With a unified bellow of, ‘POLICE! POLICE! POLICE!’, boots pounding, they burst like a tornado into the interior.
Grace stood back, outside, with the other four blocking his view.
‘Shit,’ one of them said, ‘Shit.’
‘What is it?’ Grace asked, easing his way through them to the doorway. And saw a body prostrate on the floor, and a lot of blood. Allchild, vizor pushed up over his face, came back out, carefully stepping past the body, followed by two of his team. He looked grim. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, we’ve trampled all over it. You have a bit of a crime scene in there. No young boy anywhere. Two adult males dead, looks like gunshot wounds, one badly injured. I’ve radioed for paramedics.’
‘Is the injured one conscious?’
‘Barely, sir. I’ve left Lorna with him, in case. He looks in a bad way.’
Grace hurried in. A motionless, tattooed and shaven-headed man in his thirties, dressed in jeans, trainers and a grey hoodie, lay on his back on the floor. He had a startled expression; a trail of blood and gunk leaked from a hole in the centre of his forehead, staining the beige carpet, and there was what looked like another bullet wound and a large amount of blood spreading across the front of his T-shirt. The fact that the blood hadn’t dried meant this was very recent. Was the shooter still inside the building, he wondered?
Mindful of not further contaminating the crime scene, Grace stepped carefully past the evidently dead man, noticing the faint, familiar coppery smell of blood, and along the corridor towards an open door at the far end.
He entered a kitchen that smelled of cigarette smoke, and stopped in his tracks.
One casually dressed man, in his late forties, he estimated, was seated in a wooden chair at a pine table, on which lay two globelike bottles of alcohol and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. His head lolled back over his shoulders, dark hair brushed back. There was what looked like a gun-shot entry wound through his right eye, from which a trail of dark fluid ran down his cheek and neck, and another through his blood-stained chest. His good remaining eye stared fixedly ahead.
The second man, younger and also casually dressed, with short, wiry hair, lay on his back, close to an upturned chair. He had a bullet graze along the top of his forehead and the front of his light windcheater was blood-drenched and heaving. He was looking up at Grace with large, sullen eyes and wheezing, painfully, clearly breathing with difficulty.
Indicating to Lorna that she could go, Grace knelt beside him. ‘There’s an ambulance coming,’ he said.
The man’s chest jerked. His breathing was becoming fainter by the second.
‘What happened?’ Grace asked him. ‘Do you know where Mungo is? Mungo Brown?’
The man tried to speak, then gasped in pain. He started juddering.
‘Mungo Brown? The boy you took?’ Grace pressed. ‘Do you know where he is?’
Fixing him eerily with his eyes, the man said something in a guttural voice, in a language Roy Grace did not understand. It sounded like, ‘Ick largo skow gee veten.’
Then a rattle came from his throat. Grace recognized it. He had only seconds left. Hurriedly, he pulled out his private iPhone, opened the voice recorder app and activated it, then held it close to the man’s mouth. ‘Can you repeat that?’ he asked, urgently.
The man stared ahead. Finally, struggling, he uttered the words again.
They were followed by another rattle. A hollow, rasping sound.
‘Stay with us!’ Grace said. ‘The ambulance is coming.’
The man’s chest became still. He stopped blinking, eyes open, fixed on Grace. But now sightless.
Gone.
The Detective Superintendent stood up, took photographs of each of the three dead men’s faces to hopefully get a quick identity on them, then called Nikki Denero on his job phone.
She answered almost immediately.
‘It’s Roy Grace, Nikki. Can you help me translate something that may be critical to our enquiry — it might be Albanian? You speak the language, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I’m reasonably fluent.’
‘Good. If I play it over the phone can you translate?’
‘I’ll give it a go.’
Roy Grace held his iPhone over the speaker of his job phone, turned the volume up to max and pressed the play button. The dead man’s last words came out.
‘Ick largo skow gee veten.’
When the playback was finished, Grace stopped the machine. ‘Did you get that, Nikki?’
The PC sounded hesitant. ‘Yes, I did, sir.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t think you’re going to like it.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Well, sir, you’re right, it is Albanian. He’s saying, Go fuck yourself.’
87
Sunday 13 August
14.00–15.00
Mungo was struggling to keep his balance. He had been standing for some minutes now, scared of the rapidly rising tide. Each time he moved, the wire noose again cut into his neck. The water was over the top of the plinth on which he had been sitting, and was now approaching his knees. With each suck on his legs as it withdrew, he had to fight harder to resist being pulled forward and unbalanced.
He kept working on the bonds that held his wrists behind his back, the ligature rubbing more and more painfully with each attempt.
Please. Please help me, someone.
Someone would come soon, surely?
For a while, bright sunlight had shone in through the slit in the wall, but now it was moving away. He could still just see it if he tilted as far back as he dared.
Aleksander!
He was parched, starving.
There was a sudden deep, booming splash. He felt spots of water on his face. The water level had now gone over his knees for the first time.
When were they coming back?
He was shaking. Trying not to cry any more but, instead, to think. What could he do? He tugged again on the restraints round his wrists, trying to pick at the hard material again and again with his fingers, but it didn’t feel as if he was getting anywhere.
What time was it?
Mum. Dad.
He hadn’t seen the dead crab in a long while, now. Just dark, restless water. Rising.
Somewhere outside he suddenly heard a woman’s voice. It sounded like she was calling her dog.
‘HERE! HERE, BOY!’
He tried to call out to her.
‘Mmmnnrrrmmmm.’
‘Good boy! GOOD BOY!’
Then silence.
It seemed only minutes later that the water reached his thighs.
Help me.
Help me.
He shivered in terror.
Please someone help me.
88
Sunday 13 August
14.00–15.00
Stacey looked at Kipp anxiously and expectantly as he came in through the front door. She was holding a small plastic bag in one hand and the dog lead in the other, quaking. The two detectives stood some distance behind her.
‘What happened? How did it go? Did you—?’
He closed the door. ‘I paid the deposit they asked for, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of Bitcoins.’
She closed her eyes in relief. ‘Thank God.’ Then she stared hard back at him. ‘Why — why do — do they want Mungo’s toothbrush and hairbrush?’ She held up the bag. ‘Have they found him? Is he dead? Are you not telling me?’