“I’d ship in a small army of labourers to do some emergency drainage construction, to prevent my missile sites from getting flooded out.”
Richard nodded in agreement. “Let’s hope they don’t get air transport priority, and this same weather has blocked the railway line further south, so they haven’t got here yet. Otherwise there could be a few thousand extra pairs of eyes about.”
Looking southwest Richard saw the horizon darkening. They still had three hours of daylight left, but he ordered everyone to start preparing for the night.
Garfield protested.
“We still have a few hours left; we can be halfway to the next valley floor in that time.”
“In under two hours’ time we could be experiencing one bitch of a storm.” He inclined his head toward the low ridge, “We will have that to act as a windbreak, and if it has blown itself out by morning we can continue on… in the meantime I want all the guys preparing for a blow, and temperatures falling below minus twenty.”
A large building of ugly 60’s design occupies the small street across the Lambeth Road from the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the contrast is harsh.
The earliest parts of Lambeth Palace had been built in the 1400’s, Tudor times, on land where Christian churches have stood since 1062. High walls seal off its elegant gardens from the twenty first century, but from the balcony of the canteen that served the Metropolitan Police Forensic Laboratories, a glimpse of another world could be had, least ways in the winter it could, when the branches of the trees lining Lambeth Road were bare.
Dennis Roper wasn’t in the canteen; he rarely ate there, preferring instead the sandwiches his wife made for him each morning. He munched on them now at his workspace as he tried to make a dent in the backlog of work allotted to him.
Dennis’s job was comparing tool marks and footmarks found at crime scenes with those found at other scenes, and hopefully against arrest records, those ‘hits’ made for good copy on clear-up reports. It was a job that required concentration but he had a computerised database with which to run his comparisons.
He hadn’t had any really tasty crimes to work on so far this week, just burglaries and auto crime, and he finished writing up the results of his search on tool marks from a council flat burglary, before lifting the next Form 5223 from the ‘Awaits’ pile. On the form were written the notes, comments and brief circumstances by the SOCO, scene of crimes officer, who had attended the scene, but Dennis rarely gave those more than a quick glance.
This new job was a boot mark found at the scene of a burglary in Purley, at the premises of a chemist shop. It seems the burglar had trodden on a sheet of paper whilst carrying out an untidy search, probably for drugs Dennis mused.
Removing the sheet of paper in question from an exhibits bag that came with the SOCOs notes, Dennis scanned it into the memory, set the correct scale of the image, added the crime and job numbers, and began the search by identifying the make of footwear that used the shape of tread on the exhibit, and then the foot size. Petty thieves rarely wander far, and wear and tear constantly erodes the tread, so he set the search for a twenty-five mile radius and for the previous six months only.
Dennis pressed enter, and left something with a far bigger memory than his own to do the legwork whilst he finished his sandwiches and made himself a cup of tea using the department kettle in a side room, to wash down the cheese and pickle.
By the time he arrived back at his workspace, blowing on the surface of the hot beverage to cool it slightly, the search had been completed within the parameters he had set, so he was surprised to find the most likely ‘hit’ had a reference to a police force several hundred miles outside the geographic parameters he had selected. Dennis was aware that high profile, serious or confidential cases could be ‘flagged in’ to every database in the country, but this was the first time it had occurred on one of his jobs, and he was still thinking just that when the phone at his elbow began to ring.
Within walking distance of the forensic laboratories another equally unimposing building sits on the banks of the River Thames.
Tintagel House is the home of the people who police the police in London, although that organisations name changes every few years at the whim of whatever Home Secretary happens to be holding office. A10, CIB, MS15 are three of the former names of the organisation now known as the Department of Professional Standards. If any single element of the Metropolitan Police Service has reaped the benefits of information technology, it has to be DPS. Their facilities made them uniquely placed to alert the various interested parties should any fresh leads appear in the unsolved matter of the murder of four members of the police and security forces in Scotland; which is how they knew Dennis had found a match at the same moment he did.
The war had denuded the Met of virtually all of its military reservists, and until retired members of the service could be recalled to take up the slack, the Met would continue to suffer under manning in all areas, and so it was that shortly after 4pm a contingent of a half dozen detectives from SO15, the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorist Command arrived in the office of Croydon’s burglary squad to take over the investigation of a smash and grab at a Purley chemists shop.
The crew of Her Majesty’s submarine Hood had quickly slipped back into their ultra-quiet regime, after the hurried turn around at Pearl and high speed run to get on station. Those who were not on watch either slept or lost themselves in the much thumbed pages of dog-eared paperbacks, as this was about the only form of recreation left open to them. All non-essential systems were shut down and this included the ships TV and DVD player, not that anyone in the crew could ever again watch one of the war films in the ships library in quite the same way as they had before. They had experienced war for themselves and found it far scarier, less melodramatic, and not at all glorious.
Conversations were conducted in hushed tones, not that it was necessary, but that was what the present atmosphere induced in the crew.
HMS Hood had left her homeport of Faslane almost four months before on a cruise that should have ended weeks ago. Her crews brief had been to look good and fly the flag in the former stamping grounds of the empire.
The old naval base at Singapore now served cruise ships, not men-o-war flying the white ensign, and the huge facilities in Hong Kong had been dismantled prior to the People’s Republic of China resuming ownership. The lack of a Union Flag flying in the Far East had affected arms sales and prompted the despatch of HMS Prince of Wales, Malta, Cuchullainn, the Hood and the necessary fleet support vessels. Their role had changed suddenly and they were now the sole surviving warship of that group.
The Petty Officers kept the men as busy as they could, giving the hands as little time as possible to dwell on events, but there was a limit to what could be polished and scrubbed, and those activities ceased once the Hood arrived in her patrol area.
The conversation in the vessels Ward Room was that of the war, their present mission, and the morale of the crew.
The captain was present, by invitation, because by the traditions of the Royal Navy the Ward Room is for the ships officers, not her captain.
Space is not something that is foremost in the minds of submarine designers, so even without the full complement of ships officers present, because half were on watch, it was rather cramped.
For many of her crew this had been their first taste of war, for others it had also been their first cruise.