by Nick Oldham
‘Good of you to come in willingly, Mark,’ Henry said.
‘There was a choice?’
‘Ultimately, no.’
Mark shrugged. ‘So here I am.’
‘We want to talk about you and Natalie, as you know.’
‘So you said yesterday.’
‘Why did you run?’
‘Because, Henry, you always bring me bad news. You always fuck with my mind and it’s always best to avoid you.’
‘Yet you rang me?’
Rik gave Henry a puzzled sideways glance.
‘Only because you’d have nicked me if I hadn’t — and because I have nothing to hide.’
‘You and Natalie went out together?’ Henry asked.
‘A bit.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Nowt to tell. We went out for while, then we split.’
‘Mutual decision?’
‘Are they ever?’
‘I thought you were smitten with Katie Bretherton.’
Mark screwed up his face. ‘Not now. It’s all over.’
Henry studied Mark, seeing a much older, time-scarred lad than the one he’d first met. He was spotty now, had acne, was sprouting hair all over, looked unwashed and frankly a bit of a mess.
‘What do you do other than work at KFC?’
‘College.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Astrophysics,’ he laughed bitterly. Henry waited, then Mark relented. ‘A course in motor vehicle technology.’
‘Oh, good lad.’
‘Yeah, right. I’m going to be a grease monkey. Ho-di-hey!’ He set his face hard at Henry. ‘What about Natalie?’
‘You tell me.’
‘We went out, we split up.’
‘Did she dump you?’
Mark blinked and Henry thought, yes… another person either leaving or dumping him. Not one person has stayed with him, poor sod. Mark nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Duh — because I wanted a steady relationship and she didn’t. She was a bike and liked being ridden — or didn’t you know that?’
‘A bike as in…?’
‘Shagged left right and centre,’ he said crossly, his body language leaking a touch of rage.
‘So you screwed her too?’ Rik Dean piped up at this point, leaning forward on the table. Up to then he’d sat silent, just shot Henry the occasional quizzical look.
Mark’s mouth snapped shut. His head rotated slowly to Rik, his eyes dead.
‘We need to know,’ Henry said. And they did, because the results of the post-mortem had also shown that Natalie had had sexual intercourse sometime leading up to her death. Samples had been taken, and, together with other samples taken from her skin, underneath her fingernails, and from other orifices, were now with the Forensic Science lab for analysis. But that process would take some time. Even if Henry could sweet talk an official fast-track, it would be at least two weeks before any results came back, even with a tailwind. Henry thought for a moment, then made his decision. ‘This interview needs to be taped, Mark. We’ll need to take various samples from you and at this point the best thing for you would be to get the duty solicitor. Costs nothing.’
‘You’re locking me up?’
‘Tell me when you last saw Natalie.’
‘Yesterday, just before lunch.’
‘When did you last have sex with her?’
‘Yesterday, just before lunch.’
‘Shit,’ Henry sighed. ‘Did you kill her?’
Mark shook his head and Henry believed him, but this was only based on his previous knowledge and opinion of Mark, like a ‘halo effect’. But Henry did not want to miss the chance of nailing a killer just because he thought he was too nice to do it. He had to deal with Mark straight down the line and give him no favours. This was the best thing for Mark, too, although Henry doubted if he would see it that way.
‘Mark, you’re under arrest on suspicion of murdering Natalie Philips.’ Henry then cautioned him.
Mark’s blood drained from his face. He shook his head in disbelief, then said, ‘Now you know why I ran. I fuckin’ hate you, Henry. You’ve done nothing but screw me over since we met.’
Henry took a step back at that point. He did what he should have done in the first place and let Rik Dean appoint two detective constables to interview Mark. He briefed them on what he knew so far, then let them loose on Mark, who had become unresponsive — to him, anyway. He knew their shared history would be a bar to any meaningful interview, so Henry did what any good superintendent was skilled at doing: delegated the job.
This gave him time to ensure the investigation as a whole was moving forwards. If he’d been tied up in interview he could easily have lost the bigger picture and then would have been criticized from on high.
It was all looking good. There was a semi-suspect in the traps, other jacks were out following leads, the scientific people were on top of things, doors were being knocked on, the MIR was almost up and running. Henry was reasonably confident with progress. Now he just had to find out what Mark Carter had to say.
That was when his mobile phone rang. He answered it absently as he skimmed through the first few pages of the murder book.
For a moment, there was silence, then came the hesitant voice.
‘I… I was wondering about that coffee… really, I’m not being pushy… it’s just, I’m in town for the day.’ The voice rushed on a little now. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ Henry said, reshuffling everything in his mind, trying to work out if he had time.
‘I know you said you were busy and you’d phone me this afternoon
… and I know all the other personal stuff must be hell…’
‘I’m really glad you called, Alison,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if I would’ve had the nerve to call back to be honest… so, where are you right now?’ She said the name of a town centre street. Henry said, ‘You’ll find a Starbucks on that street, yeah?’
‘Yes, I can see it.’
‘Go in, grab a table and give me ten minutes to get there.’
His thumb was dithering so much he could hardly press it down on to the end-call button. He took a few breaths to ward off hyperventilation, then gave Rik Dean a quick call as he trotted through the police station. It went to voicemail and Henry left a message to say he’d be otherwise engaged for an hour.
For some miles, the car in which Karl Donaldson, Martin Beckham and Robert Fanshaw-Bayley were sitting — a powerful Jaguar being driven by a brilliant driver from the Road Policing Unit — had reached speeds of over one hundred and thirty miles per hour. That meant the journey from Blackpool to Liverpool John Lennon Airport took somewhere in the region of thirty-five minutes. The slowest part of the journey was actually the last five miles of dual carriageway on which ninety was about the safest maximum.
The driver pulled in directly at the front of the terminal building and was told to stay in the car and wait. The three passengers hurried into the airport where they were met by a DCI from Merseyside Police, who led them quickly through to the security and customs and immigration services offices behind the line of check-in desks. The DCI ushered them into an office with nothing on the door; inside was a sparsely furnished room — table, four plastic chairs — and a wall-mounted large screen TV and what looked like a DVD player.
‘Gents, if you’d like to take a seat,’ the DCI said. His name was McMullen and he was emitting nervousness.
Silently the three visitors did as bid.
Then Donaldson, who was bursting, said, ‘What’ve you got?’
‘Your man, I think.’
The three men were only at Liverpool Airport because of a tired, but sharp-witted and well-informed, Spanish cop who had been dragged against his will by a worried airline official out of his cosy office — just to have a look at a bloodstain on an airplane seat.
The cop actually hadn’t seemed sharp-witted at all when the official had knocked on his door at three that morning. Detectiv
e Luis Delgado was working the night shift, six p.m. to six a.m. After the last plane had landed at one a.m. without any problems and the passengers had filed wearily through the almost farcical customs check, observed by Delgado through a two-way mirror, he’d settled himself down for the night with the intention of getting in some serious sleep before the next flight landed at five thirty, just before he finished. He had a comfy chair, footstool and pillow, and if those bastards wanted him to work at Las Palmas Airport, then he would, but only on his terms. Because he didn’t want to be here.
His eyes had only half-opened when the sharp, urgent knock came on his office door. His arms were folded tightly across his chest, feet were up on the stool, and he was snug, certainly did not want to move.
‘ Si? ’ he grunted in an off-putting way. The door opened a fraction. ‘ Que? ’ Delgado said, his mouth turned down underneath his heavy moustache.
‘Detective Delgado,’ the man said. His name was Ceuta, and Delgado knew him as a representative of one of the budget airlines that provided a service to Gran Canaria. ‘Please, I apologize. I know you are busy, but could I ask you to come and have a look at something the cleaning crew have found on one of my planes?’
Delgado’s tongue smacked the top of his mouth. He shook his head at the thought of the loss of sleep. ‘ Vale,’ he said, meaning OK. He rolled himself reluctantly to his feet, expecting to be told they’d found a stash of drugs or money, which was fairly common.
But blood?
Delgado bent over and looked closely at the stain on seat 39E. He was as sure as he could be that it was blood — quite a lot of it. Working out the position of whoever had been on the seat it looked as though the injury, or source, was from either the back of the right arm or the right side of the chest.
‘Leave it,’ Delgado ordered.
‘But Senor, the cleaning staff need to do their work and this plane will be back in the air in four hours, on its return journey,’ Ceuta pointed out.
‘To where?’
‘Liverpool.’
‘As I said — leave it until I say anything different. For the moment, this area is a crime scene,’ he declared. ‘You may clean the rest of the plane.’ Delgado was nothing if not a realist. ‘But leave these three seats.’ He leaned over and touched the stain with the tip of his little finger. It was still wet.
His next step was to return to the security offices and access the computer hard drives that stored the CCTV footage of passengers who had disembarked this flight as they went through passport control. He also had access to the passenger manifest. He had been well in the background as the passengers from the flight had filtered through and, as is usual, they had all entered the island quickly, without challenge, their passports only cursorily examined by gritty-eyed customs officials. No record was even taken; the passports were just fleetingly shown and individuals waved through. Delgado printed off the passenger list and then watched a recording of the passengers with a mug of strong coffee at his lips, his eyes narrowing as he tried to recall them. Truth was he hadn’t been taking too much notice. There were two hundred and sixty people going through and none of them had seemed suspicious, out of place or injured.
Maybe the blood meant nothing anyway, and for a moment he felt a little foolish declaring the seat a crime scene.
The passenger list was nothing special, and nothing struck him as odd. And there was no way of telling which passenger sat in which seat because seats on this flight were not allocated to individuals. Boarding was a free for all, where everyone scrambled for seats.
He sat back and pondered. Blood on a seat. So what?
Then his heavily lidded eyes glanced up at the TV monitor affixed high in one corner of the room, permanently tuned into a twenty-four-hour Spanish news channel. Headlines scrolled across the bottom of the screen as newscasters relayed stories above. The sound was muted… but Delgado jumped off his chair, crossed to the TV and stood right in front of it, willing the news loop to come round again. For once, news of a Real Madrid signing was of no interest to him.
It came and suddenly Delgado realized he might have something to throw into the pot in the hunt for a major terrorist. Even if he was wrong, he knew he had a duty to reveal what he had. First he would check all international police bulletins on the computer in his own office. Then, even if there was nothing on them, he would still make the phone call.
The image on the TV screen behind DCI McMullen was paused. He said, ‘This is security footage of the passengers going through Liverpool passport control. As you know in this day and age, with on-line booking and check-in, travellers carrying only hand luggage don’t have to queue at check-in desks any more, not on these budget airlines, anyway. They just take their self-printed boarding passes and passports to immigration, which get scanned into the system, and then they’re through into the departure lounge after security checks.’ He paused and surveyed the faces of the three men, got little response, so carried on. ‘Obviously I knew a bit about what happened at Blackpool, but there wasn’t a full APB out, so there was nothing about border controls at the time of this flight out.’ He sounded guilty, but didn’t have to. Proper circulations took time. ‘When the Spanish detective got through to me, that was only when I really had a proper delve into anything. The thing is, with on-line check-in, it means that passengers can leave it to the last minute to arrive, or turn up hours before. They’re not obliged to turn up just within the two or three hour pre-flight time any more. And, of course, there are lots of flights leaving, so people coming through passport control could be there for any one of a dozen flights.’
FB waved his hand. ‘We get the picture.’
‘OK,’ McMullen said ‘- anyway, what I’ve done is got the passenger list from the airline, then cross-checked with the boarding card and passport database and I now know the exact time every passenger on last night’s flight to Las Palmas went through security here in Liverpool. I’ve gone through CCTV footage and watched every person go through, all two hundred and fifty-eight of them, to be exact. Quite a task, I might add.’
Freakin’ hero, Donaldson thought.
‘So, I’ve got this… this guy, wearing a peaked cap which more or less hid his face from the cameras without it being too obvious he was hiding it, is the only Asian on the flight. All the rest are the great unwashed out for a lager-fuelled holiday. He seems to be travelling alone, one piece of hand luggage — and that’s it.’
He pressed a switch on the TV remote and the screen came to life, showing a baseball-cap-wearing man approaching the desk at which boarding cards were scanned. He had a small bag over his left shoulder and his travel documents in his left hand. His right arm was held tightly up to his ribcage and hardly moved. He passed his self-generated boarding card over, that being a barcode printed on a piece of A4 paper, which was scanned by the official and handed back to the man, who then walked on, the whole interchange lasting about twenty seconds at most.
The efficiency of modern travel, Donaldson thought. Ripe for terrorists, despite all the crap about heightened security.
The screen then chopped to the next shot: the man passing through security. Placing his bag on the conveyor belt that ran through the X-ray machine, then walking through the body scanner without setting it off. He collected his bag then walked out of shot into the departure area. All the time, his right arm was held against his body, but not in a way that would have brought any attention to him. It was only watching it now that it looked odd, and each man watching the screen knew the reason why.
McMullen flicked off the screen.
Donaldson’s mouth was dry, every pulse beating.
‘He boarded the Las Palmas flight fifteen minutes later, then made it through their customs at the other end unchallenged — then gone!’
Donaldson said, ‘Passport?’
McMullen picked up a piece of paper. ‘Seems to be a genuine British passport in the name of Ali Karim. I have the details here. I’m getting it checked now. Question is
— is that your man?’
‘It is. That’s Jamil Akram,’ Donaldson said.
‘Can you be sure?’ Beckham said. ‘Those images are not completely clear.’
‘It is,’ Donaldson said dully. ‘We need to check the booking,’ he said, thinking out loud, ‘see where it originated from, how long it had been made for, whose computer it was made from. And the passport.’
‘We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the cop in Las Palmas. He did well,’ McMullen said. ‘Followed his instinct.’
‘Did his job, you mean?’ Donaldson said.
‘Whatever,’ McMullen said, seeing he wasn’t going to get much praise or anything from these three. Fact was, a top-class terrorist had escaped right under their noses by simply walking into an airport and jumping on to a flight. No one was feeling good about that.
‘He must have started to bleed again on the plane,’ FB said. ‘He must be in real pain.’
‘And now he’s made it to the Canary Islands — but he won’t be there for long,’ Donaldson said. ‘I’ll lay odds he’s already gone.’ His lips pursed and he felt a dark shadow in his brain as his mind juggled all the angles. Some had already been mentioned, such as the origin of the passport and backtracking the on-line booking. Everything would have been in place for Akram to get out of the UK quickly, the only complication was that he — hopefully — still had a bullet in him. It was therefore vital to discover who helped Akram in the hours between him escaping from the car park, getting Rashid Rahman to take over the car, and walking into Liverpool Airport. It was a window of over eight hours.
‘Guys,’ McMullen said. ‘The plane he was on is due to land back here any time now. The seat he sat in and the two next to it have been kept free… would you be interested in having a look?’
‘Can we also get CSI to have a look?’ Donaldson asked. ‘Get a sample from the blood, check for prints… if anything it could help us get Akram’s DNA — which would be good.’
