by Iain Cameron
Walking towards the crew quarters, the ship felt deserted, which was just as well as he didn’t know who would be more surprised if he bumped into a large Latvian with his pecker out, doing his best to lift the level of the canal. Perhaps Street had slipped some largesse into the captain’s palm to give him and his boys a free night on the town, or they were all down in the galley having a party. The second option made him wince but a little voice was telling him this was foolish as he couldn’t see sights or sounds of the crew, and it was being shouted down by another voice called curiosity.
By accident, as ships like this did not have a little map pinned to the wall as they did on cross-Channel ferries, he found the galley. To him, the word conjured up a vision of the one aboard his own boat, Mingary, a two-burner hob, a tiny fridge and an oven suitable for cooking nothing bigger than a Guinea Fowl, but this place was on a different scale and would not shame a works canteen or a small school. He could see a full range of modern kitchen appliances, cupboards brimming with pots and crockery and plenty of places for diners to sit. Next door in the sleeping area, were books and magazines, all in a language he couldn’t understand but his best guess would be Russian.
In the background, the ship creaked, squeaked and groaned as it pulled on its mooring, the hull stretching and contracting with the changing temperature, and the current in the canal swishing water against the dock and slapping the sides of the ship. With this level of ambient noise, it was little wonder no one came out to enquire why he was climbing the ship’s gangplank, either that or no one else was on board.
Listening hard, he could hear another sound lurking there, a low humming. It might be the electricity generator used for lighting the ship or running the air-conditioning, but even though the fridges and freezers were all working and the corridors lit, the air felt hot and stale. In which case, the noise wasn’t an air-con system for the crew, but one for the cargo to stop it rotting. It didn’t matter if the crew sweated and sweltered through a Baltic summer, God help them if they didn’t deliver the cargo in tip-top condition.
He moved further down the corridor where he noticed an improvement in the decor with better lighting, the doors and fittings had fewer scuff marks and scratches, and the floor was covered in a smarter looking material, making him think it was the captain’s quarters. He came across what looked like a small dining room, and slipped inside for a breather. Furnished with a table and a couple of cabinets, it looked more spacious than the crowded communal table and benches he’d left behind in the galley area, and not a bad place to be during a long sea voyage.
At the far side of the room and on top of a cabinet, a silver tray with half a dozen small glasses and a bottle of vodka. Curious to discover if Eastern Europeans really did drink high-proof alcohol, or it was a rumour put about by Russians to justify boorish behaviour, he walked over to have a look and maybe try a little taste. He reached out for the bottle and stopped. He heard voices and instinctively ducked down beside the cabinet.
It took him a few seconds to realise the voices were coming not from out in the corridor, as he first assumed, but from the room next door. He stood and reached for the handle of the dining room door, intending to move outside and see if he could get any closer, when he realised he was in an adjoining room. Standing on tip-toes, he could see inside the other room by peering through a small gap at the top of the separating door.
There were times when being a lanky six-foot-two could be a royal pain in the arse, like trying to sleep in a standard-sized bed in a budget hotel, or flying in an aeroplane with seats designed for a slim, five-foot teenager, but at times like this, it was a Godsend.
He had a good view inside the other room and to his utter shock, there was Derek Crow, bound to a chair, his face covered in blood.
FORTY
Don Levinson was well agitated and when this happened, somebody usually got hurt. He waited twenty minutes outside Mat Street’s house in Brighton and as agreed, he called Derek, but the call defaulted to voicemail. He was not an impetuous man, a comment Derek would dispute, and so rather than rushing over to the door and sticking his boot into it, as he’d first suggested, he rang the doorbell. When the door didn’t open, he dialled Derek’s number but with the same negative result.
He lifted the letter box and listened but couldn’t hear the sound of people talking and moving, or the bloody annoying Ride of the Valkyries ringtone on Derek’s mobile phone. Feeling like a Peeping Tom, he peered through the front window but his heart sank when he realised neither Derek nor anyone else was sitting inside.
His Special Forces training bawled in his ear, ‘Kick the Fucking Door In!’ He turned around. It looked a compact little street and any one of half a dozen neighbours would be only too happy to lift the phone and call the bizzies, and he was sure a few of them had clocked his odd behaviour by now and were watching him or jotting down the ‘incident’ in their notebooks. Walking quickly, as if he knew which way to go, he turned into the path leading to the back garden. He saw only one doorbell on Street’s house, a sign to him that his son owned the whole house and it hadn’t been converted to flats, as he didn’t fancy wandering into the garden and meeting a dozen half-dressed students enjoying a foam party.
The back door stood at the top of a couple of steps, exposing him to all and sundry who might be looking out their back windows or walking past, but at least it was dark and he didn’t have a security light above his head. Using the width of the step, he charged forward and rammed the door with his shoulder. To his complete surprise, it gave way without trouble and he almost sprawled head-first over the kitchen floor. A quick inspection of the door confirmed wet rot in the door frame, the bloody cheapskates.
He didn’t need to be quiet as his ungainly entry had made his presence known to anyone inside, and the noise he made was an Army tactic used to scare the occupants and to make them think there were two or three other people with him. The downstairs area was empty, and without hesitation, and with the voice of his former RSM ringing in his head, ‘The bastard who hesitates is fucking dead,’ he charged upstairs. One by one he shoved open bedroom and bathroom doors but found nothing.
He headed downstairs and spotted a door under the stairs and was surprised to find it led to a basement, as the house looked too small to have one. The footprint of the house wasn’t large and neither was the basement, and so it was filled with only a couple of bikes, a spare bed and a few boxes.
Now if he was a titty sucker, and there were plenty of them around, even in the Army, this was the time when he would break down and blubber, as he could see his job, his credibility, and his future prospects as a personal protection specialist all go up in a puff of artillery smoke. He straightened his shoulders. This was not going to happen as Don Levinson was made of tougher stuff, one of the reasons they made him Captain. Instead of whimpering like a reality show contestant who’d just received severe criticism from a judge, he grabbed a seat in the living room and sat down to think.
Given the complete absence of expected personnel, it was safe to assume Derek had been kidnapped by the criminal Mathew Street and one or more of his accomplices, and taken to a place of their choosing, to be tortured, killed or held for ransom. He was convinced this was the case because if they’d instead popped out for a pint or were walking down the road munching a take-away Shish Kebab, Derek would have answered his phone or called him. Derek knew if Don said he would come to the door in twenty minutes, he would do so.
Ipso facto, this little episode was not some spur-of-the-moment jape, dreamed up for a laugh after one-too-many tinctures or a puff at the happy-baccy, but a well-planned and a bloody well-executed snatch. If all his assumptions were correct, the only thing left to determine was, where had they taken him?
Think Don, think. He knew this house was being used only as a bolt-hole for Street, as he owned a house in Eastbourne. If anything was written down or he’d received a glossy brochure of the castle-cum-dungeon or caravan-cum-prison where Derek w
as being held, Street wouldn’t know the good places in this house to hide it, providing of course, he didn’t take the bloody thing with him. He started to formulate a plan. He would take this place apart room by room and find an address, letter or photograph, anything to give him a clue, any clue, as he sure didn’t have one now. He hoped to God it didn’t sit on a computer, as kicking in doors and interrogating subjects was meat and drink to a man like him, but the one thing he hated more than the Taliban was computers.
He would first concentrate his search in this room, Street’s bedroom, and finish with the kitchen. He felt sure Street would keep anything important close to hand, especially if he was nervous about a visit from the bizzies. With the methodical approach of a man with dozens of house searches in numerous towns and villages in Afghanistan under his belt, he began to search.
After five minutes he realised most of the stuff he found didn’t belong to a sixty-seven-year-old man whose main interests were likely to be beer, right-wing politics and the weather, but a young couple with a couple of kids. He didn’t know any old geezer who shopped at Next, did a bit of hair styling on the side and owned a brilliant collection of Top Gear magazines. This place reminded him of one of the apartments he and his ex-girlfriend, Elaine, used to rent in the Lake District when they went hill walking. He remembered how strange it felt to be surrounded by someone else’s taste in CDs, DVDs and books.
He finished the search, moved to the door and took a last look, his eyes scanning across the room as if wearing a head camera, looking for anything odd or out of place. He spotted something in such an obvious place he felt stupid for missing it the first time and almost punched himself for the error. Tucked behind the clock on the mock-fireplace, he could see a small pile of mail.
He picked them up and one by one flicked through. He found utility bills, adverts for a pizza delivery service and unopened letters addressed to Neil and Angela Street, he guessed Mat’s son and daughter in-law. At the back he lifted out a folded sheet of A4 paper. It was a print-out of an email message sent to Mathew Street from someone called Malcolm Richards at Sussex Grain Ltd.
He read it, taking care over each word, feeling like a hard-pressed detective holding a clue, crucial to cracking the case, but he still didn’t like looking through other people’s stuff.
Mat,
The Baltic Star is due into harbour this Friday at four. It’ll be loaded with wheat and at five when we’re finished, we’ll take the ship’s crew down the pub. If everyone turns up for work on Monday morning and we don’t need to go out looking for them, they’ll depart for Tallinn mid-morning.
I persuaded Lenny the security guard to come down to the Propeller with us and I’ll make sure he stays even if it means spiking his drink, ha, ha - the old git doesn’t need an excuse to drink. Hope you sort out your problem mate, but don’t leave a bloody mess.
See ya,
Malc
He read it again and stood for a moment, thinking. He always did this, even in the heat of battle, as he needed to be confident the information he was about to use would move the fight forward and was not the fruits of wishful thinking or clutching the only straw left in the basket. Confident it was the real deal and not a ruse or diversionary tactic, designed to fool a harassed personal protection specialist, he pulled out his phone and used it to look up Sussex Grain.
The company was based at Shoreham Harbour, and just to confirm, he searched for the Baltic Star. This took a little longer but finally he found a web site tracking merchant shipping movements to and from the UK, and it confirmed the Baltic Star had indeed docked at Shoreham Harbour this morning. Yet again, the amount of information he could glean from the web amazed him, as he was a ‘touch-it, feel-it, kick-it’ sort of a guy and suspicious of computer geeks and their knowledge and nerdy ways; come to think of it, he didn’t like any kind of geek.
One day, he thought, as he strode back to the car, technology would be so advanced wars would be fought by computers and younger guys than him hoping for a career in the Armed Services would be sorely disappointed. Even now, the RAF flew drones over Syria and Iraq, flown by pilots who might never fly a real aircraft. In his mind, it was only a matter of time before armies of robots were deposited on battlefields and programmed to fight other robot armies or attack a town.
For the moment though, he would be delighted to have his finger on the trigger of a Predator drone equipped with Hellfire missiles. Its first target would be to find Mathew Street, then he would ram one of its lethal projectiles right up his arse.
FORTY-ONE
From his vantage position in the neighbouring cabin, DI Henderson watched as Mathew Street paced up and down the cabin in the Baltic Star. He didn’t look like a sixty-seven-year-old pensioner with a heart condition anymore. He bent down and pushed his face into Derek Crow’s.
‘I’m asking you again Crow, where’s my fucking gold?’
‘And I’ll tell you again, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Look pal, I know you nicked it, so where the fuck did you hide it? Tell me and all this will be over.’
‘Pigs might fly. What are we discussing here?’
Street grabbed a handful of Derek Crow’s hair and lifted his head. ‘The gold me and Blakey’s crew nicked from Gatwick airport in ’89; £20 mil worth.’
‘Ah right, that gold, but why do you think I would know anything about it?’
Street slapped his face. ‘Because you and your mates are the only other people who knew where it was hid.’
‘You’ve lost me there.’
‘You’re a fucking liar Crow,’ Street said, pointing a finger a couple of inches away from his face as if trying to decide if he should poke him in the eye. The prisoner coughed and spat blood on the floor, attempting to clear his throat and mouth. He couldn’t move much as his legs were bound together and his hands were tied behind him to the back of the chair.
The three men were in what Henderson assumed to be the captain’s cabin with a bed along one wall, a writing desk, a couple of chairs and little else. At least if the captain had a boozy night drinking too much high-proof vodka in the dining room, the place where he was standing, he didn’t have far to travel to fall into bed.
‘I’m telling you, I didn’t have anything to do with stealing your gold, and as far as I know, neither did my brother, Pete, or Eric Hannah.’
Street whacked him in the guts and raised his fist to give him another when his companion intervened. ‘Pack it in Mat,’ he said, ‘we need to hear what he’s got to say.’
‘Humph.’
In this setting, Street looked no longer the model pensioner who liked a little flutter and an occasional pint of ale, but a silver-streaked wolf circling its injured prey. His face was alive with emotion and expression and he was bursting with energy, moving around the debilitated figure in the chair like a man ten or fifteen years his junior.
Close-up, Street’s mate Ace was bigger than Henderson first thought. He was tall, although smaller than the DI, and towered over Street by a foot or more, well-built with thick, tattooed arms and large muscles. He would have been a menacing figure to look at from Derek Crow’s position in the chair, but the lack of emotion and the coldness in his eyes was worrying Henderson.
After allowing Derek a few minutes to recover, they resumed their questioning.
‘We’ll take it from the top. I went on the raid with Blakey and the boys at Gatwick, and we got away with £20 mill in gold, about 5 in cash and 10 in bonds. I was the one looking after the gold, Blakey the cash, and Ernie the securities. Are you cushtie so far?’
Crow nodded.
‘Right. Before I know it, we get fingered by some bastard and we all get sent down. I come out half a bloody lifetime later and when I get to my lock-up in Plaistow, the gold’s gone.’ He bent down to face Crow. ‘The guys in the team blame me and want my balls in a sling for nicking it, but I told them as I’m telling you now, it was nicked by you and your mates. You were the only
ones who knew about the lock-up.’
‘I hear what you’re saying, but you’ve got the wrong guy. I didn’t nick any gold.’
The big guy made to hit him but a sharp look from Street stopped him. The little man seemed to have some control over his big mate.
‘If you didn’t nick it, how come you and the other guys in the band all had money to set yourselves up in businesses, where the fuck did you get it?’
‘Bloody hell. If I had a pound for every time I get asked this.’
The big man punched him on the side of the face but he must have been taking it easy as Derek’s jaw didn’t seem to be broken.
‘Stop flannelling Crow and get on with it, or you’ll get more of the same,’ Street said.
Derek winced, exercising his facial muscles, trying to dissipate the pain. ‘I found out later the guys were bringing in dope from Germany and Holland and they were making a packet, this was in the days before the big, organised drug dealers moved in on the scene. That’s where they got the money from, not from any gold theft at Gatwick.’
‘What a fucking fairy story. You expect me to believe they did it all behind your back? If I remember right, you couldn’t keep your snout out of the trough back then and you’re the same now.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘See mate, I might be sixty-seven but there’s fuck-all wrong with my memory.’
‘I always drove one of the vans, sure I did, but I didn’t know about the drug dealing and wouldn’t want to have been part of it if I had. When I left the band one of our albums started selling well in Japan and Korea, and since I wrote much of it, I made a fair bit from royalties. I would have given the guys some of the money but they didn’t need it.’