If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story)

cast-iron case that couldn’t be proven. ‘No other witness accounts at all?’
    ‘Not one,’ said Tulloch. ‘Only the street you live on is close enough to see anything and everyone had their curtains drawn and their TVs turned up.’
    ‘We did find the masks,’ said Stenning. ‘Just as you described.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Waste bin at the end of the road where one of them lives.’
    ‘Well, then …’
    ‘Smells bad,’ said Anderson. ‘Karim is on record as making no mention of the gang running across the field wearing masks. On the contrary, he talked about five white men, but how would he know they were white if they’d been wearing masks? It means if he did see what he claims he saw, they must have ditched the masks before they reached him.’
    ‘Or they just took them off,’ I said.
    ‘So if they all took them off and hung on to them, what are the chances of them all ending up in one bin, at the end of the road where only one of them lives and which three of them do not have to go anywhere near to get home?’
    ‘Well, not good,’ I admitted. ‘Unless they went to that house first, maybe to agree stories.’
    ‘There wasn’t a lot of time for that,’ said Tulloch. ‘We picked them up pretty quickly. And how likely is it that they got rid of every other bit of physical evidence, but the masks got dumped in a bin where they should have known we’d find them?’
    ‘You think the masks were planted there?’ I said. ‘That it’s a set-up?’
    No reply.
    I shook my head. ‘No, come on, it’s still too soon. You can’t have had the forensic reports back yet. Or the full post-mortem findings. There could be any number of hairs and fibres that weren’t obvious to the naked eye.’
    ‘Well, let’s hope so,’ said Tulloch. ‘In the meantime, given the mood on the streets, I’m going to have to keep this lot locked up for the maximum time for their own safety.’
    I stopped to think about that. An inability on the part of the police to get justice for an aggrieved minority was the time-honoured path towards mass anger and civil unrest.
    ‘Thank God it’s cold enough outside to freeze a witch’s tits off,’ said Anderson, and we all said a silent
Amen
. Riots happened in summer, when it was warm enough to hang around on street corners and stir each other up to throwing the first stone. In winter, when the rain came down from the heavens, the mist from the Thames and the wind from the North Sea, even the most aggrieved campaigner for racial justice was more inclined to turn up the radiator than stoke up rebellion.
    ‘You think we’ve got enough to get the full ninety-six hours?’ asked Mizon. Even in murder cases, suspects could normally only be held for a maximum of thirty-six hours without charge. But the police could apply to the courts for an extension of up to ninety-six hours.
    ‘If there’s any argument, we just say the two magic words,’ said Tulloch.
    ‘Those being?’
    ‘Stephen Lawrence.’
    Nods of agreement around the room. We all lived in fear of a repeat of the murder in 1993 that precipitated what is generally considered to be the Met’s darkest hour. Eighteen-year-old student Stephen Lawrence had been on his way home when he was set upon and beaten to death by a gang of white youths. People had known who the white kids were. Names had been given to the Lawrence family, the police, the media, within hours of the teenager’s death. A racially motivated hate crime with tragic consequences, it had seemed an open-and-shut case.
    Except, without substantial cause to search flats, the police had to play it safe and potentially evidence was lost. The resulting investigation went on for years. Nobody wanted a repeat of that. We just had to hope that the evidence was there and that, in the coming days, it would rise to the surface.

5
    IT WASN’T, AND it didn’t. The best and most careful scientific brains in the country couldn’t find any physical evidence that established a direct link between the five suspects and the crime. Tulloch had no choice, once the ninety-six hours had passed, but to release them.
    As November grew old and the last month of the year champed at its heels, the threat of violence hung over London like the sour wind that precedes a plague. The five suspects, named on the internet if not in British newspapers, lived in a state of siege, with windows broken, walls graffitied, even a car torched. We had to give each of them police protection,