by Alex Scarrow
‘Minter?’
‘Boss?’
‘Dig up what you can on Chris Lewis. The investigation into his death. Any leads, friends, associates, especially anyone called Darren or Jacobs.’
‘Righto.’
‘Warren? O’Neal?’
Both detectives looked his way. Boyd beckoned to them and they came over to join him. Warren was still looking green around the gills.
‘Where are we at with the CCTV?’
‘We’ve ID’ed the row of shops that the guy must have gone into, chief,’ replied O’Neal. ‘We’re going down there tomorrow to check out their in-store cameras.’
‘Is there a reason you can’t go right now?’
They glanced at each other, then shook their heads. Boyd spread his hands. ‘Then why am I still looking at you? Off you go! Run!’
Jesus. He realised Lane’s friendly lunchtime advice had actually shaken his cage. On Friday afternoon, this had felt like a murder: plain and simple. Someone with a grudge, somebody Sutton had fucked over. Perhaps even – though, having met them, admittedly a bit of a stretch – Henry Sutton after his dad’s money or Hermione Sutton out to settle a score for her mother. But, since talking to Elaine Lewis, Boyd had a strong feeling he’d been looking very carefully in the wrong direction all along.
And Darren Jacobs… Wherever you are, sunshine, we will find you.
On a whim, he called the IC ward at Conquest Hospital, hoping that the news on Margot Bajek was going to be better. If she could talk, then they might be able to get a description, perhaps even a half-decent identikit image of her assailant to compare against the last photo of Jacobs. But the news wasn’t promising. She was back on a ventilator and, of course, sedated.
It wasn’t until gone four in the afternoon that Boyd suddenly remembered he hadn’t replied to Charlotte’s text. He dialled her number and after several rings she answered.
‘Hullo,’ she replied warily.
‘Sorry, Charlotte. I’ve only just got your message. It’s been a bit busy here this afternoon. Are you okay?’
There was a pause. ‘My head is pounding,’ she said eventually.
‘Yeah, I’m not feeling so clever either,’ he confessed.
‘Poor Mia was starving hungry when I got back this morning and not at all happy. I took her for a quick walk on the beach and she seemed better after that.’
‘You’ve been home?’ he said, surprised.
‘Yes. I had to for Mia,’ she explained. ‘But also, Bill, I stink of… drugs! I’m sure my colleagues think I’m a… a complete pothead or whatever the term is.’ She chuckled. ‘Plus, my feet were still dirty. I turned up to work late, looking like someone raised by wolves. I didn’t explain why I had to go – I just said I had to pop home for a bit.’
Lane drifted past Boyd’s desk, pulling his wheelie suitcase behind him.
‘One second,’ said Boyd. He covered the mouthpiece. ‘What’s up?’ he asked Lane.
‘I’m off. I need to check in. I want to make sure I can get my delightful B&B room back,’ said Lane. ‘See you in the morning.’
Boyd nodded and waved him off.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, returning to his call with Charlotte.
‘That’s okay. Sounds like you’re still busy there,’ she said.
‘We are. It’s typical, isn’t it? It’s right near the end of the day and things in the case have dialled up a notch.’
Okeke had got out of her chair and was heading his way. She looked as though she had a bee in her bonnet over something.
‘Look, Charlotte, I’m sorry. Can I call you back? Something’s –’
‘That’s fine,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll speak to you soon.’
‘See you on the beach,’ he said, and hung up.
See you on the beach? He winced. He’d meant it to sound funny – but feared that this time it had come out sounding more like a ‘see you around’ or worse: ‘Don’t call me…’
‘Guv,’ Okeke blurted out. ‘I’ve found Darren Jacobs.’
‘What? Where?’ Boyd stood up.
‘I filed a DPA request form against Jacob’s number before lunch and just received the data. They were super quick.’ She placed a printed page on his desk. ‘He’d turned his phone on and made a short call this morning.’
Boyd looked at the printout. Jacobs had made a call that had lasted a little over a minute at 11:17. Beneath the logged call was map indicating a triangular area of overlapping signal-collation rings and a red dot in the middle.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Cobham Services. It’s a Days Inn hotel.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yes, and it’s okay, guv. I’ve called there already. He’s booked in tonight, until the end of the week. In fact, he was booked in for all of last week too.’
‘Under his own name?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I presume he’s on some PI job.’
‘Or in hiding?’ he said.
‘Well, he’s doing a rubbish job if he checked in without using an alias,’ she pointed out.
Boyd looked across the room. Minter was chatting with Warren and O’Neal about their errand; they were pulling on their jackets and listening avidly to Minter’s, no doubt sage, advice.
He grabbed his phone and pulled up Maps. ‘Cobham Services, eh? We could be knocking on his door in an hour and twenty minutes,’ he said quietly.
Okeke took the last steps towards him. ‘Guv? You sure?’
Lane’s earlier advice about not twanging the threads of a spider’s web was still troubling him. All the same…
‘Yeah, I’m sure. Let’s go.’
50
O’Neal insisted on taking a pool car, since his was still parked outside the guv’s place.
‘We could have walked,’ said Warren. He’d actually been looking forward to some fresh air.
‘Right – we could have, or we can drive, mate.’ O’Neal glanced at Warren as he signalled left and swung onto the seafront main road. ‘Don’t forget we’d have to walk all the way back to the station before clocking off. And you don’t exactly look A game.’
‘I’ve never felt so shit,’ Warren conceded.
O’Neal shook his head and chuckled. ‘You seriously telling me you’ve never done weed before?’
Warren shook his head. Nor was he ever likely to again after today’s ordeal.
‘What you’re experiencing, young padawan, is just the booze hangover. Don’t blame the weed.’ O’Neal grinned. ‘We sank quite a few brewskies as well yesterday. Anyway,’ he pointed out, ‘the day’s nearly over and you can die quietly at home while your mum gets your dinner.’
Warren groaned. O’Neal’s boy-racer driving wasn’t helping matters.
O’Neal signalled right, swung into Pelham car park and headed left towards the arcade and the pitch and putt, finding a space and quickly zipping into it before anyone else could take it.
Warren climbed out of the cool car into the late afternoon warmth – only to be greeted by the smell of frying doughnuts coming from the arcade, and frying fish from the chippy over the road. Not exactly the kind of fresh air he’d been hoping for.
‘You’re such a drugs noob,’ said O’Neal with cheeky wink.
Warren looked at him. ‘You actually smoke that stuff outside work?’
‘Well, obviously not these days, mate, but yeah… I’ve rolled a few in my time back in my party days.’ He steered Warren towards the nearest zebra crossing. ‘Right, game faces on,’ he said as he scanned the tired old seafront apartments above the shopfronts for any useful cameras.
Across the road were the shops they were canvassing: a mixture that included chippies, souvenir shops, ice-cream parlours, a corner shop and a café. Warren readied himself for the onslaught of foody odours soon to be coming his way.
As usual, Okeke drove while Boyd pondered. The northbound A21 was still relatively empty, but the other side was starting to show signs of the homeward-bound commuter herd.
‘So let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘We’re door-knocking some old hack who may have killed Sutton and this other MP guy?’
‘He’s an ex-journo, not a hitman,’ replied Boyd. ‘Plus, he’s in a Day’s Inn, not some remote campsite.’
‘Yeah, see…’ Okeke said, ‘I was going to mention the campsite. You don’t learn from your mistakes, do you, guv?’
‘At least I didn’t go alone,’ he said, grinning guiltily.
‘If you’d gone to see Nix alone, you’d have been dead, guv. Thank God my Jay was there to save you from them.’
Boyd nodded; that was a debt of gratitude he’d yet to properly settle.
‘Speaking of them…’ she said.
By ‘them’, Boyd knew she meant the Russians.
‘What are you going to do with their little gift? It’s in your safe still, I presume?’
‘It’s evidence; we may have need to use it sometime,’ he said.
‘Sometime being when exactly?’
He turned to look at her. ‘What if ten years from now someone’s trying to build a case against Rovshan Salikov and his dirty millions?’
‘You’d actually whistle-blow? On a Russian crime boss?’
Boyd shrugged. ‘If I’ve still got the evidence, I’ve got the option. And don’t forget Her Madge. I mean, if she decides I know too much, or decides I’m a problem –’
‘You still think the Chief Super’s bent?’
‘I don’t know, Okeke,’ he said, sighing, ‘but, if she’s not, she was definitely leaned on by someone higher up. Either way, there may come a time when she’s looking for someone to throw under a bus. If she picks me, I want something I can use as leverage.’
51
Warren chose the souvenir shop because the thought of stepping into either Sid’s Seafront Chips or Meg’s Happy Baps filled him with the dread that he might hurl his lunch halfway through an interview.
The shop dinged old-style as he entered and it was mercifully cool inside. Plastic buckets and spades, cheap bath robes and T-shirts filled the windows, but inside it was essentially a corner shop with papers and magazines, snacks and booze.
The shop was busy with teenagers clasping cans of energy drinks while browsing a pick-and-mix display. Warren weaved his way through them to the counter.
‘Excuse me?’
The woman sitting on a stool behind it didn’t look up from her phone. ‘Can I help you, love?’
He pulled out his warrant card and she glanced his way, then suddenly sat up straight. ‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘we don’t sell cigarettes or drinks without ID. I promise.’ There’d been a crackdown last month, particularly among the shops along the seafront. Flack’s county lines operation had flagged up the issue of young drug runners who were, it seemed, feeling ballsy enough to swagger in and ask for alcohol and packs of twenty.
‘I’m here about something else,’ said Warren. He cleared his throat to make his voice sound a little deeper and more commanding. ‘There was a serious crime recently in the Silverhill area. We believe the suspect may have entered one of the shops along the seafront prior to the crime. I presume you have internal CCTV?’
The woman turned round and pointed to a camera above and behind her. ‘That’s the only one inside, love.’
‘Right. Well, we’re gathering the data stored from just over a week ago. Do you mind if I have a look at your camera feed?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know anything about them, love. Should I call my manager?’
Warren, a little annoyed by her constant ‘love’s, kept his mouth shut and nodded.
The woman dialled a number on her mobile and listened to a brief, pretty much one-sided conversation. Then she hung up. ‘He’s coming down, sweetheart. He’ll be here in half an hour.’
Warren managed to supress an eye-roll, but not a tired sigh. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’
Next door was a traditional tobacconist. The shop windows were obscured with a green sign like a bookie’s: Mallard’s Traditional Pipes and Smoking Products. As Warren entered, he was greeted by the smell of turpentine and the sickly tang of finely blended tobacco. He wondered if the odour was somehow faked, to induce the right ambience inside the gloomy shop. It had the look of a seedy gentleman’s club, or at least what Warren imagined one would look like.
He approached the counter and found himself facing an old man who looked very much like a part of the shop itself. ‘Yes, sir?’
Warren repeated his spiel.
‘Yes, now, we do have one of those close-circuit camera devices installed. Let me go and find the manual for it.’ He smiled. ‘I haven’t actually bothered to look at what it films since I had the thing put in. You say it stores it all?’
Warren smiled. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Like a… like one of those video-tape recorders?’
‘Yes, digitally. Typically on site. There’s usually a removable storage platform.’
The old man’s watery red eyes widened with this new-found knowledge. ‘Well, I never. How very clever.’
Okeke pulled off the motorway slip road and took the first exit off the roundabout, into the confusing, multiple-choice of access lanes to the parking area for Cobham Services.
She found a parking spot in front of the cheerful sky-blue front of the Days Inn hotel. It was twenty past five and the service station was busy with commuters stopping on their way home, and tired-looking travelling sales executives with jackets over their arms and loosened shirt collars, resigned to their fate of a service-station dinner and a Netflix series on their tablets.
Boyd had brought up a picture of Darren Jacobs on his phone. It was a picture taken from 2013, when a non-descript Andy Coulson and the flame-haired Rebekah Brooks were walked into court accompanied by a phalanx of Murdoch-hired legal heavyweights.
Jacobs had been one of the many hacks caught up in the phone-hacking scandal. Though he’d been too low down the food chain to have any particular mention in the newspaper reports, nevertheless he’d been one of the surly faces going to court to receive their verdicts and sentences.
‘It’s from about ten years ago,’ he said, showing her the picture.
‘Nothing more recent?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But it’s more recent than the one on LEDS. Either he’s doing his best to stay off the radar or he’s not learned about flattering Instagram filters.’
Okeke grimaced at the picture. Jacobs was never going to be a poster child for anything. He had a boxer’s nose – one that looked like it had been slammed into a wall a number of times – and a protruding Punch-and-Judy-like chin. The flattened nose, unkindly, served to make the chin look even more pronounced.
‘Even if he’s put weight on, I suspect we’re still going to recognise him,’ said Boyd.
‘You’re not kidding.’
He took his seatbelt off and opened the door. ‘Let’s try the hotel first. If he’s not in his room, then he’s probably lurking somewhere in the service station.’
Boyd led the way into the Days Inn and flashed his warrant card at the receptionist. ‘You’ve got a Mr D. Jacobs staying here. Which room is he in, please?’
‘Fifteen,’ she said almost immediately.
‘You didn’t have to look that up?’ said Boyd. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘He’s been with us for ten days now,’ she replied. ‘Our residents are usually never more than one night.’ She looked at Boyd, then Okeke. ‘Is he a terrorist or something?’
Boyd shook his head. ‘No. We just need to ask him a couple of questions.’
‘Fifteen’s through those double doors,’ she said, pointing them out. ‘Halfway along on your left.’
‘Thank you,’ Okeke said, heading towards them.
‘Do I need to do anything?’ the woman asked. ‘Call a manager?’
Boyd shook his head. ‘No – it’s all fine. You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’
They went through th
e swing doors and down the carpeted corridor, passing wafer-thin plywood doors that leaked out the theme tune of The Chase, one door after the other. They stopped outside room fifteen, and Boyd pressed one ear to the door.
‘Anything?’ whispered Okeke.
He shook his head. Gone were the days when one could peer or listen through a keyhole. It was one of those card-swipe doors. ‘Nothing.’
He knocked on the door gently and nodded at Okeke to say something. She frowned with confusion. ‘What?’ she whispered.
He mouthed what he wanted her to say. She pulled a snarky face at him, but did what he wanted all the same.
‘Room cleaning, sir? Is it okay to come in?’
They waited for a response. Still nothing.
‘All right,’ said Boyd. ‘The service station it is, then.’
52
Darren Jacobs recalled how scared the young girl had been. And how brave. Or perhaps how naive she’d been to come and tell him what she knew.
‘They did something to her, those bastards. Amy thought she was going to a posh ball.’ The girl who’d spoken to him was Laura, Amy’s best friend. ‘She said it was going to be tuxedos and ball gowns. She’d been so excited.’
‘Who invited her?’ he’d asked.
Laura shook her head. ‘She didn’t tell me his name. Only that his family were really wealthy and he was good looking.’
‘Did you meet him?’
‘No.’
‘But you think something happened to her at the party?’
Laura had nodded. ‘And I think they covered it up.’
He never had managed to follow up on Laura’s story. The shit had hit the fan with the Leveson inquiry and News of the World the following week and soon after he’d found himself serving time.
He’d come across poor Laura again years later, hanging from an overpass. And even then he’d thought it too crazy, too ridiculous to be a part of her conspiracy theory. The post-mortem had found her to be intoxicated. Years of crying wolf for her dead friend had taken its toll, he’d thought. Nothing to see here, people, move along.