Javelin - the gripping new thriller from the former commander of Special Branch (John Kerr Book 3)

by Roger Pearce

  ‘Is he planning another attack? Is that why you’re in such a state?’

  ‘We’re safe, I swear. Bear with me a while.’ Dodge looked up at him, distraught. ‘Please, John.’

  Kerr grabbed a couple of plastic crates for a makeshift seat but Dodge gripped his arm. ‘No. Mel can’t hear this. I’m begging you.’

  He beckoned to Melanie. ‘Too late.’

  Melanie came over and stood by him, taking in the crowded desk. She squeezed his arm and pointed a finger at Trig. ‘Do we need to get people up there?’

  ‘Not if Dodge is being upfront with us,’ said Kerr. In the dim light, Dodge’s tear smudged cheeks had turned grey and blotchy, the skin saggy around his jaw. A dark vein throbbed down the centre of his forehead and his whole face seemed to have dropped, weighted by sadness. Kerr felt an overwhelming urge to rescue him.

  ‘Boss, this feels bad,’ said Melanie, seeming to read his thoughts. ‘We need to be out of here.’

  ‘No,’ said Dodge, swinging round in Roscoe’s battered chair. ‘Has to be here and now, or I’ll never manage it.’ He slapped the crates for Melanie to sit down, then fell silent, wringing his gloved hands.

  Kerr helped him out, studying the other man in the photograph. ‘Is he involved, too?’

  Dodge took a deep breath. ‘I told you I’d never lost an agent, right? Well, that’s another lie. This is Frankie Magill. Belfast kid, raised in a boys’ home.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Not the place all the fuss was about,’ said Dodge. ‘The Olive Tree, outside Springfield.’

  Kerr adjusted the shoulder holster beneath his jacket. ‘And he was working for you?’

  Dodge nodded. ‘Around the millennium, Frankie gets arrested for rioting and firebombing. Before they can charge him I get myself into Andersonstown, have a chat in the cell and sign him in time for breakfast.’

  ‘What did he offer?’

  ‘When he’s nine years old, Frankie and a couple of the other boys in the Olive Tree are being treated special. “Low-hanging fruit,” the fathers call them.’

  ‘Abused, you mean?’ said Melanie.

  Dodge nodded. ‘Inside the home, but pimped out, too. And sometimes the clients are paramilitaries.’

  Melanie glanced at Kerr. ‘You exploited that? Isn’t the first call to child protection?’

  ‘Hey, I pass all this stuff up the chain. Anyway, that was then, this is now. The boy is going on nineteen. So, Frankie is still seeing a very bad man we have a powerful interest in, one of the commanders, inside track and all. Frankie services his terrorist uncle twice a month. Soon, the Belfast office has enough for an approach. Code name Nighthawk and the Branch keeps it tight as a duck’s arse.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Dodge shook his head. ‘He’s still active. It’s peace in our time, remember. Politicians turning somersaults to appease terrorists, so the op gets binned. The RUC receives a George medal, the Branch gets shafted and Nighthawk runs free.’

  Kerr was thinking back to Robyn’s disclosures in Rome, just five days earlier. He glanced at a couple more photographs. ‘Did Frankie ever mention a boy at the Olive Tree called Nick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what’s freaking you out?’

  Dodge fell silent again, looking at his hands. ‘I have to meet Frankie away from the city, so we end up in Capanagh Forest, near Larne.’

  ‘That’s a long way. Whose choice?’

  ‘Frankie has a van and we drive there separately. After dark, noone about, low risk.’ Something seemed to catch in Dodge’s throat, dust from the newsprint, or craving for a cigarette. He broke into a hacking cough and turned away, a podgy hand covering his mouth. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Melanie spoke first, understanding. ‘When did you cross the line?’

  Dodge swung back to the desk and lowered his head so that they had to strain to hear. ‘One night he brings a drop of whiskey and things get out of hand. The instant Frankie touches me I’m completely out of control. He takes me into the van.’ He fell quiet again, struggling to control himself. ‘I’m supposed to be the controller and he’s leading me through the trees like a wee lamb. It’s our secret for a couple of hours.’ He began sobbing, then something escaped from deep inside, like the sound after a yawn. Kerr waited for Melanie to comfort him but she stayed on the crates, her face unreadable as Dodge wiped his tears. ‘Anyway, after a couple of months he says we have to stay in the car. He’s got photographs of me and him together. Had the van wired, or someone. Frankie’s been playing me all along. This is a honeytrap in reverse, him and whoever he’s working for.’

  ‘So is it money?’

  ‘Secrets. He tells me they want everything we have on dissident targets.’

  They let the silence hang until Dodge raised his head, eyes glinting through the tears. ‘Now you’re thinking, did I report it?’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘We’re talking the dog days of the RUC here and I’m a married man. Do I confess to being gay? Christ, are you out of your minds?’

  Kerr shrugged. ‘It would have stopped them.’

  ‘John, we’re talking Ulster in the fucking dark ages.’

  ‘But not as bad as the alternative,’ said Melanie, quietly.

  ‘And you are out of order. I didn’t give away any frigging secrets.’ This was Dodge pulling rank but it came out tired, half-hearted. He found Kerr one of the press cuttings. ‘Within a week, Frankie’s dead from a headshot.’

  Dated February 2001 and headed ‘This Is Belfast At Peace?’ the yellowing extract reported the murder of nineteen year old Francis Magill, speculating he had been an informer for the RUC. Kerr handed it to Melanie and reached for a longer extract: ‘For God’s Sake, Bury The Past.’ This included a blurry photograph of the victim, spinning the murder into a denunciation of the RUC Special Branch against the new Police Service of Northern Ireland.

  ‘Shallow grave in the Capanagh Forest,’ said Kerr. ‘Coincidence?’

  ‘The IRA nutting squad got him for being a tout. End of.’

  ‘Except it’s not, is it?’ said Melanie.

  ‘No. The following year Nicola and I escape to the mainland.’

  ‘Because of the death threats, yeah,’ said Kerr.

  ‘And by now, PSNI are working to MI5 and Sinn Fein. The new brooms don’t want us blocking the gutter, so most of us jump ship. The new “Disappeared”.’

  Melanie nodded at Trig. ‘Bobby Roscoe?’

  Dodge took a deep breath. ‘For fifteen years I hear nothing and start to think this has gone away. Then I get a call out of the blue. He knows my name and tells me he got the number from Frankie, which is bollocks, like, the boy just rose from the grave. Orders me to Covent Garden. Bobby Roscoe made the warning call for Victoria and is totally involved in the bombings. I can prove it with video, even the clothes he wore.’

  ‘How many times have you seen him?’ said Kerr.

  Wheezing, Dodge held up three fingers. ‘He feeds me half-truths, knowing I have to take action, that I’ll be shown to be wrong and people will die because of me. It’s driving me mad, and it has to end today.’

  Melanie looked around. ‘How did you find this place?’

  ‘Builder’s merchant who sold him the roofing stuff,’ he said, making sense of the fight Melanie and Jack Langton had witnessed in Harlesden.

  ‘So tell us why he needs a new roof,’ said Kerr.

  ‘I met him again in Soho, Monday afternoon. They’re planning a lorry bomb, but it won’t fit in here. He needs the roof to hide it from the air. That’s what I think.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  Dodge shrugged. ‘But they won’t do it on a weekend.’

  ‘Dodge, they already did,’ said Melanie. ‘The mortar? Jack and I were there, remember?’

  ‘That was symbolic, to make the news. The lorry bomb is to leave bankers dead in the street.’

  ‘So why now?’ said Kerr.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dodge stabbed the photograph. ‘Bob
by Roscoe was Frankie’s lover and he’s taking his revenge.’

  ‘Against the IRA, or you?’

  Dodge suddenly sounded exhausted. ‘John, isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘So he holds you responsible?’

  ‘Frankie Magill was an informer.’

  ‘A blackmailer, too,’ said Melanie. ‘Roscoe believes you killed Frankie, doesn’t he? To save your own skin?’

  Melanie sounded harsh, her insubordination catching Dodge off guard. ‘Is that what you think?’

  Kerr’s BlackBerry broke the silence. He listened for a moment and rang off. ‘Did Roscoe ever mention his accomplices? Hints about Ireland? Anywhere in Europe?’

  Dodge shook his head. ‘He refused everything.’

  ‘Well, we just got the readout from Gina Costello’s Sim. There are only three items,’ he said, ‘and number two is the mobile you fed into Trig. They know each other, Dodge. In it together.’

  ‘And Roscoe’s on the move again,’ said Melanie, rotating the screen to show the star pulsing south.

  ‘It’s like I told you. He’s coming back here. For this,’ said Dodge, scuffing at his life’s detritus on the desk. He looked at Kerr, pleading.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Kerr, adjusting the Glock against his ribs. ‘I’m not calling Finch.’

  ‘John, this can’t be about Dodge,’ frowned Melanie. ‘We have to get an arrest team here, now.’

  ‘That’s you and me.’ He looked at Dodge’s hands. ‘Gloves the whole time?’

  ‘Since crowbarring the door.’

  ‘And is the garbage all here? All the photographs from the van?’ Dodge held up a torn A4 envelope and nodded. ‘Okay, here’s what you do. Collect your demons and disappear. You were never here, and we haven’t seen you. Where’s Nicola?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Do what you have to do, then join her. Speak only with us. Understood?’

  Dodge nodded. ‘What happens to Roscoe?’

  ‘What you should have done from the start…Mel?’

  ‘M1 southbound.’

  He gripped Dodge’s shoulder. ‘Drive.’

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Saturday, 22 October, 10.47 Betta Tyre and Exhaust, Old Oak Common Lane, Willesden

  Kerr and Melanie kept watch at the door while Dodge collected every incriminating document into the pannier and carried it to the Audi. The boot kept sticking and he had to kick the lid three times to release the catch. Breathless from the exertion, he bent to insert the key in the ignition, then stood upright, sucking in lungfuls of fresh air. Overwrought and ashen-faced, he lingered awkwardly by the driver’s door, his mouth working silently. Melanie stepped forward before he could find his voice and hugged him tight, while Kerr held the door, waiting for him to get behind the wheel. Dodge finally stripped off the gloves and held out his hand. ‘John…I…’

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ said Kerr, gripping his hand. He pointed at the boot. ‘Just be sure not to leave a trace.’

  ‘Will you let me…you know…’

  ‘Yes. I’ll call you at home, when we’re done.’

  They watched him drive away, then Kerr shifted the Alfa across the street to a slip road bordering the canal, reaching into the glove compartment for a set of plastic handcuffs. When he returned, Melanie was cautiously exploring the hideout, with a close watch on Trig.

  ‘Where’s Roscoe?’

  ‘Still the M1, just north of Hendon. The speed he’s going, Saturday traffic, I’d say we have less than fifteen minutes to get our act together.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘So, do I call for back-up?’ Melanie stared at him. ‘John, how are we going to play this?’

  ‘Anyone tell you how many lives Dodge saved across the water? I’m going to protect him.’

  Melanie looked exasperated. ‘But this is about more than looking after our friend. There’s a bigger picture here.’

  Kerr looked around the dismal workshop. ‘And I guess we’re standing in it.’ He picked Dodge’s crowbar from the floor and handed it to Melanie. ‘So let’s not screw up.’

  They spent the next three minutes planning their ambush, working on the element of surprise. If Roscoe arrived alone, or with a conspirator, they would contain the situation inside the workshop; two or more others, and they would steal away from the yard, call from the Alfa for urgent assistance, and keep watch.

  Roscoe would find the workshop unlocked, for Dodge had smashed the padlock and hasp beyond repair, suggesting burglary or vandalism rather than a covert police search. Melanie lowered the door to waist level, a little higher than Dodge had left it but low enough to compromise Roscoe as he ducked inside or rolled it open.

  They concealed themselves behind a thicket of brambles with a clear view of the entrance and an escape route across a low, wire mesh fence. They had less than seven minutes to wait before a dirty silver Ford Courier van pulled into the pitted yard, slowed in front of the half-open door and swung in a wide arc to stop less than a couple of car lengths from their hiding place. Kerr silently drew his Glock as they sank into the scrub. Silence settled with the dust as the driver remained in the car, watching and waiting, as cautious as Kerr and Melanie when they had come for Dodge. Then the door clicked open and heavy footsteps crunched across the gravel within touching distance of the brambles. Finger against the trigger guard, Kerr stole a look at the figure loping past and recognised Bobby Roscoe immediately. In jeans, work boots and white T-shirt, he was taller than Kerr had imagined, stronger and nastier than the fresh-faced, barechested boy with a slender arm around Frankie Magill.

  At the workshop Roscoe shifted to the left, watching for the slightest movement as the sun sneaked from behind a cloud to flood the yard with light. Shading his eyes, Kerr snatched a look back to the van but Melanie had already ensured Roscoe was alone. The crowbar appeared in her hands as they exchanged a nod and eased to their feet. The swish of the traffic and distant thump of the pile driver offered low background noise but they needed the screech of the rusting door to mask their ten metre charge across the open scrub and gravel. They saw Roscoe bend low, squint through the gap and jerk the door hard. Kerr broke cover first but Melanie overtook him, reaching Roscoe at full stretch with the door still rolling. On high alert for threats within, not behind, Roscoe was too slow to pick up the danger as Melanie smashed the crowbar across his upper back. Her direct hit threw him off balance, propelling him into the dark interior, and his howl of pain echoed around the walls as he collapsed onto the greasy concrete floor at the edge of the inspection pit. Melanie leapt at him, spinning him onto his injured back with the crowbar hard across his throat. Half-blinded from the sunlight, Roscoe struggled to focus. ‘What the fuck…’ he croaked. ‘Who…?’

  Kerr, taking his time, walked up to him, tapped Melanie on the shoulder to roll clear and kicked Roscoe into the pit. He used such force that Roscoe’s head crashed against the far wall before he collapsed into a mess of oil and hydraulic fluid, yelping like a trapped animal. Kerr took up the firing position, the Glock aimed for a head shot as Roscoe struggled to his knees and squinted up at them. ‘Where’s the vehicle?’ he said, calmly.

  Roscoe looked terrified. ‘What vehicle? Who sent you?’

  Kerr took a pace back. ‘Get out.’

  Roscoe slowly stood, bringing his head level with the floor, then climbed the short metal ladder. He was evidently in pain, with blood oozing from his temple, scarcely able to lift his arms for support. After a few seconds Melanie lost patience, grabbing his shirt to haul him up the last three steps. She manhandled him into the office, made a rapid body search and shoved him back into the chair Dodge had just vacated. Roscoe massaged his throat, taking in the upturned drawers and the opened hideout.

  ‘The lorry bomb,’ said Kerr, covering him with the Glock again. ‘Where is it?’

  Stunned by the brutality of attackers apparently intent on murder, the demand sparked a complete change in Roscoe. ‘You’re cops? Counter-terrorism?’ He looked like
a gangster reprieved from the mob, fear of execution suddenly banished by hard arrest. Now, arrogance stiffened his voice. ‘So you’ve been listening to the queer Mister Dodge? Where’s your fucking ID? Search warrant? This is how cops treat the public these days? You think you can get away with attacking a businessman in his place of work?’

  ‘A rat living in a hole,’ said Melanie.

  ‘I demand to see a lawyer, now.’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  Roscoe tried to cross his arms but the pain was too raw. ‘The fat bastard has been feeding you lies.’

  Melanie thrust the cold steel against his face, jerking his head back so violently that his boots kicked the underside of the desk. When she let go, Roscoe twisted painfully in the chair. ‘Don’t stop now. Look, I’m turning the other cheek,’ he grunted. ‘I want it all black and blue. Come on, make me rich. You are so going to jail.’

  ‘We know about you,’ said Kerr.

  ‘You know nothing.’ Roscoe let out a hoarse laugh. ‘Your friend is a sexual predator, and you’re protecting him.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘An animal. Ask him about Gabriel’s Bar, the room upstairs, where he tried to rape me and offered me a payoff to keep quiet. Thousands.’

  ‘To get you on the books.’

  ‘To be a spy. He forced me to be a grass and demanded sex. Payment for services. Hush money. Take your pick.’

  ‘Because you’re a bad person with good connections.’

  ‘Totally wrong. He told you that?’

  ‘That’s his job. We know you made the bomb call at Victoria.’

  ‘So arrest me, or get off my property.’

  ‘And now you’re going to confess to us for free. Your least worst option is to die in prison.’

  Roscoe’s smile mocked them. ‘He really did a good job on you.’ He rubbed his throat again and glared at Melanie. ‘When I told your man where to stick his bribe he threatened to stitch me up. Fact. And here you are, doing his dirty work. Same stunt he pulled in Belfast, raped a lad then murdered him to keep it secret.’ He glanced at the smashed door to his hideout. ‘He was here, right? Yes. Well, tell him I’ve got a lot more than the stuff in there, too much for you to cover up. Looking for a lorry bomb? Go and beat the shit out of him, not me, then tell your bosses what he’s really like. Show his wife and daughter what a fucking fraud he really is.’