by Faith Martin
Even though Tommy Lynch and all the rest looked impressive in protective padding, with riot shields, hard helmets and nice big hefty truncheons, she knew how false such a look of imperviousness could be. Bullets shattered shields, broke helmets apart, and did very nasty things to flesh and bone, no matter how well padded it was.
Still, she could understand why the powers that be had vetoed guns. For all that they were on the canal, they were also in the heart of the city, with snoozing terraced cottages on one side and other boats moored around the Kraken.
She listened in approval as Regis outlined his softly-softly approach. There was no point going in there yelling like a horde of Mongols.
Sergeant “Picks” Pickering, older than Methuselah, had been co-opted to see if he could get into the boat without the aid of a battering ram.
When Hillary had arrived at the Big House over an hour ago, she’d been the first person he’d approached, asking about boat doors, locks, safety features, alarms and such that he’d be likely to come across on a narrowboat.
She told him all she knew. Her own boat had bolts, top and bottom. Her uncle had never fitted a Yale lock since the doors on boats weren’t anything like the front or back doors of houses. At least, they weren’t on the Mollern, but then she was an old boat, twenty at least. Hillary wasn’t so sure about the new state-of-the-art ones. She’d seen a hotel narrowboat once, long, sleek, and from what she could glimpse through the windows, complete with every mod con you could hope for. Now those might have Yale locks and a burglar alarm.
However, she’d been relieved to see from the photos taken by Tanner and his mate yesterday that the Kraken wasn’t brand new by any means. Which was good news for Picks.
Nobody knew what Picks’s real name was. Hillary found this rather alarming, as if not knowing his name was a bad omen. The old-timer crept along the towpath and the mist seemed to swirl around him. He was in uniform and the dark blue suit enabled them to track his progress with relative ease. Regis and Mel had binoculars, but Hillary wasn’t sure that they’d be of much help, not in these conditions.
She wished Picks wasn’t quite so old. Surely he should have retired by now? Or was he just one of those men who looked ancient when they were really only fifty? He was a tall, skinny, scarecrow-like figure, who seemed to be permanently in danger of being bowled over by the slightest gust of wind.
She supposed she wasn’t the only one feeling beset by pangs of guilt. Here they all were, in places of strategic cover, the men young and fit and pumped up on testosterone and distant memories of The Bill on telly, while it was poor old Picks who was actually out there on the front line.
She glanced across to her right. She was crouched behind a parked car, a Mazda painted in a rather off-putting shade of purple. Beside her was an armoured PC she didn’t know, and beyond him, she caught an unmistakable glimpse of pale blonde hair. By leaning to her left, she could make out her sergeant’s face clearly. Janine’s eyes were glued to the crouched, advancing figure of Picks. Behind him, as per plan, crept the first of two big police constables. It was their job to come to Picks’s aid if he woke the sleeping crew as he tried to gain access.
As Regis had said, raiding a narrowboat was going to be a bit of a bugger. For a start, it was narrow, and Hillary had warned them it would be even narrower inside. The alleyway between front and rear, where the bathroom was located, for instance, would allow for single access only. Cops on raids, as a rule, preferred to stand shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, covering each other front, back and sides if possible. But there was no way you could do that on a narrowboat.
This meant they had to be very sure of the plan. They had to go in single file, hard and fast. No Keystone Cops stuff, like getting jammed in the doorways. They had to be quick and silent.
Hillary had seen the pictures of the boat yesterday, and had been able to give a good guess as to its internal layout. Most canal boats either had the lounge area at the front, like hers, incorporating the kitchen area, leading off to a narrow corridor that allowed access to the bedrooms and shower/toilet that were at the back, or vice versa. From the pictures of the Kraken, she was sure that the layout was much the same as that of her own boat. But without blueprints, which weren’t available, it was impossible to be sure.
Regis’s plan was, therefore, simple. If Picks succeeded in gaining access at the rear door, he was to leave one PC stationed at the rear and give the signal to the others. He’d then immediately go to the prow of the boat with the other PC and see if he could gain access, quietly, through that door as well. Providing that was successful, the raiding party would split into two groups, one coming in from the rear, the other from the front. They were to meet outside the bedrooms.
That was the plan. Hillary could think of a hundred things that could go wrong with it, but then no doubt so could Regis, Mel or even the greenest cop fresh out of training college.
Picks disappeared briefly from view in a particularly thick patch of mist and Janine cursed. Then he re-emerged. She sensed someone staring at her and looked around, finally encountering Hillary Greene’s unnervingly unruffled gaze.
She nodded coolly, still resentful of the way her DI had zeroed in on her during the briefing in Walton Street, all but lecturing her about safety. It made her feel like a kid at school, told by a bigger kid to keep out of the way of the school bullies. Hillary looked away. Janine found it impossible to know what she was thinking. She supposed the DI was getting past it now, and was just trying to look out for her. Her heart was probably in the right place.
Come to think of it, Janine had never heard anything on the rumour mill about Hillary Greene’s bottle — or lack thereof. She knew for a fact that she didn’t play any contact sports, not even squash, which seemed to be the woman police officer’s holy grail of fitness. That, or martial arts. But she didn’t think DI Greene was the kung-fu type. Not that it mattered, of course. By the time the DI and Mel and even Regis entered the boat, the suspects should all be nicely handcuffed and yelling for their briefs.
Janine could still clearly remember her self-defence training at police college. She thought of the big burly sergeant who’d taught her how to throw men twice her weight, and how to avoid getting stabbed if some berserk junkie came at you with a carving knife. She wondered, briefly, if they’d even had training sessions like that when Hillary Greene had attended college. Come to think of it, hadn’t she heard that her DI had been a university copper? For all Janine knew, in her day fast-track intellectual female officers might not have had to even go to training college. So where the hell did she get off telling her to keep back and keep her head down?
* * *
On the other side of Janine, crouched behind a big dumpster used by the boaties as a communal waste bin, Regis saw Picks reach the boat, and stiffened. Hillary had warned him about how a boat moved when someone got on it. She’d even had him and the raiding party down to Thrupp to demonstrate on her own boat, before they’d set off for the city.
It had been useful. He wished he’d thought of it himself. Now he watched, approvingly, as Picks, mindful of his early-morning lesson, stepped right into the boat’s centre of gravity, and carefully, very carefully, knelt down. Through his binoculars, Regis couldn’t see the boat make any appreciable movement.
He glanced at his watch. Good. It was getting lighter now. Light enough, in fact, to give good visibility inside, even with all the curtains drawn.
On the opposite side of the canal, behind the garden wall of one of the terraced cottages, Mel glanced through the open gate, and then across at the others. He couldn’t see Janine. He guessed Hillary had taken her aside back on Walton Street to warn her to keep a low profile, and he hoped she’d listened.
He cursed the fact that he had a poor view of the proceedings, and kept his ear glued to the radio. He glanced uneasily behind him, but the curtains in the cottage windows were all still safely drawn.
Usually, whenever a raid was to take place, the public w
ere warned and possibly even evacuated, but in this case, given the fact that they didn’t know until the last minute where the boat would moor, plus the fact that, in such close confines, it would have been almost impossible to silently evacuate the cottages without those on the boat cottoning on, it had been decided that what the public didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Mel only hoped some little old lady needing a pee didn’t look out the window and call out, asking what he was doing standing in her rhubarb patch.
From the buzz on the radio, it seemed Picks had got the back door opened, for he’d stepped carefully off the boat and was giving the signal.
Mel risked craning his head around the gate and looked down the towpath. The boat was moored up about twenty feet away. Through the mist, fast thinning now as the sun began to elbow it aside, he could see a big, padded constable step onto the back of the boat, ready to be first in. Now four others were coming past Mel, crouched low, waiting for the signal to join him. In a few minutes, if Picks got the front door open, another group of raiders would come by, ready to converge on the front.
Mel felt the sweat break out on the back of his neck. He was wearing a white faux-silk shirt and a navy blue Giorgio Armani knock-off jumper. He felt slightly ridiculous. Not because of the clothes — hell, nobody would wear their finest on a job like this — but because being crouched in someone’s garden at five o’clock in the morning, waiting to follow a group of gung-ho coppers onto a narrowboat seemed faintly silly. At times like these, he couldn’t remember exactly why he’d joined the police force in the first place. His brother taught mathematics at a private boys’ school in Harrogate, for Pete’s sake.
He wiped off the sweat which had surprised him by running down his forehead and onto the bridge of his nose. Shit. He must be more tense than he realised. He jumped as the second wave of uniforms passed. Picks must have succeeded in getting the other door open. Sure enough, he was coming back now. The old sergeant slid in beside Mel, who was in the nearest safe spot, and crouched down, breathing hard. No wonder, poor old sod. He’d drawn the short straw and no mistake. Everybody knew that if the gang inside were Luke’s boys, and were tooled up, they might have shot first and asked questions later. More than one cop had been shot through a locked door and killed in the line of duty.
Mel patted the old man on the shoulder. ‘Good going, Picks.’ Picks nodded and smiled. He looked just a bit sick.
Then Mel heard the squawk on the radio. ‘Right. This is it.’
He duck-walked a few paces to the open gate.
Picks stayed leaning against the wall, looking at the cottage and wondering how much one would cost. He’d always fancied retiring to the city. Most of his pals did it the other way around, living and working in town, and then moving to the seaside or a country village on collecting their pension. But he’d always lived in villages, and quite fancied being an Oxonian in his old age. His youngest granddaughter reckoned he looked quite Don-like. Perhaps he could buy a pair of pince-nez and hang out near the Bodleian reading a book and fooling the tourists into thinking he was some emeritus professor.
With a start he realised he was maundering. It was something he always did after a shock or a particularly stressful episode. He also realised he was alone.
* * *
DCI Mallow had gone.
From her position behind the car, Hillary watched the by-the-book, best-of-all-scenarios playing out, and took a few deep breaths, letting them out slowly. So far, so good. They had both doors unlocked, one constable at each end, and four others, also at each end, ready to go.
She glanced across at Regis, who was holding the radio to his mouth.
‘Come on, come on,’ Janine muttered between ragged breaths.
Then Regis spoke quietly into the radio.
‘Go.’
* * *
Something went wrong. It was a simple thing, and should have been foreseen.
Somebody had used the lounge sofa as a bed.
They were designed to convert to single beds, of course, since holidaymakers liked to cram as many people onto a boat as possible, making the cost of their canal holiday cheap. From the size of the Kraken, Hillary had — rightly, as it turned out — estimated that it could sleep at least eight, maybe even nine. It would have at most two bedrooms, probably doubles, but could, at a pinch, be converted into bunkbeds sleeping four in each.
But they hadn’t expected anything like that number to be on board.
Given that they were almost sure that The Pits, Makepeace and Gascoigne made up one unit, they were expecting three or maybe four, tops, to be on board. One, like Makepeace, to be a sort of dogsbody, driver and probably cook. One or possibly two for muscle, like Gascoigne and The Pits — Gascoigne to guard the haul at all times, The Pits to help out at locks, drawbridges and suchlike.
But this team was a lot bigger.
The constable who went in through the front entrance was the first to figure this out. Rising from his left, and moving frighteningly fast, was a near-naked figure. Aware of Regis’s plan to keep everything quiet, the constable’s first instinct — to yell blue murder — was quickly stifled. Even though he could hear the sound of footsteps at the rear of the boat, meaning the other raiding party was already moving in on the bedrooms, he still didn’t call out. He did, however, swing around to meet the challenge.
Behind him, the other constables were already boarding, but so confined was the space that only one was coming through the door.
He lifted his shield just in time. The dark-haired suspect, dressed only in a pale blue pair of boxer shorts, lifted something that looked like a radio alarm clock and tried to smash it down on his head.
Behind him, he heard one of his pals shout out a warning. After that, several yells, thuds, curses and assorted sounds came from the back of the boat. But for the PC in the lounge, who was called Brian Herbert, and was twenty-one next Monday, the heartening knowledge that the rest of the gang had been caught napping didn’t help him much.
He pushed forward with the shield, to try and squash his opponent into a corner and contain him until he and the others could cuff him. At the same time, he was trying to shift his rear end around so that his pals could get in behind and give him the necessary backup.
At this point the suspect did something totally unexpected.
Like an eel, he slithered out of the open window.
Brian hadn’t even realised that the barge window was open, let alone that it was big enough to allow somebody to get out.
He gave a startled yelp and darted forward to grab an ankle, but his shield was in the way, and he had a truncheon in the other hand, and by the time he’d dropped the shield and transferred the truncheon to his weaker left hand, it was too late.
He heard a splash, and swore.
To make matters worse, the two cops still outside hadn’t seen a thing. Brian ran to the window and looked out, expecting to see the dark head and flailing limbs of someone swimming raggedly to the bank.
He saw nothing.
He swore again, graphically. Surely the cut wasn’t all that deep? Why wasn’t the bastard wading along the side of the boat? He backed up, bumping into the last of the four men who’d come in at the rear. They were already heading for the back of the boat, where there were sounds of furious scuffling.
Shit.
Brian ran to the front of the boat and again looked fore and aft. Where had the slippery little bastard gone?
He reached desperately for the radio strapped to his collar.
* * *
But he needn’t have bothered. Mel and Regis were already running along the towpath. If Brian wanted to tell his superiors what had happened, all he had to do was shout.
He began to do so.
There was a lot of noise now coming from the Kraken, waking everyone in the surrounding cottages. Heads began to poke out of windows, and irate sleep-interrupted residents were calling out and asking what was going on.
Brian didn’t panic. He knew plenty o
f binoculars and pairs of eyes had been watching the boat. They would all have seen one of the suspects trying to leg it.
Hillary Greene certainly had.
She noticed Tommy Lynch’s large figure going in the rear, just as something white darted out and seemed to fall from the front of the boat. She saw the feet first — the unmistakable kicking motion of an expert swimmer. But why swim in only four feet or so of water? Why not stand and wade?
The answer to that was obvious. You swam to go underwater. Why did you go underwater? To hide.
Shit.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flash of a pale gold head and she knew Janine was on the move.
Too soon. Dammit, too soon.
‘Janine, no!’ she yelled, but Janine carried on. Quickly, Hillary looked around for Regis, but he was already on the towpath, along with Mel and his sergeant and everybody else and their Aunt Fanny by the looks of it, running towards the Kraken.
Hillary stood up, torn. Should she go after Janine? No, not necessary. She was surrounded by cops.
Instead, she scanned the canal. Whoever had gone over the side had to come up for air any second now. How far along could a strong swimmer go before surfacing? She had no damned idea. Twenty yards? More?
She glanced left, then right. The trouble was, the canal water was filthy. The muddy surface was still, undisturbed by bubbles or anything else.
Had he gone behind the boat? No, surely not, it was overrun with coppers.
She saw a single constable on the front of the boat who, like herself, was searching fruitlessly for air bubbles.
Brian Herbert swore frantically under his breath. He could see it now. His furious superior officer barking out questions, asking why it was that every other villain on the boat had been nabbed, save for the one in the lounge. The one that PC Brian Herbert was supposed to nab.
