PANIC BUTTON a gripping crime thriller full of twists

by Charlie Gallagher

  ‘Ma’am,’ he replied, but Chief Superintendent Helen Webb had already turned away to retrieve a notebook. She placed it on the table in front of her and lowered herself onto her seat, sighing and keeping her eyes down. She appeared to be struggling for a place to start.

  ‘You all had a very similar phone call,’ she managed. The five members of the senior management team who had arrived for the 6.30 a.m. meet, all nodded, Price included. ‘You will know that we have suffered a fourth loss overnight, just a couple of hours ago in fact. Detective Sergeant Ian Cutter, shot and killed in front of this very building.’ The people gathered around the table all knew of this but Helen’s words still got a reaction. They shook their heads, there was a sharp intake of breath and even a gasp. Price looked at their faces. They were tense and angry, but there was something else there too: fear.

  ‘The killing has enough similarities to the three shootings that occurred yesterday to suggest that Ian’s death was the fourth at the hands of the same individual,’ Helen continued. ‘Ian was shot in his vehicle as he was leaving the station in the early hours of the morning. A panic button was then pushed and a very clear message left for us to find. These are the similarities.’

  ‘No script this time?’ Price asked.

  Helen raised tired eyes. ‘No, no script, but a typed message was left on the windscreen, which is significant.’ She looked down to her notebook. ‘It appears to be the same size and font as the others and reads,’ she balanced a slim pair of glasses on her nose and read, “Those that are tasked with me shall become my next task.”’

  ‘He knew?’ Inspector Alison Moore sat opposite Price. Her voice was breathy, dramatic. ‘He knew that Sergeant Cutter was leading the investigation? Am I reading that right?’ She answered her own question, ‘He must have done.’

  ‘That’s the working hypothesis at the moment, yes,’ Helen said.

  ‘How could he know?’

  Helen stood up. They watched her pace the room. ‘There is no way he could have known without inside knowledge of the investigation. Certainly no one outside this station would be aware that Cutter was in charge.’ She stopped and turned back to face her audience around the table. ‘The reason you have all been turned out of your beds and brought in here today is simple. You represent every police constable and sergeant that work in South Lennokshire and have been part of this investigation, or were on duty yesterday, or could have any inkling that Ian Cutter would be leading the chase for our suspect. We need to be clear, the man or woman who has so far killed four of our staff in cold blood is either getting assistance from, or is, a police officer working under one of you.’ She paused. Some of them exchanged shocked glances. No one offered any response. ‘Your brief is very simple. Get out there today and get in among your people on the ground, in the offices, in the patrol cars. Get hold of your sergeants, any PCs that you know to be particularly influential, whatever you need to do. Go to the personnel files, remind yourself of any disgruntled officers and what they might be disgruntled about, while considering access to firearms, or potential associates with access. Whatever you think might be relevant and even what you don’t. I don’t believe for one second that an officer makes a decision to involve themselves in something like this lightly. This person ought to be damned obvious to us. Any questions?’

  There was a stunned silence, and Price took in the horrified faces around him.

  Helen softened her tone. ‘And let’s not forget that we all lost friends yesterday. There is going to be a lot of emotion out there today — anger, sadness and an awful lot of fear. We won’t be sending any officers out to calls without first assessing them fully, and they will have a firearms chaperone as often as possible. I would rather we keep the suggestion of an insider to ourselves for now. We’ll get together for another chat later in the day.’ Allowing no time for questions, she brought the meeting to an end. There was a scraping of chairs and excited talk. Helen had to raise her voice to be heard over the sudden noise. ‘And people! We are looking at the security of officers coming to and from work. We will be letting you know what we can do later in the day. Needless to say, we all need to be more vigilant than we have ever been. This person has just brought the threat right to our door.’

  ‘Ross!’ Helen called out towards Price. He was at the rear of the departing group of officers, keeping his head down, desperate for some time alone to think.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  Helen waited until the last officer had closed the door behind them. ‘I need you to stay. I’ll get us another coffee.’

  Price watched her walk away. Her high heels clicked on the polished wood, and she looked every bit the strong woman who knew how to sustain an image. Price scratched his head.

  Helen beckoned to him from the bar area. ‘Actually, Ross, you might as well come in here. The chairs are better.’

  Price followed her into a partitioned-off room full of soft furnishings, all positioned to focus on the bar at the far end of the room. The shutters were down at the bar now, but the coffee machine fuzzed, clicked and spat. Helen stood next to it. Price looked out through the window. Another scorching day.

  ‘Ross, you may not know these two officers.’ Helen turned back, holding a tray bearing four cups.

  Price looked across to where she was heading, and for the first time noticed two figures sitting in a dark corner. The man closest to him rose to his feet and shot out his hand. It looked as big as a dinner tray to Price. His weak smile faltered slightly under the man’s crushing grip.

  ‘This is Sergeant Barry Lance. He is the tactical commander for Lennokshire Police, based out of Greyharbour. His team specialises in armed interventions.’ The men exchanged nods. ‘And this is Inspector Andrew Manto from our Professional Standards Department.’ This man’s handshake seemed uncertain, his nod half-hearted.

  ‘Nice to meet you both,’ Price lied. He was always uncomfortable around the PSD — the police who policed the police. He could recall a couple of meetings in which Andrew Manto had featured. He had once delivered a presentation to all the inspectors on how to effectively investigate your own staff. Price was left with the impression that he enjoyed his role a little too much. Price sat down and looked at his two colleagues, both intent on the business of sugaring and stirring their coffee. The rest of Barry Lance’s body matched his enormous hands. His build looked natural, deriving more from his genes than the gym. He had short red hair and neatly trimmed beard in a darker brown. He appeared to be very comfortable in his own skin, a look reinforced by the casual navy blue ‘Tactical Command’ polo shirt, tucked into navy cargo trousers and ending in a pair of huge black boots. He wore an oversized diver’s timepiece on one wrist and a “Help for Heroes” charity band on the other.

  Beyond him, Manto sat forward to sip from his coffee cup, which he held in both hands. His face bore the half-sneer, half-smile that he had maintained for his entire presentation, and which had made him instantly and universally disliked. He had eyes that were just too close together and greying hair shorn close to his scalp, maybe in an effort to disguise the fact that he was balding from the crown.

  ‘Ross, our colleagues here are assisting us with the shootings, or Operation Tuscan as it has now been designated.’

  ‘Tuscan?’

  ‘Don’t ask. The person responsible for allocating the names is a fan of a certain sports car apparently. Anyway, as I said to the others, we think that our offender is being helped by someone inside the organisation. Or, in the very worst case the offender is one of our people. We’ve called in Barry and Andrew, neither of whom know many people down this way, to assist. We need you to make sure Andrew is up to speed with everything we have so far, everything that Ian and you have already done.’

  ‘That won’t take long.’ Price realised what he had implied. ‘I mean no disrespect to Ian, he couldn’t have done any more than he did, but there’s just nothing much to go on at the moment. It was early days. I knew it was just a matter of time before
he started making progress, but it seems that time was something he just didn’t have.’ He shook his head.

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Helen said. ‘Whatever you find, PSD will need to be kept informed. This investigation is going to need a lot of manpower. Use Andrew for whatever you need, I’m sure he won’t mind doing some of the legwork.’ Helen attempted a smile but it vanished quickly. ‘You’ll be based here for now and your security is my primary concern. We may look to house you somewhere else, but that is under an ongoing risk assessment.’

  Price was adept at seeing through management spiel, and he knew this meant, “Lennokshire Police can’t guarantee your safety but they’ll give it a go.”

  ‘What about resources?’ Price was aware that there was a considerable amount of legwork to be done, and they wouldn’t be able to do it while the threat remained.

  ‘You have a team of seven trained detectives. You will hopefully have a sergeant running the team once I can get one in, and we may look at a neighbouring force to supply this. That may take a little time, but I think it would be tough on the team to come in this morning and find Ian had been instantly replaced. You will also have just about anything else that you may need. Your team will be based here and will take their direction from you.’

  Price pursed his lips. ‘Seven detectives may not be enough to get someone through the door quickly. Is there any way you can lean on the force resource unit to get us some immediate help from elsewhere?’ Price wondered if he might have overstepped the mark.

  ‘I agree with you. There’s a lot of work to be done and I’ve already had a conversation with the FRU. They have as many as twenty detectives ready to assist us, but I don’t want any more than that while we don’t have a handle on the threat. That might not be an issue for too long though.’ Helen paused. ‘You see, there have been some developments following Ian Cutter’s death.’ Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. ‘We have a suspect.’

  Price hadn’t seen this coming. He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It seems Ian might have been responsible for a bit of a breakthrough after all.’

  Price leaned further forward. ‘Something he didn’t tell me?’

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that. Ian’s shooting followed the same basic MO as the previous ones but with a couple of significant differences.’

  ‘Differences?’

  ‘As Ian was leaving work, he didn’t have his police radio on him. To be honest, he rarely carried it when he was at work either, but this gave the shooter a problem. He appears to have solved it by using his own personal radio. As you know, each radio is tailored to the person it was issued to, and our shooter left his at the scene. It appears he might have made a big mistake.’

  Price’s eyes opened wide. ‘Who?’

  ‘You will find out very soon, I can’t divulge it right now but rest assured we have already started the ball rolling to get him in, and when we do, it will be you and Inspector Manto that will be questioning him. It’s not about trust or lack of it, you understand, it’s about protecting you. There’s an intelligence officer sitting on the target right now. Let’s just say that the name makes a lot of sense.’

  ‘Makes sense?’

  Helen nodded. ‘From what we know about this person and from the evidence left at Cutter’s murder, I’m certain it’s our offender.’

  ‘So why sit on him? Why don’t we bring him in now?’

  ‘I want him in but we need to do this right, and that’s where Barry here comes in. We’re waiting for his men to arrive. They will form a formidable arrest team. I want this done clean, I don’t want anyone else hurt, and Barry is the man to do it.’

  Barry Lance’s smile contained no flicker of doubt.

  ‘If all goes to plan, you will be in interview with our suspect by the end of the day and maybe we can all start getting some answers.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Price’s said without conviction. ‘You’re sure this is the right man?’

  Helen contorted her mouth into a sort of smile. ‘Oh yes. This is our man.’

  Price’s mind filled with questions, like why would someone who is clearly organised enough to pull off four murders of high profile targets in a twelve-hour period, then go and make such a huge and basic error? He also wondered how the target would react to Barry Lance’s team. If he was their man, he had already demonstrated his willingness to use extreme violence.

  Price shook hands with Lance. Again, the crushing grip and the self-confident smile. Price made his way out of the place that a couple of months before had been the scene of Ian Cutter’s retirement. He wondered whether the team tasked with the arrest was much concerned about ensuring that the target actually made it to an interview.

  * * *

  Helen Webb watched Price leave and then turned back to the two men. ‘This needs to be clean, gentlemen, and it needs to be done right. If this isn’t the answer I’ve got a team from the Counter Terrorist Unit on their way down. They report directly to the Home Office, and if they get a hold of this we’ll all be out of the loop.’ Helen scowled involuntarily. One thing she could not handle was losing control of her force.

  Lance and Manto left the room and Helen went over to a top floor window. She had a good view out over the town, which from her lofty position and in the bright sunlight looked deceptively calm. Already she had received confirmed reports of looting on the high street, a spate of violent robberies in corner shops and numerous other opportunist attacks and crimes. The locals knew that the police would not be turning out for anything that wasn’t life or death, and even when they did, the response would be four times slower than the previous week.

  From up here Langthorne did not look anything like the smoking apocalypse of her imagination, but under the surface and away from her elevated position she knew that, for the time being at least, she had lost the town.

  It was time to start taking it back.

  CHAPTER 7

  Barry Lance turned and addressed the man on his left and the two others sitting in the back of the Range Rover. ‘He’s on the move. He’s in a vehicle, a 51 plate Ford Mondeo heading out of Langthorne. We have an unmarked chase car in behind him and two plain Volvos at point. He should hit the A259 in less than ten minutes and that’s where we get our opportunity.’ He and his team lived for jobs like these and the adrenalin was pumping through his veins.

  His eyes flickered from man to man. ‘We’ve got the go-to.’

  The men in the vehicle knew this was firearms speak for loading and prepping their weapons. They headed for a quiet retirement cul-de-sac that had been chosen as being within a feasible distance for reaction. All four doors of the vehicle swung open. Four figures in plain black overalls put their steel-capped boots down on the tarmac and pulled their G36 assault rifles from the locked armoury. They manoeuvred these over their heads, snapping the ammunition into place, and then readied their secondary weapon, a matt-black Glock pistol, tugging and releasing the top slide to chamber a round before sliding them into their leg holsters. Two of the men checked a pouch on their ballistic vest which contained six-bangs. In an arrest situation the idea was to create so much noise and confusion that the target would have no idea what had hit him until he was in cuffs. Finally, each tugged a thick, black balaclava over his head and climbed back up into the Range Rover, where they were concealed behind darkened windows. The decision to dress like an armed gang rather than police officers was a tactical one — armed gangs don’t play by the rules.

  Over a designated and secure channel, Barry informed the other vehicles that they were on the move. He listened as two similarly equipped Volvos confirmed the go-to and then the chase car took up the commentary.

  The Volvos quickly found their position, three cars behind the Land Rover Discovery chase car which was still providing running updates. This was a further two cars behind the target Mondeo. Four by fours were the vehicles of choice when conducting what was known as a “hard stop” on an arme
d target. Their elevated seating position made them effective for observing vehicles, and also provided a good position from which to fire on a moving target.

  Lance was busy on the radio. He had four marked traffic units closing the roads where civilian vehicles would join the A259, along which the target car was proceeding. This was a long stretch of road that linked numerous seaside towns, including Hythe, where Patrol Sergeant Freddie Lee had been shot the day before. The road ran through the towns along the seafront, with the sea on the left. As it passed through villages and towns the speed limit dropped to 30 or 40 mph, but there were stretches where it opened up a little wider, where the only scenery was beach on one side and marshland on the other, and speeds could increase to 60 mph or more. One of these stretches had already been identified as the point where the pursuing cars would make their move. It was not far away now.

  The traffic cars had confirmed their positions, road closures were in place, and a town suddenly gave way to sparse marshland. Lance barked, ‘Strike!’ The Range Rover lurched forward. Lance moved out across the central white line, the car pitching a little on its raised suspension, the big wheels scrabbling for traction among the loose stones and potholes littering the middle of the road. The Range Rover emerged from the row of traffic and began to overtake the first of eight cars that were between it and the target. Just as powerful, the Discovery in front of him responded in much the same way. The driver, aware of the impending strike, had eased back from the car in front but now made up the distance, relying on the road closures ahead as a blind corner approached. Lance was aware of the sound of car horns blaring as they sped past. The target car was now visible and it had increased its speed to 70 mph.

  The Discovery radioed back. ‘One white male occupant only. Repeat, one occupant, front seat driver. No weapons observed at this time. Male fits description.’

  The Discovery accelerated forward past the Mondeo. They were now at the beginning of a long straight stretch of road, devoid of any other cars. After it swept past the target it jerked back across, cutting in front of the Mondeo, which reacted with a flicker of the brake lights. The Land Rover manoeuvred back out into the middle of the road and stayed there. A Volvo had also made its way into an overtake position behind Barry. He powered the Range Rover past the last car before the target, which reacted to the Volvo by dropping back. The Volvo at the rear cut into the line of traffic directly behind Barry, causing heavy braking and angry punching of horns. A figure wearing a balaclava in the rear of the Volvo waved the civilian cars back. The row of cars following the target fell back. The rear car of the strike team was now in front of the civilian cars. A police sign appeared in its rear window and the line of cars immediately started to slow.