The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  ‘Basically we need it turned on, and the GPS activated in order to locate it,’ Otara said. ‘We’ve already pre-set a monitoring system on the switch, so should get an identifiable location in less than ten seconds. The suspect has at least one and possibly two women hostage, one of them the wife of a serving officer, who he is threatening to kill at five p.m. today.’

  ‘You can see why we wanted you involved,’ Rigby said, smiling.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Steele. ‘We can get video too on the Android device, which should allow us to hear what is going on, even if the phone is in a pocket. If you need to make contact with the kidnapper I can also remotely turn on the speakerphone. That I’m sure will give him quite a shock.’

  She opened her briefcase and slid out quite the thinnest laptop that Claire had ever seen. It was matt black and had not a single logo visible. It seemed to exude a penetrating pale blue light from underneath. After a few keystrokes, she looked up, the reflected light of the screen giving her eyes an almost sci-fi luminosity. ‘I’ve got the secure connection that we need. I have authorised the activation, which will be undertaken from our base in Cheltenham.’

  ‘I’m amazed that you can take an electronic device that is off, and turn it on,’ said the chief constable, batting her eyelashes at the woman. My God, she’s flirting, thought Claire.

  Dr Steele’s green eyes widened further. ‘When a human is asleep, the heart still beats, the breath continues and the circadian rhythms still operate. Likewise, the concepts of on and off in telecommunication devices are a little mutable at the margin. We just whisper a few significant words into their sleeping ears.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ Rigby’s shoulders eased back, as if the woman had caressed her with this poetic simile. The chief constable was playing with the chain at her neck, her eyes radiating their most powerful blue. Claire caught Rob Townsend’s eye across the table, expecting to share a knowing glance, but as chief office nerd he seemed oblivious to the chemistry being stirred up in this darkened room. Instead he absent-mindedly scratched his ear.

  Chris Steele returned to her laptop, tucking a hank of hair behind her ear as she did so. The gentle clack of keys continued. ‘The target device is now awake, the firmware under our control. The GPS chip is being bootstrapped; the next pass from the satellite transponder may take a few seconds, but it will give us the information you need.’ She looked across at Townsend, whose own laptop was open. ‘I’ll make you my slave, for the data,’ she said, reaching across and connecting the two laptops’ USB ports with a cable. ‘You’ll get an exact copy in real-time. This phone is a slave to an emulator constructed by my colleague on Taurus, our computer at Cheltenham. Sadly, Edward Snowden revealed a lot of our techniques back in 2015, though we have developed many more since then.’

  Rigby leaned over Townsend, ostensibly to see the screen better, but also giving both Claire and the spook the benefit of some cleavage. Claire eyed the intelligence officer to see whether her transponders had been lit by the chief constable’s all-frequency broadcast. The woman was such a cyborg it was impossible to tell.

  ‘I’ve got the map,’ Townsend said excitedly. ‘The phone is travelling west of Woking towards Basingstoke.’

  ‘You want the video?’ Steele asked.

  ‘Yes, let’s try to see what’s going on,’ Rigby said.

  Townsend’s screen remained blank, and the only noises were a deep rumbling. ‘He’s in a car with a phone in a pocket, or possibly in a case,’ he said.

  ‘But we still know where,’ Rigby said.

  Otara was on his own phone. ‘I want two vehicles on the B3400,’ he said. ‘Target has just left Pirbright, heading west. Can we get one to intercept from the Basingstoke end?’

  Claire interrupted with information that Perry had called in just an hour previously. ‘Halliday might well be driving a black Range Rover.’ She read out the number plate.

  She had already awoken the duty magistrate, a rather grumpy fellow in Norwich who clearly thought it unnecessary to be pulled out of bed at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. The warrants approved, two NCA cars plus a people carrier full of uniforms had been dispatched ten minutes ago. One to the address in Fleet that Gabriel Hallam, a.k.a. Kyle Halliday, had told Ellen Bramley was his own, and the other to the industrial unit at Shildon.

  ‘Unit one ETA Shildon twenty-five minutes,’ Otara announced. ‘Unit two will be at Fleet in five minutes.’

  The DCI looked up from a clipboard on his desk. ‘Where the hell is PC Lynne Fairbanks? She was due on at six.’

  A sergeant at the far end of the room raised his hand. ‘I rang her home number, sir, and there is no reply. I assume she is on her way.’

  Slack, Claire thought. Biggest case for a decade and the woman has probably overslept.

  * * *

  DCs Worrell and Blunt raced into Fleet, and turned off the siren five minutes before reaching the address at 7.15 a.m. The house they had been directed to was an anonymous three-bedroom redbrick semi in a row of similar 1980s homes. An old red Fiat was parked outside. They cruised up and parked quietly. The two disreputable-looking leather-jacketed individuals sprinted up to the door. While Blunt rang the bell and peered through the reeded glass door, Worrell eased his way over the back garden fence and noticed there was a sliding rear door. He stood next to it with his back to the wall, just like he’d seen cops do on TV.

  ‘Police, open up!’ Blunt shouted, as he banged on the glass UPVC door. A shape coalesced behind, and the door opened. A teenage girl in fleecy pyjamas and puppy-headed slippers with a mass of dishevelled wavy blonde hair stared at them in alarm.

  ‘Where’s Kyle Halliday?’ Blunt yelled as he forced his way in, waving a lanyard vaguely in her direction.

  ‘Moved out two months ago,’ the girl said. ‘My parents are renting it now, but they’re on holiday in Crete.’

  ‘Nothing personal, darling, but we’ve got a bit of legal paper which allows us to take a look around anyway,’ Blunt said, racing up the stairs and banging from one room into another. Worrell pushed past too, into the lounge and kitchen. There was nobody there. While Blunt made some notes, Worrell returned to the doorway, where the girl had now donned a bathrobe and was sitting on the stairs.

  ‘What’s your name, love?’ he asked.

  ‘Becky Keene. My dad is Gerald and my mum is Mary. I hope you didn’t hurt my rabbits,’ she pouted.

  ‘Your rabbits are fine,’ Worrell said, not having noticed any. ‘You’re a bit young to be in the house on your own.’

  ‘I’m nearly fourteen,’ she said indignantly, running her hand through her hair.

  Worrell suppressed his amazement, but not his wandering eyes. While Blunt called in news of the failed raid, Worrell apologised for waking her up, but added that she could expect a call later in the day from uniformed officers who might take a statement and do some paperwork. ‘We’re too busy for all that,’ he said.

  Back in the car, Blunt left rubber on the road as they pulled away from the house.

  ‘Christ,’ Worrell said. ‘Did you see the body on that? Fucking thirteen, I can hardly believe it.’

  Blunt laughed. ‘Jailbait. Gets worse every year. If she’d had make-up, she could have passed for twenty.’

  * * *

  Vanessa Perry stood at the doorway and watched the police car head off. It had been a close thing. But her natural acting skills, the ones that Kyle had praised, had carried her through, helped by borrowing her best friend’s name. This time she hadn’t needed to don a wig or carry a violin. She hadn’t even needed to pad out a coat, to hide her figure, like she had when impersonating the German girl. Quite the reverse. The two cops were a couple of dim pervs.

  The most difficult role had been the first one, the Monday afternoon spent with Kyle on a lonely country road, learning how to drive his big green four-wheel-drive. She’d only passed her test four months previously, and learning how to do a fast getaway had taken her several attempts. Then he’d produced two
thick extra jumpers, two pairs of gloves and a big man’s car coat for her to wear, and made her do it again. Finally she had to learn how to do it wearing a ski mask. Doing the getaway for real at night had all been enormously exciting, and she drove the vehicle with verve and enthusiasm just as if she were a real car thief. When she saw that she had dragged Kyle over, indeed almost run him down, she had wanted to go back and see if he was all right. But he had previously made clear to her that no matter what she was to park the Warrior in his workshop by the railway arches, and pick up the Fiat that was already there to drive to Fleet.

  She had worried at first about the extraordinary things he had asked her to do for him. But the almost incredible story he had told her, about who the German girl really was, and how Kyle was being pursued by the British state, had convinced her. Not many people ever get a chance to really make a difference, and here she was just seventeen striking a blow against the big state.

  Vanessa checked the new iPhone that Kyle had given her, in exchange for her old one. She should have left half an hour ago, to pick him up at the church at Long Stainton. She’d overslept. She changed into jogging gear, grabbed the duffel bag she had already packed and the car keys, got into the Fiat and drove away. She had only been going two minutes when three police cars packed with uniformed officers raced past in the other direction sirens blaring. It was just like Kyle had predicted. She was so excited that she was going to see him again.

  * * *

  Perry was gripping the dashboard with both hands, his knuckles white. He had never endured such a ride before. Gillard had broken all blue-lighting records, picking him up in Woking just after seven a.m., and then racing off to get to the industrial unit at Shildon before it was properly light. They had been listening to the traffic on a police network, and had just got news of the failed raid in Fleet. It seemed that Hallam/Halliday/Harrison had given Ellen Bramley an old address, now rented to someone else. No surprises there. However there was considerable excitement about some unspecified trace on the location of the black Range Rover.

  ‘Tell me about the warehouse unit,’ Gillard said, as he overtook an articulated lorry at about ninety miles an hour.

  ‘It’s at the junction of two railway lines, where the Southampton track separates from the Basingstoke line, and crosses over the old spur of the Basingstoke canal. They are almost all small units, many of them arches underneath the viaduct.’

  ‘A bridge?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Perry’s scientific precision wouldn’t allow him to classify the embankment and railway viaduct as a bridge, except perhaps at the very end where the canal was crossed.

  Gillard reminded him of the riddle.

  Under the bridge/ That’s where you’ll find her/ cold, with the fishes/ drowned by your own hand

  ‘Was there a fishmonger’s or anything similar?’

  ‘Not that I saw. Scrapyards, car repair outfits, that kind of thing.’

  Gillard shook his head. ‘It still could be the place. I’ve personally checked a dozen bridges in the last two days, but of course I’ve concentrated on those over rivers or canals. I haven’t got round to anything to do with the railways.’

  At Perry’s instruction, they turned off right into the industrial estate, still doing sixty. The unmarked Vauxhall hit the first road hump with a bone-shaking impact that had it airborne for the next two seconds. Gillard skilfully dodged the worst of the potholes on the crumbling tarmac, and brought the car back under control as he passed under the viaduct, slewing the vehicle to a halt outside unit K.

  ‘We’re ahead of them,’ Gillard said, jumping out of the car and going to the boot where he habitually left a toolbox. ‘They’ll be here in two minutes. Now, let’s get this door open.’

  ‘We don’t have the warrant,’ Perry said, hurrying along behind the DCI.

  ‘John, I overheard on the radio that a warrant has been issued. It doesn’t have to be in my own sweaty paws to be effective.’ Gillard went up to the roller door, which was running with moisture. He took off his glove and touched it with his bare hand.

  ‘It’s freezing! It’s bloody freezing.’ He turned to Perry. ‘This is the place. She must be in here!’

  He flipped open the toolbox and, like a man possessed, tossed out various tools, trying to find something hefty enough for the job. Three fist-sized die-cast steel padlocks secured the shutter to a thick cast iron loop, part of a thirty-foot-wide baseplate that ran the full width of the unit. The best he could find was a very large screwdriver, but it was obvious it would make little impression.

  John Perry raised his head, and looked behind him.

  The sound of sirens, many of them, in the distance.

  * * *

  Three police squad cars and two vans screamed through the tunnel under the viaduct and up into the tarmacked apron. Uniformed officers piled out of their vehicles. The final van had a locksmith’s logo on the side.

  DCS Raj Otara spotted Gillard and said: ‘Craig, you’re not supposed to be here.’

  ‘My wife is in there!’ Gillard retorted, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘And maybe my daughter too,’ Perry added.

  Otara sighed. ‘All right, I’m not that cruel, just stay out of the way.’

  The locksmith, a skinny guy in his sixties, came up to them. ‘With these locks, you’re talking a good ninety minutes to cut them. The easiest way in is actually to cut along the base of the shutter, that’ll have you inside in ten minutes.’

  Otara sucked his teeth. ‘Okay, go for it.’

  The locksmith pulled out the back of his van the biggest set of bolt croppers Gillard had ever seen. He took them and a big metal box of tools up to the left-hand edge of the roller door.

  ‘So what about the Range Rover you were tailing,’ Gillard asked Otara. ‘Wasn’t it heading in this direction?’

  ‘It was, but it’s been found ablaze in the village of Long Stainton. The fire service got on to it almost immediately, so let’s just hope there’s enough evidence left when CSI finally get to give it the once over.’

  ‘So Halliday has got himself yet another vehicle?’ Perry said.

  ‘Looks that way,’ Otara said.

  The sound of drilling, and then grinding blotted out their words. The locksmith was gradually snipping his way across the shutter about two feet off the ground.

  DC Carl Hoskins was helping PC Tony Tunnicliffe, one of the biggest cops in the county, to try to wrench out the bottom flap, but the locksmith told him to stop. ‘If you jam the mechanism, we won’t be able to wind it up, and then you’ll all have to go in and out the rabbit hole.’

  ‘It stinks of fish,’ Hoskins said.

  Tunnicliffe had his hands resting against the metal of the door. ‘That must be why it’s so bloody cold,’ he said.

  “‘Cold, with the fishes”, that’s part of the rhyme,’ Otara said, glancing at Gillard. The detective chief inspector was clenching and unclenching his fists, staring at the shutter as if he could laser his way in with his eyes.

  The locksmith, sensing their impatience, cut two parallel snips in the roller door down to the ground, and kicked out a three-foot-by-two slot. Hoskins lay on his side to get an early view, and was met with a fog of freezing air that drifted out. He shone his torch through. It was clear the place had originally been a car repair joint: metal-lidded inspection pits, a broken hoist at the far end amid piles of tyres. Everyone outside heard his soft cursing at whatever it was he’d seen.

  ‘We found the Mitsubishi Warrior and Sam’s Renault.’

  Gillard dropped next to Hoskins to peer inside. Before anyone could react, he had grabbed Hoskins’ torch, and wriggled under the shutter into the unit.

  ‘Gillard!’ Otara yelled, ‘I told you. Come out of there, now.’

  He didn’t reply. The place was only lit by the control lights of two banks of vertical chillers, six in all, blasting out freezing air towards the vehicle. It took Gillard a moment to find the light switch, and the s
trip lighting flashed on. The Warrior stood glistening in the centre of the concrete space, so frost-covered it looked like it had been dipped in icing sugar. On either side were two supermarket-style glass topped freezers, and beyond them, deep in the recess of the vaulted space, Sam’s black Renault. It was more mildly frosted.

  Hoskins now squeezed through the gap, followed by the locksmith, who was intent on finding a way to get the shutter raised. Gillard flipped off the chillers so they could hear themselves speak, as two or three of the uniformed officers made their way laboriously inside.

  Gillard pulled open the doors and then boot of the Renault. Empty. He turned back to the Warrior.

  ‘The car’s full of ice,’ Hoskins said, scraping away the surface frost of one of the double cab’s windows. ‘That’s not just on the outside. It’s been filled with water and frozen solid.’ He scratched away at the driver-side window, and then pressed his face to the glass. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty, someone’s frozen in there. A woman. I can see hair, long dark hair.’

  Gillard let out a groan.

  ‘Definitely dark?’ Perry asked.

  ‘Yes, dark,’ Hoskins said.

  Perry gasped with relief. Thank God! It’s not Vanessa. His heart went out to Gillard, losing this roll of the cosmic dice.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, what are you all waiting for, let’s get her out of there!’ Gillard was working the controls of the freezers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Otara called. He was on the ground outside staring through the gap, just as the roller door, finally cut right across, was being hauled up manually.

  ‘I’m reversing these to defrost,’ Gillard replied. ‘We’ve got to heat this place up. Now you lot, get some tools, break the windows. Let’s get hacking at the ice.’ He stared disconsolately at the huge SUV, not only the double cab full of ice, but the truck bed too, a good foot deep. ‘Can you open this car?’ he asked the locksmith.

  ‘Not till the locks are unfrozen. But I’ve got a blowtorch in the van.’ He sprinted off to fetch it.