“Why is it odd, Sergeant?” Coombes asked.
“Well, there’s a sign on the door saying it’s closed for holidays and reopens after the Bank Holiday.”
Chapter 68
Commercial Road, Tottenham, North London. Sunday 6am.
Dee and Lavender were lying under the table on a sleeping bag which had been opened up for use as a thin mattress. Both were still chained to the table, which meant it would be virtually impossible to make themselves comfortable. Nonetheless, Lavender had fallen asleep quickly and showed no signs of rousing. The night had been warm enough to sleep through, and Dee had managed a few hours of fitful sleep herself. Now, though, she felt cold and thirsty. She could look forward to another thirty six hours of this if things didn’t go well.
Dee lay on her back, thinking. She trusted Tom Vastrick and she believed that Josh would move heaven and earth to save her. That was the type of person he was. Between the two of them, and Boniface and Coombes, Dee was sure her message would have been received and understood. At least, she hoped it had been received and understood.
Lavender stirred and turned to face Dee. Then, much to Dee’s surprise, she smiled. The girl had been kidnapped and had spent the night on an uncomfortable floor, chained to a table, yet she was still smiling. Dee involuntarily smiled back. Without layers of make-up, the young woman facing her looked like the vulnerable young girl she was.
“Good morning, ladies. I trust you slept well.” The voice made them jump. It was the leader, who had just entered the room. “If you promise not to do anything silly, I will allow you both fifteen minutes in the bathroom. If you don’t promise, I’ll have to keep the door open and watch you, won’t I? So, do you promise?”
Both women promised. Quite what this man thought either of them could possibly get up to in a bathroom was anyone’s guess. There was no external wall to the bathroom, and no window; it was a Portakabin, inside a factory unit.
***
When Dee returned to the room, having allowed Lavender to go first, she held her hands out dutifully to allow herself to be handcuffed. A two litre bottle of still water had been placed on the side table, and Rik moved it to within their reach.
“I hope you don’t mind sharing. Breakfast will be along shortly. Oh, it will probably be more continental style than ‘full English’.” He laughed and left.
Lavender reached for the water at once, but Dee stopped her. She picked it up and turned the bottle upside down before squeezing it hard. She seemed satisfied with her efforts and turned to examining the plastic bottle closely, concentrating on the section above the water line.
“What are you doing?” Lavender asked, clearly puzzled.
“If they want to keep us subdued for the day they may try to drug us. The easiest way is to inject a sedative into our drinking water.”
“Oh.” Lavender was beginning to realise how dangerous this situation really was.
Dee broke the seal on the water and handed it to Lavender.
“I think this is safe, but just in case we’ll have only a mouthful now, just to take the edge off our thirst, and if we’re both still OK in an hour we’ll be able to drink as much of it as we want. All right?”
Lavender took a mouthful thankfully. She passed the bottle to Dee and asked, “Do you think we’ll get out of here today?”
Dee didn’t want to crush her hopes. “Only if we escape, but that may not be as unlikely as it seems. I’ve got an idea.”
Chapter 69
Vastrick Security, No. 1 Poultry, London. Sunday, 8am.
I had managed to snatch five hours’ sleep on a bed set up in a small room at the back of the offices. Obviously the Vastrick staff stayed overnight regularly because there were two such rooms. Don Fisher had retired to the other room.
DCI Coombes and Inspector Boniface had gone home after a raging argument with their superiors. They had both wanted to go into the printing press ‘hard and heavy’, in the early hours of the morning, but they were ordered to hold off for twelve hours after an intervention from Europol. Tom, Don and I were livid.
We were told that Europol would be taking down Van Aart and his organisation in a coordinated series of raids spanning the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern France. Van Aart’s home, offices, brothels and drug dens would all be hit by a variety of well-armed national police and security forces.
The Koninklijke Marechaussee, the Dutch Military Police, would also hit two industrial units where East European girls were held until they could be transported to a place where they could earn money by selling their bodies. Europol were tracking a container lorry from Bucharest, which they believed was heading for one of the units in Pernis on the outskirts of Rotterdam. It would arrive within the next hour and disgorge its cargo of teenage girls.
At twelve noon, European time, or one o’clock in the UK, the raids would begin. Unbeknown to either DCI Coombes or Inspector Boniface, the Metropolitan Police had been secretly planning to coordinate raids on the Holloways’ premises at the same time. The secret plans had been codenamed Operation Tango, and we couldn’t act until the raids were over. The Assistant Commissioner had explained that almost four hundred officers would be involved in the raids in four countries, and that they couldn’t take the chance of Holloway or Van Aart’s men reporting back to Amsterdam that the police were onto them.
Despite the Assistant Commissioner’s pleas, Don Fisher still had to be threatened with a night in the cells before he accepted the decision. I had serious qualms about the idea, too, but we reached a compromise that I was able to live with.
The police now had three men watching the Tottenham Press building; they had taken up their positions at four o’clock in the morning, and were in constant radio contact. One was in a highly specialised vehicle parked in the car park of the factory across the street, and the remaining two were concealed where they could see the two personnel doors that also served as fire exits. Nobody would go in or out of the printing press without being observed.
In less than an hour we would be meeting with DS Scott, DCI Coombes, DS Fellowes, Inspector Boniface, Tom Vastrick and a new face, Geordie Lowden, who would lead Vastrick’s assault team.
Geordie, as his name suggested, was travelling down to London from Tyneside on a chartered helicopter, which should have landed by now at London Heliport in Battersea. Given that the roads would be quiet, as they usually are early on a Sunday morning, I reckoned that the car journey from the heliport would take twenty minutes or so. I managed to pull myself away from my bed and head towards the shower.
Chapter 70
Commercial Road, Tottenham, North London. Sunday 11am.
Piet entered the room where Dee and Lavender were secured and removed the coffee cups.
“I’ll be back in an hour with your famous British roast beef dinner, or another packet of sandwiches.” He sniggered and left, closing the door behind him.
So far they had been provided with water, coffee from a vending machine and sandwiches. In each case the food had been delivered on the hour. Dee was working on the theory that they had an hour until the next visit.
“Lavender, our hands have only about nine inches of movement, and so I need your help. I’m going to lean forward, and I want you to unfasten my necklace.”
Dee leaned over the table so that her nose was almost touching the table top. Lavender reached over and unclipped the necklace. The necklace was sterling silver and consisted of a thin chain and a loop which attached just below the throat, from which hung three sterling silver rods. The outer two rods were the same length, which was around an inch, but the middle rod was slightly longer, perhaps by half an inch. Their diameter was about three sixteenths of an inch.
Lavender watched as Dee pulled the rods in opposite directions, opening the silver loop which held them. The three rods came free.
“Lavender, please listen very carefully, we don’t have a lot of time. Handcuffs are
not that difficult to unlock. The fact is that the main reason you can’t unlock them is that they are often fastened behind your back. These police style speedcuffs are rigid, which means that your hands are held three inches apart and so you can’t reach the lock with either hand. Do you see?” Lavender nodded.
“Our friends downstairs have overlooked the fact that I can reach your handcuff locks, and you will then be able to reach mine, as your hands will be free. Now, hold out your hands and watch me work.”
Dee took Lavender’s right hand and turned it so that the lock was facing upwards. Taking one of the shorter rods from her necklace, she pushed it into the keyhole until it met resistance.
“Handcuff keys have to be simple and universal, because while one policeman might lock you into them, an entirely different one will probably have to release you. So they usually only have two tumblers. The key will have a space, a ridge, another space, another ridge. Like a tiny house key. The way a key works is that the ridges line up with the levers, and the spaces line up with fixed stays, so that when you turn the key the ridges open the tumblers whilst the spaces pass over the blocking stays. If you put in the wrong key the ridges will hit the fixed stays and the key won’t turn. Now, we don’t have a key but we have these three rods, and we should only need two of them.”
Lavender held her breath, watching carefully as Dee pushed the longer rod into the lock.
“I’m going to use the first rod to slide over the first lever like this.” Dee wiggled the rod until she could move the lever. “Now, this exposes the second lever and we do the same again. If we now push both levers at the same time, they should get to the point of equilibrium.”
“What does that mean?” Lavender asked.
“When you use a key to a deadlock, like the one over there on the door, you place the key in the guide, which we call a keyhole. As you turn the key you feel resistance don’t you?”
“Yes, I’m with you so far.”
“Well, that resistance is the key ridges hitting the levers. They are called levers for a reason. When the levers get to the mid-point, the point of equilibrium, gravity takes over and the only reason you keep turning the key is to remove it from the keyhole. Take notice next time you unlock a deadlock. When you get halfway through the rotation, the lock clicks open.”
Dee used the two rods to push the levers, and seconds later there was a click and Lavender’s right hand was free. Lavender unwound the chain from around the handcuffs and she was free to move around, albeit her left hand was still handcuffed.
It took Dee twenty minutes of patient coaching to teach Lavender how to prise the right hand side of her handcuffs open, but when she did she almost whooped with joy. She was so proud of herself that Dee couldn’t suppress a laugh.
Three minutes later both sets of handcuffs were off. Dee decided there wasn’t time for any more on the job lock pick training, and so released the left hands herself.
***
It was a quarter to twelve and Dee was standing at the open door on the upper level, looking out over the factory floor. There was no-one to be seen. Carefully she stepped onto the steel mesh landing at the top of the stairs.
So far, so good, she thought to herself. Since breakfast and the toilet visits, their captors had not bothered locking the door to their room, assuming the chains and cuffs would be more than enough to hold them.
Dee wanted to protect Lavender, and so she gave her explicit instructions that would ensure her safety. Now she had to act before their captors made the rounds again.
There were two cars in the unit; a Black SUV with EU plates, and a Lexus with UK plates. At the bottom of the steel staircase she could see an open half glazed door leading to a small office, and voices were coming from inside. She counted four separate voices. That was good. They were all together.
Rather than use the metal stairs, which would certainly make a noise, she removed her boots and climbed between the landing and the handrail. She hung on to the steel railings, lowering herself down until she was dangling six feet above the ground. A second later she dropped silently to the floor, landing like a cat on all fours.
The fire exits were at the far end of the factory unit, and so Dee circumnavigated the floor, keeping the bulky printing presses between her and the open office door. A few moments later she reached the fire door and her heart sank.
“This door is alarmed,” the notice read, as did the notice over the fire door opposite. They could not go through either of those doors without alerting their captors.
It didn’t really make any difference, Dee reasoned to herself. The difficulties would be the same. As soon as she exited the building the men would be alerted, and she would have to run over unknown terrain barefoot. She had no way of knowing how far she would have to run before finding somewhere to raise the alarm, but she had come too far to back out of this now.
***
The alarm on the fire door was really more of a buzzer, but it was enough to alert the four men in the office. They ran out on to the factory floor, looking around to try to discover what had set the alarm off.
“You two make sure our guests are secure, and we’ll find out what’s going on.”
Rik and Gregor had their guns at the ready as they ran out of the open fire door.
***
Dee had micro seconds to take stock of her location and try to work out which direction she needed to take. The building was an anonymous looking industrial box, with a car park on two sides and a concrete paved path leading to the front entrance. A fence, perhaps seven or eight feet tall, enclosed the site. The fence posts were concrete, with a galvanised steel chain link mesh strung between them. The top section angled inwards and was threaded with barbed wire, so there was no chance of climbing it.
She ran along the paved pathway towards the front of the building, a distance of some seventy five yards. As she got to the front of the building she heard the sound of the fire door crashing open, and she looked back to see two men in pursuit.
She raced across the car park and through the open gateway onto the deserted road, where she almost knocked over a man with a carrier bag who was walking by. Dee wasted no time.
“Please, sir, will you help me? There are armed men chasing me. We both need to run. Find somewhere safe.”
The man looked rather alarmed, but instead of running for his life he did something she wasn’t expecting. He punched her in the face.
“Shit, there were five of them,” she thought to herself as she tried to get up. Her plan was in tatters, but she had to try to keep Lavender safe somehow.
“Lavender, run!” she yelled at the top of her voice, until the tazer disabled her for the second time in a few hours.
Chapter 71
398 High Rd, Tottenham, North London. Sunday 11:30am.
Number 398 High Road in Tottenham is a huge Georgian red brick building with stone features around the Georgian paned windows and a carved stone portico around the door, into which is carved the word POLICE.
The ornate police station stands on a busy dual carriage way and so we had to wait for a change in the traffic lights before we could turn into the car park. The reason we were being hosted at this location was due to its proximity to the Tottenham Press, which was less than a mile away.
In the past week I had been in four different police stations and I didn’t really like it. I wanted my own life back. I needed to get back to dealing with clients who didn’t seek to destroy the lives of others because they couldn’t accept that they had made a mistake themselves.
Don Fisher and I were led into a bare and unfriendly waiting room whilst the four policemen went to the operations room. Tom Vastrick and three of his people were on their way.
The plan was simple, although not everyone had agreed on strategy. The four policemen who had been living and breathing this case for days wanted to storm the building from every angle with overwhelming force, a strategy the Americans refer to as ”Shock an
d Awe”. The commanders who were charged with designating personnel to the task felt that the Risk Assessment demanded a softer approach, a standoff where a negotiator would talk the men out of the building, leaving their hostages safely behind. In the end the final decision was to be left to the men on the ground.
Unless things changed, the plan was simple enough. Don Fisher and I would be sitting in an unmarked van parked a hundred yards away from the Tottenham Press car park, ready to comfort the hostages on their release.
The telephone landline would be disconnected at the exchange, and the white van already parked over the road would switch on its electronic jammer. Then, for the next few minutes, every mobile phone in that cell, about half a mile square, would be silenced with the notorious message “No Network Coverage” being displayed on their screens.
Armed police with protective vests would then form an outer ring around the building, and two armed police with full body armour and helmets would enter via each fire door. Another six similarly clad officers would go in through the roller shutter door.
The roller shutter door had presented a problem to the police during the planning stage, as they knew it was designed to be raised by inserting a key into a weather protected housing and holding the key whilst the shutter crept up an inch at a time. The police didn’t have the key, and nor did they have the time to wait for the door to open so slowly.
Vastrick, who provided security to many such buildings, referred the police to an electrical contractor whom they knew, who could bypass the key, but he would need at least five minutes to do so. The electrician was being briefed by the police upstairs. The roller shutter door was also secured at the bottom with a padlock that fixed the door to the concrete base, but that could be removed in seconds with bolt cutters.
Don Fisher wasn’t a man who could sit still for long and he was anxious to get on with the raid, even though nothing could be done until we heard from the Assistant Commissioner that Operation Tango was well under way. That would probably be closer to two o’clock than one o’clock.
“You know, Josh, yesterday I wanted to hang that Hickstead creep from the nearest lamppost. Now I don’t give a damn what happens to him. I just want my daughter back safe. Her mother will blame me if anything happens to her and I’ll probably not disagree.”
48 Hours - A City of London Thriller Page 23