Backlash

by Nick Oldham

  Naseema got out followed by Saeed. Seymour opened his door, but Roscoe held the top of it, preventing him from moving. ‘Stay with the car, Dave, I won’t be long.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Humour me, OK? There’s something buzzing round here and I don’t want to come back to a damaged motor. And don’t fall asleep.’

  Seymour looked round, puzzled, wondering what he had missed, but saw nothing. He resettled his broad posterior on the driver’s seat, actually relieved he did not have to go into the Khans’ home. He hated being surrounded by coloured people. He prayed he would not be given the job of family liaison officer.

  Roscoe followed Naseema and Saeed inside the shop.

  The family already knew and Roscoe found herself at the centre of a bereaved family at its most emotionally charged.

  Mo Khan’s widow was sobbing and wailing hysterically on the sofa, wringing her hands and beating her fists into cushions. Naseema immediately went to comfort her, while maintaining her own cool, cold, facade. Two of her sons were incandescent with rage. They paced the living room like Bengal tigers, muttering angrily, punching the air. A third son, the eldest, sat quietly on an armchair, watching the others while smoking a pungent cigarette. Then there was Saeed, the youngest, thrown into this vortex, a live wire, bursting with tension, vowing revenge.

  All in all, a volatile mixture.

  Much of what Roscoe heard was in Urdu. Some English was spoken obviously for her benefit. The talk was of retribution. Justice. Racism. Bloodshed. Death.

  Roscoe knew she had to exercise some authority but it was difficult to know where to begin. She had to lay down the law, tell them to keep it cool, keep a lid on it, let the police do their job, make promises, reassure them . . . for what good it would do. She picked on the brother seated in the armchair. He was the oldest and appeared to be most in control of himself.

  The rain had stopped, but the car was still misted up on the inside. Bloody crappy police cars, Seymour thought and turned the fan heater up a couple of notches. The windscreen started to clear very slowly.

  He leaned back. His right hand dropped to the side of the seat and fumbled with the recline knob. He turned it and the seat angled back a few degrees. Might as well be as comfortable as possible, he thought shuffling his bulk. He switched on the car radio and found a nice, jazzy station, pumping up the volume so he could hear it over the clatter of the de-mister.

  He was pretty whacked. The long day and the recently devoured kebab was having a somnolent effect on him. His eyelids drooped heavily. He drifted into a light sleep and his chin sagged heavily onto his chest. A loud snore jarred him awake for a brief moment before his eyes clicked shut again. This time his chin fell gently. He was gone. A grunting sound came from somewhere in his nose as his breathing became heavy.

  So he did not see them coming. He had no chance.

  Mo Khan’s eldest son was called Rafiq, almost thirty, now the head of the family and its various businesses. Roscoe managed to manoeuvre him away from his relatives, into the back of the shop behind the counter where she could speak to him alone.

  The shop was quiet, only a couple of customers browsing. A young Asian girl was working the till and reading a magazine.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Rafiq said before Jane Roscoe had a chance to begin. ‘Don’t take the law into your own hands. Let the police sort it out. I know, I know.’ He dismissed her with a contemptuous wave. ‘I also know that you are institutionally racist and do not care one bit about us.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Roscoe said defensively. ‘I care and I will do my very best for you. I won’t labour the point about the other things you said. You know full well there is a suspect for your father’s murder. We’re going to arrest him. So leave the justice to us, Rafiq. It’s our job, not yours or your family’s.’

  ‘I hear what you say, Mrs Copper, but I don’t know if I can hold my brothers back – or even if I want to. They are very angry. The Costains have been at our throats ever since we came here and you have done nothing to protect us – and now this has happened. You cannot be too critical if we do take the law into our own hands, can you, lady?’

  From the research Roscoe had done very recently into the Khan/Costain situation, Rafiq’s version of the conflict between the two families was not entirely accurate. However, she didn’t want to argue the toss now.

  ‘We would be critical of anyone who takes the law into their own hands, under whatever circumstance, under whatever provocation. I’m asking you to give us enough time to sort this matter out. I don’t want to have to come and arrest you or any of your family at a time of grief. Understand?’

  Rafiq looked her up and down.

  ‘I will do what I can for the moment,’ he promised her lamely. She knew it was as good as she was going to get.

  ‘Thank you. I will personally keep you informed of all our progress, once a day at the minimum.’

  ‘Don’t take too long about things,’ Rafiq began, ‘because if you do, this estate will burn––’

  There was a series of small explosions outside the shop. Pop-pop-pop. Roscoe knew exactly what had caused them. Petrol bombs. It was a sound embedded into her psyche, a sound she had heard for the first time in 1981 when, as a probationer PC, she had been part of one of the many police support units sent to assist Merseyside police when the Toxteth area of Liverpool blew up into a major riot. She had heard the noise in anger several times since.

  A wall of flame blew up against the shop front, followed by a buffeting surge of hot air.

  Rafiq growled, ‘It’s already started.’ To the girl on the till he shouted, ‘In the back, now,’ and jerked his thumb to emphasise the order.

  He started toward the front door of the shop but halted after one stride when the door was kicked open and two youths with balaclavas pulled down over their faces burst in. Each carried a petrol bomb – a milk bottle half filled with fuel, oily burning rag stuffed down the neck. They only seemed to be bits of kids, Roscoe thought quickly. Couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. But they looked evil, all in black. Terrifying. She could not help but draw a breath.

  They raised the bottles. One screamed, ‘Have these, you black twats.’

  ‘Get down!’ Roscoe shouted. She threw herself at Rafiq and dragged him to the floor behind the counter. As she moved she saw the petrol bombs arc through the air, spinning slowly, almost in slow motion, flames whipping round like a Catherine wheel.

  The bombers scarpered, screaming gleefully.

  The bottles landed virtually simultaneously on the hard floor in front of the counter. Petrol and flames sprayed everywhere. Roscoe and Rafiq huddled down behind the counter. For a few moments the heat above them was intense. Tongues of orange flames licked across the counter top, then died back.

  Roscoe could not stay down for long. Christ, she thought, what’s happened to Dave?

  Another explosion, this time a massive one, boomed outside.

  Dave Seymour’s eyes jumped open as the first three petrol bombs hit the wide paved area between where he sat in the car and the Khan’s shop front. All three ignited with a powerful whoosh. He saw two youths kick the shop door open and enter, each holding a lighted petrol bomb.

  Before he could open the car door, the front windscreen was smashed by someone wielding an iron bar. The side window was broken by another person, sending pieces of glass into his face and his clothing. Then the rear window went. There must have been a dozen of them surrounding the car, all brandishing iron bars, bats or chunks of wood, all wearing black hoods or masks.

  Seymour’s insides contracted and he knew he was in deep trouble.

  One of them hurled a petrol bomb into the car through the hole in the windscreen. Seymour saw it coming and cowered away, but there was nowhere he could go, nothing he could do, it landed on his lap but did not smash.

  Seymour had a moment of relief. Just a moment.

  As he picked up the flaming bottle the lighted wick dr
opped out of the neck. Petrol gushed out over Seymour’s thighs and groin. It ignited.

  ‘Cop bastard! Cop bastard,’ the people surrounding his car chanted mercilessly. There was laughter and triumph in their voices. ‘Burn you bastard, burn!’

  Seymour screamed horribly. He managed to open the door and fell out of the car onto his knees, desperately trying to bat out the flames with his bare hands. Where one flame went out, another came to life. Bigger. Hotter. Taking a better hold on his clothing, licking up his shirt front towards his face. ‘Help me, help me,’ he screamed.

  No one did.

  Somehow he got to his feet and staggered towards the shop.

  ‘Cop bastard, cop bastard,’ rang in his ears. ‘Burn! Burn! Burn!’

  Behind him more bombs smashed around the CID car. It went up in flames.

  Roscoe had had enough petrol bombs thrown at her during the days when she did riot training to know not to be afraid of them. ‘Petrol reception’ the classes had been mis-called. But unlike the majority of the training she had done in the police, the lessons learned about petrol bombs had stuck with her – because they had been about self-preservation. They had taught her that if you kept your eyes on the bombs as they came towards you and made sure they didn’t hit you on the head, they did not present too great a personal threat. They looked effective, frightened the living daylights out of people, made for good TV but, if treated with respect, they were not something to worry about too much.

  Having walked through pools of blazing petrol during those training sessions – albeit kitted up with stout steel toe-capped boots, flame retardant overalls, protective masks and headgear – she knew it was quite feasible to walk through flames unscathed – if you were quick enough and didn’t admire the countryside along the way. Although not exactly dressed for the part, she knew she had somehow to get through the flames and see what was happening to Dave Seymour.

  ‘Call the fire brigade,’ she instructed Rafiq before turning towards the flames and smoke on the other side of the counter. Thick black smoke was hanging just below the ceiling, beginning to fill the shop with its deadly vapours. She put a hand over her nose and mouth, protected her eyes with the other, took a deep breath of clean air and ran.

  The fire tried to catch her as she leapt through it. She could feel incredible heat beneath the soles of her shoes and the flames shooting up her legs, underneath her skirt. It was only momentary. In a split second she was through the flames, emerging from them like a phoenix. Unscathed.

  Which could not be said for Dave Seymour as he hit the shop door, bursting it open and tumbling through, twisting and writhing. He was ablaze.

  Seymour could not see anything that made any sense to him. His vision was a blur, an out-of-focus lens disorientating him. Neither could he hear anything. The chants behind him turned into an all-encompassing, rushing and booming noise, surrounding him completely, like being deep underwater. He could feel the fire. Burning him, frying him – from his belly to the underside of his chin.

  He knew he was screaming, knew he was being burned alive.

  Roscoe reacted without a second’s thought or moment’s hesitation. A surge of grade-A adrenaline sluiced into her system. She dived for Seymour instinctively thinking: Get him down, get him on the floor, smother the flames.

  She grabbed one of his arms, but in his own blind panic he wrenched it away from her, lost his balance and crashed into a wire magazine display. He stayed on his feet and staggered down the main aisle of the shop, fresh produce on one side, tinned goods and hardware on the other. Still screaming, writhing, twisting.

  ‘Dave!’ Roscoe bellowed – to no effect. She lunged for him again and leapt onto his back, riding him, trying to over-balance him and take him down, put him to the floor. ‘Get the fuck down!’ she hissed through clenched teeth.

  At the end of the aisle, he crashed into the chilled food display. Seymour fell over, but backwards, onto Roscoe who suddenly found herself trapped under his bulk.

  The fire blazed up him. He screamed again.

  Rafiq appeared from behind the counter, moving quickly through the last of the flames from the petrol bombs. He was holding a fire extinguisher which he directed at Seymour. Within seconds Seymour had been put out. Rafiq then turned what was left in the extinguisher onto the petrol bomb flames.

  Roscoe heaved Seymour to one side and got shakily to her knees, looking down at the huge detective who lay there, semi-comatose, with severe burns all the way up his front. Her mouth sagged open with shock. The adrenaline left her system as quickly as it had entered. She felt sick, weak and dithery, needing a sugar boost.

  Her hand went for her radio to call in for assistance. Before she could speak, every window in the shop was smashed, bricks, half-bricks, rocks, stones, flying through, sending glass showering everywhere. She instinctively ducked down and tried to cover the vulnerable Seymour as the missiles landed all around like meteors crashing in from outer space.

  Five

  The thrill had never gone for Henry Christie. Even approaching the twenty-five-year mark in his career had failed to diminish the excitement, the rush, the exhilaration of sitting in a cop car, all lights blazing, two-tones shrieking, driving with considered recklessness through traffic, shooting red lights, going the wrong direction up one-way streets, heading to some emergency or other. The emergency in this case being other cops needing assistance.

  Henry had a slightly fixed, wonky grin slapped across his face as Dermot Byrne pushed the under-powered Vauxhall Astra at crazy breakneck speeds through the crowded streets of Blackpool. Henry’s right foot instinctively pushed down on an imaginary brake pedal. His left hand clutched the broken arm rest on the door, steadying himself as the car lurched round corners, apparently on two wheels, and skidded out of the turn, the back end twitching on the wet roads. But Byrne handled the car with great expertise and experience, taking it all the way to its limits where possible, holding back when necessary. All the while he concentrated totally on the function of driving. Henry, while tense, was never in fear.

  Henry handled the communications side of things.

  Normally the radio channel was not on ‘talk-through’. This meant that transmissions from patrols could only be heard by communications room and selected other receivers, such as the radio console in the inspectors’ office, and not by other patrols. This enabled communications to keep tight control over radio traffic, which sometimes had a tendency to deteriorate when patrols could chat to one another without discipline. There were occasions when it was appropriate to override this and put talk-through on. This, Henry deemed, was one of those times, because he wanted to hear directly from the officers in trouble and not have to wait for their messages to be relayed by communications staff, efficient though they were.

  ‘Tell patrols to maintain strict radio discipline,’ he said into his personal radio, ‘then put us on talk-through,’ he instructed communications.

  ‘Roger.’ Communications transmitted the command and flicked the button.

  The first voice they heard belonged to Jane Roscoe. For some unaccountable reason, Henry’s heart tightened at the sound.

  ‘. . . pinned down in Khan’s shop. Must be well over thirty of them outside . . . very well organised . . . petrol bombs and bricks still coming. We need the fire brigade and an ambulance – Dave Seymour’s been badly injured. Someone’s going to die if we don’t get out of here soon . . .’

  Henry turned to Byrne. ‘Can you make this thing go faster?’ he demanded.

  Byrne – focused on the driving – nodded. ‘Yeah.’ And miraculously, from somewhere deep down, the car speeded up.

  Henry cut into Roscoe’s radio transmission. ‘Inspector Christie to DI Roscoe – keep your head down. We’ll be with you very soon.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she breathed. Henry could feel the tension in her voice, and the relief, yet she still sounded very cool. Henry was impressed.

  ‘Communications?’ he said. ‘Did you get that about th
e fire brigade and ambulance?’

  ‘Onto them now.’

  ‘Inspector Christie – be careful when you approach––’ Her voice stopped abruptly. Henry heard a bang, some rustling and a heavy breath being expelled. Then a crash. ‘Another petrol bomb,’ Roscoe’s voice came back. ‘Yeah, Henry, watch yourself. This is a well-organised job, so do it right. I want to get out of here in one piece. Wouldn’t be surprised if ambushes have been laid – scanners’ll be in use too.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ Henry acknowledged. She really was cool, telling him not to get into a position where he too would be trapped. ‘Inspector to Blackpool,’ Henry barked, getting well into the inspector mode now. He was aware that for the first time in months he was thinking clearly, buzzing and, perversely, enjoying himself. This was fun of the highest, gut-wrenching order.

  ‘Inspector – go ahead.’

  ‘If you haven’t already got a log running for this – get one. Also inform the superintendent on cover if she doesn’t already know, and deploy all patrols to an RV point on Preston New Road, junction Kentmere Drive. Ask them to meet me and PS Byrne there for further instructions, and tell them to be getting into their public-order gear just in case. No one is to drive onto Shoreside without my express permission – understood? If anyone is already there, tell them to withdraw to the RV point now! Pass the location of the RV point to the fire brigade and ambulance. Advise them not to go onto the estate without speaking to me first. Got all that?’ Henry knew he had been speaking quickly, speaking as the thoughts tumbled through his mind. ‘And also turn out the helicopter, please.’

  ‘Roger,’ the very in-control communications operator responded, taking charge of Henry’s requests in the sort of smooth, unhurried manner Henry could only dream of. ‘And by the way,’ the operator added, ‘treble-nines coming in thick and fast from Shoreside residents now.’

  ‘Received,’ said Henry. ‘Have I missed anything?’ he asked Byrne quickly.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Byrne. ‘I take it we’re not just going to pile onto the estate?’