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

didn’t see what he saw. I imagine few people did. We were mostly too far away and the light was too poor. It made no difference. What we heard told us everything.
    Screaming. Keening. Yelling. I honestly hadn’t known human beings could make such a sound. It was the sound of agony.
    ‘OK, come on, get ’em back. Everybody back.’
    Someone was trying to take charge again. We forced ourselves to muster, to link arms, to face the furious crowd and do the ‘Step back, sir … Everybody back now … Give us some room’ thing. A police van arrived and from its rear doors spewed officers in riot gear. The pictures in front of me began to merge. Sharp torch-beams, the lurid Day-Glo of police uniforms, shouting faces, accusing fists, a crowd still angry but growing colder and calmer. I saw very little of it. The only clear image in my head was that of an elderly Muslim woman on her knees in the mud, tearing her scarf and her hair as she howled at the moon.

2
    ‘OUR VICTIM’S NAME is Aamir Chowdhury,’ said Detective Inspector Dana Tulloch. Minutes earlier, she’d been appointed head of the investigation into the death of the man in Larkhill Park. She and her team weren’t next on the rota, but all early signs suggested that this was a crime motivated by racial hatred, and the Met was covering itself. Tulloch was half Indian, with creamy gold skin and gleaming black hair. Not that black, admittedly, but black enough to count. It would be harder to accuse her of not taking the murder of an Asian man seriously than it might be to point the finger at some of her white colleagues.
    The man in the park, Aamir Chowdhury, had been pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, although early reports suggested that he’d been dead before the ambulance crew had taken him from the park. On the basis of my testimony, and given that he’d been heavily doused in petrol, the case was being handled as a murder investigation.
    ‘Mr Chowdhury was twenty-seven years old, a British Muslim,’ Tulloch went on. ‘His parents were born in Pakistan, moved to Britain in the 1970s. Chowdhury himself was a junior doctor at St Thomas’s. He lived alone in a flat not far from the hospital and phoned his mother at six this evening to say he wouldn’t be coming round to the family home as they’d planned, because he had to go back into work.’
    The team gathered together at short notice was a large one, many of whom I knew from the Ripper investigation. Detective Sergeant Neil Anderson, a softening, thinning-haired man in his forties, reliable and dedicated, but never going to make chief constable. Pete Stenning and Tom Barrett, young detective constables: Stenning, super-straight; Barrett, a bit of a joker. Gayle Mizon I’d worked with quite closely on my last case: blonde, early thirties, she was a safe pair of hands. Once the victim had been carried from the park, I’d been whisked away to give my statement. Anderson and Mizon had taken it between them. When it was over, I followed them up to the briefing room. I wasn’t on duty, I wasn’t even officially part of this team, I just knew that going quietly home would be impossible.
    ‘He was identified by his father at the scene and also by documents in his wallet,’ Tulloch was saying. ‘Early signs are that this was a crime motivated by racial hatred. We’ve been given the names of five men whom the family believes are responsible for the attack. They are all white, in their early twenties, and live in the same part of London as the dead man. According to the family, the victim has been subject to ongoing abuse and intimidation for some time now. I want them bringing in. We’ve already applied for warrants to search their properties.’
    ‘How do we know the attackers were white?’ I asked.
    I’d been sitting at the edge of the group, half hidden behind blokes leaning against desks. Tulloch had to step forward to see me properly.
    ‘Lacey, you shouldn’t even be here,’ she said. ‘Give me five minutes, I’ll get someone to run you home.’
    ‘They were wearing masks,’ I said. ‘So who says they were white?’
    Tulloch looked at Anderson, who opened his notebook and flicked back a few pages. ‘Shahid Karim was at the far side of the park at 19.33 hours,’ he said. ‘He saw five white men run across the pitches, coming from the direction of the children’s play area. They disappeared on to the Wandsworth Road.’
    ‘An alien, a wolf, a zombie, a goblin and the