“But where will you get the money?”
“Borrow it. Print it. This government has borrowed more than any other in history, at the same time as cutting public services harsher than any previous government. Let’s imagine that they are looking after our household bills, okay. They say, ‘we’re spending too much, so we’re going to eat pasta for the next two weeks to balance the books.’ Then, after two weeks, they’ve saved thirty quid on the food shop, so they celebrate by going out and buying a brand-new BMW.”
The presenter laughed. “So, what’s your conclusion Sandra?”
“My conclusion is that they are mentally ill, Jeremy.”
“Okay, well, I’m not sure I agree with your choice of words there, but I think we all understand the point that you’re trying to make.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Miller was sitting in his office. He was watching the Sky News output on his laptop, and the more he listened and watched the presenter’s expert analysis of that morning’s press conference, the more that he realised that the Chief Constable’s words had created an unhealthy conflict of interest as far as this inquiry was concerned.
Sure, the political aspect, the cuts and the damage they were doing was a very important topic. But Miller felt that this had completely skewed the public’s attention away from the very nasty, and very real danger that the attacker posed. Miller was pleased that the army presence was going to make things seem a lot more secure, and it was a very impressive move by the government.
However, the bungled attack that had taken place in Shaw, the previous night was extremely troubling for Miller, as this one, albeit unsuccessful thanks to the IKEA chopping board, had taken place outside a DWP employee’s home. It meant that what Miller had believed to be the random attacks against any old person coming out of a DWP staff door, wasn’t so random after all. The previous evening’s attack brought a disturbing, chilling new angle to the investigation; The attacker knew who he was targeting, and he had even managed to track Stewart Grimley to his home address, and had stalked him as he went to the shops. This new development meant that the army presence could yet prove to be completely futile.
Miller was wound up, not least because he was shattered. He’d only had a few hours sleep, due to the two incidents the previous night. He was also stressed about the Chief Constable chucking a great big diversion into the middle of the inquiry. He decided that he was going to try and put the real story back in the news. The real story was that four innocent people were lay in hospital beds with unthinkable injuries. Injuries which had either maimed, blinded or crippled them. This was the only story in town as far as DCI Andrew Miller was concerned, and he hatched a plan to get it straight back on the news agenda.
“They’ve got Question Time for politics, for fuck’s sake!” said Miller under his breath as he closed the Sky News page and opened up his e-mail folder.
He searched out his favourite reporter from Granada Reports, Mike Johnson, and started writing an e-mail.
“Hi Mike,
Got an exclusive interview with the first attack victim, Kath Palmer, for you. Its lined up for 3pm at Stepping Hill Hospital. It’s yours and yours alone. RSVP.
Cheers
Andy”
Miller clicked send, and smiled as the reply pinged in his inbox within a minute.
“Hi Andy, wow, that’s so good of you. We’ll be there with bells on.
Much appreciated
Mike”
Miller smiled, he loved treating reporters to good exclusives, it had earned him a good reputation amongst many of the local TV and radio reporters. The “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” strategy worked well, and when he was in a tight-spot, such as this one, Miller could guarantee himself some valuable air-time, at the same time as making the local reporter famous on the national stage for a few hours. Now all he had to do was check that it was okay with Kath Palmer.
Miller rang the High-Dependency-Unit at Stepping Hill. He asked the Ward Sister if it was okay to bring down a TV crew to interview Kath, at 3pm. The Sister agreed, and so Miller asked her to check that this was going to be okay with Kath. A few minutes later, the sister was back, and confirmed that the interview could go ahead.
“Brilliant! Cheers. I’ll see you soon.”
*****
The SCIU team was currently swelled to its highest capacity since it had been formed a decade earlier. Usually, the Serious Crimes Investigation Unit gets by with around seven or eight detectives. But in recent years, since the police cuts that the Chief Constable had publicised so well, the SCIU had been scraping by with the bare minimum of five operational detectives, under the leadership of DCI Miller. However, this was not an ordinary enquiry, and the SCIU had gone from famine to feast, with almost 50 operational police officers drafted in, working on a variety of different tasks. The complexity of this inquiry demanded a number of separate enquiries, all rolled into one. DI Saunders was co-ordinating the team leaders of each group.
The key lines of enquiry were written on the incident room wall. Each team consisted of around six to ten people, and each team leader was a member of the SCIU’s full time staff.
Rudovsky was leading the biggest group. There were ten officers involved with her task, which was to contact all of the DWP offices in the area, and learn about the noisiest customers. She instructed her team to quiz as many front-of-house staff as they could, and ask them all to talk about any customers who made a fuss whenever they came in. By that, she meant the loud-mouths, the gob-shites, the kind of people that they couldn’t wait to get rid of as soon as they walked in the door. But it wasn’t just aggressive or noisy customers that they wanted the names of. They were also looking for names of anybody who regularly expressed any political thoughts during their visits to the DWP front counters. There were certainly plenty of names coming up, and the task of eliminating all of these people was going to require plenty more police officers involvement if it was to be completed in a timely fashion.
Chapman was overseeing a rather more serious, but equally time-consuming task of reviewing all of the appeals that had been rejected over the previous two-year period. It was assumed that the perpetrator of the attacks was a local man, based on the fact that the attacks had all taken place within the Greater Manchester region, and there was clear evidence that the attacker knows his way around the places where he had struck. The appeals that Chapman’s team had to review, were in respect to benefits being stopped in the Greater Manchester area. It was hoped that within this list of people, was the name
of the attacker. This was a mammoth job, as the DWP computer suggested that over 36,000 benefits claimants had had their payments stopped for one reason or another over the previous 24-month period. Chapman was stunned, as were the rest of his team of eight officers who would have to sift through the database, and build a new list of potential suspects. The method which was being used was quite rudimentary, and required lots of “common-sense” decisions to eliminate the genuine, perfectly legitimate cases of benefit stoppages, and those which were obviously petty. There was a hell of a lot of people included in this list who’d had their money stopped for the correct reasons. One typical example was a “single-mum” who had forgotten to “declare” that her boyfriend, who earns over thirty-grand a year, was living in the home and that she wasn’t a single mum at all, but she was in fact, just taking the piss. There were also thousands who had been caught working, whilst claiming to be unfit for work. But in amongst the genuine ones, there were plenty of examples that Chapman’s team were looking for. One man had his benefits stopped for three months because he hadn’t applied for enough jobs that week. His defence, which was ignored, was that he’d been in hospital after being run-over by a car. He had his money stopped for three months, and was definitely a contender for Chapman’s list of potential suspects.
Worthington and his team were looking over the various CCTV footage clips that had been collected at each attack, and were investigating
potential new sources of CCTV coverage by mapping the attackers escape route from each incident, and building a picture of where he eventually went to. The work was frustrating, and involved many hours of going into nearby shops and businesses, explaining what they were doing, and then checking CCTV sources for the time leading up to, and following each attack. It was frustrating, because nine times out of ten, there was absolutely nothing. But Worthington kept his group focused, and positive, by promising them that there was a full face shot on a CCTV camera somewhere. It was just a case of finding it. And that’s what kept them all at it, the prospect of finding footage of the attacker reaching his car, and seeing the reg plate, or catching a glimpse of him with his hood down, and with the scarf taken away from his face. It would be case closed within seconds of finding this elusive footage.
Kenyon’s task was door-to-doors and witness interviews. He was overseeing the small team of support officers who were going back to the witnesses, and starting the whole interview process again, in the hope that they would have remembered something that could be useful in trying to find out who was behind these shocking crimes.
The team’s newest member, DC Helen Grant, had been put in charge of the team who were researching Facebook, Twitter and Blog posts about the benefits cuts. There were literally millions of comments and posts about the various sanctions and benefit suspensions, the decisions to declare people fit for work, even when they were in a hospice, dying. There was a bottom-less pit of Blog posts dedicated to the topic, written by people who were absolutely horrified by the situation that they were seeing. The blog-posts ranged in quality, from exceedingly good, well-written, balanced articles, to angry rants that didn’t really manage to get the intended message across. But regardless of the quality, there was a never-ending ocean of them out there, and Grant’s task was to find out who was out there, what they thought they would achieve by slagging off the government, and ultimately, whether they were capable of carrying out these attacks themselves. The team were concentrating exclusively in the local area, investigating the people who were publishing regular posts, and regularly making anti-DWP comments on Facebook and Twitter. It was felt, amongst everybody in this team of nine, that the attacker would have started this campaign of hate on the internet, before actually taking it on to this disturbing stage.
Saunders and Miller were overseeing the various team-leaders progress, and offering support as and where needed. Saunders was also running a very small team of four, who were tasked with building a database of all the DWP staff who have been sacked, or disciplined, or made redundant in the past five years. This database was also looking at all DWP employees who had raised any kind of grievance since 2010, when the persecution tactics were first introduced. From that database, it was hoped that any ex or current employees with an axe to grind about the “benefit reforms” would quickly be identified. This small team was working in tandem with a much bigger team at the DWP, who had been put on this task as a matter of urgency.
The mood was very positive, and all of the DC’s who were running their own little teams were sure that they would figure this puzzle out very, very soon. The added advantage was that every single one of the fifty additional officers wanted to be the one who cracked the case, and would hopefully be rewarded with a full-time placement in the SCIU. With this thought in all of the temp officer’s minds, the mood in the SCIU office was competitive, focused and way more professional than usual. This case was going to be closed very soon, everybody was determined about it.
*****
“Hello, pleased to meet you.” Mike Johnson had a well-known face in the north-west area, he was on the region’s TV news most nights of the week. Kath Palmer seemed genuinely happy to see him, despite the look of pain and misery on her face.
“Hi,” she said. There was a permanent moisture in her eyes, it looked as though she was crying, constantly. Mike Johnson felt an overwhelming sadness for this lady. She looked so nice, but so sad and she was clearly in a great deal of pain and anguish. It was a stark reminder to the experienced news reporter, that this story was very, very dark, and the implications for those affected were catastrophic.
“I really need the man who did this to Kath in the back of a police van as soon as possible, Mike. That’s why I’ve asked you here. This crap that the Chief Constable started spouting today is not helping me to catch the bastard that did this to Kath.”
The tear finally rolled down Kath’s cheek. She looked so depressed, she genuinely looked as though she’d had enough. Miller handed Mike a photograph of Kath, taken just a couple of months earlier, when she’d taken her Grandchildren to Center Parcs in Penrith for their summer holidays. She was happy, beaming, full of the joys of life. And now, that light in her eyes was gone.
“Don’t worry DCI Miller, I will make sure this interview will put the criminal investigation back in the spotlight.”
“Cheers. I just want people to see with their own eyes, what this bastard has done.”
Another tear rolled down Kath’s cheek, as she stared up at the ceiling.
*****
By tea-time, the press had made such a fuss of Sir Stephen Foster’s lambasting attack against the current state of affairs in the UK, that the PM had no alternative but to come out of Number 10, and defend the government’s record. There were more than a hundred press representatives crammed on the pavement, all of them were eager to hear what the British Prime Minister made of the Chief Constable’s remarks.
But it was quite clear from the off that the PM was playing this another way.
“Good afternoon. Our country is currently in a state of deep shock. We are proud that we live in a peaceful, law-abiding country which is the envy of the world. Great Britain is a wonderful place to live, work and play. But it goes against everything that we stand for, when one individual decides to attack the very people who help to make this country so special. I am appealing to every person in this great country, to stand together, and show this cowardly attacker that we will not be beaten. We will not be bullied. We will not succumb to violence.”
The PM stared straight down the lens of the BBC News camera.
“These are dark days for our country, unquestionably, but by standing united, we can overcome the darkness. I would just like to thank the police officers in Manchester for the valuable work that they do, and congratulate them on the professional manner in which they conduct themselves. The man responsible for these abhorrent crimes will soon be arrested, and it will be thanks to those officers, who put their lives on the line every day, to protect you, the British public. Soon, once our fine police officers have detained this wicked, cowardly individual, every person in this great country will know that this type of barbaric behaviour will not be tolerated in our society.”
There was restlessness amongst the press pack. They could see that this was a statement filled with waffle, and no real substance regarding the Chief Constable’s scathing attack.
“I would like to offer my sincere sympathies to those who have been harmed so violently, and I give my word to all Department for Works and Pensions employees, we are doing everything we can to protect you. And that won’t stop, until this is over. Finally, in response to the Chief Constable of Manchester, Sir Stephen Foster’s comments earlier today. I would just like to say that neither I, nor my cabinet, recognise the picture of Great Britain that Sir Stephen paints. I will be calling for an urgent meeting with him to fully try to understand the concerns that he has, and at that meeting, I will also explain that by working together, by remaining united, we can, and we will, succeed. Thank you.”
*****
“Holy smoke! What on earth was that supposed to mean?” PC Steve Mosby was sitting in the police van with his colleague PC Joan Williams. They’d been listening to the PM’s statement on the radio, while enjoying a doughnut.
“Well, I’m no expert. But in a nutshell, to me it sounded as though the Prime Minister told the Chief to shut up, denied that the problems exis
t, and then said that he’s being called in for a serious bollocking.”
“Shit.”
“Well, that’s how I heard it, anyway.”
“Do you think he’ll get the sack?”
“Dunno.”
“It was nice for us to get a mention though, eh?”
“Yeah, lovely. It’s a load of hot air though, isn’t it? I mean, I’d prefer a pay rise in line with inflation to be honest. Thank me with a decent bloody pay-packet. Truck drivers earn more than us!”
“I know.”
“How do they justify that? How do they justify that in our jobs, we run after burglars, split up fights, tackle people with knives, deal with rapists, murderers, junkies, paedos, drunks and yobbos all day long. And we earn less than a wagon driver who sits down looking out of a window all day. It makes me sick.”
“Chefs are on better money than us.”
“The people who work for the DWP earn more than our starting salary. A personal advisor in the Jobcentre takes home twenty-eight grand.”
“Fucking hell. Twenty-eight grand just to stop people’s benefits and do their heads in. I might apply!”
“Nah, you’re too nice. You wouldn’t be able to send someone off home with no money for three months, just because they didn’t write down their job search paper work neatly enough.”
“Nah, you’re right. You’d have to be a special kind of person to do that, and sleep well at night.”
“You’d let them all come and live in your house with you!”
“Ha ha, I wouldn’t go that far Joan!”
The two PCs listened to the radio for a minute, as the broadcasters tried to make sense of the PM’s statement. After a while, PC Steve Mosby spoke again.
“So, everything the Chief said, about the state of policing, the state of the country, is just being denied?”
The Final Cut Page 19
