Crossing The Line

by Catriona King

  Andy Angel stared at him quizzically. “What will I be doing?”

  “You’ll be working with Officer Wickes to contact all the drugs and homeless charities. We need this message out on the streets. I don’t want anyone getting hooked on Bellner’s shit. Ash, can you collate a list of every homeless charity, hostel or known place that homeless people like to frequent and give it to D.C.I. Angel, please. The drugs charities as well.”

  He turned back to his officer. “You need to get the message across to everyone about not accepting any new drugs tonight, even if they’re free. I’ll contact D.C.I. Lomax and OK Rebecca to work with you. Take some flyers as well.”

  Andy White stuck out his bottom lip. “I’m feeling neglected. Can’t I help, hey?”

  It made Craig pause in his flurry of activity to smile. “Don’t worry, I hadn’t forgotten about you. I’ll update you in a minute.” He glanced at his watch. “OK. It’s two now. Everyone, grab a quick lunch in the canteen and be ready to go by two-forty-five.”

  A loud cough and a pointed sideways glance towards the analysts from Liam stopped Craig in his tracks, and reminded him that he hadn’t asked them what, if anything, they’d found on the phone and petrol station views.

  Davy read his mind. “No problem. It can w...wait.”

  “Thanks. Sorry we’re in such a rush.”

  With that Craig beckoned John, Des, Liam and Andy White into his office and when everyone had taken a seat he spoke again.

  “John and Des, if you want to stick around then please do, it might be of interest to you, but you’ll probably have no more work to do until we find some new drugs for Des to test.”

  Neither man made to leave, John always fascinated by the machinations of the police, and Des already wondering when he would get his hands on whatever machine Bellner was using to manufacture his innovative product. The thought prompted him to speak.

  “Marc, Aidan asked me what Bellner’s machinery might look like so I did some quick research.”

  “And?”

  “Well, until he starts mass-producing he could probably run the op from one room. All he needs is his raw materials ground into a paste and in liquid form, and moulds for the gelatine and shell halves. Then a quick heat seam around the sides and he’s done.”

  One room. Could that room by any chance have been renovated in June?

  “OK, thanks, Des. Liam, your trip to Tommy shouldn’t take more than an hour, so meet me at Armed Response Command at four.”

  “Oh goody, we get to spend time with the least personable man in the PSNI.”

  Craig chuckled at the description but he couldn’t disagree with it. The ARC’s lead Commander, Bill McEwan, was the most miserable and monosyllabic man that he had ever met, prompting speculation as to whether he’d had a charisma bypass in his youth or just been born dour, in which case everyone pitied his parents. All the oochy-coochy-cooing in the world couldn’t have raised a smile from a baby like that.

  Craig turned to the other D.C.S. in the room. “Andy, depending on whether we locate Bellner elsewhere or not, we might be looking at a raid on Zenith this evening. It could get messy, so don’t feel you have to join us. You can check out any drugs that we find after the raid.”

  The Dungiven man laughed. “Ach now, get away with you. This is the best fun I’ve had in ages, hey. Before last night it’d been ages since I’d been on a proper raid, and now it could be two in as many days! You murder boys have a high old time of it, don’t you.”

  Liam felt proud and pleased at the jokily framed praise, but typically tried to bluff it off.

  “Oh, aye, there’s nothing we love more than having guns pointed at us. It wouldn’t feel like a real day at work if we didn’t get shot.”

  The D.C.S. pretended to take his words seriously. “Well, there you are then. You get to do what you enjoy and you get paid for it as well. Happy days all around, hey.”

  The scientists had been listening with widening eyes so Craig hurried to reassure them. “Don’t worry, you two won’t be anywhere near the front line.” He looked at his wall clock. “OK, time for lunch. Liam, you’d better buy a sandwich to take with you. It’s time that you got on the road.

  ****

  ARC Headquarters. 4.30 p.m.

  After suffering thirty minute of growls, one word answers and almost pitying looks from Bill McEwan, as he outlined the risks involved in their possible raid and insisted on contingency plans to mitigate each one, Craig wondered whether he mightn’t have suffered less if he’d just requisitioned the additional weapons necessary himself and cut the ARC completely out of the loop. Even risking a hole in his head from one of Bellner’s men would be preferable to the grinding ache he was developing in it from McEwan’s attitude.

  Although, to be fair, his shit tolerance was low today, courtesy of all the beer he’d downed the night before, and it was with that in mind that as soon as his not-at-all-hungover deputy appeared, late, at the door, Craig had shoved him in front of the commander and made the excuse of feeling his phone vibrating to exit to the corridor.

  The mobile hadn’t been ringing of course, it was an age-old trick to escape boring verbiage, but to reduce the possibility of getting caught out Craig made an actual call to the office and was surprised when it was Nicky who answered the phone.

  “Hello! What are you doing there?”

  The PA responded in a droll tone. “I work here, or had you forgotten?”

  “Yes, I mean no, but, are you-”

  “Sorry, no, I’m not back completely. Still only part-time, but I dropped by to get something from my desk and decided to give Alice an hour off.” Having worked through all the emotions of reunion during the brief exchange she got briskly to work. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  Craig smiled at her efficient approach and realised how much he’d missed it. Alice had settled in well, eventually, after they’d broken her of her nasty habit of trying to report every tiny misdemeanour to Human Resources, and her work was very good, but he couldn’t keep them both full-time and Nicky was the undisputed Queen of the force.

  “How’s Jonny?”

  A double beat of silence was followed by a clipped, “Fine” that said the teenager still wasn’t but that she wasn’t ready to discuss it, so he moved them on to more comfortable ground.

  “Good. Right, I actually rang to speak to Davy, so can you put me through, please.”

  He heard her sigh of relief as she did, the age-old technique of dealing with your problems by burying them under work one that he understood very well.

  The analyst lifted the phone on its first ring.

  “Davy’s IT Shack. How may I help you?”

  “Very funny. You’re actually helping already, by giving me a five minute break from the world’s least charismatic man.”

  “Liam’s not that bad.”

  As they both laughed the analyst carried on. “I’m glad you called, chief. I’ve got s...something new for you.”

  Craig raised an eyebrow. They’d only finished the briefing a few hours before; what could possibly have happened since then?

  “Fire ahead.”

  “OK, w...well, the search of Jerome Tomelty’s house has just produced a burner phone and its number matches the most frequently called one on Derek Smyth’s SIM. Either Smyth or Pojello called Tomelty several times.”

  “That would make sense if he was their partner, although they couldn’t have had much of a conversation in five seconds. That’s how long you said the calls lasted, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I’ve s...sorted that as well. I’m pretty sure the calls were just a signal for Tomelty to check something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Davy was eager to tell him. “OK, so you remember the URLs we found on the SIM? Most of them turned out to be porn sites they’d accessed from the phone, but there w...was one that we had a problem opening.”

  “I hope you didn’t look.”

  “At what?”

  Cra
ig’s next line was delivered dead-pan. “At the porn sites. You’re only young, and Maggie will have my guts for garters.”

  The almost thirty-year-old analyst laughed. “I kept one eye closed, I promise. Anyway, this problem URL. Every time we tried to find out what it linked to it dead-ended on an inactive website.”

  “As in one where the domain is for sale?”

  “Not so much. More like one where the owner built the s...site and paid for it to be hosted on a server, but chose not to publish it. Or else they did publish but then deactivated it again.”

  Craig was pretty good on IT but he was starting to get confused. The analyst sensed it and cut to the chase.

  “The website was created by someone but they didn’t maintain it as live. Except that we’ve managed to find some occasions when it was activated.”

  The penny dropped.

  “So you’re saying the site’s creator only made it live for brief periods, presumably when they wanted someone else to view something there. Someone called Jerome Tomelty. Those five second calls were his signal to go and look at the website.”

  “Bingo! Anyway, I contacted Mahon and asked the governor to let me speak to the prison IT tutor. Long story short, we found a w...website that Filip Pojello had been working on in his computer class-”

  Craig gasped. “Good God!”

  “That’s pretty much what I s...said. It was bloody clever of Pojello, and Smyth too I suppose. Pojello created the website offline in his class, saved it and paid the dues, or got a family member to, then, every time they wanted to pass a message to Tomelty, Pojello embedded the message on the website and activated it on the host server. Then he or Smyth s...signalled Tomelty with a five second call to access it on his internet and read what was written there. But the website was only kept live for a few minutes each time so the three of them had probably agreed the approximate time of everything in the message before. It’s brilliant, but I should have realised what was happening ages ago.”

  Craig was sceptical. “How could you have?”

  “Because all the five second calls w...were made late at night and I didn’t spot it. That meant they had to have been up to something that required the cover of darkness.”

  Craig wasn’t having it. “There’s no way I’m having you beat yourself up, Davy. We all saw that list of calls and none of us noticed the times.”

  The analyst carried on in a grateful tone. “OK, so after Tomelty checked the w...website one of them must have erased whatever was written there, because Ash and I have both checked and there’s nothing to s...see now. I’ll send the site down to IT to see if they can retrieve the deleted text, but that’ll take a while. And after each message they must have deactivated the website again to avoid detection by anyone at the prison.”

  Craig had to admit that he was impressed by the dead men’s ingenuity, but that quickly changed to wondering about the logistics.

  “The computer room has no internet connection so-”

  “They broke into the admin suite at night. Yes, I thought of that and checked the log on the governor’s computer. It shows that someone accessed it at night a lot from S...September onwards, so the security in the admin s...suite must be pretty lax. The access times coincide almost exactly with the five second calls to Tomelty and there’s been nothing at all since Smyth’s death when you seized the SIM.”

  “Pojello was in for burglary so I imagine breaking into the admin suite was easy for him, but how the hell did he get out of his cell?”

  Davy’s sigh said he wasn’t going to believe the answer. “The prison’s a pilot site for a new approach to imprisonment. They’re running a trial of giving trustee prisoners the keys to their own cells-”

  Craig almost choked. “Royston never mentioned they were doing it at Mahon!”

  “Yes, well, I called the Law Department and apparently it’s happening at Maghaberry and Magilligan as well.”

  “And as Pojello was a library trustee...”

  “He w...was one of the first prisoners put on the trial.”

  Someone at Mahon’s head was going to roll.

  “The governor’s going to have some serious accounting to do to the DoL.”

  Davy didn’t comment, just went on with his report. “The messages they put on the w...website must have been pretty long or they could have just s...sent them to Tomelty by text, but there was only one text ever sent from that SIM. I checked with the provider and they sent me the transcript.”

  Craig’s heart sank. “What did it say?”

  “‘Five on Tuesday afternoon.’ That was it. It was s...sent about three weeks ago and then deleted.”

  “Check Tomelty’s phone and see if it’s on there.”

  “OK, but why did Pojello and Smyth send him a text when they’d always used the website and five second calls before? And why did Tomelty act on it when he’d never had a text from them before?”

  “He acted on it because it came from their phone number and people are lazy and sometimes stupid, but the text wasn’t sent by them, it was sent by Jimmy Morris, because he didn’t have access to the website. He must have got hold of Derek Smyth’s SIM and used it to send a text to Tomelty to arrange a drop. Then Bellner or McCrae made sure that what Tomelty sent in was the poisoned tabs instead of normal ones. Mainly so Morris could kill Smyth and Pojello, but my bet is it was also so they got Tomelty’s prints on the bag. They must have been planning ahead to blackmail him to hand over his drug imports from the docks.”

  Davy nodded to himself. “That w...works. OK, so, there are still those two other numbers on the SIM that we haven’t managed to trace.”

  Craig had a sudden thought. “They could be contraband phones in other prisons. They’re having problems with drug dealing inside prisons all over the north. Can you locate them next time they go live?”

  “I can set up traces. So you’re thinking Smyth, Pojello and Tomelty were s...supplying other prison dealers too?”

  Craig hadn’t thought that far ahead but it was a bloody good idea, especially considering the volume of drugs that they’d seized at the docks the night before; Jerome Tomelty could only have smuggled a small portion of it into Mahon each time and he would have been hard pushed to deal the remaining quantity on the street by himself.

  “Remind me to pursue that, Davy. But just getting back to the website messages, my feeling is they probably contained details of drug quantities, timings etcetera. Maybe even a plan of the drains. Did you ever find out what those documents on the SIM were?”

  The analyst gave an embarrassed cough. “Sorry, chief. They wiped themselves while we were trying to crack the password. They must have had them rigged to do it after a few failed attempts.”

  “Ah well, probably just the same stuff, or some ‘poor me’ prisoner crap.” He had another thought. “Any sign of the drone at Tomelty’s place?”

  “Yes. They found it in the garden shed. He didn’t even have the w...wit to get rid of it after your visit last night. Mind you, I’m not sure I would have. It was a DJI Mavic Air, a lovely piece of kit. I’m not surprised Tomelty didn’t dispose of it, it must have cost him the guts of a thousand pounds.”

  “It’ll cost him his freedom too.”

  The caustic comment made the analyst laugh.

  “Yep. There were some drugs at Tomelty’s house as w...well. Doctor Marsham went back to the lab to test them, but he called to say that none were combos. Just straight drugs.”

  If there was such a thing.

  “OK. Excellent work, Davy. You and Ash can have Christmas off.”

  It was a well-worn police joke.

  “Gee, thanks. There’s one more thing before you go, chief. Bellner and his known associates are nowhere to be found.”

  Craig gave a heavy sigh. “He has to be at Zenith. Keep an eye on the local cameras please and let me know if he leaves.”

  He turned to look back at the room that he’d left minutes before, starting to feel guilty for leaving Liam to ta
lk at Bill McEwan alone.

  “OK, good work. I’d better get on now. Liam and I will be back in about an hour.”

  He clicked off the phone and braced himself to re-enter the drab office and get into the risk planning for real.

  ****

  Warehouse Lane. The Cathedral Quarter. 6 p.m.

  When Craig would think about that evening’s events afterwards he’d realise that they had been inevitable; on the cards, if you’ll excuse the pun, since the day a year before when Hugh Bellner had been taken from a smoky poker den in Smithfield on suspicion of several murders and interviewed in one of High Street’s sterile rooms. The Lithuanian hadn’t been guilty of those murders, but as soon as the detective had encountered the man he’d sensed the darkness in him, and known that this was someone that he would have to face again. When? became the only question, not the charge; Hugh Bellner was going to murder somebody someday, without a doubt.

  So now here they were, with the charge not just drug dealing and two murders, but as of ten minutes before, three. Derek Smyth’s and Filip Pojello’s tortured ends had been joined by one even more brutal; a young woman whose only crime had been to hear or see something that she’d been willing to share with the police.

  As he thought about it Craig scanned his surroundings aimlessly, trying to make sense of the world. His gaze fell on a corner of the armoured Pangolin he was inside, where two of his D.C.I.s were donning bullet-proofed vests and priming their guns and the third, his deputy, was peering through a viewing slit at the street outside.

  The D.C.S. fixed on Andy Angel, whose red and swollen eyes spoke of a haunted man; as well he might be after finding the now dead, young informant lying in a pool of her own blood.

  After a moment’s empathy, all he could allow himself and keep his focus, Craig turned to his deputy, who was now whistling quietly to himself as he slid his gun into its holster beneath his arm. The sight cheered him up immediately and he shuffled across the floor of the vehicle to the D.C.I. and spoke in a lowered voice.