She considered a moment, then said, ‘All right, but it had better be good. One false note and I’m off.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Sit down, please.’ He went back around the table and took his own seat. ‘I’m not going to stop you leaving, but it’s very important that you hear me out. It wasn’t my idea to target Magdalen.’
‘Target? Is that what you call it in the Branch?’
Tom held up his hand. ‘Just listen. What I told you about wanting to get out of Special Branch was true—I can’t get on with my boss, and he’s been making things difficult. So when he offered to loan me to Brock for the Brown Bread investigation I was very happy. Then when Brock made it plain that he was going after the Roaches, I had a quiet word with one of my mates in the Branch. He said he’d heard something about another operation against them.’
‘What operation? We haven’t heard about this.’
‘I don’t know, it’s probably in the past. My friend had the impression it might have originated outside the Met. MI5 maybe, or the JIC. Anyway, he felt it could be useful my being here, in Brock’s team, in terms of my career.’
‘As a spy.’
‘No, no. I’ve had no contact with these other people, if they exist, and I haven’t been talking about Brock’s investigation. It isn’t like that, Kathy. I may be able to help him, and us too.’
‘By screwing—sorry, targeting—sweet Magdalen?’
Tom took another deep breath. ‘I asked my friend to keep his ears open, and he came back with a hint about one of Roach’s grandchildren being rebellious and a possible source of inside information on the clan. I took a good long look at them all and came to the conclusion that it had to be Magdalen. She’s been a bit wild, recently divorced, reputation for partying. Four months ago she was picked up for drink driving, with traces of coke in the glove box, and when local CID interviewed her she said one or two odd things about her relatives that the detective thought significant enough to pass on to the Central Crime Squad. She had her driver’s licence suspended. The drugs matter wasn’t pursued.
‘So I decided to find out more about her, where she goes, who her friends are. I arranged to bump into her a couple of times at clubs, and gradually got talking to her. She let me take her home, because she shouldn’t be driving, although in fact she does use a car belonging to a relative who’s overseas. Since her divorce she’s been living in her parents’ house in The Glebe, but she’s pretty hostile about some members of the family, especially her father, Ivor. She’s really vitriolic about him and the way he treats her mother. That was the main reason she went to stay with them, she said, to keep an eye on her mother. They seem to be very close. She’s told me things we didn’t know, like the fact that her grandpa has a trophy cabinet, with guns.’
He let that sink in, watching Kathy’s mind working. ‘Brown Bread?’ she asked.
‘It’s possible. That’s one of the things I’d like to find out. We joke about her being like Rapunzel, living in a castle, and how I’d like to see inside. That would be impossible, of course, with her parents there, only they went to New York at the weekend for a few days, and most of the rest of the clan are travelling up north today for a family function. I’m seeing Magdalen at the club tonight, and she’s promised to take me home and show me around.’
‘Bren knows about all this, does he?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Nobody does, until now.’
Kathy gaped at him. ‘Nobody? You’ve carried out your own private operation on the Roaches and you haven’t told anyone? And tonight you’re planning to walk into The Glebe without back-up, without letting anyone know?’
‘I’ve put everything down on file. It’s in the cabinet over there, everything I’ve done and learned, and when the time comes I’ll go to Brock with it. But not yet.’
She made to protest, but he leaned urgently across the table. ‘Kathy, you know that Michael Grant was right about the connection between the Roaches and the Yardies, but we’re getting nowhere. We’re like a ship without a rudder. This is what I do—undercover work. If I find something, I’ll take it to Brock. If not, no harm done.’
‘You’ve got to tell Brock before tonight, Tom.’
‘And if I do, what will he say? My guess is that he’s been told to back off. If so, he can’t afford to let me go in.’
‘Try him.’
‘Kathy, it’s better he doesn’t know.’
She thought about that. It dawned on her just how badly Tom wanted a coup, something spectacular to recharge his career or wipe out whatever had gone wrong for him in Special Branch. His secretiveness was breathtaking, but then that was the way he’d been trained to be, and maybe only he could pull off the stunt he was planning. She also remembered Lloyd’s niggling joke about Tom wanting Brock’s job.
‘But I know.’
‘No you don’t. This conversation never happened.’
‘Of course it did. I’m involved now. If we don’t tell Brock, then I’m as responsible as you are. So I’ve got to be part of it.’
‘No way.’
‘She won’t see me, but I’ll be there, your back-up. You’ll keep in touch by texting me, and if you’re not out of The Glebe by a set time I’ll call in the troops.’
‘No. Having you in the background will only increase the risk to me, Kathy.’
‘Tough.’
‘You don’t trust me, do you?’
‘I wonder why?’
He sighed, and reluctantly began to negotiate their working arrangements for the evening.
Tom had arranged to meet Magdalen at a pub in Eltham, a short taxi ride from her home, and drive her from there to the club where they planned to spend the evening. It was the same one, the JOS, part-owned by Teddy Vexx, where George Murray had told Kathy that he and his group were appearing, and she found the coincidence alarming, especially when Tom confirmed that Vexx and Jay Crocker knew and were friendly with Magdalen, who apparently had a taste for Jamaican music.
For this reason, Kathy didn’t go into the JOS, but waited in her little Renault in the street opposite. She saw Vexx and Crocker arrive in the throbbing Peugeot, and later Tom and Magdalen in his Subaru. While she waited she watched the customers coming and going, listened to the muffled thump of the music and studied the band posters covering the outside walls, Black Troika among them. She wondered if George Murray was any good.
Shortly before midnight her phone signalled a text message from Tom: ‘WAKE UP ON OUR WAY’. They appeared soon after, Tom having to support Magdalen down the front steps. Her long legs looked as unsteady as a newborn pony’s or the rubbery hand she flapped at another couple leaving in the other direction. They laughed and waved back, and Tom gave them a rueful grin that Kathy felt was probably meant for her before he turned to steer his partner away down the street.
He drove at a sedate pace across South London, Kathy on his tail. It was twelve-forty when they reached the golf club gates at Shooters Hill, where Kathy pulled onto the verge beneath a low tree and watched Tom, parked further up the lane leading to The Glebe, ease Magdalen out of his car and help her walk towards the gates. They fumbled with the keypad for a while and then they were inside and everything was still.
The agreed deadline for Tom’s return was two, but at one-fifty Kathy received another message: ‘WORKING L8 MAKE IT 3’. The minutes crept by, getting closer and closer to the hour, until Kathy had her phone out, pressing the numbers for help—and then he was there, letting himself out of the gate and hurrying towards his car, head down, arms wrapped around his chest as if against the cold. His footing seemed unsteady, and at one point he stumbled and almost fell. Then he was in his car and turning, coming fast back up the lane. He hurtled past as Kathy made her turn and she watched his tail-lights disappear into the distance.
He was waiting for her at the junction with the main road, turning onto it as she appeared, and for a couple of miles she followed him towards central London. His driving seemed erratic, the Subaru weaving in and out of its lane
and at one point almost colliding with a turning truck, and Kathy became alarmed, worried that something was wrong. Finally he signalled a turn into a quiet suburban street and drew in to the kerb. Kathy parked behind him, jumped out and pulled open his door.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Just not fit to drive. Take me home, will you? I’ll leave the car here.’
He hauled himself out and stumbled to her car, still clutching his leather jacket as before, and sank into the seat with a sigh.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
He nodded, eyes closed. ‘God, she took a bloody age to pass out.’
‘So, how did it go?’
‘Okay, I think.’
‘Did you find anything? Brown Bread?’
‘Not that, but maybe something better.’ He looked up at her with a Belmondo grin, took hold of the zip on his jacket and slid it slowly down, revealing a fat yellow envelope. ‘Let’s go home and see what we’ve got.’ He closed his eyes again and fell asleep.
As she turned her car back to the main road Kathy felt a surge of relief. At least it hadn’t been a total disaster.
Tom woke as she drew to a stop outside his flat. ‘Thanks,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t think I’d have made it.’
He let them in. ‘I’m having coffee,’ he said. ‘Want a drink?’
‘Coffee’s fine. So tell me about it. What happened?’
‘Oh, she got pretty legless at the club, more than normal, but at least she was willing to leave earlier than usual. Not for me,’ he added quickly. ‘With her parents away there was another attraction. When we got to the house she said her father kept dope in his office safe and she wanted my help to get into it. She had the key and a combination for the lock, but she couldn’t get it to work.’
‘Why did she think you could do it?’
‘I’ve told her I work as a security consultant. So she took me into her dad’s office and I had a look. It took me ten minutes to figure out what he’d done—you had to subtract one from each of the digits he’d written down to get the true entry code. Inside there were half a dozen sachets of cocaine, some of Magdalen’s mother’s jewellery, a pile of papers and a file. Magdalen removed one of the packets of coke and we went out to the living room.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said, it took forever for her to fall asleep. She got all wild and lively again, wanting to dance, and then finally flaked out, just before the time I was supposed to leave. So I sent you the message and went back into the office and had another look. The papers seemed innocuous—birth certificates, company registration documents, stuff like that—but the file was odd. It was labelled “Dragon Stout”, and seemed to be concerned with a consignment of Jamaican beer for the Paramounts off-licence chain. I thought it was strange having just one business file in among that other stuff, and I had a closer look. Most of it was straightforward letters and documents about suppliers’ contracts, container layouts, shipping arrangements, customs forms, things like that, but then I came across this sheet . . .’
Tom opened the yellow envelope and emptied its contents onto the coffee table. He thumbed through them for a moment, then lifted a single sheet with the letterhead of the head office of Paramounts Beers, Wines and Spirits, Importers and Retailers. It was dated the previous year and took the form of a handwritten list of points, like a summary for a presentation or a report, and ran as follows:
TERMS:
• standard 20’ container holds 1120 cases of 2 doz bottles of DS
• 300 (25%) cases of ‘special’ = 7200 bottles
• @ 80 gm/bottle = 576 kg FGBC
• @ £20,000/kg = £11.52m
‘DS is Dragon Stout?’ Kathy said.
Tom nodded.
‘What’s FGBC?’
‘Could be first-grade base cocaine. Twenty thousand a kilo is about right for wholesale Colombian, uncut.’
‘You think they’re bringing it over in bottles of beer?’
‘That’s how it looks.’
‘This isn’t the original, is it?’
‘No. There was a photocopier in the room, and I copied as much as I could of the file until I ran out of time. I haven’t really examined the rest. I know there are letters to the bottling plant in Jamaica and the names of distributors in the UK.’
Kathy frowned, worried. ‘Isn’t this a bit too easy? I mean, are they really going to put this sort of stuff down on paper?’
‘It’s a business, like any other, Kathy. They have to keep records of what’s been agreed, what’s been paid. Look at the initials at the bottom: I.R., Ivor Roach. He’s the accountant, he has to know. It’s his file, in his private safe, in his home. Where else would it be?’
‘When is this going to happen?’
‘It already has. According to the dates there were four container loads delivered last year. That’s forty-six million pounds worth of cocaine wholesale, say a hundred million on the street as crack or coke.’
‘Well.’ Kathy felt incapable of judgement. It was four in the morning and she wanted sleep and time to step back and digest this. She felt she barely recognised the man beside her. His face was flushed, his pupils contracted and his nose running. ‘No wonder they’ve all got better cars than me,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ He sniffed and wiped his nose. ‘And no wonder they’ve got plenty of friends. You look tired.’
‘Yes, I’ll be on my way.’
‘Kip here. Then you can run me back to my car in the morning.’
She was too weary to argue, and they tumbled onto opposite sides of his bed and fell into a troubled sleep.
twenty-three
It was one of the more difficult interviews of her life. Tom managed it as well as he could have, speaking with conviction, taking full personal responsibility and painting her role in the most favourable light. But still, she felt rotten. Brock didn’t rant or scold, that wasn’t his way. His silence was far more eloquent. He just sat there behind his desk, expressionless, his eyes fixed on Tom as he told his story, occasionally appearing to focus on some detail of his appearance, his puffy eyes, his inflamed nostrils. He didn’t look at Kathy at all, and she felt his disregard like a weight on her chest. Then, when the story was finished, he bowed his head over the papers and read them carefully, line by line, making notes on a pad in his deliberate script.
Finally he said, ‘You haven’t corroborated any of this? The shipping movements, the customs details, the contractors’ companies?’ This to Tom.
‘No, we thought we’d better talk to you first.’
‘Check what you can, without arousing suspicion. Come back at noon.’
‘Right.’ Tom began to draw back his chair.
‘And bring a written report of your operation, as brief and succinct as possible. Leave Kathy out of it.’
‘Fine.’ Tom was on his feet.
‘How did she get hold of the key?’ Brock asked suddenly.
‘The key?’
‘To her father’s safe. You said she had the combination and the key.’
‘Oh, yes. There was a false bottom in one of the drawers of his desk. The key and the note of the combination were kept there, along with other keys. She’d seen him access it.’
‘Hm.’ Brock turned away and they left.
They worked at adjoining desks, Tom tracking the movement of the containers and their consignments of Jamaican Dragon Stout through a friend in Customs and Excise, while Kathy checked the details of companies whose names appeared in the record using Companies House and a contact in the Fraud Squad. By noon they had compiled a fairly comprehensive background to the story outlined in Tom’s photocopied material. He had also written a highly abridged account of how he had come by it, with the help, so he said, of an unnamed member of the Roach family.
‘So there certainly were those orders and those shipments last year, Chief,’ Tom said as Brock finished reading their report.
‘What about this plastics business?’ Brock pointed to one of the names on Kathy’s
schedule of companies involved in the transactions. ‘Are you sure it existed?’
The order to PC Plastics in Solihull was one of the most incriminating items in the Dragon Stout file, involving the supply of 50,000 brown plastic sleeves, described as ‘wine sample containers’. These would presumably have been used to hold the cocaine inside the ‘special’ bottles of beer, hidden in the middle of each container load. However the company had gone out of business the previous year and Kathy hadn’t been able to contact its directors.
‘It certainly existed,’ she said, the first time she’d spoken. ‘I got details from Companies House, and I rang the local chamber of commerce, who knew of it. They also know of the managing director, name of Steven Bryce. He has other companies that are still functioning. I tried one of them and was told he’s overseas at present, on a business trip.’
A hurried breakfast and several cups of strong coffee had restored her confidence to some extent. They hadn’t been able to find anything in the papers that didn’t have some form of corroboration, and Kathy was beginning to be infected by Tom’s obvious excitement. Brock, though, betrayed no particular enthusiasm.
‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘Leave it with me.’ He reached for the phone and they left.
‘I’ll buy you lunch,’ Tom said as they made their way downstairs. ‘He might show a little interest. What does he want, signed confessions?’
Kathy turned down lunch. She didn’t want to listen to Tom building up his hopes. She wanted to think.
Later that afternoon she drove into South London and parked in the lane outside PART WORN TYRES. Which part? she wondered. The light was on in the window of the girl’s flat above the laundrette. She silently climbed the stairs to the access deck and listened at the door. She thought she heard the sound of soft music, but not of babies. She knocked.
The door opened on George’s face then began to swing shut again. Kathy stuck her foot in the gap.
‘Go away,’ he complained. ‘Go away.’
‘On your own, George? Don’t keep me standing out here, there’s a good lad. Someone might see me.’
Spider Trap Page 22
