range.
Brock called a hurried briefing in unit 184. Bren Gurney and several others from Serious Crime were there, as well as two senior officers from the Robbery Squad, the leather-coated man from Armacorp, and Gavin Lowry and others from the local division. Chief Superintendent Forbes put in a brief appearance just as they were getting under way, feeling obliged to register a formal protest at Brock’s lack of consultation with his officers, and to suggest that the outcome might have been very different with local backup. No one was very interested in this.
‘Needless to say,’ he said stiffly, ‘we shall provide all the support we can. But we will expect to be kept informed in return. I propose that DS Lowry act as liaison, since you’ve already worked with him. You agree, Brock?’
Brock nodded.
‘Good. At least,’ Forbes added, with a prim little smile, ‘ our Silvermeadow case is satisfactorily resolved.’
As Forbes left, Brock overheard the senior Robbery Squad man say to Bren beside him, ‘What’s his problem? What case is that?’
‘A murder. Teenage girl abducted from here a couple of weeks ago. We were assisting each other in our respective inquiries.’
‘Oh yes? No connection with North?’
‘No,’ Bren said decisively. ‘No connection at all.’
Brock found Bren’s confident answer vaguely troubling. It stirred a question that had been lurking in the back of his mind for some time.
Lowry, meanwhile, moved over to sit beside Kathy, giving her an amused little smile as she met his eye.
‘But of a sly one, aren’t you, Kathy?’ he said. ‘Letting me think you were all finished up at Silvermeadow.’
‘When we last spoke I thought we were. Anyway, this wasn’t your case.’
‘It is now, by the looks of things. It seems you lot need a bit of help.’ He grinned. ‘So you and Brock and Bren and half of SO1 were actually here, were you, when this happened? One of these geezers told me you’d been here all day looking for this North character, waiting for something to happen, only when it did, you didn’t notice it. I told him he must have got his facts wrong, eh? I said, come on, this is the famous DCI Brock’s team!’
He was enjoying himself, fairly bubbling with it.
Kathy muttered, ‘Sod off, Gavin,’ through clenched teeth.
‘Tell you what,’ he chuckled. ‘Makes me feel a lot better about my car.’
Then a new thought seemed to strike him. ‘You were probably never interested in the Vlasich murder at all, were you? You just used it as a cover to be here, on the lookout for North. Did Harry Jackson know? No? Where is Harry now, anyway?’
That was a question that had occurred to Kathy too. If the security staff were so short-handed, where the hell was Harry Jackson?
Brock interrupted, calling the group to order with a rapid summary of how they now believed the robbery had been carried out. Two men, it was thought, had hidden in the cleaners’ store cupboard beside the first staircase and waited for the security guard crew, whom they had ambushed and murdered. They had then followed the expected pattern of collections from the shop units, removing the contents of the cash bags before depositing them in the security truck hopper. As each zone served by a stairway was cleared, it appeared that a common pass code, one allocated to emergency services, had been entered into the security lock on the doorway connecting that service stair with the mall. In other words it looked as if the money had been transferred to one or more accomplices waiting in the malls.
‘Perfect cover,’ Brock announced. ‘The place was packed with people with bulging shopping bags. They could walk out without the least suspicion. Even if something had happened down in the service road to arouse suspicion and cut the operation short, the people in the mall could stroll away without suspicion. They might have been women for all we know, frazzled shoppers with bags and pushchairs and kids hanging from their elbows- maybe the little girl North was seen with a week ago. And when the two gunmen got to the final stairway without a problem, they simply took off their jackets and helmets and joined the crowd and walked away too.’
‘How come the driver in the security truck didn’t twig what was going on, chief?’ someone objected.
‘We’ll be looking a lot more carefully into that,’ Brock said, ‘but so far his story seems plausible. The two men he saw going from stair to stair were the same build as his crew, and were wearing their clothes and radios. While they were out of sight they followed procedure exactly, reporting in every two minutes until the very end. Radio reception wasn’t perfect, but the voice that made the reports was like the one the driver expected to hear: east London, working class, a bit breathless from the stairs.’ Brock nodded to the man in the leather coat at his side. ‘Mr Brown’s initial assessment is that he’s probably telling the truth. But it’s likely they had some inside help at Armacorp, and we’ll work on that assumption.’
‘And at Silvermeadow?’ someone else asked.
‘Yes.’
One of the Robbery Squad officers put up his hand.
‘You’re certain it’s our friend, Brock?’
‘I think we can be pretty sure of that.’
‘So he’ll be aiming to leave the country again?’
Brock frowned. ‘I think that may depend on the little girl he was seen with last weekend.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If she was part of a new family he brought into the country with him, it wouldn’t make sense to bring them in just to do a job, would it? Maybe he intends to settle down with them here. Maybe he thinks enough time has passed for us to have forgotten about him.’
They considered this doubtfully. ‘Risky. Where was he hiding, do we know? Argentina, wasn’t it? Good cover, a family of tourists from Argentina.’
‘We believe he had moved on to Canada. We had a report of him there over a year ago, and we suspect he may have entered the UK at the end of November under a Canadian passport in the name of Keith Nolan.’
The officer drew a sheaf of files and loose papers from his briefcase. ‘We grabbed what we could on our way out, but it sounds as if you’ve got more current info on our friend.’
Bren brought the newcomers up to date on what they’d discovered of Nolan’s movements, as well as the current whereabouts of North’s relatives and known associates. From this they began to compile a priority list of raids to be co-ordinated for that night.
When Brock asked for further comment, Kathy, with some reluctance, spoke up. ‘I think I might have seen him this afternoon, about two p.m., outside Cuddles on the upper mall. It was only for a second, and I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t report it. But I’d like to check the centre’s camera tapes.’
Brock gave her a wry smile. ‘Yes, I was coming to that. You’ll need quite a bit of help. We have to analyse every tape that was running in this place this afternoon. We know the timing of what we’re looking for, but that’s about all. We’re looking for men with black trousers, men of the right build, men who look like our most recent shots of North, little girls like the one he was with last weekend, and anyone on Bren’s list. It’s going to take a big team, and lots of machines. Can you help us, Gavin?’
An hour later Kathy and half a dozen other officers were seated in front of VDUs in a room at Hornchurch Street, starting to go through the first batch of tapes from Silvermeadow. It was going to be a long night, she guessed, for all of them. Once search warrants were issued the raids would begin, the questioning of known associates, the gathering of evidence. She had told Leon she’d be home by eight at the latest, and they had planned to go out for a meal. She’d tried his mobile number a couple of times, but the line was busy. For all she knew he might have been called in to the hunt too, looking for forensic clues at Silvermeadow.
The video watchers had plans of the shopping centre marked with the camera zones, and Kathy began with a tape for zone 16, in which Cuddles was located, and covering the early afternoon period. The screen began sequencing through four views of the mall, each held for a few seconds in turn. She identified the view that corresponded with the area outside the soft toy store, and fast forwarded to the time at which she had seen the figure in the mall.
But he wasn’t there. She found the right time, for in one of the short sequences she saw herself emerge from the shop, and Mrs Rutter waving an arm at her, but by then the man she was after had disappeared off the bottom
