Force Of Habit v5 (17 page)

‘We started with Denise Lumsden’s calls. She only ever called half a dozen numbers, the master and five others. Those other numbers only ever communicated with her. Our theory is that Lumsden’s little group was probably one of twelve self-contained units, each probably unaware of how many other units existed and everyone ignorant of other group members, that way, if any one person is compromised the worst that can happen is that they only put their own group at risk. The only connection is the master. The telecoms guy put together this chart for us,’ she pinned a copy to a board. It had twelve columns, each listing between six and ten telephone numbers. Above the columns a single number was typed, the master phone, and a line had been drawn from it to the first number in each column. ‘The master only ever communicated with one phone in each group, the group leader, and all the other phones in each group only ever communicated with other phones within their own group – that was how the telephone guy could isolate them. This looks like a tight outfit with amazing discipline and enough manpower to control a sizeable area. So far we haven’t seen any contact outside of their network other than the Rawlins’ call from the Pond House. Lumsden doesn’t strike you as the disciplined professional type so she must have been shit scared of someone to keep it all so clean. They all must be.’

‘With good reason,’ said Deacon, looking at the Lumsden crime scene pictures on the wall.

‘Are you saying that all we have here is a diagram and no names to label it with other than the victim?’ said Mason. ‘That cell phone forensics on Lumsden could only pull a bunch of dead, no name phones? We really are screwed. The Chief’s going to have the mother of all fits.’

North smiled at the prospect.

‘Let’s run through what we do have on them,’ he got in before James. ‘Lumsden had a couple of boxes of flat packed burger bags. These would be easy to knock off and would be supplied to her and the other groups so that they could be used to make onward deliveries – Lumsden had one ready to go with a hundred wraps in it. Nobody gives you a second glance if you're carrying one of those around town. Denise Lumsden was cutting pure product, packaging it in tenner wraps and selling bags of a hundred to her regular contacts for cash. The network dealers probably had their cash in a similar bag so that when they met up with Lumsden they played subtle swapsy and walked away. They probably then sold it on to small time dealers outside of their network. This is a well organised gang and the money men are pulling the strings well away from the streets.’

‘So what are you suggesting, that we stop and search everyone in town who has a McDonalds?’ said Mason. ‘Based on a theory?’

‘So what went wrong that got Lumsden killed like that?’ Deacon kept them on track. ‘Do you think that she was inflating the price and pocketing the difference? That was some wad in her freezer.’

North shrugged. ‘Fear plays its part in all this but these people aren’t stupid and I would guess they make sure their people get an alternative incentive. In the potential scale of things twenty grand is peanuts to them but more than someone in Denise Lumsden’s position could ever dream of. But we can’t rule out the possibility that they were purely putting the frighteners on poor sods like Denise and that she decided to help herself. She could have started cutting it a bit finer so she could sell more and keep a cut for herself, who knows, maybe she was bankrolling a new start for herself someplace else. They found out, killed her and stuck the needles in as a warning to others working for them but then why leave the drugs and cash? Same goes if another outfit did it in retaliation for stepping on their toes.’

‘This is all very pro-active of you but it doesn’t give me anything to arm the Chief with against the men upstairs and the cameras outside and I’m not going in there and telling him that our current best option is to go out there mob handed and search everyone with a fucking McDonald’s,’ said Mason.

‘It won’t come to that,’ said North.
Unfortunately.
‘Thanks to DC James we have another option. Mobile phones are just that – they are mobile. They move about. But two in Lumsden’s little unit don’t. They only ever make or receive calls from the same place. All the calls for each phone always go through the same phone masts. Phone one always uses mast A, and phone two always uses mast B. Fixed locations.’

‘How much does that help us? Doesn’t that just give us an area covered by each mast the equivalent of the search for the shooter?’

‘You really have to start training your mind to latch on to the positive.’

‘Easier said than done when you have to go brief the Chief every five minutes.’

‘Anything near either of them that stands out as a potential call site?’ said Deacon.

‘That’s the spirit.’ North added two print-outs to a space on one of the evidence boards. He’d circled a large building in each. There was little else on each page. They all moved in closer.

‘They look like some kind of secure estates.’

‘Prisons?’

‘Prisons,’ said North. ‘It looks like Denise Lumsden was also being used to smuggle pure heroin into Dipton and Stanegate as well as supplying people servicing the streets with cut product. We have found that she had regular appointments at both that never coincided with her cycle, all marked on her calendar, and two cellophane packages that were fit for purpose were found at PC Winters place that we believe he stole from Lumsden’s. The heroin is a hundred percent match. The cellophane throws off sniffer dogs, should they be using one, and they would be secreted inside her when she went in,’ he pointed between his legs. ‘She was getting good to go when she was killed. The product would be cut inside the nick to get the maximum heroin in on each trip.’

‘You said, ‘It looks like?’’

‘We haven’t gotten any further, DC James only just got the information that allowed us to piece this together. It’s time to put it to the test. James, call the prison pretending to be Lumsden and check that she is down to visit tomorrow.’ He turned to the others. ‘That's the next date marked on her calendar.’

‘Won't they wonder why a dead person's calling?’ asked James.

‘They'll just be looking at a list of names and times, it won't even register.’

‘Why don’t we just tell them who we are and ask?’ said Deacon.

‘We will, but we’ve already had enough data protection, red tape, big hairy bullshit on this one so we’re going to check the easy way first.’

James dialled. Did the honours. Lumsden was booked in to visit Dipton female prison in the morning. James dialled again.

‘Lumsden was also due to visit Stanegate prison in the afternoon but the inmate she was due to visit has already been released. It was Rawlins.’

‘Good work, Just James.’

Suddenly she felt better. Quite a bit better. She had been down since the incident out at the old industrial unit and had felt that she had been fobbed off with low rate routine tasks ever since. Now she was a key part of the investigation.

‘Maybe she just snuck Rawlins a phone and was getting him off by talking nasty after lights out,’ said Deacon.

‘But what about the other phone? It's at a women’s prison,’ said James.

‘Maybe she drives on both sides of the road.’

‘You'd have to be real unlucky to have your boyfriend and girlfriend banged up at the same time.’

‘Mixing with prostitutes and addicts, it isn’t exactly impossible. But couldn’t Rawlins and the woman just be loaning them out inside. Using them to barter for fags and stuff.’

‘Except they only ever contact the one number, Lumsden’s, and all the calls fall around the dates on Lumsden’s calendar. All of these periods of activity follow an initial call from the master to Lumsden. It's giving out the orders and they cascade down. The master phone is a boss. Maybe
the
boss. Rawlins called that number from the pub and it got him killed.’

‘Who was she visiting in the woman’s prison?’ said Mason.

TWENTY-TWO

DC James appeared and North waved her over to his table. ‘I'm starving,’ he forked a mouthful of fry up. His bloodstream had cleared and his head didn’t hurt quite so bad this morning. Hunger had kicked in. ‘Not having anything?’

She shook her head. He could see she was nervous.

‘You can't go in there like that,’ he said.

She looked at herself as best she could without a reflective surface to hand. ‘What? I don’t understand.’ North was pleased to see shock manifest itself on her mush. She was more afraid of not going through with it. She wanted this. She wanted to redeem herself in everyone’s eyes.

North swallowed some barely chewed sausage and bacon. ‘You look pathetic,’ he waved a laden fork at her.

James' eyes flared and she glared at him.

‘Hold that thought!’ he sprayed. A bit of egg landed on the table in front of her and she took a step back. ‘That's how you go in there,’ he shovelled in another load.

James screwed her face. ‘You're disgusting. Now you've cleaned up the outside you need to start within.’

‘That's it. Attitude,’ he waved the fork at her some more. ‘Hate everything.’

‘Don't you mean everyone?’

‘No, I mean everything. If you bump into a coke machine you give it the evils.’

She actually let out a laugh. Just the one, but it was a start.

‘That's the spirit,’ he lobbed in some tea and smiled a food free smile. ‘She will be full of attitude. You need to be prepared for it, meet it head on and give her some.’ James pulled the chair away and sat diagonally opposite him, away from the egg he’d spat onto the table. ‘You know, shit happens to all of us and just because some of us can laugh about it and take the piss out of ourselves down the station doesn't mean it hurts any less inside but our own ego and pride can be greater adversaries than the villains we come up against. If you can conquer those you'll go far. There's not many that can. You're smarting but you have to learn from these things and learn to let them slide or they’ll begin to poison your perception of things - just look at Scanlan and the Chief. Scanlan’s bitter and twisted and blames everyone but himself for his situation and I’ll bet you that it has never once occurred to him that maybe he should at least try to change his ways. The Chief cares too much about how he is being perceived instead of just getting on with the job and that effects how he does it. If you take care of the job at hand, the job will take care of you, Just James. Of course some people just aren’t cut out for it - like Scanlan.

‘Plenty of shit will be thrown your way and it isn't true that that which doesn't kill us automatically makes us stronger. It's how we cope. How we react. How we go forward. What we are made of here,’ he prodded a temple, ‘determines the suicides from the heavyweight champions and you are made of the sterner stuff, Just James. Don’t get caught up in the ego trips and all the big hairy bullshit and you won’t only go far but you will do some good for all of us when you get there.’

‘You know, you make a lot of sense for someone who has a habit of winding up the wrong people. I’m beginning to think that you do it on purpose.’

‘What can I say? Gateshead charm school isn’t exactly top of the government league tables - and I wind up exactly the right people,’ he grinned. ‘How was your briefing?’

‘You mean debriefing.’

‘Was that an attempt at humour?’ he smiled.

She smiled back. She looked up the clock on the mess wall, big and prominent to keep everyone punctual.

‘Showtime,’ said North.

***

Twenty miles away Shontelle-Leigh Stafford was going stir crazy in seg. They kept you banged up for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four with no way of telling what time it was until a tray arrived. Her head converted minutes into hours. It seemed like days since they had dragged her in here.

She had been sent down the block less than a day ago for behaving in a violent and threatening way. That was how the Governing Governor of Dipton closed female prison had put it when she removed her from association under Rule 4 and placed her in the segregation unit and it was all a great big steaming bowl of dog crap. When she found out who was stirring it they would find out what behaving in a violent way was, all right. In fact they could shove the threatening part up their backstabbing arse, Shontelle-Leigh was going to get straight down to it. The bitch was dead. Bitches, hopefully. One wasn’t going to be nearly enough for her, the mood she was in.

Right now she was more concerned about herself. She had an appointment she wasn’t going to be able to keep that could have some proper serious repercussions. She knew, she’d suffered them before. Some bitches were going to pay big style.

There was a clatter of keys and the door clanked open.

‘You have a visitor.’

She felt so relieved that she didn’t even have a pop at the screw or stop to think that she shouldn’t have been allowed visitors. She had bigger shit to worry on. The visitor could make all that go away.

***

DC James looked as rough as nuts but no one batted an eyelid at her face and arms all cut, scraped and bruised. It was nothing new here. Inmates, visitors, prison officers, you name it, they all carried fresh battle scars in some shape or form at one time or another. She had also dressed just like any other charver come to visit one of her rough arse mates.

James pushed her mobile under the glass wall and a gate officer returned a laminated card with a number printed on it, as receipt. She listened as a number of other items that were illegal inside was reeled off. James stopped chewing at the word ‘gum’ and spat it in the bin, indicated that she didn’t have anything else listed and the first door into the prison slid aside.

Once through it she had to wait in a confined space, no more than six feet square, while it closed. A click announced the release of the door in front of her, which she had to pull open. It was thick and heavy but the metal glided smoothly on its hinges. It slammed home as she closed it behind her and another click had her locked inside.

A guard was waiting and she was taken into a small room lined with lockers. She was asked to place the bag she was carrying into one of them. The guard checked the pockets in the white puffer jacket North had trodden up and down the station floor. It was filthy. Her clothes were the cheapest looking a charity shop had had to offer. A low cut sleeveless top finished above her navel and leggings clung to her arse and thighs, finishing just below her knees. Her skirt finished way above them. She was well out of her comfort zone.