Murray gave the poor man a whole minute to examine the safe before his impatience got the better of him. “How long is this going to take, Lenny?” he demanded, testily.
“This is a good bit of kit,” the locksmith said, looking up at the detectives. “It’s a Chubbsafes Executive model. These babies have a door thickness of sixty six millimetres and a body thickness of fifty millimetres, and they’re tested to International Standard UL73 Class 350 and NT Fire 017-60.” He said all this as though it should mean something to them, and was disappointed to receive blank looks in return.
“I’m sure that’s all very interesting,” Murray said, sounding bored out of his head, “but the only thing I care about is, can you open the bloody thing or not?”
Lenny snorted as though he’d never heard anything so ridiculous in all his life. “Course I can. I’ll have you know there aren’t too many locks that I can’t open after all these years in the business,” he announced with great pride.
“Well get a move on then,” Murray said, irritably snapping his fingers at the locksmith. “We haven’t got all day.”
“Give me a chance,” Lenny shot back. “I’ve only bleedin’ just got here.”
Leaving them to it, Bull wandered back to the warmth of the pool car where Kelly was topping and tailing the paperwork for the search. So far, all they had seized was the bucket of spent cartridge cases and an innocuous-looking thick green book that had been buried at the bottom of the filing cabinet underneath a load of far-right extremist literature.
The book was in a clear plastic evidence bag waiting for Kelly to seal it up. Slipping on a new pair of nytril gloves, he carefully removed it and folded it open at the page containing the latest entries.
“What are you doing?” Kelly asked. “I’m just about to index that and seal it up.”
“I need to take a quick look first,” Bull said. “Just in case there’s anything in it that the boss needs to know about in fast time.”
“Okay, but hurry up,” she told him. “I don’t like having loose exhibits inside the car.
Despite his many other faults, Charlie Dobson’s bookkeeping was immaculate. The book was neatly divided into bought and sold ledgers. In the first, every single outlay the skinhead had made over the past year was meticulously itemised. However, it was the sold ledger that grabbed Bull’s attention. The last entry was dated Thursday 6th January at nine p.m. It read: Two Brocock ME38s at £300 each plus a free box of .22. Paid in cash by D.G. Tested prior to sale by client.
Steve felt his heart rate increase. If this meant what he thought it did, it was pure gold. “Kelly, take a look. What do you think this means?”
Kelly leaned over, read the entry and raised an eyebrow. “DG could stand for Deontay Garston, I suppose,” she speculated.
“I reckon it does, and if Garston test fired the two guns in that lockup the spent cartridges ought to be in amongst all the others that were swept into the bucket we’ve seized.”
“Makes sense,” Kelly agreed.
Steve let out a low whistle. “If there are spent cartridge cases in that bucket from the gun Winston used to kill PC Morrison, we’ll be able to match the hammer marks on them to the murder weapon once we’ve recovered it.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Kelly cautioned him. “We’ve got to recover it first.”
Steve nodded. “True, but I’m confident we will, and then the FSS can test fire the weapon and compare the striations on that slug against the ones on the bullet that was removed from PC Morrison’s brain during the post mortem.”
Striation marks are caused by a bullet passing through a gun’s barrel during discharge, and they are totally unique to that weapon. The same was true of the mark a firing pin left in the back of a cartridge case when the trigger was pulled.
One of the things the Forensic Science Service at Lambeth in South London would do as part of the ballistic investigation was run the striation and firing pin data they retrieved through the National Ballistics Intelligence Service - or NABIS for short – to see if there were any matches against weapons that had been involved in previous shootings. Steve was convinced that the gun used on PC Morrison was a new weapon, but some of the other cartridge cases might have come from firearms that had, by now, been in circulation for a while.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Steve said as the cogs in his brain worked overtime. “If Dobson, his mates or Garston have handled the cartridges in that bucket, we’re going to get fingerprints and or DNA from them.”
“Assuming they weren’t wearing gloves,” Kelly pointed out.
Steve shook his head emphatically. “They won’t have worn gloves here. This is their safe place, and they won’t ever have expected us to find it.”
Hardly able to contain his excitement, Steve was just reaching for his phone to let Tyler know when he caught sight of Murray waving at him out of the corner of his eye.
He nudged Kelly’s arm. “Looks like lisping Lenny has opened the safe,” he told her. “Coming for a look?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Kelly said, grinning like she was on her way to a party, “but why do you call him that?”
Steve grinned mischievously. “Trust me, as soon as he speaks it’ll become self-explanatory.”
Jumping out of the car, they pulled their coats tight against their bodies to keep out the wind, lowered their heads, and set off towards the comparative shelter of the lockup.
“What have we got?” Bull asked excitedly, looking from Murray to the locksmith.
“Have a look for yourself,” Murray said, standing aside.
Bull knelt down next to the locksmith and peered inside.
There were two shelves, both of which were crammed full of stuff.
“Use this,” Lenny offered, handing over a pencil torch.
“Thanks,”
