Gallowstree Lane Read online

  You have to make the arrests not when the villains are outside the betting shop with the gun in a holdall. No, they need to be inside pointing it and shouting at the terrified old woman behind the counter who’s throwing the cash into a paper bag. That’s when you arrest.

  Perseus was waiting for the big one: the delivery of the guns. They needed to be in the boot of Shakiel’s car, incontrovertibly possessed by him with clear intent to further supply them. They were on the brink of it.

  But the risks were multiplying, and in a chaotic and unpredictable way. The streets might be about to descend into a warfare so noisy and interesting to the authorities that the Romanians would consider the heat and walk away.

  That was the problem with these gangs! They weren’t like the old-style crime families. You couldn’t rely on them. Shakiel might be looking to raise himself up, but the streets around him were changing by the instant. The infantry were hotheads, youngsters with no loyalty and no patience. Play, play, play. Spend, spend, spend. Two shots to your brain. Closed coffin. Amen.

  Kieran didn’t want to catch the useless fuckers who dropped their weapons near the crime scene, who left fingerprints and lingered at police cordons asking questions about concealing DNA evidence.

  The harm done by them was real, and he didn’t dismiss it. Not at all. He’d seen a lot of it. Fractured skulls, a ten-year-old girl shot in the face by accident, hangings, torturings – more than one. Burning with cigarette ends seemed to be a popular method; pliers were good too, apparently. It was ancient stuff – nasty and basic. Once he’d seen a young man bludgeoned to death just for getting out of his car at the lights and arguing with the wrong person. Part of his brain had been splashed up a lamp post. That hadn’t been nice.

  It wasn’t that Kieran was indifferent to the damage. He hated it. It was stupid and brutal and utterly wasteful. But it didn’t hold his attention. He’d insist on this, if anyone was ever interested enough to ask him, which they weren’t, of course. It wasn’t his business to be horrified, or outraged, or to have opinions about why they had done what they had done. Those reactions felt to him rather like self-indulgence. His business was to catch the proper bad guys, the ones who were capable of planning stuff. And luckily for all the bleaters, that was also what he liked doing. It came down to simple maths. Where x is serious criminality, y is the degree of difficulty and z is the resulting amount of happiness you get when you send the fuckers down then xy z. In the face of all the humbug, reduce it to a simple equation. Better criminals = more fun.

  Kieran glanced at the Eardsley Bluds’ network that was loaded on Perseus’ restricted drive. The diagram looked like nothing at all: just lines linking stick figures, the names and associations written underneath in a small and unremarkable font. This sparse schema, the result of more than two years of diligence, mapped the history of a small corner of London that would never be known in such detail or devotion outside the small walls of Perseus. Implicit within these thin black lines were the schools, the nightclubs, the streets and estates. The friendships were here too, the girlfriends, the baby mothers, the children. And here was the history: the murders, the acts of kindness, the outstanding debts. And Shakiel Oliver at the centre of it all. You had to have talent to be where he was.

  Kieran had first encountered Shakiel at the beginning of his service when he’d been working out of Atcham Green, his first nick and now closed. It felt like a lifetime ago. They’d both been starting out; Kieran in uniform and Shakiel, a few years younger than him, running with his mate Aaron Kennedy, on one of the estates. The two of them then were no more than baby drug dealers with a set of electric scales and lots of little clear plastic bags working out of a bedroom in Shakiel’s mum’s flat. Aaron had seemed way too young to be a dad but Kieran had seen him a couple of times, walking with his baby mother and the pram.

  It was seven years later that Kieran encountered Shakiel again.

  It had been a ruthless and effective killing. There were two hundred people in the nightclub. Daniel Harris was stabbed multiple times in the middle of a crowded dance floor but no one saw a thing. The local officers had done their best to keep the witnesses there. Kieran – now a member of the homicide team that attended the scene – had interviewed one of the girls himself. Ripped denim shorts, crop top, the victim’s blood splashed across her tits: she’d seemed thick, a pushover even. So much for that. She never gave him anything. Not a damn thing. By the end of the investigation he’d tried everything. Offered her all the perks of being an informant. When that didn’t work, he’d arrested her for obstructing. But her account never faltered. She had no idea at all how the blood had got on her and she hadn’t seen the stabbing. It was all a complete mystery as far as she was concerned.

  Then there had been the CCTV, or rather the lack of it. The pathologist reckoned the 999 call had been made maybe as much as half an hour after the death. Daniel had had a good long bleed before any paramedic arrived at the scene. When the police did attend, the hard drive from the CCTV was gone. They knew there’d been one because licensing had checked it just two days previously. The nightclub owner was prosecuted for perverting, but she just sucked it up – no-commented in interview, entered a guilty plea and served the twelve months. She never wavered.

  The grapevine whispered to the police who had done it, and why, but no one said it loud enough to do anything with it.

  Kieran had found it hard to believe at first that the murderer was Shakiel, the boy he’d once nicked for possesion. But Shakiel’s mate, Aaron, was nearly two years dead and Shakiel had hit the big time. No one had crossed him then or since.

  Kieran had arrested him for the murder. They had very little grounds – intelligence only – but the boss had reckoned that with so many fingering him it would be remiss not to nick him. They could search his flat. Who knows, maybe they’d get lucky.

  But they hadn’t been lucky. There was nothing incriminating in the flat. Nothing at all. And Shakiel hadn’t been living with his mum any more but rather in a warehouse conversion with his girlfriend and their young son. The plastic bags and the scales were long gone. Now it was marble worktops and a view over the canal. There were no dramas when they executed the warrant. The girlfriend calmly took the toddler out. Then Shakiel offered his wrists for the cuffs without being asked.

  Back at Atcham Green, Shakiel provided a brief statement denying the murder and made no further comment. He knew the score. It was up to the police to prove it, and until they could come up with anything decent, he didn’t need to make any further response.

  His lawyer had been bolshie on his behalf, trying to wind Kieran up about the grounds for arrest. But there’d been no subsequent complaint. Shakiel was cool. He didn’t want to be fucking with the police unnecessarily. He had made only one request – could he be released through the back door? Shakiel disdained the usual fanfare, the gangster swagger through the station office. Like Kieran, he knew that the shadows were the best place. The guv’nor – a DCI long since retired – had been angry when he’d heard Kieran had complied with the request. ‘These are the little ways we show them who’s boss.’ But Kieran had disagreed. When Shakiel had paused briefly at the back door – ‘Thanks’ – he’d taken the opportunity to let him know he had the measure of him.

  ‘No worries, Shakiel. I’ll be seeing you.’

  For years it had been an empty promise. After that stint in Homicide, Kieran had moved on and out of sight. His work had taken him away from Shakiel, but then, as they both rose in parallel, like a river meandering back to itself, they had been returned to each other.

  On the one hand that was no big deal. He could shrug it off: these sort of things were nonsense. The kind of thing, in fact, that you had to be wary of. On the other hand, secretly – for no one knew but Kieran – it did lend the job a certain sweetness. Kieran liked to keep a promise and to pay a debt.

  Shakiel had married the mother of his children – two boys, one girl. And there was another woman living
in a nice flat off the Whitechapel Road with a chubby-legged toddler of her own. Shakiel looked after her OK too. He owned houses, cars. A few years and he’d be out of central London altogether, putting his kids through private school and being the only black father in the dads’ band. Everyone’s best mate. Kieran could see him talking to the mothers at the leafy gates of a school somewhere in Essex. They’d love him.

  Every deal then would be one deniable step away from him. He’d have made the legendary move: home free.

  As soon as they nicked him, the first thing they’d do would be to start taking that dream of Essex away from him. They’d got the financial investigator ready for the searches, ready to untangle all those bank accounts and all that laundered cash. When he got out of prison, Shakiel would be a has-been.

  It was a bit sad really, a bit like shooting the stag with the big antlers. Kieran didn’t know how it would go – whether Shakiel would plead to the charges or whether the foreman of the jury would stand up and say the big G word – but he knew that when it happened, he, the man who’d given up two years of his life to sending Shakiel down, would have a moment’s regret that it was all over. It had been difficult. It had been fun. You treasured your good jobs.

  The best times were still ahead. The case files were ready to go, the applications to the Crown Prosecution Service for permission to charge drafted. It was a surprise party that the Eardsley Bluds didn’t realize was being thrown for them. Everyone on the op could feel it. A couple of the lads had taken a rest day off in anticipation of the big day. Bets had been laid as to the total number of years inside that were going to be handed down. Kieran always shook his head at the offers to join the sweepstake. ‘No thanks, you’re all right.’ It wasn’t that he disapproved. He just didn’t want to jinx the op. There was nothing like that moment in custody when the targets had been swept up but they still didn’t realize just how fucked they were.

  Generally they stood around with the swagger still on them: ‘What have you nicked me for? You’ve got nothing on me.’

  That was when he got to say it.

  ‘The interview will be your opportunity to give your side of the story.’

  It was always funny. He’d told his team: it’s a tradition. You have to say it. Make sure we can all hear. Anyone who laughs buys the cakes.

  That was what you worked for. Not for a commendation, but for that feeling of achievement. And the day after: the exhaustion combined with sheer delight, tidying up the odds and ends, laughing with your colleagues about all the funny little things that had happened, your feet up on the desk, no one moaning and nothing much to do for twenty-four hours except enjoy. Something in the bank that would always give you pleasure.

  But here was unpredictable Ryan. Kieran might feel contempt for the young bloods, but he didn’t underestimate their ability to wreck everything. All those transcripts and box files, the reports to the CPS, the patience! Christ. All that work. Suddenly it was a nest of fighting rats that he couldn’t possibly bend to his will.

  He had thought they were on the brink. Now he had to ask himself whether he hadn’t been missing the bigger picture. A word presented itself that shamed him. Complacency. It would be the worst way to lose, the mark of the amateur.

  Behind his thoughts a persistent undercurrent was running, and he made himself stop and pay attention to it. But as he stared it down, it began to come into focus. Maybe the problem was also the solution.

  Ryan.

  An experiment at school, something that – unusually – had caught his attention. You had to draw a circle and a cross and then, covering one eye and moving the paper, concentrate on the cross. If you did it properly, the circle that you yourself had drawn would disappear. Not fade, not become blurry. No, it would be gone. Unseeable. He remembered this one fact clearly: that there was a place on your retina that was entirely blind but gave no suggestion that it was there because the other eye compensated and hid your own weakness from you. The optic disc, that was what the teacher called it.

  Perhaps legends work like that: create a blind spot where you are weak. Perhaps the stories you tell about yourself deceive only yourself. You can be betrayed in many ways, but the worst way is to do it to yourself.

  Kieran had spent just that one day with Shakiel, but a strong impression of the encounter lingered. He had sat next to him on the bench in the custody suite while they waited endlessly for the custody sergeant to get around to them. Shakiel could have been waiting in a park for a customarily late friend to show up: slightly impatient perhaps, but still cool. There had been none of the usual chat. No football talk. No goading either. Only a never-ending patience that neither joked nor railed. If it had been anyone else with Shakiel’s profile then Kieran would have tried to befriend him, to persuade him to talk, to share information. But with Shakiel it was clear that that would never be a possibility. To suggest that he talk would only be to offer him your own hunger, your own weakness.

  The eleventh commandment: thou shalt not grass. For some it was just fear because – as everyone knows – snitches get stitches. But for the rest it was much more than that. It was who you were, your place in the world. It was your manhood.

  There was a legend of one old-time East End gangster bleeding to death in the driver’s seat of his car, indicating to the fresh-faced officer who was first on scene that he was willing to name the man who had fired the round.

  The officer, so the story went, fumbled with his pocket book, even remembered in the stress of the moment that there was a special bit on the back page for just this eventuality. His pen was out, shaking with the significance of it, eager to write the dying declaration. Thinking forward perhaps even then to standing in the Old Bailey in his dress uniform and receiving the thanks of the judge.

  The villain smiled as he beckoned the probationer forward to catch his dying words.

  ‘It was … it was …’ His voice faltered, his mouth filled with blood; still he struggled to speak, eager to finger the man who’d killed him. ‘It was MM.’

  MM, the probationer wrote, putting his hand on the man’s shoulder in desperation. ‘MM, what does that mean? Can you give me more?’

  The gangster beckoned him forward again. The probationer felt his breath on his ear before he heard the whisper.

  ‘It was Mickey Mouse,’ the dying man said, taking one last delighted gasp. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything, son?’

  These were the myths of how to conduct yourself, and Shakiel lived them. He didn’t talk, he didn’t make friends with police and he kept no one close who might snitch.

  But Ryan was different, because Ryan lay on Shakiel’s optic disc. Like one of those windows reflecting back sunlight so brightly it blinded, Ryan fitted so perfectly with Shakiel’s legend of himself that he couldn’t really see him. He was almost a mirror, showing Shakiel to himself as he wanted to be seen.

  His murdered friend’s son. For more than ten years, Ryan’s worshipping eyes had been on him. When Shakiel used him, gave him little jobs, he got a good feeling. He probably didn’t even realize how much information he was inadvertently sharing, because it wasn’t about that. It was about being the big man. It was the optic disc. The peril so perfectly concealed, not in Ryan’s disloyalty but in its opposite. In Ryan’s admiration, in the myth of friendships and generations and loyalty.

  Ryan would never grass, no, but he did talk.

  Steve had found it easy to play him. A bit of respect and dignity, a bit of kindness, and Ryan – weak and lost, desperate for approval – just couldn’t stop showing off, giving stuff away.

  I shouldn’t really say this, but …

  The phrase had become a bit of a running joke in the office: I shouldn’t really say this, but … I’m off to Pret if anyone wants a sandwich.

  It had become Ryan’s nickname: I-shouldn’t-really-say-this Ryan. Soon they’d shortened it.

  I-shouldn’t-really.

  It was sad in a way that his little misdemeanours would all have to b
e paid for, because he had only ever been a stepping stone on the way to Shakiel. There would be no pleasure in sending Ryan down, but equally there would be no avoiding it. It was the game they had all chosen to be in.

  And now Kieran realized that he’d been wrong to be angry with Ryan. He’d never been the problem. He was only ever the witness, and he was going to useful again. Perseus needed to know about the murder of Spencer, and it looked like Ryan had actually been there.

  Why had it happened? How had it happened? Who was responsible? What was the threat?

  Instead of trying to ignore Spencer’s murder, Kieran needed to focus on it, because the thing that threatened to derail Perseus also threatened to derail Shakiel.

  Kieran and Shakiel were nearly there, the two of them together. They shared the same interest: the delivery of the weapons. Only after that did their paths divert. Shakiel needed to keep his show on the road for twenty-four hours and Kieran could maybe help him in that endeavour by clearing his path of any irrelevancies.

  The strategy was win-win, because it was all justifiable and correct in terms of managing the risk on the streets. Kieran could write it up in his decision log and trot it out at those bloody meetings. He would be protecting Perseus and he would be doing the right thing at the same time.

  Everything looked different. Lizzie and Steve had saved Perseus rather than undermining it. It was so simple really.

  Kieran picked up his mobile phone and called Steve. This was what he was all about. He was feeling good.

  19

  Sarah found a place at one of the low tables by the window.

  She watched the recruits horsing around, showing off, filling the main space of the canteen. Around the edges the more experienced officers caught each other’s eyes with an acknowledgement of that shared history: the self-consciousness of being one of the new ones, your name written on your back in marker pen, embarrassing you. The recruits would be doing their first round of officer training, bouncing around the big cold gym, whacking each other with foam batons and shouting, DON’T RESIST! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS! Once they’d got some experience on the street, the trainers would allow them less enthusiasm.