‘It fits with the location,’ Janine said. ‘The steps. If someone had fired at him from there.’ She looked at his hands, the nails bitten down to the quick. Stupid not bad, his mother had said before she knew he was dead. Janine had got the same impression: Gleason had none of the guile or belligerence of Lee Stone.
How had Gleason reacted after the road accident? He had a child himself; had that prompted him to argue with Stone about whether they deny the crime? Or had he gone along with the plan willingly? Perhaps he’d lost his nerve later, after the men had been questioned? If the guilt about Ann-Marie’s death had begun to prey on him, coupled with a fear that the police were onto them, he may have been thinking about confessing. Had Stone cottoned on and decided to save his own skin by silencing Gleason permanently? Or had an argument led to Stone pulling a gun on his friend? At the point where they had been seen leaving the flat – just before the police lost sight of them – there was no sign of coercion or aggression and certainly no weapons drawn.
‘Nothing else to write home about,’ Susan told her. ‘Pretty straightforward.’
‘Cause of death might be plain,’ Janine said, ‘whodunnit and why is anything but.’
There was an outside chance that Gleason’s killing was linked to some other criminal activity that the police had yet to uncover. The drugs gangs in the city regularly settled disputes with a bullet. Except nothing ever remained settled. There’d be a drive-by or cycle-by shooting. And then a couple of weeks later another kid, almost always a black kid, would be gunned down in retaliation. Several times victims had been killed in error for other targets. Innocent bystanders caught up in the bloody and savage tit-for-tat. Janine had covered a couple of those cases. They’d been hard. Not only the tragic waste of young lives blown away but the sheer hopelessness of the gang members. Kids with deadly weapons and deader souls; trapped in a cycle of poverty, lawlessness and violence. Talking of honour and brotherhood. They had no hope or apparent desire for a life beyond the gang. After interviewing these boys, Janine had come away asking herself how it had come to this. How did babies, toddlers, youngsters grow up to be stone-cold killers, so completely alienated from the mainstream?
Janine considered the likelihood of a gang connection to the shooting but nothing they had learnt so far put Stone or Gleason anywhere close to that scene.
