Remains to be Seen (7 page)

It was a long, narrow room where the three of them sat so nervously. Like people waiting to be interviewed for a job, Jack thought. But they did not talk nervously to each other, as candidates for a job might have done whilst they waited their turn. They sat on upright chairs a few yards from each other, with their backs against the wall.

The three of them had long since learned not to leave their backs unguarded, Jack decided. Since each of them had come into the room, he had made no eye contact with the others. The strange nervous trio sat quite still, gazing at the polished oak blocks of the parquet floor. And waited.

They heard the clink of crockery being removed from the big panelled room beside them, and knew that the time was coming when they would be called upon to speak, to make the right moves, which would enable them to move up to the next rank in this lucrative hierarchy of evil. With the knowledge that the moment was at hand, they did begin to move, massaging nervous hands together, scuffing the soles of trainers against the polished floor. But still they looked at that floor and never at each other.

Then the broad mahogany door of the dining room opened, and a figure stood for a moment silhouetted against the more brilliant light of that room behind him. All three pairs of eyes turned to the features they could not distinguish, each man wondered whether he was the one to be summoned into that dangerous group beyond the figure in the doorway.

It was at that moment that hell broke loose.

Even Jack Clark, the only one who should have been prepared for it, was shocked by the fury and the suddenness of the police arrival. The door at the other end of the big dining room, fully thirty yards from Jack, burst open as if a bomb had been detonated, and everywhere there was noise, crashing into their ears as if noise itself were a weapon. A harsh voice, impossibly loud, yelled from the other end of the room that armed police were surrounding the place, that every exit was covered, that no one should move.

No more than a second later, helmeted police with sub-machine guns poured through the door at the end of the anteroom where Jack and his companions stood petrified, screaming at them not to move, informing them in rapid, shouted words that they too were surrounded and that escape was impossible. A single shot went off in the dining room; it was followed by an almost simultaneous burst of police fire and a yell of anguish.

As always with a successful police raid, everything seemed to happen impossibly fast and at fortissimo volume. Jack heard the words of arrest being yelled in the dining room, the absurd instruction that the unseen men in there need not say anything, but it might harm their defence if they withheld information which they might later wish to use in court. The trappings of civilization, applied in a situation where no one could afford to be civilized.

And then Jack Clark found himself with his face against the wall, with a fiercely committed black officer holding his arm hard against the small of his back, so that he was squealing with agony and lifted almost off his feet as the words of arrest were shouted into his ear.

Behind him, DCI Peach glanced round the anteroom and permitted himself a brief moment of satisfaction. They'd got the undercover man safely in their clutches, and they hadn't blown his cover. Make sure it's Clyde Northcott who arrests our man, he'd said, then there'll be no suspicion among the enemy that he's one of ours.

Let the hard bastard do the job.

Twenty minutes later, it seemed to be all over.

On the broad gravelled area in front of the main house, an army of police vehicles was now visible in the white blaze of the arc lights they had turned upon the scene. There were five Armed Response Vehicles, four powerful saloons and one estate car. On an order from their chief, the ARU personnel were beginning to stow away their Heckler and Koch 9mm sub-machine guns and their Glock 9mm pistols in the double-locking safes, which were welded into the bodywork between the back seat and the boot. Procedure: that police watchword for all occasions.

The ARU men retained the backup sidearms which had been carried in the forward sections of the vehicles. But with the order to lock away the automatic weapons, they were beginning to relax. That order meant in effect that the mission was successfully concluded, that the divisional commander who was responsible for the overall strategy of this raid was happy that every dangerous person in this huge house had been arrested. In half an hour they would be back at base, removing their bullet-proof body armour, in that final divesting which signified that an operation was over.

There were five other police vehicles, their sirens silent but their blue lamps flashing steadily, which were now about to carry a variety of occupants away from Marton Towers. Some of them were the muscle with which the biggest criminals always seemed to surround themselves, as if a battery of thugs was a badge of success. But a great house of this size needed also a battalion of servants, many of whom were no doubt totally unconnected with the villainies which had financed the maintenance and prosperity of the Marton estate over the last few years. But everyone with even a random, peripheral connection with the owners would be questioned, every scrap of evidence assembled, to counteract the slick and articulate lawyers who would eventually appear for the defence in a high-profile court case.

The ambulance carrying the single casualty of the evening had already departed. The Turkish drug baron who had risen from the dining table and drawn a pistol, in defiance of the orders shouted at him, had been shot in the chest. Probably not fatal, the paramedics had volunteered, as they had slid the red-blanketed figure into the back of their vehicle and prepared to set the siren blaring for a swift passage to the hospital.

The chief of the Armed Response Unit was glad of that, for the sake of the man who had fired the burst from the Heckler and Koch. No one liked killing, even though it might be his job, even though the world might have been better off with this particular man removed from its surface.

DCI Peach was relieved that his part in this major operation had been successfully concluded. He was happy to see his own small team reassembling without injury at the conclusion of the raid. There was a strict discipline in the Armed Response Units, but with adrenaline and testosterone pulsing through the veins of young men, accidents could always happen.

His team were full of the happy excitement that is near to hysteria which comes with the successful conclusion of a tricky and dangerous enterprise. Once they had secured the gatehouse and access to the big house, their main duty had been to arrest the three men who had been waiting in the anteroom to be appointed as drug dealers, including their own undercover man, the Drugs Squad sergeant.

Jack Clark now sat in the back of the police van with his two companions, more dishevelled and unkempt than ever, and taking care to look thoroughly cowed and depressed by his arrest. It was not entirely a pose. With the knowledge that his months of deception were almost over, that his isolation in extreme danger was coming to an end, all energy had left him and exhaustion was taking over.

He sat on the bench at the side of the van, his shoulders hunched forward, his eyes on the floor of the vehicle. He roused himself only to continue the fiction of his arrest, as he felt DCI Peach studying him through the open doors at the back of the vehicle. ‘That black bastard almost broke my arm!' he complained morosely.

Peach gave him a wicked grin, which he allowed to ripple round the other prisoners in the van. ‘He's good, isn't he? Powerful lad, DC Northcott. And if I were you, son, I wouldn't add racial abuse to my other sins.' He slammed the doors cheerfully on the three men inside, banged on the metal to signal to the driver that he could drive his cargo to the nick. They would be separated for questioning, of course. That was when Jack Clark's long ordeal would finally come to an end.

Peach and his team were among the last to leave the scene, securing the doors of the mansion before they drove away. Property had to be secured, even when it belonged to the worst of villains. They drove between the high wrought-iron gates with the bronze crests upon them and past the empty gatehouse. It seemed a long time since they had crept along its stone walls with such elaborate care to surprise Arnie Wright. A lot of drama had been crammed into the last ninety minutes.

It was no more than ten minutes after the last police vehicle had left that the first tiny orange glow appeared at the square window of the cottage. It was one of a terrace which had been formed from the former stables of Marton Towers. The light flickered, grew swiftly brighter, leapt with a crash through the glass and up the outside of the building.

And then there was smoke, whirling upwards into the night sky in a swift and hideous funnel, obscuring the thin sliver of moon which had now appeared low in the midnight sky. For a little while, there was no noise which could be heard from the gatehouse or the road. But the flames spread greedily sideways and upwards, until the first-storey windows in the long low block were as bright as those on the ground floor. It was not long before joists caught, and the ceilings began to fall with crashes like shell-fire on to the old flagged floors where horses had once been groomed.

The conflagration was well advanced, rearing wildly and terribly against the blackness around it, before a motorist, driving along the lonely road which ran beside the long stone wall marking the boundary of the estate, caught the glare in the night sky. The fire station was seven miles away, but at that time of night, its machines made swift progress to the blaze.

For the second time on the same night, the normally invulnerable Marton Towers was invaded by a fleet of professional vehicles. This time they came not just with lights flashing but with bells ringing and sirens sounding to clear their passage, flinging the gravel behind them, as they swung across the front of the great mansion and away to the conflagration on its right.

The main house was safe. There was not much the firemen could do for the offices and mews cottages. They played their hoses on what was left of the roof and sprayed foam on whatever they could see of the interior. There wasn't much left in there that could be salvaged, by the looks of things. But even their powerful torches didn't reveal very much, amidst the smoke and steam which dominated the scene.

At least there was no need for heroics. There was no one screaming to be rescued, as the flames crept along the long, low building with such terrible speed. That was always the nightmare. It was a shame to see a building as venerable as this literally going up in smoke within an hour, but at least there seemed here to be no loss of life.

A fuller investigation would have to wait until the morning.

O
n Thursday morning, Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was at his most benign.

‘Good work last night, Peach. A straightforward assignment, once we'd planned it, but these things can always go wrong. Don't think I'm not aware of that. You and your men did well.'

‘Thank you, sir. I shall convey your sentiments to them, in due course. They will no doubt show their usual appreciation.'

‘We need all the good publicity we can get at present. You can leave all that to me, though, Percy. I've already called a media conference for two o'clock this afternoon. Nothing wrong with trumpeting our successes, you know.'

‘Yes, sir. And there's certainly no one who surpasses you, when it comes to blowing the trumpet. I emphasize that to the lads and lasses downstairs, whenever I sense a rumble of discontent.'

Tucker noticed no irony. ‘I thought I should take the opportunity to stress to the media just how successful we were last night.'

‘Yes, sir. Blow your own trumpet, as you say.' Percy noticed that Tucker had made this into his DCI's enterprise before the event, in case it went wrong. With success, it had become ‘ours'. No doubt by two o'clock this afternoon Tucker would be speaking of ‘my' raid at Marton Towers.

‘I understand there was one casualty.'

‘Yes, sir. One of the big drugs men was shot. Turkish, I believe. He's had surgery in Brunton Royal Infirmary, I'm told: another unwelcome burden on the National Health Service. I think he's expected to survive; from what I hear, he'd be no loss to our society.'

Tucker frowned at such insensitivity. ‘Casualties are never a good thing, even among villains, Peach. Casualties do our image no good at all.'

‘Yes, sir. I think this chap was trying to blow one of the Armed Response Unit into kingdom come at the time.'

‘That's as may be, Peach. I understand the difficulties. I just wish this hadn't happened, that's all. No doubt one of the newspaper men will wish to raise it this afternoon.' Chief Superintendent Tucker frowned at the thought of this blot upon a perfect day.

‘Give you a chance to make your usual vigorous defence of the boys who were running the risks, won't it, sir?'

‘One has to be diplomatic, Peach, on these occasions, whatever one's private feelings on such matters.'

You'll end up bloody apologizing before you've finished, you time-serving old windbag, thought Percy. But this fool was in charge of CID, and Percy Peach must do what he could for his team. ‘DC Northcott did very well last night, sir. As did DCs Murphy and Pickering.'

Tucker looked puzzled, as if he could not put faces to the names of these men whose careers he should have been monitoring. Then recognition of one name dawned. His distaste sounded in every syllable as he said, ‘Northcott? Isn't he the officer who had a drug problem himself at one time? The black officer you insisted on bringing into our team?'

‘Indeed, sir. He was excellent during the raid last night. I gave him the responsibility of arresting the undercover man, and he carried it off most convincingly.'

‘I'm glad to hear it. I should keep a close eye on Northcott, however, if I were you.'