Find Them Dead

30 Thursday 9 May

‘Very clear, Your Honour!’ Rio Zambrano said loudly, with a grin.

Sixty miles away from Lewes Crown Court, on the tenth floor of a high-rise office building in Hoxton in East London, Zambrano, a thirty-eight-year-old computer programmer, originally from Quito in Ecuador, sat in front of his large computer screen. He was listening intently to the court proceedings being relayed to him through his headphones by Jeff Pringle’s concealed video camera. He had pulled off stills of each of the faces of the twelve jurors, which he saved into individual files.

Beside him sat Paul Constantinidi, a private investigator and disgruntled former Met Police detective who had been forced into early retirement following an accusation — not for the first time — of excessive violence during an arrest. He had been for some months in the lucrative pay of Mickey Starr and, as it appeared now, ultimately the top boss, Terence Gready. Paul Constantinidi had retained many friends within the Met, one of whom was proving particularly helpful in checking the backgrounds of each of the jurors as he relayed them to him, whilst at the same time — along with two techies who ran the county lines network for Starr — doing a google search on each of them.

Juries, if they could not agree a unanimous verdict, could reach a majority verdict as directed by the judge either on an 11–1 or 10–2 basis. If a jury could not agree then they would be discharged by the judge and, in normal circumstances, there would be a retrial. But the clear plan, outlined by Gready’s solicitor, Nick Fox, was to do better than that. Much better.

So far three names had produced hits. The first was potentially interesting: Mike Roberts, a retired Hampshire Police Detective Superintendent and former Senior Investigating Officer on the Major Crime Team. A stocky, silver-haired man of sixty-two, who left the police a decade ago as part of the government’s A19 programme. Highly unpopular, it had forced officers to retire at thirty years’ service, regardless of their rank or experience, to be replaced with new recruits, so the government could claim the salary saving and at the same time claim they had kept police numbers up. He could be a potential, Paul Constantinidi thought. An aggrieved former cop, like himself?

The second was an obese guy, Hugo Pink. His search showed that he was in deep financial trouble. Definitely a potential target. Terence Gready would be more than happy to bail him out.

The third was very interesting. A forty-two-year-old widow, Meg Magellan. Her husband and teenage son had been killed in a car crash five years ago. Now her teenage daughter, Laura, was on her gap year, backpacking through South America, and from her latest posts, currently near Quito, in Ecuador.

He turned to Rio. ‘You must have friends back in Ecuador?’

‘Sure, many. Why?’

Paul Constantinidi nodded. ‘Good to know. Might be useful.’