The Price Of Darkness
Page 18
‘That’s true. But from Mallinder’s point of view I suspect that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It gave him cover. It got him off the hook.’
‘I see …’ Faraday nodded. ‘So why had he so suddenly withdrawn the offer?’
‘Good question. What do you think?’
There was a moment or two of silence. Faraday could hear the distant clatter of a helicopter. Then Suttle cleared his throat.
‘Either there was a problem with the money,’ he said, ‘or he finally realised the MoD thing was a non-starter. From what I understand there was never any prospect of land release.’
‘You’re right.’ Kitson nodded. ‘So what does that make Mallinder? Apart from wrong?’
‘An optimist.’ It was Faraday this time. ‘But then that’s been his MO from the start. This is the guy who never takes no for an answer. I can imagine everyone telling him the MoD wouldn’t budge an inch and him paying not the slightest attention. He knows the way money works. He’s raised two and a half million quid. He regards it as an investment. The rest, from his point of view, is just conversation.’
‘But it wasn’t,’ Suttle pointed out. ‘It didn’t work.’
‘And so he withdrew. Cut his losses. That’s typical too.’ Faraday looked at Kitson. ‘How did the New Labour people feel about all this?’
‘He pissed them off. They won’t say so but it’s true. Not that any of this helps you guys at all.’
‘Quite.’ Faraday nodded. ‘Or you either, come to that.’
For the first time Kitson smiled. Mallinder was off their list, sure, but they had plenty of other names in the frame. In fact they were spoiled for choice. He paused, glancing up at Faraday.
‘So where do you go from here? You mind me asking? ’
‘Not at all.’ Faraday drained the remains of his coffee. ‘Ring me in a week’s time and I’ll let you know.’
Winter took the Central Line out to Snaresbrook. According to the A-Z, Lavender Road was only half a mile or so from the station. He strolled along in the sunshine, enjoying the warmth on his face.
Number 43a turned out to be an upstairs corner unit in a sixties block of shops. Looking up from the pavement, Winter could see Venetian blinds in the two windows. One of the blinds had been damaged at the top and hung crookedly down. The other was stained a dirty brown colour. Water penetration, Winter thought. Crap windows with gaps round the edges and no one interested in sorting it out.
The shop beneath belonged to a greengrocer. Winter helped himself to an apple from the display on the pavement and stepped inside. He waited until the young Asian had finished serving. He paid for the apple, then asked about the place upstairs.
‘You want?’
‘No. But I have a friend who might. It’s for rent?’
‘Sure.’
‘How much?’
‘I dunno. Here. You make a call. The woman, she tells you.’
He knelt quickly, peering under the counter, and emerged with a business card. Ghitta Hira.
‘She’s a friend of yours? This lady?’
‘Sure. You want anything else?’ He gestured at the apple.
Winter said no. The entrance to the unit upstairs was at the back of the building. He followed the pavement round and pushed in through a broken gate. Paint was flaking from a flight of wooden stairs and there were scorch marks round the letter box in the door at the top. Winter took his time, testing his weight on the stairs. Then he bent to peer through the letter box. Mail lay scattered on the bare floor. There was a sour smell and the plink-plink of water dripping into a stainless steel sink.
He stood upright again, peering at the number on the business card. It took a while to answer. A woman’s voice, Asian again.
Winter asked about 43a Lavender Road. He had a friend who was looking for office accommodation.
‘He’s too late, your friend.’
‘It’s gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘This morning. It was very cheap.’ Winter heard a baby crying in the background. ‘I’ve got more, though. You want to see them?’
Twelve
MONDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 2006. 18.57
Jimmy Suttle was back at Kingston Crescent by seven o’clock. To his surprise, Major Crimes was buzzing. Phones were ringing everywhere and there was a knot of senior detectives deep in conversation at the far end of the long central corridor. Suttle stepped into the Intelligence Cell. Imber and Tracy Barber were still at their desks. Definitely something up.
‘What’s going on?’
Imber was talking to somebody on the phone. Tracy asked dryly about Suttle’s day out in London.
‘It was fine. What’s the problem here?’
‘You haven’t heard?’
‘No.’ Suttle shook his head. ‘So why don’t you tell me?’
Imber was coming off the phone. He glanced up at Suttle then began punching in a fresh number.
‘Someone tried to kill a government minister,’ he said briefly. ‘Just down the bloody road.’
Winter caught up with the news as soon as he got home. BBC News 24 had dropped every other story and were reporting live from the scene of the incident. Winter recognised the distinctive logo of the Tesco Express on Goldsmith Avenue. The reporter was standing on the pavement in front of a loop of blue police tape. The road had been closed to traffic and Winter counted three SOC vans parked by the kerb. In the background a line of figures in baggy grey forensic suits were shuffling forward on their hands and knees, examining every inch of the tarmac.
The live pictures cut to footage shot an hour or so earlier. Some punter had evidently been taping trains from the bridge over Fratton Station. He’d heard what proved to be gunshots and he’d made it along Goldsmith Avenue in time to catch the traffic backed up around a distant Vauxhall saloon. People were standing on the pavement, staring at the car. The driver’s door was open and one of the rear windows was smashed. The picture wobbled, swimming in and out of focus as the man holding the camera began to run again. Winter could hear the rasp of his breath on the soundtrack. When someone stepped in front of him, he pushed them aside.
Much closer now, a figure was visible in the back of the car. He was bent over something slumped on the rear seat. It dawned on Winter that this something was still alive. The driver extracted himself from the car, a phone pressed to his ear. Already, in the far distance, the wail of an ambulance siren.
The pictures cut again. Paramedics in green were carefully manhandling an inert body from the back of the Vauxhall. The head was swathed in what looked like a white towel and one of the paramedics was holding up a drip. Three traffic cars had arrived, using the clear lane on the other side of the road. There must have been fifty or sixty people by now, massed on the pavement, pressing forward for a better look, and Winter watched as the uniforms yelled at the crowd to get back.
The paramedics had eased the body onto a stretcher. They wheeled it quickly towards the waiting ambulance. The camera zoomed jerkily, closing on the stretcher, and Winter had time to make out a spreading crimson blotch on the towel before his view was blocked. Seconds later the ambulance was accelerating away, traffic cars fore and aft, blues and twos.
Back in the studio, the newscaster linked to another live update. The reporter was standing beside the approaches to the A & E Department at the Queen Alexandra Hospital. The minister was still in theatre undergoing emergency surgery. A spokesman for the hospital described his condition as critical. He’d suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the lower face and right shoulder. If he survived the next few hours, it was likely that he’d be transferred to a specialist neurological ward in Southampton.
Winter’s phone began to ring. Stepping backwards, still watching the screen, he felt for the receiver. He knew already who it was.
‘Baz,’ he said. ‘Are you watching what I’m watching? ’
‘Yeah.’ Mackenzie was laughing. ‘You’re right, mate. Dodge fucking City.’
The Under Secretary of State for Defence Procurement had arrived in Portsmouth by train. He’d been picked up at the station and driven to Whale Island where he’d shared a stand-up buffet with senior naval officers and an assortment of invited civilians before descending to the auditorium to deliver the keynote address at a day-long conference on the future shape of logistics integration across NATO. After the speech he’d stayed long enough on the platform to field perhaps a dozen questions. The conference had been sponsored by British Aerospace and he’d spent some minutes in conversation with a handful of their senior executives before leaving.
By now, said Barrie, it was nearly four o’clock. As a favour to one of Portsmouth’s two MPs, the minister had agreed to make an appearance at a party to celebrate the hundredth birthday of a constituent who’d once served in the Royal Navy. The party was being held in a community hall in Milton and the MoD press office had organised a photocall. The minister was driven across the city and arrived at about four fifteen. He’d accepted a cup of tea and a slice of birthday cake and chatted to the veteran and his family while a photographer circled, taking shots. Afterwards, still in the hall, there’d been a handful of media interviews - two TV crews and a reporter from Radio Solent - before the minister had said his goodbyes and departed.
The minister, together with a special adviser, was taking the train back to London. The station was barely ten minutes away. The driver knew the route.
Best estimate for the minister’s departure from the community hall, said Barrie, was a minute or two before five o’clock. The treble nine calls - one from the driver, another seven from members of the public - had been logged at 17.03. Uniforms and D/Cs were still collecting witness statements but there was now a broad consensus on what had happened in Goldsmith Avenue.
The Vauxhall had been travelling west, towards Bradford Junction and the turn north to the Town Station. The car had come to a halt, trapped in a long queue of traffic. A motorcyclist had pulled up beside the rear offside door of the Vauxhall. The guy riding pillion had produced a handgun, firing down through the window at the minister. He’d taken the first bullet in the side of the face. The next one, as he tried to shield himself, had caught him in the upper shoulder. Two more shots had missed.
After that, according to a witness watching from the pavement outside Tesco Express, the bike had roared away, cutting between two cars and making a left down Haslemere Road. House to house enquiries were ongoing to try and establish a precise route but so far there’d been no sign of the bike itself.
The RN driver had described it as a Kawasaki, colour blue. Neither he nor any other witness had a record of the registration. Nor were the physical descriptions of the two riders especially helpful. One was bigger than the other. They’d both been wearing leathers, gloves and full-face helmets with darkened visors. One witness thought she might have seen a black holdall strapped to the rack on the back of the bike. But she was by no means certain.
Barrie looked at the faces around the table.
‘Anyone got anything to add?’
The silence was broken by Willard. He emphasised the need for steady, thorough, meticulous policework. What had happened in Goldsmith Avenue, thanks largely to the amateur video footage, was on TV screens across the world. The spotlight had fallen not simply on the city, but on the team still assembling to investigate.
Within the last hour the Chief had had one conversation with Downing Street and another with the Home Secretary. Jurisdiction over the coming days and weeks would remain with Hantspol but there was naturally a concern about resources. Willard himself would happily accept all the help on offer but he was adamant that the people around this table would be able to cope. The fact that a minister of the crown had been the target was, in a way, a distraction. If the minister didn’t make it, then this would be a murder, just like any other. If he survived, then they’d still be putting a case together, assembling evidence, eliminating suspects, and finally - God willing - putting faces in the dock. This is what they did. This was what they were bloody good at. He wished them well and then he looked at his watch. As he stood up one of the D/Ss enquired about the command structure. The investigation already had an operational code word, Polygon. Just who was in charge?
‘Detective Superintendent Barrie.’ Willard nodded at the thin figure at the head of the table. ‘With D/I Faraday as deputy SIO.’
Winter kept the TV on for the rest of the evening, channel-hopping as the ripples of what had happened in Goldsmith Avenue spread wider and wider. By ten o’clock, in an extended news special, BBC One were openly speculating about the likelihood of terrorist involvement, al-Qaeda temporarily abandoning suicide bombings to open a new front in the war against the infidel.
Targeted assassinations, in the view of one studio pundit, offered an extremely effective weapon in a global village addicted to breaking news. Not only was the killing of a government defence minister guaranteed to seize worldwide attention, but because the bloodshed was so confined, the larger Muslim population might well be spared the backlash that came with random slaughter. More important still, the very efficiency of the act - four bullets in a rush-hour traffic jam and so far not a trace of the perpetrators - was a chilling reminder that militant Islam could reach into the very heart of Western democracies. No one is safe, went the message. A government complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had very publicly been held to account. Those who live by the sword shall suffer the consequences.
This theory, to Winter, had its merits. The dodgier of the ragheads were obviously out of control and a stunt like this would certainly keep bums on seats for a day or two, but everything he knew about the local Muslim communities told him that the BBC’s pundit was wrong. By and large, these were hard-working, conscientious families who kept their heads down and their noses clean. They ran restaurants, flogged saris and made sure their kids did their homework every night. A little bit of that, thought Winter, wouldn’t go amiss on the city’s white estates.
He changed channels to catch Newsnight, lingering to watch the amateur footage for the umpteenth time before diving into the kitchen for more ice cubes. If the al-Qaeda lot turned out to be genuinely in the frame, then why on earth kill the bloke responsible for defence procurement? Terrorists were supposed to be savvy. They’d surely go for someone with real blood on their hands - the top guy at the ministry or a senior general or the foreign secretary, or even Blair himself. But then, as the paramedics raced the bleeding body towards the waiting ambulance, he thought about the level of protection these people must have, and how much easier it would be to choose a nice soft target, someone further down the ministerial pecking order. Earlier on he’d watched the unconscious figure on the trolley swapping small talk at some kind of birthday party. He’d seemed a nice enough guy. He had a smile for the ladies and the patience to listen to the usual drivel. Who’d ever expect to find someone like that on the end of an al-Qaeda bullet?
He shook his head, backing into the kitchen with his empty glass, trying to imagine the scene at Kingston Crescent. According to Channel Four, all police leave in the county had been cancelled and location reports had included shots of white Transit vans arriving on the motorway packed with reinforcements. Occasions like this, all too bloody rare, were truly special and Winter felt a physical ache at the knowledge that he could no longer be part of it all. With half the country breathing down your neck, the pressure would be awesome but there was nothing in the world to compare with the hot adrenalin rush of pushing the investigative machine to its limits. Informants to r
un down, arms to bend, calls to make, leads to pursue, doors to kick in, and never - for a second - any bollocks about overtime limits or the need for yet another fucking risk assessment. CID, he thought glumly, could so often be a pain in the arse but on a night like this the rule book would go out of the window.
He splashed Glenfiddich over the ice in his glass, resisting the temptation to pick up the phone and bell Jimmy Suttle. The boy would be working his arse off just now, with absolutely no time for some sad old buffer with his blanket and his Thermos and his seat in the stands. No, the war stories would come later, a pint or three in the Buckingham and maybe a chinese in the place across the road afterwards.
The thought put a smile on Winter’s face and he returned to the lounge to find Willard fending off a pack of reporters outside Force HQ in Winchester. Early enquiries, he said, had already thrown up a number of leads. A substantial squad of men and women would be chasing down every particle of information. Like everyone else in the world, he naturally hoped for an early breakthrough but not for a moment did he underestimate the size of the challenge they all faced. In reply to a shouted question about the gloves coming off, he paused.
‘We work within the constraints of the law,’ he said. ‘You’d expect nothing else.’
Watching, Winter recognised the tone of voice, the subtlest hint of a smile. He was playing with these people. Beneath the gruff officialese he was letting them know that whatever it took, in whatever situation, he’d do it. Too right, thought Winter, wondering again about Gale Parsons.
By one in the morning Faraday knew it was time to leave. The last five hours had left him drained. One meeting seemed to blur into the next, and with the ever-changing sequence of faces around Barrie’s conference table came a never-ending series of interruptions - priority callers on the phone, apologetic knocks on the door, urgent messages delivered by hand.