Cold Wrath, page 18
‘Yes, ma’am.’ The constable picked up the phone which sat on the enquiry desk and jabbed a four-figure internal number. When his call was duly answered he advised of the arrival of Carmen Pharoah at the reception desk, listened for a few moments and then said crisply, ‘Yes, sir.’ He replaced the handset, softly so, and looked up at Carmen Pharoah, and said, ‘Can you take the lift to the fourth floor please, ma’am? Mr Allardyce will meet you at the lift shaft.’ The constable then indicated to his left.
Carmen Pharoah thanked the constable and proceeded to do as she had been asked. On the fourth floor she stepped out of the lift and was indeed met by a particularly well-built, muscular man in plain clothes. He held out a meaty right hand and smiled. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Allardyce, Nigel Allardyce. You are Ms Pharoah from the Vale of York Police?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Carmen Pharoah accepted his outstretched hand and found his grip firm but not crushing.
‘This way please, Carmen. First names suit you?’ He indicated for her to accompany him as he walked down a quiet corridor carpeted with brown hardwearing fabric.
‘Oh, yes, Nigel,’ Pharoah fell into step with Nigel Allardyce, ‘first names are much preferred in fact, much preferred, and it is what I am used to except with our boss who likes to keep things formal.’
‘Good …’ Nigel Allardyce spoke with a soft London accent. ‘My office is just down here, a little further along the corridor and as you’ll see, it offers a splendid view of the backyards of all the surrounding buildings. I must confess that that is quite an interesting sounding name you have there, Carmen, if you don’t mind me saying. Carmen Pharoah … it does have a distinct ring to it.’
‘Not at all,’ Carmen Pharoah replied. ‘In fact, I get many such comments. I started out in life as Carmen St John, and I became Carmen Pharoah upon marriage.’
‘Just here, here’s my little bolthole.’ Nigel Allardyce indicated an open door and invited Carmen Pharoah to precede him into his office. ‘And a London accent to boot. I confess I didn’t expect that.’ Allardyce sat in the chair behind his desk and invited Carmen Pharoah by hand gesture to sit in one of the two chairs which stood in front of his desk.
‘Oh, yes.’ Carmen Pharoah sat down and placed her bag on the floor beside her feet. ‘Yes, London born and bred. I’m a good East End girl from Leytonstone, third-generation British, our family emigrating from St Kitts in the West Indies. In fact, I once served in the Metropolitan Police. I wasn’t here, at “the Yard”, but I was in the Met.’
‘Really?’ Nigel Allardyce beamed his approval. ‘Really?’ he repeated.
‘Yes, really.’ Carmen Pharoah glanced around Nigel Allardyce’s office and she found it to be like all police officers’ offices, neatly kept and functional, the only softening which appeared to be allowed in the room being a small cactus plant in a terracotta pot which stood atop the grey Home Office issue filing cabinet. ‘I had a few jobs upon leaving school, this and that, nothing spectacular, then I applied to join the police. I got in on my third application.’
‘That was quick,’ Nigel Allardyce commented, ‘that really is quite impressive. I beat you by one application but I have known some very good officers who got in only upon their seventh or eighth application, so third application is not bad, not bad at all. You can be well pleased with yourself on that score, well pleased.’
‘Thank you, Nigel.’ Carmen Pharoah began to relax in the company of Nigel Allardyce.
‘So what drove you from London, or what attracted you to the north of England?’ Allardyce leaned back in his chair. ‘Or is that something personal you’d rather keep to yourself?’
‘My husband was killed,’ Carmen Pharoah replied, in a flat, unemotional matter-of-fact manner. ‘And no, I don’t mind talking about it.’
‘Oh … I am so very sorry,’ Allardyce groaned. ‘That was more than a little insensitive of me. It is quite an injustice … I mean, you seem to be far too young to be widowed, again, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘I have known younger … but no need to upset yourself, Nigel. He, my husband, also worked for the Metropolitan Police. It’s how we met. We met when both of us were working,’ Carmen Pharoah advised.
‘He was a police officer? Not killed while on duty, I hope?’ Allardyce asked. ‘It being a constant fear for all police families, it is a constant nagging fear.’
‘No … and no,’ Carmen Pharoah replied. ‘He was an accountant with the Met. He was killed by a drunken driver when he, Thomas, my husband, was crossing the road, when he was coming home from work one evening after working late. He actually worked here, in this building, and we met when he visited the station I worked at, being Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper territory, as it was in 1888. He visited to check the station accounts. It has to be said, in fairness, that there was an element of culpability on both sides that has to be acknowledged. The driver was travelling at an excess speed and he was under the influence of alcohol, but my husband was wearing dark clothing and he was also Afro-Caribbean, like me. You see our skin absorbs light, it does not reflect it like the skin of Europeans does, and he was in the car’s path. He had stepped off the pavement and into the road. The driver stopped rather than tried to drive on and escape justice … but if my husband had waited at the kerb to let the car pass … I am sure my husband must have seen that the car was travelling at speed and it would have been sensible to keep out of its way as it approached. I go over it again and again in my mind … if he had only waited a couple of seconds, then crossed the road after the car had passed, but he must have thought that he had time to cross the road in front of the car.’
‘You would,’ Allardyce spoke softly. ‘It’s a tragic story, and you will keep going over it in your mind. It will stay with you for the rest of your life.’
‘Yes … I have come to realize that.’ Carmen Pharoah paused. ‘He was so proud, he was proud of being the first black accountant in the Metropolitan Police. He was the only black student on his accountancy degree course at Cardiff University where he took a very good degree … an upper second.’
‘Not bad,’ Allardyce nodded. ‘My son is at Derby University, he’s studying computer science, dare say that that is the way forward, computers I mean. He’s hoping for a 2:1.’
‘Good for him,’ Carmen Pharoah replied, ‘but, as my husband’s father told us … he gave us a lot of good advice, he said, “You’re both black, and that means you have got to be ten times better just to be as good, that’s just the way of it,” and my husband was particularly keen to prove himself to be just as good. And he was succeeding … and then he steps in front of a speeding car. I can be just as angry with him as I can be angry with the driver of the car. As I said, there was culpability on both sides.’
‘So that tragedy drove you out of London?’ Nigel Allardyce calmly stood and walked to a small table by the window of his office and picked up an electric kettle and shook it so as to test its contents. ‘Tea or coffee?’ He switched the kettle on and selected two mugs from a metal tray on which stood a number of brightly coloured mugs.
‘Tea for me, please.’ Carmen Pharoah reasoned that office-produced tea in Nigel Allardyce’s office, like all office-produced tea anywhere in the world, would be marginally less awful than would office-produced instant coffee. ‘No … it was the guilt I felt,’ she explained. ‘And still do feel. It was guilt that caused me to flee north, and I accept that guilt is a very poor reason for doing anything, but it was the guilt of it.’
‘Guilt?’ Allardyce poured boiling water into a mug containing a single teabag. ‘Why should you feel guilty? You were not there.’ He added a drop of milk to the mixture.
‘I don’t know myself; well I didn’t at the time, anyway.’ Carmen Pharoah leaned back in her chair as Nigel Allardyce handed her a mug of hot tea. ‘But I have subsequently found out that what I felt is called “survivor guilt”. It’s the feeling of guilt which sets in when you live and someone else doesn’t. Widows feel it, as do widowers, after a long and successful marriage, so do soldiers who have survived combat when their comrades in arms didn’t. I felt I had to pay a penalty for my husband’s death, and most especially for his early death. That will always seem so dreadfully unfair. So I applied for a transfer to the north of England because it’s cold up there and because I saw television adaptions of Nicholas Nickleby and of Wuthering Heights, and in those programmes I saw all that rugged moorland landscape in that driving rain and high wind and I thought that that is where I deserve to be, not in the soft south … and only when the guilt for Tom’s death leaves me will I be permitted to return to London, which I consider to be my home. That is what I feel.’
‘So is it that cold … as cold as they say?’ Nigel Allardyce carried a mug of tea back to his chair. ‘And is it as rugged as it appears? I confess it’s always seemed to be like a very hostile landscape.’
‘Well … it can get a bit cold, but then London also has its cold spells. I mean Old Father Thames has frozen solid in the past, the last time being in 1947 I believe, in the post-war 1940s anyway. So it’s not really much colder,’ Carmen Pharoah sipped her tea, ‘and the landscape … well, the Vale of York is a landscape of flat fields and low rolling hills, very similar to parts of the south of England. The landscape of the Brontë sisters does exist and I find it quite a brutal landscape, always I find it to be unforgiving. I think you have to be born to that landscape.’ She enjoyed the warmth of the tea.
‘Well, I’ll take your word for it.’ Nigel Allardyce also sipped his tea. ‘I went to Derby when I drove my son up there to start his university course and I have never been further north than that and I don’t want to go any further than that either. I am a southerner and am only happy in the Saxon south. I make no secret of it. So,’ he said after a pause, ‘the reason you are here is one Mr Garrett, Mr Anthony Garrett. Also known as … well, he has quite a string of aliases, so we’ll just refer to him as Anthony Garrett. The important thing is that we both know who we are talking about.’
‘The one and the same.’ Carmen Pharoah nodded her agreement. ‘As you say, Nigel, so long as we both know who we are talking about. My governor, Mr Hennessey, he’s another Londoner by the way … originally from Greenwich but I don’t know what made him swap London for York, but I think it was because he married a Yorkshire lass.’
‘Really? We do get about, we Londoners, despite having a reputation for being poor travellers. What is that saying? “Londoners don’t travel well because they have already arrived”? Or something like that. I need this …’ he sipped his tea, ‘… even if it doesn’t taste like tea, but it’s hot and the colour is right, and it’s been a hectic morning.’
‘Yes … but my boss, Mr Hennessey,’ Carmen Pharoah continued, ‘he said the officer you sent up to York to photograph Anthony Garrett’s tattoo wasn’t really able to help much in respect of what information he could provide. We still feel a little in the dark about Garrett. We need to know more about a man who was so obviously murdered with pre-meditation.’
‘Yes … Harry Kelto.’ Allardyce shrugged. ‘What can I say about Harry? He’s an officer who makes up the numbers rather than being someone to give a responsible job to. Harry wasn’t able to help much because he didn’t know much but I needed a photograph of Anthony Garrett’s unique “Pilot” tattoo. I needed it for personal reasons. It’s only the photograph of that tattoo when he was on a slab which would calm the demons in me and the demons in the people on the floor above this one, and the demons in the people on the floor above them. For some personal reason I can’t explain, his DNA or his dental records or fingerprint ID just wouldn’t cut it. It had to be the photograph of that tattoo.’
‘I think I can understand that,’ Carmen Pharoah replied softly. ‘It’s become personal.’
‘Yes … personal.’ Allardyce clenched his fist. ‘He’s been a thorn in the side of the Metropolitan Police, and particularly the Serious Crime Squad, for years now … and I mean years. From even before I joined, and I have been in the SC Squad for longer than I’d care to admit.’
‘Can you tell me why Garrett served only three years for murder?’ Carmen Pharoah asked. ‘It is something that puzzles my boss, Mr Hennessey and, quite frankly, it puzzles the rest of our team also and equally. Mr Hennessey specifically asked me to ask you about it.’
‘Oh … well, the answer is that it is all about Garrett. It’s all about him. I’ll tell you about him, so you may as well get comfortable,’ Allardyce sighed. ‘So where do I begin …?’ Allardyce turned and glanced out of his office window. ‘Where do I start?’
Carmen Pharoah followed his gaze. She saw the blue sky with scattered clouds at three-tenths, in Royal Air Force speak, and her eye was particularly caught by a Qantas 747 jumbo jet airliner, distinctive by the white kangaroo logo on the red tail plane, which was making its final cautious, slow approach to Heathrow Airport with a slightly nose-up attitude and undercarriage safely lowered. No one, she pondered, drawing on her own experience of flying, no one was talking on that aeroplane at that moment. The passenger cabin would be in complete silence. The passengers in the window seats would be staring out and down at the roof tops and the streets and the famous buildings of London town, some seeing the city for the first time, some enjoying their homecoming … but no one, not one single soul, would be talking.
‘Well, Anthony Garrett …’ Allardyce turned back from the window and held eye contact with Carmen Pharoah, then broke it. ‘He was a criminals’ criminal. He knew the rules and he had a hand in every major crime which took place in this city … well, practically every major crime. He was to London what Al Capone was to Chicago in the 1930s. He was never part of any job as such. He never actually took part is what I mean, but he was the Mr Big behind the scenes, pulling the strings. If a major turn went down you could be pretty well almost one hundred per cent certain that Garrett was the fixer who had put the team together, worked out the job and took a generous cut of whatever was half-inched. He held the London underworld in the grip of fear. He was one of about three crime lords in London before his arrest but he was definitely the biggest, the most powerful, and his tentacles were everywhere and they didn’t seem to have any boundaries. No limits at all. He didn’t keep to one part of London as it was in the 1960s when the Kray twins ruled London north of the river and the Richardson gang ruled the south of the river. It wasn’t like that. Anthony Garrett was London crime, and I mean Greater London crime.’
‘I see.’ Carmen Pharoah drank her tea and was finding it not the unpleasant experience she had been anticipating. ‘The Krays were before my time but I have heard of them … and I have read about them. Charlie Richardson’s gang was also before my time but I have heard about his gang as well as the Kray twins.’
‘Who hasn’t?’ Nigel Allardyce smiled. ‘Well, what copper anyway? We heard about Garrett’s firm from felons who were willing to talk but they were obviously in great fear of the man … getting information, hard facts, getting evidence which would have stood up in court … well, the words “blood” and “stone” come readily to mind.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Carmen Pharoah replied. ‘As you say … like drawing teeth. You paint a clear picture of the man, totally out of reach, and clearly knowing how to stay out of reach.’
‘Yes, this is why the good people on the floors above my humble floor were all particularly anxious to see the photograph of the tattoo. It is the one thing we wanted to see. So we sent Harry Kelto north with his box Brownie and, now, finally, it is as though a ghost has been laid.’
‘So the murder for which he was convicted?’ Carmen Pharoah pressed. ‘What was the story there? It does seem somewhat out of character for him to get himself convicted.’
‘Well, yes … yes, it was out of character, as you say.’ Nigel Allardyce clasped his hands together. ‘It was quite a turn up for the books, and, as you say, quite out of character for him to get himself caught like that, totally bang to rights. I can’t say he let his heart rule his head because he hasn’t got a heart, or he didn’t have one. So I’ll just say that in respect of the murder he committed, he seemed to let his emotions get the better of him, they totally ran away with him. He was always so calm, so calculating, from what we could learn, so always in control and then for just one incident, he loses all self-control. The incident was outside the criminal world and was a so-called “domestic”. In short, he murdered his wife. He was by all accounts a so-called “control freak” at home. It was alleged, for example, that his wife couldn’t breathe without his permission … that would have been an exaggeration, of course, but it does shed light on the sort of man he was. Anyway, the upshot was that his wife eventually had had enough, she grabbed the kids and escaped to the safety, she thought, of a women’s refuge. Garrett was given the phone number of the refuge so that he could phone her and arrange access meetings with the children. You know the number, arrange to meet in a neutral public place, collect the children and then return them at a pre-arranged time or date.’
‘Yes.’ Carmen Pharoah nodded her head. ‘Quite the usual arrangement in such circumstances. Quite normal.’
‘Yes, but Garrett,’ Allardyce continued, ‘was not the sort of man to take his wife walking out on him lying down. He took it as a personal slight. He could treat her like a dog but she could not leave him, especially she could not leave him and take the children … it seemed he had that sort of attitude. You will doubtless have come across it?’
