Once outside he breathed in deeply. You needed to take a break from being good sometimes or life became unbearably dull. He crossed the empty road. The rain came down heavily now. A couple of pints up the road then.
That’s when he saw it. Just there on the pavement, at the edge of a slimy concrete bus shelter, lay a fat wallet. A man’s leather wallet, in the rain. Now that would be fantastic if there was actually money in it. There was certainly something in it, it was positively bulging. His steps quickened. Money, he hadn’t found any money in the street since he was a kid. It looked new. And expensive. He bent down and picked it up.
‘Oi! Fuckwit!’ A large black shadow jumped from behind the shelter, another appeared from behind a parked van. ‘Leave it! Your phone, your money! Now!’
They wore helmets, visors halfway down. Shouting. One pushed him towards the other. Two scooters appeared from the nearest corner.
It was them. No way were they going to get his money. ‘Fuck off!’ He kicked back at the one who grabbed him from behind. The big guy in front punched him straight in the face with a gloved fist before he could even get his own up. He heard the crunch as his nose broke. Blood spurted. Two, three hard jabs to his right kidney from the bastard behind nearly made his knees give way. He heard himself scream in pain and lashed out at the guy in front who grabbed him by the throat with a vicious grip. He couldn’t breathe. The helmet smashed into his face. Once, twice, three times. After the third impact he fell backwards, spurting an arc of blood. When he hit the edge of the bus shelter the back of his head exploded in pain as the impact cracked his skull. And everything went dark.
* * *
DI Kat Fairfield hated being driven nearly as much as McLusky did but she would reluctantly concede that Jack Sorbie’s skills behind the wheel matched her own. She actually felt quite safe when the DS drove, even at speed. At the moment she had him just cruise about the edges of the city. A leaden sky made it darker than it should have been at this time of the evening. Headlights reflected in wet streets, kerbside puddles sent up neon-coloured spray. What, she might ask, was sweet about April showers? This was the dampest, coldest spring she could remember, hardly better than the winter that had preceded it. This was what a volcanic winter would be like, endless dreary rain from an obsidian sky. She could really do without it, thanks very much. Denkhaus’s new protege McLusky she could also do without. She had no intention of staying a lowly DI forever, so the last thing she needed was the superintendent’s new Golden Wonder. It was a shame DCI Gaunt was away. She felt that she’d been getting somewhere with him. She didn’t care that no one seemed to like Gaunt. You didn’t have to like people to work well with them, sometimes it was easier when you didn’t, it made the relationship simpler. But Denkhaus was a difficult man, with mood swings of menopausal monumentality. Somehow she found it difficult to get on the right side of him.
There was only one thing at work that had improved recently. The single thing that had eased off was the frequency with which male colleagues, civilians and officers alike, were trying to drag her under their duvets. She had turned every one of them down, politely and firmly. Well, firmly, anyway. Then recently Claire French had warned her that a rumour had sprung up that she was gay. Offers of drinks, meals and the cinema had drastically fallen off since then. Not that she’d ever consider starting a relationship with someone from the force anyway. She’d never been attracted to another officer. First she had wondered why, since she liked her job well enough and couldn’t now imagine doing anything else. But lately she had come to think that two police officers, even if they didn’t have to work closely together, could only succeed in getting in each other’s way — or worse, dragging each other down. And surely the job was tough enough as it was. Anyway, didn’t sleeping with someone from work display a certain lack of imagination? It wasn’t as if she didn’t have the opportunity to meet other people. She encountered new people every day. Problem was they were either victims or perpetrators, and she didn’t fancy either much. There was the life-drawing class, when she managed to attend, but the current intake didn’t do much to inspire her.
It wasn’t true, was it, DC French had asked eventually. Of course it wasn’t. Though she had felt a bit of a fraud for asserting it so bluntly. She was by no means sure. Fairfield thought she was probably bisexual, or would be, given half a chance, only so far it simply hadn’t presented itself. Well, not since school anyway and she doubted if that really counted. Ultimately it had remained an unconsummated affair anyway. And even if. She’d hardly tell DC French about it, the nosy cow.
‘Another circuit, Kat?’
It was Katarina but she didn’t mind the ‘Kat’, not from Sorbie, anyway. It had been Katarina Vasiliou until what her mother called, had always called, ‘Rina’s disastrous marriage’. Of course any marriage not involving a nice Greek boy would have been disastrous in her mother’s eyes. It had lasted all of one year. Well, technically she was still married and the name was useful, at least. Fairfield was an easier name to get on with in the force than Vasiliou, she was certain of it. No, she didn’t mind Sorbie calling her Kat when no one else was around. Jack was all right. Loyal, anyway. ‘Yes, just keep cruising.’ She went back to concentrating on the photocopy of the map she’d stuck to the dashboard. On it she had marked all the muggings attributed to the same gang with yellow marker pen. She was willing the resultant mess to turn into a revealing pattern that would instantly tell where they would strike next, preferably with a loud ta-dah sound, but however long she stared it still looked random. Just like herself and Sorbie, the scooter muggers cruised around town, looking for a likely victim. They struck three, four or five times in quick succession, then disappeared from the radar. All she had gleaned so far was that the gang operated strictly outside the zone covered by CCTV. As expected, the cameras installed around the centre had never brought down the overall incidents of street crime, they had simply succeeded in moving certain types into adjacent areas.
Into the yellow dots, in her clear, upright handwriting, she had logged the time of each incident. Now, with a notepad on one raised knee, she sorted the times into a list. Forty-two incidents so far. Not to have caught them by now, after all the effort expended, was becoming embarrassing. They didn’t need the Evening Post to point it out. Denkhaus was screaming blue murder that their clear-up rates were beginning to look ridiculous. As she listed the times in barely legible handwriting due to Sorbie’s driving, a pattern did begin to emerge. So far all they had realized was that the gang struck from dusk onward. They obviously liked the relative darkness but for some reason had never attacked after eleven in the evening. Now she noticed something else. So far they had never struck at weekends.
Sorbie was stunned by the news. More, it seemed to upset his sense of how decent criminals ought to operate. ‘I can’t get over it, you’re telling me they work Monday to Friday and about seven to eleven? They treat it like a job?’
‘I know. They’ve certainly got better hours than we have. I wonder what their pension plans are like.’
‘And their job’s getting easier. Since Denkhaus told the paper it was safer for victims not to resist, people have just handed over their stuff. The last victim was completely unharmed.’ Sorbie snorted contemptuously as though that was a failing on the part of the victim. ‘The bastards just had to ask nicely and were given the stuff.’
‘Denkhaus was absolutely right to make that statement. It’s much safer to just give them what they ask for. They have clearly demonstrated that they are willing to use a lot of force. But it’s the kind of advice that sticks in your throat. You see what I see, Jack?’