Kidnap

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

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Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife

Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

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Kidnap

Contents

Chapter One – May 2011. .. .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... 2

Chapter Two. .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... ....6

Chapter Three - two weeks earlier... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... ...........7

Chapter Four – May 2011 again.. .... .... .. .. .... .... . ... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....24

Chapter Five – the next week.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ......29

Chapter Six – June 2011. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...34

Chapter Seven – 7th June 2011 and onwards. ... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..... .... .42

Chapter Eight – September 2012. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... ....44

Chapter Nine – one week later.. .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .50

Chapter Ten – 1st October, 2012 and that week. ... .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .57

Chapter Eleven – 8th October and that week. .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... 61

Chapter Twelve – November 2012.. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .....64

Chapter Twelve – December 2012... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..............68

Chapter Thirteen – Christmas Day 2012, January 2013... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .............78

Chapter Fourteen – February 2013.. .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... ..............93

Chapter Fi een – March 2013.. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ..98

Chapter Sixteen – April 2013.... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..........100

Epilogue..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...........103

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Chapter One – May 2011

It had been an absolute bitch of a day. The previous day Ray Green, a long time colleague in Guildford CID

had run right out of luck. Driving on the A3 towards London he had been in the path of a lorry which had suffered a blow-out, swerved violently, and side-swiped Ray’s Mazda 6 into the central barrier. At that precise spot, however, the barrier was pierced for emergency vehicle access, with the result that the Mazda ended up in the outside lane of the opposite side carriageway, right in the path of a BMW 5 series travelling at well over the speed limit. Ray and the BMW driver were both killed instantly; the lorry driver escaped with no more than a bad scare.

Ray, like myself, was a Detective Sergeant in the Surrey police force, the number two in the team headed by Detective Inspector Jill Harris. Jill, at thirty-two, was two months younger than myself and until just two months earlier had herself been a Detective Sergeant in the team headed by DI Lloyd Ferris. She had been promoted to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of DI Charlie Villiers, a promotion that most of the folk in CID felt should have gone to Ray or myself. It was, went the murmurs, a blatant example of positive discrimination. Don’t get me wrong – Jill was a decent enough copper, but Ray had a lot more experience, and I had quite a bit more, having been made up to Sergeant a good year earlier than she had been. Still, that’s life.

What had made the day even worse, however, was when I had been called into the office of the head of Divisional CID. Detective Superintendent (DSi) Harriet Wylock was unpopular. A blusterer and a bully, she had been in post now for just over a year, coming to us from Nottingham where, careful enquiries had revealed, the locals were only too glad to see the back of her. It was no secret that the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) to whom she was ultimately responsible, had been over-ruled in the decision to appoint her, and as a result delighted in giving her a hard time, a hard time she had no qualms about passing on to her subordinates.

I knocked on her office door and in response to her growl of ‘Enter’, did so.

I found that Jill Harris was already in the room, looking somewhat uneasy. I soon discovered why.

“Ah, Morgan,” Wylock growled – there is no other description that can truthfully be applied to her voice, unusually low-pitched for a woman – “don’t bother to sit – won’t take long.”

I looked her in the eye, wondering what was coming. She glared back; no beauty to look at, she never made any attempt to put you at your ease, or to give any indication that she had the slightest real interest in you. To her, her staff were cogs in the machine, no more. She was an immense woman, nearly six feet tall, considerably over-weight and with the build of a Sumo wrestler. Her large head was surrounded by frizzy dark hair, liberally shot through with grey, which looked as though it seldom saw a comb from one day to the next. Her dark brown eyes glared at you from behind heavy metal framed spectacles which perched on the bridge of a bulbous nose liberally patterned by broken veins. Her dress sense did nothing to improve the impression she made; a shapeless dark jacket over a crumbled blouse topped dark trousers that didn’t quite match the jacket in hue, although they outdid them in shapelessness. Altogether, a less appealing example of the female sex it would be hard to imagine.

Her looks, however, were the least of the matter – it was her domineering attitude to all below her and her –

seldom successful – attempted ingratiation of herself to those above her, which really set the teeth on edge.

“Right,” she said, “with Green having got himself killed, I need to make changes.”

Clearly, as far as she was concerned, poor old Ray had got himself killed just to inconvenience DSi Wylock.

“Right, with Harris here so new as a DI I want her to have an experienced DS as her number two. Nobody in her team is up to being made up, so I’m swapping you over.”

My heart sank. Not only was Jill Harris aware that I was one of those who had been less than happy at her promotion, she was now going to be my boss. A thought struck me.

“What about DI Jackson. Ma’am?”

“What about him?”

“Well, he’s on leave until the end of next week – he was looking to me to keep the team going.”

4

She hesitated for a moment before responding.

“If it’s any of your concern, Morgan, I’ve already been in touch with him and told him to be back by Monday. You’ll start with DI Harris on Tuesday.”

That, I thought, was really going to please Jimmy Jackson. He hadn’t had a decent break for over a year and now he was having his leave cut short for, to my mind, no very good reason.

I did wonder if Bessie Bunter – Ray Green’s nickname for our leader – had actually given any thought to what would happen to Jimmy’s team with no DS; also, I had the feeling that until I mentioned the fact of Jimmy’s leave she had possibly intended for me to move to Jill’s team immediately. She had hesitated when I mentioned that Jimmy was on leave - I wondered if she had really spoken to him yet – it would be just like her not to have bothered unduly whether he knew or not that he was losing his DS.

I refused to back down.

“I’ll let the team know then, ma’am. What do I tell them about a replacement for me as DS?”

“Tell them I’ll sort that out with DI Jackson – nothing to concern you.”

I left at that point, and the moment I was out of her office I found a quiet spot and called Jimmy on his mobile.

“Jimmy, it’s Ken.”

“Ken, what’s up?”

“You heard about Ray?”

“Ray? Ray Green? No, what’s happened?”

“He was in a crash yesterday – killed outright.”

“Oh no! How did it happen?”

“On the A3, lorry had a blow-out, pushed him into oncoming traffic.”

“Oh, my God, poor Ray. How awful. Poor old bugger - at least it’s a blessing he isn’t married anymore and no kids or anyone.”

That was the only remotely good point; Ray, childless and whose parents were both long dead, and with no siblings, had been divorced for five or six years now and his ex-wife now lived somewhere in New Zealand with a new husband. I changed the subject.

“Jimmy, has the Super been in touch with you?”

“Wylock? No, why?”

“She’s just had me in her office – I’m being switched to Jill Harris’ team to replace Ray and she said she had already told you to be back by Monday.”

Jimmy’s voice rose at least an octave.

“She WHAT?”

“You heard.”

There was a long pause whilst Jimmy clearly struggled to control his temper at such treatment. Then there was a long drawn out sigh.

“Thank God I’m retiring at the end of the year. Much more of that bloody woman and I’d swing for her. If she thinks I’m breaking off my leave for her, she’s got another think coming to her. Right, Ken, this call never happened, OK?”

“OK, boss, never spoke to you.”

Later that morning, with a face like thunder, Wylock had stormed into the office of Detective Chief Inspector Clifford to subject him to one of her tantrums. The CID in the division is theoretically a pyramid; at the apex, the DSi, Wylock. Immediately below her came the three DCIs, each in turn responsible for three teams each headed by a DI. In the days of DSi Watson, Wylock’s predecessor, he had contented himself with the overall picture, relying on his DCIs to ensure that the various teams worked efficiently. Switching sergeants around would have been done in consultation with the DCI – or DCIs if appropriate - and DIs involved and the sergeant involved would have been kept in the picture as well. Watson had been universally respected; he had also been liked, and his system had worked very well indeed. Wylock was not respected, and she most certainly was not liked. In return, she trusted nobody, so the DCI’s found themselves largely sidelined, their 5

main role under Wylock being to take the blame when things went wrong, whilst she collared the praise when things went right. Of late, there had been more and more going wrong, and less and less going right, than had been the case under Watson, and it was common knowledge that Wylock’s reputation was in a spiral of decline with the senior staff - the Divisional Commander, Chief Superintendent Wallace, and the ACC (Crime) Charles Pope. There were, in fact, beginning to be mutterings as to how long she was likely to last.

The subject of the tantrum soon became general knowledge; when Wylock had at last got round to phoning Jimmy Jackson and telling him to return for Monday she had met with a blank refusal. When she had said that it was an order, Jimmy had told her to discipline him when he got back on the originally agreed date and warned her that if she did so he would have his lawyer present to press for her to be disciplined for intimidation and workplace harassment. She had backed down, then tried to take it out on DCI Clifford. He had politely heard her out, then casually informed her that he had just signed his letter of resignation giving three months notice prior to taking up an appointment with a private security company, so she might have to do rather more reorganising than she had anticipated.

All in all, the Divisional CID was not a good place to be that Thursday. But there was more to come.

Late in the morning Jill Harris appeared in our office – an office which would have been reasonably adequate for two people, but which I shared with the four DCs on the team, with Jimmy having a sort of alcove office off the main room.

She asked me to come into Jimmy’s office and we closed the door behind us. She stood looking at me for a moment, nervously chewing on her bottom lip, before she finally spoke.

“Ken, I’m sorry about Wylock this morning.”

“Not your fault, Jill – we’re all used to her ways by now.”

“The thing is – when I asked for someone to replace Ray as soon as possible, I actually recommended that Phil Harper be made acting and we bring in another DC. She wouldn’t hear of it – said, and I quote her exact words, ‘Harper is about the most useless fucker in your whole useless team. You’ll have Morgan – at least he’s not as useless as Harper’.”

I grinned.

“Coming from her, that must rank as a compliment.”

I looked at Jill more closely. She was clearly ill at ease, and I didn’t think that I had heard everything that there was to hear. I was right.

“Look, Ken, I know that there are a number of folk here who resent my promotion and that you are one of them – and that Jimmy Jackson is another. OK, I wanted the promotion – who wouldn’t – and I’m not going to apologise for getting it. Now, if you do come across as my DS, I want it to be clear between us that I am the DI and you are my number two. I’ll keep you in the loop at all times, but I expect your support, not a sniping exercise.”

I stared at her. Jill Harris was worth staring at. A couple of months younger than myself, five feet five or six tall, slim with blonde hair, blue eyes and a fresh complexion, she looked every inch the ‘girl next door’ type, an impression reinforced by the lack of make-up and her choice of clothing, a simple skirt and blouse, but I knew her to be a determined police officer and one with a good record. She was also a whole lot tougher than she looked, and I was surprised that she had found in necessary to say what she had. It was, I suppose, yet further evidence of the malign influence of Wylock on what had been an effective and efficient department.

There was another aspect, a highly personal one. A year or so before I met Pamela, my wife to be, Jill and I had had a one night stand. Both DCs at the time, we had been at a somewhat drunken celebration at the end of a particularly difficult, and very nasty, investigation, and continuing the celebration in bed had seemed a natural consequence. It had been a one off, never repeated and, by mutual, if unspoken, consent, never mentioned between us. Jill was unmarried, although I knew that she had a regular boyfriend, a local solicitor, but whose practice dealt mainly with business law, not the sort of thing that brought him into contact with the police. I, of course, was now happily married to Pam and had been for nearly six years; neither Jill nor I now really felt any residual attraction to the other – it wasn’t that we disliked each other, or anything like 6

that, it was just that what had happened between us was in the past and we both regarded the past as just that

- past.

“Don’t worry, Inspector, I wouldn’t dream of trying to undermine your authority.”

She looked at me, clearly sifting through what I has said, trying to determine if I truly meant it. Then, rather to my surprise, I got a beaming smile.

“Ken, I’m sorry, I should have known better. Look, if you do come across – I know that we can work well together.”

We parted on that note; to be honest I was left wondering if I really had meant what I had said. Jill’s promotion still rankled and I didn’t like the idea of working for her at all, but if it did happen then I would just have to make the best of a bad job.

The next three hours or so were spent interviewing witnesses to a hit and run that had left a nineteen year old girl, Alice Hamilton, in hospital, hovering on the edge of death thanks to some callous bastard who had jumped a red light at a cross roads then swung left to discover the girl crossing on the ‘green man’ of the Pelican crossing. The resultant impact had thrown her ten feet through the air to land on her head and suffer horrific injuries.

I interviewed six witnesses. About the only thing that they could agree on - and only then by a four to two majority – was that the car had been red. Of the other two, one thought that it might have been brown, the other said it all happened so quickly that she just didn’t notice the colour of the car. One witness was positive that it was a Vauxhall, another that it was a Ford, a third that it just might have been a Renault. The others had no idea. Needless to say, nobody had its number.

I spent most time with a young woman who had been within a couple of yards of the incident. I had no doubt that Tessa Williams was a bright, bubbly sort of person under normal circumstance, with her short cropped blonde hair, blue eyes and retroussé nose somehow giving that sort of impression, but she had been traumatised by what she had seen. She was, I learned, twenty-seven years old, married to Trevor who worked as a delivery driver for Sainsbury’s. She had been on the pavement beside Alice, but luckily for her, and eight month old Kathy whom she had been pushing in their baby buggy, she had been distracted by the little one suddenly waking from slumber and had been slow to react when the ‘green man’ clear to cross sign came on, or it would probably have been her and her child, not Alice Hamilton, whom the car had hit.

“It was awful, sergeant,” she said, on the verge of tears, “you know how when the little green man appears you get that sort of chirruping noise?”

I nodded my understanding.

“Well, just as it started, Kathy suddenly woke and started to make a noise – I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to bring up wind or whatever, so I looked at her and hesitated, just for a moment. Then I realised that it was just a little sort of burble and no problem, so I looked up to cross the road, and...”

She stopped in mid-flow, tears starting to trickle unbidden down her cheeks.

“It was awful, really, really awful. This girl had just stepped off the pavement, taken a couple of steps, and this car screeched round the corner and just, just hit her. She went up in the air, just like she was a rag doll or something, and then she hit the ground.”

She stopped, staring numbly at the floor of her neat and tidy living room in a modest semi-detached on the outskirts of Guildford, where we were sitting in two armchairs, facing each other across an attractive, clearly home-made, deep pile rug featuring a pastoral scene of fields and horses.

“Take your time, Tessa. Just try and remember as much as you can. I really want to catch this driver – who knows, somebody else might be next if he carries on like this.”

She took a deep breath before continuing.

“It all happened so fast. I was totally shocked, so shocked everything seemed to be sort of unreal – you know? Like it was happening to somebody else. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t even move somehow.”

I nodded sympathetically. What she was saying was something that I had heard from witnesses, or even victims, of violent episodes many, many times.

“What can you tell me about the car, Tessa? It really is important, but take your time – we have as long at this as it takes.”

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She sat there, clearly thinking hard.

“Well, we’ve got a big old Volvo estate – we need something big to take all Kathy’s stuff when we go to Trevor’s mum and dad or mine. It wasn’t as big as our Volvo, but it wasn’t small – you know, not a Mini or something like that. I suppose it was sort of average size. It was red – I’m sure about that. Not a bright red, more a sort of deep red; you know what Post Office vans look like?”

I nodded again.

“Well, definitely a deeper red than that.”

So, a dark red; I looked around the room. There was a mahogany bookshelf against the far wall with the spines of a collection of assorted volumes showing. One of them was a deep red, almost a maroon. I pointed at it.

“How about the colour of that book over there, Tessa? As deep a red as that?”

She looked at it thoughtfully.

“Yes, that would be about right, I think.”

She hesitated for a moment before recommencing.

“I only saw the side and back of the car, mostly the back, really, but I did notice that it was really clean, it really shone in the sun.” She stopped and hesitated again.

“The number plate – I didn’t get all the number, but I’ve just remembered that the first two letters were KW

– I suppose I noticed because, of course, that’s Kathy’s initials.”

Well, that was something. KW, I knew, meant that the car had first been registered in the Northampton area.

Might mean a non-local driver, but might equally be a car that had been sold on after first registration and ended up in Surrey. Also, Tessa’s identification of the colour as so deep a red explained why one of the other witnesses had thought that it was brown.

Despite more gentle probing on my part, Tessa was unable to remember anything else of use, but that partial number plate at least gave me something to work on. When I got back to the station I set Danny Collis, one of our DCs, the task of checking traffic cameras in the area at the relevant time, looking for any car with a KW registration. His glum expression was only to be expected; there were a score or more cameras to check out, with film of hundreds of cars captured by them. Still, that’s detective work; ninety percent plus is just searching for needles in haystacks.

Then I got a phone call from the hospital; Alice Hamilton had just died. It was now even more serious –

causing death by dangerous driving.

All in all, it had been a bad day, but it was about to get a whole lot worse.

Chapter Two

I drove home feeling just about worn out from the tensions at the station, the aftermath of Ray’s death and the hit and run interviews. I turned into our drive, switched off the Astra’s motor, clambered out and made my way to the front door. I opened it and walked in.

“Pam, I’m home,” I shouted but there was no reply. I checked my watch; it was just after six thirty. Pam worked in the local library and was normally home just after five thirty except when she had a late shift when it wouldn’t be until gone eight before she returned. I checked the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall; no, I hadn’t mistaken the date. Today was not a late turn for Pam, so I was surprised that she wasn’t home yet. She hadn’t mentioned that she would be late when we had breakfasted together that morning, and it was difficult to imagine anything cropping up.

Her Mini was in the drive but that meant nothing; unless it was raining or she had a fair amount of shopping to do, she walked to work. I had left before her that morning, and assumed that, as it had been a dry day and the Mini was in the drive, she must have walked and been delayed for some reason.

I checked in the kitchen and the lounge to make sure that I hadn’t missed a note of some sort, but there was nothing.

I checked the answer phone – nothing. I wondered whether to phone her mobile, but then I realised that it was sitting on the kitchen table – and so was her handbag. I couldn’t understand why I had failed to see them 8

the moment I walked in, but their presence started me worrying. Pam would never go out without her handbag, even if it was only to nip to the nearest shop – about a five minute walk – because we were out of milk or the like. Obviously, she must have been home during the day – she would never have gone to work and left her mobile and bag behind. But in that case – where was she now?

The only explanation that I could think of was that for some reason she had visited one of the neighbours; like so many town dwellers, we knew our neighbours by sight and to say hello to, but that was about it.

Although we had lived in this home for nearly five years, I had never set foot in any other house in our small cul-de-sac and I didn’t think that Pam had either.

I had just about decided to start knocking on neighbours’ doors when the phone rang.

Expecting it to be Pam with a problem somewhere, I answered it eagerly.

“DS Morgan?” an unknown male voice asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got someone here wants to talk to you.”

There was a brief pause, then Pam came on the line, her voice portraying deep fear.

“Ken, these men came to the house – they said they were colleagues of yours and that you had been in a car accident and offered to take me to the hospital. But they’re not police at all..”

At that point she was interrupted; it sounded as though the phone had been pulled from her hand.

“Listen to me, Morgan. We don’t want to hurt your wife, and if you do as I tell you, we won’t have to. Now, we want Harry Schwarz’s key.”

My mind was in a whirl, my stomach churning in horror as I tried to understand what was going on.

“What do you mean, Schwarz’s key?”

“Don’t play the innocent with me, Morgan. We know he had it when he was arrested and we want it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. He had a bunch of keys – who doesn’t - is that what you mean?” I replied with perfect honesty.

“Not his bleedin’ house keys, you idiot – the key. If you don’t know about it, then that’s just too bad. Find out about it fast and get it for us, or your wife will be sorry she ever set eyes on you. In fact, I might arrange for her never to be able to set eyes on anyone again. Oh, and by the way – don’t tell any of your mates in the fuzz about this – we have our contacts and we’ll find out if you do anything so fucking stupid. I’ll phone again tomorrow, same time.”

And at that the line went dead.

With trembling hand, I replaced it in its cradle and slumped into the nearest chair. What on earth was going on?

I cast my mind back.

Chapter Three - two weeks earlier

I settled back in the driving seat of the Passat. A slightly scruffy car, bearing 2006 plates, it had been chosen from the car pool as the most likely to be an inconspicuous vehicle from which to conduct surveillance of the shop across the road.

Beside me, DC Danny Collis did the same.

“ I suppose you couldn’t find a set of wheels with decent seats in it, could you?” he complained, “my arse is so numb I don’t even know if it is still there.”

“Don’t moan, Danny. They wouldn’t let me have anything decent when I told them that it was your arse that would be occupying one of the seats.”

“Oh, very funny,,” he broke off suddenly, “somebody coming, sarge.”

I took a quick look in the rear view mirror, which I had carefully angled to give me a clear view of that part of the opposite pavement which was behind us. Sure enough, a man was walking purposefully along it. He was big, six feet four or five at least, and heavily built with it, and carrying a large briefcase, which looked a bit at odds with his casual clothing. The light drizzle was one possible explanation for the hooded jacket he 9

wore having its hood pulled up; an equally possible reason was to avoid his features registering on any of the CCTV cameras which festooned this part of the town.

We both sank a little lower into the Passat’s uncomfortable seats, seats which bore mute testimony to the nearly two hundred thousand miles registered on the odometer.

As we watched, the man reached the shop which was our focus of interest and went inside.

“OK, Danny, get him when he comes out.”

Danny nodded and picked up the Nikon D800 digital camera which had been nestling by his feet on the floor and readied it for action. Less than five minutes later out subject emerged, now without the briefcase; it is human nature when you step out of a door onto a pavement to look briefly around and that is exactly what our man did, giving Danny a perfect full face view as he did so.

“Got him!” Danny exulted.

We had been sitting in the car for over two hours now and this was the first person we had seen enter the ostensibly closed shop. I was concerned that the shop proprietor might well have noticed our presence, despite the window being choc-a-bloc with odds and ends.

I lifted my radio to my lips and pressed the send button.

“One seen,” I said briefly.

“Leave,” came the answer. The man at the other end of the radio was my boss, DI Jimmy Jackson. His decision to have us leave was to have a switch of watchers; like me, he was concerned lest the fact that the shop was being watched became obvious. As we drew away from the kerb, another unmarked police car, containing DC George Fredericks and Jimmy Jackson himself, took over the surveillance.

The next day we gathered in the incident room which had been assigned to our operation. In addition to our own team, the teams of DIs Jill Harris and Chris Lane were also involved, so there should have been eighteen CID officers, four uniformed PCs and DCI Henry Clifford, who was in overall command, gathered together, although I noticed that a couple of faces were missing ,Ray Green, Jill Harris’ DS and one of her DCs, Phil Harper.

One wall of the over-crowded room boasted a large white board with seven photographs on it. Yesterday there had been six; Danny’s shot from last evening was number seven.

Six of the shots were arranged in a rough circle, each with a piece of red tape connecting it to the seventh picture which graced the centre of the board. Two of the pictures on the periphery also had a piece of tape connecting them together; in this case the tape was green.

“Right,” said the DCI, “update. We now have six known villains who have visited this man,” he tapped the central picture, “Harry Schwarz, in his shop over the last three weeks. In each case the visitor arrived after normal closing time with a container of some sort – briefcase, rucksack, whatever, and left without it. The most recent visitor,” he tapped Danny’s photo, “is the most interesting. Dean Walker, aged forty-six, record of robbery, often with violence, released from Wormwood Scrubs July last year after serving five years of a ten stretch. Believed to have been the leader of the team that held up and robbed the security van in the Gatwick area last week, leaving one of the guards badly beaten, the other scared out of his wits but not so badly hurt.

“Walker is a known associate of this man,” he tapped another photo, a photo connected to that of Walker by the piece of green tape, “Dicky Price, not known for getting his hands dirty, but assumed to be the brains behind the activities of Walker and several other villains specialising in the same sort of robberies. No criminal record for the last thirty years, but did time back in the early eighties for using a knife on someone outside a pub after a row inside the pub. The victim wasn’t badly cut up and was reluctant to give evidence; one thing and another, Price got away with six months.”

He paused for breath; the only new thing in the briefing so far was the appearance of Walker last night. He took a deep breath and continued.

“After DS Morgan and DC Collis saw and photographed Walker, DI Jackson and DC Lambert continued surveillance until midnight. Schwarz, has a house in Esher, but lives above his shop during the week, and did not leave the premises. I have sent DS Green and DC Harper to pick up Schwarz and they should be getting back with him very shortly. “

10

It was a mark of the regard in which Ray Green was held within CID that the DCI had sent him to make the arrest rather than one of the DIs or even doing it himself. It also underlined the surprise many of us felt that it was Jill Harris, and not Ray, who had been promoted to fill the vacant DI post when Charlie Villiers retired.

As if by telepathy, the incident door room opened and Ray and DC Harper came in. Clifford welcomed them.

“Ah, Ray – nice timing. What news?”

“Picked him up, no problem, sir. I left one forensic team turning the place over, and a second team has gone to his place in Esher.”

“Has Schwarz said anything?”

“No sir, apart that is from ‘I want my lawyer’.”

“Has he made a call?”

“Yes sir, so his lawyer can be expected soon. In the meantime the custody sergeant has him tucked up in a holding cell.”

The DCI thought for a moment, but only for a moment.

“Right, when the legal eagle gets here, I’ll do the interview and I’ll have you with me, Ray.”

“Right, sir.”

It was an indication of how high a profile this case had. Normally Clifford would have left the preliminary interviewing to one of the DIs, but Schwarz merited the big gun from the outset. I thought it was a bit pointed that Clifford was going to have Ray with him and not Ray’s DI, Jill Harris, but there was the logic that Ray had been the arresting officer. There was, however, also the feeling, never openly expressed, that Clifford had been over-ruled in the matter of filling Charlie Villiers spot when he went; that the DCI was another who felt that Jill’s promotion had rather more to do with positive discrimination than giving the promotion to the best person for the job.

I risked a quick glance at Jill; she was clearly keeping her face immobile, expressing no emotion at all in what was happening.

The briefing broke up at that point and we all went our separate ways. When we got back to our own office I quizzed Jimmy Jackson on what he wanted me to do about another case we were involved in, a series of robberies from shops in the outlying villages – that is, if anywhere can be regarded as ‘outlying’ in Surrey.

The DCs and I had been round thirteen shops in the last few days; always the story was the same. The proprietor had been on the point of locking up for the night; he or she had invariably been alone. Before the door could be locked, two men had burst in. Inevitably, descriptions varied, but averaging them out, we were looking at one man considerably taller and more slightly built than the other, both wearing ski masks that concealed all but their eyes and mouths, both dressed in dark clothes – jeans or similar trousers, heavy sweaters. The tall robber was about six feet, perhaps as much as six feet two. The shorter one was about five eight or nine. They both wore gloves; only the shorter man spoke, and then only to demand the takings on pain of ‘a bashing’ as he put it. In every case the shop-keeper had offered no resistance and had been physically unharmed, although very shaken, but we were worried that if the robberies continued the robbers might come across a shop-keeper who would not be so easily cowed – and then what might happen?

I had racked my brains over the information that we had. These were not major occurrences – the biggest haul the robbers had got away with was a little under two thousand pounds, but add them all together and the total ‘take’ was around twenty thousand. OK, hardly the Great Train Robbery, but still worth having and no end yet it sight; the most recent robbery was only two nights previously. There was no discernible pattern; some robberies had been on consecutive days, others had been a week or so apart. The first of the series and the most recent had been at premises less than quarter of a mile apart; the one before the most recent had been fifteen miles away, and out of our division, but had come to us because it was clearly the same perpetrators. There were just two common factors. The robberies always occurred at closing time and there was no external CCTV coverage of the shops which had been hit, so we had no evidence of the assumed getaway vehicle. There had been internal CCTV in five of the shops, but the films were of little use. The robbers faces were covered by their ski masks, their clothing was dark with no distinguishing marks of any kind. Apart from bearing out the witnesses’ evidence that one robber was taller than the other and that the shorter man was the more heavily built of the two, the films gave us nothing.

11

Jimmy ran his right hand through his thinning sandy hair.

“God knows, Ken. There is just nothing, not a bloody thing, to go on. This pair of sods are laughing at us all, and I’d dearly like to see them nabbed, but how? There must be literally hundreds of suitable targets for them in Surrey,” he stopped in mid-sentence, “did you get anything from over the border, by the way?”

I had asked our bordering police authorities, Hampshire, Sussex and the Met, if our robbers had been active in their areas, but so far there had been nothing. I shook my head.

“Not so far, Jimmy. So far these buggers are all ours.”

“Pity,” he pushed his chair back from his desk. “There must be something that we can get on these two, somehow.”

His voice trailed off; he was fully aware that our chances of catching these two were slim, very slim, unless they tripped up in some way. As he had said, there were literally hundreds of potential targets for them throughout the county. There was no way we had anything even remotely approaching enough manpower to try to stake out a reasonable proportion of them in the hopes of catching the robbers in the act.

There was, however, one possible avenue that we had been reluctant to pursue because of the amount of police time it would absorb. We looked at each other; he sighed.

“OK, Ken, get Danny in here.”

I stuck my head out of the door; Danny Collis was at his desk and looked up.

“Danny, the boss wants you.”

He got up and walked into Jimmy’s cubby-hole of an office. With Danny’s six feet three bulky frame added to the two of us already in the place, we almost had to take it in turns to breathe. Jimmy smiled at him; it wasn’t the sort of smile that you wanted to see on your boss’ face – it was the inevitable precursor of a rotten job.

“Danny, got a nice little job for you.”

Danny wasn’t fooled by the description, but what could he do but look interested, keen almost?

“Yes, boss?”

“Danny, these shop robberies. We have, to be blunt, got absolutely nowhere so far. Now, none of the premises turned over have CCTV outside them, so we have no idea what vehicle the robbers have used to make their escape. What I want you to do is to sit down with the map and plot where each robbery has occurred and also the location of the nearest traffic cameras to those shops. Then I want you to look at the camera films for the relevant dates and times of the robberies and try and identify a vehicle which appears in all, or at least a significant number, of those films.”

Danny looked appalled, as well he might.

“Boss, that’ll take weeks.”

“Come on, Danny, you don’t think I expect you to do it all by yourself, do you? I’ve spoken to Uniform and they are lending us three PCs, so with a team of four of you on the job, you’ll have it done in no time.”

We all knew that it was a case of clutching at straws, but we could think of no other way of even beginning to make any progress in the case – and who knows, we might strike lucky. Of course, if the robbers used more than one vehicle, the exercise was hopeless from the outset – we all knew that as well.

Danny trailed out of the office, looking anything but happy.

What happened a couple of hours later over-shadowed everything else that CID had on its plate that day. I was at my desk going through some scruffy notes that I and the others had made of the surveillance of Harry Schwarz’s premises in order to prepare a comprehensive document to form part of the evidence against him, when I became aware of a commotion outside. I got up, opened the door and stuck my head out into the corridor.

The office layout for CID was a long corridor, with the various team offices and incident rooms off it, leading to a T-junction of a shorter corridor with the offices of the three DCIs and the head of divisional CID, the unloved and unlovely Detective Superintendent Harriet Wylock. The commotion was centred on that worthy; she was standing at the junction of the two corridors berating DCI Clifford. Her voice was at near screaming pitch.

12

“What do you fucking well mean, he’s DEAD?”

Clifford stood his ground.

“Just that, ma’am. The doctor’s with him now, but the paramedics have already said that he’s had it.”

I prudently withdrew my head, closed the office door, and awaited developments.

They didn’t take long to manifest themselves; Harry Schwarz, the target of four weeks of close surveillance and a lot of police overtime, had dropped dead in the holding cell from, it subsequently transpired, a massive heart attack. He had been seen as the key which would unlock a number of high profile robberies in recent months, robberies which had grossed over three million pounds. We knew full well that Schwarz was the money launderer for a number of villains in the Home Counties and were expecting to squeeze enough information out of him to put a lot of them behind bars. Now that opportunity had gone, and Wylock’s fury knew no bounds. Predictably, she was blaming everyone in sight. DCI Clifford should have brought Schwarz in earlier – even twenty-four hours earlier would have given the chance to wring something out of the man.

That conveniently overlooked the fact that if Clifford had brought Schwarz in the day before we would not have had the link to Dean Walker.

It was the fault of the custody sergeant for not keeping a better eye on Schwarz – stupid comment. Even if the sergeant had sat in the cell with Schwarz , what could he have done? He could, I suppose, have tried resuscitation techniques, but in fact, according to the doctor on the spot, later confirmed by the post mortem, Schwarz was dead as he hit the ground, perhaps even before he hit the ground.

The paramedics should have got there sooner – same comment.

None of this, however, diverted Wylock from her tirade of abuse to all and sundry. CID that day was an even more unhappy place than usual.

Somehow, I was lucky enough to escape her direct attention, unlike DCI Clifford and his DIs. Of the three DIs, Jill looked quite shaken when, in common with the other two, she emerged from the DSi’s office after a ten minute rant at a decibel level that penetrated walls and doors alike. Jimmy Jackson and Lloyd Ferris, on the other hand, emerged with ill-concealed anger bubbling below the surface.

I later learned from Jimmy that he had contemplated talking the other two into making a formal complaint against Wylock, but that Ferris had persuaded him out of it, on the grounds that Jill Harris would never stand the heat, and that it needed to be unanimous or not at all. I was sorry to hear that; I had thought that Jill was tougher than that, but perhaps I was wrong.

With Schwarz dead, the urgency of following up his activities diminished greatly. Oh, there was still the hope that we might find enough physical evidence in his shop or flat to give us something to use against one or more of his associates, but nobody was banking on it. Presumably that is why the basic digging was delegated to myself with Danny Collis and Liz Goode to assist me.

The three of us spent virtually the whole of the next week going through everything that we could find, both physically in Schwarz’s premises themselves, and virtually on his computers and in his written records.

It was a wild goose chase. Schwarz had been far too careful to leave any trace of illegal activity for us to find

– with one exception.

One of the first things that our forensic team had discovered was a large locked briefcase. Upon opening it, it was found to contain nearly a hundred thousand pounds in high denomination notes. The notes were traced to a security van robbery a week earlier. The briefcase was visually identical to that which Danny and I had seen Dean Walker carry into Schwarz’s shop on the final night of surveillance. Visual, however, was not enough. There were no fingerprints, other than those of Schwarz, on the plastic bags containing the money, and although Walker’s prints were on the case, he had an alibi for the day of the robbery – and a story to explain his prints on the case. He was brought in and questioned, but to no avail – we could not link him to the money; as the Crown Prosecution Service said, and as we had reluctantly to accept, a defence counsel would have us laughed out of court with so flimsy a case. That was something else which failed to please DSi Wylock; once again she had no hesitation in making her displeasure known to one and all.

Our assumption as to how Schwarz had worked was that he received the actual cash – and other items of value – taken by a loose circle of villains and laundered the cash, disposed of jewellery and the like, and paid off the suppliers in clean money. But that was it. It was an assumption and, although a perfectly logical one, 13

we were no nearer finding out how he had actually done it than we had been before arresting him. Schwarz had made a mistake in keeping that money overnight – but then, he had no idea that he would be arrested early the next morning, let alone that the morning would be his last on earth.

Clearly there was more to be found out about Schwarz’s operation, but with the man dead and soon to be buried, we had no way of progressing. He had no family to be quizzed, no known close associates, and although all six of the men who had been seen entering his premises of an evening clearly delivering something and leaving without it, were questioned closely, they simply denied any knowledge of wrong doing. Their stories were so similar that they must have been a prearranged response to being questioned; yes, they had visited ‘old Harry’ in his shop. Yes, they had left something with him. There the stories varied in detail. One had left a couple of candlesticks that had belonged to an old aunt. Another claimed to have left Schwarz with a couple of old books (the fact that the individual concerned, one Angus McCready formerly of Glasgow, gave every impression of virtual illiteracy, was ironic but unshakeable), and so on. In every case the fact that the individual was able to point to something in Schwarz’s stock and claim it to be the very item he had left was evidence of just how thorough Harry Schwarz had been.

The most frustrating case was Dean Walker’s explanation as to how his prints were on the briefcase the money had been in. Danny Collis and I had seen him go into the shop with a briefcase and leave without it.

Only one large briefcase, visually identical to that which Walker had been carrying, was found in the shop with his prints, and those of Harry Schwarz, the only ones on it. When opened it proved to contain the stolen money, but when Jimmy Jackson and I interviewed him, Walker simply shrugged his shoulders.

“You’d have to ask Harry where that money come from – nothin’ to do wi’ me. I took a big old glass vase –

used to belong to the wife’s mother – the old suitcase was the best thing to carry it in. Harry give me twenty quid for the vase – and a couple of quid for the case.”

What made Jimmy and I grit our teeth in frustration was the fact that Schwarz had an old fashioned ledger on the counter of his shop and there in his spidery handwriting was an entry for the purchase of a vase and a briefcase for a total of twenty-two pounds. When it was checked, we even found Walker’s prints on the vase he claimed to have sold to Schwarz. Walker was fireproof and he knew it. Even from beyond the grave Harry Schwarz’s cunning system protected his clients.

As we slowly ran out of steam trying to find some means of linking the dead fence with his clientele, the various items that had been taken from his shop and flat were bagged up and put in the evidence store. It was extremely unlikely that they would ever prove to be of any use, but just in case...

By the end of a week we had all moved on to other cases, admitting that Schwarz’s death had totally defeated us. One bit of progress; Danny and his uniformed helpers had managed to whittle down the hundreds of vehicles that had been near the various robbed shops to a short list of five vehicles. None of them had been in the vicinity of all of the shops when they had been robbed, but all five had been reported as stolen and had been in the right place at the right time for one each of the robberies. Although this was progress, it was progress of the worst kind – it seemed to prove that the robbers were stealing a car for each robbery. I was about to give up in despair and send the uniform guys back when I had another thought. Danny and his helpers had meticulously logged all the vehicles which had appeared on the traffic cameras at a time that could have placed then at the shops when they were robbed; there were hundreds of them, but such is the wonder of computer technology that when I explained my idea to Danny we had a result within the hour. A Vauxhall Vectra had been in the right place at the right time for the eight most recent robberies – and each time it had been wearing the same false trade number plates.

I explained my thinking to Jimmy Jackson when we briefed him.

“You see, boss, they started off nicking a fresh car for each job, then dumped it when they were done. In every case the stolen vehicle was recovered shortly afterwards within a mile or three of the job for which it had been used. After five robberies, however, something made them change – perhaps they got a scare from a traffic car or something, who knows? Anyway, for the last eight jobs they have used the same car – a Vauxhall Vectra. Each time they used false plates – but not just ordinary false plates - that’s dangerous in itself, a number plate recognition camera might well pick them up, so they used trade plates. Nobody is 14

going to suspect a car with trade plates on it, and unless there is a good reason to dig deep, they won’t flag up on a recognition camera. My money is on them driving to somewhere near the job, fixing the false trade plates, doing the job, then taking the false plates off as soon as they felt it safe to do so, or perhaps even fixing the trade plates on before they set off on the job. Much safer than nicking a fresh car every time.”

I paused for effect.

“And, it gets better. Danny and uniform lads trawled a bit further afield than we originally intended and came up with the same Vectra in three cases. OK, not all eight, but enough to be worth having a look at the owner.”

“Who is it?”

“Chap called David Lewis, lives in Godalming. I thought that we could go and have a word, but then I wondered if that was wise. After all, they only stole untraceable cash, they didn’t leave any prints, the ski masks mean that none of the victims are likely to be able to identify them.”

“Anything known?”

“Yes, he has a bit of form. Nicked a few cars as a youngster, then got done for drink driving when he was twenty – that was in two thousand. Banned for twelve months, despite which he was caught well over the limit, both in terms of alcohol and speed, just six months later – so an eighteen month ban. No violence though, no punch-ups, no domestics or anything like that. Clean since that ban, which expired in two thousand and two.”

“So what do you think that we should do now, Ken?”

“Set a bit of a trap. We know the robberies always occur as the shops are closing – six o’clock. Have an unmarked car near Lewis’ house from five thirty and see what happens – if no action by six, no need to stay any longer, so we aren’t talking about using a lot of resources. Two villains, so four of us in the car to ‘shock and awe’ like that American general said. Fortunately he lives in a cul-de-sac, so can only come out one way, making following him easier.”

“OK, Ken, seems a good idea. If nothing happens after, let’s say four days, we’ll pull him in anyway.”

I thought four days was a bit optimistic, but it was a start.

As a result, two days later I was sitting in an unmarked car with DC Bruce Thorpe and two uniformed PCs, parked so that I could see the exit of Lewis’ road. We had only been in position just over five minutes when the Vectra, already wearing the trade plates, which had been carefully located to mostly conceal the car’s normal registration, came out of the road. There were two men in it. Game on.

Bruce was driving and kept a careful distance behind the suspects as we trailed them to Milford, and then down the A283 to Chiddingfold.

The Vectra coasted to a stop outside a small convenience store; it was three minutes to six. A woman emerged, carrying a shopping basket. She paused at the door, half turned back and, over her shoulder, said something to somebody still in the shop; then she walked away.

Moments later the doors of the Vectra opened and the two occupants emerged, pulling ski masks down over their faces as they did so.

“Wait,” I said to my companions. I waited for what seemed an eternity, then decided to make my move.

“OK, let’s go.”

All four of us dashed into the shop. We could not have timed it more perfectly. The taller of the two robbers was actually in the act of emptying the till, whilst his stocky companion was eyeballing a frightened middle-aged woman just a few feet away.

Both men turned as we burst into the shop; the tall man seemed temporarily paralysed with shock as he simply stood there, but his companion pushed the woman violently to one side and tried to run through us to the open door. He didn’t have a chance. PC George Harris, heavily built as befits all prop forwards, especially those who play for Surrey police, simply crashed into him with a crunching body slam. The robber was knocked off his feet, ending in a tangled heap on the floor. George dropped, knees first, on top of him, driving the breath from his body, pulled his arms behind his back, and handcuffed him.

The tall robber, doubtless influenced by what had happened to his companion, offered no resistance and in a matter of minutes George and Harry Ingram, his uniformed companion, had both robbers in the cars, one in 15

our police vehicle, the other in the robbers’ own Vectra, whilst Bruce and I interviewed the shopkeeper.

Before taking the robbers to the cars, however, we had removed their ski masks. The tall one was young, early twenties or so, with a pale face smothered in freckles and a shock of ginger hair to offset green eyes which, combined with a long, narrow face, gave him almost a ‘pop-eyed’ appearance; his companion was swarthy of complexion, dark hair with streaks of grey making him look considerably older than his actual age of thirty-two, which we had previously gleaned when we looked into the details of his car. Heavy brows, also pepper and salt, overhung deep-set dark, almost black, eyes which were set about a prominent nose which had been badly broken at some stage of his life. As befitted his stocky build, his head was almost a cube, and looked as though it had been hacked from some sort of hard stone by a careless sculptor.

The shopkeeper, Mrs Jane Roberts, was quickly recovering her composure and was effusive in her thanks for our efforts. We took a brief statement from her, agreed that she would visit the station the next morning to put her signature to a written version, and took our leave.

I was feeling pretty good when I reported the outcome of our efforts to Jimmy Jackson when we got back to the station and he was very complimentary to all of us who had contributed – for I made sure that Danny, Bruce, George and Harry, plus the three PCs who had helped Danny trawl through those interminable camera images, got their just desserts. A check of criminal records revealed that both men already had form; David Lewis, currently aged thirty-two, as we already knew had the two previous convictions for drink driving, plus three counts of stealing cars, two of which were whilst he was still a juvenile. John William Carter, ten years younger, had just a single blot on his copybook; four years earlier he had been sent down for twelve months for robbery with violence. The violence hadn’t been very serious – a shopkeeper slapped around a bit and threatened – hence the comparatively lenient sentence.

Of course it was all too good to be true. The next morning I was at my desk when the phone went. It was an internal call from Stella Marshall, who had the unenviable task of being personal secretary to DSi Wylock.

Could I please report to the DSi at once.

I walked the short distance to DSi Wylock’s office wondering what she wanted this time. I found it hard to believe that she was going to congratulate me for my efforts the previous day. Hell would freeze over before she dished out praise to any of her subordinates.

I knocked on her door and, in obedience to a growl of ‘Come in’, I did so. I found Jimmy Jackson was already there, seated in one of the two visitors’ chairs and looking decidedly uneasy.

The Gorgon spoke.

“Ah, there you are, Morgan. Pleased with yourself?”

This already had the feel on an unpleasant interview about it.

“Sorry, ma’am – in what way?”

“About yesterday’s fucking abortion of an exercise.”

I looked at her in amazement. Just where was she coming from?

“Sorry, ma’am – I don’t understand. We arrested the two robbers responsible for thirteen robberies over the last few weeks. Caught them red-handed.”

“Red-handed was it? Explain – tell me just what you mean by that.”

“We caught them in the shop. One of them had actually removed the takings from the till –he still had the money in his hand. We unmasked them so that the shopkeeper could later identify them later if needs be. I don’t see how we could have got any more positive a result.”

She glared at me as though I was some unpleasant addition she had found on her shoe.

“So, Morgan, tell me. You followed the suspects from the house of – what was his name?”

“Lewis, ma’am.”

“Yes, Lewis. So, you followed then from Lewis’ house to the shop, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“You were sure that Lewis and his accomplice – at that time unknown to you – were the robbers you were after, right?”

“Yes.”

16

“So, you followed them to the shop. Then, and this just passes my understanding, you sat on your arse in your own car until they went into the shop they had targeted. Right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did it not cross your pea-sized excuse for a fucking brain that it might have been just a bit brighter to stop them before they went into that shop? By letting them enter you were putting a member of the public at risk.

When you and your cowboy posse finally went in there, that shopkeeper could have been dead. She might have resisted and been killed for her action. Did you not think of that? Well?”

I swallowed hard to contain my anger.

“Ma’am, in thirteen robberies they have never perpetrated any violence. I had no reason to expect that this time would be any different – and it wasn’t. If we had stopped them from going in – then what? Up to that point they hadn’t committed any crime. We would not even have had grounds to arrest them. I did think about the possible danger to the shopkeeper and decided that in terms of risk assessment it was minimal.”

“All very well to say that now, Morgan, but it would have been a different story if this time they had used violence, wouldn’t it? Just think what the media would have made of it – four of our officers sit on their bloody arses in their bloody car whilst a helpless bloody woman is beaten up, even killed.”

I was furious; there was an element of sense in what she was saying, but only an element – and not a strong element. As I had already told her, I had thought of the risk involved for the shopkeeper; I reckoned it was very low and the opportunity to catch the robbers in the act, and put them away so that no further shopkeepers would be put in risk by them seemed a good course of action.

“Ma’am, we waited only moments before going in. They simply would not have had time to be obstructed by the shopkeeper and decide to do her harm. I’m sorry you aren’t happy at the result, but I think we did everything that we could be expected to.”

It was the wrong thing to say – her face became flushed in her fury.

“I’ll tell you what you are expected to do, sergeant – and don’t you fucking well dare to take that tone with me again.”

I said nothing, just glared back at her.

All this time Jimmy had sat silent; now, however, he interceded.

“Ma’am, if you are unhappy at what happened yesterday, I must respectfully ask that you take it up with me, not with Detective Sergeant Morgan. I approved of his plan of action. I still approve of it.”

Wylock turned her basilisk glare in Jimmy,

“Don’t tell me what to do, Inspector. You and I haven’t finished about this yet.” She turned her attention to me. “That’ll do, Morgan – on your way.”

Quarter of an hour later, still seething at the way that I had been treated, I was in Jimmy’s office. He listened to me moan for a good five minutes, then held his hands up, palms facing me, to stop the flow.

“Ken, I’m sorry, but Wylock is Wylock. We’ll just have to take it until she either goes too far or finds somewhere else to mess up. She does have the makings of a slight point, of course. I suppose that it is just possible that something could have gone wrong yesterday; the fact that nothing did go wrong is a reflection on how well you and your team performed, but that doesn’t seem to cut any ice with madam.”

“Jimmy, I’m honestly thinking of asking for a transfer – a transfer to anywhere to get away from that wretched woman. This used to be a good department – not just a good department to work in, but a department that got good results – she’s wrecking it.”

Even as I said it, I knew that I was wasting my breath. Jimmy knew just as well as I did – in fact probably better than I did – the effect Wylock was having on morale and effectiveness. Going on at him was pointless.

I changed the subject.

“Jimmy, I want out. There is a vacancy for a DS in East Division and I want to apply for it. I haven’t done anything about it until I spoke with you, but I really have had enough of that bloody woman.”

Jimmy looked at me thoughtfully.

“Ken, have you really thought this through? I know that you were put out when Jill Harris got made up instead of you or Ray, but I’m going in a few months and one of you is just about sure to step up in my place.

Transfer over to East as a DS and you’ll be seen as the new boy – and at the moment there is unlikely to be a 17

DI vacancy there for at least a couple of years. Also, a sideways transfer never looks very good on anybody’s record.”

I frowned; what he was saying made good sense, but I wondered how long I could put up with being berated by the DSi before I totally lost it and found myself up on a disciplinary. Jimmy’s point about Ray or myself surely being in line to succeed him was a good one – but whoever got the DI’s job would be that much nearer the wrath of Wylock. What it must be like for the DCIs having to meet with the woman every day I didn’t even want to imagine. I hesitated; there were two sides to the coin, and neither seemed very attractive.

“Perhaps you’re right, Jimmy – and I can always hope that she will step out under a bus someday soon.”

Jimmy grunted his agreement, then turned to something new.

“Ken, one last thing on the Harry Schwarz fiasco; we’ve got an inventory of everything we took but I think that we also need it computer indexed, there is so much of it; that way we can cross-reference as well as just looking for things if we need to. I’ve set Liz onto and told her to come to you when it is finished because as you know, I’m off on leave next week for three weeks. I’ve told her it isn’t urgent, but it does need to be done, so make sure that it is, won’t you?”

I nodded my agreement and he went on.

“You’ll be in charge of the team whilst I’m away of course. I’ve spoken to Henry Clifford and he’s happy with you reporting direct to him, not to one of the DIs.”

“Right, boss. Going away?”

“Yes, Helen and I haven’t had a decent break in over a year, so I’m taking her over to France for the second and third week – staying in a cottage her brother owns in Brittany. The first week I’ve promised her that I’ll decorate the living room at long last – been putting it off for too long – should really have done it last year if not the year before.”

Jimmy left that Saturday for his well deserved break. It was the following Wednesday that Liz Goode came to me with the computer print-out of the indexed list of all we had taken from Harry Schwarz’s flat and shop, items which now reposed in the evidence store. I looked quickly through it; as I had expected Liz had done a meticulous job; in addition to entering the index on the computer she had also prepared two hard copies –

one for the file and one to stay with the items in the evidence store.

I congratulated her on a job well done, then turned to other things.

“Liz, I’d like you to interview the Morrisons again. When Danny and I spoke to them I got the feeling that Mrs. Morrison was reluctant to say too much in front of her husband. If you could ‘accidently’ pop in to talk to her whilst hubby is at work, you might well get more than we managed. Go on your own – it’ll look less formal.”

She nodded her head.

“OK, sarge, I’ll go this afternoon.”

The Morrisons, Alfred, aged forty-six and a car mechanic at the local Ford franchise, and his wife Brenda, aged forty and a part-time checkout operative at the local Tesco store in the mornings, had a seventeen year old son who was currently being held on remand for a particularly nasty attack on a fellow teenager after an alleged argument over a disputed girl-friend. The other lad was in hospital with multiple injuries, none of them life-threatening, but bad enough for him to expect to be kept in for at least a couple more weeks and facing the prospect of several months of pain before he could expect to walk properly again. When Danny and I had spoken with his parents in the hope of learning a bit of in-depth knowledge about what had happened, I had gleaned the impression that there was more to it than appeared on the surface. Interviewing the boy, Colin, had got us nowhere. He had met every question with a surly lack of cooperation; however, I had a feeling that he was frightened of something or someone, and not just the law.

Just over two hours later Liz returned, flushed with success.

“You were right, sarge. Colin Morrison is scared out of his wits that the brother of the lad he attacked will come after him now he is back on the streets, And,” here she could hardly contain herself, “the brother he’s so worried about is Sammy Hughes!”

18

I looked at her in astonishment. Sammy Hughes was one of the six villains we had been trying to link to Harry Schwarz. At twenty-four, by a margin the youngest of the sextet, he already had the worst record; he was only six months out of serving five years, firstly in a young offenders’ institution, then transferring to an adult prison, for grievous bodily harm, a case in which two schoolboys who had made the mistake of mocking his misshapen face – the result of a traffic accident in his childhood – had been lucky to escape with their lives. Indeed, it had originally been contemplating charging him with attempted murder, but the CPS

had decided that the clear lack of premeditation made it more sensible to proceed with the lesser charge.

“But the youngster Colin Morrison beat up is called Jenkins, not Hughes. How come?”

“Second marriage, sarge. Mrs. Jenkins used to be Mrs. Hughes; when Mr. Hughes walked out she remarried.

Simple as that.”

I mulled over what Liz had found out. In the circumstances I could well understand Morrison junior being worried, but why had I got the impression when Danny and I talked to his parents that the mother was unwilling to say much whilst her husband was there?

“So, why didn’t this come out before?”

“Mrs. Morrison was reluctant to talk in front of her husband because Alfred Morrison is a drinking buddy of Sammy Hughes’ father, Nick Hughes.”

Things were getting complicated. Nick Hughes was not one of the six men we had wanted to tie to Schwarz, but he did have a record for breaking and entering in a fairly small way. He had done time – although only twelve months – about ten years earlier, but there was nothing against him since then. “Gawd, this is getting too incestuous for a simple copper. Still, when you think about it, I suppose it doesn’t really change things very much – just means we know more of the background than we did.”

A thought struck me.

“Liz, Alfred Morrison is a motor mechanic, right?” She nodded. “so he could probably get his hands on a set of dodgy trade plates if he was of a mind to, right?”

She was ahead of me.

“You think there might be a link to the two that you and the guys picked up yesterday?”

“Just might be. See what you can dig out, will you please.”

With that she went back to her desk (I was camping in Jimmy’s office whilst he was away) leaving me to my thoughts. The two robbers we had picked up the day before weren’t anywhere near Harry Schwarz’s league as far as I knew. Unlike Schwarz’s ‘clients’ they had no need for a fence or a money launderer; they only dealt in relatively small amounts of ready cash, nothing traceable.

A thought struck me and I stuck my head out of the office door

“Liz, could you check if Morrison senior has a record.”

Less than five minutes later I had the answer.

“Sarge, he has two convictions for drunk driving. The first was back in 1985 when he was eighteen. Fined and banned for twelve months. Second was more serious. He served six months and had a three year ban in 2001, and I checked him against Nick Hughes – they were in the same prison at the same time, so probably met there.”

The links were getting stronger. I wondered once more whether Alfred Morrison also tied in with my robbers from the day before as well as with Nick Hughes.

I had another thought, again providing Liz Goode with a search of the records. She looked up expectantly as I emerged once more from Jimmy’s office.

“Liz, the two we lifted yesterday – Lewis and Carter – can you check if they have any known associates?”

As I said the words, I realised that it had been remiss of me not to have acquired such information already.

Liz came back to me just minutes later.

“Over and above being acquainted with each other, of course, both Lewis and Carter have associated in the past with both of the Hughes, father and son, and Lewis with Alfred Morrison, so it looks very likely that he was the source of the dodgy trade plates.”

“So, I mused aloud, “we have links beyond that circle of villains we looked at for Schwarz. But Lewis and Carter are small time. Nowhere near the level of Walker or Price, for instance.”

19

“But it’s not those two they associate with, sarge. It’s Hughes, father and son.”

“True, but I do wonder if our two minor villains might not be a source of gen on bigger fish. Worth trying, anyway. Liz – you’ve done all the digging. Sit in with me whilst I have another chat with them.”

I decided to interview David Lewis first, on the assumption that as the older of the two robbers, and the owner of the car that they had used, he was presumably the leader. He lounged back in his chair, facing Liz and myself across the table in the interview room. Fern Harrison, the duty solicitor, was seated beside him, her neat and professional appearance in a smart dark blue trouser suit, ruffed white blouse and a small scarab brooch on her lapel complementing her classical good looks, high cheekbones, a mouth neither too thin nor too full, and hazel eyes alive with intelligence, put her at considerable variance with her scruffy, brutish client.

Lewis treated Liz and myself to a contemptuous sneer as I started the dual recorder and recited my name, then indicated to the other s to do likewise. Liz spoke her rank and name, Fern Harrison identified herself and Lewis just looked blankly at us.

After a long pause, I leant forward and spoke once more into the microphone.

“Also present is Mr. David Lewis, accused of robbery with violence, who has declined to identify himself.

His identity is confirmed by his solicitor.”

I looked at her, and she responded to the cue.

“I conform that my client, Mr. David Lewis, is also present and currently exercising his right to silence.”

I stared at the robber for several seconds before finally speaking.

“Mr. Lewis, I would like you to understand your situation here. You were arrested red-handed in the process of robbing a shop, after threatening the shopkeeper with violence. We have video evidence of your car, with yourself and Mr. Carter clearly visible within it, in the vicinity of eight other robberies at the relevant time for you to have been responsible for those crimes as well. We have a link to your source of the false trade number plates whom we expect to provide further evidence against you.”

At that point I saw the faintest flicker of unease cross his face. I pressed on.

“You know that we don’t make deals with criminals such as yourself. However, I want to know what you can tell me about Harry Schwarz, Dean Walker, Dicky Price, Nick Hughes and his son Sammy Hughes and Alfred Morrison.”

He looked more and more surprised as I reeled off the list of names, and surveyed me in puzzlement. Before he could say anything, if indeed he had any intention of saying anything, Fern Harrison cut in.

“Sergeant, I am at a loss to understand the purpose of your question. Are you implying that these men, or any of them, have contributed to the alleged crime of which my client is accused?”

“Ms. Harrison, let me first disabuse you on one point. There is nothing alleged about the crime your client has committed and for which he will undoubtedly go to jail. Quite apart from anything else, we have CCTV

film, and given that it comes from a small retail establishment, film of surprisingly high quality, which shows your client and his associate, Mr. Carter, entering Mrs. Roberts’ shop, both, at that point, wearing masks. The film shows your client manhandling Mrs. Roberts in a threatening manner, causing her considerable fear and distress. It shows Mr. Carter emptying the till. It then shows myself and three other officers entering the shop, your client attempting to escape and being restrained and finally, it shows both robbers being unmasked and filmed beyond any shadow of a doubt as to their identity. So, let’s forget any rubbish about this being an alleged crime, shall we? Your client is guilty beyond any shred of a doubt and will go to prison. What I am now offering him is a chance to assist the police in further enquiries that we are currently making into a wide range of crimes in this area. If he does so, the fact will be made known to the judge when he comes to trial and may possibly influence the judge towards a more lenient sentence than would otherwise be the case, but I must emphasise that this is not the offer of a deal.”

Lewis spoke for the first time.

“You mean you want me to grass people up? Fuckin’ forget it. I ain’t no bleeding grass.”

And, despite further pressing, I could get nothing from him.

After he had left, accompanied by Fern Harrison, I turned to Liz Goode.

20

“OK, let’s have the other loser in.”

Ten minutes later, and we were faced by John Carter. As with Lewis, he had a duty solicitor with him, but not Fern Harrison – as both were to be tried for the same offences, they would need different legal representatives. Carter’s solicitor was Douglas Mountjoy, whose appearance belied his somewhat aristocratic sounding name. A man in his early fifties, he was small and tubby, dressed in a dark blue suit which clearly had seen better days, over a slightly less than pristine white shirt and a startlingly bright orange tie which only served to emphasise his pasty complexion and the weak, watery blue eyes. Thinning hair, once black, now nearly all grey, was plastered across his skull in the manner of the 1950s, and circular framed spectacles, looking even more dated than his hair style, were perched on the bridge of a long, narrow nose. I must say that had I seen him coming to be my legal representative, my heart would have sunk to my boots.

Carter, if anything, was even less prepossessing. Tall and thin, six feet two inches and less than twelve stone, his ginger hair, so noticeable a feature when we had first unmasked him in Mrs. Roberts’ shop, had somehow lost all life and his already pallid complexion was paler still, throwing into contrast the multitude of freckles on his face. His long, narrow face bore an expression of anxiety, as well it might. He had already served one prison sentence; now he was facing the certainty of another, and almost certainly one of considerably longer duration. His clothing was grubby and wrinkled; dark jeans and sweater, were both in need of a wash and the shirt collar which now showed above the neck of the sweater was, again, grubby and crumpled. Still, to be fair to him, he had spent the night in a holding cell with precious little in the way of amenities.

Once again I started the dual recorder and had everyone identify themselves, which, unlike his companion in crime, Carter did without a problem. Again, I waited for a while before speaking, watching him closely; he was clearly uneasy. Seated to his right his solicitor started to look uneasy as well, and I could see that he was about to speak up. I had no wish to give the impression that I was reacting to him, which would have reduced the impression of my control over the interview, so decided it was time to break the silence.

“You’re in real trouble now, aren’t you, John?”

He looked nervously at me but said nothing.

“Yes, really in it this time. When it comes to court the evidence against you is absolutely cast iron. Even if the jury don’t like coppers and think we go around stitching up people like you two, they won’t be able to dispute the CCTV footage, nor what Mrs. Roberts will say in her evidence. No, you are going down, John. I wonder how long for? Now, your big problem is that you’ve already done time. The judge is almost certainly going to think that twelve months last time didn’t teach you anything, so this time you can look to a good bit longer. Now we both know that prison isn’t the holiday camp a lot of people like to think that it is – and a good looking young man like yourself can expect a fair amount of unwelcome attention.”

Both Carter and his solicitor shifted uneasily in their seats; I carried on.

“Now, you are going down. I wouldn’t be surprised at the judge handing you a five stretch – and you certainly won’t start in a minimum security nick like you did last time. No, you’ll find yourself with some of the hard cases – I don’t suppose that you will enjoy that at all.”

I sat back in my chair and looked long and hard at him.

“Now, John, you know as well as I do that we don’t do deals with criminals. However, there is always the chance that if you plead guilty and if we can tell the judge that you have been helpful in our enquiries into other crimes around the county, he might be disposed to be a bit more lenient when it comes to sentencing.”

Carter looked up at me; for the last few minutes he had been gazing at the table top as though seeking for inspiration as I piled on the agony, but my most recent words had given him just a glimmer of hope.

“What sort of help?” he enquired hoarsely.

“I want you to tell me all you know about Harry Schwarz, Dean Walker, Dicky Price, Nick Hughes and his son Sammy Hughes and Alfred Morrison.”

He looked bemused.

“Me? I don’t know them guys – well, not know them, like – I mean, I know of Harry Schwarz, and Dean Walker, and Nick Hughes is a drinking buddy of Dave Lewis and I know he knows Alfie Morrison as well –

all three of them go to the The Keep – that pub in Castle Street opposite the castle.”

21

“All right, let’s start by keeping it simple. Dave Lewis used false trade plates on is car for when you did the robberies. Where did he get them?”

“Alfie Morrison – he’s a mechanic in that big Ford place. He got them for Dave.”

“Why? Old pals act? Money? Cut of the profits?”

“Dave just paid him for starters – a couple of hundred I think, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Did Morrison know about the robberies – know what those plates were for?”

“He must’ve done, mustn’t he?”

“You tell me, John, you tell me.”

“Well Dave and him drinks together regular – I join them sometimes, but not often. Week before last we was all three there and Alfie asks Dave how things are going – and Dave says that thanks to the plates, very well, so Alfie says how about a little cut seeing it’s the plates what made it possible. Dave wasn’t too chuffed, but he slipped him another couple of hundred or so to keep him sweet.”

“So, Alfie Morrison supplied the plates knowing what they would be used for, and then accepted part of the proceeds of the robberies – is that it?”

“Yes, I reckon so.”

“Right, now let’s move on to Nick Hughes. What can you tell me about him?”

“Well, like what I said, him and Dave are drinking buddies regular, like. Nick’s a bit of an old has-been; did a bit of time and he don’t want to risk going back – lost his bottle total, he has. I know his lad, Sammy, is a bit of a hard nut. Wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of Sammy, you wouldn’t. I reckon even old Nick himself , even though he’s his dad, walks careful round Sammy. I know he done time for bashing two twits that made fun of his face – Sammy’s no oil paintin’ but it don’t do to say nothin’ about it. Course he knocks around with Dean Walker again now he’s out of stir.”

I pricked my ears. This was something new; before Carter’s comment we had had nothing to link Walker and Hughes junior.

“Tell me more, John. I’m sure that those two do more than just knock around together.”

Carter paused, licking his lips nervously.

“Look,” he said at last, “you really will put a word in with the beak for me, won’t you?”

“As I said, he – or she – will be told of your cooperation. What use the judge makes of that information is up to him.”

Carte hesitated again, his eyes darting from me to Liz, then back again to me.

“Look, I ain’t goin’ into no witness box, no matter what. If Sammy and Dean Walker knowed I was telling you this, I’d be a dead man. You know that security van robbery, just over a week or so back? That were Dean, Sammy and Pete Cole.”

A new name in association with Dean Walker; Peter Cole was, however, another of the men whose photos adorned the white board in our incident room.

I stared at him for a long, slow matter of seconds.

“Come on, John. You know that a witness who won’t go into the box is no use to me. How do you know this, anyway?”

He shifted uneasily in his chair, then turned to his solicitor and whispered in his ear. Mountjoy heard him out, then turned to me.

“Sergeant, I think that it might help all of us if I could have a few minutes alone with my client.”

I nodded in acquiescence.

“How long would you like, Mr. Mountjoy?”

“I think that ten minutes would be adequate.”

“Very well. There is a uniformed officer outside the door. Let him know when you are ready for the interview to be resumed and he will fetch us.”

I switched off the recorder and Liz and I left the room; I passed the necessary information to the constable on the door and we both returned to Jimmy’s office. Jimmy had a coffee maker on the windowsill and I brewed us both up a cup of strong, black liquid which proved to be somewhere in the stratosphere in the caffeine level stakes. By then I needed it, and it looked as though Liz did as well.

22

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“He’s scared. He’s scared of us, he’s scared of jail but above all he’s scared of his mates. I can’t see him giving us anything much more than we’ve got.”

I nodded. “That’s how I see him too – so why is he asking for time with his brief?”

Liz shrugged and shook her head in puzzlement.

Ten minutes later we were told that Carter and Mountjoy had finished their chinwag and we trooped back into the interview room. I restarted the recorder, stated the time and once more had everyone identify themselves. Then I leant back in my chair and looked Carter in the eye.

“Well, John, what have you got to tell us now?”

However, it was Mountjoy who spoke first.

“Sergeant, my client wishes to make a further statement to you, but he wishes it to be understood that under no circumstances would he be willing to go into the witness stand in any trial which might be held in the future. He says this, not because he wishes to be uncooperative, but because he is in genuine fear of his life should persons he is about to mention should hear of his talking to you.”

I looked from one to the other.

“You could always be subpoenaed, John.”

He shifted uneasily in his chair, but again it was Mountjoy who spoke .

“In that case Mr. Carter would refuse to testify in court. He appreciates that he could then be held in contempt, might even be jailed for that contempt, but that is far preferable to him than falling foul of the dangerous and violent men he is about to name.”

I waited patiently; at last Carter nervously cleared his throat and started to speak.

“Like I said, that security van job were done by Dean Walker, Sammy Hughes and Pete Cole. You remember how it were done?”

I nodded. The van involved had been a security van collecting cash from a wide range of businesses, including franchises at Gatwick Airport, prior to transferring the money to the bank. Just about at the end of its run it had been the subject of robbery with violence. It had been ambushed by two vehicles; as it had turned into an industrial estate it had found its path blocked by a Transit van which had suddenly shot in front of it from a warehouse entrance. Simultaneously, it had been blocked from behind by a second Transit, from which two men, one armed with a baseball bat, the other with a sawn-off shotgun, had emerged. The driver and his mate had been forced from the cab; the driver had protested and been badly beaten for his pains. The robbers had then driven the security van away, joined as they did so by the driver of the first Transit. Both vans had been found burnt out the next day, some twenty miles away. The second Transit, the one which had blocked the security van from behind, had been abandoned by the robbers; despite intensive scrutiny by our forensic people, it had yielded no useful information.

The pickings from such a robbery, with so many transactions now done by credit card, were nothing like they would have been a couple of decades or so ago; even so, the robbers had benefitted by over two hundred thousand pounds in cash. The biggest element had been from the Gatwick franchises, of course, and it was here that we had been lucky. The van had picked up cash from a faulty cash machine; the notes were unissued and the numbers known, which was how we had been able to link the money in Schwarz’s briefcase to the stolen money.

Carter continued his tale.

“Well, they needed those two vans to do it, right?”

I nodded once more.

“Well, they had them nicked – by Alfie Morrison. He’s a Ford mechanic, so he can get his hands on Ford master keys, so provided it’s a Ford, he can get anything you like. He’s got a big lock-up on the Slyfield industrial estate in north of the town. He kept the vans there until they was needed for the job. I knows about his lock-up because when he done those plates for Dave and me I got a bit curious like and followed him –

you never can tell when what you knows may come in handy – like now!”

23

I wondered if he was telling me the truth; Carter didn’t seem over-endowed with brains and the thought of him following Morrison in the way he described, just on the off chance of finding out something useful, scarcely rang true.

I stared at him without speaking. Eventually he began to fidget nervously. At last I broke the silence.

“Come on, John. Do you think I was born yesterday? Followed him on the off chance –pull the other one.

It’s got bells on it.”

He hesitated, looked at Mountjoy, who regarded him blankly, then at Liz, then finally back at me.

“All right, I knew he had a storage place of some sort. I thought that it might be worth a look at some time in the future, when he might have summat in there worth lifting. I took good care he didn’t know I was following him, mind you.”

An endearing example of honour among thieves.

“Right,” I said, “so Alfie Morrison supplied the two Transits that were used in the robbery. He stole them to order, kept them until they were needed and presumably did it for money, not love?”

Carter nodded his head vigorously in agreement. I had another thought.

“John, Alfie Morrison also supplied you and Dave Lewis with the false trade plates that you used to disguise his Vectra. But before you had those plates, you were using stolen cars. Did they come from Alfie Morrison as well?”

I was pretty certain that I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from Carter’s lips, and he promptly obliged.

“Nah, course not. We lifted them just before we used them, then dumped them as soon as we were away.”

I turned to Liz.

“DC Goode, would you please ensure that car theft is added to the charges against Lewis and Carter.”

Her short fair hair bobbed as she nodded her head and made a note on the pad in front of her.

“Right, sergeant, I’ve got that noted and I’ll get it added to the charge sheet when we’re through here.”

Carter looked unhappy.

“What did you expect, John? It came out of your own mouth in the presence of your solicitor. No way of going back on what you’ve said to us. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of all this – nothing you have told us so far is anything that can be used in court without a witness in the box to back it all up.”

He was beginning to luck desperate, and finally took the plunge.

“Look, I can’t go in no witness box. They’d kill me, honest they would.”

I said nothing, simply stared at him. The silence lengthened, with Carter growing visibly more uneasy.

Finally he spoke again.

“Look, if you want proof as to what went on over that van robbery, why don’t you have a go at Alfie Morrison? He knows more than I does – bleedin’ ‘ell – he nicked them vans for it.”

I looked him in the eye.

“So, John, you reckon that we should turn over Morrison’s lock-up and drag him in here for questioning?”

He nodded eagerly.

“S’right.”

“All on your say so, when you still haven’t given anything that will stand up in court. I don’t think so – I’ll want much more than that to think that you are really trying your best to cooperate.”

I stared at him, long and hard, letting him stew. Finally I broke the silence.

“Sorry, John, but as far as I am concerned, you’ve blown it. No kind word to the judge, I’m afraid.”

I made to turn to the recorder as though to switch it off. The ploy worked.

“No, wait.”

I hesitated, my hand theatrically poised over the recorder’s switch.

“Well?”

“Look, there’s summat else. It’s that security van job. You remember one of the guys had a shooter? A sawn off?”

I nodded.

24

“That were Pete Cole. Sammy and Dean didn’t like it – too much can go wrong when shooters are involved, but Pete insisted. He reckoned the sight of that sawn off was all he would need. He says, don’t know if it were true, that he didn’t even load it.”

“So what is all that to me?”

He looked, if possible, even less at ease.

“Look, just like, having a sawn-off is enough to put you inside, ain’t that so?”

I nodded.

“Well, Pete keeps it at his sister’s place – she’s got a garage wiv a roof space and when Pete don’t need it, that’s where it’s kept. His sister don’t like it, but Pete’s a vicious bugger and she’s shit scared of him. I don’t think he’d actually get too violent wiv her, but he can’t stand her bloke and she knows right well Pete wouldn’t lose any sleep abart doin’ him over.”

I thought over what I was being told.

“All well and good, John, but finding that sawn-off in his sister’s place won’t get me Cole and the others, now will it? Why should I care about getting his sister banged up?”

A cunning look crossed his face.

“Well, I know he’s gonna pick it up the day after tomorrow. Don’t know why – but stands to reason it’s for a job, don’t it?”

It did indeed. I continued to stare fixedly at him.

“So, John, how come you know all this?”

The look of cunning was replaced by one which, at a guess, might even have been one of embarrassment.

“Well, thing is – Linda – that’s her name, Linda Cole – her bloke is a long distance lorry driver. Offen away for a couple of nights at a time, and Linda, she reckons he’s got another bird somewhere up north. He offen drives up Manchester, Liverpool, those areas and just abart every time he does, it’s an overnighter. So, she reckons what’s sauce, an all that. So, when Davey – her bloke – is away, I nips round there to keep her from getting lonely, like. Now Davey is away for the next three nights and Linda tole me not to come over night after tomorrow ‘cos Pete is coming to pick up his shooter.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. If Carter’s information was accurate, we had the chance of nailing Cole for possession of an illegal firearm; depending on how it went, we might get his partners as well. I terminated the interview at that point, had Carter returned to the holding cell and reported my findings to DCI Clifford, who was ecstatic.

“Well done, Ken. Now we’ll have a chance of putting Cole away and perhaps some others as well.”

His face fell a little.

“Ah well, now I’ll have to tell the Super.”

No more needed to be said.

Two nights later Linda Cole’s house was under surveillance. Sure enough, Cole turned up at just before eleven, stayed in the house for no more than five minutes, and left again, carrying a small roll of carpet which he put on the passenger seat beside him before driving off. Because of the presence of the shotgun the next stage involved an armed response unit, although DCI Clifford retained overall command.

Clifford could have swooped there and then, but he was hopeful of bagging Cole’s accomplices as well as the man himself, so Cole was followed on what proved to be a drive to his own house. Once there, Cole, plus bundle, disappeared inside and shortly afterwards all the lights went out. Cole, it appeared ,was home for the night.

Clifford withdrew his forces to get a night’s rest, but had two cars observing the property throughout the night. Danny Collis and I drew the two to eight shift and it was just before eight that I was able to radio in that there were signs of life in the house. Clifford came back to me.

“Ken, I want you and Danny to stay there. I don’t want a change of watchers to possibly be seen from the house.”

“Right, sir. If Cole drives off do you want us to follow or just advise?”

25

“Just advise first up. I’ve got cars to pick him up at either end of his road, so we’ll be on him no matter which way he takes off. Give it five minutes, then follow – I may have more trade for you, depending on what happens.”

“Right, sir – we’re on it.”

A few minutes later, Cole, carrying his carpet bundle, came out of the house, got into his VW Golf, and drove off. I reported the fact to Clifford, watched as the unmarked car at the end of the road, which contained Liz Goode and Norman Lambert, pulled out and followed. I gave them a five minute start, then motioned to Danny to follow them as we had been ordered, reporting the fact to Clifford over the radio.

The radio was networked, so we could follow what Liz, who was on the radio in the following car, was reporting. The drive only lasted a little over ten minutes before Cole drew up outside a house on the Woking Road. The address was known to us; it was that of Dean Walker, and he and Sammy Hughes emerged almost at once and joined Cole in the Golf.

It drove off, but before it had gone more than a few hundred yards I heard Clifford on the radio.

“Response units one and two, go!”

Clifford had chosen his spot beautifully; the Golf was in a restricted area, religiously observing the thirty limit, and approaching a crossroads. Without warning a police Transit hurtled out of the side road to the suspects’ right, ending up at forty-five degrees across the road in front of it. Even as it was stopping, the back doors were hurled open and four officers in full combat rig leapt out and raced to the Golf, screaming

“Armed Police!” at the tops f their voices. Simultaneously, an unmarked car, which had been trailing Liz in her car, swerved round it and rammed the Golf from behind. The doors were flung upon and four more armed police surrounded the Golf.

It was all over. Stunned and shaken, the three suspects offered no resistance. Once they were safely handcuffed, a quick search of the car discovered the sawn off shot gun, fully loaded, in the well of the offside back seat.

All was pretty euphoric as a result of the successful operation. Caught red-handed with the shotgun, all three could expect to face a five year stretch. In the event, Dean and Hughes vehemently denied any knowledge of what the roll of carpet contained and left Cole out to dry, but that was for the future. Even Superintendent Wylock was hard pressed to find anything to moan about, but, par for the course, had no hesitation in claiming as much of the credit as possible for herself.

Chapter Four – May 2011 again

The kidnappers’ message had left me stunned. I could see no way out of the dilemma in which I now found myself. My obvious duty was to report what had happened, and to do so immediately, but the claim by that unknown voice that they had a contact in the station who would know and tell them, stayed my hand. It might be a bluff – surely it must be a bluff, but suppose it wasn’t? It wasn’t unknown for police officers to accept bribes or give in to blackmail by villains.

I slumped into a chair, my mind a confused whirl of possibilities. As I had said on the phone, Schwarz had a bunch of keys on him when he was arrested. They were the normal keys we all carry – front and back door keys which in this case were triplicated – one set for the shop, one set for the flat above and a final set for the house in Esher, car ignition and a key which, when checked, proved to be for turning the shop’s burglar alarm on and off. From memory that was all. However, over and above those keys, several more had been found when his places had been searched.

I returned to the question of whether or not the unknown man had a contact at the station, and had to admit to myself that I had no way of knowing, no way at all. I felt sure that my immediate colleagues were above suspicion, but what about those outside CID? Or the numerous civilian support staff?

After a lot of thought I decided that, somehow or other, I was going to comply with the kidnappers’ demands

– if I could. The emphasis in the key still had me totally stumped. Key to what? Or where?

I turned over in my mind the index that Liz Goode had made of Schwarz’s effects. To the best of my memory there must have been thirty or more keys in all, the eight on the key-ring he had had on him, some 26

lying loose in a drawer in his kitchen, others in an old tobacco tin in another drawer, again in the kitchen, still more in the Esher house. All were now safely housed in the evidence store; if I wanted to look at them, the fact would be known as I would have to sign the evidence log. Nobody was likely to worry about that initially, but if I removed a key or keys, there was no way that I would be able to cover up the fact.

On the other hand, I knew that I would do anything – anything – to ensure Pam’s safety, no matter what the cost to myself. What was the worst that could happen? I could be kicked out of the Force; possibly, but I felt very unlikely, end up in jail for impeding an investigation. Looked at in that light, there was no contest. I had to do as I had been told.

The next morning, after a disturbed night with little sleep and much tossing and turning wakefulness, I was at the station at my normal time, wondering if there had been any further developments in the tussle between Wylock and Jimmy, and, far more importantly, how I was going to meet the demands of the kidnappers.

I had only been in for a matter of ten minutes or so before the rest rolled in in quick succession. Assuming that he had been good to his expressed intent and was still on leave, I was still encamped in Jimmy’s cubby hole office and I had taken the opportunity of a few minutes grace to hurriedly scan through the print out that Liz had made of Harry Schwarz’s effects. My memory had been correct. Eight keys on his key ring, all of them identified – car, three sets of doors and burglar alarm. Nine lying loose in a drawer – duplicate house and car keys, also a duplicate for the burglar alarm. Additionally, two keys for the till in the shop, two keys for the desk in the upper room which he had used as an office, and a key which was logged as ‘use unknown’. The keys in the tobacco tin where all identified as belonging to items in his shop – desk keys, trinket box keys – that sort of thing. Each key carried a small, numbered tag – each number corresponded to an item in the shop, and, suspicious coppers that we were, we had checked that each numbered key did actually work the lock of its twinned item. The keys from the Esher house formed yet another set, but all had been easily identified as belonging to doors in the house itself.

So, there was just one key for which we had not divined a purpose, so it had been bagged separately. Surely that must be the key wanted by the kidnappers? I had no specific memory of the key in question; given the work she had put in logging everything, Liz would probably remember it, but I dare not draw attention to my interest in it by asking her. No, I would have to just remove the key from its evidence bag – a heinous crime in the eyes of my colleagues if they ever found out. Fortunately, with Schwarz dead, there was little reason for anybody to have any interest in the effects that we had collected from his shop, flat and house, so I felt that my chances of escaping detection were pretty good.

I checked Liz’s index again; because it was a mystery key it was in a bag of its own, whereas the other keys had been grouped in four bags – respectively those that had been on Schwarz’s key-ring, those loose in the drawer, those in the tobacco tin, which was, itself, in the same bag with them, and finally the keys from the Esher house. The mystery key was described as being of a modern style, which made me recall it to mind. It looked rather like some car ignition keys, with a plastic head to it and a straight serrated shank. It wasn’t a car key, however, just looked rather like one. I thought long and hard, thoughts which drove me from the office and the station itself for half an hour.

On my return, and summoning up all my courage, I tramped down to the evidence store, a huge room in the basement, presided over by Sergeant Ted Willis, a long serving fixture, both in the force and in the job he held.

“’Morning, Ted,” I said, trusting that neither my voice nor my expression betrayed the tension I was feeling, and mentally running through the cover story I had dreamed up.

“Morning, Ken, what brings you down here? Lost something?”

It was Ted’s long standing joke that what he ran was the biggest lost property office in Surrey.

“Not this time, Ted – I just want to check on the Schwarz evidence bags. I want to check that Liz Goode’s index” I waved the sheets of paper vaguely in the air, “includes all the keys that were found. I only looked briefly into the keys that were in the drawers, but I think there were more than she’s indexed.”

27

I knew full well that this meant nothing to Ted Willis; he had simply accepted the various evidence bags, signed them into his register, and found a location for them in his cavernous storage area. He would never have had the time, nor the need, to look into individual bags.

Ted referred to his master list and ran a thick forefinger down the typed page.

“Yes, here we are, Ken. Row 37, shelves A to H. I’ll get them for you.”

“No need, Ted – I won’t need to open the bag – I’ll be able to count them through it.”

As I had hoped, he was only too happy to leave me to it. I quickly found the requisite block of files and bags and, making sure that I was out of Ted’s sight, removed the bag containing the single key, replacing it with a bag containing an old car key that I had had in the house and which I had gone home to fetch during my absence from the station. Until I looked at my prize, I had no way of knowing if my substitute really looked as much like it as my memory had indicated; to my relief, at a visual inspection it would pass muster by anyone who had simply given it a glance when bagging it; it wouldn’t fool our forensic people who had checked just what sort of key it was and pronounced that it probably belonged to some sort of strong box or high quality locker, but there was no reason for them to need to look at it again. It was something that I would have to chance, but not, I calculated, a very serious chance. I had already placed my key in an evidence bag, which I had marked up with the same reference number as Schwarz’s key, so it was the work of just a moment to swap the one for the other. I made my way back to Ted Willis.

“OK, Ken?”

“Yes, thanks, Ted.”

“Why didn’t you send that Liz down to check herself – she’d have lightened my day a lot more than an ugly bugger like you!”

I did my best to look mildly embarrassed.

“Well, she’s normally very conscientious, and I wasn’t certain that I was right – didn’t want to give her something to moan about for not trusting her if I was wrong.”

“And were you?”

I tried to look more embarrassed still.

“Happen I was, she hadn’t missed anything.”

Ted chuckled at my assumed discomfort and I was on my way.

I don’t know how I got through the rest of the day, but somehow I did, and that evening I back home well before the anticipated time of the next phone call from the kidnappers.

At last it came and I picked up the handset with a trembling hand.

“Morgan?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got it?”

“Yes, I’ve got it.”

“Right, this is what you do..”

I interrupted him.

“I’m doing nothing until I speak to my wife again. How do I know she’s OK?”

To my relief, he acquiesced and in seconds I was hearing Pam on the phone again.

“Ken, what’s happening?”

“Don’t worry, love. I’m doing what they want – you’ll soon be home.”

The man came back on the line.

“Right. Put it in a large envelope, bigger the better. Leave your house straight away and come to the Friary shopping centre. Go to the cafe there, get a cup of tea or something and sit at a table. Drink your drink, wait until there is nobody walking around looking for a place to sit, get up and go. Leave the envelope on your seat and don’t look back. I’ve already got somebody there to pick it up. Try and identify or follow them and you’ll never see your wife again. Do as you’re told and she’ll be waiting for you when you get home. Got all that?”

“Yes, I’ve got it.”

28

I followed his instructions to the letter; it was nerve racking in the extreme. I sat there dawdling over my cup of tea and a bun, cursing under my breath every person who came into the area until they sat down somewhere. At last, however, there was a window; no customers milling around, no staff clearing crockery from tables, and I hurriedly got to my feet and left. The journey back was a nightmare as I ran every possibility through my fevered imagination, but to my intense relief, an hour later I was home to find Pam, shaken, frightened, but unhurt, already in the house when I got back. She rushed into my arms and I hugged her to me, feeling the sobs that wracked her body. We stood like that for seemed an age, but which was probably no more than a minute or two, before I led her to the settee and sat her down.

“Darling, are you alright?”

She nodded, tears still running down her face.

“Yes, they never touched me, but Ken, I was so frightened. I thought that I would never see you again.”

I didn’t say anything to that, but it had been my fear as well, The fact that she had seen her abductors, could, if the opportunity arose, identify them, was the most terrifying aspect of the whole affair. It had given the kidnappers a reason to kill her to prevent that from ever happening. I had even wondered if the kidnapper’s promise that Pam would be waiting at home for me was a macabre joke; that I would find her corpse. I was just so thankful that my fears had proved groundless.

“Pam, we can’t go to the police over this.”

She looked at me in amazement.

“But why not? Don’t you want to catch them?”

“I’d love to – but to make them let you go I had to falsify evidence and let them have something – a key –

that I should never have touched. They threatened to kill you if I didn’t do as they said. They also said that they have a contact in the station who would let them know if I tried to play them false.”

“But surely your bosses would understand?”

“Not Detective Superintendent Wylock – she’d take a delight in having me kicked out of the force – maybe even sent to prison. You’ve never met her, and I hope you never have to, but take it from me, she is one twisted, vicious cow, who likes nothing better than making her subordinates lives a misery .”

“So, is there nothing that we can do?”

“Yes,” I replied forcefully. “We can get on with our lives and be thankful that you came to no harm. But, tell me, love, just what happened?”

She took a deep breath.

“I had just got home from the library; it was a nice day, so I’d walked to work and walked back. I hadn’t been in the house more than five minutes when the doorbell rang. When I went to the door, there were two men there – I’d never seen them before but one of them introduced himself as DC Cooper and said that you’d been in a car accident and they had come to take me to the hospital. I immediately thought of poor Ray Green, of course, and I was in a panic. They hurried me to their car, I got in the back and we drove off. I asked how bad you were and the other one – he never gave a name – said that the hospital said it was serious but not life threatening, which was a relief. To my surprise, after they had driven for only a few minutes, they parked at the roadside behind a small van. I asked what was going on and they both got out, came round to the back of the car and dragged me out and bundled me into the back of the van. It had no windows, so when it drove off I had no idea where it went, but after about twenty minutes it stopped. Before it did so it had slowed right down and turned hard right – I over-balanced even though I was sitting on the floor- and I guessed that it had turned off the road into a drive. Then it stopped and after a couple of minutes the door was opened. It wasn’t opened by either of the men who had called for me – they both wore suits; this man was in casual clothes – sweater and jeans. I couldn’t see his face – he was wearing one of those ski-mask things, black. I was terrified and asked what they wanted, but all he did was take me by the arm and hurry me along – we were in a garage, just an ordinary house garage, one of those where you have a door straight into the house.

“Inside the house all the curtains were drawn so I couldn’t see out. He took me upstairs into a small bedroom which had shutters at the window, and locked me in. Once he had gone I tried to open the shutters but they had been screwed closed and I couldn’t make any impression o them. After a while I just sat on the bed and 29

cried – I just couldn’t understand what was going on – I mean, why kidnap me? We aren’t rich, we couldn’t pay any sort of ransom – so why? I wondered for a moment if it was a case of mistaken identity, but then I realised that they knew exactly who I was and who you were.”

“After what seemed an age – I hadn’t got my watch on - he came back in again; he had a mobile phone and he phoned you and had me speak to you. After that I was left alone again. It must have been a relatively new house, or one that had been done up recently, because it had an en suite shower room and the fittings looked new. The shower room didn’t have any windows, so there was no chance of getting out that way.

“After a couple of hours or so, I dozed off for a while. The house itself was quiet, but I could hear traffic not very far away, so it must have been near one of the main roads somewhere. I finally drifted off to sleep but I kept waking all through the night, wondering what was going to happen to me and if I would ever see you again.

“It must have been well into morning – the shutters weren’t totally light proof – there was just a tiny crack in the middle were they met, so I knew that it was daylight outside, even if I couldn’t see out through the crack

– when the man came back again with a cup of tea and some bread and butter for me. He didn’t say anything even though I kept asking what it was all about – just left the food and went, locking the door behind him again.

“I didn’t see him again all day until the evening. He came in with the mobile phone again and he obviously phoned you and you demanded to speak to me, so he handed the phone to me, then took it back again.

Hearing your voice again was about the only thing to stop me becoming hysterical. Then he looked at me – I couldn’t see his face, just his eyes, but they were the most frightening eyes that I have ever seen. Then he spoke. He told me that he was going to let me live, that he was going to release me, but that if I did anything other than go straight home and wait for you he would know and he would have both of us killed before tomorrow was out. I believed him; I believed every word that he said.

“Then he left me alone again for what seemed an age, but was probably only half an hour or so. Then he came back and, still without saying anything more about what was going on, he took me through the house, into the garage, and into the back of the van again. Even then I couldn’t believe that he would really let me go, but he did. The van stopped, he came round and opened the doors and dragged me out, then left me, got back into the van and drove off. I looked around and realised that he had left me just in the next road, so I ran back here as fast as my legs would carry me.”

I breathed a sigh of relief; I hadn’t really believed, not until I actually saw her in the flesh, that Pam would be spared. Only the remote chance, as I saw it, that she would actually survive her experience had led me to do what I had done, but now I was unutterably glad that I had done so. I took her in my arms and the dam broke; she sobbed violently against my chest, soaking the front of my shirt, until she was totally cried out.

Suddenly, it was all too much for her; her legs sagged and, but for my embrace, she would have collapsed to the floor. I picked her up and carried her to the settee and carefully laid her on it; then I went to the drinks cabinet and poured out two generous measures of Glenmorangie, my favourite malt, but one which Pam hardly ever drank. Tonight was, hopefully, a one off, and she drank the golden liquid gratefully, then held out her glass for a second helping, which I quickly poured.

At last some colour re-emerged in what had been ashen cheeks and she looked at me with more of her normal self-assurance.

I felt that it would now be safe to try and explore with her a little more of her dreadful experience.

“Tell me, love,” I began hesitantly, “ you saw his eyes – what were they like?”

She thought for a long moment before replying.

“They were blue – deep blue, almost glittering as he threatened me.”

“And his voice, how about his voice. How big was he?”

“He didn’t have any sort of a marked accent – he wasn’t from Birmingham, or Newcastle, or a Scot, or Welsh or Irish, or anything like that – just sort of neutral. He wore that mask all the time, and he also wore gloves as well – black leather ones. He wasn’t very tall – taller than me, but not as tall as you. Ken, I’m frightened – what do we do now?”

30

“Well, nothing that will piss these people off, that’s for sure. I reckon his threat about killing both of us was a bluff, but now that I’ve done what he wanted, he, or they, or whoever, have the advantage. They don’t need to get heavy – just a word in the right ear and I am in deep, deep trouble. What about the other two, though –

what can you tell me about them?”

She thought for a while, organising her thoughts about what had been a terrifying experience.

“Well, like I said, I’ve never seen either of them before. The one who spoke, the one calling himself Cooper, he was black, really black with black eyes, black hair, but he didn’t have much of an accent – not so you would have necessarily known that he was a black man if you were speaking to him over the phone. He was tall, taller than you, but slim with it – I don’t think that he would be as heavy as you. He had a dark blue suit on, with a white shirt, a red tie, and I remember that he was wearing gloves, leather driving gloves. The other one was quite a contrast. Much shorter, not much taller than me, but really heavily built. I don’t mean fat –

you could see that he was very muscular. He was white, fair hair cut very short to his skull, almost, but not quite a skinhead look. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but a leather jacket – it looked quite expensive – and grey trousers, dark grey. The jacket was open and I could see he had a leather belt with a big silver buckle to it.

That’s all I can remember, I’m sorry.”

“Pam, that’s far better a description than I would expect from nine out of ten witnesses – if I ever come across them I’m sure I’ll know them.”

“But what now? Is there nothing we can do? We just have to hope that they’ll leave us alone?”

“That’s about the strength of it, love, at least for the moment.” I changed the subject.

“What about the library? How are you going to explain your absence to them?”

She thought for a moment before replying.

“I’ll blame you. I’ll phone tomorrow, croaking on the telephone, very apologetic. Didn’t go in today because I’ve lost my voice. You were supposed to phone and tell them, but you got tied up with something at work and forgot. I’ll take a couple of more days off – to be honest, I don’t fancy going out of the house at the moment, anyway.”

I thought her idea over and agreed that it seemed a practical solution. I could well understand Pam not wanting to leave the house, at least for a day or two, until it seemed that her abductors had finished with us; I could scarcely take the next day off without warning, but I wondered if I could wangle a day or two of leave to be with my wife.

I had spoken the truth to Pam; I could see no way of doing anything about the men who had taken her and could only hope that they would leave us alone in future.

Some hope.

Chapter Five – the next week

It was now a week since Pam’s abduction, a week that I has spent on tenterhooks lest my crime –

for that was what it was, no matter the mitigation – be discovered, but to date it had not come to anybody’s notice and I began to breathe a little more easily. They had been seven days of torment for me, but for everyone else it had been a week of high drama.

The Monday had seen the return from leave of Jimmy Jackson and the seismic meeting between him and Wylock. The Superintendent had been beside herself with rage; the decibel count, even by her unequalled standards, had been awesome, but throughout it Jimmy had stood firm. He refused to allow himself to be browbeaten by the woman and the end result was that, as he had threatened her on the phone when she had demanded his return, he lodged an official complaint against her. It was just about an unprecedented move, but it proved to be a catalyst. Before any official action could be taken, Wylock had stormed into the office of the Assistant Chief Constable and had totally lost control. Charles Pope, the ACC(Crime) to whom Wylock was ultimately responsible had had enough. He was well aware of her failings; rumour had it that he had been opposed to her appointment in the first place, but had been over-ruled by the lay chairman of the Police Authority, 31

something which had rankled not only with Pope himself, but also with the rest of the senior officers.

Officially, Wylock had suffered a nervous breakdown caused by stress and over-work, and was placed on long term sick leave until she should recover. Practically, she was out on her ear and the collective sigh of relief all round must have been audible throughout the county.

The absence of the DSi inevitably led to rearrangements of other personnel. DCI Clifford, who had blithely informed Wylock that he was resigning when the Jackson affair first blew up, had been persuaded by the ACC to withdraw his resignation and been appointed as Acting Detective Superintendent to head up the division’s CID. Jimmy Jackson had been promoted, again on an acting basis, into Clifford’s post. With Jimmy only a few months away from retirement, it was presumably felt that should, horror of horrors, Wylock return, having an acting DCI on the verge of retiring would enable her to slot back in, and for Clifford to return to his old position, more easily than if a younger DI had been made acting DCI.

From my own point of view, however, the effect was even more emphatic. The previous day I had been called into Clifford’s office, to find Jimmy also there. My immediate thought had been that somehow my transgression had been discovered and that I was for the high jump, but a look at the faces of the two of them showed no sign of censure. It was Clifford who welcomed me and indicated the empty chair before his desk.

“Ken, come in, sit you down.”

I did as bidden and waited, still more on the nervous side than not. Clifford smiled at me and I realised that Jimmy was positively beaming.

“Ken, as everybody knows, Superintendent Wylock is no longer with us and is unlikely to return, hence the acting appointments for Inspector Jackson and myself. Those changes mean a vacancy in our DI ranks and as from now you, Sergeant, have become Detective Inspector Morgan.”

I stammered my thanks – given the way that I had been passed over in favour of Jill Harris, I had been sanguine about my chances of promotion in anything like the near future and this was as much a shock as a it was a welcome surprise. Clifford continued.

“You deserve the lift, Ken, so no need for thanks. Now, your appointment is not an acting one, it’s substantive. With Inspector Jackson here due to retire before very long, even if DSi Wylock should return, the establishment can cope with an extra DI for a few weeks or so, which is all it would be likely to be. Now, you already know all your team, of course, and you will need a DS to bring you up to strength. I’d like to make the upheavals as limited as possible, so what is your take on your DCs – do you feel any of them are ready to step up as a DS?”

I though hard. This was right out of the blue, but I had been working with the other members of the team for some time now and to not have a firm view on their capabilities and weaknesses would be a poor start to my career as a DI.

“Well, sir, all four of them are good DCs and I think that all of them have it in them to make DS in time. Of the four, DC Goode is still a bit young, but to be honest, she is the probably the brightest of them and I think that she will go further than the rest, but it is a bit too soon for her right now. For the immediate task I would prefer DC Lambert. He’s thirty-one and he’s a very steady performer, but not a high flyer.”

Jimmy and Clifford looked at each other. It was Jimmy who spoke this time.

“Interesting choice, Ken. The DCI asked my view before you came in, and that is just what I said.

Norman will be a safe pair of hands for you – he’s got plenty of experience and doesn’t get rattled.”

Clifford spoke again.

32

“OK, DC Lambert it is. I’ll let you tell him the good news, Ken, and you can tell him that it will be official from next Monday.”

I left the acting Superintendent’s office with my mind in a whirl and returned to our own team room

– now, I realised, my team’s room. They were all at their desks, following up by phone with witnesses to a fracas outside a club two nights previously in the town centre which had left several people, men and women, in need of hospital treatment. All but one had been sent home after being patched up, but one, a sixteen year old girl named Bryony Kelloway, had suffered a serious stab wound and was in intensive care, not expected to survive. Jimmy had set the team to the task of getting as many verbal statements over the phone as possible from the witnesses who had given their names to the uniforms who had been called to the scene, and cross referencing what we learned to work out who needed to be interviewed in more depth. To date, we had spoken over the phone with nearly twenty people, most of whom had also named other folk who had been at the club but not directly involved in the trouble, or who had left before it started.

As each DC finished the current call I indicated not to make another and waited until I had the attention of all four.

“Right,” I said, “listen up for a minute – I’ve got news for you all.”

They were instantly interested and I looked into the four faces. Norman Lambert, soon, although he didn’t yet know, to be a DS. Thirty-one, very nearly thirty-two years old, and a member of the team for nearly five years now. A steady, capable officer; as I had said to Jackson and Clifford, he wasn’t a high flyer. He would probably make DI at some time in the future, but I doubted very much if he would ever progress further. Bruce Thorpe, six months or so younger than Norman; they had joined the team together in October 2006, but were markedly different types. Whereas Norman was steadiness personified – give him a job and he would plough through it to the end, Bruce was altogether a quicker witted, more volatile personality. I knew that Jimmy had several times had occasion to pull him up for cutting corners and sailing too close to the wind, but despite that, he had the ability to pull in strands of a complicated issue in a way, and at a speed, that Norman could never match. Had he not had those tendencies to wander from the straight and narrow at times, it would have been Bruce, not Norman, that I would have recommended for promotion and I am sure that Jimmy Jackson felt the same. Danny Collis, twenty-seven, joined the team in May 2008, just three years ago. He was something of an amalgam of Norman and Bruce; more perceptive than the former, less of a chancer than the latter, I could see him outstripping both of them over the next few years. Finally, Liz Goode. The youngest, at just twenty-six, although not far short of her twenty-seventh birthday, she had only been on the team since December 2009 and although by a big margin the least experienced of the four, I had no doubt that she was also the brightest and I could see her overtaking all of us in the promotion stakes within a few years. Unlike the other three, all of whom had come to the team after spells with other DIs, Lloyd Ferris in the case of Norman, and the retired Charlie Villiers for Bruce and Danny, our team was Liz’s first placement since being posted to CID

from uniform.

“The news – as you all know, DSi Wylock is on sick leave for what may be quite a long time, so the brass have made some changes. DCI Clifford is now acting DSi – no surprise – and our DI has stepped up as acting DCI – again, no surprise. The big surprise is that I am now promoted to DI on a permanent basis to take over from Jimmy and Norman – as of Monday you are DS Lambert.

Again, that’s permanent, not acting.”

I watched their faces closely as I broke the news. Norman Lambert was clearly delighted at his step up, naturally enough, but I was more interested in the reaction of the other three. Bruce Thorpe was 33

clearly disappointed and trying to hide it without much success, but Liz and Danny seemed genuinely pleased, both for Norman and myself.

“OK, so that’s the news – now back to the telephones. Liz, what’s the score?”

Liz had been tasked by Jimmy with keeping the log of witnesses spoken to, with all of us keeping her up to date as each call was completed.

She pushed an errant strand of blonde hair off her face as she looked down at her log.

“We’ve now spoken on the phones to eighteen people, boss – eleven men, seven women – who gave their details at the scene. Nine of those eighteen have given us names of people they recognised or knew who were also there but either left before the ruckus started or for some reason weren’t asked for their details at the time. That’s given us a further twelve names and we’ve already tracked five of them down. So far nobody has admitted to actually witnessing the stabbing, but two of the women say that they know the victim – they are at the same school and also sixteen so we’ve only asked them the basics so far.”

I nodded my understanding. In view of their ages, those two girls would have to be interviewed in the presence of either a parent or another approved adult. The whole case was a mess; we had no suspect, and most of the witnesses had been decidedly the worse for drink when the uniformed response had tried to make some sense of the scene.

“OK,” I said to the room in general, “who do we have who looks worth seeing face to face?”

It was the start of several long, frustrating days. In all we interviewed over forty people, but so far as identifying a suspect was concerned we might as well not have bothered.

It was not a good start to my career as a Detective Inspector and I was well aware of the fact. The frustration and the sheer quantity of work did, however, have one good effect – they stopped me from brooding over the possibility of my tampering with the Schwarz evidence coming to light.

There was some good news from the hospital; Bryony Kelloway confounded medical expectations and survived her wound. I spoke with the doctor who had treated her; he assured me that she was very lucky. Had the wound penetrated as little as an inch more than it had, nothing could have saved her. As it was, on the following Monday, accompanied by Liz Goode, I was able to interview the girl in her hospital bed. She had both her parents there, neither of whom were impressed by our lack of progress.

I looked down at the slight figure in the bed, still festooned with various tubes and wires, still very pale and weak looking, but seeming much better than I had expected.

I introduced us.

“Bryony, I am Detective Inspector Morgan and this is my colleague Detective Constable Goode.

We want to catch whoever attacked you, but we need you to tell us as much as possible about what happened to you if we are to do that.”

She smiled weakly at us before speaking.

“I went to the club with two of my friends from school, Emma Hughes and Lindy Knowles.”

I nodded; they were the two girls that we had already identified and interviewed.

“We got talking to a group of boys and one of them came on to Emma a bit heavy – Emma told him to get lost and he didn’t like it – called her a slag or something and one of the other boys told him he shouldn’t talk to us like that. The first boy – he was pretty drunk – started getting really angry and tried to hit him, but he was so drunk he missed and fell over – and people started laughing at him. He got up off the floor and the next thing I knew there was a fight going on between about four or five boys. The club has these guys on the door – big blokes they are – and they came over and broke up the fight and bundled us all out the doors, even though we hadn’t been involved at all.

34

“Emma and Lindy and I were pretty livid at that – we hadn’t done anything, we’d paid to go in, and here we were out on the street, so we tried to go back in – and so did a couple of the boys, but the doormen wouldn’t let us.

“That’s when it all got out of hand. In no time there must have been twenty or more people outside the club door and all pushing and punching and shouting. Most of them seemed pretty drunk, and somebody threw a bottle at the doormen. I had got separated a bit from Lindy and Emma and somebody pushed me against a wall. I was really frightened and I tried to break away from the crush and as I did so I felt this terrible blow in my back and I fell down. I remember someone – I think that it was Emma, screaming out that I’d been stabbed and then I passed out. The next thing I knew was coming round here in hospital.”

This was really disappointing. I had hoped that Bryony would have been able to tell us who had stabbed her, but she clearly had no idea. She had been stabbed from behind in the middle of a scrum of people, so it wasn’t very surprising, but it meant that we were back to square one in identifying her assailant.

I left the room, accompanied by Liz and followed by Mr. Kelloway, clearly anxious to buttonhole me.

“So, Inspector, what do you intend to do now to find out who attacked my daughter?”

I looked down at him – he was no more than five foot six or so, a tubby man with thinning ginger hair liberally streaked with grey, and a moustache which, incongruously, retained its full ginger colouring.

“I’m going to interview once more all those we can identify as being on the scene, Mr. Kelloway, but to be honest with you, unless this time round somebody will admit to having seen the attack on Bryony, we are unlikely to identify the culprit. My big hope was that Bryony herself would have been able to say who it was, or at least give us a description, but as you have just heard for yourself, she has no idea who it might have been.”

“That’s not good enough, Inspector. I want the man who did this found and arrested or I will be making a complaint to your superiors!”

I kept my temper with difficulty; the man’s reaction was perfectly understandable, but I decided that there was one point worth making to him. I took out my wallet and extracted one of my cards, the brand new one identifying me as a Detective Inspector, the first time that I had given one out which didn’t say ‘Detective Sergeant”.

“Mr. Kelloway, believe me, we are doing, and will keep on doing, all we can to find Bryony’s attacker – who may not even be a man, by the way - but if you are unhappy with our efforts, by all means make a formal complaint. This card has my details, so that you will who to complain about.

There is one point, however. Bryony is only sixteen, isn’t she?”

He looked at me uncertainly.

“Yes, so what?” He demanded, aggression beginning to resurface.

“Then what was she doing in a licensed club? According to the doctors who treated her, she had been drinking, and drinking quite heavily.”

I watched him deflate before my eyes.

“Well, she and her friends aren’t children,”

I interrupted him.

“In the eyes of the law they are, Mr. Kelloway. Bryony and her friends should never have been in that club in the first place. One of the things that we will be doing is talking to the owner and insisting that he does more to ensure that no more under-age drinking takes place on his premises, 35

and we may well prosecute him for having allowed it in the past, but I do believe that parents have a responsibility in such matters.”

I didn’t give him an opportunity to respond, but turned on my heel and left him standing there in the corridor.

Back in my office I reflected on the cases we were currently running. Top of the list was the stabbing of Bryony Kelloway and the death by dangerous driving of Alice Hamilton. In neither case did we look like getting a satisfactory result. The car that had killed Alice Hamilton had still not been traced, despite hours spent poring over CCTV footage of the nearby areas, and whoever had stabbed Bryony Kelloway remained a mystery that was unlikely to be solved.

Not a very encouraging record for the force’s newest Detective Inspector.

That, however, was not the worst of my worries. In the first few days after her kidnapping I thought that Pam had coped remarkably well; I was wrong. The true horror of what had happened to her had not yet sunk in; she was in a state of numbness. Now that protective numbness had worn off and she was scared to even go out of the house by herself. Walking to work was out of the question – she now drove every day, constantly fearful that any vehicle which seemed to be on the same route for more than a minute or two might belong to her abductors and be after her again. She was scared to be in the house alone; I had already arranged for a second, more heavy duty, lock to be put on the front door and the somewhat flimsy back door was due to be replaced by something a lot more substantial in a couple of days time. All our windows were already double glazed with security locks to them and the garage, which previously we never bothered to use for the cars, now saw her Mini religiously put away every evening. Fortunately – and like the house to which she had been taken when she had been kidnapped – our garage had a door straight into the kitchen, so in a morning she could leave the house and get into her car without venturing outside. The up-and-over door was electrically operated and had a remote control, so when it was time to leave for work she could get into the car, lock its doors, open the garage door, drive out, close the garage door behind her and drive away, all without ever setting foot outside a secured environment.

None of this, however, truly set her mind at rest and I was very worried about her. She had rejected the idea of seeing her GP – I don’t know how far doctor/patient confidentiality might stretch in the face of the man being told about a crime which had not been reported to the police and neither did Pam.

Chapter Six – June 2011

Matters came to a head some four weeks later. I was late getting home and Pam was waiting for me, clearly agitated.

“Ken, why are you so late?”

I looked at her in surprise; yes, it was later than my normal homecoming, but not excessively so. It was eight thirty, the latest I had come home by perhaps twenty minutes for the last week or more.

“I’m sorry, love – but I had to clear up some stuff at the office.”

She gave a deep sigh.

“Ken, I’m sorry, of course you aren’t all that late, of course you aren’t, but I get so worried when I am alone.”

She hesitated, not really looking me in the eye before continuing.

“Ken, I can’t go on like this. Any moment, for all I know, those men might come back – and who knows what might happen if they did?”

“Pam, they got what they wanted form me – there is no reason for them to come back.”

36

She shook her head.

“No, you can’t know that – they made you do something for them before. How can you know they won’t want something from you again?”

I was about to rebut what she was saying, but stopped myself. She was right; I had no way of knowing that they might not choose to exercise the hold that they had over me again. It was something I hadn’t discussed with Pam, but it was something that was constantly on my mind.

She saw me hesitate and pressed on.

“Ken, we must get away from here. I can’t go on living like this and you can’t expect me to.”

I looked at her in concern. I knew that she was unhappy but I clearly had not appreciated just how much she had been affected by what had happened to her.

“Pam, we can’t just up sticks and leave. We’ve got jobs, both of us,”

She interrupted me.

“Not both of us, not any longer – I’ve given in my notice at the library.”

My concern changed to amazement.

“What, without discussing it? Without even telling me? When did you do that?”

“Last week – I’ve got some holiday due, so today was my last day there.”

“Pam, please, I know things have been hard for you,”

She interrupted again.

“No you don’t, not really, you only think that you do. Ken, can’t you see – I am terrified of staying here and I’m not going to. In fact, tomorrow I am going to stay with Helen.”

Another shock to the system. Helen, Pam’s sister, lived in Scotland. Married to Iain MacGregor, a farmer, they lived a few miles north of Perth and had two children, Sarah, who was fourteen and James who was twelve. We had visited them several times and I had liked all the family, but I wasn’t happy at losing Pam to them. Helen and Iain had met at university, both graduates from Durham, where Helen had read French and Spanish whilst Iain had qualified in land management and economics. Helen was five years older than Pam, Iain two years older still.

I was still numb from the succession of shocks my wife was inflicting on me, but somehow found my voice.

“What did you tell her?”

“The truth – except that you have falsified evidence. I told her that I was kidnapped to make you stop investigating something that nobody else knows about yet – which isn’t too far from the truth, I suppose. I also told her that you think it is a good idea for me to be somewhere safe in case the criminals haven’t finished with us. “

That was a mercy; at least Iain and Helen didn’t think that we had broken up – although I wondered to myself if, indeed that was what was happening. I thought things over and decided that if we were not to break up I would have to work hard at things between us – certainly harder than I had in the recent past.

“Pam, love – I can’t say that this hasn’t come as a shock – why didn’t you talk to me about it.”

She opened her mouth to interrupt, but I ploughed on.

“But if you had – now I’ve had a chance to think about it, knowing that you are safe is the best thing that I could wish for. What will you do up there?”

“I can help Helen with the house and the children and I might be able to get a bit of temporary work locally – don’t know what yet, but I’ll keep myself busy. But what about you? Will you do anything about leaving Surrey?”

I shrugged helplessly.

37

“Pam, I can’t just right now. I’ve only been made up to DI a few weeks. I can’t just chuck it in –

what would I do for a job? For money?”

“Couldn’t you get a transfer up to a Scottish force?”

“In time I might be able to – but it would take time.”

“OK, Ken – I’ll wait for you up there, but don’t take too long over it. I just can’t stay here, but I don’t want to wait forever.”

Early the next morning, I watched miserably as Pam, her Mini loaded to the gunwales with her clothes and things, drove off at the start of the long journey north.

All that day I found it almost impossible to concentrate on anything; my mind was a whirl over Pam’s action. I almost failed to respond to Jimmy Jackson’s call for me to come to his office, and I earned a quizzical look from Norman as I at last got my act together and left the team’s room.

Jimmy was waiting for me and waved me into a chair.

“Ken, with Norman made up to DS I know that you are a DC light. You need a full team, not fair to expect you to cope short-handed and I’ve got a new body for you. I’ve just got a new CID bod for Jill Harris and I’m switching George Fredericks to you. You know him, of course?”

I nodded.

“Yes, of course. Thanks Jimmy, it’ll be good to be up to strength. I suppose that there is no likelihood of the DSi coming back?”

It was a question in everybody’s mind. Officially, Wylock was on sick leave, so in theory there was always the chance that she could return.

Jimmy shook his head.

“No, Ken, I don’t think that is ever going to happen. She really burnt her boats when she lost it with the ACC. Even if the medic were to say she is fully fit, I can’t see Mr. Pope taking her back into CID. I suppose they might try and transfer her somewhere, but I honestly reckon that her days as a police officer are over for good and all.”

That, and the transfer to me of George Fredericks, were the only good points of a day which seemed never-ending. At last, however, I was able to get home; the first thing I did was to ring Scotland.

Sarah answered the phone.

“Oh, hello Uncle Ken – I’ll fetch Auntie Pam.”

The next moment I was talking to my wife, five hundred miles between us, but hopefully nothing more, no other sort of distance.

“Pam, love, how are you?”

“Tired! The journey seems never ending without someone to share the driving. I got here just in time for tea and I’ve been thoroughly quizzed by one and all. Ken, is there any chance of you getting up here, even if only for a day, in the near future. Despite what she says, I know damn well that Helen thinks that there is something wrong between us.”

It was something that I had already given much thought; with George Fredericks starting with me the next week I could hardly bugger off and leave him to blend into the team without me being there, but until next week was upon us there was the opportunity for a rare full weekend off and I had already cleared it with Jimmy.

“All being well, Pam, I will be up this weekend. I can leave here Friday evening, drive through the night and be with you around midnight if that won’t disturb everyone. I’ll have to leave Sunday after lunch, but we’ll have all Saturday together.”

“Ken, that would be great – I’ll stay up for you. Drive carefully, darling – I miss you already.”

“Me too – and Pam, we will defeat those sods somehow, even if it means me looking for a new line of work.”

38

Until I uttered the words I had given no real thought to such a move, but after I put the phone down from our conversation I did give it serious thought.

I had joined the police straight from university, where I had obtained a second class degree in PPE –

Politics, Philosophy and Economics – a bit of a catch-all degree, but one which I felt allowed me to claim that I had proved my possession of a reasonably well-rounded mind. Certainly it had been no handicap in pursuing a career in the police. Jill Harris being made DI before me had been a blow, but now I was a DI myself I had, until the events of the last forty-eight hours or so, felt that I had every chance of being the first of my contemporaries to make the next step up to Detective Chief Inspector.

In joining the police I had broken with the family tradition. My grandfather, Kenneth, who had died in 1990, had served in the Army throughout World War 2, eventually retiring as a full Colonel. He was following the footsteps of his own father, Peter, who had survived the horrors of 1914-18 and retired as a Major. Great-grandfather Peter had died long before I was born, but he had started quite an Army dynasty. With two examples, it was no surprise that my father, still hale and hearty at sixty-three and retired to Devon with my mother, where they were stalwarts of the local village community, also went into the Army, retiring as a Lieutenant-Colonel. My two brothers, both older than myself, saw no sensible alternative but to don Army khaki. Michael, five years my senior, was doing well, currently a Major in the Paratroops. Chris, three years older than me, had not been so lucky. A Lieutenant in the Green Howards, he had been killed by a roadside bomb when on patrol with his platoon in Afghanistan in 2005. We all still missed him very much. Of all of us, he had seemed the brightest, the most likely to succeed to high rank, but it was not to be.

With all that Army history in the family it had been something of a shock to everybody when I had decided to become a policeman. Never by word nor deed had my parents displayed the slightest disappointment, but I knew that deep down they were. However, I was happy with my choice and as time went on they were, at the very least, reconciled to it – and when Chris was killed, I knew that they were relieved that I was in a less dangerous profession.

Pam had also gone to university; her degree, like her sister Helen, had been in foreign languages, although with Pam it had been Italian and German, rather than French and Spanish. Her language skills had stood us in good stead on holidays to our favourite destinations, the Italian/Swiss alpine border area – we are both reasonably competent on a pair of skis - and, as a complete geographic contrast, the rich Tuscany countryside. My own language skills were less well developed, but I was reasonably proficient in French and, according to Pam, had sometimes been known to display a reasonable command of English.

We were, so far, childless, although not for want of trying. Pam had become pregnant just over two years after we had married, but had miscarried at fifteen weeks. The miscarriage had been an awful experience for her and it had been a couple of years before we had once more tried for a baby, but our efforts had so far been in vain. Given what had happened to Pam so recently, I could only thank the heavens that her abductors hadn’t had a child to threaten as well as Pam herself.

All through Friday I was on tenterhooks, convinced that something would blow up to make it impossible to keep my promise to Pam, but good fortune smiled on me and I was away from the station at an almost unprecedented four o’clock, after assuring Norman that I had every confidence in his ability to discharge the duties of his new rank and cope with anything that might come up in my absence – but I made sure that he had my mobile number, just in case.

39

The journey north was slow to start with as I struggled through the Friday evening traffic up the A3, onto the M25, the M40, the M5 and at last the M6. Once past Preston the road was much clearer, and when I crossed the border into Scotland and the road became the M74, I was able to make good time, especially when I was sure nobody was watching and I was able to give the Mondeo its head.

Even so, it was nearer one in the morning, rather than midnight, before I drove up to the big nineteenth century farmhouse where the MacGregors, and temporarily (all being well) my wife resided.

As she had promised, Pam had waited up for me, and she hugged me tightly to her.

“Ken, I am so glad you could make it – I was sure something would crop up to spoil things.”

“Me too, but for once, it didn’t, and here I am.”

“Do you want anything to eat or drink?”

“No, love – I just want to sleep – I’m bushed.”

It could have taken no more than fifteen minutes for us to get to bed, and I must have been asleep within sixteen.

The next morning was all hustle and bustle until the children were out of the way – James to his junior rugby match, Sarah to the nearby livery where she acted as a general dogsbody in return for cheap riding lessons. Then it was down to serious adult discussions. Both Helen and Iain were clearly very worried about what had happened to Pam. Neither of them blamed me for my dereliction of duty; the fact that, as far as any of us knew, my failure to act in the manner expected of a police officer had saved Pam’s life, outweighed any other consideration.

It was Iain who effectively summed up the problem.

“So, what can the two of you really do? If you stay in Surrey you have no way of knowing what might happen. If you don’t, it will be a big setback for you, Ken, no matter what else you decide to do.”

I thought only for seconds; this scenario had played itself out in my mind time and again ever since Pam and I had spoken before she escaped to Scotland.

“There is a third possibility – that I find out who was behind Pam’s kidnapping and get the bastard put away.”

The three of them looked at me; finally Iain broke the silence.

“How good are the chances of you managing that, Ken?”

“As you can imagine, I’ve thought of little else since all this happened. We know it links back to Harry Schwarz, and I realise that he had a lot of ‘clients’, but there is one man who has steered clear of direct contact with Schwartz, but whom I know pulled a lot of the strings of those who did have direct contact with him. That’s Dicky Price. When I get back to Surrey I am going to have a quiet word with Price, Even if he wasn’t directly involved, I reckon he will have a good idea of who was.”

The others looked dubious, and I could not blame them. What I had not told them was just how I intended to ‘have a quiet word’ with Price. I had no intention of following normal police procedure with the man. I had no grounds for picking him up and even if I had, questioning him about Pam’s abduction would have instantly become known by my colleagues, which I still wanted to avoid, at least for the time being, because of the inevitable link to my tinkering with evidence.

The rest of the day was spent with as little regard as possible for the reason that Pam and I were in Scotland. James was picked up, muddy but triumphant, from his Rugby – his team had won and he had scored a try. Sarah, neat and tidy despite a morning with horses, had been delivered by the friend who ran the livery, and the evening had been spent on a riotous game of charades.

40

In bed that night Pam expressed her concern for the future; could I really expect to get anywhere with my plan?

“I promise you, love, that if it doesn’t work I’ll quit the force and we’ll move well away from Guildford. I haven’t given any real thought to what I might do, but there is always the private security industry. I’m sure that I can find something there if I have to.”

It was a poor answer and we both knew it. Our love making that night was a desperate affair, almost as though it might be for the very last time.

I drove south after lunch on the Sunday in a very sombre mood. I had no real expectation of achieving what I wanted – the capture of those responsible for kidnapping Pam – and the thought of having to quit the police to preserve my marriage preyed heavily on my mind. I did, however, have the faint glimmerings of an idea which strengthened the nearer I got to home. It was Sunday, the 5th of June. Perhaps by the end of the month I might have made some progress. I made a mental promise to myself and to Pam that if by the end of the month I really hadn’t achieved anything then Surrey Constabulary and I would have to come to a parting of the ways. In the final analysis I decided that my marriage was more important to me than my job.

The next day saw me welcoming George Fredericks to the team and reviewing what had happened over the weekend whilst I was in Scotland. Effectively, nothing had happened, or at least nothing to make my absence any sort of a problem. Norman, as I had expected, had coped without the slightest difficulty.

For once, it was to prove a day of pleasant surprises. Just after lunch Danny’s phone rang. He answered it and after a few minutes beckoned frantically to me through my open door. I left me desk and crossed over to him. With the phone clamped between his neck and his shoulder he was scribbling something on a sheet of paper, then spoke to his caller.

“Look, that’s great to hear. Can you hold the line a second – I want to pass your news on to my boss.”

He took the phone from his ear but retained hold of it as he turned to me.

“The stabbing of Bryony Kelloway – we’ve got a witness at last – and he knows the name of the stabber.”

“Who’s the witness?”

“A chap called Moreton – he left the club as the fracas started and has been away for a few days, which is why he hasn’t come forward before.”

“Danny – we need to talk to him – where is he?”

“At work – he works in the Nationwide office here in Guildford.”

“Tell him we are on our way!”

Danny returned his attention to the phone.

“Mr. Moreton, my boss, Detective Inspector Morgan, and I need to talk to you as soon as we can –

we’ll come to you right away – is that OK with you?”

The answer must have been in the affirmative because Danny gave a triumphant thumbs up.

Twenty minutes later we were in the Nationwide offices in Guildford High Street, meeting George Moreton, who proved to be a tall, slim individual of about thirty or a little less, dressed in a dark business suit, white shirt and stripe tie. A high, domed skull was the site of thinning blond hair, cut neat and short. Pale blue eyes examined us from behind thick lensed, rimless spectacles. Altogether, George Moreton scarcely looked your average club goer, but I suppose that it takes all types.

I introduce Danny and myself.

41

“Mr. Moreton, many thanks for agreeing to see us at short notice. Is there somewhere that we can talk in private?”

“Yes, indeed, Inspector – please come into the room just behind you – it’s one of our client interview rooms – I know it is all glass, but in fact it is quite soundproof.”

We entered the little room, which contained a work station with a computer terminal on it and three chairs, one at the terminal, the other two facing it.

“Right, Mr. Moreton, please tell us what you saw that night.”

“Well, I was at the club with my girlfriend, We were at the far side of the club, near the door, when there was clearly trouble starting over the other side. A group of men and women seemed to be involved and a fight was starting. The club bouncers went over to break it up, but I didn’t like the look of the way that things were going, especially when I saw that the bouncers were intent on ushering the trouble makers outside, which meant that June – that’s my girlfriend – and I were right in the path of the group coming towards the door, so I took June out before the group reached us.

Once in the street I asked June if she wanted to wait until the trouble makers went, or if she would like to go somewhere else. She said she didn’t fancy going back inside and we were standing there trying to decide where to go to next when we realised that the group of trouble makers weren’t dispersing, but continuing to fight amongst themselves.

“I saw a couple of people that I recognised involved in it and I saw a girl stagger back against one of them. At the time I thought that he punched her and I saw her fall. I didn’t like what was going on, so I hurried June away from it all.

“I had some holiday time owing and I had already booked to go away the next day – I was visiting my parents who live in France – so it wasn’t until yesterday when I got back and spoke to June that she told me that a girl had been stabbed. She had kept the issue of the local paper which had reported it and which had a picture of the stabbed girl, and I am sure that it is the girl I saw fall. The man who, as I thought, punched her, but who must actually have stabbed her, is Harry Keller. I know him because he works in the garage where I get my car serviced.”

I searched my memory, but drew a blank. I was pretty sure that no Harry Keller’s name was in the list of people identified as being at the scene at the time, but given the confusion that had existed, I was hardly surprised.

“Mr. Moreton – that is very helpful. Now, it was dark, there was a lot of confusion, people shouting and pushing and shoving. Can you be certain that it was Harry Keller you saw strike Miss Kelloway?”

“Oh yes, you can’t mistake him – he is very tall, six foot four or so and has a mop of ginger hair. As I say, I didn’t realise that he had stabbed the girl – I assumed he had punched her – but he hit her and she fell, of that I am quite certain.”

Why, I wondered, had nobody else mentioned someone of apparently so very distinctive an appearance? Whatever the reason, we clearly needed to speak to Harry Keller as soon as possible.

“Mr. Moreton, you have been most helpful. Could I ask you to come to the station and make a written statement for me, please? If you could make it this lunch time that would be great.”

Moreton nodded his acquiescence

.

“That’s no problem, Inspector. I take my lunch from twelve to one, so I could be at the station at half twelve – would that be OK?”

“Yes, that would be fine. I’ll warn my team to expect you in case I’m not back myself by then – just ask at the desk for anyone from my team.”

I handed him my card so that he would ask for the right team.

42

“Also, Mr. Moreton, I will need to take to your girl friend as she must have seen some at least of what you saw – where can I find her?”

“She’s a nurse at the Royal Surrey Hospital. She’s on an early today,” he looked at his watch, “so she should be home by about half four.”

“And the address?”

“Oh, we live in the Epsom Road – we’ve a flat in number twenty-seven.”

I looked at my own watch.

“Mr. Moreton, after what you have said I’m sure you realise that we need to speak to Mr. Keller as a matter of urgency, but I really to speak with your girlfriend first, so I’m going to have to talk to her at work, I’m afraid. Where in the hospital does she work? Oh, and you called her June – what’s her other name?”

“She’s June Whitfield – and she’s fed up of all the folk who say ‘any relation’ or similar. She works on the men’s orthopaedic ward.”

Half an hour later Danny and I were seated in the ward office talking to June Whitfield. Obviously far younger than her famous namesake, she also bore not the slightest resemblance to her. Lustrous black hair and dark brown eyes were the most striking features of her attractive oval face and complemented her cafe au lait skin admirably.

Her story bore out what we had already been told by Moreton, with one added detail. A moment before Keller had, presumably, stabbed Bryony Kelloway, he had himself been jostled by two other men, who pushed him out of their way as they made off down the street. They had also jostled Bryony and her two friends and, in June’s opinion, had caused her to stumble back against Keller, who, again in her opinion, had pushed her violently away rather than specifically striking her.

Confusion between my two witnesses was the last thing I needed, but I found both of them credible; I had long experience of witnesses, all in perfectly good faith, interpreting differently what they had seen. The next priority, however, was to interview Keller. I wondered whether to go to him or to have him brought to me and decided upon the latter.

As a result, an hour or so later, Danny and I were talking to Harry Keller, accompanied by a duty solicitor, in one of our interview rooms which, like all such in the station, had definitely seen better days. Keller, as described, was tall and ginger haired. He was also heavily built and running to fat a bit. He must have weighed around seventeen stones and was clearly nervous.

I introduced Danny and myself and explained that he was being interviewed under caution and that he was not at this time, being charged with any offence but that we needed to know exactly what had happened the night that Bryony Kelloway had been stabbed.

He ran his tongue over his upper lip and looked at the solicitor, who was the same unprepossessing Douglas Mountjoy who had acted for John Carter when we had interviewed and charged him over the shop robberies.

Keller looked from Danny to myself, then at Mountjoy. The silence stretched out.

“We’re waiting Mr. Keller.”

“Well, what do you want to know? Yes, I was at the club that night and there was a big barney, started inside then went outside, but I didn’t do nothing.”

“I have witnesses. It is alleged that you were the person who stabbed Miss Kelloway, resulting in a wound that she was lucky to survive. It is only by good luck at the skills of the staff at the Royal Surrey Hospital that we aren’t discussing a murder charge today.”

Keller stared at me, a positively hunted look in his eyes.

“Look, this was all a mistake, right?”

“In what way?”

43

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Yeah, I had a knife, but it was one I’d been using that day for laying carpet at my sister’s place. I run a bit late, so I went straight to the club from her place. Didn’t want to leave the knife lying around there – she’s got a couple of nippers who are into everything – so I took it with me.

“When the punch-up started in the club I was near the door and I got sort of swept up in the mob that got pushed out the door. Outside I was hemmed in – there was a lot of pushing and shoving, some folk were throwing punches at anyone near them – it was a right pantomime. Then a couple of guys came at me, one took a swing and knocked me back against the wall, but didn’t do no real damage. I remembered the knife and pulled it out to make them back off – they did so, but as they did there was another lot of pushing and shoving and that girl fell against me and I tried to push her off – but I forgot about the knife and it went into her back. When she went down I knew that I was in trouble so I got away as fast as I could.”

Mountjoy interjected.

“Inspector, my client is willing to plead guilty to having the knife in a public place, but strenuously denies any intent to injure Miss Kelloway or anybody else. He drew it only when he was himself threatened.”

I felt deflated. I had been all ready for a tough interviewing session, a charge of grievous bodily harm, even attempted murder, and Keller had collapsed like a pricked balloon. The lesser charge would still almost certainly see him serving time inside, but not for any great length of time. I formally charged Keller and released him, warning him that he would be appearing in court for a preliminary hearing the next day and warning him, in the strictest possible terms, of the penalties he would face should he try to abscond.

Danny and I returned to the office and told the rest of the team the outcome. There was satisfaction that we effectively had a confession, but my disappointment that we could make no more serious a charge against the man was generally shared.

At the end of the day I returned to the empty house, missing Pam dreadfully. The anticlimax of the Keller interview, combined with everything else, made me feel that perhaps I really did need to leave the police and find an alternative way of earning a living.

I microwaved and ate a pretty tasteless ready meal, washed down with too much red wine, and was sitting in front of the TV, but without it switched on, when the phone rang.

It was Pam.

“Ken, how are you?”

“Missing you,” I said truthfully.

“I miss you too, darling. Look, I’ve been thinking things over. Running away to here wasn’t really going to solve anything, now was it? We need to be together, so I’m coming home tomorrow and we’ll sort things out.”

All of a sudden my gloom disappeared. I could hardly believe my ears, and stammered out my relief, my gratitude, my joy, that she coming back to me.

She chuckled at the other end of the line.

“You really have missed me, haven’t you? See you tomorrow, darling.”

I replaced the handset, happier than I had been for days. Tuesday would see us back together.

Chapter Seven – 7th June 2011 and onwards

Pam phoned me before I left for work; she would leave Scotland mid-morning, so expected to be home around eight in the evening, and I went off in my best mood ever since the kidnap.

44

It was just after three when my phone went. It was DCI Clifford; could I please come to his office. I was there in a minute or so and as I walked in I saw that Jimmy Jackson was also present.

“Ken, please sit down.”

I did so and realised that both men seemed in serious mood; I wondered uneasily if they had discovered my transgression. I was totally unprepared for what came next.

“Ken, I’m afraid we have some awful news. It’s about Pam. She’s been in a crash on the motorway

– Ken, I’m terribly sorry, but she’s dead.”

I sat there totally numb, shaking my head slowly in disbelief.

“But we spoke on the phone this morning – it can’t be right.”

Jimmy broke in.

“Ken, I’m so sorry, but it is. It happened on the M6, not very far south of Carlisle. The locals phoned us to inform her next of kin – by chance, the news came through to the switchboard here and the operator recognised the name and address.”

I still tried to refuse to believe it, but in my heart I knew it must be true.

The two of them sat there looking at me. None of us knew what to say next; the enormity of the event rendered the three of us speechless.

It was Jimmy who finally spoke.

“Ken, I think that you ought to go home and take a couple of days to yourself; if there is anything that we can do, no matter what, you only have to say.”

“Thanks, Jimmy – I think that I’ll go home now, but I’ll be in tomorrow or the next day – I don’t want to just sit in the house alone. But tell me, do we know what happened?”

This time it was Clifford who spoke.

“When I heard, Ken, I got in touch with the Lancashire folk. The man in charge of the incident is a uniformed Inspector – John Grace. He told me that what seems to have happened is that someone was joining the motorway from the slip road and misjudged things. A lorry on the inside lane –

French registration – swerved to avoid him, side-swiped a car in the middle lane and Pam went into the back of that car and then a van went into the back of her. As well as Pam the two people in the car that was side-swiped were also killed and the driver of the car that ran into Pam is seriously ill in hospital – not expected to pull through. The driver who caused all the mayhem drove off without stopping, but was caught by a Lancashire traffic car a few miles down the road. He’s being held, likely to be charged with causing death by careless or even dangerous driving.”

Just like Ray, I thought. The driver who was the cause of everything is unhurt, innocent fellow travellers are killed or maimed. The fact that the lorry was French also had a bearing; left hand drive lorries are notorious for having big blind spots when driving on the left in the UK. He probably never knew the car he hit was there until the impact. Allowing foreign lorries with insufficient fields of view onto our roads looked like having claimed another three lives, possibly four. And then there was the man whose misjudgement had caused the whole thing in the first place.

I got to my feet, slowly, feeling a hundred years old.

“I’ll just tell my team what’s happened,” I said, dragging the words out as if each one was a barb in my flesh.

“I’ll do that, Ken.” Jimmy offered, but I shook my head.

“No, thanks Jimmy, but I need to do it – then I’m going home for the rest of the day – I’ve got to tell all the family the bad news.”

My team received my news in a state of shock. Nobody knew what to say, least of all me, so scarcely anything was said before I took my leave of them.

45

I got to the front door of the station to find Jimmy waiting for me.

“Give me your keys, Ken – I’m driving you home.” He nodded to a uniformed constable standing nearby. “PC Vaughan will follow us in his traffic car and bring me back.”

Numbly, I handed over my keys and all too soon I was back home, on my own, wondering who to ring first.

The next few hours were a nightmare. In the end, I had phoned Pam’s parents first, followed by Helen and Iain and then my own parents. I tried to raise my brother, but he was out of the country somewhere and the Army were reluctant to say where, but did promise to contact him and ask him to ring me, although it was a couple of days before that happened.

There followed days of misery. Pam’s funeral took place just over a week later; I had her buried in the local graveyard. We had no real connection to it – no ancestors to be buried near, or anything like that, but there seemed no sense in having her buried anywhere else. At least it was near enough for me to visit regularly.

My determination to strike back at those who had abducted her was stronger than ever. But for them she would still be alive and I wouldn’t be living with the constant worry hanging over me of having my tampering with evidence discovered. However, my one assumed lead, Dicky Price, had left the area. A quiet word with one of my informants discovered that he had left the country and was currently in the south of Spain for an indeterminate period, so I had no way of trying to follow up on Pam’s kidnapping.

Slowly, my life fell into a routine. I worked hard, probably too hard, and for too long, but that was infinitely preferable to long hours alone in the house. After two months of this, Jimmy Jackson called me into his office. He was worried about me, he said; at the rate I was going he was sure that I was headed for a breakdown from overwork and he didn’t want to see that to happen to me on top of everything else.

“For God’s sake, Ken, find something to do other than just work,” were his final words and when I got home I mulled over them. One thing came to mind. I had grown to hate the house, almost to fear returning to it of an evening and I decided to move. The very next day I put it on the market.

Chapter Eight – September 2012

Many things change, some stay the same. Amongst the latter was the fact that Dicky Price was still living in Spain, out of my reach. I had, very carefully, asked around my informants as to the reason for his departure. Nobody was totally sure, but the general consensus of opinion was that he had somehow come into funds on a scale hitherto beyond his expectations, but that he had also upset somebody over the acquisition of those funds. Further than that I did not know, nor did I wish to make my interest in the man too obvious, for fear that it might lead back to the Schwarz evidence bags and my tampering with them.

Amongst the changes, most affected the job. It was officially confirmed that the unloved Detective Superintendent Wylock had taken early retirement on health grounds and would be seen no more in the Surrey constabulary, very much to everyone’s relief. Jimmy Jackson had retired the previous November and his replacement was Detective Chief Inspector George Hughes. George had been transferred from Eastern Division in Reigate where he had been a steady, if unspectacular, team leader as a DCI. His transfer had meant that there had been no further promotions at DI level in our own set up; the word was that ACC Pope was reluctant to appoint from outside following the disastrous history of DSi Wylock where the appointment panel, it was now becoming increasingly clear, had over-ridden his objections to appointing the woman. By effecting a series of transfers -

46

George Harris’ own post over in Reigate was filled on an acting basis by one of the DIs over there, and so on down the scale, he had avoided the need for an appointment panel and was giving the various changes a chance to settle down and eventually result in substantive promotions.

I had settled in to my own satisfaction and to that of DCI Hughes and we worked well together. I wasn’t alone in that; my fellow DIs, Jill Harris and Chris Lane, also got on well with him, and he with them. DSi Clifford (no longer acting, but substantive once Wylock’s departure had been confirmed) ran things in much the manner – both effective and efficient – of Wylock’s predecessor, DSi Watson. The divisional CID was not only happier, but more successful over the last year and a bit.

It therefore came as a major surprise when Clifford summoned me to his office one Monday morning. He looked grave.

“Ken, come in and sit down. I’ve got some bad news to tell you.”

Full of foreboding, I sat down opposite him.

“Ken, I’ve had Jennie, George Hughes’ wife, on the phone last night. George was rushed into hospital on Saturday with a suspected heart attack. It has now been confirmed and he is likely to be out of action for some weeks at least. I want you to act up in his absence. I’m borrowing a DS from Eastern division to take over from you as acting DI – Hazel Rogers. She’s good and will be a DI in her own right pretty soon. This will give the two of you a chance to gain experience in a higher rank, which will stand you both in good stead when, all being well, George returns.”

“I’m flattered, boss – but can I ask – I’ve only been a DI for just over a year. Chris Lane has been DI for nearly five years. Isn’t he going to see this as a bit of a slap in the face?”

“If he does, it will be up to you to sort him out.”

Clifford paused for a moment.

“Ken, it’s no secret that CID in this division was a disaster once Wylock had been in post for a while. When David Watson was in charge it went well. Once that woman took over, she just about wrecked things in short order. Now, in the division I’ve got some folk who I see as safe pairs of hands but who have reached, or are very near, their peak. Chris Lane is one of those. So are most of the other DIs to be frank. On the other hand, I have some folk who are capable of going a good bit further than where they are at the moment – your DC Liz Goode is one, and she is going to get the next DS vacancy that occurs, no doubt about that. Jill Harris is another, and it was very close between the two of you as to who I offered acting DCI to. You’re a third – but it’s not just potential

– the way you cleared up the Wigmore case impressed everybody, so no false modesty.”

I was gratified at his words. In truth, the case to which he had alluded was one of which I felt quite proud. Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Charles Edward Wigmore, his wife Elaine, and their daughter, twenty-eight year old Elizabeth, had been found just before Christmas, shot dead in the colonel’s impressive neo-Georgian mini-mansion. Both women had been shot twice, in or near the heart.

Wigmore had died from a single bullet wound to the head. The women had been in the kitchen.

Wigmore himself had been found slumped half in, half out, of a swivel armchair in his office. The weapon which had caused the deaths, a Browning P-35 automatic pistol, had been on the floor by his feet. On the face of it, it seemed that Wigmore had killed the two women, then taken his own life, a supposition which seemed all the more reasonable when his GP confirmed that he was suffering from incurable cancer, with only a few months to live, if that. The timing was easily established. All three had been alive the previous evening when they had entertained a couple of friends, friends who had left shortly after midnight. All three had been dead when the colonel’s cleaning lady arrived at eight the next morning.

47

I could understand the likelihood of the colonel committing suicide in such circumstances, but why kill his wife and daughter? Arrogance? Vindictiveness?

I looked further. His will made his wife his first beneficiary; if she pre-deceased him then his son and daughter inherited, but not equally. The daughter was married with two children; if she survived her father the estate would be split 60:40 with the son receiving the forty percent.

However, if the daughter and her mother both pre-deceased Wigmore, then the son inherited everything – and everything was quite a bit. Even after the taxman had taken his greedy share, the assets totalled around five million pounds. That made me look very closely at the son; the death of his sister before his father had benefitted him by around three million pounds.

David Charles Wigmore was an Army officer, like his father before him. He was a captain in the paratroops and my first port of call had been a totally unofficial one. I called my brother who, like Wigmore, was an officer in the paratroops, in his case a major. I asked him if he knew Wigmore.

There had been a short pause at the other end of the line, then:

“Not well, I am pleased to say – he’s not in my company. General feeling about him, however, is that he is a bit of a shit – totally self-centred, and as a result a poor leader. In fact, the way he is going, he might find himself politely invited to seek alternative employment in the not too far distant future.”

So, David Wigmore might well be facing the prospect of unemployment – which must have made the thought of his potential inheritance all the more appealing. One problem – he had an alibi and his father’s death really did look like suicide.

I had looked more closely into the death of the colonel. On the face of it, Wigmore had placed the muzzle of the Browning in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Very messy, and very effective. His hand had gunshot residues on it. His prints, and his alone, were on the pistol. However, when I talked things over with the pathologist we made an interesting discovery. Much of the roof of Wigmore’s mouth had been destroyed by the bullet that had killed him – but not all of it, and the remaining area had a cut about an inch back from his teeth. Not much of a cut, but something that needed explaining. The front sight of the Browning pistol is a small blade shaped protrusion at, as its name implies, the front of the weapon, the part of the barrel which would have been inside Wigmore’s mouth when the trigger was pulled. However, if the colonel was responsible for his own death, and going on how his fingerprints were located on the weapon, the normal way of holding the pistol would have resulted in it being upside down as he placed it in his mouth. Try it – clench your hand into a fist and extend your forefinger as though you are holding a pistol, then bend your arm so that the imaginary weapon is in your mouth. Your thumb will be nearest the floor, not the ceiling as it would be when you just stretch your arm out in front of you. To not have the pistol upside down would require a twist of the arm and wrist – a bit uncomfortable and totally unnecessary. The more natural way would have had the pistol’s front sight against the tongue, not the roof of the mouth. The colonel’s DNA was on the front sight, but that by itself proved nothing –

the weapon had been inside his mouth and there were traces of his DNA all over it.

The main point for me was that I didn’t believe the colonel had put that gun in his own mouth. I believed that someone else had done it. If that was the case, the gun would have been upright and that would explain the front sight making that small cut to the roof of the mouth as the weapon jerked back and up under recoil as the trigger was pulled.

So who? It couldn’t have been either of the women unless they had cooperated in a bizarre conspiracy of shooting him first, then one of them being shot by the other – but that left a survivor.

Both women had been shot twice – and the pathologist was confident that either shot received by each of them would have been fatal. If the women, or one of them, had perpetrated the killings it 48

would have been impossible without a third party being present to administer the second shot to one of them. Much too far-fetched to be credible, so I had gone hard at the son’s alibi – and I had cracked it. It revolved around the timed and dated receipt for some shopping in a supermarket, petrol from a filling station, an overnight stay at an hotel and a Eurostar ticket. What appeared to make the alibi firm was the fact that all three receipts had been issued in Calais, where Wigmore junior claimed to have stayed overnight on the relevant date. I had taken the Eurostar over to Calais and checked all three locations. None of them recognised David Wigmore’s picture. That by itself meant nothing – just because the picture hadn’t been recognised didn’t mean that he hadn’t been there. I made an assumption – that someone had played the part of Wigmore. All I had to do was find that someone – and I did. CCTV footage at the supermarket started the trail. At the time shown on the till receipt there was footage of a tall man dressed in a dark overcoat. CCTV footage at the petrol station showed the same man, or one looking very similar. Quizzing the hotel staff over the ledger entry for ‘Captain D.C. Wigmore’ produced a clerk who was sure he remembered the Englishman with his very poor French – a man at least one metre ninety tall. Mental arithmetic gave me six feet three. Wigmore was five feet eight. I had him brought in and, accompanied by George Fredericks, I interrogated him fiercely. He eventually cracked and admitted the killings and that he had paid a former Army acquaintance to impersonate him on the French trip, an acquaintance who had been only too glad of the money.

We followed up on Wigmore’s confession and also arrested his acquaintance, one time Sergeant Harry Moss, who had served with Wigmore in Iraq and Afghanistan, but was now out of the Army and unemployed. We charged him with conspiracy to commit murder, which he strenuously denied, claiming that he had no idea why Wigmore had paid him for the impersonation but assuming, he claimed, that he was cheating on his wife. In the event the CPS were happy to reduce the charge to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in return for Moss’ testimony against Wigmore. He claimed that when he heard of the killings he was too scared of Wigmore to come forward He got two years; Wigmore got life.

All that, however, was in the past. I brought my mind back to the present and to what DSi Clifford was saying. He leant back in his chair and ran his fingers through his short-cropped, and now rapidly greying, fair hair.

“You know, Ken, I begin to wonder if this division has a curse on it. To replace a good bloke like David Watson we get la Wylock. Ray Green and your Pam die in stupid road accidents. Now poor old George – let’s hope that there are no more nasty surprises to come.”

I agreed whole-heartedly and then he picked up the phone to his secretary, Stella Marshall, a lady who was much happier in her job now than had been the case when DSi Wylock had been her boss.

“Stella, would you ask Acting DI Rogers to come in, please?”

A moment later and the door opened as Stella ushered in Hazel Rogers. We had never met before; that, although not very usual for CID officers at our sort of level, was by no means unknown. I had, however, heard her name mentioned from time to time and she had a good reputation as a DS who was going to go places. She was a tall, slim young woman in her late twenties or very early thirties (I later learned that she had celebrated her thirtieth birthday the previous month) and by all accounts was seen as a high-flyer. We shook hands and appraised each other; her smooth complexion, cafe au lait in hue, was complemented by jet black hair to her shoulders and deep-set, sparkling brown eyes. Her ‘power dressing’ trouser suit and crisp white blouse added to the overall air of competence that she exuded.

49

Introductions effected, we both sat down as Clifford again used his phone. Ten minutes later the small conference room held a meeting of the senior CID staff of the division. In addition to Clifford, Hazel Rogers and myself, that meant Jill Harris and Chris Lane from George Hughes’

section, plus the other DCIs, Bill Laurence and Jerry Collyer, and their respective DIs That meant thirteen police officers in the room – I just hoped that it wasn’t an unlucky number.

Clifford opened the proceedings briskly.

“Right, folks. I won’t keep you long – just want to bring everybody up to speed. DCI Hughes, for those of you who don’t already know, suffered a heart attack over the weekend. The news at the moment is not too bad; he is expected to make a full recovery, but he will be away for at least six to eight weeks, possibly a bit longer, so I have had to make some acting arrangements. DI Morgan will act up as DCI until George Hughes returns. To fill in for him, I am obliged to East Division for loaning us DS Hazel Rogers, whom most of you probably already know, as Acting DI. I’m not reallocating any workloads – Acting DCI Morgan will simply step into DCI Hughes’ shoes for the time being and take over full responsibility for his section.”

There were murmurs of concern for George Hughes and of welcome for Hazel Rogers, and that, basically, was that.

Another ten minutes later and I was in my new, temporary, office, closeted with my three DIs. Ever since Clifford had told me of my acting promotion, I had been preparing for this first meeting. I was pleasantly surprised when, before I had a chance to open my mouth, Chris Lane spoke.

“Ken, I’m really sorry to hear about the DCI, but I want you to know that I’m sure Mr. Clifford made the right choice in making you acting.”

I thanked him for the sentiment, and Jill chimed in with “Yes, congratulations.” The accompanying smile looked a little forced, and remembering how I had felt when she had been promoted to DI before me, I could understand her feelings now.

“Right,” I said, “ we don’t know how long it will be before the DCI is back, so we’re going to have to carry on without him and without thinking that anything can wait until he gets back. I’m going to carry on the morning meetings he had with us,” I turned to Hazel Rogers, “Hazel, I don’t know if you did things this way over in East, but DCI Hughes had a brief meeting with all three of us every morning – just ten to fifteen minutes, to keep himself up to date, and so that we three knew what was going on throughout the section. Obviously anything major happening during the day got reported back to him where needed.”

She nodded her head.

“Yes, we worked about the same.”

We settled down to a quick review of cases, then when we had finished, I asked Hazel to stay after the other two had left, and we went through in more detail the cases that I had been handling. Then I introduced her to my – at least for the time being, her- team and left them to get acquainted.

I returned to my temporary office, sat down, and looked around it, realising as I did so that for the first time in my career as a police officer I had an office of my own. As a DC and then a DS I had just had one desk in a large room with other team members. As a DI I had a cubby-hole of an office off the main room, just a glass goldfish bowl, really. Now I had solid walls and a door. George Hughes’ things still dominated the room – a picture of his wife Jennie at one corner of the desk, another picture, this time of the two of them plus their two children, a son and daughter both now in their twenties, although teenagers when the picture had been taken, at the other corner. I opened a desk drawer to discover an electric razor and a spare tie, a shirt still in its Marks and Spencer’s wrapping, a clean pair of sock and fresh underwear, again still in its wrappers. George always appeared smart in the office – here were his back-up items to maintain that smartness. I went 50

through all the desk drawers, removing the personal stuff and, after making a note of which drawer the various items had come from, putting it into a large cardboard box which I had acquired from Stella Marshall so that when George returned I could replace all his things as though he had never been away.

I looked through his correspondence in-tray; nothing of any surprise there. Then I booted up his computer and checked his E-mails. A couple from admin on budgetary matters requested rapid replies, rapid replies that they were not going to get until I had had a chance to check how far George had got to in formulating his responses.

For the first time in my CID career I not only had an office of my own; I was also not immediately involved in the detail of investigations unless I chose to be. I mentally reviewed the cases that I had gone through with the three DIs earlier. None of them, I decided, needed me to get involved in the detail, at least not at the moment. Obviously, I was far more au fait with the cases that Hazel Rogers would now be handling; I must make a conscious effort not to poke my nose in and undermine her in the eyes both of her new team and the other two DIs.

Reluctantly, I decided that I would be best employed in replying to admin about budgets and sorted through George’s papers and computer files until I was able to make a first stab at drafting replies.

It took the rest of the morning and into the afternoon; I had just about finished my preliminary replies when my phone rang. I started to pick it up, but then realised that it wasn’t my desk phone, but one of my three mobiles. I checked; it was the mobile I used for a number of contacts, none of whom I wanted coming through the police switchboard. I answered it.

“Morgan”

There was a moment’s pause, then I heard Olly Collinge, one of the contacts who had this number, on the line.

“Mr. Morgan. It’s Olly.”

“I know, Olly – what can I do for you?”

“We need to meet, Mr. Morgan – I’ve got some news for you from Spain.”

My attention immediately peaked. Collinge was an informer I had cultivated since my days as a DC

and he had always been a useful source of information. Something from Spain surely meant news of Dicky Price, and I lost interest in budgetary matters instantly. I looked at my watch.

“Olly, I’ll meet you straight away – where are you?”

“I’m in the Three Tuns, Mr. Morgan.”

“Right, I’ll see you there in quarter of an hour.”

I was about to leave when I hesitated. Fresh into my new, if only temporary, post, who now needed to know where I would be? Up until this morning, I would have told whoever of my team was nearest and just gone. After a moment’s thought I phoned Stella Marshall and told her that I would be out of the office for half an hour or so and would have my office mobile with me.

True to my word, fifteen minutes later I was in the Three Tuns, the small pub just across the road from Guildford Castle. Collinge was waiting for me. A small man, slight of stature and grey of visage, he was now in his mid to late fifties, and was one of those on the periphery of petty crime in the area. Using him as eyes and ears was more advantageous to me that seeing him put away for his small time fencing operation and we both knew it. We also both knew that he walked a fine line between losing his value to me and becoming a marked man locally as an informer.

By unspoken accord, he finished his pint of beer and we left the pub, crossed the road, and strolled in the Castle gardens.

“So, Olly, what do you have for me?”

51

“Dicky Price is back, Mr. Morgan. Come back middle of last week, he did, but he’s not gone back to his old place.”

I knew that before his disappearance to sunny Spain, Price had lived with a woman, Betty Singleton, in Pewley Way, near to the Mount Alvernia private hospital.

“So, where is he holed up now?”

“He’s got one of them flats at the top of the High Street.”

That was a surprise. The flats Collinge had mentioned were rentals, and expensive rentals, even by Surrey standards. Price had clearly come into some money from somewhere. How much, I wondered, and where from?

“Any idea why he has decided to return after all this time?”

“Word is, Mr. Morgan, that he went away for his health but that he’s now done a deal with the guys he’d crossed last year.”

“Do you know who he crossed?”

Collinge shook his head.

“Not really. There is a rumour though that it were a couple of guys from London, brothers, name of Canelli.”

I frowned. I had heard of the Canelli brothers, but only very vaguely. They were, so far as I could remember, based in north London and were the Met’s problem, not ours. I would have to do some digging, but as far as I knew, they had never been involved in anything south of the Thames before.

I would have to do a bit of digging, and I would have to do it carefully. Any noticeable interest in Dicky Price, or anyone associated with him carried the possibility of leading back to Harry Schwarz’s mysterious key, and that was something that I had to avoid.

Back in the office I wasted no time in doing a quick perusal of the database for the Canelli brothers.

They were, I discovered, Lou, born in 1962 and Joe, born two years later. Both had records for minor offences from their younger days, although neither had served time, and they had both been clear of trouble for fifteen years or more now. What really piqued my interest, however, was that amongst their known associates had been Harry Schwarz, correctly identified as deceased, and perhaps that had something to do with Price’s leaving, and then returning to, the country. I wondered why, when we had checked Schwarz, the Canellis hadn’t shown up; presumably something in the way that we had set up our search of the computer records. Then I realised that the records of the Canelli brothers had been updated since we had done our search – the link to Schwarz post-dated our efforts, so that was why it hadn’t come up at the time.

What, I wondered, had caused somebody – presumably someone from the Met – to add the name of a dead man to the Canelli records? I had no way of knowing and no safe way of finding out.

Of one thing I was sure, and it was something upon which I was still determined. I wanted revenge on whoever had kidnapped Pam and, even if indirectly, caused her death.

Chapter Nine – one week later

I entered the pub and looked around. The man I had come to meet was seated at a table in the far corner, a full pint and a half finished one in front of him. I crossed the floor and slid into the chair opposite him, nodding my thanks for the beer, lifted the glass in salutation and took a deep swig before putting it back down again.

I surveyed my companion. A little taller than myself, a bit more heavily built, he looked back at me from deep-set blue eyes in a tanned face surmounted by black hair cut short and neatly trimmed. He was casually dressed, pale grey slacks, a white polo shirt under a well worn black leather jacket.

52

He was probably the toughest and most dangerous man I knew. He was my elder brother Mike, also known as Major Michael Morgan, MC, of the Parachute Regiment – the ‘Paras’.

I hadn’t seen him since Pam’s funeral, but he looked just the same as always, tough, intelligent, uncompromising, utterly dependable.

“Thanks for coming, Mike.”

He made a dismissive gesture with his left hand.

“You said you needed help. That’s what brothers are for.”

“Yeah, but still thanks, anyway.”

“So, what is in your mind.”

Mike was fully aware of the events surrounding Pam’s kidnapping; after Pam had died I had told him everything, whereas my parents were still unaware that Pam had been kidnapped, nor that I had tampered with evidence. When Pam had gone to stay with her sister Helen I had impressed upon her and Iain, her husband, that my parents knew nothing of the kidnapping and that I wanted to keep it that way. Similarly, Pam – and Helen’s – parents were unaware of what had happened to their younger daughter. I saw no point in burdening the four parents with useless knowledge which would only add to their distress over Pam’s death.

I took a deep breath and plunged into my story.

“Mike, the only lead I have to who might have kidnapped Pam and therefore lead to her dying in that accident has just returned to the UK. I want to talk to him, but I can’t do it officially – to do so would probably lead back to my tampering with evidence and just about certainly cost me my job –

perhaps even get a prison sentence.”

Mike nodded – this was not new ground to him, other than the fact that Price had returned to the UK.

“Pam’s kidnapping had a tie-up with Harry Schwarz in some way – it was his key that the kidnappers made me find for them. The only major link to Schwarz is Dicky Price, who left the country shortly after I provided the key, but has now returned and apparently a lot better off than he was before he left. I am assuming that somehow that key was the source of his new money. Now, the word on the street – although it is rumour, it is a pretty strong rumour – is that Price somehow upset a pair of London gangsters, the Canelli brothers. They also had links to Schwarz, but we didn’t know that until after Schwarz was dead. It is also believed that whatever the cause of the disagreement with the Canellis, the breach now seems to have been healed or Price would still be in Spain out of harm’s way.

“Now, I want to talk with Price – but I can’t do it officially for fear of what I have done coming to light, so I want to pick him up and take him somewhere quiet.”

Mike looked at me hard.

“And then?”

“What do you mean, and then?”

“Well, even if you wear a mask or something, if he did have anything to do with Pam’s abduction, he is immediately going to assume that you are behind him being grabbed. If he was involved, he will know that you were blackmailed into helping them. What is to stop him from dropping you in it with the police?”

It was something to which I had already given considerable thought. My solution was a weak one, but it was the only one that I had to offer.

“I intend to put the fear of God into him so that he won’t dare to do anything of the sort.”

Mike looked sceptical.

“And how do you expect to be able to do that?”

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“I’ve already tampered with evidence once. A second time won’t make things any worse for me. I’ll make it clear to him that I have evidence against him for something serious; one word from him and he goes down as well.”

“Do you have such evidence?”

“Not really, but I can persuade him that I do. Some of his mates – or at least acquaintances – are already doing time for the possession of a sawn off shotgun. I will need to convince him that, even though it isn’t true, I can produce evidence that he was also involved.”

Mike clearly remained dubious.

“Do you think it will work?”

I shrugged my shoulders helplessly.

“It’s the best idea that I can up with.”

“There is another possibility, you know.”

“What’s that?”

“You could make sure that he disappears – permanently. Kill him.”

I had given that possibility some thought – but not much. To hear it stated so baldly made me hesitate.

“I’ve thought about, I must admit. To be honest, if he did have anything to do with Pam’s kidnapping – and thus her death – I think that I would be tempted – very tempted. I don’t see how I could get away with it, though – and if he didn’t have anything to do with it, I don’t think I could bring myself to do it.”

Mike nodded.

“OK, so you need a plan B –convincing him to keep his mouth shut for fear of what will happen if he doesn’t. The threat of being taken down if he betrays you – how real is that?”

“Well, as far as I know he had nothing to do with the shotgun, nor with the robberies in which it was used, so it won’t be easy. I have thought about it a good deal and the best that I can come up with is to plant an illegal weapon of some sort either in his car or his flat – that or drugs or perhaps both.”

As I spoke I was only too aware, and very uncomfortably aware, that what I was considering was, in itself, highly illegal and against everything I had ever signed up to as a police officer. I would become, in fact, the very worst sort of policeman, one who fabricated evidence against an innocent (or presumed innocent) person for his own ends.

But Pam was dead. She was dead because criminals had abducted her and used the threat of harming her, even killing her, as a lever against me. I was determined that they would suffer for what they had done to us.

“Can you lay your hands on a weapon or drugs to plant?”

“Oh yes. I can get something quite easily.”

And so I could, but to do so I would have to deal with some of my informants contacts; unless I was very, very careful – and lucky – there was a good chance that I would be laying myself even more open to blackmail, and I admitted this to Mike. His brow furrowed in thought before he spoke.

“To be honest with you, Ken, that sounds rather like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Also – the timing might be difficult, surely? The evidence can’t be planted right away – too much chance that by the time you decided that you needed to make use of it, he would have discovered it and disposed of it.”

Once again I shrugged helplessly.

“I know, but it is the best that I can come up with.”

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“Why not just talk to the man and bribe him rather than threaten him.”

“Bribe him with what? He seems to be pretty well off at the moment.”

Mike interrupted.

“I didn’t mean with money but with something that he will need.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you were willing to plant false evidence on him – but we can both see the problems with that. Suppose you demonstrate to him that you already have evidence against him which you are willing to keep quiet about unless he tells you what you want to know?”

It was at that moment that everything changed. Mike leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and fixed my with the gaze of his deep-set eyes.

“Suppose,” he said, “just suppose, that we try a plan C?”

“So what would that be?”

“Well, we are agreed that the moment you mention Pam’s kidnapping, he will realise that you are involved and he has an opportunity to strike at you. Yes?”

I nodded my head.

“Yes – so, what can plan C be?”

“Well, all this revolves about a key which was in Harry Schwartz’s possession and which you had to pass on to someone – person or persons unknown. Now, instead of concentrating on what happened to Pam, suppose we go at him about what happened to that key? That key must have been worth a lot for whoever it was to kidnap the wife of a relatively senior CID officer, yes?”

I nodded again.

“OK, so you and I lift him and impress upon him that what we are interested in is what happened to that key because we reckon that it could still be valuable to us. Perhaps because we know that it still has secrets unplumbed, or because we want to put the squeeze on whoever got it in the first place.”

I realised that what Mike was proposing made sense; diverting Price’s thoughts away from the kidnapping of Pam to the possession of the key was the best chance I had of avoiding him taking me down. It also made me realise how wise was the normal police procedure of not involving officers directly involved in a situation from investigating it. I had been blinkered, unable to look beyond Pam’s kidnapping and death.

“So,” Mike continued, “what sort of questions do we throw at him? How do we convince him that we are villains on the make, not seekers after justice?”

I thought for a while.

“Well, we know that there is some tie up with the Canelli brothers. We know that whatever happened after Harry Schwarz died, Price seems to have come into money. The key was probably to a bank deposit box or the like, but we have no idea where, if indeed it is a bank box, that bank might be. One thing about the Canelli brothers’ involvement – I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that the men who lifted Pam were quite happy to let her see their faces. They must have been confident that there was no chance that she would identify them subsequently – and if they were a couple of rent-a-thugs from the Canelli set-up that could explain it. Once they had done their part, there was no need for them to be anywhere near this neck of the woods again. On the other hand, the man who actually held Pam went to great lengths to make sure that she didn’t see his face, that she couldn’t identify him later.”

I thought some more.

“I think that what we do is throw at him the fact that we know that he has some at least of Schwarz’s money and that we want a cut – that Harry Schwarz owed us and as he’s dead we intend to collect from Price.”

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Mike nodded thoughtfully.

“How do we explain having waited so long?”

“We lost trace of him when he legged it to Spain and have now only just got back on his trail.”

“So, how much do we want from him?”

“Fifty grand? It’s got to be fairly substantial to give credibility to all this, but we don’t have the remotest idea as to how much might be involved overall, so there’s no point in saying we want, for example, a couple of hundred thousand – there might not be that much in the pot which would show us up as not really knowing anything.”

As a plan, our scheme had a lot of loose ends, but it was all that we could come up with, so we agreed to put it into effect as quickly as possible.

Three nights later we struck. The intervening time had been spent in Mike identifying Price’s movements and I buying, for cash and under a false name, a tatty Ford Transit from a man in Wandsworth. Needless to say I had not taken out any insurance on the vehicle and by the time the DVLA had registered the change of owner its purpose would have been long achieved and the vehicle disposed of.

It was late at night; Mike had established that Price was in the habit of drinking in the Royal Oak, a small pub behind the Holy Trinity church in the High Street, only a few minutes walk from his flat.

We were parked across the road from the block of flats; Price would have to pass within feet of our vehicle as he crossed over the road.

It went smoothly. He appeared at the pavement’s edge, less than six feet from the Transit’s back doors. As he looked for traffic, Mike exited from the passenger seat, I slipped out into the road from the driver’s side. Price was now between us and he turned his gaze from looking for traffic to the sight of the two of us, clad in dark clothing and wearing black ski masks to hide our faces, as we took the paces needed to grab him.

“What the fuck..”

It was as far as he got before we had bundled him into the back of the van. Forcing him face down, despite his furious struggles we gagged him with a length of duct tape and secured his wrists and ankles with nylon cable ties. A second piece of duct tape served as an effective blindfold.

Mike stayed in the back of the van with our prisoner; I hurried back to the driver’s seat and cautiously drove away. Under the circumstances, the last thing I dared risk was being stopped for some silly traffic offence.

I drove for some miles; one of the problems that we had needed to overcome was where to question Price once we had secured him. My house was out of the question. Rolling up under the eyes of the neighbours in a tatty old Transit van would have been instantly noticed. Trying to get Price into the house unseen would have been out of the question.

The solution had been simple, although it had depended on good luck and chance rather than good planning. A few miles out of town there was a derelict barn; I knew about it because it had been the site of a particularly vicious rape a couple of years earlier, a rape which, for once, had resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of the rapist. He had been the farmer on whose land the barn stood; since then the farm had been managed by a neighbour, but the barn, already run-down, was of no use to him and had been allowed to further deteriorate. For our purpose it was perfect.

I turned off the road and drove along the track to the barn. Its double doors stood half open, leaving a gap just wide enough to negotiate on the Transit. Once inside I braked to a halt and turned off the engine, and as the reverberation died away, the corrugated iron structure of the barn fell silent.

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I climbed down from the driver’s seat, walked to the rear of the van and opened the doors. Mike blinked in the light, his eyes having accustomed themselves to the van’s dark interior during the drive. He clambered out and between us, and none too gently, we dragged Price out. There was a kitchen chair in the van which we stood up on the barn floor and we sat Price down on it, still gagged, still blindfolded, and with his wrists and ankles still secured with the cable ties. I took hold of the duct tape forming his gag and ripped it off. He took a big gulp of air and immediately spoke.

“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Who are you fuckers? What do you want?”

Instead of replying, I slapped him across the face, hard with the palm of my hand, then slapped him again, this time back-handed, his head rocking from side to side from the blows.

“Shut up,” I snarled. “Shut up until we tell you to speak.”

It had the desired effect; he stayed mute.

It had been Mike’s idea to keep Price blindfolded. Not only did it avoid any chance of him recognising either of us, but Mike assured me that from the various interrogation and counter-interrogation courses that he had been on, depriving your victim of sight heightened his sense of helplessness considerably and made him all the more vulnerable to your questioning.

It was time for that questioning to start; we had thought long and hard over them and felt that we had determined those most likely to succeed.

“Right,” I said, injecting as much forcefulness into my voice as I could, “listen to me very carefully and make sure that you tell me the truth. I already know some of the answers, so I’ll be able to tell if you lie to me. So, what happened to Harry Schwarz’s key?”

There was a long pause; Price was clearly evaluating what he had to say, what he might be able to get away with. Without warning I slapped him hard across the face again.

“We’ve not got all night, Dicky – what happened to it?”

He shook his head defiantly.

“Fuck off – I’m saying nothing.”

I had been hoping that the isolation caused by the blindfold and the threats I had uttered would be enough, but clearly I was wrong. It was time to up the ante.

I had a folding penknife in my pocket – another law that I was breaking as it had a pointed blade more than three inches long and I had no good reason to carry it in a public place. But then, compared to kidnapping and what else I was prepared to do, it tended to fade from view on the scale of my crimes.

I pulled Price forward in the chair and cut the cable tie round his wrists. Then I pushed him back and whilst Mike held one of his arms, I secured the other to the arm of the chair with some more of the ubiquitous duct tape. Having secured the first arm, I then repeated to procedure. I had wrapped the tape round his wrists, leaving his hands free.

“This,” I told him grimly, “is going to hurt.”

So saying, I took hold of the little finger of his left hand and slowly bent it back against the joint. I watched the sweat spring out on his brow as he writhed helplessly in the chair. Finally, with a sickening crack, the finger broke; he screamed in the sudden increase in pain and slumped against his bonds in a semi-faint.

I had broken my own little finger once when I was a teenager. I had opened our garage door so that my father could drive the car out; it was very windy and somehow I trapped my little finger in the handle of the door as the wind suddenly took it and crashed it back against the garage wall, transferring the whole force of the impact against the joint of my finger. It had happened in an instant, without the sadistic slow build up to which I had subjected Price, but even so the pain and shock had been considerable.

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I gave him a few moments to recover before I spoke again.

“That was just a taster, Dicky. You’ve got seven more fingers and two thumbs for me to work on, and then there’s your toes. Believe me, if you don’t tell me what I want to know you’ll go through the rest of your life with hands and feet that won’t work – you’ll be a cripple. So, what’s it to be?

Talk or suffer?”

He moaned softly.

“You bastard,” he muttered, “you lousy, stinking bastard.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Dicky. Just give me an excuse and I’ll show how unpleasant I can really make things for you.”

So saying, I took hold of the ring finger on his left hand. His reaction was immediate.

“No, I’ll talk. Leave my hand alone, you fucker.”

I retained hold of the digit, but applied no pressure.

“Right, Dicky – Schwarz’s key. Who has it? Harry had twenty grand of ours he had laundered for us and he went and snuffed it before passing it back, so somebody has our money and we want it.”

Price was beaten. If we had given him time to think, if we had subjected him to a normal sort of beating, he would almost certainly have been much harder to crack, but his helplessness and the promise of continuing torture was too much for him.

“It was the Canelli brothers. They used Harry as a launderer, just like us here did – and he had about half a million of theirs when he died. The key’s to Harry’s bank deposit box – a bank in London.”

“What bank?”

He shook his head.

“I dunno – anyway, whatever was in the box is long gone. The Canellis got the key and they must have emptied the box straightaway.”

It was much as I had expected and feared. There was no chance of picking up any local involvement, but I had one more question to ask.

“So, Dicky – who arranged to get the key – the Canellis?”

“Yes – they got some stupid copper to actually get it for them – took his missus to make him do it.

That was class, that was, getting it away from the filth like that. Gawd, if the coppers had only known!”

I realised that we had got as much out of Price as we were going to; time to decide on his future. In a way I was relieved that he clearly had nothing to do with Pam’s kidnapping and that I had no cause to do him further harm. I already felt uneasy at what I had done, even though the man before me was a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work. Now I could let him go with a clear conscience; he had played no part in the kidnapping of Pam, the crime which had led indirectly to her death .

Obviously my next targets had to be the mysterious Canelli brothers. Given, from what Price had said, their clear involvement with Harry Schwarz, I was surprised that we knew nothing about the connection in CID.

First, however, Price had to be released in a manner which could not compromise Mike nor myself.

Accordingly, after gagging him once more, we released him from the chair and put him back in the back of the van first refastening his hands with some more duct tape. Then I drove us to one of the residential roads near to Guildford railway station. We had chosen the location carefully. There was no CCTV anywhere nearby and it was a busy enough area for Mike’s car, which he had parked there earlier in the day, to attract no notice, even though it was now gone three in the morning. I got into the back of the Transit and cut Price’s hands free of the duct tape which secured them, got out, closing the door quietly behind me, transferred myself to Mike’s car and we drove off. I had left the van unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. Once he had freed himself, Price would almost certainly 58

use the van to get home, even though it was only a bit over a mile. If he should be foolish enough to keep it for any length of time and got picked up by a number plate recognition camera for being uninsured – well, life’s tough all over.

My over-riding task now, however, was to find a way of getting to the Canelli brothers.

For over a week I achieved nothing. Mike, his leave ended, had returned to his regiment, but had promised to be at my side if I should need him. I went through the motions at work, and whenever I could do so without being observed, prepared a comprehensive dossier on the Canellis and their known associates, and cross-referenced it with what was known about Harry Schwarz and his known associates.

Chapter Ten – 1st October, 2012 and that week

The month of October started on a Monday. It was a typical Monday morning for most, but for me it was to produce the first sign of progress in my quest since Mike and I had questioned, and then released, Dicky Price.

I had been reviewing, without excessive enthusiasm, a report which Jill Harris had placed before me an hour earlier. It concerned the progress, or to be more strictly accurate, the lack of progress, on a number of old cases her section had dealt with. In my new found role as DCI, even if only acting, I needed to show that we were clearing up as many cases as possible and doing so with the minimum possible demand on resources. Jill had set her DS, Phil Harper, the task of identifying all unsolved cases which had come to the section over the previous eighteen months and prioritising them as to the likelihood of any further action producing a successful result. It was quite a task, but Phil was widely respected for his attention to detail and determination to always get the complete picture when set something to do. Anyway, the results of his efforts now lay on the desk before me and one of the cases, which he had identified as having only a moderate rating for a successful follow-up, caught my attention immediately.

It was a fairly mundane case, although one of two parts. Part one was a hit and run which had left a victim quite badly injured. The car had been stolen, but not for joy-riding. Only minutes earlier it had been picked up by a CCTV as the driver stopped it on yellow lines outside a jeweller’s shop, a shop from which seconds later a second man emerged and leapt into the car which then drove off at high speed, hitting the unwitting pedestrian in the process. They had escaped from the jeweller’s with about thirty thousand pounds worth of rings, bracelets and watches – they had also left the proprietor badly injured to the extent that he was condemned to a wheelchair for ever more.

The car had later been found abandoned and a forensic examination had revealed finger-prints galore, mainly of the rightful owner and his family, but also two ‘persons of interest’. The two men were not as totally stupid as one might expect, seeing that they had left such damning evidence in the vehicle. No, they had had to leave it in haste because it had suffered a blow-out in the nearside front tyre, a blow-out caused by clipping the kerb as the driver made a hash of trying to avoid that pedestrian as he was taking a tight corner. Doubtless they would originally have planned to burn the vehicle out to make sure of leaving no usable forensic evidence behind, but fate had thwarted them and they had had to exit the car and run off on foot. Several people had actually seen what had happened and had given statements at the time, so there were reasonable descriptions of both men on file. That had enabled those who had given statements to identify both men from police photos, reinforcing the fingerprint evidence.

The villains were not locals, but from London. Both with records, the last known addresses for them proved to be long vacated when, at Surrey’s request, the Met sent officers round to pick them up.

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At that point interest in the case was shelved as more pressing matters demanded the attention of Jill’s team; strictly speaking, in fact, at the time it had not been her team. The crime had occurred shortly before her predecessor, Charlie Villiers, had retired and she had been promoted into his place. Now, however, there was a relative lull in important crime, hence the review of unclosed cases. Jill had agreed with Phil Harpers’ assessment that this particular case was unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved unless disproportionate resources were employed, and that even then the chances of success were low. I agreed with both of them, and approved the use of resources on the higher priority cases that the two of them had identified.

That wasn’t the end of my interest, however. Phil’s analysis of the various cases included, where known, identification of the known associates of suspects, and in this case one name had leapt at me from the page.

It was Canelli; these two numbered amongst their associates Joe Canelli, the younger of the two Canelli brothers.

Additionally, there were the witness descriptions. A tall, slim black man and a shorter, heavily built white man.

Once Jill had left my office, the first thing I did was to bring up the details of the two suspects from the police computer data base.

Errol Logan was thirty-two years old. Six feet four inches tall, slimly built, and of Jamaican descent, his picture stared defiantly at me from the computer screen. Was this one of the men who had abducted my wife?

Davey Merrill, thirty-three years old, five feet eight tall and even in the file photo of head and shoulders, clearly well built, with very short fair hair. Was he the other man?

The file addresses for both men – the addresses which had proved out of date when officers from the Met went looking for them – were in south west London, in the Wandsworth area, not quite the main stamping ground of the Canelli brothers, but an area in which they presumably had an interest.

I studied their records. Both had served several short prison terms when younger. They had started as teenagers stealing cars. Youth correction facilities had clearly failed to correct them, as they had progressed to robbery with threatened violence, although they had never actually harmed any of their victims. Presumably their mere threats had been enough.

They had worked as a team – the crimes that had resulted in their imprisonment had been carried out as a duo and as a duo they had been sentenced. However, their most recent incarceration had been nearly ten years earlier. I doubted that they had turned over a fresh leaf; far more likely they had simply improved their methods and in consequence not been caught.

I began to hypothesise. The Canelli brothers had money or other assets stashed with Harry Schwarz.

His sudden death left them with no immediate access to those assets in the normal way, via Schwarz himself. Somehow, they knew that a key existed, either to the assets themselves, or a means of getting to them. They knew that the key had been scooped up when the police had searched Schwarz’s premises and that it would have been kept as evidence. They knew, and this was the rub, that I had been involved in the case and had determined to kidnap Pam to force me to obtain the key for them. But why me? I wasn’t the only officer involved in the case. It had made the local press, but not the nationals. It hadn’t made even local TV, let alone national.

I thought of those of my colleagues who had been involved. Schwarz had actually been arrested by Ray Green and Phil Harper of Jill Harris’ team. Ray had died in that car crash shortly afterwards.

Phil as a DC, had been there to back Ray up. Thirty two years old at the time and married, but separated under pretty acrimonious circumstances (he and his wife were now divorced). So, Ray gone, Phil with nobody who could be taken and used as a lever against him. Jill, their team leader.

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She was unmarried, but had a regular boyfriend, Graham Douglas, a local solicitor. They lived together. Clearly there would have been no point in kidnapping Jill – Graham had no access to police premises. Kidnapping Graham to put pressure on Jill, whilst an option, wasn’t a very practical one. Given his working hours, they would have been unlikely to find him at home alone to try the same ploy that had fooled Pam. He and Jill lived in a top floor apartment, seven stories up, one of twenty-eight apartments in the block. Trying to kidnap Graham from their home was not really on. They could have tried lifting him in the street – but again not easy. The block had its own secure underground car park from which Graham drove out in the morning and to which he returned in the evening.

Who else might they have targeted? Jimmy Jackson was married, but like Jill and Graham they lived in an upper floor apartment. Same argument about lifting Kathleen, Jimmy’s wife, although not to quite the same extent, and she knew many of Jimmy’s colleagues, so would be unlikely to be deceived by imposters. Norman Lambert? Unmarried, no obvious hostage to fortune for them to seize upon, and that was the case for several of the others.

On the other hand, Pam and I were the ideal target. Small detached house, easy access. With a full-time job, Pam was less well acquainted with the folk in CID than was Kathleen Jackson, so more likely to fall for the ploy.

However, that left one question unanswered. How, given the limited publicity that the event had received, would two London gangsters know which police officers had been involved? I reflected uneasily on what that voice on the phone had said – that they had a contact in the Guildford nick who would let them know if I attempted to play them false. At the time I had, on balance, thought that it was a bluff, but one which I had not dared to call. Now, however, I wondered if, after all, it was true.

The fear that the caller had spoken the truth reinforced my belief that I dare not let what I was doing become known to any of my colleagues.

My next task was clear – I needed to locate Logan and Merrill and interrogate them. Easily said, easily determined upon. Not so easily done.

The Met had failed to find them. Admittedly, they had their own priorities and probably hadn’t tried very hard, but even so, without using official channels I had my work cut out. At the time the obvious sources had been checked. The DVLA had no record of either of them owning a car, and although both had driving licences, these had been issued years before and contained addresses even more out of date than those on their criminal records. Inland revenue had no trace of them –

clearly they declined to pay tax, but equally they didn’t claim any benefits. I was going to have be more creative in my attempts to trace the two men.

The type of creativity that I had in mind meant using money. I no longer lived in the house that Pam and I had shared; the emptiness had proved more than I could cope with, and several months earlier I had completed the sale of it and the purchase of a small flat in the town. The change in life style had left me with a reasonable profit; the new domicile felt less empty thanks to its small size and the fact that it was one of a dozen similar flats in a small block. I had even met and talked with some of my neighbours; already I knew some of them far better than any of our neighbours in the old house.

That, however, was incidental. More to the point was the profit that I had made, a profit which would give me the ability to buy information.

My first point of call had to be Olly Collinge, the contact who had told me about Dicky Price’s sojourn in Spain and alerted me to the man’s return. Accordingly, after a call to his mobile, I met him after work that day, told him that I wanted to trace Logan and Merrill, and that I would pay 61

modestly well for news of them. They were, I knew, well out of Collinge’s normal sphere of acquaintances, but I was hopeful that the promise of money would overcome that particular problem.

So it proved. It took until the end of the week, but that Friday morning a call from Olly Collinge resulted in a further lunch time meeting, two scribbled addresses, and the passing from my bank account to his pocket the sum of five hundred pounds.

Both men had moved; that, of course, I already knew. Their new addresses were in the same block of flats in The Chase, Stanmore, some miles north of their earlier stamping grounds, but still London, and more in line with the main area for the Canelli brothers.

That evening I drove to the area and studied the general area and the block in which my targets were living. I was impressed. The flats were clearly expensive, a good bit more so than my own residence. Clearly the old adage ‘crime does not pay’ didn’t apply here.

After I had met Olly at lunch time I had done some digging of my own. Neither Logan nor Merill appeared on the relevant electoral role, but that data base gave up some very interesting information. According to that official record, the flats which I had been told were occupied by Logan and Merrill were actually occupied by women. Logan’s address showed one Doreen Jordan as the sole resident. Erica Haslett was the occupant who presumably provided cover for Merrill.

Further digging showed that both women owned cars, both had driving licences. Interestingly, both driving licences were issued only five years previously and the cars had been purchased new around the same time. Clearly Logan and Merrill had apparently acquired anonymity by simply moving in with these women, although I was later to find out that it wasn’t quite that simple..

I drove past their abode, not too fast, not too slow, and took the next turning. I parked my car and got out; I had studied the map before coming and knew that I could walk past the flats, walk around the block and get back to my car without any suspicious looking backtracking.

The flats were behind a walled which was pierced by a gate clearly leading to a car park at below ground level. Additionally there was a pedestrian gate which, as I approached it, could be seen to have a numeric keypad to deny unauthorised entry. I took out my mobile and started talking into it; in reality, however, I was using its camera facility to capture as much detail as I could of the premises. Before setting off I had studied the area on Google Maps, but the pictures on that site aren’t up to date, and I didn’t want to be taken by surprise by any recent changes.

In the event, the Google images were replicated in real life; no surprises.

Or at least, no surprises regarding the layout. What did surprise me, and what was not evident in the Google images, were the security measures in place. The wall which enclosed the block (which thanks to the computer I knew to be a hollow square with a small internal lawn and swimming pool, which would have seemed more at home in the Mediterranean than North London), was topped by broken glass fragments set in cement to deter anyone wishing to climb over it. There were several surveillance cameras which between them clearly covered the entire area and the road itself. The only entry to the site was the vehicle gate and its associated pedestrian gate. The latter was controlled by a keypad, the former had no obvious means of direct entry; instead there was a camera and communication box arrangement. Clearly those inside the block valued their privacy and wished to exercise control over anyone wishing to enter.

I completed my circumnavigation and returned to the car, thinking hard. The building was three stories high; judging from the electoral roll there were two flats at ground level and at the first floor level, but the top level was either a single flat or, if similar to the lower ones, had a vacant flat.

With one exception, the names of the occupants meant nothing to me, but given that Logan and Merrill didn’t officially exist there, who knows who might also call the place home?

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I drove away from the area, still totally at a loss to know what my next step could be. Clearly knocking on the front door – or doing the equivalent – was out of the question. The electoral roll identified four women as occupying the flats other than those of Logan and Merrill – one in each of the two first floor dwellings and two in the top flat. These last two shared a surname- sisters?

Mother and daughter? It was, however, that shared surname which had caught my attention. It was Canelli.

One thing I decided upon as I drove away; I decided that I needed to know more about the Canelli brothers and, hopefully, how Merrill and Logan fitted into their set up. As far as the brothers themselves were concerned, the easiest way would have been to get onto the Met and ask – but I had no credible reason for an official approach to them and there was the danger, even if I sounded out a couple of contacts I had there – former Surrey colleagues who had transferred to the big city –

it might start a trail back to my crime, for that is what tampering with evidence was, no matter what the mitigation.

No, I would have to use my unofficial sources – Olly Collinge was in line for a bit more work and some more of my money.

Chapter Eleven – 8th October and that week

It took several days, but at last I was sitting down opposite Olly in The Star pub and listening to the result of his endeavours. It was quite a story.

‘My’ Canellis were the sons of Dino Canelli, now deceased. Dino, in his turn, had come to the UK

with his parents in 1946. His father, Luigi Canelli, and his brother, had been middle ranking crooks in the town of Reggio Calabria, the provincial capital of the commune of the same name, right down in the

‘toe’ of Italy, opposite Sicily across the Straits of Messina. At the time the town had a bad reputation as a hotbed of organised crime – the nearness of Sicily and its Mafia were reflected on a part of the mainland so close to that troubled island, and Luigi and his brother Giorgio made the mistake of trying to get too big for their boots.

The result had been very messy. Giorgio, his wife and their two young sons had died when their car was booby-trapped. Luigi had narrowly escaped with his life in a similar attack – he survived because he had told one of his men to drive the car to pick up a man he wished to speak to. The explosion killed the driver; Luigi, some thirty yards away, was injured by flying glass and metal and forever after walked with a bad limp.

He got the message. Reggio Calabria was bad for his health and he left for the UK as soon as he was fit enough to do so, taking with him his wife and his fourteen year old son, Dino.

Luigi had been able to bring quite substantial funds out of Italy and soon established himself in the Islington area of London, the so-called ‘Little Italy’, where his first business endeavour was to employ a number of fellow immigrant Italians and start up a protection racket.

In time, as Dino grew up, he joined in his father’s enterprises, which by the 1960s had widened to encompass prostitution and drugs as well as extortion. The 1960 legislation which legalised off-course betting on sporting events encouraged Luigi to open several betting shops which, in addition to their normal business, also acted as conduits for money laundering from his illegal activities.

In 1958 Dino, now twenty-six years old, married Maria Bonetti, aged nineteen. Maria was the daughter of Ercole Bonetti, a former Italian prisoner of war, captured in the fighting in North Africa during World War Two, who had declined repatriation at the end of the war, married an English girl and settled down in London, running a successful bakery business. Ercole Bonetti was aware of Dino’s unsavoury business activities, but faced with his daughter’s infatuation with her paramour, and the feeling that crossing the Canelli family might possibly be unwise, he had agreed to the wedding.

The result of the union was ‘my’ Canellis – ‘Lou’, actually Luigi, named after his grandfather, born in 1962

and ‘Joe’, actually Giorgio, named for the great-uncle killed in the Reggio Calabria car bombing, born in 63

1964. There was also a third son, Paulo, and it was what had happened to Paulo that had led to his brothers no longer living in the Little Italy area.

Paulo, born in 1974, had been the apple of his parents’ eyes. An unexpected arrival, long after they had thought that their child bearing days were over, he was, by all accounts, by a big margin the brightest of the three boys, and by the time he was eighteen he was clearly destined to succeed Dino as the head of the family businesses. It was never to happen. In 1992 he got into an altercation with another young man over a girl. A fight ensued and Paulo put the other youth in hospital with severe, but not life threatening, injuries.

The young man was the son of another member of the local underworld, one Harry Kemp. Kemp, Yorkshire born but London domiciled for many years, had a simple outlook on life which had called for revenge for his son’s injuries. Two weeks later, as Paulo was walking along the pavement near his home, he was shot dead by a shotgun blast from a passing car. General rumour was that the gunman was only supposed to cripple the boy, and had messed up, but deliberate or not, the killing had far reaching consequences.

The Canellis were distraught. Kemp, however, had made a terrible mistake. Nine days later his son, now discharged from hospital, was abducted. Two hours later his dead body was dumped on his father’s doorstep.

Kemp himself was already preparing to take further revenge and was scouring the streets for any member of the Canelli family that he could find.

Instead, they found him. The two men with him were left crippled for life but at least alive. Harry Kemp was never seen again.

The violence naturally attracted a lot of police attention, but to no avail. Nobody knew anything, nobody saw anything, nobody said anything.

The events did, however, decide Dino to move away from central London to the north of the city. By the next year he had reorganised his entire undertakings and based himself in the Stanmore area. He acquired a couple of night clubs, more betting shops, and was well on his way to becoming very rich indeed when he unexpectedly succumbed to a heart attack in 1995, aged just sixty-three.

Neither of his surviving sons had his drive and ability, and the enterprises that he had built up declined markedly. By the time they came to my notice their organisation, whilst still quite formidable, was just a shadow of what Dino had built up which, at its peak, had been an organisation controlling perhaps two hundred people – pimps, drug dealers, straightforward thugs – indirectly, as well as actually employing several dozen in the nightclubs and betting shops.

The betting shops remained, but the night clubs were gone, sold out to more successful criminal entrepreneurs. There were still some drug dealers , but much of what had been Dino Canelli’s sphere of influence had been taken over by East European immigrants.

Interesting as all this was, and useful background to show me who I was dealing with, for me the most interesting information regarded that block of flats in Stanmore. It was owned by Lou Canelli and was an alternative to his ‘official’ residence, a large flat a mile or so away which was owned by the company which Dino Canelli had established, originally to run the betting shops, and which was actually over one of them.

Apparently this odd arrangement was an attempt to protect his assets from the taxman should he fall foul of either him or the law. He tended to stay in the betting shop flat from time to time, but more often stayed in the flat I had scrutinised – which, beside himself, normally had his wife and their younger daughter, nineteen year old Sophia, in residence.

The block of flats was a mini-fortress. Although the electoral roll showed them lived in by women, in fact this was a facade. The women existed, all right, but lived elsewhere in the area. In actual fact, the flats held bodyguards. Normally there would be one man per flat in the four lower flats, with the top floor used by Lou Canelli and his family. However, if Canelli felt threatened, the block could hold, in addition to himself and his family members, a dozen or more of his men.

An indication of how things had changed since Dino Canelli’s day was the fact that Logan and Merrill, one negro and one Anglo-Saxon, were obviously fairly close to Lou Canelli. In his father’s day only the very lowest ranks of his organisation would have been of non-Italian extraction, or even immediate immigrants.

That was the situation with Lou. Joe Canelli had a more orthodox set-up, a large house a mile or so away, in which he lived with his wife Niamh, née Flaherty and their two sons, the twenty year old Guido and the 64

nineteen year old Fausto. As with the block of flats containing Lou and his entourage, I drove past Joe’s dwelling place. It proved to be a mock classical fronted building set in nearly an acre of ground and surrounded by a high wall pierced in one place only by double metal gates controlled by a gatehouse which was clearly big enough to be living quarters for somebody.

The presence of all these family members was a concern to me. Quite apart from the fact that the Canelli brothers had musclemen at their beck and call, they also had innocent family members – at least, I had to assume that they were innocent.

Until I saw where they lived, I had sadly under-estimated the problem I faced in extracting any sort of revenge from the Canellis. They had a small army at their disposal, they lived in virtual fortresses and any attempt at violence carried a high risk of collateral damage. It was in very low spirits that I returned home.

For the rest of the week I concentrated on my work, trying, with very little success, to dismiss all thought of the Canellis, and my impotence to do anything about them, from my mind. I wasn’t helped by the fact that the local villains seemed to have taken a holiday from crime; little of any significance came to the attention of my teams.

One thing of personal significance, however, did occur. George Hughes suffered a second heart attack. Thankfully, it was not fatal, but it was somewhat more serious than the first one, and our original expectation that he would be away for six to eight weeks now had to be stretched to an equal number of months. To my surprise, no mention was made of any revision to the current acting arrangements; I was to remain as the acting DCI, so I must have been doing something right.

It was Friday that everything changed. It was almost six and I was thinking of calling it a day when the fire alarm sounded. Its raucous tones sent everyone scurrying to their appointed assembly areas; satisfying myself that all my folk were accounted for, I returned to the main entrance to find out what was going on, expecting it to be a false alarm.

It wasn’t. The evidence store had been on fire. Subsequent investigation revealed the most bizarre reason; rodents had chewed through the insulation of electric cables which ran under the floor and had caused a short circuit which had led to a smouldering time bomb under the floor boards.

Deprived of any through draught, the embryonic fire had, in the opinion of the fire brigade experts, taken the best part of the day to reach a critical mass in terms of temperature and amount of burning material. At that point the flames had burst through the floor boards. The room had a sprinkler system, which had deployed almost immediately, but ‘almost’ wasn’t immediate enough to prevent an entire bay of racking from being affected by the flames. The bay in question contained the items relating to Harry Schwarz; in particular, the keys which had featured in my worst imaginings for so long had dropped from their shelf into the heart of the fire in the undercroft area. By the time the fire was extinguished and the keys retrieved, they were twisted scraps of half-melted metal.

It wasn’t just the Harry Schwarz items that had been affected; the evidence for several other cases had been destroyed or extensively damaged, but all the cases involved had been of back burner quality, either because they had been solved and the evidence was extremely unlikely to be required again or were regarded as being in the ‘no hope’ category.

It took a while to sink in, but at last I decided that I was off the hook. The false key that I had substituted could no longer be identified. OK, so whoever had arranged for the collection of the key once I had left it at the coffee shop could almost certainly identify me, but so what? I now had a legitimate line of enquiry that could be followed up which had nothing to do with the keys and a way to have it pursued without linking back to myself and Pam’s abduction. The outstanding robbery featuring Logan and Merrill could now be brought back into focus with every chance of a conviction now that I knew where to find them. The big difficulty, however, would be bringing into official notice out of the blue their location after the Met had failed to find them when requested.

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The case was one which belonged to Jill Harris and her team. I couldn’t just wander in and say ‘Oh, by the way, you’ll find your villains in Stanmore at this address.’ I had to feed the intelligence in to them without it appearing to have anything to do with me, or at least not started by me.

I started to weave my plot. My long time informant, Olly Collinge, had a wide circle of acquaintances, which was why he had so often been useful to me over the years. Amongst them, I was well aware, were men and women who were informants for some of my colleagues. It was for that reason that, a couple of days later, I met up with him. I confirmed that his information about Logan and Merrill had been accurate and fed him the story that I had dreamed up for the next step.

“It’s crime targets, Olly” I told him. “I need to get my teams all looking good, or I might find that the budget boys start asking if perhaps I have more officers than I really need – and bang go my chances of more promotion. Now, one of my teams – that headed up by DI Harris, is looking a bit behind the game at the moment. I can’t just jump in with the gen about Logan and Merrill myself –

that wouldn’t count in their numbers – so I need the information to be fed to them by one of their own informants. Now, do you know anyone who has given any of them stuff in the past?”

Olly thought for a long while, his brow furrowed in thought. Finally he spoke.

“Yeah, I reckon I do – DI Harris – I’ve got the right one, haven’t I? Blonde bird, good looker?”

“Yes, that’s her but don’t let her hear you refer to as a bird or she’ll hand your balls to you on a plate.”

Olly winced at the thought, then ploughed on.

“Yeah, I know that she has had some things from one of the tarts in Stoughton – Helen Hammond.

Helen got on the wrong side of a couple of guys about four years ago and they done her over – put her in hospital with a broken jaw and the like. Your DI Harris – she were a sergeant then - nabbed them both after talking with Helen and promising her that she wouldn’t have to testify –got them on something else and made sure they had a hard time. Helen was grateful and has been dropping her gen ever since.”

“She sounds a good choice,” I agreed, “so how does she get to know what to say?”

Olly thought for a while.

“That’s a poser, Mr. Morgan, no mistake. I mean, Stanmore – doubt if Helen’s even heard of the place, she’s very much a local girl. Got to be something that folk’ll believe, don’t it?”

I nodded my agreement. Olly continued to think, then I saw the light in his eyes that indicated an idea was forming.

He advanced an idea which seemed practical; for a further thirty minutes we thrashed out the details and I told him to get it into action. By the end of our discussion I knew that Olly was far from convinced that my sole interest in Logan and Merrill was boosting one of my team’s clear-up rate, but that was something I could do nothing about.

Chapter Twelve – November 2012

The result of our machinations took a couple of weeks to come to fruition, but finally, on the morning of Wednesday, the 7th of November, Jill Harris came into my office. I waved her to a chair and waited for the tale I already knew was coming, even though she was unaware of that fact.

“Boss, do you remember the dead cases we spoke about last month?”

I nodded my agreement.

“Well, one we thought wasn’t worth pursuing has come back to life.”

I leaned forward in my chair, radiating interest.

“Tell me about it.”

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“It’s that jeweller’s – the robbery with violence and the injured pedestrian, down to those villains who seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth – Logan and Merrill.”

I furrowed my brow in a facsimile of hard thought, then nodded.

“Yes, I remember – the Met couldn’t find them for us.”

“Well, we’ve managed to do it ourselves! One of my contacts – a working girl from Stoughton way

– took a bloke back to her place. He treated her roughly, slapped her around a bit, knocked a couple of teeth a bit loose, bruises, that sort of thing. By itself, she’d probably have shrugged it off as going with the territory, but to add insult to injury – quite literally – he then stormed off without paying for his entertainment.

“He’d picked on the wrong girl. She’d clocked the registration of his motor and through her own contacts, found out that the car was registered to a woman in Stanmore. At first she thought that would be it, end of story, nicked motor, but on the off chance she got someone to do some digging.

The address is in a block of flats and although the car is registered to a Ms. Erica Haslett, the man lives there and there is no sign of the woman doing so.”

I nodded once more.

“Your girl sounds well connected – and determined.”

“Oh yes, believe me, she is both.”

“Go on.”

“Right. Well, the man made another mistake. Whilst he was with her, and before he started knocking her about, he got her to pour him a drink – and she kept the glass and gave it to me. I had it checked for prints and got a positive – Errol Logan, the tall black robber.”

That had been the most difficult part of the scheme that Olly and I had come up with – a piece of definite evidence linking one of the robbers into the cock-and-bull story that Helen Hammond had fed to Jill. It hadn’t been easy and had needed the bribing of a couple of people. I had Olly do this; I wanted as few people as possible to know of my interest. I was uncomfortably aware of the risks that I was running in what I was doing; I was serving justice, but only by perverting it even further than I had with my tampering with Harry Schwarz’s keys.

There was a small cafe near the Stanmore block of flats which was popular with the Canelli people.

A waitress had been bribed to secure a water glass that had been handled by either Logan or Merrill.

According to whichever of them first provided the opportunity, Helen Hammond’s story would be pitched accordingly. In the event, Logan was the unlucky one.

Jill continued with her story.

“I got a mate of mine in the Met to do a quiet check; she found that both Logan and Merrill live in the same block of flats, even though they don’t appear on the electoral roll. It looks as if, after their disastrous robbery, they have found a way to disappear off everybody’s radar. The two flats they occupy are leased to a couple of women – Erica Haslett for Logan’s flat and a Doreen Jordan for Merrill’s.”

“So they’re both in the one spot – and we can get them! Well done.”

Jill smiled in satisfaction.

“So, OK to ask the Met to lift them?”

“Of course – go for it!”

Just two days later we had both Logan and Merrill under lock and key and with the evidence we had against them for the robbery, the violence, the injury to the pedestrian, there was no doubt that they would be going down for a reasonable period of time. They would still be alive when they finished their sentences, and Pam would still be dead, but it was just about the best that I that I could hope for.

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It was a partial revenge for me; however, there remained the fact that they had simply been foot soldiers. The orders had come from one or other, or both, of the Canelli brothers. Could I somehow strike back at them as well?

It was something which had been occupying my mind ever since I had known of their involvement, but I was no nearer to coming up with any specific plan now than I had been then. There was, however one possible way forward that I could pursue.

Now that we had Merrill and Logan, there was just a chance that one or other of them could be persuaded to come up with something that could be used against the Canellis. It was this in mind that I asked Jill Harris to come into my office. So far she and Phil Harper, her DS, had done the interviewing of Logan and Merrill and the results had been encouraging. Logan had been the getaway driver and he was very anxious to pin total responsibility for the vicious attack on the jeweller firmly on the shoulders of his partner. Merrill had no such opportunity for shifting any of the blame, other than the injury to the unlucky pedestrian which he pointed out wasn’t his fault, but purely that of Logan.

Jill seated herself and looked at me expectantly.

“Jill, I’ve been thinking about whether we can make some more use of your two villains. We know that they worked for the Canelli brothers and that the Canellis are, if not major figures, at least quite substantial ones in the London scene.”

She furrowed her brow.

“But that’s a problem for the Met, not one for us, surely?”

“True, but no reason why we shouldn’t help the big city out over this. I’ve had a quick word with the Super and he’s happy, so I’m going to contact the Met and suggest that they send somebody down to liaise with us in seeing what can be wrung out of your two. What do you think?”

“Seems a good idea to me – it’s always nice to have the Met owing us something for a change.”

“Good – now, you and Phil have done all the interviewing to date. Do you think one or other of the villains is the more likely to be fertile ground?”

“Logan,” she said without hesitation, “he’s dead scared of getting the same sentence as Merrill when it was Merrill who bashed that jeweller. I’m sure he would cooperate like a shot if there was something in it for him.”

“Right, we’ll start in with him then. I’ll contact the Met and make the suggestion.”

Two days later our Met contact arrived. DCI Anna Weatherby was an imposing figure; what my mother would call ‘handsome and well built’. In the two inch Cuban heels of her black patent leather shoes, she was almost as tall as my own six feet,; certainly not over-weight but with the build of an athlete in one of the more power based disciplines such as track cycling or swimming.

Chestnut coloured hair swept down to her shoulders, framing a pale oval face containing the brightest green eyes, contrasting against heavy dark eyebrows, that I have ever seen on anybody.

She was dressed in an elegantly cut black trouser suit, the jacket worn open to reveal a deep red silk blouse. She was not alone; she was accompanied by a man of well over average height – perhaps six feet five or six – but worryingly thin, and with his wispy grey hair, grey features and a grey suit, next to his flamboyant chief he looked almost invisible. He was introduced as DS George Kelly; clearly approaching retirement, he looked as though the slightest puff of wind would extinguish him like a feeble candle flame. The heavy briefcase he carried in his left hand seemed well on the way to cause him to over-balance.

I had arranged for us to meet in one of the small conference rooms- the two Met officers, Jill Harris and myself. I kicked off by inviting Jill to give a brief synopsis of what we had on Logan and Merrill, then invited DCI Weatherby to let us know how the Met saw things.

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She didn’t hesitate, but launched straight into what was obviously a previously thought out speech.

“As you know, the Canelli brothers are not top-echelon villains as far as we are concerned, but they are a bit above the middle rank and if we can put them away we will jump at the chance. Now, you feel that this Logan character is anxious to avoid being linked into the robbery with violence aspect and that he might be amenable to helping out in return for lenient treatment. I’d like to go further than that. I’d like him to be offered a place on the witness protection scheme if he can produce enough good evidence to send the Canellis to prison.

“I realise that from your point of view you have him absolutely to rights and that he should go down

– but you have Merrill, the thug who actually did the damage to the jeweller. If, by pampering Logan we can get rid of the Canellis, I hope you will agree that not going after Logan is a price well worth paying.”

I could feel Jill beside me stiffen; this was her case and I could immediately visualise what was going through her mind – two villains going down was better than one on her record and, to be fair to her, to her sense of right and wrong. Before she could open her move I cut across her.

“That seems reasonable; I’m sure that my Super and the ACC will be happy to go along with it –

obviously you will let us have full disclosure of what goes down in case there are any other tie-ins with any cases down here.”

Anna Weatherby gave a rather tight little smile.

“But if course – goes without saying.”

In my heart I was quite sure that DCI Weatherby would do no such thing if there was even the slightest possibility that by so doing she might hamper her own end of the operation, but as far as I was concerned having Logan taken off our hands was all to the good. He and Merrill had lifted Pam and unless they were totally stupid, must have been aware of, or at least suspect, my involvement in the supply of the key that the Canellis had wanted. With Logan out if the way, that surely reduced the likelihood of my crime becoming known; additionally, thanks to the fire in the evidence store nothing could actually be proved any longer.

“Right,” I said, “now all that remains is to tell Mr. Logan how lucky he has a chance of being.”

Ten minutes later we were in the large interview room, facing across the table at Errol Logan. He had only been held on remand for four days, but already he was looking dishevelled and unhappy.

I looked him in the eye.

“Mr. Logan, you will notice that there is no tape recorder here. This is not an interview in connection with the armed robbery in connection with which you were arrested and charged. You have already met with Detective Inspector Harris; I am DCI Morgan and my two colleagues here are DCI Weatherby and DS Kelly. They are officers from the Metropolitan Police and they have a proposition for you. I would advise you to listen very carefully to what they have to say.”

Anna Weatherby took up the baton.

“Mr. Logan, DS Kelly and I are here to offer you an opportunity to turn Queen’s evidence against your employers, the Canelli brothers.”

A look of astonishment crossed Logan’s face, a look which quickly changed to one of apprehension.

“You want me to grass up the Canelli brothers? Do I look stupid?”

Anna Weatherby gave him a bleak smile.

“Well, Mr. Logan, from where I am sitting, somebody facing a certain ten stretch and turning down an opportunity to avoid such a fate scarcely qualifies as a genius. Let’s be very clear on this. For you, this is a once and forever chance. Help me out and I will have you placed in the witness protection scheme. New identity, new part of the country – we’ll even help you to try and find an 69

honest job – although if you commit a crime in your new identity, that’s it – no protection at all, and we’ll throw what you’ve been arrested for here into the mix as well.”

Logan stared across the table, his glance going from one to the other of us, then back again. It was like watching a tennis ball in a prolonged rally, but at last his gaze settled on Anna Weatherby.

“OK, I’ll do it. What do you want to know?”

“Everything that you know about them.”

It was the start of many sessions with Logan as Weatherby and Kelly wrung every scrap of information they could out of him. Much of what he said could not be verified – should it have come to court, it would have simply been one person’s word against another’s – but there were some real nuggets amongst the unusable dross.

After the two detectives had been working on Logan for a couple of days, it was mutually agreed –

in our case at the level of the Assistant Chief Constable – that it would be sensible for Logan to be taken away to a location that the Met had for such purposes and we expected to see and, in all probability to hear, no more.

We were wrong.

Chapter Twelve – December 2012

Christmas was approaching, my second Christmas without Pam, and I was not looking forward to it. The previous Christmas I had somehow still been in a state of semi-denial about everything. The first anniversary of Pam’s death, the 7th of June 2012, had somehow brought it all crashing home to me. I really had lost her forever; it wasn’t just some unbelievable nightmare. There would be no awakening.

We had heard nothing from the Met about the success or otherwise of their efforts to use Logan to bring down the Canelli brothers and my original feeling of a burning desire for revenge had dwindled to a numb acceptance that Pam was gone and there was no way that I could strike back at those I saw as responsible for her death. The workload as acting DCI had kept me busy enough during the working day to push such considerations to the back of my mind; it was only at night, when I was alone, that the misery truly sought me out.

I had received invitations to spend Christmas with my own parents, with Pam’s parents, and with her sister Helen and her family up in Scotland but had declined them all, I hope reasonably graciously. I just couldn’t face the prospect of the sympathy that I knew that I would receive; I preferred my own company, at least for the time being, so that I could wallow in self-pity or whatever else appealed to me. Anyway, Christmas or no Christmas, a break of more than a day or two was out of the question – crime didn’t stop for Bank Holidays.

It was Saturday the 22nd with Christmas looming large on most people’s horizons. I was clearing some paperwork in my office when my direct line rang. I picked up the handset

“Morgan.”

“Ken, it’s Anna Weatherby.”

“Anna – how are you?”

“Fine thanks. I just wanted to let you know that thanks to Errol Logan’s information we’ve put together enough to arrest Giorgio Canelli – it’ll be in the news tomorrow.”

“That’s great – well done – but you said Giorgio – not Luigi as well?”

“No, worse luck. Nothing Logan gave us was enough of a link to Luigi. I suppose there is a remote possibility that once we have a go at Giorgio he might let something slip which incriminates his brother, but I won’t be holding my breath.”

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“What are your charges going to be?”

“Quite a list – extortion with the threat of violence, living off immoral earnings, money laundering for starters; probably a few more by the time we have finished with him. However, over and above Giorgio, our inability to get anything on Luigi really pisses me off. That’s the other reason I am ringing. You remember that one of the contacts of the Canellis was that guy Schwarz, the one who dropped dead on you?”

“I certainly do – it wasn’t the sort of thing you forget very easily.”

I had answered in what I hoped was a relatively light-hearted manner, but I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that things were about to turn very bad for me.

“Well, we got out of Logan that Schwarz did money laundering for the Canelli brothers and that at the time of his death he had been about to hand over to them something like five hundred grand.

Naturally enough, the brothers went absolutely ape-shit when they heard that he had died still with their money in his possession.

“Now, according to Logan, Luigi came up with the solution. Somehow – Logan isn’t very clear on the detail, and I’m not fussed about that aspect – somehow, Luigi got hold on a safe deposit key belonging to Schwarz. It looks as though Schwarz had kept it somewhere away from his premises and Luigi was able to find out where, probably from one of Schwarz’s clients. Once the key was in his possession, Luigi was able to get his hands on the box and, more importantly, its contents.”

I began to breathe a little more easily; it looked as though Logan was avoiding mentioning Pam’s kidnapping and the real reason why Luigi Canelli was able to get his hands on the safe deposit key.

“I found the story hard to swallow at first,” my pulse started racing again, “because surely a bank wouldn’t just hand over a box just like that without proof of identity, but the box wasn’t with a bank at all – it was with one of these companies that offer secure storage for anything from a few confidential documents or the like, to an entire houseful of furniture; as far as they were concerned, possession of the key was all the identity proof that they needed.”

My heart rate went back to something approaching normality as I waited for her to continue.

“The other thing I found hard to believe” I started worrying again, “was the likelihood of somebody like Schwarz entrusting anybody else with enough knowledge of his affairs to be able to lay their hands on his deposit box. I mean, if he trusted somebody with that knowledge, what was to prevent that person from double-crossing him and disappearing with the box’s contents at some point when what might have been in it was worth taking such a course of action?”

Things were getting worse by the minute; I realised that I was gripping the phone handset hard enough to turn my knuckles white and that my palm – and much of the rest of me – was sweating profusely.

“So, I put that to Logan, making it clear that I thought that he was spinning me a cock and bull story, and he put me onto someone who hadn’t featured before and who, as far as I can see from the information you gave us when we took Logan over, you hadn’t heard about either. Did you know that Schwarz had a second cousin living in Spain?”

The news came as a total shock to me.

“No, I didn’t. We looked for family connections, of course, but came up blank – his parents died years ago, no siblings.”

“Apparently his grandmother, Debra, maiden name Cohen, had a brother, Abraham, who had a son Eli. About the same age as Schwarz, he had retired from the antiques business – runs in the family, doesn’t it? and went to live in Marbella, but apparently he and Schwarz kept in touch.”

“You said lived – isn’t he there any longer?”

71

“Oh yes,” she said grimly, “he’s still there alright – but I’m afraid that he’s six feet under. He was murdered the week after Schwarz died and the Spanish police tell me that he was extensively tortured before he died. It looks as though the Canellis had someone go over there and extract the information needed to locate that key from Eli before he died.”

At last some things were beginning to fall into place. I had never known how the Canelli brothers –

who I was absolutely certain had arranged Pam’s abduction to force me to get the key for them –

had even known of its existence. I had found it hard to believe that a man like Harry Schwarz would have let people know that sort of thing – surely far too dangerous as there was always the risk of one or more of the unsavoury characters with whom he dealt all the time helping themselves? Now it made sense. The time delay between Schwarz’s death and Pam’s kidnapping was explained.

Somebody had gone over to Spain, got the information about the key’s existence from the luckless Eli Cohen, returned to the UK and then the whole scheme leading to Pam’s death had been put in motion. That left unanswered the question of how the Canelli brothers had known of the very existence of Eli Cohen when we hadn’t, but I wasn’t terribly interested in knowing the answer to that as long as nothing pointed to me – and in this scenario, I didn’t see how anything possibly could. I was, however, intrigued to know how Weatherby had discovered the existence of Eli Cohen

– it was embarrassing that she had found him when we hadn’t, although in our own defence, we had stopped looking into anything connected to him once Schwarz had died. My unasked question was, however, promptly answered by Anna Weatherby.

“We found out about Eli Cohen because Logan had heard the Canellis talking about Schwarz and their money and one of them – he thinks it was Giorgio, but can’t remember for sure – say that once when he had been talking to Schwarz – they had met somewhere to agree on some money laundering and how much it would cost the brothers, when Schwarz’s mobile went. Apparently he took the call but just told the caller that he would call him back and to Canelli he shrugged and just said ‘relatives!’ or something like that. However, that was enough to start Canelli digging once Schwarz died and they tracked Eli down. Logan claimed not to know that Eli had been murdered: I don’t believe him, but I also believe that he had nothing to with it at first hand. I’m just about certain that it was one of the brothers. After all, they had no way of knowing just what information Eli might or might not have had; if they had sent one of their people there would have been the danger that whatever he discovered he might be able to use himself and vanish with the brothers’

money.”

The whole thing was fascinating, but more than that, it really did look as though I was in the clear, but she still hadn’t finished.

“We checked flights out to the Costa around the time of Cohen’s murder but drew a complete blank.

I suppose it was too much to hope that Giorgio or Luigi would have obliging flown out there under their own name. What we did get out of Logan, however, was that Luigi was away for a few days at the relevant time. Where, he didn’t know – or at least professes not to know. I think, but no way to prove it, that Luigi went over to Spain to get information out of Cohen.”

“If he wanted to avoid leaving a trail, he’d have been better off taking a ferry or Eurostar and then motoring.”

“Yes, we thought that as well, but again no trace. Assuming he did go over himself – and I’m ninety plus percent sure of it – he must have used a false passport. Hardly beyond his competence, I’m certain.”

This was all very interesting, but I couldn’t see why Anna Weatherby was passing it all on to me –

our interest as a force had ended when Schwarz dropped dead over a year ago. Her next sentence enlightened me.

72

“Ken, I guess this must all seem a bit irrelevant to anything you lot are still interested in, but I wanted you to know just in case any of Schwarz’s contacts also tie back, even if very remotely, to the Canelli set up. I am going to lift Giorgio tomorrow morning, and I’m going to make sure that the fact gets reported in the nationals and on local TV. I’ve got a juicy tit-bit to throw to the media –

the immoral earnings bit includes running a brothel frequented by at least a couple of MPs –

nothing like catching a politician with his pants down to create interest in the tabloids. It’s a long shot, I know, but just in case Giorgio’s arrest creates interest down your way, you will let me know, won’t you?”

“Of course – to be honest, I think that it is pretty unlikely, but I’ll make sure that if anything gets said on the street I’ll hear about it – and I’ll pass it on.”

After I put the phone down, I sat and thought for a while. It was good news that Giorgio was to be arrested, but I was disappointed that Luigi seemed to be fireproof. I didn’t know if the kidnapping which had led to Pam’s death was the idea of one of them alone or of both of them, but as far as I was concerned they were partners in crime and equally culpable. If Weatherby and her team couldn’t do anything about Luigi, I felt that it was my responsibility to put that right, although at that precise moment I had absolutely no idea as to how to do so.

His residence, as I had already determined, was a virtual fortress. Even though Logan and Merrill had been lifted, I had no doubt that they would have been replaced by others to maintain the level of security Luigi clearly felt that he needed. Even if I had felt like storming the place single-handed, in itself a policy of despair surely doomed to failure, there was the presence of his wife and daughter to consider.

Why was it, I wondered, that Giorgio had quite easily been tied into a variety of crimes, yet there was no evidence against his brother? Was it because Giorgio had been careless in what he had said and to whom, and Luigi hadn’t, or was there another reason? If so, what could it be? I would dearly have liked to interrogate Logan on the matter but placed into the Met’s witness protection scheme he was way out of my reach.

Unless: why concentrate on Logan? I could still get my hands on Merrill; because Logan had cracked so easily and agreed to give up the Canelli brothers, nobody had quizzed Merrill about them. As far as he was concerned, the only trouble he was in was over the armed robbery. He was being held on remand, so easily within my grasp, but I would have to be careful that any questioning of him didn’t lead back to me. There was also the fact that this was Jill’s case – it would look strange if I were to be seen to be sidelining her.

After careful consideration, I phoned Jill and asked to come and see me. She entered my office and took the proffered chair.

“Jill, I’ve been thinking about the Met taking over Logan and looking as though they have only managed half a job – just Giorgio, not both of the Canelli brothers.”

She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

“Well, how does that affect us, boss?”

“We still have Merrill,” she started to open her mouth, but knowing what as sure to be on her mind, I forestalled her. “No, I’m not suggesting that he gets protection as well – quite the opposite. We let him know that Logan is singing his head off and will be rewarded with the witness protection programme by the Met and that in the process he, Merrill, is being dropped further into the mire so it won’t be just the robbery he gets done for but a host of other things as well. We sympathise with him and tell him that we will ensure he only goes down for the robbery, no matter what Logan and the Met try to stitch him up for, provided he gives us something that we can feed to the Met to keep them from making things worse for him. Specifically, we want the dirt on Luigi Canelli.”

73

Jill frowned in concentration as she turned my idea over in her mind.

“OK, we can flesh out something for the Met, but what’s in it for us? We carry on from an unfinished Met piece of work and then we’ll just have to hand it all over to them.”

I had given that a fair amount of thought before broaching the subject.

“Getting Luigi Canelli off the streets will be a feather in our caps. OK, the end result will benefit the Met – always assuming, of course, that we can actually come up with anything, but in the meantime it will reflect well on us and, as it’s your case, on you in particular if we can succeed where the Met failed.”

I could see that the idea of earning kudos from the case sat well with her and I pressed home my advantage.

“No time like the present, let’s go and talk to him now.”

An hour later we were sitting in an interview room with Davey Merrill seated opposite us. His time on remand hadn’t improved his appearance. His face was gaunt and three or four days of stubble, liberally shot with grey even though he was only thirty three years old, combined to give him the look of a certain loser. Small, deep-set, dark eyes viewed us with a mixture of suspicion and hostility.

“What’s all this about?” he demanded truculently, “where’s my brief? I ain’t talking to you without him here.”

Before meeting him we had agreed that Jill would do most, perhaps even all, of the initial talking.

She gave Merrill a wintry smile.

“Mr. Merrill, you would only need, only be entitled, to have a lawyer present if we wished to talk to you about the crime with which you have been charged. However, that’s not why DCI Morgan and I are here to talk to you. No, this is about something quite different.”

The hostility remained, but the suspicion intensified.

“What?”

“Mr. Merrill, as you know, you and Errol Logan were arrested and charged with the same crime –

the armed robbery, resulting in the serious injury to the jeweller. What you don’t know is that the charges against Mr. Logan have been dropped.”

Now amazement crossed his face; Jill ploughed on.

“Mr. Logan has been extremely helpful to our colleagues in the Metropolitan Police, so much so that not only have the armed robbery charges against him been dropped, but he has been placed in their witness protection scheme. Whilst you spend some years in jail, Errol Logan will be free to come and go as he pleases, with a new name, a new location, even perhaps, an honest job. He has earned that by cooperating fully with the police and giving them extremely useful information about Giorgio Canelli who will be arrested, along with several of his associates, tomorrow morning. Now, as I say, Giorgio Canelli and friends will be arrested tomorrow; additionally, the Met have informed us that Logan has implicated you in a number of other crimes, so you won’t just be standing trial for the Guildford robbery. We expect that you will also be implicated in,” she ostentatiously studied an open file in front of her on the table, “a similar armed robbery in Wandsworth in 2006, a case of grievous bodily harm against one Adam Piper in Battersea in2007, another armed robbery in Chelsea in 2008,” she looked up and stared into Merrill’s eyes, “I could go on, but believe me, it is quite a list, a list for which you and you alone will be standing trial.”

We were gambling; the crimes that Jane was enumerating had actually taken place, but our gamble was that the Canellis’ organisation was big enough, and the crimes long enough ago, for Merrill to have no idea whether the brothers had sanctioned them or not.

He stared at us, his face now a picture of desperation.

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“It’s all lies, I tell you – I never had nothing to do with them cases.”

Jill gave an eloquent shrug of her shoulders; a stereotyped Frenchman could not have been more eloquent.

“Do you think we, or, more to the point, the Met, care one way or the other? Your own friends are throwing you to the wolves, Davey. I won’t pretend that it’s the way Mr. Morgan here, nor I like to see policing done, but we have to live in the real world, not some fairy tale. This way, you go down for a long time and the Met – for you will have noticed that all those crimes took place in their area

– can close a few more files and make themselves look good.”

She paused again, and again stared into his eyes.

“Like the reporters always ask after some disaster ‘How do you feel about that’?”

There was no doubt how Merrill felt about it. He looked positively sick to his stomach. Clearly, he totally believed that his erstwhile friends were perfectly capable of setting him up in the way we were describing.

It was time for my intervention, an intervention which Jill and I had agreed would be pointless unless Merrill seemed likely to be in a receptive mood.

“There is one small glimmer of hope for you, Mr. Merrill,” I began, dragging the words out as though I was reluctant to utter them. “As DI Harris has stated, neither of us like the idea of you being set up as a scapegoat for your friends. I believe that there is a way for you to extricate yourself from their scheme, but only you can tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.”

“What’s that, then?”

“DI Harris told you that Giorgio Canelli and some of his associates will be arrested tomorrow. That is because Errol Logan provided the Met with concrete, verifiable proof of crimes that he had committed. However, as you know better than I, Giorgio is only one half of the Canelli partnership, and Logan has failed to provide the Met with similar proof against Luigi Canelli.”

Merrill blinked his eyes several times, slowly. Already he was anticipating what I was going to say.

I gave him my best Count Dracula smile.

“Now, let’s be clear right from the start about one thing. No matter what, you are going to stand trial for the Guildford jewel robbery and I am confident that you will serve time as a result. I am not going to let a crime on my patch go totally unpunished just to please the Metropolitan Police – I’d get no thanks for doing that. However, if you can provide me with evidence that can be used against Luigi Canelli, I will make sure that the Guildford robbery is the only thing for which you stand trial.

That will probably save you five or more years inside.”

We had him; that much was clear from his expression.

“What do you want from me?”

“Something we can take back to the Met to enable them to nab Luigi as well as his brother.

Something will persuade them to get Errol Logan off your back. But don’t forget – I want provable evidence, not cock and bull stories.”

He hesitated, looked at me from under furrowed brows.

“Luigi – we always calls him Lou - he’s the smart one of the brothers. Giorgio – Joe - he’s got a foul temper on him – flies off the handle over nothing all the time. Not Lou – he don’t get angry, not that you’d notice. The more upset he is, the quieter he goes. He’s very, very careful to see that nobody can pin nothing on him, see? One of the things he does is never to talk to people other than one to one so that if anybody says anything, it is just their word against his, not that many would want to say anything against him – not if they want to stay healthy.”

I let my disappointment show.

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“So you have nothing for me, Davey. That’s tough, especially for you. Looks like I’m just going to have to throw you to the wolves.”

He looked more desperate than ever.

“Look, there is something that don’t need someone to accuse him in court – which no bugger in his right mind is going to do.”

“And what might that be, Davey?”

“Look, it goes back to last year, right. That guy Harry Schwartz – him as dropped dead on you, right?”

I began to have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach; had I out-smarted myself? I waited with trepidation to hear what Merrill had to say.

“Well, when the old bloke died, he was holding a lot of money belonging to Joe and Lou. It were the proceeds of a couple of cash machine robberies – ram-raiders. Trouble with breaking into a cash machine is that they often has brand new notes in them – not always, mind you, but often enough that you has to be careful. Sure enough, both these buggers had brand new notes in them, so Lou salted them away with Harry Schwarz who would trickle them out a few at a time where they wouldn’t get picked up – racecourses and dog tracks is favourite for that sort of thing, and Harry had a number of men, and women, to do that for him for a percentage. Normal course of events, Harry would have given Lou some clean money, on account like, there and then with the rest coming over time as the new notes got laundered. Trouble was, he was short of clean cash at the time. Wouldn’t have mattered normally – he and Lou had done enough business over the years to trust each other, and he was expecting to pick up about twenty grand or so in the next few days which he were going to pass on the Lou. Trouble was, silly old sod first goes and gets arrested, and then drops dead, so there is Lou out half a million quid or so and not happy about it. Now, he knowed that Harry had a cousin of some sort in Spain so he goes over there and a couple of days later comes back and says he knows where Harry cached the money, but that they need a key ‘cos it’s a sort of safe of some sort, Trouble is, the key’s with the coppers – part of Harry’s stuff they picked up when he snuffed it. Somehow, Lou comes up with an idea as to how to get that key – I reckon he knew a bent copper, or at least someone he knew, knew a bent copper, and the key got handed over sweet as a nut.”

Merrill was still avoiding mentioning his part in abducting Pam, understandably so, as to do so would simply add to the litany of crimes for which he might yet stand accused. All along I wondered how much he and Logan knew about me. We had never met before their arrest, and neither had shown any hint of recognition when we met afterwards. They must have known Pam’s name to fool her into thinking that they were taking her to me, but surely they would realise that she had been my wife? And that her abduction was to facilitate the obtaining of Harry Schwarz’s key? I didn’t believe for one moment that the fact that they had lifted the wife of Detective Sergeant Morgan meant that they were deceived by the existence of Acting Detective Chief Inspector Morgan; they must surely realise that they were one and the same man.

It was the dilemma which had occupied my mind ever since I had located Merrill and Logan; would they use their knowledge of what I had done against me? On the face of it, why should they not? I did, however, feel that I had some things that were working in my favour. Firstly, neither of them had mentioned the kidnapping so far and to do so would make them self-confessed perpetrators of the crime. Secondly, I was pretty sure that they were ignorant of what precisely I had done. Using the excuse of a fracas which had occurred in the Friary Centre a few days after I had dropped off Harry Schwarz’s all-important key, I had managed to view the CCTV coverage of my actions and had seen the person who had picked it up. He had been wearing a hooded top, making his image 76

just about anonymous, but his build was such that he most certainly was neither Merrill nor Logan, too slim for the first, not nearly tall enough for the second. These two factors, I hoped and trusted, would make it unlikely in the extreme that either of them would point the finger at me. If I was wrong, the consequences would be serious in the extreme, but I would just have to live with them.

If I could strike back at those responsible for Pam’s death, it would be a price well worth paying.

I stared across the table at him.

“So where is this taking us, Davey?”

He licked his lips nervously.

“Look, this is kosher, right? And if Lou ever finds out I told you, I’m a dead man. Like I said, it goes back to when Harry snuffed it in your nick. Lou was really, really pissed off - well, who wouldn’t be with half a million quid bleedin’ well gone walkies?”

“And? Come on Davey. We’re growing old waiting for you to say something useful.”

“Look, he went to Spain, right?”

Jill and I nodded in unison.

“Well, he went over there, using the Shuttle and then driving down to Spain. That way he reckoned he wouldn’t leave no real trail for anyone to follow. Now,” he hesitated yet again, “look, I’ve got to be sure this won’t get back to him.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “he’ll never hear it from us.”

He looked first at me, then at Jill, then turned his attention back to me.

“Right. Well, when he got back he got me to go over his motor and give it a real good cleaning. A good reason for it, as well. When I lifted the carpet of the boot I found a hundred Euro note, all dirty and crumpled. I nearly pocketed it, then I had a thought. No way would Lou have dropped that or nothing – even if he had, it couldn’t have got under the carpet – no way. So, I reckon Lou has set me a little test – if I pocket that money I’m in right trouble. So, I goes to him and gives it to him, telling him where I found it. I could see from his face that it had been a test. He thanks me for it, then tells me to keep it for cleaning the car and being honest with him.”

I shifted uneasily on my chair, wondering just what all this was leading up to. Merrill, correctly, interpreted this as a sign of impatience and hurriedly continued.

“See, thing was, he decided that he could trust me. Now, he and Joe are brothers, but although they work together, they don’t always see eye to eye. Lou reckons Joe is too careless, too reckless in what he does – and I reckon that now Joe is being nabbed and Lou ain’t, proves him right, don’t it?

Anyway, Lou takes me with him to Harry’s storage place – he’d already been there before to get their money back, but this time he wants me to help him with stuff what’s there, and I drives us there in a van. What the place is a sort of big warehouse on the Slyfield industrial estate outside Guildford and inside it there are a load of lock-ups, about the size of a garage. Lou opens the one that was Harry’s and we goes inside. Reason wants me with him is obvious – place is full of boxes, each one with a number on it, and wants them shifted out. A lot of them are empty, but not all of them – can tell that from the weight. He gets me to put all the empty ones in the van and then settles down at a little desk with a big book on it. Each page in the book is numbered – and each number is also on one of the boxes.

“ ‘Right, Davey’ he says, ‘got a job for you. These boxes with stuff in them – they are stuff Harry Schwarz was holding for people, like he held stuff for us. See in this book, it says what’s in each box and who it belongs to. Now, there are some right hard cases among those names. I don’t want them getting the idea that I’m nicking their stuff. You get in touch with each of them and give them their stuff back – what they do then is up to them. Just make sure they realise that I’m doing them a favour.’ So that’s what I does for the next week or more. But there’s more. When Lou went to the 77

lock-up the first time he decided to hang on to it – after all, Harry didn’t need it no more, did he?

That second time, when I took him in the van, he had a briefcase with him and when we got there, he opened it up and took out a couple of small paintings. Didn’t like ‘em meself – they was these abstract things, but I know Lou has some like that in his flat. ‘Look at these, Davey, he says, ‘too good to leave behind.’ Then he clams up; I reckon he said more than he meant to, and he puts them into the desk drawer and locks it.”

I was getting impatient again.

“Davey, what’s all this to me? Tell me something I can use.”

He looked at me, the anxiety greatly lessened and replaced by a look of satisfaction.

“That’s just it, Mr. Morgan. Those paintings.”

“What about them?”

“Well, when Lou said they was too good to leave behind, I reckoned he meant leave from his trip across to Spain. Now, I’m not daft, Mr. Morgan. I knowed he went to talk to Harry’s relative –that Cohen bloke. Now Lou comes back knowing he needs a key to open that lock-up and get his money back. Now is he going to ask nicely? Not Lou. I reckon that Cohen’s probably been topped – dead men don’t talk. So, I gets onto the internet – the Spanish newspapers. I can speak a bit of Spanish, not much, but enough to recognise a report on the murder of a bloke called Cohen and I gets the report translated on one of those sites on the net. Turns out Cohen had not only been knocked off, but tortured as well – looks like he didn’t want to talk straight off. And more – the report said a couple of paintings had been nicked. Abstracts by a bloke called Millares and that they were worth about two hundred grand – each. Those have to be the paintings Lou brought back with him.

“So there it is, Mr. Morgan. Those paintings will have Lou’s dabs all over them. They came from Cohen’s place so that ties up, don’t it?”

I felt rising excitement. It wasn’t totally clear cut – I could see a defence lawyer claiming that Canelli had purchased the paintings from a third party, but given their value and their known previous ownership by Cohen, a man brutally tortured and then murdered, it would be a hard job to dismiss such a train of evidence if the prosecution did a half-way decent job.

We left Merrill to his own devices whilst I got in touch with DCI Weatherby. She answered her mobile on the second ring.

“Anna, Ken Graham. I’ve been talking to Merrill and he has come up with some evidence against Luigi Canelli that should tie him into the murder of Eli Cohen.

“Ken, that’s great – how good do you reckon it is?”

“It’s not concrete – but it’s pretty good. I’d say seven or perhaps eight out of ten, more if we play our cards right.”

Swiftly I outlined what Merrill had told us and we agreed on a course of action. She would continue with arresting Giorgio and his henchmen the following morning, then we would make simultaneous swoops on Luigi’s home and his holdings, if any, in Harry Schwarz’s hired storage unit later in the day. The unit was in Guildford’s general area and therefore in the Surrey Constabulary remit whereas his home was in the Met’s area.

So it was that at two o’clock the next day I supervised the breaking into Harry Schwarz’s storage unit. As Merrill had said, the desk drawer contained two small paintings, each about twelve inches by fifteen, in bold colours heavily laid onto the canvas. Hard to believe, as the forensic officer carefully placed them in evidence bags which she and I then signed, that the two together were worth the better part of half a million pounds.

The paintings weren’t the only things we found. Although Harry Schwarz’s carefully indexed boxes and book record no longer existed, a couple of the boxes were still there. Presumably when Merrill 78

and Luigi Canelli had cleared the place they had been empty. Now, however, they contained a motley collection of items – watches, clocks, assorted jewellery, presumably the ‘take’ from some of the crimes committed by the Canelli brothers’ minions and stuff presumably felt to be needing a period of storage time before trying to realise their value. At a guess, the items had been moved from somewhere else to here, with Canelli feeling the location to be secure as any records would just show the late Harry Schwarz as the person renting it.

I got on my mobile and updated Anna Weatherby. I found her in a less than joyful mood.

“Glad to hear that you’ve some success, Ken. We’ve drawn pretty much of a blank. Nothing in the house to cause any excitement, but more worryingly, Luigi has done a bunk. According to his wife and daughter he went out last night about ten o’clock and hasn’t returned. They claim not to know where he might have gone and are claiming that we should be looking for him as a missing person, not trying to arrest him.”

“Oh, no. Sounds like he was tipped off.”

“Yes, it does,” she replied grimly, “and if it was someone from the investigating team I intend to find them and crucify them.”

On that unhappy note we finished our conversation and I wondered uneasily how Luigi seemed to have obtained advance warning of what was happening. It could just be coincidence, but not for one moment did I believe that it really was. No, someone had whispered the word in Luigi’s shell-like ear and he had promptly scarpered. I mentally reviewed the possibilities. Given the amount of time involved since Logan had started to spill the beans to Anna and her team, it surely seemed that the most likely culprit was somebody in the Met. Against that was the fact that it seemed Luigi had departed at short notice and had done so only after we had started to question Merrill. That opened a real can of worms. He had left his house about ten in the evening. Jill Harris and I hadn’t finished questioning Merrill until gone eight. It had been an informal interview, so there was no recording of the proceedings for anybody else to have access to. By the time that Luigi had presumably been tipped off, only the custody sergeant who had brought Merrill from the remand cell to the interview room (he was being held in the station cells because the nearest prison was full to over-flowing and had said that they simply couldn’t accommodate him), Jill and myself were aware that we had interviewed him again. I began to have a very bad feeling.

My mind went back to Pam’s kidnapping and that unknown voice on the telephone telling me that they would know if I played them false because they had someone in the nick who would know and who would tell them. Could Jill possibly be that someone? Until that moment, the thought of her being anything other than a one hundred percent honest copper had never crossed my mind. But for this development, it never would have crossed my mind. The timing really worried me; if it was someone in the Met who had warned Canelli it could have nothing to do with our interviewing Merrill, but could I believe in such a coincidence?

On the other hand – Jill was highly intelligent. Surely she would realise, if indeed she was a mole, that the timing meant that suspicion was sure to fall on her? I just could not bring myself to believe it was her; surely there must be some other explanation. The only other person who knew that we had spoken with Merrill was George Wilson, the custody sergeant, but he had no idea at all as to what we had discussed. Surely the leak must have come from the Met and the timing really was coincidental?

I had had my normal meeting with the three DIs that morning; she had appeared perfectly normal then. We had, of course, given the other two a brief update, but by then Luigi was long gone.

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A thought struck me. I hadn’t told Jill not to say anything about our interview with Merrill; had she told anyone? We had broken up at about ten past eight. Was anyone else still around, and if so had Jill mentioned what had happened to them?

I went down to the reception desk, The on-duty desk sergeant was an old friend, Jim Douglas.

“Jim, did anyone stay late last night in CID?”

He looked at me quizzically.

“I’ll check the book, Ken. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t honestly know – I hope not, but there might be. Oh, and Jim – please don’t let anyone know that I was asking.”

“OK - silent as the grave.”

He checked the duty log.

“Well, the duty DI was DI Tom Jupp. He was here all night, of course. He had one of his DCs with him, Peter Price. Then when folk left. I’ve got you booked out at eight twenty two, DI Harris a couple of minutes later at twenty five past. DS Harper left eight thirty three, DS Prentice left eight forty four, DC Goode nine oh five. Last away apart from the night shift was DI Ferris at nine fifty.

Does that tell you what you want?”

“To be honest, I don’t know, Jim, but it’s given me something to think about.”

I looked at my watch. Five forty; I decided to knock off early for once whilst I thought over what Jim had told me. Of all the names one stood out. Jill’s Detective Sergeant, Phil Harper had left eight minutes after Jill. She had left fifteen minutes after we had finished interviewing Murrell. Time enough to phone Canelli and warn him. Also time enough to tell Phil Harper about our breakthrough and for him to warn Canelli. DI Ferris, Grace Ferris, and Jill were friends – they played squash together and sometimes made a foursome with their respective partners. Jill might well have told her what we had achieved. I felt that it was unlikely that she would have confided the news to anybody else.

I had an early night, still in a state of confusion over the Canelli tip-off. I had thought of sharing my thoughts with Henry Clifford, but the DSi had been out of the office at a budgetary meeting and unlikely to be available before going home.

Chapter Thirteen – Christmas Day 2012, January 2013

I woke early and decided to make an early start at the office. I parked my car and took the rear entrance, climbing the stairs to my own office still with my mind in a turmoil. I saw that Henry Clifford was already in, so went along and knocked on his door. I entered in answer to his ‘Come in’.

“Ken, what can I do for you? Oh, take a seat.”

I hesitated; once I voiced my suspicions all hell was likely to be let loose. Some Christmas present for the department!

“I need to talk to you – I think it is possible we have an informant in the department.”

His expression became stony.

“Tell me about it.”

Wretchedly, I went through the events of yesterday, finishing by naming my suspects. Clifford leant back in his chair, his fingers steepled under his chin.

“It sounds serious, Ken. I agree with you; we have to look into it. I hope that it proves to be just a coincidence, but we can’t ignore it. First things first, I’ll inform the divisional Commander and I think that you had better come with me.”

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Chief Superintendent David Wallace was a man who was at the crossroads of his career. Forty seven years old and four years in his present post, it was probably time for him to be looking for an Assistant Chief Constable post. Indeed, he might be thought to have perhaps missed the boat already. Barring accidents, there was little likelihood of achieving such a post in Surrey. With the exception of Charles Pope, the ACC (Crime) who was forty-six, the current incumbents were all in their fifties and seemed unlikely to move before retirement, so if he wanted to move up he would almost certainly also have to move out. Under those circumstances, the last thing he needed was a whiff of corruption in his Division to besmirch his CV. That, however, seemed to be of no consequence to him as he listened to what we had to say. I have known senior officers who, faced with such a problem, would rant and rave at the messenger and then promptly pass the buck. Not CS Wallace.

“Right,” he said, “I’ll get Internal Affairs organised to look at this and I’ll warn the DCC what is going on.”

As Divisional Commander, Wallace reported to the Deputy Chief Constable for the overall efficiency and effectiveness of his Division – the tier immediately above him, the Assistant Chief Constables, each had a specific remit – Operations, Traffic, Crime, Admin – and he would report to them on an as and when basis, but on something this wide ranging, he would report straight to the DCC.

It was then that I spoke up on what was worrying me most about the whole affair.

“Sir, I wonder if it would be possible to delay involving Internal Affairs?”

He stared at me, his expression frosty.

“Why, Inspector? I realise that DI Harris and DS Harper are members of your team, but it is yourself who has raised this possible problem.”

“That’s just it, sir. It is a possible problem. There is no evidence at the moment and the thing that worries me is that I just don’t understand how there would be a link from anyone here to the Canelli brothers. To Schwarz, or some other local villain I could understand, but not the Canellis. They operate out of North London; they use Schwarz as a money launderer, as do a lot of other villains, not all of them, as far as we can see, necessarily local, but they don’t operate directly in our area so how and why should a link be established with an officer here?”

“Their men Logan and Merrill committed a crime here – the armed robbery. Just because the centre of operations for the Canellis is Stanmore, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have things going on down here.”

“No sir, but if they have been sending people down here on jobs on a regular basis, I’m sure that there would have been word about it on the street – and there hasn’t been. After that armed robbery we quizzed all our informants and there wasn’t a sniff of them knowing about a presence from outside the area. I think that robbery was a one-off.”

“But why should that be? Why should a couple of robbers based in North London suddenly decide to pop down to Surrey?”

There he had me. I hadn’t the remotest idea why the two of them should decide to hit a jewellers in Guildford out of the blue. There was one possible reason, one which I dare not mention. These were the men who had kidnapped Pam; the jewel robbery was not their only foray into Surrey.

“I don’t know, sir, but I do know that DCI Weatherby and her Met colleagues are moving heaven and earth to try and find out how Luigi Canelli knew that it was time for him to do a runner.”

“And if they conclude that the tip-off came from down here? Then what? We would be seen to have done nothing when we should, to use your own phrase, have moved heaven and earth to ensure that we were squeaky clean. No, I’m sorry, Inspector, we have to start looking into this straightaway.”

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And with that I had my marching orders. I left with Clifford, who was clearly unhappy with my suggestion that we should hold our fire in the matter.

“Ken, what on earth were you thinking of? Don’t forget, Internal Affairs will be talking to everyone who may have been involved – and that will include you. What you said in there makes you look uneasy about being questioned by the IA people.”

I had realised that, but I was still unwilling to believe that Jill Harris was assisting criminals.

“I’m sorry, sir, it’s just that I really cannot believe that Jill Harris would do such a thing – nor DS

Harper. I’ve known them both a long time and I just can’t believe it.”

“Well if you are that sure, why come and see me?”

“Because if I am wrong it needs sorting out as quickly as possible.”

Clifford looked quizzically at me.

“Fair comment, Ken, but you should have done a bit of checking yourself before coming to see me if you are that uncertain. You might have reassured yourself, one way or the other, and perhaps saved us from what is likely to be an unpleasant few days.”

Clifford was right. Internal Affairs descended upon us like a plague. I had assumed that they would just talk to Jill, Phil Harper and myself, and perhaps Grace Ferris, as the only ones with the possible ability to pass anything on that evening. Not a bit of it. To my astonishment they interviewed all station personnel who had been on duty from just before six through to gone ten when Canelli had made his run for it. Their argument, as I learned later, was that the moment it was clear that Merrill was going to be interviewed by Jill and myself without a solicitor present, that very fact might have been enough to trigger Canelli’s flight.

They were thorough; bank accounts were checked, past cases reviewed and all those under the microscope felt that they were being subject to a degree of intimidation that would have done the Gestapo proud. All to no avail; not only did they find nothing, but on Tuesday the 8th of January I got a phone call which made everything better, or, according to your perspective, worse.

It was Anna Weatherby.

“Ken, thought you’d like to know that we’ve traced the leak that let Lou Canelli slip away. One of our civilian secretaries – still can’t really believe this – is the cousin of Canelli’s wife. She was the one who typed up the search warrant application and when she realised what it meant, she warned her cousin who warned her husband. Stupid bloody woman is facing a jail sentence as a result of her family loyalty and I’m going to ensure that nobody gives her an easy time.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I had set the dogs loose on myself and my colleagues for absolutely nothing and it was very clear that what I had done would not be easily forgotten nor forgiven.

I had not enjoyed my own quizzing by IA; in view of my rank I had been privileged to be seen by the big boss himself, Superintendent James MacDougall or, as he was affectionately known even amongst his own staff, ‘that tight-arsed Scottish bastard’. I had not enjoyed the experience. The man exuded hostility from every pore of his pasty skin, every hair of his ginger head. He had left me in no doubt that his favoured scenario had me as the villain of the piece and that I had started the ball rolling to involve him and his team as a double bluff to hide my own culpability. I had left his office shaking with anger, both at the way I had been treated and at myself for starting this thing off when, had I started by talking to Jill, all the upset might have been avoided.

The news that the leak had definitely come from the Met was greeted with relief by those of us under suspicion and, I could not help but feel, disappointment by MacDougall and his colleagues that they had been unable to nail somebody’s hide to the wall.

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My own position became very uncomfortable; my teams were clearly unhappy and, whilst the police discipline ethos saved me from outward insubordination, I had clearly lost their trust. Of my three DIs, Hazel Rogers, herself only in an acting capacity, was the least antagonistic, but I had the unhappy feeling that if either Jill or Chris Lane got an opportunity to drop me in it with the powers that be they would relish that chance. There was also the thought that, like Hazel, I was in an acting capacity. Sooner or later George Hughes would be back and I would revert to being a DI again; how much support could I expect from Jill and Chris then? I was almost back in the mindset I had suffered as a DS when Wylock had been on the warpath and I seriously considered asking for a transfer. That would have been a serious step for a Detective Sergeant; for a DI, ex-Acting DCI, it would be an admission of failure.

Going home to an empty flat didn’t help; nobody to talk to, nobody to express sympathy at the unjustness of it all – Pam had been good at that, a positive crutch to lean on.

I had the following weekend off and, unable to bear the prospect of moping around the flat I decided to get away from Guildford entirely. My brother Mike was back after a six month deployment to Afghanistan and we agreed to meet up in Winchester, one of my favourite cities. We both booked into the Wessex Hotel and I stipulated a room with a view of the cathedral. Pam and I had spent a couple of nights there after our wedding and before we had departed for Provence for ten days honeymooning, and the place had happy memories for me.

Over dinner on the Sunday I recounted to Mike the problems I was facing, only to find him less than sympathetic. When I finally finished he looked me straight in the eye, a gaze which I found discomforting.

“Tell me, Ken,” he demanded, “do you think what you did was right?”

“At the time, yes.”

“Never mind bloody ‘at the time’ waffle – was it right? Would you do the same again in the same circumstances?”

I hesitated as I turned what had happened over in my mind.

“Yes,” I finally said. “If the leak was in our set-up it was important that it be found as quickly as possible. If I had done nothing and the leak wasn’t found, who knows what future investigations might have been jeopardised. If I had done nothing and the leak had finally been found I would have been responsible for whatever had happened in the interim.”

“OK, so you have convinced yourself – and for it is worth, you’ve convinced me as well. Now, problems with colleagues. They are answerable to you, right?”

“Yes, although I am only acting up for George Hughes.”

“Doesn’t matter – for the time being you are in charge – so bloody well be in charge and make sure that they realise it and that you won’t put up with any prima donna vapouring. It’s not only Acting DCI – it’s Acting DCI. You may or may not get confirmed in that rank sometime in the future, but you certainly won’t be if you let yourself fall into the only mindset.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that Mike was making good sense and I resolved to put his advice into effect the next day, Monday, at my daily meeting with my DIs.

The meeting ran what had been by then its normal course, with the resentment of the three DIs scarcely concealed. At last the updates were completed, and it was time to lay down my marker.

“Right,” I said, “now that we are all up to date, I have something to say to the three of you. I know full well that nobody has enjoyed being turned over by the IA people, particular those of us who have come into contact with Superintendent MacDougall himself. Well, it’s happened, it’s over and you are just going to have to put it behind you. I also know that you all blame me for IA becoming involved in the first place. You are quite right – I set those wheels in motion because I realised that 83

there was a chance that a leak from this nick had allowed a dangerous criminal to do a runner. I make no apology for what I did, nor will I apologise in the future. If I was faced with the same set of circumstances tomorrow I would act in exactly the same way – and if any of you would not have acted the way I did, you have no place in CID and certainly no future in CID. Now, I expect all of you to get on with your jobs and stop allowing your resentment against me to be clear to your teams. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”

There was a stunned silence from the three of them.

“Well?” I demanded.

Chris was the first to speak.

“Look, Ken,” I glared at him, and he changed his tack, “look, boss, I’m sure that that you are misinterpreting things...”

I stopped him in mid flow.

“Inspector, I am not a fool, so don’t treat me like one. I’m not fussed about the way officers from other teams regard me, I am fussed that your team – and those of you two,” I said , shifting my gaze to Jill and Hazel, “are making no secret of their antagonism towards me. They are you subordinates and take their lead from you. It is to stop right now, and you three are going to stop it. Anymore of it and I will be down like a ton of bricks not on the individual but on his or her DI.”

Chris sat back in his chair, totally deflated. It was Hazel who spoke next, and did so hesitantly.

“I’m sorry about this, sir. It’s just that we, or at least I, felt that we are not being trusted, and for no good reason...”

I interrupted her mercilessly.

“There was a reason, Inspector –I’ve just explained it to you. Don’t you understand what I said?”

“Yes, of course I do.” She realised that she was digging a hole for herself and was bright enough to stop digging.

“I’m sorry, sir – I will make sure my people get the message.”

“Good.” I turned my gaze on Jill. She met my gaze for a moment, then dropped her eyes.

“I will as well, sir.”

I returned my gaze to Chris. He shifted uneasily in his chair, then nodded to me.

“Me too.”

“Right,” I said, “meeting over, back to work.”

As the three of them left me, I wondered uneasily what things would be like when George Hughes came back and I was once more level pegging with Jill and Chris. That, however, was for the future, At the very least it would be another four months or so before he would be fit enough to come back to work and in the meantime, as Mike had made clear to me, I had to make sure the section ran efficiently and effectively.

Immediately afterwards it was time for Henry Clifford’s meeting with his three DCIs; I continued to get vibes from Bill Laurence and Jerry Collyer that the IA investigation stigma against me was still present. Neither of them had been directly involved in that neither had been in the building that evening, but Tom Jupp, one of Bill’s DIs and one of Tom’s DCs, Peter Price, had been there and had been interviewed at length in consequence. After the meeting finished, Clifford asked me to stay behind for a moment. Here we go, I thought, somebody else not happy. I was wrong.

“Ken, two things.” He said. “First, the Internal Affairs thing. I just want you to know that in my view and in that of Superintendent Wallace, you did the right thing. I wasn’t happy, as I told you at the time, that having demonstrated the necessity for the investigation, you then suggested delaying it, but I understand your reasons, even though I don’t agree with them.

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“However, all that is behind us. I am sure that you will still find a lingering resentment aimed at you about it, but you are senior enough to squash anything like that from the rank and file, and between the two of us, I have mentioned the matter to Bill and Jerry.

“Now, something else between the two of us, at least for the time being. George Hughes won’t be coming back. His doctors have advised him that it would not be in his best interests to return to a job as demanding as that of a DCI. However, that’s under the counter at the moment. Only the ACC, myself and now you know about it. The reason is that if he delays formally retiring for a few more months it will be advantageous to his pension, because he will be over fifty. I feel, and Mr.

Pope agrees, that he’s been a damn good copper for a long time and that the force owes him this.

So, you will continue as acting DCI for a while yet – hopefully for long enough to demonstrate that you deserve to drop the acting bit, but I can’t promise that at this stage.”

I was taken aback; I had hoped that my time as an acting DCI – always provided that I could avoid committing any major blunders – would stand me in good stead in the promotion stakes in a couple of years or so time at the very earliest, but this opened the possibility of reaching substantive rank much more quickly than in my wildest dreams.

“I’m sorry to hear about Mr. Hughes’ health, sir, but thank you for the opportunity to carry on acting up. I’ll do my very best not to let you down.”

“I know you will, Ken. If I hadn’t been sure of that, you would never have been made acting DCI in the first place.”

I left his office with my mind in a whirl. If I played my cards right and demonstrated that I could cope with the job, the prospect looked to exist of becoming a substantive DCI before the year was out, at thirty-five years of age and after only a couple of years as a DI. I would be the youngest DCI in the Division, indeed perhaps even in all of the force.

“Don’t get carried away,” I told myself sternly, “it’s not certain – long way to go yet.”

As I got back to my own office, and settled down in my chair, I found myself looking around the room with a new-found sense of potential ownership. I was determined to do everything in my power to take advantage of my unexpected opportunity.

The feeling of euphoria lasted until I got home. The flat was still empty; I was still alone. Luigi Canelli, one of the two men ultimately responsible for Pam’s death, had escaped the clutches of the law and there was nothing I could do about it. A wave of depression washed over me as I mooched around the flat, unable to settle, unable even to decide what I wanted, if anything, for my evening meal. Listlessly, I switched on the TV, watched for a few minutes without taking in what was actually on the screen, and switched the set off again. I picked up the newspaper, glanced at the headlines, put it down again.

Somehow the fact that, with any luck, my career was on an upward curve, made the loss of Pam even harder to bear. Where is the joy in success if you have nobody to tell about it?

Determined to shake myself out of the dumps, I got a writing pad out of the bureau, took it to the table and sat down. My intention was to write down everything I could think about concerning Pam’s kidnapping and see if there was anything, any tiny, remote thing, that I hadn’t followed to exhaustion.

And there was. The link between Logan and Merrill and the Canellis was so strong that it had blinded me to one thing; the identity of the man who had actually held Pam captive. Logan and Merrill had had no qualms about Pam recognising them, At the time I had assumed that it was because they were out of their area and had no expectation of Pam ever seeing them again. The man who had held her, however, had gone to great lengths to ensure that she couldn’t recognise him. If Merrill and Logan weren’t worried, why should this man have been? Could it be that she might not 85

only recognise him, but that she might even have known him? From what Pam had told me, she had been held somewhere not very far away, certainly nothing like as far away as Stanmore.

Another thought struck me. If Pam might have been expected to recognise her jailer, might I also be expected to recognise him? My mind went back to that voice on the phone telling me that they had a mole in the police. Might that mole be the person who had held her, and worn a mask for fear of being recognised?

How many police officers might Pam have recognised? I started to tell myself not many, then remembered that she had come to a couple of Christmas does. There must have been several dozen policemen that she could have put a face to, if not necessarily a name. However, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that one of my police colleagues had been the man in the mask.

Why take such a risk?

I returned to thinking about where Pam might have been held, as well as by whom. She said that she had been driven for about twenty minutes – in the traffic around our way, perhaps six or seven miles. It had been a house with an integral garage – a seven mile radius circle from our house must have included thousands of such properties.

The more I thought about it, the more my mind simply went round in circles. I could see no way forward; Luigi Canelli had disappeared, I had no idea who had actually held Pam prisoner, nor where it had happened. I was at a dead end. I went to bed in a sad and sorry mood.

The next morning, Tuesday, the 15th of January dawned grey and miserable, with sleety rain threatening to turn the roads to skating rinks by nightfall. In the meantime, however, there was the day to get through. As I was finishing my breakfast, I decided to have another go at Davey Merrill, more, to be honest, from making life miserable for him than with any real expectation of learning anything new. I telephoned Jill at her home, told her my intentions and asked her to set up another informal interview with the man.

It was now a week since we had known who had tipped off Luigi Canelli as to his danger, a week in which nothing had been achieved and the whole case looked like meandering to an admission of failure as far as the elder Canelli was concerned, although there was still the satisfaction of knowing that Giorgio would go down for a substantial stretch of time.

Two hours later Jill and I were once more facing Merrill across the table of the interview room. A further week in custody had not improved him; he looked grey and beaten. I launched straight into him.

“Right, Merrill – I’ve decided that you are holding out on us.”

He eyed me uneasily, but said nothing.

“Now, tell me, do you know James Holding?”

He furrowed his brow, then shook his head.

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, you should have. James Holding is the jeweller you robbed. Thanks to you, he is going to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He’s forty-three years old. He could be in that wheelchair for thirty or forty years, and every day of those years he’ll know that you put him there, that you gave him a life sentence, that in a few years from now you’ll be a free man again, a free man walking on two good legs.”

He looked unimpressed; perhaps he thought that by recounting James Holding’s unhappy future I expected him to feel guilty – but that wasn’t my intention at all.

“Now, I’m not really happy about that, not happy at all. I’m an old-fashioned copper – I think villains like you get it far too easy in prison, and you don’t get put away for anything like long enough. Soft judges, over-crowded prisons – the system doesn’t want to put you away for very 86

long. But I do, Merrill, believe me I do. Now, we both know that a word to your judge that you’ve been helpful is likely to get you an even lighter sentence than normal – and that word might be spoken – but only if you really make it worth our while.”

“But I’ve given you what I know – I’ve given you dirt on Lou – not my fault if you silly buggers couldn’t get him.”

“I’ve had over a week to think about it – and it isn’t enough. Now, just to let you know what I am thinking. With a word to the judge and you’ll probably get a seven stretch – out in under four if you behave. Without that word – ten years, out in five. To my mind, that’s not enough. I keep thinking of James Holding in that wheelchair for the rest of his life. Do you imagine that he will think that you have been punished enough for what you did, punished enough compared to the punishment that he is suffering? I don’t think so – so here is what is going to happen. No word to the judge. A ten stretch – but it gets worse. You know, it’s amazing how rumours get round prisons. Somehow, once you’ve been inside for a few months, there’s going to be a rumour about you, Davey. A rumour that you’re a paedophile. Now, it’s always fascinated me how so many prisoners, no matter what they themselves have done, really, really loath paedos. It’s not unknown for paedos to get beaten up on a regular basis – one or two have even ended up dead in prison. That’s what is going to happen, Davey, unless you can really convince me that you can help me, and my colleagues in the Met, to track down Canelli and put him away. If you can do that, the judge gets the word, the rumour doesn’t get started. It’s up to you.”

I sat back in my chair and stared at him.

He looked at me with hatred.

“You bastard, you’d really do it, wouldn’t you?”

I smiled back at him.

“Absolutely, Davey, absolutely – and believe me, I’d enjoy doing it. So – like I said - it’s up to you.

You know Canelli better than we do, so you’re more likely to know where he may have gone – so where is he?”

“I don’t know – Lou don’t tell anybody everything anyway – you think he’d say ‘Oh and if I need to do a runner this is where I’ll go’ to any of us?”

“OK, Davey, let’s start with something simple. His stuff being kept in a storage place in outside Guildford. Why there, for pity’s sake? It’s miles away from Stanmore - how could he be sure all was well with it?”

“’Cos it belongs to a cousin and he trusted Harry Schwarz as well.”

That took me aback. The owner of the facility was registered as one James Hoggard. I’d met him when the warrant to enter Schwarz’s lock-up unit had been served. A blunt Yorkshireman in his mid to late thirties, there had been no trace of any link with Canelli other than an indirect provider/customer relationship via Harry Schwarz who was the primary renter of the storage unit.

I’d had him checked out, of course; he had no criminal record, nothing at all.

“James Hoggard? A cousin?”

“Well, a sort of cousin. Niamh, Joe’s wife – she’s Irish, right?”

I nodded.

“Well her older sister, Mary, she’s twelve years older than Niamh and she married a guy from Yorkshire, Harry Hoggard – Jim Hoggard is their son. It was Lou and Joe as helped him setup his business with a bit of capital.”

So that was one mystery explained. From the outset, I could understand the Canellis storing their loot with Harry Schwarz, but to have it in a lock-up outside the town seemed illogical. Schwarz didn’t have direct view of it, but the news that ownership of the facility was in the extended Canelli 87

family explained a lot. It also made me wonder if Hoggard might know anything about Luigi’s likely whereabouts. Clearly he would have to be spoken to, and I supposed that I would have to update Anna Weatherby on our latest discovery.

I turned to Jill.

“Inspector, would you please arrange for a search warrant for Mr. Hoggard’s premises as soon as we are finished here.”

I turned back to Merrill.

“Sorry, Davey, you still aren’t making it worth my while to have that quiet word with the judge.”

He passed his tongue over his lips, exuding nervousness from every pore.

“Look, Chief Inspector, I’m telling you all I know – it’s not my fault your mates in the Met messed things up, now is it?”

He was, of course, perfectly correct in that, but so what? I simply stared at him and waited. The silence stretched out until he could bear it no longer.

“There is one thing might help.”

I continued to stare at him, continued to wait in silence. He shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Look, Lou has a bit on the side – lives in Bushey, she does. I only know ‘cos I drove him that way once – his Jag was in for something unexpected and he got me to drive him over and leave him there.”

“So – does she have a name?”

He shrugged helplessly.

“’Course she does, but I don’t know it. I know where she lives, though – it’s a fancy sort of estate, half a dozen big houses round a big grass area, wall all the way round. I dropped him at one of the houses – had the name on the door, something like ‘Everleigh’. Didn’t see the bint when I dropped Lou – he just got out the car and told me to drive off, but I had to do a sort of circuit round the grass area so as I got back to the road, I could see her in me mirror as she opened the door to him. Too far away to get a really good look, but she looked a bit of all right, even at a distance.”

This was certainly something to pass on to the Met, but if this woman was hiding Luigi or knew anything about his whereabouts, I also wanted to know.

We had wrung as much out of Merrill as we were going to get, so we left him to stew in his own juice at that point; Jill got on with organising a search warrant for Hoggard’s storage facility and I phoned Anna Weatherby.

“Anna, it’s Ken Morgan – got some news for you.”

“Ken, glad to hear it – we are all going round the bend here over Luigi Canelli getting away – what have you got for me?”

“A possible lead – we’ve been putting the screws on Merrill in a general sort of way and he’s come up with the news that Luigi has, he reckons, a girlfriend living in Bushey.”

Quickly I summarised what Merrill had told us and I could sense the growing excitement at the other end of the line.

“Thanks for that, Ken – we’ll get right on it.”

As I finished the call I realised that I hadn’t updated her about the Hoggard connection. Freudian slip?

The next step was the search of James Hoggard’s storage facility – and it was, to say the least, interesting. It was a big place, easily two acres overall, with a high security wall all the way round, a wall topped with coils of vicious razor wire. The one gate was a substantial steel structure controlled from a small kiosk for a security guard come general factotum. As you entered, there was a row of lock-up garage type structures to the left, a single storey building to the right. There were 88

thirty-six ‘lock-ups’ and the building proved to contain a hundred and forty-four deposit boxes, each two feet square by three feet in length.

To ensure that nothing that might be evidence disappeared before our arrival I had given Hoggard no prior warning, but had him picked up by DCs Phil Greene and Harry Chambers of Jill’s team in an unmarked car and brought straight to the storage facility.

He was not a happy camper, and when I showed him the search warrant and explained that he was required to give us access to every single box and lock-up he was incandescent.

“You can’t do this – this is private property and you have no grounds for such a search – I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Before you do so, Mr. Hoggard, you will give my officers the access authorised in that warrant. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you for obstructing the police in carrying out their duties.”

Faced with my determination to do exactly as I said he climbed down to a degree and the next forty-eight hours were spent by all three of my teams going through the place with fine toothcombs. I returned to my office, leaving Chris Lane, as the senior DI, in overall charge, whilst I caught up with outstanding paperwork.

The next morning I contacted Anna Weatherby to update her on the link between Hoggard and the Canelli brothers, carefully avoiding mentioning that I could have told her during our conversation the previous day. She had news of her own.

“Ken, we tracked down Luigi’s girlfriend. Her name is Yvonne Hopkirk and your man Merrill was right about the house name – Everleigh. Quite a nice place, detached, four bedrooms, expensive fittings – and owned by Ms. Hopkirk outright. No mortgage or anything like that. Anyway, Canelli did go there the night he disappeared. She has no visible means of income, despite the nice house and admitted quite happily that Canelli actually paid for the house and all the bills. Talking to the woman, it soon became clear that as well as being his girlfriend, she also provided him with a sort of safe house where he kept things that he didn’t want anyone else to know about. Amongst those things were the elements of a false identity – passport, driving licence, the lot, all in the name of Paulo Orsini. He spent the night with Hopkirk and left first thing the next morning, telling her that he was leaving the country and would call for her in a month or two when he had things settled. She professed not to know where he was going and anyway, we’ve checked with the border control people and there is no sign of anyone calling themselves Paulo Orsini leaving the UK since Canelli disappeared.”

I thought for a moment; somehow, this all seemed too pat.

“Anna, if Canelli didn’t want people to know what he kept at that house, how come this woman knows so much?”

“She says that her curiosity got the better of her. According to her, Canelli kept one room always locked under normal circumstances, but one day he failed to lock it properly and she couldn’t resist having a look inside.”

“Really? He’s so careful yet just happens to leave the door unlocked and she just happens to take a peek? That sounds like misinformation to me.”

Anna sighed on the other end of the line.

“It does to me too, but it just means that we haven’t a clue what name he is really using.”

I thought back to what Olly Collinge had told me about the Canelli family.

“Anna, the informant I had dig up the gen on the Canelli family said that the brothers were very attached to their mother – she died of cancer in 2009 and they gave her a funeral fit for a queen. Her maiden name was Bonetti – Maria Bonetti. The apple of her eye, before he was murdered as a 89

young man, was their younger brother Paulo. It’s a long shot, but he might just have used the name Bonetti – and either Paulo after his brother, or Mario – male version of Maria.”

She sounded, dubious, and I could scarcely blame her – it really was a very long shot, but she agreed that it was better than nothing at all. She had, of course, already had Giorgio questioned at length about where his brother might have gone and what name he might be using, but had been met with stony-faced silence.

It was a long shot, but it worked out; later that day Anna was back on the line.

“Ken, your idea worked. The day Canelli left Hopkirk, a Mario Bonetti flew business class from Gatwick to Naples, so I’m organising a European arrest warrant for him under that name with the Italian police. I’m just hoping that he hasn’t used yet another name once in Italy – this bugger is a slippery as a basket of eels.”

“Here’s hoping – with any luck he won’t imagine anything like my fluke happening to trip him up.”

I left Anna Weatherby to chase down Canelli in Italy – I had done all could to help on that front. In the meantime, I had things of my own to progress. Chris Lane had reported on the results of searching Hoggard’s storage facility – and those results were very interesting.

“Quite a tale to tell, boss,” whilst the women had fallen into calling me ‘sir’, Chris hadn’t, but I hadn’t made an issue of it – ‘boss’ was fine by me provided the attitude was OK and after the showdown over the Internal Affairs episode I had no more complaints on that score. “As you saw, Hoggard has thirty-six of those big units, each of them able to swallow the contents of an entire house, and basically that’s what they are for. Hoggard stated the business in 2002, so it’s twelve years old and we’ve been through all twelve years’ records. Apart from the unit that Schwarz had –

which he had right from the day the business started up – all the rest are kosher. As of today five of them are empty; all the others contain household furniture. With two exceptions, none of them have been rented for more than a couple of months or so. Folk move house, and sometimes they have to store their stuff for a short period in the process. Hoggard offers very competitive rates for this area, so has quite a thriving concern. On average, and going back over time, a unit will have furniture in it for no more than three to four weeks; sometimes it’s only a matter of days. I did wonder about two units which have been in use for well over a year each and checked them out, but they are OK.

One is being used by a doctor who landed a three year contract in California and has taken his family over there with him and sold his house here, expecting to buy when he returns. The other –

similar case, except this chap is a banker with a Japanese owned bank, posted to the bank’s headquarters in Tokyo for two years. He’s renting his house out, but took out all his best furniture rather than risk having it knocked about by a careless tenant.

“The deposit boxes – one hundred and forty-four of them, about two-thirds currently in use. Mostly OK – copies of house deeds, wills, stocks and shares, that sort of thing. Again, Hoggard’s rates are very competitive, that’s where it gets interesting. The income he gets from hiring his facilities out isn’t bringing in enough money to explain his lifestyle – he ought to be really struggling to make ends meet, but he’s got a big four bedroomed house, drives a top of the range BMW 7 series, his wife – he’s marries with two young daughters - has a brand new Range Rover. So where is he getting his money?

“My reading – he’s on the take from local villains. We found eight of those deposit boxes had drugs in them – serious amounts of cocaine and heroin. Another five had what I’m sure are stolen goods –

jewellery, gold ornaments, those sort of things. You remember we learned that when the Canelli’s opened up Schwarz’s unit they found stuff belonging to a number of villains and gave it back to them to avoid trouble?”

I nodded in agreement.

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“Well, it looks as though quite a few of those folk just shifted the goods into deposit boxes whilst they worked out what to do with them with no Harry Schwarz to act as a fence for them. But there’s more. In one of the boxes we found guns – twelve handguns, half a dozen sawn-off shotguns and plenty of ammunition for both types. Now, I’m sure that Hoggard will claim that he had no idea what people were putting in his storage units, but I don’t think that a jury would believe him, would you?”

I shook my head; this was serendipity. I had started to be concerned at the amount of resources that I had committed to the case when, strictly speaking, it was more the concern of the Met than of ourselves, but all this now made it worthwhile – very worthwhile.

“Where is Hoggard now?”

Chris smiled.

“I’ve arrested him on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, assisting in the sale of Class A drugs, and conspiracy in the holding of illegal firearms. He’s downstairs.”

“Has he got a lawyer?”

“One’s on his way – he declined the offer of a duty solicitor.”

“Let me know when the brief arrives – you and I will do the first interview.”

Half an hour later Chris and I were seated across the table from James Hoggard and his solicitor, who turned out to be not a ‘him’ but a ‘her’. Natalie Cousins, as she introduced herself, was a tall young woman, perhaps just into her early thirties, dressed in a smart black trouser suite, the jacket of which was open to reveal an expensive looking cream coloured silk blouse, with a scarlet scarf around her neck. The colour scheme of her clothing complemented and drew attention to a pale complexion, an oval face framed with jet black hair which partially concealed her ears, ears adorned by small diamond stud earrings. Like her hair, her eyes were very dark - it was difficult to distinguish the irises from the pupils . Altogether, a young woman whom once seen, was unlikely to be soon forgotten. Her business card identified her as a partner in the firm of Henderson and Collyer, a well know local firm of solicitors with a wide ranging practice and a good reputation. I had subconsciously expected one of several solicitors around who specialised in defending the local low life. The arrival of Ms. Cousins was therefore something of a surprise.

The interview was, of course, to be taped; I started the dual machine and we all introduced ourselves to the machine.

Before I could get any further, Ms. Cousins launched her opening gambit.

“Chief Inspector, I am surprised, to say the least, that my client has been arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts. You must be aware that the warrant you utilised was a fishing trip of the most questionable provenance and that the fact that suspect goods were found on Mr. Hoggard’s premises in no way excuses that breach of correct procedure. Additionally, as you must also be well aware, Mr.

Hoggard rents out storage facilities. He had no knowledge of what others might have placed in those storage units. I therefore expect these charges to be dropped and my client released.”

I looked back at her and for a moment held my peace. Letting her, and her client wait upon my response.

“Ms. Cousins. The judge who signed that warrant would, I am sure, take exception to your describing her as approving a fishing expedition. We were acting upon information received and what my officers found in your client’s place of business fully justified our actions. No, from what you have just said, you client will presumably enter a plea of ‘not guilty’, claiming that he had no knowledge of the illegal usage others were making of his property?”

“That will, indeed, be Mr. Hoggard’s defence in the unlikely event of the Crown Prosecution Service deciding that you have a strong enough case against him for it even to come to court.”

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“Well, this is, of course, only the first of what I am sure will be a number of interviews of your client. However, even at this stage, you may rest assured that we already have evidence that physically links Mr. Hoggard with some of those illegally held items on his property.”

The dark eyes bored into mine.

“What sort of evidence, Chief Inspector?”

“Evidence that satisfies me and which will, I am quite certain eventually convince a jury, that Mr.

Hoggard was fully aware of the usage to which some of his facilities were being put.”

“I say again, Chief Inspector – what evidence?”

I smiled again, but this time my smile was directed at James Hoggard. Our first assumption had been that, whilst we were quite sure that he had been fully aware of the use to which his place was being put, he himself was just a convenient custodian for local villains wishing to keep their assets somewhere not immediately connected with themselves. As we dug further, however, it became clear that Hoggard was more involved than that. Pay dirt had come from the stored weapons. If you handle a gun very much, it is extremely difficult to ensure that you don’t leave behind evidence of that fact. Hoggard’s fingerprints had been found on several of the weapons, found in areas that had obviously proved inaccessible to his attempts to clean them off. I was satisfied that he had been acting as an armourer for local villains. It was to prove a catastrophic blunder for him. It was also to enable us to identify those who had perpetrated a number of armed robberies over the past several years. That, however, was for the future. For the present, my insistence that Hoggard’s fingerprints on those weapons was all I needed was sufficient to bring the interview to a close. We left Hoggard and his lawyer together after we had finished and I have no doubt that the impressive Ms. Cousins made very clear to her client the deep trouble in which he found himself.

The spin-off from Hoggard’s arrest I left to Chris to pursue in the first instance; as time went on it eventually demanded commitment from all three of my teams, but for the time being I could mentally put it to one side whilst I turned my thoughts, though nit not my outwardly visible efforts, to where Luigi Canelli had gone and what, if anything , I could do about it. Now in Italy I could only hope that Anna Weatherby’s European arrest warrant would bear fruit – but if he had switched to yet another alias, it might well bear no fruit at all.

At the back of my mind something stirred, something from what Olly Collinge had told me about the family’s history. Luigi’s grandfather had brought his family, including Dino, Luigi’s father as a teenager, to England after he had narrowly escaped being assassinated by an underworld rival. They had fled from the city of Reggio Calabria, at the time (and to a lesser extent, still) a town with links across the Straits of Messina to Sicily and its Mafia. The town had its own airport, but there were no flights direct to it from Britain; the nearest airport offering direct flights to and from Britain was Naples, which was where Luigi had flown. Was it, I wondered, possible that he had repaired the bridges so spectacularly destroyed in his grandfather’s time and that Reggio Calabria might now represent a sanctuary for him?

Lost to any constructive thought, I returned my attention to my paperwork for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until I got home that, after a scratch meal and a couple of glasses of wine in front of the TV, that I let my mind range far and wide over all that had happened since Pam’s kidnapping. I was almost nodding off, still in front of the TV, when something occurred to me. Pam’s description of the man who had held her in the house, the man in the ski mask and wearing gloves, a man with dark blue eyes and of average height.

James Hoggard had dark blue eyes and was of average height. He had red hair to go with those eyes

– an unusual combination. He also had an oddity to his left hand. The little finger was missing the top joint, presumably the result of an accident at some time. Something like that would have been a 92

good means of identification –and a good reason for wearing gloves in the presence of somebody you did not wish to be able to identify you.

Had Hoggard been the man in the ski mask? He had links to the Canellis and to Harry Schwarz; he was reasonably local – his home south of Woking in Sutton Green was only two or three miles north of where Pam and I had lived in Jacobswell, and the Slyfield industrial estate was even nearer to us – no more than a mile at the most from our house to Hoggard’s storage facility.

But if it was Hoggard – where had he kept Pam? He had a wife and two young daughters, so it wouldn’t have been the family home.

Over the next few days I did some careful digging into everything about James Hoggard. I had to be careful on two counts. Professionally, I didn’t want Chris Lane to thing that I was second guessing him as he built up our case against the man. On a personal level I didn’t want any of my colleagues wondering why I was taking such an interest – I was probably being paranoid, but I didn’t want to take any chance of reopening people’s thinking about Harry Schwarz.

I discovered that, in addition to the family home, Hoggard owned several properties in and around Guildford which were rented out. I took a tour of them, examining them from outside and one in particular caught my attention. It was in Burpham, off the bucolically named Partridge Way, just a couple of miles, if that, from our own house. Its location in a cul-de-sac meant that it wasn’t directly overlooked and it had an integral garage. It was the only one of Hoggard’s properties which met the necessary criteria to be the house in which Pam had been held. If it was the house, and I was increasingly convincing myself that it was and that Hoggard was the man, then clearly Merrill and Logan had driven round in circles for a while to deceive Pam into thinking that she had been transported further than was actually the case.

Things were beginning to gel; it made sense that once the Canelli brothers had determined to get their hands on what Schwarz was holding for them that they would use Hoggard in such a way. It made sense that Hoggard would have taken such steps to conceal his identity. It even made sense that Merrill and Logan didn’t need to bother to conceal theirs.

However, things slotting into place didn’t help me in my quest for vengeance against those responsible for Pam’s death. Admittedly, Hoggard and Giorgio Canelli were both facing lengthy terms of imprisonment, so that was something, but Merrill was likely to get away with a relatively light sentence, Logan had escaped prison all together, and Luigi Canelli was still at large. My depressed mood wasn’t helped by another call from Anna Weatherby.

“Ken, it’s Anna – bad news, I’m afraid. Mario Bonetti flew into Naples, but at that point he vanished. The Italian police can find no tract of him – he didn’t book into an hotel, didn’t hire a car, didn’t buy an onward airline ticket. Looks as though he has either assumed yet another identity, or someone picked him up in Naples and is sheltering him now. I don’t suppose you have any more good ideas as another alias that he might be using?”

“I’m afraid not, Anna. The only thing that I can bring to mind that have the slightest bearing is that his family had links with Reggio Calabria – but they weren’t good links.”

“I remember you saying the family came over to Britain to escape their enemies in Italy – I’d forgotten the name of the town.”

“Well – it was all a long time ago – 1946 – and I just wondered if in the interim the brothers have made their peace with whoever their grandfather and his brother had upset.”

“Thanks for the thought, Ken – I’ll see if I can find out anything from the locals.”

Three days – it was Friday, the 25th of January, she was on the phone again 93

“Ken, your idea about Reggio Calabria came off. I spoke with the local police chief a Commissario

– I think that’s about the same as a superintendent or even chief super over here – Crocetti and he has struck pay dirt. Apparently the top local villain there is a guy called Emmanuel Busconi and he has links to the Canelli brothers. One of Crocetti’s informers told him that Busconi is entertaining a guest from abroad, probably from Britain. Name unknown and at the moment Crocetti is working on finding enough evidence to raid Busconi’s place and grab Luigi – assuming it is him, of course, although it seems pretty certain. Crocetti is hopeful of making an arrest by the end of the week.”

“Anna, that’s great – I wonder how it is that Canelli linked in over there?”

“It’s a long story, but an interesting one – got five minutes?”

“Surely.”

“Right, this is what Crocetti told me. When Luigi Canelli senior fled Reggio Calabria in 1946, taking his family with him, the Martelli family were the dominant crime family in the town. The patriarch was Guido Martelli, born in 1894,who had two sons, Vittorio, born in 1920, and Luca, born in 1926. The old man died in 1960, leaving his sons in charge of his organisation. The two men hated each other, and in 1962, some eighteen months after the old man’s death, Vittorio mysteriously disappeared. No corpse was ever found, but everybody was certain that Luca was behind the disappearance.

Luca successfully followed in his father’s footsteps, but had no children of his own. He took under his wing a nephew, Salvatore Mancini, born in 1970. By 2010 Mancini was the effective head of the family; Luca, now eighty-four years old, was content to let his nephew run matters.

In 2010, however, Mancini was murdered. His car was run off the road by a gravel lorry. A lorry was seen in the vicinity both before and after the crime. It contained two men, but they were never found and nobody was ever arrested for Mancini’s murder. Two months later Luca Martelli was also dead, perhaps of natural causes, perhaps not.

The removal, in short order, of Mancini and Martelli saw the rapid emergence of a new force in the underworld of Reggio Cantabria – the Busconi family, headed by Emmanuel Busconi – and this is where it all gets interesting for us. In 1946 it was the Martelli family whom the senior Canelli brothers had upset and who assassinated Giorgio and almost got Luigi as well. Luigi fled to England and Reggio Calabria heard of him no more. However, still in the town was a cousin of theirs, one Julio Busconi. At the time he was very small fry and his relationship to the Canellis wasn’t active enough for him to come to the attention of the Martelli family. Time passed and by 1960, when Guido Martelli died, Julio Busconi, by now fifty years old, had built up a reasonably sized organisation of his own. He and the Martellis co-existed for many years, but things were to change. As Salvatore Mancini took more and more responsibility for the Martelli family affairs, he began to squeeze out the Busconi family. This began around 2005 and slowly increased in intensity; by 2010 the Busconi family, now headed by Julio Busconi’s grandson, Emmanuel, decided that they had two choices; either up sticks and leave for pastures new, or strike back. They chose the latter course – and this is how ‘our’ Canellis become involved. They had, for a long time, even dating back to Dino Canelli’s days, kept in contact with the Busconis and the two families had cooperated from time to time in enterprises outside Italy, usually in France and Spain. When Emmanuel Busconi decided that the time had come to strike back at the Martelli family by killing Salvatore Mancini, he turned to the Canelli brothers for help. He wanted the murder to be committed by outsiders to ensure that no police investigation could touch him. The Canelli brothers

– it was actually Luigi we believe who masterminded things – sent two trusted men over. Those men hired a lorry and it was goodbye Salvatore Mancini. The killers were actually out of Italy that very same day.

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Now that is why Luigi Canelli was able to seek sanctuary in Reggio Calabria, illogical as it seemed when we only knew about his grandfather having to flee for his life from the place.”

It explained a lot; now all we could do was to wait on this Commissario Crocetti.

Chapter Fourteen – February 2013

It took over a week for the wheels in Italy to grind towards a satisfactory conclusion, but at last, on Saturday, the 2nd of February, my mobile rang as I was contemplating what to do with the evening of my day off. It was Anna Weatherby.

“Ken, just to keep you up to date. Crocetti has come up trumps. He got his warrant and lifted Mario Bonetti, assumed to be Luigi Canelli, from the Busconi household today at nine in the morning their time.”

I looked at my watch; it was now half past four in the afternoon – half past five in Italy.

“That’s great! What happens now?”

“Bonetti’s fingerprints have been checked and they match – it’s Canelli alright. It’s too late to do any more today, but Crocetti’s people will drive Canelli to Naples airport for us. DS Kelly and I are flying out to pick him up and bring him back. Unfortunately, the bean counters want it done as cheaply as possible, so George and I fly from Gatwick early tomorrow morning, but can’t bring him back until Monday, so the Italian police will hold him overnight in Naples – the flight back to Gatwick is too early for them to enjoy their breakfasts before leaving Reggio Calabria! Still, gives me a chance to have a look at Naples – I’ve never been there, have you?”

“No, never – have a good look at the sights. How are you being met at Gatwick on Monday?”

“As it’s Surry and out of our area, I’ve cleared with your ACC that we’ll have an unmarked Met car at Gatwick to meet us and drive us back to the smoke.”

“Congratulations, Anna – really well done!”

“Thanks, Ken – see you some time.”

So, at last the second Canelli had been bagged and the case seemed to be all over bar the shouting.

It just shows how wrong you can be.

Monday seemed a normal day – and indeed it was, until well into the afternoon. I was in my office, battling, as ever, with the seemingly never-ending paperwork, when my phone went.

“Morgan”

“Ken, it’s Clifford. Would you pop in, please.”

“On my way, sir.”

It was only a few paces from my office to his so scarcely a minute later I entered, to find him accompanied by the ACC Pope.

“Ken, sit down – we’ve had very bad news.”

I seated myself, looking from one man to the other; both looked very grave. It was Henry Clifford who spoke.

“It’s about Canelli – Luigi Canelli. You know that the Met had arranged to pick him up from Gatwick after the Naples flight landed?”

I nodded, with a feeling of sick apprehension gathering within me.

“They sent an unmarked car. Canelli was brought through the VIP route, escorted by DCI Weatherby and DS Kelly. Their driver met them and they drove off the normal way to get from Gatwick to London, onto the A217. A couple of miles on the A217 they passed a warehouse forecourt where what seemed to be a police traffic vehicle was waiting. It pulled out after they had passed, followed them for a few hundred yards with its blue lights flashing, but not its siren 95

sounding. The Met driver pulled over to find out what was up, and as he did so the car was rammed from behind by a Transit van and two bogus policemen from the false traffic car and two men from the Transit, attacked DCI Weatherby, DS Kelly and DC John Morgan, their driver, and released Canelli. The officers put up a fight and shots were fired. DS Kelly was wounded, but I’m afraid DCI Weatherby and DC Morgan were killed.”

I was stunned, and sat there, my shock clearly obvious to my superiors. ACC Pope took up the tale.

“We know all this from DS Kelly – his wound isn’t serious and whilst he is currently in the East Surrey Hospital, he’ll make a full recovery. As the crime took place over by Gatwick, East Division will be running the case, but in view of your involvement with some aspects of the Canelli cases, I want you to go across there and give all the background you can to DSi Broughton, whom I have asked to take personal charge of the investigation.”

“I’ll go straightaway, if that’s OK, sir.”

They nodded in unison.

“Yes, please, Ken,” said Clifford, “and please keep me informed.”

“Of course, sir.”

I drove across to Reigate to the Eastern Division HQ in a daze. This was the second time I had experienced a colleague – for so I regarded Anna, even though we were on different forces, due to our cooperation in these cases – suffer a violent death. First Ray Green in that car smash, now Anna Weatherby murdered, and also my namesake, DC Morgan, whom I had never met and now never would.

I made my way to the office of DSi Broughton; I knew him quite well, as he had been a DI in Western Division when I had been a very new DC and I had even worked on his team for a brief period.

He welcomed me and waved me into a chair; already in the room were two officers whom I did not know. Broughton introduced them.

“Ken, thanks for getting here so quickly. I don’t think that you know my colleagues?” At my shake of the head he waved his arm at them.

“This is DCI Tom Morton and this is DI Julie Laidlaw.”

Tom Morton was about my age, a big, heavily built man with massive shoulders and the biggest hands I think that I have ever seen on anybody. Perhaps six feet three or four tall, his massive built made him seem almost squat and short. Craggy features that might have been hacked from stone by a careless sculptor were dominated by a beak of a nose which had clearly been broken at least once sometime in the past, a nose accompanied by deep-set brown eyes beneath jutting eyebrows, and his brown suit seemed scarcely able to contain the mass of muscle that clearly laid beneath it. He nodded an acknowledgement to me, but offered no spoken greeting. By contrast, Julie Laidlaw was no more than five feet four or so and slimly built. Fair, shoulder length hair framed an attractive oval face, with blue eyes, a snub nose and full lips giving a classic ‘girl next door’ look to her, a look accentuated by the fact that she was casually dressed in pale blue jeans and a white sweater.

She smiled at me and raised a hand in greeting, but like Morton was silent. Broughton continued speaking.

“Ken, I’ve tried to have a preliminary chat with DS Kelly – I understand that you know him?” I nodded and he carried on. “But the time he was a bit woozy from the anaesthetic and wasn’t making much sense, so I am going to see him again,” he looked at his watch, “in about an hour or so. In the meantime please tell us everything you can about the case he and DCI Weatherby were working on.”

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I spent the next thirty to forty minutes giving the three of them as accurate and succinct a review of everything I knew about the inter-relationship of Schwarz, Hoggard and the Canelli brothers. When I finished and had answered a few supplementary questions, Broughton looked at his watch and then at me.

“Ken, I think it is time for me to return to the hospital. I’d be grateful if you’d come with me – DS

Kelly already knows you so it might be helpful. OK with you?”

“Yes, of course, sir.”

We left Morton and Laidlaw to the tasks allotted to them whilst I drove Broughton to the East Surrey Hospital.

George Kelly was in a side room, with a uniformed, armed constable outside his door. Broughton was obviously taking no chances over the Met policeman’s safety and I couldn’t blame him for his caution.

When I had first met George Kelly I thought that he looked as though a puff of wind could blow him away; lying in a hospital bed with an intravenous drip disappearing under the blanket, he looked far, far worse and I was surprised that his prognosis was so good. Still, that was the medical opinion and I was glad to hear it.

Broughton had asked me to do the introductions.

“George, this is Detective Superintendent Broughton who is leading the investigation into what happened to you and DCI Weatherby.”

Kelly turned his gaze from me to the Superintendent.

“What do you want to know, sir?”

“Every you can tell me, sergeant. Start with how the trip to pick up Canelli was organised, who knew about it.”

“DCI Weatherby spoke with DSi Gregg –he’s the head of divisional CID. I don’t know the actual details of who booked our tickets and things like that, but I’m sure the Super will be able to tell you.

We flew to Naples from Gatwick on Saturday – we flew the cheapest way possible which meant a six-fifteen take-off. We stayed at the Gatwick airport hotel over Friday night at booked in at the airport at just after five-thirty. We got to Naples just after midday their time and booked into the airport hotel there as well. Because there was no cheap return flight that day we had to stay over and collect Canelli Sunday morning. The police from Reggio Calabria brought him up on Saturday, but apart from the DCI confirming to them that we had arrived OK we didn’t do anything about him until the Sunday morning. He had been bought to Naples by a couple of officers from Reggio Calabria, both sergeants, Piacentini and Panteni. Neither of them had more than a few words of English, but the DCI spoke good Italian, so that was no problem.

“One of the Naples officers drove us to the airport – I never did get his name – and ushered us through the VIP route, so we boarded the flight at the last moment. Nothing happened during the flight, and when we landed at Gatwick – again we were ushered through the VIP route, we were met but our driver. Before we left on Saturday, the DCI had arranged for one of our team, DC John Morgan, to meet us and drive us back to the station, and he met us with an unmarked car as we didn’t want to use a marked Met car out of our area. He drove us away from the airport with the DCI sitting beside him and me behind her with Canelli behind the driver. He took the normal route away from the airport towards London onto the A217, but after a mile or so there was what looked like a disused warehouse on the other side of the road with a large forecourt which was empty apart from a Transit van and a marked police car. We were only doing thirty or so – it’s a forty limit there and there was a bit of traffic, but as we got level with the warehouse, the police car pulled out 97

behind us with his blue lights flashing. For a moment we thought he was on a call and would come past us, but he tucked in behind, still with his lights on.

“Better pull over and we’ll see what’s up, John,” the DCI told Morgan and he pulled into the side.

The police car pulled past us and stopped a few yards down the road and two uniformed officers started to get out. As they did so, there was a terrific impact from behind. Whilst we had been concentrating on the police car, we hadn’t noticed that the Transit was now following us, and it had rammed us. We were all shaken by the impact, and the bogus policemen and the two from the van had surrounded our car before we really knew what was happening. They pulled the doors open and one of them spoke to Canelli.

‘Who’s got the keys to the cuffs, boss?’ He said that I had and the man turned his head towards me and said ‘Get the keys out then.’, and he pulled a pistol from under his jacket and pointed it at my face.

The DCI was recovering from the shaking and, seeing the gun, she told me to get the keys out and unlock Canelli’s handcuffs. I did as she said and Canelli got out of the car. He started to walk away, then turned to the man with the gun.

“Give me that,” he said and the weapon was handed to him. He turned back towards us and before any us could react he started shooting. The guy who had given it to him was obviously horrified and tried to stop him, but by then it was too late – we had all been hit. Then he got into the police car with the others and they all drove off. One of his bullets hit me” he indicated the dressing on his shoulder, “and others hit John and the DCI – the DCI was hit twice -I actually heard the second bullet hit her and she sort of jerked and slumped forward against her seatbelt – I had heard her moaning before that, but after the second bullet hit her she didn’t make another sound. The police car took off up the A217 so going north. I managed to get my radio out and call for back-up and an ambulance. I tried to get out of the car, but must have passed out, because the next thing I remember was being in an ambulance on the way here. I asked about John and the DCI but the paramedic with me didn’t know – they were in another ambulance.”

He stopped talking and looked at us.

“That’s all I can tell you, sir. They tell me that John and the DCI were dead before the ambulance reached us. Is that right?”

Broughton answered him.

“Yes, I’m afraid so, sergeant. Because of that they weren’t removed straightaway – we had the scene of crime people go over everything that they could before moving them.”

Kelly looked at him.

“You will get Canelli, won’t you, sir? I’ve known Anna Weatherby since she was a DC and she was a bloody good copper and a bloody good boss, and John was just a lad, with a wife and two nippers.”

Broughton nodded his head.

“Oh, yes, we’ll get the bastard, one way or another, we’ll get him.”

Broughton turned to me.

“Right, Ken, let’s get back.” He turned back to Kelly.

“Sergeant, I’ll make sure that you are looked after here, and you make sure that you do as the medics tell you and get back on your feet as soon as possible. Thanks for the account – we’ll have our day in court with this bastard and you’ll be there to see him go down.”

Kelly smiled weakly at us and slumped back against his pillows.

I drove Broughton back to the station, took my leave of him and drove slowly back to Guildford, mulling over the events of the day and what I had learned.

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I reported back to DSi Clifford and ACC Pope and it was the latter who shook his head slowly in bewilderment.

“How did they get themselves organised so quickly – they only had a day.”

“No, sir,” I replied, “they had ten days or so.”

He looked puzzled, as did Clifford.

“The Busconi family must have a contact in the Reggio Calabria police – but that’s hardly surprising. It took a week to get a warrant to raid the Busconi house and arrest Canelli, plenty of time to let the Canelli people over here know what was going on. Then it was obvious that some UK officers would go over and pick him up. All the Canelli people had to do was to arrange a couple of police uniforms from a theatrical outfitters or the like and tart up a car to look like a Surrey traffic car – then wait until their Italian contacts told them that Canelli was on his way.

“Once leaving Gatwick, if you are headed for London the only logical way is up the A217, at least to start with, so where to place their ambush was a no-brainer.”

As the investigation continued it became clear that the Met had grossly underestimated the Canelli organisation. With Giorgio and Luigi both off the scene, the assumption had been that the Canelli family was leaderless and could be ignored until it was time to round up a few more of them as, it was assumed, more information would come to light from the results of the arrests of the brothers.

Instead somebody in that organisation had taken command just about immediately and had done so very effectively.

That aspect was down to the Met to follow up on; we, or more precisely DSi Broughton and his team, had the murders of Anna Weatherby and Tom Morgan to cope with. The scene of crime work had produced little; five spent cartridge cases from a 9mm pistol, the rounds which had been fired at the three officers, one of which had hit George Kelly, two of which had hit Anna Weatherby, one of which had hit Tom Morgan, with a fifth unaccounted for, but which had presumably missed entirely with the bullet landing anything up to half a mile away, depending on whether or not something was in its path. No fingerprints, no DNA traces. The post mortems, as expected, established the causes of the two deaths as gunshot wounds. Tom Morgan had been hit in the head and killed instantly; Anna Weatherby had been hit in the left shoulder by one bullet, a wound which would have been survivable, but the other round had hit her in the heart and she would have died in a matter of seconds, a minute or so at the most.

The pseudo police car was discovered the next day, burnt out in a lay-by off the A217 near Reigate Park. There was enough of it left to confirm that it had been stolen in North London five days earlier and presumably kept out of sight whilst it had its disguise applied, which backed up my theory of the timing involved in the exercise. At Broughton’s request, the Met had instituted a check of all companies leasing out theatrical costume, trying to find evidence of the hiring of two police uniforms. The search was too successful; over a dozen companies were found within easy striking distance of Stanmore. None had leased out just two uniforms, but presumably the Canelli mastermind had taken more as a smokescreen. Several companies had yet to have their goods retuned and these were followed up. All but one proved to be genuine cases of film or theatre companies hiring uniforms for a reasonably extended period. The one exception, needless to say, was the victim of a hirer who had paid cash and provided spurious identification. The harassed shopkeeper could only vaguely remember that a young woman had done the hiring, saying it was for an amateur dramatic society’s production, and that she had hired four uniforms. A photo-fit attempt was made, but the result could have been almost anybody, so vague was the input from the shopkeeper.

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Broughton and the massive DCI Morton travelled to Stanmore and interviewed Luigi’s son, Mario, and the story which came back to us was that despite the young man expressing total ignorance of his father’s criminal activities, never mind his escape from custody and involvement in the murder of two police officers and the wounding of a third, Broughton had no doubt that it was Mario who was the brains behind the ambush and escape.

The big question, of course, was where was Luigi Canelli? Given the manhunt going on for him, the fact that every policeman in the entire UK had been shown his picture and was on the lookout for him, there wasn’t the slightest trace of him. I wondered if he had left the country again, and I am sure many others did.

The investigation, despite the efforts made by Broughton and his team, had run into a brick wall.

The Met were similarly stymied in their attempts to dig further into the Canelli family’s affairs. A few minor fish had been snaffled for things like living off immoral earnings or running crooked gambling clubs but none of them had provided any leads to Luigi or implicated Mario Canelli in any wrong doing.

Slowly over the remainder of February the impetus to the investigation declined. Broughton had his people go over everything two, three, even four times, but nothing came of it.

Chapter Fifteen – March 2013

February became March, and still there was no progress made. The murder of two of our colleagues, originally an act which had fired frenetic activity, had become a depressing fact of life.

Other crimes were afforded greater priority and although the files were not closed – and never would be so long as the cases remained unsolved – they began to edge towards the back burner.

Clearly Luigi Canelli would never again be able to show his face in his old haunts, but what did that count compared to what he had done? The general consensus of opinion inclined more and more to the view that he had once more left the country, once more, for certain, under an alias.

Admittedly, we – or rather the Met – had Giorgio, and we ourselves had Merrill and Hoggard, but the crimes for which they would eventually be sentenced, and the success in having them sentenced, was no compensation for the escape of Luigi.

It was the morning of Monday, the 18th March. I had finished my daily meeting with my three DIs and was finalising some paperwork prior to the meeting of the DCIs with Clifford when my phone rang. It was Clifford himself, asking me to pop in before the meeting started. A minute later I was in a chair in his office, wondering at the reason for the advance tête-a-tête.

“Ken, I’ve just had a call from Peter Broughton over in East. You met DCI Tom Morton over there, yes?”

I nodded.

“Well, he was playing Rugby over the weekend and managed to break his leg. The medics reckon he’s going to be out of action for at least four weeks and DSi Broughton is anxious to keep up the heat on the Canelli case. As what his folk are doing intertwines with what you have been doing, we agreed that it would be a good idea to run a joint investigation, headed up by you, reporting to Peter Broughton and myself. Bit of a dog’s dinner for you, but we both think that you are the best man for the job. What do you say?”

I was pleasantly surprised and accepted at once. I had felt frustrated at not being more involved in what were really parallel cases in many ways and this gave me the chance to try and do something about it.

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By then it was time for the regular meeting with the other DCIs who were advised of what would be happening, and once that meeting was over, Clifford and I thrashed out the details. I would split my time between Guildford and Reigate but the case files for the murders of Anna Weatherby and Tom Morgan, plus those for the Hoggard and Merrill cases would be all moved to a couple of offices that DSi Broughton had made available at Reigate. Liz Goode, now recently promoted to Detective Sergeant, and DC Patrick Horgan, newly promoted to CID and attached to Hazel Rogers’ team to fill the vacancy which Liz’s promotion would cause, would be just about full time on the Canelli case and based at Reigate until it was either successfully concluded or until we gave up and closed the team down. DIs Chris Lane and Julie Laidlaw would remain in their Guildford and Reigate offices respectively, but would attend regular briefings as, hopefully, things developed.

Additionally, the first thing that I did after sorting out the Surrey arrangements, was to talk to DSi Gregg, who been Anna’s boss and tell him what we were doing and suggesting that it might be useful if there was a Met officer appointed to act as liaison with us in case anything new cropped up linking our work with what the Met were doing over Giorgio Canelli and his contacts. He readily agreed and named a DI Heather Ingleby who had not been on Anna’s team and therefore could not be accused of over-involvement.

I held the first full meeting of my task force the following Thursday, the 22nd of March and impressed upon everybody the determination we all felt on bringing to justice Luigi Canelli for the murder of Anna Weatherby and Tom Morgan. I had delayed the meeting until the Thursday to enable Liz and Patrick to organise the accommodation, the telephones and computers, and to organise a cross reference of all the files on the interlinked cases, including the Met’s computer files on what they had on Giorgio Canelli and his associates. In that way I was hoping desperately that some detail which had escaped notice when viewed in isolation, might offer us some sort of lead. I set Liz Goode, assisted by Patrick Horgan, the thankless initial task of identifying every point of commonality in the various files. Whilst they were employed in doing that, I asked the three DIs to independently review everything that they thought might be missed in such an approach but which might still be of importance. I set a timetable of meetings on a regular basis, every Tuesday and Thursday.

The first two meetings produced a mountain of work for everybody as links, no matter how tenuous, were followed up, but none of them led anywhere. They even included another visit to Reggio Calabria, this time by myself and Heather Ingleby, to pick the brains of the locals. We were met by Commissario Crocetti himself who expressed his horror and sympathy over Anna Weatherby’s murder. We spent two days with him, even touring a variety of the Busconi family holdings to give us an idea of their activities. On our final evening Crocetti insisted on treating us to dinner in one of his favourite restaurants, an excellent meal, but one which, when it ended, left us no further forward. I had originally felt uneasy with the man, who was a picture of elegance. Tall and slim, his long, saturnine face featured dark, almost black, eyes in his olive skin. A pencil thin moustache graced his upper lip, the black moustache echoing the colour of his hair, worn short and neatly combed. He wore an immaculate white linen suit, the jacket open to reveal a dark blue shirt with a white tie matching his suit. His feet were clad in pale cream loafers, whilst a slim gold watch with a black face encircled his left wrist, balanced by what looked like an identity bracelet, also gold, adorning his other wrist. He wore a thick gold band on his wedding ring finger, again balanced, this time by a signet ring on the corresponding finger of his right hand. All in all, he looked more like a male model for a high class fashion house than a working copper. However, just a few hours in his company convinced me that the good looks were accompanied by a first class mind and we parted as friends rather than just colleagues, his promise to let us know if the very least thing occurred that might have even the slightest bearing on our work a promise I trusted implicitly.

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Despite all our efforts, by the end of the month I had to admit that we had failed. Nothing leading to Luigi Canelli had been found, although in the process of chasing down links we had succeeded in strengthening the cases against Giorgio Canelli and James Hoggard.

Sadly, I agreed the Clifford and Broughton that the chances of us finding anything worthwhile were now very remote, virtually non-existent, and the task force was wound up, with everyone returning to our normal duties.

Chapter Sixteen – April 2013

Even though the task force had been wound up, every evening when I got home I sifted through papers, chosen more or less at random, hoping against hope that something had been missed and that the something which had been missed would leap out at me. It didn’t and as April arrived in its turn I began to feel that I was becoming obsessed to a degree where even if I did stumble across something I probably wouldn’t recognise it for what it was.

I was in a mood of mild depression on the evening of Friday, the 5th of April, and after a shorter than normal session with the case papers, was about to pour myself a third glass of wine and give up for the evening, when something actually did catch my eye.

James Hoggard owned a number of properties which he rented out – a perfectly legitimate enterprise, as we had discovered after each one, and its occupants, had been painstakingly checked out. Three of the properties were in northern France, bought when property prices there had been much lower than corresponding properties in the UK or more touristy areas of France. All had been the subject of requests to the French police and all had been checked out. They proved to be bona fide holiday cottages regularly let out in the summer and around UK Bank Holiday dates. What caught my eye was that for five of the last six years all three had been let out over the New year period. In each case the rents had started on or around the 29th of December and ended around the 5th or 6th of January. Further checking showed that three families – who had no connection with each other nor with any of our suspects - had been the regular tenants. Last year, however, only two of the cottages had been let out, and despite the approach of Easter the third cottage was again untenanted. Or was it? I felt the stirrings of an idea about that cottage and checked the file again.

For the five years from 2007 until 2011 it had been rented by the same family over the New Year and Easter periods, but not for 2012. Why not? According to the family the family comprised husband and wife and two children, a boy and a girl, now thirteen and fifteen respectively. Perhaps the reason was no more complicated than teenagers getting bored with going back to same old place yet again. But just supposing?

Almost trembling with excitement, I checked the file for the family’s phone number and dialled it.

A man answered.

“Hello?”

“Is that Mr. Porter, Mr. George Porter?”

“Yes, who are you?”

“Mr. Porter, I am Detective Chief Inspector Morgan of the Surrey police. A little while ago some of my officers spoke to you about your renting a cottage in Brittany.”

“Yes, that’s right – but what about it?”

The moment of truth.

“Mr. Porter, why didn’t you rent it for New Year and Easter this year?”

“Well, we booked it, but a few days before we were due to leave we got a phone call – very apologetic – the boiler had gone wrong and frost had broken a couple of water pipes so the place wasn’t fit to be used until everything was just right. Then a week or two later we got a letter saying 102

that the damage was more extensive than at first realised and that the place wouldn’t be available for Easter either. Bloody nuisance actually, as we were looking forward to making up for not being there for New Year.”

“Who was the letter from?”

“Oh, the usual people – it’s owned by a UK company, Hoggard Holdings down in your neck of the woods – Woking. They were obviously having a good look at things as the letter actually came from the town the cottage is near, so they must have written as soon as they possibly could to warn us.”

“You wouldn’t happen to still have the letter, would you, Mr. Porter?”

“Afraid not – it didn’t need an answer so I just scrapped it.”

And at that I finished the conversation and sat back to think. In our investigations into James Hoggard we had, of course, gone through the books of Hoggard Holdings very thoroughly. It was a very small affair, with all the work being done by Hoggard himself or his wife. Now, Hoggard couldn’t have written that letter in January, and certainly not from France – he was in custody by then. It could, of course, have been written by his wife, but was it likely that she had gone across to France at that time? No way.

I sat back and thought things through. My first inclination had been to go into the office in the morning and start things buzzing. However, the more I thought about, the more I wondered if this was the best course. My task force had failed and although nothing had been said, I knew that it was something that would not improve my chances of making my acting rank of DCI into a permanent one any time soon. If I started things moving and, as I suspected, Luigi Canelli really was hiding out in that French cottage – great. On the other hand, if my guess was wrong I really would be casting myself in the role of a loser. What was the balance of probability? Another aspect struck me

– it was ages since I had taken any leave and now the task force had been wound up it wasn’t unreasonable to ask for a few days off. I could spend those days in nipping across to France, checking out that cottage and, if Canelli was there, I could return, ‘discover’ the clue, and then start things moving. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. If what I was up to was discovered I would be in deep trouble, but I had no intention of it ever being discovered.

The result was that three days later I drove off the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to St. Malo and took the D137 south towards Rennes, skirting the city to pick up the D177 and then the D777 to eventually arrive at the small town, or perhaps large village, of La Gacilly.

Hoggard’s unoccupied cottage was on the western outskirts of the town, perhaps a mile or a little less from the town centre, off a road with the strange name of La Glouzie. Thanks to the wonders of Google Maps I had been able to identify the cottage before I had even left home. Now I would investigate it. I had not booked into an hotel anywhere near – I had no wish to leave a paper trail; instead, I had prevailed upon a friend to loan me his small motor-home for the expedition. It was cramped but adequate and night-time saw me stopped in a small rest area off the road and about a mile from the cottage. Once it was reasonably dark I made my way on foot along the deserted road which, I knew from my previous studies, ran behind the cottage with a large field between the two.

Once level with the cottage, which for the moment was hidden from my view by trees, I cautiously made my way over the field, then through the belt of trees, finally emerging no more than fifty yards from my objective.

The cottage wasn’t empty; there was a car parked behind it, and lights shone from within. I crept towards it, testing every step before daring to place my weight on my feet, until I was within ten feet of what was clearly a back door. I could hear the faint sounds of a TV or radio from within, so emboldened that any noise I might make would be masked, I crept forward further still until I was 103

able to peer through a slight gap in the drawn curtains. I was looking into an empty kitchen. Clearly the sounds were coming from another room.

I started to work my way round the corner of the house, then froze. Something was pressing into the small of my back, something hard.

“Don’t move, or I’ll blow your spine out.”

The sounds from inside the house had not only masked the sound of my own footsteps; they had also masked the sound of those of the man who now stood beside me pressing something that might well be a gun into my back. As instructed, I remained motionless. I felt the pressure relax as the man stepped back away from me.

“Put your hands on top of your head and turn round, very slowly.”

I did as ordered and found myself face to face with the object of my search, Luigi Canelli. He looked at me in confusion, the shotgun in his hands trained only vaguely on me.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

My French is fairly fluent and it was in that language that I answered him.

“Please, M’sieu, I mean no harm – I was looking for shelter for the night and I had heard that this place was empty.”

He looked nonplussed. Clearly his grasp of the French language was limited, perhaps even non-existent. He frowned at me.

“Talk English – Anglais!”

I shrugged helplessly and, again in French, assured him that I had no language other than my mother tongue.

He stood there irresolute. Presumably he had thought me to be either someone from the police - but by now my obvious lack of support must have driven that possibility from his mind – or, far more likely, some would-be burglar. So now what? He couldn’t call the authorities – far too likely that he could be recognised for who he was with an European arrest warrant still out for him. I had the chilling thought that he might decide to shoot me on the spot – there was no other house within hearing distance of a shot. Then he made his mistake. He stepped towards me and as he did so allowed the shotgun, ever so slightly, to ease to his left. I hurled myself forward, knocking the gun still further round and driving him to the ground underneath me. By reflex his finger tightened on the trigger and the gun fired, but harmlessly, the pellets driving into the adjacent wall. I grabbed the weapon and strained back to me feet but as I did so, the gun somehow pivoted on his left hand so that the muzzles were towards him, and went off again. This time it was not a harmless discharge.

Most of the pellets struck Canelli in the side, tearing a gaping wound. I stood back in horror; this was not something for which I had bargained. The wound was an awful one; already a pool of blood was spreading away from him, over the concrete surround to the house. He was gasping, fighting for breath, his hands clutched to his side, his eyes fixed on my face.

“Who are you?”

I squatted down beside him. This time I spoke in English.

“I’m Ken Morgan, Detective Chief Inspector Ken Morgan. You caused the death of my wife and killed two of my colleagues. Now it’s your turn.”

“Please, call an ambulance – please.”

I looked down into his eyes.

“Oh no, Luigi – I’m going to stay here and watch you die.”

And I did. It took perhaps ten minutes, but I would have stayed however long it took. When I was sure that he was dead I simply walked away, leaving him on the ground. I hadn’t intended his death, 104

but once that gun went off and I saw the wound I realised that I had no qualms over it. I returned to me camper-van and the next day caught the ferry back to Portsmouth.

Epilogue

It was several days before we heard officially about Canelli. Where I had left him was hidden from the road but not from the front door. The day after next the postman, delivering junk mail, found him. When the local police looked into things they found that his passport was suspicious. Further digging resulted in his fingerprints being taken and identifying him as the wanted Luigi Canelli. We got the report from France via the Met and were told that the general assumption was that he had been killed by a disgruntled underworld acquaintance who had left no trace of his presence.

I had, of course, lost the opportunity to facilitate Canelli’s apprehension and the kudos that would have gone with it, so my almost instant confirmation as DCI didn’t happen. Instead an outsider was appointed to George Hughes’s vacancy, Hazel Rogers returned to East division and I reverted to DI, but with the promise that I would get to DCI rank eventually. Not to worry; I can wait.

Luigi Canelli’s death set me thinking. Justice had surely been more fully served than by him serving a few years in prison whilst Pam, Anna Weatherby and Tom Morgan were gone forever from their families. I thought more on the matter; his brother and Hoggard were just as responsible for Pam’s death as Luigi had been, and Merrill and Logan had been willing instruments. Logan was probably safe in the anonymity of the witness protection scheme, but the others will be released from prison one day. Three out of four might just be acceptable.

I ca

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Table of Contents

Chapter Two

Chapter Three - two weeks earlier

Epilogue