Amongst Our Weapons

13 Improvisation

There’s nothing the modern copper loves more than attempting the arrest of an armed and dangerous suspect in a public space. Especially when you’ve had to organise it on the fly while driving to their last known location. But when we looked at the map, it was obvious that we were never going to get a better shot at nicking Zelda with the minimum of risk.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Stephanopoulos, who, while Seawoll was in Manchester, was the senior officer and therefore responsible for everything that went wrong. ‘But we don’t dare let her evade us again.’

Because, notwithstanding the possible teleporting thing, Zelda was on a narrowboat at a mooring in Kensal Green, which meant she could shift location at any moment the old-fashioned way, by water. We knew she was heading east into the centre of London – so the collateral was only going to get denser.

So me and Guleed arrived at the Ladbroke Grove bridge over the Paddington Branch of the Grand Union Canal and started tooling up. We’d both dug out our uniform Metvests because the outer cover came with pockets and handy clips for attaching Airwaves, handcuffs and useful bits of police kit. Like our CS spray and the X-26 Tasers that Stephanopoulos had authorised us to use. Guleed had her extendable baton, but I had half a metre of iron-cored oak stave with a canvas handle at one end and a metal cap at the other. It was a genuine antique Second World War battle staff and I normally didn’t get it out of its case, but I reckoned this was a special occasion.

Once we were suitably equipped, we checked on everyone else’s status and found that our Sprinter van of TSG and the ‘just in case’ armed response unit were still ten minutes out. More importantly, Nightingale hadn’t reached the Scrubs Lane Bridge, a kilometre and a bit down the canal to the west. Once he and his contingent of TSG were in place, the plan was to cautiously work our way along the towpath from both directions.

‘And I mean cautiously,’ said Stephanopoulos.

Me and Guleed leant against the parapet and stared gloomily towards where the low charcoal clouds brushed the top of the gas towers, and wondered if it was going to rain on us as well.

‘It’s true what they say about the Job,’ said Guleed, hitching her utility belt into a more comfortable position. ‘You really do never know what the day’s work will bring.’

What it had brought that morning was the Danni report, just as I was pulling into the car park at Belgravia nick.

‘We think we’ve found her,’ she said. ‘I’m texting you a picture now.’

So I stayed in the Asbo, which had a hands-free kit, and propped my phone on the dashboard.

The picture was of a wild-eyed young woman who I immediately recognised as Zelda. Only her name wasn’t Zelda – it was Francisca.

‘Spanish?’ I asked.

‘We think so,’ said Danni. ‘Or at least from a Spanish-speaking country.’

She’d been found wandering naked and in distress along Glossop High Street first thing in the morning following Lesley’s theft of the lamp. An ambulance had been called and, worried by her obvious disorientation, the crew had taken her to Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, where she was treated for exposure, dehydration and anaemia. Fearing that she’d been a victim of a sexual assault who’d then been dumped on the moors, the staff called the police.

‘That’s where the picture comes from,’ said Danni.

Francisca continued to present as confused and agitated, and appeared to be unable to speak, although she was clearly trying. The hospital decided to keep her overnight for observation. When she did start speaking the next morning, it was in a language which a Filipino nurse identified as Spanish. Although the nurse said that she had trouble understanding the dialect. They did get her name – Francisca Velasco.

‘Apparently there’s almost as many Spanishes as there are Englishes,’ said Danni. ‘You’re going to like this bit. When they brought in a Spanish interpreter from the university, he said that while he could understand what she was saying and it was a little bit like Castilian, it was not a dialect he’d heard before. Also, GMP got on to the Spanish consulate, who couldn’t find any reports of a missing Spanish citizen of that name. Ditto Argentina and Colombia and the others. A couple of close matches, but nobody who fits the description.’

Needless to say, the GMP were not happy that we’d dug up yet another weird case on their patch and must have been overjoyed to dump this mystery on Seawoll. You can get a lot of co-operation out of other forces if you offer to pick up the tab.

During the previous December, despite now being able to communicate, Francisca continued to present as disorientated and confused, so she was referred to the Mental Health Liaison Team for an assessment, who then admitted her to one of their mental health wards for an evaluation period.

‘She was there for two weeks,’ said Danni, ‘appeared to get much better, and since they needed the beds they moved her to a halfway house. We haven’t got her medical records yet but we have talked to the halfway house.’

Who described her as quiet, well-behaved, very clean, maybe obsessively so.

‘Apparently she fell in love with the Hoover,’ said Danni. ‘Would offer to clean people’s rooms when she’d finished with the communal areas.’

‘Did she have any friends that weren’t household appliances?’ I asked.

Behind Danni I heard the unmistakable thunk of a car door closing and a distant rumble that I recognised as Seawoll talking to a third party.

‘Yeah, one friend,’ said Danni. ‘A woman called Heather Chalk, born Chester 1986, on the PNC for shoplifting. I’ll send you the details in a minute. Also treated as an in-patient for depression, which was why she was at the halfway house too. They got very friendly and she was the one who helped Francisca learn English. Which she did amazingly fast. Then early Feb, both of them walk out of the halfway house and never come back.’

‘Just like that?’

‘They were both there voluntarily. The staff were concerned but there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it,’ said Danni. ‘It wasn’t a police matter.’

Is now, I thought.

‘The thing is,’ Danni said, ‘before she was in hospital Heather was living on a narrowboat on the Macclesfield Canal and that’s gone. We asked around and they said Heather had a friend boat-sitting it. We found the friend about an hour ago and she says that Heather took possession again. Had a new friend with her – one that matched Francisca’s description.’

Danni, Seawoll and a couple of bods from the GMP had been checking the canal banks either side of the old mooring.

‘Can you sail a canal boat from Manchester to London?’ I asked.

‘Of course you can,’ said Danni. ‘That’s what the canals were built for. But … get this. Canal boats have registrations, just like cars, and we have the registration for Heather’s boat.’

And a description. Seawoll had already contacted Stephanopoulos to organise a search at the London end. Danni had some friends who lived on narrowboats and she said that the Canal Wardens monitored the boats.

‘If you’ve got a cruiser licence you’re only supposed to moor up for a maximum of fourteen days,’ said Danni. ‘So the wardens check registrations regularly.’

And kept surprisingly good records.

‘You have to,’ said the guy from the Canal and River Trust. ‘Or some entitled bugger will squat the best moorings.’

Heather Chalk’s boat had been recorded as tied up at the Kensal Green visitor mooring at 10.15 a.m. and we’d been scrambling ever since.

‘You need to change your motto,’ Stephanopoulos had said over the radio as we headed west for Kensal Rise. ‘Knowledge is Power doesn’t hack it – it should be Solum stulti irruunt – only fools rush in.’

‘I rather believe you looked that up specially,’ Nightingale had replied.

Me and Guleed stood on the bridge and looked west along the canal.

On the northern bank was a permanent mooring where affluent boaters could pay to enjoy the canal lifestyle without the faff of having to move every two weeks. On the southern bank was the towpath proper, modern flats, beyond them a red-brick mega-Sainsbury’s with its own access to the path and a stop-and-shop mooring – maximum stay four hours. Two narrowboats were tied up there.

‘There’s an inlet just there,’ said Guleed, pointing to where a channel cut under the modern flats. ‘Leads to a water activity centre.’

Just before the canal turned out of sight, there was a humpback bridge over an inlet that no longer existed, we thought, and then a couple of hundred metres beyond that, out of sight around the bend, the public mooring where Heather Chalk’s boat had been recorded the previous afternoon.

‘We want to stage on the lump there,’ said Guleed, pointing to the vestigial humpback bridge.

We would be between Francisca and the Sainsbury’s. There the north bank was filled with nothing but the stone-studded expanse of Kensal Green Cemetery and, on the towpath side, a decommissioned gasworks that was now a storage site for scaffolding, and the mainline railway track.

‘And an electrical substation,’ said Guleed. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

‘Better than a school,’ I said. ‘Or a market.’

Nightingale reported that he’d reached his bridge and was deploying. Our TSG contingent called to say they were still five minutes out – traffic being heavy. I was calling our armed response unit when Guleed banged me on the arm with the back of her hand.

‘Two women,’ she said. ‘On the hump.’

I grabbed my binoculars from the Asbo and had a look.

Two white women. I didn’t need to check the descriptions because I recognised one of them from Middlesex Street – although minus the burning halo.

‘It’s them,’ I said, and Guleed called it in.

Both women were dressed in jeans, jumpers and waterproofs. Heather Chalk’s jumper was cream-coloured and bulky, Francisca’s was a mad mix of purple, blues, reds and oranges as if hand-knitted from multicoloured wool. It was the kind of jumper that white kids get for Christmas from eccentric grandmothers. Their waterproofs were zip-up cagoules in orange and navy blue. Sensible clothes for living on a boat in the middle of winter.

Francisca was pulling a canvas shopping trolley.

The two women were chatting as they came down the steep slope. Relaxed, companionable – routine.

‘They’re doing their shopping,’ I said. ‘Sainsbury’s.’

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Guleed – which was the most swearing I’d ever heard her do. ‘We need to keep eyes on – with luck they’ll come back the way they came.’

‘It can’t be me, she’s seen me,’ I said, but Guleed was already stripping off her kit and dumping it in the back of the Asbo.

‘Don’t let any of the TSG lot steal my vest,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had it adjusted.’

By the time the two women had turned into the supermarket’s back gate, Guleed was sauntering down the towpath towards them. Stephanopoulos, who had a map in front of her, ordered me to take position at the gate as soon as they were out of sight.

The TSG would drive their Sprinter around and park in front of the Sainsbury’s. People are used to seeing police vans parked up around the place, and as long as nobody did anything stupid – Stephanopoulos left a menacing pause after that phrase – our targets should ignore it.

The armed response unit were to park on the bridge and act as reserve.

Nightingale’s team would advance up the towpath from their end, and secure the narrowboat while Nightingale took position on the humpback bridge thing.

‘Everybody stay calm,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Guleed, don’t get too close – we have a perimeter around the supermarket so we can always reacquire them when they leave.’

‘They’re going in through the main entrance,’ Guleed said. ‘Temporary loss, I’m following.’

In the background was the unmistakable clatter of shopping trolleys being shunted about.

I trotted over the raised section of the towpath and tucked myself in beside some bushes on the reverse slope, where I could keep an eye on the gate. Ahead, the two-storey-high brick and crinkly tin box of the supermarket stretched out along the towpath like a 1950s American caravan that had really let itself go. Its aluminium cladding managed to be an even duller grey than the sky. There was a scattering of uninspired tags sprayed on the walls, and I couldn’t help thinking that more graffiti could only improve its looks.

I glanced back at the bridge and was pleased to see that the armed response officers were hidden from view. Armed police tend to cause consternation when they turn up at anywhere that’s not an obvious terrorist target.

‘I have eyeball on both subjects,’ said Guleed over the radio. Oh, ‘they’ve got Island Delight.’ There was a pause. ‘It would be suspicious if I didn’t put things in my basket.’

‘Grab some biscuits, then,’ I said, because the stake-out bag in the Asbo was getting bare dry. And then I thought of the canal. ‘And some bananas.’

‘Fair trade or ordinary?’ said Guleed loudly, and then softer. ‘Heather is checking her purse – I think money must be short.’

It started to drizzle and I started to wish I’d worn my hoody over my kit. I looked over at the humpback bridge and saw Nightingale standing by the parapet. In his good suit. And he should have stood out, but with a city gent’s black umbrella unfurled over his head, he was strangely too incongruous to look out of place. A man gazing over the cemetery opposite and contemplating the infinite.

‘We’re in position,’ he said over the radio.

‘Good,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘We have all the access points covered – everybody needs to hold position until I say so. I don’t suppose Thomas has a plan for when they come back out.’

‘Assuming they return through the back gate,’ said Nightingale.

We probably should have set up Bronze, Silver and Gold command levels but since Nightingale would have been the obvious senior officer and we needed him to get up close and personal with the suspect, we opted to do without. This is what’s known as operational flexibility, and definitely not making it up as you go along.

‘When they emerge, and assuming that nobody else is in the way, we’ll let them walk ten feet or so in my direction before Peter leaves cover. Guleed takes position at the gate, joins Peter as he passes, Uniform 235 –’ the TSG mob in the car park – ‘move to create a perimeter, likewise Trojan One –’ the armed response officers – ‘stop up the towpath at the bridge end. When we’re ready, Peter calls out to get Francisca’s attention – while she’s distracted, I come down from my position and attempt to subdue her. Peter will assist me while Sahra captures Francisca’s friend.’

Everybody else would move in to secure the area.

We had contingency plans for if they didn’t come via the back gate, in which case we all pull back and let Guleed and some hastily de-uniformed TSG maintain surveillance until such time as they returned to the narrowboat.

But they came out the back gate and at first everything went according to plan.

‘Francisca, Heather!’ I called. ‘Wait up!’

Looking back, I think using Francisca’s name was probably a mistake. We learnt later that she’d hidden her real name from any casual acquaintances she and Heather had met on the journey down. Me knowing her name immediately marked me as official and/or potentially hostile.

Still, using people’s real names as a de-escalation tactic had been ingrained into me in training, and it’s such an obvious move. People hesitate when they hear their name – they take time to process whether or not you’re friend or foe. That’s the theory, anyway.

They’d been just where Nightingale had wanted them, beyond the stop-and-shop mooring and the tarnished silver bulk of the Sainsbury’s, and a couple of metres short of the steep climb to the top of the humpback bridge. I was three metres behind them, with Guleed a couple of metres behind me, doing a convincing ‘I’m an ordinary member of the public coming back from the shops’ impression. Helped by the Sainsbury’s bags she was carrying.

Heather and Francisca were dragging the – now obviously overstuffed – shopping trolley between them, each with one hand on the handle.

Francisca said something that made Heather laugh.

I called their names. Like I said – possibly a mistake.

They stopped and turned to look at me. Heather looked puzzled, but Francisca recognised me at once. She jumped forwards, lifting into the air and arching towards me as if she’d bounced off a trampoline. Obviously Caroline had not been the only practitioner to invent almost-flying.

As she flew towards me, wings of fire sprang from her back and white light blazed behind her head. Her face was contorted into an angry snarl and her eyes blazed – literally.

But I’ve been trained. Better, I’ve been trained by the man who held the rearguard at Ettersberg. And, practically without thought, I brought my staff up and raised a shield.

I felt the smooth rich honey hum of the staff as it gave up its power, but even so I staggered back when she collided with my shield. There was an almost comical look of surprise on her face, but then she scowled and the wings swept around to try and engulf me.

I shifted the focus of the shield, swinging it round and down like an invisible fly swatter. Francisca gave a satisfyingly un-angelic squawk as she was flipped onto her back. Light flared in her hand and suddenly the burning spear was there. The tip was too bright to look at, but even as Francisca used the butt to lever herself upright, I could see Nightingale closing the distance behind her.

She must have sensed him, because while she was still on her knees she swung the spear in an arc at my face.

The spear cut through my shield as if it wasn’t there. I desperately threw myself backwards, and even so the burning tip passed close enough for me to feel heat – real heat this time.

I fell onto my back and rolled – expecting the spear point to kill me any moment. But as I came up I saw Francisca had turned to engage Nightingale. He didn’t bother with a shield, but ducked under the wing aimed at him. His left hand thrust out and, with a sound like cloth being torn, a section of Francisca’s burning wing was wrenched loose.

She bellowed in pain, but didn’t even hesitate before whirling to swing her remaining wing at Nightingale. He dodged, but it was a feint and she thrust her spear at his chest. I saw him make a chopping motion with his left hand and the spear deflected down into the towpath. There was a bang and a geyser of pulverised concrete fountained out of the ground. Nightingale rolled to the side, perilously close to the edge of the canal.

Further up, I could see Guleed dragging Heather away. The woman was kicking and screaming, but Guleed was ignoring the blows landing around her face and shoulders. Her priority was to get the member of the public away from the mad fight in front of them. Two TSG officers were dashing down from the inlet bridge to help.

Francisca reared up and spread her wings – the damaged one repairing as I watched. But I didn’t watch too long. First I lobbed a glitter bomb at Francisca’s feet and popped a blinder in front of her face to distract her. She shrieked in pain as the lux variant went off like an industrial-strength flashbulb, and Nightingale used the distraction to shift away from the canal. The glitter bomb exploded in a rush of freezing air but Francisca seemed to dance over the shock wave, and I threw myself aside as a wing swept towards me. I saw her look over to where Guleed and the two TSG officers were bodily carrying her friend away.

She started towards them, but Nightingale cut her off. His shield splashed with fire as Francisca’s wings tried to bat him out of the way. She hesitated a moment, spear upraised, and then she turned and ran.

Across the canal.

I saw the soles of her trainers slapping the surface of the water as if there were a concrete causeway just below.

‘Peter!’ yelled Nightingale, running past me.

We sprinted for the bridge and across, but by the time we made it into the cemetery our angel was long gone.