Chapter 28

Reading, Berkshire. May.

There was a thumping on the front door, followed by an angry shout. “Open up in there.”

Sue opened the door of the refuge. It was on a bolt and chain, so only opened a few inches. “This is a place of sanctuary for abused and battered women,” she told the person on the other side coldly. “If you need to talk to us, please arrange an appointment.” She made to close the door, but a foot was shoved into the door to stop it closing. To Sue and the other refuge helpers, this was nothing new. Nor was their standard way of dealing with it. She picked up a heavy lump-hammer from off the table and dropped it from a height of about five feet onto the toe of the shoe. It bounced off.

“Steel toes caps, bitch,” came the snarled reply. “Now fuckin’ open up before we smash our way in.”

Sue looked properly at the people the other side, and realised it was a Security Patrol. She managed not to show her extreme distaste, but after a moment nodded. “You’ll have to remove your foot so that I can take the chain off.”

“No need. We’ll remove it for you.” Bolt croppers were pushed through the gap and gripped the chain. Nothing happened. Sue just watched, a sardonic smile on her face. Whoever was manipulating the bolt croppers took three more attempts before withdrawing them. “What the fuck?” came the muffled exclamation. “The croppers are damaged. ‘Ere, look.”

“It’s high tensile tungsten steel,” Sue told them calmly, managing to hide her amusement. “Let me close the door and I’ll take the chain off. And by the way, this door and the frame around it are all designed to stop angry husbands and boyfriends from just bursting their way in. You can’t just batter it down.”

“You’ve got ten seconds then,” came the furious reply. The foot removed itself, and Sue quickly unlatched the door, standing well clear as she opened it. As she expected, the door was slammed open, the intent obviously to try and catch her. However solid doorstops inside meant the door only opened to a fraction over 90 degrees. This was a deliberate design decision: a safety feature to prevent injury to the staff and volunteers from irate boyfriends, partners and even on occasions parents. Because of the force of opening, the door bounced back again into the face of the first two people through it.

Sue stood back and managed to look sufficiently contrite that the senior officer, who had not been at the front, didn’t just beat her. It was obvious to her that he had in fact been mildly amused at what had happened to his men, yet was publicly annoyed at her.

“How can we help?” She managed to ask politely.

“You have someone in here called Meg Simpson?” the officer demanded.

“Er, I don’t believe so, it’s not a name I recognise and I know most of the names. Let me have a quick look in the register. Sue went behind a reception desk and removed a large A4 sized book. Quickly flipping through it, she reached the page she needed and began to run her fingers down the page.

It was snatched out of her grasp by the officer, who quickly looked down the list of names himself.

“Here, you can’t do that,” Sue cried, reaching to take back the book. Her hand was slapped down, and then again a second time when she again tried to take the book from the Patrol officer’s grasp.

“Fuck off,” he growled.

“Don’t swear in here. This is a no swearing house.”

He just ignored her. “Not here.” He threw the book back at her and stormed out. It was just as well that the patrol officer didn’t know that this particular book was a con. It was maintained daily as if it was real, but every name in it was fake. It was there for this very purpose, of putting off partners of domestic abuse victims. The fact that it also put off the Patrol was a very useful bonus. In reality they didn’t have a register, that was far too dangerous. Despite the existence of the fake register, it was still possible someone could get hold of any real register, so one was not kept. But no-one would ever believe that, so the mock one had a dual purpose. All the information was in the heads of the people who helped to run the place. Meg Simpson was in the refuge, in hiding from her husband, an Assault Unit Leader in the Security Patrol. And a thug, bully and wife beater.

As the five men with him followed him out, completely by chance Sue looked into the eyes of one of the men. Her jaw dropped and her own fear hit a new high. To her intense relief the man, who had obviously recognised her, just shook his head minutely and left.

“Oh hell,” she whispered.

For the rest of the day she was as skittish as a cat on a hot tin roof.

“I was seen by someone who knows I used to be a copper, and knows where I worked,” she told Garth, her partner, that evening.

He looked at her, concerned for her safety. “What did she do?”

“He. Nothing. He sort of shook his head at me. Just a tiny shake. Sort of hiding it from the others. You know?”

“Almost as if he didn’t want you to tell on him?”

Sue paused and thought back.

Since her escape, thirteen months earlier, from High Wycombe Police station, she had not gone back to the town. She had only ever gone to Wycombe to work, but now she and her partner remained close to home on the outskirts of Reading. He had been a soldier for twelve years, retiring some ten years earlier, and had then joined the ambulance service as an ambulance technician. What some called an emergency medical technician. He’d never wanted to take the extra step up to paramedic: the tiny salary increase wasn’t worth all the extra responsibilities, or the extra year of training. The two coped. Just. Sue now helped out at a local women’s refuge, but all it really did was to get her out of the house and stop her going stir-crazy.

“Yeah,” she said. She wondered, but still worried.

Bob Garrick was scared. He didn’t show it, indeed he hid it well, but he was scared. Scared for his life. It was over a year since he had told his then boss, Matt Jacobs, that he was resigning from the Truth And Freedom party. The next few hours and days had gone very badly indeed, far worse than any of the men and women he had worked with could possibly have imagined.

The anti-TaF, anti-Thorn riots that the police had been expecting after the ‘postponement’ of the national elections hadn’t materialised in anywhere near the strength that they had been expecting, but those few riots that did occur were loud and angry in their opposition to Thorn. TaF, and the patrol, had responded brutally and murderously. The police had struggled to keep the two sides apart. Indeed they often ended up being targetted by both sides, but as soon as a couple of TaF political officers had been arrested, the patrol’s real brutality was turned on the police specifically.

The fights had turned into a Police versus the TaF, with the anti-TaF protesters standing on the sidelines and mocking both sides. Within a few hours though, the TaF had beefed up its presence in the town, and the police had beaten a retreat back to the police station, where they had been surrounded and barricaded in for nearly thirty hours. When the TaF had brought up shotguns and handguns and started shooting at the police station, the police had responded by using their Authorised Firearms Officers to try and incapacitate anyone holding a firearm.

It hadn’t worked for long, the TaF had simply brought in more and more people with heavier and heavier firearms, and eventually just overwhelmed the police. Jacobs had called for reinforcements from Thames Valley Police HQ, and from other local stations, but none had ever arrived.

Towards the end, an injured Jacobs had sought out Garrick, returned his TaF membership card and pin, and given him a task. Re-join the TaF and go in under cover. At that time Garrick was officially manning the custody suite with Sergeant Sue Stears, and between the three of them they had devised a hasty plan. It had sort of worked. After a fashion, but not in a truly successful way.

When the TaF had finally entered the station, they had found a battered and injured Garrick, arms raised and holding his TaF membership card high. Jacobs and a number of the other senior officers had been handcuffed to various metal stanchions and pipes, as well as to each other. In the mean time Stears and a few other younger constables, three women and two men, had quickly changed out of their uniforms into civilian clothes and had been locked into the cells, with D&D chalked on the boards. They were going to pretend to have been arrested as drunk and disorderly, and thrown in the cells to recover, and then been trapped. The TaF men that had already been arrested were then released by Garrick in his TaF guise. The only person he didn’t release was PC Taylor who knew the truth, had seen Garrick restate his police oath, his attestation, and knew Garrick was betraying them. Instead they had slipped him a bottle of vodka, knowing Taylor, as a bit of a lush, would drink it. What no one else knew, was that Garrick had spiked the vodka with bleach. It was a desperate ploy, and one that Jacobs and Stears would not have approved of, but it was the only way he could think of to stay alive, and to keep at least some of the others alive.

There were also eight seriously injured or dead police officers, and though only Stears and Jacobs knew it, another twenty-one men and women were hiding in outlier rooms and buildings, hoping to escape once the fighting had stopped.

Sadly fourteen of these people were found. Garrick would have nightmares to the end of his days over what the TaF had done to the men and women in the station. Luckily Stears and the few others in the cells, plus seven others hidden outside, plus the off duty men and women all escaped.

To Garrick’s relief, the highly intoxicated Taylor died before he could be interrogated. His internal organs were badly corroded by the bleach, but there had not been quite enough to kill him quickly. Unfortunately the alcohol in the vodka hadn’t quite been enough to dull Taylor’s pain and he died in screaming agony, something else Garrick would remember to his dying day. Unfortunately Garrick himself wasn’t totally trusted either, and had been interrogated a number of times over the following days and weeks by various TaF interrogators.

Eventually, grudgingly, as he seemed to have done everything right, and had released all their captured men, they let him stay. In fact they had conscripted him into the Safety Patrol, but had stamped his file to say that he was not to be promoted beyond Trooper.

Unfortunately for Hugh Rowland, the only person who knew he was locked in the back of a prison van was Detective Superintendent Ian Bound. Bound had been knocked unconscious early in the fighting and then executed by the TaF before he could regain consciousness in hospital. No one even approached the vans for nearly four days, by which time Rowland was himself unconscious and very ill. Those four days had been very warm for the time of the year and he had all but cooked in the dark blue van, which had been parked in the open, soaking up the heat of the sun. He had been taken to the local hospital suffering from severe and acute dehydration, renal failure, heart problems and severe clinical shock. There wasn’t an A&E locally and the junior doctor on duty in the minor injuries unit had taken one look at him and decided that it was just a matter of time, that there was nothing that could now be done other than make him comfortable. Although Rowland had had nearly four litres of saline infused, and two units of whole blood, he died five hours later of general systemic failure.

No one missed him, not even his own colleagues, but the TaF executed the few remaining police officers still in their custody in revenge for what had happened.

In the aftermath, Graham Thorn had formally sacked every single police man and woman in the country. Their refusal, months earlier, to arrest certain high court judges had made him angry. What had happened here had made him both furious and fearful. He sacked them outright, and ordered other employers to think twice about employing any of them.

Garrick had remained under cover ever since, gathering what intelligence he could, but he had no one to pass it on to, and no way of contacting any of the few former colleagues still out and about. Most of them in fact believed him to be a traitor and avoided him. The small number who knew he wasn’t, never came near him, and he didn’t know how to contact them. It worried and scared him. How many other people, in other patrol stations, were in the same boat, he often wondered.

He had been transferred away from High Wycombe very quickly, first to Oxford, then Swindon, and just that morning to Reading. On his first job he had seen someone he recognised. He prayed she hadn’t recognised him, and it was only when the Patrol he was part of were all leaving that she had looked at him. It was obvious that she had recognised him, the fear in her face had mirrored what he was feeling.

Now he was scared. What would she do? Would she do anything?

He thought back to the last few hours before the station had finally fallen to the Patrol, and what he was supposed to do, what he’d been asked to do. Never mind that a couple of days earlier he had volunteered to do it, when it came down to it he had almost balked at the idea. He was glad Sue and a few others had managed to escape, even if some of them did still blame him. He hoped Sue herself didn’t blame him for what had happened.

“I need to talk to her,” he muttered to himself. He was sitting on the toilet, not because he needed it, but just to get a few minutes alone. He now knew where she worked, but he wasn’t sure whether he could get to see her alone. He was rarely without a minder of some sort; he assumed the squad-leaders had been told not to fully trust him, though they probably hadn’t been told why.

It was three days before he found himself without a minder for any length of time. He wasted no time and set off at once to see his ex-sergeant. He wasn’t stupid however, and took a slow meandering route through Reading, stopping at a number of places to do a bit of personal shopping, hooked up with a couple of known touts and informers, and all the while kept a sharp lookout to see if he was being followed. Twice he thought he spotted someone following him. The first time he watched for a few minutes, but the person hopped on one of the few buses still running, and left Bob on his own. Nearly twenty minutes later, he thought he was clear, but then spotted someone who seemed to be taking a close look at him. He crossed the road and headed back in the direction he had been coming from. He lost sight of his possible pursuer and decided to go into a small coffee shop.

There were not that many coffee shops around any more. Just twelve months earlier there had been lots, but many of them had closed now: lack of customers mostly, but many junior Patrol members weren’t above doing a bit of ‘fund-raising’ for themselves and forcing shop keepers to pay protection money. Those that had managed to survive, despite the cost of ‘protection’, did so because the few customers remaining had little choice about where they shopped.

Bob ordered a coffee and a toasted tea-cake and sat by the window. He’d picked up a copy of The Sun. It was a horrible paper, but it was almost the only one still publishing that didn’t blatantly kowtow to the government. The majority of the paper was sport, and most of that was premier league football: Manchester United had avoided relegation by the skin of its teeth, and Sheffield Wednesday had just been promoted to the Premier league for the first time in a lot of years.

He ordered a second coffee about half an hour later, and sat and read, and occasionally looked out of the window. At no time did he spot anyone that aroused his suspicion. Eventually, after nearly two hours of this, he decided he really was alone and carefully made his way to the refuge.

“Hi,” Bob said when Sue opened the door of the refuge. “Can I talk? It’ll be quick, I need to get back before anyone realises I’m gone.”

Sue looked around, then nodded and opened the door wider to let him in.

“What do you want?” she asked brusquely. Sue looked haggard and gaunt. But Bob was no better: to Sue, Bob looked like he had aged at least ten years.

Bob understood her almost harsh manner. Matt Jacobs and she had been good friends, his murder had upset her badly. She hadn’t seen his death, but from what she had heard reported afterwards, it hadn’t been very nice. Bob had seen it in awful detail and wanted to forget everything he had seen, but knew he never could.

“I’ve got loads of stuff, but I’ve no one to pass it on to. I don’t know who or how or where.”

Sue stared at him. “What sort of stuff?”

“Mostly out of date stuff now. Who’s going where. When government ministers are going to be in the area. And which ones. I’ve got lots of names, and I’ve tried as far as possible to note down everyone who has committed a serious offence.”

Sue gave a bitter laugh. “That’s a good one,” she said, “what am I supposed to do with that?”

“Nothing. Not really. I’ve been in Reading for less than a week, so most of it is for Oxford and Swindon. I do know that Boase and his sidekick Harewood are supposed to be in Reading next week. That’s valuable info.”

“When and where?”

Next Thursday. As I understand it they’ll be in The Oracle shopping centre, though I’ve no idea why, so I can’t tell you exactly where.”

“Anything else?”

Bob pulled out his note book and handed it over. “Everything I do know is in there.”

Sue looked at it in surprise. It was a standard issue police notebook. She opened her mouth to speak, but Bob interrupted her.

“I’ve got a couple more, filled, but not with me, and a few more empty ones at home. Can you use them, or get them to someone who can?”

Sue shrugged. She had absolutely no idea what to do with them, but it seemed a waste to just leave Bob dangling like this. “I almost don’t care what you get, just keep getting me stuff. Absolutely anything and everything.”

“Bring it here?”

“Noo,” Sue said slowly. “Go to, er, there’s a coffee shop on, er, no, do you know the Wynford Arms on Kings Road?”