Dark Side (7 page)

Nothing so tortuous was required, however, and he soon established that the serious criminal most likely to be the man in question had at least four aliases and, indeed, liked to be known as Raptor. Reading a book in the same room, I heard a snort of derision from my husband when this came up on the screen. This individual had recently been seen in Bath. Although thought to be deeply involved in a case where evidence against another London gang leader, his brother-in-law, had ‘disappeared' from both computer and paper files, the Met had been unable to make any charges stick. One of the reasons for this was that a detective involved, implicated in corruption, had been found dead. The subsequent inquest finding had been that he had committed suicide having taken an overdose of sleeping tablets, a verdict about which his family had been very unhappy. No details were available. In another case names and addresses of witnesses had somehow been leaked, several of whom had received threats and changed their evidence or refused to testify. That case had collapsed.

‘This villain, who incidentally is a strong suspect in a jewellery shop raid in the West End a few days ago, has not only created for himself several identities,' Patrick continued after giving me the previous information, ‘but would appear to have several addresses. It's known he has a flat in Ealing and another in Manchester. He was spotted by a keen-eyed off-duty detective in Glasgow who tailed him to a tenement block in the Broomielaw but it's not known whether he sometimes lives there or was merely visiting someone. The thinking is that he's on the move for much of the time, staying with family, friends, cronies, what have you. There's no real evidence for that – but taking into consideration the experience of those doing the investigating there's every chance they're right.'

I said, ‘I'm wondering how he keeps tabs on his henchmen if he's flitting around all the time.'

‘The main theory is that he commutes between various centres of operation and doesn't just travel around in order to keep giving the police the slip. One scam has been selling so-called assassination kits to other gangs – weapons, mostly handguns, imported from abroad and assembled over here. Apparently they're supplied to customers packed in DIY power tool cases. This appears to be a personal project – but it's been done before.'

‘You said Sulyn Li Grant's Beretta could have entered the country that way.'

‘Along with many others,' Patrick replied wryly. ‘After receiving information the Met raided a lock-up garage that turned out to be a workshop used for putting weapons together. But other than a few bits and pieces that pointed to the previous presence of firearms the place was empty.'

‘That suggests he could have been tipped off, too.'

‘It does. He also dabbles in exporting stolen top-of-the-range cars to Europe but that might be coming to an end as his agent oppo in Le Havre has recently been arrested by the French police. I hope they keep him securely locked up so he can implicate this self-styled Raptor before someone puts a bullet in him.'

‘Is there a real risk of that?'

‘It never hurts to prepare for the worst with these people when they become desperate. I'm also asking myself if that implicated Met cop really committed suicide.'

‘But don't you think we should leave that to the Met and the Independent Police Complaints Commission?'

‘Oh, yes. I'm just interested in the Bath connection – if there is one – with regard to our Jockenese friend. I think I shall take Monday off.'

With that in mind and not really wanting to go against Greenway's orders, Patrick slogged away at home with his assignment through most of Sunday, even declining with apologies his father's request to sing in the choir for the morning service. John, unused to being countermanded on such matters, was not pleased, even though I helped out.

Patrick went out on Monday morning and did not come back until early evening. I had stayed at home, writing and dealing with family matters. We have a home help two mornings a week, who also gives Elspeth a hand, but with a large house and extended family there is always plenty to do. These ‘normal' activities also salved my conscience as I worry about the amount of time I spend away engaged on my other career.

‘I paid a visit to Miss Braithewaite,' Patrick started by saying. ‘The old lady who was involved in the Pryce case Sergeant Woods told you about. She lives in the flat above Paul Mallory.'

‘The lady who was James's one-time English teacher.'

‘That's right. She told me he played the part of Lord Peter Wimsey in a school play she wrote that was an adaptation of one of the Dorothy L. Sayers stories.'

‘He must have been just perfect with his fair hair,' I said. ‘But I have to say, before I spoke to Derek Woods I hadn't thought he spent any of his youth in this area.'

‘She told me that his mother moved south when he was in his early teens and when he left school he trained to be a physical education-cum-sports teacher. But it wasn't exciting enough so he joined the Met. James actually came
back
to Bath. Anyway, after I'd finished cleaning Miss Braithewaite's living-room windows—'

‘
What?
'

‘She'd been up a really tall set of steps cleaning the insides of the windows. She must be all of eighty-five so I offered to finish them for her.'

‘You're a saint. I take it you made it an official call.'

‘Of course. It's not a security risk as there's no love lost between her and Mallory. She was praying he wouldn't come back after he was released from prison but he has. And he's playing his music again. She can hardly hear it normally because she had her flat soundproofed and he hasn't had his windows open.'

‘Did she tell you anything useful?'

‘Only that she can just about hear him having huge rows with another man who I can only guess is Cooper. She hasn't seen him and made a point of telling me that she doesn't stand by the window spying on everyone else in the square. That's what Mrs Pryce, who everyone hated, used to do.'

‘Has she met Cooper?'

‘No, but his picture was in the local paper after the trial so she has an idea what he looks like. The reason she hasn't seen him might be because there's a back way that leads into a small car park for residents only. A path from that takes you into a little lane that joins another on the west side of the Circus, probably intended for the use of servants in the old days. Which means that Cooper doesn't have to enter the square in order to visit Mallory.'

‘Cooper said he'd see Mallory tomorrow. That was yesterday.'

‘Miss Braithewaite didn't hear or see any movement yesterday. They probably met somewhere else.'

‘We're really no further with this then, are we?'

‘Patience. Then
I went to the council offices and tried to track down this Raptor character. One of the surnames he's been using recently is Kingsland. Lots of Kings and names beginning with King on the council tax register but not that one. Obviously that might not mean he doesn't live in the area as he could be renting a room, or flat, where council tax is included in the rent. I've already checked the local electoral roll and he's not there either. Nationally, of course, there are thousands of Kingslands. I then abandoned that line of enquiry and went to the nick where I looked him up in Records – if you remember this mobster uses at least three aliases.'

‘I hope James didn't spot you.'

‘It wouldn't have mattered as I also needed to check up on something for my official project that I can't access on a home computer. I didn't see him, nor Campbell. Anyway, as I already knew – had made a note of, in fact – in the past Kingsland has also called himself Craig Brown, Shane Lockyer and Nick Hamsworth, the latter of which is thought
might
be the one on his birth certificate. Digging a little deeper I discovered that the first of those was definitely a stolen identity created using personal items taken during a burglary in Hounslow. That came out when he was convicted of handling stolen property: computers, TVs, jewellery and other stuff, the hauls of various burglaries. He served three years so has almost certainly dropped that alias.

‘The second, Shane Lockyer, was the name he used years previously to that, when he first started on a life of crime in his late teens. Lockyer was his mother's maiden name. When he came out of prison, where he had served five years for his first serious offences, committing several robberies with violence together with other members of a gang calling themselves, believe it or not, The Raptors, he used the third name, Hamsworth.'

‘Super chap, to use his mother's name to drag through the mud,' I murmured.

‘She's probably proud of him, having done time herself for drugs dealing and forcing girls into prostitution.'

‘OK, delete that last remark. So he might have gone back to using Hamsworth then if Kingsland got a bit hot.'

‘Or another one he's dreamed up.'

‘D'you have the addresses of the flats in Ealing and Manchester?' I enquired.

‘I do. And of the tenement flat in Glasgow.' Thoughtfully, Patrick added, ‘Hamsworth's proud of this Raptors thing, isn't he? Otherwise he wouldn't have assumed that nickname. There's every chance he'll resurrect them at some stage – in his mind, his past glories.'

The rest of the week went by, during which Patrick applied himself to what he was really supposed to be doing at HQ. While he was thus engaged and knowing I had little chance of success, but also that these things have to be thoroughly investigated, I checked locally on the name Hamsworth. I discovered that there were not very many of them: an elderly married couple living in Radstock, a teacher at a prestigious private boys' school on the outskirts of Bath, two spinster sisters sharing a cottage in Priston, a retired police sergeant and his wife who had an apartment in Midsomer Norton, and a family butcher's business in that same town, the proprietors of which might be related to them. This was just a guess as the name originates in the north-east and is not common in the West Country.

No, as I had thought, this man must either be using another name or was not trying to establish for himself an outwardly respectable identity in the locality and was, as Patrick put it over the phone one evening, ‘hiding away somewhere in a rat hole'. I felt investigating that possibility fell to him.

In between the more important writing sessions I turned my attention to the missing, presumed dead, husband of Sulyn Li Grant, the man who had called himself either Bob or Bill Hudson, and sometimes Bob Downton. Accessing police records for the London area I discovered with no surprise whatsoever that as Bob Downton he had a criminal record and had served three years in his early twenties for gang-related crimes and then another four for similar activities not long afterwards. If he was no longer alive the Met had no knowledge of it. The name Hudson only featured in connection with three shoplifting sisters, a couple of murderers who had been dead for ten and twelve years respectively, an animal rights teenager who had been party to the bombing of a laboratory and a seventy-five-year-old man who had driven the getaway car in a jewellery shop robbery.

The address for Downton at the time of his conviction had been in Bethnal Green, London, but I looked at more recent listings and discovered that his café bar business was given as the most recent known address. It was pointless to examine local registry records as if his common-law wife had not registered his death, who would? Not whoever had finished him off, that's for sure.

I changed tack and looked in the Metropolitan Police records with regard to bodies recovered from rivers and other associated watercourses that remained unidentified. I was a little shocked to discover how many there were. I emailed the force with the physical details and a mugshot of Downton, this unfortunately taken at the time of his first offences so probably completely useless by now. I did not get a reply for over twenty-four hours, by which time it was Friday afternoon.

‘There's one extremely dead body with a bullet hole in its skull in a mortuary in East London that just might be that of Sulyn Li Grant's husband,' I disclosed to Patrick later after he had arrived, had his shower and was relaxing with Vicky on his lap, something she was making her routine.

‘By that I presume you mean there's not a lot left.'

‘Yes. It was disinterred from a flooded ditch on waste ground during the re-development of a warehouse at Woolwich. Having been put into a large plastic bag pierced with holes the body had then been weighted down with bricks, possibly because it wouldn't sink. It had probably been there for several months.'

‘How long ago did he disappear?'

‘About a year.'

‘And when was the body found?'

‘Three months ago.'

‘Fits, then.'

‘So we have the corpse of a white male who wore dentures thought to have been in his fifties when he died. Otherwise it remains impossible to identify unless someone can produce some DNA to compare the remains with.'

‘I take it these folk don't have any kids.'

‘That's fairly safe to assume but we can check. How's the job going?'

‘I might finish it next week – unless someone else screws up.' Patrick smiled. ‘Perhaps I ought to go and take a pot-shot at Greenway to make him change his mind.'

I wagged a forefinger at him.

‘I wasn't all that serious, although the theory has a lot going for it. But mobsters so far have concentrated mostly on getting bent cops to delete files or give them info on witnesses and so forth. James's problem with Cooper and Mallory a while back took it several stages further but as far as I know no one's gone in for that kind of personal attack on the police since.'

‘Unless Cooper's given the idea to his new buddy, Kingsland, Hamsworth or whatever he's calling himself now.'