Rat Poison (25 page)

‘So how did they gain access?'

‘Climbed over the fence. Not a problem for fit blokes.'

I could think of nothing intelligent to say.

Anxiously, Carrick asked, ‘You would tell me if Patrick had contacted you, wouldn't you?'

‘Of course.'

‘I'm at home right now but meeting the commander at my office in around half an hour. Do you want to come in?'

I told him I would.

‘God, why didn't I expect something like this?' Greenway exclaimed. He turned to me and I could see how exasperated he was. ‘What did the man say to you after he rang his father? Sorry, but I really do need to know.'

‘That it changed everything. That's all.'

‘Which, knowing him, could be a pretty monumental comment. Everything from unleashing open warfare to bubonic plague slipped into their water supply. Ingrid, do you really think he's planning to do something like gun down the lot and to hell with the aftermath?'

‘Not
now
,' I replied. ‘Some years ago before he became a family man my answer would have been that he might do literally anything. But you do seem to be assuming that Uncle hasn't somehow got hold of him – or that he allowed them to.'

‘With regard to the latter, to what end?'

‘He's at his best when in a tight corner, good at subversion. If anyone can cause trouble with Uncle's mobsters, he can.'

‘But look, this woman Murphy  . . . sorry to distress you but she's the sort who would want to roast him slowly over an open fire.'

‘She's powerful,' I said. ‘He might flirt with her and cause even more trouble.'

‘I still don't understand. We're going to arrest the lot of them tomorrow. What's the point of it all?'

‘I can't make guesses. But if he thinks he can prevent a shoot-out where police personnel might get killed or injured  . . .' I broke off with a shrug.

With a tilt to his chin Carrick said, ‘He might not think the plan we have is that good then.'

I shook my head. ‘He's still a soldier at heart. Civvy things never are.'

Putting a brave face on everything while wanting to scream with despair was proving almost impossible. While it was obvious that Patrick did not want me to become involved I felt I would go mad if I just had to stand around doing nothing.

‘Do we carry on with what we're going to do then, sir?' Carrick wanted to know.

‘At present,' Greenway decided. ‘There are quite a few hours to go yet. We can always make last-minute decisions.'

‘Mind if have a look at the case notes?' I asked.

Carrick passed them over.

My cubbyhole just outside the main office had miraculously not been used as a dumping ground for anything – there was always a chronic shortage of space – so I sat down with the file and found the phone number I wanted. How long was the tenancy on the house in Avonhill?

I soon had my answer: six months, the minimum.

Unless the plan was to keep moving around this did not fit with the picture we had built up of a criminal shifting his scene of operations out of London to somewhere a little quieter where he could start afresh under yet another assumed identity. There was every possibility too that the Avoncliff residence had been the only one available at the time of the required standard. But if it was neither of these things?

I had already tried ringing Patrick's mobile but it was switched off so, still floundering around for ideas, I went back to Carrick's office. ‘May I have another look around the surveillance house?'

He and Greenway had been in deep discussion.

‘Sure. I'll let them know you're on your way.'

They went on talking.

I had to wait a few minutes for one of the members of the firearms unit to unlock the gate but it was not raining
that
hard. Butch, bog-brush hair and with a deep scar on his cheek he led the way indoors mumbling something about the need to keep quiet.

‘I understand everything was absolutely undisturbed when you arrived, with no sign of a struggle,' I said as we carefully made our way up the stairs.

He turned to say in a fierce whisper, ‘It's best not to talk at all.'

‘Look, this place is a building site for most of the time,' I retorted. ‘There's a van at the front with a contractor bashing away working on the exterior stonework. How the hell can those over the road hear a quiet conversation indoors with that going on?'

He did not say any more until we were in the surveillance room where his oppo – butch, floor-mop hair scragged back into a rubber band, no scar – gave me a dismissive look.

‘Yes, it was empty,' he said. ‘No one here.'

‘You went right over the entire place?'

He was really resenting my questioning. Perhaps they felt demeaned by being ordered to do ordinary surveillance work. ‘Yes, we did. Every room, upstairs and down. Very carefully.'

‘No bodies?'

‘No bodies,' he replied heavily.

‘What kind of activity has been going on over the road this morning?'

‘They all seem to be still in bed with the curtains closed.'

‘May I have a quick look?'

They stood aside with ill-concealed impatience.

Not particularly interested in close-ups, more the big picture, I gazed at the house without using the binoculars. Unlike the older, terraced, and listed properties on this side of the road those opposite were detached with quite big gardens and were of more recent build. The front gardens had mostly been turned into parking areas. As my new friends had said, not a lot was going on over there. The place looked dead. A single car was outside, a small hatchback of some kind, and there was a bag of what might be rubbish dumped in the short driveway.

‘Do you know how many cars have been parked over there lately?'

‘No. This isn't our job really.'

So that was it. ‘Are you sure anyone's actually
there
?'

The pair gazed at me as though I was raving mad.

‘We heard footsteps downstairs yesterday,' I went on. ‘If they discovered that the police were watching them the whole lot might have gone! Come on, the SOCA man who was on duty overnight has disappeared and you're standing there like a couple of
lumpenkinder
!'

Nothing changed.

‘I'll contact the DCI,' I told them, with difficulty repressing an urge to box their ears.

I had to search first, not at all impressed by their assurance of having done so thoroughly and quickly investigated each room on this floor. There were next to no places where someone, dead or alive, might be concealed as any fitted cupboards or wardrobes had been removed, no doubt riddled with woodworm: there was plenty of evidence of it.

The ground floor was larger, having had extensions built on over the years, one of which must have enlarged the kitchen. There were several built-in cupboards, together with a walk-in larder. I approached these with trepidation as not all that long ago I had found a decomposed head in one of the former in another house in the city; the stinking remainder had turned up later in a larder just like this one, situated in a mouldering back scullery. Dear God, even the paint on the door of it was the same colour, a horrible shade of dark green reminiscent of old railway stations. His body wouldn't have started to smell yet though, would it? Shuddering, I opened the door and jumped back, almost screamed, when a dark heavy shape swung towards me. Two old sacks stuffed with what looked like newspapers and magazines thumped on to the floor in a cloud of dust and dead woodlice.

This reminder of the previous horror really brought it home to me that I might be looking for a corpse. Otherwise he would have made contact. I kept asking myself why he had not and kept coming back to the same answer: he had been unable to. And of course his body was not likely to be here at all but over the road, probably hastily buried in the back garden by now, or in the River Avon, or tossed into one of the many disused quarries or down an old mine shaft. The gang had killed him, as Murphy had planned to do, and then fled.

Shakily, I made myself carry on searching and then returned to the first floor where I went up a narrower staircase to the second. All the floorboards had been taken up in these rooms and the joists looked rotten in places so I did not venture into any of them; there was no point as there were no places of concealment.

By the door to a bathroom – the fittings were museum pieces, and the high cast-iron cistern over the toilet was smelly and knitted to the ceiling by thick cobwebs – there was a narrow doorway. Gingerly I opened it to reveal a tiny staircase leading upwards. The loft.

There was no light switch and I had not brought a torch. It immediately became obvious, though, that there was dim daylight above; this, I saw when I had climbed the dozen or so stairs, coming through a small dirty skylight. Light was also coming through small holes and gaps in tarpaulins that had been placed over part of the roof for the weekend where slates or tiles had been removed.

The attic was huge and there was a lot of rubbish that had not been removed: suitcases, trunks, wooden and cardboard boxes. All of these seemed to have been opened and any contents taken out before being cast on one side. I then noticed that the brick party walls between this house and those on either side did not go all the way up to the roof, a feature I vaguely remembered reading about and which was the cause of fires spreading so rapidly in historic terraces during the Blitz. The gap was at least a couple of feet wide at the ridge. A hundred bodies could be hidden up here. All one had to do was roll them over the top of the wall into the loft of the houses next door.

This was a job for a scenes of crime team, not me.

I rang Carrick.

‘You think they might have left!' he echoed.

‘Just a feeling. I could be quite wrong.'

‘No sign of Patrick?'

‘No, but the attic's vast and there's limited access to those of the houses on either side.'

‘We must establish what's going on over the road before I send in anyone else.'

I told him I understood that.

Feeling completely helpless I went down to the ground floor. If the gang had left in a hurry with Patrick following them – although how could he have achieved that without the use of the car? – he would have reported the fact, if not immediately then later. Had they seized him and taken him with them for Murphy to deal with at leisure? I found that very difficult to believe as how could they have overpowered him without leaving any evidence of having done so?

There was nothing to be gained by my staying.

Finally, it was Greenway who made the decision and the house was raided. They found no one, nothing, the interior trashed – empty spirit bottles, used drugs syringes and rubbish everywhere. Bloodstains were found in a bathroom but that was fairly quickly connected to drug taking rather than violence and was of a different blood group to Patrick's.

They had had their party.

‘Someone must have stayed sober enough to drive!' Greenway exploded with when the three of us went to the house, the investigation well under way.

‘Although there's some damage it doesn't suggest an actual struggle, nothing like a fight,' Carrick turned to me to say, repeating something he had already told me, perhaps in an effort to reassure. ‘And I've just been told there's no disturbed earth in the garden, which is nearly all down to grass and trees.'

The commander was pacing backwards and forwards in the only space large enough available to him, the hallway, as most of the doorways into the rooms were cordoned off, forensic teams working within. ‘They've only just moved in and now they've gone. Despite all precautions being taken around the clock the watch was detected. But I simply can't believe they realized their computers were being hacked into.'

‘They might have a cyber-boffin too,' I said.

‘Whatever's happened it reflects badly on Bath CID,' Carrick observed after taking a deep breath. ‘Ultimately the buck stops with me.'

‘Not while I'm breathing down your neck it doesn't,' Greenway said with a fierce grin before taking the stairs two at a time as though needing to expend more energy.

‘I wish I worked for him all the time,' Carrick said wistfully.

‘Gives Patrick hell sometimes.'

He gazed at me sympathetically. ‘This must be terrible for you.'

‘It's happened before.'

‘Under what circumstances has he previously gone off the map and not made contact?'

‘When Patrick first joined MI5 you found a phone box or one in a pub to report in,' I told him. ‘Or had a concealed radio in your car. More recently he's been unable to make contact because his mobile was taken away or smashed, or he was drugged, or unconscious, or in a situation where he'd be overheard. He might even have forgotten to recharge the battery – he does sometimes. Or he's dead.'

‘He's not dead, Ingrid.'

‘These filthy bastards are still one step ahead of us though, aren't they? And have been, all along.'

I knew I was going to cry which was awful so left him and went back out through the front door. Fresh air helped a little – the house stank as though someone had thrown up – and I wandered through fine rain around the side of the building and into the large lawned garden at the rear.

‘Please call me,' I whispered to the sky, the cool dampness on my face mingling with tears.

I walked for a little while among the trees in an effort to regain my composure and when I returned a truck had arrived to remove and take away for examination the hatchback that had been left parked at the front. I looked at it properly for the first time and then dashed indoors. Carrick and Greenway were upstairs in a room which, for some reason, was not barred to them.

I interrupted them, again. ‘That hatchback – it's Carol Trelonic's.'

‘You're sure?' the DCI exclaimed.