hide, he’d return there sooner rather than later. If you’re in the nightclub business, you don’t trust other people to look after your investment for too long, not if you want anything left at the end of it.

  Four hundred yards up the Holloway Road, just past the Liverpool Road turning, the traffic slowed right down as a large group of maybe twenty-five or thirty people standing outside a pub suddenly spilled out into the road. Seconds later there were shouts and the sound of glass smashing, and a group of five of them split off from the rest in what looked like a wild dance. Others ran over to pile in and the whole scrum of them lumbered into the middle of the road, breaking apart and re-forming as half a dozen individual battles were fought, oblivious to the cars driving by. A bottle sailed lazily through the air, bouncing off the roof of the vehicle in front of us before ending up unbroken in the bus lane on the other side of the street.

  ‘Fucking kids,’ said the taxi driver in a voice that was half-snarl, half-sigh, as the group, most of whom looked no more than twenty, swirled back towards the pavement. One of them went down, putting up his arms in a vain effort to protect himself as he disappeared beneath a rapid-fire welter of kicks from at least three others. A girl screamed something unintelligible and rushed out of the watching crowd to intervene, wading into the kickers, handbag aloft. The one on the ground, sensing an opportunity, jumped to his feet and got out of the firing line. He was holding his head and bleeding from the nose.

  The taxi driver accelerated and we left them behind to their fighting. ‘Fucking kids,’ he said again. ‘They get worse and worse.’ I nodded and mumbled something in reply, thinking that that was the thing with London. One minute you were drinking in the ambient atmosphere of a laid-back summer evening, the next you’d stepped unwittingly into an ugly battlezone. I suppose that’s why some people like it so much. The variety.

  There was a long queue of revellers, mainly under-twenty-fives, snaking back along the street from the entrance to the Arcadia. I got the cab to stop directly outside, paid the driver in full, and tipped him a quid. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said, with a wave, as he drove off. Probably about ten years too late for that, I thought, but you never knew.

  I walked to the head of the queue where a group of four male and one female door staff were frisking the waiting punters. One of them turned to me as I approached and gave me the same sort of funny look the cab driver had, like what on earth was a bloke in his mid-thirties in a suit he looked like he’d been wearing all day doing coming to a trendy joint such as this. ‘Yeah?’ he said, by way of greeting.

  I produced my warrant card and thrust it in his face. ‘Police. I’m here to see Mr Fowler.’ I was getting déjà vu now.

  He inspected the card, then looked back at me. ‘I don’t think he’s here tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Miss Toms’ll do,’ I said, and walked past him.

  There was a line of four further doormen in the foyer just inside the main entrance and I walked past them, showed my warrant card to a very thin young lady with big hair at the desk, and asked her to phone up to Fowler. She reiterated what the doorman had said about him not being in, but I insisted. She let the phone in his office ring for about thirty seconds before telling me he wasn’t there. Next she tried Elaine Toms, who apparently was in, but wasn’t answering either. I had no great desire to enter the club proper but it didn’t look like I was going to have any choice. I thanked her and headed through the door in front of me.

  The place was heaving, as befitted a Friday night, with the majority of the youthful crowd packed onto the dance floor. The music was loud, repetitive and boring, the kind my daughter’s thankfully too young to like. At the bar at the far end, I noticed a few older people, mainly men in their thirties, and even one or two in their forties, clustered together against the noise. Some of them were wearing suits, though none of them looked like office workers, and I wondered who they were.

  My eyes drifted along, then stopped dead. Someone looked familiar. I walked nearer, manoeuvring my way through the crowd until I was only about ten yards away. Now I was absolutely sure. No doubt about it. I’d seen his photograph four hours earlier, after it was faxed over by his old regiment. The man in front of me, drinking a bottle of Becks and loo
king like he owned the place, was Max Iversson, the fugitive half the station was looking for.

  Iversson

  There was no way I was queueing to get into Fowler’s place. There must have been two hundred people standing there like lemons while they waited for the doormen to give them the sort of attention my ex-missus used to give me when she’d drunk too many white wine spritzers. But who wants it off some bald bloke with no neck? Not me, that was for sure. I thought about heading straight to the front and saying I was mates with Elaine but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to draw attention to myself, not now I’d suddenly turned into the Fugitive. So I headed round the back, jumped over the locked gate that led into the staff car park, and scanned the deserted rear of the building for any sign of an entrance. It took all of about three seconds for me to spot a window slightly open on the ground floor, about a foot above head height. It wasn’t much of a size but I’m quite a slim lad so I was confident I was going to get in. I hauled myself up with one hand while using the other to flick off the latch and open the window up fully. At the same time, I heard the unmistakable sound of piss hitting urinals and, as I poked my head inside, I saw a row of three blokes staring up at me as they deflated their bladders.

  ‘Evening,’ I said with a ready smile, trying hard to wriggle through the gap. ‘You couldn’t give us a hand, could you?’

  The bloke nearest me, a young student type about twenty or so, looked shocked but nodded anyway, re-deposited himself in his trousers, and grabbed hold of my nearest hand, giving it a feeble tug.

  ‘Come on, boy, put some welly into it. You couldn’t even give yourself a hard-on with a grip like that.’

  He tried again and, after a few grunts and groans of effort, managed to pull me in, with me landing on him a fair bit harder than I think he was expecting. I thanked him as he got unsteadily to his feet and, ignoring the strange looks coming from the other blokes in there, headed out of the door and into the club, recoiling momentarily from the wall of sound that hit me.