Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘And what particular talent do you think she was referring to, in your case?’

  ‘Football. I’d had one chance, with the Rovers, and I’d blown it. Jo told me if I really wanted it, I could get myself another go. That’s how I got myself out of the squat. No one really wants to live in those places, you know.’

  ‘So you got yourself a trial with Preston.’

  ‘Yes. North End took me on during the close season. I was just eighteen, by then. Old enough to get a contract, and wages, with bonuses for appearances at different levels. It wasn’t much, but I’d never had a regular wage until then.’ His eyes were dreamy with the memory of that unexpected Garden of Eden.

  ‘I saw you play, Billy. About ten years ago, it would be. In the first team. You were good.’

  ‘I was quick. And I had a good first touch. Improved a lot, that did, when I was training full time with North End.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Injury. Bastard brought me down when I was right through on goal and going like the clappers. Did my knee ligaments. I needed an operation and eight months off. I recovered, but I was a yard slower, and that made all the difference. I was small and quick, see. I couldn’t compensate with other things, like Alan Shearer did when he lost his pace. But North End were good to me. They kept me in the stiffs for a couple of years, bringing on the youngsters. Then they gave me this job, in charge of developing the juniors. We’re bringing one or two good lads through now.’

  ‘Good to know you’ve made it as a law-abiding citizen,’ Peach said dryly. He turned suddenly grim again. ‘Resent it, did you, when Sunita rejected your advances?’

  Billy forced himself to smile. ‘When you’re as black as I am and brought up where I was, you get used to rejection. Besides, it wasn’t just me. Turned out she wasn’t interested in men, was she, Sunita?’

  ‘She wasn’t?’

  ‘No. She took up with Jo, didn’t she? Didn’t upset me: I was glad just to be mates with the two of them, to have friendly faces to talk to. It was Matty who got upset about it, not me.’ It felt good to be able to defend himself against something.

  ‘Yes, we gathered that. Cut up quite rough, didn’t he?’

  ‘I think he did, yes. I kept out of it, mind. It was nothing to do with me. Sunita was his bird. They came to the squat almost at the same time, those two, and neither of them knew anything about life, if you ask me.’

  ‘We are asking you, Billy. We need everything you can tell us. We’re asking everyone else as well, mind. So you’d do well to give us the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ Peach was back into predator mould again, metaphorically circling his prey. His leather jacket was as black as his eyes, his moustache and the fringe of hair beneath his bold dome; Billy found himself wishing there was something about this man which was not black. ‘Do you think Matty killed Sunita because he was jealous when he saw her in the sack with Jo?’

  ‘No. Well, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t think so. He seemed a nice lad, even if he was infantile when it came to squats.’ Billy was pleased with that word ‘infantile’. The Chairman of the football club had used it, when he had been annoyed with the behaviour of one of their stars. Billy had picked it up for use with the young lads he handled, who were just kids really, and mustn’t get swollen heads. He used it quite a lot now.

  ‘Nice lads commit murders, Billy. Sometimes.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that I don’t think Matty did. He’s a concert pianist now.’

  ‘Yes, we know that, Billy. We’ve spoken to him. Twice. Surprised you’ve followed his career like that, though. Is it because you thought he might be a murderer?’

  Billy wished he wouldn’t rap out questions like that on the back of what seemed innocent sentences. ‘No. I liked Matty, that’s all. He was dead keen on football, for one thing. We got out of the squat at about the same time, and we both seemed to be making a go of it, in our different ways. Until I got injured in 1997.’ He was suddenly sad with the memory of what might have been.

  They could hear the urgent sound of young voices calling to each other outside the hut, as they played the game Billy loved. Lucy Blake said gently to him, ‘But you don’t know that Matthew Hayward didn’t kill Sunita, do you?’

  Billy shook his head unhappily. It seemed odd to have Matty’s full name rolled out like that; it was as if he was being reminded of what different worlds the two former squatters now inhabited. ‘No. But I don’t think he did. Jo would have been more likely to kill her, if you ask me, when she saw the girl going off the rails. She’d stood up for her in the squat, and I think she’d grown very fond of her.’ You didn’t mention love, he thought, when you were talking about dykes.

  ‘And Sunita rather let her down, didn’t she?’ This girl’s voice was soft and persuasive, convincing him that she already knew everything that had gone on in that squat. Far more than he did, probably, if they’d spoken to all the others. ‘Yes. She went off talking to that bloke who brought the drugs. The one who was operating out of number twenty-eight next door.’

  ‘Do you think she was pushing stuff for him?’

  He made himself think. It could help to get him off the hook, this, if he played it right. ‘Yes. I think she probably was. I heard Jo having terrible rows with her, and I can only think it was about that.’

  ‘Was Sunita pushing drugs for Wally Swift, as well?’

  It was like a blow in the face, bringing him back to Wally when he thought he had been leading the questioning away from him. He said sullenly, ‘She might have been, I suppose.’

  As soon as the words were out, he realized that he had admitted that he knew Wally was pushing drugs. But they must surely know that already. There was a pause then, and he looked from the soft features of the girl who had been questioning him into the face of the man at her side.

  Peach looked like the cat who had won the cream. A very large and dangerous cat: a tiger, perhaps. He smiled at Billy and said, ‘Running an extensive network of dealers was he, by the time you left?’

  ‘Wally?’

  ‘Who else? Sounds to me as if Sunita was torn between working for this man who came next door and Wally Swift. Of course, I wasn’t there at the time. But you were, Billy. What do you think of that idea?’

  ‘Sounds possible, I suppose.’ That sounded woefully weak, even in his own ears, and he was moved to add, ‘I didn’t know much about what was going on in the place, you see.’

  ‘Really, Billy? A streetwise young lad like you?’ His voice hardened from incredulity into accusation. ‘I’d have thought that you’d have known exactly what was going on. More quickly than anyone else in that squat, apart from Wally Swift himself.’

  Billy had gone straight for so long now that he felt he had lost the capacity to deceive. He had possessed it abundantly as a seventeen-year-old, and even earlier as a streetwise urchin. He said unconvincingly, ‘I don’t know what was going on. I didn’t have anything to do with Wally Swift.’

  ‘So how did you earn your living in those months in the squat, Billy. How did you survive?’

  All invention suddenly deserted him. He should have had an answer ready for this one, should have prepared the ground for it in advance. Now, with those unblinking dark eyes seeming to peer into his very soul, he could not even think on his feet, as he had been able to do all those years before. ‘I can’t remember, now. It’s a long time ago. We weren’t paying rent, so we didn’t need a lot. We helped each other out. I did bits of part-time work, wherever I could get it.’

  Peach smiled and shook his head. ‘Not what other people are telling us, that, Billy.’ He leaned forward and spoke as if he was iterating an established fact. ‘You were working for Wally Swift, and he was pushing drugs. Beginning to establish a network in the town.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And this man who came next door was a threat to that network. And Sunita Akhtar was a foolish girl who got caught between the two of them.’

  ‘No!’ He was shoutin
g, now, trying to stem the flow of this stream of accusation.

  ‘Did you kill Sunita, Billy?’

  ‘No! I don’t—’

  ‘Did Wally Swift kill her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know that?’

  He almost said that he did, then realized that that would be the same as telling them that he knew who the killer was. He said slowly, ‘I can’t know that Wally didn’t do it, can I, without knowing that someone else did it? I’m saying that I don’t think he killed her.’

  ‘He seems the likeliest candidate, doesn’t he? A man with a history of violence. A man making his way in the drugs industry, where violence, lethal violence, is a tool of the trade.’

  He repeated dully, ‘I don’t think Wally killed her. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Might not have done it himself, a man like that.’ Peach seemed to be thinking aloud now, directing his words to the woman next to him rather than the man opposite. ‘Much more likely to have employed an underling to do his dirty work for him. Someone like Billy Warnock here.’

  Lucy Blake nodded her head, then looked sadly at the apprehensive black face. ‘Don’t you think you should tell us everything you know about Wally Swift, Billy? Whilst there’s still time?’

  Billy spoke like a man who no longer expected to be believed as he said, ‘I don’t know anything else. I wasn’t working for Wally.’ He wondered what came next, whether they knew about the phone call to Wally he had made on the previous day, whether they were merely allowing him to condemn himself out of his own mouth.

  There was a long pause, during which the shouts of the youths outside seemed unnaturally loud, as if they were about to invade the scene in the icy hut. Then Peach said, ‘There were two women there as well as the murder victim. Tell us about the other one.’

  He tried not to show his relief at the switch. ‘Emmy. I don’t know her other name. She was a hard piece.’ He found that it was difficult to get the words out.

  ‘Hard in what way, Billy?’

  ‘She knew what went on in the world. She took whatever she could from the rest of us. Gave very little back. As little as she could get away with.’

  ‘I see. And what did she do to survive in the place?’

  He looked up, but found Peach’s face inscrutable. ‘Haven’t you spoken to her?’

  ‘We have, yes. We’d like your opinion.’

  ‘I think she was selling it.’

  ‘On the game, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t mean she was a regular prostitute. She wouldn’t have needed to stay in the squat, if she had been, would she? I mean that she sold it around, when the opportunity came up. I expect that she went on the game when she moved out of the squat. But I don’t know that. She was still there when I left.’

  ‘You’re probably right. We know that a couple of years later the woman you knew as Emmy was running a brothel, organizing her own group of tarts. Do you think she tried to recruit Sunita?’

  ‘Yes. I remember her telling the girl that there was a big demand for Paki women in the town.’

  ‘And do you think that she might have killed her, if she refused to work for her?’

  He shook his head as if trying to clear it. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought so, but she didn’t like it when she didn’t get her own way, Emmy. And I said, she was a hard piece.’

  Lucy nodded slowly and said softly, ‘Yes. If Sunita agreed to operate for her and then didn’t cough up her share of the takings, Emmy wouldn’t have taken kindly to that, would she?’

  Billy grasped at it like a man being offered a lifeline. ‘No. She had a hell of a temper, Em. And if someone had tried to double-cross her, there’s no knowing what she’d have done.’

  They asked him if he could offer them anything else about any of their suspects, then released him, sending him outside to blow a long blast on the whistle and bring in his charges. They caught a last glimpse of Billy Warnock as they drove away, standing motionless with his arms folded in the doorway of the hut and looking after them.

  They were back on the main road to Brunton before Peach said, ‘He learned to deceive early in life, that lad. I wonder if we’ve got everything he knows out of him.’

  Eighteen

  Police undercover work is a specialized and highly dangerous occupation. It requires special skills in acting and deception and an extraordinary level of nerve. No one can be compelled to undertake it. Senior officers think long and hard before putting their colleagues in danger, and are required to make it absolutely clear that anyone undertaking such an assignment has to be a volunteer. Strict regulations ensure that anyone who declines to work under cover will not be penalized for the refusal.

  Undercover work in the illegal drugs trade is the most dangerous operation of all.

  Mike Allen was twenty-eight, a sergeant in the Drugs Squad, which is the most highly trained specialist unit in the British police service. Like almost every officer who opted to take the risks of assuming a false identity, he was single and without any long-term partner. He had been operating under cover for almost four months now.

  Mike had thought he understood what he was taking on when he had volunteered for the assignment. It took him less than a week to appreciate that the dangers were far greater and more continuous than he had anticipated. You were at risk for every hour of the day and every day of the week. Even when you were asleep, you were not safe. People went through your belongings when you were asleep, listened to anything you might mutter in your exhausted rest, heard any revealing words you might blurt out in that dangerous period between sleep and consciousness, when you stirred into life without always being aware of where you were.

  Mike knew that the only solution was to live the part, to become the drop-out and the petty drug-dealer you were supposed to be. After sixteen weeks of tension, he was unshaved, unwashed and unkempt, with the stale smell which drug users, careless of everything but their next fix, carry upon them. He lived rough, shivering through the winter under a couple of thin and filthy blankets, eating little beyond stale bread and beans spooned cold out of tins.

  And Mike hoped that he looked even rougher than he felt. He took a daily intake of coke, though only a quarter of what his new masters thought he was taking. You couldn’t simulate the symptoms of addiction without taking a certain amount of the stuff. He wondered how easily he would be able to kick the habit when all this was over. He had found himself counting the hours to his next snort of the white powder in the last fortnight. They had offered him crack last week, cocaine in rock form, ‘cooked’ with baking powder. That was the most terrifyingly addictive form of coke of all. He had said he could not afford it: at forty pounds a rock, it was too expensive for him.

  That had got things moving. It had been suggested to him that there were ways of paying for his habit without cash changing hands. He knew what that meant: they were considering using him as a dealer. Things were coming to a head. One way or another, his situation was going to be resolved.

  In the darkness of the night, the only time when Mike Allen could collect his thoughts and remember what he had been in the days before he volunteered for this assignment, he often wondered whether he would ever get out of this alive. This was the reality now; that ‘normal’ world outside it, where he had worked with normal people, seemed increasingly a dream-world, a land of lost content which would never be available to him again.

  In these last months, he had joined so often in the ritual condemnations of the police and the law that he was confused: sometimes he felt that this was his real life now, that the obscenities he screamed against the pigs were bitter and heartfelt. He had been warned that it would be like this, that feeling as he did was a sign of success in the role he was playing. But he felt only confusion and danger. And isolation. He wondered how much the regular intake of coke was affecting him.

  Sergeant Allen wondered if when the moment for decision came he would recognize it, or whether he would perish in a cock
-up of his own making.

  You were hamstrung anyway by the police rules: they wanted you to pose as a drug-pusher, without actually pushing drugs. That was the most ridiculous thing of all. If you actually sold drugs to addicts, you would be committing a crime, whatever your reasons for doing it. The lawyers wouldn’t have that: it would compromise the legal case against the men higher up the chain that you were trying to trap if you were enticing them into crime.

  It was all right for the bloody lawyers, sitting smugly in their comfortable, warm, Crown Prosecution offices and making the rules for those who took the risks. Making the rules for a world they did not know and did not want to know; ignoring the dangers of that world because it suited them to do so. Mike Allen could do quite a speech about lawyers, without needing to act at all.

  Normally he was glad when it went dark. He found it easier to be convincing, to play the man he had to be, after nightfall. It seemed the natural setting for this desperate cast-off from society, this piece of flotsam who must float helplessly along currents controlled by stronger criminal men. He was glad that they would be into March tomorrow, with its promise of increasing warmth in the sun. But he found that he resented the increasing daylight, because that seemed to carry the threat of exposure. He was like a mole that operates under the earth and cannot reveal itself in the glare of the day.

  But it might all be over tonight, if things went as he hoped. Even if they didn’t, in fact. He tried not to think of his days here ending in exposure and the squalid death which would inevitably follow that. He had seen enough of the drugs trade and the men who operated it to remove any delusions about survival if things went wrong. Sometimes your body would be found in some anonymous city dumping ground, beneath a motorway flyover or in a disused canal. More often, you would simply disappear, removed from the face of the earth without any sign that you had ever existed upon it.

  He dragged his feet unwillingly through the Manchester streets, moving like a much older man. Now that the moment which would bring release or oblivion was approaching, he was reluctant to move towards it. That impulse for survival, that instinct which means that even the most determined of suicides by water finish by fighting the river with bursting lungs, made him reluctant to move towards this rendezvous with the greatest danger of all.