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  I had already said to Patrick that in my opinion a large part of the problem was the DCI’s chronic lack of sleep.

  Carrick said, ‘So, assuming I’m actually listening to you, where do I go from here with this little shit? Ignore the fact that he’s been sitting outside my house while Joanna’s there on her own?’

  ‘From what I know about your good lady,’ Patrick drawled, ‘she has a pretty devastating right hook. Once bloodied the nose of one of her DS successors when he made some kind of dirty remark about your relationship, didn’t she?’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Carrick demanded to know.

  Patrick smiled. ‘Only a little bird perched in a grape vine.’

  My money was all on Derek Woods.

  ‘Seriously,’ Patrick continued, ‘I do understand your worries. But, if it was him I can’t imagine that Joanna’s in any danger. Would you like me to watch Cooper and Mallory for you?’

  ‘How the hell can you? Just now in the pub you said you’d been given a desk job that would last a while.’

  ‘I’ll disobey orders – besides, I can do most of the desk job from home.’

  Slowly, Carrick shook his head. ‘No, but thanks all the same.’

  ‘Do you have any more info about the mobster Cooper’s involved with?’

  ‘I simply haven’t had the time to go into it. But, there’s a rumour, courtesy of a London snout, that he likes to be known as Raptor.’

  FOUR

  ‘The biggest advantage is that Cooper’s not previously clapped eyes on us,’ Patrick remarked, noting down a few figures on his clipboard.

  ‘No, but James has if we bump into him,’ I pointed out ruthlessly. Despite James’s refusal of our offer of help we were doing a little investigating.

  My partner handed me a large tape measure and began walking away from me towards a lamppost holding the end of the tape. Having arrived and noted the distance I gave him, he let go of the end and I wound it in again. Eyes on the ground as if following a trail, he then set off towards where a side street joined the main road.

  ‘He can always tell us to sod off if we do,’ he observed mildly when I caught up with him.

  We were dressed in blue overalls, part of a collection of ‘come in handy’ garments we keep in an old kit bag in the car for when we want to assume any kind of role. It includes dark tracksuits for being invisible at night and jeans and baggy sweatshirts for loafing around as Joe and Mrs Bloggs. Most have been acquired from charity shops. Patrick did ask me to dispose of a black lace Teddy-style bra that transforms my modest bust into something quite amazing – I had worn it as part of a ‘tart rig’ – on the grounds that when I wore it his concentration on the job in hand went overboard. It is now safely in a drawer in the bedroom at home, as you never know when you will need to generate some raw lust in your man.

  So, as utility company jobsworths, it being Saturday notwithstanding, no one gave us a second glance as we measured this and that, lifted small manhole covers and peered within, shaking our heads and writing a few sentences along the lines of, ‘Rain water in cavity not draining away’ and ‘This water meter is filthy. How do they read it?’ in case we were challenged. Until this moment, we had stayed in the close vicinity of the house last given as Benny Cooper’s address, a thirties semi in East Twerton, just off the Lower Bristol Road in Bath.

  ‘He’s probably moved,’ I said as we reached the street corner and turned left.

  ‘Well, someone’s at home. As we saw, there was a red sports car parked in the drive – such a vehicle was mentioned by Carrick last night, if you remember – and I saw the bedroom curtains being drawn back,’ Patrick replied. ‘The place is also in a fairly bad state of repair, which might suggest the owner spent a period of time away detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.’

  ‘And we’re walking down here why?’

  ‘Just to move away from that area for a few minutes to look normal and also, for future reference, to find out if there’s a back way.’

  There was not and we wandered back the way we had come, Patrick writing down the numbers of the telegraph poles. The registration of the vehicle had also been noted for later checking.

  ‘No, to hell with this, I’m going to ring the doorbell and tell him we can smell gas,’ he announced.

  We returned to our original scene of operations in time to see another car draw up outside the house. As is the case in most of the city there were double yellow lines on this section of road, which would explain the driver’s subsequent haste, hurrying to the rear of the car, a black hatchback, throwing up the door and grabbing several heavy carrier bags of shopping. He then kicked open the garden gate and tottered up the short path, almost falling after catching his feet in something – the overhanging weeds? – and, having dumped down the bags, rang the bell, following this with a good battering on the door with a fist. Hastening back to the car he collected two full cardboard wine carriers and, having already placed a twin toilet roll pack beneath his chin, returned to the house, the door of which still remained shut.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ he yelled after more ringing and banging.

  We, meanwhile, were exhibiting enormous interest in a drainage grid in the gutter.

  Some moments later the door was wrenched open, wrenched seemingly on account of having been stuck in the frame, setting the old-fashioned letter box clattering.

  ‘I’m not bloody deaf!’ a man yelled. ‘I was in the shower!’

  ‘And I’m on double yellow lines! I can’t wait any longer!’ the other bawled back.

  ‘Then why not just leave it and go?’

  ‘Money! That’s why. Money!’

  ‘I’ll give it to you when I see you tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. You haven’t paid me for the last lot yet either.’

  ‘I haven’t got that much money in the house.’

  ‘You’re a bloody liar! No cash from your little drugs business lying around? No takings from—?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘I’m warning you that if you—’

  ‘You’ll what, you stupid little git? I’ll see you tomorrow. Go on, get out!’

  The door slammed. And then there was another bang, as if whoever it was had had to shoulder-charge it to make it close properly.

  We continued busying ourselves with grid examining as the man got in the car and drove off, tyres squealing.

  ‘Did you get his picture?’ Patrick asked.

  I told him I had – several, in fact – having achieved this by crouching down, concealing myself behind his legs and using my mobile phone camera. Then I said, ‘The shopping must still be on the doorstep.’

  Patrick crossed the pavement to stand behind – no, mostly inside – the overgrown front hedge. Then, a quarter of a minute later the door was hauled open again and there was a short pause – only one item of shopping hitting the ground, possibly the toilet rolls, to a chorus of muttered expletives – before it thundered shut again.

  ‘Cooper,’ Patrick reported. ‘I got a good view of him. Let’s go before someone reports us to the police for snooping around.’

  Back in the Range Rover, parked several streets away, we discovered by accessing police files that my photographs were definitely of Paul Mallory. One was particularly clear as he had glanced fleetingly in our direction on the alert for traffic wardens.

  ‘You know, that was quite fantastic,’ Patrick exclaimed. ‘When I first joined D12 I can remember people sitting in phony utility vans in the vicinity of addresses for days without so much as glimpsing their targets.’

  ‘And with all the kit, too,’ I recollected. ‘Little red and white barriers to put around lifted manhole covers. Flashing warning lights. Even bunches of wires disappearing underground but nothing to do with the real thing to pretend to work on.’

  ‘A lot of money is always thrown at national security.’

  ‘The pair were well in character, weren’t they?’

  ‘Scum’s the word,’ Patri
ck commented.

  ‘What does Cooper look like now? Presumably he wasn’t wearing his shades.’

  ‘No. Overweight – although to be fair he had an overlarge dressing gown on – five feet seven-ish, dark hair, small dark eyes and a pointy nose, giving him the manner of a nervous ferret.’

  I thought this hardly surprising given that Mallory had just advertised to everyone within earshot that he was dealing in drugs and getting money from some other unspecified source – illegal almost certainly. Cooper was obviously using him as an errand boy. The man must be very sure of himself.

  ‘What do you think he hopes to gain as far as James is concerned?’ I queried.

  ‘Perhaps he’s just enjoying winding him up by sticking up two fingers, demonstrating that he’s around. I just hope Carrick doesn’t put a foot wrong.’

  Patrick was too impatient to wait for Carrick to investigate the identity of Cooper’s new mobster associate and, that same afternoon, accessed various secure Metropolitan Police websites, looking for anything about a man who liked to be known as Raptor. He also has the added advantage of being able to get into SOCA files, some of which are shared with MI5, his high security rating meaning that information not necessarily readily available to the forces unless requested by a very senior officer is at his fingertips. Other, more sensitive information has to be accessed in person, in London.

  Nothing so tortuous was required, however, and he soon established that the serious criminal most likely to be the man in question had at least four aliases and, indeed, liked to be known as Raptor. Reading a book in the same room, I heard a snort of derision from my husband when this came up on the screen. This individual had recently been seen in Bath. Although thought to be deeply involved in a case where evidence against another London gang leader, his brother-in-law, had ‘disappeared’ from both computer and paper files, the Met had been unable to make any charges stick. One of the reasons for this was that a detective involved, implicated in corruption, had been found dead. The subsequent inquest finding had been that he had committed suicide having taken an overdose of sleeping tablets, a verdict about which his family had been very unhappy. No details were available. In another case names and addresses of witnesses had somehow been leaked, several of whom had received threats and changed their evidence or refused to testify. That case had collapsed.

  ‘This villain, who incidentally is a strong suspect in a jewellery shop raid in the West End a few days ago, has not only created for himself several identities,’ Patrick continued after giving me the previous information, ‘but would appear to have several addresses. It’s known he has a flat in Ealing and another in Manchester. He was spotted by a keen-eyed off-duty detective in Glasgow who tailed him to a tenement block in the Broomielaw but it’s not known whether he sometimes lives there or was merely visiting someone. The thinking is that he’s on the move for much of the time, staying with family, friends, cronies, what have you. There’s no real evidence for that – but taking into consideration the experience of those doing the investigating there’s every chance they’re right.’

  I said, ‘I’m wondering how he keeps tabs on his henchmen if he’s flitting around all the time.’

  ‘The main theory is that he commutes between various centres of operation and doesn’t just travel around in order to keep giving the police the slip. One scam has been selling so-called assassination kits to other gangs – weapons, mostly handguns, imported from abroad and assembled over here. Apparently they’re supplied to customers packed in DIY power tool cases. This appears to be a personal project – but it’s been done before.’

  ‘You said Sulyn Li Grant’s Beretta could have entered the country that way.’

  ‘Along with many others,’ Patrick replied wryly. ‘After receiving information the Met raided a lock-up garage that turned out to be a workshop used for putting weapons together. But other than a few bits and pieces that pointed to the previous presence of firearms the place was empty.’

  ‘That suggests he could have been tipped off, too.’

  ‘It does. He also dabbles in exporting stolen top-of-the-range cars to Europe but that might be coming to an end as his agent oppo in Le Havre has recently been arrested by the French police. I hope they keep him securely locked up so he can implicate this self-styled Raptor before someone puts a bullet in him.’

  ‘Is there a real risk of that?’

  ‘It never hurts to prepare for the worst with these people when they become desperate. I’m also asking myself if that implicated Met cop really committed suicide.’

  ‘But don’t you think we should leave that to the Met and the Independent Police Complaints Commission?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m just interested in the Bath connection – if there is one – with regard to our Jockenese friend. I think I shall take Monday off.’

  With that in mind and not really wanting to go against Greenway’s orders, Patrick slogged away at home with his assignment through most of Sunday, even declining with apologies his father’s request to sing in the choir for the morning service. John, unused to being countermanded on such matters, was not pleased, even though I helped out.

  Patrick went out on Monday morning and did not come back until early evening. I had stayed at home, writing and dealing with family matters. We have a home help two mornings a week, who also gives Elspeth a hand, but with a large house and extended family there is always plenty to do. These ‘normal’ activities also salved my conscience as I worry about the amount of time I spend away engaged on my other career.

  ‘I paid a visit to Miss Braithewaite,’ Patrick started by saying. ‘The old lady who was involved in the Pryce case Sergeant Woods told you about. She lives in the flat above Paul Mallory.’

  ‘The lady who was James’s one-time English teacher.’

  ‘That’s right. She told me he played the part of Lord Peter Wimsey in a school play she wrote that was an adaptation of one of the Dorothy L. Sayers stories.’

  ‘He must have been just perfect with his fair hair,’ I said. ‘But I have to say, before I spoke to Derek Woods I hadn’t thought he spent any of his youth in this area.’

  ‘She told me that his mother moved south when he was in his early teens and when he left school he trained to be a physical education-cum-sports teacher. But it wasn’t exciting enough so he joined the Met. James actually came back to Bath. Anyway, after I’d finished cleaning Miss Braithewaite’s living-room windows—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’d been up a really tall set of steps cleaning the insides of the windows. She must be all of eighty-five so I offered to finish them for her.’

  ‘You’re a saint. I take it you made it an official call.’

  ‘Of course. It’s not a security risk as there’s no love lost between her and Mallory. She was praying he wouldn’t come back after he was released from prison but he has. And he’s playing his music again. She can hardly hear it normally because she had her flat soundproofed and he hasn’t had his windows open.’

  ‘Did she tell you anything useful?’

  ‘Only that she can just about hear him having huge rows with another man who I can only guess is Cooper. She hasn’t seen him and made a point of telling me that she doesn’t stand by the window spying on everyone else in the square. That’s what Mrs Pryce, who everyone hated, used to do.’

  ‘Has she met Cooper?’

  ‘No, but his picture was in the local paper after the trial so she has an idea what he looks like. The reason she hasn’t seen him might be because there’s a back way that leads into a small car park for residents only. A path from that takes you into a little lane that joins another on the west side of the Circus, probably intended for the use of servants in the old days. Which means that Cooper doesn’t have to enter the square in order to visit Mallory.’

  ‘Cooper said he’d see Mallory tomorrow. That was yesterday.’

  ‘Miss Braithewaite didn’t hear or see any movement yesterday. They probably met somewhe
re else.’

  ‘We’re really no further with this then, are we?’

  ‘Patience. Then I went to the council offices and tried to track down this Raptor character. One of the surnames he’s been using recently is Kingsland. Lots of Kings and names beginning with King on the council tax register but not that one. Obviously that might not mean he doesn’t live in the area as he could be renting a room, or flat, where council tax is included in the rent. I’ve already checked the local electoral roll and he’s not there either. Nationally, of course, there are thousands of Kingslands. I then abandoned that line of enquiry and went to the nick where I looked him up in Records – if you remember this mobster uses at least three aliases.’

  ‘I hope James didn’t spot you.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered as I also needed to check up on something for my official project that I can’t access on a home computer. I didn’t see him, nor Campbell. Anyway, as I already knew – had made a note of, in fact – in the past Kingsland has also called himself Craig Brown, Shane Lockyer and Nick Hamsworth, the latter of which is thought might be the one on his birth certificate. Digging a little deeper I discovered that the first of those was definitely a stolen identity created using personal items taken during a burglary in Hounslow. That came out when he was convicted of handling stolen property: computers, TVs, jewellery and other stuff, the hauls of various burglaries. He served three years so has almost certainly dropped that alias.

  ‘The second, Shane Lockyer, was the name he used years previously to that, when he first started on a life of crime in his late teens. Lockyer was his mother’s maiden name. When he came out of prison, where he had served five years for his first serious offences, committing several robberies with violence together with other members of a gang calling themselves, believe it or not, The Raptors, he used the third name, Hamsworth.’