Soft Target (35 page)

she'd only be useful if she stood in the witness box and gave evidence against him: she'd have to take a bullet in police custody. Difficult, but not impossible. It was just a question of paying the right man the right amount of money.

Kerr relaxed and took a long drag on his cigarette. Things weren't as bad as he'd first thought. The cops must have reckoned he was stupid, and Kerr resented that. How dare they assume they could get his bitch of a wife to roll over on him? He wanted to teach them a lesson they'd never forget.

Shepherd looked up as the door opened and grinned when he saw a familiar face. It was Jimmy 'Razor' Sharpe, a twenty year police veteran who had worked with him on several undercover cases. He was a small, heavy-set Scotsman with a mischievous grin. 'You've been a naughty boy again, have you, Nelson?' said Sharpe.

Shepherd caught sight of two uniformed constables in the corridor behind him. 'I've nothing to say,' he said.

'I don't give a monkey's either way,' said Sharpe. 'Come on, it's back to Glasgow for you.' He pulled Shepherd to his feet and held his arm as he took him along the corridor.

They were joined by a second detective and went out into 276 the car park. A blue Vauxhall was waiting, engine running.

Sharpe climbed into the back with Shepherd.

Shepherd waited until the Vauxhall was away from the police station before he spoke. 'How's it going, Razor?' he asked.

'Bloody fed up with babysitting you,' said Sharpe.

'Where's Hargrove?'

'Talking to your woman in there. He wanted me to tell you the tapes are fine.'

'Are you going to keep me like this all day?' said Shepherd.

'I was waiting for you to ask nicely,' said Sharpe, taking a small penknife from his pocket.

Shepherd twisted to the side and pushed his bound wrists towards Sharpe. 'Pretty please,' he said.

Sharpe cut the plastic tie, and Shepherd massaged his wrists. 'Those things hurt,' he said.

'Cost effective,' said Sharpe. 'Have you got time for a drink?'

'I wish,' said Shepherd, 'but I've got to get back to London.'

'No rest for the wicked,' said Sharpe.

Eddie Anderson looked at his watch. 'Eddie, if you do that one more time I'll chop your bloody hand off,' said Kerr.

He opened the Range Rover's window and flicked out the cigarette butt. The Volvo was where the police had left it, in the far corner of the supermarket car park. Kerr had phoned one of his police contacts and asked him to check out the registration number. The officer had promised to get back to him but said it might take a while. All checks on the Police National Computer were recorded so he'd wait until he could get on using another officer's logon.

They'd been sitting in the Range Rover for the best part of two hours when a blue Vauxhall parked next to the Volvo.

After thirty seconds or so Tony Nelson climbed out, waved to its occupants and got into the Volvo.

'What the fuck . . . I' exclaimed Anderson.

'Boss, did you see that?' said Wates.

Kerr looked at the GPS unit in his hand. 'Follow him,

Eddie, but keep your distance.'

'What's going on?'

'We'll see where the rat runs to,' said Kerr.

'Why did they let him go?' asked Anderson.

'Just drive, will you?' said Kerr, tersely. 'Leave the thinking to me.'

Shepherd drove into the underground car park and reversed the Volvo into the space next to the white Toyota. He took the lift up to his apartment and changed into his Stuart Marsden clothes. He left the Volvo keys in the kitchen, went back to the car park and got into the Toyota. He was dog tired but he had to get back to Leman Street and report for duty. He'd left his kit-bag in the boot so he could go straight to work. It would be at least eleven o'clock before he got home.

He slotted his mobile into the hands-free kit, then drove out of the car park and headed for the M6. He called Katra first. She said Liam was fine, that she was cleaning the bathroom and planned to do the kitchen. Later she was going food shopping.

His second call was to Hargrove. 'Nice work, Spider,' said the superintendent.

'Has she rolled?'

'She's thinking about it,' said Hargrove. 'She's asked for a lawyer so until he turns up we can't question her.'

'You can't let her see a lawyer - he'll just report back to Kerr.'

'We can't stop her,' said Hargrove. 'We've explained that we'll need her to gather evidence against her husband, and that he can't know what's going on, but she says she wants 278 a lawyer to advise her on the legality of any deal we make.'

'I don't like this at all.'

'We've no choice. And you can see her point of view she's got no reason to trust us. We could be planning to use her, then throw her to the wolves. She called her own lawyer,

a guy who doesn't work for her husband. We're waiting for him to come in now. We've told her you're spilling your guts and that we've got the whole thing on tape anyway.'

'She doesn't know I'm a cop?'

'Absolutely not. I can't see her lawyer advising her to do anything other than co-operate with us, so as soon as she agrees the Drugs Squad and the GPS move in. Your name won't come up.'

'And Hendrickson?'

'We'll pick him up this evening. It's open and shut so I can't see him doing anything other than copping a plea. Job well done, Spider.'

Shepherd thanked the superintendent and ended the call.

Technically it had been a job well done. Hendrickson was a scumbag who had deserved what was coming to him, but Shepherd was less convinced about Angie Kerr. Her husband had beaten her and threatened to have her killed. What sort of man would stub out a lighted cigarette on his wife's breast?

Charlie Kerr was the villain, but his wife was going to be punished.

Keith Rose sat down opposite Mike Sutherland, who was working his way through a fry-up and a stack of bread and butter. 'Do you ever measure your cholesterol?' said Rose.

'There's good and bad cholesterol, so there's no point. Six of one, that's what I figure.'

'Shot in the dark, I think sausages are probably heavy on the bad sort.'

Sutherland jabbed his fork at Rose's plate. 'Cornish pastie 279 and chips is healthier, is it?' He looked around the canteen.

'Where's Stu?'

'Some sort of medical. He never had a chest X-ray up in Strathclyde but the Met insists on it.'

'He's not a smoker, shouldn't be a problem.'

'Rules is rules,' said Rose. 'Dave Bamber will be map man today. Stu'll report to Ken and Amber team when he gets in.' Rose leaned across the table. 'The guy in Chicago's given me a date for Kelly's operation.'

'Brilliant,' said Sutherland.

'Three weeks,' said Rose. 'I'll put in for the leave and we'll all fly out together.'

'That's great,' said Sutherland.

'Yeah, but I'm still short, money-wise.'

'Fuck.'

'Yeah.'

Sutherland leaned across the table, a chunk of sausage on the end of his fork. 'If there's anything you need, Rosie, all you have to do is ask.'

Rose nodded. 'Thanks, Mike.'

They almost lost the Toyota just outside Birmingham. The M5 split off the M6 and they were too far away to see which fork the Toyota took. 'Head for London,' said Kerr. It was a gamble, but they caught up with Nelson just before the junction with the M42.

There were two other cars on the Toyota's tail: a BMW driven by two brothers from Chorlton-cum-Hardy who worked for Kerr when he needed extra muscle, and Sammy McEvoy, who ran security at Aces, in his Audi T4. The Audi was a conspicuous car so the Range Rover and the BMW did the close work with the Audi either hanging back or overtaking and staying half a mile ahead of the Toyota. They kept in touch by mobile, switching position every few minutes.

The man pretending to be Tony Nelson was either an undercover cop or worked for one of the intelligence services. Either way he'd be trained to spot a tail so they gave the Toyota a lot of space.

He was a conscientious driver, never exceeding the speed limit and only using the outside lane to overtake, so they could keep well back until they were near an intersection.

Twice the Audi took a wrong turn while it was ahead of the Toyota but McEvoy was able to get back on the motorway and make up lost ground.

'Looks like London all the way,' said Bill Wallace, in the BMW. He was a couple of hundred yards behind the Toyota in the inside lane.

'Looks like it, but stay on your toes,' said Kerr. 'If we lose him he's gone for good.'

Kerr had phoned his police contact and told him not to bother checking the registration number of the Volvo. No undercover cop would be stupid enough to use his own vehicle on a job, and if his man discovered that the Volvo was a plain-clothes police car alarm bells would ring.

Kerr had called in McEvoy and the Wallace brothers when he'd seen the Volvo drive into the underground car park of the city-centre warehouse conversion. His first thought was that Nelson lived in the block but when he drove out in a second vehicle he realised it was merely a staging-post. As soon as the Toyota had driven on to the motorway, Kerr knew Nelson wasn't local. He was going home.

Shepherd swiped his ID and pushed through the revolving door into the main building. The inspectors who headed the Specialist Firearms teams shared an office at the rear of the building, and Ken Swift was sprawled in his chair with his feet on his desk when Shepherd opened the door. 'I'm to report to you, sir,' said Shepherd.

'How was the medical?' asked Swift, looking up from the tactics manual in his lap. He was wearing his black overalls and rubber-soled boots.

'Just an X-ray,' said Shepherd. 'The docs in Scotland were supposed to give me one two years ago but it slipped by.

Personnel department at the Met spotted it and said I couldn't be active until it was sorted. All done now, anyway.'

'The guys are at the range,' said Swift. 'Get changed and join them.'

'Anything happening?' asked Shepherd.

'We've got a briefing from British Transport Police about an operation in Central London. Other than that, it's all quiet on the Western Front.'

'This is getting bloody weird, boss,' said Anderson, scratching his head. They had pulled in at the side of the road when they saw Nelson drive into the underground car park, and when he'd walked out he'd been carrying a large black kit bag. From where they'd parked they'd seen the building Nelson had walked into. 'That's a cop shop, right?'

Kerr nodded. The six-storey concrete and glass building looked like a seventies police station, but there was no sign on the front. There was no wheelchair access either, which was virtually compulsory in the politically correct twenty-first century. It wasn't a regular police station, that was for sure.

Two police cars, white with orange strips down the middle,

were parked in the roads. Jam butties, they called them in Manchester. In the corners of the windscreens there were yellow dots the size of a saucer. Kerr knew what they meant: the cars were armed-response vehicles, so the cops inside the building carried guns, which meant they were SO 19, the SWATrype units that went up against armed criminals. Why would they use an armed policeman to work undercover? It didn't make sense. 'Okay, let's go home. We know where to find him now.'

I I He called McEvoy and the Wallace brothers and told them to go back to Manchester. He'd deal with Tony Nelson in due course, but first he was going to sort out his wife.

Shepherd and the men on Amber team filed into the briefing room. Yellow team were already there. One of the Yellows was a woman, her face devoid of makeup and her hair cropped short. She was chewing gum, her Glock in a holster high on her hip. Shepherd was surprised to see an armed woman,

not because they were less capable than men, but because most of the women he knew would have hated the idea of carrying a weapon.

A man in plain clothes was standing next to Ken Swift at the front of the room. On a table behind them were a television and a video-recorder.

Swift waited until the last man was in before he raised his hand. 'Okay, guys,' he said, then nodded at the female officer.

'And girl'

She flashed Swift a humourless smile.

'This is DS Nick Wright of the British Transport Police. % He's running Operation Wingman,' said Swift. 'He's going to fill you in on the details, but basically we've got a gang of armed thugs running riot on the tube. BTP want us to provide armed back-up so it'll be a joint operation. The big problem is that Met radios don't work down the tube. When we go in, each group will have to be shadowed by a BTP officer.' There were several groans. 'I thought you'd like the sound of that.'

Wright was in his late thirties with dark hair, greying at the temples. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather '| patches on the elbows, dark brown trousers, a grey flannel I shirt and a featureless brown tie. To Shepherd he looked like a uniformed cop trying to dress like an accountant on his day off.

'It's something we're stuck with, I'm afraid,' said Wright.

'You're saying that our guy up top has to talk to one of your guys, who relays the message to your guy underground,

who tells our guys?' The question had come from a sergeant standing by the door.

Wright shrugged apologetically. 'We think it's as crazy as you do,' he said.

'Bloody madness, is what it is,' said the sergeant.

'It's a budget issue, I'm told. The Met thinks London Underground should pay for the upgrade to the system. My bosses want the Met to pay. It's going to cost millions so God knows when it'll be resolved. Until then, one of our guys has to shadow you wherever you go.'

'And what happens if shots are fired?' said Swift. 'I can't have my people looking over their shoulders worrying if there's a BTP officer about to get his balls shot off.'

'We can issue them with protective vests,' said Wright, 'and they'll be told to keep out of the way.'

'It's a recipe for disaster,' said Swift.

Wright didn't respond. Shepherd felt sorry for the guy.

He'd turned up to give a briefing and ended up taking the flak for departmental budgeting constraints.