Condemned

by R. C. Bridgestock

  Ben and Terry sat beside each other. Charley watched intently, to see how Ricky-Lee reacted in their presence, but at no time did the detective rise to their banter. He even joined in confidently, she was pleased to note. Sometimes, she had learnt it was better to do nothing when she was angry, as she had been with Ricky-Lee; it was obvious to her now that he was working through his issues in his own way, in his own time, and she felt proud of him.

  ‘Have you an update on the robbery at Mr Chaudry’s shop?’ Mike asked the pair from the cold-case team.

  ‘Yes, we’ve talked to Brad Dixon following your interview with him, and liaised with Mr Chaudry’s close relatives to inform them that Brad Dixon has been charged with the robbery at the store, as well as the murder of Mr Hussain,’ said Ben.

  Charley continued with the brief. It was important at this stage that everyone understood the links in the case. ‘Brittany Dixon was shot dead by armed officers after she open fire on them. At the same time, her husband who was unarmed, was arrested. These two had been wanted for outstanding cases of armed robbery. Brad Dixon has now been with charged with the cold-case offences. One of these offences of armed robbery was where a gun was discharged. This was at an off-licence, where six weeks later, the owner who had confronted the Dixons, died of a heart attack. Faisal Hussain was his nephew, and was searching for the Dixons because of this, we presume for some sort of retribution. Hussain was by no means an angel. A drug dealer who carried a weapon. His weapon has not been recovered. His was the body we discovered behind the fireplace at Crownest and he had been fatally shot in the head. The weapon causing this fatality was discovered taped under the bonnet of the Dixons’ motorhome. We know the rest. Brad Dixon says in interview it was Raglan who pulled the trigger, not him, and then all of them, including James Thomas hid his body. He tells us also that Raglan is addicted to cocaine, and that he launders money in connection to drugs and property through the estate agency. Dixon states that he paid no rent for Crownest because he kept Raglan supplied with his preferred drug, as that was the deal. After what happened with Hussain, Dixon sold the car to someone he doesn’t wish to tell us about, and threw Hussain’s gun into the sea. He claims the piece was an imitation, which intelligence suggests is highly unlikely. That’s it so far, in a nutshell. Our aim tomorrow is to arrest both remaining targets, Thomas and Raglan, and search their homes, and other related premieres, to secure evidence against them both prior to subsequent interviews.

  Exhausted, but fitful, sleep didn’t come easy that night for Charley.

  * * *

  At six-fifteen the following morning, the convoy set off. When they left the confines of the vault of the police station, which doubled-up as a garage where some of the vehicles had been parked overnight, it was pitch black outside. Charley could tell the team were excited at the prospect of closing the case. The arrest stage was the icing on the cake to any investigation.

  Charley headed to the Control Room so she could listen in to both arrests simultaneously, and be available for any enquiries or decisions that needed to be made quickly. It also gave an overview as to what was happening at each address.

  ‘Penny for them?’ said Tattie when Charley sat down next to her. She handed her a mug of coffee.

  ‘I hate being here, and not there in the thick of it,’ she said. Charley was aware that her own adrenalin levels were as high as that of the team. ‘I love to see the reaction on their faces when they’re surprised by an officer waking them up.’

  ‘Well, look on the bright side, they’ll all be wearing body cams so you can watch it later,’ said Tattie, nonchalantly.

  There were three boxes of biscuits piled up on the chair to her side. Tattie gave one to Charley. ‘Here, have this,’ she said.

  Charley chuckled. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t. I know there is someone more important that you’d like to give them to.’

  Tattie shook her head. ‘No, there isn’t. I overheard Ben and Terry talking last night…’ Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Did you know Tim is divorcing his fourth wife?’ She shuffled her crossed arms under her ample bosom. ‘He’ll be looking for someone to look after him, but that’s not me. It’s the last time I’ll be baking him biscuits; I’m not about to become his fifth!’

  Charley tittered despite her anxiety. ‘Obviously he’s one of life’s charmers, Tattie.’

  ‘He’ll be doing it without my biscuits; I’ve got the measure of him. I know what rules him and it’s not his head, or stomach!’

  The teams were now on the road heading to the addresses of their separate targets. Charley stood and walked backwards and forwards, waiting for one of the team on the ground to break the silence.

  ‘Target One, James Thomas, arrested,’ came the welcome news over the radio.

  Chapter 39

  The minutes seemed like hours to Charley since she’d heard of the first arrest over the dedicated radio channel. She wanted to know and hear more. It was like wearing a blindfold. She schooled herself to be patient and fought to remain calm. She thought of previous raids to distract herself during the lull in action: the sound of colleagues, wearing boots with steel-toed caps rushing up the stairs in front and behind her, pounded in her head, and at the same time threatened to deafen her, ‘On the floor! On the floor! Let me see your hands! Get down!’ came the shouts of her colleagues. Charley knew the drill well. She tried hard to shake her head clear, and tried to concentrate on the present, when suddenly the radio silence broke.

  ‘Target Two, Raglan, under arrest, and being removed from the premises, ma’am.’

  Further information was passed to the Control Room. ‘He appears to be under the influence of drugs. Team Two deployed, with keys, for work premises on the high street, the estate agency.’

  Charley imagined the scene. Those arrested being escorted to the waiting marked police vehicles to be transported to the cells, the hand of the police officer being placed on top of the prisoners’ heads as they climbed carefully, with their hands cuffed behind their backs, into the rear of the car. ‘Mind your head, we don’t want you to hurt yourself, do we?’ she would say.

  As the prisoners left, Charley could visualise the search teams going in to the designated site, each one of the specialist team chomping at the bit to start emptying drawers and cupboards, searching for anything that could connect the prisoner to the crime, to help secure a conviction. At the thought, Charley’s fists clenched around the handle of her empty mug so tightly that her knuckles turned white. It was a waiting game for her, a waiting game to see what was recovered from the premises.

  * * *

  Charley walked down the police station steps alone. From one floor to the next, she didn’t see a soul, until she reached the basement level and the custody suite. At the secure gated access, she called for the door release, and waited patiently for the CCTV camera pointing at the door to be checked. On entry she was met by single line of closed doors that lined each side of the empty, brightly lit corridor. Two doors had been left open. Inside she saw a toilet without a seat, and a wooden bed base with a thin plastic mattress on top. Charley shuddered. A windowless room with a locked door was her worst nightmare.

  As she made herself comfortable in the back office in the custody suite which was situated directly behind the custody desk, Charley planned to watch the prisoners being brought before the Custody Sergeant Percy Shaw. Here they would be booked in at the desk and asked to hand in their personal property.

  ‘Place them as far apart as you can, will you?’ she had asked the custody staff. She didn’t want to give Thomas or Raglan any opportunity to speak to each other, by shouting down the corridor in the cell area. Though she thought it wouldn’t harm to let them each know that the other had been apprehended.

  When the buzzer announced the arrival of a prisoner at the back door, it made her jump, such was her concentration on the file she was reading. James Thomas appeared through the door. The arrogance that he had displayed at Crownest was gone, as anticipated.
His grey, puffy face looked bewildered, he was shaking and extremely upset. When it came to having his personal property taken from him, he asked, very politely, if the officers would be careful with his sovereign ring, which meant a lot to him.

  ‘Do you understand why you have been arrested?’ said the Custody Sergeant.

  Thomas replied, ‘I do, but it wasn’t me.’

  The Custody Sergeant was typing up his comments onto the computer. ‘Oh, I wish I had a penny for every time someone told me that,’ she said, when she turned to face him. Her forced smile quickly dropped from her lips. ‘Cell twelve,’ she said to Ricky-Lee. ‘Take him away.’

  As James Thomas turned, Charley stood, and walked towards him. ‘We will be speaking to you soon, but in the meantime you will need to talk to your solicitor,’ she said.

  The backdoor buzzer sounded again, noisily. Ricky-Lee began ushering Thomas down the corridor to his cell, as Jonathan Raglan was brought in, bleary-eyed. He was clearly agitated, struggling, and kept shrugging off Mike’s steadying hand from his elbow as they reached the desk.

  ‘This is preposterous! Heads will roll!’ Raglan roared at the Custody Sergeant. ‘I know the Chief Constable!’

  ‘Coincidentally, I do too.’ Charley chuckled. Quickly her face turned serious. ‘I couldn’t begin to imagine how many times I hear that in a day, either. Do you understand why you’ve been arrested, Mr Raglan?’

  Raglan stood at the desk, as still as he was able to manage whilst under the influence of drugs. ‘Get me Duke Coggins, my solicitor!’ he said. ‘He’ll sort this out, and you’ll be grovelling at my feet with an apology, before this day is out,’ he said, with a quivering voice.

  Raglan’s attitude was no different from what she remembered.

  ‘Cell two,’ Percy Shaw said. ‘Take him away.’

  * * *

  By late afternoon, the officers had started to return to the police station with bags of exhibits from the different sites of investigation. By the time the majority of the team were back in the Incident Room office, it was time for the debrief where they would share the information from each address, and find out what evidence had been seized.

  With a silent room, full of tired bodies, the debrief began.

  ‘Let’s start with James Thomas, shall we?’ asked Charley.

  ‘Twenty grand has been recovered from a holdall, found behind a panel in the house, thanks to police dog Oscar,’ reported the dog handler.

  ‘Yes, and we’ve discovered a load of paperwork; we’re working through it with the financial team, who will scrutinise it to see if it is relevant,’ said Ricky-Lee.

  ‘No evidence of drugs?’ asked Charley.

  Ricky-Lee shook his head. ‘No, clean as a whistle.’

  ‘Anything from his car?’ asked Charley.

  Again, Ricky-Lee shook his head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘I suppose we haven’t found a firearm?’

  ‘No, boss, but the firearms sniffer dog is presently searching the building, so there’s still hope.’

  ‘Target Two?’ Charley asked Mike.

  ‘Jonathan Raglan was asleep on his settee, fully clothed, when we entered the property. There was a fruit bowl on the coffee table beside him that contained several wraps of cocaine. Apart from being, shall we say, three sheets to the wind, he was otherwise co-operative. We’ve recovered items of a financial nature from a set of locked drawers in bedroom two, and at the estate agency, we’ve also recovered five grand in cash.’

  ‘Owing to the amount of paperwork we have recovered, I can say from the off that this is going to take us quite some time to get through, but as soon as we find any discrepancies, you’ll be the first to know,’ said Martin Jones, the leader of the Financial Investigations Unit.

  ‘Let’s get all the exhibits booked in, and then we can assess what we have to work with.’ Charley was eager to move forward. ‘I’ll speak with the National Crime Agency regarding the cocaine seizure to see if Jonathan Raglan’s name features in any of their known distribution chains. It would be easy to go off at a tangent here, but we have to remain focused on our objective, which is to convict the murderers of Faisal Hussain. One thing to remember, from the time the prisoners were booked in, is that their custody clocks are now ticking and we will need to start speaking to them as soon as we possibly can.’ Charley turned to Mike. ‘An initial interview this evening would be good.’

  At the close of the team briefing, Charley’s mobile phone demanded her attention, and she shared the contents of the text with the team. ‘Jonathan Raglan has been medically examined and is pronounced fit for interview.’ She looked up from the screen. ‘That’s good. DC Ricky-Lee, DC Annie Glover, if he’s been fed and watered, first interview please, and I think we’ll leave James Thomas until a bit later, make him sweat a little longer, what do you say, Mike?’

  Mike followed Charley back to her office. ‘You’re not really coming into the interview, are you?’

  ‘Why? I want to get under his skin just as much as you do. It’s the best part of the job.’

  ‘Because, The Police and Criminal Evidence Act says it’s oppressive for your rank to interview a prisoner; you know that, the solicitor knows that. He might try to get the interview thrown out in court, and then we may lose anything he might disclose…’

  Charley considered his remark. ‘Oppressive? Moi, oppressive?’ She laughed in mock horror. ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Well you do scare the shit out of that lot in there,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the CID office.

  ‘My dad used to say that a little bit of fear never did anyone any harm and I tend to agree with him. There’s something though about James Thomas that doesn’t sit right, and it’s annoying me, because I don’t know what it is.’

  Mike looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I get this feeling that he likes to be thought of as Mister Clean, generous towards charitable causes et cetera, but I think he knows exactly what he is doing It’s as if inwardly he’s at home on a stage, and he enjoys the limelight.’ Charley paused for a moment or two in thought. ‘In brief, he’s a devious bastard whom I don’t trust. According to Dixon there were five people in that room when Faisal was shot dead. We know that four out of the five were involved with drugs. He might not be a user, Mike, but he’s amongst it, which suggests to me perhaps he injects cash into the distribution. That’s what I’m thinking…’

  ‘He’s a gibbering wreck at the moment, by all accounts.’

  ‘That’s how he wants us to see him. If he’s innocent and he’s nothing to hide, why should he be a “gibbering wreck”?’ Frustration was written all over her face. ‘Okay! You’re right! I won’t interview him. Take Wilkie in with you. I’ll be watching on the monitor.’

  An hour and a half later, Ricky-Lee Lewis and Annie Glover had spoken with Jonathan Raglan, and were in Charley’s office with the result. Charley, fresh from her strategy meeting with Mike, was eager to hear what was said.

  ‘We threw everything at him and his arse well and truly fell out! He’s been crying, and he says he didn’t kill anyone. Though he did think that he himself was going to be killed. He admitted to being a drug addict, and he even confirmed to us the name of his supplier, which as we thought, turned out to be the Dixons.’

  ‘He never questioned what you were saying?’ Charley interrupted.

  ‘No, and his solicitor was as good as gold. He just let him talk and talk, which makes a change.’

  ‘What did he say when you informed him that Brad Dixon told us that Faisal Hussain’s firearm was an imitation?’ Charley was keen to know more.

  ‘Nothing, as far as he was concerned it was the real thing.’

  ‘What about Faisal’s body?’

  ‘Raglan admits to helping hide the body.’

  ‘Who does he say fired the gun?’

  ‘He didn’t, but he did confirm that there were two guns. The old man’s head was bobbing all over the place, his tick appears to g
et worse when he’s put under pressure or panicking. Having said that, for his age, and considering all his drug problems, he’s still a wily old bastard. He knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘His solicitor told us that his client wanted to make a written statement about everything, including the drugs money going through the business account, the Crownest house sale, and Faisal’s death, so we’ve left them to it,’ said Annie.

  Charley took a deep breath. ‘That’s going to make some interesting reading. I’ll look forward to it. Tell me,’ she said. ‘Do you believe he’ll tell us the truth?’

  Ricky-Lee and Annie shook their heads in unison. ‘No,’ said Ricky-Lee. ‘He’s up to his neck in it, and blames anyone and everyone rather than himself for the situation he’s found himself in.’

  Annie lifted her shoulders and yawned. It had been a long day. ‘It’s only the first interview, of course.’

  Charley smiled. ‘You wouldn’t want to buy a house from him then?’

  ‘He comes across as dodgier than a car salesman,’ Annie said, ‘and car salesmen are well dodgy!’

  ‘Not all of them, Annie,’ Charley chuckled.

  * * *

  Soon after, Charley had her eyes glued to her monitor whilst Mike and Wilkie sat in another interview room in the cell area. The door was open as they waited for James Thomas and his solicitor to arrive.

  Formalities over, Mike took the lead in the interview.

  ‘You’ve met my boss, Detective Inspector Charley Mann, before Mr James, at the site of Crownest, when you were told that enquiries were being made into the discovery of two skeletons inside that building, and you were also made aware that enquiries were being made into how those people came to meet their deaths. We know you are aware, as your solicitor has been informed, that the remains of the body behind the fireplace have been identified as one Faisal Hussain. We also know his death was caused by a shot in the back of the head, and the weapon that was used has been recovered. I think it’s fair to tell you that, Brad Dixon, who was allegedly renting the property at Crownest, has been arrested, as has Mr Raglan of Raglan Estate Agency. Investigations are all to do with ascertaining the truth about what took place, so with that in mind, this is why you are here. But, before we talk about that, tell us a little about yourself,’ said Mike.