The Magpie Trap: A Novel (35 page)

The Investigation

Jim Hunter arranged to meet his old superior,
Chief Superintendent Dave Merton, at a small café called Sheila’s, which was
just outside
Wakefield
. Merton was based at the West Yorkshire Police headquarters
in
Wakefield
, but had always preferred his case review
meetings to be held on neutral ground where they would not be interrupted. He
also liked his staff to buy him his lunch and coffee; there were so few perks
in the police force that one had to take them where he could. Even though Jim
was off the force, he suspected that the reason Merton had agreed to meet him
was so that he could tally one up for his favour-bank in case anything ever
went wrong in his career. Most of the high-ranking policemen he knew worked on
this system of giving and calling-in
favours
;
the only other group Jim knew which was as rife with such
behaviour
was organized crime.

Merton arrived late,
bumbling into the café with all of the poise of a mole; Hunter could see that
his old boss had still not had corrective surgery on his eyes, nor had he
reverted to contact lenses. He still wore milk-bottle glasses which highlighted
the meanness lingering in his small, rodent eyes. He wore a long black coat,
which he clearly thought lent him an air of authority, but which instead made
him look rather like he had bought the wrong size. But Hunter knew that
Merton’s appearance belied an aggressive sense of purpose; he over-compensated
for his poor eyesight and lack of height with a terrier-like resolve.

Merton shuffled towards
Jim’s table, pretending not to see him until the last minute. He ordered a
coffee and one of the café’s special Big Breakfasts with the attentive
waitress, and then finally sat down opposite Hunter.

‘Long time no see;
although I believe that you’ve seen a few of my new detectives recently,’ said
Merton. He was leaning forward over the table; eyes boring into Hunter.

They shared some small
talk, but the long, awkward silences were a real problem for Jim. He kept
trying to fill them with pointless talk about the weather, football,
anything
but that terrible quietness.
Merton didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the silences. Instead he seemed to
relish them; in fact, he probably used such techniques in the interview room as
a way of inducing the criminal to talk just to fill the gaps.

Over the course of
their lunch, Merton made Jim wait for the information he so desperately
required; perhaps he wanted Hunter on his knees, begging. The two of them had a
chequered
history while they were colleagues at West
Yorkshire Police, which had culminated in a rather unseemly fight in the car
park at Millgarth Station in
Leeds
. The reason behind the fight could have been
picked from a whole deck of grievances, but most likely was the fact that
Merton had somehow squirmed his way to a promotion which was by all accounts
nailed on for Hunter. Hunter supposed that Merton had only got the job through
his contacts in the Masons. And Merton knew that this was what Hunter
suspected; as though he thought Merton not deserving enough of a promotion for
any other reason. This had, of course led to bitterness on both sides. Now,
Merton was enjoying his position of real power. Finishing his second coffee, he
carefully dabbed at the sides of his mouth with his napkin, drawing out the
tension for as long as he possibly could.

Finally Jim snapped:
‘Okay, you’ve had your fun. Now, are you going to tell me what I need to know?’

Merton was now playing
with the salt shaker, pouring small quantities onto the red and white table
cloth, and then blowing it distractedly away and onto the floor. They were the
only people in the café, and the waitress was watching him with mild annoyance.

Eventually, he deigned
to speak: ‘I don’t know how much I can tell you. You’re off the force, and
you’re on suspension from
Edison
’s. You’re no longer involved…’

Hunter’s anger took
over. ‘Whatever fun you’re getting from this in your twisted mind, just forget
it. I know I’m in your debt, now get on with it. The real punishment comes from
knowing that man is in hospital with a machine doing his breathing for him…’

‘Careful now Jim,’
Merton warned, eyes narrowing still further. ‘You forget who you are talking
to.’

Hunter had to raise his
voice; the waitress had increased the volume on the radio behind the counter to
excruciating proportions, probably trying to get rid of them so she could have
a break. ‘I’m not going to interfere with anything! I need to know for…’

Suddenly the waitress
turned off the radio, and Jim was still shouting. He continued, more quietly,
‘I need to know for my own peace of mind, and that only. It’s the police’s job
now, and I wish you luck with it. I just need to know whether Burr was a part
of it or not…’

Suddenly tired of his
game, Merton tutted and began to take things more seriously. Hunter watched him
run his fingers through his fine, thin black hair. It almost looked like fur;
he was becoming more and more like a mole through the years.

‘I will tell you this
because no matter what people say, you were an excellent copper. You had an eye
for detail, a nose for trouble, and a memory for faces which made you a natural
at the job. I had to work, and work at doing it even half as well as you did,
and it fucking frustrated me to see you pissing all that talent up the wall. I
deserved that promotion; I know it riles you, but I did, I worked for it; I
stayed in control. It had nothing to do with the Masons, no matter how much you
thought it did…

Anyway, I had to get
that off my chest; I want you to know that I am not telling you any of this
through any malicious thoughts of revenge… You lost it Jim; Burr planned it
right under your nose. He even used your access card. I know you’ll deny it
‘til the cows come home, but were you drinking again?’

Hunter weighed his old
adversary up across the table, feeling as though he was in a scene from the De
Niro and Pacino film,
Heat.

‘You used to think of
me as something like a nemesis, but I never thought of you that way. I just
couldn’t believe how naïve you were sometimes,’ Hunter paused. ‘But I know that
the shoe is on the other foot now. I simply do not know what happened. I have
my inklings; that sixth sense has never left me, the problem is, I just don’t
listen enough to it any more.’

           
Merton
chased a stray baked bean around his plate with his fork. He looked like the
word ‘nemesis’ had really got to him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Enough of the
bullshit; I have things to do this afternoon. This is where we are; we are
about to make an arrest. What we’ve found from our initial investigations is
that Burr
was
part of an inside job
to rob the printers. He is assumed to have pinched your card and gone to open
up the Precisioner Unit, using
both
cards;
you always need two to get in, don’t you?’

‘So, who are you
arresting?’

Merton stopped playing
with his food and looked at Jim carefully, as if weighing up how much to tell
him, but then ploughed on regardless.

‘Now, this is all a bit
short-hand, but what we’ve had teams working round the clock on this for the
past few days.
Edison
’s are a key business in
West Yorkshire
and it is in everyone’s interest to make sure an
arrest is made and quickly.’

‘And?’

‘And there are only two
or three gangs in the country that could have pulled off something like this.
Two or three that aren’t in prison anyway. We’ve had tabs on two of the prime
suspects for the past couple of days. As it happens, we’ve managed to find a
link between one of these men and Burr. We’ll be bringing the whole gang down
to the station for questioning later.’

‘Who is it? You going
after the Wardle crew again?’ asked Hunter, narrowing his eyes. Merton
always
went for the Wardle crew; it was
his one final ambition for his remaining years on the force to pin something on
them.

‘I can’t tell you,’
said Merton, in a voice that told Hunter everything that he needed to know.

‘You can’t drag them in
for every crime that’s committed in
West Yorkshire
.
And do you not think their M.O is a bit different from this?’

‘The guys that did this
were professionals, Hunter; they ignored the majority of the cash - a lot of it
worthless - and went straight for the printer itself. They now have a
licence
to print money
and it’ll be pretty hard to trace where it came from…’

‘But that still doesn’t
mean that it was the Wardle crew. Look; the way I see it is this job could have
been done by
anyone
. It didn’t have
to be one of your notorious gangs. Technology’s moved on; these old-school guys
don’t have the understanding any more. It could have been anyone that has
knowledge of the new security systems and this Intertel Shift thing…’

Hunter paused, noticing
the smirk on Merton’s face.

‘What?’

‘Nothing; it’s just
funny hearing you talk about technology like that. Like you know what you’re
talking about. I remember back in the Millgarth days when they had to hire a
whole typing pool to write up your reports for you.’

‘That’s what I mean,’
said Hunter, slapping the table. ‘Me, you, the Wardle crew; we’re all like
cave-men. The guys that did this are like a new breed. They
know
things that we couldn’t possibly
hope to…’

Merton interrupted,
leaning in close and whispering. ‘We have our crew. We don’t know ho they got
away, but we have them. Don’t bring your techno-phobia to me as an excuse to
try to wangle your way back onto the force.’

‘You just want it
brushed under the carpet and put to bed so the
business interests
are happy,’ accused Hunter. He was alarmed at
the number of
ifs
and
buts
in the story he’d just heard.
‘There’s so much that you don’t know… What about the hackers who destroyed the
CCTV images? Are there no other leads? It just doesn’t seem right.’

‘Look; this is what
used to piss me off about you,’
 
Merton
sighed in frustration. ‘You just won’t let things go… We have evidence, which
checks out, by the way, that links a known gang of armed robbers based in
Leeds
to a vehicle that we found burned out in Armley… I have a team
working on that vehicle now. We have the links to Burr…’

‘What links?’

‘He’s on the ex-forces
rugger team with one of the men if you must know,’ breathed Merton. Then he
started counting down the fingers on his hand; ‘We have motive, opportunity,
the inside man, a getaway vehicle.
 
All
we need now is them to lead us to where they have hidden the printer. And we
are watching them like hawks.’

‘I know that you’re
doing me a favour telling me all this, Merton, I really do, but something’s not
right in all of this. It all seems too obvious. Are you sure that you have the
right gang?’

Merton splurted out a
half-laugh, half-cough, ‘What are you suggesting? The Wardle crew is our
target; one of their men has been seen staking out the
Edison
’s site in the past. They’ve got form. We’ve got a
dossier
on them that’s thicker than my
dick.’

Hunter doubted whether
moles like Merton had thick dicks but thought better of raising the query.
Instead, he tried to press home his doubts about the technological expertise of
the Wardle crew. ‘But have they got form for manipulating CCTV images?’ he
asked. ‘Or for hacking into site security networks? Sounds like your armed
robbers have upped their game from relying on guns to get them the access to
the sites…’

Merton put his hand
across the table and gripped Hunter’s arm tightly, ‘Jim, just promise me you
won’t continue for your own investigations… no, don’t look at me like that, I know
that you’ve been back to Edison’s, rooting around the perimeter fencing,
searching for something. You’ve been seen. Promise me you won’t go back… I
don’t want any more cock-ups in this case. We missed the getaway van, but can
recover on that one. All we need now, as I said, is them to lead us to the loot
and then we’ll have them bang to rights. They’re still in the country, Jim,
biding their time.’

Hunter doubted that. He
shook his head wearily.

‘They can’t spend
anything at the moment anyway,’ continued Merton. ‘Not unless they learn how to
change the settings on that printer. The only notes it’ll print out are bloody
Mauritian rupees. Apparently there was a problem with the printer even before
the heist.’

With that, Merton stood
up to his full height and heartily shook his former colleague’s hand, parting
on what he thought were good terms. For Hunter, though, those antennae on his
head were twitching again, he sensed trouble.

Were the police looking
in the wrong direction?