It was a useless call and he knew it. He had to do something, but the man who could move the boat was nursing his balls on the bridge and Dillon was out of the game for the time being. He was helpless and angry. He threw the hammer towards Richter and it missed her by a couple of yards. He watched her shape blur in the area between light and dark then disappear into the night. She was gone.
He turned and looked at Dillon, who’d tried to get onto his knees, his breath still rattling through his injured throat. Hunter kicked him in the gut as hard as he could then stood over the prostrate figure, who started sobbing like a child.
‘If that girl lives we might as well dig our own fucking graves and be done with it. I knew it – Pete Handyside should have wasted you a long time ago.’ He cleared his nose into his throat and spat a mouthful on Dillon, then kicked him again before he sat down and lit up another cigarette.
About two hundred yards from the Brighter Dawn Richter was treading water in the relative safety of the dark night. The boat itself was lit up like a sports stadium so she could see everything that was happening. Most importantly, as she leapt into the water she’d spotted the lights on the horizon that offered the possibility of survival. She was still several miles from safety, but if they couldn’t find her then she might have a chance, although she was already suffering from the cold and had to move. The problem was that at some point the boat would get underway and they would guess that she was making for those flickering lights, so against her instincts she swam seawards, putting the boat between herself and the Berwickshire coast. Ingrid Richter hadn’t needed religion since she was a child but in that moment she needed God to exist and prayed that they would head for land and not circle the waters looking for her.
Hunter finished his cigarette. They had to get going or the whole thing was going to turn into a massive clusterfuck – if it wasn’t one already. He had to get Gunderson working, look for the girl on the way in and just hope that the bitch couldn’t survive the sea temperatures. ‘What a fucking mess.’ He said it quietly and looked round to see Dillon struggling to sit up. He passed him without a word, stepped into the galley and up three short steps to the bridge. Gunderson was on his feet and took a pace back when Hunter stood face to face with him.
‘Did you see what just happened?’
Gunderson knew that whatever answer he gave would be the wrong one and he was drowning in his own fears. In that moment he realised that he knew too much and he couldn’t escape the same fate as the men on his boat. Wherever they were going he would carry the same guilt. The reality of the situation steadied him, and he remembered who he was and what he’d once been. ‘I didn’t see it, but I heard enough,’ he said.
Hunter nodded without a word, studying the man opposite him, the near darkness on the bridge accentuating the deep lines that had been hacked into the fisherman’s face in his years at sea. Hunter pulled out his cigarettes and offered them to Gunderson, who picked one out of the crumpled pack. They lit up and both sucked in the first lungful as if they hadn’t smoked for a month.
‘Listen,’ Hunter said quietly, all the anger gone from his voice, ‘we’re fucked, and I don’t know if you’ve worked it out, but when I say “we” I’m including you, my friend.’ He dragged deeply on the cigarette, rubbed the back of his neck wearily and wished he was somewhere else. He tried to block out the fact that Ingrid Richter might survive, but it was impossible. They had no option but to finish the job and then lie to Pete Handyside’s face. A cold shiver ran the length of his body. He took a deep breath and looked at Gunderson, who was quiet and had nearly finished his smoke; he’d sucked at it greedily and was down to the filter in half the normal time.
‘We’ve killed two women, one made it over the side and there’s one still in the cabin. She has to go. There’s no other option. There’s an armed posse of Scotland’s finest waiting for us when we get into Eyemouth so the boat has to be clean when we get in. There’s no point in trying to run to another port because they’ll track us quite easily and we’d end up with Royal fucking Navy commandos on the case. Do you follow me?’
Gunderson nodded and felt calm. He’d descended into a nightmare and all he could do was deal with it. Hunter explained what they had to do when they got into port, where they’d be lifted by the police. The way out was to stick to the story that they’d hired the boat to pick up a load of counterfeit goods in Holland but it had fallen through. Their lawyers would arrive before they got them to a station, and if they said fuck all apart from the cover story they’d make it out of the mess.
‘That’s only part of it. If we get through that we’ve got to convince Pete Handyside. You’ve heard of him?’
Gunderson nodded. ‘Who hasn’t?’ He’d already worried years off his life that he was owned by some of the worst gangsters in the North-east, but finding out that the man who pulled the strings was Pete Handyside was just more bad news than he needed.
‘Can you do this?’ Hunter looked Gunderson straight in the eye, demanding the right answer.
‘Is there a choice?’ Gunderson said, having temporarily rediscovered his balls. All the other options were shit and there looked to be only one way out. What Gunderson wanted was an escape route and then to disappear to a place where these men couldn’t find him.
Hunter smiled. ‘Either we all spend the rest of our naturals in some Jock prison or my gaffer cuts us up for pig food. Or we get lucky and survive this.’
Gunderson asked for another cigarette. ‘Okay. Do what you have to do and let’s get ashore or they’ll wonder why we’re drifting about only a few miles from the harbour.’
Hunter went out onto the afterdeck and resisted the temptation to give Dillon another shot. He needed him to get the job finished. ‘Get the girl up here, and don’t fuck it up this time or you go in after her.’
Out in the darkness to the east of the Brighter Dawn, Richter continued to tread water, waiting for the boat to move. She was cold and beginning to doubt whether she could make it to the lights on the horizon. They looked near enough, but every minute in the numbing temperature of the water would be an ordeal. Over the next few minutes she felt as if she was a spectator to a vile stage show, with the actors playing out the last scene in the glare of the deck lights. She watched the girl she’d only known as Hanna being led onto the deck without protest. Alan Hunter took her life. Richter stared on in horror as they weighted the girl’s body and pushed her over the side, into the depths of the sea. She bit into her hand to stop herself screaming, tasting blood, but kept biting till her instincts turned back to hatred for the men on the boat. Even so far from the Brighter Dawn she could see that the last girl had been paralysed with fear and went to her death without resistance.
On the bridge Gunderson sobbed quietly as he listened to the sounds of her death – her weighted body hitting the dark waters. His old life was gone and all he felt was self-loathing for what he’d become. Hunter joined him. ‘It’s done. Let’s get the fuck out of here and see if we can get the cops off our backs. Maybe we’ll see the girl who went over and finish the job.’
Dillon and Hunter washed the decks down with power hoses and scrubbers till the jets of salt water had removed all trace of the girls. They went down into the cabin and made sure that the few items the girls had brought with them were bagged up, weighted and joined their owners beneath the North Sea.
Gunderson powered up the engines and set a course for Eyemouth as Hunter and Dillon went forward and scanned the waters they sailed through, hoping for a sight of Richter, though her name would have meant nothing to them. Dillon couldn’t speak properly – his throat still ached and his gut hurt from Hunter’s boots. He promised himself he’d slice the bastard the first chance he got and hoped they could spot the girl so he could stare into her eyes as she died with his hands clasped round her throat.
Meanwhile, on the bridge, Gunderson was wondering what had happened to his life. He felt almost nothing after the shock of what he’d witnessed on the
afterdeck of the Brighter Dawn. It was as if his soul had died along with the girls who would now be lying at the bottom of the sea. At first he’d felt like throwing himself over the side as he burned with guilt, but here he was, guiding his boat towards the harbour lights. All he wanted to do was live and survive this nightmare. He wondered why he felt so little for the nameless women who’d perished that night.
He was damned, and he knew it.
3
As the Brighter Dawn sailed past the treacherous Hurkar Rocks and through the narrow entrance to Eyemouth harbour the call went out to the police team to stand by. DCI Jimmy McGovern had arrived to take control once the boat had been boarded and the men aboard detained. He’d briefed the uniformed inspector in charge of the search team and told him that the information had come from a proven source so it would be on the money. The boat had a consignment of cocaine, amphetamine tablets and women being trafficked into prostitution. The young inspector was excited at the prospect of getting involved in international organised crime, a nice change from breaking down the doors of low-life dealers on Lothian estates.
‘Only thing that’s bothering us, sir, is that we’ve got a spotter team up on the cliffs on St Abb’s Head to the north of the harbour. They’re sure that the Brighter Dawn was behind schedule and should have arrived by now. Might be nothing but I thought I’d mention it.’
McGovern smiled. Everyone looked for bad omens on these jobs, but it changed nothing, regardless of what they felt or saw. The job was in place and they had to do what they’d planned. He knew what no one else on the operation did – that the source was an undercover officer risking his life inside a gang to feed them the information. It was part of something bigger, but other than McGovern no one on the Eyemouth operation needed to know. The fewer people who knew about a UC the better. It was one of the cornerstones of good intelligence handling. The more people that knew about a sensitive operation the more likely it was that some bent or dipstick fucker would drop it in the other side’s lap.
McGovern was with a young detective constable from his own team, and another half dozen of his guys were well back but available if required. He watched from a distance as, eventually, the Brighter Dawn steered into the long narrow harbour then manoeuvred alongside her berth. Two men put ropes ashore and tied the boat safely to the pier. They were joined by a third man from the boat, and they stood on the pier together, smoking and looking around anxiously. McGovern and every other cop there presumed they were holding on for their contacts, but none came. They couldn’t know that the targets were waiting for the police team to swarm all over them. After a long half hour McGovern picked up his radio and called the inspector.
‘I don’t get it. They shouldn’t be hanging about with what they have aboard.’
He waited for a few moments then heard the slight hiss on the radio before the inspector replied, his voice flat with the uncertainty of what to do next. ‘We’re starting to see one or two early workers on the go and we don’t need an audience for this, sir.’ He’d thrown the ball firmly into McGovern’s lap.
‘Okay, Inspector, we have a lot of issues here and number one is those women on the boat. We can’t wait for the rest of the bandits to arrive.’ He remembered the old maxim that more operations fail because of indecision than wrong decisions. He gave the order to the firearms teams to move in and make the arrests. It was all over in two minutes and McGovern watched through his binoculars as the men were restrained and the rest of the team secured the boat. Within five minutes the search team was cleared to go aboard, while McGovern sat massaging the scar tissue above his eyes that he’d earned during his boxing career. He’d suddenly become tired and his gut told him exactly what was going to come back from the search team. He didn’t have to wait long before the inspector was back on the air.
‘The boat’s as clean as a whistle, sir. We’ll have to take it apart in case it’s a good concealment, but definitely no women on-board. There are three men and they’re saying they went to Holland to pick up a load of counterfeit goods, but the deal fell through. They’re already shouting for their lawyers.’
McGovern felt it in his water: they could search till Boris Johnson became a member of the Communist Party, but something had gone badly wrong. He got out of the car and tried to think it through. The information was good and had come from the UC. He could have got it wrong but he’d provided information that had taken out two consignments already. The Police Service of Scotland had been working on a joint cross-border operation with the National Crime Agency and it had been going well up to that point. There could have been a transfer at sea, but why go to all that trouble? His head started to ache with the tension but he hardly noticed, and in any case it was just part of being involved in a long-term operation. Headaches, hangovers and heartburn – they all came with the territory.
He snapped his head up and his mind fixed on one other possibility: they’d known in advance that the police were waiting for them. The inspector had told him the boat was behind schedule. ‘What does it mean?’ he wondered out loud as the pain in his skull went up another point on the Richter scale. If they suspected something then the UC could be compromised. The problems started to overwhelm his thought processes, and then it came to him – if they knew, were they watching the whole fucked-up operation taking place?
McGovern stepped away from the car and looked round the harbour area. Eyemouth was a busy port, but it was a small place with myriad tight, winding streets in the old town next to the harbour. On all sides it was surrounded by higher ground leading down to the river that gave the ancient port its name. He grabbed the radio and called to his own team, who were all in unmarked cars.
He told them the operation might be compromised and being watched by the bandits. ‘Get out of the cars, split up, take a patch each and see if you can sniff anything out.’ He carved the surrounding areas into six sections and gave them a patch each. They were already on the move, realising why their DCI was pissed off.
McGovern looked again through his binoculars and saw the three men from the boat being shoved into the back of separate cars to be taken for interview. He went back to his car and pulled out a flask of coffee. It agitated his bladder but it had kept him going through the night at least. He leaned against the car and sipped a mouthful. It lacked quality but gave him the required kick.
‘Jesus.’
The detective who was driving him was still in the car and tired. ‘What’s that, boss?’
McGovern ignored him. He shook his head, trying to fend off another idea that had come to him. If the information was right about the cargo and the crew had been warned somehow, what had they done? It didn’t matter a shit about the cocaine . . . but the girls? ‘Fuck.’ He jumped into the car and called in to get a forensic team there as soon as. He called the inspector and told him to secure the boat and treat it as a crime scene.
McGovern’s men trawled their sectors on foot looking for any signs that there were watchers somewhere in the area. Twenty minutes after they started the search, one of the detectives was on the south side of the river but above the harbour and looking down into the basin. He stopped in a doorway and wondered if they were wasting their time. They were getting wet through in the light drizzle that had started to fall as the first dull touch of light started to mark the eastern horizon. He was moving from foot to foot, feeling cold and pissed off when he saw it. Fifty yards ahead of him the tiny but clear glow of a cigarette flared for a second in a parked saloon. He screwed up his eyes and moved closer but kept as much cover as he could. The cigarette glowed again and he could see that there were two people in the dark interior of the car.
The two men were tired as well as bored and thought they’d seen enough for one night. Maxi Turner was the older of the two watchers and had decided there wasn’t anything more to see – the boat had arrived, the cavalry had picked them up and the place was swarming with the law.
‘Time to get out of here, son; the morning traffic wi
ll be picking up so let’s get the fuck over the border. Gimme a minute for a hit or a miss.’
He pushed the car door open and saw someone moving into the shadows behind them. He was a pro and didn’t panic, opening his flies so he could do what he had to do. As he got back in the car he threw his cigarette onto the pavement. ‘Okay, we’ve got company behind us. Drive off slowly and try to look like an honest citizen. Don’t, and I repeat don’t, get fucking excited or we’ll have these Jock fuckers all over us.’
As they moved away the detective managed to get part of the car number and wrote it on the back of his hand. He pulled out his radio and cursed when he realised the battery had gone down, but that was par for the course. He had his mobile and called McGovern, who was on his phone trying to arrange for SOCOs to attend.
On the outskirts of Eyemouth the Newcastle men stopped the car in a quiet lay-by, opened the boot and changed the number plates. When they’d done that the older man smiled and lit up another cigarette. ‘Okay, son, this is the privilege of rank. I’m going to drop you five minutes from here at Ayton near the A1. If they’ve spotted us they’ll be looking for the wrong number plate and two men. You keep your head down and get a bus later. Let’s go.’
The younger man shook his head, realising that being a gangster wasn’t all glamour, but he knew better than to argue with someone like Turner, who was the closest Pete Handyside had to a trusted lieutenant.
Turner had grown up in North Shields with Handyside and was probably the only person in their world who made sense of the man. They’d screwed the same properties as teenagers, done time together and killed together. Turner had been best man at his wedding. Handyside had the brains and nous for leadership and Turner was a happy second in command. He didn’t love his boss, but he trusted him and knew that he would always cover his back. Turner was Mr Ordinary to look at, and he had a remarkably quiet speaking voice, but he was a gangster’s gangster: streetwise, suspicious and give him the task and it was done.
Shores of Death Page 4