The Path of the Bullet

by M C Jacques

  “So, the Gang’s all here!”

  The tiered, spacious car park aside GR7 had been virtually empty when McKay had arrived. Its unexpected emptiness suggested to him that it was one of the conference centre’s quieter days – a curious occurrence if, indeed, a full blown conference was in full session. Certainly, a number of cars had been exiting as McKay had turned off the A505, yet only a handful of other cars remained. One of these was the steely grey metallic Jaguar ‘S’ Type which McKay at once clocked as belonging to Mr Dickinson. A rather sad and rusty old Golf was slumped lopsidedly in a far corner not far from a dull-red Citroen van.

  Quite close by GR7’s well-signed ‘Reception Office’, a black, sporty looking Vauxhall Astra was parked. McKay noticed the wide ‘performance’ rear tyres and twin exhaust ports as he looked more closely. Further along from the Astra, one of the new Ford Focuses, in a light metallic blue, was nestled neatly in its own, secluded corner. McKay could see no evidence that Jay Gould had been here. Neither was there any evidence to suggest that he hadn’t been and gone.

  The first time his phone flashed (he’d silenced its ringer), the words ‘JAY GOULD Mob’ lit up with a vivid exigency on the tan-coloured, back-lit screen. McKay depressed the green answer symbol with fervour, registering, in the process, that his hands were now clammier than they had been only seconds before. “Jay, hello! Hello! Is everything OK?” There was no voice at all to be heard, but there was a scuffling, a struggle, a scraping of the mouthpiece, then a deathly thud of impact, encored only by a faint sigh, too faint, in fact, for him to identify it with any surety as having been uttered by Jay himself. The call was then ended and, even before McKay had replaced the phone back into his jacket pocket, he was hurrying towards the conference centre’s reception.

  The receptionist, in her mid to late twenties, ruddy, with fine, jet black hair and of stocky structure, was noticeably unruffled by the urgency invested in McKay’s opening request for immediate access to a Mr C A Dickinson who was meeting a Mr Al-Khali.

  Dutifully, whilst eyeing a security guard of megalithic stature close by the door over McKay’s right shoulder, she pressed a buzzer on the button-rich control panel just to her left. “Mr McKay to see Mr C A Dickinson and Mr Al-Khali.”

  “Yes, Mr McKay, you can go in to see Mr Dickinson and Mr Al-Khali straight away. They’re in Private Conference Room 8, along that corridor on the right hand side. It’s clearly numbered. You’ll need to knock.” The woman also pointed in the direction, obligingly, and McKay was on his way, impressed by her unruffled, if unhurried, calmness.

  Taking a deepish breath and attempting to steady himself, McKay knocked firmly on the sturdy beech-wood door. Initially, silence pervaded and then the door was opened ajar by a tall, suited gentleman, perhaps in his late thirties, brandishing a warm and assuring smile. “Mr McKay, come in, please. We’ve been expecting you!”

  The receptionist suspected nothing, at first. The muffled dronings from the hapless, bound and gagged Mr Dickinson barely reached even the sturdy door of the conference room. She did not hear the tall Arab reload his pistol before marching McKay out through a staff and fire exit door at the far end of the corridor. Neither was she aware that anything was untoward when the statuesque blonde from the Anglodeutscheflugorganization, holding a small meeting in Room 8, took a walk outside, apparently forgetting to sign out of the building, and did not return immediately.

  In fact, it was not until almost exactly twenty minutes past five that the girl from reception, Sandra Holsworth to be correct, realised that something was definitely wrong. The large blonde woman had not even signed in, it seemed. And she had now vanished quite out of sight. And the alarm on the Ford Focus, parked in the far corner, had been activated again. Finally, she had deemed that Security had better take a look into just what was going on about the place!

  45

  “One door closes, another one closes…”

  It had been an inauspicious start to the day for DI Burrows; for a start, the pressure from his superior, Roger Bolstridge, had been building up and he was now finally beginning to lean upon him directly for results. ‘Too many uncoiled ends, Burrows. Dead soldiers, dead man, dead woman – shot with what looks like an Iranian gun, of all things; a missing woman, and missing Arabs!’ Worse still, he surmised, his desk was in a mess and he was at least one mug of strong tea down on his quota for the morning. “Sutton!” blurted the reddening DI in an atypical and, it must be said, unbecoming yelp for assistance, “Have ballistics run their tests on Matt Fothergill’s Draguover, or whatever the blessed thing’s called, yet?”

  He knew that he’d been expecting too much of Mountfitchet and the suspiciously alcoholic son of his old RAF colleague, McKay. Come to think of it, they sound more like a firm of solicitors than amateur sleuths, he thought. But he’d come to quite like Mountfitchet, and McKay for that matter. And they had come through with connections which had proved extremely useful, he conceded to himself. Neither the FBI nor the CIA would have furnished the CID with anything like the information and the contacts that McKay’s Manhattan computer fiend had turned up. Never! Not even if Interpol had begged them to!

  Lifting his heavy eyes, just as Sutton scuttled into his office, tap-tapping on the already ajar door as she did so, he again encountered the storm-damaged topology of the ‘deskscape’ before him. “Oh, Sutton! Just one more thing before you shoot off to interview that Dewson chappie…”

  She drew in a deep breath, and without utterance or further delay set about sorting and rectifying the gallimaufry which had accumulated upon her DI’s expansive desk over the preceding weeks. Yes, weeks!, she thought to herself.

  For his part, the agitated Burrows half stomped, half strode around his parquet-floored office thinking hard, wanting to speak and then not wanting to. “You know, Sutton, I work damned hard at this job; I give it my very best shot, one hundred percent – Pat would say one hundred and ten percent – of the time; six days one week, seven days the next. I get no thanks from Mr High and Mighty, Bolstridge, the Jag guy, I get very occasional thanks from Joe Public, the Fiesta guys, and at the moment I just don’t know what the heck to make of things. Bodies strewn all over the place, missing bodies, well, persons, strewn all over the place, no doubt! I don’t know if I’m coming or I’m going – and it’s not very often you’ll hear me say that!” At this, Sutton managed to suppress – with commendable competence – what would have been an instinctive, and contra-flowing, interruption. “I mean, even McKay isn’t answering his mobile this morning! Now that is unusual.” He ended in an altogether ordinary, even dull, tone. Looking across at the young, becoming woman PC, who had diligently resumed her sorting and stacking, he noticed that she appeared a mite distressed, too. And then his phone rang.

  Sutton at once reached across the now unrecognisable desk and snatched the green receiver, her eyes darting around her and her fine neck distinctly veined. “Hello, DI Burrows’ office, WPC Sutton speaking.” Somehow – and he could simply not explain why, not even to his wife at The Otter on the canal near Ely the following Saturday evening – he, DI Burrows, sensed, no, he simply knew, that matters were just about to become a whole lot worse. And everybody knew that he was not a superstitious man. Sutton’s facial expression oozed concern and trepidation in roughly even measure as she gingerly handed the telephone to her boss.

  It was obvious, even to the younger and far lesser experienced WPC that this was not just any old call. It was not routine stuff. “Now just… just try calming down a little, Mr Fothergill, and then I might just be able to make some sense out of what you’re telling me, or trying to tell me, anyway. Yes, you’ve told me four times already that it is missing! No, please hear me… please hear me out, Mr Fothergill! Explain to me what exactly is missing and where it’s missing from; that’ll be a start! Right, well, that’s a start.” There was a pause, quite an extended one. It wasn’t pregnant, but it was most definitely laboured. �
�Let me just get this straight, Mr Fothergill.” Burrows was shaking his head but Sutton was unable to settle on whether this was in total despair or comprised an expression of sheer incredulity at what Matt Fothergill was telling him. Even so, Burrows retained his composure for the most part. “Just stay put, Mr Fothergill! Stay exactly where you are at this moment; we’re coming over and we’re on our way this minute.”

  Sutton stared coldly directly at her superior almost marvelling at the degree of his patent exasperation. Burrows looked across, and down slightly, still shaking his head. “Matt Fothergill has just told me, well, I’m pretty certain he’s just told me that his wife has gone AWOL and so has between sixty and seventy-five thousand pounds from the Imperial War Museum’s funds.”

  “How on earth…?”

  “Siphoned off bit by bit, it would seem, through ‘cunning manipulation of the books’, to use Fothergill’s words, by a senior member of staff. That’s what he said, or implied, if I’ve got him right, of course. He’s in one hell of a state! Come on – off we go!”

  “But his wife isn’t on the Senior Management Team at the museum. Well, certainly not in any official capacity!”

  “Exactly, Sutton, exactly!”

  46

  Tied up in a meeting

  “No! Let me point out to you, Mr Burrows, that this whole matter is very unusual, sir! We are not used to our clients behaving in such a, such a, let us say, ‘cavalier’ manner.” He glanced across, eyeing the ailing Mr Dickinson whose unfortunate plight meant that he still remained most securely bound to his beech-framed chair (the type one encounters in modern free churches) by hoops of thick, newish-looking rope and securely gagged by a wide, highly adhesive ‘extra strong’ masking tape. DI Burrows, for his part, did not like being interrupted and, indeed, was not accustomed to being so treated, neither, we should add, did he liked to be addressed as ‘Mister’. Nevertheless, his eyes followed those of his addressee and rested upon the now nearly motionless and voiceless profile of Mr C A Dickinson.

  Brad Winters was a strapping thirty-something year old from the better side of Adelaide, who had been capped several times by the Wallabies Under 18s. Some four months earlier, upon receiving news of his appointment as Events Manager at GR7 – via a call from a director of its parent company to his mobile phone whilst in an Enfield hostelry – he had commenced his celebrations forthwith; firstly, with a proclamation of his generous nature by ordering ‘drinks all round’ and then, soon after, by an equally robust affirmation of his masculine nature, sleeping with, depending on which one of the locals’ reports of this scurrilous stint is to be believed, between three and five of the gaggle of wives and mothers, which comprised the hen party in full flow at the far end of the Three Horseshoes’ public bar.

  “Be that as it may, Mr Winters, I need to get this area sealed off. There may be quite a lot at stake here. More than you could be expected to possibly imagine, in fact!” Upon hearing those words, two uniformed officers set about escorting non-essential personnel back and away from Conference Room 8. “After that, you’d better take a look around the car park. Check each vehicle out. Each one, get it! And ask the SOCO team to come in here when they’ve finished with McKay’s car.”

  Burrows then looked across at the wide-eyed, hopeful Mr Dickinson. “I see you didn’t think to help this poor soul out of his predicament, Mr Winters! Sutton, will you unpick that stuff off Mr Dickinson gingerly. Do the tape first, before the glue bonds with the skin any more than it has done already! Then bag it all and get it off to the lab, quickly! Tell them to look for everything, anything they can find!” The WPC nodded and knelt down in front of her mute patient.

  “Well, I did think about it,” began Winters, glancing briefly across at the entwined Mr Dickinson, “but I guessed you fellows might want to check it over for fingerprints and all the other things you fellows check for.” Winter’s open palms helped to plead his case. “I mean, I’d have left my own prints on them, wouldn’t I, and you fellows might imagine that I’d, well, that I’d had something to do with it, right?”

  Burrows issued a vacant stare at Winters. “Just get a first-aider here… please! No, cancel that.”

  His attention turned towards his loyal WPC. “Now, don’t say anything, Sutton! Just carry on… as slowly, as gradually as you like, careful now… easy does it!” The eyes of those remaining were drawn to Sutton as her hands cradled the cranium of the expectant captive. But the faces of the voyeurs stiffened as the first few centimetres of the manifold gagging were slowly peeled off; the tearing sound resembling that of heavy duty Velcro. And this raw, tender ripping of the industrial, all-weather adhesive tape – unwillingly relinquishing its intimate contact with human flesh – seemed to last for an eternity.

  Then, finally, in one agonising crescendo of what could have been mistaken by the patient for a vicarious assumption of the sum of human torment, the last few centimetres were torn away from his bleeding, beetroot lips and Mr Dickinson’s head slumped forward, causing both nurse Sutton and Burrows a degree of momentary concern. Propping her patient’s head back a little further than it had been, Sutton looked across at her boss. “Sir, would you get PC Downham to fetch the first aid kit from the car? He knows where it is. We ought to get some cream on his face; it’s raw! In fact, it’s as dry as the Sahara!” Burrows nodded and went to locate the PC. He was gone for only a few seconds.

  “Sort out some tea! And a few biscuits – something sweet!” enjoined the DI as he repositioned a chair aside the relieved but wearied Mr Dickinson. Winters, in turn, manually signalled, via his two index fingers, a similar injunction to a young male assistant, who had already served one round of tea to the others.

  “Well, Mr Dickinson, I came here directly from meeting Matt Fothergill in his office at the Royal War Museum, Tuxford. Now, what are you able to tell us, then? Here, drink this. Thank you, Mr Winters. Right from the beginning, please, Mr Dickinson, right from the beginning.”

  Having cleared the room successfully, applied succour to the face and hands of the tremulous Mr Dickinson, Sutton had begun scouring the floor, walls and corners of the room for any pertinent details which would help to clarify what exactly had taken place. The monotonous tones from the corridor faded as Burrows’ two officers shunted GR7’s staff and other fascinated bodies, from the nearby ‘Helsinki’ Conference Suite, back along the corridor towards the Reception entrance.

  “Sutton, take this down, get every last detail, but pronto! Mr Dickinson is telling us some very interesting things. Hmmm, very interesting indeed!”

  It was just at this moment that a junior member of the GR7 security team burst in, panting. “One of our guys saw them leave – they’re in a red, four by four Toyota, ‘S’ reg’, and two sevens in the number plate. It’s nicked. It’s Joe the groundsman’s and it’s nearly out of diesel, too! They almost ran a delivery van off the road as they cut across the exit heading towards the M11. But Joe reckons they’ll need fuel –even if they’re to get as far as Cambridge!”

  47

  “Bugs”

  “Well, Mr Dickinson, you’ve been through quite an ordeal and you have been most helpful but I’m afraid that we’ll need to press on and complete our chat on a later occasion. I’m confident that the information you’ve already given to myself and WPC Sutton will be of the utmost value in locating these terrorist thugs and, indeed, poor old McKay. Our people are already after their truck.”

  “Oh well, I do hope so! The sad thing is that I’d worked out such a promising package of investments and offshore pension bonds for Mr Al-Khali…”

  “I’m sure that you had, Mr Dickinson,” proclaimed Burrows, now desperate to get back to Cambridge and almost exultantly patting the recuperated Mr Dickinson on his back as he walked him towards the door. “I’m quite sure that you had! In fact, I’ve been so impressed at the manner in which you’ve handled all this, that I may well be paying you a little vis
it myself over the coming months!”

  “Oh, well, that would be nice! You would be most welcome,” announced Mr Dickinson, buoyed, ever so slightly, at the prospect. “We do a very thorough survey on behalf of our clients until we find just the right policy; one that fits like a glove!” His voice was softened but still carried enthusiasm.

  “Excellent! Excellent,” concurred DI Burrows who shook the cordially outstretched hand of his new financial advisor.

  Just as Mr Dickinson was exiting Conference Room 8, it became apparent that there was something afoot. Gill, the other PC, pushed in just before the door was shut.

  “Boss! You better come and see this.” The two men, tailed by Sutton, bolted down the corridor, corkscrewing past Brad Winters’ ongoing, vigorous protestations and complaints about fire regulations being breached and out into the car park.

  “Over here, boss! He’s okay, but we’d better get him inside!”

  Out of the rear of the nearly new Ford Focus emerged a battered and bruised Jay Gould. Shivering with bitter cold and sporting a demeanour which most certainly was a white shade of pale; to put it mildly, it was clear to all present that the unfortunate American had been locked in the boot of the Focus for some considerable time.

  “I heard this faint tapping, boss. Just picked it up. They’d locked the car, but couldn’t have checked the rear hatch properly, so it just opened! His name is Gould, James, I think.”

  “Right. Good work, Downham. Let’s get him into the warmth, quickly.” Burrows was in his element here. “Sutton, get a medic out here, one of ours, double quick! And find out who the first-aider is inside GR7 and ask them to check out this fellow now, at once. Mr Winters is very ‘hot’ on regulations, it seems, so there should be somebody at hand.” Sutton sprinted back across the car park to Reception. Gill and Downham propped and guided the faltering Jay Gould along the slabbed pathway back towards the main building.