by Ted Tayler
As Larcombe Manor’s residents eased themselves gently into the new week, in Portishead DS Phil Hounsell sat at his desk; arriving early, hoping for the best, expecting the worst.
He tried not to keep peering into the empty office where Zara Wheeler had once worked. He had to face up to a future without Mouse as his sidekick. Naturally, he didn't receive an invitation to her leaving do. Toby Drysdale hadn’t appeared yet either this morning to tell him how it went; Toby had less reason to be on this floor now that Zara had left. Phil realised there was little chance of hearing whether it had been a riot of fun and drunken laughter or a series of tearful farewells. Phil’s own career train was in the same siding as Zara had felt hers had been. Few people beat a path to his door to pass the time of day in amicable conversation. It generally involved a senior officer dropping by to chew him out yet again for his failure to crack a case.
Phil told Erica on Saturday afternoon that Zara had quit her job. She asked where she would be living and working next, but Phil wasn’t able to help her on that score. The couple both agreed not to upset the children by telling them Auntie Zara wasn’t going to be around much anymore. Shaun and Tracey would be off school and on their summer holidays soon, so their active little minds were due to be fully occupied. The kids would have forgotten to ask after her by Christmas, with luck. Phil wondered whether he would be so fortunate.
Talking of good fortune he thought, as he looked across the office once more, if he didn’t get a break on the ram-raiders or this new bunch of thugs soon, he could well be the next copper on this floor searching for a new job.
Dimitar Marinov shared none of the worries that Athena or Phil Hounsell faced that morning. He stood in one of the farm outbuildings on the outskirts of Windsor checking that everything was in place for tonight. His team was heading for Cheltenham and a string of three supermarkets in the High Street. They planned on taking three vehicles on this occasion; each of them seven-seater people carriers. The vehicles weren’t particularly new, they certainly couldn’t be described as ‘flash’, but for this job they were perfect.
Dimitar had no demand for luxury motors this afternoon; they would drive via Oxford and if it took them ninety minutes, or two hours it didn’t matter. They only needed to arrive safely and to carry out the attacks. They could make their way home more quickly if practical. After the raids, he planned to take the short route to the M5 from Cheltenham and head south to the M4 junction. The three vehicles split up as they transferred to the London-bound highway and lose themselves in plain sight as the busy summer evening traffic clogged the roads.
Dimitar had decided to leave Nikolay Iliev behind for this job. There was no need for anyone to stand guard on the High Street this time. They could use the Tesco car park and walk up the street to the other two stores. He reckoned on twelve to fifteen minutes maximum to achieve their goal.
So far he hadn’t considered finding the right person to help him contact the bank authorities. He didn’t want to risk bringing too many new people in on the campaign, there could be the risk of loose lips when you didn’t trust everyone in your group like a brother. That was why he elected to switch targets. To go to supermarkets for this attack. There would be time enough to put other elements of his plans into operation.
Dimitar went through the evening’s timetable for the benefit of the gang members and then he added, “A summer evening means there will be plenty of shoppers. There will be lots of easy targets and it stays light later on mid-July evenings. There’s little point in hiding dead bodies and spilt blood in dark corners. We want people to remember everything they see.”
With that chilling remark in their minds, the five men selected to join Dimitar on this raid knew what he expected of them. Andrey Pantev had been associated with Boris Tsankov in their home country and was rejoining his old ally. As a well-practised killer, he was on familiar ground. His driver would be Iliya Todorov. Tsankov was paired up with the head man Dimitar himself on this trip while Konstantin Hristov had Zlatko Yankov as his driver. The group of men was as heavily armed as for the Clevedon sortie.
The three vehicles set off at five-minute intervals from the farm outbuildings at just after five-thirty in the evening. They cruised through High Wycombe and successfully negotiated the busy Oxford ring road. One by one they drove into Cheltenham, located the Tesco car park and parked in bays that gave them as speedy an exit as possible. Contact between the three vehicles must be by walkie-talkie only and kept to a minimum.
“We will leave at seven-fifteen,” said Dimitar on the final transmission, “now… it’s ten past seven. Check.”
“Check. Check.” Both drivers replied that they were in synch and their weapons equipped with full magazines and ready to go. There were no balaclavas on this job; despite the very warm weather, the six men wore lightweight hooded jackets, dark glasses and baseball caps. The three enforcers hid their submachine guns in a ‘bag for life’ that matched the supermarket they were visiting.
At fifteen minutes past seven, Dimitar Marinov left his vehicle with Boris Tsankov and headed for the supermarket doors. Boris stopped at one of the stations and picked up a family-sized trolley, placing his bag at the bottom.
Andre Pantev and Iliya Todorov hurried up the High Street to the furthest target. Hristov and Yankov crossed the street to the doors of the smallest supermarket on their ‘hit list’. The three pairs of gangsters used a family-sized trolley when they walked purposefully around the aisles. Each of the attackers raised the hoods of their jackets over their heads. They stacked high-value spirits, small electronic gadgetry and a few dozen CDs and DVDs in their baskets. Dimitar even found a stack of large bath towels that he threw into Boris’s trolley.
Dimitar checked his watch. It was seven twenty-three. They would make their way towards the checkouts. He nodded to Boris, and the enforcer allowed Dimitar to push the trolley for a while. He retrieved his bag. As they passed the checkouts and closed on the exit, several staff members called out for them to stop. A security guard tentatively approached them and pointed towards the tills.
“You need to pay for those items, Sir,” he began.
Boris Tsankov cut him in half with the burst from his Uzi.
Dimitar had been right about the aisles being busy with shoppers enjoying the warm summer evening. The locals came out in force, stocking up on drinks and planning for a barbeque weekend. He continued to push his heavy trolley out of the doorway towards the people carrier. In his wake, he heard screams and shouts. Then came the series of shots he’d been expecting.
“Music to my ears,” he laughed. Inside Tesco’s, Boris left three more people dead and seven wounded. He walked casually out of the store and joined his boss to unload the trolley. Nobody attempted to stop him or follow him. Phones were being dialled furiously.
The local police station stood on the outskirts of town and crime was low in this genteel corner of the world. This was exactly why it had been chosen. Dimitar wanted people to experience the hell of living in a war zone. Not knowing whether it was safe to go outside or not.
Dimitar ripped open the bath towel packaging and scattered a few towels over the goods in the rear of the car. He spotted his four colleagues trotting into the car park; their trolleys loaded with valuable items. He gave towels to each pair and then he and Boris drove away. Within a minute, Todorov and Yankov drove out behind them and headed for the M5 junction.
Dimitar Marinov picked up his walkie-talkie.
“Numbers?” he asked.
Zlatko replied first, “Five altogether, a couple might make it.”
Iliya Todorov muttered into his unit next.
“We got loads of steaks and bottles of cheap wine. You gave us a crap store to rob. No TV’s to pinch, nothing. Andrey visited two or three aisles to find someone to shoot. There was just one young girl on her own at the checkout. She screamed so much that Andrey put a bullet in her throat to silence the cow. No security; just a female manager in a booth. As soon as she
picked up the phone, I shot her. So two dead definitely and three or four injured.”
Dimitar grinned at Boris, “Poor Iliya.”
He was still laughing as they merged with the traffic on the motorway.
Two hours later they unloaded the people carriers in the farm outbuilding and wondered how much they had stolen.
“I reckon the goods from the three stores totalled less than eight grand,” said Dimitar, “but the police and the citizens of Cheltenham won’t sleep well in their beds tonight.”
As they locked up and prepared to make their way back to their homes in and around Maidenhead, Iliya Todorov remembered the steaks.
“Those steaks won’t be any good if we leave them behind,” he said, “we may as well enjoy them since we stole them.”
Dimitar shrugged.
“Did you think to grab a bag of frozen chips while you hung around in Iceland, Iliya? No? I thought not.”
Iliya carried the twenty-four sixteen-ounce steaks to his car where his passengers waited for him. He had no idea what he would do with them but he wasn’t going to let good food go to waste. Dimitar Marinov and the others left for home. Dimitar was in a good mood. He wanted a drink and a woman. His passengers had to go along for the ride; nobody argued with Dimitar.
Tuesday morning promised another scorcher. Across the country, the sun shone, and temperatures soared. In Cheltenham High Street there were few shoppers. Most of the street had been cordoned off. There were more members of Gloucestershire Constabulary in attendance than on Gold Cup day up at Prestbury Park. There had been police activity there since around a quarter to eight last evening when phone lines had become unjammed long enough for the emergency services to be contacted.
When they arrived they were confronted by scenes alien to the officers and paramedics unfortunate enough to be on duty.
The police officers’ superiors over at Quedgeley HQ had been called by their colleagues at Portishead as soon as they received news of the second attack. They had been expecting a strike on their patch. The officers knew precisely how they felt; hurt, angry and helpless. Eight deaths had been confirmed in the supermarkets. There were thirteen injured customers, three of which were critical, three serious and public outcry gathered impetus. The local radio stations ran phone-ins throughout the day and the local TV stations carried lengthy reports late last night and on Tuesday morning.
“How can this happen here in Cheltenham?”
“Is it safe for me to take my kids to school?”
“Why? Why here?”
Nobody had the answers. This wasn’t London, Birmingham or Manchester where gang violence very infrequently surfaced on residential streets; this wasn’t a large metropolis where terrorists from various quarters might concentrate a bombing campaign. This was Clevedon and Cheltenham where the crime rate is low and rarely violent.
The question inevitably posed by one senior citizen from Minchinhampton who rang BBC Radio Gloucestershire summed up the mood: -
“What is this country coming to if gangs of killers can turn up where and when they please, armed to the teeth to kill people without blinking an eye? Are we safe anywhere these days?”
If Dimitar Marinov had heard that broadcast he would have laughed and clapped his hands. That was precisely the reaction he wanted; he was a psychopath. He had spent last night getting drunk and ended up taking two women to a hotel room where they partied until dawn. While the authorities and the media dealt with the attack on Cheltenham High Street, Dimitar was sleeping off the effects of his night into the early afternoon.
In the incident room at Portishead, DS Phil Hounsell listened to another debrief from the Divisional Commander. Avon & Somerset’s police staff had committed as many of their depleted numbers as they could to tracking last week’s attackers in Clevedon. They had used every traditional method available to them. Plus a few scientific tools that according to the TV shows that featured them were sure to get you the answers to the puzzle in front of you in less than fifty minutes. Avon & Somerset’s detectives had come up with precisely nothing.
The killers had worn balaclavas inside the banks. Descriptions of the four men were vague and contradictory. There was a consensus that the main gunfire came from Uzi’s; that was one useful thing TV shows taught the man on the street to recognise. The ammunition used was standard 9mm, available in quantity through all good criminal networks and possibly a few perfectly legal outlets.
Neither the car drivers nor the man in the suit who shot PCSO Ricketts had been captured on any CCTV images. Interviews with the hostages and the injured victims yielded little. Sometimes a local copper can talk to a few contacts and come back to HQ and say, the word on the street is… In this case, these confidential informants could only offer a pathetic - they aren’t from around here.
Phil gazed at a spot just above his Divisional Commander's head. Where would you look to find Eastern Europeans? Did they have a large community in Bristol that he had missed? Surely it was logical to turn towards the capital? Regardless of whichever country this mob emanated from it was a good bet that the vast majority of them settled in London and the surrounding region. They had been told the streets were paved with gold for donkey’s years; it wasn’t likely they made a beeline for West Bromwich or Exeter.
His boss droned on but Phil was miles away. Why on earth might anywhere on the M5 be the starting point for the gang? That made no sense. If they drove from London and then joined the M5, they could reach any destination in Somerset or Gloucester in a couple of hours. It might be a possibility for the ram-raiders if they were Brits, but not this mob.
“Do you have anything to add, DS Hounsell?” asked the DC, spotting that Phil was in a world of his own.
“In what respect, Sir,” spluttered Phil.
“I propose we start patrols on the M5 carrying out rolling ANPR checks to see if we can’t spot these cars the devils are using.”
“An utter waste of time, Sir, with respect, even if we had the manpower, the vehicles and the budget for the equipment. They don’t come from our patch, or anywhere close. This mob is based near London.”
“Oh, really, and on what do you base this fanciful idea?”
Phil knew as soon as he opened his mouth he would regret it. But he had committed himself so he ploughed on, thinking on his feet as he had done on cases with Zara and before that with the ill-fated SOCA a decade ago.
“Because of their nationality. Since our borders have been open to more and more Europeans and other nationalities, three-quarters of every group that has migrated here will have stayed in or around London. The gang has probably been there for around two years. If they were active in day-to-day crime and not too clever, they would have been arrested by now. This gang has, at least, one member who is very clever indeed. I believe they’ve been establishing a criminal network, gathering strength as more migrants are recruited. We should work with the Metropolitan Police. See if they have any intelligence on gangs working with the trafficking and supply of drugs, trafficking, and supply of women. Gangs that have been untouchable so far. We could check to see if there’s any possibility there could be one gang they’ve suspected, but so far not identified. One that’s rumoured to be hoping to branch out.”
The room fell silent.
“Thank you for your input, DS Hounsell,” said the Divisional Commander with a smirk.
Phil looked around the room. Most people were staring at the floor. No-one wanted to catch his eye. Strangely, the more he let his mind run loose on his ideas the more he convinced himself he was on the right track.
The Divisional Commander had one more nail to drill into Phil’s coffin.
“We will carry on with the actions I proposed. If these villains return to our patch I trust we will find them. I have every confidence in our abilities as a team when we pull together in the same direction. The other neighbouring forces that may, or may not have a part in this manhunt will have to organise their own response how they see fit.”
>
The briefing ended and Phil went back to his office. So that was how it was going to be on his patch. His bosses would cover their own backsides by assuring the public they were doing everything they could to find the killers of Claire Ricketts and the others in Clevedon. For the Divisional Commander, the big picture only existed if it was of him on the front page of the Western Daily Press celebrating the news of a successful conclusion to this case.
That French phrase he struggled to remember a fortnight ago flashed up in his brain. He wondered whether he should get a copy framed and hang it on the wall of his office.
CHAPTER 7
Friday, July 19th, 2013
Athena chaired the morning meeting at Larcombe. It started promptly at nine o’clock and had to be brought to a close within the hour. There were matters to discuss that couldn’t wait. At ten, she and Phoenix would be driven to London in one of the luxury cars from the Olympus transport section. The pair were then due to attend their first meeting with the others that comprised the twelve Olympians.
There were reports from Henry Case and Giles Burke on the Clevedon attack to be considered.
Rusty had sent a preliminary report on his investigation into the beds in sheds scandal in Outer London.
Minos had an opinion to divulge concerning the new threat that had grown from both the Clevedon and Cheltenham attacks. The number of dead and injured left the nation shocked and anxious. As the anxiety spread in the days after the second attack on Monday, the whole country took a deep breath and anticipated the next strike. Shopping centres reported footfall reduced by as much as twenty per cent. Online retailers reported a surge in demand more akin to the run-up to Christmas.
Thanatos reported that the Prime Minister visited Clevedon yesterday morning and Cheltenham after lunch to reassure the public that everything was being done to bring these killers to justice. The ‘local communities have the sympathies of the whole nation as they cope with this tragedy’ he said, and that the public should not panic. ‘This sort of attack is rare; it will not continue unchallenged.’