by Conrad Jones
“What type of vehicle was it?”
“Toyota,” Ronny lied. He didn’t know but admitting that would be a mistake. “Definitely a Toyota.”
“Did you get the reg number?”
“No. I couldn’t see the plate because of the angle,” he lied again.
“Idiot.”
“Don’t call me that.” Ronny began to get agitated. The pressure was getting to him. “I did everything that he said, dad, everything. It wasn’t my fault.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. What did you hear on the phone?”
“Nothing.”
“What do mean, nothing?” Big Ron snapped. “Did it ring?”
“Yes.”
“Then that isn’t nothing is it?”
“No,” Ronny stammered. “I meant they didn’t answer. It went to answering machine over and over. I must have called twenty times, honest I did. The signal kept dropping.”
“Go on.”
“I saw them get out. They had guns. Like machineguns but shorter. I looked through the binoculars and saw a flash. Someone fell down holding their leg. I think it was our Gary but I can’t be sure.”
“How many were there?”
“Five in that car but then another one came along but it didn’t come down the road. I mean I didn’t see it go down the road but it might have done. I called the police then so I might have missed it turning in.”
“Did it or didn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, dad but I’m not sure. Why does it matter anyway?”
Big Ron swiped his huge hand across Ronny’s face, the knuckles bruising the cheek immediately. “You need to be fucking sure, idiot!” He raised his hand again but Ronny moved backwards as far as he could.
“I’m fucking sick of you calling me that. I didn’t arrange this fuck up, our Gary did. Is he an idiot too?”
Big Ron lunged over the seat and grabbed him around the throat. His hands closed tightly around his neck, squeezing his windpipe closed. Ronny began to gasp for breath, eyes bulging from his head, hot tears spilling down his cheeks. “Don’t you talk about him like that. You had one job to do, lookout! How can you not know if the second car drove down the road or not?”
“You’re going to strangle him,” Rickets said matter of factly. He looked in the rear view mirror as Ronny’s face began to go purple. “Better let go, Ron or you’ll kill him. You’ll never know what happened.”
“No one would miss the fucking idiot!” Big Ron said, releasing him. Ronny curled up on the back seat, panting for breath. “Get up!” Ronny pushed himself upright, tears stained his cheeks. “Now think! How many men got out of the second car?”
Ronny gasped for air and swallowed painfully. “Five,” he muttered. He wasn’t sure but he daren’t say that. “There were five more. I don’t see why it matters. It doesn’t change anything, does it?”
“It matters.”
“Why?”
“Because if I know how many men they have at their disposal, I can narrow down which outfit it is.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Now, what happened when the second vehicle turned up?”
“I was watching it through the binoculars. Then I called the police. Then I looked again. When I looked through the binoculars again, one of them was looking straight at me through his binoculars. He pointed at me and they all looked up at me. I panicked.”
“Then what?”
Ronny paused. He looked out of the window and tears flowed freely. “That’s when I ran. I didn’t know what else to do.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. “I’m going to crucify the bastards!” Big Ron slapped the dashboard. “They have no idea who they are fucking with. What did they look like?” Big Ron asked angrily.
“Who?”
“The fuckers that took my gear and killed my brother, who do you think?”
“They were all big guys, dressed in black, some in combats. They all had cropped hair, some skinned completely. Most of them had sunglasses on.”
“Is that the best that you can do?”
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“Have you ever seen any of them before?”
“No.”
“Not in town or at any of the clubs?” Big Ron frowned, glaring into his eyes. “Think hard. Could you have seen them before?” Ronny shook his head adamantly.
“No, definitely not.”
“Did any of them stand out, tattoos on the hands or neck, anything out of the ordinary?”
“No.” Ronny had no idea. He hadn’t looked for anything like that.
“Where is the mobile?”
“What?”
“The fucking mobile that you called the police with!”
“Oh,” Ronny reached into his pocket. “Here.”
“Wipe it clean and throw it through the window,” Big Ron snapped. Ronny wiped the phone with his jacket, lowered the window and chucked it, watching as it hit the road at eighty miles an hour and disintegrated. “We need to get him to the farmhouse. If the police get hold of this fucking idiot and question him we’re all fucked!”
“Stop calling me that!” Ronny snapped like a petulant child. “I wouldn’t say anything to the filth. I am not a grass. It wasn’t my fault. I am not an idiot!”
Big Ron raised his hand and Ronny cowered against the back door. “You’re right. You’re beyond idiocy. I don’t even know the word for how fucking stupid you are.”
Ronny closed his eyes and dreamed about running away.
13
Braddick walked around the desk and sat in his chair. Anger boiled in his guts. The ACC had his forehead against the glass, its coolness soothing. His eyes were closed, his thoughts spinning around in his mind. Jo was on the telephone talking to the uniformed officers at the scene. She instructed them to collect all the CCTV footage from the area where Mike Pilkington had died. They listened in silence until she was finished.
“Apparently, he stumbled under a bus. How the fuck do you stumble under a bus,” she said, shaking her head. “Witnesses said he just fell forward.”
“How many witnesses are there?” Braddick asked.
“Two and the bus driver.”
“Two?” the ACC snapped. “That is one of the busiest intersections in the area. There must be more witnesses than that. Surely someone saw something.”
“You know what it is like getting people to come forward. Nobody wants to get involved.” Jo shrugged.
“Did the driver see anything untoward?”
“They had to sedate her but before she broke down, she said that he stumbled out from behind a van. She had no chance to stop. She’s been taken to the Royal.” Jo pushed her hair behind her ears. It settled like dark silk below her shoulders. “He has a receipt from a cash machine in his pocket. His car is parked across the road. They have secured it and are waiting for a flatbed to take it to forensics. Once we have the CCTV, we’ll have a better idea of what happened.”
“Do you think he was pushed?” the ACC asked.
Braddick and Jo exchanged glances and they both nodded.
“Yes.”
“Definitely.”
“This is madness,” the ACC muttered. “These people are out of control. Who do these people think they are?”
“They are virtually untouchable,” Jo said flatly. The ACC looked at her angrily. She shrugged. “We lock one of them up and another one replaces him. One of them gets shot and his place is filled before the body is cold. They have a never ending supply of soldiers. As long as there is cash, they have recruits queuing up. Any one of them will put a bullet in their rivals without blinking. Their recruits are better trained with weapons than we are. We’re fighting a foe that we can’t kill. It just regenerates itself. It is sad but true.”
“They are not untouchable. I don’t agree,” the ACC muttered. He shook his head defiantly. “Not one bit.”
“I do,” Braddick sighed. “Jo is right. If we find footage of someone pushing Pilkington under a bus,
who do you think it will be?” he asked turning his palms to the ceiling. “Viktor Karpov?” He frowned. “Yuri Karpov?” No one replied. “It won’t be any of the top echelon. It will be one of their thugs, who doesn’t give a fuck if he goes to jail or not because the Karpovs will look after his family in Russia either way.” The ACC sat down heavily on a chair. His body seemed to deflate. He put his head into his hands. “These people have nothing at home and so they have nothing to lose. We can’t touch the Karpovs unless we can find out who Cain’s informer is.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” the ACC asked, sitting upright.
“Cain and Pilkington have it documented somewhere,” Jo said. “We just need to find out where.”
“We need his car keys,” Braddick said, sitting forward.
“What?” the ACC asked.
“We need his keys,” he repeated. “We haven’t found Cain’s laptop yet have we?”
“No.” The ACC frowned. “It wasn’t in her car or her flat and her desk has nothing in it that would help.”
“They could have been through her things before we even knew that she was dead,” Jo added. “We need to search Mike Pilkington’s car and home before anyone else gets there,” she said, reading Braddick’s mind. Braddick nodded that he was about to say the same thing.
“We can’t just search his place. We don’t know that a crime has been committed,” the ACC said, shaking his head. “I mean I know how it looks but we don’t know for sure. I don’t think we could get a warrant. The family could sue the pants off us.”
“The only two people who know about the identity of the informer are dead. Now that tells me that the Karpovs don’t know what information they had or who it was from. If they find out before we do, the source will disappear permanently. You want to know who took out our people, don’t you?” Braddick reasoned.
“Of course I do.”
“Then forget we ever had this conversation,” Braddick said, looking at Jo. She nodded and looked at the ACC.
“I don’t…”
“We get the keys and search Pilkington’s place and leave it as we found it. No warrant, no law suit, no more bad guys being one step ahead all the fucking time,” Jo said calmly. “We can be there and back in an hour.” The ACC thought about her words. He turned back to the window and shook his head. Braddick waited for his response.
“Of course I can’t sanction anything illegal. You know that. When an officer is killed in the line of duty, emotions run high and mistakes can be made. If someone searched his house with best intentions to catch his killers then that would be an understandable mistake, don’t you think?”
“Emotions run high, just like you said,” Braddick said, nodding.
“Mistakes can be made. We’re only human,” Jo added.
“I think you both know what you are doing.” The ACC flushed red, uncomfortable with his choices. “Very good. You appear to have everything in hand,” he said with a nod. He walked to the door and opened it. “I’ll leave you to it, carry on. Keep me posted.” The door closed and Braddick stood up.
“I think we have just had a green light?”
“That’s the way I read it.”
“Listen, if Cain had an informer coming in,” Jo said, turning towards him. “Then she must have had a link between her and them. There’s no way an informer would be communicating directly with a DI. Not at first.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “That would be way too risky.”
“You’re right. There must be an undercover working on this but who is it?” he said. “How are you doing with your officers in Matrix?”
“I have arranged calls and meetings today with everyone that I can contact at the moment,” Joanne said. “Every DS in Matrix is bringing me a status report on where their UC’s are and what they are working on although I have a feeling that whoever Cain had on the job was reporting to her and Pilkington directly. I’ll know where everyone is within the hour.”
“With Cain and Pilkington dead, that means there could be a UC out there in the wind.”
“If communication is broken, there’s an emergency protocol for Matrix UC’s but it changes every week. Once I know where they all are and what they are working on, I’ll be able to communicate with them.”
“How?”
“They use a specified location that changes,” she shrugged. “I’ve never needed to use it before but it was designed for situations like this.”
“All that time on the streets as Lilly and you never lost contact?”
“Not once,” she said with a shake of her head. “I was lucky. I know some UC’s that did but it was mostly for operational reasons when they did. They did it on purpose if someone was sniffing around getting suspicious. Some of them went off the grid for weeks.”
“That makes sense,” Braddick agreed. He looked at his watch. “We need to find this informer quickly. I don’t think we have much time.”
“Me neither.”
“The Karpovs may already know who the informer is.”
“I have thought about that,” Jo agreed. “It might have been the leak that led them to Cain in the first place.”
“Maybe,” Braddick grimaced. “Let’s take a drive and see what we can find at Mike Pilkington’s place.”
“I’ll arrange to pick up the keys from the mortuary,” she said, picking up the phone. She dialled the mortuary and asked to speak to the property clerk. After a ten minute search of Pilkington’s belongings, she put down the phone, frustrated. “Guess what?”
“No keys?”
“No keys.”
“His car was across the road?”
“Yep.”
“No fucking keys.”
“No fucking keys.”
“Someone stole his keys.”
“Yep.”
“Just get his address,” Braddick said, struggling into his leather. “We don’t have time to mess about and we don’t need keys anyway. I’m guessing whoever took them will have opened the door already.”
14
George picked his way through the disused offices, once the headquarters of a large photograph developing company. They once had branches on every high street, charging a fortune for developing people’s blurry memories. Decades ago, they were a brand name but the photographic arm had gone into liquidation with the arrival of digital cameras. He accidently kicked a rusty cola can and it clattered across the dusty concrete, settling next to a rotting desk that stood alone in a space the size of a football pitch. He stopped and listened as the noise echoed across the vast office. His nerves were shot. He looked around and wondered what it would have been like to work there. He could only imagine what it would have been like years earlier as business began to decline, each new mobile phone camera better than the last, albums replaced with internet sites. They must have seen their decline coming a mile away, like photocopying shops and launderettes. They were all defunct and obsolete. He looked around and imagined it full of desks and full of people. The workforce must have been plagued by uncertainty as to how they would pay the mortgage. Tranche after tranche of redundancies would have whittled down the workforce month after month until the huge office was almost empty. He chuckled at the image of one last employee sat at the single remaining desk that was in front of him, waiting for the phone to ring.
A clatter from his right made his heart jump. It was pounding in his chest. He held his breath and ducked low behind the desk, the only shelter in the vast building. His nerves were on edge. He had called his handlers a dozen times in the last forty-eight hours and no one had shown up, their mobiles switching straight to voice mail. He couldn’t leave a message. It was against protocol. He had used a different call box each time and cursed when the answering services kicked in and the phones swallowed his money. There had been problems before but the lack of communication for such an extended period was very unusual. He sensed that something was amiss. Things with the informer were coming to a head, which made it all the more unusual for contac
t to be broken. Cain had been so on the ball all the way through that he couldn’t understand the silence now. Being undercover was a lonely job anyway but he suddenly felt vulnerable. He had never felt so exposed before. Communication was his only link to reality. Now that it was gone, he craved normality.
He peered beneath the desk but couldn’t see anything but litter and weeds. Electric cables hung from the ceiling where scavengers had salvaged light fittings, smoke alarms and vent covers. A pigeon took off and clattered against a grimy window at the far side of the building and he breathed a sigh of relief. The panicked bird tried to fly through the glass over and over until it landed exhausted on the window ledge.
George stood up and flicked his finger at the frightened bird, angry with himself for being so jumpy. He adjusted his filthy raincoat and walked on, searching for the stairwell. The only stairwell that was still intact. This was the default meeting place. If things went wrong and contact was broken, he was to head to the third floor and find the canteen. A communication would be left there every week. It was the last resort before email or telephone contact could be used. Undercover officers could never carry mobiles or smart devices. They were too easy to trace and as a lot of their work was illegal, it was forbidden. Setting up a drug deal was entrapment and social media left evidence that could allow criminals to walk away from charges. That said, he wished he could just text Cain. His choices had been narrowed down to one. It was a simple protocol that he had never envisaged using. Emergency protocol. ‘You will probably never need to use it but we need it in place just in case.’ He could still hear his first handler saying it. That was three years ago when his real life had disintegrated before his eyes. He had found out that his wife was shagging another detective while he was on nightshifts and things went from bad to worse. When it all came out, it seemed that everyone at the station knew, except him of course. The detective involved was a popular man, captain of the rugby team and everyone’s best mate. Betrayal hurt more than anything. It was beyond pain. He was devastated. The trust had gone at home and at work. He didn’t trust his wife and he didn’t trust his colleagues. Every time he pulled a nightshift or overtime, he couldn’t concentrate. His mind was full of distrust, images of his wife giving her attentions to another man haunted him. He could see her doing things for that man, that she hadn’t given to him for years. Things that they enjoyed when it all began, a different lifetime ago.