Fogarty: A City of London Thriller (29 page)

“I tagged along with him and that bloody insolent DS of his, Grant Pearson, when they went to the hospital. They weren’t happy, but I told them I’m still in charge of Operation Bilbao
, and the Trafalgar flats are my domain until the operation is over.

We spoke to the doctors about Mary Akuta and saw the body. It was bad, Ma’am, very bad. She’d been beaten to a pulp. We then interviewed a lady who introduced herself as May Fogarty, who had also been b
adly beaten in the same flat.”

The AC’s eyes widened. “Wh
y do I know that name, Trevor?”

“Because, Ma’am, May Fogarty is the grandmother of Ashley Garner, who was born a Fogarty, and of Ben Fogarty, the only two survi
vors of the Rectory massacre.”

Penny Thomas took a sharp intake of breath, and Griffiths could see her mind was racing. He waited until she asked him to
go on.

“May Fogarty told us that the man who beat Mary Akuta had been called ‘Rafe’ by his companion, but she had no idea what either man looked like because they wore ski masks. She described ‘Rafe’ as white, around six feet, quite slim, maybe two hundred pounds, with brown eyes.
She then said something quite alarming and also quite interesting. She said that they had called the Operation Bilbao hotline the day before to report new criminal activity in the flats, and to request help in resisting a new criminal take-over of the flats. She said that the attack, coming so soon after the call, was not a coincidence.”

“That is alarming, Trevor, but why did you use the w
ord interesting?” the AC asked.

“Well, I thought it was quite important
, and I said so in the car on the way back, but Radlett said that old biddies like May Fogarty were always ringing our hotlines about lost cats, noisy kids and so on, and that we should follow the evidence and look for Rafe. This evening I printed off the case file, the one on your desk which has notes of the interview typed up by DS Pearson, and guess what? No mention of the phone call.”

“S
o Radlett is hiding something?”

“I believe so, Ma’am. Anyway, just before I came in to see you I spoke to Tanya, the Operation Bilbao hotline supervisor, and she confirmed that a very specific call was made on Sunday afternoon to the hotline. Mary Akuta, May Fogarty and three others were on a conference line, asking us to meet with them at the flats as soon as possible to discuss some new crimina
l activity they had witnessed.”

“P
resumably the call was logged?”

“It was, Ma’am, by an operator who is not due back on duty until tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, we won’t know who, if anyone, he passed the message on
to until tomorrow. The transfer paperwork is missing.”

“Missing or deliberately re
moved?” the AC asked pointedly.

“Don’t know, Ma’am. All we can say is that a data transfer slip was allocated to that call on the log, number 0017 from memory, but neither the paper record, nor the detective’s acknowledgement, is in the file.”

“You need to speak to this operator as soon as you can. Do it under caution, let him know this is a criminal matter, not a job related matter. Let’s scare the truth out of him.” The AC was a little taken aback when she realised what she had said, but she saw G
riffiths smiling and let it go.

“I’ll have an answer on that
by nine in the morning, Ma’am.”

Derek Clegg was clearly covering for someone, and If Trevor Griffiths wanted the truth from him he would have to make himself more fearsome than that someone.

Metal Tokens UK Ltd, Wandsworth Road, London.

Monday 22
nd
August 2011; 11pm.

The cabbie had looked puzzled when two men dressed in dark clothing and carrying a black holdall had asked to be taken to the New Covent Garden Flower Market. The Flower Market was nowhere near Covent Garden any more but was now situated in Wandsworth, on the south bank of the Thames just beyond Vauxhall Bridge.

“You do know it
’s closed, right?” the cabbie inquired, with an air of suspicion.

“Course it is,” Max replied in yet another of his accents; this one was vaguely Eastern European. “We just the maintenance men. Hot weather, no air condit
ioning, flowers wilting, yes?”

The cabbie grunted affirmatively. The cab crossed the river on Vauxhall Bridge and turned down Wandsworth Road. As they closed in on the flower market, Max asked the driver to drop them by the side of the road. Max gave the driver a ten pound note for t
he £9.50 journey. The two men waited until the taxi was out of sight before crossing the road to their real destination.

***

After their dinner at the pub, Max and Ben had come up with a plan. They were plotting a daring escapade that would, hopefully, hit Gavin Mapperley where it hurt; in the pocket.

Max took Ben to a lockup garage in a part of London Ben wasn’t familiar with. Inside Max had stored lots of boxes, files and a Harley Davidson motorbike. Ben couldn’t make out the model. It was concealed under a dust cover. As Max gathered tools for the night’s work he told Ben w
hat he knew about their target.

“In 2008 Metal Tokens UK entered administration. They produced metal tokens for slot machines, vending machines and the like. They make these, too.” Max held out his hand. In it was a pound coin sized token with a supermarket logo on it and a hole punched near the m
illed edge. Ben looked puzzled.

“You keep this token on your key ring, and when you need a supermarket trolley you don’t need a pound coin, you use the token, retrieving it later when you return the trolley
. As you can see, apart from the logo, the token is the same size and weight as a pound coin. It even has milled edges.

In December 2008, Metal Tokens Limited was bought by the Cresty Group, based in the Isle of Man. It’s based at an accommodation address, according to my agent in Douglas. The premises carried on making tokens and fulfilled their ongoing contracts under their new owners, but in 2010 it was rumoured that a ‘boiler room’ was operating out of the upstairs offices. That turned out to be true. I checked. By the time I broke my story they had gone, and the offices were virtually empty, but the metal token production continued.”

Ben wondered where this story was leading but, before he could ask, Max sensed a question comi
ng.

“So, to cut a long story short, since then the premises have been raided three times by police looking for forged one pound coins. On each occasion they found nothing, probably because the forgers had ample warning of the raid. You see, whilst the tooling and the pressed tokens are difficult to conceal, there was no need for the forgers to do so. They claimed to be legitimately producing ‘blanks’, the trade name for these tokens, and no-one could prove otherwise. But according to Laslo, my source inside the company, they would turn out pound coins at night with a different crew, and they would remove the stamps that had the impressions of the Queen’s head and so on before the day shift came on. All of the police raids were carried out during the day.
If Laslo is right, then the night shift should be turning out pound coins by the thousand as we speak.”

“What does a forged pound coin look like, anyway?” Ben a
sked. Max dipped into his pocket and pulled out four pound coins, putting them down on the table. Ben did the same at Max’s behest. Max sorted through them until he came to a well worn specimen. He picked it up and examined it closely.

“I think we have a winner. The Treasury estimate that as many as one in six pound coins circulating today could be forgeries
.  Look closely at this coin.”

Ben looked. The pictures front and back looked a bit flat, but that could have result
ed from general wear and tear.

“Look at the edge,” Max invited. Ben noticed that the words etched into the milling were indistinct and were not parallel to the face of the coin. Max took the coin and walked ove
r to the rough block work wall.

“Now for the final test,” he said as he rubbed the coin vigorously back and forth against the block wall. He held the coin up for Ben to examine. The gold colour had gone and silver
base metal was showing through.

“Bloody hell! A forgery! Who’d have thought? I had a forgery in my pocket.”

“Most of us will ha
ve one somewhere, don’t fret.”

Max collected a small aerosol that looked like it might contain perfume and then he opened a wooden box and took o
ut a handgun. Ben stared at it.

“Whoa! Hold it right there.
I’m not going anywhere armed.”

“Don’t worry, it’s a starting gun. It only fires blanks. Mind you, we still wouldn’t want to be caught carrying it around. It’s against the law here.”

***

That had been two hours ago, and now the pair stood outside a three storey town house on the corner of Wandsworth Road and Miles Street, looking across at the modern brick mini industrial unit which housed Metal Tokens Ltd. Metal Tokens occupied the unit on the corner. The walls were lig
ht coloured brick and the window frames were formed metal and painted bright blue. The ground floor windows were covered with security shutters that looked as though they were rarely lifted. Facing the main road was one of the three exits, the fire exit. The single blue door led from the factory onto a path behind a wall and a decorative wrought iron security fence, also painted blue. The path was around three feet wide.

The main entrance was around the side of the building in a courtyard, and it had blue painted wooden double doors in a glass panelled surround. The final entrance was a roller shutter door about the size of a
domestic garage door, which was presumably used for deliveries. The roller shutter door was electrically operated and the key operated switch was on the brick wall beside the door. As an additional security measure, the door was padlocked closed at the bottom, making its use as an exit impossible.

As they watched the building they could hear the muffled thump, thump of the press. Ben wondered how the home owners on Wandsworth Road put up with it. Any doubts that they may have had about this being a legitimate night shift disappeared when they saw the h
oodlum guarding the front door.

“OK, let’s stick to the plan,” Max said softly. “If I get into trouble you come steaming in with one of those famo
us rugby tackles of yours, OK?”

Ben nodded. The two men walked up Miles Street, carefully remaining out of sight of the guard. Just as they were about to walk into the guard’s field of vision, Ben stopped and Max wal
ked on alone, singing out loud.

***

Paulie, as he was known to his mates, hadn’t finished school. To be strictly accurate, he’d barely started before he was playing truant more often than he attended. As a result he was twenty two years old and he could barely read or write, but in this game you didn’t need academic skills. You needed simply to look, and be, hard.

He didn’t mind this gig in the spring, summer and autumn, but it could be a grind in the winter. All he had to do was guard the door and make sure he kept any nosy parkers away. That was easy. He rarely saw anyone on his shift; this was mainly a daytime office complex and it was on a one way street. Anyone approaching in a vehicle at night would be obvious because they had to come und
er the dark railway tunnel halfway down Miles Street, and pedestrian traffic was almost non-existent. Paulie was, therefore, more than a little surprised when he saw a drunk careening in his direction.

The man couldn’t maintain a straight line. He was almost shaven headed and had what looked like the remnants of a tattoo on his neck. He was singing a discordant version of ‘Flying Without Wings’ and Paulie couldn’t help smiling. This man was a happy drunk, not like Paulie’s dad. He had been a violent drunk and Paulie had often been his punchbag. The man saw Paulie and turned off Miles Street into the mini industrial park, grinning. Paulie stood tall and put on his best menacing look.
The man looked as though he was going to engage Paulie in conversation.

“Hold it right there, p
al. This is private property.”

The man looked puzzled for a moment, then took out an aerosol and appeared to spray it into his throat. He must be freshening his breath, Paulie thought. The man took another step
forward and grinned drunkenly.

“Can I interest you in some mountain fresh mint spray?” The man slurred as he pointed the spray towards the guard. Paulie shook his head and approached the man, ready to usher him back into the street. All at once the man depressed the plunger on the aerosol and a fine mist coated Paulie’s face.
It took a moment for Paulie to realise that the spray wasn’t breath freshener after all. Whatever it was, it blinded him and it stung like hell. Rubbing his eyes instinctively, and making matters worse, he swore. He didn’t see the kick coming, but he felt it. His testicles were mashed by the drunk’s boot and he began to fold at the waist. As he doubled over, still blinded by the spray, a hard knee came up under his chin. Paulie’s head snapped back and the world went black.