Gallowstree Lane Page 17

  ‘But couldn’t it be sudden loss of control of the vehicle? The victim sees it happening, turns to run.’

  ‘Nope. With ABS we don’t get skid marks much now, but we have got dust and grime by the edge of the road and that’s given us rolling tyre marks. Nothing there suggests braking. Witness says the engine note didn’t change either. Got louder if anything. So the driver’s accelerating, not trying to stop.’ A pause, then, ‘One other thing – our witness, helpful though she is, doesn’t want to give a statement or even a name. Doesn’t want to be seen talking to us either. Very nervy. My guess is she knows more than she’s telling.’

  Slowly, another smile. Lightly challenging, this one.

  ‘The job’s CID, not Traffic. Indubitably.’

  Indubitably. It sounded good in that accent. Serious. Not serious.

  Sarah said, ‘Thought you rats were CID nowadays.’

  ‘Careful now. Anyway, it’s yours not ours. Like I said, indubitably.’ She smiled. ‘We’ll help you out with the physics. But you clever detective folk better handle all that difficult cui bono stuff.’

  ‘Cui bono? That’s fancy.’

  ‘Never underestimate a rat.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Meghan smiled again. ‘Your chums are in the tent.’

  ‘What do we know about the car?’

  ‘White VW Touareg, top of the range. We’ve got a registration from a number plate recognition camera – I’ve flagged the car for officers to stop. But the registration plate is false – that particular vehicle’s been sitting on a head teacher’s driveway in Cardiff all day. The owner’s a fitness freak, apparently, cycles to work. Old Bill in Wales has already checked it out and sent us some lovely pics.’

  ‘Our victim’s been hit by a ringed vehicle.’

  ‘Yep. Definitely a murder, don’t you think?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘Looks like it. Any of the car left behind?’

  ‘No, but if you do manage to seize it, it’ll be damaged and covered in DNA. Victim bled heavily. Practically amputated her right leg. Call me if you get it. You’ll need the vehicle examiner to give it a check after the forensics have been done. Don’t want the fucker to blame mechanical failure.’

  27

  Ryan, hands in his pockets, steered his bike with his body. It was downhill and then a bending turn. Even before Spencer’s death he’d hated Gallowstree Lane. There shouldn’t be roads like that in London – so wide and deserted. On the right, the AstroTurf pitches were already illuminated against the fading light. Beyond that the Yilmaz minimarket, and opposite it the shadowy big old space surrounded by black iron railings. He cycled quickly on, past the place of Spencer’s death. The kids said the land was poisoned. Thousands of sheep buried beneath the scrubby grass. That was why they couldn’t build here, make it more like the present day, less like a vampire movie. He believed the story. He could see the sheep ghosts moving into London through fields that were now bus lanes and cinema multiplexes and car dealerships. He’d told Spencer that and Spencer had teased him about it ever since, baaing and fooling about and falling off his bike, pissing himself with laughter. Now Spencer was a ghost too, the shadow of his bike weaving down the road by Ryan’s side.

  The girls usually worked the whole length of the road, walking in ones and twos. At first Ryan saw no one, but as he freewheeled further on, he saw a group of girls standing together, huddled like a pack, talking. Thing was, he’d always kind of liked them. They’d joked with him and Spence, called them both virgins, then looked them up and down and said they wouldn’t mind. He pulled over and braked a couple of feet away. It was different now. He couldn’t like them no more. One of them had sold Spence out.

  They’d seen him and turned towards him. He stood with one foot on the road like he did when he was dealing. Lexi wasn’t there, but she was one of them and they’d know where to find her. They’d know who the boy with the bird tattoo was. He was ready to hurt them to get the information if he had to. They couldn’t outrun him.

  But they didn’t run. Instead, one of them stepped forward out of the group. She was holding out her phone, waving it at him. Furious. He had no idea what she was on about. He knew her, had sold crack to her more than once. Michelle. Short, with curly red hair, big freckly tits and a mouth like a fish. It would have been funny because she was so tiny and ridiculous in her oversized heels and he could deck her, no problem, but her face now was running with tears and her fish mouth had gone slack and slobbery. She looked a sight. She was shouting: ‘You bastard. Bastard. You fucking bastard.’ One of the girls was pulling her back, but Michelle shook her off and started to advance towards him again.

  He didn’t want nothing to do with that craziness. He swung out into the road and cycled away. She was shouting after him and he looked back over his shoulder. She was standing in the road, hands on her thighs, bellowing like an animal.

  ‘Shakiel, was it?’

  He paused at the traffic lights and thought about that. He went back. The girls were in a huddle again, their arms round Michelle’s back. He stopped at a distance and waited. One of the other girls looked at him, thin and tall, black as paint.

  ‘What do you want?’

  28

  Sarah stepped inside the tent.

  Although the collision surely hadn’t been survivable, the paramedics had tried. They always tried. It was their dogma. So the victim wasn’t as she had been immediately after the impact. She was on her back, clothing cut open and various pads on her thin naked chest. A human there: scrawny little tits, ribs stretching white skin. Sarah’s eyes flicked to the hip and away before she made herself look again, coldly now, at the blood and gristle and bone, exposed like a cack-handed lesson in anatomy. The car must have knocked the victim forward and driven over her pelvis and right leg. The skirt and the skin of the abdomen had split under the pressure and something like thick jam oozed. Something there too like you might find floating in a basin in a butcher’s shop. The right leg had been straightened but you could see that the angle was still impossible. The broken femur poked through the skin. The foot was bent the other way to the leg, as if to make a point about the surrender of flesh and bone to metal.

  But the face was undamaged, the mouth open and the eyes fixed and staring. Perhaps in the initial stages the victim had been conscious. That would have been hard. However much she tried to blank it, Sarah would never forget one of those from her time in uniform – the confusion and fear before death and nothing to do about it. Meghan hadn’t said anything about that, which suggested that if the victim had been conscious, she’d been incapable of speech. The medics, as they unpacked their kit, must have known that the sequence of interventions they were about to begin was unlikely to be more than the city’s last rites. A different possibility occurred: that death had been slow in coming and they had fought, knowing that the helicopter was cutting its line across London’s sky, bringing perhaps a miracle. She imagined the chopper descending, landing here on this desert road. But today it was not to be the amazing red Lego lifesaver but instead the death’s-head hawk moth. The doctors climbing down and running across the tarmac, but only a brief examination of the victim to confirm what they knew the moment they saw her. ‘If everyone’s happy?’ A glance at the watch and life declared extinct.

  A person was coming into focus. A hand palm down on the ground. Chipped painted nails: sparkly blue. And the smashed leg still wore its shoe – a black slingback, surprisingly elegant and out of place. That too brought someone who had once lived – someone who chose elegant, old-fashioned shoes that belonged in black-and-white movies, not here. Sarah’s eyes lingered on the other shoe, the last detail coming into place. The heel was missing. She’d been running and it had snapped beneath her. She could see it, a desperate run becoming a hop, skip, as the heel gave way beneath her. Then the trip forward, the impact of the vehicle rolling over her, leaving her broken but still alive enough to know and understand that her life was passing irretrieva
bly away.

  Sarah looked up from the corpse. In addition to the forensic examiner, there was another man in the tent. He was a detective inspector too, and she knew him vaguely from corridors and briefings and training days. Dapper, Asian, clever. A good blue linen suit. A marvel he kept that so clean at crime scenes. His first name slipped away from her and then she pinned it.

  She said, ‘Sourav, hi. So Traffic say she’s Homicide and you say she’s ours. Is that right?’

  29

  Ryan locked his bike to one of the street’s stunted trees and walked up to the narrow front door. The shutters were down on the Chinese health shop. He pressed the bell. No reply. He pressed it again. And again. For fuck’s sake. He hammered on the grey-meshed pane above the letter box. If he broke it, so what?

  ‘Steve, Steve!’

  He heard the window above shuddering open and Steve shouting down. ‘Mate!’

  He looked up, and Steve grinned.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Ryan, I was on the bog. I’ll come down and let you in.’

  30

  Just before Vauxhall Bridge, Sarah pulled over and threw her logbook onto the dashboard. She crossed the busy road to step through a glass door into a Lambeth that had been curiously crossed with a little back-street eatery in Lisbon. Metal chairs and Formica tables. A group of men talking Portuguese and playing dominoes in the corner. The smell of good coffee. And a short, fat woman in a tweedy dress clearing a table.

  ‘Be with you in a moment, darling.’

  It was only when she was ordering at the bar that Sarah remembered her text to Caroline. She checked her watch: 7:30 already. She grabbed her phone from her bag, but Caroline’s dial tone went straight to voicemail.

  Sorry sounded like nothing, but Sarah said it anyway.

  She felt sick. In the early days Caroline had been sympathetic, but now her expression grew blank if Sarah started to narrate the details of yet another piece of trauma that had prevented her from doing what she had promised to do.

  She sat in front of her coffee. The fat woman bustled over with a plate in her left hand. With the other hand she wiped the already clean table. ‘Don’t worry, darling. It may never happen.’ She placed the plate in front of Sarah. ‘These’ll do the trick.’ The warm fishcakes left a damp circle of oil on the white ceramic surface.

  The men talked and the dominoes clicked. Sarah thought of Steve Bradshaw, leaving that flat a few hours ago. She’d worked with him at the Department of Specialist Investigations. It had been very good and then it had been really bad. She’d wanted to charge Lizzie Griffiths. He hadn’t. Not at all.

  Well, in the heat of the moment things are sometimes said. Perhaps Steve had regretted his words. No wonder you’re so fucking lonely. She’d seen him since. He’d been pleasant, conciliatory. But when she’d glimpsed him this afternoon, that shame, that shock was still there.

  Here he was, cropping up in her investigation. What was going on?

  The door pinged. Lee entered, beaming and tapping a brown envelope. He sat down, too tall for the table, and took a photo out of the envelope.

  ‘Screen grab from the car hire CCTV.’

  Sarah took it. She saw a thin Asian man. Hair sticking up.

  Lee said, ‘So the hire company says he’s hired this car a few times. Likes it. He picked it up this morning, and then about an hour ago he calls up and says can he keep it an extra day.’

  ‘Do we know who he is?’

  ‘He’s used false ID to book the car but I’ve seized the hire agreement. We might be able to get chemical prints. Problem is, it’s slow.’

  ‘What about the phone number he gives the hire company?’

  ‘Also false. Hire company’s never used it. Subscriber’s check comes back to some woman in Ealing. She’s no idea who he is.’

  ‘And the call to them today to extend the hire?’

  ‘Payphone. Don’t know why he even bothered to call in to keep it. They’re never going to see it again.’

  ‘Buying time,’ Sarah murmured. She was studying the image. They could circulate it. Maybe even put out a public appeal. But that would be slow. She needed to seize that car. ‘Order at the bar, Lee. The fishcakes are good.’

  She got her phone out and called Lizzie Griffiths. ‘Yes, I wondered if I could pick up the CCTV of the fight? Will I be able to find it in the office? … Oh, OK … Yes, no problem. I think I can remember, but give me the address anyway.’

  She wrote in her notebook, closed the call. Lee was sitting back down again. He stretched back in the chair.

  ‘So, do you want to tell me what we’ve got?’

  31

  Steve had said it was urgent. He’d called up and driven over with the recording. With the exception of DS Angel, who was sitting alone at his screen, all of Kieran’s officers had gone home in anticipation of the long day ahead. Kieran pulled the media file up and typed in the password.

  A thousand years ago, Steve, too, had worked out of Atcham Green. You’d have to look to find it, but it would be on his and Kieran’s service records; a brief coincidence of timing. They’d been attached to different response teams, but they’d come across each other as teams do, clocking off night duty to early turn, late duty to nights.

  It had been the start of Kieran’s service, when putting on the uniform each day had been putting on a person that was new to him. Those days he had still noticed how differently people saw him now that he was a cop, and had still felt excited when the blue lights went on. Atcham was one of the older nicks. Nineteenth century: iron railings, red brick, stone steps up to the double doors, a white stone lintel above carved with the single word POLICE. From the moment he walked into the briefing room on his first ever early turn – a cut on his cheek from a 4 a.m. shave, light falling from high windows onto a floor that echoed back through time to blue police boxes and whistles, and the other officers already seated and looking the new boy up and down with a sceptical eye – he had understood that through the constant turbulence of incidents – of criminals and victims and witnesses – a different river ran.

  Reputation.

  Conversations leaning on the wall in custody as you waited to book your prisoner in. Three a.m. meet-ups to which not everyone was invited. The Thames flowing darkly beside them as they drank coffee from a flask and ate chocolate and chatted shit. This was where reputation was talked into being.

  Young as he was, Kieran had sensed how it would settle on him and how important it would be.

  Sometimes it was the dourly funny, the raconteurs. The old sweats – poor dead Hadley Matthews had been one of those. There’d been a thousand stories about him. Confronted by a man with a broken bottle in a bar fight – Come here if you want some of this – he’d famously replied, ‘I’ll get to you in a minute, sir,’ before addressing the rest of the pub with expansive calm. ‘Now, did anyone call police?’ Not everyone could pull that off.

  But you couldn’t get respect by imitating others: it had to be something individual, specific to you. Lizzie, working for him with Hadley at Farlow Police Station out west, had had it from day one – a combination of her slight physical presence and her fierce determination. She’d foot-chased and caught a robber on her own within days of arriving on the team. Hadley, he remembered, had joked about her as they had sat together in the canteen and watched her queue for a breakfast that looked bigger than she did. ‘When that one was born, the doctor handed her to her mum. “Congratulations, Mrs Griffiths. It’s a constable.”’ Hadley had singled her out, wanted to work with her, made her his protégée. He’d hidden it, but he hadn’t wanted to disappoint her. That had been his Achilles heel, perhaps, the thing that had made him weak, the thing that had toppled him from the roof of a tower block.

  And, back in the day, there had been Steve Bradshaw. Working hard and keeping his own counsel, the young PC Kieran Shaw had watched him moving through custody with his prisoners like a whisper. No war stories, no bragging. People told the stories for him.

  Ther
e was a pecking order for arrests and jobs. Murder at the top, obviously. Shoplifting somewhere near the bottom. One of Steve’s arrests had been a murder. He’d been on foot patrol and heard it over the radio – a stabbing. He’d found the guy hiding in a garage, still clutching the knife, and nicked him on his own. Just luck, Steve had said: right place, right time, the suspect too shocked by what he had done to resist arrest. But Steve was always lucky, while some officers never were. He had that knack, and the best knack of all was talking. He was the officer people asked for – a difficult prisoner, a juvenile who might have some info, an abused woman who could send her gangster boyfriend to prison but was too frightened to talk.

  Some people were marked as special. The news about Steve had travelled mysteriously down the invisible wires of the Met’s jungle telegraph and he’d disappeared off borough. No posters around the nick announced the leaving party that was never organized. He’d just gone. When Kieran had asked what his new posting was, no one had been really clear. Kieran had read between the lines – Steve had been taken aside, singled out for interesting work.

  The media file on the computer had loaded. Kieran saw the static shot of the flat. Ryan was entering, and there was Steve, easy-going, moving in and out of frame, making the boy at home, offering him Coke and food, chatting.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Ryan followed him around, like a dog pleased to see its master.

  ‘Only you sounded like you were going to break the door down.’

  Steve was at the little work surface by the sink – always full of dirty cups and plates. It passed through Kieran’s mind that that was part of the legend. Steve’s kitchen sink at home would be orderly, he imagined. A plastic brush in a stainless-steel IKEA holder. Steve lived alone. Divorced.