by Ian Andrew
“Oh no, she always worked. That’s one reason we moved to Arlesey. It was close to Dad’s last tour of duty but it was also on the main rail line to Peterborough and Mum had worked up there for years. It was an easy commute.”
Kara nodded.
Zoe turned at the stub of Jay Mews that sheltered the entrance to the English National Ballet, “Well this is me. Thanks for lunch Kara and I shan’t say anything until I hear from you. I promise. I’ll also talk to Michael as soon as he gets in.”
“That’s great Zoe. And chin up and stay positive?”
Zoe nodded and reached forward to give Kara a kiss on either cheek.
Chapter 17
Thursday Midday. Huntingdon
Detective Constable ‘Pop’ Oldman came through the operations room door brandishing a piece of paper. Tony Reynolds looked up and was beaten to the punch by Moya Little, “What’s that Pop, peace in our time?”
“Huh?”
The rest of the room laughed.
“Never mind Pop, what is it?” asked Reynolds.
“It’s the ID for the brunette. A Mrs,” he referred down to the piece of paper, “Agnes Shawcross called in to say that she saw the flyer in the Post Office and she knows who the girl is.”
“And?” prompted Reynolds.
“And I thought we could go and check it out,” said Pop smiling over at him in a beguiling, if slightly blank, way.
Reynolds merely looked over to Gary Mason who was the Sergeant that had mentorship over Pop.
“I think the Gov wants to know the name of the ID Pop,” Mason said and wondered yet again if the young man was really cut out to be a Detective. Unlike his surname, Pop was actually the youngest of the squad. At just twenty-five he was keen but sometimes a bit short on common sense.
“Oh right-o. Mmm, she’s called Martina and lives opposite Mrs Shawcross in Lark Crescent. She doesn’t know what the girl’s surname is but she reckons she’s a foreign student staying with a family in the street.”
“So we don’t actually have an ID for the brunette then?” Mason said.
“Well, no Sarge but, I thought, you know, we could…” Pop didn’t finish the sentence and stood with his mouth slightly agape.
“Mmm, maybe a bit more thinking needed. C’mon,” Mason stood and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, “Let’s go see Mrs Shawcross and see where she points us.”
Pop cheered up again and turned on his heel. Mason looked round at Little and Reynolds and raised his hands in mock prayer.
As Mason and Pop left, Reynolds’ phone rang.
“Gov, it’s Anna. Can you come into the video suite?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I’ve been taking another look at some of the CCTV. I think I’ve found something.”
Reynolds and Little both went into the suite. One screen was paused on a scene from the dim interior of Rocky’s Nightclub, the other on the well-lit main foyer.
“What’ve you found?” asked Reynolds.
“It’s the blonde. The one taking the selfies.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t think she’s taking selfies. Can you see just here,” Walsh pointed to the dimmer, interior screen where a couple were sitting in the corner. “I think she’s taking photos of that couple. She’s followed them around the room. I’ve checked all the interior cameras and she is definitely tracking them, albeit very, very subtly. Eventually she leaves a couple of minutes before they do.”
Reynolds pulled out a seat, “If she left before them how’s she tracking them?”
Anna pressed play on the remote and the image from the dim interior played forward. “Because Gov, they do all the normal stuff when you’re ready to leave. Finish drinks, get coats, the woman gets her bag.” She paused the screen again. “But the blonde; that’s her just there on the edge of the screen. I think she sees all that and just goes straight to the entrance. Much easier to start a surveillance trail if you’re out before your target. Gives you time to get set up and looks less obvious.” She pressed play on the foyer screen and the blonde walked straight through the image.
“I still find it interesting how she angles her head,” Reynolds commented.
“You mean the way we never see her face?” Anna asked.
“Yeah. I mean if this is the woman who ends up killing Hastings then did she know she was going to do it, even at this stage of the evening? I find that hard to believe. I think she’s trained to avoid surveillance. It’s like she’s almost unconsciously doing it.”
“At least we can say she’s medium height, medium to slim build with blonde hair,” Anna offered.
“Well, blonde hair that night,” Moya countered. “It could be dyed, could even be a wig if she was really concerned about masking her appearance. She becomes more interesting all the time.”
As they talked the video played on and the couple came into view on the screen. Walsh paused it at the moment when they were in the middle of the brightly lit nightclub entrance and left the image frozen on screen. She ejected the DVD of the dim interior and replaced it with another disc. “This is from the camera next to the petrol station. The one up near the cemetery where we saw the blonde. I went back and looked at it again.” She pressed play and fast forwarded until she got to the view she wanted.
“We didn’t notice this earlier. Watch.” The image was a wide-angle view of the entrance roads into a petrol station and the corner of the main shopping centre complex in the town. A small segment of it also covered the footpath and pedestrian crossing on the corner of Priory Road.
As Reynolds and Little watched, the couple from the nightclub walked up to and crossed at the pedestrian crossing. As they disappeared out of shot to the top of the screen the blonde entered in the bottom right. She followed the same path and eventually exited screen-top. Again, not once did she lift her head to give a clear shot of her face on camera.
“Okay, I’ll go for it. So what is she?” Reynolds asked.
“I don’t know Gov. PI maybe?” Anna said and looked to her Sergeant for support.
Moya considered what she had seen and eventually said, “It’s possible. Definitely possible.”
“The timelines work. If she was conducting a surveillance that would explain why there’s such a gap between this view and her turning up down on Walden Road a couple of hours later,” Anna said and looked expectantly at Reynolds, awaiting his verdict.
“That’s really good work Anna, well done,” he said. “Moya, take Anna and see if you can turn up anything on this mystery couple. Talk to the nightclub staff again. See if anyone can identify them. If they’re subject to a surveillance we want to play this really carefully. We have no idea if we’ve just stumbled into something that’s official and way outside our paygrade, so if you find out who they are you do not go after them. Are we clear?”
Both women nodded.
“Okay. Whilst you do that John and I will make the rounds and see if someone’s been operating on our patch without letting us know. I can’t see it but you never can tell. The anti-terrorist chaps have a tendency to do first and apologise later.”
*
Mason and Pop were back by early afternoon. Martina Costa was an Italian exchange student staying with the Lilly family in Huntingdon whilst she attended the College of Animal Welfare. The twenty-two year old was in the second year of her Diploma in Animal Management and was currently on a mid-term break. She hadn’t gone back to Italy this time as she was, in her words, ‘saving for a car’. Mason had called ahead and Tony Reynolds was waiting for him in the annex to the interview suites.
“Hi Gov. I’m not sure if she’s hesitant because of her language skills or if it’s something else. What I do know is that she wasn’t able to tell me what she’d been up to on Friday night. The lady she lives with, Lorraine Lilly, said Martina has her own key so she has no idea what time she got in.”
“Okay,’ said Reynolds, “I called for an Italian interpreter when you first rang, but app
arently the nearest one is Cambridge so we’ll have to wait. I’ll have Pop standby to bring them in when they get here. Did you find any heels?”
“No. But I didn’t search the house. I asked her if she had a pair of red high heels and the best that I could make out was that she’d thrown them away because the heel was broken. But to be honest her English went rapidly downhill the minute we announced we were Police.”
“Convenient that they broke?” Reynolds said sarcastically.
“Yeah, but that and her hesitancy weren’t the only reasons I brought her in Gov.”
“Okay, so what else?”
Mason took his phone out and turned it to show Reynolds the picture he had taken in Martina Costa’s room. The photo showed a double floating shelf on a wall above a single bed. On it were six gilt trophies with black and gold ribbons hanging from each.
“What am I looking at?” Reynolds asked.
“These are hers. She’s a First Dan Black Belt in Qi Kwan Do. I’d never heard of it before but according to Pop it’s a specialist self-defence form. It’s the other reason Miss Costa is studying in Huntingdon.”
Chapter 18
Thursday Afternoon. Camden, London
By the time Kara made it back to her office she knew the wagons had been circled. Eugene and Dan were sitting in the occasional chairs that Zoe and Michael had sat in not seventy-two hours earlier. Tien leant against the window that looked out over the back of the small courtyard to the rear of the office. It was a reminder that the whole building had once been a house dating to the late Victorian period. Back when the likes of Karl Marx claimed the neighbourhood as home. Kara stopped in the doorway and leant against the frame, “Status?”
Tien gave a slight shrug, “It’s no worse and no better than you might think. We know it’s highly unlikely that Chekov penetrated any of our meetings up until now. Even more remote is that he had eyes on the meeting with Ty and hugely doubtful that any of us have been followed since we took on the case,” she paused.
“But?” asked Kara as she walked over and took her seat behind the desk.
“But the remotest of possibilities exist that since he learnt of us from Zoe and Michael he could have decided to come have a look. For all we know he has expert, ex-Russian Service operators and we might have been slack. They might not have moved against Ty because we’ve had babysitters on him.”
“Do we still have?” Kara asked.
Dan nodded, “Yep. I kept one of my guys in loose hold around the perimeter after we’d spoken last night but since Eugene called in I’ve upped it back to four. We can keep a pair on him day and night. I don’t think you’ve met them but they’re all solid people.”
Kara acknowledged the news with a nod, “What about here?”
“All the covert surveillance cameras are up and running. Tripwires are in place,” Tien answered and pointed to the open laptop on the small coffee table between Dan and Eugene.
“Physical assets?” Kara asked.
“I’ve called in Jacob and Toby. They’re front and back on an outer perimeter but at that point we’ve run out of people,” Eugene said.
Kara was pleased that they’d called in Toby Harrop and his younger brother Jacob for extra protection. They were both ex-RAF Regiment and although Kara had never worked with them whilst in the military, she and Tien had used them on a couple of investigations in the previous year when Dan and Eugene hadn’t been available.
“So we’re going to have to get inventive,” Eugene continued. “Either Dan and I provide the second pairing for here and you and Tien stay connected at the hip or, we drop to one-on-one and relocate inside. Either way we’ll run it in twelve hour shifts. It’s the best we can do.”
Kara considered the logistics, “I think the two pair on Ty is a good call. We promised we’d keep him safe and until we know we haven’t been compromised we should make sure he is.” Kara looked to each in turn and got nods of agreement. “But Tien and I can cope with one of you in close for each of us. However, I do think we all need to start carrying. From what we’ve heard of Chekov he’s not the ‘call round for a chat’ sort of bloke.” Kara looked to Tien.
Tien answered by raising the left hem of her jumper to reveal a snug waist holster with just the grip of her Glock26 Gen4 sub-compact pistol showing above the waist band of her jeans. “Yours is in your desk,” she said.
Kara opened the top drawer and saw her Sig Sauer P239 nestled in a concealed-carry leg holster. The eight-round magazine sat next to it. She removed the pistol from the holster, checked it was clear and slid the magazine into it. Pulling up the left leg of her jeans she secured the holster to the inside of her left shin before pulling her loose jeans back down over it.
“Thanks Tien. So what else have we got?”
“I just need to remind everyone that whilst we have to take precautions to be safe, we really have to remember that we still don’t know if Chekov, or Illy, or whatever we’re going to call him, is involved in the abduction,” Tien cautioned.
“I totally agree,” Kara nodded to reinforce her point, “but I also think he’s our only avenue of investigation, so we have to proceed. Even if we know it’s based on an assumption.”
“What about the idea of going after his girls and their pimps for information?” Dan asked.
“Like you said yesterday, that could take weeks to reveal anything. We know who Chekov is now and worse, he knows who we are. I think the only thing we can do is go direct to the source,” Kara answered.
“And do what?” Eugene asked.
“Isolate him. Talk to him. Find out where the Sterlings are if he has them or find out who might have taken them if he didn’t.” Kara once more looked at each of them in turn. She didn’t get nods of agreement this time but she got shrugs that meant they couldn’t think of anything better.
“Okay. Then I guess that’s a plan,” she said. “Tien, have you managed to turn anything up on him with the information Zoe gave us?”
Tien moved to the other soft chair and picked up the laptop from the table. She opened up a couple of browser windows and angled round so Kara could see.
“Nothing on Illarion Yurevich Sultanov. And I mean nothing. No papers in his name, no registrations, no house address, phone records, driving license, nothing. I tried all the variations of the name I could think of but all blank. He obviously has run all or any official paperwork in another ID.”
“That’s not too big a surprise is it?” Kara asked.
“Not really,” Tien agreed. “But we do have good news. The Krasota Modelling Agency is a real agency based out in Waltham Cross.”
Kara nodded, “That makes sense. If the house is on the western side of Epping Forest.”
“Yep. They even have real models doing real shoots from what I can find on the web, which to be honest surprised me. I reckoned it was just a front for the escorts.”
“I’m sure it’s a front for something,” Kara assured her.
“Probably. Anyway, Aunt Yanina is Yanina Bobrik. She holds all the papers on the business. It’s registered in her name and her very attractive face is on the website, along with a ‘Get to Know the CEO’ profile. She’s a member of the local trader’s association, the local, and very exclusive, golf club and seems to be mentioned in connection with a fair few charity events in the Hertfordshire and North London social calendar. No home address though. Everything’s addressed to either the business or Company House. There’s also no mention whatsoever of Uncle Illy. He’s the ultimate silent partner and if he attends these events with her he’s been very careful to make sure there are no photos out there. But as for her, there’s quite a lot to choose from so I’ve printed out a couple so we can get familiar.”
“What does the profile say about her background?” Kara asked.
“Allegedly she was born in a place called Kaunas in Lithuania, grew up in Kaliningrad and moved to the UK in ninety-nine after a successful international modelling career. No way of verifying any of that but
the dates tie in roughly with what Zoe gave you and her photos do show a beautiful woman,” Tien said.
Kara clasped her hands, looked down and took a deep breath. The other three waited. After a moment she raised her head, “Right, obviously the news that our most likely candidate is now bosom friends-” She was interrupted by Dan’s phone ringing.
He checked the screen, “It’s Jacob.” The tension in the room was immediate. He pressed the answer button, “Go ahead.”
Kara felt the strange mix of fear and excitement that she had known so many times on operations in the UK and overseas. She knew it was the thrill of the uncertainty and the potential danger. But deep down in places she didn’t think about or examine too closely, she knew it was also the possibility of violence and mayhem. It quickened her.
Dan raised his free hand and made the ‘ok’ for them all to see. The tension in the room dissipated and the tiniest of regrets ebbed into Kara’s mind.
“Roger that,” said Dan and ended the call. “Tien, your cameras are about to pick up three people coming into the entry porch. It’s all good.”
Tien’s phone sounded a series of soft chirps. Kara watched as Tien looked at the screen and saw recognition in her friend’s eyes. “Sammi’s here,” Tien announced and went to open the door.
The UK armed forces had many skillsets but inventive nicknames had never featured highly. Samantha Davis, James Bell and Charles Randal had, since their first days in uniform, been known as Sammi, Dinger and Chaz. Their former Welsh colleague Taff, now laid to rest in his native soil, had been further proof of the lack of effort that went into the process. But, as obvious as they were, the names had followed them into civilian life and their pseudo-military activities.
Kara and Dinger had brought some more chairs into the office, Tien and Sammi had gone upstairs to get four more laptops and Eugene and Chaz had made mugs of tea for all. Dan had stayed as the watchful point of contact for Jacob and Toby.