Low Profile (16 page)

‘He's dead?' Rik said.

‘Professional hit,' Henry confirmed. ‘And I might have been killed too, had it not been for my excellent nautical skills.'

‘Ey?'

‘Never mind. Look, I know he phoned Lisa and it may be that she was the last person to speak to him … I'm gonna start my timeline with that phone call and work backwards and forwards from there, so I need to know exactly what was said and the exact time he made the call.'

‘Right, let me talk to her,' he said dully. Henry picked up on something not right in his tone.

‘You OK, pal?'

‘Nah … he phones her and not the cops … just makes me wonder.'

‘Wonder what? If she doesn't love you, or if she's still playing the field?' Henry asked straightforwardly.

‘Well …' Rik drew out the word.

‘It's bollocks, I'd say. Percy was clearly into something he couldn't handle and desperate for some guidance … I'm pretty sure it was just a panic phone call and he knew she would get me to call him.'

‘But she's so upset!'

‘Rik, he's been murdered … let her have a sob and some hysterics, it's a big deal. I'd be upset if you were murdered.'

‘Mmm … OK, I'll get back to you.'

Henry hung up, then stood up, grabbed his jacket and left the office. He was on his way over to the MIR.

Time to get hunting.

Two hundred and fifty miles to the south, another man employed in the business of law enforcement, but on a much broader scale than Henry, was entering his own office in the American Embassy in London after a short but tedious commute into the city from a small town to the west of the capital. He stood at the threshold, shook himself out of his jacket and tried to throw the garment across the room, hoping to get it on to the coat stand next to his desk.

Unlike James Bond, he missed. The jacket flopped to the floor and the man shook his head miserably. ‘Story of my life,' he thought. He picked up the jacket, hung it up, then slumped down on to his chair.

Karl Donaldson was essentially a man of action but, like his hero James Bond (he liked the books, not the films), when he hadn't had too much action recently his spirit went into decline. His life, he thought miserably, had become humdrum, homebound, office-bound. Fucking boring.

He had once been an FBI field agent but for the past fifteen years he had been a legal attaché working from the FBI office at the US embassy. At the moment he was still working from the Grosvenor Square building, but a move to new, swanky premises was looming – and that thought filled him with dread. All glass partitions, water coolers and open plan office life … sent a shiver down his spine.

His basic job was to act as a collector, collator, analyser and conduit of criminal intelligence through various police forces worldwide but mainly in Europe, where he had close links with Europol and Interpol, as well as state police forces, including those in the UK.

Since 2001 his job had been mainly to chase, sift and sort for intelligence relating to international terrorism. Although he loved the job and had been responsible for bringing many evil men to justice – and some to the end of their lives – he had become bored and listless.

True, there had been occasions in the past few years when he had found himself back in the field, physically chasing bad guys, coming head to head with some and almost losing his life in the process once. But for too long now he had been operating from behind a desk, getting increasingly involved in the tittle-tattle of petty office politics. Worst of all, he had started dreading the daily commute in from Hartley Wintney, sometimes having to stand all the way on a packed train, eyeing all the other zombie-faced commuters and wishing one of them would pull a gun and start shooting so he could disarm the bastard.

His worst fear was that he might be the one to pull the gun.

He had access to firearms. He was getting psychologically damaged by his humdrum existence and was only one step away from mowing down a carriage-full of innocent people. Or were they really innocent?

Another thing that did bother him – killing fellow commuters was just a heavenly fantasy – was that although he was completely committed to hunting down terrorists, he was actually ‘brassed off' with it all. (Donaldson, though a Yank through and through, did have a penchant for collecting and using British colloquialisms, and ‘brassed off' was his current favourite.) He was particularly bored by seeing nothing but Islamic names passing over his desk.

He was, in fact, missing everyday crime and criminals.

Robbers, rapists, drug runners, murderers, gangsters, extortionists. Good old-fashioned hit men who didn't have bombs strapped to their bodies, even.

Where was the Mafia these days? Don Corleone – where the hell was he?

The answer to that, he thought cynically, was that they were operating with impunity. The FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA and a plethora of agencies with three or four initials, hastily cobbled together with little thought of strategy, were now strongly focused on preventing and disrupting terrorism, sending in unmanned drones to launch missile attacks on mud huts in Afghanistan whilst they watched on monitors half the earth away, dancing around, giving high fives as a house was obliterated, and never getting their hands soiled.

Donaldson knew this was all a necessity, did not question that, and he knew that others
were
still investigating organized crime, and he would do his utmost to find, seek, disrupt and destroy enemies of the USA. That was what was required of him.

But hell! He missed criminals. Pined for them.

Which was why the phone call that had woken him from a bad night's sleep earlier that morning had triggered a glimmer of excitement in him. It also served to remind him that, important as his own job was, life did still go on in ‘normal' land and innocent people took bullets and professional hit men still got contracts – and cops still hunted bad guys down.

It had been a while since he'd heard from his old friend Henry Christie, whom he'd met too many years before for comfort, when he, Donaldson, had been investigating American mob activity in the north west of England. They had been firm friends since and even worked together occasionally.

So, though Donaldson had been Mr Grumpy with Henry, what his friend had asked him to do had been of great interest.

Donaldson sat back in his office chair after logging on to the FBI intranet. He interlocked his fingers, stretched out his arms, cracking his knuckles.

The computer screen came lazily to life.

He rocked forward, entered his complex password, then wriggled his fingers like a maestro pianist about to launch into a concerto.

In his case, though, the only tune he would be playing was ‘Hunt the Hit Man', a little known ditty which he had performed hundreds of times to great acclaim.

Flynn had never felt such intense fury. It seemed to build into a crescendo as he stepped slowly, deliberately across
Faye
's deck, into the cockpit, then beyond into the galley, stateroom and sleeping quarters beyond.

‘Bastards,' he hissed.

It looked as if the boat had been damaged by a herd of rampaging bulls armed with sledgehammers and spray paint, smashing and defacing everything in their path.

The control panel that housed the sonar, GPS, radar, radio and other electronic devices – all massively expensive – had been hammered to pieces, just wanton destruction. The locked cupboards had been prised open, their contents dragged out and crushed to pieces.

In the galley, all the kitchen fittings and fixtures and equipment had been smashed, too; then beyond, the luxurious furniture in the stateroom had been shredded with a knife and the walls and windows sprayed with the same metallic paint he had seen on the walls of his villa: same people.

Flynn surveyed it all with his good eye, then walked slowly back through the mess to the deck to see Jose leaning over the rail, pulling something on to the deck.

Flynn growled as he saw what it was. One of his treasured fishing rods, twisted, bent and mangled.

Jose looked at him wretchedly, holding the broken piece of equipment in both hands. ‘They broke into the equipment locker,' he spat. ‘All the rods are missing … I think they're in the water … this one snagged on the side.'

Flynn did a quick mental calculation. Ten of the best rods and reels. Looking at twenty thousand euros just there.

He looked at Karen on the quayside, anxiously biting her thumb nail.

Flynn sidestepped the open engine hatch, then knelt to peer into the compartment to see the oil filler caps missing from both engine blocks, empty sugar bags thrown on to the floor below. Sugar in the engines. The damage from that little act almost irreparable, other than by taking out the engines, completely stripping them down and cleaning them off. A mammoth undertaking. The cost of that repair was almost incalculable.

The boat was ruined and Flynn felt like crying – just for a moment.

‘Did we get Costain's address?' he asked Karen.

She nodded. ‘You think this was him?'

‘He's my starting point – and I'm now going to finish a conversation I started last night that was rudely interrupted by the arrival of two cops and a nasty looking police dog.'

It wasn't a bad start: twenty-five detectives from around the county, a support unit team, two dog men, and three admin staff to kick start the computer system; plus an office manager, an allocator, an exhibits officer … great. Henry was fairly buoyed up about things as he gathered up his briefing notes and other paperwork, then walked in front of the murder squad and began the briefing to get a major investigation under way.

Henry and Woodcock had spent most of the last hour working on the strategy for the investigation and starting the murder book properly, in which all decisions, actions and reasoning would be recorded as it all progressed.

Within the hour everyone was deployed and Henry retreated to the SIO's office just off the main briefing room. As he went he beckoned DC Jerry Tope in with him. Tope was from the force intelligence unit and had worked for Henry on several recent cases. Although he was regarded as a bit of a ‘surly bleeder' and was insubordinate on too many occasions for comfort, Henry liked the guy and knew he was a particularly valuable asset, not least for his impressive computer skills.

Tope was going to run the intelligence cell on this investigation.

He trudged glumly behind Henry into the office. DCI Woodcock came with them.

‘Mornin' Jerry.'

‘Henry.' He nodded. ‘How are you?'

‘Good – sit.' The pleasantries were over. Tope sat, Woodcock sat. Henry poured them both a coffee from the filter machine that came with the office (coffee not included), then sat behind the desk and considered Tope. ‘Quite a few things for you to be doing here.'

Tope nodded.

‘Just off the top of my head,' Henry said, looking skywards and counting off with his fingers. ‘Phone records … Percy's mobile wasn't found at the scene but we have his number.' Tope nodded: easy enough. ‘Percy and Charlotte went away recently … Canaries and Florida … could these trips be connected to their deaths? Let's find out where they went, when they went, et cetera.' Tope nodded: easy. ‘Finance and business records need unearthing and analysing. Was the business OK or going tits up? That could be a big factor, and maybe what he said when he phoned Lisa.' Henry shrugged. ‘Know what I'm saying?'

‘Who else, family-wise, is connected to the business?' Tope asked.

‘Father was, but isn't now. As far as I know Percy was the sole owner, but I'm not one hundred per cent on that. Find out, eh?'

‘Will do,' Tope said confidently as his mobile phone rang. He balanced it on his folder and peered at the screen with a frown.

‘You need to get that?' Henry asked.

Tope picked up the phone and peered closely at the screen. Henry saw his eyes widen with shock and then Tope quickly stabbed the ‘end call' button to sever the connection. ‘Nope,' he said brusquely, but gave Henry a sheepish look, placing his hand guiltily over the phone.

Henry returned a puzzled expression but said, ‘Right, let's get on … I'm going to have a few more minutes with the e-fit people, then head off to the post mortems.' He looked at Woodcock and screwed up his face. ‘Will you just kick ass around here for the time being, then go out and see Percy's father again? I think we're going to have to keep plugging away at him and hope for some lucid moments because I think he knows more than he's capable of telling us … that OK?'

Woodcock looked slightly discomfited by the request, but said, ‘Yeah, no probs.'

‘OK – meeting over.'

Tope and Woodcock left the office. Henry sighed and began checking through his action plan for the day before setting off to see the e-fit people again at Blackpool nick. From there he would be going to the hospital for the PMs.

Outside the office, Jerry Tope stalked angrily across the incident room, out into the corridor beyond, where he tapped the keypad on his phone and returned the call he had refused to take a couple of minutes earlier. He put the phone to his ear, waited for the connection, then whispered dramatically, ‘What the hell do you want? Thought I told you never, ever, friggin' call me again … bastard.'

‘T
hat's no way to speak to an old mate, is it?'

When Scott Costain and Trish did not show up at the allotted time for their charter, Flynn declared to Adam Castle, who was waiting with him, ‘They're not going to return to the scene of their crime, are they?' Flynn got their address from Karen's booking records, memorized it and, with a snarl firmly fixed to his face, set off back to his villa on foot. Here he intended to jump into his Nissan Patrol, parked up under an awning around the back, and drive to Costain in order to confront him.