The Man Who Couldn't Lose

by Roger Silverwood

  ‘He knows, sir.’

  ‘And I want surveillance for, say, thirty-six hours. That means applying a night lens. Do they know that?’

  ‘I told them.’

  ‘Where are they putting the van with the monitor and recording gear?’

  ‘They’re parking it on a woman’s drive who doesn’t have a car, three doors away.’

  ‘You gave him my mobile number?’

  ‘DS Mutta said he would phone you as soon as it was up and running.’

  Angel nodded. Gawber seemed to have all the arrangements in good order.

  Angel said: ‘There’s only Special Operations, you and me know about this gig, Ron. I want to keep it that way. If it leaks out it, it might not work.’

  Gawber nodded.

  ‘How are you going to get the super to call a raid?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s the next hurdle. I’ll have to give that some thought. Got to be very soon.’

  Harker’s desk was still loaded with piles of paper. He peered at Angel between two of them.

  ‘What do you want?’ he growled.

  Angel closed the door and stepped up to him, waving a thin brown paper file.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, as nonchalantly as he could summon. ‘I just wanted your approval to shred this file on Gloria Swithenbank.’

  Harker frowned. His forehead was hooded over like an African buzzard.

  ‘Who? Oh, her. Why? It’s nothing to do with me. It’s DCI Gardiner’s baby.’

  ‘Right,’ he said and turned back to the door. ‘I’ll shred it then.’

  ‘Why bother me?’

  ‘The DCI said that she was clean, sir. I had supposed that you had agreed with his findings.’

  Harker’s pupils flitted rapidly to the right, to the left and then back to the middle of his sockets again. He licked his thin, blue lips.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said suspiciously.

  Angel knew he’d roused his curiosity. He’d got him worried. That was good. ‘Shredding’ had become a dirty word in police stations ever since that trouble in the Humberside force a few years back.

  ‘You know I only want to do what you want, sir. I wouldn’t want to have these notes hanging about for anyone to see. There is enough rubbish in the station as it is,’ he said, nodding towards the papers on his desk. ‘Right, I will shred them.’

  Harker pulled an impatient face.

  ‘No,’ he suddenly replied.

  ‘All right. I’ll leave them here with you to look at then, sir, shall I?’ he said, placing them on the pile of papers nearest to him on the desk.

  ‘No. No!’ Harker roared. His bloodshot eyes glared at him. He snatched the file and opened it. ‘Don’t you think I’ve enough stuff to plough through? What is it?’

  ‘It’s on the cover, sir.’

  Harker closed the file and looked at the cover.

  It read: Search of the domestic premises of Mrs Gloria Swithenbank, 26 Edmondson’s Avenue, Bromersley on 22 March led by DCI Gardiner.

  Harker said: ‘Yes. Yes. Well, all this will be in DCI Gardiner’s report, won’t it? We don’t need duplication.’ He opened the file again and began to glance down it.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Angel said. ‘Pretty much. Except for the conclusion. If you remember, his report said that there was no evidence of the presence of any drugs and that the “intelligence” was duff, whereas I said that although no actual drugs or excess cash were found, I said that the positive behaviour of the sniffer dog could not be ignored. And furthermore, I said to DCI Gardiner at the time, in front of seven other members of the force, that it was obvious to me that Gloria Swithenbank had been tipped off.’

  Harker looked up at him. He looked genuinely shocked. His mouth dropped open and he dived into the file.

  ‘You didn’t report this to me,’ he muttered, his nose still in the report. ‘I didn’t know anything about this,’ he lied.

  ‘You’ve signed it at the bottom on the last page, page three, and dated it the twenty-sixth.’

  He rapidly turned over the page, saw his signature and checked the date. His eyebrows shot up.

  Angel had a silent chuckle. He recalled most clearly discussing this with him, but he had not been receptive at the time, and obviously hadn’t read the report even though he had signed it.

  ‘All I need to know, sir, is what to do with this file,’ Angel persisted slyly. ‘If I shred it, nobody need ever know that you had overlooked it.’

  Harker’s eyes flashed. The skin on the backs of his bony hands tightened. He wasn’t falling into that trap.

  ‘Don’t come the smart arse with me!’

  Angel licked his bottom lip. Maybe he had pressed the point a bit too soon.

  ‘I don’t know what your game is,’ Harker continued, ‘but I have not overlooked anything. In fact, I think we should call another search there as soon as possible.’

  Just what Angel had wanted. That was great, but he didn’t want to let Harker notice he’d been led by the snout.

  ‘There’s no need for that, sir. I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘No. No,’ Harker insisted. He stood up, rubbed his bony chin for a few moments, looked up at the clock then back at Angel. ‘In fact, right now,’ he added, no doubt believing that he would catch everybody unprepared, especially Angel.

  ‘There’s no need,’ Angel said, pretending to protest.

  ‘I’ll get DCI Gardiner to summon the same team as before,’ Harker said pompously. ‘That’ll include you. He can do the warrant. You can leave just as soon as he can get a dog and handler here from Wakefield. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour to set up,’ he added, reaching out for the phone.

  ‘Right, sir,’ Angel said, and left the office.

  He smiled all the way up the corridor.

  Gawber was in Angel’s office waiting for him. He could tell from his face that the trick had worked.

  ‘He’s calling DCI Gardiner to assemble a raiding party now,’ Angel said. ‘You’ve given DS Mutta a photo of Gloria Swithenbank, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, phone him and tell him to expect her in shot in the next few minutes. I don’t want any slip-ups!’

  Thirty-five minutes later, two unmarked police cars came down Edmondson’s Avenue, while the ARV and the dog handler’s van came up it. They stopped at the landmark letterbox outside number twenty-six.

  Everything happened almost exactly as before. When they gained access, everywhere was spotless and tidy. Gloria Swithenbank and her mother were sat as cool as cucumbers in the sitting room when the raiding party arrived.

  Angel was again paired with Sergeant Galbraith, and he went through the motions of searching the upstairs as before. Of course, nothing was found, the dog was similarly animated in the kitchen area, but even after DCI Gardiner had instructed the constables to lift two floorboards, no drugs or excess cash were found.

  The squad left two hours later, more embarrassed than before.

  This time, as the police filed out of the house, Gloria Swithenbank was very truculent. She stood on the front doorstep with her arms folded, yelling some of the foulest language after them that Angel had heard from a woman in a long time.

  As he drove the BMW away from the front of the house, he cast a sly glance upward at the telegraph pole on the opposite side of the road. A warm, satisfied glow came over him. It was a similar feeling he had had when he heard the judge in a recent case of his sentence a particularly horrible villain – whom Angel had had great difficulty in bringing to trial for murdering two pretty young showgirls after abusing them in a most horrid way – to twenty years’ imprisonment.

  And Gloria Swithenbank’s foul mouth didn’t worry him one jot.

  THIRTEEN

  Although it had gone five o’clock, Angel dashed back to the station to the quiet and privacy of his office. He closed the door, snatched up the phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Hello. Is that DS Mutta?’

  ‘Yes, si
r.’

  ‘Angel here. Did the mark, Gloria Swithenbank, show at all this afternoon, Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, sir. She posted two long flat packets at 15.33 hours exactly.’

  ‘Ah! Good,’ he said, breathing a sigh of relief. ‘Now, sometime before the official clearance time of 12.45 hours tomorrow, you should see someone unlock the letterbox and retrieve them.’

  ‘Right, sir. I’ll be watching out for them.’

  ‘Good man. I shall want blown-up stills of both people providing ID positive enough to make a case to take to court. All right?’

  ‘Got it, sir.’

  Harker was seated at his desk, which was still a mass of paper. He had an opened bottle of Gaviscon in one hand and a screw cap in the other.

  At that moment, Angel knocked on the office door.

  Harker glanced at the door and curled up a lip. Then he took a quick swig of the medicine, swallowed it, made a face like a marathon runner with a nail in his shoe and hastily screwed the top back on the bottle.

  ‘Come in,’ he yelled, as he stuffed the medicine clumsily into an overfull desk drawer and had to struggle several times before he managed to push it down to close it.

  Angel came in carrying a videotape and two nine by six inch photographs.

  Harker looked up at him with a face like an undertaker at a pauper’s funeral and snarled, ‘Oh. It’s you. What have you got there?’

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ Angel said brightly.

  ‘There’s not a lot good about it. What do you want? I heard from the DCI that the raid on Gloria Swithenbank’s yesterday was fruitless. I don’t know why I listen to you, really I don’t.’

  Angel was momentarily speechless. He dismissed the idea of arguing with him, considering the firm, new evidence he was carrying. ‘I referred yesterday to the previous raid on Gloria Swithenbank’s, sir,’ Angel said.

  ‘Yes. You said that you thought that someone had warned her of the raid, also that the dog had been quite animated at one place in the kitchen and may have sniffed out a trace of Class A.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And then you said you were amazed that DCI Gardiner had chosen to ignore these facts. I must say, I would have had to agree with the DCI: they do seem to be rather … insubstantial.’

  Angel’s jaw stiffened.

  ‘They weren’t insubstantial, sir. The same thing happened yesterday. Someone had tipped her off. She was expecting us and was well prepared for the raid. She was tipped off by phone by someone from this station.’

  Harker pursed his lips and shook his head.

  ‘I rather doubt it,’ he said superciliously.

  Angel continued: ‘In anticipation of that, sir, I had an SE team set up a CCTV camera on the Royal Mail letterbox outside her house. As expected, on hearing by phone from an accomplice that her house was up for another raid, she stuffed the drugs and the cash into prepared bags and went out to her front gate and obligingly posted them into the box. It was done as calmly and as smoothly as if she was posting a piece of wedding cake to a distant friend. I have film and a still of that. Ten minutes or so later, the raid took place and of course her house was free of drugs and again the sniffer dog found only a trace. At six-fifteen this morning, her accomplice unlocked the letterbox with a key, retrieved the packages and walked away. I have got film and a still photograph of that too.’

  Harker leaned back in his chair with his mouth open wide enough to catch a swarm of flies.

  Angel continued: ‘That also explains the two assaults on the postmen and clears up both those incidents. The first assault was out in the country. In that instance, the villain only wanted a key to the letterboxes. The same key fits all the Royal Mail letterboxes in the district. That’s why the postman’s keys were reported missing and yet turned up in the gutter the following day. Simply to steal the keys and not let them turn up might have created suspicion. The villain only wanted them to take an impression of the appropriate key to get one made.’

  ‘Ah well, what about the assault in broad daylight on Earl Street?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m coming to that. That was the day we searched Gloria Swithenbank’s house the first time. The letterbox outside her house on Edmondson’s Avenue is due to be cleared each weekday at 12.45. After the tip-off, as before, she would have posted her packages of heroin and cash in the letterbox before we arrived, but on this occasion, because of the timing, the official collection by the Royal Mail van had cleared the box before the accomplice could retrieve the packages. So he had to recover the packages from the collection van sometime before the postman arrived at the end of his run at the sorting office, or the stuff would have been found. The villain knew the route and the timings and caught up with the van on Earl Street. That’s where he had actually to steal the van and take it away so that he could search through the mailbags to find the one containing the packages of heroin and cash.’

  There was a pause.

  Harker looked stunned.

  ‘And where is the heroin and cash now?’

  ‘Don’t know for a fact, sir. But he’s not had much time to dump it anywhere safely. It could be in his desk or even at his home, but I expect it will be in the boot of his car.’

  ‘And you say you have clear VT of him?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And blown-up stills.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  Angel passed the photographs over.

  Harker looked at them.

  ‘Aye. She looks a right hard bitch. Gloria Swithenbank?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Then he saw the photograph of the man. His jaw dropped.

  ‘It’s Galbraith.’

  As soon as Harker had seen the videotape evidence, he summoned Sergeant Galbraith to his office. Angel was required to stay there as a witness.

  The sergeant came in looking very smart, professional and innocent. Harker accused him of being in possession and dealing in Class A drugs and outlined the evidence against him. Galbraith didn’t reply or offer any explanation. DCI Gardiner and DI Angel immediately searched his desk and car in his presence; four kilos of heroin and more than £8,000 in cash were found still wrapped as seen in the VT, under a rug in his car boot.

  Harker told him that he was under arrest, appointed two PCs to guard him, demanded his warrant card, then formally charged him. All Galbraith said in reply was, ‘No comment.’ And he asked permission to phone his solicitor, and specified Carl Messenger. The superintendent was obliged to give him permission to use the phone and Galbraith made the call. He told Messenger the nature of the charges and that Angel had been the arresting officer.

  Then two PCs took him out to be processed and put him in a cell.

  Harker then told DCI Gardiner to take a couple of officers to arrest Gloria Swithenbank. He went out of the office.

  Angel stood up and made to leave, but Harker waved him down to stay. Angel thought it must be so that he had a witness that he was going through the procedure according to the book.

  The superintendent phoned the chief constable, who asked a few questions then rang off. A few minutes later, the chief phoned back to say that he had notified the Professional Standards Directorate, the PSD, and that they were sending an investigating team almost immediately and that they could be expected to arrive at Bromersley station late that afternoon.

  Angel then asked if there was anything else he could do and Harker told him that he could leave.

  Relieved, he closed the superintendent’s door and dragged himself up the corridor to his own office.

  WPC Baverstock and DC Scrivens were rushing down with solemn faces. They would be dashing out to the car to join DCI Gardiner to arrest Gloria Swithenbank.

  ‘Congratulations, sir. Great job,’ they said as they passed.

  He waved an acknowledgement but didn’t feel as if he’d earned their plaudits.

  He was thinking that when the PSD arrived later that afternoon, Galbraith would be transferred promptly to another police station, and that that wou
ld very likely be the last he would see of him until the case was brought to court.

  He arrived at his office and closed the door. He was glad to have his own office. He slumped down in the chair and sighed. It wasn’t pleasant to see a fellow policeman go down. Galbraith had seemed to be such an honest, dependable sort. But the high-flying system had beaten him. He had succumbed to the temptation of big money and had thought he was too smart to be caught. Angel thought that the station would be rather subdued for the remainder of that Friday; any discussion about the case would be conducted in low voices, and the force would assume an air of shock and mourning for a few days rather than any thought that Galbraith had been behaving in a deceitful and disloyal way, pocketing big money, and spreading the dangerous drug among people of all ages, particularly the young. Loyalty didn’t die easily among policemen. However, anger would certainly build against Galbraith when the case was heard in court and the police began to feel the backlash from the public as the media reported the case. Nevertheless, Angel wasn’t happy that he had had to be the one to expose a bent copper, even though it had to be done. It therefore took him some time to settle down to any kind of proper work that afternoon. He had gone through the post automatically, emptying envelopes, fastening all the contents of each one with a paper clip and disposing of the envelope in the wastepaper basket, which was an unchallenging job he could manage until he could put himself to matters of a more demanding nature.

  A few minutes later, he was better able to apply himself to the work in hand.

  There were several unsolved cases he was dealing with; his most important one, of course, was the murder of Joshua Gumme. One of his suspects was Alexander Spitzer, and one of the details concerning him was how he had arrived at The Feathers. Did he have his own transport? He doubted that he would have arrived there on foot. He would have been pretty conspicuous if he had walked through Bromersley town dressed as a priest. He considered that, if he hadn’t walked, had he hired a taxi? Or did he have a local friend or contact? Of course, Galbraith could have been the contact. Galbraith had to get his supply of heroin from somewhere. And it was no doubt Spitzer.

  Angel also had no idea where Spitzer had come from. The reason why Spitzer and Coulson were still free was because nobody knew where they now lived. They had to have a place they could call their own somewhere. They were too smart to be followed to it. All the time they had been on the run, nobody knew where they were actually running to.