‘Then,’ said Forrest, ‘and this is purely a personal observation by someone who’s from this area, you don’t get many Congolese or West Africans around here, not near Southend. Whoever dumped the poor child here knew this part of the Essex coast very well. You wouldn’t find this place by accident. I think, for what it’s worth, when you find him, he’ll be white and local. And as for that poor girl, well, I’ll email you the post-mortem results together with any relevant forensic information. I’m assuming you’ll just want the highlights of any report?’
Hanlon nodded; she just needed the gist of things. It wasn’t her case.
‘When’s the management team meeting on this, James?’ she asked.
‘There’ll be one tomorrow morning. I’ll send you any relevant info. Martin Horrocks is the SIO for this one, do you know him?’
Hanlon shook her head.
‘He’s good,’ said Forrest. He looked out over the estuary and watched as another gannet exploded into the sea, putting an Olympic diver to shame with its easy grace. ‘There’s quite a lot that needs follow-up, obviously, but whoever did this was careful. There’s no trace evidence. No useable tyre prints or footprints; nothing left by whoever deposited her here. I’ve got prints to run through the PNC but I doubt if they’ll have any relevance. This looks like a relatively professional job, but you never know. That’ll be in the next couple of days, we haven’t got a great deal on.’
‘Who found her?’ asked Hanlon.
‘A woman walking her dog,’ said Forrest. ‘Thank God for dog walkers. Dog walkers and joggers. If it wasn’t for them, God knows how many bodies would go undetected.’ Hanlon nodded in agreement. ‘The door there,’ he indicated it with a nod of his head, ‘is usually chained and padlocked but today her dog ran inside. It was open, so she went looking for it. That’s when she called us.’
‘It was open?’ said Hanlon in surprise. She’d have expected it to be at least pushed to, more of an attempt at concealment made. It was as if someone had intended the body to be discovered.
Forrest nodded. ‘Open. The chain was cut with bolt cutters. It was lying on the ground. It’s bagged and back at the lab.’
‘How long’s she been in there?’ asked Hanlon.
‘Not long,’ said Forrest. ‘One of your lot told me the dog walker comes by every day and yesterday the door was chained and padlocked. I’ll know more when I’ve got back to the lab.’
Hanlon nodded and Forrest’s assistant appeared through the doorway of the bunker, carrying lights and cabling. Thomas stood blinking in the afternoon light, staring at the slim, controversial figure that was Hanlon.
During the London riots a police community support officer had found himself, through a mixture of bad luck and unfortunate timing, caught up on the fringes of the Tottenham riots. When he’d started his beat patrol, alone, as his partner had called in sick, everything was more or less normal. Elsewhere in the borough, sporadic acts of vandalism, like Brownian motion in a lab, were coalescing into what eventually turned into the most alarming street violence in living memory. To James Brudenell, the hapless PCSO, it was like being trapped on a mudflat by a tide racing in, as the flood of lawlessness bore down on him from all sides, leaving him bobbing around like a piece of helpless driftwood. It was the speed of it all that was maybe the most frightening thing. One minute the shopping parade had been a picture of normality. Five minutes later the street was full of noise, rampaging masked youths shouting, normal people caught up in it running for cover or in flight, the strident, deafening wails of alarms from businesses and cars, shopkeepers frantically pulling down security screens if they had any, sirens in the distance, news and police helicopters overhead, shouting and screaming, breaking glass.
The PCSO had stood bewildered, paralysed with indecision, feeling ridiculously conspicuous in his uniform, very much alone. He had never imagined anything like this happening. He felt he couldn’t have been much more of a target if he’d tried.
It was then that he felt a blow strike him from behind. He wheeled round to confront his assailant and found himself looking at a group of about ten youths. One of them had thrown a half-empty can of Red Stripe at him, which had splashed him with beer as it hit him and now lay at his feet. He could smell it. The faces of the kids suddenly seemed very adult, very hostile as they stared at him. Brudenell thought with a sudden, terrible clarity: they want to kill me. They threw more things at him. Various missiles struck the PCSO: stones, a half-brick, a bottle and a full can of Coke which hit him on the forehead, breaking the skin. Blood coursed down his face and the sight of it was like a signal to the group, who surged forward towards him.
There were police officers in an adjacent street who had been ordered not to engage with the crowd, even though there were reports that an officer was under attack nearby. They stood around helplessly, trying to look purposeful. The truth was that nobody really knew what to do. The helicopter overhead had called the situation in but they were impotent. They were not to ‘inflame’ the situation or ‘escalate’ tension. They were to contain it. No one was quite sure exactly what that meant. Hanlon had been with them.
Ignoring orders, she had taken a baton from one of the PCs, walked away from the police line and strode through the rioters, round the corner, just in time to see the fallen PCSO surrounded by half a dozen figures, all kicking and stamping. Hanlon didn’t weigh up the risks of what she was doing. She didn’t calculate the odds. She just acted.
Accounts didn’t differ as to what happened next. What caused the argument was the legality of Hanlon’s actions. The police federation lawyers argued that Hanlon had identified herself as a police officer and that it was all by the book. Civil rights lawyers claimed that Hanlon, not in uniform and not readily recognizable as a police officer, had attacked innocent members of the public. It was unprovoked assault by a dangerous thug hiding behind a police badge. The PCSO’s blood on their clothing and shoes was proof of proximity, but not of guilt. The CCTV cameras that could have caught the action had been damaged by this time and no one came forward as an eyewitness on either side. What was uncontestable was that, on the one hand, Hanlon had hospitalized three men aged between seventeen and thirty-two and, on the other, had saved the life of a fellow officer. Several doctors had testified to the fact the PCSO would have probably died had the attack continued for very much longer. The list of his injuries was extensive, from skull fractures to broken wrists to smashed cheekbones to ruptured kidneys. One of the rioters had stamped on his face so hard you could see the imprint of the sports shoe manufacturer embedded on his skin from the sole of the trainer.
Throughout the following investigations and enquiry by the IPCC, apart from when directly questioned Hanlon had preserved an enigmatic silence.
It was a tricky problem for the Met. She was certainly guilty of disobeying orders, flagrantly so, but then again, to discipline her or sack her would make them look ridiculous. Not only ridiculous, but unpopular and out of touch with public opinion, which was in a vengeful mood. People wanted the rioters punished. Society wanted an eye for an eye. Prosecuting Hanlon would have been a PR disaster. They’d compromised on a medal and a decision to sideline her from front-line duties. In an ideal world, and heavy hints were dropped, Hanlon would resign through some unspecified stress- or health-related problem and would be handsomely paid off, pension intact. Irritatingly, she showed no signs of wanting to do this. She’d spent about three months in limbo in the system and no one really knew what to do with her, no one wanted her, until Corrigan had taken her under his wing.
Thomas thought she looked disappointingly ordinary. She was tall and slim with a long, unsmiling face and bleak, grey eyes. She didn’t fit his warrior princess preconceptions. There was no glamour. She was wearing dark clothes and they made her face even more pallid. There were smudges under her eyes as if she habitually slept badly and her shoulder-length black hair was slightly greasy and ragged-looking.