Adrian Magson - Deception

Harry lowered the side window. From eighty yards away, the coordinated shouting of the teams at the front and rear of the shop, followed by the ram hitting the back door, sounded very loud. It immediately set dogs barking in adjacent premises, and caused one or two lights to go on along the street. Most, however, stayed off; not everyone was keen to be seen joining in the public spectacle, preferring to watch under cover of darkness.

Harry stepped out of the van and walked along the street to the front door, where an officer was standing guard. Two of his colleagues were kneeling on a struggling figure in the middle of the shop, while a third was checking behind the counter and racks with a large flashlight. Harry stepped past them and walked through to the back room, his nose twitching at the spicy atmosphere, where he found a senior officer standing alongside a large man with a bald head. Two armed officers stood in the background. From overhead came the sounds of a search in progress.

‘You break my property, you pay,’ said the balding man, as something tinkled and a man swore. The man’s voice was dull with sleep, enhancing his heavy accent, and Harry thought he recognized the familiar tones of the Sarajevo district of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He’d heard them too many times before, ranging from friendly to downright hostile, ever to forget them. Mostly the latter.

The officer sniffed and looked at Harry. ‘You want a word with him?’

Harry shook his head. Questioning the man wouldn’t help; Soran would undoubtedly use every lever he could to plead a case of unlawful entry and an invasion of his privacy. ‘I’ll take a look around, though,’ he said, and walked up the stairs. He found several officers conducting a room-by-room search, piling anything of interest at the top of the stairs for removal in evidence bags. Most of it looked like junk, although there was a replica automatic pistol which looked real enough to fool anyone.

The living quarters were cramped and dark, the air heavy with cigarette smoke and the smell of cooking. It was a man’s space, with no signs of a woman’s touch. Harry knew instinctively that their chances of coming up with anything concrete leading to the two Bosnians who had killed Pike and Barrow and tried to get McCreath were slim. Whatever secrets Soran had were probably well concealed.

He returned downstairs and found the officer and Soran sitting at the room’s central table. Soran was spinning a mobile phone with his forefinger, while the officer was asking about the two young men questioned earlier.

‘They have gone home,’ Soran muttered disinterestedly. ‘They do not live here.’

‘Home? Where’s that?’

Soran shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Young men, they move all the time. . change place like I change shirts.’ He scowled and waved a hand, the matter of no importance. ‘Why should they tell me? I am not their keeper.’

‘They work for you?’

‘No. They are painting, decorating. . many jobs like that.’

‘What about phone numbers?’ said Harry, after a nod from the officer.

‘I do not know.’ Soran looked up at him. ‘Who are you?’ He jerked his head at the officer. ‘His name I know. Yours I don’t.’

It was a delaying tactic, a distraction. Harry ignored it. Instead he picked up the mobile phone from the table and pressed the call button. It showed the last few numbers dialled. He read them aloud and the officer jotted down each one in a notebook.

‘Hey!’ Soran rounded on Harry, stabbing the air with a stubby finger. ‘You cannot do that! Is private property. I complain through my solicitor.’

Harry gave him a cold look. This man had helped the two who had been watching Jean, had probably provided material assistance to Zubac and Ganic. ‘You go for it.’ He read out the last of the numbers listed, then tossed the phone back on to the table and walked through to the back door, which was sagging off its hinges, courtesy of the metal ram.

Outside, a collection of eager young faces had gathered at the rear gate. From the comments made, he got the impression that they were not unduly upset at seeing C’emal Soran being turned over. He ignored them and made for a small outhouse to one side. It had a substantial door which was out of keeping with the ancient, porous brick walls. It was locked. He went back inside and asked Soran for the key.

‘Is lost,’ the Bosnian replied without even looking at him. ‘Is nothing much in there — storeroom only. I never use.’

Harry nodded, wondering if Soran was being obstructive for the hell of it, or playing a delaying game. ‘In that case, you won’t mind if we open it for you, will you?’ He looked at the officer, who called out for the man with the battering ram and told him to break down the door.

Three heavy blows and the door caved in. It revealed a storeroom with white walls fitted with metal racking piled with cardboard boxes. A camp bed and an armchair were the main anomalies, along with a kettle, milk and two mugs with traces of cold liquid in the bottom. Packets of sugar and tea and an open packet of biscuits lay nearby. Harry touched the kettle with the back of his hand. Difficult to be certain, but he thought it held traces of warmth. Someone had been in here recently. Maybe this was where they had planned on holding Jean, to use her as a bargaining chip.

The man with the battering ram was watching him, and caught on quick. ‘I’ll get one of the guys to take the temperature,’ he said, and spoke into his radio.

Harry nodded. If nothing else, it would prove Soran was lying about the key. He flicked up the thin mattress on the camp bed. Nothing but canvas and the stale tang of unwashed bodies. The armchair was stuffed with foam, lumpy, misshapen and stained, but that was all. He nudged it to one side, then bent and picked up something lying on the floor.

A triangular metal ring.

There was nothing else to see, so he asked the officer to bag up the mugs, biscuit packet and kettle for prints and DNA testing, and left him to it.

He walked back into the building and dropped the ring on the table in front of Soran. It was clear by the man’s expression that he recognized it for what it was. So did the police officer, whose jaw dropped.

‘This is a pull ring from an M84 stun grenade,’ Harry announced. ‘It was found in your locked storeroom along with traces of recent occupation. Hours recent, in fact. This, along with chemical and DNA analysis, is going to put you right at the centre of an attack on a south London police station by Zlatco Ganic and Milan Zubac, where at least two officers were shot dead.’ He turned to leave, while the officer took out a plastic evidence bag and placed the ring inside, his face grim at what Harry had revealed.

Soran was looking sick and licking his lips. He said nothing.

‘You should have got your people to clean up properly,’ said Harry. ‘Big mistake.’

‘Employ undisciplined thugs and that’s what you get, in my experience.’ Paulton was uneasy at the news of the abortive attempt at lifting Jean Fleming. They should have had her by now. And Tate, too, as he would have galloped to her rescue like an eager bloodhound, no doubt about it. Instead it had fallen apart, following on from the widely circulated news of a terrorist attack on London’s Brixton police station, resulting in the deaths of two officers and the serious wounding of several others. No group had claimed outright responsibility for the raid, but two or three were hinting at it in an attempt to gain credibility. As a separate issue, news of a late night police raid on a house belonging to the Bosnian community in the east of the city was just filtering out, although Paulton had already heard the latest details from a contact in London with connections to the Metropolitan Police.