Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  ‘Crimewatch? That any good?’

  ‘Oh yeah. It helps a lot. we get a surge of phonecalls during and after any show. Especially from prisoners. Prisoners love it.’

  We laughed.

  But Lennie wasn’t laughing now. He was looking very grim. ‘In addition, I’ve undertaken to deliver any future death messages myself, to spare the rest of the team. Normally the FLO would do it but I’m taking the weight off. She’s dealt with enough.’

  11.

  ‘Follow me round.’ Lennie was like a conductor. We’d taken over the conference room of the station. Techies were still laying wires. ‘OK. First thing you have to know is that unlike Inspector Morse, it’s not all down to one detective to solve the dastardly crime. There’s me, the SIO, and then I have an office manager as admin. In this case it's DI Greg Rich.’

  DI Greg Rich looked at us then looked away. Lennie continued. ‘Because of the workload on this enquiry, we also have DS Lynne Cammack as assistant office manager. I asked for her specially as she worked on Operation Yeaddiss, the Levi Bellfield enquiry. She’s brought her notes from that and they’ll be available on the office network.’

  She shook our hands. ‘Hello Riz, hello Holly. My number will be on the whiteboard.’

  ‘OK, now under us, we have, the MIT, the murder team,’ He waved his hand expansively again... ‘who you've just spoken to. Ten to twelve people from CID and also civilian support staff – typists, indexers, analysts for the I2 and Xanalys... right. Everything, and I mean everything, is dictated by HOLMES 2. It sends out what we call actions, and every action has a number.’

  We’d stopped at the first open office. ‘Say hello to the intelligence cell...’ they waved; ‘the exhibits officer, the FLO – Family Liaison Officer… right, where were we?’

  We’d stopped at the int cell. ‘Next offices – this is the CCTV viewing suite…’ two cops gazed back like owlets; ‘then the Detective Sergeants’ office, then the staff…’ A gaggle of civilian staff waved cheerily, ‘then my cubbyhole, and right here is the evidence-storage room. And now we’ve run out of room. Come and look at the office network.’ This software I knew. Industry standard, clunky but well-used. I2.

  Bang-Bang was gazing curiously at a PC terminal like an archaeologist staring at an Anglo-Saxon burial mound. They still ran Windows 2000 and NT here. I supposed that Senior Management on the top floor got first dibs on all the new hardware. Bang-Bang had picked up a desktop mouse and was rolling the ball on it. She looked nonplussed.

  ‘So, these flag up actions against a nominal. In this case, Nominal 1 could be a victim, and nominal 2 could be suspect. You with me?’

  We nodded. We were with him. ‘No room for error. Then a printout is made. Action 1 for detective one – contact nominal 3, get a statement. Back into the system, and it’s typed.’

  ‘Then...’ he pointed at an office over the way – ‘Every morning of the enquiry, the SIO – that’s me – meets the guvnor – in this case that’s DCI Terry Lanehan, and we all have a conflab. And on it goes. And, finally –’ he jerked a thumb in the direction of an A4 laminated sheet with a sheet of paper covering it, hanging innocuously on the wall; ‘that, is the Word Of The Day.’

  Bang-Bang looked interested. ‘Word Of The Day?’

  ‘The very same. That’s the code word that has to be used when any of us request a check on the Police National Computer. The word is changed daily by the PNC bureau. You’re not going to be able to get any check done without quoting that word. It’s kept covered in case unauthorised persons come into the office. And you, Holly, because you’re new, have the honour of picking today’s word.’ He handed her a Pentel marker.

  She grinned and went to the wall, lifted the sheet of paper and scribbled something. She returned with an even bigger grin and handed his marker back.

  He looked at her. ‘OK, I’ll bite. What’s today’s word?’

  ‘Fifi, of course.’

  12.

  ‘Stranger murders. Stranger murders… the hardest murders to solve, and the most expensive. This enquiry will probably cost £2 million when it’s finished. With enough staff and enough time, we’ll find this bastard. The only problem is we don’t have enough staff. Or enough time.’

  ‘Eight days.’

  ‘Yeah. Eight days. Not enough.’ Lennie indicated a stack of forms and witness statements. ‘The thing you never see in the films.’

  I looked around. The terrain was vaguely familiar from my time with the Snowdrops and the MOD. Stacks of files. Printers. Personal radio chargers sitting on the desks, some empty, some with batteries in charge. A large Hitachi television in the corner for screening CCTV. The rack for the team’s stab vests, and next to it on the wall, a computer-generated timeline chart, showing the suspects’ and two victims’ movements. The paper chart was already stretching back towards the doors into the office.

  Bang-Bang blew some gum. Lennie carried on. He seemed to be talking to himself, rather than us, his new audience. We watched. ‘The other thing they always get wrong are the interviews. A row? I wish. Ninety percent of serious crims say no comment all the way through.

  ‘And that’s enough. We’ll train one of you up on HOLMES 2, and the rest of us will do police stuff. We’ll be meeting daily, so you can liaise with the Intelligence Cell.’

  He looked at us. ‘Any questions?’ We had none.

  ‘OK last thing. We need to pick a name for this operation from the approved list.’

  He nodded at a desk phone. The phone was sitting on what was known as the Force Directory. This held every police-related number in Britain. ‘Riz. 020 7230 1212 for New Scotland Yard; ring them and ask for Ops. They’ll ask you what type of operation it is and then they’ll pick a name for you from the relevant list. After you.’

  OK, so I didn’t need the Directory. I dialled the number and got through. Bang-Bang and Lennie chatted and compared war stories while I got put through various offices and waiting lists. Finally I had it. I replaced the receiver. They looked at me, waiting.

  ‘It’s Operation SALEM.’

  Lennie nodded. ‘OK. We can get started. I suppose I’d better show you the murder scenes, then.’

  13.

  The words on the wall read “Jesus says, Come unto me and I will give you rest”. Bethnal Green Mission Church and bookshop overlooked Paradise Gardens and a crime scene.

  ‘She crawled to… there.’ Lennie pointed into the mud and the scrubby bushes. ‘We didn’t put the two together until we looked at the knife wounds. Thought it might have been her pimp or a customer.’

  ‘Did she have a pimp?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Customers…’

  ‘Well. We’ll come back to that. We’ve also got one Misper from a few weeks back.’

  ‘Sorry a what?’

  ‘A Missing Person. We’re waiting for something to turn up but we fear the worst as she’s also a local Tom. Her name is Helen Farmer.’

  ‘So that’s three potential murders.’

  Lennie looked out across the main road, back across the park to the police station. ‘Yeah. One more for the timeline.’

  I followed his gaze and suddenly realised how close under their noses this had all been. Literally, within eyesight.

  He turned back to me. ‘We’re keeping some of his M.O. from the media.’ I nodded. Lennie looked like he was weighing up whether to continue. I waited.

  ‘Riz, wanna know what I think? And this is off-base, since HOLMES doesn’t let us have hunches anymore.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think our suspect is imitating what he thinks the Ripper was. You get me?’

  ‘Ah. All that Freemasons stuff?’

  ‘Yeah. I reckon we should be looking for a local conspiracy buff.’ I looked around the park. It had been a bit optimistic of the council to call this a park; it was more like a large garden. It was also the perfect spot for a murder.

  Low railings. The railway arches. The throb and clatter of construc
tion work. I couldn’t see any cameras pointed into the gardens. I looked up at the houses and the church building windows that overlooked us. ‘Asked them?’

  ‘All of them. It was late, rainy, dark, and no-one saw shit.’

  ‘Prints in the mud?’

  ‘Yep. One. A new Reebok DMX Ride Cruiser, size ten.’

  We stepped back onto the pavement and Lennie indicated cameras. ‘A couple over by the Museum Of Childhood. One on the wall of the petrol station there. All the footage is being looked at right now.’

  We walked on. Lennie was on a roll, by the looks of it. Expansive. He gestured northwards. ‘Tottenham was my old patch when I was a woodentop. Rough old manor then, even rougher now. I was a police cadet when they still had them. The same month I joined the cadets, the riots kicked off and they killed PC Blakelock. No going back from then on. My first night as a probationer, they sent me out to wave down traffic on the one-way system but they put dead batteries in my torch. Apparently it’s so you learn that you piss them off anyway as a PC, regardless of your skin colour.’ We continued walking.

  ‘Did you know that serial killing in Britain peaked in 1986?’

  ‘No, Lennie, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It did. The golden age of serial murder. OK – there are four types of serial killer, Riz. Visionary, Mission, Hedonistic, and Power/Control.’

  ‘Right. Which one d’you think our one is?’

  He stopped. ‘Mission. Just my ha’ penny worth.’

  ‘Not pleasure?’

  ‘Nah. Anyway – I’m not allowed to have hunches or mad deductive leaps. That’s your job.’

  Lennie carried on. ‘I was Borough Crime Squad for five years, then undercover SO10, then Sweeney. Loved every minute of it.'

  I knew all this of course. I’d read our TANGENT file on him. He hadn’t mentioned the Queen’s Police Medal for gallantry he’d been awarded, for some of the scariest shit I’d ever read during his tenure in SO10. He also hadn’t mentioned his winning the Lafone Cup, the Met’s boxing trophy, when he was still uniform at Tottenham. Good bloke to have in the trench next to you, I thought.

  Our travels took us to the end of Bethnal Green Road. The end was still cordoned off. ‘They reckon the Infidels or Combat 18 did it’ said Lennie.

  ‘Yes. They reckon.’

  Lennie raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Come on. Let’s get a pint. You can tell me about what happened in Birmingham.’

  Lennie and I walked away from the taped-off rubble, back towards the tube station. Lennie lit two cigarettes, handed one to me, took a long drag on his, and spoke.

  ‘This wannabe Ripper, Riz – it’s someone who’s bought into all that Stephen Knight flim-flam.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘You and me both know the original Ripper was most likely a local man, with local knowledge. Not Prince Bertie, or Ebeneezer Goode in his top hat.’

  I laughed. ‘OK. That’s true. But our perp?’

  ‘Yeah. Our perp probably loves all that stuff. I’m William Gull! I’m Ed Sickert! I’m a giant vulture!’

  By now I was laughing even harder. ‘Lennie. You and I need a beer. Follow me; we’re going to the Salmon and Ball before we start thinking too hard.’

  ‘I hear you. But listen. That’s how we might catch him. By what he thinks he should be doing. Another thing to remember, Riz – serial murderers don’t pick their victims at random. There is always something in the victim that speaks to them. If we can work out what that is, we’re partway there.’

  ‘Kelly Bowen was a prostitute, Fifi was a burlesque performer. Our Misper now known to be Helen Farmer was also a prostitute. To the murderer maybe they were all “women of easy virtue”?’

  ‘Maybe. They also all looked similar. Same height, same colour hair.’

  ‘A trigger?’

  ‘Could be.’

  Lennie continued. ‘If our killer has been working up to this, we’re going to have to look at unsolved sex attacks in the area, and review all our local usual suspects. We obviously have a sex-offenders register, and a thing called the Ugly Mugs database.’

  ‘The what?’ We walked on. ‘What about the frequency?’

  ‘Time between attacks? Seven days.’

  ‘So the next one could be…’

  ‘That’s right. 48 hours from now.’

  We assembled at Cannon Street Road, at the site of the demise of Fifi Blitz. Bang-Bang had joined us, fresh from some half-day training course the police had insisted on sending her on in Gravesend. On the way here, Lennie had been fielding phone calls, and each had placed him in a worse mood. Because quite by chance, the council had been cleaning out the lake in Victoria Park and had retrieved the weighted corpse of our missing person, one Helen Farmer, known to police. She’d been cut about badly. So that was three. Our mood was grim.

  And it was now pissing down with rain. We sheltered under our umbrellas. Bang-Bang’s, typically, was a Chinese parasol from one of her acts. It wasn’t working on keeping the rain off very well.

  I tried to imagine how the blood must have slicked away into the drains on the night of the killing. There was nothing here now save the blue-and-white police tape and a solitary uniformed constable in a high-viz jacket, who exchanged nods with Lennie.

  ‘She was found here, between the railings and behind the bins.’ He pointed at a little approach to a doorway between Al-Ikhwan chicken shop and the Ihyaa Institute. ‘Know these locales, Riz?’ I nodded. I knew them well, from back in the day.

  We all signed the security log and then gathered round Lennie, who had a folder containing photos, sketches, and notes from the scene. He pointed with a pen, stabbing at cameras on the shops and then further down the road. ‘CCTV… more CCTV… traffic. All logged or seized. Victim three; your friend, Holly. I’m sorry. Was asphyxiated. Our suspect is a strangler. He likes strangling as he can watch the death. It gives him a feeling of power. And it’s quiet. Relatively.’ We looked around. A busy street.

  ‘But THEN – he starts cutting and slashing. Now, even though there won’t be any arterial spurt, you’re going to get a good measure of blood.’

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK. He’s covered in blood. Spattered.’

  ‘Is he? We don’t know that.’

  ‘He is. Our man – and he IS a man – turns, hands steeped in blood –’

  ‘Lennie. Mate. You’re getting into this a little bit too much.’

  ‘Little bit? This is why I joined the police! ‘Orrible murdah!’

  Bang-Bang twirled her umbrella and looked at her nails dubiously. Our umbrellas clung and clustered. Lennie was off on one. ‘You can’t see now, but there was relatively little blood splashing at the time; the victim was most likely strangled and the cutting was done post-death. Hence no arterial spray, but… according to our staff it's most likely a man, tall, right handed. Wears gloves.’

  ‘How’d they arrive at that?’

  ‘Angle and penetration of the blade, style of blood spattering, lack of prints.’

  ‘Pretty good.’

  ‘Also, I think our man is a natural. He’s quick, he’s strong, and he’s quiet. A born predator.’

  ‘Local?’

  He looked around and back at the bins. ‘Very likely.’

  I looked at Bang-Bang. This had been her friend, after all. ‘You OK?’

  She nodded. ‘Course. Anyway, this is interesting.’

  I had to say it. ‘I’m sorry about calling her the Baron von Richthofen of Burlesque by the way.’

  Bang-Bang laughed. ‘Don’t be silly hun. She’d have loved that.’

  She looked at the sheaf of photos in her hand and then at the pavement. She spoke again. ‘Blood doesn’t gout like in the movies anyway. It depends.’

  Lennie looked at her and raised his eyebrows. Bang-Bang popped her gum and gazed back. I silently willed her to shut up. No dice. ‘Sometimes, you can saw a person’s head riiiiiight off and – ’

  I cut i
n. ‘OK. What’s next. Fibres.’

  Lennie’s acolyte brought the folder to my side. ‘Yes. Fibres. Under the victim’s fingernails. OK class, hands up who’s heard of Locard’s Exchange?’

  I had. Bang-Bang shook her head. ‘Let me tell you about Locard’s Exchange Principle then, Holly…’

  He had her full rapt attention. She loved this sort of stuff.

  ‘LEP is when…’

  I went to the One-Stop next door to the chicken shop to get a paper. No, the shop owner had seen nothing he hadn’t told the police already. Which was, nothing. Yes, they’d seized the CCTV footage. Waleikum salam.

  I walked back. Lennie was showing Bang-Bang how they approached a murder scene. ‘… it’s called a Common Approach Path – the least obvious route in. If we have to cut through bushes and use little metal steps, so be it. Then the fingertip, ground-level search starts. You with me?’

  She nodded and hunkered down. She cocked her head. I stood next to her. ‘Shame about the rain…’

  Lennie nodded. ‘Yes. We had the council in first thing when it was called in, they took up all the manhole covers and the suction team hoovered all the gunk out the drains. Found five mobiles, three sets of keys and a broken bayonet. No matches. We even seized and sealed all the ambo crews’ boots and overalls to eliminate them.’

  He stood up and Bang-Bang followed. ‘OK just so you know, so the notes don’t appear confusing. “Scene One” is the victim. “Scene Two”, he swept his arm, ‘is the immediate vicinity. “Scene Three” is the park opposite, and “Scene Four”, is the victim’s – Fifi’s – home address.’

  ‘Any luck there?’

  ‘None. And no luck in the Golden 24 Hours, either. We seized all the local CCTV we could, we had uniform canvassing all the shops and residencies up and down here. You’ll have noticed the yellow witness appeal boards.’