73
Sunday 13 August
11.00–12.00
Mungo didn’t know what time it was. He kept drifting towards sleep, only to be instantly jerked out of it by the noose digging into his neck or by cramp. Listening to the lapping of water made his thirst worse.
He struggled repeatedly with his arms behind his back. So far as he could work out, his wrists were tied with cord of some kind and attached to a length of chain. He kept trying to rub the cord against the chain, over and over.
Were they coming back, ever? Or just going to leave him to drown as the tide rose further?
Suddenly he heard voices.
Outside.
Through the slit in the wall.
Kids playing, messing around.
‘Hey, Mick!’
The tinkle of breaking glass. A burst of laughter.
‘Get in there!’
It sounded like two boys. Right the other side of the wall. He tried to call out to them, tried for all he was worth. But all he could make was a feeble yammer: ‘Mnnnnmmmm. Mwhrrrrrrrr.’
The voices faded. Silence again.
He wanted to be home, in his room, on his computer. It was his birthday in a fortnight and he’d asked for a new Xbox like the one Aleksander had. He’d been excited for the past month about it. Was he going to die without ever getting it?
A faint metallic clang.
Had he imagined it?
A scraping sound. Another clang, louder. Voices. Footsteps. The splashing of feet through water. Was it Aleksander, finally come to rescue him?
His hopes were instantly dashed as two figures in balaclavas, black windcheaters, jeans and gumboots appeared. One holding a carrier bag, the other a camera.
‘Mrrrrrrhlmmmmmm!’ he tried to call out to them.
One leaned down, and with a leather-gloved finger picked at something on his face. He shrieked in pain as tape was ripped away from his mouth and cheeks, leaving them stinging. A plastic bottle was held up to his mouth and he drank greedily, gulping the cold water, not daring to stop in case they took the bottle away, gulping the contents until the bottle was empty.
Next, he saw the man dig a hand in the bag and produce a sandwich. He removed it from the packaging, held it out to Mungo’s mouth. It was too dark to see what it was but he bit into it, ravenously. It was egg. He chewed and devoured both halves in just a few bites, followed by another — ham. After he had swallowed that, another bottle of water was shoved in his mouth.
Mungo drank until it was pulled away. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What do you want? What do you want?’
The man crammed the plastic bag into a pocket, without speaking, and his colleague held up a sheet of paper with some kind of graph on it, close to Mungo’s face. The other man raised a camera and took a series of flash photographs.
‘Please, who are you?’ Mungo begged again. ‘Who are you? Please — please let me go. Please let me—’
The man holding the sheet of paper stepped away. The one with the camera remained in place. The other one reappeared with a roll of grey duct tape. He pulled a length tight across Mungo’s mouth, slashing the end with a knife and wrinkling his nose. ‘You’ve messed yourself,’ he said in a coarse voice, with a foreign accent.
‘Less than six hours to high tide,’ his colleague with the camera said, in a similar accent. ‘Hope you are good at holding your breath, little boy.’
The other laughed. ‘Let’s hope your daddy’s pockets are deeper than the water, eh?’
The men splashed away.
‘Grmmmmmmm! Grmmmmmmmmm!’ Mungo cried out desperately.
He heard a distant metallic clang.
Then just the lapping of the sea.
The dead crab washed past his line of vision.
74
Sunday 13 August
11.00–12.00
Roy Grace entered the Intel suite, which was a hive of concentration and quiet activity. At the far end, Forensic Podiatrist Haydn Kelly and Super Recognizer Jonathan Jackson were studying CCTV footage from the Amex, on separate monitors.
The two analysts, Giles Powell and Louise Soper, were focused on ANPR camera information that was being fed through to them live, via the Force Control Room. Powell, a grey-haired, sixty-four-year-old former Roads Policing Unit sergeant, had worked for Sussex Police as a civilian in the decade since his retirement. He was tracking the Range Rover index, KK04 YXB, registered to Jorgji Dervishi, which had apparently been driven from the Dervishis’ home by his chauffeur, Valbone Kadare, at around 3 a.m. this morning.
Powell had picked up the vehicle on a series of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras along the coast road, heading east, through Rottingdean, Saltdean and Peacehaven and then on the road leading to Newhaven, which had clocked it at 3.48 a.m. He’d checked the next ANPR towards Seaford, and the one on the A26 at Beddingham, but it had not appeared on either of them. He widened his search, in case the Range Rover had taken one of the country roads on which there were no cameras, calculating all of its possible routes. But if it had diverted off the main roads, it would have been picked up, eventually, on the main A27 arterial road.
It left him with three alternatives. Either the vehicle had parked up somewhere in the countryside, the driver had changed the licence plates, as was a distinct possibility, or it had headed down into Newhaven Port itself.
Powell reported his findings to DS Riley.
The red-headed Detective Sergeant looked at her watch. It was now 11.20 a.m. ‘Get on to Newhaven Port,’ she instructed him, ‘and see if any of their CCTV picks it up. Check the ferry.’
Newhaven, the DS knew well, was both a ferry port to France and also a major container hub. Vehicles — as well as antiques — stolen within the south east, would disappear inside containers at Newhaven Port and be shipped out within hours. Recent-model right-hand-drive Range Rovers fetched a black-market premium in countries that drove on the left, such as Malta and Cyprus, and further afield, in India and parts of Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
‘Nice work, Giles,’ Grace said. ‘But the chances are we may have already lost it — if you can now help Louise, that would be good.’
Louise Soper, in her forties, with long brown hair and a calm demeanour, was concentrating on trying to identify pairs of index numbers. She was searching, initially, in the area where the torched BMW had been found. It was a daunting task, as this was just off the main road, the A26, carrying constant traffic between Newhaven Port and the Beddingham roundabout from where vehicles either routed east, towards Polegate, Eastbourne and, potentially, Folkestone and Eurotunnel, or the car ferries of Dover, or on the A27 to Brighton and all points west, or branching off north towards London on the A23.
It helped that at that time of night the traffic was relatively light. But it was still a huge challenge. She briefed Powell, who was seated next to her. What she was looking for were the same two vehicles, in close proximity, pinging a series of ANPR cameras, which would indicate they might be travelling in convoy. She had narrowed her search down to twelve pairs of numbers, which she sent over to him.
Fighting tiredness, after just a few hours of sleep, Giles Powell made himself a strong coffee and set to work on the laborious task of logging vehicle movements in the Beddingham area and comparing them to vehicle movements in the wider areas of Sussex and its bordering counties of Kent, Surrey and Hampshire.
Kevin Hall suddenly called out, urgently. ‘Boss! This just in!’
Grace stepped over to the DC’s workstation and peered at the screen. On it he saw video footage of a frightened-looking boy he recognized instantly as Mungo Brown. From the quality of the footage he knew, immediately, this was taken on a different camera to the one that had sent the earlier images of him.