Corpse in Waiting Read online

  All at once and as if my reasoning had weirdly made it happen there were shouts somewhere at the front of the building and the sound of shots. Seconds later yelled orders from the man with the megaphone sent several armed personnel pounding up the stairs, a couple peeling off to grab the prone suspect first to virtually sling him into the arms of other colleagues, another group running through the opening towards the main road. More yells, more shots. Then, comparative silence again.

  A policeman appeared in the doorway of the flat, went back inside after a couple of doors had been slammed and then reappeared.

  ‘Well?’ asked the megaphone.

  ‘I think we’ve sorted it, sir.’

  FOURTEEN

  I left the security of the pillar and cautiously looked around me. I could not see Patrick but did not really expect to as the lighting in the area was poor, besides which in the present circumstances he would make a point of not being anywhere where he could be spotted. Then, fleetingly, I did see him as he crossed a space between the line of parked cars. He had someone with him. I headed for where I thought he might end up, at the line of police vehicles. All the time more were arriving.

  ‘One of the drivers got away,’ he was saying to DCI Leyland as I arrived, handing over the man’s handgun. ‘You’ll find another, unconscious, in the black rubbish bin over there and a third beneath the stairs, wounded – that’s if he hasn’t done a runner by now.’

  Leyland saw me, looked through me and said to Patrick, ‘So how come you’re here?’ Whether it was because of the erratic lighting from vehicle headlights I was not sure but the man looked haggard.

  ‘I want Tony Capelli.’

  ‘You can’t have him.’

  ‘Only to arrest him. You can have him immediately afterwards.’

  ‘The answer’s still no.’

  ‘It’s of no consequence to you surely.’

  ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Personal reasons.’

  Leyland half turned away. ‘Bugger off, Gillard.’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘Until I’ve been inside and assessed what’s happened out the front I can’t answer that.’

  ‘Do you know what he looks like?’

  ‘Er – no.’

  ‘Then you might need me to identify him.’

  ‘I don’t need SOCA here at all. Leave.’

  He was then forced to give priority to the people who were clamouring for his attention. Patrick, who had already parted with his prisoner, tucked an arm through mine and steered a course away from the group, between the cars and, taking a slightly circuitous route, over towards the stairs. The flashing blue lights of ambulances pulling up in the road outside – there was no room for them now at the rear – reflected eerily off walls and windows, feet pounded pavements, the sound echoing, the general effect almost surreal. Beneath the stairs the wounded man had been found and the two bodies were being examined for any signs of life. We paused by these but neither appeared to be the Capelli brothers.

  ‘SOCA,’ Patrick snapped to the first person we met at the top of the steps, producing his warrant card. ‘I must warn you that the carved wooden dragons in there might conceal booby-traps that could well have been reloaded since I was last here.’

  ‘Do you know about these things then, sir?’ asked the man, looking alarmed.

  ‘Yes, I do. May we come in?’

  We entered. There was a strong draught, presumably coming from the open windows at the front. One glance at my immediate surroundings told me that scenes of crime people would be here for a long time. The place was shot to pieces; bullet holes everywhere, torn fabrics, pictures and ornaments reduced to splinters and shards. Amazingly, there appeared to be no spilt blood in the hallway and only one body was in sight, just inside the door of the first room we looked into, that of Martino Capelli. I would not have known this if Patrick had not told me as he looked nothing like his younger brother. He had clearly not expected to die, the look of surprise forever frozen on his dark, heavy features.

  ‘If everyone would just stay exactly where they are for a moment,’ Patrick said loudly. ‘While I check for anti-intruder devices.’

  Personally I thought that if any of the dragons was going to do its stuff it would have done so by now but, hey, we were in, weren’t we?

  From where I was standing in the doorway I heard someone out of my line of vision laugh quietly as Patrick went over to what I remembered to be the biggest dragon of the lot, almost as tall as he was. When he discovered the hidden compartment in the front of the neck and the tiny weapon it contained there were muttered exclamations of surprise.

  ‘It failed to go off,’ Patrick reported, tipping the ammunition out on to the carpet. ‘Do all stay in this room while I examine the others.’

  Two or three sobering minutes elapsed while he went from room to room.

  There was a sharp crack.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I yelled.

  ‘Yes, it fired as soon as I touched it,’ he replied from one of the bedrooms. ‘Bloody dangerous things, especially as it wasn’t activated.’

  Leyland arrived, breathing hard. ‘I thought I told you two to bugger off.’

  ‘Patrick’s just disarming the dragons,’ I told him.

  Predictably, he prepared to lose his temper.

  Patrick appeared. ‘Sorry, there was no time to find gloves so my prints are on them. Although most of them were switched off I’ve removed and left all the weapons and ammo on the floor. I suggest you get firearms people to deal with them.’

  Leyland said nothing and marched into the living room. ‘That’s Martino Capelli,’ he said, giving the body the most brief of glances. ‘How many more are indoors?’

  He was told that one slightly wounded man was in the bathroom, under guard, vomiting, there were two dead bodies in the kitchen and a door to what was guessed to be a separate lavatory was jammed or locked, someone presumably inside. Leyland then gave them the information that the rest had tried to escape out of the windows and had been, or were being, apprehended.

  ‘No one hiding under the beds?’ Patrick offered from where we were standing to one side.

  ‘Search under them,’ the DCI ordered his team and they filed out through the door into the adjoining other living room from which there was access to the rest of the flat without going into the hall. ‘Break down the door of the bog,’ he shouted after them.

  ‘So who’s going to shoot first?’ Patrick queried mildly.

  Leyland glared at him. ‘They know what they’re doing.’ His mobile rang and he answered it.

  I went back into the hall. Patrick came with me but I noticed that he kept a watchful eye on Leyland from near the doorway. Distressing noises were still coming from the bathroom, which was around a corner at the end of a short corridor, the bedrooms off it.

  ‘There are drawers under the beds,’ I whispered. ‘No space for anyone to hide.’

  ‘So there are,’ Patrick responded.

  ‘D’you reckon Tony Capelli’s the one in the loo?’

  ‘I don’t think so. His poisonous aftershave tells me he’s—’

  The door of the large built-in cupboard right behind the DCI then smashed open and two men erupted from it. I saw they were armed and that was all before Patrick gave me a violent shove and I sprawled on to the floor. There were several shots, deafening indoors.

  ‘– a lot closer than that,’ I heard Patrick finish saying. ‘Are you all right, guv?’

  On all fours, I travelled to the doorway and looked in, just as the others poured in through the other. Leyland had obviously dived for cover behind a huge sofa – it had borne the brunt of the attack – and was now emerging, a little pale. Two men lay dead on the floor, both shot in the head. One was Tony Capelli. I had to look away.

  Patrick put the Glock back in its shoulder harness and went to look down on the corpses. Although he had spoken in light-hearted fashion to Leyland there was no hint of triumph or contentment. He h
ad saved the DCI’s life and that was all.

  The next morning I got the impression that Greenway was so delighted that he would have Patrick’s report of the night’s activities put in a gold frame and hung on the wall of his office. Handwritten too, the operative’s scribe being too worn out to oblige the night before – it had been two thirty by the time we got back to the hotel – while it was still fresh in his mind and he not too familiar with my laptop. So I had slept the deep sleep of the exhausted, not even hearing him come to bed but seeing him just before closing my eyes sitting at the desk cum dressing table, the lamp on it the only illumination. The light shone on a grave face, a little careworn now but very much the man I had fallen in love with at school. If Alexandra was still out there she wasn’t going to have him.

  ‘I have to say there is a certain degree of choreography here that, understandably, you haven’t mentioned,’ the Commander said slowly, tapping the sheets of paper before him. ‘You thought there was a strong chance that Capelli was in the cupboard in the living room where you were all standing. Why didn’t you draw Leyland’s attention to your suspicions?’

  Patrick took a sip of coffee. ‘He was being uncommonly resentful about our presence and that, and tiredness, were affecting his judgement. I had an idea his lip would curl and he would open the cupboard to prove me wrong. And die on the spot, together with any number of those with him. It was important to de-clutter the immediate area to avoid collateral damage.’

  Greenway’s slightly battered from playing Rugby features split into a big grin. ‘You know, I really love the way you one-time soldiers talk. The Met’ll just adore their crack response team being referred to as clutter at a crime scene. I might even put it in my report.’

  Patrick effected a courtly ‘as master wishes’ gesture.

  ‘What would you have done if they hadn’t burst out of the cupboard?’

  ‘They had to. They’d run out of air. I knew exactly how big it was because I’d taken a look inside at our first visit.’

  ‘It was fine shooting.’

  The word ‘clinical’ had crossed my own mind.

  Patrick said, ‘Ingrid dealt with a significant amount of rubber and compressed air last night too.’

  ‘And I’m sure I was responsible for the man driving the digger at the bank raid to have a heart attack,’ I said unhappily.

  ‘Don’t distress yourself about it,’ Greenway said. ‘He’d had two already and the docs had told him that if he didn’t lose weight and stop drinking ten pints of beer a day he wouldn’t survive a third. He didn’t.’

  ‘Do we know if the bank job was a ploy to make the Met think that was the real target and not the jewellery raid?’ I asked.

  ‘It wasn’t. They were different mobsters who largely hang out in Southend thinking for some reason that they’re safe there. This is the most ambitious job they’ve ever attempted as they usually stick to top of the range car theft and drugs dealing. But the armed foursome were freelance, well known to us and hired for the night. They won’t be bothering us for a while, one of them now permanently in the really warm slammer.’ Greenway harrumphed with laughter. ‘As to the jewellery shop, it’s under heavy, if discreet guard, but probably not many of Martino Capelli’s lot are left standing to do anything even if the boss hadn’t been killed, perhaps by his cousin.’

  ‘This really was Martino trying to reclaim his patch then,’ Patrick said.

  ‘Oh, yes, it was a turf war all right.’ Greenway consulted his computer screen. ‘Five were dead in the flat, including Martino himself, four wounded, one badly. Four were uninjured, one of whom was stuck in the window of the toilet, trying to get out, the other three either having given themselves up or stranded on the canopy over the shops. Outside at the rear, you apprehended two, Ingrid slightly wounded another and a fourth escaped. The Met think they know who he is.’ He glanced at Patrick. ‘Tony Capelli was killed along with a man who appears to have been his minder. We don’t yet know his name. You met them. Do you?’

  ‘No, he was his new minder,’ Patrick answered. ‘The previous one tried to kill me but was clumsy and cut himself on my knife.’

  The Commander made a note of this, a smile tugging his lips. Then he said, ‘There were a couple more who were arrested, with others, who were trying to escape at the front and had shinned down drain pipes. It’s still in the melting pot as to who actually worked for who as it would appear that Tony Capelli had poached some of his cousin’s followers.’

  ‘Are they talking?’ I asked.

  ‘Some of them are. The usual thing, mostly bleating that they were threatened and coerced into doing as they were told. But that, as you know, has more than a grain of truth in it.’

  ‘Your plan of letting Martino Capelli out of prison a little early came off then, sir,’ Patrick said quietly.

  ‘Yes, but like both of you, and despite what impression I might give, I regret the loss of life. The redeeming factor is that no members of the public or police personnel were hurt, or at least, only a constable who managed to shut his hand in a car door. A few egos might have taken a hammering though.’

  And here he did laugh.

  Almost all the rest of that day was taken up with the aftermath. I wrote a report of my own while Patrick went with Greenway to the two crime scenes, the Commander naturally wanting to see them for himself. After snatching a bite of lunch they went to a mortuary where Greenway, together with several other officers from the Met, was able to positively identify a couple of the bodies, the desired object of the exercise as some of the gangs’ members had assumed stolen identities. All this took hours and by the time Patrick got away following another session of debriefings at HQ I was back at the hotel, having spoken to him a little earlier by phone.

  ‘We’re on a long weekend’s leave so home tomorrow,’ he announced as he came through the door. ‘Are you feeling rotten again?’ he went on to enquire, seeing that I was sitting on the bed with my feet up.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I answered. ‘Just enjoying the sheer novelty. I never have time to do this at home.’

  ‘We must talk about your new writing room. Over dinner. God, I’m starving.’ He threw off all his clothes and disappeared to have a shower.

  Jeri Ryan, an actress in Star Trek, Voyager, which Matthew watches avidly, has the most superb way of questioningly twitching an eyebrow that I have ever seen achieved by a woman. I performed one of these, only mentally, right now, slipped on the one and only dress I had brought with me and applied a little make-up and perfume.

  ‘It’s perfectly achievable,’ Patrick said over a pre-dinner glass of wine in the hotel bar. I had said not one word when he had ordered one for himself as well as he was due to see his specialist in a week’s time, who on the previous visit had strongly hinted that he would lift the alcohol ban.

  ‘What is?’ I said, knowing perfectly well.

  ‘Your writing room. We had that small room created off the kitchen that used to be the old coal store with the view that the kids could have their computer in there and use it for homework. But it didn’t work out.’

  Before he could go on I said, ‘That was your idea and it didn’t work out because even though Matthew and Katie – which is who we’re talking about here – get on brilliantly together they do need their own space and both now have their own computers. Which are in their bedrooms.’

  ‘Perfect then. You can have it to write in.’

  ‘Have you been in there lately?’ I snorted. ‘I already know the answer to that, no. Well, I can tell you, it’s just about full and now a utility room. It houses the tumble dryer that wouldn’t go in the kitchen, your parents’ new chest freezer that wouldn’t go in their kitchen, plus any number of boxes and crates, some of which contain your stuff, that haven’t been unpacked yet.’

  ‘Can’t all this be changed?’

  I looked at him over the rim of my glass. ‘No.’

  ‘Look, I have been trying to think this through for you.’

>   ‘I’ve already thought it through all by myself, thank you. I’m buying the house in Bath.’

  Patrick took a fierce swig of wine. ‘But Alex has put in a higher offer.’

  ‘I’ve put in a higher, higher offer. And, don’t forget, she’s shortly going to end up behind bars.’

  He just looked at me.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? This woman was responsible for my having the prang and—’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure yet. Nor about any of the rest of it.’

  ‘Then let me have your defence thesis by nine tomorrow morning, double spaced, written on one side of the paper only, no more than ten thousand words.’

  ‘Ingrid . . .’ Unusually, words failed him for a moment. ‘You never used to be quite as stormy as this.’

  ‘That might be because no one’s ever tried to take you away from me before.’

  There was a longish silence before Patrick grinned ruefully. ‘Perhaps you’re getting more like me.’

  ‘That’s perfectly possible seeing we’ve spent so much time together,’ I murmured. ‘Shall we eat?’

  But he still just sat there looking at me. Then he put out a hand and lightly stroked my cheek. ‘I really love you, you know.’

  I realized that I had been terribly thoughtless about something and took the hand. ‘No police or members of the public were hurt as a result of you killing several mobsters yesterday. Are you all right?’

  ‘I was wondering when someone was going to ask me that.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right – it was the job, and either them or us.’

  James Carrick showed commendably more sensitivity when we met him and Joanna in the Ring o’ Bells in Hinton Littlemoor the next evening for dinner. I was wondering how the business of the Gaelic diatribe would affect the evening but should not have worried, both men miming extreme terror on first clapping eyes on one another and then bursting out laughing. The subjects of work or our partici-pation in any shoot-outs were not even mentioned until after we had eaten and were relaxing over coffee in the snug.