Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  “There,” she said, and pointed. There was a grey post by the side of the road, propped up by narrow bits of wood that looked far too flimsy to put up any real resistance to the wind. There was something black on top of the post, and for a moment I thought it was a bird perched there, maybe one of those falcons or kestrels or whatever they were that someone had decided were so important.

  “The bird-watchers’ camera,” she said. “So he must have gone past here. Forty minutes, the Land Rover took. There and back, but we don’t know how long they were in the barn. We’ll keep going for a bit.”

  We went past another half dozen tracks before she finally picked one, but after half a mile it bent round the wrong way and the only thing leading off it was so wet and rutted there was no way Tarney would have got his Peugeot down it. Turning was impossible, so Malhotra just reversed all the way back to the so-called road, with the rain now heavy and the clouds low enough to turn afternoon into evening before its time.

  The next track petered out after a couple of hundred yards. The one after that opened out into something so wide and flat the locals probably called it the motorway, but that ended in a farmhouse with nothing beyond it and nowhere near Tarney’s elusive barn.

  I was starting to think he’d played me, and wondering whether I might give Mia Arazzi a little information after all, because if I couldn’t get anything useful out of the bastard I had no qualms about making him suffer. The next track took us uphill, then turned sharply down again and back to the road, only we couldn’t be sure precisely where or whether we’d missed any other tracks in between, so we had to drive all the way back along the track again, just in case.

  Malhotra was glancing at the clock in the dashboard. The grey was thickening into something closer to dark, and in the dark I didn’t think we’d be able to achieve anything at all. It was probably time to head back to Manchester. We could come back in the morning, find the place then.

  Or rather, Malhotra and Gaddesdon could. If Gaddesdon hadn’t been kicked off the case himself. Unless I came up with something that justified what I’d done to Serena, I’d be heading back to London and off the Carson case for good.

  My phone rang. I looked down and recognised Gaddesdon’s number. I hadn’t expected a signal this far out of town. I picked up.

  “Hello Sam.”

  He sounded fine. He sounded positively cheery. And he was calling me Sam, now, which I’d asked him to do repeatedly, to no avail.

  “What’s up?”

  “Serena’s furious. She knows it was you. I just said there must have been some kind of mix-up and Roarkes backed me up, but she’s not stupid.”

  That didn’t make sense.

  “Why did Roarkes back you up?”

  “Because he’s still pissed off she wouldn’t let him in to see Tarney. Think he’s quite pleased you got one over on her. He’s wondering where the hell you are, though.”

  I laughed. No doubt he was spitting teeth over the stunt I’d pulled, but maybe Roarkes was on my side after all. I doubted he could protect me for long, but at least I wasn’t going to be getting the treatment from him.

  “Got anything juicy then?” he asked cheerfully

  I hesitated. We didn’t have anything at all, yet, and what we might have wasn’t exactly juicy.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I’ve got something for you though,” he began, and embarked on a long and not particularly funny account of Abigail Starke, the driver of the bottle-green Jaguar, calling the station, getting put through to Gaddesdon (poor woman, I thought) and begging him to be discreet. All those trips down the M6 had ended in a hotel near Warrington, where she’d been meeting a gentleman for activities entirely unrelated to the import and distribution of electronic components, the core business of Starke Products, Limited.

  “Starke naked,” giggled Gaddesdon, and even though he wasn’t with me I felt like slapping him. Abigail Starke’s husband didn’t know a thing. She very much hoped he never would.

  I told him I’d call him back later, and said goodbye. I realised immediately that I’d forgotten to thank him, because whatever he’d said on the phone to Serena, it had worked. He might be a child in the body of – well, a large child, really – but he’d done me a favour, and he’d done it well. I hoped I’d get the chance to thank him in person.

  “Shall we call it a day, sir?” asked Malhotra. While I’d been talking to Gaddesdon she’d tried and abandoned yet another nasty little track.

  “Yeah,” I said. “OK.”

  She manoeuvred the car carefully around so we were pointing the right way, and after a couple of minutes the post with the camera came back into view. Half a dozen yards before the post there was another track leading off the road. We hadn’t noticed it on the way up, it had been obscured by the contours of the hill, and unless you knew it was there you wouldn’t see it until you were driving back the other way.

  Malhotra stopped the car.

  “Might as well,” she said. It was a question. I nodded.

  We drove on for five minutes, five slow and painful minutes, and then an even smaller track appeared on the left. Malhotra stopped again, picked up the phone, smiled and passed it to me.

  There was a flashing blue circle in the middle of the screen. That was us. Over to the top-right were the words White Hill. And not far from the blue circle – about half a mile, the map indicated – was the flag Tarney had put down.

  We were there ten minutes later. The barn wasn’t just old, it was derelict, the walls coming down, the wooden door reduced to four rotting planks, the roof one good storm away from collapsing entirely. It was dark inside, but Malhotra had a flashlight, and I knew right away this was the place Tarney had been talking about. The room was empty. It was a single room, not even a room, really, just a giant blank interior with wooden boards on the floor and nothing in it at all.

  Except right in the middle, alone and looking like it owned the place, sat a heavy oak table.

  The table was empty. Nothing on it. No meetings or drops planned, by the look of it. Malhotra pushed the light around, all the corners and edges and bits that had been blown in by the wind, but that was all there was. One empty table. Tarney had been telling the truth, I assumed, although I couldn’t even be sure about that. But unless he had some better information, I’d just blown the chance to work the biggest case of my career on a lead that had taken me precisely nowhere. I caught a glimpse of myself in a suit and tie, sitting behind a desk in a tall glass building emblazoned with the logo of Atom Industries, and shuddered.

  We made our way silently back out. There was no need to talk, nothing to talk about. As I approached the doorway I tripped in the darkness and put my hand out just in time to prevent yet another bloody nose. Malhotra turned and shone the light on me.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. I could have let loose at her, for being selfish with the light, not letting me see where I was going, but I knew I’d just be taking everything else out on someone who wasn’t to blame. That hadn’t been a problem for me lately, but this time I held myself back.

  I climbed back to my feet and I’d reached the door when it suddenly hit me.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Pass me the torch.”

  I took it from her and shone it back the way I’d just walked. The wind had dropped and I could see the dust still rising where I’d hit the floor. I walked over, pointing the torch down.

  “What is it, sir?”

  “I tripped over. But there’s nothing here. So what the hell did I trip over?”

  She was beside me a moment later, breathing fast with excitement. The torch was picking out pebbles, wood shavings, a paper cup. Nothing big enough to have made me fall. A couple of little sticks. Another cup. A ring of rope, nailed into the floor.

  That was it. That had to be it. I walked over, carefully, as if it were a dangerous animal I didn’t want to disturb. I passed the torch back
to Malhotra, bent down and picked up the rope.

  A square of wooden floor came up with it. I heard someone gasp, and realised it was me. Malhotra shone the light into the gap where the floor had been.

  It was bigger than the opening had suggested, wide enough to squeeze in a couple of people, and it went down far enough to stack them two deep. Four bodies. There were no bodies in there, no sign there ever had been, I didn’t know why I was thinking about space in terms of bodies, but I couldn’t help it.

  There were a couple of empty polythene bags and a briefcase, unlocked and also empty. And in one corner, dark and small and looking like the fossilised remains of some ancient, unknowable creature, was a mass of metal and plastic, all shiny surfaces, dark recesses, lumps and wires.

  I heard another gasp. This time it wasn’t me. Malhotra reached in and pulled it out, this thing, whatever it was, held it up, breathed in slowly like she was savouring a fine wine.

  “Well, staple my tongue to the floor,” she said. I hadn’t heard that one before. I waited.

  “Know what this is, sir?” she asked.

  I shook my head, realised she couldn’t see me, said “No.”

  She shone the torch on it, the thing, turned it around, passed it to me. It was cold and surprisingly heavy. It seemed vaguely familiar.

  “It’s a few years old, by the look of it. It’s been kicked about a bit, too, but I don’t think it’s too smashed up.”

  She paused.

  “It’s a hard drive, sir.”

  21: The Killings

  THE WAY MALHOTRA handled the track and the so-called road on the way back, in what was now quite definitely the dark, you’d have thought there was someone after us, and I couldn’t help glancing back from time to time to check there wasn’t. I couldn’t blame her. She was excited. She wasn’t the only one. Back came the lights. Back came the beats. If I needed someone to get me somewhere fast she’d be the person I’d pick to drive, but I’d ask for a different choice of music. I did ask for a different choice of music. She told me I could pick the tunes when I was driving.

  “Can I drive, then?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and turned the music up.

  I turned it back down and called Roarkes as soon as we were on a more civilised surface. As I dialled I remembered how I still wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted out of this investigation, but I couldn’t keep something like this from him. Malhotra would tell him if I didn’t. It wasn’t far off six o’clock now, and there was a chance Roarkes would have left for the day already, but I figured this was important enough to bring him back in.

  “Williams,” he said. The tone of voice was enough to remind me I wasn’t in his good books, even if he had rather enjoyed the stunt I’d pulled on Serena. Plus the fact that he was calling me Williams.

  “Hello, Roarkes. Got something for you.”

  “Yes, Williams. You’ve got an angry defence lawyer who wants you run out of Manchester, possibly out of England, and you’ve got a detective inspector who doesn’t really see why he should get in her way. And where the hell have you been, anyway?”

  He might have asked me a question, but he didn’t stop to let me answer it. On he went. I could tell he was annoyed, but I could also tell annoyed was as far as it went. He wasn’t going to kick me off the case, and if Serena Hawkes tried to get me kicked off, he wasn’t going to make life easy for her. I let him talk for another thirty seconds, and then I hit him with it.

  “I’ve got a hard drive,” I said.

  That shut him up.

  The Land Rover might have unlocked Folgate’s resources; it took the hard drive for them to open the door and invite us in for tea. There was an IT suite in the station’s basement, and it was a lot smarter than Roarkes’ office and a hell of a lot bigger than the tiny room he’d shoved me in with Gaddesdon and Malhotra. It was full of glass and computers and extraordinarily young men and women with pencils behind their ears. It reminded me of those underground research facilities you see in the movies, where top-secret scientists conduct experiments on aliens who are never quite as dead as they look.

  This time the corpse was a hard drive, and I wasn’t the only one praying it was alive.

  It was alive. All that clicking of teeth and shaking of heads when Malhotra handed it over wasn’t the sign of a patient too far gone, just contempt for our technical incompetence in ever thinking it dead. Five minutes fiddling around with some wires brought a thumbs up from the senior techie, and five minutes after that we had a USB stick full of video files neatly laid out for us to pick over.

  We watched it back in Roarkes’ office, me, Gaddesdon, Malhotra, Roarkes. He’d called Serena, because whatever bad blood there was between them this was too important to leave her out, but she hadn’t answered. He left a message instead.

  The files were neatly labelled, time, date and location. There were half a dozen cameras but only two pointing at the road. We’d been told about just one of them, but it was starting to become apparent that we hadn’t been told the whole truth by a whole lot of people. Maybe the hard drive had been stolen, like the farmer said. But more likely he’d just been frightened into handing it over.

  Malhotra put herself in charge of the computer, and it took her a few minutes to find the right files and work out how to align them side by side displaying the same time and date. Just a few minutes, but we begrudged every second, Gaddesdon hopping from one foot to another like he needed a piss, Roarkes sighing theatrically, me pacing up and down as if I were trying to remember something vital.

  “Got it,” she said, and we all stopped what we were doing and gathered round the tiny screen. The footage had been captured by a pair of modern, high-definition cameras, placed perfectly so as to cover as much of the road as they could without losing quality, so if the whole thing had been staged by a film director the view couldn’t have been much better. The road was empty as the file opened, but there was a time stamp on the screen, and we knew exactly when the call from Betterson’s phone had been made and almost exactly when Carson had been stopped. A few seconds of two hundred times normal speed, and we were there.

  “Are you sure you want to see this?” asked Roarkes, and I was about to ask him why the hell not when I realised he wasn’t talking to me. I turned to Gaddesdon, whose friend was about to be shot dead on the screen in front of us. He gave a short, jerky nod, silent, his usually ruddy cheeks the white of a November sky. Malhotra hit play.

  The blue Fiesta comes into view first, slowing already, and pulling into a lay-by just in shot. A moment later the reason it’s stopped becomes clear, as Fiona Milton’s patrol car stops in the other lay-by on the other side of the road, a little further back.

  Milton and Ahmet get out of their car. Carson stays in his.

  Ahmet stays with the patrol car. Milton approaches. Carson still hasn’t got out.

  “I don’t get it,” said Roarkes. Malhotra paused the recording.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Carson has to get out of the car. He has to get round the back. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense, the way they were shot, the way Milton was shot.”

  I was thinking the same thing. These people weren’t following the script, weren’t doing what their Lego counterparts had promised. Carson had to get round the back, maybe check the boot, maybe Milton had just asked him to. Maybe all that was about to happen. It was beyond grotesque, I suddenly realised, what we were doing, watching these people, knowing they were about to die.

  “Sod it. Start the tape, Malhotra,” said Roarkes. “Let them get shot their own way.”

  I grimaced and glanced at Gaddesdon, but he didn’t seem to register the words.

  A vehicle comes into view behind the patrol car. It’s a little Mazda. Green. The woman from Bolton. It slows as it sees the flashing lights, stops. Ahmet has turned around to face her, walks over, ducks down to the driver’s window, gestures and speaks. A moment later the Mazda reverses, stops, starts again, slowly and jerkily conducts
an eight-point turn to face the other way and drive off.

  Milton is still approaching the Fiesta. She’s not in any hurry. Carson still hasn’t got out, but his window’s down and you can just see the side of his head as he nods and appears to say something to the approaching police officer. Milton is now standing beside the Fiesta, talking through the open window. For someone who’s investigating a report of a weapon, she seems remarkably cool, but she’s not stupid. Still looking at the car, she slowly backs away as the door begins to open.

  “Here it comes,” said Roarkes, and I heard Malhotra sigh. I wasn’t the only one getting annoyed by the running commentary.

  Naz Ahmet has been watching events unfold from beside the patrol car, one hand still inside through the open window. I’m guessing that hand is on the radio. Now he retrieves his hand and steps away. Another vehicle is approaching. It’s a battered 4WD, so old I can’t even tell what make it is, and it’s carrying a trailer stuffed so full of sheep we can see the wool edging out through the gaps. Ahmet puts his hand out, the car stops, Ahmet walks over to explain. Despite having a trailer attached, the farmer manages to turn around in half the number of moves it took the woman from Bolton. As he drives away, Carson emerges from the Fiesta, his hands in clear view. In a moment, he’s going to move to the back of the car to get the gun, or she’s going to tell him to open the boot, and we’ll finally get to see how it happened.

  Carson puts his arms up in the air, and Milton approaches and frisks him, quickly and efficiently. She reaches into the car and takes the keys from the ignition, and then leans further in. I’m guessing she’s checking the glove compartment. She emerges a moment later, turns and says something to Ahmet, who nods, and then to Carson, who walks past her to open the rear driver’s side door.

  And then another car approaches.

  “Who the fuck is this?” asked Roarkes, which was pointless, because as he was well aware, none of us had the faintest idea. And he shouldn’t really have been surprised to see it.