by Ed O'Connor
‘I know I’m right, sir,’ Dexter said with quiet conviction.
‘OK. We’ll get a team down to the shop and check it out.’
‘We’ll need some muscle, sir. The Garrods are fucking enormous.’
‘We can probably get a firearms unit out of City Police. I could pull in a favour. It might take an hour. Did they twig you’d rumbled them?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Dexter replied. ‘Firearms would be sensible, sir. Bartholomew Garrod is an ox.’
‘Right.’ McInally picked up his phone. ‘You sort out a SOCO unit and commandeer some uniformed plods from downstairs. I’ll see about this shooter team.’
Dexter felt a rush of pride and excitement; she hovered for a second, enjoying the moment of triumph.
‘Well stop pissing about,’ McInally barked. ‘We’ve got work to do!’
He smiled as he watched her leave.
Bartholomew Garrod withdrew just over four thousand pounds from his bank on Leyton High Road, leaving five hundred pounds in his account. He stuffed the money into his inside jacket pocket. The look in DS Dexter’s eyes had told him enough: she had somehow sensed they had murdered Brian Patterson. Bartholomew hurried back down Leyton High Road. It was pouring with rain now; water streamed across the pavement. The money would buy them some time at least. His father had owned an old caravan on a communal site: a scrap of wasteland near a seaside resort. He had taken Ray to the caravan regularly since their father’s death. Ray liked the water, the smell of the air and the fish and chips in polystyrene trays. The caravan would be an ideal place to lie low.
Bartholomew crossed into Norlington Road. Then he stopped dead in his tracks. Two police squad cars were parked outside his shop. He quickly ducked behind a car and watched. He counted five uniformed police officers and two more in black combat fatigues who appeared to be armed. Bartholomew cursed his stupidity: he should have taken Ray with him to the bank. Now, his brother was trapped.
One hundred yards away, DS Dexter banged on the locked door of the Garrods’ shop. No one came to open it. She tried again and called out this time: ‘Mr Garrod. This is Leyton Police. Open the door please.’
‘Perhaps they’ve done a runner,’ McInally said as he joined her.
‘No. They’re here. The van’s still parked down the side alley,’ Dexter replied. She crashed on the door again.
‘What’s our strength?’ he asked.
‘The two of us, five plods and two from the City Police ARU. One more squad car on the way.’ Dexter banged furiously at the door again.
‘Pack it in, Dexy!’ McInally found the noise irritating; he turned and gestured to a uniformed police sergeant crouching next to a squad car. ‘Brown! Get the ram up here.’
A moment later PC Brown carried the black battering ram up to the door.
‘You want me to bosh it, sir?’ he asked.
McInally nodded, pulling Dexter out of the way. ‘Go ahead, son.’
The door smashed open at the second attempt. Dexter and McInally were first in, stepping over the carpet of broken glass. The firearms officers they had seconded from City Police followed close behind, fanning right and left across the shop floor. Dexter pointed through the door towards the living quarters. McInally nodded and waved the armed policemen past him. Two uniformed officers now blocked the entrance to the shop.
Through the commotion, Dexter heard a man crying. Ahead of her, one of the armed response officers called out, ‘We got one!’
Ray Garrod was sitting sobbing at the bottom of the stairs, his knees drawn up to his body, his giant arms wrapped tightly around them.
‘Ray, it’s me, DS Dexter. Remember the “honourable lady” you called me?’
Ray looked at her, then at the two guns pointing at him. ‘Bollamew’s gonna be so angry with me. I promised not to let you in. I promised.’
‘It’s not your fault, Ray,’ Dexter said. ‘Where’s your brother?’
‘He went out. He shouldn’t have gone out and left me.’
McInally sent an armed officer to each of the front and back doors. ‘Listen to me, Ray,’ he said, returning to the staircase, ‘you need to tell us about Brian Patterson now. It’s the only way to get Bartholomew out of trouble.’
Dexter shot him a concerned look. McInally shrugged apologetically.
‘Brian taught me some songs. Brian liked my singing too.’
‘What happened to him, Ray?’ Dexter pressed.
‘Ah ate some bit of him,’ Ray replied. ‘Bollamew cooked some kidney and ah ate it.’
McInally produced a pair of handcuffs from his jacket pocket. ‘Ray, I’m going to put these on you now. We need to take you away from here for a while. Could you stand up for me and face the wall?’
‘Yes. Ah’ll face the wall for the honnable gennelman.’ Ray clambered to his feet. For the first time, McInally became aware of the sheer size of Ray Garrod. He had to have a size twenty collar. He took hold of Ray’s right wrist and snapped a cuff onto it. The metal cut into the skin and Ray wheeled around in pained surprise.
‘What are you fucking doing to me?’ he shouted, lashing out at McInally. Caught off guard, the DCI crashed into the wall with blood pouring from his nose. Dexter screamed for assistance as Ray Garrod pushed past her and ran out into the shop. DS Morgan, the armed response officer at the front door, turned a split second too late. As he lifted his gun, three hundred pounds of Ray Garrod crashed into him. The deafening bang of a gunshot rang out, the bullet smashing into the glass of the meat counter. Ray, screaming in panic, barged past the two terrified uniformed policemen at the door, sending them flying out onto the pavement.
Dexter sprinted after Ray Garrod, uncertain of what she would do if she caught up with him.
Bartholomew Garrod watched in horror as his brother ran out onto Norlington Road, lumbering in his direction.
‘Bollamew! Bollamew!’ Ray shouted, unaware that his brother was hiding behind an old brown Ford Sierra only eighty yards ahead of him. He staggered on, lurching across the junction of Norlington and Albert Road. Dexter ran out onto the road. Bartholomew watched her running his brother down, powerless to act. A siren wailed somewhere ahead of him. Bartholomew knew that he would have to act; either intervene or run away. At that moment Ray ran out onto Morley Road and was hit by the source of the siren, the reserve squad car that Dexter had requested. Bartholomew watched in horror as his brother was thrown up into the air before crashing head first into the windscreen of the police vehicle. Ray didn’t move. Alison Dexter arrived at the scene a few seconds later. Bartholomew could hear her shouting ‘Call a fucking ambulance’ at the bemused driver of the police car.
Bartholomew wanted to rip her into pieces and chew on her gristle. He had to contain his fury, his agony. Blood roared into his head. He struggled desperately to remain calm. His tears stung. More policemen were running out onto the street. It was time to move on or risk capture. Unnoticed in the midst of the chaos, Bartholomew Garrod eventually turned his back on his dead brother and his family home. He walked hurriedly to Leyton Underground and took a Central Line train to Liverpool Street. An hour later he sat down in the smoking compartment of a train destined for Harwich.
Late that night, as Bartholomew Garrod unlocked the padlock to his family caravan near the North Sea coast, Scene of Crime Officers in Leyton found a stockpile of human remains secreted at the back of the Garrods’ refrigerator.
20.
DI Mike Bevan drew up at the edge of the gypsy site. The two uniformed officers he had seconded from Underwood were parked out of sight a few hundred yards behind him. He hoped he would not need them. Bevan counted about twenty caravans. Children played on an area of open grass next to the vehicles. He had decided to tackle Keith Gwynne on his own: in his experience, going mob-handed into pikey sites was a recipe for unnecessary grief.
As soon as he slammed his car door shut he was confronted by two shaven-headed men.
‘Wha’ d’ya want?’ one asked.
&
nbsp; ‘I’m from Cambridgeshire Council,’ Bevan replied. ‘I need to speak to someone called er…Keith Gwynne.’ He tried to appear vague; coppers were always aggressively specific.
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Look, go and get him,’ said Bevan with a smile he hoped was disarming. ‘Tell him I’m from the council. It’s about the ponies he’s got tethered on the other side of Balehurst. There’s a council issue. It will save him money if he talks to me.’
One of the men turned and walked back into the site. As he disappeared from view, Bevan tried to be friendly with the figure barring his entry to the site. ‘So how many of you live on this site?’
‘If you’re from the council, you should know,’ came the reply.
‘They don’t tell us everything,’ Bevan observed.
‘They told you Gwynney lived here though.’
Bevan shrugged and said nothing: he’d been clumsy there. He was getting sloppy in his old age. A minute later, Keith Gwynne emerged from a caravan and approached Bevan suspiciously.
‘Who the fuck are you then?’ Gwynne asked.
‘Mike Bevan from the council. I need to talk to you about your ponies.’
‘I sold them ponies last week.’
‘Why don’t we talk in private?’ Bevan replied as a group of youths began to gather, interested in the strange confrontation.
‘You’re a copper!’ Gwynne snorted. ‘Good fucking disguise!’
Bevan leaned forward and whispered menacingly in Gwynne’s ear, ‘Now you listen to me, dickhead. I’ve got a dead body on a railway line and I’ve got your fucking car number plate at a crime scene. I am trying to be delicate. I respect the sensibilities and privacy of your friends here. So here’s a deal for you. Come with me now or I’ll come back here with a squad and rip this shithole apart. Who knows what we’ll find. Your mate over there stinks of pot, for example.’
Gwynne took a step back, surprised and frightened. ‘Danny,’ he said eventually to the lad who had originally intercepted Bevan, ‘I can handle this. You and the boys take off now.’
Alone with his target at last, Bevan relaxed a little. ‘We need to have a serious chat Keith.’
‘You’re wasting your time. I’ve done nothing.’
‘Look, sonny. You are in deep shite. Be straight, be useful and you’ve got a chance. Otherwise you are looking at a stretch. We are going to drive down to New Bolden nick and you are going to sing like Maria Callas.’
‘If I don’t come?’
‘Accessory to murder, perverting the course of justice, resisting arrest, violation of the Dangerous Dogs Act – I’m guessing eight, maybe nine years.’
‘That’s bollocks. I didn’t murder anyone.’
‘Get in the car.’
21.
Alison Dexter was too agitated to sit down. Instead, she stood staring out of the window of John Underwood’s office at the square scrap of grass that constituted his horizon.
‘Tell me what you know about this Woollard character,’ she asked Underwood after he had briefly explained the circumstances surrounding the death of Lefty Shaw.
‘He’s a farmer. Wealthy. Mike Bevan has been watching him for weeks. He suspects that Woollard is importing and fighting illegal breeds of dog: pit bulls, that kind of thing. Bevan photographed some faces coming out of Woollard’s a couple of weeks ago. He suspects they were paying customers for a dog fight.’
‘What about bare knuckle fighting?’ Dexter asked.
‘No idea.’ Underwood considered the notion. ‘Although given the nature of Shaw’s injuries it’s plausible I suppose. Very smart of you. What made you think of that?’
Dexter turned to face him. ‘The bite wound.’
‘What about it?’
‘Remind you of anything?’
‘No.’ Underwood hesitated; something about the wound had unsettled him. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘I’ve asked Leach to run a full DNA profile on the saliva sample.’
Underwood caught an edge in Dexter’s voice. ‘Do you know who did this?’
‘Does “Bartholomew Garrod” ring any bells?’
Underwood frowned for a moment before he remembered, ‘The “Primal Cut” thing? Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m not fucking sure, John,’ Dexter hissed, ‘but I do know that Bartholomew Garrod fought bare knuckle contests across London for twenty years.’
‘That’s tenuous, Alison. Garrod’s been missing for what? Seven or eight years now? He could be dead. He could be out of the country. The chances of him turning up on your patch are remote.’
‘Maybe.’ Dexter sat down in a chair opposite Underwood. She tried to rub the acid of exhaustion from her eyes. ‘After Ray Garrod was killed, we interviewed a bunch of locals and people that knew them. Two blokes, toerags the both of them, said they’d seen Bartholomew Garrod fight bare knuckle. It used to be quite a big deal in London. Loads of pubs would arrange after hours contests in their cellars and back yards. One of the guys I questioned said he’d seen Garrod take a bite out of someone during a fight and swallow it.’
Underwood tried to allay Dexter’s concern. ‘Look, Garrod isn’t going to come up here, is he? If he’s still alive, he’ll be hiding in a big city. He’d be too conspicuous in a tinpot place like this.’ He had added the derogatory reference to New Bolden to appeal to Dexter’s cockney snobbery about Cambridgeshire. It didn’t work. ‘Why would he come up here?’
‘Me,’ said Dexter quietly. ‘Maybe he’s come for me.’
‘Don’t be daft. He’s not an idiot. I can’t believe he’d risk a life sentence to come looking for you on some revenge trip.’
‘I disagree. In any case, I’ve requisitioned Ray Garrod’s post-mortem file and medical records along with a copy of the Primal Cut case file. I’m going to get Leach to do a DNA comparison with the saliva found on Shaw.’
‘That’s your prerogative,’ Underwood replied, ‘but I think it’s a waste of time.’
There was a knock at the office door. DS Harrison stood in the doorway.
‘Guv, Bevan is in interview room 3 with someone called Keith Gwynne. He wants you down there.’
Underwood walked around his desk, pulling on his jacket and collecting his notebook as he did so. ‘This guy was at Woollard’s the night Shaw was killed.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Dexter replied.
‘You’re jumping to conclusions, Alison,’ Underwood said as they headed down the stone stairway to the ground floor. ‘Nothing that you’ve said proves that Garrod killed Shaw.’
‘We’ll do the interview together,’ Dexter conceded as she opened the door to interview room 3.
Keith Gwynne sat opposite Mike Bevan, hunched unhappily in his chair. He shifted uncomfortably as Dexter and Underwood entered the room. Bevan leaned towards the obligatory recording equipment. ‘Inspectors Dexter and Underwood have joined the interview,’ he announced into the microphone.
Dexter didn’t waste any time; she stared hard at Gwynne. ‘Tell me what happened at Woollard’s. Tell me what happened to Leonard Shaw. Tell me everything. Tell me now.’
Bevan looked up at Underwood, their toes trodden on. Underwood shrugged; he was used to Dexter’s dynamism.
‘Fuck me!’ Gwynne exclaimed. ‘What have I done to deserve you lot? You’d think I was a great bleeding train robber.’
‘Answer the question,’ Dexter snapped.
‘I suppose a lawyer is out of the question?’ Gwynne asked.
‘You haven’t been arrested, Keith,’ Bevan said gently. ‘You are helping us out. You haven’t been charged with anything so why do you need a lawyer?’
Dexter was getting increasingly impatient. ‘You were there. Tell us what happened. Or I’ll make sure you will be charged, convicted and eating porridge from a different cock every day for the next ten years.’
Gwynne took a deep breath. ‘All right, all right. Enough already. There were two fights at Bob Woollard’s: a dog fight and a prize f
ight.’ He looked up at Dexter. ‘That’s a bare knuckle fight,’ he explained.
‘I know what a prize fight is,’ Dexter shouted, ignoring the restraining hand Underwood had placed on her shoulder, ‘just tell me what you saw.’
‘Lefty took a bad beating. The other guy battered him with a steel bucket. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘What happened after the fight?’ Underwood asked.
‘I went home.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Dexter, ‘tell me about the other man. The guy who killed Shaw. Do you know his name?’
Gwynne hesitated; he did not want to incur the wrath of George Norlington. ‘No,’ he replied, his eyes darting left and downwards.
‘Liar. Describe him then,’ Dexter instructed.
Gwynne was sweating now. ‘I don’t know. Maybe three hundred pounds…about six feet tall…fat around his middle but strong as an ox.’
‘Eye colour?’ Underwood asked.
‘God knows, brown maybe.’
‘This is not enough, Keith,’ Bevan said firmly. ‘It’s not enough to help you. You are an accessory to murder looking at eight years in prison. If you don’t start being cooperative, we’ll have no option but to turn over your camp site.’
Dexter found Bevan’s quiet, insistent manner half-irritating, half-impressive. It seemed to work on Gwynne too.
‘The guy’s name is George. He rents a room behind the pub in Heydon; the Dog and Feathers.’
‘That’s better,’ Bevan said with a smile, ‘keep going.’
‘He’s a big, scary bastard,’ Gwynne continued. ‘He had a Tosa dog. One of Woollard’s animals killed it. Maybe he was pissed off by that and wanted revenge on Lefty.’
‘Surname?’ Underwood asked. ‘What’s his surname Keith?’
Gwynne scratched his head as if in admission of defeat. ‘Norlington. George Norlington.’
Dexter’s heart jumped, stopped then jumped again. She turned to Underwood.