DAY TWO – WEDNESDAY
For DI Jack Burns it was a brutally busy day. It brought two triumphs, two disappointments and a host of still unanswered questions. But that was par for the course. Rarely is a detective blessed with a case wrapped up like a Christmas parcel simply being delivered to his desk.
His first success was with Mr Patel. The shopkeeper was at the front desk on the dot of eleven, as eager to help as ever.
‘I would like you to look at some photographs,’ said Burns when they were seated in front of what looked like a TV screen. In his younger days the Criminal Records Office photos, known throughout the force as the mug shots, were contained in a large album, or several such, shielded behind plastic sheeting. Burns still preferred the old way, for the witness could flip forward and back until he had made his choice. But the process was now electronic, and the faces flashed up on the screen.
There were 100 to start with, and they covered some of the ‘hard cases’ known to the police in the immediate north-east quadrant of London. Not that 100 was the limit, not by a long way, but Burns began with a selection all known to the Dover nick. Mr Veejay Patel turned out to be a detective’s dream.
As number 28 flashed up he said, ‘That one.’
They were staring at a brutish face combining considerable stupidity with equal malevolence. Beefy, shorn skull, earring.
‘You are sure? Never seen him before? Never been in your shop, for example?’
‘No, not this one. But he was the one who took the blow to the nose.’
Mark Price, said the caption, and there was an identification number. At 77, Mr Patel got his second, the one with a long sallow face and lank hair falling to the ear lobes on each side. Harry Cornish. He had no doubt on either face and had not even paused for more than a second or two for any of the other faces. Burns closed the machine down. The CRO would come up with the full files on each man.
‘When I have traced and arrested these men, I shall ask you to attend an identification parade,’ said Burns. The shopkeeper nodded. He was willing. When he had gone, Luke Skinner remarked, ‘Strewth, guv, we could do with a few more like him.’
While waiting for the CRO computer to come up with the full files on Price and Cornish, Jack Burns put his head round the corner of the CID squad room. The man he wanted was poring over a desk. More form-filling.
‘Charlie, got a minute?’
Charlie Coulter was still a detective sergeant, but older than Burns, and he had been on the plot at Dover nick for fifteen years. When it came to local villains he knew them all.
‘Those two?’ he snorted. ‘Right animals, Jack. Bags of form. Not local; moved in about three years ago. Mostly small, low-intelligence stuff. Bag-snatching, mugging, pilfering, brawling, football hooligans. Plus some actual bodily harm. Both done time. Why?’
‘This time it’s grievous bodily harm,’ said Burns. ‘Kicked some old man into a coma yesterday. Got an address for them?’
‘Not offhand,’ said Coulter. ‘The last I heard they shared a squat somewhere off the High Road.’
‘Not on the Grove?’
‘Don’t think so. That’s not normally their patch. They must have been visiting, on the off chance.’
‘Do they run with a gang?’
‘Nope. Loners. They just hang around with each other.’
‘Gay?’
‘No record of it. Probably not. Cornish was done for an indecent assault. On a woman. It fell through. She changed her mind. Probably frightened off by Price.’
‘Druggies?’
‘Not known for it. Boozers, more like it. Pub brawls a speciality.’
At that point Coulter’s phone rang and Burns left him alone. The CRO files came through and gave an address. Burns went to see his Chief Super, Alan Parfitt, and got permission for what he wanted. By two p.m. a magistrate had signed a search warrant for the named premises, two licensed officers had drawn sidearms from the armoury. Burns, Skinner and six others, one toting a door-rammer, made up the team of ten.
The raid was at three. The house was old and scrofulous, destined for demolition once the developer had acquired the entire row; in the interim, it was boarded up and services had been cut off.
The peeling door sustained one very perfunctory knock, then the rammer splintered the lock and they were running up the stairs. The two thugs lived on the first floor up, in a pair of rooms that had never been much but were now a tip of considerable squalor. Neither man was at home. The two Armed Response officers holstered their guns and the search began.
The rummage team were looking for anything and everything. A wallet, former contents thereof, clothing, boots . . . They were not especially gentle. If the place had been a tawdry squat when they arrived, it was hardly home-sweet-home when they left. But they came up with only one trophy. Rolled up and tossed behind a shabby old sofa was a grubby T-shirt, its front crusted with blood. It was bagged and tagged. All other items of clothing went the same way. If forensic could find fibres on anything that must have come from the victim’s clothing, that match would put the thugs on the spot, at the time, and in physical contact with the limping man.
While the searchers did their business, Burns and Skinner quartered the street. Most neighbours knew the two thugs by sight, none spoke favourably of them, mainly because of their habit of rolling home drunk and noisy in the small hours, and no-one knew where they were or might be in the middle of an August afternoon.