Good Bait

She could hear faint traffic sounds, as if Cormack were standing near an open window. Run?Yes, she’d run. Run, duck, hide. But would the gunman risk identification and possible capture if his prime target was already down?

‘Tell you what,’ Cormack said, ‘send across some pictures, head and shoulders, full face, profile, you know the kind of thing. I’ll get them fed into the system, see what emerges.’

‘How long?’

‘Check that through? Might strike lucky. This time tomorrow? Don’t come up with anything by then, I’m probably not going to be able to help.’

‘Thanks, anyway,’ Karen said. But he’d already rung off.

24

Twenty-four hours. Warren Cormack was as good as his word. They met, at his suggestion, in Victoria Tower Gardens, just beyond the Houses of Parliament and overlooking the Thames. Tide out, gulls scavenged along a narrow strand of muddy bank strewn with discarded rubbish. New Scotland Yard was no more than a brisk stroll away, pleasant enough beneath a wash of wispy cloud, a patina of palish blue.

Cormack proved to be younger than he’d sounded on the phone, younger than she’d anticipated, less abrupt. Slim features, neatly suited, off-white shirt, pearl grey tie, still the right side of thirty-five.

‘This okay by you?’ He gestured towards a bench facing out towards the river, Lambeth Palace and St Thomas’ Hospital on the opposite bank.

‘Fine.’

‘Not usually too many people around.’

‘Bolt-hole, then?’

‘Something like that.’

Sitting, he loosened his tie just a little; one arm, crooked, along the back of the bench. Making her wait. One of a brace of ragged crows hopped hopefully close, then hopped away.

‘Jamie Parsons,’ Cormack said, finally. ‘The pictures you sent over. A definite match.’

‘He’s known?’

‘Only tangentially. That’s why he wouldn’t have shown up on your radar. Bottom-feeder stuff, really. Does a lot of footwork for a guy called Gordon Dooley, who we certainly do have an interest in.’

‘Dooley?’

‘A dealer, fairly big-time, contacts all along the south coast, Margate, Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton. Main source of supply was through the Netherlands, Rotterdam, but since Border Agency and Customs seem to have succeeded in stemming that particular flow, for now at least, he’s been having to look elsewhere.

‘There’s no definite proof, but we think he’s behind a spate of raids on ca

‘And these farms, who’s behind them?’

‘Difficult to say. Precisely. The workers at both premises were mainly Chinese, illegally trafficked into the country, very little English. They’d been badly beaten, some of them, during the raids, tied up with baling wire. Terrified out of their wits. They’re not going to give us a great deal, even if they wanted to. But most of that trade — what isn’t still in the hands of Dooley and his ilk — it’s the province of organised gangs originating in Eastern Europe. Turkey. Albania.’

A pleasure boat went past them downriver, heading towards Tower Bridge and beyond that to the Thames Barrier, hardy souls on deck wrapped in scarves and fleeces, the voice of the tour guide torn by the breeze.

‘Dooley,’ Karen said, ‘if he is involved, presumably he’s not going to be carrying out these raids single-handed.’

Cormack shook his head. ‘South London, that’s his stamping ground. Home patch. Recruiting, that’s where he’d look. No shortage of possibles, keen for a ruck. Especially if there’s a good chunk of cash at the end of it. A couple of known associates with more than a propensity for violence. A few hangers-on.’

‘Parsons being one.’

‘Parsons being one.’

‘And Aaron Johnson another.’

‘Maybe. A reasonable assumption. But we don’t know for sure. As it stands, nothing to say they knew one another before Camden. Not much to link them together aside from a liking for Ro

‘How about Terry Martin?’

‘You looking for a co

‘Maybe.’

‘Any special reason?’

She told him about Petru Andronic’s murder, her suspicions that Martin might have been involved.

‘Well, it’s a name we know, more through the company he keeps than anything else.’

‘Company?’

Cormack smiled, shifted his position on the bench. ‘How about this? One of Dooley’s hard men got out of the Scrubs just a month before the raid in Ma

‘Let me guess, Carter.’

‘Mad Mike himself.’

‘The link, you think, between Martin and Dooley?’

‘One of them, I’d say.’

‘So how involved in all of Dooley’s dirty work do you think Martin might be?’

‘Difficult to say. Anywhere between not at all and very. As muscle, maybe. More than that …?’ He shrugged his shoulders, dipped his head.

‘He’s not dealing himself, I suppose?’

‘Not as far as we know. There was a suggestion a while back that he might have been smuggling in drugs along with his shipments from the Baltic. Couple of containers were opened and searched — nothing but plastic wraps of cheap clothing on their way to small-scale shops and market stalls up and down the country.’

Karen sat back, starting to run the possibilities, the variables, through her mind. ‘How do you want to play this?’ she asked.

‘You run with your investigation, let your team know as much as you think they need. We’ll keep up our surveillance on Dooley, maybe widen it to take in a couple of the others. Anything important starts to show, I’ll put you in the frame.’

‘Likewise.’

‘Okay, good.’ He got to his feet and Karen followed. A scattering of scruffy pigeons made as if to take flight but their hearts weren’t in it.

Karen thanked him, meaning every word, shook hands, and set off towards Westminster Tube station. The protesters she understood to have been moved on from Parliament Square still seemed to be present in quite large numbers. No tents any more, no one sleeping rough, but ba

Compared to that, she thought, crossing against the slowly moving traffic, what she had to deal with, serious in its way, was small beer indeed.

25

The cemetery was just south of the road that separated Heamor from Penzance proper, an expanse of land protected by trees and closely studded with markers in marble and stone. Late afternoon, the winds that had earlier scoured the day had all but died and the light was fading in the sky. Cordon’s own father was here, had been here for some little time; his grave, as he would have wanted, plain and largely unadorned. Three lines from Robert Louis Stevenson, cleanly carved …

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die.

Cordon had found them in a book of verse that had lain beside his father’s hospice bed, uneasily underlined.

Three plots away lay the grave of an unknown French merchant seaman, a victim of the First World War, who for some reason had washed up on this part of the coast. There were other sailors buried there, too, Cordon knew; they had learned about it at school. Seventeen of the crew of the trawler Wallasea, killed in an attack by German surface craft down in Mounts Bay in January 1944. In his primary class they had made drawings, heavy the lurching blue of the heaving sea, the sky above erupting with the scarlet crash of exploding shells. The teacher had taken them to the causeway that leads, at low tide, across the edge of the bay towards St Michael’s Mount and had them stand there, silent, staring out, thinking the unthinkable. His fingers had been cold, Cordon remembered, the first inklings of returning water pooling around the thin soles of his plimsolls.