Lifting the Lid(90)

Jarvis was sitting on one of the purple wooden chairs at the side of the room, wearing a pair of headphones. These were attached to a black box on his lap, and this in turn was connected to a small square of plastic fixed to the wall. He lifted the headphones clear of his right ear and half turned towards Patterson. ‘Bit hard to tell without a visual, guv, but I’m pretty sure there’s a stiff in there.’

‘A stiff?’

‘A dead body, guv.’

Patterson rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, I do know what a stiff is, thank you. Any idea who it is?’

‘Dunno,’ said Jarvis with a shake of his head. ‘Seems like he’d already croaked when the blind guy arrived. One of them’s called Julian Bracewell and then there’s a Harry and a bloke with a heavy Scottish accent. Oh yes, and somebody called Delia.’

‘Delia?’ Patterson thought back to the three people who had emerged from the taxi a few minutes earlier. He was sure that all of them were men. And what about this Julian Bracewell? He told Coleman to run a check on him, although he wondered whether there was much point. If, as he suspected, the dead body belonged to Gerald Quicke MP, then the whole job was screwed anyway.

‘Hang on a sec.’ Jarvis adjusted the headphones so that both ears were covered once again and frowned in concentration.

‘What is it?’ said Patterson, guessing from Jarvis’s expression that he was hearing something that wasn’t going to be good news.

Jarvis held up his hand to motion him to silence. ‘Sounds like there’s a bit of an argy-bargy going on… Cockney-sounding bloke – I think that’s Harry – calling somebody a Judas… Something about a— Agh, Jesus!’

He snatched the headphones off and dropped them to the floor before clasping his hands to his ears and rubbing them vigorously. Even without the aid of a listening device, the wall was thin enough for Patterson and the others to be in no doubt as to the sound which had almost deafened him. It was a man screaming in pain.

‘What the hell was that?’ said Statham.

‘Not exactly sure, but I think there might have been a shot,’ said Jarvis, still massaging his damaged ears. ‘Gun with a silencer maybe.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Patterson was aware that Statham was looking at him, apparently waiting for a decision about what they should do next. He considered his options, but there seemed to be remarkably few. Their main reason for being here at all was to ensure the safety of the kidnapped MP, but it seemed more than likely they had already failed on that score. They could always burst into the flat and grab whoever was still alive in there, but at least one of them had a gun – perhaps they all did – so the risk to him and his men was not inconsiderable. Besides, what would be the point when he knew that the case would never come to trial?

His instructions had been unequivocal in that respect. Whatever the outcome, not a single detail of the operation could ever be made public. A general election was looming, and the government’s standing in the opinion polls was already causing alarm bells to ring in the corridors of power. A recent string of scandals involving some of the higher ranking party members had been particularly damaging, so the last thing the PM wanted right now was another one. If the media got even the faintest whiff of what Quicke had been up to and why he’d been kidnapped, the consequences would be disastrous. Not only that, but if it became known that the government had agreed to pay the ransom, its frequently repeated mantra never to give in to terrorist demands or any other form of blackmail would be ridiculed as a sham of the highest order.

Oh bollocks, thought Patterson, realising that he was getting nowhere with his decision-making process, and he began instead to calculate the kind of pension he might be entitled to if he took early retirement. But his financial musings were short lived.

‘You’re not gonna believe this,’ said Coleman when he ended the call on his mobile phone.

‘Don’t piss about,’ Patterson snapped. ‘Just tell me what you’ve got.’

‘Well, assuming it’s the same Julian Bracewell, he actually died four years ago.’ He paused for a reaction, but all he got was a raised eyebrow and a look of impatience, so he cleared his throat and carried on. ‘Bit of a bad lad apparently. Head of some gang in South London. Armed robbery mostly. In fact, he was out on bail over a bank job when he snuffed it.’

‘Bail?’

‘Yeah, I thought that was a bit weird. Anyway, before he croaked – when he was being questioned, like – he tried to put someone else in the frame. Er…’ Coleman glanced at his notebook. ‘Name of Harry Vincent.’