Payne opened the door. The WPC was waiting there, her back to the wall. ‘Everything okay?’ she said.
‘Everything’s fine,’ said Payne, cheerfully. ‘Mrs Kerr might need a few seconds to get herself together. She’s had an emotional time.’
‘Superintendent Hargrove would like a word with you on your way out, sir,’ said the WPC. ‘Third door on the left.’
Payne walked down the corridor, knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a response. There were three men in the room. Payne knew one, Christopher Thornton, a portly lawyer who worked for the Crown Prosecution Service. ‘Christopher, hi, I’m looking for Superintendent Hargrove.’
‘That would be me,’ said the tallest of the three. He was in his mid-forties, his hair greying at the temples, a professional smile on his lips. He was wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit with a pale blue shirt and gold cufflinks in the shape of cricket bats. His grip was firm when he shook Payne’s hand. ‘Christopher Thornton you know, and this is Chief Inspector Wainer of the Drugs Squad.’
‘I’ve heard of the chief inspector, of course,’ said Payne.
Wainer nodded curtly, but didn’t offer his hand.
‘May I assume that your client will be co-operating fully?’ said Hargrove.
‘She wants to sleep on it.’
‘I was hoping for something a bit more concrete,’ said the superintendent. ‘We’d like to put things in motion as quickly as possible.’
‘I have a question, actually,’ said Thornton. ‘You are acting for Mrs Kerr and solely for Mrs Kerr?’
‘What are you suggesting?’ said Payne.
‘Because any deal we make with Mrs Kerr depends on us proceeding in secrecy,’ said Thornton. ‘We’ll need her to help collate evidence.’
‘You want her to wear a wire?’
‘Possibly,’ said Wainer. ‘It’s one of our options.’
‘You know what her husband will do if he finds her with one?’
‘It might not come to that,’ said Hargrove. ‘She could give us the numbers of any mobiles he uses and we could access them through GCHQ.’
‘But back to the point I was making,’ said Thornton. ‘Anything you’ve heard today has to stay within these four walls. Angie Kerr’s life is on the line.’
Payne gave Thornton a withering look. ‘I’m well aware of the danger my client is in,’ he said, ‘and I don’t need to remind you that it was the police who put her in the firing line. What you’ve done was perilously close to entrapment.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hargrove.
‘Please don’t insult my intelligence, Superintendent,’ said Payne. ‘You have my client and the hitman on tape, which means you knew about the meeting in advance. That suggests either very long-term surveillance of the man in question, or that he was co-operating with you. Either way, you were clearly giving my client enough rope to hang herself.’
‘She paid fifteen grand up front to have her husband killed,’ said Wainer.
‘Which begs the question, why didn’t you arrest her then?’ said Payne.
‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ said Hargrove, impatiently. ‘Your client is on tape commissioning a murder. If she co-operates with us, she can walk away from that. But she has to help us nail her husband. The ball’s in your court and,frankly, I’m losing my patience.’
‘And, as I’ve already told you, my client will sleep on it. We’ll talk again in the morning.’ Payne smiled. ‘Maybe things will be a little clearer then. Now, I’ve got another meeting so I’ll bid you farewell.’ He left the room. Things would definitely be clearer in the morning.
The two teenage girls blasted away at the Zombies, cheering as skulls exploded and green slime splattered across the screen. ‘Die, you bastard!’ yelled one. She was a blonde in khaki cargo pants and a tight black top, clearly braless. Her friend was a brunette, hair cropped. Shepherd watched. The girls were skilled at the game, chatting to each other as they fired. Flying monsters swooped down and the girls blew them away, giggling as they exploded into bloody segments.
‘You want something, Granddad?’ said the blonde, looking over her shoulder at Shepherd. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen but even so he thought it was an unfair thing to say.
‘Enjoy yourselves, girls,’ he said.
‘Wanker,’ said the brunette.
Shepherd walked away, his hands in his pockets. At the far end of the amusement arcade there was a line of football video games. Shepherd walked slowly along them, scanning the faces of the teenagers playing them. None matched those on the CCTV pictures. One scowled at him, and he headed for the exit. He knew that a man in his thirties prowling around an amusement arcade could easily have people drawing the wrong conclusions.
He popped in his radio earpiece, then walked out to a mezzanine area where he could look down at the ground floor. A mother and father were buying ice creams for their three children, the whole family wearing backpacks decorated with the Stars and Stripes.
His earpiece crackled. ‘I have a visual on Snow White,’ said a voice. It was Nick Wright. ‘She’s with two IC Three males on the second floor.’
There was another huge amusement arcade up there. Shepherd headed for the escalator, slipping out the earpiece. He found Wright at the entrance to the arcade. He looked as out of place as Shepherd felt. The Trocadero was a known haunt of paedophiles and rent-boys, and several teenage boys had smiled invitingly at Shepherd as he’d been wandering around.
Shepherd took a ten-pound note out of his wallet and went to a change machine. As he fed in the note he looked around casually. Snow White was watching two black teenagers dancing to a rap tune on a dance machine, matching their movements to instructions on two video screens. She was wearing the same camouflage top she’d had on in one of the CCTV pictures and her phone was on a strap round her neck.
Shepherd scooped up his pound coins and walked round the arcade, looking at the games machines. He strolled out and saw Brian Ramshaw at the far side of the mall, eating an ice cream.
Shepherd took the escalator to the first floor. According to Wright, the gang waited until they were at critical mass before they headed into the tube station. He found a spot where he could watch the escalators and propped himself against a guardrail. His Glock was in a nylon shoulder holster, pressed against his left side. A BTP radio that would operate throughout the Underground system was clipped to his belt; it was connected to his earpiece and a microphone in his cuff.
Another BTP plain-clothes officer was on the ground floor. Tommy Reid was a detective sergeant, the same rank as Wright, but a good ten years older. He’d dressed down for the operation and was wearing a shabby coat tied at the waist with a piece of string, scuffed workboots and a shapeless Burberry-pattern hat with a red fishing fly stuck into the side. He was carrying a brown-paper bag that looked as if it held a bottle. A uniformed security guard had twice asked him to move away from shop fronts and now he was standing just inside the main entrance.
He made brief eye-contact with Shepherd and raised his bag in salute, then sat down with his back against the wall. Reid’s disguise was faultless, and the broken red veins on his nose suggested he was no stranger to strong drink.
Then Shepherd stiffened. He had recognised two boys on the escalator. One was an IC Three male in an Arsenal T-shirt. The other was the mixed-race thirteen-year-old. The youngster was wearing a light blue top with the hood up but Shepherd had glimpsed his face. He raised his cuff to his mouth. ‘First floor, two suspects on the escalator heading for the second floor,’ he whispered.
‘I have them,’ said Wright.
At the bottom of the escalator, also going up, was a young woman in tight jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket. She was one of the BTP’s undercover officers.
Shepherd stayed where he was for five minutes, then wandered around checking reflections in shop windows. He saw another female undercover officer walking out of an amusement arcade.
‘They’re on the way down,’ said Wright’s voice in Shepherd’s ear.
A few seconds later Shepherd saw Snow White and half a dozen young men standing in a group on the down escalator, blocking it so that no one could walk past them. They were laughing and Snow White was smoking a
