Substantial Threat (20 page)

Henry shook his head.

How things had changed, he pondered sadly. In his formative years as a young PC, everyone arrested would be charged and go to court and get fined at least. Not these days. Everybody got cautioned to death, or referred to some agency or other. Getting locked up meant little to people and a caution was just a piece of paper to blow your nose on. They only ended up in court for persistent offending.

And Marty Cragg had been fortunate. He had only been arrested once before for that particular offence, so he got cautioned and kicked out.

Henry's face showed its displeasure. The criminal justice system, he thought bleakly, is fucked.

He re-read Marty's list of previous convictions, which included several assaults. Henry decided he needed to know more about these, so he phoned down to the brainy people in the intelligence unit and asked the woman who answered to do a bit of research for him. She muttered about how busy they were, but Henry had no qualms in pulling rank for once, moaning bitch.

Then he returned to the custody record and the point at which Marty had been given his rights.

Then he had a thought and picked up his newly issued, state of the art, cancer-inducing (if reports were to be believed) TETRA radio. These new-fangled things enabled any officers in the force to talk to any other officer by simply dialling in their collar number. It did all sorts of other wonderful things, too, except tell you how to do the job. On the off chance that the officer who arrested Cragg was on duty, Henry dialled the number. He got an immediate reply.

‘Hi,' said Henry affably and introduced himself. ‘Are you anywhere near the nick at the moment?'

‘Having breakfast upstairs.'

‘Can I come and see you?'

‘Have I done something wrong?' the officer wanted to know.

‘No, no – just want a word with you about a job you dealt with a while back.'

Henry smiled. Bobbies always thought it was bad news when a senior officer wanted to talk to them. The thing was, he thought, that he felt exactly the same when a more senior officer beckoned him in, so things didn't change, no matter what rank you got to, unless you got to the top – but then again, you got the police authority and Home Office on your back, so no escape.

Before leaving the office Henry dialled another number on the TETRA on the off chance and also got through. Wonders were never going to cease, he mused.

‘Rik, it's me, Henry Christie – I need a chat about something.'

‘I'm up at Blackpool Victoria Hospital re the incident at McDonald's at the moment,' Rik Dean said. ‘I'll be up here another hour at least, I reckon, boss.'

‘Okay. I might come up and see you if I get chance.'

Henry stood up, slung on his jacket and made his way to the canteen where he found PC Dave Watts tucking into a full, very unhealthy-looking breakfast. Henry knew him by sight. He paid for a mug of decaf coffee and joined him at the table.

‘Hello, sir,' the PC said. He eyed Henry with suspicion and seemed to lose his appetite.

Henry hated being called ‘sir', but he let it ride. Sometimes it was too much trouble to put folk right.

‘You're not in any sort of bother,' he reiterated.

The young man breathed a sigh of relief, took a sip of his tea and pulled his plate back towards him.

‘About six months ago you arrested someone for a public order offence outside the Palace nightclub?'

Watts' eyebrows knitted together. ‘Did I?'

‘Probably one of dozens you've arrested,' Henry conceded. ‘His name was Marty Cragg.'

‘Yeah, I remember him. Very hard work, bit of a bastard. A hard nut.'

‘What were the circumstances of the arrest?'

‘He rolled out of the club arguing with a woman. Right in front of us, he was. We were stood outside the club. They walked away, still arguing, then suddenly he turned on her and knocked her to the ground and, started kicking her. We intervened and locked him up. He should've been done for assault, but she wouldn't make a complaint, so we ended up doing him for public order.'

‘Do you know who Marty Cragg is?'

The officer nodded. ‘Big time. Unfortunately he's got a small-time temperament.'

‘Who was the girl?'

‘Dunno, she refused to give us details. She spoke with a strange accent, bit like Russians do in James Bond films.'

‘Okay, thanks.' Henry finished his decaf.

‘That it?'

‘That's it,' Henry said. ‘Cheers.'

Karl Donaldson had once been a brilliant FBI field agent, working mainly in Florida from the Miami Field Office. His investigations had resulted in numerous convictions of top-flight felons as well as serial killers, bombers and rapists. He had enjoyed pitting his wits and skills against such people. But for over four years, Donaldson had not officially been on the streets, other than for occasional forays into the front line. Instead he had been ensconced in the American embassy in Grosvenor Square in London where he worked on the Legal Attaché Program, created to help foster good will and gain greater cooperation with international police partners. The FBI believes it is essential to station highly skilled special agents in countries other than America to help prevent terrorism and crime from reaching across borders and harming Americans in their homes and workplaces.

It was a wonderful job, very fulfilling and rewarding. Donaldson was settled, married to an English woman with two young children, and commuting every day into London from a little village in Hampshire called Hartley Wintney. He loved his work. He met many interesting people, got involved in many wide-ranging investigations which crossed international boundaries, but spent lots of time behind a desk, pushing paper.

In truth, he did miss working in the field. Sometimes he hankered for it so much it drove his wife, who was a police officer based at the Police Staff College in Bramshill, bananas.

So what he did to alleviate this hankering was get his hands dirty from time to time, though theoretically this was a no-no.

One of the tasks he had taken on, so as to keep himself as close as possible to the sharp end, was to coordinate the activities of undercover FBI field agents operating in Europe. The general public would have been surprised by the number of agents working across the continent, but following the terrible terrorist incidents in America, the FBI had become more pro-active in infiltrating terrorist organizations worldwide. But their work was not solely focused on the terrorist, they also had a number of agents in criminal gangs in Europe too.

Donaldson enjoyed his time briefing, debriefing and staying in contact with his agents. He thought they were fantastically brave people who, without exception, made light of the dangers they faced each and every day, without, of course, underestimating them.

There were currently four agents in organized criminal gangs and Donaldson had responsibility for all of them, including an agent whose code name was Zeke.

Donaldson was a big, burly guy. Six-three, fifteen stone but with not an ounce of excess fat on him. He kept himself fit by daily runs and gym visits three times a week, as well as expending an equal amount of energy chasing his two young sons round his garden and his wife round the bedroom.

He was standing by the window in his office, sipping water from a disposable conical paper cup, looking out across Grosvenor Square but his mind was not on the view.

He smiled absently at one of the secretaries who walked past him. She was a very pretty English lady, secretly crazy about Donaldson, but his mind was not on her swaying ass.

Although no longer a field agent, Donaldson prided himself on the fact that his sharp instincts had not been blunted by desk work and sexual harassment from the staff. He knew he was as keen as ever in the brain department. Which is why, as he tossed the paper cup into the waste bin, he knew something was wrong.

Very wrong.

Henry was doing his best to avoid bumping into Jane Roscoe, although he knew it was inevitable they would soon come face to face. He resolved to tell her that their fling was over and that from now on the relationship would be purely professional and platonic. Yeah, he could do that. After all, it was only words, wasn't it? One of the best things that could happen to him was to be taken off the Blackpool jobs and given something else to deal with at the far end of the county which would consume him for about six months. A mass murder, or something. He found himself praying for something like this to happen on the Lancashire–Yorkshire border.

Back in the office, he logged into his e-mail and found that the intelligence unit had sent him details of Marty Cragg's convictions and the stories behind them. He printed them off and looked round, realizing that, in hindsight, it had been a mistake to share an office with Jane. He used his TETRA radio to contact Rik Dean to tell him he would be with him within quarter of an hour.

Henry left quickly to avoid meeting Jane. He was running scared.

Karl Donaldson had worked with Zeke before when both had been field agents in Miami. Zeke's real name was Carlos Hiero. His parents had emigrated from Spain and settled in Florida in the early 1960s and had developed a fairly successful flower-selling business with about six shops dotted around the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area. They were not ultra-wealthy, but were well off and comfortable. On leaving university Zeke had become a lawyer, then joined the FBI at the age of twenty-six, when his Spanish origins meant he was used to great effect in combating Hispanic crime gangs.

He and Donaldson, although never working partners, had colluded closely on a number of cases with some good results.

Donaldson was back at his desk in the embassy, leafing through a mountain of paperwork which came with the job. His mind was not concentrating on what was in front of him. He checked his watch constantly and glanced at the mobile phone propped up on his desk. His eyes stopped at a photograph of his wife and two sons and he could not keep himself from grinning at them even though his mind was harbouring dark thoughts.

It was four days since he had heard from Zeke.

‘You know, sometimes you can't please anybody,' DS Rik Dean said to Henry. ‘I mean, we give 'em all the protection they can possible want, mollycoddle 'em and yet they still maintain they've nothing to tell us.'

The two men were standing outside Blackpool Victoria Hospital, near to the entrance to A&E. Henry had driven up from the police station and found Dean in a small private ward where the two shooting victims from McDonald's were being guarded by armed cops. Both men were now out of danger, medically speaking, but neither seemed to have any great desire to talk to the police, not surprising as they were deep in the mire themselves anyway.

‘Doesn't really matter, though,' Dean was saying. ‘Witnesses put them down as the instigators of the shoot-out and they just came off worst.' Dean shook his head. ‘Blackpool, what a bloody place!'

‘Yeah,' said Henry thoughtfully, ‘in more ways than one.' He took a breath. ‘One thing, though – keep them separated. Not only so they don't have contact with each other, but also so that they're not in the same place if anyone chooses to pay them a return match. It'll make it more difficult if they're apart from each other.'

‘Good point,' said Dean. ‘I'll sort that. For now they're under guard and as soon as the quacks say they're fit enough, we'll haul their backsides down to the station and start kicking their wounds.'

Henry laughed. ‘Yeah, good.' He had no qualms about Rik Dean, trusting him to take care of business professionally. ‘I've come about something else, actually.'

‘Oh, what?'

‘I told you I was investigating a cold case, reviewing the murder of that unidentified female in the flat in North Shore last year, remember?'

‘How could I forget?'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘Nothing, nothing – you just don't forget murders, do you?'

‘No, suppose not. Well, I've unearthed an interesting connection between that murder and the shooting down at King's Cross, I think.'

‘Yeah?' Dean drawled, his eyes narrowed, wondering why Henry was sharing this with him.

‘Thought I'd run it past you.'

‘I'm intrigued.'

‘You know there's a good chance the Cragg brothers are involved in that, yeah? I've been trawling through all the stuff we have on them both. Very little on Ray, he's a cool, very aware dude, but we've a bit more on Marty, much more volatile publicly, as you know. He got locked up for a bit of a fracas a few months ago outside the Palace.'

‘I didn't know.' Dean still had no idea where this was going.

‘Looking through the custody record I found an interesting connection, left there by mistake by Marty. I wondered if you had any observations on it.'

‘And the connection is?'

‘Jacqueline Burrows, aka Jack Burrows. You remember, the woman who owned the flats in which the girl was murdered?' Henry watched Dean's face carefully. Last time he had mentioned Burrows' name to him, Dean had gone a white shade of pale. ‘You took a statement from her, remember?'

‘I recall,' Dean croaked. He was eyeing Henry suspiciously and once again had lost all colour. Henry could not fathom why. Dean tried to shrug off his discomfort. ‘So what're you asking me?'

‘Well, it might be something and nothing. I'm just chasing shadows, maybe – it's just that when Marty was arrested for the public order offence – which was for beating up a female, by the way – he was given his rights when he sobered up . . .' He did not complete what he was going to say. He did not know why, but he was playing Dean like a fish, for some reason.

‘And . . .?' Dean almost demanded.

‘When asked who he wished to be told of his arrest, he nominated Burrows.' Dean looked perplexed.

‘An interesting connection, don't you think?'