Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (24 page)

They had left the hotel in a hurry, partly because Harry wanted to get down to Bristol as quickly as possible, but mainly because he didn’t want Julian Bracewell paying them a visit. MacFarland had never seen Harry in such a state of anxiety, and it had shown no sign of abating as they had driven the short distance to the railway station. He had been constantly alert to anyone or anything that struck him as being in the least unusual and paid the utmost attention to any vehicle which stayed behind them for more than a few seconds. Only now in the comfort of the sparsely populated First Class carriage did his lolling head and the sound of his baritone snoring indicate that, for the time being at least, he felt safe from whatever Julian Bracewell had in mind for him.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, CrossCountry trains would like to apologise for the delay. This is due to essential engineering works on the line.’

It may have been the shrill, distorted tone of the announcement over the tannoy or the absence of the train’s soporific motion that shook Harry from his slumbering, but he spluttered awake with the same look of anxiety as before.

‘Wha—? What’s ‘appened?’ he said, scanning his immediate surroundings for any sign of danger.

‘We’ve stopped,’ said MacFarland.

‘No shit.’ Harry’s voice was thick with sarcasm as he looked out of the window at the static view of fields and hedges stretching into the far distance. ‘How long we been ‘ere?’

‘Five or six minutes,’ said Delia without diverting his attention from the same snapshot of rural England. ‘Engineering works apparently.’

‘Bloody country’s gone to the dogs if you ask me. That’s why I got out in the first place.’

It was all MacFarland could do to stifle a hoot of laughter. Surely even Harry couldn’t delude himself that the real reason for his self-imposed exile was that he’d had no desire to spend most of the rest of his life in jail. He wondered if it might also have had something to do with getting away from Bracewell, but that didn’t make sense because, at the time, Harry’d believed he was already dead. Now he came to think about Bracewell, MacFarland realised he knew a fair bit of the story but not all the details. Maybe he should do a bit of homework in case he did show up again and was as dangerous as Harry thought.

‘So ye wanna tell us about this Bracewell guy, boss?’ he said.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Harry would have treated any question of MacFarland’s with contempt and told him to mind his own business. On this occasion, however, he seemed to actively welcome the invitation to tell all as if giving voice to the cause of his fear might have some kind of therapeutic effect. Whatever the reason, he launched into his story and began by explaining that he and Bracewell had once been the heads of two rival gangs operating in the same area of south London. The mutual animosity between them had eventually reached a peak with a particularly bloody spate of violence which culminated in the death of one of Bracewell’s men. A few days later, when both gangs had turned up to rob the same security van at exactly the same time, Harry and Bracewell decided that enough was enough. Both had agreed they were committing a disproportionate amount of their resources to fighting each other when they should be getting on with the real business of stealing other people’s money.

After a series of arguments over a suitable venue that would be equally acceptable to both of them, Harry Vincent and Julian Bracewell had finally sat down together in the back room of a seedy little nightclub in a neutral part of the city to try and thrash out the terms for some sort of truce. Any idea that there could be a positive outcome to the meeting had seemed doomed from the start as the two men spent the first hour or so hurling abuse, recriminations and threats at each other. However, about halfway down the second bottle of Chivas Regal, the atmosphere slowly began to mellow, and there was even the occasional manifestation of mutual respect. By about five in the morning, it was as if they had been soulmates since childhood with never so much as a harsh word between them. By six, a deal had been struck and cemented with handshakes, backslaps and – much to the amazement of everyone present – a prolonged and almost tearful hug. From now on, the two gangs would amalgamate into one with Harry and Bracewell as joint bosses, and everything they made would be put into a pool and split fifty-fifty.

Harry paused at this point in his story and laughed. ‘Dozy twat must’ve thought I was born yesterday.’

A beaming grin continued to illuminate his face as he told Delia and MacFarland how he’d never had the slightest intention of doing a deal with Bracewell. On the contrary, his only motivation for agreeing to the meeting in the first place was because he’d seen it as the perfect opportunity to ‘get the little bastard out from under my feet for good an’ all.’

It turned out that, unlike Harry, Bracewell liked to go on a job himself every now and then, partly because he missed the heart-pumping buzz of frontline action and partly because he believed it was good for the morale of his men. Harry made some crack about Napoleon fucking Bonaparte and then went on to relate how the first target of the newly formed joint venture was a smalltown bank near Croydon. Maybe he’d seen it as some kind of historic and defining moment in his criminal career, but Bracewell had made it crystal clear from the outset that he wasn’t going to be left sitting in some bar on the day of the heist.

‘Cops were all over ‘em the minute they stepped through the fucking door,’ said Harry and sat back in his seat with a look of smug self-satisfaction.

‘Ye shopped him?’ MacFarland couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Harry seemed to have little difficulty in reading the expression on his face. ‘And don’t give me that honour amongst thieves bollocks. That bastard ‘ad been crossin’ me for years. A bullet through the brain would’ve been far too quick.’

‘But wasnae that what happened?’

Before Harry could reply, a steward rattled her trolley to a halt in the aisle next to them and offered a choice of “complimentary hot and cold drinks”. Each of them ordered a coffee and then watched in silence as she poured the steaming black liquid into three cardboard beakers. She deposited half a dozen plastic pots of cream and milk on the table with a handful of sugar sachets and set off with her trolley to the next set of occupied seats.

‘I dunno ‘ow he managed it, but he got bail,’ said Harry as soon as she was out of earshot, ‘and while he was out, he topped ‘imself. Blew his own ‘ead off with a sawnoff apparently. Word was, not even his own mum could’ve identified ‘im. Dental records weren’t much use either, so they say. Daft prat didn’t open his gob properly and blasted the crap out of most of his teeth as well as his brains.’

‘Jeez,’ said MacFarland and produced a low soft whistle through his own relatively sound teeth. ‘Ye reckon he did the same as ye then? Faked his ain death, I mean.’

Harry slowly clapped his hands together in mock applause. ‘You ‘ear that, Delia? MacEinstein ‘ere thinks Bracewell might’ve faked it.’

Delia, who had continued to stare out of the carriage window throughout Harry’s story, now turned to him and gave him the grin of amusement he seemed to be expecting. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Could well be.’

‘Still, it seems like we’ve given him the slip for now,’ said MacFarland, ignoring Harry’s snide remark. ‘Anyways, him turning up like that might be just a… coincidence. Mebbe he’s nae after ye at all.’

The beaker of coffee was within a couple of inches of Harry’s mouth. He paused it and lowered it gradually back down onto the table, fixing MacFarland with an icy glare. ‘You know, ‘Aggis, if you ‘ad shit for brains, it’d be a major fuckin’ improvement.’

Perhaps he had been too busy laying into MacFarland to notice the steady increase in the volume of the train’s engines, but Harry chose exactly the wrong moment to raise the beaker to his mouth again. He was about to take a sip when the train suddenly lurched forward, jolting the carriage to one side and then the other.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said as hot coffee spilt down his chin and over the back of his hand. He slammed the cup down on the table, spilling even more over his hand, and snatched a handkerchief from his trouser pocket.

MacFarland smiled to himself as he watched Harry start to clean himself up.

* * *

Julian Bracewell studied his face in the mirror for a few seconds before taking hold of one side of his beard where it began next to his right ear. Grasping it firmly between forefinger and thumb, his features contorted as he carefully peeled it from his skin, the glue setting up a stubborn and somewhat painful resistance.

Once he had completely removed the beard, he reached towards the moustache, but the movement was abruptly interrupted. He threw out his arm and slapped his palm against the wall of the toilet compartment to steady himself as the train lurched forward with a shuddering jolt to one side and then the other.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

‘Bingo,’ said Maggie
Swann
as she breezed into the tiny office that had been allocated to them at the local police station.

DS Logan was half lying, half sitting on the thinnest of cord carpets, his shoulders against the peeling cream paint of the wall and his jacket rolled into a makeshift pillow behind his head. The servings of steak and kidney pie at the pub had been generous in the extreme, and he should probably have stuck to two pints of Pheasant Plucker, but they had slipped down so easily he hadn’t been able to resist a third. Besides, he’d only been halfway through the second pint when they’d heard that Hawkins had disappeared into the police surveillance equivalent of a black hole. Until they could pick up his trail again, there wasn’t much they could do except wait, so staying sober and alert had suddenly become less of a priority.

If the soporific effects of the food and the beer hadn’t been enough, the stuffy heat of their temporary office back at the station had made him even more desperate for sleep, although the hardness of the floor had rendered anything more than a fitful doze utterly out of the question. But he had no intention of letting Swann know that she hadn’t woken him from the deepest of slumbers.

‘This had better be good,’ he said, his tone of voice laced with irritability as he slid open the lid of one eye and slowly focused on the sheet of paper that DC Swann was waving in front of his face.

‘Like all your Christmases come at once.’

Logan peeled open his other eyelid. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve been retired early on a Chief Constable’s pension?’

‘In your dreams.’

‘Dreams, constable, are commonly held to be the preserve of those who are fortunate enough to be allowed to sleep. As your highly developed sleuthing abilities will no doubt inform you, that happy state can no longer be applied to myself.’

‘Didn’t wake you, did I, sarge?’

The sarcasm was undisguised, but he was too tired and jaded to think up a wittily scathing response. Instead, he simply grunted and waited for the inevitable explanation.

‘APB,’ she said after less than a moment’s pause and brandished the piece of paper again. ‘Seems we might have caught up with our Mr Hawkins at last.’

Logan sat forward, groaning as the stiffness in his joints reminded him of just how hard the floor had been. He remained in this position for several seconds before hauling himself to his feet and listened attentively while Swann fed him the details. She told him how a patrol car had pulled a Peugeot 206 for having a defective brake light but had let the driver off with a warning.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘it turns out that one of the plods thought the passenger was behaving a bit suspiciously and checked out the APB notices in the patrol car. And like I said, bingo.’

‘Hawkins?’

‘Yep.’

‘Thank God for a uniform with a brain,’ said Logan. ‘So if Hawkins was the passenger, who was driving? The dog?’

Swann glanced at the paper. ‘Er… woman called Sandra Gray. I checked her out, and she’s listed as a private investigator.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Logan, raising a bemused eyebrow.

‘Maybe he’s taken her on to try and prove his innocence.’

Logan looked doubtful. ‘He was bloody quick off the mark then. Where were they when the plods pulled them over?’

‘Just outside Derby, heading south,’ said Swann. ‘But better than that, the uniforms asked them where they were making for. – Bristol.’

‘They might have been lying of course.’

‘True, but it doesn’t much matter now we’ve got the details of the car. We have the technology, as they say.’

‘And so do the spooks,’ said Logan, hurriedly packing his briefcase.

* * *

The particular spooks that DS Logan had in mind were, at that precise moment, doing about a hundred and ten miles per hour in the southbound fast lane of the M6 motorway. Patterson checked his safety belt was securely fastened for the umpteenth time and tried to convince himself that gripping the edges of his seat so that his knuckles showed white might help save him in the event of an accident. He wasn’t exactly a nervous passenger, but he became distinctly nauseous at anything over seventy miles an hour. Driving at high speeds was sometimes a necessity in this job though, so he just had to grit his teeth and put up with it whenever the occasion arose. This was one such occasion, and he was grateful it was Statham behind the wheel and not some hothead rookie who fancied himself as the next Sebastian Vettel. He had consistently excelled at every driving course the Service had sent him on and had never once been involved in anything more than a minor bump.