Loose Head

by Jeff Keithly

  I flipped open my phone and hit auto-dial. “Goodspeed. DI Reed. Did you arrange the prisoner transfer we discussed? That’s right – Roto-Rooter Maitland. Right, fill him in – we’re bringing his new cellmate down. Right, see you in ten. Ta.”

  “Wait!” O’Toole had turned shocky-pale and sweaty; for a moment, I feared he was on the verge of some sort of spasm. “You can’t do this!”

  “We can and we will,” I said brutally. “You’ve left us no choice.”

  “It’s really such a simple thing we’re asking, Cyrian,” Brian observed soothingly.

  “All right! Stop the car! Let me hear the bloody tapes!”

  “Are you sure?” Brian asked, driving on. “I’d hate for you to compromise your principles.”

  “Don’t push your luck, detective,” said O’Toole in a steadier voice. “Regardless of what you may think, I do take my responsibilities as a journalist very seriously indeed.”

  I punched a tape into the sound system. A man’s voice issued from the speakers, obviously a taped snippet of a phone conversation. “This is sample one,” I said.

  “...unbelievable, really. Arsenal’re playing way over their heads. If they can beat Man U this week...”

  O’Toole shook his head. “That’s not him.”

  A second voice came on. “No, I think a change of scenery will do O’Toole a world of good! Soothing green walls, good conversation, an occasional constitutional beating, the regular insertion of ten inches of well-veined, manly...”

  “Most amusing, DI Reed! No, it wasn’t you, either.”

  We played the third sample. “...you seen the new secretary? Cor! I think he gave her the old elbow test – you know, the one where she puts her hands on her shoulders and walks toward the wall, and if her elbows touch before her knockers, she doesn’t get the...”

  “What terrifically-stimulating conversations you must have around the water cooler,” O’Toole observed. “Still, there’s something familiar... no, I don’t think it was him.”

  “Sample four,” I said.

  “...expedited. What the hell are you playing at down there? When you tell me the lab results will be on my desk by the close of business, by God, I expect you to...”

  “Stop the tape!” said O’Toole. “It was him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.” A crafty, avaricious gleam came into his eyes. “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That’s confidential. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  “But you’ll know soon enough, I expect,” said Brian. “Here, sign this.” He thrust a paper over the seat.

  “What the hell is this?” O’Toole asked suspiciously “I, Cyrian O’Toole an employee of the Star newspaper, arranged to purchase the Weathersby blackmail videos from the man whose voice I identified as sample number...”

  “Four, I growled. “Just fill in the number four and sign it, and your work here is done. You’ll be a free man, Cyrian.”

  For just a moment, I thought he was going to make a run for it. Then he furiously snatched out a pen and wrote to my direction, “There, bloodsuckers! I’ve done your reprehensible deed. Your pathetic lives hold no interest for me! Don’t ever contact me again!”

  Brian opened the passenger door. “Thanks for your cooperation. Now get out.”

  “Get out? But we’re a mile from the office!”

  “The walk will do you good,” I observed. “Goodbye, Cyrian.”

  He alighted with poor grace, made a furiously obscene gesture at our rear window, then turned and slouched back the way we’d come. I noted with some satisfaction that it had begun to rain. “So,” said Brian, driving fast and skillfully through the early-afternoon traffic. “Your hunch was correct.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “It should make for an interesting afternoon.” Then I opened my mobile and made another call.

  Chapter 21

  When we returned to Hendon, a man was waiting by the elevator. He rose when he saw me, face blooming in welcome. It was a warrior’s face, all hard planes, scarred, with a broken nose; his thinning grey hair cropped close to his skull. “Dex!” he said. “It’s been a long time! What’s this about?”

  “Docklands,” I said, shaking hands. He had a grip like a hydraulic car-crusher. “It’s good to see you, Max! Thanks for coming down on short notice!”

  “Any time, Dex. Glad to help,” he said.

  “DI Brian Abbott, my partner,” I said. They shook hands, and I quite enjoyed the look of pained surprise on Brian’s face as he retrieved his mangled fingers. “This is Sergeant Max Murdoch, an old mate.”

  “Mad Max Murdoch of Firearms Branch?” “Brian asked. “Dex has told me a lot about you, some of it quite complimentary.”

  “You know,” I said as we walked toward our cube, “I think I’m going to quite enjoy this.”

  Hackett and Carter were, as expected, waiting for me at my desk. Hackett, at least, allowed his pleasure to show. “Ah, DI Reed,” he said. “Here’s your administrative order. You may review it at your leisure, but as of this moment, you may consider yourself officially on suspension.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I replied evenly. “I believe I suggested that you re-think your theory of this case. I have some new evidence I think you’ll want to hear.”

  “Do you?” asked Carter, face impassive.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Hackett nastily. “It’s done. You’re off the case. Take it from me, detective – no matter how you squirm, your career’s over.”

  Max froze him with a stare the color of polar ice. “Take it from you. And who the hell are you, boy?”

  “DI Bartholomew Hackett of the Department of Professional Standards. And you are?”

  “Sergeant Max Murdoch, SO17 Armed Response Branch.”

  “Ah.” It was obvious that even young Hackett had heard of Mad Max Murdoch, a man whose deeds were legend even in the testosterone-gargling world of violent incident response. Perhaps he’d heard about the time Murdoch, armed only with a penknife, had killed three gun-wielding IRA assassins in a safe house. Or the occasion when, handcuffed to a radiator, Murdoch had used his toes to defuse a pound of Semtex only nine seconds before it went off. Or the time he was shot through a lung by an armored-car robber, but still carried a wounded comrade to safety, zigzagging a hundred yards under fire.

  There was also the time he had taken an eager young detective aside, just before the Docklands drugs raid, and told him to be careful. “I’ve a bad feeling about this,” he said, almost invisible in his black camouflage and boots, a fully automatic Heckler-Koch MP-5 slung across his chest. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “I’ll be fine, Max,” I said. “You’ve got my back.”

  “I do,” he said. “It’s your front I’m worried about. So I’m going to give you some advice I hope you’ll remember: be suspicious. Keep your back to the wall, and at the first hint of trouble, go straight for the ringleader, then sort out the others.”

  “What is it, Max?” I asked. My partner, Oakhurst, had disappeared inside the surveillance van; Max and I were alone. “Have you heard something?”

  The ice-blue eyes regarded me soberly for a moment. “No. But I think this is too large a quantity of cocaine. These blokes wouldn’t do a deal with someone they didn’t know very well indeed.” I started to speak, but Max held up a hand. “Yes, all right, I know you and Oakhurst have been laying the groundwork for weeks. But they don’t really know you, do they? All I’m saying is, they don’t trust you. So don’t trust them.”

  “I won’t.” I looked at my watch. “It’s time. Are you ready?”

  Murdoch spoke into a lapel mike, listened to the response on his earpiece. Then he gave me the thumbs-up and melted into the darkness.

  I drove the two blocks to the office tower that held the Central American Trading Partners’ office/warehouse complex, parked, and walked into the foyer. The building security guard, Drazen, a hulking, neckless Serb, wit
h the sunken eyes of a man whose past deeds kept him up at nights, led the way into the company offices.

  Cavendish and Mills, the two masterminds, were awaiting my arrival. Both were in their early thirties, restless and volatile – tonight more so than usual. I suspected that they had been sampling the merchandise. “Search him,” said Cavendish, a tall, bookish-looking lad with round spectacles and an Adam’s-apple that made him look as though he’d swallowed a golf ball. His partner, Mills, six feet tall and stocky, coldly handsome, looked on impassively, eyes glittering oddly, drumming his fingers on the desk in a mindless, obsessive tattoo.

  Drazen patted me down with the dispassionate efficiency of someone special-forces-trained. But he failed to find the tiny transmitter that was broadcasting every word of our conversation to the nearby surveillance van. “He’s clean,” he grunted.

  “Right,” said Mills, in a voice fairly creaking with tension. “Let’s get this over with. You’re ready to make payment?”

  “As soon as I verify quality and quantity.”

  “This way,” said Cavendish, opening a side door. He led the way into the warehouse, where a shipping container stood open. I noticed several guards, all armed, posted at strategic points. “Not taking any chances, I see,” I said as a warning to Max. “You’ll keep your security here until the stuff is loaded aboard my truck?”

  “Naturally.” We had arrived at the container. It was filled, floor to ceiling, with palletized 50-pound bags of opaque polyurethane, labeled “Quinoa.” “The super-grain of the Incas,” Mills explained. “This shipment is a little more super than most.”

  Selecting a bag, he produced a wicked-looking flick knife and cut a small slit. Inside was a fine white powder. I took out a small test kit, dropped in a dram of powder, added a reagent, and held it up to the light. “Eighty percent pure,” I said. “Excellent.” I went further back into the container, chose another bag at random, and gestured. “This one as well, please.”

  Grunting in annoyance, Mills again produced his knife. Another sample, same result. “Seen enough?” he asked.

  “I think he’s seen too much,” said Cavendish.

  “Too much?” I said lightly, unobtrusively shifting my position so my back was against one of the pallets, and all three men were in my line of sight. “Surely it’s just ordinary business sense to check more than one bag.”

  “It would be,” said Mills, “if it wasn’t for the call we received an hour before you arrived. You’re an informant. A grass!”

  “Time to cut the grass,” whispered Cavendish, producing a serrated hunting-knife. “Drazen – no guns. Use your knife.”

  “I like knives best,” Drazen grinned, producing a long, slim commando blade that had obviously seen much hard use. “Try to die quietly, English.”

  I judged Drazen the most dangerous of the three. He came in low, in a crouch. I suddenly lashed out with a foot; my steel-toed boot caught him just below the left kneecap, and he staggered to the side, tears of pain springing to his eyes. As he did so, I put my shoulder into a short vicious overhand punch that caught him squarely on the bridge of the nose; I felt the crunch of breaking bone and down he went, knife clattering to the metal floor of the container.

  My unexpected attack, though successful, had left my back exposed. Mills got behind me and I felt the cold sting of his knife at my throat. Desperately I caught the blade with my hand, felt a shock of pain as the keen edge bit deep. I jerked my other elbow into his solar plexus, heard the whoosh of air as the breath left his lungs. As I fought his knife-hand away from my throat, Cavendish danced close. Just as I kicked him solidly in the balls, he sank his knife deep into my belly.

  I looked down at the protruding handle in horror and sank to my knees, consciousness fading fast. I was vaguely aware of a spreading coldness, a hubbub of shouted commands, the sound of running boots on concrete, a short burst of automatic-weapons fire followed by a scream of pain. The last thing I heard, before my senses left me, was Oakhurst’s voice. “Dex, you damned fool, why didn’t you stick to the plan! Oh, dammit, I should have gone in myself! We need an ambulance here now!” Then a roaring sound, like a tornado about to touch down, filled my ears, and I swooped sickeningly into blackness.

  Murdoch had come to see me often in hospital during my long and difficult recovery. Two inches to the right and Cavendish’s knife would have entered my liver, with almost certainly fatal results. Oakhurst, apparently, had grasped the handle of the knife, intending to pull it from the wound; had he succeeded, the catastrophic internal bleeding would have finished me before medical response could arrive. Murdoch, however, had stopped Oakhurst just in time, seizing his wrist and shoving him roughly away. This did not prevent the grizzled armed response commander from blaming himself for my injuries. “I should have been quicker, Dex,” he said one night, face haggard in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the ward. “”I could feel it going wrong. I should’ve moved sooner.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I croaked. “You couldn’t move until they did. One thing does puzzle me, though.”

  “You wonder who tipped them off,” said Murdoch, eyes full of cold rage. “Yes, I wonder that too. I intend to get to the bottom of that, and right smartly.”

  He never did, though. British Telecom records plainly showed the call in question, but it originated from a phone box eight blocks away. We never ascertained who had placed it.

  I had my suspicions, of course. In almost any investigation, chances are that, if you can discern who has the most to gain from the crime, you’ll find your perpetrator. In this case, the one person who’d made hay was Detective Inspector – now Detective Chief Inspector – George Oakhurst. However, I’d never been able to prove a damned thing.

  Until now. “All right, gentlemen,” I said, popping a tape of a morning news broadcast into the VCR. We watched a brief lead-in from the reporter on-scene outside Hendon station, then the opening frames of the Seagrave video filled the monitor. I froze the image.

  “Note the time/date stamp in the lower left corner of the screen. You will also note the somewhat code MPSCCD-2. That stands for Metropolitan Police Service Computer Crimes Directorate; two is the copy number – a little precaution Emma Kwan and I dreamt up before she made two copies of the original disks: one for DCI Wicks, and the other for DCI Oakhurst. The original disks, still in DI Abbott’s and my possession, bear the time/date stamp but no copy number. Wicks’ copy, as you’ll find, was coded MPSCCD-1.”

  “All that proves is that whoever copied and sold the disks had access to Oakhurst’s office,” cried Hackett. “It doesn’t prove Oakhurst had anything to do with it.”

  “True,” I admitted. “But this does.” And I laid O’Toole’s signed statement, identifying sample four as the voice of the man who had sold him the videos, before them.

  “This was sample four,” said Brian, pressing “play” on his tape recorder. Oakhurst’s unmistakable voice filled the cubicle.

  “Not to tell you how to do your jobs,” Brian rumbled, “but I suspect that if you were to check very carefully into DCI Oakhurst’s financials, you’d stand a good chance of finding our missing hundred thousand pounds.”

  “You’re saying DCI Oakhurst leaked the videos himself, and told the Sun to deposit half the money in your account, to intimidate you?” Hackett asked incredulously.

  “Correct.”

  For a moment, all Hackett and Carter could do was stare at one another, stunned as steers in a slaughterhouse. Then Carter spoke. “If what you say is true,” he began, “what’s his motivation? Why try to destroy your mates by releasing the videos, and why try to pin it on you?”

  I spoke for half an hour, laying out my suspicions about Docklands. Then Murdoch spoke, corroborating many of my hunches and opinions. “I was there,” he finished. “I personally stopped DCI Oakhurst from pulling out the knife. At the time, it merely seemed a stupid and dangerously ignorant thing to do. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I think it was more than that.
I think Oakhurst was trying to ensure that he wouldn’t have to share credit for the success of the operation with DI Reed.”

  “But you can’t prove it.”

  “I can’t prove it, no” Murdoch admitted. “But that’s my best professional judgment of the case.”

  DIs Hackett and Carter rose, glumly silent. “And the administrative order?” Murdoch asked

  “Withdrawn. You’re back on the job, DI Reed,” Carter replied.

  “For now,” Hackett added defiantly. And whispering furiously to one another, the two DPS men vanished.

  “Thank you, Max,” I said.

  “Anything for a friend, Dex. A pleasure meeting you, DI Abbott.” And moving on swift, pantherlike strides, he, too, disappeared.

  Brian closed his eyes. “Ah,” he said with a malicious grin. “Hear that?”

  “Hear what?” I asked.

  “The gurgle and swoosh of a once-promising career swirling down the crapper. And the good part is, it’s not yours.”

  “Thanks, Brian. For all your help – couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Think nothing of it,” he said, pulling on his coat.

  “Where’re you off to?” I asked, pulling a legal pad from my desk.

  “Just following up on my interview with Devilliers. You know, that promising lead you didn’t want to know about.”

  “What is it? Now I want to know.”

  Brian grinned. “I’ll call you later. First I’ve got to ask Devilliers a few more questions, about this.” He waved a sheaf of papers.

  “What’re those?”

  “Oh, just something I dug up, with some help from someone in computer crime. I’ll ring you if I get any answers.” And off he went.

  I hate it when Brian becomes mysterious – it usually means he’s on to something particularly juicy, but wants to wait to spring it on me until he’s got something solid in hand. I thrust Brian’s sense of the dramatic from my mind and settled in to run through the state of the Weathersby case.