‘Nothing in the days leading up to your night out?’ Chandler pushed.
They went through the same rigmarole. Again they had nothing to offer. Bliss decided it was time to shift up a gear.
‘Perhaps you can help us with something else. Duncan recently told his parents that he had received a promotion and would be earning a lot more money. What do you know about that?’
‘He said that?’ Flying Officer White appeared perplexed. His brows almost came together. ‘I don’t know why he would. It hadn’t happened yet, but he was on the ladder and close to getting a hike, so maybe that’s what he meant and they got it wrong.’
‘They were pretty sure about what they’d been told. Actually quite proud about it. Had Duncan ever previously tried to impress people with yarns about his status?’
‘No way.’ Thomas shook his head as he said it. ‘Dunc was happy as he was. He knew he was on the rise and it was only a matter of time. Flight respected Dunc enormously, and was all for the promotion. I can’t believe he told them something like that.’
‘By ‘Flight’ I take it you mean Flight Lieutenant Holbrook?’ Chandler stared straight at Thomas this time.
‘Yes. They had a great working relationship, and were also mates.’
‘We suspect Duncan may have lied to his parents as a way of explaining his having more money to throw around lately.’
Allen snorted a dry laugh. ‘Dunc had all he needed and no more. He was never last in the queue to buy his round, but he never flashed the cash. He wasn’t any better off than the rest of us. Just check his clothes, his possessions.’
‘No changes in his lifestyle recently, then?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
Chandler refused to let it drop. ‘Maybe he was preparing the way. Maybe he was about to come into some money. Tell me, has anyone quit the job recently? Someone who does a similar job to the one Duncan did.’
‘No one that I can think of. No, I’m sure there’s nobody. It’s a good job, a hard one to walk out on.’
‘Anybody promoted from a similar role in the last few months?’ Chandler asked.
Again there were head shakes all round. Then Allen leaned across the table. ‘We did have an officer transferred out. Got a sweet posting to Saudi.’
Bliss looked at Chandler, then back at FO Allen. ‘How long ago?’ he asked.
‘Two or three months, maybe. Dunc picked up a lot of his slack, actually. They haven’t replaced Dean yet.’
‘Dean?’
‘Yes. Dean Williams. One of the Saudi crew got killed in a car accident. Dean volunteered to take his place. Took us by surprise, actually.’
‘Oh. Why is that?’
‘He had a good life here. Had his day job and then did some…’
Allen’s story came to an abrupt halt as Thomas coughed twice, deep and harsh. Bliss recognised it as a warning.
‘Ignore your friend, Flying Officer Allen,’ Bliss said. He turned his eyes on Thomas and shook his head to give his own warning. Switched back to Allen. ‘Go on. You were saying.’
The man sighed. Knew he’d gone too far to turn back now. ‘Look, I don’t want to get Dean in trouble. We’re not supposed to have gigs on the side. Some do, though. Cash-in-hand type jobs, you know like decorating or something along those lines. I never knew what Dean did, but he always had money to burn.’
I bet he did, Bliss thought.
The story had opened up. Dean Williams had to have been the primary liaison here at Wittering, the logistics man who arranged for a specific item of cargo to go somewhere other than RAF storage or official onward transport. The man out in Saudi had been killed and the crew needed a replacement. Who better to send than someone who knew the ropes so well? The next task was to convince another officer at Wittering to take over Dean’s role. Duncan Livingston had most likely been a hard sell, but the conversation he’d had with his parents suggested he had come around to the idea. Something had spooked him, though. Bliss thought the young airman had probably pulled out of the deal, and the crew could not risk having him do so. It fit.
Bliss got to wondering whether it was a one man job at either end. He was sure it would require a minimum of two. Which still left somebody at Wittering to account for. He and Chandler went at the three Flying Officers hard, centring on Livingston but all the while trying to get one of the men to trip up on something beyond. While they sat there, four aircraft either came or went, the sound of their massive engines all but drowning out conversation.
‘This what it’s like all the time?’ Bliss asked during a brief lull.
Allen shrugged. ‘We can have a day without anything, then days like today when we’ll have eight or ten scheduled flights, plus the training planes in and out.’
‘Hard to hear yourself think.’
‘You learn to shout effectively here.’
Bliss smiled. He eased the conversation towards cargo and the immense responsibility Wittering had as a pivotal transportation hub.
‘You have to remember that not everything arranged here lands or takes off here,’ Thomas said. ‘Yes, we run logistics among other things, but not just for this base. Most of the flights are not shipments. It usually depends on where the cargo is headed next.’
That got Bliss thinking. So far his focus had been flights out of the Middle East and terminating here at Wittering. What if the smuggling ring stretched beyond the base? It could be a nationwide crew. Stacey Bird had mentioned Peterborough, though. This was where those artefacts came into the country. This is where Livingston was stationed. This was also where he was murdered. If the ring’s circumference was wider than Bliss had anticipated, they would deal with that another time. He had to remember that his investigation was nothing to do with smuggling and everything to do with a horrific murder. That the two overlapped was little more than one of the case details, a connection Bliss was convinced had been established.
He studied the three men as closely as he was able, but none of the questions thrown their way drew any of them into a noticeable error. They all appeared unphased when he mentioned cargo going astray, in the same easy-natured way he had mentioned it to Holbrook. It happened. Theirs was a massive undertaking and mistakes occurred. There was no suggestion that they were anything other than mistakes in the minds of these three men, however. Either that or one or more of them was a fine actor.
When they were done, Lundy took them back to the visitors’ car park. As they headed back to HQ, Bliss was feeling unsettled. He expressed his disquiet to his partner. ‘No way Livingston was working alone,’ he said. ‘It feels too big.’
‘I agree,’ Chandler said. ‘But I don’t see it being any of the three friends we just met.’
‘Me neither. I’m not so certain about Holbrook, though. He was jumpy this time around. I didn’t get that gnawing sensation when I know someone is definitely lying to me, but there was something not right about him today. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.’
‘You have to bear in mind that he was dealing with the fact that his friend and colleague had been torched to death, boss.’
‘I know. I made allowances for that. Even so… something was off about him, Pen. When we get back I want you to contact the RAFP and have them dig out some information from their admin team. I’d like to see the shift records for Livingston for the past month, including whoever was on duty at the same times. I also want the same for the final month FO Dean Williams spent at Wittering. Once we have the information we’ll see how best to cross-check it.’
‘How about Holbrook’s details?’
‘If he was on duty at the same time we’ll see that in the crossover.’
‘You really think it could be him?’
‘He will be the constant, I’m sure of that. It just depends on whether he’s the only one. And the guilty one.’
‘But Livingston was a friend.’
Bliss took a breath. Nodded. ‘And maybe Holbrook had no idea what would happen to him. The two wor
ked closely together, and Holbrook had taken him under his wing. Who would know how to approach Livingston better than Holbrook? I’m not saying he played any part in his friend’s murder, Pen. I just think he may have been a vital component of the smuggling caper, and when he lost his right-hand man he put his faith in a colleague he had absolute faith in.’
38
While Bliss had been tied up with the interviews at RAF Wittering, his team had been busy. Bishop and Carmichael were coordinating the information-gathering process. Every other suit and uniform working as part of Operation Compound was out knocking on doors, getting into faces, and putting every effort into compiling a list of new possible suspects.
Bliss grew impatient at having to kick his heels. He felt redundant and started poking his nose into the constant flow of work being carried out by his two colleagues in the operations area. Increasingly frustrated, he was scanning hard copies of basic bullet-pointed reports feeding in, when one of them caught his attention.
‘This may be interesting,’ he said to Chandler, who scooted over on her office chair to join him. He held the sheet of paper out so that they could both read its contents. ‘A CHIS suggests we talk to a Lewis Drake about the irregular comings and goings on his properties. There’s a mention of shipments coming in and out that have nothing to do with Drake’s actual business, which would appear to be scrap metal. I see the phrase ‘High Class Items’ here. That could mean artefacts, couldn’t it?’
Covert human intelligence sources were once more commonly referred to as ‘snouts’ by the police themselves, or ‘copper’s narks’ by the people they grassed on. Now they had all been squeezed unceremoniously into an ill-fitting acronym, but it all boiled down to the same thing. A CHIS lived and belonged out on the streets, they provided the police with information from those streets, and were generally people who themselves often operated either on the edge of, or sometimes way across the boundary of, criminality.
‘Okay,’ Chandler said, stretching out the second syllable so that it became more of an expression of doubt. ‘What’s so special about this Lewis Drake character, then? There are lots of other tips here, boss.’
‘The name is familiar to me. I’m pretty sure it came up when I was with the NCA.’
‘That’s a little thin.’ Chandler shrugged and dabbed a finger onto the page. ‘It also mentions ‘Hookers’. What do you think that’s all about?’
‘If he was flagged by the NCA then I think it’s all about something serious, something organised, and something criminal. Sounds right up our street, in fact.’
Chandler sighed. ‘If you say so.’
‘I’m taking this one,’ Bliss told Bishop as he got to his feet. ‘Worth a visit before we pull everyone back in for an update.’
The visit was to one of the many droves on the edge of Peterborough’s major industrial heartland to the east of the city heading out into the Fenlands. Fourth Drove was not far from the Flag Fen bronze-age site where Emily Grant had plied her trade when she and Bliss had first met. The brown tourist attraction sign Bliss saw en-route reminded him of the woman currently sharing his home. He couldn’t help but wonder how long she would remain there, and how he would feel once she was gone.
The drive around on the ring road was easy, the traffic quite light. This part of the city always reminded Bliss of the area he grew up in, full of honest and not-so-honest businesses crammed together trying to eke out a living, filled with raw and mostly uncompliant people. If you wanted something built or fixed, you came here. Likewise if you wanted to purchase something not from the very top of any range, or even from somewhere below the counter.
Drake Salvage was a dinosaur in business terms. The big money in scrap these days lay in exports. Few people refurbished vehicles or white goods in the way they had back in the seventies and eighties, and when Bliss assessed the towers of junk sitting on the site as he bounced the Insignia through the muddy, uneven yard, he guessed some of the items at the bottom of the piles had been sitting there for decades. Mostly they were vehicles of one kind or another, but all manner of metal and cable lay strewn around the site. As Bliss rolled the car to a stop, a rat scurried out from between two mounds of oxidised corrugated steel and scampered between two tiny caravans which may once have been white but were now a colour never intended by mankind.
Chandler gasped aloud at the sight of the scurrying rodent. ‘Fuck me, that was a big bastard!’ she said, clutching at her chest.
Bliss nodded. ‘Put a saddle on that you could run it at Aintree.’
‘We should be armed.’
‘We are. We have your rapier-like wit and dragon breath.’
‘Yeah, well, just know that if that fat bastard comes in my direction I’m shoving you in front of me.’
There was a fine drizzle misting the air around them. The kind that irritated rather than inconvenienced. The sky was low and grey. As Bliss applied the handbrake, a lean, red-haired youth wearing filthy navy blue overalls, huge red rubber gloves, with a pair of goggles pulled up across his forehead, came lurching out of the caravan to their right. Grease smears camouflaged the young man’s face. His looping red eyebrows gave him the appearance of someone permanently surprised. But when Bliss peered into his dull, flat eyes, there did not appear to be much of a flicker behind the candles.
‘Good afternoon,’ Bliss said, stepping out of the car and greeting the youngster with a tepid smile. ‘We are detectives Bliss and Chandler from Thorpe Wood police station. What’s your name please, sir?’
‘Stu.’
‘I’m Detective Inspector Bliss, Stu. Is the owner around?’
‘Home,’ the man said. He stood with his legs wide apart and rigid, mopping his hands and forearms with a rag that looked dirtier than the muck he was attempting to wipe off. His boots were unlaced, thick socks pulled up over the hems of his overalls.
‘How about your boss?’
‘Same.’
‘Are you in charge here, Stu?’
‘Nope.’ Still he rubbed, his eyes narrow, mouth hanging open to reveal two rows of crooked teeth with plenty of gaps where some had never been replaced.
‘Then can we please speak to whoever is?’
‘Nope.’
‘Why? Is he not here at the moment?’
‘Caff.’
Bliss tilted his head slightly, wondering if the young man was screwing with him. ‘Sir, you are aware of the second syllable clause, yes? They made it a law only recently that you could use more than one at a time.’
This time he received no reply at all.
Bliss rubbed a hand across his jaw. ‘Fair enough. Mind if we have a look around?’
‘Yep.’
Now the conversation was starting to rankle. Bliss quickly scanned the site from where he stood. Dotted amongst the orderly towers and the huge haphazard mounds of discarded appliances and miscellaneous scrap items, stood large skips and containers, filled with all manner of pipes, aluminium tubes, sheets of stainless steel, and coils of cable peeking over the rim. Nothing stirred, and the only sound was the mournful moan of the breeze as it passed through gaps afforded by aged metals. The effect of the sunless sky was to make everything in the entire yard seem two dimensional, leeched of colour.
‘You on your own right now?’ Bliss asked. By his side, he could hear Chandler chuckling softly. At least she was getting something out of the exchange.
‘Yep.’
The man whose narrow body seemed lost inside his overalls had stopped using the rag to rearrange grease and dirt on his skin, and now simply stood there with that same vacant expression on his face. Whilst he did not look to pose much of a threat, neither did he seem to be of any use. Bliss wondered if it was genuine or an act. He decided to test the water.
‘Okay, Stu. We’re not getting anywhere like this. You can carry on responding with monosyllabic grunts, or you can talk to me. If you opt for the former, then we’ll be taking you for a ride. See, as I’ve already explained, we are detectives a
nd it’s our job to ask questions. In response, we expect answers. People who don’t provide us with answers are known to us as ignorant twats, and we take ignorant twats to our holding cells where we like to beat them until they piss blood. And let me ask you, how do you think your boss will feel when he gets back from the café – sorry, caff – and finds you gone and the gates wide open and nobody here to protect it or serve customers? You think he’ll be happy about that, Stu?’
Something shifted behind the youth’s eyes. He might not have completely understood everything Bliss had just said, but the gist of it permeated his brain somewhere along the way.
‘What d’you want?’ he asked, and went back to his non-cleaning routine with the rag.
‘What I really want is to have a chat with Mr Lewis Drake. In his absence, however, you’ll have to do. And I do hope you can help me, otherwise I may just have to close this place down and fill it with cops and dogs who will search every inch of this dump.’
The man flinched, his eyes shifted momentarily. Bliss followed the direction of Stu’s fleeting glance. Standing beside a dilapidated doorless shed containing what appeared to be stacks of vehicle batteries and a set of heavy-duty chargers, was a steel drum. It was in poor condition, and Bliss would not have entrusted water in it. However, the drum sported a sticker in the shape of a triangle depicting a skull and crossbones. The warning emblem suggested its contents might be caustic, poisonous, toxic, or an unhealthy combination of all three. Dangerous was what the sticker implied. Bliss noticed a thin trail of something dark running down from a split seam and pooling around the bottom rim of the drum, seeping gradually into the damp soil around it and turning it an ugly shade of brown.
‘What’s in the container, Stu?’ Bliss asked.
This time the eyes opened wide. The mouth gaped wider still. As Stu’s hands came to his side, Bliss noticed they were trembling. The youngster was not up to this level of scrutiny. Clearly, whoever had left him on his own had not considered the police turning up asking questions along these lines. Or any question at all for that matter.
If Fear Wins (DI Bliss Book 3) Page 29