Riot Act

by Zoe Sharp

  “Oh,” I faltered, cursing inwardly. “I just assumed that you weren’t making a social call, and—”

  “The boy’s dead,” MacMillan told me bluntly, never taking his eyes off my face while he said it. Unless you play poker professionally, it’s really hard to keep that sort of news from leaving its mark. I could feel my eyebrows lifting as my jaw fell.

  “Dead?” I repeated stupidly. “Dead – how?” Let it be an accident, I prayed. Car crash, heart attack, fell in front of a train – anything would do except . . .

  “I’m afraid Nasir received a single gunshot wound to the chest some time late yesterday evening,” MacMillan informed me in his best official tone. “It wasn’t instantly fatal, but it would appear that he died as a result of it shortly afterwards, and I now find myself in the middle of a murder inquiry.”

  Twelve

  For a few moments I sat without speaking. Nasir was dead. I remembered that shot I’d heard while I was tackling Roger. Sean had told me Nasir had managed to clear the gun and so he’d given up the pursuit.

  But what if Sean had caught up with Nas? When it came to hand-to-hand Sean was outstanding. Brutally effective. He wouldn’t have hesitated for a second before taking down an armed opponent. Particularly an unskilled teenager, running scared, and with a jammed weapon.

  What if he’d taken control of the gun and shot Nasir, leaving him dying before calmly returning to the gym to wait for me. He was certainly cold-blooded enough.

  But why? It was a damned stupid way to try and protect his brother, if that was his motive. None of it made any sense.

  I raised my head and found the Superintendent still watching me closely with the calm deliberation that made his company so uncomfortable. On the mantelpiece Pauline’s dark wood-cased clock ticked loudly into the silence. All of a sudden my mouth was dry, and I had to swallow before I could speak.

  “Where did it happen?” I asked, not stopping to think if the question was a logical one for a supposedly innocent party.

  MacMillan gave no sign that I’d made a significant slip-up. “He was found in a rubbish skip, near one of the old industrial estates in Heysham,” he said, matter-of-fact, as though he was describing a change in the weather.

  “Heysham?” Not on a piece of waste ground behind a gym in Lancaster, then.

  The wave of relief that washed over me brought light-headedness in its wake. “Poor Mrs G,” I said, guilt following on like the next breaker onto the beach. My emotions must have been strung across my face like Times Square neon by this time. “Do you have any ideas who was responsible?”

  “We’re working on several lines of inquiry,” he said automatically, but for the first time he looked a little awkward.

  I caught the hesitation and was intrigued. “Do I hear a ‘but’ in there, Superintendent?”

  MacMillan frowned for a moment, then leaned forwards in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees and straightening a cufflink while he considered what he was prepared to tell me.

  Finally, he looked up. “We’re having a certain amount of trouble with our relationship with this neighbourhood,” he said at last. “It’s vital we clear this crime up quickly, and are seen to be doing so.”

  I nodded.

  “But, if we start carrying out thorough house-to-house inquiries we are in danger of being accused by community leaders of not looking beyond the Asian population for a culprit.” He sighed and dredged up a tired smile. “It’s a case of damned if we do, and twice damned if we don’t.”

  “I can understand that,” I said slowly, keeping noncommittal.

  “Now I’m the one who’s hearing a ‘but’,” MacMillan said, his voice wry.

  I glanced up, met the policeman’s flat cool eyes with a micron-thin layer of composure. “I don’t really see what this has to do with me.”

  The Superintendent paused again, sitting up and crossing his legs, paying particular attention to the crease in the fine material of his trousers. When he spoke it was as if he was picking each word with care. “I need some eyes and ears on the ground, Charlie,” he said. “I need to know everything about Nasir Gadatra’s activities, legal or not. The sort of thing that people might not want to let slip to us.”

  He ran a hand over his face, the first time I’d seen him let his frustration show. “When something like this happens these people tend to close eyes, mouths and ranks. Then they accuse us of doing nothing. We can’t win.”

  For a while there was silence. Friday padded through from sloshing the contents of his water bowl over half the kitchen floor. He slyly dried his muzzle by wiping it across my knees while pretending to offer sympathetic support.

  I scratched his head distractedly as my brain bounced on ahead. If Sean hadn’t killed Nasir, then who had? I kept coming back to wondering why Roger had been so desperate for his friend to shoot me. What was driving the boy?

  I tried to forecast the likely consequences of telling MacMillan about the attempted shooting. What would happen if I filled him in about Roger, and moving on logically from that, about Garton-Jones and his thugs? And what about Langford’s involvement with Mr Ali? Where did they fit in to all this?

  Sean was going to be livid if I involved his brother with the police again. Mind you, Attila probably wasn’t going to be overjoyed to have his place dragged through the mud, either, and I needed my job. Perhaps it was better to be safe than sorry . . .

  I shook my head slowly. “I’m not sure if I can help you, Superintendent,” I said, managing to look him straight in the eye with amazing sincerity. “Nasir had rather old-fashioned attitudes about the role of women that meant we didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye,” I added truthfully. “We never really hit it off, and he certainly never confided in me.”

  MacMillan gave me a long stare that as good as told me he knew damned well I was holding out on him. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him, though, because I’d done it before.

  “If that’s how you feel then perhaps I should be asking where you were last night?” he said, and even as I recognised the trace of humour in his voice, I had to struggle to bite back the panic.

  “I was at work,” I managed shortly. “The gym just behind the old bus garage.”

  “Hmm, maybe I’ll check up on that,” he murmured and I cursed myself again.

  Great. Just great. That’s right, Fox, encourage MacMillan and his forensic team to go sniffing round at the gym. They wouldn’t need a microscope to discover bullets embedded all over the damned place, which might even be a match to the same gun that eventually killed Nasir. I couldn’t even be sure that Attila would have picked up all the empty brass shell casings. Oh, smart thinking, Fox.

  “After all,” MacMillan continued now, “you were an excellent shot, I understand. Marksman standard, if your military record is anything to go by.”

  I felt my chest constrict so that I had to concentrate on breathing evenly. I had always thought that the army kept that kind of information strictly to themselves. “That was a long time ago,” I said.

  “Old habits, Charlie. Old habits,” he said, his tone almost light, so I didn’t know if he was serious or not. “I’m sure it’s like riding a bicycle. You might become rusty, but you never forget.”

  No, you didn’t, and I hadn’t. I could still remember what it was like to be on the ranges, concentrating on slowing my breathing and my heartbeat, gradually taking up the pressure on the trigger.

  I could still remember feeling the kick of the butt in my shoulder, watching the holes explode through the wood and paper targets with nothing more on my mind than achieving a better aim, a closer grouping. Rifle or pistol, I had been as good with either. They’d drilled the ability to kill into me.

  They’d done the same thing with Sean, only to a higher degree. A much higher degree. I suspected that I was primary school grade compared to his university graduate.

  I looked up and found MacMillan studying me again. “You said Nas was shot in the chest,” I said. “Close ran
ge?”

  He pursed his lips, but whether he was trying to recall the details, or trying to decide if he was going to let me have the information, I couldn’t tell.

  “I won’t know precisely until I get the full post mortem report,” he said at last, “but yes, preliminary indications are that his killer wasn’t very far away when the shot was fired. Why?”

  “Because if I’m as good with a weapon as you seem to think I am, and if I’d taken a dislike to the poor lad that was sudden and violent enough for me to want to kill him – oh, and if I’d also somehow managed to get hold of an illegal firearm,” I tossed at him, sarcastic and angry, “I would have aimed for his head. And if for some reason I’d gone for a torso shot first,” I went on when he didn’t respond, “I would have followed it up with one round to the head once he was on the ground, just to be sure. Shooting him once in the chest and leaving him to maybe bleed to death smacks of an amateur.”

  I stopped, appalled at myself. What was I trying to do, convince MacMillan that I’d killed Nasir? Oh, for God’s sake . . .

  To my surprise, the Superintendent hadn’t jumped up to slap handcuffs on me. Nor was he laughing at my outburst, which was perhaps more worrying.

  “You’re assuming, of course,” he said seriously, “that whoever killed the boy wanted him dead. That it wasn’t an accident. If Nasir is as much of a reformed character as he appears to be these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be a case of, “I didn’t know it was a real gun, honest”. Too many of these kids seem to live in a computer game world these days. It’s cartoon violence to them. Unreal.”

  “If that’s the case, and it was accidental – one of his mates – then why leave him to die in a skip?”

  He shrugged. “Any number of reasons. Panic is at the top of my list. The problem is, Charlie,” he said, fixing me with that muddy-coloured gaze, “that people don’t trust us not to try and hang murder on them regardless. Forensic science is so sophisticated now, we can reconstruct a crime remarkably accurately from the minute evidence left at the scene. If someone swears the whole thing was an accident, the chances are that we can prove what they say. They shouldn’t be afraid to come forward.”

  His voice had become soft, almost gentle. He thinks I know who did it, I realised, and I’m protecting them because I live here. Because I’m part of this community now, whether I like it or not.

  I kept my own gaze steady. “I still can’t help you, Superintendent,” I said.

  He sighed, mouth thinning slightly as though he’d been expecting better things of me.

  “OK, Charlie,” he said wearily, coming to his feet, “but take my advice and don’t go off doing any crusading on your own with this one. This whole estate is like a powder keg at the moment. One spark in the wrong place and they’ll see the explosion in Carlisle.”

  Rising, I said grimly, “I know.”

  MacMillan moved towards the hallway, saying casually as he went, “I understand you’re not teaching self defence any more.”

  “No,” I agreed shortly, flicking the latch on the front door and pulling it open for him. The wood had swelled in the last lot of rain, so it stuck to the frame and rattled the door furniture when I jerked it loose. “I haven’t really got back into it.”

  He paused on the threshold to look down at me. “You should,” he said. “Don’t let what happened stop you, Charlie, it wasn’t your fault. You did what was – necessary under the circumstances.”

  I didn’t try to hide my surprise at his words. Not at what he’d said, but the fact that he’d said them at all.

  I didn’t give him an answer, partly because I didn’t have one to give. Logic agreed with the Superintendent, but emotion told me something different altogether.

  As he reached the path, he paused and turned back to me, his last question halting me just before I’d got the door safely closed behind him. “Oh, by the way, what happened to your hands?”

  I glanced down at them on reflex. They were still looking pretty scabbed up where I’d hit the road bailing out of the Grand Cherokee. “Friday,” I improvised quickly. “He spotted a cat the other morning and pulled me right over. Doesn’t know his own strength, the daft dog.” My voice sounded nervous and babbling, even to me.

  MacMillan nodded with a quizzical half smile which told me he didn’t believe a word of that, either, but found trying to decipher my reason for lying probably more illuminating than a straight answer. Turning on his heel without further comment, he strode up the drive towards his patiently waiting colleague.

  I shut the door and leaned my back against it. If I was going to face MacMillan again without getting myself arrested, I was going to have to learn how to lie a lot more convincingly.

  Either that, or I was going to have to find out some answers. And soon.

  ***

  An hour later I was knocking on another front door, in another street not dissimilar to the one I’d just left. The same neglected brick and pebbledashed houses. The same scruffy fleet of broken-down cars, and overgrown, rubbish-strewn gardens. The scenery may have looked largely identical, but the atmosphere was something different all together.

  Unlike Lavender Gardens, there were no black or Asian faces on the Copthorne estate. Maybe there had been, once, but there are only so many petrol bombs through your letterbox you can smother before you take the hint and get out.

  I may not have been Asian, but I stood out like a sore thumb on Copthorne nevertheless. It had only taken minutes before my presence on the estate was registered.

  A group of grubby-looking kids playing football in the middle of the road spotted me first. They’d been using a handily parked Astra van as a goal, but by the looks of the dents in the side of it, their keeper wasn’t up to much. As I walked by the whole group of them abandoned their game and froze, like a bunch of meerkats.

  As I moved deeper into the estate there was always someone conveniently loitering to keep an apparently casual eye on my movements. If I hadn’t been expecting it, it might have seemed natural, but I knew that the bush telegraph system on Copthorne made any high-grade military communications network look like a couple of tin cans joined with string.

  The residents of Lavender Gardens, if they were serious about setting up their own Neighbourhood React, could have learned a lot from the smooth co-ordination evident on Copthorne, but they would have practically needed an armoured personnel carrier to observe it first hand.

  The only thing was, the Copthorne inhabitants weren’t keeping such a close eye on me because they thought I was a potential burglar, car thief, or vandal. They were more worried that I might be from Social Services, or the police.

  I made sure that I didn’t appear to be taking too much interest in the houses. I just kept my head down and kept walking like I knew exactly where I was going, that I had every right to be there.

  I breathed a little easier when I finally opened the rotting gate and walked along the short lichen-covered concrete path leading to the mid-terrace house that a scan of the local phone book told me was where Sean’s mother lived.

  I’d no idea when I moved to Lancaster that’s where Sean was originally from. In the time he and I had been together, he’d never told me much about his family. I’d certainly never been taken home to meet them.

  We’d been to see mine, though. Spent a weekend at my parents’ place in Cheshire. The contrast between their ivy-clad Georgian house, with its circular gravel drive and immaculate formal garden was sharp with the run-down property in front of me. Still, it made me wonder what he’d really thought of me, that he hadn’t wanted me to see it.

  Not that the weekend with my parents had been anything of a success. My mother hadn’t known what to make of the self-contained, quiet soldier I’d presented her with. As for my father, well maybe they were too alike to have ever really got on.

  He’d accurately read Sean’s background, and made sure the younger man was subtly aware of the gulf between us. Even so, did Sean reall
y think I would have looked down my nose at his own family home?

  Now, there was a long enough pause before anyone answered the front door for me to begin planning an organised retreat. Then the curtain was pulled to one side in the front bay window, and a couple of small heads peered at me over the sill.

  I smiled and waved, and the heads bobbed out of sight. It still didn’t mean there was an adult in. There were more latchkey toddlers on Copthorne than you could shake a shoplifted box of rusks at.

  Then, to my relief, there came the sound of bolts being drawn on the other side of the door. I struggled to martial my thoughts and realised, too late, that I’d no clear idea what I was going to say to Mrs Meyer.

  I needn’t have worried.

  When the faded front door was pulled open, it was Madeleine who stood on the other side. The tall, dark-haired girl was wearing jeans and a pale green shirt, and looked like she’d just been modelling them for Vogue. There was remarkably little surprise registering on her smooth pale face.