Corpse in Waiting (18 page)

Nothing appeared to be amiss as we emerged from the lift. Without speaking, I indicated which way we should go and we made our way across the open space and along the corridor. Other than for the hum of distant machinery it was quiet: this floor, at least, appeared to be unoccupied. We reached room fifteen.

‘I think Fred was lying,' I said. ‘Sorry, I should have mentioned this before.'

Patrick was eyeing up the door locks. ‘Nothing too complicated here – very cheap and nasty actually. Lying?'

‘Yes, well, he must have told someone I was around, mustn't he? I don't think she operates from here.'

‘It might have been a coincidence and that bloke was merely checking in at HQ.'

‘And this room might be a cupboardful of nasty surprises.'

Patrick straightened and gazed at me but did not deride the suggestion, gently remarking, ‘What with gun-carrying dragons and people messing with the car you've had more than your fair share of nasty surprises lately. But I doubt she has the wherewithal for that kind of thing.'

‘No, but she employs pretty revolting blokes,' I pointed out.

He smiled. ‘Do I up the security level to Red Alert then?'

‘Don't say I didn't warn you,' I retorted primly.

With his keys he opened the door, turned the handle and pushed the door back as far as it would go. It was dark inside: there did not appear to be any windows in the room. Patrick carefully felt around for light switches, found one, and stood back quickly after he had clicked it down.

The room, around twelve feet square, was completely empty, not even a waste-paper basket. There was another door in the opposite wall. We went into the first room after Patrick had checked behind the door and looked around but there was absolutely nothing to see. He then walked round it tapping the walls, some of which sounded hollow.

‘This is just a thin partition, little more than hardboard,' he said, standing over by the wall with the door in it. ‘And so is that.' He waved in the direction of the one on his left.

‘Perhaps that's how the place is divided up,' I said.

‘You should have stud walls, proper wooden frames with plasterboard nailed to them. Let's see what's . . .'

Strong wrists wielded the keys again. The second room was in darkness as well: no daylight whatsoever. An unpleasant stale smell, like drains, only worse, wafted out. Patrick could find no light switch so he dug in his pocket for his torch. It is not designed for large-scale illumination but by the tiny beam we could see that the room was quite large and fitted out with several bunk beds.

‘Stay there,' Patrick said and went in.

He roamed around for a couple of minutes, tapping on the walls in here too.

‘The window's been boarded over,' he called across to me. ‘I think you can come in but please don't touch anything. I must be getting it from you but there's a bad feeling in here.'

It was a horrible feeling. The little pencil of light picked out the soiled bedding, discarded bloodstained clothing, other filthy strips of cloth, scraps of food, rubbish everywhere. The stench right inside the room was ghastly.

‘This is a prison,' I said.

‘You may well be right.'

‘There only seems to be women's clothing.'

‘People trafficking?'

I felt sick. Why did I think women had been raped in here?

Patrick swung the torch around. There was a side room. This was not locked and the source of most of the smell; at least seven buckets filled with human excrement.

I fled for the outer door, retching.

‘To the fag smokers,' Patrick said grimly, catching up with me after relocking both doors. ‘No, on second thoughts, I'll go alone as Fred's seen you before and he might be one of them. If I end up pulverizing him I don't want you involved.'

‘I'd rather be in scream-shot, if you don't mind,' I told him. ‘It's not as though we have the car here and I don't want to hang around outside.'

‘OK, just stay out of sight.'

We exited the building, waving to the security guard and went round the back again. By this time it was getting dark and I reckoned myself just about invisible if I waited behind one of the malodorous rubbish bins. Patrick went on ahead with the air of a man with a real grievance. All was quiet for a couple of minutes and then I heard him shouting.

‘Health and Safety at Work Executive!' he yelled. ‘It's been reported that people are smoking within this prohibited area!'

There was a muted crash as though someone's chair had fallen over backwards, taking them with it, not surprising as when Patrick really shouts everything within a fifty-yard radius tends to judder. He went on talking, speaking a little more quietly but not much. I could tell that he was taking names and addresses interspersed with dire warnings of prosecution.

After all had gone quiet I peeped around my bin and saw him coming back, putting his notebook back in his jacket pocket.

‘There's no guarantee they gave me their genuine details,' he said, unerringly coming to where I was. ‘But they can all be put in the file. There was no one who fitted Fred's description there.'

‘That was a good move,' I said. ‘We don't want anyone involved with whatever's going on in that room to know we're on to them.'

‘But they're aware that you were sniffing around and they failed to catch you. If Alex has anything to do with it she already knows we're with SOCA so for God's sake don't do any more lone sleuthing. OK?'

‘OK. But it served its purpose, didn't it? – getting you to take my suspicions seriously.'

‘I'm sure I don't have to tell you that there's absolutely no evidence to connect what you found to Alexandra Nightingale,' James Carrick pointed out. ‘Having said that, there would appear to be some connection in that the man by the name of Fred told Ingrid that's where the woman has her office, which is where you discovered the room that sounds as though it's been used as a prison.'

It was the next morning, we were at SOCA's HQ in the office Patrick uses when he is there, sometimes having to share it with someone else, and he was talking to the DCI on his mobile. I had my head on his shoulder, eavesdropping.

He said, ‘Fred's not very bright and probably should have kept his trap shut but I would guess that the first room is kept empty as a ploy to make people think nothing's going on there. It's actually rather feeble but might work with casual enquirers. What do you want me to do with the names and addresses I took?'

‘This is a real can of worms and I'm very concerned that young women might have been removed from the place and are being held somewhere else,' Carrick replied. ‘Since you rang me last night I've been on to a couple of ex-colleagues in the Met who deal with people trafficking and prostitution and they told me that most of that kind of thing, especially where it's regarded as being big organized crime, is handed over to your lot. Otherwise it'll have to be reported to the Met. I suggest you sound out Mike Greenway and give him your info before I do anything else in case connections can be made with stuff people are already working on. My bit of it's really only involved with Ingrid's incident at Limpley Stoke. Oh, by the way, you can have the car back.'

‘It must be a write-off surely,' Patrick said in surprise.

‘I doubt it. The windscreen's smashed and there are a couple of small dents on the wings but otherwise, other than the damaged brakes, it seems OK. D'you want me to get a Land Rover expert to give it the once-over?'

It was agreed that Patrick would arrange with the garage where the vehicle is serviced, not far from home, that they would collect it thus freeing James from any further bother.

Greenway was deeply involved with the Capelli case but receptive to what Patrick had to say; that is, he gave him ten minutes. I stayed in the office, calling the garage, updating our insurance company and checking that all was well at home: just because I am a consultant it does not mean I have to be in on everything.

I felt better today. A few bruises, mostly hidden by my clothes, had ripened nicely but the wound on my cheek was healing well and I had been able to leave off the dressing. Otherwise I was still relying on the painkillers, but at least was down to a ‘legal' dose. Other ills, my marriage, could be described as no longer ‘dangerously ill' and now ‘stable'.

Greenway referred the information Patrick had given him, plus the names and addresses, to his second-in-command, Andrew Bayley, who undertook to deal with it as soon as he possibly could. There were certain parallels to cases already being investigated, he said; young women lured to this country with offers of good jobs in domestic service and similar, only to be imprisoned in inner city apartment blocks and other such buildings. Gang-raped and forced to become drug addicts they were then sold into prostitution. Bayley also said that he would contact James Carrick.

At present anyway, this was as far as Patrick's and my responsibility lay as the Capelli business had to be given absolute priority.

Martino Capelli left prison and, twenty-four hours later, nothing had happened. I knew that Patrick, for one, was keen to stir the brew gently, famous, or otherwise, in our MI5 days for ‘making things happen'. Greenway was impatient too and at five in the afternoon on the second day of Capelli's freedom he called a meeting.

‘Any suggestions?' he asked, having briefly run though events so far and after there had been some general discussion.

I gazed around the room, the one adjacent to the Commander's office. Other than Greenway, Patrick and I there were present a trio from the Met I had not met before, the man running the surveillance on the flat in Romford and another two involved with the operation to thwart Martino Capelli's jewellery raid and subsequent strike on West End Central police station. There was one development in connection with this; the jewellery shop to be targeted was heavily rumoured to be Hinchcliffe and Atterberry's, in an arcade off Regent Street.

Patrick asked, ‘Is it known where Martino Capelli's mob keep their weapons?'

Without looking up, the man in charge of the surveillance team, DCI Leyland, muttered something to the effect that it was not.

‘Would you like me to find out for you?' the adviser, who did not like being muttered at, then went on to enquire coolly.

‘No, thank you,' was the grating answer. Leyland added, reluctantly, ‘They use a lock-up garage not far away but we don't think there are any weapons or explosives stored there.'

‘How's that?'

‘Intelligence.'

‘What intelligence?'

Leyland sighed with exaggerated patience. ‘Mobsters don't usually use lock-ups to conceal valuable stuff or weapons and explosives as they're so easily broken into and people are always hanging around such places hoping to do just that. And they're scared stiff of sniffer dogs.'

‘Italians probably don't come under the heading of usual mobsters,' Patrick argued.

Before there could be any local explosions, controlled or otherwise, Greenway said, ‘Gentlemen, I asked for
suggestions.
Please stick to the point.'

‘It is the point,' Patrick persisted. ‘We locate their weapons, stake out wherever it is and grab them when they collect them. No raid, no risk of the general public getting hurt.'

‘But we want to arrest these people when they're on a big job,' one of the other two said.

‘So they get banged up for ever,' his chum added.

Patrick said, ‘But most of these men are wanted for serious crimes already – they can be arrested anyway for firearms offences and will be banged up just about for ever.'

Leyland said, ‘There's a lot of meticulous planning already gone into this. We need to scoop up even more mobsters, already wanted or not, whose role in the job is further down the line, when the gang's actually carrying out the raid and when they're making their getaway – drivers, heavies, people like that.'

‘You'll need to have top-quality armed personnel right in the jewellery shop.'

‘We
are
putting armed personnel right in the jewellery shop. But only to protect the staff if necessary. We don't want to start a firefight there and the idea is that the gang'll be allowed to steal some stuff and we'll pick them up with it on them.'

‘I should very much like to be permitted to be in the area of these premises,' Patrick said.

‘No,' Greenway said. ‘If Tony Capelli's wheedled his way into the outfit he'll know your face.'

‘He wouldn't know me at all. I'd be the bloke with the squint mumbling to himself while cleaning the windows – anything.'

I have noticed that sometimes when men are together, especially those very tired with brainstorming, the testosterone level seems to have the effect of diluting the sum of their collective intelligence causing them merely to snipe at one another.

‘
When
is this supposed to happen?' I enquired heavily.

They all looked at me.

‘We don't know,' Greenway admitted.

‘As you yourself said you'd like to, you could risk everything and have Irma Burnside brought in for questioning. Quietly, while she's out on her own so anyone'll think she's still out shopping. Tell her that she might be in serious danger as her sister's been murdered and the police still don't know the motive behind the crime. That could be perfectly true. If Tony Capelli kills his cousin in order to take over the crime syndicate, he'll probably get rid of her as well as she will have fulfilled her purpose. We haven't a clue what yarn he's spun her although the little shit must have promised her loads of money.'