Seventh (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 1)

by Lewis Hastings

  Roberts could only nod his approval as he tore into a bacon sandwich, discarding his vegetarian regime for as long as it took to devour it.

  “Team, let us not forget that what Jack has brought to our table is a smorgasbord of highly organised bloody chaos. But at least we are now aware of the chaos. Cyber-crime, financial crime, call it what you like, it’s here to stay, and it’s happening, now, out there…”

  He pointed broadly across the rooftops of a busying city.

  “Jack, I’ve spoken to Eddie. He sends his best wishes and tells you to get what’s left of your arse back up the East Midlands. I’ve got a contact of mine working on keeping you here. Question: Do you have anything pressing that you need to get back to?”

  In the past Cade would have run through the things that were important to him, taking a while to mull it all over, then replied, however, it took him a millisecond to respond.

  “No sir, I don’t.”

  “Good, because quite frankly I don’t see anyone else with half the knowledge you have. By the way let me have your expense claim, it’s causing Eddie’s dyspepsia to re-surface.”

  “You know him, sir?”

  “I do, we went to Bramshill together.”

  He was referring to the internationally recognised police college in the heart of the Hampshire where the best of the breed were sent to train in commanding a modern police force.

  “Christ, me Eddie and Hewie were legends.”

  “Hewie?”

  “John Hewett. Swarthy, debonair bugger is Johnnie. Top man actually, he was there on some Foreign Office programme, likely to be something big one day, he’ll certainly beat me and Eddie to the PM’s cocktail invitation list. Got his fingers in a whole tray of luxury finger food has young Johnathan. Parents were big back in the day, worked for the Foreign Office, our little Johnnie lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, The Gambia, you name it, and he learned the languages too. Parents are of course long-retired, living out a life in France last I heard – rumour has it his folks fell out with the government over some trade deal with China. He’s a clever bugger, mind you. Loves the finer things in life. Young and gifted and honestly, not many people know much about him.”

  There was that name again.

  He looked around, realising he’d digressed.

  “Anyway, let’s crack on. What do we know? What don’t we know? And as they say these days, what do we know about what we don’t know?”

  He threw a whiteboard marker at Roberts.

  “Jason, I know you are tired but the quicker we get what we know on that board, the quicker you can all bugger off home to bed and dream about what we don’t!”

  The team muttered their exhausted approval, hoping that some of the fresher minds in the room could assist.

  As with all whiteboard brainstorms, it started with the event and then cascaded up, down and sideways, some relevant, some not, but all important. Knowledge gaps, they were called.

  Different colours denoted different lines of enquiry. Time lines were added, tasks too. Within fifteen minutes, patterns were forming.

  After forty minutes, they had more than enough to continue. New team leaders who had arrived into work to hear of the scenes from the previous night were furiously making notes and working out how to deploy their staff. Further south, other units of the Metropolitan Police had arrived for work and now found themselves in possession of a simple photograph. The image showed a starkly attractive girl who appeared to be attracting a lot of importance. There was clearly some prestige to be had for the unit or individual that found her.

  Frank Waterman had seen enough. He knew the operation was in good hands. A DI and six staff had arrived to offer support – their speciality was simple, old-fashioned detection. Nothing too flash, but they would be deployed to turn over the stones. Uniform staff had the girl’s picture. They knew there was a male person of interest too, although since his escape from the Mondeo God only knew where he was. Lastly, they knew not to talk to the media.

  Waterman gazed around the briefing room and looked at the growing group.

  “Last and by no means least, and I hate to say this, we cocked up. What’s important to me is not how long we linger over this but how we recover – and right now…” he paused and looked at everyone in turn, “…what counts, what really counts is finding the bastards that pissed on my parade, and importantly, the bastards that took that young lady from under our nose. Let us not forget that they stole our own bloody car!”

  Everyone present nodded.

  “We owe it to her, we owe it to the…people that took her, to the people that shot at my staff…endangered lives on the streets of London and above all we owe her family. Anyone who disagrees is free to leave. Anyone?” He scanned. “Good. Let’s move on.”

  It was a statement laden with honesty and frustration. Here was a commander who actually cared about the reputation of the team, rather than his own.

  Without another word he stood, causing the staff to rise as well. He motioned them to sit, nodded his appreciation, and left.

  Cade warmed to him immediately.

  He reached out and poured a couple of cups of intensely strong coffee, handed one to O’Shea, who he decided looked like death warmed up, and another to Roberts who looked marginally better.

  Roberts smiled at Cade, offered a mock chinking of his coffee cup and spoke.

  “Bloody hell, my son that was close last night, too close. My old girl would have killed me if she could ‘ave seen me.”

  Cade glanced at O’Shea, whose mind was spinning furiously, trying to sift through the fog of the previous few days. She returned a thin smile, enough to let Cade know she was tuned into him but not enough to give anyone with a law enforcement background the slightest hint that there was more than chemistry between them.

  Roberts had spotted it, subtle though it was.

  Cade continued.

  “Jason, I can honestly say that my stars did not predict what happened last night. The last time I travelled on a double decker bus, I was six. I got such a bollocking off my grandmother for messing about on the stairs. Needless to say, it didn’t end in the death of two people and the loss of another under police protection…seriously mate what was Clive thinking of?”

  The best that Roberts could do was say a wearisome, “I don’t know Jack. I’ve sent him home, stood him down, I’ll deal with him tomorrow. If it’s any consolation, he really is a good bloke, a top detective, just lets his cock do the thinking at times. He’s gutted, I’ve never known him to be so humble.”

  Roberts was as tired as the rest of the team, and Cade knew it.

  “End-of Jason. Sorry, we are all on our knees, let’s wrap this up and leave the morning shift to chase up the loose ends. They’ve got enough inky equations on that whiteboard to arouse Einstein.”

  Roberts knew his northern counterpart was right, but he also knew that his team had led to the incident unravelling – or at best, contributed heavily to it. His career options were most likely limited from now on. The least he could do was feel a few collars and lock up the bastards responsible.

  Their minds and bodies were exhausted.

  The door out onto the street, their chosen forms of transport and a home, wherever that might be were all beckoning.

  “MP, this is MP1 you receiving?”

  “Good morning MP1, this is MP do go ahead.”

  Andy Scott, the middle-aged constable in charge of police launch Patrick Colquhoun, announced the vessel’s intention of heading upstream from the Marine Unit’s historical base at Wapping.

  “MP, we’ve got a report from the skipper of the Jack D that he’s seen something which he describes as odd opposite the power station. We know the crew well and trust their judgement so we are going to take a look. We are en route, ETA around twenty minutes. Can you see if a land unit can have a butcher’s too please, somewhere opposite the station, on Grosvenor Road?”

  Despite his surname, Scott was a pure-bred Londoner. His fathe
r had worked on the river and his father before him. They could trace their maritime heritage back to the late seventeen hundreds.

  For Scott to be the skipper of the Colquhoun was a dream. She was a brand new boat, still undergoing trials for the police. Faster, larger and altogether easier to handle than her aged predecessor, and she made work, which for Scott was a vocation, an absolute pleasure.

  Day or night, good weather or inclement, he would prefer to be nowhere else than on the Thames and on board what he considered his boat. She represented the latest in a line of similarly named patrol boats, each one able to trace its lineage back to their namesake.

  Colquhoun a local Magistrate had joined forces with former naval man John Harriot. The two were to become the founding fathers of river policing in London, at a time when the concept of the Metropolitan Police had yet to be conceived.

  Colquhoun and Harriot had the experience and support of the East India Trading Company and the judiciary. They set about crafting a force who would make the treacherous river, its wharves and environs a safer place.

  Primarily created to counter the vicious gangs that preyed on shipping during the late seventeen hundreds, their Marine Policing Unit would become the forefathers of modern policing in England.

  Scott steered the boat into the channel, applied some power and started the short journey west. With the morning traffic at its worst, it was likely the launch would get to get to the scene before any land-based unit. With the right conditions and cognisant of the rules of the river, Scott fully intended to be the first on scene. He had a feeling about this one.

  Clive Wood had purchased his home, which sat on the first floor of a renovated block of flats among equally modest and somewhat identical dwellings. It was tucked away behind a grand old pine tree on the upliftingly-named Sunny Gardens Road in the area of north London called Hendon.

  He’d chosen the area after he had left the Regiment. Knowing he was going to be accepted into the police, and importantly knowing he would be training at the nearby Hendon police training centre, he had poured his recently and desperately unexpected, if not modest, inheritance into property.

  The flat belonged to his late aunt who adored him and as luck would have it had insisted that her nephew inherited the property – on the strict proviso he used what was left of the windfall to restore the home to its former glory.

  He told his beloved Sheila that it was the smart thing to do, especially in that part of the city. When all the other paras were remaining near Aldershot or heading north, he could, for once, see the writing on the wall. And the writing said ‘Profit’.

  Within two years he was proven right when a valuation showed a fifteen percent increase in the value of his modest two-bedroomed flat. It made the wretched but free commute to the Yard worthwhile. With a discreet flash of his warrant card he’d board a bus or a train each morning having already forgotten about his wife and lose himself in the journey.

  It was only about eight miles door to door, but on some days it could take an hour.

  He would arrive at work, engage in post-weekend banter with anyone who was prepared to join in. It normally revolved around Arsenal Football Club, or better still, a Welsh victory – in any sport.

  Having hung up his suit jacket, he’d grab a cup of tea; three sugars and hardly any milk. The strong beverage would be lovingly consumed as he checked overnight occurrences and any mail that had arrived. As the senior detective constable, he saw it as his duty. He was disciplined, if nothing else.

  He was never, ever late.

  Except today.

  The Patrick Colquhoun arrived ahead of schedule, Scott called in their position and waited for a larger boat to head past them, downstream to the Thames Estuary. His was a well-known voice to the Port of London Authority operator, but he made sure the communication was brief and professional.

  Travelling at a shade under ten knots, he was pushing things – but he had a legitimate excuse, at least he would if something were to go wrong. He was responding to an emerging incident, a hazard to river safety and one which would soon be supported by a PLA patrol boat.

  The PLA ‘policed’ the ninety-five miles of the River Thames, from Teddington to the North Sea. One of the busiest rivers and waterways in the world it could claim many records, one of the more unusual being that PLA staff removed over four hundred tons of rubbish from the river each year.

  The latter was at the forefront of Scott’s mind as he cut through the water, a two-knot tide helping him along his journey. He recalled the skipper of the Jack D referring to an object in the water. Nothing more than that.

  Man-made, most likely, but it wasn’t there the day before and Terry Walker knew the river better than most.

  He apologised to Scott at the beginning of their conversation – ‘I ‘ope I’m not wastin’ your time officer?’

  Scott and his crew slowed alongside Battersea Power Station, called in their intention to cross the river, and began the gentle manoeuvre. As soon as the skipper eased the rudder to starboard, he could feel the continuous wrench of the tide.

  He knew the river well; he’d grown up among what many referred to as the liquid history of the Thames. However, more than anything else, he offered his respects to the ‘Old Man’ every time he allowed him to set foot upon the water. His team would never board their boat without the appropriate safety equipment or clothing. Today, pleasant though it was, would be no exception.

  A veteran of the force who after many decades still considered himself to be only a river apprentice, he would dedicate hours to educating those that chose to use the river, boat owners and especially party-goers who would think nothing of leaping into the frigid, dark waters after a night of alcohol-fuelled merriment.

  With the flow running at ten miles an hour, five times faster than most humans could swim, the vast majority were doomed from the moment they broke the surface; the fortunate ones were swiftly swept beneath the swirling maelstrom and held at the river’s behest.

  If their families were lucky, the victim might surface within a few days, but invariably it would be weeks before the hapless soul rose to the surface, then, at best unrecognisable.

  The team had finished their handover. What they had missed wouldn’t matter now. There was more than enough to whet the appetite of any investigator: a group of apparently seasoned organised criminals insidiously fleecing the banking system of one of the largest cities on earth, numerous crime scenes, a pursuit, a firearms incident, culminating in the shooting of an officer, two fatalities at the hands of police staff and a significant crash, claiming the life of a stalwart of the London transport system. Yes, quite enough.

  Roberts practically crawled to his car, a good boss he ensured his team left before he did and then called across to Cade and O’Shea who were walking to the main gate.

  “You two lovebirds want a lift anywhere? You’ll need a new car since you smashed my other one up!”

  Cade dismissed him with a backward wave.

  “No mate, we’re fine, we are heading for coffee and then bed.”

  It was a momentary lapse.

  “Nice. I promise not to tell a living soul.”

  Cade looked at O’Shea, biting his lip at the transgression.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not. It’s been a long night Jack, come on, let’s do as you said, grab a coffee then head home to my place. That way only you, Jason, and I will know the truth.”

  He was already walking in the general direction of the Chilean Embassy and Old Queen Street.

  He was almost marching now, a second wind had kicked in.

  “Come on O’Shea, let’s get you back to your place and en route you can finish that sentence you never completed on the bus, the one about how you need to help me.”

  She raised her eyes skywards. He’d heard her. He’d remembered. He’d certainly do. Even her mother would approve.

  Clive Wood sealed the off-white, famous name, ninety-gram, watermarked envelopes and p
laced one upon her pillow, ensuring that it sat ‘just so’. The other was addressed to Detective Sergeant Jason Roberts. He placed that on his bedside table, propped up against the faithful reading lamp.

  Ten minutes later he had carefully knotted his favoured old regimental tie, using a single Windsor knot he had created a basic but classical accessory, stopping to slip the loop over his head and adjusting it, then he lovingly slipped on his gleaming leather shoes, the one’s handcrafted by Churches of Northampton. The pair he had never told his wife about.

  The main tie looked good. It’s maroon background, allowing the silvered wings to stand proud. Pure silk, handmade, slip stitched and lined. As with his shoes, it reeked of quality. It was new, he’d saved it for a special occasion.

  The cufflinks followed, matching the tie, maroon with silver detail. His trousers were sharply pressed and his blazer, darkest blue with a silver winged badge on the left breast pocket. It completed the outfit.

  He gazed at himself in the full-length mirror. Staring into the eyes of the man before him, he nodded.

  “You’ll do boyo. You’ll do.”

  Actually, the outfit was far from complete.

  He unwrapped a worn maroon beret and a pair of white gloves from some old tissue paper and walked to his bedside, placed them reverently onto the end of the bed, fastidiously picking a piece of lint from the hat badge before dropping it onto the carpet.

  He then returned to his wardrobe, paused as he looked at his number one dress uniform, ran his hand across the black tunic, its epaulette’s piped in red, complimented with a solitary brass button.

  The collars were completed with two silver winged emblems.

  Five more brass buttons featured, one above and one below a pure-white dress belt which had a gleaming silver buckle. Again, that crest resplendent at the very centre.

  On the right sleeve were three gold stripes. Medal ribbons sat perfectly in line on the left breast, immediately above the pocket. He removed two more regimental ties from the stainless-steel bar that held them in place.