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  ‘Exactly. Just trust me, Mike. I’ll be back soon.’

  I scarpered before he could argue any further.

  Chapter 23

  It was still dark when I was woken. I lay still, ears straining in the darkness. I heard another sound, the scuff of movement in the hall.

  I rolled from bed, reaching under the bed for my old baton. It was a battle-scarred PR24, the black side-handle baton that was no longer general issue.

  I padded to the door, leaving Molly asleep. There were no lights on anywhere. I listened again, but heard nothing further. I eased out into the hall, my feet silent on the carpet. The wall panel for the ventilation system gave enough light to see by as I made my way towards the living areas.

  I paused at the door, listening again. There was the rustle of clothing from the kitchen, then a click. I knew that click. What sort of burglar stopped to make coffee?

  Mike had his back to me when I stepped into the kitchen. ‘Go on then,’ I said, ‘I’ll have one.’

  He jumped at the sound of my voice, spun, and stared at me. He looked me up and down. ‘That’d be enough to scare anyone off.’

  It was a fair call. Boxers and a baton probably don’t quite cut it for intimidating burglars. I put the baton down and closed the hall door so we didn’t disturb Molly. The clock on the stove showed it was 4:48am. It felt like I’d just gone to bed.

  I fetched a pair of shorts and a T shirt from the hot water cupboard to protect my modesty, and joined Mike in the lounge. We sat with steaming cups of steaming coffee. I took the soft fabric sofa and Mike took the leather one. He was wearing the same clothes I’d last seen him in.

  ‘Not sleeping,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  I nodded. We both took a sip. I waited.

  ‘This is just bizarre, y’know?’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘I never thought…y’know.’ He trailed off.

  I wasn’t sure I did know, but I made the right noises anyway. Something was coming. I could see it bubbling away, could see my friend wrestling with something he wanted to let out. Mike’s not a deep and meaningful kind of guy. Emotional, yes – he’ll let you know about it alright. But he wasn’t one for sharing his deepest thoughts. Whatever this was, I knew it was going to be big.

  I sipped my coffee. The drapes were open and I could see lights on in the house next door. I didn’t know the guy’s name that lived there, but I knew he started worked over on the Shore and started early. We left the lights off but there was enough ambient light to see.

  ‘When I was in Bosnia,’ Mike began, speaking slowly and carefully, ‘I ran into some trouble.’ He paused as if to gather his thoughts. He was staring into the distance at something I couldn’t see.

  I took another sip. Mike made bad coffee but, right now, it didn’t matter.

  ‘We were attached to a British unit up in Banja Luka. One day we got sent out to a little village to talk to a contact person there, like a village elder. They were Serbs up there. They’d been through hell.’ He stopped again. He took a careful sip of his coffee. ‘That whole place…it was hell. It really was. The people…’ He shook his head. ‘What they had to live through. Unbelievable stuff.’

  The room was silent whenever he stopped talking. I may have stopped breathing.

  ‘We went up there, me and this British captain. I was sent as his driver. The plan was to go out to this little village, nice and low key, have a chat with the head honcho there. They’d apparently had some trouble with the Dutch peacekeepers there, there were stories of some rough treatment, stuff like that. We had to find out what the story was so we could feed it back.’

  I listened silently. I knew a little about Mike’s time over there, as much as he ever disclosed, but this story was new to me.

  ‘So we get there, pull into this little village square. There’s a few little shops, houses all around…an old white church. The head man’s an old boy, must’ve been eighty if he was a day. We meet and greet, everything’s nice and friendly. The captain spoke some Serbo-Croat and the old guy spoke some English, so they were off to a good start. He invites us into his house to have a chat.’

  Mike paused, staring at the wall, and I knew we were coming to crunch time. I didn’t move.

  ‘We get into his house and his wife’s there, this little old lady, didn’t speak a word of English. We sit down at his kitchen table, and as soon as we sat down…these guys came in. Four big guys, real heavies. Real hard, y’know…militia type guys. All armed up. They held guns to our heads and the old lady and the old man disappeared.’

  Mike looked at me now, his face pale in the half light. I recognised the thousand yard stare.

  ‘These guys had a beef with the Dutch soldiers. They tie our hands up, take our weapons and start to interrogate us. It took about a minute before they realised who we were. They’d thought we were Dutch, and they were basically going to do us in, retaliation for whatever had wrong before. One guy’s in charge, this dude with a beard. He doesn’t believe us at first, even with our uniforms and accents.’ Mike’s face clouded. My heart was pounding in my chest.

  ‘He stuck a gun in my mouth and cocked it. The captain’s pleading with him, telling him who we are, they’ve got the wrong guys, all that. Anything to stop him from blowing my head off.’

  He stopped, looked away and sniffed. He took a long sip of coffee.

  ‘The guy’s shouting at me, asking my name. Of course I can’t talk with a pistol in my gob. Finally he realises they’ve got it wrong and backs off. He goes off to talk to someone else, leaves his guys with us. Comes back and they bundle us off to the church, stick us in the cellar there and leave us.’

  I took a breath. I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. Scary didn’t even come close.

  ‘Three days.’ The words hung in the air. I wasn’t sure at first what he meant.

  ‘Three days?’

  ‘They left us there for three days. In this church cellar. Left us tied up, hoods over our heads. Just lying on the floor. We couldn’t move, we were tied to each other and to this ring in the floor.’

  I was stunned. Stunned at the barbaric actions of the militia, and stunned at how my friend had gone through this and I didn’t know. I wondered how close we really were.

  ‘Did they feed you?’

  ‘No. Poured water on us a few times…gave us a kicking sometimes.’ He drank his coffee, upended the cup and downed it one go. He sucked his teeth before continuing. ‘Our guys found us eventually, they’d been searching all over, found our vehicle some miles away. Thought we’d been ambushed or something. The sweetest thing I’ve ever heard was the sound of that cellar door opening and this Maori soldier going “We’ve got them”.’

  He put his cup on the floor and leaned forward on his elbows. ‘They pulled us out of there, got us fixed up, and we went back to work.’ He managed a wry smile. ‘When that cop tried to handcuff me the other night, it just reminded me of that. I didn’t want to ever be handled like that again, y’know.’

  I nodded silently. Words seemed superfluous just now.

  ‘So that’s it, mate,’ Mike finished. ‘That’s why I ran.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  ‘I know you were wondering.’

  I nodded agreement. ‘But I never doubted you.’ I got eye to eye with him. ‘I never doubted you, mate.’

  Mike nodded slowly. ‘I know. But you needed to know.’

  We were silent for a minute. It felt like something transformational had just occurred. A seminal shift in our relationship.

  ‘Do you think about it much?’

  Mike considered that for a long moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘I do.’ He looked away. ‘Probably too much.’

  I stood and moved towards him. He stood. We embraced, squeezing hard, not speaking. I needed him to know that I cared.

  When we broke apart I felt tears on my cheek. I wiped my eyes. Mike chuckled as he did the same.

  ‘Wow,’ he
said.

  ‘Yeah, wow.’

  ‘I’ve never told anyone that before.’

  I took a deep breath. Any doubts about the depth of our friendship evaporated with that statement. ‘I’m glad you did.’

  He nodded and rubbed his face.

  ‘Another coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not.’

  Chapter 24

  Armed with new information, I placed a call to Evans as soon as daylight was creeping over the city.

  Lawyers, particularly top guns like him, are very busy and important so not surprisingly he didn’t answer until close to nine, when he dragged himself into his office. I pictured him there in his downtown digs, puffing on a stogie while he listened to me waffle down the line.

  ‘So what’re you asking then?’ he said when I was finished.

  ‘Do we take this to the police or not?’

  He pondered quietly but I could hear the puffing in my ear. ‘So what you’ve got,’ he said at length, ‘is a guy who the cops think is a solid witness but you think is a suspect. You’ve got electronic surveillance gear installed in the victim’s apartment, but you can’t attribute it to anyone.’

  ‘Yet,’ I said.

  ‘And how do you think that’ll change? You need forensics, which you can only get through the cops. Or a witness to him installing the kit, which seems very unlikely, because letting someone see you do it completely defeats the purpose of being covert.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Or the last option is a confession, which also seems very unlikely. Why would he roll over to that, especially to you?’

  I knew he was thinking out loud, so I stayed quiet. I felt like Archie to his Nero Wolfe, the foot-slogging gumshoe awaiting the great reveal from the master.

  ‘No Daniel,’ the master said, ‘I think you keep this to yourself for now. You record everything properly, secure it all as exhibits, and sit on it. You carry on investigating the matter – you have a paying client, so that cannot be construed as interfering in the police investigation. You’re covered from that angle. Two things you need to remember, however.’

  He took a deep puff on his stogie and blew out. How he could chew on those things so early in the day was beyond me.

  ‘Firstly, this guy Beetham now knows that you know. He wasn’t recording on-site, was he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So he’s monitoring and probably recording remotely. So take it as read that he knows you know, although he may not know that you suspect him yet. As far as he knows, the cops’ve kept his identity as a witness secret from you, so you won’t have two and two together on him just yet. So that’s good. Keep that ace up your sleeve.’

  ‘And the second thing?’ I had an idea what he was thinking.

  ‘The witness statement he gave the police, in the context he gave it without the illegal eavesdropping, justified them in using electronic surveillance on you all and on looking at Mike as the suspect.’

  I nodded to myself. It confirmed my own suspicions, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It was good to know that the cops hadn’t acted illegally as I’d first thought, but it also meant that anything they gained from their surveillance was something they could use against us.

  ‘Thoughts?’ Evans said.

  I blew out my breath and looked across the office at Molly. She was doing a complete work up on Simon Beetham, but had stopped to try and listen while I spoke to Evans. The door opened and Mike walked in, fresh from the gym. Some people meditate or listen to whale noises to chill out; Mike lifted large slabs of tin.

  ‘Not a lot,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing we can do about any of that, so I guess we just crack on and do what we do.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Evans said. ‘You do what you do. Any queries, you just give me a shout. And definitely, definitely call me immediately if the cops take another run at any of you. That wasn’t smart going in alone. Am I making myself clear?’

  ‘Yes Dad.’

  I heard him sigh, but he bit his tongue. Molly gave me a disapproving look.

  ‘And Daniel?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t get tied up in the weeds, do you know what I mean?’

  I frowned to myself. ‘Not really.’

  ‘You being an ex-cop, your instinct is to believe that the cops always act with good intentions. Unfortunately it’s not always the case. Just because it now appears that they had legal justification for what they’ve done so far, doesn’t mean everything is squeaky clean, right?’

  ‘Yeah, gotcha.’

  ‘Put aside any emotion and just deal with the facts is what I’m saying, son.’ I heard a heavy exhale down the line. ‘Now go do what you do.’

  He hung up and I put the phone down, looking across to Molly and Mike. It took all of ten seconds to update them, then Molly took the lead and we gathered around her desk. Efficient as ever, she was already well underway with her profiling.

  ‘Simon Beetham is fifty four years old,’ she said. ‘Born in England, and has been here for close to ten years.’

  ‘On a visa?’ Mike enquired. He’d already mixed a protein shake and was chugging it down. He had a chocolate moustache, but I kept quiet. I knew he’d have done the same.

  ‘Not sure, but probably on one of those visas for skill shortages. I can’t find any details of a spouse or children yet, but there is some reference to him being divorced so there might be something online. If not, I could try to get records from the UK.’

  ‘Probably take some time,’ I said, ‘but you may as well get the ball rolling. We don’t know yet what will be useful and what won’t. What else have you found?’

  ‘He’s a self-employed electrician as we already knew, he’s the only director and shareholder of his company, so there’s nothing there. Plays squash at the local club, follows Tottenham for the soccer, and most of his social media posts are British comedy clips or people injuring themselves, home video type stuff.’

  She clicked open a photo of Beetham in his squash gear. He was leanly muscular with not an ounce of fat, that sort of build that runners have. He clipped his remaining hair very short and had an overbite and a lazy eye. His forearms were heavily tattooed with old ink, but the image wasn’t clear enough to make them out. I recalled that he’d grown up on a North London housing estate, or so he’d told Mike who told me.

  ‘Anything on his supposed military service?’

  ‘Not really. He’s referenced the Royal Navy a little bit, and there’re a few things he’s shared about military type things.’

  Molly looked up at me over her right shoulder. She was wearing her glasses. I liked it when she wore her glasses.

  ‘He’s made a few references to military service, but all kind of “I did but I can’t tell you about it” type of stuff. Like this.’ She turned back to the screen and found a post she’d screenshot. It was a clip of a team of blokes in black kit parachuting, laden with weapons.

  ‘Huh, “Done plenty of this back in the day”,’ Mike read aloud. His moustache was still in place. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Or this.’ Molly opened another screenshot, depicting a guy in camo gear with his face blurred out, holding some kind of an assault rifle. Beetham had shared it and commented that it was a “handy piece of kit.”

  ‘And so on and so on.’ Molly swivelled around and we both stepped back. ‘Mike, you’ve got a milk moustache.’

  Disappointing.

  ‘Thanks.’ He wiped it and drained his shake.

  ‘There’s actually nothing very interesting about him,’ Molly continued, ‘at least, not that I’ve found so far. This is all just open source info though.’

  ‘Know anyone that could check out his military records?’ I asked Mike. ‘Be good to know if he is actually some kind of a ninja.’

  He snorted. ‘He’s not, mate, trust me. But I do know someone who will be able to find out.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, rubbing my hands together. This was like a blast from the past, working on a homicide. I felt
a buzz through my veins. ‘Mike, you make that enquiry. When you’re done with that, get hold of Patrick and sort out exhibiting the stuff he’s found, okay?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Mol, you crack on with profiling him. Send off any info requests you need to, let’s just get this thing moving.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ she said with an impish grin. I liked it, maybe as much as her glasses.

  ‘What’re you gunna do, big man?’ Mike said.

  ‘Me? I’m going to see a man about a dog.’

  Chapter 25

  ‘We’ve got a forensic hit,’ Gardner said, her eyes glued to the screen.

  Powell looked up sharply from his desk, midway through reading a statement. ‘What is it?’ Rather than being dumped from the investigation, since opening his big mouth he’d been relegated to scanning and uploading documents to help the File Manager who, coincidentally, was Gardner. File Manager was effectively the 2 i/c’s right hand, which suited Gardner perfectly.

  Frustrated at being side-lined, Powell had barely spoken in the office but he was curious about any development in the case. Clearly Gardner wanted to share, so no doubt it was another nail in Mike Manning’s coffin; he’d already heard her on the phone that morning with a psych, trying to organise a professional opinion on the man’s self-disclosed PTSD.

  He waited impatiently, knowing that he was letting her play with him and hating himself for it. The inevitable gloating would be unbearable; may as well just get it over and done with.

  ‘DNA hit,’ she said, loud enough for a couple more heads to pop up across the room. Powell saw Vance walking in, fresh from a smoke break with a coffee cup in hand. He heard Gardner’s announcement as he entered and made a beeline for her, a big grin spreading across his face. Powell felt his heart sink further.

  ‘This is it,’ Gardner said excitedly, the others coming to gather around. ‘DNA hit from blood on the victim’s bedroom door handle.’ She gave Powell a sly look. ‘Now why would someone leave blood on her door handle?’