Dead if You Don’t

86

Sunday 13 August

13.00–14.00

Roy Grace patted the bonnets of both the Golf and Audi. Each was warm, only recently driven. ‘Where are the bay numbers, Vince?’

‘On the floor.’

As Grace knelt the caretaker said, ‘No, it’s OK, I know these three bays.’

In the next one along was a black Range Rover with tinted rear windows.

‘Whose is that?’ Grace asked.

‘They rent — pay for three parking spaces.’

‘Do you know their names?’

‘No — is rented by a company.’

‘But you’ve seen them?’

He shrugged. ‘A few times. They come and go, you know.’

He went over to the Range Rover and patted the bonnet of that, too. It was also warm. ‘Are they English, Vince?’

‘No — Europeans, maybe.’

‘Albanians?’

‘Possibly. I hear them speak sometime, I don’t know the language.’

‘Do you have CCTV cover?’

‘Yes, in the car park and outside, but it stopped working yesterday. I’m waiting for the engineers to come.’

Coincidence, Grace wondered? He doubted it. ‘Right, Vince, I’m going to need your help. How many exits are there?’

‘They’re on the fourth floor. One exit is down here — the main entrance we came in and the fire exit for this car park.’ The caretaker was starting to become animated. ‘Then there is the front entrance and the rear to their building. So, this is a drugs raid?’

Ignoring the question, Grace said, ‘Vince, I’m going to be moving vehicles in here. I want you to do three things for me. The first is to disable the car park entrance door, so no one can drive out. The second is to open the front door to this block, and the third is to show my team the fire escape exits. Can you do that?’

‘Sure,’ he said, with a knowing twinkle in his eyes. ‘No problem. Like James Bond?’

Grace grinned and gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘When Daniel Craig quits, we’ll put your name forward, eh?’ Then he began giving instructions, calmly but urgently, into his radio, and ran back out, followed by the caretaker, to the front of the building, as the first of the two Local Support Team vans arrived. These contained more officers than he reckoned he would need for the raid, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

Vince opened the glass front door of the building and shoved a wedge beneath it. Inspector Ian Allchild jumped down from the passenger seat in full blue riot gear with body armour, holding his vizored helmet; the driver climbed out also. A further six officers, all similarly clad, descended from the rear, while Grace briefed the Inspector. Allchild, a tough former army officer, with a no-nonsense voice, responded enthusiastically. This was the kind of job he and his team were trained for and the kind of job which they all loved. The second van pulled up behind them and another team of eight climbed out. Allchild briefed the skipper to have his team spread out around the building, in case anyone tried to leg it.

Grace’s adrenaline was surging. He directed the two vans containing dog handlers to follow the caretaker, then said to Allchild, ‘Ready?’

‘Ready, sir.’

Grace radioed the Critical Incident Manager that they were going in, then instructed Kevin Hall to bring all vehicles in now and to block the entrance. No one was to enter or leave Boden Court until he gave the all-clear. He turned to the Inspector. ‘OK, go!’

Allchild gave the signal to his team. One officer, holding the red bosher, led the way in through the front door and up the fire escape stairs. He was closely followed by a short but very strong sergeant, Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, holding a hydraulic ram, then Allchild and his remaining five officers. Grace ran up the four flights, just a short distance behind.

At the top, the team moved silently along the corridor, halting outside a door. It was too far away for Roy Grace, panting with the exertion, to see the number. All of them pulled their vizors down.

The officer with the big red key rang the doorbell, and waited.

There was no response.

Then he knocked on the door. The classic policeman’s knock. Unsubtle and loud. Rat-a-tap-tap-tap-tap. Then, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM.

Again, nothing.

He turned to Lorna and nodded.

She stepped forward, wedged both arms of the ram against the sides of the door frame, and powered it up. As the grinding howl of the machine splintered the wood, forcing the frame outwards on both sides, her colleague swung the ram against the door, sending it crashing open at the first attempt.

With a unified bellow of, ‘POLICE! POLICE! POLICE!’, boots pounding, they burst like a tornado into the interior.

Grace stood back, outside, with the other four blocking his view.

‘Shit,’ one of them said, ‘Shit.’

‘What is it?’ Grace asked, easing his way through them to the doorway. And saw a body prostrate on the floor, and a lot of blood. Allchild, vizor pushed up over his face, came back out, carefully stepping past the body, followed by two of his team. He looked grim. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, we’ve trampled all over it. You have a bit of a crime scene in there. No young boy anywhere. Two adult males dead, looks like gunshot wounds, one badly injured. I’ve radioed for paramedics.’

‘Is the injured one conscious?’

‘Barely, sir. I’ve left Lorna with him, in case. He looks in a bad way.’

Grace hurried in. A motionless, tattooed and shaven-headed man in his thirties, dressed in jeans, trainers and a grey hoodie, lay on his back on the floor. He had a startled expression; a trail of blood and gunk leaked from a hole in the centre of his forehead, staining the beige carpet, and there was what looked like another bullet wound and a large amount of blood spreading across the front of his T-shirt. The fact that the blood hadn’t dried meant this was very recent. Was the shooter still inside the building, he wondered?

Mindful of not further contaminating the crime scene, Grace stepped carefully past the evidently dead man, noticing the faint, familiar coppery smell of blood, and along the corridor towards an open door at the far end.

He entered a kitchen that smelled of cigarette smoke, and stopped in his tracks.

One casually dressed man, in his late forties, he estimated, was seated in a wooden chair at a pine table, on which lay two globelike bottles of alcohol and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. His head lolled back over his shoulders, dark hair brushed back. There was what looked like a gun-shot entry wound through his right eye, from which a trail of dark fluid ran down his cheek and neck, and another through his blood-stained chest. His good remaining eye stared fixedly ahead.

The second man, younger and also casually dressed, with short, wiry hair, lay on his back, close to an upturned chair. He had a bullet graze along the top of his forehead and the front of his light windcheater was blood-drenched and heaving. He was looking up at Grace with large, sullen eyes and wheezing, painfully, clearly breathing with difficulty.

Indicating to Lorna that she could go, Grace knelt beside him. ‘There’s an ambulance coming,’ he said.

The man’s chest jerked. His breathing was becoming fainter by the second.

‘What happened?’ Grace asked him. ‘Do you know where Mungo is? Mungo Brown?’

The man tried to speak, then gasped in pain. He started juddering.

‘Mungo Brown? The boy you took?’ Grace pressed. ‘Do you know where he is?’

Fixing him eerily with his eyes, the man said something in a guttural voice, in a language Roy Grace did not understand. It sounded like, ‘Ick largo skow gee veten.’

Then a rattle came from his throat. Grace recognized it. He had only seconds left. Hurriedly, he pulled out his private iPhone, opened the voice recorder app and activated it, then held it close to the man’s mouth. ‘Can you repeat that?’ he asked, urgently.

The man stared ahead. Finally, struggling, he uttered the words again.

They were followed by another rattle. A hollow, rasping sound.

‘Stay with us!’ Grace said. ‘The ambulance is coming.’

The man’s chest became still. He stopped blinking, eyes open, fixed on Grace. But now sightless.

Gone.

The Detective Superintendent stood up, took photographs of each of the three dead men’s faces to hopefully get a quick identity on them, then called Nikki Denero on his job phone.

She answered almost immediately.

‘It’s Roy Grace, Nikki. Can you help me translate something that may be critical to our enquiry — it might be Albanian? You speak the language, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m reasonably fluent.’

‘Good. If I play it over the phone can you translate?’

‘I’ll give it a go.’

Roy Grace held his iPhone over the speaker of his job phone, turned the volume up to max and pressed the play button. The dead man’s last words came out.

‘Ick largo skow gee veten.’

When the playback was finished, Grace stopped the machine. ‘Did you get that, Nikki?’

The PC sounded hesitant. ‘Yes, I did, sir.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t think you’re going to like it.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Well, sir, you’re right, it is Albanian. He’s saying, Go fuck yourself.’