Coffee and tea were brought into the room. Henry poured himself a large black coffee and sipped it ruminatively while he tried to clear his thoughts. Everything had happened so quickly over the last hour and a half — from the emotional outburst aimed at Danny, to the explosion, to the decapitation, to this: running an Incident Room when there hadn’t even been an incident, a Non-incident Room, perhaps. Ridiculous. It was all assumptions and guesses.
He sighed. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got here.’ He picked up a marker pen and went to one of the dry-wipe boards on the wall. He rubbed it clean with the side of his fist. ‘Other than nothing,’ he added.
‘ Three things to start with: the hoax calls to Control Room and Lancaster Comms. Then the explosion.’
He began to write.
‘ Callum Riley, a gun,’ Danny prompted. ‘Riley’s previous convictions, linked to Billy Crane’s MO.’
‘ And I’ve seen Crane recently. He has connections with Gary Thompson and Gunk Elphick, two Manchester thugs, and a Russian guy, Drozdov, an active member of the Russian Mafia.’ Henry scribbled the names up, as well as Don Smith’s. He looked at what he’d written. ‘But it’s all conjecture and doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘ Yet.’
Henry shrugged — a gesture which was starting to annoy Danny intensely. All it said to her was, ‘I don’t care’ — a defeatist attitude which was not Henry at all. It reminded her starkly that she and he had unfinished personal business to attend to.
‘ What else have we got?’ she thought out loud, trying to inject some enthusiasm into her voice.
‘ Nothing.’ Henry sat down, looking like he was bored rigid.
‘ Give that to me.’ Danny snatched the marker pen from his hand. She stood by the board, reading what was on it, then reached up and wrote, Operation Head Hunt along the top, but knew the name would have to be changed. It was completely inappropriate, just the kind of thing she would have expected from FB. She underlined the words with a squiggle. Then she drew a ring around the words ‘Lancaster Comms’.
‘ Why Lancaster Comms?’ she probed Henry and the room.
‘ Why not Blackburn? Why not Blackpool?’
Henry remained dumb, uninterested.
‘ Come on,’ she urged, ‘we’re supposed to be detectives. We’re supposed to come up with things. Ideas. Hypotheses.’
‘ Yeah, I’m sorry.’ He rocked forwards and stood up. ‘There should be a map of the county in one of these cupboards.’ He opened a few until he found a large rolled-up map which he spread open on a table-top. He pinned it down with two cups and two saucers. He took another marker pen and drew a ring around Lancaster and another around Hutton, location of Headquarters.
Danny sidled up next to him, arm to arm.
‘ What’ve we got?’ he said. ‘Lancaster: covers the port of Heysham, two nuclear power stations, Glasson Dock, the Duke of Westminster’s house, the M6, one or two MPs’ and ex-MPs’ homes; Royals visit the area regularly — officially and unofficially. There’s lots of banks, building societies, and other financial institutions in the towns.’
‘ And Control Room,’ said Danny, picking up the train of thought, ‘Controls the Force radio network and deploys patrols on the motorways — the M6, M55, M65 and M61.’
‘ Common denominator?’
‘ The M6,’ said Danny quickly. ‘That’s the first thing that strikes me. It runs through Northern Division and Control Room look after it.’
Annoyingly, Henry shrugged again. Danny ignored it this time, but glanced up at him. He’d gone distant again. She nudged him hard in the ribs.
He looked into her eyes. A flicker of excitement shivered through her as he spoke. ‘If this is all linked together, and we’re not just wasting our time, then I have a good idea what this is all about.’
Danny waited.
‘ Money,’ he said.
The next visitor turned up on time. Smith greeted him at the door of the warehouse. Everyone else stayed out of sight in the office. They had all showered and changed back into their original clothing. Their ‘operating gear’ had been bagged up in black plastic bin liners, the guns and ammunition put in a holdall. The weapons which had been fired were wrapped separately in plastic bags inside the holdall. Smith was going to arrange the disposal of the clothing and guns later that day.
As Crane, Drozdov, Thompson and Elphick sipped coffee, Smith introduced the man to his task.
‘ Can you do it?’
‘ Easy peasey.’ The man, who was only young, in his mid-twenties, placed a small toolkit down by his side. He opened it and took out a cordless drill into which he inserted a thin bit. ‘First one?’ he said.
Smith dragged one of the money cases out of the Sherpa, put it on the floor. The man knelt down and started work.
Henry picked up a phone and punched in the extension number of the Duty Officer, Control Room, again.
‘ Have you been notified of any large movements of cash today, up and down the motorway?’ Henry knew it was procedure for many security companies to inform police forces if unusually large amounts of money were being carried around or through their areas.
‘ Hold on, I’ll check… we’re only just getting back to normal after that bomb hoax…’ There was a pause during which Henry could hear the workings of Control Room in the background. ‘Yep, we have,’ the Inspector came back. ‘Three today. Two are cash deliveries from the Royal Mint — one of which is going right up the county without stopping; the third is another non-stopper, north to south down the M6 — a cash disposal.’
‘ Any problems reported with any of them?’
‘ Not as yet. They’re all vague timetables anyway — nothing fixed in stone.’
Henry tutted, disappointed. It had been a good idea come to nothing. ‘Can you give me details of all three? I’ll contact each company and check anyway.’
‘ Sure.’ The Inspector read them out, Henry noted them down. He replaced the phone slowly. ‘If you were a robber, Danny, which would you rather have, given the choice — a load of brand-new notes, or a load of used ones?’
‘ The latter. Untraceable.’
‘ Me too. I’ll call this company first.’
‘ There we go,’ the young man said three minutes later with a satisfied smile. He leaned back from the money case. ‘Unlocked and disabled, hopefully.’
‘ Hopefully?’ Smith queried.
‘ There’s always the possibility of it going wrong, but if this one is OK, the others will be a piece of piss.’
Smith nodded. He dragged the case away across the floor. He flipped the catches cautiously, expecting to be sprayed with dye. Nothing. Next he eased the lid up very slowly until the case was completely open. Again, nothing. No dye, no alarm.
What did happen was that he was faced with a suitcase full of tightly packed and bound notes. All twenties. He eased one bundle out. They were literally packed like sardines. He read the wrapper. It indicated he was holding one hundred?20 notes. Two thousand pounds. He quickly counted how many more were in the case. Two hundred and fifty — which equated to half a million pounds in used, utterly untraceable cash.
Smith’s heart pounded, making him gasp.
Another forty-nine such cases were stacked in the back of the Sherpa. If each one contained the same, and Smith had no reason to doubt otherwise, they had just stolen twenty-five million pounds. Not as much as Hodge had promised — but who could quibble? Twenty-five mill went a long, long way.
‘ How much time to do the rest?’ Smith asked the man.
‘ Minute each, now that I know what I’m doing — maybe less.’
‘ Get going with it, then.’
Henry’s bones grated when he stretched. He and Danny had just finished phoning the headquarters of each security firm and received negative responses. Nothing untoward had occurred with any of their vehicles in Lancashire that day.
‘ Worth a try, I suppose,’ he mumbled defensively. He poured himself another coffee. It was lukewarm, tasted bitter, reflected his mood.