Dead if You Don't

by Peter James

  No doubt there would be some bolshy letter in the Argus later this week about the police blocking the cycle lane, Grace thought, but it was the very least of his problems at this moment.

  Several plain-clothes officers, casually dressed and wearing earpieces, were milling around on the pavement, out of sight of any of the flats, trying unsuccessfully to look inconspicuous. To the left, almost opposite the entrance, was a small car park with a stall selling ice creams and soft drinks. Grace saw two dog-unit vans parked in there, along with another van, one of their own, today camouflaged with the name BRYAN BARKER BUILDERS. Inside was a mobile phone tracking team, scanning the complex across the road, trying to pick up a signal from the phone they had identified.

  ‘Pull in here, Kevin.’

  ‘Want an ice cream, do you, guv?’

  ‘Haha.’

  Roy Grace called Oscar-1 and told her he was at the scene. In earlier days, he would have had no hesitation in leading a raid from the front, heading straight to a suspect’s dwelling and putting the door in with his shoulder or boot. But hide-bound by the current rules of Health and Safety, every action had to be risk assessed. It was only trained officers from the Local Support Team, the specialist public order unit, who were allowed to effect entry, under their Section 17 PACE powers.

  As so often happened in the case of a raid, there was an air of uncertainty. Everyone was here, waiting, pumped up and ready to go. But exactly where? And the biggest uncertainty facing Roy at this moment was which of the flats his suspects were in. There was no way they could go charging around, banging on every door. They were either going to have to find them by stealth or wait for them to show themselves – though in his view it was too time critical to wait, that wasn’t an option for him.

  Instructing Hall to remain in the car and keep watch, he climbed out and hurried across the road. He strolled in through the entrance, trying to look nonchalant in case the kidnappers were keeping a lookout from a window. He carried on, down a ramp, passing a visitor’s parking area containing two vehicles, an older-model Jaguar and a red van with the wording in white letters MATTHEW MURPHY ELECTRICAL SERVICES, a man and a woman sitting in the front.

  He walked alongside the van, curious to know what they were doing here on a Sunday, and decided to check them out. He went up to the driver’s window, holding up his warrant card discreetly.

  The window lowered. He rapidly satisfied himself they were bona fide, Matthew Murphy and his wife, Sam, who jointly owned the company. They’d only been here a few minutes, collecting payment on a job their firm had completed in one of the flats. Neither of them had seen any car come in or leave.

  He thanked them and approached the entrance to the first building. The smell of cooking wafted from a window, roasting meat – Sunday lunch. It gave him a sudden pang of hunger, reminding him he hadn’t eaten anything since a sandwich in the early hours and a muffin.

  Staring at the entry panel, he found the nameplate he was hoping for: CARETAKER. He pressed the buzzer beside it. Would he or she be in?

  There was a crackle and an Italian-sounding voice. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Police,’ Grace said. ‘Could I have a word, very urgently.’

  ‘Police? OK.’ There was a click of the door’s latch and Grace pushed it open. There was a stronger smell of Sunday roast now, as well as stale cigarette smoke. He was mindful that it was possible the kidnappers could be using the caretaker’s flat. But when he saw the door open at the end of the corridor and the very short man of around sixty, wearing white-flecked dungarees and a liberal amount of paint on his face and hands, shuffle towards him, he decided they were not.

  ‘Hello, officer,’ the caretaker said. ‘I’m not usually in on Sunday, but I’m decorating today – so how can I help you?’ He sounded Italian.

  Grace showed him his warrant card. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Vince.’

  ‘OK, Vince, I’m looking for the drivers of two cars,’ he said. ‘An Audi A4 and Volkswagen Golf.’ He told him the registration numbers. ‘Does either vehicle ring a bell?’

  The man thought, screwing up his forehead, then shook his head. ‘We have a lot of cars here. Quite a few Audis and Golfs, you know – very popular cars.’

  ‘Where does everyone park – are the garages round the back?’

  Vince shook his head again and pointed a stubby, nicotine-stained finger at the floor. ‘Underground.’

  Grace felt a sudden flash of excitement. ‘Is there a separate car park for each of the buildings?’

  ‘No, one big one, with separate lifts up to each building.’ He looked at Grace with a kind of beady, mischievous excitement in his eyes. ‘What’s up, officer? We have terrorists here? Bank robbers?’

  ‘I can’t tell you at the moment, I’m afraid. Can you show me the car park?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  Grace followed him along the corridor, the man walking unhurriedly, almost painfully slowly, a big bunch of keys dangling from his belt. He pressed to open the lift doors, waited for Grace to enter, then stepped in.

  They went down one floor. The door opened and they stepped out into a sparsely lit expanse of parking bays, about a third of them empty. It was dry and warm, with the same familiar smell of engine oil, spent exhaust fumes and rubber compounds, as most underground car parks Grace observed, other than municipal ones which tended to smell of urine, as well. But they were in upmarket territory here.

  ‘Are the bays allocated to specific flats, Vince?’

  ‘Yes, numbered.’

  ‘So, from the number of the bay, you can identify the building and the flat number?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Grace strode along towards the far end, with Vince keeping pace. There was a wide range of cars down here, mostly modern and across the price spectrum, as well as a 1970s Bentley coated in dust and with flat tyres, that didn’t look like it had moved in years. A short distance along they passed what looked like the shape of a Porsche beneath a dust sheet. He reached a Golf, and checked the number plate against the one stored in his memory: TR57 GPN. It was different, but he still patted the bonnet, just to check. Stone cold, the car had not been driven today.

  As they turned a corner, passing a wide concrete pillar, he saw an Audi and a Golf next to each other, some bays along. He broke into a run, and as he came closer looked at their number plates.

  TR57 GPN; RW15 AVU.

  It was them.

  85

  Sunday 13 August

  13.00–14.00

  Kipp Brown remained at his desk in his office, staring at the words on the screen.

  Thank you. Your funds have been received. You may not reply to this message.

  He took a photograph with his iPhone, then sent DI Branson an image of the severed ear, the Polaroid and the receipt, by WhatsApp. At the end he added the words,

  Please do not tell my wife about the ear.

  It was only seconds before Branson phoned him. ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘Yes, in my office.’

  ‘Listen, Kipp,’ Branson said, keeping his voice low – perhaps Stacey was in nearby, he wondered. ‘I need you to do something for me. Neither Jack nor I can leave here, obviously. I need this ear and the photograph to go very urgently to Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Branch forensics in Guildford, along with some items from Mungo that would contain his DNA – his toothbrush and hairbrush, perhaps? We’ve got to establish this is a DNA match to your son, and if there is anything we can get, forensically, from it.’

  ‘A DNA match?’ Kipp said. ‘Does that matter? You can see the bandage over his ear in the photograph pretty clearly.’

  ‘We may be able to get a fingerprint off the ear,’ Branson replied. ‘We also have techniques now for reading fingerprints off a photograph. The way the man is holding the watch, palms out towards the camera, means there’s a very good chance of the fingerprint team getting something.’

  ‘What do you need?’ Kipp Brown was relieved to have
something positive to do.

  ‘Would you normally take your dog out for a walk?’

  ‘Yes, every day at some point.’

  ‘In the car?’

  ‘It depends. Sometimes.’

  ‘OK, good. If you can, come back here quickly.’

  86

  Sunday 13 August

  13.00–14.00

  Roy Grace patted the bonnets of both the Golf and Audi. Each was warm, only recently driven. ‘Where are the bay numbers, Vince?’

  ‘On the floor.’

  As Grace knelt the caretaker said, ‘No, it’s OK, I know these three bays.’

  In the next one along was a black Range Rover with tinted rear windows.

  ‘Whose is that?’ Grace asked.

  ‘They rent – pay for three parking spaces.’

  ‘Do you know their names?’

  ‘No – is rented by a company.’

  ‘But you’ve seen them?’

  He shrugged. ‘A few times. They come and go, you know.’

  He went over to the Range Rover and patted the bonnet of that, too. It was also warm. ‘Are they English, Vince?’

  ‘No – Europeans, maybe.’

  ‘Albanians?’

  ‘Possibly. I hear them speak sometime, I don’t know the language.’

  ‘Do you have CCTV cover?’

  ‘Yes, in the car park and outside, but it stopped working yesterday. I’m waiting for the engineers to come.’

  Coincidence, Grace wondered? He doubted it. ‘Right, Vince, I’m going to need your help. How many exits are there?’

  ‘They’re on the fourth floor. One exit is down here – the main entrance we came in and the fire exit for this car park.’ The caretaker was starting to become animated. ‘Then there is the front entrance and the rear to their building. So, this is a drugs raid?’

  Ignoring the question, Grace said, ‘Vince, I’m going to be moving vehicles in here. I want you to do three things for me. The first is to disable the car park entrance door, so no one can drive out. The second is to open the front door to this block, and the third is to show my team the fire escape exits. Can you do that?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, with a knowing twinkle in his eyes. ‘No problem. Like James Bond?’

  Grace grinned and gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘When Daniel Craig quits, we’ll put your name forward, eh?’ Then he began giving instructions, calmly but urgently, into his radio, and ran back out, followed by the caretaker, to the front of the building, as the first of the two Local Support Team vans arrived. These contained more officers than he reckoned he would need for the raid, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Vince opened the glass front door of the building and shoved a wedge beneath it. Inspector Ian Allchild jumped down from the passenger seat in full blue riot gear with body armour, holding his vizored helmet; the driver climbed out also. A further six officers, all similarly clad, descended from the rear, while Grace briefed the Inspector. Allchild, a tough former army officer, with a no-nonsense voice, responded enthusiastically. This was the kind of job he and his team were trained for and the kind of job which they all loved. The second van pulled up behind them and another team of eight climbed out. Allchild briefed the skipper to have his team spread out around the building, in case anyone tried to leg it.

  Grace’s adrenaline was surging. He directed the two vans containing dog handlers to follow the caretaker, then said to Allchild, ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready, sir.’

  Grace radioed the Critical Incident Manager that they were going in, then instructed Kevin Hall to bring all vehicles in now and to block the entrance. No one was to enter or leave Boden Court until he gave the all-clear. He turned to the Inspector. ‘OK, go!’

  Allchild gave the signal to his team. One officer, holding the red bosher, led the way in through the front door and up the fire escape stairs. He was closely followed by a short but very strong sergeant, Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, holding a hydraulic ram, then Allchild and his remaining five officers. Grace ran up the four flights, just a short distance behind.

  At the top, the team moved silently along the corridor, halting outside a door. It was too far away for Roy Grace, panting with the exertion, to see the number. All of them pulled their vizors down.

  The officer with the big red key rang the doorbell, and waited.

  There was no response.

  Then he knocked on the door. The classic policeman’s knock. Unsubtle and loud. Rat-a-tap-tap-tap-tap. Then, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM.

  Again, nothing.

  He turned to Lorna and nodded.

  She stepped forward, wedged both arms of the ram against the sides of the door frame, and powered it up. As the grinding howl of the machine splintered the wood, forcing the frame outwards on both sides, her colleague swung the ram against the door, sending it crashing open at the first attempt.

  With a unified bellow of, ‘POLICE! POLICE! POLICE!’, boots pounding, they burst like a tornado into the interior.

  Grace stood back, outside, with the other four blocking his view.

  ‘Shit,’ one of them said, ‘Shit.’

  ‘What is it?’ Grace asked, easing his way through them to the doorway. And saw a body prostrate on the floor, and a lot of blood. Allchild, vizor pushed up over his face, came back out, carefully stepping past the body, followed by two of his team. He looked grim. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, we’ve trampled all over it. You have a bit of a crime scene in there. No young boy anywhere. Two adult males dead, looks like gunshot wounds, one badly injured. I’ve radioed for paramedics.’

  ‘Is the injured one conscious?’

  ‘Barely, sir. I’ve left Lorna with him, in case. He looks in a bad way.’

  Grace hurried in. A motionless, tattooed and shaven-headed man in his thirties, dressed in jeans, trainers and a grey hoodie, lay on his back on the floor. He had a startled expression; a trail of blood and gunk leaked from a hole in the centre of his forehead, staining the beige carpet, and there was what looked like another bullet wound and a large amount of blood spreading across the front of his T-shirt. The fact that the blood hadn’t dried meant this was very recent. Was the shooter still inside the building, he wondered?

  Mindful of not further contaminating the crime scene, Grace stepped carefully past the evidently dead man, noticing the faint, familiar coppery smell of blood, and along the corridor towards an open door at the far end.

  He entered a kitchen that smelled of cigarette smoke, and stopped in his tracks.

  One casually dressed man, in his late forties, he estimated, was seated in a wooden chair at a pine table, on which lay two globelike bottles of alcohol and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. His head lolled back over his shoulders, dark hair brushed back. There was what looked like a gun-shot entry wound through his right eye, from which a trail of dark fluid ran down his cheek and neck, and another through his blood-stained chest. His good remaining eye stared fixedly ahead.

  The second man, younger and also casually dressed, with short, wiry hair, lay on his back, close to an upturned chair. He had a bullet graze along the top of his forehead and the front of his light windcheater was blood-drenched and heaving. He was looking up at Grace with large, sullen eyes and wheezing, painfully, clearly breathing with difficulty.

  Indicating to Lorna that she could go, Grace knelt beside him. ‘There’s an ambulance coming,’ he said.

  The man’s chest jerked. His breathing was becoming fainter by the second.

  ‘What happened?’ Grace asked him. ‘Do you know where Mungo is? Mungo Brown?’

  The man tried to speak, then gasped in pain. He started juddering.

  ‘Mungo Brown? The boy you took?’ Grace pressed. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  Fixing him eerily with his eyes, the man said something in a guttural voice, in a language Roy Grace did not understand. It sounded like, ‘Ick largo skow gee veten.’

  Then a rattle came from his throat. Grace recognized it. He had only s
econds left. Hurriedly, he pulled out his private iPhone, opened the voice recorder app and activated it, then held it close to the man’s mouth. ‘Can you repeat that?’ he asked, urgently.

  The man stared ahead. Finally, struggling, he uttered the words again.

  They were followed by another rattle. A hollow, rasping sound.

  ‘Stay with us!’ Grace said. ‘The ambulance is coming.’

  The man’s chest became still. He stopped blinking, eyes open, fixed on Grace. But now sightless.

  Gone.

  The Detective Superintendent stood up, took photographs of each of the three dead men’s faces to hopefully get a quick identity on them, then called Nikki Denero on his job phone.

  She answered almost immediately.

  ‘It’s Roy Grace, Nikki. Can you help me translate something that may be critical to our enquiry – it might be Albanian? You speak the language, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m reasonably fluent.’

  ‘Good. If I play it over the phone can you translate?’

  ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  Roy Grace held his iPhone over the speaker of his job phone, turned the volume up to max and pressed the play button. The dead man’s last words came out.

  ‘Ick largo skow gee veten.’

  When the playback was finished, Grace stopped the machine. ‘Did you get that, Nikki?’

  The PC sounded hesitant. ‘Yes, I did, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to like it.’