If I Should Die (Joseph Stark) by Matthew Frank Page B

to the needle sharp. Kids like these hadbeen in and out of interview rooms half their lives. The sharp ones learnt the system, learnt that keeping your trap shut really did work. You saw them changing, blooming from amoral youth into full-blown adult sociopath. But the dim ones … ‘It’s like they’ve been coached.’
    ‘Or threatened,’ said Fran. ‘Probably both. And if they’re not scared enough of Kyle, Nikki has her big brother to wave around.’
    ‘Gary Cockcroft.’ Stark dragged up the memory. He’d read about Gary in Nikki’s file.
    Fran nodded. ‘Knocked over a security van full of cash. Killed three guards. The guv’nor worked the case.’
    ‘I remember. Gary and another guy, Ben something, went down but a third suspect walked. Liam … Dawson?’
    ‘They never got the cash back either. I was warned not to ask the guv’nor about it – a bit touchy? Anyway, Gary’s doing life-minimum-twenty in Belmarsh but that doesn’t stop little sis using him as leverage, I’m told.’
    Stark thought about that, and about Fran’s tone regarding Tina Gibbs’s profession. They probably all had their hard-luck stories and unstable upbringing. Now they were the Ferrier Rats, busy repaying the fear, abandonment and abuse of their childhoods tenfold. Did their pitiful backgrounds excuse their delinquency? There but for the grace of name-your-deity go we all? Stark didn’t know the answer, but he’d seen kids their age overcoming worse day in day out, and kids not much older fighting in the name of democracy. He resolved to call his mum and sister when he got home. The star of the last recording, Stacey Appleton, was at least less gobby than the rest, though no more co-operative. ‘Wait,’ he said suddenly. ‘Do you mind if I replay that?’ On screen the interview had concluded and both Fran and Groombridge had left the room. Just as the clip ended Stacey wiped a finger beneath both eyes. Stark paused the image. ‘Is she
crying
?’
    Fran pushed out her lower lip. ‘Hard to say. I doubt it. The guv’nor pressed them all quite hard. None of them cracked.’
    ‘Did she seem more frightened than the others?’
    Fran shrugged. ‘They were all crapping themselves behind the bullshit.’
    Stark stared at the frozen image. ‘We should talk to her again.’
    ‘We’ll be talking to them all again.’ Fran sighed wearily. ‘Come on, let’s finish this up before I get any more suicidal.’
    Harper was just wrapping up the foot-search briefing as they rejoined the team. ‘Everyone clear? Right, then, you lazy sods, time for a stroll.’ He spotted Stark and Fran. ‘You too, Trainee. Time you learnt life out of uniform still has its muck ’n’ bullets.’
    The search was organized into teams, each taking a section of the most likely route from the war memorial to the Ferrier Estate. Harper and Bryden led the first line of uniforms across Blackheath. Stark and Dixon joined the second, assigned the first few residential streets beyond: wide streets lined with large houses in large plots, some divided into flats, some not. As well as lifting drains and picking through verges, this demanded knocking on doors, asking if anyone had found, seen or heard anything, and obtaining permission to search front gardens and bins.
    It was a long and tiresome process, and when he guessed they were only about halfway, Stark had to rest on a wall. A treadmill was one thing, reality another. He’d passed the combat-fitness test God knew how many times, completed the Fan Dance (fifteen miles in full kit up and down Pen y Fan) in under four hours, the Long Drag (a forty-mile yomp across Brecon in full kit in under twenty hours), and hacked his way through miles of Borneo jungle, yet here he sat, defeated by a stroll. It was pitiful.
    It wasn’t a particularly popular process either. They’d been met with everything from ambivalence to hostility. At most of the large houses, though, it was alarm, residents leaping from