There was no reply. He tried again louder.
‘Mr North, we’ve had the phone signals cut off from this mast. Your weapon won’t work. The game is over.’
After a short silence North shouted back.
‘Do you think isolating this mast will make any difference, Chief Superintendent? There are a hundred of these masts in London, and my signal has the strength to reach quite a few of them from here. You’d better call the Mayor, Chief Superintendent. I want to walk out of here and I want my money. Call him. He’s got five minutes left.’
Palmer looked at Gheeta.
‘Is that right? Can his signal reach the other masts?’
‘Depends on his power source, guv. If the battery in his box is big enough…’
‘He’s played his trump card then, hasn’t he? But he’s also signed his own death warrant.’
He turned to the SFO in charge.
‘Use the same procedure as for a terrorist with a suicide belt: aim for the head. He’s got to go out like a light. Wait for my signal; I’ll give a nod. I’m going over to try and distract him. When I see he’s not got his finger on the box, I’ll give the nod and you take him out, okay?’
The firearms officer nodded and aimed his weapon. Palmer stood ready to walk over to the base of the water tower. Gheeta caught his arm and whispered.
‘I have an idea, guv. I talked it through with the engineer at Global Technologies, which is North’s mobile network. Keep him talking as long as you can.’
She pressed in a number on her phone and turned out of earshot.
Palmer responded to her request.
‘You’re not getting any money, Mr North, and you’ve got two choices of getting out of here. Come down now and walk out in handcuffs, or try and use your little box of tricks and go out in a body bag. There are three sniper rifles trained on you right now.’
‘Do you think that worries me, Superintendent? Do you really? If I go then an awful lot of people go with me.’
He held up his box of death.
‘I’ve wired this into the networks; one little press on the switch and thousands of people will answer their phones and die. The networks don’t discriminate between people, Superintendent. Could be quite a lot of the rich and powerful in amongst that lot; MPs, royalty, maybe even members of your own family. Think of that, eh? Call the Mayor. He only has three minutes now.’
Palmer was unsure what to do. If the signal was going to be picked up through other masts, then there was nothing he could do. People would die.
‘It’s Chief Superintendent, and I’ve got the Mayor on the phone right now. He’s doing his best. Where is the money to be wired to?’
North was getting angry.
‘Stop playing games with me Chief Superintendent. The Mayor has all the details. You’re just stalling me.’
Gheeta moved close and whispered urgently into Palmer’s ear.
‘One more call, guv. For God’s sake, don’t let him press the button yet.’
Palmer had no idea what she was doing as she keyed in another number and turned to be out of sight and earshot of North, but he knew he could trust her one hundred percent to know what she was doing.
‘Where’s your mate Randall then?’
Palmer didn’t want to bring Randall up now, but couldn’t think of another way of further stalling North. He noticed Sergeant Singh turn her attention to what he’d just said, and then turn back again to continue on the mobile.
North was silent for a moment. So Randall was still around; the police hadn’t got him. Then why hadn’t he made contact? Where was he when he was needed?
‘Two minutes, Chief Superintendent. Two minutes to Armageddon.’
The firearms officer leant in close to Palmer.
‘Shall we take him out, sir?’
Palmer thought quickly.
‘No, I can’t risk him pressing that button; can’t risk him falling on it if you kill him. I’m going over to try and talk to him and try to get him to release the box from his hand. As soon as he does, then you can take him.’
He stood up.
‘Mr North, I’m coming over to talk.’
North laughed.
‘Oh no, Chief Superintendent, I’m not having any of your funny business thank you. If you come within ten yards of me, I press the button. One minute left.’
Gheeta whispered urgently into Palmer’s ear.
‘Every mast within forty miles is switched off, his machine is useless now.’
‘What?’
Palmer was incredulous.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes guv, no phone in the Greater London area will get his death call except one.’
‘One? Which one?’
‘The Mayor’s. It means North’s box will show a green light and he will think all his signals have got through when they haven’t. The Mayor won’t be answering; I’ve just spoken to him so don’t panic, guv. And then North will get a shock.’
Palmer looked into Sergeant Singh’s eyes.
‘Is this one of your technical jigsaws that you’ve got lined up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure it will work? There are a lot of people’s lives at risk here.’
‘It will work, guv. Trust me’
‘I always do, Sergeant. Okay.’
He turned to the firearms officers.
‘Go get him, lads. No shooting, he can’t hurt you now.’
He shouted to North.
‘Mr North, we are coming to arrest you now. Your plan has failed.’
North stood up out of the shadows and held his death machine in front of him for all to see. He could see the officers coming for him.
‘All right, Chief Superintendent. If you and the Mayor want it to end this way, so be it.’
Theatrically he pressed a button on the machine. His mobile rang. He laughed loudly as he saw the screen indicate it was the Mayor’s number.
‘Oh my, the Mayor is calling me, I hope he’s not ringing to say he’s paid the money. Look a bit of a fool now won’t he, with a few million of his electorate dead.’
He pressed the answer button and put the phone to his ear.
‘Hello Mr Mayor.’
It seemed to Palmer that everything then went into slow motion. North’s startled expression lasted for what seemed an eternity, as the phone slid from his hand and he dropped to his knees. The wires tied into the mast pulled his box from his hand as he dropped, and it swung on the end of them like a pendulum clattering against the steel mast with each swing. North’s body slid slowly off the mast base onto the water tower, where it rolled to the edge and fell the twenty foot to the hotel roof, landing with a dull thud.
The firearms officers stood with their weapons pointing at the lifeless body as Palmer knelt and turned the head sideways. The line of blood from his ear was still shining in the reflected street light. He turned and looked up at Sergeant Singh.
‘Just how did you manage that?’
She smiled.
‘Simple. I put ‘call divert’ on the Mayor’s phone to North’s phone.’
Chapter 23
The late-night revellers of central London crowded round the hotel entrance as North did indeed leave the hotel in a body bag, as Palmer had warned him he would do. In the side lounge Palmer and Singh sat drinking very welcome cups of tea as the firearms team packed away their uniforms and weapons and left.
‘So Sergeant,’ Palmer said as he moved into a comfortable arm chair. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t charge you with murder? You didn’t have to use the call diversion from the Mayor’s phone. The signals were all cut off.’
‘They were, and if his box had registered that his signal wasn’t getting through to any mobiles he may well have had an override capacity built in, or even been able to input a repeat function into the network computers so that when they turned the signal back on, bingo. I couldn’t take that chance, guv. He was a very clever man; top man in his field. But if even just one signal
got through to just one phone, it would register as okay on his box and he’d think it had worked. But that phone would have to be answered by somebody, and who better than North himself? We knew his mobile number from his calls to our three victims and the Mayor’s office.’
Palmer thought for a moment or two.
‘If the Assistant Commissioner or PCC want answers, I think it might be better to say that North’s little box must have malfunctioned.’
Singh smiled.
‘Okay, sir. Now, I want you to fill me in on Mark Randall’s part in all this. I’m a bit confused.’
‘Alright, but you won’t like it. Come on, let’s get a squad car and I’ll drop you off at home. I’ll tell you the whole story on the way.’
Palmer got out of the squad car in front of his house, thanked the driver and breathed in the cool late-night air. Detective Sergeant Singh hadn’t seemed too upset by the subterfuge and double dealing of her now ex-partner; he was pleased about that, as Palmer wasn’t one for extending a comforting arm or a shoulder to cry on. Mrs P. had often told him he was devoid of emotions, but the truth be known was that he wasn’t, he was just very good at hiding them; a skill developed over many years of police work.
He walked slowly up the drive as the scent from the roses wafted over him. He stood admiring the blooms and stepped into the rose bed, leaning over to smell a few individually; at the same time he wondered why his feet felt wet. Looking down, he saw that his shoes had sunk into the soft earth that was Mrs P.’s prize rose bed, now drowned in a river of water coming under the fence from Benji’s garden. On tiptoe Palmer peered over the fence, half knowing what he was going to see; and he wasn’t wrong. A half-empty luxury hot tub with a broken side panel was leaking gallons of water across the lawn and under the fence; the wonderful Benji would be getting an earful of Mrs P.’s anger in the morning.
Palmer smiled, looked up towards the heavens, and mouthed the words ‘thank you’. It had been a good day, and now it had just got better. He let himself in, quietly giving Daisy a pat in her basket, and took a bottle of cider from the fridge into the lounge, where he settled onto the sofa for a quick five minutes to unwind. Another case put to bed, and pretty soon he would be too.
And then the phone rang.
THE END
The Author
B.L. Faulkner was born into a family of petty criminals in Herne Hill, South London and attended the first ever comprehensive school in the UK, William Penn in Peckham and East Dulwich, where he attained no academic qualifications other than GCE ‘O’ levels in Art and English and a prefect’s badge (some say he stole all three!)
His mother had great theatrical aspirations for young Faulkner and pushed him into auditioning for the Morley Academy of Dramatic Art at the Elephant and Castle, where he was accepted but only lasted three months before being asked to leave as no visible talent had surfaced. Mind you, during his time at the Academy he was called to audition for the National Youth Theatre by Trevor Nunn – and fifty years later he’s still waiting for the call back!
His early writing career was as a copywriter with the advertising agency Erwin Wasey Ruthrauff & Ryan in Paddington, during which time he got lucky with some light entertainment scripts sent to the BBC and Independent Television, and became a script editor and writer on a freelance basis, working on most of the LE shows of the 1980-90s. During that period, whilst living out of a suitcase in UK hotels for a lot of the time, he filled many notebooks with Palmer case plots, and in 2016 finally found time to start putting them in order and into book form: six are finished and published so far, with more to come. He hopes you enjoy reading them as much as he enjoyed writing them.
Find out more about B.L. Faulkner and the real UK major heists and robberies, including the Brinks Mat robbery and the Hatton Garden Heist, plus the gangs and criminals that carried them out (including the Krays and the Richardsons) on his crime blog at [email protected]
Take care, and thank you for buying this book; an honest review on Amazon would be very much appreciated if you have time, and there are more Palmer books to read if you like the old sod as much as I do!
P.S. No, I didn’t pursue the family business of petty crime – honest…
P.P.S. I’ve got a Rolex going cheap if you’re interested?
POETIC JUSTICE & A KILLER IS CALLING: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series, cases 3 & 4. Page 18