Justice Delayed

by David Field

  ‘Was the allegation of square-bashing on Council property ever investigated properly?’

  ‘Apparently not. The file simply records “complainant deceased”, which is presumably all the excuse they needed.’

  ‘No doubt. Have you started on the Ethel Clay file yet?’

  ‘Is that before or after I turn the water into wine?’ Brandon enquired with heavy sarcasm. ‘I give you a brick in the wall, and you demand the entire building.’

  ‘Sorry, Brandon. Put it down to acid indigestion. Well done, and keep up the good work.’

  As they were leaving, Brandon first, Cathy looked back with a cheeky grin.

  ‘You know what’s good for killing stomach acid, of course?’

  ‘Out!’ Mike ordered her playfully, then called Geoff Keating in.

  ‘You’ve got Folio P7, right? The Cardiff gang-fight?’

  ‘Yep, but nothing shouts out at me right now. The local plod put it down to a turf war between rival drug gangs. Two dead, one severely hospitalised. The losing team seem to have taken knives to a gunfight.’

  Something to do with Newcastle rang a bell in Mike’s brain.

  ‘Not by any chance Italians versus Middle Eastern?’

  ‘Yes, since you ask, but there are so many ethnic groups into drug pushing these days that it could have been anyone.’

  ‘Did DI Petrie give you a list of Arab-sounding names on his way out this morning?’

  ‘Yes – I was about to dial up the detailed crime sheet from Cardiff when you called me in.’

  ‘Don’t let me delay you, and let me know ten seconds after you know.’

  A few minutes later there was a shout of triumph from the outer office, as Geoff yelled out a name.

  ‘Imran El Hashem! Among the wogs arrested! Tried to give a false name, but betrayed by his fingerprints, apparently. He jumped bail, and there’s still a warrant out for him.’

  ‘Thanks, Geoff, but don’t alert Cardiff,’ Mike yelled back through the open door. ‘We want him for something worse than a breach of diplomatic protocols with the Italian community.’

  Mike sat behind his desk, the smile broadening as he began mentally joining up the dots, starting with the Newcastle death of Johara Begum aka Jasmin Ballantyne. She’d obviously joined the Italian opposition in her drug trading, and what happened in Cardiff a year later was probably a more broadly delivered warning not to venture onto Arab turf. Imran had clearly been sent as part of this trade delegation, and may well have been allocated the task of croaking his own sister, by way of ‘proving’ himself as worthy of the brotherhood following his graduation from a secondary school in Lancaster where his attempts to drum up recruits for the cause had been nipped in the bud by the soon to become deceased Carolyn Tasker.

  Although there was, as yet, no physical description of Imran to hand, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that another of his proving missions had been the car bombing of the unsuspecting, mild-mannered, trusting West Country publishers who’d been handed what they thought was a manuscript through their car window as they were flagged down by a mysterious figure hidden beneath an anorak. Jim Westaway had taken the person to be a female, although he’d only got a brief glimpse from behind before his dog demanded his attention, and a small slim youth would look just the part.

  The circumstances preceding Emma Baynton’s death also had an eerie similarity to what had happened to Charlie Renshaw from Clay Cross, who’d spotted something paramilitary going on in the early morning mists on the Derbyshire moors. At least, for a change, it wasn’t something paranormal. It was over a decade ago, but it fitted the pattern.

  That just left Folio P4 – the Ethel Clay death that had started the entire ball rolling – and something to do with a death in Scotland, the Edinburgh area from memory. That was more recent, and hopefully Brandon would crack that one shortly. But Mike still needed to identify the mole, and he needed to be somewhere else before those in the outer office took their lunch break, and Cathy threatened him with death by yoghurt.

  ‘Twice in one day?’ Van observed above raised eyebrows as Mike sauntered in. ‘If you’re prepared to go green, I’d be happy to introduce you to a whole new lunch experience in “The Healthy Harvester” two blocks away.’

  ‘It’s either that or constabulary yoghurt while I watch Geoff Keating massacre bangers and mash or steak pie with chips. But before that, have you got me that list of possible moles from Vice at around the time you launched Delilah?’

  Van peered up at her computer screen, executed a few mouse clicks and sat back.

  ‘Coming out of the printer even as we speak. Unfortunately I can’t give you much informal background on the Squad team at around that time, because Peter Glazebrook’s dead now.’

  ‘Peter Glazebrook being?’

  ‘The Two I/C in “Vice” in those days. He supervised all the staff on an operational basis, leaving Tom McKinney to preen himself with all the team’s achievements. Peter was a DI with me in a supervisor training course we both went on after our promotions, but he died in the line of duty, allegedly.’

  ‘Tell me more about the “allegedly”, if you recall anything of it after all these years.’

  ‘It was only a couple of years ago, and we gave him the benefit of the doubt. Bottom line was that he was found dead in a bedroom in a private hotel in North Berwick – that’s East Lothian, in Scotland. He’d been the first choice undercover man in Vice for some time, and the profile fitted. He was in his early fifties, left a widower some years ago after his wife went with an undetected heart complaint, and he was investigating the first suggestion of Moslem working girls packing a punch for Allah. As a matter of fact, it was rumoured to have been his intuition that led Tom McKinney to suggest that we set up Delilah.’

  ‘Tuition or insistence?’ Mike enquired, the hairs on the back of his neck beginning to prickle.

  ‘Not sure, why?’ When Mike simply shook his head, she continued.

  ‘Anyway, according to witnesses a dark-skinned young lady was seen getting out of the lift on the same floor as Peter’s room only a few minutes before a muted thud was heard from a room somewhere on that floor. The next morning Peter was found with a bullet hole just below his left eye, and we assumed that the young lady in question was a working girl who Peter was pumping for information rather than ...’

  ‘Pumping her for pleasure?’ Mike offered.

  ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,’ Van protested with a disgusted facial expression.

  ‘Didn’t it occur to any of you that maybe he wasn’t shot simply because he declined to make payment for the lady’s services?’

  ‘Of course, but we put it down to the possibility that he was about to crack the Moslem connection – and if you make any smart retort to that, I swear I’ll throw this paper weight at you.’

  ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ Mike asked. Van smirked.

  ‘I imagine that the girl will be long gone by now.’

  ‘I do the funnies in this organisation,’ Mike growled as he dialled and waited for Cathy to pick up at the other end.

  ‘Cathy, jump onto your computer and dig me out the name of the deceased on Folio P6 – the Scottish one.’

  ‘Hang on a minute while I log back on, sir.’

  After thirty seconds or so of muttering to herself, she raised her voice to telephone level.

  ‘A Peter Glazebrook, according to this. Mean anything important?’

  ‘Sure does. You can leave that one now, and go back to assisting Brandon.’

  ‘Actually, he’s about to take me to lunch at the yoghurt counter. Then after that, perhaps he’ll take me to the zoo, or buy me a pony. Will you be joining us?’

  ‘Not today – I have an appointment with a disappointment salad.’

  ‘At least if you went fulltime vegetarian, it would help to cleanse your mind as well as your body,’ Van grinned, reaching for her shoulder bag.

  ‘Then Alison would have nothing to complain about,’ Mike
pointed out as he stepped out of the office ahead of her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘I gather you gave Dave two weeks off,’ Alison observed as she placed the shepherd’s pie on the heat-absorbent coaster in the middle of the table. ‘Save some of that for me, at least until I get the vegetables on the table,’ she added sarcastically.

  ‘I’ve been a good boy today,’ Mike replied with a superior smirk. ‘I had pumpkin tart for lunch, accompanied by what the menu described as “a mouth-watering chef’s selection of rocket salad”. Why they need a chef to wash lettuce and break it up into portions is beyond me. Anyway, how did you become aware of my latest personnel deployments?’

  ‘Joy phoned. She’s a quivering mess about her upcoming operation, and so would I be. Reading between the lines, she’s clinging on to Dave like a drowning man with a lifebelt, so I hope you’ll allow him as much leave as she needs.’

  Mike abandoned the intended query regarding how one could “read between the lines” of a telephone conversation, and changed to another topic while he could still remember to do so.

  ‘Fancy going to see Steven in all his musical glory?’

  ‘Can you take time off to drive to Manchester?’

  ‘No need, since it seems that the mountain is coming to Mahomet. Well, as far as either Lincoln or Leicester anyway. He’ll be here in town as well, but from memory it’s the same day as the wedding.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘One of my young DCs has become not only my yoghurt buddy but also my entertainment consultant. That young lady singer Steven’s hanging around is doing a tour of trendy jazz clubs, accompanied by an outfit that describes itself as “The Steve Saxby Experience”. I assume that refers to his music, and not the experience that young Miss Hamilton’s receiving at his hands.’

  Alison went silent, and was obviously thinking hard, whereas he’d expected her to leap at the chance.

  ‘I agree that we’d probably look about as out of place in a jazz club as a condom vending machine in a convent,’ Mike admitted, ‘but I thought you might want to admire our offspring for only ten quid a head. It costs us a whole lot more on the rare occasions when he comes to us.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Alison replied distractedly, and Mike wished that he could understand mothers. Particularly ones that he was married to.

  The phone rang just as Alison was organising the cheeseboard, and since she was nearest she took the call, then handed the hands-free set to Mike with a grimace.

  ‘It’s one of your other women,’ she advised him. Mike took the handset, expecting to hear either Van or Cathy on the other end. Instead, it was Maggie Gillies.

  ‘Sorry to crash the prandials and all that,’ she said, ‘but I’ve not seen Brandon so excited since he learned that support stockings can come with suspenders. Hang on, I’ll put him on.’

  ‘Mike,’ Brandon almost shouted as he took the phone from Maggie, ‘I need your authorisation for something!’

  ‘I’m not Maggie’s father, Brandon,’ Mike joked.

  ‘Not Maggie – this explosion in Ethel Clay’s apartment block. Cathy dug up the incident file, and I need your authorisation to ask for a more detailed forensic report on the cause.’

  ‘They said it was a gas leak,’ Mike reminded him.

  ‘I know that’s what they said,’ Brandon replied, ‘but even to a mere genealogist that can’t be right. I was wondering how the remains of the inside walls came to be covered in weedkiller, and was mulling it over with Maggie here. She tells me that ammonium nitrate’s a popular ingredient in bombs these days, so we’d presumably better get a fuller report.’

  ‘We should indeed,’ Mike grinned to himself. ‘I’ll deal with it first thing tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the support stockings.’

  ‘What was that about support stockings?’ Alison enquired as she hit the button on the coffee percolator.

  ‘Nothing, but when you get older and even more grey, I’m coming with you to the charity shop from which you buy your intimate apparel.’

  At shortly after nine am the following morning, Mike stood in the middle of the outer office, bringing the troops up to date.

  ‘I was right, and I was wrong,’ he admitted. ‘I was right in thinking that the series of deaths that have occupied your full attention for several weeks were connected, but I was wrong in my hunch as to how they were connected. The answer is “gang related”, as they say in the Media releases. The gang in question is a mob of people with Middle East connections and intensely criminal motivations who silence those who get in their way. People like Emma Baynton, who reported what she took to be a group of Pakistanis doing rifle drill on Council property. Charlie Renshaw from Chesterfield, who spotted something similar in darkest Derbyshire. Carolyn Tasker who broke up a recruitment cell in her school. Peter Glazebrook – who incidentally was one of ours under cover – who was investigating their prostitution network. And so on. Somehow we have to work out how all this led to the death of Jeremy Giles, which believe it or not is what we’re actually investigating.’

  ‘He obviously joined up the dots for himself,’ Geoff observed out loud, ‘and he became the latest target.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Mike repeated. ‘But we need to find out precisely who it was within this den of thieves, murderers, pimps and drug pushers who did the deed, or at least gave the order. And how did they ping on him in the first place?’

  ‘Did you explore every entry on his computer hard drive?’ Geoff asked.

  ‘Funnily enough, that was my next task,’ Mike smiled as he walked back into his office, sat down and hit his computer.

  Conscious of the fact that he hadn’t fully explored the hard drive download after being distracted by the seeming ‘Ursula Winthrop’ connection that had gone nowhere, Mike scrolled carefully down every entry, clicking into the occasional one to make sure that something significant was not hidden behind an innocuous file name. Satisfied that there was nothing on there to connect Giles with either Haddad or Hashem, and assuring himself that given Giles’s known sexuality Johara Begum would not have been likely to have featured on his radar, he sat back and stared at the ceiling. Where was the connection?

  He was interrupted by Cathy Norman, who breezed in waving a USB and wearing a triumphant smile.

  ‘Thought you might like a preview of what to expect when you go to see Gina Hamilton,’ she announced proudly as she laid the stick down on his desk. ‘I downloaded this from U-tube. They put it out as a concert tour teaser, and your son plays a mean flute.’

  ‘He learned “meanness” at his mother’s knee,’ Mike advised her with a grin, ‘but thanks anyway. I’ll take this home and prepare his mother for the shock.’

  ‘Surely she already knows how good he is?’ Cathy enquired.

  ‘Probably not,’ Mike replied, ‘since all we ever heard at home were a few strangled squeaks in his early days. But that wasn’t what I was referring to. His mother hasn’t yet seen Gina Hamilton.’

  ‘You mean ... ?’ Cathy enquired, leaving the sentence uncompleted. ‘But surely she’s not . . . I mean ... ’

  ‘I didn’t get around to raising the issue of possible grandchildren.’

  ‘There goes another of my dreams,’ Cathy pouted as she walked out.

  Mike sat staring at the USB for a moment, wondering when would be a good time to plug it into their home computer, and whether or not to warn Alison in advance, or just let it hit her in the face. Then his constabulary brain kicked in, and he remembered something.

  He reached inside his desk drawer and retrieved the USB that had caused Troy Lesley to take a post-mortem dip in the river. Then he inserted it into the port at the side of his desk computer, and clicked on it as he sat back for what he hoped would prove to be a profitable ride.

  In the main, the USB entries duplicated what had been on the computer hard drive, but then he read ‘Diary’, and his hopes rose. After ten minutes he had all he needed to justify another trip upstairs
, and he picked up the phone and dialled Van.

  ‘When are you expecting Mani in again?’

  ‘He just about lives here,’ Van advised him, ‘and if he stays true to form, I expect he’ll come wafting in here at around eleven.’

  ‘When he does, let me know,’ Mike instructed her. ‘I think we have enough to lock up Ali Baba and at least one of his forty thieves. When Mani gives the authorisation, of course.’

  ‘Will do, but unless you want “racist” stamped on your record, as well as the existing “misogynist”, “loudmouth” and ‘disrespectful of those in authority”, I suggest that you give our targets their correct names.’

  ‘I can do even better than that,’ Mike almost yelled back down the handset, ‘I can give you their photographs as well – along with their victim!’

  An hour – and several celebratory yoghurts - later, Mike was seated next to Mani in Van’s office, the door shut and the blind down.

  ‘First things first,’ Mike said with a self-satisfied smirk. ‘I’ve identified your mole, and he’s conveniently dead – killed by his own paymasters.’

  ‘Peter Glazebrook,’ Van muttered, then looked across at Mani. ‘Mike always gets that smug look on his face when he’s shaken the poo off his shoe.’

  ‘Explain?’ Mani invited, but Mike was about to anyway.

  ‘Glazebrook worked undercover in Vice, but unfortunately at some stage in the process he fell among thieves, as it says in our Bible. He was persuaded, bribed, threatened or whatever to divert everyone’s attention to the activities of a terrorist cell here in Brampton by suggesting that the real threat to the EU Summit came from a coven of Muslim prostitutes. Then he was shot as an extra precaution. I don’t know what the collective noun is for a group of prostitutes, but “coven” will do, given the totally misleading Ursula Winthrop connection.’

  ‘Who?’ Mani enquired.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mike assured him. ‘The whole thing was a furphy anyway, and the real organisers of the planned terrorist outrage are, as you advised us some time ago, a bunch of Middle Eastern types who’ve been recruiting locally for some years. On at least two occasions their training activities were spotted by someone who finished up dead, and – I suspect more recently – these executions were carried out by Hadad and his siblings, who’ll do anything for money. Their paymasters are quite content to let them take the fall if it goes wrong, and claim the credit if it goes off – literally - with a bang. Either way, it looks as if you won’t get to the real heart of the movement simply by arresting the front men.’