by Carl Goodman
‘And the raid, sir?’
‘I also agree in principle,’ Hadley said, ‘but you’re correct. We need to rattle cages and we need to do that without forewarning Razin’s people.’ A train was coming. He turned towards the platform.
‘Sir?’
‘Leave it with me,’ Hadley told her. ‘And not a word to anyone, obviously.’
* * *
‘I suppose I don’t need to tell you that you look like shit,’ Judy Wren said, with far more glee than Eva felt was appropriate.
She glowered at Wren. ‘You’re all heart.’
Wren smiled. ‘Glad to see you’re not letting it get to you,’ she added, pointedly.
Eva rested her head against the back of the chair in Wren’s office. ‘Somebody died. I know it’s not my fault, I really know that, but somebody is dead today as a consequence of someone else trying to kill me. That’s wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to start.’
‘Yeah,’ Wren agreed. ‘Sutton reckons it was Lynch’s people?’
‘It seems to fit,’ Eva lied. She wanted to trust Wren. God damn it, she did trust Wren, but telling her the truth would be like breaking the chain of evidence. She needed to have an equivalence of knowledge throughout the station and those who worked with it regularly, otherwise the case against Razin’s fixer might be compromised when it eventually went to court.
‘And how does that make you feel?’ Wren said quietly.
‘Judy,’ Eva said, ‘you cut up dead people. You’re not a shrink. If I ever come to you for psychoanalysis I’ll definitely be in serious trouble.’
Wren laughed a quiet, dark laugh and turned a computer screen towards her. It showed an autopsy report. ‘Robert Isherwood,’ she told Eva.
‘Robert Isherwood,’ Eva agreed.
‘Regrettably, the late Mr Isherwood’s family favoured cremation, otherwise I’d be requesting an exhumation right now. To recap. Robert Isherwood took a rather spectacular flyer in his Mercedes-AMG GT Roadster at around ninety miles an hour on the M3 motorway somewhere between the M25 and Sunbury junctions. He did that in almost perfect weather conditions without being on the phone, without being under the influence of drink or drugs and without having any known mental health issues. Eyewitnesses say Isherwood seemed to suddenly lose control of the car, swerved into the central reservation, flipped, flew and wound up under a lorry on the opposite carriageway.’
The description seemed too close to recent events for comfort. Eva shivered. She saw Wren’s suddenly forensic stare. ‘I’m alright,’ she insisted. ‘Go on.’
‘A difficult autopsy,’ Wren continued after a moment spent watching Eva, ‘because the car really was crushed. There was some fire damage, but petrol from the fuel tank spread across the motorway, burned and burned out fairly quickly. Isherwood was dead on impact, so it wouldn’t have bothered him.’
‘Thank Christ for that.’
‘The lorry driver had some significant injuries, but he recovered. Anyway, after drugs, depression and distraction, attention turned to mechanical failure, but the car was new, top spec and in perfect working order from what could be ascertained from the wreckage. Despite the impact and subsequent damage the tyres were inflated and the tread was in prime condition, so it wasn’t a blowout. It wasn’t the car either. In fact,’ Wren pulled a file from a pile and dropped it on the desk in front of Eva, ‘if the autopsy and mechanical reports are to be believed, it wasn’t anything. The official verdict was driver error, cause otherwise unknown.’
Eva watched her. ‘But you don’t believe that?’
Wren blew her cheeks out to convey incredulity. ‘It’s a seriously big error. Okay, so he was doing ninety, but lots of people do ninety along that stretch of road. Traffic is often quite light, which is surprising given how close it is to the M25. It’s a long, easy stretch. But to suddenly swerve into the crash barrier like that? The only thing that comes to my mind is that Isherwood suffered a shock of some sort.’
She tried to imagine the situation. Sitting behind a driving wheel, something suddenly upsetting her, and as a consequence swerving into the central reservation. ‘It would have to be one hell of a big shock. Insect bite? Did he have any allergies?’
‘Not recorded with his GP. Anaphylactic shock would have been indicated from the toxicology report, and in any event it comes on in minutes, not seconds. He would have been able to make it to the hard shoulder.’
Eva cast her hands around. ‘So, what then?’
Wren looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ll spare you the details because of your delicate condition, but suffice it to say Robert Isherwood face-palmed a lorry so hard there’s not a lot to go on. However, despite the extensive cranial damage, the examiner did note one thing that seemed just a little unusual. They found fragments of plastic in Isherwood’s eyes.’
She thought about that for a moment. ‘His intraocular lenses shattered in the impact?’
‘Yeah,’ Wren agreed, ‘it seems most likely, doesn’t it? It was a major collision. It would probably have been the same if he’d been wearing hard contact lenses.’ She gave a slight shrug. ‘There’s not a lot of research that’s been done on that particular combination of injuries.’
Eva gazed into the middle distance and tried to imagine the situation again. ‘Suppose something had affected his eyes and suddenly he couldn’t see? Would that be enough to make him lose control?’
‘What, like having a contact lens pop out at ninety miles an hour? I know a few people who have lost a lens while driving. They’re all alive to bleat about it.’
‘It would have to have been a lot worse than that.’
Wren turned the screen back to face her. ‘We’ll probably never know,’ she admitted then.
‘I’m not so sure,’ Eva said. ‘Somebody sent me his name. I think somebody already knows what happened to Robert Isherwood, probably someone at the Chatham Centre. We need to find out who that is and why Isherwood died. If we know that,’ she added as she stood to leave, ‘I reckon we’ll know why Stepanov, Swain and Markham were murdered.’
* * *
Eva stood in front of the whiteboard in the incident room, the board that still showed the blue line she had drawn on it in what was starting to feel like the distant past. Along the line Flynn, Newton and Chakrabati had added their own scrawled notes. She read ‘financial motive’, ‘jilted lover’, ‘jealousy’, ‘revenge’ and half a dozen other possible motivations. Eva stared for a while. Then she wiped them all out, until only the two ends of the line remained. She drew circles around ‘psychopath’ and ‘rational motive’. Under ‘psychopath’ she wrote: Khan, Gibson, Russell, Lloyd. Under ‘rational motive’ she wrote: Stepanov, Swain, Markham.
She stepped back from the board and stared for a while. Then, under Markham’s name Eva added: Robert Isherwood?
In her office she opened her laptop and checked a list from another investigation, names of individuals who were at least candidates for being the person leaking information to Semion Razin. It wasn’t an exhaustive list, and she had only compiled it through a process of elimination, but the ease with which Martin Ward had obtained bail had convinced her Hadley was right. Somebody was pulling strings. Probably more than one person.
Eva sat in front of the laptop and drummed her fingers slowly on her desk as beyond the window a grey sky faded to black. If I were Razin’s man, she thought, but then she stopped herself. Cowan had been right. The temptation to think in terms of local thugs and dealers was undeniable, but Razin was orders of magnitude more sophisticated than that. If I ran Razin’s local operations, she thought as she stared at the list, if I were responsible for this franchise, what pieces would I want in the game? A senior officer would be a plus. She had several candidates but nothing more than circumstantial evidence linked any of them. Some middle-tier people too. Moresby would be a great candidate, but Moresby seemed incorruptible. And in any event, she had been able to place him out of the county on a number of significant occasions. Intuitivel
y, she did not believe it could be Moresby, but her circumstantial evidence also pointed to him not being involved.
And low-level grunts too, she thought, like worker ants. Lab technicians, constables, custody officers, a handful of people dotted here and there in any role that touches the custody and evidence processes.
There would be a structure, a hierarchy. Maybe it would be like spy cells during the Cold War, or perhaps it would be like a covert operations unit and more tightly knit. Either way, Razin could keep the police at arm’s length and conduct his business with alacrity.
But you made a mistake, Eva thought. You should have sent someone to warn me off, but instead someone tried to kill me. Was that intentional? Did you order that, or did you just put some goon on the job? It didn’t matter. What mattered was a dead man in a burned-out car and a grieving family, and a need for revenge that was growing inside her like a tumour. She despised Hadley. She loathed him with every cell in her body, because she knew him to be a vindictive bastard. This time though, Eva thought as she closed the screen, I can use that.
Eva did not know what Hadley was planning. She was pretty damned certain though that whatever it was, it would make Razin’s people sit up and take notice.
* * *
By eleven that night she was back in her flat, microwave meal in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Another screen. This time the laptop with the eGPU connected to it. The number on that screen was in the tens of billions, the permutations of possible passwords the computer had gone through so far. She knew there would be billions more, but she was starting to get a sense of the general size and shape of the code it was searching for. It would crack it, she felt certain of that now. It was only a matter of time.
This one’s for you Dom, she thought as she raised her beer bottle to the screen. I will get him, for you. The image of Dominic Bradley flashed into her mind. Maybe it was the beer, perhaps it was delayed shock, but in that moment she realised again that she was utterly alone.
Eva put the bottle down, curled into a foetal position in the middle of the living room floor and sobbed herself to sleep.
Chapter Seventeen
The following morning Eva signed herself into the records room with a list scribbled on a piece of paper and a note file open on her phone. ‘I’m looking for records from around the time of the previous cases,’ she told the duty officer who sat in front of the locked door.
Fifty-something, overweight and with thinning hair, the man frowned. ‘I thought your team had already picked everything up?’
‘They’ve picked up everything that’s directly connected,’ Eva said in her best smooth and professional voice, ‘but I’m looking for anything else that happened. I don’t want to rule anything out at this stage.’
He had no reason to object, and even if he had Eva could have overruled him. She needed to sound plausible, though. She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that she was trawling records; it needed to seem routine. Apparently it did, because the duty officer nodded and opened the door.
She stepped into an evenly lit space with no windows. The gentle rumble of elderly air-conditioning units filled the room. Racks of boxes stacked with files stood floor to ceiling, with narrow passageways in-between them. For the most part the files went back seven years, that being generally considered their likely useful lifespan. She knew files older than that were held off site in secure storage at a subcontractor called Iron Cave, which also kept magnetic media for commercial organisations and government departments. If she needed something older than seven years Eva knew she could search a database, make a request to Iron Cave and the files would be couriered to her within half a day.
Eva checked a file on her phone and started to search. Hadley had finally shared a list of cases where he considered the outcomes suspect, and at first glance she had to reluctantly agree. Less reluctantly than before. The threat Razin represented was real. She now knew that for a fact.
She had jotted down eleven cases on the scrap of paper. Almost all of them were drugs related, although a couple involved protection, violence and prostitution. She went through the physical records of the cases chronologically, starting with another drugs investigation from almost five years before. Unlike Ward the suspect under surveillance in that instance had been a major player, someone who handled supply and distribution through international connections. A local DI, now no longer at the station, had spent months gathering information and building an argument for a raid on the suspect’s property. Eva’s eyebrows rose a little when she saw the address. It was another house in St Jude’s Hill. A search warrant had been issued and a team assembled, and they had gathered at dawn outside the property. But when the door had been rammed open and officers poured into the house they had found it to be empty. Even the furniture had gone, Eva saw, loaded into several removal vans and driven away the night before.
How the hell did anyone pull off that kind of stunt without plenty of advance warning and surveillance being interfered with? She checked the names attached to the case, but the chances were someone outside the investigation team had pulled the rug from under the operation. Eva compared the names of senior officers against Hadley’s list of suspects. Sure enough, there were half a dozen matches. Not Sutton though, she noticed as she moved to the next case. Sutton had not been on the scene then.
An hour and a half later she found herself sitting leaning against the wall of the records room with a pile of boxes stacked around her. At one point she had disappeared back to her desk to grab a notepad and a pen. Now she had pages of looped diagrams and scrawled lists that could make sense only to her.
One diagram in particular troubled her. Part timeline and part decision tree, it comprised a scruffy network of connections she had scribbled down to try to understand the links between three separate cases that included more failed drugs busts. In each case it was the level of information that stood out. Either information had been leaked just prior to teams engaging in raids, or someone very senior had made Razin’s people aware of specific investigations even before those teams had started their planning processes. No wonder his people never get caught, she mused as she stared at her almost illegible scribbles. He knows we’re coming even before we do.
Where did that leave her? Was it another officer at the station who had sent someone to kill her, or had they simply passed on information to Razin’s local organisation? She thought about the faces she passed every day, in the corridors and in the canteen. Did one of them really want her dead?
There was not enough here, Eva decided after another half an hour, not enough to draw a conclusion or point a finger, but then she had never really expected that. She had a spreadsheet on her phone. A file that contained the names of fifteen individuals that she, and Hadley, considered potential suspects. One of them might be Razin’s man, or woman, she thought as she checked the list. Using her thumb she sorted the names by rank then picked a range of cells and coloured them blue. Cool, she meant, unlikely because of lesser rank. Above that came yellow, and above that red.
Her hotlist now contained seven names. She shivered when she thought of the damage any one of those senior individuals could cause if they were in Razin’s employ.
If they really put their mind to it.
* * *
Hadley messaged her from an email account that afternoon. ‘You were right about that location,’ he wrote. ‘A solid connection,’ he added cryptically, but she knew exactly what he meant. ‘I’ve organised a visit for tonight.’ Eva frowned. She had not heard about any operations being planned. ‘Not local,’ Hadley texted. ‘I don’t want any warning being given. I have another team ready to go. You need to be at this location,’ he specified an address, ‘by 1800 for a briefing.’
Eva looked at the time on her phone; that was a little over two hours from now. She had plenty of time.
‘Go home and get changed,’ he instructed. ‘Jeans, T-shirt, something comfortable for when things get busy, but make i
t conspicuous.’
She frowned again. ‘Why?’ she texted.
He replied immediately. ‘You’re the bait.’
* * *
By ten o’clock that evening a slow drizzle was falling from a smooth, purple sky. She parked her replacement car out of sight and walked through concrete towers to a place on one side of the Allen estate, to a pub with an odd name and a mock Tudor frontage. ‘The Cross and Dragon’, the sign that hung at the front announced, in gothic typeset around a peculiar image of St George actually riding a flying dragon. It looked as dodgy as hell, Eva thought as she ambled up to the door, but that was only because it was.
Hadley had done his homework, though. A sergeant named Walker led the team. In the briefing, which had been held in a local sports hall, Walker had spelled out the surveillance intelligence that Hadley’s other sources had allegedly gathered. Hadley was nowhere to be seen but she knew he would be watching. As she listened Eva had felt her scalp crawl. Most of it was bullshit. Much of it was fabrication and supposition and all of it was geared towards justifying the raid. Somewhere in the background though Hadley had actually verified the basic facts. Razin’s people were using the pub. It was being protected and it did deserve turning over. How he had elected to do that simply reinforced her idea that however much she might hate him, he was not a man to be crossed lightly.
There were posters near the front door, ones that somebody had designed and printed in black and a handful of lurid colours to keep the cost down. She had seen them in a few places around the town as well. They promoted metal bands and pole dancers mostly, along with the occasional stand-up comedian offering ‘adult’ humour. Let’s see if we can raise a laugh tonight, Eva thought as she pushed on the door.
The first thing she heard was the sound of an electric guitar being strangled. At one end of a room that held about a hundred tables some sort of tribute band pounded on a low stage. She saw four men, all with long beards, sunglasses, long grey hair and leather jackets covered in studs hammering out a medley of metal rock favourites from the last century that was just about recognisable. Next to them two pole dancers dressed only in sequinned thongs vied for the audience’s attention. They weren’t succeeding, Eva noticed.