looks better.
‘There are lots of serious gangs in Birmingham,’ said Vince. ‘Not just the Johnnies and the Burgers. Your lot ought to go after some of them Asian gangs — the Lynx, and the Panthers.’
‘Right.’
‘Oh, but I forgot. You won’t take on the Asians.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me any more.’
‘Oh, yeah. You got out, didn’t you? Left it all behind. Lucky you.’
‘The local gangs, Vince.’
‘They’re not all bad, you know. Those crews have been around the city for a while. There’s two hundred members in the Johnnies, and they’re not all out shooting innocents on the street. Some of them are safe.’
The Johnson Crew was widely accepted as being the more organized of the two main gangs, having made loose affiliations with the local Asian heroin gangs in Aston as well as with Jamaican-born Yardies, until the Jamaicans became increasingly marginalized in the city. Despite being numerically inferior, the Burger Bar Boys had taken advantage of their small, tight-knit community and were seen as the more ruthless.
The UniSeven Studio shootings were in retaliation for the murder of leading Burger Bar Boy Yohanne Martin, who died behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes in West Bromwich High Street.
And it wasn’t just a bunch of testosterone-charged youths proving their manhood and earning respect. Girls were being drawn into the nightmare now. The suspects charged with the shooting of Yohanne Martin were seventeen and eighteen — and both of them were female.
The gangs got their names from two caf?es in Handsworth where black youths congregated in the late eighties and early nineties. The Burger Bar was on the Soho Road, while the Johnson cafe was in Heathfield Road. Legend had it that both gangs were originally friendly, but fell out over a bet on who won a game of Streetfigbter on the PlayStation. By the late nineties, their street fighting had moved off the computer screen and out on to the streets. And it was no longer a game.
The killings began in the last days of 1995 as the young men fought off Yardie gangsters, and then turned on each other in a bloody turf war. Betrayals, executions and tit-for-tat killings. Bodies on the streets of North Birmingham. Fry knew gangsters’ lives weren’t glamorous. They were full of fear and paranoia.
‘I want you to make contact with two men,’ said Fry. ‘Marcus Shepherd and Darren Barnes. They’re known on the street as S-Man and Doors.’
She could see by his expression that he knew them. Or had heard of them, at least. A spasm of fear passed across his face, before he forced his features back into that sullen mask.
‘Do you know which gang they’re in?’
He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yeah, the m1 Crew. But I can’t do this. They’ll think I’m baiting them up.’
‘Setting them up for arrest?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But I’m not working with the police here, Vince. You don’t even need to tell them that I’m a police officer. I’m sure you can think of something to persuade them.’
‘I suppose.’
She watched him smoke his cigarette and think about it. Across the road, a drug dealer was operating openly, small plastic packages changing hands in full view. There would be lookouts at each end of the block, and a car arriving each day to distribute the drugs to the street dealers.
Being a civilian gave Fry an exhilarating sense of freedom. As a police officer, if she’d wanted Vince Bowskill to become an informant, she would have had to do everything officially. There was no such thing as a detective running his own snouts any more, with their names known only to him. Those days were long gone, swept away in the desperation to clean up any suggestion of corruption or dodgy practices.
Now, she would have to make Vince sign a contract and leave all contact with him to a properly appointed handler. In documents, he would be a referred to as a CHIS — a Covert Human Intelligence Source.
Immediately, her brain began to churn with extracts from the code of practice relating to Section 71 of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. According to the code, she would have to get authorization from a designated authorizing officer, who would provide authorization in writing. Using the standard application form, she would have to provide details of the purpose for which the source would be tasked, the grounds on which authorization was sought, the level of authority required, a summary of who would be affected, details of any confidential material that might be obtained. She would have to keep detailed records of every task, and be prepared to account for her actions to the Chief Surveillance Commissioner. She would have to carry out a risk assessment on the deployment of her source. A risk assessment, for goodness sake.
She was amazed that she could remember all this stuff. It was even more incredible that, right at this moment, she could forget the whole bloody thing.
‘So will you help, Vince?’ she said.
‘Yeah, okay. Well, it’s family, right?’
‘Right.’
Angie had taken on her own jobs. Diane wasn’t entirely sure why her sister was so keen to get involved, but she wasn’t in a position to turn down help. What she needed most was someone to talk to, a person she could open up to and bounce questions off.
Right now, the only person who came close to filling that role was Angie. She wouldn’t have been Diane’s first choice, but this was all she had. She was waiting when Diane got back to her hotel in Brindleyplace.
‘This first witness, Louise Jones,’ said Angie. ‘She doesn’t work for the publisher any more. She left them months ago. They don’t have a current address for her — but they say she moved away from Birmingham.’
‘If she was on witness protection, she wouldn’t be giving out her address,’ said Diane.
‘No.’
‘But it seems someone got to her, nonetheless. Everyone is out to put the knife in. It feels as though the whole world is against me.’
‘There are people on your side, Diane. They’re trying to help you.’
‘I don’t know who they are.’
‘Well, where do you think I got a copy of the case file from?’
‘I don’t know.’
Angie shook her head. ‘Gareth Blake. He rates you.’
‘He told me to clear off home. Almost in as many words.’
‘He had to say that in front of his sergeant.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, what about this other witness?’ said Angie. ‘Tanya Spiers. Where does she work again?’
‘Some place called the Rosebud Massage Parlour.’
‘A massage parlour? Oh, great. There are so many massage parlours in Birmingham it’s a miracle they haven’t caused a worldwide shortage of baby oil.’
Diane agreed. Oh, a few of them were genuine, of course. They administered a good, healthy pummelling to get the stress out. Not a bad idea, either. But the others…
She pictured a grimy flight of stairs and a dim bulb. The sweet smell of cannabis creeping under a door, unmasked by the scent of incense and aromatic oils. An overweight dyed blonde in a low-cut lurex top and skin-tight leather. A fakefur rug and a price list on the back of the door. Sex and the City? Forget the glammed-up Hollywood version. The real thing was quite different.
She had no doubt that trafficked women still worked in the massage parlours of Lozells and Digbeth. Young girls fresh off the plane at Birmingham International, flight BA305 from Bucharest. They came believing they had a job in the hotel business, speaking little English and carrying even fewer possessions. And instead of going into a job, they were passed from hand to hand, deprived of their passports, beaten and intimidated by a succession of new ‘owners’ until they accepted their fate, became resigned to a grinding day-by-day degradation. And, of course, they were told over and over that the police couldn’t be trusted. So no one was going to come forward with information.
But there were lots of other places, officially licensed as massage parlours, where sensual massages and special services were openly advertised. These places were rarely raided, unless there was a problem. As long as the girls were called Chelsea and Holly, everyone turned a blind eye. And maybe Tanya, too.
