No Time to Lose: A Matt Flynn Thriller

by Iain Cameron

  Matt stopped, maintaining control of his breathing, while listening for any unknown occupant still in the house. The team knew about four men, but the surveillance operation hadn’t been in place long enough to know if one of their number was incapable of undertaking work. Perhaps someone too young, or too old, or someone who believed selling drugs was beneath their dignity.

  Moving quietly, he drew his gun and checked the downstairs rooms. He ignored the white powder smeared over the coffee table. He was looking for people, not drugs. One floor clear, he moved upstairs. The stairs creaked and squeaked but he had no choice. He pushed open the doors of each bedroom in turn and, relieved to find none of the beds occupied, he re-holstered his gun and headed back downstairs.

  He knew from what Jamil had told him, that only the ground floor needed to be searched for the holdall. Matt started in the lounge. He didn’t expect to find many hiding places, but he also wanted to see how they lived, and if they left packets of drugs or terrorist leaflets lying around.

  With the men working on a building site by day, he didn’t anticipate the house would be Molly Maid clean, but nor did he expect to see such a mess. Discarded food cartons and pizza boxes had been thrown on the floor, and empty glasses and cups were sitting on every flat surface. Dust was everywhere, which suggested they weren’t house-proud, or weren’t intending sticking around for long. He needed to be careful what he touched, as fingerprints would be obvious to the vigilant.

  Their lack of cleaning wouldn’t earn them a colour spread in Good Housekeeping, but it helped to confirm, if any confirmation was required, what they did in their spare time. Earlier, he’d noticed the glass-topped table was smeared with white powder, but when he looked closer, there was enough of what looked like cocaine to give a couple of druggies a decent hit for the evening.

  He entered the kitchen expecting it to be bad; it was worse. It was clear to him the men who stayed here lived like pigs. Dirty dishes were piled up in the sink with no room for more. Worktops were stained and littered with various bits of detritus, and the kitchen table so covered in plates, packets, and empty coffee cups, he couldn’t tell if it was made of wood or glass.

  Matt opened and closed all the cupboards he came across, including those not big enough to contain a sports holdall, without success. He walked into the hall and spotted a cupboard under the stairs.

  He bent down and pulled the door open. In front of him was the only thing the cupboard contained. The holdall left by Yusuf Batuk.

  NINETEEN

  Matt closed the front door of his house and set off for the gym at a moderate running pace. A perfectly good gym was installed in the basement of HSA HQ, a place he occasionally visited, but this required him to go into the office.

  The discovery of timing devices and explosives in the sports bag at the house in Hackney, had caused apoplexy in the corridors of every security agency they informed. The TFF were previously regarded by all as a small, insignificant and underfunded radical group who didn’t have the resources or capability to mount a credible threat. Matt was sure that was the reason HSA had been given the surveillance task by MI5. They believed the TFF group to be of no consequence, and thought the task would keep HSA out of their hair.

  The PM’s office, their eye on a major terrorist coup, were pressuring Gill to arrest Batuk and the men in the house immediately. Cooler heads, Gill included, were advocating caution.

  The occupants of the house were no more than foot soldiers, a forward party put in place to raise funds. They weren’t so sure about Batuk, though. He might have been one of them, or a fundraiser through his supermarket business, or he could be the puppet master pulling the strings.

  The people they wanted to grab hold of were those who had sourced the explosives, and the people or person leading the operation and deciding how to spend the profits from the drug dealing business. In the end, the PM’s ardour for a quick arrest was cooled with the promise of a bigger coup to follow. Matt had fitted a tracker to the bag, and another surveillance team had been detailed to watch and follow Yusuf Batuk.

  This new development may have excited the counter-terrorism boys, but it did nothing to assuage Matt’s fears for David Burke’s safety. They were no closer to finding him. The consensus of the heads of the security agencies involved was that David was dead, most likely killed after the information about the Lancaster House meeting had been extracted. His continued presence in any terrorist group’s custody would serve no useful purpose.

  In his previous role as a murder detective, Matt had been here before. Despite the direst of predictions, the victim turned up traumatised but otherwise safe and well. She had escaped the clutches of her kidnapper, who had kept her in a rural hut, turning up every night for over a month to feed and rape her. The police investigation team, of which Matt had been a member, had given up all hope of finding her alive, and their numbers had been scaled back after she had been missing for fifteen days. David had been missing for eleven.

  Matt had gone to the gym in his training gear, and therefore had no need for the changing rooms, but they did have strict rules about the wearing of outdoor shoes. After first making sure the soles of his trainers weren’t caked in mud, or any other unsavoury items discarded on the pavements of Clapham, which would have left a telltale track right to him, he entered the main area of the gym.

  It was early morning, around 7:15am, and the place was busy. In fact, gyms in London were busy most times of the day, and often into the night. When Matt first moved to Clapham, he’d thought the majority of those around him had to be students or housewives if they could go to the gym during working hours. Talking to neighbours, his nascent theory held as much water as a sieve. Most of the young people in the area were saddled with high mortgages they could barely afford, and it would be a disaster for them to be out of work for more than a couple of months.

  No, his fellow gym bunnies were people working from home, running their own businesses, working shifts, or those with an understanding boss who allowed them to shoehorn some leisure time into their day. Matt wasn’t burdened with such high debt. He had sold the house he and Emma Davis once shared together in Ingatestone, and utilised the capital it generated to buy the house in Clapham with only a manageable mortgage.

  Matt had come to the gym today to work with weights, he would leave the cardio machines: the rowers, step-climbers, and treadmills, to everyone else. He found an empty bench, put a bar on the rests at the back of it, and added some weights. He hadn’t told Doctor Webb in his medical the other day that the bullet wound in his shoulder was still nagging him. It was on the left side, and with him being right-handed, he reasoned, the muscles in his wounded arm weren’t getting enough exercise. Activities like the one he was about to start were designed to address this.

  In a way, he liked to be reminded of the injury, as the incident leading up to it was the one time he could say he had looked death straight in the eye. He’d been chasing a perp who had crashed his car, and but for the failing light, the bullet he’d fired at Matt would surely have hit him in the head, rather than the shoulder. Luckily, Rosie had downed him before he’d realised his aim had been off target.

  Doctors were bound by patient confidentiality, and Matt should have been able to confide in him about the pain he was suffering and asked what could be done to address it. Doctor Webb had other commitments outside the organisation, but in essence, he was an HSA employee, and Matt imagined, rightly or wrongly, that any weakness identified in his ability to operate as an agent would be communicated straight back to Gill.

  After bench-pressing for around fifteen minutes, Matt removed the weights from the bar and replaced them on the rack. He picked up two dumbbells from another rack and returned to the bench. He knelt on the bench with one leg and did a series of single-arm rowing exercises with each arm.

  Keeping hold of the weights, he lay down on the bench and with a dumbbell in each hand, lifted his arms through an arc into the air, bringing the dumbbells clos
e together. The previous exercises he had done had been leading to this. It was the one exercise which would exacerbate his wound. He winced as he did each rep, pain like needles shooting through his shoulder. However, around the fifth rep, the pain subsided. He completed ten reps, two more than normal, and still the shoulder didn’t bother him.

  He finished a number of other exercises with the dumbbells, this time using a lesser weight as a way of cooling down. He wasn’t such an optimist to believe the pain in his shoulder was gone for good, but he would take it as a positive sign that it was on the mend.

  After completing a series of other cool-down exercises, he walked out. He was tempted to stop off at the in-house café and avail himself of a treat from the pastry bar along with something to drink, but instead he headed outside and bought a takeaway coffee, deciding not to run home as he’d done enough exercise for one day.

  He was walking against the tide, away from the centre of Clapham and its busy underground station. His relaxed manner, a man who had been to the gym and was now enjoying a cup of well-earned coffee, drawing some dirty looks from a couple of harassed commuters.

  When he arrived home he headed straight upstairs for a shower. When he’d first moved into the house, he’d decided the main bathroom was the first room to be tackled for redevelopment. A local firm of plumbers stripped out everything and installed a tiled cubicle with a power shower.

  What he hadn’t anticipated was now with the bathroom looking swish, it made the rest of the house look a bit shabby. He’d made a start on repainting the hallway, and on researching builders to design and install a new kitchen, but everything had been put on the back-burner in the hunt to find David Burke.

  He was luxuriating in the hot water and Lynx shower soap when his phone rang. At least it sounded like his phone, as with the noise of the shower, water gurgling down the drain, and the steady beat of the pump which powered the shower, he couldn’t be sure. A minute or so later, he heard it again, and perhaps now with less water in his ears, he knew it was his phone.

  He wasn’t the type to stop what he was doing and stand in a rapidly spreading puddle of water to answer it. If it was something important, they would call back; if not, it couldn’t have been important. A younger version of himself would have rushed out only to find it was some incomprehensible bloke from an Indian call centre trying to sell him something, or an unnamed individual informing him he had recently been involved in an accident.

  Since buying the house he’d been pestered for a time by calls from various estate agents, lawyers, and on occasion, the marketing managers of building sites. If it was one of those, they could ring him back if they wanted to speak to him, but he had no intention of doing the same.

  He towelled himself dry and opened the window to let the steam out before walking into the bedroom. He had left his phone on the dresser, and picked it up. While selecting clothes with one hand, he looked to see who had phoned with the other: he’d missed three calls from Rosie.

  He dressed quickly and called her back.

  ‘Where the hell have you been Matt? I’ve been calling you for ages.’

  ‘Can’t a guy spend some me-time in the bathroom without being harassed by arsey work colleagues?’

  ‘Matt, I’m sorry to say, I’m the bearer of bad news. David Burke’s body has been found.’

  TWENTY

  Matt headed east following the directions of the car’s satnav, based on the details given to him by Rosie. He couldn’t believe it would end like this, with him heading to a dump site to view David Burke’s broken body. David had been a strong-willed individual, opinionated and resilient. No way did Matt see a bunch of Turkish terrorists, or whoever had taken him, being able to push him around.

  David had been in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Phillipa, who had now moved in with another man, a man she had been seeing for the previous two years. Despite the advice of David and well-meaning friends, Phillipa had engaged a top London divorce lawyer. Since then, the harmonious process they had been going through had turned acrimonious, with arguments over who should take ownership of the microwave, lawnmower, and the dog. In spite of this, Matt was convinced Phillipa would be distraught at hearing the news.

  He had no doubts about the effect David’s death would have on his two daughters, Hayley and Louise. He had met them both, and they doted on their father, despite his long absences while away on MI5 business. At the beginning of the split, the two girls had a little wobble, blaming David for splitting up the happy family, but this lasted only until their mother’s long-term lover appeared on the scene and moved in with Phillipa.

  What Matt wanted to do now was pull in the members of the TFF from the house in Hackney, plus Yusuf Batuk, and interrogate them. If they refused to talk, he would beat them to a pulp until they told him everything they knew about David’s kidnap and murder. Gill, however, was adamant this was not the best approach. HSA would continue their surveillance of the TFF, and find out what they intended to do now with the information they obtained from David. After having a look at the crime scene, Matt was to be assigned to other duties. In Gill’s view, Matt’s job had been to find David Burke. Irrespective of the circumstances, this investigation was now complete.

  Gill was banking on the PM’s intervention. Simon Moore, the PM’s advisor and someone he relied on heavily, was a ‘shoot from the hip’ sort of guy. This meant if someone raised an issue which he believed would generate significant levels of political capital and improve public opinion of the government, he would leap at the chance and demand immediate action. Gill also knew the PM was being counselled by all security agencies to play the long game, and he hoped this would result in HSA being left to track the TFF in the hope it would lead them to bigger fish.

  Playing over the facts of the case in his head, he still believed an associate of Byron Locke, or at least someone he knew and trusted, had asked him to kidnap David Burke. Researchers were currently examining Locke’s financial transactions, looking for an anomaly such as a large payment made for services rendered.

  This was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, as Locke owned a Byzantine-range of real companies, any one of which could have been in receipt of an unusually sizable deposit. This would also apply to the illegal businesses he operated, but Matt didn’t think him stupid enough to push dirty money through legitimate bank accounts, as he knew the security services were able to access them. Irrespective of the difficulties, it was important to look.

  Matt knew a man like Locke would only soil his hands to do something not directly to his own benefit if he knew and respected the requestor. Any money paid would be an irrelevance to such a rich individual, and instead, he would be more interested in the kudos it would bring or the favour he would be owed.

  He was deep in thought, driving on automatic, and slavishly relying on the satnav for directions. It was no wonder some people found themselves heading down increasingly narrower roads until the car couldn’t go any further, or approaching the top of a high cliff.

  It was a good job David had been his friend and not Rosie’s. She had been okay since returning to active duty following the scare at the boxing gym, but she still appeared a little fragile, as if it wouldn’t take much to knock her off her axis. If she had to deal with the death of someone close to her, it would be too much to bear, and with no one at home to lean on or to offer comfort, he would imagine her downward spiral would surely be rapid and debilitating.

  He was so disconnected with today’s journey it took him time to realise he was now in Essex and heading towards Epping Forest. His destination had to be somewhere in the Forest, as the satnav indicated there were only two miles to go.

  His head started to spin; he had to reduce the speed of the car in case he did something stupid. It was a good job the roads around this place were quiet, with no one directly behind him. Epping Forest was the place where his partner Emma Davis’s body had been found, not far from where he was now. Was someone trying to sen
d him a message?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Matt parked the car in a lay-by in Epping Forest, the crime scene about fifty metres further on. Before getting out, he tried to cast all thoughts that somehow David Burke’s murder was connected with him to one side. It was one thing for Matt to be allowed to work on this investigation, in spite of his friendship with David, but quite another for him to believe it revolved around him. Whether true, or a simple but macabre coincidence, if he suggested as much, it would be him sent for a psychiatric assessment, not Rosie.

  Matt’s former partner, Emma Davis, had been a detective inspector in a Met drug squad. During an operation, she was shot and killed by Roderick Lamar, a drug dealer, at a house in Romford. In the room was Emma, her rat of a colleague, Jack Harris, latterly a Met Police Detective Inspector, and standing guard outside the door, Lamar’s muscular bodyguard, Reno.

  Matt had killed Lamar, and also made sure Jack Harris and Reno received some serious jail time. The man who had ordered the killing, Lamar’s uncle and boss of the drug running business they all worked for, Simon Wood, was on the run, whereabouts unknown. Although Emma had been killed at the house in Romford, her body had been dumped here, in Epping Forest.

  He walked into the forest, following a well-trodden trail between the trees, and headed for the activity up ahead in a clearing. He then followed the directions of the copper standing guard at the start of the crime tape border, to deter curious hikers and nosier journalists. Memories of making the same trip when Emma’s body had been found came flooding back, but he did his best to dismiss them. This was about David, not Emma or himself.

  He approached Rosie.