Gunrunner (27 page)

‘And what’s your name?’ asked Sheila Armitage.

‘Donna Wilcox.

‘When did she arrive, Miss Wilcox?’

‘It must’ve been about six o’clock,’ said the blonde.

‘It went on all night,’ said the woman in the catsuit, ‘but Erica pushed off just before midnight. About eleven, I suppose. She said that her girlfriend wasn’t well, and she wanted to make sure she was OK.’

‘Did she mention this girlfriend’s name?’ asked Kate.

‘Yes, it was Charlie Pollard,’ said Donna Wilcox. ‘We were sorry she couldn’t make it. We all know her, and Charlie could always be relied on to go the extra mile, if you know what I mean,’ she added, winking broadly.

‘Did Erica come with anyone else?’ asked Sheila Armitage.

‘Yes,’ said Kitten. ‘She came with another of our friends, Sally Hyde.’

‘Does the name Kerry Hammond mean anything to any of you?’ Kate asked.

‘Not to me,’ said Kitten. She glanced round at the group of women. ‘Girls?’

No one seemed to know Kerry, even though Charlie Pollard had insisted that she’d met Kerry in this very same club.

But then Donna Wilcox spoke. ‘I knew her,’ she said.

Kate drew her to one side. ‘How well did you know her?’

‘We had a fling,’ said Donna, ‘but nothing serious. It lasted a month, I suppose, and then we split.’

‘And did Kerry promise to leave you everything in her will?’

Donna Wilcox laughed. ‘Yes, she did as a matter of fact, but I took that with a pinch of salt. It was the sort of stupid thing she’d say in a moment of passion. She even talked about setting up home with me in St-Tropez, but I didn’t pay any attention to that, either. We just had a few good times in the sack and then moved on.’

‘Well, that’s that, I suppose,’ I said, when Kate reported to me on the Thursday morning. ‘I’ll put it in the report to the Crown Prosecution Service, but I can’t see them being prepared to charge Erica Foster with anything.’

‘But what about the question of the smuggled firearms, guv?’ asked Kate.

‘Frankly, Kate’ I said, ‘I don’t think that Charlie Pollard knew anything about them, much less that Erica Foster did.’

And so it proved to be; the CPS decided that there was no case for Erica Foster to answer. But Charlie Pollard was charged with Kerry Hammond’s murder and had appeared at the City of Westminster magistrates Court on the morning following her confession. A remand in custody had followed, as surely as night follows day. Sometimes.

However, before Charlie Pollard’s appearance at the Old Bailey, we had to attend there for the trial of Michael Roberts, Patrick Hogan, Frankie Saunders and Danny Elliott. They faced a string of offences under the Firearms Act and several other related statutes that the Crown Prosecution Service had dredged up. It came as no surprise that the CPS declined to prosecute either Gary Dixon or Billy Sharpe, the argument being that there was no proof that either of them knew the contents of the vehicles they were driving. The CPS lawyer muttered something about there being a less than fifty per cent chance of a conviction. Personally, I’d’ve had a go, but these days it’s out of our hands.

The trial of the others, who Dave had christened the ‘Walworth Four’, was short. The evidence was overwhelming and the outcome was never in any real doubt, even though English juries can be extraordinarily fickle at times.

The upshot was that Roberts got fifteen years and Hogan ten. Saunders and Elliott were sent down for four apiece. Dave cynically observed that he was surprised that they hadn’t been given community service. Although Hogan had been charged with his part in the Hillingdon post office robbery, it was adjourned
sine die
, a decision that must’ve upset the Flying Squad. They don’t like having ‘unsolveds’ on their books.

I was about to leave the Old Bailey when an usher caught up with me.

‘DCI Brock?’

‘That’s me.’

‘That bloke who just got sent down, Michael Roberts, guv’nor.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s asking to see you,’ said the usher.

Dave and I descended the familiar staircase to the cells. A prison officer nodded in recognition, and opened up Roberts’s cell.

‘What d’you want to see me about, Mike?’ I asked.

‘Bloody Gary Dixon, Mr Brock. I was well pissed off when he got away.’

‘There wasn’t any evidence that he knew what he was carrying.’

‘Of course he bloody knew,’ scoffed Roberts, ‘and I’ll tell you something else an’ all. That little toe rag tried to put the arm on Kerry. He rang her on Christmas Eve and said that a grand a month wasn’t enough, and he wanted five, the saucy little bastard.’

‘Now you tell me, Mike,’ I complained.

‘Yeah, well, we’ve got our own way of dealing with the likes of Dixon. Straight after he’d rung Kerry, she gave me a bell, and Pat Hogan and me sorted him. But it took us a long time to find the little bastard.’

‘So it was you,’ I said, at last having confirmation of what I’d suspected.

‘Yeah.’ Roberts grinned. ‘Want to tack it on the end of my fifteen?’

‘I’m not bothered, Mike, but you can tell me who you were knocking out the shooters to.’

‘I can’t do that, Mr Brock,’ said Roberts. ‘You see, now I’m likely to be banged up for a while, I’ve let my private health insurance lapse.’

And we never did discover who was supplied with these firearms, despite a protracted enquiry. I suppose we might find out one day, but none of the Walworth Four would give him up. In the circumstances, I suppose it was wise of them. As Michael Roberts had hinted, Her Majesty’s prisons can be unforgiving places for a grass.

The other aspect of our investigation that came to nought was Kerry Wine Importers. After exhaustive enquiries by customs it was decided that no offences had been committed. I could only assume that any fraud that might’ve existed was the use of Kerry Trucking’s vehicles to bring the wine to England without paying for the carriage. But that, in my view, merely amounted to one half of Kerry Hammond’s empire fiddling the other half. And that, presumably, was some aspect of either company law or tax law in which I had no desire to become involved.

But, despite my original thoughts, that wasn’t the end of it. Several days before Pollard’s trial began, a Fraud Squad detective constable called Baker appeared in my office.

‘I’ve been looking into the affairs of the Spanish Fly nightclub and Kerry Wine Importers, guv,’ he announced.

‘What, all by yourself?’

‘Of course,’ said Baker. ‘If it’s a multimillion job, you get a sergeant. And it has to be an international scam of epic proportions before you get an inspector.’

Things had clearly changed since I was on the Fraud Squad.

‘Did you learn anything?’ I asked.

‘Money laundering, guv, both of them, but it’ll be months, possibly even years, before we get a result.’

But that didn’t concern me, thank God.

Some weeks later, at the beginning of March, Charlie Pollard appeared at the Central Criminal Court at Old Bailey charged with the murder of Kerry Hammond.

‘By the way, guv,’ said Kate, as we entered that forbidding building, ‘I eventually interviewed Sally Hyde, the woman with whom Erica Foster said she’d spent most of Christmas Eve. She confirmed that the two of them did have lunch at her flat in Limehouse, and that they then went on to Tottenham Court Road, arriving at around six o’clock. She also said that Erica left the club at about eleven.’

‘I didn’t doubt that she would confirm Erica’s story,’ I said. ‘What I don’t understand is why Charlie Pollard was at such pains to implicate her. Erica must’ve done something far more serious than just carrying on with Kerry, surely?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Kate. ‘Catfights – even verbal ones – can turn very nasty, and I think that Erica was right when she suggested that, because she and Kerry were still seeing each other, Charlie was trying to exact revenge on her.’

‘Perhaps you’re right, Kate,’ I said, as we entered Court One. I’d never professed to understand sexual relationships between women, or the underlying tensions that seem to be implicit in such affairs. But to me, it still remained a mystery why Charlie Pollard should’ve been so vindictive as to attempt to implicate her friend in a murder.

The usual sombre opening to a trial for murder began as the clerk stood up and put the single indictment to the accused.

‘Charlie Pollard, you are charged in that on the twenty-fourth of December last at Heathrow Airport in the County of London you did murder Kerry Hammond, against the peace. How say you upon this indictment: are you guilty or not guilty?’

The figure of Charlie Pollard, flanked by two female prison officers, now looked smaller than it had done in real life. But, cynic that I am, I took the view that this was not real life; it was a tragicomedy cloaked with the panoply of justice.

‘Not guilty,’ said Charlie, in little more than a whisper.

‘You may sit down,’ said the judge, who enjoyed the splendid title of Common Serjeant of London. ‘Bring in the jury.’

It was the signal for the prosecution witnesses to leave the courtroom. We returned to the splendour of the vast echoing Grand Hall, and sat down on one of the benches, knowing what form the next part of the performance would take.

About now there would be the usual arguments until counsel arrived at a mutual acceptance of the jurors. Prosecuting counsel’s opening address would follow, during which she would set out what she would seek to prove, or disprove. After she had finished, the trial proper would at last begin. I knew that I had at least an hour to kill, and I picked up an abandoned copy of
The Times.
After several unsuccessful attempts at the crossword, I gave up.

Eventually, an usher opened the door. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock,’ he bellowed in stentorian tones, even though I was only six feet away from him. Another usher at the far end of the hall repeated the summons.

‘You don’t have to shout,’ I said, standing up. ‘I’m not deaf.’

‘Sorry, guv,’ said the usher. ‘I thought you might be outside having a crafty smoke.’

I stepped into the witness box and took the oath. For a moment or two, I studied the jury of nine women and three men, and wondered if the women would be sympathetic or hostile to a lesbian charged with the murder of her ex-lover. I was cynical enough to ponder whether any of them were lesbians themselves, and whether that would make a difference.

My evidence was fairly straightforward and would be difficult to challenge, but, although I say it myself, I was fairly skilled at this sort of thing.

Prosecuting counsel asked the usual routine questions, and, having satisfied herself that she’d got the answers she needed in order to prove her case, she sat down.

Defence counsel stood up to cross-examine, and went through the usual pantomime of adjusting his gown, his spectacles, and carefully perusing his brief. But I hadn’t left many gaps in my evidence into which he would be able to drive a wedge of doubt. He asked one or two run-of-the-mill questions about the circumstances under which Charlie Pollard had made her written confession, and then he, too, sat down.

The judge asked Crown counsel if she wished to re-examine.

‘No, My Lord,’ she said, bobbing briefly.

The usual procession of prosecution witnesses followed me into the box. Henry Mortlock gave his evidence of the cause of death and the manner in which it was inflicted. As usual it was concise and left no excuses for defence counsel to pick holes in it. Linda Mitchell’s testimony of the scientific evidence was, as ever, clear, succinct and indisputable.

Testimonies were given by each member of my team who had played some relevant part in the investigation, together with anyone else whom prosecuting counsel thought might help to nail down what was already, in my view, an irrefutable case.

Even so, for a murder trial, it was remarkably short: five days. As I had thought from the outset, the evidence that Charlie Pollard had taken a bayonet with her when she went to the airport to meet Kerry Hammond was the clincher. Nor was there any doubt that it was the murder weapon; an expert from the forensic science laboratory stated that he had found traces of Kerry Hammond’s blood on the bayonet.

After taking a mere ninety minutes to weigh the evidence, the jury returned the inevitable verdict of guilty.

A month later, we were back at the Bailey to hear the sentence. Thankfully, His Lordship didn’t deliver one of the lengthy homilies that those familiar with major murder trials had come to expect from judges. Sentencing Charlie to life imprisonment, he imposed a tariff of fifteen years before she could be considered for parole. I thought it was remarkably lenient in the circumstances.

There then followed another little scene in this command performance. As Charlie Pollard was put down, I was approached by an army officer, a major from the Army Legal Corps, who had been in court during both the trial and the sentencing hearing.

‘Chief Inspector, I am required to interview the prisoner in accordance with military law.’

‘May I ask why, Major?’

‘I have to serve her with notice of dismissal from the army,’ said the major. ‘It’s a formality, of course. Even so, she has the right of appeal.’

We descended to the cells beneath the court.

‘Corporal Pollard,’ began the major, ‘I have to inform you that, following your conviction, you are reduced to the rank of private. Furthermore, you are discharged with ignominy from the army.’ He handed her an official document before adding, ‘You have the right of appeal, should you so wish it.’

Charlie Pollard took the sheet of paper and without even a glance at it, tossed it on the floor. ‘You can stuff your fucking appeal,
Major
,
sir
,’ she said, and raised a single finger in his direction.

‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ commented the major drily.

It had taken ten minutes to complete that little drama and Charlie Pollard’s reaction was hardly surprising. She knew that an appeal would be pointless.

However, the cynic in me imagined that she was quite looking forward to her sojourn in Holloway prison and, doubtless, at any other women’s prison to which she was eventually transferred.