by Paul Finch
I shot him anyway.
Another double-tap, but this one less clean. The first shot punched a neat hole in his vascular system, but the second was wide, plunging through his left eye and exiting over his left ear in a deluge of blood, bone and churned-up brains.
The next thing I knew, sirens were homing in from all directions, and black-clad assault-men were everywhere. Paramedics were on the scene like a streak of white and green lightning, throwing plastic sheets over the downed men, presumably to try and preserve what little of their worthless lives was left.
I remember taking off my helmet and finding it full of sweat. Wolfe put a hand on my shoulder and asked me if I was okay. I didn’t reply at first. I was too exhilarated. One thing I’ve always hated in police-work is the mountain of paper you’ve got to fill in after making a clean arrest. This way, somebody else would have to do it.
*
On January 19th 1992, a 37-year-old prostitute was found floating in the River Irwell, where it passes through the west side of Hag Fold. She had been beaten, bound, and raped with a broken bottle. After this, the assailant had gouged out her eyes and cracked her skull with a heavy blow from a hammer.
“Hi,” he said, approaching her.
It was already past nine, but it had taken him this long, and over half a bottle of Woodpecker, to pluck up the courage to go and talk to her.
“Hi,” she replied, giving him a look that was either one of apprehension or relief, it wasn’t entirely clear.
Tim was hopeful. Erika had seemed out of place at the party all evening, especially now: the lights were turned down, the air was thick with joss stick fumes, and every room was shaking to the blaring beat of ‘Bat Out of Hell’.
“Fancy sharing a bottle with me?” he said, having to raise his voice to be heard.
Quite a number of the teen revellers had paired off and were draped around the floor or over the furniture, necking, though others were still up and about, shouting, drinking, frenziedly playing air-guitar. She bit her bottom lip and glanced at the proffered cider as if it was a jar of strychnine. Tim, who’d been watching her all night, hadn’t seen her take a drink even once. He wondered if alcohol abuse figured somewhere in her disturbed past. That would be cool.
“The name’s Tim,” he said, giving up on the offer and taking a gulp himself.
“I know,” she replied.
“Oh?” This was the opening he’d been hoping for. “How come?”
“You’re the lad who used to live next door to us, aren’t you?”
“Used to. We moved in ’75, when my mum got the promotion she was after.”
“Do you still live with your mum?”
“‘Fraid so. Hey … I’m only fifteen, you know.” In actual fact, he wasn’t, he was fourteen, but Erika had to be seventeen at least, and he didn’t want to scupper his chances from the outset.
She was blossoming into young womanhood, and looked as desirable as any girl Tim had ever seen. She’d grown her dark hair well past her shoulders. Her dress was red and clingy, and ran to knee-length, though it was split up one side, showing black tights underneath. Her make-up was delicate: light blusher, lip gloss and streaks of grey shadow to bring out the haunting blueness of her eyes.
“So what brings you here?” he said. “Didn’t have you down as a party type.”
“Came with a mate.” Her voice was nice; accented but pert and smart, in that streetwise Manchester girl way.
“Sure I can’t tempt you to a drink?”
“Go on, then.”
She took a sip. It sparkled on her lipstick.
“Fancy a dance?” he asked.
“To this?”
Todd Rundgren was currently pulling screaming chords off his lead guitar.
“Let’s go in the next room,” he said. “We can have a chat.”
“Do you really want a chat? Or are you just after a snog?”
“I’m after a snog.”
“Thought so.”
She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. He responded immediately, trying to force his tongue into her mouth, which she permitted him to do for a minute or two, before breaking free and pulling back from him.
“That’s all you get for now,” she said. “Come back when you’re a bit older.”
*
The curious thing about wise guys the world over is this messianic conviction they have that whatever happens, whatever atrocity they’re party to, for some reason best known to God, or maybe the Devil, they are above the law.
This is not an excuse for why they behave the way they do. It’s a mindset. They genuinely believe it. If you were to slam one against the toilet wall in some seedy pub, just before you cave his bonce in with a sockful of snooker balls, he might confess to you that he’s a career criminal. He might even admit to knowing that what he does is wrong. But he will never, ever agree that his activities invited the sort of retribution you are about to exact. He cannot conceive that society’s watchdogs – i.e. us – are out to get him. To him that’s unfair. It’s being picked on. It’s a bleeding injustice. There are much worse individuals out there we should be after. Not him. He’s a decent villain. By doing this to him, we’re bang out of order. And now our cards are “fackin’ marked!”
Little wonder that after I slotted those two shitheads in South Woodford, I had to give my evidence at the Old Bailey from behind a curtain, with a covert ID. Every night, mob-land spotters were allegedly posted at the exits, trying to work out who I was. I was taken in and out wearing a blanket over my head.
Even when it was all finished and the survivors went down, my gaffers felt it was no longer safe for me to operate on the London streets. There was no certainty the East End underworld knew who I was, but word would get out eventually. I was given two choices: I could desk-jockey for the rest of my career, which roughly speaking had another twenty years to run, so that was out of the question; or I could transfer to a different force. Up ’til then, the Met had been my adult life. The army was a distant memory. I was a London copper through and through. So they tried to soften the blow. How about the Greater Manchester Police? How would I feel if they managed to get me a transfer home?
*
The frozen body of a 28-year-old secretary was discovered in a derelict Hag Fold bus shelter on the morning of December 2nd 1995. She had been raped, beaten and strangled with her own tights. The assailant had then arranged the body in a lewd, spread-legged fashion, to cause maximum shock and distress to those who eventually found it.
The care home loomed over Tim. He hadn’t seen it for a couple of years by this time, and it seemed even more run-down than he remembered. The front porch was dusty, with bits of waste paper blown into it, windows were cracked, moss and weeds hung from the high gutters. He supposed that, as no person actually owned it, there was nobody to get house-proud about it. But it still fascinated him that the gloom and despondency of growing up in an orphanage could be reflected in the building’s grim exterior. That Erika had spent her life in a place like this was incredible.
When someone answered the door, it wasn’t Erika but Mark Hopwood, one of the lads who lived there. An unpleasant smell accompanied him, like eggs and bacon that had gone off. Tim wondered if it came from Hopwood, or just from the interior of the house.
Hopwood regarded him with disbelief. He was older than Tim by a year, but they both knew each other from high school, and there wasn’t much in the way of friendship between them. Mind, there wasn’t much in the way of friendship between Hopwood and anybody. Over the years, he’d turned into a surly, argumentative sort with a big chip on his shoulder, not just over his deprived upbringing but because he was ludicrously short and had weird, thick hair, which grew stiff and upright like the bristles on a brush.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Come to see Erika,” Tim replied.
“What do you want her for?”
“That’s my business.”
“I’m making it mi
ne.”
Tim got irritated. “Look, she’s expecting me … Hopfrog!”
Hopwood bared his teeth. “You little twat!”
He’d been given that nickname – Hopfrog – after a deformed dwarf in a Vincent Price film, and he absolutely detested it. But like so many little men, when he got angry it came over as being ridiculous rather than threatening.
“Go and get her,” Tim said, “or I’ll tell every bird I know that you’re a Kojak.”
A Kojak was a guy who didn’t have hair on his todge; if you were still in that paltry state by the time you reached the third year, you were an object of derision.
This seemed to stun Hopwood. “I’ll tell them you are!” he shouted.
“Yeah, but I can prove I’m not,” Tim replied. “Can you?”
Seething, Hopwood stuttered a few more foul-mouthed threats, then withdrew inside. Several moments later, Erika appeared. She was barefoot, but wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and looking incredibly, if unintentionally, sexy. She was as surprised by Tim’s arrival as Hopwood had been.
“I thought I said come back when you’re older,” she said.
“I am older. Three days.”
“So … what do you want?”
“To take you out.”
She eyed him up and down. Tim wondered what she saw there: a reasonably handsome lad, or so his mother kept assuring him, with a mop of jet-black hair and grey, twinkling eyes; a trim but sturdy physique thanks to football practice; and a snazzy dresser – denims it went without saying, but clean and stone-washed, and snugly-fitted.
“Are you serious?” she finally asked.
“Look, you like me and I like you. What could be more serious than that?”
“So … where you going to take me?”
Tim liked the sound of that. He realised she was up for it – flattered, maybe even turned on. It struck him that, good-looking though she was, Erika’s background must have put off a large number of potential suitors.
“Just for a walk,” he said. “The park. Quite a few of the kids hang out there at night.”
“You’d better not try anything.”
He held up his hands. “I’m only asking for a walk, not a roll in the hay.”
*
GMP Drugs wanted ten uniforms to go plain clothes during a street festival, where they were setting up a sting to catch local pushers.
Preferably, they wanted good thief-takers, because though we’d be in scruffs and mingling with the crowd, we’d have to be alert to any faces around us, and any illegal activity we might sniff. We’d also have to have balls: there was possible posse involvement, though no-one suggested there’d be shooters. It was unlikely the fish we’d net would be that big. Even so, this was the sort of op where bobbies had been stabbed and bludgeoned in the past, and probably would be again, so we’d have to take care.
In essence, the festival was little more than a gathering of several thousand students and counter-culture dropouts under the railway arches down Ardwick, huddling together for protection from the drizzling autumn rain, slugging tins of lager and listening to a so-called rock band; post-punk era jerks by the looks of them, faces vampire-white in the flickering arc-lights, dressed in drainpipes and baggy jumpers, their hair spiked up and thick with grease. Whatever trash it was they were producing was meaningless to me; fuzzy and distorted by waterlogged amps, and in any case drivel – the singer couldn’t sing and one lanky prat was bashing out a rhythm on two dustbins.
We slid through it all like snakes in the grass. This was enemy territory. Everywhere we looked there were Socialist Worker banners, CND placards, shaven-headed bone-men giving out Class War leaflets. Among the masses of ‘okay-yah’ rebellia, there were also biker gangs, mohawks, skins, rastas, rockabillies. And dealers. I mean, that went without saying. Wherever you found rag-tag, bobtail was too. The only difficulty was choosing which ones you wanted to bust first. I suppose, in some ways, I was being hypocritical. I’d always had the odd snort, the odd reefer, but who hasn’t? It was still a case of them and us. They fought the law – and the law was about to win.
The first one we took was a total balloon. He was wearing this quilted, crocheted coverall and a sort of tea cosy on his head. We caught him eyeballing us from outside a makeshift shelter built from timber and polythene sheeting. All we had to do was ask him what was available, and without even vetting us, he led us through into a narcotics mini-mart. A fat slob in shades and a mid-70s Black Sabbath t-shirt was slumped in a deckchair beside a trestle table laid out with samples. A propped-up blackboard gave us a range of prices, and believe me, there was nothing you might have wanted, or needed, that wasn’t available there, from angel dust to crack to the big H.
We rolled the pair of them easily. We even managed to do it quietly, so that none of the party animals outside would get spooked. We had to fix them up in plasticuffs of course, and once we’d secured the evidence, to frogmarch them outside in full view, but in all that littered garbage and shitty, pissing rain, no-one seemed to notice.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to stay under the radar. Whenever we made contact with a target, we did our best to get him out of the way, beckoning him into the straggling undergrowth that fringed the plot, or down the muddy banks of an open-sewer connecting with the Gorton Canal. Inevitably, some weren’t buying it. They either sussed us and started spreading the word, or had it away on their toes. One or two got heavy and ended up on the ground, wrestling and kicking. There were so many alkies and druggies there, not to mention derelicts, losers, wasters and general-purpose scumbags that these sporadic scuffles were at first written off as the inevitable consequence of a human trash get-together. But not for long.
Things got tasty when we moved team-handed on a particularly menacing bunch, who, from obs, had been supplying the entire congregation with grass. They were an organised crew, all black and all flash, in leather overcoats, designer running-suits, shades and chunky jewellery. As we approached them under one of the dingier arches, I recalled what we’d heard about posse involvement, and for a second I felt naked without some sort of weapon. Thankfully, they weren’t armed with anything heavy, either. But they did see us coming, and they were carrying. No sooner had we begun chatting them up than they pulled blades. A set-to developed, but the targets were more interested in getting away than slugging it out, and though one or two made off, the majority were bundled down the slope to the canal, on the other side of which a couple of armoured TSGs had arrived, complete with dogs and riot-shields.
Of course, the net result of that was that, although we’d cracked a firm, we’d also scared the crowd, who began to scarper. The next thing we knew, idiots were racing everywhere. A couple of our lot had been slashed or bruised in the previous ruck, but many more of them were injured at this point, knocked over, trampled. I found myself swapping blows almost for the hell of it. People were buffeting me from all sides. I grabbed hold of a couple but, not really having anything to charge them with, smacked them and let them go. Yet even in the midst of that mayhem, I caught sight of something that stopped me in my tracks. Someone who looked like a medieval jester was making his stupored way across the rubble. He wasn’t a dwarf or a midget, he was just astonishingly short. He wore scruffy tracksuit pants, which must have been child-size, and a baggy pink sweater, which was worn full of holes and showed his hairy, stunted torso beneath. His ugly face was a picture of grinning drunkenness, topped off by a mass of unwashed, spiky hair.
Hopfrog.
He was in his early thirties by this time, but by the looks of him, still a loser. That he hung out in this junkie sewer was surely no surprise.
“Hey, Hoppy!” I said, taking him by the collar and hauling him down an entry between the rusting hulks of two giant fuel tanks.
“What’s this?” he stammered, too drunk or drugged to put up much resistance.
“Now what do you think?”
“You a copper then?”
“No fooling you, is there, son?�
��
He shook his head. He still hadn’t recognised me, but the seriousness of his predicament was slowly dawning on him. “I’ve not done nothing.”
“I don’t care,” I said, “I’m not arresting you.”
“Eh?”
I moderated my voice, giving it a low, ominous monotone. “Hopfrog … you’re about ten seconds from the worst beating anyone in this city has ever had.”
His cheeks had now paled, and he looked genuinely frightened. I was still clutching his collar, glaring into his face with eyes which Mary Tucker – a probationer WPC I’d once fucked at an office-party, then dumped – had said were “like bits of broken glass”.
“I want some info,” I added
“I’m not a grass.”
“Not that sort of info. I want to know where Erika is.”
He looked bewildered. “Erika?”
“You used to live with her. In that care home over on Leatherbrook Road.”
“That Erika?” He sounded surprised. “I’ve not seen her for years.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I think she got wed. Moved out of town.”
This was something I didn’t want to hear. I tightened my grip. “You sure?”
“Yeah, but he kept beating her up. I think she legged it back here eventually. Far as I know, she’s back in the Fold, in a flat.”
This was better. “What’s the address?”
“Jesus … I haven’t a clue! I never see her!”
I took a twist of paper from my back pocket, and showed it to him. There was actually nothing in it; it came from a toffee I’d eaten earlier, but of course he didn’t know that.
“See this?” I said. “Know what it is? I’ll tell you, Hopfrog … it’s a stretch. I’ve just found it in your possession.”
By now he’d sobered up. There was growing panic in his face. “Leave it out, mate, that’s not mine.”
“Then tell me what I want to know.”
