‘Dad?’
‘Hello, love. How are you doing?’
‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I just wondered if you could tell me where Vince lives now.’
‘You’re planning to go and see Vincent?’
‘Yes.’ She tried to detect the tone of his voice, and wished she could see his face. ‘There’s no problem with that, is there?’
‘No, no. He’s around. I’ll find you the address.’
He put the phone down on the table, and Fry heard him fussing about the room, then saying something quietly, Alice’s voice replying. She wondered if Jim really needed to go and look the address up. His memory wasn’t that bad yet, was it?
‘Yes, here we are,’ he said cheerfully, when he came back. ‘He managed to get a flat in one of the old tower blocks, Chamberlain Tower. Flat 1620. That’s quite a way up, on the sixteenth floor.’
Fry made a note. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
She could hear him breathing, trying to think what else to say. She wondered whether she could prompt him to get whatever it was off his chest. Or would she just make him clam up?
‘Diane, are you sure you want to go and see him?’ he asked finally.
‘Yes, of course. I haven’t seen Vince for ages.’
‘Well, you ought to know then…’
‘Yes? What, Dad?’
‘You see…he has this girl living with him.’
Fry laughed. ‘Is that all? I thought it was going to be something terrible. So Vince has got himself a girlfriend. That’s perfectly normal.’
‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘I suppose so.’
Cooper could not explain the sudden surge of pleasure at being asked for his help by Diane Fry. It was something he had thought would never happen. Probably that was why it meant so much — the pure rarity value of it.
Some of the information she wanted was easy enough to access. Marcus Shepherd and Darren Joseph Barnes were well documented on the PNC. Intelligence provided their addresses, known associates, and aliases. These two were called S-Man and Doors by their friends. He printed out their previous convictions. There were photographs, too. He hoped it was what Fry needed.
The solicitor, William Leeson, was more difficult. He only had an expired conviction for minor fraud, and a note of disciplinary action taken against him by the Law Society.
Cooper did a search on the Law Society’s database, found several Leesons practising around the country. But most of them were female, and almost all of them partners in firms in London or the South of England. It looked as though William Leeson had been struck off.
He tried for a while longer, but failed to come up with anything else. There was no William Leeson in the phone book, or on any of the electoral registers for the West Midlands. He wasn’t listed at Companies House as a director of any company. Left the country, perhaps. Taken his ill-gotten gains and fled to the Costa Brava. Well, it happened.
If Diane Fry had been here with him in the office, he could have talked it over with her, bounced ideas around, asked questions, challenged each other’s opinions. It had always worked well in the past.
But Fry wasn’t here. She was a long way from Edendale. And without her, he was only operating like half a man.
14
Vincent Bowskill lived in a tower block near Yellow Park. Fry arrived as the setting sun was casting its shadow right across the low-rise housing in Gordon Avenue.
High-rise towers. Not much community cohesion here. It seemed to Fry that decades of short-sighted architectural policies had done more to destroy communities than any amount of immigration could. For years, Birmingham had been known as the ultimate concrete jungle. The inner ring road had created a cement collar separating the centre from the rest of the city, and driving pedestrians underground. At least it was reversing its direction now, trying hard to rid itself of that concrete image.
Poor maintenance and social issues had resulted in the residents becoming unhappy with the towers. Rivalries had broken out among groups of residents, and many were uneasy about people suffering from HIV/AIDS living in the towers. A report in one daily newspaper had quoted a resident who said that she wore protective gloves when she touched the buttons on the lift, for fear of contracting the disease. Birmingham City Council had been deluged with complaints about waste facilities, and about a man who had previously threatened suicide being re-housed on a high floor of one of the towers.
And this was the Chamberlain Tower. That was a man who got everywhere. Fry had a feeling there used to be a hotel called the Chamberlain Tower, too, on Broad Street. It probably had a different name now, rebranded for new corporate owners. Or to avoid confusion with this place.
Estates like this were a policing nightmare. The main problem was the grassing code. Reporting someone for a crime brought vilification and harassment. Yet any experienced copper knew that many of those who claim to adhere to the code would sell out their friends in a heartbeat under the right circumstances, to get a hit of heroin or to save their own skin.
In Perry Barr, Fry knew she was standing on the edge of gang country. To the west, Handsworth and Hockley were the territory of the notorious Burger Bar Gang, while Lozells, Aston and Nechells to the south and east were the patch of the Johnson Crew.
Somewhere near here was a spot known as Checkpoint Charlie — if you crossed it at the wrong time you might end up dead. It was the disputed frontline between two of Birmingham’s most ruthless criminal gangs.
The Burger Bar Boys had become nationally infamous after a gunfight with the Johnson Crew left two girls dead at a New Year party in Birchfield Road — seventeen-year-old Letisha Shakespeare and eighteen-year-old Charlene Ellis. The attack was carried out as retribution for the murder of a Burger Bar member, Yohanne Martin. And so the cycle went on.
Last year, a report produced for Birmingham City Council had listed more than eighty schools described as recruiting grounds for violent street gangs. Children whose families had a gang connection used it as a badge of honour in the playground. It was a world away from anything that Jim and Alice Bowskill had experienced, and alien to the lives of most parents, thank God. But there were many families right here in the northern districts of Birmingham who were faced with the daily reality of teenagers growing up with only one ambition — to become a member of the Burger Bar Boys or the Johnson Crew, or one of the many other gangs who operated in Birmingham. The Blood Brothers, Real Man Dem, the Ghetto Hustla Boys — the list was endless. Police intelligence systems creaked under the pressure of untangling all the links; when feuds flared up, allegiances were broken, and brothers could end up on opposing sides.
As a child, Fry hadn’t quite realized that everyone dreaded finding themselves on the outside, not a part of the gang. She thought it was her own weakness of character that drove her to seek acceptance from her peers. It made her wince now to think of her teenage self, hanging around in the corridors of her comprehensive school, trying to attach herself to a group. It was only as an adult that she’d learned it was the same for most kids of her age. Some were so desperate to belong that it became a question of any gang that would have them.
Being a member of the herd was a primal instinct — probably the deepest, most powerful instinct of them all.
But here, it was all about drugs. That was where the money and the power came from. And that was in spite of the fall in street value. In the right area, you could buy a gram of coke for a couple of tenners, enough for twenty lines. Cheaper than a latte at Starbuck’s, they said. Well, it was cheaper because most of that coke was actually baking soda, or crushed powder from painkillers like Phenacetin and Benzocaine to simulate the numbing effect of cocaine. Analysis had shown that some street coke was as low as nine per cent pure. Sometimes it contained worse than baking soda. Cockroach insecticide and cat worming powder, for example.
