Thomas opened the car door, reluctant to keep Miranda and her family waiting any longer. “Ring Heick back — have him ask more forcefully. Lock up when you’re done.” He tossed Karl the key.
The family were seated around a burning brazier, on crates, an office chair and an old deckchair.
“Everything go to plan?” Miranda cupped her hands for her key.
He opened his empty hands and gestured back towards the car. “Why wouldn’t it?” Now did not feel like the time to play top dog.
“I dunno.” Miranda’s eyes flickered with the flames. “I wasn’t sure if you’d snuck a piece of scaffolding in the boot.”
The whole family erupted into laughter and Thomas stood there and accepted it like a man.
Diane took pity on him. “There’s tea in the pot, love. You look like you could do with a cuppa.”
He helped himself. Miranda made space on a milk crate and he sat close, his thigh pressing against hers.
“Look, I just wanna say, I appreciate everything you all did — especially you, Terry.”
“And what about this Italian geezer?” John kept his mug close and stared into the fire.
That was a tough one to answer. Jack Langton’s welcoming committee hadn’t finished the job before Heick’s people got hold of Moretti, so what did happen next? Heick wasn’t the police. True, he had passed on the information about Theo Pritchard, but he was hardly going to turn Moretti over to the boys and girls in blue.
He chewed it over. How to point Edwards towards Moretti? Maybe Karl could provide some proof — a photo of Pritchard as a starting point, only with no one else in the frame. He smiled. Had it come to that now — fabricating evidence?
Miranda nudged him and he looked up to see Karl standing there.
“When we get back to Dagenham I’ll leave you good people to it. I have a car on the way there to collect me — special delivery.”
“You stopping at mine then?” Miranda pushed her thigh against his.
Thomas gave her a sideways glance. It was the perfect end to a far from perfect day.
Chapter 24
It was late when they reached Miranda’s flat, but Bow was still lively. She let him open the door and then squeezed past, slinking her way to the end of the hall and easing out of her boots.
“Remember to bolt the door.”
He smiled. Like he’d ever forgotten. But tonight, spooked by their adventures at the breaker's yard, he stuck his head back out and glanced in both directions. The coast was clear, unlike his conscience. He closed the door, double-locked it and then bolted it. The monsters would have to try harder tonight.
Miranda stood in the middle of the room, eyes closed, arms by her side. He dropped his coat to the floor and took his place before her, pulling her towards him, tight against his groin.
“Why, Mr Bladen,” she mocked, “I do believe something’s come between us.”
He stood his ground and held the moment, tasting her skin, breathing in her scent like cool oxygen, and only easing back a little when he felt her fingers exploring his torso and feeling for buttons. Maybe they both needed a release of tension, or maybe their hormones were in synch, but they made it to the bed with few clothes left. No words, no deeper meaning, no justifications.
“What?” she looked down at him, and he gazed up, smiling, watching the light and shadow in her bedroom play across her breasts.
“We should definitely do this more often.” He raised his head and licked the sweat from her.
“Well, we could,’ she slid herself free, despite his protests, and laid alongside him. “If you weren’t always on call.”
He didn’t react. It was a statement of fact. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.
“One sugar, thanks.” She leaned over and sucked at his nipple with a pop, and then headed off to the bathroom, pausing at the doorway to turn and check he was still watching her. And who was he to disappoint a lady?
“Tea!” she insisted, laughing as she disappeared across the carpet.
She came to find him in the kitchen and he stared at her, open-mouthed. She surely was a fine piece of woman.
“You’re drooling.” She looked him up and down, smirking at his embarrassment.
Her body was cold to the touch so he did his best to warm them both up again. Then they sat there, enjoying tea, like a latter-day Adam and Eve. He didn’t bother looking at the time. It was probably late. He didn’t care. Sure, Heick and Moretti and all the other bastards would soon occupy his thoughts but right now, this minute, every one of them could just stay where they were. All it took was the right naked woman and a decent cuppa.
* * *
He woke to the sound of his work phone buzzing and tried not to respond. He lasted a full thirty seconds.
“Yeah.” He tried to ignore Miranda playing peek-a-boo with a sheet, even though he was fighting a losing battle.
“Morning to yer, Tommo. I’ve been thinking. We ought to speak to Edwards today, now that I have a printed image of Theo Pritchard we can use. But first we ought to check out the location of the body.”
Heick must have come up with the goods then. “Ah . . . okay. What time can you pick me up?”
“I’m already parked, not far away.”
Thomas pressed a hand over the phone. “Karl’s here,” he whispered.
“Well, invite him up then. I wouldn’t want to keep you two apart.”
“Miranda says . . .”
“I heard, Tommo. I’ll, er, give you a few minutes to get yourself organised.”
Call ended, his first words were, “Are you gonna put some clothes on then?”
Miranda didn’t complain, and somehow that was worse.
Karl gave them a full fifteen minutes before making two tentative rings on the bell. Miranda, now in jeans and a sweatshirt, stared at Thomas and blinked a couple of times. He took the hint and got the door.
Chapter 25
Thomas didn’t ask where they were going. It was enough to know why. Karl seemed so absorbed that Thomas left it several minutes before he spoke, instead turning his eye into a camera lens. Teenagers clustered around a bus stop while one of them tried to light a cigarette; an old woman slumped in a doorway, semi-conscious, an arm draped limply over a clutch of carrier bags; a child exploding with laughter as she pointed at a threadbare cat on a windowsill. A succession of scenes, everyone a split-second slice-of-life shot, begging to be captured on black and white celluloid by a latter-day Garry Winogrand. He wondered momentarily if Karl’s encyclopaedic knowledge extended to photographers and decided it was a pub conversation.
“So, what will happen to Moretti?”
The car slowed. “That depends on how useful he is to Heick. What were you expecting?”
Thomas felt the weight of that look again. The one that made him feel like a complete amateur in Karl’s world of counter-intelligence and expedience. It was a good question though and he took his time thinking it through, concluding that his idea of justice and Heick’s were poles apart.
“I’d expect Moretti to be removed from the equation.” He listened to himself and it sounded unyielding and callous, but he meant every word.
Karl nodded. No objections there. “I know you’d have preferred to leave him to Jack Langton’s tender mercies. It’s more complicated than that, though.”
Thomas smiled. Karl ought to have that printed on a card. He understood the subtext all too well, hard won over the three years they’d worked together. An intelligence war, fought with information and influence. Right and wrong, ally and enemy — a fluid demarcation line, depending upon that elusive objective: the greater good.
“Here’s how I think we should do this, Tommo. Scope the area, get confirmation of Moretti’s inadmissible admission, and then let someone else discover the body.”
* * *
The burned out shell of a caravan marked the transition from heathland to wasteland. Thomas gave up counting abandoned tyres at eleven, while Karl drove on down
the track where fractured tarmac had given way to bare ground and a few half-arsed attempts at filling in the potholes with ballast. Karl kept the car in low gear. Thomas figured he was either trying to save his suspension or searching for something specific. Or both.
“There.” Karl tapped the brakes and the car stopped in a flurry of dust.
To the right of the track a stack of wooden pallets had been topped with an old mattress. If Thomas had to guess, he’d say children had built it as a landing point from the grassy bank. It looked like a modern art installation: deconstructed futon.
Karl hadn’t moved. “Yer man could be over there somewhere. Put some gloves on.” He pointed below the dashboard.
“Could be?” Thomas covered his hands in blue latex and lifted the binoculars from their case on the back seat.
“Moretti didn’t know for sure. And believe me, Jack Langton asked!”
Karl’s laughter got under Thomas’s skin, but his Belfast buddy had said something interesting.
“How’s that?”
Karl rubbed his forehead. “From what I gather, Heick let Langton and his people have a minute or two with Moretti before intervening. It got him talking and it gave us Theo Pritchard’s name and this location. It also meant Langton managed to warn Moretti off any further action where Caliban’s is concerned, even if he did realign Moretti’s shoulder in the process.”
Thomas waited for the sucker punch.
“And of course,” Karl sighed, “Heick and his people came in looking like rescuers, so naturally Moretti would be a bit more obliging, at least in the early stages.”
Karl stopped talking once Thomas opened the passenger door. Thomas had heard enough. He closed the door quietly and went around the front of the car, across the track, carefully picking his way between the broken glass and the dogshit in a wide arc from the pallets. If this was a crime scene he wanted to keep as far away as possible. He suddenly remembered a song played at primary school — An English Country Garden — but his smirk didn’t last when he thought about what he was doing there. Theo Pritchard had been no harm to anyone, and this was no fit resting place for him.
Conscious that Karl was watching, Thomas took a run-up to climb the earth bank. Below him, on the other side, trees, bushes and discarded electrical goods formed a dense and foreboding thicket. He scanned the terrain, what he could see of it, and sidled along the bank, scuffing the ground to obliterate his shoe prints.
He worked methodically, sweeping the lenses at a measured speed and then returning to the starting point to lower the angle, shoulders rigid. Karl’s car horn jarred him and made him start a line again, but he didn’t falter. He owed Pritchard that much at least.
From his vantage point there was little to see. No corpse as such, not even a limb on show. But the broken foliage he’d picked out drew his gaze downward and after some retuning he saw what appeared to be rubber sheeting or tarpaulin. He moved position to view it from a different angle, confirming it as the underside of a carpet. Judging by the depth and distance from the bank, two people must have swung it to launch it that far in — there was no way to have carried it without causing some disturbance. His gut instinct told him there was a body down there. He raised a hand and turned to Karl, and then made his way back to the car.
“We’d better tell Edwards to bring out a dog unit as well.”
* * *
The hour and a half wait passed slowly, interrupted only by a couple in an estate car who opened the rear door to eject a small refrigerator before nonchalantly closing up again and driving off. Karl paid them no attention, but managed a couple of photographs of a passing buzzard. Mostly, the radio filled in time. DS Edwards arrived with flashing blue lights and a police van behind her.
Thomas and Karl stayed put while she got out and spoke to the copper in the van.
Karl watched the scene through his wing mirror. “That is one angry looking dog.”
Edwards sent the one man and his dog out towards the pallets and then came over.
“Mind if I join you, gentlemen?”
Thomas stretched to unlock the back door. Edwards got in and pulled hard, sealing out the unfolding drama.
“I can’t help thinking you’re giving me a trail to follow, piece by piece. Am I right?”
“Hang on a minute.” Karl sounded genuinely aggrieved. “We’ve acted in good faith, passing on information received.”
“Yeah, but from where? Look at it from my position, boys. I’m the one who has to explain this to my DI.”
Thomas saw Karl reach for Theo Pritchard’s photo, hidden in an envelope on the inside of the driver’s door. His arm was halfway across when the dog started barking, out of sight.
Edwards stirred. “Come on. You can do the preliminaries until the forensic team gets here.” She pulled out her phone, still walking, and made the call.
Thomas waited for Karl to emerge and they followed in Edwards’s wake together.
“This place was a bona fide dump, and then it became a travellers’ camp.” Karl started taking pictures of the pallet tower. “So the council built up the embankment to stop it happening again.”
Thomas looked to the distance. That explained the massive boulders dotted about, as if some glacial disaster had befallen High Wycombe. Edwards called from the top of the embankment — the dog was kicking off again. Thomas was first up and stood beside Edwards, getting his breath.
“I’m not stupid, Thomas. Even if I don’t know what the fook is going on. You take whatever footage you need to and remember that I didn’t stand in your way.”
He descended into the undergrowth, hearing Karl behind him. As they neared the canine commotion the copper with the dog thrust his arm out to stop them in their tracks.
“Give us a sec — he gets a bit lairy sometimes. It’s all the excitement.”
Thomas nodded. Ajit had told him similar tales of the North Yorkshire public, and one or two coppers, coming a cropper when police dogs were brought in at close quarters.
The copper dragged his dog aside, still up on its back legs and straining to get at the rolled up carpet. Thomas could see the outer edge of the pattern now, red and brown like blood, He heard Karl’s camera bleeping and got involved, moving around to photograph the site from the other side. A lazy swarm of flies hovered around him, drunk on the stench of death. He did his best to ignore them, until one landed on his face.
“I can’t see anything useful here, Karl — you?”
“Hmm, probably not. No ground disturbance so they must have hoiked the body from the embankment.”
“Which means two people.” Thomas tried out his theory for comment.
“One could have been the driver of the 4x4 they tried to palm off on Terry and Sam. Right, I’m done. Shall we get out of here, Tommo?”
“Yeah. One thing. Why such an amateur job, you know, if Mr M is . . ?”
Karl cut him off. “Let’s talk about this in the car.”
Edwards passed them on their way back up over the embankment. She went down into the jungle and had a few words with the dog handler. Thomas waited for her. She didn’t stay long.
“Would you two like a peppermint? That bloody smell gets right in my gullet.”
Karl received Thomas’s camera and traded it for the brown envelope. Thomas lifted the seal and Pritchard’s photo stared back at him across time, and death. Poor bastard.
“This should help you confirm the victim’s identity. We believe he’s called Theo Pritchard.”
She looked at it for a few seconds and then passed it back. “You keep it, and be sure to include it in the evidence you’re supposed to be analysing at the station. I’ll see you both there.”
Karl blew out a breath, as if to say ‘now that’s gratitude for you.’
Chapter 26
Thomas kept his mouth shut until Karl had driven to the end of the track.
“Explain it to me then. Why does this Europe-wide Shadow State employ such total amateurs?”
; Karl crunched up a gear. “It doesn’t. Everything’s well-ordered in the upper echelons of power — probably no different from your average corporation or government. Lower down the food chain it’s a different story — as brutal as any battlefield.”
Thomas turned that around in his head. “Then how do people progress?” He pulled out a notepad.
“Same as in our business. Someone spots your potential and they approach you. Or else you claw your way into a position of power until you can’t be ignored. I suppose there are other ways . . .”
Thomas grinned back. Like him, Karl meant, who happened to get in a lift one day with a camera, when Sir Peter Carroll was in the building.
“I wish you’d told me all this three years ago!”
“Why, would you have believed me? Nah, you’d have had me pegged as a conspiracy nut job. You had to see it for yourself, same as I did.”
Thomas snorted. “The Zen of Counter-Intelligence?”
“Maybe, something like that. Now, when we get to the police station just busy yourself for a good ten minutes. Go play with the truncheons or something.”
* * *
Thomas grabbed a coffee, found a table in the corner of the police canteen and scratched at his notebook. Time to kill meant time to think. He drew overlapping circles, adding initials to the middle segments. AM — Arlo Moretti; JL — Jack Langton; and SH — Stephen Heick. Different names but the process remained the same. Mentally revisit the connections to get a more complete picture. Running through the names sometimes prompted other ideas and associations. He thought about Mrs Leibowicz, whose stolen vehicle and abducted child had been the catalyst. An unbroken blood-red line ran from her to a body in the undergrowth, and another in the back of a 4x4. All the more strange that Karl hadn’t focused on how central she seemed to be to their activities. He stopped doodling. Unless Karl’s people were protecting her from the fallout?
He wrote down chemist and added a question mark. Hadn’t she said something about a loan from Moretti that they couldn’t refuse? He slapped the notebook shut at the sound of voices. A bunch of uniforms entered the canteen, stared over at him and then picked the table furthest away. They looked and sounded like they’d left Hendon Police College the previous week. He finished his coffee and checked his watch. He felt old.
Shadow State Page 11
