Double Identity

by Alison Morton

  She made a cup of tea from the tray and consumed two energy bars from her backpack. The only moveable furniture was a metal-framed chair that had been decorously tucked under a bench masquerading as a desk, and an armchair with dubious stains. The door overlock thunked as she flipped the oval knob. The window was sealed shut against the noise, but anybody with a centre punch could shatter the outside pane, then hammer through. Not a pleasant thought.

  Mel closed the curtains, upended the armchair and dragged it under the window, then fished out a compressed coil of polypropylene cord from her backpack. Reaching up, she stretched it across the window area from the wall light on the opposite wall to the one by her bed and back to the central heating unit. At least she’d have a couple of seconds’ warning with this primitive obstacle course.

  After cleaning her teeth, she lay down on the bed fully clothed and pulled the duvet over her. It was only seven in the evening, but she was exhausted after driving around for thirty-six hours only broken by snatched meal breaks, a quick walk in Cambridge and a six-hour stop in a similar hotel. Tonight, she’d give herself eight hours then make an early start. She clutched the rough grip of her C-cell torch in her hand and closed her eyes.

  * * *

  A crack pierced the silence. Mel woke instantly, her heart thudding. She gripped her torch, shoved the duvet back and rolled out of bed. The crash of shattering glass as something or somebody punched through. More glass falling. Cloth chafed on cloth behind the curtains. A suppressed grunt.

  Mel crouched down, took some shallow breaths. The LEDs from the television and temperature control cast a faint glimmer over the shiny curtain. Stepping first over the cords she’d set up, Mel crept to the window frame. She pressed her back to the wall to the right of the opening. A bulge in the curtain the size of a human body. The curtains were flung apart. Mel brought her arm up and smashed the torch down on the invader’s head. He dropped to the floor, pulling the curtain off the rail, and was still. The remaining curtain hiding Mel waved in the cold wind. She shivered and edged towards the opening. The window had been hammered. Lethal jagged edges surrounded the hole. She covered the torch lens with one hand and twisted the head as quietly as she could to the floodlight setting. She took a deep breath, stepped towards the hole and released the full power of the torch into the dark.

  A shriek from the left.

  Mel grabbed the torn curtain, wrapped it round her hand and lower arm and smashed out the glass shards sticking up from the bottom of the frame. She set her foot on the frame and climbed out, wincing when a shard at the side nicked her cheek. She ran towards the site of the shriek.

  A figure in black was sprinting towards a dark van. He nearly made it, but she floored him with a rugby tackle. They slid as one across the black ice. She seized his hair and smacked his head on the tarmac. He was completely still. She grabbed some breaths, not least to steady her heart rate. Her fingers on his neck confirmed a pulse. Reassured, she bound a cable tie from her pocket round his wrists and another round his ankles.

  She glanced round. The link station she’d called Joanna from yesterday evening was only twenty metres away. She raced across the car park, the freezing air searing her lungs. Swiping her card through the door reader, she was relieved to find the duty officer she’d spoken to earlier and a second man.

  ‘Come with me. Now, please,’ she gasped.

  She was back out of the door in a second and heard them running behind her. At the black van, she pointed down at the man she’d trussed up. The first duty officer dropped to his knees to check him. Mel signalled the second to follow her back to the motel window.

  ‘Stay here, please, in case the other one tries to get out through the window,’ Mel ordered. She glanced at the lethal peaks of glass projecting from the window frame. ‘I’ll have to go back in through the front. My key card’s in the socket in the room.’ She wiped her face with the torn curtain flapping in the breeze. Only a little blood from the shard. She prayed the scratch wouldn’t start seeping again in the next five minutes.

  The night receptionist, sullen and more concerned he was missing a vital play in the game he was watching, grunted when Mel said she’d lost her door key card.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Mel said, truthfully. She leant on the counter, cupping her injured cheek in her hand to hide the cut. ‘I’ve been out with a friend and seem to have lost the original one. Can you let me have a replacement, please? I promise to look after this one more carefully.’ She grinned at him as if she’d had a few drinks.

  ‘Credit card or ID. Otherwise I can’t help you.’

  Mel wiped her hand back across her cheek, then pulled out her credit card from her inner jacket pocket.

  The receptionist grunted again and looked disappointed. Mel thought he wanted to refuse and tell her to get lost. With glacial slowness, he took a new card and programmed it. Mel glanced at her watch. It was a full seven minutes since the attack. She prayed the first attacker was still out cold by her bedroom window.

  After two false starts, the night receptionist handed her a replacement key card. Mel gave another false smile and restrained herself from snatching it out of his hand. The instant she was round the corner into her corridor, she broke into a run. Outside her door, she looked both ways down the corridor. Nobody. She swiped the new card, the green LED lit up and she was in. She flicked the light on.

  The figure was still slumped on the floor by the window. Mel circled round and stooped down to retrieve her torch. As she stood up, the figure lashed out and went for Mel’s legs, but Mel was quicker and kicked back. The attacker fell back, chin in the air, cap falling off to reveal a full head of hair, plaited and pinned up. A woman! She grunted and collapsed on the floor. Mel knelt and secured her arms behind her.

  ‘Nice one,’ the link station duty officer said through the broken window. ‘My oppo has put the other one in our secure room and called out a clean-up squad. Give me your key card.’ He eyed the gaping hole lined with jagged glass. ‘Can’t do anything about that window.’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll sort it. My name’s Alan, by the way. Do you fancy a cuppa?’

  15

  Mel’s watch showed 6 a.m. before she’d completed her report to Stevenson, copied to Joanna Evans. She’d questioned the two attackers but had got nothing. They’d given their names as Minnie and Mickey Mouse in accented English. Mel had snorted at them and had them locked up, one in the secure room, the other in the stationery cupboard.

  The first duty officer, Alan, plied her with another mug of tea. His colleague, Chris, had disappeared about half an hour ago when there’d been a knock at the door. Apparently, it was the clean-up squad reporting in. Mel cupped the mug in her hands and savoured the warmth.

  Before she’d left, Stevenson had given her location details of several security services outposts; this one was really just a communications hub, a relay station. She thought she’d only use it to liaise with Evans, nothing more. Well, that would teach her. But Alan and Chris seemed calm and competent as if such attacks happened every day.

  Forty-five minutes after she’d emailed her report, she heard a buzz cutting through the noise of the motorway traffic. It grew into a pulsating roar. The whump-whump of rotor blades overhead deafened them. Alan stood, motioned Mel to stay put, then walked unhurriedly to the door and went out.

  Joanna Evans strode into the station five minutes later in Alan’s wake. Clad in a dark blue flight suit and carrying a safety helmet, strands of hair sticking out at odd angles, she looked nothing like her usual mousey skirt-suited self. And she was wearing sergeant’s chevrons.

  ‘What are you doing here, Joanna?’ Mel said.

  ‘I came along for the ride,’ Evans replied. Just for a brief second, her face broke into a grin. Two enormous men had followed her into the building. ‘These two are the escort. We’ve come to take Minnie and Mickey Mouse off your hands.’

  * * *

  The green railings at the police college looked sturdy enough to Mel as she drove a
long to the entrance later that afternoon. The gate checkpoint officer was polite but thorough as he scrutinised her documentation and examined the contents of the boot of her hire car. She was assigned a room, a pass and a sheaf of papers along with an invitation to a working supper at 6 p.m.

  The room was as sparse as in a student mess, but perfectly adequate. Mel peered out of the window. Sleet was turning to snow. Central England in the middle of January was a dark, cold place.

  At least the company – twelve altogether – was interesting. Mostly men, but three other women apart from Mel; some were from European police forces, some military, others merely declared themselves as ‘civil servants’, which Mel took to mean internal or external security services. All were here for a week to familiarise themselves with practical skills in the way the British civilian police operated.

  For the next few days, Mel jogged first thing, ate three proper meals and slept soundly. Lectures and exercises in the classroom were interspersed with demonstrations outside. The tactical analysis and intelligence areas were easy for her as was the physical side of the public order exercises. The command side of managing critical and terrorist incidents was reasonably familiar, but she failed on media skills and needed an extra session with the tutor. When had she needed these skills in the past several years operating in terrorist-infested deserts and jungles?

  She particularly concentrated on the sessions on managing criminal investigations and transnational organised crime as she was sure she would need these as she pursued Gérard’s killers.

  Assembled at 8 a.m. in a not very large teaching room on the last day, the group was split into three teams to run an exercise each; one terrorist incident, one organised crime and one biological attack. Three triptych whiteboards set up next to each other took up one side of the room. The round team tables were close to each other so passing between and behind the chairs wasn’t easy. The tutor said it was as near to reality as it could be; most squad rooms would be even smaller.

  Mel was teamed with Andreas Holzmann, a specialist financial cop from Germany, a woman ‘civil servant’ from the Netherlands who introduced herself simply as Jansen, and a British Royal Military Police detective called Martin Bailey. Their exercise was organised crime. Each team busied itself grasping the essentials of their own task, but after two hours, Mel couldn’t see where they had to go next to take their investigation forward. Holzmann, a tall blond man, bent over the desk and was going back through the paperwork to analyse it for the umpteenth time, Bailey was drawing up a plan to raid the gang’s suspected HQ and Jansen was wielding a felt-tip marker, jotting down the team’s findings on their incident board.

  Mel stood and wandered up to the board, spattered with personalities’ photos and known facts from their briefing files and their deductions. She gave Jansen a half-smile, then scanned the information they’d accumulated. Something didn’t quite gel. Frustrated, she glanced at the next team’s board, mostly to see if they were doing any better in their simulated anti-terrorist operation. One of the photos showed a face similar to one of Mel’s team’s suspects, a younger version. She looked at the other photographs, then shuffled along to the third board. One from the second board was present on the third board. Dieu, all three apparently separate cases were connected.

  Mel ambled back to her seat, collecting Jansen on the way. She laid a hand on the back of Holzmann’s which made him look up. Bailey glanced up from his draft and frowned.

  ‘Quietly now,’ Mel said in a low voice. She scribbled her discovery on a clean sheet of paper and circulated it to the three others.

  ‘Really?’ Bailey said. Two students from the next table turned round at his loud voice.

  ‘Keep it down,’ Mel hissed at him.

  ‘This completely changes our game plan,’ Jansen whispered.

  Holzmann said nothing for a few moments. He shuffled his papers. ‘I’ve rechecked the reports and there are certainly a few holes in them, some amounts of transfers I just can’t trace. Obviously, in a simulated classroom exercise like this, they can’t give us a detailed, watertight dossier to work on, but the information should be more complete than it is.’

  ‘This is one of the best police services in the world,’ Mel replied. ‘They’re unlikely to have given us sloppy briefings. It must be deliberate.’

  ‘What do you propose, then?’ Bailey asked.

  ‘In real life, I’d think they would set up a liaison meeting with other interested parties,’ Mel said.

  ‘Can we do it within the rules of the exercise?’ Holzmann asked. ‘We might be disqualified.’

  ‘Seconded,’ Bailey chimed in.

  Jansen said nothing, but looked worried.

  Mel glanced at them. ‘If it comes to a choice between breaking a petty rule or achieving operational success, then there is no real choice. I’ll do it.’ She leant back, her chair tipping, and touched the shoulder of the nearest member of the anti-terrorist exercise group. ‘Have you got a minute?’

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the tutors start towards her, but the senior one shook his head at the junior one. He gave her a steady look, then wrote something on his clipboard. Probably ‘class awkward one’ or something similar. Tant pis. She had work to do.

  Mel pulled her chair up to the anti-terrorist group’s table and explained her findings and theory. After a few murmurings, they agreed and leant over to bring in a member of the biological attack group. Mel and a representative of each group went over to the three incident boards to compare notes. The room quietened; the other participants watched as Mel and the other two made connections. Mel called Jansen over with her red felt-tip. Just as Jansen started to draw lines on the boards as Mel called out the connections, the senior tutor, Blake, came over.

  ‘Okay, that’s enough. Please resume your seats and carry on with the tasks allotted to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but no,’ Mel said. We’ve made a significant breakthrough that will possibly lead to the successful and early resolution of all three cases.’ Mel gave Blake a confident stare. Inside, she trembled. All week, they’d been students, absorbing, conforming and obeying instructions given to them. Now she was facing off this senior policeman who had authority over her and all the others in the room.

  ‘If you don’t,’ Blake said, ‘we’ll have to cancel the exercise and fail you all.’

  A gasp and a murmur or two which died quickly.

  ‘Fail me, if you must, but don’t blight the careers of others just because I initiated cooperation that might lead to solving our cases.’ She shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. ‘But I think, being frank, that you are breaking your own rules – ultra vires. That’s a new concept you taught me this week.’ She reached for her organiser and flipped the pages to a section with green paper. ‘I quote, “In the exercise at the end of the week, you will be set tasks to resolve. You will act completely on your own. We will be present as observers, but cannot be asked for information, nor will we interfere with your investigation.” Unquote.’

  Blake looked as if he had been poleaxed. After a second or two, he tilted his head, raised his eyebrows then breathed hard through his nose.

  ‘I can’t fault your observation or your logic, Miss des Pittones.’ He gestured towards the incident boards. ‘Well, you’d better carry on.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Oh, and it’s Investigator des Pittones.’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ he said and gave her a wry smile.

  But she’d already turned back to her team.

  16

  At the formal meeting before the course broke up Friday evening, Blake conceded the students had completed the group exercise effectively and ahead of time. Only a few groups had ever solved the complete case through to the end. He mentioned that in a live case a little more attention to the paperwork would be desirable. Mel exchanged glances with Holzmann whose face tightened at that; he’d been meticulous working with Jansen to ensure the case file was written up correctly. She gave him
a tiny shake of the head and a smile. He returned both with a shrug. The tutors had to say something critical to balance the praise.

  Mel bought the rest of the course a drink in the visitors’ bar where they swapped phone numbers and emails. Most of them were not starting home until the next morning, so were happy to make an evening of it. Mel sat opposite Holzmann.

  ‘Keep in touch, won’t you, Andreas?’

  ‘Of course.’ His ice-blue eyes studied her face. ‘I enjoyed working with you. If you ever come to Wiesbaden, you must tell me.’

  ‘Ditto, for me and Brussels.’

  * * *

  Next morning, Mel was called into Blake’s office. She stood in front of his desk, hands clasped behind her back, waiting.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Miss… Sorry, Investigator des Pittones. Sit down.’ He closed a brown folder and leant back in his chair. ‘I should bollock you for wrecking the exercise so early. We spent a significant amount of time putting it together and reckoned the first student to rumble it would take at least four or five hours. With your two hours, you’ve lost me a bet.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Let me finish. That’s the personal out of the way. Professionally, I’m all admiration and wish you well in your career in the EIRS. One word of advice: you discovered for yourself that media skills are necessary in any law enforcement job these days. You eventually passed on that module, but only just. Pay a little attention to that area.’

  ‘I’m more at home in the field, sir, and I think that’s going to be my operational area.’