‘He was selling drugs, Stone. To kids.’
‘I bloody know that, but we don’t choose who we get to treat professionally and you know it. Or at least you did before that day.’
‘He talked in the end,’ he defended.
‘Not because you’d roughed him up. He talked because his mother gave him a clip round the ear and told him to come clean.’
He turned accusing eyes on her.
‘Why didn’t you report me?’
‘Because I knew there was something wrong. You were clearly—’
‘Not for that, Stone. For the other thing. For what happened later?’
There it was. Now they were getting somewhere.
‘You mean when I challenged you about the kid and you punched me in the mouth?’
The memory of the pain had nothing to do with her lip.
Shame flooded his face but he kept contact with her gaze.
‘Come on, why didn’t you report me assaulting you. Was it so you had something on me?’ he accused.
She shook her head. ‘No, it was clear that something wasn’t right.’
‘Get off it, Stone. You were young and ambitious. You put the information in your back pocket to use at a later date, didn’t you?’
She allowed the horror to show on her face. ‘Is that really what you think? Or is it what you’ve told yourself to think?’ she asked.
‘You used that incident to get a step up. You threatened me with taking time off. You left me no choice.’
‘You needed some time away, to cool down, sort out whatever it was that was needling you.’
‘I didn’t want time off. I wanted to do my fucking job,’ he raged, punching the dashboard.
‘You needed to be at home,’ Kim said.
‘It’s no use saying that now. You didn’t know about Melissa then. You just wanted me out of the way. You wanted to further your own career at my expense. You knew sick time would count against me.’
‘Can you even hear what you’re saying?’ she cried in disbelief. ‘Assaulting a teenager and then smacking me would have counted a lot more if I’d wanted to affect your promotion, Tom. You took the leave—’
‘You left me no damn choice,’ he growled.
‘You came back after two weeks and you couldn’t even speak to me. We both went for promotion and you missed out. Fuck’s sake, Tom, we came up through the ranks together. You’d have had my vote for DI, and neither what happened with that boy or what happened later in the locker room was ever repeated to a soul by me.’
Silence fell between them.
‘I’ll never understand why you didn’t tell me what was going on,’ she said.
‘And I still don’t get why you didn’t report me?’ he said, quietly.
She thrust the car into gear and headed off the car park.
‘You’ll never understand if I tell you.’
‘Try me,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t to further your own career or have something to hold over me, why didn’t you file a formal complaint?’
She felt the hurt as though it was only yesterday. The way he’d looked at her when he came back. The way he’d treated her. The rumours he’d spread about her ruthless ambition.
She packed the hurt away and offered him the only thing she had. The truth.
‘I didn’t report you, Tom, because I thought that we were friends.’
SEVENTY
Dawson couldn’t help the feeling of hopelessness that washed over him each time Fred Windsor opened his mouth.
There had been a time he’d felt that there was only one kind of racist, and the picture had been clearly defined in his head; skinhead, tattoos and a swastika sign somewhere upon his person. His initial assessment of Gary Flint had been coloured by his outward respectability. His first instinct had been doubt that such vile threats could have come from such a man.
Fred continued. ‘You need to understand that hate crime offenders differ in age, education, family background and the underlying causes of their acts and the type of hate motive expressed. You have serial offenders and one-off perpetrators. There is no simple profile of a hate crime perpetrator. The educated and middle class are well represented in the hate movement.’
This kind of insight scared the life out of him.
‘Hatemongers once had to stand on street corners and hand out leaflets. Extremists now use mainstream social networking sites. The Internet is an invaluable tool. Far more insidious is the ability for many to psychologically affiliate with hate groups without physically joining and attending formal meetings. The Internet makes it much easier to hate.’
‘But how do normal, reasonable, educated individuals get turned towards racism?’ he asked.
Fred smiled at him. ‘You’re making the assumption that all perpetrators are “turned” by a hate group,’ he offered. ‘There are families that have been raising and training their children from birth.
‘The years between the ages four to ten have been identified as the optimum chance of becoming a dangerous racist if exposed to prejudiced ideas. People are not born bigoted. They are made that way. I won’t bore you with all the theories of social learning etc, but nearly forty per cent of hate crime offenders are under the age of twenty-five. So evidence suggests the most common offender is a teenager or young adult acting in a group for excitement.
‘The second highest percentage are what we call “defensive” and covers about a quarter of incidents. This covers the hate crimes that are committed to protect a neighbourhood.’
‘So many different types and motivations,’ Bryant observed.
Fred nodded his agreement and continued. ‘Retaliatory hate offenders make up a third aspect. They typically travel to the victim’s territory to retaliate against a previous incident.
‘And then there are the “mission” offenders. The fully committed “haters” who commonly have far-right leanings. Their allegiance to an ideological bias is much stronger than the other three. The smallest percentage but the most dangerous. Mission offenders mean business.’
‘But you’re saying that these hate groups are made up of totally different types of people, educated, upstanding members of society and yobs?’ Dawson asked.
‘And everything in between, Sergeant. We’ve come to understand that the groups can be made up of four types of people, especially for thrill hate crimes. You have the leader who is normally a mission offender, then the fellow traveller who joins in, the unwilling participant and potentially the hero who tries to stop it.’
Bryant sat back and shook his head, seemingly overwhelmed by the information that was hitting his brain.
‘And then you have the lone wolf in extremis ? such as Anders Behring Breivik who killed sixty-nine people on the island of Ut?ya in Norway. Eight people had already lost their lives at his hand before he even got there.’
Suddenly Fred turned towards him. ‘If you take one thing from this meeting, it’s this: if you continue to stick to your narrow-minded views on the appearance of a hate crime perpetrator, more people will die. And you can mark my words on that.’
SEVENTY-ONE