by Jack Probyn
‘I suppose people need hobbies, don’t they?’ Drew rubbed his nose and snorted.
‘Yes, and what’s yours?’ Garrison raised his eyebrows and glanced at Drew’s nose. It looked a little redder than usual. Was that a nostril caving in?
‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ Drew replied. ‘Jake’s found a link between Maddison and Cipriano. Now it’s our turn to do what we’re good at.’
Perfect. Come to Daddy, Garrison thought. He was like a Venus flytrap, lying dormant, waiting for its prey to fly straight into its mouth. And Drew had done just that.
Garrison smirked. ‘I’ve got the perfect idea. Listen up, and listen good. Here’s what I want you to do…’
CHAPTER 29
THC-27
Drew was grateful for the little kick of ecstasy he’d taken in the bathroom – his second of the day – before leaving the office. It was much needed. It had given him a gentle boost right in the sweet spot.
Skipping down the stairs two at a time, he felt the blood surge through his body. At the foot of the building, he exited Bow Green and made a left turn. The station was positioned on the corner of a main road, and opposite was a row of small, independent businesses. One of them, an off-licence called Prime Time News, was a place he frequented on lunch and coffee breaks. The owner always gave them a discount on fizzy drinks and snacks. Drew had joked that it was because he was an illegal and he was afraid they’d use their contacts in the Home Office to get him deported. But there was no substance to it. Drew saw it as a fair trade-off; they were keeping him safe out there in the big wide world, and he was returning the favour in kind by making sure they were well fed and hydrated enough to do it.
‘Afternoon, mate,’ Drew said as he approached the cash register.
‘Ah, Detective! It is good to see you! You are looking very well. What can I get you today?’
‘Nothing from here, mate. I need something else. You still having that extension put in out back?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘You got any bags of cement, or any large blocks of concrete I could take? I need it for an investigation.’
The proprietor hesitated before responding. ‘Erm… I will have to just check. I will only be a moment. Please wait there.’
‘Perfect, mate. Nice one. Anything you’ve got’ll help!’
The shop owner disappeared through a door, travelled along a narrow corridor and then out of the shop. As he waited, Drew tapped his finger on the cash desk. His head darted from left to right, admiring the variety of sweets in front of him. And then his eyes fell on the wall of tobacco and alcohol. His mouth became dry and he licked his lips. He needed a smoke, but—
The shop owner returned, distracting Drew from his thoughts. In his hand, he held a small chunk of concrete, four inches long and two inches wide in the shape of a dagger. Drew’s face lit up at the sight of it. He placed his hand in his pocket, pulled out an evidence bag and ordered the shop owner to place the concrete inside the bag.
‘My hero,’ Drew said, sealing the bag shut. ‘Don’t you go changing.’
He left, raced across the road and skipped up the steps into Bow Green. One piece of the puzzle down, one to go. At the back of the station, in a separate annexe, was the evidence building, where the SOCOs and crime scene managers were tasked with collating and submitting evidence for forensic analysis. The place was a fortress that required key card access.
It was times like this that he was grateful for the second hit.
Standing before him was a set of revolving doors. Bloody things always invoked fear inside him. Ever since he was a child. What if they stopped midway through and he got trapped inside one? Irrational fears – no matter how crazy and absurd – were always heightened by drugs.
Eventually, and what felt like a thousand steps later, he fell out of the revolving doors and into the main lobby. In front of him was a set of double doors, and to his right was a reception desk.
‘Can I help you?’ a balding man asked. He was perched all high and mighty on his office chair, peering over the top of his computer monitor.
‘How’s it going?’ Drew asked, feeling slightly gutted it wasn’t a woman working behind there.
Each to their own.
‘How can I help you?’
‘I’ve got a meeting with Sandy.’
The crime scene manager.
‘You want me to tell her you’re here?’
‘It’s cool. Just buzz me through and I’ll find her. I know where she is.’
The man’s brow furrowed in a look that he’d obviously mastered through years of shooting it at untrustworthy-looking people.
‘You got your warrant card?’
Drew nodded and flashed it at him, keeping his index finger over his name as much as possible.
The desk jockey seemed content. ‘Sign in as well, if you wouldn’t mind.’
A wry smile grew on Drew’s face. He took the pen from the surface and scribbled Jake’s name, forging his signature along with it. Then he made his way through the double doors, thanking the man as he left.
The corridor he entered was a world away from the ones he was used to in Bow Green. Modern, contemporary. Everything about the wall fixtures, flooring and ceiling told him that the department had a much bigger budget than MIT, that much he was certain of. It reminded him of the science labs from his school years – white, sterile, bright lights overhead, large worktops visible through windows, row upon row of evidence shelves and a storage unit at the back of the room.
Feeling like a defiant adolescent, Drew wandered to the end of the corridor. He soon spotted the room he needed.
The only problem now was how to get into it. Beside every door handle in the corridor was a key card scanner. Find the key card, find the evidence, make the switch. But whose? The building was empty. In the minute that he’d been standing there, he’d heard nothing – not even the sound of movement, chatter, laughter, or someone dropping a mug in the kitchen somewhere. It was eerily silent.
And then he had an idea.
Sandy. The crime scene manager. The reason he was supposedly here.
Her office was on the second floor, on the other side of the building. He strode across the linoleum floor, feigning confidence, attempting to make it look like he had every right to be there, while in his mind he formulated a cover story, hoping he wouldn’t need to use it.
Sandy’s door was made from wood; a small, rectangular hole, filled with glass, allowed Drew to peer through. His cheek hovered millimetres from the glass, his eyes scanning what he could see of the room. On the right-hand side was a chair, on the left was a shelf with filing cabinets beneath it and immediately in front of him was Sandy, sitting at her desk with her back to him, working on a laptop with a set of files beside her. A coffee cup rested on them, stains running down the side of the mug. She was plugged into a set of headphones, the sound echoing to Drew on the other side of the door. Heavy. Lots of thrashing. Drums. Symbols. Screaming. Metal.
As his eyes moved about the room, he found her lanyard resting on the corner of her desk.
Bingo.
Drew tried the door carefully, holding his breath. Much to his surprise, it opened.
He was in.
Keeping one foot on the door to hold it open, he reached across the room and lifted her lanyard. He clutched it tightly in his hands, beads of sweat forming in the small of his back and on his forehead, then pulled the door to gently. As soon as it was closed, he hurried down the corridor, into the stairwell and down the steps, the adrenaline levels in his blood reaching new highs. At the bottom of the stairs, he snapped his head left and right. Empty still. He paused for a second, and then made his way towards the evidence room.
Before him, in the centre of the room, was a row of shelving units, like the ones he’d seen in Costco. Evidence bags from the various cases that the SOCO team were working on dangled from thick metal poles which ran across the length of the units. At the end of each one was the case number
.
Drew wandered the length of the shelves, searching for Danny’s.
HC/08921/D.
He found it and began to forage for a piece of evidence that had been lifted from the scene. A piece of cement. A piece of concrete. Anything that he would be able to switch with the sample he’d taken from the shop.
He thumbed through the evidence bags until he stumbled across what he was looking for.
Evidence number THC-27. The letters were the initials of the staff member who’d bagged it up, while the number corresponded to the number in the evidence list. This small piece of concrete that had been extracted from the crime scene was the twenty-seventh exhibit. In the top corner of the bag was a label that signified the evidence had been examined.
Lovely.
He placed the bag on the shelving unit, removed the one he had in his pocket and switched the stickers over. Returning the fake sample to the shelf, he pocketed the original and rearranged everything so that it was back to the way he’d found it. Breathing a sigh of relief, he made his way out of the evidence room, past the desk jockey and out of the lab.
Mission complete.
Now all he needed to do was plant the evidence.
But, as he headed back towards MIT, he realised that wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t do. He wanted another piece of evidence. Something that would incriminate Richard Maddison for something else and make sure he went down for a really long time.
Before he headed to his car, Drew made a detour to his computer, grabbed his USB flash drive and started transferring files onto it.
Richard Maddison had no idea what he would be coming home to.
CHAPTER 30
FOR THE BUSINESS
‘Where are you?’ Garrison asked into the phone. He was sitting inside his car, with the keys still in the ignition.
‘I’m walking up to it now.’
‘Where? I don’t see—’
Garrison swallowed his words. A figure came into view in the distance, with one hand pressed against his head and the other in the pocket of his gilet. Dressed in jeans and a forest-green jumper, the man looked like he’d just stepped off a farm. He strode with purpose and Garrison watched him wander up to the café they’d agreed to meet at.
‘I’ll be there in a minute. Find a table. I’ll have a coffee. You’re buying.’
Garrison brushed himself down and pulled the collar of his trench coat above his ears. With his hands in his pockets, he started towards the café. By the time he entered, there was a coffee already on the table for him. There was one other couple sitting in the far corner of the café. After a quick – and in his experience accurate – assessment, he didn’t deem them as a risk.
‘All right, Phil,’ Garrison gestured to the man behind the counter with a nod.
‘All right, Pete, how’s it going,’ the owner replied.
Garrison didn’t respond. Instead, he focused his attention on the man at the table. He was small and well built, with short, jet-black hair and a shaggy beard. A set of stitches graced his chin, and another graze decorated his cheek. But what surprised Garrison the most was that he wore the countenance of a man who had nothing to worry about, when, in actual fact, Garrison knew he should be more worried than he was letting on. The man’s name was Isaac, and he’d been chosen very early on in the process.
‘Pete!’ Isaac said, rising out of his chair and shaking Garrison’s hand. The man’s handshake was how Garrison remembered it: firm, like he’d been wanking too much.
‘Good to see you.’
They both sat, and Garrison took a sip of his coffee.
‘It’s good to see you,’ Isaac repeated, shuffling forward on his seat. He sat hunched, and his shoulders looked like separate heads growing from his back. ‘I’m glad you called. I’ve been shitting myself after the other night.’
‘You don’t look it,’ Garrison remarked and glanced down at the man’s Rolex, which sparkled in the light. ‘You been treating yourself with the money already?’
Isaac looked at his wrist. ‘Hey, you know what they say: if you’ve got nothing to hide, then act like it.’
Nobody’s ever said that. Now he remembered why he didn’t like Isaac. The man was full of shit. But to save face and lure Isaac into a false sense of security, Garrison chuckled, while the other part of him didn’t want to dignify Isaac’s comment with a response.
‘This is the first time someone’s made contact with me,’ Isaac continued.
‘What did you think was going to happen? We were going to come round to your house, make sure you were OK, give you a cuddle? What did I say when I briefed you?’
Isaac hesitated as he searched his memory. ‘That I had to sit tight?’
‘Yes. And what else?’
‘That… that…’
Now and then the whooshing sound of a car passing the front of the café could be heard.
Garrison sighed. ‘I told you if I needed to speak with you, then there was an issue.’
Isaac’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s wrong? I did everything you told me. I told my bosses nothing. I told them I was ambushed in the middle of the street by a group of thugs. I’ve had the IPCC hounding me about this ever since. Naturally, I’ve told them nothing.’ He pointed to the stitches on his chin. ‘I even told them that Danny’s abductors did this to me.’
‘You sure they don’t suspect you of anything?’
Isaac nodded.
‘Good. But that’s not the issue I’m talking about.’
‘Then what?’
‘We might need to use you for something.’ Garrison was deadpan as he spoke. He supposed that, in another life, he could have been a successful businessman sitting in the boardroom dishing out P45s. Perhaps even a politician.
‘You what?’
‘We’re going to use you for evidence.’
‘What evidence?’
‘We need you to take the fall. There’s this guy we’re pinning the murder on. So far we’ve got some evidence stacked against him. But he’s supposed to be a one-man team.’
‘Right…’
‘So it begs the question: how did a one-man band manage to break Danny Cipriano out of his high-security detail on the same night that he was being transported to a new location?’
‘He… he…’
‘Don’t stumble, Isaac. I’ll give you some time to work it out.’ Garrison was enjoying this. He finished his coffee and set the mug on the table.
Isaac’s face contorted as he considered what Garrison had told him. Garrison lost his patience.
‘I’ll put it simply for you, Isaac. It would be incredibly difficult – but not impossible – for one person to stop your security van in the middle of transit, break in, and then make off with Danny Cipriano, exactly the same way that The Farmer and his team actually did. He would have needed inside help.’
‘He could have done it on his own…’
Garrison shook his head. ‘I said it was incredibly difficult but not impossible. And that’s cutting it too fine for us. In our business, we don’t like those kind of margins.’
Garrison leant forward. ‘So what I want to happen is: you and Richard were working together, he propositioned you with a large sum of money – the same sum of money we gave you to let The Farmer take Danny – which you accepted. And now you’re going to take the other large sum of money we’re going to give you for agreeing to this.’
Isaac slammed his fist on the table, startling nobody.
‘I could go to prison… I could lose my job…’
‘How’s your love life, Isaac? Going well? From a quick check of your social media accounts, it looks like your missus just left you. I haven’t seen her face appear in any photos recently.’
‘You don’t even know how to use social media.’
‘I know enough,’ Garrison snapped. He didn’t take kindly to being offended. ‘And when was the last time you spoke to your mum?’
‘She’s…’ Isaac swallowed, turned his head away. ‘She�
�s in hospital.’
‘Tragic,’ Garrison replied. ‘Didn’t you say that’s what you were going to use the money for?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Except the watch, of course. But at least now she’ll have double the charitable donation. Is she going to live?’
Isaac bounced his leg up and down, shaking the rest of his body. ‘Maybe. Doctors don’t know for certain.’
‘Well, I hope she does. But you might want to consider using the money for yourself then, when you get out.’
‘You—’
Garrison shot him down with a wave of his hand. ‘I haven’t finished yet. As I was saying, would you say it’s fair that you’ve not really got anyone? Under these circumstances, your mum doesn’t count.’
Isaac didn’t respond. A tear formed in his left eye and he wiped it away with his thumb. Garrison watched the man’s movements, remorseless.
‘No? Nobody that relies on you? Well then. Makes perfect sense. Y’see, this is a business, Isaac. And you’re a product of that business. And sometimes products go bad, so we have to get rid of them for the good of the company – for the good of the business. Otherwise, the rest of the company suffers as a result. It’s nothing personal; I hope you understand that. But you knew the risks when you signed up to this. What happens next is on you.’
‘You can’t!’ Isaac protested. ‘You said nothing would happen to me.’
‘And I wasn’t lying. Nothing’s happened yet. I just need to know you’re aware of what might happen to you next.’
‘I don’t want to.’
Garrison chuckled. ‘Funny. Because I don’t remember mentioning you had any say in the matter. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just need to prepare yourself. You’ve got us working on the case, so chances are we might not even need you. And if you can prove worthwhile in the meantime, then that can only add to your case.’
Garrison hesitated for a moment while an idea blossomed in his head, like a flower in spring. He wasn’t finished playing with Isaac’s emotions just yet.
