by Roger Pearce
‘With a woman called Consuela,’ said Kerr, glancing at his pad. ‘I already have that from Alan. Maria Benita Consuela.’
‘It was all round the office, a love job, according to Sara. She was married with two sons but this was definitely your classic suitcase in the hall, leave home scenario.’
Kerr regarded Sergeyev in vain for any hint of embarrassment. He even managed to inject disappointment into his voice, as if Knight’s adultery had smashed the mould of cabinet politics.
‘I get all that,’ said Kerr, ‘but since when did we allow principals to wander the streets unprotected?’
‘Since the day ministers began to talk about their entitlement to privacy and family life. Human rights, John. Everyone’s equal now. Even secretaries of state.’
‘Pathetic. Did the team report this back to anyone?’
‘Unlikely. Avril Knight was a Rottweiler. She would have vetoed anything official.’
‘So they should have got their commander involved. Can you imagine Bill Ritchie letting her get away with this?’
‘That’s the Branch, John.’ Sergeyev shrugged and shifted in his seat, like a man who had to be somewhere else. ‘New world now.’
‘You’re the second person to tell me that today.’
‘I’m thinking the team probably dealt with this as a SPEC,’ said Sergeyev. ‘That’s often the way these days.’
‘A what?’
‘Sensitive Personal Consideration. Basically, it means flexible protection around ministers cheating on their partners.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Unofficial, of course, but they would have kept everything secret from people outside the loop.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Kerr, reaching for the phone. ‘Except the people who killed her.’ He was already dialling 1830 as Sergeyev paused by the door.
‘John, I was wondering…would it help you to have Knight’s personal phone records?’
Kerr replaced the phone and looked up in surprise. ‘You can do that?’
‘They kept a trace of every number. You know, for insurance. Perhaps revenge, also.’
‘Who?’
‘The people closest to her, of course. Sara. The other young women she bullied and intimidated.’
‘That’s fantastic.’
‘Yes. They belong to the new world, too, don’t you think?’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Monday, 17 October, 13.43, Corley Services, M6
Clearing the mountains, they pressed through a gentler landscape as dark rain clouds chased them from the west, with Costello giving a running commentary about suspicious vehicles and Jay, calm as ever, telling her to relax.
‘Who’s to say they’re even British? The Dutch do a lot of collaborating with the English police. That’s what I heard,’ she said, eyes flickering between the mirrors. ‘Perhaps they flew over, you know, bloody waiting for us. You think they’ve got guns?’
‘For what? They can’t show out, so what are they going to do? It’s probably the cops updating their files, I dunno, taking a break from jihadis. It happens.’
In fact, to Gina Costello, it did not. This was new. She was expert in the dark arts of intrusive surveillance by Europe’s secret states and had long ago sacrificed privacy for direct action. Radicalism extinguished free speech, as Jay and her other comrades in Anti-Capitalist Insurrection were always reminding themselves, shrouding their phone calls, emails and texts with doublespeak and paranoia. For militants living beneath the radar, there was no safe place for social media.
These were the invisible perils of cyberspace and Costello had learned to live with them. Avoiding Facebook was no big deal. But the drive from the ferry terminal had brought something new, the first tangible evidence of physical surveillance, of real people actually following her. She had found it unnerving, then provocative. Sex in the mountains had been an impulse, a retro, hippy protest. The real fight back, what Jay called the ‘ultimate revenge strike,’ had been conceived while held in a bottleneck at Llangollen, and fully planned by the time they crossed the English border.
Whirring down the slipway onto the M6, Costello could feel the adrenaline pumping again. ‘Whoever they are,’ she said, filtering into the nearside lane, ‘we’re about to seriously piss them off.’ She waited for Jay to say something back, but he simply gave her thigh a squeeze and gazed out at the fields.
Costello breathed deeply and scanned the mirrors. The motorcycle and Honda were nowhere to be seen, but she located the Volvo six cars behind. Caught behind a lorry trailing a Wide Load sign, she had her finger on the indicator, impatiently waiting for a gap in the middle lane. ‘How can you always be so…so fucking cool about everything? These jerks are watching every move we make and it’s like you’re in the sack with Zen. I mean… how?’ she said, losing patience and forcing a way out.
‘Because they’ve got nothing on us,’ said Jay quietly, craning his neck to the wing mirror, reminding Costello how much he had already suffered for his zealotry. ‘If they did, we’d be in jail.’
Their destination was Corley Services, a Welcome Break facility in Warwickshire with fast food bars, shops and toilets on each carriageway, linked by a covered footbridge. They found a place in the busy car park just as it started to rain. Costello stayed a long way from the entrance, concealing the Fiat between a motorhome and a self-hire Transit, and they sat in silence, ignoring the squeak of the windscreen wipers.
The Honda arrived first, followed by the Volvo and motorcycle together, the only vehicles without lights against the rain and thickening cloud. They memorised their parking places, plotting the number of rows from the Fiat in each direction. In the glove compartment was the six inch Phillips screwdriver Costello had used to repair the engine’s water hose on her last visit to Dublin. She laid it next to the cup holder and took Jay’s hand. ‘Okay?’
They watched the female motorcyclist remove her helmet and walk to the service area, followed by the Honda crew, all of them hurrying through the drizzle with heads lowered. The Volvo driver went last, losing himself among a couple of families in bright summer clothes as the rain suddenly intensified. He was in his late fifties, stocky and grey haired in a North Face waterproof. Easily identifiable. ‘Come on,’ said Costello as soon as they had disappeared, ramming her door open against the Transit and making herself tall to double-check the Honda.
They strolled into the entrance hall past a bank of slot machines before separating for the toilets. By the time Jay re-emerged, Costello was dawdling by the row of burger bars, checking out the menus beneath a muted TV screen showing the latest on the Home Secretary’s murder. The hall was noisy, with clumps of new arrivals escaping the dangerous traffic conditions. As soon as Jay joined her they raced for the footbridge, taking the steps two at a time and jogging across the motorway.
On the other side they disappeared into the toilets again, locking themselves into cubicles for exactly three minutes. As she left, Costello managed to collide with the female watcher from the pub, hurrying down the corridor. Costello apologised and backtracked a couple of paces to hold the toilet door open for her, forcing eye contact.
The food outlets and shops here were even more crowded than those on the opposite side, but they easily located Volvo Man in the open-plan seating area, then his Asian partner perusing newspapers in WH Smith.
‘Ready?’ murmured Costello, squeezing Jay’s arm and waiting for his nod. They dashed up the staircase and sprinted back over the footbridge, deserted except for a mother with a child in a buggy, the rain now driving against the glass. Beneath them every vehicle was showing headlights in the spray and gloom, and the bridge itself had become a brightly lit shaft, with no hiding places. At the far end Jay stopped to make an imaginary mobile call, looking back along the footway to maroon the watchers while Costello scampered down the stairs.
The Suzuki rider had evidently remained on the southbound side and Costello caught her loitering in the queue for coffee, bumping the helmet against he
r leg and apparently murmuring to herself. Avoiding a wheelchair and a couple of lads in Liverpool shirts, Costello hurried through the giant revolving door into the open, enjoying the rain on her face as she sprinted for the car.
By the time Jay appeared she was already on the move, wheel-spinning towards him across the glistening tarmac. She slowed for him to clamber aboard, then raced for the Volvo as he grabbed the screwdriver. ‘Go!’ she screamed, slewing sideways as he leapt out and stabbed the two front tyres, then skidding around the perimeter as he dodged between parked cars to reach the Honda. He had already spiked one of the front tyres by the time Costello reached him, and paused to skewer the rear offside as she shoved the passenger door open for him.
They attacked the Suzuki last, on the sprint for the Exit. Braking hard, she looked around for witnesses, but everyone was hurrying to and from the entrance with hoods and umbrellas raised, oblivious to them. As Jay destroyed the front tyre she acted on impulse for the second time that day, leaping from the Fiat to kick the heavy bike until it crashed from its stand.
Their acts of sabotage had taken less than three minutes.
‘How fucking great was that?’ yelled Costello above the racing engine, as they charged back onto the motorway with wipers at full speed.
Jay was using his shirt to dry his head. ‘Feel better now?’ he said, his voice muffled.
‘Sex is great, but, hey, the serious stuff is even better,’ she laughed, accelerating into the blinding spray.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Monday, 17 October, 15.23, Wymark Corporate Solutions, Mayfair
Jack Langton returned to duty within forty-eight hours of being shot. When he broke the news to John Kerr from his home in Mill Hill, north London, he was acting against the advice of his doctor at St Thomas’ Hospital, where the paramedics had rushed him from Trafalgar Square. He listened impatiently while Kerr ran through the obligatory guidance on health and wellbeing, officer safety and return to work, interrupting him in the middle of work-life balance. ‘Save it, John. See you later,’ he said, then rang off and speed-dialled Melanie.
By the time she arrived he was in the kitchen deflecting half-hearted dissuasion from his wife, Katy, the second Mrs Langton. A Geordie, like Jack, she taught sports technology three mornings a week and had just collected their three year old daughter from nursery. ‘You know Jack’s trouble?’ she said, pouring Melanie’s coffee. ‘Testosterone and bravado outgun reason every time.’ Langton, silently adjusting his sling while the little girl fetched his shoes, may as well not have been there. ‘I mean, don’t you think getting blown up in Victoria is enough excitement for one week?’
‘Yeah, we’d rather he stayed home for a while. It’s probably the Home Sec thing,’ said Melanie, brushing away a stray hair. She was wearing a sleeveless navy smock with jeans and cheap silvery trainers, hair scrappily tied back and no make-up. ‘Thinks he’s indispensable.’
‘That’s what you’re working on now, is it?’ said Katy, tugging at a yellow duster poking from the smock. ‘Playing Mrs Mop?’
‘Trust me,’ said Melanie, with a laugh. ‘I’ll make sure he behaves.’
Katy shook her head in resignation. ‘You’re all as bad as each other, really,’ she said, dispensing two sweeteners into her coffee.
Mindful of her own domestic situation, Melanie genuinely sympathised with Katy, tossing a few disparaging comments across the worktop while Langton looked sheepishly between them. In truth, Melanie was just as guilty, for both had declined the Yard’s offer of stress counselling, an HR tick in the box following a COLT, or ‘Critical Officer Life-Threatening Trauma,’ the latest fancy euphemism for attempted murder via handgun.
Langton pulled a face as soon as they reached the street. ‘Is that all you could get?’
Melanie had booked out a green Vauxhall Astra from Langton’s covert vehicle pool in Wandsworth, a high mileage, non-operational vehicle used for ferrying operatives between surveillance plots. When she clicked him into his seat belt, Langton’s grimace was from distaste as much as pain.
‘You’re on light duties, Jack,’ she said as she drove away. ‘That’s what the boss told me.’
‘Did he get promoted? It’s obvious he’s been cramming.’
‘Guess.’
Langton studied Melanie’s domestic cleaner outfit. ‘We’re going to the office?’
‘Eventually.’
Kerr had given Melanie strict instructions to keep Langton away from the surveillance around the Avril Knight investigation. Instead, as Melanie joined the A41 Watford Way for London, they talked about Saturday’s near-death experience, Langton masking his discomfort every time Melanie braked, turned or accelerated. This was their first contact since the paramedics had rushed them to St Thomas’, the conversation Kerr had encouraged Melanie to trigger, mutual counselling masquerading as operational debrief.
They worked through the chronology, from Pete Webb’s distress calls to the explosion on Southwark Bridge, the chase and the terrifying climax in Trafalgar Square. Langton talked at length about Webb, his core team player and friend, whom he had sat with late into Saturday night, despite his own suffering. According to the duty staff nurse, the bullet had shattered Webb’s right collar bone and ricocheted into his chest, passing through the lung before shredding the lumbar muscles and exiting his lower back. After two days of intensive care in a private room off the male surgical ward, his condition remained serious but stable.
Langton, on the other hand, knew he had been extremely lucky. Slowed by the angle of the windscreen, the bullet had travelled cleanly through the soft tissue of his left shoulder to bury itself in the rear head rest. Langton had suffered trauma and blood loss, but a few weeks of intensive physio would return him to full strength. ‘Should be me in there, Mel,’ he said grimly, looking away through the side window.
‘Survivor guilt?’
‘No, not that. I’m younger than Pete. Fitter. Should’ve been me.’
They drove in silence for a while, half-listening to LBC’s blanket coverage of the Home Secretary’s murder. Melanie’s tasking from Kerr was to check out the phone number Donna had lifted from Finch’s diary on Friday afternoon, and she could sense Langton reviving as she briefed him. According to research by 1830, the mobile was listed to Philip Deering, a retired major general, now CEO of Wymark Corporate Solutions, a private limited company registered at 23 Chapel Row, Mayfair, W1K. Incorporated in 2007, accounts filed with Companies House the previous December showed a net worth of £3.2 million and liabilities of £367 thousand.
Melanie turned off Park Lane into Mount Street and took another left as Berkeley Square came into view. ‘Should be up here on the right.’
Both were familiar with the myriad private security companies thrown up by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All ravenous for lucrative government contracts, they based themselves as close as possible to prestigious Mayfair, as if W1’s high octane wealth and access would rub off on them. The majority specialised in guns for hire, special forces veterans retooled as bodyguards to oil engineers, construction workers and other contractors at risk of murder or kidnap. A few were more shadowy, specialists in threat assessment and intelligence gathering with dubious links to foreign intelligence agencies, as well as MI6.
‘So which is Wymark?’ said Langton, ‘Psycho or spook?’
‘Bit of both, so far as Alan can make out…there it is,’ said Melanie as they cruised past a long row of tall, red-brick mansion blocks, each with a black oak doorway and multiple bell pushes. ‘No marketing, nothing showy. Looks like business by word of mouth only.’
Langton adjusted his arm. ‘What’s Deering?’
‘Your bog standard career soldier. Sandhurst, staff officer jobs and a glide upwards without firing a shot in anger, apparently. But he lost a son in Northern Ireland.’
‘And why the secret trysts with the Bull?’
‘Big beasts comparing their willies, probably,’ said Melanie, turning into a cobbled s
treet of white mews houses and parking away from the corner. ‘But you never know.’
She cut the engine, opened the boot and took out a battered vacuum cleaner. ‘No, Jack,’ she called inside, as Langton’s seat belt clicked open. ‘Don’t move. Back in a mo.’
Melanie sauntered into Chapel Row, climbed the steps to the entrance and studied the bell panel. Wymark was shown on the third floor, one down from the top, with the company name handwritten on a piece of card in a yellowing plastic sheath. Melanie selected the classy looking Glencore Finance for access, on the basis that it covered the whole of the fourth floor and probably received the most visitors. Sure enough, the door buzzed open the moment she pressed the button.
The vintage lift at the core of the building was out of order, its concertina grill jammed open, so she took the stairs, pausing to activate the camera concealed in the vacuum extension before reaching Wymark. Without knocking she eased the door open with her shoulder, entering a small reception area. Facing her was a chest high counter with a brass bell push. There was a camera high in the right corner, but no receptionist or other security. To the right was a dark conference room with leather chairs around an oval table, with faded prints in cheap frames crowding the walls. Above the fire place hung a modern painting at odds with the general mood of faded grandeur.
The door directly in front of Melanie was also open, and a convex mirror reflected a cluttered office to the left with a leather inlaid desk in the far corner, presumably Deering’s workplace. Behind the door, a middle-aged woman sat by her computer eating a sandwich. She looked up, startled, when Melanie pressed the brass bell.
‘Brightmore Cleaners for Glencore.’
It took the woman only a single, bad-tempered glance in the mirror. ‘Next floor,’ she called at Melanie’s distorted image, pointing her finger upwards.
