The Detective Jake Tanner Organised Crime Thriller Series Books 1-3 (DC Jake Tanner Crime Thriller Series Boxsets)

by Jack Probyn

  ‘And what about me? I’ve been the one to throw open your investigation the most – why haven’t you killed me? Why haven’t you tried to silence me like you did the others? Or have you finally come to do it now?’

  Liam shook his head and, to Jake’s surprise, lowered the weapon.

  ‘It’s complicated. I tried to get you out of this. In truth, I never wanted you to become involved in any of it. You’re too young. Too naïve. You have too much promise; the rest of your career ahead of you. A family. None of us had that. And I didn’t want you to ruin your life by following the same path as we did. In the long run, it wasn’t worth it. It still isn’t.’

  ‘How can you say that when you’ve just planted evidence against me and told my wife I’ve been having an affair?’

  ‘I don’t want to kill you, Jake – only ruin your life like you’ve done mine. There are people I know in certain places who could have got the drugs and the money and the affair off your record and wiped it clean. They would have transferred you to another department in a different borough, perhaps, but you would have been allowed to stay in the Met. You would have been free of it all, up to point – so long as you said nothing and kept your mouth shut about everything you knew. It just meant you would be forced to live your life, and the rest of your career, in constant fear and paranoia. In fact, you still will, regardless. Now your name’s become a target, The Cabal’ll come for you and insist on making your life hell. If you let me go, then I might be able to protect you. But if you arrest me now, there’s nothing I can do for you.’

  Jake opened his mouth but he couldn’t think of what to say.

  ‘If you get rid of me, Jake…’ Liam continued. ‘If you get me off the team, I’m not gonna be there to defend and protect you. Remember that. They’re ruthless, Jake – they don’t care who you are, who you care about, who you love. It’s a business, with each cog working as part of the machine, and at the end of the day, businesses can’t have weak cogs, Jake. They simply can’t.’

  ‘Who is it, Liam? Who is The Cabal? You must know. Tell me and I can help you.’

  ‘Like you’ve managed to help Bridger? Like you’ve managed to help Danika?’

  Jake’s expression dropped.

  ‘Yeah,’ Liam continued, ‘I know about your conversations with them. I’ve got recordings of all the calls with them both, two more bent cops who you’ve dealt with closely in the past couple of years – just in case I needed more ammunition to add to the blackmail. And how is it going – getting them out of this corruption we’re all a part of?’

  ‘It’s… I… What’ll happen to them? They told me everything. They told me that you’re always watching them, always listening, always following. They’re frightened for their lives. When is it going to end for them?’

  ‘Now,’ Liam said bluntly, taking Jake aback. ‘It’s already ended. In more ways than one. They’ve served their purpose.’

  Jake’s mouth opened as he realised something. ‘You killed them?’

  Liam chose to ignore the question. ‘Bridger is out of the equation for reasons you can’t understand, I can’t understand, nobody can understand. The Cabal needs Bridger. But the same doesn’t apply to Danika. I can’t guarantee she’s safe. She was just a small cog, serving an important purpose. But now she’s a dirty cog, messed up, someone who knows too much. Last time I checked, she was making new friends with Molly and Charlie, and some other friends called Jack. She’s ruining her life at the end of the bottle, and it won’t be long until she opens her filthy little mouth. But without me watching her, with me out of the picture, anything could happen to her. It could go two ways: she either tops herself, or she gets dragged back into this world as a dirty cog, which she will always be. And we know what happens to dirty cogs…’

  ‘I can stop that from happening.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? It’s all just paper houses. It’s all part of the master plan. Everything’s been calculated for. Including you.’

  As soon as Liam finished, a sound erupted from behind him, followed by two armed officers clad in black vest jackets storming into the utility room.

  ‘Armed police! Put your hands in the air!’

  Liam flinched and, in that moment, dropped the gun to the floor. Before he had any time to react, it was too late. The armed officers were on him in a flash, throwing him to the floor and pinning him there, their knees resting on his back.

  ‘Clear!’ one of them cried as he finished placing handcuffs over Liam’s wrists.

  Next to appear in the utility room was Charlotte. She was also wearing a protective vest wrapped around her body.

  ‘Jake, are you all right?’ she asked, hurrying over to him. She stepped aside as the two armed officers carried Liam out of the house.

  ‘I’m fine. Fine. I’m fine.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get you out of here.’

  Jake turned to the kitchen door and pointed. ‘Drew… what about Drew?’

  ‘We’ll get forensics in.’

  Jake’s body was in a state of shock. His muscles wouldn’t move, and he didn’t know where to look or what to think. Everything he’d just been told scared him – petrified him, even. And there wasn’t enough time for him to process it all.

  ‘Where are we going now?’ Jake asked absently, aware of the narrow patio ahead of him.

  ‘Back to work.’

  CHAPTER 94

  LAUNDRY

  ‘Where are we going?’ Jake asked as he and Charlotte drove past Bow Green. It was the first time he’d spoken since entering the car. Out of choice, he’d remained quiet. He knew she had a barrage of questions that she wanted to ask him, and he knew they were necessary for the investigation, but he just needed time and quiet to allow his mind to process everything.

  ‘My HQ.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Time for you to meet the rest of the team.’

  Before he knew it, Charlotte pulled off the road and into an underground car park, somewhere in the north end of London. The air down there was chilly, much colder than the air outside, and as he climbed out of the car, his body shivered. Charlotte led him to a staircase, where they climbed four flights of stairs and eventually entered into an office space. The sign on the wall told him that it had recently been let. The inside of the office was almost a carbon copy of MIT. There was an enclosed room to the right where the briefing room usually was, another smaller room on the left which would have been home to Liam’s office, and the bulk of the floor space was occupied by nearly a dozen desks and computers, at least two personnel manning each.

  ‘What is this place?’ Jake asked as he scanned the surroundings, taking it all in. The men and women were dressed smartly, folders and tablets they held in their hands. The muted conversations. The furious typing. The distant sound of telephones ringing. For a moment he thought he’d entered into an alternate reality.

  ‘Welcome to the home of Operation Jackknife…’ Charlotte said as she strolled round the office.

  Jake felt obliged to follow her.

  ‘There are about fifty people working on this case right now. Everything they’ve been working on is here. Everything you’ve already given them. Everything we’ve managed to find ourselves.’

  ‘But what about the call logs back at Bow Green?’

  ‘They’re in the car. I packed them already.’

  ‘And Liam?’

  ‘Headed towards Wembley police station. Think he’s requested Rupert Haversham’s services, but the solicitor’s refused. We’ve got our investigators down there now working on him. They’ve taken control of the entirety of MIT. Nobody’s allowed to do anything else until we say they can.’

  ‘Like CIB back in the day.’

  ‘Only better,’ Charlotte replied.

  And then a thought popped into his head. Rather, an image.

  ‘The money,’ he said to her.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Money. There’s some in my drawer. Twenty grand. Ten
from Drew, ten from Liam. They planted it there to make it look like I was bent. Just in case some of your guys find anything.’

  Charlotte shot him a disapproving look that suggested she didn’t believe it had been planted there, but in the end, she ceded, thanked him and told him that she would pass the message on. It was better to get it out in the open now rather than explain himself later. If only he’d done the same with certain aspects of his marriage. Directing his mind away from that, he took stock of what was happening around him, in awe of it all. At last, he felt proud of what he’d done. All these people were working on something he’d brought to their attention, working on something that wasn’t completely preposterous and inconceivable.

  This was all down to him.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you and I need to have a chat.’ Charlotte gestured for him to sit at a desk in the centre of the room that was in almost the exact same position as his desk in Bow Green. He wasn’t sure whether it had been designed that way to inspire some sort of familiarity, or whether it was just fortuitous, but he liked it nonetheless.

  As soon as they sat down, Charlotte’s expression turned to resolve. ‘What did Liam tell you, Jake? Did he confess? Did he kill Drew? Danny? Michael? Richard?’

  ‘Only Drew. The killers of the rest of them are still out there. The people working with Nigel Clayton. The woman I saw in the ditch, and a man called Georgiy.’

  ‘Did Liam say anything about him?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘Nothing. I just know his name’s Georgiy.’

  ‘Did he say anything else about who Georgiy might be working for, or with? Anything at all?’

  ‘I wish he had. I didn’t have enough time to get it out of him.’

  ‘Rather that than he put a bullet in you though, eh?’ Charlotte said with a smirk. Despite the severity of the situation, she still managed to find some humour in it all.

  Jake tried but struggled.

  Over her shoulder, a fresh-faced detective, dressed in a newly pressed designer-looking suit with not a hair out of place, approached Charlotte. He looked no older than nineteen, twenty at a push, yet he had the confidence of a detective who’d been in the service twenty years.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, handing her a set of folders.

  Charlotte took them from him and removed the elastic band wrapped around it. ‘Fancy giving me the TL-DR version?’

  The young detective stood to attention, as though he’d had some form of military past. ‘Certainly, ma’am. We’ve been unable to locate the black van that was used at Danny’s and Michael Cipriano’s murders.’

  At the mention of the van, Jake’s brow furrowed. ‘Did you use the plates I gave you?’

  The detective nodded. ‘They were fake, as expected. Nothing’s being picked up on CCTV either. But we’ve arrested the owner of Tyred Out Mechanics. Turns out he’s been wanted for fraud for a long time. We suspect he’s the one who made the number plates in the first place.’

  Makes sense, Jake thought. It explained why the hooded woman had forced him to put the plates on; he was supplying them.

  ‘What about Clayton’s missing vehicle?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘No luck there either,’ the young officer said.

  ‘Have you got any good news for me?’

  The young man gave her a thumbs up. ‘Memory stick, ma’am. It was found on Nigel Clayton’s body when they lifted him out of the car wreckage.’

  ‘And?’ Jake asked.

  ‘We’re going through it now.’

  Jake leapt out of his seat and followed the detective to another desk in the far corner of the room, with Charlotte in tow. The occupant of the desk was introduced as Steve – a man whose fuzzy black hair and sideburns looked like a badger’s, and whose slightly bulging stomach belied the rest of his body, which suggested he was physically fit.

  Jake and Charlotte joined the young detective behind Steve and watched his movements on the screen.

  ‘It’s packed with documents,’ Steve said, his eyes moving rapidly across the screen.

  ‘Any viruses?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘Checked it twice. Clean. Only glitchy thing on there was a corrupted file. Other than that, we’re free as a bird.’

  Steve clicked the mouse and moved deeper into the USB memory stick. A list of seven folders appeared. Jake scanned the first two, and then his eyes fell on the bottom folder. Written in capital letters was: insurance package.

  ‘That one.’ Jake pointed at it. ‘That’s the one we want.’

  Steve did as instructed. Inside the folder was a series of documents. Photographs. Microsoft Word files. Excel. PDFs. But most importantly – and the one that stuck out to Jake – there was an MP4 video file sitting at the bottom. After following Jake’s instruction again, Steve played the video, raising the volume on the computer.

  Immediately, Nigel Clayton’s face occupied the screen. He was holding a phone or a video camera to his bedraggled, unkempt face and speaking into it.

  ‘My name is Nigel Clayton,’ he said, starting his monologue. ‘But, chances are, if you’ve found this then you already know that. Depending on who you are, I’d imagine something bad has happened to me. Or, if it hasn’t already, then it probably will. For a long time, I’ve been working with a group of Russian and Eastern European contract killers. Their names will be infamous and well known to any in law enforcement tasked with finding them. Not least the most influential in this group, the leader, who calls himself The Farmer. Real name, Georgiy Ivanov. The man’s a narcissist, professional and there’s no target too big.

  ‘Next on the list we have Vitaly “The Lion” Antonov, but nobody calls him that. Big brute of a man. Dopey, young, learning the ropes with Georgiy at the helm. Only a matter of time until they either join forces permanently or go their separate ways, either amicably or not.

  ‘And then, finally, we have Tatiana. Tatiana Malkovich. Honestly… I don’t know what she’s here for. She brings nothing to the table, but she’s good with her feet and good with her tongue. I’m sure she’s managed to wriggle herself out of a handful of difficult situations with Georgiy in the past. There’s got to be some reason why she’s still here.’

  Nigel paused a second and stared into the camera lens. It was like he was looking right at Jake, blaming him for his death.

  ‘The rest of the information you need on any of these individuals is in these files. Do with them what you will, but if you try to delete them, I have copies. And copies of copies. And so on.

  ‘I’m making this because I fear for my life. For the past few years, I’ve been the group’s accountant, helping them launder money into the economy via a series of successful businesses. But things have escalated. They’ve started asking me to join them on their contracts. I have no idea what I’m doing; I’m just an accountant. This isn’t what I signed up for. And now I’m afraid that, if I leave, they’ll kill me. I know too much. I’ve seen too much. I’m a problem for them. And I don’t want that. So if anything does happen to me, I want this to be found, so that they can be caught. The truth will out.’

  The video stopped, and Jake, Charlotte, Steve and the young detective with them were stunned into silence. And then a flurry of activity broke out. Charlotte leapt out of her chair and started to bark orders around the office, Steve removed the memory stick and hurried to the head of the room, the young detective disappeared down a corridor and dived into another room. Meanwhile, Jake sat there, devoid of any thought, staring at the black screen that had, moments ago, held Nigel Clayton’s face. Jake didn’t know why he couldn’t move. Perhaps it was the shock of it. Perhaps it was the excitement that they finally had a lead. Or perhaps it was the realisation that he had been right all this time; Nigel had been a cog in The Cabal’s machine, along with The Farmer and the others.

  In the end, he determined it was all of them.

  ‘I want all the information we have on each of these three individuals ASAP!’ Charlotte ordered the officers
scurrying around her. She was standing at the head of the office. There were windows either side of her, but immediately behind her was a projector screen, with Steve setting up the projector in front of her. The beam of light shone on half her face. ‘I want somebody to check the rest of the files and let me know what’s in them.’

  Within minutes, it was done. The projector had been set up and was now showing the list of folders on the screen. Officers were around their desks, scanning through the information in the memory stick’s files, absorbing it. And Jake watched in awe at the efficiency of it all.

  ‘This must be what it’s like in a well-oiled team,’ Jake said to her as she hurried across to him.

  ‘One of my teams,’ she said, placing a hand on his forearm. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get to experience what that’s like soon enough.’

  Just as Jake opened his mouth to respond, a voice cried from the other side of the office.

  ‘Ma’am,’ a female officer with short, vibrant red hair shouted. ‘In here it says they’ve got three hideouts.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘One for each kill.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A nightclub. A mobile phone shop. And a launderette.’

  ‘In that order?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the addresses?’

  ‘All on this document.’

  ‘Bring it up,’ she said, and a second later, it was displayed on the projector.

  Jake and Charlotte moved to the middle of the room, focusing their eyes on the pixelated text in front of them.

  The nightclub. They’d had no idea about that. But they did the mobile phone shop – they’d been there the previous night and there had been no sign of The Farmer or his associates. But at least they were on the right track.

  In that order… one, two, three in total… Danny… Richard… Michael…

  ‘They’re in the launderette,’ Jake said aloud.

  ‘We’ll deploy tactical firearms units to the locations now.’

  Charlotte moved across the room and grabbed a set of car keys. As she hurried back to Jake, she called to someone in the office to email the street addresses to her pronto.