Underdogs

by Jack Fiske

  “Hey!” she protested.

  “Sorry! I’m sorry,” Jim apologised, letting go when he saw the look of alarm on her face.

  “Where’s the bus station?”

  The woman pointed down the road and Jim could see a single-decker pulling out from a side turning.

  “Thanks,” he said, and broke into a run.

  “How far?” he asked, as he neared the turning.

  “Fifty yards, if that,” Mark replied.

  Heads were turning as Jim ran down the road and he slowed to a jog and then to a fast walk. He didn’t want to attract his target’s attention.

  “You’re nearly there,” Mark’s voice said in his ear. “Straight ahead. You must be able to see them by now.”

  The bus station wasn’t crowded, but there were enough people that Jim had to weave from left to right as he made his way forward. He scanned the faces of the people around him, but no one stood out.

  “Speak to me,” Jim demanded down the phone.

  “You’re right on top of them,” Mark said.

  Jim let the phone drop from his ear and stood looking around. There were twenty, maybe thirty people in the immediate area. Jim started to go through them one by one. The old lady with the suitcase – no. The couple with the pushchair – no. The three teenagers with a skateboard – no. The good looking woman getting something out of the lockers? The lockers. That was it!

  “Are they still moving?” he asked.

  “No,” Mark replied. “I don’t know how accurate this thing is, but I’d say that there is no more than ten yards between you and the other tracking unit.”

  Jim walked forwards until his way was blocked by the row of steel lockers. “How much now?”

  “Five yards?” Mark replied.

  Jim rushed to the end of the row and looked down the other side. There was no one there apart from a couple with a young baby, a boy in school uniform and an elderly man with a walking stick. He took a few steps forward.

  “What about now?” he asked.

  “Can’t tell the two apart,” Mark said. “You’re both in the same place.”

  Jim kept on walking and turned round so that he could take in as many faces as possible. He didn’t recognise any. Not that he expected to. There were too many people. It could have been any one of them. His heart sank. The unit had been left in one of the lockers and he’d missed it by a matter of seconds. Whoever had left it must still be in the bus station, but his chances of spotting them were virtually non-existent. Despite this, he found a bench and sat down to watch people passing by in case he should strike lucky, but no one stood out from the crowd. After a few minutes he gave up and started to retrace his steps to the car park.

  The phone rang in his hand. Mark had hung up on him and then redialled.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  “Sorry,” Jim said. “I’ve lost them. They’ve left the thing in a locker at the bus station. If I’d been here a minute earlier, I’d have got them.”

  He could hear Mark’s frustration at the other end.

  “How’s Stephen?” he asked, wondering how he’d take the news.

  “I’ll need to tell him,” Mark replied. “He’s in the other room. He’s on to something with the phone number that he’s been working on. He’s hooked up to the phone company’s mainframe on another line.”

  “Don’t interrupt him,” Jim said. “We can break the news to him when he’s finished. Right now, I’m going to pick up the car and get down to the marina to see what’s there. Have you still got a record of where the tracker has been?”

  “Yes I do,” Mark confirmed.

  “Maybe someone’s still there,” Jim said, trying to convince himself that they might be.

  It was twenty minutes later when he arrived at the marina and Jim wasn’t hopeful. There were plenty of boats, but the advantage of using a boat was that it was easy to move.

  He parked the car next to a group of buildings which housed the marina offices and a small shop that sold groceries and marine equipment. There were one or two people going about their normal business – restocking with food, filling up with water, calling at the office, but the place wasn’t busy.

  Jim dialled Mark again.

  “I’m here,” he said, when Mark answered. “Where do I go?”

  Back at the office, Mark still had the tracker that lay in Jim’s pocket marked on the PC in front of him and he was now familiar enough with the software, that he could switch screens to show where the other GPS unit had been over the course of the last two hours.

  “Go down to the water,” Mark suggested. “Then I can tell you how far away you are and which direction.”

  There were parking bays alongside the boats that lined the water’s edge and Jim drove towards them. If the kidnappers were still here, he didn’t want to be seen walking around in the open.

  “Now where?” he asked.

  “I would say about a hundred and fifty yards east of where you are now.”

  Jim turned left and drove slowly along the tarmac, putting the sun visor down as he did so, peering at the boats which passed on his right. These varied in size from luxury cruisers to small pleasure craft. Most were unoccupied, but one or two had people on deck and there were two boats out in open water beyond them, either arriving or just leaving.

  After eighty or ninety yards, the line of boats stopped and the permanent moorings with their wooden decking, gave way to a stretch of concrete quay, where just two boats swung at the end of their ropes.

  “Keep going,” Mark said in his ear. Jim drove on – past the second boat and on for another thirty yards before Mark said, “You’re there – they should be about twenty yards in front of you.”

  Jim looked ahead. There was nothing there, apart from an empty stretch of concrete and three unoccupied moorings. He pulled the car to one side, put the handbrake on and stepped out to have a look. A few pieces of rubbish floated on the water next to the mooring: an empty coke can, a few cigarette butts and a small patch of oil that made a rainbow of colours on the water. Whoever had been there had gone.

  A middle aged couple dressed in shorts and sandals passed, going back to one of the nearest boats and Jim hurried to speak to them.

  “Excuse me?”

  The couple stopped.

  “You didn’t see a boat here about an hour ago did you?”

  The man put his shopping bag down for a moment. “No, I’m sorry. We’ve only been here for fifteen or twenty minutes ourselves. Have you missed someone?”

  “Afraid so. It looks like I got here too late.”

  “Oh that’s a shame,” the woman replied sympathetically. “Maybe we can get them on the radio for you or give you a lift?”

  Despite the situation, Jim smiled – grateful to come across someone who was kind enough to offer their help.

  “Thanks. That’s kind of you, but I couldn’t put you to that trouble. Anyway, I’m hoping I’ll be able to catch up with them later.”

  The couple, they explained, were sailing the length of the south coast and had only put into the marina to pick up some groceries and to top up with water. These moorings, they said, were reserved for that purpose. If you were staying for any more than an hour or two, you had to arrange a permanent mooring and pay at the office.

  As they talked, one of the boats that had been out in open water slid into the vacant space beside them and a young girl jumped from the deck to the concrete below, a line in her hand.

  Jim thanked the couple and hurried back to the car. He’d left the phone on the dashboard and as he slid behind the wheel, he pressed it to his ear.

  “What’s happening?” Mark almost shouted.

  “Sorry,” Jim replied. “They’re not here.”

  “Are you alright?” Mark said, his tone part anger, part concern.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Well you should bloody well stay on the phone,” Mark said, the anger winning. “What am I supposed to think when I su
ddenly get silence? Another few minutes and I was going to call the police.”

  Jim apologised. Mark was right; it was bloody stupid of him. He was too busy thinking of Susan and Millie and how on earth he could find them if this was a dead end. At the other end of the phone Mark calmed down a little.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  Jim looked at the empty mooring and the open water beyond. It was a good question. What was he going to do now?

  FIFTEEN

  Armstrong turned his pipe upside down and tapped it firmly on the side of the ashtray. A small puff of ash found its way onto the desk beside him and he tutted, before sweeping it off with the flat of his hand.

  The room was full. Archie and Andy Veitch-Moir sat at the back. Armstrong had apparently drafted in more help, because seven other agents sat in front of them waiting for instructions. Armstrong wasn’t happy. It was late morning by the time Archie and Andy had got back to the office and the operations room was in turmoil. The team had lost the signal from their tracking unit twenty minutes earlier and there was still no sign of whoever had picked up the equipment in the woods. Two hours later, things were no better. They had just finished a full debrief and it was clear they were no nearer to recovering the missing detector unit, no nearer to knowing where Walker and Quinn were holed up and no nearer to finding Jim Turner’s wife and daughter. In fact the only good news had come by luck, not from anything that the team had done. They knew from the forensics team in Cadnam that the courier had switched from the motorbike to a mountain bike in the depths of the woods and purely by good fortune, they’d had a report from one of the PCs on the ground that someone had seen a mountain bike being loaded into the back of a black Volvo in the centre of Cadnam. Nearly everyone within a fifty mile radius behind the wheel of a black Volvo had been stopped and questioned in the last two hours, but evidently not the black Volvo that they were interested in.

  Armstrong leant back on the edge of his desk and surveyed the notes that had been put up on the flipchart beside him, before he turned to the group.

  “Right. This is how we’ll break it down. Smith and Watson, I want you to go down to Southampton and see if you can track down this man McArthur who Garrett was going to meet. If possible, I want him picked up. I don’t care if we’re supposed to be working with them. I need to know what they’re up to.

  “Dennis and Everett, I want you to team up with Trent and O’Hara in Ringwood. I want someone with O’Hara all the time and I mean ALL the time. If he’s got his own agenda, I want you right next to him so that we’re in control.”

  Armstrong turned to one of the two women in the room.

  “Jane, I want to know what Musa was doing when he visited the bank this morning. Get down there with a Section 29 notice and have a word with someone in authority. If you need a Court Production Order, speak to Claire and she’ll organise it. I don’t want it dragging on though, if we do need a court order, I want it sorted today, not tomorrow morning.”

  That left two other agents, together with Archie and Andy. Armstrong nodded in Andy’s direction.

  “Andy, go home and get some sleep. You look as if you need it. Simon, you can take over in the ops room. Archie, I want you to go with the other two down to Ringwood. You know Turner well. Go and have a chat with him. Make sure we know everything he knows and that he’s not keeping anything back from us.”

  Armstrong’s eyes roamed over the heads of the people in front of him. “Who have I missed?”

  The other woman in the room raised her hand.

  “Katie, that means you’re in the ops room as well. We need to coordinate our efforts with the local police. I want you and Simon to double check every report we’ve had on black Volvos and I want a regular update from Cadnam. Let’s see if they’ve come up with anything else since we’ve been in here.”

  Armstrong slid off the desk and taking their cue from him, everyone got to their feet and filed out.

  Dennis Ness, the most senior there apart from Armstrong himself, was waiting for Archie outside.

  “Archie, do you want to come down with us? One of us can go with you to interview Turner if you like, or would you prefer to do it alone?”

  Archie didn’t want Ness tagging along, but then he didn’t want to give the impression that he wasn’t going to do the interview strictly by the book.

  “I don’t mind Dennis. I’m going to drive down myself, but if you want to tag along when I see Jim Turner, that’s fine. Mind you, Jim and I go back a long way. He’s more likely to tell me everything if I’m on my own than if we go mob handed.”

  Ness nodded thoughtfully. “O.k. I’ll leave it to you then. Meet up with us afterwards and we’ll compare notes.”

  Archie had no problem with that and he agreed to phone Ness once he got to Ringwood. Ness hurried after his partner and Archie followed them downstairs. He wanted to pick up a couple of things before he left. He checked his watch – one-forty. He should be able to get away by two. It should take about two hours in the car so he’d be there by four. He could phone Jim on the way. Better phone Harriet he thought. Let her know she’d be on her own again tonight.

  On the way out, Archie made two stops; one to pick up his copy of the case file and the other to pick up his gun from the armoury.

  The armoury, housed in the basement of the building next door, was deserted apart from the armourer, who was sitting in his office surrounded by paperwork. Archie tapped on the security window with his keys and the man turned round, looking as if he were glad of an excuse for a break. Archie produced his i.d. card and the armourer pressed the button on the edge of his desk which released the steel gate at the entrance. Beyond it, the firing range stretched for fifty metres or more, with firing positions on the left and banks of lockers to the right. Halfway along was a locker with Archie’s name on it and he produced a small key, turned it in the lock and let the door swing open. Inside was a revolver, three boxes of shells, a leather shoulder holster and an assortment of cleaning materials. The gun looked odd on its own. There were normally a pair, but the missing gun had already gone to Ringwood ahead of him. Archie picked up the holster and taking off his jacket, he put it on, letting it hang comfortably below his left arm. Unlike its partner, this gun was well worn and part of the trigger guard and the front sight had been filed away. Archie slipped it into the holster, where its weight gave him a sense of reassurance. He picked up a box of shells and dropped them into his briefcase.

  When he got back to the gate, the Armourer acknowledged him with a wave of his hand, buzzed him through and turned back to his papers.

  Quinn and Bryant got back to Henson’s Farm just after three. and they pulled into the yard, parking next to Walker’s BMW. As Quinn switched off the engine, the door to the farmhouse was thrown open and Walker himself stepped out to meet them, a look of thunder on his face.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, glaring at Quinn. “We were expecting you over an hour ago.”

  Quinn looked at Bryant for support.

  “We stopped for something to eat on the way.”

  He couldn’t see why Walker was so concerned. They’d phoned him as arranged once they’d handed the box over in Cadnam, and again to let him know they were on their way back. True, there had been the matter of the police helicopter, but Bryant had lost that completely before they left.

  “Why couldn’t I reach you on the bloody phone?” Walker demanded.

  Quinn produced the phone and saw that it was switched off.

  “I must have switched it off boss.”

  Walker let out a string of expletives that left Quinn in no doubt as to what he thought of him.

  “Get inside. Both of you. We need to talk.”

  Quinn and Bryant hurried into the farmhouse. Clarke and Spencer were already there, waiting in the lounge, listening to a police band radio that stood on the table between them. Clarke looked slightly better than when Quinn had last seen him. His face was badly swollen
, but someone had attended to the injury and there was a thick strip of sticking plaster across the bridge of his nose.

  “Who’s watching the annexe?” Quinn asked.

  “No one,” Walker snarled. “We were just deciding how we’re going to get rid of them. Clarke, you get back over there and keep an eye on things.”

  Clarke got to his feet and hurried out, looking as if he was glad to get away. Walker took a deep breath in an effort to calm down and then continued less aggressively.

  “Have you seen any police?”

  “No,” Quinn and Bryant both said in unison.

  Walker nodded towards the radio. “You’re all over the police band. They’ve got a description of that bloody car and they even know there’s a bike in the back of it.”

  Bryant looked worried. “Shit, that means . . . .”

  “Yes, shit!” Walker interrupted. “We’ll be bloody lucky if we don’t have police banging on the door in the next ten minutes. If you were spotted on the way back and followed, then we’ve had it.”

  Quinn looked worried himself. His Irish accent was more pronounced when he was under pressure.

  “How could they? I mean, we’d thrown them off completely.”

  “Someone in Cadnam saw Tony putting his bike in the car,” Spencer explained. “We’ve been listening to reports for the last two hours. They’ve been stopping every black Volvo they could find and gradually widening the search.”

  “Bloody hell,” Bryant said. “We’ll need to get it out of here.”

  Walker snorted. “Like hell we will. That thing’s not going anywhere near a public road. In fact get it out of sight in one of the outbuildings now. If it’s locked up, then at least it can’t be spotted from the air.”

  Quinn produced the car keys and took a pace towards the door.

  “Not you,” Walker barked. “Spencer, you go.”

  Quinn tossed the keys to Spencer, who hurried to do as instructed.