David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good (23 page)

       
“Unofficially. I had no
choice. His snout wouldn’t agree to meet unless he was there. Would you?”

Pearson didn’t relax his right foot, but the pitching and rolling of
the Range Rover subsided a little once we reached the motorway and the road
ahead straightened out. The conversation had more or less died away, too, so I
took advantage of the lull in proceedings to reach into my pocket for my phone.
I needed to text my control and let him know where I was headed, but instead of
the phone my fingers closed around a piece of paper. It was the flyer
advertising the Elvis impersonator Melissa had given me on the way to the BT
tower. At first I smiled, imagining I was on the way to see his show. Then my
expression changed, as I thought about the women he’d lured back the hospital
basement. And finally, my brain made another connection with last night.

       
“Melissa, you know you
told me Elvis had a
hazmat
suit in his stash?” I said.
“Where did he get it from?”

       
“From the emergency team
that came to deal with the explosion, I should think,” she said. “Why?”

       
“Something just occurred
to me. Remember when we were at the Tower? And Gerard told me the storage room
was the kitchen? Did you look inside?”

       
“No. I was too busy
looking out of the window.”

       
“Well, it was piled high
with stuff.
Just random junk.
But the last thing that
had been thrown in there was a coat. And it struck me, what would the owner do
when they had to go outside without it?”

       
“Get cold, I expect. I
don’t see the connection.”

       
“Did you see the place
where Elvis kept his stash?”

       
“No. I just got a list
of what was in it. Why?”

       
“I figured the two
places were probably pretty much alike.
One with a coat
thrown in on top.
One with a
hazmat
suit. And
if the first guy was going to get cold without his coat, what was the other guy
going to do without his
hazmat
suit?”

       
“I don’t know. He’d have
a problem, I guess.”

       
“There’s no mystery,”
Jones said. “It was a spare. There were five people in the original team. But
only four raiders, right? So one suit was left over. Elvis must have found it.”

       
“But where did he find
it?” I said.

       
“Who knows?” Jones said.
“He’s obviously a kleptomaniac. Who knows how those people work?”

       
“The original team,” I
said. “Had they had time to suit up before they were overpowered?”

       
“No,” Melissa said.
“They were jumped before that.”

       
“So why would the thieves
have taken the fifth suit out of the van?” I said. “Did they abandon anything
else?”

       
“No,” Melissa said. “All
their other kit was accounted for.”

       
“So why this one spare
suit?” I said.

       
“Maybe they didn’t take
it out,” Jones said. “What makes you think they did? Elvis could have taken it
directly from the van.”

       
“When the place was
swarming with police?” I said. “We’ve seen how he reacts to them. I bet he
wasn’t within a mile of the place till the fuss died down. He must have found
it somewhere, later. And why would the thieves have left it to be found? It
doesn’t match their M.O. at all. Everything else they did was planned and
meticulous. This is random and sloppy.”

       
“No one’s perfect,”
Jones said. “And does it really matter how he got it?”

       
“Probably not,” I said.
“But I hate loose ends.”

       
“I do, too,” Melissa
said. “Chances are it’s nothing, but it’ll easy enough to find out. We’ll just
go and ask Elvis, himself, when we get back from
Luton
.
Assuming it still matters then. Who knows what this other guy can tell us?”

We left the M1 at Junction Twelve, and I felt a little like a kid
reaching the end of a fairground ride. Invigorated, relieved to still be alive,
and slightly disappointed the fun had ended, all at the same time. The official
status of the vehicle meant Pearson didn’t have to worry about the police, but
the way he drove would be more than enough to get you shot in several countries
I’d visited. He kept up his speed and aggression on the smaller roads as well,
and thirty-three minutes after leaving Thames House I looked out of my window
and saw the driveway that led to the workhouse. We didn’t turn into it, though.
There would have been no point. The gap in the heavy
stone
walls
was filled with blocks of solid concrete. There were six of them.
Each was about five feet square. They were connected with a double line of
rusty metal cables. That made a far more effective barrier than the original
wrought iron gates would have done, before they were undoubtedly melted down
for munitions during World War II. They were nowhere near as picturesque,
though. But then, we were in
Luton
.

       
Pearson followed the
wall along to the end and then around to the left. Trees had grown wild behind
it, but through the branches I was able to catch glimpses of the top floor of
the main building. It was made of pale stone. The roof was grey slate, though
large sections were missing. The facade was perfectly symmetrical, and the
remains of an imposing clock face were still visible in the portico above the
broad front entrance. There was a pair of bay windows on either side. Each was
made of six individual, ornate casements, and even without the glass the skill
of the stonemasons was clearly apparent. Taken all together, the place looked
more like the ruins of a fairytale palace than a brutal semi-prison, and it was
hard to imagine the degree of
institutionalised
misery that must have lingered for so many years behind its picturesque walls.

       
We continued for another
hundred and fifty yards, then Pearson slowed to a sane speed, pulled sharply to
the left, bounced across the curb, and steered the Range Rover through a ragged
gap in the wall. We clearly weren’t the only ones to know about this makeshift
route, though. I could see other
tyre
tracks snaking
across the rough ground in front of us. One set. Still fresh. They led straight
away to our right and disappeared behind a precarious looking mound of bricks
and rubble. I turned in my seat and checked the patch of pavement we’d just
crossed. It was perfectly clean. I didn’t know who’d arrived before us. But
whoever it was, they hadn’t left.

 
      
Pearson followed round to our right, and as soon as we cleared
the side of the rubble heap I saw another car.
A silver
7-series BMW.
It was clean and shiny, and had this year’s registration.
A car like that would have looked perfectly innocuous on the motorway or in an
office car park, but it was as suspicious as hell in that particular location.

       
The driver’s door swung
open as we appeared behind the car and a man emerged, slowly swinging his legs
around and placing his feet tentatively on the uneven ground. It was Stan
Leckie
, but he was dressed for the office rather than a
demolition site. He paused, nodded to Melissa,
then
approached Pearson’s side of the Range Rover.

       
“Good, then, you’re
here,” he said, as Pearson hit the button to lower his window. “Let’s get on
with it. Our boy will probably be a bit spooked, already. Let’s not keep him
waiting. It’ll only make him edgier. Melissa and I will stay in the vehicles
till you boys give us the word you’re in position.”

       
“OK,” Pearson said,
handing him plan of the site. “Where’s the rendezvous point?”

       
“Pretty much dead in the
centre
,”
Leckie
said,
pointing to a spot in the middle of the page. “At the entrance to this charming
place. It was the workhouse asylum. You can imagine the kind of things that
used to go on in there. In fact, whenever I’m in a sticky spot, I think of it.
I tell myself that whatever kind of trouble I’m in, I can’t be worse off than
the poor sods who ended up in that hell-hole.”

       
“Probably not,” Pearson
said. “And we’ll find the place, no problem.”

       
“I’m ninety-nine percent
sure our boy’s working alone,”
Leckie
said. “But I’d
suggest you do one more sweep of the perimeter anyway, to be on the safe side.
Then if you set up where you can see him waiting, we’ll get the show on the
road.”

Chapter Nineteen

We all walked together as far as the BMW, then Pearson, Jones and I
continued under cover of the rubble heap.

       
“Your man’s picked a
good spot,” Pearson said when we out of
Leckie’s
earshot. “It’s the easiest place to
surveil
from
multiple vantage points.”

       
“You’ve used this site
before, then?” I said.

       
“A few times,” he said.
“The question is, has he?”

       
“I wouldn’t know,” I
said.

       
“And the way he spoke to
Agent Wainwright,” he said. “They’ve worked together before, have they?”

       
“Not since I’ve known
them,” I said. “But why here? It’s hardly a convenient location for you.”

       
Pearson shrugged.

       
“It just works for us,
being out of town,” he said. “People feel comfortable with it, for some reason.
We’ve done dead-drops. Snatch jobs. Set ups. Covert meetings, where people
don’t want to be seen leaving.
Or meetings where people don’t
leave at all.
Although we generally use a different part of the site for
that.”

       
“The buildings are in
better shape than I’d imagined,” Jones said. “The main one is, at least.”

       
“It’s in amazing shape,”
Pearson said. “Apart from that section, over there.”

       
He was pointing to the
narrow wall at the end of the middle bar of the E. It looked fine from the
first floor up, but three holes had been punched in the stonework, four feet
from the ground. They were roughly circular, about three feet in diameter. The
first was almost dead in the
centre
, and the other
two were equally spaced out between it and the edge of the wall.

       
“Did someone hit it with
a canon?” I said.

       
“No,” he said. “A
wrecking ball. Attached to a mobile crane that was here for a while.”

       
“That’s a strange way to
kick off a demolition job.”

       
“It would be. If
demolition was what you had in mind.”

       
“There are other uses
for a wrecking ball?”

       
“Somebody found one.”

       
“What was it?”

       
“A tongue
loosener
. Someone took five people.
Four
men and a woman.
They fixed them to the wall,
spreadeagled
,
by their wrists and ankles. Then they started pounding away.
One
chance to talk.
One
swing
each.”

       
“Five people? There are
only three holes.”

       
“The police found two
empty sets of shackles hanging from the wall. They’d definitely been used.
There
was
plenty of blood and skin cells on them.”

       
“Creative.”

       
“Psychotic.”

       
“Imagine holding out
while three of your friends are crushed by a wrecking ball, a few feet away.”

       
“Maybe there are worse
things than the asylum block after all.”

       
“Who did it?”

       
“I don’t know. The
police never nailed anyone.”

       
“Any suspects?”

       
“A few. None panned out,
though.”

       
“When did...” I said,
when Pearson stopped dead and held up his hand for silence. Then he gestured
towards a clump of bushes that was sprouting from the remains of what looked
like a greenhouse.

       
“Sorry,” he said, after
a moment. “I thought I saw something moving.”