“That’s her!” Mrs. Rayner’s stick slipped from her hands and rattled on the floor. “That’s the little madam who had my bag!”
“Right you are, love.” PC Blick gave the van driver a little wink, and the driver drove on.
“That’s her,” said Mrs. Rayner. She leaned over the back of Blick’s seat and prodded a finger between his shoulders. “Aren’t you going to stop?”
Blick helped her back to her seat, picked up her walking stick along the way. “Yeah, don’t you worry, love. We’ll send a patrol car after her. We’ll have the little madam.”
One of the old men sitting at the back didn’t bother to stifle a snorted laugh. Blick shot him a warning look.
“Yes, well, you mind you do,” said Mrs. Rayner. “Because that is her, I’m telling you.”
Blick yawned, settled himself back in his seat at the front. This was Mrs. Rayner’s sixth trip on the Victim Bus. It was the ninth time she had identified the teenager who had mugged her outside the Oak Lane Post Office just after Christmas. Blick had taken the first three identifications seriously. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He knew why the poor old girl kept signing up for the tour: it was a day out. Nothing old folk like better than being driven around in a minibus all afternoon, even if it was only on a trip around the borough’s most notorious Youth Assembly Points.
He hadn’t thought it would be like this. He’d thought it was the big, bright idea that would free him from a uniform tunic that never quite fit around the waist, and uniform trousers that were always two inches too long at the ankle. He’d thought this was his ticket into plainclothes.
He’d told his inspector: “Robbers get arrogant, they get cocky, they think they’re safe once they’ve got away with it, they don’t think we’re going to keep coming after them. So, a week, two weeks after the offense, we drive the victims around in a minibus, take ’em ’round all the usual gathering places, get them to ID their attackers. We’ve got a car following up, as soon as the vic spots a suspect, the car pulls up, does the arrest. We’ll clean up. Can’t lose.”
One arrest in seven months. And he was too young to be charged.
“Where to next, chief?”
“Go up by the car park,” Blick told the civilian driver. “We’ll have some refreshments.”
The driver chuckled. “Only reason they come, that is. Free tea and biccies.”
“Piss off,” said Blick.
“Language!” said a ninety-year-old Jamaican woman who’d had her mobile phone snatched by four twelve-year- olds at the taxi rank outside the bus station.
“Piss off,” said Blick. Silently.
The driver was an irritating berk, to put it bluntly. Bad breath, a sarcastic nature, and a lousy driver.
“You ever think you’re in the wrong job?” he asked Blick as they leaned against the side of the bus drinking tepid tea from paper cups.
“What are you on about?”
“Well, you’re supposed to be a copper, yeah? You do all that training, you wear a fancy uniform—even if it was made for a slightly smaller man—you swear an oath to uphold the Queen’s peace. Yeah? Twelve years in the job, and here you are, a bloody social worker, spending every Wednesday afternoon taking half a dozen old buzzards on a mystery tour round the shopping centers of suburban London.”
“They’re not all old.” It wasn’t a complete rebuttal, he knew that, but it was how policemen went about things: find the first mistake, and chip away at it.
“They’re all blind, though,” said the driver, chucking the dregs of his tea over the tarmac and tossing the cup in the general direction of a litter bin. “Or might as well be. They never bloody see anything, do they?”
“Pick that up,” said Blick, pointing at the cup, “or I’ll nick you for littering.” He finished his own tea, crumpled up his cup, and pressed it into the irritating berk’s hand.
The driver subvocalized energetically as he carried the two paper cups over to the litter bin. Just before he got there, Blick shouted his name.
The timing’s the last thing to go, he thought as the irritating berk, distracted for a vital second, walked straight into the litter bin, and then doubled over clutching his groin. It was bad enough being a laughingstock back at the station without the bloody civilian staff joining in.
True, though; one arrest in seven months. No convictions. It had got to the stage now that he didn’t fear management declaring the project a failure, closing it down—he longed for it.
PC Blick dragged himself back onto the Victim Bus and announced that they would be moving off in five minutes. There were a few clucks and groans from the older passengers. Driver’s right, he thought. They are only here for the free biscuits.
The one who wasn’t old was a fat, shy girl of seventeen who d been cornered by a gang of girls in an alley a couple of weeks earlier, on her way home from the cinema. They’d made her take her contact lenses out, and the smallest of the girls had then crushed them underfoot. Della’s replacement lenses hadn’t arrived yet, which made her presence on the Victim Bus a little academic.
How you doing, Della?” Blick sat down next to her and treated her to what he hoped was an avuncular smile.
“Okay, Mr. Blick.”
She didn’t seem too scared by the smile, so he gave her another one. “I expect this seems like a waste of time to you, yeah?”
“No, not at all, Mr. Blick,” said Della, her voice and face earnest. “You got to have a go, haven’t you? You can’t just let them get away with it.”
He wished he could pat her on the knee without it seeming like he was...well, patting her on the knee. “You’re a good citizen, Della,” he said. “I’m glad you—”
“Little bastard!’’
Blick looked up in time to see Mr. Holt, a retired local government officer, and Victim Bus first-timer, leap out of his seat, run down the bus, jump out of the door, and rush across the road. He was almost run over by two cars and one van, and actually collided with a courier on a racing bike. Mr. Holt picked himself up, gave the prone bicycle a kick, gained the far pavement, and threw himself at a short, thin youth with blue hair.
“Oh my God,” said Della, squinting out of the window. “What’s happening?”
“It’s all right,” said PC Blick. “It’s just one of the victims murdering a child.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance whatsoever that the boy Mr. Holt attacked is actually the boy that attacked Mr. Holt?”
The inspector had a private office, but when he needed to bawl out a junior officer, he preferred to do it in the open-plan area. It was little touches like that which convinced Blick, on his darker days, that he would never be management himself. It would just never have occurred to him to do that. He didn’t have the imagination. Or the inner rage.
“No connection has so far come to light, sir, no. Not at this time.”
“He wasn’t armed?”
“He had an umbrella, sir.”
“What?”
“Mr. Holt struck Dean Stubbs with a telescopic umbrella which—”
“Not Holt, the boy. Was the boy armed?”
“No, sir. Regrettably not.”
The inspector, an ovoid man with an absurd amount of hair on top of his head, but none at all at the sides, crossed his arms and hissed. “Not even a penknife?”
“No, sir.”
“Was he carrying drugs?”
If he had been, it’d have been in the initial report, wouldn’t it? “No, sir. Not so much as an ancient roach.”
“And he has no record?”
“Not known to police, sir, no.”
“God Almighty, Blick.”
“Yes, sir.”
The inspector kicked a swivel chair and hissed some more. The swivel chair was empty, but only—Blick suspected—by chance. “He’s conscious, at least? The boy?”
“He has a broken finger—classic defense wound—but other than that he seems to be sound. They’re keeping him in overnight just to be sure.”
“Right. Well, your precious bloody Victim Bus is off the road until further notice—that goes without saying, I trust.”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Meanwhile, you’d better sit in on the interview with Holt. Seeing as how he’s one of your precious bloody victims.”
“The problem we’ve got here, Mr. Holt—”
“The problem you’ve got,” said Mr. Holt, “is that you’re in here harassing me, the bloody victim, when you should be sorting out chummy. The bloody criminal.”
“The problem is,” Blick continued, not bothering to argue with the prisoner and definitely not bothering to seek support from, or even to glance at, the ostentatiously bored woman who sat by his side, representing CID, “that the description you gave us of your mugger at the time was—and I’m quoting from your original statement here—‘a tall, well-built white male, aged early twenties, with dark hair, pockmarked skin, and a goatee beard.’ Yes? Whereas, the lad you attacked by the car park earlier today is a short, thin fourteen-year-old with blue hair, no beard, and an enviably clear complexion. That, you see, is our problem.”
Mr. Holt, a round man of high pink complexion, bald except for his ears, drummed his fingers on the table and made faces of incredulity at his lawyer. His lawyer—a young, solemn-faced Indian woman—tried to persuade her jaw muscles that she had not just seen the CID officer yawning. The ensuing struggle between reflex and professionalism caused her eyes to bulge and her nostrils to flare. Mr. Holt interpreted this as full-on support for his brave battle against police stupidity.
“He could have shaved it.”
“Pardon?” said Blick.
“Could have shaved the beard. Dyed his hair. And I said he was white, didn’t I?”
PC Blick sighed the sigh of a martyr. He rubbed his hands over his five o’clock shadow. “Mr. Holt,” he said. “It’s not the same bloke. Is it? I mean, come on—what’s he done? Had surgery to reduce the length of his legs? Is he a basketball player who always dreamt of being a jockey, do you suppose?”
“Could have been crouching,” said Holt.
“It-is-not-the-same-man,” said Blick. “Be reasonable. This child is nothing like the young man who attacked you. You have beaten up, and seriously injured, an entirely innocent young boy.”
“Innocent? I’ll tell you what, Constable, I’d love to meet an innocent youth in this neighbourhood. Ha! Even one.”
“I’m sure your solicitor has explained to you the extremely serious nature of your situation. Now what I am going to ask you to do is to talk to her again, and to think hard, and to see if you can’t come up with some way of explaining today’s rather bizarre events to my satisfaction.”
“Surely that is no great mystery, Constable?” said the lawyer, who had learned in the very earliest days of her legal career that talking is often an efficacious cure for yawning. “My client simply made a mistake of identification. We all make mistakes.”
“That boy made one,” said Holt, “when he decided it was all right to kick people in the crotch outside the snooker hall and run off with their wallets.”
This time, Blick’s sigh was unfeigned. “Mr. Holt—it was a different boy. It was, in actual fact, a very different boy. Yes?”
The lawyer held up her hands, palms out. “Constable, I think I should like to consult with my client.”
“Interview suspended because solicitor needs a pee,” said PC Blick. Silently.
Most people are not muggers. This piece of knowledge—as well as explaining why cops are often less cynical about human nature than their civilian neighbors—is crucial to the functioning of law enforcement.
There are three broad categories of crime. Crimes that almost everyone commits at least once (mostly motoring offenses and dope smoking); crimes that almost no one commits (such as terrorism or serial killing); and crimes that the same, small group of offenders commit over and over again—like indecent exposure or joyriding. Or mugging.
In an area the size of that policed by PC Blick and his colleagues, there was a core of between twenty and thirty young people, most of them drug abusers, which was responsible for almost all street robberies. This was one of the main theoretical planks of Operation Victim Bus: when Blick took his victims out on their tours, they weren’t looking for a needle in a haystack. They were looking for a needle in a haberdasher’s.
One look at Dean Stubbs in his hospital bed was enough to tell Blick that the boy wasn’t a member of the local muggers corps. Of course, he could be a new face, but Blick didn’t think so. Blick reckoned there was something else going on. Mr. Holt was lying—that was what was going on.
“I hope you’ve got the bastard pervert that did this,” said the middle-aged blonde woman at Dean’s bedside. “I hope you’ve got him safe behind bars, because if you haven’t, my son’ll have him. And that’s not an idle threat, believe me. My son knows Tae Kwon Do.”
“I know him, and all,” said Blick, pulling up a chair. “Runs the Chinese chippy down by the leisure center?”
“Oh, that’s right—have a laugh!”
“And you are...?”
“I’m this poor little lad’s Nan, that’s who I am. This is my grandson’s been beaten up like this. Have you seen his fingers? He’ll never play the piano again.”
Blick knew a feed line when he heard one. He ignored it. “Now then, Dean—are you feeling up to answering a question or three?”
“S’pose so.” The kid in the bed was very small. His blue hair looked like a symptom.
Dean’s Nan opened her mouth to speak, but Blick had been in the job long enough to know how to silence grandparents without leaving visible marks. He looked at her. She scowled, and became silent.
“The man who did this to you—did you get a good look at him?”
“S’pose so. It was a bit quick. I’m, like, walking along? And then suddenly he’s like wham! Bam! All over me.
“Did you recognize him?”
“Never seen him before.”
“But you saw him well enough that you would have recognized him, if you had known him?”
“I’d have known him,” said Dean. He added, in a smaller voice, “I’d know him again, an’ all.”
Kids are good liars, because that’s all kids do. That’s how they get through childhood. So Blick was only pretending to study Dean; really, he was studying Dean’s Nan. As far as he could tell, she thought Dean was telling the truth. That didn’t mean he was, of course. But it made it more likely.
Blick didn’t think Dean was a mugger, and the nurse he’d spoken to before he came in didn’t think Dean was a heavy drug user. Dean definitely didn’t look like Mr. Holt’s mugger, according to Mr. Holt’s own description.
Blick had entered the hospital expecting to discover some connection between Dean Stubbs and Mr. Holt, which would explain why Holt had singled him out for violence. He’d already checked the obvious ones—address, kinship, workplace, clubs, and so on—and none of those had produced anything. Holt had never reported any other crime— vandalism, say—which young Dean might have been involved in. Now Blick was starting to believe that maybe there wasn’t a connection to be found.
He still thought Holt was lying, though. He just couldn’t think what he was lying about.
Back at the station, PC Blick went straight to the CID office, to speak to a DC called Jan. Before he could speak to her, she spoke to him.
“Blicky! The hero of the day!”
“Oh. You heard.”
“I heard. I heard about your victims going around the place walloping teenagers. Excellent development! Before your next bus trip, can I give you a list?”
“Thanks, Jan. I knew I could count on your sympathetic support.”
“Always, Blicky. Always.”
She was his best friend in the job. They’d slept together once, a couple of summers ago, but somehow they’d survived even that.
“Jan, you were the officer dealing in the Holt mugging?”
“Yup—if you call taking a statement and filing it ‘dealing.’”
“The assailant description—it wasn’t anyone you recognized?
She shook her head. She had nice hair, but at this stage of the shift it could do with a wash. “Nope. Definitely not one of our regulars. And it didn’t produce a hit on the suspect index, either. Why—what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” said Blick, which was close to the truth. “And there haven’t been any incident reports since, that matched that description?”
She reached out a finger and flicked his tie. He was glad there was no one else around, because flicking someone’s tie like that—with just one finger—counts as foreplay in police circles. “You don’t think the mugger exists, do you? Or at least, you don’t think a mugger matching that description exists.”
“I don’t know,” said Blick, which was slightly less true than it had been a few seconds earlier. “Was the victim drunk when officers arrived?”
“He’d been drinking, he wasn’t drunk. He’d had a couple of pints at the snooker hall. But he hadn’t been in a fight, if that’s where you’re going. No grazing to the knuckles, clothes weren’t in disarray, no cuts or bruises. Well, except the bruises in his trousers.”
“He did take a blow to the balls?”
“Duty surgeon said so.”
Blick reset his tie. The superintendent was fussy about standards of appearance. Also, in case Jan wanted to flick it again. “Does that sound like a mugging to you?”
She thought about it. Her posture became a little defensive. She wasn’t in a tie-flicking mood anymore. “There was nothing to suggest that this was a domestic.”
“Okay, but—”
“What sort of man is going to report a domestic kick in the balls? And if he did—if he was a battered husband—why would he report it as a mugging? Doesn’t make sense, Blicky. Think about it.”
“Okay, but supposing he was cruising. Supposing he came on to a woman, or a boy, thinking she or he was a prostitute. Picked the wrong person, got his nuts crushed as a lesson in manners.”
“Well...”
“Makes more sense than a one-time-only mugger. A successful mugger, who retires immediately after his first performance?”
Jan swiveled her chair away from him. She had plenty of volume crime to keep her busy. She had no time for mysteries. “Well, Blicky, if you come up with anything, be sure to keep us informed.”
“Oh, sure, I will,” said PC Blick, which was entirely untrue.
“You’re making a complete testicle of yourself, young man.”
For a second, Mr. Holt’s lawyer looked as if she might like to comment on this statement by her client, but a second later she looked as if she might prefer not to.
“Mr. Holt,” said PC Blick, “this case will go to court. You can count on that. You beat up a child, put him in hospital, quite possibly destroyed any potential future he might or might not have had as a concert pianist.”
For the first time in two interviews, the CID woman sitting next to Blick looked at him. She frowned. Could have been a smile, maybe, but Blick thought it was probably a frown.
He continued, “As I’m sure your solicitor will have explained to you, your best hope is to convince the judge that there were mitigating circumstances.”
“Him being a mugging little bastard, for instance?” said Holt. “Would that do?”
“No one is ever going to believe that you mistook Dean for the man who attacked you. The court is going to believe that you attacked Dean Stubbs because you had some reason to attack him. Because he had done you some harm.”
“He’s a mugger,” said Holt. “Is that harm enough?”
And that’s when Blick got it. “Mr. Holt. Could you please describe the man who mugged you?”
“Constable, my client has already—”
“I’ve told you what he looked like. I told you at the time.”
“Yes, you did. And, of course, I told you, didn’t I? In our first interview, earlier today. I refreshed your memory.”
“My memory didn’t need refreshing, young man. I know well enough what a mugger looks like, thank you very much.”
“I’m sure you do, Mr. Holt. I’m sure you think you do.”
Holt’s face was pinker than ever. Pinker than Blick had ever seen it, anyway. “You, young man, are making a total testicle of yourself.”
The lawyer threw her pen down on the table and said: “Spectacle! The word is spectacle.”
Holt gave her a haughty look. “Perhaps it is where you come from.”
“There was no mugging, sir.”
“Holt was never mugged?” said the inspector. “Then who kicked him in the balls?”
“He did it himself, I believe.”
“Impossible. You can’t kick yourself in the balls.” The inspector spoke with the certainty of one who had tried. Which caused Blick to lose his train of thought momentarily.
“I’m sure you’re right, sir,” he said at last, when he had cleared his mind of irrelevant speculations and unwanted images. “You can’t do it to yourself deliberately. But you can do it accidentally—or at least, something that provokes similar bruising patterns. I’ll bet teachers do it all the time, walking into child-size desks in classrooms.”
“Your Mr. Holt isn’t a teacher, is he?”
“No, sir, but he does play snooker. We’ll never prove it, of course—”
“God, I hope not!” the inspector interrupted. “What sort of spectacle would that make in court?”
“—but I reckon if you were to compare Holt’s inside leg measurement to that of a snooker table, you would—”
“Yes, all right, Blick.” The inspector waved his fingers in front of his face. “So, he accidentally knackers himself. Why did he report a mugging that never took place?”
“So that he could get on the Victim Bus, sir.”
“Not another of your bloody day-trippers, Blick? Looking for an afternoon on the town courtesy of the taxpayer?”
“No sir. Looking for an excuse to attack a teenage boy.”
“What? Why, for God’s sake?”
“Because,” said PC Blick, speaking slowly to let it sink in, “all teenage boys are muggers. Everyone knows that. That’s what it says on the TV, isn’t it? In the newspapers. It’s common knowledge.”
The inspector was so astonished by this that for a moment he forgot not to be intelligent. “And, of course,” he said, “all muggers are big louts with pockmarked skin and goatee beards.”
“Unless they’re big scary blacks, sir, yes. Holt probably thought black would be too obvious.”
“But Dean Stubbs isn’t a big lout with pockmarked skin, is he?”
“No, sir. But he is just the right size for walloping about the face and body with a furled umbrella. Besides, one kid will do as well as another. They’re all at it, after all—everyone knows that.”
A couple of days later, the inspector called Blick into his office and told him that the Victim Bus scheme was being permanently and irrevocably canceled.
“If you think that’s best, sir,” said Blick.
“I do,” said the inspector.
“That is the best bloody news I have had in the last three hundred years. I am going to get so bloody drunk tonight they’ll have to take me home in a bucket,” said PC Blick. Silently.