Vacuum (2 page)

Iles maintained that possibly the greatest police objective after ‘stuff the Home Office' was ‘no blood on the pavement'. Throughout his domain, including drugs-pushing spots, he wanted a situation where people could walk unhurriedly and relaxed, especially younger women with brilliant arses. He, Ralph W. Ember and Manse had achieved these conditions for most of the time. Well, at least, for
some
of the time: plainly, not for Shale's wife and son. And there'd been other deaths. But, together, Manse and Ralph were strong enough to provide a reasonable degree of tranquillity under the Assistant Chief's conditional, constructive supervision. The agreement had never been explicit. Iles despised explicitness, unless, of course, he wanted something explicit. But the understanding worked. Now, with Shale's departure, Iles clearly sensed impending breakdown of the system; his careful, creative work ruined; its precise, frail, blessed balance vilely threatened. Blitzing up the Jag? A sort of blasphemy. Would the new managing director and CEO of Shale's outfit be willing to, and able to, maintain that violence-free, decently eye-socketed townscape demanded by the ACC? Would Ember agree to work with this jumped-up new boy? Also, could the amended alliance remain strong enough to smother machine pistol trouble from outside gangs trying to invade and capture some, or all, of the nicely hooked, lavish, Ember-Shale customer-base?

‘Manse can't run that kind of pushing operation in his new role, sir,' Harpur had said. ‘It wouldn't harmonize. The apostle James in the Bible states faith without works is dead, and probably means
good
works, not flogging skunk.'

‘I direct no blame at Shale, not a fragment. Poor, desolate, endlessly suffering Manse. His present needs have to be paramount. Our requirements trail his. Tolerance, Col.' They were in Harpur's room at headquarters; Desmond Iles, wearing uniform, had called in on his way to some lunchtime civic function where he might be able to give offence. He looked snotty, brilliantly smart, would-be wholesome, evasive, utterly dandruff-clear: he looked an Assistant Chief. ‘Tolerance is a quality I prize above all, except wise hate,' he said. ‘In some quarters I'm known as “Forbearance Des”.'

‘Is that right?'

‘Why shouldn't it be right, you fucker?'

‘These phrases!'

‘Will it last?'

‘What, sir?'

‘Manse Shale's “born again” experience.'

‘Back to the Bible – St Paul,' Harpur replied.

‘What about him?'

‘In his case it went on and on, after that moment on the road to Damascus. Many an Epistle. Two each for the Corinthians, Thessalonians and Timothy.'

Iles said: ‘He just wanted to bulk out the New Testament, like the long story Joyce put on the end of
Dubliners
to make a full-scale book of it.'

‘That Joyce—'

‘And if you say, “That Joyce – she was always a fly one,” I'll kill you,' Iles replied.

In the afternoon, Harpur decided to go down to Sandicott Terrace again, where the school-run shooting had happened. It would be his fifth trip there. Of the five, his later visits didn't have much to do with detection. There weren't any new discoveries to be made. But he'd fallen into a kind of dim ritual. It was as if he wanted to reassure himself that everything there was OK now: no further appalling incidents like those morning murders – the two people dead or dying in the Jag; the girl cowering blood-covered next to her brother's body in the back and having to be lifted out by Harpur; the demolished, low, front garden wall of a house where the car, its driver no longer a driver, got up on to the pavement at next to no speed and gave the brickwork a minor nudge  . . . not enough to prompt the air bags, but sufficient to bring some destruction and stop the wheels. The wall had been repaired now.

Sandicott Terrace was a section of middling or upper suburbia, and Harpur considered it only right that a proper appearance should be quickly restored, at public expense. On the whole, he admired suburbia. It tended to be tidy. It shouldn't be subjected to turf-battle knocks. Just after the shooting, the elderly couple who lived in the property had come out on to their front lawn and spoken to Iles and Harpur. They'd rushed separately to the scene. The man said apologetically, but not apologetically enough, that he'd heard the police had lost control of the streets. His wife remarked it was as if some evil force from another way of life had taken over. Harpur recalled verbatim a few of her words: ‘This is not civilization as we used to know it.' And he recalled, too, how badly that had shaken Iles. When he and Harpur were alone a bit later, the ACC said, yes, maybe some widespread evil force
was
destroying civilization and its little, sheltering walls. Harpur gave him a bit of rejoinder-bark then: ‘We're a
police
force. We're here to shelter them,' he said. ‘
We
haven't been fucking flattened, sir.'

‘Often in my prayers, Harpur, I say, “Thank you, God, for Col and his continuous, stupid optimism,”' Iles had replied.

Today, for visit five, Harpur parked a good way from the site of the shooting and walked a hundred metres or so. He stood at the minor junction where the gunman's Mondeo had waited. On the face of it, this had been an almost ridiculously simple pounce – ridiculously simple as long as the Jaguar came that way making for Bracken Collegiate private school, which the children attended. This was likely, though not totally certain. Shale's daughter had told them that he advised his wife to vary her routes there and back when she took over the run if he was away, but she would not always bother. Apparently, she didn't like to be instructed by Manse – to be bossed by Manse. So, the Mondeo had a fair chance of picking the right spot.

Harpur stood on that spot now, across the street from the restored wall. They had witness statements explaining what had happened. The Mondeo, one man in it – white, late twenties or early thirties – waited near the junction. The Jaguar came into Sandicott Terrace from the far end, the second Mrs Shale driving today, and had to slow and go round the Mondeo, aiming to turn left into the main highway – Landau Road – and on to a straight four-mile stretch to the school. But, as the Jaguar drew abreast, the automatic firing had started from the Mondeo into the Jaguar, with Mrs Shale a car's width away and Laurent, in the back, about the same. The nearness, and that kind of weapon, made it virtually impossible not to get a hit, at least of the Jaguar driver.

But the nearness also meant that if the main target should have been Mansel Shale, the gunman must have seen it was a woman at the Jaguar wheel. Nerves? No previous hit experience? Gung-ho madness – the need to kill for the sake of killing? A plan to hurt Manse, but not directly: lasting pain from immense grief? All this assumed, of course, that the objective
was
Manse, either to be eliminated himself or to be tortured by the deaths of those very close to him. Was the young girl, Matilda Shale, intended for execution, also?

The Mondeo had screamed away within a minute of the attack. Panic? Professionalism? Good luck? Exceptional luck? After all, the uncontrolled Jaguar might have taken some other streets that day. It might also have veered left not right after the shooting and hit the Mondeo, possibly disabling it.

Harpur walked back to his car. It had been another profitless, nervous-twitch, time-wasting sojourn. He thought he had glimpsed the woman from the repaired house watching him through the front-room window. She hadn't come out to talk, though. Perhaps she could tell from his manner that he knew no more than everyone knew, and had only returned to the Terrace as a kind of face-saving spasm: his attempt to show he still governed the streets, at least until someone proved he didn't.

TWO

N
aturally, others besides Iles speculated on the new situation. A couple of days ago at home Harpur's daughters had also spoken to him about Mansel Shale. Inevitably, the news of his substantial retirement from the shopping corpus had circulated. Some of the older pupils at their school, or teenagers in the clubs, had probably been customers. They'd hear of changes. The word would be around. And Harpur wondered whether one or both of the girls themselves did weed now and then and bought from Shale's people. Jill might be still a little young for that, but Hazel was fifteen. He thought he should have seen the signs, sniffed the signs, witnessed the giggles, but the girls were wily.

They found the whole Shale tale intriguing, anyway. Inevitably, the shooting of his wife and son, Laurent,
¹
had made big news on television and in the papers. Shale's thirteen-year-old daughter, Matilda, who'd been in the car but survived, was Jill's age. That gave an extra interest: a sort of bond.

For much of the time, Harpur assumed – like almost everyone else – that the kills were in fact a cock-up by a hired gunman: young, cheap, incompetent, nervy, a novice. Firearms found weaknesses, in the user as well as the target, and one of the weaknesses could be wrong target. Yes, the marksman had almost certainly been sent to take out Mansel. Maybe a vengeance commission of some sort; not everyone found Shale lovable. The pot-shot briefing for this sloppy executioner must have said Manse usually drove the school-run Jaguar. Correct. So, the attack plan came down to: (a) identify the car; (b) shoot the driver, and anybody else if unavoidable; (c) scarper back to base; (d) collect the second half of the fee – in cash, not vouchers for concerts in the Albert Hall.

Mansel wasn't even aboard the Jaguar that day, though, but en route to a London conference in a different vehicle. He'd never spoken about the shooting: or, rather, never spoken about it to Harpur or any other officer. They'd tried to discuss it with him, naturally, but he wouldn't have it. Simply, he quit the active part of the game, and apparently had frequent conversations with vicars and so on these days. They'd do their best for him, explaining considerately and patiently why life had to be like that as part of the divine pattern: innocent people wiped out on the way to school.

‘It's what's known as
omertà
,' Jill had said. ‘Crooks like Mansel Shale don't talk to cops, even when the crooks have been horribly hurt.
Omertà
's Italian. I've read about it. O – m – e – r – t – à, the “a” with an accent
grave
on it. Now, please don't be afraid of words because they're foreign, Dad. All sorts of them around these days owing to the European Union. Think of Beaujolais Nouveau, which is wine, and
les sans papiers
, which is immigrants. These Mafia racketeers sort out their own troubles. They don't complain to the
polizia
, being the police over there. This would stain their honour, make them finks. They have to be
macho
. I'm glad Mansel Shale has given most of it up. If they had another go they might kill him next time and Matilda would be an orphan.'

‘We see her some days,' Hazel said. ‘She seems all right now. She comes to judo off and on. Her dad brings her and picks her up. The Jaguar has been repaired. He looks very sad.'

‘Well, of course,' Jill said.

‘Matilda's a brave kid,' Harpur said.

‘As a matter of fact, near Naples the Mafia is known as the Camorra,' Jill replied. ‘Also it's called
il Sistema,
meaning “the system”. Everything is sweetly organized, like that Brando pic,
The Godfather
, on The Movie Channel. They have their own lawyer, such as Robert Duvall, to state they're not breaking the law when they're breaking the law, say through a garrotting. They all believe in
omertà
and they'll kill and torture members who go to the police, and their families.'

‘What will happen now, Dad?' Hazel said. She liked to get to the practicalities. ‘There's a story around.' But she hesitated, apparently embarrassed.

‘What story?' Harpur said. He believed he could guess.

‘It includes a vulgar word, Dad,' Jill said. ‘But I should think you know it, in your sort of job.'

‘What's that mean?' Harpur said.

‘Meeting many kinds of people,' Jill said. ‘Thugs, toerags, Des Iles, lowlife.'

‘The story is that just before he got shot, Laurent Shale realized what was going to happen and spoke to Matilda,' Hazel said.

‘Something about who had set up the attack,' Jill said, ‘in his opinion.'

‘Who says this?' Harpur asked, knowing he'd get a crap reply.

‘I told you, Dad, it's the buzz,' Hazel said.

‘Rumour,' Harpur said.

‘Maybe rumour,' Hazel said.

‘This word – the vulgar word – it's “twat”,' Jill replied. ‘Some say it to rhyme with “cat”, like I have; others, especially in the United States, with “hot”.'

‘Yes, vulgar,' Harpur said.

‘Some do say it, though, or make it a joke,' Jill said. ‘For instance, there's a café called “The Warm As Toast”.'

‘Yes?' Harpur said. ‘Yes?'

‘Need the Enigma code-breaker, Dad?' Hazel said. ‘The initials. We gather that what Laurent muttered just before the shooting was, “It has to be that twat Ralphy.”'

‘Spoken with the cat rhyme, you see, Dad,' Jill said. ‘I don't know if there's research by the Oxford dictionary to show which pronunciation is top.'

‘They were in the back of the car and ought to have got right down when the gunfire began, but Laurent wanted to look, so he was hit,' Hazel said. ‘Matilda kept out of sight.'

Yes, that's what Laurent had said in the moment before he died, according to Matilda. She'd told Harpur just after he lifted her out of the Jaguar. She
had
quoted Laurent, using the cat rhyme. But he didn't mention any of this to his daughters.

‘We think the Ralphy referred to in that sentence must be Ralph W. Ember,' Jill said. ‘He's a big trader in the commodities and owns a club, The Monty. He's like you in some ways, Dad.'