Silvermeadow (37 page)

‘Want me to go up and check?’

‘Yeah, that’d be good. Thanks. I can’t step out of here. They’re on the upper level. Two blokes in uniform. Tell them to get their fingers out. Base is getting stroppy.’

Kathy went through the door the men had used, wondering what to say if she met some of Harry’s security people, but the stairway was empty all the way up to the top floor, making the bustle of the crowded mall seem all the more chaotic when she reached it. It took her ten minutes to check the main stores within range of the service stair. All confirmed that they’d handed over their day’s takings to the two Armacorp security guards at least twenty minutes before. With a growing sense of unease she ran back down the stair to confirm that the security truck was still there, still waiting for them, then she rang Brock.

Afterwards, recalling what happened next, Brock had a sense of events unfolding with a desperate slowness, as if, no matter how hard they tried to speed them up, they could only unravel at a predetermined pace. Having called for assistance, Brock had his team close the exits and check every shopper—exhausted, frustrated, quarrelsome and broke—as they tried to leave by car or bus. Meanwhile the rain descended more heavily, the wind picking up viciously.

The stream of traffic arriving at the upper site entrance closest to the motorway became blocked by some exiting vehicles trying to detour around the police checkpoint, and the resulting queues of incoming cars developed so rapidly that they had tailed back down the exit ramps and onto the M25 before anyone could control them. A number of tailgate smashes in the ensuing chaos ensured that the London orbital motorway was soon brought to a complete halt in the southbound direction, which didn’t help the armed robbery squad and Armacorp support vehicles attempting to reach the site from the north. Police and TV helicopters circling overhead completed the atmosphere of catastrophe.

In Silvermeadow itself, while police searched the retail floors for any sign of the two missing guards, Brock conducted a stilted interrogation of the Armacorp driver, who still refused to leave his locked cabin without instructions from base, and who stared out at the figures surrounding his truck like a worried goldfish in a green glass tank. This was only the third time he’d been out with the two other crew, he said, and though he didn’t know them well, he found it hard to come to terms with the idea of them making off with the final load of cash.

‘How much?’ Brock asked, and got the tinny reply, ‘A million? Maybe two.’

Each of the half-dozen staircases would have yielded something like that from the blocks of shops they served, apparently, four or five times their normal Saturday takings. Despite the amounts involved, the collection arrangements here, in enclosed and secure service areas, were considered relatively low-risk, and the difficulties that conventional bandits would experience in making a getaway added to the sense of security. The possibility of two guards laden with cash bags conspiring to walk off into the blue didn’t seem to have been taken all that seriously.

‘How do you know it’s only the last load they took?’ Brock asked.

‘Because I saw them deposit the previous loads in the cash hopper.’ He pointed over his shoulder, and Brock bent to examine the steel door built into the side of the truck.

He straightened again and spoke at the microphone. ‘You saw the actual cash?’

‘No, no. The bags.’

‘Maybe we should check what’s in them, eh?’

‘Can’t.’

The whole essence of the security system was that no one, neither driver nor crew, could open the secure box built into the vehicle’s body. Once the cash bags were in there through the hopper, only base could access them again.

It was almost half an hour before the Armacorp base vehicle, escorted by a police patrol car, managed to weave its way through the road chaos and scream, lights flashing and horn blaring, down the service road ramp. Four men got out, three very bulky and menacing, and one diminutive, wearing rimless glasses and a leather coat and looking like a Hollywood version of a Gestapo officer, Brock thought. The driver of the security truck at last consented to open his door and step down, saluting the new arrivals with pointed dignity. They conferred briefly with Brock, then the small man, screened by his minders, entered the rear of the vehicle like a sinister midwife to release the treasures from its belly. These comprised forty-three cash bags, some containing coin, some bulked out with crumpled paper and cardboard, all devoid of banknotes.

Not long after this detectives radioed Brock to report that they had encountered a locked cleaners’ store, located just off the first of the service stairs which had been used by the security guards, and the door latch wouldn’t budge, apparently jammed shut with superglue.

When he joined them Brock recognised the smell that hung in the air of the corridor outside, a smell familiar from the firing range.

‘Hercules powder,’ one of the two detectives, a gun freak, said to him, sniffing the air like a connoisseur.

‘Sure,’ the other said sceptically, lifting the ram to swing at the door.

‘No, straight up. Bullseye, I reckon. Yer Vectan and yer GM3 are sweeter, like. Know what I mean?’

‘Bullshit,’ the other grunted.

‘Get on with it,’ Brock said, and the man nodded and swung the ram against the lock. It burst open on the second swing, revealing the foot of the first of the two bodies on the floor inside.

From their positions in the cramped space, it appeared as if the two men had been forced to crouch on their knees among the buckets and bottles. Their black tunics, with the Armacorp flashes and radios, had gone, as had their helmets. They had knelt with their backs to the door, and a bullet had been put into each head at point-blank range.

Brock called a hurried briefing in unit 184. Bren Gurney and several others from Serious Crime were there, as well as two senior officers from the Robbery Squad, the leather-coated man from Armacorp, and Gavin Lowry and others from the local division. Chief Superintendent Forbes put in a brief appearance just as they were getting under way, feeling obliged to register a formal protest at Brock’s lack of consultation with his officers, and to suggest that the outcome might have been very different with local backup. No one was very interested in this.

‘Needless to say,’ he said stiffly, ‘we shall provide all the support we can. But we will expect to be kept informed in return. I propose that DS Lowry act as liaison, since you’ve already worked with him. You agree, Brock?’

Brock nodded.

‘Good. At least,’ Forbes added, with a prim little smile, ‘
our
Silvermeadow case is satisfactorily resolved.’

As Forbes left, Brock overheard the senior Robbery Squad man say to Bren beside him, ‘What’s his problem? What case is that?’

‘A murder. Teenage girl abducted from here a couple of weeks ago. We were assisting each other in our respective inquiries.’

‘Oh yes? No connection with North?’

‘No,’ Bren said decisively. ‘No connection at all.’

Brock found Bren’s confident answer vaguely troubling. It stirred a question that had been lurking in the back of his mind for some time.

Lowry, meanwhile, moved over to sit beside Kathy, giving her an amused little smile as she met his eye.

‘But of a sly one, aren’t you, Kathy?’ he said. ‘Letting me think you were all finished up at Silvermeadow.’

‘When we last spoke I thought we were. Anyway, this wasn’t your case.’

‘It is now, by the looks of things. It seems you lot need a bit of help.’ He grinned. ‘So you and Brock and Bren and half of SO1 were actually
here
, were you, when this happened? One of these geezers told me you’d been here all day looking for this North character, waiting for something to happen, only when it did, you didn’t notice it. I told him he must have got his facts wrong, eh? I said, come
on
, this is the famous DCI Brock’s team!’

He was enjoying himself, fairly bubbling with it.

Kathy muttered, ‘Sod off, Gavin,’ through clenched teeth.

‘Tell you what,’ he chuckled. ‘Makes me feel a lot better about my car.’

Then a new thought seemed to strike him. ‘You were probably never interested in the Vlasich murder at all, were you? You just used it as a cover to be here, on the lookout for North. Did Harry Jackson know? No? Where is Harry now, anyway?’

That was a question that had occurred to Kathy too. If the security staff were so short-handed, where the hell was Harry Jackson?

Brock interrupted, calling the group to order with a rapid summary of how they now believed the robbery had been carried out. Two men, it was thought, had hidden in the cleaners’ store cupboard beside the first staircase and waited for the security guard crew, whom they had ambushed and murdered. They had then followed the expected pattern of collections from the shop units, removing the contents of the cash bags before depositing them in the security truck hopper. As each zone served by a stairway was cleared, it appeared that a common pass code, one allocated to emergency services, had been entered into the security lock on the doorway connecting that service stair with the mall. In other words it looked as if the money had been transferred to one or more accomplices waiting in the malls.

‘Perfect cover,’ Brock announced. ‘The place was packed with people with bulging shopping bags. They could walk out without the least suspicion. Even if something had happened down in the service road to arouse suspicion and cut the operation short, the people in the mall could stroll away without suspicion. They might have been women for all we know, frazzled shoppers with bags and pushchairs and kids hanging from their elbows— maybe the little girl North was seen with a week ago. And when the two gunmen got to the final stairway without a problem, they simply took off their jackets and helmets and joined the crowd and walked away too.’

‘How come the driver in the security truck didn’t twig what was going on, chief?’ someone objected.

‘We’ll be looking a lot more carefully into that,’ Brock said, ‘but so far his story seems plausible. The two men he saw going from stair to stair were the same build as his crew, and were wearing their clothes and radios. While they were out of sight they followed procedure exactly, reporting in every two minutes until the very end. Radio reception wasn’t perfect, but the voice that made the reports was like the one the driver expected to hear: east London, working class, a bit breathless from the stairs.’ Brock nodded to the man in the leather coat at his side. ‘Mr Brown’s initial assessment is that he’s probably telling the truth. But it’s likely they had some inside help at Armacorp, and we’ll work on that assumption.’

‘And at Silvermeadow?’ someone else asked.

‘Yes.’

One of the Robbery Squad officers put up his hand.

‘You’re certain it’s our friend, Brock?’

‘I think we can be pretty sure of that.’

‘So he’ll be aiming to leave the country again?’

Brock frowned. ‘I think that may depend on the little girl he was seen with last weekend.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘If she was part of a new family he brought into the country with him, it wouldn’t make sense to bring them in just to do a job, would it? Maybe he intends to settle down with them here. Maybe he thinks enough time has passed for us to have forgotten about him.’

They considered this doubtfully. ‘Risky. Where was he hiding, do we know? Argentina, wasn’t it? Good cover, a family of tourists from Argentina.’

‘We believe he had moved on to Canada. We had a report of him there over a year ago, and we suspect he may have entered the UK at the end of November under a Canadian passport in the name of Keith Nolan.’

The officer drew a sheaf of files and loose papers from his briefcase. ‘We grabbed what we could on our way out, but it sounds as if you’ve got more current info on our friend.’

Bren brought the newcomers up to date on what they’d discovered of Nolan’s movements, as well as the current whereabouts of North’s relatives and known associates. From this they began to compile a priority list of raids to be co-ordinated for that night.

When Brock asked for further comment, Kathy, with some reluctance, spoke up. ‘I think I might have seen him this afternoon, about two p.m., outside Cuddles on the upper mall. It was only for a second, and I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t report it. But I’d like to check the centre’s camera tapes.’

Brock gave her a wry smile. ‘Yes, I was coming to that. You’ll need quite a bit of help. We have to analyse every tape that was running in this place this afternoon. We know the timing of what we’re looking for, but that’s about all. We’re looking for men with black trousers, men of the right build, men who look like our most recent shots of North, little girls like the one he was with last weekend, and anyone on Bren’s list. It’s going to take a big team, and lots of machines. Can you help us, Gavin?’

An hour later Kathy and half a dozen other officers were seated in front of VDUs in a room at Hornchurch Street, starting to go through the first batch of tapes from Silvermeadow. It was going to be a long night, she guessed, for all of them. Once search warrants were issued the raids would begin, the questioning of known associates, the gathering of evidence. She had told Leon she’d be home by eight at the latest, and they had planned to go out for a meal. She’d tried his mobile number a couple of times, but the line was busy. For all she knew he might have been called in to the hunt too, looking for forensic clues at Silvermeadow.

The video watchers had plans of the shopping centre marked with the camera zones, and Kathy began with a tape for zone 16, in which Cuddles was located, and covering the early afternoon period. The screen began sequencing through four views of the mall, each held for a few seconds in turn. She identified the view that corresponded with the area outside the soft toy store, and fast forwarded to the time at which she had seen the figure in the mall.

But he wasn’t there. She found the right time, for in one of the short sequences she saw herself emerge from the shop, and Mrs Rutter waving an arm at her, but by then the man she was after had disappeared off the bottom of the frame, while in the previous clip, ten seconds before, he was still invisible in the crowd.