‘Happy Christmas, Jack. Something must be important for you to come all this way to see Ian on Christmas Eve. But how lovely to see you again.’
Jack smiled back at her; they’d only met twice before, but she sounded as if she’d really meant it. She showed him into a large bright lounge where Ian Dunmore sat in front of an inviting log fire, enjoying a drink. He turned and smiled at Jack.
‘We were just having a Christmas drink, Jack. Will you join us?’
‘Better not, sir. I’ve got to drive home and I’ll be drinking later.’
The chief super sipped his drink; then put the glass down on a small table beside him. ‘Sit down. It sounded urgent on the phone.’
Jack glanced at Claire. He didn’t want to speak in front of her. Years of being a policeman’s wife had obviously given her special powers; she smiled at the men and left the room.
Jack had spent a long time working out exactly what to say to the CS to get clearance for his idea. He told him concisely what he’d discovered and mentioned that a member of the drug ring was prepared to cooperate with them in exchange for police protection and a lighter sentence. He didn’t want to mention Bianca but had to; she’d need police protection too.
‘She’s a good friend of Batas. She trusts me and she’s the only one he trusts, sir. If I work with them, I think we can catch the gang that’s been running rings around the BC, the SOCA and the Met for months.’
Ian Dunmore had been only mildly curious when Jack had started his story, but by the time he’d told him about the ingenious method they used to smuggle in the drugs, coupled with the fact that one of them was blackmailing Mark Logan’s wife because she was the hit-and-run driver they were looking for, he was staggered.
‘How did you find all this out?’ Dunmore said in amazement.
‘I’ve been working undercover for weeks, sir. I knew there was something suspicious about Paolo Cellini’s death and it all led back to him. You know what I’m like with leads.’
‘Yes, they always seem to go somewhere unlike Alan Saunders’.’ Dunmore got up and put another log onto the fire making the sparks shoot up the chimney.
‘I’d like to come back, sir,’ Jack said quickly before he lost his nerve. His body was tight with tension as he looked to see how the CS would react.
He turned to smile at Jack. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to say that for a long time.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘I shouldn’t have accepted your resignation, Jack, but we have a problem.’ He picked up his glass and sipped his drink. ‘Alan Saunders has got your job. I can’t have two DCIs in one division.’
Jack stared into the fire, feeling deflated. It was his own fault Alan had been given promotion.
‘But there could be a solution,’ Dunmore continued, finishing his drink and pouring himself another.
Jack looked at the CS and held his breath.
‘I’m telling you this in confidence. I think DCI Saunders could be transferred in the New Year, so I’ll need an experienced senior officer.’
Jack felt light-headed from holding his breath.
‘I’d like you to continue working under-cover on full pay,’ the chief super continued, and who knows, if you crack this case, there could even be a promotion. This is strictly off the record of course.’
Jack could hardly remember driving home he was so euphoric; from Chauffeur to DCI and perhaps more in a month! All he had to do was set up the fly-trap with the help of the SOCA, get all the information he could from Rico and try not to get killed.
CHAPTER 40
24th December 2012
Jack found it difficult to concentrate on family conversation; he kept thinking of the crate lying in the basement, full of cocaine. What if the gang discovered it before they could plan the fly-trap? He had to get Bianca to find out as much detail about them as she could, but, then, life would become dangerous for her and she’d had enough trouble in her life already. But he knew Rico Batas wouldn’t open up to him.
‘Dad?’
Jack turned to see Tom looking at him quizzically.
‘Do you want one?’
‘What?’
‘A drink.’
‘Sorry, just thinking of something I have to do.’
‘Not over Christmas, surely, Jack,’ Mary said, looking at him with disbelief.
Jack glanced at Lucy before saying, ‘No, not over Christmas, Mary. I’m on holiday. I’ll have a beer, Tom. Anyone else fancy a drink?’
‘I’ll have a G& T,’ Tom said.
Jack smiled at Lucy; their son had actually made a joke.
‘He heard someone ask for that on an old film we were watching,’ Mary said, smiling. ‘I’ll have a glass of white wine, Jack. Only one day left.’
Jack frowned at her. One day to what?
‘It’s Christmas day tomorrow, Dad, remember.’ Tom looked at him.
Jack groaned silently; he’d forgotten to buy any Christmas presents. he jumped up. ‘Just need to pop out. Back soon.’
They looked at him, startled as he hurried from the room.
He raced around the shops before they closed, buying anything he thought the family would like without even looking at the prices. Then just as he was paying for the presents, he glanced up and noticed a short, stocky man staring in one of the shop mirrors; Jack’s heart lurched; he’d seen this technique used hundreds of times to stop people noticing that they were being followed. He wondered how long the man had been tailing him. Why hadn’t he noticed him before? He was getting careless. Gathering up his gifts, he ran up one of the escalators. The man looked at him startled; he obviously expected him to walk out of the shop. Jack glanced back; there were lots of people on the escalator behind him; he’d never reach him. Jack raced around to the other side of the shop to the descending escalator and ran out of the back entrance of the shop and into the car-park. Sweat dripped down his face as he started the car; not from exertion, but fear: the man must have followed him home from the hospital. He reversed the car and suddenly saw ‘his tail’ coming out of the department store, laden with last-minute shopping; walking with him was a woman and two excited children. Jack started laughing. He was becoming paranoid. The man must have been startled because of the manic way he had raced up the escalator laden with presents. How could the gang link him to Rico? he thought, as he drove past Kentish Town Tube station.
The Prince of Wales Road was unusually light in traffic for a Christmas Eve so he managed to drive down it without the normal stops and starts. He turned into Grafton Road and drove up to their semi-detached house which Lucy and he had bought twenty years ago. Today, they wouldn’t be able to afford it. He put the Ford in the garage and picked up the presents. As he closed the garage door a light rain descended and he hurried towards the front door. It was Christmas and his family was waiting for him. He glanced through the lounge window; they were laughing at someone on the T.V. For a moment, as Jack stood in the drizzle, staring at them, everything seemed perfect.
He was so absorbed that he failed to notice a black saloon car parked on the opposite side of the road. A short, squat man sat in it, talking into his mobile. He watched Jack open the front door, wipe his feet and walk in.
CHAPTER 41
27th December 2012
The hospital reception area was festooned with Christmas lights and decorations; it was almost like a celebration of illness, Bianca thought as she walked past it towards Rico’s room. She was exhausted by stress and it was arriving in bucket-loads. A couple of nights ago, Jack had phoned her and told her to move out of her flat; she was the gang’s link to Rico. She was frightened by what he asked her to do; it was dangerous. But if she didn’t, Rico would rot in prison. She told Jack she’d stay with one of the band, but within minutes of cutting the call, she’d fallen into a deep sleep. Her taxi-driver told her on the way to the hospital that a car had followed them all the way from her flat. All she wanted to do was to be able to live without worrying if she or anyone she cared about was going to die. Was t
hat too much to ask? She instinctively looked up at the hospital ceiling as she traipsed down the familiar corridor. Rico was staring up at the ceiling too as Bianca opened the door to his room.
‘Hi, Rico. How’d you feel today? I forgot to bring you this.’ She put a gift on his bed for him as she sat down. He didn’t look at it.
‘Christmas – what a joke,’ Rico croaked. His throat was still painful. He tried to smile at her and winced with the pain. ‘You look tired, Bi.’
Bianca leaned over and kissed his cheek. ‘I am, but we’ve got to work fast. Jack Bradley, the undercover cop I was telling you about needs more info on the drug dealers. What the fuck were you doing with them, Rico? What were you thinking of?’
‘Mostly of you, Bi.’ Rico pressed his hand in hers.
Bianca sighed. ‘You should have kicked him in the nuts when you had a chance.’
Rico smiled at her, then leaned back in the bed – speaking was exhausting. ‘What am I going to do, Bi?’ He turned to look at the young PC outside his room. ‘He’s not going to stop them.’
‘I’ve told you. Jack is going to help us, Rico.’
‘Why?’ Rico snapped.
‘It’s not like that. He loves his wife and son.’
Rico made a dismissive sound. ‘Yeah, so did Ferdinand Marcos.’
‘If you help him, Rico, perhaps you could get out of prison in two or three years. If you don’t…’ Bianca shrugged her shoulders.
‘I don’t want you coming here again. It’s too dangerous.’ Rico tried to get out of the bed in agitation. There wasn’t any hope for him; he knew that they’d find him before the police did and he didn’t want her to be there.
Bianca pushed him back onto the bed. ‘And what would happen to you if I did?’
‘It doesn’t matter what happens to me, Bi. It’s only you I worry about.’
Bianca blinked rapidly. She was sitting beside a guy whose face looked like it had gone through a meat-mincer; a guy who thought a gang would kill him one night in the hospital and all he cared about was her. She’d never had that much love in her life before and suddenly she was sobbing. ‘Rico, why did I go with a bastard like Paolo?’
Rico touched her face; there was no answer to that question. Perhaps she was right; perhaps this man Bradley would help him. He decided to tell her what little information he had about the drug ring, then asked her to leave the UK and go far away, where they couldn’t find her.
She promised him she would, but she knew, even as she promised, she would never leave. Her life was in London now and nowhere else.
The car park outside the hospital was in shadows. Bianca shivered as she hurried towards her car. I must have a death wish, she thought as she got into the car; she was being followed and yet she was still going to see Rico. She was just about to start the engine when she heard a click behind her. She screamed as she saw a man’s face in the rear mirror.
‘Cut the screaming now!’ he shouted in her ear.
She stopped screaming immediately and started shaking.
‘I’m a reasonable man, just tell me where the fucking drugs are and you can go home and have a kip. How’s that sound?’
Bianca tried to stop shaking so she could speak. ‘Rico doesn’t know.’
He pressed something hard against her head and screamed again. ‘Stop wasting my fucking time and tell us where they are or I’ll shoot the top of your fucking head off!’
Tears poured down her face, soaking her coat. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’
‘I’m counting up to three, then say goodbye to your head.’
‘One! Two! Three!’
There was a sharp click, then nothing. Bianca was paralyzed with fear; she couldn’t feel her body. There was complete silence in the car. Then she heard another softer click. What was he doing?
‘Just testing, love,’ the man said in a quiet voice. ‘Okay, so Rico don’t know where that bastard Cellini hid the stuff, but your boyfriend do, don’t he?’
‘My boyfriend’s dead.’ She held her arms tightly around her body in case she fell apart.
‘The dodgy ex-copper, love. The one who took you home…remember him? He’s been nosing about Cellini’s place. But we been nosing an all. Nothing there, but he’s a bit of ferret, so here’s what you gonna do.’
CHAPTER 42
31st December 2012
Angelica had been taken into police custody after they had taken a statement from Rico Batas of his account of the events leading to him being assaulted. Jack’s old team worked through the entire database of tires and compared them with another database to determine the brand and model. They passed the results to the Forensic team who analyzed them on a powerful computer with Autodesk Revit software. All the tests confirmed that the tires had belonged to a vehicle owned by Angelica Logan. Other members of the team studied a database of garages in London; they eventually found a garage that had worked on the Lexus the day after the Albanian boy had been hit. The repairs were consistent with the vehicle hitting something or someone at high speed. But the most conclusive forensic evidence of all were the spots of blood on the underside of the car. Forensics studied a slide of Ramiz Agani’s blood and compared it to a slide from the blood spots on the car and discovered they were a perfect match.
Alan Saunders was ecstatic; he had all the evidence he needed to charge Angelica Logan with first-degree vehicular manslaughter and attempted murder. But when she was brought into the police station in a completely disorientated state, the custody sergeant had immediately called a police surgeon and Alan Saunders wasn’t allowed near her. When she was sent to a medium secure psychiatric unit to be medically assessed, DCI Saunders knew he wouldn’t be able to charge her with either crime if she was declared unfit to stand trial. He was incandescent with rage. She’d wriggled out of her sentence, he’d shouted to Jamila, by claiming she had mental-health problems. All criminals had to do these days was plead insanity and they could get off with murder! Where would it stop? After listening to him ranting for hours, Jamila thought she’d have to ask the chief super for a transfer; she really couldn’t work with such a bigoted man.
She rang Jack to tell him what had happened but he was more interested in informing her about the fly-trap operation they were planning in two days’ time. He wanted her to go to the chief super’s room for a briefing tomorrow. Jamila felt her heart racing; the operation was going to be dangerous, but it was an opportunity to prove that she was a good officer. She was suddenly bumped back to earth when he told her that she wasn’t experienced enough to be on the front-line of the op; he wanted her as back-up. How could she get promotion if she wasn’t given any opportunities? He knew that she was one of the best shots in the Met.
CHAPTER 43
2nd January 2013
Jack had made an enormous effort over Christmas to seem bright and cheerful and Lucy’s parents had been deceived, thinking that whatever was worrying him had now been resolved, but Lucy and Tom knew it hadn’t. Tom came up to him when they were alone to ask what was happening. He wasn’t a child any more he told them. Jack suppressed a smile, but Tom did look mature at that moment. How could he be prepared if something went wrong, he asked his father, if he had to live with so much uncer-tainty? In that moment, Jack realized that Tom had lived with far too much uncertainty since Lucy’s illness. When Colin and Mary had gone out for a walk, the three of them went into the study to talk.
Jack looked at Lucy. ‘I think he’s mature enough to cope, don’t you?’
She blinked once.
Tom sat tensely on his chair as his father spoke.
‘I’m working undercover on a drug-smuggling case. I found out where one of the dealers has hidden a stash of drugs. Tonight, we’re going to catch the gang. That’s it in a nutshell, Tom.’
Tom’s eyes were enormous as he looked at Jack. ‘Will it be as dangerous as the last drugs op?’
‘I’ll be working with the same SCD7 team I worked with before. You know how good they are.�
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‘Is Jamila going with you?’
Jack knew he was trying to make the work more personal; he liked her. ‘No, she’s not experienced enough yet, but she’ll be one of the back-up team.’
While Jack was speaking Lucy was typing. They looked at her laptop.
yr dad is a great dci trust him i do
Jack smiled at Lucy. ‘Thanks, Luc.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Tom asked; his voice tight with tension.
Jack and Lucy knew exactly what he was thinking. He could lose both parents.
‘You know I can’t tell you the details, but remember how many ops I’ve done. I never take unnecessary risks, Tom. I bet I’ll be home before you come back from your Batman film.’
how much Lucy typed
‘A grand,’ Jack said, smiling at her.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Tom spoke in a flat voice.
Jack looked at his vulnerable son and wanted to hug him, but he knew that if he did, Tom would break down and he wanted him to be strong.
‘You can’t let your grandparents think that’s something’s wrong, Tom. I’m relying on you, remember.’
‘Hello. Where is everyone?’ Mary called out from the hallway. They heard the front door close.
‘Are you ready, Tom?’ Colin shouted. ‘We don’t want to be late.’
‘He’s coming, Colin,’ Jack called back, smiling reassuringly at his son.
‘Be careful, Dad. I can buy a lot of Batman books and games with a grand.’
‘No chance,’ Jack said, getting up and ruffling his son’s hair. ‘Now get going.’
Jack waved to Colin and Tom from the lounge window, thinking about the night ahead. He’d been liaising with his friend and colleague Bob Cooper, the Head of the SCD7 since Jack had got the go-ahead from the chief super. Some of the team would be waiting at the pub. The rest of them would be entering Palladian Mansions via the tradesman’s entrance at the back. Both men had been worried by the lack of time they’d had to plan the op, but they didn’t have a choice; it was too dangerous for Bianca and Rico if they didn’t move tonight.
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