by Jack Probyn
‘It occurred to me that it would be almost impossible for Maddison to abduct Danny out of witness protection, take him to the construction site and kill him alone,’ Drew began. ‘He would have needed an accomplice, someone who could have helped him. Someone with higher criminal connections who could make that sort of thing happen. That’s what I’ve been looking into. While Richard Maddison was in prison, he became close friends with a particular inmate of interest who’s got connections with organised crime. I think they may have plotted to kill Danny Cipriano together.’
‘Does it check out?’
Phrase number two.
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Chances of success?’
And there was number three – the final test to make sure this was a ‘Go Ahead’.
‘A hundred, I’m certain.’
‘I like those odds. Who is it?’
Drew paused. ‘Jermaine Gordon.’
Liam froze. He couldn’t believe it; it was genius. Jermaine fucking Gordon. The man was a big-time player in the East End drug-trafficking world, one of the city’s kingpins, second only to Henry Matheson, and together they owned over ninety-five per cent of the drugs coming in, and going out, of Stratford and West Ham – and the surrounding postcodes. Liam had only just managed to get his foot in the door – with the shipment and distribution side of things – with Henry, but the dealer had refused him further privileges on the grounds that he was too straight for a bent copper. But now Liam had an opportunity. A way in. With Jermaine Gordon off the streets and locked up for the murders of Danny Cipriano and Richard Maddison, there was no way Henry could decline his help. One less competitor meant a lot more trade for him. And a lot more money. For both of them.
‘Do it,’ Liam replied after a thoughtful silence. ‘Build the evidence against him, prove it was him and then bring him in.’
Before Drew was able to answer, Liam pretended his phone had gone off. He answered the imaginary call.
‘This is DCI Greene,’ he said and then paused for a while. ‘OK. Right… We’re on our way, Tanner. Sit tight.’
As soon as he hung up, he jumped out of his seat and started towards the exit.
‘What is it, guv?’ Charlotte asked.
Liam spun on the spot. ‘Michael Cipriano’s just been murdered in a hit and run. Drew – we’ll see you there. Charlotte – you’re coming with me. We’ve got some catching up to do.’
CHAPTER 50
WALLET
Jake drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the imaginary beat in his head, stopped, then massaged the sides of the wheel with his hands. He was traumatised. Worse, he was in fucking shock. He’d almost been run off the road, caught and killed, and watched a man die all within the space of an hour. He wanted to think of the silver lining – the fact that he’d been spared – but couldn’t. Instead, images of Michael’s body appeared in his mind, this time stained in indelible ink. The blood. The pale skin. The despair in his face as his eyes closed for the last time.
As he replayed the thumping sounds of the man beating Michael to death in his head, he felt the onset of a panic attack. With a vengeance. His heart rate increased. His breathing. His pulse. His skin became clammy. His vision became blurred; tunnelled. The car’s walls were closing in on him, ready to crush him and his windpipe.
Frantically, Jake scrambled for the key, twisted it in the ignition and rolled down the windows, allowing a torrent of cold air to flood inside. He gasped heavily, in through the nose, out through the mouth, until his breathing had slowed and returned to some semblance of normality.
That had been close. Too close.
But not close enough for you to save Michael.
Jake grabbed his phone and dialled Charlotte’s number. It rang several times, but there was no answer.
Frustrated, he tried again, this time bouncing his leg up and down in the footwell.
Still no answer. He was beginning to have a better relationship with her voicemail than her. Jake ceded defeat and squeezed the phone in his hand. There was evidence inside the factory, a lot of it, just sitting there, waiting to be found. And it needed to be found by him, rather than the bent forensics and emergency responders Liam would deploy as soon as they arrived.
There was only one problem standing in the way: he needed a warrant. Approval. Something. Anything that could permit him to search the factory.
Jake made the decision for himself. He couldn’t afford to wait around, let the attackers return and drive the vehicle away. He couldn’t afford to wait for Liam and Drew and Garrison to arrive, let them seal off the factory and allow them to destroy pieces of vital evidence.
Jake opened the door and grabbed a pair of disposable gloves, the three remaining evidence bags he had left, an evidence log and an attendance log from the boot. He donned the gloves and then jogged towards the building, eyes darting left and right, lest anyone was approaching from a distance.
As he approached, the smell of manure and farm dirt assaulted his senses. Almost as large as Bow Green, the structure was made of steel and corrugated iron. There were two main entrances – a large shutter door at the front and another on the side of the building. Jake rounded the side and came to a stop at a small door. It opened with a creak. He held his breath. Then he paused and listened intently as the sound echoed around the vast expanse of space.
Seconds later, he crossed the threshold. The smell of manure was even stronger inside; it smacked him in the face and made him want to vomit, and a flurry of wind rushed past his ankles. There was an ominous feel to the place, like he’d entered a haunted house.
Sitting in the middle of the factory was the van that had been used to run Michael off the road. Either side of it were two sets of black tyre marks. In the corner was an overturned chair – probably used for some form of torture, Jake thought – and, beside it, the stains and marks of machinery that had been there for decades.
Opening the evidence bag, Jake approached the van, pulled open the driver’s door and peered inside. He placed one hand on the seat to steady himself, and then searched the inside. In the middle of the armrest between driver and passenger, something caught Jake’s eye. A wallet. He picked it up and leafed through the cards, stumbling upon the driver’s licence. Danny Cipriano’s face was glaring straight back at him. Though the name was different – Harry Winston.
He pocketed the wallet inside the evidence bag, then moved to the rear of the van. His fingers dipped beneath the groove of the handle and pulled. He tensed as he prepared himself for what he might see. Another dead body? Another crime scene? A murder weapon?
The boot lifted, and Jake’s heart sank – there was nothing inside.
Cautious of the time, and aware that the rest of his team were rapidly closing in on him, he quickly removed the cotton bud from the bottom of the evidence bag, swabbed the floor of the van and returned it to its vial. He repeated the process for the driver’s seat and steering wheel.
Then he tidied up.
He stuck a white label to each of the evidence bags – in the centre, folded either side – and wrote his name, warrant number, and the date and time. Whoever had abducted and killed Danny Cipriano had been driving this van. And whoever had killed Danny was responsible for Michael’s death also. And he hoped the findings were enough to identify The Farmer and the rest of his associates.
Shortly after, Jake clutched the evidence bags in his grip and returned to his car.
CHAPTER 51
UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCES
Liam was brimming with questions as he sat beside Charlotte, driving east on the A13 towards Southend-on-Sea. Up until this point, their contact with one another had been minimal. On purpose, but now he wanted to change that. The car journey to North Ockendon was long enough for him to get to know her and find out what her real purpose was. He’d read her personnel file from back to front and committed it all to memory. Everything. Her birthday, the year she’d started in the service, the number of professional d
evelopment reviews she’d had, the disagreements with her seniors, her operations and successes. He’d even confirmed her transfer with DCS Marston, but he still wasn’t convinced.
At first, he’d believed she’d been sent in by The Cabal to highlight his ineptitude and either make him learn from it or to simply appease Oliver Penrose and the LOCOG – and, it was clear to him, that if it were the latter, only The Cabal had the connections to do it while keeping it under the radar. But when Charlotte had advised him about the bloodstains and footprints at Richard Maddison’s suicide, he’d known instantly that he was wrong about her. She hadn’t been sent in by The Cabal or the LOCOG.
She was here for a different purpose.
She was a bad egg.
‘Please accept my apologies for not having introduced myself to you properly earlier,’ he said, breaking the deadlock that had befallen them since the beginning of their journey. ‘It’s been a busy, stressful time.’
Charlotte stared out of the window at the trees streaming past, avoiding his gaze. ‘I understand how it is.’
‘How you finding it so far?’
She turned to him and flashed a smile. ‘Interesting.’
‘How so?’
‘Because this is a complex case, more so than any I’ve ever worked on. We don’t really get these sorts of things down in Croydon – at least, not as much. And it doesn’t look like we’re any closer to solving it.’
‘That’s the nature of the work. We don’t get any easy wins. They’re not handed to us. If they were, you’d be a DCS and I’d be the commander.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s just that, at Berin House, a case is opened and closed within a day or two, sometimes a couple. It’s insane. Our guys are phenomenal at what they do, and—’
‘You saying my team’s not good enough?’
‘No… Not at all. Your team are fantastic. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
Liam chuckled. ‘They can take it. They’re adults.’
‘What I meant was… What separates us from the rest of the boroughs in the force is our methods.’
‘Methods?’
‘How familiar are you with Occam’s razor?’
‘“Two explanations for everything and the one that requires the least guesswork is the one that’s most likely correct” – that one?’
‘Not far off,’ Charlotte replied with a facetious smile.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
She shuffled herself on the leather seat so that her body was angled slightly towards him. ‘When someone’s murdered, there are two possibilities. The person who did it, and the person who didn’t do it – Occam’s razor, part one. But when you begin adding multiple suspects to the question. Three. Four. Five. Six… that’s when things get tricky, and that’s when it’s more difficult to control, sustain and narrow down the correct explanation. You following?’
Liam took a moment to respond. ‘I think so.’
‘I mean, take Danny Cipriano’s murder, for example. Who were the suspects? Richard Maddison to begin with. Perfect. We’ve got him, our main suspect. Should be easy. But now he’s dead—’
‘And you’re the one who suggested to us that he’d been murdered rather than his death being ruled a suicide.’
Charlotte cleared her throat and continued, ignoring what he’d said. ‘But now you’re throwing Jermaine Gordon into the mix. One person again. One culprit. One suspect. If you start digging deeper and finding more names to add to that suspect list, that’s when things become a little more complicated, if you see what I mean.’
‘So you’re saying that you lot over at Berin House like to arrest the first suspect so you can put the case to bed?’
Liam’s suspicions were aroused. She was talking about something he reckoned she knew nothing about. If she really believed what she was saying, then she wouldn’t have been the one to raise the suspicions about Richard Maddison’s death. She would have just put it to rest. Like any good bent copper would have done.
‘The way we like to do it,’ she continued, ‘is instead of finding ways to prove someone did it, we find the evidence that proves they did it.’
Liam contemplated for a second. ‘And… when you say finding the evidence, you mean…?’
She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Sometimes the evidence has its own way of turning up conveniently when you least expect it – know what I mean?’
He did know what she meant, but he wasn’t about to admit that to her.
‘I’m sorry, Charlotte,’ he said, reaching up to 95mph as they neared Rainham on the outskirts of the city. ‘I don’t know how you guys like to work over there, but we do things a little differently on this side of the river.’
‘You sure?’
‘Positive,’ he lied.
She turned away from him, and as she looked out of the window again, she whispered to herself, ‘S’not what I’ve heard.’
If she had any intention of him hearing it, she didn’t show it. And if she didn’t mean for him to hear it, then she’d just made the biggest mistake possible.
For the rest of the journey, Liam sat in comfortable silence – and hoped it was the complete opposite for Charlotte.
CHAPTER 52
TORTOISE, MEET HARE
Jake had been sitting in his car for the past hour, and in that time he’d seen nobody. Not even a tractor or a horse rider. Not even a cyclist – or road vermin as Martha, his mother-in-law, called them, much to his disgust.
While he was waiting, he’d managed to calm himself down, reduce his heart rate, think rationally, and clean the majority of Michael Cipriano’s blood from his hands and face, although some remnants remained. His mind was still unable to shirk the thoughts of Liam and The Crimsons working together. In recent months, he and Liam had grown closer. They’d spent more time together outside of work – drinking beers, catching up with everyone else in the office, going on coffee runs together… Jake had even invited Liam over for a meal. They’d bonded and Jake had allowed Liam near his children. He remembered it clearly… high-fiving Maisie, playing with her hair, asking how her day was.
But worst of all was the fact he and Elizabeth had named Ellie after Liam’s mother. Now she would serve as a constant reminder of his betrayal and deviousness. The thought made him shiver.
A set of lights flashed in his rear-view mirror.
Garrison. In his brand-new car.
‘All right?’ Jake asked, getting out of his vehicle as Garrison pulled up in front of him.
‘All right. What happened here then?’
Jake filled him in.
‘Bloody hell,’ Garrison replied. ‘Have you got yourself checked out? You hurt?’
‘No, no, I’m fine. Where’s everyone else?’
‘Er, I… er…’ Garrison stuttered. ‘I think they said something about stopping at the crime scene quickly, notifying Essex Police that there might be a slight conflict of interest. I said I’d come to meet you here, make sure you’re all right.’ Garrison twisted and nodded in the direction of the large structure behind Jake. ‘You checked it out yet?’
‘Been waiting for you.’
‘Is that so I can be your muscle?’
‘You mean the man who’s old enough to be my dad?’
Garrison pointed a finger at Jake. ‘You’d better watch your mouth!’ He slapped Jake on the shoulder playfully. ‘Just kidding! I’ll let that shit slide this once, but if you say it again, I will have to hurt you. And just because I’m old, don’t think I won’t – or can’t.’
Jake chuckled nervously. His attention was distracted by the sound of another vehicle approaching.
It was Drew. Rolling down the window, coming to a stop beside them both, he asked, ‘What’s all this about then?’
‘Michael Cipriano’s dead,’ Jake replied.
Drew pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Tricky one.’ His eyes wandered to Garrison’s car. ‘This the new motor, Pete?’
‘Isn’t she a beauty?’
‘Shame you don’t pick your women like that, mate.’
Garrison shot Drew the middle finger and slapped him on the back of the head.
Jake observed them both for a moment. How immature they were being, defiant. Like petulant children, just waiting to be told off. One of the country’s most prolific robbers had just been killed and they weren’t phased by it at all. Of course they aren’t, Jake soon realised. They had nothing to worry about. They knew that they’d be able to cover it up and take care of it. Easy.
‘You feeling all right, mate?’ Drew asked him.
‘Not particularly. Just watched a man die in front of me. But you know – I’ll get over it.’
He wouldn’t. The night terrors would be worse now. The sheets of white snow that he saw nearly every night would be covered with a new addition: Michael Cipriano’s blood.
A few minutes later, Liam and Charlotte arrived.
‘Jesus, what the hell happened to you?’ Liam asked.
‘I tried to save Michael Cipriano’s life. Didn’t have much luck evidently.’ Jake said it with malice in his voice.
‘We’re gonna have to get you cleaned up. Don’t want people in the office thinking you’re a daredevil.’
Jake nodded and chuckled reluctantly. ‘I’ve got a change of clothes back at the office.’
‘Run us through what happened,’ Liam said.
This was the part Jake had been dreading. If he told them all the real reason he’d met Michael, they’d suss him out and uncover the truth instantly. Fortunately, time had been on his side and he’d been able to spend those precious minutes coming up with a lie.
‘I thought it would be a good idea to check up on Michael. See if he knew anything about Maddison, see if there was anything he could tell us about him and Danny.’ Jake’s eyes flickered to Charlotte before returning to Liam. ‘I remember seeing somewhere that Danny and Richard had had dealings with Jermaine Gordon in the past, so I thought I’d see if Michael could shed some light on it.’