Chapter 4

 

The drive to work the next morning gave Milton plenty of time to contemplate his predicament.

“Will you be home this weekend?” was the last thing Maggie had said to him on the doorstep.

“I’ll call you later,” was the only reply he could muster.

He felt that his wife was falling out of love with him. Or, more likely, falling out of love with the situation she was in.

In the first eight years of their marriage, Maggie was partnered with a high flyer in the Metropolitan Police Force, a man being groomed for the higher echelons, and she had bragged to her jealous friends until their coffees went cold. Now her friends were getting their own back. Detecting all was not well in the Milton household, they were quick to pounce, messing with Maggie’s mind and making her believe that her husband was more interested in his job than his family.

Milton’s quest to please everyone else had started to backfire badly and he would be the first to admit that his current assignment had made him selfish and insular. He was desperate to succeed now, and if his wife was getting fed up then so be it. If she couldn’t wait the few months more that he needed to get on top of this case, then maybe he was better off without her. He was beginning to resent his lack of support from those closest to him. The fact that he could never tell his own wife what he was actually working on had not helped the situation at all.

The job was taking over his life and the only way he could get his life back would be by cracking the case: bring the ringleaders to justice and ensure the World Cup came to England in 2006. The irony of it all, as he smirked to himself, was that such was his distaste for football that he probably wouldn’t bother watching a single match even if he were given free tickets to the World Cup Final itself.

The crawl through the London Friday morning traffic meant that he reached his office some time after his team, who, to their credit, were still remarkably keen despite the lack of progress.

The unit had their own central London offices: six rooms in all, containing the latest television and computer technology that Japan was able to manufacture. There had been no expense spared in the British Government’s bid to catch the thugs, and this had made Milton’s excuses even harder for his superiors to swallow.

“Morning troops,” Milton announced as he entered the video analysis room, removing his jacket and throwing it over an empty chair.

“Morning sir,” was the reply in unison from four junior officers who had already started wading through the CCTV footage gathered from Zurich city centre and the other main areas affected by the trouble two days earlier.

He picked up a memo, which had been neatly folded and placed into his pigeonhole. It was from the public relations department and stated that The Sun newspaper would like ten clear images to splash over its front page and centre pages as their bid to ‘back our bobbies’ in catching the yobs. He handed it to one of his officers to deal with and walked over to the screens.

“What have we got, Waite?” Milton enquired of his eager sergeant in whom he placed the most faith. They were all good officers, but Waite stood out.

“Well sir, it seems to be the same story as the last match,” Waite replied, lifting himself out of his office chair. “You see this screen? This is where most of the arrested fans that we interrogated claimed the trouble started, and yet nothing is captured on film. It looks perfectly peaceful.” Pointing at three other screens he added, “And, as you can see, this is where it escalated to.”

The screens showed madness, terror, insanity. Men punching, kicking, smashing and people running here, there and everywhere. Absolute mayhem.

“Sir, it just doesn’t make sense,” continued Waite. “If I rewind the tapes, you can see that the trouble spills out from this area here.” He again pointed to the screens at what looked like a normal day with empty streets.

“Are you sure you have the correct order of footage, Waite?” asked Milton.

“Definitely, sir. I walked that area of town with you a hundred times last week. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Waite was right. Milton wheeled away to absorb the scenario. The time and the location that the cameras were covering should have revealed how the trouble started and yet the street was empty, with not even a stray dog or discarded paper blowing in the wind.

Then Milton thought back to John Simons - the thug that they questioned back at the temporary lock-up in Zurich. He declared that the men he believed started the trouble looked to be well organised and trained. The officers confirmed that it had become a common sentiment among the arrested fans.

Rubbing his hand on the back of his neck, Milton returned for a closer look at the screens and then turned to face his team.

“Let me throw something at you guys. Don’t interrupt me, just hear me out.

“Let’s just say that, somehow, someone has managed to get to these cameras; doctor them in some way in order to conceal their identities and then managed to restore them before we got to the cameras the following morning.”

His troops looked at him puzzled, but did not interrupt. Any new theory or line of investigation was welcome at that point.

“Okay, let me take it a bit further.” Milton patrolled the room. “We have been looking for troublemakers - drunks, yobs, street fighters - and we have arrested hundreds of them over the past year. And yet the trouble persists and, let’s be honest about it, it’s getting worse. Something tells me that we have been targeting the wrong sort of villain.

“As time has been ticking on, we have been targeting amateurs when we should have been looking for professionals. Let’s face it, the force wasn’t looking for pickpockets after the Brinks Matt gold robbery and the scale of this violence is the same. We are simply wasting our time and resources even talking to most of the idiots arrested in Zurich, just like the other matches we have investigated.”

Milton’s Sherlock Holmes-like address was stopped in its tracks by an abrupt “sir” shouted by Sergeant Sandra Bennett.

As Milton turned, she was pointing at one of the screens they had been observing. Milton walked closer to the screen and leaned over Bennett’s shoulder as a smile started to stretch across his face.

“Well, will you look at that?” Milton whispered into Bennett’s ear before proclaiming, “Houston, we have made contact!”

Milton edged even closer to the screen, which had earlier displayed an empty street next to the one onto which the trouble had spilled. Now, though, he could just make out on the right-hand side of the screen some sort of commotion.

It was obvious to Milton what had happened. Someone had taken a photograph of the scene from the exact position of the camera and somehow positioned it in front to show that same constant image. However, the picture had slipped to the left slightly and was revealing the truth as to what had actually taken place two days earlier in that particular part of Zurich.

Although difficult to make out in the small corner of the screen not covered by the photograph, Milton could see punches being thrown, plenty of white England shirts and what looked like a fight escalating into something bigger; something the whole world was able to hear about on their 9.00 o’clock news programmes.

Suddenly one thing stood out on the screen more than anything. He focused his laser-like gaze as if spotting a pound coin on the floor of a busy pub.

“Stop it there, Waite. Rewind a fraction and blow it up to full screen.”

The keen sergeant did as he was told.

“Okay, play it from there in slow motion,” ordered Milton.

What they could make out on the grainy screen was a man in a black shirt performing what looked like the tail end of a fight manoeuvre that was certainly not beer-induced. It left its audience watching open-jawed.

“Has anyone seen our pathetic bunch of beer-bellied maulers do anything like this before?” asked Milton to no one in particular as he took charge of Waite’s control panel to rewind the tape again. They watched as the man blocked what looked like a punch and sent his rival crashing to the ground with a kick normally reserved for martial arts movies.

Unfortunately for Milton, at no point was the man’s face visible, but nevertheless he ordered Waite to sharpen the image and produce as large a printout as possible of the man’s head.

The printer seemed to take forever as it spewed out the image taken from a back-sided angle.

Milton grabbed it from the printer and was dumbstruck by what he saw.

Tucked in the man’s ear was what appeared to be some sort of earplug. Milton would have liked to believe that this man had an ear infection of some kind, but having seen the karate-style move moments earlier he suspected different.

This man was wearing some sort of communications device. He was receiving orders. This was all going in a horribly wrong new direction and Milton felt as if he had just been punched in the stomach and had to sit down.

Moments earlier he was asking his officers to believe his own theory of a professional unit orchestrating England’s football violence, and now he had possible proof, even he found it hard to swallow.

“People,” he announced from his chair. “We have been hunting in the wrong river. It seems to me, after looking at what we have here, that there is a great white calling the shots out there and we have just wasted the last 12 months fishing for bloody tiddlers.”

Milton had mixed feelings about what he had uncovered. Sure, this could now explain why the trouble was happening time and time again. But once again the same questions had to be asked: who are they, where are they and, more importantly, what the hell are they?

Nevertheless, it was a breakthrough and the next few hours were spent trying to find more CCTV images of men who fought more like trained assassins than football louts. The footage from the city centre was inconclusive.

The Sun would have more than its ten pictures to choose from for its weekend edition, but even the arrest of these men would not make an ounce of difference to solving the problem. As Milton had discovered with previous matches, there were plenty of new recruits willing to take the place of those arrested, but it was the men at the top who mattered most and, apart from the brief glimpse captured earlier that morning, the day looked like finishing with nothing more.

“Okay, folks, let’s get our thinking caps on.” Milton broke a silence that had lasted for hours as the unit got stuck into its collective job.

“Think, people, think. Think back to all the other matches we’ve done. Copenhagen, Rome, Warsaw, Madrid. At any time have any of you come across anything like this?”

He again held up the picture of the karate kid with the earplug. “Waite, you took a team undercover in Warsaw, you must have seen characters like this? Professionals? Anyone you thought was calling the shots?”

Waite shook his head. He was reminiscing about the time he had travelled abroad five months earlier with two other undercover officers and had ended up sucking his meals through a straw for a fortnight after breaking his jaw. The well-built Waite had been recognised in a bar by a hooligan from his home manor of Tottenham and had received a kicking he would not forget in a hurry, along with his two colleagues.

“Sir, I would rather not remember that trip!”

His reply was met by sympathetic sniggers from his colleagues. One of the men was still off work with a fractured skull, such was the ferocity of the attack. Since then, Milton had deemed it too dangerous to send in undercover police until they had a strong enough lead to go in for the kill. Maybe now that moment was approaching, only this time he knew he wanted a slice of the action himself.

“Okay, guys,” Milton readdressed his weary troops. “I know it’s been a hard few weeks but I feel we are close to catching something big; something that could provide us with our first genuine lead. I can’t force you to, but I ask you. Please work with me this weekend in going over these tapes again because I seriously believe something will fall onto our laps from this.”

The four officers present had not taken a day off for almost three weeks and were approaching the end of their tether. At 4.30 p.m. on a Friday, Milton expected them all to get up and walk out of the door, but was astonished by the show of solidarity.

“We’re in this with you, guv,” said Waite, who was backed up by words and nods of agreement from the three other officers.

Milton was a likeable man and had won the respect of his comrades. They, like him, had lived through this over the past year and maybe sensed too that they were close to something big. Milton felt a lump in his throat as he ordered, “Back to work,” and rolled up his sleeves for the long night ahead.

 

Milton couldn’t remember if it was 4.00 or 5.00 a.m. when he had last looked at his clock, but he was awoken at his desk by Sergeant Bennett who walked in with a tray of toast and tea.

“Morning fellas,” she announced. “It’s 10.00 a.m. and time for breakfast.”

The officers were strewn around the room like the remnants of a student party and started stretching their arms and rubbing their eyes as they tucked into the pyramid of toast.

Milton was somewhat disappointed with himself, and not just for having fallen asleep. He remembered, firstly, that he had forgotten to call Maggie and, secondly, that his team had failed to find anything other than the karate kid footage from earlier on.

“I must have looked at these damn tapes ten times last night,” Waite declared while throwing a VHS onto his desk. “I’m going to get square eyes if I look at these screens much longer.”

In response, Sergeant Bennett, a slightly butch and yet attractive 31-year-old, quipped, “Better than the cross eyes you’ve got from spanking your monkey three times a day!”

The injection of humour made Milton feel good and it showed that his team had established a remarkable sense of camaraderie since coming together.

“I think we’ve seen enough of the shopping centre footage, Waite. Let’s start having a look at the football ground stuff. After all, it is Saturday and Saturday’s a day for watching football, right?”

Milton’s attempt at humour wasn’t a touch on Bennett’s earlier jape and he decided that maybe he should leave the funnies to his juniors.

The day progressed. The team reached the end of the tapes and, despite a few isolated incidents, there was no sign of anything resembling the breakthrough they caught the previous day.

They had routinely focused on recognising faces, identifying familiar faces and known names to try to piece together the sequence back through the running battles in order to locate its source. But they had not looked for the unlikely, which only the sharp eyes of the boss were doing.

“Waite!” Milton called his junior over.

Milton was watching the generic views of a camera showing a wide shot of the shopping precinct, which had been the epicentre of the lunchtime trouble.

“What’s that?” he asked Waite, pointing to a dark smudge hovering in the distance.

“That’s a helicopter, sir. I didn’t realise we had aerial surveillance this time, sir,” replied Waite, recalling their actions the previous week.

“Exactly. It must be the Swiss Police or TV. Get on the blower, Waite, and tell them we need all the footage they shot from that chopper.”

Waite scurried off through the door and into one of the adjoining offices as Milton sat and stared at the screen.

After what seemed like an eternity, but which was probably only ten minutes, Waite returned.

“Sir, the Swiss said they didn’t have a chopper in the sky on that day and the only aerial footage that the TV shot was during the game itself, from 8.00 p.m. onwards.”

Pointing at the security camera’s recorded time in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, Waite said, “This was taken at noon during the trouble.

“Okay, Waite, work your magic on this image and give me a good printout of this chopper,” said Milton, who sensed he may be onto something.

As Waite brought the black blur to life, white writing started to appear along the tail of the chopper.

Milton waited patiently by the printer, but inside he felt like a kid on Christmas morning eager to open his presents.

As the printer churned out the image, he was able to read the writing on the side of the helicopter as clear as day.

“Alpine Tours.”

A thousand theories buzzed around Milton’s head, but he asked himself just loud enough for everyone present to hear, “Why on earth would anyone want to take an aerial city tour when the beautiful Alps are only a stone’s throw away?”

Again his gut feeling told him that he might have made another key breakthrough. The helicopter appeared to be hovering above the vicinity of the trouble, and if it wasn’t the police or the media, then who was it?

“Waite, I want you to get the Swiss onto this and find out exactly who hired this chopper on that day. Let’s call it a day, folks. Enjoy what’s left of your weekend and I’ll see you back here on Monday morning - 8.00 a.m. sharp!”

Milton charged out of the door and knew he had just rewarded himself and his team with a day off.

Saturday was fast disappearing, but he could spend all of Sunday with his family with a clear head. Maybe the park, maybe the swimming baths or maybe the swings and slides?

Whatever he did, he had not felt this good in months, and he made his way homewards across London as fast as his Audi A8 and the heavy traffic would allow.