Dark Tides Thrillers Box Set

by Tony Hutchinson

‘You are creating smoke screens, Inspector, smoke screens behind which you are trying to hide your own inadequacies. You have not heard the last of this.’

  Sam kept the receiver in her hand after Carver disconnected, dialled the HOLMES room and asked for Bev to come into her office.

  ‘I’ve read your email,’ she told her. ‘Do you think they’re protecting a CHIS?’

  Bev closed the door and sat down.

  ‘He was very cagey when I spoke to him on the phone,' she told Sam. ‘He wouldn’t confirm it was an informant. I wouldn’t expect him to confirm in an email but on the phone?’

  ‘What do you think then?’

  ‘I got the feeling it was an undercover cop,’ Bev said.

  Sam gave that some thought. It would explain why Devon and Cornwall were keeping the identity secret. She doubted even DC Welch would know.

  ‘Okay, it changes nothing,' she said. ‘We’ve still got somebody who could identify who drove the car into the garage and the good thing, if it is a UC, I’m a lot happier with the ‘it’s not Sukhi’ identification. I’ll get our Director of Intelligence to call theirs… so, Jack Goddard.’

  ‘And perhaps Aaron Leech,’ Bev said.

  ‘I know,’ Sam told her. ‘I want victimologies doing for every drowner. The usual... associates, habits, places they visit, social media. Get the information on an analytical chart. Let’s see if there are any common denominators. We already know Jack and Aaron were on the ‘hashtag’ photograph. See if the others are somehow linked.’

  ‘Will do,’ Bev said, scribbling in a notebook. ‘Did anything come out last night on the tow path?’

  Sam shook her head. ‘Too much police activity so just a few drunken arseholes staggering along at about 4am. All the publicity about students going into the river and still they walk home lashed.’

  ‘What are we doing about the girls?’ Bev asked her.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ Sam said. ‘I want Amber’s phone sorting before we go for them.’

  Twenty minutes later, Ed walked into Sam’s office. She looked up from her emails.

  ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

  He relayed Sue’s conversation with Mrs Maan.

  ‘I wasn’t keen Ed, but good call,’ Sam said. ‘It’s given us a steer. Give me a minute.’

  Ed sat down.

  Sam picked up her mobile and called Darius Simpson. His phone rang and eventually went to voicemail. ‘Darius, when you get this give me a ring. It’s Sam Parker.’

  She had barely put the phone back on her desk when it rang, Darius’s name in the caller display. She put her phone on speaker.

  ‘That was quick.’

  His voice was groggy. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t get to the phone quick enough. I saw it was you on the missed call.’

  ‘Hope I haven’t woke you.’

  ‘No, I’m up,’ Darius said unconvincingly.

  Liar. Sam smiled.

  ‘I’m after a favour,’ she said. ‘Can you email some of those photos from last night across to me? The dad, brother and the guy outside the house?’

  ‘Yeah, no problem but who was he by the way?’ Darius asked her. ‘He never got involved but was watching everything. We got a few of him anyway. Why the rush?’

  ‘Just something I’m following up.’

  ‘Sam, if it’s anything, you will let me know?’ Darius said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They’ll be with you in 10 minutes,’ he told her.

  ‘That’s great Darius but send them to my personal email,’ Sam said. ‘They’ll not get through the firewall.’

  She hung up and looked at Ed.

  ‘Interesting development down in Plymouth.’

  Ed waited.

  ‘Bev was right. There’s a UC on the job. He or she is providing the ID evidence on the driver of Sukhi’s car. I got our Director of Intelligence to ring theirs. Obviously they’ll not let us use the UC for identifying the driver. Not yet anyway. Not until their own job’s sorted. But I want Bev to send the photos from last night down to them. Maybe one of them was the driver.’

  ‘What about prints on the car?’ Ed said.

  ‘Some,’ Sam answered. ‘The rear-view mirror has a couple and there’s some on the inside of the windscreen. Rest are on the outside bodywork, which as you well know, are useless.’

  Ed scowled. ‘I know... 'My client must have touched it when it was parked in the street, your honour. Doesn’t prove he stole it’. Ever wondered what life would be like without lawyers?’

  ‘Easy,’ Sam said.

  ‘They’re like bloody wasps,’ Ed ranted. ‘Serve no real purpose other than irritate everybody.’

  Sam’s laptop pinged.

  ‘Darius… good as gold.’

  A number of JPEG images were attached to the email.

  ‘Problem at the minute with this lot is that we only have Baljit’s prints on file,’ Sam said. ‘Have a word with Bev. Get these sent down to DC Welch.’

  ‘I was thinking... ’

  ‘Don’t make a habit of it.’ She smiled, flashing her white teeth.

  ‘Ha ha.’ Ed pulled a face. ‘If what Mrs Maan says is right, and why would she lie, Aisha and Sukhi are split up. Aisha’s dragged back to her house. He looks unconscious. We know where his car ends up but where is he? And if Aisha escapes again, does she contact him again? How would she? No way she’s got a phone and even if she could use someone else’s, people don’t remember numbers these days.’

  ‘Thoughts?’ Sam asked and waited.

  Ed took a deep breath.

  ‘I always said if she didn’t escape, she was dead. Do I believe she escaped a second time?’ He paused. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘We could have a potential double homicide here, with the family right in the thick of it,’ Sam said.

  ‘That’s what worries me. I’ll sort the photos.’

  ‘Make sure they do it right, Ed. Get other photos off the system.’

  The detective constable from the Intelligence Cell walked in as Ed walked out.

  ‘Just a quick one, boss.’

  Sam waited.

  ‘Somebody has just tried to use Aisha’s mini-bank card.’

  Sam was out of her seat. ‘What? Where?’

  ‘Embankment tube station at Westminster,’ the detective told her. ‘About an hour ago –10.17 to be precise.’

  London! Bloody hell.

  In all the time she had been missing there had been no activity on Aisha’s bank account and her phone had never been switched on. All the checks with hospitals drew a blank and now out of nowhere her card was being used in London.

  ‘Feed that into Ed,’ Sam told the detective. ‘Tell him to get on to the Met. I want CCTV around that tube station. Villiers Street, Thames Embankment.’

  The detective raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I used to go there quite a lot, years ago,’ she answered the unspoken question. ‘Great wine bar in Villiers Street.’

  Sam wandered into the finance offices and checked with the department head, Linda Foxton, how much money she was spending on each of the investigations. Each had a separate code: overtime, forensics, and all other costs billed to the respective inquiries. The budget was always in a perilous state.

  ‘There you are,’ Ed said, as she walked back into the corridor. ‘Hot off the press, Devon and Cornwall. The driver? It’s Baljit, Aisha’s brother.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘We’ll hang fire,’ Sam said. ‘He’s now linked to a disappearance. Get his prints checked against the ones they got off the mirror. I want that doing pronto, even if we have to pay to call somebody out at the Fingerprint Bureau.’

  More money.

  Sam stood by her office window, looking across the deserted car parks. Headquarters was populated with nine-to five-weekends-off workers... admin, finance, IT, training, and some centralised CID functions. Only those in the control room worked 24/7, and they parked on a different side of the site.

  Today the Murder Tea
m car park was full and yet Sam was still worried she wouldn’t have enough staff.

  ‘The cost of these jobs is spiralling,’ she told Ed. ‘Last night’s operation at Aisha’s street and then on the tow path was a fortune, everybody working a 12-hour shift. I saw Linda just to tot everything up.’

  ‘She’s top drawer,’ Ed said. ‘Coming in on a bank-holiday weekend. Not many civvies would do that.’

  But even she can’t magic money out of thin air, Sam thought.

  ‘So Baljit’s driving Sukhi’s car in Plymouth,’ she was saying now. ‘That suggests they found out where Aisha planned to go. If the car was ever found we were just meant to assume Sukhi dumped it.’

  The simple plan could have worked and probably would have save for the undercover cop being embedded at the chop-shop.

  Sometimes you needed a bit of luck.

  Sam sat down. ‘I don’t want to make a move on him until we find out about the settee.’

  Then she told Ed about the bank card.

  ‘All a bit of a coincidence,’ he said. ‘Nothing on her bank or phone since she went missing, and then after we’re in the street... ’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Bev Summers appeared at the door and passed a photograph to Sam. ‘You might want to see this.’

  Sam looked at it then passed it to Ed.

  A small hammer with a metal head and a yellow handle was laid on a desk. The ball part of the head had traces of what was clearly blood, and a few hairs were stuck in the brown stains.

  ‘Found by one of the crew in undergrowth by the tow path,’ Bev said. ‘About 200 metres from where Jack Goddard was found.’

  ‘They did well to find that,’ Sam said, impressed and surprised in equal measure.

  ‘I think he went for a pee and stumbled across it,’ Bev said, a ‘go figure’ look on her face.

  More good luck.

  ‘Get it off to the lab on Monday,’ Sam told her. ‘Pay the extra money for a quick turnaround. Let’s find out if it’s Jack Goddard’s blood and or hair, and if it’s not too much to hope for, let’s see if we can find the killer’s prints or DNA on the handle.’

  ‘You do want it with a cherry on the top,’ Ed grinned.

  ‘I know... look, I need some fresh air. Let’s go for a walk.’

  The daffodils around the perimeter road swayed in the breeze, a gentle balletic movement that was almost hypnotic, and a soothing contrast to the investigative maelstrom thrashing around inside Sam’s head.

  ‘Funny fresh air that,’ Ed said, watching Sam light a cig. ‘And you’re not supposed to smoke in the grounds, you naughty girl.’

  Sam blew out smoke. ‘Let them discipline me… If you wanted to get to London quickly, how would you travel?’

  ‘Train.’

  ‘Why not go to Plymouth?’

  Ed thought for a moment.

  ‘Too far,’ he said. ‘From here you’d have to get to London, then get a train to Plymouth from, I think, Paddington, or you get on that Cross-Country train at Newcastle or Darlington, but that feels like a two-day camel ride, takes about eight hours.’

  Not for the first time, Sam was amazed at the things Ed had stored away in his head.

  ‘I know it’s bad practice, but let’s assume Aisha is dead and her family still have her bank card,’ she said. ‘If they don’t want to drive, they get the train or fly but last minute, train is easier. I know we’re running out of staff but let’s have somebody looking at the CCTV at Newcastle and then Darlington train stations. Find the time of the trains after we left the street last night. Let’s see if anybody from Aisha’s family got the train to London. We know what time the card was used. The station CCTV up here might be an easier spot than the Saturday cameras in London.’

  Ed said he would get Paul Adams straight on it.

  ‘I’m getting ahead of myself here, Ed, but if we can find someone and they’ve gone there with the intention of coming back today, we might get them coming off a train still carrying Aisha’s card.’

  Ed called Paul Adams.

  ‘Sorted,’ he said, catching up with Sam, who had walked ahead. ‘The uniform who took the initial missing-from-home report is now on the search teams. He remembers the mother, father and brother. He doesn’t know the uncle but he’s on the way to the station now and he’ll get stills of any Asian men.’

  He noticed Sam was on to her second cigarette.

  ‘I want the girls getting in tomorrow,’ Sam said, stopping suddenly. ‘I can’t keep paying for cops to walk the tow path, plus politically I don’t want to give the ‘we need more police patrols’ camp any indication I agree with them. We had cops there last night and we’ll have them there tonight, so tomorrow we get the girls. I don’t want to put it off any longer. Amber’s phone exam will be finished today, so tomorrow well go with what we’ve got.’

  ‘We arresting them?’ Ed said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam replied with zero hesitation. ‘I don’t want them getting the opportunity of refusing to attend voluntarily. They’re all on or near the tow path but only Alex O’Connell said she was there. They all know Goddard, at least with the possible exception of Amber Dalton. They had an altercation with Goddard. They’re members of a group. Whether that’s Sisters Of Macavity, time will tell. As they say on the TV, they’ve got motive and opportunity. Lock them up on suspicion of murder.’

  She put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled.

  ‘I’ve told the CPS the way I'm thinking, just to keep them in the loop,’ Sam continued, smoke swirling around her face. ‘I don’t want them buried under a mass of paperwork they’ve no idea about if I’m looking for a charging decision sometime tomorrow.’

  Ed answered his phone, listened, thanked the caller and turned to Sam.

  ‘Paul Adams. The lab’s been on. The blood on the settee…’

  Chapter Thirty

  Saturday 14th December 2013

  Nothing in the street moved. Nothing except me, swinging from side-to-side, dangling from a line of clothes. I thought I’d be able to abseil down, like I’d seen on the TV, like how the girls from school told me they’d done it when they went on a trip to an outward bound place – not that I’d been allowed to go.

  School? Why had they even bothered sending me? If it hadn’t been against the law, I don’t think they would have.

  As soon as I got out of the window, any thoughts I had of abseiling vanished. The rope was swinging; my legs were hanging in mid-air, my weight taken by my arms and shoulders. This must be what the college gym rats mean when they go for the burn.

  I tried to gauge where my legs were in relation to the living room window. I knew I had to be quick. If someone went into the front room and saw my legs I was finished.

  I loosened my grip, slipped down a few centimetres then gripped the rope tight. My palms hurt, burning. I couldn’t breathe. My legs were about two metres from the ground.

  My heart was pounding.

  I was swinging again.

  I looked down. My feet were near the top of the window.

  I didn’t want to be swinging in full view of anyone who went into the front room.

  The next time I would slide down to the ground. I could live with rope burns. They wanted me to kill myself.

  I slid down. My hands were on fire. I was passing the window. The room was in darkness. Come on, Aisha! Be quick! I was at a point where I could just about jump.

  Then it happened.

  The ceiling light went on.

  I froze, like a rabbit in a beam, staring at my mother. She stared back. Two motionless rabbits. I even stopped swinging.

  Nothing. Just silence and empty time.

  Then she screamed.

  I let go, stumbled, jarred my ankle on the concrete and jumped over the little wall that runs around our tiny patch of front garden, if you can call a lump of concrete a garden. My ankle was on fire, but I had to run. I knew they’d come after me, and while I could probably outrun my father and uncle, there was no way I coul
d outrun my brother.

  I sprinted, arms pumping, trying to ignore the pain. I needed to get out of sight, hide somewhere, anywhere. I was already gasping for breath. I’d never won a race at school but I needed to be faster than I’d ever been before. I could see the end of the street.

  Which way?

  They’d expect me to go right so I’d go left, away from the town centre. Right would take me towards the police station but it was too far. I’d never make it. I was too slow.

  Behind me I could hear shouting.

  Don’t look back.

  My ankle was getting hotter. Every time it hit the pavement I winced, but I couldn’t stop. I knew they were after me. I turned left, half-dashed and half-limped across the road, my eyes darting everywhere, looking for somewhere to hide, to hide from my own family.

  Find somewhere Aisha! Anywhere!

  The parked cars were no good. The builder’s skip, a big one, would do. It would have to. I couldn’t run much further. If I could get there, hide there, I might be safe.

  Please God let me be safe.

  Why were there no white neighbours? The area was full of Asians. I wished I could knock on somebody’s door but I couldn’t. They’d side with my parents. Someone must have seen Sukhi getting beaten up, me being dragged home, but nobody would have reported it, or at least if they had, the police hadn’t come around. The skip was close. I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing. I put on a burst of speed and dived into the skip. My torso cleared it but my legs didn’t. I was half-in, half-out. I heaved myself downwards and my legs followed, falling over my head, forcing me to roll down to the bottom of the skip, my shoulders bashing into some broken bricks. I knew without looking that I’d taken the skin off my shins. I pushed myself up and got myself into a sitting position.

  I was covered in brick dust.

  Please don’t let there be a cloud of dust above me.

  Tears ran down my cheeks. I was playing hide-and-seek but if I lost this game, I would lose my life. I listened, tried to stop my teeth chattering. All I could hear was heavy breathing. My breathing. No footsteps. No cars. Silence.

  Maybe they’d gone right.