No Way Home

The man tilted his head. ‘I’m Clive Davis. I’m your solicitor.’

‘Why?’

Davis pursed his lips. ‘You’ve been charged with carrying an offensive weapon. A knife, I understand. We’re going to have to attend court. It’s a charge that can carry a term of confinement.’

‘Prison?’

Tommy heard the door close behind him.

Davis tilted his head again. ‘More like where we are here. You’re only – what – fourteen? You wouldn’t be sent to a conventional prison.’

I’ve lived worse, Tommy thought. This past winter. ‘How long for?’ he asked.

‘It depends on the circumstances. It can be up to four months. Or you could get an official caution or anything between the two.’

‘So, they might just tell me off and let me go?’

Davis pursed his lips. ‘That’s not the way to look at it, but in essence, from a practical point of view, yes. However, it goes on your record, so that if you’re charged again it’ll be taken into account and you will serve time.’

‘OK.’

‘So, tell me how you came to be here.’

Tommy shrugged, spreading his hands. ‘I was just minding my own business, doing my job, and all of a sudden, this guy’s coming after me, so I ran. They caught me and searched me and, next thing I know, they’re charging me for carrying a tool of the job.’

‘A flick-knife.’

‘Well, I’m not going to carry an open blade in my pocket, am I? And penknives can be dangerous. I saw a kid using one once and it folded up on him, got his finger between the blade and the handle. No, thanks. A flick-knife’s much safer.’

‘But illegal.’

‘As a weapon. Mine’s a tool. It’s essential for the job.’

Davis shook his head. ‘It makes no difference why you had it, Thomas. The simple fact is, you shouldn’t have.’

‘What am I supposed to do then? Bite stuff?’

Davis paused. ‘I’m not saying the law is perfect, Thomas, but it is the law and it’s there to be obeyed. Your father’s a police officer, isn’t he?’

‘So?’

Davis sighed. ‘So, a number of questions arise from that fact. We may discuss them at another time, but the point for now is that you ought to appreciate the necessity of rules.’

‘Yeah. They’re made for the rulers. To keep the little guys in line.’ He sat back, arms spread wide. ‘And what am I?’

Davis smiled. ‘A very clever and resourceful young man, evidently. But still one who needs to learn when to fight and when not to.’

Tommy’s lip curled into a sneer. ‘Try living my life. It’s one long fight. Always has been.’

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_65de8ca9-7f5f-55d9-9401-c13b3ac17e66)

Pete wound up the stop-and-check at just after nine.

‘We’ll take it up again at lunchtime,’ he told the assembled crew when they returned to the cars, parked on a side street just down from Argyll Road, on the opposite side of Pennsylvania. ‘That’ll catch any late-shift workers. Meantime, I’ll get onto communications at Middlemoor and get a couple of signs made up that can be put either side of the junction to pick up anyone we haven’t managed to interview.’

‘So, what’s next other than that, boss?’ Ben asked.

‘We need to interview as many taxi drivers as possible, for one thing. Find out if there’ve been any threats, any attempted robberies or other attacks on them and get whatever details we can. I can’t imagine this came out of nowhere. There’s got to be a history there somewhere. Something significant’s behind it.’

‘Or it could be about the other way round,’ Jane said. ‘Taxi drivers attacking customers. Specifically, our victim and those cases we talked about before.’

He nodded. ‘That would go with the use of the pepper spray before the knife. Have you got any more on them?’

‘When? I haven’t had five seconds to spare yet.’

‘Right. That’s your first priority when we get back then. See what you can dig up. We also need to check the PND, the papers, the Internet. Any other sources anyone can think of. And we can’t do any of that from here, so let’s get going.’

‘Aye aye, Cap’n.’ Dave saluted smartly.

‘For that, you can go down to the Express and Echo and check their archives. Then do the same at the Daily News,’ Pete told him.

‘Oh, cheers.’

Pete gave him a grin. ‘It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.’

*

As the day drew to a close, Pete wasn’t grinning any more. After two days of hard work on the case, he and his team had got nowhere and frustration was setting in. He recognised it even as it took hold, pulling his mood down and breaking his concentration.

He finished his daily case notes and hit save. ‘Right, that’s it. Time to call it a night. We’ll pick it up fresh in the morning.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Dave agreed. ‘Trouble is, where do we go from here?’

‘Well, we’ve got all night to sleep on it. I’m not going to spoonfeed you now.’ And besides, I’m as bloody stumped as you are, he thought, but kept it to himself. Where were they going to go from here?

He’d been to the Devon and Cornwall Police Headquarters at Middlemoor to get a couple of road signs made up, asking for witnesses to come forward. DCI Silverstone was dealing with the press office, as usual. Three sessions of stopping traffic at peak times and questioning the drivers had come up empty, as had visits to the two most likely places for him to have picked up the suspect. Investigation of the victim’s past had drawn a blank apart from unsubstantiated rumours from some years ago that couldn’t be corroborated because the owners of the company he’d been working for at the time were currently out of the country and no official complaints had been made. Jane had come up empty on the other complaint. The complainant had moved and left no forwarding address, though census records had last put her in Bristol, and the alleged victim had been from somewhere in Lancashire, and there was no trace of her either. Singh’s family offered no likely suspects. He seemed, of late, to have a decent reputation. There were no signs of enmity with rivals or colleagues. And as for forensics – there were loads of prints on and in the taxi, but none were identifiable and the same applied to other trace evidence in the vehicle. If they got a suspect, then comparisons could be made, but until then, the lab was no use to them. And there had been nothing in the local papers or on the database that helped either.

It looked like the case was going to come down to possible motives.

It hadn’t been a robbery, unless something less obvious than money was the target. No mention had been made of drug traces being found in the car. He would check on that with forensics, but he could probably discount the idea. Was there anything else he might have been carrying in the car? He picked up the phone.

‘I thought you were packing it in?’ asked Jane.

He looked up and saw that she was standing behind her chair, shrugging into her jacket. He hadn’t even been aware of her getting up. ‘Just thought of something. A quick call and I’ll be on my way. You go on.’

‘OK. Night.’ She picked up her bag and headed for the door, followed by the others as Pete flipped through his notebook and dialled the number he’d noted down.

It was picked up on the second ring. ‘Hello?’