Silvermeadow bak-5

by Barry Maitland

  Leon was already there when Kathy got home. He was sitting at the table by the window with a mug of tea, absorbed in a road atlas. Rain was beating against the dark window, making the distant streetlights glimmer liquidly.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Tea’s fresh. Come and sit down.’ He fetched her a mug.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Looking for places to spend a lull in. There’s Lulham in Herefordshire, and Lullington in Derbyshire, and another one in Somerset. Or how about Lulsgate Bottom? Sounds good, eh? My money’s on Dorset; we can get four lulls in one hit, all within walking distance: East Lulworth, Lulworth Castle, West Lulworth and Lulworth Cove. That’s an irresistible concentration of lulls. What do you reckon?’

  Kathy smiled. For a brief moment, before he lifted his head, he reminded her of an earnest schoolboy doing his homework assignment. Then he looked up at her with his intense dark eyes and her stomach tightened. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t go. Brock wants us to work tomorrow.’ She put her arm round his shoulder. ‘And it’s going to be a total waste of time. But I have to go.’

  ‘Oh. Too bad. Another time.’

  She suppressed an impulse to say, no, we’ll go, there won’t be another time, not like this. But instead she nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Next week,’ he said. ‘I thought of going up to Liverpool for a day or two. We could go together.’

  ‘Liverpool?’

  ‘Yes. I want to have a look around.’

  ‘Why?’ She felt a small chill inside her.

  ‘I’m thinking of applying to go there.’

  ‘A transfer? Why?’

  ‘No, no. I’m thinking of doing a masters. Investigative psychology. I’d ask for leave for twelve months.’

  Kathy sat down facing him across the table and stared at him, saying nothing.

  ‘I’m stuck, Kathy,’ he went on patiently. ‘To move up I need some more qualifications. The Liverpool M. Sc. is exactly what I need. I’ll show you the brochures.’ He made as if to get up, but then, seeing the look on Kathy’s face, didn’t move. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s where Alex Nicholson teaches, isn’t it? Did she tell you about it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, while we were having dinner the other night. I was explaining the problem I have, and-’

  ‘What problem? You never told me you had a problem, Leon.’

  He leant forward, mildly exasperated. ‘But you know how it is. I can’t go beyond sergeant as laboratory liaison.’

  ‘We didn’t discuss this. You’ve only been here a few days, and you’ve already decided to move on.’

  ‘It’s not like that!’ he protested. ‘Look, Kathy, you should be thinking about this for yourself, too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You haven’t got a degree.’

  She flushed. ‘I know that.’

  ‘Well, you should get one! Hasn’t Brock ever told you?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, he bloody well ought to have done. He’s a negligent supervisor.’ He sat back and folded his arms in a pose that Kathy found quite astonishingly, insufferably smug. The anger flared inside her.

  ‘Fuck you, Leon,’ she said. ‘He’s ten times the copper you’ll ever be.’

  ‘But he’s near his used-by date, Kathy,’ he replied coolly. ‘Things are different now, you know that. Look’-he held up his hands in truce-‘this is stupid. I’m not going to fight about this. You know I’m right. I just didn’t… find the right way to put it.’

  ‘Damn right,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘And I haven’t got time to get a degree. If I was going to get one I should have done it years ago. It’s too late now. I can’t stop what I’m doing just to get a paper qualification.’

  ‘Wrong,’ he said, more gently. ‘You must make time. Do it part-time. I’ll help you.’

  ‘Oh sure. From Liverpool.’

  ‘That’s just for a year, for God’s sake. And it’s only a couple of hours away.’

  She relented eventually, and they made it up and prepared a meal together and generally agreed to be sensible and adult. It would have been all right if she hadn’t known as soon as she saw Alex Nicholson that she was going to be trouble, and if they hadn’t both initially told themselves, as a kind of insurance, that this was never going to work out anyway.

  14

  T he following morning Kathy put on what she hoped would pass for shop assistant’s clothes: a white blouse and navy cardigan and skirt. She pulled and clipped back her hair to try to avoid cursory identification by Harry Jackson’s staff, and drove to Silvermeadow where she duly reported for duty at Cuddles, the soft-toy shop. The manager gave her a quick introduction to handling cash and credit-card transactions, then had her memorise the shop’s mission statement (‘We aim to bring joy to young and old through the medium of soft cuddly toys’), before placing her at a checkpoint in the middle of the shop, with a clear view of the large badger in the open shopfront facing the mall.

  At ten a.m., when the centre opened its doors, she had a call on her mobile from Brock to say that the two vans were in position at the site entrances, ready for the day. She was armed with an extendable baton and a pair of handcuffs in the pocket of her skirt.

  By lunchtime she felt she had pretty well exhausted whatever interest was to be derived from selling soft toys, and was glad of a break. She sat in a small staff room at the back of the shop, keeping an eye on the customers through the half-open door while she ate a sandwich, before returning reluctantly for the afternoon shift. Shortly afterwards she was in the middle of an electronic funds transfer transaction for a heavily built, extensively tattooed truck driver clutching a five-foot orange giraffe, when she caught a fleeting glimpse of a man standing at the edge of the swirling mall crowd, staring at the badger. She looked hard, trying to make him out, and immediately he turned away and disappeared into the mass of people.

  While the truck driver and the rest of the queue looked on in surprise, Kathy abandoned her till and hurried towards the front of the shop. She was almost at the mall when she was stopped by a penetrating female voice. ‘Sergeant! Sergeant Kolla! What on earth are you doing, serving in here? Is this a part-time job?’

  Harriet Rutter emerged from behind a column, blocking Kathy’s way, and she had to weave past her to get out into the mall. She could see no sign of anyone looking like North’s pictures. She turned back, told Mrs Rutter to keep this to herself, and rejoined her queue.

  At six, tired and exasperated at the waste of the day, Kathy phoned Brock to say she was leaving. He thanked her, apologised, and mentioned that an Armacorp security truck had driven down into the service road twenty minutes before, and she might like to check it on her way out. She took the first exit corridor she came to on the mall, used her code to pass through the fire door, and descended the concrete stair into the basement and out onto the loading platform.

  Fifty yards to the left a couple of men in overalls were unloading a truck reversed against the dock. The Armacorp van was parked about the same distance in the opposite direction and on the other side of the service road, engine running, warning lights flashing. She walked in that direction and made out the driver behind the green armoured glass of the front compartment, waiting, and then saw him looking into his side mirror as two other guards, wearing uniforms and visored helmets and laden with bags, emerged from the doorway of a service stairway. They dropped the bags into a hopper in the side of the truck, one of the men spoke a couple of words into the radio clipped to his tunic, and they strode on to the next service stair, the van following slowly after them.

  Kathy lifted her phone and reported to Brock again. ‘I’d say they’re nearly finished. Looks like they’re on the final stair.’

  She walked on along the loading platform towards the exit ramp, past the security truck, giving the driver a wave as she went by. It was a shock, after the continuous sunlight of the mall, to realise that it was dark outside, the day over. Somewhere out there across the bleak, wet carparks, Brock and
Bren and their teams would be huddled inside their cramped vehicles waiting for a decent excuse to go home.

  She reached her car eventually, after forgetting where she’d left it. There seemed to be an incredible number of vehicles on the site, and as many coming in as leaving.

  Her phone rang as she started the engine.

  ‘Kathy? Brock again. What’s happened to the security truck?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hasn’t it left yet?’

  ‘We haven’t seen it.’

  She drove back to the mouth of the service road and parked on the roadside, running back down into the basement. The truck was still where she’d last seen it, lights still flashing, driver still sitting behind his bullet-proof windscreen drumming his fingers. She went up to his side window and showed her warrant card.

  His voice squawked through a loudspeaker. ‘What’s the problem?’

  She spoke into the microphone. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yes. My crew’s been delayed upstairs. One of the big stores wasn’t ready for them. Rushed off their feet they are.’

  The driver was nervous, she could see.

  ‘Big takings today?’

  ‘Biggest day of the year this is. Bigger than the sales. We picked up almost ten million this time last year. Reckon this year it’ll be more.’ He went on drumming his fingers, then said something into his radio, waited, shook his head. ‘They’re not picking me up. Reception’s bad down here.’

  ‘Want me to go up and check?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good. Thanks. I can’t step out of here. They’re on the upper level. Two blokes in uniform. Tell them to get their fingers out. Base is getting stroppy.’

  Kathy went through the door the men had used, wondering what to say if she met some of Harry’s security people, but the stairway was empty all the way up to the top floor, making the bustle of the crowded mall seem all the more chaotic when she reached it. It took her ten minutes to check the main stores within range of the service stair. All confirmed that they’d handed over their day’s takings to the two Armacorp security guards at least twenty minutes before. With a growing sense of unease she ran back down the stair to confirm that the security truck was still there, still waiting for them, then she rang Brock.

  Afterwards, recalling what happened next, Brock had a sense of events unfolding with a desperate slowness, as if, no matter how hard they tried to speed them up, they could only unravel at a predetermined pace. Having called for assistance, Brock had his team close the exits and check every shopper-exhausted, frustrated, quarrelsome and broke-as they tried to leave by car or bus. Meanwhile the rain descended more heavily, the wind picking up viciously.

  The stream of traffic arriving at the upper site entrance closest to the motorway became blocked by some exiting vehicles trying to detour around the police checkpoint, and the resulting queues of incoming cars developed so rapidly that they had tailed back down the exit ramps and onto the M25 before anyone could control them. A number of tailgate smashes in the ensuing chaos ensured that the London orbital motorway was soon brought to a complete halt in the southbound direction, which didn’t help the armed robbery squad and Armacorp support vehicles attempting to reach the site from the north. Police and TV helicopters circling overhead completed the atmosphere of catastrophe.

  In Silvermeadow itself, while police searched the retail floors for any sign of the two missing guards, Brock conducted a stilted interrogation of the Armacorp driver, who still refused to leave his locked cabin without instructions from base, and who stared out at the figures surrounding his truck like a worried goldfish in a green glass tank. This was only the third time he’d been out with the two other crew, he said, and though he didn’t know them well, he found it hard to come to terms with the idea of them making off with the final load of cash.

  ‘How much?’ Brock asked, and got the tinny reply, ‘A million? Maybe two.’

  Each of the half-dozen staircases would have yielded something like that from the blocks of shops they served, apparently, four or five times their normal Saturday takings. Despite the amounts involved, the collection arrangements here, in enclosed and secure service areas, were considered relatively low-risk, and the difficulties that conventional bandits would experience in making a getaway added to the sense of security. The possibility of two guards laden with cash bags conspiring to walk off into the blue didn’t seem to have been taken all that seriously.

  ‘How do you know it’s only the last load they took?’ Brock asked.

  ‘Because I saw them deposit the previous loads in the cash hopper.’ He pointed over his shoulder, and Brock bent to examine the steel door built into the side of the truck.

  He straightened again and spoke at the microphone. ‘You saw the actual cash?’

  ‘No, no. The bags.’

  ‘Maybe we should check what’s in them, eh?’

  ‘Can’t.’

  The whole essence of the security system was that no one, neither driver nor crew, could open the secure box built into the vehicle’s body. Once the cash bags were in there through the hopper, only base could access them again.

  It was almost half an hour before the Armacorp base vehicle, escorted by a police patrol car, managed to weave its way through the road chaos and scream, lights flashing and horn blaring, down the service road ramp. Four men got out, three very bulky and menacing, and one diminutive, wearing rimless glasses and a leather coat and looking like a Hollywood version of a Gestapo officer, Brock thought. The driver of the security truck at last consented to open his door and step down, saluting the new arrivals with pointed dignity. They conferred briefly with Brock, then the small man, screened by his minders, entered the rear of the vehicle like a sinister midwife to release the treasures from its belly. These comprised forty-three cash bags, some containing coin, some bulked out with crumpled paper and cardboard, all devoid of banknotes.

  Not long after this detectives radioed Brock to report that they had encountered a locked cleaners’ store, located just off the first of the service stairs which had been used by the security guards, and the door latch wouldn’t budge, apparently jammed shut with superglue.

  When he joined them Brock recognised the smell that hung in the air of the corridor outside, a smell familiar from the firing range.

  ‘Hercules powder,’ one of the two detectives, a gun freak, said to him, sniffing the air like a connoisseur.

  ‘Sure,’ the other said sceptically, lifting the ram to swing at the door.

  ‘No, straight up. Bullseye, I reckon. Yer Vectan and yer GM3 are sweeter, like. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ the other grunted.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Brock said, and the man nodded and swung the ram against the lock. It burst open on the second swing, revealing the foot of the first of the two bodies on the floor inside.

  From their positions in the cramped space, it appeared as if the two men had been forced to crouch on their knees among the buckets and bottles. Their black tunics, with the Armacorp flashes and radios, had gone, as had their helmets. They had knelt with their backs to the door, and a bullet had been put into each head at point-blank range.

  Brock called a hurried briefing in unit 184. Bren Gurney and several others from Serious Crime were there, as well as two senior officers from the Robbery Squad, the leather-coated man from Armacorp, and Gavin Lowry and others from the local division. Chief Superintendent Forbes put in a brief appearance just as they were getting under way, feeling obliged to register a formal protest at Brock’s lack of consultation with his officers, and to suggest that the outcome might have been very different with local backup. No one was very interested in this.

  ‘Needless to say,’ he said stiffly, ‘we shall provide all the support we can. But we will expect to be kept informed in return. I propose that DS Lowry act as liaison, since you’ve already worked with him. You agree, Brock?’

  Brock nodded.

  ‘Good. At least,’ Forbes added, with a prim little smile,
‘ our Silvermeadow case is satisfactorily resolved.’

  As Forbes left, Brock overheard the senior Robbery Squad man say to Bren beside him, ‘What’s his problem? What case is that?’

  ‘A murder. Teenage girl abducted from here a couple of weeks ago. We were assisting each other in our respective inquiries.’

  ‘Oh yes? No connection with North?’

  ‘No,’ Bren said decisively. ‘No connection at all.’

  Brock found Bren’s confident answer vaguely troubling. It stirred a question that had been lurking in the back of his mind for some time.

  Lowry, meanwhile, moved over to sit beside Kathy, giving her an amused little smile as she met his eye.

  ‘But of a sly one, aren’t you, Kathy?’ he said. ‘Letting me think you were all finished up at Silvermeadow.’

  ‘When we last spoke I thought we were. Anyway, this wasn’t your case.’

  ‘It is now, by the looks of things. It seems you lot need a bit of help.’ He grinned. ‘So you and Brock and Bren and half of SO1 were actually here, were you, when this happened? One of these geezers told me you’d been here all day looking for this North character, waiting for something to happen, only when it did, you didn’t notice it. I told him he must have got his facts wrong, eh? I said, come on, this is the famous DCI Brock’s team!’

  He was enjoying himself, fairly bubbling with it.

  Kathy muttered, ‘Sod off, Gavin,’ through clenched teeth.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he chuckled. ‘Makes me feel a lot better about my car.’

  Then a new thought seemed to strike him. ‘You were probably never interested in the Vlasich murder at all, were you? You just used it as a cover to be here, on the lookout for North. Did Harry Jackson know? No? Where is Harry now, anyway?’

  That was a question that had occurred to Kathy too. If the security staff were so short-handed, where the hell was Harry Jackson?

  Brock interrupted, calling the group to order with a rapid summary of how they now believed the robbery had been carried out. Two men, it was thought, had hidden in the cleaners’ store cupboard beside the first staircase and waited for the security guard crew, whom they had ambushed and murdered. They had then followed the expected pattern of collections from the shop units, removing the contents of the cash bags before depositing them in the security truck hopper. As each zone served by a stairway was cleared, it appeared that a common pass code, one allocated to emergency services, had been entered into the security lock on the doorway connecting that service stair with the mall. In other words it looked as if the money had been transferred to one or more accomplices waiting in the malls.