Copyright © 2024 Alan Johnson

The right of Alan Johnson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

WILDFIRE

an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

First published as an Ebook in Great Britain by

WILDFIRE

an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2024

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

Cover design by Patrick Insole

eISBN: 978 1 0354 0347 9

HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

An Hachette UK Company

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

About Alan Johnson

Praise for Alan Johnson

Also by Alan Johnson

About the Book

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Part One 1999

1 The Single Shot

2 Operation Incisive

3 Crimesolve

4 A Visit to Tagg’s Island

5 A Friday Night Out

6 The Criminal Co-Op

7 Tea on the Inner Peace

8 Harrison is Helpful

9 A United Nations of Criminality

10 Low Tide

11 A Visit to White City

12 Coffee on the Navicula

13 The Good Doctor

14 Mangan is Taken off the Case

15 The Streatham Bank Robbery

16 Templeman Makes his Case

17 A Visit is Contemplated

18 Saturday Morning

19 Saturday Afternoon

20 Brunch in Belsize Park

21 The Holiday Maker who Missed the Plane

Part Two 2019

22 The Housebuyer

23 Mangan’s Dilemma

24 A Vacancy at the Met

25 A Fire on the Thames

26 Restricted Information

27 At the two Chairmen

28 Finding Detective Constable Traore

29 Mangan Meets the Man From Melbourne

30 Traore’s Dilemma

31 Return to Tagg’s Island

32 Alex Makes a Big Mistake

33 The Saturday Routine

34 Showdown

35 The Tagg’s Island Residents’ Association

36 Alex Gets a Letter

37 Gingernut

38 Louise Learns a Lot

39 Storing Grain

40 Remembering Sage

41 Navicula

42 A Happy Occasion

About the Author

Alan Johnson’s childhood memoir THIS BOY was published in 2013. It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the Orwell Prize, Britain’s top political writing award. His second volume of memoirs, PLEASE MR POSTMAN (2014) won the National Book Club award for Best Biography. The final book in his memoir trilogy, THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD (2016), won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Memoir. IN MY LIFE - A MUSIC MEMOIR was published in 2018 and his highly acclaimed first novel, THE LATE TRAIN TO GIPSY HILL was published in 2021. The sequel ONE OF OUR MINISTERS IS MISSING followed up in 2022, and a third book in the series DEATH ON THE THAMES will be published in March 2024.

Alan was a Labour MP for 20 years before retiring ahead of the 2017 general election. He served in five cabinet positions in the Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown including Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Home Secretary.

He and his wife Carolyn live in East Yorkshire.

Praise

Praise for Alan Johnson’s novels:

‘Clever Alan Johnson . . . [he] has invented a new genre, the cosy thriller . . . Richard Osman, here‘s a bullet with your name on it.’ The Times

‘More layers that a filo pastry.’ The Sun

‘A punchy thriller’ Irish Independent

‘A fast-paced who-done-what’ SAGA Magazine

‘Fascinating and ingenious.’ Melvyn Bragg

‘A smart, captivating, modern but timeless thriller.’ John Marrs

‘A fast-moving plot, complex but all too credible, expertly told. The fact it comes from the pen of a former Home Secretary makes the rich security detail and the myriad relationships all the more powerful.’ Alastair Campbell

‘Is there no limit to his talents? Not content with being a top politician, and a very nice feller, he turns his hand to writing four memoirs, which win prizes and awards and sell bucketloads. God I was spitting with envy. Why didn‘t he just stick to politics? I absolutely loved Alan‘s new thriller, it‘s brilliant.’ Hunter Davies

‘Featuring espionage, the Russian Mafia and a gorgeous female on a train with a deadly secret, the tantalising plot has set Alan up for dominance of the bestseller charts for years to come’ Fiona Phillips

‘Johnson‘s writing style is easy, relaxed, self-deprecating . . . impressive’ Observer

‘Johnson writes wonderfully’ Telegraph

‘This boy can write . . .’ The Spectator

Also by Alan Johnson

Also by Alan Johnson and available from Wildfire

The Late Train to Gipsy Hill

One of Our Ministers is Missing

About the Book

DEATH ON THE THAMES

There’s blood on the water. No one is safe . . .

1999. A young Detective Constable Louise Mangan crosses the Thames one misty morning in pursuit of a killer. She finds a tranquil community on a leafy island close to Hampton Court Palace, but soon realises that all is not as it seems. There is something evil at play in this quiet suburb, and this junior detective’s questions seem only to scratch the surface.

Twenty years later, a horrific fire brings Detective Chief Superintendent Mangan back to that same island. Soon, she discovers that murder was just a drop in these dark waters.

The river runs deep, and the tide is rising at last. Will the truth rise with it?

Dedication

To the memory of
Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Dunn
of Greater Manchester Police;
born 1938, died 2011.

Acknowledgements

This is a work of fiction, although the murder of Jenny Daniels is based on something that tragically happened in 1999.

Liam Thomas, author of The Buyer told me much about undercover policing that I didn’t know.

As always, Alex Clarke at Wildfire was a patient commissioner and wise advisor. My agent Clare Alexander was a constant source of encouragement. Jack Butler at Wildfire, like all good editors, improved the book, and I was privileged to have Russel McLean, an expert in this genre, as my copy/line editor.

My wife Carolyn read it before anybody else and gave it her seal of approval. The book is dedicated to Carolyn’s father.

PART ONE

1999

1

THE SINGLE SHOT

It didn’t seem like anything to worry about – at first. She’d glanced out of her bedroom window that morning and saw him standing on the pavement opposite as if waiting for a car to pass before crossing, except that no car passed, and he hadn’t crossed. He just stood looking up at the house for at least a minute. She knew him, and knew he wasn’t exactly ‘Brain of Britain’ ever since the day his poor widowed mother had brought him to her house to ask if she could help find him a job where she worked – at the BBC.

They lived just round the corner. Why should she find anything remotely threatening about him being in her street?

By the time she left the house, pulling the red varnished front door firmly shut behind her, he was nowhere to be seen. On the train into work, she remembered bumping into his mother at the shops one day and being told how much he’d hated the job at Television Centre: the job she’d helped to find for him – the job he’d left after only a few weeks.

‘I know he’s never been academic,’ his mother had said, ‘but he does have his talents,’ adding pointedly that humping scenery around all day wasn’t one of them.

So ungrateful.

And more recently there was the incident outside her house, when he rode his bike straight at her, calling out vile things as he cycled away. Rather than complaining that she hadn’t made him a star, his mother should be grateful she hadn’t pressed charges.

It was a quiet day at the office, so she was heading home by lunchtime. On the train, an elderly couple asked for her autograph, thanking her for ‘everything you do to keep us safe.’ The approach wasn’t unusual, but it was the first time she’d been asked to sign her name on the back of a pension book. Walking home from the station, along the banks of the Thames, she smiled as she thought of the encounter.

As she turned into her street, she saw him again – fleetingly – crossing the road thirty metres ahead, walking quickly as if there was somewhere he needed to be. She thought that if she bumped into him, she’d be friendly – let bygones be bygones – and demonstrate that, as far as she was concerned, there were no hard feelings, ingratiate herself, try to end this nonsense.

All the same, she wondered, why was he still here? Lurking in her street? He must know about the programmes she made, the connections she had with the police. She was damned if some half-wit was going to frighten her. But, as she covered the last few metres towards her house, she found herself hurrying as if there was danger, on this April morning, on this quiet street, in broad daylight.

She opened her handbag to feel for the big bunch of keys with its plastic Bob the Builder fob. Separating the house key from the rest, she lifted it towards the door. It was then that she heard the footsteps behind her, felt the forceful hand on her shoulder pushing her down onto her knees to receive the single, fatal gunshot.

2

OPERATION INCISIVE

The early April sky was streaked with red. It had been an unusually warm afternoon, now darkening into night. Two plain-clothes detectives sat in an unmarked Rover; part of the twenty-five-officer team deployed on Operation Incisive, a joint Met/Surrey Police initiative to catch whoever was responsible for a string of sexual assaults on women in the Hampton Court area.

One of the police officers – a thickset man with wispy hair and a paunch – was demonstrating a surprising dexterity as his fat fingers picked at the remains of a fish supper. Detective Sergeant Ralph Harrison was an opinionated man, and the opinion he was currently articulating concerned what he saw as the stupidity of young girls dressing inappropriately as they went through the social rituals of a Friday evening.

‘I mean, I could understand it if this was the Costa del Sol, or that place in Cyprus, where me and Sheila went on our holidays, but it’s not. This is close to the chilly old Thames, and in an area where women have been attacked previously – most often on a Friday night. And this is a Friday night,’ he said, lifting a final salt-laden chip, which he consumed prior to his peroration. ‘I’m not saying they’re asking for it, course I’m not, but for God’s sake, girls, just exercise a bit of common sense.’

The young woman sitting next to him behind the steering wheel said nothing. She’d heard this stuff so often during her short time in the Met that she could no longer be bothered to point out that the girls going about their lawful business were dressed in accordance with the culture and fashion of the late twentieth century and it was the job of the police to protect them, rather than offer excuses for those who would do them harm. Detective Constable Louise Mangan was Harrison’s subordinate and more pleased than he was to have a role in this operation. She hadn’t been a plain-clothes officer for long but had been in the Met long enough to feel that the force was lethargic about attacks on women in general, and particularly so in relation to these incidents in the Hampton Court area.

The assaults had been happening here for three years. The first had been along the towpath on the Middlesex side of the Thames, followed by a second on the Surrey bank. There followed further incidents in Hampton Wick, Bushy Park and on Pavilion Terrace. Low-level stuff at first; a buttock slapped, a skirt briefly lifted as the assailant sped by on a bicycle.

A senior officer had originally suggested that it was a passing trend engaged in by pubescent boys; a bit of mischief that should be left for community officers to deal with. It was only when pressure from the families of the girls, supported by their MPs, forced the Commissioner to insist upon a proper collation of all the evidence that this ‘group activity’ theory disintegrated, and it became obvious that one person was responsible. For a start, the assaults happened consecutively, never concurrently. Matching descriptions of the perpetrator, whilst not being enough to reveal his identity, disclosed important consistencies – the same yellow reflective polycarbonate cycling helmet, mirrored lens goggles, a drop-handle sports bike, the absence of any lamps back or front, and every victim who heard their attacker say anything reporting the same vicious words spat out as he fled – ‘filthy fucking whore.’

The assaults had become increasingly violent. One teenage girl was strangled to stop her crying out; she was lucky to be alive. Another was repeatedly punched when she fought back against her attacker, and the most recent, nineteen-year-old Tiffany Mordaunt, had disappeared on a night out in the vicinity on a Friday night two weeks ago.

A tabloid newspaper, the Daily Candour, was now running front page stories on ‘The Beast of Hampton Court’, but the attacks continued. Whoever was responsible wasn’t exactly lying low. The criminal psychologists at the Met felt he had reached the stage where a perverse awareness of the likelihood of being caught made him ever more reckless.

He’d struck again the previous Friday, in Hampton Court Park; pouncing on an older woman, an American tourist walking back towards the gates after visiting Hampton Court Palace. She’d been molested, traumatised, sworn at, her assailant using the same words – ‘filthy fucking whore’ – on the same sports bike, wearing the same helmet, same mirrored goggles.

The disappearance of Tiffany Mordaunt had at last provoked an adequate police response – Operation Incisive. Tonight, there were seven police vehicles of one sort or another, from motorcycles to people carriers stationed across the broad area in which the attacks had taken place. As well as the officers in (or on) these contraptions, there were policemen and women mingling with Friday-night revellers, walking the streets, paying particular attention to passing cyclists.

Louise Mangan had only become a detective six months ago, joining Borough Command in Southwest London on her first plain-clothes assignment. She’d badly wanted to be part of Incisive. In part, this had been about combatting the sexism she knew still existed in the department and that she believed would affect this particular investigation. She had experienced some of this herself after the birth of her two daughters (Michelle in 1994 and Chloe in 1996) when some in the department had implied that she needed to choose between being a mother and being an officer, but such experiences had only made her more determined to combat misogyny within the force by proving herself. She’d even had to join as a ‘Woman Police Constable’, a separate and anomalous designation that was due to disappear shortly. She felt that these small advances mattered.

Detective Sergeant Ralph Harrison, sitting beside her in the car, personified old-school policing. Ralph wasn’t a bad person. From the time she’d already spent with him, Louise could recognise laudable qualities of bravery and loyalty and patriotism forged through his many years of service. Louise was married to a police sergeant (a uniformed one), she knew how the hierarchy worked. But Tom Mangan was part of her more enlightened generation, the post-boomer Generation X, better equipped to embrace the impending third millennium than the officer sitting next to her who had now begun pontificating on a different subject. The Macpherson Inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence had just been published.

‘That all happened six years ago,’ Harrison was saying, ‘a lot of water has flowed down the Thames since then. I don’t buy this shit. Excuse my French, Louise, but that’s what it is, about the Met being, you know, intentionally racist.’

Louise muttered something, unwilling to become engaged in this conversation but unable to resist a correction.

‘Sorry, what was that?’ her sergeant asked.

‘The report said the Met was institutionally racist, not intentionally racist,’ Louise said.

Harrison reflected for a moment. ‘Same thing, isn’t it?’

Louise, unwilling to pursue the matter further, agreed it probably was. It was too late at night to champion Macpherson, and Ralph’s criticism was mild compared to some of the entrenched bigotry she’d been subjected to by other colleagues.

Harrison and Louise had been occupying this car park on Hampton Court Green for two hours, receiving regular reports from fellow officers staked out across the area, keeping a close eye out for lone females and yellow-helmeted cyclists. There’d been a few false alarms, and one embarrassing mistake when an officer apprehended what he thought was a voyeur in black camouflage, but who turned out to be a local vicar taking a stroll after evensong.

Then, at 9 p.m., the radio burst into life. A girl walking along Lower Hampton Road had been dragged into the scrubland bordering the road. Her scream had been heard by two of the Surrey officers monitoring that patch and their car siren had scared the attacker off. He was last seen cycling fast towards Kempton Park riding a drop-handle sports bike and wearing a fluorescent yellow helmet.

Detective Sergeant Harrison had been outside the car smoking a cigarette when the alert was broadcast. ‘Okay, you wait here,’ he said to Louise. ‘He’ll be coming through the park.’ He stamped on what was left of his fag, and ran towards Bushy Park behind them.

Alone in the car, Louise examined the map. She could see how easily a cyclist could disappear onto the trails and pathways of the park, but she could also see that he’d have needed to cross the A308. Knowing he was being pursued, she asked herself, wouldn’t he be more likely to try to blend in with the many cyclists using this main route down towards Hampton Court? The car park where she and Harrison had based themselves opened directly onto that road. But her sergeant had gone in the opposite direction.

Louise left the vehicle and ran to the road. She needed to walk about twenty metres to a bend in the A308 to get a long view. Even this long after the rush hour, traffic roared past in a ceaseless stream. She could see plenty of bikers on a fenced-off elevated section that was supposed to be a footpath, but had long been claimed by cyclists, a horde of which were currently heading towards her.

Most of the cyclists seemed decidedly un-sporty, using their bicycles simply to get from A to B. Louise could only see a couple of serious bikers with their heads bent low over dropped handlebars, dressed in lycra, and with plastic bottles clipped to their cycle frames. Only one wore a helmet, and it appeared to be red rather than yellow.

Louise realised that the attacker may have gone in the other direction, towards Kingston, but the Surrey guys hadn’t seen him, and, in any case, Hampton Court was known to be the epicentre of his activities. She calculated that, given the timing of the attack and the distances involved, if he was cycling in her direction on the A308 he wouldn’t get to where she was for another few minutes. She had time to run back to the car, grab the binoculars from the glove compartment and make a proper job of monitoring the approaching traffic.

As soon as she returned to her vantage point and adjusted the focus on the binoculars, she was excited to see a cyclist in a luminous yellow helmet with mirrored goggles on a drop-handled sports bike around three hundred metres away.

Louise radioed the information upstream to the team that had frightened the attacker off and downstream to the officers stationed on Hampton Court Bridge. By the time she’d lifted the binoculars to her eyes once again, the rider had vanished. She tried to concentrate her gaze harder, ensuring the viewfinder was perfectly focused. By now the yellow helmeted biker should have been just a few metres away, at the point where a bunch of riders she’d seen him huddled in with had now reached. But there was no sign of him. Where could he have gone?

Louise’s map showed no junctions leading off the A308. On the left were the railings around Bushy Park, on the right the Thames. If he’d turned round for some reason, the officers further up would spot him, but crossing over lanes to change course wouldn’t be easy in this traffic and the disruption would still be visible, like the waves left by a boat changing course on a busy river.

Louise returned to the car and was standing by the driver’s door chewing over her options, instinctively keen to move towards the spot where she’d last seen the yellow-helmeted rider, when she heard Ralph Harrison yelling from behind. Turning quickly, she saw another cyclist come racing out of Bushy Park and onto the car park heading straight towards her.

‘Use your spray,’ Harrison shouted, but before she could reach for the canister of CS gas clipped to her belt, the bike was almost upon her and showed no signs of slowing down. Louise took a small step to her left before flinging herself at the bike, hitting its rider sideways on, a coup de grace exercised in a single manoeuvre.

Together, Louise and Harrison managed to restrain the cyclist sufficiently to apply handcuffs. The ruckus attracted an audience. Motorists had pulled over to watch and before long a knot of pedestrian spectators had gathered. The commotion itself was over in minutes and Harrison removed the cyclist’s yellow reflective polycarbonate helmet to place him gently into the back of the Rover. But before the two detectives could drive off with their prize, they had to wait a further fifteen minutes for a bigger police vehicle to collect the drop-handle sports bike. In that time the crowd had grown even bigger as word spread that the Beast of Hampton Court had been snared.

When he’d left Louise, just as the alarm was raised, Detective Sergeant Harrison had thought better of simply crashing through the undergrowth, preferring instead to wait in the bushes next to the track through Bushy Park, where he felt the fugitive was most likely to emerge.

‘When I saw him bombing towards me, I stepped out and told him to stop. But the bastard managed to ride around me . . . You must have been watching old Fred Astaire movies,’ Harrison told Louise admiringly. ‘I couldn’t do those moves you did.’

‘Well, Ginger Rogers was always the better dancer. Didn’t she once say she could do all the moves that Fred could do, but backwards and in heels? Excellent metaphor for the more skilful contributions we women make.’

If Ralph Harrison recognised her good-natured teasing, he ignored it. They were crossing the car park towards their vehicle at the police station in Kingston-upon-Thames. It was 3 a.m. and the man they’d captured, Darnell Thomas, a local fitness instructor, was being questioned by detectives from the Flying Squad who had overall responsibility for Operation Incisive. Louise would drop Ralph off at his house in Sudbury before driving home to the flat in Brixton that she, Tom and the girls had recently moved into.

DS Harrison and Louise were due back on duty in six hours’ time. As the arresting officers, when they returned, they’d be required to fill in numerous forms once Darnell Thomas had been formerly charged.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any doubt that he will be charged?’ Louise asked as she turned the key in the ignition.

‘Nah, got him bang to rights.’

‘But he says he bolted because he thought you were some thug lurking in the park,’ Louise persisted, ‘and you do look a bit thuggish.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘The point is, he wouldn’t have known we were police officers,’ Louise continued.

‘That’s true. I didn’t have time to show him my warrant card but there’s no doubt he’s our man. The girl he attacked tonight didn’t get a clear view of his face, but he was in the location, riding a sports-bike, and wearing that distinctive yellow cycle helmet. When the Flying Squad guys have finished questioning him about tonight’s attack and the attempted murder of the girl he tried to strangle, they’ll begin to interrogate him about the one who’s gone missing. Our work is done.’

Louise drove in silence. Her report about the man she’d seen cycling towards her along the A308 had been logged but discounted now that Darnell Thomas was in custody. Nevertheless, she planned to resubmit it to the DCI in charge of the investigation.

As the car pulled up outside Ralph Harrison’s house, Louise said, ‘I really did see that cyclist in the yellow helmet coming down the main road, Sarge, so there is another suspect. And he was wearing the goggles. Thomas wasn’t.’

By now Harrison was standing outside the car. He bent back down so that Louise could hear him without the need to speak too loudly into the soft night air.

‘But where the hell did your man go? Given that Darnell’s in custody and your guy vanished into thin air, I think the reality is that there’s only one suspect here. He probably threw the goggles away because they marked him out.’

‘But so did the helmet,’ Louise protested.

‘True, but he was a man in a hurry, and the helmet takes more time to get off. As I can testify, having removed Darnell’s to get him in the car. Now you get yourself home and grab as much rest as you can. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Harrison walked off towards his front door but before Louise could put the car in gear he was back with an afterthought.

‘The fact that Darnell Thomas is black may lead some people to accuse us of being intentionally racist, but they don’t have responsibility for stopping these attacks, we do. Goodnight, Ginger, and well done.’