Angels Passing (29 page)

‘And the other two lads?’

‘Went home. Both local.’

Winter nodded, checked with Sullivan that he had it all, then stood up. Harris, holding his tea, looked astonished.

‘That it then?’

‘Yes, thanks. We’ll give you a ring if anything comes up on Bradley. What’s your number?’

Harris hesitated a moment before giving him a mobile number, and then watched them leave. Winter called goodbye to his wife along the little hall but she didn’t reply. Back in the car he looked up at the house, catching the child’s face at an upstairs window. He gave her a little wave, then told Sullivan to get going.

‘Guilty as fuck,’ he said.

‘What about the alibi?’

‘Phoney.’ He glanced across at Sullivan. ‘You’re a Petersfield lad. Know this pub, do you? The Plough?’

‘Not personally, but I can make some enquiries.’

‘Do that. I’ll get Brian Imber to sort out the mobes. It’s always the billing that shafts scum like Harris.’ Winter grinned in the darkness of the car. ‘What a twat.’

Willard called a squad meeting for eight o’clock. He’d listened to Winter’s account of the interview with Harris and he agreed that the alibi sounded dodgy. The video camera put Harris alongside Bradley Finch, and the sequences on the tape argued that the double glazer was into violence as well as burglary. Willard would have preferred more time to prepare for the custody interviews but events had forced his hand. Unless he moved fast, precious forensic evidence might be lost.

He’d already told Sammy Rollins to sort out overnight surveillance on Harris’s Stamshaw house. Now they had to plan the next stage.

‘Early doors,’ he grunted. ‘Harris, his brother and Kenny Foster.’

Heads nodded round the incident room. ‘Early doors’ was CID-speak for dawn arrests. Under the PACE rules, Willard could hold a suspect for twenty-four hours. Application to a uniformed Superintendent would extend the custody period to thirty-six hours. An arrest at, say, seven o’clock in the morning would therefore give him two full days in the interview rooms. If push came to shove, he could go to the magistrates and ask for yet another extension, and experience told him that might well be necessary. So far, they had precious little to throw at any of the three men. Only by getting bodies out on the ground and giving the alibis a good shake while the suspects were still in custody would they start to make progress.

Dave Michaels would be organising the arrests. Willard wanted each of the three men taken to different police stations elsewhere in the county. At least a couple of hours would be occupied by the police surgeon taking DNA samples and the lawyers getting their acts together, and Willard didn’t anticipate the interview teams sitting down to business until late morning. That gave him a fighting chance to get the TIAs up to speed. He’d already asked Sammy Rollins to appoint three Tactical Interview Advisers, all DCs, and these would be charged with sorting out intelligence briefs from Brian Imber’s cell. They’d monitor the interviews from adjoining rooms, offering a touch on the tiller during the compulsory comfort breaks.

‘Forensic, sir?’

It was the DI responsible for the SOCO teams. Willard nodded. He wanted full forensic on all three addresses, special attention to Harris’s address and Kenny Foster’s garage. They were looking for signs of a struggle, mopped-up bloodstains, hidden weapons, discarded clothing – anything that could connect the properties with events on Friday night. Washing machines were to be seized, drain traps taken apart, surfaces dusted for prints, carpets and furniture taped, floorboards lifted, gardens turned over and motor vehicles given a thorough seeing-to. People like the Harris brothers often had lockup garages. These, if they existed, were to be located and searched.

‘What about Mrs Harris and the kid?’

Willard acknowledged Winter’s query. In situations like this, you had to find somewhere for Harris’s wife and daughter to go. No way would they be permitted to stay, not with the property sanitised for the SOCO team.

‘Travel Inn, Sammy?’

Rollins nodded. The Travel Inn was a new hotel on the seafront and the MIR had opened an account to lodge potential witnesses. With Harris under arrest, mother and child would be swifted off for an early breakfast.

‘But I want her interviewed,’ Willard added. ‘Not the child, just the mum.’

Rollins made a note while Willard returned to Dave Michaels. The next two days might well be make or break for
Bisley
. There were never enough bodies on the ground to satisfy Willard but it was up to himself and the management team to squeeze the available resource as hard as they could.

Willard had propped himself against a desk. Now he eyeballed the faces around the room, and Winter prepared himself for the pre-match team talk. This was the moment when guvnors like Willard let themselves go, and if they were any good, then the message was always broadly the same. Get out there amongst the bad guys. Work your fucking socks off. But whatever you do, whoever you’re talking to, make sure you can prove it, and make sure it stays proved. Every inquiry’s a chess game. Every move you have to anticipate and counter. So think elegant. Think alternatives. And above all think
court
. We’re not here to fanny around with hunches; we’re here to lock the bad guys up. And the way we do that is by being miles ahead, light years ahead, of any smart fucker who wants to stand in our way.

The latter phrase brought a smile to Winter’s face. Willard had a knack for sending messages in the plainest possible terms. His massive body was hunched, classic prop forward, and his voice was low but you had to be deaf as well as blind not to get the gist. If justice was a game of rugby then Willard was only interested in a thrashing. He wanted big points on the board. He’d enjoy the major piss-up afterwards. But at this point in time, if anyone dropped the ball, they were history.

‘OK?’ He dared anyone to say a word. No one did. ‘Go to it then. And good luck tomorrow.’

Two hours later, Faraday managed to drag Brian Imber out for a curry. The Intelligence Cell were still hard at work preparing briefs for the interview teams but Imber himself was exhausted. Just now a change of subject would be more than welcome, and if Faraday wanted to talk about an infant tearaway called Doodie, then so be it.

As it happened, Imber had actually met Doodie only six months before. He’d gone looking for his mother’s current partner on a smack inquiry and ended up in the flat at Raglan House. Doodie, for once, had been at home.

‘So what was he like?’

They were sitting in a Bengali restaurant barely five minutes’ walk from Kingston Crescent. They’d known each other for years, ever since J-J had made an unsuccessful bid to turn out for the colts rugby team Imber used to run, and the friendship had survived.

‘Small, thin, shaven-headed, pale, stud in one ear.’ Imber picked at the remains of his chicken bhuna. ‘He’s one of those kids who comes at you at a thousand miles an hour. You ever meet his mother?’

‘I did.’

‘Then you’ve got the whole story. Kid never stood a chance. Not that he isn’t bright.’

‘So where do I find him?’

‘Find him?’ Imber smiled wearily, pushing the plate away. He hadn’t gone into details about his day at the Yard but Faraday could tell that he wasn’t the only one battling against the current. ‘The problem with these kids is they have a city of their own. You and me think we know Pompey. We think we’ve got the place sussed. But we’re wrong. You want to find someone like this Doodie and you’ve got to get inside his little head. He knows all the short cuts, all the safe places, all the properties empty and up for sale, all the offices with dodgy windows and knackered locks, all the buildings with scaffolding round them, all those little corners where he can get his head down without being rolled. They’re cluey, these kids, they really are, and they have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t make it.’

‘How do they eat?’ It seemed, to Faraday, a reasonable enough question.

‘Some of it’s nicked. Some of it they buy. You see them in pub gardens in the summer. They go round asking for sweet money. It’s begging really but if you’ve had a few pints you don’t begrudge the odd fifty pence. Then there’s the nastier side of it. You and me know life’s a market, and so do the kids. You’ve got a nice arse, you don’t mind helping out with a bit of wrist shandy, you’re on an earner. There are blokes in this city will pay good money for personal services.’

‘You’re telling me Doodie’s on the game?’

‘I’m telling you it happens.’

‘Of course it does, but at
ten?
’

‘Ten would make him unusual, sure, but …’ Imber shrugged ‘… fuck knows.’

For the first time it occurred to Faraday that he owed Doodie a duty of arrest. Not for society’s sake, but for his own.

Imber wasn’t having it.

‘So what? Say you’re right? Say you catch a kid like Doodie? Say you nick him for shoplifting, or vandalism, or whatever else he’s up to? What happens then? If these kids are old enough they’re marched off to court but in the end they’re going to be in the hands of the social workers. They’re going to be listened to, and interviewed, and assessed to death. Don’t get me wrong, Joe. Frankly, I don’t know what the fuck else you do. But the fact is most of these social workers are clueless. They’re straight out of university. They’ve talked the talk, they’ve read the books, and they’re falling over backwards to be these kids’
friends
. That’s great but you’ve got to know who you’re dealing with. These are kids from the tower blocks, fifth-generation unemployed, multiple stepfathers, mothers on the piss, the full Monty. They take one look at these new buddies of theirs and they know they’re on Easy Street. These kids are practically feral, Joe. They’re animals, tough as fuck, and what’s more they don’t care any more. This Doodie’s not alone. There are dozens of them out there. We give them all the guff about society and citizenship and taking responsibility for yourself but they’re just not interested. They’ve sussed us. They know society’s all bollocks. They’re out there on their own and that’s the way they want to stay. Can you blame them?’

Faraday, for a moment or two, was robbed of an answer. Over the years he’d never heard anything like this from Brian Imber. He could be passionate, like a number of other CID specialists charged with keeping their ears to the ground, but there was something extra here, something that must have happened over the last couple of years since their last conversation. The man wasn’t just angry. He was swamped.

Faraday watched him swallow the remains of his lager.

‘You think we’ve lost the plot?’

‘I fucking know it. And so do you. And so does anyone with half a brain in this city. Blaming the kids is the easy bit. Try working out where it all went wrong. And then try sleeping at night.’

‘That bad?’

‘Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong, Joe. I love my kids. But I tell you something else. If I was starting all over again, I’d have the chop.’

Imber nodded, then made a graphic downward gesture with his open hand towards his lap, scissoring two fingers. He gestured Faraday closer. A decade of Margaret Thatcher might have seemed a good idea at the time but read the kind of street intelligence that went over his desk daily, and you’d start wondering what the Brits had signed up to. Thatcherism had long survived the Iron Lady. Indeed, in many respects life had become even more brutal.

Faraday gazed at him. Exhaustion could do this to you, he thought, and so could clinical depression. Yet he’d never had Imber down as a depressive. On the contrary, he’d rarely come across anyone with such a ready appetite for life. Maybe that was it. Maybe, if you pushed your body hard, if you ran all those miles, you knew what was possible for anyone willing to make the effort.

‘So what’s made the difference? Are we talking drugs?’

‘That’s part of it, certainly.’

Imber signalled the waiter for more lager and then bent towards the table again. The mention of drugs had lit another fuse. The narco biz, in Imber’s view, was capitalism in the raw. The mark-ups were huge, the client base was ever expanding, and you didn’t have to invest one penny in advertising because word of mouth and the chemicals themselves would do the selling for you.

‘Now isn’t that neat?’ He was smiling. ‘Isn’t that just the most beautiful thing in the world? No wonder criminals don’t bother with bank jobs any more. Why should they give themselves all that grief when there’s a million tons of cocaine out there?’

‘Bazza McKenzie?’

‘Perfect example. Guy starts as a painter and decorator. Seven years later, with Harrison off the plot, he owns half of Southsea. Café-bars. Estate agents. Student lodgings. Condemned hotels to house asylum seekers. Big chunk of the taxi business. Are you seriously telling me all that comes out of a van and a couple of litres of white emulsion? Of course it doesn’t. But there’s the rub, you see, Joe. Kids watch people like Bazza. Some of them work for him, run drugs for him, do legit jobs in Café Blanc. He’s become a kind of folk hero. He’s become a role model. He’s become Robin fucking Hood. And you know why? Number one because he’s got more dosh than he knows what to do with. And number two because he couldn’t care a fuck. He flaunts it all. In our faces. The kids see that and they make a note or two. No wonder they give us such a hard time.’

This time Faraday could only agree. After Marty Harrison’s exit to Spain, MacKenzie had the cocaine business to himself.

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘As far as Bazza is concerned?’ Faraday nodded. ‘We screw him. We invest lots of money, lots of time, lots of resources, and we nail him to the ground by taking every last penny off him. The legislation’s there. All we need is the balls to use it.’

‘And the wider problem?’

‘Legalise the lot. Destroy the market.’

‘And you think any of that will ever happen?’

‘Absolutely no fucking chance. Anything to do with money laundering, anything to do with taking on the professionals, all that goes straight in the too-difficult basket. As Bazza knows only too well.’

Faraday ducked his head, then told Imber about the Helen Bassam inquiry and about his team’s exchanges with Misty Gallagher. Just the name was enough to light Imber’s fuse again.