by Iain Cameron
‘It suggests to me,’ DS Walters said, as she doodled on an A4 pad, ‘their violence is escalating. If anyone resists, they’ll beat the hell out of them until they tell them where the keys are.’
‘Even to murder?’ Sergeant Tony Haslam said. A little smile played on his lips as he tried to catch her eye across the table. He had been seconded to the team from Traffic Division, as he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of cars, but Tony also had a soft spot for the feisty sergeant. Unfortunately for him, Walters did not reciprocate his admiration or welcome it, because as much as she regretted shunning the attentions of any eligible and attractive man, in her book dating a guy from the office was taboo.
‘I don’t know if they would go that far, just for a car,’ Walters replied, ‘but you have to admit they don’t stand any nonsense and hand out a pasting to anyone who gets in their way.’
‘True,’ Haslam said running a hand through thick, spiky black hair, ‘but it’s different from many of the gangs operating in the Midlands and Surrey, as they only use the threat of violence and are in and out of the victim’s house fairly quick. This lot seem to be taking things to a whole new level.’
‘So, Tony,’ Henderson said, keen to move things on, ‘any news about the car they just nicked or any of the other three on the list, for that matter?’
‘The car they took from Henfield in the early hours of Monday morning was a Porsche GT2 RS with only three thousand miles on the clock and fits perfectly into the profile they’ve established so far. High quality marque, top of the range model, full spec and not long out of a dealer’s showroom.’
‘Could someone in a dealership be giving them the nod?’ DC Seb Young said.
‘I think it’s unlikely, Seb as each car was sourced from a different garage.’ He rifled through his folder once again. ‘Ah yes, here we are. The first car, taken from a house in Brighton, came from Samson’s in London, the second from Cuckfield, was purchased at Dales in Shoreham, the third at Petersfield from ALS in Eastbourne and the last one, the Porsche at Henfield, from Callans of Worthing.’
‘As for finding where they’re selling them,’ Haslam continued, ‘Sally and Seb are still looking through the small ads in car magazines and checking various web sites, but so far none of the cars have shown up.’
‘Thanks.’ Henderson looked at Pat Davidson. ‘Pat, the crime scene. Make my day and tell me they’ve left something behind this time.’
Crime Scene Manager, DS Pat Davidson was in charge of the SOCO team which had dusted and combed every surface of the Frankcombe house looking for any clue, no matter how small, to help them trace the people who were responsible for doing this, but Henderson wasn’t hopeful. Witnesses reported the gang always wore leather gloves and balaclavas and left nothing behind but a few wool fibres from a garment widely available in BHS or M&S stores.
Davidson took a large slurp from a can of Fanta orange before shaking his head. ‘Sorry boss, nothing much yet, I’m afraid and they didn’t even take their gloves off to beat up poor Mr Frankcombe. I’m telling you, these modern criminals have no sense of fair-play.’
A similar story came from DC Sally Graham, in charge of house-to-house enquiries and DS Harry Wallop, working with Tony Haslam in trying to identify who the buyer might be among known criminal gangs. It didn’t help that the house was isolated and so they didn’t have the benefit of CCTV cameras or witness sightings from nosey neighbours. He was about to move to the next item on his short agenda when Sally Graham interrupted.
‘Sorry to interrupt, sir but there's something I forgot to say before.’
‘Go on.’
‘I don’t know if it’s significant but when we were taking the neighbours statements, a man called Doctor Robert Masters, a retired paediatrician who lives further up the road from the Frankcombe’s place, said he was awake at three in the morning as he needed to go to the loo. Afterwards, he went into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water and saw a large white van drive past. The reason it stuck in his mind was it looked like one of those chilled food delivery vans which calls into the local shop in the village, but they don’t come around his neck of the woods until at least seven-thirty in the morning.’
‘If I could give a doctor a bit of advice for a change,’ Harry Wallop said, ‘if he didn’t drink so much water, he wouldn’t need to get up in the middle of the night to take a piss.’
A collective groan went up but Henderson ignored it. Could this be the little nugget they had been waiting for, the veritable needle in a haystack, the result of hundreds of man-hours, or the ramblings of an old man with a brain befuddled by too much whisky and Temazepam?
‘Enjoy this moment people,’ he said, ‘this could be the first time we’ve ever had an eye witness to anything in this case. Then again, I realise it might be nothing as there could be a dozen reasons why a large white van was driving past his house at that hour of the morning.’
Haslam was searching through his papers once again. The man took more papers into a meeting than a government minister or his PPS. ‘Tony, have you got something to add?’ Henderson asked.
‘Hang on a sec, there’s something of interest in here.’ He pulled out an enquiry sheet, peering at it over his glasses. ‘It’s on this page somewhere. Ah, right here it is. This,’ he said, holding it up for everyone to see, ‘is the report on the theft at the O’Conner house in Cuckfield when they took the...’ He looked around the table for help.
‘Lamborghini Gallardo Spider, the second one,’ Walters said without looking up.
‘Yes, dead right. Thank you Sergeant Walters, I owe you one.’
A ripple of bawdy laughter encircled the room causing Walters’s face to crumple in disgust.
‘Listen to this,’ Haslam said, oblivious to the mirth his comment had caused. ‘A neighbour of theirs, Margaret Draper said more or less the same thing as DC Graham’s Doctor Masters. She says, ‘I saw a large van driving past the window and moving slowly as if it was in low gear, or was just starting out and the engine was cold. During the day I wouldn’t give it another thought but at two-thirty in the morning, I thought it a bit odd.’’
‘Could be a coincidence,’ DC Graham said.
‘You’re a detective,’ Walters said, ‘since when did you believe in coincidences?’
‘Sally,’ Henderson said, ‘I want you to re-interview both Doctor Masters and Margaret Draper and see if you can tease out any detail that might tie the two sightings together. Then we’ll decide what we do with it. Well done, it was a good spot.’
‘Right oh, thank you sir.’
‘Now listen up. We need to change the direction of this enquiry. I’m not dissatisfied with any of the work done, far from it but I’m not convinced the breakthrough will come from forensics as our car thieves are being too careful for that, but on the sales side of the equation, the buyers and sellers of these stolen cars.’
‘Before you do,’ Haslam said, ‘be aware the thieves who nick the cars could well be a different gang from the people who sell them. The sellers are probably buying the cars at a fixed price from the thieving gang and selling them through their own channels. If that’s the case, the two groups will communicate with one another through a single contact and so nicking the sellers, or ringers as they’re called, might not stop the thefts.’
‘I realise that,’ Henderson said, ‘but when I look at the similarity of the raids, high value cars only a few weeks old, it makes me think they’re being nicked to order. If so, it must be the ringers who are pulling the strings and the car thieves are doing what they’re told. So nicking the ringers will stop the thefts.’
‘Yeah, maybe for a time, until they find another buyer.’
‘It’s a chance I’m willing to take.’
For the next ten minutes he outlined his mini re-organisation, shifting the emphasis from what was becoming a fruitless search for the gang, to spending more time in trying to establish who the buyer might be. He left the meeting feeling only partially uplifted but con
fident he was doing the right thing.
He had to do something as the lack of information was driving him nuts and there was a review scheduled with his boss in a couple of day’s time and Chief Inspector Harris as always, wanted results, not lame excuses.
FIVE
He slumped down on the settee. It had been a crappy morning. The DSS were playing silly bastards with his disability money and despite loads of notices posted around the place telling ‘clients’ not to abuse staff, if it wasn’t for the security screens, he would have jumped over the counter and carved the ugly bitch’s face.
Rab McGovern was a thin, wiry Glaswegian who at times was jumpier than a rabbit, thanks to all the dope he took. His body contained more tats than the Illustrated Man and he had a predilection for getting into fights due to an argumentative nature, particularly when drunk or high on dope and bore the ugly marks and scars of numerous street fights and prison attacks, most visibly, a ragged scar on his right cheek.
However, he could usually get out of fights with profuse deployment of his trademark tools, an open razor and a serrated hunting knife. It had been given to him by a bloke more than twice his size during a fight at Saughton Nick in Edinburgh, when he was forced to defend the honour of his hometown against a bunch of arse bandits from the east coast. In telling the story, he saved the best bit for last because his assailant did not get off scot-free, able to go where he pleased to main more of his compatriots from the west as he now moved around with the assistance of a wheelchair and crapped into a colostomy bag.
To be fair to the DSS, he wasn’t disabled other than having a long razor slash on the right thigh, given to him by a mad druggie who was so high on some crap, he missed slicing the side of his face, but he could fake a limp better than most. If there was any doubt in their minds or they wanted verification, he didn’t bother producing a doctor’s note and instead dropped his trousers. That was often enough, as it was an ugly thing running from a point close to his balls, to an inch or so above his right knee and looked debilitating, even if it wasn’t.
It was ugly because at the time, he was also out of his head on dope and didn’t go to hospital for a day or two and when he did, he was so abusive to the doctors at the Southern General in Glasgow, he was sure they employed a leather worker with bad eyesight to stitch him up.
He pulled a beer from the fridge when he heard the thump-thump of the stereo system from the flat above him. The owner, a former bond trader, now a crack addict who cruised the streets at night getting his fix and sleeping most of the day, hence some days the music didn’t come on until late in the afternoon.
McGovern had warned him before about playing his music too loud but the prick wasn’t listening or didn’t take his warnings too seriously. He hauled the door open, ran up the stairs two at a time and banged on his door. When he opened it red-eyed, hair needing washed and wearing crumpled clothes he had probably worn in bed, he said, ‘where the fuck’s the fire?’ McGovern grabbed a handful of t-shirt and head-butted him across the bridge of his nose.
He walked over to the stereo, a neat B&O system that must have cost a packet and pulled it off the shelf, the connecting wires popping out as he did so. He dropped it on the floor and stamped on it. As usual, he was wearing heavy boots and after only three whacks, it was turned into a heap of broken acrylic and a mess of electronic circuitry and components, with the added bonus it stopped playing the techno crap the prick had been listening to.
Damien, as the druggie was called, was bending over holding his face and trying to make sense of the pain in his nose and would only realise he had nothing to play his CDs on later when the effects of the drugs wore off. McGovern walked up to him, his finger pointing at his face with the rigidity of a steel blade. ‘You stupid fucker. I told you turn it down.’ He kicked him in the nuts and smacked him in the face with his knee, knocking him backwards where he banged his head on the wall. ‘Next time,’ he said, leaning in as close as he dared to avoid receiving a puff of his rancid breath, ‘I’ll decorate your face with my fucking razor.’
McGovern walked downstairs to his flat, grabbed his jacket and headed outside. He wandered around Clapham for a while, trying to ease the anger out of his system as he was meeting the guys in ten minutes and they needed him cool and business like.
In a building, two streets away from Severus Road where McGovern lived, he entered a flat on the second floor. As usual, the large armchair was left for him, a position where he could see everybody and keep an eye on the door to make sure no one was standing out there and earwigging or trying to stick a surveillance camera through a gap under the door.
The gang were all there, his gang. Stu Cahill, a good looking bloke and an expert at cutting telephone lines and neutralising house alarms but even better, he gave them access to a database that told them where they could find a nice new motor.
Jason Ehuru, a tall, well-built guy who could strike the fear of God into the most resistant ‘target’ but a cool man to have in a crisis, driver of the getaway car, and an indefatigable user of a sledgehammer.
Tremain Rooney, another big guy with no fear and a genius at driving and fixing any motor, no matter how complicated. Ehuru brought him into the gang and the tall Jamaican proved his worth time and again when they were stuck inside an unfamiliar car, unsure how to start it, not to mention driving it.
It was McGovern who pulled them together and drilled into them the standards he demanded but if anybody screwed-up or tried to be clever, he would be on them like a rash and no matter how big they were or were or how indispensible they were to the operation, he would take them down. They were doing it his way because his way worked and in time, they would all be rich, not stewing their arses in some piss-smelling prison cell. No way was he going back there, no fucking way.
‘Right Stu,’ McGovern said, ‘let’s get moving, I don’t wanna be here all fucking day, people to see, balls to break.’
‘Sure thing,’ Cahill said. He lifted a sheet of paper and peered over it, like an actor about to deliver his lines or a poet doing a recital, but the thick bastard couldn’t remember what he had for lunch, never mind trying to memorise a few lines of a play.
‘Next up is a Maserati Quarterport Sport GTS. It’s a bloody silly name for a motor, if you ask me but what the hell do I know?’
‘Its Quattroporte, ya dickhead,’ Rooney said. ‘It’s Italian for four doors.’
‘Ok smartarse, have it your way. Next up gents is a four-door Maserati, ok?’ He picked up a computer printout. ‘The last one sold around here was to a guy in Warninglid, a place near Gatwick Airport, three weeks ago.’
‘Is the motor on Benny’s list?’ McGovern said. Benny told them what to nick and if it wasn’t on the list, they didn’t get paid.
‘Yep.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, I am, Rab, I doubled checked.’
Cahill might be a handsome bastard but he had to be watched, as he would rather try to get his mitts up some bird’s dress than do the needy on the car lists. With short black hair, a face devoid of marks and scars and having the right amount of pecs to get noticed, he was washed, scrubbed, and wearing his best t-shirt and jeans.
This could only mean one thing; he was on the pull. This did not please McGovern as Cahill’s little lady, Jena, was vital to this enterprise and he didn’t want her getting messed around. He would need to have words.
‘You been there?’ Jason Ehuru asked as he pressed back in the chair, his bulk causing it to squeak in protest. To those that didn’t know him, the big Nigerian with close-cropped hair and arms like a heavyweight boxer, was a menacing presence as he was a keen body-builder and larger and stronger than anyone else in the group, but to those that did, he was a pussycat until crossed.
‘Yeah, I’ve been down there. It’s a big gaff, well away from neighbours and surrounded by fields. Can’t see another house for miles.’
‘Course it’s a big gaff,’ Rooney said. ‘You don’t think somebody who li
ves in a council flat in Clapham’s got a hundred fifty grand to splash out on a motor, do ya?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘What’s access like?’
‘There’s a quiet road at the end of a field, then up a long, narrow farm track to their place. No neighbours and no fuckin’ gates.’
‘You sure?’
‘Of course I’m bloody sure. I know what fucking gates look like, don’t I?’
McGovern nodded. ‘Good. We can be in and out of there quicker than last time.’
‘This motor gents, this Maserati,’ Rooney said, ‘it’s a bit downmarket for us, yeah? Ain’t it a cheap Italian sports car made by Fiat or somethin’?’
Tremain Rooney, a half-caste Irish-Jamaican and solidly built, didn’t do weights like the other guys as he worked on a building site carrying bricks all day and the only one of the four of them to have a ‘real’ job. He had shoulder length Rasta-style hair and a genial face, which some said made him look girly but this belied a sharp brain, nasty temper, and a deft ability with a flick knife, and having the jumpy fucker in the same room as him made McGovern uneasy.
‘Rooney you fucking prat,’ Ehuru said, ‘you might know what’s going on under a car’s bonnet, but you know fuck-all about cars. This motor’s got a four thousand cc engine, costs over a hundred grand and sounds like a sports car should. The fuck you care? We get paid even if we nick a scooter or a Peugeot 208, right Mac?’
‘Yep, but listen up, we need to crack on and yak more about the gaff,’ growled McGovern. ‘It looks like an easier take than the last one but I still need to make sure you fuckers know what you're doing, I don’t want any fuck-ups this time.’
SIX
A well dressed man stepped out of Markham House and into spring sunshine. Normally he ‘acclimatised’ before moving out of the sterile, air-conditioned atmosphere of the building behind him, but today he was in too much of a hurry and the sharp blast of cool air swirling up from the seafront, made him gasp. For once, William Lawton’s reason for leaving the office early wasn’t a lie. He told them he was going to see the chairman and this time, he was going to see the chairman.