Snatched From Home: What Would You Do To Save Your Children? (DI Harry Evans Book 1) (4 page)

The pair of thieves sneaked in through the back door, entering the required code into the panel beside the door before the alarm announced their presence. They made their way through the building to the manager’s office, the leader guiding the way using familiarity instead of light.

The leader opened a desk drawer and pulled out a key that opened the safe cabinet and then bent down and entered a code into the digital lock on the internal strongbox.

The three lights flashed red as the code was entered and then turned green as the last digit was pressed. Turning the handle, the leader opened the strongbox and removed all the cash and stuffed it into a cloth money bag, which was then secreted into a poacher’s pocket of the accomplice’s wax jacket.

Closing the strongbox and locking the safe cabinet, the leader took the accomplice’s arm and guided him out the way they had came, only pausing to reset the building’s alarm before exiting and locking the door behind them.

Each breathed a sigh of relief before a noise startled them both. Shrinking into the shadows on either side of the door, they held their breath expecting a police torch to shine into their eyes at any moment and a stern voice to speak. All they heard was the sound of a zip being pulled down and the sounds of running water as a man relieved himself, his contented sigh interspersed by hiccups. The smell of alcohol as strong as the caustic tang of ammonia.

The accomplice pointed in the opposite direction to the man. They walked away from him, taking care to make as little noise as possible. They were in luck, the man was so wasted, they could have been leading a brass band and still he would have been unaware of their presence.

Easter Monday

Campbell was in the first official day in at his new station and already he was having doubts about his transfer. The new police station at Durranhill was located in the middle of an industrial estate and the building looked like the back end of a grandstand. He believed police stations should be cold unedifying buildings, steeped in history. Their imposing structures ought to strike fear into criminals, not have them admiring the architecture. Modernity was always going to win out when the new station was built as a replacement for the old one, which had been submerged along with large sections of the city, in the January floods of 2005.

Monday mornings were never his favourite and this would be his first real meeting with the officers who would be in his new team. Plus, he had the outgoing DI showing him the area he would be covering, giving him a rundown on where the local stations were all located.

He’d begun the morning with an extra long shower, followed by three cups of coffee. His stomach had been too knotted with tension to allow him the luxury of breakfast, and he’d nicked himself twice with the razor. Hardly the first impression he wanted to give his new team. All cut up and rumbling guts.

‘Good morning all.’ DCI Peter Grantham entered the room with Campbell trailing behind him.

Grantham waited a moment until all the eyes in the room were on him. ‘I’d like you all to welcome DI Campbell here who has just joined us from Strathclyde force. He’s the person who helped catch the muscle behind the protection gang that has been plaguing small shops and businesses. You may not know this yet, but we managed to roll one of them and he’s given us solid leads on the gang behind a lot of protection rackets in the county. So well done to him.’

A smattering of applause rang round the room, but as there were only five people to clap, the noise was more embarrassing than deafening. Campbell raised his hand in acknowledgment and said that he looked forward to working with a new team.

Nodding at Evans, Grantham held up a sheaf of papers. ‘I’ll let you make all the formal introductions later, Harry; I have some cases for you. Firstly, there have been three break-ins into licensed premises in the last two days which appear to be inside jobs, with a total of just over thirteen thousand pounds stolen. So either a crime syndicate is forcing people to help them or there’s a common factor between the pubs and nightspots that’ve been burgled.’

‘Who’s been done over?’ Evans was slumped in a chair opposite his standing DCI, his disrespect obvious.

‘Jumpers in Silloth, the Black Horse in Bowness-on-Windermere and Beenies in Carlisle. Plod and local CID have been round, but I think they are all connected and I want you to look into it.’

‘You mentioned cases, sir?’

Campbell looked across at the new speaker. As she was the only female in the room he didn’t need to be a detective to work out that she must be DC Lauren Phillips.

He’d been given a full briefing on the team he would lead. The mandate simple, he was to bring order to the chaos of Evans’s reign, to end their renegade ways.

It was Lauren who puzzled him most. According to the files he’d read, she was a brazen exhibitionist. Shameless in her dress sense, she used her femininity as a weapon of mass distraction. In his experience, most female officers dressed to hide their curves not emphasise them. Their biggest enemy, speculation as to whose bed they were sharing.

Her pretty face and wavy blonde hair didn’t fill him with confidence. The cleavage she was showing would be a distraction. She’d be nice to have around in a decorative way, but would she be any use to him?

Tuning back into the meeting, he listened to Grantham’s report.

‘Farm vehicles such as quad bikes, tractors and the like have been going walkabout from all over the county again. Lots of hand-held power tools are also being taken at the same time.’

‘So much for the SmartWater campaign.’

‘That’s enough thank you, DC Phillips.’ DCI Grantham struggled to look at her face as he snapped at her. ‘Not one of the farms affected has the SmartWater technology.’

‘Any other cases, sir?’ This from the obese man wedged in front of two computers. Again Campbell knew his name without being told. This would be DS Neil Chisholm; the file Campbell had read on his team stated Chisholm was a computer genius who researched details and did all the cross checks necessary to compile evidence.

‘Yes, we’ve had ten complaints of a man and woman conning car dealers out of money while actually paying them. They count out the cash to them in fifty-pound notes and the dealers agree to the value, yet when they cash up at the end of the day, they’ve all been short by two thousand pounds.’

Campbell saw the remaining member of his team raise a hand, the too-big suit jacket rucking at his elbow. ‘I’d like to look into that, sir.’

‘Thank you, DC Bhaki. DI Evans will allocate you tasks as he sees fit.’

Evans scowled at Grantham. ‘Are there any decent cases, sir? All we have so far are thefts and a few second-hand car dealers getting ripped off. It’s hardly a call for the specialist team we have here.’

‘I trust you are not hoping a murder or kidnap investigation comes our way, Quasi?’

‘Of course not,
sir
, but I was hoping for something juicier than other peoples cast offs. I was hoping for one last big case before… you know?’

‘The more mundane the better if you ask me; now get cracking and stop complaining that we do not have any serious crimes to investigate.’ Grantham walked towards the door and then turned with a final comment. ‘Quasi, try not to piss the locals off too much. I don’t want you riding roughshod over everybody and getting their collective backs up just for the hell of it.’

‘Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.’

When Grantham left, Evans glared at the team, ‘If I hear any of you lot calling me Quasi, I’ll use your guts for a skipping rope.’ Receiving muted replies he got a pen from the tray below the whiteboard on the tiny room’s back wall and wrote up the three case headings: ‘Pubs’, ‘Farms’ and ‘Cash Con’.

Under the headings Pubs and Farms he wrote DS Chisholm, DC Phillip’s name went under ‘Farms’ and he added DC Bhaki to the third category of ‘Cash Con’.

‘Chisholm, I want you to contact the guys in the CCTV control rooms. We need any footage that covers the properties that have been robbed. Bhaki, go over all the statements from the robberies and get me the gist of each one. Me and Campbell are gonna visit them. I don’t want to be asking questions plod has already got the answers to and making myself look like a twat. When you’ve done that, you can crack on with the garages. Lauren, find out what’s been stolen from the various farms. Also speak with crime prevention or whatever it’s called this week and find out if the farms who’ve been done over had been offered SmartWater, and if not, why not. Bhaki, you find out if there’s a pattern with these garages that’ve allegedly been ripped off.’ Evans looked around the room. ‘Questions?’

Campbell watched with interest as the team reacted to their orders. He needed to see them working to assess their capabilities.

‘Is there any connection with the ownership of the garages?’ Bhaki was the first to lead the questioning.

‘None as far as I know, but check it out anyway.’

‘Same question for the pubs and clubs, sir.’

‘The last I heard Jeremy Cussiter owned Jumpers at Silloth and Pete Mitchers owns Beenies.

‘What about the Black Horse?’

‘That’s where me and DI Jock McJock are going. It’s owned by the Leightons now. Fat Larry runs it for them.’

Evans looked around the room waiting for more questions. Receiving none he reached for his jacket. ‘I’ll call in about lunchtime, so have some answers for me.’

As Campbell followed Evans, he was already working out what changes he would make to the team. Evans seemed to rule the roost with a combination of threats and disregard for his superiors.

‘We’ll hit Beenies first, mara; they do a breakfast which’ll set us up for the day.’

When they left the station, Evans led the way to his car – a BMW M3, which he claimed to have inherited from Traffic. The back was littered with case files, jackets and a pair of pizza boxes, while the front seemed to have had a bucket of ash sprinkled on any surface not buried beneath empty cigarette packets. The smell of stale tar and decaying food spurred Campbell’s already knotted stomach to new levels of disquiet.

Parking in a public car park and neglecting to pay for a ticket, Evans started walking up Botchergate to where Beenies was located. The sun was shining, although a cool wind surged between the sandstone buildings.

A council worker pushed a handcart along the street picking up the detritus from the previous evening’s revelry. Even a Sunday night down Botchergate was raucous and most mornings there was a sea of chip papers, half-eaten kebabs and pizza littering the pavements or swirling in the wind that always blew down from the Crescent.

It seemed to Campbell every third person they met on the short walk to the disco-pub knew Evans, as he was greeted with a cheery good morning or Evans would make an enquiry after a family member of the people he passed.

When they walked into Beenies, his amazement was compounded further as Evans walked right up to the counter, engaged the barmaid in a conversation about her boyfriend’s mother and then asked for two full English, two pints and a meeting with Helen Salter, who Campbell presumed was either the manager or a CHIS – confidential human intelligence source – who worked there.

‘Oh, and, Pam.’

Hearing Evans call after her, the barmaid turned and threw him a questioning look.

‘Do us three breakfast rolls to go as well, would you?’

Pam punched their order into a till and after contacting Helen Salter via an internal phone turned to face Evans. ‘I’m afraid I can’t serve the pints, It’s only half nine and there are coppers in.’

As they waited on the breakfasts coming, having spent little time in each other’s company since they had collared the gang extorting money for protection, the new colleagues started in on small talk and a natural assessment of each other.

Beenies was the kind of place where most of the clientele are on the pull or just want to be seen in the trendy place. A cafe-bar through the day it morphed into a cool hip place in the evening, with a clever use of different lighting systems. The decor was ultra-modern with retro touches such as the mosaic of a seventies’ hippy wearing a beanie hat. There were two or three tables occupied with people having breakfast and coffees, but it was still too early in the day for any of the lunchtime crowd.

Campbell guessed Evans was an alcoholic ordering drinks so early in the day, and while he obviously had no time for his superiors, they must have had a great deal of faith in him to let him run this team. He made a mental note to find out why the DCI called him Quasi.

A woman in her mid-thirties came over carrying two breakfasts. Her admonishment was delivered before the plates. ‘You should know better, Harry, asking staff for a pint outside licensing hours.’ She then went and poured the drinks herself, setting them down in front of Evans and Campbell.

‘DI Campbell, Helen Salter.’ Evans made the introductions while reaching into his jacket pocket and producing a small bottle of Tabasco sauce. Spreading a liberal splash over his breakfast, he picked up his knife and fork to begin his assault on the food.

Evans questioned Helen Salter as he ate, half-masticated food visible in his mouth as he made his enquiries. ‘Where the money was taken from?’

‘The main safe cabinet.’

‘Who had keys?’

‘Only me.’

‘How much money was taken?’

‘Over six grand. Six thousand and twenty-three pounds and fifty pence, to be exact.’

‘Why was so much in the safe?’

‘It was the weekend’s takings.’

Slowly they went over who had keys to the building, when the theft was discovered and by whom, whether there any obvious signs of how the thieves had got into the building and what, if anything, had been taken from the safe other than money. Helen answered each question with tightly-suppressed irritation.

‘Why didn’t you read the notes the detective took when he questioned me yesterday?’ she asked when they were finished.

‘If I ask questions myself, I remember the answers better.’ Evans paused for a moment. ‘Do you remember the name of the investigating DC?’

‘Patterson. DC Patterson.’

Evans put down his knife and fork for a moment and looked at Helen. ‘He’s an imbecile who couldn’t find a pane of glass in a greenhouse.’

She nodded. ‘He didn’t seem like the brightest spark in the fire to me.’

Campbell was trying to write down her answers but couldn’t keep pace. Evans made no attempt to commit anything to paper, trusting his memory.

As he listened to Evans’s questioning, Campbell revised his opinion of the man’s ability. While his approach was unorthodox, there was nothing haphazard about it. Evans was asking all the right questions. Every question he thought of, Evans included in his debrief of the woman.

Her answers were short and to the point. Not the usual rambling answers witnesses gave. None of the usual evasion or tentative guesses, just the information asked for in a brief statement.