“And Mower had got his leg over already had he? He doesn’t waste much time, that lad.”
“I think it was more serious than that,” Thackeray said, his voice straight from the Arctic, full of splinters of ice.
“There’ll be an inquiry,” Longley conceded. The accusation on Thackeray’s face did not have to be put into words. He knew the chief inspector blamed him for what had happened, both directly and indirectly. “Best thing is if you and Mower take some time off…”
“It won’t be put right that easily,” Thackeray said, slumping into a chair suddenly as if all the strength had leeched out of him. ““We’ll be lucky to keep Mower after this.” He closed his eyes for a moment and let his mind come obliquely at the fear that was tormenting him but the possibility that Laura too might be dead was too much to contemplate.
“Where the hell’s Roberts?” he said explosively. “They must have some information by now. He says there was a bug on the truck. At least they did one thing right.”
“It’s a pity they didn’t get the chance to put a bug on the Escort as well,” Longley said, relieved to switch back to practicalities and away from his own culpability in the case of Imran Hussain. If careers were going to be curtailed over this he was not at all sure that his own might not be amongst them and he thought bitterly of the pension and the long retirement he had anticipated.
“What have you done about the Haque boy?” Longley asked suddenly.
“We’ve got a photograph of Patel. I’ve sent Mower out to the remand centre to see if he can identify him as the man who made illicit travel arrangements for his brother. It’ll keep his mind off things.” Though not for long, he thought. “There are plenty of other people who can probably be persuaded to ID him now the whole thing’s in the open.
When all the loose ends are tied up I imagine the CPS will drop the charges against Majeed. He was probably telling us the truth about what happened that night. Patel was in the car and shot Imran Hussain. Though I don’t suppose we’ll ever know why. A falling out amongst thieves of some sort, I expect.”
“Have you considered the possibility that Imran was killed because he found out what was going on?” Longley said.
“I’ve considered it,” Thackeray said coldly. The two men’s eyes met and it was Longley who eventually looked away.
“Aye, well, it’ll all come out in the wash,” he said, suddenly sounding defeated. “They’ll be looking at his brother’s possible involvement an’all, I dare say. He’ll not be pleased. Mud sticks. He had ambitions, did Sayed.” The door opened behind them and both men turned to face Ray Roberts who came in holding a sheaf of papers and looking pleased with himself, his moustache positively bristling with self-satisfaction.
“We’ve found it,” he said, and Thackeray’s stomach lurched in fear. “I knew we would. They’re very reliable, these tracking devices. We’ve used them before.”
“Are the women…”
“No, no, we’ve not actually reached it. We just know where it’s stopped. The trace hasn’t moved for more than an hour.”
“So where the hell is it?” Thackeray said explosively.
“Calm down, Mike,” Roberts said. “We’re moving in. It’s in a container park just off the M1 near Sheffield. I’m on my way down there now.”
“I’m coming with you,” Thackeray said, getting to his feet. Roberts glanced at Longley, who shrugged helplessly.
“You owe us,” the superintendent said.
“Right, then,” Roberts agreed. “It’s a big park. It’ll take them some time to locate the right sardine can, I dare say. We may be there before they find it if we’re quick.”
As the container doors swung slowly open Laura launched herself like a bullet out of the darkness, ready to run for her life, only to be caught by strong arms which wrestled her to a stand-still. Dazzled by the sunlight it took her seconds to realise that she was being held on the edge of a precipice three containers high. Fifty feet below she could see police cars and an ambulance parked in the narrow canyon between the cliffs of containers. Ladders reached up to the level she was on.
“Steady on,” a voice said as she struggled pointlessly against the arms that held her. “You’re safe now.” And then, suddenly, to her astonishment, Thackeray was there, taking her by the arms and pulling her away from the uniformed police who had forced open the door of the container in which she had been imprisoned and were now climbing into the dark interior. For a moment they clung to each other unable to speak.
“You’re OK?” Thackeray asked. “You’re not hurt?” Laura shook her head, numb with relief.
“How did you find us?” she gasped at last. “I thought…I thought…” Lost for words for once in her life she let him hold her tightly until she had fought off the waves of emotion which threatened to overwhelm her.
“Us?” Thackeray asked, but glancing over her at the rusty red container which had been her prison his question was answered as a policeman carried the limp body of an Asian girl, still in her navy blue school shalwar kameez, out of the truck and laid her gently on a stretcher which had been passed up from ground level.
“Safi?” he said.
“I think so,” Laura said, glancing in the direction of the unconscious girl. “It was pitch dark in there and I couldn’t wake her. I think she must have been drugged.” She looked around her in disbelief at the containers which stretched in long lines in all directions.
“We could have died before you found us,” she said, her mouth dry, the words no more than a whisper.
“Immigration had all the trucks in Dale’s yard bugged,” Thackeray said, not wanting to pursue what might have been, for his own peace of mind as much as Laura’s. “Unfortunately they missed out the car that Trevor Dale and his friends got away in.”
“A black Escort?” Laura asked. “That was Dave Swinburn’s. He’s the reason I went up there. I bumped into him in town and followed him. I thought it was so odd for him to be up here, so far from London….”
She stopped, realising that Thackeray was gazing at her open-mouthed.
“What is it?” she asked. “You know the man driving the Escort?” He looked round the still milling crowd of police and ambulance men and waved Ray Roberts in their direction.
“Laura has an ID on the third man,” he said. Roberts listened non-commitally as Laura explained how she had met Swinburn in Docklands. “It makes sense,” she said. “I couldn’t understand how every move I made to protect Ahmed seemed to attract attention..”
“Not from us,” Roberts said snappily. “We hadn’t a clue where he’d gone.”
“I was threatened in London,” Laura said, flashing a quick glance at Thackeray who was listening grimly. “The police didn’t seem interested. DI Wesley virtually told me to get out of his hair. And then when I got home I was burgled. They must have been looking for Ahmed. He almost died in a container like this. I dare say if you bother to look you’ll find where he wrote his name in one, high up where there’s a bit of a crack in the metal. Though if you look as hard as you did for the dead bodies we saw in Kent, I dare say you’ll still be looking next Christmas.” Roberts looked away and cleared his throat, his colour rising slightly.
“The existence of the bodies wasn’t something we wanted broadcast at that stage of our operation,” he said. “Publicity about that consignment might have delayed the next, and we were anxious to detain live bodies, not dead ones, and find out where the final destination was. Kent was obviously just a…” He hesitated, aware of the look of outrage in Laura’s eyes.
“Just a dumping ground?” she said sweetly. “You could say that.” She turned to Thackeray angrily.
“Take me home,” she said. “I’m not sure which side of the law throws up the bigger bastards these days.”
“Ah,” Roberts said quickly. “There’s just one more thing. I want you to come to London with me. Show me where this Swinburn character is based and ID him for me. I don’t want to alert the local p
olice - for obvious reasons.”
“You don’t trust them either?” Thackeray said and Roberts nodded. Laura looked at the two men in disbelief for a moment, wanting to refuse.
“I’ll come with you,” Thackeray said. “In fact, you don’t go without me.” Laura shook her head in despair.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “But it’s not for you, either of you. It’s for Ahmed and Safi, who were almost killed by those bastards. And for the ones who didn’t survive. You and the wretched rules you enforce,” she said venomously to Roberts. “If you can’t distinguish between someone like Ahmed, in fear for his life, and people just coming in to look for work, you’re not the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
Three hours later Laura was sitting in Roberts’s unmarked car parked a hundred yards down the street from the immigration advice centre she had visited just a few day’s before. The drive down the motorway to London had been tense and unpleasant. The antipathy between Thackeray and Roberts was tangible and Laura did not wholly understand it. There had been no opportunity for her to talk privately to Thackeray since Roberts had hurried them away from the container park into his car.
The two men had kept in touch with their respective HQs by mobile phone. At least the news Thackeray gained was good. Safi Haque was in hospital, awake and re-united with her family.
“Ask Kevin Mower to take a statement from her if she’s fit enough to talk,” Thackeray had instructed.
“I was surprised Kevin wasn’t with you,” Laura said idly, half turning from her front seat next to Roberts to face Thackeray behind her. Thackeray shook his head.
“Kevin has enough problems to be getting on with,” he said non-commitally.
“She was his bit of stuff, was she? The girl who got shot?” Roberts asked casually and Laura glanced at him, appalled.
“What happened?” she asked Thackeray directly, knowing that she did not really want to know the answer.
“One of my officers was killed when immigration raided Dale’s haulage yard,” he said, his face like stone, and Laura felt her heart sink. She looked at the two men and understood why they were barely on speaking terms.
“I’m sorry,” she said, to no-one in particular and relapsed back into strained silence. Later, Roberts, steering at eighty miles an hour with one hand and using his mobile with the other, had instructed a watch to be kept on half a dozen immigrant centres in Docklands because Laura could not remember the exact address of the one she had visited. It was not until the car was grinding its way through the start of the evening rush hour on the Mile End Road that a call finally came to indicate that a black Escort convertible had arrived at the back entrance to the centre in Stepney.
“Why do you think he’s gone back there?” she ventured, after Roberts had given instructions for his men to concentrate their surveillance there, but not to intervene until armed reinforcements arrived.
“To cover his tracks, I should think,” Roberts said as he slid perilously between two double decker buses, ignoring blaring horns of protest, to take a right turn towards Stepney. Five minutes of edge-of-the-seat driving later he had pulled up alongside a street-front workshop from which dozens of Asian women were just emerging at the end of their shift.
“Half of them shouldn’t be in the bloody country,” Roberts said as they waited for the crowd to disperse.
“How can you possibly know that?” Laura protested.
“Oh, I know,” Roberts said. “I didn’t get where I am today without having a nose for these things.”
Before Laura could think of an answer to that she stiffened in alarm. Just beyond the milling crowd of women, cheerful and full of chatter at being released from their daily imprisonment, Laura spotted three people she knew walking purposefully down the street towards the car. Ahmed Barre and Tom Massey looked relaxed and cheerful in the late afternoon sunshine, and between them they each held one of Ben Neill’s hands, letting him swing along with giant strides between them. They stopped outside the advice centre and Tom bent down to scoop his son up into his arms as he opened the door and the three of them went inside.
“Oh blast,” Laura said, under her breath but not quite softly enough to avoid being heard.
“What is it?” Thackeray and Roberts said almost in unison. Laura glanced behind her at Thackeray, who was leaning anxiously over the seat.
“There’s something I have to do,” she said, and before he could respond or either of them could intervene, she flung open the passenger door, slid out and dodged quickly along the crowded pavement. Roberts cursed and made to follow but Thackeray put a iron hand on his shoulder and pinned him back in his seat.
“Leave it to me,” he said and there such venom in his voice that Roberts hesitated.
“If she blows this operation I’ll charge her with obstruction,” he said angrily as they watched Laura disappear into the advice centre.
“I’ll deal,” Thackeray said, getting out of the car. Inside the reception area of the advice centre, Laura found herself on the heels of Tom Massey. The same black receptionist she had seen last time looked flustered to see another client so close behind those who had already arrived.
“We’re just closing,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“We need to see Dave Swinburn tonight,” Tom insisted.
“Not now, Tom,” Laura said urgently. “This isn’t a good moment. You need to get Ahmed and Ben away from here.” Tom looked at her incomprehendingly.
“It’s not safe,” Laura said, watching the receptionist out of the corner of her eye. The girl was already turning to the door which Laura knew led into Swinburn’s office. In the silence she could hear the murmur of voices beyond.
“Come on!” she said, and she picked up Ben, who yelled out in surprise, opened the door and walked into the street, trusting that the others would follow. Her confidence was justified enough, but as the three of them stepped out onto the pavement they were met by Thackeray, closely followed by Ray Roberts, the former with eyes only for Laura and the child, the latter much quicker to spot Ahmed Barre, who left the advice centre last. And even as they hesitated, face-to-face on the pavement, a van pulled up beside them and half a dozen armed and flak-jacketed police officers rushed in through the advice centre door.
“You,” Roberts said, his pale blue eyes fixed on Ahmed. “I’ve been looking for you, my lad. You’re nicked.” Ahmed turned and ran, hotly pursued by Roberts, who was soon joined by several more of his men who overtook the fleeing boy easily enough, as Thackeray pulled Laura and Tom Massey away from the glass fronted building.
“What the hell is going on?” Massey asked, snatching Ben angrily from Laura. “I thought you were trying to help that boy, Laura.”
“I was, I am,” Laura said vehemently.
“There’s an armed man in there, and Ahmed knows a lot more than he should about his affairs,” Thackeray said grimly. “Laura probably just saved Ahmed’s life.”
“And I suppose you’re his fairy godfather,” Tom said contemptuously. He glanced down the street to where Ahmed was being pushed into another unmarked car. He turned his gaze to Laura again and the dark eyes were full of dislike.
“Sister,” he sighed. “If that’s the best help you can offer I suggest you stay away from here in future. We do a damn sight better on our own.” And with that he turned and walked away, head high, back straight, his small son looking back over his father’s shoulder in bewilderment.
“I expect Roberts will want to interview him too,” Thackeray said.
“Roberts can do what he likes,” Laura said. “I’d like to go home now, please.”
Laura sat on the terrace of the Malt Shovel in Broadley, her hair blowing around her face like flame as the sun set over the westerly hills behind her. She watched Thackeray make his way through the evening drinkers with two glasses in his hands and she sighed. He looked tall and burly as ever, but not reassuring. There was too much unhappiness around the eyes for that.
She t
urned away as he joined her, tucking her feet up on the dark stone of the terrace wall, and putting her arms round her knees.
“So Majeed is free?” she said, avoiding the topic they both feared to broach.
“Majeed is free, Safi is back home. Poor Safi seems to have been spirited away to keep the community quiet when they realised so many people had gone missing on their way here.”
“One of them her elder brother?”
“That’s right. And Ali Haque is dead I’m afraid. He was one of the bodies they eventually admitted finding in Kent.”
“And Ahmed?” Laura asked.
“Ahmed’s OK. He’s been allowed to stay with his mother at a secure address, and Dale and Patel are busy accusing each other of murder. Interestingly neither of them has tried to implicate Imran Hussain in the immigration racket, so I think the superintendent probably was right. Imran was killed because he found out what was going on. So his brother is off the hook too. He can get on with his political career after all.”
“And Kevin? How’s Kevin?”
“He’s taken some leave. He’s devastated,” Thackeray said simply. Laura shuddered, very aware of how close Thackeray himself had come to being similarly devastated.
“And Osman’s killers? Have the Met got around to arresting anyone for that?” she asked.
“I think your friend Steve Wesley has been severely leaned on,” Thackeray said. “There have been several arrests in London now Ahmed has confirmed your story. You’ll be wanted as a witness. I expect.”
“Which means I can’t write about it until the trial is over,” Laura said. “I’ll have to let my editor in London know.”
“And what will you tell him about the job offer?” Thackeray asked, gazing at the sunset as if the question was of no consequence.
“I suppose Vicky told you about that,” Laura said. She was silent for a moment, gazing at the dark purple hills across the Maze valley where the sun was sinking fast and streamers of pink and vermilion cloud reached out to the milky sky above them.
Dead on Arrival Page 24