But I’m innocent, Jude reminded himself. How many of his fellow inmates could genuinely vow and declare that they’d been purely a victim of circumstance, just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? He seemed to make a habit of that, he reflected bitterly. Like the time he’d just happened to get a crewman job on an African container ship that just happened to get itself hijacked by pirates.
And as he walked around the next corner, Jude suddenly discovered that he’d blundered into the same situation yet again: because he’d just happened to turn into a passageway in which he found himself alone with none other than the hulking figure of Luan Copja, the Albanian crime boss.
For once, the most dangerous man in Bullingdon seemed to be without his gang of cutthroat bodyguards. Jude swallowed nervously and paused in his step, trying not to think of eyeballs and red-hot skewers. He’d been in the presence of some pretty nasty characters before now – the Congolese warlord General Jean-Pierre Khosa might just about rival the likes of Luan Copja for nastiness – and in general they weren’t his favourite company. Was the correct prison etiquette to walk on by without acknowledging the man, or to offer some gesture of deference? Copja was lumbering along in the other direction, moving slowly like a great ponderous bear and paying Jude as much attention as if he’d been a flea crawling on the ground, so Jude decided to do the same. They passed by one another without a word.
And then the brief encounter would have been over, and Jude and the crime boss would have gone their separate ways. But that wasn’t how it played out.
Wrong place, wrong time.
In the next instant, a third man appeared in the corridor, emerging from the head of a metal stairway. He was lean and bald and sunken-cheeked, with tattoos lacing both sides of his neck. He wasn’t looking at Jude, but Jude saw the way the bald man was staring at Copja. The Albanian didn’t seem to notice him, and kept on slowly up the passageway. The bald man stalked after him, face tense, his body language full of intent, pace quickening step on step. Something appeared in his right fist. Something long, dull and pointed.
It was a shank.
As the scene unfolded as though in slow motion right before his eyes, Jude could see what was about to take place. He’d thought prison hit jobs only happened in movies, but this was real and a man was about to die.
He was under no illusion that the intended victim was any kind of angel. Copja more than certainly had it coming, many times over. But something in Jude’s nature just couldn’t allow him to stand by and let this happen in front of him. He ran after the bald man and yelled, ‘Hey! You! Stop!’
The Albanian jumped like a bull jolted by a cattle prod, and whirled around. The bald man hesitated in his step and glanced back at Jude with his teeth bared in rage. Nobody else was about. For a second Jude, Luan Copja and his attacker just froze, locked in a three-way standoff. Copja could have made a break for it, but there was little chance he could outrun his leaner, faster assailant. He seemed calm. Watching the knifeman. Watching Jude. A thread of a smile on his lips, a wily, knowing expression in his eyes.
‘Turn around and walk away, my friend, and you get to live through this day. Or else you will see what will happen to you, hey?’ Copja’s voice was deep and his accent was thick.
The knifeman’s eyes were darting as he quickly worked out his best move. He looked to Jude like a serious and highly motivated thug who wasn’t about to be deterred from carrying out his business. Jude thought he was probably getting well paid for it, and faced harsh consequences if he failed. Which meant that by intervening in this private murder attempt and becoming the only thing standing between the hunter and his bounty, Jude had just put himself on the line.
Still, Jude couldn’t back down. It just wasn’t in him. Call it genetics. Call it what you like. Pure foolhardy stupidity, perhaps. Jude said, ‘You heard the man. Come on, you don’t want to hurt anybody.’
‘Back off, arsehole,’ the bald guy snarled. ‘Unless you want some of this too, do you?’
‘Seriously. You need to drop that thing and walk away right now,’ Jude warned him.
‘Or what? You gonna take it from me?’
Jude could see the hard hate and desperation flashing in the guy’s eyes, and knew he was going to make a lunge at him.
When Jude had gone through his phase of wanting to enlist in the Navy and train to join up with the Special Boat Service, he’d spent some time learning some principles of combat from Jeff Dekker at Le Val. Jeff had showed him some pretty neat tricks. One of those that Jude had mastered quite well during those sessions was a way of disarming someone coming at you with a bladed weapon. He’d practised it quite a bit, although he and Jeff had only ever done it with a plastic training knife. If this maniac made a slash at him, it would be the first time Jude had faced a confrontation with the real thing, and his knees suddenly turned to water at the thought.
‘Expect to get cut,’ Jeff had warned him. ‘Even the best of the best will avoid getting into a tangle with a live blade, if there’s any way out.’
But right now, Jude didn’t have any way out.
And then his worst fear came true, because the guy did come at him.
The knifeman wanted Jude out of the way as fast and efficiently as possible, so that he could turn his attentions to his main target and get the hell away before guards turned up. He clutched the shank in an underhand grip, held it high and rushed at Jude trying to punch the blade downwards into his upper chest or throat. There was a lot of inherent power in that movement, using the full tension of the back and triceps muscles to drive the weapon down hard and fast. But Jude had tactics and leverage on his side. Jeff’s training flashing through his mind, he deflected the arm clutching the knife and twisted it sideways while pushing the guy’s elbow in the opposite direction as it came driving down under its own momentum. The move put breaking strain on the knifeman’s shoulder joint and he contorted his body in a bid to reduce the pressure. But Jude followed it through smoothly until the guy was being cranked over sideways in screaming agony, losing his balance and totally unable to prevent it from happening.
As Jeff Dekker had taught him, ‘If you can get it to that point, it’s game over for the bugger.’ And it was. As the pain shredded his nerve endings his fingers involuntarily lost their grip on the handle of the shank. The weapon tumbled to the floor, followed shortly thereafter by its owner. To Jude’s amazement and no small relief, the disarming move had worked perfectly.
The bald guy was struggling and thrashing on the floor. Jude still had a grip on his arm. What to do now? Stamp on his head or something? Jude was unwilling to hurt him too much, but it was like having a tiger by the tail. Before Jude had time to decide either way, he heard rushing steps and voices coming up behind, and spun around fully expecting to be rushed by a squad of prison guards.
He was wrong. Three of Luan Copja’s henchmen, the same ones he’d seen clustered around their boss in the mess hall, now arrived on the scene to take charge. One of them motioned to Jude to let go of the bald guy’s arm. They swarmed around the body on the floor, piling in a furious barrage of kicks and stamps. The bald guy was curled up in a foetal position, trying to protect his face, but in seconds the blood was streaming. Then two of them backed off to attend to their boss while the third threw himself on top of their victim, something in his hand, his arm pumping rapidly. Shtick-shtick-shtick-shtick; a high-pitched scream; more blood appearing.
Jude was numb, but before he could react someone yelled ‘Guard!’ The two henchmen with Copja hustled him quickly towards the head of the stairwell. The third one jumped up from the now inert body of the bald guy, grabbed Jude’s arm in a pincer grip and said in his heavy accent, ‘We must run.’ There was blood on his face.
Luan Copja growled ‘Wait!’ His henchmen hesitated, darting anxious glances up the passageway where racing footsteps and raised voices were getting closer every second. Copja stepped over to Jude and placed a hand like a crushing hydraulic press on his
shoulder. ‘Little man, you have saved my life. Thank you,’ Copja rumbled, looking Jude earnestly in the eyes.
‘We must go!’
The guards were coming. The pair of men hustled Copja down the stairs. The third led Jude the other way along the passage. ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ A siren had begun to blare. Legs pounding. Heart racing. Tingling with adrenalin and shock. Jude’s escort dragged him around a corner and pressed him up against a wall. ‘You are a good boy. You say nothing to no one about this. Okay?’
‘O-okay,’ was all Jude could say. Then Copja’s henchman was gone, vanished like smoke.
Jude hurried back to his cell, where Big Dave was reading a magazine on his bunk. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Jude said, somehow collecting himself.
‘What’s going on out there?’
‘I don’t know. Think there was a fight. I didn’t see anything.’
Big Dave peered at him over the top of the magazine. ‘Sure you’re okay?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be? Nothing to do with me.’
‘Never said it was, did I?’
Jude clambered up to the relative privacy of the top bunk to close his eyes and let his heart rate settle. He felt sick to his stomach. And something told him this business wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 25
It was a UPS delivery driver who found the gunshot body of Emily Bowman’s grounds manager in the yard of the big house in Boars Hill just after four o’clock that afternoon and called the police. When the officers arrived on the scene, they made the grisly discoveries of three more corpses inside the house and a fifth elsewhere in the grounds. In response to the bloodbath, Thames Valley rolled out an armed response SWAT team, and soon the property was cordoned off and resembling a war zone swarming with troops, while a helicopter thudded back and forth overhead. The usual show of force that the cowboys liked to put on when the actual threat was long since gone.
In the midst of the mayhem, Tom McAllister’s black Barracuda was waved through the cordon and rumbled into the yard to join the fleet of marked patrol cars and armed response vehicles, ambulances and coroner’s vans already there. A forensic tent had been set up around the body out front. They were still in the process of bagging up the housekeeper’s corpse in the front hallway as McAllister walked in. ‘Thins’ Waller, head of Forensics, was taking a momentary break from the slaughterhouse and had just got off the phone to his wife to say he was going to be working late.
‘Jesus wept, I’ve seen some godawful bloody messes, but never anything quite like this,’ Waller muttered, shaking his head.
‘What’ve we got?’
‘Two unidentified shooters and about a million spent rounds of forty-calibre ammunition. Mrs Bowman copped one in the shoulder, one in the back and one in the back of the head. Execution style. This was a professional hit, make no mistake.’
‘Until someone hit the hitters,’ McAllister said.
Waller nodded. ‘Looks that way. Or a couple of them, at any rate. One’s got his guts blown out with a shotgun, the other’s been stabbed, drowned and beaten half to death. Looks like a bloody battlefield out back.’
‘So there’s another shooter still at large,’ McAllister said. ‘A third player, with a different agenda. Except he turned up here too late to stop them.’
‘These people have been dead since this morning. Long enough for your mystery shooter to be a thousand miles away by now. I don’t envy you, McAllister.’
‘Thanks. I was hoping you might have some brilliant ideas to share with me.’
‘That’s your department,’ Waller said sourly. ‘My job’s to gather evidence, not to have brilliant ideas. And I’ve got enough work on here to keep me busy for weeks. I’m getting too damn old for this crap.’
‘Aye, you’re not the only one. Yowch.’ McAllister winced and pressed his hand against his right cheek.
‘Toothache?’ Waller said, knowingly.
‘Just a twinge. Started last night.’
‘Now I envy you even less, Detective Inspector.’
As McAllister threaded his way through the house, a coroner’s team passed him on the stairs, carrying Emily Bowman’s body on a covered gurney. Anger rose inside him, thinking about her 999 distress call after seeing the black Mercedes. If that fool Forbes had allowed him to post a patrol car outside the house, none of this might have happened.
There were a lot of loose jigsaw pieces floating around in McAllister’s mind right now, but only two questions stood out. Who had reason to kill Emily Bowman? And who turned up to take down the killers?
He was pondering the first question, absently tonguing his tender tooth and hoping it wouldn’t get any worse, when his phone buzzed.
‘Hi, Sweetie.’ There was only one person in the world who would ever call him Sweetie with anything approaching sincerity, and that was Detective Sergeant Billie Flowers. Billie sang bluesy, soulful jazz in clubs when she wasn’t working nights, and had a voice to match. Right now she was still at HQ and McAllister had set her to work going through Emily Bowman’s recent phone records.
‘Anything?’
‘Not a lot,’ she admitted. ‘Except that the last call she made was to a prepaid mobile account. No way we can trace the owner’s identity.’
‘Got the number?’
Billie read it off. McAllister grabbed a biro and wrote it on the back of his hand. The number looked vaguely familiar to him.
‘That’s all for now,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll call you back when I’ve cracked the case.’
He was putting the phone away when it rang again. ‘Christ, can a man get no frigging … This is McAllister.’
‘I expect to be kept updated, Detective Inspector.’ The unlovely tones of Superintendent Forbes rattling his eardrum.
‘I just got here. Sir.’
‘Have you put a trace out on all black Mercedes in the area?’ Forbsie demanded. Can you believe this frigging eedjit, McAllister thought. He felt like replying, ‘I thought that was all in her imagination.’ Instead he answered truthfully, ‘Yes, we have, and nothing unusual or suspicious has come back.’
‘Then I suggest you widen the net, McAllister. Obviously I have to do your job for you, seeing as you clearly have no ideas of your own.’
Stay calm. Stay calm. ‘I do have one, sir,’ McAllister said. ‘I think we need to consider the implications for the Arundel case, don’t you?’
‘Implications?’
‘You don’t think this puts a different light on things? The fact that Carter Duggan’s employer has now been murdered too, while the original suspect was locked up in Bullingdon?’
Forbsie huffed. ‘That’s for the court to decide. I don’t see the connection myself. There could be all kinds of reasons. Arundel could have had an accomplice, for example. Makes sense to me,’ he added, already warming to his own on-the-spot unsubstantiated hypothesis.
‘Hold on, I’m losing the signal,’ McAllister lied, cupping the handset with his hand to muffle himself. ‘Go … f— … y—’ He ended the call in disgust, thinking that next time he saw Forbsie he should wring his scrawny neck and be done with it. Or maybe not.
He spent another while touring the crime scene, taking the details in for himself while pondering the second question that had been in his mind. The first was still impossible to answer for the moment, but solving the burning issue of who had caught up with Emily Bowman’s killers might not be such a hard one. He looked at the prepaid, untraceable mobile phone number he’d written on the back of his hand, the last call she had made, and realised where he’d seen the number before. It was Ben Hope’s.
‘You might have Forbes hanging over you watching every move, but I don’t,’ Hope had said to him last night.
To which McAllister had replied, ‘As long as you behave yourself, then I can’t stop you.’
But now McAllister was getting worried that he might not be able to stop Hope, whether he behaved himself or not.
Chapter 26
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nbsp; It was approaching nine o’clock that evening by the time Ben arrived in the seaside resort of Hunstanton. Though it was situated on England’s east coast, the town itself faced west across the broad estuary of the Wash, and the sun had just finished setting over the sea as Ben parked the car. The Man O’War pub was a traditional low-slung inn not far from Hunstanton’s famous striped sedimentary cliffs.
A cool westerly breeze was blowing inshore. He zipped up his leather jacket and walked inside the pub. The nautical theme – ship’s bells and wheels and naval art all over the walls – added to the old-world ambience of low ancient beams made from ship’s timbers, rough-clad walls and tiny windows. The place was fairly busy and filled with laughter, music and the smell of fried food wafting over from the little restaurant section in one corner. Ben’s mouth watered, because he’d still eaten nothing since breakfast. He had a strong hankering for some liquid refreshment, too, but as he was here on duty – albeit fraudulently – it might not be appropriate to walk up to the bar and order a big plate of food and a double scotch.
A portly, cheerful middle-aged barman and a younger woman with red hair in a ponytail were enjoying a break in between serving drinks and laughing over a joke as Ben approached. The barman smiled at him and said, ‘What’ll it be, mate?’
Ben swallowed back the last bit of temptation, took out his wallet and flashed Tom McAllister’s warrant card, holding it out in such a way that his thumb masked most of the ID photograph and letting the guy see it just long enough for him to register the big red POLICE OFFICER lettering. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Tom McAllister, Thames Valley Police,’ he declared, as though he’d been saying it for half his life. In fact this wasn’t by any means the first time that he’d impersonated a police officer, so he was used to adopting the role. It certainly made the job of getting people’s cooperation far easier, without having to point a gun at them. Much more civilised. The bar staff’s reaction to the warrant card was the predictable mix of surprise, unease and deference to authority. If either of them thought that this slightly tousled, unshaven blond-haired stranger in leather jacket and jeans was an unlikely sort of Detective Chief Inspector, they didn’t show it.
The Pandemic Plot Page 16
