Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  He focused on the screen, the document icon on there. As Pauline had said: Pig Farm.

  He still wore the latex glove. He didn’t want his prints on the keyboard or on the mouse.

  The document opened on the first of one hundred and thirty-four pages, apparently organized in alphabetical order. He scanned the page quickly to try to assess its validity. It had been unbelievably arrogant and indiscreet to write it all down in one place. But Joey had been old school and he’d never expected to be brought down.

  There was information with every name. Reasons for obedience, and misdeeds to be hidden. Moments of rebellion. Punishments meted out. Favors done on both sides. Amounts paid. Will scrolled quickly through the document to find the names he needed to check.

  And then he stopped.

  He stared at the screen with disbelief and betrayal he didn’t know he could still feel. A shock so huge that he was sliding into bargaining in his head.

  No. Joey had made it up to fuck with him.

  DS Sanjay Anand.

  How often d’you hear about an honorable copper?

  No wonder Joey had been laughing at him. At his moral crusade. At his obsessive legal vendetta.

  “Are you just gonna fuckin’ stare at it?” Pauline sniped. “Make a copy.”

  His mind was howling with disoriented shock. Guilt and rage over Sanjay had driven and distorted his life for years. Even his relationship with Tom.

  He made himself scroll on. Alphabetical order made it easy.

  Some of the names he skimmed past had been paid off by Fred long ago. Some would be retired or dead. But the roll call of new corruption had built relentlessly through every year. And Joey was just one gang lord. Who knew how many others had their own stables of bought cops?

  But Joey was the biggest. The most dangerous.

  Will scrolled fast to the Cs to check for Alan Cochrane, the head of the ACC. His name wasn’t there. The relief of that did something to cut through the stunned coldness in his gut. Hansen had warned against him of course. But the head of Serious and Organized Crime who were supposed to be monitoring Joey, he was on the list—Spencer Coleridge. Hansen had warned against him too.

  Will could see what she’d done: keeping him away from anyone who could help, but also keeping him from people who’d sell him straight out to Joey.

  He spun to the Ds, watching names flash by as his blue-clad finger spooled the mouse on.

  He looked at the photographs embedded on the page and grimaced with disgust. Hansen hadn’t been lying about that either. There had been someone even more senior than her in Joey’s pocket. Sir Robin fucking Dunn.

  Rage surged with no underlying loyalty or affection to temper it. It felt like a relief to be able to just . . . despise.

  “You need to get a fuckin’ move on,” Pauline urged. Her voice shook with nerves.

  Will scrolled down to M. Sir Ian wasn’t there. DC Jeremy Masson was; his death on his yacht had been the result of attempting to leverage more money from Joey. And another name he didn’t want to find: DC Omar Saddiq. Will remembered waking on a camp bed in the office to find Saddiq returning his phone. That’d be how Hansen got access.

  None of the three remaining Assistant Commissioners were on the list.

  Finally, for his own peace of mind, he searched three more names.

  The last name he checked was on the list.

  He must have made some sound, given some indication of pain, because Pauline looked at him sharply.

  There was a commotion in the distance—probably in the body of the club. Yelling, but no gunfire. Maybe Charles had succeeded in containing Joey’s men or maybe they’d just been overwhelmed.

  “You need to decide now,” Pauline barked. “If she’s on that list,” she gestured with her head toward the door. “The dead cop . . . you wanna wipe her off?”

  “You said Max’s firewalls would destroy the files,” Will protested.

  “Yeah, if I don’t tell ‘em how to get in. But you’d need to prove the lists are kosher right? An’ it suits me to be seen to cooperate.” She shrugged impatiently as the shouting voices got louder and closer. “Look just fuckin’ decide. I don’t give a fuck what you do either way. ‘s your funeral.”

  The words were a slap across the face.

  He’d promised. He’d promised Hansen white gloves.

  But his duty was still to follow the rules. His superiors would make the big decisions and justice would take its course.

  Except he’d already compromised that to get the lists, to find out who he could trust to follow the rules.

  But the lists were all about people who’d decided they were above the law.

  There was no more time to second-guess himself; to agonize over rights and wrongs.

  He was judge and jury.

  He grimaced as he bent to his work. It took a couple of minutes and then it was done, the revised document saved and transferred to the USB stick.

  He straightened, heart racing. He’d just concealed evidence of wrongdoing. He’d just broken the law.

  Will’s radio crackled into life, a male voice, demanding a status report.

  Will told him, “Immediate crime scene is clear. Two dead, one officer urgently requiring medical aid.”

  The reply was a burst of static and cautious officialese. Will understood why—he could be giving false information under duress or there could be gunmen somewhere in the building he didn’t know about—but it didn’t make his frustration any less intense as he looked at James’s death-white face.

  “You done?” Pauline asked impatiently.

  Will stepped away from the keyboard. “You have two minutes.”

  Pauline took over the keyboard and began to type at incredible speed. He glanced over her shoulder to make sure she was doing what she’d claimed, and she was. Transferring a huge amount of cash from the Clarksons’ joint bank account before the Proceeds of Crime legislation froze it. Compared to what was in the account though, the transfer was modest. God knew how much Charles would be skimming off.

  Will paced to the door then returned just as Pauline logged out.

  “I’m sayin’ me an’ Charles came in after she wiz shot.” Pauline stood, chewing her thumbnail, head down, her wired, focused tension bleeding to nervousness, at last. “We found her dead outside, everyone gone, Joey dead in ‘ere. And the Angel Gabriel bleedin’ out over the floor.”

  Will raised his eyes from James and tried not to examine the fact that he was rehearsing a story with the wife of a criminal.

  “June’s last request was that someone tell her daughter that she loved her,” he said.

  Pauline froze then lifted her head to stare at Will.

  “Will you tell Holly that?”

  Pauline ’s mouth twisted. “Not a fuckin’ chance.”

  There were people in the annex now; loud and urgent. Will could identify the exact moment the officers out there saw Hansen’s body. The moment they identified it. The changed quality of their raised voices: shock, pushing to hysteria.

  He sank to his knees beside James’s unconscious body and raised his hands bellowing, “I’m a police officer!” as they burst in.

  Pauline fell to her knees beside him. And it was over.

  28

  Will was tired of saying the same things over and over again.

  At least that had stopped temporarily. He sat in the back of an empty police car parked inside the crime scene cordon, and waited to be released to return to the station.

  It was moving toward late afternoon. Perhaps he’d been forgotten. He could fully believe it, given the air of headless chicken urgency that pervaded the crime scene.

  The violent deaths of an Assistant Commissioner of the MPS, and the most successful homegrown gangster in London plus the shooting of a DI. It was too much for one crime scene team to cope with. So, it was now a circus, with competing priorities between murder investigation personnel, the Serious and Organized Crime team who’d supposedly been monitori
ng Joey’s operations, and various layers of top brass. Hansen had been the AC in charge of both Homicide and Organized Crime. So, she was also the former boss of just about everyone at the scene.

  To add to the pressure, a huge phalanx of TV and press cameras, flanked by a crowd of people wielding camera phones all waited with hungry excitement behind the flimsy barrier of blue and white tape at the end of the narrow street. News of important murders had leaked quickly.

  There was a sudden uproar in the press mob as they were shoved aside by uniformed officers to allow the bonnet of a sleek black car to edge up to the cordon. Cameras flashed spastically and reporters screamed pointless questions at the closed windows. A minute later the car was through and purring to a halt on the double yellow lines outside Tina’s.

  Two slim uniform-clad figures emerged almost before the car came to a halt. Together, they strode through the front doors of the club, one a step behind the other, ignoring the clamor from the crowd behind them. Sir Ian, closely followed as always by Sir Robin.

  Will laid his head back against the headrest and waited. His and James’s BMV cameras had been taken and he’d expected his phone to be taken too, but the slightly awed officers at the scene had let him keep it on the understanding he wouldn’t use it until he’d been given leave to go. Will would have definitely taken it if he’d been in charge.

  The USB stick with Joey’s files on it was in his trouser pocket.

  He was going to scrupulously examine those lists before he submitted them because he needed to know everyone who’d sold out to Joey before any names could disappear. The guilt of that thought made him shift in his seat.

  Well, he knew one of them at least. He glowered at the door of the building, as if he could fry Sir Robin through it. A light tap on the back car window across from him startled him from his thoughts.

  He slid across the seat and opened it. A very young PC in a high viz jacket tilted his head through the gap.

  “There’s a person claiming to know you at the barrier, sir. He says he has to talk to you.”

  He gestured over his shoulder. A tall, blond figure holding a motorcycle helmet had pushed to the front of the crowd and stood in front of the tape, visibly impatient.

  Will didn’t realize he was grinning until the PC said, “I’ll let him through, then, sir.”

  “Yes. Thanks,” Will said and the PC marched smartly to the end of the road and raised the tape.

  Tom ducked under it and strode toward the car as if he were walking the catwalk, sex on legs. Not, Will thought, because he meant to move like that, but because he couldn’t help it. Will thought his grin must look manic when the car door opened and Tom slid inside.

  Tom didn’t wait. He hurled himself across the space, took Will’s face in his hands and kissed him, hard and urgent.

  “Fuck,” Tom said when he wrenched back an inch. “I was so fucking scared. I went to Ben’s so we could be scared together.”

  “I’m sorry.” It felt as if Will was finally pulling in sweet oxygen after holding his breath for far too long.

  “I was with Ben when they called to tell him Jamie’d been shot.” Tom closed his eyes. “And another officer had been killed.”

  Will grabbed his shoulders and pulled him close, hugging him awkwardly in the cramped space.

  “Will . . . .” Tom said. The word held pure desperation.

  “It was Hansen,” Will said.

  Tom jerked violently in his arms. “Hansen?” He pulled back to look at Will, eyes wide.

  “She walked in to Clarkson’s office and just . . . put him down. If she hadn’t, fuck knows what would have happened, but we were going to try to march him out in handcuffs anyway.”

  “Well thank fuck she did it,” Tom said savagely. “Whatever else she did wrong, that was right. One way or another, the bastard would have destroyed you.” Then his burst of defiance bled to bewilderment. “I just . . . she’s dead?”

  Those mascaraed, vacant gray eyes. Her slack frosted-pink mouth . . . .

  Will shook his head, trying to physically dislodge the image. But he knew it was there for good.

  “Can I borrow your tablet?” he asked. He’d wallow later.

  Tom blinked at the non sequitur but he didn’t ask questions. Instead he reached into his messenger bag and dug out the small screen, forehead creased, opened it and handed it over.

  Will stuck the USB into it’s slot and opened the file called Pig Farm. He scrolled until he found what he was looking for.

  Sir Robin Dunn. Will skimmed over the salacious details: the then-Commander Sir Robin, blackmailed after weekly visits to a prostitute who specialized in extreme domination scenes. Still captures of Sir Robin—the ones Will had seen—ejaculating into the air, face contorted with ecstasy as he was thrashed to orgasm by a plump faceless woman in cartoon black leather.

  He’d thought the images said it all but, as he read there was a surprise. Sir Robin had refused to succumb to blackmail. But instead of destroying him, Joey had decided to wait until Sir Robin reached a level where Joey judged he’d have too much to lose to hold on to his scruples. To wait until he made Commissioner.

  So Hansen had been lying after all. She had been the most senior traitor in the ranks. Whoever had worn the Commander’s uniform in Steggie’s photographs had left the MPS, or never won promotion.

  Ironically, for all she’d done to cover for her father and her family name, former Chief Constable Malcolm Delingpole hadn’t even been on the current list.

  Will considered the irony of that for a moment.

  “There’s something wrong,” he said. Tom’s blink of alarm reflected his own apprehension.

  Why wasn’t her father’s name on the list?

  His mind paced around it. And again. And from nowhere he flashed on Joey’s reaction when Will had goaded him. His mask and his temper had melted as if Will had turned a blowtorch on them. With that word. That idea. Nonce. It disgusted Joey, and his defensiveness had exposed his shame.

  Will looked back down at the email and tapped the file he hadn’t checked. The Dairy Farm. Joey’s party list.

  The names on that file were divided into two groups.

  Daddies were the men who’d paid to go to the Clarksons’ parties to rape and compete to impregnate adolescent girls. Desmond was in that group.

  Paedo Scum was a seperate list, to underline the Clarksons’ sanctimonious disgust for men who went to their parties involving sex with little children.

  Malcolm Delingpole was on page two.

  Sir Ian McMahon was on page five.

  It felt as if years had passed since Will had last stood outside the door of the station Incident Room. It echoed perfectly his sense of detachment after his near-assassination by Eddie Butts. But this was much more extreme.

  His whole world had changed and shifted since that morning.

  Hansen and Joey were dead. James was in hospital. Will had finally lost Sanjay.

  He stood in the corridor for whole minutes trying to gather the determination to go in there and finish this off.

  Hansen had been dirty, and he’d had no idea. Sanjay had leaked the information about the raid that had killed him, and almost killed Salt. Sir Ian was as corrupt as a cop came.

  And now, Will had one last confrontation to face.

  He clenched his jaw and opened the door.

  The room was buzzing with normality. Officers changing shift—some getting ready to go; some coming in. But it felt to Will as if every single eye turned to him and all conversation stopped. He pretended he didn’t notice the stares or the humming silence as he began the walk toward Ingham’s office. His shirt was stained with James’s blood. Of course they’d look.

  Then someone began a slow handclap.

  Will’s stomach plummeted. Guilt told him that somehow they knew what he’d done.

  But the clapping immediately quickened and other people joined in, until the whole room transformed in a matter of seconds to whooping, whistling, yel
ling insanity. Clapping, grinning people walked toward him as he stood, paralyzed with bewilderment, until there was a curving wall of them in front of him, all cheering. Celebration. Joy.

  He looked at them with disbelief.

  Then Salt emerged from the barrier of people to stand in front of him.

  “You took down Joey fuckin’ Clarkson!” Salt yelled. The cheering grew still more exhilarated.

  “Hansen did,” Will protested.

  Salt shook his head fiercely. “You and Jamie.” His voice was loud, to be heard over the clamor. “Everyone knows now that’s what you were doin’. Everyone else wanderin’ around the bastard for years like a fart in a trance. You built a case, an’ you went in there an’ you fuckin’ arrested him Guv. You did what no one else had the stones to do. You’re a fuckin’ hero.”

  The volume of cheers rose to deafening levels and Will felt like crying at the stupidity of the moment.

  “Sanjay can rest easy, Guv,” Salt said, just for Will to hear. His brown eyes looked damp. He patted Will’s arm. “You did him proud.”

  Should he tell him? Or allow him his illusions for a little while longer? What was served by telling anyone the truth now? If the ACC chose not to expose Sanjay posthumously, how could Will?

  For all of Will’s bitterness, he remembered Sanjay’s family’s pride and grief, that long ago spring day, as they’d buried a decorated police officer who’d died in the line of duty.

  No. The living were more than enough to deal with.

  Will eventually raised his hands and grinned and nodded his thanks to try to calm the room, until at last the applause began to die down and officers started to return to their desks, or head toward the door and home.