If I Should Die (Joseph Stark)

by Matthew Frank

  He showed them his books.

  No Whelan. No Nikki Cockcroft, Nicola Michaels, Liam Dawson or Steve Baker. Fran slid an image of Dawson across the desk: the CCTV still from the prison visit, a dodgy-looking image of a dodgy-looking bloke. ‘Know this man?’

  Brown shook his head. Fran placed Whelan’s latest arrest mugshot on the desk. ‘This one?’ Same reaction from Brown, but his eyes betrayed him. ‘You’ve a lousy poker face, Mr Brown. Billy Whelan is a known associate of yours. And he’s in a world of shit. If you don’t want to join him, I suggest you start being a whole lot more co-operative. All I want to know is whether he bought a car from you recently.’

  It was almost laughable to watch the man’s eyes darting as his brain scrambled for options. It was a wonder he eked out a living trading used cars.

  ‘Perhaps we should ask the Albanians,’ suggested Fran.

  ‘All right, all right! Billy bought a car, couple of weeks back.’

  Fran jabbed at the books. ‘Which?’

  Brown found the entry. ‘This one. Silver Volkswagen Golf.’

  Fran stared. ‘Says here this car was bought by a John Michaels. Whose name is the car registered in?’

  ‘I’ll look.’ Brown pulled out a ring-binder of ownership slips. ‘Here … Nicola Michaels.’ Fran glared at him dangerously and he went on the defensive. ‘Billy asked for the slip in that name, said the bloke was a mate. Nothing illegal there, happens all the time. Dad buying his daughter’s birthday surprise. It’s all legit!’ he insisted desperately.

  ‘Look at the address, Sarge,’ said Stark. According to the book, Nicola Michaels lived on the Ferrier Estate.

  ‘One of Dawson’s flats, maybe.’ That wasn’t the only detail that piqued her curiosity. ‘According to these numbers you sold at a loss. Paid in cash, did he?’

  ‘Win some, lose some,’ said Brown, innocently. It was an old trick. Fill in the price on the buyer’s slip but not your own. Then fill in a lower number on yours, pocket the rest VAT free and offset the loss. Fran slapped the book shut and took it.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong!’ protested Brown, in rising alarm, as Stark followed Fran across the showroom.

  Fran stopped. ‘Tell the Albanians you’re getting too old for their game. You’re retired. Otherwise I’ll be back with that warrant.’

  ‘The Golf’s registered under Nikki’s alias …’ Groombridge’s voice sounded mechanical, Bluetoothed through the car speakers. ‘Okay, I’ll get someone back on to DVLA to confirm, and have uniform check out the address. In the meantime we’ve got a shout on the Mondeo. The phone ping still hasn’t got a live location but the call history shows multiple calls in the vicinity of a light-industrial site in Welling. We got hold of the manager, who thinks he’s seen a grey Mondeo coming out of a unit rented recently by a tall, heavy guy in a black bomber jacket and baseball cap, fictional name, of course.’

  ‘Text Stark the address. We’ll meet you there. Good hunting!’

  Moments later, Stark’s phone beeped and he typed the location into the sat-nav. They were still thirty minutes away and the dull rumble of the road coaxed Stark’s eyes closed once more, but the possibility of his colleagues kicking in the right door stopped him nodding off.

  ‘How’s it going with Aqua-hottie?’ asked Fran, out of the blue.

  ‘Given your recent conspiracy, you could call her by her name.’

  ‘Defensive of her already. How sweet.’

  ‘I hardly think this is the time, Sarge.’

  ‘I’m just making conversation.’

  ‘Try “Nice weather for the time of year.”’

  Fran tutted. ‘You were more fun when you were falling apart.’

  ‘That show’s over.’

  ‘I thought you were finished being a secretive bastard now your sordid past is public knowledge.’

  She had a point. And he’d decided to make changes. ‘She’s great, thanks. She’s forgiven me for being a secretive bastard.’

  Fran glanced at him in surprise. She made little effort to hide her triumph. ‘Meaning you think it’s about time I did too? After that stunt with the CPS lawyer!’

  Stark smiled. ‘I can wait. You’ll forgive me eventually.’

  ‘What do you mean “eventually”, Mr We’ll See? You’re just trying us out for size, remember?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Fran blinked. ‘You’re ready to hop off the fence and be a proper copper?’

  ‘I’m ready to try.’

  ‘Wow! Another blistering strap-line for the recruitment poster.’

  ‘At least I’ll be learning from the best.’

  ‘Flattery now, is it?’

  ‘I was talking about the DCI.’ Stark laughed.

  That earned him another punch in the arm. ‘Another year in my bad books! Keep this up and you’ll never make DC. It’s not the DCI who signs your PDP sheets. All right, next question.’

  ‘Come off it, Sarge!’

  ‘What happened with your SAS thing?’

  ‘What SAS thing?’

  ‘Training. Why were you sent home?’

  Stark cursed silently. Where had she unearthed that? ‘They call it “returned to unit”. And it’s Special Forces Training. You’re not SAS or SBS till you’ve passed.’

  ‘Which you didn’t. Why? I asked Captain Wendy but she wouldn’t say.’

  ‘Wouldn’t admit she didn’t know.’

  ‘She didn’t? She gave me guff about how these things are “not discussed”.’

  ‘They’re not.’

  ‘Boy Scout bullshit again. Tell me.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I’m curious.’

  Just that. No threat or dissemblance, just plain, honest curiosity. Was she beginning to work him out? ‘Malaria.’

  ‘Malaria?’

  ‘During jungle training in Borneo.’

  ‘They can’t fail you for getting ill!’

  ‘They can and they do. Malaria, dengue fever, dehydration, infected cuts, blistered feet – it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s carelessness, susceptibility or plain bad luck, if you’re not fit to go on you go home.’ They had always been swamped with applicants. For years Special Forces had represented the best hope of genuine combat, until Afghanistan and Iraq had changed everything. Stark had given it little thought until an ex-SAS instructor pushed him to apply. For a while a sand-coloured beret had appealed to his vanity. A proper cap, as Maggs would’ve put it. Now just another forgotten dream.

  ‘So that’s it? All that cock-waving and it comes down to who gets a mozzie bite and who doesn’t – that’s madness!’

  ‘Maybe.’ Of course that wasn’t it – not all of it. But Fran couldn’t see through him like Groombridge; not yet at least. Stark hadn’t flown home early from Borneo. His symptoms hadn’t seriously kicked in till weeks later. By the escape-and-evasion he had felt like death but didn’t know the cause and sure as hell couldn’t let the Directing Staff know.

  He’d escaped and evaded, but still had to face the resistance-to-interrogation test, or tactical questioning, as they liked to call it now. Stark had had little fear of it. However real they tried to make it, it wasn’t. No matter how tired you were, how humiliated, what stress or discomfort you were put in, they weren’t going to pull your nails out or attach electrodes to your balls. All you had to do was wait them out. Or so he’d thought. But three days’ E&E in winter sleet, old boots and a Second World War greatcoat had let the malaria take hold. During TQ the fever had spiked and he’d become delirious. They’d eventually tracked him down eight miles away, barefoot and raving.

  As the first applicant ever to escape TQ he was credited with demonstrating ‘unique resolve’, but told that escaping while too ill to evade recapture demonstrated ‘flawed strategy’. He was invited to think better next time. So much for the grey man. Stark still felt mildly embarrassed about the whole thing.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Fran!’ Groombridge’s voice, urgent
now.

  ‘Yes, Guv.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘A2 passing Gravesend.’

  ‘Turn around. Head for Folkestone. We just got a call saying the silver Golf is booked on Eurotunnel, midday train. Reservation was made by one Nicola Michaels. DVLA confirmed the Golf is registered to that name and the address is an empty flat, not one of Dawson’s. You’re closest now. Local uniform have been told to wait for you unless Nikki tries to take an earlier train. The super won’t look kindly on us if she’s handed back by French Customs.’

  ‘And the Mondeo? Dawson?’

  ‘The car’s here. Dawson’s not. SOCO are on their way. I’ll have to wait around. Get Nikki Cockcroft for me. And be careful, she’s a spiteful little cow.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Guv. I’ll send in Stark to charm her, then cuff her while she’s busy chewing his head off.’ She gunned the accelerator.

  43

  Fifty minutes later they cornered into the terminal service road and flashed their warrant cards at the gate. A uniform constable met them in the staff-only area. ‘The Golf arrived ten minutes ago. Woman driver.’

  ‘She’s early?’ Fran clicked her tongue in irritation. No time to set up or direct her car quietly aside.

  ‘Sergeant Riley is waiting upstairs. I’ll show you the way.’ They followed him up to the police suite, cluttered with monitors that looked like they’d been there since the 1994 opening. A window looked into the central atrium of the terminal, a square, two-storey concourse with a coffee booth, seating in the centre and the typical shops dotted around the outside. The atrium roof was a tensile fabric tent, the going thing in the early nineties; nouveau modernism reasserting itself over post-modernist usurpers. Sadly the edifice was dogged by the usual civic underfunding and showed its age. The louvred glass ventilation windows beneath the roof were dirty, their cheap actuators black with grease. The painted walls looked cheap, the sloping, flush, inward-looking first-floor windows made an effort to be modern but were obviously hard to clean. Even the concourse floor showed signs of indifferent repair. On a sunny day like today the sunlight diffused evenly through the roof, reflecting off the white walls and bathing the concourse in an overgenerous, even glare. The one-way mirrored glass of the police-suite window looking in was an adhesive film rather than a factory-applied aluminium coating, an afterthought, now blistering and peeling at the edges. Stark stared through it despondently, embarrassed by the parsimony, the state disease of post-war, post-imperial Britain. He was knackered and there were no spare chairs in the cramped suite.

  Sergeant Riley introduced himself. ‘She’s at the coffee booth.’ He pointed to one screen. The image was several generations short of high definition, but there, sitting among those topping up on hot drinks and pastries, was a girl, short to average height, boyishly skinny, shiny branded tracksuit and baseball cap. Nikki sipped her coffee with her head down and kept checking the phone in her hand.

  ‘She’s gone blonde.’ Stark pointed at the ponytail.

  ‘She’ll be the belle of the jail,’ muttered Fran, with a dark smile. ‘How long till her train’s called?’

  ‘Forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Okay. Safer if we take her in the car away from the crowd.’

  Riley nodded. ‘I’ve got Passport Control standing by to pull her car over on the pretext of a spot check.’

  A few minutes later Nikki stood and walked into the toilets.

  ‘Odd,’ said Riley. ‘She went on the way in.’

  ‘I guess the heartless little cow is prone to nerves after all.’ Fran scoffed. ‘The Ladies Room has never been a sadder misnomer.’

  Nikki emerged, towing a small black, wheeled suitcase, and turned towards the exit. Every officer in the suite sat up.

  ‘Are we looking at some kind of drop?’ frowned Riley. ‘I thought this was a fugitive case.’

  ‘It is,’ said Fran, equally puzzled. ‘Can you wind this back?’

  ‘There!’ Riley pointed at a woman, emerging backwards from the toilets. His officer paused the image. She was pulling a large wheeled suitcase. One of those solid ones with the hard shell, but cheap, unbranded.

  Fran frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘People don’t wheel in cumbersome luggage. They leave it in the car. Why is this woman trailing around a sodding great case? Rewind a bit more … There, play.’

  Coming in from the car park the woman approached the coffee booth without looking at Nikki, glanced at the refreshments without buying, then walked back past them on her way to the toilets. Nikki got up and followed her in. The woman re-emerged and went straight back outside. Nikki came out with the smaller case.

  Another camera showed the woman lifting the large case into a BMW, getting in and driving off to join the queue for France. Riley was shaking his head. ‘Little woman throws a big case into the boot one-handed … Rewind it to where she gets out, Thompson.’

  The constable complied. The woman parked, got out and lifted the big case out of the boot.

  ‘Two hands, much heavier,’ nodded Fran. She turned to stare at the real-time image of Nikki crossing the car park. ‘So what’s in that case?’ she mused aloud. ‘Get Passport Control to pull her over.’

  Riley radioed the instruction.

  ‘Where’s she going?’ asked Stark. On screen Nikki had turned right out of the exit and was heading out of the car park.

  ‘The Golf’s in the coach park,’ explained one constable, operating the CCTV.

  The car park swept in a quadrant around one corner of the terminal and gave way to an equally large area crammed with coaches, motor-homes, towed caravans, dozens of cars and hundreds of people milling around and making use of the grassed area and children’s playground beyond. ‘Where?’ asked Stark.

  ‘I haven’t got a camera on it. It’s back there between those gold double-deckers.’ They watched Nikki disappear where the constable was pointing.

  Several minutes passed.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ announced Fran, picking up a pair of radios. ‘Let’s go round there and get eyes on her.’

  They hurried outside to the car and drove back round to the public side. Riley and the constable who’d greeted them came too.

  The Golf hadn’t moved. It had tinted rear windows and from where they’d parked the police couldn’t see in, but the officers in the police suite assured them Nikki had not emerged or gone elsewhere.

  Minutes ticked by. ‘Something’s wrong,’ said Stark.

  ‘I thought soldiers were taught to be patient,’ sighed Fran.

  ‘They’re also taught to be wary.’

  ‘She’s getting out,’ announced Riley.

  But it was the passenger door opening, and Nikki wasn’t getting out. Stark stared at the big-framed figure in jeans, navy-blue hoodie with the hood up over a grey baseball cap, and cursed his stupidity. He’d noted the same figure on the CCTV several times. ‘He was shadowing her in the terminal. I should’ve realized. It’s Dawson.’

  As he said it, the figure glanced around and they saw his face. It was Dawson, minus the goatee. ‘How did he get here?’ asked Fran.

  ‘Could easily have been in the back seats when the Golf arrived,’ suggested Riley. ‘The automated check-in booth camera wouldn’t have seen him.’

  Dawson opened the boot of the Golf and lifted out the small black suitcase Nikki had been pulling and walked away. Suddenly he froze. A blue Volvo had cruised into the space in front of him and two men in their late thirties got out, wearing dark suits.

  ‘Yours?’ said Riley.

  ‘No,’ said Fran. ‘If those arseholes at National Crime have decided …’ The two men walked past Dawson, chatting idly.

  ‘I thought he was going to bolt,’ said the constable, leaning forward between Fran and Stark for a better look.

  Dawson wheeled the case to join a group of people milling around a huge coach with Belgian livery. ‘What’s he doing?’ asked Riley.

  ‘Switching,’ said Stark, with sudden
certainty. ‘Something’s wrong.’

  Fran was nodding. ‘Let’s take him. If he gets on that coach this could get ugly.’

  In that moment Dawson looked their way. The constable’s uniform must’ve drawn his attention straight to Stark and Fran. Dawson’s eyes went wide with shock. Looking around desperately, he shoved a young couple out of the way and set off across the coach park with the suitcase snaking behind him.

  ‘Shit!’ hissed Fran, kicking open her door. ‘Get Nikki!’ she barked at Stark and set off with Riley and the constable at a surprising turn of speed.

  Hurrying between the coaches, Stark approached the rear of the Golf. He could see Nikki’s white cap in the wing-mirror. Adrenalin coursed through him. He should have been looking forward to this – Nikki had tried to cheat justice, cheat him as she had cheated Pinky and the others of a life without fear, as she had cheated Alfred Ladd of his remaining years, his remaining dignity, as she had cheated Stacey Appleton of her young life – but creeping up the side of the car, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was badly wrong.

  He felt for a pulse but knew it was too late.

  Nikki stank of booze. There was a bottle of vodka open in her lap, a clear plastic bag of pills too, with more on the floor. The air reeked of cannabis, but something else, something Stark recognized from the pipes of Afghan villagers and Afghan National Army soldiers, but there was no pipe or joint in sight. Then he saw the phone in Nikki’s hand. The screen was still awake – a sent text. Goodbye Mum I’m sorry.

  Dawson.

  Slamming the door, he set off after the others as fast as he could, hobbling, almost hopping, on his good leg, using the cane for balance rather than support. ‘Nikki’s dead,’ he shouted, into the radio. ‘Get some uniforms out here to the car.’

  In the distance Stark saw the eager young constable cut around some cars in front of Dawson but the big man simply dipped his shoulder and slammed through, like a battering ram.

  Looking around wildly, Dawson jumped in front of a blue Toyota, forcing it to stop. Then he yanked open the door and dragged the driver out on to the tarmac, the poor man’s wife screaming as she climbed out of the other side. Riley caught up and, unlike his constable, had thought to flick out his ASP baton – twenty-six inches of telescopic steel. Mistake, thought Stark. Given Dawson’s size and profession, CS spray would’ve been a safer bet.