The House Sitter

by Peter Lovesey

  “I mean, potentially he’s the security risk, isn’t he, even though it’s all set up to protect him?”

  “You mean if he wanted out? That could have been a risk in Streatham. Not here, I think.”

  A personal radio gave off the sound of static and a voice came through clearly enough for everyone to hear. “Oscar Bravo to Control, reporting a sighting from the chopper. A four by four, possibly Range Rover, stationary in Caseys Lane, reference six-eight-five-eight-zero-three. Repeat six-eight-five-eight-zero-three. Shall we investigate? Over.”

  “Await instructions. Over.”

  “Caseys Lane. Where?” Barneston demanded, already poring over the map on the kitchen table.

  Hen found it. “Less than a mile, I’d say.”

  “Give me that,” Barneston said to the officer holding the radio. He touched the press-to-talk switch. “We’re on the way. Over and out.”

  There was a stampede to the cars.

  16

  The map reference wasn’t required. The helicopter marked the spot by hovering over it. The convoy of three police vehicles travelled at speed in emergency mode, blue lights flashing. When they got closer the sound of the rotors beating the air drowned out the sirens.

  “One thing’s certain,” Diamond said to Hen, some distance in the rear in a fourth car, his own. “We’re not going to surprise anyone.”

  But it was wise to advertise their approach. The width of the lanes left no margin for the drivers. After a series of bends they passed a derelict cottage, its roof stripped of most of its tiles, foliage thrusting through the rafters. A short distance ahead was the gate to a field where sheep were grazing, indifferent to the activity. Beside an oak tree, a dark green Range Rover stood in front of the gate on turf, just off the lane. The helicopter pilot had done well to spot it under the tree’s thick foliage. There was no movement at the windows.

  Having pointed the way, the helicopter climbed higher, circled a couple of times and remained overhead in case someone made a dash to escape.

  The convoy stopped about thirty metres short and two armed officers were detailed to make an approach. A few people got out and crouched behind the vehicles, but Diamond and Hen chose to wait in the comparative safety of the car. They still had a view of the two men moving cautiously ahead, stooping below the level of the hedge. The Range Rover looked unoccupied, but there was no telling what was below window level.

  Hen muttered under her breath, “I don’t like to think what they’ll find.”

  Neither did Diamond, though he said nothing. The young man had been under Special Branch protection, and it had let him down. If the very worst had happened, any police officer who took his job seriously was going to feel regret, if not shame.

  The two armed men in black coveralls and body armour separated, one taking a wide arc through the field on the far side of the Range Rover, while the other remained in the lane. After a series of short forward movements, one of them-the man in the lane-flattened himself to the ground and began a crocodile-like approach to the rear of the vehicle, using his knees and elbows for leverage, but still gripping his short-barrel machine gun. He was close enough to be below the sight range of the wing mirrors.

  The afternoon sun caught every detail of the drama. It was getting hot inside the cars.

  Progress was agonizingly slow. The man inched forward, and finally got right up to the rear bumper of the Range Rover. For about half a minute he did nothing, listening, no doubt, for a voice or a movement inside the vehicle. Then he raised himself into a crouching position and slowly stood high enough to look through the rear window. Abruptly he turned towards the others and gestured with both hands for them to approach.

  “Go, go, go!”

  The response was immediate. Everyone got out and started running towards the Range Rover, with Diamond and Hen well in the rear. Even the helicopter dipped its nose and zoomed lower.

  The officer was shouting, “They’re on the floor. We’ve got to get in.” He smashed the side window with the butt of his gun- which activated an alarm loud enough to shatter eardrums. He put his arm through, swung back the door and dipped inside.

  In a moment he emerged with a body trussed with plasticuffs and leather belt. Others helped lift the man out and onto the grass, where they unbuckled the belt that pinioned his legs. He was breathing. He opened his eyes.

  A second man was removed from the space behind the back seat. He, also, had been tied up and handcuffed, and he, also, was alive. Like his companion, he looked dazed and ill. The heat inside, with all windows closed, must have been appalling.

  Neither of the rescued men was Matthew Porter.

  Jimmy Barneston wasn’t too concerned by the state of them. Quite rightly, he wanted information. Someone thoughtfully produced a bottle of water. Barneston snatched it, unscrewed the top and splashed most of the contents across the face of the nearest man.

  “Somebody kill that fucking alarm!” Barneston yelled.

  It took a few minutes to get under the Range Rover’s bonnet and locate the mechanism. A uniformed inspector disabled it.

  The men’s groans could now be heard by everyone. The more animated of the two was still handcuffed and lying on his side. But at least he was conscious.

  “Where’s Porter?” Barneston asked. “What happened to him?”

  One question was a lot to cope with. Two was overdoing it. The man shook his head.

  Barneston asked again, “What happened? Come on, man, I need to know.”

  The mouth was moving soundlessly, like a beached fish.

  “I can’t hear him,” Barneston said. “Someone tell that chopper to get the hell out of here.”

  Hen said, “He’s dehydrated. Give him a drink, for pity’s sake.” She snatched up the plastic bottle and held it to the man’s mouth.

  He gulped at it.

  They fetched another bottle for the second man. “Can’t we get them out of these cuffs?” Hen asked. “The poor guys are in pain.”

  One of the police gunmen unhitched cutters from his belt and snipped through the plasticuffs.

  The man who seemed in slightly better shape sat up, and immediately vomited, throwing up all of the water he’d swallowed and more.

  It definitely wasn’t Jimmy Barneston’s day. He’d taken some of it on his shoes.

  The man seemed to be about to retch again. In fact, he was trying to speak a word that he eventually spluttered out.

  “Gas?” Barneston said. “Did you say gas? He used gas on you?”

  A nod.

  “What-CS?”

  He shook his head, and the movement seemed to hurt him, because he winced and shut his eyes.

  “Did he put it to your face, or what?”

  Now he managed a few connected words. “Took me from behind. I was coughing. Couldn’t breathe. Don’t remember any more.”

  “So the gas knocked you out. This was inside the house?”

  “Living room.”

  “Did you see him?”

  He shook his head and placed his hand, palm inwards, against his face, covering his mouth and nose.

  Barneston was quick on the uptake. “He was wearing a gas mask?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t you get any warning? Alarms?”

  “Going to throw up again.”

  This time, just in time, Barneston stepped aside.

  When the man’s head came up, Barneston said, “What about Matt Porter? Was he in the room with you?”

  “Another room.”

  “So he would have been gassed as well. What happened then?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t have any memory of being driven here? You didn’t see what happened?”

  The man looked around him and asked, “Where are we anyway?”

  The question remained unanswered because Barneston had turned to the second guard and was trying to question him. But the gas had affected this one more seriously. He was talking gibberish.

 
This was a medical emergency. Up to now, Peter Diamond had thought of himself as an observer, but someone had to take some initiative here because there was no telling how seriously these men were affected. They’d been unconscious for some time. Heatstroke and even brain damage was a possibility. Barneston was entirely taken up with extracting any information he could, so Diamond told the nearest man with a mobile to call an ambulance.

  When Barneston stood up, muttering in frustration at getting so little out of the guards, Diamond drew him aside and told him what he’d arranged. It was a courtesy. You don’t muscle in on someone else’s incident. But the message didn’t seem to register. JB was extremely keyed up. He turned his back on Diamond and returned to the more coherent of the two men.

  “This isn’t getting anywhere,” Diamond confided to Hen. “It’s up to Barneston to do something.”

  “He’s in shock,” she said. “I’ve never seen him like this. If there’s stuff he should be doing, you’d better tell him. You’ve got experience.”

  In fact, this wasn’t really about experience. Every incident brings its own unique problems, and the challenge is to stay cool and deal with them as well as resources allow. Considering Barneston was one of the generation who made ‘cool’ into a cardinal virtue, he wasn’t shaping up at all.

  So Diamond tapped him on the shoulder and discreetly suggested he ordered everyone off the grass and onto the lane.

  “What’s the problem?” Barneston asked. “What’s up now?”

  At least there was communication this time.

  “Crime scene procedure. You’ve dealt with the incident. Now it’s a matter of preserving what you can of the scene.” For a man who had never been a slave to the rulebook this was rather rich, but Diamond was putting it in language the new generation of CID should understand. “Particularly the treadmarks.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Barneston said vaguely.

  “Not the Range Rover’s marks.”

  “No?”

  “The Mariner’s. The Mariner had his car waiting here.”

  “You think so?” Those blue eyes showed little understanding.

  “You’ve got the picture, haven’t you, Jimmy?” But it was obvious Barneston’s brain hadn’t made the jump, so Diamond laid out the facts as he saw them. “Back at the house he gassed these blokes and Porter and trussed them up and put them in the Range Rover and drove here. He must have had a vehicle waiting, right? So he transferred Porter into his own motor and drove off, God knows where. The least we can do is find the treadmarks his tyres made.”

  The last twenty minutes had been too frantic and traumatic for Barneston to give a thought to anything so basic as treadmarks, but he nodded his head sagely as if it had always been in his plans and ordered everyone off the turf and onto the hard surface of the lane. The ground was already marked with many footprints as well as the contents of the guard’s stomach. Crime scene tape was fetched and used to seal off the area.

  Hen said, “That’s better. Feel as if we’re getting a grip, even if we aren’t.”

  “He’s away,” Barneston said bleakly. “He’s hung us out to dry.”

  “Snap out of it, Jimmy,” Diamond told him. “Have you sent for the SOCOs yet? I’d get one of those sergeants onto it if I were you.”

  “Good point.” He went over to arrange it.

  When he came back, he was still in the same fateful frame of mind. “We can check the motor inside and out and every inch of the field, but let’s face it, we knew fuck all about this guy before this, and we’re still up shit creek.”

  That kind of talk didn’t go down well with Diamond. “Haven’t you heard of DNA?”

  “What use is that without a suspect? We don’t know a thing about him.”

  “We know several things,” Diamond said. “He’s extremely well informed on our security. Somehow he found out Porter was transferred here. He knew how to get in without activating the alarms or panicking the dog. He must have had some kind of training or inside information. He has access to gas, not CS, but something that knocks you out completely. He’s well organised, very focused. He could have killed the guards, but he chose not to.”

  “Christ, that’s not bad,” Barneston said, the interest reviving in his eyes.

  “Common sense,” Diamond said dismissively.

  But Hen wasn’t letting it pass so lightly. “Uncommon good sense, more like, and a lot better sense than any of those berks at Bramshill ever talk. Isn’t that right, Jimmy?”

  Barneston appeared to agree, because he asked Diamond what he recommended next, and there wasn’t a hint of irony in his voice.

  “The Mariner’s car is the thing to concentrate on,” the big man answered. “Obviously it was parked in this lane for some time. There’s a chance someone drove by and noticed it. A farmhand, maybe. These are quiet lanes, but people are moving farm machinery around a lot of the time. I’d order a house-to-house on all the inhabited places in the vicinity, asking (a), if they saw anyone along the lanes, or crossing the field-which I think is more likely-and (b), if they noticed a vehicle parked here, or being driven away.”

  “I was thinking along those lines myself,” Barneston said.

  “Great minds,” Hen said with a wink that only Diamond saw. “And, of course, you’ll have your SOCOs going over the house and the Range Rover and all of this area. We ought to get some of his DNA out of this.”

  “We can hope.” He moved off to speak to one of his team.

  Diamond turned to Hen and said, “Any more of that and I’ll buy you a damned great spoon.”

  “Why?”

  “Stirring it up between Barneston and me. ‘Uncommon good sense’.”

  “Quite the opposite, Pete. I was throwing him a lifeline. Can’t you see he’s poleaxed, poor love? His whole world has blown up in his face. He’s lost the man he was supposed to be protecting. He’s got a neurotic woman in another so-called safe house who is going to go bananas when she hears about this, and who wouldn’t? He knows Bramshill will come down on him like a ton of bricks, and what’s more they’re going to decrypt those deeply embarrassing files any time. No wonder he’s in such a state.”

  He couldn’t feel the same degree of sympathy. He said (and immediately regretted it), “Why don’t you give him a cuddle, then?”

  “Sod off, mate. He badly needs advice from someone with sand in his boots and a few ideas in his head. If you want to stay involved in the hunt for the Mariner, ducky, this is your opportunity.”

  “Our opportunity,” he said, recouping a little.

  “That goes without saying,” Hen said. “You’d better talk to him man to man.”

  They remained there while the paramedics arrived and took the two SO12 guards away for treatment. They would be questioned again, but there was little prospect that they’d remember any more. Not long after, a team of three SOCOs drove up and pulled on their white protective overalls. Jimmy Barneston pointed out some potential treadmarks to the right of the Range Rover. The SOCOs looked at all the other marks they had to contend with and didn’t seem overly impressed.

  Barneston eventually came back to where Diamond and Hen were watching the action from behind the tapes. He was looking marginally more in control. “All the farms and houses in the area are being visited.” He cleared his throat. “There was something you said just now. You suggested this could be an inside job, seeing that the Mariner found out about Porter being moved here.”

  Diamond lifted his shoulders a fraction. “He must have got it from somewhere.”

  “Or someone,” Hen added.

  “You’re right, and it’s a bloody nightmare,” Barneston said, the anxiety returning to his features. “I don’t know who I can trust any more. I think I know my own squad, but you can never be totally sure. Bramshill are involved, and Special Branch. That’s a lot of people. It only needs one.”

  “If we had a suspicion, we’d let you know,” Diamond told him.

  “The worst of it is that I’ve got som
eone else under protection. Well, you read the files, so you know who she is. The Mariner found his way to Porter, so what’s to stop him finding Anna Walpurgis? She’s more of a risk than Porter was.”

  “Why is that?” Hen said, as if, like some High Court judge insulated from the real world, she’d never heard of the volatile pop star.

  “Temperament,” he said. “She’s hyper. You’d think she was on something, but she hardly ever stops.”

  “That would be a problem.”

  Barneston looked about him to make sure no one else was close enough to overhear. “You see, this story is going to break in the press any time. I can’t keep the lid on much longer. I was able to hold things down with Axel Summers because he was known to be taking a complete break from his work. And Matt Porter could miss one tournament. But questions are being asked about them both.”

  Diamond said, “In that case, you’d better go public right away.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Barneston flapped his hand as if swatting away a wasp.

  “Face it, Jimmy. You just said the story is about to break. You don’t want it leaking out by degrees. Take control. Call a press conference and tell all.”

  He stood as if stunned, his eyes making tiny nervous movements.

  Diamond hammered home the message, “What’s the value of secrecy? You can’t rely on safe houses being safe for anyone any more. If Anna Walpurgis is locked away in the country somewhere like this, she’s a sitting duck for the Mariner. He’ll get to her, whatever hi-tech security you have protecting her. And he’ll relish the challenge.”

  “Yes, but what’s the alternative? Let her swan around the country-or abroad-inviting a bullet? That’s as good as handing her over to the bastard.”

  “Not this guy. He’s a planner. He works everything out, down to the last detail. We’ve seen two examples. The killing of Summers was a blueprint job. He must have done his research, learned his technique with the crossbow, picked his spot in the garden, prepared his sheet of paper with the quote from the poem and the names. Today was the next stage on, even more precision-planned than that. Agreed?”