After the Fire (23 page)

‘He trusted you to keep his secrets,’ I said.

‘That’s not all I kept. I thought you’d like these.’ She reached behind her and lifted up a heavy box file from the floor. It was too full, bulging against the catch that held it shut. ‘These are the threats that came in by email or on the Facebook page or Twitter or by post. Anything written down. We got phone calls too but I didn’t record them. I logged them with a brief synopsis of what the caller said but it’s not all that accurate, I’m afraid. Most of the threats were emailed.’

‘You said Armstrong told you to throw it away,’ I said.

‘Yes, but I didn’t say I did it.’ She handed it to me. ‘I hope there’s something useful in there.’

Whether there was or there wasn’t, going through it was going to keep me busy. And I couldn’t expect any help from my senior officer, I knew very well, glancing up to see a distant look on his face. He didn’t need to tell me the paperwork was all mine.

I PARKED IN
an empty space outside Murchison House, reversing into a spot between two vans. My meeting was in Elton House, the third high-rise tower on the Maudling Estate, but outside Murchison House the parking spaces were still taped off for the emergency services. The building was closed to everyone except the fire investigators, the scene of crime officers who were following up on our inquiries, and the workmen who were starting to make inroads into repairing the structure for the residents. Days after the fire, the building looked worse than ever, dark-streaked where the smoke had stained it, with gaping ugly holes in the walls where the fire had clawed its way out. The sky was concrete grey, the few trees bare and black. There was no colour in it, no life. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to move back into Murchison House, but choice was a luxury. It didn’t take me very long to decide against putting the Police on Duty notice on the dashboard of the car. It looked like a police officer’s car anyway: there was no point in putting an actual target on it.

I headed into Elton House, my collar turned up against the chill, and took the stairs rather than risk the rattling lift. Claudine Cole lived on the sixth floor and I was glad I was on my own, without Derwent, who would have taken the stairs two or three at a time and complained when I got out of breath. And Liv – she would have struggled to keep up with me. She was too fragile for this, too vulnerable to be back-up. I preferred to be alone. Without wanting to, I thought of her pale face floating in the comforting gloom of the pub, the look of disappointment and surprise in her eyes. I knew she was worried about me, and I knew that, unlike Derwent, she would hold back until I invited her into my world, my problems. They were alike only in that they were both my friends, I thought, then checked myself, because Derwent wasn’t a friend.

Except that, now and then, I recognised that the way he spoke to me was as close as he could come to telling me he cared. He had added me to the small group of people he would defend with his life, without question, and I knew he was pleased to be able to insert himself into my struggle with Chris Swain. I just wasn’t sure that was something I should be glad about. Derwent had a trick of amplifying any situation he found himself in. If anyone was going to turn Swain from a grenade to a nuclear bomb, it was Derwent.

On the other hand, I’d been trying to provoke Swain for months, and I’d got no closer to him than before I started. So maybe I needed Derwent.

I arrived at Claudine Cole’s door and took a second to let my heart rate slow. The door was decorated with a red and a white paper rose intertwined, the symbol of her campaign. A banner underneath read ‘Justice for Levon’, red letters on white satin, the whole thing slightly dingy now. He’d died in August, shot by an armed officer who’d chased him into a stairwell, convinced he was a gunman. A violent gang had just killed a twenty-year-old a few streets away and the area was flooded with armed officers on the lookout for a gunman. Mistaken identity. An easy mistake to make, maybe, when all teenagers seemed to wear the same trainers, the same jeans, the same oversized hoodies that shadowed their faces.

An unforgivable mistake, when you knew Levon Cole, who had never been in a gang in his life.

I squared my shoulders, took out my warrant card, and knocked on the door. A murmur of voices and the door opened. It wasn’t Claudine Cole who stood there – I would have recognised her instantly, with her beautiful oval face, her braided hair, her huge, shadowed eyes. Instead, a slim black man stood in front of me, his expression unwelcoming behind heavy, dark-framed glasses. His hair was cropped, showing off the fine shape of his skull. He wore a thick cable-knit blue jumper and grey flannel trousers, like a student in the 1960s.

‘Can I help you?’

‘DC Maeve Kerrigan, Metropolitan Police.’ I held up my warrant card and slid my foot across the threshold in the same moment. It was a mean trick, but a useful one. ‘I’d like to talk to Mrs Cole, please.’

‘With regard to what, exactly?’

‘With regard to the fire in Murchison House.’

‘That has nothing to do with Claudine.’ He started to close the door.

‘I know. I’m not suggesting that she was involved. I just really need to speak with her about Geoff Armstrong, the MP.’

The man stopped. Not looking at me, he said, ‘What about him?’

‘He was one of the victims of the fire.’ It wasn’t the time to go into the details of how he’d actually died, I judged. ‘I need to follow up on a few things he said to people about what he was doing here on the estate. He was a regular visitor, apparently, and he said it was in order to support Mrs Cole’s work.’

A laugh began deep in the man’s stomach, spreading through him until his entire body was shaking. His head was thrown back as he struggled for air. ‘Geoff … Armstrong … of all people … What a complete and total cock.’ He wiped his eyes, calming down. ‘No, it was nothing to do with Claudine.’

‘I’d like to speak to her.’

‘I’ve told you—’

‘And I’d still like to speak to her.’ There was a conversation going on somewhere in the flat, women’s voices, and I strained to hear how many people were there. On and on it ran, water over stones, and I thought I could pick out Claudine Cole’s low tones among the babble. ‘Is there a meeting here this morning?’

‘A meeting? Nah. Just a group of friends.’ The man put his palms together, long fingers folding against one another. His soft voice was pure north London. ‘Not somewhere you need to be, Miss Detective.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know you’d prefer it if I could leave you alone. I’d prefer that too. But I really do need to speak to Mrs Cole and if I can just come and talk to her now, I’ll make sure she’s left in peace.’

‘Didn’t you call already? She spoke to you.’

‘That’s right. I didn’t get your name, sir.’

‘No, I didn’t give it to you.’ He gave me a long, hostile look. ‘I think you should leave now.’

‘Better me on my own now than a gang of us in a couple of days’ time.’ I hated using bullying tactics but there was no way round it. ‘You know we’ll be back because we have to be. This won’t end here and now. And I’m not looking for an argument with Mrs Cole. I don’t want to upset anyone.’

‘You being here is upsetting for all of us. We’ve met the Met before.’ He turned his head and spat, the gobbet of saliva landing in the hallway, right beside my foot.

‘I’m aware of that.’ This wasn’t going my way. I’d tried charm, I’d tried threats. Time for honesty. ‘Look, I know I’m part of the Metropolitan Police and you and Mrs Cole have every reason to be hostile towards me because of that, but it’s a big organisation. There are a lot of police officers working under the same name, and some of them are pretty shit at their jobs. Not everyone is in the game for the right reason. I have no way of convincing you that I’m one of the good guys, but I hate what happened to Levon. It shouldn’t have been that way, and the officer concerned made more than one mistake when he shot him. He didn’t follow the correct procedures and he’s been suspended ever since it happened, quite rightly in my view.’

‘It’ll all get covered up and forgotten about. That’s why the Police Complaints Commission haven’t released their report. They’re waiting for the public to lose interest so they can forgive and forget.’

‘I don’t think that’s true. I don’t know why it’s been delayed but there are a lot of police officers who want to see that report published.’

‘And a lot who think we’re overreacting.’

‘As I said, it’s a big organisation. We carry the same badge, but that’s where it ends.’

‘You’ll say anything.’ The man’s voice was harsh with contempt.

‘It’s what I believe.’
When all else fails, tell the truth
.

Incredibly, it worked. Not on the man, but on the person behind him.

‘Let her come in.’

‘Claudine—’ the man protested.

‘Let her come.’ Claudine Cole turned away. I didn’t wait around for the man to argue back. I dodged past him and followed Mrs Cole into her sitting room. The layout of her flat was similar to the burned-out flats I’d toured in Murchison House, and the effect was weirdly disorientating. I knew I’d never been there before but it all seemed familiar to me. Maybe it was too much time spent around grief, too. The air was tight with it, and suppressed anger, and the utter disillusionment of a mother who did everything right for her child and still lost him in the cruellest way possible. Levon Cole’s face looked back at me from every wall, every surface that could hold a photograph frame. Every moment of his life had been recorded until a trigger-happy cop pressed stop.

There were three women in the room apart from Mrs Cole and me. Two of them were middle-aged, the third young, and I looked at her with interest but she wasn’t the woman Mrs Hearn had described coming and going from Armstrong’s flat. She was plump, her face round, her hair a cloud of dyed red curls. She glowered, an expression that I saw on the faces of the women beside her.

‘I’m sorry for interrupting,’ I said. ‘I won’t be here for long.’

‘No, you won’t.’ It was one of the middle-aged women who’d spoken, a gaunt black lady with a lot of grey in her hair. Her friend had a very similar expression on her face, although she was built on a large, solid scale.

‘It’s all right, Barbara. Really.’ Claudine Cole sat down in a chair near the window and put a hand to her head. She looked exhausted. ‘I spoke with you on the phone.’

‘I know. I’m just following up.’

‘If there’s something you want me to say, you’d better tell me what it is. You can’t expect me to guess.’

‘I don’t want you to say anything more than the truth,’ I said.

‘I already did. Geoff Armstrong was never involved with us. He never came to a meeting of Justice for Levon. And there wasn’t a meeting the other night when the fire started.’ She made a helpless gesture with the hand that had been pressing on her temple. ‘So I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

I was still standing in the middle of the room. There wasn’t an empty chair and I didn’t dare ask for one. I left my notebook in my bag: I’d remember what she said anyway. ‘You said he made overtures to you a couple of months ago and you weren’t interested in his support.’

‘He wanted to apologise to me for things he said about Levon on the television. Armstrong said he hadn’t done what he was told so he deserved to die.’ Her voice was flat: Claudine had run out of emotion a long time before. I remembered Armstrong saying it, although he had been a sideshow to the main event, a distraction. We had been trying to work out why police officers were dying; Armstrong had been trying to hold the media’s fickle attention. I hadn’t cared what he thought then. Now it seemed hugely important to understand him better.

‘Did he apologise?’ I asked.

‘Eventually. He didn’t accept at first that Levon had no reason to trust the police, even though he had done nothing wrong.’

‘At first?’

‘I talked to him. I made him understand how this community feels about the police. I shared the statistics about black males being stopped and searched for no reason, about racial profiling of offenders, and the Met’s bias against black teenagers.’

‘Did he listen?’

‘He seemed to. He told me it was easier to change the institutions than the minds of young people. But he was still a racist. Still a hostile individual, always looking for common ground with the white middle classes. He didn’t care about black kids who were never going to vote for him or his kind. He thought we should be grateful to the police for hounding our children.’

‘Did anyone else speak with him?’

‘We all did.’ Barbara folded her arms. ‘We put him in his place.’

‘Did he form a – a friendship with anyone on the estate, do you know?’

The young woman snorted. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘He came here every Thursday,’ I said. ‘He met someone in Murchison House.’

The four of them stared at me, shocked expressions on their faces, and I thought none of them was faking. It was news for them, which was bad news for me.

‘Who?’ Claudine asked.

‘I don’t know. He kept it a secret from everyone. According to a witness, the person he was meeting was a black woman, and those meetings began after he visited the estate in connection with the fatal police shootings that took place here in September. So you see why I’m wondering if he developed a relationship with someone involved in your campaign, Mrs Cole.’

‘If he did, which I doubt, I certainly wouldn’t hand them over to you.’ Her voice was diamond-hard. The other women exchanged looks but Claudine Cole held my gaze, her face impassive. ‘I’m sure you would like to pin his death on someone involved in my campaign. That would be quite the publicity coup for you. It would discredit us, which is something that the Commissioner would dearly like.’

‘Anyway, none of us would have touched him,’ the young woman said. ‘He was a horrible, disgusting person. And he was ugly.’

‘What if he paid?’ I asked.

‘His money wouldn’t be any good here.’ She sounded definite. But Barbara’s eyes had flickered, then dropped to her lap. Something had added up for her, something seen and not understood until now – which meant there was something for me to know. The frustration walked along my spine with spider feet.