Tony Park - Silent Predator

The station was overwhelming, with its throngs of people rushing past her. Everyone seemed to know where they were going. She stopped a young man to ask directions, but he only spoke Spanish. An elderly English woman was more helpful. The train was warm but crowded.

By the time she alighted at Vauxhall’s mainline station she wondered whether it would have been easier, in fact, to walk. Using the A-Z Tom had loaned her, Sannie found her way back to the Thames and the Albert Embankment.

She recognised the distinctive architecture of Vauxhall Cross, the home of Britain’s overseas intelligence organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service — SIS or MI6 — from a James Bond film she’d seen.

It had to be the most ostentatious secret building in the world. It looked like some futuristic temple, inspired, though, by the ancient Mayan or Mesopotamian stepped pyramids. Deep green shoots of glass, which looked to be thick enough to stop a rocket, sprouted from its angular beige terraces. Security men dressed all in black added to the Hollywood image of the spies’ nest, which was topped off by a pair of bizarre giant white springs, festooned in turn with satellite dishes and radio antennae.

If Vauxhall Cross was like something from a George Lucas movie, the Metropolitan Police’s old office building further down the Albert Embankment was straight out of the days of black and white television. It was an office block in the truest sense. No funky futuristic lines here — just an uninspiring, faintly depressing, sixties monolith of pale concrete and red brick that was grubby with age.

A bored-looking civilian security guard asked for her identity and pointed the way across the marbled floor, the only concession to flamboyance in the building, to the lift lobby. When she got out of the lift the stone was gone, replaced by dirty grey carpet tiles. She came to a wooden door with a glass panel and pushed a buzzer. It seemed she was expected, because when she said her name to a woman squirrelled away somewhere inside, the electronic lock clicked and Sannie pushed open the door.

Before her was mostly empty office space which could have been populated by any bunch of bureaucrats anywhere in the world. It was fitted out with computer workstations. Two men and a woman in plain clothes were tapping away on keyboards. A mousy woman with horn-rimmed glasses looked up and said, ‘Inspector Rensburg, is it?’ The woman spoke loud and slowly, in the way that ignorant tourists do when they think slowing their delivery and increasing their volume will somehow make a non-English speaker pick up a few words.

‘Van Rensburg.’

‘Chief Inspector Shuttleworth’s waiting for you. Corner office.’

‘ Baie dankie. ’ Sannie smiled to herself as she headed for the office, and casually wiped her right hand on the side of her black pants. With her other she brushed an imaginary stray hair from her forehead.

A man in his early fifties, with a thinning pate and the deep-etched lines of stress defining his gaunt face, opened the door before she reached it and said, ‘Hello, I’m David Shuttleworth. You must be Susan?’

It started cordially, with the pair of them making tea in the office kitchen before getting down to business. Outside, the sky was still a uniform grey and it seemed to match the skin tone of most of the people she’d so far seen in this cold, crowded city. She knew the politeness would soon disappear. Shuttleworth ushered her into his office, which was a fishbowl on one side of the floor. He lowered slimline blinds to stop the other detectives from peering in.

‘I’ve had a call from Robert Greeves’s widow,’ Shuttleworth began.

Sannie sighed. It had been too much to hope that the woman’s fear of some defamatory news about her husband leaking out might have led her to keep quiet about their unauthorised visit.

‘Inspector Van Rensburg.’ All trace of civility had fallen with the blinds. ‘I have no authority over you, but let me assure you that you most certainly do not have any jurisdiction here to be interviewing relatives of a deceased British politician.’

‘Of course not, Chief Inspector, and I’m — ’

‘If it were up to me I’d have you on the next plane back to South Africa. Do you not think that we’ve looked into Robert Greeves’s home life already?’

Sannie knew that any response from her at this point would be the wrong one, so she kept her silence.

‘I know Furey’s looking for someone else to put the blame on, some slip-up by Greeves or Roberts that might have made it inevitable that the terrorists would kill them, and that there was nothing Tom could have done to prevent it. But that is not the case.’

Sannie wasn’t so sure about that, but again she held her tongue.

‘From what I heard about you while I was in South Africa you’re lucky to be still on the job. You let him lead you off on a wild-goose chase that — ’

‘That very nearly caught the people responsible and freed the hostages.’

Shuttleworth was having none of it. He stood and put his hands on his desktop, then leaned forward, closing the distance between them. ‘Very nearly is not good enough. You two were playing catch-up all the time, and the villains outran you. Simple as that.’

‘Tom Furey was the only one on the trail of those men and it wasn’t his fault that they got away. Those are the facts of this case, and that’s what I’ll be telling your parliamentary inquiry, Chief Inspector.’

Shuttleworth sat down again and smoothed his tie. He looked, Sannie thought, like a man who did not raise his voice very often, especially not to women. She saw him struggling to retrieve his dour, unflustered demeanour. She also saw it as her opportunity to start questioning him. ‘When will the South African Police Service be given copies of the execution tapes?’

Shuttleworth frowned. ‘They’ll get our analysis of the tapes when I do.’

‘So you don’t have them?’

He sighed. ‘The SAS handed them over to the security service. They have their own state-of-the-art video analysis and forensics people. They’ll do as thorough a job as anyone else.’

Sannie could sense the man’s annoyance, not at her but, as she had guessed, at the fact that a government agency other than the police had grabbed such important evidence and was not sharing it; he had given her the company line and wasn’t happy about it. The police were spinning their wheels in this investigation, and it clearly rankled the Scotsman.

Shuttleworth lifted his chin. ‘How are your people doing with the burned-out vehicle and lists of people who entered the Kruger Park in the days before the abductions?’

Sannie explained that the licence plates on the torched Isuzu belonged to another vehicle. ‘It was a BMW sedan which was car-jacked two days before the abductions. However, the registration number didn’t show up on the lists of vehicles entering the park, which means the gang must have switched plates after entering. The chassis number was traced to the current owner, a Pakistani surgeon living in Pretoria.’

Shuttleworth’s eyes widened at her mention of the doctor’s heritage.

‘Doctor Pervez Khan hasn’t fit the profile of a terrorist suspect so far, though,’ she admitted. ‘We’ve checked him out. Wealthy, single — divorced, actually. A drinker and a bit of a midlife-crisis party boy, from what the detectives investigating him so far have learned.’

‘They’ve questioned him, then?’

‘No. He didn’t show up at his practice two days before Greeves and Joyce were taken. Our missing persons unit already had a file open on him. His business partner reported him gone. Best guess so far is that he was car-jacked and killed. We’ve circulated his photo and a description of the destroyed vehicle to the media, but had no witnesses come forward.’