Murder Without Reason (DCI Cook Thriller Series Book 5)

by Phillip Strang

  ***

  Rajko Djuric was not a good man. An encampment outside Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, was not a place to call home and, with parents who survived by petty and sometimes major crime, he had no option but to follow the family business. Begging in winter with barely any warm clothes and barefooted was hardly the upbringing for a child from the age of three, but the money was better if he was shivering, hungry and close to death. Summers were better and, by the age of six, he could pickpocket better than anyone. Schooling was haphazard and infrequent, but somehow, he managed to learn how to read and write. At the age of thirty-eight, with a wife he cared little for, and eight children – the more the better for begging and stealing – he travelled to England.

  With a relaxation of the immigration laws stating that Bulgaria was now part of the European Community, it was enough to convince him that the long and costly trip would be worth the effort. He had heard the stories of government benefits, free housing, free medical treatment and schooling and he wanted it all. A gypsy in Bulgaria was no more than a person of contempt, no more than a social leper.

  It was a day in April when his family made the crossing from France, armed with a passport and a ticket ‒ there was no need for a shipping container or a people smuggler. He was legal, and even the customs inspector at Immigration had been civil to his wife. At last the Promised Land, he would have thought, had he been religious.

  Within three months he was on benefits, and within four he had a house with four bedrooms, fully furnished with a bed for each child and a television, on a housing estate not more than twenty minutes from the centre of London. The decent job eluded him. Besides, wasn’t crime an honourable pursuit if you were looking after a family? In the three months, while waiting for benefits, he had struck a deal with a Muslim, who supplied him with heroin, which he sold on from a corner in East London. There were always prostitutes, often Romanian and Bulgarian, desperate for a fix and they’d pay plenty, even give him sex in exchange, but mainly it was money he wanted. Rajko Djuric knew good heroin, and Shafi supplied a good quality.

  ***

  The first couple of years in England had not always been easy for the gypsy, but by the third life was looking better. His children had not needed to beg, and all were enrolled in school, a luxury he had never been able to pursue satisfactorily. The two eldest looked as though they were going to pass their exams and be admitted to a grammar school. Rajko Djuric could not be more content. He even looked forward to retiring from the drug trade, maybe become a used car dealer, go legit, but he needed a few more pounds, a couple of more trades, and then he’d be home and hosed.

  ‘Shafi, two more trades and I’m going legit,’ he said.

  ‘Good for you.’ Shafi had heard it all before. Everyone wanted to be on the right side of the law, but he had seen precious few achieve their goal.

  ‘I’m serious, life is good here. The government pays for my house. Even the kids are in school. I can afford to give up crime, do something else.’

  ‘I wish you well then,’ Shafi said, although it was clear that Rajko Djuric and Shafi did not like each other. A good business relationship, but that was all. They had nothing in common, only a desire to make money the best way they could.

  ‘Give me some of your finest,’ Djuric said.

  ‘There’s a new shipment in today. It came out of Northern Afghanistan, quality stamped.’

  ‘Normal price, is that okay?’ Djuric asked.

  ‘For you, since you’re going legit. For anyone else, it’s a twenty per cent premium.’

  ‘I appreciate that.’ The gypsy knew that the Pakistani had lied. There was no way he would have given him a discount for old times’ sake. It was just the typical bartering talk of the street. Drug dealers, especially Shafi, were not known for their generosity.

  ***

  The gypsy knew he had good quality. He could tell by the look of it, and the stamp on the original packaging that Shafi had shown him made it clear that this was the finest available. He may have paid the normal price, but today, because he was leaving the business, he would ask for some extra money. Usually, he would sell it for fifty pounds a gramme, but this time, sixty seemed a fair price.

  ‘It’s the best. Guaranteed quality, only sixty pounds a gramme,’ Rajko Djuric said to the Ukrainian girl, who had just started work in the brothel on the second floor above a liquor outlet.

  ‘I can only afford forty-five,’ she said. ‘Can’t we make a deal? Business has been slow.’

  ‘You can give me a blow job while you’re shooting up. Do we have a deal?’ He was feeling in need of a woman, and his wife was getting old and lumpy, while the girl in front of him was easy on the eye.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ she said.

  The room where she practised her trade was decorated with fairy lights, the windows covered with a dark material, and a bed in one corner that was neither large nor luxurious. It was functional, fit for the purpose of satisfying her customers, and generating enough money for her drug habit and sometimes paying for a decent feed. She neither wanted her customers to be too comfortable nor to feel that overstaying their welcome was acceptable. It was a quick massage, a screw or a blowjob and out the door. Rajko Djuric took the blowjob option.

  As she commenced to honour her side of the agreement, it became apparent even to the excited gypsy that the girl on her knees in front of him was overdosing. The quantity she had injected had not been excessive, and the promised blow job was not happening. Djuric quickly left, only stopping long enough to inform the madam of the establishment – a fat, ugly cow of a woman with a foul mouth who swore profusely, a bottle of whisky permanently held upright close to her mouth – that she’d better phone the hospital and quick. He had no time to deal with it. He had to discuss the matter with his supplier.

  ‘Hey, you sold me some bad stuff?’ Djuric angrily confronted Shafi as they both stood on the corner of the street, close to where they usually conducted business. It was due to his anger that he failed to notice the police car parked across the road.

  ‘Here’s not the place to discuss it,’ Shafi said.

  ‘Don’t try to get out of it. The heroin was bad, the girl OD’d. It’s your bad product. Now I’m going to have her pimp after me.’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t used to it?’

  ‘She was used to it. Her arm looked like a pin cushion.’

  ‘I guaranteed it. You saw the quality stamp.’ Shafi was convinced that the product he had sold was good quality.

  ‘What I saw and what I received are two different things. I’ve got to keep my head low, at least until she’s out of the hospital and flat on her back again. You need to pay me for my inconvenience.’

  ‘No way. You paid a decent price for a quality product. I don’t owe you anything.’ Shafi pushed hard against the gypsy with the flat of his hand.

  The two police officers, idly sitting in their patrol car eating hamburgers, sat up alert, and focussed on the actions across the road. Djuric hit Shafi hard, but he was a big man, more than a match for the small Bulgarian. Tempers flared, both were out of control. The gypsy pulled a knife and threatened to stab the Pakistani. Shafi grabbed the knife by the hilt and aimed to throw it away. Suddenly, the gypsy lunged to the right and received the blade clean in the chest.

  From the other side of the road, it looked as if it had been intentional and no amount of protestation from Shafi convinced the police otherwise. They were glad one drug dealer was dead and another guilty of his murder. It had been a good result for the police officers. For Mohammad Sohail Shafi, however, it was one more case of discrimination against an immigrant Pakistani Muslim.

  Chapter 3

  Wali Hasan may have been dead, but whoever killed him knew something. Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook was sure on that.

  He needed his killer, and he needed him now. The indiscriminate bombings were intensifying around the country. It was only a matter of time before the casualties reached into the thousands.
So far, the police had been only able to pick up the pieces after the bombings and, apart from a thwarted attempt in Norfolk, they had failed to stop any. Whoever was behind the bombings was smart, certainly smarter than the police, but not smarter than Isaac Cook. He was determined to bring it to a conclusion.

  Forensics had Hasan’s body, too long for Isaac Cook’s liking, and yet there was no result. It should have been an easy DNA match, but apparently, there had been contamination of the samples back at Counter Terrorism Command, and the backup DNA was still on its way to the laboratory. What a cock-up, he thought. If we’re this bad at a DNA match, how the hell will we ever stop this madness?

  It was five-fifteen in the afternoon when the phone call finally came through to the DCI. He had taken the opportunity to pop out for a meal when the phone rang.

  ‘Mohammad Sohail Shafi, that’s the name on the DNA match,’ Barbara Sykes, the lead investigator at the terrorist attack in Salisbury three days earlier, said.

  ‘One hundred per cent match?’ Isaac Cook asked.

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent, that’s close enough. Shafi’s your man. He left enough sperm for us to double-check our results.’

  Ten minutes later, DCI Cook was back in the Governor’s office at Belmarsh. ‘Do you have a Mohammad Sohail Shafi here?’

  ‘Yes, unpleasant man, drug dealer,’ Governor Sheldon said. ‘He’s in here for killing a gypsy over a drug deal that went wrong. Is he your man, the killer?’

  ‘If he was the only one who went into the detention cell, then he’s the rapist and the murderer,’ DCI Cook said.

  ‘You want to see him?’ Governor Sheldon realised that it was a foolish question.

  ‘Of course. And what about the missing prison officer? Have you managed to contact him?’

  ‘Seamus Gilligan. I’ve had his wife on the phone every fifteen minutes asking the same question. He’s done a runner. I suppose by inference it must have been him that let Shafi through to the detention cell.’

  ‘The rope or cord used to throttle Wali Hasan, any luck?’ DCI Cook asked.

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person. Your forensic people have been scouring the place looking for it,’ Sheldon replied.

  ‘Okay, I’ll check with them, but in the meantime, I need to talk to this Shafi. He must know something.’

  ‘Does he need a lawyer?’ the Governor asked.

  ‘Under the Counter-Terrorism Act? He’ll be lucky if he gets a cup of tea, let alone a lawyer. He’s in for a rough night if he doesn’t talk.’

  Ed Pickles was more senior to Isaac Cook, not in capability or rank, but in years. He had been a solid investigating officer rising to the rank of Detective Inspector. After success in apprehending a belligerent potential suicide bomber at a house in Birmingham some years previously, he had been personally asked by Richard Goddard, the head of the Counter Terrorism Unit, to join the team.

  In his late fifties, Pickles was short and stocky, with a solid mop of curly, often uncombed hair going grey on the sides, and in need of a good haircut. Isaac Cook represented the modern plain clothes policeman – university educated, well-cut suit, athletic and a moderate drinker. Ed Pickles, on the other hand, was old-style, good at conversing with the criminals, setting up the occasional informer, nosing around, and indulging in a few too many pints of beer of a night. He didn’t hold with the modern type of policing – too many computers, too much sitting in the office, too much paperwork. He was glad that, in another four years, he would have his police pension and a few pounds in the bank, enough to enjoy his remaining years.

  ‘It’ll give you a chance to practise those skills of yours,’ Richard Goddard, the head of Counter Terrorism Command, had said on the phone when he had offered the invitation.

  ‘You mean my nosing around, pay a few pounds here and there, look for anything suspicious?’ Ed Pickles asked.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Commander Richard Goddard was a pragmatist. He saw that modern policing methods were necessary, but a good old sniffing around using instinct and experience still came in handy, and Pickles had a good track record.

  Ed Pickles and Isaac Cook hit it off immediately, and they quickly formed a good team. Today, it was going to be the good guy/bad guy routine and, as usual, Isaac Cook was to be the former and Ed Pickles the latter.

  ***

  ‘We know it was you,’ Ed Pickles led off in the interview room at the prison. An austere brick room, with windows up high on one wall close to the ceiling and a single, high-wattage bulb enclosed in a cage in the middle of the ceiling. The interviewing table, metal legs, metal top, was securely bolted to the floor, as were the four chairs. The recording equipment was duplicated, the video camera up high and secured in a metal cage with only the lens free.

  ‘Know what? I’ve done nothing,’ Mohammad Sohail Shafi responded. ‘You’ve no right to have me in here. I’m a model prisoner, cause no trouble. Ask the Governor, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re a saint, Christian or Muslim,’ said Ed Pickles. ‘We’re not here to talk about your exemplary behaviour. We’ve got other matters to discuss.’ He maintained the bad guy routine. Isaac Cook was yet to speak.

  ‘I’m entitled to a lawyer,’ Shafi insisted.

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re here under the Counter Terrorism Act of 2008. You’re entitled to nothing,’ Ed Pickles replied curtly.

  ‘I want a witness in the room. I’m at least entitled to that; in case you decide to rough me up.’

  ‘There’ll be no roughing up while I’m here, and everything is on video,’ Isaac Cook, said. His manner was calm; Ed Pickles was harsh and direct.

  ‘You can always fix a video afterwards.’

  ‘Roughing up, I can’t guarantee that,’ Ed Pickles said.

  ‘You’re only a little guy. What could you do?’

  ‘Do? I can do plenty, anything I want.’ Ed Pickles leant over the table, looked the reluctant interviewee squarely in the eyes. ‘There’s a couple of prison officers outside who are none too pleased that you committed a murder on their premises. There are bound to be some awkward questions about dereliction of duty, failure to put in place proper safeguards to protect a prisoner in detention. They’re in a lot of trouble, and the chance to vent some of their anger will suit them fine. I don’t expect there’ll be any hesitancy on their part to hold you down while I give you a good thumping, maybe break a few bones.’

  ‘You can’t do that. It’s against the law,’ the Pakistani feeling intimidated, said in a raised voice.

  ‘Law?’ replied Ed Pickles ‘There’s no law here. Counter Terrorism Act, we can do what we like.’

  ‘You’re not going to let him get away with this, are you?’ Shafi asked, looking directly at Isaac Cook.

  ‘He’s my superior officer,’ Isaac Cook replied. It was not the truth, but Shafi did not know that he was the senior of the two interrogating policemen. ‘If he gives me an order, I will have to obey. I promise that I will report him to our disciplinary committee.’

  ‘You mean after I have been beaten to a pulp?’

  ‘It’s the best I can do. They will take action against him. I can promise you that.’

  ‘Of what use is that to me?’ Shafi said.

  ‘Give him the answers he wants, and then there’s no problem, is there?’ Isaac Cook, still maintaining his position as the good guy, had given Shafi a solution.

  ‘I don’t know anything. What are we talking about?’ Shafi continued to insist.

  ‘Last night,’ Ed Pickles again looked Shafi directly in the eyes. ‘A British Pakistani by the name of Wali Hasan was raped and murdered in the detention cell. Do you deny that you were not there?’

  ‘It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. I swear on the grave of my mother.’

  ‘Firstly, your mother is fine and well and living in Pakistan,’ Ed Pickles said. ‘Secondly, we have proof that you were in the detention cell.’

  ‘What kind of proof? I wasn’t there. I’m telling you the truth.�
�

  ‘You raped the poor little sod. Admit it.’

  ‘Rape? That’s for women, not men.’ Shafi, not as confident as when he was first brought into the interview room, maintained his innocence.

  ‘You saw him?’ Isaac Cook asked calmly.

  ‘Yes, I saw him. We all did, when he was brought in,’ Shafi said.

  ‘And men get frustrated in here, and they take it out on some of the younger inmates,’ Ed Pickles said.

  ‘It happens, so what? We’re banged in here for crimes we didn’t commit, and then we’re meant to sit idle until we’re too old to care?’

  ‘So you sometimes take advantage of them?’ Isaac Cook asked.

  ‘Me, never,’ Shafi insisted. ‘I’m innocent of killing that gypsy. I’m not going to ruin my appeal by forcing some frightened boy in the showers.’

  ‘Innocent, are you sure about that?’ Isaac Cook asked.

  ‘Yes, I am, but the police wouldn’t believe me. It was the gypsy’s knife, not mine. I just grabbed it off him, attempted to throw it away, and he moved and got in the way. It was his stupid fault, and here I am banged up in this dump for fifteen years.’

  ‘If you play fair with us, then we can look into that conviction.’ Isaac Cook had studied all there was in reference to Mohammad Sohail Shafi. The evidence against him had been largely circumstantial and, if the judge and probably the jury had not been prejudicial against an unpleasant Pakistani, he would have got off with manslaughter, five years at most. It didn’t change the fact that he was the murderer of Wali Hasan.

  ‘I’m telling you the truth,’ Shafi continued to protest his innocence.

  ‘We have your DNA, you raped him,’ Ed Pickles said.

  ‘DNA?’ said Shafi. ‘I’ve heard of that before. Some smart-arse scientists in a laboratory messing around with glass tubes! What does that mean to me?’