When Dillon left, Jack was pleased to see that the spring was back in his friend’s step and that he seemed less burdened than he had when the meeting started. Maybe the pep talk had helped, or maybe it was just the fact that Jack had given him some actions to occupy his mind. Either way, it was better than seeing Dillon torture himself over something that wasn’t his fault.
Jack walked out into the main office and switched the TV on, hoping to catch the main news. Unfortunately, the closing credits were already rolling, but he decided to hang on for the regional BBC bulletin to see what that said about the incident.
Sure enough, the show opened with a tantalisingly brief segment on the murder of a police officer and the killer’s dramatic escape in the hijacked air ambulance. The presenter promised there would be more on that story later, but viewers would first have to endure lacklustre pieces about a James Bond look-alike contest, a local authority that had painted some yellow lines around a row of parked cars and promptly ticketed them, a dog that could sing, and an inner London school that was in deep shit with OFSTED because of its sub-standard performance figures.
Jack decided to give it a miss.
He meandered along the corridor until he came to the main office for Andy Quinlan’s team, where he stopped and peeked through the door. Where his own team’s office was deserted, Andy’s was a buzzing hive of activity. There wasn’t a spare seat anywhere, and officers were talking animatedly on telephones, hurriedly typing reports up on their computers, filling out forms and generally rushing around trying to get the job done. It was always like this when a new job broke – manic, but with a great sense of purpose. He loved it, and he was a little disappointed that Andy had got to keep this job, even though it made perfect operational sense, seeing as he was about to go into the frame anyway, and he had been the SIO for Winston’s original arrest last year.
Jack found himself at a bit of a loss. Although his team was assisting Andy’s, there was nothing for him to do. An investigation only required one DCI, and he could hardly start peering over Andy’s shoulder every few minutes; it would look like he was trying to muscle in and take over. With a heavy sigh, Jack turned around and wandered back to his office. He would call Andy for a quick chat, just to see how he was getting on, and then he would head off home. Dillon would let him know if anything exciting happened.
◆◆◆
They were holed up in a little one-bedroom flat just off Star Lane in Plaistow. It was situated in the basement of a run-down, Victorian terraced house that had been divided into three separate accommodations.
The flat was currently being sub-let by one of Garston’s drug runners, an anemic rat-faced white boy whose name was Rodney Dawlish, although pretty much everyone who knew him called him Rodent. The unflattering nickname had come about as a result of his unfortunate resemblance to a sewer rat. It wasn’t just the protruding upper front teeth or the pointy nose and bushy side-whiskers; it was also his furtive and twitchy mannerisms and the way that he didn’t so much walk as scurry along.
Garston had rung Rodent while the pilot was preparing the helicopter for take-off, and he had ordered the boy to meet them at the edge of the wasteland in which they had subsequently forced the pilot to land. From there, Rodent had driven them straight back to the cramped little flat in his clapped-out Rover 216 hatchback.
Had everything gone smoothly, Garston would have driven Winston straight out of London to the safe house he had rented near the Sussex coast; it was a tiny cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by marshes and well away from prying eyes. Then, after laying low for a couple of days, Winston would have been slipped onto a fishing boat during the hours of darkness and smuggled across the channel. However, following the brawl in the elevator, it had quickly become apparent that Winston wasn’t up to an arduous journey, so he had been forced to recalibrate his plan and call on Rodent’s services instead.
Garston planned to review the situation in the morning, but right now the most important thing was that they were off the streets in a safe location unknown to the police.
Garston took himself on a quick tour of the pokey little flat. In addition to the single grungy bedroom, it consisted of a small living room, an even smaller kitchen, and a mold-infested bathroom with an avocado suite that had gone out of fashion years ago. The rickety toilet was lacking a seat, and there were some horrendous brown stains at the bottom of the bowl. Unbuttoning his zip, he found himself hoping that he wouldn’t need to do more than take a piss while they were there.
After flushing the chain and rinsing his hands, Garston looked around for a towel, but there was none to be seen. Wiping his hands on his trousers, he joined the others in the living room. It was inexcusably messy, and it stank of last night’s Indian takeaway.
“Sorry. Been meaning to clean the place up, but just haven’t got around to it yet,” Rodent said, clearly embarrassed.
With Angela’s help, Garston led Winston along the narrow corridor into the bedroom. He noticed how her tone of voice and demeanour immediately became deferential and compliant in his uncle’s presence, and it grated on him that she was yet to show him this same degree of respect, although he had to admit that her attitude had marginally improved since he’d given her the slap at the hospital.
After undressing him, they laid him down on Rodent’s bed, but it was too small for his giant frame. The middle of the thin
