Roberts had abandoned his coffee and was halfway through McGee’s water. “This unlikely pair are somehow related team. No idea how, but that’s the word on the street. Remember their faces. If we spot them, follow them, see them with anyone, and I mean anyone, even me, grab a photograph. And watch your backs. Jack, David and I had a run in at Highgate cemetery yesterday, which I know you will have all heard about. I was the bravest, with Jack spending half the time either concussed or up to his nuts in dead people. But during his unexpected excavation he found this.”
He held up the piece of soiled envelope, which peered out at them from behind the plastic exhibit bag.
‘You can have the information in exchange for Farin Mala’Ika. There is a padlock on Westminster Bridge. Find it and you will find what you are looking for. Leave him there for us. No questions. No answers. No stupid games. One chance, Jack.’
“So, we are up against a team of potentially equal guile. We’ll defeat them in the good look’s stakes and hopefully the equipment and training. But as you can see, they want the old boy badly. But a decision has been made on high. No team that works out of Scotland Yard will ever be threatened or blackmailed or bullied. We set the standard and we enforce it. And we will be doing all of the above. Besides, they are assuming they can just tie him to a chair and beat a confession out of the poor old bastard. He’d last two minutes.”
Roberts was aware that the room had gone quieter than before, then he turned to his left and saw why. He cleared his throat, then spoke again.
“Team, somewhat unexpectedly, I would like to introduce you to the man himself, Lieutenant Commander Tom Denby. It’s a pleasure to have you here in our operations room.” It was a less than subtle remark, aimed at Daniel, who stood alongside Denby and Hewett.
“Thank you, young man. It’s ex-Lieutenant Commander. I appreciate your briefing and for the record I’d last a good ten minutes.” Then he smiled, and the room joined in and listened.
“You see, I fought in the war, was hunted by U-boats, torpedoed, twice, I think I may have even been captured in Africa once, I can’t recall, but what I can remember is why I told Jack my story. I’ve got a few weeks left they reckon and in that time I want to put some wrongs right.” He looked around the room. They all looked so young, just as he had when he had first sailed north towards the Arctic.
“Now, has anyone got any questions for me?”
“What was it like being torpedoed?” asked a youthful constable from the back of the room.
Daniel interrupted. “Gents, ladies, it’s already been a long morning, we need to get Tom to a place where he can rest.”
They all took the hint.
“I also need someone to empty my bag. Any takers?” Denby smiled that schoolboy smile again. A little boy staring out through adult eyes that had seen so much, some of which he could never forget; dementia or not, they were etched into his mind like the shape of a light bulb that continually glares back at its unsuspecting new owner.
McGee stood up. “Come on Tom, I’ll do it as this lot are obviously afraid. There’s nothing to it. I’ve done it plenty of times.” She hadn’t, but she was that sort of person.
Cade nodded. ‘Thank you.’
As she escorted him to a nearby toilet, the team went quiet once more.
“Right, that dear old man there holds the keys to the sweetie tin, or is it cookie jar, whatever it is, he holds them. If he talks to you, talk back, if he asks for a cup of tea, with twelve sugars, stirred six times in reverse and two forward whilst singing Flower of Scotland, do it. If he asks you to empty his bag of highly pungent piss…ask DS McGee.”
There was a mumbled cheer as McGee re-entered the briefing, rubbing sanitiser into her hands.
“What? What did I miss?”
“Nothing DS McGee. Nothing at all. Right, go and hunt and be back here tomorrow at zero nine, no make that zero eight hundred. Team, every second counts. Kate, how are you getting on with the padlock stuff?”
“Slow and steady, guv. You got time to take me for a coffee so I can appraise you?”
His head said no. He looked quickly at McGee, whose face said ‘Avoid at all cost – boss.’
“Yes, that would be lovely Katie. Let me just fetch my coat.”
Across the city Dex Hodgkinson was at work once more, sifting through the paperwork, looking at the overnight unfortunates that had arrived for his examination. There were no new African females so that was a box he didn’t need to tick today.
He called out to the office. “You in yet Jacqui?”
Jacqui Clarke was always in. She never went home and never claimed a penny in overtime. There was dedication, then there was Clarke.
Dex walked over to the office, passing a rack with three bodies inside, all victims of one thing or another.
He saw the note.
‘Dex. I need to take a few days off. Sorry. Long story. I’ll explain when I return. JC x.’
He read it twice. Turned it over then placed it back on the desk. This was the first leave she had ever taken other the statutory ones, and she often worked those.
Clarke had no significant other in her life, and that was that. Perhaps she’d found a man at last?
“And about bloody time too!” He smiled and munched his way through a cold meat pie as he dialled a colleague to see if he could lend a hand; even the dead were impatient when it came to wanting answers.
In Knightsbridge, Jacqueline Clarke slipped back between the Egyptian cotton. She loved how cool it felt. She was definitely a cool pillow girl. It meant something; she’d read about it once.
She loved the feel of the chilled material on her skin. It had been an incredible night. Beyond her wildest dreams, and she had some wild ones, deeply attractive, real, so much so that she often woke in a start.
She had only ever heard of such activities.
Three people? In the same bed?
They looked so incredibly masculine, their dark brown skin against the purest white of the cotton and her own milky skin. The one on her right was good-looking, muscular, but the one on her left was younger, beautiful almost – she had loved how his skin shone, what she could see of it beneath the edges of the blindfold.
It was all touch. And sound. For her anyway.
They had front row seats as they laid her on the California king, her head just off the edge of the bed, all designed to add to the thrill.
They both had exquisite scars that she had traced her hands over the night before. She could almost read them, where they were from, from the softest of touches; braille by another name.
What a night. And a night which for purely technical reasons she decided had only ended that morning. Accuracy was everything.
How they kept going was beyond her, but they did and she had only complained once, but they didn’t listen, and she loved every moment of it.
She looked around the overly large bedroom. It had happened, hadn’t it? The room was immaculate. Last night it had been an unrestricted mess.
There was a light knock on the door.
“Just a minute.” She got out of bed and found a white robe, caught a glimpse of herself in the free-standing mirror.
Nice hips, lovely legs, flat tummy – was how she described herself.
To others that knew her she was Jacqueline Clarke, forensic scientist, prude, Shy Little Lady.
Well, not anymore.
It was good to be a part of a new team. Subject Matter Expert indeed.
And now she knew why Doto smiled a lot.
“Hello and good morning. Did you have a pleasant night last night?” Doto asked her guest. It was rhetorical, but both women knew it required an answer.
“Er yes, thank you, it was…pleasant. Yes. Very pleasant. And you?”
“Just a quiet one in my room, watching a film.”
“Oh lovely, what was it about?”
“A beautiful white woman, who fantasises about sleeping with black men.”
Clarke looked away. �
�I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”
“Pop over to my room anytime, I’ve kept the recording. It’s incredible, so very real, with such familiar faces, and the woman in it is so happy to do anything that the men ask her to. So happy. She wears a blindfold, but you would know that smile and that discreet dolphin tattoo on her ankle anywhere.”
Spider. Web.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London
Cade held the door for O’Shea.
“Whilst Jason does his best to screw up his marriage with Kate over a chocolate sprinkled cappuccino, I thought we could ask around here, see how far we get before we get thrown out… Game for a laugh?”
“You’re serious aren’t you Jack?”
“Never been more so. After you, follow my lead.”
His hair had got just slightly greyer since the Eastern European operation, stress JD called it, but it somehow made the blue of his eyes, bluer. And women loved blue-eyed men, and those that didn’t loved the ones with brown eyes. Whereas women looked for other qualities in a man. Eyes, yes, but sometimes it was the subtle hints and characteristics. That he cared. That he still felt it was acceptable to open a door for a woman and stand there long enough to let a male walk through too.
Classic dark blue suit, white shirt, lilac tie, matching pocket square, Oxford brogues. It was one of Cade’s favourite ways of walking into a building like this, with its tradition, its somewhat staid, slightly stuffy air and occasionally stuffier people.
O’Shea wore a serious grey business suit over a pale blue blouse. Black court shoes, a heel just high enough to accentuate her lower legs. She had long ago fallen out of love with stuffy and posed and traditional, favouring instead light and positive and now and then a swathe of orange, for no other reason than the designer felt like it.
There was none of that here. This was government, personified.
“Good morning. Jack Cade. I’m with the Operation Orion team at Scotland Yard.” He flashed his ID and slid it back into his wallet. “This is our crime analyst, Carrie O’Shea. We are here to see Captain Susan Reddington.” He smiled and started to fill out the visitors’ book before being asked.
The receptionist stared back, moved some stationery around the desk, pressed a few buttons on her keyboard, then spoke.
“Erm Mr. Cade, I’m sorry, but there appears to be something of a problem. I’m not really sure how to explain. I’ll get my supervisor.”
Cade looked at O’Shea, raised his eyebrows playfully.
“We have them on their back foot, we should strike now. You take the stairs, I’ll take the lift!”
“Ever the bloody gentlemen Cade!” She smiled back, wanting to playfully punch him on the arm but aware that a building like this watched the cameras that watched the visitors that watched them back.
A stark looking man appeared. Dowdy blue pinstripe, a white shirt, slightly grey around the collar and a wristwatch worth more than his quarterly salary. It didn’t add up. Neither did these two police people arriving at his place of work asking questions about Reddington.
“Good morning, Mr.?” He asked, hand outstretched, more confident than his suit.
“Cade. And this is Carrie O’Shea. And you are?”
“Ted Gainsborough.”
“From?” Cade knew he was pushing his luck, but when in Rome.
“From the Ministry of Defence Mr. Cade. Right here where we stand, in fact, within these most hallowed of halls.” Touché.
“Forty-Love. You beat me with your stunning cross-court volley, deep into my side of the court and almost unplayable…” Cade smiled, held Gainsborough’s hand a little longer.
“I could just ask you to leave Mr. Cade. You know, game, set and match to me and all that. But something tells me this is about to become a rally. Right, my serve. Why are you here and importantly, why are you asking for Captain Reddington?” Straight for the jugular.
“Can we talk somewhere quieter?” They walked in silence to one of a few places that were set up for visitors. Gainsborough stopped.
“Actually, do you mind if we take this outside? Fancy a walk?”
It threw Cade, yet equally he felt it was somehow Forty-Thirty, and he hadn’t even tried.
“We’d love to,” replied O’Shea, buttoning up her jacket before they got out into the much cooler air.
They walked along the embankment. There were the usual hardy joggers, the rush hour traffic and a solitary male in a white and blue kayak, powering his way downstream, to where, God only knew.
“What do you know about Red?” Gainsborough was swift, trying to catch them out.
“I know that right now you are not just protecting her because she’s a defence intelligence liaison officer. There’s something else, and trust me…Ted, I will get to the bottom of it. That is my job.”
“And mine is arranging for highly trained people to kill others Jack. So let’s cut to the chase, shall we? I’ll give you one shot, and that’s all. If I don’t like it I’m gone. And please, don’t try to stop me.”
Gainsborough had an air about him. As cool as the breeze that drifted in off the Thames, chilling everything it met.
“I, or rather the Orion team feel she has got herself involved in something dangerous, that she’s somehow connected to her grandfather’s death and also, and bear with me on this, the growing number of young African women who are turning up dead on the streets of this city. Is that offering you some clarity?”
“It is, and equally it isn’t. What you are telling me is that Red is potentially guilty of murder? Of African women? Can you prove it?”
“Probably.”
“All seems a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”
“About as far-fetched as her grandfather accidentally falling to his death off that bridge.” Cade nodded down river.
He stared through Cade. “What’s the worst that would happen if she was involved?”
“Manslaughter at the worst I reckon, but yes, she’s in an invidious position, Ted.”
“What if I told you, completely off the record and as deniable as Elvis being alive and well and living in Memphis…what if I told you she has a get out of jail free card?”
Cade paused, walked a few paces more, then stopped.
“Then I’d say I’d like to see that and that we need to walk a bit further and discuss why she has the monopoly on such things. Coffee?”
He pointed to a stall alongside the river. The smell was almost too hard to ignore, and the small queue told Cade that the coffee was good.
“Why not? Your shout? I’m guessing your budget is greater than mine.”
Cade ordered the drinks, leaving O’Shea to try to work her magic.
She pulled her jacket a little tighter, pushing her cleavage up slightly. He spotted it. She spotted him looking.
“Tell me, how long have you been working for the police, Carrie?”
“More years than I care to remember. How about you?”
“Twenty. This month. I joined as a boy soldier, worked my way up the ranks then ended up at Defence HQ – never really looked back.” He clicked his fingers. “Twenty years.”
“Time flies when you are having fun.”
“Does it ever. Look, I won’t mess with your head. You seem like good people. Is Jack a good boss?” He asked bluntly. She knew he was gathering intelligence all the time. A worker bee by any other name.
“The best. Saved my life a few times. Long stories, but let’s just say when he sinks his teeth into something, he rarely lets go until he gets what he’s after. He’s had more close shaves than a Turkish barber’s razor.” The army officer laughed. She’d disarmed him.
“Has he ever got you?” Gainsborough smiled at her. It was equally beguiling. He was a very attractive man, in an understated way. Grey suit, greying hair, grey eyes. He was physically fit and exuded confidence. Difficult to age. And he met her head on with body chemistry signals that were hard to fake. She liked it a lo
t. But then felt awkward when Cade returned with three hot drinks.
“There you go. I’m guessing you two have solved the world’s problems and we are on a better footing than we were ten minutes ago?”
The army officer looked at O’Shea. It was a minutely detailed look that said, ‘I want to see you again.’
She struggled not to return it.
“We have Jack, Colonel Gainsborough has agreed to allow me to accompany him back to the office and continue this chat. He feels that it might be better with just one of us there. Away from walls that might have ears…” She narrowed her eyes very slightly. Cade had seen it before. Trust me on this.
“Agreed.” His decision was as swift as any Gainsborough had made that chilled morning. He took a sip of the coffee. “Thanks Colonel – you should have introduced yourself by rank, I would have been more respectful. Over to you, but have her back before midnight or all hell will break out and I don’t have enough in my budget to replace a glass slipper.”
The two men shook hands firmly.
Cade gave her a sideways glance. Confident that she knew what she was doing, but after last time, afraid to let her out of his sight.
At the Orion briefing room, the Execution element of the plan was falling into place.
“Team. We are good to go in one hour. By my watch, that will be eleven hundred hours. Any questions?”
“First round at the Sanctuary if we are successful guv?”
“It would be rude not to, wouldn’t it, Del? And yes, I accept your kind offer.”
There was a small cheer as the detective sergeant realised he’d walked into a self-made trap.
“Touché boss. See you later.”
The team kitted up and moved out.
Chapter Forty
Cade’s phone began to buzz. He checked the screen. O’Shea.
“Go.”
“Our man’s given up more than I might have imagined.”
“He wants to sleep with you in return?”
The Angel of Whitehall Page 34
