‘I’m sorry I spoke that way to you,’ Mac said to Cooper, locking his phone. ‘You’re a good copper,’ he added.
He was putting the phone away when it rang. He was smiling when he removed it from his jacket, thinking it was the same caller as before. But his smile disappeared when he saw the name of the caller. He almost put the phone to his bad ear again, but realised his error just in time. It was still hurting from when he made that mistake earlier.
‘Our Nancy-boy leg-breaker is called Brad Smithfield,’ Gondal said.
‘I know him! I investigated that bastard three years ago.’
But Gondal already knew the background: a guy had been found outside a tower block late one night. Dead by cerebral ischemia: insufficient blood to the brain. Turned out to be a guy affectionately known as Rocker, because he was off his. He was an enforcer employed by an Edinburgh crime figure called Razor Randolph. He’d been investigating a robbery at Grafton’s nightclub, in which two masked men had burst in, shot the place up, and fired rounds at Randolph as he and his men sat in a booth with Grafton and his cronies.
The cops had looked at the residents. Brad Smithfield was a career criminal with a plethora of small convictions, one of which had been for choking a guy unconscious. And a stranglehold could cause cerebral ischemia – it was too coincidental. He was visited immediately, and the police thought they had their story: Rocker had information that Smithfield might have been one of the shooters and had decided to pay a visit. Good information, because he was soon dead. The CCTV had been busted in the flats for weeks, and in that area of Erith in Bexley the cops faced a wall of silence when seeking witnesses. A search of Smithfield’s flat yielded no evidence. No arrest. No one was ever charged with the killing.
‘I bet it was him,’ Gondal said. ‘The police missed something.’
‘I led that investigation,’ Mac said. ‘He was fully assessed, and interviewed. I missed nothing.’
‘I got his address. Nobody home, though. It’s owned by a guy called Ian Barker, Smithfield’s boyfriend. I’ve just got hold of his place of work, so—’
‘Don’t go there,’ Mac said. ‘We don’t want him telling Smithfield that the police are after him. This guy could go underground. Leave the boyfriend out of it. Keep watching the house. But let’s not throw everything including the kitchen sink at this guy. Remember his name came from that scumbag Ramirez. Smithfield wasn’t the only guy the Scottish mob were after. They had dozens of names. We’ve got dozens ourselves to check up on. We don’t listen to rumours, especially from criminals who might have their own reasons for giving people up.’
He hung up and told Cooper to drive him back to his car. He had a new lead to follow, he told him. It should take him about three hours.
Forty-Nine
Katie
Katie rushed upstairs to grab her laptop. A minute later, she was looking at a newspaper website, based on a search of the name the young DC had mentioned: Ronald Grafton. There it was, right before her eyes. Three chopped up in gang war cottage carnage late last night. And one missing woman, Liz Grafton, wife of powerful ganglord, Ronald Grafton. There was a picture of the wife. Katie stared at it and tried to picture Karl with her. Where were they right now? What were they doing?
The DCI, McDevitt, had lied to her about his appointment with Karl, and now she thought she knew why. In a police station, Karl would have his statements recorded with a solicitor present. He would be coached in what to say. But if he met the detective outside, alone, he wouldn’t have that security. The detective must be planning to coerce Karl into making some kind of confession. He knew the case against Karl was weak, and wanted him alone and vulnerable so he could be tricked into incriminating himself. Thrown to the wolves like a common criminal.
But there was more. The dead man in the shop was, as DC Cooper had said, the DCI’s informant. McDevitt was unhappy that his informant was dead, and he wanted to lash out at Karl because of it. Maybe he would beat Karl at the meeting, then claim he resisted arrest.
Both of these things pointed to the police not believing Karl’s story. They thought he was a killer.
There was only one thing worse than seeing her husband thrown in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and that was something she was slowly failing to ignore: Karl might actually be a murderer.
Katie paced because the baby was hurting her back. At least, that was what she told herself. But the pain was pure stress, she knew. She didn’t want to believe that Karl had killed a man, but something didn’t add up. If Karl had killed someone, even accidentally, even in self-defence, he would have gone immediately to a police station. She knew it. And yet he hadn’t. Could that be because of guilt?
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t let him face the detective alone. She would go to the meeting point, and she would take the police with her. Karl would go into their custody, not the detective’s. That man wouldn’t get near him until Karl was in a police station.
She grabbed her phone and scoured the Internet, seeking a solicitor. She found one called Miller, Jones & Tuck, on Aldgate High Street. Thirty years’ experience, highest level of representation, excellent track record – just some of the lines she read on their homepage. She jabbed the link for the phone number.
That was when it hit her. She was calling solicitors to save her husband. He would sit in a police cell. He would go to court – even if he killed in self-defence, even if the dead man was a criminal.
She started to cry. How old would their baby – Michael, she now hoped it would be a boy because that was what Karl wanted – be when Karl got out of prison? If. She had heard about ‘whole life tariffs’ being given to some criminals, which meant they stayed in prison until they… She could no longer keep the phone to her ear with just one hand. She had to use two.
Fifty
Brad
‘Repeat: this is a waste of time,’ Dave said. Unable to pace in the car, his legs were jumping up and down, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. He looked like a guy missing the buzz of heroin. ‘We’re sitting here doing nothing but risking arrest.’
Brad didn’t look up from his phone. ‘Repeat: stop bloody moaning. You’ll run out of synovial fluid and then you’ll really moan.’
‘Whatever.’ He looked at Brad’s phone, saw that his colleague was scrolling through Varsity jackets for sale and said: ‘You could have just bleached the blood out instead of lopping the arms off.’
‘And walk round until then looking like I just killed someone?’
‘Look at your forehead. People would know the blood was from that. How are you going to find one with a B?’
Remembering, Brad looked down at the emblem on the jacket’s breast. ‘Shit.’
Dave laughed, then slapped the steering wheel impatiently. ‘Why isn’t Mick here?’
Brad sighed. ‘We’re here because he can’t be, aren’t we?’
‘Maybe he ran away to Germany already,’ Dave said. ‘Maybe for once his brain stopped to think, and he’s realised he’s made this situation a lot worse by trying to set-up Seabury and the woman. But that’s Mick. Shoot first, sod the questions. And he literally did shoot first, didn’t he? He’s going off the rails a bit, don’t you think? I mean more so than normal. Even the Germany thing proves that. Why not a country with no extradition, like Chile?’
That much was true: the man was getting more erratic, and less thorough. Brad put it down to ego. Akin to some undefeated boxer getting sloppy in the ring, Mick was taking more and more risks because he believed he was invincible. Of course, there was a pinch of lunacy, too. But he didn’t want to talk about that any longer.