by Iain Cameron
The officers waited ten minutes before approaching the door. Tuttle turned the key, pushed the door open, and allowed the officers carrying guns and wearing protective gear to enter first.
The five men were seated around the bench, masks on their faces and in the process of spooning product into small bags using little plastic scoops. No one turned around at the sound of the door opening, perhaps believing it to be the delivery of their morning coffee, or the noise was drowned out by the loud radio, tuned to some Asian station.
‘Police! Put your hands where I can see them!’ Tuttle shouted.
Hands reached inside jackets and down to their waistbands where Henderson could now see hidden weapons, but the officers were on them in a flash, knocking them to the ground and eliminating the threat.
A short time later, the men were led out, their hands secured and their heads down. They were dark-skinned men, darker than Cheema, suggesting they came from an area further south, or perhaps from India.
‘Not a bad haul, thanks to you Angus,’ Tuttle said. ‘I owe you one.’
‘I might take you up on that, Dave, as there are still other members of this crew I’d like to identify. I don’t know if the guys in here know them, but I’m sure Cheema does.’
‘I’m not sure you’ll get a crack at him. Once Customs get their claws into anybody, they can be hard to shake.’
Henderson and Neal walked out of the S&H building and headed for the surveillance flat. Before knocking on the door, he bought some coffees from a local coffee shop and threw in a couple of muffins and doughnuts.
‘What did you make of it all from your vantage position?’ he asked Lisa Newman as they climbed the stairs after she opened the door.
‘It was like watching a crime drama on television with the sound turned down.’
He walked into the back bedroom of the top floor, the one overlooking the S&H backyard. He found DS Walters reading a book.
‘What’s this? The goings-on at S&H not exciting enough for you?’
‘What? Ah, morning guv. Oh good, you brought some goodies.’
Henderson handed out the coffee and snacks and took a seat on a box. The surveillance team were in a great position, with a fantastic view over the yard inside the large steel gates. No wonder Cheema wanted to demolish the place and build houses.
‘Did you nab all the key players?’ Walters asked.
‘Between us we did. Customs got Cheema, and Organised Crime arrested the five guys who worked in the drugs warehouse.’
‘It was drugs was it?’ Newman asked.
‘Yes. It looks like they’ve been bringing over large amounts of cocaine and heroin in the textiles they’ve been importing. The guys in the warehouse were making up smaller bags which, judging by their size, would be sold to small-time dealers.’
‘Who in turn will dilute its potency even more with whatever white powder they can lay their hands on.’
‘It’s a dirty business, but at least we can take comfort from knowing a large quantity of product, and a major drug supplier, has been taken out of the equation.’
‘Now we’ve got something to celebrate,’ Walters said holding up her takeaway coffee cup as if it was a champagne glass. ‘The tricky part will come later in trying to find who pulled the trigger on our four victims.’
FORTY
Getting to Gohar Cheema was much easier than Henderson expected; he was being held in the custody suite at an East London police station. Revenue and Customs might feel a bit miffed if they discovered Henderson was talking to their suspect, but they were aware that Cheema was involved in something a lot more serious than VAT fraud.
‘Mr Cheema, I am Detective Inspector Henderson and this is Detective Sergeant Walters. We’re from Sussex Police and, in a bid to keep this discussion simple, we’d like to talk to you about the murder of Robert Saunders.’
‘What can I say? An unfortunate death.’
‘You were friends, I understand.’
‘We went to the same school, and he was the only one who defended me against racist bullies. I never forgot it.’
‘You returned the favour many years later when he found himself out of work and you gave him a job.’
‘Yes,’ he said, his face inscrutable. ‘He was a genius when it came to logistics.’
‘Yes, re-routing your lorries to pick up drugs, and driving through back roads in the middle of the night to avoid police checks.’
He shrugged.
‘You can’t deny it can you?’
‘My defence, in case the Serious Crime people didn’t tell you, is I knew nothing about it. This all went on without my knowledge, and set up by that swine-dog, Ibrahim Nazari.’
‘Mr Cheema, it is what, three, four days since your arrest, and this is the best defence you can come up with? In time, we’re confident of proving that your big house, nice car, and the villa in France were all funded by drug profits.’
‘Hmph,’ he said, crossing his arms as if he’d said all he was going to say.
The term ‘follow the money’ had been the watchword in this and many other cases. Yes, they could arrest the women in the sewing room, the men in the drug factory, Cheema and all his managers, but if they couldn’t prove they had benefitted financially, they had nothing. Behind the scenes, work on this side of things was moving at a fast pace.
‘What did you feel when the repayment you received for hiring Robert Saunders was for him to steal money from you?’
A black look came over his features. ‘Nobody steals from me and gets away with it. Nobody.’
‘Not even a childhood friend?’
‘He wasn’t a friend at the end. Friends don’t steal from one another.’
‘Did you kill him?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve killed no one.’
‘It’s just a coincidence, is it, when someone you want punished winds up dead?’
‘What can I say? Shit happens.’
Henderson thought it unlikely he could hang a murder charge on Cheema; the best he could hope for was Conspiracy or Accessory to Murder. He decided to introduce the murder of Faisal Baqri as that also involved kidnapping and it felt closer to Cheema emotionally.
‘Tell me about your daughter’s boyfriend.’
‘Boyfriend! Don’t make me laugh, she doesn’t have one. She’s too young, she’s only eighteen.’
‘Eighteen’s old enough to have a boyfriend, don’t you agree detective Walters?’
‘Was for me.’
‘You…you Europeans with your lax standards. Anything goes over here, but this is not what I want for my daughter.’
‘She did have a boyfriend though, didn’t she? She met him at college.’
‘That decadent shithole, I should never have allowed her to go there.’
‘He wasn’t good enough for her?’
‘Of course he wasn’t,’ he said, banging his fist on the table. ‘He is from a low family, his father is an underground train driver, no less. It would never work. I would never have permitted it to work.’
‘What about your daughter, did she like him?’
‘She might have, but what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Was your daughter secretly seeing him?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Did you see them together?’
‘What?’
‘Did you kidnap Faisal Baqri?’
‘Who?’
‘Did you kidnap your daughter’s boyfriend?’
‘What?’
‘Did you want him dead, like Robert Saunders?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘Yes, no, I mean no. What am I saying? You are trying to trap me, Inspector. Hoping I will say something I will regret.’
‘I’m doing no such thing. I’m endeavouring to establish the truth.’
‘I no longer want to answer any of your questions.’
‘Here’s a simple one: tell me about the Shah brothers.’
‘Tariq and Kazem? They are my nephews, of course, but I’m sure you know that.’
‘What do they do for you?’
‘Nothing. They do not work for my organisation. You will not find them on the payroll.’
‘Why then, were they spotted at your fashion business last Saturday night?’
Henderson placed down the surveillance pictures taken from the house overlooking the yard. Henderson was a little out on a limb here, as not knowing what they looked like, he had no idea if it was them or not.
‘I had a big delivery, I needed all the help I could get.’
‘At two-thirty in the morning?’
He sighed as if talking to an idiot. ‘These lorries have driven all the way from Pakistan, from Bangladesh. I can’t expect them to arrive between the hours of nine and five to suit my business.’
‘This is Tariq and Kazem?’ Henderson said pointing at the men in the photograph.
‘Yes, Kazem is the tall one.’
‘Where can I find them?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t keep tabs on my nephews. I have fifteen nieces and nephews, Inspector, doing so would be a full-time job.’
Henderson and Walters left the interview room a few minutes later.
‘It was like getting blood out of a stone,’ she said.
‘It’s the old problem, unless we can lay some good evidence down in front of him, he can continue to stonewall us. We’ll get him for the drugs business, as the source of the money will prove his guilt, but for the murders we need to find someone who can tell us where we can locate the Shah brothers.’
‘Cheema doesn’t keep tabs on them, he says, but he managed to contact them to help with the big delivery last Saturday.’
‘He knows where they are, all right, but he’s also aware how high the stakes are. On the drugs charges, he could be a free man in four or five years’ time. If we can hang the murders of the Beeches, Saunders, Nazari, and Baqri around his neck, he would never see daylight again.’
**
Henderson and Walters took the tube to Holborn and entered Holborn police station. A half hour later, Dave Tuttle showed them into an interview room where he had put one of the five guys arrested in the small warehouse at S&H Oriental Fashions, a person he regarded as the leader and more knowledgeable than his compatriots.
Nazir Kazi originated from Bangladesh and, according to Tuttle, was keen to cooperate as his son was suffering from cerebral palsy and the boy was too much for his wife to handle alone. As a favour to Henderson, Tuttle would be willing to let Kazi off with a caution if he gave Henderson what he wanted and wasn’t guilty of other charges. He was doing this as Kazi was the only member of the team who hadn’t been armed.
The five guys they arrested were workers, illegal immigrants who received a small weekly wage and didn’t benefit from the sale of the drugs. As such, and with a defence of coercion, they could be looking at eighteen months to a two-year stretch. Henderson had no intention of mentioning this to Kazi.
Nazir Kazi was a small man with jet black hair, a dark complexion, and a small pencil-thin moustache. If the DI was being critical he would say he also looked undernourished, and this before he’d become accustomed to prison food.
‘Mr Kazi, you are facing some serious charges here. We in the UK are determined to stop the flood of drugs on our streets from Asia and the Middle East, and judges are likely to make an example of people like you.’
‘I cannot go to prison, sir. I have a young son with a serious medical condition who needs attention all day and all night. My wife could never cope alone. It would break her.’
For a man who only came to the UK a year and a half before, he spoke good English. His accent was strong, but understandable if Henderson listened closely.
‘Tell me about the place where you worked.’
‘It was owned by Mr Cheema, sir. I only did what I was told.’
‘Where did the drugs come from?’
‘We received a large delivery usually two times a month hidden inside bales of textiles. I think the drugs came from Iraq and Pakistan.’
‘These deliveries are made on Cheema’s lorries?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you know who organises the drugs at the other end, in Pakistan and Iraq?’
‘It used to be Mr Nazari, but now one of Mr Cheema’s brothers does it.’
‘What happened to Mr Nazari?’
‘Did you not hear? He was found shot to death in a car park.’
‘Why was he killed?’
‘Mr Cheema told us it was because he tried to rape his daughter, but I thought he was only trying to scare us. Mr Nazari was such a nice man, I don’t think he would do anything of this nature.’
‘What about Faisal Baqri, the boy who was seeing his daughter?’
‘Oh, yes, we heard about that. Mr Cheema said he pulled the trigger himself, but that is all bluster. The Shah brothers would have done it. It’s what he pays them for.’
‘Where do I find them?’
‘Tariq lives in Chelsea and Kazem in Fulham. You see, sir, I am a big Manchester United fan, and they are big Chelsea supporters. We talk football any time I see them.’
‘Have you been to their houses?’
‘Oh no, sir. They would not invite me, a poor Bangladeshi man to their house. We are each Muslims, yes, but they think they are better Muslims than us.’
A few minutes later, Henderson told Kazi the interview was over, and the information provided by him had been very helpful.
‘That is good, sir. Will I still go to prison?’
‘No, you will not. I will tell DI Tuttle to let you off with a caution.’
He took Henderson’s hand in both of his and gripped it tight. ‘Oh, thank you, sir. I cannot tell you how much this means to my wife and my son. Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.’
FORTY-ONE
As befitting a rich drug dealer, not simply a gun for hire who was paid for each hit on Cheema’s enemies, Tariq Shah lived well. The house belonging to the older of the two Shah brothers was in a smart street not far from Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge football stadium, where drug factory worker, Nazir Kazi had suggested Tariq and his brother were season ticket holders. DS Walters hoped they hadn’t renewed them for the forthcoming football season, because if today’s operations were successful, neither Tariq nor Kazem would be attending any games in the foreseeable future.
Finding the brothers was easier than they had expected. Their addresses were contained in an address book found by Dave Tuttle’s team among the items in Cheema’s office, undiscovered by the Revenue and Customs search. To be fair to them, it wasn’t easy to find. It was held inside a magnetic sleeve and attached to the inside of a filing cabinet.
Neither Customs nor Organised Crime had shown any interest in the Shah brothers as yet, so it was down to the Sussex Major Crime Team to bring them in. Not knowing if the two men talked to one another on a daily basis, or were barely on speaking terms, they couldn’t take the risk of bringing them in one after another with a long gap between raids. While one team with DS Walters in charge would go after Tariq, at roughly the same time another team with DI Henderson at its head would be going after Kazem.
The unmarked vans of the raid team were parked at either end of Langton Street, as the man in question wasn’t at home. Watchers had told them he had just popped out for what would be called bread and milk in most other parts of the country, but here in Chelsea it would be a sourdough baguette and roasted almond milk.
They waited and waited as the target enjoyed a bit of window shopping in nearby King’s Road, no doubt thinking how he was going to spend the big bonus coming his way after Saturday’s drug delivery. According to the team watching, he was looking at watches, leather clothing, and he also visited a kitchen shop. Perhaps he was considering having his three-million-pound house redecorated. He would need it after the occupants of the two police vans piled into his smart house with their big boots
and paint-scratching H&K carbines.
It was decided at the Risk Assessment stage that they wouldn’t tackle Shah in the street. He was likely to be armed, and if they leapt out behind parked cars he could shoot a passer-by, take a hostage, or a stray shot could penetrate one of the numerous windows nearby. They decided to take him in the house, where his chances of escape and ability to manoeuvre would be more restricted. Walters had to hope the watchers were right when they assured her there was no one else living in the house.
At last, Walters’ headset came alive with the news she wanted to hear: Tariq Shah had finished shopping and was now returning home. Alas, the message also included something she did not want to hear: he was not alone. An attractive girl who the watcher believed to be a girlfriend, judging by the familiarity of their touches and laughter, was now walking with him.
‘At least it’s not a child,’ she said to Phil Bentley and Lisa Newman beside her, decked out as she was in protective clothing. ‘I’d hate to accidentally shoot a kid.’
‘Maybe as she’s the good-looking sort,’ Bentley said, ‘it’ll be kit off as soon as they get indoors. When we burst inside, we’ll find them naked and unable to put up much resistance.’
‘Knowing my luck, she’s a Russian arms dealer showing him some new gear, and we’ll find them armed to the teeth with enough ammo to hold out for a week.’
They watched on the camera feed as the happy couple walked arm-in-arm along the road towards them, looking as though they didn’t have a care in the world. Perhaps Bentley was right. There was enough warm interchange going on there to suggest a shag-fest could be in prospect, although the heavy bags they were carrying could equally be groceries for a post-coital feast or the aforementioned arms and ammo.
After putting a call through to DI Henderson, as they wanted to coordinate both raids, Walters allowed the couple to spend ten minutes inside the house before she gave the order to go. The vans made their way to Tariq’s house without the roar of engines or screech of brakes which could alert the subject, and parked close to his front door. The officers exited with haste and ran towards the target house.