“You did a damn good job,” Banks said simply.
Joanna laughed. “Thanks. It might have helped if you’d told me so at the time.”
“Well, no one likes being under the microscope.”
“Oh, I was never out to get you. You know that. You just had an exaggerated sense of your own importance, like most men.”
“Now there’s a generalization if ever I’ve heard one. I wasn’t that bad, was I?”
Joanna wrinkled her nose and held her thumb and forefinger slightly apart. “Maybe just a little bit. Anyway, you haven’t come all this way only for the pleasure of my company.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “What can I do for you?”
Banks waited while the server brought their plates of food, warning them to be careful, they were hot. It was typical modern pub grub, haddock and chips and a beef and mushroom pie, also with chips. Banks sipped a pint of Timothy Taylor’s and Joanna stuck to Diet Coke.
“You’re still working on Operation Hawk, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I spend most of my waking hours on it. Ever since our new police commissioner made it a priority. Why?”
Banks explained a little about the missing tractor and the blood found at the abandoned hangar.
“And you think they’re linked?” Joanna asked.
“Yes. Not officially, of course, not yet. We don’t have the DNA results, for a start. But we do have a stolen tractor and two people of interest who seem to have disappeared. And the timing is just too close to be coincidence.”
“Are these two local?”
“Yes.”
“Can you give me their names?”
Banks told her, and Joanna wrote them down in her notebook. She ate some more fish, then put her knife and fork aside and rested her arms on the table. Banks noticed that the cuffs of her white blouse were a little frayed around her wrists. That wasn’t like the Joanna he had known. Had she let things go? Was she hard up? Perhaps the divorce was costing her in more ways than one. Or maybe she was just working too hard. “As you probably know,” she said, “what we do on Operation Hawk is try to keep track of criminals on the move who strike at rural communities around the country. We also link up with various farm and border watch groups, along with the National Parks Commission, Country Watch and the Farmers’ Union, to spread awareness of the problem. I don’t really see how we can help you much if it’s a local matter. You’d be just as well equipped to deal with something like that as we would.”
“I understand,” said Banks. “But it’s the national angle I’m interested in. Maybe even international. Who knows? I mean, if someone steals a few sheep, the odds are he’s going to slaughter them locally in an illegal abattoir and sell the meat off the back of a lorry, especially with the price of lamb these days. But if he steals a tractor worth a hundred thousand quid or more, he’s going to whisk it out of the country sharpish. And for that you need organization. Remember Tallinn?”
“I do remember,” Joanna said, with a tilt of her head. Then she laughed and touched his hand. “Whatever happens, Alan. We’ll always have Tallinn.”
Definitely not the Joanna Banks he had known. She had changed. She would never have said something like that before.
“But that was different,” Joanna went on. “It was people we were dealing with, not sheep or pigs. Or tractors.”
“We think the hangar might have been used as an exchange point,” Banks went on. “You know, somewhere the local thieves deliver their goods, whatever they are, make the transfer, and get it on transport brought in specially for the purpose. Then it goes on its way to Bulgaria or wherever. For that, some of the people involved have to drive up and down the A1. I understand you’re using ANPR to track the movements of suspects?”
“You’ve been reading the papers, I can tell,” said Joanna, leaning back in her chair and sipping her Coke. “OK, yes, that’s a part of what we do.” ANPR stood for automatic number plate recognition, a system of software able to collect number plate data from converted CCTV units on all motorways, major roads and in town and city centers.
“So you must have some names for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of your regulars. And don’t tell me Operation Hawk has yielded no results so far. There’s organization involved here, Joanna. Palms to be greased, papers to be forged, that sort of thing. They might use locals for the jobs and for the scouting, but the whole operation’s got to be run by an organized gang. There has to be a brain behind it somewhere. And money.”
“Fair enough. There’s a few people we’re keeping an eye on, though they’re hardly the ones who drive lorries up and down the motorways. We do liaise with the NCA, too, on a regular basis, as well as with other county forces.” The NCA was the National Crime Agency, what the media referred to as the British FBI, which had replaced the Serious Organised Crime Agency. They weren’t primarily concerned with rural crime, as was Operation Hawk, but they were interested in almost everything else except counterterrorism, which remained within the Met’s remit. Slowly but surely, the technology was catching up with the criminals. “The problem is,” Joanna went on, “that we’d need specific locations to know if a certain car or lorry has been regularly spotted on that route. And, as you can imagine, on somewhere like the M1 or the A1 there’s a hell of a lot of normal traffic flow to rule out.”
“I see what you mean,” said Banks. “But if I give you the location of the hangar, and the closest access points to and from the A1, can you find out whether anyone’s been visiting the place regularly over the past year or so?”
“We keep the ANPR data for two years, so yes, we can do that. I don’t know about the actual location itself, but certainly the general area. Have you thought, though, Alan, that if some organization is using that corridor, as you suggest, then they’ll be smart enough to know about ANPR, and maybe even about Operation Hawk—it’s hardly a classified operation, after all. They could avoid detection by using different vehicles. Or different number plates. Or varying their route.”
“Surely even you lot can spot a false number plate?”
Joanna laughed. “Sometimes. But there’s a lot of traffic. Not to mention all the foreign vehicles. We can liaise with Interpol and Europol if we need, as well as with forces in specific countries, but that takes time and a finely honed sense of what you want. What you’re talking about just sounds too vague to me. I’m not saying we can’t help. Don’t get me wrong. Just telling you not to expect miracles.”
“I never have,” said Banks. “Not unless I’ve laid the groundwork for them.” He finished his pie and sipped some beer, then swirled the pale gold liquid in his glass. “If I’m thinking along the right lines,” he went on, “someone might have driven up on Sunday morning. At least that’s when one of our suspects received a text and left his flat in a hurry.”
“Or down,” said Joanna. “How do you know they didn’t come from Newcastle, or Edinburgh, Glasgow?”
“Point taken. Or down. But one way or another we’re looking at placing a vehicle, or vehicles, at the abandoned airfield between, say, half past nine and ten o’clock, which means they would have come off the A1 about a mile from the village of Hallerby five minutes earlier. Or from the junction at Thirsk or Northallerton.”
“You’d be surprised how much data that involves, but I’d say we could probably do it, yes. Remember, though, we’re only interested in specific vehicles. We’ve got a definite location and a specific time frame. What exactly are you looking for?”
“In the first place, anyone on your list, any of your specific vehicles, anyone suspected of having even the remotest involvement in rural crime on a large scale being spotted at that place and time. Second, anyone you’ve been tracking for some time, anyone who seems to have made an inordinate number of trips up there for no apparent reason. Also, anyone with a criminal record of any kind, especially for violent offenses.”