Chloe- Never Forget

by Dan Laughey

  Just before you lose the will to attack, you’re back on the offensive – actually, the defensive. The officer in your sights drops his wreath and comes at you; straight at you.

  His bony face is cruel, unbending, furious. He glares at you. He will not back down from bringing you down and humiliating you in front of all these veterans; these silver ghosts.

  You have no choice. The hand holding the knife is limp no more. Before it’s too late you spring forward. You sweep the curved steel out in front of you, plunging into his onrushing chest with a fierce and sudden cut.

  Blood spurts through your fingers.

  You look up. A bugler from afar is playing… The Last Post. Greyness is dispersing… like the honourable guests.

  You look down. Officer on the ground. Blood all over him.

  The next thing you know… you’re on the ground too. A big brute has come from behind and flattened you. He sits on you, rubbing your nose in the blood, forcing you to taste its iron tang.

  He spits out his mangled toothpick and speaks to you.

  ‘Former Police Constable Frank Tanner, I am arresting you on suspicion of…’

  Red meets grey. Your heart gives way.

  It’s time to join the glorious dead.

  11

  The funeral of Chief Constable Edward Lister was held at Ripon Cathedral two weeks later. He never recovered from the single stab wound that punctured his heart. Hundreds of officers attended the service as well as the Home Secretary, the Archbishop of York and chief constables of six other police forces.

  Capstick and Holdsworth were there too, holding hands, exchanging pleasantries. Sant was pleased at their fondness for each other and saw no purpose in driving a wedge through their blossoming relationship, though he knew full well how Capstick had fallen under the seductive spell of another woman. But setting aside his failings, his partner’s star was rising. Specially trained firearms officers had been no match for DC Capstick in spotting the man in the crowd with murder on his mind.

  Sant also saw little purpose in pressing posthumous charges against Lister, Chloe expressing no wish to pursue the matter. For her, justice had been served in Tanner’s fatal flash of his knife. But the whole sorry mess left Sant frustrated. Here they were mourning the passing of a great and honourable officer when he knew different; knew the fact of Lister’s evil. The man might be dead, but his reputation lived on untarnished.

  In contrast to Lister’s grand send-off, in the interim Sant had witnessed two very private cremations. The first of these was for Sergeant Liam Dryden. Sant’s heart had broken on hearing Claire Dryden’s sobbing groans. It reminded him of the newspaper image of Victoria Gray wiping away tears at her husband’s funeral a generation before.

  The second funeral was graced by a handful of onlookers, none of whom were serving or ex-serving officers. Nigel Fleming died in custody five hours after Sant had restrained him beneath the shadows of the war memorial. The dead man’s former identity never received a mention, though it soon became public knowledge once the enquiry into Lister’s killing had begun.

  The jury at his inquest heard that the seventy-year-old alcoholic was subject to half-hourly ‘rouse and response’ checks by detention officers supervising him inside the forty-cell custody suite of Elland Road Police Station. However, staff carried these checks without entering Fleming’s cell and failed to notice the symptoms of a stress-induced stroke.

  The press got excited for a few days as a long queue of hacks tried to add meat to the bones of conspiracy theories about what had motivated a former policeman to murder a present-day chief constable. Numerous reports resurrected the 1984 police shootings but were at a loss to understand how Fleming/Tanner’s attempted murder was mixed up with Lister, thus explaining the ex-PC’s motive to kill.

  Gilligan was left to hold the reins and revel in belittling this pure speculation bordering on fairy tale stuff. In the end the media settled for one of two theories: either Fleming/Tanner had been delusional and killed Lister by accident, mistaking him for another officer with whom he bore a long-term grudge; or Fleming/Tanner had slayed the CC as a symbolic – not personal – act of retribution against a police force that had hung him out to dry on his perpetual sick bed while his assailant, for years, evaded the blundering investigation.

  No-one alive except Chloe – and through her, Sant and Holdsworth – knew the true identity of that assailant. Forget the fall guy. It was Lister who had pulled the trigger that day – twice. But although Sant liked the idea, in practice he saw no means of prosecuting Lister after the fact of his execution at the hands of a man he’d almost executed over thirty years earlier.

  The inspector’s sombre thoughts settled on the thirteen (excluding Lister) who’d lost their lives in recent times, all of them connected in some way to the 31st of October 1984. Liam Dryden, Kate Andrews, Callum Willis and the other four bus victims; Sheila Morrison; James Miller; Vanessa Lee; Oliver Mosley; Tony Gordon; Nigel Fleming.

  The bus tragedy would remain a mystery in the public eye. The fake news media continued to draw parallels with Islamist terror plots despite zero evidence to back up their conjecture. The murders of Sheila Morrison and James Miller also went unexplained and were consigned to oblivion by news editors within a week.

  Tony Gordon took the sole blame for the murder of Vanessa Lee and the abduction of her daughter, even though he was effectively innocent of the latter offence. Again, Sant and his CID colleagues towed the public line, seeing no mileage in tugging against it. Tony’s death was officially recorded as accidental, but Sant disagreed. Firing a bullet inside an overturned car leaking fuel was suicide – intended or not.

  Another insoluble mystery was the source of Tony’s firearm. As Sant had suspected, it turned out to be a police-issue Glock 17, and moreover, the serial number on the gun confirmed that it had been licensed for police use back in 1996. It was reported stolen three years later. How had Tony got his hands on it? Given that the man was almost certainly in cahoots with Lister, Sant guessed the Chief Constable had supplied it to him for assassination purposes.

  The two who’d got away with their lives intact were the most pivotal of all in unravelling bygone injustices: Chloe Lee and her associate Mia. Chloe was offered a range of social care services to help her cope with the harrowing hardships she’d endured, but she politely refused. She was an adult, after all, and turning a new leaf was her prerogative.

  And it was the subject of Chloe that shaped the conversation between Sant and Mia as they dined by candlelight one late November night – the first time he’d invited anyone to his apartment not counting his sons, and one of the few times he’d cooked anything other than breakfast in his underused kitchen.

  After making love on his sofa, they paid tribute to the girl who’d dared to dig up the past, the skeletons of corruption and hate. What Chloe had discovered, thanks to her talent for research and inspired by the undercover journalism of her ex-neighbour Sheila, was that the racist individuals and institutions she learnt about in textbooks were not mere remnants of the past, but ugly and unshakeable beasts feeding on the ignorance of the present. But the ignorant present was now a little less ignorant owing to one student’s unceasing determination to right long-standing wrongs.

  Something Chloe had said continued to nag at Sant. She’d used the word mafia… in the present tense. Did this mean Lister’s past accomplices – those in the know who shared his fascist sensibilities – were still alive and kicking: and worse, still serving officers? He made a mental note to trace Chloe after a suitable interval. Give her time to recover, then gently force the issue.

  On the first day of December Old Man Gilligan proudly took up his post as the new Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police. He no longer looked old as he stood on the sunny balcony adjoining his new office, his immaculate new uniform radiating for the cameras. It was a photo opp too good to miss. Before long, though, that maddening sun began to irritate his eyes, so he reached for his trusted Ray-
Bans.

  At that moment Gilligan believed all who looked up at him wished him well with his promotion to the very top of his profession, but he was totally unaware of the girl with the binoculars honing in on him from a block of flats some two hundred yards away.

  This girl was on a mission. That mixed up fool Tanner had killed the wrong man, but so be it. In view of that, she’d fed a load of lies to DI Sant about Lister being the guilty one.

  Why? Because she wanted the final say; she demanded it no less. It had to be her, for she alone knew the real truth. And the real truth was this: the gunman who had killed and wounded two police officers all those years ago, and who still wrecked havoc on anyone obstructing his hateful agenda, was none other than the new man at the helm; the man in the video recorded on the disk in her pocket; the newly appointed Chief Constable Bill Gilligan.

  Things were getting personal. She was afraid no more.

  About the Author

  Dan Laughey is a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University where he teaches a course called ‘Youth, Crime and Culture’ among other things. He has written several books on the subject including Music and Youth Culture, based on his PhD in Sociology at Salford University. He also holds a BA in English from Manchester Metropolitan University and an MA in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds.

  Before entering academia he enjoyed a brief career in public relations, became a secondary school teacher, barman, waiter, trader, door-to-door salesman, car park attendant, film extra and convenience-store manager (not quite in that order).

  Dan was born in Otley and bred in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, a hop and a skip away from the Leeds setting of his Chloe novels. He now lives in the Leeds suburb of Guiseley and shares his time between England and Thailand, where his in-laws live. His wife and two sons keep him occupied when he’s not lecturing or writing, and all three are technologically savvier than him.

  Dan’s crime writing was purely academic to begin with. He’s written about media violence and tackled the age-old concern about television and video games influencing patterns of antisocial behaviour in society. After years of research and theoretical scrutiny, he still hasn’t cracked that particular nut!

  He’s also written about the role of CCTV and surveillance in today’s Big Brother world, the sometimes fraught relationship between rap and juvenile crime, football hooliganism, and the sociocultural legacy of Britain’s most notorious serial killer – the Yorkshire Ripper.

  All in all, his work has been translated into four languages: French, Hebrew, Korean and Turkish. He’s presented guest lectures at international conferences in Amsterdam, London, Dublin, Montreal and Bangkok, and has appeared on BBC Radio and ITV News in addition to providing expert commentary for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post.

  Despite all this intellectual stuff, Dan much prefers writing fiction. Making it up is far more fun than dissecting the real thing. As a child, he loved reading detective stories by Enid Blyton and Arthur Conan Doyle, and his crime fiction addiction was rekindled in early parenthood. He is particularly fond of hardboiled American pulp fiction (old and new), spy novels and psychological thrillers.

  Dan’s love of crime and mystery stories has found its way into his day-to-day teaching. He educates students on the history of drugs and gang crime, the emergence of post-war countercultures like the Beats and Hippies, the golden age of film noir, and media stereotypes revolving around Generations X, Y and Z – not to mention those delinquent Baby Boomers. Needless to say, great movies like Gun Crazy and Bonnie and Clyde get screened by Dr. Laughey on a regular basis.

  Dan’s hobbies include hunting for treasure at car boot sales, watching football and playing the occasional (bad) round of golf. He also enjoys running and gambling on the horses (no connection between the two) and can’t get enough of his wife’s Thai cuisine.

  He can be followed on Twitter @danlaughey