Питер Джеймс - Dead if You Don’t

He also had a very secret, very nice little earner on the side.

Right now, Suckling, with his muscular body and shaven head, dressed in a high-viz vest over a grubby singlet and jeans, was sitting in the cabin of his JCB, operating the levers to dig the bucket deep into the side of a pyramid of rubble. He raised it in the air, swung it round and emptied the load into the hopper of the Jaw Crusher, which made a grinding roar. Tiny pieces rode up the Crusher’s conveyor and tumbled to the ground, forming a new pyramid.

He could set the level of the Jaw Crusher into different gradings. Type 1 would be recycled rubble for the construction industry. Type 6F2 would be a smaller grading, mostly for drains or for the footings of a new road.

That was what this particular pile was for — the road in a new housing development near Horsham.

He had chosen to work on this Saturday for two reasons. Firstly, because his bosses had asked him, and it was all on overtime pay. Secondly, because no one was around. They were all at the Amex Stadium, watching the Albion’s first league game of the season, against Manchester City. He would have liked to have been there too, to support his home team, but the money was too good today. He wasn’t just getting overtime from his Carter Contracting bosses, he was getting a very big bung from a certain Mr Jorgji Dervishi — an Albanian paymaster who regularly gave him five grand in cash to not notice human body parts inside a particular pyramid of rubble. Limbs, torso and a head which he would crush beyond all recognition, and in a week or so would be safely buried beneath hundreds of tons of tarmac. Forever.

And tonight, after he had finished here, he was looking forward to going to a barbecue at some friends’ with his wife, Aileen — and most of all he was looking forward to a cold beer. He could murder one now.

As the rubble dropped off the end of the conveyor he saw what looked like a human hand. Almost instantly, it was covered by more finely ground rubble. Then he noticed, dispassionately, what might have been part of a human head. Some hair and an ear?

He swung the machine round, dug back into the pyramid and raised another bucket-load in the air.

Then there was a sound from the JCB he had never heard before. A chunk-chunk-chunk grinding sound. The whole cab vibrated, alarmingly.

Then silence.

A red warning light flashed on the dashboard.

Shit, fuck.

He peered out of the cab window, alarmed, at the bucket, which was halted high in the air.

Especially at the object hanging over the side.

Unmistakably, a severed human arm. It was wearing a shiny wristwatch.

Shaking, he turned the ignition off, then back on again, and pressed the starter button.

Nothing happened.

‘No, no, no!’

He tried again. Then again.

Nothing.

The arm dangled. Too high for him to reach.

In desperation, he climbed out of the cab and, monkey-style, tried to climb along the extended, articulated boom of the machine, holding on to the hydraulic cylinder that would raise the second boom, to which the bucket was attached. He reached the linkage, hauled himself over, then tried to slide down the next section, to the bucket.

He lost his grip.

Plunging, his head struck the side of the bucket six feet below, then he fell another fifteen feet to the hard ground, landing upright with a sickening crunch, a snapping sound and searing pain from his legs as he crashed face down.

He cried out in pain, desperately tried to move and screamed again in agony.

Then he lay rigid with panic.

Oh Jesus, no.

The lower bone of his right leg was sticking out through his jeans. His shattered left leg lay at an impossible angle, partly beneath his body.

He tried to raise himself with his arms, but the pain was too excruciating.

Above him, he heard the cry of gulls. And above him he also saw the bucket. The human arm. The wristwatch glinting in the afternoon sun.

Thoughts spun through his pain-addled mind. He tried to haul himself along the ground towards the JCB. Stared around the site, at the piles of grey and brown rubble. At two parked blue lorries’ signs — written in the red lettering of his employers. CARTER. A skip filled with junk wood, plaster and cartons that he had removed from some of the building-site rubble that had come in recently. At the green roof of a warehouse on the wharf across the water, on the far side of Shoreham Harbour.

It was dawning on him that going to that barbecue tonight was not going to happen. It was also dawning on him that this was the least of his problems. He crawled again, a few inches nearer the caterpillar tracks of the JCB, then stopped, crying out in pain.

What the hell to do?

He felt in his jeans pocket. The hard lump of his mobile phone was there. Thank God! He eased it out, every movement shooting further pain through his body, dialled 999 and asked for an ambulance.

In his blurred and confused mind he wondered, perhaps, if the paramedic crew might not look up and notice anything amiss.

Saturday 12 August

17.00–18.00

The coded message the dog handler relayed to Adrian Morris via the police radio operator told him the sniffer dog had detected possible explosives in the suspect item.

Morris informed the Match Commander, who updated Oscar-1. He in turn alerted the duty officer at the Explosives Ordnance Division, based in Folkestone — and emailed him a photograph of the camera, lifted from the stadium’s CCTV. The EOD, who were normally one hour and ten minutes away, on blue lights, would make an instant assessment from the image, using guidelines set out by NaCTSO, the National Counter-Terrorism Security Office, for the area of evacuation required in the event of a suspected bomb.

Less than one minute later Kundert’s phone rang. It was the EOD duty officer. ‘Sir, it looks a relatively small object. We have a unit at Gatwick Airport on a training exercise and we’ve dispatched them — they’ll be with you in thirty minutes. We’d like you to immediately clear a minimum area of fifty metres around the object. One hundred would be preferable, but given your situation, we’d be OK with fifty.’

He relayed the information to Morris and everyone present in the Control Room. One hundred metres would mean a total evacuation of the stadium, and a crowd-control nightmare. One potential danger they needed to be mindful of was that of secondary explosive devices, a classic terrorist tactic, where explosives would be placed in the Rendezvous Points to where the evacuated crowds would be directed. For this reason, the club kept these RV points a secret, regularly changing them. If they just evacuated the South Stand, where the suspect camera was, and part of the East and West Stands, they could put the people in safe RV points in the concourse and immediately outside. But more than that and they would have to send them home. Which would mean the match was abandoned and would have to be rearranged.

They all agreed to an immediate partial evacuation. With luck, if the device turned out to be a false alarm, there was a possibility, albeit slim, of recommencing the game.

Kundert called Oscar-1 and informed him of the decision.

Keith Ellis immediately ordered a Roads Policing Unit escort to meet the EOD vehicle at the junction of the Gatwick slip road and the A23, and help speed its journey to the stadium.

As he put down his radio, his phone beeped.

It was Roy Grace.

The two of them went back a long way. Ellis had been Roy’s sergeant at John Street police station, when Grace had been a uniformed probationer, nearly twenty years ago.

‘What’s the update at the Amex, Keith? I’m here with my son.’