“Someone like Frankie Doyle” Morris said, his accent resplendent with all the sonorous resonances of his home in the valleys.
“Got to be. A pound to a penny” agreed Goodwin “Any witnesses?.”
“Nothing really. Just an old boy who thinks he saw a car drive of at speed. Dark coloured Fiesta perhaps, or something similar. He thought so, anyway, but he couldn’t be sure. No idea of the index number. It may just be a co-incidence. Someone stopping to help and getting frightened off by all this.” He gestured towards the scene of the carnage. “You couldn’t really blame him. The driver may well have been hurt in the struggle. There’s an awful lot of blood on his side too but it could just be referred. There are some blood stains outside on the road but they fade out a few yards back.”
“Which implies that he got into the car that your witness saw driving off. Maybe he had backup. But if he did get away on foot, he can’t have gone far. He must have been swathed in blood, especially if he’s wounded.” Goodwin was now feeling lucky. “I want you to do a sweep of whole the area, Phil. I don’t expect you’ll find anything but I want you to try. And get the house to house under way as soon as you’re through here. Davey Boy and I’ll get back to the Yard now but I want you to keep me posted. With anything at all. No matter how trivial.”
Penncott agreed and Goodwin and Morris set off back to brave the west London traffic.
* * *
It was late when they arrived at Scotland Yard. So far, their investigations had yielded nothing and although Bellini’s death meant that he would be forever denied the kudos of a successful prosecution, Goodwin felt no small sense of satisfaction. Whatever way you looked at it, it was good result. To get a bastard like Bellini off the streets alone was worth it. He hoped that it was Loader and not Doyle who had been the driver that evening, but he knew that was too much to dream for, and he was more than content with what he had got.
He took Morris into his office and pulled a bottle of standard police issue Glenfiddich and two glasses from their statutory home in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and poured then each a glass so large that it alone would have probably taken them over the drink driving limit. Not to worry, they both knew enough of the right people to make sure that nothing would ever come of that, even if they were stopped. Goodwin raised his glass and made a toast.
“Dis manibus” he proposed.
“Uh?” A classical education was an alien concept to Morris and similarly even the most basic command of foreign tongues remained a mystery to him. Some of his less charitable colleagues would sometimes be unkind enough to say that he often even seemed to struggle with English.
“To the spirits of the departed. This one’s for you Don” Goodwin said, a little pretentiously, and then, with somewhat more charity, he smiled like a kindly uncle at Christmas and asked his subordinate “What do you make of it all, Dave?”
Morris was nobody’s fool, despite his lilting sing-song voice, and the propensity to sometimes speak before thinking, which he was now so desperately keen to control. Goodwin genuinely valued his opinion and Morris considered his words carefully before speaking.
“It seems to me, Guv, that it’s likely to be one of two possible scenarios. Number one: it’s unrelated to Tommy’s death and the D.I.’s. It’s a gang land hit, pure and simple. Someone else making a move on his territory. Maybe the Malek twins are back on the scene if they’re still alive. That’s one possibility but it’s unlikely. It doesn’t really ring true to my mind. A professional hit man wouldn’t use a knife, not when Bellini was tooled up with a gun. Which brings us on to scenario number two. We saw it ourselves today in the interview. Bellini was distancing himself from Frankie Doyle. He’s never done that before. Not to my knowledge and, God knows, he’s been interviewed enough times, even if never been able to get anything to stick. It was like he was giving us Doyle. Not on a plate. He wouldn’t make it that easy for us, would he? But making him his scapegoat all the same. What I think is that Doyle had got wind of it, himself. But he wasn’t expecting to have to act as quickly as he did. It took him by surprise that’s for sure. Why else crash into the back of a parked car? I think that Bellini was putting the finger on Doyle and it all went pear shaped. He got a bit more than he bargained for.”
“I was thinking along the same lines myself” Goodwin agreed.
“There was something about Bellini today” Morris went on at a pace, “Did you notice it? I can’t quite put my finger on what it was, but something wasn’t quite right. He was cocky enough, nothing unusual in that, but it was like he was trying to keep himself in check all the time, like it was all a front. Now, he’s not normally like that. It just struck me as odd.”
“You could be right.” Goodwin couldn’t say that noticed anything like that and he wondered if his anger had blinded him. “So you agree that it was Doyle who killed Charlotte and Tommy?”
“It seems most likely. But not off his own back. He’s Bellini’s puppet. He wouldn’t fart unless Don Bellini told him to.”
“Well, he’s going to find a lot of things different with Bellini out of the way.”
“No doubt about that. He won’t last ten minutes on his own, without him. It shouldn’t take too long for us to pick him up but what worries me is what if he turns psycho now that Bellini’s out of the picture. Now that nobody loves him any more. Shoots up a McDonalds’s or wanders down Oxford Street blasting away with a Kalashnikov. I really think he’d be capable of it. I always had the feeling that Bellini kept the lid on old Frankie Doyle. He could control him but I’m not sure that anyone else can.”
“Once we’ve got him, this time, he’ll go down for ever, Dave. Mark my words. Without Bellini to engineer a good defence for him, we will have seen the last of Frankie Doyle.”
They were interrupted by a single sharp knock on the Superintendent’s half open door. Detective Sergeant Pat Todd stood there. He looked agitated and a single bead of sweat ran from his forehead, skirting his eye and over the polished ebony skin of his cheek only to be flicked casually away with the back of his hand. When he spoke, Goodwin could tell that he was seriously on edge but he wasn’t in the mood to allow anyone to rain on his parade.
“Thank God you’re back, Guv. There’s been developments” Todd blurted out.
“Come in and have a drink, Pat. We’re celebrating. That long time friend of the Metropolitan Police Force, Mr. Donald Bellini, of the Mount of Venus whorehouse, Southwark, has been shuffled off this mortal coil. And not before time too.”
Todd ignored the good cheer as he stepped inside the office, shutting the door firmly behind him and then pushing it again, just to make sure that it was closed. “I’ve got news, boss.”
Goodwin saw now that it was more serious than he had at first anticipated and he adjusted his mood appropriately. “Go on” he said dejectedly.
“First, we’ve got a positive I.D. from the closed circuit cameras at the Tower. Frank Doyle was there this morning. Just one shot of him. Just for an instant. And he’s on his own. But it’s definitely him. He was there.”
“Brilliant.” By Todd’s tone of voice, Goodwin had been expecting something bad. He felt suddenly relieved. “This is great news. Does the time fit?”
“Oh yeah. He’s in the frame alright. For Tommy’s murder. But he didn’t kill D.I. Ashworth.”
“What? How do you know.” Goodwin felt suddenly deflated and uncomfortable once more. Todd’s whole demeanour was tangibly depressing.
“I’ve been round to Tommy’s flat. I found some ….. stuff.” It was as though he couldn’t bring himself to be any more explicit than that. Goodwin knew it must be bad and he forced the issue.
“Stuff? What stuff?”
“Clothes. Packed into a bin liner, hidden away under his bed. They’re caked in blood.”
“You’ve not told me that it was the D.I.’s blood.” Goodwin felt instinctively that there was more to come.
“No but …..”
“But what, m
an?” He was no longer the avuncular elderly relative. He had now returned to being the hard nosed copper, a man who could see one hell of a problem appearing over the horizon and rampaging relentlessly towards him with the speed and ferocity of a rogue bull elephant.
“It’s his shoes. Trainers. New Balance ones. And expensive by the look of them – they’re not all that common. They’ve got a very distinctive tread pattern. It’s definitely the one we found all over the D.I.’s house.”
“Are you sure?” Christ, Christ, oh Christ, was all that ran through Goodwin’s mind. “I mean absolutely fucking certain?”
“I was there, Guv. It’s the same. I’m certain.”
“Oh, Jesus wept. This bag. Have you sent it down to forensic?”
“Not yet, I came straight to find you.” This was a clear breach of procedure and they all knew it.
“Where is it now?”
“It’s locked in the boot of my car.”
“Good. That’s good. Sit down, Pat.” He fetched another glass and poured Todd a very large whisky. He topped up his own glass and Morris’. Goodwin could feel his mind racing, but it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, as though it was stuck in neutral. He knew what he wanted to do, but did he dare? Would they back him up?
“Who else knows about this?”
“No-one, Guv. Like I said, I bagged it up and came straight here.”
“Well done, Pat, you’ve did right.” It all seemed too much for Goodwin to take in. He had known that Ashworth wasn’t happy. At their last meeting she had told him that she wanted Tommy pulled out. She said that it was simply that he wasn’t getting the right results, but she intimated that it ram deeper than that. That there was something more. He hadn’t wanted to hear. He could tell that she had lost faith in Tommy but he had no idea that it could have been this serious. He doubted if she had either. And when Goodwin had said no, she whinged a bit but accepted it. Operations like these don’t get results over night – you’ve got to develop a trust, a confidence that only embeds itself gradually. After all, Tommy had been his boy, he’d picked him out for SO10 training in the first place and then, it had been him who had recommended him for the Bellini infiltration. Could he really have gone wild? It wasn’t the Tommy that he knew, but then the pressure and isolation of undercover work can do strange things to even the most experienced men. Living two separate lives; befriending people in order to betray them. It was no wonder that lines of demarcation became indistinct. But could this really have happened? Todd seemed very sure, but only the forensic labs could conclusively prove or disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Goodwin had made his decision. He wouldn’t, couldn’t let that happen.
He sat in silence, facing his two colleagues across the desk. If it was true, he thought, he, Goodwin, had killed Charlotte and Steve Ashworth, just as certainly as Tommy had. It would be something that, over the years, he would have to learn to live with but, he was now resolved, he would do so in private and not in the full glare of the mass media coverage that would attend the public enquiry that would have to precede any court case.
Meanwhile Dave Morris sat silently as if in a trance, trying to take it all in.
“OK. We’ve got to decide what we’re going to do. It seems to me that there’s absolutely no proof that Tommy was involved in Charlotte’s death. If he was there – and that hasn’t been proved, its only conjecture – we know that he would have been there trying to protect her from someone, most probably from Frank Doyle. It must have been him who killed Charlotte. Not Tommy. I won’t accept that he could have done it. You both knew him, for Christ’s sake. Surely you can’t believe it? No. It had to be Doyle. Let’s get that straight now. That would be why he killed Tommy, because he wouldn’t play along. Because he tried to save her. Are we all agreed?”
There was stunned impassivity from Todd and Morris.
“Are we all agreed on that?” Goodwin repeated, this time more forcefully, and he received curt, almost reluctant nods, by way of response. “Good” he said. “Good. Because Tommy was one of us. And Charlotte was one of us. We have a duty to take care of them. To see that justice is done to them. Not to besmirch the name of a good friend and colleague. Can you imagine it? If this is put before the Crown Prosecution Service we’ll never even get Doyle into court. You saw what he did to her. Could that have been the work of a police officer? You saw it. Tell me” he demanded. “Could Tommy have done that? He was a friend of yours, Pat, wasn’t he? Would he have split her head open, down to the mouth. And cut Steve’s right off?”
“No. I don’t suppose so.” Goodwin detected more than a hint of uncertainty in Todd’s reassurance.
“There’s no suppose about it. Of course, he couldn’t have done it.”
“But what about the footprints, Guv. Why was there only the one set?” It was a fair question that Morris raised and one to which Goodwin didn’t have an answer but he tried to deflect as best he could.
“That just goes to prove Tommy’s not involved” he argued weakly. “Doyle did the business, taking care not to leave any traces. He’s a pro after all. Tommy comes in, interrupts and tries to stop him and walks right through all the mess he’s made.”
Morris shook his head slowly. It wasn’t so much that there were holes in the story rather the fact that there were only holes and no story and Goodwin knew it. He tried to change tack.
“What good would it do, dragging Tommy’s name through all this shit? Doyle’s the only one that would win. Not Charlotte. She wouldn’t want to see Tommy dragged through the gutter for something that Frank Doyle did. You know that. The Force couldn’t win either – not the Met. Surely you can see as well as I can that the last thing we need is another scandal. Especially after all that fuss over Ryan’s bent team out in Catford last year. It rocks public confidence. They lose faith and that means we can’t do our job properly. What good is the Met. if people can’t trust us? Think about it. How would it look for us?” This was his trump card. “One bad apple sours the whole barrel. You know that that’s the way it works. The whole squad would be disbanded. We can have kept our noses clean for our entire careers but who’s going to believe that. It wouldn’t be so bad for me. I’ve not got long to go. They’d pension me off early. Stress. Ill health. Something like that. It’s you lads that I’m worried about. And the rest of the team. You’re young. You’ve got twenty or so years ahead of you. Twenty years of being a pariah. Of being overlooked for promotion while other people, less deserving people, are pushed ahead just because they weren’t tainted by a bent copper. Twenty years of not being trusted. Twenty years of rumours, of whispers. Can you put up with that? I sure as hell couldn’t. And what for? To see that a cold blooded, psychopathic cop killer like Frank Doyle doesn’t go down for killing your boss. You know he did Tommy as well. Definitely. Well? What do you say lads?”
Todd was the first to speak. This had been what he wanted to hear. That’s why the bin bag stayed in the boot of his car when he couldn’t find Goodwin and had not been booked in and sent directly down to the forensic labs. “I say that we burn it, Guv. The whole damn lot of it. Everything I found in Tommy’s flat. We agree here and now, the three of us, that the clothes never existed. I think it’s what the D.I. would have wanted.”
“What about you, Dave? What do you say?” Morris didn’t say anything. He sat impassively, eyes firmly fixed on the floor. The others stared at him and waited. He could feel their eyes on him but he couldn’t bring himself to look up. In the silence, it seemed to last for an eternity. Eventually, slowly, he nodded.
“Say it, Dave. And mean it. We’ve got to be in it together. All of us. Or none of us.” Goodwin knew him well enough to be sure he would acquiesce now.
“OK” he responded, although he certainly still didn’t sound as though he meant it. “I’m with you.”
Goodwin breathed a silent sigh of relief, choosing to ignore the complete lack of conviction in Morris’ voice. “Good. Well, we’ve got work to do. Pat, you burn the clothes
. Use petrol, paraffin, whatever, just make sure that there’s nothing left. I saw seen some empty metal barrels near that site in Lambeth we passed the other day. You know the one I mean?”
“Yeah. I know it.”
“If anyone comes near, just flash your warrant card. But make sure you keep your name over your name. And,” he added, “make sure that there’s nothing left. I mean nothing – nothing at all. Then clean the boot of your car out, where the bag was. Scrub it. Really thoroughly. We don’t want to take any chances. Dave and I’ll go back to Tommy’s place and clean up any mess that’s left. We’ll make sure that there’s nothing else there. Is that OK with you, Dave?”
Morris nodded again. “Right, you go out and pick up some cleaning stuff. Bleach, Vim, whatever you can get. Tommy’s not the type to have any of that in.” He unconsciously used the present tense as he spoke, before pulling out his wallet and handing Morris two twenty pound notes. “I’ll see you outside, by my car in fifteen minutes. OK?”
“OK” said Dave, in a voice that was little more than a whisper, and he left without looking back.
After he was sure that Morris was out of earshot, Goodwin rounded on Todd. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Pat?” He shut the door that Dave Morris had left slightly ajar. “Why the hell did you say anything in front of that Welsh twat? Are you bloody stupid? The fewer people involved in something like this the better all round. It’s safer for us all. Haven’t I told you that before? Him and his fucking ‘chapel on Sunday’ conscience. He’s not with us. Not yet, despite what he’s saying. We can’t afford to let him loose. I’ll have to talk to him again. Try to make him see sense, this time.”
Lost in Shadows Page 23
