Peter Cave - War on the Streets

‘Oh shit!’ Sofrides spat out in anger – but it was fear that registered on his face. He dropped to his knees, staring into the girl’s wide, but unseeing eyes. They were completely still now, and her body was totally motionless. Panic rising in him, Sofrides snatched up her wrist, feeling for the faintest hint of a pulse. There was nothing.

Sofrides pushed himself to his feet and stood there shaking for a few seconds, his brain racing. He turned towards the telephone, thinking briefly about calling an ambulance but rejecting the idea almost immediately. The girl’s face was already puffy and showing signs of bruising where he had struck her. He remembered the bite marks he had put in the soft flesh of her breasts during their brief sexual encounter. With his criminal record, reporting the girl’s death was tantamount to placing himself on a manslaughter charge at the very least.

He tried to think, as he paced round the small bedsitter several times, trying not to look at the girl’s lifeless form slumped just inside the bathroom door. He crossed to the room’s single window and stared out into the dark and deserted street.

There was only one choice, he realized finally. Somehow, he had to get the girl’s body into his car without being seen. After that it would be easy. London had hundreds of backstreets and alleyways where the body of a drug addict, drunk or vagrant turned up every so often. With nothing to connect the girl to him, she would be just another statistic.

His mind made up, as quietly as he could Sofrides began to drag Glynis’s body towards the door.

Paul Carney tidied up the paperwork on his desk and switched off the Anglepoise lamp. Rising, he crossed to the door and switched off the main light, plunging his office into darkness. Locking the door, he strode across the deserted main office towards the outer reception area.

The desk sergeant looked up at him, grinning, as he walked past. ‘Barbados for our hols this year, is it, Mr Carney? Or a world cruise, with all this overtime you’ve been putting in?’

Carney smiled at the man wearily. ‘Oh yeah, at least,’ he muttered. ‘Goodnight, Sergeant.’

The man nodded. ‘Goodnight, sir.’

Carney walked out into the night air, taking a deep breath before heading for the rear car park. On reaching his Ford Sierra, he climbed in and drove slowly to the main gates. He was exhausted, yet in no hurry to get home. Or at least back to the Islington flat, Carney reminded himself, thinking about it. It had ceased to be a home when Linda had walked out, over six months earlier. She’d even taken the dog.

The roads were almost deserted. Carney cruised past the rows of darkened office buildings for a couple of miles before turning off into the residential back-streets around Canonbury. He passed a small row of shops, some with their windows still lit or showing dim security lights in their rear storage areas.

The grey Volvo took him by surprise, shooting out from a small side road only yards ahead of him. Carney stamped on the brakes instinctively, allowing the car to complete its left turn and accelerate away from him with a squeal of rubber on tarmac.

Crazy bastard, Carney thought, reacting as a fellow road-user. Then the copper in him took over, asking the obvious question. What could be so damned urgent, at four-thirty in the morning? He stamped down on the accelerator, making it his business to find out.

Carney caught up with the Volvo at the next set of traffic lights. He pulled across the vehicle’s front wing and leapt out of his own car. He wrenched the driver’s side door of the Volvo open.

‘All right, you bloody moron. What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he growled, before he had even seen who was sitting at the wheel. There was a long, thoughtful pause as he recognized the driver.

‘Well, well, well,’ Carney said slowly. ‘If it isn’t Tony the Greek. And what particular form of nastiness are you up to tonight, you little scumbag?’

Sofrides looked up at him with a fearful expression, cursing the cruel vagaries of fate which had thrown Detective Sergeant Paul Carney across his path this night of all nights. They’d had run-ins before – almost every one of them to his cost.

‘I ain’t done nothing, honest, Mr Carney,’ Sofrides whined, desperately trying to bluff it out.

Carney grinned cynically. ‘You don’t have to do anything, Tony. Just being in the vicinity constitutes major environmental pollution.’ He held the door back, jerking his head. ‘Out.’

Reluctantly, Sofrides climbed out of the car, still protesting his innocence. ‘I’m clean, Mr Carney – honest.’

Carney shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t be clean if you bathed in bleach and gargled with insecticide,’ he grunted. He paused, staring at the young man thoughtfully. There was something wrong, something out of character. Sofrides was not displaying his usual arrogance. He looked frightened, guilty.

‘What’s wrong with you tonight, Tony?’ Carney demanded. ‘Where’s all the usual backchat, the bullshit? You’re scared, Tony – and that makes me very suspicious indeed.’

Increasingly desperate, Sofrides tried to force a smile on to his face. ‘I told you, I ain’t done nothing. I just don’t feel so good, that’s all. Must have been something I ate.’

It wasn’t going to wash. Carney was convinced he was on to something now. He peered at Sofrides’s face more closely.

‘I do have to admit that you don’t look so good,’ he muttered. ‘In fact, Tony, you look as sick as the proverbial parrot.’ He paused momentarily. ‘Know what I think, Tony? I think you’ve just made a collection and I’ve caught you bang to rights. I think you’re carrying a major consignment of naughties, that’s what I think. The question is: what, and where?’

Carney suddenly seized Sofrides by the arm, forcing it up around his back in a savage half nelson. He frogmarched him over to his own car, opened it and pulled a pair of handcuffs out of the glove compartment. Snapping the cuffs around the young man’s wrist, he pushed him back to the Volvo, wound down the window a few inches and clipped the other bracelet to the door-frame.

‘So let’s take a little look-see, shall we,’ he suggested, returning to his own vehicle for just long enough to grab a powerful torch.

The Volvo seemed clean, much to Carney’s disappointment. Sofrides watched him search thoroughly beneath and behind the seats, in the glove compartment and underneath the dashboard.

‘See, I told you I ain’t done nothing. So how about letting me go, Mr Carney?’ Sofrides suggested hopefully.

Carney shook his head. ‘We’ve only just got started, Tony. It’d be a pity to break the party up this early now, wouldn’t it?’ He straightened up from searching the interior of the car. ‘Right, let’s take a little look in the boot.’

A fresh glimmer of panic crossed Sofrides’s eyes. ‘Look, tell you what. Suppose I make you a deal?’ he blurted out.

Carney sounded unimpressed. ‘Oh yes, and what sort of deal would that be, Tony?’

Sofrides snatched at his slim remaining chance eagerly. ‘I know a couple of new crack houses which have just opened up. I can give you names…places…times.’

Carney grinned wickedly at him. ‘But you’ll do that anyway, once I get you nailed,’ he pointed out. ‘You’ll sing your little black heart out just as soon as you see the inside of the slammer. You’ll have to do a bit better than that, Tony.’

Sofrides was really desperate now, clutching at straws. ‘How about if I set someone up for you – someone big?’ he suggested. ‘I’m only a little fish, Mr Carney – you know that.’

Carney paused, tempted. ‘And who might you have in mind?’ he asked.