‘So like a grenade, then?’
‘Don’t go putting words in my mouth, Debs. You asked and I was trying to explain.’
‘Then explain to me why your brother wants to learn how to fire an RPG and throw grenades.’
‘Like he said, it’s fun. You heard what I said, I wouldn’t find it in the least bit fun but he and his pals are civilians. They’ll get a kick out of it. Same as Harry loves his video games.’
‘Except it’s not a game, Micky. You know what Gary’s like. Him and that Crusaders group. They hate Muslims, you know they do. What if they read about that attack on the mosque in Acton and decided that they want to do something similar?’
‘I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you.’
‘No, I know what he’s like. He doesn’t mouth off like he used to because he knows I won’t put up with it, but we both know what he’s like.’
‘Debs, he’s an adult. He makes his own choices.’
‘If anyone should hate the Muslims it’s you, right? You were out there. You were the one they were trying to kill.’
‘Just the ISIS nutters,’ laughed Micky. ‘Most of the Iraqis, the real Iraqis, are as nice as pie. I met loads of decent Muslims, regular guys just trying to earn a living and raise their families, and they were in as much danger as I was. Gary doesn’t understand that. He believes what he reads in the Daily Mail and on Twitter and on those stupid Facebook pages he posts on.’
‘You should talk to him.’
‘I have done. You know I have. But Gary’s Gary. He blames everything on the Muslims. But I don’t think for one moment he’s going to do anything stupid. His bark has always been worse than his bite.’
His wife said something but her voice was faint as if she had moved away from Harry’s phone. Micky replied but his voice was inaudible and then there was just the sound of the television in the background.
‘She is feisty, isn’t she?’ said Sharpe. ‘Not afraid to give her old man what for.’
‘Interesting that the brother doesn’t think Gary would be violent,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yeah, but if he knows how the sister-in-law feels, he’s not going to start mouthing off, is he?’ Sharpe sipped his coffee. ‘He’s got a point, about bad apples spoiling it for everyone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You only ever hear the bad stuff about Muslims. But we had a dozen Algerian cops over last month for a surveillance training course. Lovely guys, hard as nails but they were knocking back the red wine like there was no tomorrow. They were Muslims but it was no big thing. I’m pretty sure one of them was gay, but nobody cared.’
‘No one’s saying that all Muslims are bad, Jimmy.’
‘But the likes of Gary Dexter are,’ said Sharpe. ‘That’s the problem. We need to be taking out the bad apples not shooting up the whole barrel. That’s what’s so annoying about the likes of him. You and your mob need to be targeting the ISIS-trained jihadists that are here planning their next atrocity, not wasting your time on Walter Mitty types.’
‘People were seriously injured in the Acton attack, Razor.’
‘I know that. But the mosque attacks are a reaction to what the jihadists and fundamentalists have been doing in the UK. If we showed zero tolerance to crap like poppy burning and abuse of our servicemen and the Muslim community brought its bad apples into line, then there’d be nothing for nutters like Gary Dexter to react against.’
‘You should run for office, Razor. Mayor of London, maybe. Or be an MP.’
Sharpe laughed and raised his coffee mug. ‘My running days are over,’ he said. ‘And I’ve never been one for trying to change the world. I see what the rules are and I follow them. And I put away those people who break the rules. That’s my life in a nutshell.’
‘And to be fair, you have put a lot of people away over the years.’
‘You never said a truer word,’ grinned Sharpe.
Gary left the house at just after seven o’clock. Shepherd had an app on his phone that allowed him to track the man’s vehicle and he showed it to Sharpe as the Mercedes drove down the road.
Harry’s phone continued to broadcast but there was nothing of interest, mainly his mother nagging him to clean his room and his sister telling him to get his feet off the coffee table. At eight o’clock Shepherd decided to call it a day and drove back to London.
‘This is good shit,’ said Swifty Taylor, staring at the large joint in his hand. ‘I mean, it’s really maad shit.’
‘Too good to share, obviously,’ said Jason ‘Dancer’ Morris, holding out his hand.
Taylor grinned. ‘Sorry, Daadie,’ he said, handing the joint over. ‘Do yu ting.’
Morris took a long pull on the joint and then leaned back on the sofa and tried to blow a smoke ring.
Beamer Lewis laughed. ‘That is one sorry smoke ring,’ he said. He was leaning over the coffee table using a gold American Express card to divide a small pile of cocaine into lines.
Mario James was drinking rum from a bottle, and he held out his hand for the joint. Morris passed it over.
They all jumped as the door buzzer burst into life. Morris looked at the diamond-studded gold Rolex on his wrist. It was after midnight and they weren’t expecting visitors. ‘Who the fuck is that?’ asked Morris.
James gave the joint back to Morris and he went over to the monitor by the door, swinging his bottle as he walked. He looked at the screen. There was a big man standing outside the door on the pavement. He had his head down so James could only see the top of his head. The buzzer went off again and on the screen the man had his hand out. ‘Can’t see his face,’ said James.
‘Tell him to fuck off,’ said Morris.
James picked up the handset. ‘Fuck off,’ he said into it.
The figure on the monitor pressed the intercom and it buzzed again.
‘If he does that again, go down and shoot the fucker,’ said Morris.
James replaced the handset.
Lewis rolled up a fifty-pound note and sniffed a line of cocaine up his left nostril, sat back, then did a second line up his other nostril. ‘This is quality,’ he said. He handed the rolled-up note to Taylor.
‘I’m okay with the pot,’ said Taylor. He held out his hand to Morris who gave him the joint.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Lewis. He bent down and did another line. When he sat back up he blinked his eyes and focused on the two men who had appeared from the kitchen, one of them holding a pistol. They were big white guys, definitely not cops. ‘What the fuck?’ he said.
Morris looked over at the kitchen door and his jaw dropped. It took his mind a couple of seconds to process what he was seeing. There was a fire escape leading from the kitchen down to the yard that the kebab shop used to store its rubbish bins. The men must have come up the fire escape and somehow unlocked the door from the outside.
The man holding the pistol was limping as he walked out of the kitchen. He looked at Morris. ‘You Dancer?’
‘Who you, man?’
‘I’m the man with the gun, that’s who I am.’
‘You gonna shoot me for what?’ asked Morris. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘You’re coming with us,’ said the bigger of the two men. He was well over six feet tall with massive hands that he kept clenching as he glared at Morris.
‘Like fuck we are,’ said Morris.
‘My boss wants to talk to you.’
‘Well, tell your boss to use the phone,’ said Morris. ‘What the fuck does he want, anyway?’
‘He’ll explain,’ said the man. He gestured with his gun. ‘We’ve got a car downstairs.’
Morris slipped his hand under the cushion next to him. He gripped the butt of the Ingram MAC-10 that he kept there as he continued to stare stonily at the man with the limp. ‘We ain’t gonna do road with you,’ said Morris. He grinned savagely as he pulled out the MAC-10 but the dope he’d smoked had slowed him down and by the time he’d raised the weapon the man with the l
imp had shot him twice in the chest. The dope dulled most of the pain and Morris actually smiled before the life faded from his eyes.
James threw his bottle at the guy with the gun but his aim was off and it hit him on the shoulder. James stepped towards a cabinet to the side of the door and pulled open a drawer. ‘Don’t!’ shouted the man but James wasn’t listening. He whirled around, holding the gun gangster-style and managed to fire one wild shot before two rounds hit him in the chest. ‘We don’t have to do this!’ shouted the man with the gun. James slumped to the floor.
The big man cursed out loud. He reached his right hand into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
Lewis groped under the coffee table. There was an Ingram MAC-10 taped to the underside but he had trouble reaching it.
‘Put your hands where I can see them!’ shouted the big man.
Lewis didn’t react. He kept trying to pull the gun free but before he could, the big man fired once and Lewis’s face imploded, his body slumping onto the coffee table.
Taylor had pulled a handgun from his belt but before he could aim it the big man shot him in the chest. Taylor continued to bring the gun around so the big man shot him twice in the face and to make absolutely sure the man with the limp put another bullet in his chest as he fell to the ground.
‘Bir kurve,’ said the big man as he surveyed the carnage. ‘Frenk is not going to be happy about this.’
Shepherd’s mobile phone woke him from a dreamless sleep and he rolled over and picked it up. It was three o’clock in the morning and it was Jimmy Sharpe calling. Shepherd’s mind raced into gear. It could only be bad news. ‘What’s up, Razor?’
‘The shit’s hit the fan, Spider. The Morris gang has been hit and hit hard. I’ll text you the address.’
By the time Shepherd had dressed, the text message from Sharpe had arrived. He took the lift down to the underground car park and got into his black BMW SUV. There was little in the way of traffic and less than fifteen minutes later he was pulling up in front of a kebab shop with more than a dozen police and emergency vehicles parked outside. He saw Sharpe’s red Jaguar parked down the road and he left his car next to it and walked back to the scene. A young uniformed constable in a high-vis jacket moved towards him but he was intercepted by Sharpe. ‘He’s with me,’ said Sharpe.
The constable nodded and went back to his post.
‘They’re all dead,’ said Sharpe. ‘Morris, Taylor, Lewis and James.’
‘What the hell happened, Razor?’
‘Come and have a look for yourself.’ The door leading up to the flat was being guarded by another uniform, this one a woman with bright red lipstick. She flashed them a smile and stepped out of their way. Sharpe took Shepherd up a flight of stairs. ‘We’re still waiting for SOCO,’ he said, ‘there’ve been four stabbings tonight so everyone’s busy. The SIO in charge of the Morris investigation is here, Inspector Victoria Cave.’
They reached the top of the stairs. The door was open and inside was a woman in a dark suit, standing in the middle of the room looking at a dead body on the sofa.
‘You’ll need these,’ said Sharpe, handing Shepherd a pair of shoe protectors and blue latex gloves. As Shepherd finished putting them on, the woman in the dark suit came out. She was in her late thirties, brown eyed with straight dark brown hair. Sharpe made the introduction. ‘Victoria, this is Dan, he’s been riding shotgun with Harry Dexter.’
The inspector offered her hand to Shepherd and they shook. ‘How’s that been working out?’ asked Cave. She had a trace of a Devon accent.
‘He’s doing well, considering he’s just a kid. How does what’s happened affect him?’
‘It’s all up in the air,’ said Cave. ‘There’s going to be a briefing at Peel House at midday and we’ll know more then. You should be there.’
Shepherd nodded. ‘I will be. What’s going to happen here?’
‘We’ll wait to see what SOCO turns up, and we’re canvassing the area for witnesses and CCTV.’ She looked at her watch and sighed. ‘They were supposed to be here five minutes ago.’
‘Busy night, apparently,’ said Shepherd. He looked around. ‘So a drug deal went wrong, maybe?’
‘There’s more to it than that, I think. There were drugs here but they kept most of their stash in a lock-up and that hasn’t been interfered with.’
‘You checked already?’
‘We’ve got it monitored with CCTV. We get a red flag as soon as anyone goes near it and it hasn’t been disturbed tonight. Morris only kept relatively small amounts here, not enough for him to be worth killing for.’
‘Addicts tend not to think too clearly at the best of times,’ said Sharpe.
‘Addicts tend not to carry guns,’ said Shepherd. ‘And there must have been at least two of them. Probably more. And the shooting doesn’t have an amateur feel to it. Was Morris having problems with another gang moving in on their turf?’
‘Not that we know about,’ said Cave. ‘That’s the whole point of the county lines, they move out into areas where there’s little or no competition.’
Shepherd looked around at the room and tried to picture what had happened to produce the carnage. Morris dead on the sofa, a MAC-10 on the sofa next to him. James slumped by the door. Lewis sprawled over the coffee table, and another MAC-10 below it. Taylor on the floor, an unfired Glock still in his hand. James was the only one of the four who had managed to get a shot off by the look of it.
‘Who broke the door in?’ asked Shepherd.
‘The uniforms. They got a call about gunshots and decided there wasn’t time to call in a locksmith. They didn’t know everyone was dead by the time they got there.’
‘And it was locked?’ He smiled. ‘Sorry, stupid question. If it hadn’t been locked there’d have been no need to kick it down.’
‘No, actually it’s the right question to ask. It was locked and bolted from the inside.’
‘So how did the killers leave?’
‘There’s a fire exit in the kitchen. It leads down to a yard behind the kebab house and there’s an alleyway there to the road.’
Cave took Shepherd over to the kitchen. It was long and narrow with a wooden door reinforced with metal plates at the far end. ‘Was that door bolted?’ asked Shepherd.
‘Just locked,’ said Cave. ‘It’s a good quality lock, but as you know all locks are pickable.’
Shepherd nodded. So the killers came up the fire escape into the flat, catching the occupants by surprise. Two of them, maybe three. But all four of the Yardies had guns to hand, even though only James had pulled the trigger. If it had been a straightforward hit, the killers would have stepped out of the kitchen without giving the men inside the chance to draw their guns. ‘I don’t know if my opinion counts for anything, but I think they came to talk,’ Shepherd said to Cave. ‘They rang the buzzer as a distraction, then the others came in through the kitchen. They wanted to talk to Morris, or at the very least get information from them. But the Yardies were high on drugs and booze and probably weren’t thinking straight. They pulled out their guns but they weren’t quick enough.’ He shrugged. ‘I could be wrong.’
‘No, that’s how I read it,’ said Cave. ‘Look, this is part of a bigger picture that you should be aware of. You’ll know more once you’ve heard what the Sheriff has to say.’
Shepherd waited until they were out on the street before asking who the Sheriff was. Sharpe laughed. ‘Superintendent Ken Sherwood, he runs the Major Incident Room at Peel House.’
‘I still don’t get it?’
‘Sherwood Forest. Sheriff of Nottingham.’
‘Yeah, but it wasn’t the Sheriff of Sherwood Forest, was it? Going from Ken Sherwood to the Sheriff of Nottingham makes no sense.’
Sharpe slapped him on the back. ‘You know what your problem is, Spider?’
‘No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘You overthink everything,’ he said. ‘You always have done.’
‘We all have
our crosses to bear,’ said Shepherd.
Shepherd drove back to his apartment and grabbed a couple of hours sleep before showering, shaving and putting on a half-decent suit and driving to Peel House in Hendon, north London. Jimmy Sharpe was waiting for him on the ground floor. The Scotsman was also suited and booted. Peel House was part of the Hendon Police College complex. The lower floors were used to train new and serving officers but on the top floor – the fifth – was the Met’s Major Incident Room where serious crimes were investigated.
Shepherd didn’t have any Met ID so Sharpe had to sign him in. Paperwork completed and with a plastic badge clipped to Shepherd’s jacket pocket, they rode up to the fifth floor.
There were close to a hundred men and women in the MIR, most of them detectives but there were also several dozen civilian workers, mainly typists and researchers. At any one time the MIR housed five or six major investigation teams, each one headed by a senior investigating officer. It was where the Met handled all its north London murder investigations.
‘It’s not usually as busy as this but the guv’s brought in people from teams across London,’ said Sharpe. ‘He wants to see you as soon as you get in. I’m under orders.’ Sharpe took Shepherd down a corridor to a glass-sided office where a big man with the build of a rugby player run to fat was sitting behind a terminal. He was wearing a light blue suit and a red tie with black dots on it. He was in his forties but his hair was already steel grey and he was looking at his screen through wire-framed spectacles. He got to his feet as Sharpe knocked on the glass door and opened it.
‘Guv, this is Dan Shepherd, from Five. Dan, this is Superintendent Sherwood.’
The two men shook hands. Sherwood had a firm grip and an intense stare. ‘I have to say up front that I’m not happy about the Security Service getting involved in one of our criminal cases,’ said Sherwood coldly. ‘I’ve had investigations turn to shit before because MI5 has gotten busy.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ll try not to make any waves.’
‘The problem is that your people aren’t bound by the likes of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. No one’s disputing the great work you do combating terrorism, but my personal feeling is that criminal investigations are best left to the police.’
Short Range (The Spider Shepherd Thrillers Book 16) Page 10