by M. R. Hall
‘Fine. Just give me a few minutes’ head start.’
Tracing the last known position of a mobile phone was a new procedure to Williams. He called several colleagues, conversing exclusively in Welsh, and learned that the phone operators only dealt with such requests when they were made by certain designated senior officers. Yet another phone call yielded the name of a friendly detective inspector in Cardiff whom Williams persuaded, by telling more half-truths than he was comfortable with, to broker the request. Then came fifteen minutes of haggling with a surly official at the mobile network who opened with a demand for £10,000. Williams beat him down to £6,000 at which point the official dug in his heels.
What the hell, Jenny said. There was no way her minuscule budget could cover it, whatever he wanted. She produced her office credit card and prayed the payment would clear. It didn’t. Only after another fractious call to Visa and with promises of a personal guarantee was the transaction approved.
After more than an hour of cajoling and persuading, Jenny had the information she wanted. Anna Rose’s phone had last been connected to the network forty-eight hours before. It had been located in an area – accurate to within one hundred yards – centring on a section of Hanley Road, at the north end of central Bristol. On that occasion it had been on for less than two minutes. It had also been activated for a similar brief period, at the same location, three days before that.
‘I hope it’s bloody worth it,’ Williams said, as he set down the phone.
‘I’ll send the bill to Bristol CID,’ Jenny said. ‘They’ll sure as hell want the arrest.’
‘Well, give them my love, won’t you, Jenny? And, while you’re at it, a good hard kick in the nuts.’
It was after ten p.m. by the time Jenny crossed the Severn Bridge, heading for Bristol on the motorway. She fought and failed to suppress the temptation to switch on her own phone to try McAvoy’s number one last time. No joy. She was groping for the off switch when it rang. Her heart jumped as she glanced at screen: UNKNOWN CALLER.
‘Hello?’ The line was faint. She waited on tenterhooks for McAvoy’s reply.
‘Mrs Cooper? DI Pironi. I’ve just been talking to Mike Stevens.’
Shit.
‘About time,’ Jenny said.
‘Who the hell is this American?’
‘You tell me.’
‘You’ve been speaking to McAvoy. He knows.’
‘Well, ask him.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Pass.’
Pironi lost patience. ‘You know the penalty for withholding this kind of information.’
‘I’ve withheld nothing. I’ve already told the police everything I know.’
‘Which police?’
‘Chepstow.’
‘Dear God. What the hell are you playing at, Cooper? I’ve got the anti-terrorist branch, MI5 and uniform all out looking for Anna Rose Crosby. We could have a dirty bomb maker out there.’
‘I’d just about worked that out.’
‘If you’re holding anything back from me—’
‘I’ll make you a deal. Whoever finds Anna Rose first, we both get to talk to her.’
‘You think either of us is going to be allowed anywhere near her? You’re more deluded than I thought.’
Jenny said, ‘I sense you’re a man with a troubled conscience, Mr Pironi. If you hadn’t sat on your hands for eight years, Mrs Jamal might still be with us, Anna Rose Crosby might still be going out to parties. Why don’t you do the decent thing and see if we can’t both get what we want?’
There was a brief pause, then Pironi said, ‘I’ve reasonable suspicion that you have withheld information concerning terrorist activity. I advise you to go to the nearest police station and surrender yourself for arrest.’
Jenny said, ‘Have they told you to do this – the same high-ups that had you frame McAvoy?’
‘You heard what I said.’
‘You should think hard about who you’re working for. I’m not sure going to church is doing the trick.’
Jenny drove into the zone from which Anna Rose had picked up her messages. Cloaked in sleet, the Victorian buildings that lined Harlowe Road were grimy and soot-stained in the dingy orange street light. She crawled past a parade of shuttered-up low-rent shops, several down-at-heel pubs and a shabby late-night convenience store. She pulled into a side street and hurried back to it, her coat pulled up over her hair.
An elderly Asian man, wearing one cardigan on top of another and fingerless gloves, was watching a Bollywood movie on a tiny TV perched precariously on the tobacco shelf. Fishing in her handbag and producing a dog-eared card, Jenny introduced herself and said she was looking for an attractive young woman he might have seen in the shop recently.
The old man squinted at the rain-smeared print. She gave him a charming smile, aware that many among the Asian community regarded coroners with deep suspicion. Traditional Hindus were opposed to autopsy, as were many Muslims.
‘She’s a potential witness,’ Jenny said. ‘A young woman in her early twenties, short blonde hair, intelligent, very pretty – you’d have noticed her.’
The man drew down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.
Jenny said, ‘I know for a fact she was in this street two days ago. She might have looked anxious, wary of people.’
It seemed to stir his memory. ‘English girl?’
‘Yes. Have you seen her?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe. There’s bed-and-breakfast places along there.’ He gestured eastwards with his thumb. ‘A lot of young people use them, mostly foreigners.’
He handed back her card.
‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’
He frowned, gave a rattly cough and turned back to the TV.
The first one she arrived at, the Metropole, was a converted Victorian villa with flaking paint and a single bare bulb hanging in the porch. She approached the tatty reception desk, behind which sat a slender woman with premature crow’s feet at the side of her eyes, and launched into a description of Anna Rose. The receptionist responded with a blank look, then explained in a heavy East European accent that the hotel’s occupants were mostly foreign workers. Jenny noticed that the laminated signs taped to the wall behind the desk were written in Polish. The Metropole was a labourers’ flop house. Anna Rose was not their kind of guest.
Freezing water seeped though the soles of her shoes as she dodged the angry traffic and ran up the steps of the Hotel Windsor, which stood opposite. It considered itself upmarket from its neighbours, but its feeble attempts at grandeur made it tackier. The chintz sofas in the lobby were stained and sagging; the fraying carpet was patched with duct tape. Jenny pressed a buzzer on the unmanned counter. A short, fat man with a stained navy waistcoat and matching tie emerged bleary-eyed from a back office. He wore a plastic badge that said, ‘Gary, Assistant Manager’. His annoyance at being disturbed faded on seeing a passably attractive woman. He gave her a greasy smile.
‘Good evening, madam. What can I do for you?’
Jenny presented the card she’d shown the store keeper and ran through her story. Shifting effortlessly from solicitous to unctuous, Gary said he didn’t think any of his guests matched the description.
Jenny detected a note of uncertainty. ‘You’re sure about that? What about the daytime staff – is there anyone I can call?’
He scratched his head and thought again. ‘There has been a girl staying here for a few days, but she had black hair, short, like a crew cut . . .’
‘What was her name?’
‘Sam, Sarah . . . something like that . . .’ He tapped on his computer. ‘That’s her – Samantha Stevens.’
‘Is she still here?’
‘She checked out earlier this evening – about an hour ago.’
It figured. If she’d collected her messages tonight, there were bound to have been several from Mike. She would know about the American and that he was coming for her.
‘Any idea where she went?’
>
‘I know she caught a cab. I heard her call for it.’ He nodded to a payphone screwed to the wall beside the counter.
‘Did she have much luggage?’
‘Just a rucksack, I think . . . she seemed in a hurry. Is she in some kind of trouble?’
Pretending not to have heard the question, Jenny grabbed the receiver and pressed redial. The call was answered by a controller at PDQ Cabs. Short on patience, Jenny demanded to know where the last fare from the Hotel Windsor had been dropped off. The controller, a hostile woman with a smoker’s rasp, claimed the rules forbade her from releasing confidential ‘passenger information’.
Jenny said, ‘Let me spell it out for you – you don’t have a choice. I’ve no doubt your office is pretty shitty, but I’m sure it beats a police cell.’
Gary stepped out from behind the counter and gestured for her to give him the receiver. ‘Let me—’
Jenny reluctantly gave it up.
‘Hey, Julie, my love,’ he purred, ‘it’s Gary. Look, sweetie, I’m with the lady now, trying my best to help. So why don’t you tell her what she wants or maybe we’ll be recommending a different cab company in future . . .’
Jenny heard the controller give a bad-tempered grunt and tell Gary the fare had been to Marlborough Street bus station in the middle of town.
He came off the phone all smiles and asked if there was anything else he could do to assist, his eyes dipping downwards towards Jenny’s breasts.
‘No thanks. You’ve been more than helpful.’ She drew her coat across her chest. ‘See you around, Gary.’
As she pushed out through the doors she caught his reflection in the glass: he was flicking his tongue at her like a hungry lizard.
TWENTY-SIX
JENNY DIDN’T NOTICE THE MIDNIGHT blue Lexus sedan tucked in two cars behind her as she gunned towards the city centre. The sleet had given way to big flakes of wet snow that were starting to lie. She was out of screen-washer and the street lights kaleidoscoped through the dirty windscreen. She jostled though the heavy traffic on the Haymarket, narrowly missed a jay-walking drunk, shot the lights and slewed into Marlborough Street.
She pulled up on a double yellow and ran into the bus station. Save for a handful of weary-looking stragglers waiting at a cab rank, the concourse was deserted. The only buses in evidence were parked up for the night. A metal grille was drawn down over the ticket-office window. Jenny hurried between the rows of silent vehicles: there was no sign of a young woman lugging a rucksack.
Fighting off a rising fear that Anna Rose had slipped through her fingers, Jenny headed back towards the timetables. She spotted a man in liveried overalls climbing down from an empty coach with a vacuum cleaner. She hurried towards him, fishing her damp and crumpled card from her coat pocket.
‘Excuse me—’ Breathless, she handed it to him. ‘I’m a coroner. I’m looking for a young woman who would have come through here about half an hour ago. Short black hair. Rucksack.’
The cleaner, a mild West Indian with heavy-lidded eyes and the weary expression of a man resigned to a lifetime of joyless, badly paid work, peered suspiciously at the card.
‘Have you seen her?’
Cagy, the cleaner said, ‘Don’t think so.’
‘Have any buses gone out in the last half hour?’
‘The London bus would have left at a quarter to.’
Jenny glanced at her watch: nine minutes to eleven.
‘Was that the only one?’
‘Far as I know.’
‘Does it go straight through?’
The cleaner shrugged. ‘I never been on it.’
Jenny ran back to her car, her dainty work shoes slipping on the light covering of snow. The feet of her tights were wet, her toes aching with cold. Sliding into the driver’s seat she turned the heater on full blast and took off, the back end of the car fish-tailing as she swung away from the kerb. Fifty yards behind her, the stationary Lexus flicked on its headlights and followed.
The main road out of town widened swiftly into the M32 motorway. Jenny pushed up the empty outside lane at eighty miles an hour, cutting virgin tracks through the slush. What would she do even if she did catch the bus? she asked herself. She could follow it all one hundred and twenty miles to London, but what then? Even if Anna Rose was on it, there was no reason why she’d cooperate, and God knows what she was carrying in her backpack. The rational thing would have been to call the police and assert her right to take a statement once Anna Rose was safely in custody. If they were obstructive she could come armed with a High Court order and insist. Cold, wet and painfully tired, it was an attractive proposition. Her phone was right there in her handbag. She could be speaking to Pironi in seconds.
Another more persuasive voice told her not to be seduced, that she’d never get to speak to Anna Rose if the police got to her first. She’d be pushed out, gagged, and issued with threats of dismissal if she threatened to make trouble. The full might of the terrorist-fighting state would be wheeled out against her.
She thrust her foot down harder. The needle climbed towards ninety.
On the margins of the city she took the east-bound lane and swept in a semi-circle to join the M4. The motorway descended into unlit darkness. Her eyes smarted with the strain of squinting through the smeared arcs of dirt on the windscreen: every oncoming set of lights blinded her to the road in front.
Rigid with tension, she had covered more than fifteen miles when the double-stacked tail lights of an express coach appeared out of the gloom. It was cruising at a steady seventy in the inside lane, filthy fountains spewing from its massive tyres. Keeping the middle lane between them, Jenny drew alongside, trying to distinguish the passengers’ faces, but all she could make out through the bus’s steamy windows was the flickering of seat-back screens.
The car lit up with strobing light. Startled, Jenny glanced in the mirror. A large, aggressive vehicle inches away from her rear bumper flashed its headlights a second time. Dazzled, she swerved left into the centre lane and caught the full spray from the bus as a Range Rover powered past. Instinctively, she touched the brakes and swung back away from the bus. A horn sounded behind her; another set of lights flashed, forcing her to jerk sharply to the left. She barely saw the Lexus accelerate away as the back end of the Golf flicked out to the right. For a brief moment she was sliding sideways along the carriageway. She wrenched at the wheel, clipped the rear corner of the bus, travelled through a long, slow, graceful one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and came to rest on the hard shoulder, pointing into the traffic. A huge lorry thundered past honking long and loud as it swerved to avoid her front end.
Exhilarated at simply being alive, she snatched at the ignition, brought the engine to life and slammed the stick into first. The front wheels spun in two inches of snow, then caught and lurched erratically forwards. Several tightly bunched cars sped past on the inside lane sounding their horns. Aiming for the gap before the next wall of approaching headlights, Jenny stamped on the accelerator, threw the car sharply left and crunched through the gears past sixty, to seventy to eighty . . .
She sped precariously over the skin of snow for over a mile and caught up with the lorry that had nearly struck her. She edged past and emerged ahead of it to see the distinctive tail lights of the bus up ahead. It was indicating left and exiting onto the slip road of a service station. Jenny swerved across two lanes and made the exit with only feet to spare.
At the crest of a slope she followed signs to the bus and lorry park. The coach had come to a halt in the far right-hand corner of the football-pitch-sized lot. She nursed the Golf across the lying snow, passing rows of trucks parked up for the night, and contemplated the prospect of coming face to face with Anna Rose. What if she refused to talk? Or ran off into the night? Hot needles spread outwards from her chest and down her arms.
She made for the coach’s left-hand side. She was no more than thirty yards away when the front passenger door swung back. At the same moment, two figures ran swift
ly out of the shadows: wiry, athletic men in black paramilitary overalls and caps. They reached into their jackets as they gained the bus door and burst inside. She stamped on the brakes and slid to a halt, watching the blurred, frenetic movement of bodies behind the misted-up windows. She heard muffled snatches of shrieks and raised voices. A slight, indistinct figure was bundled along the aisle.
It was a glint of reflected light on metal which caught her eye. She looked sharply left and saw his tall, slender silhouette appear from between two goods trailers. He was dressed in jeans and a puffy anorak, a baseball cap pulled down over his forehead, obscuring his face. He stopped at the corner and glanced briefly towards her.
It was him. The American. The man who’d come to the mortuary claiming to be looking for his lost stepdaughter. His attention snapped back to the bus. He raised both hands and took aim as the two men manhandled their prisoner down the steps.
Some reflex made Jenny stamp on the throttle and accelerate towards him. A burst of orange light issued from the barrel of his gun, then another; several more flashes issued from the direction of the bus. The American staggered and reached out a hand to the side of the trailer. Jenny spun past him and slewed to a stop.
Ten yards to her left the two men threw a small, dark-haired female into the back seat of a Range Rover, leaped inside and took off over the kerb, crashing through the thin hedge separating the bus park from the exit road beyond.
The fleet of police cars and unmarked vehicles arrived less than two minutes later. A helicopter followed soon after, illuminating the scene from above with an array of searchlights. The bus park was sealed off. Jenny was rounded up together with the hysterical passengers from the bus and a handful of bewildered truckers. All were frisked and relieved of their mobile phones, cameras and other electrical equipment, before being herded towards the service-station building. Jenny refused to move and was protesting to a uniformed officer that she was one of Her Majesty’s coroners on official duty when she saw DI Pironi, with Alison in tow, striding angrily towards her.
‘I’ll deal with that woman, Officer,’ he shouted at the constable, waving his warrant card.
