Destroying Angel
By Stuart Slade
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London.
Sir Humphrey Appleday helped himself to his fifth glass of sherry of the morning and wondered if he could arrange a comparatively pleasant and comforting conversation with Agnes Moorehouse instead of his scheduled meeting. Across the beautifully-decorated room, Commissioner Chris Keeble was hard put to conceal his glee at the sight of a greatly discountenanced Cabinet Secretary. "Something the matter, Sir Humphrey?"
"I was merely considering the variety of unfortunate outcomes that might be precipitated, directly or indirectly of course, by us once again having to request the assistance of two parties, one of whom has an unfortunate tendency to disrupt the continuity of good government by an excessively detailed and pedantic examination of issues and the resulting discovery of information that would better remain buried in the workings of the Civil Service while the other looks upon said orderly government and properly-constituted procedure as objects of example that should be eliminated by a prolonged sequence of expertly-aimed pistol shots, said shots being made on sight if not sooner."
"How is Heather doing by the way?" The truth was that Keeble rather missed Heather Watson after she had been exiled to Cheltenham as a result of very nearly getting herself shot dead by Angel. He appreciated that her removal had been as much to save her from that fate as to ensure a fitting rebuke for the poor judgment and basic lack of soundness demonstrated when she had managed to put herself in such an invidious position in the first place.
Sir Humphrey drained his glass of sherry and contemplated the virtues of another. They were, he considered, definitive and thus he refilled his glass with celerity. "I was down at our establishment in Cheltenham last week in pursuit of various miscellaneous duties that fall within the remit of my responsibilities vis-à-vis the security services, and found her in the process of making the tea for an administrative meeting attended by the more junior staff whose participation in the decision-making process was restricted to matters that would normally be described as mundane. I found it most perplexing that she still does not comprehend how close she came to gaining the unique distinction of being dispatched on a permanent, non-pensionable basis by multiple gunshot wounds while still in the precincts of the Cabinet Office. I sincerely believe that she had only a second or so before she would have found an unambivalent set of answers to the eternal celestial questions that have confounded human philosophy."
"Much less than a second. If Conrad hadn't called Angel off, we would have had a major problem here. You're not doing either of them justice though, Conrad straightened the war-claims tribunal business out very well and managed to resolve the issues without too much of an outcry. While he did so, Angel's tutoring of the Thames Valley police may have been unconventional but it has been an absolute success and helped us avoid a potentially serious problem with law enforcement here. Anyway, it’s much better to have her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in." Keeble was interrupted by the telephone ringing.
"Your visitors are here, Sir Humphrey. They are on their way up." The receptionist sounded slightly smug, being well aware that these two visitors in particular caused Sir Humphrey an entirely disproportionate degree of angst.
There was a brief knock on the door and then Conrad opened it to usher Angel through. "Good morning, Sir Humphrey, Chris. How is everything?"
Angel looked at Keeble and nodded briefly, then at Sir Humphrey, lifting an eyebrow. "Whatever you have here must be serious."
Conrad seated her while Sir Humphrey collected a glass of Bacardi 151 and an Armagnac brandy. "Chris, perhaps you could enlighten our visitors on the rather unusual law enforcement situation we face giving due attention, in as far as that is possible bearing in mind we have only very limited and superficial information ourselves, to the various aspects of the problems and the impact they might have on the policing situation within the confines of the United Kingdom while also covering how Angel and Conrad's talents might be of assistance to us in preventing the worst manifestations of the underlying situation becoming more fully developed."
"He never stops does he?" Angel directed the remark at Conrad. "Chris, for pity's sake tell us what is going on will you?"
"Certainly. Recently we have become aware of a statistical anomaly in the crime figures we have been receiving as part of the annual reports of the various police regions. Mostly, the levels of violent crime have been dropping steadily, even in Metropolitan London where there has historically always been a law enforcement problem. As you might expect, Thames Valley crime rates have plummeted recently and the other police regions that are following their example are seeing the same. All except the West Country Division. Their murder figures, in particular, have risen steeply in recent years. Now, West Country consists of the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorsetshire and Somerset. They have had 321 murders in the last five years and the death rate is accelerating."
"I've never been there." Angel made the point very firmly.
"I know." Keeble managed to make the confirmation sound as if it had been the first thing he had checked. Which was correct, it had.
Angel nodded, satisfied that the significance of her skill-set was being recognized. "Anyway, that's only about sixty a year. Doesn't seem unreasonable."
"It is for here. It's way above the national average. Anyway, it gets odder. We looked a little deeper and found that nearly all those 321 murders took place in Somerset. Of the four counties in West Country division, Cornwall, Devon and Dorset accounted for less than ten of the total. Not ten percent, ten. That is about the national average. So we looked at Somerset a bit closer. Turns out, it's not the whole county. Of the three police districts, East and West Somerset are average, North Somerset, that's the rub. Nearly all these murders are concentrated there."
"What is your solution rate?" Angel asked the question that was most relevant to her. The truth was she really didn't regard a murder rate of around sixty a year as being unusual. Until very recently, she had killed more people a year than that by herself. Since she had been in business for twenty years, people who knew her well enough to do the mathematics tended to be very wary of her.
"That's the odd thing, Angel." Keeble was one of those who was circumspect about her even though he recognized she had done an excellent job in rooting out the overly-aggressive policing habits that had drifted in from America. He also knew that she was regarded with respect bordering on affection by the Thames Valley police officers she had worked with. "The clear-up rate is very high; in nearly all the cases in question, the murderer or murderers were arrested, tried and sent to prison. Or, to a secure mental facility which, bearing in mind the details of some of the cases, was considered more appropriate."
"How so?" This time it was Conrad who asked the question. He had pictures of people being sent to secure medical institutions because a case could not be sustained any other way.
"Because the details of the killings have been peculiar in the extreme. One victim was staked out in his garden and bombarded with catapult-launched wine bottles. Another was soaked in truffle oil and thrown into a pig-pen. We even had a couple guillotined. And nearly all the victims were involved in some form of vice. Adultery, prostitution, gambling, blackmail, even brother-sister incest. There's a pattern there but we just can't make it out. Anyway, the DCI in that sub-region has become a star performer at putting these crimes together and finding the guilty parties."
Conrad looked up from the notes he was taking. "Who is he?"
"Detective Chief Inspector Barnstable. A bit of an odd character; he was a 'Six" agent back in the early nineties but got thoroughly blown after an op went badly wrong. So, he was pensioned off and given a retirement job in the West Country division. North Somerset sub-region seemed like an ideal place to put a man out to pasture. Back then it seemed quiet, the sort of place where nothing ever happened. To be honest it was a bit of an Omega division. You know, the place we put people who aren't good enough to make it anywhere else. Barnstable's Detective Sergeant, Tony Gavin, is like that. Not corrupt or anything, just not very bright. Terrible driver as well.
"Anyway, for some reason those two seem to have really clicked as a detective team." Keeble decided to take a chance and make a joke. "Bit like you and Angel, an incredibly unlikely partnership that actually works well and is very productive."
Angel shot an inquiring glance at Conrad who hastened to explain. "He's being complimentary."
"All right, he can live then." Angel saw Keeble gulp and gave Conrad a half-wink, letting him know she really was just pulling Keeble's leg. Conrad was slowly getting confirmation of something he had long suspected; that Angel actually amused herself by exploiting by the trepidation with which she was regarded by people who met her. "So, if the cases are being solved, what is the problem?"
It was Angel who answered. "They're worried that the murder rate in this mid-Somerset place isn't particularly high or abnormal; it's that equivalent crimes elsewhere are going undetected. They believe that, probably a legacy of the Occupation, people don't tell the police what is going on. That's wrong by the way; people don't tell the police about problems because they don't believe anything will be done. We're addressing that in Thames Valley right now."
"That's right, Angel." Keeble reminded himself that Angel wasn't stupid; within her area of expertise, she had an unusually alert and highly-focused mind. That was especially so now that she was working to correct the lack of basic education that had held her back for so many years. "We don't believe that we're missing criminal activity on this scale, not at this level anyway, but we don't know that is the case. One we're satisfied that we're right in that belief, we're left with the question of what the devil is going on in North Somerset?"
"You need to look at something else as well." Conrad was running over the implications of the situation in his mind. "Are the people who have been arrested and charged with these murders actually the guilty parties? We all know that there is an established tradition of police forces in less-enlightened parts of the world fitting up a convenient suspect to keep their clearance record high."
Sir Humphrey bristled at the implications. This is exactly what I had feared. Conrad's obsession with defending innocent people is going to disrupt the processes of orderly government. Again.
"He did say 'less-enlightened police forces' Humpty." Keeble had got in first which won him a smile of approval from Angel. Whether it was a genuine smile or one of the reflexes she had learned from Conrad to hide her psychopathy was something he couldn't be sure of. He wasn't even sure there was a difference between the two.
"We will need to see all the case files." Conrad was aware of Sur Humphrey's feelings but was not deterred by them.
"All 321 of them?" Sir Humphrey sounded astonished. Conrad simply nodded. "Where are you two staying?"
"The Connaught." Conrad watched Sir Humphrey wince at the mention of one of the most expensive hotels in London. "Can you get the first fifty to us today?"
"Conrad, there's some people I have to see today." Angel was working out schedules. The people she had to see included her own Triad organization, representatives of the London 'Firm' and some other organized crime networks. Mostly, her visits were a courtesy aimed at ensuring her involvement in the investigations weren't misinterpreted, but she also intended to make sure that being asked to look into this business was not going to step on sensitive toes. It was the kind of pre-emptive preparation that had helped to bring an unprecedented spell of peace to the underworld. "I'll be back to help reading files later in the day."
"One other thing, Angel." Keeble had a large envelope in his briefcase. "Your consultancy contract with the Thames Valley Police is up for renewal next month. Your performance review was glowing so we've been authorized to offer you a three-year contract at a five percent increase in your annual fee. If you could sign it and return the original to us? I've also been asked by East Midlands and Wessex Divisions if you can recommend one of your colleagues to do the same for them? Or, preferably find time to do so yourself?"
Upstairs Room, The Whispering Mushroom, Houndsditch, London
"It's right good of yer ter check wiv us first, Angel." Brian Frost took a pull from his pint. "Ah don't want ter waste yor time so Ah'll tell yer straight. We've got nuffink dahn there yer need ter worry about."
"That's good to know, Brian. Any other Firms down in Somerset we should talk to before nosing around?"
Frost thought carefully before answering. " There are a couple of wee firms along the coat. In the ports loik, Bristol an' Weston. Yer know, smugglin'. Nuffink more. Just give them a call and they'll be 'appy, right? Tell’em yer spoke ter me and Ah said ter call them. Tell yer this, we stay out of tha county. They're all stark starin’ mad there. Tha’ place is right dangerous."
“How do you mean?”
“Wot I say, Angel. The bleedin' killings dahn there are all worse than durin' the bloody occupation. We cop to finkin' That Man must 'ave come hammer and tack from the bloody grave. It ain't just the number of killings. Evry one of them is done by weird folk for weird reasons. And they cops nab’em in weird ways, 'alf the chuffin' time we cop to finkin' the bobbies set up the bleedin' blokes they charge but we knows there ain’t none else did the victims in. Any road, so yer work wiv the coppers sometimes don'tya, isit? Wot 'ave they got ter say?”
“They’re worried and that isn’t good for us either. You know what happens when the cops get worried, Brian. They throw their weight around, start interfering with everybody and peaceful, honest villains like us can’t make a living. Everything works best for us all if we keep everything down to a dull roar. We and the cops got a common interest there."
Frost spluttered with laughter. “Peaceful an’onest villains like us! Well, its true innit. Woss gahn on dahn there ain't doin' right good for any bloke. Yer sort out woss gahn on, Angel, yer'll be doin' all of us a favor.
The Carlos Suite, The Connaught Hotel, Mayfair, London.
"How did the meetings go, Angel?" Conrad was getting their rooms sorted out and had arranged the case files in the living room section of the suite. It was a single-bedroom suite with a king-sized bed that would have led any observer to the natural assumption that he and Angel were sleeping together. In reality, he would sleep in the bedroom alone while Angel took the extra bedding and made herself a nest in the living room. That way, if there was an attempt on them, the attackers would be caught by her guns as they crossed the living room while Conrad was safely out of the way. It was improbable that there would be any such attack but Angel was a dedicated believer in preparing for the worst. That was why she was still alive.
"Had a long talk with the Dai-Lo of London House of course." There had been a time when Angel would have been the supplicant at such a meeting, paying substantial tribute for the privilege of a meeting and displaying great respect. Now, she was the senior party who received the respect and deference. She still paid the tribute to London house though although she regarded it as a professional lubricant rather than a required gesture. "They don’t operate in Somerset, or in the West Country at all come to that."
Conrad guessed that meant she would be keeping a careful eye open for any business opportunities for her Triad. That was a natural outgrowth of her ability to construct viable agreements between opposed parties; it extended to finding new grounds for generating profitable enterprises for both. The remarkable thing, given Angel's background, was how she was shepherding the people she worked with away from violent crime and confrontation between gangs and into a more peaceful and mutually cooperative existence. In doing so, she was knowingly making her own profession obsolete. That was something for which Conrad was devoutly grateful. "I swept the rooms by the way. No electronics here that shouldn't be."
Angel nodded. She had taken that for granted although she was pleased that Conrad had thought to make sure. "I also spoke with the London Firm and the Russians. Neither of them have any interests down there either. Not least because the risks are too high and the potential profits too low."
Conrad knew that was the critical point. Angel had taken the concept that organized crime did not exist to commit crimes but to make money for its members to its logical conclusion. Conflict between gangs was expensive, never a profitable enterprise and served only to bring the police down on everybody's heads. Gang wars were a dead loss for everybody involved and the police actions they caused made them an equally dead loss for everybody, even those not involved in the war. It therefore made sense not to have gang wars. It was a simple concept, that everybody benefited from peaceful coexistence, and that profits could thus be maximized by keeping the peace. Also, criminal enterprises should concentrate on those areas that brought in maximum income from minimum costs and with minimum risk. Overt violence served only to reduce income and increase costs and that was better avoided as well. If that meant traditional criminal activities were abandoned, so be it. And if people who committed such crimes insisted on continuing, a helpful telephone call to an efficient police force, providing them with some highly compromising information was a much more effective and less expensive solution than the more traditional killing spree.
Angel went over to their bar and poured herself a Bacardi. "I got you a present Conrad. They have great liquor stores here although they call them off-licenses for some reason. I went into one and their range of Armagnac is damn good. Much better than back home. The owner recommended this one."
She held the bottle up for him to inspect and made a pouring motion. He nodded enthusiastically and she poured out a shot for him. When they had both settled down, she nodded at the files piled up on the table. "So, what do we have?"
"I've only looked through the first of these files but I can see what Chris was getting at. These murders are all, well, odd is the only way to put it." Conrad rooted through the files to one he had marked with a post-it note. "This woman was clawed to death by a falcon, a peregrine falcon no less. It turned out she had killed her sister's husband who was something of an entrepreneur so that his estate would go to his wife. She was then going to kill her sister so that the legacy would pass to her. Only, the planned victim was a keen falconer and when she was attacked, her favorite hunting bird came to her defense and tore the killer's face apart. Killed her of course. Our Inspector Barnstable managed to figure it all out and came to the rescue."
"That's in line with what the people I've been talking with said. Us villains keep out of North Somerset, it's just too dangerous to operate up there." Angel thought for a moment. "In that case you just mentioned, where did the money go, eventually?"
"To the widow. There's something worrying you about all this?"
Angel nodded thoughtfully. "It's what Chris said about these killings. They're all hooked up with various aspects of vice. He mentioned prostitution, gambling, smuggling, drugs etc. Those are all organized crime operations yet none of the people I've been talking to will admit to working those rackets down there. Makes me wonder what is really going on."
"They could have been evasive with you of course."
"They could, but it wouldn’t be sensible for them to do that. That's asking for the kind of conflict we're trying to put behind us." Angel thought for a second. "No, they were being straight with me. There's something else going on here."
2005 - Destroying Angel
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Two
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"We are looking for number 115. It's a single-story ranch-style house. The English call it a bungalow." Conrad was craning around in his seat, trying to read the house numbers.
"Got it." Angel slowed right down and then turned her car into the driveway. "End of the line, all change."
She stood leaning against the front wing of the Rover. It was a plain-clothes SD-4 owned by the West Country Police although it wasn't obviously a police car unless one took into account the spotlight mounted on the driver's door, the internal light bar and dash camera installed to record forward, the two extra radio antennas on the roof, the red and blue lights in the rear window and the words "Police Interceptor" on a small silver plate fixed to the tailgate. Angel had popped the tailgate before getting out of the car, now she was casually keeping watch while Conrad unloaded her overnight bag and his suitcase. The house was owned by the police as well and was officially for the use of local or temporarily-assigned police officers in need of accommodation. Detective Chief Inspector Barnstable, his wife and daughter had lived there before buying their own place.
Satisfied that she and Conrad were not about to be besieged by a horde of peasants with torches and pitchforks, Angel detached herself from the car and unlocked the front door. Conrad put her bag down in the hall with some relief. Being stuffed with boxes of ammunition and spare magazines, it was a lot heavier than his suitcase. The first thing he did was pick up the telephone and dial the number of the West Country Police administration center. "Conrad de Llorente and Special Inspector Angelique de Llorente, just letting you know we've arrived and moved in."
Outside, Angel had locked the car and then checked its total weight and the loading on each wheel displayed on her security pad. Before getting in and starting the engine, she would check the new figures against the previous set. If the vehicle's weight increased by even a small amount or the weight distribution changed, the system would pick it up. It wasn't a perfect defense against car bombs but it was the best precaution that could be arranged. Looking around, she saw that the front garden was slightly unkempt. It was typical of a house that really didn’t belong to any particular person and was used by a series of temporary occupants. The inside matched; it wasn't actually dilapidated or in poor repair and it was very clean. It was just had the forlorn air of a house that had never really been a home to anybody.
"This place is standard, Angel. Bedrooms and bathroom are on the left, kitchen and living rooms on the right. Doors to the outside are front and back. A lot of these were built starting in the 1960s and the design wasn't really changed until the mid-1980s. You can assume everybody knows the internal layout. They're solid compared with American houses. This one has brick outside walls, loadbearing inside walls are brick as well. Some of these were made out of poured concrete but that didn’t work well. Inside, non-lead-bearing walls are plasterboard, it's like our sheetrock.
Angel nodded. The bungalow was solid and thus defensible unless the attackers brought up a heavy machine gun. "Thank you, Conrad. I'll walk around and see what we have here. You know, our condo in Bangkok is much nicer than this place. I'll be glad to get back home."
"Don't let the police hear you say that. Their feelings might be hurt. They like you."
"The guys in Thames Valley do. The rest, not so much." Angel was, as usual, being very realistic. She knew that to most police in Britain, she was a known, if unconvicted, criminal whose final allegiances were, at best, uncertain. Their attitude ranged from grudging acceptance to open hostility. That would apply here as well and was the reason why she was treating the area as hostile territory. On the other hand, quite a few of the West Country division police had sneaked into her Thames Valley training sessions and they knew that, whatever her motives were, her advice was valuable and applying it in their daily work had convinced them that it was sound. Anyway, as her students pointed out to critics, she had not hesitated to risk her life in order to rescue two critically-wounded officers. In any police officer’s eyes, that forgave a multitude of sins.
“How do you want to organize this?” Conrad had no reticence about leaving their security in Angel’s hands. He knew how the expertise in their relationship was apportioned and in this area it wasn’t with him.
Angel looked around. The central feature of the bungalow was a corridor that led from the front to the rear with a door at each end. As Conrad had said, the bedrooms and bathroom were on the left, the bathroom being in the middle. There was a living room at the front on the right with a kitchen behind it. “There’s no good way to do this, Conrad. Either way, you’ll be in a corner room with an outside door next to you. That's good if we have a fire or something of course. I’d rather you stayed in the front; the front door is much heavier than the back one and getting through it will take more time. Gives me time to do something about it."
Conrad nodded glumly. He was very well aware that Angel's 'doing something about it' meant killing all the attackers. Angel may have retired from work as a professional assassin but the abilities, both mental and physical, were still there. He was also aware that they were both alive because of that attitude. "It seems very hard to believe that this place is murder central in Great Britain. It's even more of a traditional English rural county than Marsh Baldon. Time seems to have stopped here."
"Split, not stopped. I was looking at the towns around here. They're old enough, mostly, but there are modern suburbs that were built in the last twenty years or so. By the appearance of the buildings, the occupants are a lot less well-off than the people who live in the older areas. That could be behind some of the situation here. We know that communities like this mistrust newcomers."
"And that if there are enough of them, they can feel threatened by the new arrivals." Conrad finished off the line for her. "It's an old situation, Angel. 'You are not threatened by your neighbors and I am not threatened by mine but you are by mine and I am by yours.' Half the civil wars in history have started that way."
"More than that I would think. Conrad, I have to do my homework, then we can get something to eat. Anywhere good around here?"
"We'll have to go to Taunton. It's only five miles. There's a Zizzi Pizza place that sounds good."
"Sounds great."
Conrad grinned at her. "I thought you would say that. I booked us a table for this evening."
Zizzi Pizza, Taunton, Somerset
"We'll start with two single-serving plates of Fritto Misto please. Decided on your pizza yet, Angel?"
"I'd like the Pollo Rosso Pizza Rustica, please."
"And I'll have the Risotto Pollo Funghi please. And a bottle of your Chardonnay-Catarratto, Sicilia." Conrad folded the menu and handed it to the waitress.
Once they were alone, Conrad relaxed slightly. "How was your homework, Angel? Any problems?"
She shook her head. For over a year now, she'd been making a concerted effort to remedy her almost complete lack of education, starting with her limited ability to read and write. That included working with private tutors when she was at home in Bangkok and taking homework with her when she and Conrad were travelling. "It's getting easier as I practice. I never knew there was so much I just didn't know."
"I'll let you into a secret. 'Lea's the same. Very detailed and comprehensive knowledge within defined limits, not much outside those limits. Her only advantage is that she's had a lot of years to read and learn."
He broke off as a slightly confused waitress brought the two plates of Fritto Misto. Two people usually ordered a single large plate and shared the contents. The way the pricing was set made that the cost-effective option. What the menu didn’t allow for was that if somebody tried to take food off a plate Angel considered hers and she was in a good mood, she'd break their fingers. And if she's feeling cranky, well, Angel has never understood why she shouldn't kill somebody if it suits her to do so. Conrad reflected on the dangers of living with Angel around and then rebuked himself. He had long ago adjusted to the unusual demands of their friendship and also understood that, thanks to the way she looked out for him, he was safer now than he had ever been in his life. Given the way the world had changed in the last few decades, that was quite an achievement.
"What's the fish, Conrad?" Angel was looking at her plate with anticipation. She'd acquired a taste for fish and other seafood fried in batter since first trying them in Japan years earlier.
"Plaice, it’s a sort of British equivalent to flounder. You've had it before when we bought fish and chips."
"The flat one. Know what you mean now. I like that one." Angel picked up a goujon of plaice with her fork, dipped it and ate. "Mmm, good."
Conrad poured them each a glass of the wine and then sampled his own dish. "You're right, they've done this just right. They've kept the fish moist and not allowed it to dry out."
"We cook all the food fresh for each order, Sir." Their waitress seemed slight affronted by the suggestion her kitchen might do otherwise.
"And splendidly done it is." Conrad took a sip of his wine. "The wine is excellent as well."
Once again, the fact that Angel had an entire pizza to herself caused a certain degree of confusion which was only resolved when she took a slice and started to eat it New York style rather than with a knife and fork. Being identified as an American appeared to be all the justification she needed for slightly odd behavior.
"Excuse me for interrupting but, Angel?" A man had come into the restaurant and, on seeing Angel, detached from his small family party and came over to meet her.
"Ronnie! Haven't seen you for a long time. Conrad this is Ronnie 'The Jaws.' Friend of mine from way back."
Conrad noted that Angel was speaking in her 'prison voice', one that was remarkably difficult to overhear. Conrad couldn't imitate it fully but he had learned to get close. "Have you two shot each other?"
Angel laughed and explained the reference to a meeting during the Bangkok Poisoner case to Ronnie who also erupted into laughter before replying. "Not recently."
Angel pushed a spare plate over. "Sit down, Ronnie and grab a slice."
"Would love to but my wife and kids are waiting. Some other time perhaps. I just wanted to thank you, Angel, for letting us know you'd be down here. Saves people a lot of worry and searching of guilty consciences. You working for your family?"
Conrad knew that the delicate reference was to Angel's membership of the 14K Triad. She shook her head. "Nah, I'm a consultant to the police right now. Look."
She held her warrant card up. "I'm an Inspector. No sweat for you, we're looking at why this place makes Chicago seem peaceful"
Ronnie nodded. "There's something really crook about this place, Angel. Between us villains, right?"
He looked at Conrad questioningly. "It's all right Ronnie, secret of the confessional."
"OK, if you're with Angel you must be kosher. We had a nice little earner going down here. We'd bring in antiques, art, that sort of loot from foreign parts. The little ports along here ain’t got no customs people so we'd just walk it through and store it all here, in an old school. They'd hide it and keep it in good nick and we gave them a kickback for the privilege. Then we'd sell it. Only, there were some killings in that school and the cops got involved. Now, here's the strange bit. They blew our racket all right, but they arrested all the wrong people and nothing they said made any kind of sense to us. Got convictions, too. Right strange all of that was. They got it all wrong and didn’t even look at us. Anyway, you sort that one out, might be a good start for you."
After Ronnie had departed and rejoined his family, Angel munched another slice of pizza and then looked at Conrad. "Wrong people arrested. Now, you should feel a bit better about getting involved in this?"
He grinned back, knowing that she knew he always felt better when he had innocent people to exonerate. "It's somewhere to start, isn’t it."
Angel looked very thoughtful. "If this place has the Mob worried, the there is something seriously bad going on down here."
North Somerset Division Headquarters, West Country Police, Upper High Street, Taunton.
“Good morning Sergeant, I am Inspector Angelique de Llorente and with me is a Home Office Consultant Conrad de Llorente. I believe West Country told you we would be arriving?”
“They did indeed, ma’am. Chief Inspector Barnstable has had an office set up for you. With computers, cyberweb access and datalinks. Welcome to North Somerset. I'm Sergeant Steve Collier.” The Sergeant, an elderly man obviously working out his last posting before requirement, looked gloomily an Angel’s twin Berettas. “No offense ma’am but you may need those. People around here dropping like flies they are.”
“That’s why the Home Office sent us down.” Angel was very well aware that, as soon as the ‘Angelique de Llorente’ identity had been used, ‘Five’ would have picked up on it and passed word back that she and Conrad had arrived safely and started work. “Have we lost any of our own yet?”
The Sergeant shook his head. “There’s no real pattern to the deaths. Just a lot of them. The Coroner was shocked speechless, ee was, when we had a ‘natural causes’. Rechecked the autopsy twice, thinking ee must have missed sumpin."
"Angel, how are you keeping?" A young man in the bland suit of a detective had come out to meet them. "remember me? Detective Sergeant Scott. I sneaked into your lectures up at Thames Valley."
"So that's where you kept vanishing to. We all thought you had a girlfriend." The desk sergeant muttered the words just loud enough for people to hear.
"Of course, Mike." Angel smiled at him. "And how is everything working out?"
"We had a lower death toll here during the Black Death." Scott noticed the brief glimpse of puzzlement on Angel's face although Conrad was chuckling to himself. "The Black Death was a pandemic in the 14th century. Killed about a third of the population of Europe. England got off more lightly than most although the West Country was particularly badly hit, probably because the infection arrived from France here. About a quarter of the population died. We're heading that way now."
Detective Sergeant Scott laughed at that but Conrad noticed an uneasiness in the laughter, as if the Sergeant was joking but was not quite certain whether his joke was not fast becoming reality. "Sergeant Scott . . . . "
"Please, Mike."
"Thank you, Mike. I'm Conrad. I think we met briefly up at Oxford? Anyway, in the Black Death, most of the casualties were in the small villages. Does that apply here?"
"It does, and we'd noticed that as well. Bigger towns seem immune but some of the small villages have murders more than weekly. Look, I'll take you to your office and then down to the Canteen where we can talk. You haven't had breakfast yet have you?" Conrad and Angel shook their heads. "Well you're in for a treat. Farm food in Somerset is better than anywhere else."
"Devon." The Desk Sergeant apparently coughed the word out.
"Now come along, Steve. Devon's got the clotted cream but for bacon and eggs, nobody can beat Somerset."
The standard police canteen breakfast had fat levels that would have appalled Igrat and Naamah but seemed to be ideal for refueling police officers. The canteen had an odd payment system; the cashier weighed their trays and charged by the ounce. Once they had taken their seats, both Conrad and Angel had to concede that Scott had been right; the bacon was excellent and even the eggs seemed to have a better flavor to them than they had experienced before. Scott cut his buttered toast up into strips and dipped them into the still-soft yolks of the eggs. "We call them soldiers," he explained.
Angel was sitting with her back to the wall and in a position where her constantly-scanning eyes could see everything going on. "Mike, what is the crime situation here like, from your point of view?"
He carefully dipped another 'soldier' and bit the yolk-soaked tip off. "Off with his head. It's really strange, Angel. If we don't look at the murder rate around here, this seems like a very peaceful, bucolic county. In fairness, most of the villages are. It's a small sub-section that act like the wild west. I'll give you an example of how trivial most crime is; one of the major investigations around here is an outbreak of bag-snatching. Two kids on a motorcycle see a woman walking alone, ride up behind her at speed and grab her bag. Take the money and throw it away later."
"That's not trivial, Mike." Angel sounded slightly stern; nevertheless she had cut her toast into soldiers and dunked one, being pleasurably surprised by the resulting taste. "Off with his head. Now, they pick on some old lady, the grab pulls her off her feet, she breaks her hip and will probably die. When that sort of thing gets tolerated, the bad people escalate their actions and the good people give up talking to you and either live with it or solve it themselves. Either way, you're losing control of the situation."
Scott glanced around and saw the policemen and women within earshot nodding in agreement. Some were enthusiastic, some were obviously reluctant to agree with Angel, but all were swayed by her signature coldly objective and brutally practical advice. "We're trying, Angel. We've put extra police patrols out, both on foot and in cars but if the snatchers saw them, they just waited until we had to redeploy elsewhere. We thought of putting a policewoman out there as a decoy but our lawyer warned us that using a police officer would be construed as entrapment."
Scott saw Angel roll her eyes slightly and hastened to explain. "It's a residue from the Occupation. The Gestapo and German police were heavily into entrapment and using agent provocateurs and the police back then, well we picked up some very bad habits. So, after the Occupation, Parliament passed really strict laws over what the police can and cannot, mostly the latter, do. We are absolutely not allowed to do anything that might be considered inciting a crime. Since you have been issued with an official warrant card, nor can you."
"So, you have to wait until some poor unsuspecting civilian gets her bag snatched and a police officer happens to arrive soon enough to catch the snatchers, right?"
Scott sighed and nodded. "That's about the size of it."
Then he wondered why Angel was smirking. However, before he could investigate, a policewoman tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me Sergeant, but you asked to be told when Detective Chief Inspector Barnstable was in."
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"We are looking for number 115. It's a single-story ranch-style house. The English call it a bungalow." Conrad was craning around in his seat, trying to read the house numbers.
"Got it." Angel slowed right down and then turned her car into the driveway. "End of the line, all change."
She stood leaning against the front wing of the Rover. It was a plain-clothes SD-4 owned by the West Country Police although it wasn't obviously a police car unless one took into account the spotlight mounted on the driver's door, the internal light bar and dash camera installed to record forward, the two extra radio antennas on the roof, the red and blue lights in the rear window and the words "Police Interceptor" on a small silver plate fixed to the tailgate. Angel had popped the tailgate before getting out of the car, now she was casually keeping watch while Conrad unloaded her overnight bag and his suitcase. The house was owned by the police as well and was officially for the use of local or temporarily-assigned police officers in need of accommodation. Detective Chief Inspector Barnstable, his wife and daughter had lived there before buying their own place.
Satisfied that she and Conrad were not about to be besieged by a horde of peasants with torches and pitchforks, Angel detached herself from the car and unlocked the front door. Conrad put her bag down in the hall with some relief. Being stuffed with boxes of ammunition and spare magazines, it was a lot heavier than his suitcase. The first thing he did was pick up the telephone and dial the number of the West Country Police administration center. "Conrad de Llorente and Special Inspector Angelique de Llorente, just letting you know we've arrived and moved in."
Outside, Angel had locked the car and then checked its total weight and the loading on each wheel displayed on her security pad. Before getting in and starting the engine, she would check the new figures against the previous set. If the vehicle's weight increased by even a small amount or the weight distribution changed, the system would pick it up. It wasn't a perfect defense against car bombs but it was the best precaution that could be arranged. Looking around, she saw that the front garden was slightly unkempt. It was typical of a house that really didn’t belong to any particular person and was used by a series of temporary occupants. The inside matched; it wasn't actually dilapidated or in poor repair and it was very clean. It was just had the forlorn air of a house that had never really been a home to anybody.
"This place is standard, Angel. Bedrooms and bathroom are on the left, kitchen and living rooms on the right. Doors to the outside are front and back. A lot of these were built starting in the 1960s and the design wasn't really changed until the mid-1980s. You can assume everybody knows the internal layout. They're solid compared with American houses. This one has brick outside walls, loadbearing inside walls are brick as well. Some of these were made out of poured concrete but that didn’t work well. Inside, non-lead-bearing walls are plasterboard, it's like our sheetrock.
Angel nodded. The bungalow was solid and thus defensible unless the attackers brought up a heavy machine gun. "Thank you, Conrad. I'll walk around and see what we have here. You know, our condo in Bangkok is much nicer than this place. I'll be glad to get back home."
"Don't let the police hear you say that. Their feelings might be hurt. They like you."
"The guys in Thames Valley do. The rest, not so much." Angel was, as usual, being very realistic. She knew that to most police in Britain, she was a known, if unconvicted, criminal whose final allegiances were, at best, uncertain. Their attitude ranged from grudging acceptance to open hostility. That would apply here as well and was the reason why she was treating the area as hostile territory. On the other hand, quite a few of the West Country division police had sneaked into her Thames Valley training sessions and they knew that, whatever her motives were, her advice was valuable and applying it in their daily work had convinced them that it was sound. Anyway, as her students pointed out to critics, she had not hesitated to risk her life in order to rescue two critically-wounded officers. In any police officer’s eyes, that forgave a multitude of sins.
“How do you want to organize this?” Conrad had no reticence about leaving their security in Angel’s hands. He knew how the expertise in their relationship was apportioned and in this area it wasn’t with him.
Angel looked around. The central feature of the bungalow was a corridor that led from the front to the rear with a door at each end. As Conrad had said, the bedrooms and bathroom were on the left, the bathroom being in the middle. There was a living room at the front on the right with a kitchen behind it. “There’s no good way to do this, Conrad. Either way, you’ll be in a corner room with an outside door next to you. That's good if we have a fire or something of course. I’d rather you stayed in the front; the front door is much heavier than the back one and getting through it will take more time. Gives me time to do something about it."
Conrad nodded glumly. He was very well aware that Angel's 'doing something about it' meant killing all the attackers. Angel may have retired from work as a professional assassin but the abilities, both mental and physical, were still there. He was also aware that they were both alive because of that attitude. "It seems very hard to believe that this place is murder central in Great Britain. It's even more of a traditional English rural county than Marsh Baldon. Time seems to have stopped here."
"Split, not stopped. I was looking at the towns around here. They're old enough, mostly, but there are modern suburbs that were built in the last twenty years or so. By the appearance of the buildings, the occupants are a lot less well-off than the people who live in the older areas. That could be behind some of the situation here. We know that communities like this mistrust newcomers."
"And that if there are enough of them, they can feel threatened by the new arrivals." Conrad finished off the line for her. "It's an old situation, Angel. 'You are not threatened by your neighbors and I am not threatened by mine but you are by mine and I am by yours.' Half the civil wars in history have started that way."
"More than that I would think. Conrad, I have to do my homework, then we can get something to eat. Anywhere good around here?"
"We'll have to go to Taunton. It's only five miles. There's a Zizzi Pizza place that sounds good."
"Sounds great."
Conrad grinned at her. "I thought you would say that. I booked us a table for this evening."
Zizzi Pizza, Taunton, Somerset
"We'll start with two single-serving plates of Fritto Misto please. Decided on your pizza yet, Angel?"
"I'd like the Pollo Rosso Pizza Rustica, please."
"And I'll have the Risotto Pollo Funghi please. And a bottle of your Chardonnay-Catarratto, Sicilia." Conrad folded the menu and handed it to the waitress.
Once they were alone, Conrad relaxed slightly. "How was your homework, Angel? Any problems?"
She shook her head. For over a year now, she'd been making a concerted effort to remedy her almost complete lack of education, starting with her limited ability to read and write. That included working with private tutors when she was at home in Bangkok and taking homework with her when she and Conrad were travelling. "It's getting easier as I practice. I never knew there was so much I just didn't know."
"I'll let you into a secret. 'Lea's the same. Very detailed and comprehensive knowledge within defined limits, not much outside those limits. Her only advantage is that she's had a lot of years to read and learn."
He broke off as a slightly confused waitress brought the two plates of Fritto Misto. Two people usually ordered a single large plate and shared the contents. The way the pricing was set made that the cost-effective option. What the menu didn’t allow for was that if somebody tried to take food off a plate Angel considered hers and she was in a good mood, she'd break their fingers. And if she's feeling cranky, well, Angel has never understood why she shouldn't kill somebody if it suits her to do so. Conrad reflected on the dangers of living with Angel around and then rebuked himself. He had long ago adjusted to the unusual demands of their friendship and also understood that, thanks to the way she looked out for him, he was safer now than he had ever been in his life. Given the way the world had changed in the last few decades, that was quite an achievement.
"What's the fish, Conrad?" Angel was looking at her plate with anticipation. She'd acquired a taste for fish and other seafood fried in batter since first trying them in Japan years earlier.
"Plaice, it’s a sort of British equivalent to flounder. You've had it before when we bought fish and chips."
"The flat one. Know what you mean now. I like that one." Angel picked up a goujon of plaice with her fork, dipped it and ate. "Mmm, good."
Conrad poured them each a glass of the wine and then sampled his own dish. "You're right, they've done this just right. They've kept the fish moist and not allowed it to dry out."
"We cook all the food fresh for each order, Sir." Their waitress seemed slight affronted by the suggestion her kitchen might do otherwise.
"And splendidly done it is." Conrad took a sip of his wine. "The wine is excellent as well."
Once again, the fact that Angel had an entire pizza to herself caused a certain degree of confusion which was only resolved when she took a slice and started to eat it New York style rather than with a knife and fork. Being identified as an American appeared to be all the justification she needed for slightly odd behavior.
"Excuse me for interrupting but, Angel?" A man had come into the restaurant and, on seeing Angel, detached from his small family party and came over to meet her.
"Ronnie! Haven't seen you for a long time. Conrad this is Ronnie 'The Jaws.' Friend of mine from way back."
Conrad noted that Angel was speaking in her 'prison voice', one that was remarkably difficult to overhear. Conrad couldn't imitate it fully but he had learned to get close. "Have you two shot each other?"
Angel laughed and explained the reference to a meeting during the Bangkok Poisoner case to Ronnie who also erupted into laughter before replying. "Not recently."
Angel pushed a spare plate over. "Sit down, Ronnie and grab a slice."
"Would love to but my wife and kids are waiting. Some other time perhaps. I just wanted to thank you, Angel, for letting us know you'd be down here. Saves people a lot of worry and searching of guilty consciences. You working for your family?"
Conrad knew that the delicate reference was to Angel's membership of the 14K Triad. She shook her head. "Nah, I'm a consultant to the police right now. Look."
She held her warrant card up. "I'm an Inspector. No sweat for you, we're looking at why this place makes Chicago seem peaceful"
Ronnie nodded. "There's something really crook about this place, Angel. Between us villains, right?"
He looked at Conrad questioningly. "It's all right Ronnie, secret of the confessional."
"OK, if you're with Angel you must be kosher. We had a nice little earner going down here. We'd bring in antiques, art, that sort of loot from foreign parts. The little ports along here ain’t got no customs people so we'd just walk it through and store it all here, in an old school. They'd hide it and keep it in good nick and we gave them a kickback for the privilege. Then we'd sell it. Only, there were some killings in that school and the cops got involved. Now, here's the strange bit. They blew our racket all right, but they arrested all the wrong people and nothing they said made any kind of sense to us. Got convictions, too. Right strange all of that was. They got it all wrong and didn’t even look at us. Anyway, you sort that one out, might be a good start for you."
After Ronnie had departed and rejoined his family, Angel munched another slice of pizza and then looked at Conrad. "Wrong people arrested. Now, you should feel a bit better about getting involved in this?"
He grinned back, knowing that she knew he always felt better when he had innocent people to exonerate. "It's somewhere to start, isn’t it."
Angel looked very thoughtful. "If this place has the Mob worried, the there is something seriously bad going on down here."
North Somerset Division Headquarters, West Country Police, Upper High Street, Taunton.
“Good morning Sergeant, I am Inspector Angelique de Llorente and with me is a Home Office Consultant Conrad de Llorente. I believe West Country told you we would be arriving?”
“They did indeed, ma’am. Chief Inspector Barnstable has had an office set up for you. With computers, cyberweb access and datalinks. Welcome to North Somerset. I'm Sergeant Steve Collier.” The Sergeant, an elderly man obviously working out his last posting before requirement, looked gloomily an Angel’s twin Berettas. “No offense ma’am but you may need those. People around here dropping like flies they are.”
“That’s why the Home Office sent us down.” Angel was very well aware that, as soon as the ‘Angelique de Llorente’ identity had been used, ‘Five’ would have picked up on it and passed word back that she and Conrad had arrived safely and started work. “Have we lost any of our own yet?”
The Sergeant shook his head. “There’s no real pattern to the deaths. Just a lot of them. The Coroner was shocked speechless, ee was, when we had a ‘natural causes’. Rechecked the autopsy twice, thinking ee must have missed sumpin."
"Angel, how are you keeping?" A young man in the bland suit of a detective had come out to meet them. "remember me? Detective Sergeant Scott. I sneaked into your lectures up at Thames Valley."
"So that's where you kept vanishing to. We all thought you had a girlfriend." The desk sergeant muttered the words just loud enough for people to hear.
"Of course, Mike." Angel smiled at him. "And how is everything working out?"
"We had a lower death toll here during the Black Death." Scott noticed the brief glimpse of puzzlement on Angel's face although Conrad was chuckling to himself. "The Black Death was a pandemic in the 14th century. Killed about a third of the population of Europe. England got off more lightly than most although the West Country was particularly badly hit, probably because the infection arrived from France here. About a quarter of the population died. We're heading that way now."
Detective Sergeant Scott laughed at that but Conrad noticed an uneasiness in the laughter, as if the Sergeant was joking but was not quite certain whether his joke was not fast becoming reality. "Sergeant Scott . . . . "
"Please, Mike."
"Thank you, Mike. I'm Conrad. I think we met briefly up at Oxford? Anyway, in the Black Death, most of the casualties were in the small villages. Does that apply here?"
"It does, and we'd noticed that as well. Bigger towns seem immune but some of the small villages have murders more than weekly. Look, I'll take you to your office and then down to the Canteen where we can talk. You haven't had breakfast yet have you?" Conrad and Angel shook their heads. "Well you're in for a treat. Farm food in Somerset is better than anywhere else."
"Devon." The Desk Sergeant apparently coughed the word out.
"Now come along, Steve. Devon's got the clotted cream but for bacon and eggs, nobody can beat Somerset."
The standard police canteen breakfast had fat levels that would have appalled Igrat and Naamah but seemed to be ideal for refueling police officers. The canteen had an odd payment system; the cashier weighed their trays and charged by the ounce. Once they had taken their seats, both Conrad and Angel had to concede that Scott had been right; the bacon was excellent and even the eggs seemed to have a better flavor to them than they had experienced before. Scott cut his buttered toast up into strips and dipped them into the still-soft yolks of the eggs. "We call them soldiers," he explained.
Angel was sitting with her back to the wall and in a position where her constantly-scanning eyes could see everything going on. "Mike, what is the crime situation here like, from your point of view?"
He carefully dipped another 'soldier' and bit the yolk-soaked tip off. "Off with his head. It's really strange, Angel. If we don't look at the murder rate around here, this seems like a very peaceful, bucolic county. In fairness, most of the villages are. It's a small sub-section that act like the wild west. I'll give you an example of how trivial most crime is; one of the major investigations around here is an outbreak of bag-snatching. Two kids on a motorcycle see a woman walking alone, ride up behind her at speed and grab her bag. Take the money and throw it away later."
"That's not trivial, Mike." Angel sounded slightly stern; nevertheless she had cut her toast into soldiers and dunked one, being pleasurably surprised by the resulting taste. "Off with his head. Now, they pick on some old lady, the grab pulls her off her feet, she breaks her hip and will probably die. When that sort of thing gets tolerated, the bad people escalate their actions and the good people give up talking to you and either live with it or solve it themselves. Either way, you're losing control of the situation."
Scott glanced around and saw the policemen and women within earshot nodding in agreement. Some were enthusiastic, some were obviously reluctant to agree with Angel, but all were swayed by her signature coldly objective and brutally practical advice. "We're trying, Angel. We've put extra police patrols out, both on foot and in cars but if the snatchers saw them, they just waited until we had to redeploy elsewhere. We thought of putting a policewoman out there as a decoy but our lawyer warned us that using a police officer would be construed as entrapment."
Scott saw Angel roll her eyes slightly and hastened to explain. "It's a residue from the Occupation. The Gestapo and German police were heavily into entrapment and using agent provocateurs and the police back then, well we picked up some very bad habits. So, after the Occupation, Parliament passed really strict laws over what the police can and cannot, mostly the latter, do. We are absolutely not allowed to do anything that might be considered inciting a crime. Since you have been issued with an official warrant card, nor can you."
"So, you have to wait until some poor unsuspecting civilian gets her bag snatched and a police officer happens to arrive soon enough to catch the snatchers, right?"
Scott sighed and nodded. "That's about the size of it."
Then he wondered why Angel was smirking. However, before he could investigate, a policewoman tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me Sergeant, but you asked to be told when Detective Chief Inspector Barnstable was in."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Three
Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Sir, the next case is one of robbery with violence, assault causing grievous bodily harm and driving a motorcycle without due care and attention. The accused are Kevin Small and Darren Woods, both of Heathfield. The complaint has been brought by Miss Chen Mao-Lee, also known as Mollie Chen, of Limehouse in London and by the North Somerset Police, both of whom are represented by the Crown Prosecution Service." The Clerk of the Court sat down, his announcement completed.
"And what are the facts of this case?" Mr. Justice Melrose directed the comment to the officer from the Crown Prosecution Service.
"Sir, Miss Chen was engaged in market research to gauge the viability of a new 'authentic Chinese' restaurant in Taunton. In the process of that work, she was visiting the Saloon Bar of the Stag at Bay public house, talking with local residents and gaining their input and suggestions for the project. On completing her research for the evening, she left the public house and went to the bus stop nearby to return to her hotel in Taunton. It is the contention of the CPS that the two accused had seen her at work, realized she was carrying a significant amount of cash, and decided that she would be a suitable victim for a street robbery. They therefore attempted to rob the victim by snatching her handbag. Miss Chen put up a courageous fight while also calling for help. The accused are then alleged to have struck her repeatedly in the face, knocking her to the ground and then kicking her. As a result, she received severe bruising to her face and mouth and has a cracked rib. By this time, the guests at the Stag at Bay were hastening to her rescue and the accused allegedly tried to escape on their motorcycle. They were prevented from doing so by two off-duty police consultants who arrived at the scene in response an emergency call made by the landlord of the Stag at Bay."
"And how do the defendants plead to this accusation?"
The barrister for the defense stood up and looked around him, gauging the temper of the court and the attitude of the spectators. Those factors would have a significant bearing on his tactics and he was concerned that the spectators in the public gallery looked extremely hostile. That would undoubtedly communicate to any jury and meant that allowing this case to go to trial was unwise. "Sir, I ask for an immediate dismissal of the case on the grounds that the Police incited this incident and entrapped my clients, thus acting in breach of the Incitement and Entrapment Act of 1953 which stipulates that in cases where the police entrap a defendant, the case must be dismissed."
"I am aware of the terms of the act, Mr. Carson and I will thank you not to instruct me in basic law."
"My apologies, Sir. I did not mean offense."
"I am glad to hear it. Mr. Ashley, does the Crown Prosecution Service have any response to these allegations?"
"Sir, they are completely without foundation. Miss Chen is a student at the London School of Economics and her father runs a Chinese restaurant in London. She has never been in this area before and she has no connection with the Police force in any official or unofficial capacity. We have sworn statements from guests at the Stag at Bay, testifying to her market research efforts over the three days preceding the attack and to the fact she was registering with local estate agents to find a suitable property for her family business. The authors of these statements all speak of her friendliness, readiness to stand her round, courtesy and professionalism while gaining the information she sought."
"And presumably building up goodwill for the new business." Melrose had noted the comment about 'standing her round', a strong vote of approval from the regulars in any public house.
"One might so speculate, Sir." Ashley paused for moment before continuing. "We also have sworn testimony from multiple eye-witnesses that confirm the two accused made a brutal attack upon her and that members of the public were closing in on them with a view to detaining them. The accused made attempts to escape that were foiled by the prompt arrival of the two police consultants."
"If I may, Sir, that is the crux of our claim. It strains credulity beyond any reasonable limits that a patrol vehicle with two officers in it should have been within two minutes of the alleged incident taking place. We believe that alone is conclusive evidence of entrapment. In addition, we also note that both the victim and one of the police officers are Chinese."
"Mr. Ashley?"
"Sir, we have sworn statements from the staff at the Zippy Pizza restaurant that the two officers in question are in the habit of eating at the restaurant every evening and always leave promptly at 8:15 pm. They then return to their temporary accommodation in Bishop's Lydeard, reaching there at around 8:45 pm whereupon they check in with the station switchboard. Assuming they drove at the legally-mandated speed limit, they would have been passing the junction for Cotford St. Luke when the emergency response call went out. We have some evidence, in the form of marks on the road surface, that Inspector de Llorente was, subsequent and only subsequent to the call for assistance being sent out, driving at very high speed in order to assist the victim of the attack. I must add that Inspector de Llorente has a record of sparing no effort to bring about the rescue of those in distress and has been decorated for doing so. Sir, you might remember the Atkinson-Rowley case two years ago when two police officers were grievously wounded in an ambush, and Inspector de Llorente showed no hesitation in risking her life to rescue them from their assailants?"
"I do indeed remember that case. Continue.”
“With reference to my learned friend’s comment about the ethnicity of both victim and officer, I would point out that there are 1.3 billion Chinese in the world. It is a bit unrealistic to expect that they all know each other and I believe many of them have not even been introduced. In any case Inspector de Llorente is half-Italian and that widens the pool still further. Also, it is quite rational to expect a Chinese restaurant to employ Chinese staff. I might also note that the Police Force is under steady pressure to increase its recruitment from racial minorities. This all being the case, unless my learned friend can produce some evidence that the two have actually met, the ethnic similarity between officer and victim can be seen as mere happenstance.”
“Can you summarize your response to the motion for the court please?"
Ashley thought for a brief second. "Sir, we got lucky in this particular case, but that it had to happen eventually. There have been more than fifty of these bag-snatching attacks and the laws of chance dictate that eventually one would happen in circumstances where we would be able to detain the accused suspects. This is, after all, the basic principle of policing. We may not be on scene for any particular crime but the more often a crime is repeated, the more likely it is that one or more officers will be present. Also, Sir, frankly, if we had set this up, our decoy would have been protected by undercover officers and we would have had an ambulance and other backup standing by. There was none of that present. Miss Chen had to wait, in great pain, for almost ten minutes before an ambulance arrived. That alone . . ."
"Quite. Mr. Carson, it is clear to me that your allegations of incitement and entrapment cannot stand. There is no evidence of any connection between the victim and the police other than the extraordinarily tenuous ethnic link. It is apparent she was an innocent victim, a young student whose father was putting her university training to use for in his business and thus getting some return on the investment he had made in her education." There was a ripple of laughter around the court at the reference to the continuing controversy over Universities offering expensive but essentially useless degrees. Melrose said nothing but glowered at the public gallery who were instantly silenced. "There is no evidence that the police were aware of the situation and Mr. Ashley's argument about the lack of police preparation is persuasive. Mr. Carson, you had the temerity to instruct me on basic law, now I shall do the same for you. The defense of incitement and entrapment is an affirmative one; to be valid you must produce some evidence in support of the assertion. You have signally failed to do so. Your motion for dismissal is therefore denied. Clerk, please set an early date for commencement of trial."
At the defense desk, Carson had a brief, quiet conversation with Small and Woods. They reluctantly nodded and he stood up. "Sir, in view of your ruling, my clients wish to make a plea of Guilty and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Court, asking that 58 other offenses be taken into account."
Melrose nodded with satisfaction. "Very well. Clerk, void my instructions for setting a date for trial. Instead, set a date for sentencing before the full panel of District Judges."
North Somerset Region Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Pled guilty, asked for 58 offenses to be taken into account. Down for sentencing next week. Bail set at fifty thousand pounds. Each." The desk sergeant put the message out over the address system. "They're coming back in now."
Conrad and Angel had made the brief walk over the road from the Magistrate's Court to the Police Station. Conrad wasn't quite sure how she'd done it but he was certain that Angel had arranged the situation somehow. The one thing that really worried him was whether she had known the girl she had used as a decoy would be hurt so badly. Nevertheless, it had worked out well in the end. When they reached the station, he opened the door for her to be met by a roar of cheering. Once they were in the reception area, the duty officers poured in from their offices and started applauding. They lined the corridor, forming an honor guard for Conrad and Angel as they made their way to their office. Conrad had his hand grabbed and shaken all the way down; word had been passed of Angel's deep-seated revulsion for being touched so she simply got respectful salutes from her admirers.
"Conrad, Angel, could you come to my office please." Chief Inspector Barnstable looked out of his door and waved them in. "On second thoughts, it is a beautiful day, why don’t we get some fresh air in the churchyard? Get the air of the court out of your lungs.”
“Sounds good, Tom.”
They wandered out of the back door of the police station and crossed the road to an old churchyard containing trees that had been ancient when Queen Victoria had been on the throne. Barnstable looked around. “A lot of our officers come here when they need to clear their heads or just take a deep, clean breath. It’s peaceful, like. Conrad, you understand what I mean?”
“Depends on belief, Tom. For somebody who looks on the church as a refuge or a support in times of grief, yes indeed. On the other hand, God is everywhere and is always there when we need Him. We just need to understand that we only need to look.”
“What about you, Angel?”
Angel looked at him very steadily, running over possible answers in her mind. The truth is that my whole life is a graveyard, filled with the headstones of people I have put there. One of those gravestones is mine, I just haven’t got there yet. A lot has changed in my life, but one thing has not. I am still one of the walking dead. “I don’t believe in any god except my boys. But this place is beautiful, and it is quiet. I can see why it is a good place to reset one’s mind.”
“I suppose your ‘boys’ are your guns. I’m going to be frank, Angel. I don’t like you, I don’t like who you are and I don’t like what you do. But, I know you wrapped up that handbag snatching case fast and in a way we could not. For that, I give you due credit. Is the girl going to be all right?”
“Chen Mao-Lee? Yeah, she’ll be fine. She knew the risks before she went in and knew we couldn’t cover her without giving the game away. She’ll be off work for the rest of summer break, though, and she was counting on earning money to help pay her tuition fees. She’ll have to ask her father for help now and she’ll hate doing that.”
Barnstable realized he was being given a hint. “There’ll be somebody coming to see her from the Victims Compensation Fund. She won’t lose out. You were right; the way she was attacked shows how things were going. Small and Woods would have killed one of their victims sooner or later. The way they kicked her after knocking her down suggests it would probably have been sooner. Why did she fight so hard for the bag though?”
“Because all the notes she had made while researching property and local opinions on a restaurant serving authentic Chinese food were in there. That was a lot of real work and if she’d lost it, she would have had to start again. She really was doing market research, Tom. There really will be a very up-market Chinese restaurant opening here soon. Everything we said was true. If it had gone to trial and we’d been on the stand under oath, we could have answered all the questions without committing perjury. Just not mentioned some details, that’s all, and that's on me. None of your officers knew what was happening."
"And that's another thing I don't like. Not knowing what was happening on my patch. Especially when it concerns our investigations and a career criminal is organizing the events. By the way, I’m supposed to rap you over the knuckles for those two shots and remind you of the valid lessons you are teaching our officers. You have become an example to them and I don’t think you want them copying that bit of gunplay. So, whack."
"Ow.” Angel made a play of shaking her hand. “But, if you had known, we couldn’t have pulled it off. It would have been thrown out as entrapment. You say you don’t like me. That's fine with me because I don’t really understand what 'liking somebody' means. It's a foreign concept to me. But you can take this to the bank. You can trust me because my entire career is built around being somebody people can trust to do my best for them and mediate fairly, no matter which side they are on."
"She's right, Tom." Conrad had let the conversation continue but now came to Angel's side. "I have worked with Angel for quite a few years now and I've watched her negotiate many agreements. The key is that both sides understand, in fact she was appointed as a mediator because, she sees herself as working for everybody involved and they know that she always does her best for the people she works for. And so, when she comes up with an agreement, the participants understand that is in the best interests of everybody. I've seen her do that time after time. Often finding a profitable and peaceful resolution that everybody else had overlooked. She would be a superb politician."
Angel pointed at Conrad's head and then at the wall behind him. "There is no need to be insulting."
Barnstable looked confused so Conrad hastened to explain. "Angel just threatened to splatter my brains over the wall. Don't worry, business as usual."
The ringing of a portable telephone echoed around the quiet churchyard and cut off any reply Barnstable may have thought of making. He answered it, listened briefly and then ended the call with a curt 'thank you'. "Well, that's a bugger."
"What's the matter, Tom?"
"According to the CPS, Kevin Small and Darren Woods have had their bail paid and they will be released within the hour. I have to get back to my office; I need to put a guard on Miss Chen and other key witnesses."
"Just remember, those two have friends. And they're not nice people like us." Angel's smile was beatific. What worried Barnstable was that he agreed with her.
After Barnstable had gone to make his calls, Conrad turned to Angel. "Don't let that bit of bonhomie fool you. Tom very badly wants to bring you down. He was patting you on the back so he could feel the best place to stick a knife in."
Angel agreed. The only question in her mind was how he would try to do it.
Office of Rupert Ashley, West Country Division, Crown Prosecution Service, Exeter
"I must say that, as agents of the Crown Prosecution Service, our prime consideration is that there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. In this case, the only way we could have seen an increased prospect of conviction would have been to have found the defendant standing on top of the village war memorial, loot and signed confession in hand while shouting "I did it" at the top of his voice." In the background, Angel took out a notebook and wrote that down. Ashley watched her and his mouth twitched. "However, setting bail is the prerogative of the Magistrate's Court and, of course, once set, the payment of bail is at the discretion of the payer. I must admit that going by the guidelines issued to magistrates, Melrose made the right decision."
"How? We checked the two thugs of course." Barnstable was irate that this situation had even arisen. "Neither of them had anything like that kind of money."
"In the case of Kevin Small, it appears that his mother borrowed money using her house as collateral. Of course, if he absconds as we believe he will, then she will lose her home. Darren Woods, well he is unemployed and without funds but his uncle is a property developer and owns a building and builder's supplies business. He took the money out of there. He stands to lose the money as well of course and that will do his business no end of no good. Having said that, those consequences are really nothing to do with us. Of course, when the two accused do fail to appear, they will become fugitives adding to the charges against them. Whether that actually means anything of course depends on whether they get caught again."
"Reward for information?" Angel's question had more self-interest in it than was immediately apparent. "And is it dead or alive?"
"No, and no. It's the Occupation again I'm afraid. Just as there was a tremendous backlash against the police using entrapment after the Occupation, so also was there great revulsion against the activities of informers, especially paid informers. There was a particularly vile case, one Dorothy Garrison, who had a blackmail racket centered around inventing stories about people and demanding payment for not passing the stories through to those Gestapo. She was found hanged in the woods not far from here, presumably by the Resistance. Anyway, Police are not allowed to pay rewards for information. As for dead or alive, no. Just, no."
"So, does this affect the trial, other than the extreme improbability of the defendants actually appearing?' Barnstable was now more irate at the fact to dangerous thugs had been released on bail than at Angel who had played the rules in order to capture them in the first place.
"if they turn up, they get convicted. As I said before, no doubt about that, this case is solid. If chummies got acquitted, it would such a blatant miscarriage that the CPS would appeal. So, they won't appear and the people who put up bail will lose out. Not that Small and Woods will care about that."
"Uncompensated, low-functioning psychopaths." Angel sounded scornful. "They give the rest of us a bad name."
Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Sir, the next case is one of robbery with violence, assault causing grievous bodily harm and driving a motorcycle without due care and attention. The accused are Kevin Small and Darren Woods, both of Heathfield. The complaint has been brought by Miss Chen Mao-Lee, also known as Mollie Chen, of Limehouse in London and by the North Somerset Police, both of whom are represented by the Crown Prosecution Service." The Clerk of the Court sat down, his announcement completed.
"And what are the facts of this case?" Mr. Justice Melrose directed the comment to the officer from the Crown Prosecution Service.
"Sir, Miss Chen was engaged in market research to gauge the viability of a new 'authentic Chinese' restaurant in Taunton. In the process of that work, she was visiting the Saloon Bar of the Stag at Bay public house, talking with local residents and gaining their input and suggestions for the project. On completing her research for the evening, she left the public house and went to the bus stop nearby to return to her hotel in Taunton. It is the contention of the CPS that the two accused had seen her at work, realized she was carrying a significant amount of cash, and decided that she would be a suitable victim for a street robbery. They therefore attempted to rob the victim by snatching her handbag. Miss Chen put up a courageous fight while also calling for help. The accused are then alleged to have struck her repeatedly in the face, knocking her to the ground and then kicking her. As a result, she received severe bruising to her face and mouth and has a cracked rib. By this time, the guests at the Stag at Bay were hastening to her rescue and the accused allegedly tried to escape on their motorcycle. They were prevented from doing so by two off-duty police consultants who arrived at the scene in response an emergency call made by the landlord of the Stag at Bay."
"And how do the defendants plead to this accusation?"
The barrister for the defense stood up and looked around him, gauging the temper of the court and the attitude of the spectators. Those factors would have a significant bearing on his tactics and he was concerned that the spectators in the public gallery looked extremely hostile. That would undoubtedly communicate to any jury and meant that allowing this case to go to trial was unwise. "Sir, I ask for an immediate dismissal of the case on the grounds that the Police incited this incident and entrapped my clients, thus acting in breach of the Incitement and Entrapment Act of 1953 which stipulates that in cases where the police entrap a defendant, the case must be dismissed."
"I am aware of the terms of the act, Mr. Carson and I will thank you not to instruct me in basic law."
"My apologies, Sir. I did not mean offense."
"I am glad to hear it. Mr. Ashley, does the Crown Prosecution Service have any response to these allegations?"
"Sir, they are completely without foundation. Miss Chen is a student at the London School of Economics and her father runs a Chinese restaurant in London. She has never been in this area before and she has no connection with the Police force in any official or unofficial capacity. We have sworn statements from guests at the Stag at Bay, testifying to her market research efforts over the three days preceding the attack and to the fact she was registering with local estate agents to find a suitable property for her family business. The authors of these statements all speak of her friendliness, readiness to stand her round, courtesy and professionalism while gaining the information she sought."
"And presumably building up goodwill for the new business." Melrose had noted the comment about 'standing her round', a strong vote of approval from the regulars in any public house.
"One might so speculate, Sir." Ashley paused for moment before continuing. "We also have sworn testimony from multiple eye-witnesses that confirm the two accused made a brutal attack upon her and that members of the public were closing in on them with a view to detaining them. The accused made attempts to escape that were foiled by the prompt arrival of the two police consultants."
"If I may, Sir, that is the crux of our claim. It strains credulity beyond any reasonable limits that a patrol vehicle with two officers in it should have been within two minutes of the alleged incident taking place. We believe that alone is conclusive evidence of entrapment. In addition, we also note that both the victim and one of the police officers are Chinese."
"Mr. Ashley?"
"Sir, we have sworn statements from the staff at the Zippy Pizza restaurant that the two officers in question are in the habit of eating at the restaurant every evening and always leave promptly at 8:15 pm. They then return to their temporary accommodation in Bishop's Lydeard, reaching there at around 8:45 pm whereupon they check in with the station switchboard. Assuming they drove at the legally-mandated speed limit, they would have been passing the junction for Cotford St. Luke when the emergency response call went out. We have some evidence, in the form of marks on the road surface, that Inspector de Llorente was, subsequent and only subsequent to the call for assistance being sent out, driving at very high speed in order to assist the victim of the attack. I must add that Inspector de Llorente has a record of sparing no effort to bring about the rescue of those in distress and has been decorated for doing so. Sir, you might remember the Atkinson-Rowley case two years ago when two police officers were grievously wounded in an ambush, and Inspector de Llorente showed no hesitation in risking her life to rescue them from their assailants?"
"I do indeed remember that case. Continue.”
“With reference to my learned friend’s comment about the ethnicity of both victim and officer, I would point out that there are 1.3 billion Chinese in the world. It is a bit unrealistic to expect that they all know each other and I believe many of them have not even been introduced. In any case Inspector de Llorente is half-Italian and that widens the pool still further. Also, it is quite rational to expect a Chinese restaurant to employ Chinese staff. I might also note that the Police Force is under steady pressure to increase its recruitment from racial minorities. This all being the case, unless my learned friend can produce some evidence that the two have actually met, the ethnic similarity between officer and victim can be seen as mere happenstance.”
“Can you summarize your response to the motion for the court please?"
Ashley thought for a brief second. "Sir, we got lucky in this particular case, but that it had to happen eventually. There have been more than fifty of these bag-snatching attacks and the laws of chance dictate that eventually one would happen in circumstances where we would be able to detain the accused suspects. This is, after all, the basic principle of policing. We may not be on scene for any particular crime but the more often a crime is repeated, the more likely it is that one or more officers will be present. Also, Sir, frankly, if we had set this up, our decoy would have been protected by undercover officers and we would have had an ambulance and other backup standing by. There was none of that present. Miss Chen had to wait, in great pain, for almost ten minutes before an ambulance arrived. That alone . . ."
"Quite. Mr. Carson, it is clear to me that your allegations of incitement and entrapment cannot stand. There is no evidence of any connection between the victim and the police other than the extraordinarily tenuous ethnic link. It is apparent she was an innocent victim, a young student whose father was putting her university training to use for in his business and thus getting some return on the investment he had made in her education." There was a ripple of laughter around the court at the reference to the continuing controversy over Universities offering expensive but essentially useless degrees. Melrose said nothing but glowered at the public gallery who were instantly silenced. "There is no evidence that the police were aware of the situation and Mr. Ashley's argument about the lack of police preparation is persuasive. Mr. Carson, you had the temerity to instruct me on basic law, now I shall do the same for you. The defense of incitement and entrapment is an affirmative one; to be valid you must produce some evidence in support of the assertion. You have signally failed to do so. Your motion for dismissal is therefore denied. Clerk, please set an early date for commencement of trial."
At the defense desk, Carson had a brief, quiet conversation with Small and Woods. They reluctantly nodded and he stood up. "Sir, in view of your ruling, my clients wish to make a plea of Guilty and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Court, asking that 58 other offenses be taken into account."
Melrose nodded with satisfaction. "Very well. Clerk, void my instructions for setting a date for trial. Instead, set a date for sentencing before the full panel of District Judges."
North Somerset Region Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Pled guilty, asked for 58 offenses to be taken into account. Down for sentencing next week. Bail set at fifty thousand pounds. Each." The desk sergeant put the message out over the address system. "They're coming back in now."
Conrad and Angel had made the brief walk over the road from the Magistrate's Court to the Police Station. Conrad wasn't quite sure how she'd done it but he was certain that Angel had arranged the situation somehow. The one thing that really worried him was whether she had known the girl she had used as a decoy would be hurt so badly. Nevertheless, it had worked out well in the end. When they reached the station, he opened the door for her to be met by a roar of cheering. Once they were in the reception area, the duty officers poured in from their offices and started applauding. They lined the corridor, forming an honor guard for Conrad and Angel as they made their way to their office. Conrad had his hand grabbed and shaken all the way down; word had been passed of Angel's deep-seated revulsion for being touched so she simply got respectful salutes from her admirers.
"Conrad, Angel, could you come to my office please." Chief Inspector Barnstable looked out of his door and waved them in. "On second thoughts, it is a beautiful day, why don’t we get some fresh air in the churchyard? Get the air of the court out of your lungs.”
“Sounds good, Tom.”
They wandered out of the back door of the police station and crossed the road to an old churchyard containing trees that had been ancient when Queen Victoria had been on the throne. Barnstable looked around. “A lot of our officers come here when they need to clear their heads or just take a deep, clean breath. It’s peaceful, like. Conrad, you understand what I mean?”
“Depends on belief, Tom. For somebody who looks on the church as a refuge or a support in times of grief, yes indeed. On the other hand, God is everywhere and is always there when we need Him. We just need to understand that we only need to look.”
“What about you, Angel?”
Angel looked at him very steadily, running over possible answers in her mind. The truth is that my whole life is a graveyard, filled with the headstones of people I have put there. One of those gravestones is mine, I just haven’t got there yet. A lot has changed in my life, but one thing has not. I am still one of the walking dead. “I don’t believe in any god except my boys. But this place is beautiful, and it is quiet. I can see why it is a good place to reset one’s mind.”
“I suppose your ‘boys’ are your guns. I’m going to be frank, Angel. I don’t like you, I don’t like who you are and I don’t like what you do. But, I know you wrapped up that handbag snatching case fast and in a way we could not. For that, I give you due credit. Is the girl going to be all right?”
“Chen Mao-Lee? Yeah, she’ll be fine. She knew the risks before she went in and knew we couldn’t cover her without giving the game away. She’ll be off work for the rest of summer break, though, and she was counting on earning money to help pay her tuition fees. She’ll have to ask her father for help now and she’ll hate doing that.”
Barnstable realized he was being given a hint. “There’ll be somebody coming to see her from the Victims Compensation Fund. She won’t lose out. You were right; the way she was attacked shows how things were going. Small and Woods would have killed one of their victims sooner or later. The way they kicked her after knocking her down suggests it would probably have been sooner. Why did she fight so hard for the bag though?”
“Because all the notes she had made while researching property and local opinions on a restaurant serving authentic Chinese food were in there. That was a lot of real work and if she’d lost it, she would have had to start again. She really was doing market research, Tom. There really will be a very up-market Chinese restaurant opening here soon. Everything we said was true. If it had gone to trial and we’d been on the stand under oath, we could have answered all the questions without committing perjury. Just not mentioned some details, that’s all, and that's on me. None of your officers knew what was happening."
"And that's another thing I don't like. Not knowing what was happening on my patch. Especially when it concerns our investigations and a career criminal is organizing the events. By the way, I’m supposed to rap you over the knuckles for those two shots and remind you of the valid lessons you are teaching our officers. You have become an example to them and I don’t think you want them copying that bit of gunplay. So, whack."
"Ow.” Angel made a play of shaking her hand. “But, if you had known, we couldn’t have pulled it off. It would have been thrown out as entrapment. You say you don’t like me. That's fine with me because I don’t really understand what 'liking somebody' means. It's a foreign concept to me. But you can take this to the bank. You can trust me because my entire career is built around being somebody people can trust to do my best for them and mediate fairly, no matter which side they are on."
"She's right, Tom." Conrad had let the conversation continue but now came to Angel's side. "I have worked with Angel for quite a few years now and I've watched her negotiate many agreements. The key is that both sides understand, in fact she was appointed as a mediator because, she sees herself as working for everybody involved and they know that she always does her best for the people she works for. And so, when she comes up with an agreement, the participants understand that is in the best interests of everybody. I've seen her do that time after time. Often finding a profitable and peaceful resolution that everybody else had overlooked. She would be a superb politician."
Angel pointed at Conrad's head and then at the wall behind him. "There is no need to be insulting."
Barnstable looked confused so Conrad hastened to explain. "Angel just threatened to splatter my brains over the wall. Don't worry, business as usual."
The ringing of a portable telephone echoed around the quiet churchyard and cut off any reply Barnstable may have thought of making. He answered it, listened briefly and then ended the call with a curt 'thank you'. "Well, that's a bugger."
"What's the matter, Tom?"
"According to the CPS, Kevin Small and Darren Woods have had their bail paid and they will be released within the hour. I have to get back to my office; I need to put a guard on Miss Chen and other key witnesses."
"Just remember, those two have friends. And they're not nice people like us." Angel's smile was beatific. What worried Barnstable was that he agreed with her.
After Barnstable had gone to make his calls, Conrad turned to Angel. "Don't let that bit of bonhomie fool you. Tom very badly wants to bring you down. He was patting you on the back so he could feel the best place to stick a knife in."
Angel agreed. The only question in her mind was how he would try to do it.
Office of Rupert Ashley, West Country Division, Crown Prosecution Service, Exeter
"I must say that, as agents of the Crown Prosecution Service, our prime consideration is that there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. In this case, the only way we could have seen an increased prospect of conviction would have been to have found the defendant standing on top of the village war memorial, loot and signed confession in hand while shouting "I did it" at the top of his voice." In the background, Angel took out a notebook and wrote that down. Ashley watched her and his mouth twitched. "However, setting bail is the prerogative of the Magistrate's Court and, of course, once set, the payment of bail is at the discretion of the payer. I must admit that going by the guidelines issued to magistrates, Melrose made the right decision."
"How? We checked the two thugs of course." Barnstable was irate that this situation had even arisen. "Neither of them had anything like that kind of money."
"In the case of Kevin Small, it appears that his mother borrowed money using her house as collateral. Of course, if he absconds as we believe he will, then she will lose her home. Darren Woods, well he is unemployed and without funds but his uncle is a property developer and owns a building and builder's supplies business. He took the money out of there. He stands to lose the money as well of course and that will do his business no end of no good. Having said that, those consequences are really nothing to do with us. Of course, when the two accused do fail to appear, they will become fugitives adding to the charges against them. Whether that actually means anything of course depends on whether they get caught again."
"Reward for information?" Angel's question had more self-interest in it than was immediately apparent. "And is it dead or alive?"
"No, and no. It's the Occupation again I'm afraid. Just as there was a tremendous backlash against the police using entrapment after the Occupation, so also was there great revulsion against the activities of informers, especially paid informers. There was a particularly vile case, one Dorothy Garrison, who had a blackmail racket centered around inventing stories about people and demanding payment for not passing the stories through to those Gestapo. She was found hanged in the woods not far from here, presumably by the Resistance. Anyway, Police are not allowed to pay rewards for information. As for dead or alive, no. Just, no."
"So, does this affect the trial, other than the extreme improbability of the defendants actually appearing?' Barnstable was now more irate at the fact to dangerous thugs had been released on bail than at Angel who had played the rules in order to capture them in the first place.
"if they turn up, they get convicted. As I said before, no doubt about that, this case is solid. If chummies got acquitted, it would such a blatant miscarriage that the CPS would appeal. So, they won't appear and the people who put up bail will lose out. Not that Small and Woods will care about that."
"Uncompensated, low-functioning psychopaths." Angel sounded scornful. "They give the rest of us a bad name."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Four
Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Sir, the next case is one of robbery with violence, assault causing grievous bodily harm and driving a motorcycle without due care and attention. The accused are Kevin Small and Darren Woods, both of Heathfield. The complaint has been brought by Miss Chen Mao-Lee, also known as Mollie Chen, of Limehouse in London and by the North Somerset Police, both of whom are represented by the Crown Prosecution Service." The Clerk of the Court sat down, his announcement completed.
"And what are the facts of this case?" Mr. Justice Melrose directed the comment to the officer from the Crown Prosecution Service.
"Sir, Miss Chen was engaged in market research to gauge the viability of a new 'authentic Chinese' restaurant in Taunton. In the process of that work, she was visiting the Saloon Bar of the Stag at Bay public house, talking with local residents and gaining their input and suggestions for the project. On completing her research for the evening, she left the public house and went to the bus stop nearby to return to her hotel in Taunton. It is the contention of the CPS that the two accused had seen her at work, realized she was carrying a significant amount of cash, and decided that she would be a suitable victim for a street robbery. They therefore attempted to rob the victim by snatching her handbag. Miss Chen put up a courageous fight while also calling for help. The accused are then alleged to have struck her repeatedly in the face, knocking her to the ground and then kicking her. As a result, she received severe bruising to her face and mouth and has a cracked rib. By this time, the guests at the Stag at Bay were hastening to her rescue and the accused allegedly tried to escape on their motorcycle. They were prevented from doing so by two off-duty police consultants who arrived at the scene in response an emergency call made by the landlord of the Stag at Bay."
"And how do the defendants plead to this accusation?"
The barrister for the defense stood up and looked around him, gauging the temper of the court and the attitude of the spectators. Those factors would have a significant bearing on his tactics and he was concerned that the spectators in the public gallery looked extremely hostile. That would undoubtedly communicate to any jury and meant that allowing this case to go to trial was unwise. "Sir, I ask for an immediate dismissal of the case on the grounds that the Police incited this incident and entrapped my clients, thus acting in breach of the Incitement and Entrapment Act of 1953 which stipulates that in cases where the police entrap a defendant, the case must be dismissed."
"I am aware of the terms of the act, Mr. Carson and I will thank you not to instruct me in basic law."
"My apologies, Sir. I did not mean offense."
"I am glad to hear it. Mr. Ashley, does the Crown Prosecution Service have any response to these allegations?"
"Sir, they are completely without foundation. Miss Chen is a student at the London School of Economics and her father runs a Chinese restaurant in London. She has never been in this area before and she has no connection with the Police force in any official or unofficial capacity. We have sworn statements from guests at the Stag at Bay, testifying to her market research efforts over the three days preceding the attack and to the fact she was registering with local estate agents to find a suitable property for her family business. The authors of these statements all speak of her friendliness, readiness to stand her round, courtesy and professionalism while gaining the information she sought."
"And presumably building up goodwill for the new business." Melrose had noted the comment about 'standing her round', a strong vote of approval from the regulars in any public house.
"One might so speculate, Sir." Ashley paused for moment before continuing. "We also have sworn testimony from multiple eye-witnesses that confirm the two accused made a brutal attack upon her and that members of the public were closing in on them with a view to detaining them. The accused made attempts to escape that were foiled by the prompt arrival of the two police consultants."
"If I may, Sir, that is the crux of our claim. It strains credulity beyond any reasonable limits that a patrol vehicle with two officers in it should have been within two minutes of the alleged incident taking place. We believe that alone is conclusive evidence of entrapment. In addition, we also note that both the victim and one of the police officers are Chinese."
"Mr. Ashley?"
"Sir, we have sworn statements from the staff at the Zippy Pizza restaurant that the two officers in question are in the habit of eating at the restaurant every evening and always leave promptly at 8:15 pm. They then return to their temporary accommodation in Bishop's Lydeard, reaching there at around 8:45 pm whereupon they check in with the station switchboard. Assuming they drove at the legally-mandated speed limit, they would have been passing the junction for Cotford St. Luke when the emergency response call went out. We have some evidence, in the form of marks on the road surface, that Inspector de Llorente was, subsequent and only subsequent to the call for assistance being sent out, driving at very high speed in order to assist the victim of the attack. I must add that Inspector de Llorente has a record of sparing no effort to bring about the rescue of those in distress and has been decorated for doing so. Sir, you might remember the Atkinson-Rowley case two years ago when two police officers were grievously wounded in an ambush, and Inspector de Llorente showed no hesitation in risking her life to rescue them from their assailants?"
"I do indeed remember that case. Continue.”
“With reference to my learned friend’s comment about the ethnicity of both victim and officer, I would point out that there are 1.3 billion Chinese in the world. It is a bit unrealistic to expect that they all know each other and I believe many of them have not even been introduced. In any case Inspector de Llorente is half-Italian and that widens the pool still further. Also, it is quite rational to expect a Chinese restaurant to employ Chinese staff. I might also note that the Police Force is under steady pressure to increase its recruitment from racial minorities. This all being the case, unless my learned friend can produce some evidence that the two have actually met, the ethnic similarity between officer and victim can be seen as mere happenstance.”
“Can you summarize your response to the motion for the court please?"
Ashley thought for a brief second. "Sir, we got lucky in this particular case, but that it had to happen eventually. There have been more than fifty of these bag-snatching attacks and the laws of chance dictate that eventually one would happen in circumstances where we would be able to detain the accused suspects. This is, after all, the basic principle of policing. We may not be on scene for any particular crime but the more often a crime is repeated, the more likely it is that one or more officers will be present. Also, Sir, frankly, if we had set this up, our decoy would have been protected by undercover officers and we would have had an ambulance and other backup standing by. There was none of that present. Miss Chen had to wait, in great pain, for almost ten minutes before an ambulance arrived. That alone . . ."
"Quite. Mr. Carson, it is clear to me that your allegations of incitement and entrapment cannot stand. There is no evidence of any connection between the victim and the police other than the extraordinarily tenuous ethnic link. It is apparent she was an innocent victim, a young student whose father was putting her university training to use for in his business and thus getting some return on the investment he had made in her education." There was a ripple of laughter around the court at the reference to the continuing controversy over Universities offering expensive but essentially useless degrees. Melrose said nothing but glowered at the public gallery who were instantly silenced. "There is no evidence that the police were aware of the situation and Mr. Ashley's argument about the lack of police preparation is persuasive. Mr. Carson, you had the temerity to instruct me on basic law, now I shall do the same for you. The defense of incitement and entrapment is an affirmative one; to be valid you must produce some evidence in support of the assertion. You have signally failed to do so. Your motion for dismissal is therefore denied. Clerk, please set an early date for commencement of trial."
At the defense desk, Carson had a brief, quiet conversation with Small and Woods. They reluctantly nodded and he stood up. "Sir, in view of your ruling, my clients wish to make a plea of Guilty and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Court, asking that 58 other offenses be taken into account."
Melrose nodded with satisfaction. "Very well. Clerk, void my instructions for setting a date for trial. Instead, set a date for sentencing before the full panel of District Judges."
North Somerset Region Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Pled guilty, asked for 58 offenses to be taken into account. Down for sentencing next week. Bail set at fifty thousand pounds. Each." The desk sergeant put the message out over the address system. "They're coming back in now."
Conrad and Angel had made the brief walk over the road from the Magistrate's Court to the Police Station. Conrad wasn't quite sure how she'd done it but he was certain that Angel had arranged the situation somehow. The one thing that really worried him was whether she had known the girl she had used as a decoy would be hurt so badly. Nevertheless, it had worked out well in the end. When they reached the station, he opened the door for her to be met by a roar of cheering. Once they were in the reception area, the duty officers poured in from their offices and started applauding. They lined the corridor, forming an honor guard for Conrad and Angel as they made their way to their office. Conrad had his hand grabbed and shaken all the way down; word had been passed of Angel's deep-seated revulsion for being touched so she simply got respectful salutes from her admirers.
"Conrad, Angel, could you come to my office please." Chief Inspector Barnstable looked out of his door and waved them in. "On second thoughts, it is a beautiful day, why don’t we get some fresh air in the churchyard? Get the air of the court out of your lungs.”
“Sounds good, Tom.”
They wandered out of the back door of the police station and crossed the road to an old churchyard containing trees that had been ancient when Queen Victoria had been on the throne. Barnstable looked around. “A lot of our officers come here when they need to clear their heads or just take a deep, clean breath. It’s peaceful, like. Conrad, you understand what I mean?”
“Depends on belief, Tom. For somebody who looks on the church as a refuge or a support in times of grief, yes indeed. On the other hand, God is everywhere and is always there when we need Him. We just need to understand that we only need to look.”
“What about you, Angel?”
Angel looked at him very steadily, running over possible answers in her mind. The truth is that my whole life is a graveyard, filled with the headstones of people I have put there. One of those gravestones is mine, I just haven’t got there yet. A lot has changed in my life, but one thing has not. I am still one of the walking dead. “I don’t believe in any god except my boys. But this place is beautiful, and it is quiet. I can see why it is a good place to reset one’s mind.”
“I suppose your ‘boys’ are your guns. I’m going to be frank, Angel. I don’t like you, I don’t like who you are and I don’t like what you do. But, I know you wrapped up that handbag snatching case fast and in a way we could not. For that, I give you due credit. Is the girl going to be all right?”
“Chen Mao-Lee? Yeah, she’ll be fine. She knew the risks before she went in and knew we couldn’t cover her without giving the game away. She’ll be off work for the rest of summer break, though, and she was counting on earning money to help pay her tuition fees. She’ll have to ask her father for help now and she’ll hate doing that.”
Barnstable realized he was being given a hint. “There’ll be somebody coming to see her from the Victims Compensation Fund. She won’t lose out. You were right; the way she was attacked shows how things were going. Small and Woods would have killed one of their victims sooner or later. The way they kicked her after knocking her down suggests it would probably have been sooner. Why did she fight so hard for the bag though?”
“Because all the notes she had made while researching property and local opinions on a restaurant serving authentic Chinese food were in there. That was a lot of real work and if she’d lost it, she would have had to start again. She really was doing market research, Tom. There really will be a very up-market Chinese restaurant opening here soon. Everything we said was true. If it had gone to trial and we’d been on the stand under oath, we could have answered all the questions without committing perjury. Just not mentioned some details, that’s all, and that's on me. None of your officers knew what was happening."
"And that's another thing I don't like. Not knowing what was happening on my patch. Especially when it concerns our investigations and a career criminal is organizing the events. By the way, I’m supposed to rap you over the knuckles for those two shots and remind you of the valid lessons you are teaching our officers. You have become an example to them and I don’t think you want them copying that bit of gunplay. So, whack."
"Ow.” Angel made a play of shaking her hand. “But, if you had known, we couldn’t have pulled it off. It would have been thrown out as entrapment. You say you don’t like me. That's fine with me because I don’t really understand what 'liking somebody' means. It's a foreign concept to me. But you can take this to the bank. You can trust me because my entire career is built around being somebody people can trust to do my best for them and mediate fairly, no matter which side they are on."
"She's right, Tom." Conrad had let the conversation continue but now came to Angel's side. "I have worked with Angel for quite a few years now and I've watched her negotiate many agreements. The key is that both sides understand, in fact she was appointed as a mediator because, she sees herself as working for everybody involved and they know that she always does her best for the people she works for. And so, when she comes up with an agreement, the participants understand that is in the best interests of everybody. I've seen her do that time after time. Often finding a profitable and peaceful resolution that everybody else had overlooked. She would be a superb politician."
Angel pointed at Conrad's head and then at the wall behind him. "There is no need to be insulting."
Barnstable looked confused so Conrad hastened to explain. "Angel just threatened to splatter my brains over the wall. Don't worry, business as usual."
The ringing of a portable telephone echoed around the quiet churchyard and cut off any reply Barnstable may have thought of making. He answered it, listened briefly and then ended the call with a curt 'thank you'. "Well, that's a bugger."
"What's the matter, Tom?"
"According to the CPS, Kevin Small and Darren Woods have had their bail paid and they will be released within the hour. I have to get back to my office; I need to put a guard on Miss Chen and other key witnesses."
"Just remember, those two have friends. And they're not nice people like us." Angel's smile was beatific. What worried Barnstable was that he agreed with her.
After Barnstable had gone to make his calls, Conrad turned to Angel. "Don't let that bit of bonhomie fool you. Tom very badly wants to bring you down. He was patting you on the back so he could feel the best place to stick a knife in."
Angel agreed. The only question in her mind was how he would try to do it.
Office of Rupert Ashley, West Country Division, Crown Prosecution Service, Exeter
"I must say that, as agents of the Crown Prosecution Service, our prime consideration is that there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. In this case, the only way we could have seen an increased prospect of conviction would have been to have found the defendant standing on top of the village war memorial, loot and signed confession in hand while shouting "I did it" at the top of his voice." In the background, Angel took out a notebook and wrote that down. Ashley watched her and his mouth twitched. "However, setting bail is the prerogative of the Magistrate's Court and, of course, once set, the payment of bail is at the discretion of the payer. I must admit that going by the guidelines issued to magistrates, Melrose made the right decision."
"How? We checked the two thugs of course." Barnstable was irate that this situation had even arisen. "Neither of them had anything like that kind of money."
"In the case of Kevin Small, it appears that his mother borrowed money using her house as collateral. Of course, if he absconds as we believe he will, then she will lose her home. Darren Woods, well he is unemployed and without funds but his uncle is a property developer and owns a building and builder's supplies business. He took the money out of there. He stands to lose the money as well of course and that will do his business no end of no good. Having said that, those consequences are really nothing to do with us. Of course, when the two accused do fail to appear, they will become fugitives adding to the charges against them. Whether that actually means anything of course depends on whether they get caught again."
"Reward for information?" Angel's question had more self-interest in it than was immediately apparent. "And is it dead or alive?"
"No, and no. It's the Occupation again I'm afraid. Just as there was a tremendous backlash against the police using entrapment after the Occupation, so also was there great revulsion against the activities of informers, especially paid informers. There was a particularly vile case, one Dorothy Garrison, who had a blackmail racket centered around inventing stories about people and demanding payment for not passing the stories through to those Gestapo. She was found hanged in the woods not far from here, presumably by the Resistance. Anyway, Police are not allowed to pay rewards for information. As for dead or alive, no. Just, no."
"So, does this affect the trial, other than the extreme improbability of the defendants actually appearing?' Barnstable was now more irate at the fact to dangerous thugs had been released on bail than at Angel who had played the rules in order to capture them in the first place.
"If they turn up, their guilty pleas are accepted and they are sentenced. As I said before, no doubt about that, this case is solid. If chummies withdraw their guilty pleas and somehow, in the absence of new evidence, get acquitted, it would be such a blatant miscarriage that the CPS would appeal. So, they won't appear and the people who put up bail will lose out. Not that Small and Woods will care about that.
"Uncompensated, low-functioning psychopaths." Angel sounded scornful. "They give the rest of us a bad name."
Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Sir, the next case is one of robbery with violence, assault causing grievous bodily harm and driving a motorcycle without due care and attention. The accused are Kevin Small and Darren Woods, both of Heathfield. The complaint has been brought by Miss Chen Mao-Lee, also known as Mollie Chen, of Limehouse in London and by the North Somerset Police, both of whom are represented by the Crown Prosecution Service." The Clerk of the Court sat down, his announcement completed.
"And what are the facts of this case?" Mr. Justice Melrose directed the comment to the officer from the Crown Prosecution Service.
"Sir, Miss Chen was engaged in market research to gauge the viability of a new 'authentic Chinese' restaurant in Taunton. In the process of that work, she was visiting the Saloon Bar of the Stag at Bay public house, talking with local residents and gaining their input and suggestions for the project. On completing her research for the evening, she left the public house and went to the bus stop nearby to return to her hotel in Taunton. It is the contention of the CPS that the two accused had seen her at work, realized she was carrying a significant amount of cash, and decided that she would be a suitable victim for a street robbery. They therefore attempted to rob the victim by snatching her handbag. Miss Chen put up a courageous fight while also calling for help. The accused are then alleged to have struck her repeatedly in the face, knocking her to the ground and then kicking her. As a result, she received severe bruising to her face and mouth and has a cracked rib. By this time, the guests at the Stag at Bay were hastening to her rescue and the accused allegedly tried to escape on their motorcycle. They were prevented from doing so by two off-duty police consultants who arrived at the scene in response an emergency call made by the landlord of the Stag at Bay."
"And how do the defendants plead to this accusation?"
The barrister for the defense stood up and looked around him, gauging the temper of the court and the attitude of the spectators. Those factors would have a significant bearing on his tactics and he was concerned that the spectators in the public gallery looked extremely hostile. That would undoubtedly communicate to any jury and meant that allowing this case to go to trial was unwise. "Sir, I ask for an immediate dismissal of the case on the grounds that the Police incited this incident and entrapped my clients, thus acting in breach of the Incitement and Entrapment Act of 1953 which stipulates that in cases where the police entrap a defendant, the case must be dismissed."
"I am aware of the terms of the act, Mr. Carson and I will thank you not to instruct me in basic law."
"My apologies, Sir. I did not mean offense."
"I am glad to hear it. Mr. Ashley, does the Crown Prosecution Service have any response to these allegations?"
"Sir, they are completely without foundation. Miss Chen is a student at the London School of Economics and her father runs a Chinese restaurant in London. She has never been in this area before and she has no connection with the Police force in any official or unofficial capacity. We have sworn statements from guests at the Stag at Bay, testifying to her market research efforts over the three days preceding the attack and to the fact she was registering with local estate agents to find a suitable property for her family business. The authors of these statements all speak of her friendliness, readiness to stand her round, courtesy and professionalism while gaining the information she sought."
"And presumably building up goodwill for the new business." Melrose had noted the comment about 'standing her round', a strong vote of approval from the regulars in any public house.
"One might so speculate, Sir." Ashley paused for moment before continuing. "We also have sworn testimony from multiple eye-witnesses that confirm the two accused made a brutal attack upon her and that members of the public were closing in on them with a view to detaining them. The accused made attempts to escape that were foiled by the prompt arrival of the two police consultants."
"If I may, Sir, that is the crux of our claim. It strains credulity beyond any reasonable limits that a patrol vehicle with two officers in it should have been within two minutes of the alleged incident taking place. We believe that alone is conclusive evidence of entrapment. In addition, we also note that both the victim and one of the police officers are Chinese."
"Mr. Ashley?"
"Sir, we have sworn statements from the staff at the Zippy Pizza restaurant that the two officers in question are in the habit of eating at the restaurant every evening and always leave promptly at 8:15 pm. They then return to their temporary accommodation in Bishop's Lydeard, reaching there at around 8:45 pm whereupon they check in with the station switchboard. Assuming they drove at the legally-mandated speed limit, they would have been passing the junction for Cotford St. Luke when the emergency response call went out. We have some evidence, in the form of marks on the road surface, that Inspector de Llorente was, subsequent and only subsequent to the call for assistance being sent out, driving at very high speed in order to assist the victim of the attack. I must add that Inspector de Llorente has a record of sparing no effort to bring about the rescue of those in distress and has been decorated for doing so. Sir, you might remember the Atkinson-Rowley case two years ago when two police officers were grievously wounded in an ambush, and Inspector de Llorente showed no hesitation in risking her life to rescue them from their assailants?"
"I do indeed remember that case. Continue.”
“With reference to my learned friend’s comment about the ethnicity of both victim and officer, I would point out that there are 1.3 billion Chinese in the world. It is a bit unrealistic to expect that they all know each other and I believe many of them have not even been introduced. In any case Inspector de Llorente is half-Italian and that widens the pool still further. Also, it is quite rational to expect a Chinese restaurant to employ Chinese staff. I might also note that the Police Force is under steady pressure to increase its recruitment from racial minorities. This all being the case, unless my learned friend can produce some evidence that the two have actually met, the ethnic similarity between officer and victim can be seen as mere happenstance.”
“Can you summarize your response to the motion for the court please?"
Ashley thought for a brief second. "Sir, we got lucky in this particular case, but that it had to happen eventually. There have been more than fifty of these bag-snatching attacks and the laws of chance dictate that eventually one would happen in circumstances where we would be able to detain the accused suspects. This is, after all, the basic principle of policing. We may not be on scene for any particular crime but the more often a crime is repeated, the more likely it is that one or more officers will be present. Also, Sir, frankly, if we had set this up, our decoy would have been protected by undercover officers and we would have had an ambulance and other backup standing by. There was none of that present. Miss Chen had to wait, in great pain, for almost ten minutes before an ambulance arrived. That alone . . ."
"Quite. Mr. Carson, it is clear to me that your allegations of incitement and entrapment cannot stand. There is no evidence of any connection between the victim and the police other than the extraordinarily tenuous ethnic link. It is apparent she was an innocent victim, a young student whose father was putting her university training to use for in his business and thus getting some return on the investment he had made in her education." There was a ripple of laughter around the court at the reference to the continuing controversy over Universities offering expensive but essentially useless degrees. Melrose said nothing but glowered at the public gallery who were instantly silenced. "There is no evidence that the police were aware of the situation and Mr. Ashley's argument about the lack of police preparation is persuasive. Mr. Carson, you had the temerity to instruct me on basic law, now I shall do the same for you. The defense of incitement and entrapment is an affirmative one; to be valid you must produce some evidence in support of the assertion. You have signally failed to do so. Your motion for dismissal is therefore denied. Clerk, please set an early date for commencement of trial."
At the defense desk, Carson had a brief, quiet conversation with Small and Woods. They reluctantly nodded and he stood up. "Sir, in view of your ruling, my clients wish to make a plea of Guilty and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Court, asking that 58 other offenses be taken into account."
Melrose nodded with satisfaction. "Very well. Clerk, void my instructions for setting a date for trial. Instead, set a date for sentencing before the full panel of District Judges."
North Somerset Region Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Pled guilty, asked for 58 offenses to be taken into account. Down for sentencing next week. Bail set at fifty thousand pounds. Each." The desk sergeant put the message out over the address system. "They're coming back in now."
Conrad and Angel had made the brief walk over the road from the Magistrate's Court to the Police Station. Conrad wasn't quite sure how she'd done it but he was certain that Angel had arranged the situation somehow. The one thing that really worried him was whether she had known the girl she had used as a decoy would be hurt so badly. Nevertheless, it had worked out well in the end. When they reached the station, he opened the door for her to be met by a roar of cheering. Once they were in the reception area, the duty officers poured in from their offices and started applauding. They lined the corridor, forming an honor guard for Conrad and Angel as they made their way to their office. Conrad had his hand grabbed and shaken all the way down; word had been passed of Angel's deep-seated revulsion for being touched so she simply got respectful salutes from her admirers.
"Conrad, Angel, could you come to my office please." Chief Inspector Barnstable looked out of his door and waved them in. "On second thoughts, it is a beautiful day, why don’t we get some fresh air in the churchyard? Get the air of the court out of your lungs.”
“Sounds good, Tom.”
They wandered out of the back door of the police station and crossed the road to an old churchyard containing trees that had been ancient when Queen Victoria had been on the throne. Barnstable looked around. “A lot of our officers come here when they need to clear their heads or just take a deep, clean breath. It’s peaceful, like. Conrad, you understand what I mean?”
“Depends on belief, Tom. For somebody who looks on the church as a refuge or a support in times of grief, yes indeed. On the other hand, God is everywhere and is always there when we need Him. We just need to understand that we only need to look.”
“What about you, Angel?”
Angel looked at him very steadily, running over possible answers in her mind. The truth is that my whole life is a graveyard, filled with the headstones of people I have put there. One of those gravestones is mine, I just haven’t got there yet. A lot has changed in my life, but one thing has not. I am still one of the walking dead. “I don’t believe in any god except my boys. But this place is beautiful, and it is quiet. I can see why it is a good place to reset one’s mind.”
“I suppose your ‘boys’ are your guns. I’m going to be frank, Angel. I don’t like you, I don’t like who you are and I don’t like what you do. But, I know you wrapped up that handbag snatching case fast and in a way we could not. For that, I give you due credit. Is the girl going to be all right?”
“Chen Mao-Lee? Yeah, she’ll be fine. She knew the risks before she went in and knew we couldn’t cover her without giving the game away. She’ll be off work for the rest of summer break, though, and she was counting on earning money to help pay her tuition fees. She’ll have to ask her father for help now and she’ll hate doing that.”
Barnstable realized he was being given a hint. “There’ll be somebody coming to see her from the Victims Compensation Fund. She won’t lose out. You were right; the way she was attacked shows how things were going. Small and Woods would have killed one of their victims sooner or later. The way they kicked her after knocking her down suggests it would probably have been sooner. Why did she fight so hard for the bag though?”
“Because all the notes she had made while researching property and local opinions on a restaurant serving authentic Chinese food were in there. That was a lot of real work and if she’d lost it, she would have had to start again. She really was doing market research, Tom. There really will be a very up-market Chinese restaurant opening here soon. Everything we said was true. If it had gone to trial and we’d been on the stand under oath, we could have answered all the questions without committing perjury. Just not mentioned some details, that’s all, and that's on me. None of your officers knew what was happening."
"And that's another thing I don't like. Not knowing what was happening on my patch. Especially when it concerns our investigations and a career criminal is organizing the events. By the way, I’m supposed to rap you over the knuckles for those two shots and remind you of the valid lessons you are teaching our officers. You have become an example to them and I don’t think you want them copying that bit of gunplay. So, whack."
"Ow.” Angel made a play of shaking her hand. “But, if you had known, we couldn’t have pulled it off. It would have been thrown out as entrapment. You say you don’t like me. That's fine with me because I don’t really understand what 'liking somebody' means. It's a foreign concept to me. But you can take this to the bank. You can trust me because my entire career is built around being somebody people can trust to do my best for them and mediate fairly, no matter which side they are on."
"She's right, Tom." Conrad had let the conversation continue but now came to Angel's side. "I have worked with Angel for quite a few years now and I've watched her negotiate many agreements. The key is that both sides understand, in fact she was appointed as a mediator because, she sees herself as working for everybody involved and they know that she always does her best for the people she works for. And so, when she comes up with an agreement, the participants understand that is in the best interests of everybody. I've seen her do that time after time. Often finding a profitable and peaceful resolution that everybody else had overlooked. She would be a superb politician."
Angel pointed at Conrad's head and then at the wall behind him. "There is no need to be insulting."
Barnstable looked confused so Conrad hastened to explain. "Angel just threatened to splatter my brains over the wall. Don't worry, business as usual."
The ringing of a portable telephone echoed around the quiet churchyard and cut off any reply Barnstable may have thought of making. He answered it, listened briefly and then ended the call with a curt 'thank you'. "Well, that's a bugger."
"What's the matter, Tom?"
"According to the CPS, Kevin Small and Darren Woods have had their bail paid and they will be released within the hour. I have to get back to my office; I need to put a guard on Miss Chen and other key witnesses."
"Just remember, those two have friends. And they're not nice people like us." Angel's smile was beatific. What worried Barnstable was that he agreed with her.
After Barnstable had gone to make his calls, Conrad turned to Angel. "Don't let that bit of bonhomie fool you. Tom very badly wants to bring you down. He was patting you on the back so he could feel the best place to stick a knife in."
Angel agreed. The only question in her mind was how he would try to do it.
Office of Rupert Ashley, West Country Division, Crown Prosecution Service, Exeter
"I must say that, as agents of the Crown Prosecution Service, our prime consideration is that there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. In this case, the only way we could have seen an increased prospect of conviction would have been to have found the defendant standing on top of the village war memorial, loot and signed confession in hand while shouting "I did it" at the top of his voice." In the background, Angel took out a notebook and wrote that down. Ashley watched her and his mouth twitched. "However, setting bail is the prerogative of the Magistrate's Court and, of course, once set, the payment of bail is at the discretion of the payer. I must admit that going by the guidelines issued to magistrates, Melrose made the right decision."
"How? We checked the two thugs of course." Barnstable was irate that this situation had even arisen. "Neither of them had anything like that kind of money."
"In the case of Kevin Small, it appears that his mother borrowed money using her house as collateral. Of course, if he absconds as we believe he will, then she will lose her home. Darren Woods, well he is unemployed and without funds but his uncle is a property developer and owns a building and builder's supplies business. He took the money out of there. He stands to lose the money as well of course and that will do his business no end of no good. Having said that, those consequences are really nothing to do with us. Of course, when the two accused do fail to appear, they will become fugitives adding to the charges against them. Whether that actually means anything of course depends on whether they get caught again."
"Reward for information?" Angel's question had more self-interest in it than was immediately apparent. "And is it dead or alive?"
"No, and no. It's the Occupation again I'm afraid. Just as there was a tremendous backlash against the police using entrapment after the Occupation, so also was there great revulsion against the activities of informers, especially paid informers. There was a particularly vile case, one Dorothy Garrison, who had a blackmail racket centered around inventing stories about people and demanding payment for not passing the stories through to those Gestapo. She was found hanged in the woods not far from here, presumably by the Resistance. Anyway, Police are not allowed to pay rewards for information. As for dead or alive, no. Just, no."
"So, does this affect the trial, other than the extreme improbability of the defendants actually appearing?' Barnstable was now more irate at the fact to dangerous thugs had been released on bail than at Angel who had played the rules in order to capture them in the first place.
"If they turn up, their guilty pleas are accepted and they are sentenced. As I said before, no doubt about that, this case is solid. If chummies withdraw their guilty pleas and somehow, in the absence of new evidence, get acquitted, it would be such a blatant miscarriage that the CPS would appeal. So, they won't appear and the people who put up bail will lose out. Not that Small and Woods will care about that.
"Uncompensated, low-functioning psychopaths." Angel sounded scornful. "They give the rest of us a bad name."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Five
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
It was rather fortunate that the design of the bungalow featured a combined living and dining room since that gave more space for Conrad’s corkboards. He was methodically setting up boards for as many of the murders as he could and the forest was reaching impressive proportions. He and Angel had already made two runs to an office supplies store and it was looking like they would have to make a third. Conrad was in new territory here; he had never had to deal with so many cases at once and the sheer volume of data was crushing him.
“Angel, its six-thirty. We ought to be heading over to the hospital. Our slot in the visiting hours starts at seven. Where are you?”
“Over by the glass factory board.” Angel looked around and realized Conrad couldn’t see her amidst the corkboard jungle so she lifted up her pony tail and waved the end in the air to act as an improvised flag. She heard him laugh at the sight and start to make his way through the maze. “I know this case, from the other end so to speak.”
“The glass factory? Ah yes. Margaret King's husband owned a glass factory that was in dire economic trouble. He died in an accident in China, she married his brother. He died and so did their accountant. The wife was arrested and charged with all three murders. Tom made a good case that she planned the whole thing to seize control of the company and move it to China where labor costs are a lot lower.”
Angel nodded. “Well, they better release her. We were involved in that and they have all the details wrong. It wasn’t the wife who was trying to move the company to China, it was her original husband’s brother and the company accountant. They’d been illegally bleeding money out of the company for years to finance the move and they hired us to move the money into China for them, so they could fund the new business out there. The original owner didn’t approve of the plan you see. Anyway, we were moving the cash for them when everything went down here, brother and accountant were murdered, and wife arrested. Since the whole business had collapsed, we disappeared the money. We didn’t know much of the details of course. It’s only when I saw this that I realized the case is wrong. It’s like Ronnie was saying a few nights back, the police solved the case but when somebody knows what really happened, the solution doesn’t make much sense.”
Conrad had a horrible thought. “Angel, you didn’t, did you?”
“You know what Igrat says. Before asking a question, think very carefully about whether you want to know the answer.” Then she had mercy on him and gave him a warm, beaming smile. “The answer is no. Not this time. Victims were stabbed, not shot. In fact, the killings surprised us. One of the reasons we liked the deal was that this seemed such a quiet, safe place. Damn, did we ever get that wrong. There is an odd thing though; the court case made great play of the Freemasons being involved and the details do match. The murder weapon was a Masonic ceremonial dagger with the wife's fingerprints all over it. Only, the society in question wasn’t the Freemasons at all. It was . . .”
“The 14K Triad?” Conrad offered.
“Good boy. We're organized crime, they're not, but take out cosmetic details and there probably isn’t much difference between the two. It’s just the similarity with Ronnie’s little problem that bugs me.”
“Why don’t we go and see her in prison tomorrow? Have a talk with her. Is that all right with you?” Conrad was well aware that Angel had been in prison for several years, and spent the time dodging police-instigated attempts to kill her. It occurred to him that visiting a prison might have some extremely unpleasant associations for her.
“Yeah, no problem." Angel put the tip of her right thumb between her teeth and stared at the boards. It was a mannerism she had copied from Suriyothai and Conrad reminded himself that all her "personal relations" gestures were the same. They were copied from others so she could get along with the people around her. It was what was meant by 'high-functioning', the ability to simulate the behavior needed cope with an environment that she didn’t really understand. "You know, Conrad, something really worries me about this. Of all these cases, we know what really happened in two of them and in both cases, the reality is very different from the official conclusions. It's a one-hundred-percent score. Doesn’t that make us think about the rest?"
"You believe that Ronnie the Jaws was telling you the truth then?"
"Certainly, he has every reason to support the official line. It means that his own people are in the clear and that's his primary responsibility. The fact that he told me, despite the fact I'm wearing a police hat right now, indicates he's really concerned." Angel bit her thumb again. "This one worries me as well, the loan-sharking in a golf club one. It doesn't smell right to me."
She flashed an affectionate smile at Conrad. Like her earlier smile, it was genuine and seeing it gave him a warm glow of satisfaction. "Speaking as a career villain, of course. Loan sharks don't kill their clients, one can’t get money out of a corpse. Let alone three of them. Even breaking arms and legs has gone out of fashion these days. Put a man in hospital for six months and any possibility of getting the money back has gone. In fact, most loan-sharks are scaling their interest rates back right now. Much better to charge a medium rate that will get paid than a high one that won’t. And yet, despite that, the woman in question charged exorbitant rates that couldn’t possibly be paid and then killed three people who couldn't pay?"
That is Angel at her most cold-blooded utilitarian best. Moral issues are meaningless, what matters are results. And for a criminal organization, the result that matters is making money. Why is it I get the feeling there is a pattern behind all these killings, it's just that we can't see it? Conrad shook his head. "I thought killing or maiming people who didn't pay their debts served as an incentive to other people to pay theirs?"
"That's true, but it’s a very risky policy. Frighten people enough and they'll either go to the police or fight back. If they do either, it costs us a lot of money to solve. Much better to find a way of doing things that lets people pay what they owe without being ruined in the process. Make the deal attractive enough, and they might even come back again. No, Conrad, this golf club case doesn’t ring right either. We don't have inside knowledge the way we have with the other two, but this looks to me like a third case of the official story being way off-beam. And you know what they say."
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time makes a pattern. Angel, let's keep this to ourselves right now; the fewer people who know we are on to something the better. I'll call Eastwood Park Prison tomorrow morning and make an appointment to see Mrs. King. Now, we better get moving to see Mao-Lee. Got some flowers?"
Angel shook her head and held up two envelopes. "These will make her a lot happier."
Gould Ward, Queen's Building, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
"Ah, Mollie. An excellent patient; I wish all our visitors were as polite and cooperative. I understand you got the two . . . . beggars . . . . who beat her up?" Sister-in-Charge Kate Onslow, resplendent in the dark blue tunic that marked her absolute authority over the ward, controlled her indignation heroically.
"Oh yes." Angel looked around. She was remarkably familiar with hospitals having spent a fair amount of time recovering from assorted wounds over the years. This one really impressed her. "They'll be going down hard."
Sister Onslow looked at Angel sharply. "Excuse me, but are you armed?"
Angel flipped her jacket open and revealed her twin Berettas in their shoulder holsters. "My boys are legal. I'm a police firearms training officer. My friend here is a police consultant. We are here on business."
"Well, I don’t like having guns in my ward, but I suppose in this case . . I'll take you to see Mollie now. We have a two visitors per bed rule but since this is official business, we'll make an exception."
Chief Inspector Barnstable and his wife were at Mao-Lee's bedside. They looked up as the door opened to let Conrad and Angel walk in. Sister Onslow looked at the four severely. "Keep your voices down please and do not disturb the other patients. Otherwise, I'll have to enforce the visitors per bed rule."
"Hello you two. Darling, this is Conrad and Angel, the consultants from the Home Office who are helping us. This is my wife, Joan. We were just keeping Mao-Lee up to date on what was happening."
"And bringing her some flowers." Joan Barnstable looked around at Mao-Lee's room. There were a large number of bouquets distributed around. The newspapers had reported the attack on her, telling a somewhat exaggerated story of how she had fought off the attackers long enough for the police to come to the rescue and had thus been instrumental in their arrest. She was now something of a local heroine as a result, especially with previous victims of the bag-snatchers. "This might be of more use to you, Mollie. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board has made you a preliminary payment to cover any out-of-pocket expenses you may incur. You'll be receiving another compensation payment a bit later when the wheels of the Civil Service finally work. And here's a voucher that gives you free access to the hospital television film rental service."
Angel chuckled at the aspersions cast upon the Civil Service. "We're not that bad, Mrs. Barnstable. And in a case like this, the wheels grind pretty fast otherwise the press get nasty."
Joan Barnstable smiled politely at Angel. "I'm sorry, Inspector, no offense meant. It's just I work on the Victim's Support Group here and we see all too many cases where victim's compensation gets held up for months or even gets denied completely. Please call me Joan by the way. Everybody does."
"Thank you, Joan. I'm Angel. It is good of you to help out victims like this. That television voucher is very kind." Angel actually made the comment sound sincere although she couldn’t really understand why Joan Barnstable bothered with good works that didn't benefit her. "Mao-Lee, how are you doing? May I look?"
Mao-Lee nodded and Angel bent over her, carefully looking at the blackened eye, split lip and bruised cheeks. Mao-Lee's ribs were bandaged but Angel was able to see that the bruising there was already beginning to yellow. At some point in the inspection, Angel had slipped the two envelopes into Mao-Lee's hand. One was from London House and represented her share of the agreed fee for her services. The other was from the 14K central house and was a gratuity for a job that, by being well-done, had benefitted the Triad as a whole. Together, they were substantially greater than the compensation payment she would receive from the government. "Looks to me like you're healing up quickly. Are they looking after you properly?"
"Oh yes, Eldest Sister. They even made some chicken egg-drop soup especially for me." Mao-Lee looked at Angel with awe. It was the first time she had met the fabled Hēilóng Shāshǒu. Despite the fact that she had spoken in Cantonese, Barnstable's eyes had opened wide when she had addressed Angel as 'Eldest Sister'. That was the first intimation Angel had that Barnstable spoke, or at least understood, Cantonese. It suddenly occurred to her that she had been quite remiss in not getting more details of his previous career with 'Six'. Sitting beside her, Conrad also had caught the exchange and come to the same conclusion.
"So how did your research go?" Joan Barnstable was prattling on, completely oblivious to the unspoken exchange that had taken place right in front of her. "Will we be seeing your family opening a new restaurant here?"
"I believe so, Mrs. Barnstable. There are some very promising properties available and I think my honored father will be very keen to take the most favorable. I think we will have our new restaurant open by this time next year."
And the 14K Triad will have a foothold in this area by then, one that will help us slowly expand into a vacuum. It was interesting to know that there was no organized crime presence in this part of Britain. It means we can move in without stepping on any toes. Angel was happy with the way that particular part of her program was working. 14K Triad influence was slowly but surely spreading cross the whole of the UK. From a minor operation in a small part of London, London House now controlled sub-houses in Glasgow, Oxford and Cardiff. Each was now the center of a web of quiet, low key and very profitable operations. Combined with the profits London House was making since it had moved into the stock fraud and share manipulation industry, Britain was quickly becoming one of the stars in the 14K Triad constellation. She was also quietly proud of the fact that she had managed the growth so far without causing any serious conflict between the authorities and the Triads. It was a vindication of the established Triad strategy of infiltrate, make alliances and avoid disputes.
"I will look forward to that. Please call me Joan by the way."
A few minutes later the group left. Joan Barnstable looked back at Mao-Lee's room and sighed. "What a nice girl. It was horrible of them to beat her like that. Why did they do it?"
"It could have been much worse." Barnstable was looking very pensive. "Those two are a really nasty pair of thugs. I really wish they hadn't been bailed out. I suspect Melrose only went by the book because he thought the families wouldn't be able to come up with the cash. As for why they beat that poor girl up, they're just bad people. They do bad things."
Barnstable looked nervously at Angel as if he was expecting her to suddenly riddle him with bullets. Instead, to his surprise, she was nodding in agreement. "Having vicious street criminals preying on local people, Tom, is a problem for everybody no matter which side of the law they are nominally on. Let's just be grateful this one worked out all right in the end."
Angel walked over to where there was a "Friends and Supporters" collection box and shoved a well-stuffed envelope through the slot. Barnstable saw that it was so thick that it barely passed through the slot and he guessed that none of the notes inside were small-denomination. He also suspected that the gift seemed generous but actually it was an investment in future goodwill. That worried him.
Confidential Meeting Room, Her Majesty's Prison for Women, Eastwood
"I didn't do it. I don't know who did but it wasn't me." Prisoner 64261 Margaret King looked across the table at her visitors. At one point, her eyes would have been filled with desperation at her situation and the miscarriage of justice that had put her in it. Now, hopelessness had eaten that away and reduced her to something very close to catatonia. Angel recognized the look from her own time in prison and made a mental note to have her put on suicide watch.
"Your second husband and the company accountant were stabbed with a Masonic ceremonial knife. It's got a very distinctive wavy blade. One was found in your home, with your fingerprints on it. Can you explain that?" Conrad came to the same conclusions about Margaret King as Angel had just reached although based on entirely different logic. He had looked at her and seen a woman in late middle age who had once taken great care over her appearance and tried to remain stylish and elegant. All of that had gone. Even allowing for the prison uniform and the scarcity of make-up, she had taken no pains over her appearance at all. Quite simply, she obviously didn’t care what she looked like.
"Both my husbands were Freemasons. Each had his own dagger. The one the police found had belonged to my second husband. I used to clean it for him. I cleaned my first husband's as well but that has vanished. I don’t know where it went."
"Interesting." Conrad replied almost absently. Then, he picked a strategy from his playbook and started the carefully-constructed web of apparently-innocuous questions that would entrap the guilty before they realized the net was even there. This time, the answers the questioning produced led him to an irrefutable conclusion. Angel had been right, Margaret King was innocent. But if she didn’t do it, then who did? And why?
"Margaret, you say you didn't commit those murders and I believe you. So, there's a triple murderer out there and we need to get him. Have you any idea who might have killed your husbands and their company accountant?"
King shook her head. "I didn't know anything about the company, other than it was in a lot of trouble. I only found out about the move to China after I was arrested. I know there was a lot of trouble with the Union brewing, that's all. Word had got out that the company was in serious difficulties and there were going to be a lot of redundancies. Of course, when it came out that the company pension fund had been looted, their attitude got really bloody but that was after the killings."
Conrad watched her carefully, watching her slowly come back to life as she realized there was somebody who believed in her innocence. "There's another way to attack this. Whoever killed them, went to a lot of trouble to frame you. Who hates you enough to want to do that?"
"There was a lot of ill-feeling in the village when it came out that I was going to marry Derek. Quite a few of the women said that the thought of me marrying, meaning having sex with, my late husband's brother made them feel sick. I even got a few poison-pen letters over it."
"That's strange." Angel looked around the room. "Where I come from, it's compulsory."
That made Conrad laugh and, after a split second, King joined in. It was the first time she had laughed in a very long time. Conrad wiped his eyes and shook his head. "I don’t know why we're laughing, the same provision is in the Bible. If a woman is left a widow without children, she has the right to demand that one of any unmarried brothers of her late husband marry her. Her first son by the new marriage is considered her previous husband's legal heir. It's called a Levirate marriage. It was also considered a very honorable and decent thing for the man to do for the widow and for his family in general."
"Same with us. If one of our married women loses her husband, she has the right to go to the Incense Master and ask him to find her a suitable replacement. He'll usually act as a matchmaker, fixing up meetings with some suitable but unmarried men of an appropriate age and letting nature take its course."
"I wish North Somerset was so civilized." Margaret King was still smiling at the release of knowing somebody believed in her innocence. "Some of the letters I got were really nasty."
"I don't suppose you kept them?" Conrad wondered if they were in a police file somewhere although he had a feeling that if Margaret King had kept them, they would have vanished by now.
"No, I burned them. Some of them were horrible, making nasty threats. That was foolish of me wasn't it?"
Angel was about to agree with her but Conrad got in first. "It might have been, but as it happens it didn’t work out that way. By the way, where were you when your first husband died?"
"In our hotel room in Shanghai, waiting for him to return from a business meeting. There was a knock on the door and I thought it was him but it was a Chinese policeman telling me there had been an accident."
That puzzled Conrad; he was beginning to realize the more carefully he looked at these cases, the more holes in their logic opened up before him. Beneath it all, he was getting the feeling that something very unwholesome was lurking.
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
It was rather fortunate that the design of the bungalow featured a combined living and dining room since that gave more space for Conrad’s corkboards. He was methodically setting up boards for as many of the murders as he could and the forest was reaching impressive proportions. He and Angel had already made two runs to an office supplies store and it was looking like they would have to make a third. Conrad was in new territory here; he had never had to deal with so many cases at once and the sheer volume of data was crushing him.
“Angel, its six-thirty. We ought to be heading over to the hospital. Our slot in the visiting hours starts at seven. Where are you?”
“Over by the glass factory board.” Angel looked around and realized Conrad couldn’t see her amidst the corkboard jungle so she lifted up her pony tail and waved the end in the air to act as an improvised flag. She heard him laugh at the sight and start to make his way through the maze. “I know this case, from the other end so to speak.”
“The glass factory? Ah yes. Margaret King's husband owned a glass factory that was in dire economic trouble. He died in an accident in China, she married his brother. He died and so did their accountant. The wife was arrested and charged with all three murders. Tom made a good case that she planned the whole thing to seize control of the company and move it to China where labor costs are a lot lower.”
Angel nodded. “Well, they better release her. We were involved in that and they have all the details wrong. It wasn’t the wife who was trying to move the company to China, it was her original husband’s brother and the company accountant. They’d been illegally bleeding money out of the company for years to finance the move and they hired us to move the money into China for them, so they could fund the new business out there. The original owner didn’t approve of the plan you see. Anyway, we were moving the cash for them when everything went down here, brother and accountant were murdered, and wife arrested. Since the whole business had collapsed, we disappeared the money. We didn’t know much of the details of course. It’s only when I saw this that I realized the case is wrong. It’s like Ronnie was saying a few nights back, the police solved the case but when somebody knows what really happened, the solution doesn’t make much sense.”
Conrad had a horrible thought. “Angel, you didn’t, did you?”
“You know what Igrat says. Before asking a question, think very carefully about whether you want to know the answer.” Then she had mercy on him and gave him a warm, beaming smile. “The answer is no. Not this time. Victims were stabbed, not shot. In fact, the killings surprised us. One of the reasons we liked the deal was that this seemed such a quiet, safe place. Damn, did we ever get that wrong. There is an odd thing though; the court case made great play of the Freemasons being involved and the details do match. The murder weapon was a Masonic ceremonial dagger with the wife's fingerprints all over it. Only, the society in question wasn’t the Freemasons at all. It was . . .”
“The 14K Triad?” Conrad offered.
“Good boy. We're organized crime, they're not, but take out cosmetic details and there probably isn’t much difference between the two. It’s just the similarity with Ronnie’s little problem that bugs me.”
“Why don’t we go and see her in prison tomorrow? Have a talk with her. Is that all right with you?” Conrad was well aware that Angel had been in prison for several years, and spent the time dodging police-instigated attempts to kill her. It occurred to him that visiting a prison might have some extremely unpleasant associations for her.
“Yeah, no problem." Angel put the tip of her right thumb between her teeth and stared at the boards. It was a mannerism she had copied from Suriyothai and Conrad reminded himself that all her "personal relations" gestures were the same. They were copied from others so she could get along with the people around her. It was what was meant by 'high-functioning', the ability to simulate the behavior needed cope with an environment that she didn’t really understand. "You know, Conrad, something really worries me about this. Of all these cases, we know what really happened in two of them and in both cases, the reality is very different from the official conclusions. It's a one-hundred-percent score. Doesn’t that make us think about the rest?"
"You believe that Ronnie the Jaws was telling you the truth then?"
"Certainly, he has every reason to support the official line. It means that his own people are in the clear and that's his primary responsibility. The fact that he told me, despite the fact I'm wearing a police hat right now, indicates he's really concerned." Angel bit her thumb again. "This one worries me as well, the loan-sharking in a golf club one. It doesn't smell right to me."
She flashed an affectionate smile at Conrad. Like her earlier smile, it was genuine and seeing it gave him a warm glow of satisfaction. "Speaking as a career villain, of course. Loan sharks don't kill their clients, one can’t get money out of a corpse. Let alone three of them. Even breaking arms and legs has gone out of fashion these days. Put a man in hospital for six months and any possibility of getting the money back has gone. In fact, most loan-sharks are scaling their interest rates back right now. Much better to charge a medium rate that will get paid than a high one that won’t. And yet, despite that, the woman in question charged exorbitant rates that couldn’t possibly be paid and then killed three people who couldn't pay?"
That is Angel at her most cold-blooded utilitarian best. Moral issues are meaningless, what matters are results. And for a criminal organization, the result that matters is making money. Why is it I get the feeling there is a pattern behind all these killings, it's just that we can't see it? Conrad shook his head. "I thought killing or maiming people who didn't pay their debts served as an incentive to other people to pay theirs?"
"That's true, but it’s a very risky policy. Frighten people enough and they'll either go to the police or fight back. If they do either, it costs us a lot of money to solve. Much better to find a way of doing things that lets people pay what they owe without being ruined in the process. Make the deal attractive enough, and they might even come back again. No, Conrad, this golf club case doesn’t ring right either. We don't have inside knowledge the way we have with the other two, but this looks to me like a third case of the official story being way off-beam. And you know what they say."
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time makes a pattern. Angel, let's keep this to ourselves right now; the fewer people who know we are on to something the better. I'll call Eastwood Park Prison tomorrow morning and make an appointment to see Mrs. King. Now, we better get moving to see Mao-Lee. Got some flowers?"
Angel shook her head and held up two envelopes. "These will make her a lot happier."
Gould Ward, Queen's Building, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
"Ah, Mollie. An excellent patient; I wish all our visitors were as polite and cooperative. I understand you got the two . . . . beggars . . . . who beat her up?" Sister-in-Charge Kate Onslow, resplendent in the dark blue tunic that marked her absolute authority over the ward, controlled her indignation heroically.
"Oh yes." Angel looked around. She was remarkably familiar with hospitals having spent a fair amount of time recovering from assorted wounds over the years. This one really impressed her. "They'll be going down hard."
Sister Onslow looked at Angel sharply. "Excuse me, but are you armed?"
Angel flipped her jacket open and revealed her twin Berettas in their shoulder holsters. "My boys are legal. I'm a police firearms training officer. My friend here is a police consultant. We are here on business."
"Well, I don’t like having guns in my ward, but I suppose in this case . . I'll take you to see Mollie now. We have a two visitors per bed rule but since this is official business, we'll make an exception."
Chief Inspector Barnstable and his wife were at Mao-Lee's bedside. They looked up as the door opened to let Conrad and Angel walk in. Sister Onslow looked at the four severely. "Keep your voices down please and do not disturb the other patients. Otherwise, I'll have to enforce the visitors per bed rule."
"Hello you two. Darling, this is Conrad and Angel, the consultants from the Home Office who are helping us. This is my wife, Joan. We were just keeping Mao-Lee up to date on what was happening."
"And bringing her some flowers." Joan Barnstable looked around at Mao-Lee's room. There were a large number of bouquets distributed around. The newspapers had reported the attack on her, telling a somewhat exaggerated story of how she had fought off the attackers long enough for the police to come to the rescue and had thus been instrumental in their arrest. She was now something of a local heroine as a result, especially with previous victims of the bag-snatchers. "This might be of more use to you, Mollie. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board has made you a preliminary payment to cover any out-of-pocket expenses you may incur. You'll be receiving another compensation payment a bit later when the wheels of the Civil Service finally work. And here's a voucher that gives you free access to the hospital television film rental service."
Angel chuckled at the aspersions cast upon the Civil Service. "We're not that bad, Mrs. Barnstable. And in a case like this, the wheels grind pretty fast otherwise the press get nasty."
Joan Barnstable smiled politely at Angel. "I'm sorry, Inspector, no offense meant. It's just I work on the Victim's Support Group here and we see all too many cases where victim's compensation gets held up for months or even gets denied completely. Please call me Joan by the way. Everybody does."
"Thank you, Joan. I'm Angel. It is good of you to help out victims like this. That television voucher is very kind." Angel actually made the comment sound sincere although she couldn’t really understand why Joan Barnstable bothered with good works that didn't benefit her. "Mao-Lee, how are you doing? May I look?"
Mao-Lee nodded and Angel bent over her, carefully looking at the blackened eye, split lip and bruised cheeks. Mao-Lee's ribs were bandaged but Angel was able to see that the bruising there was already beginning to yellow. At some point in the inspection, Angel had slipped the two envelopes into Mao-Lee's hand. One was from London House and represented her share of the agreed fee for her services. The other was from the 14K central house and was a gratuity for a job that, by being well-done, had benefitted the Triad as a whole. Together, they were substantially greater than the compensation payment she would receive from the government. "Looks to me like you're healing up quickly. Are they looking after you properly?"
"Oh yes, Eldest Sister. They even made some chicken egg-drop soup especially for me." Mao-Lee looked at Angel with awe. It was the first time she had met the fabled Hēilóng Shāshǒu. Despite the fact that she had spoken in Cantonese, Barnstable's eyes had opened wide when she had addressed Angel as 'Eldest Sister'. That was the first intimation Angel had that Barnstable spoke, or at least understood, Cantonese. It suddenly occurred to her that she had been quite remiss in not getting more details of his previous career with 'Six'. Sitting beside her, Conrad also had caught the exchange and come to the same conclusion.
"So how did your research go?" Joan Barnstable was prattling on, completely oblivious to the unspoken exchange that had taken place right in front of her. "Will we be seeing your family opening a new restaurant here?"
"I believe so, Mrs. Barnstable. There are some very promising properties available and I think my honored father will be very keen to take the most favorable. I think we will have our new restaurant open by this time next year."
And the 14K Triad will have a foothold in this area by then, one that will help us slowly expand into a vacuum. It was interesting to know that there was no organized crime presence in this part of Britain. It means we can move in without stepping on any toes. Angel was happy with the way that particular part of her program was working. 14K Triad influence was slowly but surely spreading cross the whole of the UK. From a minor operation in a small part of London, London House now controlled sub-houses in Glasgow, Oxford and Cardiff. Each was now the center of a web of quiet, low key and very profitable operations. Combined with the profits London House was making since it had moved into the stock fraud and share manipulation industry, Britain was quickly becoming one of the stars in the 14K Triad constellation. She was also quietly proud of the fact that she had managed the growth so far without causing any serious conflict between the authorities and the Triads. It was a vindication of the established Triad strategy of infiltrate, make alliances and avoid disputes.
"I will look forward to that. Please call me Joan by the way."
A few minutes later the group left. Joan Barnstable looked back at Mao-Lee's room and sighed. "What a nice girl. It was horrible of them to beat her like that. Why did they do it?"
"It could have been much worse." Barnstable was looking very pensive. "Those two are a really nasty pair of thugs. I really wish they hadn't been bailed out. I suspect Melrose only went by the book because he thought the families wouldn't be able to come up with the cash. As for why they beat that poor girl up, they're just bad people. They do bad things."
Barnstable looked nervously at Angel as if he was expecting her to suddenly riddle him with bullets. Instead, to his surprise, she was nodding in agreement. "Having vicious street criminals preying on local people, Tom, is a problem for everybody no matter which side of the law they are nominally on. Let's just be grateful this one worked out all right in the end."
Angel walked over to where there was a "Friends and Supporters" collection box and shoved a well-stuffed envelope through the slot. Barnstable saw that it was so thick that it barely passed through the slot and he guessed that none of the notes inside were small-denomination. He also suspected that the gift seemed generous but actually it was an investment in future goodwill. That worried him.
Confidential Meeting Room, Her Majesty's Prison for Women, Eastwood
"I didn't do it. I don't know who did but it wasn't me." Prisoner 64261 Margaret King looked across the table at her visitors. At one point, her eyes would have been filled with desperation at her situation and the miscarriage of justice that had put her in it. Now, hopelessness had eaten that away and reduced her to something very close to catatonia. Angel recognized the look from her own time in prison and made a mental note to have her put on suicide watch.
"Your second husband and the company accountant were stabbed with a Masonic ceremonial knife. It's got a very distinctive wavy blade. One was found in your home, with your fingerprints on it. Can you explain that?" Conrad came to the same conclusions about Margaret King as Angel had just reached although based on entirely different logic. He had looked at her and seen a woman in late middle age who had once taken great care over her appearance and tried to remain stylish and elegant. All of that had gone. Even allowing for the prison uniform and the scarcity of make-up, she had taken no pains over her appearance at all. Quite simply, she obviously didn’t care what she looked like.
"Both my husbands were Freemasons. Each had his own dagger. The one the police found had belonged to my second husband. I used to clean it for him. I cleaned my first husband's as well but that has vanished. I don’t know where it went."
"Interesting." Conrad replied almost absently. Then, he picked a strategy from his playbook and started the carefully-constructed web of apparently-innocuous questions that would entrap the guilty before they realized the net was even there. This time, the answers the questioning produced led him to an irrefutable conclusion. Angel had been right, Margaret King was innocent. But if she didn’t do it, then who did? And why?
"Margaret, you say you didn't commit those murders and I believe you. So, there's a triple murderer out there and we need to get him. Have you any idea who might have killed your husbands and their company accountant?"
King shook her head. "I didn't know anything about the company, other than it was in a lot of trouble. I only found out about the move to China after I was arrested. I know there was a lot of trouble with the Union brewing, that's all. Word had got out that the company was in serious difficulties and there were going to be a lot of redundancies. Of course, when it came out that the company pension fund had been looted, their attitude got really bloody but that was after the killings."
Conrad watched her carefully, watching her slowly come back to life as she realized there was somebody who believed in her innocence. "There's another way to attack this. Whoever killed them, went to a lot of trouble to frame you. Who hates you enough to want to do that?"
"There was a lot of ill-feeling in the village when it came out that I was going to marry Derek. Quite a few of the women said that the thought of me marrying, meaning having sex with, my late husband's brother made them feel sick. I even got a few poison-pen letters over it."
"That's strange." Angel looked around the room. "Where I come from, it's compulsory."
That made Conrad laugh and, after a split second, King joined in. It was the first time she had laughed in a very long time. Conrad wiped his eyes and shook his head. "I don’t know why we're laughing, the same provision is in the Bible. If a woman is left a widow without children, she has the right to demand that one of any unmarried brothers of her late husband marry her. Her first son by the new marriage is considered her previous husband's legal heir. It's called a Levirate marriage. It was also considered a very honorable and decent thing for the man to do for the widow and for his family in general."
"Same with us. If one of our married women loses her husband, she has the right to go to the Incense Master and ask him to find her a suitable replacement. He'll usually act as a matchmaker, fixing up meetings with some suitable but unmarried men of an appropriate age and letting nature take its course."
"I wish North Somerset was so civilized." Margaret King was still smiling at the release of knowing somebody believed in her innocence. "Some of the letters I got were really nasty."
"I don't suppose you kept them?" Conrad wondered if they were in a police file somewhere although he had a feeling that if Margaret King had kept them, they would have vanished by now.
"No, I burned them. Some of them were horrible, making nasty threats. That was foolish of me wasn't it?"
Angel was about to agree with her but Conrad got in first. "It might have been, but as it happens it didn’t work out that way. By the way, where were you when your first husband died?"
"In our hotel room in Shanghai, waiting for him to return from a business meeting. There was a knock on the door and I thought it was him but it was a Chinese policeman telling me there had been an accident."
That puzzled Conrad; he was beginning to realize the more carefully he looked at these cases, the more holes in their logic opened up before him. Beneath it all, he was getting the feeling that something very unwholesome was lurking.
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Six
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"What confuses me is how Mrs. King was found guilty of murdering her husband." Conrad had read the case notes and, while he could see how the court had found her guilty of murdering her second husband and the company accountant, there was no way he could puzzle out as to how they could possibly have come to the same verdict for the death in China. "There's no real evidence that there even was a murder. The Chinese police said it was a common-or-garden road accident. A man who had too much to drink lost control of the car on a corner with a known accident history, and that was it."
"Which of the three made the best case?" Angel knew how it had been done; the same strategy had been used to convict her once.
Conrad thought about that. "Probably the company accountant. He was found at the glassworks after it had been shut down, stabbed with Mr. King Mark Two's Masonic knife. No defensive wounds which suggested he knew his attacker. There was evidence that Mrs. King had been there at approximately the same time. It's a very weak case really."
"Nevertheless, they talked it up, went to great lengths to explain the evidence they had and made it as damning as possible. They got the jury into the mind-set where they accepted Margaret was guilty of that crime. Then they introduced the murder of her second husband. Since the guilty mindset was already established the jury had much less trouble agreeing with the prosecution case. When they brought the third case in, it went to guilty almost without thought." Conrad looked at Angel and saw her eyes had become cold, black and sleepy. That was usually a preliminary to her killing somebody.
"They did that to you, didn’t they?" Conrad asked the question gently.
"Oh yes. Mind you, in that case I was guilty of almost everything I was charged with. Although I don’t think the mopery with intent to gawp charge should have stuck." Angel visibly shook herself and returned to the present. "In this case, I suspect the prosecution also used the fact she had married her late husband's brother against her. Character assassination. Something the judge should have thrown out. Before you ask, yes, they did that to me as well. What was the basis of the accusation that she murdered her first husband?"
"That's the interesting part, there really isn’t one. It's more a suggestion that she could have sabotaged the car or could have hired somebody to do it for her. I think this is a classic case of why multiple charges should not be tried at the same time." Conrad put the file down sadly. "This was a serious miscarriage of justice. You know, I think we've been looking at this the wrong way. We've been trying to find the links between the murders; perhaps we should be looking for links between how the accused were prosecuted?"
Angel got up and paced around. "I'm a city girl, small country towns aren’t really my scene, but if I get this right, small towns are a closed club, right? Everybody knows everybody, everybody who has pull moves in the same circles."
"I'd say so. And I think I can see where you are going with this."
"In that forgery case we wrapped up a few years back, Mike Delgado told me that in my trial, the judge, the prosecuting attorney, my defense attorney were all collaborating to make sure I got executed. That's why my convictions, all of them, were thrown out when the case was reviewed."
Conrad couldn’t help himself; he snorted with laughter at that. Angel looked at him with an eyebrow raised. "That's funny?"
"Legally it is. It means that you got a presidential pardon for a set of crimes you hadn’t committed. It’s about the best legal contradiction since Jonathan Taylor was convicted of taking a bribe that Nicholas Kinnock was acquitted of giving him. In this case, though, its not so much a deliberate set-up as all the participants coming from the same background and sharing the same basic beliefs. That’s why so many places have provisions for a trial to be moved to a different venue.”
“Conrad, say again, I did do everything, more or less, that they charged me with.”
“Not in the eyes of the law, you were then, and are now, innocent until proven guilty. And they haven’t so you are.” Conrad tilted his head to one side as he thought about the implications of that. “Anyway, let’s look at this school thing Ronnie the Jaws mentioned. It was all started when one of the students at the Saint Helena Charter School was killed while on a cross-country run. Clubbed to death. The investigation linked that to society in the school called ‘The Pudding Club’, apparently devoted to preserving the recipes for traditional British puddings and recreating the recipes that have been lost.
"Shortly after the investigation started, a second pupil was killed and then one of the teachers. The investigation showed that ‘The Pudding Club’ was actually an international ring of thieves, old boys from the school who had entered the Foreign Office, then used their positions to steal valuable artifacts, smuggle them back to the UK and then sold them to help finance Saint Helena's. The first victim had found the stolen artifacts by accident. He had told a friend about it so they were both killed to keep the secret. A teacher who was a member of the Pudding Club was appalled by that, was going to go to the police so he was killed. The killer was apparently one of the school servants who took his dedication to the club too far. There was quite a scandal about it although most of it was hushed up.”
“And that, Conrad, is the reason why we are really down here. Nothing to do with the extraordinary rate of murders in this part of the world, it’s that Humpty wants to clear the Civil Service in general and the Foreign Office in particular, of involvement. We're being played. Although, we always are when we're in this country. The question is, can we play them as well?"
Conrad had to admit that Angel had a point. He had never trusted Sir Humphrey Appleday and Angel never trusted anybody. Or hadn’t until recently. Now, there were a very small number of people she does trust. Or at least she has decided she would trust them if she could so she imitates ‘trust’. I wonder if that is a good thing? "Ronnie's version has nothing to do with the official one as I remember?"
"The world is awash with illegally-exported antiquities. Japan looted China of everything they could find when they occupied the place. They're now selling it all off to try and keep the country running, and of course to avoid giving it back to China which would mean they would have to admit they stole it all in the first place. There were groups in The Caliphate, before it collapsed, that were smuggling historical relics out of the country before the lunatic fanatics got to them with sledgehammers. Better sold illegally to collectors than reduced to fragments I suppose. Since the current regime took over out there, they are continuing to sell stuff semi-legally while making a show of demanding the earlier losses back. Nobody is listening.
"Almost all of the organized crime networks are involved in antiquity trading, some of it semi-legal. We are, the Mob are, the Firms here, the Milieu in France, the Solntsevskaya Brat'va in Russia. Even the Tongs in China itself. The problem is that because there are so many antiquities on the market, the price they command has seriously been depressed. After all, when somebody has a hundred antique Japanese swords, it's hard to persuade him to buy the one hundred and first."
"Or to persuade his wife to let him buy the one hundred and first." Conrad looked at Angel with amusement. Collecting things was a vice that most of the long-lived indulged in. Achillea had a remarkable collection of weapons that had in common she'd taken them from the bodies of people she had killed. Angel also had a collection of rare firearms although she'd bought or stolen most of them. Naamah collected medieval and earlier treatises on herbs and medicines, Hawkwood, naval memorabilia. The Seer collected antique chess-sets. Then, of course, there was the collection of seriously legendary objects in the NSC building basement. Conrad was the exception since his nomadic life had prevented him from doing so. Now, settled down with his own home for the first time, he was beginning to fall into the same habits. He had started buying rare Bibles and cataloging the differences in the text between them.
"That too." Angel thought of making a gibe about Conrad's Bible collection but decided not to. "It all adds to the same thing, the market for antiquities is seriously depressed. So, Ronnie and his associates came up with a very sensible idea. There's no need for them to steal antiquities, just buy them now when the market is low, store them in good conditions until the market picks up, and then sell them. He told us why they use the ports down here to bring them in. Small ports, no customs, lots of small craft moving in and out, mostly day-running. They found the school inland, one that has a relatively small number of staff and students and a big building, and rented storage space there. I'll bet it was a really comfortable arrangement until it all dropped in the pot."
"So, there was no real reason for the killings." Conrad had come to that conclusion very quickly. "If one of the students had found the stolen material, he'd have had no reason to believe they were stolen property. They'd probably just assume they were school assets, put into storage. If they were sophisticated enough, they'd assume that the school had put them into storage to sell when the market improved. It's the same as the glass factory case, it falls apart once we look at it."
"It does more than that. It strongly suggests that the person who has been charged with, and convicted of, the murder wasn't even connected with the case. He was simply an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like Margaret King. Who was he by the way?"
Conrad read the file carefully and it struck him as strange how far he had to read the account of the investigation until he came to the man's name. "David Henderson. He was the head porter of the Saint Helena Charter School. That sounds menial but head porter is an important post in a school like this. He's almost equal to the head master in that the head master runs the teaching side of the school while the head porter runs the administrative side."
"A man like that wouldn't do the job himself. He'd hire somebody like me. It was the first killing that kicked off the investigation?"
"That's right."
"We need to speak with Mr. Henderson. Another prison visit?"
Confidential Meeting Room, Her Majesty's Prison Horfield
It was at times like this that Conrad found himself envying Angel, or more precisely the medical fact that she was a psychopath. After an hour interviewing David Henderson, he was having to work hard in order to avoid becoming sympathetic with him. It wasn't just that he was convinced Henderson was innocent, it was also that the courtly, fastidious man must have been finding confinement in Horfield prison intolerable. Despite his conviction that Henderson had not committed the three murders of which he had been found guilty, the truth was that he had very little positive information to work with. There was substantial evidence against him and his trial had been scrupulously fair. The problem was, had it not been for Ronnie the Jaws claims about what the local firm's relationship with Saint Helena's Charter School had been, he would have agreed with the verdict that had been passed. With that knowledge in hand and with his own impressions from his interrogation of Henderson, Conrad couldn't agree with the verdict. The difficulty was going to be disproving it. Unlike the Margaret King case, there were no glaring faults in how the trial had been conducted.
"So, Mr. Henderson, the police investigation started when the first of the pupils was found murdered?"
"That is indeed correct, Sir. James Marley was found in the woods surrounding the school while a cross-country run was in progress. He had been struck with a tree branch, one being found close by with blood stains on it. The police investigation concluded he had been murdered and it went from there. And here I am." Henderson sounded resigned to his fate but without the soul-destroying despair that had been so evident with Margaret King. "The police and trial reports have all the details."
“They do, although I am not sure whether they have all the details. The victim, James Marley, was there anything unusual about him? Something that might have provided another motivation for his death?”
“Nothing unusual, no.” Henderson had placed a slight intonation on the word ‘unusual’ that Conrad picked up on immediately.
“Something that wasn’t quite the same as his colleagues?”
Angel got the message at last and cut to the heart of the matter. “He was gay?”
“Yes, madam. He and the second victim were . . . special friends I believe the accepted term is these days. So was the master who was killed although there was no hint of impropriety in their relationship. It is something schools are very careful about these days. With more and more teenagers staying on to get ready for university and masters getting younger as the veterans retire and are replaced, the age gap narrows. As it does, so also does the potential for inappropriate relationships.”
“I see.” Conrad thought carefully about that. “Did the police know that the three victims shared the same sexual orientation?”
“I do not know, Sir. Certainly, they never asked.”
“Is it possible they were picked out for attack because of their orientation?”
“Nothing is impossible in schools, Sir. But I think it is unlikely. In my young day, that would have been the cause for bullying, certainly, but times have changed. It is odd though; the Police weren’t just not interested in the issue, when they were looking for links between the victims, they seemed almost determined not to pursue that line. I remember Chief Inspector Barnstable changing the subject rather quickly when it started to head in that direction."
Conrad frowned at that; that kind of prejudice had died on the Russian Front fifty years before. Also, Barnstable didn’t seem to him to have been the kind of man who would allow unprofessional prejudice to affect his handling of the case. “Have the police been at your school before these murders? Any time in, say, the last year?”
“They were, sir. Chief Inspector Barnstable , with his wife and daughter, came to visit us about a month before. It was a routine visit, speaking to students who will taking their A-levels this year about career opportunities in the police force. His wife spoke about community organizations and the need to conserve and protect the countryside. The staff entertained them to a feast in the staff dining room afterwards.”
"Feast?" Angel was puzzled.
"It is one of the traditions of the school, Madam. A feast is an elaborate dinner, with live musical entertainment, featuring traditional dishes that have been recovered by the research and experimentation of the Pudding Club. It is a joyful event."
"I see, thank you. The name is Angel by the way. Not Madam." She watched Henderson dip his head in acknowledgment.
"Mr. Henderson, can we now move to the subject of the storage of allegedly stolen, and certainly smuggled antiquities into the school. Did you know of this?"
"It all depends on what one means by 'know', Sir. Obviously I was aware that the school administration had rented out some of its vacant space to an import and export company. The space in question was ideally suited for the purpose of storing antiquities The gentlemen from the company seemed sound and their rental payments were always made on time. There were no irregularities in the deliveries to our property or removals from. They appeared to have legitimate title to their goods. We are an educational establishment, we could not make detailed international checks the way law enforcement authorities could have done. I did not know, and I am sure that nobody else in the school knew, that there anything improper about the material in question."
"Sounds reasonable, Conrad." Angel was mentally storing the information away for future use if necessary. "Basic tradecraft in fact."
A further thirty minutes of questioning convinced Conrad that, while the School authorities had been unwise in their choice of clients for storage space, their participation didn't rise to justifying a triple murder that had severely damaged their reputation. In his honest opinion, he doubted if the School would survive. It might stagger on for a few years but the damage to its image was probably irreparable. That made them innocents who had been wrongly punished by this affair as well. He got the feeling that the police had seized on the discovery of smuggled antiquities in the building as an excuse to wrap the three killings up in a convincing package. But, if they were so determined to wrap this case up easily, why did they ignore other links between the victims? The answer has to be that those links went somewhere they didn’t want to go. So what was it?
"Are we done, Conrad?" Angel sounded thoughtful.
"I think so."
"Give me ten minutes alone with David will you? I'll join you outside."
As he left, Conrad saw Angel leaning over the table towards Henderson and heard her drop her voice into its prison tones. Ten minutes later, she opened the door and came out, smiling slightly shyly at the curious expression on his face.
"I just gave David a few tips on how to survive in here. He was quite impressed when he found I'd spent three years on Death Row. I'll make a couple of calls this evening and get some mutual friends to put out word he's protected. I don’t think he needs it; he's done OK and he's popular enough with the others but he shouldn’t be in there. He doesn’t belong in a place like that."
Conrad smiled happily at that. "I have always said there is a good person inside you, Angel."
"Must be a long way inside. Let me pick up my boys and we can get out of here."
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"What confuses me is how Mrs. King was found guilty of murdering her husband." Conrad had read the case notes and, while he could see how the court had found her guilty of murdering her second husband and the company accountant, there was no way he could puzzle out as to how they could possibly have come to the same verdict for the death in China. "There's no real evidence that there even was a murder. The Chinese police said it was a common-or-garden road accident. A man who had too much to drink lost control of the car on a corner with a known accident history, and that was it."
"Which of the three made the best case?" Angel knew how it had been done; the same strategy had been used to convict her once.
Conrad thought about that. "Probably the company accountant. He was found at the glassworks after it had been shut down, stabbed with Mr. King Mark Two's Masonic knife. No defensive wounds which suggested he knew his attacker. There was evidence that Mrs. King had been there at approximately the same time. It's a very weak case really."
"Nevertheless, they talked it up, went to great lengths to explain the evidence they had and made it as damning as possible. They got the jury into the mind-set where they accepted Margaret was guilty of that crime. Then they introduced the murder of her second husband. Since the guilty mindset was already established the jury had much less trouble agreeing with the prosecution case. When they brought the third case in, it went to guilty almost without thought." Conrad looked at Angel and saw her eyes had become cold, black and sleepy. That was usually a preliminary to her killing somebody.
"They did that to you, didn’t they?" Conrad asked the question gently.
"Oh yes. Mind you, in that case I was guilty of almost everything I was charged with. Although I don’t think the mopery with intent to gawp charge should have stuck." Angel visibly shook herself and returned to the present. "In this case, I suspect the prosecution also used the fact she had married her late husband's brother against her. Character assassination. Something the judge should have thrown out. Before you ask, yes, they did that to me as well. What was the basis of the accusation that she murdered her first husband?"
"That's the interesting part, there really isn’t one. It's more a suggestion that she could have sabotaged the car or could have hired somebody to do it for her. I think this is a classic case of why multiple charges should not be tried at the same time." Conrad put the file down sadly. "This was a serious miscarriage of justice. You know, I think we've been looking at this the wrong way. We've been trying to find the links between the murders; perhaps we should be looking for links between how the accused were prosecuted?"
Angel got up and paced around. "I'm a city girl, small country towns aren’t really my scene, but if I get this right, small towns are a closed club, right? Everybody knows everybody, everybody who has pull moves in the same circles."
"I'd say so. And I think I can see where you are going with this."
"In that forgery case we wrapped up a few years back, Mike Delgado told me that in my trial, the judge, the prosecuting attorney, my defense attorney were all collaborating to make sure I got executed. That's why my convictions, all of them, were thrown out when the case was reviewed."
Conrad couldn’t help himself; he snorted with laughter at that. Angel looked at him with an eyebrow raised. "That's funny?"
"Legally it is. It means that you got a presidential pardon for a set of crimes you hadn’t committed. It’s about the best legal contradiction since Jonathan Taylor was convicted of taking a bribe that Nicholas Kinnock was acquitted of giving him. In this case, though, its not so much a deliberate set-up as all the participants coming from the same background and sharing the same basic beliefs. That’s why so many places have provisions for a trial to be moved to a different venue.”
“Conrad, say again, I did do everything, more or less, that they charged me with.”
“Not in the eyes of the law, you were then, and are now, innocent until proven guilty. And they haven’t so you are.” Conrad tilted his head to one side as he thought about the implications of that. “Anyway, let’s look at this school thing Ronnie the Jaws mentioned. It was all started when one of the students at the Saint Helena Charter School was killed while on a cross-country run. Clubbed to death. The investigation linked that to society in the school called ‘The Pudding Club’, apparently devoted to preserving the recipes for traditional British puddings and recreating the recipes that have been lost.
"Shortly after the investigation started, a second pupil was killed and then one of the teachers. The investigation showed that ‘The Pudding Club’ was actually an international ring of thieves, old boys from the school who had entered the Foreign Office, then used their positions to steal valuable artifacts, smuggle them back to the UK and then sold them to help finance Saint Helena's. The first victim had found the stolen artifacts by accident. He had told a friend about it so they were both killed to keep the secret. A teacher who was a member of the Pudding Club was appalled by that, was going to go to the police so he was killed. The killer was apparently one of the school servants who took his dedication to the club too far. There was quite a scandal about it although most of it was hushed up.”
“And that, Conrad, is the reason why we are really down here. Nothing to do with the extraordinary rate of murders in this part of the world, it’s that Humpty wants to clear the Civil Service in general and the Foreign Office in particular, of involvement. We're being played. Although, we always are when we're in this country. The question is, can we play them as well?"
Conrad had to admit that Angel had a point. He had never trusted Sir Humphrey Appleday and Angel never trusted anybody. Or hadn’t until recently. Now, there were a very small number of people she does trust. Or at least she has decided she would trust them if she could so she imitates ‘trust’. I wonder if that is a good thing? "Ronnie's version has nothing to do with the official one as I remember?"
"The world is awash with illegally-exported antiquities. Japan looted China of everything they could find when they occupied the place. They're now selling it all off to try and keep the country running, and of course to avoid giving it back to China which would mean they would have to admit they stole it all in the first place. There were groups in The Caliphate, before it collapsed, that were smuggling historical relics out of the country before the lunatic fanatics got to them with sledgehammers. Better sold illegally to collectors than reduced to fragments I suppose. Since the current regime took over out there, they are continuing to sell stuff semi-legally while making a show of demanding the earlier losses back. Nobody is listening.
"Almost all of the organized crime networks are involved in antiquity trading, some of it semi-legal. We are, the Mob are, the Firms here, the Milieu in France, the Solntsevskaya Brat'va in Russia. Even the Tongs in China itself. The problem is that because there are so many antiquities on the market, the price they command has seriously been depressed. After all, when somebody has a hundred antique Japanese swords, it's hard to persuade him to buy the one hundred and first."
"Or to persuade his wife to let him buy the one hundred and first." Conrad looked at Angel with amusement. Collecting things was a vice that most of the long-lived indulged in. Achillea had a remarkable collection of weapons that had in common she'd taken them from the bodies of people she had killed. Angel also had a collection of rare firearms although she'd bought or stolen most of them. Naamah collected medieval and earlier treatises on herbs and medicines, Hawkwood, naval memorabilia. The Seer collected antique chess-sets. Then, of course, there was the collection of seriously legendary objects in the NSC building basement. Conrad was the exception since his nomadic life had prevented him from doing so. Now, settled down with his own home for the first time, he was beginning to fall into the same habits. He had started buying rare Bibles and cataloging the differences in the text between them.
"That too." Angel thought of making a gibe about Conrad's Bible collection but decided not to. "It all adds to the same thing, the market for antiquities is seriously depressed. So, Ronnie and his associates came up with a very sensible idea. There's no need for them to steal antiquities, just buy them now when the market is low, store them in good conditions until the market picks up, and then sell them. He told us why they use the ports down here to bring them in. Small ports, no customs, lots of small craft moving in and out, mostly day-running. They found the school inland, one that has a relatively small number of staff and students and a big building, and rented storage space there. I'll bet it was a really comfortable arrangement until it all dropped in the pot."
"So, there was no real reason for the killings." Conrad had come to that conclusion very quickly. "If one of the students had found the stolen material, he'd have had no reason to believe they were stolen property. They'd probably just assume they were school assets, put into storage. If they were sophisticated enough, they'd assume that the school had put them into storage to sell when the market improved. It's the same as the glass factory case, it falls apart once we look at it."
"It does more than that. It strongly suggests that the person who has been charged with, and convicted of, the murder wasn't even connected with the case. He was simply an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like Margaret King. Who was he by the way?"
Conrad read the file carefully and it struck him as strange how far he had to read the account of the investigation until he came to the man's name. "David Henderson. He was the head porter of the Saint Helena Charter School. That sounds menial but head porter is an important post in a school like this. He's almost equal to the head master in that the head master runs the teaching side of the school while the head porter runs the administrative side."
"A man like that wouldn't do the job himself. He'd hire somebody like me. It was the first killing that kicked off the investigation?"
"That's right."
"We need to speak with Mr. Henderson. Another prison visit?"
Confidential Meeting Room, Her Majesty's Prison Horfield
It was at times like this that Conrad found himself envying Angel, or more precisely the medical fact that she was a psychopath. After an hour interviewing David Henderson, he was having to work hard in order to avoid becoming sympathetic with him. It wasn't just that he was convinced Henderson was innocent, it was also that the courtly, fastidious man must have been finding confinement in Horfield prison intolerable. Despite his conviction that Henderson had not committed the three murders of which he had been found guilty, the truth was that he had very little positive information to work with. There was substantial evidence against him and his trial had been scrupulously fair. The problem was, had it not been for Ronnie the Jaws claims about what the local firm's relationship with Saint Helena's Charter School had been, he would have agreed with the verdict that had been passed. With that knowledge in hand and with his own impressions from his interrogation of Henderson, Conrad couldn't agree with the verdict. The difficulty was going to be disproving it. Unlike the Margaret King case, there were no glaring faults in how the trial had been conducted.
"So, Mr. Henderson, the police investigation started when the first of the pupils was found murdered?"
"That is indeed correct, Sir. James Marley was found in the woods surrounding the school while a cross-country run was in progress. He had been struck with a tree branch, one being found close by with blood stains on it. The police investigation concluded he had been murdered and it went from there. And here I am." Henderson sounded resigned to his fate but without the soul-destroying despair that had been so evident with Margaret King. "The police and trial reports have all the details."
“They do, although I am not sure whether they have all the details. The victim, James Marley, was there anything unusual about him? Something that might have provided another motivation for his death?”
“Nothing unusual, no.” Henderson had placed a slight intonation on the word ‘unusual’ that Conrad picked up on immediately.
“Something that wasn’t quite the same as his colleagues?”
Angel got the message at last and cut to the heart of the matter. “He was gay?”
“Yes, madam. He and the second victim were . . . special friends I believe the accepted term is these days. So was the master who was killed although there was no hint of impropriety in their relationship. It is something schools are very careful about these days. With more and more teenagers staying on to get ready for university and masters getting younger as the veterans retire and are replaced, the age gap narrows. As it does, so also does the potential for inappropriate relationships.”
“I see.” Conrad thought carefully about that. “Did the police know that the three victims shared the same sexual orientation?”
“I do not know, Sir. Certainly, they never asked.”
“Is it possible they were picked out for attack because of their orientation?”
“Nothing is impossible in schools, Sir. But I think it is unlikely. In my young day, that would have been the cause for bullying, certainly, but times have changed. It is odd though; the Police weren’t just not interested in the issue, when they were looking for links between the victims, they seemed almost determined not to pursue that line. I remember Chief Inspector Barnstable changing the subject rather quickly when it started to head in that direction."
Conrad frowned at that; that kind of prejudice had died on the Russian Front fifty years before. Also, Barnstable didn’t seem to him to have been the kind of man who would allow unprofessional prejudice to affect his handling of the case. “Have the police been at your school before these murders? Any time in, say, the last year?”
“They were, sir. Chief Inspector Barnstable , with his wife and daughter, came to visit us about a month before. It was a routine visit, speaking to students who will taking their A-levels this year about career opportunities in the police force. His wife spoke about community organizations and the need to conserve and protect the countryside. The staff entertained them to a feast in the staff dining room afterwards.”
"Feast?" Angel was puzzled.
"It is one of the traditions of the school, Madam. A feast is an elaborate dinner, with live musical entertainment, featuring traditional dishes that have been recovered by the research and experimentation of the Pudding Club. It is a joyful event."
"I see, thank you. The name is Angel by the way. Not Madam." She watched Henderson dip his head in acknowledgment.
"Mr. Henderson, can we now move to the subject of the storage of allegedly stolen, and certainly smuggled antiquities into the school. Did you know of this?"
"It all depends on what one means by 'know', Sir. Obviously I was aware that the school administration had rented out some of its vacant space to an import and export company. The space in question was ideally suited for the purpose of storing antiquities The gentlemen from the company seemed sound and their rental payments were always made on time. There were no irregularities in the deliveries to our property or removals from. They appeared to have legitimate title to their goods. We are an educational establishment, we could not make detailed international checks the way law enforcement authorities could have done. I did not know, and I am sure that nobody else in the school knew, that there anything improper about the material in question."
"Sounds reasonable, Conrad." Angel was mentally storing the information away for future use if necessary. "Basic tradecraft in fact."
A further thirty minutes of questioning convinced Conrad that, while the School authorities had been unwise in their choice of clients for storage space, their participation didn't rise to justifying a triple murder that had severely damaged their reputation. In his honest opinion, he doubted if the School would survive. It might stagger on for a few years but the damage to its image was probably irreparable. That made them innocents who had been wrongly punished by this affair as well. He got the feeling that the police had seized on the discovery of smuggled antiquities in the building as an excuse to wrap the three killings up in a convincing package. But, if they were so determined to wrap this case up easily, why did they ignore other links between the victims? The answer has to be that those links went somewhere they didn’t want to go. So what was it?
"Are we done, Conrad?" Angel sounded thoughtful.
"I think so."
"Give me ten minutes alone with David will you? I'll join you outside."
As he left, Conrad saw Angel leaning over the table towards Henderson and heard her drop her voice into its prison tones. Ten minutes later, she opened the door and came out, smiling slightly shyly at the curious expression on his face.
"I just gave David a few tips on how to survive in here. He was quite impressed when he found I'd spent three years on Death Row. I'll make a couple of calls this evening and get some mutual friends to put out word he's protected. I don’t think he needs it; he's done OK and he's popular enough with the others but he shouldn’t be in there. He doesn’t belong in a place like that."
Conrad smiled happily at that. "I have always said there is a good person inside you, Angel."
"Must be a long way inside. Let me pick up my boys and we can get out of here."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Seven
Detective's Office, North Somerset Division Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"We've got another weird one. Here we go again." Detective Sergeant Scott looked around. "Body found in a building site. Conrad, Angel, you want to join us for this?"
"Oh yes; we need to see one of these cases from its start." Conrad put away the file he was reading and picked up his jacket.
Scott looked over at Angel. "What about you, Angel?"
"I go where he goes. Where's this one?"
"Village called Westonzoyland, about ten miles north-east of here."
Angel looked at him, eyes wide open. "You're kidding me."
"I'm not, honest. It's even got an airfield. Used to be a biggish fighter base back during the Occupation but its only used by microlights these days. Might not be around much longer. I've heard the Council want to sell it for development. They’ve already sold half the runway for new homes." Scott shook his head. "There's been a lot of that around there. Stirred up a lot of resentment it has. Especially when the old manor house was knocked down. Some of the demonstrations about that got close to being riots."
Conrad looked up at that. "I thought it was almost impossible to knock old buildings down here?"
Scott laughed at that. "It is, if they really are old. This one though is a bit different. Businessman bought the title of "Lord of the Manor" back in the 1930s and built himself a manor house to match it. Foolish really, of course, the "Lord of the Manor" title has been almost meaningless since the 1920s. Unless the title is formally compounded with the manorial lands and the seignory rights, it's just empty words. Anyway, when That Man seized power, our businessman left and spent the next decade in America. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe seized the building for pilot's accommodation. Then the US Navy pounded the whole area pretty hard; Westonzoyland took a real battering which is why so much of it has been rebuilt. The Manor House was assumed to be used for accommodation and as an officer’s club, which it was. So, it was a prime target and got virtually demolished.
"Then, after the war, our 'Lord of the Manor' came back, took one look at the ruins and gave it up as a bad job. Instead, and wanting to bring some employment to the village, he built a new Manor House on the outskirts of the village. That became the New Manor House and, of course, the ruin became the Old Manor House. It was left to rot, became even more unsafe and the council approved the site for demolition and redevelopment. Really was unsafe too, the developer found an unexploded five hundred pound bomb and several live rockets in the ruins. However, the preservationists picked up on the name "Old Manor House" and assumed it was a really old building. Created a lot of fuss and were well-peeved when they were ignored. Got really nasty, the family started getting death threats and all that."
"Does this link to our case?" Angel didn’t bother to keep the boredom out of her voice.
Scott knew her well enough to realize she didn’t mean to offend him; it was just Angel being Angelic. "It does to yours. The developer who took over the land the Old Manor House had occupied was George Woods, the builder who put up bail for his nephew, Darren Woods. He's also the developer running the project where the body has just been found."
"Has the body been identified?" Conrad didn’t like coincidences like that.
Scott shook his head. "We've been told that identifying the body presents difficulties. We'll find out more when we get there."
Building Development Site, Westonzoyland, Somerset.
There was no mistaking the scene where the body had been found. There were three marked police cars blocking the access points, all with their lights on, plus DCI Barnstable's unmarked car. A little beyond them was a mobile police incident room and the Scene of Crime Officer's vehicles. Before they were allowed to enter the scene, Conrad, Angel and Scott were issued disposable blue plastic overalls to prevent contamination. Conrad and Angel exchanged glances; it was obvious that these investigations were being taken very seriously. If either of them had suspected otherwise, those doubts had been dispelled.
"Now that's different." A walk into the building development had taken them to the scene of the find. The site had once been a square of land adjoining the village common. It had been surrounded on three sides by main roads and on the other by the boundary between the development area and the common. The developer had built a new road that formed an L-shape joining two of the main roads so that the site was divided into an outer ring and an inner core. The houses on the outside had been largely completed but those in the core had barely been started. Large cement squares for the foundations had been poured but that was all. Out of one such square, obviously the most recently poured, a pair of legs, pulled open to form a Y, pointed forlornly skywards. The owner had been buried up to his waist and upside down in the wet cement. Angel found the sight memorable.
"Something the SS and Partizanjaegers brought with them." Scott explained. "That way, the victim's family could watch his legs kicking in the air as he suffocated. We think that's George Woods but we won't know for sure until we dig the body out. The cement has set, so the boys have gone to get pneumatic drills from the contractors here. We've stopped all work of course."
"That will please the conservation movement." Barnstable had arrived with a Detective Sergeant in tow. "You've met Detective Sergeant Gavin of course."
"Tony." Conrad greeted Gavin; Angel gave him a polite nod. Her mind was occupied with the logistics of the killing in front of her to the exclusion of much else. As Achillea had noted on occasion, over-focusing was one of Angel's limitations. Conrad kept speaking, more to fill the gap than anything else. "You don’t think the conservationists did this do you?"
Gavin actually thought about that. Anywhere else, the idea would have been laughable but in North Somerset, it was a possibility that had to be considered. "There's a lot of bad feeling about developing this area. Some of it's a basic difference between the long-time residents here and the newcomers. The residents are mostly county folk, they see the land as an asset that has to be used and managed like any other asset. The newcomers are people who have moved in from towns and they see the countryside as something almost mystical that has to be preserved just as it is regardless of any value it might or might not have."
"Somebody has to act as a check and a balance, Gavin. Otherwise everything just gets swept up and built-over." Barnstable was inspecting the dead man's shoes for trace evidence.
"Mrs. Barnstable is a keen conservationist, one of the reasonable ones. Member of all the local societies." Gavin explained. "Jonesy, have you finished with the area? I want to take our consultants over to the common."
"Sure, Tony. We got everything we need. Nothing we can do now until we get the body out of that concrete." The SOCO looked at the legs pointing upwards and shuddered.
"Great. Conrad, Angel, let me show you the Westonzoyland Common. Coming, Mike?"
Scott waved and joined the party. Conrad, Gavin and Scott were pleased to get away from the macabre sight of the two legs sticking up into the air. Angel was simply curious as to how the killers had done it. The other side of the development area led directly on to the common with a four-strand barbed wire fence marking the boundary. To Angel, the common was a shock. She was used to the beautifully-kept and carefully-managed village green at Marsh Baldon and had assumed that all English village commons were the same. Obviously, they weren't.
This common was unkempt wasteland, yellowing, unhealthy-looking grass studded with ragged, untrimmed bushes and clumps of invasive plants in varying shades of brown and yellow. Only one small square towards the village itself was well-kept and it was carefully hedged off with a parade of poplar trees to mark its status. Beside her, Conrad shook his head sadly. "What happened?"
"Nothing, that's the problem." Scott sounded aggrieved. "Remember I told you that the Lord of the Manor title wasn't compounded with the lands of the Manor? Well, this used to be the Manorial land and when the title was sold, the land ownership didn’t go with it. So, who does own it? The bit down there, by those trees? That's the real common. This bit, well, as far as anybody can make out, it belongs to the Duke of Somerset only he's probably never heard of it. As it is, it's useless. You can see how overgrown it is. The ground is waterlogged and stagnant water is pretty rank. There's a lot of plants in there that are poisonous, deadly nightshade for one, and it's even rumored adders live in there. The village council are buying it as funds permit, section by section for development and Woods has been at the front of getting the development rights for the land and turning it into something useful. That's not cheap; the land has to be cleared and drained before any work can start."
"Builds nice houses he does." Gavin sounded quite respectful of the man. "Well designed, well built. Me and the wife bought one of them and never regretted it. You know, all the corners inside are right-angles? And the walls are plumb-vertical? Take a look over the other side of this so-called common. See a sideroad that ends in a loop? Well, that loop has a fountain in it and a couple of sheltered seats where the old folks can sit. They’re just normal houses, sort of thing any young family might buy, but he went to a bit of extra trouble to make their new house something special for them. Woods is a rough diamond, no arguing that. Bit too ready with his fists and has some pretty dodgy friends but nobody's ever said he doesn't do good work and his word is as solid as they come."
"Yet every time, every time the village puts a compulsory purchase order on a section of this land, the conservation groups fight them, tooth and nail." Scott continued the story. "Really nasty it can get, accusations of corruption, protest marches, demonstrations, you name it. So, you can see why we're not ruling out poor old George being done in by some extremists."
“Something confuses me.” Conrad was trying to visualize the flow of money in this situation. ‘Follow the money’ was, after all, the first rule. “If nobody knows who really owns this land, how did the council buy it?”
Detective Sergeant Scott answered that. “Compulsory Purchase. There is provision in the enabling act for exactly this situation. See, when the Germans occupied the country, they destroyed as many of the land ownership records as they could find. That way, the land belonged to who they said it belonged to and nobody could prove otherwise. Reassembling land records is a big thing here ever since.”
Conrad agreed wholeheartedly with that. His work on the Royal Commission on War Loss Compensation and Restitution scandal had acquainted him with the level of chaos caused by the Occupation. This was another aspect of the same thing and, he realized, also opened pathways to abuse. Scott saw Conrad understood the enormity of the situation and carried on. “Obviously, the council couldn’t be allowed to say they had been unable to find the ownership and just take the land over. The procedure is they have to appoint a group of independent experts, the Home Office has a list of approved companies, who will investigate the ownership and report. If they can find a legitimate owner, fine. If they can’t then the Council has to pay the money into a special fund, an escrow account, which is held in trust in case an owner is identified. You can imagine that some of those escrow accounts are huge. With the working of compound interest, they’re worth a lot of money to somebody.”
“What will happen to the money eventually?” Angel was always interested in large sums of money floating around. Some of them might be persuaded to float in the direction of the 14K.
“The law says this arrangement will remain in place until the 75th year after the start of the Occupation. That’s a compromise of course. When the legislation was being debated, some people wanted six months, others perpetuity. Once that period expires, any unclaimed land will be deemed unowned and be available for distribution. The National Trust will take some, there's a limit on what percentage of the total acreage they can have, the rest will be auctioned off. The money in the Compulsory Purchase Escrow funds will be divided out between various claimants including the council itself, the developers and others. There’s a complex formula that says who is entitled and who gets what. Applying that, and developers like George Woods, or his descendants, will do very well out of it. In a word, they’ll be loaded.”
“When does that apply, Mike?” Angel’s grasp of history was one of her educational deficiencies that she hadn’t started to address yet.
“October 15, 2017.” In contrast, the official date of the start of the Occupation was right up there with 1066 as the one date every British person knew.
“So it’s not a dim and distant future thing. This is a huge chunk of change coming his way very soon.”
“That’s right Angel, in just over twelve years, our George will be a very rich man indeed. His business could use all that money to clean up when the remaining land is auctioned. I’d say a year after the auctions are completed, Woods Construction will be the biggest land developer in the country. Or would have been if what we suspect is true.” Scott was interrupted by the sound of jackhammers at work. “We’d better go and see.”
By the time the group returned to the crime scene, workmen were already well-advanced in breaking the concrete slab up. Others had hooked cables around the protruding legs and were ready to lift the body out. The foremen gave a wave and the diesel engine in the crane revved up. The cable winch at the foot of the crane jib squealed and the body lifted smoothly out of the grave. Doctor Pollard closed in and started to inspect the body. Eventually he straightened up and looked around.
“Pending a formal identification, I can provisionally identify the body as being that of George Woods. Again, subject to confirmation when I get the body on to my table, the cause of death appears to be asphyxiation due to blockage of the nose and mouth with wet cement. I would say the victim was alive and conscious when immersed in the concrete.”
“Oh my God.” One of the policewomen in the background had clapped her hand over her mouth and looked like she was about to be sick. After a quick run to a waste materials drum, she was.
Angel had an eyebrow lifted while she stared at the contorted face. “How?”
“What do you mean, Angel?” Scott was more used to her cold-blooded detachment from the world around her than the other police at the scene.
“I’m trying to imagine how I would have done this. Slugging him unconscious, putting him in a pit with a stake for stability and then filling the pit is the obvious way. But, he was conscious which precludes slugging him and there’s no trace of a stake. Is there?”
Dr. Pollard looked carefully at the hole in the concrete. “No, no trace at all. And there is also no trace of any form of restraints. I think we can assume if we find out how this was done, it’s a big step towards finding who did it.”
“Remember the Bangkok Poisoner, Angel?” Conrad had just had an inspiration. “She used ketamine to disable her son when she poisoned him. I looked it up. In the right dose, it paralyses the recipient but leaves them conscious. Can see and hear everything but can’t move or respond.”
“That’ll do it.” Pollard’s agreement was forceful. “Ketamine is a seriously restricted drug here for exactly that reason. Its only supposed to be used on animals.”
“Doped him up with ketamine then to make him helpless.” Angel looked around. “Then they tied his legs to the scaffolding over there and there and hung him head-first in the foundation pit. Poured the cement in, then when it had started to set, removed the ropes and left.”
“That’ll do it.” DCI Barnstable had come over. “You think two people, Angel?”
“At least. This isn’t a one-man job. This is why professionals don’t do things like this by the way. Far too many loose ends. Already we’re looking for multiple people, at least one of whom had access to and expertise in using ketamine. This isn’t a professional hit, so you can rule organized crime out. That narrows the field down right there.”
Conrad listened to Angel with a degree of pride. Although, in his opinion, she was critically limited by her inability to relate to other people, she had evolved into a capable analyst of circumstances and physical situations. Of course, in doing so she was drawing on experience he would rather not think about. Now, it was his turn. “Which brings us to another question, why? I don’t mean motive for the killing but why the body is displayed like this. It has to be a message of some sort.”
There was a long silence. Eventually, it was broken by Barnstable. “We’d better be careful not to overthink this since we all know that complex murder schemes don’t happen very often. We’ve seen more than our fair share of strange murders around here but they were all pretty simple when we got to the bottom of it. We need to look at the simple solutions first. This could be something as simple as the killers trying to go one better than their predecessors.”
“It could be.” Conrad was completely unhappy with that explanation. Every instinct he had was that there was more to this scene than just one-upmanship. He also strongly suspected that every instinct he and Angel had between them was to keep as quiet as possible about any conclusions they were coming to. At least until they had reported back to the Cabinet Office.
Detective's Office, North Somerset Division Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"We've got another weird one. Here we go again." Detective Sergeant Scott looked around. "Body found in a building site. Conrad, Angel, you want to join us for this?"
"Oh yes; we need to see one of these cases from its start." Conrad put away the file he was reading and picked up his jacket.
Scott looked over at Angel. "What about you, Angel?"
"I go where he goes. Where's this one?"
"Village called Westonzoyland, about ten miles north-east of here."
Angel looked at him, eyes wide open. "You're kidding me."
"I'm not, honest. It's even got an airfield. Used to be a biggish fighter base back during the Occupation but its only used by microlights these days. Might not be around much longer. I've heard the Council want to sell it for development. They’ve already sold half the runway for new homes." Scott shook his head. "There's been a lot of that around there. Stirred up a lot of resentment it has. Especially when the old manor house was knocked down. Some of the demonstrations about that got close to being riots."
Conrad looked up at that. "I thought it was almost impossible to knock old buildings down here?"
Scott laughed at that. "It is, if they really are old. This one though is a bit different. Businessman bought the title of "Lord of the Manor" back in the 1930s and built himself a manor house to match it. Foolish really, of course, the "Lord of the Manor" title has been almost meaningless since the 1920s. Unless the title is formally compounded with the manorial lands and the seignory rights, it's just empty words. Anyway, when That Man seized power, our businessman left and spent the next decade in America. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe seized the building for pilot's accommodation. Then the US Navy pounded the whole area pretty hard; Westonzoyland took a real battering which is why so much of it has been rebuilt. The Manor House was assumed to be used for accommodation and as an officer’s club, which it was. So, it was a prime target and got virtually demolished.
"Then, after the war, our 'Lord of the Manor' came back, took one look at the ruins and gave it up as a bad job. Instead, and wanting to bring some employment to the village, he built a new Manor House on the outskirts of the village. That became the New Manor House and, of course, the ruin became the Old Manor House. It was left to rot, became even more unsafe and the council approved the site for demolition and redevelopment. Really was unsafe too, the developer found an unexploded five hundred pound bomb and several live rockets in the ruins. However, the preservationists picked up on the name "Old Manor House" and assumed it was a really old building. Created a lot of fuss and were well-peeved when they were ignored. Got really nasty, the family started getting death threats and all that."
"Does this link to our case?" Angel didn’t bother to keep the boredom out of her voice.
Scott knew her well enough to realize she didn’t mean to offend him; it was just Angel being Angelic. "It does to yours. The developer who took over the land the Old Manor House had occupied was George Woods, the builder who put up bail for his nephew, Darren Woods. He's also the developer running the project where the body has just been found."
"Has the body been identified?" Conrad didn’t like coincidences like that.
Scott shook his head. "We've been told that identifying the body presents difficulties. We'll find out more when we get there."
Building Development Site, Westonzoyland, Somerset.
There was no mistaking the scene where the body had been found. There were three marked police cars blocking the access points, all with their lights on, plus DCI Barnstable's unmarked car. A little beyond them was a mobile police incident room and the Scene of Crime Officer's vehicles. Before they were allowed to enter the scene, Conrad, Angel and Scott were issued disposable blue plastic overalls to prevent contamination. Conrad and Angel exchanged glances; it was obvious that these investigations were being taken very seriously. If either of them had suspected otherwise, those doubts had been dispelled.
"Now that's different." A walk into the building development had taken them to the scene of the find. The site had once been a square of land adjoining the village common. It had been surrounded on three sides by main roads and on the other by the boundary between the development area and the common. The developer had built a new road that formed an L-shape joining two of the main roads so that the site was divided into an outer ring and an inner core. The houses on the outside had been largely completed but those in the core had barely been started. Large cement squares for the foundations had been poured but that was all. Out of one such square, obviously the most recently poured, a pair of legs, pulled open to form a Y, pointed forlornly skywards. The owner had been buried up to his waist and upside down in the wet cement. Angel found the sight memorable.
"Something the SS and Partizanjaegers brought with them." Scott explained. "That way, the victim's family could watch his legs kicking in the air as he suffocated. We think that's George Woods but we won't know for sure until we dig the body out. The cement has set, so the boys have gone to get pneumatic drills from the contractors here. We've stopped all work of course."
"That will please the conservation movement." Barnstable had arrived with a Detective Sergeant in tow. "You've met Detective Sergeant Gavin of course."
"Tony." Conrad greeted Gavin; Angel gave him a polite nod. Her mind was occupied with the logistics of the killing in front of her to the exclusion of much else. As Achillea had noted on occasion, over-focusing was one of Angel's limitations. Conrad kept speaking, more to fill the gap than anything else. "You don’t think the conservationists did this do you?"
Gavin actually thought about that. Anywhere else, the idea would have been laughable but in North Somerset, it was a possibility that had to be considered. "There's a lot of bad feeling about developing this area. Some of it's a basic difference between the long-time residents here and the newcomers. The residents are mostly county folk, they see the land as an asset that has to be used and managed like any other asset. The newcomers are people who have moved in from towns and they see the countryside as something almost mystical that has to be preserved just as it is regardless of any value it might or might not have."
"Somebody has to act as a check and a balance, Gavin. Otherwise everything just gets swept up and built-over." Barnstable was inspecting the dead man's shoes for trace evidence.
"Mrs. Barnstable is a keen conservationist, one of the reasonable ones. Member of all the local societies." Gavin explained. "Jonesy, have you finished with the area? I want to take our consultants over to the common."
"Sure, Tony. We got everything we need. Nothing we can do now until we get the body out of that concrete." The SOCO looked at the legs pointing upwards and shuddered.
"Great. Conrad, Angel, let me show you the Westonzoyland Common. Coming, Mike?"
Scott waved and joined the party. Conrad, Gavin and Scott were pleased to get away from the macabre sight of the two legs sticking up into the air. Angel was simply curious as to how the killers had done it. The other side of the development area led directly on to the common with a four-strand barbed wire fence marking the boundary. To Angel, the common was a shock. She was used to the beautifully-kept and carefully-managed village green at Marsh Baldon and had assumed that all English village commons were the same. Obviously, they weren't.
This common was unkempt wasteland, yellowing, unhealthy-looking grass studded with ragged, untrimmed bushes and clumps of invasive plants in varying shades of brown and yellow. Only one small square towards the village itself was well-kept and it was carefully hedged off with a parade of poplar trees to mark its status. Beside her, Conrad shook his head sadly. "What happened?"
"Nothing, that's the problem." Scott sounded aggrieved. "Remember I told you that the Lord of the Manor title wasn't compounded with the lands of the Manor? Well, this used to be the Manorial land and when the title was sold, the land ownership didn’t go with it. So, who does own it? The bit down there, by those trees? That's the real common. This bit, well, as far as anybody can make out, it belongs to the Duke of Somerset only he's probably never heard of it. As it is, it's useless. You can see how overgrown it is. The ground is waterlogged and stagnant water is pretty rank. There's a lot of plants in there that are poisonous, deadly nightshade for one, and it's even rumored adders live in there. The village council are buying it as funds permit, section by section for development and Woods has been at the front of getting the development rights for the land and turning it into something useful. That's not cheap; the land has to be cleared and drained before any work can start."
"Builds nice houses he does." Gavin sounded quite respectful of the man. "Well designed, well built. Me and the wife bought one of them and never regretted it. You know, all the corners inside are right-angles? And the walls are plumb-vertical? Take a look over the other side of this so-called common. See a sideroad that ends in a loop? Well, that loop has a fountain in it and a couple of sheltered seats where the old folks can sit. They’re just normal houses, sort of thing any young family might buy, but he went to a bit of extra trouble to make their new house something special for them. Woods is a rough diamond, no arguing that. Bit too ready with his fists and has some pretty dodgy friends but nobody's ever said he doesn't do good work and his word is as solid as they come."
"Yet every time, every time the village puts a compulsory purchase order on a section of this land, the conservation groups fight them, tooth and nail." Scott continued the story. "Really nasty it can get, accusations of corruption, protest marches, demonstrations, you name it. So, you can see why we're not ruling out poor old George being done in by some extremists."
“Something confuses me.” Conrad was trying to visualize the flow of money in this situation. ‘Follow the money’ was, after all, the first rule. “If nobody knows who really owns this land, how did the council buy it?”
Detective Sergeant Scott answered that. “Compulsory Purchase. There is provision in the enabling act for exactly this situation. See, when the Germans occupied the country, they destroyed as many of the land ownership records as they could find. That way, the land belonged to who they said it belonged to and nobody could prove otherwise. Reassembling land records is a big thing here ever since.”
Conrad agreed wholeheartedly with that. His work on the Royal Commission on War Loss Compensation and Restitution scandal had acquainted him with the level of chaos caused by the Occupation. This was another aspect of the same thing and, he realized, also opened pathways to abuse. Scott saw Conrad understood the enormity of the situation and carried on. “Obviously, the council couldn’t be allowed to say they had been unable to find the ownership and just take the land over. The procedure is they have to appoint a group of independent experts, the Home Office has a list of approved companies, who will investigate the ownership and report. If they can find a legitimate owner, fine. If they can’t then the Council has to pay the money into a special fund, an escrow account, which is held in trust in case an owner is identified. You can imagine that some of those escrow accounts are huge. With the working of compound interest, they’re worth a lot of money to somebody.”
“What will happen to the money eventually?” Angel was always interested in large sums of money floating around. Some of them might be persuaded to float in the direction of the 14K.
“The law says this arrangement will remain in place until the 75th year after the start of the Occupation. That’s a compromise of course. When the legislation was being debated, some people wanted six months, others perpetuity. Once that period expires, any unclaimed land will be deemed unowned and be available for distribution. The National Trust will take some, there's a limit on what percentage of the total acreage they can have, the rest will be auctioned off. The money in the Compulsory Purchase Escrow funds will be divided out between various claimants including the council itself, the developers and others. There’s a complex formula that says who is entitled and who gets what. Applying that, and developers like George Woods, or his descendants, will do very well out of it. In a word, they’ll be loaded.”
“When does that apply, Mike?” Angel’s grasp of history was one of her educational deficiencies that she hadn’t started to address yet.
“October 15, 2017.” In contrast, the official date of the start of the Occupation was right up there with 1066 as the one date every British person knew.
“So it’s not a dim and distant future thing. This is a huge chunk of change coming his way very soon.”
“That’s right Angel, in just over twelve years, our George will be a very rich man indeed. His business could use all that money to clean up when the remaining land is auctioned. I’d say a year after the auctions are completed, Woods Construction will be the biggest land developer in the country. Or would have been if what we suspect is true.” Scott was interrupted by the sound of jackhammers at work. “We’d better go and see.”
By the time the group returned to the crime scene, workmen were already well-advanced in breaking the concrete slab up. Others had hooked cables around the protruding legs and were ready to lift the body out. The foremen gave a wave and the diesel engine in the crane revved up. The cable winch at the foot of the crane jib squealed and the body lifted smoothly out of the grave. Doctor Pollard closed in and started to inspect the body. Eventually he straightened up and looked around.
“Pending a formal identification, I can provisionally identify the body as being that of George Woods. Again, subject to confirmation when I get the body on to my table, the cause of death appears to be asphyxiation due to blockage of the nose and mouth with wet cement. I would say the victim was alive and conscious when immersed in the concrete.”
“Oh my God.” One of the policewomen in the background had clapped her hand over her mouth and looked like she was about to be sick. After a quick run to a waste materials drum, she was.
Angel had an eyebrow lifted while she stared at the contorted face. “How?”
“What do you mean, Angel?” Scott was more used to her cold-blooded detachment from the world around her than the other police at the scene.
“I’m trying to imagine how I would have done this. Slugging him unconscious, putting him in a pit with a stake for stability and then filling the pit is the obvious way. But, he was conscious which precludes slugging him and there’s no trace of a stake. Is there?”
Dr. Pollard looked carefully at the hole in the concrete. “No, no trace at all. And there is also no trace of any form of restraints. I think we can assume if we find out how this was done, it’s a big step towards finding who did it.”
“Remember the Bangkok Poisoner, Angel?” Conrad had just had an inspiration. “She used ketamine to disable her son when she poisoned him. I looked it up. In the right dose, it paralyses the recipient but leaves them conscious. Can see and hear everything but can’t move or respond.”
“That’ll do it.” Pollard’s agreement was forceful. “Ketamine is a seriously restricted drug here for exactly that reason. Its only supposed to be used on animals.”
“Doped him up with ketamine then to make him helpless.” Angel looked around. “Then they tied his legs to the scaffolding over there and there and hung him head-first in the foundation pit. Poured the cement in, then when it had started to set, removed the ropes and left.”
“That’ll do it.” DCI Barnstable had come over. “You think two people, Angel?”
“At least. This isn’t a one-man job. This is why professionals don’t do things like this by the way. Far too many loose ends. Already we’re looking for multiple people, at least one of whom had access to and expertise in using ketamine. This isn’t a professional hit, so you can rule organized crime out. That narrows the field down right there.”
Conrad listened to Angel with a degree of pride. Although, in his opinion, she was critically limited by her inability to relate to other people, she had evolved into a capable analyst of circumstances and physical situations. Of course, in doing so she was drawing on experience he would rather not think about. Now, it was his turn. “Which brings us to another question, why? I don’t mean motive for the killing but why the body is displayed like this. It has to be a message of some sort.”
There was a long silence. Eventually, it was broken by Barnstable. “We’d better be careful not to overthink this since we all know that complex murder schemes don’t happen very often. We’ve seen more than our fair share of strange murders around here but they were all pretty simple when we got to the bottom of it. We need to look at the simple solutions first. This could be something as simple as the killers trying to go one better than their predecessors.”
“It could be.” Conrad was completely unhappy with that explanation. Every instinct he had was that there was more to this scene than just one-upmanship. He also strongly suspected that every instinct he and Angel had between them was to keep as quiet as possible about any conclusions they were coming to. At least until they had reported back to the Cabinet Office.
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Eight
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"We're stuck." Angel looked around at the display of corkboards that were slowly spreading throughout the house. "I suggest we back-burner most of these and concentrate on the new one plus the three we have serious doubts about."
"Good plan." Conrad had just set up a board for the murder of George Woods. There was no room left in the living room and kitchen so it had been place in the front-to-rear corridor. "We're losing sight of the woods for all the trees here. We can move the cork-boards for those four in here."
A few minutes later, the appropriate boards had been rearranged. Conrad had taken out a new stack of index cards and was standing with pen poised. "Obvious motive. All that money in the property escrow funds. George Woods wasn't an elderly man, quite the reverse. Young middle-aged, fit and active. I would say he was good for another fifty years at least. It might be that some of his family didn’t want to wait that long before getting their hands on the money."
"And from that, who inherited when he died? Wife, children? One question though, Conrad, with this amount of money at stake, wouldn't whoever did it, hire somebody to do a professional hit? Doing it themselves would be pretty chancy. Much better to hire a professional. Just pump Woods full of bullets, throw the body into a building site pit and fill it with cement. Nobody would even know where to look."
Conrad reflected that Angel might have retired from, or more accurately grown out of, her professional killer past but she still had a disturbing amount of expertise in the practical aspects of the business. "True, but if somebody just disappears, the relatives have to wait seven years before he's declared dead."
"But, with a death-scene like that, there are so many loose ends, they stand a really good chance of getting caught. After all, we have our doubts about some of the convictions here but the clear-up rate is still very high." Angel thought for a second. "If the heirs are guilty of blowing him away, who gets the money then?"
"Another good question." Conrad noted them on the 'motive-money' card. "We'll have to ask tomorrow."
"Remember we're going up to London. By the way, don't tell anybody where we will be. I want us to have just disappeared for a few hours. If somebody wants to frame us, that will be too good a chance for them to miss yet we will have an alibi so solid it could shatter diamonds. Think of it as flushing game. Humpty and a couple of his cronies want to talk business with me so they're wining and dining us. At Humpty's club, so everything sort of fits in neatly."
"Oh dear. Best bibs and tuckers. We'll have to wear the evening clothes Iggie bought us." Conrad shook his head although privately he was intensely curious to see what Angel looked like in an evening dress. "Second motive. The rabid conservationists killed him to stop him redeveloping the waste ground in the village."
"Now that sounds plausible. They wouldn't have the sense to have it done professionally and the ostent . ." Angel fumbled the word for a second ". . . . showiness of the killing matches that. They might also have got all self-righteous about the public money and wanted to stop him getting it. Perhaps in their minds, it should go to the public rather than a private individual."
"That does make a lot of sense." Conrad wrote out the card for a potential suspect and two more for the possible motivations. "Do you really think that money's behind it?"
"Could be. There's enough of it." Angel had the tip of her thumb in her mouth. "Do you want a really odd pair of suspects? How about Kevin Small and Darren Woods?"
Conrad raised a skeptical eyebrow. Angel grinned at him before carrying on. "He provided surety for Darren Woods out, right? Well, everybody agrees that those two are not going to show up for their trial date which will cost George Woods fifty grand. Now, I know building contractors, we do business with a lot of them. They may be very rich but they're always short of ready cash. Everything is either going into their business or going out of it. Very little is resident there. We make good money giving them bridging loans. So, losing fifty grand in cash is going to really hurt, it might even kill his business. So suppose Small and Woods told him they were going to do a runner? One thing that everybody says about George Woods was that he had a pretty strong sense of ethics. Keeping his word, doing right by his customers, even if he treats the law as an optional extra."
"A bit like the 14K?"
Angel guessed Conrad was joking so she laughed. "Yeah, exactly like us. Now, his nephew comes up, probably with his friend and tells him they're running. That means they are breaking their word, both to the court and to him. They'll shaft his business and ruin Small's mother. That's against everything he is. He gets mad, swings a punch and it all goes downhill from there."
"That's all probable but it missed one thing. The ketamine. I can't see two thugs like Small and Woods using that in those circumstances. And without it, they couldn't have set the body up the way we found it."
"They could have slugged him of course. We need to get confirmation on the ketamine. That's a piece that doesn’t fit."
"Remember he was conscious when they poured the concrete. That rules against slugging him."
"Ever been hung up by your feet, Conrad? It's damned hard to get out of it unless you're a gymnast. Woods wasn't. He could have been knocked out, hung up and come round while they were pouring cement."
Conrad had his three suspect's cards ready and pinned them up. He placed the family killing the victim for the money first, the conservationists second and Angel's theory last. "That'll change, may change, when we get the autopsy results. No ketamine and your theory comes up to the top."
"Sounds fair." Angel paused for a second. "You want an even weirder one? George Woods was killed because he bailed out one of the two handbag-snatchers. Bailing them out wasn't popular and nobody believes they are going to show up for trial. This whole area is weird enough for somebody to whack him as retaliation."
Conrad was about to laugh, then he thought about the implications. "If that's true, it means that Ada Small is in danger. And so, come to think of it are Small and Woods."
He thought a bit more and then wrote out the card. After another moment's thought, he pinned it up as the second most likely explanation.
Autopsy Room, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
Dr. Pollard peeled off his gloves and looked again at the body of George Woods on his table. His wife, Samantha Woods had formally identified the body as her husband and was now sitting, weeping, in the waiting room. Conrad intended to speak with her once she had managed to compose herself. In the meantime, Dr. Pollard had his undivided attention.
"As I suspected, cause of death was asphyxiation due to immersion in unset concrete. Time of death somewhere between nine and eleven last night. His nose and throat are full of concrete that he inhaled while struggling to breathe. I thought he might have drowned but the liquid concrete never got as far as his lungs. He slowly suffocated. That's a grim way to die. "
"Toxicology screen on the blood?" Conrad found himself looking back on the days before forensics had become a science. It was hard to realize how recent that was.
"Got the results a few minutes ago. High blood alcohol, well we all knew that George liked his drink. No medications other than trace amounts of aspirin. He'd probably had a headache. No ketamine. That was a good idea but the blood panel didn’t find any. A pity, that would really have thinned the suspects list down."
"Any other injuries?" Angel was looking at the body, trying to see if anything about it clicked with her.
Pollard shook his head. "A minor injury on the back of the head. I guess your original idea about slugging him must have been the right one. Odd wound though. Looks like he was hit with something soft if that makes any sense."
"Ahh. A sap." Pollard looked at Angel curiously. She hastened to explain. "A flattened leather tube filled with lead shot. Much more useful weapon than a hard, blunt object."
"Got you, Angel, I know what you mean. We call them coshes over here. Yeah, that would do it, but they're rare. It's a weapon, like a long-blade knife or a truncheon you see. Being found with one gets the same penalty." Pollard couldn’t help looking at the bulges in Angel's jacket where it covered her pistols. She intercepted the glance and tried to look innocent. It was not something she was good at.
"Two people. One was having a row with him, the other came up from behind and sapped him. Then they hung him by his feet, waited until he came around and poured the concrete."
"That's cold." Pollard shook his head. "They may not have realized he had come around of course."
"I doubt it." Angel didn't sound at all convinced. "When he realized what was happening, he would have been threshing around and screaming. They'd have known he was conscious. How about his hands?"
Pollard held one of Woods' hands up. "A lot of abrasions on the knuckles. The problem is they are coated with dried cement and we have no means of telling whether they were inflicted in a fight prior to his murder or while struggling in the concrete during that event. All we can say is that the injuries happened around the time that he died. I'm sorry, this really isn't much help, is it?"
"The absence of ketamine in his blood is a big help. It thins the possibilities down greatly." Conrad thought for a second about the information he had just received. "In fact in changes the direction of this case quite significantly."
Samantha Woods was sitting in the hospital waiting room, trying to compose herself before going home. She was an overweight woman, hair dyed platinum blonde and heavily made-up. All of that make-up had run and the very fact she hadn't even tried to repair it showed just how stricken with grief she was. Conrad sat down next to her and used every last measure of compassion and sympathy he could dredge up to try and comfort her. Angel knew she had no part in that process so she simply stayed out of the way, contemplating instead the merits of getting a bar of chocolate from the vending machine.
"So, could you tell us what happened that night?"
"We was watching the telly, program about some of the really awful jobs that people 'ad to do way back when, then Georgie gets a telephone call. Our program ‘ad only just started too, so it musta been only just after nine. Right unhappy about it, 'ee was and all. Said 'ee 'ad to go meet somebody and fix somethin', Promised to be back in an 'our. Gone all night 'ee was. Then I gets the visit from the cops." She dissolved into tears again. Conrad shifted gears and went back into comfort mode. In the background, Angel bought herself the bar of chocolate.
Once Conrad had calmed her down again, he asked the critical question. "Mrs. Woods, did your husband have any enemies? Ones who hated him enough to do this to him?"
"'Ow long 'ave you got? This could take all day." She tried to smile bravely. "Please, call me Sam, it's what everybody does. Let's see. There's rival developers. Georgie was real good at spotting an opportunity an' moving in fast. By the time the others got wind of what was 'appening, 'eed got it all sewn up. Didn't 'ave no partners you see. 'Is decision and' 'ee kept a lot of cash on hand to make the first payment. Everybody knows his work is good so by the time the main payment came up, 'eed already taken deposits on enough 'ouses to cover it. Then, there's the conservation. They didn't like Georgie buying the waste land and developin' it. Said it was destroyin' the 'eritage whatever that is. They got right nasty some. Threatened me, threatened me kids."
In the background, Angel's head suddenly snapped around. Conrad noted that. "How many kids do you have, Sam?"
"Just two. Twin boys. Georgie named them Aston and Martin. They're with me mum right now."
“Sam, George put up bail for his nephew. Was there anything unusual about that?” Conrad had his handkerchiefs ready in case it would start her off again.
“Nah. Unless you count havin’ a fifty-grand hole in the accounts right now. Georgie got a cashier’s check from the bank and gave it to the beak.” Suddenly her eyes narrowed and Conrad realized that, despite her appearance and grief, Samantha Woods was very sharp. In fact, he began to wonder how much of the success of Woods Developments was down to her. "Georgie's gone, there's a lot of cash money in the 'ouse. You thinkin' somebody might come after us, try and fin' it?"
It was Angel who answered. "It's possible. If you like, I can pull some strings and have a police guard assigned. And I'll arrange for a couple of friends of mine to come and stay with you if that's all right? Personally, I'd sooner bet on a three-legged racehorse than police protection alone."
Woods couldn't help but laugh at the picture of a three-legged racehorse trying to run around the track. "Yeah, that's kind. You'll be charging us for protection?"
It was obvious that she'd guessed the kind of connections Angel had although the high-rank she now held in her world would have shocked her. Angel shook her head. "Nope. Consider it a . . . . friendly gesture. And, Sam. We'll get the people who did this."
Samantha Woods started crying again. "I don't care about that. I just want my Georgie back."
Offices of Hannam, Sturgess and Kelly, Solicitors, Silver Street, Bridgewater.
"We are investigating the suspicious death of George Woods." Angel had the neutral tone of a police officer down perfectly. "We were given your name by his wife, Samantha Woods, for information on his legal affairs."
"She called a few minutes ago." Denise Kelly had a legal pad in front of her and the first lines on it were the instructions she had received. They read, quite simply, "tell them everything they want to know."
"We're trying to identify people with a motive for the murder." Conrad had taken over the interview. "We have to ask the obvious. Who benefits from George Wood' will?"
"Simple answer. Sam inherits everything. If she passes on first, everything gets equally divided between the twins. If Sam and the kids are dead as well, the business goes to Sam's mum. It's one of the simplest wills I've ever drawn up. No ifs, buts or weird provisions."
"What about the company?"
"Woods Developments or the building supplies? Same answer. Won't make much difference. Sam runs the business side of things anyway. She came up with the idea of owning their own supplies business so they get their raw materials cheaper. George was the builder and a damned good one." Kelly grinned at them. "Bought our family house from him. Done us proud he did."
"Professional discount?" Conrad returned the grin.
"Woods Developments don’t give discounts. In fact, their properties sell at a premium. My husband and I just paid list price, no premium."
"I see. Have you any idea who might have killed him?"
Kelly thought very carefully about that. "Business rivals probably. He and Sam were very good at what they did and they were on the ball. I suppose it's possible that one of their rivals was sick of being beaten to the punch and brought a couple of heavies in. Then there's the conservation societies. They can be really obsessive. Sam told you they threatened her and her children?"
Conrad nodded. "I thought that was particularly disgusting."
"So did we; that's why we got an injunction and restraining order. None of the members of the listed societies can come within a hundred yards of either members of the family, nor of the family home."
"Anybody else?"
"George got into fights now and then. But, he was a hard man to hold a grudge against. Couple of times, it looked like there was going to be an assault case but he sat down with the other party at the bar, they bought each other pints and shook hands on it."
"Just to complete the picture, I don't suppose the children could have got tired of waiting to inherit."
Kelly laughed at that. "They're twelve years old! Which twelve year old is going to kill his own father?"
Her voice trailed away as she caught Angel's eyes. The ice-cold deadly lack of expression in them would have sent a basilisk running screaming for the horizon. Denise Kelly did not sleep well that night.
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"We're stuck." Angel looked around at the display of corkboards that were slowly spreading throughout the house. "I suggest we back-burner most of these and concentrate on the new one plus the three we have serious doubts about."
"Good plan." Conrad had just set up a board for the murder of George Woods. There was no room left in the living room and kitchen so it had been place in the front-to-rear corridor. "We're losing sight of the woods for all the trees here. We can move the cork-boards for those four in here."
A few minutes later, the appropriate boards had been rearranged. Conrad had taken out a new stack of index cards and was standing with pen poised. "Obvious motive. All that money in the property escrow funds. George Woods wasn't an elderly man, quite the reverse. Young middle-aged, fit and active. I would say he was good for another fifty years at least. It might be that some of his family didn’t want to wait that long before getting their hands on the money."
"And from that, who inherited when he died? Wife, children? One question though, Conrad, with this amount of money at stake, wouldn't whoever did it, hire somebody to do a professional hit? Doing it themselves would be pretty chancy. Much better to hire a professional. Just pump Woods full of bullets, throw the body into a building site pit and fill it with cement. Nobody would even know where to look."
Conrad reflected that Angel might have retired from, or more accurately grown out of, her professional killer past but she still had a disturbing amount of expertise in the practical aspects of the business. "True, but if somebody just disappears, the relatives have to wait seven years before he's declared dead."
"But, with a death-scene like that, there are so many loose ends, they stand a really good chance of getting caught. After all, we have our doubts about some of the convictions here but the clear-up rate is still very high." Angel thought for a second. "If the heirs are guilty of blowing him away, who gets the money then?"
"Another good question." Conrad noted them on the 'motive-money' card. "We'll have to ask tomorrow."
"Remember we're going up to London. By the way, don't tell anybody where we will be. I want us to have just disappeared for a few hours. If somebody wants to frame us, that will be too good a chance for them to miss yet we will have an alibi so solid it could shatter diamonds. Think of it as flushing game. Humpty and a couple of his cronies want to talk business with me so they're wining and dining us. At Humpty's club, so everything sort of fits in neatly."
"Oh dear. Best bibs and tuckers. We'll have to wear the evening clothes Iggie bought us." Conrad shook his head although privately he was intensely curious to see what Angel looked like in an evening dress. "Second motive. The rabid conservationists killed him to stop him redeveloping the waste ground in the village."
"Now that sounds plausible. They wouldn't have the sense to have it done professionally and the ostent . ." Angel fumbled the word for a second ". . . . showiness of the killing matches that. They might also have got all self-righteous about the public money and wanted to stop him getting it. Perhaps in their minds, it should go to the public rather than a private individual."
"That does make a lot of sense." Conrad wrote out the card for a potential suspect and two more for the possible motivations. "Do you really think that money's behind it?"
"Could be. There's enough of it." Angel had the tip of her thumb in her mouth. "Do you want a really odd pair of suspects? How about Kevin Small and Darren Woods?"
Conrad raised a skeptical eyebrow. Angel grinned at him before carrying on. "He provided surety for Darren Woods out, right? Well, everybody agrees that those two are not going to show up for their trial date which will cost George Woods fifty grand. Now, I know building contractors, we do business with a lot of them. They may be very rich but they're always short of ready cash. Everything is either going into their business or going out of it. Very little is resident there. We make good money giving them bridging loans. So, losing fifty grand in cash is going to really hurt, it might even kill his business. So suppose Small and Woods told him they were going to do a runner? One thing that everybody says about George Woods was that he had a pretty strong sense of ethics. Keeping his word, doing right by his customers, even if he treats the law as an optional extra."
"A bit like the 14K?"
Angel guessed Conrad was joking so she laughed. "Yeah, exactly like us. Now, his nephew comes up, probably with his friend and tells him they're running. That means they are breaking their word, both to the court and to him. They'll shaft his business and ruin Small's mother. That's against everything he is. He gets mad, swings a punch and it all goes downhill from there."
"That's all probable but it missed one thing. The ketamine. I can't see two thugs like Small and Woods using that in those circumstances. And without it, they couldn't have set the body up the way we found it."
"They could have slugged him of course. We need to get confirmation on the ketamine. That's a piece that doesn’t fit."
"Remember he was conscious when they poured the concrete. That rules against slugging him."
"Ever been hung up by your feet, Conrad? It's damned hard to get out of it unless you're a gymnast. Woods wasn't. He could have been knocked out, hung up and come round while they were pouring cement."
Conrad had his three suspect's cards ready and pinned them up. He placed the family killing the victim for the money first, the conservationists second and Angel's theory last. "That'll change, may change, when we get the autopsy results. No ketamine and your theory comes up to the top."
"Sounds fair." Angel paused for a second. "You want an even weirder one? George Woods was killed because he bailed out one of the two handbag-snatchers. Bailing them out wasn't popular and nobody believes they are going to show up for trial. This whole area is weird enough for somebody to whack him as retaliation."
Conrad was about to laugh, then he thought about the implications. "If that's true, it means that Ada Small is in danger. And so, come to think of it are Small and Woods."
He thought a bit more and then wrote out the card. After another moment's thought, he pinned it up as the second most likely explanation.
Autopsy Room, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
Dr. Pollard peeled off his gloves and looked again at the body of George Woods on his table. His wife, Samantha Woods had formally identified the body as her husband and was now sitting, weeping, in the waiting room. Conrad intended to speak with her once she had managed to compose herself. In the meantime, Dr. Pollard had his undivided attention.
"As I suspected, cause of death was asphyxiation due to immersion in unset concrete. Time of death somewhere between nine and eleven last night. His nose and throat are full of concrete that he inhaled while struggling to breathe. I thought he might have drowned but the liquid concrete never got as far as his lungs. He slowly suffocated. That's a grim way to die. "
"Toxicology screen on the blood?" Conrad found himself looking back on the days before forensics had become a science. It was hard to realize how recent that was.
"Got the results a few minutes ago. High blood alcohol, well we all knew that George liked his drink. No medications other than trace amounts of aspirin. He'd probably had a headache. No ketamine. That was a good idea but the blood panel didn’t find any. A pity, that would really have thinned the suspects list down."
"Any other injuries?" Angel was looking at the body, trying to see if anything about it clicked with her.
Pollard shook his head. "A minor injury on the back of the head. I guess your original idea about slugging him must have been the right one. Odd wound though. Looks like he was hit with something soft if that makes any sense."
"Ahh. A sap." Pollard looked at Angel curiously. She hastened to explain. "A flattened leather tube filled with lead shot. Much more useful weapon than a hard, blunt object."
"Got you, Angel, I know what you mean. We call them coshes over here. Yeah, that would do it, but they're rare. It's a weapon, like a long-blade knife or a truncheon you see. Being found with one gets the same penalty." Pollard couldn’t help looking at the bulges in Angel's jacket where it covered her pistols. She intercepted the glance and tried to look innocent. It was not something she was good at.
"Two people. One was having a row with him, the other came up from behind and sapped him. Then they hung him by his feet, waited until he came around and poured the concrete."
"That's cold." Pollard shook his head. "They may not have realized he had come around of course."
"I doubt it." Angel didn't sound at all convinced. "When he realized what was happening, he would have been threshing around and screaming. They'd have known he was conscious. How about his hands?"
Pollard held one of Woods' hands up. "A lot of abrasions on the knuckles. The problem is they are coated with dried cement and we have no means of telling whether they were inflicted in a fight prior to his murder or while struggling in the concrete during that event. All we can say is that the injuries happened around the time that he died. I'm sorry, this really isn't much help, is it?"
"The absence of ketamine in his blood is a big help. It thins the possibilities down greatly." Conrad thought for a second about the information he had just received. "In fact in changes the direction of this case quite significantly."
Samantha Woods was sitting in the hospital waiting room, trying to compose herself before going home. She was an overweight woman, hair dyed platinum blonde and heavily made-up. All of that make-up had run and the very fact she hadn't even tried to repair it showed just how stricken with grief she was. Conrad sat down next to her and used every last measure of compassion and sympathy he could dredge up to try and comfort her. Angel knew she had no part in that process so she simply stayed out of the way, contemplating instead the merits of getting a bar of chocolate from the vending machine.
"So, could you tell us what happened that night?"
"We was watching the telly, program about some of the really awful jobs that people 'ad to do way back when, then Georgie gets a telephone call. Our program ‘ad only just started too, so it musta been only just after nine. Right unhappy about it, 'ee was and all. Said 'ee 'ad to go meet somebody and fix somethin', Promised to be back in an 'our. Gone all night 'ee was. Then I gets the visit from the cops." She dissolved into tears again. Conrad shifted gears and went back into comfort mode. In the background, Angel bought herself the bar of chocolate.
Once Conrad had calmed her down again, he asked the critical question. "Mrs. Woods, did your husband have any enemies? Ones who hated him enough to do this to him?"
"'Ow long 'ave you got? This could take all day." She tried to smile bravely. "Please, call me Sam, it's what everybody does. Let's see. There's rival developers. Georgie was real good at spotting an opportunity an' moving in fast. By the time the others got wind of what was 'appening, 'eed got it all sewn up. Didn't 'ave no partners you see. 'Is decision and' 'ee kept a lot of cash on hand to make the first payment. Everybody knows his work is good so by the time the main payment came up, 'eed already taken deposits on enough 'ouses to cover it. Then, there's the conservation. They didn't like Georgie buying the waste land and developin' it. Said it was destroyin' the 'eritage whatever that is. They got right nasty some. Threatened me, threatened me kids."
In the background, Angel's head suddenly snapped around. Conrad noted that. "How many kids do you have, Sam?"
"Just two. Twin boys. Georgie named them Aston and Martin. They're with me mum right now."
“Sam, George put up bail for his nephew. Was there anything unusual about that?” Conrad had his handkerchiefs ready in case it would start her off again.
“Nah. Unless you count havin’ a fifty-grand hole in the accounts right now. Georgie got a cashier’s check from the bank and gave it to the beak.” Suddenly her eyes narrowed and Conrad realized that, despite her appearance and grief, Samantha Woods was very sharp. In fact, he began to wonder how much of the success of Woods Developments was down to her. "Georgie's gone, there's a lot of cash money in the 'ouse. You thinkin' somebody might come after us, try and fin' it?"
It was Angel who answered. "It's possible. If you like, I can pull some strings and have a police guard assigned. And I'll arrange for a couple of friends of mine to come and stay with you if that's all right? Personally, I'd sooner bet on a three-legged racehorse than police protection alone."
Woods couldn't help but laugh at the picture of a three-legged racehorse trying to run around the track. "Yeah, that's kind. You'll be charging us for protection?"
It was obvious that she'd guessed the kind of connections Angel had although the high-rank she now held in her world would have shocked her. Angel shook her head. "Nope. Consider it a . . . . friendly gesture. And, Sam. We'll get the people who did this."
Samantha Woods started crying again. "I don't care about that. I just want my Georgie back."
Offices of Hannam, Sturgess and Kelly, Solicitors, Silver Street, Bridgewater.
"We are investigating the suspicious death of George Woods." Angel had the neutral tone of a police officer down perfectly. "We were given your name by his wife, Samantha Woods, for information on his legal affairs."
"She called a few minutes ago." Denise Kelly had a legal pad in front of her and the first lines on it were the instructions she had received. They read, quite simply, "tell them everything they want to know."
"We're trying to identify people with a motive for the murder." Conrad had taken over the interview. "We have to ask the obvious. Who benefits from George Wood' will?"
"Simple answer. Sam inherits everything. If she passes on first, everything gets equally divided between the twins. If Sam and the kids are dead as well, the business goes to Sam's mum. It's one of the simplest wills I've ever drawn up. No ifs, buts or weird provisions."
"What about the company?"
"Woods Developments or the building supplies? Same answer. Won't make much difference. Sam runs the business side of things anyway. She came up with the idea of owning their own supplies business so they get their raw materials cheaper. George was the builder and a damned good one." Kelly grinned at them. "Bought our family house from him. Done us proud he did."
"Professional discount?" Conrad returned the grin.
"Woods Developments don’t give discounts. In fact, their properties sell at a premium. My husband and I just paid list price, no premium."
"I see. Have you any idea who might have killed him?"
Kelly thought very carefully about that. "Business rivals probably. He and Sam were very good at what they did and they were on the ball. I suppose it's possible that one of their rivals was sick of being beaten to the punch and brought a couple of heavies in. Then there's the conservation societies. They can be really obsessive. Sam told you they threatened her and her children?"
Conrad nodded. "I thought that was particularly disgusting."
"So did we; that's why we got an injunction and restraining order. None of the members of the listed societies can come within a hundred yards of either members of the family, nor of the family home."
"Anybody else?"
"George got into fights now and then. But, he was a hard man to hold a grudge against. Couple of times, it looked like there was going to be an assault case but he sat down with the other party at the bar, they bought each other pints and shook hands on it."
"Just to complete the picture, I don't suppose the children could have got tired of waiting to inherit."
Kelly laughed at that. "They're twelve years old! Which twelve year old is going to kill his own father?"
Her voice trailed away as she caught Angel's eyes. The ice-cold deadly lack of expression in them would have sent a basilisk running screaming for the horizon. Denise Kelly did not sleep well that night.
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Nine
Guest's Dining Room, The Gresham Club, St James, London.
"Looking good, Conrad." Angel ran her eyes quickly over Conrad making sure that he was immaculate. He was wearing a fashionable dark gray evening suit with a white turtleneck-collar dress shirt. The style suited him remarkably well and also hinted at his priestly background. She thought that Igrat had done him proud when she had chosen that suit for him. She had done an equally good job for Angel, getting her an evening dress in dark green silk whose style was reminiscent of a Qipao without being an imitation of one. The matching jacket was, of course, cut to conceal Angel's guns. The truth was that they made an exceedingly elegant couple.
Conrad didn't return the praise since Angel was one of the few women on Earth who did not like being complimented on her appearance. Instead he ushered her through the doors of the Gresham Club giving a nod of thanks to the doorman as he did so. Inside, Commissioner Chris Keeble was waiting. "Good evening Angel, Conrad, we're glad you could make it up here."
He dropped his voice. "The Home Secretary will be joining us. His bodyguards will be in attendance. Let me take you through to the dining room."
"This is a lot of high-powered politics for a simple business discussion, isn’t it?" Angel was curious and on-guard.
"The situation has grown significantly since you two started work." Keeble saw the group standing by the bar and steered his guests over to them. "Ladies, Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Conrad de Llorente and Angel. Conrad, Angel, this is the Home Secretary, Sir Royston Merchant, the Chief Constable of Mercia Division, Dame Wendy Chapman the Chief Constable of Wessex Division, Sir Derek Steele, and I believe you have already met the Chief Constable of West Country Division, Sir David Durling. And, of course, you know Sir Humphrey Appleday.”
Five minutes later, they were sitting at a secluded table with Angel nursing a glass of her favorite Bacardi 151. Sir Royston opened the discussion and got right to the point. “We’ve all seen the reduced crime figures in Thames Valley Division and very impressive they are. So much so that the Home Office would like to see the same philosophy and training programs extended to the rest of the Police Divisions in Great Britain. The purpose of this meeting is to lay the groundwork for us to do just that. Mercia, Wessex and West Country have all expressed an urgent desire to take a leading role in this transition. The problem I see is that I can’t see how one person who isn’t even resident in Great Britain can undertake that amount of work.”
“I can’t. So, I recommend we go a different way. Thames Valley now has a well-trained, properly-equipped armed response unit that is part of a police force which has returned to the traditional precepts of British policing. That is, they work with the community and police with the consent of that community. We take some of those officers and transfer them to your districts. At the same time, we pick the most promising of your young officers and transfer them to Thames Valley to join the training courses we run there. I look after the firearms side of things, Conrad looks after the community policing aspects. That way your people will be getting their training in an environment where they can see what they are learning really works. Once I’m satisfied they’ve got the message, you get them back and return the Thames Valley officers. Then we repeat the process. I’ll bring in some professional gunslingers to help with the training side of things if necessary.”
There was a brief interval while the soup was brought in. Dame Wendy broke the satisfied silence. “I’d like to ask something. If you had to summarize the objective of what you propose to teach in a few words, what would it be?”
“To create smaller armed response units that are much better trained and equipped. Not just in handling guns but in handling situations generally so that gunplay is unnecessary. Although my courses at Thames Valley are called firearms training, in fact they are about analyzing and managing situations so that nobody ends up getting hurt. In its shortest form, making sure what happened in San Francisco last night never happens here.”
There was much nodding and agreement over that. The chaotic shoot-out in San Francisco had been all over British television. It was Sir Derek who voiced the obvious consensus. “That was a disgrace. 165 rounds fired by nine police officers that wrecked four cars belonging to local citizens and the criminals got away. Just what happened, Angel?”
“I wasn’t there so I can’t be sure, but I suspect police converged on the scene from different directions without proper coordination and nobody bothered to work out what was going on. The criminals didn’t really get away, they just quietly left in the confusion. I will tell you this, I know whose side the local people will be on from now on and it will not be the police’s. That’s a big win for the gangs in that area.”
“Without wishing to pre-empt any official decisions made by Her Majesty’s Government and recognizing that the formal decisions must be examined in depth by an inter-departmental commission that will evaluate the advantages of the proposed scheme of centralized training supported by inter-divisional transfers of experienced police officers familiar with the principles being conveyed as part of that training and contrast those advantages with any suggested limitations and disadvantages that may arise from its widespread adoption, acknowledging of course that supervising the system and providing necessary funding will also require the participation of the Home Office and the Treasury in the preparation of the agenda for subsequent commission and any working groups it may feel the need to generate so that all the implications of these proposals are adequately addressed, it would appear to the Cabinet Office that Angel’s proposals do offer a valid blueprint for the successful spread of realistic firearms training and the appropriate police strategies aimed at avoiding the kind of unfortunate, some may say regrettable, events that occur in countries without the good fortune to be aided by such highly competent advisors.”
There was a prolonged period of silence while everybody tried to work out what Sir Humphrey had just said. Eventually, Sir David gave it up as a bad job and addressed Angel instead. “Why?”
“I’m sorry; I don’t . . .”
“Angel, we all know that you are a senior member of an organized crime group, the 14K Triad. Rumors vary as to what position you actually hold but none believe it is anything other than a senior one. So, why are you helping us become a more efficient law enforcement operation?”
Angel thought about that. “To start with, as a demonstration of good faith, my position is that of Vanguard, with the I-ching number 438. My responsibility is to take the policy directives formulated by the ruling council of the 14K and convert them into plans and operational strategies. That includes making alliances, brokering agreements and resolving disputes. I gave a long lecture on our philosophy to DCI Barnstable recently, but I’ll spare you that. Instead I’ll give you a quick example. One of our most lucrative operations is gambling, legal or illegal depending on the laws of the country we work in. It’s no secret that we own a casino-hotel in Cuba, the Mandarin. As the Mob have proved in Cuba and we have confirmed at our other casino-hotels in Macau, Hongkong and Thonburi, to be wildly profitable the gambling must be strictly honest.
"Now, let us assume that we own a gambling club in London that is equally productive and, therefore, honest. One of our clients wins big, really big. No problem for us since we’ll make the money back in a few minutes, but our lucky guest now has a very large wad of currency in his pocket. If the streets are rife with crime, he will be robbed and possibly killed. When word spreads that a big winner was robbed, the assumption we did it to get our money back will harm us greatly. Suddenly, our profitable and legal business isn’t so profitable any more. We have two options. Support the police in suppressing street crime or providing every guest who leaves our club with an armed escort home. From an economic and organizational viewpoint which makes more sense?”
“Supporting the police . . . I see.” Sir David gave an agreeable smile. “That is actually a convincing and credible explanation. You’re supporting us because it suits both our interests. I find that very reassuring. By the way, may I ask how the investigation into North Somerset District is going?”
Angel wasn’t smiling. “You were right. You have a serious problem there. So far we have found three cases where the people convicted of the crimes are certainly innocent. That is a pointer to a systemic problem. It’s not with the quality of policing; from our own observation and participation, the officers there are skilled, meticulous and know their communities well. Your problems lie somewhere else. Apart from anything else, we cannot afford any more bad convictions so we’ll need to have a divisional or even national forensic team on call to check out evidence. Conrad, any thoughts?”
Conrad nodded. “There’s something wrong with the investigations down there. It's a severe problem in its own right but I'm not sure if it's linked to the main issue of the excessive murder rate. Even if it isn't, every wrongful conviction dents the reputation and credibility of the force. By the way, Chris, you were wrong about Detective Sergeant Gavin. He’s really a very competent officer. Thing is, he’s happy where he is and in the position he holds. Lack of ambition is his problem, not lack of ability. I think he would be everlastingly grateful if you found a way to reward diligent service without promoting him.”
There was another long pause as the fish was served. Keeble looked at it fondly. “Grilled Dover Sole is one of the specialties of the club. This morning, that fish was swimming happily in the English Channel. West end of course, caught by fishing boats out of Weymouth and the Navy checks the water daily. You'll be happy to know contamination is receding at last and even areas of the North Sea are safe now. I’ll make a note about Gavin. It’s not an uncommon thing you know.”
“Better than too much ambition.” Dame Wendy was expertly peeling the meat from the backbone of her sole. “We had a friend of your trying to join us recently. Very ambitious man. Previously a DI in Thames Valley according to his record. He had a 45 minute interview and, according to the interview board, he spent 23 of those minutes raving abuse at you, Angel, and 21 minutes blaming you for him getting fired. By the way, he crosses his legs every time your name is mentioned.”
“Ahh, Howell.” Angel shook her head sadly. She honestly couldn’t understand why he would behave like that. “You didn’t hire him, did you?”
“With his confidential record? I heard later, through the grapevine, that he now has a job as a store detective at a supermarket in Merthyr Tydfil. The fish really is splendid isn’t it.”
“Excellent. The flavor is exquisite, and the touch of lemongrass is inspired.” Conrad reflected that somehow he was becoming a foodie. “There’s something I’d like to throw in here. One of the convictions we believe is a miscarriage of justice was obtained by combining three or more separate murders into a single trial. Essentially, each acted as a support for the other two. I can see multiple charges for lesser offenses but a capital charge like murder? I would argue that each case should be tried separately.”
“A point that has been made by others.” Keeble had glanced at Sir Humphrey and been given a nod to explain the situation. “If it does turn out that the case in question was made invalid by the use of multiple charges within a single trial, it will give us the leverage we need to pass the appropriate legislation. This is one of the issues that is developing as a result of your investigations.”
“I am very glad to hear it.” Sir Royston had been listening quietly to the discussions, maintaining a discrete silence lest his position impede a free flow of ideas. Although he didn’t know it, Suriyothai had the same policy. “Every time I see a major conviction obtained by using multiple charges, I feel a cold dread within me that this might be the one that starts a major scandal.”
Sir Humphrey’s expression didn’t change but he was struck with horror at the words ‘major scandal.’ Oh God help us all, please let it not be so. Don't tell me that Conrad has done it again. No matter where he starts off, he always ends up disrupting smoothly-functioning routines and hazarding the quiet and orderly process of government.
“That may well be coming, Sir Royston.” Conrad shook his head. “One of the convictions we believe may have been unsafe directly involves the Civil Service.”
The words seemed the clap of doom to Sir Humphrey. “You are referring to the alleged involvement of personnel, whose primary attachment on a full-career basis has been in service with the Foreign Office, in an art and antiquities theft ring operating in multiple countries and which, if verified, could result in severe diplomatic complications and which has resulted in the deaths of three people whose presence in a school where the stolen antiquities were housed led to the exposure of said theft ring?”
Angel looked at the ceiling. “He never stops, does he? Yes, its that case but you have the wrong end of the stick, Humpty. It’s the involvement of Civil Service people we know is a red herring. We know who the people behind the thefts were and what the school was actually used for. It’s nothing like the picture presented in the trial. In fact, it seems to me the art thefts and the killings were unconnected. Which causes us to ask how they got connected. In fact, I would have to ask whether whoever set up the Head Porter also had it in for the Foreign Office.”
Sir Humphrey was about to say something, but Angel held up her hand. “Please, Humpty, don’t thank us. This Beef Wellington looks perfect and I want to eat it before it gets cold.”
That caused a roar of laughter while Sir Humphrey looked confused. Sir David took a slice of his Beef Wellington and nodded. "Perfect indeed; the meat is excellent, well-seasoned and the herb crust complements it perfectly. Angel, is it true you can draw and fire a pistol before somebody who is pointing one at you can pull the trigger? I must say, I find that thought alarming."
"It's true. I'm not particularly special in that, any competent gunslinger can do the same. I suspect that more than a few police officers who have been shot made the mistake of assuming that because they were pointing a gun at somebody, the confrontation was over. One of the things I teach your officers is the signs to watch for that will tell them a shot is coming. The only way to beat the Gunslinger's Paradox is to pre-empt it." Angel tried her beef. "I was right, this is really good."
"I have to ask something organizational." Sir Royston noted that he and Angel were the only members of the party who were eating their Beef Wellington very rare. Conrad, Sir Humphrey and Keeble all are theirs well done, something which had undoubtedly broken the Chef's heart. The three Chief Constables were all eating theirs medium-rare. "Who will be the contracting authority at your end? Will we be paying you or . . . . "
"The 14K has formed a special business division, Dragon Security Consultants, whose specified activities are to provide training and consultancy services to police forces. And provide direct assistance where necessary. The business plan we will provide to you will include provide full details of how we will work together and who you should make the checks out to. Your management personnel will be in ultimate control of course, DSC will be working for you. I'll be paid by them."
Sir Humphrey and Chris Keeble exchanged glances. What Angel had just described was very similar to the relationship that existed in America where the Hudson River Institute ran the National Security Council under contract to the government. Both guessed that The Seer had been teaching Angel a lot since she had become Vanguard. Conrad intercepted the gaze and nodded slightly.
"That would seem to be very satisfactory. Subject, of course, to a careful examination of the contract and business plan by the government's lawyers." Sir Royston shook his head. "Lawyers get their hands into everything, don't they."
There was much rueful agreement on that point. By the time the desert, traditional British bread pudding, had arrived, all the outstanding details had been cleared up and it was apparent to everybody that an amicable agreement had been struck. With business concluded, the party retired to the bar where they remained until it closed at midnight. It was, everybody agreed, a very successful meeting although Sir Humphrey took nearly five minutes to say so.
Chris Keeble drove Conrad and Angel back to the Connaught Hotel, being privately of the opinion that Angel wasn't in any condition to drive. In fact, knowing Angel's drinking habits, he'd appointed himself the designated driver for just that reason. Also, there was a something he was curious about that he wanted to discuss in private. As he edged his car down the Strand, he brought it up.
"Angel, Dragon Security Consultants is a legitimate business isn't it."
"Of course." Angel was quite agreeable with talking about that particular business. It was, after all, completely legal. "Most of our more visible operations are these days. Including nearly all the most profitable ones."
"I know. I was speaking with a club owner recently, one the Met had pulled in on fraud charges. He was paying your London House for protection."
"Insurance." Angel made the point firmly. "Protection money is forced on the client under threat of dire harm if they refuse to pay. It’s an obsolete and counter-productive business model. When we offer insurance, the client is at liberty to refuse it and doesn’t suffer for doing so. At least not at our hands. We just offer such a good deal that people would be foolish to turn it down."
"That's what chummy said. He claimed he'd heard from Chinese associates that the . . . insurance . . . offered by your Triad was the real deal but he actually had to approach London House and ask to be allowed to take out a policy."
"Sounds right." Angel looked out the window at the passing shop windows. "We got out of street crime and violence years ago. Income was too low and the risks too great. The hard edge is still there and everybody knows it but it's a minor part of our operations. I'd say most of what we do is, the bits that are not completely legal that is, may not be quite legal, but they are in the gray area between legal and illegal. That's why we can work with you."
"Conrad, is North Somerset as bad as we think? I noticed you were a little cagy when the subject came up."
"It's worse." Conrad frowned deeply, revealing his great unease at the situation. "There is something profoundly wrong with the set-up down there and I can't work out what it is. Good news for you, it's not incompetence from your police officers."
"It's rotten." Angel was quite blunt. "I can smell when something is bad and North Somerset stinks. I'm with Conrad on this; your officers are good enough right now and we can fix what little is wrong. There's something else gone bad down there and we need to find it before it really blows up in our face."
Guest's Dining Room, The Gresham Club, St James, London.
"Looking good, Conrad." Angel ran her eyes quickly over Conrad making sure that he was immaculate. He was wearing a fashionable dark gray evening suit with a white turtleneck-collar dress shirt. The style suited him remarkably well and also hinted at his priestly background. She thought that Igrat had done him proud when she had chosen that suit for him. She had done an equally good job for Angel, getting her an evening dress in dark green silk whose style was reminiscent of a Qipao without being an imitation of one. The matching jacket was, of course, cut to conceal Angel's guns. The truth was that they made an exceedingly elegant couple.
Conrad didn't return the praise since Angel was one of the few women on Earth who did not like being complimented on her appearance. Instead he ushered her through the doors of the Gresham Club giving a nod of thanks to the doorman as he did so. Inside, Commissioner Chris Keeble was waiting. "Good evening Angel, Conrad, we're glad you could make it up here."
He dropped his voice. "The Home Secretary will be joining us. His bodyguards will be in attendance. Let me take you through to the dining room."
"This is a lot of high-powered politics for a simple business discussion, isn’t it?" Angel was curious and on-guard.
"The situation has grown significantly since you two started work." Keeble saw the group standing by the bar and steered his guests over to them. "Ladies, Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Conrad de Llorente and Angel. Conrad, Angel, this is the Home Secretary, Sir Royston Merchant, the Chief Constable of Mercia Division, Dame Wendy Chapman the Chief Constable of Wessex Division, Sir Derek Steele, and I believe you have already met the Chief Constable of West Country Division, Sir David Durling. And, of course, you know Sir Humphrey Appleday.”
Five minutes later, they were sitting at a secluded table with Angel nursing a glass of her favorite Bacardi 151. Sir Royston opened the discussion and got right to the point. “We’ve all seen the reduced crime figures in Thames Valley Division and very impressive they are. So much so that the Home Office would like to see the same philosophy and training programs extended to the rest of the Police Divisions in Great Britain. The purpose of this meeting is to lay the groundwork for us to do just that. Mercia, Wessex and West Country have all expressed an urgent desire to take a leading role in this transition. The problem I see is that I can’t see how one person who isn’t even resident in Great Britain can undertake that amount of work.”
“I can’t. So, I recommend we go a different way. Thames Valley now has a well-trained, properly-equipped armed response unit that is part of a police force which has returned to the traditional precepts of British policing. That is, they work with the community and police with the consent of that community. We take some of those officers and transfer them to your districts. At the same time, we pick the most promising of your young officers and transfer them to Thames Valley to join the training courses we run there. I look after the firearms side of things, Conrad looks after the community policing aspects. That way your people will be getting their training in an environment where they can see what they are learning really works. Once I’m satisfied they’ve got the message, you get them back and return the Thames Valley officers. Then we repeat the process. I’ll bring in some professional gunslingers to help with the training side of things if necessary.”
There was a brief interval while the soup was brought in. Dame Wendy broke the satisfied silence. “I’d like to ask something. If you had to summarize the objective of what you propose to teach in a few words, what would it be?”
“To create smaller armed response units that are much better trained and equipped. Not just in handling guns but in handling situations generally so that gunplay is unnecessary. Although my courses at Thames Valley are called firearms training, in fact they are about analyzing and managing situations so that nobody ends up getting hurt. In its shortest form, making sure what happened in San Francisco last night never happens here.”
There was much nodding and agreement over that. The chaotic shoot-out in San Francisco had been all over British television. It was Sir Derek who voiced the obvious consensus. “That was a disgrace. 165 rounds fired by nine police officers that wrecked four cars belonging to local citizens and the criminals got away. Just what happened, Angel?”
“I wasn’t there so I can’t be sure, but I suspect police converged on the scene from different directions without proper coordination and nobody bothered to work out what was going on. The criminals didn’t really get away, they just quietly left in the confusion. I will tell you this, I know whose side the local people will be on from now on and it will not be the police’s. That’s a big win for the gangs in that area.”
“Without wishing to pre-empt any official decisions made by Her Majesty’s Government and recognizing that the formal decisions must be examined in depth by an inter-departmental commission that will evaluate the advantages of the proposed scheme of centralized training supported by inter-divisional transfers of experienced police officers familiar with the principles being conveyed as part of that training and contrast those advantages with any suggested limitations and disadvantages that may arise from its widespread adoption, acknowledging of course that supervising the system and providing necessary funding will also require the participation of the Home Office and the Treasury in the preparation of the agenda for subsequent commission and any working groups it may feel the need to generate so that all the implications of these proposals are adequately addressed, it would appear to the Cabinet Office that Angel’s proposals do offer a valid blueprint for the successful spread of realistic firearms training and the appropriate police strategies aimed at avoiding the kind of unfortunate, some may say regrettable, events that occur in countries without the good fortune to be aided by such highly competent advisors.”
There was a prolonged period of silence while everybody tried to work out what Sir Humphrey had just said. Eventually, Sir David gave it up as a bad job and addressed Angel instead. “Why?”
“I’m sorry; I don’t . . .”
“Angel, we all know that you are a senior member of an organized crime group, the 14K Triad. Rumors vary as to what position you actually hold but none believe it is anything other than a senior one. So, why are you helping us become a more efficient law enforcement operation?”
Angel thought about that. “To start with, as a demonstration of good faith, my position is that of Vanguard, with the I-ching number 438. My responsibility is to take the policy directives formulated by the ruling council of the 14K and convert them into plans and operational strategies. That includes making alliances, brokering agreements and resolving disputes. I gave a long lecture on our philosophy to DCI Barnstable recently, but I’ll spare you that. Instead I’ll give you a quick example. One of our most lucrative operations is gambling, legal or illegal depending on the laws of the country we work in. It’s no secret that we own a casino-hotel in Cuba, the Mandarin. As the Mob have proved in Cuba and we have confirmed at our other casino-hotels in Macau, Hongkong and Thonburi, to be wildly profitable the gambling must be strictly honest.
"Now, let us assume that we own a gambling club in London that is equally productive and, therefore, honest. One of our clients wins big, really big. No problem for us since we’ll make the money back in a few minutes, but our lucky guest now has a very large wad of currency in his pocket. If the streets are rife with crime, he will be robbed and possibly killed. When word spreads that a big winner was robbed, the assumption we did it to get our money back will harm us greatly. Suddenly, our profitable and legal business isn’t so profitable any more. We have two options. Support the police in suppressing street crime or providing every guest who leaves our club with an armed escort home. From an economic and organizational viewpoint which makes more sense?”
“Supporting the police . . . I see.” Sir David gave an agreeable smile. “That is actually a convincing and credible explanation. You’re supporting us because it suits both our interests. I find that very reassuring. By the way, may I ask how the investigation into North Somerset District is going?”
Angel wasn’t smiling. “You were right. You have a serious problem there. So far we have found three cases where the people convicted of the crimes are certainly innocent. That is a pointer to a systemic problem. It’s not with the quality of policing; from our own observation and participation, the officers there are skilled, meticulous and know their communities well. Your problems lie somewhere else. Apart from anything else, we cannot afford any more bad convictions so we’ll need to have a divisional or even national forensic team on call to check out evidence. Conrad, any thoughts?”
Conrad nodded. “There’s something wrong with the investigations down there. It's a severe problem in its own right but I'm not sure if it's linked to the main issue of the excessive murder rate. Even if it isn't, every wrongful conviction dents the reputation and credibility of the force. By the way, Chris, you were wrong about Detective Sergeant Gavin. He’s really a very competent officer. Thing is, he’s happy where he is and in the position he holds. Lack of ambition is his problem, not lack of ability. I think he would be everlastingly grateful if you found a way to reward diligent service without promoting him.”
There was another long pause as the fish was served. Keeble looked at it fondly. “Grilled Dover Sole is one of the specialties of the club. This morning, that fish was swimming happily in the English Channel. West end of course, caught by fishing boats out of Weymouth and the Navy checks the water daily. You'll be happy to know contamination is receding at last and even areas of the North Sea are safe now. I’ll make a note about Gavin. It’s not an uncommon thing you know.”
“Better than too much ambition.” Dame Wendy was expertly peeling the meat from the backbone of her sole. “We had a friend of your trying to join us recently. Very ambitious man. Previously a DI in Thames Valley according to his record. He had a 45 minute interview and, according to the interview board, he spent 23 of those minutes raving abuse at you, Angel, and 21 minutes blaming you for him getting fired. By the way, he crosses his legs every time your name is mentioned.”
“Ahh, Howell.” Angel shook her head sadly. She honestly couldn’t understand why he would behave like that. “You didn’t hire him, did you?”
“With his confidential record? I heard later, through the grapevine, that he now has a job as a store detective at a supermarket in Merthyr Tydfil. The fish really is splendid isn’t it.”
“Excellent. The flavor is exquisite, and the touch of lemongrass is inspired.” Conrad reflected that somehow he was becoming a foodie. “There’s something I’d like to throw in here. One of the convictions we believe is a miscarriage of justice was obtained by combining three or more separate murders into a single trial. Essentially, each acted as a support for the other two. I can see multiple charges for lesser offenses but a capital charge like murder? I would argue that each case should be tried separately.”
“A point that has been made by others.” Keeble had glanced at Sir Humphrey and been given a nod to explain the situation. “If it does turn out that the case in question was made invalid by the use of multiple charges within a single trial, it will give us the leverage we need to pass the appropriate legislation. This is one of the issues that is developing as a result of your investigations.”
“I am very glad to hear it.” Sir Royston had been listening quietly to the discussions, maintaining a discrete silence lest his position impede a free flow of ideas. Although he didn’t know it, Suriyothai had the same policy. “Every time I see a major conviction obtained by using multiple charges, I feel a cold dread within me that this might be the one that starts a major scandal.”
Sir Humphrey’s expression didn’t change but he was struck with horror at the words ‘major scandal.’ Oh God help us all, please let it not be so. Don't tell me that Conrad has done it again. No matter where he starts off, he always ends up disrupting smoothly-functioning routines and hazarding the quiet and orderly process of government.
“That may well be coming, Sir Royston.” Conrad shook his head. “One of the convictions we believe may have been unsafe directly involves the Civil Service.”
The words seemed the clap of doom to Sir Humphrey. “You are referring to the alleged involvement of personnel, whose primary attachment on a full-career basis has been in service with the Foreign Office, in an art and antiquities theft ring operating in multiple countries and which, if verified, could result in severe diplomatic complications and which has resulted in the deaths of three people whose presence in a school where the stolen antiquities were housed led to the exposure of said theft ring?”
Angel looked at the ceiling. “He never stops, does he? Yes, its that case but you have the wrong end of the stick, Humpty. It’s the involvement of Civil Service people we know is a red herring. We know who the people behind the thefts were and what the school was actually used for. It’s nothing like the picture presented in the trial. In fact, it seems to me the art thefts and the killings were unconnected. Which causes us to ask how they got connected. In fact, I would have to ask whether whoever set up the Head Porter also had it in for the Foreign Office.”
Sir Humphrey was about to say something, but Angel held up her hand. “Please, Humpty, don’t thank us. This Beef Wellington looks perfect and I want to eat it before it gets cold.”
That caused a roar of laughter while Sir Humphrey looked confused. Sir David took a slice of his Beef Wellington and nodded. "Perfect indeed; the meat is excellent, well-seasoned and the herb crust complements it perfectly. Angel, is it true you can draw and fire a pistol before somebody who is pointing one at you can pull the trigger? I must say, I find that thought alarming."
"It's true. I'm not particularly special in that, any competent gunslinger can do the same. I suspect that more than a few police officers who have been shot made the mistake of assuming that because they were pointing a gun at somebody, the confrontation was over. One of the things I teach your officers is the signs to watch for that will tell them a shot is coming. The only way to beat the Gunslinger's Paradox is to pre-empt it." Angel tried her beef. "I was right, this is really good."
"I have to ask something organizational." Sir Royston noted that he and Angel were the only members of the party who were eating their Beef Wellington very rare. Conrad, Sir Humphrey and Keeble all are theirs well done, something which had undoubtedly broken the Chef's heart. The three Chief Constables were all eating theirs medium-rare. "Who will be the contracting authority at your end? Will we be paying you or . . . . "
"The 14K has formed a special business division, Dragon Security Consultants, whose specified activities are to provide training and consultancy services to police forces. And provide direct assistance where necessary. The business plan we will provide to you will include provide full details of how we will work together and who you should make the checks out to. Your management personnel will be in ultimate control of course, DSC will be working for you. I'll be paid by them."
Sir Humphrey and Chris Keeble exchanged glances. What Angel had just described was very similar to the relationship that existed in America where the Hudson River Institute ran the National Security Council under contract to the government. Both guessed that The Seer had been teaching Angel a lot since she had become Vanguard. Conrad intercepted the gaze and nodded slightly.
"That would seem to be very satisfactory. Subject, of course, to a careful examination of the contract and business plan by the government's lawyers." Sir Royston shook his head. "Lawyers get their hands into everything, don't they."
There was much rueful agreement on that point. By the time the desert, traditional British bread pudding, had arrived, all the outstanding details had been cleared up and it was apparent to everybody that an amicable agreement had been struck. With business concluded, the party retired to the bar where they remained until it closed at midnight. It was, everybody agreed, a very successful meeting although Sir Humphrey took nearly five minutes to say so.
Chris Keeble drove Conrad and Angel back to the Connaught Hotel, being privately of the opinion that Angel wasn't in any condition to drive. In fact, knowing Angel's drinking habits, he'd appointed himself the designated driver for just that reason. Also, there was a something he was curious about that he wanted to discuss in private. As he edged his car down the Strand, he brought it up.
"Angel, Dragon Security Consultants is a legitimate business isn't it."
"Of course." Angel was quite agreeable with talking about that particular business. It was, after all, completely legal. "Most of our more visible operations are these days. Including nearly all the most profitable ones."
"I know. I was speaking with a club owner recently, one the Met had pulled in on fraud charges. He was paying your London House for protection."
"Insurance." Angel made the point firmly. "Protection money is forced on the client under threat of dire harm if they refuse to pay. It’s an obsolete and counter-productive business model. When we offer insurance, the client is at liberty to refuse it and doesn’t suffer for doing so. At least not at our hands. We just offer such a good deal that people would be foolish to turn it down."
"That's what chummy said. He claimed he'd heard from Chinese associates that the . . . insurance . . . offered by your Triad was the real deal but he actually had to approach London House and ask to be allowed to take out a policy."
"Sounds right." Angel looked out the window at the passing shop windows. "We got out of street crime and violence years ago. Income was too low and the risks too great. The hard edge is still there and everybody knows it but it's a minor part of our operations. I'd say most of what we do is, the bits that are not completely legal that is, may not be quite legal, but they are in the gray area between legal and illegal. That's why we can work with you."
"Conrad, is North Somerset as bad as we think? I noticed you were a little cagy when the subject came up."
"It's worse." Conrad frowned deeply, revealing his great unease at the situation. "There is something profoundly wrong with the set-up down there and I can't work out what it is. Good news for you, it's not incompetence from your police officers."
"It's rotten." Angel was quite blunt. "I can smell when something is bad and North Somerset stinks. I'm with Conrad on this; your officers are good enough right now and we can fix what little is wrong. There's something else gone bad down there and we need to find it before it really blows up in our face."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Ten
Angel and Conrad in West Country Detective Police Car, Zed-Venus-Five
"Now why was Detective Sergeant Scott waiting for us in a side turning and is now following us?" Angel sounded only vaguely interested, an impression that was very misleading. She was always extremely interested in anybody who seemed to be following or waiting for her. It had been a three and a half hour drive down from London using the M4 and M5 motorways and she was looking forward to getting back down to work. The whole situation in North Somerset also interested her primarily because it was something that she hadn't encountered before.
"We'll be in the station in a few minutes; we'll find out then." Conrad sounded unconcerned by the situation. He saw the entrance into the police station parking lot in front of them and felt Angel making her usual precision turn. Behind them, Scott's car did the same. He parked next to them.
"Good afternoon Conrad, Angel." Scott smiled and then suddenly went serious. "Angel, watch your back. We had two more killings last night. Kevin Small and Darren Woods, both found in the waste ground at Westonzoyland we saw. Both shot in the back of the head with a 9mm pistol. We tried to call you but we couldn’t find you. Tom Barnstable is convinced you did it. He's even claimed he has evidence."
"Thanks for the warning, Mike. When were they shot?"
"Sometime between nine thirty and eleven last night." That made Angel smile.
As they went into the police station reception area, DS Gavin repeated the warning in an equally subdued voice. He also added something else. "We've all got your back, Angel. Just let us know if you need anything investigated."
There was a ripple of agreement around the reception area. Angel smiled and winked at him, having noted the emphasis he had placed on 'us'. "Don’t worry, everything will be fine."
"Angel, Conrad, I'd like to speak with you in my office please."
Inspector Barnstable’s Office, North Somerset District Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Last night, the bodies of Kevin Small and Darren Woods were found in Westonzoyland. The forensics team have found that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the back of the head of each person. The bodies were found at 11.30pm, the victims having been dead for between 30 minutes and two hours at the time. Therefore they were killed between nine-thirty and eleven. We have forensic evidence to place you, Angel, at the scene of the crime."
"That's remarkable." Angel was smiling while Conrad was only just managing to keep a straight face. He rebuked himself for taking sinful delight in the situation. Angel's simple plan to flush out the opposition had worked perfectly.
Barnstable picked up his telephone. "Doctor Pollard? Ah, James, could you come up here please? And bring the evidence from last night's killings with you. Yes, that evidence."
It took only five minutes for Doctor Pollard to arrive. When he was seated, Barnstable continued. "At the scene of the crime, we found some very distinctive red hair clasped in Small's hand. Dr. Pollard, have we identified the source of that hair?"
"We haven't been able to perform a DNA test yet but going by microscopic examination and the extremely unusual color, I am certain it is Angel's. But . . .. . "
"Thank you, James. Well Angel, can you account for your movements last night?" Barnstable sounded triumphant.
"Certainly, Tom. Conrad and I were in the Gresham Club, London."
"Have you witnesses to confirm that?"
"Oh yes. The Home Secretary, Sir Royston Merchant, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleday, Police Commissioner Chris Keeble, the Chief Constable of Mercia Division, Dame Wendy Chapman, the Chief Constable of Wessex Division, Sir Derek Steele, and the Chief Constable of West Country Division, Sir David Durling.”
Conrad noted that she had remembered the introductions almost verbatim. He also noticed that there was an audible thump as Barnstable's jaw dropped. In five hundred years of detecting, Conrad had never heard a more solid or unimpeachable alibi. In his professional opinion it was enough to make even the Spanish Inquisition retreat in confused defeat. With almost perceptible glee he succumbed to temptation. "Well, that would convince even the Spanish Inquisition."
"Conrad, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." Angel was completely deadpan but there was a lively flicker in her usually dead eyes that suggested this was going exactly the way she wanted.
Barnstable didn’t share the exchange. He was sitting silently, staring at Angel with a mixture of rage and disbelief. The silence seemed to stretch on for hours before it was broken by Dr. Pollard
"I tried to tell you Tom, I proved the hair sample belongs to Angel but you stopped me before I could tell you that I also proved it was planted at the scene."
"How could you do that?" Barnstable was still stunned. He hadn't expected the meeting to go this way at all. Much more importantly, he clearly understood what Angel had done and how he had walked into the trap she had laid.
"Angel, what color is your hair?" Angel looked at bit confused and pointed at her pony tail. Pollard smiled and shook his head. "No, I mean the real color."
Angel blinked at that. "I honestly don’t know. I've been dying it this shade of red since I was twelve."
"Well, I can tell you, it's dark brown. Very unusual for a Chinese woman, if you don't mind me saying so."
"I'm half-Italian, from my mother's side."
"That would explain it. Now, is it correct that you dye your hair every week? That's unusually frequent by the way. When did you last dye your hair?"
"Every week, on a Saturday. I don’t want the roots to show, most people assume my natural hair color is black and I'd like them to continue thinking that. Last time was a few days ago."
"I understand. Human hair grows at a rate of one centimeter per month. Saturday was four days ago. One centimeter per month is .25 of a centimeter per week or .125 of a centimeter in four days. The undyed portion of the hair found at the scene is .75 of a centimeter long. In other words, you hadn't dyed your hair for three weeks when this sample was taken. When did you last not dye your hair for that length of time?"
Angel's answer was immediate. "When I came here. Your local stores didn’t stock my color and I had to order it using the cyberweb. It took a long time to arrive. Three weeks more or less."
"And you've been here a month. So, from the length of time it was left undyed and the time you restarted coloring it, we can conclude that the sample of your hair was obtained about ten days ago. And yet, the sample was supposed to have been left last night. Could I have some of your hair please?"
Angel plucked some hairs from her pony tail and handed them over. Pollard took them and inspected them carefully using a magnifying glass. "Dyed nearly to the root. About a millimeter of growth. There is no way you could have left the hair in question at the scene of a killing last night. Therefore, it must have been planted by person or persons unknown. Tom, this was a deliberate attempt to frame one of our own."
Barnstable looked abashed although to Conrad's practiced eye, he was faking it. He just wasn't as good at faking human reactions as Angel was. Few people were of course. "I'm sorry, Angel, I jumped to conclusions."
Angel smiled at him although the expression did not touch her eyes. "That's all right, you saw a chance to bring down the legendary Angel. I can understand that. But, you understand that we have a real problem now because Conrad has identified several cases where the people convicted of a crime couldn’t have done it. We wondered how that had happened, now we know that the planting of evidence is a factor. We find out who and how. If we can do that, we have a big jump on finding out what has been going on down here."
Angel, Conrad and Doctor Pollard left Barnstable's office together. Angel stopped in the main work area and coughed politely. "All over, as I promised nothing to worry about. Dr. Pollard will explain why. But, when this thing blew up, you all had my back. That's something very few people have ever done for me before and I really appreciate it. Thank you, all of you."
A patter of applause ran around the room. Then people crowded around Dr Pollard while he explained the mechanics of the hair sample and gave a colorful description of Angel's alibi that had expanded to include the Archbishop of Canterbury and at least one Royal Prince. That caused a serious outburst of laughter. Listening, Conrad guessed that by the end of the day the party would have grown to include the Queen, the Prime Minister and quite possibly the Pope. In the background, Angel could see Barnstable was on the telephone, almost certainly checking Angel’s alibi. When he finished, he started out of the window of his office, looking at Angel with angry frustration. The enormity of her victory over him was sinking in. From now on, he was going to be the central subject of her investigations and the question was not whether she would find out how he was involved but how deeply. Meanwhile, Dr. Pollard turned to Angel. "What else do you need to know?"
"A couple of things, James. May I call you James?" Angel had noted Conrad usually asked permission before using first names.
"Of course, be my pleasure."
"The victims. How many times were they shot and what with? And was the same gun used for both."
"They were each made to kneel down and shot once each in the back of the head. Bullet was a 9 by 21 Skoda, same as you use. It's hard to be sure since the two bullets were both hollow-points and were badly mangled but we think they came from the same gun. What that gun was, though, we can't tell, the markings on the bullet are too badly mangled to give us any precise information."
Once they were back in their office and had shut the door, Angel started to speak but Conrad put his finger over his lips. His hands moved quickly in the Triad hand-signal code she had painstakingly taught him. The message read. 'Talk later. Not secure.' She nodded quickly. "Well, the excitement being over, we better get back to work. Why don’t we get the Woods-Small case file and see what we make of it."
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"You know the drill, Conrad. If a professional assassin leaves a body to be found, it's because she wanted it to be a message. Usually we charge extra for the service because of the added risk. There is no message here, none that I can see anyway. Therefore, this wasn't a professional hit."
"I guessed that the moment Tom told us the victims had been killed by a single shot in the head. You'd have fired two or three. And so would all your professional colleagues." Conrad looked somber for a moment. He had closed his eyes to Angel's professional life for many years, knowing full well that doing so was both criminally and morally a sin, one for which he could pay a dire price in both this life and the next. He had justified doing so by believing that he was serving the higher cause of saving a soul that had been endangered by the appalling negligence of his church. The happiest day of his life had been the one when she had told him she had given up taking free-lance hired gun contracts. "This whole affair is interesting though. We're beginning to see a pattern emerging here."
Angel was sitting at the dining table, a cloth spread out and one of her Berettas field-stripped on it. She was methodically cleaning it and checking each part for wear or damage. She'd already finished the work on one and it was hanging under her shoulder. She'd carefully replaced the firing pin on the second and was now checking to make sure that everything still functioned smoothly. Satisfied, she wiped the parts down to remove excess oil and started to reassemble the weapon. "Do tell, Conrad."
"Have you noticed that each of these incidents starts off with a single killing and it's followed by three or four more. Then somebody gets charged with the whole lot. We now know at least four cases, including yours, where the charge was supported by falsified evidence. By the way, that was a nice little speech you gave when we were leaving Tom's office. Struck exactly the right note."
Angel nodded. The truth was she had watched Conrad thank people for helping or supporting him and, although she didn’t understand why he had done that, she had added doing so to her 'rules'. She'd also mentally noted down what he had said on those occasions for her own use. "They were taking quite a chance by supporting me so openly. They were siding with me against their boss and that isn't smart in any organization. I still don't understand why they did it. They had nothing to gain from backing me."
Conrad thought carefully about that. He'd had this kind of conversation before with Angel and trying to explain why somebody would do something for somebody else when the act didn’t benefit themselves was like trying to explain color to a man blind since birth. "They did it because it was the right thing to do. They saw Barnstable was running way ahead of the evidence, primarily because of his dislike for you and it rubbed them the wrong way."
Angel nodded while she thought about that. "Wait a minute, Conrad. Could the defense attorney for , , , , no that doesn’t make any sense at all."
"What was it? There may be something helpful there."
"All right. The defense attorney for Woods-Small made a big thing out of entrapment and demanded the charges be dismissed. Suppose he killed Woods and Small, or had them killed, and planted evidence there that implicated me. The logic being, I killed them because they beat up Mau-Lee. He may have thought that to beat that charge, I'd have to admit that Mao-Lee was a willing participant as bait and that I'd organized the whole thing. With that admission, the charges would be thrown out. But, of course, Woods and Small are dead. So it all falls apart." Angel's mouth twisted slightly; her idea had been stupid and she knew it.
"Well, every lawyer I know would cheerfully kill his clients if it meant racking up another acquittal. But, I think you said something very important. Why would the real killers try and implicate you? What would they have to gain? Not to mention that, assuming they knew who you are, the attempt would be suicidally dangerous for them."
"Yet they did try." Angel paused for a second. "You're right, who would gain anything by framing me? If they were trying to stop us getting too close to what is really going on here, they'd frame you, not me. Although I can't think how they would do that."
And if trying to fit Angel up is suicidal, her reaction to an attempt to do that to me would be a holocaust. Her likely reaction to me being harmed frightens even her. Conrad dismissed the thought; he was well-aware that the simple fact he was Angel's friend put him off-limits to the organized criminal community. It was a matter of respect, they might try and kill her but not him. Anyway, no sensible person wanted to be responsible for a five-generation kill against their entire family. "Perhaps they thought that if they framed you, I would spend all my time getting you out of that frame and not pursue these cases?"
"Possible." Angel didn’t sound convinced. "Let's put the why to one side and concentrate on the how. And, of course, the who."
"Good idea. And the first question is, who knew where we would be last night? Because anybody who knew that would have known that your alibi was so solid that it made granite seem like putty. So, we can eliminate them as suspects."
"It does more than that. It means the people responsible knew we were out of touch but not where we were. Did you tell anybody at the station where we were going?"
Conrad shook his head. I may have a Papal dispensation allowing me to forgo wearing Priestly garb, one that long predates my first meeting with you, Angel, but I still know how to keep secrets and you asked me to keep quiet. "The Home Office, Cabinet Office, the Division HQs, all knew where we were. The general population mostly don’t know we exist and the ones that do have no means of knowing where we were. They also had no means of knowing we weren't in the police station. The boundary conditions are that whoever did this did not know where we were but did know we were out of contact and, as far as I can see, the only people who fit those conditions are the North Somerset Police Force."
"And a related question. How did they get a sample of my hair. I don't walk around shedding like a poodle."
The picture made Conrad snort. "That's a good question. You brush your hair of course, I assume you cut it now and then. That means whoever got hold of a hair sample from you either took it from your hairbrush or your hairdresser."
"Don’t have a hairdresser, Conrad, I know too many people who died in one. If my hair needs cutting which isn’t often, I do it myself. That's why I wear it this way. And, by the way, I burn the cut-offs for exactly this reason."
"So, it has to be your hairbrush. Which means whoever got the samples must have been in here."
"And they saw all these boards and realized what we were up to."
"And they saw an imminent danger to themselves that we haven’t spotted yet."
"Which means all our corkboards do contain the answer to what is going on here."
"It also means that there is a common factor to all these crimes and we've missed it." Conrad paused and the earlier comments about who knew where they had been blended with the conversation. "Not any more we haven't, Angel. The common factor is that every one of these cases was investigated by the police. That's the one and only common factor. That means there is a measurable chance we have a Police death-squad on our hands."
Angel sighed. "Oh damn. That will piss off Humpty, again. And he'll look at us like a ruptured walrus. Again."
Angel and Conrad in West Country Detective Police Car, Zed-Venus-Five
"Now why was Detective Sergeant Scott waiting for us in a side turning and is now following us?" Angel sounded only vaguely interested, an impression that was very misleading. She was always extremely interested in anybody who seemed to be following or waiting for her. It had been a three and a half hour drive down from London using the M4 and M5 motorways and she was looking forward to getting back down to work. The whole situation in North Somerset also interested her primarily because it was something that she hadn't encountered before.
"We'll be in the station in a few minutes; we'll find out then." Conrad sounded unconcerned by the situation. He saw the entrance into the police station parking lot in front of them and felt Angel making her usual precision turn. Behind them, Scott's car did the same. He parked next to them.
"Good afternoon Conrad, Angel." Scott smiled and then suddenly went serious. "Angel, watch your back. We had two more killings last night. Kevin Small and Darren Woods, both found in the waste ground at Westonzoyland we saw. Both shot in the back of the head with a 9mm pistol. We tried to call you but we couldn’t find you. Tom Barnstable is convinced you did it. He's even claimed he has evidence."
"Thanks for the warning, Mike. When were they shot?"
"Sometime between nine thirty and eleven last night." That made Angel smile.
As they went into the police station reception area, DS Gavin repeated the warning in an equally subdued voice. He also added something else. "We've all got your back, Angel. Just let us know if you need anything investigated."
There was a ripple of agreement around the reception area. Angel smiled and winked at him, having noted the emphasis he had placed on 'us'. "Don’t worry, everything will be fine."
"Angel, Conrad, I'd like to speak with you in my office please."
Inspector Barnstable’s Office, North Somerset District Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Last night, the bodies of Kevin Small and Darren Woods were found in Westonzoyland. The forensics team have found that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the back of the head of each person. The bodies were found at 11.30pm, the victims having been dead for between 30 minutes and two hours at the time. Therefore they were killed between nine-thirty and eleven. We have forensic evidence to place you, Angel, at the scene of the crime."
"That's remarkable." Angel was smiling while Conrad was only just managing to keep a straight face. He rebuked himself for taking sinful delight in the situation. Angel's simple plan to flush out the opposition had worked perfectly.
Barnstable picked up his telephone. "Doctor Pollard? Ah, James, could you come up here please? And bring the evidence from last night's killings with you. Yes, that evidence."
It took only five minutes for Doctor Pollard to arrive. When he was seated, Barnstable continued. "At the scene of the crime, we found some very distinctive red hair clasped in Small's hand. Dr. Pollard, have we identified the source of that hair?"
"We haven't been able to perform a DNA test yet but going by microscopic examination and the extremely unusual color, I am certain it is Angel's. But . . .. . "
"Thank you, James. Well Angel, can you account for your movements last night?" Barnstable sounded triumphant.
"Certainly, Tom. Conrad and I were in the Gresham Club, London."
"Have you witnesses to confirm that?"
"Oh yes. The Home Secretary, Sir Royston Merchant, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleday, Police Commissioner Chris Keeble, the Chief Constable of Mercia Division, Dame Wendy Chapman, the Chief Constable of Wessex Division, Sir Derek Steele, and the Chief Constable of West Country Division, Sir David Durling.”
Conrad noted that she had remembered the introductions almost verbatim. He also noticed that there was an audible thump as Barnstable's jaw dropped. In five hundred years of detecting, Conrad had never heard a more solid or unimpeachable alibi. In his professional opinion it was enough to make even the Spanish Inquisition retreat in confused defeat. With almost perceptible glee he succumbed to temptation. "Well, that would convince even the Spanish Inquisition."
"Conrad, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." Angel was completely deadpan but there was a lively flicker in her usually dead eyes that suggested this was going exactly the way she wanted.
Barnstable didn’t share the exchange. He was sitting silently, staring at Angel with a mixture of rage and disbelief. The silence seemed to stretch on for hours before it was broken by Dr. Pollard
"I tried to tell you Tom, I proved the hair sample belongs to Angel but you stopped me before I could tell you that I also proved it was planted at the scene."
"How could you do that?" Barnstable was still stunned. He hadn't expected the meeting to go this way at all. Much more importantly, he clearly understood what Angel had done and how he had walked into the trap she had laid.
"Angel, what color is your hair?" Angel looked at bit confused and pointed at her pony tail. Pollard smiled and shook his head. "No, I mean the real color."
Angel blinked at that. "I honestly don’t know. I've been dying it this shade of red since I was twelve."
"Well, I can tell you, it's dark brown. Very unusual for a Chinese woman, if you don't mind me saying so."
"I'm half-Italian, from my mother's side."
"That would explain it. Now, is it correct that you dye your hair every week? That's unusually frequent by the way. When did you last dye your hair?"
"Every week, on a Saturday. I don’t want the roots to show, most people assume my natural hair color is black and I'd like them to continue thinking that. Last time was a few days ago."
"I understand. Human hair grows at a rate of one centimeter per month. Saturday was four days ago. One centimeter per month is .25 of a centimeter per week or .125 of a centimeter in four days. The undyed portion of the hair found at the scene is .75 of a centimeter long. In other words, you hadn't dyed your hair for three weeks when this sample was taken. When did you last not dye your hair for that length of time?"
Angel's answer was immediate. "When I came here. Your local stores didn’t stock my color and I had to order it using the cyberweb. It took a long time to arrive. Three weeks more or less."
"And you've been here a month. So, from the length of time it was left undyed and the time you restarted coloring it, we can conclude that the sample of your hair was obtained about ten days ago. And yet, the sample was supposed to have been left last night. Could I have some of your hair please?"
Angel plucked some hairs from her pony tail and handed them over. Pollard took them and inspected them carefully using a magnifying glass. "Dyed nearly to the root. About a millimeter of growth. There is no way you could have left the hair in question at the scene of a killing last night. Therefore, it must have been planted by person or persons unknown. Tom, this was a deliberate attempt to frame one of our own."
Barnstable looked abashed although to Conrad's practiced eye, he was faking it. He just wasn't as good at faking human reactions as Angel was. Few people were of course. "I'm sorry, Angel, I jumped to conclusions."
Angel smiled at him although the expression did not touch her eyes. "That's all right, you saw a chance to bring down the legendary Angel. I can understand that. But, you understand that we have a real problem now because Conrad has identified several cases where the people convicted of a crime couldn’t have done it. We wondered how that had happened, now we know that the planting of evidence is a factor. We find out who and how. If we can do that, we have a big jump on finding out what has been going on down here."
Angel, Conrad and Doctor Pollard left Barnstable's office together. Angel stopped in the main work area and coughed politely. "All over, as I promised nothing to worry about. Dr. Pollard will explain why. But, when this thing blew up, you all had my back. That's something very few people have ever done for me before and I really appreciate it. Thank you, all of you."
A patter of applause ran around the room. Then people crowded around Dr Pollard while he explained the mechanics of the hair sample and gave a colorful description of Angel's alibi that had expanded to include the Archbishop of Canterbury and at least one Royal Prince. That caused a serious outburst of laughter. Listening, Conrad guessed that by the end of the day the party would have grown to include the Queen, the Prime Minister and quite possibly the Pope. In the background, Angel could see Barnstable was on the telephone, almost certainly checking Angel’s alibi. When he finished, he started out of the window of his office, looking at Angel with angry frustration. The enormity of her victory over him was sinking in. From now on, he was going to be the central subject of her investigations and the question was not whether she would find out how he was involved but how deeply. Meanwhile, Dr. Pollard turned to Angel. "What else do you need to know?"
"A couple of things, James. May I call you James?" Angel had noted Conrad usually asked permission before using first names.
"Of course, be my pleasure."
"The victims. How many times were they shot and what with? And was the same gun used for both."
"They were each made to kneel down and shot once each in the back of the head. Bullet was a 9 by 21 Skoda, same as you use. It's hard to be sure since the two bullets were both hollow-points and were badly mangled but we think they came from the same gun. What that gun was, though, we can't tell, the markings on the bullet are too badly mangled to give us any precise information."
Once they were back in their office and had shut the door, Angel started to speak but Conrad put his finger over his lips. His hands moved quickly in the Triad hand-signal code she had painstakingly taught him. The message read. 'Talk later. Not secure.' She nodded quickly. "Well, the excitement being over, we better get back to work. Why don’t we get the Woods-Small case file and see what we make of it."
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"You know the drill, Conrad. If a professional assassin leaves a body to be found, it's because she wanted it to be a message. Usually we charge extra for the service because of the added risk. There is no message here, none that I can see anyway. Therefore, this wasn't a professional hit."
"I guessed that the moment Tom told us the victims had been killed by a single shot in the head. You'd have fired two or three. And so would all your professional colleagues." Conrad looked somber for a moment. He had closed his eyes to Angel's professional life for many years, knowing full well that doing so was both criminally and morally a sin, one for which he could pay a dire price in both this life and the next. He had justified doing so by believing that he was serving the higher cause of saving a soul that had been endangered by the appalling negligence of his church. The happiest day of his life had been the one when she had told him she had given up taking free-lance hired gun contracts. "This whole affair is interesting though. We're beginning to see a pattern emerging here."
Angel was sitting at the dining table, a cloth spread out and one of her Berettas field-stripped on it. She was methodically cleaning it and checking each part for wear or damage. She'd already finished the work on one and it was hanging under her shoulder. She'd carefully replaced the firing pin on the second and was now checking to make sure that everything still functioned smoothly. Satisfied, she wiped the parts down to remove excess oil and started to reassemble the weapon. "Do tell, Conrad."
"Have you noticed that each of these incidents starts off with a single killing and it's followed by three or four more. Then somebody gets charged with the whole lot. We now know at least four cases, including yours, where the charge was supported by falsified evidence. By the way, that was a nice little speech you gave when we were leaving Tom's office. Struck exactly the right note."
Angel nodded. The truth was she had watched Conrad thank people for helping or supporting him and, although she didn’t understand why he had done that, she had added doing so to her 'rules'. She'd also mentally noted down what he had said on those occasions for her own use. "They were taking quite a chance by supporting me so openly. They were siding with me against their boss and that isn't smart in any organization. I still don't understand why they did it. They had nothing to gain from backing me."
Conrad thought carefully about that. He'd had this kind of conversation before with Angel and trying to explain why somebody would do something for somebody else when the act didn’t benefit themselves was like trying to explain color to a man blind since birth. "They did it because it was the right thing to do. They saw Barnstable was running way ahead of the evidence, primarily because of his dislike for you and it rubbed them the wrong way."
Angel nodded while she thought about that. "Wait a minute, Conrad. Could the defense attorney for , , , , no that doesn’t make any sense at all."
"What was it? There may be something helpful there."
"All right. The defense attorney for Woods-Small made a big thing out of entrapment and demanded the charges be dismissed. Suppose he killed Woods and Small, or had them killed, and planted evidence there that implicated me. The logic being, I killed them because they beat up Mau-Lee. He may have thought that to beat that charge, I'd have to admit that Mao-Lee was a willing participant as bait and that I'd organized the whole thing. With that admission, the charges would be thrown out. But, of course, Woods and Small are dead. So it all falls apart." Angel's mouth twisted slightly; her idea had been stupid and she knew it.
"Well, every lawyer I know would cheerfully kill his clients if it meant racking up another acquittal. But, I think you said something very important. Why would the real killers try and implicate you? What would they have to gain? Not to mention that, assuming they knew who you are, the attempt would be suicidally dangerous for them."
"Yet they did try." Angel paused for a second. "You're right, who would gain anything by framing me? If they were trying to stop us getting too close to what is really going on here, they'd frame you, not me. Although I can't think how they would do that."
And if trying to fit Angel up is suicidal, her reaction to an attempt to do that to me would be a holocaust. Her likely reaction to me being harmed frightens even her. Conrad dismissed the thought; he was well-aware that the simple fact he was Angel's friend put him off-limits to the organized criminal community. It was a matter of respect, they might try and kill her but not him. Anyway, no sensible person wanted to be responsible for a five-generation kill against their entire family. "Perhaps they thought that if they framed you, I would spend all my time getting you out of that frame and not pursue these cases?"
"Possible." Angel didn’t sound convinced. "Let's put the why to one side and concentrate on the how. And, of course, the who."
"Good idea. And the first question is, who knew where we would be last night? Because anybody who knew that would have known that your alibi was so solid that it made granite seem like putty. So, we can eliminate them as suspects."
"It does more than that. It means the people responsible knew we were out of touch but not where we were. Did you tell anybody at the station where we were going?"
Conrad shook his head. I may have a Papal dispensation allowing me to forgo wearing Priestly garb, one that long predates my first meeting with you, Angel, but I still know how to keep secrets and you asked me to keep quiet. "The Home Office, Cabinet Office, the Division HQs, all knew where we were. The general population mostly don’t know we exist and the ones that do have no means of knowing where we were. They also had no means of knowing we weren't in the police station. The boundary conditions are that whoever did this did not know where we were but did know we were out of contact and, as far as I can see, the only people who fit those conditions are the North Somerset Police Force."
"And a related question. How did they get a sample of my hair. I don't walk around shedding like a poodle."
The picture made Conrad snort. "That's a good question. You brush your hair of course, I assume you cut it now and then. That means whoever got hold of a hair sample from you either took it from your hairbrush or your hairdresser."
"Don’t have a hairdresser, Conrad, I know too many people who died in one. If my hair needs cutting which isn’t often, I do it myself. That's why I wear it this way. And, by the way, I burn the cut-offs for exactly this reason."
"So, it has to be your hairbrush. Which means whoever got the samples must have been in here."
"And they saw all these boards and realized what we were up to."
"And they saw an imminent danger to themselves that we haven’t spotted yet."
"Which means all our corkboards do contain the answer to what is going on here."
"It also means that there is a common factor to all these crimes and we've missed it." Conrad paused and the earlier comments about who knew where they had been blended with the conversation. "Not any more we haven't, Angel. The common factor is that every one of these cases was investigated by the police. That's the one and only common factor. That means there is a measurable chance we have a Police death-squad on our hands."
Angel sighed. "Oh damn. That will piss off Humpty, again. And he'll look at us like a ruptured walrus. Again."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Eleven
The Mulberry Tree Restaurant, Union Street, Yeovil, Somerset
“Thank you for coming down, Chris. I’m sorry to bring you here so soon after our last meeting but this is serious. In fact, it could hardly be more serious.” Conrad looked around at the restaurant. It was pleasingly empty for this kind of meeting although he doubted the staff were satisfied with business this slow.
“It’s serious then.” Keeble paused; a waitress was on her way over with their meal. He kept quiet until she had removed the appetizer plates and replaced them with their steaks. Once she was gone, he carried on. “We heard about the affair yesterday afternoon. Frankly, that’s causing quite a laugh in London. The story has already grown, Angel, to have you addressing the assembled heads of the Commonwealth countries.”
Angel shook her head. “Great steak, Chris. Thank you for recommending this place.”
Keeble had recommended the 10-ounce ribeye steak with stilton-cream sauce. Angel had taken his advice and her steak, oozing red blood, was a marvel to behold. She waited until he had his first mouthful before continuing. “Did you know you may have a police death-squad in North Somerset?”
The explosion of coughing as Keeble choked on his steak echoed around the restaurant. Conrad pounded him on the back and admonished Angel. “That was cruel, Angel. Funny, but cruel.”
Keeble gulped down some wine and managed to restore his balance. “Are you serious? Conrad, this isn’t funny at all.”
“No, it isn’t.” Conrad looked around. “We didn’t figure it out until we got back to Taunton. The only people who knew Angel and I were out of contact but didn’t know where we were are the officers in the Taunton police station. Sometime in the three weeks after we arrived here, somebody entered the house we are staying in and stole some hair from Angel’s hairbrush. At the time it was probably just an insurance policy, but then they planted it at the scene of the Small-Woods killing. Then it dawned on me, the only common factor behind all the killings we’ve had in North Somerset is the police involvement. Add in the timing and background to the attempt to frame Angel, the fact that the frame must have been planned for some time and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion.”
“If it’s any comfort, we are fairly sure that it’s not all of them.” With anybody else, Keeble would have suspected that Angel could not believe people she had trained and worked with could have tried this. However, he knew that she simply took it for granted that the people she worked with were no more and no less likely to betray her as anybody else. She looked at him and nodded. “The death squad knows I’m a gunslinger and use nine by twenty-ones. But, they used hollow-points which I never, ever do and which I forbid my students from using. They shot each of the victims once in the head, I’d have shot them multiple times. They made their victims kneel down, which I don’t. They used one gun, I would have used both mine to shoot the two victims simultaneously. In other words, they didn’t know me. DS Scott is one of my students, he’d have known me well enough not to make those mistakes. He and DS Gavin are friends and I guess they would have spoken about me and Scott would have passed at least some of my lessons on. Those two are in the clear.”
“DCI Barnstable on the other hand. . .” Conrad looked at Angel’s blood-rare steak and shuddered. Almost all long-lifers from a century or more in the past ate meat cooked through. “Did you bring his file?”
Keeble nodded. “You know he was with ‘Six’ in Singapore? He was there from 1988 to 1992.”
Angel looked up, “that’s when the Black Dragon gang war was going on. I was there then as well.”
“I know, Hēilóng Shāshǒu.” Angel looked up sharply causing Keeble to smile at his revenge for Angel’s stunt a couple of minutes earlier. “Barnstable doesn’t know that though. I don’t think he even knows the name. But in 1992 he was honey-trapped by the opposition out there and compromised. It was a nasty one, they used a ladyboy and Barnstable didn’t realize it until she dropped her pants. Give him credit, he made an excuse, left and reported the whole thing but his ‘Six’ career was over right there. So, very nearly was his marriage. Once things had settled down, ‘Six’ got him into the police, he did his training and then got pushed up the scale and into this place.”
“So, he’s never been a beat cop or a uniform.” Angel sounded thoughtful. “Didn’t he live in the house we’re using?”
Keeble checked the file. “Yes, he and his wife and daughter did. I wonder if he still has a key?”
“Sorry, Conrad I blew it. We should have changed the locks.” Angel actually looked apologetic.
“Not allowed.” Keeble was shaking his head. “It’s a police house. No structural changes allowed without written permission.”
“And Barnstable would have known that, of course.” It wasn’t necessary for Keeble to agree with Conrad’s comment, the conclusion was all too obvious.
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"Somebody has left us a present." Conrad had seen the object on their doorstep as soon as Angel had swung the car on to the drive.
"Shall I call the bomb squad?" Angel wasn't joking. She had painstakingly taught Conrad to be extremely suspicious about unsolicited packages. As she had pointed out, her being a psychopath was a mental condition, being paranoid was simply a reasonable defense mechanism.
Conrad looked carefully. "It's not a parcel, it looks more like a basket, the sort of thing flowers or vegetables are put in."
Angel backed the car up and got out. "You stay here."
The she walked to the door and looked down at the basket, taking care to stay well away from it. "Conrad, somebody has given us a box of mushrooms. There's a note on it welcoming us to the neighborhood. Since we've been here for a month already, that seems a little late. Suspicious, much?"
"Much." Conrad agreed. "Call an expert."
Angel nodded and took out her portable phone. To Angel, her portable telephone was a vital business tool and she never begrudged spending money on having the latest technology available. So, her current telephone was one of the new models with the ability to transmit high-definition pictures from the built-in camera. She had the privacy screen up so the person on the other end could see her. She heard the bleeping and the answer. "Hello?"
"Nammie, it's me, Angel. I've got Conrad with me and we need your help. We've just been given a present and we're suspicious."
"Being suspicious is never a problem." Naamah still had her privacy screen down but now she lifted it, showing she was at her desk despite the time in the US. "What is it."
"We found these on our doorstep when we got back to our house this evening." Angel held her telephone so Naamah could see the mushrooms easily. Naamah looked carefully then looked up and for the first time since Angel had met her, Naamah was genuinely frightened.
"Tell me the truth right now." All the imperiousness of the Queen she had once been was there. "Have either of you eaten any of those? Or touched them? Don't try and say you haven't if you have, it won’t do you any good. If the symptoms haven’t started, we might be able to save you. If you have started getting stomach pains, you are already dead."
"My God, what are those things." Conrad was looking down at the basket with shock.
"Amanita virosa. They're the most poisonous mushrooms in the world. About the only treatment that works for people poisoned by them is a liver transplant but people like us react very badly to transplants. Now, have you eaten any?"
"No, Nammie, honestly. I've taught Conrad never to eat anything from or even touch unexpected packages that arrive on the doorstep. Not touched, not close enough to breathe in, certainly never, ever eat."
"Thank the Gods for that. There's no cure once that thing has got hold of you. You need to call the . . . " Naamah hesitated. "Actually I'm not sure who you should call over there. Here it would be the Center for Disease Control. I think. Amanita virosa grows wild in the UK, especially on desolate or derelict land. They don’t just appear in baskets like that. This was a deliberate attempt to kill you both. Start with Chris Keeble, he'll take it from there."
"Anything we need to do." Conrad asked the question hoping the answer was 'stay away from them'. To his relief, it was.
"Right, thank you Nammie." Angel faked gratitude in her voice.
Naamah knew it and gave her a wry smile. "One thing. The common name for Amanita virosa is the Destroying Angel. Somebody has a sense of humor. Have a good night, you two."
If Conrad and Angel had been in any doubt about the toxicity of the gift somebody had so thoughtfully left on their doorstep, those reservations had been dispelled by the arrival of a Public Health UK van and the staff clad in biological isolation suits and watching them remove the basket in a sealed isolation bag. Eventually, the team leader took of her breathing mask and came over to them.
"Somebody doesn’t like you." Senior Public Health Officer Jacqueline Hemsley considered herself to be a master of studied understatement. After her comment, everybody agreed with that.
“We’ve got Central Forensics on the way down. This is now a crime scene.” Conrad was shaken by how close he could have come to being murdered. “Thank you for your work here, Officer Hemsley.”
“It’s Jackie. I’ll have to stay here, we all will. This is going to take some disentangling. Quite apart from anything else, whoever left you one present may have left you others. We’ll look after environmental things like a radiation source in your bedroom. Once we’ve given the OK, Forensics will handle possible bombs, sabotaged gas mains and other things.”
Conrad felt as if somebody had kicked him in the stomach. Angel just shrugged. “We won’t be staying here. We both have bug-out bags in the car for exactly this reason. Can you recommend a good hotel around here, Jackie?”
Hemsley thought for a moment. “The Fitzhead Arms is supposed to be very good; just outside Taunton, south on the A38. You might as well leave now. This area is off-limits until we’ve declared it safe and the forensic people have finished processing it.”
“Thanks Jackie, we’ll be back at the office tomorrow morning. Can you let us have a report then.”
Hemsley took one look at Angel’s cold, completely lifeless eyes and agreed. Then watched as Conrad and Angel got into their car and left.
Inside the Rover SD4, Conrad looked at Angel. “We’re not going to the Fitzhead Arms are we?”
“Not even close. We’re at war now and this is called ‘going to the mattresses’. We’ll be staying almost anywhere but there.”
On route to North Somerset District Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
After leaving Bishop's Lydeard, Conrad had got an impressive demonstration of why the 14K Triad was such an effective organization and why countering its less-than-legal operations was so difficult. Angel had spent a couple of minutes on the telephone and then driven to a railway station at Burnham-on-Sea. She had parked their police car there and picked up a nondescript car from the road outside. She had then driven to a private house, a dozen miles away for the night, On arrival, they had been greeted by a Chinese couple who had a hot meal and a room ready waiting for them. They’d spent the night there, had been provided with a lavish breakfast and then left, picking up their police car on the way back. By the time Angel had pulled out of the railway station parking lot, the civilian car they had used had vanished.
“I thought you said there wasn’t a Triad presence in South West England?” Conrad had to ask.
Angel looked at him with a half-smile. “There isn’t, not yet. Although there will be very soon. We do have a very strong presence in South Wales though. They fixed up everything for us. I don’t know how and won’t ask. But, the family who looked after us, who aren’t Triad members by the way, will get very generous compensation for doing so and Cardiff Sub-House will owe them a favor. I wish we’d been able to put a lid on the information that the attack had failed. Now we can’t watch for people who look shocked when they find out we are still alive.”
Conrad agreed with that. "If the couple who looked after us, weren't members, why did they help us?"
"They weren't threatened if that's what you mean. That wouldn’t work. They were asked, politely, if they would mind helping us. I assume that Cardiff House has a list of people who are willing to help out if needed, in exchange for the generous compensation I mentioned of course. That compensation will be billed to me and I'll charge the Cabinet Office for it since we're working for Humpty. He'll probably charge it to the Home Office budget."
"Wait a minute, that means the family are, or were, working for the British government?"
"Sure, through a series of cut-outs of course. As I said, there's no Triad presence in South-West England. Yet."
When they got to the police station, what worried Conrad was that nobody seemed to be surprised to see them. It was taken for granted that they had been nosing around looking at the killings of Small and Woods. The Desk Sergeant had barely looked up when they had arrived and just passed word that Dr. Pollard would like to speak to them when they had a moment. Conrad had also realized Angel had deliberately timed her drive here so that they would be two hours late into the station, having told everybody the previous evening that they would be present there at the normal time. He had a strong feeling that he was seeing her at work in a way he had not done before.
“Angel? Good to see you again.” Sir Kendall Busch, head of the Forensic Science Service, had come in from the back of the station. “And you too, Conrad. We need to have a meeting. Dr. Pollard and Ms. Hemsley are on their way right over.”
By the time everybody had assembled in the Police Station Conference Room, the others had arrived. Detective Sergeant Gavin was standing in for Barnstable who was 'unavoidably detained' elsewhere. Privately Conrad guessed that he didn’t want to face Angel, believing that she would learn too much from his body language. The guilty flee where no man pursueth. Only Angel is pursuing him now and he knows it. As the most senior officer present, Sir Kendall took over the meeting and started by asking Hemsley for her report.
"Well, I can confirm some of the mushrooms in the basket were Amanita virosa. They went bright yellow when tested with potassium hydroxide. Not all of them, they were mixed in with non-poisonous ones. Even those, though, were contaminated with pollen and would have been extremely unhealthy to eat. Since you two are Americans, let me explain something. Public Health UK used to be known as the Public Health and Safety Authority. We were formed in 1948, in fact we were the first new government agency formed after the Occupation. Our first responsibility was checking on black market food that was being sold here, making sure it wasn't contaminated or radioactive. That quickly expanded to cover things like nerve gas and other chemical weapons and biologicals. Especially, but not limited to, anthrax. Our remit has now expanded to cover anywhere we have reason to believe that contamination by chemicals, radioactives or biologicals, natural or otherwise, may be a danger to the health and safety of the public. That even includes such things as mold in houses.
"Now, we checked the house top to bottom, side to side, up and down. It's clear. There's no trace of any contaminant. It's actually in good condition for a house that has no regular occupants. We checked the things you had there and they are safe as well. You travel light, don't you, Angel. Just to put you in the picture, those mushrooms were horribly dangerous. If you'd eaten one, you'd be having unbearable stomach cramps right now while the toxins dissolved your liver and kidneys. You'd be dead within three days. If you get the pollen in your eyes, it could blind you."
Sir Kendall shuddered. "Once the house was cleared, we went in and did a thorough forensic sweep. We found nothing that would indicate booby traps or other lethal devices present. There was no relevant trace evidence inside the house but we did find a footprint outside. A woman's shoe. The problem is, of course, we have no way we can connect the footprint to your gift basket. In short, we have no usable evidence to trace who left that basket there. My forensics team will be staying down here until this matter is cleared up. You will be more than welcome to work with us, Dr. Pollard."
"If I may add something?" DS Gavin looked around. "I think it is fairly obvious that this attack was made because the attempt to implicate Angel in the killing of Woods and Small failed. I'd suggest that this was a hurried attack, made with tools that were available. You should be on your guard against a more sophisticated assault now. Enhanced vigilance is the official phrase."
Angel nodded approvingly. "Good boy. Only, Barnstable was trying to do more than fit me up. He was trying to goad me into doing something stupid, so I could be killed. He assumed that if I thought I was being framed, I’d go berserk and try to shoot my way out. That makes sense to people who believe the television show version of a psychopath and expected me to go on a wild shooting spree. If it had happened as he expected, Conrad and I would either be dead or hopelessly discredited. What he didn’t know was the truth about psychopaths. It’s sociopaths who go berserk, we get very cold and calculating under pressure. He should have talked to the Saigon Tripartite Police about that. These mushrooms were the second attempt to kill us, not the first, and it was the first one that was a botched-up rush job. When he saw all our corkboards he knew we were getting very close to him. The ironic thing was, we hadn’t realized that yet. Give him his props though, that original set-up in his office was a pretty gutsy thing to do. Barnstable may be lots of things but he’s no coward."
Conrad hesitated slightly. “I think there was more to it than that. He had two objectives in that first meeting. His first was to convince everybody that despite his dislike for you, something he had made very obvious, he was going out of his way to give a fellow-officer a break, a chance to speak off-the-record before a formal inquiry was started. He would have maintained that the damage to an officer’s career from such an inquiry would be terminal so if there was a reasonable explanation, a preliminary private interview would make all the procedures of a formal inquiry unnecessary. That way he could maintain his position in the station while destroying yours. If you’d started shooting, so much the better, but his twin objectives were to destroy your position while reinforcing his own. He was expecting one of the two, arrest or shoot-out, but he never expected you to be able to destroy his case so quickly.”
Conrad paused again, thinking the situation through. “As a matter of fact, I might be wrong there as well. He may have done, and that was another reason to hold a private, unofficial meeting with us first. He doesn’t think fast; remember how long he took to come up with a new course of action? My impression of him is that he’s excellent when he’s executing a carefully-constructed plan but doesn’t think on his feet so well. A bit like Lord Lucan.”
Conrad smiled at the reference to their meeting with the errant Lord, then a thought occurred to him brought on by Angel’s mention of the internal politics in Saigon. It reflected a concern that had been forming in his mind ever since he and Angel had arrived at the Station. "Tony, are there any cliques here? I don’t mean societies like the Masons but groups that keep themselves to themselves and really discourage anyone else from approaching them? Did Barnstable have a group of close colleagues that he used as an elite squad."
Gavin shook his head. "No, I can honestly say that. For example, there are half a dozen West Indian officers in West Country Division and they have drinks together and so on but if another officer walks into the pub, he gets welcomed into the circle and has a drink or three with them. And stands his round of course. Same across the board. I won’t say there are no social groups but they aren’t exclusive or unfriendly to non-members. Quite the reverse, if anything. Being a copper comes first."
Conrad relaxed significantly although probably only Angel noted it. "Conrad, should we look at where Woods and Small were found?"
"I think so. Jackie, if you could let me have a copy of your final report?"
"Sure thing, Conrad. I'll have it ready by late afternoon. Dropping it off at the desk here OK?"
The Mulberry Tree Restaurant, Union Street, Yeovil, Somerset
“Thank you for coming down, Chris. I’m sorry to bring you here so soon after our last meeting but this is serious. In fact, it could hardly be more serious.” Conrad looked around at the restaurant. It was pleasingly empty for this kind of meeting although he doubted the staff were satisfied with business this slow.
“It’s serious then.” Keeble paused; a waitress was on her way over with their meal. He kept quiet until she had removed the appetizer plates and replaced them with their steaks. Once she was gone, he carried on. “We heard about the affair yesterday afternoon. Frankly, that’s causing quite a laugh in London. The story has already grown, Angel, to have you addressing the assembled heads of the Commonwealth countries.”
Angel shook her head. “Great steak, Chris. Thank you for recommending this place.”
Keeble had recommended the 10-ounce ribeye steak with stilton-cream sauce. Angel had taken his advice and her steak, oozing red blood, was a marvel to behold. She waited until he had his first mouthful before continuing. “Did you know you may have a police death-squad in North Somerset?”
The explosion of coughing as Keeble choked on his steak echoed around the restaurant. Conrad pounded him on the back and admonished Angel. “That was cruel, Angel. Funny, but cruel.”
Keeble gulped down some wine and managed to restore his balance. “Are you serious? Conrad, this isn’t funny at all.”
“No, it isn’t.” Conrad looked around. “We didn’t figure it out until we got back to Taunton. The only people who knew Angel and I were out of contact but didn’t know where we were are the officers in the Taunton police station. Sometime in the three weeks after we arrived here, somebody entered the house we are staying in and stole some hair from Angel’s hairbrush. At the time it was probably just an insurance policy, but then they planted it at the scene of the Small-Woods killing. Then it dawned on me, the only common factor behind all the killings we’ve had in North Somerset is the police involvement. Add in the timing and background to the attempt to frame Angel, the fact that the frame must have been planned for some time and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion.”
“If it’s any comfort, we are fairly sure that it’s not all of them.” With anybody else, Keeble would have suspected that Angel could not believe people she had trained and worked with could have tried this. However, he knew that she simply took it for granted that the people she worked with were no more and no less likely to betray her as anybody else. She looked at him and nodded. “The death squad knows I’m a gunslinger and use nine by twenty-ones. But, they used hollow-points which I never, ever do and which I forbid my students from using. They shot each of the victims once in the head, I’d have shot them multiple times. They made their victims kneel down, which I don’t. They used one gun, I would have used both mine to shoot the two victims simultaneously. In other words, they didn’t know me. DS Scott is one of my students, he’d have known me well enough not to make those mistakes. He and DS Gavin are friends and I guess they would have spoken about me and Scott would have passed at least some of my lessons on. Those two are in the clear.”
“DCI Barnstable on the other hand. . .” Conrad looked at Angel’s blood-rare steak and shuddered. Almost all long-lifers from a century or more in the past ate meat cooked through. “Did you bring his file?”
Keeble nodded. “You know he was with ‘Six’ in Singapore? He was there from 1988 to 1992.”
Angel looked up, “that’s when the Black Dragon gang war was going on. I was there then as well.”
“I know, Hēilóng Shāshǒu.” Angel looked up sharply causing Keeble to smile at his revenge for Angel’s stunt a couple of minutes earlier. “Barnstable doesn’t know that though. I don’t think he even knows the name. But in 1992 he was honey-trapped by the opposition out there and compromised. It was a nasty one, they used a ladyboy and Barnstable didn’t realize it until she dropped her pants. Give him credit, he made an excuse, left and reported the whole thing but his ‘Six’ career was over right there. So, very nearly was his marriage. Once things had settled down, ‘Six’ got him into the police, he did his training and then got pushed up the scale and into this place.”
“So, he’s never been a beat cop or a uniform.” Angel sounded thoughtful. “Didn’t he live in the house we’re using?”
Keeble checked the file. “Yes, he and his wife and daughter did. I wonder if he still has a key?”
“Sorry, Conrad I blew it. We should have changed the locks.” Angel actually looked apologetic.
“Not allowed.” Keeble was shaking his head. “It’s a police house. No structural changes allowed without written permission.”
“And Barnstable would have known that, of course.” It wasn’t necessary for Keeble to agree with Conrad’s comment, the conclusion was all too obvious.
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
"Somebody has left us a present." Conrad had seen the object on their doorstep as soon as Angel had swung the car on to the drive.
"Shall I call the bomb squad?" Angel wasn't joking. She had painstakingly taught Conrad to be extremely suspicious about unsolicited packages. As she had pointed out, her being a psychopath was a mental condition, being paranoid was simply a reasonable defense mechanism.
Conrad looked carefully. "It's not a parcel, it looks more like a basket, the sort of thing flowers or vegetables are put in."
Angel backed the car up and got out. "You stay here."
The she walked to the door and looked down at the basket, taking care to stay well away from it. "Conrad, somebody has given us a box of mushrooms. There's a note on it welcoming us to the neighborhood. Since we've been here for a month already, that seems a little late. Suspicious, much?"
"Much." Conrad agreed. "Call an expert."
Angel nodded and took out her portable phone. To Angel, her portable telephone was a vital business tool and she never begrudged spending money on having the latest technology available. So, her current telephone was one of the new models with the ability to transmit high-definition pictures from the built-in camera. She had the privacy screen up so the person on the other end could see her. She heard the bleeping and the answer. "Hello?"
"Nammie, it's me, Angel. I've got Conrad with me and we need your help. We've just been given a present and we're suspicious."
"Being suspicious is never a problem." Naamah still had her privacy screen down but now she lifted it, showing she was at her desk despite the time in the US. "What is it."
"We found these on our doorstep when we got back to our house this evening." Angel held her telephone so Naamah could see the mushrooms easily. Naamah looked carefully then looked up and for the first time since Angel had met her, Naamah was genuinely frightened.
"Tell me the truth right now." All the imperiousness of the Queen she had once been was there. "Have either of you eaten any of those? Or touched them? Don't try and say you haven't if you have, it won’t do you any good. If the symptoms haven’t started, we might be able to save you. If you have started getting stomach pains, you are already dead."
"My God, what are those things." Conrad was looking down at the basket with shock.
"Amanita virosa. They're the most poisonous mushrooms in the world. About the only treatment that works for people poisoned by them is a liver transplant but people like us react very badly to transplants. Now, have you eaten any?"
"No, Nammie, honestly. I've taught Conrad never to eat anything from or even touch unexpected packages that arrive on the doorstep. Not touched, not close enough to breathe in, certainly never, ever eat."
"Thank the Gods for that. There's no cure once that thing has got hold of you. You need to call the . . . " Naamah hesitated. "Actually I'm not sure who you should call over there. Here it would be the Center for Disease Control. I think. Amanita virosa grows wild in the UK, especially on desolate or derelict land. They don’t just appear in baskets like that. This was a deliberate attempt to kill you both. Start with Chris Keeble, he'll take it from there."
"Anything we need to do." Conrad asked the question hoping the answer was 'stay away from them'. To his relief, it was.
"Right, thank you Nammie." Angel faked gratitude in her voice.
Naamah knew it and gave her a wry smile. "One thing. The common name for Amanita virosa is the Destroying Angel. Somebody has a sense of humor. Have a good night, you two."
If Conrad and Angel had been in any doubt about the toxicity of the gift somebody had so thoughtfully left on their doorstep, those reservations had been dispelled by the arrival of a Public Health UK van and the staff clad in biological isolation suits and watching them remove the basket in a sealed isolation bag. Eventually, the team leader took of her breathing mask and came over to them.
"Somebody doesn’t like you." Senior Public Health Officer Jacqueline Hemsley considered herself to be a master of studied understatement. After her comment, everybody agreed with that.
“We’ve got Central Forensics on the way down. This is now a crime scene.” Conrad was shaken by how close he could have come to being murdered. “Thank you for your work here, Officer Hemsley.”
“It’s Jackie. I’ll have to stay here, we all will. This is going to take some disentangling. Quite apart from anything else, whoever left you one present may have left you others. We’ll look after environmental things like a radiation source in your bedroom. Once we’ve given the OK, Forensics will handle possible bombs, sabotaged gas mains and other things.”
Conrad felt as if somebody had kicked him in the stomach. Angel just shrugged. “We won’t be staying here. We both have bug-out bags in the car for exactly this reason. Can you recommend a good hotel around here, Jackie?”
Hemsley thought for a moment. “The Fitzhead Arms is supposed to be very good; just outside Taunton, south on the A38. You might as well leave now. This area is off-limits until we’ve declared it safe and the forensic people have finished processing it.”
“Thanks Jackie, we’ll be back at the office tomorrow morning. Can you let us have a report then.”
Hemsley took one look at Angel’s cold, completely lifeless eyes and agreed. Then watched as Conrad and Angel got into their car and left.
Inside the Rover SD4, Conrad looked at Angel. “We’re not going to the Fitzhead Arms are we?”
“Not even close. We’re at war now and this is called ‘going to the mattresses’. We’ll be staying almost anywhere but there.”
On route to North Somerset District Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
After leaving Bishop's Lydeard, Conrad had got an impressive demonstration of why the 14K Triad was such an effective organization and why countering its less-than-legal operations was so difficult. Angel had spent a couple of minutes on the telephone and then driven to a railway station at Burnham-on-Sea. She had parked their police car there and picked up a nondescript car from the road outside. She had then driven to a private house, a dozen miles away for the night, On arrival, they had been greeted by a Chinese couple who had a hot meal and a room ready waiting for them. They’d spent the night there, had been provided with a lavish breakfast and then left, picking up their police car on the way back. By the time Angel had pulled out of the railway station parking lot, the civilian car they had used had vanished.
“I thought you said there wasn’t a Triad presence in South West England?” Conrad had to ask.
Angel looked at him with a half-smile. “There isn’t, not yet. Although there will be very soon. We do have a very strong presence in South Wales though. They fixed up everything for us. I don’t know how and won’t ask. But, the family who looked after us, who aren’t Triad members by the way, will get very generous compensation for doing so and Cardiff Sub-House will owe them a favor. I wish we’d been able to put a lid on the information that the attack had failed. Now we can’t watch for people who look shocked when they find out we are still alive.”
Conrad agreed with that. "If the couple who looked after us, weren't members, why did they help us?"
"They weren't threatened if that's what you mean. That wouldn’t work. They were asked, politely, if they would mind helping us. I assume that Cardiff House has a list of people who are willing to help out if needed, in exchange for the generous compensation I mentioned of course. That compensation will be billed to me and I'll charge the Cabinet Office for it since we're working for Humpty. He'll probably charge it to the Home Office budget."
"Wait a minute, that means the family are, or were, working for the British government?"
"Sure, through a series of cut-outs of course. As I said, there's no Triad presence in South-West England. Yet."
When they got to the police station, what worried Conrad was that nobody seemed to be surprised to see them. It was taken for granted that they had been nosing around looking at the killings of Small and Woods. The Desk Sergeant had barely looked up when they had arrived and just passed word that Dr. Pollard would like to speak to them when they had a moment. Conrad had also realized Angel had deliberately timed her drive here so that they would be two hours late into the station, having told everybody the previous evening that they would be present there at the normal time. He had a strong feeling that he was seeing her at work in a way he had not done before.
“Angel? Good to see you again.” Sir Kendall Busch, head of the Forensic Science Service, had come in from the back of the station. “And you too, Conrad. We need to have a meeting. Dr. Pollard and Ms. Hemsley are on their way right over.”
By the time everybody had assembled in the Police Station Conference Room, the others had arrived. Detective Sergeant Gavin was standing in for Barnstable who was 'unavoidably detained' elsewhere. Privately Conrad guessed that he didn’t want to face Angel, believing that she would learn too much from his body language. The guilty flee where no man pursueth. Only Angel is pursuing him now and he knows it. As the most senior officer present, Sir Kendall took over the meeting and started by asking Hemsley for her report.
"Well, I can confirm some of the mushrooms in the basket were Amanita virosa. They went bright yellow when tested with potassium hydroxide. Not all of them, they were mixed in with non-poisonous ones. Even those, though, were contaminated with pollen and would have been extremely unhealthy to eat. Since you two are Americans, let me explain something. Public Health UK used to be known as the Public Health and Safety Authority. We were formed in 1948, in fact we were the first new government agency formed after the Occupation. Our first responsibility was checking on black market food that was being sold here, making sure it wasn't contaminated or radioactive. That quickly expanded to cover things like nerve gas and other chemical weapons and biologicals. Especially, but not limited to, anthrax. Our remit has now expanded to cover anywhere we have reason to believe that contamination by chemicals, radioactives or biologicals, natural or otherwise, may be a danger to the health and safety of the public. That even includes such things as mold in houses.
"Now, we checked the house top to bottom, side to side, up and down. It's clear. There's no trace of any contaminant. It's actually in good condition for a house that has no regular occupants. We checked the things you had there and they are safe as well. You travel light, don't you, Angel. Just to put you in the picture, those mushrooms were horribly dangerous. If you'd eaten one, you'd be having unbearable stomach cramps right now while the toxins dissolved your liver and kidneys. You'd be dead within three days. If you get the pollen in your eyes, it could blind you."
Sir Kendall shuddered. "Once the house was cleared, we went in and did a thorough forensic sweep. We found nothing that would indicate booby traps or other lethal devices present. There was no relevant trace evidence inside the house but we did find a footprint outside. A woman's shoe. The problem is, of course, we have no way we can connect the footprint to your gift basket. In short, we have no usable evidence to trace who left that basket there. My forensics team will be staying down here until this matter is cleared up. You will be more than welcome to work with us, Dr. Pollard."
"If I may add something?" DS Gavin looked around. "I think it is fairly obvious that this attack was made because the attempt to implicate Angel in the killing of Woods and Small failed. I'd suggest that this was a hurried attack, made with tools that were available. You should be on your guard against a more sophisticated assault now. Enhanced vigilance is the official phrase."
Angel nodded approvingly. "Good boy. Only, Barnstable was trying to do more than fit me up. He was trying to goad me into doing something stupid, so I could be killed. He assumed that if I thought I was being framed, I’d go berserk and try to shoot my way out. That makes sense to people who believe the television show version of a psychopath and expected me to go on a wild shooting spree. If it had happened as he expected, Conrad and I would either be dead or hopelessly discredited. What he didn’t know was the truth about psychopaths. It’s sociopaths who go berserk, we get very cold and calculating under pressure. He should have talked to the Saigon Tripartite Police about that. These mushrooms were the second attempt to kill us, not the first, and it was the first one that was a botched-up rush job. When he saw all our corkboards he knew we were getting very close to him. The ironic thing was, we hadn’t realized that yet. Give him his props though, that original set-up in his office was a pretty gutsy thing to do. Barnstable may be lots of things but he’s no coward."
Conrad hesitated slightly. “I think there was more to it than that. He had two objectives in that first meeting. His first was to convince everybody that despite his dislike for you, something he had made very obvious, he was going out of his way to give a fellow-officer a break, a chance to speak off-the-record before a formal inquiry was started. He would have maintained that the damage to an officer’s career from such an inquiry would be terminal so if there was a reasonable explanation, a preliminary private interview would make all the procedures of a formal inquiry unnecessary. That way he could maintain his position in the station while destroying yours. If you’d started shooting, so much the better, but his twin objectives were to destroy your position while reinforcing his own. He was expecting one of the two, arrest or shoot-out, but he never expected you to be able to destroy his case so quickly.”
Conrad paused again, thinking the situation through. “As a matter of fact, I might be wrong there as well. He may have done, and that was another reason to hold a private, unofficial meeting with us first. He doesn’t think fast; remember how long he took to come up with a new course of action? My impression of him is that he’s excellent when he’s executing a carefully-constructed plan but doesn’t think on his feet so well. A bit like Lord Lucan.”
Conrad smiled at the reference to their meeting with the errant Lord, then a thought occurred to him brought on by Angel’s mention of the internal politics in Saigon. It reflected a concern that had been forming in his mind ever since he and Angel had arrived at the Station. "Tony, are there any cliques here? I don’t mean societies like the Masons but groups that keep themselves to themselves and really discourage anyone else from approaching them? Did Barnstable have a group of close colleagues that he used as an elite squad."
Gavin shook his head. "No, I can honestly say that. For example, there are half a dozen West Indian officers in West Country Division and they have drinks together and so on but if another officer walks into the pub, he gets welcomed into the circle and has a drink or three with them. And stands his round of course. Same across the board. I won’t say there are no social groups but they aren’t exclusive or unfriendly to non-members. Quite the reverse, if anything. Being a copper comes first."
Conrad relaxed significantly although probably only Angel noted it. "Conrad, should we look at where Woods and Small were found?"
"I think so. Jackie, if you could let me have a copy of your final report?"
"Sure thing, Conrad. I'll have it ready by late afternoon. Dropping it off at the desk here OK?"
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Twelve
The Bayington House Hotel, Frome, Somerset.
"We were wrong about being a police death squad here." Conrad stretched out on the massive bed with a little groan of luxury. "There's no sign of one. Do you know what Mike Scott said when I asked him about cliques here?"
"Do tell." As usual, Angel was busy using the spare bedding to make herself a nest in one corner of the room. She loved the American hotel habit of piling large numbers of pillows on the beds. She just wished they were made of Kevlar and filled with sand.
"He more or less said the same thing as Tony, that there were social groups but they were outgoing and inclusive rather than the reverse. However, he added that the armed response unit had been secretive, arrogant and disrespectful towards other officers but, as the content of your lessons found their way down here, the authorities had put a stop to that. The old unit was broken up and replaced by one that tries to follow your principles. That's one of the reasons you had so much support here when Tom Barnstable tried to frame you. Anyway, I went around, keeping my eyes open and both Mike and Tony were right. There's no sign of a clique-like atmosphere anywhere. I've found that whenever death squads form, they always do so around a closely-knit group that openly drives outsiders away. I've seen them all too often."
"So have I." Angel sounded reflective. "This isn’t the first time I've had one after me."
"I'd guessed that. What happened?"
"I'm here. They're not." The explanation was simple and uninformative although Conrad could imagine what must have happened and was shocked by how little he was dismayed by that. In his long experience, police and other official death squads were an instrument of tyranny responsible for mass deaths of the innocent and never served any useful purpose.
He was prevented from pursuing that line of thought by the telephone ringing. Conrad reached over and picked it up. “Good evening?”
“Good evening, Sir. I thought you might like to know that our switchboard had a call from outside, asking if you and madam were staying here. The caller claimed that she was Inspector Jane Blake from Taunton CID and said that contacting you was a matter of extreme importance. In accordance with your instructions, the switchboard operator stated that we had no guests of your names, nor any answering the descriptions the Inspector provided.”
“That’s excellent news, thank you.” In the background Angel held up two fingers and rubbed them together in the traditional ‘money’ sign. Conrad gave her a ‘thumbs up’. The switchboard would be generously tipped.
The manager’s voice was slightly embarrassed. “May I ask, was the meal we supplied satisfactory? Madam came down and tasted the food before it was brought to you. I hope that . . .”
“The meal was excellent, thank you. I have some health-based dietary restrictions, you know, peanuts and things, and my companion was just making sure everything was in accordance with them. It is I who should thank you for your patience and tolerance.”
When the call ended amid mutual pleasantries, Conrad looked at where Angel was sitting on the floor. “Tasting the food?”
“Of course. If I was on my own, I’d be buying packaged food out of convenience stores right now. There’s no point in taking chances. That mushroom thing was scary.”
“I’m slowing you down and endangering you, aren’t I? Shouldn't you leave me behind somewhere?” Conrad had realized the truth and was suddenly crushed with guilt.
Angel’s eyes went cold, dead and light seemed to fall into them before vanishing without trace. For the first time in a long time, Conrad was genuinely afraid of her. “You ever say that again, Conrad and I’ll hurt you. Badly. You know damned well I never do anything I don’t want to do and if I want to, it’s for reasons that suit me. The only reason I wouldn’t want you around is when it’s certain you’ll get killed if you stay with me and then I have to get you to safety. We’re a long, long way from that. Right now, I’m just being careful.”
Conrad realized that what she was really saying was that if there was a situation where she was certain to be killed she would get him to safety before the inevitable happened. “I’m sorry, Angel. It’s just . . . never mind. I’m sorry.”
The deadly expression vanished from Angel’s face and she smiled at him. “What else was the call about? I got the bit about an incoming call for us and the switchboard swearing blind we weren’t here.”
“Oh, an Inspector from Taunton called here, trying to find us with an urgent message. The hotel denied knowledge of us. Do you thing we should call in?”
“That would be telling them where we were.” Angel paused and frowned. “What was the Inspector’s name?”
“Jane Blake.”
Angel’s frown became even deeper. “That’s funny. There is no Inspector Jane Blake at Taunton. I don’t think we better return that call.”
Conrad thought about that for a few minutes. “Angel, there’s something about that call, or rather who it was allegedly from. It’s an odd thing but when people adopt a fake name for any reason, most of the time they keep their initials. I’m always C and L, Igrat is always I and S, Achillea is always A and F. Even the Seer always uses P and S, sometimes reversed which shows how sly, devious and cunning he is. It’s a really long shot but that fake inspector used J and B.”
Angel shook her head. “Doesn’t register.”
“We only met her once, in the hospital when we were visiting Chen Mao-Lee. Joan Barnstable, DCI Barnstable’s wife.”
"And Tom Barnstable is in our cross-hairs. Interesting. Naamah has always said poison is a woman's weapon."
"And another line to investigate. You know something? I'm not sure that Tom Barnstable is the power behind all these killings after all. I keep getting a feeling he's part of the problem but far from being all of it." Conrad thought about the situation. "It's odd how often these lines do lead back to Joan Barnstable isn’t it? She was at the hospital, she is involved in the conservation movements, She was visiting that school where the killings took place. Just before they started."
"Saint Helena Charter School?"
"That's the one. I got the feeling when we were talking to David Henderson that the police didn't follow certain lines of investigation because they didn't want to go where they could lead."
"You mean like the victims being gay?" Angel thought for a moment. "Now, that is odd, because it leads back to Joan Barnstable as well."
"Singapore?" Conrad guessed where Angel was going.
"That's right. Where Barnaby was honey-trapped using a ladyboy. I said at the time that was unusually nasty. Usually we used to set up honeytraps using the most beautiful girls we could find. That way, if it blew, the wife could always console herself with the thought that it took a girl who was very beautiful to lure her husband away from her. That gives the poor husband a way of talking himself out of the mess if he’s smart enough. Using a ladyboy was nasty, it was calculated to wreck the marriage. Which it nearly did by all accounts."
Conrad had to ask although he was afraid he would upset Angel again. "It wasn't your people who set Barnstable up was it?"
Angel shook her head. "Not us. Or at least I don’t think it was. Remember I wasn't then who I am now. Now, I would know. Back then I just headed up one of a dozen or so street combat teams. We needed intel to work with and honey-traps were one way of getting it. This one doesn’t sound like ours though, the nastiness of it smells more like Yakuza or the Black Dragons."
"Why do I think we've just hit upon something that's important. We'd better sleep on it."
Conrad flipped out the light and settled down. After a minute or two, he heard Angel's voice from the darkness, speaking shyly and diffidently. "I didn’t mean it when I said I'd hurt you."
"I know. Anyway, you've threatened to kill me so often I thought just hurting me showed you were learning moderation. I know that I'm far safer when I'm with you than I am when I'm not."
Angel's chuckle sounded through the darkened room. "Nobody has ever said that to me before. It's just this poisoning thing has spooked me. Poison is the one thing I can't defend against. The idea of everybody knowing what happened and watching us dying, unable to do anything to help, haunts me."
"I know. I grew up in Spain and Italy where poisoning people was about as common as car accidents are today. Get Naamah to tell you about that time. She ran herself ragged trying to protect all her group. She managed it though; they only lost one of their people to poison."
"Naamah scares me. She's the only person who does. Anyway, get some sleep, Conrad. We've got miles to travel, places to go and people to kill."
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset
As tan-kun, the banker of the game of Fan-tan, Chen Mao-Lee reached into the pot and took out two handfuls of the small black beads inside. Then, she placed them on the card table and covered them by placing a polished wood bowl in the center of the metal square in the middle of the table. “Place your bets please. Remember, sides pay four to one but corners only two to one.”
“Five on side two please, tan kun.” Aston Woods pushed five green Smarties forward and put them on side two of the square.
“Six on corner two-one please, tan kun.” Martin Woods pushed six of his red Smarties forward to the corner made by sides one and four.
Mao-Lee and Samantha Woods exchanged amused and knowing smiles. The twins had fallen in love with Mao-Lee and were quietly and politely but very firmly competing for her attention. “Your bet, Sam?”
“I’ll ‘ave three on side three please, tan-kun.” Samantha pushed three of her blue Smarties forward to the correct place.
That left just Qiu Shun-Tan to place his bet. He rubbed his jaw reflectively then pushed out eight white Smarties. “Eight on side two please, tan-kun.”
Mao-Lee looked quickly at the square in the table; as usually, nobody had bet on side four which was considered terribly unlucky. “Here we go.”
She lifted up the wooden bowl and took the lacquered bamboo spatula that was the tan-kun’s badge of office. Carefully she separated four beads from the pile, waited while everybody verified there were four, and then pushed them back into the bowl. She did that again and again until all the beads save three had gone.
“Three wins! Sam, you bet three on three, so you win twelve! Rest of you lose.” Mao-Lee used her spatula to rake in the other smarties. The house had made 10 Smarties on the round. In a Chinese gambling club, the same round could have made somebody hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Sometimes much more than that. For an extremely simple game, it was remarkably addictive.
Sam piled up her bank of Smarties before looking at the table. “Wat I can’t work out is ‘ow the ‘ouse makes a profit on this. The odds and payment are for real. Over time, it should work out dead even.”
Mao-Lee looked up. She’d introduced the family to Chinese gambling as a way of keeping their minds off the possible danger they might be in, but their enthusiasm suggested that Chinese gambling clubs in the UK would find gwailos to be lucrative customers. She’d mention that to her Red Pole who would take the suggestion upwards. “Usually, a professional gambling house will charge a commission on the bets. An illegal house may charge up to 25 percent, but a house run by the Auspicious Society will take no more than one to five percent. If this was a Society game, the tan kun would note that 22 Smarties had been wagered and note that 1.1 Smarties were owed to the August Association. At the end of the shift, that would all be totaled up and paid. Even at one percent, that will be a lot of money. Remember something Aston and Martin, in any professional gambling, the House always wins. In the long term you will lose. Always.”
“Remember that, kids. Wise advice, it is, right from the source.” Sam’s remark was accompanied by a general burst of laughter.
“So, Mao-Lee, how do we win at a casino?” Aston had got the question in first by a hair.
“Three rules. First, before you go in, decide how much money you can afford to lose and take that in with you. When you lose it, leave. Second, never sign IOUs or promissory notes and that includes paying for chips with a credit card. In fact, never take a credit card on to the floor. Third rule, if you do get a short-term winning streak, put your original stake back in your pocket and play with the Casino’s money. When your streak ends, recognize it and leave while you are still ahead. Above all, and this really does stand above everything else, never, ever try and win back your losses. You will only end up deeper in debt.”
“That’s what my Georgie said when we goes to Cuba for ‘oneymoon.” There was a long pause while Sam dabbed at her eyes and tried to get herself under control. “I’m goin’ to the kitchen. Anyone for snacks?”
Very well aware that she wanted to go to the kitchen so she could have a good cry in private, everybody gave enthusiastic approval to the idea of snacks. While she was away, Mao-Lee and Shun-Tan walked around the house, checking that the windows and doors were locked, and all the curtains drawn. By the time they got back, Sam had returned with two pots of tea and some plates of cakes and sandwiches. “I made some Chinese tea as well,” she explained.
“That is very kind.” Shun-Tan exclaimed in pleasure. In his heart he believed that the only thing worse than the milky, sickeningly sweet concoction the British called tea was the vile sludge they called rice pudding. But, this time he had properly-made Chinese tea and he quietly thanked the Gods for winning him this assignment.
“There’s somethin’ I don’t get. When we was in Cuba, they had fan-tan played there but it was a card game. Not like this.”
“Different game.” Mao-Lee was suddenly on guard, but she couldn’t quite understand why. She exchanged glances with Shun-Tan and realized he had the same feeling. “Each player puts a Smartie in the pot. Then we take a standard pack of western playing cards and deal them out so everybody has a hand. “Most times one or more people will have a card less than the others. They put an extra Smartie in the pot. Person on the dealers left must lay a seven on the table face-up. If he hasn’t got a seven he has to pass and put a Smartie in the pot and the play continues clockwise. Each player in turn must play one card to the layout. This card can be any seven, starting a new line for the suit or a card that is next in sequence up or down to a card of the same suit that is already on the layout. Lower cards are added to one side of the seven; higher cards to the other. If he can’t play a card, he has to pass and another Smartie goes into the pot. The first player who succeeds in playing all his or her cards is the winner and gets the contents of the pot. Less a commission for the house of course.”
“Of course. I’ve got a lot of packs of cards.” Sam looked at the group. “Shall we try it?”
Before anybody could answer, there was a crash as something was thrown through the glass window facing the front garden. It was followed by a dull thud as whatever had been thrown hit the Lexan bullet-resistant sheet Shun-Tan had installed behind the window frame. Mao-Lee yelled out “DOWN” and flipped off the lights on her way to the floor. She rolled across to where her StG-45 automatic rifle was propped against the wall then took cover behind the table. Shun-Tan had his rifle and was on the opposite side of the room; if somebody tried to come in they would be caught in a murderous cross-fire. Sam and her twins were down behind the sofa, another area that had been reinforced with bullet-resistant panels.
There was silence for a split second as Mao-Lee wormed her way to the broken window. There was a brick with a piece of paper wrapped around it trapped between the broken glass and the Lexan. She reached in and fished it out. Looking outside, she was the police car that had been parked outside the front of the house returning, its lights flashing. Mentally she added that note to the incident report she was writing for Hēilóng Shāshǒu.
“What is it, Mao-Lee?”
“Message wrapped around a brick. I think it’s for you.”
Mao-Lee handed Sam the brick and watched the woman unwrap and read the note. Wordlessly Sam handed it to her protector. Mao-Lee read the words “Give us our money back or you’ll regret it. And so will your kids.”
“Well, that’s clear enough isn’t it.” Shun-Tan was most displeased.
“Yeah. Mao-Lee, can you teach me to use one of them.” Sam pointed at the StG-45. A remnant of The Occupation, the rifle was almost sixty years old but still a very effective weapon.
Mao-Lee shook her head. “Women in our Association are taught to use knives, guns and hatchets. And martial arts of course. It all takes time and the most important lessons are when not to use them. We’ll teach you, but it will take time and that we haven’t got. This situation is about to explode. Don’t worry, you are under our protection.”
“Well then. Time we tried playin’ Fan-tan with cards, innit.”
The Bayington House Hotel, Frome, Somerset.
"We were wrong about being a police death squad here." Conrad stretched out on the massive bed with a little groan of luxury. "There's no sign of one. Do you know what Mike Scott said when I asked him about cliques here?"
"Do tell." As usual, Angel was busy using the spare bedding to make herself a nest in one corner of the room. She loved the American hotel habit of piling large numbers of pillows on the beds. She just wished they were made of Kevlar and filled with sand.
"He more or less said the same thing as Tony, that there were social groups but they were outgoing and inclusive rather than the reverse. However, he added that the armed response unit had been secretive, arrogant and disrespectful towards other officers but, as the content of your lessons found their way down here, the authorities had put a stop to that. The old unit was broken up and replaced by one that tries to follow your principles. That's one of the reasons you had so much support here when Tom Barnstable tried to frame you. Anyway, I went around, keeping my eyes open and both Mike and Tony were right. There's no sign of a clique-like atmosphere anywhere. I've found that whenever death squads form, they always do so around a closely-knit group that openly drives outsiders away. I've seen them all too often."
"So have I." Angel sounded reflective. "This isn’t the first time I've had one after me."
"I'd guessed that. What happened?"
"I'm here. They're not." The explanation was simple and uninformative although Conrad could imagine what must have happened and was shocked by how little he was dismayed by that. In his long experience, police and other official death squads were an instrument of tyranny responsible for mass deaths of the innocent and never served any useful purpose.
He was prevented from pursuing that line of thought by the telephone ringing. Conrad reached over and picked it up. “Good evening?”
“Good evening, Sir. I thought you might like to know that our switchboard had a call from outside, asking if you and madam were staying here. The caller claimed that she was Inspector Jane Blake from Taunton CID and said that contacting you was a matter of extreme importance. In accordance with your instructions, the switchboard operator stated that we had no guests of your names, nor any answering the descriptions the Inspector provided.”
“That’s excellent news, thank you.” In the background Angel held up two fingers and rubbed them together in the traditional ‘money’ sign. Conrad gave her a ‘thumbs up’. The switchboard would be generously tipped.
The manager’s voice was slightly embarrassed. “May I ask, was the meal we supplied satisfactory? Madam came down and tasted the food before it was brought to you. I hope that . . .”
“The meal was excellent, thank you. I have some health-based dietary restrictions, you know, peanuts and things, and my companion was just making sure everything was in accordance with them. It is I who should thank you for your patience and tolerance.”
When the call ended amid mutual pleasantries, Conrad looked at where Angel was sitting on the floor. “Tasting the food?”
“Of course. If I was on my own, I’d be buying packaged food out of convenience stores right now. There’s no point in taking chances. That mushroom thing was scary.”
“I’m slowing you down and endangering you, aren’t I? Shouldn't you leave me behind somewhere?” Conrad had realized the truth and was suddenly crushed with guilt.
Angel’s eyes went cold, dead and light seemed to fall into them before vanishing without trace. For the first time in a long time, Conrad was genuinely afraid of her. “You ever say that again, Conrad and I’ll hurt you. Badly. You know damned well I never do anything I don’t want to do and if I want to, it’s for reasons that suit me. The only reason I wouldn’t want you around is when it’s certain you’ll get killed if you stay with me and then I have to get you to safety. We’re a long, long way from that. Right now, I’m just being careful.”
Conrad realized that what she was really saying was that if there was a situation where she was certain to be killed she would get him to safety before the inevitable happened. “I’m sorry, Angel. It’s just . . . never mind. I’m sorry.”
The deadly expression vanished from Angel’s face and she smiled at him. “What else was the call about? I got the bit about an incoming call for us and the switchboard swearing blind we weren’t here.”
“Oh, an Inspector from Taunton called here, trying to find us with an urgent message. The hotel denied knowledge of us. Do you thing we should call in?”
“That would be telling them where we were.” Angel paused and frowned. “What was the Inspector’s name?”
“Jane Blake.”
Angel’s frown became even deeper. “That’s funny. There is no Inspector Jane Blake at Taunton. I don’t think we better return that call.”
Conrad thought about that for a few minutes. “Angel, there’s something about that call, or rather who it was allegedly from. It’s an odd thing but when people adopt a fake name for any reason, most of the time they keep their initials. I’m always C and L, Igrat is always I and S, Achillea is always A and F. Even the Seer always uses P and S, sometimes reversed which shows how sly, devious and cunning he is. It’s a really long shot but that fake inspector used J and B.”
Angel shook her head. “Doesn’t register.”
“We only met her once, in the hospital when we were visiting Chen Mao-Lee. Joan Barnstable, DCI Barnstable’s wife.”
"And Tom Barnstable is in our cross-hairs. Interesting. Naamah has always said poison is a woman's weapon."
"And another line to investigate. You know something? I'm not sure that Tom Barnstable is the power behind all these killings after all. I keep getting a feeling he's part of the problem but far from being all of it." Conrad thought about the situation. "It's odd how often these lines do lead back to Joan Barnstable isn’t it? She was at the hospital, she is involved in the conservation movements, She was visiting that school where the killings took place. Just before they started."
"Saint Helena Charter School?"
"That's the one. I got the feeling when we were talking to David Henderson that the police didn't follow certain lines of investigation because they didn't want to go where they could lead."
"You mean like the victims being gay?" Angel thought for a moment. "Now, that is odd, because it leads back to Joan Barnstable as well."
"Singapore?" Conrad guessed where Angel was going.
"That's right. Where Barnaby was honey-trapped using a ladyboy. I said at the time that was unusually nasty. Usually we used to set up honeytraps using the most beautiful girls we could find. That way, if it blew, the wife could always console herself with the thought that it took a girl who was very beautiful to lure her husband away from her. That gives the poor husband a way of talking himself out of the mess if he’s smart enough. Using a ladyboy was nasty, it was calculated to wreck the marriage. Which it nearly did by all accounts."
Conrad had to ask although he was afraid he would upset Angel again. "It wasn't your people who set Barnstable up was it?"
Angel shook her head. "Not us. Or at least I don’t think it was. Remember I wasn't then who I am now. Now, I would know. Back then I just headed up one of a dozen or so street combat teams. We needed intel to work with and honey-traps were one way of getting it. This one doesn’t sound like ours though, the nastiness of it smells more like Yakuza or the Black Dragons."
"Why do I think we've just hit upon something that's important. We'd better sleep on it."
Conrad flipped out the light and settled down. After a minute or two, he heard Angel's voice from the darkness, speaking shyly and diffidently. "I didn’t mean it when I said I'd hurt you."
"I know. Anyway, you've threatened to kill me so often I thought just hurting me showed you were learning moderation. I know that I'm far safer when I'm with you than I am when I'm not."
Angel's chuckle sounded through the darkened room. "Nobody has ever said that to me before. It's just this poisoning thing has spooked me. Poison is the one thing I can't defend against. The idea of everybody knowing what happened and watching us dying, unable to do anything to help, haunts me."
"I know. I grew up in Spain and Italy where poisoning people was about as common as car accidents are today. Get Naamah to tell you about that time. She ran herself ragged trying to protect all her group. She managed it though; they only lost one of their people to poison."
"Naamah scares me. She's the only person who does. Anyway, get some sleep, Conrad. We've got miles to travel, places to go and people to kill."
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset
As tan-kun, the banker of the game of Fan-tan, Chen Mao-Lee reached into the pot and took out two handfuls of the small black beads inside. Then, she placed them on the card table and covered them by placing a polished wood bowl in the center of the metal square in the middle of the table. “Place your bets please. Remember, sides pay four to one but corners only two to one.”
“Five on side two please, tan kun.” Aston Woods pushed five green Smarties forward and put them on side two of the square.
“Six on corner two-one please, tan kun.” Martin Woods pushed six of his red Smarties forward to the corner made by sides one and four.
Mao-Lee and Samantha Woods exchanged amused and knowing smiles. The twins had fallen in love with Mao-Lee and were quietly and politely but very firmly competing for her attention. “Your bet, Sam?”
“I’ll ‘ave three on side three please, tan-kun.” Samantha pushed three of her blue Smarties forward to the correct place.
That left just Qiu Shun-Tan to place his bet. He rubbed his jaw reflectively then pushed out eight white Smarties. “Eight on side two please, tan-kun.”
Mao-Lee looked quickly at the square in the table; as usually, nobody had bet on side four which was considered terribly unlucky. “Here we go.”
She lifted up the wooden bowl and took the lacquered bamboo spatula that was the tan-kun’s badge of office. Carefully she separated four beads from the pile, waited while everybody verified there were four, and then pushed them back into the bowl. She did that again and again until all the beads save three had gone.
“Three wins! Sam, you bet three on three, so you win twelve! Rest of you lose.” Mao-Lee used her spatula to rake in the other smarties. The house had made 10 Smarties on the round. In a Chinese gambling club, the same round could have made somebody hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Sometimes much more than that. For an extremely simple game, it was remarkably addictive.
Sam piled up her bank of Smarties before looking at the table. “Wat I can’t work out is ‘ow the ‘ouse makes a profit on this. The odds and payment are for real. Over time, it should work out dead even.”
Mao-Lee looked up. She’d introduced the family to Chinese gambling as a way of keeping their minds off the possible danger they might be in, but their enthusiasm suggested that Chinese gambling clubs in the UK would find gwailos to be lucrative customers. She’d mention that to her Red Pole who would take the suggestion upwards. “Usually, a professional gambling house will charge a commission on the bets. An illegal house may charge up to 25 percent, but a house run by the Auspicious Society will take no more than one to five percent. If this was a Society game, the tan kun would note that 22 Smarties had been wagered and note that 1.1 Smarties were owed to the August Association. At the end of the shift, that would all be totaled up and paid. Even at one percent, that will be a lot of money. Remember something Aston and Martin, in any professional gambling, the House always wins. In the long term you will lose. Always.”
“Remember that, kids. Wise advice, it is, right from the source.” Sam’s remark was accompanied by a general burst of laughter.
“So, Mao-Lee, how do we win at a casino?” Aston had got the question in first by a hair.
“Three rules. First, before you go in, decide how much money you can afford to lose and take that in with you. When you lose it, leave. Second, never sign IOUs or promissory notes and that includes paying for chips with a credit card. In fact, never take a credit card on to the floor. Third rule, if you do get a short-term winning streak, put your original stake back in your pocket and play with the Casino’s money. When your streak ends, recognize it and leave while you are still ahead. Above all, and this really does stand above everything else, never, ever try and win back your losses. You will only end up deeper in debt.”
“That’s what my Georgie said when we goes to Cuba for ‘oneymoon.” There was a long pause while Sam dabbed at her eyes and tried to get herself under control. “I’m goin’ to the kitchen. Anyone for snacks?”
Very well aware that she wanted to go to the kitchen so she could have a good cry in private, everybody gave enthusiastic approval to the idea of snacks. While she was away, Mao-Lee and Shun-Tan walked around the house, checking that the windows and doors were locked, and all the curtains drawn. By the time they got back, Sam had returned with two pots of tea and some plates of cakes and sandwiches. “I made some Chinese tea as well,” she explained.
“That is very kind.” Shun-Tan exclaimed in pleasure. In his heart he believed that the only thing worse than the milky, sickeningly sweet concoction the British called tea was the vile sludge they called rice pudding. But, this time he had properly-made Chinese tea and he quietly thanked the Gods for winning him this assignment.
“There’s somethin’ I don’t get. When we was in Cuba, they had fan-tan played there but it was a card game. Not like this.”
“Different game.” Mao-Lee was suddenly on guard, but she couldn’t quite understand why. She exchanged glances with Shun-Tan and realized he had the same feeling. “Each player puts a Smartie in the pot. Then we take a standard pack of western playing cards and deal them out so everybody has a hand. “Most times one or more people will have a card less than the others. They put an extra Smartie in the pot. Person on the dealers left must lay a seven on the table face-up. If he hasn’t got a seven he has to pass and put a Smartie in the pot and the play continues clockwise. Each player in turn must play one card to the layout. This card can be any seven, starting a new line for the suit or a card that is next in sequence up or down to a card of the same suit that is already on the layout. Lower cards are added to one side of the seven; higher cards to the other. If he can’t play a card, he has to pass and another Smartie goes into the pot. The first player who succeeds in playing all his or her cards is the winner and gets the contents of the pot. Less a commission for the house of course.”
“Of course. I’ve got a lot of packs of cards.” Sam looked at the group. “Shall we try it?”
Before anybody could answer, there was a crash as something was thrown through the glass window facing the front garden. It was followed by a dull thud as whatever had been thrown hit the Lexan bullet-resistant sheet Shun-Tan had installed behind the window frame. Mao-Lee yelled out “DOWN” and flipped off the lights on her way to the floor. She rolled across to where her StG-45 automatic rifle was propped against the wall then took cover behind the table. Shun-Tan had his rifle and was on the opposite side of the room; if somebody tried to come in they would be caught in a murderous cross-fire. Sam and her twins were down behind the sofa, another area that had been reinforced with bullet-resistant panels.
There was silence for a split second as Mao-Lee wormed her way to the broken window. There was a brick with a piece of paper wrapped around it trapped between the broken glass and the Lexan. She reached in and fished it out. Looking outside, she was the police car that had been parked outside the front of the house returning, its lights flashing. Mentally she added that note to the incident report she was writing for Hēilóng Shāshǒu.
“What is it, Mao-Lee?”
“Message wrapped around a brick. I think it’s for you.”
Mao-Lee handed Sam the brick and watched the woman unwrap and read the note. Wordlessly Sam handed it to her protector. Mao-Lee read the words “Give us our money back or you’ll regret it. And so will your kids.”
“Well, that’s clear enough isn’t it.” Shun-Tan was most displeased.
“Yeah. Mao-Lee, can you teach me to use one of them.” Sam pointed at the StG-45. A remnant of The Occupation, the rifle was almost sixty years old but still a very effective weapon.
Mao-Lee shook her head. “Women in our Association are taught to use knives, guns and hatchets. And martial arts of course. It all takes time and the most important lessons are when not to use them. We’ll teach you, but it will take time and that we haven’t got. This situation is about to explode. Don’t worry, you are under our protection.”
“Well then. Time we tried playin’ Fan-tan with cards, innit.”
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Thirteen
North Somerset District Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
“Have you seen Conrad and Angel?” Scott stopped Gavin in the corridor with the question.
“Not yet. They’ve done their usual disappearing act. The Guvnor tried to trace her portable telephone last night. We got a hit all right, in Strand.”
“That’s logical Tony, we know she reports to the Cabinet Office on the investigations down here.”
“Not the Strand, London, Mike, Strand, Cape Town, South Africa.”
“That’s different.” Scott was impressed. "Good for them."
“Yeah, we found that there’s a company on the Far East that makes spoofing packages for portable phones. Should be Government Sales Only but I guess a few find their way onto the black market.”
“Remember Angel is a consultant to ‘Five’ as well and the rumor is she’s hooked up with GKSN, their Thai equivalent. She seems to have fingers everywhere. I’d say if there’s kit she needs, she can get it pretty quickly. One way or another.” Scott was interrupted by the doors banging. “Angel, Conrad, good to see you. We were wondering where you'd got to.”
“Mike, Tony. Is DCI Barnstable around?” Conrad was looking slightly tired and worn from the constant movement. He and Angel hadn’t slept in the same place twice since the attempt to poison them. They’d moved from Triad safe-houses to Hotels and back again, the various locations scattered all over the county. Angel, on the other hand, looked remarkably fresh and possibly even a touch nostalgic. The truth was that the last few days had reminded her of the time when she had been a street soldier with few responsibilities.
“He’s not in his office. Something you should know, Angel. The Woods house was attacked last night. Somebody threw a stone through one of their windows with a threatening message wrapped around it.” Scott read the message out. “I suppose we’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
“Luck doesn’t come into it. What happened to the police cruiser outside?”
“Apparently we got a call in on the emergency line from a woman saying a couple of drunken men were trying to force their way into her house. It was only a few streets away and time is of critical importance in situations like that. So the police unit answered the call.”
Angel sighed. She didn’t actually blame the police, but it was more or less what she had expected. “Let me guess, the call came from a vacant lot.”
Scott took a second to translate and nodded. “Not quite empty but an unoccupied house that was up for sale. Our unit checked it, made sure nothing was happening and got back to their station, lights on and siren sounding. They thought that would scare off anybody trying anything.”
“That earns them a ‘good boy’. Although the people who threw the rock had long gone.” Conrad and Angel exchanged glances, smiling at the way he had appropriated her favorite compliment. He regarded that as due revenge for the way she had stolen his favorite joke about the Spanish Inquisition. “Do we know where the emergency call came from?”
Scott shook his head. “It was an unregistered portable telephone. They’re illegal of course but one can buy them at any market in the country.”
Angel frowned slightly. “How does that work. My phone is registered with a service provider, AT&T (Thailand) and they bill me monthly.”
“Usually, the illegal telephone is registered to a non-existent company that never pays its bills. So, the telephone is cut off for non-payment after a month or so. Another non-existent address job.”
Conrad watched, trying not to smile as he saw Angel file that away as a possible for lucrative business opportunity for the 14K. He had also assumed that, whoever Angel used as her service provider, it was not AT&T. “Mike, do we have the tapes of the call? We need to get them to forensics.”
What he didn’t add was that he had a recording of the call made to the Bayington House Hotel. Proving that the two calls had been made by the same woman would be very helpful.
Forensic Science Laboratory, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
“Well, that’s about the most positive response I can give you.” Sir Kendall Busch looked at the two traces on the oscilloscopes that he’d placed side-by side. “Allowing for the issues with recording media and methods and for the fact both calls came over a portable telephone, the analysis software says there is an 86 percent probability the two calls were made by the same women. She is a woman by the way. The legal minimum for a voice trace comparison is eighty percent. So, this evidence would be admissible in court.”
Listening to Sir Humphrey had taught Conrad to pay attention to exactly how words were used. “Sir Kendall, you said, ‘calls came over a portable telephone’. Not ‘calls came over portable telephones’. Were both calls made over the same telephone?”
“I think so, yes. It’s hard to be sure, but there are some electronic anomalies that are present on both traces. They are not as conclusive as the voice match. The software puts the match as seventy percent. Not enough for presentation to a court on its own but taken along with the fact the calls were made by the same person, a court might well decide that the presumption they were the same telephone was reasonable.”
“Really sloppy tradecraft. Amateurish.” Angel sounded more thoughtful than anything else.
"It is, isn't it. Yet Tom Barnstable was trained by 'Six'." Conrad drummed his fingers on the table. "He wouldn't be amateurish. Skills like that never go away; at most they get put into storage and dusted off when needed."
"You can add leaving those mushrooms outside your front door in with that. If this was a 'six' job or any other professional intelligence service come to that, they'd have just puffed cyanide gas into your faces in the middle of a crowd or smeared nerve gas on the door-handle. Even your skills won’t counter that, Angel. And there would be no evidence of what had happened or who had done it." Sir Kendall wondered if that was true. If the stories about Angel's abilities were well-founded, he honestly wondered if the assassin would survive the attempt.
"I stay away from crowds whenever I can. There are other reasons as well but that's another one. You're right though. None of this fits with somebody who has professional intelligence training." Angel had the eerie feeling that she was looking at all the bits of the problem but hadn’t put them together the right way yet. "Do those tapes tell us anything else?"
"Not really. As I said, a woman, not transgender. The accent is bland, BBC English. I can’t really say how old she is. Children and the elderly we can detect but the woman speaking is somewhere in between. If you can get me another recording from a known party, I can compare them and that would identify the person making these calls.”
“I need your telephone.” Angel paused as she caught Conrad’s eye and then she added, “Please.”
Sir Kendall pointed at the telephone on his desk. “Direct to the outside and its scrambled”
Angel picked it up and dialed a London number. “This is Angelique de Llorente. I’d like to speak to Sir Laurence Coveney please. . . . . Sir Laurence, I need to have some telephone taps put in place. Yes, this is a secured line. The taps are to be on all the telephones used by DCI Thomas Barnstable and two members of his family. Yes, private and professional for all three. Specs? . . I’ll hand you over to Sir Kendall Busch. He’ll give you the details.”
Angel handed the receiver to Sir Kendall and mouthed the single letter ‘Q’. Sir Kendall spoke for a few minutes, reeling off what were obviously technical specifications. When he had finished, he handed the receiver back to Angel. “Thank you, Sir Laurence. Can you get the recordings down to us? They are to be placed in the hands of a woman called Chen Mao-Lee. 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset. . . . . That’s right. Yes, absolutely reliable. You could say she’s a member of ‘14’.”
The roar of laughter at the other end of the line was clearly audible. Angel hung up. “There we are. We’ll have our recordings day after tomorrow and at daily intervals after that.”
"Thank you; with tapes that are a known sample, we can do a lot." Sir Kendall paused for a second. "We found a woman's shoeprint outside 115. That would fit in with these telephone calls."
The telephone rang again. Sir Kendall picked it up and listened for a few minutes, noting down some numbers on a pad. When the call was over, he looked very happy. "That was Q. He has the warrant for the phone taps we need. Tom Barnstable, Joan Barnstable and their daughter Jordana."
"That was fast." Conrad was impressed but a little worried by how fast the warrants had arrived. Speed meant errors could be made and that set the ground for innocents to suffer.
"I don’t think you two realize quite how large the bomb you threw into the Home Office has been. Even the idea of a police death squad running around in North Somerset is enough to undo fifty years of trying to rehabilitate our police force. That is an objective, Angel, to which you have made some considerable personal commitment. The only way we can offset some of that damage is to be seen to move quickly and aggressively against any such situation at the earliest possible time. The Home Office has a Queen's Counsel waiting in the wings to approve, or otherwise, any applications for warrants."
"What is a Queen's Counsel when he's at home?" Angel sounded puzzled.
"A very senior lawyer, whose honesty and integrity are beyond question." Conrad in contrast, was relieved. "Technically, a QC is an advisor to the Crown on legal matters and how proposed legislation might affect the country as a whole. It's a very old position, but the powers and responsibilities of the QCs were revamped after the occupation."
"That's right." Sir Kendall was nodding in agreement. "Being appointed a QC is just about the highest professional honor a lawyer can receive. The fact one put this through so fast tells me concern over this case must have reached Cabinet level. "
"Humpty must be having hysterics." Angel was trying very hard to stop herself laughing.
"I am told that he took twenty five minutes to say good morning to his private secretary today." Sir Kendall sounded grave but it was obvious that he too was trying not to laugh.
Westonzoyland Common, Westonzoyland, Somerset.
Both Angel and Conrad were thankful for the fact that they had had the foresight to change into wellington boots before proceeding to go through the gate cut in the barbed wire and walk across the derelict land towards the taped-off area where the bodies of Woods and Small had been found. They had expected to see the site deserted but there were several officers apparently involved in an inch-by-inch search of the area. Tony Gavin appeared to be in charge of the operation and was directing the search efficiently.
"Hi, Angel, Conrad. Having a look at the crime scene?"
"We thought we would have a look around." Conrad surveyed the scene. "I didn't know the search was being repeated. I hope we won’t be in the way."
Gavin shook his head. "Pleased to have you two here. Look, I'll be honest, this isn’t a repeat search. The crime scene wasn't properly searched the first time. DCI Barnstable supervised the first search but as soon as he found the sample of Angel's hair and two 9x21mm brass, he more or less called any further effort off. That's been worrying me so I got some of the lads and we came down to redo everything. We're lucky, the scene is still largely uncontaminated. Somebody forgot to take the watch off it."
I wonder if that was an accident or whether somebody decided the scene had to be preserved for a subsequent investigation. That should have been us, we slipped up there but Tony has saved the day. Conrad looked at the way the methodical search was been carried out. "Your lads seem to be doing a good job. Find anything?"
"Not really. We confirmed there are adders here. We've seen two to date. Bit odd really, adders usually like dry country but they're pretty tolerant. "
"What's an adder?" Angel was looking around at the scene of the killings. The difference was, she was doing so with eyes that had seen more killing grounds than any police officer saw in their entire careers.
"Britain's only venomous snake. It's unaggressive and its poison is weak. I think the last time we had anybody die from an adder bite here was in the 1870s. Very docile as well, people can actually handle one if they know what they are doing but the wildlife people don’t recommend it." Gavin looked around as well. "I wonder why the killers picked here?"
"It's hardly an ideal spot is it? Difficult to get to, easy to leave a lot of trace evidence and it doesn't really achieve anything. Take a word of advice, Tony. If you’re going to kill somebody, only leave the body in a place like this if you're sending a message. Otherwise, make it disappear. But what message could this be sending. Killing George Woods was definitely sending a message. This? Leaving the bodies here doesn't seem significant. It's just a dump."
"Sarge, found something." One of the constables doing the search had stopped and raised his hand. On inspection, his find was a footprint in one of the tufts of grass. It was a small, raised area surrounded by stagnant water.
"Woman's shoe." Conrad looked carefully. "I'd guess that the wearer was moving from clump like this to clump, trying not to ruin her shoes."
"We'll take a cast of it and give it to forensics."
“You have the necessary equipment here?”
“Of course. I brought a complete crime scene investigation team.” Gavin gestured towards a police van, white but painted in a garish pattern of orange and yellow stripes and checkers. “They’ve got everything we need.”
“I’m surprised DCI Barnstable allowed you to bring all this kit.”
“He didn’t, not at first. Said there was nothing more to learn here and we had better things to spend our funds on. I wouldn’t give up and he got the idea I would go over his head if he didn’t approve. So, in the end he told me to do what I – expletive deleted – wanted and be damned. Then he scrawled his signature and stormed out. Haven’t seen him since.”
“You’re taking a hell of a chance with your career.” Angel sounded genuinely impressed. “People like that can really screw you over. You could be a DS for the rest of your career.”
Gavin looked shy. “I wouldn’t care too much if I did, to be honest, Angel. I like being a DS. If I went up to DI and then to DCI, I’d be getting more administrative work and less out here investigating. And there are all the political sides of things I want to stay clear of. This post here has been an eye-opener.”
“How do you mean?” Conrad was suddenly very interested.
“Almost every investigation we run, a theory gets formed very early and then the investigation concentrates on that and ignores everything else. Angel here was a good example. Once DCI Barnstable had focused on her for these killings, he ignored everything else. It’s as if he was afraid of where following other routes would lead. But, as a lowly DS I can do what’s right and not worry about a career I don’t really have. And the wife earns ten times as much as a lowly copper anyway. When we have kids, I'll probably become a stay-at-home dad."
Conrad understood exactly what Gavin had meant about investigations being narrowed down to fit in with a pre-determined theory of the crime. "Tony, were you involved with the Margaret King and Saint Helena's Charter School cases?"
"Yeah, both of them. And they're great examples of what I mean. In both cases, Barnstable decided what had happened very early and the investigation got funneled down that route. As soon as he decided that the killings were gay-related, that was it. Proposing something else was a waste of breath. Same with Margaret King. Barnstable concentrated on her as soon as he found out she had married her first husband's brother. Almost every other possibility was shot down out-of-hand."
"Have you any idea why?" Conrad recognized the symptoms all too well. A search for and desire to punish sin. As defined by the searcher. God help me, that was the Inquisition to a T. Or an I.
Tony looked extremely uncomfortable. "Look, don’t get me wrong. At the time, it seemed like everything was above-board and we'd made good cases. It was only as we moved on that the narrow focus became apparent. But, there's a puritanical aspect to those cases. As if the people were being punished for how they lived rather than what they did. This could apply to you two as well you know."
He stopped and looked at Angel extremely nervously. "Look, I don’t mean to be offensive, but nearly everybody assumes you two sleep together. Conrad, most people know you're a priest. So it looks as if you two are breaking your holy vows and all that. Mike tries to put them straight, 'platonic life partners' is the phrase he uses but . . . Well, I can't help wondering if the attempted poisoning was linked to that. The way you smacked down Barnstable, Angel, has given me a case I can do a proper investigation into. It feels good, I can tell you."
Angel gave him a friendly smile, one Conrad realized was a very rare genuine one. "Good boy. Very good boy indeed.
North Somerset District Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
“Have you seen Conrad and Angel?” Scott stopped Gavin in the corridor with the question.
“Not yet. They’ve done their usual disappearing act. The Guvnor tried to trace her portable telephone last night. We got a hit all right, in Strand.”
“That’s logical Tony, we know she reports to the Cabinet Office on the investigations down here.”
“Not the Strand, London, Mike, Strand, Cape Town, South Africa.”
“That’s different.” Scott was impressed. "Good for them."
“Yeah, we found that there’s a company on the Far East that makes spoofing packages for portable phones. Should be Government Sales Only but I guess a few find their way onto the black market.”
“Remember Angel is a consultant to ‘Five’ as well and the rumor is she’s hooked up with GKSN, their Thai equivalent. She seems to have fingers everywhere. I’d say if there’s kit she needs, she can get it pretty quickly. One way or another.” Scott was interrupted by the doors banging. “Angel, Conrad, good to see you. We were wondering where you'd got to.”
“Mike, Tony. Is DCI Barnstable around?” Conrad was looking slightly tired and worn from the constant movement. He and Angel hadn’t slept in the same place twice since the attempt to poison them. They’d moved from Triad safe-houses to Hotels and back again, the various locations scattered all over the county. Angel, on the other hand, looked remarkably fresh and possibly even a touch nostalgic. The truth was that the last few days had reminded her of the time when she had been a street soldier with few responsibilities.
“He’s not in his office. Something you should know, Angel. The Woods house was attacked last night. Somebody threw a stone through one of their windows with a threatening message wrapped around it.” Scott read the message out. “I suppose we’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
“Luck doesn’t come into it. What happened to the police cruiser outside?”
“Apparently we got a call in on the emergency line from a woman saying a couple of drunken men were trying to force their way into her house. It was only a few streets away and time is of critical importance in situations like that. So the police unit answered the call.”
Angel sighed. She didn’t actually blame the police, but it was more or less what she had expected. “Let me guess, the call came from a vacant lot.”
Scott took a second to translate and nodded. “Not quite empty but an unoccupied house that was up for sale. Our unit checked it, made sure nothing was happening and got back to their station, lights on and siren sounding. They thought that would scare off anybody trying anything.”
“That earns them a ‘good boy’. Although the people who threw the rock had long gone.” Conrad and Angel exchanged glances, smiling at the way he had appropriated her favorite compliment. He regarded that as due revenge for the way she had stolen his favorite joke about the Spanish Inquisition. “Do we know where the emergency call came from?”
Scott shook his head. “It was an unregistered portable telephone. They’re illegal of course but one can buy them at any market in the country.”
Angel frowned slightly. “How does that work. My phone is registered with a service provider, AT&T (Thailand) and they bill me monthly.”
“Usually, the illegal telephone is registered to a non-existent company that never pays its bills. So, the telephone is cut off for non-payment after a month or so. Another non-existent address job.”
Conrad watched, trying not to smile as he saw Angel file that away as a possible for lucrative business opportunity for the 14K. He had also assumed that, whoever Angel used as her service provider, it was not AT&T. “Mike, do we have the tapes of the call? We need to get them to forensics.”
What he didn’t add was that he had a recording of the call made to the Bayington House Hotel. Proving that the two calls had been made by the same woman would be very helpful.
Forensic Science Laboratory, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
“Well, that’s about the most positive response I can give you.” Sir Kendall Busch looked at the two traces on the oscilloscopes that he’d placed side-by side. “Allowing for the issues with recording media and methods and for the fact both calls came over a portable telephone, the analysis software says there is an 86 percent probability the two calls were made by the same women. She is a woman by the way. The legal minimum for a voice trace comparison is eighty percent. So, this evidence would be admissible in court.”
Listening to Sir Humphrey had taught Conrad to pay attention to exactly how words were used. “Sir Kendall, you said, ‘calls came over a portable telephone’. Not ‘calls came over portable telephones’. Were both calls made over the same telephone?”
“I think so, yes. It’s hard to be sure, but there are some electronic anomalies that are present on both traces. They are not as conclusive as the voice match. The software puts the match as seventy percent. Not enough for presentation to a court on its own but taken along with the fact the calls were made by the same person, a court might well decide that the presumption they were the same telephone was reasonable.”
“Really sloppy tradecraft. Amateurish.” Angel sounded more thoughtful than anything else.
"It is, isn't it. Yet Tom Barnstable was trained by 'Six'." Conrad drummed his fingers on the table. "He wouldn't be amateurish. Skills like that never go away; at most they get put into storage and dusted off when needed."
"You can add leaving those mushrooms outside your front door in with that. If this was a 'six' job or any other professional intelligence service come to that, they'd have just puffed cyanide gas into your faces in the middle of a crowd or smeared nerve gas on the door-handle. Even your skills won’t counter that, Angel. And there would be no evidence of what had happened or who had done it." Sir Kendall wondered if that was true. If the stories about Angel's abilities were well-founded, he honestly wondered if the assassin would survive the attempt.
"I stay away from crowds whenever I can. There are other reasons as well but that's another one. You're right though. None of this fits with somebody who has professional intelligence training." Angel had the eerie feeling that she was looking at all the bits of the problem but hadn’t put them together the right way yet. "Do those tapes tell us anything else?"
"Not really. As I said, a woman, not transgender. The accent is bland, BBC English. I can’t really say how old she is. Children and the elderly we can detect but the woman speaking is somewhere in between. If you can get me another recording from a known party, I can compare them and that would identify the person making these calls.”
“I need your telephone.” Angel paused as she caught Conrad’s eye and then she added, “Please.”
Sir Kendall pointed at the telephone on his desk. “Direct to the outside and its scrambled”
Angel picked it up and dialed a London number. “This is Angelique de Llorente. I’d like to speak to Sir Laurence Coveney please. . . . . Sir Laurence, I need to have some telephone taps put in place. Yes, this is a secured line. The taps are to be on all the telephones used by DCI Thomas Barnstable and two members of his family. Yes, private and professional for all three. Specs? . . I’ll hand you over to Sir Kendall Busch. He’ll give you the details.”
Angel handed the receiver to Sir Kendall and mouthed the single letter ‘Q’. Sir Kendall spoke for a few minutes, reeling off what were obviously technical specifications. When he had finished, he handed the receiver back to Angel. “Thank you, Sir Laurence. Can you get the recordings down to us? They are to be placed in the hands of a woman called Chen Mao-Lee. 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset. . . . . That’s right. Yes, absolutely reliable. You could say she’s a member of ‘14’.”
The roar of laughter at the other end of the line was clearly audible. Angel hung up. “There we are. We’ll have our recordings day after tomorrow and at daily intervals after that.”
"Thank you; with tapes that are a known sample, we can do a lot." Sir Kendall paused for a second. "We found a woman's shoeprint outside 115. That would fit in with these telephone calls."
The telephone rang again. Sir Kendall picked it up and listened for a few minutes, noting down some numbers on a pad. When the call was over, he looked very happy. "That was Q. He has the warrant for the phone taps we need. Tom Barnstable, Joan Barnstable and their daughter Jordana."
"That was fast." Conrad was impressed but a little worried by how fast the warrants had arrived. Speed meant errors could be made and that set the ground for innocents to suffer.
"I don’t think you two realize quite how large the bomb you threw into the Home Office has been. Even the idea of a police death squad running around in North Somerset is enough to undo fifty years of trying to rehabilitate our police force. That is an objective, Angel, to which you have made some considerable personal commitment. The only way we can offset some of that damage is to be seen to move quickly and aggressively against any such situation at the earliest possible time. The Home Office has a Queen's Counsel waiting in the wings to approve, or otherwise, any applications for warrants."
"What is a Queen's Counsel when he's at home?" Angel sounded puzzled.
"A very senior lawyer, whose honesty and integrity are beyond question." Conrad in contrast, was relieved. "Technically, a QC is an advisor to the Crown on legal matters and how proposed legislation might affect the country as a whole. It's a very old position, but the powers and responsibilities of the QCs were revamped after the occupation."
"That's right." Sir Kendall was nodding in agreement. "Being appointed a QC is just about the highest professional honor a lawyer can receive. The fact one put this through so fast tells me concern over this case must have reached Cabinet level. "
"Humpty must be having hysterics." Angel was trying very hard to stop herself laughing.
"I am told that he took twenty five minutes to say good morning to his private secretary today." Sir Kendall sounded grave but it was obvious that he too was trying not to laugh.
Westonzoyland Common, Westonzoyland, Somerset.
Both Angel and Conrad were thankful for the fact that they had had the foresight to change into wellington boots before proceeding to go through the gate cut in the barbed wire and walk across the derelict land towards the taped-off area where the bodies of Woods and Small had been found. They had expected to see the site deserted but there were several officers apparently involved in an inch-by-inch search of the area. Tony Gavin appeared to be in charge of the operation and was directing the search efficiently.
"Hi, Angel, Conrad. Having a look at the crime scene?"
"We thought we would have a look around." Conrad surveyed the scene. "I didn't know the search was being repeated. I hope we won’t be in the way."
Gavin shook his head. "Pleased to have you two here. Look, I'll be honest, this isn’t a repeat search. The crime scene wasn't properly searched the first time. DCI Barnstable supervised the first search but as soon as he found the sample of Angel's hair and two 9x21mm brass, he more or less called any further effort off. That's been worrying me so I got some of the lads and we came down to redo everything. We're lucky, the scene is still largely uncontaminated. Somebody forgot to take the watch off it."
I wonder if that was an accident or whether somebody decided the scene had to be preserved for a subsequent investigation. That should have been us, we slipped up there but Tony has saved the day. Conrad looked at the way the methodical search was been carried out. "Your lads seem to be doing a good job. Find anything?"
"Not really. We confirmed there are adders here. We've seen two to date. Bit odd really, adders usually like dry country but they're pretty tolerant. "
"What's an adder?" Angel was looking around at the scene of the killings. The difference was, she was doing so with eyes that had seen more killing grounds than any police officer saw in their entire careers.
"Britain's only venomous snake. It's unaggressive and its poison is weak. I think the last time we had anybody die from an adder bite here was in the 1870s. Very docile as well, people can actually handle one if they know what they are doing but the wildlife people don’t recommend it." Gavin looked around as well. "I wonder why the killers picked here?"
"It's hardly an ideal spot is it? Difficult to get to, easy to leave a lot of trace evidence and it doesn't really achieve anything. Take a word of advice, Tony. If you’re going to kill somebody, only leave the body in a place like this if you're sending a message. Otherwise, make it disappear. But what message could this be sending. Killing George Woods was definitely sending a message. This? Leaving the bodies here doesn't seem significant. It's just a dump."
"Sarge, found something." One of the constables doing the search had stopped and raised his hand. On inspection, his find was a footprint in one of the tufts of grass. It was a small, raised area surrounded by stagnant water.
"Woman's shoe." Conrad looked carefully. "I'd guess that the wearer was moving from clump like this to clump, trying not to ruin her shoes."
"We'll take a cast of it and give it to forensics."
“You have the necessary equipment here?”
“Of course. I brought a complete crime scene investigation team.” Gavin gestured towards a police van, white but painted in a garish pattern of orange and yellow stripes and checkers. “They’ve got everything we need.”
“I’m surprised DCI Barnstable allowed you to bring all this kit.”
“He didn’t, not at first. Said there was nothing more to learn here and we had better things to spend our funds on. I wouldn’t give up and he got the idea I would go over his head if he didn’t approve. So, in the end he told me to do what I – expletive deleted – wanted and be damned. Then he scrawled his signature and stormed out. Haven’t seen him since.”
“You’re taking a hell of a chance with your career.” Angel sounded genuinely impressed. “People like that can really screw you over. You could be a DS for the rest of your career.”
Gavin looked shy. “I wouldn’t care too much if I did, to be honest, Angel. I like being a DS. If I went up to DI and then to DCI, I’d be getting more administrative work and less out here investigating. And there are all the political sides of things I want to stay clear of. This post here has been an eye-opener.”
“How do you mean?” Conrad was suddenly very interested.
“Almost every investigation we run, a theory gets formed very early and then the investigation concentrates on that and ignores everything else. Angel here was a good example. Once DCI Barnstable had focused on her for these killings, he ignored everything else. It’s as if he was afraid of where following other routes would lead. But, as a lowly DS I can do what’s right and not worry about a career I don’t really have. And the wife earns ten times as much as a lowly copper anyway. When we have kids, I'll probably become a stay-at-home dad."
Conrad understood exactly what Gavin had meant about investigations being narrowed down to fit in with a pre-determined theory of the crime. "Tony, were you involved with the Margaret King and Saint Helena's Charter School cases?"
"Yeah, both of them. And they're great examples of what I mean. In both cases, Barnstable decided what had happened very early and the investigation got funneled down that route. As soon as he decided that the killings were gay-related, that was it. Proposing something else was a waste of breath. Same with Margaret King. Barnstable concentrated on her as soon as he found out she had married her first husband's brother. Almost every other possibility was shot down out-of-hand."
"Have you any idea why?" Conrad recognized the symptoms all too well. A search for and desire to punish sin. As defined by the searcher. God help me, that was the Inquisition to a T. Or an I.
Tony looked extremely uncomfortable. "Look, don’t get me wrong. At the time, it seemed like everything was above-board and we'd made good cases. It was only as we moved on that the narrow focus became apparent. But, there's a puritanical aspect to those cases. As if the people were being punished for how they lived rather than what they did. This could apply to you two as well you know."
He stopped and looked at Angel extremely nervously. "Look, I don’t mean to be offensive, but nearly everybody assumes you two sleep together. Conrad, most people know you're a priest. So it looks as if you two are breaking your holy vows and all that. Mike tries to put them straight, 'platonic life partners' is the phrase he uses but . . . Well, I can't help wondering if the attempted poisoning was linked to that. The way you smacked down Barnstable, Angel, has given me a case I can do a proper investigation into. It feels good, I can tell you."
Angel gave him a friendly smile, one Conrad realized was a very rare genuine one. "Good boy. Very good boy indeed.
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Fourteen
Forensic Science Laboratory, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
"We have a match." Dr. Pollard sounded triumphant. "The footprint DS Gavin found at the Small-Woods crime scene is identical to the one I found at 115 Greenway Drive. That's a direct link between the two."
"May be a direct link." Conrad was being cautious. "We have proved that the footprints were left by people wearing the same design and size of shoes. That makes it very probable they are the same person but not certain."
"AHA! But look here. See the footprint cast on the Greenway Drive case? There's a pronounced crack in the sole where the ball of the foot rests and the heel is slightly worn down on the right. Now, on the Westonzoyland Common print, we have the same crack, see how it bends in the middle? And the same wear pattern. That's enough for a positive ID. By the way, Angel, we compared this with your footprints and the size is different. Your feet are significantly larger. Also, the cowboy boots you usually wear have a totally different sole pattern. Your sneakers of course have nothing in common with these prints."
"He's right." Sir Kendall had inspected the two prints with a magnifying glass. "There are other minor flaws as well common to both prints. See here, where a stone got stuck in the sole once and was levered out? Same on both. First class work, Dr. Pollard. Now, what you need to do is to go back to the evidence gathered at all the other murders and see if these footprints turn up there as well."
"That's over three hundred murders! It'll take months." Dr Pollard's cry of anguish caused merriment.
"That's why I said 'what you need to do'. Rank hath its privileges." Sir Kendall looked innocent. "You can speed it up though. Ignore everything except the footprints found at the crime scenes and only look at women's shoe-prints. This one is size seven, that's seven and a half US. If we are really lucky and we find numerous shoe-prints between size seven and eight we might actually get a picture of the unidentified woman's shoe collection. That'll be as good as a fingerprint on a murder weapon."
"That's why all my sneakers and boots are identical." Angel spoke dryly.
Looking at her, Dr. Pollard guessed that forensic countermeasures were a routine part of her life. "You're a lucky man, Conrad. You've been spared the domestic hell of shoe-buying expeditions."
"I take him buying guns instead. I know I've picked the right one when he falls to his knees and starts praying for my soul." Angel turned slightly and winked at Conrad, appreciating the round of laughter she had received. Angel was actually quite nervous about making jokes concerning people since she didn’t understand them well enough to know what would be considered funny and what was offensive. That thought caused her to note, with some surprise, that she had been concerned about offending some people. She couldn't understand why.
"You shoot Beretta 98s don’t you?" Sir Kendall was surprised at how amiable the conversation was. He'd always assumed that Angel's default mode was dour and menacing.
"Not quite. They started off that way, but they've been modified with 5.9 inch barrels, an extended slide, hair-triggers and are single action only. "
"You didn't see the bullets and casings we recovered from Small and Woods did you?" Dr Pollard went to the evidence locker. "We've still got them up here since the case is open."
He took out a plastic bag containing two expended cartridge cases and two badly distorted bullets. He also handed Angel a pair of disposable gloves before she opened the bag. "The bullets are too badly distorted to tell us anything. The cases, well, as far as we can see they are standard 9x21 Skoda."
Angel looked carefully at the cases. "They're standard all right. Headstamp is CISH. That means they were made by Charger Industries in Singapore in 1992. G would be 1991. Mine are ACP 05 right now."
"Automatic Colt Pistol?" Dr Pollard asked. It was a fair enough question, he was a pathologist, not a firearms expert.
Sir Kendall was both. "Arms Corporation of the Philippines. 2005. I would guess you keep their 9x21 line in business?"
That caused another burst of laughter. Again, Angel wondered why, it was something she sometimes suspected was true. Nevertheless, everybody else was laughing so she followed her 'rules' and joined in. "Well, I do get a bulk discount."
Once again she was puzzled by everybody thinking that was funny. Especially since she knew that it was also true. "The bullets though, they're a bit different. Hollow points. Take a word of advice, never fire those from a semi-automatic pistol. They're much too likely to jam on you. If one of my boys jams in a firefight, it's bad news. If they both jam, I'll be dead seconds later. Remember I have a pistol in each hand so clearing a jam means dropping one of them. I've found that the Armscor 9x21s have the lowest misfire rate so I use them. These Singaporean rounds are OK in FMJ but they're bad news in hollow-point."
"So these are not likely to have been fired by a professional?" Dr. Pollard was really pleased to have his assumption confirmed by a real expert so he was surprised when Angel hesitated before responding.
"Well, I don’t know a professional who would take the chance. Of course, if they were using a revolver, it's a different matter. I'd guess that these were bought by somebody who knows a bit about guns but not as much as they think they do."
As they were leaving, Conrad spoke quietly to Angel. "Singapore, 1992."
"I noticed."
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset
“Take her out into the garden and shoot her.” Mao-Lee was almost trembling with fear while she related what had happened three evenings before, culminating with the brick being thrown through the window of a house she was supposed to be guarding. And then I handed the brick to Sam! She believed Hēilóng Shāshǒu would not forgive such negligence. She could almost hear the terse order being given as she finished her report and awaited the verdict,
“What do you think, Conrad?” Angel smiled at him.
Conrad thought very quickly. He knew Angel would never put him into a position where he was effectively pronouncing a death sentence on anybody, not that he believed for one moment that was the situation here. That was when he realized that Angel wanted him to be complimentary so it would look like everybody approved Mao-Lee's handling of the attack. “As far as I can see, Mao-Lee did an excellent job. Nobody can stop a brick thrown from the darkness, but she controlled the situation, got everybody under cover and was ready to fight off a mass assault. She had the place well-protected and the Lexan panels were an inspired idea. The only thing I would criticize Mao-Lee for is her lack of self-confidence right now.”
Angel smiled to herself. By using Conrad as the medium, his analysis had come over as a purely logical, unprejudiced verdict. Her own was as well of course but few people really understood how the mind of a psychopath worked. Her inability to form relationships with anybody other than Conrad meant her judgements on people were always unprejudiced. “I agree; Younger Sister, with a few exceptions you did a good, efficient job. The major error on your part was handing that brick to Sam. You must not hand a wrapped present to the person you are protecting. It could have been a bomb, contaminated with poison, or a biological agent. You had the device isolated on the other side of the lexan panels; it should have stayed there. Quite apart from anything else, almost all evidence on the brick and the note were spoiled."
"You are right eldest sister. It was a grievous fault on my part."
"I would not say grievous. Inexperience perhaps. I will recommend you receive proper bodyguard training. I think you have much promise and professional training will be of great value. I would echo Conrad’s comments though. You must learn to have confidence in your own judgment. You should have come before me this evening with the quiet pride that comes from knowing your work was well done. Your lack of self-confidence is a weakness you must strive to correct. Start by thinking on this. Since being assigned here, you have been given two duties and performed both well. One of those operations put you at considerable personal risk, you were injured, yet your performance was near perfect. At the same time you must not allow self-confidence to become arrogance. Always remember that every incident, whether success or failure, has lessons that should be studied and remembered. Never be ashamed to learn. Bear all that in mind and you can be sure of promotion in due course.
"The first lesson to remember here is that the 14K does not shoot its members for failing. Yes, I saw you look at my guns and then at the garden. I read body language very well, it's emotions I have problems with. We are sisters and we look out for each other. There are organizations that do shoot their members when they fail but the policy is stupid and it cripples them. Instead, the 14K uses failure as a reason to teach and instruct. If repeated failure shows that one of our brothers and sisters cannot cope with their duties, they are found other responsibilities that they can perform successfully. The only other lesson we have here is that you kept your rifle too far from you. You might have had a problem reaching it quickly enough if there had been a serious attack. Why did you put it so far from you?"
Mao-Lee's head was swimming with the shock of receiving praise from the famous Hēilóng Shāshǒu and her companion Zhēnxiàng the truth-finder. "There were two children with us and I thought that the rifles should be out of their reach. Children do not understand how destructive guns are. I had my pistol so I thought the balance of risks weighed in favor of a safe distance."
Angel nodded and thought that over. "You are right and there is a balance to be struck between risks of one kind and those of another. You were the authority on the scene and the decision was yours. I will not criticize it. By the way, what pistol do you carry?"
"A Makarov PM, eldest sister."
Angel pushed out her bottom lip. "I have something for you. The PM is under-powered and can suffer stoppages. Try this and see if you like it. If you do, you may keep it."
She handed over a flat cardboard box. Inside was a Sig-Sauer P225 chambered for 9x21 Skoda. Mao-Lee took it carefully, checked the chamber was empty and looked it over carefully, noting that the serial number looked authentic but was almost certainly a complete fake. "I am greatly honored, eldest sister."
"I wish I could use one of them things." Sam had brought out a tray of Chinese tea and digestive biscuits. "Angel, when you are done 'ere, can we 'ave a talk?"
"Sure, I think we're finished. Any questions, younger sister?"
Mao-Lee shook her head and Angel followed Sam back into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. "What is the problem, Sam?"
"It's the business, 'luv. I been running the administration for years and that's fine. But construction is a rough business and Georgie used to 'andle the physical side of it. Like the bits that meant punchin' people. And I don't know 'ow to keep a check on the building work. It's been sort of runnin' on remote control since Georgie died but it's fadin' now. I needs 'elp. Can your association give me some?"
"You do realize we are gangsters don’t you. Associate with us and you'll be opening yourself up to possible criminal action?"
"I'd guessed that all right. But I ain't got many choices right now if I'm gonna save the business for the kids. And I've bin watchin' you and Conrad and Mao-Lee and Shun-Tan. You mebbe crooks but you play fair."
"We prefer being called villains and, yes, we play fair with the people we associate with. It costs a bit in the short term but it pays dividends in the long term. And we're Chinese, we think in terms of generations. What do you want from us?"
"Ah dunno . . A replacement for Georgie I think."
Angel ran the situation over in her mind. "All right. One route is that you can pay tribute to the local 14K Triad branch. At the moment that's Cardiff House. How much you pay is up to you and it doesn’t have to be a set sum. When business is good you might decide to pay more, when it's bad, you pay less. What you get for that is our friendship and friends help each other. If somebody tries to muscle you, we send somebody like Mao-Lee down to explain to them why that is a very bad idea. Otherwise, if somebody asks us to recommend a contractor, we give them your address. If you need staff, we'll find somebody who can do what you need and you like working with. Sounds like you need a building manager to make sure the work stays up to the standards George set. We can find you a qualified manager you can trust.
"The other option open to you is that you can invite us in as a partner. Sell us a share in the business, all legal and above-board. Usually, we'll be a silent partner, just helping out when you need and supporting you. You can be sure that nobody will ever dare try messing with you. If you're competing for a contract, we help you win it. Likewise, you help us when we need it. Most times we are like any other partner, all we care about is out share of the profits at the end of the year. The FBI calls it 'legitimate business with a hard edge' and they've given up trying to stop us."
"I've heard that if we let people in as partners. They'll clean the business out and wreck its credit." Sam sounded more curious than worried.
"That's a mob thing from back in the day. They used to do that, sure. Still do in the States. Remember, we think long-term, years or even decades, so it's in our interest to make sure this business stays a success. What we might ask you to do is give a job to one of our brothers who needs it or take in somebody who doesn’t want to be found for a while." Angel tactfully did not mention giving them the keys to the building site and leaving a cement mixer full of concrete available. She didn’t understand why that was tactful but knew that Conrad wouldn’t have approved of her mentioning it. "Or perhaps to build something special like a house with a concealed panic room."
"We got one of 'em here." Sam sounded reflective. "I told Mao-Lee about it. Right impressed she was. You'll make sure we hire good staff who know what we're doin'? And keep the standards where Georgie wanted them?"
"If you want us to. Sam, there are other options but you have no Chinese blood so you can't use them. You don’t need to make a decision now, just think it over. If you want, I can ask London House's White Fan to come down and talk it over with you."
As they were leaving, Conrad had picked up the package of telephone intercepts that had been delivered earlier that day. He had a firm opinion that the recordings, or ones like them, would eventually crack this case wide open.
Forensic Science Laboratory, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
"All right, we have one set of recordings that are off each telephone, another which have the same calls digitally enhanced. Then we have another set that are those calls arranged so the same person is on each disk. They're all going off to the electronics lab now." Sir Randall looked satisfied at the information he had received. "There'll be another delivery tomorrow?"
"So we are told." The truth was that Angel missed having Igrat around as a courier. It is so easy to get used to Igrat delivering messages and packages, apparently before she had left with them. "Q is pretty reliable on such things."
"Angel, we finished looking at the bodies of Woods and Small again. This time in view of what DS Gavin found at the scene of the crime. Which wasn't much; I hate to think of how much evidence we lost because the first search wasn't done properly." Dr. Pollard shook his head sadly. "I should have seen it earlier, looking back over the cases, it's obvious that the investigation jumped to a conclusion and focused all its attention on that. Do I have to assume every single case we have here is unsafe?"
Conrad sighed; it was a scene he had seen all too often. "I am afraid so. I've seen this many times, probably the most common investigating error there is. And it always ends with the innocent being arrested. Or, in this case, murdered."
"Huh?" Dr. Pollard looked shocked. "A blunder certainly but murdered?"
"Haven't you seen the pattern here? We have one person being murdered, then after the investigation starts, a series of others. Look at the dates and times and the how the crime was carried out. Isn't it apparent that the later murders were carried out to remove people who might know too much about the original crime? Or might be able to contradict the official line that a selected party was guilty of them all?"
Dr Pollard had gone slightly gray. Angel, in contrast was gazing at Conrad with her eyes shining. He'd taken the vast mass of information that had been gathered from an unprecedented number of cases, distilled it to its essentials and from that spotted the links between the cases and the pattern of killings that had resulted from them. She had never been more proud of him. Pollard shook his head with shock at the realization of what Conrad's theory might imply. "The recording voice analysis will take an hour or so. Why don’t we have dinner in the hospital canteen while we wait?"
Conrad and Angel looked at each other and replied in perfect chorus "Not if they are serving mushrooms."
As it happened, the canteen was serving fish and chips, something easily recognizable and devoid of mushrooms. By the time the party got back to the forensics library, the report was waiting in an envelope. Dr Pollard took it out and read it, then handed it to Sir Kendall. "Definitive. Ninety three percent match."
"Joan Barnstable?" Conrad asked.
"No, their daughter, Jordana."
Forensic Science Laboratory, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
"We have a match." Dr. Pollard sounded triumphant. "The footprint DS Gavin found at the Small-Woods crime scene is identical to the one I found at 115 Greenway Drive. That's a direct link between the two."
"May be a direct link." Conrad was being cautious. "We have proved that the footprints were left by people wearing the same design and size of shoes. That makes it very probable they are the same person but not certain."
"AHA! But look here. See the footprint cast on the Greenway Drive case? There's a pronounced crack in the sole where the ball of the foot rests and the heel is slightly worn down on the right. Now, on the Westonzoyland Common print, we have the same crack, see how it bends in the middle? And the same wear pattern. That's enough for a positive ID. By the way, Angel, we compared this with your footprints and the size is different. Your feet are significantly larger. Also, the cowboy boots you usually wear have a totally different sole pattern. Your sneakers of course have nothing in common with these prints."
"He's right." Sir Kendall had inspected the two prints with a magnifying glass. "There are other minor flaws as well common to both prints. See here, where a stone got stuck in the sole once and was levered out? Same on both. First class work, Dr. Pollard. Now, what you need to do is to go back to the evidence gathered at all the other murders and see if these footprints turn up there as well."
"That's over three hundred murders! It'll take months." Dr Pollard's cry of anguish caused merriment.
"That's why I said 'what you need to do'. Rank hath its privileges." Sir Kendall looked innocent. "You can speed it up though. Ignore everything except the footprints found at the crime scenes and only look at women's shoe-prints. This one is size seven, that's seven and a half US. If we are really lucky and we find numerous shoe-prints between size seven and eight we might actually get a picture of the unidentified woman's shoe collection. That'll be as good as a fingerprint on a murder weapon."
"That's why all my sneakers and boots are identical." Angel spoke dryly.
Looking at her, Dr. Pollard guessed that forensic countermeasures were a routine part of her life. "You're a lucky man, Conrad. You've been spared the domestic hell of shoe-buying expeditions."
"I take him buying guns instead. I know I've picked the right one when he falls to his knees and starts praying for my soul." Angel turned slightly and winked at Conrad, appreciating the round of laughter she had received. Angel was actually quite nervous about making jokes concerning people since she didn’t understand them well enough to know what would be considered funny and what was offensive. That thought caused her to note, with some surprise, that she had been concerned about offending some people. She couldn't understand why.
"You shoot Beretta 98s don’t you?" Sir Kendall was surprised at how amiable the conversation was. He'd always assumed that Angel's default mode was dour and menacing.
"Not quite. They started off that way, but they've been modified with 5.9 inch barrels, an extended slide, hair-triggers and are single action only. "
"You didn't see the bullets and casings we recovered from Small and Woods did you?" Dr Pollard went to the evidence locker. "We've still got them up here since the case is open."
He took out a plastic bag containing two expended cartridge cases and two badly distorted bullets. He also handed Angel a pair of disposable gloves before she opened the bag. "The bullets are too badly distorted to tell us anything. The cases, well, as far as we can see they are standard 9x21 Skoda."
Angel looked carefully at the cases. "They're standard all right. Headstamp is CISH. That means they were made by Charger Industries in Singapore in 1992. G would be 1991. Mine are ACP 05 right now."
"Automatic Colt Pistol?" Dr Pollard asked. It was a fair enough question, he was a pathologist, not a firearms expert.
Sir Kendall was both. "Arms Corporation of the Philippines. 2005. I would guess you keep their 9x21 line in business?"
That caused another burst of laughter. Again, Angel wondered why, it was something she sometimes suspected was true. Nevertheless, everybody else was laughing so she followed her 'rules' and joined in. "Well, I do get a bulk discount."
Once again she was puzzled by everybody thinking that was funny. Especially since she knew that it was also true. "The bullets though, they're a bit different. Hollow points. Take a word of advice, never fire those from a semi-automatic pistol. They're much too likely to jam on you. If one of my boys jams in a firefight, it's bad news. If they both jam, I'll be dead seconds later. Remember I have a pistol in each hand so clearing a jam means dropping one of them. I've found that the Armscor 9x21s have the lowest misfire rate so I use them. These Singaporean rounds are OK in FMJ but they're bad news in hollow-point."
"So these are not likely to have been fired by a professional?" Dr. Pollard was really pleased to have his assumption confirmed by a real expert so he was surprised when Angel hesitated before responding.
"Well, I don’t know a professional who would take the chance. Of course, if they were using a revolver, it's a different matter. I'd guess that these were bought by somebody who knows a bit about guns but not as much as they think they do."
As they were leaving, Conrad spoke quietly to Angel. "Singapore, 1992."
"I noticed."
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset
“Take her out into the garden and shoot her.” Mao-Lee was almost trembling with fear while she related what had happened three evenings before, culminating with the brick being thrown through the window of a house she was supposed to be guarding. And then I handed the brick to Sam! She believed Hēilóng Shāshǒu would not forgive such negligence. She could almost hear the terse order being given as she finished her report and awaited the verdict,
“What do you think, Conrad?” Angel smiled at him.
Conrad thought very quickly. He knew Angel would never put him into a position where he was effectively pronouncing a death sentence on anybody, not that he believed for one moment that was the situation here. That was when he realized that Angel wanted him to be complimentary so it would look like everybody approved Mao-Lee's handling of the attack. “As far as I can see, Mao-Lee did an excellent job. Nobody can stop a brick thrown from the darkness, but she controlled the situation, got everybody under cover and was ready to fight off a mass assault. She had the place well-protected and the Lexan panels were an inspired idea. The only thing I would criticize Mao-Lee for is her lack of self-confidence right now.”
Angel smiled to herself. By using Conrad as the medium, his analysis had come over as a purely logical, unprejudiced verdict. Her own was as well of course but few people really understood how the mind of a psychopath worked. Her inability to form relationships with anybody other than Conrad meant her judgements on people were always unprejudiced. “I agree; Younger Sister, with a few exceptions you did a good, efficient job. The major error on your part was handing that brick to Sam. You must not hand a wrapped present to the person you are protecting. It could have been a bomb, contaminated with poison, or a biological agent. You had the device isolated on the other side of the lexan panels; it should have stayed there. Quite apart from anything else, almost all evidence on the brick and the note were spoiled."
"You are right eldest sister. It was a grievous fault on my part."
"I would not say grievous. Inexperience perhaps. I will recommend you receive proper bodyguard training. I think you have much promise and professional training will be of great value. I would echo Conrad’s comments though. You must learn to have confidence in your own judgment. You should have come before me this evening with the quiet pride that comes from knowing your work was well done. Your lack of self-confidence is a weakness you must strive to correct. Start by thinking on this. Since being assigned here, you have been given two duties and performed both well. One of those operations put you at considerable personal risk, you were injured, yet your performance was near perfect. At the same time you must not allow self-confidence to become arrogance. Always remember that every incident, whether success or failure, has lessons that should be studied and remembered. Never be ashamed to learn. Bear all that in mind and you can be sure of promotion in due course.
"The first lesson to remember here is that the 14K does not shoot its members for failing. Yes, I saw you look at my guns and then at the garden. I read body language very well, it's emotions I have problems with. We are sisters and we look out for each other. There are organizations that do shoot their members when they fail but the policy is stupid and it cripples them. Instead, the 14K uses failure as a reason to teach and instruct. If repeated failure shows that one of our brothers and sisters cannot cope with their duties, they are found other responsibilities that they can perform successfully. The only other lesson we have here is that you kept your rifle too far from you. You might have had a problem reaching it quickly enough if there had been a serious attack. Why did you put it so far from you?"
Mao-Lee's head was swimming with the shock of receiving praise from the famous Hēilóng Shāshǒu and her companion Zhēnxiàng the truth-finder. "There were two children with us and I thought that the rifles should be out of their reach. Children do not understand how destructive guns are. I had my pistol so I thought the balance of risks weighed in favor of a safe distance."
Angel nodded and thought that over. "You are right and there is a balance to be struck between risks of one kind and those of another. You were the authority on the scene and the decision was yours. I will not criticize it. By the way, what pistol do you carry?"
"A Makarov PM, eldest sister."
Angel pushed out her bottom lip. "I have something for you. The PM is under-powered and can suffer stoppages. Try this and see if you like it. If you do, you may keep it."
She handed over a flat cardboard box. Inside was a Sig-Sauer P225 chambered for 9x21 Skoda. Mao-Lee took it carefully, checked the chamber was empty and looked it over carefully, noting that the serial number looked authentic but was almost certainly a complete fake. "I am greatly honored, eldest sister."
"I wish I could use one of them things." Sam had brought out a tray of Chinese tea and digestive biscuits. "Angel, when you are done 'ere, can we 'ave a talk?"
"Sure, I think we're finished. Any questions, younger sister?"
Mao-Lee shook her head and Angel followed Sam back into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. "What is the problem, Sam?"
"It's the business, 'luv. I been running the administration for years and that's fine. But construction is a rough business and Georgie used to 'andle the physical side of it. Like the bits that meant punchin' people. And I don't know 'ow to keep a check on the building work. It's been sort of runnin' on remote control since Georgie died but it's fadin' now. I needs 'elp. Can your association give me some?"
"You do realize we are gangsters don’t you. Associate with us and you'll be opening yourself up to possible criminal action?"
"I'd guessed that all right. But I ain't got many choices right now if I'm gonna save the business for the kids. And I've bin watchin' you and Conrad and Mao-Lee and Shun-Tan. You mebbe crooks but you play fair."
"We prefer being called villains and, yes, we play fair with the people we associate with. It costs a bit in the short term but it pays dividends in the long term. And we're Chinese, we think in terms of generations. What do you want from us?"
"Ah dunno . . A replacement for Georgie I think."
Angel ran the situation over in her mind. "All right. One route is that you can pay tribute to the local 14K Triad branch. At the moment that's Cardiff House. How much you pay is up to you and it doesn’t have to be a set sum. When business is good you might decide to pay more, when it's bad, you pay less. What you get for that is our friendship and friends help each other. If somebody tries to muscle you, we send somebody like Mao-Lee down to explain to them why that is a very bad idea. Otherwise, if somebody asks us to recommend a contractor, we give them your address. If you need staff, we'll find somebody who can do what you need and you like working with. Sounds like you need a building manager to make sure the work stays up to the standards George set. We can find you a qualified manager you can trust.
"The other option open to you is that you can invite us in as a partner. Sell us a share in the business, all legal and above-board. Usually, we'll be a silent partner, just helping out when you need and supporting you. You can be sure that nobody will ever dare try messing with you. If you're competing for a contract, we help you win it. Likewise, you help us when we need it. Most times we are like any other partner, all we care about is out share of the profits at the end of the year. The FBI calls it 'legitimate business with a hard edge' and they've given up trying to stop us."
"I've heard that if we let people in as partners. They'll clean the business out and wreck its credit." Sam sounded more curious than worried.
"That's a mob thing from back in the day. They used to do that, sure. Still do in the States. Remember, we think long-term, years or even decades, so it's in our interest to make sure this business stays a success. What we might ask you to do is give a job to one of our brothers who needs it or take in somebody who doesn’t want to be found for a while." Angel tactfully did not mention giving them the keys to the building site and leaving a cement mixer full of concrete available. She didn’t understand why that was tactful but knew that Conrad wouldn’t have approved of her mentioning it. "Or perhaps to build something special like a house with a concealed panic room."
"We got one of 'em here." Sam sounded reflective. "I told Mao-Lee about it. Right impressed she was. You'll make sure we hire good staff who know what we're doin'? And keep the standards where Georgie wanted them?"
"If you want us to. Sam, there are other options but you have no Chinese blood so you can't use them. You don’t need to make a decision now, just think it over. If you want, I can ask London House's White Fan to come down and talk it over with you."
As they were leaving, Conrad had picked up the package of telephone intercepts that had been delivered earlier that day. He had a firm opinion that the recordings, or ones like them, would eventually crack this case wide open.
Forensic Science Laboratory, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
"All right, we have one set of recordings that are off each telephone, another which have the same calls digitally enhanced. Then we have another set that are those calls arranged so the same person is on each disk. They're all going off to the electronics lab now." Sir Randall looked satisfied at the information he had received. "There'll be another delivery tomorrow?"
"So we are told." The truth was that Angel missed having Igrat around as a courier. It is so easy to get used to Igrat delivering messages and packages, apparently before she had left with them. "Q is pretty reliable on such things."
"Angel, we finished looking at the bodies of Woods and Small again. This time in view of what DS Gavin found at the scene of the crime. Which wasn't much; I hate to think of how much evidence we lost because the first search wasn't done properly." Dr. Pollard shook his head sadly. "I should have seen it earlier, looking back over the cases, it's obvious that the investigation jumped to a conclusion and focused all its attention on that. Do I have to assume every single case we have here is unsafe?"
Conrad sighed; it was a scene he had seen all too often. "I am afraid so. I've seen this many times, probably the most common investigating error there is. And it always ends with the innocent being arrested. Or, in this case, murdered."
"Huh?" Dr. Pollard looked shocked. "A blunder certainly but murdered?"
"Haven't you seen the pattern here? We have one person being murdered, then after the investigation starts, a series of others. Look at the dates and times and the how the crime was carried out. Isn't it apparent that the later murders were carried out to remove people who might know too much about the original crime? Or might be able to contradict the official line that a selected party was guilty of them all?"
Dr Pollard had gone slightly gray. Angel, in contrast was gazing at Conrad with her eyes shining. He'd taken the vast mass of information that had been gathered from an unprecedented number of cases, distilled it to its essentials and from that spotted the links between the cases and the pattern of killings that had resulted from them. She had never been more proud of him. Pollard shook his head with shock at the realization of what Conrad's theory might imply. "The recording voice analysis will take an hour or so. Why don’t we have dinner in the hospital canteen while we wait?"
Conrad and Angel looked at each other and replied in perfect chorus "Not if they are serving mushrooms."
As it happened, the canteen was serving fish and chips, something easily recognizable and devoid of mushrooms. By the time the party got back to the forensics library, the report was waiting in an envelope. Dr Pollard took it out and read it, then handed it to Sir Kendall. "Definitive. Ninety three percent match."
"Joan Barnstable?" Conrad asked.
"No, their daughter, Jordana."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Fifteen
The Royal Sovereign, Stoke St. Gregory, Somerset. 7:43 pm.
Casual passers-by might have wondered what was happening at the Royal Sovereign. It wasn’t that the car park was crowded, it always was, even on a Tuesday. The food and beer were that good. The point of interest was that there were two police cars and a Public Health UK van present. They were parked at the back of the pub car park and they weren’t showing their emergency lights, so it was apparent they were not there in a professional capacity. Mostly, it was assumed that one of the local officers was leaving and this was his departure bash.
In fact, the explanation was much simpler. Detective Sergeant Michael Scott and Senior Public Health Officer Jacqueline Hemsley were at the early stage of the dating game where they would arrive at the scene of their date separately, leave separately and usually other friends would be present. Scott’s plans for the evening included a casual suggestion to Jackie that he could pick her up for their next meeting which would be by themselves. Jackie's plans included agreeing.
Despite being in a public house with a fine selection of top-quality locally-brewed ales, there was remarkably little alcohol on the table. Mike Scott, Jackie Hemsley and Tony Gavin were all driving while Veronica ‘Nika’ Gavin had the slight thickening of the waist that showed a baby was in the early stages of making its appearance. Thus, all four had avoided alcohol. They were just about to place their orders when Scott and Gavin’s portable telephones went off almost simultaneously. They made their apologies and retreated to a quiet corner.
“You’ll have to get used to this you know.” Nika looked sympathetically at Jackie sitting opposite her. “Police are never actually off-duty.”
“I know, quite a few of the girls have married police officers and a few of the boys, police women. We work together so much it’s natural I guess. Hello, this doesn’t look good.”
Scott and Gavin returned to the table, their faces grim. Scott explained quickly. “Look, we’ve got an emergency come up. That was DCI Barnstable himself. A mob is gathering outside the home of a witness we have under protection. There’s a woman and two kids in the house and up to a dozen thugs outside. We got to get there. The Guvnor has reinforcements coming in from all over but we’re the nearest.”
“Two of you against how many?” Nika was on the point of having hysterics.
“We don’t know.”
“Why don’t I follow you in my van?” Jackie spoke up, driven mostly by Nika's obvious distress. “I’ve got my Dacia Dokker, its fast, looks like a police vehicle and has the same emergency lights. If this problem is real, they’ll think we’re an armed response unit coming in.”
Scott thought hard. “All right, we’ve precious few choices right now. But Jackie, if we hit real trouble you get out of there fast.”
“And Nika, you’ve got your car here as well, right?” Gavin spoke quickly. He had severe doubts about bringing Jackie along but kept them to himself. “Get home as quickly as you can. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s happening.”
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset. 7.47 pm
“Elder sister, it’s happening again.” Qiu Shun-Tan had heard the police car outside start its engine and move off at speed.
“Eldest sister warned us; if the police get an emergency call, they have to respond. If the car outside is the nearest unit, then it has to go to the scene. I think they know this is a decoy, but they still have to go. What would happen if they did not and the call is genuine?”
“What’s ‘appenin’?” Sam had spotted something was wrong.
“Police car has been called away. That means we’ll get another brick at best, probably something worse.” Mao Lee had picked up her rifle, checked the magazine and made sure she had several spares. Shun-Tan had done the same.
“My guess is a riot outside, followed by an attempt to get in. Don’t worry, we have this but make sure you can get to your panic room if it does go sour. And once inside, never come out. They may try and force you out by doing things to us. That can get pretty bad, but don’t fall for it. If this gets to that point, they will kill everyone eventually anyway. So, once inside stay put with your kids. I don’t need to tell you they come first.”
“They’re coming.” Shun-Tan had seen figures starting to close in.
Mao-Lee opened her portable telephone and dialed 999. She gave a terse warning to the police that explained the situation and then hung up. Then she dialed Angel’s portable. “Eldest sister, we have a mob forming. We need help.”
“On its way.” A man’s voice had responded. Mao-Lee guessed it was Conrad speaking with Angel driving. “We’re at Glastonbury right now. Angel says, hold tight, we’re coming.”
In the background, Mao-Lee heard the vehicle’s emergency sirens going on. It was an immensely reassuring sound, even when diluted through a portable telephone.
Angel and Conrad in West Country Detective Police Car, Zed-Venus-Five, Outside Glastonbury. 7:50pm
“This is traditional. A Chinese family besieged in their home by a murderous mob and Triad hatchetmen rushing through the night to their rescue. This is how the Triads got started.” Angel sounded grimly amused. She had the car’s emergency sirens and lights full on, even the strobing headlights and flashing blue lights in the car’s radiator grill that warned of a ‘lives at risk’ situation. She was steadily accelerating and was doing nearly 90 miles an hour already. She had heard the Police Interceptor SD4 was capable of 130 miles per hour and intended to find out if that was true. Ahead of her, a large container lorry has seen the display and swerved off the road to clear the way through. “We’ll need the dashcam on once we get to the scene. This is likely to get bloody.”
“What puzzles me is why we got the warning from Mao-Lee and not the police emergency service. Our police radio is silent. Shouldn’t we have received an official ‘all-hands’ warning by now?”
“Yes.” Angel was still terse. “And do you get the feeling that this breaking loose just an hour after West Country Division issue an arrest warrant for Jordana Barnstable is a bit of a coincidence?”
“Not quite an arrest warrant, not yet. Seeking her assistance with Police inquiries. DCI Barnstable will take one look at that though, see it’s coming from West Country Division HQ and know the game is up. Whatever else he is, he isn’t stupid. Angel, that car up in front isn’t getting out of the way.”
“Got him. Don’t sweat it, there he goes. Anyway, I know how to push people off the road. Bodyguard training, remember?”
Conrad did not find that reassuring. At that point, the police radio burst into life. “All units, say again all units, major civil disturbance impending in Church Road, Middlezoy. All units available, respond.”
He picked up the hand set and squeezed the transmission button on the side. “This is Zed-Venus-Five, on way to scene now. We received private citizen warning five minutes ago. What is happening?”
“Zed-Venus-Five, this is dispatch. We are working off same private citizen warning. Be advised, this is the first official response call.” There was a brief hesitation. “Is Angel there?”
“Yes.” Angel snapped the word out.
“Thank God for that. Something very bad is going down. Be advised, our warning came from your friends. Central off.”
“So Mao-Lee called it in; what is going on over there?” Conrad stared out through the windscreen, willing the car to go faster and feeling it respond as Angel pushed it to its limits.
Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset. 8.00 pm
The convoy of three vehicles looked remarkably like two police cars followed by an armed response unit van. They were coming in fast, with the van struggling to keep up, all three vehicles with their emergency light bars blazing and headlights strobing. In the lead car, Mike Scott had received the message sent out by dispatch central. Already the timing discrepancy was worrying him. Another thing was that the duty car hadn’t returned. Being called away on an emergency was one thing; not returning immediately was quite another.
He broadsided his vehicle to a halt outside Number 45, swung the door open and dived out. As he did so, he saw a dozen or more figures emerging from the darkness to close in on him. He grabbed his microphone and screamed the warning. “Jackie, it's an ambush, get out of here!” Then he was brought to the ground as a group of attackers swarmed over him. In the background he saw Tony Gavin being dragged to the ground the same way.
Jackie Hemsley got the desperate, last-minute warning and swerved into an emergency stop. She slammed the transmission into reverse and tried to back her way clear at the van’s maximum speed. What she didn’t know was that the ambushers had already dragged tire-bursting strips out behind her. When she hit them, all four tires on her van exploded and the vehicle ran out-of-control into a ditch. She screamed as the windows were smashed in, hands reached in to drag her out and pulled her through the smashed glass. Kicking, screaming, and fighting desperately, she was thrown on to the van’s engine hood and pinned down.
Arriving on the scene, Angel took one look at the situation and knew that there had to be tire-bursting strips on the road. These, she knew how to handle and anyway her police car, unlike the Public Health UK van, had run-flat tires that gave her a few moments of control at the critical point. She used them to bring the car skidding across the road to an emergency halt and dive out of the driver’s door.
To her horror, she saw Conrad stepping out of the car and lifting his hands in supplication. “In the name of God, people, stop this.”
“Go to hell, copper.” One of the men at the ambush turned to face Conrad, swung a shotgun up and pointed it at him amid a stream of highly obscene abuse. The shotgun blast, when it came, went straight up in the air. The gunman had already suffered half a dozen bullet wounds in his chest and four more in his face. Angel was in her red-zone now, fighting on autopilot, her decisions made in a part of her brain that had been conditioned by a quarter of a century of close-quarters gun battles. Human decision-making was too slow in a battle where times were measured in hundredths of a second. Angel knew that, her opponents didn’t, and that was the difference between a professional gunslinger and an amateur.
In the brief second it had taken her to kill the man threatening Conrad, she had absorbed all the details of the scene. Scott and Gavin were being held by groups of three or four men each, one of whom was holding a knife to the Sergeants’ throats. Jackie Hemsley was spread-eagled on the front of her van, held down by her arms and legs while a fifth man was kneeling astride her trying to unfasten her utility belt and the waistband of her slacks. She was frantically struggling still, trying to cross her legs and swing her hips but the remorseless pull on her limbs was defeating her. Yet for all the impending horror of the developing riot, she detected an air of falseness about it. The attacks were real enough but she realized that most of those present were being carried along by mob-think and would snap out of it as soon as the spell was broken. If they didn't, they would die.
The leader of the men clustered around Scott and Gavin had meant to scream ‘Drop the guns or we’ll kill them.’ What the man holding a knife to Scott’s throat actually said was “Drop the gu . . . .” before he went down to a stream of bullets from the gun in Angel’s left hand. The man holding a knife to Gavin’s neck took one look at the scene and threw the knife down, by a microsecond fast enough to save his life. "Don't shoot, please God don't shoot."
Gavin had jumped to his feet and forced the terrified knife-man to the ground. Angel spun around, keeping her mental map of where everybody was. Conrad had, to her relief, had finally taken cover and was staying out of her way. On the hood of the van, Angel could see that Jackie had lost her fight to avoid being raped. Her clothes were down around her knees, her top was torn open and the rhythmic pumping of the man on top of her told its own story. Nevertheless, to Angel, that situation could wait. She could tell from the screams that the rapist hadn’t started to strangle his victim yet. A much more urgent situation was that two men were running at her, each carrying an odd instrument that looked like a long, bladed hook on the end of a staff. She lifted both her guns but the two stopped in their tracks and dropped their weapons. "On your faces, on the ground, right now."
The sudden, violent and explosively bloody death of the first knife-wielder holding the two sergeants had shocked the survivors of that group in stunned acquiescence, allowing Gavin and Scott to regain control of the situation despite still being outnumbered. Scott broke away from three of the group that had been holding him, leaving them to Gavin, and started to restrain the two men on the ground. By then, Angel had turned and was running towards the group of five men around the UK Health van.
The man raping Jackie was now holding her by the throat and was slamming her head against the metal of the engine hood. He was concentrating on that, savoring the agony and desperation in her eyes and had lost track of the rest of situation. All Jackie could see was his eyes staring down on her, the drool from his slack mouth coating her face when suddenly, without warning, the head just shattered. The man was dead, instantly, hit seven times in the side of the skull which reduced his face and skull to a ruin. He slumped forward on top of Jackie, his smashed face pressed up against hers and his blood gushing over her head.
The other four men, the ones who had been holding her arms and legs let go and started to run from the deadly threat of Angel and her guns. Before she could open fire, they stopped and raised their hands, yet their panic and confusion showed they were obviously expecting to be gunned down as well. Angel was sorely tempted to do so on public hygiene grounds but her situational awareness was telling her that the battle was over. In addition, Shun-Tan had come out of Number 45 with his StG-45 in his hands. He gave Angel a signal, identifying himself, not realizing she had already recognized him. Angel guessed that Mao-Lee was positioned to fire from inside the house; that way she could cover her brother and sister while also protecting Sam and her family. Angel approved.
Behind her, Conrad carefully looked up from where he had taken cover. Painfully aware that his first action was going to earn him a long, comprehensive and detailed tongue-lashing, he was trying not to make the situation any worse. There were three men dead on the ground and nine more being taken into custody. He and Angel independently scanned the scene, checking for additional threats. With anguish, Conrad saw Jackie lying motionless on the hood of her van while Angel used cable-ties to immobilize the survivors of the men who had violated her. Even from several tens of yards away he could tell that, given her own choice, she’d have simply executed them. That was the course of action that exposed her to least risk and he realized the only reason why she hadn’t done so was that extra police already beginning to arrive would have made disposing of the bodies difficult and giving reasonable explanations for the additional deaths more so. Her actions were, as always, supremely practical.
Conrad knew what he had to do. He started to get out of cover, only to duck again when two more police cars, one from each end of Church Road, joined the scene. Four uniformed officers got out and looked around at the carnage. He knew now what his duty was, it was obvious when the two cars were the start of a steady stream converging on the area. His first priority was Jackie and he ran over to where she was lying, fearing that Angel’s intervention had been too late and the girl was dead. She was still pinned underneath the body of the man who had raped her, her head and shoulders soaked with his blood. To his relief, one glance told him that, while she was bleeding heavily from her injuries, none was coming from head wounds. What did worry him was that she was shaking uncontrollably, making a quiet but strange shuddering wail that never seemed to stop.
He looked at the scene for a second, then took a firm grip on the feet of the dead man and pulled him off his victim. The corpse slid off the sloping hood of the van and landed in a heap on the floor. Conrad resisted the temptation to kick it. Then, looking at the badly battered and severely abused woman in front of him, he regretted resisting the urge. Instead, he took off his jacket and put it over her hips, trying to arrange it so it would give her at least some semblance of cover without destroying any evidence. “Jackie, Jackie? It’s Conrad. It’s over, you are safe now, we’re here and we’ll protect you. You’ve got the deadliest gunslinger in the world looking after you and she will not let you be hurt any more. Because of her, the men who did this are either dead or in custody. There’s an evacuation Rotodyne on its way and they’ll take you to hospital. If you need anything just ask us and we’ll look after you.”
Jackie was lying motionless except for the violent trembling in her limbs, her eyes staring upwards, unblinking. Conrad recognized the symptoms. She was catatonic with shock and desperately needed to be kept warm. That thought gave him an inspiration. He went around to the back of the van and found there were some emergency blankets kept there. He assumed they were for people who had been rescued from contaminated environments. Nevertheless, he took them and wrapped them around Jackie.
“You’d better go over to her.” Tony Gavin had the pump-action shotgun that had once been pointed at Conrad in his hands and was using it to contain the surviving members of the group who had threatened to cut his and Scott’s throats. “I’ve got this.”
Mike Scott looked at the scene where Conrad was sitting beside Jackie. “How can she ever forgive me for this? I should never have allowed her to come along. How can I ever forgive myself?”
Privately, Gavin agreed with the last question. In his eyes, allowing the Public Health officer to join the group had been a serious, possibly career ending error of judgment. He was also quite convinced that it was only the last-minute arrival of Angel that had prevented the situation deteriorating horrifically. He still couldn’t believe the brief demonstration of pistol-fighting he had seen. Up to now, he had known Angel as an instructor and a fellow-officer. If one accepted her remoteness, distance and detachment she had been an amiable enough companion. Now he had seen her at work, he could easily believe she was the merciless killer without a conscience that rumors described. The revelation made him wonder if the men who had been taken into custody understood how lucky they were to be still alive. It also made him wonder why they were still alive. He couldn't find a reasonable answer to that.
"Secure here?" Angel's voice cut through the noise of vehicles, aircraft and people shouting instructions.
Scott looked at her and found her eerie calmness chilling. "Yeah, I got them. Angel, I don't know how to thank you. I've never seen anything like that before . . . Why didn’t you kill them all? Did you see what they just did to Jackie?"
Angel looked at him blankly. "It's what I do. It's what I'm teaching your armed response units to do. Assess a situation and act accordingly. As to why I didn’t kill them all, I wanted to. But, have you heard the definition of a conscience?”
Scott shook his head. Angel just looked at him. “It’s the little voice in your head that tells you there are too many witnesses. You need to look at your neck. The guy who was holding the knife has opened the skin and the blood's trickling down your collar. It's not deep but you need to get a bandage on it."
"How's Jackie?" Gavin forced himself to ask the question, holding himself at least partially to blame for the situation. He knew he should have spoken up when he had doubts back in the car park.
Angel shrugged. "Bad. Bleeding like a stuck pig and in deep shock. Conrad's looking after her now. She should never have been here. Mike is going over to see her. I think he's in shock as well.
“I know. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here."
Angel walked over to the van, making sure she didn’t get hit by the stream of police vehicles that were appearing. The Rotodyne ambulance was angling in for a landing and an area of road had been cleared for it. All around her, she saw the brilliant flashes as photographers took pictures of the dead bodies and the scene where Jackie had been raped. She saw Conrad sitting beside her, quietly speaking and she guessed he was constantly repeating that she was safe now and that the people here would look after her. Then, as Jackie was transferred to a stretcher, he saw her and came over. His expression was sheepish.
Angel looked at him and gave him a friendly smile. "Tired of life are we, Conrad?"
He looked at her and knew he had been right. He was due for an epic ass-chewing. Unfortunately, he guessed she had been taking lessons from The Seer in that as well.
The Royal Sovereign, Stoke St. Gregory, Somerset. 7:43 pm.
Casual passers-by might have wondered what was happening at the Royal Sovereign. It wasn’t that the car park was crowded, it always was, even on a Tuesday. The food and beer were that good. The point of interest was that there were two police cars and a Public Health UK van present. They were parked at the back of the pub car park and they weren’t showing their emergency lights, so it was apparent they were not there in a professional capacity. Mostly, it was assumed that one of the local officers was leaving and this was his departure bash.
In fact, the explanation was much simpler. Detective Sergeant Michael Scott and Senior Public Health Officer Jacqueline Hemsley were at the early stage of the dating game where they would arrive at the scene of their date separately, leave separately and usually other friends would be present. Scott’s plans for the evening included a casual suggestion to Jackie that he could pick her up for their next meeting which would be by themselves. Jackie's plans included agreeing.
Despite being in a public house with a fine selection of top-quality locally-brewed ales, there was remarkably little alcohol on the table. Mike Scott, Jackie Hemsley and Tony Gavin were all driving while Veronica ‘Nika’ Gavin had the slight thickening of the waist that showed a baby was in the early stages of making its appearance. Thus, all four had avoided alcohol. They were just about to place their orders when Scott and Gavin’s portable telephones went off almost simultaneously. They made their apologies and retreated to a quiet corner.
“You’ll have to get used to this you know.” Nika looked sympathetically at Jackie sitting opposite her. “Police are never actually off-duty.”
“I know, quite a few of the girls have married police officers and a few of the boys, police women. We work together so much it’s natural I guess. Hello, this doesn’t look good.”
Scott and Gavin returned to the table, their faces grim. Scott explained quickly. “Look, we’ve got an emergency come up. That was DCI Barnstable himself. A mob is gathering outside the home of a witness we have under protection. There’s a woman and two kids in the house and up to a dozen thugs outside. We got to get there. The Guvnor has reinforcements coming in from all over but we’re the nearest.”
“Two of you against how many?” Nika was on the point of having hysterics.
“We don’t know.”
“Why don’t I follow you in my van?” Jackie spoke up, driven mostly by Nika's obvious distress. “I’ve got my Dacia Dokker, its fast, looks like a police vehicle and has the same emergency lights. If this problem is real, they’ll think we’re an armed response unit coming in.”
Scott thought hard. “All right, we’ve precious few choices right now. But Jackie, if we hit real trouble you get out of there fast.”
“And Nika, you’ve got your car here as well, right?” Gavin spoke quickly. He had severe doubts about bringing Jackie along but kept them to himself. “Get home as quickly as you can. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s happening.”
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset. 7.47 pm
“Elder sister, it’s happening again.” Qiu Shun-Tan had heard the police car outside start its engine and move off at speed.
“Eldest sister warned us; if the police get an emergency call, they have to respond. If the car outside is the nearest unit, then it has to go to the scene. I think they know this is a decoy, but they still have to go. What would happen if they did not and the call is genuine?”
“What’s ‘appenin’?” Sam had spotted something was wrong.
“Police car has been called away. That means we’ll get another brick at best, probably something worse.” Mao Lee had picked up her rifle, checked the magazine and made sure she had several spares. Shun-Tan had done the same.
“My guess is a riot outside, followed by an attempt to get in. Don’t worry, we have this but make sure you can get to your panic room if it does go sour. And once inside, never come out. They may try and force you out by doing things to us. That can get pretty bad, but don’t fall for it. If this gets to that point, they will kill everyone eventually anyway. So, once inside stay put with your kids. I don’t need to tell you they come first.”
“They’re coming.” Shun-Tan had seen figures starting to close in.
Mao-Lee opened her portable telephone and dialed 999. She gave a terse warning to the police that explained the situation and then hung up. Then she dialed Angel’s portable. “Eldest sister, we have a mob forming. We need help.”
“On its way.” A man’s voice had responded. Mao-Lee guessed it was Conrad speaking with Angel driving. “We’re at Glastonbury right now. Angel says, hold tight, we’re coming.”
In the background, Mao-Lee heard the vehicle’s emergency sirens going on. It was an immensely reassuring sound, even when diluted through a portable telephone.
Angel and Conrad in West Country Detective Police Car, Zed-Venus-Five, Outside Glastonbury. 7:50pm
“This is traditional. A Chinese family besieged in their home by a murderous mob and Triad hatchetmen rushing through the night to their rescue. This is how the Triads got started.” Angel sounded grimly amused. She had the car’s emergency sirens and lights full on, even the strobing headlights and flashing blue lights in the car’s radiator grill that warned of a ‘lives at risk’ situation. She was steadily accelerating and was doing nearly 90 miles an hour already. She had heard the Police Interceptor SD4 was capable of 130 miles per hour and intended to find out if that was true. Ahead of her, a large container lorry has seen the display and swerved off the road to clear the way through. “We’ll need the dashcam on once we get to the scene. This is likely to get bloody.”
“What puzzles me is why we got the warning from Mao-Lee and not the police emergency service. Our police radio is silent. Shouldn’t we have received an official ‘all-hands’ warning by now?”
“Yes.” Angel was still terse. “And do you get the feeling that this breaking loose just an hour after West Country Division issue an arrest warrant for Jordana Barnstable is a bit of a coincidence?”
“Not quite an arrest warrant, not yet. Seeking her assistance with Police inquiries. DCI Barnstable will take one look at that though, see it’s coming from West Country Division HQ and know the game is up. Whatever else he is, he isn’t stupid. Angel, that car up in front isn’t getting out of the way.”
“Got him. Don’t sweat it, there he goes. Anyway, I know how to push people off the road. Bodyguard training, remember?”
Conrad did not find that reassuring. At that point, the police radio burst into life. “All units, say again all units, major civil disturbance impending in Church Road, Middlezoy. All units available, respond.”
He picked up the hand set and squeezed the transmission button on the side. “This is Zed-Venus-Five, on way to scene now. We received private citizen warning five minutes ago. What is happening?”
“Zed-Venus-Five, this is dispatch. We are working off same private citizen warning. Be advised, this is the first official response call.” There was a brief hesitation. “Is Angel there?”
“Yes.” Angel snapped the word out.
“Thank God for that. Something very bad is going down. Be advised, our warning came from your friends. Central off.”
“So Mao-Lee called it in; what is going on over there?” Conrad stared out through the windscreen, willing the car to go faster and feeling it respond as Angel pushed it to its limits.
Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset. 8.00 pm
The convoy of three vehicles looked remarkably like two police cars followed by an armed response unit van. They were coming in fast, with the van struggling to keep up, all three vehicles with their emergency light bars blazing and headlights strobing. In the lead car, Mike Scott had received the message sent out by dispatch central. Already the timing discrepancy was worrying him. Another thing was that the duty car hadn’t returned. Being called away on an emergency was one thing; not returning immediately was quite another.
He broadsided his vehicle to a halt outside Number 45, swung the door open and dived out. As he did so, he saw a dozen or more figures emerging from the darkness to close in on him. He grabbed his microphone and screamed the warning. “Jackie, it's an ambush, get out of here!” Then he was brought to the ground as a group of attackers swarmed over him. In the background he saw Tony Gavin being dragged to the ground the same way.
Jackie Hemsley got the desperate, last-minute warning and swerved into an emergency stop. She slammed the transmission into reverse and tried to back her way clear at the van’s maximum speed. What she didn’t know was that the ambushers had already dragged tire-bursting strips out behind her. When she hit them, all four tires on her van exploded and the vehicle ran out-of-control into a ditch. She screamed as the windows were smashed in, hands reached in to drag her out and pulled her through the smashed glass. Kicking, screaming, and fighting desperately, she was thrown on to the van’s engine hood and pinned down.
Arriving on the scene, Angel took one look at the situation and knew that there had to be tire-bursting strips on the road. These, she knew how to handle and anyway her police car, unlike the Public Health UK van, had run-flat tires that gave her a few moments of control at the critical point. She used them to bring the car skidding across the road to an emergency halt and dive out of the driver’s door.
To her horror, she saw Conrad stepping out of the car and lifting his hands in supplication. “In the name of God, people, stop this.”
“Go to hell, copper.” One of the men at the ambush turned to face Conrad, swung a shotgun up and pointed it at him amid a stream of highly obscene abuse. The shotgun blast, when it came, went straight up in the air. The gunman had already suffered half a dozen bullet wounds in his chest and four more in his face. Angel was in her red-zone now, fighting on autopilot, her decisions made in a part of her brain that had been conditioned by a quarter of a century of close-quarters gun battles. Human decision-making was too slow in a battle where times were measured in hundredths of a second. Angel knew that, her opponents didn’t, and that was the difference between a professional gunslinger and an amateur.
In the brief second it had taken her to kill the man threatening Conrad, she had absorbed all the details of the scene. Scott and Gavin were being held by groups of three or four men each, one of whom was holding a knife to the Sergeants’ throats. Jackie Hemsley was spread-eagled on the front of her van, held down by her arms and legs while a fifth man was kneeling astride her trying to unfasten her utility belt and the waistband of her slacks. She was frantically struggling still, trying to cross her legs and swing her hips but the remorseless pull on her limbs was defeating her. Yet for all the impending horror of the developing riot, she detected an air of falseness about it. The attacks were real enough but she realized that most of those present were being carried along by mob-think and would snap out of it as soon as the spell was broken. If they didn't, they would die.
The leader of the men clustered around Scott and Gavin had meant to scream ‘Drop the guns or we’ll kill them.’ What the man holding a knife to Scott’s throat actually said was “Drop the gu . . . .” before he went down to a stream of bullets from the gun in Angel’s left hand. The man holding a knife to Gavin’s neck took one look at the scene and threw the knife down, by a microsecond fast enough to save his life. "Don't shoot, please God don't shoot."
Gavin had jumped to his feet and forced the terrified knife-man to the ground. Angel spun around, keeping her mental map of where everybody was. Conrad had, to her relief, had finally taken cover and was staying out of her way. On the hood of the van, Angel could see that Jackie had lost her fight to avoid being raped. Her clothes were down around her knees, her top was torn open and the rhythmic pumping of the man on top of her told its own story. Nevertheless, to Angel, that situation could wait. She could tell from the screams that the rapist hadn’t started to strangle his victim yet. A much more urgent situation was that two men were running at her, each carrying an odd instrument that looked like a long, bladed hook on the end of a staff. She lifted both her guns but the two stopped in their tracks and dropped their weapons. "On your faces, on the ground, right now."
The sudden, violent and explosively bloody death of the first knife-wielder holding the two sergeants had shocked the survivors of that group in stunned acquiescence, allowing Gavin and Scott to regain control of the situation despite still being outnumbered. Scott broke away from three of the group that had been holding him, leaving them to Gavin, and started to restrain the two men on the ground. By then, Angel had turned and was running towards the group of five men around the UK Health van.
The man raping Jackie was now holding her by the throat and was slamming her head against the metal of the engine hood. He was concentrating on that, savoring the agony and desperation in her eyes and had lost track of the rest of situation. All Jackie could see was his eyes staring down on her, the drool from his slack mouth coating her face when suddenly, without warning, the head just shattered. The man was dead, instantly, hit seven times in the side of the skull which reduced his face and skull to a ruin. He slumped forward on top of Jackie, his smashed face pressed up against hers and his blood gushing over her head.
The other four men, the ones who had been holding her arms and legs let go and started to run from the deadly threat of Angel and her guns. Before she could open fire, they stopped and raised their hands, yet their panic and confusion showed they were obviously expecting to be gunned down as well. Angel was sorely tempted to do so on public hygiene grounds but her situational awareness was telling her that the battle was over. In addition, Shun-Tan had come out of Number 45 with his StG-45 in his hands. He gave Angel a signal, identifying himself, not realizing she had already recognized him. Angel guessed that Mao-Lee was positioned to fire from inside the house; that way she could cover her brother and sister while also protecting Sam and her family. Angel approved.
Behind her, Conrad carefully looked up from where he had taken cover. Painfully aware that his first action was going to earn him a long, comprehensive and detailed tongue-lashing, he was trying not to make the situation any worse. There were three men dead on the ground and nine more being taken into custody. He and Angel independently scanned the scene, checking for additional threats. With anguish, Conrad saw Jackie lying motionless on the hood of her van while Angel used cable-ties to immobilize the survivors of the men who had violated her. Even from several tens of yards away he could tell that, given her own choice, she’d have simply executed them. That was the course of action that exposed her to least risk and he realized the only reason why she hadn’t done so was that extra police already beginning to arrive would have made disposing of the bodies difficult and giving reasonable explanations for the additional deaths more so. Her actions were, as always, supremely practical.
Conrad knew what he had to do. He started to get out of cover, only to duck again when two more police cars, one from each end of Church Road, joined the scene. Four uniformed officers got out and looked around at the carnage. He knew now what his duty was, it was obvious when the two cars were the start of a steady stream converging on the area. His first priority was Jackie and he ran over to where she was lying, fearing that Angel’s intervention had been too late and the girl was dead. She was still pinned underneath the body of the man who had raped her, her head and shoulders soaked with his blood. To his relief, one glance told him that, while she was bleeding heavily from her injuries, none was coming from head wounds. What did worry him was that she was shaking uncontrollably, making a quiet but strange shuddering wail that never seemed to stop.
He looked at the scene for a second, then took a firm grip on the feet of the dead man and pulled him off his victim. The corpse slid off the sloping hood of the van and landed in a heap on the floor. Conrad resisted the temptation to kick it. Then, looking at the badly battered and severely abused woman in front of him, he regretted resisting the urge. Instead, he took off his jacket and put it over her hips, trying to arrange it so it would give her at least some semblance of cover without destroying any evidence. “Jackie, Jackie? It’s Conrad. It’s over, you are safe now, we’re here and we’ll protect you. You’ve got the deadliest gunslinger in the world looking after you and she will not let you be hurt any more. Because of her, the men who did this are either dead or in custody. There’s an evacuation Rotodyne on its way and they’ll take you to hospital. If you need anything just ask us and we’ll look after you.”
Jackie was lying motionless except for the violent trembling in her limbs, her eyes staring upwards, unblinking. Conrad recognized the symptoms. She was catatonic with shock and desperately needed to be kept warm. That thought gave him an inspiration. He went around to the back of the van and found there were some emergency blankets kept there. He assumed they were for people who had been rescued from contaminated environments. Nevertheless, he took them and wrapped them around Jackie.
“You’d better go over to her.” Tony Gavin had the pump-action shotgun that had once been pointed at Conrad in his hands and was using it to contain the surviving members of the group who had threatened to cut his and Scott’s throats. “I’ve got this.”
Mike Scott looked at the scene where Conrad was sitting beside Jackie. “How can she ever forgive me for this? I should never have allowed her to come along. How can I ever forgive myself?”
Privately, Gavin agreed with the last question. In his eyes, allowing the Public Health officer to join the group had been a serious, possibly career ending error of judgment. He was also quite convinced that it was only the last-minute arrival of Angel that had prevented the situation deteriorating horrifically. He still couldn’t believe the brief demonstration of pistol-fighting he had seen. Up to now, he had known Angel as an instructor and a fellow-officer. If one accepted her remoteness, distance and detachment she had been an amiable enough companion. Now he had seen her at work, he could easily believe she was the merciless killer without a conscience that rumors described. The revelation made him wonder if the men who had been taken into custody understood how lucky they were to be still alive. It also made him wonder why they were still alive. He couldn't find a reasonable answer to that.
"Secure here?" Angel's voice cut through the noise of vehicles, aircraft and people shouting instructions.
Scott looked at her and found her eerie calmness chilling. "Yeah, I got them. Angel, I don't know how to thank you. I've never seen anything like that before . . . Why didn’t you kill them all? Did you see what they just did to Jackie?"
Angel looked at him blankly. "It's what I do. It's what I'm teaching your armed response units to do. Assess a situation and act accordingly. As to why I didn’t kill them all, I wanted to. But, have you heard the definition of a conscience?”
Scott shook his head. Angel just looked at him. “It’s the little voice in your head that tells you there are too many witnesses. You need to look at your neck. The guy who was holding the knife has opened the skin and the blood's trickling down your collar. It's not deep but you need to get a bandage on it."
"How's Jackie?" Gavin forced himself to ask the question, holding himself at least partially to blame for the situation. He knew he should have spoken up when he had doubts back in the car park.
Angel shrugged. "Bad. Bleeding like a stuck pig and in deep shock. Conrad's looking after her now. She should never have been here. Mike is going over to see her. I think he's in shock as well.
“I know. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here."
Angel walked over to the van, making sure she didn’t get hit by the stream of police vehicles that were appearing. The Rotodyne ambulance was angling in for a landing and an area of road had been cleared for it. All around her, she saw the brilliant flashes as photographers took pictures of the dead bodies and the scene where Jackie had been raped. She saw Conrad sitting beside her, quietly speaking and she guessed he was constantly repeating that she was safe now and that the people here would look after her. Then, as Jackie was transferred to a stretcher, he saw her and came over. His expression was sheepish.
Angel looked at him and gave him a friendly smile. "Tired of life are we, Conrad?"
He looked at her and knew he had been right. He was due for an epic ass-chewing. Unfortunately, he guessed she had been taking lessons from The Seer in that as well.
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Sixteen
North Somerset Region Headquarters, West Country Police, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Mike, how is she?" Sergeant Collier had never in all his career experienced anything like this. His memories stretched back even further, to the last days of the Occupation, and still he couldn't remember situations like this. There were, he knew with heavy certainty, senior police officers from all over the country converging on North Somerset. The advance guard had already arrived and its officers were searching through the personnel files. He was very glad he was retiring soon; he suspected anybody who had even a shadow of a question against their behavior would have their careers irreversibly blighted.
"In intensive care. She's really badly hurt, Steve, they raped her. Right there in front of us. They made us watch."
"It's worse than that, Mike. The helicopter found the police car that was outside 45. Crashed in a ditch. The bastards torched it with Fred and Tim inside. Both dead. I just hope they were before the car burned. You need to know that there's a gag order in place on this, right from the top. Nobody talks to anybody outside and there are senior brass already here, ready to enforce it. By the way, I was asked to show you this."
It was the signal log from dispatch central. The information on it was deadly. "You mean Barnstable sent us the warning ten minutes before it was received here?"
"That's right, he knew what was going to happen. He was sending officers before anybody else knew what was happening. And didn’t warn anybody."
"Where is he?" Scott was furiously angry as the implications of the log sank in.
"Down in the interrogation room three. Mike, don’t do anything stupid, there's too many top brass descending on us for that. And if that doesn’t stop you, remember what Angel says about violence against prisoners. Doesn’t do any good and hurts everybody. And you really don’t want to piss her off right now."
Scott went to the rear of the station where the interrogation rooms were located. He went straight to three and opened the door. Barnstable was sitting behind a table, apparently alone. Two things stopped Scott from committing the violence that he had fully intended. One was the video camera on the wall that would record everything. The other was the sight of Barnstable himself. He was sitting motionless in the simple wooden chair behind the table, his eyes vacant. He never looked up as Scott entered the room.
“You set us up. You sent us in there without backup knowing that they would be waiting for us and you made sure it would be at least ten minutes before the rest of the station got the word. You wanted to be sure we were both dead. You . . . you . . . . .” Words failed Scott and the last bit came out as a near-scream that combined almost incandescent rage, deep, bitter frustration and overwhelming grief, “you plonker!”
He strode out slamming the door behind him. Conrad and Angel were coming in the opposite direction, Conrad looking very sheepish. Angel was different, she was in 'business mode' and her whole bearing and attitude exuded an ice-cold chill. Looking at her eyes, he realized that they were completely non-reflective. Light just fell into them and vanished, just like the abyss Nietzsche had described. When she saw him, her mouth twisted into a tight smile that never even came close to touching those blank, dreadful eyes. When she spoke, Scott got the impression of an accountant adding items to a ledger. “Any word on Jackie?”
Scott shook his head. “She’s in intensive care. The doctors won’t say much because of the nature of her injuries but one of the surgeons said that she’s been hurt very badly. They won’t let me in.”
“I spoke with her, Mike, before she was airlifted out. She didn’t say anything, she’s too deep in shock. I think being told she was safe now and we’d protect her got through though.” Conrad looked at Angel, his expression still downcast.
Angel shook her head and punched him lightly on the arm. “Cheer up, Conrad. I didn’t even threaten to blow your brains out this time.”
“This time you were right, Angel. I was so incredibly stupid it bewilders me. Are we good?”
"We're good. Look, Conrad, It’s called a brain-fart. Remember how I nearly got a shotgun blast in the back the same way? You saved me, remember? Now forget it and get in there to do your questioning job. Mike, if you want to you can watch this from the viewing room. Watching Conrad do an interrogation is an education. I’ve been watching him for ten years and I still can’t understand how he does it.”
Watching her, Scott realized that all the apparent friendliness and humor was faked and always had been. Angel was as cold, distanced and detached from the situation around her as any person could be. He realized he was looking at somebody whose soul, if she had one at all, was defined by a complete lack of any vestige of humanity. Suddenly, he realized why Dante had made his ultimate circle of Hell one of eternal infinite cold where all passion and sentiment had been burned out. The insight terrified him.
North Somerset Division Headquarters, West Country Police, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Thomas Barnstable, you are charged with conspiracy in the murders of Police Constable Frederick Naylor and Police Constable Timothy Wallace, the attempted murders of Special Inspector Angelique de Llorente, Detective Sergeant Antony Gavin, Detective Sergeant Michael Scott, Consultant Conrad de Llorente and the rape and attempted murder of Senior Public Health Officer Jacqueline Hemsley. You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defense if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” Detective Inspector Helen Morse turned to the desk sergeant who had accompanied her. "Take it away and throw it in the most unpleasant cell you have. And put it on suicide watch."
She turned around and saw Angel lounging against a wall. "Good to see you again Angel. Coming back up to Thames Valley?"
"As soon as we've cleaned up down here. This place is a damned awful mess. Tell the newbies up there they'd better start reading their Sig-Sauer manuals. There will be a quiz."
"You can tell me all about the mess. The investigation into this will take the entire region apart. You heard that Sir David Durling has offered his resignation?" She looked up as there was a knock on the door.
"The court documents and reports ma'am. Sergeant Collier asked me to deliver them. Excuse me, ma'am. Are you related to DCI Morse in Oxford?" DS Gavin had come up to watch his ex-boss taken to the cells.
Helen rolled her eyes. "He's my uncle and I do have a career that doesn't depend on the fact. Now, we need to get these charges in front of the magistrate."
"Magistrate's Court is over the road and they're holding special session tomorrow morning starting at eight. A lot of work to do following tonight's events." Sergeant Steven Collier had worked long hours to make sure the paperwork was in order. After he had it finished, two other desk sergeants had volunteered to come in and check it. Nobody wanted this case to be put at risk by simple clerical errors.
Two uniformed police constables and another Detective Sergeant joined the group watching Barnstable being taken away. When he had gone, the DS made his report to Angel in her persona as, apparently, the most senior police officer on the scene. Watching from one side, Helen Morse's mouth twitched at that. "They've gone, ma'am. Joan and Jordana Barnstable. Done a runner. Forensics are on their way to the house now."
The report was interrupted by a telephone call. Sergeant Collier picked it up. "Conrad, it's for you."
Conrad took the receiver and listened for a couple of minutes. When the call ended, he stopped and stared into space before speaking. "Angel, I've got to go to the hospital. Jackie's come out of her catatonia and her first action was to try and kill herself. Lucky you had her put on suicide watch."
"I'll be right with you. Damn, I seem to be spending most of my time in this case putting people on the watch. Steve, do you need me to do anything for tomorrow?"
Collier shook his head. "You'll have to be there, that's all. You may get asked a question or two but I doubt it."
Angel followed Conrad out through the doors. "How bad is she?"
"The attempted suicide? She broke some glass and tried to cut her wrists."
"Up and down or across?"
"Up and down, she meant it. The staff got to her very fast but she's already lost a lot of blood and this put her close to tipping over the edge." Conrad paused and looked around to make sure nobody else could overhear. "She's got fourth degree vaginal lacerations. According to the doctors, it doesn’t get much worse than that. She was going in for surgery again but now . . . Anyway, she's asking for me. I think you being there will help her as well. So, she'll know she's safe."
Angel sighed and looked across the police station parking lot. She was remembering the night when the same thing had happened to her, only the people who should have helped her had turned her away. Everything that had happened in her life stemmed from that night and she wondered briefly what her life would have been like if people had rallied around her the way they were doing for Jackie. For a moment she was jealous, but the brief shadow quickly vanished before she was really aware it was there. I really wish I could feel sorry for her. I know I should be and I am trying hard, really hard, but I just can’t.
Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
The court had been cleared of spectators while the dash cam footage from the police vehicles had been shown. By chance, Zed-Venus-Five had ended up positioned so that the Public Health UK van and the events that had taken place around it were clearly in view. By the time it had reached the end of the sequence, the four women on the jury were weeping. Mr. Justice Melrose had been advised by the jury that there were indeed cases to answer in all of the nine charge-sheets that had been brought before them. Two additional charges each had been added to the lengthy list, that of the murder of two uniformed police officers in the wrecked patrol car. The autopsy results had arrived only an hour before; to everybody's relief they showed that the officers had been dead from shotgun blasts before their police car had been torched. The nine prisoners were committed to the assizes for trial.
Now, the previous jury had been dismissed and a Coroner's Jury brought in. The fact that three men had died at the hands of a police officer meant that the verdict would be returned by a jury advising the Coroner who would then inform the Magistrate of the decisions. The Coroner had advised that jury of the causes of death, in all cases multiple gunshot wounds, and the films of the incident had been shown again. Once spectators had been re-admitted, affidavits from the officers involved had been presented.
Melrose then briefed the jury on the verdicts they could reach. "Most of the verdicts that could be reached are inappropriate in these circumstances. There are only two that are appropriate here. The first is justifiable homicide. This indicates that while the subjects died as the result of a deliberate action taken by another, that action was justified by the circumstances. Such justifications may include self-defense or, in the case of police officers, action taken to protect the lives of others. The other verdict you may consider is unlawful killing. This indicates that the subjects died as the result of a deliberate action taken by another and that action was not justified by the circumstances. The choice between these verdicts is yours and yours alone.
"In this case, you will doubtless pay much attention to the films we have seen, films which reveal the great wisdom of the Home Office in mandating that all police vehicles be equipped with dash-cams. I would put it to you that the first case shows that the shooting of Christopher Andrews was necessary to prevent him from firing a shotgun at close range, into the face of a civilian and thus is a clear example of justifiable homicide. The next case, that of James Ballinger, was a man who was holding a knife to the neck of a police officer and was threatening to cut his, and his fellow-officer's, throats should another police officer not drop her guns. Since complying with this demand would certainly have resulted in her death, you may well come to the conclusion that these cases combine both protecting others and self-defense.
"Robert Couchman was shot dead while in the process of raping, beating and attempting to strangle an officer of Public Health UK. You might well be certain in your own minds that had he not been shot when he was, his victim would certainly have died very soon afterwards. You might well also bear in mind that this court is not in the business of taking weeks to second-guess officers who had to make a decision in a tiny fraction of a second. A key point that should weigh in your minds is that the other men who have just appeared in this court were detained alive despite their participation in a loathsome, despicable and cowardly attack. Please now withdraw and consider your verdicts remembering that this is not a trial; the law requires you to give your opinion, as reasonable people, based on the evidence presented and the balance of probabilities. You are not required to give your opinion beyond reasonable doubt."
The Coroner's Jury was out for almost an hour. When they came back, the foreman handed a folded piece of paper to the Coroner who read it and then handed it to Mr. Justice Melrose. He read it and looked up.
"In the case of Christopher Andrews, how does the Jury find?"
"We find his death to be justifiable homicide, Mr. Justice."
"I concur. So ruled. In the case of James Ballinger, how does the Jury find?"
"We find his death to be justifiable homicide, Mr. Justice."
"I concur. So ruled. In the case of Robert Couchman, how does the Jury find?"
"We find his death to be very justifiable homicide Mr. Justice."
"Sadly, I must tell the jury that this is not an available option, and your verdict shall be recorded in the standard form. These cases are closed. Inspector, may I see you in my chambers please."
Chambers, Mr. Justice Melrose, Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Come in, Inspector de Llorente." Melrose had poured himself a cup of tea. "May I offer you some tea? I am rather partial to Chinese tea myself. I watched those films and I will say one thing right now. You are a very brave young woman. I wish I could do something that would recognize that fact although I suspect the authorities will do so in due course."
"Thank you . . . ." Angel hesitated, not knowing the correct form of address. "Your Honor?"
"Ahh, American. Just a Mister will be suitable. I am but a humble magistrate who wanted to see what sort of woman would voluntarily enter a pitched battle with a dozen men and be the one who walked away afterwards. Your skill with those pistols is remarkable. What position do you hold with the Police?"
"I am a firearms training instructor, Mr. Melrose. Did I get that right?" Melrose nodded.
"And you teach our officers to that standard?"
"I try to. Very few people can dual-wield the way I do. Also, teaching them to assess risk and prioritize objectives is as important as shooting guns. However, the major part of any firearms combat course is not teaching people to shoot but when not to and how to avoid a situation getting to the point where they have to. Last night was too late, by the time we had got there, it had already passed that point. If the other officers had been warned at the same time Gavin and Scott were, it would have been a very different situation. One in which probably nobody would have been hurt. In my report on this situation, I will be indicating that there was a failure in police command and control, one that was made worse by the actions of one officer whose motivations are under investigation. I will also recommend that the police dispatchers need to see themselves as part of the front-line force and a full participant in any action that takes place. In turn, they need to be recognized as a vital part of the team by the men on the street."
"I will concur with that agreement. I suspect that your voice carries more weight than mine but helping you would be a privilege. All I can say is that we were very lucky you were there at all last night. Otherwise we would have had at least four dead police officers instead of two and an equally dead Public Health official. And, I suspect, three dead members of the public as well. May I offer you a Jaffa Cake to have with your tea?"
"Thank you." Angel took an orange-flavored Jaffa Cake off the plate. "One thing I don’t understand. I shot and killed two people up in Oxford and we never had all this."
"Ahh, the Atkinson-Rowley case. You weren't officially a police officer at that time, just a private citizen doing her civic duty, so the Coroner simply presented his justifiable homicide conclusion. Since you are a police officer now, you are held to a somewhat higher standard and a jury must have its say. I believe that is what you teach is it not? That the police should be above reproach and seen by everybody to be so?"
Angel nodded. Melrose took another sip of tea and offered the Jaffa Cakes to Angel again. "Just what is happening in this county . . . Angelique, or may I call you Angel?"
"Angel is good. You'll have to ask Conrad for the full details but it seems that DCI Barnstable, his wife and his daughter appear to have been involved in at least some of the killings in this part of the world. I honestly can't say much more than that because I really don't know. As I said, you'll have to ask Conrad, he's the investigator. In that context, I'm just dumb muscle."
Melrose shook his head. "Very far from dumb I think and I find your discretion admirable By the way, you may be interested to know that while you have been here, Detective Inspector Morse has been promoted to Detective Chief Inspector and assigned as Barnstable's replacement as a first step in completely reorganizing this region. You know her I believe?"
"She is, or was, one of my students at Thames Valley. If I may respectfully offer some advice, don’t ask about her uncle. It annoys her."
"I will 'Endeavor' not to." Melrose laughed at a private joke that Angel did not understand. "Well, Angel, thank you for coming to my chambers, I have enjoyed speaking with you. And, thank you for the service you performed for our community last night. That was indeed bravely done."
He got up as she was leaving and stretched out his hand. Angel bit her lip, took it and gave the Magistrate a firm handshake. To her surprise, her nausea at human contact wasn't quite as bad as usual. "Thank you for the meeting and the cookies, Mr. Melrose.
As she was on the way out, Melrose added one last comment. "By the way, Angel, my old friend Chris Keeble asked me to pass his best wishes and compliments to you on a job well done. I don’t know what he means by that of course.”
North Somerset Region Headquarters, West Country Police, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Mike, how is she?" Sergeant Collier had never in all his career experienced anything like this. His memories stretched back even further, to the last days of the Occupation, and still he couldn't remember situations like this. There were, he knew with heavy certainty, senior police officers from all over the country converging on North Somerset. The advance guard had already arrived and its officers were searching through the personnel files. He was very glad he was retiring soon; he suspected anybody who had even a shadow of a question against their behavior would have their careers irreversibly blighted.
"In intensive care. She's really badly hurt, Steve, they raped her. Right there in front of us. They made us watch."
"It's worse than that, Mike. The helicopter found the police car that was outside 45. Crashed in a ditch. The bastards torched it with Fred and Tim inside. Both dead. I just hope they were before the car burned. You need to know that there's a gag order in place on this, right from the top. Nobody talks to anybody outside and there are senior brass already here, ready to enforce it. By the way, I was asked to show you this."
It was the signal log from dispatch central. The information on it was deadly. "You mean Barnstable sent us the warning ten minutes before it was received here?"
"That's right, he knew what was going to happen. He was sending officers before anybody else knew what was happening. And didn’t warn anybody."
"Where is he?" Scott was furiously angry as the implications of the log sank in.
"Down in the interrogation room three. Mike, don’t do anything stupid, there's too many top brass descending on us for that. And if that doesn’t stop you, remember what Angel says about violence against prisoners. Doesn’t do any good and hurts everybody. And you really don’t want to piss her off right now."
Scott went to the rear of the station where the interrogation rooms were located. He went straight to three and opened the door. Barnstable was sitting behind a table, apparently alone. Two things stopped Scott from committing the violence that he had fully intended. One was the video camera on the wall that would record everything. The other was the sight of Barnstable himself. He was sitting motionless in the simple wooden chair behind the table, his eyes vacant. He never looked up as Scott entered the room.
“You set us up. You sent us in there without backup knowing that they would be waiting for us and you made sure it would be at least ten minutes before the rest of the station got the word. You wanted to be sure we were both dead. You . . . you . . . . .” Words failed Scott and the last bit came out as a near-scream that combined almost incandescent rage, deep, bitter frustration and overwhelming grief, “you plonker!”
He strode out slamming the door behind him. Conrad and Angel were coming in the opposite direction, Conrad looking very sheepish. Angel was different, she was in 'business mode' and her whole bearing and attitude exuded an ice-cold chill. Looking at her eyes, he realized that they were completely non-reflective. Light just fell into them and vanished, just like the abyss Nietzsche had described. When she saw him, her mouth twisted into a tight smile that never even came close to touching those blank, dreadful eyes. When she spoke, Scott got the impression of an accountant adding items to a ledger. “Any word on Jackie?”
Scott shook his head. “She’s in intensive care. The doctors won’t say much because of the nature of her injuries but one of the surgeons said that she’s been hurt very badly. They won’t let me in.”
“I spoke with her, Mike, before she was airlifted out. She didn’t say anything, she’s too deep in shock. I think being told she was safe now and we’d protect her got through though.” Conrad looked at Angel, his expression still downcast.
Angel shook her head and punched him lightly on the arm. “Cheer up, Conrad. I didn’t even threaten to blow your brains out this time.”
“This time you were right, Angel. I was so incredibly stupid it bewilders me. Are we good?”
"We're good. Look, Conrad, It’s called a brain-fart. Remember how I nearly got a shotgun blast in the back the same way? You saved me, remember? Now forget it and get in there to do your questioning job. Mike, if you want to you can watch this from the viewing room. Watching Conrad do an interrogation is an education. I’ve been watching him for ten years and I still can’t understand how he does it.”
Watching her, Scott realized that all the apparent friendliness and humor was faked and always had been. Angel was as cold, distanced and detached from the situation around her as any person could be. He realized he was looking at somebody whose soul, if she had one at all, was defined by a complete lack of any vestige of humanity. Suddenly, he realized why Dante had made his ultimate circle of Hell one of eternal infinite cold where all passion and sentiment had been burned out. The insight terrified him.
North Somerset Division Headquarters, West Country Police, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Thomas Barnstable, you are charged with conspiracy in the murders of Police Constable Frederick Naylor and Police Constable Timothy Wallace, the attempted murders of Special Inspector Angelique de Llorente, Detective Sergeant Antony Gavin, Detective Sergeant Michael Scott, Consultant Conrad de Llorente and the rape and attempted murder of Senior Public Health Officer Jacqueline Hemsley. You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defense if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” Detective Inspector Helen Morse turned to the desk sergeant who had accompanied her. "Take it away and throw it in the most unpleasant cell you have. And put it on suicide watch."
She turned around and saw Angel lounging against a wall. "Good to see you again Angel. Coming back up to Thames Valley?"
"As soon as we've cleaned up down here. This place is a damned awful mess. Tell the newbies up there they'd better start reading their Sig-Sauer manuals. There will be a quiz."
"You can tell me all about the mess. The investigation into this will take the entire region apart. You heard that Sir David Durling has offered his resignation?" She looked up as there was a knock on the door.
"The court documents and reports ma'am. Sergeant Collier asked me to deliver them. Excuse me, ma'am. Are you related to DCI Morse in Oxford?" DS Gavin had come up to watch his ex-boss taken to the cells.
Helen rolled her eyes. "He's my uncle and I do have a career that doesn't depend on the fact. Now, we need to get these charges in front of the magistrate."
"Magistrate's Court is over the road and they're holding special session tomorrow morning starting at eight. A lot of work to do following tonight's events." Sergeant Steven Collier had worked long hours to make sure the paperwork was in order. After he had it finished, two other desk sergeants had volunteered to come in and check it. Nobody wanted this case to be put at risk by simple clerical errors.
Two uniformed police constables and another Detective Sergeant joined the group watching Barnstable being taken away. When he had gone, the DS made his report to Angel in her persona as, apparently, the most senior police officer on the scene. Watching from one side, Helen Morse's mouth twitched at that. "They've gone, ma'am. Joan and Jordana Barnstable. Done a runner. Forensics are on their way to the house now."
The report was interrupted by a telephone call. Sergeant Collier picked it up. "Conrad, it's for you."
Conrad took the receiver and listened for a couple of minutes. When the call ended, he stopped and stared into space before speaking. "Angel, I've got to go to the hospital. Jackie's come out of her catatonia and her first action was to try and kill herself. Lucky you had her put on suicide watch."
"I'll be right with you. Damn, I seem to be spending most of my time in this case putting people on the watch. Steve, do you need me to do anything for tomorrow?"
Collier shook his head. "You'll have to be there, that's all. You may get asked a question or two but I doubt it."
Angel followed Conrad out through the doors. "How bad is she?"
"The attempted suicide? She broke some glass and tried to cut her wrists."
"Up and down or across?"
"Up and down, she meant it. The staff got to her very fast but she's already lost a lot of blood and this put her close to tipping over the edge." Conrad paused and looked around to make sure nobody else could overhear. "She's got fourth degree vaginal lacerations. According to the doctors, it doesn’t get much worse than that. She was going in for surgery again but now . . . Anyway, she's asking for me. I think you being there will help her as well. So, she'll know she's safe."
Angel sighed and looked across the police station parking lot. She was remembering the night when the same thing had happened to her, only the people who should have helped her had turned her away. Everything that had happened in her life stemmed from that night and she wondered briefly what her life would have been like if people had rallied around her the way they were doing for Jackie. For a moment she was jealous, but the brief shadow quickly vanished before she was really aware it was there. I really wish I could feel sorry for her. I know I should be and I am trying hard, really hard, but I just can’t.
Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
The court had been cleared of spectators while the dash cam footage from the police vehicles had been shown. By chance, Zed-Venus-Five had ended up positioned so that the Public Health UK van and the events that had taken place around it were clearly in view. By the time it had reached the end of the sequence, the four women on the jury were weeping. Mr. Justice Melrose had been advised by the jury that there were indeed cases to answer in all of the nine charge-sheets that had been brought before them. Two additional charges each had been added to the lengthy list, that of the murder of two uniformed police officers in the wrecked patrol car. The autopsy results had arrived only an hour before; to everybody's relief they showed that the officers had been dead from shotgun blasts before their police car had been torched. The nine prisoners were committed to the assizes for trial.
Now, the previous jury had been dismissed and a Coroner's Jury brought in. The fact that three men had died at the hands of a police officer meant that the verdict would be returned by a jury advising the Coroner who would then inform the Magistrate of the decisions. The Coroner had advised that jury of the causes of death, in all cases multiple gunshot wounds, and the films of the incident had been shown again. Once spectators had been re-admitted, affidavits from the officers involved had been presented.
Melrose then briefed the jury on the verdicts they could reach. "Most of the verdicts that could be reached are inappropriate in these circumstances. There are only two that are appropriate here. The first is justifiable homicide. This indicates that while the subjects died as the result of a deliberate action taken by another, that action was justified by the circumstances. Such justifications may include self-defense or, in the case of police officers, action taken to protect the lives of others. The other verdict you may consider is unlawful killing. This indicates that the subjects died as the result of a deliberate action taken by another and that action was not justified by the circumstances. The choice between these verdicts is yours and yours alone.
"In this case, you will doubtless pay much attention to the films we have seen, films which reveal the great wisdom of the Home Office in mandating that all police vehicles be equipped with dash-cams. I would put it to you that the first case shows that the shooting of Christopher Andrews was necessary to prevent him from firing a shotgun at close range, into the face of a civilian and thus is a clear example of justifiable homicide. The next case, that of James Ballinger, was a man who was holding a knife to the neck of a police officer and was threatening to cut his, and his fellow-officer's, throats should another police officer not drop her guns. Since complying with this demand would certainly have resulted in her death, you may well come to the conclusion that these cases combine both protecting others and self-defense.
"Robert Couchman was shot dead while in the process of raping, beating and attempting to strangle an officer of Public Health UK. You might well be certain in your own minds that had he not been shot when he was, his victim would certainly have died very soon afterwards. You might well also bear in mind that this court is not in the business of taking weeks to second-guess officers who had to make a decision in a tiny fraction of a second. A key point that should weigh in your minds is that the other men who have just appeared in this court were detained alive despite their participation in a loathsome, despicable and cowardly attack. Please now withdraw and consider your verdicts remembering that this is not a trial; the law requires you to give your opinion, as reasonable people, based on the evidence presented and the balance of probabilities. You are not required to give your opinion beyond reasonable doubt."
The Coroner's Jury was out for almost an hour. When they came back, the foreman handed a folded piece of paper to the Coroner who read it and then handed it to Mr. Justice Melrose. He read it and looked up.
"In the case of Christopher Andrews, how does the Jury find?"
"We find his death to be justifiable homicide, Mr. Justice."
"I concur. So ruled. In the case of James Ballinger, how does the Jury find?"
"We find his death to be justifiable homicide, Mr. Justice."
"I concur. So ruled. In the case of Robert Couchman, how does the Jury find?"
"We find his death to be very justifiable homicide Mr. Justice."
"Sadly, I must tell the jury that this is not an available option, and your verdict shall be recorded in the standard form. These cases are closed. Inspector, may I see you in my chambers please."
Chambers, Mr. Justice Melrose, Magistrate's Court, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Come in, Inspector de Llorente." Melrose had poured himself a cup of tea. "May I offer you some tea? I am rather partial to Chinese tea myself. I watched those films and I will say one thing right now. You are a very brave young woman. I wish I could do something that would recognize that fact although I suspect the authorities will do so in due course."
"Thank you . . . ." Angel hesitated, not knowing the correct form of address. "Your Honor?"
"Ahh, American. Just a Mister will be suitable. I am but a humble magistrate who wanted to see what sort of woman would voluntarily enter a pitched battle with a dozen men and be the one who walked away afterwards. Your skill with those pistols is remarkable. What position do you hold with the Police?"
"I am a firearms training instructor, Mr. Melrose. Did I get that right?" Melrose nodded.
"And you teach our officers to that standard?"
"I try to. Very few people can dual-wield the way I do. Also, teaching them to assess risk and prioritize objectives is as important as shooting guns. However, the major part of any firearms combat course is not teaching people to shoot but when not to and how to avoid a situation getting to the point where they have to. Last night was too late, by the time we had got there, it had already passed that point. If the other officers had been warned at the same time Gavin and Scott were, it would have been a very different situation. One in which probably nobody would have been hurt. In my report on this situation, I will be indicating that there was a failure in police command and control, one that was made worse by the actions of one officer whose motivations are under investigation. I will also recommend that the police dispatchers need to see themselves as part of the front-line force and a full participant in any action that takes place. In turn, they need to be recognized as a vital part of the team by the men on the street."
"I will concur with that agreement. I suspect that your voice carries more weight than mine but helping you would be a privilege. All I can say is that we were very lucky you were there at all last night. Otherwise we would have had at least four dead police officers instead of two and an equally dead Public Health official. And, I suspect, three dead members of the public as well. May I offer you a Jaffa Cake to have with your tea?"
"Thank you." Angel took an orange-flavored Jaffa Cake off the plate. "One thing I don’t understand. I shot and killed two people up in Oxford and we never had all this."
"Ahh, the Atkinson-Rowley case. You weren't officially a police officer at that time, just a private citizen doing her civic duty, so the Coroner simply presented his justifiable homicide conclusion. Since you are a police officer now, you are held to a somewhat higher standard and a jury must have its say. I believe that is what you teach is it not? That the police should be above reproach and seen by everybody to be so?"
Angel nodded. Melrose took another sip of tea and offered the Jaffa Cakes to Angel again. "Just what is happening in this county . . . Angelique, or may I call you Angel?"
"Angel is good. You'll have to ask Conrad for the full details but it seems that DCI Barnstable, his wife and his daughter appear to have been involved in at least some of the killings in this part of the world. I honestly can't say much more than that because I really don't know. As I said, you'll have to ask Conrad, he's the investigator. In that context, I'm just dumb muscle."
Melrose shook his head. "Very far from dumb I think and I find your discretion admirable By the way, you may be interested to know that while you have been here, Detective Inspector Morse has been promoted to Detective Chief Inspector and assigned as Barnstable's replacement as a first step in completely reorganizing this region. You know her I believe?"
"She is, or was, one of my students at Thames Valley. If I may respectfully offer some advice, don’t ask about her uncle. It annoys her."
"I will 'Endeavor' not to." Melrose laughed at a private joke that Angel did not understand. "Well, Angel, thank you for coming to my chambers, I have enjoyed speaking with you. And, thank you for the service you performed for our community last night. That was indeed bravely done."
He got up as she was leaving and stretched out his hand. Angel bit her lip, took it and gave the Magistrate a firm handshake. To her surprise, her nausea at human contact wasn't quite as bad as usual. "Thank you for the meeting and the cookies, Mr. Melrose.
As she was on the way out, Melrose added one last comment. "By the way, Angel, my old friend Chris Keeble asked me to pass his best wishes and compliments to you on a job well done. I don’t know what he means by that of course.”
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Seventeen
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"I don't suppose I can outbid Thames Valley and get you to base your training courses here can I?" Helen Morse was sitting in a new office chair, behind a new desk. The office smelled of fresh paint and even the filing cabinets had been replaced. The Council Works Department had lived up to their name and done an excellent job of refurbishment in the few hours available. All traces of DCI Barnstable had vanished. She watched Angel shaking her head. "I thought so. Worth trying though. Tell me, Angel, how much rebuilding work do I need to do here? Do we need a completely new CID?"
Angel thought carefully about that and while doing so she realized that she was thinking as a manager rather than the street soldier she had been. "No. Contrary to Chris's belief, the staff here are pretty good. They know their jobs and how they should be done. It's just that they believe that trying to do their jobs right is not worth the hassle and they just coast along."
"Leadership problem then?"
"Damn right Helen." Angel paused; Conrad had coughed gently. "What do you think, Conrad?"
"You do have one structural problem here. You are way under-strength on Detective Inspectors and way over-strength on Detective Sergeants. I think the appropriate promotions have been held up, probably because Barnstable wanted to keep all the investigations in his own hands to make sure they went the way he wanted. The result is, as Angel says, people don’t see the point of going out on a limb to do their jobs right and instead just coast along. You need a group of DIs who can form a middle management layer and put some drive into Criminal Investigations. With Taunton full of top police brass, it's probably a good time to push through some promotions."
Morse nodded. It suddenly occurred to her that Angel, directly working for Chris Keeble, had a lot more influence than most of the senior officers who were streaming into the area. To her relief, Chief Constable Sir David Durling's offered resignation had been refused on the grounds that he had already identified the problems and taken action to correct them. She realized that decision had Angel's fingerprints on it. Probably not decisive ones, but certainly influential. "Point made. Any ideas?"
"The two DSs we've worked with are Gavin and Scott. Scott was one of those who sneaked into our training courses at Thames Valley."
"Not him. Not after what happened to Jackie Hemsley. He'll be a DS, at best, until the day he leaves the force. He had no right or authority to put a civilian in that position. And she's paid, is paying, the price for his blunder."
Angel nodded in agreement. "Easing him out?"
"Let's just say he'll be somewhere else, on strict probation, for a long, long time. Gavin, though?"
Angel glanced at Conrad who picked up the ball. "He's a coaster, primarily because he's afraid of having authority. He told Angel he didn’t want to be promoted because as officers went up through the ranks, politics got in the way of doing things right. As a DS he could do things right. Which, oddly enough, makes him a good candidate. Although he doesn’t realize it, he's shown he's prepared to make personal sacrifices to see the job done the way it should be done. He's got into a lot of bad habits though; that's where you'll come in."
"All right. I've got a free hand here, where reorganization is concerned anyway. Let's get him in here." She reached over and pressed a button on the internal telephone system. "Ask Detective Sergeant Gavin to come to my office please."
Conrad guessed that Gavin had been waiting for the call and arrived on the scene within a few seconds. "Ma'am?"
"I prefer people call me Sir, like any other copper. Now, Detective Sergeant Anthony Gavin, I've been reviewing your file and your work in this region. Lazy bugger aren’t you? However, I've been talking to Angel who speaks highly of your field skills, and let me tell you her praise doesn’t come easily. Conrad has spoken well of your deductive abilities. I can’t comment on how easily his praise comes but, for what it's worth, you got it. So I am offering you a probationary post as Detective Inspector. Do well, and it will be confirmed. Screw up and you'll be pounding a beat again."
"Thank you ma . .. .Sir. But I don’t wa . . . . "
Angel cut in before he could finish. "Tony, you told me once you didn’t want promotion because it would stop you doing your job right. I had to say something very similar to Conrad here once. Now, I'll tell you what I told him. If you had to do something once and it turned out badly, trying again is your chance learn what went wrong and to do the job properly. You said that once you moved above DS, you wouldn’t be able to do your job right. Well, what you told me shows you saw and recognized what was being done wrong. Now's your chance to make things right and do things right."
Gavin looked around the completely redecorated office. "I suppose so. Thank you, Ma. . . . Sir."
Morse made a note in her pad. "I'll get your new rank posted immediately. As Conrad pointed out, this is a good time to get a lot of promotions, and disciplinary firings, done quickly. Gavin, looking at your record, I advise you to drink a lot of over-caffeinated coffee until you get used to moving out of second gear. And take a refresher course on driving. If you're lucky, Angel will give you some pointers. Finally, as your first job in the DI rank, I'm going to put you in charge of finding Barnstable's wife and daughter. You were his DS for a long time, you know the family. You're in the best position to do that."
Conrad lifted a hand and got a nod to continue from Morse. "We've got an idea that may help there. Barnstable gave up everything to give those two a chance to get away. We can use that against them. Angel?"
"That riot the Barnstables staged was partly intended to cover the women's escape. They've got a good head start and they can disappear fairly easily. If they're not on the continent now, they will be fairly soon. However, Barnstable knows where they are, I'm sure of it. They have to have a rendezvous point in case he got clear as well. All we have to do is persuade him to tell us. Conrad?'
"That should be possible. Tony, how good at acting are you and Mike?"
Cell Block, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
Barnstable sat in his cell, still staring into space. Complete detachment was his only defense against the state to which he had fallen. That way, he could ignore the searing contempt on the faces of other officers as they passed his cell and, much worse, the contemptuous loathing in the looks he received from the women. Part of him wished that he could simply be sent out of the station and transferred to prison. Only, he was all too well aware of what was likely to happen to him there.
The voices from the room next door penetrated the walls and sliced into Barnstable's isolation. He recognized the voices of course and what they said seared into his brain.
"So you're a Detective Inspector now Tony? I thought you didn’t want promotion?"
"Didn’t get a chance to say no. Angel made it clear that she wanted me to accept and I'm not going to cross her, not in the mood she's in. Talk about bloody frightening."
"I know what you mean. It’s a side of her we never saw at Thames Valley. There she was always amiable enough as long as we all did what she wanted. What's going on?"
"It’s the way that bastard in there and his bitches tried to poison Conrad. She doesn’t care about herself but when they tried to hurt him . . . . Well, Doc Pollard says if they'd eaten those mushrooms they would spent three days dying in agony. Now the bitches are on the run, she'd determined to get to them before we do. And when she does, God help them. It’s whispered she's brought in Triad torturers to kill them very, very slowly."
"Dear God. Do you think she will get to them first? I mean we have the whole police force looking."
"Of course she will. There's 130,000 Chinese in Britain which means a quarter of a million eyes watching. All the Triads are in, and then there's the Mob, the Camorra, the Milieu, the Russian Mafiya, the Unione Corse, you name it. She's cashed in a whole mass of her personal chips to bring in every organized crime group in the world. I bet she's even got the Women's Christian Temperance Union out there looking."
"The WCTU isn't an organized crime group."
"I'm not so sure about that. But, the sick thing is that Barnstable's bitches can’t possibly know that the whole underworld is hunting them. They'll go to an organized crime group for help getting out of the country and they'll be handed right over to the 14K instead. We'll never find out about it of course and we couldn’t do a damned thing about it if we did. They'll get taken to some secluded place, spend a week or two being tortured to death and then their bodies will be fed to the pigs. I could almost feel sorry for them."
"I won't." Scott sounded savage. "Jackie and I could have had a good thing but that bastard destroyed it. She won’t even look at me now. When I try and talk to her she just turns her face to the wall and cries. I hope those experts of Angel's really stretch it out."
"Oh, they'll do that all right. They'll probably start by scraping the bitches' bones. They'll put a knife into a muscle and cut down to the bone then scrape the blade along it like they were playing a violin. The screams even sound like a violin so the book says. Anyway, come along, I'll take you the canteen for a cup of tea and battenburg cake to celebrate my promotion."
The voices faded away while Barnstable slowly absorbed the full horror of what he had just heard. As the implications sank in, he realized there was only one thing he could do that could prevent the hideous plans he had discovered. The Police had to get to his wife and daughter before the Triads did. He went over to the door of his cell and started hammering on it, screaming "I want to see DCI Morse, now."
Canteen, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"There wasn't any truth in any of that was there?" Scott sounded really worried.
"Of course not." Conrad had decided to treat himself and had accompanied his cup of tea with a slice of Battenberg cake. He skewered one of the pink sponge squares with his fork and ate it with appreciation. "This is very good."
"I keep telling people, I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not a sadist." Angel had a cup of canteen tea that she had liberally laced with rum. "And all the Triads gave up torturing people decades ago. It wasn't cost-effective. I think our last torturers retired at least twenty years ago and they'd been given other duties long before that. Anyway, there's no profit to be made from organizing a manhunt like that. Quite the reverse. All cost, no benefit."
"It's true. I've been working with Angel for years and in all that time, I've never seen her be deliberately cruel to anybody. I'm sorry about the bit with Jackie, Mike. I hope there's no truth in that either?" Conrad had written the script for the 'conversation' with Angel's help and was now having qualms about it.
"More than I'd like. She says she doesn’t blame me but I can see in her eyes she does. And I can’t deny it."
"Don't." Conrad leaned forward slightly. "Right now, she can only think of two people who might be to blame, you or her. You denying blame will be the same as telling her that this is all her fault and that is something you must never, ever think, let alone say. When the shock passes, she'll realize that the person who was to blame was Robert Couchman and he's dead. That's when her recovery will really start. Just be patient."
The room went silent suddenly. Sergeant Collier had come in with a list in his hand. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Barnstable caved in five minutes after our little play ended. The winner of the sweepstake is . . . . . . Constable Karen Maxfield!"
Maxfield jumped to her feet, her hands clasped in the air over her head. "Drinks on me, at the Nag's Head, when the shift's over!"
That really did cause a roar of approval.
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
Three Public Health UK vans were parked outside the bungalow when Angel pulled up outside. The roar of cheering as the environmental officers saw them seemed to drown out almost everything else. Conrad got out the passenger seat and gave a bow, Angel an elaborate Georgian-era curtsey that Igrat had taught her. The cheers redoubled. The officer in charge stepped forward and gave a sharp salute. “Sir, ma’am, we’ve been over this place top to bottom, side-to-side and front to back. It’s clean. We checked the gardens as well and there’s nothing poisonous or damaging there. This place is as safe from chemical, biological and radiation hazards as any place can be.”
“Thank you. . .” Conrad twisted his head to read the supervisor’s tag. “Principle Environmental Officer Williams. Is the K for Keith?”
“Kurt, Sir. And ma’am . . .”
“Angel”
“Angel, thank you from everybody here. There’s some that think Environmental Officers are soft targets for a bashing. Well, they won’t be thinking that any more. You’ve done everybody in the service a huge favor and we won’t forget it. Keeping an eye on this place for you is the least we can do.”
Once Conrad had closed the door behind him, he looked around and sniffed the air. "Odd how we can always tell when somewhere had been really thoroughly cleaned and decontaminated. It's not the smell, more the absence of any kind of smell. I suppose that little conversation means the 14K now has another alliance with the authorities."
"Word's already going out to all our sub-houses. Be nice to PHUK." Angel stopped and cocked her head to one side. "That's a really unfortunate name isn’t it? Our little conversation just now will add speed to that. Sun Yee On and Wo Hop To are following our lead. Now, get the plates out and I'll unwrap our fish and chips. That'll get rid of the absence of smell problem. Then we'll have to bring our boards up to date. They're two weeks behind since we went to the mattresses."
"We'll have to move them around too. I want to regroup them so we have the primary murder victims with the secondaries arranged with them. If I'm right and the secondaries are part of the cover-up for the deliberate misdirection of the original case, then we should concentrate on those primaries. Solve them and everything else will fall into place."
"Sounds like a plan." Angel picked up a chip from the packages and ate it. "Why is it this is the only country in the world that makes decent fish and chips?"
"Something in the blood, I suppose. Restricting the investigation to the primaries cuts down the number of cases we have to think about. We seem to have 90-odd primaries and the rest are secondaries. That's a lot more containable. Cod's good. We must remember that shop. Or shouldn't we go to the same place twice?"
Angel didn't answer; the sudden ringing of her portable phone stopped her from doing so. She flipped it open and spoke quietly to the person on the other end. When she finished she was grinning broadly. "That was Brian from the London Firm. It appears that Joan and Jordana Barnstable tried to do a runner when the police closed in on the location Barnstable gave us. They went to The Firm to try and get themselves smuggled out of the country and got a ride, back down here in the back of a florist's van instead. They should be arriving soon. Brian wanted my advice on whether to make the delivery directly to Taunton station or ask me to do it for them. I told him to leave the two on the station steps themselves. Chance to do themselves some good with the locals."
Conrad nearly choked on his fried cod. "I shouldn’t laugh but it is funny. Can you imagine the face of our friends in Upper High Street when a florist’s van pulls up and unloads two much-wanted suspects?"
Angel had picked up her fried plaice and taken a bite out of the end. "Oh yes. Delicious isn’t it?"
"It is indeed." Conrad stopped for a moment. "The situation or the plaice?"
"Both. I could live on fish and chips."
"And in today's news, shares in pizza companies world-wide dived sharply on news that Angel was shifting her diet to fish and chips."
Conrad's impersonation of a TV newsreader nearly had Angel choking on her fish on her turn. "Well, that might be true but we can only get real fish and chips here. So, the rest of the time, I'll stick to pizza. Without mushrooms."
Conrad nodded, suddenly very serious. "I think it will be a long time before either of us eats mushrooms again."
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"I don't suppose I can outbid Thames Valley and get you to base your training courses here can I?" Helen Morse was sitting in a new office chair, behind a new desk. The office smelled of fresh paint and even the filing cabinets had been replaced. The Council Works Department had lived up to their name and done an excellent job of refurbishment in the few hours available. All traces of DCI Barnstable had vanished. She watched Angel shaking her head. "I thought so. Worth trying though. Tell me, Angel, how much rebuilding work do I need to do here? Do we need a completely new CID?"
Angel thought carefully about that and while doing so she realized that she was thinking as a manager rather than the street soldier she had been. "No. Contrary to Chris's belief, the staff here are pretty good. They know their jobs and how they should be done. It's just that they believe that trying to do their jobs right is not worth the hassle and they just coast along."
"Leadership problem then?"
"Damn right Helen." Angel paused; Conrad had coughed gently. "What do you think, Conrad?"
"You do have one structural problem here. You are way under-strength on Detective Inspectors and way over-strength on Detective Sergeants. I think the appropriate promotions have been held up, probably because Barnstable wanted to keep all the investigations in his own hands to make sure they went the way he wanted. The result is, as Angel says, people don’t see the point of going out on a limb to do their jobs right and instead just coast along. You need a group of DIs who can form a middle management layer and put some drive into Criminal Investigations. With Taunton full of top police brass, it's probably a good time to push through some promotions."
Morse nodded. It suddenly occurred to her that Angel, directly working for Chris Keeble, had a lot more influence than most of the senior officers who were streaming into the area. To her relief, Chief Constable Sir David Durling's offered resignation had been refused on the grounds that he had already identified the problems and taken action to correct them. She realized that decision had Angel's fingerprints on it. Probably not decisive ones, but certainly influential. "Point made. Any ideas?"
"The two DSs we've worked with are Gavin and Scott. Scott was one of those who sneaked into our training courses at Thames Valley."
"Not him. Not after what happened to Jackie Hemsley. He'll be a DS, at best, until the day he leaves the force. He had no right or authority to put a civilian in that position. And she's paid, is paying, the price for his blunder."
Angel nodded in agreement. "Easing him out?"
"Let's just say he'll be somewhere else, on strict probation, for a long, long time. Gavin, though?"
Angel glanced at Conrad who picked up the ball. "He's a coaster, primarily because he's afraid of having authority. He told Angel he didn’t want to be promoted because as officers went up through the ranks, politics got in the way of doing things right. As a DS he could do things right. Which, oddly enough, makes him a good candidate. Although he doesn’t realize it, he's shown he's prepared to make personal sacrifices to see the job done the way it should be done. He's got into a lot of bad habits though; that's where you'll come in."
"All right. I've got a free hand here, where reorganization is concerned anyway. Let's get him in here." She reached over and pressed a button on the internal telephone system. "Ask Detective Sergeant Gavin to come to my office please."
Conrad guessed that Gavin had been waiting for the call and arrived on the scene within a few seconds. "Ma'am?"
"I prefer people call me Sir, like any other copper. Now, Detective Sergeant Anthony Gavin, I've been reviewing your file and your work in this region. Lazy bugger aren’t you? However, I've been talking to Angel who speaks highly of your field skills, and let me tell you her praise doesn’t come easily. Conrad has spoken well of your deductive abilities. I can’t comment on how easily his praise comes but, for what it's worth, you got it. So I am offering you a probationary post as Detective Inspector. Do well, and it will be confirmed. Screw up and you'll be pounding a beat again."
"Thank you ma . .. .Sir. But I don’t wa . . . . "
Angel cut in before he could finish. "Tony, you told me once you didn’t want promotion because it would stop you doing your job right. I had to say something very similar to Conrad here once. Now, I'll tell you what I told him. If you had to do something once and it turned out badly, trying again is your chance learn what went wrong and to do the job properly. You said that once you moved above DS, you wouldn’t be able to do your job right. Well, what you told me shows you saw and recognized what was being done wrong. Now's your chance to make things right and do things right."
Gavin looked around the completely redecorated office. "I suppose so. Thank you, Ma. . . . Sir."
Morse made a note in her pad. "I'll get your new rank posted immediately. As Conrad pointed out, this is a good time to get a lot of promotions, and disciplinary firings, done quickly. Gavin, looking at your record, I advise you to drink a lot of over-caffeinated coffee until you get used to moving out of second gear. And take a refresher course on driving. If you're lucky, Angel will give you some pointers. Finally, as your first job in the DI rank, I'm going to put you in charge of finding Barnstable's wife and daughter. You were his DS for a long time, you know the family. You're in the best position to do that."
Conrad lifted a hand and got a nod to continue from Morse. "We've got an idea that may help there. Barnstable gave up everything to give those two a chance to get away. We can use that against them. Angel?"
"That riot the Barnstables staged was partly intended to cover the women's escape. They've got a good head start and they can disappear fairly easily. If they're not on the continent now, they will be fairly soon. However, Barnstable knows where they are, I'm sure of it. They have to have a rendezvous point in case he got clear as well. All we have to do is persuade him to tell us. Conrad?'
"That should be possible. Tony, how good at acting are you and Mike?"
Cell Block, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
Barnstable sat in his cell, still staring into space. Complete detachment was his only defense against the state to which he had fallen. That way, he could ignore the searing contempt on the faces of other officers as they passed his cell and, much worse, the contemptuous loathing in the looks he received from the women. Part of him wished that he could simply be sent out of the station and transferred to prison. Only, he was all too well aware of what was likely to happen to him there.
The voices from the room next door penetrated the walls and sliced into Barnstable's isolation. He recognized the voices of course and what they said seared into his brain.
"So you're a Detective Inspector now Tony? I thought you didn’t want promotion?"
"Didn’t get a chance to say no. Angel made it clear that she wanted me to accept and I'm not going to cross her, not in the mood she's in. Talk about bloody frightening."
"I know what you mean. It’s a side of her we never saw at Thames Valley. There she was always amiable enough as long as we all did what she wanted. What's going on?"
"It’s the way that bastard in there and his bitches tried to poison Conrad. She doesn’t care about herself but when they tried to hurt him . . . . Well, Doc Pollard says if they'd eaten those mushrooms they would spent three days dying in agony. Now the bitches are on the run, she'd determined to get to them before we do. And when she does, God help them. It’s whispered she's brought in Triad torturers to kill them very, very slowly."
"Dear God. Do you think she will get to them first? I mean we have the whole police force looking."
"Of course she will. There's 130,000 Chinese in Britain which means a quarter of a million eyes watching. All the Triads are in, and then there's the Mob, the Camorra, the Milieu, the Russian Mafiya, the Unione Corse, you name it. She's cashed in a whole mass of her personal chips to bring in every organized crime group in the world. I bet she's even got the Women's Christian Temperance Union out there looking."
"The WCTU isn't an organized crime group."
"I'm not so sure about that. But, the sick thing is that Barnstable's bitches can’t possibly know that the whole underworld is hunting them. They'll go to an organized crime group for help getting out of the country and they'll be handed right over to the 14K instead. We'll never find out about it of course and we couldn’t do a damned thing about it if we did. They'll get taken to some secluded place, spend a week or two being tortured to death and then their bodies will be fed to the pigs. I could almost feel sorry for them."
"I won't." Scott sounded savage. "Jackie and I could have had a good thing but that bastard destroyed it. She won’t even look at me now. When I try and talk to her she just turns her face to the wall and cries. I hope those experts of Angel's really stretch it out."
"Oh, they'll do that all right. They'll probably start by scraping the bitches' bones. They'll put a knife into a muscle and cut down to the bone then scrape the blade along it like they were playing a violin. The screams even sound like a violin so the book says. Anyway, come along, I'll take you the canteen for a cup of tea and battenburg cake to celebrate my promotion."
The voices faded away while Barnstable slowly absorbed the full horror of what he had just heard. As the implications sank in, he realized there was only one thing he could do that could prevent the hideous plans he had discovered. The Police had to get to his wife and daughter before the Triads did. He went over to the door of his cell and started hammering on it, screaming "I want to see DCI Morse, now."
Canteen, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"There wasn't any truth in any of that was there?" Scott sounded really worried.
"Of course not." Conrad had decided to treat himself and had accompanied his cup of tea with a slice of Battenberg cake. He skewered one of the pink sponge squares with his fork and ate it with appreciation. "This is very good."
"I keep telling people, I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not a sadist." Angel had a cup of canteen tea that she had liberally laced with rum. "And all the Triads gave up torturing people decades ago. It wasn't cost-effective. I think our last torturers retired at least twenty years ago and they'd been given other duties long before that. Anyway, there's no profit to be made from organizing a manhunt like that. Quite the reverse. All cost, no benefit."
"It's true. I've been working with Angel for years and in all that time, I've never seen her be deliberately cruel to anybody. I'm sorry about the bit with Jackie, Mike. I hope there's no truth in that either?" Conrad had written the script for the 'conversation' with Angel's help and was now having qualms about it.
"More than I'd like. She says she doesn’t blame me but I can see in her eyes she does. And I can’t deny it."
"Don't." Conrad leaned forward slightly. "Right now, she can only think of two people who might be to blame, you or her. You denying blame will be the same as telling her that this is all her fault and that is something you must never, ever think, let alone say. When the shock passes, she'll realize that the person who was to blame was Robert Couchman and he's dead. That's when her recovery will really start. Just be patient."
The room went silent suddenly. Sergeant Collier had come in with a list in his hand. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Barnstable caved in five minutes after our little play ended. The winner of the sweepstake is . . . . . . Constable Karen Maxfield!"
Maxfield jumped to her feet, her hands clasped in the air over her head. "Drinks on me, at the Nag's Head, when the shift's over!"
That really did cause a roar of approval.
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
Three Public Health UK vans were parked outside the bungalow when Angel pulled up outside. The roar of cheering as the environmental officers saw them seemed to drown out almost everything else. Conrad got out the passenger seat and gave a bow, Angel an elaborate Georgian-era curtsey that Igrat had taught her. The cheers redoubled. The officer in charge stepped forward and gave a sharp salute. “Sir, ma’am, we’ve been over this place top to bottom, side-to-side and front to back. It’s clean. We checked the gardens as well and there’s nothing poisonous or damaging there. This place is as safe from chemical, biological and radiation hazards as any place can be.”
“Thank you. . .” Conrad twisted his head to read the supervisor’s tag. “Principle Environmental Officer Williams. Is the K for Keith?”
“Kurt, Sir. And ma’am . . .”
“Angel”
“Angel, thank you from everybody here. There’s some that think Environmental Officers are soft targets for a bashing. Well, they won’t be thinking that any more. You’ve done everybody in the service a huge favor and we won’t forget it. Keeping an eye on this place for you is the least we can do.”
Once Conrad had closed the door behind him, he looked around and sniffed the air. "Odd how we can always tell when somewhere had been really thoroughly cleaned and decontaminated. It's not the smell, more the absence of any kind of smell. I suppose that little conversation means the 14K now has another alliance with the authorities."
"Word's already going out to all our sub-houses. Be nice to PHUK." Angel stopped and cocked her head to one side. "That's a really unfortunate name isn’t it? Our little conversation just now will add speed to that. Sun Yee On and Wo Hop To are following our lead. Now, get the plates out and I'll unwrap our fish and chips. That'll get rid of the absence of smell problem. Then we'll have to bring our boards up to date. They're two weeks behind since we went to the mattresses."
"We'll have to move them around too. I want to regroup them so we have the primary murder victims with the secondaries arranged with them. If I'm right and the secondaries are part of the cover-up for the deliberate misdirection of the original case, then we should concentrate on those primaries. Solve them and everything else will fall into place."
"Sounds like a plan." Angel picked up a chip from the packages and ate it. "Why is it this is the only country in the world that makes decent fish and chips?"
"Something in the blood, I suppose. Restricting the investigation to the primaries cuts down the number of cases we have to think about. We seem to have 90-odd primaries and the rest are secondaries. That's a lot more containable. Cod's good. We must remember that shop. Or shouldn't we go to the same place twice?"
Angel didn't answer; the sudden ringing of her portable phone stopped her from doing so. She flipped it open and spoke quietly to the person on the other end. When she finished she was grinning broadly. "That was Brian from the London Firm. It appears that Joan and Jordana Barnstable tried to do a runner when the police closed in on the location Barnstable gave us. They went to The Firm to try and get themselves smuggled out of the country and got a ride, back down here in the back of a florist's van instead. They should be arriving soon. Brian wanted my advice on whether to make the delivery directly to Taunton station or ask me to do it for them. I told him to leave the two on the station steps themselves. Chance to do themselves some good with the locals."
Conrad nearly choked on his fried cod. "I shouldn’t laugh but it is funny. Can you imagine the face of our friends in Upper High Street when a florist’s van pulls up and unloads two much-wanted suspects?"
Angel had picked up her fried plaice and taken a bite out of the end. "Oh yes. Delicious isn’t it?"
"It is indeed." Conrad stopped for a moment. "The situation or the plaice?"
"Both. I could live on fish and chips."
"And in today's news, shares in pizza companies world-wide dived sharply on news that Angel was shifting her diet to fish and chips."
Conrad's impersonation of a TV newsreader nearly had Angel choking on her fish on her turn. "Well, that might be true but we can only get real fish and chips here. So, the rest of the time, I'll stick to pizza. Without mushrooms."
Conrad nodded, suddenly very serious. "I think it will be a long time before either of us eats mushrooms again."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Eighteen
Main Steps, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
The van from the Pretty Petals Flower Company pulled up at the foot of the steps and four very large and obviously over-muscled men, who did not at all look like workers in a flower shop, got out and unloaded two somewhat cumbersome parcels, wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string. They placed the parcels on the Police Station steps, got back in the van and drove off. Once clear of the town, they got out again, changed the number-plates and switched the inscription on the sides from 'Pretty Petals Flower Company' to 'Marigold Cakes and Confectionary'. The clear plastic overlay with the previous name was tossed into a jerrycan of acetone and the flower company vanished as if it had never been. Which, of course, it never had.
Back on the police station steps, the two parcels were viewed by the police officers arriving for their shift. The more optimistic, or naive, thought they were bouquets of flowers sent to welcome their new DCI to her job. The more pessimistic, or realistic, assumed they were bombs sent for the same purpose. However, both explanations were discredited by the fact the packages were wriggling around and making 'mmph, mmph, mmph' noises.
"All right, I was expecting this." DCI Morse looked at the package and mentally raised her eyebrows. "We need to get these two to the cells. Make sure they, and Barnstable, are kept separated, Conrad will want to speak with them individually."
"Should we unwrap them first?" Constable Karen Maxfield was looking at the two brown-paper parcels with awed fascination.
DCI Morse shook her head. "To the cells first, then unwrap them. By the way, what does the gift card attached to the parcels say?"
Detective Inspector Gavin bent down and read it, "It says, 'With love from Houndsditch' Sir. . . . Houndsditch?"
"That's where the headquarters of the London Firm hangs out. Rest of you, form two groups of four and carry our new guests to the cells."
Ten minutes later, Joan and Jordana Barnstable were in their allocated cells being carefully unwrapped. The results caused a ripple of noise that consisted equally of surprise and amusement. One constable, a new addition to the ranks and on his first day out of training blurted, "what is all that stuff?"
"Bondage equipment, you can get it from any BDSM catalog." Karen Maxfield realized everybody was staring at her and she went a very bright shade of crimson. "Or so I've been told."
Interview Room Three, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"So, did you know Kevin Small and Darren Woods?" Conrad looked over at Timothy Fish with something very close to pity in his heart. He was a typical small-time crook who had been swept along by the false romance of being 'outside the law' right up to the point where he had found himself facing trial on charges that could easily put him into prison for the rest of his life. Part of his delusion had been that he considered himself to be street-tough and that had lasted right up to the moment he had found himself facing Angel's guns. Now, he knew himself for what he really was, an arrogant, ignorant and above all cowardly child who had wrecked his life before it had even properly started. He also had very bad breath.
"They was part of our gang, weren't they? Comes up with the idea of snatchin' 'ags from the 'ack of theer 'ike. Brought in lotsa dosh at first only that Chink bint put up a fight didn't she? n' them two cops turned up anarl." Fish looked at Angel lounging up against the wall, recognized her and then the significance of her appearance sank in. So did what he had just said and he went white.
"So, Tim, why did you kill them if they were part of your gang?"
" Kill'em? us? ya gottow be kiddin' ain't ya? weren't us what done it were it. Fist us hears was when the 'odies got found."
Conrad thought about that. It had the ring of truth about it and it was hard to think of a plausible motivation for the gang to turn on two of its own members like that. "Then why do you think they were killed?"
" Bait inn't? the 'int what lives in that 'ouse ad'em done for killin her old lad didn’t she. That’s why us go round ther to dee her."
"But why would they want to kill George Woods? He'd just bailed his nephew out."
"They wuz goin' to dee a runner weren't they. When they said they was goin' to skip, he threatened to grass them up. So they did'im."
Conrad shook his head. "Just shot him down . ."
"Yeah, well iz own fault for grassin' weren't it. Snitches get found in ditches don'they. Nuff said "
"And you were there while it happened?" Conrad was getting a picture of what had been going on and it wasn't what Fish was telling him.
"Nah, bint told us."
"Do you see the picture of the woman here?" Conrad passed over a pile of pictures, one of which was Jordana Barnstable.
Fish thumbed through them. "Naah . . . . but yeah. This one's a little like er thow in'she? But t’yun 'angs round us is propa old like."
That picture was Jordana Barnstable. Conrad picked out another picture. "How about this one?"
"Yeah. That’s 'er."
The picture was of Joan Barnstable.
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
After spending twelve hours interviewing the survivors of the gang, Conrad felt he needed a bath, a stiff drink and to read some classical English literature. Even Angel looked genuinely sympathetic.
“So, what do you think?” Helen Morse had arranged for Conrad to have a nice cup of tea.
“I think the British education system is in terminal collapse.” Conrad shuddered at the memory of the conversations.
Angel reached over and poured some rum from her hip-flask into his tea. “Get that inside you and you’ll feel better.”
“I agree. That’s why everybody who supports comprehensive education sends their kids to private schools.” Morse shuddered slightly in horror at the thought of her own children going to one of the comprehensive schools. She and her husband had sacrificed a lot of the small luxuries that many families took for granted to make sure they didn’t have to. “Now, what did we learn about the crimes here?”
“The gang we pulled in are not responsible for the death of George Woods. Quite apart from the fact that none of them knew how he had been killed, they just aren’t smart enough. They all identified Joan Barnstable as, and I quote, ‘the old bint what hangs around with us’. The odd thing is, I can’t really see any of this lot actually attacking a house with women and children inside and killing the occupants. I can see them talking about it, I can see them boasting about how horribly they’ll do the occupants but I know youngsters like that. When it comes to actually doing it, they’ll be somewhere else. Only this time they actually started doing it.”
"That's why hooligans like that got the name Leggits. They hang around on the streets acting tough and shouting abuse at passers-by. If one of the people they're insulting actually turns to face them, one of them yells 'leggit' and they all run off.
“One of the things we watch out for when we’re recruiting. The ones who mouth off on how tough they are and the evil things they’ll do to our enemies are the ones that won’t be there when it comes time to do something.” Angel shook her head. "It’s always the quiet ones we watch out for. Anyway, these days we recruit from the universities, not the streets.”
“You know, Angel, it sometimes worries me how alike we are.” Morse shook her head. “We do the same when examining candidates. As you pointed out when you started looking into our Armed Response Units. The people who most want to be in them are the ones who should never be allowed near them. And yet those kids attacked and killed two police officers. They came close to killing two more and very badly raped Jackie. There’s a huge discontinuity there that I just can’t figure out.”
There was a knock on the door and Dr. Pollard stuck his head in. “I’ve got two messages from the Hospital, people. One is that Jackie has been taken back into emergency surgery, severe internal bleeding. Again. The other is, I got a call from Sir Kendall. The footprints we found at the Small-Woods crime scene and the one near 115 all match a shoe found in Jordana Barnstable’s collection. Even better news. In going through some of the old crime scene pictures, I found some shoe prints that were overlooked.”
“You mean not followed up.” DCI Morse was in no mood for euphemisms.
“Ignored.” Dr. Pollard had got the message. There was a new sheriff in town. “One of them matched a shoe in Jordana’s wardrobe as well. We’re still checking the rest.”
"It won't help us that much." Morse looked sad but also slightly accusatory. "I had a long talk with Commissioner Keeble before coming down here. There's going to be a change in procedures as soon as it gets through Parliament. We won't be able to use evidence from one crime to support another charge in capital offenses, at least. Each murder will have to be tried individually. This is one case where that will hurt us."
"A thought." Angel had been mulling over the situation. "In the Black Dragon War, we would sometimes use students to stage a demonstration as a cover for a strike. Once, we were planning to get a Black Dragon high-up like that. The demonstration started as his car was coming down the street and it stopped him. He saw a red-headed Chinese woman walking towards him, he thought it was me and dropped dead of a heart attack. Joke is, it wasn't me at all, just a student who looked a bit like me. I still got the bounty though."
There was some very uneasy laughter at that. Then the penny dropped in Conrad's mind. "You're suggesting that this Leggit gang was the cover for a planned killing? That the real target was somebody else?"
"Good boy. We're the obvious target but nobody knew where we were. Who really got hurt there?"
That threw the question back at Dr. Pollard who was in no doubt about the answer. "Jackie Hemsley. They really tore her up inside. The surgeons may have to do some drastic surgery to save her."
"But they couldn't have known that Scott would be so incredibly stupid as to let her come along." Morse had spotted the flaw in the argument almost instantly. "The target would have to be Mrs. Woods and her children."
"Or Gavin and Scott. They could easily have been the primary target. Now why would Barnstable want them dead?" Conrad had liked the idea behind a buried strike group but he didn’t like where this was going.
"I can tell you the answer to that but you won't like it." Angel had the remote, detached sleepy look in her eyes that usually meant somebody was about to die. "Tony and Mike have been getting on pretty well with us and we work well together. Barnstable saw that as them betraying him. He tried to fix the problem by getting rid of us, then when that failed, he tried to do it by getting rid of them. We know from the timing that he was setting them up."
Conrad shuddered at the thought. "And now we know why."
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
Angel had heard Conrad working on his corkboards until late in the night. That hadn't troubled her; she was a night-bird herself. She'd simply slept in, then gone to the kitchen to make herself her usual breakfast, a cup of strong black coffee laced with rum. She had just finished it and was contemplating the virtues of another when Conrad came in.
"Damn it, Conrad, you look like hell."
Looking at himself in the silvered side of an electric toaster, Conrad had to admit she was right. Bleary-eyed, unshaven and unkempt, he thought he looked like a tramp. "I was up late last night, trying to put this thing together."
Angel had put some bread in the toaster. Now it popped up and she buttered it before dropping some marmalade on and pushing the plate over to Conrad. "Here, that will make you feel better."
"Thank you. I never knew you could cook?"
"The instructions were on the side of the toaster. How are we doing."
"I think I've cracked it." Conrad bit into the toast. Angel had obviously not realized the significance of the browning control and the bread was barely warm. He carefully did not mention that though. The fact she had actually tried was oddly touching. "I've identified some ninety primary killings, all of which have some form of moral basis to their motivation. Victims have committed or been accused of some form of act that could be considered immoral. I think we have a vigilante here. And, whenever there is any evidence in these cases, it points at Jordana Barnstable. In each case, the evidence is very tenuous but taken together, it's fairly convincing. The big thing, of course, is that there are no links outside this very constricted area. What we are dealing with is a local problem, isolated and detached. That'll make Humpty very happy."
Conrad took a bite of his 'toast' and drank some coffee, "The other two hundred and thirty nine murders are the secondary murders. These are intended to blur the original case, to disguise the real motivation and point suspicion in another direction. These killings were very carefully carried out and there is almost no available evidence as to who did them."
"Indicating some detailed training. Barnstable was in "six"."
"I think so. Only, I suspect the division of labor was that Joan Barnstable actually did most of the killings, probably following a script written by Barnstable, while Tom Barnstable steered the investigation towards a suspect who was almost chosen at random. Or at least one against whom a reasonable case could be made. We saw that at work when he tried to frame you, Angel. A little planted evidence, some careful insinuations and choosing a time and place when he believed you did not have a valid alibi. Add in the small-town syndrome we talked about before and we have it. That's a problem for Humpty and Chris to deal with."
"Barnstable sure got the alibi thing wrong. A lot else as well of course. I wonder of 'six' really did ditch him because of the honey trap or they were already looking for an excuse to do so? Whatever. So, what we have is a serial-killing family. Damn, there's a good film script there." Angel decided that a second cup of her breakfast coffee would be a good thing. "There is a problem with this. It doesn’t fit the most recent batch of killings."
"No, it doesn't. That's what kept me up late last night. Then I realized what the problem was. We've been treating the last spate of killings as one case. It isn’t. It’s two separate cases that have some features in common. I didn't see it until I looked at the older ones and realized there were a few cases where the people involved are linked. Then I applied the same principle to our cases and they all fell into place.
"The first case was the builder George Woods. What he was doing was buying up derelict ground and refurbishing it. He would then build on it, improve it greatly by almost everybody's standards but the Barnstables' and making a packet in the process. He was due to make a lot more when the funds held in escrow were released. In Jordana Barnstable's eyes, he was ruining the environment and making huge profits that would be increased still further when he got his share of the escrow money which she saw as being stolen from the local people. So she killed him."
"Err, Conrad, professional killer here. She doesn’t have the strength to do that." Angel tried to look innocent.
"Retired, Angel, remember? But, you're right. She must have had help. That's something we will have to sort out. Probably she lured him to a meeting then while she distracted him, her assistant sapped him and they hung him up. When he came too, they poured the cement. Then she, or they, killed Woods and Small to make it look as if they were George Woods's killers and tried to frame you.
"Now, the second crime. Woods and Small were doing their handbag snatching and that wasn't a problem. Only you and Mao-Lee set them up and busted them. Jordana Barnstable realized, or her father told her, that it had been a set-up, and that offended her sense of righteousness. So, she decided to kill you and Mao-Lee. And me of course. The first step was the poison mushrooms, we thought it was a follow-up to the attempted frame but it wasn't. It was a quite separate development. When that failed and we disappeared, you really did save our lives by the way, she decided to kill Mao-Lee. By then, she had moved in with Sam, to protect her of course, and the attack on her was planned to look like an unfortunate by-product of the attack on George Woods and his family. That way, the killing of Woods and Small served two ends, framing you and riling up the Leggit Gang for the attack on Sam."
"So, the attack that brought everything down was actually aimed at Mao-Lee?" Angel shook her head. "We managed to put Sam in danger by sending Mao-Lee in to protect her."
"Partly, although the major aim was to create a massive diversion to screen his wife and daughter's escape. And his own if possible. And to get even with Scott and Gavin. Now we come back to the first crime. There is a loose end, who tried to frame you? The plan was to get Scott and Gavin to the scene of the attack on Sam's house and the killing of Mao-Lee, let them get killed there, and then implicate them in the framing of you. If you came in running to the rescue, as you did, they could kill you as well and that would wrap up Crime Two. The Barnstables didn’t realize that you could turn that street into a bloodbath without even trying hard."
Conrad paused and when he resumed, he sounded sad. It reminded Angel of how much he had hated her previous career as a hired gun and how much he had had to give up in order to be her friend. That also reminded her of just how much she owed him and that made her glad she had left her old career behind. "A family of serial killers with a body count of almost four hundred kills and who knows how many more?"
Angel knew he was wondering what her body count was. The truth is, Conrad, I don’t know. I've never counted, But, 400 wouldn't even come close. Five times that probably. "We got them, Conrad. Let's have a police canteen fry-up to celebrate."
Main Steps, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
The van from the Pretty Petals Flower Company pulled up at the foot of the steps and four very large and obviously over-muscled men, who did not at all look like workers in a flower shop, got out and unloaded two somewhat cumbersome parcels, wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string. They placed the parcels on the Police Station steps, got back in the van and drove off. Once clear of the town, they got out again, changed the number-plates and switched the inscription on the sides from 'Pretty Petals Flower Company' to 'Marigold Cakes and Confectionary'. The clear plastic overlay with the previous name was tossed into a jerrycan of acetone and the flower company vanished as if it had never been. Which, of course, it never had.
Back on the police station steps, the two parcels were viewed by the police officers arriving for their shift. The more optimistic, or naive, thought they were bouquets of flowers sent to welcome their new DCI to her job. The more pessimistic, or realistic, assumed they were bombs sent for the same purpose. However, both explanations were discredited by the fact the packages were wriggling around and making 'mmph, mmph, mmph' noises.
"All right, I was expecting this." DCI Morse looked at the package and mentally raised her eyebrows. "We need to get these two to the cells. Make sure they, and Barnstable, are kept separated, Conrad will want to speak with them individually."
"Should we unwrap them first?" Constable Karen Maxfield was looking at the two brown-paper parcels with awed fascination.
DCI Morse shook her head. "To the cells first, then unwrap them. By the way, what does the gift card attached to the parcels say?"
Detective Inspector Gavin bent down and read it, "It says, 'With love from Houndsditch' Sir. . . . Houndsditch?"
"That's where the headquarters of the London Firm hangs out. Rest of you, form two groups of four and carry our new guests to the cells."
Ten minutes later, Joan and Jordana Barnstable were in their allocated cells being carefully unwrapped. The results caused a ripple of noise that consisted equally of surprise and amusement. One constable, a new addition to the ranks and on his first day out of training blurted, "what is all that stuff?"
"Bondage equipment, you can get it from any BDSM catalog." Karen Maxfield realized everybody was staring at her and she went a very bright shade of crimson. "Or so I've been told."
Interview Room Three, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"So, did you know Kevin Small and Darren Woods?" Conrad looked over at Timothy Fish with something very close to pity in his heart. He was a typical small-time crook who had been swept along by the false romance of being 'outside the law' right up to the point where he had found himself facing trial on charges that could easily put him into prison for the rest of his life. Part of his delusion had been that he considered himself to be street-tough and that had lasted right up to the moment he had found himself facing Angel's guns. Now, he knew himself for what he really was, an arrogant, ignorant and above all cowardly child who had wrecked his life before it had even properly started. He also had very bad breath.
"They was part of our gang, weren't they? Comes up with the idea of snatchin' 'ags from the 'ack of theer 'ike. Brought in lotsa dosh at first only that Chink bint put up a fight didn't she? n' them two cops turned up anarl." Fish looked at Angel lounging up against the wall, recognized her and then the significance of her appearance sank in. So did what he had just said and he went white.
"So, Tim, why did you kill them if they were part of your gang?"
" Kill'em? us? ya gottow be kiddin' ain't ya? weren't us what done it were it. Fist us hears was when the 'odies got found."
Conrad thought about that. It had the ring of truth about it and it was hard to think of a plausible motivation for the gang to turn on two of its own members like that. "Then why do you think they were killed?"
" Bait inn't? the 'int what lives in that 'ouse ad'em done for killin her old lad didn’t she. That’s why us go round ther to dee her."
"But why would they want to kill George Woods? He'd just bailed his nephew out."
"They wuz goin' to dee a runner weren't they. When they said they was goin' to skip, he threatened to grass them up. So they did'im."
Conrad shook his head. "Just shot him down . ."
"Yeah, well iz own fault for grassin' weren't it. Snitches get found in ditches don'they. Nuff said "
"And you were there while it happened?" Conrad was getting a picture of what had been going on and it wasn't what Fish was telling him.
"Nah, bint told us."
"Do you see the picture of the woman here?" Conrad passed over a pile of pictures, one of which was Jordana Barnstable.
Fish thumbed through them. "Naah . . . . but yeah. This one's a little like er thow in'she? But t’yun 'angs round us is propa old like."
That picture was Jordana Barnstable. Conrad picked out another picture. "How about this one?"
"Yeah. That’s 'er."
The picture was of Joan Barnstable.
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
After spending twelve hours interviewing the survivors of the gang, Conrad felt he needed a bath, a stiff drink and to read some classical English literature. Even Angel looked genuinely sympathetic.
“So, what do you think?” Helen Morse had arranged for Conrad to have a nice cup of tea.
“I think the British education system is in terminal collapse.” Conrad shuddered at the memory of the conversations.
Angel reached over and poured some rum from her hip-flask into his tea. “Get that inside you and you’ll feel better.”
“I agree. That’s why everybody who supports comprehensive education sends their kids to private schools.” Morse shuddered slightly in horror at the thought of her own children going to one of the comprehensive schools. She and her husband had sacrificed a lot of the small luxuries that many families took for granted to make sure they didn’t have to. “Now, what did we learn about the crimes here?”
“The gang we pulled in are not responsible for the death of George Woods. Quite apart from the fact that none of them knew how he had been killed, they just aren’t smart enough. They all identified Joan Barnstable as, and I quote, ‘the old bint what hangs around with us’. The odd thing is, I can’t really see any of this lot actually attacking a house with women and children inside and killing the occupants. I can see them talking about it, I can see them boasting about how horribly they’ll do the occupants but I know youngsters like that. When it comes to actually doing it, they’ll be somewhere else. Only this time they actually started doing it.”
"That's why hooligans like that got the name Leggits. They hang around on the streets acting tough and shouting abuse at passers-by. If one of the people they're insulting actually turns to face them, one of them yells 'leggit' and they all run off.
“One of the things we watch out for when we’re recruiting. The ones who mouth off on how tough they are and the evil things they’ll do to our enemies are the ones that won’t be there when it comes time to do something.” Angel shook her head. "It’s always the quiet ones we watch out for. Anyway, these days we recruit from the universities, not the streets.”
“You know, Angel, it sometimes worries me how alike we are.” Morse shook her head. “We do the same when examining candidates. As you pointed out when you started looking into our Armed Response Units. The people who most want to be in them are the ones who should never be allowed near them. And yet those kids attacked and killed two police officers. They came close to killing two more and very badly raped Jackie. There’s a huge discontinuity there that I just can’t figure out.”
There was a knock on the door and Dr. Pollard stuck his head in. “I’ve got two messages from the Hospital, people. One is that Jackie has been taken back into emergency surgery, severe internal bleeding. Again. The other is, I got a call from Sir Kendall. The footprints we found at the Small-Woods crime scene and the one near 115 all match a shoe found in Jordana Barnstable’s collection. Even better news. In going through some of the old crime scene pictures, I found some shoe prints that were overlooked.”
“You mean not followed up.” DCI Morse was in no mood for euphemisms.
“Ignored.” Dr. Pollard had got the message. There was a new sheriff in town. “One of them matched a shoe in Jordana’s wardrobe as well. We’re still checking the rest.”
"It won't help us that much." Morse looked sad but also slightly accusatory. "I had a long talk with Commissioner Keeble before coming down here. There's going to be a change in procedures as soon as it gets through Parliament. We won't be able to use evidence from one crime to support another charge in capital offenses, at least. Each murder will have to be tried individually. This is one case where that will hurt us."
"A thought." Angel had been mulling over the situation. "In the Black Dragon War, we would sometimes use students to stage a demonstration as a cover for a strike. Once, we were planning to get a Black Dragon high-up like that. The demonstration started as his car was coming down the street and it stopped him. He saw a red-headed Chinese woman walking towards him, he thought it was me and dropped dead of a heart attack. Joke is, it wasn't me at all, just a student who looked a bit like me. I still got the bounty though."
There was some very uneasy laughter at that. Then the penny dropped in Conrad's mind. "You're suggesting that this Leggit gang was the cover for a planned killing? That the real target was somebody else?"
"Good boy. We're the obvious target but nobody knew where we were. Who really got hurt there?"
That threw the question back at Dr. Pollard who was in no doubt about the answer. "Jackie Hemsley. They really tore her up inside. The surgeons may have to do some drastic surgery to save her."
"But they couldn't have known that Scott would be so incredibly stupid as to let her come along." Morse had spotted the flaw in the argument almost instantly. "The target would have to be Mrs. Woods and her children."
"Or Gavin and Scott. They could easily have been the primary target. Now why would Barnstable want them dead?" Conrad had liked the idea behind a buried strike group but he didn’t like where this was going.
"I can tell you the answer to that but you won't like it." Angel had the remote, detached sleepy look in her eyes that usually meant somebody was about to die. "Tony and Mike have been getting on pretty well with us and we work well together. Barnstable saw that as them betraying him. He tried to fix the problem by getting rid of us, then when that failed, he tried to do it by getting rid of them. We know from the timing that he was setting them up."
Conrad shuddered at the thought. "And now we know why."
115 Greenway Drive, Bishop's Lydeard, North Somerset.
Angel had heard Conrad working on his corkboards until late in the night. That hadn't troubled her; she was a night-bird herself. She'd simply slept in, then gone to the kitchen to make herself her usual breakfast, a cup of strong black coffee laced with rum. She had just finished it and was contemplating the virtues of another when Conrad came in.
"Damn it, Conrad, you look like hell."
Looking at himself in the silvered side of an electric toaster, Conrad had to admit she was right. Bleary-eyed, unshaven and unkempt, he thought he looked like a tramp. "I was up late last night, trying to put this thing together."
Angel had put some bread in the toaster. Now it popped up and she buttered it before dropping some marmalade on and pushing the plate over to Conrad. "Here, that will make you feel better."
"Thank you. I never knew you could cook?"
"The instructions were on the side of the toaster. How are we doing."
"I think I've cracked it." Conrad bit into the toast. Angel had obviously not realized the significance of the browning control and the bread was barely warm. He carefully did not mention that though. The fact she had actually tried was oddly touching. "I've identified some ninety primary killings, all of which have some form of moral basis to their motivation. Victims have committed or been accused of some form of act that could be considered immoral. I think we have a vigilante here. And, whenever there is any evidence in these cases, it points at Jordana Barnstable. In each case, the evidence is very tenuous but taken together, it's fairly convincing. The big thing, of course, is that there are no links outside this very constricted area. What we are dealing with is a local problem, isolated and detached. That'll make Humpty very happy."
Conrad took a bite of his 'toast' and drank some coffee, "The other two hundred and thirty nine murders are the secondary murders. These are intended to blur the original case, to disguise the real motivation and point suspicion in another direction. These killings were very carefully carried out and there is almost no available evidence as to who did them."
"Indicating some detailed training. Barnstable was in "six"."
"I think so. Only, I suspect the division of labor was that Joan Barnstable actually did most of the killings, probably following a script written by Barnstable, while Tom Barnstable steered the investigation towards a suspect who was almost chosen at random. Or at least one against whom a reasonable case could be made. We saw that at work when he tried to frame you, Angel. A little planted evidence, some careful insinuations and choosing a time and place when he believed you did not have a valid alibi. Add in the small-town syndrome we talked about before and we have it. That's a problem for Humpty and Chris to deal with."
"Barnstable sure got the alibi thing wrong. A lot else as well of course. I wonder of 'six' really did ditch him because of the honey trap or they were already looking for an excuse to do so? Whatever. So, what we have is a serial-killing family. Damn, there's a good film script there." Angel decided that a second cup of her breakfast coffee would be a good thing. "There is a problem with this. It doesn’t fit the most recent batch of killings."
"No, it doesn't. That's what kept me up late last night. Then I realized what the problem was. We've been treating the last spate of killings as one case. It isn’t. It’s two separate cases that have some features in common. I didn't see it until I looked at the older ones and realized there were a few cases where the people involved are linked. Then I applied the same principle to our cases and they all fell into place.
"The first case was the builder George Woods. What he was doing was buying up derelict ground and refurbishing it. He would then build on it, improve it greatly by almost everybody's standards but the Barnstables' and making a packet in the process. He was due to make a lot more when the funds held in escrow were released. In Jordana Barnstable's eyes, he was ruining the environment and making huge profits that would be increased still further when he got his share of the escrow money which she saw as being stolen from the local people. So she killed him."
"Err, Conrad, professional killer here. She doesn’t have the strength to do that." Angel tried to look innocent.
"Retired, Angel, remember? But, you're right. She must have had help. That's something we will have to sort out. Probably she lured him to a meeting then while she distracted him, her assistant sapped him and they hung him up. When he came too, they poured the cement. Then she, or they, killed Woods and Small to make it look as if they were George Woods's killers and tried to frame you.
"Now, the second crime. Woods and Small were doing their handbag snatching and that wasn't a problem. Only you and Mao-Lee set them up and busted them. Jordana Barnstable realized, or her father told her, that it had been a set-up, and that offended her sense of righteousness. So, she decided to kill you and Mao-Lee. And me of course. The first step was the poison mushrooms, we thought it was a follow-up to the attempted frame but it wasn't. It was a quite separate development. When that failed and we disappeared, you really did save our lives by the way, she decided to kill Mao-Lee. By then, she had moved in with Sam, to protect her of course, and the attack on her was planned to look like an unfortunate by-product of the attack on George Woods and his family. That way, the killing of Woods and Small served two ends, framing you and riling up the Leggit Gang for the attack on Sam."
"So, the attack that brought everything down was actually aimed at Mao-Lee?" Angel shook her head. "We managed to put Sam in danger by sending Mao-Lee in to protect her."
"Partly, although the major aim was to create a massive diversion to screen his wife and daughter's escape. And his own if possible. And to get even with Scott and Gavin. Now we come back to the first crime. There is a loose end, who tried to frame you? The plan was to get Scott and Gavin to the scene of the attack on Sam's house and the killing of Mao-Lee, let them get killed there, and then implicate them in the framing of you. If you came in running to the rescue, as you did, they could kill you as well and that would wrap up Crime Two. The Barnstables didn’t realize that you could turn that street into a bloodbath without even trying hard."
Conrad paused and when he resumed, he sounded sad. It reminded Angel of how much he had hated her previous career as a hired gun and how much he had had to give up in order to be her friend. That also reminded her of just how much she owed him and that made her glad she had left her old career behind. "A family of serial killers with a body count of almost four hundred kills and who knows how many more?"
Angel knew he was wondering what her body count was. The truth is, Conrad, I don’t know. I've never counted, But, 400 wouldn't even come close. Five times that probably. "We got them, Conrad. Let's have a police canteen fry-up to celebrate."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Nineteen
Chief Warden's Office, Her Majesty's Prison Dartmoor
Contrary to public perception, Dartmoor Prison was not some escape-proof super-prison housing insanely ingenious master-criminals. As the inmate's joke had it, they all went to the House of Commons. Instead it housed habitual criminals guilty of violent offenses but who were not judged to be high risk or those who had served a long time with good behavior. Despite being a step up from a maximum security prison, it was still an unpleasant place, damp, chillingly cold for most of the year and, worst of all, with poor-quality food even by institutional standards. It was also mind-numbingly boring.
Andrew Parker and James Ward were, therefore, pleased (or in their own words 'right chuffed') to be summoned to the Chief Warden's office. They found themselves standing in front of his desk, something that made a welcome change from the monotony of the bleak daily routine. "54932 Parker and 78758 Ward reporting as ordered."
The Chief Warden looked up. "Parker and Ward, you are being transferred to Her Majesty's Prison Horfield. I have to advise you that if your behavior remains above reproach you will be considered for early parole next year. Your van leaves at noon. Dismissed."
For the first time, Parker and Ward were aware of a man sitting quietly in one corner. It was Robert McGilvray, their brief, or more accurately, Brian Frost's brief. That meant what he had to say to them would be direct from the top boss. "I would like to speak with my clients in private please, Sir"
Once in the confidential interview room, he dropped the urbane act. "Right, Brian did the fuzz a favor and they've just done him one. Horfield is a good nick, new, comfortable and well-equipped. Everything this place isn’t. You are to keep your noses clean and not make any attempt to do a runner. Understood? You do and he'll be very annoyed with you. One other thing. A friend of his is in Horfield, a bloke called David Henderson. Brian asks you to spread word around that he's under our protection and Brian won't be best pleased if anything happens to him. So, keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t have any accidents."
Autopsy Room, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
Dr. Pollard looked at the blood panel tests to reassure himself that what he had deduced was correct. It seemed implausible yet it fitted exactly what had happened. He guessed that the delay in the blood screen results coming back from the forensic labs had been due to the unusual results being checked and rechecked. “Well, the blood panel results are in and I think they explain some of your questions Conrad. Blood tests on the three men Angel killed all show traces of pervitin and phencyclidine.”
“Crystal meth and angel dust.” Angel’s eyes had opened wide. She knew all about the properties of street corner pharmaceuticals and was very wary of people who used them. “That’s an evil combination.”
“Germans came up with it during the war. They started off by feeding their troops methamphetamines mixed into chocolate and pills. Pervitin is actually a commercial trade name for methamphetamine. Only, its effects wear off with repeated use, so they started adding small amounts of phencyclidine. There’s evidence that mix might have been behind some of the things that happened on the Russian Front. Nobody knew how dangerous the two were back then and it was only after the Russians noted irrational violence and hyper-aggression amongst the German PoWs most exposed to the pair that things began to make sense. We've got a handle on the problem now and nobody could believe the mix had reappeared.”
Conrad was looking bewildered by the references. He knew the properties and effects of the traditional drugs all too well but the more recent chemicals were foreign to him and Naamah wasn’t around to give advice. Angel explained it for him. “Crystal meth causes unpredictable and rapid mood swings and violent behavior. Angel dust, PCP, causes aggressive behavior, also with rapid mood swings, and gives the users feelings of strength, power, and invulnerability. The two together make people very dangerous. If I’d known they were on those, I’d have gunned down the whole lot of them. We got lucky, both drugs make people very erratic and they go from one extreme to another unpredictably and without warning. This time, the sight of their mates being killed pushed them into docility. As I said, we got really lucky. When dealing with people who are doped up, it could have gone the other way very easily.”
“Sounds like you have faced that before.” Dr. Pollard was nodding in agreement.
Angel shrugged. “Not quite. In a village back in the recovered provinces, there was a dope-head living with a woman. She got busted by the police for dealing and he went to get her back. Started machine-gunning the local station. I watched while they used an RPG-7 to take him down. I know of another case in Saigon where a user high on PCP ate his girlfriend's face. She died of course. Any idea how these dumbasses got their fix?”
Pollard shook his head. “We have blood trace only. Stomach content analysis still has to come back.”
“I think we can short-circuit that.” Conrad sounded very thoughtful.
Interview Room Three, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
To Conrad’s deep regret, the night in the cells had not done Timothy Fish any good. Quite the reverse if anything; he was shaking, constantly twitching and brushing at himself. Unusually, it was Angel who opened the interview with Conrad sitting back and watching.
“How long have you been using crystal meth, Fish?” Her voice displayed only vague interest in the answer.
“What are ya talkin' about ya 'itch.” Fish was aggressive without realizing just how foolish that was under the circumstances.
“Have you looked in a mirror recently?” In contrast, Angel’s voice was mild and polite. It wasn’t that she felt even remotely sympathetic to him. In fact, as the old saying went, left to her own devices, she would have shot him as soon as look at him. But, she had noticed how Conrad always kept his voice level and gentle, so she copied him. “Reddened skin, ulcers around the mouth, continuous twitching and shaking. You’re going into meth withdrawal right now. Open your mouth; I want to see your teeth.”
“Why dinnit ya mack me try it don’ya.” More meaningless belligerence and aggression.
“Because, frankly, you are not worth the effort. Also, if my guess is right, I could catch something nasty from the blood spray as I rip your jaws apart. Now, open up. Believe me on this, I am trying to help you.”
Slowly, very reluctantly, Fish opened his mouth. The smell when he did so was appalling, wafting out from between blackened teeth and vacant spaces in diseased gums. Angel perceptibly winced. “That, Fish, is called meth mouth and there is nothing you can do about it. Your teeth are history. By the way, please stop scratching your balls, those crabs have got to eat too.”
In the background for once, Conrad was working hard to avoid laughing. This was the first time Angel had ever taken the lead on a police interview and in his opinion, her approach might have been unorthodox but it was working.
“I never used meth, ‘ave I.” Truculence was replacing aggression.
“You have all the symptoms. Also of Angel Dust. No relation to me by the way. You mess around with PCP and you stand a chance of survival. Mess with me and you don't. Let’s take this from the start. Who came up with the idea of going to Mrs. Wood’s house and staging a riot?”
“It were the old cow weren't it. Told us how the bint in 45 ad Kev'n Dar'n done in. Brought us a crate or three of booze as well. Got us orite mad din'she.”
“Joan Barnstable. I bet the beer was dosed with a mix of Meth and PCP.” Angel knew it was time for an expert to take over. “Conrad take it from here, will you?”
Two hours later, Fish was returned to his cell. Conrad was left shaking his head at the picture he had patiently unraveled. Before he summarized what he had learned for DCI Morse, he had another duty to perform. “Angel, thank you for softening him up for me. You did extremely well there.”
Angel wriggled slightly at hearing the praise. “You mean that I was a good bad cop?”
“That too, but the information you got was something I couldn’t. I’d never have picked up on his bad teeth like that. And the bit about his constant scratching was a masterpiece. Anyway, we better see Helen. After that, I think we need to talk to Joan Barnstable.”
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
“Well, we know who did all the cases that have turned this area into murder central, we know how they did it, what we need to find out now is why. By the way, we’ll need to advise the defense of what we have just found out. The fact that the Leggits were unknowingly drugged in ways that made them irrationally violent could easily constitute a mitigating factor for them.” Conrad looked out of the window for a moment. “Angel had to explain to me what those drugs did and the effect they could have had. How could people do that to themselves?”
“You might not be doing them a favor there, Conrad.” Morse was reading the notes Conrad had made. “If my understanding of the long-term effects caused by a mix of PCP and Crystal Meth is right, they might be suffering from permanent brain damage. I did two years in the drugs squad by the way. It wasn't unknown for PCP-using felons who would have had a ten or fifteen year sentence to get sent to a secure unit for life instead.”
Conrad was saddened by the futility of the whole situation. “The thing that puzzled me as soon as we linked Joan Barnstable to the Leggits was why a group of late teens and early twenties hooligans would tolerate a late middle-aged woman hanging around them. Now we know why, she was their dealer. She was supplying them with soft drugs, marihuana primarily, and feeding them the hard stuff without their knowledge. That’s not a new technique by the way. I understand getting potential rivals hooked was a favored technique in the middle ages.”
“It also explains why Jackie ended up so badly hurt.” Angel was bored with the exposition of what they had learned from their interview of Fish. She had heard it all before and she wanted to get on with wrapping this case up. “I bet you that Couchman was already using meth and the extra dose pushed him so far over the edge he lost sight of the ground. By the way, don’t jump to the conclusion it was in the beer. The drugs could have been mixed in with the grass as well. That's quite common with Angel Dust.”
“I think so.” Morse drummed her fingers on the table. “I did two years with the sexual offenses squad as well, almost every policewoman does. It makes me boil when I hear some of the feminists screaming rape because somebody touched their backside or looked at them the wrong way. If they had any idea how badly hurt some of the women we had to deal with were, they’d shut up. I shouldn't say this, but I’m not sorry you killed that bastard, Angel.”
“Nor am I.” Angel left it there. It would be too awkward to explain why she was never sorry about killing anybody.
“Anyway, we have the pattern now. For some reason, Jordana Barnstable would kill somebody. Looking at the history of events, there was something about the initial sets of victims that triggered her off. When Tom Barnstable started investigating, he wasn’t trying to find the killer since he already knew that. He was trying to find a plausible alternative and steer the investigation down that route. The second wave of killings were needed to make the alternative route work. Joan Barnstable would organize those killings using her little gang of Leggits as cover and heavy muscle. I think we’ll find the three you killed were probably the hard core, Angel. The very fact they were the hard men made you single them out as the prime risks and you instinctively took them down first. Then the rest just gave up when they saw the reality of what was happening."
"Smart of them." Angel's curt dismissal of the Leggits spoke volumes.
"So where do we got from here?" Helen Morse could see light at the end of the tunnel. She just wanted to be sure it wasn't the headlight of an approaching train.
"I was going to start with Joan Barnstable but I think we should start with her daughter instead. The bit we're missing is why and once we get that, the other bits will fall into place.
Interview Room Three, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Because, they were all evil." It had taken Conrad several hours to get Jordana Barnstable talking but once he had broken through her defenses, the truth was pouring out. When it had started the flow, he had recognized the old, old story. A deadly combination of a well-intentioned extremist and a fundamentalist self-appointed moral guardian had led to a person who had blinded themselves with their ideals and beliefs. Jordana Barnstable lacked the insight and wisdom to realize that her rigid and merciless approach to dealing with those whom she considered evil, meant that she could not be on the side of righteousness. The first quality of righteousness is compassion. The second is self-awareness and thus recognition of one's limitations. Lacking both of those made her a good recruit for the Inquisition in days gone by. And so it is that sins get carried down from one generation to the next.
"So what had Margaret King done that was so evil. Jordana? Why did you frame her for the murders?"
"Her? She'd married her husband's brother. That's sick and disgusting and it’s against the Bible. Leviticus 20:21. She wasn't the one though. It was her new husband. He and the accountant had been looting the company for years. They'd stolen the entire contents of the pension fund, leaving the employees destitute. So I killed them both. Dad just made sure she got blamed for it."
"Using this?" Conrad had a Masonic ceremonial dagger in a plastic evidence bag.
Jordana took a quick look at it. "That looks like it. Where did you get it from?"
"We searched your house. Or rather a team from Central Forensics did. Found a lot of interesting evidence that will put you and your parents away for life. You can blame the Swedish Government by the way. They just published a pamphlet called 'Gardening Tips for Mass Murderers'. It gave our forensic people all sorts of ideas on where to look. What about David Henderson? What did he do to get framed?"
"Nothing." Jordana's self-righteous smirk turned Conrad's stomach. "When mum, dad and I went to the school, we saw one of the little brats there was gay. So I smashed his head in to stop him contaminating the others. Mum killed another couple of gays, a pupil and the master as well to distract attention. She might as well not have bothered. Dad had found the stolen goods so he made them the center of his case instead. That porter was just convenient."
"And George Woods?"
"He was stealing money from the council and ruining the environment. So mum called him to a meeting about the next development scheme, trying to reach an agreement over the plans, and while they talked I came in from behind and smacked him with a cosh. Then, we hung him up by his feet, waited for him to come round and poured the concrete. You should have seen his legs waving, funniest thing I've ever seen."
"Why? Why Jordana did you kill all those people? What made you decide that they had to die?"
"You know what happened to Dad in Singapore? Got tricked into going with one of those freaks he did. He and mum fought and argued for months, every night screaming at each other until right early in the morning. It went on and on, mum screaming at him, saying he was a sick freak and I was the only reason she stayed with him. I was still a teenager then and I spent every night with my head under the pillows trying to cut out the noise. Eventually, I couldn't stand it anymore so I ran away. Somehow I found myself where those freaks hang out. One of them saw me and wanted to take me back home so I panicked and killed it. Stabbed it and cut its thing off. Then I went home, I didn’t know where else to go, and found they were waiting for me. They were frightened because I’d gone missing. That night, it was the first night for months Mum and Dad didn’t fight. So, it was obvious. If I killed the evil people, everything would be happy again."
"And why us?"
Jordana openly sneered at him. "You're evil too. You're a priest but you sleep with that monster behind you. So I tried to get you both. I will, you wait and see."
"No, you won’t." Angel seemed disinterested in the confession. That impression was correct, she was. She and Conrad had already worked most of it out. "You forgot two things. One is that anybody who tries to hurt Conrad here, I'll deal with them very finally. And the other thing you forgot is that I am the real Destroying Angel. I've got a quarter of a century's experience in killing people. You'll never leave prison alive, I can promise you that."
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"I doubt if she'll even go to prison to be honest." Morse was carefully teletyping the charge sheet to the Home Office. "She's undoubtedly insane. I guess that the family dispute over the honey-trap caused a psychotic break. She'll spend the rest of her life in a secure facility. That iswhat you meant by her not leaving prison alive, isn't it Angel?"
"Of course." Angel gave her friendliest, warmest and most ingenuous fake smile to the DCI.
"Tom and Joan will be going to prison though. They don’t have an insanity plea to fall back on. Joan will never get out. Not after all those killings. Tom? He might I suppose. Depends if we can prove he actually killed somebody. If he just covered up for his wife and daughter, it'll be hard to get a full-tariff life sentence on him." The machine Morse was using beeped as the last message went through. The charges were filed. "That was a neat way to get Joan to confess though."
Conrad didn’t really agree. He felt guilty about the way he had reminded Joan Barnstable that she was a drug dealer and how she was, by her daughter's definitions, evil. And what that daughter did to people she considered evil. Then, he had asked one simple question. Did she really want to be in the same prison as her daughter?
That simple, deadly question had done it. Tom Barnstable had never confessed though. He had simply sat mute, the way 'six' agents were trained to do. It was fortunate that the evidence of his involvement was piling up although so far it lacked any direct evidence of his involvement in the killings. On the evidence so far, they seemed to be entirely the work of his wife and daughter. "I think the murder spree down here will end now. Angel, it's time we went back home. Got everything?"
"There are a few loose ends I have to tie up. And we have to get wedding presents for Phan and Vanna. Then we're out of here."
Chief Warden's Office, Her Majesty's Prison Dartmoor
Contrary to public perception, Dartmoor Prison was not some escape-proof super-prison housing insanely ingenious master-criminals. As the inmate's joke had it, they all went to the House of Commons. Instead it housed habitual criminals guilty of violent offenses but who were not judged to be high risk or those who had served a long time with good behavior. Despite being a step up from a maximum security prison, it was still an unpleasant place, damp, chillingly cold for most of the year and, worst of all, with poor-quality food even by institutional standards. It was also mind-numbingly boring.
Andrew Parker and James Ward were, therefore, pleased (or in their own words 'right chuffed') to be summoned to the Chief Warden's office. They found themselves standing in front of his desk, something that made a welcome change from the monotony of the bleak daily routine. "54932 Parker and 78758 Ward reporting as ordered."
The Chief Warden looked up. "Parker and Ward, you are being transferred to Her Majesty's Prison Horfield. I have to advise you that if your behavior remains above reproach you will be considered for early parole next year. Your van leaves at noon. Dismissed."
For the first time, Parker and Ward were aware of a man sitting quietly in one corner. It was Robert McGilvray, their brief, or more accurately, Brian Frost's brief. That meant what he had to say to them would be direct from the top boss. "I would like to speak with my clients in private please, Sir"
Once in the confidential interview room, he dropped the urbane act. "Right, Brian did the fuzz a favor and they've just done him one. Horfield is a good nick, new, comfortable and well-equipped. Everything this place isn’t. You are to keep your noses clean and not make any attempt to do a runner. Understood? You do and he'll be very annoyed with you. One other thing. A friend of his is in Horfield, a bloke called David Henderson. Brian asks you to spread word around that he's under our protection and Brian won't be best pleased if anything happens to him. So, keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t have any accidents."
Autopsy Room, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
Dr. Pollard looked at the blood panel tests to reassure himself that what he had deduced was correct. It seemed implausible yet it fitted exactly what had happened. He guessed that the delay in the blood screen results coming back from the forensic labs had been due to the unusual results being checked and rechecked. “Well, the blood panel results are in and I think they explain some of your questions Conrad. Blood tests on the three men Angel killed all show traces of pervitin and phencyclidine.”
“Crystal meth and angel dust.” Angel’s eyes had opened wide. She knew all about the properties of street corner pharmaceuticals and was very wary of people who used them. “That’s an evil combination.”
“Germans came up with it during the war. They started off by feeding their troops methamphetamines mixed into chocolate and pills. Pervitin is actually a commercial trade name for methamphetamine. Only, its effects wear off with repeated use, so they started adding small amounts of phencyclidine. There’s evidence that mix might have been behind some of the things that happened on the Russian Front. Nobody knew how dangerous the two were back then and it was only after the Russians noted irrational violence and hyper-aggression amongst the German PoWs most exposed to the pair that things began to make sense. We've got a handle on the problem now and nobody could believe the mix had reappeared.”
Conrad was looking bewildered by the references. He knew the properties and effects of the traditional drugs all too well but the more recent chemicals were foreign to him and Naamah wasn’t around to give advice. Angel explained it for him. “Crystal meth causes unpredictable and rapid mood swings and violent behavior. Angel dust, PCP, causes aggressive behavior, also with rapid mood swings, and gives the users feelings of strength, power, and invulnerability. The two together make people very dangerous. If I’d known they were on those, I’d have gunned down the whole lot of them. We got lucky, both drugs make people very erratic and they go from one extreme to another unpredictably and without warning. This time, the sight of their mates being killed pushed them into docility. As I said, we got really lucky. When dealing with people who are doped up, it could have gone the other way very easily.”
“Sounds like you have faced that before.” Dr. Pollard was nodding in agreement.
Angel shrugged. “Not quite. In a village back in the recovered provinces, there was a dope-head living with a woman. She got busted by the police for dealing and he went to get her back. Started machine-gunning the local station. I watched while they used an RPG-7 to take him down. I know of another case in Saigon where a user high on PCP ate his girlfriend's face. She died of course. Any idea how these dumbasses got their fix?”
Pollard shook his head. “We have blood trace only. Stomach content analysis still has to come back.”
“I think we can short-circuit that.” Conrad sounded very thoughtful.
Interview Room Three, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
To Conrad’s deep regret, the night in the cells had not done Timothy Fish any good. Quite the reverse if anything; he was shaking, constantly twitching and brushing at himself. Unusually, it was Angel who opened the interview with Conrad sitting back and watching.
“How long have you been using crystal meth, Fish?” Her voice displayed only vague interest in the answer.
“What are ya talkin' about ya 'itch.” Fish was aggressive without realizing just how foolish that was under the circumstances.
“Have you looked in a mirror recently?” In contrast, Angel’s voice was mild and polite. It wasn’t that she felt even remotely sympathetic to him. In fact, as the old saying went, left to her own devices, she would have shot him as soon as look at him. But, she had noticed how Conrad always kept his voice level and gentle, so she copied him. “Reddened skin, ulcers around the mouth, continuous twitching and shaking. You’re going into meth withdrawal right now. Open your mouth; I want to see your teeth.”
“Why dinnit ya mack me try it don’ya.” More meaningless belligerence and aggression.
“Because, frankly, you are not worth the effort. Also, if my guess is right, I could catch something nasty from the blood spray as I rip your jaws apart. Now, open up. Believe me on this, I am trying to help you.”
Slowly, very reluctantly, Fish opened his mouth. The smell when he did so was appalling, wafting out from between blackened teeth and vacant spaces in diseased gums. Angel perceptibly winced. “That, Fish, is called meth mouth and there is nothing you can do about it. Your teeth are history. By the way, please stop scratching your balls, those crabs have got to eat too.”
In the background for once, Conrad was working hard to avoid laughing. This was the first time Angel had ever taken the lead on a police interview and in his opinion, her approach might have been unorthodox but it was working.
“I never used meth, ‘ave I.” Truculence was replacing aggression.
“You have all the symptoms. Also of Angel Dust. No relation to me by the way. You mess around with PCP and you stand a chance of survival. Mess with me and you don't. Let’s take this from the start. Who came up with the idea of going to Mrs. Wood’s house and staging a riot?”
“It were the old cow weren't it. Told us how the bint in 45 ad Kev'n Dar'n done in. Brought us a crate or three of booze as well. Got us orite mad din'she.”
“Joan Barnstable. I bet the beer was dosed with a mix of Meth and PCP.” Angel knew it was time for an expert to take over. “Conrad take it from here, will you?”
Two hours later, Fish was returned to his cell. Conrad was left shaking his head at the picture he had patiently unraveled. Before he summarized what he had learned for DCI Morse, he had another duty to perform. “Angel, thank you for softening him up for me. You did extremely well there.”
Angel wriggled slightly at hearing the praise. “You mean that I was a good bad cop?”
“That too, but the information you got was something I couldn’t. I’d never have picked up on his bad teeth like that. And the bit about his constant scratching was a masterpiece. Anyway, we better see Helen. After that, I think we need to talk to Joan Barnstable.”
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
“Well, we know who did all the cases that have turned this area into murder central, we know how they did it, what we need to find out now is why. By the way, we’ll need to advise the defense of what we have just found out. The fact that the Leggits were unknowingly drugged in ways that made them irrationally violent could easily constitute a mitigating factor for them.” Conrad looked out of the window for a moment. “Angel had to explain to me what those drugs did and the effect they could have had. How could people do that to themselves?”
“You might not be doing them a favor there, Conrad.” Morse was reading the notes Conrad had made. “If my understanding of the long-term effects caused by a mix of PCP and Crystal Meth is right, they might be suffering from permanent brain damage. I did two years in the drugs squad by the way. It wasn't unknown for PCP-using felons who would have had a ten or fifteen year sentence to get sent to a secure unit for life instead.”
Conrad was saddened by the futility of the whole situation. “The thing that puzzled me as soon as we linked Joan Barnstable to the Leggits was why a group of late teens and early twenties hooligans would tolerate a late middle-aged woman hanging around them. Now we know why, she was their dealer. She was supplying them with soft drugs, marihuana primarily, and feeding them the hard stuff without their knowledge. That’s not a new technique by the way. I understand getting potential rivals hooked was a favored technique in the middle ages.”
“It also explains why Jackie ended up so badly hurt.” Angel was bored with the exposition of what they had learned from their interview of Fish. She had heard it all before and she wanted to get on with wrapping this case up. “I bet you that Couchman was already using meth and the extra dose pushed him so far over the edge he lost sight of the ground. By the way, don’t jump to the conclusion it was in the beer. The drugs could have been mixed in with the grass as well. That's quite common with Angel Dust.”
“I think so.” Morse drummed her fingers on the table. “I did two years with the sexual offenses squad as well, almost every policewoman does. It makes me boil when I hear some of the feminists screaming rape because somebody touched their backside or looked at them the wrong way. If they had any idea how badly hurt some of the women we had to deal with were, they’d shut up. I shouldn't say this, but I’m not sorry you killed that bastard, Angel.”
“Nor am I.” Angel left it there. It would be too awkward to explain why she was never sorry about killing anybody.
“Anyway, we have the pattern now. For some reason, Jordana Barnstable would kill somebody. Looking at the history of events, there was something about the initial sets of victims that triggered her off. When Tom Barnstable started investigating, he wasn’t trying to find the killer since he already knew that. He was trying to find a plausible alternative and steer the investigation down that route. The second wave of killings were needed to make the alternative route work. Joan Barnstable would organize those killings using her little gang of Leggits as cover and heavy muscle. I think we’ll find the three you killed were probably the hard core, Angel. The very fact they were the hard men made you single them out as the prime risks and you instinctively took them down first. Then the rest just gave up when they saw the reality of what was happening."
"Smart of them." Angel's curt dismissal of the Leggits spoke volumes.
"So where do we got from here?" Helen Morse could see light at the end of the tunnel. She just wanted to be sure it wasn't the headlight of an approaching train.
"I was going to start with Joan Barnstable but I think we should start with her daughter instead. The bit we're missing is why and once we get that, the other bits will fall into place.
Interview Room Three, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"Because, they were all evil." It had taken Conrad several hours to get Jordana Barnstable talking but once he had broken through her defenses, the truth was pouring out. When it had started the flow, he had recognized the old, old story. A deadly combination of a well-intentioned extremist and a fundamentalist self-appointed moral guardian had led to a person who had blinded themselves with their ideals and beliefs. Jordana Barnstable lacked the insight and wisdom to realize that her rigid and merciless approach to dealing with those whom she considered evil, meant that she could not be on the side of righteousness. The first quality of righteousness is compassion. The second is self-awareness and thus recognition of one's limitations. Lacking both of those made her a good recruit for the Inquisition in days gone by. And so it is that sins get carried down from one generation to the next.
"So what had Margaret King done that was so evil. Jordana? Why did you frame her for the murders?"
"Her? She'd married her husband's brother. That's sick and disgusting and it’s against the Bible. Leviticus 20:21. She wasn't the one though. It was her new husband. He and the accountant had been looting the company for years. They'd stolen the entire contents of the pension fund, leaving the employees destitute. So I killed them both. Dad just made sure she got blamed for it."
"Using this?" Conrad had a Masonic ceremonial dagger in a plastic evidence bag.
Jordana took a quick look at it. "That looks like it. Where did you get it from?"
"We searched your house. Or rather a team from Central Forensics did. Found a lot of interesting evidence that will put you and your parents away for life. You can blame the Swedish Government by the way. They just published a pamphlet called 'Gardening Tips for Mass Murderers'. It gave our forensic people all sorts of ideas on where to look. What about David Henderson? What did he do to get framed?"
"Nothing." Jordana's self-righteous smirk turned Conrad's stomach. "When mum, dad and I went to the school, we saw one of the little brats there was gay. So I smashed his head in to stop him contaminating the others. Mum killed another couple of gays, a pupil and the master as well to distract attention. She might as well not have bothered. Dad had found the stolen goods so he made them the center of his case instead. That porter was just convenient."
"And George Woods?"
"He was stealing money from the council and ruining the environment. So mum called him to a meeting about the next development scheme, trying to reach an agreement over the plans, and while they talked I came in from behind and smacked him with a cosh. Then, we hung him up by his feet, waited for him to come round and poured the concrete. You should have seen his legs waving, funniest thing I've ever seen."
"Why? Why Jordana did you kill all those people? What made you decide that they had to die?"
"You know what happened to Dad in Singapore? Got tricked into going with one of those freaks he did. He and mum fought and argued for months, every night screaming at each other until right early in the morning. It went on and on, mum screaming at him, saying he was a sick freak and I was the only reason she stayed with him. I was still a teenager then and I spent every night with my head under the pillows trying to cut out the noise. Eventually, I couldn't stand it anymore so I ran away. Somehow I found myself where those freaks hang out. One of them saw me and wanted to take me back home so I panicked and killed it. Stabbed it and cut its thing off. Then I went home, I didn’t know where else to go, and found they were waiting for me. They were frightened because I’d gone missing. That night, it was the first night for months Mum and Dad didn’t fight. So, it was obvious. If I killed the evil people, everything would be happy again."
"And why us?"
Jordana openly sneered at him. "You're evil too. You're a priest but you sleep with that monster behind you. So I tried to get you both. I will, you wait and see."
"No, you won’t." Angel seemed disinterested in the confession. That impression was correct, she was. She and Conrad had already worked most of it out. "You forgot two things. One is that anybody who tries to hurt Conrad here, I'll deal with them very finally. And the other thing you forgot is that I am the real Destroying Angel. I've got a quarter of a century's experience in killing people. You'll never leave prison alive, I can promise you that."
Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse's Office, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
"I doubt if she'll even go to prison to be honest." Morse was carefully teletyping the charge sheet to the Home Office. "She's undoubtedly insane. I guess that the family dispute over the honey-trap caused a psychotic break. She'll spend the rest of her life in a secure facility. That iswhat you meant by her not leaving prison alive, isn't it Angel?"
"Of course." Angel gave her friendliest, warmest and most ingenuous fake smile to the DCI.
"Tom and Joan will be going to prison though. They don’t have an insanity plea to fall back on. Joan will never get out. Not after all those killings. Tom? He might I suppose. Depends if we can prove he actually killed somebody. If he just covered up for his wife and daughter, it'll be hard to get a full-tariff life sentence on him." The machine Morse was using beeped as the last message went through. The charges were filed. "That was a neat way to get Joan to confess though."
Conrad didn’t really agree. He felt guilty about the way he had reminded Joan Barnstable that she was a drug dealer and how she was, by her daughter's definitions, evil. And what that daughter did to people she considered evil. Then, he had asked one simple question. Did she really want to be in the same prison as her daughter?
That simple, deadly question had done it. Tom Barnstable had never confessed though. He had simply sat mute, the way 'six' agents were trained to do. It was fortunate that the evidence of his involvement was piling up although so far it lacked any direct evidence of his involvement in the killings. On the evidence so far, they seemed to be entirely the work of his wife and daughter. "I think the murder spree down here will end now. Angel, it's time we went back home. Got everything?"
"There are a few loose ends I have to tie up. And we have to get wedding presents for Phan and Vanna. Then we're out of here."
Re: 2005 - Destroying Angel
Chapter Twenty
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset
Conrad, Mao-Lee, Shun-Tan and the twins, were playing an enthusiastic and noisy game of Fan-Tan in the living room, a game whose noise also served to mask the negotiations that were going on. While the others were occupied with their game, Angel, Sam Woods, Huang Ming-Chu and Guanyu Shui-Zou were discussing business in the kitchen over cups of Chinese tea. Shui-Zou, the White Fan of London House was explaining the details of the proposal being offered to Woods Construction.
"The main document is straightforward. It is an agreement between Woods Construction and the Urbanpear Development Corporation of Singapore for the sale of ten percent of Woods Construction stock to UDC. To be honest this is a boilerplate agreement but we do ask that you submit it to your lawyers for approval. As part of this agreement, UDC will provide you with a building construction manager who will report directly to you. We are proposing Huang Ming-Chu for this post with a three-month probationary period. If the two of you get along and work well together, fine. If not, we will find you another candidate. Mr Huang?"
Huang Ming-Chu stood up and bowed slightly. "I am Huang Ming-Chu, or if you prefer, you can call me Michael Huang. I am thirty eight years old and have a wife and two young daughters. I am presently a departmental manager for UDC responsible for ensuring that the quality standards of our construction work meet our client’s expectations. I am a qualified quantity surveyor and also have a degree in architecture from the University of Singapore. If you wish, I can show you references from previous employers. It is a great honor to be entrusted with this position and I hope that we will work together to ensure a prosperous future for your company."
Sam Woods nodded. "Let me guess. UDC is owned by your . . . . Auspicious Association?"
Guanyu Shui-Zou nodded almost imperceptibly. "Between ourselves, yes although nobody will ever be able to prove it. Do not let that concern you. It is our hope that this will be a profitable investment for us both and we will take nothing from your business that any other partner with a similar shareholding would not receive. We will gain by our association with a company well-known for the high quality of its work. You will gain from your membership of a family that can help you expand and become even more profitable. Let me explain that a little further. When you are doing business with people outside our Auspicious Association, than you carry on as you always have. However, when selling to people who are members of our family, you would be expected to give them a 'friends and family discount'. Not so much that you will lose money on the deal of course, but a gesture of help and friendship to a brother or sister. Of course, other companies in our family will give you similar discounts when selling their products to you. This will reduce your costs and give you a commercial advantage when competing with construction companies who are not members of our Association."
Shui-Zou drank some tea. He wasn't actually familiar with having to explain this; normally the mechanisms would be well-understood already. It was after all, how Chinese families and their businesses had operated for centuries if not millennia. "The other part of the relationship is that, every so often, we may ask you for help. Perhaps one of our brothers or sisters has had to leave their previous home somewhat hurriedly and needs to start a new life with his family. We may ask you to give him a job in your business until the family has settled down or use your influence to find them work in a suitable enterprise. Mrs. Woods, I must make this clear. Most of our businesses are legal and the ones that are not will never involve you. We may even ask you to assist the local police when necessary. A competent, efficient and effective local police force is actually very valuable to us. They provide us with a peaceful environment. Helping them do so is a matter of mutual interest."
"Like with the 'andbag snatchers? Mao-Lee is still a local 'eroine for that. Now, since we're partners, I'm Sam. Michael? 'Ave you somewhere to live?"
"I do, yes. I have an apartment in a converted manor house in the next village, High Ham. I have rented it right now but the lease contains an option to buy if we get along well. Once we are settled down, my wife and daughters will be joining me."
"Welcome to the company then." Sam stood up. "Subject to my lawyer's agreement on the contract, I think we 'ave a deal."
Sitting quietly at the table, Angel smiled to herself. This deal will mean that the 14K will prosper from another profitable investment. We have created a favorable impression amongst local people for their Chinese neighbors and that will ease the process of establishing our presence here. Sam and her family will be secure, and her business will also flourish. Given how her sons have been impressed by Mao-Lee it is not impossible that one or both will marry Chinese girls and then they will truly be part of the Hung Family. When Taunton sub-house opens next year, with Sam, of course, building the Happy Dragon Restaurant that will be its headquarters, we will have a firm foothold in this territory. I think this has worked out very well.
Reception Area, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
There was a tense, breathless silence in the main desk section of the reception area. The duty shift had crowded in and were watching the clock up on the wall with baited breath. Suddenly the silence was broken by the desk telephone ringing. Everybody held their breath while the Desk Sergeant answered it. When he put the receiver down, his relief was palpable. "Drunk and disorderly in Church Street. Patrol officer attending and no backup needed."
The acute silence resumed. Up on the wall, the minute hand on the clock clicked forward, indicating the exact time was midnight. At once, wild cheering broke out across the station. It had been a whole week since a murder had been reported.
Main Courtroom, Appeals Division, Yeovil Assizes. Yeovil Courthouse.
"You have a motion on behalf of your client Mr. Carson?" Judge Zubeda Patel already knew what was happening of course, having been thoroughly briefed by both parties in her chambers, but procedures had to be obeyed. Above all justice had to be done and had to be seen to be done. In this case above all, that had to be the case.
"Yes indeed, My Lady. In the case of Mrs. Margaret King, found guilty of murdering her first and second husbands and the company accountant of King Glassworks, new evidence has been received by us that exonerates her completely. I therefore ask on her behalf that her convictions be quashed."
"What is the substance of this new evidence?"
"We have received, from the Shanghai Police Department, details of the autopsy on the first Mr. King. These showed that his blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit allowed in China and three times the legal limit permitted here. Shanghai uses road traffic cameras at known accident black spots and these show his vehicle being driven at excess speed weaving on the road before the driver lost control and crashed. Finally, we were supplied with a forensic examination of the crashed vehicle that revealed no mechanical fault that could have caused the crash that resulted in Mr. King's death. The Shanghai Police ruled that the death was caused by Mr. King driving while severely intoxicated."
"How did you obtain these documents?"
"Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse asked the Shanghai police for them on our behalf. The Shanghai police were happy to cooperate and sent the material by courier the same day. Copies were passed to us as soon as they arrived."
"I see. Why was this material not made available before?"
"It appears that the police officer in charge of the investigation, DCI Barnstable, was exceptionally dilatory in making his inquiries and made no effort to verify whether the death in question was an accident or not. He appears to have settled on his decisions very early and limited the investigation to confirming those preconceptions. My office has read the court documents in detail and found that the evidence presented does not support any of these convictions. We have submitted a report to the Crown Prosecution Service detailing the shortcomings of the case presented."
"Mr. Ashley, what does the CPS have to say about this?"
"My Lady, we have read the report submitted by my honorable friend and we concur with his conclusions. Furthermore, it is apparent to us that the destruction of the basis for her conviction for the murder of her first husband throws the gravest of doubts on her other two convictions. The only real evidence in those cases was that the two later victims were stabbed with a Masonic ceremonial dagger, one of which was found in her home covered with her fingerprints. It is now apparent that there were two near-identical daggers in the house, one owned by her first husband and one by her second, both men being masons in good standing. Mrs. King was in the habit of cleaning them for her spouses. One of those daggers had disappeared although its existence and the fact of it being missing were never disclosed to the original court. That missing dagger has now been found and forensic tests have shown it to be the real murder weapon.
"In summary, these are convictions that should never have been made. We would join with my honorable friend in asking that the convictions be quashed. I assure the Court that the necessary actions to make sure this never happens again are already in hand."
"So ordered. My dismay at what is obviously a major miscarriage of justice is tempered only by the efforts made to remedy the matter. Mrs. King, you are free to leave this court without a stain upon your character. Also, I am ordering that you be fully compensated, according to the scales and provisions authorized by Parliament, for the losses you have incurred as a result of the injustice you have suffered. Next case." Judge Patel sighed to herself. It was going to be a long morning.
Gould Ward, Queen's Building, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
Jackie Hemsley, as a rape survivor, had a private room all to herself. Her internal injuries were beginning to heal at last although her condition was still listed as critical. Despite her not having made another attempt to kill herself, she was still on suicide watch. Mentally, though, she continued to be in a very bad way. From their very different histories and in very different ways, both Conrad and Angel recognized how traumatized she was. The difference was that Angel didn't understand why she should be sympathetic; she simply saw that Conrad was and that was enough to make her fake that concern. In his turn, Conrad knew that it was Angel's psychopathic mind-set that prevented her from recognizing how the long-term effects of Jackie's ordeal could also be applied to her own, very similar, experience.
"It's Mike. He blames himself for what happened to me." Jacke's voice was slow and slurred. Conrad could see that there was very little left of the competent, capable person she had once been. How much she would recover was seriously open to question.
"Of course he does. He knows very well that the only alternative right now is for you to blame yourself and he won’t allow that. So, he takes all the responsibility on to his own shoulders to spare you from carrying the load. That's how much he loves you." Conrad saw Jackie's eyes brighten and her attention sharpen. The sight comforted him greatly. It might be a trite cliché to say that love conquers all but it often does a pretty good job.
"And don’t forget, the one who really is to blame is Robert Couchman. If he wasn't already dead, I would offer to kill him for you. A real bargain at 5,000 sovereigns, and most hired gun-chicks will give a substantial discount to a woman who wants the man that raped her killed. But I can't do that, I already blew his head apart. So, I brought you a box of chocolates instead." Angel handed the box over with all due solemnity.
Conrad looked at Angel, trying hard to resist the desire to laugh. Not just because of the very Angelic wisecrack, he'd always known Angel had a macabre sense of humor, but because the mention of the fee Angel had charged for killing somebody when they first met. Now, theoretically at least since she had retired from being a hired gun, she would charge much, much more than that and wouldn’t even consider a contract that paid only 5000 sovereigns, It was a clear message to him that killing somebody for pay was a thing of the past and she had left that part of her life far behind her.
"Every time I close my eyes, I can see his face poised over me, drooling on me. I can feel his hands around my throat choking me. I can feel him inside me, tearing at me. I can't sleep, if I do, the nightmares wake me up screaming. I know it's going to be like that for the rest of my life. You can't possibly understand."
"He can't." Angel waved at Conrad. "He can't possibly. But I do. I know exactly what you are going through." I can't be sympathetic, much as I would like to be. I don’t know how, but I can be practical and some practical advice might be more useful right now. "The nightmares will fade, Jackie. I promise you that."
Jackie's eyes opened wide. "You? You too?"
"That's right. Only difference is that I killed the man who did it myself. And I killed the man who told me that being raped was my fault because I must have done something to provoke him. Shot them both in the head, just like I did Couchman. Listen, Jackie, if you let what happened to you destroy you, you're giving Couchman one last victory over you. Instead, count your blessings because they are weapons you can use against the effects of what he did to you. You have people all around you who want to help you. Let them, allow them to help you carry your load and deny him that victory. This is when you can lean on your friends and they'll be proud to help you. Nobody ever helped me, I never even got any medical attention. I was alone until I met Conrad. That why I was who I was back then and Conrad's help and support is why I am who I am now. A much better person, even I can see that. You don’t have to be a better person, you're already a good one. I think, I don’t really know what a good person is. I assume it is being like Conrad. He's my yardstick of goodness and you measure up to it." Angel paused and added very softly. "Jackie, what happened to me wrecked my life because I let it. Don't let what happened do the same to you."
By the time they left, Mike Scott had come in and was sitting on her bed. He was holding her hand and she was smiling at him. It was a weak smile, more than half-forced but it was a first step on a long road back. Conrad looked at Angel proudly. "Thank you, Angel. That was a wonderful little speech."
Angel shrugged in a futile attempt to hide her pleasure. "I must have read it somewhere."
Headmaster's Office, Saint Helena Charter School
"It's good to have you back, Henderson. Your presence here has been sorely missed. When can we expect you to resume your duties?"
"You want me back, Headmaster? Employing somebody who has done time might damage the school's standing." David Henderson had a quite different view on life from his outlook before incarceration. He was under no illusions about how time in prison had affected his employability.
"Of course we want you back. You're the best Head Porter this school has had in decades. Look, you probably don’t know this but the case really hurt us. The board of management was considering closing us down; new admittances had collapsed and we were losing money very rapidly. Two years, perhaps three, and we would be done. A school doesn't run well without pupils. However, when news of your conviction being quashed and the falsehood about us acting as receivers of stolen goods was exposed, we bounced back. We have received substantial compensation for the government for the damage to our reputation and the parents and Old Boys have rallied around. Admissions are picking up although they are still down on the totals we once had.
"Also, a Chinese educational foundation has joined forces with us. They are paying us a substantial fee every year to provide scholarships to Chinese students. In exchange, we will select students every year who will go to a Chinese school where they will learn the Chinese language and ways. The Foreign Office is greatly enthused by the arrangement since it will provide them with Chinese experts for foreign postings. In addition, we will be adding Chinese to our curriculum and the foundation will be sending us an experienced teacher to conduct the lessons. "
"And the storage of antiquities?"
"Sadly, the new lessons and the presence of Chinese pupils will mean that we have to use the space we had previously rented out for the new classrooms. I spoke with the companies in question and they were very understanding. Now, Henderson, we have arranged a feast to welcome you back. Master's Dining Room at six."
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London.
"It's not as bad as it could have been." Commissioner Chris Keeble sat back with a glass of Sir Humphrey's best Gonzalez Byass Fino sherry. "The major lesson is to be very careful where we put retired members of the security services out to grass. This one came back to bite us."
Sir Humphrey looked, as Angel had once remarked, a bit like a ruptured walrus. "I must, with some reservations imposed by the recognition that this matter has not fully played out and that unforeseen and unexpected consequences may yet arise from unanticipated quarters, concur that the situation related to the abnormally high death rate in North Somerset when compared with the norms that historically and geographically apply throughout the component parts of the United Kingdom, appears to have been resolved with much less disruption and public disquiet than was initially expected by the personnel assigned to the Home Office, allowing us to experience an eminently satisfactory outcome that has been reinforced by the timely and effective discrediting of scurrilous rumors that had circulated concerning the involvement of our professional colleagues in the Foreign Office with some illegal importation of stolen antiquities, these rumors it is now obvious having been the result of personal antipathy of the arresting officer towards the institution to which I referred."
"Did you get that, Conrad?" Angel drained her glass of Bacardi 151.
"I think he's pleased." Conrad sounded cautious.
"Humpty said that you two have done damned well. Angel, your invoice for professional services and required expenses has been approved and I have your bank draft here. With a significant bonus, I might add. Conrad, Her Majesty has elected to make a significant donation to your foundation in recognition of its work in resolving a number of cases wherein serious miscarriages of justice has occurred. Conrad, you see your role in life as saving the innocent. Well, this is probably the biggest victory you have ever scored." Keeble gave Angel her bank draft and Conrad the letter authorizing the donation. Unlike Angel, Conrad actually read his and his eyebrows raised dramatically when he saw who had signed the letter.
"Angel, you'd better read yours as well. It appears that a Very Distinguished Person Indeed has recognized our efforts. Chris, what will happen now?"
"You were right, Conrad. There has been a detailed evaluation of the procedures in North Somerset and it found that due to negligence and incompetence by Barnstable and a small number of his officers, a large number of convictions, more than ninety in all, have been found to be unsafe. Rather than allowing an innocent person to be punished, we have granted all of them a full pardon and compensated them. By the way, six of the murderers who Barnstable arrested were clearly guilty and they will remain inside. That helps us hush this all up. Prompt and resolute action has largely defused the issue although there is now a lot of pressure for the formal abolition of the death penalty. As for North Somerset, Chief Inspector Morse is restructuring the entire department. This is a bit of a test for her; if she does well, she'll be on the fast-track to Superintendent."
That will be a step in the right direction. Angel thought quietly to herself. "What about the Barnstables?"
"Jordana Barnstable has been examined by psychiatric experts and found to be unfit to plead due to mental disability. In her case, she now suffers from acute pseudoneurotic schizophrenia resulting from a psychotic break, although she was probably increasingly unstable long before that crisis erupted. She has been committed to a secure unit where she will remain until she either convinces the examiners that she is no longer a danger to the public or she dies. Joan Barnstable doesn't have that defense. She'll be charged with a carefully-chosen selection of murders and will go down for a full-life tariff. Trying to ensure her daughter didn’t get caught isn't exactly a defense."
"And Tom Barnstable?" Angel had a particular interest in the ex-DCI's fate.
"Now, that's an odd one. He may have come over as a sleepy local copper but there was a damned sharp mind in there. The truth is, we can't get him for a single murder. It's not what we know to be true that matters, it's what we can prove in court. We can get him for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, certainly. Wrongful arrest, of course. Forgery, possibly. But, the way he set it up, he simply looks like an incompetent and all the blame falls on his wife and daughter. I'm not sure we could even make an accomplice after the fact charge stick since it might be hard to prove he was knowingly complicit rather than astoundingly incompetent. There are a string of minor and not-so-minor charges we can get him on. He'll get life but with possibility of parole and it wouldn't surprise me if he got out in eight or ten years."
Angel nodded as she slowly absorbed the information. I can understand the problem; I've lived for years on the difference between what people know about me and what they can prove in a court. It doesn't matter though. We're Chinese, we're patient. We can wait that long. No need to get a hatchetman into his prison. Even though we have specialists on doing just that. Let him do his eight to ten and we'll snipe him as he steps through the prison gates.
"It's Angel who really tripped him up though." Conrad was thinking carefully about the case. "Or rather the fact that he hated her. I'm sure a part of it was racial, he just couldn't believe a Chinese-American could out-think and outmaneuver him. He never understood that she has lived in the sort of situation he had created all her life and she was at home in it. Angel, I’ve known for years that you're superbly adapted to living and surviving in your environment and now I watched you save both our lives because of it. I'll be honest, I never realized how good at surviving you are until we went to the mattresses. And you got Barnstable to expose himself."
Angel snorted with laughter. "Now that is a picture I do not need. Pass the brain-bleach please."
Keeble reached over and topped up her glass with a generous measure of Bacardi 151. "There you go Angel. Conrad's quite right you know. It was Barnstable's visceral dislike for you that finally tripped him up.”
Conrad sipped his Armagnac thoughtfully. “It was a bit more than dislike. He hated you, Angel. Hated and feared you. That was why he believed every word of the conversation we allowed him to overhear. It fitted exactly with his preconceptions of the sort of person you are and made what was otherwise a severely overplayed scene convincing. He associated you with the people who honey-trapped him and he was obsessed with getting his revenge."
"Ironic." Angel knocked back her glass of rum and looked hopefully at the bottle. Keeble sighed and topped up her glass again. "It wasn't us. I checked. My guess is it was the Black Dragons and there's a good chance I actually killed the people responsible. My street combat team tore the heart out of the Japanese gangs. That's how I got the name Hēilóng Shāshǒu."
"Black Dragon Slayer. It's strange to think that Barnstable didn’t recognize that and realize you'd probably killed the people who had ruined his career. That's really the single mistake that brought him down."
"It was his one weakness." Conrad shook his head at the follies he had seen. "He could never accept that he might be wrong and would always force a situation to match his preconceptions. He knew Angel's associations, assumed that she was up to something murderously criminal and went from there. He just couldn't accept she was one of the good guys here. This was a gang war for you wasn't it Angel?"
"It was, on a small scale. Same basic principles, gather intelligence, identify the target and isolate it. Then take it out and keep moving so we didn’t form a stationary target ourselves. Chris, there's another aspect to this you need to address. Barnstable only got away with it because everybody he needed was part of the same social clique. Magistrates, Judges, CPS, even defense lawyers. They all worked on the basis that 'good old Tom had to know what he was doing' so they overlooked the obvious. You need to rotate people so that doesn’t happen again."
Keeble decided he had better answer before Sir Humphrey took an hour or more to explain what was happening. "We will be doing that. Sir Humphrey is already working out a list of the professions in question and deciding on a suitable assignment time. We can't rotate defense barristers of course, but we can rotate judges and prosecution officers. Doing that actually got a lot of advantages, other than the obvious ones. Extends familiarity with other sections of the UK, widens experience and so on. By the way, I see you pinched DI Tony Gavin from us." Keeble tried to glower at Angel.
"He told me he was going to leave the force anyway once their baby arrived. Become a stay-at-home dad. Dragon Security Consultants have offered him a work-from-home job as one of our liaison people. He speaks British Police and can help smooth out any problems. Once the baby is old enough to go to school, you can have him back. Provided you count his time with us as time-in-service of course."
Keeble made a note on his pad. "We can do that. Anyway, congratulations on a fine job both of you. Now, we have another little problem with a police force and an excessive crime rate. It’s a small island in the Caribbean. Small force there, just two locally-recruited uniformed officers, two of the most under-dressed detective sergeants in British police history and a DI assigned from the Met. Despite their efforts and a very high success rate, the local population are dropping like flies. I don’t suppose you two could have a look, could you?"
Sam Woods' House, 45 Church Road, Middlezoy, Somerset
Conrad, Mao-Lee, Shun-Tan and the twins, were playing an enthusiastic and noisy game of Fan-Tan in the living room, a game whose noise also served to mask the negotiations that were going on. While the others were occupied with their game, Angel, Sam Woods, Huang Ming-Chu and Guanyu Shui-Zou were discussing business in the kitchen over cups of Chinese tea. Shui-Zou, the White Fan of London House was explaining the details of the proposal being offered to Woods Construction.
"The main document is straightforward. It is an agreement between Woods Construction and the Urbanpear Development Corporation of Singapore for the sale of ten percent of Woods Construction stock to UDC. To be honest this is a boilerplate agreement but we do ask that you submit it to your lawyers for approval. As part of this agreement, UDC will provide you with a building construction manager who will report directly to you. We are proposing Huang Ming-Chu for this post with a three-month probationary period. If the two of you get along and work well together, fine. If not, we will find you another candidate. Mr Huang?"
Huang Ming-Chu stood up and bowed slightly. "I am Huang Ming-Chu, or if you prefer, you can call me Michael Huang. I am thirty eight years old and have a wife and two young daughters. I am presently a departmental manager for UDC responsible for ensuring that the quality standards of our construction work meet our client’s expectations. I am a qualified quantity surveyor and also have a degree in architecture from the University of Singapore. If you wish, I can show you references from previous employers. It is a great honor to be entrusted with this position and I hope that we will work together to ensure a prosperous future for your company."
Sam Woods nodded. "Let me guess. UDC is owned by your . . . . Auspicious Association?"
Guanyu Shui-Zou nodded almost imperceptibly. "Between ourselves, yes although nobody will ever be able to prove it. Do not let that concern you. It is our hope that this will be a profitable investment for us both and we will take nothing from your business that any other partner with a similar shareholding would not receive. We will gain by our association with a company well-known for the high quality of its work. You will gain from your membership of a family that can help you expand and become even more profitable. Let me explain that a little further. When you are doing business with people outside our Auspicious Association, than you carry on as you always have. However, when selling to people who are members of our family, you would be expected to give them a 'friends and family discount'. Not so much that you will lose money on the deal of course, but a gesture of help and friendship to a brother or sister. Of course, other companies in our family will give you similar discounts when selling their products to you. This will reduce your costs and give you a commercial advantage when competing with construction companies who are not members of our Association."
Shui-Zou drank some tea. He wasn't actually familiar with having to explain this; normally the mechanisms would be well-understood already. It was after all, how Chinese families and their businesses had operated for centuries if not millennia. "The other part of the relationship is that, every so often, we may ask you for help. Perhaps one of our brothers or sisters has had to leave their previous home somewhat hurriedly and needs to start a new life with his family. We may ask you to give him a job in your business until the family has settled down or use your influence to find them work in a suitable enterprise. Mrs. Woods, I must make this clear. Most of our businesses are legal and the ones that are not will never involve you. We may even ask you to assist the local police when necessary. A competent, efficient and effective local police force is actually very valuable to us. They provide us with a peaceful environment. Helping them do so is a matter of mutual interest."
"Like with the 'andbag snatchers? Mao-Lee is still a local 'eroine for that. Now, since we're partners, I'm Sam. Michael? 'Ave you somewhere to live?"
"I do, yes. I have an apartment in a converted manor house in the next village, High Ham. I have rented it right now but the lease contains an option to buy if we get along well. Once we are settled down, my wife and daughters will be joining me."
"Welcome to the company then." Sam stood up. "Subject to my lawyer's agreement on the contract, I think we 'ave a deal."
Sitting quietly at the table, Angel smiled to herself. This deal will mean that the 14K will prosper from another profitable investment. We have created a favorable impression amongst local people for their Chinese neighbors and that will ease the process of establishing our presence here. Sam and her family will be secure, and her business will also flourish. Given how her sons have been impressed by Mao-Lee it is not impossible that one or both will marry Chinese girls and then they will truly be part of the Hung Family. When Taunton sub-house opens next year, with Sam, of course, building the Happy Dragon Restaurant that will be its headquarters, we will have a firm foothold in this territory. I think this has worked out very well.
Reception Area, North Somerset Regional Headquarters, Upper High Street, Taunton.
There was a tense, breathless silence in the main desk section of the reception area. The duty shift had crowded in and were watching the clock up on the wall with baited breath. Suddenly the silence was broken by the desk telephone ringing. Everybody held their breath while the Desk Sergeant answered it. When he put the receiver down, his relief was palpable. "Drunk and disorderly in Church Street. Patrol officer attending and no backup needed."
The acute silence resumed. Up on the wall, the minute hand on the clock clicked forward, indicating the exact time was midnight. At once, wild cheering broke out across the station. It had been a whole week since a murder had been reported.
Main Courtroom, Appeals Division, Yeovil Assizes. Yeovil Courthouse.
"You have a motion on behalf of your client Mr. Carson?" Judge Zubeda Patel already knew what was happening of course, having been thoroughly briefed by both parties in her chambers, but procedures had to be obeyed. Above all justice had to be done and had to be seen to be done. In this case above all, that had to be the case.
"Yes indeed, My Lady. In the case of Mrs. Margaret King, found guilty of murdering her first and second husbands and the company accountant of King Glassworks, new evidence has been received by us that exonerates her completely. I therefore ask on her behalf that her convictions be quashed."
"What is the substance of this new evidence?"
"We have received, from the Shanghai Police Department, details of the autopsy on the first Mr. King. These showed that his blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit allowed in China and three times the legal limit permitted here. Shanghai uses road traffic cameras at known accident black spots and these show his vehicle being driven at excess speed weaving on the road before the driver lost control and crashed. Finally, we were supplied with a forensic examination of the crashed vehicle that revealed no mechanical fault that could have caused the crash that resulted in Mr. King's death. The Shanghai Police ruled that the death was caused by Mr. King driving while severely intoxicated."
"How did you obtain these documents?"
"Detective Chief Inspector Helen Morse asked the Shanghai police for them on our behalf. The Shanghai police were happy to cooperate and sent the material by courier the same day. Copies were passed to us as soon as they arrived."
"I see. Why was this material not made available before?"
"It appears that the police officer in charge of the investigation, DCI Barnstable, was exceptionally dilatory in making his inquiries and made no effort to verify whether the death in question was an accident or not. He appears to have settled on his decisions very early and limited the investigation to confirming those preconceptions. My office has read the court documents in detail and found that the evidence presented does not support any of these convictions. We have submitted a report to the Crown Prosecution Service detailing the shortcomings of the case presented."
"Mr. Ashley, what does the CPS have to say about this?"
"My Lady, we have read the report submitted by my honorable friend and we concur with his conclusions. Furthermore, it is apparent to us that the destruction of the basis for her conviction for the murder of her first husband throws the gravest of doubts on her other two convictions. The only real evidence in those cases was that the two later victims were stabbed with a Masonic ceremonial dagger, one of which was found in her home covered with her fingerprints. It is now apparent that there were two near-identical daggers in the house, one owned by her first husband and one by her second, both men being masons in good standing. Mrs. King was in the habit of cleaning them for her spouses. One of those daggers had disappeared although its existence and the fact of it being missing were never disclosed to the original court. That missing dagger has now been found and forensic tests have shown it to be the real murder weapon.
"In summary, these are convictions that should never have been made. We would join with my honorable friend in asking that the convictions be quashed. I assure the Court that the necessary actions to make sure this never happens again are already in hand."
"So ordered. My dismay at what is obviously a major miscarriage of justice is tempered only by the efforts made to remedy the matter. Mrs. King, you are free to leave this court without a stain upon your character. Also, I am ordering that you be fully compensated, according to the scales and provisions authorized by Parliament, for the losses you have incurred as a result of the injustice you have suffered. Next case." Judge Patel sighed to herself. It was going to be a long morning.
Gould Ward, Queen's Building, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.
Jackie Hemsley, as a rape survivor, had a private room all to herself. Her internal injuries were beginning to heal at last although her condition was still listed as critical. Despite her not having made another attempt to kill herself, she was still on suicide watch. Mentally, though, she continued to be in a very bad way. From their very different histories and in very different ways, both Conrad and Angel recognized how traumatized she was. The difference was that Angel didn't understand why she should be sympathetic; she simply saw that Conrad was and that was enough to make her fake that concern. In his turn, Conrad knew that it was Angel's psychopathic mind-set that prevented her from recognizing how the long-term effects of Jackie's ordeal could also be applied to her own, very similar, experience.
"It's Mike. He blames himself for what happened to me." Jacke's voice was slow and slurred. Conrad could see that there was very little left of the competent, capable person she had once been. How much she would recover was seriously open to question.
"Of course he does. He knows very well that the only alternative right now is for you to blame yourself and he won’t allow that. So, he takes all the responsibility on to his own shoulders to spare you from carrying the load. That's how much he loves you." Conrad saw Jackie's eyes brighten and her attention sharpen. The sight comforted him greatly. It might be a trite cliché to say that love conquers all but it often does a pretty good job.
"And don’t forget, the one who really is to blame is Robert Couchman. If he wasn't already dead, I would offer to kill him for you. A real bargain at 5,000 sovereigns, and most hired gun-chicks will give a substantial discount to a woman who wants the man that raped her killed. But I can't do that, I already blew his head apart. So, I brought you a box of chocolates instead." Angel handed the box over with all due solemnity.
Conrad looked at Angel, trying hard to resist the desire to laugh. Not just because of the very Angelic wisecrack, he'd always known Angel had a macabre sense of humor, but because the mention of the fee Angel had charged for killing somebody when they first met. Now, theoretically at least since she had retired from being a hired gun, she would charge much, much more than that and wouldn’t even consider a contract that paid only 5000 sovereigns, It was a clear message to him that killing somebody for pay was a thing of the past and she had left that part of her life far behind her.
"Every time I close my eyes, I can see his face poised over me, drooling on me. I can feel his hands around my throat choking me. I can feel him inside me, tearing at me. I can't sleep, if I do, the nightmares wake me up screaming. I know it's going to be like that for the rest of my life. You can't possibly understand."
"He can't." Angel waved at Conrad. "He can't possibly. But I do. I know exactly what you are going through." I can't be sympathetic, much as I would like to be. I don’t know how, but I can be practical and some practical advice might be more useful right now. "The nightmares will fade, Jackie. I promise you that."
Jackie's eyes opened wide. "You? You too?"
"That's right. Only difference is that I killed the man who did it myself. And I killed the man who told me that being raped was my fault because I must have done something to provoke him. Shot them both in the head, just like I did Couchman. Listen, Jackie, if you let what happened to you destroy you, you're giving Couchman one last victory over you. Instead, count your blessings because they are weapons you can use against the effects of what he did to you. You have people all around you who want to help you. Let them, allow them to help you carry your load and deny him that victory. This is when you can lean on your friends and they'll be proud to help you. Nobody ever helped me, I never even got any medical attention. I was alone until I met Conrad. That why I was who I was back then and Conrad's help and support is why I am who I am now. A much better person, even I can see that. You don’t have to be a better person, you're already a good one. I think, I don’t really know what a good person is. I assume it is being like Conrad. He's my yardstick of goodness and you measure up to it." Angel paused and added very softly. "Jackie, what happened to me wrecked my life because I let it. Don't let what happened do the same to you."
By the time they left, Mike Scott had come in and was sitting on her bed. He was holding her hand and she was smiling at him. It was a weak smile, more than half-forced but it was a first step on a long road back. Conrad looked at Angel proudly. "Thank you, Angel. That was a wonderful little speech."
Angel shrugged in a futile attempt to hide her pleasure. "I must have read it somewhere."
Headmaster's Office, Saint Helena Charter School
"It's good to have you back, Henderson. Your presence here has been sorely missed. When can we expect you to resume your duties?"
"You want me back, Headmaster? Employing somebody who has done time might damage the school's standing." David Henderson had a quite different view on life from his outlook before incarceration. He was under no illusions about how time in prison had affected his employability.
"Of course we want you back. You're the best Head Porter this school has had in decades. Look, you probably don’t know this but the case really hurt us. The board of management was considering closing us down; new admittances had collapsed and we were losing money very rapidly. Two years, perhaps three, and we would be done. A school doesn't run well without pupils. However, when news of your conviction being quashed and the falsehood about us acting as receivers of stolen goods was exposed, we bounced back. We have received substantial compensation for the government for the damage to our reputation and the parents and Old Boys have rallied around. Admissions are picking up although they are still down on the totals we once had.
"Also, a Chinese educational foundation has joined forces with us. They are paying us a substantial fee every year to provide scholarships to Chinese students. In exchange, we will select students every year who will go to a Chinese school where they will learn the Chinese language and ways. The Foreign Office is greatly enthused by the arrangement since it will provide them with Chinese experts for foreign postings. In addition, we will be adding Chinese to our curriculum and the foundation will be sending us an experienced teacher to conduct the lessons. "
"And the storage of antiquities?"
"Sadly, the new lessons and the presence of Chinese pupils will mean that we have to use the space we had previously rented out for the new classrooms. I spoke with the companies in question and they were very understanding. Now, Henderson, we have arranged a feast to welcome you back. Master's Dining Room at six."
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London.
"It's not as bad as it could have been." Commissioner Chris Keeble sat back with a glass of Sir Humphrey's best Gonzalez Byass Fino sherry. "The major lesson is to be very careful where we put retired members of the security services out to grass. This one came back to bite us."
Sir Humphrey looked, as Angel had once remarked, a bit like a ruptured walrus. "I must, with some reservations imposed by the recognition that this matter has not fully played out and that unforeseen and unexpected consequences may yet arise from unanticipated quarters, concur that the situation related to the abnormally high death rate in North Somerset when compared with the norms that historically and geographically apply throughout the component parts of the United Kingdom, appears to have been resolved with much less disruption and public disquiet than was initially expected by the personnel assigned to the Home Office, allowing us to experience an eminently satisfactory outcome that has been reinforced by the timely and effective discrediting of scurrilous rumors that had circulated concerning the involvement of our professional colleagues in the Foreign Office with some illegal importation of stolen antiquities, these rumors it is now obvious having been the result of personal antipathy of the arresting officer towards the institution to which I referred."
"Did you get that, Conrad?" Angel drained her glass of Bacardi 151.
"I think he's pleased." Conrad sounded cautious.
"Humpty said that you two have done damned well. Angel, your invoice for professional services and required expenses has been approved and I have your bank draft here. With a significant bonus, I might add. Conrad, Her Majesty has elected to make a significant donation to your foundation in recognition of its work in resolving a number of cases wherein serious miscarriages of justice has occurred. Conrad, you see your role in life as saving the innocent. Well, this is probably the biggest victory you have ever scored." Keeble gave Angel her bank draft and Conrad the letter authorizing the donation. Unlike Angel, Conrad actually read his and his eyebrows raised dramatically when he saw who had signed the letter.
"Angel, you'd better read yours as well. It appears that a Very Distinguished Person Indeed has recognized our efforts. Chris, what will happen now?"
"You were right, Conrad. There has been a detailed evaluation of the procedures in North Somerset and it found that due to negligence and incompetence by Barnstable and a small number of his officers, a large number of convictions, more than ninety in all, have been found to be unsafe. Rather than allowing an innocent person to be punished, we have granted all of them a full pardon and compensated them. By the way, six of the murderers who Barnstable arrested were clearly guilty and they will remain inside. That helps us hush this all up. Prompt and resolute action has largely defused the issue although there is now a lot of pressure for the formal abolition of the death penalty. As for North Somerset, Chief Inspector Morse is restructuring the entire department. This is a bit of a test for her; if she does well, she'll be on the fast-track to Superintendent."
That will be a step in the right direction. Angel thought quietly to herself. "What about the Barnstables?"
"Jordana Barnstable has been examined by psychiatric experts and found to be unfit to plead due to mental disability. In her case, she now suffers from acute pseudoneurotic schizophrenia resulting from a psychotic break, although she was probably increasingly unstable long before that crisis erupted. She has been committed to a secure unit where she will remain until she either convinces the examiners that she is no longer a danger to the public or she dies. Joan Barnstable doesn't have that defense. She'll be charged with a carefully-chosen selection of murders and will go down for a full-life tariff. Trying to ensure her daughter didn’t get caught isn't exactly a defense."
"And Tom Barnstable?" Angel had a particular interest in the ex-DCI's fate.
"Now, that's an odd one. He may have come over as a sleepy local copper but there was a damned sharp mind in there. The truth is, we can't get him for a single murder. It's not what we know to be true that matters, it's what we can prove in court. We can get him for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, certainly. Wrongful arrest, of course. Forgery, possibly. But, the way he set it up, he simply looks like an incompetent and all the blame falls on his wife and daughter. I'm not sure we could even make an accomplice after the fact charge stick since it might be hard to prove he was knowingly complicit rather than astoundingly incompetent. There are a string of minor and not-so-minor charges we can get him on. He'll get life but with possibility of parole and it wouldn't surprise me if he got out in eight or ten years."
Angel nodded as she slowly absorbed the information. I can understand the problem; I've lived for years on the difference between what people know about me and what they can prove in a court. It doesn't matter though. We're Chinese, we're patient. We can wait that long. No need to get a hatchetman into his prison. Even though we have specialists on doing just that. Let him do his eight to ten and we'll snipe him as he steps through the prison gates.
"It's Angel who really tripped him up though." Conrad was thinking carefully about the case. "Or rather the fact that he hated her. I'm sure a part of it was racial, he just couldn't believe a Chinese-American could out-think and outmaneuver him. He never understood that she has lived in the sort of situation he had created all her life and she was at home in it. Angel, I’ve known for years that you're superbly adapted to living and surviving in your environment and now I watched you save both our lives because of it. I'll be honest, I never realized how good at surviving you are until we went to the mattresses. And you got Barnstable to expose himself."
Angel snorted with laughter. "Now that is a picture I do not need. Pass the brain-bleach please."
Keeble reached over and topped up her glass with a generous measure of Bacardi 151. "There you go Angel. Conrad's quite right you know. It was Barnstable's visceral dislike for you that finally tripped him up.”
Conrad sipped his Armagnac thoughtfully. “It was a bit more than dislike. He hated you, Angel. Hated and feared you. That was why he believed every word of the conversation we allowed him to overhear. It fitted exactly with his preconceptions of the sort of person you are and made what was otherwise a severely overplayed scene convincing. He associated you with the people who honey-trapped him and he was obsessed with getting his revenge."
"Ironic." Angel knocked back her glass of rum and looked hopefully at the bottle. Keeble sighed and topped up her glass again. "It wasn't us. I checked. My guess is it was the Black Dragons and there's a good chance I actually killed the people responsible. My street combat team tore the heart out of the Japanese gangs. That's how I got the name Hēilóng Shāshǒu."
"Black Dragon Slayer. It's strange to think that Barnstable didn’t recognize that and realize you'd probably killed the people who had ruined his career. That's really the single mistake that brought him down."
"It was his one weakness." Conrad shook his head at the follies he had seen. "He could never accept that he might be wrong and would always force a situation to match his preconceptions. He knew Angel's associations, assumed that she was up to something murderously criminal and went from there. He just couldn't accept she was one of the good guys here. This was a gang war for you wasn't it Angel?"
"It was, on a small scale. Same basic principles, gather intelligence, identify the target and isolate it. Then take it out and keep moving so we didn’t form a stationary target ourselves. Chris, there's another aspect to this you need to address. Barnstable only got away with it because everybody he needed was part of the same social clique. Magistrates, Judges, CPS, even defense lawyers. They all worked on the basis that 'good old Tom had to know what he was doing' so they overlooked the obvious. You need to rotate people so that doesn’t happen again."
Keeble decided he had better answer before Sir Humphrey took an hour or more to explain what was happening. "We will be doing that. Sir Humphrey is already working out a list of the professions in question and deciding on a suitable assignment time. We can't rotate defense barristers of course, but we can rotate judges and prosecution officers. Doing that actually got a lot of advantages, other than the obvious ones. Extends familiarity with other sections of the UK, widens experience and so on. By the way, I see you pinched DI Tony Gavin from us." Keeble tried to glower at Angel.
"He told me he was going to leave the force anyway once their baby arrived. Become a stay-at-home dad. Dragon Security Consultants have offered him a work-from-home job as one of our liaison people. He speaks British Police and can help smooth out any problems. Once the baby is old enough to go to school, you can have him back. Provided you count his time with us as time-in-service of course."
Keeble made a note on his pad. "We can do that. Anyway, congratulations on a fine job both of you. Now, we have another little problem with a police force and an excessive crime rate. It’s a small island in the Caribbean. Small force there, just two locally-recruited uniformed officers, two of the most under-dressed detective sergeants in British police history and a DI assigned from the Met. Despite their efforts and a very high success rate, the local population are dropping like flies. I don’t suppose you two could have a look, could you?"