Hail and Farewell (The Lakeland Murders) (3 page)

Iredale had always liked the idea of Uppies and Downies, even if the thought of actually playing the game held no appeal. He’d rather be on his own, walking or running on the fells. He scanned the faces on the screen to see if he could pick up either the DI or the DS among the crowd, but he couldn’t. They’d just be two more bullet-headed men waiting for the fun to begin. He watched until the ball was thrown up into the air, from the middle of the little stream over Cloffocks Beck, and that was the last he saw of it. Because a huge scrum formed around it, wheeling slowly and occasionally ejecting players from the side.

He went and made a brew, then chatted to a WPC who he liked and who he was almost sure liked him back. When he glanced back at the screen twenty minutes later the scrum seemed to have moved no more than a few feet, and he watched as it collapsed under its own weight. Then the players stood up and helped the others to their feet. It was almost chivalrous, and that made him smile. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d even thought of that word. ‘Chivalrous’ he said out loud, as if he was trying to remember how to pronounce it.

For the next two hours, until darkness fell from Debenhams down to the docks, Iredale worked in the silent office, filling in form after form, often with the same information but in a slightly different order. He made a few phone calls, to organisations and bodies that the Super insisted on calling ‘partners’, but these were the kind of partners who kept office hours. So in each case Iredale left a brief voicemail message, and went back to work.

At snap time Iredale decided to walk down across the Cloffocks to Tesco to buy a sandwich, and he stopped and looked over at the game, which was now in the Council car park. He reckoned that it had moved no more than thirty yards in three hours, so he wasn’t surprised to see that the crowd of onlookers had thinned out. And when he walked back past again, after he’d been to the shop, the game still hadn’t moved.

He spent the rest of his break looking online at bits for his mountain bike, and then he went back to work. The phone hadn’t rung once all shift, and he was almost sorry. Iredale filed the last of his forms for the night, drew a line through another item on his ‘to do’ list, and called up the CCTV from the Cloffocks. Straight away he knew that was something was wrong. It had to be. The scrum had dispersed, and people were milling about the car park. And then he saw the ambos, four of them, and a couple of marked cars too. Bumps and bruises in the game weren’t uncommon, he knew that, but this didn’t look right at all. So Iredale grabbed his radio and his high-vis jacket and ran for the door.

He kept running until he reached the foot bridge where the game began, and he saw the DI and the DS on the bridge. And he knew, long before he saw it, that there’d be a body nearby somewhere too.

‘What do you need, boss?’ he shouted, not wanting to interfere with the crime scene, and happy not to get too close to the body.

‘Help uniform to get witness details. Anyone who was playing tonight. Try to get the names of all of them.’

‘I’m on with it.’

There were only five uniformed officers on the ground, but that was all that was available, and it included the duty sergeant.

‘We’ve got more lads coming over from HQ, but they won’t be here for half an hour’ the sergeant told Iredale, ‘by which time most of this lot will have fucked off.’ He raised the loud hailer to his mouth, and asked again for anyone who’d been playing that night to stay in the car park until they’d been spoken to by an officer. Then he switched it off and turned back to Iredale. ‘Tell you what, Keith. Most of them will head back into town to get a few drinks in, so why don’t you get up there? Anyone who looks like they might have been playing tonight, and they’re not hard to spot what with the mud and the wet clothes, get their details. There’ll be a fair few who wouldn’t ever talk to us voluntarily, like.’

‘Got you, sarge. Will do.’

Saturday, 19th April

It was almost 6am when DI Smith called the team together in the CID room.

‘For those of you who don’t know the victim’s name is Chris Brown, aged 20, from an address in Workington. Next of kin have been informed. That wasn’t difficult mind you, because his dad was in the game earlier, and his mum and sister were watching, worse luck.’

‘Christ’ said someone.

‘Preliminary cause of death is drowning, but don’t be surprised if that changes. He was pulled out of the beck at about 10.55, only about five yards below the bridge. SOCO is on site, but as you’d expect the place looks like it’s been trampled over by a herd of rhino, which is pretty much how it felt, I can tell you. And that brings me to the next point. As most of you will know both myself and DS Hodgson were playing last night, because our information was that George Hayton had issued a kind of challenge to Jack Moffett. If you don’t know who those two are then you don’t deserve to be coppers, so don’t ask me about them. Look them up if you bloody have to. Anyway, this is what we know for sure. At about half ten some of Hayton’s lads arrived, and we have positive IDs on three of them, and they joined the game. Shortly after that it all really kicked off, and that’s when we had the casualties. Three or four, all Moffett’s boys, ended up with broken bones, ruptured kidneys, the works. At that time the game was here,’ Smith pointed at the map on the big screen, ‘just on the edge of the council office’s car park, only a few yards from Cloffocks Beck. The scrum then went back into the water, at about ten two, and soon after they moved away again, along the Cloffocks in the direction of the Reds’ ground. And that’s when the body was spotted by one of the spectators, in the water, like. A young lad he is. We’ve got his statement, and he’s not a suspect. Any questions so far?’

‘We’re sure that the deceased was a player, are we, sir?’ asked Iredale.

‘In which sense? Player of the game, or a player as in an active gang member? He was certainly a player of the game, and his mum has confirmed that he’d been in right from the start at half six. He’d been looking forward to it for weeks, apparently. As to whether or not Chris Brown was involved with either gang that’s hard to say. He didn’t have a record, not even a caution, which as you know is pretty unusual these days. He’s not showing up in intelligence reports, and the drugs team have no interest. However, we know exactly what was going on last night, don’t we? So I’d say it makes sense to assume that he might have been associated with one of our gangs, most likely Moffett’s crew. So let’s divide up the tasks. I need all of the witnesses we’ve got listed spoken to, today please. How many are there, Keith?’

‘We’ve got a total of twenty four participants, plus half a dozen others who say they were nearby at the time it happened.’

Smith looked tired, and irritable with it. He shook his head.

‘That’s not good enough, not good enough at all. There had to have been fifty in the scrum at the time it happened, minimum, so where are the others at? I want every witness interview to start by asking who else they knew who was in the game. Let’s see if we can’t get that total up, and quickly. I’m relying on you, Keith.’

‘Aye, boss.’

‘Right, Kenny. Get the tech support team collating all the CCTV that they can find, and we’ll go through it later. Then I need you to get the background enquiries started. By the time we meet again I want us to have a full picture of this dead kid. What he did, who he knew, whose gang he was in.’

‘If anyone’s, boss’ said Iredale.

‘Aye, that’s right. But our working hypothesis has to be that this kid was a soldier, probably for Moffett, and that one of Hayton’s lads killed him. And if that’s the case, and they think that they’ll get away with it because we won’t be able to identify exactly who it was who drowned the kid, then they’ve got another bloody thing coming. Because conspiracy to murder is what we’ll be looking at here, at least until we know different. And the benefit of that charge is that we might get to put a whole load of scum-bags away at the same time, and for a long time too. So there’s plenty to play for. All right, let’s get on with it.’

Smith hadn’t heard the phone ringing in his office as he was talking, so he was as surprised as anyone else when ACC Val Gorham walked into the room. She wasn’t a big woman, but she certainly got everyone’s attention. ‘DI Smith, if I could have a word.’

‘Certainly, ma’am.’ Smith wondered if he could reach his office before Gorham did, and reckoned that he could. But it would hardly be worth it, because there wasn’t a lot of tidying that he could do in five seconds. So he just held the door open instead.

‘Can I get you a coffee?’

Gorham glanced round the room, and then said that she wouldn’t have a drink. Smith already seemed to have the station’s entire stock of mugs on his desk anyway.

‘I’d like an update on the death last night. What are we looking at? An accidental death?’

‘Possibly, ma’am. It certainly has been known. But then it’s also been known for an Uppies and Downies scrum to actually go through the cinema right up in town, so pretty much anything is possible at this stage.’

Val Gorham didn’t smile, but Smith hadn’t really expected her to. They’d only met once before, at a senior manager’s conference, and she’d seemed about as warm, and every bit as stiff, as one of the frozen fish fingers that his kids loved so much.

‘So you’re treating the death as suspicious?’

‘Absolutely, for now at least. I expect you’re aware of the intelligence that we had regarding the power struggle between our two resident gang leaders? The word is that the game last night was supposed to be some kind of show of strength, to prove to the whole town that George Hayton is the main man round here now.’

‘I do hope that Superintendent Skinner is the main man round here, as you put it.’

‘Of course, ma’am. I meant in the criminal community.’

‘Is that really a likely explanation, Inspector? Some kind of gang battle? It seems a bit implausible.’

‘They don’t call this the wild west for nothing, ma’am.’

Smith hazarded a smile, but quickly realised that he’d hazarded in vain.

‘I do dislike stereotyping, Inspector. It makes for inefficient policing. But you’re probably wondering why it isn’t your own station commander who is sitting opposite you now?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I need to discuss your potential conflicts, DI Smith.’

‘What, because me and Kenny Hodgson were playing last night, ma’am? I’ve already explained that we had information concerning Moffett and Hayton.’

‘You have. May I see your risk assessment form, please?’

‘I haven’t had time to complete one yet, what with the death last night.’

‘I see. You are aware that the whole point of such a form is that it is completed in advance of an operation?’

Smith nodded. he couldn’t think of an excuse, and even if he could he wouldn’t have bothered.

‘And you’ve had this particular information for how long?’

‘Just a day or two. Something like that, anyway.’

‘That’s more than long enough to complete the risk assessment form. But you did discuss the situation with tactical of course? You must have decided not to deploy the armed response team. As a strategic decision, I mean.’

‘That’s right, ma’am.’

‘So you did discuss that decision with tactical, didn’t you? After all, we’re talking about serious public disorder here.’

‘No, ma’am. I didn’t think it was necessary. Like I say, Uppies and Downies always involves a bit of disorder. It’s the whole idea of the thing, in a way. And Moffett and Hayton aren’t stupid enough to start open warfare in front of hundreds of witnesses.’

‘And yet you still pulled a young man’s lifeless body out of that stream last night. Didn’t you, DI Smith?’

Smith didn’t reply. There didn’t seem to be much point. But surely Gorham hadn’t come all this way just to bollock him about his paperwork. All she had to do was read his appraisals, any of them, to know that had never been his strong point. It was what you had DCs for, anyway.

‘So let’s talk about your conflicts’ said Gorham, looking at him as intently as if he was suspected of murdering her mother. ‘I have a decision to make, and I wanted to talk to you before I made up my mind.’

‘And what’s that, ma’am?’

‘Whether you and DS Hodgson can continue to be involved in this investigation. Having spoken to you I have now arrived at my decision, I’m afraid.’

Smith tried not to look as angry as he felt ‘But ma’am, we’re the blokes on the ground. We know the people. Christ, it was us who saw this coming.’

‘And that’s one of the reasons that I’ve decided to remove you from this investigation, just as soon as a new SIO can be appointed.’

‘But ma’am..’

‘I don’t expect my decisions to be questioned, Inspector. And please do bear in mind that in due course there will be an inquiry into the way in which you both prepared for and carried through the operation last night. I’m not going to say that your apparent flouting of procedure led to this young man’s death, but it may have been a contributory factor. As a result, you could easily be conflicted, as a natural causes cause of death and a no-crime outcome would be very much in your interests, and in those of DS Hodgson.’

‘But I’ve just told the troops that I think that the kid could have been involved with one of the gangs, ma’am.’

‘I appreciate that, Inspector, but you weren’t subject to an investigation at that point, were you?’

‘So what next, ma’am?’

‘You continue to run the investigation until you are relieved. Brief your DS on what I’ve said, but no-one else. You’ll be contacted by the new SIO just as soon as he or she has been appointed. But please ensure that all approved investigative procedures are followed in the meantime. I hope I make myself clear?’

‘You do, ma’am. So who’s it to be? Andy Hall, I expect.’

‘He’s certainly one option. What makes you suggest him?’

‘It’s not a suggestion, ma’am. Not at all. But he is the blue-eyed boy. We all know that, even out here.’