Game Over

Andrew and the woman – whatever her name was—’

‘Funny how nobody remembers,’ Atherton said moodily.

‘And ask them what it was all about. Go on from there. And go through his papers, try and find out what he was doing these past months. We’ve got his diary to go through, his latest correspondence, and they’ve taken his computer to Jimmy Pak to examine. Enough there to keep us all busy for a day or two.’

‘Right,’ said Atherton, pulling himself together. ‘First find out the woman’s name, then find out where she and Sid Andrew have gone. A bit of phone and computer work there. And on the subject of computers . . .’

‘You’d better find out how Emily’s doing,’ Slider supplied for him. ‘She’s had her head down all day, as far as I can tell – no-one seems to have seen her. In fact, I dare say she needs a cup of tea. I could do with one as well.’

They had found her a corner and a desk, in the room that housed the photocopier. There she had settled in with case notes, files, and Atherton’s laptop, which he’d rigged up to a printer borrowed from the desk of one of Ron Carver’s firm who was on holiday. When they went to rescue her, she looked up from a sea of papers in surprise. ‘I didn’t realise it was that late. I’ve been so absorbed.’

A good thing, too, Slider thought. Nothing like work for keeping your mind off things. He saw the realisation come back to her almost at once; but she braced her shoulders with a determination not to brood about it.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked. ‘Any luck?’

‘Nothing so far, I’m afraid,’ Slider said. ‘I’m thinking we really need to know what your father was doing since he left the DTI. There might be some clue in that, so we’re looking at his diary and computer, and we’ll probably have to go through all his papers. You may be able to be of help to us there.’

‘Anything I can do, you know I will,’ she said. ‘But this looking into Trevor Bates has been very interesting. He’s quite a man. Evil, but interesting.’

In the canteen they got three teas and three slabs of bread pudding (which the canteen did very well) for sustenance, and took them to a table by the window. There was a day outside, Slider noted with vague wonder. He sat down next to Emily as Atherton had sprung into the chair opposite her, and he realised his colleague wanted to be able to look at her face. He was that far gone.

‘So what have you found out?’ Atherton asked her.

‘Nothing really about where he might be. I’ve mostly been catching up on his past history, which I suppose you know all about, but was new to me. He’s had his fingers in a lot of pies. He must have a brilliant brain.’

‘Pity it’s so misdirected,’ Slider said.

‘Yes. But here’s the thing I found this morning that interested me particularly. You know that he was being moved to the secure remand facility by a private security company, Ring 4?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Slider. ‘Most prisoner movements are undertaken by private companies. The Home Office contracts out a lot of services to the private sector now.’

‘It’s a good name, isn’t it: ring for security? But I didn’t realise they did that kind of thing. I always thought they delivered wages and collected the cash from banks, and so on.’

‘They do everything,’ Slider said. ‘They’re one of the biggest security companies in the country. They cover every aspect from guarding dockyards and moving bullion right down to domestic burglar alarms.’

‘And security doors,’ Atherton added. ‘That’s why the man who contacted Dave Borthwick pretended to be working for Ring 4. It’s probably the first name that sprang to his mind.’

‘I see. Well, here’s the thing that really intrigued me,’ Emily said. ‘You said the van was held up and Bates was freed, but there’s never been an inquiry into how it happened.’

Slider and Atherton looked at each other blankly, and then Atherton said, ‘There must have been.’

‘I’ve been through every record I can access, and there’s nothing. No internal investigation at Ring 4, no report by the Prison Service, no inquiry by the Home Office, nothing from Woodhill – which is also privately run, of course. And what’s more,’ she added, before they could say anything, ‘there was nothing in any of the newspapers either. Now don’t you think that’s odd? There was lots and lots about his arrest, rehashing the murder with all the sleazy details, because let’s face it the public loves that sort of thing so the papers latch on to it. Yet when this terribly interesting murderer goes missing from the back of a prison van, there’s nothing in the papers at all.’

‘There must have been something,’ Slider protested. He looked at Atherton. ‘I don’t read the papers, but you do. And you watch the television news. It must have been covered.’

Atherton was frowning. ‘We were told about it personally by Mr Porson,’ he said, ‘but I can’t remember at this distance whether I saw anything in the papers. I’m assuming I must have, but we were very busy about then and I can’t recall specifically—’

‘No need to rack your brains. You didn’t,’ Emily said with a little understandable triumph. ‘I’ve looked up every newspaper for the day and for two weeks afterwards, and the only report is in a local paper, the Woburn Courier, which says that a prison van was held up on the way to Woodhill and a prisoner, Trevor Bates, escaped. And there was a stop press in the Telegraph. Neither gives any details of how it happened, and the Telegraph doesn’t even mention Woodhill or Bates by name – it just says “a prisoner”. And after that, nothing. Now don’t you think that’s odd?’

‘It is odd,’ Slider said, ‘but I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.’

‘Well, look,’ she said, ‘the first report must have come from someone local to the hold-up, probably the local police. Someone on the local press must have had a contact at the Telegraph, and it made it to their late-edition stop press. But the next day the whole thing is killed stone dead. In normal circumstances there must have been a heck of a lot of people who would know who was in that van – the Ring 4 people, the people at Wormwood Scrubs where he went from, the Woodhill people who must have been expecting him – and all their wives and children and friends and secretaries, because people do talk to their families even in these inarticulate times. But nothing gets out. So either there was some very heavy duty leaning to keep it quiet, going on from the very top – which I suppose would be the Home Office?’

‘Ultimately, yes,’ Slider said. ‘I suppose they might have wanted to suppress it so as not to alarm people.’

‘But when dangerous prisoners escape,’ Emily said, ‘they usually put it out so as to warn people not to approach them.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘The other possibility,’ Atherton said, ‘which I suppose you’re building up to, is that he was deliberately sprung.’

Slider looked at him in surprise, but Emily was nodding. ‘It’s the only thing, to my mind, that makes sense. The whole thing was done secretly, so that only the people involved knew about it – and they wouldn’t tell.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ Slider said. ‘It would take connivance at a very high level. Someone very, very high up would have had to decide on it and plan it, and I can’t believe—’

‘Can’t you?’ Atherton said.

‘You’re being needlessly cynical. Even if there was one corrupt person high up in the Home Office, he couldn’t do it all on his own. There’d be high-level police involvement.’

‘But look,’ Emily said, ‘Bates did have connections with the government, and at a high level. He provided them with important services. Suppose it was thought to be for the greater benefit that he was got out and allowed to carry on performing those services, rather than mouldering in prison where he could do no good? That could be a good motive, even if it involved corruption in the execution. A lot of people, acceptable people, think it’s OK to do evil that good might come.’

‘That’s true,’ Atherton said. ‘And there are quite a few of them in the Job. You know that,’ he said to Slider. ‘We’ve all known cases where the evidence has been buffed up a bit so as to put a real villain away. When you know someone’s guilty and you just can’t get enough for the CPS – well, the temptation’s there. And I don’t believe there’s one copper in ten who would think that was morally wrong, even if they don’t do it themselves.’

‘We don’t do that,’ Slider said stubbornly.

‘But others do,’ Atherton said. ‘And maybe we should, now and then. How many times have we busted our balls catching some villain, and then he walks away because the CPS won’t prosecute?’

Slider shook his head in frustration. ‘You can’t start sub-dividing justice—’

‘Oh, justice! Since when was it about justice?’ Atherton said, as the frustrations of the Job burst out from