by James, Peter
This evening, he was sitting in the back of an unmarked, innocuous-looking Vauxhall Astra with burly, experienced PC Dave Horton at the wheel and Detective Inspector Paul Davey in the passenger seat, cruising the dark streets of Camberwell in South London, during another of their regular blitzes. Hunting anyone who might be carrying a knife or drugs, as well as moped gangs who were currently plaguing the city, snatching bags and phones.
The car’s interior had the familiar rank smell of most operational vehicles, of junk food and the odour of unwashed villains, but he didn’t mind. He peered out of the window, studying the body language of everyone they passed, while Davey watched the ANPR camera mounted on the dash, which would pick up the registration plates of any car with a previous history of association with any criminal activity.
All three of them were wearing jeans and T-shirts and bulky stab vests beneath bomber jackets, with brand-new, expensive trainers, issued by the Met. Fresh kicks were the principal status symbols of the new wave of young street criminals, and the easiest way for them to spot a copper was by the old and shoddy trainers they usually wore. Not any more. This had been one of Grace’s first initiatives since taking on his new role, to spend a tiny portion of the £15 million budget the Task Force had been given on kitting out his team with the latest drop of trainers.
They were travelling along a main road lined with shoddy shops and restaurants on both sides. As Grace watched a dodgy-looking group of youths on the far side, some in trainers, some in their casual, insouciant street footwear of sliders and black socks, Dave Horton suddenly shouted out, ‘Him!’ and swung sharply left into a side road, unclipping his belt and stamping on the brakes. As the car squealed to a halt, all three opened their doors and jumped out.
Grace sprinted after Horton and Davey, back onto the main road, just in time to see someone in a Scream mask, puffa jacket, gloves and trainers pedalling a bike hard along the pavement towards them.
Shouting, ‘Police!’ Paul Davey put his hands out wide to stop the cyclist, while Horton side-stepped into the road to stop the bike swerving past. Roy Grace braced himself to grab the rider if the other two failed.
The cyclist halted as the Inspector held up his warrant card. An aggressive youth in his late teens raised his horror mask and glared at the three men. ‘Yeah? What you want? You stopped me just because I’m black, right?’
Before either of the other officers could say anything, Roy Grace stepped forward, holding up his own warrant card. ‘So, we’re psychics, are we?’
‘What?’
‘Are you telling us we’re psychics?’
‘Ain’t telling you nothing. You stopped me because I’m black. That’s what you do.’
‘What’s your name?’ Grace asked him, pleasantly.
‘Darius.’
‘Darius what?’
‘Yeah, Darius What. That’s my name. Darius What.’
Grace nodded. ‘OK, Darius. Do you want to tell me how, before we stopped you, any of us knew you were black?’
The cyclist frowned. ‘That’s why you stopped me, innit?’
Grace shook his head. ‘You’re wearing a mask, a jacket zipped to the neck and gloves. You could have been a Martian inside that lot for all we knew. Riding a bike on a pavement is an offence, but that’s not why we stopped you. Your ethnicity doesn’t come into it, but if you go around wearing a mask that scares and intimidates people, we are going to stop you. It’s early evening, don’t you think it might be frightening for any young children to see that?’ Grace smiled. ‘The way you’re making us feel, we should be the ones in the mask. We’re the monsters and you are OK. Is that right?’
‘What you mean?’
‘What I mean, Darius, is that I care about one thing only, and that’s that ordinary folk can walk down the street – any street they choose – without being afraid, without being intimidated, without someone in a terrifying mask hurtling down the pavement towards them. Am I being racist for wanting that?’
Darius looked at him as if trying to figure him out.
‘Well?’ Grace pressed. ‘I’m not going to search you, I’m not booking you for riding on a pavement, or for riding after dark without any lights, which I could. I’m going to let you go on your way, on one condition.’
‘Condition?’
Grace nodded. ‘One condition.’
‘And that’s, like, what?’
‘That when you get to wherever you are going, you give your mates a message. Will you do that, Darius?’
‘What message?’
‘That not all cops are bastards. Tell them we are your cops, too. We care for everyone, regardless of their colour, their gender or their faith. Tell them to stop mistrusting us and work with us, instead, to help make this city better. Go on your way and give them that message. Tell them we didn’t search you and we didn’t ticket you for riding on the pavement, OK?’
Darius looked at him, warily, as if still waiting for the sting.
‘Tell them what my mum used to tell me,’ Grace said.
‘Huh?’
‘My mum used to tell me: If you’re ever in trouble, go to a policeman.’
‘In your fucking dreams.’ He lowered the mask and raced off, pedalling like fury.
Grace turned to his colleagues with a shrug. ‘Win some, lose some.’
Paul Davey patted him on the back. ‘A ten for effort, boss.’
‘And a one for results, sir,’ Horton added.
And the whole enormity of what they were up against, this vast clash of cultures, hit Roy Grace yet again.
An instant later, Horton inclined his head to listen to the radio in his breast pocket. Then he looked up. ‘We’re on!’ he said, gleefully, and sprinted back towards the car, followed by Grace and Davey.
9
Tuesday 27 November
Horton accelerated as Grace and Davey struggled to clip on their seat belts, then turned the car around, racing back down to the intersection with the main road, where he waited. ‘Little fucker on a red moped, green helmet, just threw acid in a man’s face and grabbed his mobile phone. Heading north down this road. Part index, Charlie Alpha Zero Eight—’
At that moment, a bright red moped raced across their path.
‘That’s him!’
In a long-rehearsed move, Paul Davey, in the front passenger seat, leaned forward and punched on the blue lights and siren, as Horton pulled out in front of a line of traffic and accelerated hard. The car, whup-whup-whupping, raced past several vehicles, gaining speed, seemingly oblivious – to Roy Grace in the rear seat – to the oncoming traffic, which melted away as Horton swerved through an impossible gap between a bus and a taxi.
The moped rider appeared ahead between a van and a minicab, a hundred metres or so in front.
They were gaining on him.
Horton swung out, overtaking the van. A red traffic light was against them. The moped ran it. Taking a risk that Roy Grace would not have done in Brighton, Horton barely slowed, following it straight over the lights, cars braking sharply to their right and left. Grace held his breath. His buddy Glenn Branson’s driving used to scare the shit out of him, but Glenn drove like a dawdler compared to this guy. Although he had to admit, Horton was a brilliant driver.
They were gaining.
Twenty metres behind the moped now.
Of all the methods employed by muggers, those using acid – mainly sulphuric, car-battery acid – were the ones Grace hated the most. The young guy, whoever he was, who had just had the hideous stuff thrown in his face for nothing more than the pathetic value of a black-market mobile phone, was now going to be facing life-changing injuries. Perhaps blinded. Years of agonizing plastic surgery. Whatever looks he might have once had destroyed. And probably terrified to ever go out in public again.
Still gaining.
Ten metres.
‘There’s an alleyway coming up in five hundred metres, guv,’ Horton cautioned, and Paul Davey nodded in confirmation. ‘He swings left down
that and we’ve lost him. Permission to take him down?’
Like an armed officer faced with a gunman, who had a split-second to decide whether the gun pointing at him was real or fake, Grace was aware he had only seconds to make the call.
A few months ago, the Commissioner of the Met had given an instruction to her officers to go ahead and knock riders off their bikes if there was no other means of stopping them, but this was not universally supported. Protests in the papers and all over social media. Poor little moped riders should be free to throw acid in people’s faces without having the nasty big bully police knock them off and scrape their little knees. And the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) had recently issued a statement questioning the morality of the Commissioner’s decision.
Morality? thought Roy. Some people had a damned skewed idea of morality.
The car accelerated, drew level with the moped’s rear wheel. Roy could hear the rasping of its exhaust. Saw the rider’s green helmet with some jagged motif on it. His blood boiled as he saw the arrogant stance of the rider, glee in his body language. Glee at what he had done.
‘Knock the bastard off, Dave,’ he commanded.
‘Knock the bastard off, with pleasure, sir.’
Horton swung the car sharply left, striking the centre of the moped’s rear wheel hard. The effect was instant and catastrophic for the machine and its rider.
The rear kicked out hard left, hitting the kerb in front of a Kebab House, catapulting the rider several feet through the air before he struck the ground with his helmet, somersaulted and lay still.
Horton pulled the car up in the middle of the road beside him and the three officers leaped out. Two black youths were racing up to the motionless figure. One of them shouted out at the police, ‘You fucking racist murderers!’
The rider was already stirring, and climbed up onto his knees.
‘What did you do that for, you filth?’ the other youth shouted.
Horton, followed by his colleagues, ran up to the rider before he could get to his feet, silently relieved he wasn’t seriously hurt – to avoid the inquiry that would go with any injury. He grabbed the rider’s right arm, pulled it behind his back and snap-cuffed him. Then he yanked back his left arm and cuffed that, too. Paul Davey, wearing protective gloves, shoved up the rider’s tinted visor and said, ‘You’re nicked, mate.’
Davey began to pat him down, carefully, aware of the youth’s hostile eyes peering out from under his helmet. An instant later, the Inspector pulled out of a pocket a small glass bottle containing a clear liquid, half of which had gone. Shaking with fury, he held it up to the youth. ‘Thirsty? Like a swig, would you?’
The rider was shaking his head, wildly.
‘What’s your name?’ the Inspector asked him.
‘Lee.’
‘Lee? Lee what?’
‘Lee Smith.’
‘So, it’s all right to throw this in someone else’s face, is it, Lee? But you don’t want any yourself? Why’s that? Want to tell me?’
The rider stared in sullen silence.
Horton placed the bottle in an evidence bag, then wrapped it up in a cloth and placed it in the boot of the car before returning to the rider to read him his rights.
Grace walked over to the two youths on the sidelines, aware that a considerable crowd was now forming. He could hear sirens approaching – an ambulance and back-up, he assumed. ‘Would you like to be witnesses as you seem so interested and saw everything? Care to give me your names and addresses?’
Both of them hesitated, glanced at each other, then sprinted off, shouting abuse as they did so.
10
Tuesday 27 November
On the second and third floors of a shabby terraced building above a Chinese takeaway on a main road close to Brighton’s Magistrates’ Court, a stone’s throw from the police station, was the law firm of TG Law, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. For over twenty-five years its eponymous proprietor Terence Gready and his associates had practised criminal law, specializing mostly in legal aid cases.
Occasionally the firm took on a rape case, or a GBH, or murder, but its bread and butter was an endless procession of impaired drivers, small-time drug dealers, shoplifters, sex workers, muggers, burglars, domestic abusers, sex offenders, pub brawlers and the rest of the flotsam of low-life criminals that plagued the city and endlessly stretched police resources.
Terence Gready was a short, neatly presented and scrupulously polite fifty-five-year-old who had a sympathetic ear for every client. He always put them at ease, however hopeless he considered their case might be. With his conservative suits, club ties, immaculately polished shoes and beady eyes behind small, round tortoiseshell glasses – which had been in and out of fashion during his thirty years of practising law and were now back in again – a client had once described him as looking like the twin brother of the late comedian Ronnie Corbett – but with smaller glasses and flappier hands.
Gready presented to the world a family man of seemingly modest ambition, for whom the pinnacle of success was to avoid a custodial sentence for a drug addict accused of shoplifting thirty pounds’ worth of toiletries from an all-night chemist. A good husband and devoted father, a school governor and a generous charitable benefactor, Terence Gready was the kind of person you would never notice in a busy room – and not just because of his lack of height. He exuded all the presence of a man standing in his own shadow, perfectly fitting Winston Churchill’s description of ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.
‘Gready by name but not by nature,’ the solicitor would never tire of telling his occasional private clients, when informing them of his fees. On the wall behind his desk was a framed motto: NO ONE EVER GOT RICH BY GOING TO JAIL.
Terence Gready could have added to it that no one ever got rich by defending clients on legal aid. But he seemed to make a decent-enough living from it. A nice four-bedroomed house in a des-res area of Hove, with a well-tended garden – mainly due to his wife’s green fingers – and a holiday timeshare in Devon. They always had nice cars, recent models, although never anything remotely showy. The only thing about him that could in any way be called flashy was his proudest possession, his vintage Rolex Submariner watch. But, at over sixty years old, it did not look anything special to anyone other than real watch collectors.
His wife, Barbara, had sold her small orchid nursery and was much in demand as an orchid competition judge, which frequently took her abroad. Any free time she had, she spent choreographing for the local amateur dramatics society. They had privately educated their three children, who were all doing well on their chosen career paths, the eldest of whom, their son, Dean, was a successful accountant with a firm in the City of London and married to a colleague, who was soon to produce their first grandchild. Their two daughters were both working more locally, one as a mortgage broker and the other for a domestic abuse charity.
After her husband’s arrest, Barbara Gready would tell everyone that she had absolutely no idea, none at all, about all the offences he was accused of, and simply would not – could not – believe it. There’d been a big mistake, they had the wrong man. Completely. They must have.
11
Thursday 29 November
‘The French Connection, yeah?’ DI Glenn Branson said into the phone, seated at his workstation in the empty Major Incident Room at Sussex Police HQ.
‘French Connection?’ Roy Grace replied, mildly irritated by the early-morning phone call interrupting his routine of stretches. He was standing in the field next to his cottage, at the end of his five-mile run. Humphrey, his rescue Labrador-cross, was running around sniffing the ground hard, on the scent of something – probably a rabbit, he guessed.
Grace was taking a rare weekday off, because he would be at work most of the weekend, overseeing a major stop-and-search operation in South East London on Friday and Saturday night. He was happy to enjoy this unusual time at home with no commitments whatsoever.
Glenn B
ranson and some of the team from Major Crime were working with the Regional Serious and Organized Crime Unit on the investigation of a Ferrari busted for drugs at Newhaven earlier that week. Glenn had been appointed SIO, heading up a multi-agency team as the RSOCU had a number of high-profile jobs running simultaneously.
‘I’m not with you, Glenn – you mean because the Ferrari came in from Dieppe?’
‘Duh! Surely you remember that movie? It was about your vintage!’
‘It’s ringing a faint bell.’
‘Nah, that’s the sound of the dinner bell in your old people’s home! Off you run, you don’t want to let your soup go cold – isn’t that what they give you, cos you can’t really chew any more?’
‘Cheeky bugger! The French Connection?’
‘Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider.’
‘Wasn’t he the cop – the Chief of Police – in Jaws?’
‘Now you’re getting there.’
‘Yep, I remember now, vaguely. The French Connection – didn’t it start with Gene Hackman in bed with some bird in handcuffs?’
‘Trust you to remember that bit. What I’m talking about is the car, the Lincoln Continental that the villain, Fernando Rey, shipped over to New York from Marseilles.’
Branson paused to nod greetings to some of his team, who’d entered the room for the morning briefing which was due to start in a few minutes. ‘Gene Hackman had it weighed and realized it was wrong – it weighed more than a proper Lincoln should have.’
‘Got it, yes! I remember now, good movie!’
‘It was well brilliant. Yeah, so that’s how the Border Force officer rumbled the Ferrari, because it weighed more than it should have.’
‘Not surprised, with six million quid’s worth of Class-A stashed inside it.’
‘Top-quality cocaine.’
‘Don’t I get any credit for the tip-off?’
‘I suppose so, since you asked so sweetly.’
‘Sod you! How’s the investigation going?’
