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China Roses

Page 23

by Jo Bannister


  ‘Only that she’d been here,’ Ash said hurriedly. ‘Not that … not what I suspect. That was the reason I wanted to catch you at home. I didn’t want her there while we talked.’

  ‘No.’ DCI Gorman sounded remote, non-committal. As if he had a lot to think about. ‘And you really can’t say where Cathy might be now?’

  ‘I think she was meeting a plane. A light aircraft, something that could land in a field. I imagine by now she’s back where she came from – wherever she’s been living.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You think it was her too, don’t you?’ Ash said miserably.

  ‘Gabriel, I have no idea. And thanks to you, I don’t know how we’d find her if it was. I have to go to work now. But this isn’t finished. You understand that?’

  ‘I am sorry, Dave.’

  ‘You do keep saying that, don’t you?’

  Gorman left the blind up, so he could see from his office into the big CID room. He wanted to speak to Hazel the moment she arrived.

  So he was startled when she arrived at his other door, the one connecting directly with the upstairs corridor, flinging it open and surging in like a tightly focused tornado. Her eyes were on fire and her cheek flushed with haste. But some lingering sense of what was appropriate made her rap on the door with her knuckles in passing.

  ‘Come in, why don’t you?’ said Gorman levelly.

  Either she didn’t hear him or she didn’t recognise it as a rebuke. ‘I know what it means. The bruise on David’s leg. And the scratches.’

  ‘Bruise?’

  ‘The same as those on Rose’s knees. Less noticeable, because he wasn’t in the van as long, but it’s recorded in the autopsy report.’

  ‘Van?’

  ‘The van that left its wheel-tracks on the verge at Myrton. The one they used to make deliveries up country lanes where the lorry wouldn’t fit, and would draw too much attention if it did. Chief, I know where it is!’

  This wasn’t what he’d intended to talk to her about. But it was both more important and more urgent than Hazel Best’s future as a police officer. That conversation would have to wait. ‘Take me. No, explain. No – take me, and explain on the way.’

  Mrs Kiang looked up with a certain resignation as Hazel entered her shop. It turned to suspicion when she saw the detective constable had brought her boss. ‘You want flowers?’ she asked, more in hope than expectation.

  ‘Not this time, Mrs Kiang. We want to talk to your William. Where is he?’

  The florist spread tiny hands in a helpless shrug. ‘Out on the lorry. I don’t know where he’s driving today.’

  ‘Folkestone? Dover? Hull?’

  ‘Could be. He was away overnight, I know that. Should be back tomorrow. What you want him for?’

  Hazel ignored the question. ‘You said, sometimes he borrows your van. How often?’

  ‘A couple times a month, maybe. That lorry’s too big for some jobs. Why? What’s this about?’

  ‘Did he have it six days ago?’

  Mrs Kiang thought back. ‘About then. He had business in Coventry, it wasn’t worth getting the lorry out. Wednesday night, I think it was.’

  ‘What time did he get back?’

  ‘I don’t know, I was asleep.’

  ‘Is the van out the back, Mrs Kiang?’

  The florist was becoming a little flustered and a lot annoyed by all the questions. More and more her accent was veering into the Brummie patois. ‘Why do you want to know? If William’s got himself some speeding tickets, talk to him about it, not me. I am not my husband’s keeper!’

  Gorman stepped in, his gruff voice commanding attention. ‘The van, Mrs Kiang. I want you to show me, now.’

  She threw up her hands in a gesture of compliance. ‘If I must.’ She locked the front door before taking them through the back of the shop, past racks of flowers steeping in tall zinc buckets, to the yard behind. To the cream Transit van with China Roses inscribed on its side in twining silver letters.

  ‘It’s just a van,’ complained Mrs Kiang.

  It wasn’t locked. Hazel went to the back and threw open the load-bay doors. She looked at DCI Gorman. ‘Do you want to try it or shall I?’

  Gorman considered. She was younger than him, fitter and more flexible. Also, it was her idea. ‘You.’

  Hazel climbed up into the back. It was as she remembered, fitted out for the careful transport of flowers, with benches running the length of the bay on either side and, screwed to them, a grid of aluminium bars that the tall zinc buckets would slot into. Hazel manoeuvred herself onto one of the benches. The only place to put her legs was through the grid.

  She looked at Gorman. ‘See?’

  ‘I see it.’

  Her knee was resting just above the bar. Over a long journey, mounting weariness would make her lean on it more and more, leaving a distinctive mark. On a short journey, say from Norbold to Coventry, the bruise would be less pronounced.

  ‘See what?’ demanded Mrs Kiang, bewildered and irate.

  But right now Hazel had no interest in updating the florist on her husband’s extramural activities. She was talking to Gorman, the words coming fast and sure. ‘He tried to tell us he’d seen this van. I thought he was confused: that he was remembering the China Roses name from the cellophane wrap on the flowers I took him. But he was right all along. And when he knew it for sure, he figured out a way of telling us.

  ‘Everyone who looked at those scratches on his knee said they looked like a bunch of flowers. But I wouldn’t have it, would I? I couldn’t see why he’d keep saying the same thing – china roses, china bloody roses! But he wasn’t. He was telling us what he could see – right then, immediately before he died. Flowers. He was surrounded by flowers.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  The lorry owned by William King travelled from Holland on the Harwich ferry, docking a little before seven the following morning. News of his coming preceded him: by five a.m., Harwich Police were talking to Meadowvale’s senior detective.

  ‘Do you want us to stop him or let him through?’

  ‘What I’d really like,’ said Gorman, stifling a yawn, ‘is for you to let him through and follow him until I can take over. I don’t just want him: I want every skinflint farmer and every snooty cow who’s too posh to do her own ironing, who buy these kids’ dreams for pennies. Without end-users there’d be no trade. There’s as much blood on their hands as there is on Bill King’s. I want to see where he goes, who he’s doing business with.’

  ‘It’s a gamble,’ the voice on the phone reminded him. ‘Things do go wrong. Even in a big rig, he could give us the slip. If we take him on the dock, we can control the situation.’

  ‘Your dock, your call. If it was mine, I’d let him run. We know who he is, we know where he is – and the lorry’s the size of a bloody great whale. How can we lose it? The worst we’re going to do is mislay it for a bit. We’re always going to find it again.’

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ said the voice at the other end dubiously. ‘Where will you meet us?’

  ‘He’ll come through Colchester, yes?’ Gorman had his finger on the road-map: it said all you needed to know about his life that he kept one beside his bed. ‘Then where?’ It turned out there were three feasible alternatives: north via Cambridge, south to pick up the M1 by way of the M25, or west to the M40. They wouldn’t know which route King would take until he took it.

  ‘We’ll follow him through Colchester to see if he turns north,’ proposed Harwich. ‘If he heads south, he’s probably heading for the M1. Hard to see why he’d go on round the Magic Roundabout to the M40.’

  Gorman agreed, though he knew they could be wrong. It depended on where King had contracted to take his passengers. Assuming he had passengers on this trip. ‘Can you stick with him as far as the M25 if you have to? We’ll take over as soon as we can.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ said Harwich obligingly. ‘You’ll owe us.’

  ‘We will,’ admitted Gorman. ‘Call
me after Colchester. If he is going north-about, we’ll meet you around Cambridge somewhere.’

  He did some calculations, allowing leeway for things to go wrong in, and concluded that he needed to have his team on the road by seven thirty. He began phoning round the members of his department. By six forty-five the CID offices upstairs at Meadowvale were buzzing with activity.

  The briefing didn’t take long. Everyone in the room already knew what they were there for. ‘We’ve plenty of time, so I don’t want anyone driving into a ditch or having a fender-bender. We should take over from Harwich a bit after nine if he goes via Cambridge, a bit later if he heads south. We won’t know which until we’re on our way.’

  He jerked his thumb at Hazel. ‘You: with me. Everyone else: find cars. Unmarked. Your own, somebody else’s, I don’t care. I want wheels on the ground. I don’t want this guy making us so we rotate: nobody sits in his mirror for too long. Every time he makes a drop-off, somebody goes in after he leaves. Arrest first, ask questions afterwards. There shouldn’t be too much aggro, they’ll be too surprised, but make sure you’ve got enough bodies to discourage arguments. I’ll ask Miss for some spare plods’ – he meant uniformed officers – ‘but for God’s sake make sure they take their hats off!’

  Hazel claimed Wayne Budgen for the back seat of Gorman’s car. She owed him an outing. Whether he entirely appreciated the favour was something else.

  In the end five cars left Norbold and headed down the M1, dawn growing palely in their nearside windows as they went. Early commuters were already supplementing the heavy haulage which dominated the motorways at night, but there were no delays, and no one drove into a ditch or got involved in an accident, and Gorman’s team had been an hour on the road when Harwich called to say the lorry had turned south after Colchester.

  By the time Harwich reported King turning up the M1, Gorman already knew. He was waiting on the hard shoulder with his bonnet up, looking like a casualty, and could see the lorry coming. He had all the information necessary to identify it: the make, the colour, the registration number. Also, it had the words William King of Norbold emblazoned on the front and both sides in red metre-high letters. Gorman let it pass, then – engine miraculously cured – he took up the tail from a discreet distance. Hazel thanked Harwich for their help and wished them a safe journey home.

  Songs have been written about the world’s great highways. Very few of them are about the M1. For much of its length it is singularly charmless – which is perhaps just as well, because the last thing any motorist surrounded by thundering juggernauts ought to be doing is admiring the scenery. But the miles passed quickly, county boundaries coming and going as the road scythed across them. Gorman let himself be overtaken by DC Lassiter, then DS Presley took up the tail. King showed no sign of having spotted them, and no inclination to leave the motorway. Signs for Luton were superseded by those for Milton Keynes, for Northampton.

  ‘Is he going straight home?’ wondered Hazel. ‘Hellfire, Chief, you don’t suppose there’s nothing in that truck except what ought to be there? What if he’s clean this time? What if there’s nothing to find?’

  ‘We’ll find something,’ said Gorman bleakly. ‘I’ll have Forensics swab the inside with cotton buds if I have to. He’s been carrying illegal immigrants in it, and even if they’re not in it today, I don’t believe they left no evidence behind.’

  ‘You’ll arrest him anyway?’

  ‘Damn right I will. This is our one chance to take him by surprise: once he talks to his wife it’ll be gone. Emma’s with her right now, but I can’t keep her incommunicado for ever. If we can’t catch him in the act, I’ll pull him in on suspicion and do it the hard way.’

  Hazel stared at him, appalled. ‘I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to thump the suspects any more.’

  Gorman breathed heavily at her. ‘I mean, by interviewing the shit out of him.’

  The pursuit continued, the hounds changing places at random intervals, the fox apparently unaware of the hunt. They were only one junction short of the Norbold turn-off, and Hazel was becoming increasingly convinced that William King was simply heading home after a routine, entirely legal, trip to Europe, when the lorry’s indicators came on. She heard Gorman’s breath hiss in his teeth.

  ‘So maybe he’s only got one delivery to make,’ he said, thinking fast. ‘I’ll take the lead. Tell everyone.’ And while Hazel was on the phone he added, ‘Have Lassiter stay on the motorway in case we lose him. Everyone else to follow me. Wherever King stops now, we’ll take him, and just hope he does have passengers. Catching suspects red-handed makes the Crown Prosecution Service so much happier.’ He cast Hazel a grim smile. ‘This doesn’t look much like vegetable-growing country to me.’

  It wasn’t. It was light industrial outskirts – the outskirts of where Hazel couldn’t work out even by reference to the map in Gorman’s glove-box – a linear estate on blighted land convenient to the motorway. Thousands of people came here to work every day. Their cars rafted on acres of cracked tarmac, but of the people there was no sign. Presumably they were all inside the steel and concrete sheds, translucent panels in the roofs supplying second-hand daylight, making whatever it was all those small businesses made: garden furniture and kitchen cupboards and house number-plates and dog beds and throwaway plastic cutlery.

  The lorry swept off the motorway and seemed to leave the estate behind. But then the road curved back on itself, and King turned in. A sign popular with the local birdlife said Danforth Industrial Estate.

  Gorman drove straight on. The high-sided vehicle remained visible across the asphalt desert, intermittently eclipsed by the commercial units but always emerging on the other side. Until it didn’t.

  Tom Presley, who’d been keeping his distance, followed it into the estate, pulling up on the first corner with an uninterrupted view down the service road. ‘He’s gone into the last-but-one unit and he’s driving round the back,’ he reported. ‘I can move closer without him seeing me. If you turn in at the far end, we’ll have him trapped between us.’

  ‘I see him,’ said Gorman, as the lorry reappeared between the shed and the road, clearly visible through the perimeter fence. ‘I’m turning in now. Move up, but stay in your car till I give the word.’

  The unit was in the business of manufacturing clothing, a fact which it advertised openly and indeed proudly on a board over the door: Prestige Costumiers. Hazel supposed the words Cheap Tat Sweatshop would have needed a bigger board.

  Gorman drove down one side of the unit, Presley down the other, each pulling up at an angle to block both exits. Hazel went to open her door but the DCI pulled her back. ‘You stay in the car. Call Lassiter – tell him we’ve got the lorry bottled up and to get back here ASAP. If it goes pear-shaped, we’ll need all the bodies we can muster. And if someone takes off on foot,’ he added, fixing her with a stern eye, ‘you can follow – but do not try to apprehend him on your own.’

  He waved away her protests impatiently. He let Presley know he was moving in, and six substantial police officers converged on the lorry. By now other cars were blocking the exits from the industrial estate.

  William King had been inside the unit, presumably concluding business; he emerged together with a smaller man in a suit, the unit’s owner or manager. One of them must have made a joke because they were both laughing. They stopped abruptly when they saw they had company.

  Gorman identified himself, although he guessed from King’s expression that he knew exactly who, or at least what, he was. ‘I have reason to believe you have illegal immigrants on board this vehicle, and I intend to search it. You can save us all some time by getting them to come out now.’

  William King was a big, florid-faced man in his mid-fifties. The fact that he was running to fat, straining the seams of the well-worn sweatshirt under his sheepskin coat, slightly disguised the other fact that under the fat was a bulk of solid muscle. But he was designed for fighting, not for running, and certainly not for running
across broken ground with a pack of younger, fitter men on his heels. After a moment in which it looked like he was going to resist, he threw up his hands in resignation.

  ‘Ryan, we’re buggered,’ he called wearily. ‘Get them out.’

  Ryan was his mate, a younger, shorter, thinner man with ginger hair and a seriously apprehensive expression. Presley walked him to the back of the lorry, and when he’d lowered the tail-gate climbed in after him.

  The lorry was packed with wooden shipping crates labelled in a dozen languages and at least three scripts: shoes from Italy and mattresses from Croatia and bookcases from Indonesia and sports equipment from China and garden furniture from Greece. There seemed to be no room for people, or any way to reach them, even if a corner had been found. Ryan, throwing a hunted look back over his shoulder, tugged at a board in one of the shoulder-high crates. It was half empty, and on the far side another loose board pulled out to reveal a dark space at the front end of the load-bay, carefully insulated to mask telltale heat signatures. Presley shone his torch, and six young women were blinking fearfully in the sudden light.

  ‘They’re here, Chief,’ he shouted.

  Even experienced police officers make mistakes. Hearing movement inside the lorry, and mentally downgrading the threat in view of King’s age, bulk and resigned co-operation, DCI Gorman craned to see what his trawl had netted. So, unfortunately, did the four officers behind him, each apparently believing that handcuffing Bill King was the job of one of the others.

  Bill King might have been getting older, and might have been getting fat, but he’d been supplementing his income imaginatively for a long time now, and he hadn’t stayed ahead of both the police and HM Customs & Revenue by being stupid. He identified the instant in which all the policemen whose function it was to curtail his liberty were distracted, and he acted without hesitation. One big hand grabbed the front of Gorman’s coat and yanked, and he met Gorman’s startled face with his forehead in that gesture of greeting commonly known as a Norbold smacker. While Gorman was still falling, King had used Wayne Budgen as a weapon to hit two other officers, and the tangle of limbs and bodies between him and the last man standing gave him all the time he needed to reach into the pocket of his sheepskin coat and come up with a gun.

 

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