Girl On Fire_DC Max Wolfe

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Then I shall pray for him, too.’

  We watched the children training.

  ‘There was a famous murder case in the Seventies,’ I said. ‘The press called the killer Black Moses. A married white woman who had been playing around was strangled and they arrested her black husband. He was a lay preacher out of Trinidad and that fit very well because the killer wrote the chapter and verse number of the Commandment about not committing adultery on the bedroom wall. And he wrote it with her blood. Did you ever hear about that case, Father?’

  ‘Double up that jab, Lewis!’ Gane shouted.

  ‘The husband did ten years,’ I said. ‘But the murderer turned out to be the woman’s father, who was white and angry that his daughter had married a black man. Today we would call it an honour killing, even though there’s never any honour in them. The real killer, the woman’s father, let it slip to a workmate a decade later. They usually have to talk about it to someone in the end. It must drive you nuts, trying to keep that kind of secret. But the law missed the real killer at the time because he wrote the Commandment about not committing adultery on the wall.’

  ‘Deuteronomy,’ Gane said. ‘Book 5, verse 21.’

  ‘Although the way the killer wrote it was Exodus 20:14. He used Exodus rather than Deuteronomy. Like our guy now – like Bad Moses. He uses Exodus, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Does he?’

  Gane was not looking at me. But I knew he was listening.

  ‘And I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why would you use one set of Commandments and not the other? How would you choose between Deuteronomy and Exodus? What’s the difference?’

  ‘None. Personal preference.’

  ‘But when you talk about the Ten Commandments, you use Deuteronomy, don’t you, Father Gane? Bad Moses quotes Exodus. But you look me in the eye and you quote Deuteronomy.’

  He turned to face me. ‘And do you think that might be a false lead, Detective? Me using Deuteronomy when the man you are seeking quotes Exodus?’

  I could smell his sweat now.

  I had not noticed it before.

  ‘Do you think I am capable of killing a man?’ he said.

  I didn’t think Father Marvin Gane was capable of taking a life.

  I knew it.

  ‘We never really talked about your brother,’ I said. ‘We never really talked about what happened to Curtis, did we?’

  I had seen a lot of Father Gane in those last days of my colleague’s life. In truth, his brother Curtis and I had never been close friends. Curtis was too far ahead of me when I joined Homicide and Serious Crime Command for a real friendship to develop early on and when we grew closer, after he broke his back, the time was always running out.

  But I had been there the night we busted a paedophile ring in an abandoned mansion on The Bishop’s Avenue, and I had watched DI Curtis Gane take one step back from a man holding a black carbon lock knife with a four-inch blade and I had seen him fall two storeys, breaking the vertebrae that connected his head to his spine.

  I had been there when Curtis Gane’s life changed and I was there in those long hospital nights when he begged me to end his life.

  I could not do it.

  But I had always known that Father Marvin Gane had it in him – the physical strength, the moral certainty – to hold a pillow over his brother’s head until the pain and suffering was over.

  ‘My brother was in unimaginable pain,’ he said. ‘In the end his death was a mercy. For him. And for my mother. God took him.’

  ‘I saw you – and your mother – the day we scattered Curtis’ ashes from the roof of West End Central. But I didn’t see you again after that. Not until Borodino Street. And I still don’t understand what you were doing there. I could understand why all those people came to pay their respects to Alice Stone and to leave their flowers. But some people couldn’t stay away from Borodino Street. Some people were drawn back to it again and again. And you were one of them, weren’t you?’

  He watched the children springing around the ring, throwing punches at their invisible foes.

  ‘Your iniquities have separated you from your God, your sins have hidden His face from you, so that he will not hear,’ he said. ‘Isaiah chapter 59, verse 2. That’s why I went to Borodino Street, Detective, because it was a place without God. That seems totally absurd to you, I know. In a godless society, faith always seems insane. The idea of being separated from God seems raving mad to the man who does not believe in God. Of course it does. But you didn’t really come to talk to me about theology, did you? You came to see me because you mistakenly believe that I murdered my brother and you are wondering who else I might have killed.’

  For a long moment there was only the sound of leather hitting leather, and gasps of effort, and the sound of breath running out.

  ‘Where were you last night, Father Gane?’

  For a moment I thought he was going to put his hands on me.

  I thought he was going to kick me out of the Muhammad Ali Youth & Leisure Centre just as he had violently ejected the stoned young man. I did not doubt that he could do it. Of the two of us, he was by far the more powerful man. But he wrung his huge hands, as if in prayer or perhaps restraining himself.

  ‘I was home alone,’ he said.

  ‘So I shouldn’t look for you on the CCTV around Borodino Street?’

  His mouth flinched.

  ‘I wasn’t anywhere near Borodino Street. And I didn’t run down that lawyer. And I didn’t kill the father of those two mass murderers.’

  I waited for him to mention his brother.

  I waited for him to tell me that he had not placed a pillow over the face of Curtis Gane.

  But he was standing up.

  ‘Are we done?’

  I got up and held out my hand. ‘For now,’ I said.

  He took my hand and he did not let it go and, with the slightest of motions, he pulled me towards him.

  And once again I felt the power of this man.

  ‘Be careful out there,’ he told me.

  When I got back to Smithfield, the meat market was in full swing, the club kids were coming out to play and my favourite Criminal Informant was waiting for me, watching the night go by and giving his pale frail body what it craved.

  Nils was standing in the shadows, eating a sponge cake with his fingers, a streak of jam running down his leather trousers, relishing the sudden hit of sugar the way only the career heroin addict truly can.

  ‘You still looking for those hand grenades?’ he said, licking his fingers.

  30

  ‘Rapid entry, dig out and dominate,’ Jackson Rose told his team of Specialist Firearms Officers.

  The young men and women of SC&O19 sat in the front two rows of the briefing room of Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel. They wore grey body armour and expressions that were pulled tight by adrenaline.

  ‘Then back here for tea, biscuits and medals all round,’ Jackson grinned. ‘How’s that sound?’

  They smiled back at him.

  There were murmurs of amusement and assent.

  It sounded pretty good.

  We were back in the place of legends. This was the police station where murder detectives once hunted Jack the Ripper. And this was the police station where DS Alice Stone had led the raid on Borodino Street that resulted in the death of the Khan terror cell and herself. Now Jackson Rose stood on the low stage of that dimly lit room, telling his young shots how it would go down, and trying to inoculate them with his own quiet confidence.

  Because somebody always had to go in.

  And because you never knew.

  You never really knew what was waiting beyond the door.

  My mob sat to one side in the front row. Whitestone. Joy. Edie. And me on the aisle, waiting for Jackson’s nod to come on stage. All of us trying to get comfortable inside the stab-proof Kevlar. PASGT helmets resting on our laps, apart from Edie Wren, who was already wearing hers.

  She leaned in.

 
‘How you sleeping?’ she whispered.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Good, good.’

  She leaned back with a knowing smile, her green eyes sparkling with amusement under the rim of her PASGT helmet. There were freckles on her nose that would always be there now.

  ‘As bad as that?’ she said.

  Then Jackson was looking at me, giving me my cue with a small nod.

  I got up and walked on stage.

  ‘DC Wolfe of West End Central,’ Jackson said.

  I looked out at the briefing room. Beyond the SFOs in the front rows, I could see a Specialist Search Team from SO20, the Counter Terrorism Protective Security Command, dog handlers with firearms and explosives search dogs from DSU, the Dog Support Unit, and teams of paramedics. And right at the back, resting his great bulk against the wall, Flashman of Counter Terrorism Command and his team.

  Once upon a time they called them the bomb squad.

  We might need them today.

  There was a laptop on a lectern. I hit a button and a face appeared on the big screen behind me. A police mugshot, face-on and profile of a white man in his late twenties.

  ‘This is Peter Fenn,’ I said. ‘AKA Ozymandias. He sells weapons. Mostly small firearms to gang members and drug dealers south of the river but lately he has been expanding. We believe he has established a connection with the Balkans. It was believed Ozymandias sold two twenty-year-old Croatian hand grenades to Asad and Adnan Khan. This was the initial intelligence that took us to Borodino Street. As you know, we found the brothers but not the grenades.’

  I hit another button.

  Two hand grenades appeared on screen. Black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. You could clearly read the name of the manufacturer on the side.

  Cetinka, it said.

  ‘But we have finally located our Mr Fenn. Ozymandias has been off the radar for a while. Our CI – a regular buyer at one of the crack houses in the estate where Fenn lives – tells us he is back in town after a prolonged bout of sex tourism in Pattaya, Thailand.’

  Another button. A derelict council estate of pre-fabricated blocks, five storeys high, dark steel sheets covering many of the windows and stairwells.

  ‘The Elphinstone Estate,’ I said. ‘An open sewer of drug gangs, crack addicts and rats the size of unneutered toms. Developers have been trying to tear it down for ten years to build luxury flats but some of the residents have refused to move out.’ I looked at the blighted block of flats. ‘It’s as close as this city gets to a no-go area. And it is home to Peter Fenn.’

  Jackson stepped forward.

  ‘Expect firearms on the premises,’ he said. ‘It’s what Ozymandias does. There is also the strong possibility of explosives. So look after yourselves and each other in there, as I know you will. You’ve already got plans of the building. Any questions?’

  Jesse Tibbs raised his hand.

  ‘MOE, skipper?’

  ‘Our Intel is that Fenn has a stronger front door than the Bank of England,’ Jackson said. ‘So method of entry will be you blowing it off its hinges with your Benelli shotgun. But you might have to knock more than once. Good with that, Jesse?’

  Tibbs nodded.

  Jackson was no longer smiling.

  ‘Then gun up,’ he said. ‘And let’s go to work.’

  We arrived at the Elphinstone Estate at first light.

  But for some people the night was not yet over.

  As our unmarked jump-off van pulled into the courtyard, four blocks of flats facing a no man’s land where someone had dragged a sofa and then set fire to it – I could hear distant laughter, screams, crying – and music. Lots of music. The sounds of Detroit and Jamaica and Ibiza, all swirling around the rotting estate, like the soundtrack to a party that was over in some other lifetime.

  We had left Leman Street in a small convoy but the rest of the vehicles – the ambulances, the dog units, Flashman and his team – were left in neighbouring streets with their engines idling by the time Jackson’s shots and my mob piled out of our jump-off van.

  Led by Jackson, we headed for the far block of flats and sprinted up three flights of stairs before he raised a hand and we crouched in a stairwell. Wind whistled down the bleak corridors and stairs. Wind would always whistle down them.

  And then suddenly we were being watched.

  The tiny child must have wandered out of one of the flats. He was wearing just his pants and a filthy T-shirt. He was perhaps two years old, with all the chubby roundness of that age. He gripped a can of fizzy drink and stared wide-eyed at the shots with their Glock 17 handguns, Black Mamba Sig assault rifles, M26 Tasers, the body armour, their faces hidden by black balaclavas, three holes for mouth and eyes.

  Edie pushed her way forward.

  ‘Go home,’ she hissed at the child.

  He did not move.

  I waited to hear the voice of an adult calling his name, desperately trying to find him. It did not happen. The children were left to wander in the Elphinstone Estate. The kid slurped his fizzy drink and showed no sign of moving.

  So Edie picked him up and carried him away.

  Jackson was conferring with Tibbs.

  ‘Go,’ Jackson said.

  Tibbs began walking down the long windy corridor with the Benelli M3 Super 90, his youthful face impassive. We followed him and I was aware of eyes watching us from the other blocks. And then Tibbs was directly outside Peter Fenn’s front door.

  It was a mesh metal grille over a slab of steel.

  Tibbs considered the door for a moment, then shouldered his weapon and began to fire. The day cracked with sound, again and again and again. Spent brass flew.

  It was a strong door. But the semi-automatic shotgun went through it like a machete through margarine.

  The shots poured inside. We followed them.

  ‘Armed police! Stand still!’

  ‘Show me your hands!’

  ‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’

  ‘Stop! Armed—’

  And then there was that moment of total stillness when we were inside the target building and nobody was trying to kill us. There were two large Samsonite suitcases in the hallway. BKK–LHR said the baggage tags. Bangkok to London.

  The shots were moving into the flat, still shouting the commands, until they suddenly stopped and I heard someone mutter an appalled curse.

  They had found Ozymandias.

  The weapons dealer had been crucified.

  He was naked and unmoving on the floor of the living room, pinned there by some kind of knives or short swords that had been driven into his hands and feet. Both his hands were pulled high above his head, in a gesture of surrender, and his feet had been placed on top of each other.

  He looked as though he had put up a fight because there were perforations to his hands and arms after some unsuccessful early efforts to nail him to the floor. There was a lot of blood but most of it had come out of his right wrist where the sword – no, it was a bayonet – that held him to the floor must have nicked his radial artery.

  ‘No pulse,’ one of the shots said. ‘No heartbeat.’

  Jackson got down on his hands and knees and began pumping the crucified man’s chest.

  ‘Max,’ Whitestone said, pulling on a pair of blue nitrile gloves.

  She was indicating the writing on the wall.

  The letters were a foot high, daubed with the weapon dealer’s blood.

  The blood had been drying for long enough to turn black.

  Exodus 20:16

  I looked at Joy Adams.

  ‘The Ninth Commandment,’ she said, pulling on white baggies over her shoes. ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Someone thinks he was a grass.’

  The shots were searching room to room, their blood still pumping.

  ‘Armed police! Stand still!’

  ‘Show me your hands!’

  ‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’

  ‘Stop
! Armed—’

  But there was only the dead man here now.

  The room swam into focus. In contrast to the squalor of the Elphinstone Estate, the flat had an almost suburban cosiness to it. It had the mustiness of a place that had not been lived in for a while but the cushions on the leather sofas were almost prissily arranged. Peter Fenn aka Ozymandias had been proud of his home.

  There were framed photographs on a desk with a large iMac. I stepped closer to look at them.

  They were displayed like family portraits.

  But they were not family portraits.

  Boy scouts, long dead, in shorts and khaki shirts smiled for the camera. No, not boy scouts. Hitlerjugend (HJ) said the caption. Hitler youth.

  The next photograph was of an unsmiling man in a black uniform.

  Waffen Schutzstaffel der NSDAP (SS).

  And finally, in the largest photograph, there was a sea of helmets for as far as the eye could see, staring at a distant stage.

  Overview of the mass roll call of SA, SS and NSKK troops, Nuremberg, 9 November 1935.

  I stepped back. I had wondered what kind of mindset you needed to make a career out of selling weapons.

  And now I knew.

  ‘It’s a shrine,’ Whitestone said beside me, pulling off the PASGT helmet.

  ‘So Bad Moses killed Ozymandias,’ Adams said. ‘And Bad Moses killed Ahmed Khan and crippled Sir Ludo.’

  Whitestone looked uncertain.

  ‘This could be the work of a fan of Bad Moses,’ she said. ‘The Ten Commandments are right on trend these days. Bad Moses never wrote on the wall in blood before.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is not a copycat kill. It’s not just the Old Testament Bad Moses likes.’

  I remembered Ahmed Khan dying in my arms, and the name of his granddaughter escaping with his final breath, and I remembered the knife that had been plunged into Ahmed Khan’s subclavian artery, and the motto on the blade.

  ‘Bad Moses likes knives,’ I said. ‘And he likes these kind of knives. Third Reich blades. The knife that killed Ahmed Khan was bought from Ozymandias. And whoever bought it believed that Ozymandias – Peter Fenn – had ratted him out.’