CHAPTER TEN
Angel stood the team down, returned to the station, handed his gun into the desk sergeant to be held in safe-custody until the armourer came on duty, went home and was in bed for 2 a.m. He had almost six hours sleep, an easy breakfast with Mary and was back in the office as fresh as a home-baked bap by 8.28 a.m.
As he walked into the office, his phone was ringing. He raised his eyebrows as he leaned over the desk and picked up the handset. It was Harker.
‘I want you, lad,’ the superintendent bawled. ‘Come up here, smartish.’ Then there was a loud click; the line went dead. Angel replaced the phone and wrinkled up his nose. He wondered what sort of a flea had got in Harker’s vest that early in the morning. He sounded threatening and was obviously in a bad mood.
‘What do you think you are playing at?’ Harker roared as he entered the office.
Angel stared back at him, sitting behind his desk looking like an orang-utan with toothache. The vein on his left temple throbbed at the beat of The Ritual Fire Dance.
Angel sighed, closed the door and came up to the desk.
‘What’s the matter, sir?’
‘I understand that you’ve put a young lass and her child in the safe house up at Beechfield Walk.’
‘Yes, sir. Well, it was the only safe thing to do. She is the mother of an eighteen-month child and—’
‘A one-parent family, eh?’
‘I believe so, sir.’
‘Oh I see. You’re fancying a bit of young easy skirt, is that it?’
Angel’s jaw tightened. ‘No, sir. I was setting a trap to catch the man whom I think is Harrison’s murderer, a Simon Spencer,’ he said. ‘This young woman might have been in the line of fire. It was for one night only. She can return back to her flat this morning.’
‘You realize that it has taken WPC Baverstock off her regular duties to play nursemaid to this lass and her offspring, don’t you?’
‘Well, I knew that somebody would have to—’
‘And did you think of the cost? And the shortage of officers?’ He suddenly stopped. ‘What trap? Who did you catch?’
‘I didn’t catch anybody, sir. But I enticed a bigger fish than—’
‘A bigger fish? Who? Who?’ he yelled excitedly.
‘I don’t know, sir,’ Angel said trying to control his temper. ‘It was obviously an organized gang of four men and a driver, armed to the teeth. We couldn’t possibly have taken them on. They were tooled up and ready for a fight. A commitment there and then would have resulted in a blood bath.’
Harker threw up his arms.
‘Well, where are they? Who are they? You talk grand, but you’ve let them get away.’
Angel sighed.
‘We had to remain concealed, sir, but I put a tracking device on their car. I was about to phone DS Mallin in Traffic to find out where their car is now.’
Harker’s face changed. The tirade stopped.
‘Hmmm,’ he grunted thoughtfully. It seemed to please him. He sat down and rubbed his chin. Then he reached out for the phone and tapped in a number.
Standing in front of the desk, Angel could hear a distorted reply through the earpiece.
‘Mallin? You’re monitoring a tracking device for DI Angel. Has it come to rest yet, and if so, whereabouts?’ Harker said.
There was more distorted chat from the earpiece.
‘Right,’ he snapped and dropped the phone back in its cradle. He sniffed. ‘As I thought. It’s from some green-belt land just off the motorway on the road to Huddersfield. It’ll have been discovered and thrown away. If the gang’s as professional as you said it was, it would be wary of tricks like that.’
Angel pursed his lips. Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, in his experience, when tracking devices had been found by crooks, they used to transfer them to a different vehicle. It amused them to think of the police tailing some innocent lorry or bus driver pointlessly around the countryside.
‘I want you to get that girl and her infant out of Beechfield Walk. Let WPC Baverstock get back to her duties, and you get back to those two unsolved murder cases. You’ve got plenty on your plate, lad.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Angel drove the BMW northwards on the road towards Huddersfield. Sitting next to him was Gawber who was looking at a laptop monitor showing the map and flashing co-ordinates indicating the whereabouts of the Mercedes. The flashing arrow on the screen showed that they needed to move west and north, so Angel left the main road and was directed to travel up a narrow unmade road, like a cart-track, almost parallel to the motorway. It was built up on the left like the banking on a railway track. Both sides were overhung with long grass interspersed with nettles and rosebay willow-herb.
The intensity of the signal showed that they were dead on course for the tracking device.
Angel frowned as the car rocked and splashed through a puddle on the uneven track. ‘Up here?’ he said.
‘We are very close, sir.’
‘Can’t see anything but grass and weeds.’
Angel suddenly had to take a bend round to the right and came onto an open piece of rough ground hardened with clinker from burnt-out coal fires and big enough for a vehicle to turn round. He pulled up in front of a sign. It read: ‘KEEP OUT. Private Property. Employees Grock’s Rhubarb Limited only’.
He read the sign and rubbed his chin.
Behind the sign was a large padlocked gate and beyond that a large spread of low buildings, thirty or more, built close together, in total extending to the size of a football pitch. They appeared to be mainly constructed from corrugated metal sheets and timber, arched like miniature airplane hangars, eight feet tall at the highest point. They had been heavily repaired and patched with all kinds of oddments, sides of packing cases, tea chests, bed heads, tin advertising signs for Mazawattee Tea, Senior Service and Zubes. The structures were roughly weatherproofed with brattice-cloth and heavily daubed with a mixture of tar and creosote. There were no windows and each building had large double doors with a padlock securing it. The place seemed deserted.
Angel looked around and pursed his lips.
‘Ah. They’re rhubarb forcing sheds,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t seem the likely HQ for an armed gang, sir?’
He nodded in agreement and looked across at the monitor. It showed that they were dead on target. ‘This thing is accurate to about forty yards. That car must be in one of these sheds, Ron.’
‘Which one?’
Angel shrugged and got out of the car. ‘There’s nobody about. Let’s take a look round.’
The sign indicated that they had reached a dead end so far as vehicles were concerned. Angel looked through the wooden spars of the gate. There was no sign of anybody. As he turned away, he spotted a trodden pathway between the fence and a hawthorn hedge.
‘Let’s see where this leads,’ Angel said.
They made their way along it for about twenty yards to another hedge with a stile through it. They looked over the stile into a small clearing with an imposing country house ahead, and a barn on the right of it. There was a formal drive up to the house from the left. Angel reckoned that the drive to the house and barn must be accessible from somewhere on the main Bromersley to Huddersfield Road.
Gawber made to climb the stile.
Angel suddenly grabbed the sleeve of his coat. ‘Hang on, Ron,’ he whispered urgently and pulled him behind the hawthorn hedge. ‘There’s somebody coming out of the house.’
Sure enough, from behind the hedge they saw a huge man in a black T-shirt, jeans, trainers and the distinctive jockey cap worn the wrong way. He appeared on the front doorstep of the house. He looked round, then went back in and returned with a slim, young man in a suit. The young man’s head was hanging down, his hands appeared to be tied behind his back. The big man frog-marched him down the steps and across the drive to the barn. The big door was open and fastened back. They went inside.