DS Mickey Schaeffer was looking dapper in a tuxedo. He eyed Kathy approvingly. ‘Got your gun?’
She opened her shoulder bag. He was wearing his in a holster beneath his dinner jacket, one of the new Glock 22s, ninety grams heavier and twenty-six millimetres longer than Kathy’s model. ‘We have different ammo,’ he said. ‘Not good.’
He was tense, fingering his bow tie.
‘I don’t think we’ll run out,’ she said with a smile.
‘How can you be so calm? You ever meet Jack?’
‘No. You?’
‘In my first year in CID we found someone who’d upset him. He’d chopped her into little bits and stuffed her inside a couple of old sacks used for cow manure. I still get the nightmare.’
They caught a cab to Fantasyland, and entered arm in arm, looking as if they’d been out on the town all night.
The gaming rooms were relatively quiet, a few bleary-looking couples yawning, a gaggle of young women from somewhere up north—Manchester by the sound of it—still buzzing on pills and alcohol, a couple of more serious punters with expressionless faces. Kathy had an earpiece hidden beneath her hair, through which she heard the operation controller checking the arrival of armed response units in the surrounding streets. Together, she and Mickey made their unhurried way from room to room, checking the layout against the plans and photographs they’d memorised, and mentally recording the faces of guests and staff. A camera in Kathy’s bag was also transmitting pictures to control.
A shriek drew them back to the gaming tables, where one of the Manchester women had spilled her drink over the roulette wheel and was now giggling hysterically. They watched as a big, stony-faced security man moved in to steer her away to a seat while the croupier fussed over the table with a box of tissues. More staff appeared, and Kathy noticed the security man check his watch and walk away.
After a few minutes the controller’s voice sounded in Kathy’s ear. She listened, then turned to Mickey and murmured, ‘Someone inside the building is taking a call from Jack on a mobile.’
There was no one in that room using a phone and they hurried out to the bar, then into another gaming room and simultaneously clocked the big security man standing on the far side with a hand raised to his cheek. As they moved towards him he wheeled around and pushed the exit door open behind him, at the same time hitting a fire-alarm button on the wall. The alarm immediately began to scream as he disappeared through the door. They followed, running, through the door and down a corridor, around a corner, Kathy talking to control as they went. They came to a stair, a long flight, with the man halfway down.
‘Oi!’ Mickey shouted. ‘Police. Stop! Stay where you are!’
The man looked back over his shoulder, then began racing down the steps three at a time. Mickey, ahead of Kathy, was faster, and before the man reached the bottom he launched himself at him and the two fell in a struggling heap. As she ran down after them Kathy saw the man jerk his arm out from beneath Mickey, a knife gripped in his hand. She jumped onto him, stamping on his wrist with a heel, and he gave a scream. She pointed her gun at his face and he froze, staring up at her.
‘You all right, Mickey?’
‘Yeah.’ The DS struggled to his feet.
There was something unexpectedly fearful about the security man’s expression, Kathy thought, almost panicky. He gulped, the Adam’s apple leaping in his throat. ‘We gotta leave,’ he croaked.
‘What’s that?’
He hesitated for a moment, teeth clenched as if trying to prevent himself from speaking. Then he gave an odd kind of whimper and said, ‘There’s a bomb.’
‘Where?’
He shook his head. ‘Two minutes.’
Control was speaking urgently in Kathy’s ear. They could see the images of the man but not hear what he was saying. Kathy told them, then said to Mickey, ‘Take him outside. I’ll make sure the place is clear.’
He began to protest but she turned and ran back up the stairs, along the corridor, through the door. Most people had left the gaming room, a straggler scooping up betting chips. She shouted at him to get out and then saw the Manchester girls still fooling around in the next room, shrieking with laughter, refusing to move. She ran to them, grabbing the arm of the one who’d spilled her drink. ‘There’s a bomb,’ she cried. ‘Get out NOW!’ She bustled them to the door, stumbling on their high heels, then down the stairs, across the hall, out into the sudden cold of the street. One of the women started complaining that she’d left her purse behind and began walking back towards the front door with its lurid flashing lights. Kathy grabbed her arm and hauled her back. ‘Come ON!’ she yelled. ‘We need to cross the street.’ She saw men running towards them, recognising Brock and someone else—the new commander. She heard the howl of a fire engine, and then a tremendous blast hit her back and knocked her flat onto the ground.
10
She thought she must be underwater, because all she could hear was the muffled sound of her own breathing. She raised a hand to her face and felt the mask. Scuba-diving then. She struggled to remember, but nothing came to her. Then she opened her eyes and saw a head looming over her, blurry, then coming into focus, a familiar face—Bren. He was mouthing something to her, but she couldn’t hear a thing. He vanished and she closed her eyes again. She felt the sway of her body in the current.
She woke again to a dream, hearing the distant squeal of women’s voices, from Manchester surely, demanding dirty leprechauns.
After a while she was aware that the swaying had stopped and everything seemed very quiet. She tried opening her eyes and there was Bren once more, looking down at her.
‘Kathy! You’re awake!’
Why was he talking with his mouth full of cotton wool? He vanished again, and she blinked up at dazzling light. Raising a hand to her face she found that the mask had gone, but that there was soft padding covering her forehead.
‘Hello.’ A young man was looking down at her.
‘Hello,’ she replied.
‘What is your name?’ he asked politely.
‘Kathy. Kathy Kolla. Detective Inspector Kathy Kolla.’
‘Good. Do you know what day it is?’
What a stupid question. ‘Wednesday.’ Then she remembered getting up in the middle of the night. ‘No, Thursday. What happened to my dress?’
The young man grinned and shone a flashlight into her eye.
‘Thirsty,’ she mumbled, her mouth seeming filled with rancid dust from the explosion, and tried to struggle upright.
When she eventually insisted that she was all right, the doctor gave her some painkillers and told her to go home and rest. Bren had brought her some police overalls and a pair of running shoes, because her little black dress and high heels were beyond repair. It seemed she had been remarkably lucky, just a few scrapes and bruises and some lingering deafness, though there was still a risk of concussion. They had all been very lucky, with no fatalities and only a couple of significant injuries. They left the Manchester girls in casualty still laughing, one with an arm in a sling and another with a bandaged head, texting home about what a blast London was, and how their trip had been pure dynamite.
‘What’s a dirty leprechaun?’ Kathy asked Bren.
He grinned. ‘Some kind of Irish cocktail. Why, you want one? Let’s get you home first.’ He checked his watch.
‘You in a hurry?’
‘There’s a debriefing in an hour.’
‘Forget about home.’
‘You sure?’ He looked at her doubtfully. ‘You took a hell of a bang.’
‘I need to be there, Bren.’
Brock met them at the police station, concerned for Kathy, and when she had assured him she was okay he led the way to the assembly room, where Mickey was still in his dinner suit, a dishevelled James Bond, face flushed, lapping up the attention as Commander Lynch leaned in close to hear him explain a detail. Kathy stayed at the back of the packed room, still feeling slightly disoriented, but suddenly the commander wa
s advancing on her, the crowd parting in front of him, and he was shaking her hand. It was the first time she had seen him up close, and she felt the power of the man, fierce, stocky, rocking forward on the balls of his feet as if to gouge the truth out of her. But his voice was soft, almost gentle. Was she all right? He regretted that they would have to take her through it all again after the debriefing.
She had expected them to get a bollocking, for Jack Bragg had not been caught and a sizeable chunk of a West End city block was a smoking ruin, but instead Lynch seemed remarkably sanguine. There had been no fatalities and the exercise had been a decisive demonstration of the powerful new digital surveillance techniques of Unit 12, which had accurately pinpointed Bragg’s attack. It was just unfortunate that they hadn’t been able to figure out that his intention wasn’t to rob the casino but to destroy it. And they had an arrest, thanks to the nimble footwork of DI Kolla and DS Schaeffer. There were muted cheers, and then a few puzzled looks when Lynch announced, almost as an afterthought, that Ashur Najjar, the arrested security man, would be questioned by a special team.
As the meeting broke up Kathy and Mickey were led away to an interview room where Lynch and a man from Unit 12 were waiting. Kathy looked around to see if Brock would be joining them, but apparently he wasn’t required. There was a large TV screen at one end of the room on which they began to replay the film made by the little camera in Kathy’s bag, working through it in painstaking detail, step by step, image by image, identifying each of the people inside the casino. After a while it occurred to Kathy that they were looking for a second accomplice, perhaps the one who had brought the bomb. As they came to the point where they saw Najjar speaking into his mobile, Kathy felt her heart begin to thump, her breathing speed up. Then she was aware of Lynch studying her.
‘All right, Inspector? You can be excused if this is too stressful. How about you, Schaeffer?’
‘No,’ Mickey said confidently. ‘I’m fine, sir.’
‘Me too,’ Kathy said.
‘You sure?’ Lynch smiled at her, but it was a cold smile, and it suddenly struck her that he didn’t like her. Was that it? Or perhaps didn’t trust her? Why would that be, when he didn’t know her? Had she made some unspoken mistake? Or was it because she was too close to Brock? Was he out of favour?
They continued, right up to the end, a blur as Kathy hustled the Manchester girls out of the building.
‘Right,’ Lynch said finally. ‘Got enough for now, Darryl?’
The Unit 12 man had said almost nothing so far, concentrating on making notes and diagrams. Now he pushed back the glasses on his nose and nodded. ‘Yep.’
Yep? She hadn’t come across this example of the new breed, or anyone else from DiSTaF for that matter. He reminded her of the bird in the print on Gudrun’s narrow-boat, with his black clothes and gelled hair and dark-framed glasses, and she wondered if he’d gone through basic training or spent any time on the beat, or if he’d been plucked straight out of a computer science lab.
Without another word Commander Lynch got to his feet and left the room. Darryl gathered up his papers and followed him. Mickey grinned at Kathy. ‘We did well.’
Kathy wasn’t so sure. ‘Why aren’t we interviewing Najjar?’
Mickey shrugged. ‘Ours not to question why, Kathy.’
Later she passed Zack, their civilian computer suite operator, working at his screens. He called after her, ‘Hi, Kathy, how you feeling now?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Where did they take you to check you out after the blast?’
‘Accident and emergency at UCH.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ He looked puzzled. ‘So why did they take your prisoner to a private clinic in Richmond?’
‘Richmond?’
‘Yeah. Was he badly hurt?’
‘No, not as far as I know. Just shaken up, like the rest of us. Are you quite sure?’
‘It came up on the computer, an acknowledgement that he’d been checked in to the Pewsey Clinic, Richmond, for emergency treatment. Here, I’ll show you . . .’
He tapped away for a few minutes, then looked up with a frown. ‘It’s gone. It’s not here any more.’
‘What kind of clinic is it?’
Zack pulled up its website. An image showed a house overlooking the river. ‘Drug and alcohol rehab, that’s what they’re advertising. Had he overdosed or something?’
Kathy thought back, picturing the security man’s walk, his reactions in the stairwell. ‘No, he seemed to be functioning normally.’
‘Well, I don’t know . . . I didn’t imagine it, Kathy. It was there, and now it isn’t.’
11
The Fantasyland bombing had shaken the team out of their preoccupation with the office review, and the following day there was a mood of excitement in the office. The papers were full of the case, and people stood around, comparing the photographs and reports, but no one, not even Brock, knew what was happening to the arrested security man. Finally, in the late afternoon, when he had heard nothing, Brock phoned Lynch’s office and was informed that, following intensive questioning, it had been decided to release Ashur Najjar without charge. When Brock exploded, Lynch’s assistant explained soothingly that Najjar would be closely monitored, in the hope that he would lead them to Bragg, the real target of the operation. When Brock asked who had been detailed to shadow him, he eventually came to understand that the monitoring would be entirely electronic, carried out by Unit 12, and would not involve physical surveillance as such. Having made clear his dissatisfaction at the lack of consultation, he rang off, feeling edgy. He went over to his office window, looking out over the roofs across the street to the bare branches of the trees in St James’s Park beyond, then turned and fiddled with his new coffee machine, and buzzed Kathy and asked her to come up.
When she arrived she spotted the new machine immediately. ‘That’s neat,’ she said, going over to examine it.
He explained that it had arrived unexpectedly in the post, a surprise birthday present from his son in Canada. The recent shock of discovering that he had a son, by his ex-wife who had left him and London almost thirty years before, still lingered, and when Kathy asked how John was, now that he’d returned home, his answer was vague.
‘Fine, I think. He was making noises about maybe coming back to the UK, but I told him that the way things are we’d be better all moving over there. Anyway, how are you today?’
‘Good.’
‘Are you sure?’ He looked at her with concern, seeing the signs of strain in her face. ‘That was some explosion. I don’t know how more people didn’t get hurt. You’re looking a bit pale.’
‘I’m grieving for my outfit.’
‘Ah yes, we’ll have to do something about that.’
He poured their coffees and they took them to the table on which an unmarked file was lying. As they sat he pointed to it and said, ‘Take a look.’
She opened it and spread out two photographic enlargements, each of a right hand with the flesh between thumb and forefinger sliced open. ‘Gudrun Kite?’ she said.
‘That one is. But you’ll see that the other cut is a bit bigger, less careful.’
She looked more closely. ‘Ye-es. But very similar. Whose is it?’
‘Her sister’s, Freyja. That picture was taken at her postmortem, eight months ago. They’re both post-mortem photographs.’
As Kathy examined them, he told her about his meeting with Chandramouli and conversation with the Cambridge pathologist. ‘Neither he nor Sundeep can account for it,’ he said. ‘They haven’t seen it before.’ He noticed a worried expression on Kathy’s face and said, ‘Something the matter?’
‘It was something one of the other boat owners said to me, a bit of a crackpot; he said that Gudrun died because she had the mark of the beast, and when I googled the phrase I found a quote from the Book of Revelations saying that the mark of the beast—of Satan, that is—was on your right hand.’
Kathy looked at her ow
n right hand, the pad of flesh on which a pen or a javelin might rest, feeling uneasy. ‘You don’t think it could be the signature of a killer, do you?’
‘I’ve been trying to resist that idea. Anyway, they’re not our cases, and I don’t think, in the current climate, that this is enough to justify our involvement, although there is another coincidence. Apparently Freyja, like Gudrun, was working in the field of security, for a Cambridge company called Penney Solutions, though from what I can gather they’re a very different kind of outfit to Gudrun’s Paddington firm.
‘I asked Zack to run a quick check on the two companies to see if he could find a connection between them.’ He reached for a second file on his desk and handed it to Kathy, who scanned the notes inside.
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