‘Well, he was never charged with it,’ she said.
Corrigan shook his head in irritation. ‘Typical,’ he said. ‘They all do that kind of thing. Nail guns,’ he added to himself in an angry tone.
Hanlon couldn’t work out if the assistant commissioner was annoyed by the crime itself or the laziness of using a nail gun. She half expected him to say something along the lines of, in my day, when I was young, criminals used hammers for this kind of thing. Not any more, couldn’t be bothered to get off their fat arses. ‘The point is, what were you doing nicking him?’
My job, I suppose, thought Hanlon. She decided not to say it and further annoy Corrigan. She knew he had, after all, saved her career when there was a call for her to be got rid of. Nobody else had wanted her. For that she was genuinely grateful and, deep down, quite touched. Corrigan was usually so politically and career motivated. Helping Hanlon, she knew, could not be considered a wise move. She knew she was very good at certain aspects of police work, but she was perfectly aware she was trouble. Her performance appraisals made that abundantly clear. She didn’t care. It was quite touching to discover that the AC was actually a fundamentally decent man, although the fact that it should surprise was an alarming indictment of the society they were in.
‘I didn’t make the arrest, sir. The officer in charge was DS Whiteside.’
Corrigan grunted contemptuously. ‘Pull the other one, Hanlon. Whiteside wouldn’t wipe his arse unless he’d cleared it with you.’
‘If you say so, sir.’
Corrigan was fishing, thought Hanlon. There was no definite proof she was involved in the arrest. Whiteside had given his DI the information that had led to the bust as coming from an informant, which it had. Neither Toby Manning nor Cunningham had complained. Thompson, the uniformed sergeant, was notoriously silent and Whiteside said he had it on good authority Childs wouldn’t talk. They’d all closed ranks and mouths. So, no loose ends.
The AC leaned back in his chair. He was in his shirtsleeves and the sun through the windows sparkled on the crowns on the shoulders of the epaulettes on his shirt. ‘Do you know who Kevin Briggs is?’ asked Corrigan tetchily.
‘Yes, sir. He’s assistant commissioner, territorial operations.’
‘That’s correct. It was a rhetorical question,’ said Corrigan. ‘And you’ll doubtless know the name of the assistant commissioner for specialist operations.’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Hanlon. She could guess where this was leading. She didn’t bother answering, he used to be my boss. They both knew that. They also both knew he had tried to have her dismissed from the police force.
‘Well, I’ve had both of them on my back about Anderson’s arrest. Compromising investigations, treading on people’s toes, up to your old tricks, I’m sure you can imagine the row you’ve provoked. Can you?’
‘It was nothing to do with me, sir,’ she said levelly. ‘I think you’ll find it was Haringey drug squad that made the arrest. I don’t know what they’re on about.’ They looked at each other, Hanlon’s gaze steady. ‘Quite frankly, sir, I’d have thought they had other things to occupy their minds with.’
Corrigan stared back at her. ‘Just, just, don’t, OK.’ He motioned with his hands to try to indicate the areas she should keep clear of. It was an expansive gesture. ‘You’ve got enough enemies as it is, I’m sure you can appreciate that.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’ His eyes narrowed. Not I’m sorry, but I’m sorry to hear that. In no way, shape or form was that an apology. She was no longer part of Special Crimes and Operations but Whiteside was, and she knew that she hadn’t compromised anything by what she’d done. Credit for the Anderson bust had, like she’d said, gone to the Haringey drug squad. She was mildly surprised to find herself having this conversation. Someone must have talked.
‘I’ve had to spend a lot of time explaining to ACSO and ACTO that you probably had nothing to do with it. I said it was all hearsay.’
‘Yes, sir. But-’
‘No buts.’ Corrigan held up an enormous, admonitory hand, palm outwards. ‘Please try to remember that you work for me, not in some unspecified vigilante capacity. Is that clear?’ Hanlon didn’t look contrite as she nodded.
‘Yes, sir.’
Corrigan absent-mindedly rubbed his expanding paunch. He’d always been fond of food and, courtesy of Fleet Street, had eaten his way through the menus of most of London’s top restaurants. PR after all was one of his duties. He had to keep the media informed and if the media chose to be informed over agreeable lunches, so be it. Now the mood had changed. Corrigan was aware of the zeitgeist and adopted the new hair-shirt strategy. The Leveson Inquiry into the press and their lavish wining and dining of Scotland Yard was going to hit the assistant commissioner’s stomach hard. Today he’d eaten at the canteen. It hadn’t been very nice. He tried again to lay down parameters.
‘Let’s get this straight, Hanlon. I got you out from that disciplinary enquiry you were facing and, until the dust settles, you’re supposed to keep your head down and ideally help me, not chase high-profile criminals that you have a personal grudge against. Is that clear?’
‘Crystal clear, sir.’
‘Don’t take the piss, Hanlon.’
‘No, sir.’ She didn’t add, I wouldn’t dream of it, for fear of sounding sarcastic.
He looked hard at the woman sitting opposite him. Hanlon returned his gaze equably. Oh well, thought Corrigan, it’s not as if I didn’t know what she was like when I gave her the job. I brought this on myself. I might as well be talking to the wall. He was genuinely fond of Hanlon but he found her impossible to understand at times. Most people fitted in to the police force — it was a broad church — whether they were crusaders or career officers or simply the kind of people who temperamentally like large organizations. But she was none of those things. She was an enigma. She was… then the expression came to him from yesterday’s phrase of the day… sui generis. He was pleased with it. Sui generis. One of a kind, or, more literally, ‘of its own kind’. Well, that was something to be grateful for. David Anderson wasn’t sui generis; he was generic, he was a violent nutter of which London was not in short supply. Join the queue, Anderson, he thought. Violent crime in the capital was getting like football. The local talent was being overshadowed by players brought in from abroad. The Russians and the Albanians. Globalization was making his job increasingly hard. At the lower end, criminals were being undercut by the Poles and Romanians. You could get someone killed for a couple of grand these days, maybe not very professionally, but it was remarkably cheap. London was awash with Eastern European ex-Warsaw Pact firearms and Eastern European criminals who’d all done military service and were very much at home with guns.
What annoyed him about this situation, the reason he was giving what he recognized as an ineffectual bollocking, were the signs of Hanlon’s meticulous planning and executing, right down to the phrasing in Whiteside’s reports. He knew her handiwork when he saw it. Worthy as it was, she had engineered this arrest when she knew she should have been doing no such thing. She would go too far one of these days and then she’d give the Met the excuse it needed to sack her. She’d got away with it this time by the skin of her teeth.
Hanlon sat in front of him, irritatingly self-composed. I’m getting nowhere here, he thought. I might as well cut my losses.
‘OK, Hanlon, let’s move on. These child murders, the Essex one and the baby in the canal, anything I need to know? We are doing everything sensibly, I take it. We haven’t cut corners? We haven’t fucked up?’ His eyes were resting on the report she’d sent him about the Somali girl.
‘No, sir.’
Corrigan raised his gaze from the paperwork. ‘And they’re not related at all?’
Hanlon met his eyes. God, that man is shrewd, she thought. Now isn’t the time, she decided. Not yet. Her suspicions, her certainty, that the two deaths were linked would for now remain unvoiced. Both were sexual in nature, both involved children, both were connected by the use of the number eighteen which had been added like a signature. She had worked once in paedophile crime and she knew how overstretched the team was. And that was before Operation Yewtree. You were dealing with an unusual group of criminals, usually highly organized, highly secretive and generally extremely intelligent. They also covered all sections of society. File-sharing on the Internet and people-trafficking with cheap travel to Far Eastern countries where policing was lax and more corrupt than Europe only added to the problems.