The Killing

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘That poor little girl,’ Kerry said sadly, as John pulled away from the kerb. ‘I know we had to do it and I know it makes it realistic if we trash the place, but her mum was crying and she looked really worried.’

  ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Lauren said, repeating a phrase that often came up during CHERUB training; though she now felt guilty about the amount of fun she’d had trashing the bathroom.

  ‘So what did you get?’ John asked. ‘You were in there for long enough.’

  ‘Financial stuff mostly,’ Kerry said. ‘About four hundred pages’ worth. It took ages because nothing was filed. Half of it was still stuffed inside envelopes.’

  ‘And the computer?’

  Lauren nodded. ‘I copied all the data, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything useful, unless you get a sudden urge to play Jimmy Bear Learns His ABCs.’

  28. CONCLUSIONS

  John was now working the Tarasov mission full-time. He had no intention of driving between London and campus every day, so he’d booked a two-bedroom suite at a hotel overlooking the river Thames.

  Lauren and Kerry were on attachment, which meant they were assigned to the mission, but would go back to campus when they weren’t needed. John picked up swipe cards at the hotel reception, stepped into a glass-sided lift and went up to the seventeenth floor with the two tracksuited girls.

  A vanload of paperwork and equipment had beaten them to the scene and Chloe Blake – an ex-cherub who’d recently taken a job as an assistant mission controller – was busy stacking papers into filing trolleys and setting up the laptop computers and the satellite link to campus. Kerry and Lauren unpacked a few personal items in a room with two double beds, then took showers and changed into hotel robes before ordering a Thai curry from room service.

  The girls were lying back on their beds watching MTV when John came after them.

  ‘Come on, ladies,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re here on a mission, not to loaf about. Kerry, I want you to print off all the documents you scanned and try making sense out of them. Lauren, e-mail the Patels’ computer data to campus.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Kerry puffed.

  ‘Don’t give me that look,’ John said stiffly. ‘This isn’t a hotel, you know.’

  Lauren started to giggle. ‘Actually, this is a hotel.’

  John was usually mild-mannered, but he didn’t appreciate Lauren’s cheek. He went into the living-room, grabbed a picture of Will Clarke’s body from one of the files and held it up in front of the girls. Neither of them had seen the picture before and they both winced.

  ‘I’m trying to catch the people who did this,’ John said. ‘I was hoping you two would want to see them go to prison as badly as I do.’

  ‘Sorry, John,’ Kerry said defensively, standing up quickly and grabbing a pair of jeans from her wardrobe.

  Lauren looked sheepishly down at the carpet. ‘Yeah, sorry. We’ll get right on it.’

  *

  John called everybody together for a 9 p.m. conference. James and Dave parked up underneath the hotel. They got into the lift at the parking level and bumped into Lauren and Kerry when it stopped two floors further up. Both girls wore robes, pool shoes and had streaks of water running out of their hair.

  ‘Nice cushy mission for some,’ Dave grinned. ‘Swimming in the hotel pool while me and James have to live in a slum.’

  ‘James likes slums,’ Lauren grinned. ‘They’re his natural habitat. And I’ll have you know that me and Kerry spent four of the last five hours doing our brains in trying to make sense out of the Patels’ financial records. John told us we could take a break and go for a quick swim before the meeting.’

  James could smell the chlorine on Kerry’s skin as the lift moved upwards. He hadn’t given her a lot of thought since he’d met Hannah, but she’d really grown up since they were thrust upon each other as basic training partners nearly two years earlier. James thought she looked more attractive than ever as he imagined leaning forward and kissing her damp cheek.

  ‘Seventeenth floor,’ Dave said, stepping into a drab corridor and heading for the suite.

  John and his assistant Chloe were in the room, as well as a bearded lawyer called Mr Schott. He was one of CHERUB’s legal advisors and also a member of the ethics committee that had to approve every CHERUB mission. Millie turned up last. Dressed in police uniform, she entered as Lauren and Kerry emerged from their bedroom in shorts and T-shirts.

  The four cherubs and four adults arranged themselves into a circle in the living-room, using a hotchpotch of sofas, dining chairs, a footstool and a long coffee table.

  ‘OK,’ John said. ‘Glad you could all make it. We’ve had a flood of information coming at us from different sources since James and Dave made their initial breakthrough with the computer a couple of days back. Chloe and I have spent the last few hours trying to make sense of it, with some valuable assistance from the girls. Now everyone is here, I’ll give you a quick rundown on the situation. Feel free to butt in with questions, or if I miss anything out.

  ‘First of all, we’ve established that Leon and Michael Patel were both members of the Golden Sun and owed the casino significant sums of money. We already knew that Leon had debts. According to the paperwork the girls copied at the Patels’ house this morning, it appears that Michael and Patricia were months behind with their mortgage repayments and owed more than thirty thousand pounds on credit cards and two car loans. In other words, both men were desperate for money.

  ‘According to the police file on the robbery, on May sixteenth last year, a member of staff at the Golden Sun Casino went into the computer room and stole a back-up tape containing all the casino’s data. We don’t know who stole it, but when a copy was later passed to Will Clarke, it was accompanied by passwords belonging to Eric Crisp and Patricia Patel.

  ‘Three weeks later, on June seventh at about five p.m., casino manager Ray Li called out an engineer to report that the CCTV system inside the casino had gone wrong. The engineers didn’t turn up until after the robbery. They found that several wire connectors had been twisted and broken off, making sabotage the only likely cause.

  ‘Eleven hours after that, Eric Crisp was the only security guard on duty after the casino shut its doors at four a.m, June eighth. At some time between four and six a.m. two masked men entered the staff entrance at the rear of the Golden Sun Casino using keys. Eric claimed that he went downstairs to investigate a noise and that the two men overpowered him. He said they tied him up and coshed him over the head. Of course, none of this was recorded because the CCTV system had been sabotaged earlier in the day.

  ‘The police commandeered the surveillance tapes from surrounding buildings after the robbery. I’ve got the tapes here, but I very much doubt they’ll be of much use. The cops at Abbey Wood would have tried already.’

  ‘Typical,’ James tutted.

  John continued his rundown of the facts. ‘The two masked men then used codes in their possession to open two safes and steal a sum of cash reported to be ninety thousand pounds, but now believed to be significantly greater, perhaps as much as six hundred thousand. Eric claims he regained consciousness two hours later and reported the robbery to the police as soon as he came around.

  ‘Crisp was later treated in hospital for a minor head wound and rope burns on his wrists and ankles. The security guard is always the first person suspected in a big robbery, in the same way that a spouse is always the first person suspected in a murder. Eric was questioned extensively about the robbery, but as you’d expect from an ex-cop, he knew how to handle himself in an interview room and stuck to his story.

  ‘In the months following the robbery, the behaviour of our suspects was consistent with people who’d just come into a large sum of money. Eric Crisp sold his house in Battersea, quit his job in the casino and moved abroad; we know not where. Leon Tarasov paid off his outstanding debts and purchased the Queen Of Russia pub. Michael Patel paid off all his debts, took his
wife on a luxury Caribbean cruise, gave his mother fifteen thousand pounds towards buying her council flat and – this is my favourite detail – purchased a seventeen-thousand-pound BMW from Tarasov Prestige Motors.’

  Everyone around the table exchanged looks and smiles.

  ‘Well John, you’ve got me convinced,’ Dave grinned. ‘But would that stand up in court?’

  John looked at the bearded man straddling a coffee table. ‘Mr Schott, you’re the legal eagle, would you care to take that question?’

  Schott leaned forwards, sucked in a lungful of air and waved his hand in front of his face. ‘There’s no clear evidence, like video or fingerprints, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. If we passed the information we’ve gathered to the Abbey Wood serious crime squad they’d pull Tarasov, Crisp and the Patels in for questioning. Then they’d get search warrants and tear up their homes and workplaces.

  ‘Patricia Patel would probably be the key to the whole thing. Michael, Eric and Leon all know how the cops break a suspect down and won’t play ball, but Patricia has never even had a speeding ticket. If you get the mother of a young child, scare the wits out of her and then offer her a deal that enables her to stay out of prison and hang on to her kid, she’ll usually crack.’

  ‘It’s obviously good news that we’ve got a realistic chance of getting convictions for the robbery,’ John said. ‘The bad news is that three of our four suspects have no criminal record, one of them is an ex-policeman and even Leon Tarasov only has a few minor blotches on his copybook. They didn’t use guns and the only violence employed was when they duffed up Eric Crisp to make it look like he wasn’t in on the deal. So, despite the large sum of money involved, none of our baddies would be looking at particularly long prison sentences. Four to six years would be my guess. With parole and remission, they’d all be out inside three.’

  James looked gutted. ‘Is that all they’d get?’

  ‘Maybe a little more for Michael Patel because he’s a serving police officer,’ Mr Schott said. ‘Other than that, John is absolutely right.’

  ‘That’s bull,’ Dave yelled furiously. ‘What about Will? The poor kid’s dead.’

  John grinned. ‘Boys, keep your hair on and let me finish. I’ve studied the photographs of Will’s body again and I can’t help agreeing with your theory that Michael Patel touching an obviously dead body was a highly suspicious thing to do. He was tangled up in a robbery with Will and on the scene at the time he died. The data disk hidden inside the computer indicates that Will either wanted evidence against his partners if things turned bad, or he was trying to blackmail them for a bigger share of the loot. Taking all of this into account, I now think it’s highly probable that Michael Patel killed Will Clarke. Are we all agreed on that?’

  John looked to everyone in turn for confirmation. Lauren and Kerry both nodded.

  ‘Ninety per cent certain that he killed him,’ Dave said.

  James shook his head. ‘Eighty per cent, more like.’

  Chloe smiled. ‘Well I’m not going to put a number on it, but I think he probably did.’

  Mr Schott nodded.

  John looked at Millie last. She seemed upset and for a second James thought she was going to start blubbing again. Her eyes narrowed into determined little slits as she spoke. ‘I’d like to see Michael Patel go to prison for a very long time.’

  ‘So we agree,’ Dave said, looking at Mr Schott, ‘but to get Michael convicted of murder, you’ve got to convince a jury of twelve people beyond any reasonable doubt. We don’t have anything strong enough to do that, do we?’

  Mr Schott shook his head. ‘Not even close. We’re all basing our presumptions of guilt on the fact that Patel touched the body, but a smart lawyer will defend Michael by claiming that he acted strangely because he was traumatised by what had just happened. Even if some of the jury members thought Patel was probably guilty, the judge would instruct them to find him innocent even if they entertained moderate doubts.’

  ‘We’ve all got doubts ourselves,’ Chloe reminded everyone.

  ‘Does that mean we’re bummed?’ Lauren asked.

  ‘There’s little chance of turning up more evidence via conventional investigative methods,’ John said. ‘We’re going to have to get a confession.’

  ‘You’re tripping,’ James said, shaking his head. ‘Tarasov and Patel will never confess, not in a million years.’

  John smiled. ‘Credit me with some intelligence, James. I’m not planning to take Tarasov and Patel down to Palm Hill police station, make them a nice cup of rosie and ask them to do the decent thing. I’m talking about a sting operation. We’re going to have to devise a trap.’

  ‘How?’ James asked.

  ‘I’ve got a few ideas,’ John said. ‘But it’s going to take time and a lot of detailed preparation to get all of the elements into place.’

  ‘How long?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Ten days, perhaps,’ John shrugged. ‘Maybe a fortnight.’

  ‘So what do we do until then?’ Lauren asked.

  ‘James and Dave stay at Palm Hill, keeping in with the Tarasovs and seeing what else they can dig up. I expect you and Kerry will be able to go back to campus until a day or two before we’re ready to roll.’

  29. KISS

  The plan took longer than expected to come together; not that James minded. He spent the nineteen days after John announced his scheme bumming around Palm Hill with Max and Charlie: playing football, riding bikes, cruising the shops, hanging out at the reservoir and making out with Hannah whenever her parents weren’t keeping tabs. It wasn’t as much fun as the CHERUB hostel would have been, but James was determined to enjoy himself because he knew it was the closest to a summer holiday he’d get.

  Tuesday, 20:58

  What started out as a low-key mission had turned into the most technically complex CHERUB operation James had been involved with. The sting was going to be controlled from the suite adjoining the one John Jones had been living in.

  James passed through the connecting door, stepping gingerly over a dozen tangled cables. There were three satellite dishes rigged up on the balcony. The beds had been put in storage and replaced by metal racks stacked up with computers, monitors, tape drives, telephones, back-up power supplies and two-way radio equipment. The only active screens showed Internet weather forecasts, one from the BBC and one from CNN.

  Chloe was crawling behind the racks with a bunch of cables draped over her shoulder and she looked stressed out. James leaned over one of the computers and menacingly wiggled a finger in front of the reset switch.

  ‘Here, Chloe, what would happen if I pushed this button?’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Chloe yelled. ‘Unless you fancy spending the next six months in traction.’

  James looked at the two weather forecasts. ‘Has John given the go-ahead yet?’

  Chloe’s voice strained from beneath a chipboard shelf, as she reached for a power socket. ‘Not yet, but it looks OK. The BBC were saying rain earlier in the day, but they’ve changed their minds now.’

  ‘Why’s the weather so important, anyway?’ James asked.

  ‘Some of our listening posts are using laser microphones and all our link-ups are via satellite. If it rains heavily, especially thunderstorms, half of our signals will go down the toilet.’

  ‘Right, like when you’re watching football on Sky and the picture freezes as Thierry Henry’s running on goal.’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Chloe said.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen so many wires before in my whole life.’

  ‘James, I’m trying to concentrate here,’ Chloe said irritably. ‘I’ve got thirty-seven electrical devices going into four wall sockets, more than fifty cables to plug in and a WiFi network to set up. I don’t mean to be rude, but can you please go next door and sit with Kerry and your sister.’

  ‘Sorry,’ James said, holding up his hands. ‘Give us a shout if you need anything.’

  James turned around and head
ed back through the connecting door. Kerry and Lauren had both been watching TV when he stepped out a minute earlier, but the set was off now and they’d both disappeared. James figured they’d gone into their bedroom. He sat on the sofa, hit the power button and flipped until he found an episode of Futurama.

  After thirty seconds, the lights went out. James felt the back of his T-shirt being grabbed, followed by a shower of popcorn going down his neck.

  ‘Aaagghh!’ James yelled, jumping up as Kerry switched the lights back on.

  Lauren sprung from behind the sofa with a massive grin on her face. James ripped off his T-shirt and flicked away the bits of popcorn stuck to his back.

  ‘You are so dead, Lauren.’

  Lauren grinned. ‘Gotta catch me to kill me.’

  James closed down on the sofa. Lauren was fast and could wriggle for England. James knew whichever way he moved, she’d dive out the opposite side. To get around this, he charged at the sofa and pushed it backwards. When Lauren realised she was about to get pinned to the wall, she scrambled up over the sofa and collapsed on to the cushions. James stopped pushing and dived on to his sister’s back. She tried to break out, but James had enough of a weight advantage to hold her.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ Lauren moaned as he squashed her.

  James scooped a handful of the loose popcorn off the sofa with one hand and tugged the elastic of Lauren’s shorts with the other.

  ‘James no,’ Lauren squealed. ‘Not down my knickers. This is war, James. LET ME GO.’

  21:06

  John was seventeen floors down in a corner of the hotel bar, as far as he could get from the other guests. Two stocky men passed through a set of double doors and John reflected that somehow, years of police and intelligence work had given him the nose to spot a plain-clothes cop a mile off: jeans, beer gut, ski jacket. There was even something about the way they spoke.

  ‘You must be John Jones,’ the older one said, as he dumped an Adidas sports bag on the carpet.