Stranger Child (32 page)

Was this the man she had married?
Images of their life together flashed through her mind – of times when she had perhaps misinterpreted her husband’s actions. She had always assumed his inability to face the harsh realities of life was down to his optimistic nature. Now she was sure that it was more a case of hiding from the truth. Right now, he would be convincing himself that it was fine for Emma to do this. He would have devised a list of reasons to justify why it was better for Emma to go down into that dark, silent vault. That way, he didn’t need to feel guilty about it.

Whatever he was thinking, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how terrified she was.

She had visited David’s company in daylight hours, when the half dozen people who worked there had been around. Even then, she had found something spooky about the place. It was months since she had been there – not since the time she went to show Ollie off
to David’s colleagues just after he was born – and she tried to visualise the place, to fix the layout in her mind.

The customer entrance was on the main road, but she had been told to go in the back way – an entrance she didn’t know. It didn’t matter, because everything – the offices, the reception, the safe deposit boxes – were all in the bowels of the earth, under the streets of Manchester.

There was a long flight of narrow steps leading down to a small reception area, with just enough space for a couple of security men and a bank of CCTV monitors behind a counter. A door led from there into the key room.

Then there were more stairs down into the tile-lined spaces below. David’s office was in this part of the building; he always said that he felt a bit like a mole, buried beneath the earth all day. In the winter, he never saw sunlight during the week. There were no windows - they were too far underground.

There had been one moment during her last visit when she had been left on her own while David went to answer the phone. Emma remembered having the same sensation that she’d once had on a deserted underground platform in London. The silence had a dead quality to it, and there was the sense of being watched by the hordes of people who had passed that way before.

Then David had come back and shown her the individual rooms that led off the cavernous central space, each one lined with row after row of safe deposit boxes. There was a tiny viewing room where customers could take their boxes to examine the contents – to add or remove whatever they were storing there. It sat, like a polished, wooden coffin, at the side of the room: a place to hide your secrets.

The vault was like a rabbit warren – room after room hidden round corners, opening up into unexpected spaces. She knew it had been used as an air-raid shelter during the war, and Emma pictured people huddled against the walls, listening to the blasts as the bombs of the Manchester Blitz destroyed the Palace Theatre only a few hundred metres away.

She shuddered. It wasn’t a place she wanted to visit on her own, even with all the lights on. She had no idea how she would cope in the dark. But it was for Ollie. She would do anything for Ollie.

She perched on the side of the bath, knowing she was going to have to phone Tom, but she couldn’t decide how much to tell him. Should she tell him about David – about the deal
he had made six years ago? Would it make a difference to what happened now? She didn’t think so, but it might. She didn’t want to tell him – she felt such a deep sense of shame.

She couldn’t regret David, though. Without him there would be no Ollie, and even if David wasn’t prepared to fight to the death for his wife and take her place in the vaults he knew so well, she was damned sure she would battle to her last breath for her baby.

Using her Australian phone, she pressed the call button.

‘What’s happening, Em?’

*

Tom listened as Emma repeated the instructions and told him all she had learned since she had arrived home.

Emma’s revelation about David was sadly no real suprise to Tom; it certainly explained some of his actions and Natasha’s attitude.

‘Do you think he’s got anything to do with what’s going on this time, Emma?’

He had to ask, even though the thought might not even have entered Emma’s head.

‘I don’t think so,’ she answered, without a hint of shock at the suggestion. ‘He genuinely looked horrified that I could think that, as if it was a totally ridiculous idea.’

He heard Emma’s voice catch and wondered how much more she could take.

‘You don’t have to do this, Emma. We can do another swap; somebody else can go into the vault for you.’

‘That’s not going to happen, Tom. I’ll walk over hot coals for my baby if I have to. If somebody else does this and it goes wrong, I’d never forgive myself. And besides that, they need my fingerprint on the locks.’

‘Bollocks, I’d forgotten the biometric locks. Why are your prints stored?’

Emma explained that it had been a precaution when David was ill once. The gang must have hacked the system to clear the time lock so no doubt they found out about her prints at the same time.

‘There’s a chance you might not have to do this at all,’ Tom said. ‘If we get Ollie before your deadline, that’ll be the end of your part in it.’

He heard a whispered plea from Emma and gave her a moment.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘It’s okay. I’m not going to mess this up,’ she said quietly.

‘I know. There’ll be somebody with you every step of the way, Em. Just remember - we’ve got your back.’

52

‘All set, Boss,’ Finn said, looking at the younger, taller man standing warming himself in front of an open fire.

‘Confident?’ the man Finn called ‘Boss’ asked.

‘Yeah, I think so. The wife’s not going to blow it. Didn’t trust the tit of a husband to get it right, but she’s a bit more solid. Timing’s an issue. If she doesn’t get out the alarm will go off and we’re fucked – or rather she is. But I doubt she’s going to let that happen.’

‘Is the hacker on standby?’

‘Yeah – he’s confident he can override the alarm to get her out, but he’s had no way of testing it. He’s probably got a window of a couple of minutes to free up the auto locking of the doors before the police arrive.’

‘The buyer? You checked him out?’

The Boss moved away from the fire, briefly rubbing the back of his trousers with both hands. He reached for a glass of clear liquid on the table. A couple of ice cubes bobbed around on the surface, clinking against the side.

‘As much as I could. He’s given us eyes on his money – so we know he’s got it. That’s as much as we can be sure of.’

‘It’s time to get rid of Rory, Finn.’

‘Yeah - he’s a fucking liability. We need him for this job, but after that … He didn’t manage those kids well. Rick and Shelley caught on camera, and then there’s the other one – Izzy.’

‘Are we sure it’s her?’

The Boss drank the whole glass of liquid. Finn knew it would be water; the Boss never drank before a job.

‘Ninety per cent. According to the intel, she was wearing the right clothes – the nightdress that Julie gave her. They think she was pumped full of ket, too. That sounds about right. Could have picked that up at Julie’s.’

‘Well – at least she’s dead. That’s one less to worry about.’ The Boss looked pleased, and it was Finn’s job to keep him that way.

‘Shelley shouldn’t have blabbed to her. If Izzy hadn’t already been dead …’ Finn didn’t need to say more. ‘Speaking of Shelley, we’ve got a couple of hours before the handover. I’m going to pull her out. She did okay with the baby, but she’s made some stupid mistakes and she needs to pay for them. She nearly fucked up the whole thing, and she’s not to be trusted any more.’

Shelley Slater was about to find out what happened to people who crossed Finn McGuinness. He hadn’t quite decided what to do with her – how severe to make the punishment. But Julie wouldn’t want her marked. She said Shelley could net them a fortune.

‘Back here in one hour, then – when you’ve sorted her,’ the Boss said.

Finn nodded, pulled on his leather gloves and made his way out of the door.

53

When Tom arrived at the control room in Salford West there was an air of restrained tension. Operators sat at computers, quietly and efficiently getting on with their jobs. In spite of the apparent calm, though, Tom knew that every person in the room would be feeling a tightening in their gut at the burden of their responsibility.

A bank of monitors along one wall was showing three simultaneous operations, and the silver commander of the firearms unit was issuing instructions to the operational team on the ground at Finn and Julie McGuinness’s home. But nobody as yet had heard the sound of a baby.

Two screens were being set up to monitor activity in the vicinity of Joseph & Son. A team would be standing by in case Emma got into any kind of trouble.

Three further screens were displaying images from a location that Tom didn’t recognise. Paul Green was staring at them intently, and Tom realised that these must be related to the Titan operation.

‘Where are we?’ Tom asked, turning to Paul Green and pointing to the screens.

‘A cemetery just off the M60. They’ve chosen well. No CCTV and several fast exit routes. It’s where we believe the goods are going to be handed over to their buyer, and the word is that the big man likes to be there. He doesn’t trust a soul, it seems.’

‘They haven’t told Emma where she has to go after she leaves the vault, so I presume your informant has given you this location?’

‘Yeah, he has. I hope to God he’s not been pulling my plonker on this. But I don’t think so.’

Tom suddenly felt a crushing need to know more. It wasn’t just about Emma – although she and Ollie were his priority – but this was so closely related to the events of six years ago, and he desperately wanted to know what Jack’s role had been back then. He’d clearly known something the night Caroline died, and Jack had installed the security system at
Joseph & Son in the first place, his company chosen because the system had been hacked by somebody who left messages on people’s desktops.

There was no longer any doubt in Tom’s mind where the money in his brother’s secret – and now empty – account had come from. The link between the sources of his funds and his clients was too strong. He had been hacking into people’s computer systems and then selling them his services, and Tom knew exactly how Jack would have justified that.

‘If I could do it, so could somebody else.’ Tom could hear him saying it now. But Jack didn’t have to cheat people. He could have done it legitimately by pointing out the weaknesses in their systems.

Jack’s voice filled his head again. ‘They wouldn’t have trusted me after that. They would have thought I was a slimy bastard, and they’d have gone to somebody else. Don’t be a moron, Tom.’

It didn’t help Tom understand how Jack had known that Caroline and Natasha were going to be abducted, though. Or why, having warned Caroline, Jack had left the country the next day. A few hours later, he was dead.

Too many coincidences, and Tom didn’t like coincidences. Was Jack killed? Was he murdered for his part in it all – for warning Caroline Joseph?

Paul Green interrupted his reverie.

‘Tom, we’ve got about half an hour until Emma has to leave home. Have you got five minutes for me to fill you in on what we know about the gang?’

Tom walked across to a whiteboard displaying any and all information that might help in their investigation.

‘Do we know how the gang is planning to bypass the security system to get Emma into the vault? According to David Joseph it’s watertight – but that’s clearly not the case. I assume it’s been hacked.’

Paul Green nodded.

‘I agree. Emma won’t be able to get in unless at least the security on the main door has been breached, but it would be absolute foolishness to go into the vault without knowing what you’re looking for, so they must also know exactly what’s in the box.’

‘Do you think this organised crime group have their own hacker?’ Tom asked.

‘No – I think they’ll have advertised for one. The dark web is responsible for so much these days – a hacker’s paradise with more jobs than people to fill them. But this is a really
specialised job – they would have needed somebody exceptional, and I guess they found him – or her.’

‘So the hacker isn’t your informant, then?’

‘No. He’s not.’

Tom had a vague sense of unease. He knew the Titan team would handle it well, but if the informant was discovered, he wouldn’t be long for this world.

‘I thought you might like to know a bit more about this group. You know about one of the bottom-feeders – Rory Slater. There are plenty of others like him. We know of at least two enforcers – Finn McGuinness being the most active – and we’re also aware of Julie McGuinness’s various businesses. We’re ready to go on those as soon as we’ve got the main man.’

Paul Green pointed to images of each person as he mentioned them.

‘We don’t often manage to get a picture of the boss. He’s quite reclusive and very good indeed at disguise. But we grabbed this as he was going through security at Manchester airport.’

Paul Green pointed to an image of a tall man wearing a dark overcoat – smart, stylish, it hung well from his broad shoulders. Tom looked at the man’s face and slowly walked towards the whiteboard until he was inches from it.

‘My God,’ he whispered. It wasn’t what he was expecting, but somehow he wasn’t surprised. It felt like another piece of the puzzle, but he had no idea where it fit.

‘Do you know him?’ Paul Green asked. ‘He’s called Guy Bentley.’

‘He might be called that now,’ Tom said, ‘but he used to be Ethan Bentley. His dad owned Bentley’s Hotel.’

‘He did indeed. As bent as they come too, until he died when his hotel burned down – most believe at Guy’s hand, but it’s never been proven. Provided girls, boys, drugs – whatever his clients wanted. But Guy’s been much smarter. His profile’s so low it’s barely in existence. How the hell do you know somebody like Guy Bentley?’

‘He knew my brother, Jack.’

Green looked at Tom sharply.