Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  He ducked his head, slightly breathless, refusing to meet her gaze. Harriman was silent, looking back into the lock-up with a half-smile creasing his eyes.

  ‘The Wheatsheaf’s no good to me. I can’t lift him from there – I might as well post fliers. What I need is a few hours alone with him before anyone knows he’s gone.’

  Mickey passed a hand over his eyes. He said, ‘You don’t care whether I live or die, do you?’ Stella waited. ‘He works out of Harefield.’

  ‘The armoury’s on the estate?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Ever done business with him?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ But he turned his head fractionally as he spoke.

  ‘I could make a call, Mickey, and sit here with you until a search team arrives, and if they found an illegal weapon in here I’d have to arrest you. Then we could start working back through the stolen-vehicle register for the last five years and choose a few at random. We’d probably be right half the time.’

  Mickey was silent for a long time. He was making a calculation, a careful assessment of the odds. He said, ‘Is there some way you can cover me?’

  ‘We’ve been talking to a lot of people. Every officer on the squad talking to every informant they have. This seems to be generally known because it’s how DC Harriman got that face. In theory, we could have got this information from any one of ten or fifteen people.’

  Mickey shook his head. At fifteen to one, the odds weren’t nearly long enough. Even so, he named a block on Harefield and gave a number. He said, ‘Now fuck off, would you?’

  Stella said, ‘It’s a deal, Mickey. I won’t be back.’

  ‘Good.’ Then he added, ‘You’re a bastard, Mrs Mooney.’

  She thought he was probably useless to her now anyway.

  72

  She saw me. Shes a street person a dirty girl she sleeps out so Ill just keep looking till I find her. Its not right. Its not the way to do things. Jan or Stella not this person I dont know. I would never have followed heror clipped her shes a down and out shes no one. I dont know if Jan looked back. The dirty girl knocked into me and I said something and she said something and I dont know if Jan heard and turned round perhaps she did and then she might have seen me. I have to hurry to get her out of the way. The dirty girl has to go before anything else can happen. I dreamed of Kate last night. Kate Reilly. What happened was I went to the churchyard after that stupid street person bitch fucked things up and I went to sleep there leaning up against the tree and I dreamed it all again right from the moment I first saw her. It happened in bits – the dream it was like scenes from a film. Seeing her in her long coat with her red hair and then following her past the church and taking a clipping. Then going after her in the churchyard and hitting her. And I was looking at this from somewhere else but I was doing it too like there was me watching and me doing it and it could have been a film but I could smell things. I could smell her hair it was flowers with a tang.

  He walked through the alley by the Ocean Diner, but the only person there was a skinny man in a quilted coat talking about Jesus.

  He went into the underground at Notting Hill and Queensway and Holland Park and Lancaster Gate. He spent some time in the subway passages beneath Shepherd’s Bush roundabout.

  He crashed a few squats and looked at the vacant faces in vacant rooms, the groups round jury-rigged stoves in littered kitchens, the bodies sharing a mattress. It didn’t occur to him to wonder what he would have done if he’d found her in such a place. He just wanted to find her, kill her, get back to normal.

  He tried the cashpoints and the burger bars. He elbowed through the crowded streets, looking left and right into doorways. He tried the parks and the patches of green with their dog shit and cans and condoms.

  He even went down to the Harefield DMZ, though he knew it was dangerous territory. He looked among the rusty white goods and the junked sofas, the burned-out cars and the rubble of ex-rental TVs.

  Sadie wasn’t there. Beggars, buskers, panhandlers, junkies, drunks, some with a mouth organ or a guitar, some with a message written on a strip of cardboard, some with a doped dog, some deep inside their bags, some deep inside themselves, but no sign of Sadie.

  She saw me.

  And she had, of course, but it meant nothing. Sadie had been off her face. Out of her head. Away in space. Kimber couldn’t have known it, but she wouldn’t have recognized the Queen of England.

  He walked back across the DMZ. He hadn’t eaten, but he’d get a burger and eat on the move. He’d keep looking. He knew it was just a matter of time. They had territories. Street-people kept to what they knew.

  Stella and Harriman were driving down a Harefield approach road on the other side of the estate. Their car wasn’t a Beamer, it wasn’t a Merc, it wasn’t an American classic and it wasn’t a rust-holed Mondeo, so they were fairly easy to spot. Harriman was saying, ‘Are you sure –?’

  Sadie emerged from the walk-space under Block C and made for a subway that would take her under the traffic flow. She was in need. Crack was for her, no question, but she needed more of it more often. It was the answer. It was the ultimate ‘okay’.

  A London winter’s afternoon, the light fading back to the horizon, darkness seeping in, snow flurries on the wind.

  73

  Harriman was saying, ‘Are you sure you want to do it this way?’

  Because lifting an armourer on Harefield would normally be a two-day op with an so19 gun squad taking the lead. so19 are the specialists, they’re the technicians. They look at maps and plans, they send in a covert surveillance team, they run a trial op in similar terrain, they devise code designations for the north, south, east and west faces of the target building. Snipers occupy vantage points. Calculations are made about the number of occupants, their location, their routes in and out. No one would have wondered whether these occupants might be carrying weapons, given the fact that Slipper Wilkie was an armourer. The assumption would be ‘yes’ and ‘many’. The standing orders for such an operation are ‘extreme prejudice’ and ‘centre-target’. You didn’t shoot to wound. An inspector or someone of greater rank oversees operations and procedures: everyone in Kevlar, everyone properly deployed. They probably wait for the early hours when they might expect people to be asleep or stoned. Then it’s go.

  That’s the way it would normally be done. On this occasion, Stella and Pete Harriman were driving across the west perimeter of Harefield on their own in an alien car and with no visible back-up.

  With no back-up, visible or otherwise.

  ‘Wilkie doesn’t know we want him,’ Stella said. ‘There’s a police presence on Harefield most days. Kids dealing. Gang fights. We could be here for anything.’

  ‘We could be here to get shot.’

  ‘You know how tough it is to mount a raid on Harefield. Almost impossible to get close, also no chance of cooperation, so where’s your stake-out, where do you situate your snipers, how do you carry out surveillance? Here’s another problem – too many of the local cops earning some extra. Even with a complete information shut-down among the so19 crew, the chance of a leak is high. Look at the history of drugs raids on this estate – by the time the action-men are abseiling down the blocks, the place is clean.’

  Block D, Mickey Wicks had said. Stella parked in the bull ring so as to give no immediate indication of where they were going. When they entered Block D, they could have been taking the lift to any one of twenty-five floors and even then might have backtracked through the sky-high walkways that took you from landing to landing.

  Of the four lifts, one was functioning; it even had an internal light. Stella and Harriman rode it to the ninth floor in a miasma of piss, puke and food gone bad. It moved slowly and it made noises like trains coupling.

  Harriman said, ‘Everyone has a gun, we allow for that. But this bastard’s got a room full of them.’

  ‘You think we should have made a weapons-application?’ Stella was being wry: you have to p
aper those requests. Sorley would have wanted the whys and wherefores.

  ‘Maybe we should have made a connection and bought a couple. Everyone else does.’

  ‘I’d like to have a gun,’ Stella said. ‘And a couple of stun grenades. And a family-size can of CS gas.’

  ‘We have each other,’ Harriman observed.

  Stella laughed. After a moment, she said, ‘Element of surprise.’

  Harriman sounded waspish. ‘Good, yes; hadn’t thought of that. Obviously, we’ve got the bastard cold.’

  Which seemed to be more or less the case, because as they approached Slipper Wilkie’s door it opened and a black girl in a white fun-fur came out, saw them and froze. Stella put her hand on the door, holding it open a fraction in case the locks engaged. Armourers have locks and they have hinge-bolts and they have steel-plating. Harriman put a finger to his lips. The girl held her hands out sideways to demonstrate innocence and spoke in a whisper.

  ‘I ain’t carrying.’

  Harriman was whispering too. ‘Slipper Wilkie.’ She nodded. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the bedroom.’

  ‘Is he alone?’

  ‘He is now.’

  ‘Mobile.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give me your mobile phone.’ The girl didn’t move. Harriman said, ‘Unless you want to become his close friend and associate on the charge-sheet.’

  The girl handed over her phone.

  Harriman said, ‘Goodbye.’

  It was three deadlocks and a Banham; you could take the steel-plating as read. Stella closed the door gently. Harriman went into the bedroom ahead of her, his body tensed. There was a silence, then she heard him laugh, because Slipper Wilkie was lying on the bed bare-arsed, smoking a spliff.

  Stella leaned against the door-jamb and smiled at Harriman. She said, ‘You see?’ He smiled back. They were both still smiling when Wilkie took a gun from underneath the pillow and pointed it lazily at Stella.

  He said, ‘You’re fucking dead.’

  Harriman was standing left of Stella but still close enough to be covered by Wilkie’s field of fire. He said, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going with this?’

  Wilkie laughed. ‘Me? Let’s talk about your next move.’

  He sounded good, but he was making things up as he went along. The dope wasn’t helping, his heart-rate was up and little paranoid thoughts came at him like moths at a lamp. He got off the bed, the joint dangling from his lips. He stood a moment, then crouched down and placed it carefully in an ashtray, as if he intended to come back to it later.

  He said, ‘Get down on the floor.’ Stella and Harriman stayed upright. He said, ‘Get down on the floor or I’ll fucking shoot your knees off.’ As they lowered themselves, he added, ‘Sit on your hands.’

  Wilkie’s jeans were over a chair. He leaned against the side of the bed and got into them one-handed, standing up to zip. He pushed his feet into a pair of trainers, then backed up to a closet and took out a padded windcheater and put it on, switching from right hand to left with the gun. At that range, it made no difference; you didn’t have to be steady or think about good aim.

  Stella said, ‘It might not be what you think.’

  ‘Sure.’ Wilkie wagged the gun, indicating that they should move away from the door.

  ‘If we were busting you, we’d be a gun squad. We’d be mob-handed.’

  ‘You’re in my way.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Go for a drink and pop back later in the hope that we’ll have gone?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Wilkie advised her.

  ‘Is this clever?’

  Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Wilkie stepped in and hit her with the gun, then stepped back. He’d been striking from above and had taken her across the scalp with the barrel-end and the metal had lifted a patch of skin. She could feel a dribble of blood starting up and rolling towards her left eye.

  Harriman said nothing. He knew when to keep quiet. Stella moved aside and Wilkie opened the bedroom door but didn’t go through. Now the moment had arrived, he had no idea what to do next. He’d shown them the gun, he’d hit the bitch, no way to backtrack from that.

  Stella saw the indecision and knew what it meant. He’s deciding what to do. He’s deciding whether to kill us. And it won’t take much. A blood-bead seeped out of her hair and ran down her cheek. Do something. Do this...

  She stood up and backed off a little, at the same time moving round to confront Wilkie directly. She said, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen now. I’m going to arrest you and take you to Notting Hill police station, where you’ll be charged with assault and possession of an unlicensed firearm.’

  Wilkie looked at her as if she couldn’t be real – a little dope-dream, a spliff-spook. He glanced down at Harriman and his look seemed to say, ‘Can’t you tell her? Doesn’t she know how to behave?’

  Stella took a step nearer. She held out her hand for the gun. Wilkie stepped in too, bringing the gun up but not to surrender it. He extended his arm and the barrel met Stella’s forehead, metal on bone, so that she stopped dead and stood still. Harriman watched but didn’t speak, as if a word, any word, might tip the scales. The room rang with silence.

  After a moment, Stella said, ‘You can do this – you can put the gun down and then I’ll arrest you and certain things will happen. We can talk deals. You can listen to what I’ve got to say and you’ll find out what I want. Or you can shoot me. In which case you’ll have to shoot him. And then your life changes completely.’ She said all this with her head tilted slightly backwards under pressure from the gun.

  Wilkie didn’t speak because he didn’t know what to say. And when Stella lifted her hand very slowly and moved the gun from her head, but kept hold of it, tugging slightly, he didn’t know what to do. Until he let go of the gun and he knew he’d done the wrong thing.

  They walked out to the landing, Wilkie wearing plastic cuffs and a sorry expression. The lift was on their floor. Harriman thumbed the button and the doors shook, then opened with a clatter. Stella said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and they took the stairs.

  Wilkie said, ‘I could have killed you.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Stella said, ‘you could have.’

  ‘You talked about a deal.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it more later.’

  As they crossed the lobby towards the bull ring, a great crash came from the lift shaft and the floor-indicator light went out. Wilkie laughed out loud. He said, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I used to live here,’ Stella told him. ‘I used to breathe the same air as pissrags like you.’

  74

  ‘And the deal is what?’

  In the interview room Wilkie looked oddly put together, with his jeans-but-no-underwear, his shoes-but-no-socks and his coat-but-no-shirt. The blond-streaked hair was perfectly in place and had the shellac glint of lacquer. Harriman had organized a little whip-round in the squad room and raised ten cigarettes. Wilkie was smoking them one after the other and the room carried scrolls and scarves of blue.

  Stella indicated the tape. She said, ‘Of course, anything you might do or say to help us in the course of our inquiries will be reported to the court and might possibly assist them in their consideration of any sentence.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘A Glock forty-five calibre handgun was recently used in the commission of a murder. We want to know whether you supplied the weapon and who to.’

  ‘You think I sell guns?’

  ‘I know you sell guns. There’s a search team in your apartment as we speak. They’ve found sixty weapons ranging from handguns to machine pistols and a large quantity of ammunition. You sell guns. Did you supply the Glock?’

  ‘The flat isn’t mine. I’m renting it.’

  Stella said, ‘DC Harriman is leaving the room. Interview temporarily halted at eighteen twenty-seven.’

  She switched off the tape. Harriman hadn’t moved. Wilkie said, ‘Wha
t?’

  ‘Let’s not start off on some long and tedious journey, because we’re just going to end up back at the start. You sold a Glock recently. Who bought it?’

  ‘I’m not the only armourer in London.’ As he used the word ‘armourer’, Wilkie glanced at the tape.

  ‘You’re the only one sitting in a police interview room talking about a deal.’

  ‘What’s the time-scale?’

  ‘Three days. Maybe four. Less than a week.’

  Wilkie fell silent. He could have been deciding whether to come clean, or simply enjoying a little after-rush from the spliff. Stella was trying not to look as if his answer mattered much, but she knew it was crucial. Wilkie was right. Mister Mystery could have got the gun from a number of sources, though geographically Wilkie was most likely. But if Wilkie had sold a Glock forty-five within the last week, then the chances were strong that it was the murder weapon. There had been only two other shootings on Stella’s patch in the last five days and they were black-on-black drug disputes, one involving a Mach 10, the other an Uzi machine pistol.

  ‘Will I walk?’ Wilkie wanted to know.

  ‘You heard what I said for the tape.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. Will I walk?’

  He was talking about police bail, about being back on the streets in time for a drink at the local. Stella said, ‘It’s not up to me.’

  ‘So what kind of a fucking deal is it if nothing’s up to you?’

  ‘Give me ten minutes.’

  ‘Okay,’ Wilkie nodded and lit another cigarette. To Harriman, he said, ‘I’m going to need some more of these.’

  ‘I’m clearing this with you,’ Stella told Sorley. ‘The tape will be off, obviously, but it’s possible that questions will be asked afterwards.’