Nom de Guerre

by Gulvin, Jeff

  ‘You have a theory that Storm Crow was a student, the word “protégé” has been used, of Carlos the Jackal,’ the reporter said.

  ‘I do. I know for a fact that Ismael Boese was part of the group known as the “Friends of Carlos”, who were responsible for attacking the Paris-Toulouse express train in March 1982. The group were a mixture of nationalities, German predominantly. But there was one young man, half-caste, whose national origins were unknown. It was always believed that he was a favourite, and I have had first-hand information from two members of the group that this man was something of a protégé. He did not stay with them for very long, however, but again, intelligence sources have confirmed that he and Carlos have remained in contact over the years.’

  ‘And this man was Ismael Boese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re positive?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There can be no doubt.’ Again, he glanced at the camera. ‘Where the crow flies, bad news follows. That’s Ismael Boese.’

  ‘But how could he have planned such an escape?’

  ‘Storm Crow has access to all the major players worldwide. There may’ve been a state sponsorship behind this. We’ll only know for sure when he resurfaces, which, I’m afraid, he will.’

  The pictures returned to the studio and Swann crushed out his cigarette. ‘That what he told you, Jack?’ Cregan asked him.

  Swann snorted. ‘I wasn’t asking his opinion. I wanted to know what he and Boese talked about.’

  Harris bought a fresh round of drinks and then her pager sounded. She frowned and glanced at the display, then, making her excuses, she left.

  Amaya Kukiel finished her packing and sat on top of her suitcase. She glanced at the meagre bedsit and listened to the trains on the District line rumble over the bridge outside the window. She thought of her classes, the degree she would not now finish and what she would tell her father when she got back to Gdansk. The doorbell rang and for a moment she ignored it, then she slid off the bed and went down to answer it. She could see two figures outlined through the frosted glass and her heart sank. Her fears were confirmed when she opened it. Moore and Harris pushed their way into the hall. She looked at each one in turn, sighed, and led the way upstairs. Harris lifted one eyebrow when she saw the suitcase. ‘Leaving us, Amaya?’

  ‘I told you. I’m finished.’ Amaya’s eyes smarted. ‘If I leave, you can’t threaten me about my visa.’

  ‘Nobody ever threatened you.’ Moore’s voice was soft, but his eyes were cold.

  ‘No?’ She sneered at him. ‘That’s not how I saw it.’ She stood now with one hand across her belly, gripping her other elbow. Then she picked up a packet of cigarettes and, hands shaking, she lit one. Moore walked to the window and looked out across Ravenscourt Park.

  ‘We need you to stay, Amaya.’ Harris lifted the suitcase off the bed and sat down.

  ‘Too bad.’ Amaya picked up her plane ticket from the mantelpiece and flapped it under her nose. ‘I’m flying home tomorrow. You can keep your fucking visa and your fucking degree course. They’re not worth the risk.’

  ‘There is no risk.’

  Amaya snapped air, audibly, from compressed lips. ‘You want to swap places? Jorge Vaczka tells me something which I tell you. He then delivers charity clothes all over the north of England. He’s never done a charitable thing in his life.’ She broke off for a second. ‘You don’t see the way he looks at me.’

  ‘We’ll protect you.’ Moore had turned from the window.

  ‘No, you won’t. Because I won’t be here to protect.’ She took a step towards him. ‘You can’t stop me leaving. I’ve been to the Polish Embassy, told them exactly what you made me do. I’m flying out tomorrow and if you try and stop me, I’ll tell everything to the newspapers, how British MI5, or whatever it is you are, blackmailed me,’ she tapped herself in the sternum, ‘a poor, impressionable student from Poland over a perfectly legitimate visa.’

  Harris glanced at Moore. ‘OK, Amaya. If that’s what you want to do. No one’s going to stop you.’

  Outside, Moore took a deep breath and sighed. ‘Some you lose,’ he said.

  George Webb parked the Ford in the main car park inside Reading Prison. A special escort group truck was parked by the side of the compound, with a motorcycle outrider alongside it. Again, images of the wrecked vehicles burned themselves into his mind. He got out, looked across the roof at Tania Briggs, and closed the door. The afternoon following the attack, a team from the office had swarmed all over the special secure unit, which he could see now—a grey concrete building in the shape of a plus sign, behind its own wall and razor-wire fence. The other category A inmates had been locked in the cells while the SO13 officers took Boese’s apart. Webb had found a note under the thin mattress, which the wardens said he never used, wishing them all the best in their search. Boese had known beyond any doubt that he would never reach the Old Bailey on the morning of 5 February.

  They made their way across to the SSU entrance where Griffiths, the warden with the embarrassed face, was waiting for them. Slate rain rattled the concrete from an ash-coloured sky. Webb could smell the wet tarmac. Briggs carried their gear, not much of it now. Today, they were checking the records and hoping to talk to some of the other prisoners. Boese, according to the wardens, had not been particularly popular and perhaps they might make some headway. Webb knew the three PIRA men would not speak to them.

  Inside, the governor was waiting for them. Webb had met him before. He had been assistant governor at Wormwood Scrubs, where Webb had interviewed some prisoners in the past. They shook hands and, for the second time in two days, Webb and Briggs were ushered through the airlocked doors into the dead space between them. On their left, the officers in the control room looked through smoked glass, caught their eyes and looked away. Webb chuckled softly to himself and winked at Briggs. ‘Nothing like someone else’s discomfort,’ he said.

  They were greeted by Maureen Bryant, the supervisor, a tall well-built woman, one of four in the team of ten wardens. She took them into her office, which looked directly across the dining area and pool table. The inmates were all locked in their cells. They would remain there all day while Webb and Tania carried out their investigations. One by one they would be exercised, like dogs, for half an hour. Webb laid his case on the desk and looked across at Bryant. ‘We want to check the assessment logs,’ he said. ‘All of them. Then I want to talk to the officers who had the most contact with Boese.’

  ‘That’ll be most of us, then,’ she said, holding his gaze evenly.

  ‘Griffiths seemed to have a lot to say yesterday,’ Briggs put in.

  ‘Michael always tries hard with the prisoners, Constable.’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to him.’ Webb smiled across the table at her. ‘What about the inmates themselves?’

  ‘They won’t talk to you.’

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise.’

  Bryant smiled. ‘Well, that’s not quite true, actually. One of them might. Gianluca Terlucci.’

  Webb’s eyes lit up. Our very own Mafia hitman. How many knives has he got in here?’

  ‘Only the ones in the kitchen and they’re counted daily, Sergeant.’

  Webb leaned across the table and smiled at her. ‘Why him, anyway?’

  ‘Because we think he had a run-in with Boese on the night before the trial. Terlucci got cut, superficially.’ She touched the fleshy skin under her chin. ‘Said he cut himself shaving.’

  ‘And did he?’ Briggs asked.

  Bryant lifted her eyebrows. ‘At five in the afternoon, peeling potatoes in the kitchen?’ She leaned both elbows on her desk. ‘Terlucci has family in Italy, two young children and a wife. He’s trying to get the Home Secretary to let him serve his sentence back home.’

  ‘He stabbed a man to death in Hyde Park,’ Briggs said.

  ‘That’s right. A rival, warring factions of the same family.’

  Webb stood up. ‘Let’s talk to him, then,’ he said. ‘Then I want the
little red books to look at.’

  Terlucci was brought to the office they were using and Webb sized him up across the table—a slim, thin-faced man with slicked-back hair, jet black; so black in fact, it looked as though it had been dyed. His eyes were tight, scrapings of coal set deep in a prominently boned skull. He tapped long fingernails on the desk, a signet ring in gold on the third finger of his left hand. Webb studied the reddened line under his chin.

  ‘Cut yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Shaving.’

  ‘Of course. Careless. Boese did that to you, didn’t he?’ Webb leaned his weight on the edge of the table as he said it, pressing both arms flat and looking into Terlucci’s eyes. ‘You were having a pop at him or something.’

  ‘Pop? What is pop?’

  ‘Pop.’ Webb leaned and brushed the Italian’s jaw with his knuckles. ‘Either that or sharper,’ he said.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Webb sat back again. ‘What was going on in here, Luca, what was happening?’

  Terlucci seemed to consider then, perhaps thinking that if he did get out and back to Italy he had nothing really to lose. He pressed his lips down at the corners and made a gesture, lifting both palms to the ceiling. ‘He is a bad man, this Storm Crow. He kill a lot of people in Roma. My country.’ He poked himself in the chest.

  ‘You had words with him about this?’

  ‘Not so much. He speak to me. He like to laugh at me, at the misfortune of my country. He talk about Roma. The Pope. It was St Peter’s Square where it happen.’

  Webb nodded. ‘What did you do about it?’

  ‘I speak with him, of course. I say not to be so foolish as he is being. This is a small place. There are English here and Italian.’

  ‘And Irish,’ Briggs put in.

  ‘Yes, but the Irish they don’t care. England is bombed by the Storm Crow. Italy is bombed also.’

  ‘What’re you telling us, Luca?’

  ‘Nothing. I just speak with him. “Take a little more respect, Mr Storm Crow.”’ He wagged his finger from side to side.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, he don’t care, does he. He is the Storm Crow. He threatens me, my wife, my children. He know where we live. He know where we say Mass, where the children go to classes. He know everything about me.’

  Webb was silent. ‘You have visitors in here, Luca?’

  ‘Of course. I have big family.’ Again, the Italian touched himself on the chest. ‘They love me.’

  ‘Do you talk about the visits?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘When they’re gone, do you talk about the visits?’ Webb shook his head at him. ‘Come on, Luca, all you Italians love to talk. Boese probably listened to you. You got photographs of your children?’

  ‘Of course. Lots in my cell.’

  ‘At church, school, home?’ Webb pushed himself back from the table. ‘It’s not difficult to frighten someone if you really want to. You should know that, Luca.’ He paused for a moment then. ‘Who did Boese get on with?’

  ‘Get on with?’ Terlucci looked puzzled.

  ‘Like. Who did he like?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Pool?’ Webb glanced through the glass partition to the cloth-covered table. ‘Did he play pool?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Partners? Did he play partners with anyone?’

  ‘No.’ Terlucci sat forward then. ‘He play chess, a lot of chess.’

  ‘With you?’

  He snorted. ‘He don’t play nothing with me. Morgan. He play chess with Morgan all of the time.’

  They talked again to Griffiths, while Webb flicked through the log assessments that the wardens ran on each prisoner—watching his actions, behaviour, assessing how he was coping with prison life, whether or not he showed any early signs of disruption.

  ‘In many ways he was the model prisoner,’ Griffiths told them, ‘if a little strange. He used to sleep on the floor of his cell, he never once used the bed.’ Webb squinted at him. ‘He used to put the blankets on the floor and sleep there. Very strange. Never seen it before.’

  Webb was looking at the Ichthys fish on his lapel. ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘I try to talk to all of them. The Irish are the easiest in many ways.’

  ‘Well, they’ve got religion, haven’t they,’ Webb said.

  ‘Something in common.’ Griffiths coloured, but said nothing. ‘What did you talk to Boese about?’

  ‘The usual concerns. Part of my job is rehabilitation, Sergeant, especially in here.’ They looked at one another across the table.

  ‘What did Boese talk to you about?’ Webb asked him.

  ‘Not a lot. If you want to know, most of his comments were based in sarcasm. He seemed to delight in sarcasm.’

  ‘Maybe he worried you,’ Briggs put in. ‘Did he worry you?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Was he worse than anyone else in here?’

  ‘He was intelligent, Constable,’ Griffiths said. ‘The intelligent ones I can handle well enough. They’re predictable and not so given to spontaneous bouts of violence.’

  Webb was looking at Boese’s log book. ‘Tell me about Morgan,’ he said. ‘Boese seemed to play a lot of chess with him. Were they friends?’

  ‘Boese had no friends, Sergeant. He kept himself to himself.’

  ‘But your assessment says he mixed.’

  ‘He did. Pool, and the chess, obviously. He wasn’t isolated particularly, he just didn’t generate conversation with anyone. He liked the gym. He used to hang upside-down on the parallel bars. Let the blood run to his head for ages.’ Griffiths opened his eyes wide. ‘Weird man. Very weird man.’

  ‘But he played chess with Morgan. He didn’t play anyone else?’

  ‘Initially, he did. But I don’t think anyone else was good enough for him. Sergeant.’

  ‘Was Morgan good at chess?’

  ‘He beat everyone apart from Boese.’

  Webb nodded and scribbled a note on his pad. ‘I’d like to see Morgan’s assessment log,’ he said.

  Griffiths brought it, then left them alone. Together, Webb and Briggs studied the two books, looking at dates and checking to see what did or did not correspond. Morgan was serving life for murder. He had never denied it, but equally had shown no remorse. He had always been considered a threat to other prisoners, because of his capacity for violence. Eleven of his fifteen years prison time had been spent in one of the four other SSUs in the country. He had been transferred out of Barlinny, in Glasgow, after clashing with other inmates. Webb looked at his visitor record and felt excitement well in his breast.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Morgan’s only living relative is his sister. She lives in Hawick in Scotland. Family is Welsh, but moved to Scotland when they were both kids. Their father was based on the Clyde. Navy.’ He paused and rubbed his chin. ‘She visited him for the first time in almost a year, last October.’ He tapped the page with a pudgy finger. ‘Morgan had to pay for the train ticket.’ He hunched himself over the page then. ‘Bloody hell, Tania. Listen. Morgan requested the visit, said he wanted to make contact again because he could be due to come up for licensed release in another year. Record here says he was concerned that if he had no outside help, he would slip back into the old ways.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘This is the man who showed no remorse whatever for the previous fifteen years. He gets about a fiver a week in here, buys tobacco and papers and that’s it.’

  ‘What was the date of the visit?’ Briggs asked him.

  ‘The 4th.’

  Briggs ran her finger over the page. ‘On the afternoon of the 3rd, Boese played chess with him.’

  Webb looked again at Morgan’s assessment log. He discovered that after travelling down from the Scottish Borders with the payment being met by her brother, Morgan’s sister came once a month until February. They checked Boese’s activities and found that he and Morgan had a game of chess on each afternoon preceding the day of t
he visit.

  Swann leaned against the wall in the mortuary while the pathologist worked on the body of the biker. Disinfectant was thick in his nostrils, along with the other smells that were indistinct from one another—death or cleanliness or the imagined smell of death, he could never decide which. The corpse had been badly smashed in the motorcycle accident; hitting the old man’s car at something like eighty miles an hour. The police outrider had only just been able to stop himself. The chest cavity had caved in and ribs had penetrated one lung, causing it to collapse, and the victim had bled profusely from the mouth and nose. His internal organs were savaged by the impact and both legs had been wrecked, along with his right arm, which was left hanging by sinew and bloody thread in the torn sleeve of his flying suit. Swann had examined his clothing in detail: grey, one-piece flight suit, the flame-retardant type used by the military, black Hi-Tec boots, like some of the ninjas preferred in SO19, and a pair of leather, knuckle-protected, military-issue gloves.

  He looked across at the face where the pathologist was cutting into the skull, and grimaced at the sound of the electric saw. He stepped closer and studied the man’s features. The face was intact, saved by the quality of the black Shoei helmet he had been wearing. Already they had analysed the suit, helmet and silk balaclava, and found traces of firearms residue. The man had once been good-looking, with chiselled, even features, black, short-cut hair and a distinctively styled beard—again, very black, and shaped round the lips and chin and rising in two points along the jawbone. Swann was vaguely reminded of Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter. He looked for other distinguishing marks, and narrowed his eyes at a small tattoo on the man’s right ankle: ORHNEG. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

  The doctor looked at him over the lip of his paper mask and his eyes creased at the corners. ‘Blood group,’ he said. ‘O. Rhesus-negative. He’s got another one tattooed on his elbow.’ Swann bent to his knees and saw the same marking on the man’s right elbow.

  ‘Soldiers sometimes do it,’ the pathologist explained. ‘Two places is always good, in case one gets blown off in battle. Saves a heck of a lot of trouble with blood transfusions.’