Driving into Darkness (DI Angus Henderson 2) (9 page)

‘The latter. He and his assistant received a generous pay-off.’

‘Is it likely they will cause trouble?’

‘Oh no, not at all. It’s all done and dusted now.’

Green looked at his face. This was an important point and he had to make sure Lawton wasn’t telling him porkies. Bad things happened to people who told lies to Dominic Green.

‘Fine. My second question is, how well developed is this technology? I mean, if it was up and running, I’m sure you would have brought along a working model to show me.’

‘You’re quite right. At the start of this month, all we had were drawings and computer models but last week we had a major breakthrough. We’ve built a prototype and the great news is, it actually works.’

The squad room on the first floor of Hackney Police Station was bursting at the seams. DI Henderson and DS Walters couldn’t find a seat, so they stood at the back to listen to the briefing.

It was being conducted by Detective Inspector Gary Wallis, a gung-ho, ‘lead from the front’ type, a description often used by Henderson’s brother Archie to describe some of his commanding officers in Afghanistan. When he mentioned this to DS Billy Hardcastle, Henderson’s contact in the Metropolitan Police, he was told Wallis was a former member of the Parachute Regiment but a number of years ago, left the Army to join the police after receiving a bad shrapnel wound in his right leg.

Henderson and Walters were in London only as observers as there was no question in Henderson’s mind or that of Inspector Wallis, this was a Met operation since the garage that was pinpointed by the surveillance team was very much on their patch.

The Sussex officers were there as the car thieving gang had put five local residents in hospital, including one still in a coma with a fractured skull and Henderson felt responsible all the time this gang hadn’t been apprehended. It was a difficult situation for them because if any of the Met officers were injured, they would receive flak for calling the raid but with no influence as how it would be conducted.

It was all thanks to Billy Hardcastle they were there at all, as he had taken a greater interest in the case than they might have expected. Not only did he set up a small team to do the legwork around the area where they thought the chilled foods van disappeared, he used some of his people to pose as telephone engineers and rig up surveillance cameras across the road from the four possible sites that had been identified.

They struck gold two days ago when a Jaguar XK-R Coupe was stolen from a house in West Grinstead and Billy’s cameras spotted it being unloaded from the chilled foods van at 3:45am, outside a dilapidated building, formerly a furniture wholesaler, in Pritchard’s Road. However, it was not good news for the car owner, as in line with the gang’s trend of escalating violence, he was beaten unconscious.

Wallis decided against a night raid, despite the obvious attractions, as he believed and Henderson concurred, there was a good chance the car they nicked last night was still in the garage and if left any longer, it would be moved to another location. He also said, he hoped no one would be naive enough to believe they would find the big bosses sitting around drinking tea and reading car magazines when they all piled in, but grabbing a mechanic or an electronics expert would put a big spanner in their operation and with a bit of luck, could lead to the top dogs as well.

Unlike similar operations mounted by Henderson in Sussex, many of Wallis’s officers were armed. It was a tough call and one Henderson would not have made, as the car thieving gang had used only boots and sledgehammers and not once had they deployed or threatened to use guns. However, the occupants of the garage could well be from a different gang and DI Wallis knew this part of London better than he did and Henderson had no option but to keep his mouth shut and defer to his more considered judgement.

To his surprise, Wallis then asked Henderson to come up and say a few words. He didn’t mind speaking in public, but would have preferred a little more notice, as he liked to be well prepared and well rehearsed when making speeches at places like this or at press conferences. In the short walk to the front of the room, he was racking his brains, searching for something useful to say that hadn’t been said already by Wallis.

‘Good afternoon everyone,’ he said, looking around at all the inquisitive expressions. ‘I am Detective Inspector Angus Henderson of Sussex Police and my colleague, standing at the back, is Detective Sergeant Carol Walters. Take a good look at our faces, as I don’t want any of you arresting us or shooting us by mistake.’ The laughter sounded easy but lingering behind he could feel the tension.

‘I have no idea the kind of the people we might meet inside the garage, as my intelligence suggests the car thieving gang we are chasing are delivery boys, and the people today are likely to come from some other crew. The gang operating in Sussex have been responsible for a number of vicious attacks on innocent householders, gratuitous some might say as several car owners were beaten, even after they handed over their car keys, but I do stress neither guns nor knives were used. It just leaves me to say, good luck to everyone and I hope and trust this raid is a complete success.’

Henderson returned to his former position to polite but muted applause. Wallis make a few closing comments, dropping the ‘Brigadier addressing the troops’ tone and replacing it with a more street-based jocularity, as he wished everyone happy hunting and a safe return.

It was pleasing to see none of the sour faces that ended some of his briefings, when he asked them to head out into a cold, miserable night to take over the surveillance of a warehouse where drugs were being stored, or to drive into a run-down estate and arrest a suspect. This lot were joking and smiling and despite the anxiety attached to any job of this nature, he was sure many of them regarded this as a cushy number.

They caught a lift to the rendezvous in the back of a grubby Ford Mondeo. It would have been acceptable in Sussex as a pool car, but he expected more from the Met’s Stolen Vehicles Unit, they had to have better cars than this in their garage. Hardcastle sat behind the wheel and unlike the deep, sensuous voice on the telephone, giving Walters the impression she was dealing with the English Antonio Banderas, he was small, rotund, mid-forties with a large bald patch on the crown of his head and a squashed, fat nose that had been punched too often, and he suspected not all in the line of duty.

In the passenger seat, Hardcastle’s companion was a taciturn Geordie by the name of Adam Ledbetter, about whom they were told, would make a better car thief than the people they were chasing as he knew every trick in the book. However, Henderson suspected the main reason for his inclusion in the raiding party was not for his under-the-bonnet skills, but intimidation value as he was a giant of a man and as a result Walters, sitting behind him, could only see out of the car’s side windows.

Not that there was much to see. It was five-thirty on a damp Wednesday afternoon at the end of April, a long month without a break as Easter was early this year and memories of Christmas were long forgotten even if the bills were not. Local streets which no doubt looked fine on a good day, were depressing in the pissing rain, with shoppers scurrying from shop to shop under broken umbrellas, cars splashing long queues at bus stops, and the tops of high-rise flats hidden under thick, grey clouds.

They turned off Pritchard’s Road into a side street. They exited the vehicles and a large group of fourteen officers made their way up the road to the garage without further conversation. Henderson and Walters were bringing up the rear, in part due to their lowly status as observers, but also to avoid being clobbered by something solid, as the Met team were wearing stab-proof vests and helmets with anti-spray visors, carrying door bangers and riot shields, and armed with side-handled batons and Heckler & Koch carbines.

Wallis emphasised in the briefing it was not the ideal place for indiscriminate fire, as they were heading into a small area where a number of their own people would be, and Henderson hoped they had all been listening. Their instructions were only to fire if they were fired upon first and the moment guns were raised, neither Henderson nor Walters needed telling twice that both of them would make friends with the floor.

The officer with the door banger smashed the door open and once inside, Wallis shouted in a deep baritone that could grace the stage of a television talent show, ‘This is the police! Stop what you’re doing and make yourself visible. Put your bloody hands out where I can see them.’

Henderson and Walters squeezed in behind the last officer. The building looked small from the outside but it was huge on the inside with ample space to park the chilled foods van, two inspection pits, banks of electronic testing gear, a couple of overhead hoists and several large trolleys of tools.

In one bay he saw a blue Range Rover Vogue with its bonnet raised, looking a lot like the car taken from a house in Horsham over a week ago. All doubts about the origin of these vehicles was cast aside when he spotted the car beside it, a gold Jaguar XK-R Coupe. It was the car stolen from a house in West Grinstead a few days ago, easily recognisable by the distinctive colour, wheels, and side body stripe, and the car they had been tracking on CCTV yesterday morning.

Without warning, all hell broke loose. A huge black guy with an American marines haircut started swinging a baseball bat and coppers began dropping like ninepins. Two coppers got a grip of him and grappled him to the ground while two others ran off in pursuit of another guy who dashed out of the door in the confusion.

The thudding of boots on the inside staircase dragged Henderson’s eyes away from the scene unfolding before him, but it wasn’t gang reinforcements coming down to assist their beleaguered colleagues, as he expected, but three coppers and Wallis racing up. A few seconds later, he could hear scuffling and shouting from the floor above.

Henderson edged between the cars to help an officer who had been smacked by the bat, leaving him disoriented and with a bloody gash on his forehead, when he noticed movement coming from a glass-fronted office at the rear of the garage. He was sure no member of the Met team had yet ventured in this direction as they were all occupied out here. Sidestepping the injured officer and dozens of scattered tools, he made his way towards it.

At the back of the office and partly hidden by a large table, a man was on his knees, scooping papers out of a scratched, blue safe and stuffing them into a metal bin. Henderson kicked the door open. The man turned, panic written all over his features. He stood up and pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket. Realising he wasn’t heading out for a quick smoke, Henderson ran towards him and placing a hand on the table, vaulted over and aimed a kick at his head.

He didn’t get the height he needed and instead of knocking him cold on the canvas, as a professional wrestler executing a perfect drop kick would do, he caught him on the shoulder, knocking him backwards. The guy dropped the lighter, stumbled back and tripped over the bin. He tried to break his fall by grabbing the armrest of a small stack of surplus chairs, piled up in the corner, but as soon as he touched it, the stack rolled away.

Chairs collided with one another and the man, now off-balance, executed a theatrical scissors kick, good enough to grace a Tiller Girls show or be added to Wayne Rooney’s repertoire, before losing his footing and falling into the morass.

Henderson got to his feet before his opponent did and in a couple of strides, reached over and grabbed him by the back of his jacket and hauled him up from the jumble of arms, castors, and seats that was once a neat stack of surplus furniture. He appeared groggy but as he turned, he swung a wooden chair leg and caught Henderson on the side of the face, causing him to jerk back in pain.

He lost his grip and the guy sprinted for the door but before he reached it, Henderson leapt on his back and brought him down. They rolled on the floor, trading punches and more by luck than judgement, Henderson landed a good right hook under his chin. The struggling reduced a bit but when he followed it up with another rammed hard into his gut, his resistance collapsed. He flipped him on his face, knelt on his back, and applied the cuffs.

With all the cacophony of crashing furniture, he didn’t realise Walters was in the room and standing behind him, rummaging through papers from the opened safe and retrieving discarded items from the bin.

‘Good of you to help me,’ he said, rubbing the side of his face. It ached like hell but it didn't feel like anything was broken.

‘There was no need, as you were doing so well on your own. You should see what I’ve got here. No wonder lighter-boy was so keen to burn them. I’ve only flicked through a bit but I don’t think they were exporting the stolen cars as we thought.’

‘You’re making it up so you don’t have to talk to Customs again.’

‘Ha, I wish. No, there are emails here from a car recovery outfit in Holland who’ve been supplying this lot with details of insurance write-offs for the exact make and colour of the cars our gang have been nicking. I recognise just about every car in this part of the list as cars stolen in our region.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘I’ll bet the mad mechanic out there has been altering the car’s electronics to set up its new identity and wait for it,’ she said pulling out another piece of paper, ‘they’ve got a goon at the DVLA who enters the cloned car’s details on the national vehicle database.’

‘So, the cars out there,’ Henderson said, jerking a thumb towards the workshop, ‘will in a few weeks time appear in Auto Trader and various web sites as bona fide UK-registered cars?’

‘Yep. It’s an ingenious scheme if you ask me.’

‘Too true lady,’ the prisoner said in a broad Essex twang, ‘and trust you lot to fucking spoil it.’