The Boardman Files

by Gus Ross

  “Of course Sir. Please leave it with me and I will make sure it is picked up with the rest of the mail first thing tomorrow.”

  “What do I owe you?” I asked feeling a little embarrassed that I may have laid it on a bit thick.

  “Not at all Sir, I’ll put it through the franking machine. My own mother is getting on a bit too these days and I know how important the little things can be, I am just happy to be able to help out.”

  Now I really did feel like the bad guy, but in the grand scheme of things it was only really a white lie. As I returned to the bar to wait for my dear wife I had a brief proud feeling that pushed the anguish and fear to one side for a bit. I was not always the sharpest tool in the box but I had figured that whatever was in the brown envelope was most likely what everyone had been looking for and that keeping it here with me might not be the best idea. If I had been followed, then I certainly did not want to be caught holding the baby if they finally caught up with me and if my dear wife was not picking up her calls then the chances were that she had gone to ground. Yes, I was pleased with myself and after all what was the worst that could happen? If my wife appeared before the post went out I’d simply retrieve the envelope and if not then I was long overdue a visit to my mum’s. I sat back in my chair and ordered some more coffee and waited.

  As is often the way when you start to shake the big apple tree at the top of the drive - the one that sits on the private ground and has its own road leading up to it with the big ‘Private Property Keep Out’ sign that really should have said ‘Fuck Off Oiks’ and where all the big boys play and you aren’t even allowed to watch- once it starts to move, you can be certain that you are going to grab someone’s attention pretty quickly. And quite often it is the bloke sitting right at the top.

  DI Bright had not just been shaking the tree, he had pretty much pulled a big yellow JCB right up to its gnarled trunk and was now in the process of trying to bring it crashing down around him. He had a pretty good idea what would come of it, that was the intention. Watt had brought him something that stank like a Mexican sewer and as was regularly the case with that particular sewer system, it had gotten all blocked and clogged up. They were onto something big but they were in need of a break. He was asking some pretty direct questions and making as much noise as possible with as many of the senior brass as he could and he expected to get his wrists slapped. But that was not what concerned him. What concerned him was that if something did fall from above, then it was likely that not even a hard hat would be enough to protect him.

  George Thomson sat close to the top of the tree in question, as too had the now sadly deceased Charles Hanson. Hanson of course had not been in the least bit worried about what plod were up to; his client was never going to be linked to any of the goings on with Osram and Hendrick. As far as he had been concerned they could rock the boat like a tsunami and it would make no difference.

  Thomson on the other hand was very interested. He desperately needed to tie something to Howison, and judging by the files he had been looking at earlier in the day, Bright and Watt were on the right track, but there was a piece of it missing, the vital piece that links the whole god damn railway together and without which the rest of it was just a useless pile of junk; a train track that went nowhere, that suddenly stopped just in the middle of the countryside, miles from the station he wanted to get to, sending all the rolling stock tumbling down the embankment.

  He had hoped like hell that Howison would break cover and the self-righteous American had not let him down, but he hadn’t really given him anything. He still needed the vital piece of track. So, for now, it suited him just fine to have Bright and Watt shake things up a bit. He too was hoping that something juicy might just have fallen out from the tree, but unfortunately when the call had come from Howison to meet, there was still nothing.

  I spent a good few hours sitting in the bar area, I had heard the sound of sirens not long after I decided to post the package to dear old mum; they had increased in intensity until it sounded like every available member of the emergency services was on their way somewhere in a hurry. At first I thought they might be coming for me but then almost immediately I thought of my wife. But there was nothing I could do but sit and wait. I tried to find out what was going on but all that anybody knew was that the whole area down by the Pavilion had been cordoned off and that there had been shots fired. There was some speculation that someone had been shot but there were no details.

  I watched the news, along with all the residents of the bar and half the hotel staff, who had stopped what they had been doing in the hope of getting an update, but there was nothing on BBC or ITV. I was beginning to feel like I had been here before as well. Finally, in a state that was not quite panic but getting pretty close, I left the hotel and tried to make my way down to the scene. I got no further than a few hundred yards along the road before being turned back by a particularly unhelpful grunt of a police officer who was probably pissed that he had Friday night duty and was determined to share his miserable demeanour with anyone who crossed his path.

  Soon I was back at the hotel and pestering the check in girl again. Still no answer.

  In the end I had no choice but to take a room for the night, there was nothing else for it. The manager explained how, despite him having no doubt that I was indeed Eva Richards husband, that policy dictated that I could not be given a key to her room and that instead I needed to get one of my own. By that stage I had little will to argue with him and so here I was sitting in the Honeymoon suite of the Tudor, trying to find any kind of news bullet that might give me some information about what had taken place. There was of course nothing.

  A complete news blackout.

  The local residents no doubt thought they were in the middle of Afghanistan or some equally war torn part of the world, but as far as the general public was concerned there was nothing going on at all. I would never trust good old Aunty Beeb again.

  I lay on the oversized honeymoon bed, that had no doubt seen more than its fair share of excitement over the years, staring endlessly between the ceiling and the door, hoping that somehow she might arrive, that somehow I would hear the key in the lock and there she would be in front of me but also hoping that Thomson’s men or the Ruskie’s would not come bulldozing through the door and whisk me away forever.

  I do not remember sleeping although I do recall another of those bizarrely confused dreams that only seem to come when you are out on your feet, so I suppose I must have dropped off at some point.

  And nobody came to the door.

  The next morning a number of things happened and I am not entirely certain as to the correct order of events, but like everything up to this point I have tried my best to tell it as it was.

  I had come down from the honeymoon suite before the rest of the hotel had woken and certainly well before the sun had made it across the English Channel. The front doors were locked and most of the lights were off. For a brief moment I felt like a prisoner. Not long after I would be, well after a fashion.

  I had finally found the night porter who happily opened the front door for me and then I was outside in the freezing cold of the morning. I just had to get out of that place, it was suffocating me. I needed to find out what had happened but had no idea how to go about it. My second attempt to get close to the site of the previous nights gunfight had me walk straight into the arms of a man named Sam Holt; a man who recognised me before I recognised what was happening, and who seemed very pleased to see me.

  It seems ridiculous when I think about it, but before I had time to even start asking any of the questions that had been raging between my ears for the whole of the previous night, I was, yet again, in the back of a car that was not of my choice, only this one had blacked out windows and some rather scary looking blokes who had chosen to sit either side of me.

  I decided to talk to them instead, but they were clearly some form of robotic android that currently had their programme set to silent mode. I tri
ed to make my excuses and leave, but soon discovered that their programme setting clearly included restraining the passenger if he tried to escape. I decided to give up for now and wait for the man who had set the programme.

  Bob Sutherland had also woken early that morning, although not quite as early as some. He made himself a full fried English breakfast complete with his favourite potato scones and had even gone to the bother of making a pot of tea, something he normally reserved for visitors, but they were very few and far between these days.

  He had laid out his suit and freshly ironed shirt the night before and they sat as proudly as they could on the back of his worn sofa above his now heavily polished, but still rather battered, shoes. This was a special day for him and he was giving it the respect it deserved. He would follow his instructions to the letter as always, but this time they were different and he already knew that this would be the last thing he was going to be asked to do. It was just a gut feeling but he had learned over the years to trust his instincts.

  Breakfast finished, the dishes could wait till later, and on with the suit and tie. He had even bothered to shave and his dry looking skin had that kind of prickled red look that was only really possible with an old fashioned razor. He caught his reflection in the hall mirror and breathed in, puffing out his weary chest as best he could. He felt good. He tucked the A4 envelope marked MH15-300 under his left arm and left his tiny flat.

  Bournemouth gardens run for about two miles following the Bourne Stream. At some time during the previous night the torn, and heavily bloodstained, remains of some jeans had been found in the central part of the gardens. There was no sign of the person who had been wearing them and although tracker dogs had eventually been brought in, even they could not find a scent to follow.

  The search would go on throughout the night but not even the thermal imaging and Nightsun search lights of the Eurocopter EC 135 T could locate the person they were looking for.

  She had vanished into the night and she would never be found.

  There would be speculation that due to the amount of blood she must have lost that she was dead and that her body would be located in due course. The search would continue for three full days before being scaled back, but her body would never be located.

  The press had finally released a story that an unknown woman, believed to have been an illegal immigrant, most likely from Eastern Europe, had gone berserk with a gun in the quiet seaside resort of Bournemouth, killing a number of innocent bystanders before being shot and killed by SCO19, the Specialist Crime Operations firearm support unit.

  It was one of those perfectly plausible press releases that hit the headlines for a day or so and then everyone forgets about them. They had even managed to tie in the lock down at Bournemouth Train Station as an attempt to locate and prevent her from escaping the scene.

  You had to hand it to those boys; they could spin almost anything and make it sound like the truth.

  Bob Sutherland drew up his black Fiat Uno in a space marked for visitors and walked calmly into the police station. He approached the Desk Sergeant and in the most commandeering voice he could muster, requested to speak with DI Bright.

  “DI Bright is it. Can I ask what it refers to?”

  “If you could tell him that I have something that I think will be of great interest to him,” said Sutherland, who had been rehearsing his lines for most of the night.

  “Right, take a seat Sir and I will see if he is available.”

  It would not be long before DI Bright was sitting back at his desk with the A4 envelope. He had asked the man in the suit and shiny battered shoes just what it was that he was delivering but he had been unable to tell him anything more than his client had told him; to deliver it in person to him. He had not even been able to tell him who his client was, but then that was not a first. It was clear that the man who had come to see him was merely the messenger and that there was no mileage in trying to get anything out of him. He had the man’s name but that was all, assuming it was his real name.

  Later he would have wished that he had taken things a little more seriously, but he was a busy man and he could not have foreseen the impact of what he had just been given. He opened the envelope with interest but without any great expectation.

  Within five minutes of opening it he was on the phone to Sergeant Watt. Within an hour of that phone call, the big boys, whom he had always expected to come in and steal the ball, had done just that. Both he and Watt had been left in no uncertain terms that the contents of the unremarkable A4 envelope were a matter of national security and that their little investigation ended right there and then. They were also reminded of the Official Secrets Act they had both signed and the consequences if anything ever leaked out that could be traced back to either of them.

  The late Charles Hanson had always known who the final recipient of his little package would be, even when he made the final call to Mr Bob Sutherland. But there was a final element of twisted pleasure in knowing that he had not handed everything directly to him and perhaps, just perhaps, the local plod named Bright might have had enough balls to go it alone and make everyone look bad. After all he had made a pretty good job of putting the pieces together in terms of Osram and Hendrick.

  But whatever way it was to play out he didn’t really care; he knew he was not going to be around to see it. If Mac’s boys didn’t finish him off then he was perfectly set to do the job himself. He was a dead man walking whatever way he looked at it; a bullet with Howison’s name on it, or with his, or the chair for his part in setting up Hendrick and goodness knows how many others he had helped Howison ‘put away’ over the years. But he had gone down fighting and now all the information he had squirreled away over the years, courtesy of a sad little lawyer that he had never met, was going to bring down the whole shit pile. His only disappointment was that he would not be around long enough to see the expression on that fat bastard Howison’s face when it all hit the fan.

  George Thomson was of course the final recipient of the package. And he was beyond delighted when he received it. His primary objective had always been to uncover the mole. The one that for years had been slipping someone the information on A.P.R.I.L., the one whose information had no doubt almost got Boardman assassinated eighteen months ago, when he was on the brink of his amazing discovery, the one who had leaked the whole Russian agent set up that ultimately led to the killing of Lucian Hendrick and all those unfortunate casualties that followed as a result of it.

  He had always suspected it was Charles Hanson, or maybe someone even higher up that food chain. In fairness, he had always hoped it would be Hanson; there was just something so terribly disagreeable about that smarmy American.

  He had to congratulate himself for the way he had set things up. He had deliberately kept Hanson out of the loop with regards to the ‘dummy data’ he had let the SVR sleeper extract from Boardman. As far as Hanson had been concerned there was a real breach and the information that was about to be handed over was the real deal. The fact that Ulyana Lyalyushkin had decided to have a fit of consciousness and hand it over to the boys at C.E.R.N. was just an irrelevance; the data was nothing more than some plausible sounding fake.

  He had made sure that all the intel’ on her planned drop to her Russian superiors was duly shared with all parties, and then all he had to do was wait and see what would happen next. If he was right, and he almost always was, then there was no way that handoff would be allowed to go as planned.

  And, sure as eggs were eggs, everything he had expected to happen had happened; even the other obnoxious Yank Howison had come forward and shown his hand. The only problem was that there was nothing to tie him to any of it.

  Until now that was.

  He had spent most of the night in total frustration; the fiasco down in Bournemouth and then the report of Charles Hanson’s gun crazed spree and ultimate assassination had left him a sitting duck. He could point the finger all he liked at Howison, but all he had was a host of d
ead bodies scattered all over the country and not one piece of hard evidence that linked him to any of it, or the name of the mole for that matter.

  He would have some serious explaining to do.

  But now he was sitting with everything and he could only thank his lucky stars.

  Of course there was a deep irony in that it was Hanson that had finally provided him with the elusive evidence he had craved for, but perhaps that was just the way of it. He was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if it was a dead one who had betrayed all those around him and all those that he was supposed to protect and serve.

  He had all the information he required to put Mac Howison away for a very long time indeed and apart from the collateral damage, he had not even spilled the milk when it came to A.P.R.I.L. Even the tragic suicide of Boardman, whilst being far from ideal, would not hamper the programme; what he had discovered was well documented and there were as many brilliant minds coming along behind him as they required. In fact Boardman had pretty much run his course.

  But there was something niggling at the back of his mind, something that was nothing more than a feeling and that he had finally chosen not to pay too much attention to. He had given it some thought initially and finally dismissed it; sometimes men do strange unpredictable things when their heart is broken and he had no doubt that she had broken his. But still there was something about Alexander Boardman’s suicide that was slightly off; he just wasn’t the type.

  The girl was most likely dead or certainly would be if she ever decided to ‘turn up’, and anyway she had nothing more than a bunch of dummy data. And apart from some knuckle wrapping that he would need to hand out to his old friend Vladimir (just another farcical piece of political gesturing), he had managed to somehow manoeuvre his way through the whole minefield without kicking off a huge international incident.

  Yip he had pretty much covered all the bases.

  And now there was only one thing left to do.