Dyer nodded.
‘Any kind of payback, only right you’d want to be involved. Family, yeah? Your mum’d have told you, I’m sure. Got to stand up, Stu. Be counted on this. But I bet she never, you never, thought it would come to this …’ Tapping the photographs. ‘Am I right, Stuart? Am I right? You never …’
There was panic now, bright and darting, in his eyes. The kind you see in rats, Ramsden thought, trapped up against the wire.
Slowly, he leaned in, not enough to frighten, just enough to reassure. ‘What we need to talk about, Stuart, is how you got yourself mixed up in all this. See if there isn’t something we can do. Some way round this, don’t leave you in the dock along with everyone else. Culpable homicide, Stuart, three times over. Life inside. You don’t want that.’ Reaching across, Ramsden patted his hand. ‘Okay, Stuart? Okay? Let’s see what we can do.’
‘This is all on tape?’ Karen said. ‘Transcribed?’
Ramsden grinned his crooked grin. ‘Even as we speak.’
They were in her office, evening, late, but no one was going home. Sandwiches, half-eaten; coffees, growing cold. Through the blur of half-glass, other officers moved around as if underwater, sat hunched over their desks, computers, accessed this list and that, pressed keys, made calls.
‘He’s named everyone?’
‘Everyone in the car, the van. Everyone involved.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Les Arthurs, Kevin Martin, Jason Richards riding with Dyer in the Volvo, Dougie Freeman and Mike Carter up ahead in the van.’
‘Just Kevin Martin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not Terry?’
Ramsden shook his head.
‘Shame,’ Karen said.
‘Yes. No Dooley, either. Too careful to get his hands dirty, this kind of business. Just a name, where Dyer’s concerned. Barely that.’
‘Who was it, then, set him up?’
‘Arthurs, apparently. Told him there was going to be some serious payback for what had happened to his cousin, Jamie. Give them a good working over, that’s what Dyer reckoned. What went on out at Wing, he didn’t know about. Not till after.’
‘Even though he was there?’
‘Sent him off for pizza, didn’t they? His story. Twenty-mile round trip in search of fifteen-inch pepperoni pizzas. Maybe when this is over he’ll get a job with Domino’s.’
‘You believe all that? Believe him or d’you think he’s just stringing us along?’
Ramsden shrugged. ‘I’d say, bit of both. But right now, it suits us to take what he’s saying as gospel. Long as it keeps him talking. And, besides, what he’s given us so far, Carter and Arthurs doing most of the heavy stuff, fits in pretty well with what we might have guessed. Nasty bastards, both of them. Sooner they’re off the streets the better.’
Karen nodded. ‘I’ve had one conversation with Burcher already. Due another one tomorrow.’
‘No plans for lifting Arthurs and the others till then?’
Karen shook her head. ‘Watching brief only. Till we’re told otherwise. My guess, they’ll want to wait till they’re sure everything’s in place, make one fell swoop.’
‘Just so long as they don’t hold off too long, let ‘em slip away. And make sure they remember who got ‘em this far. Don’t let the bastards grab all the glory.’
A rueful smile came to Karen’s face. ‘Trust me on that one, Mike. Trust me.’
48
This time the meeting was in a hotel close to the Westway, a conference room on the eleventh floor. Corporate anonymity. Silent through triple-glazed windows, three lanes of slow-moving traffic eased their way, ghost like, towards the city centre; drivers, whey faced, bored, listening absently to the radio, smoking, illegally using their mobile phones. On the table, jugs of water, glasses, a selection of sweet biscuits, notepads and pens bearing the hotel’s crest and name. At intervals the air conditioner cut in above the radiators’ low hum.
Sterile enough, Karen thought, should it be necessary, to perform an operation.
Burcher.
Cormack.
Alex Williams.
Charlie Frost.
Karen had made her report first, bringing them up to speed on her team’s progress: the links between Dennis Broderick and Gordon Dooley; the evidence that placed Valentyn Horak and two others on their way to Stansted inside the van Broderick had leased at Dooley’s request; Stuart Dyer at the wheel of the second vehicle — Dyer who placed five of Dooley’s known associates at the place where Horak and two others were tortured and probably killed.
‘No chance he’s going to recant?’ Cormack asked. ‘This witness?’
‘Always a chance,’ Karen said. ‘What I’d be more concerned about is someone getting to him. Persuading him to change his mind or shutting him up for good.’
‘We can cotton-wool him, surely,’ Alex Williams said. ‘Protective custody.’
‘Not something we’ve been conspicuously good at recently,’ Cormack chipped in.
‘We won’t lose him,’ Burcher said. ‘Lessons learned.’
‘The sooner, then, maybe,’ Karen said, ‘we pick up Arthurs and the rest, the better.’
‘Let’s not lose sight, though, of the bigger picture,’ Burcher said. ‘What we still don’t have, as far as I can see, is anything watertight that ties Dooley in to all this — Broderick’s assertion, aside, that it was Dooley talked him into leasing the van in the first place.’
‘Must count for something,’ Karen said.
‘Not a bloody lot.’
She flashed him a look.
‘There has been one other development,’ Cormack put in swiftly, ‘might prove useful. By dint of promising to revise his immigration status, we’ve persuaded one of the Chinese workers picked up at one of the raided cannabis farms to start cooperating, remembering a few faces. So far we’ve come up with Mike Carter, wielding a machete. And Carter’s links back to Gordon Dooley are, I think, pretty well documented.’
‘It’s something,’ Burcher said. ‘Still not enough.’
‘I don’t know,’ Alex Williams said. ‘Maybe Karen’s right. Lift Arthurs, Carter and the others now. If they think there’s mileage to be gained from shopping Dooley, that might just give us what we need. It could even panic Dooley himself into some kind of false move. Leave himself open.’
‘From our point of view there’s one big risk in going in too soon,’ Charlie Frost said, speaking for the first time. ‘SOCA’s main interest here, as you know, is at the money-laundering end of things. And as you also, I think, know, one of our principal targets, Anton Kosach, has — or, rather, had — links with Valentyn Horak which were starting to become more clearly defined at the time of Horak’s unfortunate demise. Quite large amounts which were being paid into one of Kosach’s subsidiaries, from where it would be moved around offshore, washed through a couple of shell companies and thence …’
A smile came to Karen’s face: she liked the thence.
‘… and thence to a numbered but otherwise anonymous account in the Caymans-’
‘Or Jersey,’ Alex Williams suggested.
‘Or Jersey. Either way, there’s some clear evidence that Dooley, after successfully moving in on Horak’s operations, has been in contact through intermediaries with Kosach, in order to move the extra money he’s been
