Revenger

46

Detective Inspector Mara Keane was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and big- footed. But then, as she liked to point out, you could say the same about Maria Sharapova. She had long since conquered the crippling self-consciousness of her youth and now saw her size as an advantage. It was much harder for a male colleague to patronize her if he had to look up to her while he did it. But even DI Keane wasn’t mentally strong enough to be able to walk unaffected through the carnage of Netherton Street.

Ambulances had been going to and fro in a constant stream for the best part of an hour. There hadn’t been many wounded rioters or local people for the doctors at the A & E department at St Thomas’ Hospital to deal with. Many of those who had still been alive when the first emergency service personnel had arrived had been beyond treatment: the best that could be done had been to make their passing slightly less terrible than it might otherwise have been.

Meanwhile, the sheer number of corpses that had to be photographed in situ and given a preliminary forensic examination was so great that even though police officers and forensic pathologists had been drafted in from the entire Metropolitan Police area, the fatalities were all still lying where they had fallen. The figures quietly going about their business amongst the dead looked like ghosts themselves in their hooded white scene-of-crime suits, which glowed in the spotlights set up to illuminate a crime-scene encompassing an entire street. The rain had stopped, but the pavements were still slick with water and there were puddles by the side of the road.

Keane heard a polite cough beside her and turned to see a balding man in his late fifties, with his remaining hair cropped as close as his beard. His name was Dr Karl Lewisohn. He had a wise, gentle face with liquid black-brown eyes, and they looked at Keane over the top of the glasses he required for the close-range examination of dead bodies. He stood half a head shorter than her.

‘Hello, Mara,’ he said. ‘I would have said “good evening” but it hardly seems appropriate…’

She gave a little smile. ‘Hello, Karl… Ghastly, isn’t it?’

‘Well, let me put it to you this way. In a typical three-month period, roughly sixty-five post-mortems are carried out in the whole of Greater London, and less than thirty of them are determined to be homicide. We’ve got over fifty dead bodies here, in a single night, and every one of them was killed by another human being.’

‘So when are you going to be able to give me the post-mortems?’ she asked, getting down to business.

‘Oh, it’ll be several days, maybe weeks, before you get them all. But I can give you the basic summary right now.’

Together, Keane and Lewisohn ran through the deaths at the Khyber Star restaurant and the Dutchman’s Head pub. They were all the results of frenzied, uncontrolled acts of violence. Then Lewisohn pointed towards Paula Miklosko’s car, still wedged against the garbage truck, and said, ‘Now this is where it gets interesting.

‘There are two clusters of bodies on the street itself. One, by that abandoned car over there, shows more examples of knife deaths, but whoever carried out the killings wasn’t just another rioter. He knew exactly what he was doing. He even killed one victim with a knife thrown to the base of the throat — a very rare skill indeed. Now, moving on, there are two men in the middle of the road who have both been killed by firearms — almost certainly the same firearm in the hands of a single shooter, and I’m betting it was a pistol.

‘Again, you’re looking for an expert. Both victims were shot at extremely close range, which of course makes the job easier in some ways, but both were carrying weapons of their own: a machete and an axe, respectively. It takes very considerable courage to maintain a steady hand and a clear eye under those circumstances, but this man was remarkably self-controlled. He hit one of the rioters in the shoulder, but the man just kept coming at him. Our shooter didn’t flinch. He stood his ground and fired a second, fatal round.’

‘That sounds like someone with military training,’ Keane observed.

‘Absolutely,’ Lewisohn agreed, ‘and not just training. I’m certain we’re dealing with more than one serving or recently retired soldier with considerable combat experience. I haven’t even got to their real pièce de résistance yet.’

‘You mean the Lion Market?’

‘Quite.’ Lewisohn began walking towards the wrecked supermarket. He paused to let an ambulance drive past them, taking bodies away to the morgue. Then he went on a few more paces and stopped on the edge of the scene, where it was still calm enough for them to talk in peace.

‘Again there are several shootings,’ he continued. ‘Two victims were killed outside the shop, this time with a shotgun, and the blood evidence suggests that a third may have been wounded. I presume this was a straightforward defensive action against some sort of a charge. But then the rioters managed to get into the shop, and that’s where at least two more of them were hit at point-blank range — in the guts — again with a shotgun. Once more we see the same pattern of a shooter remaining calm enough to fire with deadly effect when almost overrun by assailants.’

‘So we have either one man who’s very heavily armed or two equally well-trained shooters.’

‘I’m sure it’s the latter. At the back of the building there’s a storeroom. We found another four shotgun-victims there, and two more killed with what I suspect will turn out to be the same pistol that accounted for the ones in the middle of the street. Now all the threads of our story come together. You see, a pistol was found in the grasp of a dead male. His abdomen had been cut open by a large blade. One of your people found a bloodstained machete by a rioter whose body was lying less than a metre away, and that rioter…’ Lewisohn paused for effect, like a comedian tantalizing an audience before delivering his punchline, ‘… had been killed by a close-range blast from a shotgun.’

‘So Shooter One is killed. Shooter Two gets the man who did it… and then mysteriously disappears,’ Keane summarized.

‘Precisely… and I’ll tell you another interesting thing about Shooter One. He couldn’t have fired the shotgun. It’s almost impossible to use without both hands, and he had a bullet wound in his left arm, to which someone had applied a crude, improvised dressing. He had cling film wrapped around his torso to immobilize the arm.’

‘And then he’d gone back to the fight…’

‘Exactly.’

Keane nodded to herself, silently taking in everything Lewisohn had said and getting it clear in her mind. He said nothing, knowing her well enough to wait until she spoke again.

‘So what about the bomb-victims?’ Keane asked.

Lewisohn shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be so confident that this explosion was caused by a bomb, if I were you.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s the nature of the wounds,’ Lewisohn explained. ‘When a conventional bomb goes off, there’s a tremendous amount of shrapnel flying through the air. Arms and legs are torn off, and heads are ripped from torsos, but there’s relatively little of that kind of damage here. The overwhelming mass of fatalities were due to internal damage as the shock wave from the explosion passed through the victims’ bodies. I took a quick look inside a few sets of ears, too. The eardrums were all shredded. These poor people were dazzled, burned and deafened before they drowned in their own blood.’

Keane swallowed hard, then said, ‘I still don’t quite understand, though — what caused the explosion in the first place? What exactly went bang?’

‘You’ll have to ask the army chaps about that. They’re all in there, looking at scorch-marks and whatnot. But I can tell you crudely what went bang: the air did. These people were actually inside the explosion. It was all around them, everywhere at once.’

‘My God, who could do such a thing?’

‘Well, whoever had the expertise to create that explosion certainly knew the effect that it would have. He knew how these people would die. And if you’ll excuse me for departing from my proper professional objectivity, I think that makes him a monster.’

‘A cold-blooded, calculating monster, by the sounds of it,’ Keane agreed. ‘But think about what he was up against — an armed mob that had already looted and killed. What kind of people were they?’

‘Savages,’ said Lewisohn mournfully. His eyes were filled with sadness as he added, ‘Terrible, isn’t it? A nation of monsters and savages… Is that really what we’ve become? How utterly bloody depressing.’