Persons of Interest

by Peter Grainger

  But someone had married Terry Christopher – further proof, if any was needed, that it’s a funny old world that takes all sorts. He looked a nervous chap, too, even though Smith had been more than friendly – perhaps he could have a word with him over the coffee – which was coming up soon, according to the plan of the morning that was up on the screen. Smith didn’t like the look of the final session - ‘Targeted small group discussion and final feedback’. A plan B began to form – instead of socializing with RSCU – he winced again – he could use the twenty minutes back at his desk to take a first proper look at Mr Everett. There were several other ideas still floating around from when he had thought about it last night as well, and he could start making a list of people that it might be worth looking up in Lake – it had been a while since he did the rounds of his acquaintances. It was entirely possible that he would get so involved in this that he would not make it back to the meeting.

  His mistake was in trying get a cup of coffee to take with him. Alison Reeve had found him as he left the queue, and taken him to one side.

  ‘I’ve just had an email from Superintendent Allen – basically, he says you’re to carry on as normal.’

  ‘Oh, good. So you don’t want my badge and my gun...’

  ‘No. You weren’t intending to leave just now, were you?’

  ‘Are we talking about the room or the force?’

  ‘The room. You seemed to have your eye on the door as soon as you got that coffee. It’s only a twenty minute break, five of which have already gone.’

  Smith pulled a face before he took the first sip; meeting room coffee was remarkably predictable.

  ‘I just thought I’d nip down and log on – so that I can make a flying start on this drugs thing. There’s no time to lose, ma’am. Assistant Commissioner-’

  ‘I checked over Everett’s records twice on Saturday while you were out enjoying the sunshine. There is nothing local to us. If he ever even came here, he didn’t commit any offences.’

  ‘That we know of... But, to be honest, I feel a sort of connection with him now, after they found my old number in his cell. I feel that I owe it to him to make the effort. I mean, you’d be a bit curious if they’d found your number there, wouldn’t you?’

  She was walking back into the centre of the meeting room and he had no choice but to follow – logging on would have to wait.

  ‘Yes, of course, and I’ve no doubt that you will have to ‘look into it’. But not now. Before that you have an important job in here, DC.’

  He had had a bad feeling about that final session all morning.

  ‘We’ve been asked to sort people out into small discussion groups. There is a structured list of points to be addressed, and the sergeant in charge of each group will then feed back at the end of the session. The best thing is, Superintendent Allen says, it will be an excellent bonding opportunity if the sergeants do not work with their own regular teams. Here is your list.’

  He took it as if it was an instruction to have all officers born on even dates shot the following dawn.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am. I’m not surprised, though. I’d sort of guessed he was into that sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘You know...’ with a nudge towards the leader of men in question. ‘ The old bonding, and what-not.’

  ‘I’m glad that your visit to the Velvet Club has opened your mind to new possibilities, DC.’ She nodded down at the list in his hand, which he had yet to read. ‘And don’t forget to take notes before you report back. Some of your biggest fans are in the room, and you don’t want to let them down.’

  He looked at the list. It was about as predictable as the coffee had been.

  So O’Leary was no surprise. Alison Reeve would have had a hand in drawing up the list of teams for the morning, and she was not above putting O’Leary into Smith’s team for a joke – but it would also be a practical joke, practical in the sense that she would have a serious objective. The tension that had existed last year between Smith’s and Wilson’s teams was no longer visible on the surface, and day-to-day life was almost harmonious at times, but it still lay buried, a dormant virus likely to break out if stress levels peaked again. As a manager, Reeve could not let that rest, and Smith respected that; his own approach would have involved locking the key players in an interview room until everything had been said that needed to be, followed by a metaphorical shaking of hands, but everyone has to do these things in their own way. During the investigation into James Bell’s death, Reeve had tried placing O’Leary under Smith’s command for a day or two and it had not worked – now she was trying something different. She deserved an A for effort.

  The other three detective constables who sat around the table with him were new faces: Steven Brazil and Clive Betts were from Norwich, and George Sadler was from Longmarsh. Smith had asked Sadler why Paul Harrington had not been sent, only to be told that the former Kings Lake detective had announced that he would resign rather than return to that den of iniquity. Sadler said it with a straight face but there was amusement behind it, and Smith knew that Sadler knew exactly who he was talking to. Smith said, ‘Well, someone has to make sure they’re not picking under-sized cockles out on the marsh,’ and Sadler had said then, ‘But he sends his regards to you.’

  Smith looked around at the other teams – there were nine or ten in all. He could see the other members of his own squad – Waters was back with Wilson, John Murray was with Helen Walker, and Serena Butler was with an all-female group led by Denise Sterling, an experienced sergeant from Yarmouth.

  He said to Sadler, ‘You must know Serena as well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A pause then, and Smith looked more directly at the man from Longmarsh.

  ‘Yes, I do. How’s she doing?’

  ‘Well. She’s made a really good start here.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it. She deserves a break after what they...’

  Sadler looked back at Smith then, to see if he needed to explain further, and could see that he did not.

  They ought to make a start – some of the other groups had done so. But he took one more look around for Mike Dunn, and found him this time in a group led by Patrick Chambers. Chambers was laughing and the others with him were smiling; it looked like the happiest team in the room and if Detective Superintendent Allen was watching, if he hadn’t already had to leave the room on no doubt urgent business, he would have been gratified to see such bonding taking place. The fact that Chambers was almost always laughing, at any time of the day and at any stage of an investigation, would have been neither here nor there.

  Smith picked up the sheet.

  ‘Right. We’re going to start with “Sharing our perceptions of the issues raised by the sale and use a of illegal substances in areas of the county known to us. Steven, over to you. Share a perception with us.”

  ‘Actually, sir, I’m not sure what that means.’

  ‘Oh. Well it all sounds pretty simple to me, and I’m sure to the rest of us. Clive, explain it to Steve, would you?’

  ‘Er... Could you say it again slowly, sir. I didn’t quite get the bit about ‘issues raised by.’’

  Smith read it again, and the group fell silent as they thought about it. Other groups seemed to be noisy, and he could see the sergeants busily making notes for their feedback.

  He said, ‘I reckon it means “Do you think drugs are a problem on your patch?” George – what about out at Longmarsh?’

  Sadler was looking too serious, too thoughtful for his own good, and Smith thought, he’s already spent too much time with Harrington – I know what’s coming here.

  Eventually Sadler said, ‘Well, sir, we’ve got this old boy, a sort of old hippy really, down at the harbour. He sits there all day smoking a pipe and staring out to sea a lot...’

  Smith nodded.

  ‘Yes, that’s the sort of thing we’re after. That’s the top of the slippery slope. Let’s move on to point two – “Talk about a
ny initiatives of which you are aware in your own division, and analyse their successes and failures”. This, of course, is much more straightforward than talking about initiatives of which we are not aware. George, what have you tried with this old boy down at the harbour ? Have you given him any of those leaflets?’

  Sadler was going to give him another straight-faced answer and the other two newcomers were smiling now. O’Leary had withdrawn into his usual silence and Smith left him alone. Smith knew that it was all his own fault – he had led them astray – but if they tried to take this seriously, the morning would last even longer than it was already going to do. O’Leary would report back and it might lead to words, but Dear God, spare us all this nonsense. He was wondering what time Warder Ward came on duty.

  Chapter Four

  As Smith began to read Everett’s file that afternoon, he realized that O’Leary’s presence in his group earlier in the day had at least given him one idea. The mobile number that he had used up to the September of last year had been known to whichever branch of the security services had involved itself in the investigation into the death of Wayne Fletcher and the doings of Captain Jonathan Hamilton – it was not inconceivable, then, that it was from that source that the number had found its way into the prison cell that was to have been Lucky Everett’s abode for the next eighteen months. It was patently absurd, of course, that there could be any operational connection between someone like Dominic Fox and the small-time car-thief-come-diesel-liberator but not quite so absurd that someone in the back corridors of power had it in for Smith, and Hamilton himself, though possibly dead by now, had never been located.

  But that would mean that ‘someone’ had had a hand in Everett’s death – unless they had given the policeman’s number to scores of criminals in the hope that eventually one of them would implicate him in something unfortunate. It really was absurd, to the point of paranoia, and he had a brief moment during which he had to look away from the screen, eat two Rich Tea biscuits from the packet on Serena Butler’s desk and give himself a short talking to. Because Lionel Lucky Everett really was small-time. It was a familiar enough story – the silly-boy warnings when he was a teenager, followed by minor misdemeanours followed by minor convictions, the magistrates becoming gradually – too gradually, of course – more annoyed as the young man made it clear that he was no longer following in the footsteps of James Dean but that he had chosen his cause, his career, and it was to be a professional criminal. Just as there are professional athletes who always come last, there are professional criminals who always get caught, and Lucky was one of those; Smith rather hoped that someone had noticed this early on and awarded him his nickname with proper British irony.

  The list of offences was a long one, and Smith braced himself for a depressing read. He began at the beginning and painstakingly noted dates and places, even for all the ‘taken into account’ offences each time Everett was convicted – in that respect the man had been quite tidy, obviously wanting to come out of the court or the prison with a clean sheet before he went to work again. But there was nothing to connect Everett to him or him to Everett. The man had spent his life in the Cambridge area, living mostly in fenland villages, which made perfect sense if one is serious about stealing agricultural diesel in order to resell it to unscrupulous motorists – a simple tax-avoidance scheme that does not involve the expense or the complications of opening a Swiss bank account. Lucky had been quite organized in his own way; the later cases against him showed that he had his own company vehicles – two vans adapted to carry fuel tanks in the back, and some proper electric pumps to get the red gold into them nice and quietly in the middle of the night. In addition to his main business, the occasional suspect vehicle passed through Everett’s hands, along with the usual insurance, tax and MOT issues – lots of these offences had been left lying on the files, and with his passing those files could finally be closed.

  Not a name, not a place, not a date – there was no sign that the professional paths of Smith and Lionel Everett had ever crossed. Someone at Huntingdon had already been through all this and come to the same conclusion: it was odd but the presence of the phone number in that cell seemed to have no bearing on what had happened to the prisoner in the wash-room on the first landing of A wing last Friday night. It’s like a Venn diagram, Smith thought, the worlds of criminals and those who pursue them intersecting in all sorts of ways, some obvious and some not – at some point in space and time, presumably at least several months ago, something must have linked the lives of a detective sergeant and Prisoner LH 7008, but that point was, as yet, invisible.

  Finally, he turned back to the photographs – plural because Everett had been processed a number of times over the years. In the last one, the most recent, he looked back into the camera as if he was a little tired of this now, and he was showing his age, the hair thinning, bags under the eyes. Smith thought, well, you should have put a bit more into the pension scheme, Lucky, and then you could have retired... like I haven’t. But again there was no recognition, and Smith trusted his memory where faces were concerned. He had never met this man.

  He closed the screen, sat back and looked around, aware that everyone had returned after lunch. This afternoon they had to organize themselves for the new initiative which wasn’t really an initiative at all but a case; he wondered when the management would come out and say so, and he wondered which of the other experienced people had already realized it as well. Kings Lake had been divided geographically into sectors and each sergeant’s team would take one of those, focusing closely on the drug-related activity in it for the next two weeks. Detectives were to work in pairs, and there would be progress reports each Wednesday and Friday so that any issues which clearly crossed the sector boundaries could be addressed by senior officers. Further up the food chain there would be meetings organized by RSCU looking for patterns of activity across the county. As an intelligence-gathering exercise, it would not be a complete waste of time and they had been told to keep the paperwork to a minimum in the early stages, but Smith did wonder about what would actually be done over the next fourteen days – time out in the field was welcome, yes, but how many officers were still capable of sitting in cars, watching the streets, talking to sources and generally just being out there all day as opposed to in here? Well, we will find out.

  As a team, they were still a man or a woman short. Smith had indicated that he would be happy to have Mike Dunn transferred to him permanently but this had not come about; even though the detective constable himself was willing, the politics meant that it was probably viewed as less troublesome to keep Dunn where he was and to keep Detective Sergeant Wilson happy. In that case, the one combination that Smith could not have was for John Murray and himself to work together on this – they had the local knowledge that was needed, and the other two did not, though Waters was getting there with it. Serena Butler was still relatively new to the area or to most aspects of it; she had shown a lively interest in the seamier side of life in Lake, as he never failed to point out to her, but it was unlikely that they would be making a return visit to The Velvet Club during the course of this latest investigation. He would put her with Murray and Waters with himself.

  Chris Waters had been on the streets of Kings Lake for nine months now and he felt that he knew them like the back of his proverbial hand. In another three months, this phase of his accelerated development programme would come to an end, and there would be decisions to make. The programme was flexible in the sense that he could leave it but not so flexible that he could get back onto it if he changed his mind. He had, to use Smith’s own words, “made himself useful” here and there were clear indications that there might be a position for him as a detective should he want it, but the programme’s demands meant that he would need to move on to another station and probably to another branch of police work in order to broaden his experience. He could find himself anywhere in the country at short notice as long as he was on the programme – and there was Cla
re to think about as well. He hadn’t exactly put down roots and she had said that his career must come first, that they would find a way to keep their relationship going, but Waters already had a sense of how difficult it was for many officers to balance their private and professional lives. He only had to look around him.

  ‘So I thought we could at this point ask Waters to demonstrate how the use of an iPhone can make these inquiries more effective and probably more fun at the same time.’

  All three faces turned towards him, two of them smiling, the other looking serious and expectant – the young detective’s reputation for day-dreaming was now well-established.

  Smith continued, ‘I mean, is there an app for this? Someone must have invented a routine surveillance app for over-worked DCs by now. So that we could just point the phone at the street and it would record all the criminal activity, and because it was linked to the national databases, it would even name all the people involved, and we could just touch-screen them and get their full histories...’

  Smith seemed to go off into a daydream of his own at that point, carried away by his own vision of policing in the future.

  Waters said, ‘Well, actually, that’s not as mad as it sounds. They’re developing apps for birdwatchers that will work in that way – show the phone the bird and it will identify it. So I suppose you could do something similar with people who have a criminal record.’

  Smith looked faintly aghast.

  ‘So you would just wander about the countryside, pointing the phone at birds and it would do everything for you?’

  ‘Yes. And GPS means that the record could be automatically added to a database, you wouldn’t even have to write anything down.’

  ‘And then, once you’ve attached it to a drone, you wouldn’t even have to leave the building.’