Corpse in Waiting (21 page)

We took quick peeps around the corner. It was a weird scene, such traffic as there was had stopped, the bucket of the JCB being used to smash and crunch its way into the wall of the bank with the ATM in it like some crazed prehistoric monster. Then, a small flat-bed truck of some kind came speeding up, travelling the last fifty yards or so half on the pavement, battering into a car that was in the way, knocking over street signs and scattering litter bins. It was spun round and reversed until it was quite close to the main entrance of the bank. All this activity was being guarded by four men, three seemingly carrying hand guns, another with a sub-machine gun. They had had to move aside for the arrival of the truck, the one with the machine gun firing a burst at a motorist who had left his car and was running away. The shots smashed into everything; vehicles, road signs, shop windows, all the while people screaming as they stampeded away. The man escaped uninjured.

‘Where's bloody Murphy's law?' Patrick bellowed, the Glock pistol in his hand. ‘Stay here!'

In the next second he had gone. Already having the Smith and Wesson in mine I ignored the instruction. There was a flurry of shots and the man with the machine gun nosedived to the pavement, the weapon still firing as he fell. The one on his left went over backwards but I did not see what happened to the third as I had rolled into the cover of a metal litter bin that had escaped the truck and took out the fourth, who was firing in the direction of where I thought Patrick might be right now, behind a group of concrete flower tubs.

I decided that my responsibility lay in disabling the lorry so potted the windscreen and two of the tyres nearest to me. Thus encouraged I followed this up with a shot to discourage the digger driver that whanged off the cab superstructure and killed a street light. The two men in the truck abandoned ship and would have run off had it not been for two people who ran past me shouting ‘Police!' and tackled them to the ground. Sirens blared in the distance.

The driver of the JCB extricated the vehicle from the mess he had made and, bouncing over rubble, jerked forward into the main road, the driver shaking the bucket to rid it of more detritus. He endeavoured to turn right but there was no room to manoeuvre so veered around to the left and after twenty yards or so wrenched the vehicle around in the road, crashing into street furniture and a parked car. Bucket lowered it then headed straight for where the two who had apprehended the lorry driver and his accomplice had just started to cross the road, hauling them off to meet a rapidly approaching police van. They ran to get out of the way but one of the suspects tripped and fell flat, almost pulling over the man who was holding him.

I dared not shoot in case the digger careered out of control to cause mayhem and death on the other side of the road. Then, unaccountably, it swung hard right and thundered into the truck. For a moment it looked as though the latter might overturn but it thumped down again, trapping the bucket underneath. The digger stalled and juddered to a halt.

Gingerly, I raised myself a little. People, hopefully police, were arriving but cautiously, crouching behind parked vehicles, obviously not knowing how many would-be robbers were left. I could not locate Patrick for a moment but then saw that he was in the bank doorway with someone I presumed was gunman number three whom he had disarmed. As I watched he brought the man out, one hand tightly in the material behind the neck of the other's sweatshirt.

‘SOCA!' he shouted to the four winds. ‘You can all come out now.'

DCI Murphy was one of the first to appear. ‘I thought that was a pretty good response time, actually,' I heard him say to Patrick.

He was given a big, bright smile. ‘In that case, congratulations. Would you like this one?'

‘I shall need you to make a statement.'

‘We both will. In the morning. To Greenway. You can always read it afterwards.'

I joined them, and Murphy left with his prisoner after giving me a curt nod. Any further conversation was impossible at the moment because of the alarm bells and ambulance sirens so I went with Patrick as he moved from one wounded or dead man to another, trying to identify them, or rather find out if they were either of the Capelli brothers. None appeared to be.

The man with the sub-machine gun was very dead and, as Patrick said to me later and not for the first time in his career, you simply cannot risk them being able to use a weapon like that again. The one I had hit was wounded in the leg. I always aim low even though this also is risking them using their weapons again and killing someone. I always incur Patrick's anger over this – ‘it's unprofessional' – but causing the kind of pain and loss of blood that I was witnessing now is bad enough.

The digger driver, a grossly overweight individual, was found to have suffered a fatal heart attack.

‘Right,' Patrick said, having conferred with the paramedics in attendance. ‘We're now superfluous.'

‘The two who arrested the men in the lorry were the Chinese man and his girlfriend,' I told him when we had put a little distance between ourselves and the scene so we could speak fairly normally.

‘Just as I thought.'

He was deliberately being annoying so I merely commented, ‘There weren't enough mobsters here to do the job properly.'

‘No. No Capellis either. I agree, it's odd.'

‘So are they still going to hit West End Central, only tonight, or the jewellery place tomorrow as planned or was this another outfit entirely?'

Patrick paused on a street corner and gazed around. ‘Pass, although I lean to the latter. But the police personnel at both places should be prepared for anything and it's not up to me to try to teach Murphy his job. I have no intention of riding shotgun for the Met for the rest of the night – it's not my brief.' The wonderful grey eyes rested on me briefly. ‘And what do I do now? Mike's told me to do as I like, hasn't he?'

‘I think he meant just tonight,' I pointed out.

‘Yes, tonight. I shall go and look for Tony Capelli.'

‘That's if he's not dead.'

‘That would be a great pity.' He stopped speaking and then looked at me again.

‘I know what you're going to say,' I said. ‘You want to go alone.'

‘Ingrid, you look all in – terrible. You've had a nasty crash and this job's not worth killing yourself for.'

‘This is about Capelli ordering Luigi to kill James and hitting Joanna instead, isn't it?'

Patrick nodded. ‘I know that neither of our friends is safe until he's dealt with, one way or another. He'll want to settle what he regards as old scores. He's like that. He'll want to take out Carrick, then Joanna, then me. Thorns in his flesh. His failures.'

‘But surely then you'll have the rest of the Capelli clan after you.' I could see that even talking about it was reigniting the anger he had felt at the time.

‘It's unlikely. James told me. It was Martino's brother in Italy who tried to finish him off last time. His own family. He'd done things at home that brought utter disgrace to them.'

‘One way or another?' I queried.

‘No, I'm going to kill him.'

We went to our hotel together where Patrick made sure that I was safe and comfortable, told me only to open the door of the room in answer to one of our special knocks and then moved to leave. Then, chuckling at his own forgetfulness, he came back and kissed me, his parting remark as he went out of the door, ‘That was good shooting by the way.'

In the ensuing quiet I flopped on to the bed, the cursed writer's imagination churning out what the aftermath might be.

This was how it all ended. He went out of the door and she never saw him alive again. All that kind of pathetic piffle in third-rate women's fiction that nevertheless haunts me when Patrick goes off on his own. It seemed like hours that I sat there brooding about it but my left behind watch insisted it was only five minutes.

‘This isn't fiction,' I said to my pale, miserable-looking and scabby reflection in the dressing table mirror.

Five children.

‘Oh, God,' I whispered. ‘What shall I do?'

I prised myself off the bed and went into the bathroom where I swallowed two of my painkillers plus two of the pills Patrick carries with him and takes when he needs to stay awake. Then I reloaded the Smith and Wesson, put some more ammunition in my other jacket pocket, slammed out of the room and tore after him.

He could always bring me back and chain me to the loo.

A piercing whistle rent the calm of the foyer as I hurried through it, the kind that some men use to summon taxis. I gazed around wildly and saw the source of it sitting in a little bar near the entrance doors. When I breathlessly arrived I saw that he was drinking strong black coffee.

‘Ah,' Patrick said.

‘You're a pig,' I panted.

‘I thought it would be a good idea to hang around for a little while as you always follow me and this is one job where I'd prefer to have you under my nose right from the start.'

‘That's about the most pompous thing you've ever said to me.'

‘True though.'

‘I seem to remember getting you out of really sticky situations a couple of times.'

He smiled infuriatingly. ‘Coffee?'

‘No, thanks, I took a couple of your wideawake pills.'

‘You're only supposed to take one.'

‘I didn't bother to read the label.'

‘Ingrid, you've done this before! I can distinctly remember you dosing yourself up with a god-awful brew concocted by some harridan in Hinton Littlemoor, one of her “rural remedies” or other such rubbish.'

‘Your mother gave it to me. It was called
Essence of Flowers.
'

‘Yes, mostly home-grown poppy juice!'

After I had admitted to experiencing a floating away sensation – we had been undertaking rooftop surveillance at the time – he had poured the rest of it down the kitchen sink.

While it was naive to assume that Tony Capelli would be calmly ‘at home' in Romford that was where we headed initially, to lurk and watch. Despite what Patrick had said, I was of the opinion that he would make every effort to arrest him. If not, it had been the Italian who had made death threats first.

There were lights on in every room at the rear of the flat, clearly visible from our position in the small car park, that is, wedged in a dark corner near the inevitable stinking bins. The outside door of the apartment was actually ajar but there was no movement within, no shadows criss-crossing the curtains.

‘Was that raid a feint?' Patrick whispered. ‘A few expendable thickos sent off to keep the Met busy and make them think the threat's over?'

I said, ‘As we've already discussed, it's obviously not practical to raid a jeweller's at night because everything's in the strongroom, never mind the steel shutters over the windows. Unless you go and grab a senior member of staff and force them to open up everything, that is.'

‘I don't think they're that organized. It would probably be early tomorrow morning just after the place has opened.'

‘Leyland won't be too pleased if you grab Capelli first.'

Patrick's teeth flashed white in the gloom as he grinned at me. ‘That's all part of the fun.'

We had not entered the area through the drive-in from the main shopping street but via a pedestrian access to another road with smaller shops and a public library where our taxi had dropped us off. Patrick had silently drawn my attention to a car with two men sitting in it parked nearby and then flung an arm around my shoulders and generally acted tipsy, almost causing me to lose my balance. But surely Leyland would not really have given out the descriptions of two members of SOCA with a view to warning them off. Would he?

Several minutes went by during which we did not speak and precisely nothing happened. Then Patrick broke the silence by saying, ‘You know, I'm still not happy with the idea of allowing these mobsters to commit a crime so they can be arrested. It's quite likely innocent people will be hurt or killed. The police might even screw up and they'll get away.'

‘You might have to let the other bloke get on with it for once,' I murmured.

He did not respond for a moment, then said, ‘Is this my oracle speaking?'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘We might have to pick up the pieces.'

‘
We
won't have to pick up anything. SOCA wasn't created to sort out any potential disasters the Met might have.'

‘But as I've just said, people might be killed!'

‘Remember what Daws once said to you? “No more tilting at windmills.” Stick to what you're meant to do or
you
might be the one who ends up injured or dead because of a misplaced crusading instinct and an erroneous belief that someone who's been in special services knows best.'

‘Bloody hell! How long have you wanted to say that to me?'

‘Years. May I make a suggestion?'

‘I have an idea you will anyway.'

‘You want Capelli. But in my view, he could already be dead. I think we should wait. See what these people plan to do, if anything at all now Irma's not returned. Let the Met do what's necessary and if he's alive and well and they fail to catch him then you'll have your chance.' When Patrick said nothing I continued, ‘You were planning to storm in there when everyone was catching up on a little sleep, weren't you?'

‘I do believe I was,' he muttered. ‘Right now actually.'

‘Ignore me if you want to.'

‘I loathe this man, Ingrid.'

‘I know you do but please don't allow it to rule your common sense. Remember what you said to me about gunning for terrorists and gangsters in Northern Ireland and elsewhere? Something along the lines of the satisfaction being in the planning, tracking down, the fine weapon to hand, the outwitting of someone who employs vigilant and vicious weapons-carrying minders, etc. etc. To burst in there now would be unprofessional and messy.'