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The frosting of the windows prevented her seeing anything other than shadows moving around within the space.
She tried the door. It was locked.
She knocked hard and continuously until the door opened and her knuckles almost met the chest of a stringy male.
He rolled his eyes dramatically and called over his shoulder, ‘Feds are here.’
‘Why did you say that? This isn’t America and we don’t have Feds. How does it even work?’ Kim asked.
‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘Is this another attempted raid for our intel?’
‘Oh please, enough with the dramatics. Just let us in already. And if you’d let us see any authentic intel before posting it on social media, we might not be too late to seize evidence.’
That was the problem with vigilante groups. Most of them wanted to be useful but often ended up being a nuisance.
This particular group had formed in the late nineties, following a spate of local burglaries where elderly people were targeted and beaten for purse change. A group of twenty had formed immediately and grown to more than fifty volunteers who patrolled target areas in pairs.
The attacks hadn’t stopped straight away, but the presence of the volunteers had restricted the culprit to a smaller area, where he’d eventually been caught.
In the years since, those concerned citizens had faded away and been replaced by a younger core with a more proactive approach. Another word for it was entrapment. She remembered a case around six years ago where one of the Black Country Angels had posed as a fourteen-year-old and had lured a man from Walsall to Cradley Heath train station. They’d filmed the encounter, complete with accusations, and uploaded it to YouTube before the day was out. When officers searched the man’s home, it was clear that he, having seen his face all over the internet, had taken the precaution of destroying every piece of evidence. They hadn’t been able to charge him with a thing.
The man stepped aside for them to enter, and Bryant introduced himself and Kim.
‘I’m Reedy, and this is Banksy,’ the man replied, pointing to another man sitting at the second desk in the room. Beyond was a kitchen that had probably been left behind by the previous occupants as well.
‘You the one doing all the graffiti?’ Kim asked the guy, sullen looking beneath a heavy beard and a baseball cap.
‘He ain’t that Banksy,’ Reedy said, sitting down.
‘No shit,’ Kim replied as she took the last chair and Bryant perched behind on one of the window seats.
‘Full names please,’ Kim said as her colleague took out his notebook.
‘I’m Elliot Reed and this is Gordon Banks.’
Bryant snapped his notebook shut.
‘How’s business?’ Kim asked.
‘The usual. We follow tips. We do stuff you lot can’t be bothered to do.’
‘Yeah, I checked out your social media. Still bugging that guy from Stourbridge.’
‘He’s a paedophile. His neighbours should know.’
‘It’s a bit more than that when you picket his place of work and lose the guy his job.’
Reedy shrugged. ‘He’s a danger to kids.’
‘He served his time seventeen years ago, and there ain’t many unaccompanied kids going to the tip to my knowledge.’
Kim didn’t have a great deal of sympathy for the man concerned. But the methods of the group went far beyond monitoring.
She also knew that sometimes overeager individuals accused the wrong person of horrific crimes, which resulted in assault and even murder.
For vigilantes, the burden of proof was much lower than that required by the police. They operated on little more than rumour and hearsay.
She remembered the case of a man named Bijan Ebrahimi, forty-four, who’d taken a series of photos of youths attacking his hanging baskets for evidence. Someone saw him with the camera and told the police. He was quizzed, rumours started and two days later his neighbours beat him unconscious, dragged him into the street, doused him with white spirit and set him on fire. The man had done nothing wrong.
