The Dark Heart, page 5
‘I’m assuming that was Uncle Ross wanting you to respond in an indecently fast time?’ said Katie, bending down and picking up Evie, who giggled.
‘Aye. Barney has had a call about something. Best get in, I guess. Do we have any cakes?’
‘I think there’s a pack of Tunnock’s in the cupboard. Is this going to be a long hours situation?’
‘Who knows, babe?’ Max stood up, and stretched, just as Nutmeg tore around the corner, with Amber, the neighbour’s new puppy in hot pursuit. Amber was another cockapoo who looked like a smaller version of Nutmeg. They whizzed by, both barking furiously, and disappeared as quickly as they had arrived.
‘God, Nutmeg just loves that puppy,’ said Katie, laughing at the look on Evie’s face as she stared, open mouthed, at the departing blonde dogs.
Max chuckled. ‘I’d best head off.’ He kissed Katie, and then Evie in turn.
Within ten minutes, Max had grabbed his bag, ready as it always was for the urgent, and usually foul-mouthed, call from his boss, Detective Inspector Ross Fraser.
9
Max parked his car at Tulliallan Castle, the headquarters of Police Scotland, and got out, slinging his bag over his shoulder and picking up the box of teacakes from the passenger seat. He was locking the door when he heard footsteps crunching on the gravel.
‘You took your time. Ross will be giving you pelters when we get in.’ Janie’s voice was laden with amusement, as Max turned to see her at the boot of her Volvo, pulling out a large, clear bag full of documents. Janie wore a wide grin, and her normally short chestnut hair was a little shorter and streaked with blonde highlights.
‘Not in a good mood?’ said Max, slamming the door.
‘Ach, he’s okay, but I think Barney’s call has dragged him away from his rose garden, and he’s scunnered about it. He’s on his way, apparently. Barney, I mean. Do you know anything about the job?’
‘He didn’t say anything, and cut me off before I got a chance to ask. Nice hair by the way, was that your achievement for yesterday?’
‘Aye, it took bloody ages sitting there, looking like metal micky with foils in my hair. I’m not used to shite like that, reminds me why I like uncomplicated haircuts. That, and the fact that it cost me eighty quid.’
‘It suits you. You look like a member of a 1980s boy band.’
Janie stopped and stared at Max. ‘Sounds a bit homophobic to me, sergeant.’ Janie’s potentially concerning comment was only partially tempered by the puckish smile on her face.
‘W-what?’ said Max, unsure what else to say.
‘Well, just because I’m currently in a relationship with a woman, you’re using the boy’s haircut on a girl stereotype. Microaggression, or what?’ Janie’s voice was without inflection.
Max opened his mouth to answer, but then paused. ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said, his smile widening.
‘Had you for a moment, didn’t I?’ She giggled, throwing the bag over her shoulder.
‘Not even a bit. How is Melissa?’ said Max, feeling a touch of relief in the unconscious unclenching of his stomach muscles.
‘Bonny and ditsy as ever. Come on, we best get in. He’s already had a go at me because I didn’t bring all the stupid unused material in from the last job. They’ve managed to get Baz off the MIT team to volunteer to schedule it all.’ Janie’s grin widened.
‘That’s a lot of unused material, is Baz off his nut?’ said Max, nodding at the bag.
‘It was a big job, but Bazza is a disclosure nerd. Up for trial soon, but the whisper is we’re getting a plea offer imminently.’
‘That’ll be a result. Where’s Barney been?’
‘He was up in the Cairngorms in his van, but got a worrying call from an old spook pal. He didn’t want to talk about it on the phone, apparently. Being cagey.’
‘Well, as Barney isn’t prone to hyperbole, we should probably listen.’
‘I think “prone to hyperbole” is something of an understatement. I doubt his pulse would go over sixty bpm even if he was putting a tracker on Vladimir Putin’s limo, under the nose of the FSB.’
‘That’d be before lunchtime, before moving onto whistling as he bugged Kim Jong-il’s car, deep undercover in Pyongyang.’
‘Un.’
‘What?’ said Max, eyeing his friend balefully.
‘Kim Jong Un is the current supreme leader, although Barney is probably old enough to have worked against his dad.’
Max shook his head and sighed, and then grinned. ‘You’re such a pernickety geek. Come on, let’s get in there, and get the swearing over with.’
* * *
Max pushed open the chipped and scuffed painted door that bore the dog-eared, laminated A4 sign declaring the small office to be the home of Policing Standards Reassurance. The door creaked alarmingly to reveal the depressing interior. The windows were small and dusty but wide open, one of the lighting tubes flickered. And then the smell hit them. A faint, yet pervasive odour of sewage, deep, noxious and cloying.
‘Jesus, what the hell is that stink?’ said Janie, wrinkling her nose, as she pushed the nearest window open to its maximum.
Ross had a phone clamped to his ear, and his face was brick-red as he muttered into the handset.
Norma had a handkerchief held under her nose, but her eyes sparkled with amusement. ‘Morning, team, I like your hair, Janie. Do I spy teacakes?’ she said, eyeing the box under Max’s arm.
‘Indeed, you do.’ Max laid them down on her desk.
‘So, what is the stink all about?’ said Janie.
‘Something unpleasant with the soil-pipe upstairs, I’m told. Ross is getting very angry with building services, as usual,’ she said, unboxing the Tunnock’s and beginning to peel the foil off.
‘How can you eat? It’s bogging. I hope they can sort it out pronto, or I’m gonna boak,’ said Janie.
The phone slammed down on the desk, and Ross scrubbed his face with his large, calloused hands. ‘I know, it fucking reeks. I’m on the case.’
‘You sounded almost calm and empathetic, boss,’ said Max.
‘Aye, Mrs Fraser has been impressing on me the need to not lose my shit with people who push me, and I almost managed it with that weapon of a building services manager.’
‘You called him a “useless, incompetent roaster”, Ross,’ said Norma.
Ross’s eyes narrowed. ‘I thought I was being subtle, like.’
‘Subtle. You?’ said Norma, her eyes wide behind her statement spectacles.
‘Well, I had my voice lowered, and I didn’t know you could hear me, so that’s a start. Anyway, stop fucking eavesdropping on important managerial phone calls. I’ve sorted it, the bog-squad are on their way, and it’s all down to bloody you lot blocking toilets again with your big jobbies in the ladies khazi. Now I cannae work in these putrid conditions, it stinks like the Portaloos at a Grateful Dead outdoor gig in 1980.’
‘I didn’t know you were a Deadhead, Ross. I bloody love them, what’s your favourite period of their work?’ said Janie, her eyes brightening with the enthusiasm of a dedicated music fanatic.
‘I’m not, it’s a load of dull hippy shite.’
‘Nonsense, their early work was seminal, and particularly the early albums beginning with Anthem of the Su—’
Ross shot Janie a glare, his eyes narrow and flashing. ‘Dinnae give a toss about your weird music bollocks. Come on, Barney’s got the kettle on, and bring those Tunnock’s.’
‘What about me?’ said Norma.
‘Aye, you too. Let’s reconvene in old Father Time’s campervan in the car park, where he’s setting up a Wi-Fi link. A bit of al fresco crime busting is just what we need on a lovely day like this, and Janie?’ Ross looked across.
‘Aye?’
‘Your hair looks bloody weird. You look like that mannie from Wham in the 1980s before he went bald.’
* * *
Barney had set up a trestle table on the grass outside his VW California camper van, just in front of where he’d parked at the immediate front of the Police HQ. A long wire snaked from the side of the van and into an ajar window. The kettle was singing, as they all sat on folding camping chairs, and Barney poured boiling water into a battered old aluminium teapot and filled five mugs.
‘Well, this is nice,’ said Norma, as she unwrapped another teacake and dipped it into her tea. Norma was the team’s analyst whom Ross had poached from the National Crime Agency. She was capable of unpicking the most complex piles of raw intelligence and condensing them into charts and summaries better than anyone Max had ever worked with. She also had an insatiable desire for cakes and biscuits.
‘I note that, as fucking usual, you’re choring leccy from the Chief Constable,’ said Ross, with a half-smile and pointing at the orange hook-up cable that snaked into the building.
‘Borrowin’, I think you’ll find.’
‘Aye, right.’
‘You want the tea that the kettle has provided?’
‘Isn’t it a gas hob?’
‘It needs leccy to spark the gas.’
Ross just shook his head. ‘Why have you dragged us all in?’ said Ross, without sarcasm or anger, probably because he was about to take a big bite of his own teacake.
Barney told them. He told them everything that Finlay had told him. When he’d finished, there was a brief silence before Max spoke.
‘I heard about this. A body found hanging from the bridge. It made the BBC News. South MIT have picked it up, I hear.’
‘I heard as well, but does it feel likely that a load of far-right football casuals have moved from smashing up shops to bombings, to hanging MI5 agents from a bastard bridge?’ Ross said, his eyes narrowed.
‘Well, National Force had apparently been written off as a bunch of hooligans who were behind a few protests at hotels where asylum seekers were housed, certainly before Dent got remanded for a year on the murder case he’s just beaten.’
‘A year? How did they get over custody time limits?’ said Janie.
‘At defence requests, strangely they asked for extra trial prep time, but a cynical man would assume that Dent was giving himself enough time for the main witness to not show up.’
‘Missing?’ said Max.
Barney shrugged.
‘So let me get this straight. Your man, Fin. You trust him, right?’ said Ross.
‘He’s a bit of a funny bugger, but he’s dead honest, and he had a real knack with agents. According to him, he’d been running Billy Mackee, the dead man, for a couple of months. He was a decent level drug dealer, who had moved into the space probably created by us after we busted the Albanians and Hardies before him.’
Max shrugged. ‘That’s the problem with the war against drugs. Bust a network, create a vacuum to be filled by a possibly worse network.’
Barney just raised his eyebrows. ‘Anyway, he was apparently supplying all the old fishing villages on the north-east coast, and had a big piece of Inverness, but then he started working with a crew from the North-East of England. Two blokes called Stringer and Shorty, one of who’s just got out of jail, and that’s when things changed. Stringer and Shorty run a firm that are starting to take over a lot of the markets in the north of England, and wanted to move into Scotland. Billy Mac was gonna be their route in.’
‘So, what made him want to clipe on Shorty and Stringer?’ said Ross, licking a shard of chocolate from his lips.
‘Billy was a drug dealer, but he apparently wasn’t a bad bloke. Not violent, was good at building bridges, and he discovered the real problem with Stringer and his crew.’
‘And?’ said Norma, licking her lips and eyeing the remaining teacake.
‘They are horrible, evil racist thugs. They’re part of an emerging far-right group called National Force. They initially thought that they were just like English Defence League or National Action. Then it went a bit odd, as they stopped any of the more typical yobbery a year ago or so, and then they went very quiet, possibly because Stringer was on remand. Billy told Fin that he reckoned they’re linked to the bomb in York almost a year ago, and the rumour is, they’re planning summat else bigger. Like proper big.’ Barney slurped at his tea, and raised his eyebrows.
‘I remember the car bomb. Killed that lovely author, didn’t it? I read his book afterwards, and it was really thought provoking. I thought it was linked to Islamic terrorism,’ said Norma.
Barney nodded. ‘Aye, they scrambled a big old team to run it, led by a superintendent from national Counter Terror. Apparently the IED bears a very strong resemblance to those used by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and the folks at Porton Down are rarely wrong,’ said Barney.
‘I had some input on this when I was in the Met at the time of 7/7 and 21/7. Bombs are almost like fingerprints. Each bomb-maker has a unique style, so I can see why the CT team would dig their heels in. Or are we suggesting that National Force employed an Islamist bomb-maker?’ said Max.
‘Fucking typical. “When I was in the fucking Met, guvnor, strike a light, my old man’s a fucking dustman,”’ Ross said, in an appalling cockney accent.
‘Well, that’s hardly likely, is it? Far-right terrorists using Islamists to make their bombs?’ said Janie, shaking her head at Ross’s typical bumptiousness.
‘Aye, well, that together with the fact as usual every bugger, including Sharia 4 UK, tried to claim it, as they often do, but Fin’s man was convinced that it’s connected to these two bastards. Hard to prove, I guess, particularly as one of them was in jail when the bomb went off.’ Barney took a swig of his tea.
‘Okay, but why us? Why not farm it out to the cops over the border?’ said Janie.
‘Here’s the thing. Billy didn’t go straight to the cops. Have you heard of CEF?’ said Barney.
‘Counter-Extremism Forum, right?’ said Janie.
‘That’s the one. They’re an online blogsite that tracks racist activity, a bit like Hope Not Hate. Well, that was Billy’s first stop. He met with one of the investigative journos there, a woman called Juliet McNamara, and after a load of toing and froing, she put him onto Police Counter Terror North-East team in Wakefield who in turn handed him over to Fin. Seems it were going okay, but—’ Barney left the sentence hanging.
‘Does this sound to everyone like no one was taking Billy seriously, or Fin for that matter?’ said Norma.
‘It does a bit, but then I think the link to the bomb emerged a little later. Who knows? Let’s not forget just how bloody incompetent some police are. MI5 are worse,’ Barney said, shrugging.
‘But then Billy wound up hanging from a bridge over the Tweed, having first had the shite battered out of him, which adds to the mix,’ said Max, shaking his head, sadly.
‘Tortured, and hung, to be more accurate.’
‘It’s hanged, not hung,’ corrected Janie.
Everyone turned to look at her, her face frozen and reddening, as if she suddenly realised what she’d said. ‘Sorry, it’s my weird thing, isn’t it?’
‘Really, Janie. Now’s not the time for pedantry,’ said Max.
‘Aye, lass. Nae time for pedantry, whatever that actually means. Anyway, one question remains, Barney,’ said Ross, turning to the ex-MI5 man.
Barney just raised his eyebrows.
‘Why us? Or why you, anyway?’
‘Looks like there’s a bent bugger, either in the cops, or in MI5. Fin doesn’t know who to trust. Whoever they are, they sold out Billy Mac, and he wound up tortured, and dead. Christ knows what he told them.’
‘But Fin trusts you?’ said Ross.
Barney shrugged. There was a long, pervasive silence that enveloped the space, the only noise being the soft wind wafting through the trees.
‘I need to ask the unavoidable, Barney. Do you trust Fin?’ asked Max.
‘He’s a funny bugger, and he hasn’t always been popular with the bosses. He’s not averse to jumping in with his big clod-hoppers, which doesn’t do well with the management at my old firm.’
‘So, that’s a no?’ said Ross.
‘I didn’t say that. I’d say he’s an honest fella, if a bit odd. I have to say, that for some reason he was one of the best agent handlers I met during all my years with 5.’
‘So, is that a yes?’ said Ross.
Barney just nodded, and sipped his tea.
‘Right, get going on this, team. I want a strategy, pronto. It could be that in light of what the old goat has told us, the anti-terror cops may want to re-evaluate their conclusion on National Force and the York bomb, and we have a bent copper to find,’ said Ross, his brow heavy.
10
Juliet McNamara was sipping a coffee in a small café on Exchange Street in Jedburgh, as she absent-mindedly switched between her WhatsApp screen and her news feed. They didn’t have an office. Clem always felt having a fixed locus just made them vulnerable. An address was just a target for the type of people that they were trying to disrupt, dissuade and, if necessary, dismantle. (By legal means, of course.)
She looked at the time. He was late. Bloody late again. Clem, her colleague on the Counter-Extremism Forum, was always late, always digging, and always looking for the next big job. He was never satisfied, never happy, but he was utterly committed to their objectives of exposing, and tackling extremism.
She dialled Clem once more, and was almost surprised when he answered. ‘Jules, sorry, I totally forgot the bloody time, and I’m stuck in crap traffic, with a dying phone battery, sorry.’
‘You’re bloody useless, man. Where are you?’ she said.
‘Kelso.’
‘Kelso? God, you’re gonna be ages, and I really want to get home,’ she said, feeling her cheeks flush.
‘Aye, I know, sorry. Can we do it tomorrow? We really need a catch-up. Are you supposed to be meeting your contact?’
‘Yes, and he’s sodding late. I wanted you to meet him.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna make it, Sally is coming home from school early unwell, so I’m going to have to mind her at her mum’s. You do the meeting, and we’ll catch up tomorrow, okay?’ he said.
