City of Sinners

by A. A. Dhand

  But there was nothing out of the ordinary here.

  He checked his phone and saw he had a new text message.

  Do you see the sinner, Harry?

  Harry’s heart raced. Keeping the phone in his hand, he glanced around the dance floor. This wasn’t someone wanting to give Harry intel about Usma.

  The killer was here.

  Another text.

  Do you see what you started?

  Harry started to reply. Then reconsidered.

  Who’d I come in with? he replied.

  White girl. She’s gone.

  Harry’s breathing quickened.

  A new text, this one from Palmer.

  I’m here. By the cloakroom. You?

  Harry replied urgently.

  Killer is in here. LOCK THIS PLACE DOWN. NOW. NOBODY LEAVES. CALL IT IN.

  Harry moved quickly towards the exit but stopped in his tracks when he heard a sudden commotion coming from the middle of the dance floor. He paused and moved closer to the edge of the balcony. A group of clubbers were jostling with each other.

  With the strobe effects flickering rapidly and artificial mist obscuring his view, Harry could only just make out distressed faces.

  Then he saw the blood.

  Harry jumped over the balcony just as the dancers on stage lost their rhythm. He landed with a heavy thud on the edge of the dance floor.

  The Dhol-player stopped banging the drums and the music petered away, replaced by the sound of screaming.

  As clubbers moved towards the exit in a sea of panic, Harry was carried back with them and had to fight his way forward.

  He heard a scream for help, then several more.

  Harry forced his way through them.

  He arrived in the middle of the dance floor to find a group of boys surrounding a girl who had folded to the floor.

  ‘Move!’ shouted Harry as he saw the blood rapidly pooling underneath her body. ‘Police!’ he screamed.

  Nobody moved.

  ‘I said move!’ he yelled and forcefully pushed some of the crowd out of his way. ‘Police!’ he repeated, and now he saw the girl, eyes staring up at Harry, panic written across her face, her yellow Asian suit, peppered with sequins, turning steadily brown as it absorbed a stream of fast-flowing blood from her neck.

  ‘Shit,’ said Harry and removed his jacket. He crouched next to a boy on the floor who was applying pressure to a wound on the girl’s neck. The boy moved aside, clearly relieved someone was here to take over.

  From close up, Harry could see she had a deep puncture wound in her neck.

  Her artery had been severed, the blood loss was massive.

  In the middle of the dance floor, as people continued to scream and run towards the exit, Harry could do nothing but watch as the girl’s breathing slowed and she died in his arms.

  TWENTY-NINE

  HARRY WAS SITTING on the balcony of the now deserted nightclub. SOCO units and HMET officers did their jobs around him, all the usual procedural tasks Harry had seen a thousand times before.

  Outside, Harry had left Palmer and a handful of uniformed officers trying to contain four hundred party-goers. Some had fled in the initial panic, others had arrived to see what the fuss was about, further complicating matters. The night grew colder. Here, on Manningham Lane, the setting of two major race-riots in the past two decades, Bradford was once again caught in the middle of a shitstorm.

  Harry had two murders on his hands; in all likelihood, they were dealing with a serial killer.

  He had contacted the duty inspector at Trafalgar House, who had sent initial responders. Requests for officers from other districts had quickly been put in and patrols from Halifax, Wakefield and Huddersfield had arrived.

  It still wasn’t enough to control what was happening outside the club.

  Media vans were already onsite, social media rapidly spreading the news, most of it inaccurately reported. One thing was certain: controlling the mob outside was a priority. They needed to get details from as many witnesses as possible.

  Harry had spoken to the Assistant Chief Constable, who had sent out a ‘force request’ to North Yorkshire, Humberside and Manchester asking for PSUs, police response units, a van of six constables and a sergeant in full riot gear.

  No chances were being taken.

  Bradford knew this scene all too well.

  Harry wandered outside, still in shock. He saw a sea of blue lights, officers trying to quarantine witnesses into small groups and media vans training their lenses on the unfolding drama. The riot vans were strategically parked to fence the crowd in, ready to be called upon, but nobody wanted to incite anarchy. For now, they simply observed.

  The crowd huddled together, all of them dressed for the club, not the cold early morning streets. They’d rushed outside, leaving their jackets in the cloakroom and, unable to re-enter, everyone was shivering, their breath forming clouds of white mist. Girls were crying, boys jumping at the chance to console them. A sea of mobile phones shone bright in the darkness, thumbs tapping furiously, no doubt blasting social media with Chinese whispers.

  Girl murdered.

  I heard the gunshots.

  Terrorism in Bradford.

  This was how the wrong stories ended up in the papers. It escalated beyond the facts.

  The murder victim, identified by a friend as Jaspreet Mann, was a student out celebrating her twenty-first birthday. She hadn’t stood a chance. Whoever had slashed her throat knew exactly what he was doing. He’d gone straight for the carotid artery. Her death had taken only a few minutes.

  Harry rubbed his hands together; Jaspreet’s blood had dried into the creases of his palms.

  Fuck this.

  He looked into the crowds of witnesses, thinking only one thing.

  Is the bastard here?

  Am I looking at him right now?

  Harry’s phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and saw it wasn’t ringing. Confused, he put his hand in his other jacket pocket and found another device, one he didn’t recognize.

  A burner. It was ringing.

  Unknown number.

  Harry thought about the crowd on the dance floor pushing past him, desperate to get out. Dozens of them brushing past his body, any one of them could have slipped a phone into his pocket.

  The killer.

  Harry pressed the green answer button.

  Laughter.

  Hysterical laughter.

  Harry listened, his patience wearing thin. He scanned the crowds. Dozens of people were on their phones, some recording what was going on. But he couldn’t find anyone laughing.

  Harry didn’t say a word.

  Suddenly it stopped.

  Still, Harry kept quiet.

  ‘You will catch me, Harry, you know that, don’t you?’

  Harry didn’t recognize the voice.

  He stayed mute, desperately scanning the street. If he’d spotted him in the crowd, he’d have marched over and smashed his face into a pulp.

  ‘Why play the games, then? Hand yourself in,’ replied Harry.

  ‘Games? I’ve not even started yet. This is on you, Harry. You ruined my life. And now, I’m going to ruin yours.’

  THIRTY

  RONNIE VIRDEE ENTERED Queensbury Tunnel, a now abandoned piece of Bradford’s history.

  He was changing.

  But it couldn’t happen overnight.

  Bradford didn’t work that way.

  Here, inside a tunnel which connected the world outside to one of a more hellish nature, Ronnie still had work to do to ensure his vision for Bradford did not suffer because he had taken his eye off the ball.

  He walked the quarter-mile stretch, accustomed to the stench of damp and abandonment, using a torch to illuminate the darkness. The ground was a waterlogged trench, ice starting to form on the surface. Sections of an ancient rusted train track were glowing orange in the beam of the torch. Instead of the usual water dripping from the roof, razor-sharp icicles were hanging ominously from the ce
iling.

  Ronnie heard screaming as he approached a dry section of the tunnel, the area lit by several powerful lamps. He found his second-in-command, Enzo, standing beside a dishevelled man bound to a rickety chair.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Ronnie.

  Enzo shook his head, removed his gloves and wiped perspiration from his face. ‘Told you these Europeans were tough bastards.’

  Ronnie wasn’t disheartened. This place broke everybody. Eventually.

  He crouched in front of the man, who had blood streaming down his face. Ronnie looked him in the eye and saw only one thing.

  Defiance.

  He waited a few seconds, staring hard into the man’s eyes, as if trying to look into his soul. Then he stood up.

  ‘He’s more afraid of his boss than of us,’ said Ronnie.

  ‘Give it a few days. He’ll break.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Ronnie softened his tone and focused on the man. ‘You want out? A new life? Money in your pocket? I can make that happen. Everyone will just think you succumbed to Bradford. No different to any other day for men like you and me. Better way to end this than me putting you to the streets.’

  The man spat on the floor and hissed something in Polish.

  ‘That’s fine,’ replied Ronnie, removing a pair of thick padded gloves from his pocket and slipping them on. ‘I like to leave this place knowing that I offered you both sides of the coin. Your choice to go this way.’

  Ronnie sighed and grabbed a bag from the floor beside Enzo’s feet. Something inside struggled to break free.

  ‘Already?’ said Enzo, surprise clear in his voice.

  ‘He’s not becoming part of this tunnel. He needs to be found. So they’ll know not only are we back but they need to fuck off or they’ll end up like this one.’

  For the past two years, as Ronnie had slipped back into alcoholism, a European gang, mainly Polish, had aggressively placed their footprint in Bradford. For them, it was simply territory in a city which had one of the largest heroin problems in England.

  For Ronnie, it was fucking with a much larger picture.

  He was going to change the game in this city but he could only do that if he had total control. There were deals going on behind closed doors, none of which could happen if Ronnie allowed the Europeans to continue to increase their profile. They were hard-liners and thought nothing of dropping a body on to the streets of Bradford.

  They acted first and thought later, the complete opposite to Ronnie’s strategy.

  In the past year they had ensured Bradford was second only to Greater London for homicides. Whilst it might have kept Harry busy, it was dragging Bradford back to a place Ronnie had worked hard to raise it from.

  ‘What your boss needs to realize,’ said Ronnie, opening the bag in his hand and removing a large, hungry sewer rat, ‘is that for him, Bradford is just a piece of currency. He doesn’t give a fuck about it. Not like I do. And he and I are nothing alike. You see this guy standing next to you?’

  Ronnie pointed at Enzo.

  ‘Best SAS operative of his time. The other guys I employ? Similar. We’ve a discipline and a code you fuckers will never understand or rise to. It’s why you’re bound to fail. So, I’m going to send you back to your boss in a way he’ll understand. He wants to bring this fight to me – there’s only one outcome.’

  The man tensed in the chair, eyes glued to the rat squirming in Ronnie’s hands, trying to bite its way through his gloves.

  ‘Last chance,’ said Ronnie, holding the rat near to the man’s face so its fur brushed against his bloody skin. It became immediately animated at the scent of blood.

  More Polish gibberish from the man in the chair.

  Another gobful of phlegm landed on the ground.

  ‘Have it your way then,’ said Ronnie, stepping closer.

  He put the bag over the man’s head, slipped the rat inside and pulled the drawstring tight around his neck.

  The screaming was instant, the man’s thrashing in the chair forcing it to topple sideways and hit the ground.

  ‘Come on,’ said Ronnie to Enzo. ‘We’re done here.’

  Outside, Ronnie and Enzo lit up cigarettes. In the calm, bitter cold outside the mouth of the tunnel, they stood side by side.

  ‘Only a matter of time before we had to send a message,’ said Enzo.

  ‘They don’t have the fight in them to take Bradford from us,’ replied Ronnie.

  ‘Got some backing though, haven’t they.’

  ‘Took my eye off the ball but we’ll flush them out.’

  Ronnie turned to Enzo, took a deep pull on his cigarette.

  ‘I know that look,’ said Enzo.

  Ronnie smiled. ‘Been two years since we broke ties with Harry. Two years since that night we lost Tara. Time to make things right.’

  ‘He won’t turn, Ronnie.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to.’

  Enzo looked confused.

  ‘You trust me?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Good. Because I need it more than ever. If we want to flush out these Europeans, put our fist firmly back around Bradford, we’re going to need Harry’s help. We need someone on the inside to feed us that intel we’re missing.’

  ‘We tried that before. Look what happened.’

  Ronnie thought about his family situation. His mother wanting to reconnect with Harry and his father’s precarious position in the hospital.

  Change was coming for the Virdee family.

  Change which would put the brothers firmly back on track.

  THIRTY-ONE

  AT FOUR A.M. Harry finally entered his home. He checked Saima was asleep, had a brief glance into Aaron’s room, then hit the shower, leaving the lights off. He turned the temperature to scalding and sat down in the shower tray. He envisaged Jaspreet’s blood washing off his skin, down the plughole.

  Do you see the sinner, Harry?

  Had he caused this?

  If it wasn’t Gurpal tormenting him, was it someone else? He struggled to think. Had he pushed it too far, too many times?

  He closed his eyes, trying to see what he’d missed.

  He sat like that for forty minutes. There was no point going to bed, he had to be at the eight a.m. briefing in a few hours. And he couldn’t sleep, there was too much noise inside his head.

  The girl had died in his arms.

  Eyes wide and disbelieving.

  Pleading, panicking.

  Harry thought about what he had done to Kash, breaking his nose the way he had.

  Was this some sort of knee-jerk reaction?

  The bathroom door suddenly opened and Saima stepped inside and turned the light on.

  ‘Harry?’ she said, alarmed, barely able to see him in the steam-filled room.

  ‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘Turn the light off, Saima.’

  ‘Are you okay? Have you only just got in? What happened?’

  ‘Just a really, really, bad night, Saima.’

  She opened the shower door, turned the water off and grabbed a towel, handing it to Harry. ‘Come on,’ she said softly, ‘let me help you out of here.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  HARRY ARRIVED FOR the eight a.m. HMET briefing having had no sleep. He was pissed off, his mind loaded with questions he didn’t have answers to.

  Saima had refused to go back to bed and he’d told her all about his night. He’d felt bad that he’d woken her so early and was thankful today was her day off.

  Conway caught Harry outside and pulled him aside.

  ‘Some night,’ she said.

  Harry simply nodded.

  ‘You look like hell.’

  ‘Like you said. Some night.’

  ‘ACC wants a word after the meeting. A sit-down.’

  Harry sighed. He knew what that meant. Scrutiny of his decision-making process at Maestro’s.

  ‘Did everything I thought was right at the time. If I’d known—’

  She put her hand out to stop him.
‘ACC wants a word. Not me,’ she said.

  Harry forced a smile. ‘Cheers, boss.’

  She nodded for Harry to enter the briefing room. ‘Come on. Get up to speed before we make that meeting.’

  Harry learned that the riot gear hadn’t been required at the nightclub and that two dozen constables had managed to take details from over two hundred witnesses. The statements would take weeks to collate.

  And then the kicker. The nightclub had only opened three months before and the owners hadn’t deemed the installation of CCTV a priority.

  There was no footage of the murder.

  He must have known that.

  After the briefing, Harry accompanied his boss to a sit-down meeting with Assistant Chief Constable Frost, who wanted a personal update from Harry. It felt like walking into the headmaster’s office.

  Frost wanted to know why the killer was contacting Harry personally.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Harry had said.

  Frost liked the Gurpal Singh angle, the timings worked.

  ‘You’ve got my full support here, Harry,’ he said, holding his gaze.

  At Frost’s request, they were focusing all their resources on trying to find the bastard. The team were in touch with the prison and chasing up a meeting with Gurpal’s parole officer.

  Frost had pressed Harry hard: was there anything Harry wanted to tell them?

  Harry thought about the video camera he had destroyed. The footage which showed Gurpal had acted in self-defence even if he had almost beaten his wife, Indy, to death.

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  It was late morning before Harry managed to grab some time with his team. DI Palmer was at Jaspreet Mann’s autopsy, but he’d sent in confirmation that she’d been killed by a puncture to the neck that had severed her carotid artery.

  Harry shivered at the memory of her lying dead in his arms, blood soaking through his clothes.

  Witness statements provided by Jaspreet’s friends revealed she was a dental student at Leeds University, she lived in Pudsey and had been dating a white guy called Roger, also a dental student, who was two years her senior. He’d been at the bar when the attack happened. He was reportedly in bits.

  Nobody had reported witnessing the attack. The dance floor had been heaving, mist clouding everybody’s view, and the music drowning out all other sounds.