Gallowstree Lane Read online

  44

  The other mothers were dropping off, stopping to chat, going off for coffee together. Lizzie kissed Connor and put him on the nursery floor, but he wrapped his arm tightly around her leg. She picked him up again and walked towards the pile of plastic animals and trees.

  ‘Come on, let’s say hello to the elephants.’

  They sat together on the floor. Talulah, one of the workers, joined them. One of the baby elephants was getting hot, Talulah said. They would make a forest with some shade for them all to rest in together. She caught Lizzie’s eye and nodded. Lizzie leant over and kissed Connor on the forehead.

  ‘Bye, sweetheart. See you later.’

  It was going well. Connor hadn’t cried and Lizzie had slipped out of the door with no fuss.

  45

  Sitting in the unmarked Volvo waiting for the surveillance team to get into position, Sarah looked at the photo of Tia that Loretta had given her. She saw a pretty girl with a round, guileless face. She would be compliant, Loretta had said. They wouldn’t have any reason to hurt her.

  The problem was that Sarah knew too well the realities of gang-related kidnaps: the cigarette burns, the beatings, the boiling water. Kidnappings were perhaps the darkest realm of these wired, angry, excited young men. Here they had prisoners and, both omnipotent and also strangely in fear of their own power, they exacted revenge and punishment and obedience. In the worst cases these enactments assumed their own momentum, which overtook the supposed motive for the kidnapping and turned it into something else. A madness.

  A murder waiting to happen: that was the fear with kidnappings.

  For a second Sarah felt sick with responsibility. It had been a kind of arrogance that had made her insist that stupid DS give intelligence as the grounds for arrest. Why on earth had she done that? Saying CCTV would have been just a little white lie to keep Ryan safe.

  She told herself not to look at the photo of Tia again. She needed to keep a cool head. Things were moving quickly. The kidnap unit had never lost anyone. They were good at their job and she was good at hers. The Met was pouring resources into the hunt. They would find the girl.

  The weasel who had dragged Tia down the stairs had already been identified – Charlie Douglass, the same boy whose Velux window King had climbed through when escaping arrest. Fearful of returning to Loretta’s home address, Sarah’s team had emailed her photos of the boy and she’d confirmed the identification. King and Douglass had been getting nicked together since they were fourteen. These were the nuts and bolts of most so-called organized criminality – neighbourhood connections, boyhood friendships. Groups of lads standing at bus stops, riding their bikes, kicking a ball together on a rough piece of grass.

  The search for Tia and the investigation into Spencer’s murder overlapped and fed into each other. Douglass was a candidate now to be King’s companion when he killed Spencer.

  The priority, however, was not detecting crime but finding Tia. Life before everything else. For all the developing picture of King and his associates, the most important thing was still eluding them: location. King and Douglass lived with their families so their homes were out of the question. They might have a storage shed somewhere, a lock-up, a flat used as a cannabis factory. But how to find it? How to get inside a tight-knit group of young men quickly and without alerting them to police awareness of the kidnapping? King might be the new kid on the block, just eighteen years old, but he knew better than to use his mobile. The phones of Douglass and their prisoner, Tia, had also gone silent.

  Sarah’s phone rang. Surveillance was in place for Loretta’s flat. She started the engine and began the drive through the rush hour traffic back towards Hendon. Commuters walked quickly. A late schoolboy ran out in front of her and she had to brake. Buses dipped in and out of their stops, accelerating and decelerating, loading and unloading. As Sarah queued at a junction, a detail popped into her head. The failed arrest of King had been at about 2 a.m. Why then had he and Douglass waited until after eight to take Tia? It would have been better surely to have acted immediately after the failed arrest.

  She thought about that. They could have been deciding what to do. Or they could have been waiting for something. She called Lee on speakerphone.

  ‘Are you working the ANPR camera from the murder?’

  ‘Good morning, Sarah. I’m doing fine, thanks. How are you?’

  ‘Good, yes. Last night Elaine told me the team had identified four possible hire cars that passed the ANPR camera before and after Spencer’s murder.’

  ‘We’re doing it now.’ He started on a spiel about how the team hadn’t been able to do anything last night because the hire companies were closed and how he had been tied up with the drink-drive and then, ‘God forbid, but a few of us actually went home and slept in our own beds for a few hours.’

  But Sarah didn’t really hear any of that. The information she heard was that none of the hire car companies had opened before 8 a.m.

  46

  Ryan cycled. A fine drizzle hung in the air and his face was wet with a film of moisture that settled on his hair too in fine beads. The street was lined by broad-trunked trees and white houses as big as ships guarded by winking black alarms. Once these houses had been humming with life. Big dirty doors. Lots of bells. Lots of bins in the front gardens. Kids playing out. Now they were silent and tidy and the people who owned them were never there.

  Ryan reached down to the bicycle’s frame and slid the gear shift forward with the blade of his thumb. The chain slinked leftwards on the front cog, satisfyingly, like an obedient snake. He pushed hard, feeling the strength passing through his body and leaning into the turn further than was necessary.

  Today was different, he understood that.

  Goodbye to boyhood. Goodbye to freewheeling. If something went wrong, then goodbye too to standing up in front of magistrates and promising to change.

  The bike tipped pleasingly beneath him. Hands on hips, he swayed his way down the road in curves and bends. It came to him in a wave of sadness: this moment of precarious balance was no more than a flashback to a time that was already past. No more Spencer side by side with him blocking the drivers and making their bikes rear into the air. No more Spence waiting in a side street to take a phone from his hand. The look on their faces as he swooped in on them from another dimension. Once a guy had shouted, ‘Stop, thief!’ For days after that they’d yelled that at each other, bent double with laughter. Instead, irreversibly, Spencer on that dark night, stepping backwards holding his thigh. ‘What’s happening to me?’ Ryan could feel it, almost drag his hand down it, as if the pain had been burnt along the centre line of his body. He tilted his face to the sky: suddenly blue again.

  The bag on his back wasn’t Shakiel’s. That would have drawn attention.

  Shakiel had explained it all to him. Don’t do nothing that’ll give grounds for a search. If the feds pull you, be polite, don’t give them any excuse to put their hands in your pockets. And remember, you’re only there just in case. Keep it down. If something goes wrong with the handover, just point the machine. You don’t need to shoot. Just scare the shit out of them. I’ll do the talking.

  And then he’d shown him the gun.

  It was a revolver. The paint was worn on the barrel and the handle was wound with tape. He had to admit he’d have imagined something better. The feds had those tasty Glocks with a magazine in the handle and that sliding motion to load the bullet. That was more like it.

  But Shakiel had said, ‘I can see what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. You can kill a man with this no problem. Main thing is you need to hit them. I’ve seen someone miss shooting straight through a car windscreen. So if you’ve got to fire, get as close as you can and squeeze and keep squeezing till you’ve got none left.’

  Ryan freewheeled past the park and the traffic thickened. Buses queued. He cycled carefully, uncharacteristically respectful of the law. Small brick terraces with dirty windows. Shopfronts on the ground floors.
Flats above. He slipped into a cycle lane and swept past a group of loitering girls – dark tights, tartan skirts, school bags over their shoulders. The thought of the gun in his backpack. He pulled up and unhooked the D lock. The key turned with a stiff cadence, strange in its familiarity on such a day. How could anything be normal? Hood up, he slipped into McDonald’s, locked the door of a toilet cubicle and tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans. It felt secure, but he hesitated and pushed it down harder, the muzzle grazing the skin on his back. He reached behind him and practised taking it out. He stood for a moment, holding the gun and seeing the tiled wall of the cubicle.

  There was a knock on the door. He made no movement and heard, ‘You all right in there?’

  After a brief hesitation he said, ‘Just finishing.’

  ‘Get a move on.’

  A momentary feeling of omnipotence. The guy wouldn’t have said that if he’d known!

  He took a breath, tucked the gun back in his waistband and pulled the hoody down again. He flushed the empty toilet and left the cubicle moving quickly, head down. The guy waiting outside was white, thin and pimply in bleached jeans. A total loser.

  The street was same old, same old – a woman with a child in a little folding buggy, three boys of his own age who clocked him and nodded as if in agreement with something fundamental, an elderly Jew walking slowly in a stained black overcoat and shoes with crêpe soles. But it was also as if his vision was electrified by the machine in his waistband. He turned down the little side street. The glass door was stiff in its hinges. His senses filled with the smell of warm dough. With a can of Coke by his left hand and a tuna bagel on the white plate in front of him, he sat on a high stool by the window watching the street.

  47

  The local-authority CCTV control room was quiet and windowless, the light low. A long, narrow Formica desk faced a bank of screens showing alternating views from the cameras that covered the main roads of the borough. For every hour of real time these indifferent municipal eyes captured hundreds of hours of people’s lives as they did nothing remarkable. Small grey stick figures walking down London’s streets, cars queuing to turn right at junctions, buses stopping and starting, collecting and depositing. Lizzie had seen many times how such ordinariness could suddenly be illuminated by life-changing incident, blue lights flashing on monochrome screens while on another camera just metres away people continued to walk along.

  A portly white man with grey hair was in charge, and he wasted no time letting her know he was ex-job. ‘Yes, did my thirty years,’ he said, answering a question she hadn’t asked and evidencing no curiosity as to the nature of the operation she was working on. ‘Pleased to be out of it, to be honest. We had the best of it. Feel sorry for you guys.’

  With no further comment he took Lizzie through to a partitioned area and handed her over to Mohammed, a courteous, unhurried African man whose unsocked feet spread widely into his flat leather shoes. Angel was already there, feet up on the desk, leafing through a copy of the Daily Mail. He nodded to her.

  ‘Happy to take the Bluds’ car?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s fine.’

  He looked back at his paper. Lizzie put her police radio on the desk.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ Mohammed said.

  ‘I’d rather you stayed in here, if you don’t mind. I’d like to go through the cameras with you.’

  Mohammed laughed. ‘You’ll be all right.’

  She glanced across at Angel. He seemed relaxed, bored even. He’d probably done this many times before. But she knew better than to act cool and then fuck up. This was the proper police work Kieran had promised her, and although it wasn’t glamorous, she understood its importance. As Mohammed flipped through the cameras, she made a note of their locations and numbers on the map she’d printed out from Google. He pointed to a map on the wall – ‘They’re all there’ – but she smiled and replied, ‘I’d rather work like this if you don’t mind. Going through it gives me more of a sense of them.’

  Her phone buzzed with a WhatsApp from Kieran. Perseus was using a reserved radio channel but it was silent, only to be used in emergency. Most communication would be done via their phones.

  Silver Toyota. No information on the destination.

  Lizzie checked her watch and noted the time on the log. Shakiel was on schedule. A big day for him. A big day for everyone. She watched. If she didn’t pick up the car when it left the dealership, it would be impossible to identify it later. Mohammed offered a bag of Werther’s Originals and she took one, her eyes never leaving the screen. A car pulled out of the side street. On the CCTV it looked grey, not silver. With an air of weariness, Angel swung his legs off the table and wheeled his chair over to sit beside Lizzie.

  Camera 4 had a high, distant view of the road. Lizzie put her pen on the car to follow its progress and asked Mohammed to zoom the camera in. A marked motorbike overtook with blue lights flashing and disappeared right at the junction. Almost immediately the WhatsApp buzzed confirming the vehicle and its registration number.

  The traffic was slow. Lizzie let Mohammed switch cameras as she scribbled the numbers and times into her log and updated the WhatsApp. The car edged along the high street and then indicated left down a side street.

  ‘We got any cameras down there?’ Lizzie asked.

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Not ma’am, please. Lizzie.’

  She checked the street name on her Google map and entered it into the WhatsApp group and the log.

  Maiden Lane: One way.

  Eyes flicking between the screen and her phone, she looked at Maiden Lane on Street View: a graffittied picket fence protecting a blank brick wall; a cab office, a bagel bakery. On the opposite side of the road a derelict petrol station.

  Ryan took a bite of the bagel. The tuna was cold and oily, the dough stiff and obstinate. He regretted trying to eat. Shakiel had given him a burner, and he pulled it out of his back pocket to check for messages. The screen was dead. He got up, trying to keep one eye on the window.

  ‘Can I charge my phone?’

  The guy behind the counter – a mountain in a white baker’s outfit, greying curls trapped beneath a blue plastic hairnet – looked at him as if he was entirely irrelevant to his day. Shakiel had told him to have the phone on, and in a panic, Ryan considered offering the guy money, lots of it. Shakiel had given him a hundred in twenties just in case. But in a flicker of thought he realized just how crazy that would seem. He glanced at the window. A small silver Toyota was driving past.

  He heard the guy speaking behind him. ‘Do you want me to take it or don’t you?’ He turned back to the counter. Shrek was stretching out a massive hand tightly squeezed into a blue plastic glove. Ryan gave him the phone – ‘Thanks’ – and moved back to the chair by the window.

  A Toyota was swinging to the opposite side of the road, pulling up outside the fly-posted boards of the derelict filling station a few doors down. Shakiel was in the front passenger seat. Steve in the driver’s. No Jarral. That was strange. Had something happened? He considered fetching his phone, but it would be too soon to have any charge.

  Mohammed said, ‘Lizzie,’ and she drew her eyes back to the screen. On the main road a small, darker car was turning right towards the side street. Even zoomed in, the camera was too distant to decipher the number plate. She updated the WhatsApp and her log and waited as the car turned.

  Angel had his own log in his hands. He said, ‘You need to swap cars, yeah? Because you’re following the Bluds. I’ll take the Toyota. I’ll have the screens on the right.’

  Lizzie nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  They waited and watched in silence.

  Lizzie’s phone rang. It was the nursery. She rejected the call.

  Three minutes later, a voicemail pinged. Watching the CCTV screen she listened.

  ‘It’s Talulah here. Nothing to worry about, but Connor’s eye’s looking worse. Can you call me?’

  Lizzie felt Angel’s eyes on her. She put her p
hone back on the desk.

  Ryan took sips of the Coke and waited.

  A blue hatchback BMW had passed in front of the bakery and parked behind the Toyota. Shakiel wouldn’t like that. He had a thing about BMWs; said the feds always pull a brother if he’s driving a Beamer.

  Shakiel got out of the Toyota, leaving Steve in the passenger seat. He moved towards the boot and slipped the catch. From the other car two white guys emerged. Ryan got up and moved towards the door. He felt as if he was floating. The metal of the gun had warmed up and he experienced suddenly a wave of excitement at its solid, hard presence. His feet were tingling inside his shoes.

  The white guys had opened the boot of their car and were crossing Shakiel on the pavement. Shakiel glanced inside the BMW: the white guys looked inside the Toyota. The boots were closed. The passengers swapped cars, taking their seats and pulling the doors shut. The drivers stepped out in no particular hurry, handing each other their keys midway between the cars. And then, like two ducks in a pond, the BMW and the Toyota had turned and were disappearing back up the street towards the main road.

  It was done. So easy! Nothing to it.

  Ryan was smiling: Shakiel would be irritated the other guys had hired a Beamer, and that was funny. He jumped down from the stool, abandoned the bagel and the can of Coke and stood at the counter, calling to the man, who had disappeared into the kitchen.