The Rule of Fear Read online

  ‘Thank you, sir. I will,’ he assured them.

  Gerrard grew serious again and appeared to look to Johnston for moral support before speaking, moving uncomfortably in his chair as Johnston looked on through her green eyes that shone with intelligence and ambition.

  ‘Terrible thing that happened to you,’ Gerrard finally spoke. ‘Terrible thing that you had to see.’ King just shrugged, dying inside at the thought of having to discuss it with two people he neither respected nor liked. ‘The young girl – the girl you saved – eventually spoke to the Murder Investigation Team. She confirmed it was her father who’d tried to kill her – who’d killed the rest of his family. The investigating officers discovered he suspected the mother of having an affair and feared she was going to leave him and take the children with her, so he decided better to kill them all. Turns out she wasn’t even seeing anyone else. He just imagined it.’

  ‘I know,’ King managed to say. ‘The investigation team told me before the trial.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gerrard said, sounding more melancholy than King had ever heard him. ‘I suppose they did. But after such a traumatic experience I was wondering how you felt – how you really felt? Never mind what you told the psychiatrist.’

  ‘I’m fine, sir. I just need to get back to work. Proper work.’

  ‘Very well,’ Gerrard smiled, seemingly satisfied. ‘As I’ve said, you’ll be taking care of the day-to-day running of the Unit and will report to Inspector Johnston here who’ll be overseeing things as a whole.’

  ‘Fine,’ King agreed, already rising from his chair, happy he’d heard everything he needed to before Johnston stopped him.

  ‘You’ve been working on the Crime Desk, I understand?’ Johnston finally spoke – her voice accentless and pleasantly toned. Designed to trap the unwary.

  ‘Yes,’ King confirmed, easing back into his chair.

  ‘Then are you aware there appears to be a serial offender preying on young children on the estate and surrounding areas?’ Johnston asked.

  ‘I am,’ King answered.

  ‘Not as serious as it could be, thank God, although we take all offences against children, particularly sexual offences, very seriously indeed.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ King went along with her, wondering where she was heading.

  ‘It’s time he was stopped,’ she insisted, ‘before he does something even worse.’

  ‘I understand,’ King assured.

  ‘Good,’ she smiled slightly – showing the tips of her straight white teeth as she turned to Gerrard to let him know she’d finished.

  ‘You start tomorrow,’ Gerrard told him. ‘We’ve sorted out an office over at Canning Town for you. It’s not much, but it’ll do. Your new team will meet you there in the morning and you can all get acquainted. I’m sure you’ll already know one or two of them.’

  ‘Probably,’ King shrugged and headed for the door.

  ‘Inspector Johnston will email you a list of the team members before tomorrow,’ he continued. ‘Give you a chance to look them over.’

  ‘Make sure you keep me fully informed,’ Johnston told him, with a trace of a warning in her voice.

  ‘Of course,’ he assured him, guessing that Johnston wouldn’t be slow in taking the credit for anything positive they achieved.

  ‘And be careful,’ Gerrard warned him as he headed through the door. ‘I hear the locals occasionally take potshots from the tower blocks at passing police officers with unwanted television sets.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ King smiled as he pushed himself from his seat and headed for the door.

  The next morning, shortly after ten, King entered the small office on the second floor of Canning Town Police Station that used to belong to the now reassigned Crime Prevention Officer. His three charges were already there noisily sorting out their new desks and trying to find places to stash the huge amount of kit that every uniformed officer now possessed: body armour, utility belts, riot helmets, normal helmets, flat caps, CS gas, extendable truncheons, fixed truncheons, light jackets, heavy jackets and a seemingly endless number of other items. He knew all three of them by name and sight, although they’d never worked closely. None of them were distracted from their mission to sort out the office when he entered, choosing to acknowledge his presence in a more casual manner.

  ‘You must be mad to want to be in charge of this shit posting,’ PC Davey Brown accused him in his strong Glaswegian accent – his hair still cropped exactly as it had been in his days as a Royal Marine before a shoulder injury had forced him to retire when he was only twenty-one. He had a tough, unpleasant-looking face, other than his striking green eyes, all enhanced by a muscular body that made him appear shorter than his five-foot-ten inches. Since joining the Met four years previously, he’d established a reputation amongst his peers and the lowlife of Newham that was to be feared. ‘I heard you actually volunteered for this shit,’ he continued, stuffing his newly acquired drawers with kit.

  ‘Maybe,’ King played it cautiously, heading deeper into the office.

  ‘Just like you did,’ PC Renita Mahajan laughed at Brown who pulled a face of disgust.

  ‘Did I fuck,’ he insisted. ‘First rule of being a police officer – never volunteer for fucking anything.’

  ‘Well I volunteered,’ she proudly admitted, her bright smile adding to her attractiveness before she pushed her shiny, short black hair out of her face and returned to emptying the previous incumbent’s hordes of paperwork from her desk’s drawers and throwing them into a confidential waste bag. At only five-foot-five and the tender age of twenty-three, she made up for her shortcomings by remaining strong and athletic, fearless and tenacious. She had only three years’ service with the Met, but she was already confident and capable way beyond her years. ‘Better than driving around in a patrol car all day with some old fart who doesn’t want to get involved any more, delivering messages and taking crime reports.’

  ‘You’ll be wishing you were back in that patrol car soon enough when you’re walking around the Grove Wood Estate in the middle of the night on your own, hen,’ Brown smiled evilly.

  ‘Ignore these two,’ Danny Williams, the final member of the team, advised King. ‘They think they’re Laurel and Hardy.’

  ‘Who?’ Brown spat the question. Williams ignored him as he tried to close the tall metal locker he’d filled with equipment with no success, ramming it with his sizeable shoulder in frustration, before giving up and turning to King and straightening to his full six-foot-two, his lithe, athletic body augmented by his mahogany skin. He kept his Afro hair cropped so nothing would distract from his undeniably handsome face, although at only twenty-four some boyish features still remained.

  ‘We all volunteered,’ Williams ended the argument, ‘and so did a shitload more people, but we got picked because we’re the best.’

  ‘Aye,’ Brown interrupted. ‘Six months of this shit and I’ll have earned enough brownie points to fuck off to the TSG. Borough policing’s strictly for mugs. Territorial Support Group’s the real show.’

  ‘It’s the CID next for me,’ Williams explained.

  ‘And you?’ King asked Renita, who continued tidying her desk for a few seconds while she thought.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘Promotion maybe. What about you?’

  ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ he admitted before Brown answered for him.

  ‘Have you not heard?’ Brown grinned. ‘Sergeant King here’s on accelerated promotion. Oh, he’s strictly just passing through on his way to the top.’

  ‘You’re on accelerated promotion?’ Renita asked, suspicious.

  ‘That’s the rumour.’ King knew he’d need to quickly earn their respect. ‘If that’s the way I want to go.’

  ‘If?’ Brown almost shouted. ‘Listen, pal – take some advice. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Fucking accelerated promotion – easy life, eh.’

  ‘We’re not pals yet,’ King warned him. ‘Let’s start wit
h Sarge and see how we get on, eh?’

  Brown eyed him silently for a few seconds before answering. ‘Aye. Fair enough.’

  Williams calmed the tension. ‘So what’s the score – what’s the brief with this estate policing unit?’

  ‘What you been told?’

  ‘Only what Inspector Johnston told me,’ Williams explained. ‘Police the Grove Wood Estate and sort it out. I was hoping you could be a little more specific.’

  King moved deeper into the office and dumped his heavy kitbag onto the only desk that hadn’t been taken. ‘Fair enough,’ he began. ‘The estate’s in a shit state. Local criminals and yobs seem to run the place. Reported crime’s through the roof, so God only knows how much unreported crime’s going on.’

  ‘Powers-that-be won’t like that,’ Renita added.

  ‘Safer Neighbourhoods Team tried to get on top of it, but failed,’ King continued.

  ‘SNT,’ Brown scoffed. ‘They couldn’t get on top of a whore.’

  King ignored him. ‘Our job, to put it bluntly, is to kick some arse – within the confines of the law, naturally.’

  ‘I like the sound of that,’ Williams joined in.

  ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’ Brown once more grinned his evil grin.

  ‘I said within the confines of the law,’ King reminded him.

  ‘Aye,’ Brown argued, ‘but the local slags know the law better than most barristers. We want results, we’re going to have to bend things a little. Know what I mean?’

  ‘No one minds things getting a little bent,’ King agreed. ‘But it better be for the right reason and the right person. I don’t want anyone overstepping the mark. Very low-grade stuff and only when there’s no question of them being guilty. No stitch-ups – even on the local faces. We’re better than that. Someone tosses a stolen phone when they see you coming and your evidence says you found it in their pocket when you searched them – hey, so be it. No one’s going to get too worried about it, but no more than that. Everyone understand?’ Everyone nodded in agreement, except for Brown who just shrugged. ‘Good,’ King left it.

  ‘As I’m sure you all know by now, there are several fairly notorious drug dealers in the estate and at least one prolific handler,’ he explained.

  ‘I’ll soon take care of them,’ Brown crowed before King cut him down.

  ‘No you won’t,’ he ordered. ‘None of you will. Our job is to take out all the little shits who’ve been making life hell for everyone on the estate. Later on maybe we can move on to bigger fish, but right now we sort out these little bastards who are beginning to feel untouchable. The CID can deal with major crime. Our brief is to get the streets back.’

  ‘The bloody CID?’ Brown asked in his own unique way.

  ‘Yes,’ King answered – the fact he was losing patience plain to hear in his voice. Brown just shook his head. ‘Now, I spent half of yesterday in with the Intelligence Unit getting the info on who’s who on the Grove Wood and I’ve identified the people we should be looking at.’ He pulled a folder and some Blu-tack from his kitbag and spilled the photographs from inside over his desk. As he spoke he stuck mugshots of the people he discussed to the closest whiteboard.

  ‘Let’s start with the local burglars, shall we?’ he began. ‘Tommy Morrison, seventeen-year-old residential burglar.’ The mugshot showed a skinny youth with bad skin and unkempt brown hair. ‘He specializes in daytime burglaries of homes on the estate.’

  ‘So much for not shitting on your own doorstep,’ Williams said.

  ‘Morrison doesn’t care about rules and sayings,’ King told them. ‘He only has one rule – steal it if you can. He doesn’t care from who.’

  ‘Why don’t the locals just give him a good kicking and teach him a lesson?’ Renita asked.

  ‘Because they’re all as bad as each other,’ Brown explained. ‘All fucking thieving from each other – all fucking each other over.’

  ‘Probably,’ King agreed, ‘but the fact remains this kid is a one-man crime wave, so let’s bring an end to it.’ He stuck another photograph of a similarly unpleasant-looking youth to the board. ‘Justin Harris. Another residential burglar and sometime partner-in-crime of the before-mentioned Morrison and just as prolific.’ Yet another photograph was stuck to the board, this time of a black youth in his late teens. ‘Everton Watson,’ King explained. ‘The last of our residential burglars, only he strictly works solo and is notoriously slippery.’

  ‘I’ve dealt with that slag,’ Renita told them. ‘Nicked him for screwing a car. Looks like he’s moved up to bigger and better things.’

  ‘He has,’ King agreed, ‘and now he needs to be stopped. But speaking of screwing cars,’ he continued, sticking two more photographs on the board, ‘we shouldn’t forget these two – Craig Rowsell and Harrison Clarke – a salt-and-pepper team specializing in theft from motor vehicles. Where you find one you’ll usually find the other. Prolific isn’t the word for these two. Next time you feel broken glass from a smashed car window under your feet, you can be sure it’s probably down to these two clowns. They’ll think nothing of breaking into a car just to see if there’s anything worth nicking. They’re looking for satnavs people have been stupid enough to leave inside or mobiles, but they’ll take absolutely anything: loose change, adaptors, chargers, pens, CDs, even lighters in the past. If they had a motto it’d be “steal first – think later” and they are causing havoc to the borough motor vehicle crime figures.’

  ‘Well now,’ Brown added sarcastically, ‘we can’t have that, can we.’

  ‘No we can’t,’ King reprimanded him. ‘And then there’s those who are slightly further up the food chain. As I’ve said, they’re not our immediate problem, but you should be aware of who they are.’

  The first mugshot was of an overweight man about thirty-four years old, with oily olive skin and hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was smiling in the photo, revealing his heavily stained teeth. ‘This is Arman Baroyan,’ King told them. ‘By all accounts he’s a proper Fagin – the main dealer in stolen goods on the estate, but judging by his lack of arrests he’s no fool.’

  Next he slapped a photo of a man in his mid-twenties to the rogues’ gallery – tall and skinny with a poor pox-marked complexion, his head shaved, dead blue eyes staring from his skull-like face. ‘Micky Astill’s our main local heroin and crack dealer, selling out of his secured flat in The Meadows. He never seems to get turned over by any bigger or more violent dealers, so assume he’s getting protection from somewhere.’

  ‘Probably the Campbells,’ Renita offered, referring to the area’s most notorious crime family.

  ‘Probably,’ King agreed, ‘but the Campbells neither live on the estate nor commit the sorts of crimes we’re interested in.’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ Brown snarled.

  ‘And last but not least,’ King ignored him, sticking his final photo to the board, ‘Susie Ubana – our primary local cannabis dealer.’ He tapped the photograph of the attractive black woman in her early thirties. ‘If it’s cannabis you want she’s your girl. She deals from her heavily fortified maisonette in Millander Walk. Drug Squad have hit it before, but by the time they got through the metal grates any drugs had been long flushed or so well hidden they couldn’t find them.’

  ‘If we’re not going to hit them, why we talking about them?’ Brown demanded to know.

  ‘Because they’re a good source of arrests,’ King told him. ‘You see any local toe-rags coming from any of these addresses there’s a strong chance they’ll be carrying drugs or stolen goods. Never look a gift horse in the mouth – wasn’t that what you said?’

  ‘Aye, well,’ Brown struggled for an answer.

  King pressed on. ‘And remember – in amongst the scum there’ll be a lot of decent folk just trying to live their lives quietly. Treat them with respect when you’re dealing with them and we might just win their support and confidence. We’re there to police by consent – not just force. Everyone under
stand?’

  Renita and Williams nodded, whereas Brown just shrugged.

  ‘Now, most of the people we’re interested in don’t even get out of their beds till midday, lazy bastards, so there’s no point us wandering around the estate at seven in the morning. We’ll work two shifts between ten am and six pm and six pm till two in the morning – two of us per shift. You don’t have to walk around holding hands, although sometimes we’ll need to stick together. Any questions?’

  ‘Aye,’ Brown asked. ‘When do we get started?’

  ‘Right now,’ King told him, clipping on his utility belt and pulling his body armour from his bag. ‘The Grove Wood Estate’s crawling with criminality. It’s time to restore the rule of law.’

  The small meeting began to break up before King stopped them. ‘One more thing, before I forget.’ The others stopped what they were doing and turned back to look at him. ‘Apart from the before-mentioned rogues’ gallery, the Grove Wood has an additional and very unwelcome problem.’

  ‘Such as?’ Renita asked.

  ‘Some animal messing with the local kids,’ King explained.

  ‘The fucking kiddie fiddler?’ Brown jumped in. ‘CID still not caught the bastard?’

  ‘Yes, the kiddie fiddler and, no, the CID still haven’t caught him,’ King answered. ‘But this one’s already up to half-a-dozen attacks to date and doesn’t look like stopping until he’s stopped. I spoke with DS Marino about it and he’s convinced whoever’s doing it is already escalating. Only a matter of time before he commits a serious sexual assault on a child. We have to stop him before that happens.’

  ‘That’s a lot of attacks in a relatively small area,’ Renita questioned. ‘How come he keeps getting away with it?’

  ‘CID have had the Crime Squad down there a few times,’ King explained, ‘but he never attacks out in the open, so observation posts haven’t worked. They tried to put plain-clothed units on the ground, but you know what it’s like on the Grove Wood – strangers stand out a mile and Old Bill even more so. As soon as the Crime Squad moved onto the estate the local slags put the alarm up – warning whoever we’re looking for, even if they didn’t mean to.’