Blood Debt, page 10
Rick experienced a cold wash of anger. ‘Worked out all right last autumn, didn’t it, sir?’
‘Be very careful, Sergeant.’ Ghosh’s icy tone matched his own.
Easy, Rick … It was Sam’s voice he heard. The man’s under pressure – the last thing he needs is his protégé turning on him. Words like ‘protégé’ had only become part of Sam’s vocabulary after Theo Lockleigh, dodgy lawyer, illegal moneylender and amateur art collector had made Sam his own protégé. That mentorship had led to the darkest days of Rick’s boyhood.
From the set of his jaw, Rick knew that Ghosh was grinding his teeth. But he couldn’t bring himself to apologise. He took a slow breath and said, ‘I don’t believe that the Blackfriars mob was turned in by a disgruntled ex-crew member, or that Emin’s place was torched by a rival. And Floren’s shooting looks a lot more complicated than a revenge attack arranged by his former partner.’ Should he tell his boss the conclusion he’d reached? No. ‘Vigilante’ was almost a taboo word in policing, so he stayed silent on that point.
Ghosh eyed him for a few moments longer, sucking his teeth. At last, he spoke: ‘D’you think I don’t know what you’re driving at? Don’t you know the potential damage that kind of wild rumour could cause?’
Rick had no real, concrete proof, so he chose his words carefully: ‘It’s true, I don’t have all the answers, but surely, we should at least be asking the questions?’
Ghosh shook his head bitterly. ‘Get out of my sight.’
Chapter 20
Nine a.m. briefing
ONLY A FEW MEMBERS OF THE TASK FORCE were present in the meeting room, the rest being actively engaged on inquiries. Rick picked a seat out of Ghosh’s direct line of sight, sipping coffee and blinking away tiredness, focusing hard on what each person had to say. He’d been awake and active since seven a.m. the day before, and the room seemed to be spinning slowly. In moments of clarity, he gathered that Emin was moving fast at both the supply and processing ends of his business. He had left his temporary address in Dalston just after dark the previous night to meet with a Turkish Cypriot suspected of bringing large quantities of heroin into the country via the Balkan route.
‘They met in a Turkish café on Stoke Newington Road.’ This came from the sallow-skinned NCA agent. ‘Interpol’s got him tagged as moving large shipments – heroin and cocaine – people, as well,’ she went on. ‘I think we can safely assume that Emin is negotiating a restock after the fire that wiped out his main factory.’
Ghosh spoke up. ‘Assume?’
‘We couldn’t get listening equipment anywhere near the place.’ When Ghosh began to fidget, she said, ‘It’s a tight-knit community – we’d need someone of Turkish ethnicity to have any chance of getting in there unnoticed, and we just don’t have the personnel.’ She spoke with regret, though she seemed unruffled.
‘So we have no idea when,’ Ghosh said, irritated, now.
‘Sooner, rather than later would be my guess,’ Rick chipped in before he could stop himself.
The searing look Ghosh gave him made heads turn. Finally the superintendent jerked his chin and said curtly, ‘Go on.’
‘The warehouse was quiet except for a few deliveries up until six-thirty last night. White vans, single crew.’
‘We checked the vehicle registrations you sent in.’ This came from the tech who’d set up the cameras on Rick’s surveillance the previous afternoon. Rick hadn’t noticed him at the table, so maybe he’d joined them part way through. Or maybe you nodded off for a second. The notion was unsettling, and Rick made a mental promise to himself to get a few hours of sleep in as soon as he got home.
‘… local and national delivery services,’ the tech finished, and Rick realised he’d missed something.
‘So they were all legit,’ he said, winging it, hoping he wasn’t contradicting whatever it was that had come before.
The tech stared at him as if he were slow. ‘Well, yes …’
Well, it would seem that you just stated the bleeding obvious, Rick.
‘Then box vans started arriving at seven p.m.,’ Rick said. ‘If you remember, the estate agent told me that whoever rented the place was going to set up a dark kitchen selling Mexican food? Well, these vans were marked “Papa Pepe’s Burritos”.’
‘Hang on.’ The tech clicked to an image Rick had taken of one of the vans.
The name was emblazoned in an arc of red and green lettering on a white background. Beneath this, images of dancing burritos wearing brightly coloured sombreros and a bold promise: ‘Delivered to your door!’
‘The vans were bought at auction a day after the warehouse fire,’ the tech added. ‘And the graphics look like cheap vinyl stickers.’
He nodded to Rick to continue.
‘There are three vans. They showed up every thirty minutes or so in rotation,’ Rick said. ‘Two-crewed, same crew each time – and fully loaded, so they must’ve been picking stuff up from somewhere local.’
Ghosh turned to the NCA agent. ‘Can we get GPS trackers on those?’
‘We could try …’ she said doubtfully. ‘We know they’ve got someone watching each end of the access road, and it doesn’t get much foot traffic, so it’s a big ask. We’d probably do better with a combination of TfL cameras and mobile surveillance.’
They wrangled for a couple of minutes over personnel to crew cars and sit through hours of Transport for London traffic cam footage, then the technical surveillance expert gave a breakdown of what was in the boxes the vans were ferrying in. Hidden cameras inside the warehouse had sent live video of weighing kits, bags, tape, polystyrene fast-food boxes and clingfilm, such as a catering company would use. But any thought that they were catering only to food cravings was dispelled when he showed them stills of bulking agents unpacked and stacked on pallets in readiness for cutting the drugs when they arrived. Boxes of surgical masks, tiny click-seal baggies, pill presses and encapsulating machines had also been laid out on long metal tables in what was surely destined to become a production line.
‘We got names for most of the crew,’ the tech said, coming to the tail end of his report. ‘Except this guy.’ He threw a still on-screen of a short, thick-set man with a dark fuzz of five-o’clock shadow that extended from the top of his cheekbones to his T-shirt collar. ‘They only referred to him as “guv” or “boss”.’
Ghosh named Emin’s right-hand man, getting there ahead of Rick.
‘He wouldn’t show up on-site just for a progress report,’ Rick said. ‘They must be expecting a consignment.’
‘We’ll put a team onto him,’ the NCA agent said. ‘We’ve already got eyes on Emin – and Border Force is on alert at Dover.’
The Border Force rep nodded. ‘We’ll let you know immediately if we believe a shipment has come in. We can track boats to the London ports without arousing suspicion.’
‘And if they unload the cargo at Dover?’ Ghosh asked.
‘We’ll enlist air support, if need be,’ the NCA shot back. ‘Rest assured, if they go by road, we’ll have the shipment covered every step of the way.’
After a few more minutes of discussion on comms and staffing, the meeting broke up and Rick headed to the locker room. He stared stupidly into his locker at his running gear, wondering if he had the energy for a thirty-minute jog to Putney, deciding after a few addled moments that it might loosen the stiffness he felt after eighteen hours cooped up in one room. He was tying his laces when his work mobile buzzed in his pocket, and he fished it out.
‘Where are you?’ Ghosh asked without preamble.
‘The locker room.’
‘Well, get back up here – pronto.’
Almost the full complement of inter-agency personnel were already gathered when Rick walked through the door. The room was packed, and he wondered what could be so important that they’d dragged people off tasks they’d just been assigned. The arrival of a major drugs shipment was imminent – what could be more important?
Maybe sleep deprivation was making him paranoid, but heads seemed to turn as he edged inside, and he felt he was getting some funny looks from the more senior members of the team.
Ghosh rapped on the table and the room fell silent. ‘This just went live on various podcast platforms.’ He clicked a button on the remote and stood to one side, watching with the rest.
The screen lit up to reveal a woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair. She was sitting at a desk, with a microphone in front of her. Rick recognised her immediately. Pandora’s podcast was designed to work on audio channels, but the video clips she used to make her investigatory points lent themselves to visual presentation, and she encouraged her followers to access her YouTube channel and her website for the additional material.
‘My name is Pandora Hahn,’ she began. ‘And you’re watching the Pandora Unboxes podcast.’
This caused some uneasy shuffling of feet.
‘In this second season of Pandora Unboxes, we’re digging deep into policing in the capital. Trying to work out why criminals can brazenly go about their illegal activities without consequences. Is it because our law enforcers are hamstrung? Are British law enforcement agencies incapable of carrying out their sworn duty to serve and protect because they’re afraid of infringing the rights of those who break the law? If so, what about the rights of law-abiding citizens? Don’t they have a right to feel safe on the streets of our capital?’
She paused, looking into the camera. ‘In this episode of Pandora Unboxes, I will reveal the shocking truth of what really happened the night that London Metropolitan Police arrested three men in connection with the Blackfriars Bank robbery.’
The room was too crowded for everyone to take a seat, and Rick was standing at the back in a corner, with a good view of the rest. The looks on their faces bore an odd mix of avid interest and dread.
‘Blackfriars Bank is an independent institution, based here in London. This case involved kidnap, threat and extortion. On the sixth of January, the wife of the bank manager and fiancée of the deputy manager were kidnapped in separate car-jackings as they drove home after the morning school run. They remained in the hands of the kidnappers until ten o’clock that same evening, after the manager and his assistant were forced to give the kidnappers access to the bank vault.’
Her image shrank abruptly, ending up in one corner of the screen, while an image of Quinn opened up.
‘Police arrested this man, Gary Quinn, but released him without charge a day later. Three months on, he’s back in custody, along with two other men, following a tip-off to police.’
Quinn’s picture was replaced by the now infamous video clip of Anstell outside the car park in Tower Hamlets, prompting groans and eyerolls around the room.
‘“Three significant arrests,”’ Pandora quoted from Anstell’s thirty seconds of self-glorification. ‘“A substantial sum of money was retrieved during the course of the arrests …”’ Then, quoting DCI Steiner: ‘“My team has been working tirelessly behind the scenes.”’
Pandora froze the footage at a point where Steiner appeared to have an unpleasant snarl on her face, then looked into the camera and said, ‘Does it sound like the Metropolitan Police are claiming full credit for the arrests? Detective Chief Inspector Anstell says, “We have on video the division of a substantial sum of money,” yet we now know that the police were not on the scene at the time the money was shared out between the suspects. They had a tip-off from a man named Bert Wickstead – and I revealed in the last episode of Pandora Unboxes that the name was fake – at least in the sense that Bert Wickstead is dead … He was a famous gangbuster of the 1960s and Seventies – a well-known and greatly admired detective superintendent at the Met. The caller even identified himself as a police officer, yet nobody at the Met made the connection.’
She went on to invite viewers to tune in to previous episodes and like and subscribe to the podcast.
‘Do we have to sit through all of this?’ The plea came from Kath Steiner herself.
Ghosh flicked a look in her direction. ‘Context, Kath. Keep watching.’
‘The police have backpedalled since then,’ Pandora was saying. ‘So what really happened that night?’ She paused. ‘You’re about to find out. Pandora Unboxes – Hamstrung Law has exclusive video from inside the car park on the night of the arrests.’
A nervous shifting and a few murmured curses, then the room fell silent again.
The screen faded to black. Then, the dimly lit interior of a multistorey car park in shades of grey. In the bottom right-hand corner was a stylised wolf logo. Rick thought the image was a photograph until one of the strip lights flickered. A few cars stood in the bays, but there was no sign of human activity. A sudden glare spotlit the concrete beams of the ceiling, then a light-coloured car appeared at the top of the up-ramp at the far end of the level.
Someone said, ‘Is that Quinn’s Qashqai?’
For a few seconds the full beam of the headlamps blinded the camera, until the car turned and reversed into a bay.
A long pause, then a man swung out of the car. It was Gary Quinn. After checking that he was alone, he hefted a large sports bag from the boot of his SUV and started walking.
A slight flicker indicated that the surveillance operator had switched to a different camera, then the screen split in two, showing the empty Qashqai on one level and Quinn on another, nearing two men, standing next to two cars.
The gathering watched as the spoils were divided, then Quinn said, ‘The cops haven’t given up on Blackfriars, yet, so hold back for a while, be cautious, pay cash – and don’t brag.’ The incriminating words were spoken with crystal clarity.
Suddenly five helmeted, masked, and heavily armed figures in tactical gear burst on the scene, bellowing commands, subduing two of the suspects in seconds. But the split screen remained on, and they saw the tall figure of Quinn fold himself like a paperclip and drop down to the lower level.
The next minute was a confusing blur of movement. A van appeared out of nowhere as Quinn tried to get into his car. He reached behind him as two of the tactical team came into view at the far end of the level.
A muffled scream, then the van skidded sideways, colliding with the Qashqai. Here, it was hard to make out what happened, but there was a definite muzzle-flash and a deafening bang, then Quinn came around the van and reached in to the driver at the exact moment two of the tac team appeared and dragged him back. They dropped him hard to the concrete floor, rolled him on his face, zip-tied his hands, and dumped him in his car in one fluid and practised action.
‘Now, it’s difficult to make out what was happening in those last few seconds,’ Pandora said, her voice calm and objective. ‘So let me talk you through.’ She ran the end of the clip a second time, describing how Quinn had tried to shoot the van driver.
‘Impressive, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘But they are not police.’ She paused for effect. ‘Look at their jackets and helmets. No police logos, no chequer banding, no badging. You might think, well … maybe they’re under cover – they are wearing tactical gear, and they are armed, after all. It’s a thought, but I’m pretty sure it would be illegal.’ She allowed herself a small flicker of a smile. ‘And I say again, with absolute certainty they are not police, or any other law enforcement agency. I know this for a fact, because they told me.’
A gasp, then a buzz of conversation.
‘Quiet,’ Ghosh snapped and they subsided once more.
‘I was sent this recording by the group that made the arrests,’ Pandora explained. ‘They accomplished in one night what the Metropolitan Police with their considerable resources have failed to do in three months.’ Another pause. ‘They achieved justice for victims, consequences for criminals. They even returned the stolen bank cash. Be sure to check back soon with Pandora Unboxes, because they assure me that the Blackfriars Bank robbers will not be the last.’
This provoked a more determined rumble of protest and muttered curses that Ghosh could not quell.
‘They call themselves the Wolf Pack,’ Ghosh said, muting the screen as Pandora started her wind-down to the end of the programme.
Animations and icons on the screen encouraged people to ‘like’, review and subscribe to her podcast.
‘She didn’t get anything from them about who they are?’ the NCA agent asked.
Ghosh shook his head.
‘They look police or military trained,’ Rick said, and a murmur of agreement followed.
‘I want her arrested,’ Steiner hissed.
‘On what charge?’
Rick recognised the lofty tone Ghosh often took before descending into acid sarcasm.
‘Theft of evidence for one,’ she said.
‘Where’s the theft?’ Ghosh demanded. ‘She claims she was given the recording by the people who claim to have made it.’
‘Conspiracy, then,’ Steiner said with an irritated twitch of her shoulders.
‘Conspiring to do what – advance the course of criminal justice?’
Steiner hardened her voice. ‘She’s shielding perpetrators of crime. A gun was discharged. Those amateurs could have killed someone.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. But they caught the robbers practically with their hands in the till.’
She shook her head.
‘Look, Kath,’ Ghosh said, more conciliatory, now. ‘I sympathise. But what exactly do you think it would do for the Met’s image if we went after a reporter who is in communication with a group who claims to be cleaning up London’s streets?’
‘She’s a podcaster, sir!’
‘She got more information about what went down during the apprehension of the Blackfriars mob than we did,’ he pointed out. ‘She got a digital recording to corroborate it. And if what we’ve just seen is amateur, what does that make us?’
The DCI verbally flattened, Ghosh turned to practical matters and in a matter of under five minutes the NCA had agreed to dig into Pandora Hahn’s background and her podcast, while Ghosh allocated someone in the press office to ask her to come in for a chat.
The meeting dispersed and Rick was about to slip out of the door, when Ghosh raised his voice over the murmur of voices. ‘Rick – a word.’
