Petersen grasped the handle and heaved the sliding door aside to reveal the back of the van.
‘What are you looking for?’ Petersen asked.
‘Blood,’ Ayala said melodramatically.
Petersen jumped backwards. ‘Bloody hell. Where in God’s name did you come from?’
Ayala ignored him and leant inside the van to look around. There were tools scattered haphazardly around the floor. He picked them up each in turn and stared intently at each before he replaced it. ‘I wish we had some luminol,’ he muttered.
After a few minutes of this, Petersen began to lose patience. ‘My van’s empty. Can I get back to my supper now?’
‘I’ve got a few questions yet, Mr Petersen. Were you driving this vehicle tonight?’
‘Yes. I already told you. I did some work on a wet room, and then I came home.’
‘And where was that work undertaken?’
‘Chertsey. I stayed there until a little after six and then called it a night. Her indoors doesn’t like it when I’m not home in time for supper.’ Petersen looked towards the dining room. The kids and Mrs Petersen had finished their dinner, and Mrs Petersen was beavering away clearing up behind them.
Petersen looked from Morton to Ayala. ‘If it’d help, I can fetch my client’s phone number, and you can verify my whereabouts.’
Just when Morton was about to reply, his phone began to vibrate. The caller ID said Ashley Rafferty. Morton held up finger in a ‘one minute’ gesture and turned away from Petersen. ‘Morton.’
‘Boss. I’ve found something. White transit van in the area. Vanity plate number Pi53PER–’
Morton cut her off. ‘I’m way ahead of you. I’m standing next to that van right now. It’s not the right one. The owner was in Chertsey for a plumbing job.’
‘I don’t think so, boss. You can’t be standing next to it. It’s just gone past the ANPR cameras heading north on the A320 in the last ten minutes.’
‘Shit.’ The kidnappers were headed for the intersection of the A3 and M25 – the ideal place to disappear.
Morton had had the right number plate all long. He just had the wrong van. Petersen’s number plate must have been cloned by Vanessa’s – and Mayberry’s – kidnappers.
‘Sixty seconds? We’re ten minutes out. Get as many local officers in the areas as you can. I want roadblocks on the motorway in both directions. Promise them whatever you have to.’ Morton hung up and sprinted for his car without saying a word.
‘Hey! Boss? Where are you going?’ Ayala shouted from behind him. ‘Wait for me!’
Chapter 21: Bloodied and Bruised
Thursday April 9th 20:05
The Automated Number Plate Recognition system worked in real-time. In theory.
In practice, the last hit for the cloned number plate was as the kidnappers were heading north along the B388 towards the M25. That hit was time-stamped for ten minutes ago, when Morton and Ayala were questioning Boyd Petersen.
Every second counted in kidnapping cases. The kidnappers had been careful enough not to be connected to the robbery. They’d stolen one van and cloned the number plates from another. They weren’t going to make it easy to follow them.
Morton cast a glance at the passenger seat and saw Ayala tap the refresh button again. Still nothing.
‘Give it a rest, Ayala. You know it’ll update as soon as another hit comes in.’
‘Where do you think they were going, boss?’
‘They were probably headed for the motorway, but if Rafferty has done her job quickly enough, then we’ve cut off those options–’
‘What if she hasn’t, boss?’ Ayala asked.
Silence hung in the air. If Rafferty was too late in getting up roadblocks, then the kidnappers would be long gone before Morton could do a damned thing.
‘We’ve got to proceed as if she has. If the kidnappers head along the motorway, then she’ll cut them off. That leaves us with the back roads. If I were trying to flee, I’d follow the road west from the B388 onto the B389 to Virginia Water, then cut back south over the M3 and then along the Guildford Road.’
Ayala craned around to look at Morton. ‘Why?’
‘Because if they can make it to the Six Crossroads Roundabout, then they’ll lose us,’ Morton said.
It was true. The Six Crossroads would let them head in virtually any direction, and keep them far enough away from the motorway to avoid the roadblocks.
‘You think they’ll take the back streets?’
‘No. They were two minutes out from the motorway intersection twelve minutes ago. If they went that way, then they’re already long gone.’ Morton stared ahead, willing the traffic to move faster. ‘But we can only do what we can do.’
The traffic was both blessing and curse. It meant that the criminals could still be in the area, but if they got to the edge of the jam before Morton did, then they’d get away.
They made it to the Six Crossroads in less than ten minutes. As Morton approached the roundabout, he could see police cars visible in every direction.
‘Good lass,’ Morton muttered before turning to Ayala. ‘You got anything on that laptop of yours? We’ve got cars in every direction. If they came this way, then we’ll find them.’
Ayala mashed the refresh button again. Still nothing.
‘Next guess, boss?’
‘If they’re not here, then they’ll have gone somewhere to ditch the van. These guys are too cautious not to change vehicles as soon as they can. Get a map up on that thing. Find me any disused industrial sites, wooded parklands or road-accessible bodies of water within twenty miles, and fast.’
‘Yes, boss!’
***
After the better part of half an hour roaming around West Byfleet and Woking, there was little to do but rejoin the search along the motorway, which proved to be easier said than done.
The M25, or the London Orbital Motorway as it was formally known, was a pain at the best of times. Tonight it was chock-a-block with commuters parked nose to tail. Rafferty had closed everything, and Morton was forced to crawl along the hard shoulder, much to the chagrin of the drivers he passed.
Every time Morton spotted a white van, his heart gave a leap. There was no shortage of transit vans queued up in the rain, either. Every single one had to be checked just in case the kidnappers had swapped plates yet again.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 22: Momentum
Thursday April 9th 20:10
The van travelled along in deathly silence. Mayberry found himself bound tightly, the plastic cable ties digging into his wrists. He could feel the heat of another body to his right, and from the muffled sobs which punctuated the silence, he knew it to be the girl he had seen the moment the van doors opened.
He wanted to talk to her, to tell her that the kidnappers had blindfolded them for a reason.
Mayberry found that if he leant to his right and strained just so, he could offer the gentlest of touches on her arm by way of reassurance. He thought, or perhaps imagined, that she leant towards him in acknowledgement.
The silence was almost eerie. The hum of the motor drowned out the sounds of breathing, and so Mayberry had no way to tell how many men were in the van.
He knew that there had to be at least the two men who had bundled him inside, and another man driving up front, but there could just as easily have been five or six men watching them.
Metal pranged on metal somewhere to Mayberry’s right. Then a man’s voice, smoky and raw, cursed in a language that Mayberry did not speak.
It had to be the box. Mayberry felt a grim resolve swell up inside of him.
Over and over again he heard someone strike the box. They seemed to be hitting it faster and faster, as if angered that it would not give up its secrets.
Then the smoky voice spoke again, firm and in control. ‘Zatrzymaj się.’
The van fell silent. They had given up attempting to open the box. A moment later the van rolled slowly to a sto
p and the engine cut off.
It had been less than fifteen minutes since Barker Road. They couldn’t have gone far.
Hinges creaked as the rear doors to the van swung open.
Mayberry sensed movement and tensed in the expectation that he and the girl would be bundled out of the van, but then the door thudded shut again as quickly as it had opened.
He heard voices, muffled and growing quieter.
‘Falowanie!’ the husky voice cried, and then the van lurched forward as if someone had crashed into the back of it.
Mayberry felt the van begin to move underneath him, but the engine was still off. A split second later it hit him: they were rolling downhill.
He and the girl were still tied, bound at wrists and ankles. He struggled furiously, trying to free his hands, desperate to do something.
Faster and faster the van rolled. Every minor bump in the asphalt sent a shudder through the van.
Mayberry did the only thing he could. He threw himself to his right, covering the girl with his body, trying to shield her from the coming impact.
And then it happened. There was no squeal or scream. Nobody hit the brakes to arrest their momentum. In silence the van thrust forward, pulled by the weight of gravity, and slammed without remorse into something at the bottom of the hill. The windshield shattered, imploding inwards and pelting the interior of the van with a hail of glass shards.
The front of the van crumpled, but it did not stop. Instead it flipped over to the right, the side of the van dragging along the pavement, and then there was another crash as the van came to a halt.
The van’s occupants, untethered by seatbelts, were flung forwards into the corkboard dividing the cabin from the back of the van. They slammed into it, Mayberry first as he clung to the girl, and he felt his back collide in a wave of pain more terrible than anything he had felt in his life.
The air was ripped from his lungs, his head began to scream, and then, mercifully, he slipped out of consciousness and silence ruled once more.
Chapter 23: Rock Bottom
Thursday April 9th 20:35
Rafferty idled on the north side of the M3 for over half an hour.
During that time, roadblocks had been set up on either side of Junction 12 where the M3 and the M25 met, causing traffic to quickly pile up for miles in every direction.
She had inched along the hard shoulder, her ANPR camera recording every number plate she passed as she drove. Every few seconds the computer pinged back another result. If she had been a traffic cop, it would have been a most productive use of her time. Several cars were being driven uninsured, two drivers were flagged as disqualified, and one sports car had been reported stolen the previous weekend.
But there was no sign of the van.
Rafferty watched the road with one eye and kept the other fixed on her dashboard. Officers from nearby precincts were assisting. They were visible, but totally ineffective. With every minute that passed without sight of the stolen van, it became more and more apparent that it was long gone.
A few drivers had taken to getting out of their cars. They milled idly around, perplexed and angry that the police would have closed such a busy thoroughfare during rush hour.
Rafferty was about to go and order the pedestrians back into their cars when the radio crackled.
‘Van spotted. Hillcrest Road, Camberley. We’ve got a situation.’
***
Ten minutes later, Rafferty roared into Camberley. She heard the crime scene long before she saw it. Sirens were wailing, and an ambulance sped past her as she turned onto Hillcrest Road.
Squad cars were lined up blocking off most of the road, and Rafferty was forced to park at the top of the road in case any more emergency vehicles needed to drive past.
She leapt from her car and jogged uphill on foot. Picturesque houses, each recessed a good thirty feet from the road, passed her by in a blur. If the situation had not been so dire, Rafferty might have taken time to reflect how beautiful and quiet Camberley was compared to inner London. It was an unusual place to hide, with only one entrance from the main road and nowhere to go on foot at the bottom of the cul-de-sac.
Rafferty rounded a bend at the top of the hill, jogged briefly along a flat bit of land where squad cars were parked two abreast, and then headed back down the other side of the hill, where the road was split by a grassy embankment running down the middle. The ground began to drop back down, much more steeply than her ascent, and the longest part of the road came into view before her. The road dropped straight down faster and faster. It reminded Rafferty of the kind of road that she would have sought out as a kid to thunder down on her skateboard.
It was only then that she saw it.
Perhaps a hundred feet down the road, at the bottom of the hill, the white van they had been chasing lay on its side amongst the conifers that guarded the front garden of one of the final homes in the road, the van’s undercarriage exposed to the elements. Firefighters were yelling for people to back away as Rafferty continued to jog towards it. Fuel was dripping from the exposed diesel tank, and the pungent smell of aerosolised diesel was in the air.
As Rafferty closed in on the van, an arm which belonged to a burly firefighter wrapped around her and pulled her away from the van just as the diesel caught fire. With an almighty whoosh the van was engulfed in flames, and the smell of burning conifer sap erupted into the air, pungent and smoky.
‘Mayberry!’ she cried.
‘Ma’am, get back.’
The firefighter dragged her away as smoke began to billow towards them. Once they were a safe distance away, the fireman came to a halt while Rafferty continued to yell herself hoarse.
‘There’s no one in there, ma’am. We got both occupants out, a man and a woman.’
Rafferty stopped struggling, the fireman loosened his grip, and Rafferty pulled away.
‘The man who was in the van. Where has he gone?’ Rafferty demanded.
‘Hospital, ma’am. He looked rough. Is he a friend of yours?’
Rafferty shook her head slowly. ‘Just a colleague.’
***
Morton arrived on the scene half an hour after Rafferty. He had been stuck south of the motorway and had to wait for the roadblock to clear before he could make it to Camberley. Though he would not know it for another hour, Mayberry’s ambulance had passed him in transit as it headed for the Accident and Emergency department at St Peter’s in Chertsey.
The van fire had been put out, which Morton knew would seriously hamper the work of the scene of crime officers who would descend on the scene as soon as they could. After a fire and water, there was a good chance that any forensics had been compromised.
Word had been sent from the hospital that Mayberry was in surgery. Morton wanted to head over there as soon as he could. It had been his choice to send in poor, stuttering, and relatively green Mayberry.
Morton found Rafferty doing crowd control fifty feet from the van. She was barking orders to uniformed officers as Morton approached. Crime scene tape had been set up across the road, and the residents who lived on the wrong side of it were now crowded around the police cars, huddled up with thermal blankets and thermoses full of tea.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Emergency services were called by a homeowner. She was in her living room when the van crashed into her conifers.’
‘Where is she now?’ Morton said.
‘Paramedics took her away,’ Rafferty said. ‘She’s being treated for shock.’
‘And Ayala?’
‘He’s canvassing door to door looking for anyone who might have seen the van.’
‘Go and help him out.’
For once she didn’t argue about being paired up with Ayala again. She nodded and ducked under the crime scene tape. Morton watched her go and then turned his attention to the van. Paint had been scorched off the lower half of the van, while the remaining paint had been turned a pale grey by the smoke.
The bodywork looked la
rgely intact, other than the front cabin, which had crumpled upon impact with the conifers. Glass from the windscreen littered the ground, a thousand tiny pieces reflecting the dying light of the day.
It was when Morton looked inside the van that the true extent of the devastation became apparent. The Jaws of Life had been applied to the rear door to leverage the metal apart, and Morton was able to shine a torch inside. The corkboard which had once divided the front cabin from the rear of the van had given way, and the contents of the van, which included tools and a large bag of ballast, had been scattered all over as if by a giant shaking the van like a snow globe.
Much of the detritus was covered in blood. Mayberry’s blood.
Morton turned away, his eyes beginning to well up at the sight.
He stared at the ground for what seemed like an age and barely noticed when Ayala came jogging towards him.
‘Boss! Boss! I found a witness.’
Morton dabbed at his eyes quickly with his sleeve. ‘Dust,’ he said quickly, by way of explanation, and then, before Ayala could question him, he added, ‘What did they see?’
‘She – that is to say, Mrs Lydia Hunt up at The Cottage on the Hill’ – Ayala pointed up at the top of the hill – ‘saw the van... and a car. Get this. One of the ladies saw a black sedan parked outside her house first thing this morning, which, according to her, is really unusual because everyone around here has multiple driveways and nobody is rude enough to block the road. She shrugged it off until this evening, when she heard an engine starting out front.’
‘Did she see the kidnappers get in?’
Ayala shook his head. ‘No, sir. She thought there were multiple men in the car, but it was the van she was concentrating on.’
Morton looked up from his position by the van, squinting uphill. It was a long way away to see anything. ‘How did the van draw her attention from all the way up there? Was it already on fire?’
‘No, sir. The van hadn’t even crashed by then.’
‘Then how...?’
The DCI Morton Box Set Page 33
