So what business could Eastman have been doing with Germans and Arabs and Pakistanis? Who had been killed? And most vitally of all, was there a terror connection?
Still staring at her notes, Liz picked up her phone and rang the Essex Special Branch office in Chelmsford. Identifying herself by means of her counter-terrorism team code, she asked if any reports of a homicide had come in that morning.
There was a short silence, the faint clicking of a keyboard, and she was put through to the duty officer.
“Nothing,” the officer said. “Nothing at all. We had a report of a firearm discharged outside a nightclub in Braintree last night, but… Hang on a minute, someone’s trying to tell me something.”
There was a short silence.
“Norfolk,” he said a few seconds later. “Apparently Norfolk had a homicide early this morning, but we haven’t got any details.”
“Thanks.” She punched out the number for Norfolk Special Branch.
“We’ve had a shooting,” confirmed the duty officer in Norwich. “Fakenham. Discovered at six thirty this morning. The location’s the toilet block of the Fairmile transport café and all-night lorry park, and the victim’s a local fisherman named Ray Gunter. Crime are on the case but we’ve got a man down there because there was a query on the weapon used.”
“What sort of query?”
“Ballistics identified the round as…” there was the sound of papers being shuffled, “7.62 millimetre armour-piercing.”
“Thanks,” said Liz, noting down the calibre. “What’s the name of your bloke down there?”
“Steve Goss. Want his number?”
“Please.”
He gave it to her and she broke the connection. For some minutes she stared at her notes. She was no expert, but she had been around firearms long enough to know that 7.62 calibre weapons were usually military or ex-military rifles. The Kalashnikov was a 7.62, as was the old British Army SLR. Perfect for the battlefield, but a pretty unwieldy choice for close-quarter murder. And an armour-piercing round? What was that all about?
She turned the facts around in her mind. Whichever way she combined them they looked bad. Dutifully, but with a sense of pointlessness, she rang Bob Morrison. Once again the Special Branch officer rang her back from a public phone, but this time the reception was better. He had heard about the killing at the transport café, he said, but not in any detail. He had never heard of the victim, Ray Gunter.
Liz repeated what Ferris had told her. Morrison’s responses were curt, and she sensed his acute resentment that his source, however supposedly useless, had cut him out of the loop and was now reporting to her.
“Zander says that Eastman was livid,” she told him. “Shouting about Pakis and ragheads and networks being overloaded.”
“I’d be livid if I was Eastman. The last thing he wants is trouble on his patch.”
“Is Norfolk on his patch?”
“It’s on the edge of it, yeah.”
“I’m sending you the details of Zander’s call, OK?”
“Yeah, sure. Like I said, I don’t believe a word the little toerag says, but do by all means nod the stuff over if you like.”
“On its way,” said Liz, and hung up.
Would he forward the conversation to the Norfolk Special Branch? she wondered. He certainly ought to. But he might just sit on it out of sheer bloody-mindedness. It would be a way of putting her-Liz-in her place, and if anyone asked questions afterwards he could claim that Zander was a compromised and unreliable source of intelligence.
The more Liz thought about it, the more certain she became that Morrison would say nothing. He was a jobsworth, a man whose entire life had become a bullying, nit-picking course of least resistance. The more valuable Frankie’s product proved to be, the worse he’d look for having mishandled him. He’d probably just bury the whole thing, which was fine by Liz, because when all was said and done it meant that she had more pieces of the jigsaw than anyone else. Which was how she liked it.
Pencil in hand, she stared at her notepad and its headings. What did they tell her? What was it reasonable to surmise? Something or someone had been brought in by sea from Germany, and “dropped off” at “the headland.” This activity related to Melvin Eastman’s operations, but was not one of them-indeed she had the impression that Eastman might well be being squeezed, that things were out of his control. A fisherman, meanwhile-a boat owner, presumably-had been found shot dead in a lorry park near the Norfolk coast. Shot dead with a weapon which, as things stood, looked as if it might have been military.
Reaching for her keyboard she called up an Ordnance Survey map with Fakenham at its centre. The town was about ten miles due south of Wells-next-the-Sea, which was on Norfolk’s long north coast. Wells was the biggest town for a good twenty miles along that northern coast-most of it seemed to be salt marshes and inlets, with a sprinkling of villages, wildfowl sanctuaries and large private estates. Lonely, sea-girt countryside, it looked. Probably a few coastguard stations and yacht clubs, but otherwise a perfect smuggler’s coast. And less than three hundred miles from the German ports. Slip out of Cuxhaven or Bremerhaven when the light began to fade, and you could be lying off one of those creeks under cover of the early-morning darkness thirty-six hours later.
Bremerhaven again. The place where the fake UK driver’s licence had been issued to Faraj Mansoor. Was there a connection? At the back of her mind, quiet but insistent, was Bruno Mackay’s report that one of the terrorist organisations was about to run an invisible against the UK.
Could Faraj Mansoor be the invisible? Unlikely-it would almost certainly be an Anglo-Saxon type. So who was Faraj Mansoor, and what was he doing in Bremerhaven buying a forged driver’s licence? Was he a UK citizen who’d been banned from driving and wanted a clean document? Bremerhaven was a known source of fake passports and other identity documents, and the fact that Mansoor wasn’t after a passport suggested that he didn’t need one, that he was already a UK citizen. Had anyone checked that?
Mansoor, she wrote, underlining the name. UK citizen?
Because if he wasn’t a UK citizen, then two things were possible. That he was coming into the UK on a fake passport that he had acquired from some other source at some other time. Or, more seriously, that he was coming into the UK in such a way that he didn’t need a passport. That he was someone whose entry had to remain unknown to the authorities. A senior ITS player, perhaps. A contact of Dawood al Safa, whose job in a Peshawar auto repair shop was a cover for terrorist activities. Someone who, whatever the state of his documentation, couldn’t risk passing a customs point.
Every instinct that Liz possessed-every sensibility that she had fine-tuned in a decade of security intelligence work-whispered to her of threat. Pressed, she would have had difficulty in defining these feelings, which related to the way that particles of information combined and took shape in her subconscious. She had, however, learned to trust them. Learned that certain configurations-however fractured, however dimly seen-were invariably malign.
Beneath the words Mansoor. UK citizen? she wrote, Still working at auto shop?
A methodical search of the north Norfolk coastline yielded a number of possible headlands. The most westward of these, Garton Head, jutted several hundred yards into the sea from the Stiffkey Marshes, while an unnamed but similarly sized projection nosed into Holkham Bay a dozen miles to the west. Both looked like navigable landfalls. A third possibility was a tiny finger of land reaching out into Brancaster Bay. The property was on the edge of a village named Marsh Creake, a couple of miles east of Brancaster.
She examined the three headlands again, and tried to look at the map with a smuggler’s eye. They were remarkably similar, in that each was a spit of land surrounded by mudflats. The Brancaster Bay headland, with its proximity to the village of Marsh Creake, was probably the least likely, as it appeared to have a large house on it. The sort of person who owned a property of that size was unlikely to allow it to be used for criminal activity. Unless, perhaps, the owner, or owners, were absentees. Impossible to tell by looking at a few inches of map on a flatscreen monitor. She’d have to check out the place on the ground.