The Last Girl (29 page)

‘Marvellous.’

‘What we got when we turned up to check it out was two bodies in the back seat and one in the boot. The gunmen stood outside the car and shot through the windows – silenced weapons, we’re assuming, because otherwise we’d have had half the neighbourhood ringing 999.’

‘Who are the victims?’

‘Three lads who were working for Ken Goldsworthy. We had their names already – I liked one of them for a killing over in Catford.’ He shrugged. ‘Probably right, wasn’t I?’

That was no satisfaction when we’d never prove it and
the
case would remain open, unsolved. ‘Has the pathologist been yet?’

‘On his way. But come and have a look. They’ve been doing the outside of the car while they’re waiting, but I think they’re done now.’

I followed Maitland, unable to think of a reason not to look at the contents of the car. It was soaked in blood, blood I could smell as I got nearer, along with a ranker odour.

‘This is Lee Wright, aged all of nineteen.’ The beam of Maitland’s torch lingered over his face, the mouth hanging open, the eyes blank. He looked terribly young. He leaned forward at an angle, slumped over but held in place by a seat belt. ‘You can’t see it from here but their hands are tied.’

‘Why are his trousers around his ankles?’

‘It’s an old trick. Stops them from running if they get free. No shoes either. They’re in the front footwell.’ The torch beam flicked over dirty toes, pale calloused skin. There was something pathetic about them, something infinitely human. He’d been nineteen years old and heavily involved in drug dealing, but he’d been a person too, for all that. He’d had a life ahead of him.

‘On the other side of the car we have Curt Mason, all the way from Tottenham. Goldsworthy got in with a gang from one of the estates up there, recruited them for his own purposes. Convictions for violence, drug dealing, theft – you name it. Aged twenty-three.’ He was big, heavily built, his shoulders packed with muscle. His skin shone like polished ebony in the light of the torch. They had shot him in the head. Bits of his brain splattered across the back of the car, soaking Lee Wright’s hair on that side.

‘They wouldn’t have been shot at the same time, would they? Too risky for the killers.’

‘Depends on the angle.’ Maitland stood back and extended his arm to show me. ‘If you stay back and keep
your
field of fire relatively narrow, you needn’t come to any harm. Remember, they weren’t going anywhere. You’re not talking about moving targets. I’d say two shooters, not three, because they left the lad in the boot until last, but you could certainly have had two of them firing at the same time. Less chance of attracting attention if it doesn’t take too long.’

‘It’s cold, isn’t it? An execution.’

‘Professional. Nothing personal about it.’ Maitland moved around the car. ‘This is Safraz Mahmood, aged twenty, who got to ride in the boot. They left him until last, I’d guess, because he pissed and shat himself while he was waiting to die. He also battered the living daylights out of the boot trying to kick himself free. These things are like tanks – he didn’t have a hope.’

I looked in at him, curled up in the bottom of the car. His eyes were closed, the expression on his face sad. There were footprints all over one side of the boot.

‘No gags on any of them. Whatever about the other two, he must have been screaming,’ I murmured, almost to myself.

‘So you know what to ask about on the door-to-door enquiries. Shouts, loud noises or thuds, screams, car engines.’ He ticked them off. ‘Anything else strange they saw or heard.’

‘Right.’

‘Here’s your list of streets. Both sides of the road, please, commercial premises as well as residential.’

‘This is going to take all day,’ I said.

‘It’ll take as long as it takes.’

‘I’ve got to do interviews this afternoon with Derwent, on the Kennford case.’

‘Then you’d better get a move on.’

‘Nice of you to drop in, Kerrigan.’ The voice came from behind me that I instantly recognised as Belcott’s. ‘Whining about doing a bit of work already?’

I ignored him. To Maitland, I said, ‘What time are we starting to knock people up?’

‘Six. Best chance of catching everyone before they leave for the day.’

‘What should I do in the meantime?’

‘Same as everyone else. Hang around talking shit. Or drinking it, if you fancy a coffee.’

‘You’re selling it to me. I should have brought my own.’

‘Like you brought your own company.’ Belcott hadn’t taken the hint and now I registered that he was standing beside my elbow, glaring at Rob. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘What does it look like he’s doing? Come on, Belcott. Use your exceptional observational skills.’

Rob was still deep in conversation with Godley, a conversation that had both of them looking serious.

‘I wonder if he thinks you’re worth it.’

‘I wonder why you’d care.’ I knew he was a bitter, venomous little man but he had an instinct for playing on your worst fears, no matter how deeply they were hidden.

‘We lost out, didn’t we? You got a boyfriend and we had to give up a good copper.’

‘I bet you wish I’d gone instead.’

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Not how the boss feels, unfortunately. But then Langton can’t do the things you can do.’

I turned around and glared at him. ‘For the last time, I’m not sleeping with Godley. Rob chose to leave. He got a promotion out of it, and he’s doing really well. Now fuck the fuck off and don’t come back.’

It was poetic, really, that Maitland chose that very moment to break the news. ‘By the way, Kerrigan, you’re teamed with Belcott on the enquiries. You’ll be spending the day together.’

‘And don’t think you’re going to be able to duck out of it,’ Belcott hissed in my ear. ‘You’re going to have to pull your weight for once.’

I really couldn’t see how my day could get any worse.

As it turned out, that was just lack of imagination.

Chapter Thirteen

IT WAS DURING
the fourth straight hour of knocking on people’s doors that I began to despair. As usual, it was heart breaking work – repetitive, time-consuming and frustrating. There was the occasional excitement of being called pigs, or being told to fuck off. There was the young mother who burst into tears because Belcott’s aggressive ringing of her doorbell had woken her baby. There was the middle-aged woman who invited us in to tell us what she’d seen, who made us a cup of coffee with gravy granules and proved to be, in the words of her harassed husband, doolally. And there were the curtain-twitchers who had a good look at us and decided not to answer the door, for which I blamed Belcott and his clipboard.

‘You look like a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s no wonder they don’t want to talk to us.’

‘They still count as done.’ He forced a hastily printed leaflet through the letterbox (‘MURDER – did you see or hear anything?’) and scribbled something on the clipboard. He was more focused on ticking off addresses than on what we were trying to find out, and to begin with, that annoyed me. By the fourth hour, though, my feet were aching, my face hurt from smiling in an unthreatening way and my notebook was essentially empty. Most of the locals who had actually spoken to us were as helpful as they could be, which wasn’t very helpful at all. It was the curse of murder investigations in London, the deeply ingrained desire not to get involved with one’s neighbours
or
catch anyone’s eye on the street. I understood the head-down mentality, having seen too many cases where attracting the wrong person’s attention had resulted in death or serious injury. But I still wondered how the hell three men could be shot multiple times at half past one in the morning in an essentially residential area without anyone paying any attention whatsoever.

And speaking of not paying attention, I had missed the moment when Rob left, looking around to find him gone about half an hour after we’d arrived. I appreciated his delicacy in not coming over to say goodbye – I had told him to keep a low profile, after all, and there would have been comments from the team members who were gathering in the yard, bleary-eyed and rumpled to a man. But I still wanted to know if he’d got what he wanted from Godley, whatever that was. I had sent him a text and got no reply, which wasn’t unusual because he hated texting. Also, it had been getting on for five in the morning and I half-hoped he was asleep. I would have given a lot to be back in my bed myself, and I was far from being the only one who was shivering with fatigue and too much caffeine. The yawning was constant and infectious. Only Godley looked truly awake, galvanised by the scene in front of him, talking to the SOCOs, the pathologist, the first responders and, later, a handful of the reporters who had been besieging us for hours. He needed to look dynamic, Maitland told me in a low voice, because the shit was about to hit the fan. There had been plenty of intelligence to warn us that this shooting was coming and we still hadn’t been able to do a thing to prevent it.

‘It’s all right when it’s just shitbags, obviously. But it’s only a matter of time before there’s collateral damage. A stray bullet goes through a window or across the street, hits someone innocent. A kid, even. Someone nice and middle-class and decent is what you’d get in an area like this, and the press would go crazy.’ Maitland shook his
head
slowly, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. ‘Wouldn’t want to be the one who’s supposed to be in charge when that happens.’

‘He doesn’t look worried.’ I was watching him bending down to listen to what a boilersuit-wearing SOCO who looked exhausted was telling him.

‘If he looked panicked we’d all be screwed, wouldn’t we? No hiding that we’re up shit creek then. He’s got to look as if he knows what he’s doing, but believe me, he’s out of ideas. And we’re out of luck.’

After so many fruitless interviews, I was beginning to feel the same way. Another door, another blank face and shaking head. I came down the short flight of steps and resisted the urge to sit down on them so I could take off my shoes and rub my feet. We were on the shady side of the street at least, so it wasn’t as hot as it might have been. Belcott was still dripping with sweat, his hair standing up in hedgehog spikes.

‘How many more do we have to do?’

‘The rest of this side. The other side. The next two streets that way. Then we’re done.’

The Victorians had known how to build high-density housing and that area favoured long streets, so he was talking about hundreds of properties. We were working away from the crime scene, out of the likely area where anyone would have seen anything, and I couldn’t manage to put any enthusiasm at all into it.

‘Brilliant.’

‘Having fun?’

‘More than you can imagine.’ I looked past him, to a silver Mercedes that was cruising towards us. ‘Isn’t that Godley’s car?’

‘Look busy.’ Belcott hurried up the steps of the house next door and rang the bell, scanning his clipboard with intense concentration.

The car was slowing down as it approached us. Instead
of
following Belcott’s lead, I stepped out to the road and waved. It glided to a stop and the driver’s window slid down. Godley was driving himself, and he was alone.

‘Maeve. Just the person I was looking for. How are you finding it?’

‘Not that useful, unfortunately. We haven’t had much luck so far.’

‘Nor has anyone else.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s the usual story, isn’t it? Someone probably did notice something that would help us but they won’t tell us about it, or they can’t, or they haven’t realised we need to know it.’

A van was coming down the street behind the Mercedes, its engine noisy. With cars parked on both sides of the road, Godley’s car was blocking the whole carriageway and there was nowhere to pull in. The van driver blasted a volley on his horn and I acknowledged it with a glare. As soon as I looked away, the horn blared again. Godley glanced in his rear-view mirror and grimaced.

‘Better make this quick. I want you to leave Belcott to finish off the house-to-house and come with me.’

Rescue, at last. ‘Where to?’

‘Wandsworth Prison. Tell Belcott and make it snappy, or that van is going to be parked in the back seat.’

There were more glamorous destinations, but I didn’t truly care. I nodded and hurried up the steps to interrupt Belcott, who was embroiled in a lengthy conversation with an elderly man. He couldn’t hear a word Belcott was saying and Belcott couldn’t understand his answers when he did manage to get a question through to him. Another typically rewarding encounter.

‘I’m going. Godley’s got a job for me.’

‘What?’ He turned round and glared at the car, then at me. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘Don’t get any ideas, Belcott. It’s not what you think.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Prison, not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Why?’

If I’d answered, I’d have had to reveal that I didn’t know why we were going to prison, who we were going to see or why I was included. Ignorance was not anything to boast about; it was much better to let Belcott think I was withholding information deliberately. I skipped back down the steps. ‘Good luck with the enquiries.’