Gagged & Bound

by Natasha Cooper

The street was quiet and empty, except for a black cat that poured itself down from an extension roof on to a wobbly dustbin lid. Luckily the bin was plastic, or the lid would have clattered as it fell, waking everyone within earshot. Mac raised a hand to keep them all quiet. Stephanie could hear her own breathing as well as feel it. At last Mac started moving again. She stood aside and watched him swing the heavy battering ram.

  The door must’ve been reinforced with steel because it didn’t budge until the fifth swing; the noise would have woken everyone in the house. Even so, she burst through the gap as soon as it was wide enough, hearing the familiar shouts from behind her. She was up the stairs and on the landing before there was any noticeable movement from inside. Mac was behind her. Once again, she stepped aside, flattening herself against the wall as she’d been taught. He smashed open the main bedroom door and she swung round to go through.

  Something hit her in the throat. Her legs collapsed and she was on the floor. She couldn’t breathe. Her throat was burning as if someone had stuffed a red-hot poker down it. Liquid poured down her neck. Her eyes wouldn’t work. She tried to move and screamed as more pain ripped through her, but no noise came out. Through the fog and agony someone was shouting her name. Why didn’t they stop her body burning up? She was on fire. She tried to pass out but the pain kept her conscious. People were trying to hold her back too, shouting her name and grabbing at her. All she wanted was no more pain.

  ‘Stephanie! Stephanie! Hang on in …’

  Caro had been in a meeting in the superintendent’s office since nine o’clock and was on her way back to her overflowing desk when she noticed the atmosphere. At first she couldn’t work out what it was. Then she saw fury in some of the faces she passed, and an unpleasant mixture of excitement and shame in others. She’d only ever seen that particular combination when someone unpopular had been injured.

  ‘Who’s been hurt?’ she asked Fred Walley, her favourite sergeant.

  ‘Stephanie Taft. You know, the one-woman cleaner of the sewers.’ Caro felt as though she’d been dipped in an ice bath. For a moment she couldn’t breathe or move.

  ‘What’s happened to her?’ she said at last, amazed to find that her voice worked in spite of the clenching in her throat.

  ‘Shot on a drugs raid.’ Fred looked curiously at her. ‘Are you OK? You weren’t a friend, were you, Guv?’

  ‘I’ve met her once or twice. Is she dead?’

  ‘Yeah. It was only a .22, but they got her in the neck. She lived longer than if it had been a head shot, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do. You can’t put a tourniquet on a neck. Must’ve been bad luck. They were probably aiming at her head, filthy toe-rags, and were too out of it to shoot straight.’

  Unless it was someone who knew what he was doing, Caro thought, and had been aiming at the most vulnerable spot just above the bullet-proof vest. The use of a .22 could mark him out as a professional in itself. For anyone who could shoot straight, a small bullet was always preferable – much more likely to disintegrate within the victim’s body and so provide no evidence to identify the rifle that had fired it.

  ‘Poor cow,’ said Fred. ‘I didn’t always like what she did, but she didn’t deserve this.’

  ‘Was anyone else hurt?’

  ‘You ought to sit down and have a cuppa.’ His voice told her he was still wondering why she’d taken his news so hard. ‘It’s been a shock.’

  Caro frowned to get his face back in focus. ‘What? No, I’m fine. Was anyone else hurt?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. Bad luck, like I said.’

  ‘Who was the target of the raid?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘I heard something about the Slabbs causing new trouble on the street. Was it them?’

  ‘Not as far as I know, but I doubt it. They don’t go in for shooting us, Guv. They bag-and-gag their own. Or they did in the old days.’

  ‘True.’ Caro made an effort to smile and said she mustn’t keep him. She waited until he was out of sight before making herself walk back to her office. She wasn’t sure she could keep a straight line and didn’t want to arouse any more suspicion than she already had.

  Was Stephanie’s death an accident? Or an attempt by the Slabbs to stop her talking to anyone else about their man inside the Met?

  Three hours later, in an office on the north side of the river Thames, James Grogan, one of the selectors for the liaison job, strolled in to have a word with the chair of the panel.

  ‘I’ve just heard about the death of this woman, Taft. Is there anything for us to be concerned about, Martin?’

  ‘In what way, James?’

  Grogan moved to the window, looking out at the depressing view of a back yard furnished with immense rubbish bins and inhabited only by pigeons and the odd rat that was too lazy to patrol the sewers.

  ‘She’s been trying to sell a story that John Crayley is bent. I wondered whether this might have had something to do with an attempt to stop her.’

  ‘Sell? Are you speaking metaphorically or suggesting that she’s trailed her fantasy in front of the newspapers?’

  ‘The former,’ Grogan said.

  ‘Ah. Good. No, we have nothing to worry about. It has been raised and looked into and we’ve been given the all-clear.’

  ‘But she’s dead.’

  ‘So I hear. Poor woman.’ Martin sounded politely sad, but not remotely worried. ‘I’ve raised that, too, and am reliably informed that it was a deeply unfortunate accident. It is, of course, particularly unfortunate that there seems to have been one more inhabitant of the house than was actually caught.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Fled over the roofs, taking his rifle with him.’

  ‘That sounds altogether too neat and well planned.’

  ‘Perhaps. Even so, it’s still considered to be no more than an unhappy accident.’

  ‘Why?’ Grogan’s voice was almost harsh.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I just wondered why everyone is so sure Taft was wrong about this.’

  Martin Wight sighed. It was right that his officers should be dogged, but it was tedious to have to make explanations one would really prefer to keep private.

  ‘I mean,’ James went on, ‘I’ve heard that although she was a highly tiresome woman, her campaigns against individual officers were always sincere and often successful in the end, once the powers that be got over their shock at what she was telling them. Couldn’t that be the case here?’

  ‘Apparently not. She’s been banging this particular drum for some time, and I understand it stems from an incident when she and Crayley were living together. He couldn’t cope with her conviction that there was conspiracy hiding behind every filing cabinet and sexism inside every jockstrap. He left and married her best friend. The calls to the whistle-blower’s helpline started only a month or so after the marriage.’

  ‘I see. Poor woman.’

  ‘Yes. But poor Crayley too. The accusations, which had been vague in the extreme, became more detailed and grimmer each time she reported them. The latest batch has been accompanied, I understand, by a suggestion of corroboration. The woman was vindictive. She didn’t deserve to be shot, but she’s been a damn nuisance for well over a year.’

  James Grogan saw a rat climb to the top of one of the tall bins and begin to insinuate itself under the lid.

  ‘Ugh!’ He walked back to stand in front of the desk. ‘So, are you still inclined to take Crayley on?’

  ‘I haven’t yet had all the vetting reports or the psychiatric assessments. Once they’re in, we can meet again and make our decision. You’ll be fully informed.’

  ‘But I take it he is still your preferred candidate?’

  ‘On balance, yes. He’s had more experience than any of the women.’ Martin rubbed the loose skin under his chin. ‘And I feel a certain sympathy for him over this long-standing campaign to discredit him. If there is anything doubtful about him, it’ll surface in the positive vet
ting. I’m keeping an open mind until I get the reports.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Grogan, trying to avoid sounding sarcastic.

  Trish got the news when Nessa came back to chambers with their lunch. She’d heard it on the radio in the sandwich shop.

  ‘A police officer’s been killed,’ she said, disentangling her cheese-and-pickle on brown from Trish’s roast-vegetable ciabatta. ‘On a drugs raid this morning. Shot, poor woman. It’s all over the news.’

  Trish felt her eyebrows snapping together in the frown she still had to fight, even now. It can’t be Caro, she told herself. She’s far too senior to go out on drugs raids.

  ‘Did you get a name, Nessa?’

  ‘Stephanie something, I think. I wasn’t really concentrating.’ Nessa looked apologetically at Trish as she handed over the sandwich. ‘You know how it is when you’re juggling coins and knowing everyone in the queue wants to throttle you for taking so long. Here’s your change.’

  ‘Great. Thanks.’ Trish took a bite, and felt slippery red pepper squishing out of the side of her mouth. It was hard to eat something like this cleanly at the best of times, and impossible to make conversation while you did it. Luckily Nessa was already back at work. Trish pushed the pepper back into her mouth with her left thumb and tried to follow her example, looking down at the notes she’d made on her car-leasing contract brief. They were almost done. And very dull.

  She was still chewing when Caro phoned, wanting another meeting in the Café Rigoletto.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather come to the flat?’ Trish said. ‘We’ll have free run of it till at least seven, so we’ll be able to talk more easily there than in the café. I’ll open a bottle.’

  ‘OK. Fine. I’ll be there at five.’ Caro put down the phone. Trish blinked at the peremptory tone.

  When Caro reached Southwark, she was still wearing the tidy, practical dark trousers and jacket she favoured for work, with well-polished flat loafers on her feet. Her hair was as tidy as ever, but her expression belonged to someone on the brink of losing control. There were new lines running right across her forehead, her eyes were darkened by the dilated pupils, and her lips kept moving as though she was trying to pick the right word out of a mass that wouldn’t do.

  Trish was glad she’d chosen a particularly good bottle of wine. She reached for the corkscrew, but Caro shook her head, saying abruptly, ‘I don’t want a drink. Have you heard about what happened to Stephanie Taft this morning?’

  ‘Yes.’ Trish put down the bottle unopened. ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘It was she who warned me about me about my rival taking bribes.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ It wasn’t the most elegant or sympathetic of expressions, but it was all Trish could produce in time. Ideas poured through her brain like rafts in white water, churning and banging against obstructions as they went.

  ‘One comfort must be that she was for real,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t trampling too hard on Caro’s sensibilities. ‘I mean, she can’t have been part of a set-up designed to manipulate you after all. It would be too much of a coincidence for her to be shot by accident only just after she asked you for help in blowing the whistle on a corrupt cop working with a violent crime family.’

  ‘It isn’t a comfort.’

  Trish looked at her friend’s face and saw in it an expression she knew far too well from her own mirror.

  ‘You’re not telling yourself you’re responsible for her death, are you, Caro?’

  ‘How can I not?’ Her voice was high and thin with strain. ‘If I hadn’t been so keen to protect my own interests … If I’d been quicker about deciding how to handle her information, I might have been able to get her out of the front line in time to save her.’

  ‘I doubt it. Not in less than twenty-four hours. In any case, that doesn’t make you responsible for what happened,’ Trish said steadily. ‘You didn’t ask her for information; you didn’t betray her to anyone; you didn’t set up the raid this morning, or put her in the front of it. Nor did you organise the shooting. None of it’s your fault.’

  ‘I know that,’ Caro said with a snap like a bulldog clip. ‘Sorry. I didn’t come to shout at you. I just wish I could believe it as well as know it.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Trish forgave the snap; she knew all about the way fear and misery could emerge in the guise of fury. ‘You’ll have to tell someone on the investigating team, won’t you?’

  ‘Listen.’ Caro dragged a chair away from the table and plumped down into it. ‘Listen, Trish.’

  ‘I am listening.’ She sat on the opposite side of the table. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘I told you how Stephanie had tried to use the whistle-blower’s phoneline all those times, as well as telling a whole lot of senior officers what she thought about John, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did,’ Trish said, registering the suspect officer’s first name.

  ‘And they’ve done nothing. Which has to mean he’s been investigated and found to be clean. So if I go repeating Stephanie’s allegations …’ Caro’s voice died as though the prospect of the disaster that might cause was too much to contemplate.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ Trish said, recognising a new possibility that made sense of a whole lot of things that had been puzzling her. ‘Caro, has it occurred to you that it’s odd you were allowed to see John after your interview, when you were told everything about the job is incredibly secret and you have no idea who either of the other two candidates are?’

  ‘It must have been chance.’

  ‘Maybe. But isn’t it possible that it could have been deliberate? I mean, what if they have investigated John and failed to find any evidence to show conclusively whether or not he’s bent? Mightn’t someone be hoping you could do better?’

  Caro shook her head. ‘Not possible, no. What could I ever do that they can’t with all their surveillance techniques, and all their powers? I have nothing to work with.’

  ‘Forget the idea then. Why are you so scared of reporting that she came to you? Is it because she’s been shot? I could understand that, but it doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘It’s not the shooting. It’s the same dilemma she had. Who could I go to? How would I know who to trust?’

  ‘There must be someone in all the Met who’s above suspicion,’ Trish said.

  ‘There are hundreds of people. Thousands. Of course there are. But how could I be sure of any particular one? There’ve always been stories about long-standing officers believed to be cleaner than clean by everyone, who turn out to have been on the take in the end. There’s a whole secret squad that was set up years ago to track them down.’

  ‘Then why not go to the squad?’

  ‘Because I don’t know who or where they are.’ Caro was looking puzzled, as though she couldn’t believe anyone could be such a fool. ‘That’s the point of the secrecy.’

  Trish had to work hard to stop herself protesting. There had to be a safe way to report important suspicions like this. Caro just had to find it, but that wouldn’t happen until she stopped this unlikely dithering.

  ‘I must go,’ she said before Trish could comment. ‘Jess will be waiting. Oh, I nearly forgot. Here’s Bill Femur’s phone number. I hope he tells you something that will help your biographer.’

  Taking the small piece of paper and shoving it in her pocket, Trish hugged her friend’s resistant body. It felt like a tree, unmoving and unmoveable.

  ‘You didn’t kill her,’ she said with her arms still wrapped around Caro. ‘And you couldn’t have stopped whoever did. Believe it. When you do, you’ll see your way through this.’

  ‘How can I believe it?’

  Trish had never heard Caro’s voice throb like that.

  Chapter 6

  Friday 16 March

  William Femur lived alone in a small house near Streatham Common. Trish found it without difficulty but was surprised to see parking restrictions in every street nearby.

  ‘In Streatham?’ she mut
tered. When she had manoeuvred her big soft-top Audi into a Pay & Display space and found the right change and stuck the ticket in the approved position on her windscreen, she began to think wistfully of public transport. But Streatham had no tube yet. It wasn’t a bad area, but she found the rows of identical red-brick houses depressing, in spite of the care that was taken of them. Very few had the kind of splitting paint on the window frames and doors that would have been commonplace only five years ago, and their front gardens were full of plants instead of rusting bins and wheel-less bicycles.

  She had to pass an estate agent’s windows on her way back to Femur’s road and paused to look at the prices. There was something wrong with a system, she thought, in which one of these basic little houses in an area with no unusual charms of its own, and without a tube, cost more than fifteen times a teacher’s annual salary. No wonder the whole economy was held up on the shaky pillars of consumer debt. And no wonder there were still people living on the street and depending on individuals like Jeremy Marton to offer them shelter.

  Femur’s door was plain black and very glossy, as though he had repainted it in the last few weeks. Trish had only a vague picture of him in her mind from their few meetings five years ago, but she recognised the stocky white-headed man as soon as he opened the door. It was his diamond-shaped grey eyes, she thought, that made him so familiar.

  ‘Trish Maguire?’ He sounded puzzled, then his face cleared. ‘Ah. I know what’s different: you had spiky hair.’

  She smoothed back her expensively cut hair and admitted she’d changed her image.

  ‘It makes you look a lot more important. Come on through. I’ve got a pot of coffee in the conservatory. Your journey all right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ She didn’t want to waste time in one of the route-finding conversations so many men used to establish status or break through social constraint, so she launched straight in. ‘Caro thought you might help me with some information about Jeremy Marton and the bombing of X8 Pharmaceuticals in 1972. Do you remember the case?’