Rough Justice (2 page)

The two men with spanners circled Davis. ‘He’s a big lad, isn’t he?’ said one. He swung the spanner and slammed it into the man’s hip. Davis grunted and glared at him. ‘Hard as nails, aren’t you, Da Vinci?’ He hit him again, harder this time. Davis kept his teeth clamped together and made no sound.

‘Yeah, he’s a right hard bastard all right,’ said the policeman with the cricket bat. ‘Especially where little girls are concerned. Raped a thirteen-year-old in Kingston, he did.’ He walked over to where Davis was hanging. His head was almost touching the floor, his dreadlocks piled around him like a nest of snakes. ‘Raped her and then slashed her so that she’d never forget.’ He swung his cricket bat through the air. ‘You know what I’m gonna do, Da Vinci? I’m going to smash your balls to a pulp.’ He patted the bat against Da Vinci’s groin. ‘Think about that for the next minute or two. I’m going to smack your balls and your dick so hard that you’ll never be able to have sex again. Ever.’ He grinned. ‘I reckon your dick’s going to look like a dinner plate by the time I’ve finished.’

He walked around to stand in front of Richie again. Blood was trickling down Richie’s face, dripping through his dreadlocks and pooling on the concrete floor. ‘So, let me tell you how it’s going to be, Orane. Are you listening?’

Richie tried to speak but his mouth was filling with blood and he gagged. He spat out bloody phlegm. ‘Yeah, I hear you.’

‘My friends and I are going to beat the crap out of you. We’re going to break a few bones and smash a few kneecaps and Da Vinci there is gonna lose the use of his gonads. When we’re finished we’re going to cut you down and then you can crawl to the local hospital and they can patch you up, courtesy of the good old National Health. That’s one of the great things about this country. We’ll treat any foreign scumbags because, deep down, we’re basically too nice for our own good. And once they’ve patched you up, Orane, you and your two dickhead mates are going to get on the next Air Jamaica flight to Kingston. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Richie looked up at the black officer. ‘You gonna let them treat a brother like this, man?’ he asked.

Even through the visor, Richie could see the contempt in the man’s eyes. ‘You’re no brother of mine, scumbag,’ he said.

The officer with the cricket bat walloped Richie’s shins again. ‘Talk to me, not him,’ he said. ‘Now, do you understand what I’ve said to you or do you want me to run through it again?’

Richie closed his eyes. ‘I hear you,’ he said.

‘Because, my scumbag friend, if you’re still in this country next week, me and my mates are gonna pick you up again, and we won’t be as gentle with you. In fact, my little scumbag friend, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill you stone dead.’ He smacked the cricket bat against Richie’s left ankle. Richie screamed in agony. ‘And if you ever tell anyone what happened, we’ll kill you. Do you understand that?’

Richie nodded. The officer hit his ankle again, harder this time, and the pain was so agonising that Richie almost passed out. ‘I can’t hear you, Orane.’

‘I understand!’ howled Richie.

‘Believe me, we’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Because what you’ve got to remember, my little scumbag friend, is that we are the police and we can do what we fucking want.’ He rested the cricket bat on his shoulder and grinned at the two men with spanners. ‘Let’s get started,’ he said. ‘I’m taking the girlfriend out for dinner tonight.’

Langford Manor had been built on the blood of slaves. Every stone and slate, every window frame, every feature in the five reception rooms and two dozen bedrooms had been chosen personally by the Honourable Jeremy Langford, one of the most successful slave-traders ever to operate out of the port of Bristol. He was born in 1759, the same year as the slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce. But while Wilberforce had devoted his life to ending the vile trade, Langford had made a fortune from it. By the time the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787, Langford’s ships were transporting hundreds of thousands of slaves from West Africa to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. He had begun designing Langford Manor when he was in his teens and building work had started when he was just short of his twenty-fifth birthday. It had taken three years to complete.

In 1806, a year before the British Parliament abolished the transatlantic slave trade, Langford sold his shipping line and used some of the money to purchase several thousand acres around the house he had built. The rest he invested wisely and spent the remainder of his life following country pursuits and sitting as a local magistrate. He died in 1833, just days after the Abolition of Slavery Act was passed, lying in his four-poster in the master bedroom of Langford Manor, surrounded by his wife, five children and twenty-three grandchildren.

Not that the four men in the dark blue Transit van cared about the history of Langford Manor or the man who had commissioned it. All they cared about were the works of art hanging on its walls, which were conservatively valued at close to fifteen million pounds, and the contents of a small safe in the master bedroom.

The man driving the van was a stocky Scotsman with a greying moustache and slicked-back hair. Like his three companions, he was wearing dark clothing and black leather gloves. ‘Are we going or what?’ he growled. His name was Carrick Thompson and he tapped his fingers on the steering-wheel as he stared at the house in the distance.

‘We’ll go when I say we go,’ said the man in the front seat. He took the binoculars away from his face and stared at Thompson with cold blue eyes. ‘Have you got somewhere you’d rather be?’ His name was Alex Grimshaw, but everyone called him Lex.

Thompson stared impassively back at him. ‘I’m just saying time’s a-passing, that’s all.’

‘Time’s a-passing because there’s still a light on in the library, which means that someone’s still up, and if there’s someone still up then they’re probably going to pick up the Batphone if we go charging in, so let’s just wait until whoever it is pops up to bed, okay?’ Grimshaw sneered at Thompson. ‘I’ve spent three months casing this place. We’re not going to blow it just because you’ve got a short attention span.’

‘Forget I spoke,’ mumbled Thompson.

Grimshaw put the binoculars back to his eyes and scrutinised the house. They were parked about half a mile away, on a hill that overlooked Langford Manor. From where they were sitting they had a clear view of the front of the house and, at the main entrance, the lodge, which was occupied by an elderly gamekeeper and his wife. As usual they had gone to bed before nine o’clock. There were three cars parked in front of the manor: a Bentley, a Land Rover and a Ford Focus. Grimshaw knew that the present owner of the house owned all three. The Bentley was for show, the Land Rover for driving over the estate, and the Ford Focus was the vehicle of choice for the wife when she visited the local supermarket. Tobias Rawstorne had bought Langford Manor five years earlier and spent more than two million pounds on improvements, including a state-of-the-art security system. One of the men who had helped fit the burglar alarm and CCTV system was married to a good friend of Grimshaw’s and for ten thousand pounds in cash had been more than happy to provide the information necessary to gain trouble-free access to the premises.

Grimshaw scanned the road leading towards the main gate. A white Transit van was parked in a lay-by about a hundred yards away from the lodge. Its lights were off. Grimshaw cursed and pulled out his mobile phone. He tapped out a number, then barked, ‘Turn your bloody lights on, Matt,’ he said. ‘Anyone who drives by is gonna wonder why three grown men are sitting by the side of the road in the dark.’ The lights of the white Transit van flicked on. Grimshaw swore and ended the call.

‘What’s happening?’ asked the man sitting directly behind Grimshaw. He was holding a sawn-off shotgun in his lap. They weren’t expecting any trouble but Rawstorne had half a dozen shotguns in a cabinet in his study. The man with the shotgun was Eddie Simpson: he was a newcomer to Grimshaw’s crew and was tapping his fingers nervously on the stock of the shotgun. In his mid-thirties, with brown hair that needed cutting, he was chewing gum noisily.

‘Nothing’s happening until whoever it is in the library heads upstairs,’ said Grimshaw.

The man sitting next to Simpson had the build of a wrestler, a shaved head, and a tattoo on his left forearm of a British bulldog wearing a Union flag waistcoat. His name was Geoff Maloney and he was a good ten years older than Simpson, but most of those years had been spent behind bars. He patted Simpson on the knee with a shovel-sized hand and winked. ‘Relax,’ he said.

‘I’m relaxed,’ said Simpson.

Grimshaw twisted around in his seat. ‘Don’t go all soft on me now,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ said Simpson, defensively. ‘I just don’t like waiting, that’s all.’ He scowled at Maloney. ‘And get your bloody hand off my knee.’

Grimshaw turned back and took a drink from a pewter hip flask. ‘The waiting’s the key,’ he said. ‘Waiting means we know what we’re doing. Amateurs rush in because they’re all hyped up on adrenalin, and that’s when mistakes are made. I don’t make mistakes, which is why I’ve never been caught.’

‘That, and the fact that you’ve got one of the best drivers in the business,’ growled Thompson.

‘Yeah, but he was busy tonight, so I had to use you,’ said Grimshaw. He chuckled and checked out the house again through the binoculars. The light went out. ‘Right, here we go,’ he said. He nodded at Thompson. ‘Wagons roll,’ he said, and pointed down the road.

Thompson started the engine and drove slowly down the hill, then turned left and followed the high wall that ran around the entire estate. They had used satellite photographs on Google Earth to find the best place to go over the wall, well away from any other houses and with large trees that would make it easy to hide from any passing vehicles. Thompson stopped the van as the three passengers put on night-vision goggles and switched them on. ‘All working?’ Simpson and Maloney nodded.

Grimshaw climbed out. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. He took out his phone and hit redial. ‘We’re going over the wall, Matt,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you when we’ve secured the house.’

‘Roger,’ said Matt Burrowes, at the other end of the line.

‘I’ll give him bloody roger,’ said Grimshaw, ending the call. Burrowes was a professional thief and Grimshaw had worked with him more than a dozen times over the years, but he could be careless and had a big mouth. Maloney opened the side of the van and got out, then pulled a pair of aluminium stepladders after him. He jogged over to the wall as Simpson jumped out and slammed the door.

Maloney opened the ladders as Grimshaw and Simpson ran over. Simpson went first, passing the sawn-off shotgun to Grimshaw before straddling the top of the wall and leaping down. He grunted as he hit the ground and rolled to absorb the impact. He stood up and held out his hands to catch the shotgun. He moved away from the wall while Grimshaw clambered over and, a few seconds later, Maloney.

As they moved together through the trees towards the stables at the rear of the house, Thompson ran to the wall, retrieved the stepladders, put them back in the van and drove to a nearby lay-by.

The three men moved quickly, bending low, Simpson cradling the shotgun. They skirted around the stables, following the edge of a paddock and then moving through a small orchard of fruit trees. There was no moon and the sky was cloudy, but the night-vision goggles gave them a perfect view of the house and grounds.

To the right was a clay tennis court, and beyond it concentric circles of flowerbeds around a fountain in the shape of an angel with outstretched wings.

They went around the tennis court and headed to the kitchen. There was a door but their inside man had told them it was always locked and bolted from the inside. They crept around the building and reached a conservatory. They kept low, even though it was in darkness, and made for the staff entrance.

Grimshaw took a key from his pocket. It had been supplied by the technician who had fitted the burglar alarm and worked perfectly. The console began to beep quietly so Grimshaw walked quickly over to it and tapped in the four-digit master code to deactivate it. The beeping stopped.

Maloney padded across the kitchen as Simpson closed the door. The three men strode quietly along a corridor, past the study and the library, into a large hallway. Two stairways led up to the first floor. Grimshaw reached into his jacket, pulled out a semi-automatic and waved for Maloney and Simpson to go up the staircase on the right while he ascended the one on the left. Maloney slid a revolver from a holster under his arm as he went up. Simpson followed, holding his shotgun across his chest.

Grimshaw knew that none of the staff lived in and there were only three people in the house – Rawstorne, a fifty-year-old businessman, his trophy second wife, a former model and actress who had once done a two-year run in
Emmerdale
, and their daughter Amy. Rawstorne had a son by his first wife but he was away at university.

Rawstorne had made his money from an employment agency that specialised in bringing gangs of workers from EU countries where the British minimum wage was a big improvement on the pittance they earned at home. It wasn’t quite slavery, but there was a certain irony in the fact that he had ending up owning Langford Manor. Rawstorne’s wife liked to think that she was a gifted interior designer so she had done up the house from top to bottom, then invited
Country Life
magazine to do a photo-shoot. The photographs, and the hours he had spent keeping the house under surveillance, meant that Grimshaw knew where the master bedroom was, and where the teenager slept.

They reached the upstairs landing. Simpson joined Grimshaw and they tiptoed towards the master bedroom. The man of the house was the only one likely to put up any resistance so it was important that he saw the heavy artillery. Maloney headed down the landing towards the bedroom where the girl slept.