Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (37 page)

Michael
Prosser was driven back to Croydon and formally charged with the rapes of
Miranda Beckett,
née
Hargreaves, and Larissa Stephenson. As possible further charges
were pending in the cases of Denise Cole, Lisa Harkness, Violet McMinn and two
other unsolved sexual assaults, Prosser was taken at once before the
magistrates and remanded in custody for a week.

Zoltan
was in no hurry. Even if one investigation seemed to be going pear-shaped, a
result in another one, on the same day, wasn’t to be begrudged.

As soon as the all
clear had been given at 289 Ladywell Road, Helen Wallace, Jeff Wetherby, Marie
Kirtland and half a dozen bobbies off the early turn at Lewisham had piled in.
They’d found Malcolm Kavanagh and his girlfriend in an upstairs bedroom. In one
of the downstairs rooms, the one Quaife had been occupying, they found a large
Union flag and an army kitbag full of, among other things, fascist literature,
some of which Marie had seen copies of before. Kavanagh confirmed that Quaife
was booked to accompany the band to Germany and had moved in about a month ago
to make things easier. He professed ignorance of the fact that his housemate
was on parole and subject to travel restriction, and said he knew he was
‘partial to the odd Heil Hitler’. Asked about Edward Porter, he simply looked
blank.

A
side pocket of the kitbag contained an iPhone on which was very little of
interest apart from some texts, received at various times over the last ten
days from an unknown number, suggesting where Quaife might be able to find
Philip Meredith, Billy Scofield and Jayne Mansfield. At the bottom of the
wardrobe, Marie found a plastic bag from B&Q containing a hammer and an
opened box of long nails. There was also a receipt showing that these items,
together with three metres of timber and two cans of white spirit, had been
purchased with a credit card, the last four digits of which did not match the
one in Quaife’s wallet.

The
other downstairs room was full of band equipment and amplifiers. Behind a stack
of these they found, propped up in a corner, a man. The long matted hair led
one of the uniforms to suggest that he must be a homeless guy who’d found a
good place to doss and had then popped his clogs. The first two detectives to
enter the room, Helen and Jeff, nixed that theory by pointing out the large
knife-induced hole over the man’s heart, but it was the third, Marie, who took
one look at the Bob Marley tattoo on his left forearm and confirmed that Philip
Meredith had finally turned up again.

By noon, a crowd of
nearly a hundred neo-Nazis had gathered outside Lewisham police station with
placards and chants, accusing the police into any news microphone pointed in
their direction of murdering a hero and a patriot. All the police would say in
reply was that an official investigation by the Independent Police Complaints
Commission was under way.

The
news from Croydon University Hospital that Robin Benton had undergone a first
successful skin graft operation received a mention at the end of the local
lunchtime bulletin.

At
one-thirty p.m., officers of the British Transport Police at St Pancras
International responded to a report that a man answering Edward Porter’s
description had booked a ticket on a Eurostar service to Brussels. They boarded
the train, but the seat was empty and a thorough search revealed nothing. The
train was allowed to depart on time.

By
half past four, tension between the protesting neo-Nazis and more recently
arrived counter-demonstrators had risen to an ugly pitch. Watching television
crews somehow failed to record the first move, but suddenly missiles were being
thrown and sections of the crowd were attempting to make rushes at each other.
For a long few minutes, the hundred and fifty riot shielded coppers keeping the
two sides apart were in danger of caving. The chief superintendent appeared on
the steps of the police station with a loudhailer and appealed for calm. Just
as abruptly, the counter-demonstrators withdrew behind the cordon. It took
another three hours, but eventually the neo-Nazis realised their enemies
weren’t going to play and dispersed, leaving a dozen diehards to keep vigil at
the foot of the station steps. Encouraged by members of Mark Watkins’s family,
Grace Carmichael among them, the counter-protesters began in their turn to go home,
drifting off in the opposite direction down streets full of strobing blue
lights and the red glint of the evening sun on helmet visors.

When a police
officer shoots a suspect dead, it is proper that a rigorous investigation
should ensue. Citizens of a civilised society enjoy the basic right not to be
shot by police officers, so when it happens it follows that society demands
clear and thorough reassurance that the deed was necessary in the interest of
public safety. It is in this same interest that a cop, though his gun may be
burning a hole in its holster, must be mindful of the consequences of pulling
the trigger.

In
Britain, whose police service is one of the few in the world that does not
routinely arm its officers, the procedures that swing into motion following a
fatal shooting border on the obsessive. The officers concerned, along with any
of their colleagues who might have had the remotest sniff of the incident, are
hauled in and questioned about events until they can picture them with their
eyes closed. The actions of the dead suspect, aggressive and life-threatening
though they might have been, are cruelly scrutinised for alternative
interpretations. The remotest possibility that lethal force might not have been
necessary is brought into the open and left there until its last remnant of
plausibility is gone. However murderous the suspect’s character or behaviour,
it is the police who have taken a life; the officers involved who must answer
first for their actions. Any of them who might have passed off lightly the
discharging of a firearm will come away from this inquisition with such
illusions rudely disrupted.

These,
among numerous others, were the reasons why Sophia Beadle’s top priority had to
wait until the evening. She made it her business to be the one personally to
inform Luke Benton of what had happened, but because she’d been present at the
death of Michael Quaife she, along with every other member of the team who’d
been in Lewisham - even those at the back of the house who’d seen nothing - had
been put through the mill by detectives from Professional Standards. Even
Sophia’s written, signed, witnessed statement had been examined with a
fine-toothed comb. She was beginning to appreciate the gruesome canteen talk
there’d been of armed operations being routinely videoed, cameras mounted on
guns or lapels, just to leave no room for question.

Luke
must have watched her park, for he opened the front door as she walked up the
path. He wore a nervous smile and an expression in his eyes she couldn’t for
the moment define. He led the way through to the living room, where a short,
cheerful woman in her fifties sat knitting in a chair by the fireplace. She
beamed a greeting. Luke introduced her as Nick’s mother. She stood and shook
Sophia’s hand. ‘You’ll be wanting to talk alone,’ she said, and excused
herself.

‘The
Lynotts’ve said they’ll put me up as long as I need,’ Luke said when she’d
gone. ‘They’re being really great.’

‘No
Nick today?’ Sophia smiled.

‘Upstairs
revising,’ Luke said. ‘Exam tomorrow.’

‘Of
course. That time of year.’ Sophia stopped short of bringing her eldest’s first
year exams into the conversation. ‘How are you managing with yours?’

‘Next
week, mine start. I’ll do ‘em, but God knows what grades I’ll get. Doesn’t seem
that important.’ He changed the subject, avoiding her eyes. ‘Nick’s dad’s
handling the probate for me. Way above my head, all that. He reckons the
insurance should be more than enough for us to buy our own place. Me and my
brother, I mean, when he gets out of hospital.’

Sophia
nodded, sensing the coming shadow Luke didn’t want to acknowledge. Robin, when
and if he came home, would need constant care.

Luke
said, as if reading her mind, ‘Not something I really want to think about,
right now.’

‘You
don’t expect to be saddled with all this, at your age.’

‘Tell
me about it,’ he said, with sudden bitterness.

He
seemed to want to talk about today, but Mrs Lynott came in with tea and
biscuits. She fussed around them for a few minutes before withdrawing again.
Luke sat anxiously on the edge of his chair.

‘I
saw what happened on the telly,’ he said.

Sophia
nodded. ‘I gathered you might have.’

‘Is
it true? What those fascists are saying?’

‘That
Quaife was killed in cold blood?’

‘Some
bloke on the news, s’posed to be an eyewitness, said they shot him in the back
as he was running away.’

‘Luke,’
Sophia said, ‘the incident’s still under investigation.’

‘
Sub
judice
?’

‘In
a manner of speaking. I was directly involved, so officially I can’t say much
at the moment.’

‘OK,’
he said, ‘and
un
officially?’

‘Unofficially,’
Sophia said with an edge to her voice, ‘you deserve the truth. Porter and
Quaife, while they have both committed some serious crimes and fully justify
the amount of manpower that’s gone into trying to apprehend them…’

Luke
frowned, seeming to sense that she was about to tell him something he didn’t
want to hear. ‘What?’

‘They
didn’t kill your mother.’

An
almost luminous flash of anger crossed Luke’s face, superseded by a waxlike
blankness.

‘Technically,
no, I know that,’ he said after a long silence. ‘But Debbie… they didn’t give
her a choice.’

‘Luke,’
Sophia said, kindly but firmly, and told him about the alibi. She also told him
about the B&Q receipt they’d found at the Ladywell Road house, the credit
card that had been used traced to a stockbroker who’d reported it lost a month
ago after a visit to the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, known to be one of
Philip Meredith’s preferred panhandling haunts. She told him about Helen
Wallace and Jeff Wetherby’s conversation that afternoon with Corin Rice-Newman,
live-in boyfriend of Grace Carmichael and sometime solicitor providing legal
guidance to the Watkins campaign. About how Rice-Newman had admitted exploiting
his contacts with other law firms to give Meredith inside information on Michael
Quaife and his connection to Edward Porter and Thrall. How the last time he’d
seen him was right before meeting Grace for lunch a couple of weekends ago,
when Meredith had abruptly broken off their conversation and run away as if the
hounds of hell were after him.

She
told him about the working theory she, Zoltan and the team had put together,
their best educated guess based on what they knew for sure; about how Meredith
and his cronies had decided that if they couldn’t bring Porter and Quaife to
justice for Mark Watkins, they’d create something they
could
bring them to justice for. How
Debbie’s passionate teenage rhetoric had perhaps inspired them, had given one
of them, Billy or Jayne or most likely Philip Meredith, the idea to use her as
a stooge. How it had blinded them to the reality that their chosen targets were
the very last people they ought to fuck with. It was a blindness soon lifted by
the rapidity with which Porter had identified them and tracked them down to the
Paragon Road squat, later underlined by the message the attempted murder of
Nina Tyminski had sent.

‘And
Debbie knew about this?’ Luke half-whispered.

‘She
was complicit,’ Sophia said. ‘We’ve interviewed her again. She still denies she
knew the full extent of what Meredith and his crew were planning. She’s
sticking to her original story that she was supposed to phone your mum to warn
her to get out. But she was well aware that Porter and Quaife were being set
up.’

‘And
they got Meredith back for it? It
was
actually them who killed him and not somebody else
again?’

Sophia
studied him thoughtfully for a few moments before answering. Natural, perhaps,
that Luke should want Porter and Quaife to be guilty of
something
, even if it wasn’t his
mother’s murder. How must he feel now that he knew it was them who’d meted out
retribution to her true killer? She said, ‘Whether Meredith didn’t know where
Quaife lived and it was just a coincidence that he’d arranged to meet Mr
Rice-Newman in Ladywell Road, or whether he actually was stupid enough to try to
stake him out, we’ll probably never know. From the CCTV, what it looks like
happened is that Quaife saw them talking, almost immediately saw Grace and her
sister on the other side of the street, assumed the two must be connected and
made the threat. We know Meredith managed to give him the slip, because we
interviewed him at Charing Cross police station the following day, but of
course they did eventually catch up with him again.’ She chose to leave out the
part about the large patch of dried blood in the backyard of 289 Ladywell Road,
where sometime last week, according to the ME’s initial guesstimate, Philip
Meredith had presumably met his end in the same way that it had been intended
Nina would.