The Follow

by Paul Grzegorzek

  As I turned, a man further down the corridor suddenly ducked to his left and out of my sight. I wouldn’t even have noticed him if not for the quick movement, but I carried on into the shop as if nothing had alerted me. I wasn’t sure if it was PSD or one of Davey’s goons but either way it didn’t bode well. Not wanting to give the game away, I bought a paper which I ostentatiously placed under my arm as I walked out.

  I headed over to my car, parked in one of the bays at the front by Eastern Road, and sat in the driver’s seat for a few minutes pretending to talk on the phone while I watched people going in and out of the building. I’d only managed to get a glimpse of the man following me; late twenties, shaven head, blue t-shirt and jeans, and I wanted to get a proper look at him before I left so that I would recognise his face and not just his clothes.

  That’s why so many mid-level criminals wear outfits that we think look ridiculous. So you see a bloke in a red tracksuit top and trousers with a stupid hat that stands up off the top of his head. He does something criminal, deals drugs, steals something, take your pick, and you call the police. When they arrive (probably later than you or they would like), they ask for a description and you tell them about the horrible tracksuit and hat the guy was wearing. I can promise you that ninety percent of the time the guy that you’re talking about could walk past you as you’re giving the description to the police and, if he’s changed out of the tracksuit and hat, you won’t recognise him. The more garish the outfit, the harder it is to remember the face. A good surveillance officer (and I’d like to think I am one), will memorise all sorts of things about a target, like the way they walk, habits and mannerisms, how they slouch, that sort of thing. It makes a real difference when you can spot someone in a crowd from a hundred yards just because of their body language, believe me.

  So I sat and waited, careful not to be too obvious as I had a pretend conversation on the phone with my ex-wife. It helps to imagine the person you’re making up the conversation with, it makes your body language change, which will get picked up by anyone watching you and make you seem more convincing. No one told me in training how hard it could be just to look and act like any other person on the street and I wouldn’t have believed them if they had. Irritatingly, despite the fact that I was making up the argument I was having with Lucy I still lost. My therapist would find that interesting, I was sure, not that I ever went to see him anymore.

  Just as I put the phone down, convinced that my mark wasn’t coming out, he appeared and began walking across the car park in my direction, scanning left and right as he looked for me. I began to get a little worried as he got closer; he didn’t look, or act, like a copper, but I knew his face from somewhere – only I couldn’t place it for the life of me. As he walked past the car, somehow not seeing me, it clicked and I remembered seeing him in an intelligence photograph on Davey’s association chart. So not PSD at all in fact, but instead one of Davey’s crew.

  Shit. I wondered whether he had seen me here and decided to follow me off his own back or whether Davey had him tailing me in the hopes that I would lead them to the heroin. I nearly drove away and left him to it, but I needed to find out what he wanted for my own peace of mind if nothing else. I waited until he disappeared around the corner of the building towards the service road that ran through the centre of the hospital grounds, then got out of the car and ran after him. I paused at the corner, counted to five and walked round slowly, just in time to see him slip down the side of a building, still looking right and left, but not behind. I moved quickly across the open space and followed him down the alley, stopping dead when I saw him turn to face me only a few feet along.

  Up close his face resembled nothing so much as an angry bulldog as he grinned at me in a manner that told me he had known I was following him.

  ‘Davey’s got a message for you mate,’ he stated in a hard Brighton accent. ‘He wants you to know that what happens now is all your fault. He tried to be nice and you told him to fuck off.’

  I laughed at him, positioning myself in solid stance so that I could fight easily if it came to it, feet firmly grounded and facing forward, shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent and hips tilted forwards. ‘You can tell Davey that he can go and eat his own shit. I told your man the other day that I only deal with the big boys, not the muppets. If you’ve got a problem with that I suggest you take it up with him.’ I began to edge away slowly, still facing him, but I could almost feel the adrenaline begin to hit his system as his face began to drain of colour, the blood flowing to the muscles instead.

  ‘You don’t understand mate,’ he continued as he began to edge closer to me. ‘If you don’t do as he says, your mate up there’s gonna find himself with a whole new set of illnesses. You get me?’ His voice was getting lower and more aggressive as his body prepared to fight and I could feel my own body yearning to do the same, sensing the threat my adversary was presenting. Not for a minute did I take the threat to Jimmy seriously – there were too many people and CCTV cameras around here for them to hurt him without being caught.

  ‘Yeah, I get you and you wouldn’t dare. If you even so much as touch him, I’ll break your fingers.’ I should have turned and walked away but I suspected that if I did he would jump me so I stayed facing him as he inched closer. Finally, it became too much to bear and I lashed out with a foot as he came within range, his fists up in a boxer’s guard.

  He skipped forwards rather than backwards as I was expecting and the foot that should have hit his chin discharged its energy on his thigh instead as he closed. He stumbled and I moved in quickly, throwing three rapid punches into his chest. He collapsed, struggling for breath, and I grabbed his face between my hands, squeezing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  I leaned over him so that I was close enough to smell the cigarettes and coffee on his breath and growled, ‘If you ever threaten Jimmy again, I’ll kill you. Then Davey and anyone else who stands in my way. The drugs are where you’ll never find them, so don’t even bother looking, okay?’

  He struggled for breath for a moment longer then finally got enough to speak. ‘Too late mate, you’ve fucked it now!’ He cocked his head to one side as if listening and I suddenly became aware of shouting, the banging of a car door and then the screeching of tyres in the car park I had just left.

  Dropping my opponent I ran back to the front of the hospital to see a host of angry-looking medical staff milling around as a white panel van screamed off east along the main road. I grabbed hold of a confused-looking nurse and shook her, just a little, to make her look at me. ‘What’s going on?’ I shouted, having to raise my voice over the general hubbub in the car park.

  She looked up at me and pulled away from my grip. ‘They just came in and took a man from the ward! They knocked the sister out and just took him from the bed; four of them in balaclavas, one of them had a gun!’

  I knew the answer before I asked the question but I had to ask anyway. ‘Which ward, which bed?’

  ‘Catherine James ward, bed four. They took the police officer that got stabbed.’

  28

  THE WARD was a mass of confusion, shouting voices and angry staff and patients as I tried to work out exactly what had happened. As soon as the nurse had told me that Jimmy was missing, I’d run into the building and sealed the area off as a crime scene, already on my mobile for backup.

  I was holding down the fort, just, my badge unfolded and hanging from my jacket pocket so that people would listen to me as I barked instructions, demanding that anything the kidnappers may have touched be left well alone. The ward sister had a nasty gash on her forehead that looked as if it had been done with a baton or torch and was being dealt with by two other nurses, one of whom was crying silently as she worked.

  Apparently the men had burst in at about the time I had been fighting in the alleyway and had grabbed Jimmy, hauling him out of the bed, heedless of the drip and other pipes and tubes attached to him. There was blood on his sheets from the cannula coming lo
ose and just looking at it made guilt hit me harder than anything I had felt before. There was no escaping it; this was my fault. If I had just done things properly instead of going out and stealing from Davey, Jimmy would still be lying there trying to chat up the nurses instead of being taken God only knew where in the back of a van. I crossed to the bed and felt under the pillow. My hand closed on something cold and hard and I pulled out the can of pepper spray I had left Jimmy with.

  I heard booted feet pounding down the corridor as backup arrived in the form of two entire vans of LST, four response officers and three detectives, all racing to get to the scene first. I shoved the can in my pocket before anyone noticed and walked quickly away from the bed. As they entered the ward I gave them a brief sit-rep, explaining what had been touched, who had seen them and how long ago it had happened. I had given the description of the van and the direction of travel over the phone and traffic and firearms units were already scouring the city in an attempt to find the vehicle before it disappeared.

  Sam Moran, the senior LST sergeant, took charge of the scene with cool professionalism, organising the milling staff, patients and visitors into two gaggles; those who had seen the kidnappers and those that hadn’t. Officers began to seal the ward off with tape, much to the annoyance of the staff who were still trying to work around the sudden wave of uniforms that surrounded them, and I took the chance to step into the corridor and phone Kev. Despite the fact he was probably at home by now, he would kick my arse from here to Sunday if he was left out of the loop when one of his officers had been kidnapped.

  He answered after two rings and I could hear that he was on a car hands-free kit. ‘I already know,’ he said before I could say anything. ‘They called me as soon as you called it in. I’m on my way.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll be here,’ I said as he hung up. I turned back to the ward, trying to work out what to say that wouldn’t implicate me in his disappearance. As much as I wanted to get Jimmy back, I had a feeling that this would only be resolved through returning the heroin I had taken and not through police work. If I told them what I had been up to I would be in prison, Davey would never see his heroin and Jimmy would wind up dead. I couldn’t let that happen, so I thought furiously about what I would say when they got around to questioning me.

  Even more officers turned up, including Superintendent Doyle, a stern-looking woman in her early fifties with steel grey hair and the crispest uniform I’d ever seen. I assumed that she was the duty ‘Gold Commander’, which meant that she was nominally in charge of the force for this shift. Doyle frequently dropped into various divisions while she was Gold, and to get here so quickly she must already have been in Brighton.

  She looked around, clearly waiting for someone to notice and give her an update and I stepped towards her without really thinking about it. Some habits die hard. ‘Ma’am,’ I said, nodding respectfully.

  She looked me up and down, noting my badge. ‘DC…?’

  ‘Uh, PC Bell ma’am, DIU. Jimmy’s my friend; I’d just finished visiting him when he got taken.’

  She was silent for a moment as she absorbed the information. ‘Right. So you left and they took him. Did you get to see anyone or anything useful?’

  I shook my head. ‘No ma’am, I was around the back trying to find the café for a bite of food before I left and I ran back when I heard the shouting and screeching of tyres.’

  She looked at me, her fierce blue eyes boring into mine. I could feel the intelligence in her gaze hit me like a physical weight as she assessed what I was telling her. ‘I assume that they knew who you were too and were waiting until you had left before kidnapping PC, uh—’

  ‘Holdsworth,’ I finished for her. ‘Yes ma’am, that’s what I’d assumed too. If there’s nothing else ma’am, I’d like to do what I can here to find Jimmy.’

  She nodded and I gratefully escaped, finding Sam Morgan talking to the newly arrived Kev. Kev reached out his hand for me to shake without stopping talking to Sam. ‘So the cameras were all out? This is starting to sound like a very professional job.’

  My head turned sharply as I heard him say that and he turned to include me in the conversation. ‘Sam was just telling me that there was a power cut in the security office, so all the recorders were offline, as were the monitors from about five minutes before the grab until about thirty seconds ago. That means we haven’t even got a chance of footage showing the van index.’ He sounded angry, his usual laconic air missing.

  ‘Have you got any idea who might have done it or why?’ I asked, knowing that there was only one sensible answer.

  He shrugged. ‘Until we get something else, the only link we’ve got is to the court case with Davey but I can’t see a reason why they’d take him, unless you know something we don’t?’

  Shaking my head while maintaining eye contact with Kev was one of the hardest things I’d ever done; it made me feel dirty inside. ‘No idea, but I intend to find out. I don’t mean to sound alarmist but do you think it could be the guys in the Cherokee?’ I instantly regretted my dissembling as I saw the look of alarm cross the sergeants’ faces.

  ‘I hope not. We’ll log it as a possibility just in case but we’re going to have to keep an open mind. We’re doing everything we can think of fast-time. Brighton’s too small a place for someone to do this and keep it quiet for long, so we’ll hear something. Look, I need an intel officer on this. Are you happy to go back to the Nick and do it?’

  I nodded, glad to be away from eyes that were trained to see too much for my comfort. Every major job has an intelligence officer assigned to it, a person to research anything that the officers on the ground might need checking for relevance and add it to the log so that there’s an easily readable trail to follow for everyone involved in the job. I’d done it plenty of times but never for something like this. I could easily be adding information to the log that would be incriminating myself. Still, it was better than being here, waiting for someone to spot or realise something that I hadn’t thought of and put two and two together. So, with a wave, I headed out into the car park and drove back to the Nick, all the while worrying about Jimmy and wondering how Davey would make contact with me.

  Back at the station I swiped myself into the deserted office and headed to my desk, taking my radio off charge and switching it on so that I could hear the units on the ground. When I didn’t hear anything I called comms as I logged into my computer and OIS, the system that kept the logs that I needed to access.

  ‘Charlie Papa 281, comms.’

  ‘281 go ahead.’

  ‘I’ve been tasked as intelligence officer for the kidnapping, can you derestrict it to my terminal please and let me know which channel we’re working on?’

  I knew that the serial would be restricted before I even got into the system, it would have to be for a job like this, and due to the lack of radio traffic, they also had to have dedicated a separate radio channel to the job.

  ‘Roger 281, serial 1355 derestricted to your terminal and it’s channel B-DIV-A.’

  ‘Roger, many thanks. I’ll be here if you need me.’

  A double blip told me that they had received my last and I turned the dial on the back of my Nokia handset to the right channel, hearing controlled chaos as white panel vans were stopped by units right across the city.

  I read the log, beginning from the moment that I had called in and working through to the current time. Barely half an hour had passed since I had alerted them but it felt as if years had gone by already. I fretted as I read through the log, worrying about Jimmy. The pneumonia had hit him hard according to what the nurses had said, and he needed the antibiotics that they were pumping into him intravenously or it would begin to spread again. I knew why he’d hidden from me just how bad it was. I’d once had pneumonia and, even healthy and whole as I’d been, it had nearly killed me. Doubtless he hadn’t wanted me to worry like I now was.

  I had that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that you get when you know you’ve done s
omething wrong and don’t know how to fix it, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking as I sat there waiting to be useful.

  ‘Charlie Echo 104, comms?’ came an excited female voice over the radio, making me jump.

  ‘104?’

  ‘We’ve got a white panel van on fire at the top of Wilson Avenue, partial index W79 something, the rest is obscured by flames, over?’

  ‘Received, we’ll get Trumpton en route.’

  Trumpton is police slang for the fire brigade, and I wasn’t sure if I was hoping for or dreading their arrival. It was recent enough that they might be in time to put out the fire before all the forensics were scoured away and if the kidnappers weren’t top notch it would give us something to work with.

  My thoughts were racing, alternating between wanting them to find Jimmy before his kidnappers went to ground and not finding him until I could get the heroin back to them. I hated myself for not telling all, but I knew that Davey was capable of killing if he didn’t get what he wanted, and I also knew that the only thing he would want was the heroin. If I handed it over to my bosses, the chances were that Jimmy would end up dead in a ditch as revenge and I would end up dead in a prison cell a few months later. Shaking my head to try and clear it I turned back to the log, searching for anything I may have missed the first time.

  Six hours later I was startled by Kev coming into the office, where I sat slumped in front of my computer screen. The log was now over a hundred pages long, which was pretty impressive even for a job of this magnitude. I was so tired from my relentless hours of screen work that my eyes felt like they had been packed with sand and when Kev offered to make me a cup of tea, I could have kissed him. Being the only one in the office, I hadn’t even dared leave for a piss, just in case I missed something, and a cup of tea would hopefully wake me up enough to keep going.

  Kev brought the promised tea over a few minutes later then pulled up Sally’s chair to sit next to me. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, his face full of sympathy that I didn’t want or deserve.