Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  John Martin looked blank. Islamic theology obviously wasn’t his strong suit. Rukshana went on. “I accept everything as part of the divine plan. So, no, I wasn’t disappointed.”

  “Very commendable, I’m sure. But you must have been a little upset when you were let go? Angry?”

  She smiled at him. “That’s for atheists, I’m afraid.”

  John Martin had the feeling he was being put down, but he pressed on. “Were you aware that the successful candidate was having intimate relations with your manager?”

  “Jeff and Sarah? I certainly was not. I had no idea. People don’t pass gossip on to me. It’s because I’m a Muslim, you see.”

  John Martin pursed his lips and produced a photo from a file. He handed it to Rukshana. “Do you know who that is?”

  It was a CCTV still photo from the lobby of the bank. It showed Rukshana at the security gate in her heels, short skirt, low-cut top, and sunglasses. Rukshana passed it back.

  “No, sorry.”

  John Martin passed it back to her. “Have another look. Rack your brains.”

  Rukshana studied it again before handing it over.

  “Still no.”

  John Martin moved in for the kill. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Rukshana feigned outrage and tugged at her headscarf. “Certainly not. I’m a good Muslim. That girl looks like a prostitute. Totally inappropriate clothes for any decent Muslim woman.”

  John Martin passed her another photo, asked her if she recognized the subject. This one was a CCTV still of Rukshana in her burka outside Al-Nutjobs. But Rukshana had hit her stride. “I doubt her own mother would recognize her. If it was a woman, of course; perhaps it was a man in disguise? We don’t wear burkas in this house.”

  John Martin played her the tape of the phone call to the anti-terrorist hotline. When it was finished he said, “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “It sounds more like a white comedian making fun of Asians. There’s too much of that sort of racism in our society. I don’t know why the police don’t crack down on it.”

  And so it went on. For an hour, John Martin probed and Rukshana parried. But Rukshana could see the detective was getting frustrated. He knew, okay, but he couldn’t prove it. Eventually, John Martin accepted a cup of tea and a couple of samosas that he found “very tasty”. Then, with obvious reluctance, he returned to the attack.

  “Our inquiries have revealed – oh, I say, good shot!”

  John Martin was looking over Rukshana’s shoulder at the cricket. A young Pakistani batsman had just hit the ball clean into the cheering crowd. Granddad turned around and said to him, “What about that kid, eh? What a prospect!”

  John Martin returned to his questioning, but he began going around in circles. He admitted the photos could have been of anyone. He also confessed there was no fingerprint evidence and that the tape didn’t really prove anything. He admitted – off the record – that the police had quite a list of people who didn’t much like her ex-boss Jeff, so they had a lot of others to interview. In fact, some of his fellow officers suspected Jeff’s wife was the real culprit, and, frankly, they didn’t blame her. The wife was certainly a more promising suspect than a nice Muslim girl like Rukshana.

  “Okay, Miss Malik, I think we’re about finished for now.”

  But as he got up to go, he noticed something on the mantelpiece. He walked over and picked up the large pair of sunglasses that Rukshana had worn the previous Thursday when she’d framed Jeff. They were sitting where she’d left them when she’d got back. John Martin looked at the shades and then fished out the CCTV still of Rukshana in the bank lobby and studied it. They were obviously the same distinctive pair. Rukshana felt her stomach tense. She’d been so careful, and now this . . .

  But before John Martin had a chance to ask Rukshana for an explanation, her granddad snapped, “What are you doing with my sunglasses?”

  “Your sunglasses?”

  “Yes. They’re medicinal, I use them to cut out the glare from the TV.”

  Granddad got up, took the sunglasses from the cop’s hand, and put them on. He looked quite natty in them. John Martin was not convinced.

  “You use them to cut out the glare from the TV?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why weren’t you wearing them when I came in?”

  “I was. But I take them off when we have visitors. I don’t want to look like a prat, do I?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but . . .”

  Granddad angrily turned on the unfortunate police officer. “Are you calling me a liar? And by the way, the girl is right – she was here all day last Thursday and I was here all day watching cricket in my sunglasses and I’d like to see you prove otherwise. Now, why don’t you clear off and catch some real criminals?”

  When John Martin was gone, Rukshana sat down in the front room by her grandfather.

  “So you were listening then?”

  “I can listen and watch cricket at the same time. I’m not stupid. And that was a very foolish thing you did. You could have gone to prison.”

  “I know. And thanks, Granddad. For backing me up.”

  Her granddad nodded and then said, “If you’d wanted revenge on someone, you should have spoken to me. I know all about that. When I was a child, a British prime minister came to our village and was a little bit rude and arrogant.” Rukshana’s granddad forgot the cricket for a moment and became lost in thought. Then he added, “Now, that was a revenge story . . .”

  The Zatopec Gambit

  Roger Busby

  When the bold chess player sacrifices a piece, usually a pawn, during the opening in order to secure an advantage, the move is called a gambit.

  The day the burka bandit hit the King Kebab mini mosque and sparked an international incident, Detective Constable “Metal” Mike Malloy was raiding his brother-in-law’s scrapyard. It was good solid CID work, the sort he enjoyed, so whenever the stats needed a boost he would borrow a couple of PCs from the relief, a handful of PCSOs and a dog handler for good measure and they would roar down the Old Kent Road in unmarked cars and a couple of vans, blues-and-twos going full blast, and turn the place over in fine old style.

  Over his twenty years in the job “Metal” Mike had become a past master in the technique of raiding premises, and every time he would burst into the office, scowl menacingly and announce: “Okay, everybody stay put – this is a police raid!” And Alex Donnelly, his brother-in-law, would look up from his desk with tired, patient eyes and reply: “You got a warrant this time, Michael?” To which Malloy would invariably respond: “Since when did I need a warrant, Alex? This is family business.” With a sigh Donnelly would push his work aside, produce a concertina print out of his scrap register for official scrutiny, and exchange pleasantries on family affairs while the raiding party, suitably equipped in loaned hard hats and steel toecaps to avoid infringing Health and Safety, scrambled over the acres of junk in the yard outside.

  When it was all over, “Metal” Mike would return to the station, debrief his team, crank up the system and input the “dynamic intel” in meticulous detail. The borough had never had a more conscientious crime intelligence analyst than DC Malloy and nobody seemed unduly concerned that the monthly crime profiles uploaded to the Yard’s number-crunchers appeared to relate exclusively to the activities of Southside Ferrous Factors, Alex Donnelly’s scrap-metal business. Malloy could be relied upon for big number crime stats which kept the dream factory happy, and that was all that mattered.

  Of course “Metal” Mike’s preoccupation with his brother-in-law’s scrapyard was not as simple as might appear at face value. For one thing, Detective Constable Malloy was blissfully ignorant of the fact that Donnelly really was a high-class villain and that was why he never complained to the brass about the seemingly unwarranted intrusion into his business. Similarly Alex Donnelly, who felt quite confident in his ability to hoodwink his numbskull brother-in-law, was unaware of the fact that the borough’s glowing
crime stats had risen through the system and had impressed NSY’s Serious and Organized Crime Command. So much so that, unbeknown to him, Donnelly had been elevated to the rarefied status of a Zatopec target and circulated to all London-wide crime squads.

  Otherwise, this example of familial symbiosis ticked along quite nicely to each other’s advantage; such as the time “Metal” Mike earned his sobriquet by recovering two war-memorial plaques, a giant bronze sculpture and a mile and a half of copper signalling cable which had closed the Northern Line for a week thanks to a whisper from his brother-in-law. While DC Malloy basked in the glory of a two-page spread in the South London Press, and twenty seconds on BBC London, Alex Donnelly was quietly satisfied that the media vilification and subsequent court case had put a troublesome rival out of business. Yes, in filial fashion, the unlikely brothers-in-law rubbed along in blissful ignorance until the day the burka bandit hit the King Kebab mini mosque just as Lawson Hollingsworth MP, Minister of State for International Affairs and the Third Secretary to the Pakistani High Commissioner, dropped in for a cultural visit, and all hell broke loose.

  Alex Donnelly cut a fine figure for a South London scrap dealer with his penchant for pinstriped business suits and hand-tailored shirts. His thick dark hair was greying at the temples, adding a distinguished touch to his appearance, and he would have passed in the Square Mile for a merchant banker or stockbroker with his meticulous Old World manners and careful attention to the niceties of social etiquette. He had long since disposed of the amusingly alliterative South Side Scrap sign over the gates to his yard in favour of the more upmarket Southside Ferrous Factors, a respectable cover for his flourishing business exporting other people’s antiques concealed in shipments of processed metal. He had built up a lucrative Euro-business on the booming continental metal exchange which qualified for all the EU subsidies, but to his criminal associates who specialized in plundering country mansions, Alex Donnelly was a 20 per cent of market value take-it-or-leave-it fence and, as such, a leading light of their fraternity.

  If only his waspish younger sister hadn’t upped and married that pride of the local law, Michael Malloy, the chain of events, which eventually elevated Alex Donnelly to the exalted criminal rank of Zatopec target, might never have happened. But as was his nature he took the bumbling attention of his detective-relative philosophically and in the course of “Metal” Mike’s frequent visits to his premises even found him a useful, if unwitting, source of police information. While the raiding party rummaged half-heartedly through the mountains of twisted metal and gutted car shells, he would lubricate their conversation with Scotch and American sipped from cut-glass tumblers in quite a convivial manner.

  In sharp contrast to the fastidious Donnelly, “Metal” Mike was studiously slovenly, favouring the de rigueur attire of the plainclothes street cop, scuffed leather jacket and jeans more often than not topped off with a woollen watch cap which he considered added a raffish touch to his street cred at the factory as an all-about-no-nonsense thief-taker. Quite what his sister had seen in him, Donnelly was at a loss to comprehend, but despite their singular incompatibility things went tolerably well as each played his own game with the other. Then, as so often happens when much has been invested in preserving the status quo, an unrelated event snuffs out the sun and changes everything forever.

  By a coincidence of geography, Alex Donnelly’s scrapyard sprawled across a vacant tract of Southwark hinterland between gaunt high-rise estates and clutches of low-rent retail and street markets once earmarked for a grandiose shopping/leisure complex, then abandoned as the civic planners fled before the hot breath of the transplanted slum dwellers who had made the neighbourhood their own. And central to this cosmopolitan milieu was the King Kebab and mini mosque where the devout could satisfy both their earthly and spiritual hunger under one roof. Thus it was that at the moment of alignment as the Minister of the Crown and his diplomatic guest from the land of the Wazir sat down for a convivial cultural lunch, the runes were cast in the form of the burka bandit bursting in from the street and emptying the twenty-round magazine of a stubby TEC-9 machine pistol into the ceiling with a deafening rasp of automatic gunfire. As the tableau froze under a haze of plaster dust, the bandit calmly flipped another magazine into the assault pistol and growled: “Infidel goat-fuckers, you is being robbed . . . Inshallah.”

  Deputy Assistant Commissioner Tom “The Cat” Parker cast a jaundiced eye over the zoo-like chain-link fence which protected the yard of Peckham’s central police station from the denizens of the neighbourhood, breathed a despairing sigh and exclaimed: “Rank hath its privilege, Bobby, and for a DAC just four rungs from the top of the ladder, mine happens to be a nice warm office on the fifth floor with plenty of passing eye candy and a good lunch in the Commissioner’s mess, not slumming it out here in the backwoods. So before I put this down to a sad bad dream, get back in the car here and tell Simon to whisk me back to the Yard, and please remind me what the hell I’m doing here.”

  Grinning from ear to ear as he held open the door of the DAC’s Range Rover, Detective Chief Inspector Bob Jones, who ran the borough’s robbery squad, replied with studied insouciance: “You’re the guv’nor, guv’nor; me, I’m just a foot soldier toiling in the weeds, so you tell me.”

  From anyone else the flippant response would have brought a sharp rebuke, but despite the gulf of rank, the pair were old friends from back in the eighties when they had stood shoulder to shoulder in full riot kit repelling the hordes as members of the Met PSUs dispatched north to quell the miners’ strike, a plum tour of overtime duty which had enabled Bobby Jones to pay off his mortgage and “The Cat” to buy a pied-à-terre in the Barbican as a hedge against inflation. Both men were career cops with time in, but loath to sever the umbilical. Jones inclined his head towards the mesh-enclosed tunnel, which accessed the factory through the custody suite, and swept a hand: “Shall we?” he said.

  In the squad chief’s office Jones drew the Venetian blinds and produced a bottle of Bells from his desk drawer. He poured two glasses and for a long moment they sipped whisky. Then “The Cat” said: “I was in the outer office admiring Charlene’s legs – the pelmets they wear for skirts these days are enough to give a man palpitations – when I got called to the presence and the Old Man was stalking around the office like a caged tiger. Apparently Hollingsworth is tipped for promotion to Home Secretary in the next reshuffle and the Old Man’s terrified he’ll be out on his ear and no chance of the promised K, so he practically pleaded with me to get over here and sort this little job of yours pronto so he can get back into the heir apparent’s good books.”

  “So a penny-ante stick-up, which might have rated a DS top weight, suddenly gets five-star treatment, eh guv?”

  “You know the game as well as I do, Bobby. The Old Man says jump, all I say is “How high?” I’m not dying in this ditch, and neither are you. So let’s take it from the top and see if we can’t wrap this up pronto, before it all hits the fan.”

  Jones fed a disk into his laptop and swept a theatrical hand. “Meet the burka bandit,” he said as the black-clad figure appeared in blurry monochrome. “Got him on the Mickey Mouse street CCTV.”

  “Not much to go on there then.” The Cat peered at the fuzzy image. “Looks like a walking tent.”

  “Oh, it gets better,” Jones said, as the briefest glimpse of the bandit entering the King Kebab and mini mosque flashed up and then the screen went blank. “That’s when he shot out the camera.”

  “Weapon?”

  “TEC-9 on full auto just to make sure he’d got their undivided attention.”

  “Part One prohibited weapon,” the Cat sighed. “Where do they get them from? We’ve been running Trident like an express train, and still they keep coming.”

  “South London, guv’nor,” Jones shrugged, “You could get yourself anything from a Saturday-night-special to an RPG if you needed one. All Trident’s done is make ’em smarter; nobody keeps their own shooter anymore, you hi
re ’em out from rent-a-gun.”

  Jones tapped the mouse to pause the DVD. “He gives ’em the gypsies while they’re paralysed in shock-n-awe and good as gold they turn out their valuables on the tables, mister scoops up the goodies, empties the till and he’s on his toes in thirty seconds flat. Good old-fashioned no frills stand-and-deliver blag.”

  “Score?”

  “Twenty grand top whack. Cash and the brethren’s bling.”

  “Including the third’s classic platinum, diamond-studded Day-Date Rolex Oyster on President Bracelet presented to him personally by one-time El Presidente himself, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, for services rendered when he was the ISI section chief in Waziristan.”

  “Spook?” Bobby Jones raised an eyebrow.

  “Probably still is,” the Cat said. “Not unusual for the right-hand man to the High Commissioner. So he’s giving it bunny to Hollingsworth that this is a Taliban-inspired attempt on his life; thinks they’ve got a fatwa on him and Hollingsworth gets the hot prickles under his collar and starts melting the Old Man’s dog-n-bone.”

  “Give me strength, guv,” Jones sighed. “Next they’ll be saying it’s the Klingons.”

  “Al-Qaeda was mentioned,” the Cat said.

  “More like Al Capone,” Jones said. “This tickle isn’t a jihad, it’s a gee-up.”

  The Cat folded his arms: “Enlighten me further, Chief Inspector.”

  Jones tapped the mouse and the laptop came back to life. “We got a blizzard of niners and the rapid response van got there first.” A kaleidoscope interior of a speeding transit caroomed around the screen. “Head-cams,” Jones explained. “They’re doing a reality doc for Channel Four, Cops-n-Robbers.”

  “Who authorized that?”

  “Fifth floor, guv,” Jones grinned. “All part of the Commissioner’s hearts-and-minds programme. Remember ‘Dull it isn’t’?”

  “Yeah and ‘Badge of Courage’, classics from the DPA cringe-makers.”