Tell No Tales (21 page)

‘What about Poulter?’

‘He got funny, wanted to know why I was so interested.’ Selby shrugged. ‘Once he asked that it was like I didn’t exist, they started talking about the football. End of discussion.’

Shotton’s mobile phone rang and he checked the display. Walter again. He let it ring out, in no mood to take a earful of abuse which he had no answer for.

He told Selby to go home for a few hours, he wouldn’t need him until this evening, and retreated to his desk, copies of the Saturday papers strewn about, including the weekend edition of the local rag, which featured the smiling face of the young woman who’d died in the hit-and-run on its front cover, an interview with her sister inside. The riot had happened too late to get any coverage but he knew the Sundays would have a field day with it.

Marshall had already given a statement to several journalists, a blanket condemnation followed by full support for the police, the same sentiment, but in different terms, to the quote he’d given
Look East
this morning after they caught him on walkabout in Peterborough.

The ENL were hijacking him at every turn.

He lit a cigarette and waited for Ken Poulter to arrive, wishing there was a button he could press which would instantly vaporise the whole lot of them.

As damaging as the riot was he tried to take some encouragement from the onlookers who had joined the fray. A few dozen potential voters swayed in his direction and with turnouts as low as they tended to be those people could make a difference.

He just needed to create distance between the ENL and his party. It had been a problem right from the off and he calmed himself with the knowledge that any political movement would initially be limited by its hardcore early adopters, the classic lunatic fringe. It happened across the spectrum and it was a sign of the English Patriot Party’s potential that they were suffering it too.

Fifteen minutes later Ken Poulter’s minicab pulled onto the driveway and he marched across the driveway towards the office like a man bent on losing his temper.

Marshall showed him in and tactfully retreated.

‘Things not working out with your driver?’ Poulter asked.

He stood with hands curled by his sides, simian-looking with his long arms and slightly stooped posture, earned by spending years hunched over in his cell, Shotton guessed.

‘Sit down.’

‘I’ll stand.’

If he thought that constituted an advantage he was much mistaken.

‘Back to your old tricks, Kenneth,’ Shotton said, keeping his own anger smothered for the time being. ‘We talked about that, didn’t we?’

‘Nothing to do with me, boss.’

‘You’ve got ten grand of my money that says otherwise.’

Poulter smiled. ‘Exceptional circumstances.’

‘It was a fucking riot.’

‘Out of my control. I was at work last night. Can’t do much about it if I’m not there. Got to earn a living, you know.’

He was jumpy behind the bravado, Shotton saw. Couldn’t keep his feet still, couldn’t control the nervous energy which made his fingers twitch.

‘No public displays, we agreed on that.’

‘I didn’t sanction it,’ Poulter said, shoving his hands in his pockets, hiding the knuckleduster rings and the prison tattoos. ‘And if I could have stopped them, I would have. I want the same thing you do.’

‘I want whoever killed those men arrested and charged,’ Shotton thundered. ‘You’re as much at risk as I am now. Do you understand that?’

‘None of my boys are responsible for those murders.’

Shotton carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Do you want the ENL to become an outlawed terror group?’

‘No.’

But the idea seemed to amuse him.

‘How about another spell in Littlehey?’ That killed the amusement. ‘Because when the police catch your man, it’ll reflect very badly on you as leader. And I doubt they’ll buy whatever rubbish you give them about being ignorant of his actions.’

‘I don’t know who’s responsible,’ Poulter said.

‘Then find out.’

‘Isn’t that Selby’s job?’

‘It’s your job now.’

Shotton stood up and moved around his desk. The muted television was still playing, showing the steps outside Thorpe Wood Station, a young blonde woman standing in front of the gathered press.

‘I want you to find him and turn him in.’

Poulter eyed him suspiciously. Wet his lips. ‘Why would I do that? Even if I could.’

‘Because you’re getting on and I imagine you don’t have much in the way of a pension provision.’ Shotton smiled slightly, seeing that he was right. ‘Thirty grand goes a long way in Turkey, I hear.’

Poulter’s expression hardened in an instant.

‘You think I’m going to sell out the cause for thirty fucking grand?’ Poulter stepped up and Shotton forced himself to hold firm against the wave of aggression rising off the man. ‘This is why you’ll never get anywhere. You don’t believe in what we stand for, you just want a cushy job and a fucking expense account.’

‘Thirty grand is more than fair.’

‘You jumped-up Tory cunt,’ Poulter spat. ‘What do you think the press would make of your pay-offs? Won’t hurt us if it gets out, will it? But I reckon your political career would be properly fucked.’

‘Forty then.’

‘You can’t buy me.’

‘I already have,’ Shotton barked.

Poulter’s face darkened. ‘The deal’s off. And if you send any shit in our direction I’ll go straight to the papers.’

He stormed out of the office and Shotton returned to his desk on uncertain legs, seeing his carefully laid plans, all of the whoring and finessing, ground to nothing under the heel of a heavy black boot.

27

‘
YOU’RE GOING TO
get wrinkles if you keep doing that,’ Wahlia said.

Ferreira glanced up from her computer, footage of the riot playing, chanting coming through the bud she’d plugged into her right ear.

‘Doing what?’

He pulled a face like an angry kabuki mask.

She smiled, felt the tension leave her forehead, her jaw unclench. ‘What’re you doing?’

‘Forensics have just come through,’ he said. ‘Preliminary stuff. About what we expected. Blood type match from Khalid on the guy’s boots, fibres from his jumper on Khalid’s jacket.’

Ferreira stretched in her chair, rolled her shoulders and heard something crack in her neck. ‘Have they found any sign of our second attacker?’

‘Jenkins has retrieved a couple of unidentified hairs but they’re blonde, very long and dip-dyed.’

‘We could be looking for a woman.’

‘I think we both know how they got down his shirt,’ Wahlia said, unwrapping a stick of gum.

‘You Asian boys and your dirty blondes.’ Ferreira swivelled in her chair, looked towards Grieves, who was dunking a biscuit in her tea, keeping her cup under it so it wouldn’t drip on her keyboard. So neat and careful. So fucking conscientious.

Ferreira thought of her sitting outside the inspector’s office, bolt upright, her uniform just as immaculate that day as it was on any other, despite the fact that she’d spent the previous fifteen minutes down in the cells performing pointless CPR on a dead boy.

‘Grieves, have you got hold of the CCTV footage yet?’

‘There’s no sign of a woman with Khalid,’ she said. ‘I’ve traced him right back to when he left the Yates’s on Long Causeway.’

‘Anything on Cromwell Road?’

‘I’m still trying to get in touch with the company whose camera it is,’ she said, turning away from her desk, brushing a few crumbs from the thighs of her charcoal-grey trousers. ‘They obviously don’t answer work calls over the weekend.’

‘So get the owner’s address and send a couple of uniforms round there,’ Ferreira told her. ‘You do this shit in CID, don’t you?’

Grieves mumbled a ‘Yes, ma’am’, and picked up her phone.

Across the desk Wahlia shook his head at her, more amused than disapproving. She was glad Zigic wasn’t there; his reaction wouldn’t have been quite as indulgent, she suspected.

He was impressed with Grieves. She was just the kind of DC inspectors loved, all yes sir, no sir, perfectly deferential and incapable of independent thought.

‘What else?’ she asked Wahlia. ‘Has Jenkins run our attacker’s samples against what we got off Manouf’s body?’

‘Yeah, same blood type. DNA to follow. The usual.’ He snapped the gum between his teeth, popping it with a sharp crack. ‘It’s all looking pretty neat.’

Ferreira paused the footage on her screen, faces frozen in wild contortions. ‘I don’t like this. How hasn’t he got a record? The man’s like forty years old and he’s never been arrested once. There are no dead starts for psychos. It doesn’t make sense going straight to serial murder.’

‘You can’t argue with the evidence, Mel.’

‘I’m not arguing with it, I just don’t think we’re getting the full picture.’ She picked up the half-smoked stub of her last cigarette and relit it. ‘And why isn’t he talking? He salutes a CCTV camera – for us to see – he’s telling us everything about his motivation right there. He should want this platform.’

‘I don’t know,’ Wahlia said.

‘We put the crime-scene photos in front of him and he beamed. He’s proud of what he’s done, he’s got a captive audience. He should be boasting.’

‘I don’t know,’ Wahlia said, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice. ‘You’re the one with the psychology degree, you tell me why.’

Ferreira drew deep on her cigarette, eyed fixed on the computer screen, all of that rage held static, poised to flare again. ‘Maybe he’s scared of his little buddy. If he starts talking it becomes a negotiation, doesn’t it? We offer him consideration if he turns the bloke in, maybe he gets tempted to take it.’

‘He’s kicked three men to death,’ Wahlia said. ‘I doubt he’s scared of much.’

‘We don’t know what his situation is. What if he’s got a family? You want someone to keep their mouth shut, what do you do? Talk and we kill your kids.’

Wahlia ran his fingers through his hair, face twisted in thought. ‘It happens, I suppose. But not with this sort of crime. If it was drugs or something, yeah, maybe.’

‘What makes this any different? Fear’s fear.’

‘And it’s usually exercised on unwilling participants,’ Wahlia said. ‘Drug mules, prostitutes. Nobody falls into a racist killing spree by accident. He knew what he was doing. Nobody forced him to kill those men.’

Ferreira sucked the last breath out of her cigarette, felt the burn touch her lips and stubbed it out angrily. ‘We’ll see.’

She unpaused the footage and watched the final few minutes play through, knowing exactly what was coming. She’d watched the same scene from a dozen or more, very slightly different angles, but saw nothing she hadn’t noticed at the time. Everything on YouTube had been uploaded by people in the car park, not ENL players, just civilians who were more interested in the dead body and the murderer being escorted out of the house.

One person had focused solely on her and Zigic though, and it made her uncomfortable now, sitting at her desk in the contained environment of this office, to know someone had zoomed in on her face as she lifted the sheet from Asif Khalid’s corpse, wanting to see her reaction more than anything else. They’d been watching her and she hadn’t felt it, too wired from the violence in the air and the adrenalin singing in her veins.

This was the wrong place to look, she thought, as she clicked through to another account and watched the same things happening yet again. Zigic walking out through the police cordon, her behind him. He tries to reason with them and fails, then falls as he’s hit on the head. She saw herself haul him away and plunge into the clash of bodies, take a blow to the back she couldn’t remember feeling at the time.

The camera panned away to the right, trained on the men grappling at the mouth of the road, and Ferreira hit pause.

Ken Poulter. ENL commander-in-chief. Standing well back, looking like any other passer-by, uninvolved and unobtrusive in his black shirt and trousers, a black wool beanie pulled low on his forehead.

He wasn’t among the men they arrested.

Sure enough when she unpaused the footage she saw him turn away from the riot and disappear up Westgate like it was nothing to do with him.

She opened up Facebook, signed in and went to the ENL Peterborough Division group, a St George’s Cross emblazoned across the top of the screen.

‘Mel, coffee?’

‘Thanks.’ She passed her cup across the desk in the gap between her and Wahlia’s computers. ‘Find me some chocolate, would you, Bobby? There’s change in my jacket.’

There were a few new members since the last time she’d visited the site, a week ago, and she guessed they’d been drawn in by the attacks. That or Richard Shotton’s campaigning had attracted some fresh bodies to the militant arm of the cause. She recognised a couple of the names, both petty offenders, a car thief and a small-time dealer. There was another woman, or a woman’s name at least, attached to a profile picture which showed nothing more than a pair of red glossed lips cut from a cosmetics advert.

The photograph Ferreira had used to gain access to the closed group was just as fake, plucked from a amateur porn site, a bleach blonde with a bust bigger than her head. It took over a month to position ‘Tracey Holland’, make the right contacts, say the right things. A delicate job among people who believed they were constantly under surveillance by the police and MI5, with ‘reds’ trying to infiltrate them from all angles. Tracey was supportive but not pushy, flirty but ‘in a relationship’, and she categorically was not a racist. She just didn’t like what was happening to her country.

When the invitation had finally hit her inbox Ferreira punched the air, shouted ‘Suckers!’ in the middle of Topshop.

Now she could see all the stuff the ENL didn’t think fit for public consumption.

More photographs of the riot, ones of the cordon Mr Shahzad’s men had formed at the mouth of Cromwell Road – ‘Paki patrol in PBO’ – then a shot from this morning, three ENL members on the steps of Thorpe Wood Station, smiling stupidly with their black eyes blooming.

Left the copshop. Off
4
a full english. Yolo.

Tracey ‘likes’ this.