The Jackdaw (31 page)

He’d worked late and then headed for a quick drink at a pub close to his office where he knew the landlord was good for a few after-hours drinks – so long as you worked for the right paper. He’d bumped into some journalist friends and a quick drink had turned into a heavy session before he finally took a cab home to his flat and girlfriend who was sixteen years his junior and very much planning on becoming the next Mrs Jackson. His first wife still lived somewhere in north London with their two kids, while he was unsure where his second wife was right now. Somewhere in America, he thought.

Finally, the realization that the ringing phone was
the phone
cut through the remaining effects of the alcohol and shocked him awake. As he grabbed the phone from the bedside table he realized that Denise was no longer in the bed next to him.
Thank fuck for that
, he thought. Now he could talk freely.

‘Hello.’

‘Good morning, Mr Jackson,’ the awful electronic voice greeted him. ‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes,’ Jackson scrambled, trying to clear his head enough to think, regretting switching from beer to vodka the night before. ‘I’m alone.’ There was a pause, as if the man at the other end of the phone didn’t entirely believe him.

‘You sound,’ the voice told him, ‘troubled.’

‘No,’ Jackson assured him. ‘Just a little tired, that’s all … I was working late … on your story. I wanted to get it in today’s issue.’ He rubbed his face, trying to wake himself up and think.

‘I see,’ the voice answered.

‘I wanted to do your story justice,’ Jackson told him. More silence while The Jackdaw considered his words.

‘That’s very considerate of you,’ he eventually answered.

‘Just doing my job,’ Jackson lied, thinking faster now. ‘I’m glad you called, but I thought the last time we spoke you said it would be a few days before you would contact me again.’

‘I did,’ the voice admitted, ‘but things have changed, Mr Jackson. I need to see you now. This morning.’

‘Changed?’ Jackson asked, his mind awash with possibilities and none of them good. ‘What’s changed?’ He endured yet more silence before the voice answered.

‘Corrigan,’ he told him. ‘He concerns me.’

Jackson jumped out of bed and started pacing around the room, the floor still littered with his clothes from the night before, as well as the underwear he’d
relieved
Denise of on his arrival home.

‘Corrigan?’ he asked. ‘Corrigan concerns you how?’

‘I looked up some of his recent cases,’ the voice explained. ‘Difficult investigations it appears, yet seemingly Corrigan solved them quickly enough. He strikes me as being a very determined man.’

Shit
, Jackson silently mouthed to himself, afraid The Jackdaw was about to abandon his cause for fear of Corrigan and along with it the story.
Think
, he told himself,
think.
He needed to get what he could while he could from The Jackdaw – even if it was just the lead into the next story he had in mind. ‘Do you see Corrigan as your
adversary
?’

Yet more painful silence.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘I’m not at war with the police. I’m not a criminal. But Corrigan is a threat – an unwitting tool of my would-be oppressors and tormentors. If I am to complete what I must complete before being brought to my knees by the attack dogs of the greedy and powerful, then I must accelerate my plans.’

‘Plans?’

‘We’ve spoken long enough on the telephone, Mr Jackson,’ the voice told him. ‘To speak any longer could be dangerous for us both. There’s a cemetery near Fulwell train station, in Strathmore Road. Meet me there at ten.’

‘Where?’ Jackson tried to catch him, but it was too late. The Jackdaw had gone. ‘Shit,’ he swore to himself before tossing the mobile onto the bed and scampering to the bathroom to empty his bladder and the contents of his stomach.

Sean looked up from the latest report of buildings that the searching officers had deemed as being possible locations for the white room, but nothing had leapt out at him as particularly likely. He looked out into the main office and decided enough of the team were gathered to make an office meeting worthwhile. He pushed his chair back and, standing up on tired, aching legs, walked from his own office into the communal area which, owing to the earliness of the hour, hadn’t yet been turned into a tip.

He stood by the large whiteboard, more from habit than a need to use it, and called across the office. ‘All right, everybody – I need your attention please.’ He waited for the conversations, discussions and phone calls to be put on hold before beginning. ‘OK, people. Let’s go over what we’ve got so far, which isn’t exactly a lot. What we do know is he’s abducting people who do or have worked for financial institutions and so far all the victims’ workplaces have been based in the City. He likes to snatch them from open spaces and appears to have a preference for park car parks, although remember he snatched the first victim straight from the pavement. He doesn’t appear to be put off by the presence of other people, although clearly it’s not going to be his preference. Once he has them he uses the same white van, fitted with different stolen number plates to move them to this white room
.’

‘Guv’nor?’ DC Maggie O’Neil asked. ‘How do we actually know it’s the same white van?’

‘We’ve had CCTV of the van fleeing all three abduction sites enhanced and compared,’ he explained. ‘Small imperfections in the paintwork, marks on the wheel covers, even the resting position of the windscreen wipers are identical. It’s the same van.’ O’Neil nodded she understood. ‘Once he has them in the white room, they’re taped to a chair while he, for want of a better word,
preaches
online before getting the viewers to vote. Depending on how the vote goes they’re supposedly freed unharmed or punished, only our boy doesn’t seem to be taking too much notice of the votes any more. This room he uses, it’s the same over and over, and we know this for the same reasons we know it’s the same van – imperfections on the walls, the exact same positioning of the black bin liners in the background, even the light quality – the lab rats have looked at it all and are telling me it’s the same room, no question. So whoever it is we’re looking for has found himself a place where he feels safe enough to keep returning.’ He looked around the room until he found who he was looking for. ‘Paulo. Any luck tracing the name of the man who threatened Goldsboro?’

‘He was threatened?’ Jesson asked, reminding Sean that only he, Sally and Zukov knew about it.

‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘Goldsboro told us he was threatened several years ago – threats that led to someone being arrested.’

‘I imagine he was threatened by more than one person,’ Jesson argued.

‘He was, but apparently this one stood out,’ Sean explained. ‘Paulo.’

‘The man the City Police arrested is a guy called Jason Howard – male, white, in his late forties. Apparently he lost his business shortly after the banking crisis and then his house and then his wife and kids. The City Police told me he blamed the banks.’

‘Sounds like we have someone with a clear motive,’ Jesson told the gathering.

‘What happened to him?’ Sean asked.

‘They cautioned him and released him,’ Zukov answered. ‘Apparently no one was too keen to go to court over it so … He’s not been in trouble since, according to the PNC, but by all accounts the threats were pretty heavy – appeared to have some substance to them instead of just ranting. I took the chance to give them the names of our victims too and, surprise, surprise, Goldsboro wasn’t the only one he threatened. He also threatened our first victim – Paul Elkins.’

‘’Allo, ’allo,’ Jesson chipped in.

‘But not Georgina Vaughan?’ Sean asked.

‘Apparently not,’ Zukov confirmed.

The image of a man sitting alone in a small room spending years plotting his revenge began to form in Sean’s mind, his heart rate jumping as he saw the possibility of a tangible connection between at least two of the victims.

‘Where was Elkins working at the time the threats were made?’ He held his breath and prayed it would be the same company that Goldsboro had been working for – King and Melbourn.

Zukov took a second to check his notebook. ‘Not his present company,’ Zukov explained, further exciting Sean’s sense of anticipation. ‘He was with the Bank of Shoreditch at the time of the threats.’

Sean’s heart sank at another dead end. He only hoped his despondency didn’t show too obviously on his face. ‘And since then this Jason Howard’s not come to anyone’s attention?’ he managed to ask.

‘Seems so,’ Zukov told him. ‘Dropped off the face of the planet. The City emailed me over his photo and details. D’you want me to circulate them?’

‘Just within the team. Then find him, if he’s still alive, and arrest him. I want him brought in for interview,’ Sean demanded. ‘And search wherever he’s been living.’

‘You think he’s our man?’ Cahill asked.

‘I think he needs to be found,’ was all Sean would tell her. He searched the room for his next target. ‘DC Bishop – any update on where the suspect’s broadcasting from?’

Bishop cleared his throat before replying. ‘Nothing more since last time. I’m pretty sure he’s based in east or southeast Surrey somewhere, but can’t get any closer than that until he goes back online.’

Sean looked around all the faces gathered in the room. ‘East or southeast Surrey,’ he told them. ‘It’s big, but it’s not exactly the Amazon, so can somebody please tell me how come we haven’t found this building yet? I’ve got a pile of reports giving me the details of properties searched, but still we have nothing. How so?’ For a few seconds no one answered. ‘Does this not strike you as a little strange?’

‘Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place,’ DC Jesson offered in his Liverpudlian accent. ‘Maybe he’s using something that messes up our tracking equipment – making us look in the wrong place.’

Sean looked back to Bishop. ‘Is it possible?’

‘Highly unlikely,’ Bishop answered, looking and sounding somewhat affronted. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, such equipment does exist and he is using it, but we’ve already broken through his encryption and re-direction. The signal’s source is solid. I know it is.’

‘And we have CCTV footage from traffic-monitoring cameras that show the van travelling west out of London,’ the tall, well-spoken DC Fiona Cahill reminded them.

‘And a limited time span,’ DC O’Neil added. ‘Between the time he snatches the victims, drives west, shows them on Your View, then kills them or releases them, he has to be somewhere west of London.’

‘So southeast or east Surrey looks good.’ Sean took over. ‘So why the hell haven’t we found this damn white room?’ No one answered. ‘We need to increase the scope of our search – consider the possibility he doesn’t have the luxury of an isolated, derelict building. Maybe he’s doing all this from his garage or even his house or flat.’

‘He’d need a house with a decent-sized garage at least,’ Sally joined in, ‘and a house with a garage usually means a family. Hell of a job to keep something like that from your family. As for a flat – I can’t see how it could be possible.’

‘A house with a garage then,’ Sean agreed.

‘His family?’ Cahill asked. ‘I thought Howard’s family had left him?’

‘Don’t assume Howard’s definitely our man,’ Sean warned her, ‘or that he doesn’t have a new family.’

‘OK,’ Sally argued, ‘so say it’s a house with a garage – what are we supposed to do? Call on every house with a garage in Surrey? It’s not even inside the Met. They don’t have the manpower and nor do we. They’re already helping us out with roadblocks on as many main roads in and out of London as they can. I don’t see how this is helping us move things forward. We should stick with the derelict buildings until we’ve exhausted it,’ she continued. ‘At least it’s something we can manage – on a scale we can manage.’

‘But it’s not getting results,’ Sean snapped back at her. ‘We have to be prepared to look further afield. Assume nothing, bring some fresh thinking to this investigation. This bastard’s running rings around us. We need to put the pressure on him for a change.’ For a second he was tempted to share Addis’s not so veiled threats with them, but thought better of it. Instead he turned to DC Summers. ‘How we getting on tracing anything he could have bought to build this damn contraption he uses to change his voice?’

‘Sorry, guv’nor,’ Summers apologized. ‘You’re talking hundreds of shops – big and small – too many to cover on foot, so we’ve spoken to the regional managers of the big chains and they’ve circulated emails to all their store managers who they’ve asked to play detective and quiz their staff about any suspicious sales or characters. The independent stores – we’ve got the local CIDs checking on them for the same, but it’ll be a long, slow haul. We haven’t had a bite yet.’

‘Keep on it,’ Sean encouraged before turning back to the rest of the room. ‘You all know what to do, so let’s get on with it.’ He headed back to his office with the beginnings of a migraine growing in the centre of his brain. Sally followed him in without waiting to be invited.

‘You all right?’ she asked him. ‘You seemed a little tense out there.’

‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘I just don’t like wandering around in the dark – which is exactly what we’re doing here.’

‘Getting some heat from above?’

‘When am I not?’

‘Ah, but this is different,’ she told him sagely.

‘Meaning?’ He couldn’t resist her intrigue.

‘Meaning this time it’s money the powers that be are truly worried about,’ she explained. ‘Bad press, the potential for more victims, we’ve dealt with that sort of pressure plenty of times before, but when it comes to governments losing money – that brings a whole different kind of pressure.’

‘So Addis tells me,’ he confided in her, ‘although I’m not entirely convinced of the connection.’

‘It’s real enough,’ she warned him. ‘I’ve spoken with plenty of people from the City the last few days and they all tell me the same thing – the City’s in a perpetual state of fine balance: when things tip into the positive, no matter how slightly, everybody makes heaps of money and money means taxes for the government, business growth, high employment. But if it tips into the negative, even fractionally, the opposite can happen. It’s not a case of the City losing money – more that it’s just not making
enough
to sustain itself and all that it brings to the economy.’