No Time to Lose: A Matt Flynn Thriller

by Iain Cameron

  ‘The lights have been out for…’ he looked at his watch, ‘fifteen minutes. We’ll give him another five to make sure he’s in the land of nod, then we’ll make a move.’

  ‘Good.’ She paused. ‘We don’t have much to hang him with.’

  ‘As my old boss, Jonty Fleming, used to say, don’t bring me circumstantial.’

  ‘They must teach that at DI school. Mine used to say the same thing.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll present a problem in this case.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’ll pretend we know more than we do, and leverage as much out of him as we can. He doesn’t need to know that so far we have diddly squat. For starters, living in a place like this, how can he convince us that a scumbag like him was viewing a property in Highgate with the aim of buying it?’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll think of something.’

  ‘How would he explain the fake passport?’

  Rosie shrugged.

  ‘There’s no doubt in my mind he was involved in the kidnap of David Burke, but we’ll hold him in custody until we can prove it. I’m confident once we search his place we’ll find other evidence.’

  The property they were looking at was what estate agents like Ben Cordell would call a twee or bijou town house. Two floors were located above a ground-floor garage, giving the owner plenty of exercise climbing up and down the numerous sets of stairs. It was hard to see under the dull light from the streetlights, but the railing outside the patio doors on the first floor led out to a tiny balcony. There was only enough space to open the doors and let in some air, there wasn’t room to stand and admire the view, even if there was one. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a bad gaff for a serious scumbag, but whatever it cost, it wouldn’t buy a garage in David Burke’s road.

  ‘You’re right about searching his place,’ Rosie said. ‘One look at his finances will reveal he doesn’t have the wherewithal to buy Burke’s house.’

  ‘Yeah, but he might say he was a rubbernecker, having a peek to see how the other half live, but I wouldn’t say that to him. Guys like him don’t need excuses from people like me to get them out of doing time.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Mind you, if we manage to take a look at his finances, we should expect to see a large payment for the kidnap of David Burke. I don’t think he would have done the job for nothing, and his record doesn’t suggest he’s on anyone’s payroll.’

  After a few more minutes of sitting in silence, Matt looked at his watch. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  ‘Right fellas,’ he said into the radio. ‘It’s time to make a move.’

  Matt would have preferred to leave the raid on Tamplin’s house until the dead of night. If he had the choice, it would be around three or four in the morning, but he and everyone else at HSA was conscious of the clock ticking on David Burke. Based on the assumption of David being tortured to disclose details of the security arrangements for the Lancaster House meeting, they had to act quickly on any leads they came across.

  Matt closed the car door quietly and gave the thumbs up to the small contingent of Metropolitan Police armed officers exiting the van parked behind them. He didn’t hear any bitching from them about the delay on the small short-wave radio. They were happy to be sitting and clocking up generous overtime rates.

  The door banger positioned himself, and the uPVC door of Karl Tamplin’s house caved in at the second attempt. Everyone had been briefed on the interior layout of the house, as Amos Moore, their brilliant researcher and internet hacker back at HSA HQ, had found a schematic on an estate agent’s website.

  This told them to ignore the ground floor, as due to the space taken up by the garage, only a kitchen and garden were on the same level. Similarly, to ignore the first floor, containing the lounge and a few storage cupboards. Instead, they should concentrate their firepower on the second floor, where three bedrooms and hopefully their target was located.

  It had been agreed at the briefing that four cops would head straight to the top floor and grab Tamplin. Rosie would sweep and cover the first floor, and Matt would do the same to the ground floor. It wasn’t a case of the agents ducking out of the dangerous stuff and letting the cops take all the risk, but there was little point in bringing heavily armed officers and having them guard empty floors. It was like inviting musicians into a venue and doing the singing yourself.

  The available ground floor space wasn’t large, barely enough room for a compact fitted kitchen and a small table and chairs. The whole place looked a bit tired and old-fashioned, as if it hadn’t been updated in a decade or more. It also looked little-used, suggesting Tamplin didn’t cook much and relied on takeaways, a theory verified after a quick look inside the bin. Satisfied no one was lurking on this floor, Matt decided to take a look at the garden. After a short search, he found the key to the back door hanging on a peg.

  Turning the key, Matt noticed the level and tone of the noise above him had changed. This wasn’t unusual, as the coppers had gone from clunking upstairs to standing still in the perpetrator’s bedroom, trying to intimidate him with their masked appearance and raised weapons.

  However, the sound he heard now suggested their entry to the bedroom had hit some sort of barrier. This meant only one thing.

  Matt went to turn the key in the lock, but it refused to move. He tried again, but the outcome was the same. The third time, he lifted the door handle with some force, effectively lifting the uPVC door a few millimetres., and while holding the handle, he turned the key. He heard a click as the key engaged and the lock turned.

  It took a few seconds for Matt to orientate himself with his new surroundings. By the time he did so, and noticed the fire escape, Tamplin had shimmied down and was haring across the garden.

  SIX

  The garden at the back of Karl Tamplin’s house wasn’t big, and was surrounded on three sides by a high panelled fence. It contained a barbeque in the shelter of the house, and at the far end, a tree and a small potting shed. The tree was large and lop-sided, its branches and leaves leaning over, almost touching the roof of the shed. It was behind this that Tamplin had now taken up a defensive position.

  Matt had been lying on the grass ever since Tamplin, armed with a handgun, had whizzed a couple of bullets close to his ear when the gunman ran to hide behind the shed. There was no cover, except for a rotary dryer. However, Matt was saved from being a sitting duck by the slope of the ground, leaving him downhill from his assailant, and the enveloping darkness, the garden being mercifully out of range of nearby streetlights.

  ‘Give yourself up, Tamplin,’ Matt shouted. ‘You’ve nowhere to go and you’re outnumbered.’

  ‘Fuck off, copper, I’ll die here if I have to.’

  Tamplin hadn’t moved from the back of the shed. This suggested to Matt he was winging it. He didn’t have a prearranged escape route at the end of the garden. This from a man who had managed to evade a police raid and arm himself with a weapon, all elements of good forward planning. Matt couldn’t understand why at some previous point in the past, he hadn’t cut a hole in the back fence. Maybe he had, but the HSA agent’s presence had stopped him reaching it. He could have tried to climb over it, but that would have made him an easy target for Matt’s gun.

  The gunman fired another couple of shots, wilder this time, suggesting he didn’t have good sight of Matt’s position.

  ‘Back off copper, I can hold out all night. I’ve got plenty of ammo.’

  ‘So have we, and there’s six of us, there’s only one of you.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  Matt took aim at the rear, left-hand edge of the shed. He was aiming below waist-height, to ensure any bullets that penetrated the wood wouldn’t hit the windows of neighbouring houses. He fired two shots, one about five centimetres to the right of the other.

  ‘Aggh!’ Tamplin screamed. ‘You fucker.’

  At the sound of the man’s scream, a number of lights switched on i
n nearby houses, and Matt realised it wasn’t a good idea to prolong this stand-off any longer than necessary. A picture of a gun-toting HSA agent running through a suburban garden on the front page of the morning’s newspapers, would have the loonies on the left calling for Gill’s head, and Gill taking a swing at his with something heavy.

  With the addition of the new lighting, Matt’s exposed position on the grass would be obvious and Tamplin could pick him off at leisure, providing he was still fit enough to do so. Matt knew Tamplin had been hit, but he didn’t know if he’d been struck with a bullet, or simply showered in woodchips. He broke cover and crawled towards the shed, hoping Tamplin was too preoccupied attending to his wound to notice he was coming closer.

  Matt knelt beside the shed without moving, listening for any change in Tamplin’s moaning and breathing. Hearing none, he stood and edged around the shed, past the door, his weapon out front, finger on the trigger.

  On reaching the edge around which Tamplin was situated, he stopped and searched around for any advantage, such as a reflection on a piece of metal or glass. Spotting nothing, he was resigned to doing it the hard way.

  Trying to expose as little of himself as possible, he peered around the corner of the shed. Tamplin was on the ground bare chested, holding his t-shirt against his thigh. In his other hand he held the gun, and it was pointing at Matt. He pulled back just in time as Tamplin let off another burst, wood splinters stinging his face.

  ‘Get back, fucker, or I’ll nail ye!’

  Matt moved back to his original position at the front of the shed, and turned to face Tamplin’s house. Using hand signals, he instructed one of the armed cops to come towards him. When he arrived, Matt whispered what he wanted him to do. He nodded in acknowledgement.

  Matt sidled round to the door of the shed and tried the handle. Locked. Adrenaline racing, he stepped back, but not far enough to put him in Tamplin’s line of fire, and booted the door, hard. The screws in the lock separated from the wood, and the lock fell uselessly to the ground. He yanked the door open and moved inside. Little light penetrated the interior, and Matt didn’t dare take too many steps in case he stood on a rake or received a mouthful of spider webs.

  He had to work fast. If Tamplin realised he was in the shed, the only thing separating Matt from a bullet was a piece of wood no more than a centimetre thick. The window overlooking the prone figure outside was filthy and broken, with some pieces of glass missing. Matt poked his gun through the gap, aiming at a concrete slab close enough for Tamplin to feel and hear its effects.

  In a loud voice Matt called, ‘Ready!’ and fired two shots a metre or so from the gunman. The sound of bullets coming from nowhere scared the bejesus out of Tamplin and he curled into a ball and held his head. At the same time, the copper appeared in front of him and kicked the weapon out of Tamplin’s hand. He then pointed his carbine at Tamplin’s head.

  Ten minutes later, Matt, with Rosie beside him, watched as two officers led Tamplin out of the garden, a temporary dressing covering a thigh wound. It was clear from the amount of blood visible, the bullet had missed his femoral artery. If it had hit, they would now be looking at a dead suspect and not the walking wounded.

  ‘Where the hell did he get a shooter?’ Rosie asked. ‘It’s not what you expect to face when someone gets rudely awakened at one in the morning. He must have kept it under his pillow.’

  ‘It’s a good question. Why was he so paranoid? He wasn’t aware we were after him. Perhaps he was expecting the guy who hired him to send a couple of goons to top him. His way of getting rid of all witnesses, and to save paying him.’

  ‘When you play with the big boys, you’ve got to be prepared for anything.’

  ‘It’s no way to live, is it? Having a piece under your pillow and barricading the door of your bedroom every night.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Matt, why did you let the cops take him? I thought we were going to question him?’

  ‘Due to him staging this little stand-off tonight, they now have more than circumstantial evidence to throw at him. He can be charged with possession of a weapon, evading arrest, endangering life, attempted murder, a whole range of stuff which will make sure he doesn’t walk even if he engages a serious lawyer, which I doubt.’

  ‘Meaning, we can interview him any time we want as he’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘Correct. The problem is, I don’t know where they’re taking him. C’mon, we should ask.’

  SEVEN

  Standing outside Leicester Square tube station on Saturday evening, Matt was early for a change. This was his fourth date with Suzy Needham, and for all the three previous occasions they’d gone out together, he hadn’t been on time. If Suzy was surprised, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Hi there Matt,’ she said, before throwing her arms around his neck and giving him a kiss. ‘It’s wonderful to see you. How are you?’

  ‘I’m great. All the better for seeing you.’

  ‘You charmer,’ she said, before planting another kiss on his lips and then breaking free.

  ‘Where shall we go first? It’s an hour before the film.’

  ‘Let’s find a bar,’ Matt said, ‘I could do with a drink.’

  ‘A tough day, or week?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  Matt and Suzy had been introduced by an actor friend of fellow HSA agent, Joseph Teller, and any time a gap in their schedules coincided, they would go out. Suzy was a writer of movie scripts, a screenwriter. She was more active than some, appearing almost every day at the movie shoot, rewriting, amending, and listening out for words and phrases that actors frequently tripped over.

  ‘How’s the new movie going?’ he asked as they walked.

  ‘It’s a bit of a pig’s breakfast if I’m being honest, but I’ve worked with this director once before. He tends to make a few false starts before he finally gets it right.’

  ‘Don’t film companies and directors plan these things in advance?’

  She nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. Luckily it wasn’t the one he’d bruised after tackling a gunman a couple of months back. It still hurt.

  ‘You’ve got a lot to learn about the movie business, Matt. I’ve seen directors come to a shoot without the foggiest idea about what they’re going to do. With all the actors assembled and awaiting his instructions, he might set them off doing what I would call acting school routines.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Oh, you know, he’ll ask them to behave like dogs, or to pretend one of them is invisible. It’s the sort of thing they do in acting schools, designed to limber the actors up, or for those new to the company to get to know one another.’

  ‘It sounds a crazy thing to do when it costs so much money to make a film, and when you’ve got so many people in the room with no idea what they’ll be doing next.’

  They were walking in the direction of Soho, where the cinema club they were going to this evening was located. They walked into a pub in Old Compton Street. Suzy went off to find a table while Matt stood at the bar waiting to be served. This wasn’t an example of him playing the alpha male, or the gallant gent; Suzy had made it clear at the outset she would always take her turn when it came to buying drinks and meals. Tonight, due to the luck of the draw, it was him standing at the bar and not her.

  ‘I love these original London pubs,’ Suzy said as he put the drinks down on the table and took a seat beside her. ‘All this polished wood, the windows, these brewery mirrors, have all been in place for decades, and more beers have been served than could fill a swimming pool.’

  Suzy was a brunette with shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, and lips frequently creased in a smile. She looked younger than her thirty-one years, which often gave her problems at work. Actors, thinking she was the director’s assistant or one of the runners, would order her to fetch them a coffee.

  ‘You could shoot one of the scenes from your movie in a place like this.’

  ‘Done it already, about two movies ago. Again
st everyone’s advice, the director insisted on a location shoot and not in the studio. The set designers could easily have recreated it. As expected, the filming was a nightmare. It was a pissing wet day and the pub was too tight for us to get inside with all the gear. Next, the camera was getting too much reflection from the bar, the pumps, and the mirrors. We had to laugh at the director’s tantrums or we’d all have gone mad.’

  Suzy’s thought processes operated at about a hundred miles an hour, while ideas came out of her mouth at a marginally slower speed. If Matt wanted to veg out and say nothing, she would do all the talking. At the start of their relationship, he put this down to the solitary nature of her work, sitting alone for hours, typing away on a script, but that wasn’t it. She came from a family of six children and, being the youngest, she had to pipe up if she wanted to be heard.

  ‘How was your week?’ she asked. ‘Nab any dangerous criminals?’

  ‘I’m working on a kidnapping at the moment. We picked a suspect up last night. We’re waiting for him to recuperate from a leg wound before questioning him.’

  ‘Hang on, was it you in Beckenham last night? It was, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘God almighty! What did the front page of The Standard call it? Gun Fight in Suburbia? Were you in any danger? I didn’t notice a limp, or any bits missing.’

  He laughed. ‘No. We never go into those situations unprotected. We had four big coppers with us, and they were armed to the teeth.’

  She took his hand across the table. ‘I don’t want anything happening to you, Matt. I’m only just getting to know you.’

  Matt smiled at Suzy across the table, hoping it appeared reassuring. ‘I don’t want to get injured any more than the next guy.’

  ‘Yeah, but I know how some of you people behave. In our business we call them stuntmen. Guys who take too many risks, but the laws of probability say you’ll come a cropper in the end.’