Blood Line (38 page)

‘Have you had any information about or sighting of him?’

‘Nope, not so much as a whisper. He’s a real piece of scum. He’s been dealing for years. If we catch him and lock him up, he comes out with more contacts than before he went in. He was always a smalltime operator dealing mostly in weed and ecstasy tablets. He’d move from beach to beach selling to the young kids. I think – in fact, I know – he had access to a farm where they were growing the weed. The plants were inside an old barn with very sophisticated heating, hydroponic lighting and a drainage system, producing top-grade weed. It was busted four or five years ago.’

Again he withdrew photographs and passed them to Anna.

‘The skunk as they call it was moving out on a bloody conveyor belt, being sent all over England. I know he was part of it, but he slipped out of the net and surfaced again a year later. This is Sammy.’ He got out a mugshot for them to look at. Then another. ‘This is also Sammy.’

Paul leaned closer to Anna to see the photographs. ‘Looks like Johnny Depp.’

‘Take a look at this one.’

Sammy Marsh was adept at changing his appearance. Williams kept on passing over one print after another, surveillance shots and mugshots. The man’s hair went from shoulder-length to braids, to cut short, to a pig-tail with thin moustache and a small goatee beard. Some pictures even showed his hair dyed blonde.

‘Right little chameleon, isn’t he? He’s only about five foot eight, always very slender, and in the summer he gets tanned. He wears top designer gear and drives flashy cars.’

More photographs showed how many cars Sammy had owned and driven: a Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, beach buggy and various motor bikes. In most of them he was smiling, posing with two or more gorgeous bikini-clad girls. In one of the prints, Sammy could be seen with a group of equally tanned and handsome men, their surfboards stuck into the back seat of a Land Rover.

‘Is one of these men Alan? Paul, what do you think?’

Paul shook his head and passed the photo back to Williams.

‘Sammy’s flat is still owned by him, isn’t it?’ Anna asked.

‘Yes. Well, he rented a number of places, but he actually only owns one. Looks like he left in one hell of a hurry because there was food in the fridge, wet clothes in the washing machine and no sight of him for six months.’

‘Any movement in his bank accounts?’

Williams laughed. ‘Sammy will no doubt have accounts in God knows how many banks or countries, but he primarily dealt in cash. If he was to bank his earnings from drugs he’d have to prove how he was making enough to buy all those flash motors, never mind his flat. He also had heavies watching out for him, but even they have disappeared.’

Williams gathered up the photographs, put them in his briefcase and then took out a single sheet of paper.

‘Here’s a list of the names he used. He’d often keep his Christian name, but it’s sometimes Sammy Miles, Sammy Myers, Sammy Lines . . . we found four passpor ts in his flat all with different names – brilliant forgeries and they must have cost a packet.’

Anna sat back, watching Williams getting more tense and angry.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.

‘That’s what I am here for, Detective Travis.’

‘Sammy, you have said, was smalltime, had numerous arrests for drug-dealing; he serves short sentences, then gets released and goes straight back to doing exactly what he had been doing before his imprisonment, right?’

‘Correct. But he was mostly charged with possession. He was never caught with either money from drugs or actually dealing.’

‘What about the photographs, the surveillance? If you knew he was up to his old tricks and from the photographs out in the open . . .’

‘First off he moved from selling the skunk himself to using his heavies for dealing, collecting payment for him, breaking a few arms and issuing threats if the punters didn’t pay up for their bag of shit. To be honest, with the government changing its mind two years ago and upping cannabis from Class C to B it looks like he decided to switch.’

‘Switch?’

‘Prison sentences for Class B are longer. Maybe he decided he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb so he started dealing Cat A drugs – heroin, cocaine and crack. He was under covert surveillance because the Drug Squad wanted to discover who the supplier was, and who was backing him financially because he didn’t just focus on this area, he was moving from coast to coast. He also bought this.’

Out came a photograph of a high-powered speedboat. And again it was passed to Anna and then Paul.

‘Paid for in cash from a local boat-builder, but the little bastard disappeared. That’s still moored and no one has been near it.’

The waitress cleared Paul’s soup bowl and returned with their main order. They remained silent until she left them to eat, saying in an expressionless voice, ‘Enjoy your dinner.’

Anna was really hungry and tucked in straight away. Williams topped up their wine again and carved up his steak.

‘This is delicious.’ Anna grinned.

‘Good food – that’s why we use this place. Come high season though, it’s packed with families and a load of screaming kids.’

For a while they were silent as they concentrated on eating before Anna said to Williams that she was a little bit confused. It appeared that the Drug Squad still did not have the names of the contacts that Sammy was now using to score the Category A drugs, but had decided to arrest him regardless.

Williams nodded and suggested they finish their meals before he showed them the reason.

‘I don’t think either Paul or I are squeamish enough to be put off our food, especially not after having only a sandwich on the train,’ Anna offered.

Williams forked a large mouthful of steak into his mouth before yet again delving into his briefcase. He took out a brown manila envelope and opened it.

‘Reported missing by her mother late last summer. She was washed up on the rocks aged sixteen – heroin overdose.’

Anna looked at the mortuary shot of the dead girl. Her wet hair plastered to her bloated face, her body covered in wounds from the jagged rocks. She passed it to Paul. However, Williams hadn’t finished. He followed it with a second photograph of an equally young girl, her body found in a rented caravan. It was a heroin overdose and the needle still protruded from her arm.

‘She doesn’t look as if she was a regular user. She’s not underweight and I don’t see many track marks. She was fifteen years old.’

Williams produced yet another mortuary photograph of a young boy. His naked body showed the white skin on his buttocks and genitals, but the rest of his skin was a deep brown.

‘Seventeen year old. All of them were here in Cornwall for the holidays. The boy worked the deckchairs on the beach. None of them were residents, but had been introduced to heroin whilst they were here. Nor did any of them have any previous drug-related arrests. They were simply kids from good families who became embroiled in the beach traffic scoring drugs.’

‘Did you get direct evidence linking any of these victims to Sammy Marsh?’

‘Just the first girl. She was in the photograph I showed you with the two other bikini-clad girls hanging around Sammy’s jeep. Drug Squad joined forces with me and we did a lot of the legwork identifying them all. It was decided to pick up Sammy before he could sell any more of the gear, and he must have got wind of it because he disappeared.’

‘But what evidence did the Drug Squad have that these kids scored from him?’

‘We made an arrest of a young guy working at a bar. He’d ended up in hospital suffering from an overdose, but he survived, and we were able to get the remainder of the wrap he had bought. It was heroin, but it had been mixed with Christ only knows what. There were traces of ketamine and morphine, and it was very high quality and lethal, especially to someone who had never used before, so the first fix could kill.’

‘So he gave up Sammy’s name?’ Paul asked. Unlike Anna he had found that the photographs of the victims had turned his stomach. He had hardly touched his food.

‘Eventually he did, after a lot of persuasion as he was scared rigid that he would get beaten up by the heavies. Especially one bastard, Errol Dante, who acted like an enforcer.’

‘We interviewed him,’ Anna said sharply.

‘Well, he did a runner before we could nab him, but apparently he’d stolen drugs from Sammy and . . .’

‘Moved in with his girlfriend. He was dealing on the estate in Brixton where he lived and got busted for that. He and his girlfriend think that someone tipped off the London Drug Squad.’

‘That would be Sammy, yet Errol is still refusing to give us any assistance,’ Williams said grimly.

‘Nor to help us,’ Anna added.

‘I’d say he was scared Sammy would cut off his legs.’ Williams replaced the photographs and ate some more of his steak before he continued.

‘We have a statement from a woman who lived in a caravan next to where Errol stayed with his girlfriend. She called the local police because of the row that was going on inside the caravan, saying she was certain she’d heard a gunshot. By the time they arrived, the place had been totally trashed, windows broken and every stick of furniture smashed. She was able to identify Errol Dante as the one living in the caravan and she described Sammy. She said he was first outside the trailer, banging on the door and screaming, then he eventually kicked the door open and went inside. She said he was hysterical and his face was twisted as if he was having some kind of fit, eyes bulging and so agitated that it looked as if he was frothing at the mouth.’

‘How long after that did Sammy disappear?’

‘Few days. He was sighted a couple of times, but then nothing. We know Errol went back to London, but all we had on him was that he’d trashed a caravan owned by Sammy. Previously he had been sleeping on Sammy’s floor in his flat – at least, that’s what we were told.’

He replaced the statement into the envelope and once again closed his briefcase. He finished his steak and glanced at Paul’s half-eaten sea-food platter.

‘Something wrong with that?’

‘No, but the soup was very filling.’

Williams laughed and could see that Anna had now taken some bread and was cleaning around her plate with it.

‘You want a dessert?’ Williams asked, but they both declined.

Williams insisted he drive them back to their B&B in his unmarked patrol car when they left the pub. He had also insisted he pay for dinner. It was ten o’clock and Anna felt that although they had by now learned a lot of details about Sammy Marsh, they had no leads to Alan Rawlins. In fact, she felt that they had hardly touched on the reason why she and Paul were in Cornwall.

‘I know it’s late,’ she said to Williams, ‘but would you mind talking to me a bit more, maybe have coffee somewhere? It’s just that we’ve been allocated so little time here and I don’t want to waste it.’

Williams agreed to take them to the station, where he claimed the coffee was acceptable as the team had all clubbed together to get an espresso machine. As he drove he went into great lengths about the coffee machine, which could also make cappuccinos. Paul was in the back of the car with Williams’s seat pressed so far back there was no leg room on one side, leaving him hunched against the passenger side. Unlike Anna, he felt exhausted. Thankfully it was not too long a drive.

The station was situated in a residential area, close to the railway station. As they pulled up, the car park was empty and it seemed to be very quiet. Even though it was dark, Anna could see that the building looked rather modern, but quite small in comparison to the station she had come from back in London.

Once inside, the station was as Harry Took had described, very empty apart from a couple of officers. The local uniformed police were located on the first floor, the Drug Squad were in a different building, and although the place on first view seemed modern, it was actually an awful sixties-built block.

Williams towering above Anna was very much the gentleman, gently steering her by the elbow through a warren of corridors until they approached double doors leading into the incident room. Williams had to press in a code to gain entry. The lights were off and he switched them on from a panel by the side of the door, and holding it open, he gestured for Anna and Paul to walk in ahead of him. Even at his size Williams was very coordinated, moving quickly to light up the incident board before heading into a small kitchen annex to brew up some coffee.

Anna and Paul looked over the astonishing array of information in front of them. Many of the photographs they had seen in the pub were also pinned up here, along with witness statements and reports which cluttered almost every inch of the board. Then they noticed that a separate board had been brought in and placed beside the Cornwall investigation. There were the email contacts sent by Anna’s team with photographs of Alan Rawlins, plus the photograph of the property they believed he owned.
Missing, Presumed Murdered
was written in large capital letters.

‘Is Williams Drug Squad?’

Anna shook her head. He was obviously leading the enquiries into the dead teenagers.

‘I like him,’ she decided.

Paul agreed, liking Williams even more when he carried in a tray of mugs with steaming coffee, milk and sugar, indicating that they should help themselves to whatever they wanted.

‘I see you’ve started to compile a board for my enquiry,’ Anna remarked.

‘Yep. Reason being, I am interested in the possibility that your man might have been caught up in the drug situation. We’ve sort of collaborated with the Drug Squad and we’re working together. You’ll meet everyone tomorrow.’

‘I appreciate it,’ Anna said, sipping the strong coffee.

Williams perched himself on a desk facing the boards.

‘What’s your gut feeling on this bloke Alan Rawlins?’ he said.

It was strange to hear Williams ask the same question that Langton always asked, and Anna didn’t say anything at first, continuing to sip her coffee. Then she sat beside him and gave a brief rundown of her enquiry to date, while Paul eased himself into another chair. She detailed the amount of money they’d established Alan Rawlins had accumulated and added that they’d found that he did know Sammy Marsh, so there was a possibility they were connected through the drug trade.