by Linda Regan
Uniformed police moved in, some holding stun-guns.
Dawes didn’t take the bait. ‘Your other mates. Michael Delahaye and Dwayne Ripley.’
‘No idea.’
Dawes and Scrap Mitchell held each other’s gaze and the dogs growled. Mitchell smiled sarcastically, and Dawes resisted the urge to lean over and punch him between the eyes.
‘Go and lock your dogs away. I need you to come to the station and answer a few questions,’ he said flatly. He had no grounds to arrest Mitchell; his DNA wasn’t on the murdered woman. He was there to bring in Boot and Mince, but he knew if Scrap agreed to come, the other two wouldn’t be far behind.
‘What about?’ Mitchell raised his eyebrows. ‘You ain’t got nothing on me.’
‘You’re right,’ Dawes answered. ‘You’re not under arrest.’
‘Confiscate the dogs,’ Hank Peacock said.
Dawes clenched his teeth. He was playing Scrap, to get him to lead the way to Dwayne Ripley and Michael Delahaye. This young trainee DC had just blown it by riling the boy.
‘Mind your own fucking business,’ Mitchell snapped at Peacock.
Peacock flashed his warrant card. ‘I’ve been watching you for the last hour. Those dogs are dangerous.’
‘They ain’t touched you,’ Mitchell shouted. ‘You can’t fucking take my dogs unless they do something. You back off.’
Dawes interrupted. ‘I’d like you to come to the station of your own accord, and answer a few questions,’ he said. ‘You haven’t done anything, so it won’t take long. It’s just procedure.’
‘What for?’
‘The youths we want to question about last night’s murder were wearing sweatshirts with BB on the back. I notice you’ve got the same tattoo on your forearms. We’d like you to give us a DNA sample, so we can eliminate you.’
‘And we’ll overlook the charge of the dogs being a public nuisance,’ Peacock added.
Dawes took a sharp breath. Peacock had a lot to learn. He ignored him, and looked at Scrap, waiting for an answer.
Peacock spoke again. ‘We’re only interested in finding out who killed Haley Gulati. If you didn’t, keep the boss happy and give us the DNA.’
Scrap ignored him and looked at Dawes. ‘Which boss is that?’
‘DI Johnson.’
‘The one with her nose on top of her head?’ Scrap asked. Now he did look at Peacock. ‘Rumour has it she takes it up the arse.’
Peacock took a step towards Scrap, and jumped back as the one of the dogs growled. Dawes thought Peacock actually was going to hit the lad, but at that moment two ambulances screeched into the estate.
NINE
The address Stephanie had been given for Jason Young was his grandmother’s third floor flat. She and Georgia stood outside, blowing on icy fingers to warm them. Someone was moving around inside, but Stephanie had to bang a second time before the door finally opened.
When Sally Young’s face peeped out, Georgia was appalled to the see a worm of dark red coagulated blood clinging to red, puffy skin over one eyebrow. The woman’s eyelid was half shut, and the sliver of grey eye it revealed was bloodshot. Her mouth was swollen and distorted, as if a trout-pout job had gone very wrong indeed.
Georgia’s first thought was that Jason Young had set about his grandmother. Then she noticed teeth marks in the fingers that clung to the door frame. More likely the Brotherhood had learned that Jason was out of prison, and Sally had born the brunt of their displeasure.
‘It’s your grandson we’re after,’ Stephanie said.
‘He ain’t here,’ Sally replied. She sounded completely exhausted.
‘Where is he?’ Georgia asked.
‘I don’t know,’ came the weary answer.
‘What happened to your face?’ Georgia put out a hand, but Sally pulled away.
‘Look, I’ve had a bad morning, right? I’m on my way to Casualty. I need a tetanus.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know where the boy is. All I do know is ’e ain’t ’ere.’
She tried to push the door closed, but Georgia blocked it with her foot.
‘What happened to your face?’ she asked her again.
‘Someone don’t like my grandson, and took it out on me.’
‘Do you want to make it official?’
‘No. I just want to get down to Casualty and get myself a tetanus jab, and then forget this ever happened.’ She tried to close the door again, but Georgia’s foot still prevented her.
‘Mind if we take a look around inside?’ Stephanie asked.
‘Got a warrant, have ya?’
‘We can get one.’
Sally shrugged and stood aside. ‘Make it quick. I’ve got one hell of an ’ead on me.’
Georgia took the lounge and Stephanie the kitchen. Sally followed Georgia, watching her check behind the settee, lift the cushions and open the drawers in the cheap teak-effect sideboard.
‘He ain’t here, I’ve already told you . . .’
‘Guv.’ Stephanie stood in the doorway. ‘I assume this isn’t yours,’ she said to Sally, holding out a bloodstained grey sweatshirt. ‘I found it behind the washing machine.’
Sally put a hand over her bad eye. ‘It is mine,’ she said defiantly. ‘It’s my blood. From the injuries what I got this morning.’ Her voice rose. ‘Look, you can bloody see I’ve been set on. It’s mine, and it’s my blood.’
Stephanie pulled a large evidence bag from her pocket and dropped the sweatshirt inside. ‘We’ll need forensic confirmation of that,’ she told her.
‘What are you doing? Setting him up? Is that what this is?’
Georgia spoke patiently. ‘Mrs Young, we need to speak to your grandson in connection with a brutal murder that took place last night on the Aviary estate. We have evidence that puts him at the scene of the crime. If you know where he is, you need to tell us. Our forensic lab will confirm whose blood is on that sweatshirt in a few hours.’
Forty-eight, if they were lucky. But Sally Young needn’t know that. ‘If it turns out it isn’t your blood, or indeed your sweatshirt, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that obstructing a murder enquiry is a very serious offence. I suggest you tell us what you know, for your own sake as well as your grandson’s.’
‘Look, ’e’s not guilty, all right?’ Sally’s voice cracked with emotion. ‘My Jason served ’is time, and ’e’s turned over a new leaf. It’s that fat bastard Stuart Reilly what you wanna be questioning. My Jason’s turned good. Why can’t you just let him be?’
‘Why has he gone on the run, then?’ Georgia asked flatly.
‘He ain’t.’
‘You just said you don’t know where he is.’
‘He’s gone up west. He’s got a dancing scholarship, but I don’t know where.’
Georgia and Stephanie exchanged looks.
‘Been knocking you about, has he?’ Stephanie asked.
Sally shook her head, wincing with pain.
‘He’s got form for violence, you know that as well as we do,’ Stephanie pushed. ‘Don’t make trouble for yourself by covering for him.’
‘My Jase’d never ’urt me,’ Sally declared. ‘And ’e’s killed nobody. It’s them bleedin’ no good Brotherhood scum.’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘They’re looking for ’im too. But he’s done his time, he’s . . .’
‘Where is he, Sally?’ Georgia’s patience was wearing thin.
‘I told yer, I don’t know. Time you went now. I wanna get myself to Casualty.’
‘Where’s your phone?’ Stephanie asked.
Sally looked at her. ‘Kitchen table, in me bag. Ain’t you got one of your own?’
Stephanie went back to the kitchen; Sally and Georgia followed. Stephanie found the phone and scrolled the recent call history. The letter J came up four times.
Stephanie pressed the Call button and handed Sally the phone. ‘Ask him where he is.’
Sally shook her head sadly, but took the phone. Jason’s voicemail picked up and told the caller to leave a message.
Stephanie took out her notebook and wrote down Jason’s phone number.
‘We will find him,’ Georgia said to Sally. ‘If he hasn’t done anything, you need to help him prove it.’
‘’E ain’t,’ Sally said again.
She was nothing if not loyal, Georgia thought. ‘I’m going to get one our drivers to take you to Casualty to get you looked over,’ she said. ‘Then I need you to come to the station to give us a statement.’
Sally looked horrified. ‘I ain’t going nowhere in no cop’s car.’
‘We’ll need a statement from you about your grandson’s movements last night,’ Georgia told her. ‘And I’d prefer you were checked over and got your tetanus jab first. It’ll be an unmarked car; no one around here will know. But I have to insist.’
‘Oh, they’ll know.’ Sally shrugged. ‘Can we go out the back way then?’
Stephanie went down to arrange Sally Young’s ride, and a few minutes later Georgia shut the car door and tapped the roof to send it off to the hospital.
‘TIU will have a trace on Jason’s phone within the hour,’ Stephanie told her as the car drove off.
‘Good. We’ll get Sally Young to give us his comings and goings last night.’
‘I don’t think she’ll tell us much,’ Stephanie said. ‘If I’ve read her right, she’ll protect him with her life. Then again, she has no previous. I don’t know if she’d lie to keep him out of trouble.’
‘Better get the sweatshirt to forensics ASAP,’ Georgia told her as they made their way back to Steph’s car. ‘See if the blood is Sally’s or Haley Gulati’s.’
‘You don’t think Sally Young killed her?’
‘No. What I do think is that with luck we’ll have Jason Young back behind bars within a day.’
‘Hardly worth letting him out,’ Stephanie sneered.
Hank Peacock and David Dawes rushed up thirteen flights of stairs, leaving the lift for the paramedics. They arrived to find Chantelle being strapped to a stretcher. Her eyelids fluttered as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Two uniformed police officers escorted the paramedics.
David Dawes flashed his warrant card at the paramedics and leaned over the stretcher. ‘Chantelle, tell me who did this,’ he urged gently, his mouth close to her ear. ‘Was it Jason Young?’
The larger of the two paramedics intervened. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I realize you’ve got a job to do, but this is an emergency and I’m going to have to ask you stay back. You’re welcome to follow us to the hospital.’
Dawes stood up and nodded assent. It was clear Chantelle was in no fit state to tell them anything. He turned to the uniformed officers. ‘Did anyone see what happened?’
The paramedic spoke again. ‘We were told three women have been attacked. The one that called us has an arm injury, but she ran off to look for the third.’
Dawes’s concern turned to anger. ‘Weren’t you told to keep an eye on these women?’ he growled at the uniforms on the walkway.
‘Sir, we’re all working flat out. We were told to go looking for the knife,’ a young female constable with glasses answered. ‘We were a couple of floors down, at the other end of the building. We came running when we heard screaming. The other girl ran straight into us. She was holding her arm and shouting that they had been attacked, and she asked us to help her friend. She had to find her sister, she said.’
‘Who attacked them?’ Dawes asked.
‘She didn’t say, and we didn’t see anyone approaching or leaving. We came as soon as we heard the screaming.’ The young officer was clearly upset. ‘The girl said she needed to go to the hospital, but she had to find her sister first, in case she got hurt again. We called it in, and back-up was here within seconds, but no one on the estate admits to seeing the attackers.’
Dawes punched Georgia’s number into his mobile. He updated her, and told her he was still looking for Boot Ripley and Mince Delahaye. ‘I’ll send a couple of uniforms to the hospital to be there when Chantelle comes round,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I’ve asked Scrap Mitchell to come to the station and give a DNA sample, but I’m not holding my breath.’
Georgia told him about Reilly’s release. ‘Looks like Chantelle lied to get Reilly arrested. This attack is more than likely retribution.
‘It’s looking more and more as if it was Jason Young who stabbed Haley Gulati,’ she went on. ‘We’re running a trace on his mobile phone, and his description’s been circulated.’
Dawes leaned against the graffiti-covered brick wall of the flats. ‘Reilly will be going after Jason Young too,’ he reminded her.
‘His gang has already had a go at Sally Young. She looks as if she’s gone ten rounds with Joe Calzaghe.’
He sighed gloomily. ‘Maybe we should leave them to kill each other, and save ourselves the bother.’
‘I’d rather get a proper result,’ came the curt reply.
He answered with a flat, ‘Of course,’ wondering how Georgia would feel if someone she loved had died at the hands of a money-grabbing drug baron. Would she still want to stay within the law and bring them to court, only to watch a bent solicitor get them off?
Jason had found a spare patch of pavement under the south side of Waterloo Bridge. He hoped it didn’t belong to one of the vagrants who lived down here. He didn’t want to start any trouble, but he did need a safe place to sleep. Soon the postcode gangs would be out; Saturday evening they always patrolled their territories. He could look after himself, but didn’t want to take on a full tribe of them.
He hadn’t slept last night and was feeling pretty shattered, so he wanted to get a few hours’ sleep this afternoon, then walk on through the night. He’d be safer that way, especially if there were gangs about. Tomorrow he would be a day nearer to being with Chantelle. He planned to knock at the stage school. He would have to hope the woman who owned the gaff was around on a Sunday. He liked her; she had helped him before, filled in the application form for him when he told her he couldn’t write properly. He’d been well embarrassed, but she’d said that with talent like his, writing wasn’t important. He might ask if there was somewhere he could have a wash too; he was going to ask the family he was to stay with if he could come a bit earlier, and he didn’t want to stink and put them off.
His phone trilled and Luanne’s name came up on the display. ‘Hey, babe . . .’
But after a few seconds he was trembling as if an electric current had run through his whole body. Chantelle was in a bad way, Luanne told him, but an ambulance had come and she was in good hands. She was going to the hospital herself as soon as she found Alysha, who had run off when the Brotherhood attacked them.
Luanne cried as she told him what had happened. She had tried to pull Boot Ripley away from Chantelle, but Mince Delahaye had twisted her arm up her back so hard she thought it might be broken, then punched her in the face. That was when she told Alysha to leg it.
Jason was shaking with fury. ‘How bad is Chantelle?’
‘She’s taken a hard beating.’
‘Boot and Mince, you say? I’m coming back.’
‘Jason, no! It’s not safe. The estate is swarming with Feds, and they’re looking for you.’
‘I need a gun. Can you get me a gun?’
There was a pause. ‘I don’t think that’s wise, man. There’s Feds everywhere. If you get caught . . .’
Jason gritted his teeth. ‘This is Chantelle we’re talking about. And they’ve hurt you, and Alysha. I ain’t having that. Help me out here, Luanne. Get me a gun. I’ll be there in less than an hour.’
There was a beat.
‘Luanne?’
He heard her sigh. ‘OK. But I ain’t happy about it, and it may take a while. The Feds are everywhere.’
‘Where shall we meet? Where’s safe?’
Another pause. ‘In the shed at the end of your gran’s estate. It’s not on Brotherhood turf, and there are less Feds around there. If I can get you a gun, I’ll leave it in the shed, wrapped in newspaper. Or in the ru
bbish dump there.’
‘Make sure to get poppers to go with it.’
‘Are you going to the hospital first?’
‘Yes, I’m on my way now. Then I’m sorting this.’
‘Be careful. The place will be surrounded with Feds, and they’re looking for you. I have to find Alysha, and I have to get myself there. My arm hurts like hell. I’ll try and call you again.’
‘They’ll pay for this, I promise.’
‘Yeah. I was afraid you’d say that.’
TEN
‘There’s exits everywhere,’ the bespectacled female constable told David Dawes. ‘Three fire escapes, a stairway to the upper floor, another up to the roof, and then there’s the lift. They could have used any of them to get off the estate. None of us saw anybody running.’
‘I’ll bet none of the residents will have seen anything either,’ the other uniformed officer added, a slight edge of hysteria creeping into his voice.
Dawes said nothing. He didn’t trust himself not to lose his temper. He knew it wasn’t their fault; the station was short of manpower, and they’d been doing as they were told and searching for the weapon that killed Haley Gulati. At the end of the day it was CID, not uniform, who were to blame; they should have known the girls could be in danger.
Hank Peacock was still loitering on the walkway. ‘Get a forensic team up here,’ Dawes told him.
‘I’m very sorry, guv,’ the WPC continued. ‘We were told to search . . .’
Dawes cut her off in mid-sentence. ‘Luanne Akhter and her sister Alysha are hurt and frightened. They won’t have gone far. See if you can find them.’
He turned his back on her and leaned over the balcony, peering down at the routes in and out of the estate. He felt both guilty and angry. Those vulnerable young witnesses shouldn’t have been left unprotected after they had been brave enough to speak out. This would do further harm to the fragile relationship the police already had with the terrified residents.
He spotted a van below with the RSPCA’s logo on its side. A huge man came out of the flats and walked towards it. It was impossible to mistake Yo-Yo Reilly. No one else around here was that big. Even from thirteen floors up, Dawes was aware Reilly was looking up at him.
