by Graham Smith
Chapter 6
After her fruitless search, Samantha had cuddled into Kyle’s back and pulled the thin sheet over herself. Sleep hadn’t come easy to her as she fretted and worried about their fate.
She was more worried about her brother than herself. He hated being away from home. He was uncomfortable visiting friends and he even got homesick when they went on holiday. If they had to stay in this room for any length of time, she knew he would suffer greatly. Without a window and with no watch between them, there was no way to measure time and when they awoke they had no idea whether it was early or late morning.
‘Can we have Coco Pops for breakfast?’
Samantha smiled in spite of herself. Kyle was treating their imprisonment as a holiday. ‘We’ll have to wait and see what they bring us.’
‘Why don’t we bang on the door and shout to them? Tell them we’re hungry?’
‘I don’t know what time it is. It might be the middle of the night. I don’t think it will be a very good idea to make the men cross.’
‘But I’m hungry and I want to see Mummy.’
Samantha faked a smile and admonished him with a wagging finger. ‘You’re always hungry. You eat more than I do.’
A metallic clatter interrupted them and they shrank back, hugging each other tight. Samantha identified the sounds as bolts being drawn back and a key rotating the tumblers inside a lock.
The bedroom door opened to reveal the man in the Elvis mask. He was holding a tray bearing a carton of orange juice, two plastic glasses and a pile of buttered toast.
Making sure he kept himself between them and the door he set the tray on the floor and then faced them. ‘You are going to be here for a few days at most. If you’re good, then we won’t harm you. If you’re not good, then we will punish you. Do you understand?’
Samantha nodded and held a crying Kyle closer to her body.
‘Come with me for a minute, lass.’
When Samantha didn’t move, he crooked his finger at her. ‘You’re not exactly being good, are you? I’m not gonna hurt you. I’ve just got something you need to see.’
‘You make a start on the toast, Kyle. I’ll be back in a minute.’ Samantha tried to reassure her brother, but she was petrified of being raped by the masked man.
Surely that was what he wanted her for. The one wearing the Blair mask was a definite perv. She’d felt his hands grabbing her backside and boobs when he led them from the van last night.
‘Don’t even think of trying to escape, ’cause we’ve still got the boy.’ Elvis locked the door and pocketed the key.
This is it. They’re going to rape me now.
Trudging down the stairs in front of her captor, Samantha tried to push her plight to the back of her mind. She was no virgin and only a few months ago had allowed a drunken boyfriend to make love to her when she was afraid to say no. If she didn’t fight with the men then perhaps it wouldn’t be much worse than that ordeal.
The house had a decayed feel to it, as if it had been neglected by its owner for many years. Mould adorned the top of skirting boards, the wallpaper was decades out of date and there was a damp fusty smell in every room.
Samantha tried to look out of the windows to see if she could spot a local landmark but all the curtains were pulled to. Elvis was hot on her heels, uttering one-word directions until they were in a small downstairs room.
The room held one chair and a desk with a laptop. Sprouting from the side of the laptop was a mouse and what she recognised as a dongle to connect the laptop to the Internet.
At Elvis’s command, she sat in front of the laptop and clicked play to activate the video on the screen.
‘Pay attention. This is what will happen to you if you don’t do as we say.’
The blood drained from Samantha’s face as she watched the forty-five second video.
‘Oh my God, no.’ Samantha propelled herself back from the laptop until she was tight against the wall. ‘Please no, I’ll do anything you want, don’t do that to us. I beg you. Please. Anything you say, I’ll do.’
‘Now that I’ve got your attention I want you to listen very carefully. If you try to escape, you’ll star in the next video. If you don’t do as we say, you’ll star in the next video. You hold the power of decision.’ He paused and stared at Samantha.
‘We’ll be good. I promise. You won’t hear a peep from us. We’ll do whatever you say.’
‘Good. Now that we’re on the same page you can go back upstairs. There are a few games up there for the PS2 to keep you amused; the telly is already tuned to the right channel. We don’t mean you any harm so long as you do as you’re told.’
Returning back to her prison, Samantha found Kyle curled up in a ball with silent tears running from his one visible eye. When she called his name he leapt up and ran to her flinging his arms around her waist and squeezing her tight.
‘I was scared, Sam. I thought those nasty men were going to do something to you. I didn’t know if you were coming back.’
Swallowing back an honest answer, Samantha pried her brother loose and offered him a piece of toast.
‘Don’t be silly. They are looking after us for a few days and if we’re good we can play video games all day.’ A smile was forced onto her lips. ‘Now, who said they were hungry?’
* * *
Once the girl was locked back in the bedroom, Marshall pulled off the Elvis mask and hung it on the door handle.
Lighting a cigarette, he walked through the front door, admiring the sight of Skiddaw bathed in morning sunlight. Sheep munching at the tough hill grass dotted its flanks.
Not keen on hill-walking or hiking, he still enjoyed looking at scenery and had spent many a weekend in the lakes with his ex-wife. The only blots on the landscape he could see other than the farm buildings were the dry stone dykes on the lower hills and the TV mast at Caldbeck.
A short saunter across the yard and he pulled back the shed door to find Alker on his back underneath a small tractor. Sparks were flying in an orange arc as he ground away serial numbers. Williams and Johnstone were at work replacing the tin tags on small power tools with ones they had fabricated themselves.
‘How you getting on?’
‘Like he said last night, we’ll finish this lot today. When they drop off tonight’s load they can take this lot away with them.’
‘Make sure that you get them done and ready to load then. We don’t want them here any longer than they need to be.’
As Marshall left to return to the house, Johnstone turned to Williams. ‘He doesn’t want them here any length of time yet we have to unload all the stolen stuff. We work our arses off while he spends all day on that laptop. He’s in the warm drinking coffee and we’re covering stolen goods with our fingerprints.’
‘Quit moaning, will you? You knew what the deal was when you signed up. He’s the one who knows where the stuff is available and how to get it. Without him we’d be wasting our time trying to rob places which have nowt worth taking.’
Chapter 7
The pair of thieves sneaked in through the back door, entering the required code into the panel beside the door before the alarm announced their presence. They made their way through the building to the manager’s office, the leader guiding the way using familiarity instead of light.
The leader opened a desk drawer and pulled out a key that opened the safe cabinet and then bent down and entered a code into the digital lock on the internal strongbox.
The three lights flashed red as the code was entered and then turned green as the last digit was pressed. Turning the handle, the leader opened the strongbox and removed all the cash and stuffed it into a cloth money bag, which was then secreted into a poacher’s pocket of the accomplice’s wax jacket.
Closing the strongbox and locking the safe cabinet, the leader took the accomplice’s arm and guided him out the way they had came, only pausing to reset the building’s alarm before exiting and locking the door behind them.
Each breathed a sigh
of relief before a noise startled them both. Shrinking into the shadows on either side of the door, they held their breath expecting a police torch to shine into their eyes at any moment and a stern voice to speak. All they heard was the sound of a zip being pulled down and the sounds of running water as a man relieved himself, his contented sigh interspersed by hiccups. The smell of alcohol as strong as the caustic tang of ammonia.
The accomplice pointed in the opposite direction to the man. They walked away from him, taking care to make as little noise as possible. They were in luck, the man was so wasted, they could have been leading a brass band and still he would have been unaware of their presence.
Chapter 8
Easter Monday
Campbell was in the first official day in at his new station and already he was having doubts about his transfer. The new police station at Durranhill was located in the middle of an industrial estate and the building looked like the back end of a grandstand. He believed police stations should be cold unedifying buildings, steeped in history. Their imposing structures ought to strike fear into criminals, not have them admiring the architecture. Modernity was always going to win out when the new station was built as a replacement for the old one, which had been submerged along with large sections of the city, in the January floods of 2005.
Monday mornings were never his favourite and this would be his first real meeting with the officers who would be in his new team. Plus, he had the outgoing DI showing him the area he would be covering, giving him a rundown on where the local stations were all located.
He’d begun the morning with an extra long shower, followed by three cups of coffee. His stomach had been too knotted with tension to allow him the luxury of breakfast, and he’d nicked himself twice with the razor. Hardly the first impression he wanted to give his new team. All cut up and rumbling guts.
‘Good morning all.’ DCI Peter Grantham entered the room with Campbell trailing behind him.
Grantham waited a moment until all the eyes in the room were on him. ‘I’d like you all to welcome DI Campbell here who has just joined us from Strathclyde force. He’s the person who helped catch the muscle behind the protection gang that has been plaguing small shops and businesses. You may not know this yet, but we managed to roll one of them and he’s given us solid leads on the gang behind a lot of protection rackets in the county. So well done to him.’
A smattering of applause rang round the room, but as there were only five people to clap, the noise was more embarrassing than deafening. Campbell raised his hand in acknowledgment and said that he looked forward to working with a new team.
Nodding at Evans, Grantham held up a sheaf of papers. ‘I’ll let you make all the formal introductions later, Harry; I have some cases for you. Firstly, there have been three break-ins into licensed premises in the last two days which appear to be inside jobs, with a total of just over thirteen thousand pounds stolen. So either a crime syndicate is forcing people to help them or there’s a common factor between the pubs and nightspots that’ve been burgled.’
‘Who’s been done over?’ Evans was slumped in a chair opposite his standing DCI, his disrespect obvious.
‘Jumpers in Silloth, the Black Horse in Bowness-on-Windermere and Beenies in Carlisle. Plod and local CID have been round, but I think they are all connected and I want you to look into it.’
‘You mentioned cases, sir?’
Campbell looked across at the new speaker. As she was the only female in the room he didn’t need to be a detective to work out that she must be DC Lauren Phillips.
He’d been given a full briefing on the team he would lead. The mandate simple, he was to bring order to the chaos of Evans’s reign, to end their renegade ways.
It was Lauren who puzzled him most. According to the files he’d read, she was a brazen exhibitionist. Shameless in her dress sense, she used her femininity as a weapon of mass distraction. In his experience, most female officers dressed to hide their curves not emphasise them. Their biggest enemy, speculation as to whose bed they were sharing.
Her pretty face and wavy blonde hair didn’t fill him with confidence. The cleavage she was showing would be a distraction. She’d be nice to have around in a decorative way, but would she be any use to him?
Tuning back into the meeting, he listened to Grantham’s report.
‘Farm vehicles such as quad bikes, tractors and the like have been going walkabout from all over the county again. Lots of hand-held power tools are also being taken at the same time.’
‘So much for the SmartWater campaign.’
‘That’s enough thank you, DC Phillips.’ DCI Grantham struggled to look at her face as he snapped at her. ‘Not one of the farms affected has the SmartWater technology.’
‘Any other cases, sir?’ This from the obese man wedged in front of two computers. Again Campbell knew his name without being told. This would be DS Neil Chisholm; the file Campbell had read on his team stated Chisholm was a computer genius who researched details and did all the cross checks necessary to compile evidence.
‘Yes, we’ve had ten complaints of a man and woman conning car dealers out of money while actually paying them. They count out the cash to them in fifty-pound notes and the dealers agree to the value, yet when they cash up at the end of the day, they’ve all been short by two thousand pounds.’
Campbell saw the remaining member of his team raise a hand, the too-big suit jacket rucking at his elbow. ‘I’d like to look into that, sir.’
‘Thank you, DC Bhaki. DI Evans will allocate you tasks as he sees fit.’
Evans scowled at Grantham. ‘Are there any decent cases, sir? All we have so far are thefts and a few second-hand car dealers getting ripped off. It’s hardly a call for the specialist team we have here.’
‘I trust you are not hoping a murder or kidnap investigation comes our way, Quasi?’
‘Of course not, sir, but I was hoping for something juicier than other peoples cast offs. I was hoping for one last big case before… you know?’
‘The more mundane the better if you ask me; now get cracking and stop complaining that we do not have any serious crimes to investigate.’ Grantham walked towards the door and then turned with a final comment. ‘Quasi, try not to piss the locals off too much. I don’t want you riding roughshod over everybody and getting their collective backs up just for the hell of it.’
‘Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.’
When Grantham left, Evans glared at the team, ‘If I hear any of you lot calling me Quasi, I’ll use your guts for a skipping rope.’ Receiving muted replies he got a pen from the tray below the whiteboard on the tiny room’s back wall and wrote up the three case headings: ‘Pubs’, ‘Farms’ and ‘Cash Con’.
Under the headings Pubs and Farms he wrote DS Chisholm, DC Phillip’s name went under ‘Farms’ and he added DC Bhaki to the third category of ‘Cash Con’.
‘Chisholm, I want you to contact the guys in the CCTV control rooms. We need any footage that covers the properties that have been robbed. Bhaki, go over all the statements from the robberies and get me the gist of each one. Me and Campbell are gonna visit them. I don’t want to be asking questions plod has already got the answers to and making myself look like a twat. When you’ve done that, you can crack on with the garages. Lauren, find out what’s been stolen from the various farms. Also speak with crime prevention or whatever it’s called this week and find out if the farms who’ve been done over had been offered SmartWater, and if not, why not. Bhaki, you find out if there’s a pattern with these garages that’ve allegedly been ripped off.’ Evans looked around the room. ‘Questions?’
Campbell watched with interest as the team reacted to their orders. He needed to see them working to assess their capabilities.
‘Is there any connection with the ownership of the garages?’ Bhaki was the first to lead the questioning.
‘None as far as I know, but check it out anyway.’
‘Same question for the pubs and clubs,
sir.’
‘The last I heard Jeremy Cussiter owned Jumpers at Silloth and Pete Mitchers owns Beenies.
‘What about the Black Horse?’
‘That’s where me and DI Jock McJock are going. It’s owned by the Leightons now. Fat Larry runs it for them.’
Evans looked around the room waiting for more questions. Receiving none he reached for his jacket. ‘I’ll call in about lunchtime, so have some answers for me.’
As Campbell followed Evans, he was already working out what changes he would make to the team. Evans seemed to rule the roost with a combination of threats and disregard for his superiors.
‘We’ll hit Beenies first, mara; they do a breakfast which’ll set us up for the day.’
When they left the station, Evans led the way to his car – a BMW M3, which he claimed to have inherited from Traffic. The back was littered with case files, jackets and a pair of pizza boxes, while the front seemed to have had a bucket of ash sprinkled on any surface not buried beneath empty cigarette packets. The smell of stale tar and decaying food spurred Campbell’s already knotted stomach to new levels of disquiet.
Parking in a public car park and neglecting to pay for a ticket, Evans started walking up Botchergate to where Beenies was located. The sun was shining, although a cool wind surged between the sandstone buildings.
A council worker pushed a handcart along the street picking up the detritus from the previous evening’s revelry. Even a Sunday night down Botchergate was raucous and most mornings there was a sea of chip papers, half-eaten kebabs and pizza littering the pavements or swirling in the wind that always blew down from the Crescent.
It seemed to Campbell every third person they met on the short walk to the disco-pub knew Evans, as he was greeted with a cheery good morning or Evans would make an enquiry after a family member of the people he passed.
When they walked into Beenies, his amazement was compounded further as Evans walked right up to the counter, engaged the barmaid in a conversation about her boyfriend’s mother and then asked for two full English, two pints and a meeting with Helen Salter, who Campbell presumed was either the manager or a CHIS – confidential human intelligence source – who worked there.