Black Quarry Farm

by Iain Cameron

  ‘It was a case of mistaken identity. A local drug gang, the police thought. You don’t think they made the same mistake again?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘But it’s… it’s preposterous. How could they do the same stupid thing twice? Are they complete idiots?’ Mr Baqri spoke with passion and verve, and Henderson was fearful he was about to tip the cup of hot tea into his lap.

  ‘You must consider, Mr Baqri,’ Henderson said in an attempt to placate him, ‘while your son may not be involved in drugs, he might look like one of the leaders of a rival drug gang.’

  ‘Oh yes, you could be right, Inspector. I hadn’t thought about that.’

  ‘If this is true,’ Mrs Baqri said, ‘they might shoot him again.’ She started crying, but her husband made no move to assist.

  A few minutes later, the questions exhausted, Henderson left Bentley in the lounge with the cakes, which he seemed to be enjoying, while he climbed the stairs.

  Faisal’s room bore the hallmarks of any teenager he could mention: pictures of his heroes on the wall, books and CD’s on the shelf, and clothes scattered across the bed, as if he’d run off in a hurry, too late and harassed to leave it tidy. The big difference here from the rooms of other teenage boys being that it wasn’t Ariana Grande or The Weeknd he was idolising, but West End musicals. There were posters on the walls of the cast of Cats, Chicago, and Hamilton, and biographies of well-known Hollywood singers, and books about musicals on the bookshelf.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find my brother hiding under the bed.’

  He turned to see Aisha standing there.

  ‘No, things like this are never so easy.’

  ‘He wants to be a dancer, you know, although you being a detective, I imagine you have deduced it from all his posters and books.’

  ‘Not a singer, then?’

  ‘Oh no, but don’t tell the folks downstairs. They’d have him crooning in the local nightclubs and sleazy gambling dens. I think Papa dreams of Faisal becoming north London’s answer to Frank Sinatra.’

  ‘Do you think the people who took him the time before knew about his dancing?’

  ‘Why do you say that, because they shot him in the leg?’

  Henderson nodded, impressed at this young woman’s perceptiveness.

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe, but it doesn’t take a genius to find something like that out. Faisal’s an open book as far as his real friends and the people he talks to on Instagram are concerned.’

  ‘My suspicious nature thinks it’s not a coincidence. They knew what he was like and did it deliberately. A warning, if you like.’

  She bit her lip, as if debating whether to say anything more or not.

  ‘Faisal’s kidnapping wasn’t a case of mistaken identity,’ Henderson said in an attempt to prompt her, ‘was it?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ she said a few moments later. ’It was to do with something else. If I tell you about it, you mustn’t say anything to my parents. Okay?’

  Henderson nodded.

  ‘It was to do with his girlfriend, but as far as I knew, he’d finished with her. You don’t think he went back to her without him telling me, and the same thing’s happened again?’

  ‘It’s possible. What’s his girlfriend’s name?’

  ‘Sadia Cheema.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  The van dropped the workers off at 6:30am and, without much delay, Dan, Stag, and Juno, the senior men in the wrecking crew, headed over to the site caravan to make a brew. The various Latvians, Poles, and Estonians who also worked there made their way to an old bench and dug out their flasks if they had one, which many of them didn’t.

  Dan had worked on many building sites around London, doing what he could. He wasn’t a skilled worker like a brickie or chippie, so he had to take whatever was going. He liked working on construction sites, putting up new office or apartment blocks. On days when he could see his daughter, Tania, he would take her down by the river, or to a museum, and if it was dry and warm, they would make a detour past a construction site where he had worked. Then, he would say, ‘I built that.’ She was still young enough to believe him.

  Stag, in charge of the kettle, was about to hand Dan a brew when he felt it coming. It originated in the depths of his chest, and when he coughed, it sounded loud and hacking, like broken pieces of glass. It lasted for no more than half a minute, but it left him shaking and as weak as a baby.

  ‘I told you mate, you should get that seen to,’ Stag said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Remember Bobby Willis?’ Stag said, pushing a mug into his trembling hand.

  ‘The skinny guy with the buck teeth?’

  ‘Yeah, him. A big Millwall fan, just like me. He had a cough the same as you.’

  ‘What did he take for it?’

  ‘A box. He’s brown bread, mate. Went to the doc and told him it happened every morning. The last few weeks he’d been spitting blood.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘A couple of days later at a hospital, they diagnosed lung cancer. He didn’t go home from that appointment, they kept him in hospital. He died three weeks later.’

  ‘Christ, what a happy story to start the week. With a repertoire like that, you should be on breakfast telly.’

  ‘What, with my good looks? The post room would never be able to cope with all the fan mail.’

  Dan started laughing, and the cough reappeared. He managed to shove his mug on a shelf before letting it take its course, as no way could he keep his hand steady.

  Ten minutes later, the three men left the caravan and headed towards their places of work. They were in Tottenham, at the site of a former carpet factory. Dan hated demolition work, all dust, grime, and mangled metal, but the foreman had promised to put a good word in for him and his mates with the site’s developers. They were scheduled to build an apartment block for social housing once the ground had been cleared.

  Dan made a beeline for an area at the back of the ground floor where he and a couple of the Latvians would be working today. Before bringing in a wrecking ball, the guy who owned the demolition company decided he wanted to try and salvage something from several large machines left behind by the previous owners. Dan couldn’t blame him for doing so, as they were huge lumps of metal and worth a bob or two as scrap, and who didn’t want to make a few extra quid these days?

  None of the machines were still attached to the mains supply, so all they had to do was loosen the fixings securing them to the floor and wall. It was an easy job, in theory at least, especially using the heavy tools they carried with them. However, many of the bolts had rusted away and it was often a job and a half just to free them.

  He took off his jacket and slung it over a box. He walked towards one of the metal monsters, this one a huge, green thing with two giant rollers. Just then, one of the Latvians let out an enormous scream. The daft bastard had probably got his arm or leg trapped, not an uncommon occurrence. Much of the material inside the factory had been damaged by a flood nine months ago and was prone to sudden movements.

  Dan ran towards the noise, but when he found the shouter, a bloke called Mareks, he was standing back from the machine and no part of him appeared to be trapped. Dan turned to where the faces of the other workers were staring. There, at the side of the machine, lay the battered body of a young man, a bullet hole drilled into the side of his head.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Henderson lifted the photograph in front of him and examined it in detail. Beside him, around the small meeting table in his office, Carol Walters was sifting through a pile of pictures, looking for another one to show him.

  ‘I see the truck,’ he said, ‘the people unloading, and the goods in the truck, but nothing to suggest it’s incriminating.’

  ‘I don’t know, any delivery at 2:30 in the morning makes me suspicious.’

  ‘I agree, especially as many of the packages they took from the back of the truck don’t look anything like a textile company would use
. I imagined long rolls of fabric.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not sure we can say with any certainty the packages unloaded contain drugs.’

  ‘You’re basing this on the assumption they’re dealing in drugs. What if they were gold smuggling or gun running? The shape of the packages then would be more revealing.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Walters fished another photograph out of the pile and handed it to him. ‘Take a look at this one,’ she said, ‘it shows the faces of the unloading team better.’

  Henderson picked it up. Most of the photographs were of good quality: in colour, using a good camera and lens, but restricted by the distance between the surveillance position and the truck, and the low-level of light available in the middle of the night.

  ‘These two guys look interesting.’ ‘They’re younger than the rest, and bigger and stronger too. Look at this one,’ he said pointing, ‘what do you think this is sticking out of his belt?’

  ‘From its position, my first reaction is, it’s a gun, but knowing we’re dealing with Asians, it could also be the handle of a knife, or some sort of ceremonial clasp.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s a gun. See if you’ve got a better angle.’

  Walters handed him another picture and from it he confirmed in his mind he was looking at a gun. ‘It does beg the question: why are there armed men helping to empty what could be a delivery of textiles, albeit at two-thirty in the morning?’

  ‘The business is located in a rough part of London?’ Walters suggested.

  ‘For sure, but even if local thugs were planning a raid on the place, the site is well protected by a wall and those big gates.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What else have you got?’

  ‘That’s about it. Three big deliveries Sunday morning and nothing for the rest of the time.’

  ‘Okay, let’s take a look at Vicky’s pictures.’

  Vicky Neal, in charge of the car-based team, had a harder job than Carol Walters who was safely hidden in a second-floor flat, the camera mounted on a tripod. Vicky and her people had been harassed by drunks, druggies, and local idiots who repeatedly tapped on the windows asking for money for cigarettes and food and generally making a bloody nuisance of themselves.

  Unlike Carol’s team, who came up with three suspicious deliveries which raised more questions than they answered, Vicky’s team came up with little. In the morning, a succession of women turned up for work, and Henderson was pleased to see they travelled in cars driven by relatives, and not a company bus. This dispelled the notion they were dealing with trafficked women. He remembered Irene Jennings telling him about her own investigation and coming to a similar conclusion.

  At various times of the day, a series of cars and small vans arrived, but on checking their details through the Police National Computer, none raised suspicions. They were part of the regular deliveries any business received throughout the day: stationery, parts and supplies for various office machines, light bulbs, coffee.

  ‘The way they’re set up,’ Henderson said, ‘is anything they don’t want the outside world to see goes through the double gates. Everything else can come to the front door. Even the movement of Cheema and the two big guys that we think are carrying guns is through those gates.’

  ‘Makes sense, but we need more; I don’t think it’s enough to convince Edwards.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said stretching. ‘I don’t think she’d be happy deploying twenty-odd officers and all we get is possession of a couple of guns, before finding the suspicious parcels taken out of the trucks were gifts for his workers.’

  ‘When Harry and Phil met Cheema, he didn’t give them the impression he was the benevolent kind.’

  ‘I can imagine, but you’re right, we need more and at this rate I don’t think surveillance is going to give it to us. We’ll keep it going to the end of this week, but I don’t think I’ll be asking for an extension beyond this time frame.’

  ‘I agree. You can only tell so much from pictures of parcels.’

  ‘What’s the latest on Faisal Baqri’s disappearance?’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t check the serials when I came in this morning.’

  ‘It adds a new layer of suspicion now we know the reason Faisal had been shot in the leg wasn’t due to a case of mistaken identity as we first thought, but because he was seeing Cheema’s daughter.’

  ‘It takes a father confronting his daughter’s date at the door with a shotgun to a whole new level.’

  ‘It’s an extreme response, for sure.’

  ‘If Faisal knew he might get beaten up or shot for seeing Cheema’s daughter, you would think common sense would tell him to stay away. Didn’t his sister say something similar?’

  ‘Perhaps he couldn’t avoid bumping into her at college and somebody saw them talking.’

  ‘It seems a pretty slim excuse to kidnap someone, but it might be a good enough reason to convince Edwards.’

  He shook his head. ‘Everything we’ve got is circumstantial. We know Robert Saunders once worked for Cheema, we know Ibrahim Nazari was one of his suppliers, and we now know Faisal was dating his daughter, but there’s nothing to link Cheema directly to the two murders or the boy’s disappearance.’

  She gathered her photographs together. ‘We’ll just have to keep plugging away.’

  ‘We do, but I think I know someone in the Met who might be able to help us gee this up a bit. First, I need something to eat, I’m starved.’

  ‘The perils of a recent house move. Have you not worked out how to use the cooker, or forgotten the place where you stored the breakfast cereals?’

  ‘It feels like that at times, when I’m looking for something I know I’ve put away somewhere. It’s like being in someone else’s house.’

  She laughed as she stood. ‘I’m like that now and I’ve lived in my flat for years.’

  Ten minutes later Henderson returned from the staff restaurant with a granola bar to eat now and a tuna baguette for lunch, as he had a huge amount of paperwork to get through. Even a week-long surveillance job like the one in Haringey generated its own weight in paper: risk assessments, car requisitions, overtime approvals, dry-cleaning bills, and all the rest.

  With his hunger sated, he began to make a number of phone calls. His contact at the Met wasn’t much help, but Rudi Cavell, the Kent DI who led the enquiry into the murder of Ibrahim Nazari, sounded more hopeful. However, he was heading off to an all-afternoon meeting and he couldn’t speak to Henderson for the rest of the day.

  For the next twenty minutes he worked through a succession of forms requiring his approval, and read through reports generated by the murder team.

  Reaching a natural break, he picked up his phone and called Vicky Neal, sitting in one of the cars outside the S&H Oriental Fashions business in Haringey.

  ‘Hi Vicky, how’s it going?’

  ‘Not bad, sir. For once we haven’t been bothered by the local crazies.’

  ‘Good, as there’s a chance they could compromise your position.’

  ‘If they do turn up, I drive around the block for ten minutes before parking in a different spot. They’re so spaced-out on cheap wine or spice, they couldn’t tell the difference between a car and a refuse skip. Moving the car confuses the hell out of them.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Is there anything new on the surveillance front?’

  ‘They’ve had a number of small deliveries today, DPD and DHL, and a couple of visitors. One who looked like a council official, and two blokes from Customs. Also, one large delivery truck headed around the back.’

  Henderson terminated the call a few minutes later, and then called Lisa Newman at the flat overlooking S&H’s backyard.

  ‘Hi Lisa, everything all right?’

  ‘Nothing much to report, sir, although I would welcome a functioning toilet, but I know we can’t have everything.’

  ‘Count yourself lucky you’re not being harassed by the local nutcases, as Vicky is.’

>   ‘I do, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Vicky was saying she saw a large truck drive round earlier today.’

  ‘The gates opened around eleven this morning. Unlike the three we saw on Saturday night, this one was clearly carrying textiles. Long reams of the stuff.’

  ‘Interesting. Nothing in boxes or packages?’

  ‘Nope, only long strips. This stuff looked the real deal.’

  ‘I’d like to see the pictures, see if our two armed men turned up to help.’

  ‘Carol should have copies, I think; I’m looking over at Sunderam who is nodding. We sent them over around midday.’

  As if on cue, Walters came into his office, in her hands a series of photographs.

  ‘Okay Lisa, thanks for the update. Is there anything else?’

  ‘No, that’s it.’

  ‘Good, give me a call if anything else happens. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I will. Bye.’

  ‘You look to be in a hurry, Carol.’

  ‘I’d like you to see these,’ she said, putting the pictures in her hand down in front of him.

  These hadn’t been taken by either of the surveillance teams as the lighting used was too harsh and the setting too grimy.

  He studied the photographs for several seconds before he spoke. ‘This is the kidnapped teenager from Haringey, Faisal Baqri, isn’t it? I was looking at his picture in the Baqri’s living room only a few days ago.’

  She nodded.

  He banged his fist on the table. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘What a waste. What did such a young boy do to deserve this?’

  ‘He was found this morning by demolition workers at the site of a former carpet factory in Tottenham. The forensics guys think he’s been dead for three days.’

  ‘I can see what looks like a bullet wound to the side of his head. I wonder if he was shot by the same gun used to kill Saunders and Nazari. I would be interested to read the ballistic report.’

  ‘I’ve already asked for a copy.’

  ‘Good.’

  Henderson thought for a moment. ‘Unless forensics can come up with some startling insight, I don’t think his death changes anything.’