Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  I wandered down to the canteen and called Claire, to kill some time, if nothing else, and she sympathised in an emotionless, heard-it-a-thousand-times sort of way. I’d been droning on for seven minutes solid about the case and my nose and arm before I realised she wasn’t really responding, and it was another minute before I realised why.

  “So, more importantly, how are you getting on with Jonas Wolf?” I asked, with a big emphasis on that “So”, as if that had been the reason for the call in the first place. It didn’t work.

  “Oh, finally remembered something that isn’t about Thomas bloody Carson, have you?”

  There was a pause, but I wasn’t stupid enough to jump in and defend myself. I knew Claire’s pauses by now. She wasn’t finished with me yet.

  “What with that photographic memory of yours, I’m surprised you forget anything at all. But then, you only remember the important things, don’t you?”

  Not long after we’d moved in together I’d explained, by way of apology, how I could recite minute details of cases I’d worked more than a decade back, but had forgotten every single item she’d asked me to pick up from the supermarket that afternoon. It was one of many things I wished I’d never said.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. There was no defence. There wasn’t much chance of mitigation, either. I’m sorry was the best I had. She ignored me.

  “Wolf’s going very well, thanks for asking. I’ve tied him to Rosa’s import,” – I shuddered, briefly, at that, the idea of a human being imported, but that was what these girls had been, commodities, and disposable ones at that – “and I’m building a connection with the guy who got convicted for Xenia.”

  “Well done,” I said. “That’s brilliant.”

  I should have been impressed. I was impressed. I just wasn’t very good at putting that into my voice, and Claire wasn’t particularly disposed to find it there.

  “Look,” she replied, with a sigh that made me think for a moment that we were turning into Roarkes, all of us, old and weary and permanently dissatisfied. “Why don’t you just run along and crack your case, and let me know when you’ve finished and you’re ready to have a proper conversation, OK?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, again, and got a hmmph in return, a grunted acknowledgement that wasn’t as good as a friendly goodbye but was a lot better than nothing. At least she hadn’t told me to fuck off this time.

  I toyed with the idea of calling Serena, but what did I have to say to her? Maybe I could ask her to get me in with Tarney. Sit in front of another silent face and restrain myself from punching it until it finally had something to say. Shout “I know about the Corporation!” a few times, see if that did anything. It probably wouldn’t. But it was better than sitting there drinking police station coffee and exploring the pointless twists and turns of my own mind. I’d picked up the phone and was scrolling through it for Serena’s number when Malhotra burst into the canteen and stopped in front of me panting like a fat man on a big hill.

  “What?” I said, after thirty seconds, because she still hadn’t caught her breath. These Manchester CID weren’t the fittest bunch I’d come across. She gasped a moment longer and finally spoke.

  “We’ve found it, sir.”

  “Found what?”

  “The car.”

  Another dead end had just opened up a little.

  19: Across the Line

  SHE HADNT FOUND the car itself, or at least, not its current position. But she knew where it had been, and that was something.

  The answer lay in ANPR, the national automatic number plate recognition system. The plates had already been fed into the database, and nothing had turned up except Abigail Starke’s bottle-green Jaguar shooting up and down the M6 half a dozen times a month. ANPR data was stored for two years, and there were plenty of cameras, including nine between Burnley and Liverpool, which led to a couple of reasonable conclusions: Betterson hadn’t been driven to Liverpool in the Land Rover Defender, and the plates had been cloned recently enough that they weren’t likely to show up anywhere at all.

  Until they did.

  The database was divided into motorway, urban, high-intensity and “other” sections. High-intensity meant ports, airports, power stations, sensitive spots that needed monitoring. “Other” was for places that didn’t need ANPR in them at all, but some local police officer or politician with too much power and too little brain had decided they did. “Other” was always the last place to be searched, if anyone bothered searching it at all. If your target didn’t show up in urban, motorway or H-I, it wasn’t likely to show up outside the 7-11 on the village high street.

  But Malhotra was both persistent and rigorous and she wasn’t giving up on the Land Rover until she’d exhausted all possibilities. Which is why she’d asked for access to the “other” data, been granted it, reluctantly, and trawled through it herself until she got a hit even she hadn’t been expecting.

  Right up in a remote part of the Forest of Bowland that no one ever visited, even by Bowland standards, there were some birds. White Hill, the place was called. Every year the birds came back to their nests in this cold, grey bit of England and every year their numbers got fewer and fewer until, as Malhotra informed me, there were only three nesting pairs in the country and all three of them nesting in that same spot.

  The local farmers hated the birds, because they blamed them for attacking livestock. The local thieves loved them, because their eggs sold for a fortune on a black market populated solely by rich lunatics. The upshot was that these six birds lived their lives under constant threat of being shot or poisoned or having their eggs stolen, and they weren’t smart enough to just move somewhere else.

  When that kind of thing happens in city estates, to actual humans, when there’s a family getting harassed and threatened and spat at and beaten and occasionally stabbed or shot or just burnt to death, usually by my clients, they can complain as much as they like, nothing ever gets done. But if it’s three pairs of nesting birds in some protected site an hour from the nearest pub, everyone gets indignant and there’s CCTV and regular sweeps in the 4WD and occasionally even a helicopter. And following a particularly heinous spate of egg-snatching, someone had decided to link the CCTV on the road nearest the nests to the ANPR system, and got about as much joy out of it as I’d got out of being punched in the face. In the six weeks since the link had been installed, precisely zero birds had been assaulted. But the camera still ran and the data still got sent and the matches still got made. And around the same time as Thomas Carson was getting himself arrested, a dark blue Land Rover Defender with the registration number PK11 VAX was driving through this particular spot on its shitty little single-track road, and back again forty minutes later.

  I went over the ANPR stills three times with Malhotra. There was no doubt at all. Up the hill and down again, the Grand Old Duke of York in a Land Rover, and when I asked her what was there, apart from some rare nesting birds, all she could tell me was there were some farms and some barns and nothing anyone could possibly be interested in. I doubted that. The people who’d threatened Betterson, the people who, I was starting to think, had almost certainly been involved in the deaths of Ahmet and Milton, wouldn’t have driven all that way to look at a bird.

  “Off we go,” I said, and Malhotra looked at me like I’d just suggested we strip off and make love on the canteen floor.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think you realise what it’s like up there, sir,” she said, and I smiled and shook my head.

  “You can tell me while we’re driving.”

  “No,” she said. “We need to think about this first.”

  I couldn’t imagine what there was to think about. We were going to stop at every building within a mile or so of the camera until we found what we were looking for. Neither of us actually knew what it was we were looking for, but I figured we’d know it when we found it.

  She waited till I’d finished, shook her head at me, and laughed.

/>   It turned out I really didn’t realise what it was like up there. In a mile or so there might be a barn, there might be twenty, there might be another half-a-dozen ruined outhouses that didn’t figure on a map and never had. But a mile wasn’t what we were looking at. Google might tell me there was just the one road up there, but Google didn’t know about all the side tracks and farm tracks and fords and paths that your average family car could probably handle without much difficulty. A Land Rover Defender could have gone anywhere. Our potential search area was half the size of London, and it would take a dedicated team of a dozen officers up to a week to search it properly. Malhotra and I driving up there to take a look would be like hunting for a sober Scotsman on Burns Night.

  “What else can we do?” I asked. For a moment we’d had a lead, a proper lead, and I’d been the one that had found it. Already that lead was starting to look like all the others. I couldn’t see Roarkes getting a dozen officers, or lending them to me if he did, and I had the feeling a week was too long anyway. Malhotra frowned.

  “We could watch the CCTV?” she said, hopefully. I remembered the way she’d raced in, eyes gleaming, close to bursting with excitement. Now she probably felt as shit as I did, but at least she’d come up with a suggestion. It was better than nothing.

  Other than the stills with the number plates on them, the ANPR database didn’t hold any useful footage, but the Bowland feed was uploaded daily to an online site monitored by lonely bird-watchers with too much time on their hands. So now I was sitting with Malhotra in the little room Roarkes had given us, perched uncomfortably on a chair designed for one large person, or two tiny ones, watching forty minutes of CCTV footage in real time in case we missed something.

  We hadn’t missed a thing, because apart from the Land Rover coming up the hill and down it forty minutes later, not a thing had happened. We couldn’t see enough of the Land Rover to tell who was driving it or how many people were in it. All we had were the car and the general location.

  “Let’s widen it out a little,” said Malhotra, and I looked at her in amazement.

  “You can do that? You can search different places?”

  She shook her head at me, slowly, the way you shake your head at an adult struggling with a child’s toy.

  “No, sir. It’s not magic. I mean widen out the time frame. Search half an hour before, maybe, half an hour after.”

  “Oh.”

  We watched the half-hour from before the Land Rover had driven past, in real time, again, and saw nothing at all. By the time it came to looking at the half-hour after we were both bored and convinced we were wasting our time, but we did it anyway, at four times normal speed.

  After two minutes – eight minutes of real time – we hit pay-dirt. A car sped by, too fast to see clearly.

  Neither of us spoke. There were farms and homes out there, after all, not many of them, but enough to account for the occasional car driving past. Malhotra reached forward, adjusted the speed, turned back the clock. We waited. After thirty seconds a car entered the frame, moving slowly, pausing to handle potholes or dead rabbits or whatever the hell they put on their roads up there. Malhotra had grabbed a pen and paper to make a note of the licence plate, but there was no need.

  “I know that car,” she said, after a moment.

  I nodded. I knew that car too. I’d followed that same battered green Peugeot through half of Manchester, lost it, found it again just in time for its owner to put his fist through my face.

  It was time I had a conversation with Russell Tarney.

  Serena wasn’t in a cooperative mood. Or, as she put it, she wanted to help as much as she could, but she didn’t have the authority to just let people in and out of a police station whenever they wanted.

  “It’s all we’ve got, Serena,” I said, and she sighed and told me to meet her at Chetwood in an hour’s time and she’d do what she could. I didn’t mention the ANPR. I thought it would be a nice surprise.

  Tarney stared at me when I walked in. He was sitting behind a table with Serena next to him, his lawyer, technically, although the way she told it they’d hardly exchanged a word. I ignored the stare and sat down opposite him, where the police usually sat, only there weren’t any police today because they’d got bored of being stared at by a silent Tarney.

  He wasn’t silent this time, though. He was laughing. He laughed at my face, for a moment, then stopped and stared again.

  “I didn’t do that,” he said. If nothing else, he was a good judge of facial injury.

  “You started it,” I replied. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’m going home in a couple of hours, Williams. I don’t have to say a thing to you.”

  I looked at Serena and she nodded. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. You can’t lock people up indefinitely for punching someone in the face. Even if that someone’s me.

  “Tell me about the Corporation,” I said, and he didn’t so much as flinch. “Come on,” I pressed. “Tell me about Carson, then. We know he’s not who he says he is. We know he’s Francis Grissom.”

  Tarney shrugged. “Seems you know more than I do,” he said. “Any idea why he killed those officers then, Williams?”

  “Where did you get the money, Tarney?”

  “Dogs,” he said, and grinned at me. I turned to Serena. She nodded again.

  “Sergeant Tarney insists that the money found in his possession at the time of his arrest was his winnings from a greyhound meeting the previous night.”

  “Was there a meeting?” I asked, and she nodded again. I paused for a moment, and thought about what she’d just said. Sergeant Tarney insists. At the time of his arrest. Stiff. Formal. Not the Serena Hawkes I’d been getting to know. She was in a difficult position, I realised. She wanted to break Tarney as much as I did, but she was still supposed to be his lawyer, and that meant she had to protect him from bastards like me. If I pushed things too far, she’d have to stop me.

  Serena Hawkes was getting in the way, I realised. She didn’t want to be in the way, but she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  I got to my feet and walked out of the room. She followed me into the corridor.

  “I’m sorry,” she began, but I cut her off.

  “Don’t be. I wouldn’t want to be where you are. Haven’t got much room to move, have you?”

  “No,” she said, and smiled at me, and it occurred to me that there might be a way round this after all. For a moment I felt a little guilty, but only a moment. It had to be done. I excused myself to visit the bathroom.

  I’d been back in the room with Serena and the still-grinning Tarney for less than a minute when her phone rang. She spoke quietly, for thirty seconds or so, nodded, looked concerned. Tarney didn’t stop grinning at me. I tried not to care.

  “Got to go,” said Serena when she’d finished the call. “That was Detective Gaddesdon, from Folgate.”

  “Yeah, I know the guy,” I said, sympathetically.

  “Says Roarkes needs to see me. Urgently.” She’d already stood and put on her jacket.

  “Any idea why?”

  “Gaddesdon didn’t know.”

  “No surprise there,” I said. Again, a twinge of guilt. All for the greater good. I got up to leave with her and she gestured for me to sit back down, just as I’d hoped she would.

  “No. He said just me.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You might as well stay here. Talk to Tarney. I doubt he’ll tell you anything, but you never know.”

  The grin on Tarney’s face didn’t shift a millimetre. It was like he couldn’t even hear us talking about him.

  “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “Just don’t beat up my client,” she said, and laughed. I might have imagined it, but I thought Tarney’s grin had just got a little wider.

  Tarney was still grinning. Serena was right not to worry. I had more chance of winning a Nobel Prize than intimidating her client. I’d be
nt the rules just to get in alongside Serena. Staying behind with Tarney was like snapping them in half and setting fire to the stumps. I had to work fast.

  “Come on, Russell,” I began. “It’s just you and me now.”

  “And the tape,” he said.

  The tape wasn’t running. I held up the machine to show him.

  “Out in a couple of hours, right?” I asked. He grinned again.

  “And all that time in a cell without saying a word to a soul. Your friends will be delighted.”

  “If I knew what you were talking about, maybe I’d agree,” he replied. I carried on, as if I hadn’t heard him. He was starting to piss me off.

  “And if you had told us a little, well, I’d imagine they’d be pretty angry, wouldn’t they?”

  The grin didn’t shift.

  “Like, if you’d told us about Grissom and the Corporation? I mean, how else would we know about that?”

  He leaned forward and put his head in one hand, the way you do when you’re having to explain something very simple to someone very stupid.

  “Listen, Williams, let’s get this straight. I’ve never heard of this Grissom. I’ve heard of the Corporation, because I’ve been a cop round here for years, and you hear things. You could have picked that up anywhere, Williams. No one’s going to believe it was from me.”

  He sat back again and took his hand away from his head. He was smiling. He was right, too, and time was running out. I had twenty minutes, if I was lucky, before Serena got to Folgate and realised I’d set her up. She’d be on the phone straight away, and I’d be out of Chetwood so fast they’d be testing me for performance-enhancing drugs. Serena wouldn’t trust me again, not after this, and neither would Roarkes, and Gaddesdon would be in trouble himself and not particularly inclined to talk to me. Malhotra was waiting outside in her own car and if she knew what I’d just done she wouldn’t be very happy, either. If Tarney had nothing to give me, I’d just pissed off a lot of people for very little payoff.