The Judas Sheep (27 page)

I had some arranging to do. I rang Peacock and told him we were go! Then I rang Heckley, where we had a plain Armed Response Vehicle standing by to lend a hand. All I had to do then was collect the big van and hot-foot it to Burtonwood.

The two numbers from the memory in Darren’s phone had been for an insurance salesman in Knutsford and a woman in Birmingham who worked, she said, as a travelling masseuse. We’d arranged to see their itemised bills to see who was receiving the calls that crooks were making on their behalf. A BMW with the same number as Darren’s belonged, rightfully, to a bank manager in Hemel Hempstead. He said he could see it outside his office even as he spoke to me. We didn’t learn much from these exercises, so a meeting was our remaining hope.

The ARV followed me all the way. A traffic car, lights flashing, was parked on a bridge near the M6.1 flicked my lights at him and pulled on to the hard shoulder. A few minutes later he joined us, and three officers armed with Heckler and Koch automatics, made in Nottingham, piled into the back of my Transit.

This had better be worth it, Charlie,’ DCI Trevor Peacock warned me.

‘No guarantees, Trevor. Your assessment of the information is as good as mine.’

They were rattling and sliding about in the back of the van, unable to hold on to anything. Fortunately for them it wasn’t far. At Burtonwood I parked in the middle of a big space that gave me a good view of most of the car park and switched off the lights. The ARV had kept going when I stopped, and was already lost somewhere in a line of cars.

‘Which are ours?’ I asked.

The furniture van and the minibus. Plus a cleaning van near the exit and the chopper’s standing by.’

‘That should just about cover it,’ I said, glad that it wasn’t coming out of my wages. Peacock radioed the others and told them that Vicar One was in position. It was the nearest he ever got to making a joke. Vicars Two to Four acknowledged.

At dead on eleven twenty-eight a Salford Van Hire Transit cruised into the services and wandered about, looking for the optimum parking space amongst the eight hundred that were available, before settling for
one of the Disabled spots. I heard the scrape of metal behind me and Peacock clicked his transmission button three times.

‘Are you armed, Charlie?’ he whispered.

‘No,’ I replied, without moving.

‘Christ, you ought to be.’

‘Take a good look at my back. I’ll be lying on the floor with my hands over my ears.’

There was a snigger from behind me. I didn’t bother telling them that three years earlier I’d emptied a Walther into someone. Killed him. This time they could have the glory, and the pain.

A middle-aged lady climbed out of the van with great difficulty, before walking round to extricate a wheelchair from the back. She helped her crippled husband out from the passenger seat and into the chair and pushed him in the direction of the toilets. Fifteen minutes later they reappeared and went through the long and painful procedure in reverse, before driving away. Peacock clicked the radio once. Everybody relaxed.

There was a steady procession of vehicles. Some people just used the loo, others presumably had a meal or a snack. One or two had us on red alert. At about twelve-thirty I went for a pee and bought a morning paper. A footballer had been done for drink-driving and a star of one of the soaps had been reunited with her thirty-year-old love child. I hadn’t heard of any of them. According to the latest Gallup Poll, the Government would be annihilated in the forthcoming by-election. I’d
thoughtfully provided a plastic bucket for them to use in the back of the van, but they had strong bladders.

An hour later the sarcastic comments were coming thick and fast. At two o’clock Peacock declared: ‘They’re not coming. Let’s go home.’ They fell out of the back of the van and stretched stiff limbs. The rest were ordered to stand down, and little groups of figures in flack-jackets started doing callisthenics in the corners of the car park, automatic weapons hanging from their shoulders.

‘Don’t call us, Charlie. We’ll call you,’ Peacock wisecracked before slamming the back door and turning the handle. He was a wag underneath, after all. We drove off in convoy. At the next exit the ARV and I turned off to go round the flyover while the rest of them continued westwards. An hour later the ARV overtook me and headed back to the station. They gave me a friendly wave, which I needed. I returned the van to Merlin and went home to bed. It was broad daylight and the blackbirds were singing like lunatics.

Nigel was right – I needed a dishwasher. I collected all the leaflets and listened to the sales patter from
smooth-chinned
youths who didn’t know the difference between dabbing it on and showering in it. ‘May I just take a few details?’ they’d ask, fingers poised over the keyboard.

‘No, I’m just looking,’ I’d reply, eyes watering.

At home I took a big sheet of paper and drew a rectangle on it, the same shape as my kitchen. Along
one side I represented the worktops and the sink. The dishwasher would have to go in place of one of the cupboards. I drew a square for the washing machine, linked to the sink by a couple of pipes, and wrote WASHER in it. The dishwasher would need more pipes, and they’d need electrical connections. It was going to look like a Sellafield under there.

Did the dishwasher need to be near the sink? That was the big question. Or did the washing machine? Annabelle would know, but it was a feeble reason for ringing her. She’d be an expert in such things – all I knew about was being a policeman, but there were doubts about that.

I crossed out WASHER and wrote NICOLA. In the square for the sink I wrote PROSTITUTE, and on the pipe linking them I put DNA. The dishwasher became MRS NORRIS, linked to the prostitute by the expensive watch.

I drew three more squares, radiating out from Mrs Norris, and wrote CIGS, HURST, and LORRY DRIVER in them. Off to one side were Darren and his gang, with more lines joining them to the cigarettes and the two dead drivers. I tore the sheet into shreds and went to bed.

Dave Sparkington volunteered for unpaid overtime during the by-election. ‘If somebody bumps off the Prime Minister I want to be able to tell my grandkids that I was there,’ he explained.

‘You’re supposed to prevent it,’ I told him, testily.

‘Humph!’ was his reply. Who’d be a Prime Minister?

The campaigns started in a civil-enough fashion, but soon degenerated into personalised slanging matches. The candidates were cleancut newcomers, with impeccable credentials and winsome images. Then it was leaked that the Opposition hopeful had been sent down from his first university for shagging the Provost’s daughter. His lead in the polls immediately leapt by a further ten points, much to the dismay of the Government’s spin doctors. Annabelle went out distributing leaflets, and received much leg-pulling from me for it. She tried to persuade me to go with her, but I informed her that policemen weren’t allowed to express a political standpoint. She called me a lackey of the State.

The day before the election, Heckley nick was like a stockbroker’s office on Derby Day. Everybody was out playing. They’d all been seconded to our neighbours, and were now poncing about on rooftops or poking into manholes, looking for weapons of assassination. They were armed with pictures of Shawn Parrott and an armoury of equally lethal hardware. Particular attention was being devoted to grassy knolls.

I had a coffee with Gilbert and listened to the phones ringing unanswered. Eventually the system would bring the more persistent callers to him, unless, of course, I was at my desk, in which case they’d come to me first. I decided to go out.

A woman from Keighley had been mugged in the town over the weekend. We’d recovered a handbag which may have been hers, so I decided to drive over and ask her to identify it and make a statement. It was a bit feeble, but it would do.

‘How’s Annabelle?’ Gilbert asked.

‘Very well, thank you. Pass the spoon, please.’

He handed it to me and looked grave. ‘I can’t see us doing well in this election, Charlie. The PM’s handled the whole thing very badly.’

‘Us!’ I protested. ‘Speak for yourself.’

He shook his head, as if in despair. ‘What are you doing today?’

‘I have to go over to Keighley, to interview Mrs Webster, the woman who was mugged on Monday.’

‘Good idea. Better show how keen we are, with her husband being Chairman of the Bench.’

I hadn’t known that. ‘Just what I thought,’ I replied.

He dunked a chocolate digestive. ‘Do you really think they’ll have a go at the PM?’

‘Nah. They just want to cause disruption, which they’ve already done. Still, you never know, do you?’

What was it Governor Conally said in 1963? ‘Now you can’t say we don’t love you in Texas, Mr President.’

My next cuppa was from a china cup in Mrs Webster’s sitting room. The bag was hers, but the contents were missing. Her assailant had a mohican haircut, which
made him rather conspicuous, so an ID parade might not go down well with the brief of the youth we’d arrested. Ideally, we’d let them all wear hats. Failing that, we’d organise a street ident, where the victim tries to pick him out of the crowd. ‘That’s him,’ she’d say. ‘The one handcuffed to the policeman.’ Mrs Webster was badly shaken by her ordeal, but was willing to cooperate in any way. I wondered how muggers would fare in her husband’s court from now on.

It was a beautiful day, so I bought a sandwich and ate it in the car, parked near the river. I tuned in to the local station to catch the news, make sure mayhem wasn’t breaking loose during canvassing. There was only one item, the full programme being devoted to the by-election. It was the biggest local story since the Queen opened the new Municipal Swimming Pool. She should have told them she couldn’t swim.

‘The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are even competing in their modes of transport,’ the newsreader was saying. ‘The PM is already in town, having arrived in an Army Chinook helicopter which landed on the Grammar School playing field. Meanwhile, firefighters are standing by over the length of the Settle to Carlisle railway line in anticipation of Andrew Fallon’s journey. He is travelling by train later this afternoon, demonstrating his support for the railways, and will be hauled by the record-breaking steam engine Mallard. The last time a steam train did this journey, over fifty grass-fires were started along the line.’

Great, I thought. The bloke can’t stand cigarette smoke but has no compunction about igniting most of the North of England. Wait till I see Annabelle. The newsreader was rabbiting on: ‘Trainspotters are expected to congregate at famous beauty spots like Dent and the Batty Moss viaduct to take advantage of this opportunity to see the legendary locomotive Mallard for what might be the last time. Thanks to Fallon, the Opposition candidate can now safely rely on the trainspotter vote.’

‘Mmm.’ I nodded in appreciation of the thought. Wouldn’t mind seeing Mallard again myself. It was common enough on the local lines when I was a kid, but I’d never seen it on the Batty Moss viaduct. I’d never seen any steam train up there. It promised to be a memorable event. If I’d had my camera in the car I might have been tempted to play hookey and have a drive over. What was it? A hundred feet high and quarter of a mile long, with twenty-four arches?

How did I know that?

I walked over to the bin and dumped my litter, brushing the crumbs off my trousers. Who’d told me about Batty Moss viaduct?

Annabelle had been there, but it wasn’t her. We were at the cottage, when …

It was Darren.

He saw the photo on the mantelpiece and knew all about it. What was it he said? They’d been ‘just for a look’ and he ‘liked to know what he was talking about’.

I thought about my other conversations with him. He’d said they had something big planned for the middle of this week – something that would make them rich.

And that they had five million cigarettes.

It was them, the drugs gang! They’d hijacked the lorry and murdered the driver. They were responsible for the disappearance of Mrs Norris and Harold Hurst’s death. One of them had strangled two women. And now they were planning an assassination, but it wasn’t the Prime Minister they were after – it was Andrew Fallon.

Norris had been the inside man for the hijack, possibly as a down payment, and now he’d hired them to bump off the man who wanted to wreck the tobacco business. Maybe they’d had dealings before, hence the disappearance of Mrs Norris. They’d killed Tom Noon to set up the election, and put Fallon just where they wanted him. It made sense, and it was all going to happen at Batty Moss viaduct. Soon.

I dialled the Heckley number. ‘Put me straight through to Mr Wood, please; it’s urgent.’

‘Superintendent Wood.’ He sounded fed up. I’d soon alter that.

‘It’s Charlie, Gilbert. Listen. It’s not the Prime Minister they’re after, it’s Andrew Fallon. He’s coming down on a train from Carlisle. Get him off that train.’

Poor Gilbert sounded hesitant. I was only putting his reputation on the line, in front of the nation’s press. He wanted an explanation.

‘No time. I’m going to Batty Moss. Ring Fearnside. Ring anyone, but get Fallon off that train. At a guess they’re going to blow up the viaduct.’ I switched off before he could argue.

I made a tyre-squealing U-turn, causing a woman in a Mitsubishi Shogun to hit the anchors, depositing her two children and a Labrador pup on the floor, and screamed up through the gears. Ribblehead, and the viaduct, were about thirty-five miles away. I drove with the headlights on and used the horn a lot. I’ve done the advanced course, but I think my instructors would have disowned some of the manoeuvres I made.

It’s a right turn in Settle, and then you’re on a typical Yorkshire Dales switchback, I never actually took off, but I achieved weightlessness for several seconds over some of the bigger brows. A couple of lorries carrying limestone from the quarries slowed me for a while, but I bullied my way past them. I barely noticed
Pen-y
-ghent on my right and Ingleborough on the other side as I swept through Horton-in-Ribblesdale in a flurry of gravel and irresponsibility.