A Cry in the Night (18 page)

*

They reached the Heygate estate by car, but parked a few minutes away on a more suburban road. Police cars had been known to be vandalised while unattended and Adam said he was fucked if he was going to let anyone touch his. The estate was a depressing, tawdry spot. A long run of high-rise towers linked by walkways were all made up of the
same dirty grey concrete that felt oppressively hot in the summer and brutally cold in the winter. Kids mucked about on pushbikes and skateboards at the bottom while dealers would whistle and vanish as soon as the police appeared. There was graffiti everywhere. Zoe looked up at the tall buildings and saw a few faces staring glumly down at her. There was a sinking hopelessness about the whole place. Someone should just raze it to the ground, she thought. Knock it all down and start again. If you were born here, if you grew up here, then your future was set.

They passed the marked police car and headed up the concrete steps, avoiding the corners, which stank of piss. More graffiti tags, more litter. On the third floor they followed a walkway along and Zoe looked down at the kids below. They were pointing at the police car.

‘Oi!’ she yelled down at them. ‘Try it! Go on. I dare you.’

The kids looked up at her with faces that were a mixture of defiance and mock innocence. She didn’t move and eventually they cycled off.

‘Nice one,’ said Adam. ‘Now they’ll do it for sure.’

They reached flat 343 soon after. Adam knocked and the door was opened by one of the PCs who had been in the locker room that morning. Gareth Strivens was blond and tall, with that clumsy mix of someone who knows they’re good-looking yet lacks the confidence to do much with it. It meant he could be brash and laddish one moment,
then surprisingly diffident the next. Right now, he looked spooked.

‘Alright?’ Adam asked.

‘Yes, Sarge,’ the young man answered, standing aside to let them in. ‘It’s a bit full-on.’

Zoe clocked how pale he was.

‘You okay?’ she asked.

‘Course,’ he replied, and nodded a little too vehemently.

Zoe looked past him and saw Malcolm further down the corridor in what must be the flat’s kitchen. He was talking to someone out of view, his hands out – placatory, calming.

Adam put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll go see if the neighbours heard anything,’ he said, and slipped out. Malcolm must have heard his voice because he turned and gestured for Zoe to join him. As she walked down the narrow passage, Zoe saw that several framed pictures – some photographs, some children’s drawings – had been smashed and now lay on the floor. She stepped over them and entered the kitchen.

‘This is Detective Constable Zoe Barnes,’ Malcolm said, introducing her to a tall, thin black woman in her early twenties. She was neatly dressed and pretty, leaning with her back against the sink, arms folded. Her eyes met Zoe’s and she nodded but barely spoke. Zoe could see that she had been crying and also clocked the shudder in her movements. Trauma.

‘This is Miss Jade Adeyobe,’ Malcolm added. ‘She lives here with her two daughters. There was a break-in while she walked them to school. She doesn’t think anything was taken.’

Zoe faced Jade and said all the appropriate things, while trying to work out why CID would be called to a break-in and vandalism case. This was a job for uniform, surely. But she also clocked the sombre tone to Malcolm’s speech.

‘May I see the damage?’ she asked.

Malcolm glanced at Jade, who nodded, clearly close to crying again. He gestured to his right and Zoe followed his direction through the door and into the small living room.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. Then she saw the graffiti on the walls. Some of it was simple tags. But there was more – abuse, sprayed in two-foot-high lettering on every wall.
Slut. Bitch. Nigger. Fuck off. Go home. Get out
.

Everything was overturned. The sofa had had its stuffing ripped out and its yellow foam was strewn across the floor. Chairs had been broken and thrown against the walls – they lay in pieces in the corners of the room. Books had been torn apart, lamps destroyed, CDs and DVDs cast everywhere. There was so much debris that it took a moment before Zoe clocked the dead cat that lay on top of it all. It had been cut open.

‘Fucking hell,’ slipped from her lips.

She stood still, took it all in again so she wouldn’t have to come back in there, and then went back to the kitchen.

‘I’m so sorry,’ were her first words. And this made Jade cry again.

‘Animals,’ snarled Malcolm. ‘Bloody animals.’

‘Do you have any idea who might …?’

Malcolm interrupted her. ‘There are a bunch of kids nicking metal, any metal, to sell on as scrap. It’s been going on for a while. Yesterday she came home and caught them trying to dismantle the swings in the playground. So she had a word. That’s all she did. Gave them a piece of her mind.’

‘Okay. Would you be—’

‘She knows who they are, alright.’

‘And would you be willing to testify against them?’

Malcolm was silent at this and Zoe was given her answer. Jade simply hunched her shoulders, her fingers clutching her sides, digging into her own ribs.

‘There are no witnesses,’ Malcolm said, a little more quietly, ‘and the CCTV hasn’t worked for months now. Unless we get fingerprint evidence …’ Malcolm shrugged. He knew it, Jade knew it. They all knew how this worked.

‘We’ll have a forensics team over very soon,’ Zoe said, trying to hide their painful, obvious impotence.

‘The kids will be home at three,’ Jade said. She was breathing a little faster, her eyes flicking from side to side as she began to consider all of the things she’d now have to do.

‘Do you have friends or family that they could stay with? Until you’ve had a chance to get things straight?’

Jade shook her head. She was all alone.

‘Would you excuse us for a moment, Jade?’ Malcolm said, and ushered Zoe back into the sitting room.

‘Poor cow,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah. Chance of fingerprints?’

He shook his head. ‘They’ve done this shit so many times before. They know the game.’

The game. She nodded. They all knew the game. Then she pointed to the tags on the walls.

‘Can we nail them for that?’

The tags were signatures. They were blatant admissions of guilt. But even though they said ‘This is me, I did this,’ they were still not enough to win a case in court. A defence lawyer could easily claim that someone else had copied them. Without the compelling evidence of a witness, DNA or CCTV (and that was often too blurred to secure a conviction), these cases were almost impossible to prove.

Malcolm didn’t bother to reply and she couldn’t blame him.

‘I’ll stay with her for a bit,’ Zoe said.

‘No, it’s not your job,’ he replied. ‘You go do your CID thing, write it up, log it, blah-blah, bollocks. I’ll stay with her.’

‘Sarge?’

He shook his head, then sighed. ‘I hate this. Feeling pathetic. She’ll have to tidy it all up on her own. She’s the
one who won’t sleep tonight. We’re alright. They’re alright. It’s just her that’s screwed. Because she spoke her mind.’

His radio crackled and he turned it down.

‘I can’t even start tidying up for her in case we disturb possible evidence. Bloody obvious there won’t be none, but still. Can’t even turn a table the right way round.’

He seemed too big for his uniform. His hands swung uselessly by his sides.

‘And we know who they are,’ he added with a hiss. ‘You and I know exactly who they are. Eli Robinson and his mob.’

‘Probably, yeah.’

‘Not probably. Those are his tags on the walls. I’ve spent enough time chasing him to know it.’

Eli Robinson was known to all divisions of the local police. He was a tall, arrogant lad in his late teens, mixed race, with a history of small convictions that ranged from antisocial behaviour and vandalism to more serious offences such as aggravated burglary. His misdemeanours were a constant source of irritation: a kid out of control who one day would overstep the mark and end up in prison. After that he’d probably come back wiser and quieter, and all the more dangerous for it. But for now he was a wrecking ball of overblown pride and rage, smashing anything he could without hesitation.

Zoe saw Malcolm’s anger rising and falling. She didn’t
know what to say so she patted him lightly on the shoulder and trod carefully back towards the front door where Gareth stood, a useless patrolman.

‘Nasty, eh?’ he said.

‘Seen worse,’ she replied. She had, but she didn’t know why she said it. An attempt to alleviate the gloom, maybe. A need not to wallow in it.

He nodded earnestly, his inexperience showing.

‘Your sergeant’s in a bit of a state,’ she added. Behind Gareth, she saw Adam come out of the one of the neighbouring flats. He caught her eye and shook his head. Nothing to work with. As expected. She looked down and saw the kids cycling around the cop car again. One of them had been in that flat, most likely. Smashing and grabbing. The carelessness was disgusting.

‘He doesn’t like it when they do it to young mums,’ Gareth said, and it took her a moment to rewind their conversation and remember what he was talking about.

‘Yeah, he can be surprisingly chivalrous,’ she said, but the joke was lost on the young PC.

She looked back inside and saw that Jade had come into the corridor and was staring into her sitting room, inspecting the damage. She saw her start to cry and watched as Malcolm put a big arm around her shoulder. Jade leaned into him, but Zoe knew this wouldn’t make him feel any better. He wanted to be a champion. He always had been.
She felt a pang of sympathy for him as she noted his grey hair and the creases around his eyes.

‘We’ll get them, won’t we?’ Gareth asked. ‘We’ll catch the cunts, right?’

‘Don’t say that word,’ she said.

‘Oh God, it’s political correctness gone mad,’ Gareth scoffed. ‘Cunt say this and cunt say that,’ he said, a little too pleased with his own joke. Zoe just shook her head.

‘But we will catch them, right?’ he said, serious again.

Zoe looked down at the kids below. The ones on bikes rode in long slow, bored circles over and over. Not trying to run, not trying to hide. Slow circles leading nowhere.

Sam arranged the six files on his desk into two neat rows of three. He kept everything evenly spaced and ordered. His handwriting was small and neat. He underlined and circled facts and important details as if he were an accountant checking the books. Although he was no slob, he was rarely so fastidious. But this work needed some insulation against the details.

He read again about the nanny and little Melinda, and how the poor young police constable had found the girl drowned in the bath. Then he cross-referenced the details with the death of James Harrison at the hands of his own mother in the local swimming pool. Both times, he found the same name defending them: Helen Seymour.

He opened the third file where Jenny Smeeton, the aunt of a young boy (Leo, eleven years old), had been found shaking and shivering on the kitchen floor after repeatedly smashing her nephew’s skull against an old-fashioned
butler sink. Blood was splattered across the ceiling as well as the floor and was all over her hands and body. Once again, Helen Seymour was listed as counsel for the defence.

Case four. At first, Lucy Harvey’s death was considered a terrible accident. Her canoe had overturned during an adventure holiday just outside of Bolton, and because the incident had occurred on a bend in the river where there had been no witnesses, there had been no initial suspicions. However, the behaviour of Lucy’s elder stepsister, Annie, had been noted by the police and by the trip’s staff: a strange silence that might have been shock or grief but seemed colder and weirder. It was the small girl who had been sitting on the riverbank who eventually came forward – herself traumatised by what she had seen: a sudden lunge and attack; Annie holding her sister underwater until the little girl stopped struggling, and then letting her drift away, capsized, to be discovered later. Swabs under Annie’s fingernails found traces of Lucy’s skin.

Helen Seymour defended the case.

Case five found Yasmin Ng suffocated to death by the use of a plastic shower curtain. The prime suspect in the case, defended by Helen Seymour, was her mother, who had calmly phoned the police to tell them of her actions but then never spoke again.

And case six was Sarah Downing, whose son was found drowned in a lake and whose daughter was still missing.

Sam put a simple red line under Helen Seymour every time her name was listed.

No client ever spoke again once Helen had talked to them. Even when the evidence against them was undeniable, she found loopholes and technicalities to lessen their punishments. Both Elizabeth Harrison and the nanny who murdered Melinda were put into psychiatric units after being deemed unfit to stand trial. The evidence found by the police which incriminated Annie was deemed unreliable after Helen contested it. The veracity of the little girl’s evidence against her was then derailed in court and a jury was unable to come to a verdict. Annie walked free. However, so traumatised was she by the events that she subsequently had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide.

Yasmin’s mother was due to stand trial later that month, but the case had been delayed due to her deteriorating health (she’d been assaulted in prison) and the withdrawal of her previous confession – which Sam assumed was directly related to Helen Seymour’s appearance as defence counsel – and the police were in chaos after vital evidence had gone missing.

The case against Jenny Smeeton should also have been cast-iron: blood on her clothes, found with the victim, no denial or alibi. But police were also troubled by the lack of motive, and once Helen was brought on board, a statement was released which claimed that Jenny had found the boy
already dead and the blood found on her was only there because she had picked him up, desperately hoping that she might help in some way. The trial was due to begin in three months’ time.

Sam took a clean sheet of paper and began writing.