by Peter James
A scraping sound. Another clang, louder. Voices. Footsteps. The splashing of feet through water. Was it Aleksander, finally come to rescue him?
His hopes were instantly dashed as two figures in balaclavas, black windcheaters, jeans and gumboots appeared. One holding a carrier bag, the other a camera.
‘Mrrrrrrhlmmmmmm!’ he tried to call out to them.
One leaned down, and with a leather-gloved finger picked at something on his face. He shrieked in pain as tape was ripped away from his mouth and cheeks, leaving them stinging. A plastic bottle was held up to his mouth and he drank greedily, gulping the cold water, not daring to stop in case they took the bottle away, gulping the contents until the bottle was empty.
Next, he saw the man dig a hand in the bag and produce a sandwich. He removed it from the packaging, held it out to Mungo’s mouth. It was too dark to see what it was but he bit into it, ravenously. It was egg. He chewed and devoured both halves in just a few bites, followed by another – ham. After he had swallowed that, another bottle of water was shoved in his mouth.
Mungo drank until it was pulled away. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What do you want? What do you want?’
The man crammed the plastic bag into a pocket, without speaking, and his colleague held up a sheet of paper with some kind of graph on it, close to Mungo’s face. The other man raised a camera and took a series of flash photographs.
‘Please, who are you?’ Mungo begged again. ‘Who are you? Please – please let me go. Please let me—’
The man holding the sheet of paper stepped away. The one with the camera remained in place. The other one reappeared with a roll of grey duct tape. He pulled a length tight across Mungo’s mouth, slashing the end with a knife and wrinkling his nose. ‘You’ve messed yourself,’ he said in a coarse voice, with a foreign accent.
‘Less than six hours to high tide,’ his colleague with the camera said, in a similar accent. ‘Hope you are good at holding your breath, little boy.’
The other laughed. ‘Let’s hope your daddy’s pockets are deeper than the water, eh?’
The men splashed away.
‘Grmmmmmmm! Grmmmmmmmmm!’ Mungo cried out desperately.
He heard a distant metallic clang.
Then just the lapping of the sea.
The dead crab washed past his line of vision.
74
Sunday 13 August
11.00–12.00
Roy Grace entered the Intel suite, which was a hive of concentration and quiet activity. At the far end, Forensic Podiatrist Haydn Kelly and Super Recognizer Jonathan Jackson were studying CCTV footage from the Amex, on separate monitors.
The two analysts, Giles Powell and Louise Soper, were focused on ANPR camera information that was being fed through to them live, via the Force Control Room. Powell, a grey-haired, sixty-four-year-old former Roads Policing Unit sergeant, had worked for Sussex Police as a civilian in the decade since his retirement. He was tracking the Range Rover index, KK04 YXB, registered to Jorgji Dervishi, which had apparently been driven from the Dervishis’ home by his chauffeur, Valbone Kadare, at around 3 a.m. this morning.
Powell had picked up the vehicle on a series of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras along the coast road, heading east, through Rottingdean, Saltdean and Peacehaven and then on the road leading to Newhaven, which had clocked it at 3.48 a.m. He’d checked the next ANPR towards Seaford, and the one on the A26 at Beddingham, but it had not appeared on either of them. He widened his search, in case the Range Rover had taken one of the country roads on which there were no cameras, calculating all of its possible routes. But if it had diverted off the main roads, it would have been picked up, eventually, on the main A27 arterial road.
It left him with three alternatives. Either the vehicle had parked up somewhere in the countryside, the driver had changed the licence plates, as was a distinct possibility, or it had headed down into Newhaven Port itself.
Powell reported his findings to DS Riley.
The red-headed Detective Sergeant looked at her watch. It was now 11.20 a.m. ‘Get on to Newhaven Port,’ she instructed him, ‘and see if any of their CCTV picks it up. Check the ferry.’
Newhaven, the DS knew well, was both a ferry port to France and also a major container hub. Vehicles – as well as antiques – stolen within the south east, would disappear inside containers at Newhaven Port and be shipped out within hours. Recent-model right-hand-drive Range Rovers fetched a black-market premium in countries that drove on the left, such as Malta and Cyprus, and further afield, in India and parts of Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
‘Nice work, Giles,’ Grace said. ‘But the chances are we may have already lost it – if you can now help Louise, that would be good.’
Louise Soper, in her forties, with long brown hair and a calm demeanour, was concentrating on trying to identify pairs of index numbers. She was searching, initially, in the area where the torched BMW had been found. It was a daunting task, as this was just off the main road, the A26, carrying constant traffic between Newhaven Port and the Beddingham roundabout from where vehicles either routed east, towards Polegate, Eastbourne and, potentially, Folkestone and Eurotunnel, or the car ferries of Dover, or on the A27 to Brighton and all points west, or branching off north towards London on the A23.
It helped that at that time of night the traffic was relatively light. But it was still a huge challenge. She briefed Powell, who was seated next to her. What she was looking for were the same two vehicles, in close proximity, pinging a series of ANPR cameras, which would indicate they might be travelling in convoy. She had narrowed her search down to twelve pairs of numbers, which she sent over to him.
Fighting tiredness, after just a few hours of sleep, Giles Powell made himself a strong coffee and set to work on the laborious task of logging vehicle movements in the Beddingham area and comparing them to vehicle movements in the wider areas of Sussex and its bordering counties of Kent, Surrey and Hampshire.
Kevin Hall suddenly called out, urgently. ‘Boss! This just in!’
Grace stepped over to the DC’s workstation and peered at the screen. On it he saw video footage of a frightened-looking boy he recognized instantly as Mungo Brown. From the quality of the footage he knew, immediately, this was taken on a different camera to the one that had sent the earlier images of him.
Mungo was slumped, his mouth taped, and with what looked like a bloodstained bandage over his right ear. A wire ligature was round his neck. A woollen-gloved hand held a crumpled sheet of printout by his face. It was a tide table. It showed the low and high tide times for today for the Shoreham area.
Low tide was 11.32.
High tide was 17.40.
The hand withdrew the document from the frame.
The camera pulled back to a wider angle and panned down. It showed water a couple of feet below where Mungo was perched on a slab or ledge of some sort, his arms restrained behind him. A dead crab floated into shot, moving backwards and forwards in the tide, now just a foot or so deep.
Then a close-up of a photograph showing the high-water mark, several feet above the boy.
Followed by another image of the tide chart, as if as a reminder.
An instant later it was replaced by a typed, large-print sign which read:
BY 17.40 TODAY WATER LEVEL IS ABOVE MUNGO HEAD
Grace stared at it. ‘Shit. Send it to me. Have you got any geo-mapping or triangulation on the location?’
‘We’re working on it, guv, but it looks like these villains are tech-savvy and have disabled geo-mapping.’
Grace’s phone rang.
It was Glenn Branson. ‘Boss, we’ve just had another communication from the kidnappers – it’s come in on Stacey’s phone.’
‘Texted?’
‘Yes, same as before. They’re now requesting £250k in Bitcoins, as a down-payment on the £2.5 million. They want it paid by 2 p.m. or they let Mungo Brown drown.’
‘A down-payment?’ Grace said, raising h
is voice, angry and frustrated. ‘What are these jokers playing at? You put a down-payment on a sofa or a car or on a house, you don’t put a down-payment on a child’s life, for God’s sake!’
‘I agree, boss,’ Branson said calmly. ‘I’m wondering if they’ve got wind of Brown’s finances.’
‘Bitcoins?’ Grace had only a vague idea about the internet currency and how it worked. But one thing he did know was that crypto currencies were increasingly the currency of choice for criminals around the world, because these transactions were hard, if not impossible, to trace. ‘What’s the next move?’
‘They’re going to issue further instructions on confirmation that Kipp Brown has the money. He needs to buy them online – and there’s a problem with that.’
‘Yes?’
‘He doesn’t have that sort of cash readily available.’
‘What?’
‘Seriously.’
‘He’s well connected – he can’t drum up £250k to save his son’s life?’ Grace said angrily. ‘Come on!’
‘It’s real, boss, from what he says. The mortgage lender is about to repossess his house. He’s behind on the finance payments for his and his wife’s cars. He’s maxed out – gambling debts, apparently. All his credit cards and debit cards.’
‘Glenn, if these kidnappers are serious, they’re not going to let this boy die – he’s their golden goose.’
‘So how should Brown reply?’
‘Well, it’s looking to me like he’s going to have to make some payment. The problem with Bitcoins is we’ve no way of recovering it for him – with cash we’d always have a chance.’ He thought, briefly. ‘It’s Sunday morning. UK banks are shut. Tell him to stall, play for time, that he can’t do anything until tomorrow.’
‘I’ve tried, boss. He says the whole point about Bitcoins is they’re nothing to do with banks. All you have to do if you want them fast is to download an app – you can look for them on a certain website. So, ideally, he’d simply buy Bitcoins and then send them as instructed by the kidnappers – where they would be untraceable.’
‘How many people have that kind of money lying around their homes?’ Grace replied.
‘You’re missing the point. He could do it all from his online banking account.’
‘Money he says he doesn’t have in his account. Or any account.’
‘Exactly. And he’s in panic mode.’
‘Get him to calm down. With all his resources, not to mention wealthy clients, he’s going to be able to lay his hands on £250k somewhere – maybe his bank will help him out tomorrow. Explain to him they’re not going to harm his son so long as they can see money on its way. He’s a smart guy, he must know how to handle people.’
‘I’ll keep trying, boss.’
Ending the call, Grace sat down at his workstation, wishing he could believe what he had just told Glenn Branson. But from what he had learned about the criminal fraternity within the Albanian community, violence, rather than negotiation, tended to be their response to situations. They could choose to make an example of Kipp Brown by cynically and callously killing Mungo, as a warning to other businessmen in the city to stump up ransom demands if one of their children was ever taken.
Throughout his career, people had constantly surprised Roy Grace, to the point where little shocked him any more. There was the facade they showed the world and there was the reality behind, lurking in the shadows. The police were strongly against paying ransoms, but the current circumstances, as they were no closer to finding Mungo Brown, meant that some payment was becoming inevitable, to buy time.
The next briefing was due for 11.30 a.m., twelve minutes’ time; he turned his focus back to the video and the message:
BY 17.40 TODAY WATER LEVEL IS ABOVE MUNGO HEAD
He looked at the map on the wall. On it was the county of Sussex broken down into police divisions. Beyond, to the east and west, the counties of Kent and Hampshire. Miles of coastline, inlets and rivers. Rye to the east; Chichester to the west. A coastal search just of Shoreham alone would take many hours, if not days. And they had just over six hours.
Alec Davies came up to him. ‘Sir, in case it’s of interest, I’ve just heard from Forensics at Guildford. They’ve obtained something from the fingerprints of a severed hand found at the crusher site of Carter Contracting, at Shoreham.’
‘Yes?’
Eagerly, the young Detective Constable said, ‘He’s identified as Ryan Brent – he’s got form for small-time drug dealing. For the past two years this man has been employed by Jorgji Dervishi to collect the cash, daily, from his car wash and kebab empire. Several other body parts have been recovered from the site so far, all bearing evidence of torture – what appear to be razor cuts to his skin.’
‘He’s been employed by Dervishi?’ Grace repeated.
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Nice work, Alec,’ Grace said.
Just over six hours.
A £250,000 ransom demand.
Sent from where? Hopefully Digital Forensics would find that out, quickly.
Mungo Brown’s father claiming to be unable to drum up that amount of money.
They had to stall the kidnappers and locate the boy, somehow.
Somehow.
How?
What the hell was Jorgji Dervishi’s involvement? He could arrest him again, based on what Alec Davies had just told him. But would that serve any purpose? Perhaps it was better to cut the Albanian gangster some slack and keep watch on him.
‘Sir?’ An excited voice brought him out of his thoughts and he looked up.
The analyst, Giles Powell, was standing in front of him, holding a sheet of paper. ‘Sir, we may have found something!’
75
Sunday 13 August
11.00–12.00
Stacey came into Kipp’s den, crying. ‘I can’t bear this,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear this, I can’t bear this, I can’t bear this. Get him back, please, please get my baby back. Please get him back.’
‘I’m going to, I promise.’ He stared through the open window, feeling a warm breeze on his face. Looked at the covered barbecue beside the swimming pool. A glorious summer Sunday. Ordinarily he’d have had a swim. Perhaps played some tennis with Mungo, then a late barbecue lunch. Mungo loved his special burger recipe.
Stacey walked across and put her arms around Kipp, clinging to him like a drowning person clinging to driftwood. ‘Please. Please. Please.’
His heart felt like it was twisting, tearing at the sinews that held it in place. ‘Stace, I love him as much as you do.’
‘You don’t know how much I love him. He’s all we have in the world. I couldn’t bear it – if – if anything happened to him – I just couldn’t.’
He felt her tears on his hair, on the back of his neck. He found her fingers and squeezed them. ‘It won’t, trust me,’ he said. ‘Trust me, Stace.’
‘Trust Kipp?’ she said, disentangling herself and standing back, staring at a photograph of Mungo grinning, looking unsteady on a paddleboard. ‘Really? I should trust Kipp?’
‘Stace.’
She laughed, a hollow, mocking laugh. The laugh of a total stranger. ‘Trust Kipp! Of course! I’d trust you anytime. Why wouldn’t I trust a man who would put his business in front of his son’s life?’
‘Because I won’t,’ he said.
‘Then prove it, prove it now.’
A text came in on Stacey’s phone. She looked.
Tell your husband to go his office now. Await instructions and a package. Tell the police again and this time your boy does die.
‘Oh God no.’ She handed the phone to Kipp and sobbed while he read it.
A package.
What could that mean? he wondered.
An icy gust of fear swept through him.
What did a package mean?
Mungo parcelled?
Dead?
He sat still, struggling not to throw up. Then he stood, abruptly, grabbed his phone and headed for the door
.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘To the office.’
‘To the office? Now?’
‘I’m going to do it, OK? I’ll pay the ransom, I’ll move some funds around, cover my tracks. I can check the client discretionary fund from here, but I can’t make any transactions – a security thing – it can only be done from a computer in the office, where the code changes daily.’
‘Be careful.’
He looked back at her. ‘You want me to be careful or you want me to get Mungo back?’
‘Both.’
‘It’s going to be one or the other.’
76
Sunday 13 August
11.00–12.00
‘How long have you worked for me, Dritan?’ Jorgji Dervishi asked with a kindly smile, soon after the police officers had left.
‘Ten years, sir, Mr Dervishi.’
Despite being a foot taller and weighing one hundred pounds more than his boss, Dritan was afraid of the man.
‘And in these ten years, have I ever given you any reason to be unhappy with me?’
‘No, Mr Dervishi.’
‘None at all?’
‘None at all.’
Dervishi lit a cigar. ‘Yet you wish to leave me and go home to Albania? You don’t like to work for me any more?’
‘It isn’t that. My girl – Lindita.’
‘She’s very pretty but she doesn’t like that you work for me, does she?’
‘Why you say that?’
Dervishi pointed at his own eyes. ‘I see it in how she looks at me. She thinks I am a bad influence on her sweet little man, yes? You want to go back home, where she is going to convert you into a good little citizen, eh? Run a little shop together – no – a coffee house, right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you have to go.’
‘Yes.’
‘But now you find out today that the cut you were going to get from my son’s plan with his friend is no longer going to happen, right?’ He blew a smoke ring. ‘Gone, yes, like a puff of smoke? You had plans for this money? Enough to start your own business with your sweetheart, Lindita?’