Fallen Angel (23 page)

Collins was walking along the Strand, passing the entrance to the Savoy Hotel, when the phone in her hand rang again.

‘Yes?'

‘Two hundred yards upon your right there's a jewellery shop. There's a watch that has been reserved for you in the name of Collins. Go in and pay for it.'

‘But I don't have any money,' said Collins, ‘You told me to leave my purse and empty all my pockets.'

‘You're carrying a bag with more than three million inside, aren't you?'

All at once Collins understood. It would have been all too easy for the police to booby trap the bag so that it sprayed dye over the kidnapper and the money once it was opened, or to have filled it with counterfeit cash rather than the real thing. By forcing Collins to open it and buy something with the cash, the kidnapper would be assured that the bag was safe and the money genuine.

Collins crossed the road and made her way to the jewellery shop. The middle-aged Asian owner buzzed her in and smiled warmly as she approached the counter, struggling to pull the duffel bag behind her.

‘How can I help you, madam?'

‘I understand you have a watch reserved in the name of Collins?'

‘Ah, yes, madam,' said the man, reaching under the counter. ‘Your husband called a little while ago. We've been expecting you.' Collins cringed as the man pulled a small case from under the counter and placed it in front of her. ‘A lovely model. A Breitling chronograph. The amount payable is £2,700.'

The man's eyes followed Collins as she bent down and unzipped the edge of the duffel bag. She reached in and pulled out a wad of notes, then stood up and counted out the full amount.

‘Thank you,' said the man, closing the case and putting the watch into a gift bag. ‘Your husband also arranged for a courier to deliver this. He said you'd collect it along with the watch.' The man pushed forward a jiffy bag, which she immediately ripped opened. Her heart sank when she realized what was inside: a mobile phone.

A new phone meant that it would be far harder for Blackwell's team to track down the call – tens of thousands of calls were being made in that area at any one time. It all went to show just how wrong they had been when, during the first case, they had assumed they were working with an amateur.

The phone was already switched on, and Collins immediately noticed that the battery held only a single bar of charge. There was a note inside the envelope:
Take Blackwell's phone and place it in this envelope. Leave it in the shop.

The new phone began to ring almost as soon as Collins emerged on to the street. She didn't know exactly where Duncan Jenkins was, but she knew that he was extremely close.

The undercover officer dressed like a tramp, who happened
to be closest, couldn't hear what was being said but still had a visual on Collins and the money.

‘Stop,' barked the voice in Collins's ear.

She was directly outside a bookshop that was under a set of narrow arches, with Nelson's Column off to her right.

‘You see the No. 13 bus at the stop?'

Collins looked across and saw the red double-decker.

‘Yeah.'

‘Get on it. Right now.'

At that instant the last few passengers were boarding and Collins had to run, dragging the heavy bag behind her as best she could. The doors began to close just as she reached them, and she hammered furiously on the glass to attract the driver's attention. He looked at her and pressed the button to open the doors once more. She struggled to drag the heavy bag on board as the other passengers, annoyed by the delay, gave her disapproving glances.

Fifty yards along the Strand, one of the undercover officers started to bark into his radio, ‘She's on the bus, she's on the fucking bus.'

Collins didn't remain there for long. Jenkins told her to get off and walk to Piccadilly Circus, then get on the underground and head for Oxford Circus. She struggled up the stairs, a passing Italian tourist helping her to carry the bag, and emerged into the bright sunshine. By now she was sweating with the exertion of it all.

Crowds were everywhere, enjoying the weather and filling both sides of the road in an endless moving sea of people. Collins had no idea whether any of the undercover
team had managed to keep track of her. She knew they would no longer be able to monitor her communications. She could only assume she was all on her own.

In the control centre DCI Blackwell was tearing his hair out with frustration. Dixon had been unable to call up an image from one of the cameras on the bus's route, and there hadn't been enough undercover officers in situ to verify whether Collins had got off. Although he could now see the bus on the screen in front of him, there was no way of knowing if Collins was still on board.

The room supervisor was frantically clicking the controls of the panel in front of him, switching from camera to camera to check as much of the route as he could. One strong possibility was that the kidnapper was already on board the bus and had taken the money from her. This could only be confirmed if she came off without the bag.

‘Why can't you get the picture?' barked Blackwell.

Dixon shuffled uncomfortably in his seat before speaking. ‘I … I can't.'

‘Why the hell not? What's gone wrong?'

‘It's a blindspot. The camera's out. There are fifteen cameras down on the system at the moment, and that's one of them.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?'

Dixon sighed heavily. ‘Some of them have been out for a week. But the one on the bus route went down five minutes ago. The chips have burned out. Looks like someone's used a laser point on it. It's going to be out of commission for at least half an hour.'

‘Shit,' said Blackwell, lowering his head forward over
the desk until it rested on his bunched fists. ‘Shit.' Laser pointers were widely available on the Internet and were occasionally used by criminals to disable CCTV cameras. The small device produced a powerful beam of light that overloaded a camera's circuits until it burned out.

The one thing Blackwell had promised himself would not happen now seemed to be an absolute certainty: the kidnapper was going to beat him.

Collins had walked only a little way along Oxford Street in the direction of Centrepoint when the phone rang again. ‘To the right of you is a narrow doorway leading to some flats. There you'll find a roll of bin liners. Take as many as you need and place all the cash inside them. Tie off the tops as if you were throwing away bags of rubbish. Then carry them with you until I tell you where to drop them off.'

Collins did as she was told. Leaving the empty duffel bag in the doorway, she made her way along Oxford Street. She had gone only a few more feet when the phone rang again.

‘Leave the bags by the lamp-post in front of you and walk away. Thank you, DI Collins, your work is done. I want you to keep walking towards Tottenham Court Road. Don't look back.'

Collins felt sick as she put down the bags. Jenkins could be anywhere. He could have been standing right behind her. She simply had no way of knowing. If she wanted Michael to be found alive, she had to call Blackwell and let him know where she was.

She had to take the chance. She looked down at the phone in her hand and began to dial. Almost immediately the phone squealed with disapproval and a warning message flashed briefly on the screen:
INCOMING CALLS
ONLY
. She could always just dial 999, but it would take time to convince the operator to put her through to the right department. Collins needed a phone on which she could call someone on the team direct.

She walked more than a hundred yards before slipping into a small women's clothing shop. ‘I need to borrow your phone,' she said to the slim young woman behind the counter.

‘What do you think this is? Go find a phone box.'

‘I'm a police officer. This is urgent police business. I need to borrow your phone.'

‘Got any ID?' The girl was cocky as hell, and Collins took an instant dislike to her. She instinctively reached to the back pocket of her trousers where she always kept her warrant card, only to find an empty space in its place. What she wanted to do was push the girl aside, but she knew that would only lead to the alarm being sounded and uniformed officers rushing to the scene. She didn't have time to explain what was going on.

‘Shit,' she muttered, then turned and stormed out.

‘Up yours, nutter,' the girl called after her.

Collins stood on the pavement, crowds surging past on both sides of her. ‘Where the hell is a policeman when you need one?' she said under her breath. She looked up and down, but there were none to be seen. Although dozens of uniformed officers and community support officers regularly patrolled the street, the weight of the crowd made it impossible for her to spot one.

Time was running out. And so was her patience. Across the road she spotted a small cafe in a side street with a bank of tables outside. A man in a pale linen shirt was
chatting nosily on his phone. Collins marched over and snatched it out of his hand.

‘What the fuck.' The man looked stunned.

‘I'm a police officer. I need to use your phone urgently.'

With one eye on the man, Collins began to dial one of the few numbers she knew by heart.

‘Tony? It's Collins. The money is in a couple of bin bags close to Oxford and Wardour streets. Tell Blackwell and get them to swing the cameras around. I'm going to head back that way to see if I can spot anything.'

Collins clicked off the phone and handed it back to the man. ‘Thanks. I didn't mean to scare you. It was an emergency. Please, call the police if you need proof. My name is Detective Inspector Stacey Collins.'

She headed back towards the place where she had left the money, hoping beyond all hope that it was not already too late.

Dixon spun his seat around so quickly that he almost fell over.

‘Guv, we've got her. Collins has been in touch. She made the drop. She called Tony Woods. The money is in a couple of bin bags just outside Marks & Spencer.'

‘Put it on the screen.' Blackwell looked up, but all he could see was a bright red blur. It quickly dawned on him. ‘Shit. He's taken it out, hasn't he? It's another one of the blindspots, isn't it?'

Dixon hit a few buttons on his keyboard. ‘The closest we've got right now is fifty yards away.'

‘Then get some bodies down there. We need to get eyes on the cash, otherwise we're fucked.'

‘Already done, sir. They're on their way right now. I've got the closest camera up.'

Blackwell scanned the large screen. Even with the zoom on maximum, it was still too far away to make out individual faces. All he could see was a steady stream of shoppers stepping around two plastic bags.

A middle-aged man deposited a newspaper. A bearded teenager threw a half-eaten hamburger on top of the pile. Then a man in a threadbare coat and no shoes drew up and began rummaging around.

‘Who the hell's that?' said Blackwell, staring open-mouthed at the screen. ‘Is that one of our men? Get him the hell away from there.'

It was quickly apparent that he wasn't an undercover officer, as the same man casually picked up the two bags and tucked one under each arm, then began walking back towards Oxford Circus. He was moving towards the camera, his image becoming clearer with each step.

‘That's him,' said Blackwell. ‘That's our man.'

Two streets down and hidden from view by a market stall on the pavement, Collins was also watching the man. He wasn't what she had expected at all. The photograph she had seen made him look bigger, more frightening.

There was no way of knowing exactly how close the other units were or whether they had managed to get the CCTV cameras to track the man. If Collins was going to be sure that they kept sight of the money and apprehended the kidnapper, she would have to follow him herself.

Keeping a discreet distance and using the crowds of people all around her as a cover, she kept moving in
on the man, her heart racing as she got closer and closer.

Suddenly she felt a burly hand on her shoulder. She looked around to see Woods. He nodded to his left and right, indicating the plain-clothes members of the SO19 firearms team who were advancing up along the street, their guns concealed so as to avoid alarming members of the public.

The man with the bags moved through the crowd, then stopped on the corner of Oxford Circus and placed them in a litter bin on the side of the street. As he began to walk away, the armed officers moved in.

‘Jenkins,' an officer called out above the noise of the crowd and the traffic.

No reaction.

‘Jenkins!' This time his voice was louder, more of a bellow than a shout. The man must have heard it, unless he was deaf, but there was still no reaction. Collins felt a tingle in her spine. This wasn't Duncan Jenkins.

‘Armed police. Stop right now.'

At last the man stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. The armed officers took out their police-issue baseball caps and placed them on their heads, the distinctive black-and-white check pattern clearly visible around the rim. At the same time they pulled the Velcro pads off their slim-fitting bulletproof jackets to reveal the word POLICE emblazoned above their chests.

It took only a split second for the man to realize that they were indeed talking to him rather than to anyone else. He turned around, and, as the guns were pointed towards him, he raised his hands to the sky.

Collins held back. This was a job for the armed team,
and she didn't want to risk getting between them and their target. There were more than enough distractions around as it was.

The officer to the right of her began to bark instructions. ‘Get down on your knees.'

The man's face was contorted with terror. He was so scared he had lost the ability to move and stood completely frozen.

‘Turn around and get down on to your knees,' the officer said again.

By now, shoppers had realized what was going on. Some had stopped to stare, while others had hurried along, eager to give the whole thing a wide berth. Collins looked up and saw a double-decker bus moving slowly past, faces pressed up against the window as passengers and tourists enjoyed the free show.

The man's mouth opened and closed like a goldfish's but no sound came out.

Collins turned her head and cupped her hand against her ear in an effort to hear. She caught only a few words: ‘… gave me money … told me to take bags … promised me money …'

Collins spun around on the spot. Jenkins was there somewhere. He was probably watching them right now. He might even have Michael with him. Could she have been wrong? Was he genuinely after the money after all? He had used the man as a decoy.

And that's when it happened.

One moment the man was standing fifty feet in front of her; the next he wasn't.

The blast wave of the explosion hit her. It was as if
someone had punched her hard in the stomach, knocking all the wind out of her and sending her flat on her back.

The others felt it too. In a perfect circle all around the man people were falling and screaming and twisting in the air as the shock wave passed through them. Then it hit the windows of the shops. They shattered, sending razor-sharp shards of glass flying in all directions. For a few seconds there was deathly silence, then alarms began to sound everywhere and the screaming started.

Lying on the ground, Collins put her hand to her head and felt something warm and wet alongside something jagged and sharp. A small shard of glass was caught up in the top of her scalp. Instinctively she reached up to pull at it. It came out easily, tangled up in nothing more than a few ragged strands of her hair. There was blood on her face, to be sure, but not all of it was her own.

Burning banknotes were fluttering down from the sky like some kind of strange tickertape parade, and the air was heavy with the smell of burning petrol …

The blast had caused devastation everywhere, and the man was screaming in agony, one of his legs bleeding badly. She could see his broken body lying on the ground in front of her, twitching slowly as spasms of pain shot through him. But during the blast Collins had seen something else. As she had flown backwards through the air, she had seen the reaction of those around her. Shock, horror, terror in hundreds of faces.

All except one.

There had been one man to the far right in her field of vision, just on the edge of the blast zone, who had not seemed to react when the blast went off. While
everyone else turned, pointed or stopped in their tracks, he had simply carried on walking at a steady pace, his hands tucked deeply into the pockets of his light jacket. He hadn't even turned around to see what was going on.

There were two possible explanations. Either the man was as deaf as a post and blind as a bat – though that was unlikely, as even a deaf person would have felt the shock wave of the blast – or he was the man who had set off the explosion. It was Jenkins. And he was getting away.

Collins dragged herself to her feet. Woods was kneeling beside a woman with a badly cut face. There were other people who were hurt, but it was more important to get Jenkins and, ultimately, Michael. Dozens of uniformed and plain-clothes officers were flooding into the area, convinced that the one man who could tell them where Michael was lay mortally injured on the street. She alone knew the truth, and there wasn't a second to waste.

For all she knew, Jenkins was on his way to kill Michael at that very moment.

She called out to Woods and pointed at the man leaving the scene. ‘That's him – that's Jenkins.' Woods responded with a look of confusion. She had no time to explain, so she shook the dust and debris from her clothes, took a deep breath and started to run after Jenkins.