An Incidental Death

by Alex Howard

  Schneider was not really big enough to warrant diplomatic protection but he was maybe slightly too important to simply farm the job out to a divisional support team. He was kind of on the cusp.

  Gower shrugged. ‘He’s doing the media rounds, talking to a UKIP meeting in Islington, at the Union Chapel. They don’t associate themselves officially with his views on refugees but they say he’s anti-EU so that’s why he’s there. There’s a lunch at the House of Commons, he’s a guest of a couple of MPs. That’s London really. Then Oxford, he’s been invited to speak at the Oxford Union in a debate with some left-wing speaker, who it is hasn’t yet been finalized. They wanted Owen Jones originally but he couldn’t make it. So it’ll be someone like that, maybe a prominent Muslim if they can get one.’

  ‘So that’ll be Oxford’s pigeon.’

  Gower shook his head.

  ‘No, policing the event and maintaining public order is their job, not preventing assassination.’

  ‘Preventing assassination!’ Gower thought to himself that the look on Corrigan’s face was hard to pin down. Surprise mixed with incredulity mixed with exasperation were some of the contenders.

  ‘Yes, sir. Seemingly there’s credible evidence to support this. The home secretary does not want a dead German on her hands right now. Particularly at this time. Nor, I would imagine, do the Met need an international incident in London. Wolf Schneider’s head of staff, Christiane Hübler, is due tomorrow to fill us in on the precise details.’

  Corrigan breathed deeply. ‘And what do you expect me to do?’

  Gower slid a folder across the desk to Corrigan.

  ‘This is my plan of action to protect Herr Schneider – numbers of police are noted together with relevant stations. It’s only really the Islington event that’s a problem.’

  ‘How do you figure that out?’ asked Corrigan.

  ‘Well, the House of Commons has its own security. Oxford: Thames Valley will deal with that. They can always call on Firearms from Kidlington if they feel the need.’

  He held up a hand to forestall any protest. ‘It’s fine, it’s all cheap and low-key. SO1 will provide the specialist officers, just a small team. We just need a few bodies to deal with a small protest when he’s at the Commons and the same for Islington. I’ve got a DI who’s worked out the details. We’ll need a couple of cars with drivers to accompany Schneider and that’s about it. I just need authorization.’

  Covering your back, thought Corrigan. Just in case anything does happen to Schneider.

  ‘And when you say “a small protest”, how small is small?’

  Gower scratched his head. ‘Probably no more than about fifty to a hundred people, just a few from the SWP and Labour, now they’ve become a bit more radical. But Schneider’s fairly unknown in this country, as is “New Destiny”, that’s his party.’

  ‘New Destiny, it sounds like an act from X Factor.’ Corrigan’s voice was scathing.

  Gower shrugged. ‘Neu Schicksal, maybe it sounds better in German, but I think they like to abbreviate it to NS, you can chant it when you have a march, then it works.’ He took his laptop out. ‘Have a look.’

  Corrigan did so. The pictures revealed a night sky, flares, police dogs, riot police, a couple of thousand skinheads in bomber jackets chanting. At their head a stocky, good-looking blond-haired man in a blue two-piece suit flanked by two women.

  Behind them was a bearded giant with an equally powerful-looking dog on a leash. He guessed he was Schneider’s bodyguard.

  ‘What’s that they’re shouting? No to refugees?’ he asked.

  Gower nodded. ‘Exactly. There’s a big party called the AFD, Alternative for Germany, who are more mainstream, but he’s snapping at their heels. And he’s photogenic, and he’s media savvy, and women like him.’

  ‘I get the picture,’ said Corrigan wearily. ‘So, just a signature then?’ he asked.

  ‘There is something else, sir.’

  I knew it, thought Corrigan.

  ‘It’s more a PR thing really.’ Gower sounded almost apologetic. ‘I thought it would be good for our image if we had a non-white policeman as his protection officer, particularly as we’re going to be facing crowds shouting the odds that we’re protecting fascist racists.’

  Corrigan nodded thoughtfully. It made sense, it might even help to calm things down. Gower continued, ‘The trained POs will be in the background, I want window dressing. Do you have an officer who is bright and keen, maybe who even fancies moving into Protection Command? Someone who’d like a bit of glamour maybe, for a change.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Corrigan’s voice was guarded. Could guarding Schneider count as glamorous?

  ‘He’d just have to be from some ethnic background, I’m not choosy,’ said Gower. ‘Black, Asian, any colour but white.’

  ‘It smacks a bit of tokenism,’ demurred Corrigan.

  Gower shrugged. ‘Life’s not perfect, sir. We’d be out of a job if it was, but have you got anyone you could recommend, level-headed, not rash?’

  ‘Yes,’ Corrigan answered firmly.

  ‘Calm, alert...’

  ‘I do know what you’re after, there’s no need to spell it out,’ said Corrigan.

  Gower was taken aback by the senior policeman’s helpful attitude. He’d been expecting a locked and bolted door, not to have it thrown open in welcome. He began to smell a rat.

  ‘Great,’ he beamed, covering his suspicions. ‘Well, thank you very much. Have him drop by my office tomorrow about three. Ms Hübler will be there and we can all make sure we’re singing from the same hymn sheet. They won’t get a Glock or a Smith and Wesson but they will get to do something out of the ordinary with a chance for bigger things, if it all works out well.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘Which borough’s he from?’ asked Gower.

  ‘Hackney at the moment, a DI.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure he’d appreciate seeing something other than Haringey,’ said Gower. ‘They’ll kick up but they must have a fair few DIs.’

  ‘I asked him that once, I think it’s about fifteen, not so many.’

  ‘Well, when the cuts bite they’ll have to scale back anyway, do them good to practise.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll agree.’ Corrigan’s tone was sarcastic. Now his voice turned dismissive. ‘I’ll speak to them, the chief super’s a mate,’ he said. ‘Until tomorrow.’

  They shook hands and Gower left the office, pleased with what he had managed to extract from the assistant commissioner.

  Corrigan stood up and walked over to the window overlooking the Thames from his new office on the Victoria Embankment.

  The great river rolled its muscular might far below him.

  He did not want an issue with someone trying to kill a right-wing politician on his patch.

  Even if he was German.

  4

  Christiane Hübler looked at DI Enver Demirel with ill-concealed disgust. It was the kind of look that did not just express dislike or disapproval, but almost naked dislike.

  Enver was wearing a new, dark blue suit and a white shirt and tie. He looked like he was attending a job interview which, in a sense, he was. Corrigan scratched his head with irritation.

  Hübler was being astoundingly rude. She also did not seem to realize how honoured she was that he was there at all. Corrigan was not a vain man but he had a keen sense of his own importance. He had much more pressing things on his plate than to be embroiled in the political shenanigans of a foreign politician. Gower’s face was inscrutable. Schneider’s visit was causing trouble far beyond what it should have done.

  ‘Wolf Schneider is currently under the threat of death from an extremist Islamic organization that we suspect has a great deal of sympathy within the Turkish community.’ Hübler’s English was flawless, her pointed finger accusatory. ‘And you,’ her icy gaze switched from Enver to Corrigan, ‘want to have him guarded by a Muslim Turk.’

  She shook her head saying in German, ‘Das ist ein Witz?’ add
ing a translation as an afterthought: ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  Corrigan sat silent and massive, glowering at her.

  ‘DI Demirel...’ he began. Hübler rolled her eyes as if Enver’s surname was some sort of added provocation.

  ‘DI Demirel is a British police officer, and will be treated by you with the respect and courtesy that his position entails.’

  The trouble is, thought Corrigan as he made this rather pompous speech, that she’s got me by the short and curlies. I’d love to just storm out and let them get on with it, let them be hacked to bits maybe, but I can’t, and she knows that.

  Enver stroked his thick moustache, a gesture he often made when he felt nervous. Gower looked at him with interest. He was always keen to see how officers who were potential recruits would behave under stressful conditions and this had to be very testing for DI Demirel. He had interviewed him earlier and come away with a very favourable impression.

  It was as he had suspected. Demirel was bored to death with his current role in CID at Wood Green, finding himself shunted more and more into community liaison work. It was work he was uniquely qualified to do, although he very much didn’t want to do it. He hated community politics. As a policeman it was the most thankless position he could think of. It was ironic that being half-Turkish had worked in his favour in North London and was now screwing up his chances with this crack at diplomatic protection.

  Enver wanted very much to be taken away from his rather dull duties in Wood Green. He wanted to run around the woods firing Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns. He wanted to have his driving skills brought up to professional standards; he wanted to design protection plans and be part of a Strategy and Tactics team.

  He wanted excitement.

  ‘If I may be allowed to answer Ms Hübler’s point, sir,’ he said now, his voice calm and reasonable.

  ‘Go ahead.’ Corrigan glared at Christiane Hübler. She looked pretty non-Caucasian herself, come to that, he thought. She had very black, coarse hair, brown eyes, swarthy skin. She was buxom and slightly running to fat. He guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She was no advert for white Judaeo-Christianity, so it seemed hypocritical of her to be criticizing Enver.

  Pot. Kettle. Black. Corrigan’s thoughts.

  Enver turned to look at her and Gower noted the impressive musculature of Enver’s body visible even through the material of his suit.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Ms Hübler.’ Warmly polite, noted Gower, no trace of sarcasm. Diplomatic, grace under pressure, good for you. ‘I am, it is true, half-Turkish but my mother was British and I was raised in a fairly liberal household with Western values. I can assure you—’

  ‘You can assure all you like, DI Demirel,’ said Christiane Hübler acidly. ‘The fact remains that far from providing the reassurance of protection, you’re a potential danger.’

  Corrigan leaned over the table menacingly. ‘I will not have my officers insulted in my presence. Perhaps it would be best for all concerned if Mr Schneider remained at home in Bavaria in some reassuringly Christian enclave.’

  ‘Baden-Württemberg,’ corrected Gower.

  ‘Enver stays,’ Corrigan said bluntly.

  It had now got far beyond the original idea of placing an ethnic minority policeman in a prominent role. It was now a battle of wills.

  ‘No, he doesn’t,’ countered Hübler.

  Corrigan got the impression she was almost enjoying this, that she thrived on antagonism. Well, it was stalemate, he wasn’t going to back down and neither was she.

  There was a knock on the door and a uniform appeared and beckoned Gower out. He muttered an excuse and left the office. A difficult silence reigned in the small room.

  Corrigan stared intimidatingly into space. Enver sat with his big hands, fingertips steepled, on the table in front of him as though they were potential assassin’s weapons and Hübler would feel reassured if she could see what they were doing. She was the only one who seemed happy, glaring with hostility at the others.

  Corrigan thought, I bet she’s Schneider’s Rottweiler. Many powerful figures employ a human attack dog, he’d done it himself. He thought nostalgically of Hanlon.

  Still off on sick leave sanctioned by himself after the business with the Russians. Well, at least that seemed to have died a quiet death.

  The door opened and Gower appeared, accompanied by a blond-haired man in his early thirties wearing an expensive leather bomber jacket and an easygoing smile. Christiane Hübler looked up, startled.

  ‘Wolf, was gibt?’

  It was Schneider.

  5

  The two men walked down past the Ashmolean museum in the centre of Oxford, turning left into the broad thoroughfare of St Giles.

  A casual observer might have taken them to be students, at first glance. They were wearing street clothes, hooded sweatshirts, one of them in camouflage combat trousers, the other in tight, skinny jeans. But if you looked closer the taller, stockier one was in his early thirties, too old to be an undergraduate, and the other’s visible tattoos, LOVE on one set of knuckles, HATE on the other, were not the kind of thing that Oxford students sported, not even in an ironic sense. And their hard-eyed gaze was neither studious nor academic.

  ‘So what’s the plan exactly, Mark?’ asked James Kettering, the shorter, younger one.

  Mark Spencer gave a bleak smile. ‘You know Marcus Hinds?’

  ‘Georgie’s bae?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The two of them walked past the Eagle and Child where Tolkien and his fellow Inklings had famously met.

  ‘Do you know him?’ asked Spencer.

  ‘No, well, I know what he looks like. Journalist, isn’t he?’

  ‘Seemingly.’ Spencer’s voice was dismissive. ‘Anyway, Georgie wants him taught a lesson. He’s getting dangerous, according to her.’

  Kettering glanced at him. ‘How much of a lesson?’ he asked. Spencer put his hand in his pocket and handed him a pocket knife. Kettering glanced at it discreetly: five inch blade, more or less, spring mounted, a classic flick knife. He hefted it in his hand.

  ‘That much of a lesson?’

  ‘You got it, buddy.’

  Spencer eyed his companion. He’d been on a few riots with JK, as he was known, and knew him to be a vicious, hard fighter. They’d also been on a couple of raids on EDF pubs, ‘Fascist bashing’ outings. He was pleased to see that JK seemed perfectly happy, that mix of excitement and tension that both men loved before things kicked off.

  ‘Where’s it going to go down?’

  They walked past one of the colleges. Kettering eyed it incuriously, they were all the same, full of privileged arseholes.

  ‘We’ll take him on the stairs. Georgie’ll buzz us in. He won’t know what’s hit him.’

  A while later they reached their destination in Summertown, a quiet residential street.

  ‘Hinds is a journalist,’ said Spencer, ‘a writer, it’ll be a piece of piss.’

  Kettering nodded. ‘Looking forward to it,’ he said.

  ‘Eleuthera will be very grateful,’ Spencer said. ‘And they’re very generous and Georgie controls the purse strings.’

  ‘Thought you’d say that,’ said Kettering with a grin.

  There was a skip outside Hinds’s communal front door and, just as they reached it, the door opened and a woman pushing a bike emerged. The two of them crossed the road to avoid being seen by her.

  ‘Thought you said the place was deserted at this time of day?’ Kettering’s tone was angry.

  They reached the other pavement and then they saw an old bag lady, hunkered down on a step with three carrier bags in front of her and an old blanket draping her. They looked at each other and shrugged. They waited for the Lycra-clad neighbour of Hinds to pedal off and then recrossed the road, Spencer glancing at the screen of his phone as they did so. Neither of them paid her any attention, as far as they were concerned. Nobody notices street people, nobody pays them any attention. They are a smelly
, embarrassing eyesore.

  But Elsa was paying them attention, and Elsa, former fine art lecturer and an authority on nineteenth-century European portrait painting, never forgot a face.

  6

  Wolf Schneider sat back in his chair and favoured the assembled group with a high-voltage smile of easy charm. It was an inclusive smile and he particularly focused on Enver, giving him a millisecond longer and a couple of extra watts of charisma. It was as effortless as turning up the central heating a notch. It was also equally effective, a highly calibrated instrument. It was as if he were trying to make up for Hübler’s intense rudeness. He didn’t look like a right-wing racist demagogue, he looked like an affable entrepreneur with the confidence that only a healthy bank balance and good looks can bring.

  Corrigan guessed that he was in his forties. He had blond hair and an outdoorsy glow to his features. His background had been in construction and he still had the powerful physique of a builder mixed with an amiable can-do toughness. He could see that Schneider’s appeal would be to attract people who were alienated by the political class. He wasn’t an intellectual or a businessman, he was an ordinary Joe, telling it like it is, telling it straight.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m giving you all so much trouble, particularly you, DI Demirel. I’m a great fan of the Turkish people.’ He raised a hand as if to ward off any criticism. ‘I know that you’re British, but my message is really one of tolerance and acceptance.’

  Oh, God, thought Corrigan, he’s about to make a speech. Schneider had a kind of messianic look on his face; four or forty thousand, the numbers were immaterial, he was determined to get his message across.

  ‘In an ideal world, we would have no racist problems. Sadly though, our world is very flawed. I want a multicultural Europe, a multicultural Germany, a multicultural Britain and by controlling numbers of Muslims to a certain percentage and winnowing out the extremists, we can achieve that.’

  Point made, he smiled winningly. Hübler looked at him admiringly.