Black Quarry Farm

by Iain Cameron

  ‘Why? If Faisal was killed by the same gun as the others, everything then points to Cheema.’

  ‘Tying the gun is all very well, but it’s circumstantial, as we still don’t know who fired it. We need to find the shooter.’

  ‘This case is driving me to distraction,’ Walters said. ‘Everything points to Cheema’s involvement in five murders, and yet we can’t arrest him, or raid his business.’

  ‘We could bring him in for questioning, but it would be a waste of time without more evidence, and let’s face it, it wouldn’t be his hand on the trigger.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It didn’t take long for Henderson and Bentley to reach Maidstone in Kent, the morning rush on the M25 long gone. He liked coming here, a smart modern town which still retained many traditional buildings and streets, a reminder of its historical heritage. However, like many similar towns in the south-east, it had become a victim of its own success, with relentless house building and the inevitable increase in traffic.

  The headquarters of Kent Police was situated along the leafy Sutton Road, tucked behind a row of suburban houses. If they were trying for anonymity, they had succeeded, with only a small sign and the movement of several police cars to indicate its true purpose.

  After security checks, they were taken to a meeting room by Jodi Henson, the DS that Henderson had spoken to when he first heard about the murder of Ibrahim Nazari. Jodi was short in stature, but anything she lacked in height and girth was more than made up with an energetic and bubbly personality.

  ‘While you get yourselves organised, I’ll just go and chase up Rudi and organise some coffees. All right?’

  She breezed out of the room and closed the door.

  ‘It makes a change from grumpy old cops who can’t be bothered to tell you the time of day,’ Henderson said.

  ‘Ten minutes with her and I’d be worn out,’ DC Phil Bentley said.

  The meeting room looked shabby. The walls bore a variety of scuff marks, the table looked scratched and chipped, and many of the chairs were wobbly and marked. The temptation for some in such a narrow room was to lean the chair back on two legs and rest it against the wall. No wonder so many of them were falling to bits.

  Henderson picked a chair which looked steadier than most, and sat.

  ‘You were saying in the car, boss,’ Bentley said, ‘not much had happened at the surveillance sites last night.’

  Henderson sighed. ‘Nothing at all, in fact. We’ve had no real movement since the big delivery on Saturday night, early Sunday morning.’

  ‘Maybe this is how it works. If it is drugs they’re dealing in, they get a consignment delivered once a week, or every two weeks and nothing in between.’

  ‘Could be, but–’

  The door opened and Henson, accompanied by a man Henderson presumed to be her boss, DI Rudi Cavell, walked in. Following introductions, they all sat down.

  Rudi had a crop of thick, black hair and a dark complexion. With the fine weather of late, many people around Brighton look tanned, but when Rudi spoke, using his hands for emphasis, it was clear he hadn’t been sunbathing, but originated from southern Europe, possibly Italy.

  Rudi opened the file in front of him and extracted a number of papers and pictures before passing them to Henderson and Bentley.

  ‘There you have various pictures of the Nazari crime scene, a list of suspects, and the ballistics report.’

  Henderson managed to speed-read the documents before Cavell asked, ‘You came at this one from the murder of Robert Saunders, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, we did. Detectives at Surrey informed us he was killed with the same gun used in the murder of Ibrahim Nazari.’

  ‘Do you know why either of these men were targeted?’

  ‘At first, I suspected it was a rented weapon, with no relationship between the victims, but we now know they’re both connected to a company in Haringey called S&H Oriental Fashions.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t you remember, boss?’ Henson said. ‘Nazari was an importer of oriental fabrics, and one of his customers, one he worked with regularly, was S&H Oriental.’

  ‘What’s the connection between him and Saunders?’

  ‘Saunders used to work there, as the Logistics Manager.’

  ‘Ah,’ Cavell said, ‘I remember the company now.’ He searched through the thick folder once again and came up with a report. He handed it to Henderson.

  ‘We talked to S&H,’ Cavell said. ‘The boss, a fella called Gohar Cheema. We only managed to speak to a few of Nazari’s big customers before the top brass pulled the plug.’

  Cavell spent some time going over his interview with Cheema, but it sounded not unlike the report produced by DS Wallop after he and Phil Bentley had talked to him. The S&H boss told them he was sorry to hear about the death of a loyal and trusted supplier, but his murder had nothing to do with him and he didn’t know who might have killed him.

  ‘Did you do any more research on S&H?’ Henderson asked.

  Cavell shrugged. ‘There wasn’t any point; we didn’t have anything to go on and pretty soon the folks upstairs decided to call it a day.’

  ‘You see, even though the evidence points to him, I don’t see a man like Cheema murdering Saunders or Nazari.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Cavell said.

  ‘Did you find any evidence that Cheema employed bodyguards or moved in circles where he could hire a couple of gunmen?’

  Cavell shook his head.

  ‘There’s one thing I found out after I did a little digging,’ Henson said. ‘You might find interesting, but I would file it under pub gossip, so take it how you like. There are two guys who work for Cheema called the Shah brothers, Kazem and Tariq. They’re his nephews and, according to the guy I spoke to, they’re a couple of violent thugs. He couldn’t see Cheema shooting Nazari, but he could see them doing it.’

  ‘We followed this lead up,’ Cavell said with a heavy sigh, ‘and while it sounded credible at the time, as it fitted the woolly description we had of Nazari’s attackers, we couldn’t find them and nobody would admit to knowing them. We concluded that Jodi’s source was over-egging it.’

  Henson gave Henderson a look that said, ‘See what I have to put up with?’ but otherwise she remained silent.

  They left the offices of Kent Police ten minutes later, Henderson feeling the trip had been worthwhile. It didn’t add much to their knowledge about the shooting of Ibrahim Nazari, but it told them something about the shooters. Two men were involved in the shooting at Black Quarry Farm, Adam White, the witness at Leatherhead, mentioned seeing two men at the scene of Robert Saunders’ murder, and a witness saw two men in a car kill Ibrahim Nazari.

  None of the suspects identified so far fitted the bill, except the Shah brothers. It was just a shame Cavell’s investigation was cut short, as it would have been the icing on the cake to be driving back to Sussex now with details of how to find them.

  ‘They’re quite a pair those two,’ Bentley said, ‘him with his exaggerated Italian hand movements, and her not being able to keep still for more than a couple of minutes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy sitting beside her in a boring briefing, she’d be climbing the walls.’

  ‘Do you think there’s anything in her Shah Brothers story?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m not going to ignore it. I’ll stick a couple of analysts on the job of trying to find them. If they’re as violent as Jodi’s contact said they were, they’re bound to have fallen foul of the law somewhere along the line.’

  ‘The thing I don’t get is why would Cheema kill all those people. What’s his beef?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this too. It doesn’t matter if they’re importing drugs or looted gold, the killing of Saunders wasn’t about any of that. It was down to stolen money. They killed the Beeches because they believed they were shooting Saunders and his partner.’

  ‘I get that, but why didn’t the shooters wake up the Beeches and ask them w
here they’d put the money? They did it with Saunders.’

  ‘Maybe, when they went to Black Quarry Farm they didn’t believe he had any money left. When they found him hiding out at the house in Leatherhead and tortured him for a bit, they realised he had some of it left.’

  ‘Fair enough, but what about Nazari and the boy, Faisal Baqri? Where do they fit in?’

  ‘This is where my reasoning becomes a bit flaky. See, I don’t think Nazari was stealing like Saunders, despite the smart car and big house. He was taking a big risk importing whatever illegal substance they’re dealing in, so I’m assuming he was well rewarded. No, I think it has to do with something else. Perhaps something to do with Cheema or his family, as Irene Jennings suggested.’

  ‘Well, Baqri was shot the first time, we think, because he was seeing Cheema’s daughter, so he’s proved he doesn’t stand any nonsense as far as his family’s concerned.’

  ‘In which case, Nazari may have insulted Cheema, had a fight with his son, or even made a play for his wife or daughter. Irene Jennings said he was a lecherous sod, although that might have been only with her, as she’s an attractive lady, but who knows?’

  ‘It’s not so far-fetched,’ Bentley said. ‘If he was once a senior officer in Saddam’s personal bodyguard, he’s probably used to having things all his own way. Maybe with Cheema, he pushed too hard and met an immovable object.’

  ‘It’s a good point, Phil, and I hope in the information Rudi gave us there’s some assessment of Nazari’s personality. Was he an arrogant son-of-a-bitch who wanted everything done his way, or was he a serious sexual predator with a string of conquests and young girlfriends?’

  ‘It would be good to know.’

  Henderson’s phone rang.

  ‘Henderson.’

  ‘Angus, this is Dave Tuttle. How are you doing?’

  Dave worked in the Met’s Organised Crime Unit. Henderson had called him a week ago to find out if they were working on anything connected to S&H Oriental Fashions or Gohar Cheema.

  ‘Dave, it’s good to hear from you. I’m good. You?’

  ‘I’m tickety boo, mate. Listen, I told you before we’d assumed Cheema was involved in the importation of drugs, but we couldn’t do anything as we didn’t have the evidence?’

  ‘Sounds a familiar story,’ Henderson said. ‘My boss said the same.’

  ‘Well, listen up, you’ll like this. Revenue and Customs have decided to raid S&H, suspecting them of VAT fraud. If it’s true, the greedy bastards deserve to go down. It’s the ones who keep a low profile that last the longest, in my experience, but I digress. They’ve asked my team to provide support. You wanna tag along?’

  THIRTY-NINE

  At seven-thirty in the morning, Henderson and DS Vicky Neal found themselves in the back of a police van waiting for the starting whistle. The logic of Revenue and Customs starting the raid on S&H Oriental Fashions first thing in the morning was to catch the workers all bleary-eyed and lacking resistance. He could see the sense of this. If they left it to the evening, by five o’clock all the women in the sewing room would have gone home, leaving only a few men, according to Henderson’s watchers.

  Neal had briefed everyone in the raid team about the S&H morning routine. She had watched it often enough, from the time the workers walked through the front of the building, to the moment when Cheema’s large Mercedes rolled into the back entrance through the double gates.

  It wasn’t an ideal scenario, detectives from Sussex piggy-backing on a Revenue and Customs raid; R&C were the lead agency and anything they deemed important to their investigation they would remove, making it nigh on impossible for them to lay their hands on any of it. If this only included invoices and delivery notes, it wouldn’t be a problem, but he knew they also wanted Cheema.

  Edwards was thrilled to hear of the involvement of another agency, and Henderson was now convinced her lack of decisiveness had more to do with the new job she was chasing than any shortcomings she believed existed in the evidence now piled up against Gohar Cheema. For her, the R&C raid was a win-win situation. She could claim credit if they found something other than VAT fraud, and if not, Henderson’s faulty assumptions were to blame and further justified her refusal to issue a search warrant.

  At eight, a succession of cars drew up and the sewing ladies entered the building. Minutes later, cars belonging to the various managers drove through the double gates, and ten minutes after, Cheema’s Mercedes joined them. The gates closed and the order was given: ‘Go! Repeat, Go!’

  Henderson and Neal got out of the van and approached the officers exiting other cars and vans parked around the area. All told, there were some twenty officers, the majority from Revenue and Customs. A van was parked in front of the gates to make sure no one tried to leg-it, while the rest of the crew filed in through the front door.

  Henderson had been told what to expect by Harry Wallop, but still the size of the place and the racket made by the sewing machines startled him. It was a cavernous place inside, tall ceilings and high windows and a bugger to heat, evidenced by the lingering chill of the morning air.

  ‘Stop what you’re doing!’ the big guy from Revenue and Customs shouted. ‘This is a raid!’

  They did as they were told and all they could hear was the thump of Bhangra music.

  ‘And would someone turn that bloody racket off!’ The R&C guy shouted irritably. ‘It’s doing my head in.’

  The Customs guys headed straight for the office looking for Cheema and incriminating pieces of paper, while Henderson and Neal, in the company of DI Dave Tuttle from the Met, looked around.

  They headed out the back door to where Cheema and his managers parked their cars, and lorries were unloaded. Henderson looked up to the house where Walters and her team were based and gave them a wave. He’d told them about the raid, the expected closure of S&H Fashions, and his decision to cease the surveillance from today.

  Henderson turned to look at the back of the S&H building.

  Tuttle joined him.

  ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ Tuttle asked.

  ‘You mean the extension over to the right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Let’s go and take a look.’

  They walked back inside the building and soon found a locked door, not easy to spot at first glance due to the subdued lighting in the sewing hall and the colour of the door which closely matched the stone of the wall.

  Henderson could see the door was well secured, locks top and bottom with one in the middle.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ Dave Tuttle said and ran off.

  Henderson watched as Cheema was led out. It was the first time he’d seen him, with the exception of surveillance pictures at the wheel of his car. He was of average height, thick mop of dark coloured hair parted in the middle, bushy moustache, and rotund. No way did he fit Adam White’s description of either of the two men who shot Robert Saunders or the even more vague description of two men in a car who killed Ibrahim Nazari. His chain of thought was broken when Dave came striding towards him, a bulky officer at his side, carrying a door banger.

  ‘If these don’t work,’ he said holding up a bunch of keys, ‘Eddie here will do what he’s good at.’

  After several failed attempts, a key turned. Flushed with success, Tuttle attacked the task with gusto and soon found the others. Moments later, the door opened. Eddie looked disappointed as he walked away.

  They couldn’t see a thing until Neal reached in and switched on the light.

  At first, it looked like a small warehouse with blue metal racks, a work bench, products on the shelves, and equipment and debris on the bench where people had been working. On closer examination, the product was powder, cocaine and heroin according to Tuttle, after an initial assessment based on a bout of sniffing and nods from his colleagues. The work taking place on the bench seemed to involve taking the powder from big bags and decanting it into smaller ones. The bench equipment included scales, various sizes of small ladles,
an industrial size box of baking powder, and boxes of small polythene bags.

  ‘Do we know who works in here?’ Henderson asked Neal. Then he remembered the pictures of the men unloading the lorry the previous Saturday. He rushed out of the room and caught up with one of the sewing women as she was about to leave.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said to her, ‘but can I ask, what time do the men who work in there,’ he said, pointing towards the small warehouse, ‘start work?’

  She looked skyward for a moment. ‘About ten, but it varies.’

  ‘How many are expected today?’

  ‘There’s usually about five.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He walked back towards Tuttle and told him what he wanted to do.

  ‘I can rustle up about six guys, how does that sound?’

  At nine-thirty, Henderson took up his designated position, close to the rear door. He’d explained the plan to the senior Revenue and Customs officer and as a result, their vehicles were moved to more discreet positions, and their officers were shut inside the office area at the back and told to keep quiet.

  At ten-fifteen, when they were starting to believe no one would come, they heard two cars drive into the yard. It was possible to get into the small warehouse without entering the sewing hall, but the issue all the officers foresaw was the absence of the women and the lack of noise from their clattering machines. Perhaps, like footballers, they would arrive for work wearing headphones.

  The door opened, filling Henderson’s hiding place with the light and warmth of the morning sun.

  ‘I tell you,’ a loud voice was saying, ‘Lukaku’s the real deal. He studies videos of strikers like Ronaldo and Van Basten to improve his scoring record.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said another. ‘Kane’s way better. He doesn’t need as much support from midfield that Lukaku does. He can play up front on his own.’

  They unlocked the door, and someone reached inside and switched on the light. Five men walked into the room. Seconds later, the door snapped shut.