by Iain Cameron
The last profile in the pile was that of Sean Callaghan, the man who’d tried to shoot Matt in the office at the back of the warehouse, and the only member of the team still to be questioned. He was clearly the boss and Matt suspected he was also the lynchpin between the UK operation and the people in Ireland. Active in Belfast, and one of the first recruits to the nascent IRM organisation. The PSNI had in the past identified him as a person of interest.
Seeing the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s name reminded Matt of something. He stopped reading and dug out the information produced by Siki at the start of this investigation, a brief summary of the IRM and a roll-call of its members. Sure enough, the names of Sean Callaghan and the other three guys he’d been looking at were all listed there.
He was tempted to hand Siki the PSNI list and ask him to find out what he could about all one hundred and ten names listed in an attempt to identify the ringleaders. However, ‘shotgun’ research like this often threw up a load of dross: family friends and associates, business colleagues and lovers. As a result, any unfiltered information could have them chasing their tails for weeks with nothing much to show for it.
‘That’s it for me,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m done. I’m off home.’
Matt turned to see her standing behind him, her bag over her shoulder.
‘What time is it?’
‘Six-thirty, and in case you’ve forgotten, this is Friday.’
‘Anything planned for the weekend?’ he asked.
‘Andrew’s home for a change.’
‘Of what, clothes?’
‘Funny. No, he’s home for few days so we might go out to a movie and afterwards find somewhere to eat. You know how I love to cook.’
‘Tell me about it. I’ve tasted your cooking.’
‘Cheeky bugger. What about you?’
‘Nothing much. Hit the gym, bit of reading,’ he said nodding at the pile of papers in front of him.
‘I’d invite you round, but you know how sociable Andrew can be.’
‘No worries, have a good one.’
‘You too. Don’t work too late.’
Work late? In Matt’s mind, HSA work didn’t stop, not at the weekend and not in the evening. At home, he would be thinking about Emma’s murder and how to catch her killers, and when he went to bed, his head would be turning over the events of the preceding days.
He left the office at eight and noticed as he headed for the stairs that Gill’s office was empty. The Director lived and breathed HSA as much as Matt did, but he also needed to placate Chief Constables and Home Office ministers any time HSA agents stepped on their toes. Like Matt, it didn’t look like he was working when he dined at the House of Commons, or met someone from the government or another security agency in a posh restaurant or club, but he was.
Matt took the tube to Kentish Town and, after looking at the menus of a couple of pubs and restaurants along Kentish Town Road, selected an Italian place. Three or four years back, solo diners were considered an inconvenience by most restaurants, someone to be stuck at the back where they were assailed by the noise of the kitchen and had their chair thumped every time a waiter bustled past. Now, most modern eating establishments had solo spots dotted around the dining room, leaving the lonely of London feeling perhaps not quite part of the gaiety around them, but certainly able to share in some of it.
Matt left the restaurant around ten. An advantage of being single was despite there being a queue of eager diners waiting outside, no one had been eying his table with envious eyes and willing him to finish. The meatballs he’d selected were spicier than the ones he’d eaten in other restaurants and he’d loved the freshly cooked pasta. The takeaways he often ate were good, but if focussed on a report on his laptop, or if his meal was interrupted by a phone call, he could be eating Weetabix for all it mattered.
It wasn’t yet dark, so to kill some time he walked into a pub. He didn’t feel much like drinking after consuming such a large plate of pasta, but he bought a pint nonetheless. It was a busy place, full of enthusiastic and smiling young men, talking to one another while eyeing up the women. Despite many being dressed in ripped jeans and t-shirts, the hair on most of them looked neat, as if trimmed and styled in the last couple of days.
He left the pub a short time later, leaving most of his drink untouched, but far from sitting alone and staring at the wall or his phone, he had been engaged in conversation with a young woman. He didn’t have a problem with women making the first move, but as he’d gone in there for a different purpose, his mind focussed on other things, her approach did take him unawares.
It was dark when he headed towards Huddleston Road. When he got there he walked purposefully, like a man who knew where he was heading. When he reached Jack Harris’s house he turned in and ducked behind a hedge. To check no one had noticed him, he stood back in the shadows and scanned up and down the road.
Despite Matt’s sighting of Jack Harris with Simon Wood the week before, and the raid on the house, nothing had changed. This suited Matt as he wanted Harris to go about his regular business unruffled by police interviews. However, it worried him that his report of spotting Wood had not been taken more seriously. Perhaps someone had added a footnote to say the agent in question had recently returned from sick leave and his judgement was clouded.
The house was shrouded in darkness; Harris and his partner were away for the weekend visiting her mother in Derby. This little snippet was gleaned from a detective on Harris’s team, one he called every ten days or so. He did this to find out what progress or otherwise was being made on Emma’s case, all the while gently probing for information about his partner’s former colleague.
The front of the house was bathed in the glare of street lights, the back in complete darkness. Standing at the back door in shadow, he was mindful of making too much noise as the houses in the next road overlooked Harris’s back garden.
In fact, Matt made no noise at all; the lock on the double-glazed door opened without trouble. He stepped inside, confident there wasn’t an alarm and closed the door. What he didn’t have any confidence about was if Harris was the type who never went anywhere without his laptop.
He tried a couple of rooms until he found a study facing the rear of the house. The blinds on the large window were shut, shielding him from anyone outside but still offering some degree of light. A new Apple MacBook sat on a neatly ordered desk, an area devoid of any clutter or rubbish. This accorded with Emma’s description of the man, orderly and organised to the point of obsession. Why he didn’t take it with him to Derby, Matt didn’t know, but as it didn’t bear the Met Police logo, it had to be his personal device and the one Matt wanted to look at.
This smart, new top-of the-range laptop could have brought Matt’s illegal break-in to an abrupt halt before it started. The USB stick given to him by Siki, already loaded with spy software, wouldn’t fit the USB-C connectors fitted to the latest range of MacBooks. Siki, to his credit, had thought of this. Good job, as Matt wouldn’t have a clue.
Matt attached the adapter to the USB stick and plugged it into the laptop. He switched the machine on and waited while a program on the memory stick ran through a series of hundreds of password combinations. A few moments later, the laptop commenced its boot-up procedure. Even now, Matt didn’t have to do anything. Once the program on the memory stick had finished downloading all the data, it would switch the machine off.
Five minutes later Matt was outside the house, the USB stick in a safe place, zipped inside his jacket. He re-locked the back door and walked across the back of the house, treading softly and feeling pleased with himself.
He turned the corner, leading to the front of the house, when he collided with someone, causing them to stumble backwards and fall. Just then, he heard the clang of metal falling on stone. He didn’t panic, fearing the early return of Jack Harris or his partner, as this person was smaller and more slightly built. He thought of this person as being a ‘he’, but dressed in black and with a
baseball cap pulled down over their face, it was difficult to make a sound judgment. Matt reached over to grab a lapel and haul them upright and ask what the hell they were doing here, when the person squirmed away and ran off.
Matt watched them go and looked around for the source of the earlier clanging. He found it: a metal jemmy, a heavy crowbar with a hook and two prongs at one end, an essential tool in any burglar’s kitbag. The prongs were used to open a space between a door or window frame, before using the lever effect of the jemmy to crack it open. Matt had an idea. He wiped his prints from the bar and tossed it into a flower bed. If he’d inadvertently left any evidence of his intrusion, Harris would blame it on the activities of his local burglar.
Chapter 14
Tuesday morning, Matt woke early and headed to the gym. For the last week or two he had been doing a full work-out; lots of weights, stretches, and high-intensity cardio. His shoulder and the rest of his body came through without issue, and now he didn’t need to lie to Rosie and Gill; not only was he was back mentally, he was back physically too.
He returned home, his head filled with many of the issues he needed to work through today. After breakfast he booted up his laptop and inserted the memory stick used to filch data from Jack Harris’s laptop. Matt had deployed Siki’s system a couple of times before and been amazed at the amount of information it downloaded. This time it surpassed his expectations.
Not only did it provide him with a copy of Harris’s ‘Documents’ folder, it also gave him copies of all his emails, including those deleted, a history of internet searches, and data from a couple of applications being accessed more frequently than others. This included personal banking software, a system used for reconciling credit cards and bank accounts. As a bonus, as Siki often liked to throw in a little give-away, Harris’s laptop was also used to back up his mobile phone, so this was included too.
In previous investigations, Matt would start by targeting emails and finding out who the subject was associating with. Now, armed with the knowledge of Harris and Simon Wood, a fugitive drug supplier, he decided to follow the money. He went straight into the banking software app.
After a few minutes, he felt to be out of his depth, as he wasn’t hot on computers and the app didn’t look in the least bit familiar. In the past, Emma controlled the house finances, and his attempts at doing the same could only be described as muddling through, although the untidy pile of credit card and till receipts in the hallway drawer would suggest otherwise. He stared at the screen for a minute or two before realising the odd, truncated words listed down the left-hand side of the screen were the abbreviated names of accounts. When he clicked on one, a detailed list of transactions appeared on the main part of the screen.
Matt suspected Harris suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD, so he wasn’t surprised to find him using such a system as he would need to keep his finances in order. However, if he was receiving backhanders from a drug dealer, Matt was sure the copper in him would keep the details well away from the bank accounts he used every day, no matter how much his compulsion urged him to do so. He paged through the current account transaction list looking for unusual deposits, but nothing stood out. He checked the other accounts and came up with a similar story.
He sat back and thought for a moment. Harris would want control of any money moving in and out of a dodgy account, this much was clear, but would he document the information in a system such as this, or in a little black book? Matt had done a cursory search of Harris’s desk and bookcase while waiting for the spy software to finish, but didn’t find anything. This was all he had. He went back to the laptop and looked for a way to open hidden or closed accounts in banking software program.
Failing miserably, did a search on Google. Ten minutes later, every account on the system appeared in a list on the left-hand side of the screen. Some were old credit card accounts and one an old savings account, but others had a nice Caribbean ring: Hamilton Savings, Nassau Funds, St John’s Investments.
Matt clicked each one in turn, wondering why a UK drug detective would have opened several offshore bank accounts, even if it was just to dump the thousand or so pounds he would receive every month from Wood. This is what he believed to be the going-rate for a bent drugs detective, a reward for the odd snippet about an upcoming raid, or the low-down on the drug dealer’s rivals.
Matt sat back in astonishment. The Caribbean accounts didn’t contain a few grand in return for a good tip, but sizeable deposits every three or four months. Fifty grand here, seventy-five there, over one hundred thousand pounds another time. All told, Harris had the equivalent of over four million pounds in the three Caribbean bank accounts.
Matt pushed the chair back and put his feet on the table, his mind abuzz with questions. Why had Harris access to so much money? If it was his, what had he done to earn it and who had given it to him?
Putting two and two together and risk making a stupid assumption, it suggested two things, both predicated on seeing Harris with Simon Wood. Harris had received it from Wood for services rendered, making Harris a drug dealer, courier, chemist or banker, the only jobs Matt could think of which would pay this sort of cash. Alternatively, it could be money belonging to Wood. If so, it still meant Harris and Wood were inextricably linked.
It went some way in explaining the big house in Tufnell Park, the new Audi and the top of the range laptop lying in his study. It also put Emma’s murder in a new light. If she had discovered his lucrative other life, he was sure she would have taken steps to stop it. Matt felt buoyed by his discoveries, vindicating the suspicions he’d held about Harris, but he decided not to articulate any of it yet. First, there was a CTC meeting he needed to attend.
**
‘Nice offices you have here,’ Matt said smirking.
DI Hillman laughed. ‘They’ve condemned better dumps than this. Just because we’re moving to a new purpose-built place, they won’t spend a fucking bean on this one.’
Matt had travelled to Limehouse in East London this morning on his latest acquisition, a Honda CBR500R motorbike. He would have bought it sooner, but had been banned by Emma on account of the danger she believed those machines posed. It didn’t matter to her that Matt had ridden a bike regularly in the years before they’d met. She’d insisted he sell that one as a condition of them moving in together. Financially, it made sense, but he would have liked to have explored other cost-saving options first.
Matt and Hillman walked back to the conference room loaded up with the coffee orders. No temperamental vending machine for the CTC, these were all produced by a large, sophisticated coffee machine, no doubt appropriated following a raid on a suspicious coffee bar.
They walked back into the conference room, in reality a squad room where the plods in this part of East London listened to briefings and had their orders dished out. He remembered simpler days when the coffee on offer was either black or white; now even simple souls like coppers drank cappuccino, flat whites, skinny whites, espressos. Most were based on a shot or two of coffee and a little or a lot of milk, and Matt was sure if some of them received the wrong one they wouldn’t notice.
‘Right,’ Hillman at the front of the room said after the door was closed, ‘let’s have a bit of peace and quiet.’ He gave it a second or two before he spoke. ‘Ok, we’re here today with our colleagues from HSA,’ he said, looking directly at Rosie, ‘and our forensic team fresh from the crypt…’ he paused to allow some steam to vent, ‘to pool what we know about our four suspects arrested in Leicester. I’ll ask DS Tony Urquhart to speak first, he’s pulled together a summary of what we’ve learned from the interviews.’
Hillman sat and Urquhart made his way forward. Matt recognised him from the Leicester raid, the officer who’d hauled the forklift driver from his cab. He looked a big guy, even without the benefit of protective gear. They didn’t know at the time, but by asking Urquhart to climb the platform and grab the forklift truck driver, it put him within easy reach of the shoo
ter hiding inside the office.
He didn’t look nervous addressing a group of fifteen experienced men and women, any one of whom would be happy to point out any errors he made concerning fact or procedure. Maybe the job of facing down terrorists and standing close to dangerous chemicals and caches of explosives put these things in some form of perspective.
He ran through a summary of the Irishmen’s backgrounds, most which Matt already knew from Siki’s notes.
‘The two Belfast boys, O’Conner and Fitzpatrick, told us fuck-all. They gave us some spiel about fighting for a united Ireland and dying for a cause they believed in, and all that shite, but nothing useful. The others comments were all along the lines of, ‘No Comment’, or ‘I don’t recognise the legitimacy of your legal system.’
‘Whatever the fuck that means,’ someone said.
‘Cormac Kavanagh was a bit more forthcoming. He didn’t grow up in the Belfast hot-pot, and none of his relatives spent any time in H Block like the other two. Born in the Irish Republic, he moved to Belfast when his company moved some of their operations there. He’s a man who can see there’s money to be made in this terrorist caper.’
‘It’s a good point,’ Matt said. ‘During the Troubles, the IRA controlled many districts of cities like Belfast and Londonderry, making them no-go areas for the security forces. They extorted protection money from businesses, fined wrongdoers, charged journalists for interviews, took donations. They said it was being done for the cause, but it didn’t stop some lining their own pockets.’
‘Kavanagh mentioned something similar,’ Urquhart said. ‘He’d heard about people creaming off profits during the Troubles and thought to himself, why not? Which raises another important issue. How are they being funded?’