by Iain Cameron
‘Did it? Can you provide me with more details?’
He did, and Henderson noted them down. If the murder of Robert Saunders had been done by the same person or persons who killed the Beeches at Black Quarry Farm, find one mistake and it could lead to the killers. Find the killers, and he could solve three murders. He had harboured some reservations about this trip, whether it would prove useful or not, but now any doubts were well and truly dispelled.
‘The guns in your case,’ Brady said, ‘were Mac 10 or similar. What makes you think we’re seeing the same shooter?’
‘I don’t know, and there’s no clear evidence to suggest we are, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility for the killers to change the weapon they deploy, depending on its required use.’
‘Well, I think you’re wasting your time with this one.’
‘Maybe. Is there anything else you can tell us?’
Brady shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Can we see the crime scene?’
‘What for?’
‘We’ve come all this way, so it would be a shame not to. It’s not so far from here to Leatherhead, is it?’
**
The Sussex detectives were driven to the Leatherhead house by a young DC in Brady’s team.
‘This is my first real murder,’ DC Sarah Oswald was saying with some fervour as she negotiated afternoon traffic.
‘Where were you before?’ Neal asked.
‘Uniform. In Guildford.’
‘What’s it like there?’
‘Quiet most of the time, but manic from Thursday to Sunday night. I think Guildford must have the highest number of eighteen to twenty-five-year olds in the country, what with the Uni and all the language schools. Come the weekend, everyone comes into the town centre and you can’t get anywhere near a bar or into a club. When a fight breaks out, we have to wade through crowds of people before we can even get close enough to the culprits to see what’s going on.’
‘DI Brady doesn’t think he’s after the same shooters as Black Quarry Farm,’ Neal said in a voice low enough so the DC in front couldn’t hear above the clatter from her personal radio.
‘Let him. It will stop someone upstairs suggesting we combine the cases.’
‘There’s no danger of that happening here, is there?’
‘I don’t think so, as Brady believes the evidence points to two different teams. If so, and shoehorning his opinion into our scenario, it would suggest the person who sanctioned the hit at the farm changed teams after the first lot failed.’
‘Saunders is a key feature in both incidents, there has to be a connection between them.’
‘We’re here,’ the driver announced.
Stepping out of the car, Henderson paused for a moment to look around. He asked himself: where would a man being hunted by a gang of vicious criminals hide? Why would he stay here in Leatherhead? In Henderson’s view it was too crowded. He would choose somewhere more remote, like the north of Scotland. Knowing he was Scottish, his pursuers would probably go there, so instead he would probably head to Ireland or Wales, as both possessed many similarities to his homeland.
‘Are you coming, guv?’
He turned and looked at the target house. The front door was lying open and there was no sign of DC Oswald. He walked up the path and followed DS Neal into the house. He noticed almost immediately the lack of personal possessions: no pictures on the walls, photographs, newspapers, books; nothing to reflect the preferences or personality of the person who once lived there. Here was a man living on his nerves, who at the first sign of something amiss would up-sticks at a moment’s notice.
DC Oswald popped her head around the door. ‘If you’d like to come with me, I’ll show you where it all happened.’ Henderson was happy mooching around, trying to gain an understanding of who Robert Saunders might have been, but instead he turned and followed the young DC.
‘The kitchen,’ she said, ‘is where we found the body, lying on the floor.’
The floor was covered in slate tiling and since the murder, this room and the rest of the house had been cleaned by the owners. There was no trace left of the victim: no chalk outline, no numbered blocks to mark out photo points, no stain of un-mopped blood.
DC Oswald walked out of the open kitchen door into the garden. Henderson followed.
‘This is where a lot of blood was found,’ she said pointing at the flagstones making up the small patio, ‘indicating the place he’d been beaten or, more likely, received the shots he received in his leg.’
They’d cleaned the slabs, but unlike the kitchen, Henderson could still see traces of blood.
He looked around. There were houses on either side and, at the end of the garden, the backs of houses in a neighbouring street
‘They were taking a risk, shooting him out here,’ Henderson said to Neal. ‘Any number of people could have seen it, or are there no night owls in Leatherhead?’
‘Maybe the light wasn’t on and they used a silencer.’
‘You could be right.’
They left the house ten minutes later, their visit less useful than their chat with DI Brady. Henderson was about to get into the car when a young man approached.
‘You the detectives investigating the murder in that house?’
‘Yes.’
The guy backed away as if not wanting the others to hear, and sat on the edge of the garden wall. Aged around nineteen, he had floppy black hair falling over his eyes. His face was going through a ‘spotty’ phase, a curse on similar-aged teenagers, his cheek, nose, and what Henderson could see of his forehead dotted with angry red spots.
Henderson leaned on the wall beside him.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Adam.’
‘Adam what?’
‘Adam White.’
‘I’m Detective Angus Henderson.’
‘I saw what happened.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I was outside having a smoke when I saw the guy in there,’ he said, nodding towards the Saunders house, ‘get shot.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘His garden backs on to ours.’
‘You live with your parents?’
‘My mum.’
‘Tell me what you saw.’
‘I was out having a smoke, like I said, and walked to the bottom of the garden as I thought I heard something going on. I saw two guys hanging about the back door, and when your man in the house walks out, they grab him and throw him down.’
‘Describe the men you saw.’
‘One was tall and broad, the other smaller, but well-built too. Both aged around thirty, I would say.’
‘Good. What time was this?’
‘About half-twelve, quarter to one.’
‘It’s a bit late to go out for a smoke.’
‘I don’t sleep well.’
‘Okay, what happened then?’
‘They slapped him about and asked him questions. I didn’t hear everything, but I could tell it was about money. They wanted to know where the guy on the deck had hidden it.’
‘Not drugs or anything else, you’re sure it was about money?’
‘Oh yeah. I heard the bloke who got shot say, ‘I’ve got the money,’ or something like it.’
‘Okay.’
‘They didn’t sound too happy with his answers, like, so the bigger guy of the two pulls out a gun and shoots him in the leg.’
‘Wasn’t it loud?’ Henderson said, hoping it was as it might lead to other witnesses.
‘Nah, it just made a sort of low popping sound.’
‘What can you tell me about the gun? Was it big and shiny, like a machine pistol or small and dark, like a revolver?’
‘What, you don’t think I know what a gun looks like? It was a handgun, most likely a 9 mm and made of some dark material, so I’m guessing it might have been a Glock or a Sig.’
‘I won’t ask why you know so much about guns. What about the guy they shot? Didn’t he
scream? I know I would if someone shot me.’
‘They stuck something in his mouth to shut him up.’
‘What happened next?’
‘They pulled him into the house and closed the door. I didn’t hear anything after.’
‘You weren’t tempted to go over there and…’
‘No fucking way! That big bastard had a gun.’
‘You were right not to. You saw plenty, and you’ve been very helpful. Why didn’t you ring 999 or come forward when the local police were conducting door-to-door enquiries?’
‘I dunno, I didn’t think what I saw was, you know, important.’
Henderson might have said, “What, seeing someone getting shot?” but he didn’t. The lad was probably smoking dope and frightened the officer taking his statement would smell it.
‘One question. Why did Robert Saunders, the owner of the house, come out of his house at twelve-thirty in the morning?’
‘I don’t know, for a smoke?’
‘I didn’t see any ashtrays in there,’ Henderson said, indicating the Saunders house with his thumb. ‘I don’t think he did.’
‘Maybe the bad guys were knocking on the door or making a noise.’
‘Did you hear any knocking?’
He shook his head.
‘Perhaps he came out to speak to you? Find out what you were doing.’
He threw his head back as if he’d received a slap. ‘No bloody way. Why would he? I didn’t know the guy.’
‘From Adam’, Henderson could have added, but he imagined the young man received enough ribbing about his name from his friends.
‘Fair enough.’ Henderson levered himself away from the wall. ‘As I said before, you’ve been very helpful Adam, thanks for coming forward. Someone will come around to your house later today and take a statement.’
‘Can I do it at the local station? My mum gets a bit weird about having police in the house.’
‘No problem.’
Henderson returned to the car in thoughtful mood. He would call Brady and make sure Adam was added to his roll call of witnesses. He felt sure the young man wasn’t telling the whole story, but equally sure the part of his story he omitted to tell, his real reason for being outside after midnight, had no bearing on the killing of Robert Saunders.
TWENTY-SIX
Henderson got up from his desk and stretched before walking around his office a few times, trying to get some oxygen into his system. The focus of attention this evening was scattered across his desk. He took a seat, opened the lid of his coffee and took a sip; still boiling hot.
There were now two main threads to this enquiry: the background of Robert Saunders, and the gun used to kill him. Saunders had kept his head well below the radar while on the run, and did a similar job since leaving school at sixteen, but there was a hiccup in his attempts to remain hidden, the chink in his defence which would reveal his identity: the two convictions he received, one for assaulting his partner, and the other for driving while over the legal limit.
His overnight stay in the cells didn’t furnish them with a full CV, but it did provide a photograph, the name of his brief, and the name of his next of kin. The last two he hoped would be useful in discovering more about the man.
So far in discussions with CI Edwards, there hadn’t been any mention of combining his case with the one being investigated by DI Brady in Guildford. Short of finding the shooters and having them admit their guilt, there was always the possibility the two were unconnected. Henderson was content to leave the issue ambiguous. He had no aspirations to take over Brady’s case, and he hoped the Surrey DI felt the same about his.
The position Henderson took wasn’t born out of any desire to stake-out territory, but based on practical considerations. His team had done a mountain of work on the murders at Black Quarry Farm, and each day he felt they were edging ever closer to the perpetrators. To lose it in a combined operation would set back all they had achieved.
The second main thread to this enquiry was the gun used to shoot Robert Saunders. It had some history, unlike the weapons deployed in the Beech murders, which were most likely clean out of the box. Brady’s team had uncovered two previous incidents in which the Saunders weapon had been fired: the injuring of a student, Faisal Baqri in Haringey, and the fatal shooting of a businessman, Ibrahim Nazari, in Sevenoaks.
For the purposes of his review tonight, Henderson would assume the killers of Robert Saunders also killed Ibrahim Nazari. It was possible the shooters were unconnected and the gun rented. Increasingly, unscrupulous dealers and importers could make more money by renting guns than selling them. This rendered them almost untraceable, as the dealer was unconnected to the shooter or the victim. However, in this instance, the low number of incidents and their geographical concentration made him think it was an owned weapon. He would assume this until he uncovered any evidence to contradict it.
A large body of research on the shooting of Ibrahim Nazari had been done by the team investigating his murder, much of which was lying in front of him. On 28th March at around seven-forty in the evening, Nazari was walking back to his car at a retail park in Sevenoaks, Kent. He’d been shopping in Sainsbury’s, picking up a few things requested by his wife, the subject of the last call he had received on his mobile.
He’d blipped the alarm off as he approached his vehicle. A car was parked in front of his, waiting to move into a space. The passenger in the waiting car called out something, perhaps his name, according to a witness who heard the exchange but didn’t see the people involved. When Nazari turned and walked towards the parked car, the passenger leaned out of the window, gun in hand, and blasted him three times. He was dead from a head shot by the time he collapsed on the tarmac.
The car sped off before the witness, now ducking down in case the shooters spotted him, could make his way through the forest of cars and look at the scene. From a distance, he said he thought the shooters’ car was a black 4x4, perhaps a VW, Volvo, or Mercedes. It wasn’t enough to start a vehicle search, and, as it turned out, the offending car, or in reality, the shell of it, turned up four days later, burned-out and identified as a stolen Skoda Kodiaq.
The remaining paperwork consisted of forensics on the murder scene, ballistics on the bullets found in Nazari’s body, and the post-mortem examination. It was detailed stuff. If he could be bothered reading it all, he would have a fantastic understanding of what happened that dark March night, but what he couldn’t find so much about was Nazari’s background.
There was a picture, a head shot looking like it had been taken at some government function; Henderson could see tall windows behind him and the trace of a flag that looked to him to be that of Iraq. He was broad-shouldered, overweight, no doubt from too many official lunches, with short dark hair and a bushy moustache. He was aged fifty-five and married with a son and daughter.
Nazari was a self-employed businessman working out of small offices above a row of shops in Sevenoaks, Kent. His speciality was textiles, not the tons of cotton, linen, and wool bought by the likes of Next and Marks & Spencer which they did by the container-load, but the bright-coloured fabrics worn by women from India and Pakistan.
Nazari lived in Sevenoaks in a substantial detached house with space for many vehicles, and a garden which looked straight out of a house or gardening magazine. The interview with his wife told of a devoted family man with few enemies.
So far, so normal, but a couple of anomalies stood out. First, the car Nazari drove to the supermarket. It was a nearly-new Porsche 911 Carrera, valued by Henderson’s estimation at over one hundred grand. Second, a quick check on house prices in the Sevenoaks area revealed the large house he and his family lived in could be worth over a million and a half. Added to this, in the photograph of the house, a top-of-the-line Range Rover was parked in the drive.
Henderson had no idea how many women in the UK bought material to make saris or other sorts of traditional clothes, but surely it wouldn’t be enough to provide one import
er with such an affluent lifestyle?
He flicked through the pages and looked at the scribbled notes, but didn’t find anything to suggest this had been investigated by Kent detectives. It was possible Nazari’s surprising wealth had occurred to them, and they’d done some investigating, but had hit a dead end and were reluctant to leave anything speculative in the file.
He picked up the phone and put a call through to the number he found on one of the documents, a DI at Kent Police HQ in Maidstone.
‘This is DI Henderson from Sussex Police,’ he said to the woman who answered. ‘I’m looking for Rudi Cavell.’
‘He’s gone home for the night, sir. Can anyone else help you? I’m DS Jodi Henson.’
‘Good evening Jodi. You on the late shift?’
‘No, sir. I’ve been sidelined for two weeks after snagging my leg on barbed wire. Tonight is my attempt at catching up.’
‘Not helped by phone calls like this, I’m sure.’
‘No problem, I needed a change of subject or my brain will freeze. What would you like to know?’
‘I’m looking for someone who worked on Operation Sovereign, the investigation into the shooting in Sevenoaks of Ibrahim Nazari.’
‘You’ve struck lucky, sir, I did. What can I help you with?’
‘Can you tell me what’s the latest on the case?’
‘No one’s been arrested for the murder and it’s still an open investigation. Between you and me, we won’t be doing much more unless some new information comes to light.’
‘I understand. What did you make of Nazari’s wealth?’
‘It was obvious as soon as we saw his body. A Rolex on his wrist and a thick gold chain around his neck. If the motive was robbery, between those and the cash he carried, the robbers would have cleared ten grand easy.’
‘What about the car?’
‘No lease-job for him. He owned it, and the thing was fitted with all the extras it could carry.’
‘I don’t know much about Indian textiles, but are wholesalers like him making a packet?’