Michael Parker - A Covert War

Susan smiled. ‘I’m sure I’m not. Very well; give me five minutes and I’ll walk down to the station with you. Is it far?’

He pointed over his shoulder. ‘I’ve got the car here. I’ll bring you back as well.’

‘Five minutes, then,’ she said and closed the door.

About fifteen minutes later, Susan walked into the police station with the young constable. He took her up to the station desk. The young, female police officer looked up at them.

‘Susan Ellis,’ the constable told her, pointing over his shoulder at Susan. ‘Chief wants a word with her.’

The young woman reached across to a box with an array of buttons and held one down. ‘Chief, desk here. Susan Ellis to see you.’

She looked up. ‘Take Miss Ellis through John,’ she told him, and looked back down at whatever she had been doing when they walked in.

Evans took Susan through a small maze of people working at their desks, on the phones, checking data on computer screens and busy chatting away as though they were anywhere but in a working nick.

Evans knocked on a closed door marked ‘Detective Chief Inspector Rendell.’ He didn’t wait for a response but opened the door and stepped into the office.

‘Evening, Chief. Got Miss Ellis for you.’

Rendell looked across the top of his half-moon glasses and signalled with a crooked forefinger to bring her in.

Susan followed Evans into the office as Rendell stood up. ‘Thank you, Evans. I’ll call you when we’re finished.’

Evans left the office as Rendell shook Susan’s hand and asked her to take a seat.

‘Can I get you a coffee, glass of water?’ he asked Susan. ‘Anything?’

Susan shook her head. ‘No thank you, Chief Inspector. So long as you don’t intend keeping me here too long, I think I’ll manage.’

Rendell was in his fifties and looked fit for his age. He reminded Susan of her father a bit. He had a warm, inviting face and seemed to exude friendliness, although she doubted he would show that countenance to offenders.

‘I’ll try not to keep you.’ He hadn’t taken his seat yet and immediately went across to a filing cabinet set against the far wall. On top of the cabinet was a folder which he brought across to the desk. He sat down and spun the folder round so that it was facing Susan.

‘Now, do I call you Miss, Ms, or what?’

‘Susan will do fine,’ she told him.

He smiled and seemed to relax. ‘Good. Now, I have it on highest authority that you are a little bit special. I haven’t been told why, not yet anyway, so I’ll assume you’re related to the Prime Minister or something like that, eh?’ He allowed himself a little chuckle at the joke.

‘Now, there are some photographs in there,’ he told Susan, pointing to the folder. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, would you look through them and tell me if you recognise anybody.’ He passed the folder across the desk and sat back and watched as Susan opened the folder.

She began turning over the page and saw a photograph of one of her neighbours coming out of the front door. ‘My neighbour,’ she muttered and kept on turning the pages.

It was obvious to Susan that someone, no doubt a police officer had been stationed outside her flat with the instruction to photograph everybody who came in or went out, and even those people like delivery men or salesmen who simply called at the front door or posted mail through the letter box.

Then she stopped at a photograph of a man putting something through the letter box. In the next photograph he had turned round and was now walking away from the door. The photograph was very good; she recognised him immediately.

‘That’s Maggot,’ she said, looking up. ‘What the hell is he doing there?’

Marcus sat in his hotel room thinking about his next move. He had thrown himself off the M.V. Odessa deliberately because he knew there was not much of a drop from the main deck down to the water, and the option of remaining on board and trying to make a fight of it hadn’t come into it; especially as someone was firing a gun at him.

As soon as he had surfaced, he had swum away from the ship as fast as he could. He could hear the sound of shouting, but mercifully no more shooting. The darkness helped to cover his escape and he hoped that the captain of the Odessa would assume he was an illegal immigrant making a run for freedom.

Eventually, more by luck than judgement, he ended up some way along the river, and by the time he had dragged himself up on to a small, wooden landing stage he was breathless and soaked through to the skin.

He had put about a hundred yards between him and the Odessa. There was no obvious sign of pursuit, so Marcus had walked away from the river and out on to a road. He took his bearings and made his way back to the hotel. Fortunately for Marcus his clothes were not in too bad a state when he walked to reception and asked for his room key. The night porter barely glanced up at him.

He had taken a hot bath, then a shower before slipping into bed. His shoulder was beginning to hurt a little but he ignored it. The flesh wound that Cavendish had dressed at the safe house hurt as well, but he ignored that too.

He felt a little troubled by them but soon fell asleep. When he woke that morning he showered again, put on a pair of jeans and a check shirt, called Cavendish and then went into the town to buy another change of clothes.

He had watched an early morning television broadcast on the local news channel carrying reports of an illegal immigrant shooting his way out of a trap on board the M.V. Odessa in the docks. It suited Marcus to see the incident reported that way, and it probably suited the captain of the Odessa too.

Now he was sitting in his room contemplating his next move. He had been reticent about explaining to Cavendish exactly what had occurred the night before, so kept much of the detail to himself. He was surprised when Cavendish suggested he went back to the docks and tried to identify the illegal cargos once it was on the quayside and find out where it was heading.

He wondered if the security chief was really concerned about what happened to him; whether he really cared that Marcus was not exactly a trained agent. After all, he had literally been given free rein to follow his own instincts and to come up with some answers. Perhaps Cavendish trusted those instincts to the point where he believed Marcus was more than capable of achieving a satisfactory conclusion to whatever objective he set him.

Or maybe not; maybe Marcus was a pain in the arse and Cavendish wanted shot of him. The drugs coming into the country through Kings Lynn Docks couldn’t have represented more than a fraction of what was flooding into the country anyway, and there was a National Drugs Squad or something to take care of that. So why him, why Marcus?

Susan Ellis sat staring at Chief Inspector Rendell. She found it difficult to believe what he had told her; that Maggot was known to them and was listed as having links with Al-Qaeda, the Muslim terrorist organisation.

‘Don’t misunderstand me, Susan,’ Rendell was saying. ‘Just because a person is listed as suspect, it doesn’t mean he or she is guilty of terrorism. A lot of people come up on our radar and we have to investigate them as thoroughly and discreetly as possible.’

‘But I was only talking to him a couple of days ago,’ she told Rendell. ‘I didn’t know who he was when I met him. He said he was a friend of Marcus Blake.’

Rendell looked down at a file in front of him. ‘Who is Marcus Blake?’ he asked, looking up.

Susan explained who Marcus was, more or less repeating what Maggot had told her without going into detail about her own reason for contacting him in the first place. She thought her description of Marcus as a private detective would be sufficient and left the description at that.