The Price Of Darkness (24 page)

This theory, to Winter, had its merits. The dodgier of the ragheads were obviously out of control and a stunt like this would certainly keep bums on seats for a day or two, but everything he knew about the local Muslim communities told him that the BBC’s pundit was wrong. By and large, these were hard-working, conscientious families who kept their heads down and their noses clean. They ran restaurants, flogged saris and made sure their kids did their homework every night. A little bit of that, thought Winter, wouldn’t go amiss on the city’s white estates.

He changed channels to catch
Newsnight
, lingering to watch the amateur footage for the umpteenth time before diving into the kitchen for more ice cubes. If the al-Qaeda lot turned out to be genuinely in the frame, then why on earth kill the bloke responsible for defence
procurement
? Terrorists were supposed to be savvy. They’d surely go for someone with real blood on their hands - the top guy at the ministry or a senior general or the foreign secretary, or even Blair himself. But then, as the paramedics raced the bleeding body towards the waiting ambulance, he thought about the level of protection these people must have, and how much easier it would be to choose a nice soft target, someone further down the ministerial pecking order. Earlier on he’d watched the unconscious figure on the trolley swapping small talk at some kind of birthday party. He’d seemed a nice enough guy. He had a smile for the ladies and the patience to listen to the usual drivel. Who’d ever expect to find someone like that on the end of an al-Qaeda bullet?

He shook his head, backing into the kitchen with his empty glass, trying to imagine the scene at Kingston Crescent. According to Channel Four, all police leave in the county had been cancelled and location reports had included shots of white Transit vans arriving on the motorway packed with reinforcements. Occasions like this, all too bloody rare, were truly special and Winter felt a physical ache at the knowledge that he could no longer be part of it all. With half the country breathing down your neck, the pressure would be awesome but there was nothing in the world to compare with the hot adrenalin rush of pushing the investigative machine to its limits. Informants to run down, arms to bend, calls to make, leads to pursue, doors to kick in, and never - for a second - any bollocks about overtime limits or the need for yet another fucking risk assessment. CID, he thought glumly, could so often be a pain in the arse but on a night like this the rule book would go out of the window.

He splashed Glenfiddich over the ice in his glass, resisting the temptation to pick up the phone and bell Jimmy Suttle. The boy would be working his arse off just now, with absolutely no time for some sad old buffer with his blanket and his Thermos and his seat in the stands. No, the war stories would come later, a pint or three in the Buckingham and maybe a chinese in the place across the road afterwards.

The thought put a smile on Winter’s face and he returned to the lounge to find Willard fending off a pack of reporters outside Force HQ in Winchester. Early enquiries, he said, had already thrown up a number of leads. A substantial squad of men and women would be chasing down every particle of information. Like everyone else in the world, he naturally hoped for an early breakthrough but not for a moment did he underestimate the size of the challenge they all faced. In reply to a shouted question about the gloves coming off, he paused.

‘We work within the constraints of the law,’ he said. ‘You’d expect nothing else.’

Watching, Winter recognised the tone of voice, the subtlest hint of a smile. He was playing with these people. Beneath the gruff officialese he was letting them know that whatever it took, in whatever situation, he’d do it. Too right, thought Winter, wondering again about Gale Parsons.

 

By one in the morning Faraday knew it was time to leave. The last five hours had left him drained. One meeting seemed to blur into the next, and with the ever-changing sequence of faces around Barrie’s conference table came a never-ending series of interruptions - priority callers on the phone, apologetic knocks on the door, urgent messages delivered by hand.

Barrie himself, to the surprise of many, had remained totally unflustered in the eye of this storm, addressing one issue after another, calling for clarification over this point or that, seeking all the time to identify worthwhile investigative pathways forward as the sheer volume of incoming information threatened to overwhelm them.

The key task in these early hours, he kept reminding everybody, was concentration. They had to keep an open mind. They had to sift. They had to assess. And soon, once the focus became a little sharper, they had to eliminate. His one concession to Operation
Polygon
’s quickening drumbeat was an hourly break for a roll-up and a trip to the open window beside his desk, leaving others to sort out yet another round of coffees.

Past midnight, he called a halt. Only Faraday remained in his office. As the evening lengthened he’d compiled a list of developments. House-to-house checks by a small army of uniforms and D/Cs along the motorbike’s presumed escape route had so far failed to raise anything of real significance. South of Goldsmith Avenue lay a warren of terraced streets, dozens of intersections, an endless choice of turns for a man in a hurry. Aggregate all those streets and you were looking at literally thousands of front doors.

Many of these people had been out at work or at the back of the house, and all of them were only too used to the howl of a passing motorbike. One pensioner at the northern end of Haslemere Road thought she might have spotted something through her net curtains. Another woman, much younger, reported seeing a blue motorbike with a pillion passenger making a left turn into Grayshott Road. She’d been on foot, wheeling her nipper back from the nursery, and it was only all the stuff on telly that had prompted her to make a call.

The bike, she said, had been going slowly. She’d had to stop on the kerb to let it make the turn. There’d been nothing at all to raise her suspicions. Asked for a description, she’d said the person on the pillion was much smaller than the driver. Also, she thought she remembered something distinctive on the forks that held the front wheel, a sticker or something, black and yellow. And, yes, there’d been a holdall strapped on the back pannier rack.

The mention of Grayshott Road had at least been a lead. From here, the bike could have motored the half-mile or so to the Eastney Road. Directly north lay one of the major routes out of the city. At five fifteen, the Eastern Road was choked with rush-hour traffic and Barrie had ordered an appeal through the media for homebound drivers who might have spotted a blue Kawasaki. That appeal had produced nothing of any real value and neither - so far - had a trawl through the afternoon’s CCTV tapes.

Within fifteen minutes of the shooting, traffic cars had been stationed alongside all three roads off the island, with others at the ferry terminals. That left a tiny chink in Pompey’s wall but these roads were covered by cameras, and although there’d been dozens of motorbikes amongst the traffic, none of the CCTV sightings had precisely matched the target.

Other cameras monitored key roads and junctions across the city and Barrie had a team of four D/Cs combing through hours of pictures, while others sat beside the control room staff, monitoring live feeds as the evening went on.

Then, at dusk, had come a call from a woman who worked at The Orchards, a new psychiatric unit beside St James’ Hospital. She, like everyone else, had been watching the coverage on television. Late in the afternoon, she said, she’d been looking out of the window and had seen a motorbike coming down the road that led to the unit. Beyond the turn into the car park lay the back gate to the hospital itself. The main gates were always padlocked but the side gate was open for staff on foot. Unusually, the bike had squeezed through the gate and then disappeared. At the time, she’d thought nothing of it. Only now, remembering the two leather-clad figures on the bike, did she start to wonder.

St James’ Hospital was barely a mile from the scene of the hit. At Barrie’s prompting, Faraday had sent a couple of D/Cs to interview the woman and dispatched a dozen uniforms to the hospital with instructions to comb the grounds. They’d been hard at it for three hours now but by midnight there was still no trace of the blue Kawasaki. The conclusion, comfortable or otherwise, was only too clear.

The bike had been dumped somewhere else within the city, enabling the riders to make their escape at a time of their choosing. Shedding their leathers, they could have left by car, by public transport, even by ferry or hovercraft. They could be in London by now, or on the Isle of Wight, or even abroad. In the seven hours since the shooting, hundreds of flights had departed from Heathrow, Gatwick, Southampton and Bournemouth. The guys on the Kawasaki could be literally anywhere.

That left the bike itself. Alongside the house-to-house calls and revisits, Barrie had ordered a detailed street-by-street check on every garage, lock-up and patch of waste ground within a steadily expanding radius south of Goldsmith Avenue. The task was enormous but for once he could call on almost limitless manpower, and on the basis of progress reports from the Major Incident Room, he expected the south-east quadrant of the city to have been thoroughly checked within twenty-four hours. If nothing turned up, then he’d extend the search north and west, covering the whole of the island on which the city was built, but in truth he thought that unlikely. Already he sensed that these people had done their homework. There were simply too many CCTV cameras to risk any kind of breakout.

A professional hit. Almost certainly. Every fresh scrap of evidence - or lack of it - suggested a carefully planned operation. The choice of time and place for the killing, the city in its usual state of rush-hour gridlock. The decision to use a motorbike, with near-perfect concealment inside a helmet and full leathers. Even the choice of weapon. According to the Scenes of Crime Co-ordinator, no spent cases had been recovered from the road. That meant the use of a revolver, rather than an automatic handgun, leaving only the bullets themselves, deformed lead slugs, to offer any kind of forensic lead. A couple had been dug out of the Vauxhall’s upholstery. Of the other two, one had been removed from the minister’s chest cavity after penetrating his shoulder, while the other was still lodged at the back of his skull, awaiting a second operation at the hands of the neurosurgeons in Southampton.

‘How is he?’ Barrie had almost forgotten about the victim.

‘Still critical, sir.’

‘And if he survives?’

‘No one’s saying. But an injury like that, full face, you’d expect impairment of function at the very least.’

Impairment of function was a horrible phrase and Faraday had only used it because someone else had, and because he was tired. The truth of the matter, he thought grimly, was far more graphic. This man had taken a bullet in the brain. If he was unlucky enough to survive, there’d be precious little function left.

‘Poor bastard,’ he said softly.

Barrie didn’t appear to have heard him. He wanted Faraday’s thoughts on the intelligence picture. Brian Imber and Tracy Barber had spent the evening almost permanently on the phone, chasing their various contacts. Neither Special Branch nor the Serious and Organised Crime Agency could come up with any obvious candidates who might have wanted to kill the Under Secretary of State for Defence Procurement but the intelligence services were taking a very different view.

MI5 were currently conducting dozens of surveillance operations on various groups of fundamentalist militants. A top secret report endorsed at the highest level in Thames House was ready for dispatch to Downing Street. The report, it seemed, carried a disturbing analysis of changing patterns in the terrorist threat and warned that UK-based fundamentalists appeared to be in the process of developing sophisticated cell structures very similar to the Provos’ at the height of the Troubles. Sooner or later one of these cells would mount an operation, and on the phone to Brian Imber a senior analyst had concluded that this was probably it.

The minister’s visit had been flagged in various specialist defence magazines. The rush-hour certainty of near-gridlock in the city’s traffic offered a perfect opportunity for a hit. The minister himself was unlikely to travel with armed protection. Four bullets at point-blank range would make headlines around the world.

Faraday, pressed for an opinion, thought the MI5 view had some merit. The key weapon in the terrorist war was surprise. It was in the interests of these people to keep changing their MO. The lesson of 7/7, after all, was pretty plain. The intelligence services had known nothing about the London bombers, yet four of them had managed to kill fifty-three people.

‘So you think Five might be right?’

‘I think their analysis holds water. Until now, as far as I know, they’ve gone for suicide bombings. This is something different but that in itself may be significant. The best terrorist hits come out of nowhere.’

‘Of course they do, Joe. But they’re not giving us names, are they?’

‘No, sir, not yet, but this is huge. Five will have the politicians all over them. The pressure will be enormous. And we should be aware of that too.’

‘Of course.’ Barrie frowned. He was as exhausted as Faraday. ‘So we keep an open mind? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I’m afraid so, sir. You wouldn’t have it any other way.’

 

And he wouldn’t. Faraday was sure about it. He made a start on tidying his desk, then gave up. One o’clock in the morning was far too late to worry about rogue paperwork. He reached for his briefcase, turned out the light, and stepped into the corridor. There was the trill of a telephone and a murmur of conversation from a nearby office. At the other end of the corridor, through the open door into the incident room, he could see the Outside Enquiries D/S locked in conversation with one of the civilian indexers. Passing the Intelligence Cell, he paused. The lights were still on. He gave the door a gentle push, then peered round it. Jimmy Suttle was bent over a file on his desk, pen in hand. A pad at his elbow was covered in figures.