Good Bait

‘What shooting?’

‘Woodford, not so many nights back. Unlawful wounding, grievous bodily harm, could be attempted murder, depends which way the CPS want to go. Kid doesn’t pull through, likely turn out to be the real thing. Go down for that and by the time you get out you’ll be lining up for your Freedom Pass and your old age pension both.’

‘Bollocks,’ Cullen said again, but without conviction.

He reached for the plastic glass of water that had sat, up to then, untouched on the table getting warm, and as he did so, Costello reached out also and, for the briefest of moments, covered Cullen’s hand with his own.

‘Your gun, Brendan, fair enough, face the consequences. Not your gun, my advice, say now before you’re in too deep.’

As Costello moved his hand away, Cullen lifted the glass. The water in his mouth was brackish, stale.

‘Liam’s,’ he said quietly.

‘Sorry?’

‘It was Liam’s, the gun. Liam Jarvis. A favour, like.’ He looked away.

Costello did his best not to smile. ‘Why don’t you tell me how that favour worked?’

Karen listened carefully, tapping the tabletop lightly with the end of her pen. Cullen’s story: Jarvis had told him to get rid of the gun, instead of which, Cullen had clung on to it, thinking to lie about it being clean and sell it on — that the reason he’d had it with him that evening, but the prospective buyer had cried off. After which the smack took over and his sense of purpose became a little vague.

‘Last time we went looking for Jarvis,’ Karen said, ‘he proved hard to find.’

‘So eager to get into our good books,’ Costello said, ‘Cullen might’ve given us a hand there, too. Reckons there’s little Jarvis likes better than a few frames of snooker of an afternoon.’

‘Anywhere special?’

‘Snooker hall, Old Kent Road. Not far from the Thomas a Becket.’

Her aunt used to love watching it on TV, Karen remembered, snooker; hour after hour from the Crucible, the movement of the colours, deep green of the baize.

‘You’ll need back-up,’ she said. ‘No point in taking risks. And best take Mike Ramsden with you. Just in case.’

42

When they arrived, Jarvis was coming towards the end of what would surely have been a wi

His opponent took the game by default.

Once Jarvis had been hauled away, Costello foolishly took up Ramsden’s challenge and lost the best of five frames in next to no time, Ramsden clearing the table on two occasions without Costello pocketing a single red.

‘One of those games,’ Ramsden said, as he relieved the younger man of much of the contents of his wallet, ‘where luck has bugger all to do with it. Craft, son. Practice. That …’ winking, ‘and a good eye.’

In the interview suite, Jarvis had done his level best to suborn Brendan Cullen as a congenital liar. Why in God’s name would he be giving Cullen a gun? To throw away? Dispose of? What kind of idiot would do that? Cullen, of all people. But images of himself, clear as if in HD, making off after the shooting in Woodford, added to some careful reminders of the factors behind his original arrest — witnesses who had placed himself and Rory Bevan in Walthamstow at the approximate time of the shooting — brought about a change of tack.

Yes, all right, maybe he’d passed along the pistol to Cullen. Maybe. But that night in Woodford, it’d just been about making a few threats, right, showing face. Warn the kid, back off, that was all. Stick the gun in his face and watch him shit himself. But, of course, for Rory fuckin’ Bevan, that wasn’t enough. Mad bastard that he was. Rory, who squeezed the bloody trigger, that was who.

‘You mean, like the time in Walthamstow?’ Costello had asked, mild as you please.

‘Yeah, like that,’ Jarvis said. ‘Just like that.’

Since when, Rory Bevan had been brought in and charged and now the pair of them, Bevan and Jarvis, were busy putting one another in it, passing the blame, talking themselves into the best part of sixteen years and change.

Well, Karen thought, they’d needed a break, deserved one, and, at length, it had come. She eased back the curtains to reveal pavements that were dark and slick from early morning rain. The first strands of light were stretched almost to breaking point across the sky.

She set the kettle to boil, showered, dressed, switched on the radio — more bad news of the economy — and almost immediately switched it off again, opting for music from the stereo instead. Humming along, she made toast and coffee, fixed her make-up, checked her phone. Three messages and half a dozen texts, one from Carla, two from her sister, one from her mum in Jamaica, all of them wanting, deserving, a little of her time.

She made a promise to phone her mother, at least; rinsed cup and plate in the sink and left them to dry, then reached for her coat. Her boots could have done with a lick and a polish, but what the hell.…

A good hour later she was at her desk, checking rotas, signing forms, wondering where her next cup of coffee was coming from, and there was Mike Ramsden, looking for all the world as if he’d spent the night on a park bench, but balancing two cups of coffee, one above the other, a smile crinkling up his face regardlessless.

‘The lottery?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Do tell.’

‘CCTV on the approach roads to Stansted — nothing at the storage units themselves, as we know, so that’s been our best bet. Poor bastards going swivel eyed, hour after hour of sodding tape. Concentrating on vans, seemed the most likely, and you can imagine how many of those there are shuttling in and out. Need checking, each and every one, but it looks like in the end it might’ve paid off. Clocked a Ford van coming off the slip road from the M11 just after four in the morning, heading for the airport, Volvo saloon following, S60 by the look of it, dark green. An hour, give or take, later, the same journey in reverse. Van’s a Transit 360, registration clear as a bell at one point, leased six weeks before from a garage in Milton Keynes.’

‘Leased to? False name, don’t tell me.’

‘Thought at first it was, but no, I don’t think so. D amp; J Foods. Office in Milton Keynes. De

‘Good work. And Cormack, he’s up to speed on all this?’

‘Thought you’d like to do the honours.’

Smiling her thanks, Karen punched in Warren Cormack’s number.

A little over twenty-four hours later, prompt as before, Cormack got back to her with positive news. As well as Broderick’s office in Milton Keynes, there was another in Luton, plus storage facilities in a small industrial park off the Al close to Bedford and, until six months previously, on a disused airfield at Wing, close to the Bucks-Beds border.

‘Bit of help from the local force, we’ve been checking those out. Nothing at Bedford, not so far, but a patrol car from County Division went out to the airfield first thing. Not immediately clear which of the buildings Broderick might’ve rented, so they looked around. Found, maybe, more than they bargained for. One of the older buildings, disused for quite a while by the look of it. Blood all over the place inside. A lot of blood. Not new but no doubting what it was. Burned clothing. And more. Hooks and chains where somebody might have been tied.’