The Dead Sea Deception (19 page)

He pushed his empty plate away. ‘Then I moved up to Burnt Hill – to comprehensive school. And it all went bad. Little mummy’s boy, suddenly thrown right into the fiery furnace.’ He grinned at Kennedy, as though inviting her to laugh at the image. ‘The first time I saw a kid pull a knife in a fight, it was a real eye-opener. It was like … there’d been a balance before and now there wasn’t. The willingness of the kids around me to do harm – and their ability to do it – had escalated by about
n
per cent, where
n
is a really big number.

‘But the system of control hadn’t changed much at all. We were still being threatened with detentions, demerits, loss of privileges. Pint-sized Al Capones, malevolent little bastards with weasel minds and heavy weaponry, being told that if they didn’t buck their ideas up they’d have to stay behind after class. I
realised right there and then what cops were for, and I started wanting to be one.’

He grinned at her again. ‘And eight years later, my dream came true. Don’t you love a story with a happy ending?’

Kennedy acknowledged the potted autobiography with a solemn nod. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I understand you a little better now, Harper. The strict disciplinarian keeping the naughty schoolchildren of the world at bay. Do uniforms figure in this fantasy at all?’

‘I only just got out of uniform,’ Harper reminded her. ‘Uniforms aren’t sexy for me. Plainclothes – that’s where it’s at, Kennedy.’

‘Of course.’ He was looking at her in a speculative way. She met that look squarely, a little irritated by it. ‘What? What’s on your mind?’

‘You are. I’m wondering about something, and maybe you can explain it to me. You seem pretty focused on the job – and you seem to be pretty good at it. I’ve only known you for a day or so, and I’ve already got you clocked, more or less, as career police. I mean, this isn’t even a little bit casual to you. You’d never describe it as “just a job”. Am I wrong?’

‘Is this relevant to anything?’

‘Well, maybe not. I’m just asking because it would be a good thing to know. I mean, since we find ourselves working together.’

‘It’s not just a job. So what?’

Harper threw out his hands. ‘So how do you find yourself in such a ridiculous mess? It’s like you chose it. Like you wanted to be shoved out on your own, and hated. I mean, going your own way instead of backing up the rest of your unit. Briefing against other officers, in an official inquiry. That’s a marked choice, isn’t it?’

Kennedy went through several answers in her mind. Most involved telling Harper to shove it up his arse and work it in really deep. She finally settled for: ‘The rest of my unit had just put four bullets into an unarmed man.’

‘That’s not the point, though, is it? Not really. I’m assuming that wasn’t the point.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be? You think Marcus Dell doesn’t matter because he was black and stoned?’

‘Jesus.’ Harper shrugged brusquely, as though the words had settled on his shoulder and he wanted to dislodge them. His tone became more serious. ‘Listen, I put my name down for ARU as soon as I got my transfer into Detective Division. The shortlist is three years, I knew that. But I didn’t even get short-listed because the psych tests are so sensitive – I mean, really hair-trigger. I didn’t score quite high enough on impulse control. So I think it pretty much follows that anyone who did get their hand on a gun has proved their fitness to carry one. You hear what I’m saying, Kennedy? You put yourself into an elite group. Self-selecting. Top of the class.

‘So once you’re in a situation like that, I’m thinking your team is first and last and everything. Doesn’t matter if this guy, Dell, was carrying or not. He
looked
like he was carrying, and he assaulted an officer. You don’t second guess the luckless bastards who have to make that call, right? I would have said that was basic. So what am I not getting?’

Harper fell silent, staring at her expectantly. They could have sat there like that until the crack of doom. Kennedy didn’t feel that she owed him an explanation, or care overmuch what he thought about her. But she did care about the false logic. She knew where it led.

‘You have any idea how many kills the Met has to its name, Harper?’ she asked him. ‘Total. Going all the way back to 1829,
when they kicked out the Bow Street Runners and formed the modern service?’

Harper made a tutting sound. ‘No. And neither do you.’

‘Right. You’re right. But I can tell you how many we bag in an average year. Shootings, I mean. Not accidents. Officers shooting to kill.’

Harper chewed it over, along with a stray piece of fried bread. ‘Well, I’d be guessing, but I know it’s a lot less than—’

‘It’s one.’

Harper’s eyebrows did a dip and rise. He said nothing.

‘Yeah,’ said Kennedy. ‘Some years it bumps to two, or God forbid three, but some years there aren’t any. So on average, over the long haul, it’s just the one.’ She didn’t say:
and last year, the one was me
. It didn’t seem to need saying.

Harper nodded, accepting the figure, inviting Kennedy to get to the point.

‘Across the whole of the country – and I’m counting in Wales and Scotland – the worst year so far this century was 2005. That was a bad one, all right. A shame and a scandal. Three times the body count of the previous year. That brought it up to six. Six shootings in a year. In the country. You got that, Harper? But you know, we can drop the bar a little lower. All deaths arising from civilian contact with police officers – beatings in remand cells, dodgy restraint techniques, high speed chases that go that little bit too far. What’s the score now? Any guesses?’

‘No,’ Harper said. ‘No guesses, Kennedy. But I’m sure you can tell me.’

‘It’s less than a hundred a year. A whole lot less. Most years, say sixty and you’ll be close. There are cities in America – and not even particularly big cities –that have more deaths in police custody than our whole island. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because most cops aren’t out there to score points or fight wars. They’re
out there to do a job. A job that’s hard. Blood, sweat and tears
hard
.’

‘Okay.’ Kennedy’s tone had a hard enough edge to it that it would have taken a brave man to disagree. But Harper wasn’t about to disagree in any case. ‘That was sort of my point before it was your point,’ he said. ‘That the job is really tough and if you’ve been doing it for any length of time, you maybe deserve a bit of love and understanding. But you draw a different conclusion, obviously.’

‘Not just a different conclusion, Harper. The opposite conclusion. If you’re proud of those figures, or if you just think they mean anything, then you hold serving officers to a higher standard, not a lower one. Because the worst thing anyone can do is let things go by on the nod. Between the three of us, my team and me, we killed a man, when there was no good reason to. If you think we should get away with that, then sit back and watch those numbers climb and climb. Sit and watch accountability go out the window while brain-dead cowboys like Gates and Leakey go back into the division and get clapped on the back as though they took one for the team.’

She was talking a little too loudly by the time she’d finished, and a few people at other tables were shooting her nervous glances. ‘All right,’ Harper said. ‘All right, Kennedy. Point taken. I guess that was what I wanted to hear. I guess I know where you’re coming from now.’

‘No, you don’t,’ she assured him, grimly. Because she’d left out the main point of the story. She hadn’t particularly meant to. She just found, when she came to it, that it was the hardest part to put it into words.

But Harper was still looking at her, waiting for the punchline. So she gave it to him, without quite knowing why.

Before there was Kennedy, H., Det Sgt 4031, there was
Kennedy, P., Det Sgt 1117. He served twelve years in uniform and twenty-eight in Division. He got his ARU in 1993, although they didn’t call it that back then, they called it Open Carry, because that was an American phrase that was getting some currency and it sounded pretty damn cool.

On the 27th of February, 1997, openly carrying, Detective Sergeant Peter Kennedy pursued an armed man, Johnny McElvoy, who was fleeing the scene of a gangland shootout. The chase led Kennedy into an alley, where, in the dark and thinking – as it turned out, wrongly – that he was walking into an ambush, he fired three rounds at a pregnant woman at a range of twenty feet.

Amazingly, the woman survived. But the bullet that passed through her uterus and mulched its contents also passed through her lower spine and left her paraplegic.

Kennedy was devastated. His friends, though, were supportive, and agreed between them a version of events that spared both him and the force a great deal of pain and embarrassment. McElvoy, they said, had taken up a defensive position in the alley and was firing on them. Kennedy had returned fire, and the woman, panicked, had run into the path of his bullet.

Kennedy got to this point in her account and just stopped. Harper was looking at her, clearly expecting more, but this was where it got complicated and ugly and harder to explain. ‘They covered his back,’ she summarised.

‘I got that,’ Harper said. ‘But it was an accident, yeah? Just a horrible accident.’

‘Harper, it was an accident that wrecked one life and aborted another.’

‘So … ?’ He looked blank.

Kennedy was exasperated that he didn’t get it. ‘So rallying around your mates isn’t the right response in a situation like that. If it was a reasonable mistake, the truth should be good
enough. If it was a screw-up, then the truth has to come out and a copper has to lose his gun licence because he wasn’t good enough to have it in the first place.’

Harper settled back in his chair, staring at her shrewdly. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What’s the bit you’re leaving out?’

‘I’m leaving nothing out,’ Kennedy said.

‘Yes, you are. I’ll agree with you this far: what your dad did was terrible. It was
really
terrible. And I could see where that would leave a scar on you. But it didn’t stop you from joining the force, or going out for detective, or applying for your ARU. So where’s the scar, Kennedy? Which bit hurts?’

Kennedy didn’t answer. She left a tenner to cover the breakfasts and the tip, and they walked back to the yard. She was silent as they walked, and so was Harper. He seemed to have that interrogator’s knack of making a silence push against you, until you felt like you needed to do something to fill it.

‘Okay,’ Kennedy said at last. And she told him what was, for her, the worst thing. The thing that, even after all this time, she couldn’t describe in a level voice. How Peter Kennedy had lined up his wife and two kids and schooled them in the fine detail of the lie, in case anyone – a friend at school, a journalist, someone they met in Sainsbury’s – should ever ask. Because God forbid there should be a crack big enough for a stranger to pry a crowbar into and overturn the rock under which he was now hiding. Heather and Steve and little Chrissie, along with their mother, had to parrot back to Sergeant Peter Kennedy the exact sequence of events, in the right order, again and again, and when they got it wrong he shouted at them in a fury that came undiluted from the panic in his soul, and when they got it right he hugged them with fervent love.

‘It pretty much wrecked us, as a family,’ Kennedy said. Over the hump now, she could at least do the summing up dispassionately. ‘We had that big lie sitting in between us, then, all the
damn time. You couldn’t talk around it, so you didn’t talk at all. What was saved, Harper? He never got past sergeant, because whatever the docket said, everyone knew what had happened. Everyone could see the monkey on his back. He started drinking like a maniac, and I think that brought his Alzheimer’s on. The stress – well, maybe it didn’t cause my mother’s cancer, but it seemed to make her give in to it a whole lot quicker. And none of us feel anything for each other any more. I haven’t seen my brother for ten years. I see Chrissie once in a blue moon. We … we stopped working, and we fell apart. Game over.’

‘And your dad’s dead?’

Kennedy thought about the shambling set of mannerisms she shared her flat with. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘My dad is dead.’

‘So. Did you become a lesbian to get even with him?’

Kennedy stiffened, stopped, turned to face Harper, ready to tear a number of thin strips off his facetious little ego. But Harper was grinning and he threw up his hands in surrender.

‘Trying to lighten the tone,’ he said.

‘Idiot.’

‘No, really. Sigmund Freud said—’

‘I’m probably going to get my gun licence back at some point, Harper. Bear that in mind.’

He nodded, still grinning, and bailed out of the joke right there.

Summerhill still hadn’t shown. Rawl said he hadn’t even gone into the committee room yet.

Kennedy called it. They’d head out to Luton and be back by lunchtime. Probably they’d still return before Summerhill surfaced. She went to retrieve the case file, so they could add in Opie’s statement if she said anything pertinent, and to leave a handwritten note for Summerhill explaining what they were
doing. In the meantime, she asked Harper to shoot out an Interpol trawl for Michael Brand. You never knew your luck, after all.

The car they’d been driving the day before was unavailable for some reason, so they signed out another one from the pool and found it, after a short search, in the Caxton Street garage: a bottle-green Volvo S60, in good condition apart from a deep scratch down the full length of the driver’s side where somebody had keyed it. Opening the doors released a miasma of stale smoke, which made Harper swear and Kennedy wince. But it wasn’t worth the trouble of going back inside and working through two more sets of paperwork.