Page 163 of The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
We were in that moment for an eternity. The rivals, now comrades in arms, shout, panicked, clueless how to resolve the stand-off they started. As police patrol cars scream into the street, they throw their hands in the air, back away from JC, who jumps up. Officers of all shapes and sizes leap to his aid, including the two guys JC smoked with earlier.
Forgotten, I creep back to the car, shut myself in. JC is fine. The rival guys are fine. They amble away together. Everyone laughs it off. Patrol cars roar away as quickly as they arrived. JC and I are alone again in the car. The look he gives me in that rear-view mirror makes me pee a little. Finally, he says he’ll drop me back at the station. He means the tube station.
So, my grand excursion in a British police car might have been brought to an inglorious end if JC were not ‘dying for a fag’. On the way to the tube he drives up to a carpark barrier at the edge of a field, bordered by woodland. Not just closed for the night. This place has been closed years, but JC knows the code. He opens the barrier and there we are, parked alone at a lookout point that gives us a view across the London night skyline. I ask where we are. Horsenden Hill.
As JC smokes out of the car window, I sense he was more shaken by being held hostage back there than he let on to his colleagues.
I apologise. He tells me, ‘Don’t worry about it, mate.’ Then he gets a call, not on his police phone, but on another, deep in his pocket. He throws his cigarette away, leaps from the car, slams the door, shouts back at me to ‘stay put this time’ and walks a good distance away before he finally answers the call, too far for me to hear. He talks on the phone for a while and when he returns, looks worried.
‘Something’s come up. I can’t take you back yet. You’ll have to get down on the floor.’
I must have looked as blank as I felt, because he snaps, ‘Mark! Get down on the floor and keep your head down.’
I stammer out a ‘why?’
‘Someone’s gonna come and give me something. Be here any minute. Don’t move, don’t sit up, just … stay there.’
He rolls the window up and locks the door. I’m pressed against the filthy floor. My mind winds back to the envelope of cash he took through a dark doorway. He wouldn’t be the first cop in bed with a drugs gang.
In no time I hear another car. Its engine runs as voices, low and firm, give instructions with no room for questions. Footsteps round the car. If they look down, they’ll see me—JC jumps to bring those footsteps back with a needy question. The trunk opens. This is it. The drop. THUD. Something heavy lands in the trunk. A drugs haul? If so, then it’s the size and weight of a grown man.
Slam, slam, slam of doors, one of them the trunk. I eye that back seat and wonder if there’s a chance what’s on the other side isn’t a body.
‘Stay down,’ JC hisses as he jumps into the driver’s seat. ‘I’ll tell you when to sit up.’
We drive in silence. JC nervous at the wheel. Me jammed behind the seats.
‘What’s back there?’ I figure there’s no harm in asking.
‘Something they want rid of,’ JC says. ‘We’ll take it somewhere and lose it.’ I try to speak again, but JC shushes me.
Finally, we pull in and stop. I glance up. It’s dark, but there are people around. I hear footsteps, shouts, slamming doors. More grim than urgent. A larger vehicle pulls in nearby, but manoeuvres away. Someone shouts to keep the exit clear.
Voices again. I hear the trunk open. The car’s suspension is relieved when whatever’s in there gets hauled out. I chance my arm, peer through the window. JC is deep in conversationwith a guy. The grey kind. Could stand up in your stew and you wouldn’t know his height, weight, age … couldn’t tell you then or now.
I duck down as two figures carry something past me. They wear police uniforms, or at least I think they do. The trunk slams behind them. That’s it, there. Whatever JC picked up in the car park. An unmistakable body-shaped mass.
I try the car door. Locked. But the driver’s door may not be. Slowly I crawl between the seats, my bag gets hooked on a gear lever, I lose a shoe and have to fish for it. Finally, I’m there. Click. The door opens. I slide out, try to look grey too, like I have a job to do, like I belong there. I shadow those grey guys and the unwieldy package they carry between them.
As soon as I slip through the doors, I think I know what this place is. A meat-packing plant. It’s cold, stark and smells of blood and flesh. Further in, I’m not so sure. The cops have rigged up lights so they can work through the night. Soon as I’m in I hear raised voices. ‘You don’t moveanything,’ says one.
‘We thought he breathed. We saw him breathe,’ says one of the grey guys.
‘He could have been alive. We sat him up and tried to revive him, then carried him where it was lighter and we could see,’ the other one adds. This ‘grey guy’ is female … a young black woman. Pretty.
‘Well,WAShe breathing?’ snaps the officer, and glares from one to the other.
‘No.’
‘Where’d you find him?’
‘Through there, up the stairs, on a half-landing.’ She points beyond, nowhere near the patrol car that body had just come out of, nowhere near the car park or wherever it’d been before then.
‘I’m really sorry. I’mNEWand he’s just a PCSO.’ This girl blinks around at the disdainful looks, winces, simpers likeshe got shit for brains. But her and the guy stood cringing at her side … ISAWthem. They were waiting like fucking hawks for JC to arrive with the body. The way they carried it … wasn’t the first time. They were a team.
Officer in charge sighs, stares at the girl’s badge. ‘Well, Marie-Claire, fucking take it back and put it where you found it.’ They mutter apologies, shuffle away, towards an old doorway, not the one they’d manoeuvred through from outside. The mood in the room sends an air of utter disgust after them.
No one spots me as I press myself into a corner. I hear muttered vows to report the officers. Did anyone know them? Kids sent out without proper training. That’s when I see what’s on the floor right here in this room and something happens to me.
