Deadly Intent

by Lynda La Plante

  Langton had made sure that, to date, there had been little press coverage; they were hoping to keep the case under wraps. What Langton did not want was a leak that they were hunting Alexander Fitzpatrick. This could create pressure from the U.S., and Langton didn’t want their interference. None of the team were aware that DCI Langton was now going to be present full-time. As the case had mushroomed out of control, he had taken the decision that Cunningham needed help.

  Phil Markham was the first to have his collar felt, as Langton put a rocket under him. He would accompany Phil to interview the two drug dealers. As they now had the photograph of the man he was certain was Alexander Fitzpatrick, one or both of the dealers had to recognize him. It was crucial they work closely with the Drug Squad: Langton didn’t want their noses put out of joint. If there was a possible deal to be made, then they should, with Sam Power’s assistance, put the pressure on for the dealers to talk. They were being charged with possession and dealing in narcotics. If the charges were upped to murder, they would be looking at a very long stretch in prison.

  Phil had never worked alongside Langton before, and he found him

  unnerving. He sat beside him in the patrol car; at first Langton used his BlackBerry, firing offmessages, his fingers moving over the tiny keys like lightning. He then opened a window and lit a cigarette. Phil watched as he drew three or four heavy drags, then tossed it out. He opened his briefcase and took out the copies of the two dealers’ statements. Then he replaced them, muttering to himself. “We go for Silas Roach first,” he said quietly.

  Phil nodded; he noticed that Langton kept rubbing his right knee as if it pained him badly.

  “So how do we work it?” Phil asked.

  Langton shook his head with a sarcastic smile as he repeated what Phil had just said, then turned to face him. “You watch, listen, and learn, son. You’ve had these two pieces of shit in and let them walk away.”

  Phil sat back, smarting. “You know, many of our problems have come from the long wait for the toxicology reports. I mean, in Donny Petrozzo’s case, we didn’t know what had killed him, then the same with D’Anton. This Fentanyl stuff—I’d never even heard of it.”

  Langton leaned back against the headrest. “Fentanyl is used mostly in hospitals for fast-acting pain relief. It’s an opiate, like morphine but nearly a hundred times more potent, faster-acting, and out of the system more quickly—a high of five or ten minutes. Mix it with OxyContin, or Acopolamine painkillers and maybe a dash of heroin, and you have a God Almighty high better than cocaine, and some poor suckers want this as a way of life.” “Oh.”

  “Yeah—oh. In case you don’t know, we’ve already got a few problems in our NHS hospitals. Instead of chucking out the residue not needed in operations, it’s being nicked, and there’s been a few doctors shooting themselves up with it.”

  “Wow.”

  Langton just shook his head, before returning to check his messages.

  “Where do you think Fitzpatrick is hiding out?” Phil asked.

  “No idea, but the murder of David Rushton last night makes it pretty obvious our man is still close at hand. Whatever happened between

  them would be about money. Whether or not our kingpin actually got it we’ll hopefully find out. He must need a lot—it’s expensive staying on the run, and it costs to build a network of shippers and dealers you can trust.” Langton gave a rueful laugh.‘Td say that’s where it went pear-shaped; he chose the wrong ones, so he had to get rid of them!”

  “You think that he hid out at the farm?”

  “Maybe. We’ll know soon enough. What concerns me is that the Nolans didn’t seem too worried about the loft discovery.”

  “So we charge Honour and her husband with harboring a wanted felon?”

  “I think there’s a lot more to get out of that couple. They can just say they were forced to hide him out and were too scared not to.”

  “But if Damien Nolan wrote the directions for Fitzpatrick to the farm, then it’s not looking as if he was forced into doing it.”

  “Correct.”

  “So are we bringing them in?”

  Langton sighed. Phil’s constant questions were starting to annoy him. “Not yet. They may be the only people that Fitzpatrick trusts; if they are, he may contact them.”

  “Not when it’s swarming with us.”

  “The search should be over sometime today, and we can get everyone cleared out. Most important is the go-ahead to put a tap on their phones and retain covert surveillance. If they make a move, we will know about it.”

  Phil leaned back. He stared out of the window as they hit a nose-to-tail traffic jam. Langton tapped the driver to put the siren on and get them moving; he was impatient to interview the two dealers. As he turned back to say something to Phil, he suddenly winced in pain. He gritted his teeth, then hunched over to grip his knee; it felt as if it was on fire. No matter how much pressure he applied, it continued to be excruciating.

  By the time they drove into the Drug Squad’s car park, Langton was ashen, with a film of sweat that made his face look even more pallid. He needed Phil to help him out of the patrol car, and he closed his eyes

  with the pain as he slowly straightened up. It took a few moments before he was able to walk into the building, stopping at a water fountain to take some painkillers.

  Phil felt helpless, not knowing what to do, but eventually the color came back into Langton’s face, just as Sam Power approached. “You’re late,” he said. “We got the pair of them ready for you.”

  “Good. Sorry—we got into a god-awful traffic pile-up,” Langton said, shaking Sam’s hand.

  Phil was amazed at his recovery; it was as if nothing had happened. However, it had. Langton could still feel nightmare pain at every step. Thankfully, this time, his leg had not seized up. They had said he would suffer from housemaid’s knee when he had been in rehabilitation. He hadn’t really taken it seriously but, over the past months, he had upped his painkillers, as it had begun to hurt more frequently; the pain was very debilitating.

  The aftermath of the nightmare attack, two years previously, the horror of almost being sliced in two, had taken its toll. He continued to have spasmodic pains in his chest, sometimes feeling very short of breath, and he suffered violent headaches and depression. The notion that he should take it easy was anathema to him. Langton’s obsession about never allowing it to be known just how much he was physically affected by the attack was his way of dealing with it. The thought of retiring, and possibly ending up in a wheelchair, was unbearable. Without the pressure of work, keeping his adrenaline pumping, he knew he would not survive the black depression.

  Phil and Langton went into the interview room. Silas Roach was sitting with his solicitor, Margery Patterson. He seemed nervous: his head twitched as he sat threading and rethreading his fingers. He repeated what had taken place on the night of Frank Brandon’s murder. Langton let him talk, looking over his statement. Silas ended up swearing on his mother’s life that it was the truth.

  Langton spoke quietly. “So, let me just get this straight: you have admitted to dealing drugs from the squat on the Chalk Farm estate, but the gun—the Glock automatic—you say did not belong to you, but Delroy Planter.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t use it—he just had it for show, you know what I mean?”

  “On this night,” Langton continued, in the same quiet voice, “you have stated that Donny Petrozzo was there and that he was very agitated.You said he was high.”

  “Yeah, well—he was actin’ crazy like.”

  Langton nodded, as if agreeing. He held the statement up in front of him. “Describe the door to me, would you, Silas?”

  “What door? The front door?”

  “No, the door to the room you say you were using inside the squat.”

  “Oh yeah, I understand. Well, it was a special door the lads fixed up. It had bolts across and we’d made a sort of grille in the middle of it; well, not the middle—up a bit.”

/>   “Like in the old speakeasies.”

  Silas was not sure what he meant but explained that sometimes when the dealers were passing gear over, the junkies could make a grab, or try to throw a punch, so the door was for the dealers’ protection, not just from them, but also from their rival dealers, or from the police.

  Langton smiled, nodding. “So there you are, working the deals, and you get a rap on the door. You say that Donny Petrozzo opened the grille, looked out, and then grabbed the Glock and opened fire.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because he had seen someone he knew? Someone he was scared of? And he picks up Delroy’s Glock, and fires at this person outside—he fires three rounds?”

  “Yeah, that is exactly what he done; I think he said the guy was a cop.”

  Langton nodded, placing the statement down in front of him, touching the sides as if to make the three pages neat and tidy. “You say that Donny Petrozzo next opens the door, steps out, and fires another three shots into the man who was lying on the ground.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, Donny Petrozzo has the Glock pistol in his hands. You say he then ran from the building—in fact, you say you all got out of there as fast as possible.”

  “Yeah, right, because I mean, what went down was crazy, understand me? Like, it was fucking bad, man.”

  Langton nodded. “You know Donny Petrozzo has been found murdered?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Donny? Well, he was a good buyer, you know? He used to score from us all the time; always paid up, no trouble. Not heavy stuff; he was mostly dealing a few grams of cocaine to the blokes he drove around, some spliff, but never the hard stuff, mostly coke and some Ecstasy tabs, I think. Delroy knew him better’n me. Del always trusted him.”

  Langton placed down the photograph of Alexander Fitzpatrick. “What about this man?”

  Silas shook his head.

  Langton put the photograph back in the file. “You escaped via the back window?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you never went out the main door; never saw the dead man’s face?”

  “No, I just got the hell out.”

  Langton sniffed, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, then folded it to place it back in his pocket. He stared at Silas for at least fifteen seconds before he said, so quietly that Phil could hardly hear,“You are fucking lying, son. Let me tell you something: Donny Petrozzo wouldn’t worry about recognizing the man at the door, because he was working for him. He also knew he was an ex-cop, so he would have no reason to open fire.”

  Silas, having been gradually relaxed by Langton so that even his twitch had stopped, was now very tense and started to twist his neck.

  Langton still kept his voice very soft. “I think what happened is you recognized Frank Brandon. You had been busted by him: he was on the Drug Squad when you were arrested and now here he was again. You were the one to go crazy—you; you panicked and you opened fire.”

  “No, that’s not true, I didn’t, I never shot him!”

  “Silas, you arc going to go down for murder. You’ll not get a few years for dealing this time. You shot a man in cold blood, fired into his face three times. An ex-cop, it’s eighteen years at the very least.”

  “No, I swear before God, it wasn’t me!”

  “Who was it, then, Silas? Give it up, because we have your pal’s statement that you, and you alone, used that Glock pistol; that you were high on crack cocaine. Donny Petrozzo wasn’t even fucking there, was he? Was he?”

  “It wasn’t me! Jesus Christ! It wasn’t me that done him!”

  Langton sipped from a beaker of water. “Next, I need to ask you about a secondhand car dealer: this man, his name is Stanley Leymore.” Langton put down a photo of him. “You see, the reason I know you have been bullshitting me is because the same gun used to kill Frank Brandon”—Langton slapped down the photograph of Frank from his police ID—“also killed Stanley Leymore. Look at him.”

  “I never done that, I never done it.”

  Langton laughed. “Don’t be dumb, Silas, you had the fucking gun when you were arrested! In your statement, you said that Donny Petrozzo went out of the room, then fired three more shots into this man as he lay 011 the floor. So did Donny hand the gun back to you whilst you were escaping out of the window? ‘Here, Silas, you take the gun’? Or did he, as you say, run off with it? If he ran off with it. how did it get back to you? Unless you also killed Donny Petrozzo? You see how this is building, Silas? You understand what we are going to charge you with?”

  Silas kept on shaking his head. Langton placed down the photograph of Donny Petrozzo’s body, bound in the plastic bin liners. “Donny Petrozzo.” Next, he placed down the photograph of Stanley Leymore sitting on the toilet, dead, the bullet through his temple. “Stanley Leymore; same weapon, Silas.”

  Silas’s eyes were wide, almost popping out of his head.

  Lasdy, Langton laid out the picture of Frank Brandon’s dead body, facedown in a pool of blood in the squat.

  Silas started to whimper, sniffing. As the snot trickled down his nostril, he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Honest to God, 1 never done them.”

  “Honest to God, Silas, you are going to go down for all three. Your pal has given it up: you had the Glock. Out of your skull, you just went crazy and opened fire.”

  “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!” Silas slumped forward, his head on his arms, as he started crying.

  Langton looked at the tape recorder and gathered up his papers.

  “You can have a five-minute break to talk to your solicitor, Mr. Roach, but when I come back, I suggest you start telling me the truth, because I’m losing patience.“Just as Langton pushed back his chair, Silas grabbed at the photograph in front of him.

  “I never done it—not to him or the other blokes, I never done it,” he choked.

  Langton gave a wide, openhanded gesture. “So tell me the truth. What did happen?”

  Silas covered his face with his hands. “Ah shit, shit! It wasn’t fucking me!”

  It took half an hour for Silas to make a second statement. He and Delroy Planter were working the squat, and had been there for a few hours. Delroy had told him that Donny Petrozzo had been by earlier, and wanted to talk about a big deal. A friend of his had some very high-quality gear, and a lot of it; not heroin or cocaine, but a new drug, much more powerful, and one that Petrozzo knew they could get a lot of money for, from the kind of people that he scored for. Mixed with heroin, it was nicknamed “Polo” in the States. Neither of them had ever heard of it, and Delroy said that until he knew what it was, he wasn’t going to mess with it. He also said that the kind of money Petrozzo was talking about was out of his league; he couldn’t buy in, but he might be able to distribute, as he had a lot of guys he could bring in.

  Petrozzo brought a vial of the drugs around for Delroy to test; he told them that he was getting a bit scared and he needed some cash. Silas was unsure how much money had changed hands, but was told that Stanley Leymore had the drugs at his garage. Both Silas and Delroy used Stanley to get their wheels. On the night Frank was murdered, Delroy had expected Donny to turn up; when he didn’t, he became very agitated, as he was doing a lot of crack. When they got the knock on the door, Delroy

  recognized Frank Brandon as a cop and shot him. When he opened the door, he got scared because there was another man there. He ran back into the room, put the silencer on the gun, and reopened the door, but the man had gone—so he fired three more shots into Frank Brandon. The two of them went out the back window, and drove to Stanley Leymore’s garage. Delroy was crazy, and threatened to kill Stanley if he didn’t give him the drugs that Petrozzo said he was holding. Stanley refused, so Delroy shot him and, after searching the garage, gave up. They tried to contact Petrozzo, but his mobile was dead and his wife didn’t know where he was. The next thing they knew, the pair of them were busted and arrested.

  Langton remai
ned in the small interview room as Silas was led away to the cells and Margery Patterson left. “One down, one to go,” he said quietly to Phil, who had not said one word during the entire interrogation. “Strange, isn’t it? You first think we have this kingpin serial killer, wiping out everything and everyone in his way, and then it turns out to be two punks on a dirty crumbling estate, high on the stuff they’re dealing to more part-crazed kids. Then they get gun happy and kill. Poor old Frank Brandon was a good guy; we still don’t have the reason why he was at that shithole with Fitzpatrick—if that’s who he was with.”

  “Maybe they were looking for Petrozzo?”

  “Maybe.” Langton nodded. “Question is, who killed Petrozzo?”

  Sam Power popped his head around the door. “I got some fresh coffee for you. We’re bringing up Delroy Planter from the cells. Might be a few minutes; his solicitor’s not turned up yet.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You get a result?”

  “Yep—and coffee sounds good.” Langton had to grit his teeth to stand; he held on to the back of the chair for a few moments.

  “You want it in here or in the incident room upstairs?”

  “Need to stretch my legs and take a leak, but back in here’s fine.”

  Phil watched Langton walk out. He was impressed, and somewhat self-conscious at how he had conducted his earlier interviews with Silas and Delroy. Langton was giving him a master class.

  Langton returned to the interview room to wait for Delroy Planter.

  He stood, leaning against the wall, using his BlackBerry. “Mrs. Julia Brandon has just turned up to be requestioned,” he announced. “Should be interesting.”

  Phil looked up as the handcuffed Delroy Planter was pushed into the room. Langton gestured to the seat and then proceeded to read him his rights, as his solicitor sat, opening his briefcase. The tape was switched on and Langton pointed to the video recorder. He then poured a beaker of water for Delroy and filled his own, placing the water bottle down beside him. Phil passed him the files; then they all waited as Langton slowly read Delroy’s previous statement. Then he put it to one side and stared hard at Delroy. He didn’t look away; his eyes were dark and angry.