Good Bait

14

It would have been her father’s birthday. A picture of him in her mind, another fixed by magnets to the fridge door. A tall black man, open-necked shirt, hair brushed back, the beginnings of a belly, hands — large hands — down by his sides. A street in west London where they had lived. She looked for a smile on his face that was never quite there.

Serious he had been. A serious man.

This country, I don’t like the way it’s goin’.

Rioting on the streets of Brixton after a black woman was shot during a police raid; more rioting on an estate in Tottenham, in the midst of which a white police officer was hacked — hacked — to death. Earlier that year, the Miners’ Strike, police and pickets in pitched battles every night on the television news. And everywhere now, it seemed, her father looked, knots of men, young men, young men black and white, on street corners, unemployed.

At parent-teacher evenings, her father, dressed in his best suit, the one he wore for church, shoes shining for all they were worth — My girl, how’s she doin’? - pride reflected in his eyes.

Education, my girl, that’s the thing. College, university even. Make somethin’ of yourself.

A kiss on the forehead after he had read her school report, silver coins pressed down into the palm of her hand.

Make somethin’ of yourself, you promise me that. Make a difference if you can.

As if, somehow, he knew he would never live to see her grow.

‘You think this is what he would have wanted?’ her mother had asked, when Karen told her she was joining the police.

‘I don’t know,’ Karen said. ‘But I think so, yes. Yes, I do.’

Her mother had squeezed her hands and said, ‘God bless,’ uncertainty in her eyes.

Now some days, too many days, if truth be told, it was difficult to bring back, fresh to mind, exactly why she had made the choice she had. Too easy to become mired down in the quotidian, the day-to-day: forms and rotas and outcomes, the minutiae of personnel management and organisation. The lack of apparent progress.

One pace forward, one step back.

What was it that girl used to sing? The one who wished she’d been born black.

Something about little by little? Bit by bit?

Back when Karen had still been a PC — still in uniform, for God’s sake — she’d gone out with a hazelnut-complexioned swimming instructor with a predilection for white women who sang the blues. Blues and soul. Dusty Springfield — that was the one. Janis Joplin, Bonnie Bramlett, Lulu, even. All fine up to a point. Making love beneath a blow-up of the Robert Crumb cover for Cheap Thrills, with Janis hollering for someone to take a piece of her heart, a piece of something — just about acceptable if it helped the boy get it on.

She still had some of the CDs he’d given her; played them from time to time. Dusty in Memphis. Lulu at Muscle Shoals.

Little by little, bit by bit.

Police work to a T.

Once in a while you just had to pinch yourself, remembering why.

The night cleaner who had come forward in the Wood Green stabbing had picked out one of the assailants from a batch of photographs. Hector Prince, street name Mohock, a name derived from the two gangs — the Mohocks and the Hawkubites — who’d terrorised London in the early eighteenth century, beating up women, children and old men after dark. It was something Hector had picked up in a year ten citizenship lesson, one of those rare days he’d bothered showing up at school. A little learning, a dangerous thing.

Only problem was, when Hector had been invited to attend a line-up at the police station, the cleaner had failed to pick him out. And there he was, cocky as a prize-winning bantam when they told him he was free to go, bumping fists with his solicitor outside the station.

A closer look at Terry Martin, following the conversation with his wife, revealed that, in addition to three minor drug busts which went back quite a few years, more recently he had been charged with two serious offences: involvement in a post office robbery in Greenford, and possession of a large amount of high-grade cocaine with intent to supply. The first case had come to court, then fallen apart on the issue of identification; the robbers had worn rubberised Blair and Bush masks throughout and the Crown’s other evidence had been less than foolproof from the start. What had stymied the second case, even before the CPS had agreed to prosecute, was the disappearance of the confiscated cocaine from police hands. One of the officers concerned had been warned about his future conduct and transferred to other duties; another had resigned.

In neither instance, then, had Martin been convicted, but even so, the company he was shown to have been keeping was tasty indeed. One of the men charged alongside him for the post office robbery, Graham Arthurs, was currently serving five years for malicious wounding and causing grievous bodily harm; and Arthurs’ older brother, Les, had been questioned about his suspected involvement in a payroll snatch at a supermarket in High Wycombe. A second suspect, Kevin Martin, Terry’s half-brother, was on police bail, pending an investigation into an incident in Lewisham in which a fifteen-year-old who’d been doing grunt work for one of the local drug dealers had been beaten so badly as to lose the use of an eye.

And there were others in Martin’s circle, mostly around the same age, thirty-five to fifty, almost all of them, a couple of Glaswegians aside, from south of the river.

Dougie Freeman. Jason Richards. Aaron Johnson.

Michael John Carter. ‘Mad Mike’ to his friends.

Ramsden told Karen he’d seen Carter once, during a raid on a club in Peckham where he was employed as bouncer, lift an officer off the ground, two-handed, and hurl him against and almost through the windscreen of the nearest car. After that it had taken half a dozen men to overpower him and hold him down.

And then there was Martin’s involvement with the BNP. Several photographs and a short piece of video footage culled from Special Branch files. Martin at full throttle, mouth wide open, shouting racist abuse, singing ‘God Save the Queen’, the flag of St George fluttering behind him.

All of which was enough, Karen thought, to brace Terry Martin on his return from Tallinn. Taking Tim Costello along would give her a chance to see how well he handled himself, as well as, maybe, offering a little light relief.