Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (4 page)

Helen
made a face. ‘Some hopes.’ She grinned at Lucky. ‘Come on. This over here’s
where the magic happens.’

‘Go back and do a
thorough search of that bedroom again,’ Sophia had decreed. ‘Don’t take no for
an answer. I’ll think up some excuse for a warrant if necessary, but I want to
know what Debbie’s involvement with these people is.’

‘What
about Carruth?’

‘Since
Sandra is familiar with that case, I’ve put her onto trying to track him down.’
Sophia’s faint frown conveyed that Kim’s disappointment was noted. ‘You two
have an in with the Clarkes, so I’d like you to stay on them for now.’

And
so Kim and Marie were back at Ballards Way. Andrew Clarke wasn’t there. He’d
gone to work ‘to keep occupied’, leaving strict instructions to his wife to
ring him if there was any news. ‘Nice. Leave
her
to do all the worrying,’ had
been Marie’s opinion, expressed without too much consideration as to whether
Charlotte Clarke was out of earshot. Kim had been careful to persuade Mrs
Clarke that they were on her side, and had obtained her acquiescence to the
search without difficulty. To their secret relief, she’d declined the offer to
bear witness to their actions.

Which
was probably just as well. Kim and Marie conducted their new search with a
vigour and thoroughness that would have astonished DCI Summerfield. They
rummaged again through drawers, cupboards and the wardrobe. They shook out the
bedclothes and felt the duvet and the mattress for suspicious lumps. They
tapped walls, the ceiling and the window frame looking for concealed niches.
Shifting the furniture piece by piece, they checked behind, under and if
necessary on top of it. Finally, with the aid of a claw hammer, they turned
back the rug and lifted floorboards. There, in a dark, dusty space between the
joists, they found what they were looking for.

In
an old square biscuit tin was stashed what could have passed as Hitler’s junk
mail. There were books and magazines bearing apoplectic titles like
White
Rage
and
Manifest
Destiny
,
covers splashed with violent graphic images of fists and flags and marching
feet and idealised studies of white male youths. There were badges and
booklists and printed lists of web addresses, posters advertising rallies and a
talk by a notorious right wing revisionist historian.

There
were also a large number of press cuttings.

‘Looks
like our Debbie’s a right little Nazi,’ Marie said.

Kim
said nothing. She held her teeth clenched as she searched through the tin,
handling the contents as though they were crawling with maggots. Suddenly she
stopped and pulled something out. It was a small thin red notebook, spiral
bound, the sort you could pick up in WH Smith’s for a quid. Kim glanced at it
and handed it to Marie.

At
first it looked empty. But, a third of the way through, a folded piece of
newspaper fell out. The subject of the clipping didn’t surprise them, but two
of the three words written in biro along the top margin meant nothing.

THRALL
  
Porter
  
Quaife

They arrived back just
as Gary Harper was leaving. Catching sight of them, he looked like the man
whose lottery scratchcard is about to make him extremely popular in the pub.

‘Those
cuttings from the
Torygraph
,’ he said, grinning. ‘I think we’ve got something.
They’re all - ’

‘We
know,’ Marie said, walking straight past. Kim smiled, patted him on the
shoulder and followed her.

‘ -
to do with the Watkins murder,’ he finished, limply and to himself. ‘Well,’ he
added, watching them disappear inside. ‘Thank you, Gary. Not a Cumberland
sausage.’

Lucky had lived
most of her life in the London Borough of Croydon, and all her working career
had been spent at Gipsy Hill just over the boundary in Lambeth, so she already
had a good knowledge of the ground the team had to cover. But Helen Wallace
used the tour wisely. Like any good copper charged with looking after a new
recruit, she showed her the places she’d have call to be familiar with,
introduced her to people she would, in one capacity or another, get to know
well. They spent time at hostels and sheltered housing, at the council social
services department, at a Hindu luncheon club, at the Women’s Centre at
Woodside Green, which Lucky had never before had occasion to visit but from
where, after wary beginnings, many of the team’s calls and leads now came.

And
Lucky got to know DS Wallace. Helen was a tall, thin, plain woman in her
mid-thirties, short brown hair clinging in curls close to her head. She had
wide hazel eyes and a bow mouth that cracked easily into a warm smile which suited
her West Country burr. Lucky, who found it easy to talk, revelled in her
company, in the prospect of a colleague she could get on with, who wouldn’t
look down on her because she was a humble PC.

‘I
think the medal clinched it,’ she caught herself boasting in response to
Helen’s ‘what brought you to Special Crime?’ enquiry. ‘So then the Chief Super
says to me, “What do you say?” I’m thinking, “I say stop treating me like a
five year old who’s just been given a sweetie, you patronising over-promoted
git.”’

‘I
presume that’s not what you actually
said
.’

‘No.’
She was enjoying herself. She’d never dared tell the story to anyone above her
own rank before. But this was Helen (‘sod Summerfield’) Wallace, who had a
healthy lack of awe towards authority. Lucky or not, she didn’t think her
remarks would be the final hurrah for the briefest CID service in the history
of the Met.

Helen
nodded. ‘You said...?’

‘I
said, “Thank you, sir,” then went down to the canteen and said it to
them
.’

Amid
the laughter, Helen glanced at the dashboard clock. ‘Crumbs, is that the time?
We’d better head back. It’s nearly lunchtime.’

‘CID
eat lunch?’

‘On
the hoof, normally,’ Helen admitted. ‘But it’s your first day. Break you in
gently.’

‘Right.’
Lucky thought for a moment and then said, ‘Would it be OK, d’you think, if I go
home for lunch? Only,’ she fingered the lapel of her jacket, ‘I feel a bit
overdressed.’

‘Sure.
New Addington, wasn’t it?’ Helen, stopping for a junction, subjected her to a
careful once-over. ‘You look fine.’

‘I
don’t fit in,’ she persisted. She glanced across at Helen in her sensible skirt
and sweater. ‘I mean from what I can tell you’re all more or less casual. Even
the DI.’

‘Sophia’s
policy is we dress as we like, within reason,’ Helen explained. ‘We have to
feel comfortable, and convey that to the people we talk to, who’re often very
upset. Power dressing is hardly the thing.’

‘I’ll
bear that in mind,’ Lucky said earnestly. ‘It’s just not what I was led to
expect.’

‘By
whom?’

Lucky
shrugged. ‘The Job.’

‘You’ve
hit the nail on the head,’ Helen smiled. She concentrated on the road for a
moment, making sure the way ahead was clear. ‘How much was it gone into at your
interview? What we’re about?’

Lucky
opened her mouth to reply, but stopped and thought. She tilted her head and
shot Helen a sly look. ‘Let’s pretend I know nothing,’ she said. ‘I want to
hear it from somebody who isn’t quoting the press release.’

‘We’re
guinea pigs, really,’ Helen said.

‘That
much I gathered.’

‘It’s
basically one upshot of the G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson a few
years back,’ she explained. ‘And what came out of O’Connor, about the
heavy-handed way the demo was policed, our tendency to overreact to every tiny
thing, most especially about the us-and-them attitudes in the Job.’

‘I
thought we were all your friendly local bobby?’

‘That’s the public
line,’ Helen said, ‘but the Commissioner knows it’s at least partly true, and
that hurt. So one of the things he did was hold strategy workshops with senior
ranks, trawling for ideas. Sophia was one of the ones who came up with
something.’

Lucky
assumed an intent expression.

‘She
told him the public perception of us as clodhopping Neanderthals with riot
shields isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What it basically boils down to is
unprofessionalism.’

‘We’re
professional.’

‘The
perception again,’ Helen pointed out. ‘The quasi-military structure. Think
about it. You recruit somebody, call her a cadet, send her to Hendon to march
up and down the parade ground. Then you give her a rank and a uniform, train
her to stand to attention and salute senior officers and address them as “sir”
and “sarge”. Are you getting my drift?’

Lucky
shrugged. ‘So? Nobody complains about the army doing that.’

‘The
army don’t deal directly with the public. We do.’

‘Good
point.’

‘So,
having been trained basically to be a soldier, our recruit is then told she’s
part of a service, not a force, and sent out on the street. But it doesn’t
matter how polite and professional you are or how much customer awareness
training you’ve had,’ Helen said with feeling, ‘people won’t trust a plod with
a pocket book out there any more than a squaddie with a gun. It’s too late. The
battle lines have already been drawn. We even
call
them civilians.’

‘So
we shouldn’t be surprised if they get upset when we go around giving the
impression we think they’re a lower life form.’

‘Right.’

‘So
what makes
us
different?’

‘Apart
from cosmetically, not a lot,’ Helen said. ‘We’re partly a behavioural
experiment, I suppose – to see if our internal culture affects the way we
do business. So the atmosphere in the team is informal. The dress code, or lack
of, you know about. We don’t use rank, except occasionally when talking to
other units, for convenience.’

‘Not
to the public?’

‘Give
your rank if asked,’ Helen said, ‘but generally just name and station will do.’

‘Gotcha.’

‘More
fundamentally, we stick to standard CID procedure except that the cases we get
– in theory, at any rate – are thoroughly screened, so we can spend
a lot more time and effort on them. Sophia doesn’t have to have one eye glued
to the overtime budget.’

Lucky
grinned. ‘And all the women?’

‘Refreshing,
right?’ Helen shared the joke. ‘Seriously, the official line is it just turned
out that way; we happened to be the people Sophia wanted for her team.’ She
paused and inclined her head towards Lucky. ‘
Un
officially, word is the
Commissioner leaned on her to have a female bias for appearances’ sake.
Something he’d never’ve got past the Federation. Where d’you want dropped?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You
wanted to go home and change. I’ll drop you off.’

Lucky
nodded thanks and looked out of the window. They were on Lodge Lane, heading up
past the fire station. ‘Take King Henry’s Drive,’ she said. ‘Sure it’s OK?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I
left my car at the nick, though.’

‘No
problem,’ Helen said. ‘You’re shadowing Nina Tyminski this afternoon. I’ll get
her to pick you up around oneish. It’s on the way anyway.’

‘That’s
lucky,’ Lucky said without thinking.

The
two women looked at one another and giggled. So Helen had overheard. The secret
was out. But it didn’t seem to matter.

The bathroom window
hadn’t been shut properly, she noticed, glancing up at the house as Helen drove
off. Her mother was a sous-chef at a country hotel out beyond Westerham and
wouldn’t have left for work until about ten, which didn’t leave much
opportunity for a burglar. Not that, in New Addington, that bothered them. She
made a mental note to secure the window.

Even
after four years in the Job, she’d never settled to the stiff restrictiveness
of uniform. It was a throwback to schooldays, to rebellion against the tyranny
of uncomfortable, unflattering ties, jumpers and skirts. Kicking the front door
shut behind her, she headed for the stairs, removing her jacket and top as she
went and draping them over her arm. Something she’d done since her early teens,
this, undressing on the move, when she was alone in the house. It gave her a
sense of adventure, a vague thrill of wickedness, and it also meant she could
get into something comfortable that much quicker. On the landing she paused to
unzip her trousers and take off her socks, then gathered the whole lot together
to toss into the laundry basket that stood just inside the door to the master
bedroom. When younger this had been the climax of the adventure, never sure as
she was whether her father might not be asleep, arrived home unexpectedly from
his business travels.

Now
he was gone for good, and the Stephenson inner sanctum lay still and quiet,
forever imbued with the awe it had inspired in her as a child. She ventured
inside, into the gloom where she’d watched dust sparkling like stars in the
shafts of sunlight that fell through the half-drawn curtains. Briefly she stood
before the wardrobe mirror, to look at herself in the silk underwear. Not bad.
She smiled nervously, conscious of the presence of her mother in the fittings
and furnishings of the room, turned away and went out.