Tell No Tales (6 page)

‘Yes, sir. Four men gave pursuit.’ She showed him the CCTV footage from the crash site, the driver jumping out of the car, catching his foot on the seat belt, half tripping but managing to keep on his feet. Then he was running, fast, a small gang following, twenty or thirty yards behind him.

‘We lose them for a minute,’ Grieves said and switched to another view. ‘Then here on Dogsthorpe Road one of the cameras picks him up again. A couple of the men have fallen back.’

She switched to a different view. A street of Edwardian villas, cars parked on the road, bins out on the pavement, everything shadowy and ill-defined, the street lamps only throwing out dim light, with long stretches between them.

‘Then at the end of All Saints Road he’s gone.’

‘Have we got any more?’ Zigic asked.

Grieves shook her head, sending her bobbed red hair swinging around her face. ‘Our last sighting is at 06.08, sir.’

‘Plenty of time to get back home to Hampton and swallow the medicine cabinet,’ Wahlia said. ‘It’s a hike though.’

‘OK, Deb, why don’t you stay on this for a bit, see if you can find out where he emerges? If we’re lucky we might get his face on camera.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Wahlia moved away to answer his phone and Zigic topped up his coffee, took it with him into his office. He closed the door and dropped into his chair, the leather sighing under his weight.

For a moment he did nothing, only looked at the photographs of Anna and the boys on his desk, smiled back at them automatically then felt stupid for doing it. Anna was taking Milan to the dentist today and he didn’t envy her it – last time he refused to open his mouth no matter how gently they all coaxed him, and then it was apologies and awkward laughter while Milan watched them all from under a furrowed brow, as if scenting a conspiracy against him. He was older now though. Maybe he could be reasoned with. Or bribed.

Zigic straightened with a deep breath and dragged the keyboard towards him. He dug into the files until he found what he wanted. It was a short video clip, ten seconds long and four days old, retrieved from a security camera outside a halal butcher’s, a few feet away from the alley where Ali Manouf was kicked to death.

His killer entered the shot from the right, his body made shorter and wider by the angle. He wore a black padded jacket, dark jeans and heavy boots which Zigic knew were spattered with blood and bone and flecks of grey matter even though he couldn’t see them. Enough gore to leave a trail of footprints. The man’s face was obscured by a balaclava with a fine gauze across the eyes; he was careful, wouldn’t even give them that thin strip for identification.

He turned to the camera, drew himself up to his full height and raised his gloved hand in a stiff-armed Nazi salute.

9

‘
WE NEED A
strategy for this,’ Marshall said, standing with his arms folded in front of the monitor, as footage from the hit-and-run on Lincoln Road played on a loop. ‘Just in case it’s one of ours.’

‘They are not
ours
,’ Richard Shotton snarled. ‘Not even in this office, between us. We create distance and we maintain it. I will not tolerate any insinuation of links to those bloody jackbooted, tattooed oiks.’

Marshall’s eyes dropped to the polished concrete floor. ‘No, sir, of course.’

Shotton strode over to the office’s long glazed wall and stood looking out across the gravel driveway at the facade of the main house. His wife was coming down the front steps, her coat over her arm, slipping on her sunglasses as she popped the remote locks on her car. She waved to his driver as she climbed in and the man gave her a salute – their little joke. He clearly fancied her but Shotton couldn’t blame him. Forty-five years old and she was still a glorious-looking creature.

She sprayed the side of the Range Rover with gravel as she pulled off, a few more dings for the battle-scarred beast. In the last few weeks it had taken heavy damage, kicked and slammed by protesters, the rear window shattered by a placard bearing some misspelt anti-fascist slogan. His security could have dealt with them but it would have been terrible press coming after his triumphant performance at the Cambridge Union.

And right now press was what mattered.

Four months ago a snap by-election, prompted by some shady expense accounting on the part of his Conservative predecessor, saw Shotton elected for the constituency of Cambridgeshire North, but he knew better than to rest on his laurels. He’d won with a narrow majority on a low turnout and any first-year PPE student could tell you how often the electorate used these mid-session changeovers as protest votes against the current government.

The general election in May might not be such an easy ride.

He needed to consolidate his position and up until this morning he felt confident of doing that.

The party already held four seats on Peterborough Council, another three in Fenland, and the polls he’d commissioned showed a strong backing in the area for their core policies, suggesting his win was more than just the locals sending a message to Westminster.

Not that he needed the polls.

He’d been pounding the streets, getting out there, talking to ordinary folk, going to their village fetes and community open days, testing the waters, and he knew that they were ready to cast their votes his way come the election. He was giving them what they’d wanted for years and now they were finally prepared to admit it in the polling booth.

Across the country they’d identified twenty-four constituencies with similar demographics; slim majorities, rising unrest, council seats already won, paving the way for the English Patriot Party to become serious parliamentary players.

They wouldn’t win them all of course but six or seven this time round would improve their standing nationally, force the Westminster elite and the left-wing media class to admit their growing relevance.

As long as he could manage this situation.

He went back to his chrome-and-glass desk where Marshall was standing with his iPad on his forearm, fingertips moving nimbly over the screen.

‘Alright, plan of action.’ Shotton spread his hands wide. ‘The line is – “This hit-and-run is clearly a terrible accident and our sympathies go out to the friends and families of those involved.”’

‘There’s already speculation online that an English Nationalist League member might be responsible.’

‘We won’t dignify that with a response.’

‘I think we need to be prepared,’ Marshall said. ‘This woman from
The Times
is quite likely to ask the question and it’s best to have a response.’

‘Don’t worry about her.’ Shotton settled into his chair, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows again, sunlight glinting off the Range Rover’s bodywork as his driver washed it down. He pressed a button on his phone. ‘Send Christian in here, please.’

‘I’m not sure how he’s going to help,’ Marshall said.

His iPad chimed. ‘And . . . it’s starting. The HuffPo are running a piece on the presence of high-ranking English Nationalist League members in Peterborough.’ He scanned for a moment. ‘They’ve got a photograph of you and Ken Poulter.’

Shotton groaned internally. He hadn’t spoken to Poulter in public for over a year, aware of the negative impact on PR, but there was always some dedicated muckraker out there who’d put the hours in to smear him.

‘Anything in there I need to worry about?’

‘Apart from the photo of you hugging a man with barbed wire tattooed around his neck?’ Marshall didn’t look up from the screen. He rarely did. The thing might be surgically attached to him for all the time he spent away from it. ‘They’re insinuating a causal link between the hit-and-run and the atmosphere of racial tension in the city. You’re being singled out as an agitator.’

Shotton rocked back in his chair, looked up at the vaulted ceiling, white between the sturdy pine rafters. An agitator. When had that become a bad thing? he wondered.

Somebody had to ask the questions the rest of the world were too scared to raise.

Churchill, Thatcher, Benn. They were all agitators and it hadn’t done them any harm.

‘They keep banging the same old drum.’

Marshall sighed. ‘We need to offset some of this damage.’

‘No, we do nothing. Not until we have a better idea of what’s going on.’ Shotton knitted his fingers together over his chest. ‘A good general appreciates the value of stillness.’

Christian’s hulking blond figure appeared on the other side of the glass door, the main office behind him, only one of the four desks manned, Elizabeth, his secretary working her charms on his social diary. The rest were in mothballs until the end of the month when the real work would start.

Then it would be a electrifying chaos of ringing phones and churning printers, press releases and mission statements, placards and bumper stickers and the stale-skin smell of working through the night. Everybody pulling together, fighting hard to get ticks in boxes, making the long push towards 7 May.

The mere thought of it made him rise from behind his desk, energy shooting through his body like the old days, waiting for the call to scramble.

‘Come in, Christian.’

‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

He stood with his hands tucked in the small of his back, big feet planted wide and his gut sucked in. Still every inch the copper even though he’d been out of the force for a couple of years now, an injury sustained on the rugby pitch removing him from the front line and sending him straight to an agency he was far too good for. Deferential when he needed to be but sharp. Shotton liked that. Liked that the man had an instinct for ensuing ruckus. You couldn’t put too high a price on that in a bodyguard.

When his contract was finished they would take him on full-time. After all, loyalty didn’t come on a short-term basis.

‘This hit-and-run in Peterborough – have you heard anything about it from your former colleagues?’

‘What hit-and-run?’

‘Don’t you watch the news?’ Marshall asked.

‘My kids have cartoons on in the morning.’

He looked faintly embarrassed by the admission.

‘This morning,’ Shotton said. ‘A car took out a group of migrant workers on Lincoln Road – that’ll be a Thorpe Wood job, won’t it?’

‘Yes, sir. I’d think so, sir.’

‘Right. Well, make some calls, would you? See what the thinking is for us.’

Christian nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Subtly, please,’ Marshall said. ‘I don’t want to be having a conversation about this with their press officer later.’

Christian ignored him, kept his attention fixed on Shotton. He was used to a sight more bad attitude than Marshall could muster.

‘Is there anything else, sir?’

‘Not right now, thank you, Christian.’

He left with a nod, returning to the main office where Elizabeth’s expensively educated voice rang out across the quiet. A personal call by the sounds of things, but Shotton would forgive her.

‘Do you think that was wise?’ Marshall asked. ‘The Chief Constable could keep you better informed with less chance of a leak.’

‘Weir’s an overambitious shit. The less he knows about this situation the better. If he thinks we’re concerned he’ll start digging around for a way to hold it over my head. Christian just wants to keep this job. He’ll achieve the same thing for a lower price.’

Shotton returned to his desk and sipped the cooling tea Elizabeth had brought him twenty minutes earlier, thinking ahead to the afternoon’s interview. Some young woman from
The Times
. They’d headhunted her from the
New Statesman
and she was an influential political blogger in her own right, with extremely good contacts and killer instincts, far more powerful than her years suggested. It was a changing world and he knew he’d better get used to it. Political clout was still held in the hands of men like him, but when it came to the media he couldn’t rely on the boys’ club.

She’d take the route they always did, he imagined, pressed to hit her deadline, and the usual answers would satisfy her. How he’d moved up to Peterborough because he had happy memories of his time at Uppingham nearby and the long stint at RAF Cottesmore during the nineties. That would give her an excuse to precis his service record and use the photograph of him climbing into a Tornado GR4 with a cigar between his teeth. They all used it. Then how he met his wife at a charity fund-raiser and her human rights work. The women always wanted to talk about Gabriela and he was happy to oblige, knew any politician was only as good as their other half in the eyes of the electorate.

Marshall let out a murmur of annoyance.

Shotton ignored him, looking at the photo of Gabriela on his desk. She hated being away from London and he couldn’t blame her, Peterborough was the worst sort of backwater, unaware of its own shortcomings, but they would be off again as soon as possible. Back to the little flat in Kensington for as many nights a week as they could get away with.

Marshall swore and this time he didn’t wait to be prompted.

‘Our Twitter feed is going crazy.’

‘Fabulous.’

‘No,’ Marshall said slowly. ‘Not fabulous. We’re getting bombarded with tweets from those jackbooted oiks you want to distance yourself from and they are vomiting filth at us.
Supportive
filth.’

‘Damage limitation then.’

Marshall moved over to the window. ‘It has to start at home.’

Shotton followed his gesturing hand to the Range Rover. ‘I’m not downsizing to a Prius if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘You know full well what I’m suggesting,’ Marshall said.

He did. Marshall had been banging on about Selby for months.

‘He’s got to go. Right now. Before someone makes the link back to the English Nationalist League.’

‘Selby’s not going anywhere.’

‘The man is a convicted criminal –’

‘That fight wasn’t his fault,’ Shotton said.

‘Do you think the press will bother with the context?’ Marshall shoved his glasses back up his nose with an angry stab of his middle finger. The subconscious gesture lost on neither of them. ‘You are employing a murderer. That’s the headline.’