Spencer Holland looked around the Major Incident Room that was now up and running to deal with the two murders, Warren Evans and Danny Cross. He had a certain pride about what he had achieved in such a short space of time, because getting an MIR operating was no easy thing and to get it staffed properly was also a nightmare, but he had pulled it off.
He had, as far as possible, staffed it with people he knew and trusted, and it was structured as per the Murder Investigation Manual and Major Incident Room guidelines.
He walked around it now, looking carefully at the walls on which many flipchart sheets had been Blu-tacked. They contained information about the murders, including timelines, crime scene assessments, details about the victims and what little was known about the offender.
Holland paused as he studied the flipcharts, his eyes playing over the details and getting very fucking annoyed.
‘Shit,’ he said to no one in particular. He stalked back into his office and logged into the computer system and onto the force intranet. He began to search.
After half an hour he hadn’t discovered anything he didn’t already know. But then, as he looked at the screen, his mouth went very dry and he sat bolt upright.
‘Shit,’ he said again, this mine in awe of himself. ‘Now that’s what I call a fucking coincidence.’
He reached for his desk phone and dialled an internal number.
‘DCI Holland,’ he introduced himself grandly. ‘I want the full physical files that we have on Warren Evans and Daniel Cross…I know I can look at them online … I don’t want to look at them online … I want them here on my desk in front of me in ten minutes in nice Manila file covers … do I make myself clear? I’m in charge of a double murder investigation for fuck’s sake and people like you,’ – he almost said “minions” – ‘do as I say...understand? Ten fucking minutes.’ He slammed the phone down. ‘Pen pushing arsehole.’
He rocked back in his chair, almost tipping it over he went so far back.
Then his mobile phone rang. He scooped it up from his desk blotter and saw who was calling. Instantly his demeanour changed.
‘Sir,’ he answered as smooth as silk. It would hardly be in his best interests to insult a chief superintendent.
***
To be honest, the last thing Spencer Holland needed at that moment in his life was a pep talk from a boss. But he could hardly refuse, so twenty minutes later he was walking through a fairly swish West End restaurant to get to the bar and meet Chief Superintendent Dennis Walsh, a man who was both friend and mentor.
Walsh was late fifties, medium build, well-spoken and had a commanding presence that Holland could only dream of emulating. He seemed to own the very space he stood on and surrounded him. He was waiting for his drink to arrive when Holland sidled up next to him. Holland respected the guy, not only for his aura, but also for his suavity, something else the brash Holland could only dream of. Walsh seemed immune to the stress and strain of being a high level cop, took it all in his stride, but still dealt with people and situations with ruthless efficiency. People often came away from him not realising they had been shafted – until much later. Whereas Holland did not have that skill. He was easily riled by pressure and when he dealt with anyone, there was no subtlety about it: they knew they had been dealt with.
As would, Holland thought, the next person in my line of fire. That was one bastard who would know for sure. Unfortunately, that little encounter had to be put on hold for a little while.
‘Chief Superintendent,’ Holland said by way of greeting.
Walsh turned slowly. ‘Ahh, Spencer … you having a drink?’
As much as he would have liked to drink a brewery dry, Holland said, ‘No thank you.’
‘Go on, won’t hurt, on or off duty.’
‘No, really sir,’ Holland said, smiled politely and settled himself on the barstool alongside Walsh. ‘I’m never off duty.’
Walsh grinned and ordered him a gin and tonic anyway. The drink came and Holland drowned the spirit with the mixer. He wanted to keep a clear head.
Walsh gestured for Holland to follow him and led him to a table close to the window, obviously reserved, and they sat opposite each other. Walsh said, ‘Heard you’ve got your plate full. Some fairly gruesome murders.’
Holland shrugged as a tinge of anxiety shot through him. He thought that maybe this was going to be snatched away from him. His throat went arid and he took a generous swig of his drink, the ice clanking against his teeth. ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ he said confidently. ‘I’ll get him.’
‘You think it’s the same person?’
‘Possibly. Would you say that’s a safe assessment?’
‘Lord knows.’ Walsh raised his eye heavenwards, as if he should know such a thing. Walsh was presently working from New Scotland Yard on a personnel and change project on behalf of the Commissioner. It was one of those projects that seemed to have been going on for years without any result in the offing and Walsh didn’t appear to want it to end. Projects had become his speciality and though they never seemed to deliver what they promised, he was highly thought of in the hierarchy, taking on many a poisoned chalice that others shied away from. He was next up for promotion and Holland envied the guy’s career. Walsh went on, ‘That’s why me and your dad became chief supers, so we didn’t have to deal with the shits any more.’
Walsh had mentioned Holland’s father, who was a chief superintendent in a northern force, approaching the end of an illustrious, though mainly headquarters-based career. Walsh and his father knew each other from the many training courses they had attended. Both of them were professional course-goers. A good long course was an excellent way of networking and legitimately keeping well away from the front line.
Walsh noticed a disheartened look come into Holland’s eyes.
He paused, then began, ‘In 2003, I went to New York on a holiday with the missus,’ – and at that point, Holland thought, ‘here comes the pep’ – and downed another mouthful of his G&T which was starting to taste rather nice. ‘The week we were there, the bin men were on strike. No rubbish had been collected for a week. You cannot imagine the smell. A city that size – what, ten million people? I don’t know. And in August, too. People don’t see or really take notice of bin men or care how they toss people’s rubbish, but if they don’t, they know about it and cities start to reek. Do you get where I’m going with this?’
Holland’s face twisted into a pompous smile. He nodded.
‘Do you know who you are in this story, Spencer?’
‘The guy clearing all the scum to make the streets cleaner?’ he hazarded.
‘Yes, you are.’ Again Walsh paused for effect. He was one of the Met’s best orators and he knew how to keep an audience in the palm of his hand. ‘If you’re an idiot.’
It was like the nick of a knife blade and Holland’s pomposity burst and farted away like a balloon losing air.
Walsh leaned forward, intense. ‘The cop who thinks he can clean up the streets is a deluded fool. Don’t rock the boat, look after number one. Just between me and you’, – here Walsh tapped his large nose – ‘I’m going up very soon.’ He jerked his forefinger towards the ceiling. ‘And when I do there will be a vacuum and it’ll need filling, if you get my drift. I’ve put it about, and there have been some nods of agreement from he who shall be obeyed, that when the shuffle starts you will be going upwards, too. Up and sideways and you could be the youngest superintendent in London by the end of this year, which is not far away. Nice, or what?’
Holland lapped it up. ‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘But you cannot leave a shit storm behind you, Spencer. That’s not how it’s done.’ He pointed at Holland. ‘Wrap up this gruesome case quick. Get your statements, get ’em scraped off the streets, and above all keep the media out of this. We can’t afford any more scandal, because if the Commissioner starts to hear about shit getting out of control, he might change his mind very quickly. It’s fuckin’ cold on nights in Limehouse, if you get my drift, Spencer. You’ll be demoted before you can say Katie Price is a virgin. You understand? This is all in the balance and if you put your weight in the right direction, then you go up on the see-saw, then jump on the climbing frame. Understand?’
Holland finished his drink. ‘Yes sir,’ and thought, ‘Rock and a hard place.’ A pep talk, a promise, a kick up the arse, a threat – all rolled into one. Nice.
‘Now let’s have another drink and relax.’
***
Holland’s head was a mush by the time he left Walsh’s company as he realised that his predicament was actually make or break. He’d thought that solving the murders would be a good step for his career, but now, reading between the lines, it was deal maker – or breaker, not something he could just shrug aside if he didn’t bring it to a successful conclusion. He had to get a result fast, not allow this shit to drag on any longer. Otherwise this shit would stick.
The mention of nights in Limehouse made Holland shudder with abhorrence. His idea of a career move was to a nice corner office in Scotland Yard’s Empress Building next to Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre. A great view of Brompton Cemetery and Stamford Bridge (he was a keen Chelsea supporter) and the opportunity to watch planes coming in to land at Heathrow while dispensing authority to all and sundry. Not fucking Limehouse.
He had to walk to get his thoughts in some kind of order. He ended up by the Thames, near to the Houses of Parliament where steam pouring up from a hotdog stand and the resultant aroma made him realise he was excessively hungry.
He reached into his pocket for change and joined the short queue, ordered a hotdog and coffee. He took his little feast over to the condiments table and squeezed ketchup and mustard onto his sausage and added several shots of sugar into his coffee. Normally he liked his coffee black and unsweetened. Today, his energy levels were sagging and he needed a boost.
A man stepped beside him with just a coffee and said, ‘After you, mate.’
Holland passed the sugar pourer over and refitted the lid on his polystyrene cup.
‘Bloody cold, isn’t it?’ the man commented.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Holland said, disinterested.
The man made eye contact with Holland, who started to grow uncomfortable – but for the wrong reasons. He assumed he was being tapped up for sex.
‘Do we know each other?’ he asked the man aggressively, his body language making it plain he was a raving heterosexual.
The man eased the lid onto his coffee, took a sip and said, ‘My name is Colonel Leach.’
***
They stood on Victoria Embankment, looking across the Thames to the London Eye which rotated slowly, inevitably. The river looked murky brown and moved slowly, inevitably.
Leach sipped his coffee while Holland leaned casually on the wall, watching him carefully, trying to get his measure and being unsettled by his presence. Leach was a big man and came across as physically and mentally powerful. His stone-grey eyes particularly had the deadly knowing look of someone with great knowledge and experience who had seen things no man should.
But, ‘Fuck that,’ Holland thought. This could be the very breakthrough he needed.
He was one hundred per cent off-track, as the words Leach spoke made very clear. ‘Gonna need you to hand over everything you’ve got on him.’
Holland’s mouth creased up. ‘Yeah, right, like that’s gonna happen, mate. Other way round, if you please.’
‘Kid belongs to us, not you.’
‘Don’t think so,’ Holland guffawed. Then he said, ‘Colonel Leach, or whoever you claim you are, he belongs to me when he’s taking the law into his own hands on my patch.’
Leach walked back and forth a few times, sipping his coffee thoughtfully. Then he stopped and looked at Holland, who stared blandly at him, challenging.
‘Let me explain something to you, chief inspector.’
‘I’m listening,’ Holland said, but his demeanour said, ‘I’m listening but I’m not taking any fucking notice of this.’
‘September 2009. We got Intel there was a major attack being planned on British soil. This would’ve made 7/7 look like a dress rehearsal. We ran an op to bring in the guy running the attack. The Taliban came down on us like piss rain. Biggest firefight I’d ever seen. There was no way we could get the prick out of there to a safe environment, so we had to get what we needed there and then.’ He paused, recalling. ‘Took Jimmy Vickers ten minutes alone with this guy to get him to spill his guts. While we held off thirty Taliban, he gave Vickers everything. Took the guy’s life as well, just for good measure. Cold blood. We had to let that one go. Now these people do not fear death, chief inspector, they welcome it, so you gotta ask yourself how Vickers got the goods. How do you extract information from a man who ain’t afraid of dying?’
Holland remained quiet, listening, not remotely impressed.
‘In the end, we were in danger of being overrun. We had to get out of there and we couldn’t find Vickers … turns up three days later at Camp Bastion, not a scratch on him. No one knows how he did it. But you need to know this, Mr Holland – if Jimmy Vickers does not want to be found, he won’t be.’ Leach’s eyes stared hard into Holland’s, reinforcing his point. ‘He’ll channel his emotions, he’ll finish up on these guys and then he’ll vanish.’
‘You’re fulla bullshit,’ Holland uttered, breaking the moment of tension – and realising there would be no help ever from the military on this. The lack of response from them wasn’t just bad admin or communication. It was deliberate. He leaned towards Leach. ‘I will find him and he will be mine. It’s what I do.’
For a few seconds they had a glaring contest until Leach took a threatening step forward, making Holland jump, thinking he was going to get punched.
Leach’s voice was full of menace. ‘You lay a finger on our boy and I will come down on you so hard they’ll be using paint stripper to mop you up.’
He gave Holland once last, knowing look, then turned away.
Holland watched him and said, ‘Arsehole,’ under his breath. Certainly not loud enough for Leach to hear.
***
Holland was on the hunt. He checked the computerised duty states on the intranet and knew that his quarry was working that day and all he had to do was track him down. He stalked the corridors and eventually spotted PC Tony Griffin emerging from the sergeant’s office, where he collared him.
‘PC Griffin – with me, mate.’
He had thought of doing the, ‘My Office, now,’ shit, but decided against it.
***
Holland’s office was actually quite pleasant, if functional. But there was no view of Chelsea FC from it. No view of anything.
He moved in ahead of Griff and motioned for him to sit while he slid in behind his desk but did not sit.
Griff’s face had remained flat. Underneath, he had a very bad feeling about this encounter.
Holland gathered up the two thick Manila files sitting on top of each other on his blotter and, for effect, he dumped them back down side by side under Griff’s nose with a dull thud and a whoosh of air displacement.
Griff knew exactly what they were. His throat constricted.
Holland folded his arms.
‘Major coincidence, isn’t it, that the last officer to access these two gentlemen’s files was you? Prior to their deaths, I might add.’
Griff looked at the photographs pinned to the front of each file. Mug shots, face on, sideways, custody record numbers on boards along the bottom of each photo. Both were of sneering, defiant young men.
Warren Evans and Danny Cross. Shaven headed, tough looking boys from the streets, a starkness behind the eyes showing they didn’t care what the authorities had to throw at them.
‘You accessed the Intel files on both these individuals and now they are dead,’ Holland reiterated. ‘You also did a PNC check on a red Ford Focus that belonged to this guy,’ Holland tapped his finger on Warren’s photograph. ‘He wasn’t the registered owner, but Intel had him down as the owner and user and this was the car in which he was incinerated, while still alive, according to the PM result. You checked this number before he died.’ Holland slipped a PNC print-out under Griff’s nose. His collar number was on the sheet.
Griff opened his mouth to protest.
‘Ah-ah-ah,’ Holland stopped him and waggled a finger. ‘Don’t want to hear a word from you, yet.’
He then placed half a dozen black and white photographs in front of Griff, spread them out. They had been screen-printed from the CCTV footage from The Wolf pub. They showed Jimmy Vickers and his 4x4 and just one of the images caught Jimmy’s features enough – maybe – to ID him. Griff certainly could.
Griff sifted through them. His heart was now slamming.
‘James Vickers, soldier boy. Currently serving with what appears to be a somewhat dubious department of our Majesty’s armed forces. MoD aren’t exactly falling over to fill us in on him, but we understand interrogation is his speciality. And, would you believe it, they want to know immediately when we apprehend him. “Our boy” they call him. How very fucking sweet.’ Holland regarded Griff stonily. ‘Is he done, or are there any more?’
Griff didn’t answer.
Holland leaned forwards, arms still folded. ‘I need to know who’s next – or do I have to send a request to the PNC Bureau and the Intelligence Unit to ask them to put up your name and ask for every search you’ve done in the last week? Y’know, the ones where the people you checked have, “accidentally”, died. Just after you checked them?’ Holland tweaked his fingers on the word accidentally.
Griff’s face rose. ‘You don’t need to know anything. The only thing you need to do is stay out of his way.’
Holland stood bolt upright. ‘I’m not staying out of anyone’s way, sunshine. I’m gonna find him and I’m gonna lock him up and whoever he’s after for whatever they’ve done.’
Griff could not hold back a sarcastic grin. ‘The last thing he’s gonna let you do is lock ’em up. He’s gonna wipe ’em out, or die trying.’
‘Die trying’s good enough for me. He thinks he can go vigilante on my streets, he’s got another think coming.’
‘He doesn’t care about you or the law. He doesn’t care about justice.’ Griff shook his head. ‘He just wants one thing…’
Holland waited.
‘Revenge,’ Griff said. ‘Thing is,’ Griff went on, suddenly feeling the righteousness of this now, after much agonising and soul searching, ‘he’ll do more justice in a week than we could hope to do in a year.’
‘We?’ Holland gasped incredulously. ‘Mr Griffin – and I say “mister” advisedly – I think it is safe to say you ceased being a police officer from the moment you started helping your little friend out.’
‘Well good luck finding him, then.’ Griff stood up and smiled slyly as he quoted Holland back to his face. ‘“Might take a while but, eh, slow justice is better than no justice. That’s what I say”.’ He patted Holland on the side of his arm, and Holland looked down to where Griff had touched him, repulsed.
Griff left, leaving Holland seething at his own inability to intimidate.
At that moment, DC Porter swung into the office, as he had a habit of doing so.
‘What?’ Holland snapped.
***
‘Oh my fucking shit,’ Holland cursed time and again as he circled the upside down hanging body of Leon Romes. ‘Oh my fucking shit.’
Uncharacteristically, Holland had donned a forensic suit that was so loose and badly fitting on his narrow frame, it billowed like the Michelin Man. But he wasn’t concerned by his appearance. He was concerned that night shifts in Limehouse were getting closer and closer.
He stopped his circling and looked at the naked body, from the horrendously cut ankles, wrapped in barbed wire, the blood having run down his legs, down his thighs and all the way down his body to his neck and shoulders.
Holland bent low and inspected the tube inserted into Leon’s nostril, following it with his eyes to the electric pump and beyond that to the hose pipe connected to the tap.
He also looked at Leon’s eyes, which had been forced out of their sockets and hung down on their optic nerves.
Holland barely had the strength in his legs to stand upright again. He felt so weak and voraciously hungry, recalling with ire that his last food had been a hotdog on the Thames Embankment with the army spook or whatever the guy named Leach thought he was. A mysterious wanker, was Holland’s assessment.
The Home Office pathologist had been called to the scene. This was often beneficial to a murder investigation as it gave the pathologist a good feel for the scene and location and body before its eventual removal to a mortuary for post mortem. He was standing a few feet away from Leon’s body, mumbling his observations into a portable digital recorder.
Holland tried to get a grip of himself before speaking to the guy.
‘What’ve we got?’
The pathologist stopped recording and blew out his cheeks. ‘A particularly brutal, violent death.’
Holland raised his eyes contemptuously, as if to say, ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘Death was caused by suffocation – not drowning in the conventional sense as you might suspect from the way it looks. His lungs will not be saturated with water, although there will be water in the lungs, of that I’m certain. What in essence has happened is suffocation similar to someone holding a pillow over your face. In this case, though, the airways have been blocked by water rather than a pillow, if you see what I mean? That is how the death has been caused. The skull has filled with water and eventually the eyes have burst out of their sockets, rather like a pair of those joke glasses you can buy at funfairs. Eyes on springs, you know?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘He did also try to struggle free – desperately – as you can see from the terrible cuts in his feet and ankles caused by the barbed wire, but he was so expertly bound that he had little room to move or manoeuvre and dislodge the tube, which I think I will find a few inches down his throat. A terrible death.’
Holland exhaled a long sigh and said, ‘Bollocks.’
His mobile phone rang. It was an analyst from the Intelligence Unit confirming that PC Tony Griffin had also accessed the file relating to Leon Romes a few days earlier.
And now Leon was dead.
Holland hung up, thinking, ‘Got you now, you bastard.’ He looked at the dead piece of meat that was the carcass of Leon Romes, and said, ‘All I need do now is catch you.’
++++