by Alex Carver
He would have preferred to have the ransom paid in pounds, as would Crash, but the research he had done while planning the kidnapping had made it clear that three million pounds in English notes was far too bulky – something nearly always ignored by films and TV shows, was how bulky money was, it was both heavy and took up a lot of space. It was just as impractical, his research had revealed, to request the untraceable bearer bonds that films liked to feature as an alternative to hard currency; while such bonds were undeniably easier to hide, transport and deposit, without the bearer being tracked by the authorities – hence the name – they weren’t easy to come by. Requesting bonds would have delayed everything, and given the police more time to track them down, and time, he knew, was their biggest enemy.
Fortunately, it didn’t really matter to Jim how the ransom was paid, as long as it was paid; he wanted his half of the ransom because he could do with the money, but there was a much bigger reward coming his way as a result of Alice’s kidnapping. He would have to wait to get his reward, because it was likely to be some time before the final step in the plan he had come up with produced the result he was after, but he could be patient.
He waited until Keating and his escort had disappeared around the corner, only then did he leave his vantage point. The first thing he did was avail himself of the coffee shop’s facilities, after that he left, reaching into his pocket for his phone. “Crash, it’s Jim,” he said when his call was answered.
“What’s up?” Crash wanted to know. He hoped the answer was nothing, because he was looking forward to becoming a millionaire - he already had plans in place for quitting Britain for somewhere with a better climate, where the pound would stretch nicely and allow him a comfortable life.
“Nothing,” Jim assured his partner. “I just thought you’d like to know the money’s been collected; I just watched him walk out of the bank with it in a briefcase. I’ll let you know if anything changes during the day, but right now it’s all good on my end. Is everything ready on yours?”
“Yeah, no problems here,” Crash said confidently, though the moment he was off the phone he turned to Lewis. “Your gadget gonna work?” he demanded of the man who had been brought on board for his technical expertise.
Lewis stifled the sigh of frustration the question provoked in him and nodded. “Yes, it’s going to work, as I’ve already told you several times over the last couple of days.” He crossed to his bag, which was in the corner of the room, from it he took out a small black box with a switch and a light on one side. He put the simple device on the coffee table in front of his partner. “Turn it on, and whatever tracking devices the police have in with the money will be blocked. As long as you have that with you, and you’re out of sight of the police, they won’t have a clue where you are; remember, though, it’s only got an effective range of about ten feet, so keep it close.”
When he had first been told what Crash and Jim wanted of him, he had been afraid he wouldn’t be able to deliver. After being taken into their confidence, he had realised that he couldn’t tell them that he was a programmer and didn’t know much about electronics; doing so would have put his life in danger – he realised the irony of that now he knew his life had always had an expiration date as far as his partners were concerned.
Fortunately, Google, as it so often did, provided him with the answer he needed after only a quick search; equally fortunate was the fact that he managed to find instructions and diagrams that were easy for him to follow. An evening in his dining room, after a shopping expedition to purchase the required items, and he had a device that blocked all signals: radio, electronic and mobile phone, within a short range.
51
With the lift at Harper Tower still out of action – he was not surprised by that – Stone made his way slowly up the stairs towards the fifth floor, the rest of his team trailing behind him. He had two uniformed officers in the car park, and five more with him, as well as DC Reid, who had taken the injured Grey’s place – Grey was in hospital, where he was undergoing scans to be sure he had suffered no serious or permanent spinal damage.
When they reached the fifth floor, Stone divided the officers with him: Reid and two of the uniformed officers, he sent to cover the rear of the Logans’ flat. He gasped as the last of the trio bumped into him on the way past, catching him in the bruised and cracked ribs that had been strapped up during his brief visit to the hospital – the doctor who had dealt with his various injuries had been none too keen to let him leave, it had been necessary for him to sign himself out against medical advice – and had to hurriedly bite back the string of expletives that rose to his lips. The pain made him wish there was someone who could take his place, so he could go home and rest, unfortunately, there was no-one, which meant he had to soldier on.
Stone knocked on the door of the Logans’ flat when he got there; he hoped Ben was home, his arrest would not be the end of the festival robbery investigation, but it would be a significant step towards it – all that would be left was the forensics report proving that both Logan brothers had been in the car used by the robbery, and involved in the hit-and-run. They already had paperwork from the Tredegar scrapyard, showing that David Ashford was responsible for the car’s presence there, so his connection to the robbery and hit-and-run was established.
“What the hell d’you want now?” Ben asked in a frustration-filled voice when he saw who was at the door.
Stone had to admire the younger man’s cool - Ben knew he was suspected of involvement in the robbery, and that the police were actively trying to find the evidence to connect him to it, yet he showed no concern, only irritation, at the interruption of whatever he had been doing. Despite his admiration, which was muted by his knowledge of the crimes Ben Logan had committed, Stone took a measure of pleasure in ruining his day.
“Ben Logan, I am arresting you on suspicion of armed robbery, vehicular assault…”
“Ain’t you given up on this yet?” Ben wanted to know when he had heard everything he was being arrested for. “I might be on license, but that don’t give you the right to harass me like this; you’ve ain’t got no proof I were involved in anything. If you don’t leave me alone, I’m gonna sue the shit outta you.” He grinned nastily. “Yeah, I think I’ll have a word with my brief ‘bout that, I could do with the compo; what d’ya think about that?” Without waiting for an answer, he swung the door closed.
Stone reached out quickly to stop the door closing, a move he immediately regretted as pain shot through him from his strapped-up ribs, making him gasp aloud and swear. He managed to keep the door open, but it was several long moments before he could speak.
“I wouldn’t waste your time talking to your brief about a lawsuit, if I were you,” Stone said once he recovered the ability to speak. “You’d be better off talking to him about making a deal. We’ve got your friend, Mr Ashford, in custody, and we have the car,” he told Ben as he opened his mouth to speak.
Ben’s jaw dropped open and shock showed in every line of his face; how could the police have the car, he wondered, his mind a frenzied whirlwind of confused thoughts, Ash was supposed to have destroyed it. That was Ash’s part of the robbery, getting rid of the car, so the evidence was gone; the plan had been for him to take the car straight to the scrapyard where he worked and put it in the crusher, there should have been no car left for the police to find, just a relatively small cube of metal that had formerly been a car, but whose make and model were impossible to determine.
If something had gone wrong, and Ash had been unable to deal with the car, why hadn’t he said anything?
He remembered the money then, the money and the shotguns; they were in the garage at Ash’s place, hidden there deliberately so they wouldn’t be discovered by the police. If it was true that Ash was in custody, though, then the police would no doubt search his house soon, if they hadn’t already, where they would find the money and the guns – the final nails in the case against him.
In desperation,
Ben snatched the door from Stone’s grasp and slammed it shut. He quickly turned from the door and darted down the passage to the kitchen so he could try and escape – he was barefoot and dressed in just a pair of jeans, with no wallet, phone or keys, but he didn’t stop to grab anything, he didn’t want to waste the time. Besides, he figured that if he managed to get the money from Ash’s garage, he would be able to buy whatever he needed.
Stone stepped aside the moment the door was slammed in his face, and gestured for the constable with the portable ram to step forward. The first swing was badly aimed and caught the doorframe, rather than the door, the second was better, it hit the door just below the lock, and with the third the door burst open. Immediately the two unburdened constables raced inside to find Ben Logan, which didn’t prove all that difficult, he was in the kitchen in the grip of DC Reid and one of the constables with him.
“Well, Ben.” Stone permitted himself a satisfied smile when he saw the ease with which the blagger had been caught. “Should I add resisting the arrest to the list, or are you going to come quietly now?”
Two words answered that question, words that Stone could have predicted.
52
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you, sir.” Stone shifted uncomfortably in the chair he had taken in his superior’s office.
“Is there anything you need, to close out the investigation?” Collins asked, pleased by his subordinate’s success that morning, though he wasn’t quite so pleased that the success had come at the cost of a detective in the hospital, and another who should be. Because of the morning’s events, his detective’s division was short on officers, which had required him to talk to his superior to arrange for cover to fill the vacancies.
“I don’t think so,” Stone said, gritting his teeth against the pain the movement caused as he reached for the mug of coffee on the desk in front of him. “We have the car, which is in the hands of the lab boys; it’s probably going to take them a few days to finish working on it, especially with the weekend coming up. That doesn’t matter, though, because we recovered the money and the shotguns from Ashford’s garage, and I’ve been promised fingerprints by lunchtime tomorrow at the latest.”
Collins nodded as he took in what his inspector was saying while he looked him over. He saw the pain in his face, and in his movements, and wanted to tell him to go home until the doctor cleared him to return to duty, he couldn’t, though, not with the ransom drop due to take place that evening, and Stone the most senior of his officers, injured or healthy.
“Have you interviewed Logan and Ashford yet?”
Stone shook his head; another move he wished he could have avoided. “Not yet, I wanted to wait until the search of Ashford’s place was finished, and now I’m not sure there’s any point in questioning them; we might as well just remand them, and pass the case to the CPS so they can decide on charges.”
Collins was silent for a short while as he considered what Stone had said, finally he nodded in agreement. There was no point in wasting time with interviews when they had enough evidence to charge the Logans and Ashford, especially when there were more important things for them to worry about, namely the Keating case. “Is everything set for tonight?” he asked, mentally crossing his fingers. If anything went wrong there would be an unholy outcry in the media, who had been following the kidnapping closely, despite there being little in the way of facts for them to print or report on.
“As far as I know, sir,” Stone said, not entirely certain since he hadn’t been back to the Keating house since that morning. “The ransom money is at the Keatings’ house according to Stephen, and Inspector Evans should be making the necessary arrangements for tonight. I’m heading there next so I can make sure everything’s in hand. Have you been able to arrange for the officers Evans and I asked for?” He was sure, despite the injuries that had depleted the CID ranks, that enough officers, uniformed and plain-clothed, would be found for the operation that was to happen that night; no-one, least of all the DCI, wanted a lack of officers to be the reason if anything went wrong.
“I’ve spoken to Chief Inspector Vaughn and Superintendent Vaz, they’ve both agreed that you’ll have all the officers you need,” Collins told him. “I just hope everything goes as planned.”
53
Owen Keating marvelled that the price of his daughter’s freedom, perhaps even her life, could weigh so little as he carried the briefcase from his study to the library. When he got there, he pushed the troubling thought from his mind and focused on what mattered, ensuring the ransom could be tracked once it was collected by Alice’s kidnappers.
He stood to one side and watched while a small device, no bigger than a ten pence piece, was slipped into the middle of one of the stacks of money – the stack was selected at random to decrease the chances of it being found by the kidnappers if they made a cursory search of the money. Though he had been given a brief demonstration earlier in the day, he found it hard to believe that something which looked as if it should be given out in change by a cashier could help catch the people who had kidnapped his daughter.
A second tracking device, identical to the first, was hidden within the lining of the briefcase, where it was hoped it wouldn’t be found. The redundancy, Evans told Owen, was necessary in case something happened to the first - it stopped working, or it was found; as a further redundancy, the second device was set up to transmit on a different frequency. Once the two devices were hidden, Evans made a quick check on his computer to be sure both signals were being received without interference – they were.
It was Owen’s turn to be fitted out then. He tried not to let it trouble him, but he couldn’t help feeling a little abused as Sergeant Hunt, with only the briefest of apologies, untucked and unbuttoned his shirt so she could tape a small microphone to his chest. Owen worried a little about the amount of hair that was going to be pulled out when the microphone was removed, there was nothing to be done about it, however, and a few hairs, he decided, was a small price to pay for ensuring that those who had taken his daughter were caught.
Owen ruthlessly forced aside his concerns over what was to happen as he got behind the wheel of his car and set off for St George’s Park. None of them thought the handover would actually take place in the park, at least not where he had been instructed to be at eleven p.m., nonetheless he didn’t wish to be late.
He reached the park after a little over half an hour and, in obedience to the instructions received that afternoon, left his car in the car park that adjoined it. He then proceeded on foot, without looking around for the surveillance van he had been told would be parked nearby – it took a lot of willpower for him to avoid doing that – into the park so he could make for the play area that was, supposedly, the location of the exchange.
A check of his watch when he reached the play area revealed that it was still a few minutes before eleven; since that was the case he settled himself on one of the benches, the briefcase on his lap, to wait. He didn’t know what was going to happen, and that made him nervous; he drummed his fingers anxiously on top of the briefcase, while his eyes moved impatiently between the two entrances to the play park and the forlorn looking telephone that stood a short distance from where he sat.
From his position in the rear of the surveillance van, Stone watched Keating as he carried the briefcase into the park. While his eyes were focused on the millionaire, he waited for his call to be answered; it was nearly a minute before DC Reid’s voice sounded in his ear.
“Any sign of Rice?” he asked. He suspected he was wasting the young detective’s time by having him watch for the programmer at his house, especially since the ransom drop was supposed to take place any time, but he couldn’t afford to ignore any possibility.
“No, sir,” Reid answered. “I spoke to his neighbours again, and he still hasn’t been home apparently.”
Stone wasn’t surprised by that; if Lewis Rice was one of the kidnappers they were looking for, it was unlikely tha
t he would return home before the ransom had been collected, and Alice freed, if then. It was entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that Rice would take his share of the money and head out of the country as quickly as he could. It would have been better, he thought, if they had been able to come up with the slightest bit of evidence, so they could get a search warrant for Rice’s house – that lack had prevented them even getting access to Rice’s phone records, which might have proved very useful, as would his bank records.
“What about the motorcyclist he was seen leaving with on Wednesday morning?” He didn’t bother holding his breath or crossing his fingers as he asked that question; doing either would, he was sure, be a waste of time.
Reid caught himself as he was about to shake his head, and quickly responded verbally. “Nothing, sir. I’ve spoken to everyone who might have been in a position to see the motorcyclist, but no luck, there doesn’t seem to be a nosey neighbour amongst them.” His voice reflected the surprise and disappointment he felt; even in his short career he had learned that there was nearly always a nosey neighbour who just had to keep an eye on the comings and goings. “Except for Miss Burton, I couldn’t even find anyone who saw the motorcyclist, let alone well enough to help us identify him.”
With a resigned sigh, Stone ended the call and turned his attention back to Owen Keating. DS Hunt had a video camera on a tripod focused on the multi-millionaire through the windscreen of the van, the footage from it was being displayed on a monitor on the console built into the side of the van, enabling both Stone and Evans to watch Owen Keating as he waited – impatiently they were sure – for the kidnappers to either arrive or get in touch.