Free The Outsiders by Gerald Seymour

number plate – and was building a portfolio with the hand-held camera. He had the tripod ready but rarely used it: he reckoned a camera on a tripod made a photographer lazy, that it was more likely a ray of sunshine, a streetlight or a car’s headlights would catch a lens if it was tripod-mounted and reflect back from it. Little details mattered in his trade. There were five white families left in that Asian-dominated street, and among them Snapper had found the widow of a prison officer. He had done the chat while he was shown the scrapbook featuring her husband in uniform and the plastic-protected commendations for meritorious service. He would hang on in there until the next morning, or the one after, and would only slip away – with Loy loaded up – when the sledgehammer brigade and the search party turned up.
    The door across the street opened. Snapper stiffened, lifted the camera, did fast focus, captured the image of a visitor hugging the lecturer, then hurrying away. The ‘subject’ would likely do a minimum of twenty years and his children would be grown-up by the time he next walked down the street with them.
    Snapper and Loy had permitted only one visitor to their den in the front bedroom. They denied access to rubber-neckers, but they’d let her come. She’d acted the part of a health visitor, in a foghorn voice, at the front door. No way she would have made it over the back-garden fence off the rear entry. She’d cleared the biscuit plate. They thought she was gold-minted.
     
    ‘They come off the street and make it a red-letter day,’ Winnie said softly, from the back.
    ‘Yes, Boss,’ the chauffeur from the pool answered.
    ‘You can spend a year or two on a fishing expedition, identify the one who seems right, and find you’ve wasted your time. Then a Joe comes in off the street, and spills it all out.’
    ‘A bit beyond my horizons, Boss.’
    She was driven south, fast and smooth. Ninety miles an hour, outside lane. The car’s headlights ate the darkness of a November evening, and the wipers worked overtime.
    ‘I feel it in my water. It’s a fucking goer, this one. It’s got legs.’
    He didn’t answer her, concentrated on the road ahead.
    She remembered the body in the mortuary.
    Her secure phone rang, and she dragged it out of her pocket.
    ‘Is it good to speak? Secure?’ her chief asked.
    ‘Fine. Shoot.’
    ‘The DDG called you?’
    ‘He did.’
    ‘I’ve been asked to clarify. Winnie, no offence.’
    ‘Why should there be?’
    ‘If it turns up right, if it’s evidence that points to murder . . .’
    ‘A long way down the road. If , yes.’
    ‘Everything would need to be done in a transparent and legal way. The intention would be for the gaining of a conviction at the Central Criminal Court. It would be done with circumspection and by the book.’
    ‘Of course, Chief.’
    ‘It needed saying.’
    ‘You know me, Chief. Sir William Blackstone, judge, 1753 to 1765: “Better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffers . . .” There won’t be anything – if it’s kosher – that you’d lose sleep over, Chief. Believe me.’
    ‘Thank you, Winnie.’
    The phone went back into her pocket. She remembered how they had zipped up the bag and the hearse had carried it to the airport, how she had fought with a British Airways manager, and with the aircraft’s pilot . . . She could remember nearly every minute of the funeral, and every word she had said every time she’d gone down to the parents and made the same promise that she would not rest until . . . Winnie Monks had never knowingly reneged on a promise.

3
    ‘If you have to, get hold of his balls and squeeze.’
    ‘I get your drift, Boss.’
    ‘If he’s a busted flush, kick him – and give him another kick from me.’
    ‘Yes, Boss.’
    Looking down at her watch, Winnie Monks slapped Caro Watson’s shoulder boyishly. ‘Time you were on the move – and good fucking luck to you, kid.’
    There were a