The Most Hated Man

Chapter 1

Cops and Kids

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Certainly, nhất trainers were a well-made shoe but that wasn’t the reason they were twenty quid over the retail price of their competitors. They were more expensive because they were more desirable, and they were more desirable because they had the brand name tốt nhất thế giới written around the back of the heel. There were no rational grounds for the desirability of this, it had simply been agreed and established and everyone under the age of twenty-five was very clear upon the point. The phrase around the heel was Vietnamese for the world’s best but since they were only sold in the West and few folk in that part of the world could pronounce tốt nhất thế giới, they were invariably referred to as nhất trainers, which actually translated as most rather than best. The confusion didn’t affect the retail price.

One nhất shoe, wrenched off the right foot, its laces loosely tied, lay on its side on the ground. It had broad scuff marks along the toes and the reinforced suede was even torn in places. The other shoe remained inexpertly tied on the left foot a yard away where the stubble-haired kid, with eyes rolled back in his head, sprawled half propped-up against the pock-marked wall of a narrow alley. The kid’s complexion, like the wall, was pustular and blemished. He was well-nourished but the chest and belly of the England football shirt he was wearing were drenched in the blood that had evidently exploded from his nose. He was stone dead, but not yet stone cold. He wore no socks and the bright summer sunlight glittered on the toenails of the exposed foot. There were a lot of flies restless in the air around him, settling and resettling, but the boy himself had a perfect stillness that he’d never once exhibited in life. One of the busy insects landed on the soiled groin of the boy’s cropped combats where the body had defecated in its final moments.

The alley ran down between the backs of two rows of social housing, ragged tumbles and jumbles of junkyard gardens on either side, its far end connecting with the notorious Wilverne Avenue; a place of nasty fun for some and of sustained misery for others, where the nasty funsters ruled. The corpse was ninety seconds shoe-scuffing walk from his own front door. This was an alley that most locals didn’t use because it didn’t lead to the row of shops along the dual carriageway, it didn’t act as a short cut to the discount warehouses on the roundabout, and it didn’t allow you to feel safe in the world. This was an alley that was strictly for kids and other cynics. Drug-abusers playground. The more dangerous the drug, the more admired and respected the abuser. This was snuff alley. One of several lanes and byways around this locale that were worthy of such unworthy status.

In Wilverne Avenue a tall, rather ungainly man, all legs and elbows, was leaning against the roof of an unmarked police car which had been parked there to block the entrance to the alleyway at that end. His nondescript suit was all that was needed to prove that he didn’t belong in this neighbourhood. The absence of sports leisurewear declared him a foreigner in the community; his collar and tie made him an alien. Another species. It made him as unwelcome as his choice of profession. There was a police radio in the car but the unreliable lowest-tender equipment supplied to his division meant that, as usual, he held a tiny mobile phone clamped to the side of his head. It nested there like an artificial third ear.

He was listening to the Assistant Chief Constable mouthing platitudes at him down the phone. The tall man’s resolute expression remained unruffled as he patiently murmured banalities in reply. Both sides of the conversation were littered with the verbal detritus of the culture they inhabited, the jargon phraseology of community empowerment and proactive inclusivity and cultural sensitivity and suchlike; phrases to which an infinite value was ascribed despite their lack of any meaningful content. Both officers spoke with apparent sincerity, as if unwearied by this vacuous semantic merry-go-round, but in truth the tall man’s bones ached with the expenditure of patience required of him to maintain this linguistic self-deception. The insipid verbiage poured out of the ACC and out of the phone into the tall man’s head where it was immediately rerouted into a dribble of politically correct responses that trickled out of his mouth and back into the phone like an extended drool of spit. These days, when engaged in conversation with his senior colleagues he simply waited for it to be over.

When he looked back on his life, which he did only reluctantly, it seemed to him that he had spent the entirety of it waiting patiently. At school he had waited for the slower kids to catch up, and for the kids whose first language was something other than English to catch up, and for the black and white boys who always rushed to occupy the desks furthest away from the teacher to catch up, although everyone knew that these last two categories of underachiever were a lost cause now that the working class had been socially engineered by their betters into the underclass.

After leaving school he’d had a few patience-wasting years at university and then he had joined the police force at just about the time that it was ceasing to be a police force and was being feminised into a police service. He had been waiting and exercising his threadbare patience ever since, endlessly writing up the same arrest details in a multiplicity of paper forms in what purported to be an efficiently eco-friendly paper-free working environment; queuing to process suspects through the central custody suite as the few response officers who attended to the actual police work on the streets got caught up in the bureaucratic bottleneck; waiting to locate a translator so that he could communicate with the suspect in something more than sign language; waiting for the defence brief to arrive so that the very civil rights which the suspect had denied to their victim could nonetheless be observed and be seen to be observed in respect of the suspect; waiting through the thousand and one other irksome impediments to job satisfaction that burdened the frontline officer.

So now, a thin and somewhat harassed-looking man in his late thirties, already greying a little, he waited uncomplainingly for the Assistant Chief Constable to complete the usual fatuous exercise known as the provision of professional support; a duty of care. Ironically, of course, it was the time wasted on the necessity of going through this rigmarole of jargon-speak that stopped the ACC from offering him any genuine support that might actually have been useful. Not that it was her job. Strictly speaking, he should have been getting an earful from his chief inspector, superintendent or chief super, but as the recent spate of drug-related child deaths was making headlines in the press the ACC had decided to stick her oar in. When she finally hung up, the tall man eased himself off the car, slipped his phone into the pocket of his jacket, and walked in his awkwardly loose-limbed fashion up the alley to the crime scene. He was Detective Inspector Bapoto Smith and he was leading one of the response teams on the ground who were working the snuff killings.

DI Smith lifted the strip of blue and white plastic tape cordoning off the crime scene and ducked under it. The tape sprang out of his fingers when he was half way under to slap against his neck, snagging on his collar. No pain involved, just embarrassment. He pushed it upwards again irritably and stepped beneath it. They always put the damn tape at just the wrong height. Too low for a man a couple of inches over six feet. It was supposed to be set high enough and loose enough to lift it easily to shoulder height and step under, but the world was built for people smaller than himself and this tape was level with his ribs and fixed as tight as a trampoline. Smith supposed it was set at that height to keep out the kids. But a sign saying ‘Police Line - Do Not Cross’ was more of a challenge or an invitation than a prohibition. The young rarely, if ever, respected it. Grass wasn’t for being kept off, it was for rolling in, and they had the cliché to prove it.

The kid in the alley wouldn’t be disrespecting anything again, though, or rolling in the grass. Poor little fucker. Blood all over him. Blood everywhere. Must have lost pints. Fresh enough to fill Smith’s nostrils with that rich, unnerving smell, and old enough to have congealed black and solid in the warmth of the afternoon sun. Smith tried to hide the crease in his face as he bent low over the body, not wanting to show discourtesy to the dead with a display of repulsion. It was more than professional etiquette, it mattered to him. His lower back gave him a sharp twinge to remind him not to bend over like this, and he straightened up.

Like every other, this death was banal. Significant for the moment, but in itself prosaic. He thought perhaps this was why people invented so many rituals to make death seem like it was the way we feel it ought to be instead of the way it is. Maybe he shouldn’t be thinking that way, not right now. The parents of this fifteen year old wouldn’t be thinking it banal when they identified the wreckage. After all, it wasn’t one of Smith’s own kids lying there, terminal and cooling. His children were safe at home. At least he hoped to a Christ he didn’t believe in that they were safe at home. He found himself wishing he hadn’t thought of his own children. Not here. But he was always going to. Every time. This kid was number five. Fuck. Five children. He was starting to feel the nausea a little now. More than a little. He drove the thought to a place in his mind where it didn’t disturb him so much. It resisted being driven.

The parents, or more probably the mother and her current boyfriend, had yet to be found, so no one had performed a formal identification of the corpse. The next of kin could be anywhere, it being lunchtime of the Sunday after the Saturday night before, and the mother’s son having been dead for only a few hours. Smith noticed the lack of vomit on the corpse. Apparently the boy had only had snuff for breakfast. But there was no hurry for a formal ID because the local uniforms knew the lad at a glance from numerous previous encounters. His crimes over the last few years were, nominally at least, not crimes at all but ‘anti-social behaviour’ and he had been in receipt of an armful of ASBOs and Crimbos as well as being entered into an Acceptable Behaviour Contract although, naturally, he had wiped his arse on them. The local uniforms were on a first name basis with him, as they were with all the kids who were ASBOed up to the eyeballs.

Above the corpse was graffiti of the gang logo for the Stone Hill Massive. They left their scrawl on the walls of all the streets around here, marking their manor. The animals pissed graffiti all over their territory to inform the outsider – anyone who didn’t belong to the Stone Hill Massive – that everything here belonged to them. They were a mostly Somali, Ghanaian and African-Caribbean gang who understood the theory and practice of small scale terror but, even so, they were forced to share borders with two other gangs toward whom they were permanently hostile although only intermittently in a state of open warfare. To the north was the al-Banna Cru, a Pakistani/Bengali/Punjabi gang whose territory was based around the Hassan al-Banna youth centre and extended half a mile in every direction. To the south the ground was owned by the Pavey Estate Muthafukkers, a multiethnic gang who were much the weakest of the three, both in numbers and in their capacity for proactive violence. Bapoto Smith took note of the insignia of the Stone Hill Massive on the wall by the dead body but disregarded its relevance to the crime. The previous snuff killings had occurred across a number of different territories, the graffiti was coincidental.

The forensics team hadn’t arrived yet and the uniforms were handling crowd control so there wasn’t too much for a detective inspector to do just at this moment. It was important that someone of his rank be here, of course, to acknowledge the seriousness of the offence committed. The social conventions had to be observed. DI Smith accepted that, as he accepted all that was expected of him. He wasn’t one to buck the system. If you made waves, you drowned. He had no illusions about being the maverick cop of the cinema screens or the great romantic outlaw hero or any of that childish stuff. Conformism might not be as sexy as insolent iconoclasm, but it paid better. When you had a wife and kids to provide for, you had to put aside the vanity and pretentiousness of romanticism and buckle down.

Bapoto Smith was a man who had been defined by the society in which he lived and, now that he had reached an age when he might have valued self-definition, he understood that it was too late. Having been their man for so long, he could not now become his own man. He was irretrievably trapped within the standard contemporary caricatures of his brown skin, his masculine gender, his heterosexuality and a catalogue of other crude sociological assumptions. Bapoto had no nickname amongst his colleagues. Few officers with non-European names did; it wasn’t worth the risk of an accusation of ethnic insensitivity. Back when he’d been a detective constable one of his mates in CID had tried fixing the nickname B on him but it hadn’t stuck. In recent years promotion had ensured that he was either DI Smith or Sir. No one called him Bapoto except the Chief Superintendent, who made a point of doing so and pronounced it as three evenly-spaced and very distinct syllables.

Although a third generation British citizen, Bapoto’s name had awarded him a permanent reminder as to which side of the national heritage he belonged. Both of his parents were mixed-race but both had English names. When their eldest child had been born in the late 1970s they had selected an African Zezuru name for him, partly because his mother believed herself to be descended from the Zezuru people of what was soon to be Zimbabwe and wished to honour them, and partly because she liked the name. To his mother an English name was no better than a Rhodesian name and she was having none of that. His sister was called Nehanda and his younger brother was called Jiri. Yet the family had retained his father’s surname. They were the Smiths. What his parents hadn’t known or had chosen to ignore was that the name Bapoto meant born amid the noise of quarrelling. If Bapoto Smith hadn’t known his parents’ characters so well, he might have thought them prescient. His wife called him Bap. No one else did. He would have liked it if they had.

The crime scene of the latest snuff death looked much the same as the previous four. Which made dealing with it easier but worse. Always the location was mere steps away from the street but just slightly out of sight from passers-by. Always there was the explosion of blood. Always the dead child. Well, youth, if not a child. The corpse was long and gangly. He might pass for an adult if you didn’t look too closely. Not that he was going to find his way to maturity now. Not that he would have done if he had lived.

Snuff was the media term for the latest pharmaceutical craze, coined by some journalist with a particularly macabre sense of humour, for a recreational drug that was frequently fatal with the first dose. Whoever was peddling it had targeted kids. It was proving to be a winner with those whose adolescent bodies had outgrown their embryonic brains. Once upon a time the way to large it in druggie-cred had been to abuse yourself with strong solvents, real brain damage stuff. But when snuff had come along its status had swiftly grown way bigger than solvents, so now there was only one way to large it; the way that this pathetic youngster had. Amongst the tribes and the gangbangers and the street crews it was one of the ways that contemporary youth could acquire status through risk, to show their peers that they prioritized a respected reputation over life itself. It was their version of death before dishonour.

At the top end of the alley, where a yellow and blue police patrol vehicle was blocking the entrance to Marshall Road, the local uniform who had been the first response officer to arrive on the scene was looking a little green about the gills. She was PC Dianne Winbush, a member of the SNT Safer Neighbourhood Team responsible for providing a recognisable presence in the local area, and it had been a big day for her. Now she was standing alongside two redundant paramedics who had been called in along with the five other constables - every response officer on duty at the time - who had rushed to the location in response to Winbush’s radio call for assistance, none of whom appeared to have much in the way of duties to attend to at the scene beyond establishing a police barricade at both ends of the alley to keep the local populace at bay and secure the scene. Oddly enough, it was the most important job as far as practical policing was concerned.

As a local constable PC Winbush’s job normally entailed the routine tasks of the modern police’s service to the community. Things like searching for the same looked-after child every time the kid walked out of their care home because any time a child strolled off to buy some fags or visit their friends in the town centre they were officially classified as a missing person and had to be found, even though everyone involved knew perfectly well that the child wasn’t really missing but had simply slipped off the leash for a few hours. Or routine tasks like calling on disputatious domestics when someone had sent someone else a harshly worded text message and the civilian support officer who took the telephone call to the police had decided to tick the box marked harassment, thereby establishing the harshly worded text message as a crime. It wasn’t really the civilian support officer’s fault. They didn’t have a box marked immature timewaster to tick. Or tasks like re-sending all the paperwork on a case to the CPS, the inappropriately named Crown Prosecution Service whose acronym was otherwise known by the alternative nomenclature Can’t Prosecute, Sorry, because the only talent these overpaid bureaucrats possessed was an extraordinary capacity for losing paperwork. Or routine things like attending promotion-oriented courses on social enrichment through ethnic diversity for sustainable inclusive communities in which the speaker would re-state endlessly the same old establishment-approved civilizing imperatives that had already been made and hammered home repeatedly in previous promotion-oriented courses on ethnic inclusivity for a culturally enriched society and on inclusive tolerance to promote ethnic diversity and on tolerance and diversity for the sustainability of social cohesion and so on ad infinitum. This fashionable political agenda meant that you couldn’t in all honesty expect the humble uniformed response officer to cope very readily with an honest-to-goodness murder. Crimes of this magnitude were not what she was trained for. Which was why CID had been brought in as soon as Winbush had reported finding the corpse. Ordinary street coppers had never been trusted with criminal investigation, it required a special department.

Detective Sergeant Gloria Kovač was also present at the crime scene, talking with Constable Winbush, whose helpful and accommodating young face wore that frightened-attentive expression of someone who doesn’t want to make a mistake, knowing how easily they could be made. Winbush responded to Kovač’s succinct questions with short bursts of descriptive prose couched in formal language; cautiously, in report-speak. The sergeant took in the constable’s answers, writing them down in her notebook. PC Winbush would also write down exactly the same details in her own notebook at the first opportunity. Later DI Smith and the other five constables would do likewise in their notebooks. Then everyone would re-write the same details in various versions for their respective MG forms in accordance with the Manual of Guidance. Their performance of these notations would be monitored, reviewed, and quality-controlled. Numerous support officers who worked a 9 to 5 day and who never left the office would pounce ruthlessly upon any response officer who failed to complete all the necessary MGs. As the dead teenager stiffened into rigor mortis the police in attendance had to remember to make sure that their arses were covered against uncompromising criticism from their intrusive superiors in accordance with procedural requirements.

DS Kovač was Smith’s regular partner. She felt less need to peruse the corpse than her detective inspector, having had more experience of multiple child murder than her boss. She actually had something of a reputation in that regard, which was surprising for someone who was only a detective sergeant, because Kovač had worked the Sarah Miranda case two years ago under DI Parker. Miranda was the nurse who had sexually molested eight infant children in her care and had killed three of them. Kovač could handle the sight of the mortal remains of an adolescent fairly dispassionately. More readily than her DI could, probably. Unlike Smith, she wasn’t a parent. More to the point, she had a matter-of-fact realism toward the unpalatable aspects of their work that made Smith feel like a hopeless idealist in comparison. Kovač would be a valuable member of the team on this case and everybody knew it, even if her colleagues occasionally found her equanimity in the face of the grotesque a shade unnerving.

She had been born Gloria Fareham but when her mother had re-married she had taken her Croatian step-father’s name, Kovač, in conformity with her mother’s change of surname and she had acquired a measure of her step-father’s stoicism along with her new name. His character had been a positive influence on her. At least, she thought so. Certainly, she never appeared to be as emotionally affected by the horrors of the job as Smith was, even when kiddies were involved. It had served her well when the Miranda case had stalled as a result of the senior officer, DI Parker, being blind to the obvious suspect simply because that suspect was a woman. Kovač had pushed hard to get the investigation passed the obstacle of conventional gender supremacist thinking about of how a woman’s delicate feminine sensibilities and maternal susceptibilities ruled out the possibility of a female perpetrator in a child sex-crime. Having finally dispensed with such misconceptions the investigative team had worked the actual evidence in front of them, arrested the demonstrably guilty person, and achieved an emphatic conviction. Kovač had been commended for her role in getting a much needed result. In fact, her colleagues considered it rather mysterious that Kovač hadn’t been promoted following that case. In a service constantly looking for reasons to promote women, it was weird that Kovač had remained a detective sergeant despite her instrumental role in catching Miranda. No one could understand it.

The Miranda case had been one of those tragically newsworthy the-nation-is-appalled cases where a seemingly endless succession of politicians and spokespersons get interviewed by the broadcast media affirming that we must ensure that this never happens again. Just like they had the last time it happened and just like they would the next time it happened. As if they could ensure anything. But it had been a real fillip for Kovač because DI Parker had taken a desk-job immediately afterwards and Gloria had been assigned to work with DI Smith, which she considered the next best thing to a promotion. She got on much better with him than with Parker.

The case that Smith and Kovač were working now had already established itself firmly with the public and the news media as the latest the-nation-is-appalled case, potentially the biggest in years. Maybe since Shipman. They were still a long way short of his body count, thank God, or of that Russian bastard’s tally, whatever his name was, from the eighties, or that evil fucker Iqbal in Pakistan in the nineties who murdered a hundred runaway boys off the street without anyone even noticing till he boasted of it to the newspapers. Apparently, homeless boys were so expendable that he could slaughter a hundred of them without drawing attention to himself. But that was in Pakistan. There’d been nothing involving kids in the UK before as bad as this new series of killings looked set to be unless they could stop it quickly. Chemical analysis of the peculiar composition of the drug in the victims bloodstreams had shown that the snuff must have come from the same source for each fatality and the mixture of chemical constituents was so uncommon that it appeared as if the deaths were deliberate murders. The victims were complicit in their own deaths, of course, taking the drug by choice, but that was probably just the result of ignorance. And that meant that the potential number of volunteers was unknowable. The death rate could accelerate at any time or continue even after the supplier of the drug had been apprehended. Unfortunately, the snuff killings were already proving to be a damn sight more difficult than the Miranda case, without a whisper of a suspect. On the other hand, DI Smith was a good deal smarter than that idiot Parker, so things weren’t yet hopeless, and at this rate DS Kovač would soon be known as a specialist in this kind of horror.

Naturally, they were not the only officers on the case. There was a whole task force, so called. But the majority of the officers assigned were office ‘support’ and could therefore be largely discounted. Smith and Kovač had been assigned to head the response team for the first death, after Kevin Dean Sommers had been found in the back garden of an empty house on Blackwell Street, and they’d been kept on at the sharp end of operations throughout the subsequent killings because of their local knowledge. All five deaths had been within their divisional jurisdiction.

Kevin Sommers had been Jamaican and the second victim, Faaid Awaale Dáhir, had been Somali. Based solely on this happenstance their deaths had initially been assumed to be possible race hate crimes and the clenched arsehole of many a senior ranking police officer had quivered in panic. But then the third and fourth corpses, Olivia Trent and Sarah Crowley, had been two white girls of English heritage and everyone from the Home Secretary in Whitehall to the lowliest constable in a stab vest had all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Some psychotic drug dealer might be peddling shit that was butchering his baby customers but at least the murderer wasn’t a racist. The investigation on the ground had thereafter been re-framed toward youth drug culture in general, although the Hate Crime Unit, having been mistakenly given a role, retained its omnipresent surveillance of all ongoing activities. They could find symbolic racism in a carton of fried rice so they certainly weren’t going to release their grip on murdered black boys.

DS Kovač had finished questioning Constable Winbush and she ambled down to join her inspector by the corpse. Unlike her boss, Gloria’s body language was very definite, very certain, as if the motions of her body were purely functional. She didn’t communicate much to other people through her physical movements, they simply served their purpose. She wore a charcoal grey crepe trouser-suit over a plain white shirt open at the collar. Her shoes were flat-soled. She gave the impression of almost being smartly dressed but not quite. The crepe was a little too creased, her cropped brunette hair was always clean but seldom combed. It was short enough for that to not matter much. The overall effect of her appearance was of a person who didn’t much care what other people thought about such things. DI Smith, whose eyes had been drawn back to Kevin Sommer’s most recent companion in death, looked up from the sprawled figure at his feet and across at his sergeant as she approached him.

Do we have a name yet? he asked.

David Michael Keeting, replied DS Kovač, with two E’s.

Smith glanced over at the huddle of local residents in Wilverne Avenue, their expressions resentful and bullish, who were being held back from the alley by a less than secure cordon of three of the uniformed officers. There was no sense of reverence. The constables were standing very upright and squaring their shoulders in an attempt to look as bulkily intimidating as possible. But if the locals were to charge forward mob-handed the three uniforms would have no chance of holding them back. And the direct family hadn’t even arrived yet. There would be trouble when they did.

The newspapers were screaming worse than ever this morning, television is ready to turn nasty, and the community leaders will have our balls if we don’t pick up something definite on who is peddling this shit soon, said Smith to his DS, muttering through a clenched jaw, reiterating the obvious, and now they’ll all have another death to reproach us with, to tell us how useless and incompetent we are.

Kovač placed her hand in front of her groin and swung her empty fingers from side to side.

"Okay, they’ll have my balls and they’ll have your tits, Smith corrected himself in mock-painful concession as Gloria smiled archly. It was a measure of how well they worked together that he felt comfortable using the word tits" to a female officer. Kovač was probably the only female colleague that Smith could speak to without continually monitoring his own vocabulary. Being able to discard the constant self-supervision and just talk freely was a considerable blessing. For her part, Kovač had discovered that it was unnecessary for her to monitor her own choice of language regarding race and ethnicity when in conversation with her mixed-race boss. When they spoke outside of the hearing of other officers, they had a natural unstated agreement to suspend the usual restrictive hypersensitivity. It made everything so much less guarded and inhibited. This unaccustomed freedom had formed a bond between them early in their working relationship. More than most inspector/sergeant partnerships in the CID, they had a willing reliance on each other, a trust in each other, that enhanced good policing. He continued telling her things that she already knew:

But not a single one of these investigative journalists has turned up anything either, you’ll notice. They don’t reproach themselves. They’re like our masters at divisional headquarters; instead of investigating the killings, they investigate us, the police.

We’re easier to find, observed Kovač coldly.

Smith gave her an unappreciative look.

Five dead in a month, he said. That’s one kid every six days. Just what is going on? Is this what the world is now?"

It wasn’t a question, just exasperation, and DS Kovač made no reply. Bapoto was a lot more upset than he let on. After almost two years working together Gloria knew him quite well enough to catch the subtle inflections in his voice and manner. She examined the scene again herself, having taken only a cursory glance earlier. She saw nothing more this time for there was nothing more to see. No clues, no revealing tell-tale anythings, no inferences as to the murderer’s motivation. Or the victim’s motivation, come to that. Nothing but another predictable death through the inhalation of fatal substances. Learn what you can from that. Out of earshot of the onlookers twenty metres away she said quietly, sounding resigned, almost reconciled:

"It’s the world we live in, Sir, at any rate. Is this what you thought you were signing up for when you joined? Any morning after breakfast this could be waiting here for us to deal with it."

As far as Bapoto Smith remembered, his main reasons for joining the police service had been a cut-price mortgage and early retirement but this was hardly the place to voice the thought.

Gloria saw, inside the right nhất shoe with the loosely tied laces, a faded numeral 8. Size eight. Small feet for such a lanky kid. The measure of someone still only three-quarters grown. She pointed at it.

Jesus, look at this.

In the stress of the moment her voice took on an edge of despondency. Smith recognised it and didn’t blame her for it. He might’ve tried to respond with something reassuring except that he couldn’t think of anything. So he stuck to business.

We won’t need to wait for the coroner to determine the cause of death. Snuff; no question.

Another unaspiring, uneducated unemployable who didn’t have enough of a reason to live to avoid killing himself, she mused.

Let’s drop the political profundities, Gloria, and concern ourselves with this poor little bastard’s reason for dying, said Smith. Kovač muttered something in reply about profundities and profanities which her inspector didn’t quite catch.

The Specialist Crime and Operations forensics team finally arrived and Smith and Kovač were required to step out of the way. The white overalls looked absurdly science-fictional in the squalid, ordinary backstreet littered with the discarded effluence of the everyday; greasy takeaway cartons, empty alcohol cans, and sweetie wrappers. While the specialists toothcombed the alley, the two detectives watched the sterile intricacy of scientific method, knowing full well what the ultimate findings would be. The deceased David Michael Keeting had inhaled a quantity of pale cream coloured powder, somewhere between two and four milligrams, had suffered the arterial swelling and tearing that frequently resulted from such inhalation, and had drowned in his own blood. Snuff death. Despite the fact that it was the media who had first called the drug snuff with a waggish humour that they later regretted and disowned, the strident indignation of the subsequent headlines expressing their cultural piety had since obliterated any comedy from the label. But the name had stuck and one name was as good as another when you were choking on type O positive.

A pair of white overalls gestured toward Kovač to summon her. She walked over, consulted a moment, then strode back to DI Smith.

One piece of luck, Sir. The dead boy had a copy of a stop-search report in his pocket dated yesterday morning and the report shows no drugs on him at that time. So he must have bought the snuff since then.

Well, that’s something. Have a word with the officer concerned, instructed Smith. He paused to glance at the rapidly growing crowd of locals gathered in the adjacent road, then continued: I wonder how many stop-search reports he acquired during his short life?

His mum could probably have wallpapered their house with them, Sir.

Wouldn’t catch his mum doing any wallpapering.

Smith looked again at the crowd in the avenue. They were repeatedly making hesitant advances toward the entrance to the alley and were being politely but firmly discouraged by the three uniformed officers. To Smith’s relief two further yellow and blue police cars pulled up and disgorged more uniforms. The Superintendent must have called in a favour and borrowed some bodies from the neighbouring division. They were not here for the dead boy, they were here for crowd control; the usual priority with major street crime. The assembly of locals was the inevitable corollary of this kind of incident, and they displayed the usual mixture of voyeurism, outrage, panic, grief, and recrimination. Especially the latter. Smith was used to their staring at him with that special contempt they reserved for law-enforcement, or any officialdom, any legal authority, but now after five deaths he was becoming accustomed to a crueller brand of hatred in their faces, a hatred propagated by their finding themselves in a situation where they were dependant upon a despised scapegoat for succour from a hell of their own making. Incapable of blaming themselves, from long practice of refusing to do so, it was simpler and easier to hate him for his failure. Smith’s own decency made him feel guilty at being hated, as if all hatred must have a just cause. He knew how unfair they were being toward him, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that if they all felt so passionately that he was in the wrong, then he must somehow really be at fault. The uniforms handling the increasingly restless crowd were too busy to feel ashamed of themselves. Their patient politeness was under strain.

Smith sighed at his inability to believe what he knew to be true. With Kovač in tow, he walked further up the alley to have a word himself with the sickly-pale constable who had originally found the body. The faces in the crowd were her regular clients and she might have a valuable suggestion or two about who David Keeting’s customary drug dealers were. As he approached PC Winbush, Smith noticed a certain frailty creeping into the constable’s set expression of dogged tenacity. He could guess the reason. The spate of snuff killings had exerted additional demands on police public relations in recent weeks and the level of pressure from the Chief Constable’s office to maintain inclusive community liaison during this troubled time was such that the very limited supply of response officers from the local division was being pushed to breaking point to offer the highest of high-profiles, to the extent that individual constables had been patrolling single-crew around this very dodgy part of town by themselves instead of in pairs. Some patrols were even on foot for maximum visibility. Not only did this cut down enormously on the effectiveness of officers, who had no chance of being where they needed to be if they weren’t in a car, but maximum visibility also meant maximum vulnerability for officers who had nothing but a small telescopic baton and a can of pepper-spray between themselves and intensive care. In consequence of this absurdly dangerous policy of desperation, PC Winbush had been alone on foot patrol when she stumbled across the dead body. According to the Superintendent’s statistics, the uniformed presence on the streets around town in the last four weeks had been doubled. This, of course, was true only on paper and the rate of killings hadn’t even slowed down.

*                              *                              *

The Oppressed was looking out of his window on the landing at the top of the stairs watching the kids loitering in the street outside. It was dusk and he had two layers of net curtains on all his windows but he still worried that his indistinct presence might be visible from the street. He didn’t want to be seen watching as that would only exacerbate matters. If he could be thought of as someone who spied on the street from his window, then he would be even more of a target. The Oppressed moved away from the window, back into the living room of his first floor flat. He kept his occasional watch on the street because he was already a target. One of their favourite victims, although he was very far from being the only one.

Just yesterday evening he’d had the usual conversation about juvenile violent crime with the proprietor of the burger takeaway up on the main road. The shop was part-owned and managed by a huge, solid Geordie in a very off-white tee shirt who looked like he’d just finished a regular ten years in Her Majesty’s armed forces and his character was self-evidently honourable and honest to the point where it almost became a social disability. The other part-owner and manager was his wife. She was Asian-oriental in a wouldn’t-quite-want-to-guess-for-fear-of-offending way. Burmese or Malaysian or Indonesian or somewhere thereabouts. Or perhaps a completely different part of the orient. The Oppressed had often wondered how the two of them had originally met but he’d never had the nerve to ask. He liked them, they seemed a very mutually supportive couple. She was, from all appearances, the boss and the business brain. Neither of them trembled at a job of work. She didn’t often serve at the counter but generally bustled around in the background. She seldom spoke to customers. He, in contrast, was quite chatty.

Whenever The Oppressed popped in for his usual sunhat and chips, this being a burger with a fried egg on top sitting on a bed of salad in a bun, he and the chippy would swap stories about victimisation. They both had plenty of stories. Yesterday the chippy had told him about the time that he’d been closing up for the night, lowering the latticed metal shutter that rolled down to cover the glass front of the shop, when one of the kids who routinely hung around the bus shelter in the street right outside had rushed forward, taken hold of one end of the shutter and thrust up with both hands, causing the contraption to jam solid halfway down the window. When those things get jammed they stay jammed. In total disbelief the chippy had looked at the kid, who was all of thirteen, and asked him what on earth he thought he was doing. The reply had been Iain’tdoin’nuffin’. Fuc’off. Iain’tdoin’nuffin’. The chippy had just gaped. He hadn’t sworn or shouted or raged, but just gaped. It beggared belief. He had seen the little swine push up on the shutter to jam it. He had seen him with his own eyes and the kid knew that he had seen him. Yet still the miscreant denied it. What were these foul little shits? What were they? The most baffling thing of all was why they were so irresistibly drawn to that bus shelter night after night.

The Oppressed was a single, ethnically English, white male, which disadvantaged him from the start. This combination of attributes was a major part of what made him The Oppressed because it made him a legitimate target. He was unentitled. No one need ever be on his side in anything. He could expect no sympathy or support. He was forever an object to be blamed, never a subject to be defended. No one would be concerned to protect him, only to protect others from him. He was expected to need no help. Sink or swim. Nice world he lived in. His status got worse when you added to this permutation of predicates his introverted, reticent personality; his disassociation from his neighbours. He stayed indoors and watched a lot of telly. He didn’t socialise amongst what a state official would call ‘the local community’. In the eyes of the community’s children, on their values, his solitariness was reason enough to paint three circles on his face. The Oppressed was low-waged, forty-five, and 30lbs overweight. Things were as they had always been. He had no sexual partner, he’d never married, and had no children of his own. If he’d had children himself, his kids might have mixed with the other neighbourhood children and then maybe they wouldn’t have picked on him so much. But he hadn’t and they did. To them, he did not belong. He was someone wholly outside of their world and yet, by chance, located within it. On top of which, he was an almost entirely inoffensive character, and that really provoked them. To be inoffensive was to be weak and to be weak was to be a suitable object for the routine infliction of misery. These were the rules.

The Oppressed’s council flat was upstairs over a corner shop. The council had offered it to him because no one else wanted it, even deep in the extremes of a housing shortage. It had been near-derelict when he had moved in seven months earlier because it had been unoccupied for so long. For the first week he’d spent his time sweeping loose plaster and rubble out of the kitchen cupboards, painting everything including the floors, not being able to afford carpets, bleaching whatever he hadn’t painted yet, and waiting for the council to turn the electricity on. He’d taken it, of course he’d taken it, because as a single man the council was never ever going to offer him anything else. He was so far down the waiting list he’d get a bed in a retirement home before he qualified for any other kind of social accommodation. And it was, after all, a council property. It offered some kind of secure tenancy. Some kind of security. At least, he’d thought so before moving in. Funny how you can be so totally wrong, so entirely and comprehensively mistaken. His security was merely legal, not actual. Fourteen perfectly good houses in his street were boarded up, despite the desperate scarcity of available housing, because people refused to live in them when offered them. They’d rather stay on the waiting list. There was nothing wrong with the properties materially, it was just their location slap-bang in the middle of shitsville. The sight of all those boarded up houses should have warned him off. He’d noticed them before he’d moved in, but this had been his one opportunity to get his name on a council rent book and so he had taken a chance. But chance had fucked him over, good and proper.

The Oppressed returned to the landing at the top of the stairs. Looking again out of his window he saw three of the regulars from the neighbourhood. They lived outdoors in the street, pretty much. They were out there until all hours. The Oppressed had given them names. One was a boy of perhaps twelve years of age who liked to sit on the rectangular, olive green electricity box and kick his heels against it loudly for the hollow sound of the impact. So The Oppressed had christened him Hollow-Stomp. The cover of the box was loose from the various kinds of abuse it suffered, and was generally half-torn out of the ground so that the wiring was exposed. Which meant that the electric connections got wet when it rained. Every few weeks an engineer would come by at taxpayers’ expense to refit the cover. It would stay in place for maybe a day, then the thing would be broken again. The electricity box, like The Oppressed’s flat, was on the corner where two residential streets intersected. A favourite gathering place for the nasty funsters. They seemed drawn to road junctions for some reason, never to anywhere in the middle of a street.

Another of the regulars was Bottle-Breaker, a six year old girl who regularly smashed fizzy-pop bottles in people’s front gardens. The Oppressed had been the recipient of this act of personal contempt any number of times. There was nothing anyone could do about it because she was only six years old, so he had to swallow the insult. Bottle-Breaker had an inseparable friend, Dirt-Box, a four year old girl who would put dirt and small stones through people’s letterboxes. Again, inevitably, The Oppressed had been an unwilling participant in this sport on numerous occasions. Bottle-Breaker would always be there to encourage Dirt-Box and they would enjoy running away together after the younger girl had posted her unwelcome deposit. When Dirt-Box ran she lacked co-ordination in her movements, her feet splaying out behind her in random directions. She was too young to run properly because it was only a couple of years ago that she had learnt to walk.

The Oppressed turned away from his sentinel position at the top of the stairs and trudged back into the living room. Being a modern person living a contemporary life, he spent far more of his leisure time in the company of his personal machines than in the company of other people. His personal machines contained many people, of course. The television held people who lived out fictional lives of drama, humour or, best of all, excitement. Lives that found resolution in gunfire, where an individual beset by the complex contrivances of adversity could settle matters in a hail of bullets, supplying a simple solution to complicated problems. That was the best of all. The CD player enabled him to listen to people who performed songs of intimate self-disclosure or sentimental communal feelings. Human expressions he could identify with but could not replicate in his own life. Reminders of himself in others, who were preserved on disc for his convenient consumption. The people contained in his domestic entertainment machines were so much more rewarding, so much more engaging as company, than the people of flesh who existed outside of the machines. The latter couldn’t seriously compete.

Having said that, there were many people inside the machines who were hostile to him. It wasn’t just the impossible standards they expected of him that he couldn’t live up to and knew he couldn’t: the commercial goods that would always be out of his price range, the happy families he would never be a part of, the beauty and self-reliant capacity of the ‘success-object’ men he was supposed to emulate, and the achingly desirable women who routinely paraded across his screen just above an invisible caption which read ‘this is what you’ll never have’, their perfection explicit in the rectangle of glass but impossible to touch. Nothing under his fingertips but the glass. The fantasy concoction of the feminine that rendered women in real life a perennial disappointment. No, it wasn’t just the impossible standards of aspiration that belittled him. It wasn’t simply that so much of the entertainment on offer worked against him. It was that so much of it was intended to, with the ceaseless ridiculing and disparagement of the misbegotten white male, the endless scorn and vilification directed toward people who were the same sex and skin colour as himself. The idiot fathers, the immature boyfriends, the inept male co-workers, the gormless pick-up artists, the violent husbands, and the male sexual predators, with which popular entertainment was populated.

Then there were the talking heads on television who routinely said so many things that would have him raging out loud against the people behind the glass who could not hear his furious response to their bigotry. They chastised the truth with a stick of lies so glaringly fraudulent that they actually brought the truth they were denying into sharper focus. The pundits, experts, spokespersons and cultural commentators who lied about him and his status in the world. They were the champions of the intellectual elite who had been the reactionaries of the politically correct establishment all their lives and yet who still maintained the self-deceiving fiction that they were the progressive counter-culture; a fiction that they believed with the same absolute certainty with which they held all of their establishment opinions. The Oppressed was much given to erupting aloud in frenetic dispute with the hostility expressed toward him by the advocates of ideological dogmatism on the television screen who believed themselves to be the people who know best. Multiculturalists who justified none of their unsubstantiated assertions but simply used the smear ‘racist’ to denounce and dismiss anyone who disagreed with them; sociologists offering spurious social-group collective identities in which to imprison the mind; feminists wallowing in privilege yet presenting themselves as perpetual victims; pedagogues who turned what should have been education into the ideological indoctrination of the next generation. All claiming the moral high ground. All taking it for granted that they knew best. The whole pack of the arrogant chattering class, treating their political faith as if it were knowledge rather than theory, presenting their failed policies as the panacea for society’s ills, always offering to kiss it better if we would just surrender ourselves in conformity and obedience to their beliefs and values, if we would just trust them to know what was best for us all. One of these days we would be given a Minister of State for Trust and nobody would believe a word she said.

The Oppressed asked little from life, to save it from the embarrassment of having to disappoint him. So now, as he switched on the television, he declined the programming provided by the broadcast channels and instead slid a DVD into his bottom-of-the-range player to watch something that wouldn’t rouse his temper. He waited impatiently through the rubbish that they put at the start of every disc. The manufacturers disabled the main menu option to force their customers to sit through anti-piracy warnings and trailers advertising their future products. He used the remote control to skip to the next track repeatedly to get passed the commercials more quickly. Finally he reached the menu and pressed play.

Thom Joey had never been given a slot on broadcast television but his DVDs sold steadily to a loyal non-mainstream audience. The Oppressed was a big fan. Thom Joey was a rant stand-up. He had started his career as a stand-up comedian of the I smoke-I swear-I drink-I fuck-I don’t apologise variety. A typical routine in the old days would go something like:

"Y’know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see every single smoker in the country quit smoking on the same day. (Buzz from the audience as this seems contrary