It was four thirty a.m. by the time they arrived back at the hotel in Greenwich and got to their rooms. They were exhausted, and Flynn was still in agony from his earlier encounter with a wall. Henry thanked them both and they arranged to meet later in the morning in the restaurant on the ground floor.
Henry thought he would not sleep. His mind was buzzing, but as soon as his head touched the pillow he went out like a light until eight a.m. when his phone rang and he scrambled across the wide bed to answer it.
‘Hope I haven’t woken you,’ Rik Dean said.
‘No.’ Even that word was thick, and it was obvious to Rik that he had done just that.
‘Anyway … what’s happening?’
Henry shook his head and put his mind into gear. ‘Twenty-odd migrants dead in the back of a lorry.’
‘Yeah, it’s all over the media. And?’ Rik sounded confused. ‘Been too busy to take it in really. Tell me.’
‘That’s what I was doing last night, following up the “ping”. It got kinda complicated, but Dunster Cosmo’s been arrested, plus a few members of his organization. Unfortunately, it means we’re at the back of the queue to talk to the guy, but we did manage to find the mobile phone, minus the SIM, on which he received the text from the prison. There’s more work to do on that, but it’s a trail to follow and he won’t be going anywhere soon, if ever.’
Henry spent a few minutes bringing Rik up to speed with last night’s operation and how it had panned out just from the ‘ping’ from the prison.
‘Brilliant work,’ Rik said.
‘So why have you rung?’
‘Just to say I’m sending you the work done by the police e-fit artist on the pictures you sent of McCabe’s brother.’
‘Brilliant … but could you chase up the army? They should have a photo in their records. I know it’ll be one from a few years ago, but it may be helpful.’
‘I will. So, today? You’re planning to go door to door down that street?’
‘I am.’
‘You need to take care, Henry. If you come across this guy, you know what he’s like. He won’t be a pussy cat. He’ll just shoot you dead you know that.’
‘He’ll have to shoot Steve Flynn first.’
Henry made another phone call after this, then dragged himself unwillingly out of bed, showered, dressed and made his way down to the restaurant where he helped himself to too much food and a large coffee, then sat at a table close to the wall-mounted TV which was showing a news channel that seemed devoted to the police operation last night in north London. The sound was low but the scrolling news banner told of the tragedy of twenty-four deaths of people believed to be from the Far East and the arrest of seven men believed to be members of a people-smuggling gang.
Henry watched an exhausted-looking Tom Sandford give a quick press briefing and promise more details as and when they were available and appropriate.
Already there were stories emerging of desperate texts sent from the container, some family photographs of the people believed to have died and even an interview in China with the father of one of them. When news broke, Henry thought, it broke fast these days.
Flynn and Jake joined him around nine fifteen, grabbed breakfasts and coffees, and with eyes on the TV screen, they ate.
The first thing Jake asked was, ‘Diane?’ assuming Henry would have made the call to check on how she was.
He had. ‘No change but no worse.’
Jake nodded.
Henry explained his phone call from Rik and that he was expecting some mug shots to be sent to his email which he then wanted to get hotel reception to print off.
‘Then we go knocking on doors, see if we can find a killer behind one of them.’
Norman Road was only a couple of minutes away from the hotel on foot and when Henry saw it he sighed with frustration. It was a pleasant enough road but seemed mainly to consist of low-rise apartment blocks with access to them restricted to tenants by way of security keypads. There was one block that looked older than the others and could possibly have once been owned by the local authority way back, but the bigger picture was that it would be difficult to gain entry to any of the blocks and go knocking on doors and flashing the photographs that Rik had sent to Henry.
Henry felt despondent, but then his day brightened when he saw a Post Office van pull to a stop alongside one of the blocks. A postman got out and went into the foyer of that particular block with a handful of letters.
Henry hurried up to catch him as he came back out empty-handed.
‘Excuse me, can I have a quick word?’
The postman looked immediately suspicious and a little wary of the three big men bearing down on him. Henry saw the look and wondered how many times the poor guy had been robbed.
‘Hey, nothing to worry about,’ Henry assured him. He still did not look too convinced. ‘Just a few seconds of your time, if you don’t mind.’
‘Right, OK.’ Still not happy.
Henry unfolded the photographs he’d had printed off on A4-sized paper, one of the actual Gerald McCabe and then the speculative e-fit of what his twin brother, Darren, might look like based on a combination of the mugshot and the description taken from the B and B owner, but with the face slightly cleaned up, a bit more flesh around the gills, the bags under the eyes less prominent.
‘We’re police officers … just curious if you know this man, or maybe someone who looks similar and lives here in Norman Road. We think he lives here with a woman and a young child.’
The postman screwed up his face and again looked suspiciously at Henry and his two companions. ‘You sure you’re police?’
‘Yeah, of course.’ Henry indicated to Jake. ‘Show him your warrant card.’
Jake did. The postman read it carefully and muttered, ‘Lancashire Constabulary, eh? Long way from home.’
Henry nodded.
‘Where’s your ID?’ the postman asked Henry.
‘Look, I’m a civilian employee and it’s not come through just yet … thing is, do you know this guy or not? If not, fine. But if you do, or think you do, we need to know because he’s wanted for some very serious offences up north, which is why we’re down here in London, and we’re simply trying to track him down and make an arrest.’
Finally, the postman seemed to accept the tale.
He studied the photographs and said, ‘There is a guy … looks a bit like this, I suppose, but not completely like him, if you get my drift. He lives with a woman and they’ve got a pretty young kid.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘There.’ The postman pointed across the road to the red-brick block of flats that Henry had already tagged as possibly having once been council-owned. ‘That ground-floor flat.’
The block was divided into ten flats over three floors, so they were quite large units, built in the 1960s before space became such an issue in London and everything became smaller and more expensive. There was a ground-floor flat on either side of the entrance foyer, and the front doors of the properties could only be accessed through a security door leading into this foyer. There was the obligatory keypad plus doorbells for each flat with scribbled name plates relating to each flat. All had names with the exception of Flat 1, the one on the left of the entrance foyer.
‘Four-zero-eight-five,’ Henry said, regurgitating the keypad code the postman had given him which, he also informed Henry, would only get him into the foyer. The postman had this number only because the letter boxes relating to each flat were in there. The lift and the stairs required another number which he did not possess.
Henry was fine with that because it gave him direct access to the front door of Flat 1.
He tapped in the number, heard the click of the door being released, then stepped through with Flynn and Jake behind him. He knocked on the door, but there was no response. There was still nothing from further knocking. He would have liked to have been able to shout through a letter box, but there wasn’t one. The door was just one piece of solid wood without any glass, just a peephole. He turned to Flynn.
‘How are you feeling today?’
‘Well enough to kick a door down,’ he said enthusiastically.
‘Be my guest.’ Henry had a quick look at Jake who had a slightly worried expression on his face about the legality of entering the flat in this manner. Henry said, ‘I can smell smoke, can’t you?’
He stood aside, allowing Flynn room to operate.
Flynn lined up with the concentration of a rugby player about to convert a try. He sniffed. Rolled his shoulders. Measured the distance. Worked out where best to flat-foot the door (just below the Yale-type lock). There may have been bolts on the other side, but if the flat was empty, they would obviously not be in place. His eyebrows twitched. His body wound itself up to deliver a powerful blow.
The first kick did not seem to have any discernible effect.
The second clattered the door open and almost smashed it off its hinges.
They had gone and all the signs pointed to not returning in the near future.
Henry looked disconsolately around the main bedroom, seeing swathes of clothes strewn across the bed as if laid out and a choice made.
‘Henry?’
Flynn had entered the room holding a framed photograph, a nice one of a couple and a child. Smiling. Happy. Proud. ‘This was on the fireplace.’
The man in it looked very much like a smarter version of Gerald McCabe and very much like the speculative e-fit.
But not quite. It was his twin brother who looked quite sweet and normal. The gunman.
Jake then entered bearing several unopened letters he had retrieved from the letter box in the foyer. They were mainly flyers and circulars, and it was hard to say how long they had been there. ‘Addressed to a Mrs Marcie Quant.’
Henry took this in, the surname sounding familiar, and then he looked at the photograph in Flynn’s hands.
‘I’ve seen this woman before – and the man,’ he said.
Jake peered at the photo over Henry’s shoulder and simultaneously all three men’s eyes locked as they realized where they had all seen them both before.
‘Surveillance photographs,’ Flynn said. ‘The ones Ted Sandford showed us. The ones taken by the NCA at that guy’s funeral, the one who’d been gunned down in Liverpool. Dunster Cosmo was in attendance. She’s the dead guy’s widow and this fella’ – he tapped the photo – ‘was there, too.’
‘That’s it!’ said Jake. ‘She’s called Quant and the funeral was for Brendan Quant, the guy who got whacked in Liverpool.’
‘Cosmo seems to be the common denominator in all this,’ Henry said, ‘and looking at this guy’ – he tapped his finger on McCabe’s face in the photograph – ‘I’d say he was Gerald McCabe’s better-looking twin brother, Darren, and one thing’s for sure, we’re hot on his tail.’
‘Why don’t we get a proper warrant and a search team in here?’ Jake suggested. ‘Do it by the book.’
Henry took out his mobile phone and took a photograph of the framed photo, then called up Ted Sandford.
Henry found the remainder of the day to be frustrating but necessary.
Through Ted Sandford, he managed to rustle up a search team from the Met which seemed to want to trash the flat and get out as soon as possible. It took a lot of patience and the application of some discipline by him to keep them on track.
In the end, after a four-hour search, they found seemingly little of importance and nothing much was seized other than a few more photographs and some documents. There was no computer in the flat, although it did have broadband connection. Henry guessed any computer would be with the couple, wherever they were.
When the search was over, Henry ensured the property was sealed up securely and a notice with phone numbers on was slapped on the front door saying this was now a police crime scene. Two police cordon tapes were strung across the door.
Finally, everything that had been bagged up was transferred to a secure property store at Lewisham Police Station.
By the time all this had been done, it was five p.m.
Henry checked on the status of Gerald McCabe to find he was still being interviewed, and the buzz was that he had now admitted to twenty abductions/murders in the Greater London area in the last fifteen years, plus numerous break-ins where he had raped elderly occupants, male and female. His recollection of the number of indecent assaults and indecent exposure offences – as well as the stranger rapes he had committed where he had not abducted or murdered anyone – was hazy.
Henry also checked on Dunster Cosmo’s progress but struggled to get any update. He was very much being kept under wraps, which Henry understood. There was a very good chance that if he cracked, a whole multi-million-pound criminal enterprise could be brought down.
After this he, Jake and Flynn returned to the hotel in Greenwich where they had booked rooms for another night.
They split up, with plans to meet up later and get an evening meal in Greenwich. Flynn headed straight for a hot bath to ease his aching muscles and then bed for a couple of hours. Jake went to grab a shower, then call home. Henry hit his room and showered too, aware that stepping back into the clothes he had been wearing for the last couple of days was taking its toll.
He stretched out on the large bed and watched a news channel which was still buzzing with the deaths of the migrants but had also picked up on the arrest of a serial killer in New Cross and even had some footage of the actual arrest of McCabe, taken by the driver of one of the cars that had crawled past as Jake was kneeling on the prisoner’s back. Fortunately, all the faces had been pixelated out.
Then he opened his laptop and transferred the photographs he had taken with his phone of all the documents seized from the flat on Norman Road on to it so they were easier to expand and inspect.
Before perusing them, though, he made a couple of phone calls.
First to Royal Lancaster Infirmary for an update on Diane. There was no change; she was still critical, but the internal bleeding had definitely stopped.
Next he called Rik Dean to update him on progress and asked him to get things together to circulate Darren McCabe as wanted for the murder of Bethany York, Jack Carter and Billy Lane, together with the shooting of DC Diane Daniels. Henry sent him a copy of the photographs he had taken from the flat search.
Rik promised to pull that together and then asked when Henry and his little crew expected to be back in Lancashire.
‘Tomorrow sometime. Going to chill tonight, see where we are up to in the morning, then head back. Late afternoon, I suspect.’
‘That’s fine … Hey, look, come round for tea, will you? Get dropped off and I’ll ensure Lisa makes that chicken casserole – you know, her signature dish? After that I’ll drive you up to RLI to see Diane, then take you home. Lisa needs to see you, I need to catch up with you … What d’you say? You haven’t even seen the new house yet.’
‘OK, but what if I bring Flynn along too? Then I can do the RLI thing without bothering you and he can take me home because he’s bedding down at The Tawny Owl anyway. I promise he won’t trash your house, and if I have to, I’ll make him wear a bib and feed him myself.’
‘If you must.’
‘OK, speak tomorrow.’
Henry returned to the photographs and documents from the search. Although he had sent Ted Sandford a copy of the photograph that Flynn had found of the happy couple and baby, so far nothing had come back about that. He knew Sandford was busy with Cosmo, so he didn’t push him about it.
As he skimmed through more documents, he came across one relating to the lease of a car. He hadn’t read it at the time of seizure, but now he did and saw it was about the long-term lease of a Rolls-Royce at some astronomical monthly figure; the lease had been terminated when the car was taken back by the lease company for failure to keep up payments. These documents were all dated about four years before.
Something made him frown. Then he remembered.
He picked up his phone, flicked through the contacts, found who he was looking for and made the call. It rang and was answered quickly.
‘Jenny Peel here.’
‘Jenny? Sorry to bother you. This is Henry Christie. I came with DS Daniels to chat to you about John and Isobel York if you remember?’
‘Course I do. What can I do for you, Henry?’ she asked.
‘You recall mentioning that someone came to see John York, a woman who landed in a Rolls-Royce? A woman with a driver?’
‘Yes, the hunky driver. I remember him well,’ she purred.
‘Do you mind if I text you a photograph just to see if it’s the same people who turned up to see John?’
‘No probs.’
Henry did and a few minutes later Jenny Peel came back with a reply via text. These are the ones.
Henry thanked her by text, then slowly closed his laptop, sank back on the bed and closed his eyes, unable to stop thinking about Diane Daniels. He did something he rarely did: he prayed for her.