‘The Arif Brothers, sons of Turkish immigrants with middlemen drug supply contacts in that part of the world. They had a takeaway in Peckham with the same name, The Curry Leaf – ran a drugs empire covering South London from it. We hit them about six months ago; didn’t get the brothers but put ten of their dealers inside. I can’t believe they’d play the same game again with the same name.’
‘Did they use the delivery lads to get the drugs out?’ Palmer asked.
‘No, their dealers came to the place on a Friday evening under the guise of ordering a takeaway and bought enough drugs to supply their punters for the week. That’s when we got them – all sitting pretty in the back room with fifteen kilos of cocaine and a hundred and twenty thousand in cash.’
‘But not the brothers.’
‘No, too clever. They never get near to the operation, organise it all from burner phones. Fly it in from Europe to small or disused airstrips, or bring it over in small boats to marinas; then their people pick it up and take it to a safe house or a shop rented monthly for cash. They cut it, split it, and do the business with the middlemen who packet it and supply the street dealers.’
‘So if the brothers got burnt for one hundred and twenty grand, they’re not likely to use that system of distribution again, are they?’
‘No, they won’t, too clever.’
‘So Deliver-Eat would be an ideal cover for their runners to shift it from the premises to the middlemen rather than the middle men to come to them.’
‘Absolutely ideal.’
Gheeta pointed to the screen.
‘So all these addresses that Jack Bernard went to could well be middlemen who cut and package it for their teams of street dealers.’
Knight nodded.
‘Probably are.’
Palmer sat down.
‘Okay, it’s not likely that these Arifs are hitting their own people; so we must have somebody else in the frame who wants the Arifs gone.’
‘There are quite a few little gangs dealing around the West End and North London,’ Knight carried on, ‘Mostly postcode gangs – gangs who operate inside their own postcodes or council estates and violently defend their turf if anybody else tries to do any dealing on it. Hence the large numbers of knifings and shootings. As fast as we hit one lot and put them away, others take over. But this isn’t any of them, this is big time. The Arifs have stepped across the Thames and stepped on the toes of the big boys here, and they are being sent a nasty message: pack up and get out or else. I think there’s only one lot who would be capable of that, and that is Sammy Wellbeck.’
Palmer shrugged.
‘Name doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘Clever man is Sammy Wellbeck – and his wife Christine, known as Chrissie. They operate out of a big scrap yard and second-hand car parts business in Hackney. He won’t show up on a crime data base anywhere.’
He had noticed Gheeta tapping in Wellbeck on her terminal. She sat back.
‘You’re right, he doesn’t.’
‘As I said, a clever man. Started out with a used car dealership and made a lot of money with ringers – turning the clock back, welding the front and backs of insurance company write-offs together to make one good one. He cornered the market with the insurance companies by giving backhanders to their decision makers – backhanders on the back of threats.’
Palmer nodded.
‘There’s a few I’ve known do that. Sweeten the pill.’
Claire hadn’t heard of it.
‘How does that work then, Sir?’
‘Well, let’s say the chap who gives out the contracts to the scrap dealers for getting rid of the insurance company’s write offs – that is, the decision maker – is out on his own somewhere, maybe even just having lunch or a quiet pint. Somebody – or more usually, two people – put a proposition to him that his company’s write-offs will be sold to, for instance, this Wellbeck character’s scrap yard at a certain price per vehicle. The decision maker might say no, or I’ll call the police. Bad move. He then gets told where his children go to school, what evenings his wife goes to the gym or bingo or whatever. The threat is implied, but – here comes the sweetener – a bag of money is passed over with the promise that a similar amount will be given to him every month. So, a two-pronged attack: the threat to the family, and the cash in the bag – never fails as the amount in the bag is enough to tempt anybody. And the insurance for the criminal is usually a photo taken of the cash handover without the mark knowing, so should he ever not play ball or want to terminate the deal he’s shown the snap and told that copies will go to his boss, the papers and the police.’
Claire took a deep breath.
‘Clever, clever.’
Knight continued.
‘My guess is that the Arifs thought the area was a sort of mish-mash of smaller drug gangs and didn’t realise that those smaller gangs were all supplied by Wellbeck. He’s bringing the stuff in and shifting it out to the middlemen, who cut and pack it in twists for the street and club dealers. If the Arifs have any sense they’ll pack up and clear off back to their own manor. They’d be no match for Wellbeck – he’s in the frame for three murders over the last five years, but nobody will talk, they’re too afraid of the consequences, Wellbeck doesn’t take prisoners. The only firm that could take on Wellbeck and have a chance of winning is the Adamsons, and if they fancied their chances they’d have had a go by now.’
Another new one on Palmer.
‘Adamsons?’
Knight nodded.
‘Crime family who work out of Clerkenwell, they basically run the City and East End. Three brothers – three very clever brothers; thought to have financed the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit job. Top man is Terry Adamson – only ever been nicked for Proceeds of Crime when he couldn’t explain his millions; his wife paid the seven hundred thousand pound fine in used fifties in Tesco bags. Mark my words, if Wellbeck could be pushed out the Adamsons would have done it by now. If the Arifs were to take over Wellbeck’s manor the Adamsons would not be pleased; and with their reputation for violence and murder, the Arifs would have another war on their hands. As I said before, if they have any sense they’ll pack up and go back south of the Thames.’
‘But whether they stay or go, it doesn’t make any difference to us,’ said Palmer. ‘Let’s not forget we are after a serial killer, not a drug dealer. Our killer may well be a dealer, and if he is and we take him down all the better; but it’s the serial killer we are after.’
He stood and stretched.
‘Right, that will do for today. Thank you Knight, your input has been enlightening. We have a good suspect target in this Wellbeck character to take a look at tomorrow.
CHAPTER 10
The evening light was fading outside. Sammy Wellbeck stood at his office window in the scrap yard, thinking hard. He made a tall, gaunt-looking figure, with little hair left and brown-stained chain smoker’s fingers. In his early fifties he really wasn’t in the mood for a turf war; that was all behind him, in the past. He just wanted his quiet narco life style to continue unabated. And the fucking Arifs were spoiling that.
Behind him, his wife Chrissie stood behind the reception counter doing business with one of the young dealers from a local estate. She was ten years younger than Sammy, with a trim figure, dyed copper hair that ringed her white face and dressed in a smart designer trouser suit and jacket. His two lieutenants, as he called them, Harry O’Keefe and Marty Chaplin sat on comfy guest chairs and watched. Both men had been with Wellbeck since the early days of car dealing.
Chrissie scooped tablespoons of cocaine from a plastic box and sifted them carefully onto a digital scale.
‘There you go Jamil, one hundred grams.’
She poured it into a plastic bag, sealed it, and pushed it across the counter. Jamil was a third generation British-Pakistani. He took a wad of twenty pound notes from inside his expensive jacket and handed it acr
oss without a word. Chrissie took it and slid it out of sight behind the counter.
‘I don’t need to count it do I, Jamil? You know the amount and you’ve always been spot on in the past.’
She gave him a false smile.
‘If it’s short, we know where to find you.’
‘It’s all there.’
Sammy turned and came over to Jamil, putting an arm round the boy’s shoulders.
‘Tell me Jamil, have you been approached by anybody lately? Anybody offering to supply?’
Jamil shook his head.
‘No, Mr Wellbeck. Why?’
‘Nothing really, just that we heard somebody might be around the district offloading a dodgy supply – Colombian low-grade mixed with some poisonous fertiliser. You sure you haven’t heard a whisper?’
‘Not heard nothing about that. Heard about a couple of new dealers on mopeds had showed up. Heard that you took care of them.’
He gave Wellbeck a large grin.
‘Me?’ Wellbeck said, feigning surprise. ‘Come now Jamil, would I do anything like that?’
Jamil tilted his head and shrugged, the grin still in place. Wellbeck patted him on the back.
‘Jamil, you just remember this: I look after my dealers, I make sure they aren’t troubled. We are watching your back, Jamil. Our business, the business between you and me, it’s based on loyalty. Just remember that, son.’
He gave him another pat on the back.
‘Harry will walk you out. See you next week.’
Harry O’Keefe prised his bulk off the chair and opened the office door for Jamil, then followed him out across the yard to the Judas gate. He slipped the bolt and Jamil disappeared through it into the gloom. Sammy, Chrissie and Marty watched it happen on the CCTV screens in the office. Harry returned to the office and settled back into the chair. Chrissie took a drawer full of bank notes from behind the counter and started to count and band them into one-thousand-pound bundles. Sammy paced up and down a couple of times.
‘Are the Arifs fucking stupid? If we’d had three of our blokes killed, we’d go to war.’
‘They’d never win a war with us, boss,’ O’Keefe said, a smile crossing his obese face. Five feet six and eighteen stone – people didn’t mess with Harry O’Keefe. ‘The Reilly’s tried that didn’t they, and they ran in the end.’
Wellbeck nodded. He remembered the Reilly gang trying to elbow into his manor some years ago. It was nasty, very nasty: bodies in the canal – some found, some not – dealer’s homes fire bombed.
‘We don’t want to get into all that again’
Chrissie stopped counting and looked up.
‘Strikes me you’ve got into that already. We’ve hit three of their delivery boys and crushed another two’s bikes, and still they carry on. They ain’t going anywhere, Sammy. What if they make our dealers an offer they can’t refuse? What if they cut the price to below us and our dealers start to buy off them, eh? We have to hit them now – blow their fucking takeaway up, preferably with them inside it.’
O’Keefe murmured agreement. He liked his work; he liked hurting people, it gave him great pleasure. If your name was Sammy Wellbeck and you needed to control a manor, you needed a ‘Harry O’Keefe’ type to keep any upstarts under control, and fear is the best method of control that man invented.
‘I can run down a couple more? If their delivery blokes ain’t got the message with three whacked, perhaps a couple more might do it?’
Marty Chaplin shifted uneasily in his chair. He was older than the others and in his late sixties. Always a smart dresser, he liked expensive suits and was well-groomed, with his dyed jet black hair slicked back giving him a vintage look.
‘Be like the minicab wars of the old days, bloody offices being torched and cars being smashed up. I don’t fancy going through that again.’
Chrissie scowled.
‘If we hit them hard now, we won’t have to go through anything will we, eh? Drug Squad kicked their arse over the other side of the river so they think they can just walk in here and start over? No way.’
‘Maybe we could do a deal?’ Chaplin offered.
Chrissie laughed.
‘Oh yeah, we do a deal and all the other gangs see that and think they’ll barge in on part of our manor and get a deal too, eh? The word would be out that the Wellbecks have gone soft and they’ll be queuing up. No deals, no.’
Sammy turned to face them.
‘She’s right, you know. We have to hit them so hard they fuck off quick. You have to think of the message it would give to our suppliers if we don’t. They’ll think that maybe the Arifs are a better firm to back than us, and if that happens and they cut our supplies, or start feeding the Arifs, then we are done for.’
He paused for thought.
‘Give Ronny Robards a call and get him to pop in.’
Marty Chaplin’s heart sank. Everything had been tickety-boo; the business was good, the money coming in was more than enough, and after years of dodging the police and several stints in prison it had finally gone right, or as right as it ever could for a petty villain turned major name. And now, if Sammy wanted Ronny Robards to ‘pop in’ it was all going to turn nasty, very nasty.
Ronny Robards was an explosives man – Marty hoped Ronny was out of the business now, but doubted if he was. The same age as Marty, Ronny had built his reputation on opening safes with a bang when all else failed. The Wellbecks had used his expertise to secure the lucrative mini-cab trade of north London back in the sixties by literally ‘blowing’ the competition away. Ronny Robards’s skills were so advanced that the police knew at once if he was involved by their use.
Not for Ronny was the usual two pounds of Semtex slapped on the safe lock, light the fuse, go out of the building, wait for the bang and then go back and find the safe door swinging open, offering its riches on a plate; that didn’t work, as Chubb and the other safe makers increased the security and anti-blast capabilities of their products. So Ronny increased his skills to keep ahead of them. He found a natural ability in his head to understand the new time lock systems and how to overcome them. He did break-ins to various safe makers’ offices to steal their drawings, which he studied to find the weakest parts of their products. For a number of years his method of blasting the door hinges rather than the plated steel-reinforced lock systems paid dividends, until the companies realised their blunder. But in the end it just got too difficult and Ronny retired – or shall we say, semi-retired. He still provided the occasional package to a firm robbing a warehouse or jewellers that had not updated their safe or entry systems to withstand a blast.
Marty Chaplin knew exactly why Sammy had asked for Ronny to ‘pop in’. The Arif takeaway was going to be torched.
CHAPTER 11
‘We need some corroborative statements.’
Palmer, Knight and Singh sat at a table in the Team Room the next morning. Claire was still cross-referencing on the mainframe to try and link names and addresses.
‘Have a trip round to the ones that got away,’ Palmer continued. ‘See if you can get one to talk and point the finger one of them might have an idea who is behind it.’
Knight raised his eyebrows.
‘We will be lucky if they do. If you’d had three mates killed and an attempt on your life, would you talk?’
Gheeta saw it another way.
‘It would be a way of stopping another attempt on you, wouldn’t it? Giving up the killer?’
‘Another one would take his place and you’d be top of his hit list. This is the organised drugs game, the stakes are high – put a couple of thousand street dealers in jail, and there’s another couple of thousand on the street taking their place within hours. I’ve known dealers refuse to name their suppliers even when offered Witness Protection. This game is run on fear, and that fear is backed up with violent actions.’
‘Then there’s the tie in with Deliver-Eat,’ Pal
mer said. ‘That’s the key. Court’s in this somewhere along the line, he can’t claim ignorance now we have the proof of his company’s involvement via the app. I think we ought to pay Mr Court another visit.’
They took a plain squad car from the car pool and Knight drove them to the Deliver-Eat premises. Palmer didn’t want to be announced in any way, so they parked it around the corner out of sight.
‘Okay, this is the plan. I will go in and collar Court; we’ve enough circumstantial on him, plus his lies about the victims not working for him for me to make an arrest. But I want to rinse him a bit first. I didn’t get the impression he is a criminal type, so I think he’s got dragged into this caper somehow and a bit of pressure will crack him. Give me five minutes to get at him and then you two bring the car round and wait in reception.’
He left the car and walked into the building, where the receptionist smiled in recognition as he approached her.
‘Detective Chief Superintendent Palmer to see Mr Court,’ he said, showing his warrant card.
‘Is he expecting you?’ came the reply as she ran her finger down an open day diary, but whether he was or wasn’t expected didn’t really matter as Palmer was already past her, through the glass doors and halfway down the main call centre floor before she could buzz Court’s phone. He was into the despatch area before Court knew he was even on the premises.
Court was standing in front of the giant wall screen and turned to answer the internal phone which buzzed as Palmer entered.
‘I wouldn’t bother to answer that, Mr Court. It will be your receptionist announcing my arrival.’
Court looked out towards the reception, where the girl just shrugged in defeat. He raised a worried smile.
‘Mr Palmer, I thought you had all you needed from us? This is an unexpected visit.’
‘Really?’
Palmer was showing his nasty face, the one Mrs P. said could make the Pope confess to rape.
‘An unexpected visit, eh? I would think it would be more of an expected visit after the lies you told me before.’
TAKEAWAY TERROR: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series. Case No.8 Page 4
