If Snow Hadn't Fallen (A Lacey Flint Short Story) (2 page)

While they did so, the man lay on the ground, horribly injured, possibly dead.

The uniformed sergeant in charge did his best, but it was an impossible situation. The ambulance arrived and the crowd, to give them their due, allowed the paramedics through unscathed, but then surged forward again as the police barrier began to weaken.

The sergeant went down. A constable who stooped to help him was knocked off his feet. We’d lost control. It happens so quickly in crowds: one second everything’s in hand, the next all
hell
is breaking loose and all you can really do is run for it and regroup. People often ask the police, are you ever afraid? I was afraid that night, in the midst of a crowd that was quickly becoming a mob.

As the police cordon broke, the man who’d been yelling for his son ran forward. Others followed – there was a small woman, with a long scarf over her head, and one of the men put an arm around her as they hurried forward. The sergeant, back on his feet and with one arm raised high in a surrender gesture, held on to the first man’s shoulder. ‘Stand back, sir,’ he tried. ‘Let the paramedics do their job.’ He was pushed away. The man knelt down by the injured body. I didn’t see what he saw. I imagine few people did. We were mostly too far away and the light was too poor. It made no difference. What we heard told us everything.

Screaming. Keening. Yelling. I honestly hadn’t known human beings could make such a sound. It was the sound of agony.

‘OK, come on, get ’em back. Everybody back.’

Someone was trying to take charge again. We forced ourselves to muster, to link arms, to face the furious crowd and do the ‘Step back, sir … Everybody back now … Give us some room’ thing. A police van arrived and from its rear doors spewed officers in riot gear. The pictures in front of me began to merge. Sharp torch-beams, the lurid Day-Glo of police uniforms, shouting faces, accusing fists, a crowd still angry but growing colder and calmer. I saw very little of it. The only clear image in my head was that of an elderly Muslim woman on her knees in the mud, tearing her scarf and her hair as she howled at the moon.

2

‘OUR VICTIM’S NAME
is Aamir Chowdhury,’ said Detective Inspector Dana Tulloch. Minutes earlier, she’d been appointed head of the investigation into the death of the man in Larkhill Park. She and her team weren’t next on the rota, but all early signs suggested that this was a crime motivated by racial hatred, and the Met was covering itself. Tulloch was half Indian, with creamy gold skin and gleaming black hair. Not that black, admittedly, but black enough to count. It would be harder to accuse her of not taking the murder of an Asian man seriously than it might be to point the finger at some of her white colleagues.

The man in the park, Aamir Chowdhury, had been pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, although early reports suggested that he’d been dead before the ambulance crew had taken him from the park. On the basis of my testimony, and given that he’d been heavily doused in petrol, the case was being handled as a murder investigation.

‘Mr Chowdhury was twenty-seven years old, a British Muslim,’ Tulloch went on. ‘His parents were born in Pakistan, moved to Britain in the 1970s. Chowdhury himself was a junior doctor at St Thomas’s. He lived alone in a flat not far from the hospital and phoned his mother at six this evening to say he wouldn’t be coming round to the family home as they’d planned, because he had to go back into work.’

The team gathered together at short notice was a large one, many of whom I knew from the Ripper investigation. Detective Sergeant Neil Anderson, a softening, thinning-haired man in his forties, reliable and dedicated, but never going to make chief constable. Pete Stenning and Tom Barrett, young detective constables: Stenning, super-straight; Barrett, a bit of a joker. Gayle Mizon I’d worked with quite closely on my last case: blonde, early thirties, she was a safe pair of hands. Once the victim had been carried from the park, I’d been whisked away to give my statement. Anderson and Mizon had taken it between them. When it was over, I followed them up to the briefing room. I wasn’t on duty, I wasn’t even officially part of this team, I just knew that going quietly home would be impossible.

‘He was identified by his father at the scene and also by documents in his wallet,’ Tulloch was saying. ‘Early signs are that this was a crime motivated by racial hatred. We’ve been given the names of five men whom the family believes are responsible for the attack. They are all white, in their early twenties, and live in the same part of London as the dead man. According to
the
family, the victim has been subject to ongoing abuse and intimidation for some time now. I want them bringing in. We’ve already applied for warrants to search their properties.’

‘How do we know the attackers were white?’ I asked.

I’d been sitting at the edge of the group, half hidden behind blokes leaning against desks. Tulloch had to step forward to see me properly.

‘Lacey, you shouldn’t even be here,’ she said. ‘Give me five minutes, I’ll get someone to run you home.’

‘They were wearing masks,’ I said. ‘So who says they were white?’

Tulloch looked at Anderson, who opened his notebook and flicked back a few pages. ‘Shahid Karim was at the far side of the park at 19.33 hours,’ he said. ‘He saw five white men run across the pitches, coming from the direction of the children’s play area. They disappeared on to the Wandsworth Road.’

‘An alien, a wolf, a zombie, a goblin and the Queen,’ I said.

Eyes stared at me. A couple of people exchanged bemused glances.

‘Did he tell you that?’ I asked.

Some eyes remained fixed on me. The rest went back to Tulloch, who raised an eyebrow at Anderson.

‘Mr Karim said nothing about masks,’ he told her. ‘I made a note to double-check when Lacey mentioned it downstairs just now. You’d think it was the sort of thing he would have remembered.’

Tulloch nodded. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Can we get word to the team down at the recreation ground? If they dumped the masks between fleeing the scene and being spotted leaving the playing fields then they’ll still be down there.’

Barrett crossed the room and picked up the phone.

‘Right, Lacey,’ said Tulloch, ‘as you’re here, why don’t you tell us all what you saw? As much as you can remember.’

Conscious of all eyes on me, many of them more than half curious about the detective constable who’d achieved such notoriety only weeks earlier, I went through the events of the evening again, from my first taking the call from Control.

‘I thought I heard someone running away just before I got to the park,’ I said, ‘but I honestly can’t be sure it had anything to do with the attack. Another thing I’m not sure about is whether they were all men, but my guess is they were. Several of them were tall; the ones who weren’t seemed to be built like men. I’d struggle to guess ages, but they all moved pretty quickly when they had to, so not that old. On the other hand, definitely all adults. Probably all over twenty. They didn’t move like kids.’

‘And you think this was deliberate?’ asked Anderson. ‘Not just messing around gone badly wrong.’ He and I had already gone through this, he just wanted the others to hear it from me.

‘They all had sticks,’ I said. ‘They surrounded him. As he got near to any of them, they’d push him back with the sticks. They wanted to keep him burning. And they were taunting him.’

Anderson looked up. ‘You didn’t say that earlier.’

‘Sorry, I just remembered. It happened very fast.’

‘What were they saying?’ asked Tulloch.

I took a moment, thought hard, then shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I admitted, ‘I can’t remember any words, if I even heard them clearly enough.’

Silence for a moment as I dropped my eyes to the ground and they gave me time. I was thinking. I’d definitely heard them taunting him, so why couldn’t I recall what they’d said?

‘What is it, Lacey?’ asked Tulloch.

I looked up. ‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘Just something that doesn’t feel right. Who reported it? Who made the call in the first place?’

Tulloch looked from one face to another.

‘Anonymous,’ said Stenning. ‘A female voice, talking from a mobile. Possibly someone in one of the overlooking houses who didn’t want to get involved.’

‘Maybe the person Lacey heard running away,’ suggested Mizon. ‘Anything else you can tell us about him? Her?’

‘Tallish, slim,’ I said. ‘Able to run pretty fast. Could have been anyone.’

They sent me home shortly after that.

3

I WOKE THE
next day to find the country talking of little other than hate crime. Most of the main news sites covered the attack: it was on BBC, ITV and Channel 4 news. The premeditated nature of the murder, the brutality of it and the agonies the man had suffered before death were all grist to the mill of the country’s media, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder, united by collective outrage. Every channel I turned to seemed to carry calls for ‘robust action’ to combat the rising trend of Islamophobic attacks. A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain cited violent assaults, death threats, fire-bombing of mosques and desecration of graves as just a few examples of the rising wave of crime against British Muslims, most of which went unreported or was inadequately investigated.

A woman in a pink coat standing outside New Scotland Yard told the nation that five suspects had been apprehended the night before and items of property seized. An announcement was expected shortly.

Everyone wanted a quick resolution, for punishment to be inflicted fast and hard. The five suspects – unemployed local white men, aged between nineteen and twenty-three, all with police records – were named on social media in the course of the day. As the hours ticked by we waited for an announcement that DI Dana Tulloch, already the nation’s favourite policewoman following her successful closure of the Ripper case, had formally charged the suspects.

The post mortem on the victim was carried out. He’d died from suffocation after his soot-blackened airway had swollen and closed. Had the paramedics got to him sooner, they might have been able to insert a tube and keep him breathing. Might. There were third-degree burns over some 70 per cent of his body. At 80 per cent, it’s nearly always fatal.

We heard that Mr Karim, who’d been walking on the far side of the recreation ground and had seen the five men fleeing, had gone into the station and had correctly identified the photographs of the five suspects. The park was still sealed off and being combed by crime-scene officers, as was the wider recreation ground. The sticks I’d described hadn’t turned up. The door-to-door enquiries went on, in the hope that someone other than Mr Karim and I had seen something, or of finding the person who’d reported the attack. The recording of the anonymous voice was listened to many times before the team concluded that the reporter was female and
probably
Asian. CCTV footage was gathered and watched. Still we waited for the announcement of Tulloch’s latest triumph.

We waited in vain. And all the time there was that nagging voice at the back of my head. Something was wrong. Something even more wrong than a brutal and unprovoked racist attack. There was something I was missing.

4

‘WE COULD TRY
hypnosis,’ someone suggested.

‘We cannot go to court relying on a statement acquired under hypnosis,’ snapped Tulloch. ‘Look, I’m as frustrated as anyone, but it really doesn’t look like Lacey has any more to tell us.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

We were at Lewisham police station, where the Major Investigation Teams were based. The frustration around me, almost solid enough to cut through, stemmed from my inability to describe in any useful detail the clothes the five perpetrators had been wearing in the park the previous night. I’d done my best, but other than a general impression of dark casual jackets, hooded sweatshirts and dark trousers, there had been nothing. Normally, I’m very good at noticing and remembering details, but either the five men had deliberately dressed to be as inconspicuous as possible, or I’d been too shocked to take much notice.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. This should not be a difficult case. Suspects had been named and apprehended within an hour of the crime. Witness statements would be fresh and reliable. There would have been no time for alibis to be fabricated. There should barely be enough sterile plastic bags to contain the physical evidence.

The others looked at each other. ‘This doesn’t leave this room,’ warned Tulloch.

‘Of course,’ I agreed.

She threw her hands up into air. ‘We have nothing,’ she said.

‘Bugger all,’ added Anderson, in case Tulloch hadn’t been sufficiently clear.

‘They’re denying being anywhere near the park?’ I said.

‘Naturally,’ said Anderson, ‘but we expected that. What we didn’t expect was that two of them would have pretty solid alibis.’

‘Is that all?’ I asked. Alibis were tricky, but not insurmountable. They often came down to one person’s word.
Yes, my brother was at home all evening, we watched television together
.

‘No evidence at all,’ said Tulloch. ‘We seized every pair of shoes in every residence, but none match prints left at the scene or show any traces of mud from the park or grass from their supposed run across the field. No smell or trace of petrol on any of the clothes. No petrol found in any of the houses. You stank like a furnace last night, Lacey, no offence. They didn’t.’

‘I thought somebody picked them out of the Identikit photos?’ I said.

‘Yeah, this Karim bloke,’ said Barrett. ‘Trouble is, he knows them all anyway. He’s had run-ins with them before. They hang around his shop, apparently, making a nuisance of themselves. Bit of petty shoplifting. Any defence worth his salt will just claim he picked out five blokes he knew who’d pissed him off.’

I was starting to see their problem. ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t them.’

‘On the other hand, guess who intervened one time when they were threatening Karim?’ Barrett continued. ‘Chowdhury himself, the victim. He had some balls, that guy. Stood up to them, wouldn’t let them leave until the police arrived. There’s no doubt they had a grudge against him.’