The Cutting Crew (3 page)

I got out, turned right and there it was.

The man was on the floor, rolling, trying to cover his head but not really succeeding. The last thirty seconds had taken any fight out of him. The skinny guy with the ruined shirt was viciously kicking out and stamping at him, catching him wherever he could, while the wiry kid was leaning down, hooking punches in at his face. The other three were just watching. Two were forming a barrier to keep the girlfriend back. The third - the weight-trainer was holding his drink and watching the beating carefully, as though he might step in if he found it lacking.

The skinny kid kicked the man in the head and he went limp.

Perhaps they didn't realise, or maybe they did, but whatever - the pair of them got him onto his back and the wiry kid held his hair and started punching him in the face. The other boy was putting his foot into the guy's ribs, over and over.

'Stop it,' I said loudly.

Amazingly, they did. I walked over, staggering slightly, unsteady on my feet. I hadn't realised how drunk I was, but it wasn't going to be a problem. In fact, it would probably make everything a whole lot easier.

I said, 'You're going to kill him.'

They were, as well. People watch too many movies, and too many movies have no real conception of the effects of proper violence. In a film, someone'll get punched and just look pissed off; you punch people like you're saying hello. In real life, the guy on the pavement was already in hospital for a long time. You don't get kicked in the head and then go get a burger. We're all pretty flimsy.

It can take a lot to beat someone to death, or it can take a little.

You just never know.

The weight-trainer gestured with his bottle and said, 'What the fuck is it to you?'

He probably thought he was quite tough. Certainly, he didn't look unduly bothered by the idea of fighting me. He was probably more concerned with the fact that I was spoiling their evening.

'You've done enough to him,' I said.

The wiry kid stood up.

'Mind your own fucking business.'

He had blood on his knuckles. I remember that. And the skinny kid, glaring at me, had blood all over his shirt.

I looked around. Nobody was going to back me up at all. A few people even looked pissed with me for stopping the show. I looked back at the guy, who was bleeding on the tarmac and something clicked inside me. Some stupid kids were going to kill a guy because of a slop of spilled beer, and nobody here actually gave a shit. Crowds of people standing around thinking: he's going to get what he gets and there's nothing I can do.

And suddenly, I was very annoyed about all of that.

'Right, you motherfuckers,' I said.

I pulled out my gun and started firing.

All this came back to me later, piecemeal.

I woke up, dimly aware that something wasn't right but physically unwilling to do much investigation into what it might be. Opening half an eye was enough to confirm that I'd fallen asleep with the light on; and, as I became more conscious of my body, I realised I was also fully dressed, curled in a vaguely foetal position on the floor by my bed. Not grand. I'd had enough self awareness to stick a cushion beneath my head before passing out, but that had surely taken more effort than simply clambering upright and just falling onto the bed. Drunken logic is a curious thing.

I sat up slowly, beginning to shiver.

What had happened? Fragments came back to me slowly and disjointedly: the old woman in Whitelocks; the dancefloor at Spooks. I remembered the text from Rachel, which had arrived as I unlocked the front door on my way back in.

miss u so much :-( please ring me. need to talk, xx Drunk last night, my first reaction had been disappointment that the message had been from her and not Lucy. Now, I felt upset and sad, but the underlying sentiment remained.

I remembered the fight about the same time I realised that my shoulder was aching. I rubbed it absently, wondering why.

Then went cold.

Oh shit.

Had I shot somebody last night? Surely I hadn't, but I knew that I'd fired the gun - I could dimly remember the shots, and then screams and people running. Sirens in the distance. A hazy memory of the world wobbling around me as I ran, drunk and desperate.

Fuck.

I scrambled to my feet too quickly and had to fight back the urge to be sick. Then I scrabbled around and found the gun. The clip was empty.

Fuck.

Carefully, I tried to put the events of the evening together. It was like threading beads onto a thin wire - but I only had about four beads to work with and I kept dropping those, so any necklace was going to be patchy at best.

I was trying to decide whether I'd shot at someone, or just up in the air to frighten everybody away, when I noticed the envelope on the table.

It wasn't mine, and it hadn't been there the last time I'd looked at the table and paid it any attention. Where had it come from? I thought about it, and finally remembered that it had been lying on the doormat waiting for me when I'd got back inside. I'd received the text at the same time and I'd only had enough mental cohesion to handle one at once. The text had won out; the envelope - I'd just carried it upstairs, put it down and forgotten about it. Now, I picked it up.

Just my first name and no address, so it must have been delivered by hand. But I recognised Sean's writing from the stacks of police paperwork we'd shared and sent between us. My ex-partner.

How did you find me? I wondered, ripping the envelope open and emptying the contents on the bed, sitting down beside them.

There wasn't much inside - just two sheets of paper - but the first thing I saw brought back a hundred unwelcome memories. It was a photograph of a dead girl. The dead girl, in fact - despite our best efforts she'd never had a name or an identity beyond that sad title.

We'd never discovered who she was.

I'd seen the picture itself many times, and I didn't need to study it again now. I knew it off by heart. That was where it hit you, and that was where it stayed.

The second sheet was a photocopy of a driver's licence. The ink was faint, but I could make out a name - Alison Sheldon - and an address out of town. The photograph in the top corner showed a pretty girl, smiling sweetly for the camera.

And Sean's handwriting again, underneath it.

It said:

"I Found Her"

Chapter
2

I had been a cop in the city for nearly six years, and I left because it felt like it was slowly killing me. Maybe it sounds stupid, but I got into law enforcement because I wanted to enforce laws; more than that - I wanted to save people, help them, serve them. As I was growing up, police officers were pointed out as men and women to look up to. The ones I saw always wore smart blue suits that gave them an air of authority, wisdom and judgement - they were good characters who were on my side and would help me when I needed them, and as I got older that was who I wanted myself to be. It was a job that seemed good, in the way that shuffling paper or firing people for a living didn't. More useful, more rewarding. That's why I joined and that's why I left.

Here is the reality of how crime works in the city, and where we as police fit into that.

Let's start with the big stuff.

First of all, you have gangland crimes, pretty much all of which occur or at least originate in the east wing of Wasp. Most of these, you let go. You have to. The vast majority are committed by hardened criminals against other equally hardened criminals, and so you're faced with the triple difficulty of establishing any evidence, risking your life to bring the bad guy to book and actually giving much of a shit one way or the other. Add in the fact that half the force are taking kickbacks to look the other way (which means that if you get involved you might end up shot in the back by one of your own) and what you have is a genuine loser of a situation. Fuck them, you tend to think. Let them sort their own out. Which they do, of course. This is the way in which the dark merry-go-round of criminal society keeps itself turning.

Sean cared about people and it haunted him, but it seemed like a worthy quest that you admired him for and instinctively wanted to help with. My career - if you can call it that - wouldn't have lasted half as long without Sean. Leaving aside the fact that I would have been dead five times over, I would have lost the enthusiasm and the desire. Without him to show me how ideals and reality could be reconciled, it would all have finished a lot sooner.

And I have something else to thank or blame him for. He showed me that you could play the game the way they wanted and still make some kind of difference, by presenting me with an alternative to more official methods of justice. Because when he trusted me enough, he introduced me to Rosh and Lucy.

The first time I went along with them, it was to see a mechanic named Timothy Hartley. At the time, he was running a chop shop out of western Wasp. A young girl had disappeared, and we had good reason to believe that Hartley was involved. He had form, but we also had a witness that placed him near the scene and less reliable sources that pinned him as the guy, and so we brought him in and leaned on him. The whole time, he laughed and joked and basically told us to go fuck ourselves.

Twenty-four hours into the questioning, I went to a firing range with Sean. We did that a lot: we were both good long-range shots, and we'd often compete a little, but it was mainly so that we could let off steam and talk the shit over the details of whatever case we were working on - see if there was anything we'd missed. In Hartley's case, there was nothing. We both knew that the case was going to fall.

'We know he did it,' I said.

Sean was loading his rifle. 'That's not enough, though, is it?'

'Yeah, well. It fucking should be.'

I was pissed off at myself, and doing a bad job of keeping it in check. It felt like there was something I should have been able to do to stop Hartley from walking. Of course, it was a familiar feeling and I was used to it by now - but it smarted all the same. I knew from Sean's hooded expression that he felt the same.

He held the button down, moving his target right the way to the back of the range. It quivered slightly as it went, then jerked to a stop. He raised his rifle, aimed and let loose a single shot. Then, he adjusted his grip slightly and fired two more.

When he lowered the weapon, he looked at me thoughtfully.

'What time are you off duty tonight?'

I shrugged. We both knew it didn't work like that.

'I don't know,' I said. 'Why?'

'Come out to Carpe Diem,' he said. 'I've got a couple of friends who want to meet you.'

Carpe Diem is a cop bar in Owl, close to the department. We often went for a drink there after work, and that's what we did that night as well. And that's where I met Lucy and Rosh properly for the first time.

Technically, I'd met Lucy before, but only in a professional capacity: she was in forensics and she handled major crime scenes.

Even more so than me, her work was steeped in death - but you'd never know it, not to look at her anyway. She had long blond hair, a pretty face; she was small and slim and curvy. Physically, everything was right, but with that extra twist you can't describe and just know when you see it - that slight side-step that takes pretty and makes it sexy. The first time I'd seen her, I was almost intimidated by how attractive and alive she was. She'd induced a kind of awe in me.

But looks are only half the story. One of the other cops had told me to watch her. He said she was cold and distant, and - I thought he was joking - borderline psychopathic. Certainly, she was very professional, aloof even, but I'd caught a flash of humour in something she'd said to me, and I'd figured that a lot of the gossip and comments came down to resentment or jealousy: shit like that.

She played her cards close to her chest. I thought that was fine.

That night at Carpe Diem, I discovered it was Lucy who'd introduced Sean to what we were about to do. Before that, she'd been recruited into it by Rosh.

Rosh had ten, maybe fifteen years on all of us, and he carried a lot of respect in the department. Partly it was because, on the surface, he was astute and good at playing the game and being accepted by the rest of the force. The other part was that he was frightening and dangerous, and so people didn't mess with him.

Not only was he two metres tall and extremely well-built, he was also bald and probably one of the ugliest men you're ever likely to see. It was like his face had been mangled by something, then stretched back out in all the wrong directions. He never threw his weight around because he never seemed like he needed to. Despite his appearance, Rosh was one of the gentlest, most polite and demure men you would ever meet, and that made people even more careful. When you find that dichotomy in a person, you always get the feeling that it's better not to push and overbalance it. When it topples, you know instinctively that it'll take half the room with it.