“This isn’t Colditz,” Naomi told her “and we’re hostages, not prisoners of war. I think there might be a subtle difference.”
“You lot, in there, hurry it up.” It was the friendly man’s voice. Naomi had noticed that he only raised it when Ted Harper was hovering. Dorothy had made the same observation.
“Old big mouth must be on the prowl,” Dorothy remarked.
“We’d better go.”
“Keep the bugger waiting,” Dorothy announced. “What can he do?”
“Dorothy, I don’t think we want to find out,” Naomi told her. She began to move towards the door, hand outstretched. Megan took her arm leaving Dorothy to bring up the rear.
“You know,” Megan said quietly as they crossed the reception area of the bank. “I’m not sure if I’m more scared of what he might do or of Dorothy.”
Naomi squeezed her arm, but said nothing. Two totally unpredictable souls in the one place and on opposite sides. No, it didn’t exactly make for a sense of security.
***
Danny shut the door on the hostages and crossed back to where Ted and Allan were standing. Ted leaning against the wall and Allan at his post by the window.
Danny perched beside him on the table.
“We need to talk.”
“Talk, what about.”
“About how we propose to get out of here. You’ve got to open communications, Ted. We let some of the hostages go, they gave us food, now it’s our turn again.”
Ted scowled at him.
“They won’t wait forever,” Danny told him and they’ll know by now where we’re keeping the others and the layout of this place. It’s only a matter of time before they give up on us and come in mob handed.”
“Then we split the buggers up and if the filth try anything we shoot somebody. That old woman for a start.”
“Why didn’t you let her go?” Allan asked
Ted shrugged. “What’s it matter to you.”
“Ted, this is getting us nowhere. Use the phone they sent in. Tell them we’ll release the others if they guarantee us safe passage. Let a couple go, once we have transport, just to show good faith and the others when we reach our destination.”
“Where would we go?” Allan asked.
“Somewhere with no extradition treaty. Brazil, maybe, even Spain for starters.”
“With no money.”
“We’ll ask for money.”
“I don’t ask for nothing.”
“Demand it then. Ted, it’s either that or we wait until they bust in here and the only place you’ll be going after that is back to jail and it’ll be cat A all the way through this time. Not some soft option of an open prison, like you’ve had the past few years. “
“I don’t want to go to jail,” Allan said plaintively. “I..”
“Oh, shut your mouth. You’re a bloody wuss. Just like your mam.”
“Mam used to say I was just like you,” Allan retorted. It didn’t sound as though the accusation had given him any pleasure.
“There’s another thing,” Danny added, changing tack and raising his voice to stop the incipient father son argument. "What to do with Ash.”
“Leave him where he is.”
“They won’t let us out if they know he’s dead,” will they,” Allan asked miserably. “I mean, robbery, even robbery with shooters is one thing but killing someone. That’s something else.”
“Which is exactly why we treat the hostages right,” Danny said. That’ll count in our favour. The ones we let out will tell the police we treated them ok, looked after them.”
“You think that’ll make any difference you’re more stupid than you look.”
Danny sighed. “Ok, leave that for the minute,” he said. “What do we do with Ashwin. We can’t just leave him there?”
“Why not?” Allan sounded as though he didn’t really want to know.
“Because he’ll start to stink. And the flies have already moved in. This time tomorrow there’ll be maggots.”
“Flies? How did they get in?” Allan gazed around round eyes as though Danny had scared him with a tale of monsters.
“Through the window,” Danny explained patiently. “The flies arrive minutes after someone dies. They smell it and there’s something else, either of you noticed its getting warmer in here?”
Ted looked sharply at him then glanced upward at the lights. They’d been left on all night and no one had bothered to switch them off again. “They’ve cut the bloody power,” he announced.
Danny nodded.
“When?” Allan sounded even more panicked.
“I don’t know for sure. I noticed the hand dryers weren’t working earlier, so I tried the lights. We can’t leave Ash inside. The temperature will go up rapidly now and he’s going to rot.”
Allan turned away. He looked sick. Ted Harper shrugged.
“We’ll manage,” he announced. “Those buggers in there are going to suffer too. They’ll switch the power back on soon enough.”
“I don’t think they will. They know whose in there now…”
“And whose bloody fault is that?”
“They’ll know that they’re all able bodied and capable of coping with a little more discomfort. Ted, my guess is, we don’t start talking soon, they’ll wait until its dark and come and get us anyway.”
“Then we’ll be waiting for them, won’t we,” Ted Harper said.
***
Alec glanced once more through the press clipping Simon had delivered to him. They would be joined soon by the official files – now Simon had told them what exactly they were looking for; and Alec had to reluctantly admit that had saved them some time.
The story the clipping told was a worrying one. Ted Harper was a local man, but thirteen years ago he’d also shown signs of sense. He’d committed three armed robberies, but the closest one had been a good hundred miles away, which was why Hemmings hadn’t picked him up on the initial collection of evidence. Local records would have focussed on the assault of his wife and subsequent arrest and the likelihood was that it would have been filed as a domestic. He had been tried in the area where he’d committed his third robbery and, although it had made a bit of a splash in the local papers, coverage had not been nearly as active as it might have been had he gone through the local courts.
Although, now, it would have been perfectly possible to cross reference data on Ted Harper through computer records of other forces, records from a dozen years before were still on paper file and such facility simply not available.
The reports mentioned Naomi as a minor player. She’d been part of a surveillance team on the night of his arrest, but the hero of the moment was her partner that night, a young woman by the name of DC Polly Thompson, who’d entered the building without waiting for backup and so probably saved Nan Harper’s life.
Alec had a vague memory of Polly Thompson. She’d transferred to the Met a few years before and was now, if he remembered right, a fully-fledged Inspector. Definitely someone worth talking to, he thought, if this went on much longer. According to the reports, Harper had demonstrated excessive levels of violence in the robberies – carried out with an accomplice that had never been caught- and his battery of his wife had been brutal in the extreme. He believed that his wife had tipped off the police. Something she had, apparently, continued to deny.
“I’m still not happy about us cutting power.” Alec said. He looked across at Sam. “I’ll go with your recommendation, of course, but I don’t like the idea….”
“Of making the hostages any more uncomfortable? I know. But we have to show we’re in control. This is a bargaining chip, Alec. They start to co- operate, we put the power back on. Maybe. Or we send in more food.”
“You’d recommend withholding food?”
“Maybe. Not water, of course, though supplies of that won’t be affected with what we’ve done so far. But food is another bargaining chip. It can be provided or withheld. We’ll allow them to consider for a while, then
we’ll use the phone later. Unless, of course, they contact us first.”
“If the phone’s still in one piece,” Hemmings commented.
“I tried a half hour ago. There’s a signal,” Sarah told him. “We can test without it ringing.”
“Couldn’t we have fitted it with a bug or something?” Hemmings asked, a plaintive note in his voice.
“Well, in theory yes,” Sam told him. “Getting the right technical backup and the expertise at short notice isn’t that easy. And it costs. Someone would have to decide whose budget it was coming out of.”
Hemmings snorted. “So,” he said. “We’re waiting again?”
“We are,” Sam agreed,” but knowing what we do about Ted Harper adds a certain urgency to the situation. Naomi remembered him. It’s entirely possible that Harper will realise who she is and the longer this goes on, the more time he has to think about it.”
It was not, Alec thought, a comforting analysis. He glanced at the clock. Nine thirty. He had a press conference scheduled for ten followed by a meeting with the relatives. “Had anyone found family for the Brigadier yet?” he asked.
“Not so far as I know. So far we’ve not found anyone that cares if the poor old bugger’s alive or dead.”
“I’d better be off,” Alec said.
“Right you are, but before you go. We took a guess at your size, so, if it doesn’t fit, blame me.”
“What?”
Hemmings nodded at someone behind Alec and he turned to find a young officer holding out a still wrapped shirt. “Don’t worry Alec, he’s one of mine, I’ll mark his shopping trip down as admin. Have a wash before you put it on.”
Alec took the shirt gratefully and headed for the bathroom.
***
“My father was a soldier and his father before that. It seemed like the only thing to do,” Paul Hebden said.
“Were you in a war?” Patrick asked.
“I missed out on the second War by three or four years, but I saw action, yes. In the Far East mainly and I was in India in ’47.”
“Partition,” Harry said.
“Yes, that’s right. Messy time. Bloody messy time. I’ve been back since. It’s a beautiful country, it really is.”
“Partition?” Patrick didn’t get the reference.
“”India and Pakistan,” Harry explained. “When the British pulled out, the country was divided along roughly religious lines and Pakistan was born. “
“Pity the fool that drew the line on the map didn’t actually take a look at the ground first,” Paul Hebden commented. “There were a lot of people caught on the wrong side when the borders closed and a great many died because of it.”
“Naomi says that’s what happened in Africa,” Patrick commented. “That people just drew lines on a map and divided the country up. That’s why there are so many straight lines.”
“It happened all over,” the Brigadier told him. “Have you ever seen any pictures of Simla?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“If you do become a photographer, you should take a trip there,” he recommended. “It was the place that all the big wigs in the raj escaped to when the summer got too hot. They camped out in the mountains where the air was, well not cool, exactly, but at least bearable. Simla is…well it’s as though someone took an old English town and planted it up there in the foothills. A little train winds its way up the hillside there, through the tea plantations, it takes an age. You can almost walk faster. If you go there, you should walk up and take your pictures on the way. You’ll think you’re walking out of India and into …Stratford on Avon. Somewhere like that.”
“It sounds cool,” Patrick said. “There’s lots of places I’d like to go. “
“You’ve not mentioned family,” Dorothy said. She’d been quiet for a while, listening to Paul Hebden talk. It was the first time he’d really opened up.
“Oh, family. I’ve a brother somewhere, unless he’s dead. He was older than me. But I never married and I was always on the move. I always thought there’d be time for that later, but you know, suddenly you find that it is later and you never noticed until you were there.”
There seemed no easy way of following that and for a few minutes silence reigned. Typically, it was Dorothy that broke through the reverie. “Did anyone notice that little window in the lavatory,” she said. “The catch is broken and I bet that Patrick could get through.”
Naomi sighed.
“I noticed it, Patrick said. “But I wouldn’t leave my dad or Naomi.
Naomi could have hugged him.
“I noticed something else as well,” he added before Dorothy could get another word in. “I think the electric must have gone off?”
“Oh?” Naomi was intrigued. Why”
“’Cos the hand dryers wouldn’t work and the black man, the nice one, he noticed and he tried the light switch. Nothing happened. I started to ask him about it but he shook his head, so I didn’t. The big guy was standing just behind him and I think he didn’t want him to realise right then. Do you think the police had the power cut, Nomi?”
“It’s possible. If they did then they’re trying to put the pressure on. Speed things up.”
“Well, I’m in favour of that,” Dorothy applauded. “Anything that gets us out of here sooner.”
“It means it’ll be very dark tonight,” Megan commented.
“Scared of the bogey man, Megs?” Tim asked her, poking her playfully in the ribs.
She squeaked. “Fool!”
“Seriously though,” Tim continued. “Do you think that means they plan to do something tonight, Storm the building or something when it’s dark.”
Naomi frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “It could just be a bargaining ploy. They want more cooperation from the thieves, I suppose”
“So, what do we do, if that does happen?” Megan asked
Funny, Naomi thought, since they found out what she had once been, she was suddenly the expert on everything. “Stay calm and stay down,” she said. “Flat on the floor and wait. If they do come in there’s a chance they’ll use stun grenades first. You’ll hear a very loud bang and there’ll be a lot of smoke.”
“Hopefully,” Harry said. “The police will simply be able to talk the thieves out before it comes to that.”
CHAPTER 18
Simon went home for long enough to change, then drove across town to Trigo Place, where Ted Harper had been arrested.
The layout of the road was an odd one. A square of houses facing onto a green, houses in the corners set at right angles to one another and a cut through between those gardens leading through to the next street. He parked his car and wandered down between the houses at the second corner. Looking up to his left he could see the bedroom window from which Naomi and Polly Thompson must have kept watch and a little further on his right, the back gate to the Harper property as it had been then. The gate was slatted and he could see into the garden. Children’s toys were scattered across the lawn and two children played on a swing set. He could just glimpse a woman, their mother presumably, as she moved from the window across to the open back door. She looked quite young. He knew from his check of the electoral role, that the residents were called Williams. He wondered if Nan Harper had stayed for long after her husband’s arrest and if these people knew about the violent past their house had observed.
He returned to Trigo Place and knocked on the door of number twenty seven, the house next to the Harper’s. He had noticed the neat, well established front garden and the old but immaculately kept car on the hard standing just in front of the front door. By contrast, number twenty five, the Harper’s old place, looked slightly overgrown. Not untidy, not exactly uncared for, just the sort of garden owned by a woman with small children and a man that worked all hours. Their gardening tasks were confined to the odd hours at weekends. Unlike that of the house next door.
Older people lived here, Simon guessed. Probably retired. Possibly long resident.
&n
bsp; He walked up to the red front door and rang the bell.
At first he thought he’d been wrong in his guess. The girl that answered the door looked no more than twenty. She looked askance at him.
“Whatever you’re selling we don’t want any.”
Simon smiled. “I’m not selling,” he said. “I’m looking for someone, but you’d be far too young to remember them.”
The girl frowned, then smiled as though unable to decide how to take that statement. She half turned – careful to keep one eye fixed on Simon – and shouted over her shoulder. “Nan, it’s someone for you.”
For a moment, Simon was utterly confused. Had he got the wrong house? Was Nan Harper living next door. “Nan?” he asked.
She looked at him as though he were stupid. “My gran,” she said. “Look, what is it you want?”
Simon almost laughed aloud. Nan. Of course. His own grandparents were always referred to as Gran and Grandpa, his mum holding the opinion that ‘nan was common’, but Patrick usually talked about Mari that way. “I told you, I’m looking for someone,” he repeated. “Her name’s Nan. For a moment, I thought...”
“Oh,” she said, then laughed. “Oh, I see. I didn’t think Nan was a name?”
“You must be after Nan Harper,” a woman said.
The girl stepped back from the doorway, allowing her grandmother to see the visitor. She stood guard though and Simon could still see the suspicion in her eyes despite the brief laughter.
“That’s right,” he said. “I know she’s not here anymore. I wonder if you knew where she’d gone to.”
The older woman studied him carefully a frown creasing between her eyes. “What would you want with Nan Harper,” she wanted to know. “She moved out nine, ten years ago.”
So, not straight after Ted Harper’s arrest, Simon thought. That was one question answered. “Do you know where she went to?”
The woman shrugged. “Moved to Pinsent, I think. That lad of hers was taken into care and she shifted herself fast enough after that. A bad lot the whole family. We were glad to see the back of them. Now, what do you want with her?”
Pinsent, that was good. A simple check of the electoral roll and, hopefully, she’d still be there. “Her son?”
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