first.
Partly, this was because of the relative inexperience of the members of this evening’s task force. It was supposed to comprise the tactical firearms unit of the South East Constabulary, acting as support for an elite team from Gatwick Airport.
The airport officers were well used to armed operations but the Gatwick team couldn’t leave the airport because of a terrorist alert. Her team had become the lead unit whilst a second unit from three different divisions had been hurriedly assembled. For some members it was their first operation. And none of them had worked together before.
That would have been OK had Danny Moynihan been leading the operation on the ground. Moynihan, ex-SAS, was experienced, careful, as cool as they come. She trusted him implicitly after her other three operations with him. But at the last moment he’d been stood down – she didn’t know why – and replaced by Chief Superintendent Charlie Foster. Who was definitely second eleven.
The timing of the operation was unfortunate too. The other operations she’d been involved with had been dawn raids, the targets asleep in their beds. Sunrise streaking the sky as the house doors front and back had been breached, the explosion of violence rupturing the morning’s calm.
But this was ten in the evening. Dusk had just fallen, but there were lots of people out in their gardens, television shows and music blaring from open windows, cars revving by. Ten in the evening, there were all sorts of problems. Especially here, in this neighbourhood.
The main reason for her anxiety.
‘It’s straightforward enough,’ Charlie Foster had said in the briefing before they left the station thirty minutes before – but he was sweating when he said it. ‘Career criminal called Bernard Grimes. Wanted in connection with a string of armed robberies and the shooting of two security guards in a payroll robbery in Willesden. Hard nut.
‘He’s got a place on the Cote de Crime – all the best crooks prefer Provence to the Costa Brava these days.’ He got a rumble of laughter for that. ‘We have a tip from a reliable source that he’s heading there via tomorrow morning’s Newhaven-Dieppe car ferry. And that he’s spending tonight in a house in Milldean.’
Several people groaned when Foster mentioned Milldean. It was one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Brighton, ruled for generations by half a dozen crime families. The closely packed housing estate was a virtual no-go area for the police.
‘We’re going in mob-handed, I hope, sir,’ Finch said. He was a burly man with a shaved head and a little indent in his ear where once he used to wear a ring.
‘On the contrary, John. We don’t want a pitched battle or a riot. We want it to be fast. We’ll set the roadblocks, isolate the house, get the marksmen in position. Then we’ll flood into the premises, close him down, get him out of there and off the estate. It’s a classic Bermuda.’
Bermuda as in Bermuda Triangle. That was the name the force used for its standard armed building-entry technique because it was a triangulated operation. Front, back, marksmen outside at elevated points. Not that Gilchrist was superstitious, but she’d always wondered if the name could also mean that the target might disappear without trace.
‘Lean and mean,’ Finch said.
It was Finch’s first operation with the tactical firearms unit. Gilchrist assumed his bravado was a mask for his nerves. He couldn’t really be like that – could he? If he was, she couldn’t understand how he had got on the team. Sure, armed response units comprised people like him who were fit and had quick reflexes. But these people were also calm, focused and thoughtful. Well, that was the theory. How somebody as gung-ho as Finch had got through the psychological testing, Gilchrist couldn’t imagine.
‘This is a one-night-only offer, ladies and gentlemen,’ Foster said. ‘We miss him tonight and he’s gone. Any questions?’
Geoff ‘Harry’ Potter, one of the more phlegmatic of the team, raised a hand.
‘If he’s being sheltered by one of the families, he’s unlikely to be alone.’
‘The intelligence we have indicates there’s no link with any of the families. I’m confident it’s one hundred per cent accurate. We’ve had the house under surveillance for the past two hours.’
Gilchrist shifted in her crouch to ease her legs. She’d been in the back garden about three minutes but it seemed ten times longer. She strained at the static in her ears, willing Charlie Foster’s voice to come through.
She was vaguely aware of muffled music from the pub on the corner. It became louder when the pub doors opened and a raucous din spilled out.
‘We’re going on a count of three,’ Foster said quietly, his voice unexpectedly intimate inside her ear.
A car horn blared.
‘Damn!’ The voice in her ear was strained. ‘All units: go!’
As Gilchrist hurled herself towards the rear of the house, the two officers stationed against the back wall swung the ram and hit the door just above the lock. The door flew open, splinters flying. The two men took up positions either side of the door.
Lights came on in the house. Her three colleagues with Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols went into the kitchen first. She scanned left to right as she came through the door. Unwashed crockery piled in the sink. Harsh fluorescent lighting set crookedly in the ceiling.
The passage was ahead, a turn, then the staircase. She was aware of the unit that had come through the front door pounding up the stairs.
Her unit fanned into the dining room. Prints of seaside landscapes in cheap frames on the walls.
They looked behind the door, under the table. Nobody.
Down the hall to the living room. Widescreen TV and DVD player in the corner. Magazines and redtop newspapers strewn on the sofa. Toffee wrappers and cigarette stubs overflowing an ashtray.
They looked behind the sofa and the single armchair. Nobody.
From upstairs she heard shouted commands. Then, the sharp crack of a gunshot. And another. Her three colleagues looked at each other. Ignored her. Jostled into the hall. Started up the stairs. More shots, too close together to say how many.
When Gilchrist moved to follow, the last one on the stairs waved her back. She remained in the living-room doorway, tilting her head to try to see up to the first floor. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a door under the staircase open.
None of them had spotted it when they’d come down the corridor. It opened towards her, obscuring her view of who was on the other side of it. She heard the sound of someone hoofing it towards the kitchen.
Gilchrist took two steps and barged the cupboard door closed. A skinny guy in white T-shirt, jeans and trainers headed through the kitchen to the open doorway. He was holding something away from his body in his left hand.
The thought that there was only supposed to be one person in the house flitted through her brain. Was this skinny man Grimes? If so, then what was the shooting upstairs about?
She aimed at the man’s back.
‘Halt, armed police officer!’ she called, relieved that her voice was steady and clear. ‘Drop your weapon and halt!’
The man kept moving. Adrenaline surged in her. She knew she couldn’t – wouldn’t – shoot him. If she did, she’d kill him. She’d been trained to take no chances, trained to aim for the biggest target with the most body mass. Don’t try tricky leg, head or arm shots.
She’d been trained like that but even so she aimed at his left leg just above the knee. She aimed but she didn’t fire. The man went through the doorway into the garden.
And almost immediately re-entered the kitchen, flung backwards, arms wide. He landed with a heavy thud flat on his back, blood spreading across his chest. As he hit the floor, whatever was in his left hand skidded away into the corner of the room.
Fuck. Gilchrist edged cautiously towards the prone man, nervous of presenting a target to the trigger-happy police marksman outside.
The man wasn’t moving. Blood spread across the kitchen floor. Gilchrist swallowed. There was little doubt the man had died a split-second before he’d come flying back through the door.
She frowned when she realized she had stepped in his blood. Frowned again when she couldn’t immediately see what had fallen from his hand anywhere on the floor.
