Riddled on the Sands (The Lakeland Murders) (11 page)

‘Which lot?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Anything you want me to do?’

‘Nothing you can do, Andy. If you phone one of their contact numbers and ask questions you’ll just get stonewalled, though you’ll probably be buzzed by all the drones on your way home tonight.’

Hall laughed. ‘Name for this bloke?’

‘James Rae, Captain. Or at least he was. Meeting him on the foreshore in ten minutes.’

‘Got it. Real name?’

‘Yes, as far as I know. I’ll call you when I’ve spoken to him, OK?’

‘Fine, and thanks for the heads up. You’re a careful bloke, Ian, make sure you stay that way.’

‘You’re the second person to say that to me today. But yes, in my experience it pays to be careful.’

‘You want me to send a babysitter, then? Maybe get one of the coppers on door-to-door to go with you?’

Mann laughed. ‘Sorry, mate, but Rae wouldn’t exactly shit himself if you sent the entire bloody Constabulary.’

‘What about Val Gorham?’

‘All right, but she’d scare anyone. I need to make another quick call, see what I can find out about what Captain Rae is up to these days.’

‘OK, but call me as soon as you’re done.’

Mann half thought about coming at Rae from a different direction, but he didn’t know the ground well enough, and there wasn’t time to do a recce. And anyway, what harm could the bloke intend him? Mann was pretty sure that they were still on the same side. So as he walked down the barely surfaced lane that the tractors used Mann felt surprisingly relaxed. But he was still as alert as he’d ever been.

Rae was waiting, and he seemed to be alone. But Mann knew that looks could be deceiving. So he banished those thoughts, and held out his hand. They sat on a rock, looking out at the Bay.

‘Nice’ said Rae.

‘Aye. God’s country, this is. Those Tykes don’t know shit. Where are you from again, Captain?’

‘Sussex.’

‘Oh aye. But you didn’t come for a holiday like, did you? I assume this is business.’

‘Very much so. I assume you’ve made a call or two.’

‘Aye, you’re still working with the old mob, looking after drug interdiction ops. Going well too, I hear.’

‘Satisfying work, Ian, you’d enjoy it. You always were a bit of a moralist as I remember. And yes, we’ve had a couple of decent results. But where are my manners? We should talk about you.’

‘This isn’t a date, Captain.’

‘Still as dry as ever, I see. I just wondered how you enjoy life with the Police, that’s all.’

‘You’re not on a fucking recruitment drive, are you? I’m a bit long in the tooth now, mate.’

‘Nonsense, you’re just a year or two older than me. We’d have you back in a flash. But no, we rely on old mates to contact us if they’d like another go. A couple of your contemporaries have come back recently, in fact. There are opportunities, you see.’

‘I’d heard. So what do you want, Captain Rae?’

‘It’s Jimmy, you know that. It’s about the job you’re on, this fisherman and all these inconvenient bullet holes.’

‘You are well informed, Jimmy. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised about that, though. What about him? Don’t tell me you have an interest in Jack Bell?’

‘Never heard of him before in my life. He’s of no interest to me whatsoever.’

‘Really? So what’s all this about then? If we’re off the record you can level with me.’

‘You, my friend, are the only person I could even think about leveling with. Tell me about your boss.’

‘Andy Hall? Christ, you can’t be interested in him. Clever bloke. Very, very clever. But I’ve seen him in a fight, if you can call it that.’

‘I’m not interested in his skills, Ian. I want to know if he’s trustworthy. Do you trust him?’

‘Aye. More than I’d trust you, anyway.’

‘With your life?’

‘What the fuck is this, Jimmy? We’re not the plucky French Resistance all of a sudden, are we?’

‘No, we’re not. And pithily put. All right. What I’m going to tell you is for your ears and that of your immediate boss only. You’ll soon understand why.’

‘Fine, whatever. Just get on with it. I’m getting piles here, sitting on this bloody boulder.’

‘As your contacts so accurately informed you we’ve been kept busy, on the home front as it were, by a number of significant drugs cartels, responsible for the importation of upwards of 80% of Britain’s Class A drugs. It seems to be a bit of a growth industry, even in these straightened times. And our own MO is much the same as in your day. Carry out informal hull inspections on the target vessels when they’re outside British waters, shall we say, stick homing devices on them, track them until they get here and then pay them a proper visit, when they’re safely in our territorial waters, of course.’

‘Aye. I did a few myself, remember?’

‘I do indeed. Wasn’t it you who kicked a cabin door down and came face to face with a crewman reading a book about British special forces?’

Mann laughed. ‘No, that was Taffy Edwards. He said the bloke kept looking at him, then back at the book. Couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.’

‘Happy days. Well, the thing is, we’ve been encountering a bit of an operational problem lately. Two or three of our target vessels have been motoring along merrily, just about to cross the line as it were, and they’ve veered off at the last minute, out of our jurisdiction. Does that suggest anything to you?’

Mann thought for a second.

‘There’s a leak. But you can’t think it’s one of our lads, I mean one of yours?’

‘Of course I don’t, Ian. Never happened before, and it won’t happen now. No, it’s someone else, I’m afraid.’

‘Who?’

‘We have no idea, not really. Because there are, to use your term, a lot of suspects. You’d be surprised how many civilian agencies, Police, Coastguard, HMRC, a couple of others, have to be kept in the loop when we’re planning an op these days. I’m just a bloody filing clerk, most of the time.’

‘Look, Jimmy, I’m sorry to hear about this, but I don’t see how it connects to what’s happened here. It doesn’t sound as if you can help us at all.’

‘But when someone starts mowing people down with Russian-made assault weapons your thoughts do turn to a drug connection?’

‘It’s a line of enquiry certainly, but what makes you so sure where the weapon or weapons came from?’

‘An educated guess, that’s all. The short answer is that I don’t know how it connects. I don’t know anything about your man Bell, and that’s the truth. But what I do know is that we think the source of the leak is from this sector, that’s anywhere from Liverpool to the Solway.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘We don’t for certain, but the vessels that have changed course at the last minute have all been headed to ports over in your very lovely neck of the woods. So it seems like a sensible assumption. There are some Whitehall warriors who have the whole picture of course, and they could be leaking selectively to cover their tracks. That would be clever, but it seems more likely that the information is coming from someone on the ground.’

‘I see. So what do you want me to do about it?’

‘Be aware, and let me know if you come across anything in the course of your investigation that might help us identify the source. Would you do that?’

‘The old phone number?’

‘That’s the one. Just say it’s for Jimmy.’

Mann nodded. ‘OK, but I’d like something in return.’

‘A commemorative tea-towel perhaps?’

‘Nah, I’ve got a dishwasher. I was thinking of information.’

‘You want to know if we’ve got any solid reason to connect what happened out there to drugs and organised crime?’ Mann nodded. ‘The short answer is no. The longer answer is that drugs do come in to the UK by boat, and it happens in this sector, that’s a given. We’ve intercepted vessels just a few miles from here in the past. Plus it would appear that a member of the local peasantry has been mown down by people with access to considerable firepower. Your cartridge case was steel, I understand, not brass?’ Mann nodded again. ‘We have been engaged by people using similar weapons and ammunition in the recent past.’

‘Brief engagements, I imagine?’

Rae didn’t smile. ‘Our reputation does seem to precede us rather, for better or worse, so yes. Your average drugs runner, especially if he’s from a military background, tends to realise quite quickly who we are, and that he’s as well not to irritate us. So they tend to cease fire, and try to dump as much of the gear, as I think you call it, before we manage to board them.’

They sat and looked out at the Bay in silence, both reliving similar memories.

‘So can I leave this with you, Ian? Brief your boss if you must, but that’s it.’

Rae stood up, and held out his hand. Mann stood and they shook.

‘One other question’ said Mann. ‘Are you, or any of the lads, hanging around up here for a bit? From now on, like?’

Rae smiled. ‘I wasn’t surprised when you became a copper, Ian. You always did have a knack of finding the right question.’

Rae turned and walked away. Mann knew that there was no point in repeating the question.

When Rae turned back up the lane, and disappeared from view, Mann called Hall.

‘Are you alone?’ he asked. It was just like old times, and he was far from sure that he liked it.

Gary O’Brian wanted to make a good impression. There weren’t many pictures of the kids in the house, so he propped a couple of school photos on the mantlepiece. Sheila had tidied up, and offered the young reporter from the local paper a cup of tea, but she’d refused. So Sheila sat down next to Gary, and smiled. He was telling a story that she’d heard a million times before about when he’d met one of Take That in a bar in Kendal, and told him how shit their music was. Sheila hadn’t found it funny the first time, but she’d always liked Take That anyway. Gary didn’t seem to have noticed, and the reporter didn’t seem very interested either. At least, she wasn’t writing anything down.

‘So tell me about the fire’ she said eventually. ‘It must have been terrible for you all.’

‘Too right’ said Gary. ‘By the time we came downstairs it was well ablaze. Nothing I could do, like.’ Gary tried to look as if, had he been alerted just thirty seconds sooner, he would have been able to suppress the inferno. ‘But we were asleep. It was the middle of the night, see.’

‘Yes, and what was in the garage? Your car?’

Gary bridled. ‘We don’t have a car. Don’t need one, and we’re eco, we are.’

‘I see, so your bicycles were destroyed, along with your children’s?’

‘No. Well, I say no, but yes, our bikes went up as well. But that’s not what we’re worried about. It was seeing our little one’s faces when we had to tell them that their lovely new bikes had gone. Heartbreaking it was, wasn’t it, Shiel?’

She nodded briefly. ‘Tell me about the bikes’ said the reporter.

‘How d’you mean? I don’t have the receipt, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, I meant describe them for me, if you could.’

‘Oh, right. Well Jessie’s was pink, and it had these little streamers on it. Lovely, it was.’

‘And how old is Jessie?’

There was a pause. ‘Three’ said Sheila. ‘Four in September.’

‘That’s young to be riding a bike, isn’t it?’

‘It had those little wheels on it, what you call them?’

‘Stabilisers?’

‘Yeah, them. And Joe had like a little lad’s mountain bike. All rufty-tufty it was, like him.’

‘And how old is Joe?’

‘Seven’ said Gary firmly.

‘Six’ corrected Sheila. ‘Nearly seven. His birthday is next month.’

‘Aye’ said Gary. ‘But I thought it might be a while until this came out, like.’

‘It will be in next week, so I’ll say six. And you’re looking for someone to donate replacement bikes, is that it?’

‘That would be lovely’ said Sheila.

‘Or cash might be better. That way they could choose the ones they wanted. You know kids, they have to have just what they want, don’t they?’

The reporter smiled. ‘And what else did you lose? Some of their toys, wasn’t it?’

‘Aye, them too’ said Gary. ‘But we can’t give you a list like’ he added, anticipating a question, ‘if that’s what you want.’

‘No, nothing like that. But can you remember a few?’

Gary looked at Sheila, and she looked at the reporter. ‘Paddling pool, some model cars, diggers...’

‘Wasn’t one of them remote control? That was Joe’s favourite.’

‘Aye, remote control’ agreed Sheila.

‘And again you’re looking for cash donations to replace them?’

‘That’s it, yeah, cash would be perfect.’

‘Great, then I think that’s all I need. But can we take a picture with you and maybe little Jessie outside, by where the garage used to be.’

‘Jessie’s at nursery’ said Gary, ‘so it’s just us. Is that OK for you, love?’