My Name Is Not Jacob Ramsay (35 page)

"I feel honoured to be in your presence, sir," Mr Ahmed said humbly.

"Don't be," Edward responded, concentrating on the image of the print as Jason took a clear, decent picture of it.

"I apologise for my rudeness earlier," Mr Ahmed continued.

"Are you able to email it to someone?" Edward asked Jason.

"Course," Jason confirmed.

   "Let me give Geoff a call. He's on a late shift."

   Behind the wheel, in the jeep, Edward retrieved his mobile phone and spoke to Geoff, informing him that he had a fingerprint to check immediately against the police database for an identity and any known associated addresses.

   As Geoff already knew the situation and the natural urgency surrounding it, he obliged without question or hesitation, receiving the emailed fingerprint from the projectile casing and scanning it into the database for any known offender.

Olafemi Kuku. Twenty-two years old. Nigerian born. Lived in Thamesmead, South East London. A persistent offender since he arrived in the United Kingdom at the age of eleven. Despite previous known addresses and aliases, it was the Thamesmead address which Edward took particular note of and together, with his son Jason, he drove to that address.

The Nigerian man known as Olafemi sat in the back of a minicab, driven by a Nigerian man in his forties. Next to Olafemi was Michael, complete with his tied wrists and taped eyes. Olafemi Kuku was indeed the very man who, previously, was involved in a bloodthirsty gunfight deep underground in Jack Cade's Cavern.

"OK to walk?" asked the driver, looking up into his rear view mirror at Olafemi.

"Yes. Two minutes. OK?" replied Olafemi.

"OK," said the driver and with that, Olafemi opened the door, wincing as he limped to a money transfer store a few feet from where the car was parked.

The face of a fifty-five-year-old Nigerian man peered out of the window of the money transfer store and nodded to acknowledge Olafemi who was standing outside. The man unlocked the door and let Olafemi inside the darkened shop.

"Olafemi. What is so urgent? What is the emergency?"

"I need a passport," Olafemi commanded, wincing.

"A pail? Come back in two days," snapped the man, annoyed. A pail was Nigerian slang for passport.

"I need it tonight. I know you can do it. I have money. Lots of money. Do it for me. I need to leave tonight," said Olafemi.

"Just a passport? How will you leave the country? Do you have transportation? Where is your private jet?" chuckled the man, already moving to a back office. He opened a cupboard filled with British passports.

"No planes. A boat maybe."

"A boat? I can sort you out a ship. How old are you now?" quizzed the man, looking through a number of passports. He flipped the back page and eyed up several photographs that depicted African men.

"Twenty-two."

"Twenty-two? How about thirty-seven? This one?" said the man, showing Olafemi a passport picture of a Ghanaian man in his late thirties who looked similar to Olafemi.

"Perfect," Olafemi agreed, nodding his head, giving approval to the ready-made passport.

"All right then, Mr Mynah Lampitey?"

"Lampitey? You are giving me a name from Ghana! What is wrong with you?" snapped Olafemi.

"No, what is wrong with you? Take it or leave it."

Olafemi snatched the passport from the man, scowling at him. "How much?"

"A thousand pounds."

"No problem." Olafemi pulled a bundle of cash, which must have been twenty thousand pounds at least. The top note was bloodstained as he fingered the money to count.

"This will do fine," said the man, taking the whole bundle from a weak Olafemi.

"There is much more than a thousand pounds there!"

"Inflation. Go home. Wait for my call. I will get someone to take you to a boat."

"Thank you."

"Just stay out of trouble when you get back to the UK again, do you understand me, Olafemi?" ordered the man, sincere and stern as he looked Olafemi up and down.

"I understand, Uncle," replied Olafemi, respectfully. He turned and left the store.

Detectives Cole, Crowe and Blake drove through the night on a dual carriage way, heading towards Plumstead High Street.

"McDonald's tonight?" suggested Crowe, cheerily.

"Not tonight, mate," replied Cole.

Blake's attention was drawn elsewhere as she stared out of the back passenger side window and across the carriageway to a row of shops, silent, closed and deserted. Except for the sight of Olafemi who clambered into a minicab that quickly pulled away. She turned her head back in a double-take and fixed on the lone white passenger who was in the back with Olafemi.

"I swear I just saw Jacob," she exclaimed to the other detectives.

"Jacob? Oh, Ramsay?"

"Yes."

"You've got him on the brain, especially since the boss mentioned he had gone missing this eve-" Crowe's voice trailed off and he glanced at Blake on the backseat.

"Where'd you see him?" asked Cole.

"Back of a car. Couple of black guys inside," she replied.

"Dammit. Can't turn around," replied Crowe.

"We'll have to go up there, mate," Cole said

Blake sighed and glanced round out of the back window to a totally deserted street. There was no sign of anyone or anything, and especially no cars.

Edward drove toward Abbeywood, passing through Plumstead.

Jason looked at his father, tense behind the wheel, staring and thinking.

Mr Ahmed was asleep in the backseat. His seatbelt prevented him from sliding across, but he still looked uncomfortable nonetheless.

Michael was shoved into a hallway of a dark, dingy flat with brown décor on an estate in Thamesmead.

Olafemi left a blood-smeared handprint on the wall as he barged past Michael and frantically staggered into a room. In his distress and discomfort, he slung a sports bag onto an unmade double bed, opened a chest of drawers and pulled out several boxes of brand new Calvin Klein underpants, tossing them into the bag. He closed the drawer and opened another, finding a pair of new Levi jeans. A crisp white shirt hung on a wire hanger in polythene from the door handle. He packed each into the bag.

He stuffed four bundles of elastic-band-wrapped cash from the Adidas track bag he had collected from within the cave into his own bag under the clothes, along with the six kilos of wrapped cocaine. He laid them on the top and painfully exited the room.

A scared Michael turned as he heard the man step near to him and dropped the sports bag on the floor and pass into another room.

"What are you going to do with me? If you're going, please, just go, but please, leave me here. Please, I've not seen your face."

"Shut up," replied Olafemi from the other room.

A cell phone rang and Michael's ears pricked up and his head turned toward the direction of the telephone ring.

"Yes, I have money! Come up. The door is open. Come up," Olafemi said, impatiently before hanging up the call. He gulped down a glass of water and washed his bloodstained hands in the kitchen sink.

An overweight, tired Nigerian man, in his late forties, exited a dark Vauxhall car and glanced up at the flats in the Thamesmead estate. It really was a concrete jungle with a maze of meandering walkways that formed eerie, jagged shadows. He sighed and heaved his bulk towards a stairwell.

Michael shivered in the hallway and swallowed, swaying slightly with fear and tiredness combined. His head twitched to the door as it opened and the bulky Nigerian man entered.

His eyes locked onto Michael, hands bound and eyes taped, bag draped over his neck. He frowned and walked past him, peering into the kitchen, his eyes diverting immediately to a pool of blood on the floor.

Olafemi rested against the kitchen sink. The blood was escaping from his leg at a rapid rate. He slowly looked around to meet the eyes of the other man, looking him up and down from the doorway with disgust.

"We are going here." The overweight man handed a folded strip of notepaper to Olafemi.

"OK." Olafemi placed the paper on the side by the kettle and winced with pain.

"I have eshin waiting to take a passenger. Where is the money?" the man said in a thick Nigerian accent, then announced he had a car outside.

"There is kishi in the bag outside. Take the akata I have in the hall. He is going to come with me," said Olafemi. In Nigerian slang kishi meant money and akata was white man.

"I was told one passenger only. Fashi," said the man. Fashi was a Nigerian slang term for forget it.

"I will be out in a minute! Just take the white man!"

The man in the doorway looked at Olafemi, turned and stepped back into the hall to where Michael was. He looked at the small sports bag and picked it up, noticing the cocaine that was laid on the top.  The overweight Nigerian held the sports bag on one hand and grabbed Michael's arm with the other, then led him to his car. He opened the rear passenger door and shoved Michael inside. As he heaved his own bulk into the car, he looked at the cocaine in the bag again. He turned to Michael and wondered if he should go with the money and drugs and leave Michael behind or if it would benefit him to take him. He looked up at the flats, sighed, impatiently tapping the wheel like a drum with his big, thick forefingers. He started the engine, formed a devilish smirk, pulled the car away out of the estate just as another vehicle's headlights flared up and entered.

Edward pulled his jeep into the estate and saw the car with the overweight Nigerian driving past them, the man shielding his eyes from Edward's headlights. Edward turned his head to look at the man as he passed them. He quickly took a mental note of the car registration.

"I can call up some more people, Dad," Jason suggested to his father.

"No. It's OK, son," Edward said, opening the door and tucking in his shirt as he stood outside.

Jason noticed a Beretta pistol in his father's waistband, which was soon covered up when Edward zipped up his fleece. He frowned, worried.

"Careful," Jason warned softly.

"If I'm not back in five minutes, just wait longer," Edward smirked, trying his best to lessen his son's worry and tension.

He carefully pulled on a pair of clean gloves. Edward ascended the concrete stairwell and exhaled deep, sighing breaths every other step. He was by no means as fit as he used to be. Getting back into the game after so many years of being inactive was taking its toll. It was simply the stress of the situation and his pure anguish that was driving and pushing him. He reached the right level and walked past a couple of flats coming to an open door: the door to Olafemi's home. Edward tightened his mouth and entered the hall just as Olafemi exited the kitchen.

Their eyes locked, both staring for different reasons.

Olafemi, caught off-guard and confused as to why a once-well-built white man was in his hallway. Edward, wary, yet satisfied that he had already located the man who had taken his son from the cave.

"Olafemi Kuku?" Edward asked, brief and hard.

"Wahala? Comot!" Olafemi yelled aggressively at Edward to get out.

Edward bounded forth, clenched his fist and punched Olafemi hard in the throat, making him double over and choke for breath. Edward noticed his gunshot in his side and grabbed hold of the bloody wound. He forced him into the kitchen and slammed him into the work-surface.

Olafemi wheezed. His face filled with the pain Edward was causing him as he clutched his injured side and pushed him backwards over the kitchen sink, creating further discomfort.

"Olafemi Kuku?" repeated Edward.

"Wetin!" Olafemi said "what" in Nigerian Pidgin English.

Edward scanned the draining board. He picked up a fork and pressed it hard to Olafemi's Adam's apple.

"I no sabi. I don't understand. Talk English or you'll be breathing through a pen for the rest of the night," Edward said.

"I don't know you! What do you want?"

Edward dug the fork harder against Olafemi's skin and clasped a dishcloth, which he covered Olafemi's face with.

Olafemi tried to blow the cloth off, but Edward began to pour water from the kettle over the cloth on his face. Makeshift waterboarding. He coughed and spluttered as the water entered his mouth and nose.

"Listen well. Where is my son?"

"I no. I no sabi." Olafemi struggled to speak, even in his own native tongue.

"Yes, yes you do know. You do know!" Edward insisted, pouring more water onto Olafemi's face.

Olafemi spat and spluttered some more, choking and practically drowning.

"Please - please. No more. I speak," gasped Olafemi.

Edward removed the dishcloth from Olafemi's face and angrily stared down at him. Olafemi took two deep breaths. His eyes rolled to the kettle and the piece of folded notepaper given to him by the overweight man. With all his energy he reached across, grabbed the piece of paper and stuffed it into his mouth.