head for months and no one’ll touch the cash. They need to be opened properly.’
He pushed Gunk back, not in any way worried by Gunk’s powerful body and mean temper. Crane knew he could deal with Gunk, no problem.
‘ Don? How long?’ Crane asked Smith.
‘ He’ll be here in half an hour — so in the meantime I suggest we all get changed and showered in the bogs back there. Get the clothing back into the plastic bags, get all the weapons and ammo together, then let’s chill out.’
‘ Shit!’ said Thompson irritably. He too was fired up by the sight of all that money, so near, yet so far.
‘ He’s right,’ Drozdov agreed with Crane. ‘Let the expert do it when he arrives. We’ve come this far. Waiting another half hour will not do us harm.’
FB revelled in his rank. He loved strutting around Headquarters, barking at people, ordering them around and being generally unpleasant. He was not a people person, but a hard taskmaster who pushed himself even harder than his subordinates. But such power and drive did have its upside because within minutes of returning to HQ, FB had turfed a handful of Human Resource managers out of a room they had been using for a meeting in the LEC building adjacent to Headquarters and declared it to be the hub of Operation Head Hunt — the first name that sprang to his whirling mind.
Henry and Danny looked on rather shamefacedly as the HR managers collected their belongings and shuffled out, shooed along by FB with words and phrases like, ‘Too many bloody meetings these days anyway,’ and ‘Not enough focus on operational policing,’ and ‘I’m not even sure what you lot do, anyway.’
They left bristling with annoyance. FB basked in their reactions.
When they were gone, the ACC turned to the two detectives.
‘ Down to you,’ he said, and left.
‘ Thanks a fucking bunch,’ Henry said to himself. He sat down heavily, no enthusiasm in him at all. He examined the room. The LEC–Local Emergency Centre — building is a single-storey construction, consisting of a series of rooms which, in the event of a large-scale disaster, incident or emergency, would be staffed by the relevant people from the Police, Fire and Ambulance Services, together with representatives from other agencies. It is geared up to handle such an occurrence in terms of communications and facilities. In between times, the rooms are used by whoever needs them, for whatever purpose — such as an HR managers’ meeting.
Two phones were already installed, together with a fax machine. Points for dozens of others to be put in were available. Flipcharts and dry-wipe boards were dotted around the room.
Henry picked up one of the phones and spoke to the Duty Officer in Control Room. His staff were now back in place following the bomb alert. Henry informed him of his presence and function in the LEC and asked him to forward any information which might be of relevance — particularly reports of large-scale crime in the county.
Coffee and tea were brought into the room. Henry poured himself a large black coffee and sipped it ruminatively while he tried to clear his thoughts. Everything had happened so quickly over the last hour and a half — from the emotional outburst aimed at Danny, to the explosion, to the decapitation, to this: running an Incident Room when there hadn’t even been an incident, a Non-incident Room, perhaps. Ridiculous. It was all assumptions and guesses.
He sighed. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got here.’ He picked up a marker pen and went to one of the dry-wipe boards on the wall. He rubbed it clean with the side of his fist. ‘Other than nothing,’ he added.
‘ Three things to start with: the hoax calls to Control Room and Lancaster Comms. Then the explosion.’
He began to write.
‘ Callum Riley, a gun,’ Danny prompted. ‘Riley’s previous convictions, linked to Billy Crane’s MO.’
‘ And I’ve seen Crane recently. He has connections with Gary Thompson and Gunk Elphick, two Manchester thugs, and a Russian guy, Drozdov, an active member of the Russian Mafia.’ Henry scribbled the names up, as well as Don Smith’s. He looked at what he’d written. ‘But it’s all conjecture and doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘ Yet.’
Henry shrugged — a gesture which was starting to annoy Danny intensely. All it said to her was, ‘I don’t care’ — a defeatist attitude which was not Henry at all. It reminded her starkly that she and he had unfinished personal business to attend to.
‘ What else have we got?’ she thought out loud, trying to inject some enthusiasm into her voice.
‘ Nothing.’ Henry sat down, looking like he was bored rigid.
‘ Give that to me.’ Danny snatched the marker pen from his hand. She stood by the board, reading what was on it, then reached up and wrote, Operation Head Hunt along the top, but knew the name would have to be changed. It was completely inappropriate, just the kind of thing she would have expected from FB. She underlined the words with a squiggle. Then she drew a ring around the words ‘Lancaster Comms’.
‘ Why Lancaster Comms?’ she probed Henry and the room.
‘ Why not Blackburn? Why not Blackpool?’
Henry remained dumb, uninterested.
‘ Come on,’ she urged, ‘we’re supposed to be detectives. We’re supposed to come up with things. Ideas. Hypotheses.’
‘ Yeah, I’m sorry.’ He rocked forwards and stood up. ‘There should be a map of the county in one of these cupboards.’ He opened a few until he found a large rolled-up map which he spread open on a table-top. He pinned it down with two cups and two saucers. He took another marker pen and drew a ring around Lancaster and another around Hutton, location of Headquarters.
Danny sidled up next to him, arm to arm.
‘ What’ve we got?’ he said. ‘Lancaster: covers the port of Heysham, two nuclear power stations, Glasson Dock, the Duke of Westminster’s house, the M6, one or two MPs’ and ex-MPs’ homes; Royals visit the area regularly — officially and unofficially. There’s lots of banks, building societies, and other financial institutions in the towns.’
‘ And Control Room,’ said Danny, picking up the train of thought, ‘Controls the Force radio network and deploys patrols on the motorways — the M6, M55, M65 and M61.’
‘ Common denominator?’
‘ The M6,’ said Danny quickly. ‘That’s the first thing that strikes me. It runs through Northern Division and Control Room look after it.’
Annoyingly, Henry shrugged again. Danny ignored it this time, but glanced up at him. He’d gone distant again. She nudged him hard in the ribs.
He looked into her eyes. A flicker of excitement shivered through her as he spoke. ‘If this is all linked together, and we’re not just wasting our time, then I have a good idea what this is all about.’
Danny waited.
‘ Money,’ he said.
The next visitor turned up on time. Smith greeted him at the door of the warehouse. Everyone else stayed out of sight in the office. They had all showered and changed back into their original clothing. Their ‘operating gear’ had been bagged up in black plastic bin liners, the guns and ammunition put in a holdall. The weapons which had been fired were wrapped separately in plastic bags inside the holdall. Smith was going to arrange the disposal of the clothing and guns later that day.
As Crane, Drozdov, Thompson and Elphick sipped coffee, Smith introduced the man to his task.
‘ Can you do it?’
‘ Easy peasey.’ The man, who was only young, in his mid-twenties, placed a small toolkit down by his side. He opened it and took out a cordless drill into which he inserted a thin bit. ‘First one?’ he said.
Smith dragged one of the money cases out of the Sherpa, put it on the floor. The man knelt down and started work.
Henry picked up a phone and punched in the extension number of the Duty Officer, Control Room, again.
‘ Have you been notified of any large movements of cash today, up and down the motorway?’ Henry knew it was procedure for many security companies to inform police forces if unusually large amounts of money were being carried around or through their areas.
