‘Two weeks.’
That was enough for Tina. They were too far away for the Kalamans to get to them, and therefore no longer a concern. She made small talk with Tom for a while, said she was going to have a family barbecue for all of them when they got back, then finally rang off, feeling relieved but still very, very angry at the way she’d just been treated.
The anger simmered away in her for another couple of hours as she continued ploughing through the paperwork, until finally it was time to get ready to go and pick up Ray’s passport and driving licence so he could be on his way, hopefully to a place where the many people hunting him wouldn’t be able to find him. After what had happened earlier, she wasn’t taking any chances. Slipping off the loose-fitting sweatshirt she’d travelled here in, she put on a light, custom-fitted Kevlar vest that she’d bought online from a specialist US-based company, before putting the sweatshirt back on over the top, and adding a summer jacket, so that there was no way anyone could tell she was wearing it. She put the can of CS gel in one of the jacket’s outside pockets where it was easily in reach, then left the office by the back entrance.
Having adopted her usual anti-surveillance techniques, she drove a round-about route into Hounslow through unusually heavy traffic and found a parking spot on a quiet tree-lined road about half a mile from where Zafir Rasaq lived.
Tina’s job often required her to follow people, mainly errant spouses suspected by their partners of having affairs, and in the four years she’d been a PI she’d become very good at getting documentary evidence of their activities, even if sometimes it took her a while. In order to avoid being spotted by the more eagle-eyed of the people she was tracking, she’d also become something of a master of disguise. She had a variety of wigs and props, and with some carefully applied makeup she always amazed herself at the ease with which she became a completely different person, enjoying the anonymity it gave her.
There was no way she wanted either Rasaq or the men she was collecting the documents from to see her real face so she opened a bag on the car’s passenger seat, took out what she needed and, using the rear-view mirror, spent the next twenty minutes transforming her appearance into that of a demure, olive-skinned Muslim woman wearing a black hijab to keep her hair covered, and big black sunglasses.
She checked herself in the mirror, concluded there was no way she’d ever be recognized, and got out of the car, pulling a cheap burner phone she’d never used before from her pocket.
It was time to call Zafir Rasaq.
21
‘So what have we got, Mr Bolt?’ asked DCS Sheryl Trinder.
Trinder was Mike Bolt’s boss, a short, tough, ambitious black woman with more than thirty years on the job, and a definite eye for the NCA director’s role. Consequently she was a hard taskmaster, who expected a lot from the people under her, including some very long hours. But she was also fair and honest, and Bolt respected her, even if he didn’t much like her. And now, at the end of a Saturday afternoon, with the sun shining outside the window, almost mocking him with its hint of what the seaside could have been like today, he was sitting in her office giving her an update.
‘The man on the captured CCTV image looks a lot like Ray Mason,’ he told her, passing a photocopy across the desk. ‘As you can see, he’s done the classic of shaving his head, growing a beard, and throwing on a pair of glasses, which would be enough to confuse people who don’t know what they’re looking for. But I’m certain it’s him. We’ve released the photo to the media, and it should already have been made public.’
DCS Trinder examined the photo, which had been blown up so that it showed a close-up of the suspect’s face. ‘That’s definitely Mason.’ She shook her head. ‘The Kalamans are going to be really after him now. The word is, they already had a half-million-pound bounty on his head while he was in prison. God knows what they’re going to increase it to now.’
Bolt thought of Tina then, and hoped she’d been telling him the truth, because if she was mixed up in all this and helping Mason, she was potentially in a lot of danger. ‘Then it’s important we get to him first,’ he said. ‘We know he had help breaking out. And the chances are someone’s helping him now.’
‘The person who springs to mind is Tina Boyd,’ said Trinder.
‘We spoke to Tina this morning,’ said Bolt, ‘and she gave us permission to search her house. There wasn’t any sign that Mason had been there, and she claimed not to have seen or heard from him since his escape.’
‘And where was she last night?’
‘She refused to say. I think it was because she was pissed off that she was under suspicion. But we checked her car’s movements on the ANPR and she made a journey on the M25 yesterday night to somewhere in west Essex. It wasn’t possible to get an exact location because it’s a pretty rural area, but it’s also a long way from where the getaway car was last seen.’
Trinder frowned. ‘Do you think we need to put her under surveillance?’
Bolt had been thinking about that a lot. ‘I don’t think so at the moment. She’s hugely surveillance-savvy after everything that’s happened to her, so we’d need twelve-strong teams round the clock to make it effective, and there’s no evidence that she’s been helping Mason. In my opinion, we should keep an eye on her movements on the ANPR and if anything turns
