by David Mark
He moves closer, his yellow eyes boring into mine. ‘The alternative is that I make a call to Bishop’s contact and tell them that there’s a loose end. And they will hate that, love. They’ll really hate that.’
I stay rooted to the spot, unable to put into words just how much I want him to get the hell away from me and my house. Suddenly I want Callum. I want my lying, cheating ex to pull up on the driveway and tell me that I got it all wrong and that he loves me, and only me, and wants to come home and make everything right again.
‘I hate this,’ he says, his voice full of genuine regret. ‘I think you’re a grand lass. Clever, funny, tough. I can see something of the copper in you, truth be told, and for me to like a person with a copper’s personality is not much shy of a miracle. I hoped we could be friends, but circumstances conspire to rob us of such luxuries, so now I just need you to say that you understand, you agree, and I’ll go pack my stuff and be out of your hair before the morning.’
I hear my breath come in short, ragged bursts. I can’t agree to what he’s saying. I can’t be a party to any of this.
And then one hand is around my jaw, pushing me back against the wall, and the other is holding the CS spray millimetres from my eyeball, his thumb hovering just above the button. His face swims in my vision. I see sadness in his eyes. Real, genuine regret that it has come to this. But I also see a willingness to do what must be done.
‘I understand,’ I say, in little more than a whisper. ‘I’ll do what you want.’
For a fraction of a second he looks as though he wants to tell me not to be so bloody stupid: to fight and scrap and knee him in the balls and do anything other than make a pact with this foul, corrupted demon. Then he gives a simple nod, turns, and walks away towards his room.
I slide inside the back door. Slam it shut. Bolt it, and slither down to the floor. I cry until my face is sore and my throat feels as if it has been cut with a blade.
When I finally look up, Lilly is staring at me, her petite little features a mask of concern.
‘What matter, Mummy? Mummy cry?’
I reach out and hold her. Press her head to my own. Let her hold me, as if she were the mother and I the child.
At no point do I think about calling the police.
The deal has already been done.
13
A large house, stuck on the end of a terrace of tall Georgian properties. White-painted, like the others, with big sash windows and a door the same shade of green as the big laurel bushes which cling to the wrought-iron fence and which shields the bottom floors from prying eyes.
Inside, pure luxury. A basement has been converted into a games room with big glass doors opening out to a courtyard garden: a single mulberry bush serving as the focal point, accessed by a footpath of reclaimed sleepers and big glittering stones.
The members of the NCA Covert Strategy Unit are making themselves comfortable in the long, high-ceilinged room on the first floor. It’s wood-panelled and two large black chandeliers hang from the ceiling, their light reflecting back from the lacquered wood and the big windows. The sun pours in to puddle in expensive corners – on the writing desk, at the foot of the Chesterfield sofa, slicing down on half of the reproduction George Stubbs equestrian portrait above the big open fireplace. One whole wall is given over to leather-bound books and the table at the centre of the room is so hefty and ancient that more than one visitor has wondered whether the builders erected the place around it.
The head of the unit is standing at the fireplace as if posing for a Country Living photo shoot. There are gold-framed mirrors and bowls of pine cones on the mantelpiece and though she has her back to the room she is using the reflections to survey the members of her team. She likes them to wait until she’s good and ready. In other units where she has worked there has always been a surfeit of blokeish chatter: dirty jokes and silly comments and raucous laughs amid the belches and farts. Not in this unit, thank you very much. She’s made that plain. She has no problem with people being boisterous and can hold her own in the smutty remark department, but the truth is she wants her team to be slightly in awe of her. Wants them to do what she tells them because they’re afraid to do otherwise. And every time she gets to enjoy the sound of silence ahead of a briefing, she knows she’s winning the game.
The three operatives are sitting quietly, their electronic tablets on laps or tabletops. Two women, one man. She knows their real names, knows more about their secrets than they know themselves, but she has instituted a strict confidentiality code since taking over and now insists that the undercover operatives refer to themselves entirely by code names.
She has few vices outside of a desire to become all that she can be, but she does have a fondness for opera. As such, she refers to her team members by the names of operatic composers. In the armchair is Verdi. She’s got a Rubenesque look about her. Big bones, red hair, pale skin. She’s still perspiring slightly from the walk from the Tube station.
At the table sits Smetana. Thin, sharp-eyed, always fighting off or coming down with a cold, she has a look of fragility that is utterly at odds with the facts on record. She’s tough, determined and willing to go almost as far as it takes to get the job done. She was a detective sergeant with Thames Valley Police until she was seconded to the NCA.
Lounging in the wooden chair by the open window is Bizet. Forty-odd. Seen-it-all, done-it-all, he’s a lugubrious, sick-of-it sort of soul who makes every tiny task seem like a Herculean level of effort is required to do it right. He’s tall, too tall, and has developed a bit of a stoop through years of hunching over. He walks as if looking for a dropped coin. The boss doesn’t like him very much, but she wants to keep him where she can make sure he’s not causing mischief. He’s a gifted hacker and she wouldn’t put it past him to have already had a dig around in some confidential files looking for dirt on the team leader, and she knows, to her cost, that there is plenty to be found.
She turns into the room. Looks past Bizet, and out through the gleaming glass into the cold blue sky. Then she takes her seat at the head of the table, opens up the sleek little laptop, and hits a key at random. A moment later, the trio of tablets held by her officers light up with received information.
‘One nine eight zero,’ she says, without emotion, and the operatives key in the decryption code. Lines of nonsensical data and multi-coloured pictures delineate into confidential briefing documents, mugshots and witness statements.
‘Item 1.9 in Bundle 3.3,’ she says, looking at her own screen. She touched a tanned index finger to the relevant icon, and the picture becomes a grainy mugshot: a short, angry-faced man, with dark curly hair and sunken eyes. ‘Operation Pontian.’
‘Pontian?’ asks Verdi. ‘What does that mean?’
The boss eyes her coolly. ‘We’ll save questions until the end. Preferably after I’m gone.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ve no doubt.’
The space grows chilly as she glares at Verdi. Glares at her the way cats regard one another from opposite ends of an alley. Then she returns to the job in hand.
‘This man is called Pope. Sometimes “The Pope”. He’s been known by that name since 1989, when some funny fucker said that he had such a charmed life it was as if he had a personal hotline to God. The name’s stuck. Prefers it to his own, which we think was only ever an alias. Douglas Sturrock. Born in Paisley, 1955. One of seven children and the only one that his mum made no attempt to keep when the social services of the time took him into care. Children’s homes, after that. Bad lad, getting worse.
‘Ran away at twelve and didn’t surface again until 1980, when he turned up with a tan and an attitude and a Foreign Legion bayonet, which he promptly stuck in the head of a retired caretaker from his old infant school. Didn’t kill him, but not far off. Arrested, charged, then the procurator fiscal messed up with witness statements and he walked. Walked straight into the loving arms of Glasgow’s favourite crime boss, Derrick Ovenden. Did his dirty work for
him, and there was a lot of that to go around. Got himself a reputation for being particularly colourful in terms of teaching people a lesson. No simple kneecappings for Pope. Liked to snip your toes. Liked to scald your feet. Learned that one from Ovenden himself. And if you were going to die, he liked to get his money’s worth out of the experience.
‘We’ve got one report of him setting up a gladiatorial arena in an abandoned swimming pool. Sent three lads in there bollock-naked and chucked in a few weapons and said he’d let the winner out alive. There was no winner. They hacked one another to bits. He sat watching, drinking red wine and eating grapes. If there’s no such thing as Caligula Syndrome, I’m going to patent it.’
She pauses. Takes a sip of water. Considers a cigarette and decides to save it until she’s done.
‘Fast forward to 1998. Derrick Ovenden is killed leaving a casino. His firm and another led by a couple of ambitious upstarts had been involved in an escalating series of confrontations. Two shootings, a stabbing and no shortage of slashes to the cheeks. Ovenden thought he was untouchable. He wasn’t. Prime suspect in the killing was one Benjamin Moss – a teenage member of the Ovenden firm who figured he’d get himself in the good graces of the enemy by doing them a favour. He turned up two days after the shooting, banging on the door of his local police station and begging to be arrested. The locals obliged, but despite his best efforts he was released.
‘They found him ten days later. Found some more of him the next day as well. Word was, Pope didn’t see why his boss’s death meant he should stop being loyal. With Ovenden dead, Pope took over, and the locals quickly learned that Ovenden had been the restraining force for many a year. With Pope in charge, the methods became more ruthless, the punishments for grassing became more severe, and anybody who threatened their territory was forced to suffer every kind of agony you can imagine.’
‘I can imagine quite a lot,’ says Smetana, quietly.
The boss allows that one to pass unremarked. ‘You can read about it at your leisure. There are true crime books about all this too, and you’ll be surprised to learn that it’s not all bollocks.’
She takes another sip of water. Wets her lips. Clicks on an icon on the laptop. The image of a dark-haired man with gold teeth and a mocking smile appears on the screen.
‘This gentleman goes by the name of Bishop. Whether we had that name before he got into bed with Pope, I’ll leave you to speculate upon. He’s a bit of a grey area for the intelligence units. We think he’s mid-forties. Think he may be one Fraser Lockhart, who left university two terms into his second year to go and explore the world. Expanded his horizons you might say – geographically and chemically. Did time in a prison in Thailand and loved it so much he thought he’d try out a South American jail for comparison when he got out. Drugs offences, naturally. Refused any help from the British Embassy, hence the lack of information.
‘Next heard of providing security services at a gold mine in Mazaruni, Guyana. Same man was rumoured to be involved in the illegal export of blood diamonds from Sierra Leone in 2009. A real world traveller, this one. Got a lot of connections and doesn’t scare easily.’
She clicks on another image. This time the screen fills with an image of an emaciated man in ludicrously baggy football shorts, lying on a cot bed in what appears to be a khaki-green tent: mud and leaves at the base of the picture. He has bandages across his eyes, and a great curving wound across his stomach and sternum. One arm lolls off the side of the bed, trailing in the earth, but there is still a hint of life into the sheen of fetid sweat that clings to this dark skin.
‘Illegal organ donation,’ she says, straightforwardly. ‘Top prices paid for anybody willing to put a price tag on their insides. Turns out we’re worth a fortune. Corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys – there’s a buyer for whatever you’re willing to offer. And our Bishop here is connected to the same cartel that realised they were missing a trick when it came to despatching their enemies. No more dumping them by the side of the road, limbless and headless and bleeding. No, with a couple of health professionals and a few blind eyes turned – pardon the pun – then everybody who crossed them could be neatly repackaged as an organ donor. Up to and including their hearts.’
She looks up. Smetana is staring at her, nose wrinkled. Disgusted. ‘This is Colombia, yes?’
‘Among others. World Health Organisation has performed tissue samples on organs donated in the US, in Russia and a couple of choice European nations and the organs in question have been traced back to China, India, and most recently, South America. Some may have been willing donors. But not all.’
She touches another icon. Sits back in her chair as an image of a small, torpedo-shaped vessel appears on the screen. It cuts through the water like a shark surfacing to take down a surfer.
‘This is a narco sub,’ she explains. ‘Not quite a submarine but not far off. Cuts through the water and is damn near impossible to pick up on radar or to spot from another ship. Hand-built, but not as basic as you might think. The cartels have been using them to get their product into the US for more than a decade but last year one was picked up not far off the coast of Spain. Point of origin, South America. These things can cross the Atlantic in the right hands. This one in particular had cocaine and heroin worth three million on board. That’s a guess, of course. The crew followed orders and scuttled it before it could be recovered for evidence. For all we know it could have been ten times that.’
She pauses again, daring anybody to interrupt her. She gives a little nod. Clicks her finger on the screen. Calls up an image of a round-faced, unremarkable man with curly black hair and glasses. He looks like a junior school teacher: loud shirt, playful smile, a look about him that says: “I’m out of my depth but trying.”
‘Nine days ago, this gentleman was picked up by detectives in Greenock. Callum Ashcroft. As of late, he’s been working in oil rigs and wind farms. He’s a consultant drilling engineer, which is every bit as exciting as it sounds. He was arrested when the Drugs Squad raided a known hangout of one of the pubs with links to Pope. His face didn’t fit. No record. No obvious reason to be there. Tried too hard when the officers took down his details and they saw through him in a flash. Took him to be interviewed at a separate station and told him they knew what he’d been doing. Not much of a strategy but it tipped him over. He told them the lot. Told them he’d got in further than he ever intended to.’
‘Heard that before…’ begins Smetana.
‘He lives with his wife and children in a horribly out-of-the-way peninsula. I won’t try and say it but it’s in your documents. She runs a guest house and when he’s not away working, he takes tourists out onto the lake.’
‘Loch,’ says Bizet, automatically, then winces, in apology.
‘Okay, the fucking loch. He’s a canoe enthusiast, though it’s hard to imagine why anybody would be enthusiastic about it. It’s what he does to relax, apparently, and he’s found a way to make it into a nice sideline. Chatty fellow. Always talks to the customers. And one day the customers were two lads from Glasgow. Nice as pie, or so he said. Chatted with him like they were the best of friends.
‘It wasn’t until they were all out on the loch that things turned. They had a proposal for him. They had cargo coming in from abroad – a shipment big enough to put most of Scotland into a stupor for a fortnight. But Border Force knew it was coming. They had to change their route at the last moment and ended up in the area off the Islay where the authorities are intent on sticking up an offshore wind farm. The crew were told to scuttle it in the event of being boarded, but they’re a stingy lot, and couldn’t bring themselves to. Before they headed for the lifeboat they wrapped as much of the product as they could in tarpaulins and oilskins and tied a trio of great underwater parcels to the channel markers marking out the proposed site.
‘It so happened, Ashcroft was due to go and provide a surveyor’s report at the self-same site three days later. All he had to do to make sure everybody went home happy, was
take a different mode of transport out to the site. He’d had good links with one trawling firm, but this time he would go with a different pilot. He’d do the same job, but he’d turn a blind eye to whatever they got up to, and if anybody asked questions, he could flash his lanyard and his credentials and nobody would have a problem.’
‘He agreed?’
‘The way he tells it, they implied that it was only going to happen one of two ways. He was going to agree, or they were going to put a bullet in his head, then go visit his family at their little holiday home and kill every one of them where they sat. The alternative to that was getting richer, and having a favour in the bank.’
‘Tough call,’ says Bizet.
‘Went well. Went without a hitch, in fact. And after that, the shipments started being left in the channel rather than brought inland, and every time they needed to be picked up, they had a tame consulting engineer who gave them cover to pick up. He got paid handsomely for it. He said he hated being involved, never wanted any of it, but once he was in he couldn’t get out.’
She clicks back on the picture of Pope. Looks up and shakes her head at the unit.
‘There’s always a fly in the ointment, isn’t there? And in this case, it’s that Pope isn’t immortal. Pope’s a poorly man. Pope has cancer in his liver, in his lungs and in his pancreas. Pope is alive by the grace of whatever God he serves, and Police Scotland are rather pleased he is, because when he dies it will be open season as all the other gangs fight over his turf. He hasn’t got a successor. He’s only got one guaranteed right-hand man – colossal great bruiser whose party piece is smashing the pommel of a claymore into the heads of people who don’t do as they’re told. Likes to tell people he doesn’t need the blade to kill with a sword. No photo on file, but we know he exists.’
