Persons of Interest: A DC Smith Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  It was the most that he had ever heard her say, and Waters thought it over before he responded.

  ‘I thought you came from a rural backwater. Is all that going on in Longmarsh?’

  ‘It’s going on everywhere. But that’s where I worked – it’s not where I’m from.’

  He sensed then a tiny opening, and through it had a glimpse of an unexplored country – her past which he somehow knew was very different to his own. There was a temptation to take a step forward into it, to ask her, just to see how much she would reveal, but his courage failed him. He was a little afraid of her.

  ‘So, you really do think this is a waste of time?’

  She drank at least half of the lemonade in one go and put down the glass.

  ‘Not totally, from DC’s point of view. He is thinking about the team, so it’s useful to get you and me out together – you’re still new to this but you know the city a bit, I’m not but I don’t. He wants us to do some bonding.’

  She put her hand on his thigh and squeezed, but it was only mischief-making and she knew that the tattooed man was watching her again.

  She said, ‘Have we bonded a bit?’

  When she took her hand away, the place that she had touched was still warm.

  ‘I expect so. But as part of the operation, you think this is pointless?’

  ‘You’re very serious about all this, aren’t you? You have to able to chill out. You’ve got a girlfriend, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How does she feel about this sort of thing, you and me sitting here? Is she OK with it? Would she be, if she walked in now with some friends?’

  Waters looked away from her, knowing that he did not want her to see his eyes as he answered.

  ‘Yes. She understands the job, what I have to do. We give each other some space.’

  Serena Butler paused, and then said quietly, ‘Oh dear.’

  He wanted to ask why she said that but did not.

  After another short silence, she said, ‘As far as your question goes, yes, this is pretty much a waste of time. Operationally, DC has plonked us in front of a DVD so that he and Murray can go and talk to people who know stuff. We’ll find out about some of it tomorrow. In the meantime,’ raising and emptying the glass, ‘do you fancy going and doing this all over again somewhere else?’

  ‘Why, if it’s all a waste of time?’

  ‘Because we’re booked to work until ten o’clock, because I intend to do that as I can use the overtime. And because I am enjoying getting to know my new partner.’

  She had that look in her eye again – Waters got up before she could use his leg to provoke the man at the bar some more.

  John Murray called Maggie Henderson at a few minutes after nine o’clock and said that he would be about another hour or so. He didn’t put it as a question, but they both knew that if she had said she wanted him home, he would have gone there instead of on to the Fenton estate, where he was now parked. She had just a couple of months to go, was uncomfortable a lot of the time and seeing the GP weekly, just in case. She had asked him questions about how his evening had gone so far, and he explained why he wanted to see one more person, if he could; it was enough for her to feel that she had not yet lost touch completely with the job that had been her life, as well as his, until now.

  The address that he had been given looked right – there was a Golf parked outside. It was not Sonny’s old model, but it was Golf nevertheless, and enough to convince Murray that he had found the man he was looking for. Number 12, Charles Way – all the streets and roads were named after English kings and queens – was a semi, an ex-council house complete with a privet hedge and a wooden garage by the side and little wrought-iron gates into the makeshift drive. If Sonny Green lived here, he had gone up in the world. The thought went through Murray’s mind as he watched the house from the road that maybe Sonny hadn’t retired – maybe he was still wholesaling and this suburban semi-respectability was his cover. That was something to bear in mind if he did manage to get to speak to the man.

  There were three lights on at the front of the house, in addition to the four frosted panes in the front door; the two downstairs rooms, one either side of the centrally placed door, and the right-hand bedroom seemed to be occupied. Murray worked out the geography of the house, or at least made a guess at it, knowing from experience that if he got inside, the consequences might be unpredictable, and then he knocked firmly with the knuckles of his closed fist, four times. Then he stepped back so that he could see the curtains at the windows.

  After perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, he could hear voices – a man and then a woman. They seemed to be in the hallway beyond the door but well back in the house. Murray knocked again and watched the distorted rectangles of light beyond the door panes. There was movement in the house, and it was not furtive enough to be an attempt at hiding – eventually they would open the door. He stepped further away from it then, aware that his size, his six feet four inches and eighteen and a half stones, were liable to intimidate – and from here he could also see whether the neighbours were taking an interest.

  The woman who opened the door thirty degrees was small, white and wary.

  She said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sorry to bother you this late in the evening. I’m looking for Sonny Green. If he’s in, I’d like a quick word.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  He told her and showed the warrant card. Her face was a mask.

  ‘He’s not in.’

  ‘But I do have the right address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any idea when he’ll be back?’

  ‘No.’

  She was waiting - not closing the door, not opening it any further. He had heard at least one man in the house, and the woman had two rings on the third finger of the hand that held the door in position.

  Murray said, ‘Right. Well, if you do happen to be speaking to him in the next few minutes, tell him I called by. As you can see, I’m on my own. I’m not here as part of an investigation, I don’t have a warrant and I’m not going to come in uninvited. I just want an informal chat with Sonny to see if he can help me out with something. Here’s my card. Tell him he can ring me. If he rings me in the next ten minutes, I’ll be outside in my car. Goodnight.’

  He had reached the privet hedge when he heard the woman’s voice shout ‘Oi!’ Turning around then, he could see that the door was now open.

  Sonny was mixed race – somewhere in his family history was Afro-Caribbean ancestry, and it made up a quarter or perhaps an eighth of him. Murray hadn’t seen him for a couple of years, and it was more obvious now that he was no longer the cocky, fashionable young dealer about town that he had once been – Sonny was in his thirties now.

  Murray had been taken into the front room, and the door had been closed; he would have bet a week’s pay that there were other adults in the house, as well as children, adults who were being very quiet, wondering whether Sonny had lost the plot by inviting one of the enemy into his house. There was a faint smell of weed, and Murray made a point of not examining the room for evidence; if it was there, he did not want to see it. He had not planned to look for Sonny Green tonight but what he had found, or rather, what he had not, now made it seem like a good idea. He would much rather talk to him than arrest him.

  ‘Let me get this straight. You’ve come around here ten o’clock on a Monday night to ask me why I am not dealing no more?’

  ‘That’s pretty much it, Sonny.’

  ‘So instead of goin’ after the people who is committing the crimes now, you is going after the people who is not, and asking them why?’

  Letting him have a little fun might help.

  Murray said, ‘It’s not quite that daft. You were a good hand at it, Sonny. We didn’t catch you often, and you were making money. As far as I know, you only ever did weed, so you weren’t at the nasty end. I wanted to know what’s going on these days, and I find you’ve retired. I wondered why. You have retired,
haven’t you?’

  Sonny nodded, and thought before he spoke again.

  ‘I can’t tell you nothing. Everything is different now, and I ain’t a snake. No names coming from me, so you might as well quit.’

  ‘How is everything different now?’

  ‘Different people, different way of doing things, man.’

  ‘Is that why you got out?’

  This time, no quick answer – Murray’s instincts told him there was something here after all.

  He said, ‘Sonny, don’t give me any names. I didn’t come here trying to turn you into a grass – I respect that. But give me a real answer to the question. How is everything different now?’

  Chapter Eight

  Smith’s morning visits to Sergeant Charlie Hills on the front desk were usually for commiseration these days, for mutual reassurance that the world had not yet changed utterly beyond recognition overnight, but this morning was different – he had a purpose.

  ‘Sergeant Hills – I have a purpose.’

  ‘That’s nice. Have you adopted it, part of one of these sponsor-an-animal schemes? I didn’t know you were that interested in wildlife.’

  ‘I reckon your ears are going, Charlie. Purpose, not porpoise.’

  ‘Oh. Well that’s still good news, DC. Everyone should have a purpose in life, as well as a porpoise. I can see that it’s already made you more whole as a person.’

  ‘I’d love to stay and chat, Charlie, but upstairs I have a team of eager young detective constables; they want to get back out onto the streets and fight crime some more. You might want to sit down before I tell you what I want to know – it involves police work.’

  Charlie Hills made a face that might have been faint surprise or faint disgust but he had turned to look at Smith now.

  ‘Right, Defective Sergeant – fire away.’

  After his evening out, Smith had gone home, made some tea and then sat at the desk in his study for a long time, wondering what to write in the notebook. How do you make notes about what you did not find? Whilst Lake did have plain clothes officers who had responsibility for investigating the drugs business in the city, the station was not so large that it had a specialized unit – all detectives would be involved at some point in their working lives because, apart from being illegal in itself, the business was lucrative and the daily demand for its products led users to commit so many other crimes in order to pay for them. Smith’s recent cases had not taken him into these murky realms – one could hardly consider Ralph Greenwood a typical user – and in his absence something had changed. The regular old players had either disappeared or gone to ground, and none of his sources last night had wanted to talk about the business any more; one or two had even tried to draw his attention away from it by offering information about other things that were going on in Lake. It had begun to puzzle him. He was going to have to take an interest in this new ‘initiative’, after all.

  ‘Uniform and traffic are still searching when they suspect drugs, aren’t they? You know, in a car pulled over, or if they see things changing hands in the street?’

  ‘I’ve no reason to think otherwise – the no-tolerance policy has been in place since Adams became CC three years ago. Why?’

  ‘Are they finding any, recently?’

  ‘It’s easy enough to check, DC...’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I’m looking for an impression really, not a number. Are they finding less than they used to, just on routine searches? Fewer people carrying than you might expect for the number of stops and searches being made?’

  ‘I can have a word with a few people this morning. Is this Mrs RSCU?’

  Smith nodded.

  Charlie said, ‘If your usual sources have dried up, you know you can always come to me.’

  Disconcertingly, that was a little too close to the mark. Smith turned to go and then remembered.

  ‘And while we’re at it – you earning your salary for a few minutes, that is – did you ever come across a character called Lionel Everett, aka Lucky Everett? A red diesel specialist, recently deceased?’

  ‘No – not known at this address,’ tapping his forehead.

  ‘Alright, thanks Charlie. Sorry if I’ve ruined your day with all this work.’

  As he walked away, he heard the muttered words, ‘No problem. Every man needs a porpoise.’

  Wilson and his team must be doing things a little differently – but whatever the reason, the office they shared was empty apart from Smith’s own people, and so he decided to hold the meeting around his desk rather than in one of the briefing rooms. He had given them five minutes’ warning, and in the meantime had switched on his computer; checking for emails, he saw that there was one from nhinton@..., with two attachments. He would check those later on.

  He asked Butler and Waters to report back on their evening out, and it was the former who talked, listing the three pubs that they had visited and outlining their impressions without giving any details of significance – she did not go so far as to sound bored but if she had made a joke about wasting police time at the end of it, Smith would not have been surprised. When she had finished, he looked at Waters to see if he had anything to add, and nothing came. Already the meeting had taken a somewhat unexpected turn, and he had to decide whether to deal with this now or not.

  ‘Well, according to my calculations, we’ve got another eleven bars to do plus a couple of music venues, and then there are some cafes and coffee places. If we don’t physically go in and have a look, what do we do instead?’

  The question was spoken aloud for all to hear but clearly directed to Serena Butler.

  ‘I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go – it’s routine and it’s what we always do. I’m saying that we shouldn’t expect it to produce much, if anything at all.’

  The side door opened. Smith glanced around and saw that Alison Reeve had entered the room – she waved to him to continue with what they were doing as she picked up a chair and sat in next to John Murray.

  ‘Why not?’

  Serena Butler was looking back at him directly, eye to eye, making a point of not being intimidated – and that was alright because he did not want them to be intimidated. On the other hand, if she had a problem with what she was being asked to do, she had to say what it was, aloud and right now.

  ‘Because times have changed, sir.’

  The ‘sir’ had reappeared because Reeve had entered the room. There are times, thought Smith, when this all gets too complicated and I yearn for a simpler life.

  ‘Three hours times two times forty pounds an hour equals two hundred and forty. Tell me a bit more precisely why we wasted two hundred and forty quid last night.’

  ‘People don’t deal in bars any more. I know they did years ago when rock music was progressive, but that was probably because there wasn’t any alternative. If you wanted to buy, you had to go and find a dealer in a room somewhere. Now you don’t – you can phone or text or email. Some dealers have Facebook and Twitter accounts. A fortnight ago, the Met arrested four men for supplying three million pounds’ worth of cocaine over two years directly to users over the internet. They had their own courier network. Locally, our people will be handing it over from car to car in laybys, arranged by phone, a different location every time. We’re not going to see them doing it in the toilets of pubs any more.’

  And that, thought Smith, is why you would be a sergeant by now if you hadn’t jumped into bed with the wrong detective chief inspector – not that there is really a right one in such situations. Across the table, Reeve was silent, though she almost certainly had something to say; the response had to come from Smith.

  He said, ‘I don’t disagree with any of that. Technology changes crime as much as it changes anything else. Opium used to arrive by sailing ships – now heroin arrives by Dreamliner. Tomorrow, I’ve no doubt those cocaine dealers will be delivering it using those drones we were talking about earlier, and we will be sitting in here trying to intercept them with drones of our
own – it’ll be like a giant computer game for real up in the sky and they’ll have to make Waters a Detective Superintendent with immediate effect. But I think what you’re forgetting is that at the end of the day it’s still about people – the people who sell and the people who buy. All the mobile phones and email accounts belong to people, and people still socialize, they still get together occasionally with those of like mind and that gives us a chance to take a look at them.’

  Butler raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips momentarily – she would not go so far as to look convinced by anything that he had said. Smith waited for someone else to move things on, aware that the last detective he had had with such an independent streak was probably the one sitting across the table from him now as his DI.

  Alison Reeve said, ‘There is no argument here – you’re both right. We have to look forwards and backwards. It makes sense to begin with what we know, or at least with what we knew the last time that we looked at this.’ And then, more directly to Serena Butler, ‘Of course we don’t expect to see packets changing hands under tables in bars – and even if you did, the last thing I want you to do this week is arrest the idiots who might still be doing it. This is an intelligence-gathering exercise, and we don’t want to frighten them away. They will realise that we’re looking soon enough, without us trying make a few arrests for possession. This is part of a bigger picture – you all need to remember that.’

  Smith looked around the table and then asked John Murray to report what he had found. When Murray said that he had met up with one or two old informants, Smith saw the look that went from Butler to Waters – a look that said ‘I told you so’. He had wanted her to find her feet, and it had taken a while. Now she had, and it might turn out to be more interesting than he had anticipated.