Remains to be Seen

by J M Gregson

  ‘I still think you’re wrong. I’m sure our Federation Representative would agree with me.’

  ‘I doubt that, on this occasion. But as I’m telling you this project is still at this moment theoretical and highly confidential, you can hardly bring in the Fed. Rep., can you?’ Percy, realizing he was sounding smug, tried to offer an olive branch. ‘You’ll be involved in the subsequent interviewing, where your skills will be much appreciated.’

  ‘Except that the National Crime Squad or the Drugs Squad will take over all the really juicy interviews, as you well know.’

  DS Blake was usually very clear-sighted about such matters. But on this occasion, as things would turn out, she was quite wrong.

  Five

  At ten o’clock on Wednesday night, there was no moon. But it was a cold, clear night, with just enough light from the stars to allow the long, low outline of the big house to be seen clearly against the night sky.

  Peach usually felt himself irresistibly reminded of the house in Psycho on such occasions; he had met a few examples of the Anthony Perkins character in his career, some of them sinister, some of them no more than odd. But this house was clearly much bigger and grander than that decrepit motel in Psycho. It was much more like a National Trust mansion, both in its own dimensions and in the size of its grounds.

  Marton Towers had never belonged to one of the nation’s great landed families. It had been built in the heyday of neo-Gothic, when Victoria was still a young queen, and when labour was cheap, materials solid, and workmanship excellent. There were turrets, castellations and even the odd minaret, all executed with the exuberance of a Britain confident of its empire. In the days when King Cotton had ruled Lancashire, one of its magnates had enjoyed pouring his profits into this demonstration of his success.

  Percy moved his small team into position at 22.05. Ultimately, they were to make some important arrests, whilst the Armed Response Unit covered them and every exit with their weapons. A piece of cake, Percy had told his team, in that cliché beloved of commanders. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? If things went to plan. If the element of surprise enabled them to keep the initiative. If …

  Things rarely went exactly according to plan, when the police made a raid. Indeed, you couldn’t plan every detail. Especially on a battlefield as big as this one.

  Percy didn’t like the size of the big house, feared the way that his resources might have to be spread too thinly over too wide an area. From three hundred yards away, he could already see many lights piercing the massive outline of the mansion against the navy sky. As well as the high block of the main house, there were servants’ quarters, kitchens, old stables that had been converted into garages and workshops and God knew what else.

  All of these were places where men could hide. Dangerous men, in an industry like this, where there were many millions of pounds available to employ muscle and guns. DCI Peach showed nothing to his team, but he was more on edge than he could remember being for years.

  Somewhere behind him, a little further down the lane, members of the Armed Response Unit were probably peering over the seven-foot-high stone wall of the estate and thinking the same things he was thinking. Percy Peach hoped they were. It never paid to underestimate your enemy, or the dangers which were going to confront you in the next half an hour.

  There was a solid stone gatehouse at the entrance to the Towers. A high arch framed the wrought-iron gates which screened the tarmac drive up to the front of the house. No one entered without passing the Cerberus who guarded it. A Cerberus which took the shape of Arnie Wright, a heavy who had done time for GBH and now controlled access to the man who owned Marton Towers.

  If they were to retain the element of surprise on their side, Cerberus must remain toothless. Arnie Wright must not be allowed to warn his master and the drug barons who were meeting with him at this moment in the dining room of the big house of the imminent disruption of their feast.

  Three men were plenty for this task. Percy glanced sideways, caught a glint of light from the gatehouse on a face which was blacker than the moonless night above them. DC Clyde Northcott, once a drug user himself, before he was recruited, first into the police and lately into the CID, by Percy Peach himself. Six feet three of bone and muscle. A hard bastard. A good man to have at your side on a night like this.

  And on Peach’s other side, the paler, fresher face of Brendan Murphy, who should have been Irish but who had spent all twenty-five years of his life in Lancashire. In that moment, Percy Peach was surer than ever of his decision to exclude DS Blake from this enterprise. It was simply not a suitable assignment for her. That was what he had told himself as well as Lucy, until now. It was only here, feeling the cold solidity of the estate wall against his fingertips, that he acknowledged to himself that he could never have faced Agnes Blake, if her daughter had come to any harm here.

  A second later, they were at the gatehouse, slinking like predators out of the darkness and up to the thick stone walls of this huge sentry box. Arnie Wright was lounging back on his chair by the desk, turning the pages of the Sun, happy that he would be undisturbed for the rest of the evening now that all the expected guests had arrived. His unconscious assumption was that no one came to this isolated place on foot, that any strangers who came to disturb him would do so in a vehicle, whose engine noise would give him due notice of their arrival.

  Peach studied him for a moment through the orange square of the gatehouse window. Wright’s right hand was on the edge of his newspaper. It was perhaps five feet from the warning button which would give notice to the house that someone, some alien presence, was at the gatehouse and threatening to enter the main house.

  Those could be the most important five feet of the evening. Peach nodded to each of the men beside him, felt them taking the same deep breath as he took, as they approached the door.

  And then they were in, shouting instructions at the broad, startled face at the desk, telling it not to move. Wright did move, of course. As Peach flung himself into that five-foot gap between him and the electronic link to the house, he leapt up from his seat with a fierce, automatic oath.

  But he had no chance. Clyde Northcott was on him, the force of his attack carrying Wright back against the wall, his ebony hand on the man’s throat, bending his chin and his head backwards against the cold, unyielding plaster. ‘Don’t even think about it, sunshine!’ he snarled into Wright’s face from three inches.

  And Wright’s dilated eyes filled with fear as they saw the fierce determination in the dark pupils which were so close to his. He shook his head the minimal quarter of an inch which Northcott’s grip allowed him, signifying that no, he wouldn’t think about it, whatever ‘it’ might be. A hard bastard, this. Arnie Wright had met a few of them whilst he was in Brixton. He knew when he was beaten.

  Brendan Murphy cut the electronic link to the main house. Peach radioed to the uniformed men in the van a hundred yards down the lane to come and collect Wright, then gave the news of the first move in the battle to the Armed Response Unit who waited a little further away.

  So far so good. The first phase was completed.

  There were four nationalities among the group which sat around the big mahogany dining table in Marton Towers.

  Jack Clark waited with two other men in an anteroom alongside the very grand panelled room, where Victorian industrialists had eaten huge meals and striven to achieve the transition from trade into the gentry. He could hear a low murmur of conversation from behind the huge panelled door of the dining room, but he could distinguish not a syllable of what was being said. He fancied that the conversation was in English, the new lingua franca of the twenty-first century, but he could not even be sure of that.

  Jack wanted to hear laughter from behind that door, to hear voices raised in amusement and friendly exchange. Laughter meant that you were relaxed, and when you were relaxed you were vulnerable. He had long since ceased to wear a watch, but he knew that the strike must come soon, if it came at al
l. He prayed that his friends when they came would be borne into that room on an irresistible tide of surprise.

  His friends. He had come to terms with that now, but it had taken him a full day to switch sides again in his mind. He had worked so hard to submerge himself into his character in the squat that he had found it difficult to drag himself out of it, to change his mindset to accommodate what was going to happen here.

  If things went according to plan. His brain framed again that condition, trying for the mindset which would ensure his safety, if tonight’s raid failed and he had to live for a little longer with the armies of the night.

  It was a long, narrow room where the three of them sat so nervously. Like people waiting to be interviewed for a job, Jack thought. But they did not talk nervously to each other, as candidates for a job might have done whilst they waited their turn. They sat on upright chairs a few yards from each other, with their backs against the wall.

  The three of them had long since learned not to leave their backs unguarded, Jack decided. Since each of them had come into the room, he had made no eye contact with the others. The strange nervous trio sat quite still, gazing at the polished oak blocks of the parquet floor. And waited.

  They heard the clink of crockery being removed from the big panelled room beside them, and knew that the time was coming when they would be called upon to speak, to make the right moves, which would enable them to move up to the next rank in this lucrative hierarchy of evil. With the knowledge that the moment was at hand, they did begin to move, massaging nervous hands together, scuffing the soles of trainers against the polished floor. But still they looked at that floor and never at each other.

  Then the broad mahogany door of the dining room opened, and a figure stood for a moment silhouetted against the more brilliant light of that room behind him. All three pairs of eyes turned to the features they could not distinguish, each man wondered whether he was the one to be summoned into that dangerous group beyond the figure in the doorway.

  It was at that moment that hell broke loose.

  Even Jack Clark, the only one who should have been prepared for it, was shocked by the fury and the suddenness of the police arrival. The door at the other end of the big dining room, fully thirty yards from Jack, burst open as if a bomb had been detonated, and everywhere there was noise, crashing into their ears as if noise itself were a weapon. A harsh voice, impossibly loud, yelled from the other end of the room that armed police were surrounding the place, that every exit was covered, that no one should move.

  No more than a second later, helmeted police with sub-machine guns poured through the door at the end of the anteroom where Jack and his companions stood petrified, screaming at them not to move, informing them in rapid, shouted words that they too were surrounded and that escape was impossible. A single shot went off in the dining room; it was followed by an almost simultaneous burst of police fire and a yell of anguish.

  As always with a successful police raid, everything seemed to happen impossibly fast and at fortissimo volume. Jack heard the words of arrest being yelled in the dining room, the absurd instruction that the unseen men in there need not say anything, but it might harm their defence if they withheld information which they might later wish to use in court. The trappings of civilization, applied in a situation where no one could afford to be civilized.

  And then Jack Clark found himself with his face against the wall, with a fiercely committed black officer holding his arm hard against the small of his back, so that he was squealing with agony and lifted almost off his feet as the words of arrest were shouted into his ear.

  Behind him, DCI Peach glanced round the anteroom and permitted himself a brief moment of satisfaction. They’d got the undercover man safely in their clutches, and they hadn’t blown his cover. Make sure it’s Clyde Northcott who arrests our man, he’d said, then there’ll be no suspicion among the enemy that he’s one of ours.

  Let the hard bastard do the job.

  Twenty minutes later, it seemed to be all over.

  On the broad gravelled area in front of the main house, an army of police vehicles was now visible in the white blaze of the arc lights they had turned upon the scene. There were five Armed Response Vehicles, four powerful saloons and one estate car. On an order from their chief, the ARU personnel were beginning to stow away their Heckler and Koch 9mm sub-machine guns and their Glock 9mm pistols in the double-locking safes, which were welded into the bodywork between the back seat and the boot. Procedure: that police watchword for all occasions.

  The ARU men retained the backup sidearms which had been carried in the forward sections of the vehicles. But with the order to lock away the automatic weapons, they were beginning to relax. That order meant in effect that the mission was successfully concluded, that the divisional commander who was responsible for the overall strategy of this raid was happy that every dangerous person in this huge house had been arrested. In half an hour they would be back at base, removing their bullet-proof body armour, in that final divesting which signified that an operation was over.

  There were five other police vehicles, their sirens silent but their blue lamps flashing steadily, which were now about to carry a variety of occupants away from Marton Towers. Some of them were the muscle with which the biggest criminals always seemed to surround themselves, as if a battery of thugs was a badge of success. But a great house of this size needed also a battalion of servants, many of whom were no doubt totally unconnected with the villainies which had financed the maintenance and prosperity of the Marton estate over the last few years. But everyone with even a random, peripheral connection with the owners would be questioned, every scrap of evidence assembled, to counteract the slick and articulate lawyers who would eventually appear for the defence in a high-profile court case.

  The ambulance carrying the single casualty of the evening had already departed. The Turkish drug baron who had risen from the dining table and drawn a pistol, in defiance of the orders shouted at him, had been shot in the chest. Probably not fatal, the paramedics had volunteered, as they had slid the red-blanketed figure into the back of their vehicle and prepared to set the siren blaring for a swift passage to the hospital.

  The chief of the Armed Response Unit was glad of that, for the sake of the man who had fired the burst from the Heckler and Koch. No one liked killing, even though it might be his job, even though the world might have been better off with this particular man removed from its surface.

  DCI Peach was relieved that his part in this major operation had been successfully concluded. He was happy to see his own small team reassembling without injury at the conclusion of the raid. There was a strict discipline in the Armed Response Units, but with adrenaline and testosterone pulsing through the veins of young men, accidents could always happen.

  His team were full of the happy excitement that is near to hysteria which comes with the successful conclusion of a tricky and dangerous enterprise. Once they had secured the gatehouse and access to the big house, their main duty had been to arrest the three men who had been waiting in the anteroom to be appointed as drug dealers, including their own undercover man, the Drugs Squad sergeant.

  Jack Clark now sat in the back of the police van with his two companions, more dishevelled and unkempt than ever, and taking care to look thoroughly cowed and depressed by his arrest. It was not entirely a pose. With the knowledge that his months of deception were almost over, that his isolation in extreme danger was coming to an end, all energy had left him and exhaustion was taking over.

  He sat on the bench at the side of the van, his shoulders hunched forward, his eyes on the floor of the vehicle. He roused himself only to continue the fiction of his arrest, as he felt DCI Peach studying him through the open doors at the back of the vehicle. ‘That black bastard almost broke my arm!’ he complained morosely.

  Peach gave him a wicked grin, which he allowed to ripple round the other prisoners in the van. ‘He’s good, isn’t he? Powerful lad, DC Northcott.
And if I were you, son, I wouldn’t add racial abuse to my other sins.’ He slammed the doors cheerfully on the three men inside, banged on the metal to signal to the driver that he could drive his cargo to the nick. They would be separated for questioning, of course. That was when Jack Clark’s long ordeal would finally come to an end.

  Peach and his team were among the last to leave the scene, securing the doors of the mansion before they drove away. Property had to be secured, even when it belonged to the worst of villains. They drove between the high wrought-iron gates with the bronze crests upon them and past the empty gatehouse. It seemed a long time since they had crept along its stone walls with such elaborate care to surprise Arnie Wright. A lot of drama had been crammed into the last ninety minutes.

  It was no more than ten minutes after the last police vehicle had left that the first tiny orange glow appeared at the square window of the cottage. It was one of a terrace which had been formed from the former stables of Marton Towers. The light flickered, grew swiftly brighter, leapt with a crash through the glass and up the outside of the building.

  And then there was smoke, whirling upwards into the night sky in a swift and hideous funnel, obscuring the thin sliver of moon which had now appeared low in the midnight sky. For a little while, there was no noise which could be heard from the gatehouse or the road. But the flames spread greedily sideways and upwards, until the first-storey windows in the long low block were as bright as those on the ground floor. It was not long before joists caught, and the ceilings began to fall with crashes like shell-fire on to the old flagged floors where horses had once been groomed.

  The conflagration was well advanced, rearing wildly and terribly against the blackness around it, before a motorist, driving along the lonely road which ran beside the long stone wall marking the boundary of the estate, caught the glare in the night sky. The fire station was seven miles away, but at that time of night, its machines made swift progress to the blaze.