She returned to Meadowvale at half-past three in desperate need of strong coffee and a doughnut.
But before she could do more than nibble at the jam leaking out of the side, Sergeant Murchison descended on the canteen, looking for bodies to throw into a developing situation in the Kingswood shopping centre on the edge of town. Hurrying out to the cars, Hazel asked what kind of a situation.
The sergeant didn’t know, except that it appeared to be gang related. Half a dozen shopkeepers had phoned in, anxiously reporting that the mall was filling up with bellicose young men, half of them very hairy, the other half very bald. Even allowing for a certain amount of nervous exaggeration, there was clearly trouble brewing. Superintendent Maybourne wanted a big enough presence in the mall to stop it boiling over.
‘It’s not Hell’s Bunnies, is it?’ Hazel had rather a soft spot for the local biker gang.
Donald Murchison shook his head. ‘They don’t generally give us much aggro – they’re just petrol-heads, they like looking tough but they’re actually more interested in bikes than bovver. No, going off the descriptions it’s going to be the Mill Street Maulers and the Canal Crew. They’ve never liked one another. Most of the time they have the sense to keep a demilitarised zone between them. I don’t know why they’d suddenly start facing up to one another in broad daylight in a shopping centre.’
Hazel hadn’t seen much gang-related activity in Norbold. ‘Which are the hairy ones?’
‘The Canal Crew,’ said Murchison. He held the door of the people carrier for Hazel, squeezed in after her. ‘They’re easy enough to deal with. They’re basically thieves: mobile phones, women’s handbags, branded trainers – anything that’s worth money and easily passed on. Casual violence rather than deliberate viciousness. That’s more the Maulers’ style.’
‘They’re the bald ones?’ Now she thought about it, Hazel had seen them around. Not, as it were, on duty, crowding together for some purpose requiring big boot sizes and small IQs, just loitering in twos and threes on street corners and in tobacconists’ doorways, glowering as she passed and flicking foul-mouthed epithets after her once she was safely out of earshot.
The sergeant nodded. ‘They’re modern skinheads. Anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-establishment – anti-us, of course; pro selling drugs and extorting money from people who’re scared of them, which is most anyone with a modicum of sense.’
It was only a six-minute drive from Meadowvale, in the centre of Norbold, to the shopping centre on the ring road. But by the time they got there the car park was emptying fast. The sight of the Crew and the Maulers squaring up to one another was enough to persuade most people to finish their shopping later.
Meadowvale’s finest piled out of the people carrier as soon as it came to a halt. But Sergeant Murchison blocked Hazel’s exit for a moment. ‘No heroics,’ he rumbled in her ear. ‘These are not nice people. It’s no use appealing to their better nature – they don’t have one.’
Hazel couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘You mean I should shoot first, ask questions afterwards?’
Sandy eyebrows lowered over his gaze. ‘Given your track record, that would be pretty rash advice, wouldn’t it? Just – stay close to me, stay alert, and don’t turn your back on the beggars.’ He did not, in fact, say Beggars.
The central concourse, with its bench seating for weary shoppers and its coin-in-the-slot carousel horses and fire engines for their toddlers, made an incongruous battlefield for some of Norbold’s least desirable citizens. But a battle seemed to be in prospect, if not yet in progress. The ritual threats and gestures that accompanied most encounters of this kind were today conspicuous by their absence. Everyone present – fifty or more young men, aged from mid-teens to late twenties, and perhaps a dozen young women dressed to match – was there on business. The atmosphere was tense, hot with anger, primed for explosion if anyone was careless enough to strike a spark.
Murchison’s first move was to create a physical barrier between the two sides. He led his thin blue line through the heart of the gathering, steering the odd errant Mauler or reckless Crewman back to his own side as he went. It wasn’t a Riot Squad operation and they weren’t in full riot gear, though they had all – Hazel included – pulled on stab vests as they left the vehicles. It was a calculated risk. If the situation deteriorated fast, they would rue the helmets, riot-sticks and tasers they had left behind.
But there were times when wading in like paramilitaries was enough to turn a bit of bad-tempered posturing into open warfare, and that was worth avoiding if it could be done with a clear conscience. Today, Murchison thought he could just about justify keeping things friendly.
So he led his colleagues down the fracture line between Crew and Maulers, firmly but patiently separating them; and Hazel, being Hazel, had a few words with those that she recognised, asking after mothers and girlfriends and, in the case of Jobber Bunting, his prize-winning ferrets.
Once the DMZ had been re-established, there was time to take stock. Murchison had a shrewd idea that if he could keep the rivals from physically reaching one another, sooner or later they’d get bored, and wonder if there was anything on the telly, and wander off. So it was that Hazel found herself in close proximity to someone she’d seen around Norbold on several occasions, most recently only a few days earlier on the train. The regrettable fact that the only name she knew him by was Rat didn’t prevent her from greeting him cheerfully.
‘Hello again! I didn’t know you were a Mauler. Trucker’s idea, was it? Is he here too?’ She craned but failed to make out that substantial presence in the crush.
The Rat muttered something she didn’t hear. She bent closer. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said, Trucker’s the reason we’re here.’
‘OK,’ Hazel said carefully. ‘Did he want to see the Christmas decorations? Visit the Elves’ Grotto down by the pound shop and have his photo taken with Santa?’
‘They’ve done something to him.’
She frowned. ‘Who have?’
‘The Canal Crew. They’ve done something to him. We can’t find him anywhere.’
The individual known as the Rat was so far from a reliable witness that he almost came out on the other side of disbelief. Hazel didn’t think he was making this up. She sent a nudge up the line to attract Sergeant Murchison’s attention. ‘You’re going to want to hear this.’
There had been a confrontation earlier in the day. Trucker had been spotted panhandling – well, demanding with menaces – outside an off-licence widely acknowledged as Canal Crew territory, and had been asked to leave. He’d sauntered away five minutes later with his pockets jangling, his unlicensed bounty supplemented by a Crewman’s silver nose-ring, while its previous owner held a grubby handkerchief to his bloody face.
‘And now he’s disappeared. Vanished – gone.’ There was no mistaking the genuine unhappiness in the Rat’s tone. He may, Hazel reflected, have been the only person apart from Trucker’s mum to actually care about Trucker. ‘They’ve done something to him, I know they have.’
‘Have you asked them?’
‘Like they’d admit it!’ moaned the Rat. ‘They have, though. We’ve looked everywhere. And he isn’t answering his phone. Them bastards have done something to him.’
Donald Murchison frowned. ‘So what are you all doing here? When you could be out looking for him?’
Another sotto voce mumble.
‘Sorry?’ said Hazel again.
‘I said, we grabbed one of their scrubbers. Said we’d give her back when they let Trucker go.’
‘Let me get this right,’ rumbled Murchison, in a Scottish accent with girders in it. ‘You’ve kidnapped a young woman associated with the Canal Crew, to hold as hostage until the Crew release Trucker Watts.’
The Rat nodded. He declined to meet either the sergeant’s gaze or Hazel’s; but then, he never met anyone’s gaze, ever.
‘And they’ve come here to get her back. All right, sunshine, where is she?’
The Rat wriggled. But he was never going to hold out against the moral authority of Meadowvale’s station sergeant. He’d never held out against any form of intimidation in his life. ‘She’s in a van, round the back. Nobody’s laid a finger on her, honest. We just want Trucker back.’
Murchison, with Hazel at his side, shouldered his way through the front ranks of the Canal Crew until he came to what looked like the combined chiefs of staff. ‘I gather you people are missing a young lady.’
It took a moment for them to mentally translate. Hazel heard them whispering: ‘Does ’e mean Fleabag?’ ‘I fink so. Yeah, ’e must.’ ‘Does ’e know where she is then?’
‘We do know where she is,’ confirmed the sergeant. ‘I’ve sent someone to bring her here right now. So what have you done with Trucker Watts?’
One of the hairy young men appeared to be senior to the others. ‘We ’aven’t got ’im. We never ’ad ’im. We ’aven’t seen ’im.’
There was something almost Shakespearean about it, Hazel thought. But Sergeant Murchison was harder to impress. ‘You saw him this morning, panhandling outside the off-licence in Arkwright Street.’
Yes, they admitted, they had. They’d seen him off – or, to be more accurate, they’d seen him leave. They hadn’t seen him since.
‘Is that the truth?’
‘On my mother’s grave.’
Murchison frowned. ‘Your mother’s still alive, Billy Barnes.’
‘Yeah – but she’s already bought a plot down the Municipal. Cost her an arm and a leg, it did.’
About then Constable Budgen returned with the Crew woman known as Fleabag. It was quickly established that she’d come to no harm, and since the Crew were content to take her and leave the mall, the sergeant took the executive decision that it was more important to defuse the situation than to charge someone with unlawful imprisonment, at least for now. The Crew drifted away. So, a few minutes later, did most of the Maulers.
Soon, there were only police officers, a few brave shoppers, and the Rat left in the mall. The Rat looked up at Sergeant Murchison. ‘So who’s going to find Trucker?’ he demanded with a kind of nervous courage.