Then, six months ago, while I was on another job, I finally got my breakthrough. An informant of mine told me that he’d heard Tyrone Wolfe bragging that he was the man who’d shot my brother, and I decided then and there that I had to infiltrate his crew. Although they were a tightly knit unit, they did use other people in the commission of their crimes, particularly on the brothel and people-smuggling sides of the business, and I was convinced that if I could just get close enough I could get Wolfe to admit on tape that he’d killed my brother, and then we’d have them all bang to rights.
But when I went to see Captain Bob in his office at the CO10 HQ in Brixton to get the authorization to go ahead, he turned me down flat.
Captain Bob’s a bald, cadaverous ex-public schoolboy in his late fifties with a plummy accent who’s been my boss at CO10 for more than ten years. He sits on his arse and supplies the jobs. I go out and do them. He gets paid twice what I do (I sneaked a look at one of his payslips once) and I take all the risks, which seems to encompass perfectly how the world of work works.
I’ve always been able to tolerate that because generally he’s not been a bad boss and doesn’t interfere too much, but the day when he sat behind his immense tinted-glass desk in his expensive suit and told me there were other bigger and more important targets than Tyrone Wolfe, I blew my top.
‘Not to me there aren’t,’ I’d said coldly, leaning over the desk, getting in far too close to him. ‘That bastard killed my brother, and now he’s walking round scot-free, boasting about it, and still making his living from crime. What does he need to do to get you interested? Assassinate the fucking Queen?’
As unflappable as always, Captain Bob had told me to calm down and sit down. ‘I will pass on your information to the powers-that-be, but it’s precisely because this is so personal to you that I can’t authorize it. Look at you, Sean. It’s almost fifteen years since your brother died, and you’re still full of rage. You’ll never be able to approach the situation objectively and gather evidence without blowing your cover.’
‘I will. Just give me the chance.’
‘No. I can’t.’ There was a finality to his words, and I knew he wasn’t going to budge.
‘Will you use someone else, then? I’ve got evidence that he’s still heavily into the drug trade.’
‘How have you got evidence?’ he demanded, looking pissed off.
‘How do you think?’ I countered. ‘Because I take an interest.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, but I’m telling you this, Sean.’ He pointed a long, bony finger at me. ‘I don’t want you spying on Tyrone Wolfe or any of his associates any more. If I hear that you are, I’ll have you up on it. I promise you that. I don’t want your personal life interfering with the job.’
There was nothing else I could do at the time. But when, three months later, there was still no infiltration job authorized against the Wolfe crew, I knew I was going to have to do it myself, and do it alone.
And that, unfortunately, is exactly what I did.
Eleven
It should have been a good afternoon for Tina Boyd. The arrest and charging of Andrew Kent, not to mention the evidence that had been discovered as a result of the search of his apartment and laptop, was a massive result for the team, and there was an atmosphere of excitement bordering on euphoria in the incident room as the necessary paperwork was completed, and the first stage of the case against him closed off.
But Tina wasn’t sharing in it. Instead, she felt a heavy, black gloom descending on her as she sat in her shoebox-sized office in the far corner of the incident room, listening to the noise and banter outside the door, feeling like the perpetual outsider she was. It wasn’t that she thought Kent was innocent. She didn’t. She’d felt the odd twinge of doubt during the course of the interviews, but that was more down to what she was now convinced were his Oscar-winning acting abilities. Only once in all her years as a copper had Tina ever seen someone play the part of an innocent man as effectively as Andrew Kent. That was a guy they’d arrested on suspicion of murder during her first stint in Islington CID, after his wife had gone missing following a series of violent arguments, and he’d turned out to be telling the truth.
Tina, though, had concluded that there was too much evidence against Kent to suggest he was innocent. It was humanly possible, of course, that the hammer and the laptop containing footage of the murders could have been planted, but only by the murderer himself, or someone working with him, and how would he have even known who Kent was? Only the members of the inquiry team knew Kent’s identity, and they’d only discovered it in the past few days. In that time he’d been under almost constant surveillance, making planting evidence both risky and difficult.
It was too far-fetched a theory to waste time on. And it wasn’t what was making Tina unhappy. What was depressing her was the fact that a seemingly ordinary man like Andrew Kent — someone who’d never been in trouble before, who’d had no known psychiatric illnesses, who looked like he wouldn’t harm a fly — could commit such utterly inhuman and barbaric crimes. Earlier that afternoon she’d called the managers of three of the companies who’d used his services in the past year to tell them that Kent had been arrested and charged with murder, and that officers would be coming round to take statements from them, and all three had expressed total shock. One of them had even commented on what a nice guy Kent was, describing him as friendly, polite, a great worker. None had used the classic ‘serial killer’ soubriquets of ‘quiet’ or ‘withdrawn’. They’d liked him. It had shown in every one of their voices.
Yet somehow he’d felt the urge to take a ballpeen hammer and smash it into the face of his victims again and again until there was nothing left but pulp, and then rape them as they lay dying.
It was this that was tearing Tina apart. The fact that people could be so terribly and inexplicably evil, and that every time she, as a police officer, helped to bring one to justice, another popped up, hydra-like, to take his place — except this time Kent had raised the bar still further, almost as if he was trying to outdo all those who’d gone before.
He’d filmed his victims dying. For his own pleasure. So that he could watch their death throes afterwards in the comfort of his own home.
Like a masochist taking pleasure in her own pain, she replayed the film in her head, listened once again to the choking, desperate sounds of Adrienne Menzies dying, until finally she shook her head violently to try to force the images out.
She needed a drink. Badly. More than she’d needed one for a while. She never normally drank at work, preferring to wait until the end of the day, when she could finally let herself go and enjoy peaceful oblivion. She’d always been able to keep her habit under control in that respect, which was why none of her colleagues had ever suspected she had a problem. But occasionally, when things were tough, as they were now, the urge came hard and unforgiving, like an arrest team in the night, and the more she resisted the stronger it became until there was no choice but to succumb. Like now.
She pulled a single key from the back pocket of her jeans and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk, rummaging around beneath the files of paperwork until she found what she was looking for: a quarter bottle of Smirnoff Red Vodka and an open packet of Sharp’s Extra Strong Mints. Slipping them into one of the inner pockets of her suit jacket so the booze at least wasn’t visible, she got to her feet and walked through the incident room, throwing out the occasional instruction to members of her team as she passed, knowing she was taking a big risk but already excited at the prospect of a quick, much-needed fix.