by Adam Carter
OPERATION WETFISH
BOOK 14
Adam Carter
TRUST AND BETRAYAL
Copyright 2017, © Adam Carter. All rights reserved. No content may be reproduced without permission of the author.
CHAPTER ONE
The house stank of embezzlement and lies. It was a large family home; two garages, an electric fence surrounding the exterior, a camera perched on every post. There were kennels outside where Dobermans had been living in constant watch of danger, although a special concoction of gas had soon put them to sleep. The lock upon the door had been relatively easy to break, considering the amount of security otherwise, although Detective Jen Thompson suspected Arcady had put so much effort into securing his premises he never believed anyone could actually make it to the front door.
Arnold Arcady had made his fortune off the back of other people’s hard work. He had skimmed so much money for so long from his employer that within ten years he had made enough to retire. Five years from now it would be a new millennium and Arcady could be looking forward to seeing it in from a privately owned yacht somewhere in the Caribbean. Thompson’s department did not deal with embezzlement, though: there were other people to care about that sort of thing. It was when the body had been discovered that Thompson’s DCI had shown some interest. Arcady had been approached by a young woman named Liz Farris, who had spent several months building up a case against him. She had enough to send him to prison and demanded a take of his skimmed profits. But Arcady was an angry and violent man and instead of acceding to her blackmail he had tossed her out of a window twenty storeys up. His rage had taken control, and all his careful years of subterfuge spilled out into the media.
The case came to court and the not-guilty verdict was returned; Arcady had a very expensive lawyer.
Paperwork had then made it to Thompson’s desk. Her DCI wanted her to deal with this one as quickly as possible; there was a steady increase in work back at the office and they needed results far more quickly than they were currently gaining them. Plus their star officer seemed to be slowing down, disappearing when they needed him. Thompson could see the DCI was concerned and promised to get it sorted.
Easily through the door, she paused in the dark hallway. It was close to midnight and there was no sound in the house. Thompson had researched the layout and knew where Arcady’s bedroom was located. That she would have to do this without alerting Arcady’s wife was the trick, but that was why Thompson had backup.
“Clear,” Thompson whispered and Detective Lin moved in beside her. Lin was a short woman of Chinese origins who always seemed far too serious for Thompson’s liking. Thompson herself preferred to live life in the fast lane – literally, if she could get her motorcycle into an assignment – and could not understand how people could spend their lives fixed to a rulebook. She spent most of her time on the job and figured if she was miserable while doing it she might as well hang herself. She seldom worked with Lin, however, and wondered whether she was judging her too harshly. Lin was quiet, even-tempered and no fun at all. Thompson wanted to get the mission over with as quickly as did the DCI.
“I have downstairs covered,” Lin said and Thompson headed for the stairs. A tall, dark-haired woman wearing a leather jacket and biker’s gloves over a black T-shirt which left her arms bare, Detective Thompson exuded rebellion. It had been a while since she had been a teenager, yet she had found it very difficult to leave that lifestyle behind. Not that she much wanted to, she thought with a smirk.
The landing was silent as she approached and Thompson counted the doors along to make sure she had the right one. There was no light coming from under any of the doors, which was a good sign. Creeping across the landing, Thompson was thankful Arcady had so much money he did not even have any creaking floorboards, although as she came to the first door she paused. There was a plaque on the door reading, ‘William’s Room. Keep Out. This Means You!’ and a small picture of a green stegosaurus with a big red tongue. Thompson felt a pang of regret over what she had come here to do, although knew she could not afford such feelings. William’s father was a murderer and it was her job to make sure he paid for that crime.
Still, it could have been worse; she could have been there to kill him.
Detective Thompson worked for a department known as Operation WetFish. They were a legitimate yet highly unorthodox division of London’s police and it was their job to correct the mistakes of the courts. When an obviously guilty individual was found innocent due to corruption, witness intimidation or simply good lawyers, WetFish assigned an officer to remove the fortunate criminal. Either they killed him themselves or they planted evidence so the target would be arrested for a similar crime and this time be sent down. Whatever WetFish decided, nothing would ever make it to the newspapers, or if it did it would never be linked to them. Thompson had taken command of the assignment and had decided in this instance she would frame Arcady for the murder of another young woman. This woman had had nothing to do with Arcady of course, but the DCI had fabricated evidence placing her in contact with Arcady over the past year. Logs of phone calls, DNA evidence; it was a particularly tight case they had made against Arcady. All it needed was for the police to raid Arcady’s house and find incriminating evidence on his person, and it would all be over. The DCI had arranged for the police to come knocking tomorrow morning, which meant Thompson had to leave her evidence tonight.
Tearing her eyes from the dinosaur and the plaque, she headed farther down the landing, passing a second door which was decorated with a drawing of a flower and clearly belonged to Arcady’s daughter Becca. Above this door was another in the ceiling, leading to the attic, but Thompson ignored this one as well.
The door to Arnold Arcady’s bedroom was ajar, which made Thompson’s job a little easier. When taking this case she had had a bad feeling that things would not work out the way she wanted, simply because of the time constraint, although if there was a patron saint of WetFish he was certainly looking out for her tonight. Pressing her palm to the door, Thompson took a deep breath before slowly pushing. The room was pitch-black, the thick curtains allowing in no light at all, and Thompson stood in the doorway for several long moments to allow her eyes to adjust. She could make out the dull bulk of furniture; a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, even the bed was beginning to take shape, within which Arcady lay in blissful slumber. As she stood there taking in all these details she became aware of a strange sickly sweet smell, although brushed it from her mind.
Her eyes about as good as they were going to get, Thompson stepped farther into the room, heading for the chest of drawers. She withdrew something from her jacket pocket. It was a handful of keepsakes Arcady might have taken from a corpse as trophies: pieces of unique jewellery and the like. The DCI had given them to Thompson, making sure there were traces of hair and blood from the dead woman on them which would show up nicely later on in forensics.
Placing two fingers on the brass handle, Thompson gritted her teeth as she pulled open the drawer. It was stuck at first, although with a little tug she was able to yank it open. She paused, snapping her head towards the bed, although the sudden sound had not alerted Arcady as to her presence. In the dimness of the room she could just make out a shape in the bed, but that was about as far as her eyes allowed. The smell was beginning to annoy her, and Thompson’s brain screamed that she had smelt it somewhere before. She wrinkled her nose, trying to work out what it was, but her adrenalin was pumping and she wasn’t thinking all too clearly.
Dropping the jewellery into the drawer and covering it with some underwear already in there, she carefully pushed it back in, although it got a litt
le stuck before it could be fully closed. Cursing silently, Thompson knew it would do no good for Arcady to discover the jewellery before the police arrived in the morning, and if she couldn’t get the drawer shut there would have been no need for her to have come at all. She put both her hands upon the drawer and shoved, although still did it not move. Raising it slightly, she tried again, and it slammed into the back of the chest with a resounding crack. A dark shape wobbled before her and Thompson lunged for the thing, but it slipped from her grasp and the ornament shattered as it struck the skirting-board, sending a crackling thunder throughout the room.
Thompson dived through the door and was halfway across the landing before she realised there had been no activity from the bed. Having a very bad feeling, she walked slowly back into the bedroom. Withdrawing a small torch from her belt, she shone its light about the room, her overworked mind suddenly placing the dull tang of copper to the air.
The bed sheets were a mass of blood, so much so it had soaked through the expensive white silk and had steadily dripped into the thick carpet. There was a single woman in the bed, her wide eyes staring fearfully at the ceiling, vacant for eternity. Through the sheet, Thompson identified six obvious stab wounds, and could see discolouring about the woman’s mouth where a hand had been pressed down to stop her screaming. The detective shone her meagre light about the room and caught signs of a struggle, although only a small one. A bedside lamp had been overturned where the woman had flailed with her arms, although nothing else seemed amiss. The woman had been attacked in bed, perhaps even while sleeping, and had been overpowered almost immediately.
There was no sign of Arnold Arcady.
A beeping sounded from her hip then and Thompson had to shake her mind clear to realise her phone was shouting at her. Absently she raised the device to her ear, her eyes still fixed in horror upon the body of the dead woman, and Lin’s frantic voice half whispered, half shouted at her. “Jen! Get out of there!”
“Lin, there’s a body. I ...”
“Get out! The police are here!”
“We are the police.”
“Jen!”
Suddenly Thompson understood what Lin was saying, and her mind snapped out of its shocked funk. DCI Sanders was going to alert the police to come in the morning, once Thompson had placed the evidence, but someone had got there before her and the murder of this woman had set off some sort of alarm. And the police had arrived early.
It was rare indeed that Thompson became affected by the horrors of the job, but she also felt she was good at coping under stressful situations. Once she accepted that being caught by the police was a very bad idea her mind instantly forgot about the dead woman. She could hear hurried footfalls on the stairs and dived out the door, taking the next one along, which brought her into the Arcady bathroom. Closing the door, she shone her torch about, revealing nothing she could use. Then she remembered the landing had a hatch set into the ceiling, and if she could make her way into the loft she might stand a chance at getting out.
The footsteps had made it to the bedrooms by this time and she knew the police would be entering each of them. Shooting the bolt on the bathroom door to gain her more time, Thompson again spoke into her phone. “Need a diversion, Lin. Need one kinda now.”
“Just get ready to run. And remember to cover your eyes.”
Thompson had intended to go through to the loft, although Lin’s words changed all that. The DCI did not like his officers to be caught in the midst of their duty. They were all police of course, although WetFish needed to stay out of the public eye. That meant their first priority, even over the mission itself, was secrecy. To this end each WetFish vehicle kept a supply of what some might call weapons, others tools. There were no armaments in the cars of course, that would have been foolish, but Thompson knew there were chemicals which seemed harmless but when combined could produce an effective smokescreen. She knew nothing about chemistry, but if it could get her out of the house she was willing to learn.
Someone tried the bathroom door handle and Thompson sucked in a breath, her heart freezing in her chest. She heard a man’s voice tell someone else it was locked and an order was received to break it down. Thompson backed off a step as a shoulder slammed into the door. It shook, but held, and Thompson frantically looked about for something she could use, some way she could escape.
The shoulder slammed into the door once more and Thompson tore the shower curtain from its rail, a dozen plastic rings springing off and clattering into the bath. There came a shout from outside the door then as they realised she was inside, although Thompson blocked that from her mind as she drew a knife and cut the shower curtain into strips. There was no permission for weapons to be carried by WetFish officers, although it was a rule Thompson had always flouted with regards to her knife. It was an old Second World War bayonet given to her on her sixteenth birthday by someone she had cared a great deal about; it was practically the only thing she had to remember him by. She would not be parted from it for any reason and the DCI was not fool enough to insist.
With the curtain cut into strips, Thompson tied one about her face to mask her appearance, and the others about her limbs and torso to disguise her clothes. The door splintered at that moment, although amazingly the lock still held it together. She could see officers outside, although they still could not reach her.
And then a shout came and Thompson saw thick black smoke pouring onto the landing. Lin had come through after all.
Shooting the bolt, Thompson raised her arms before her and barrelled out of the bathroom, careening across the landing and almost stumbling as she found the stairs, unable to see much of anything in the chaotic blackness. Clumsy hands reached for her, although she evaded them or else batted them aside in her mad rush. Grabbing hold of the bannister, Thompson practically slid down the stairs, landing more heavily than she would have wished and almost losing her balance. Downstairs was even denser with smoke, and she fought to remember the way to the exit.
Shouts filled the room and rough hands grabbed her, but she threw them off and ran without knowing where she was going; she just knew she had to head somewhere. As she burst into the kitchen, smoke poured into the room through the open door. She could see the back door and headed over to it quickly, stopping to take a look. There would be further officers out there and she had very little hope of escaping them, but she would have to try.
Someone fell into the room behind her and she threw herself at the back door, running out into the cold night air and tearing across the lawn. She saw an armed officer taking aim upon her, and dived behind a bush. She did not know whether she should have expected armed police, but knew the situation had not deteriorated badly enough for him to fire. Scrambling along on her belly, she broke out the other side of the bushes just as something large and loud and powerful broke through the hedges. She recognised the car which had brought her and Lin all this way and powered her legs into a final mad dash. The car screeched to a halt and the door opened, Lin urgently waving her inside. A shot thundered through the air and Thompson felt a dull stabbing pain in her shoulder. But it had not affected her legs and she doubled her speed, all but collapsing into the back seat of the car.
The vehicle took off the instant she was inside, cutting back through the hedge and onto the road. The woman at the wheel clearly had no intention of being caught, although there was nothing Thompson could do to change that. If they were caught, they were caught. Lying across the entire back seat, Thompson at last felt the pain set into her shoulder. She gingerly touched the wound and her fingers came away bloody. From the passenger’s seat in the front of the car she could see Detective Lin staring at her with frantic, worried eyes.
“It’s fine,” Thompson said with a grimace. “Had worse than this during training back in the barracks.” If Lin replied, Thompson could not say. She had already slipped into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER TWO
“We have to get out of here, we have to get back to the bunker, none
of this was supposed to happen, we have to get to Sanders, Sanders will know what to do, we have to ...”
“Shut up!” Detective Lin really wanted to punch the woman in the face, although doubted that would help the situation any. It would make her feel better, sure, but they were in this together and there was no sense in antagonising each other. Detective Thompson had not regained consciousness and Lin was more than a little worried for her. Lin knew nothing of medicines or first aid beyond her basic training, and that had done precious little for Thompson. They had driven for an hour before realising they were completely lost, and had pulled up at a disused railway depot. Lin had found an abandoned train which while cold was out of sight, and together the two able-bodied women had dragged Thompson into the carriage, where Lin had made her as comfortable as possible. She had even started a small contained fire so Thompson wouldn’t freeze to death. Lin wasn’t even sure though that sleep was the best thing for Thompson. Perhaps falling unconscious had even killed her.
Sitting on one of the incredibly uncomfortable seats, drawing her knees up to her chin and to hell with the rules against placing your feet on the chairs, Lin wondered where it had all gone wrong. There had clearly been some problem in the house, maybe it was a set-up, Lin could not say. All she knew was that the police, the regular police, had arrived, and Thompson was unable to fill them in on any details. And to top it all off they were stuck with their designated driver.
Detective Sharon Foster was a short red-haired woman with a slightly fuller figure. She delighted in celebrity gossip, watched far too much bad television and was one of those annoying people who described themselves as bubbly. She was not what Lin would have considered a field agent, although she did get out of the bunker from time to time. Unfortunately this was one of those times. Foster was good with statistics, with psychological profiling; but she was terrible with actual people. Lin always had the impression that Thompson didn’t think much of her, and following the escape from the Arcady house Lin was beginning to see why.
