Silenced For Good
Alex Coombs
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
More from Alex Coombs
About the Author
About Boldwood Books
1
‘I think that you’re addicted to violence. I think you like the adrenaline rush, the danger. I think you like losing control.’ Dr Morgan’s gaze was steady, her voice calm. ‘I’ve seen this so many times before, usually in drugs and alcohol. Starting off as fun, then a remorseless escalation until we have total addiction, an inability to live without it.’
She glanced at Hanlon. Over to you, the look said.
‘I never lose control,’ Hanlon replied icily. She let her gaze wander around Dr Elspeth Morgan’s consulting room while she struggled to maintain her composure. It was a large, airy first-floor room overlooking a quiet residential road. It was a reassuringly expensive area. Dr Morgan’s fees were not reassuring; they were alarmingly high. They were in Hampstead, in North London, just up the road from the Freud museum. Freud had tribal art in his consulting room; Dr Morgan favoured modern, abstract paintings and sculpture.
Hanlon disliked them intensely.
‘Then why are you here?’ countered Dr Morgan, her voice sceptical. ‘For showing a worrying amount of kindness to a suspect avoiding arrest? I think not. You broke his nose.’
Hanlon had been temporarily suspended from duty while an assault charge was investigated. She didn’t blame the criminal responsible for struggling while she arrested him, but she did blame her colleagues for not backing her up. She had been in the police for twenty years now, and her career had plateaued. She was high-ranking, a DCI, but somewhere a line had been crossed from respected elder statesman – she was forty – to dinosaur. Embarrassing dinosaur. Her opinions were old-fashioned, as was her approach to policing.
‘He was resisting arrest.’
Dr Morgan raised an elegant shaped eyebrow and looked at her quizzically. She was about sixty, tall and sophisticated. She had short, skilfully cut grey hair and a shrewd face. She was wearing a grey silk trouser suit and a patterned blouse. Hanlon could imagine her in court giving evidence as an expert witness, unflappable, convincing.
Now she said, ‘I would imagine a lot of people resist arrest where you’re concerned, DCI Hanlon. Well above the average.’
‘The suspect didn’t complain at the time.’ She shrugged.
‘No, indeed. Not at the time, but he did later, didn’t he?’ Dr Morgan gave her an uncomfortably penetrating look and Hanlon moved uncomfortably in her chair. Not because it was badly designed; it was guilt. Hanlon had spent her life hiding things deep inside, and now here was this woman shining a light on things that had been in a cavernous darkness for years, decades sometimes. The present events that they were discussing would be a portal to the past, and Hanlon, although she would never have admitted it, was scared. She was beginning to regret coming here.
Dr Morgan looked at the hard-faced, dark-haired woman sitting opposite her and continued, pressing the point, ‘And your colleagues failed to back you up. I think we can draw our own conclusions from a rather deafening silence.’ Dr Morgan looked at Hanlon. ‘Bit unusual, isn’t it? You normally close ranks. When it’s the police worrying about police violence, surely alarm bells should be ringing in your head.’
‘I think I am suffering from stress,’ Hanlon lied, trying to shift the ground. The interview with the clinical psychologist was not going to plan. She had hoped that Dr Morgan would sympathise with her, agree that the Metropolitan Police had treated her shamefully and agree to help her fight her corner. She didn’t need this. Dr Morgan seemed to be casting herself as a hostile witness.
The psychologist raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘You can’t control yourself, Hanlon – worse, you don’t want to.’
‘That’s not true.’ She looked around the room again. There were three plain pale grey unadorned ceramic vases on a table against the wall. They were very simple in design. Her fingers curled and her knuckles whitened.
She was reliving the incident, the four of them following the BMW 3 series through the streets of South London. A suspected arms drop. They didn’t want the driver, he was just the delivery man, they wanted the customers. Then the brief chase as the driver realised he was being followed. The car stuck in traffic, two men abandoning it, Hanlon chasing the driver on foot.
‘They’re Bauhaus vases,’ Dr Morgan said, misinterpreting Hanlon’s gaze but not the anger and frustration underlying it. ‘Please don’t even think of smashing them. They’re rather beautiful and rare.’
Hanlon ignored her. She was still in South London. Running down the alley. Behind a Chinese restaurant. The smell of five spice from the extractor fans and rotting food from the black bin-bags outside the kitchen door. The man, twenties, stocky. The alley had been a dead end, a chain-link fence. Shouting at Hanlon in some unknown Eastern European language. She glanced around, no one there, no witnesses. She hit him hard in the stomach, saw the pain and surprise in his face – it felt good… ‘you can’t control yourself’ – spun him round, cuffed him. More perceived insults, the frustration inside her, another punch and then, quite casually, an elbow into his face… ‘Worse, you don’t want to…’
She stared hard into Dr Morgan’s eyes. ‘He was resisting arrest. He brought it on himself. There was no excessive force – it was necessary, proportionate and reasonable.’
The doctor drummed her fingers thoughtfully on her desk.
‘There’s a technical term, Hanlon. In layman’s terms it’s called pushing the fuck-it button. That’s when addicts give in to their chosen addiction big-time. They know it’s going to have terrible consequences, but they’ve ceased to care. They almost seem to relish it.’
‘Really?’ She tried to sound unconcerned.
‘I know you know that feeling, Hanlon.’
‘No. That’s
