by Andy Maslen
The cops dragged the brute over to the desk sergeant.
“Got a live one here, Sarge,” the woman gasped. “Just assaulted a couple of tourists in Leicester Square. Think he’s taken something.”
“They’re fucking parasites,” the young thug shouted. “Come here to live on our benefits and steal our jobs. I’m a patriot! Like you lot should be instead of protecting them. Look at me. A white man in a white man’s country.”
Then, with a convulsive twist of his torso, he wrenched himself free of the grip of the two cops.
Before they had a chance to react, either by drawing their extendible batons or grabbing him again, he reared back and head butted the female cop on the bridge of her nose. She screamed in pain as the bone broke and blood spurted over her face.
The thug turned away from her as she collapsed to her knees, hand clamped over her face, and jerked his knee up between the male cop’s legs. The man went down with a cry of agony, clutching his groin.
A screeching alarm went off; the desk sergeant had obviously hit a panic button.
Looking around for a way out, the thug came face to face with Gabriel, who’d moved to block his exit though the double doors.
Gabriel’s personal code placed talking above violence.
When possible.
It was not possible.
His right hand shot out, bunched into a fist, and punched hard into the thug’s windpipe. He stepped back and hit him twice more with blows to the stomach, driving his wind from him in a gasp. But the thug was tough, and solid, maybe fourteen or fifteen stones of muscle and bone. He staggered back, eyes blazing, but he didn’t go down.
With the sound of booted feet running down the corridor getting louder, Gabriel wanted to stop his adversary from doing any more damage. As the thug drew his own right boot back to kick the fallen policewoman, Gabriel used a technique he’d learned from a slightly built Scottish unarmed combat instructor who went by the unlikely moniker of “Ghandi”.
He leapt towards his target and, with his right hand bent into a claw, dug his fingers into the guy’s eye sockets. Not with the intention of blinding him or, in the charming Scot’s words, “enucleating the bastard,” but causing him excruciating pain and enough temporary damage to his corneas to stop him from doing any more harm to friendly forces. Two knee-jerks into the thug’s groin and the outside edge of his shoe raked down the left shin completed the trifecta of disabling moves.
With a squeal of pain, surprisingly high from such a large chest cavity, the thug crumpled. It was over.
For the second time in the space of a couple of minutes, doors banged back against the walls as a posse of uniforms and detectives tumbled into the increasingly cramped waiting area.
Gabriel was panting. He stood back as four uniformed cops grabbed the man, hauled him to his feet and slammed him face-first into the wall by the booking desk.
“Right!” the desk sergeant bellowed. “Will one of you lot read this fucker his rights so we can stick him downstairs.”
“I’ll do it.” It was Susannah Chambers. She shouldered her way through the throng and planted her not inconsiderable frame in front of the now subdued thug. She grabbed his lower jaw in her right hand, making sure her purple fingernails dug deeply into the skin on his cheeks. “OK, sunshine. Name? And if you say ‘Mickey Mouse,’ ‘you tell me,’ or ‘fuck off pig,’ I’ll turn the security cameras off and leave you in here with this lot.”
The man grunted something.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that, sir. Did you say, ‘fuck off pig’? OK, sergeant, turn off the …”
“No! It’s Jason Watts.”
“Well, Jason Watts, I am arresting you under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act for being a complete cunt. But the record will show you are being charged with causing grievous bodily harm, resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, and whatever else I can come up with. You have the right to remain silent. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Right!” she said, brushing her hands together. “That’s the pleasantries out of the way. Here’s a little something from me for hurting my officers.” She drew back her right hand, balled it into a fist and drove it with some force into the man’s stomach.
To laconic cheers and applause, the now drooping thug was dragged away to a cell. Susannah turned to Gabriel.
“Thanks, Gabriel. Sarge just told me what you did. I owe you one. Now, are you ready to stand behind me and do nothing but observe and listen?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, tipping her a salute.
“Good. Come on then. Chel’s in the forensics lab. We just got some good news.”
17
The War of Drugs
TORON WATCHED JARDIN PICKING HIS teeth with a long fingernail as he stood thirty yards away from the plane. The Cessna 206 had just taxied to a stop after touching down on Eden’s bumpy grass landing strip. Toron observed him from inside the plane, enjoying keeping his business partner waiting. His navy suit was a silk number, reasonably cool, but not a garment to stand around in with the temperature as hot as it was today. He hoped the ridiculous white prophet’s robe Jardin affected was keeping him nice and warm. After two minutes had passed according to the stopwatch on his chunky gold Rolex, he opened the door and descended the short flight of steps. Giving an ironic salute, he ambled across the stretch of grass towards Jardin, carrying a tan leather briefcase. He extended his hand as he reached the cult leader whose drug factory he had come to discuss. Closing the gap between them to arm’s length, he took Jardin’s outstretched hand and pulled him into an embrace, kissing both cheeks.
“Christophe,” he said, beaming. “Ready to scope out our facility?”
“Come, Diego, pleasure before business. I have some coffee brewing. From your native Colombia. Walk with me. Oh, and perhaps you would do me the courtesy of calling me Père Christophe while you are my guest.”
Toron’s eyes narrowed for a split second. In his line of work, it was he who was used to courtesy from others, although he knew it was often born simply out of a fear of drowning. Then he smiled again.
“Why not? It’s your place, so I guess I can call you Father. Even though you’re not a priest, eh, my friend?” He clapped Jardin on the back as he said this, harder than was strictly necessary, enjoying the brief scowl of irritation that flitted across the older man’s face.
They crossed the meeting ground and walked up the path that led to Jardin’s house.
Once inside, Toron looked around and whistled. “Madre de Dios, you have some fine looking shit in here. They all original, or what?”
“Oh, they’re original, my friend,” Jardin called from the kitchen. Then he emerged, bearing a silver tray laden with a coffee pot, cups, sugar, spoons, and a plate of cakes, scalloped ovals of pale yellow edged with brown. “Here, I thought you might be hungry after your trip. No room for air hostesses on those Cessnas, eh?”
Toron took a cake and bit it in half, brushing a couple of crumbs off his lapel. “Mmm. These are good,” he said. “You make them yourself, or did you have one of your slaves whip up a batch for you?”
Jardin smiled and stroked his beard. “Home-baked, by me. They’re called madeleines. My mother’s own recipe. One taste of a madeleine inspired Proust to compose À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.”
“Sorry, man. English I know for business, but French? Not necessary.”
“It means, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’,” Jardin said, picking up a madeleine for himself. “But what I want to discuss with you, compadre, is times future.”
“Now who’s in a hurry?” Toron said, always happiest when he could force other people to fall in with his pace. “How about some of that coffee?”
“Of course. And help yourself to more cakes.”
Coffee poured, and more cakes eaten, Toron finally permitted Jardin to talk business.
“So, my friend, we go i
nto business together, this is what you want? Maybe we choose a good name for our little joint venture. I know!” he said, clapping his hands together with a loud smack. “Salvación. You know, because you are like Jesus to your followers, and people call me The Baptist.” Toron laughed loudly, watching Jardin fidgeting with impatience to get started.
“Yes, fine. A name. For the stationery, I suppose. And the corporate jet. Now, how about I show you the site I’ve picked out? I think it should work rather well.”
One of the male Children drove Toron and Jardin out of the village and down a dirt track for a mile until they reached a huge clearing surrounded by a thick screen of trees whose upper branches swayed in the breeze.
“Wait here, Child Raymond,” Jardin ordered as he climbed out of the Jeep.
“Yes, Père Christophe,” the young man said.
Toron followed Jardin into the centre of the clearing. It was roughly the size of a football pitch. Jardin pivoted on the spot and waved his arm around, taking in the whole circumference of the field.
“I think this would be ideal, don’t you? There’s a river beyond those trees, a tributary of the Rio Negro. So, one,” he held up a finger, “an abundant, reliable water supply.” He pointed at the sky. “Two, no commercial air routes cross Eden,” another finger flicked up, “so no government snooping.” Then he hooked his thumb back over his shoulder towards the village. “And three, a willing and docile workforce. Unpaid, too, so no labour costs. What do you think?”
Toron look around the vast expanse of the clearing. He was already calculating supply routes, tonnages, equipment costs, specialist chemists’ salaries, additional freight planes and boats to move product into the US. He was also enjoying keeping Jardin waiting.
18
The First Piece of Evidence
GABRIEL FOLLOWED CLOSELY BEHIND SUSANNAH as she navigated the cramped CID operations room, swerving to avoid detectives shooting back from desks on their wheeled chairs to grab phones, or jumping to their feet to ask her questions on her way past.
She issued rapid-fire orders, responses, and questions of her own without breaking step.
“Follow it up.”
“Tell him if he calls again you’ll arrest him for wasting police time.”
“She sound genuine?”
“Yes, if you’re back before the briefing.”
“Fuck, no!”
Within thirty seconds, they were through the large square room with its confusion of whiteboards, incident timelines and notices about firearms training and first aiders, and into a narrow corridor. Susannah was marching along, and Gabriel was forced to lengthen his own stride to keep up. She stopped abruptly at a door marked, “Forensics”.
She turned to Gabriel.
“They’re my little pets in here, and I don’t want you to say a word. OK?”
“Sure.” He made a lip-zipping gesture and threw away the key for good measure.
Inside, the buzz and banter, ringing phones and hubbub of multiple conversations in CID were silenced. The noise was replaced with a muted murmur. Centrifuges were spinning test tubes full of blood and other liquids. Printers hummed as they churned out documents. Keyboards were being tapped furiously. And below it all was the furious whirring of extremely large brains.
Standing beside a balding, bearded guy, whose brown eyes were magnified by his thick, tortoiseshell glasses, was Chelsea, the Detective Sergeant. They were staring at his monitor.
“Boss,” she called, causing all the other people in the lab to look up with varying expressions of annoyance or disgust on their pallid faces. “Steve’s got a hit on one the ball bearings. A print.”
Once all three of them were clustered around the forensic analyst’s desk, looking over his balding head at the monitor, he pointed at the screen, which was divided into two vertical panes. The left-hand pane was labelled, “BB 79—partial”.
He pointed with a bitten fingernail at a pattern of red dots and lines superimposed onto an enlarged fingerprint, which reminded Gabriel of the contour lines on a map.
“We got this off a ball bearing recovered from the bus itself,” he said in a nasal voice that suggested he should have had some kind of adenoid surgery as a child. “It’s a miracle, really, given the heat the charges must have generated. Maybe someone was smiling on us for once. Anyway, I ran it through …” then he looked up at Gabriel and paused.
“It’s all right, Steve,” Susannah said. “He’s helping us catch the people who did it.”
The man sniffed and continued speaking.
“I ran it through the, shall we say, usual databases, and look what popped up ten minutes ago.”
He pointed to the right-hand pane, where a complete fingerprint was depicted in pin-sharp resolution, displaying an identical pattern of red lines connecting minuscule red squares. A green banner was flashing across the bottom of the screen. It consisted of a single word.
MATCH.
“So who does it belong to, my darling?” Susannah said, ruffling what was left of the man’s hair and causing him to shake his head like a dog objecting to being patted.
He tapped a couple of keys, and a PDF of a police report flashed up onto the screen. He read out the top line, even though his audience were more than capable of doing it for themselves.
“Eloise Alice Virginia Payne. Possession of a Class A controlled substance; specifically, ten grammes of cocaine. Fined one thousand pounds and ordered to do one hundred and twenty hours community service; Woking Magistrates Court, nineteenth of June, two thousand and thirteen.”
The colour photograph in the top right-hand corner of the report showed a young girl of maybe seventeen or eighteen. Not particularly pretty. Bad skin, her forehead peppered with spots; long, lank blonde hair; no makeup apart from dark smudges of eyeliner. Sullen expression. Gabriel stared at it. There were similarities with the girl he’d seen leaving the car outside Biaggi’s, but he couldn’t be sure. Was this her?
“Not much to look at, was she?” Susannah said, stabbing her finger at the picture.
“Why do you say ‘was’, Guv?” Chelsea asked. “We don’t know for sure she was the bomber. Just that she was there when it was made.”
“Wishful thinking,” Susannah said. She patted Steve on the shoulder. “Good work. Now, print me a copy of that and we’ll get out of your hair. No offence.”
He smiled. “None taken. You know what they say about bald men, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. And if you want to disappear that lovely wife of yours and run away with me to Zanzibar, we can find out if it’s true, can’t we?”
“Come on, Gabriel,” Chelsea said with a grin. “Let’s get out of here before these two start shagging on the carpet.”
“Oi! You cheeky little bitch,” Susannah said. “Fuck off and get a brew for us. Then see me in my office with wonder boy here.”
Chelsea crooked her finger at Gabriel and they left the forensics lab ahead of Susannah, who presumably hadn’t finished flirting with her pet.
While they waited for the kettle to boil, Gabriel used the time to find out how the investigation was going.
“So apart from the fingerprint, have you got anything else that might help us?”
She leant back against the fridge in the cramped little kitchen and folded her arms across her chest.
“To be honest? We’ve got fuck all. All the witnesses who might have identified the bomber are in body bags, or in some cases, freezer bags. Sorry, more cop humour.”
He waved the remark away.
“Don’t worry about it. Carry on.”
“OK, so there’s the head. That’s our next best hope. It’s still with the pathologist, downstairs. He’s going to call me as soon as he has something to ID the owner. At least DNA won’t be a problem.”
“What about CCTV? I’m still sure I saw the bomber. She could be the girl in the photo, but if I could see her walking, I’d be more confident.”
“Next stop after the Guvnor’s told us wh
atever she wants to tell us. Look, the kettle’s boiled. Help me make three mugs, would you?”
The tea made, they carried the steaming mugs through CID and into Susannah’s office, partitioned off from the open plan area with stud walls and large plate glass windows. She was already there and on the phone. She waved them to chairs in front of the desk, rolled her eyes and signalled she was trying to wind the call up, rolling her index finger around in a circle. They sat, sipped the scalding tea, and waited. It soon became obvious who was taking up Susannah's time.
“Yes, sir. I know, sir. It’s just … No, I understand the public need to be reassured but we haven’t … Can’t we wait for another twenty-four hours before we … Yes. Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Straight away. I’ll get Pam Vickers onto it right away. She’s our new Chief Press Liaison Officer. She’s … Yes, I have full confidence in … yes, thank you, sir. Goodbye, sir.”
She held the phone away from her face, which had coloured alarmingly as if she were about to have a heart attack. Her breathing was coming in deep, growling inhalations and exhalations. With a carefully extended middle finger she tapped the red icon to end the call, placed the phone on her desk, then ran both hands through her luxuriant auburn hair.
“That bloody man is going to be the death of me. Chief Superintendent Graham Ford had just ordered me—ordered, mind—to hold a press conference. I mean,” she said, her tone protesting, “what the fuck am I supposed to say? A hundred-odd people lost their lives two days ago and so far all we’ve got to go on is a fingerprint of some bloody teenaged coke-head from a couple of years ago. Oh, yes. Very bloody reassuring. Why don’t I go on the morning fucking telly and sit on that luminous bloody sofa and trot out the same platitudes we always have, too? ‘Doing everything in our power. No stone unturned. Every officer working round the clock to find the culprits.’ Jesus Fucking Aitch Christ, what a fucking mess.” She took a slurp of the tea and immediately winced and clamped her hand to her lips. “Shit, Chels. What did you do to it? Taser the fucking thing? I just lost all the skin off my tongue.”
