Silvermeadow

by Barry Maitland

  When he joined them Brock recognised the smell that hung in the air of the corridor outside, a smell familiar from the firing range.

  ‘Hercules powder,’ one of the two detectives, a gun freak, said to him, sniffing the air like a connoisseur.

  ‘Sure,’ the other said sceptically, lifting the ram to swing at the door.

  ‘No, straight up. Bullseye, I reckon. Yer Vectan and yer GM3 are sweeter, like. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ the other grunted.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Brock said, and the man nodded and swung the ram against the lock. It burst open on the second swing, revealing the foot of the first of the two bodies on the floor inside.

  From their positions in the cramped space, it appeared as if the two men had been forced to crouch on their knees among the buckets and bottles. Their black tunics, with the Armacorp flashes and radios, had gone, as had their helmets. They had knelt with their backs to the door, and a bullet had been put into each head at point-blank range.

  Brock called a hurried briefing in unit 184. Bren Gurney and several others from Serious Crime were there, as well as two senior officers from the Robbery Squad, the leather-coated man from Armacorp, and Gavin Lowry and others from the local division. Chief Superintendent Forbes put in a brief appearance just as they were getting under way, feeling obliged to register a formal protest at Brock’s lack of consultation with his officers, and to suggest that the outcome might have been very different with local backup. No one was very interested in this.

  ‘Needless to say,’ he said stiffly, ‘we shall provide all the support we can. But we will expect to be kept informed in return. I propose that DS Lowry act as liaison, since you’ve already worked with him. You agree, Brock?’

  Brock nodded.

  ‘Good. At least,’ Forbes added, with a prim little smile, ‘our Silvermeadow case is satisfactorily resolved.’

  As Forbes left, Brock overheard the senior Robbery Squad man say to Bren beside him, ‘What’s his problem? What case is that?’

  ‘A murder. Teenage girl abducted from here a couple of weeks ago. We were assisting each other in our respective inquiries.’

  ‘Oh yes? No connection with North?’

  ‘No,’ Bren said decisively. ‘No connection at all.’

  Brock found Bren’s confident answer vaguely troubling. It stirred a question that had been lurking in the back of his mind for some time.

  Lowry, meanwhile, moved over to sit beside Kathy, giving her an amused little smile as she met his eye.

  ‘But of a sly one, aren’t you, Kathy?’ he said. ‘Letting me think you were all finished up at Silvermeadow.’

  ‘When we last spoke I thought we were. Anyway, this wasn’t your case.’

  ‘It is now, by the looks of things. It seems you lot need a bit of help.’ He grinned. ‘So you and Brock and Bren and half of SO1 were actually here, were you, when this happened? One of these geezers told me you’d been here all day looking for this North character, waiting for something to happen, only when it did, you didn’t notice it. I told him he must have got his facts wrong, eh? I said, come on, this is the famous DCI Brock’s team!’

  He was enjoying himself, fairly bubbling with it.

  Kathy muttered, ‘Sod off, Gavin,’ through clenched teeth.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he chuckled. ‘Makes me feel a lot better about my car.’

  Then a new thought seemed to strike him. ‘You were probably never interested in the Vlasich murder at all, were you? You just used it as a cover to be here, on the lookout for North. Did Harry Jackson know? No? Where is Harry now, anyway?’

  That was a question that had occurred to Kathy too. If the security staff were so short-handed, where the hell was Harry Jackson?

  Brock interrupted, calling the group to order with a rapid summary of how they now believed the robbery had been carried out. Two men, it was thought, had hidden in the cleaners’ store cupboard beside the first staircase and waited for the security guard crew, whom they had ambushed and murdered. They had then followed the expected pattern of collections from the shop units, removing the contents of the cash bags before depositing them in the security truck hopper. As each zone served by a stairway was cleared, it appeared that a common pass code, one allocated to emergency services, had been entered into the security lock on the doorway connecting that service stair with the mall. In other words it looked as if the money had been transferred to one or more accomplices waiting in the malls.

  ‘Perfect cover,’ Brock announced. ‘The place was packed with people with bulging shopping bags. They could walk out without the least suspicion. Even if something had happened down in the service road to arouse suspicion and cut the operation short, the people in the mall could stroll away without suspicion. They might have been women for all we know, frazzled shoppers with bags and pushchairs and kids hanging from their elbows— maybe the little girl North was seen with a week ago. And when the two gunmen got to the final stairway without a problem, they simply took off their jackets and helmets and joined the crowd and walked away too.’

  ‘How come the driver in the security truck didn’t twig what was going on, chief?’ someone objected.

  ‘We’ll be looking a lot more carefully into that,’ Brock said, ‘but so far his story seems plausible. The two men he saw going from stair to stair were the same build as his crew, and were wearing their clothes and radios. While they were out of sight they followed procedure exactly, reporting in every two minutes until the very end. Radio reception wasn’t perfect, but the voice that made the reports was like the one the driver expected to hear: east London, working class, a bit breathless from the stairs.’ Brock nodded to the man in the leather coat at his side. ‘Mr Brown’s initial assessment is that he’s probably telling the truth. But it’s likely they had some inside help at Armacorp, and we’ll work on that assumption.’

  ‘And at Silvermeadow?’ someone else asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  One of the Robbery Squad officers put up his hand.

  ‘You’re certain it’s our friend, Brock?’

  ‘I think we can be pretty sure of that.’

  ‘So he’ll be aiming to leave the country again?’

  Brock frowned. ‘I think that may depend on the little girl he was seen with last weekend.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If she was part of a new family he brought into the country with him, it wouldn’t make sense to bring them in just to do a job, would it? Maybe he intends to settle down with them here. Maybe he thinks enough time has passed for us to have forgotten about him.’

  They considered this doubtfully. ‘Risky. Where was he hiding, do we know? Argentina, wasn’t it? Good cover, a family of tourists from Argentina.’

  ‘We believe he had moved on to Canada. We had a report of him there over a year ago, and we suspect he may have entered the UK at the end of November under a Canadian passport in the name of Keith Nolan.’

  The officer drew a sheaf of files and loose papers from his briefcase. ‘We grabbed what we could on our way out, but it sounds as if you’ve got more current info on our friend.’

  Bren brought the newcomers up to date on what they’d discovered of Nolan’s movements, as well as the current whereabouts of North’s relatives and known associates. From this they began to compile a priority list of raids to be co-ordinated for that night.

  When Brock asked for further comment, Kathy, with some reluctance, spoke up. ‘I think I might have seen him this afternoon, about two p.m., outside Cuddles on the upper mall. It was only for a second, and I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t report it. But I’d like to check the centre’s camera tapes.’

  Brock gave her a wry smile. ‘Yes, I was coming to that. You’ll need quite a bit of help. We have to analyse every tape that was running in this place this afternoon. We know the timing of what we’re looking for, but that’s about all. We’re looking for men with black trousers, men of the right build, men who look lik
e our most recent shots of North, little girls like the one he was with last weekend, and anyone on Bren’s list. It’s going to take a big team, and lots of machines. Can you help us, Gavin?’

  An hour later Kathy and half a dozen other officers were seated in front of VDUs in a room at Hornchurch Street, starting to go through the first batch of tapes from Silvermeadow. It was going to be a long night, she guessed, for all of them. Once search warrants were issued the raids would begin, the questioning of known associates, the gathering of evidence. She had told Leon she’d be home by eight at the latest, and they had planned to go out for a meal. She’d tried his mobile number a couple of times, but the line was busy. For all she knew he might have been called in to the hunt too, looking for forensic clues at Silvermeadow.

  The video watchers had plans of the shopping centre marked with the camera zones, and Kathy began with a tape for zone 16, in which Cuddles was located, and covering the early afternoon period. The screen began sequencing through four views of the mall, each held for a few seconds in turn. She identified the view that corresponded with the area outside the soft toy store, and fast forwarded to the time at which she had seen the figure in the mall.

  But he wasn’t there. She found the right time, for in one of the short sequences she saw herself emerge from the shop, and Mrs Rutter waving an arm at her, but by then the man she was after had disappeared off the bottom of the frame, while in the previous clip, ten seconds before, he was still invisible in the crowd.

  As she searched through that and the other tapes, trying to find any signs of North before and after her sighting, and getting annoyed with herself for the slow and inefficient way she was working the machine, and frustrated by the mechanical way in which the cameras cut in and out of scenes regardless of their possible importance, she realised how much easier this would have been with somebody like Speedy at the controls. Without his inquisitive eye to guide it, the whole system was clumsy and arbitrary, as likely to miss a crucial event as capture it. How fortunate for North and his accomplices then that Speedy hadn’t been around. And who knows but that Speedy’s cunning, prying eye might even have recognised someone among them, and zoomed in and followed the suspect, maybe right out to their car, and caught their registration number, and the faces of the others . . .

  But he hadn’t, and without that guiding hand the tapes were frustratingly unhelpful, the external ones completely useless, with only distance shots of acres of rain-battered cars, dazzling headlight flashes, and tiny black figures scurrying through the darkness.

  The removal of Speedy had been very lucky for the robbers in another way too, of course, for it had closed the Vlasich murder case and with it unit 184 and the police presence at Silvermeadow. North would presumably have seen the press reports of Speedy’s death on Friday, but would he have realised its implications for his operation?

  Kathy returned to scanning the tapes, but without much enthusiasm. She found it hard to concentrate in the way that was necessary, as the others were doing, systematically freezing frames and identifying figures to be later enlarged and enhanced and printed out for identification. After a while her mind returned to Speedy.

  Because they had only been aware of the first crime, Kerri’s murder, when Speedy died, they had never really doubted the connection between those two events. But suppose Speedy had been removed in order to clear the way for the second crime, the robbery? Perhaps he had even seen something on his screens to warn him of what was coming, as Sharon had hinted, and had had to be disposed of, and in a way that would make the police assume a connection to Kerri’s murder, rather than forewarn them of the robbery.

  This was fanciful, she told herself, and she was getting tired. There had been ample forensic and other evidence to link Speedy to Kerri’s murder, from her backpack to the ketamine and hair samples—although Leon had seemed concerned at the absence of Kerri’s fingerprints at either Wiff ’s den or Speedy’s house.

  Kathy tried his mobile again. It was switched off. Her phone at home was on the answering machine. She sighed and returned to her task.

  In another office, Brock was sitting down with Bo Seager. Like Harry Jackson, she too had been away from Silvermeadow when the robbery had happened, and had phoned Brock soon after learning of the details, insisting that she come to Hornchurch Street rather than meet at the shopping centre. She was tense, agitated even, and asked if she could smoke a cigarette. When it was alight she continued fiddling with the gold lighter while she asked Brock to describe to her exactly what had happened.

  At the end of it she said flatly, ‘This is terrible.’

  Brock said nothing, watching as she slapped the lighter down on the cigarette packet on the table, then tapped the filter tip of her cigarette up and down on the lighter, her eyes fixed on it without seeing, eyelids blinking rapidly.

  ‘Now we have five dead,’ she said. ‘They’re really going to have my ass.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The board.’ She took in the questioning look on his face. ‘Oh yes. This will be my fault. Nathan Tindall is desperate to have my job. He feeds poison to all the other money men on the board.’

  ‘It’s hard to see how they could blame you for any of this.’

  ‘I get the blame for everything that happens inside those eighty acres, David. That’s my job.’

  She took a deep lungful and then exhaled, speaking through the smoke. ‘They had inside help, did they?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘But you think?’

  ‘I’d rather not say at the moment.’

  She nodded, as if he’d confirmed it. ‘Of course they did. And I guess it could be me, right?’

  ‘Could it?’

  ‘Why not? We’d all think about it for a million or two. I got Harry Jackson out of the way, didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah. I sent him to a security conference that’s on in London at the moment. We agreed months ago that he should go. Really bad timing, so close to Christmas.’

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘At the Barbican. Ironic, isn’t it? He missed his own case study.’

  ‘Is there any other reason I should suspect you, Bo?’ Brock asked, smiling.

  ‘Actually there is.’ She took another deep draw on her cigarette. ‘You see, I’ve seen this done before.’

  The smile vanished from Brock’s face and he leant forward. ‘Go on.’

  ‘In Canada. About two years ago I spent a month in Toronto, as part of a centre management course. I was mainly based downtown, in the Eaton Centre, but while I was there there was a big hold-up at one of the suburban shopping malls, at Yorktown. Most of the big out-of-town North American centres don’t have the service tunnel arrangement we have at Silvermeadow because it’s relatively expensive to build and maintain, but Yorktown was like us, too big for its site, so they put the service bays underneath to save space. One day some bandits got into the service areas and hid out until a security truck arrived and gathered up the cash from all the stores. On the final pick-up they jumped the guards, took their uniforms and calmly climbed into the truck, and the driver drove off with them inside. They hijacked him once they were out in clear country. But they made a mistake.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘They tied up the guards and locked them in a storeroom, but one of them managed to make enough noise to attract help. The cops caught up with the truck before the gang could clean it out, and they nailed them all. This lot didn’t make that mistake.’

  ‘No, they made very sure that couldn’t happen. Interesting. And the Canadian gang had inside help?’

  ‘The security man at the service road entrance checkpoint. He’d got bored with his job, and had passed the time working out how it could be done. He mentioned it to his brother-in-law, who knew some bad people. But for a time it looked as if someone in the centre management office had been involved, maybe even the centre manager himself. The police gave him a tough going over, and afte
rwards the centre owners got rid of him anyway, just in case.’

  ‘I see.’ Brock rubbed a hand through his beard thoughtfully. The connection with Toronto corresponded chillingly well with what they suspected of North’s movements. It sounded as if he hadn’t been idle while he’d been away.

  ‘If our case did follow your Canadian model, who would you nominate as the insider?’ he asked. ‘Assuming it isn’t you.’

  She shrugged. ‘Speedy? Who else?’

  ‘Yes. Well, with or without your help, that place of yours seems to have become a magnet for killers, Bo.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She stubbed the cigarette out angrily. ‘It’s a nightmare, Brock. A dream that’s turned sick. I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

  It was after midnight when Kathy got home. There were the remains of a take-away Chinese meal on the table, an empty bottle of Chilean red beside it, and Leon asleep on the sofa. He opened his eyes and watched her for a moment as she stood at the table scavenging the remains of the beanshoots and noodles.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’ She shot him a smile as she lifted the fork to her mouth. ‘Sorry about the meal,’ she mumbled, mouth full.

  ‘Haven’t you eaten?’

  ‘Not much. You know how it is.’

  ‘Serious, is it?’ He yawned and slid a hand across his hair.

  ‘Ten million quid. Two dead.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what they said on the news.’

  ‘Then you know about as much as me,’ she said, and turned back to scrape at the foil container.

  ‘And tomorrow?’ he asked.

  She shrugged, came over and slumped down beside him. ‘I’ll have to go back. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘That’s okay. I understand.’ He stroked her brow.

  ‘Tuesday evening. I’ll go with you to Liverpool.’

  His fingers hesitated in their caress through her hair. ‘You sure? Can they spare you?’

  ‘Oh yes. This is a manhunt now. I’ll check with Brock, but I’m sure it’ll be okay.’

  ‘I could leave it till after Christmas.’