Make Them Pay (3 page)

At ten to one in the morning of Friday the eighteenth of July, the crew of the same police car received a call from the despatching sergeant at Richmond police station to a fire in the camper van they’d noticed earlier. Acknowledging the message, the operator turned on the blue lights and the driver accelerated away.

When the police car arrived the van was burning furiously, the flames leaping some ten feet into the night sky. The fire brigade was already in attendance, but despite the efforts of its crew little could be done to save the van or the occupants. By the time the firefighters had quelled the flames all that remained of the vehicle was a blackened burnt out shell with blown-out windows and deflated tyres. Black smoke still rose into the air and black flecks of debris were spirited away in the slight breeze.

And that’s when it got complicated.

‘Well, that’s it, mate. We’ve done our bit,’ said the fire chief, ‘but you might be interested to know that there are a couple of charred bodies inside.’

‘Wonderful,’ said the police car driver, hands in pockets as he surveyed the smoking debris. ‘That’s all I need. We’ll be lucky if we get off duty by seven.’

‘Well, it’s not my problem, pal. By the way, the van’s got German number plates.’

‘Even better,’ said the PC. ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Anything else to cheer me up?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said the fire chief, laughing as he removed his helmet and wiped his brow with a grubby handkerchief, ‘there seems to be a strong smell of petrol. More than I’d expect in the circumstances.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Could’ve been started deliberately, but it would need an arson investigator to say for sure.’

‘It’s all too much for me, mate.’ The policeman turned to his colleague. ‘Better put in a call for the CID,’ he said.

I just hate being woken up at half past three in the morning by my mobile phone playing a silly little tune. However, it’s one of the penalties of my job that wherever I go, it goes. My late father tried to encourage me to become an accountant, but I knew that I’d’ve died of boredom if I’d pursued a career in bookkeeping. After leaving school, I spent three weary years as a clerk with a water company, but on my nineteenth birthday, I decided that the commercial world was not for me and I joined the Metropolitan Police. Even now I’m not sure I did the right thing, but I might as well hang in there for my pension.

Not that the old man was a great judge when it came to career choice; after a lifetime spent driving an Underground train on the Morden Line, he died of pulmonary emphysema four weeks into his retirement. He left me nothing but a pile of pornographic magazines, a clapped out vintage motorcycle and a crop of unpaid bills.

However, back to the present problem. Hoping to reach my wretched phone before it disturbed Gail I grabbed at it, but managed only to knock it to the floor.

‘Damn the bloody thing!’ I muttered, leaping out of bed, stubbing my toe, and only just restraining myself from using an obscene epithet.

‘What
are
you doing, darling?’ asked Gail in her sleepy, sexy voice as she turned and stretched sensuously. She always stretches sensuously.

‘Trying to answer my bloody phone,’ I said, as I scrabbled about on the floor in an attempt to find it. ‘Harry Brock,’ I snapped, having finally reunited myself with the small black box that is the bane of my life.

‘It’s Gavin Creasey, sir, at the incident room.’

‘D’you know what bloody time it is, Gavin?’ I asked, somewhat testily. Sitting naked on the floor with my back against a bedside cabinet is not a position conducive to good humour when conversing with a detective sergeant.

‘Yes, sir, it’s twenty-five to four. In the morning, that is.’

‘I hope this is important, Gavin.’

‘A burnt-out Volkswagen camper van has been found in Richmond, sir. There are two dead bodies inside. And you’re next on the list.’

‘Why should that concern me? It’s just a fire, isn’t it?’ I was doing my best to avoid getting involved in this distant tragedy, hoping that it was an unfortunate accident, but I knew instinctively that I was on a hiding to nothing. ‘What’s the SP?’ I asked, culling a useful bit of jargon from the sport of kings that, when used by a CID officer, was a request for the details.

Creasey explained, in a masterpiece of brevity, what had occurred, including the comment by the fire chief about an excess of petrol fumes. Then he added the crippler. ‘The commander has directed that you investigate.’

That was all I needed. The day had started early and badly and could only get worse. The one redeeming feature was the thought of the commander being roused in the wee small hours, and the earbashing that he would undoubtedly have received from his harridan of a wife at being disturbed by something as trivial as a couple of dead bodies in a fire-ravaged camper van.

I’d never met Mrs Commander, but I’d seen her photograph on the commander’s desk, and that was enough. I’d always regarded it as an awful warning against matrimony.

‘Dave Poole is on his way, sir,’ continued Creasey. ‘Doctor Mortlock is the duty Home Office pathologist and he’s en route to the scene as I speak. And I’m just about to raise DI Ebdon and the rest of the team.’

‘Don’t bother Miss Ebdon, Gavin. There’s no point in all of us turning out, at least not yet,’ I said. ‘And arrange for a traffic car to pick me up,’ I added, finally admitting that I was lumbered.

‘Right, sir. Would you by any chance be at Miss Sutton’s place?’ Creasey enquired with cunningly feigned innocence.

‘You know bloody well I am,’ I said. It was an open secret among my team that I spent a lot of my time at Gail’s house. And knowing how CID officers’ minds worked they’d probably deduced that much of it was spent in her bed. And they’d be right.

‘I’ve been called out, darling,’ I said to Gail, who was now wide awake. ‘It seems that a couple have been barbecued in a camper van in Richmond.’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ said Gail, completely unfazed by this momentous announcement. Slipping out of bed completely naked apart from Chanel Cristalle, she sashayed across the bedroom and made for the door. Deliberately waggling her voluptuous derrière, she glanced over her shoulder and shot me a lascivious smile. I do wish she wouldn’t do that just when I’ve been called out.

I drank my tea, pecked Gail on the cheek and left. Reluctantly.

‘Mr Brock is it?’ asked the traffic car driver, as I sleepwalked out of Gail’s house.

‘That’s me.’

‘Where to, guv?’

‘Bendview Road, Richmond.’

The traffic guys, known to us of
the
Department
as the Black Rats, got me to my destination in a hair-raising siren-filled seven minutes.

‘Sorry it took so long, guv,’ said the driver, grinning broadly. ‘Always have to be a bit careful at night. People tend to take chances, jumping traffic lights and that sort of thing.’

‘Yeah, thanks a bundle,’ I said, shakily alighting from the car. If the journey had taken less time, it would’ve been positively suicidal. I know I shouldn’t have worried – the Met’s drivers are among the finest in the world – but I’m only human despite what my subordinates might tell you.

The road had been closed and police officers, male and female, normally scarce during the daytime, seemed to be there in abundance, most of them doing not very much.

‘And you are?’ An officious uniformed inspector approached me clutching a clipboard and waggling a pen. He was what the Metropolitan Police likes to style ‘the incident officer’.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock, HSCC West,’ I said.

‘Right, sir.’ The inspector carefully recorded my details without which an investigation couldn’t possibly begin. Once again, I reflected that solving crime is easy, but paperwork’s the tricky bit. ‘Your people are already here, sir,’ he added helpfully.

‘I should hope so,’ I muttered, ducking under the inner tape.

‘Morning, guv,’ said Dave Poole, all bright and perky as usual.

Of Caribbean origin, Detective Sergeant Poole is my assistant, what in the trade we call a bag-carrier. What I don’t think of, he does, and we enjoy an excellent working relationship, unlike that invention of fiction, the oppressive senior officer who is always rude to his subordinates. That most definitely does not work in practice.

Not that all senior officers are as agreeable as me; in some I’ve known the similarity to an orang-utan springs to mind: the higher they go the more of their less attractive features become apparent. Even so, an overbearing senior officer will often dig himself a big hole while his acolytes stand round silently waiting for him to fall into it. But in Dave’s case he frequently spotted something I’d missed, thereby saving me a great deal of aggro, to say nothing of veiled hints from the commander of neglect of duty.

Dave’s grandfather came to this country from Jamaica in the fifties and set up practice as a doctor in Bethnal Green, and Dave’s father was a chartered accountant. But Dave, after graduating in English from London University, spurned a professional career and decided to become a policeman thus making him, in his own words, the black sheep of the family. He then compounded the offence by marrying a delightful white girl called Madeleine who is a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. The suggestion that Madeleine occasionally assaulted Dave was put down to canteen scuttlebutt. Dave is six-foot tall and well-built, whereas his wife is a petite five-two. Nevertheless, ballet dancers are renowned for their strength, so perhaps . . .

‘How far have we got, Dave?’

‘Not very far, guv. Doctor Mortlock’s just finished poking about.’ Dave indicated a black saloon car parked behind an ambulance, the presence of which was clearly unnecessary. Unless, that is, a callow young policeman happened to faint from the sight of dead bodies. It never seemed to affect the women officers; they just gritted their teeth and got on with the job.

‘Good morning, Henry.’ Mortlock, our pet forensic pathologist, was sitting in his car making notes. I slid into the passenger seat beside him.

‘There’s nothing bloody good about it,’ muttered Mortlock testily, ‘and before you ask, I can’t tell you a thing, other than that both bodies are well and truly done to a turn. What the French would call
bien cuit
. I’ll need to get them on the slab before I can come up with anything. Try to get your people to move them in one piece, there’s a good chap. From the state of them they’ll likely fall apart when they start to shift them, and it’s a bloody nuisance trying to put them together again.’

‘When are you going to do the post-mortem?’ I asked.

‘This afternoon, I suppose. Once I’ve had some sleep.’ And with that pithy rejoinder, Mortlock whistled a few snatches from some obscure aria, started the engine and drove off. I only just managed to get out of his car in time.

‘I understand that this job’s all yours, guv.’ The local detective inspector looked extremely pleased with himself, presumably because he was aware that what had all the signs of being a tortuous investigation had been taken over by HSCC.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘What do we know?’

‘Couple of bodies seriously overcooked, but we haven’t found any ID so far. By the way, the camper van’s got German number plates. The index starts off with a letter E and the dealership’s details on them show it was supplied by a firm in Essen, so I suppose that’s where it’s registered.’ The DI was obviously a detective who quickly got to grips with the basics.

‘Thanks very much,’ I said with a hint of sarcasm. It was as well that I spoke German fluently, the only advantage of my marriage to Helga, because it looked as though I was going to need it. ‘Who called the fire brigade?’

‘A man called Guy Wilson at number 21.’ The DI pointed at a house opposite the scene of my latest investigation.

‘Anyone spoken to him?’

‘Not as yet, guv. By the way, the fire brigade reckoned there was an excess of petrol fumes. The chief thinks the fire was started deliberately.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That much I’ve heard.’

Making a mental note to have Wilson interviewed later in the day, I crossed to the camper van and gave it a cursory visual examination. There was nothing much to see beyond what I’d been told already. The fire had left little of the van’s interior intact, so much so that there was hardly anything to learn just by looking at it. Two blackened corpses, their sex not immediately apparent, occupied the front seats and from their posture appeared to have been overtaken by the flames before they could do anything. A strong odour of petrol still pervaded the air, but given what the fire chief had said that was to be expected.

The presence of an abandoned jerrycan on one of the rear seats caused me to wonder why it was there and why the cap was open. Not for the first time I was to discover that things aren’t always as they seem.

A smart white van had been parked just inside the tapes. It was emblazoned with the words EVIDENCE RECOVERY UNIT, a snazzy slogan doubtless created by the boy superintendents who staff the funny names and total confusion squad at the Yard.

Linda Mitchell, the senior forensic practitioner, walked across to join me. Unlike the crime scene investigators in American television shows, she was not wearing high-heeled shoes or attired in one of the latest designer creations to emerge from New York. Neither had she come straight from a fashionable hairdressing boutique. She was instead dressed in unflattering white coveralls. ‘Is it all right for me to make a start, Mr Brock?’

‘By all means, Linda,’ I said, ‘but from what Doctor Mortlock said, I doubt you’ll find very much.’

‘He’s a pathologist, not a forensic scientist,’ said Linda dismissively. ‘And unlike TV, he doesn’t try to do my job and I don’t try to do his.’ This was a sharp and uncharacteristic reaction from the normally equable Linda, and I got the impression that she was no happier than the rest of us at having been called out this early in the morning.

But on this occasion, Mortlock was right. Very nearly.

‘There’s nothing we can do until we get the vehicle to the lab, Mr Brock,’ said Linda, having made a brief visual examination of what remained of the camper van and its gruesome contents. ‘I’ll arrange for a low-loader to take it to the Amelia Street lab in Walworth. I think the best idea would be to move it as it is, bodies and all, and then they can be shifted to the mortuary in sterile conditions.’