The Third Attempt - a story of a coup d'état in Britain

Nice to see it here James G.

So what are the two previous coup attempts.

Would that be this also then: Did Lord Mountbatten really plot to overthrow Harold Wilson in a coup?

That is where it comes from, yes.




That's brilliant!
I'll only be posting the whole story for a week though.

Chapter Five – A Dog Called Billy
Wandsworth, South London – November 8th 2013


Later that day, Emma Cartwright came home from work and wasn’t greeted once inside the door by her Labrador. Billy didn’t come bounding towards her like he always did with that look on his face. Emma put down her bag of shopping from the mini-supermarket that was located a few minutes away as she closed the front door behind her and then again looked down the darkened hallway in the hope that her faithful friend was about to appear.

“Billy!”

No response came. There was no friendly bark or his appearance.

Once Emma took off her shoes and hung up her coat, she switched on the light and walked down the hallway towards the kitchen. She went past the door to the living room as she did and saw that Billy wasn’t in there either. Nor, she noted as an afterthought, was Chris.

She pondered over whether her partner had taken the dog out for a walk. On rare occasions he would do so, though only when she browbeat him into doing such a thing.

When she reached the kitchen, Emma turned the light on in there too and walked over to the side where the kettle was. She’d had a long and stressful day at work – as she always did – and wanted a cuppa. As she set about making herself a hot drink, she called out again: “Billy!”

Immediately, there came a bark.

Emma smiled as she turned her head around and down to look at the floor beside her. She was expecting Billy to be right there even though his bark hadn’t sounded right. Yet, he wasn’t there in the kitchen with her.

The sound had instead come from the back door leading out to the garden.

Billy was out there. Emma reasoned that Chris – who had presumably gone out somewhere without calling to let her know he wouldn’t be home when she got in – must have put him outside instead of leaving him in here. She forgot the kettle and went towards the back door.

As Emma reached it, something caught her eye down on the mat just inside. The light in the kitchen wasn’t that great over near the door but it looked like…a knife!

Without thinking, Emma picked it up by its handle. She recognised it at once as one from the kitchen draw. There was something on it too… was that tomato sauce?

It was blood, not tomato sauce.

Emma dropped the knife back down when Billy barked again from on the other side of the door. She took a hold of the key in the lock and tried to turn it to the left to unlock it. The key wouldn’t go over any further and so she moved to the handle and lowered that she as she pulled it down. The door had been closed but unlocked; it opened as she tugged the handle.

Emma let out the first of many screams when she opened the door. Meanwhile, Billy kept barking.

*

The police arrived after several calls from neighbours along with one who had gone into the house that Emma shared with her partner Christopher Young. A patrol car with two officers inside pulled up on the busy road where the house was and they were shown inside by a pair of concerned (i.e. nosy) neighbours. They had been told that there was a man dead at the property and a hysterical woman inside. An ambulance was on its way too – just in case the reports that the man was dead were wrong – as well as back-up.

The initial reports made to the 999 operator were correct though: there was a deceased man.

Very quickly, the police on the scene established that all evidence pointed to a murder as having taken place here in suburban Wandsworth. The man in the garden, found just outside the door, had multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest. He’d bleed to death sometime within the past half an hour or so (the time of death would later be established by a coroner) and they had what appeared to be the murder weapon recovered at the scene. There was no sign or any forced entry into the house, no evidence of a burglary and no violence seemed to have taken place inside the house itself – there was dried blood on the pavement right outside the house’s back door.

There were two people in the house along with a cute dog that seemed to want attention from all of the unexpected visitors. One of those people was an elderly lady from the a-joining house while the other was the common-law wife of the dead man. The former appeared to be in shock and had been taken to the living room with a female officer. As to the latter, the initial attending policemen had noted blood on her hands. They’d taken her name and calmed her down a little and she was with another officer as she sat at the bottom of the house’s stairs out in the hallway.

A uniformed sergeant was the first senior officer on the scene and he took charge of things until the pair of detectives that he had called could arrive. He’d also requested a forensic team to attend and alerted his Inspector that he might need more manpower. This had come after a remark by another neighbour – there was a small crowd of them gathering outside among all the commotion – that the dead man inside, thought to be Christopher Fredrick Young until proved otherwise, had a job that would bring media attention here; the sergeant didn’t want nosy reporters about with the cameras and their questions.

The deceased was reportedly some sort of media coordinator with the Parliamentary Labour Party, a so-called ‘spin doctor’.

*

Emma was taken to the police station up on the High Street. She’d only been here last month to report a suspicious man that she was sure she spotted leaving her garden; that had been a bothersome experience with the policeman she’d spoken to not taken her worries about that as serious as she’d liked. This time she was driven there at high speed and then ‘processed’ when she came into the building through the back way.

It was a very unpleasant experience for her, the act of them processing her. They’d told her that she wasn’t under arrest and that they could contact a solicitor on her behalf, but she really hadn’t been paying attention to that. She could only think of Chris and kept picturing him as she’d found him in their garden. He’d been covered in his own blood and his face had shown much pain as well as being ever so pale.

It was a horrible image.

Emma wanted to go somewhere to lie down and cry, but instead the police wouldn’t leave her alone. They took pictures of her, especially her right hand, and took away her clothes. A doctor examined her and then she was put in a cell: they told her that she needed to rest before they could talk to her.

She asked about Billy, but the police didn’t care about her dog: they just wanted to get her into the cell.

All the while, the thought never occurred to her that she was in serious trouble.

*

The media were slow to respond to the death of Chris Young.

With it being a Friday evening, most senior London journalists were at the beginning of their weekend. Like most people who worked in the capital, they lived out in the suburbs – out in the Home Counties. Most were with their families though others were off getting gloriously drunk. Less experienced people thus worked in the offices of twenty-four hour news organisations at this time as they didn’t have the length of service behind them to get weekends off on a regular basis.

Thus, calls from police officers who usually had ‘relationships’ with journalists were unanswered for a while until mobile phones were looked at. Word was slow in getting out that someone newsworthy had died under violent circumstances.

However, local news organisations in the Wandsworth area were quick to converge on the scene of the murder. They were tipped off by all of the police activity and went to find out what was going on. The name Christopher Young wasn’t one that set off alarm bells among all of them, but one local journalist knew the man and his radio station reported on his death (before it could be confirmed by the police) in a special news bulletin. It was a scoop for them and something that was later picked up by national media outlets as they understood that someone of national prominence had been killed in his home.

Even later in the night, a tabloid journalist for The Sun would make a call to the police detective from Scotland Yard who had been trying to ring him for the past few hours. The reporter was told by his contact of Christopher Young’s death and then informed that the Met. Police had a record of contact with both the dead man and the woman that he lived with. The month before, and on another occasion a few months previous, police had been called to their house when neighbours reported shouting, screaming and crying coming from within. They’d launched a domestic violence investigation into Christopher Young and Emma Cartwright.

The journalist would ask his contact why that news had not got out beforehand, only to receive the response that it wasn’t the usual sort of domestic violence enquiry. In this particular case, it was the woman, not the man, that the police had come close to arresting twice for physically assaulting her partner. Though he didn’t know it at the time, when the reporter’s newspaper went out to print on the Saturday morning the front page insinuation would be that Christopher Young had been murdered by his violent female partner.





Chapter Six – Constituency Business
Sawston, Cambridgeshire – November 10th 2013


Parliamentary convention dictated that an MP maintained a home within his or her constituency. For many a politician, this was something that they didn’t like. They wanted to be close to Westminster, not those who interests that they went bound to serve, and there weren’t enough seats near London within an easy commutable distance.

For John Williams, such was the opposite. He had grown up in south Cambridgeshire, his family was from here and so he thoroughly enjoyed having a home here inside his constituency. He had brought one on the outskirts of the village of Sawston when he’d become an MP and stayed here ever since; he had no intention of leaving the area. Yet, he did have a second home too, one down in London. He and his wife had purchased a flat in fashionable Knightsbridge so that they both could have somewhere to sleep when they worked early or late within the city. Lisa would be staying there tonight because she was working today and tomorrow, but Williams himself was up here at home in Cambridgeshire.

His son Nathan – fourteen years old and as troublesome as all teenagers were – was up his room and on the internet while his father sat downstairs in the living room. Williams had browsed through the Sunday newspapers earlier today, but now he went back to them and read several articles in depth. He was in his favourite armchair, had his feet up on a stool and a glass of lemonade beside him: near bliss.

Things would have been even better with a cigarette, yet Lisa had finally forced him to quit in the New Year. Marriage was all about compromise: doing what you were told.

Williams preferred to read both The Times and The Telegraph during the week, yet he read almost all of the published newspapers on a Sunday rather than just the Sunday editions of his two favourite ones. He stayed away from the trashy, red-top tabloids and focused on the others. Each newspaper was different in content and the political outlook that it had. Their publishers and editors wanted different things in print and there was always something in one that wasn’t in another. To be able to do his job effectively, he needed to get a feel for what they all said too because they were all highly influential not just to the voters, but to fellow members of his professional circle as well.

The Observer (the Sunday sister of The Guardian) had an interesting feature article that he turned to first. He had only recently come back from having his Sunday dinner and his stomach was settled enough now to read this particular newspaper. He and Nathan had driven across to the nearby village of Whittlesford to eat there. Almost every Sunday, they would go to eat at a pub in one of the villages within his South Cambridgeshire constituency. Lisa was almost always at work and her husband (nor his son) was any real good at cooking. This allowed a lot of variety in Williams’ routine and allowed him to run into constituents. Nine times out of ten this was a pleasant experience; only rarely did they meet someone unpleasant. Spending money and showing his face in local businesses was always going to go down well too.

The article that he turned his attention to concerned the current state of unemployment within the country. Williams didn’t like the author who had composed this piece, and noticed that the man couldn’t stop himself from allowing his prejudices to influence what he was writing, yet it was still something interesting. Unemployment in the UK was still on the rise no matter what the Government did to change that. This Williams already knew; he was also aware that people up and down the country were losing their jobs no matter what their profession, age or skills. Rather than pick heart-wrenching examples, the author pointed to the general state of matters. He used numbers instead of names. This wasn’t the ‘in’ thing to do, but it worked. The numbers were staggering: three million.

Across in The Sunday Telegraph, Williams read a similar sort of article. This one concerned employment: part-time employment. There were millions of people up and down the country employed on a part-time basis. He knew that years ago, this wasn’t seen as a problem. Young mothers and students and the old took jobs that they did a few hours a week to meet their financial needs. Yet, in the past few years, with the national job shortage brought about by the economic mess that the country was in, more and more people were taking jobs that gave them twelve, sixteen or maybe (if they were lucky) twenty hours a week work. The Sunday Telegraph article pointed out that the vast majority of these were low-skilled and low-paid jobs that the people doing them had no choice but to do. There were a lot of people doing two or sometimes, in extreme cases, three at once. Complicated tax issues came with this and so too did a diminished time spent with family.

The Sunday Mail had a well-written article about the state of the economy. Williams knew much more of this matter than the newspaper put in print here, but the article wasn’t rosy in any way. The country was sliding further into debt as the Government kept borrowing more and more. Pension funds were propping up the nation’s finances at the minute, yet people were paying less into their pensions. Many people were dipping into their savings for general, everyday expenses. Millions more were not saving at all: so there was soon going to be a shortage of money that the Government could borrow from banks if things kept going as they were.

The final article he read was from The Independent on Sunday. That focused on Britain’s ever-growing energy dependency from the Russian Federation. The journalist was out in the Siberian wastelands and writing from there. Only earlier this year, in a controversial decision that Williams had in no way supported, the Government had started subsiding the nation’s energy bills as it brought oil and gas direct from the Russian government. The nation’s cars ran on Russian petrol and its homes were heated by Russian natural gas. By selling this directly to the UK Government, and not private energy companies, Moscow had taken a lower price. They had wanted geo-political concessions for this though, which Williams (and many others) regarded as detrimental to the country’s interests. The article in The Independent on Sunday warned of the journalist’s suspicions that the Russians were soon to up their ‘ask’ for the energy to keep flowing.

Williams didn’t like any of this that he was reading.

His country was going to shit, as the Americans would say. Where was the Great in Great Britain? Where was the conservative in the actions of the current Conservative government? Didn’t these people have any notion that the mistakes which they were making today were going to come back to bite ten times as hard in a few years’ time?

There was no one to ask these questions to though. He thought that he had some of the answers to solve many of the country’s problems, but who was going to listen to him at the minute?

Williams’ phone was on the table next to his glass. It vibrated and beeped just as he turned to have a gulp of his drink. He picked it up and saw that there was a text message on there; he opened the message and saw that it was from Lisa.

His wife was never one for pleasantries when using any form of electronic communication as so just had a question for him rather than any sort of ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you’. Instead, she just had an enquiry: had he ever heard any rumours about Andy James molesting young women?

He gave an instant response to this, one that he realised afterwards that he wouldn’t have written with reflection. Rather than directly respond to her question, Williams asked what she’d heard. All he got back was to check the online edition of her newspaper at ten o’clock: tomorrow’s headline for the printed edition would be up on there at about that time.

Knowing that Lisa got excited about things in her newspaper that he personally thought would be forgotten about by most people within minutes, Williams decided that he didn’t want to get into a long discussion about whatever ‘exclusive’ her newspaper had. What her newspaper was going to write about that socialist warhorse from The Guardian would be of interest to a lot of people, he knew, but it wouldn’t change the world.

Finished with his newspapers, Williams left his armchair and went over to the computer on the other side of the room. The house had a room that the previous owners before him and Lisa had used as a study, but neither of them liked it. That room was too small and draughty for their tastes. Moreover, they had long ago agreed that having a study in their house would mark them both out as a bit snobbish.

Therefore, they had the computer at table in the living room.

Once it was on, Williams saw that Nathan was using the internet upstairs in his room. He wasn’t able to see what websites his son was using – the kid always had many open at the same time – though he told himself that he shouldn’t want to know. His son was soon to be an adult and wanting to snoop on the boy wouldn’t be right.

Williams had several email accounts. There was a private one, a Parliamentary one and one for constituency use. He accessed them one at a time here and now. The first one was mainly full of junk messages though there was a confirmation email there from some books that he’d ordered online. There were many emails that had been sent to Westminster office, yet none of those were important enough to need dealing with now. His secretary would see all of them tomorrow and let him know if he needed to address any matters within those when he got into work late tomorrow morning.

Finally, Williams went into the third email account. It was full of constituency business: the unglamorous, but important, side of being an MP.





Chapter Seven – The Jogger In Green
Woolwich, South London – November 12th 2013


Baxter had been to Woolwich back when he was a soldier. On the outskirts of the town centre lay the historical Royal Artillery Barracks. He’d never been stationed there, though had visited on many occasions. Away from the barracks, all that he knew of the urban area in southeast London on the banks of the River Thames was that the place was a shithole.

Coming back here today, even when the morning was as dark as it was now, he saw that nothing much had changed.

The man he was going to follow this morning apparently lived in a new housing development down near the river itself – a gated community of sorts where the prices for flats were immense – but that was still in Woolwich. No smart sales pitch about luxury apartments with river views, good transport links to central London or gentrification was ever going to convince him that this was a really bad neighbourhood.

Baxter sat in his parked car at the minute. He’d pulled up on a main road that ran up a hill and out of the town centre, though he was still within the main shopping area of the town. Because it was just gone six in the morning, and not even dawn yet on this cold, dark and rainy morning, there was hardly anyone in sight. Baxter was using his car mirrors to look around and couldn’t see anyone. There were no brave commuters heading for the train station yet and certainly no one out going to closed shops. There should be a lone jogger though: one man who lived down near the river and would be coming this way if Baxter’s information was as correct as the woman sitting beside him said it was.

Liz was seated in the rented car’s passenger seat. She was dressed in vastly different attire to Baxter this morning. Liz had a heavy raincoat and jeans on, complete with her trademark leather boots. In contrast, Baxter wore comfortable trainers as well as a jogging outfit. He was getting ready to go outside, while she was fully intending to stay within the warm confines of the vehicle.

“I see him.” Baxter spotted Marcus Bland coming up the road, just as Liz had said he could.

“Where?” Baxter caught a glimpse of Liz turning her head to look in the wing mirror on her side of the car.

“He’s just coming up on the other side of the road: green tracksuit.”

“I see him now.” She paused for a moment and said nothing as the jogger ran past them. When she spoke again, she whispered as if she was afraid that he’d hear them even though the car’s windows were closed: “He’ll be easy to follow wearing that.”

“I’m off. Red, I’ll give you a call when we come back into town and get to the edge of his little housing development.”

“I’ll come and get you; don’t call me ‘Red’ or I’ll leave you here alone.” Liz flashed him an odd smile before Baxter opened the car door. When he turned to close it behind him, he noticed how she was climbing across and moving into his seat so that she didn’t have to get out of the vehicle to drive it afterwards.

“Crazy woman.” When he spoke this time, Baxter was out of earshot of Liz – who really didn’t like his nickname for her – and had also started to run. He had been stretching ever since he’d woken up two hours ago because he knew that this morning, he was going to get one hell of a workout. Back when he’d been in the Army, he’d jogged six days a week; since then he rarely got much exercise and when he did it wasn’t on a regular basis.

The intelligence that they had on the jogger in green was that he ran for forty odd minutes every morning over a varying course that took him around the edges of Woolwich. He appeared to like going up to and then across the high ground to the south, near where the barracks was, before taking a route home. Baxter wanted to trail the man as he did this so that he could commence a dry run of the assassination that he planned to undertake against Bland later in the week.

Within minutes of following his fellow jogger, he was regretting not getting any more exercise recently.

The two of them – separated by about fifty yards, a distance that Baxter fought very hard to maintain – went uphill and towards where Baxter knew that the barracks was. The course got steeper the closer they came to the top and Baxter could feel every muscle in his body screaming at him to give it all up. He was panting like a maniac and reckoned that the sweat he was releasing might soon be enough to drown him.

All that kept him going was the desire to continue the Mission that he had set himself upon. He couldn’t give up following this man today because not being exactly sure of how the jogger in green did his run – his pace, whether he stopped, if he ran into anyone he knew out doing the same thing etc. – was of great importance. Baxter had never failed at anything in his life too and he was determined that this hill wasn’t going to beat him.

Continuing on despite the pain, Baxter looked up and ahead just as Bland reached the top of the hill and turned to the left. The man had just done what was expected: turning towards the open expanse of Woolwich Common.

Fifty yards, Baxter silently told himself as he nearly killed himself getting up to the horizontal road than ran past those famous old barracks.

Baxter mentally congratulated himself when he got to the top. He didn’t follow his urge to stop, but rather kept going. He’d thought that the road levelled out here and thus was unpleasantly surprised to find that there was still an incline as it kept going. Still, it wasn’t as steep going at it had been coming up and out of the town centre. He kept an eye on the jogger in green, though he did also take a second to look over the right towards the barracks there.

The famous building frontage and that immense parade ground came into view over a low fence and Baxter had memories of the past on seeing that. There were no soldiers out on parade there: he wasn’t sure if he was happy or sad at not seeing such a sight. He would have been reminded of happy times soldiering, though he knew that on the other hand there would have been much regret at the loss of what he was in his past life before he had become what he was now.

What Baxter was now was a hunter of men and that man was slowing getting further and further ahead. Bland had picked up his pace and so Baxter had to do the same.

With it being so dark, Baxter knew that he had nothing to fear if his fellow jogger up ahead should choose to turn and look around for a moment. Should he do so and take notice of Baxter, there was no chance that he would sense any danger. Baxter would be dismissed as just another early morning jogger coming for a run up here.

That’s what Baxter told himself.

A crossroads came up and Baxter watched as the jogger in green ran across that in a diagonal manner. There was no traffic – hence he decision not to follow the man in a car and be very conspicuous – and Bland went straight over so that he reached the edges of the common. Baxter felt the wind pushing raindrops violently into his face as he sought to keep up and had to ignore the urge to turn his face out of the wind. It was whipping across the open ground with full gusto and only by giving up would it be stopped from affecting him as it was.

Woolwich Common was both where Baxter wanted the jogger in green to go and not where he wished the man to run across as well. When the time came to take the man’s life, this would be the perfect place to do it. Nonetheless, to directly follow him across here this morning would also leave Baxter open to being observed by the target. To exactly follow the man’s path would make it clear that he was doing such a thing. Baxter thus had to comprise, something which he never liked doing but what he had been doing ever since he’d been forceful forced to ‘retire’.

On the eastern side of the common, over near the hospital, were trees and thick undergrowth. The jogger in green ran towards that area, though he went across the open western side of the common to get there. Baxter planned to run into the man over there on Friday and he didn’t want to spook Bland by following him into there now. He thus stuck to the road that followed the edge of the common while the jogger in green ran across the grass. Baxter kept turning his head towards his target and didn’t appreciate the distance opening up between them; he had no choice at the minute though.

It took a while, but soon the jogger in green went into the trees. Liz had mentioned back in the car that Bland would be easy to follow when wearing such clothes, but she wasn’t very skilled at this type of thing. Under the glare of streetlights when back alongside main roads, that had been the case. Yet it was the opposite up here on Woolwich Common. Bland’s outfit was almost camouflage and with it being dark too, Baxter lost sight of him in seconds.

Baxter and Liz had been in the Woolwich area since three o’clock and had driven around the area extensively. The muggers that the town was well known for had gone home and so too had the drug dealers and the shockingly violent teenage gangs by that time. Baxter had thus been able to wander around a little without worry, even through the pitch-blank area of the common where the trees were. It had been hard to follow the track that served as a walkway through there, but he had been just about able to do so with a low-level handheld light. He’d timed that passage through the trees too and then figured out afterwards what he’d have to do.

The plan was for him to meet the jogger in green on the other side, but that meant the Baxter now had to run very fast around the hidden area to get to the road on the other side at the same time as Bland arrived there.

He ran.

Baxter went past the hospital there and kept following the road. He couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain that he would meet his target where and when he wanted to, nor even that the jogger in green would stick to the pathway. He only suspected that Bland would follow the logical way through that part of the common and emerge back out on the other side in preparation for the final part of his run back home. He kept on telling himself that the jogger in green would be there and Baxter would make the rendezvous.

In the end, Baxter’s timing was a little bit off. The other jogger was out of the trees and already heading back in the direction of home by the time Baxter got there. The man was only just in sight and maybe two hundred yards off. Baxter wanted to slow down, but he didn’t want to lose sight of the jogger in green just yet. He allowed himself a smile though: the intelligence on Bland had been perfect in all respects.

Instead of going back down the hill that he’d come up, the jogger in green went down another main road. This was one that Baxter had driven down earlier and he knew it wasn’t going to be fun to follow Bland this way either. The road went downhill and then straight back up again onto high ground to the east of Woolwich town centre. By following that, only afterwards would his target drop back down and towards reach his home. Baxter kept on following the man – he’d managed to close the distance down to less than a hundred yards – and went down into that dip while he tried to remember the layout back up on the other side.

How Baxter wished for a nice flat piece of ground away from all these hills!

The jogger in green didn’t go back up the other side as Baxter had feared though. Instead, he turned left when he got down to the bottom and ran past a pub. Baxter saw a small council estate that way and recalled that earlier on he’d come to the end of a close when driving there. Such a road was fine for those on foot though and also led straight back into the town centre.

Finally, Baxter came to a stop. It felt fantastic to halt his running and he involuntarily bent over as he caught his breath. His target was very quickly lost from view, yet he didn’t care! He’d stopped next to a lamppost and he leaned against that while he tried to recover from his near-death experience. When he was ready, he’d call Liz and tell her where he was. She would probably be unimpressed that he hadn’t followed Bland all the way home, but he was prepared for that verbal abuse.

It didn’t matter, because when he went after the jogger in green, who Baxter made himself think of as just another name on his list, that man wasn’t going to have his life taken from him near his home. No, Baxter would do that up on that common and away from anyone else.





Chapter Eight – The X-Files
Thames House, Central London – November 13th 2013


Apart from her father (who knew better), to her friends and family, Harriet Byrne was a junior civil servant. She was an agricultural administration specialist with the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and worked in one of their off-sited locations in Central London. She took a train into the city every morning from her home in Chelmsford and returned to Essex in the evening. Sometimes she took trips up and down the country on DEFRA business, though that was a rare event. When she spoke about her work, which was a rare occurrence, anyone listening was soon bored. A husband of one of her girlfriends in Chelmsford had once jokingly remarked that she had ‘the cover worthy of a spy’; laughter had followed this offhand comment…

… yet it had been the truest words spoken about Harriet away from her colleagues.

Harriet had an agricultural management degree from the University of Manchester – attained six years ago now – though she’d only done any work that had anything to do with what she’d studied for a couple of months. Straight from university, she’d gone to work for Essex County Council in their environmental management department. Harriet had previously worked as a summer intern there and her expectation had been that she’d spend her life as a low- to middle-ranking civil servant within that organisation. Fate had intervened though to bring her to where she was now.

Unknown to Harriet, her father had spent his entire working life not as the junior diplomat with the Foreign Office that she’d always believed he had, but rather as an intelligence officer serving the interests of his country. The elder Byrne had served with the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI-6 of James Bond fame) all over the world. Before she’d graduated from Manchester, her father had sought out some old colleagues in the UK intelligence community and professed to them that his daughter had all the makings of someone who could well serve her country like he had. Harriet had the smarts, the common sense, the dedication to work and the patriotism for such a job. Checks had been made with an previous professor of hers who done work with the intelligence services in the past and she’d been unexpectedly invited to a job interview that her father had arranged for her with what she was told had been DEFRA.

In the end, Harriet had not gone to either the Secret Intelligence Service or the code-breakers and encryption service of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) as her father had hoped. Instead, she’d been offered a role at Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence and anti-terrorism organisation: the Security Service.

Popularly known as MI-5, the Security Service was a large and important government agency. It operated nationwide (not abroad) in a concerted effort with other intelligence services to defend the country from threats against it. Her father had told Harriet before she’d joined it that the Security Service was in many ways just another large government bureaucracy. Any ideas that she had about running around with a gun chasing down foreign spooks, her father had added, was baloney. Instead, Harriet would spend her days doing what he’d always dreaded doing: paperwork.

The Security Service had field offices in the cities of Manchester and Glasgow as well as in Northern Ireland. Its headquarters was in London though, at Thames House on Millbank. The northern half of the building had previously housed the Northern Ireland Office before that government department had moved up onto Whitehall: Harriet and her colleagues were in the southern portion. In there she worked for one of the three directorates that the Security Service had.

Reorganisation of the Security Service in the past decade had split it into a trio of component parts. There first was Administration. Harriet had worked in this directorate up until late last year and done there what the title suggested. The Security Service needed admin support for its functions and there were more than a hundred staff members in that directorate. There were a lot of secretarial duties and paper-filing, but also other ‘interesting’ functions that Administration undertook. Employees of the Security Service were paid by other government departments (the money transferred across from their own budget) and so too were their PAYE and national insurance contributions. This wasn’t an easy thing to do, but it was necessary so that those who worked at Thames House could keep their job anonymous from prying eyes.

In addition, Administration dealt with technical support for the two other directorates. When Security Service officers were deployed on sensitive intelligence gathering missions, they needed all sorts of hi-tech equipment. Harriet hadn’t had many dealings with the technical support people in her previous posting within the Security Service, yet she had seen plenty of descriptions of their fancy gadgets on paper.

After her time working for Administration, Harriet had at first been slated to move across into Anti-Terrorism. This was the Security Service’s high-profile directorate and its personnel spent a lot of their time away from their desks. The threat of terrorist attacks being undertaken against the country and its civilians was very real and the Government had long ago made it clear that they considered stopping these to be the priority of the Security Service. Bombings and murders carried out by Islamic extremists were the main threat, though there was still the ever-present danger that came from Irish republicans too who didn’t respect the peace process in Ulster. The Security Service worked to prevent attacks as well as the spread of terrorist ideology. Work was done with police forces and even community groups nationwide, while they also worked with foreign representatives (from embassies in the UK) to stop this.

However, Harriet had eventually moved to the third and biggest portion of the Security Service: National Security. The National Security Directorate (NSD) was the home of British counter-intelligence. She had only had a limited idea of what the NSD would be all about when joining the Security Service as an Intelligence Officer. Monitoring and curtailing the activities of foreign agents to spy against Britain was just a small (though vital) part of the NSD’s mission. The directorate had all sorts of other important functions too. Undertaking thorough background checks for those working for the higher-echelons of the government in sensitive positions took up much of their work and so too did later scrutiny of people in such roles who were suspected of misusing the trust they had been given.

Guarding the national security of the country was more than just about secrets though. Harriet found herself working as an analysis looking at confidential and open-source information before passing it along to the relevant people who would act on what she found. The Security Service worked with Customs to prevent the import and export of sensitive goods, technology and information. There were threats to foreign defectors and high-profile asylum seekers from a political background that needed to be stopped. The economic and cultural wealth of the nation was something that the Security Service protected too. Nation states and private individuals had to be stopped from damaging the national security of the country by conducting industrial espionage against British companies; those companies paid taxes and created jobs which were vital for the country’s well-being.

Another role of the NSD, and one which the Security Service didn’t like to publicise due to adverse public reaction, was maintaining the current political structure of the nation: ‘Democracy Security’. They were sworn to uphold Parliamentary democracy, one which was backed up by the force of law and the age-old institution of the Monarchy. Harriet had quickly learned that there were a surprising large number of people and groups who wanted to change things in the UK through illegal and violent means. Some worked with foreign backers (knowingly or unknowingly), while others didn’t, and they all had to be stopped.

In dealing with all of these threats, members of the NSD often worked away from their desks. Harriet had yet to find herself in a situation where there was a personal danger to herself, yet there had been a few close calls. The Security Service would investigate maters and would then turn to Special Branch to physically stop and arrest those whose aim was detrimental to the country’s national security. Her colleagues in Anti-Terrorism often turned to UK military special forces to stop terrorists, but the NSD worked extensively with the civilian police before people were handed over to the courts to be punished for their crimes. Harriet would deal with people who were committing crimes on a grand scale and they acted like criminals too. They were boastful to others and would leave paper or electronic trails of their activities.

How the NSD would come across threats that they investigated was something that Harriet had always found interesting. In the main, senior police officers up and down the country would contact Thames House with their suspicions of criminal acts being undertaken that required more investigative skills than they had and were also deemed as potential threats to the nation. However, on other occasions, other government departments or even MPs would contact the Security Service to take action when they had their suspicions. For example, someone might try to bribe a civil servant at the Treasury for tax information on a national company involved in foreign ventures, a diplomat at the Foreign Office may notice personal surveillance of himself being undertaken, or an MP might have been approached by someone who was suspected of working for a foreign country. There were a hell of a lot of false leads, Harriet found, but also plenty of real work to be done.

Within the NSD, there was a small section of personnel – eight officers in all, Harriet among them – who worked for ‘Unusual Inquires’. Harriet had heard the nickname ‘The X-Files’ for what was done in this section of the NSD when coming to work at Thames House though only found out what they actually did when her supervisor had assigned her to work within it. Her own, personal analytical investigative skills (which other people regarded as a tad odd) had been the force behind this. It had seemed like a demotion when she’d been moved from ‘Democracy Security’ across to the X-Files, though that fear had been unfounded on her first day at her new desk. Her new supervisor wanted people who would keep following lines of inquiry that other people dismissed as irrelevant until they were run down. This was because the X-Files dealt with matters that didn’t fit into any other description of what the multitude of sections within the NSD usually investigated.

Today, Harriet was about to be assigned an X-File that would take her places where she never expected to go, learn things that were very worrying and even threaten her life. She had no idea of those consequences when she and one of her colleagues were called into see their supervisor this afternoon though.

*

Jamie Trent, the man who ran Unusual Inquires, was an unusual man.

Harriet respected him on a professional level though was physically scared of him on a personal one. He was a hulking figure of a man with a stare that she could never hold for longer than a few seconds. He had an odd accent: one that come from spending his life between his native Northumberland and then working in London for many years. Trent had a nervous tic that mean he would involuntarily jerk his left arm to a noticeable effect every few minutes or so. Harriet understood that this wasn’t something that Trent wanted to do, but she couldn’t help by find it unnerving.

When Harriet and her colleague Patrick Collins entered Trent’s little office on the fourth floor of Thames House, they found him standing behind his desk and seemingly impatiently waiting for them.

“Harriet, Patrick…” There was a sense of urgency in his voice that confirmed Harriet’s initial suspicions.

“Good afternoon, Chief.” Patrick spoke up and called him by the title that he used for everyone in authority; Harriet chose to say nothing for the moment and just nodded at her supervisor instead.

“I presume that the whole business with the strawberry company is all finished up, Patrick?”

“Yes, it is. All paperwork has been filed in the relevant places, though my conclusion is that there was nothing there to start with.”

“I agree.”

In the silence that came over the room for a moment, Harriet quickly remembered what they two of them were talking about. Back in the summer, a Welsh MP had approached the Security Service concerning a private company in his constituency that had suddenly been given an infusion of capital. The money came from what were first described as ‘Italian sources’, though after taking an interest because many of his voters worked for the company, the MP had learnt that those who had supplied the money to the company were Albanian immigrants to Italy. The concern on the politician’s part had been that there was some sort of money-laundering or even drug-smuggling connection between the strawberry growers and exports in his rural constituency. Such things may have sounded crazy, she knew, but similar things had happened before.

Patrick, a hard-working and long-service intelligence officer more than twenty years her senior, had been looking into that but was now saying that that particular X-File had nothing to it.

“And you, Harriet, you have nothing urgent on your desk at the minute?” It was not so much a question rather a statement. Trent’s words demanded an answer though.

“No, Jamie, I have not.”

“Excellent…” He reached down to his desk with one hand, just as his other arm twitched, and picked up what appeared to be a dossier. She recognised the official folder a saw a lone word printed on the front: YOUNG.

“I’ve got something that I need the two of you to look into. I want you both to give this a serious investigation. Take your time… but don’t mess around either.”





Chapter Nine – Records: Altered & Unaltered
New Scotland Yard, Central London – November 14th 2013


Everyone wanted to know where Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke was.

His family – a wife and two young children – hadn’t had him at home in four days.

His police colleagues at Scotland Yard had not seen him in six days, and they had people out searching for him.

Harriet and Patrick were now looking for him as well.

*

Clarke was a fifteen year veteran of the Metropolitan Police. He’d spent the majority of his career a desk man, Harriet had found out, in junior management roles. After a few short years as a uniformed officer in the London suburbs, Clarke had been assigned to a vice crimes unit at Scotland Yard first as a detective and then promoted to a sergeant. During that time, he’d divorced his first wife and also accumulated significant debts from that separation. His career had been imperilled some by those personal issues, though he’d remarried a few years ago and held down his job. Last year, Clarke had transferred out of his vice duties across to an administration role within Scotland Yard. His current role was with their computerised crime recording system that was used nationwide: HOLMES.

Harriet had learnt a little bit more about Clarke too when her and Patrick had yesterday started looking at the YOUNG investigation. The policeman lived out in Walthamstow within a smart little house with the mortgage fully paid off. He’d been investigated early last year as part of the tail-end of the News of the World phone hacking inquiry and suspected of passing information to journalists for cash. Nothing had been proved, yet that had resulted in his reassignment away from frontline policing and there had been a black mark against his name ever since.

Clarke was someone very much suspected of once, maybe still, being in the illegal pay of journalists.

*

Events that had taken place six days ago had brought Harriet and her currently-assigned partner Patrick here to Scotland Yard today. She’d read last Saturday how Christopher Young, the chief spin-doctor for the Labour Party, had apparently been murdered by his live-in girlfriend the evening before and hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Nor had hardly anyone else either… until the Metropolitan Police started to look into their own organisation’s history with both the dead man and the woman in their custody.

A Murder Investigation Team from Wandsworth Borough Command had taken over the enquiry within an hour of the initial 999 call being made and a Detective Inspector assigned to head it up. As a matter of routine, they had run the names of both the deceased Young and the arrested Emma Cartwright. Paper records on-file showed that the former had been arrested (but later released with no charge) four years ago – on September 3rd 2009 – when suspected of committing a drink-driving offense, and the latter had made an official report to their station on October 14th of this year about a suspected prowler around their property. There had been no further contact with both people either beforehand or since.

Therefore, it came as a surprise to the Metropolitan Police officers the next morning when they read in The Sun newspaper that Cartwright had been detained on two recent occasions on suspicion of domestic violence directed against her partner. The newspaper had stated that this had occurred on September 3rd and October 14th of this year. Those dates were at once seen by the Metropolitan Police as being significant because one matched up precisely to past contact with Cartwright and the other was exactly four years off from contact with Young. While remaining focused upon the crime scene in Wandsworth and the suspected murderer that they had in custody, the investigating team still took time to check on those dates back with Scotland Yard. The Detective Inspector had been annoyed with the media for making such a big mistake in the public arena and also more than a little curious at such a mistake too.

The Metropolitan Police were anything but sloppy when it came to record keeping. Maintaining accurate data on past crimes committed was something that they excelled at because it was important in future investigations as well in in current ones that they passed onto the courts. The Detective Inspector had thus been stunned to learn that there were two different sets of dates and circumstances concerning police contact with Young and Cartwright. Wandsworth police station had been experiencing technical problems with its computers on the Friday evening and so they had relied upon paper records at first. Those vastly contradicted with those that the media had been told were accurate and what was quickly shown to be currently listed on the nationwide database of criminal activity.

An anti-corruption investigation was at once opened within the Metropolitan Police in addition to the murder investigation down in Wandsworth.

The Sun newspaper was soon contacted and at first reacted as expected. The journalist who had broke the ‘story’ concerning Cartwright’s previous alleged assaults against Young refused to speak to the Metropolitan Police as to how he had got the information that he had. He was supported by his editor and lawyers were prepared to get involved in an effort to defend ‘journalistic sourcing integrity’. However, once The Sun was shown a (selective) copy of Metropolitan Police records, one which didn’t match up to what they had been told it had, their attitude changed. Their sister paper – The Sun on Sunday – wouldn’t repeat the allegations against Cartwright made the day before and the journalist at the centre of the original story agreed to give up his source at the Metropolitan Police.

Anti-corruption officers at Scotland Yard had already had a suspect despite what had happened with the media.

It had been determined that the HOLMES computerised records concerning Young and Cartwright had been tampered with three days previously using an access code to the nationwide system that had been issued to a senior officer who had retired earlier in the year. An access code like that was very difficult to obtain and also one that left a trail when used; unfortunately, yet another code from another retired officer had been used to try to erase the sign that an original change had been made. The perpetrator had tried to cover his tracks, yet the Metropolitan Police had many clever computer forensic investigative officers within its ranks who followed the trail back and came across one senior man who they believed responsible for all of this: Clarke.

Two days (Saturday and Sunday) had been spent confirming this and senior officers had been ready to confront the Detective Sergeant in question on Monday morning to hear an explanation. Clarke hadn’t showed up for work though and so officers had gone to his Walthamstow house to arrest and question him. Again, there was no sign of Clarke, though his wife informed the anti-corruption officers that he had been upset by something that he’d read in the newspapers the day before (later thought to be something that he hadn’t read, when expecting to see further ‘revelations’ about Young and Cartwright) enough for her to be concerned. Yet, he had left their house on Monday morning and told her that he was off to work.

Due to this high-level tampering of official records, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was informed of what was going on. Following that, because of the political implications concerning Young’s profession and links to the Government Opposition, the Security Service was alerted.

*

Clarke wasn’t senior enough to warrant an office, though he did have his own personal work station within an open-plan office area. He had a desk which came with a computer and a phone. Harriet looked at his in-tray and saw paperwork requests there. The missing man had a job confirming minor amendments to records on the system that he was suspected of tampering with. Alongside another man of equal rank, Clarke had been responsible for updating mistakes; that official job required that two people authorise any changes like that on HOLMES.

It was clear that the man had decided to make changes on his own and they hadn’t been minor either.

While Harriet stood browsing that paperwork, with policemen nearby watching over her and no doubt angry that an ‘outsider’ was in here, Patrick was seated at Clarke’s desk and looking into his computer. As directed by their office the two of them were not here to prove what Clarke had done, but to find out why. To do that, Patrick thought that there might be something in the man’s computer that would help them with that.

Despite his age, Harriet knew that Patrick was somewhat of a whizz at computers. There were some very bright and technical people back at Thames House who would want to complete a forensic examination of this computer and probably Clarke’s home one too, but here at Scotland Yard her fellow intelligence officer was busy searching though this quite thoroughly. There wasn’t much yet to the YOUNG investigation for them to be getting on with apart from a missing man who had some answers that a lot of people would want to hear. In the absence of him, wherever he’d run off to, there was just this computer and a whole bunch of seemingly-innocent files and records of internet activity.

Patrick had already found a draft copy of a novel that Clarke had been writing while at his desk (the policemen present weren’t visually pleased at how their colleague had been spending his days) along with a scanned copies of the man’s divorce certificate from his first marriage and the certificate from his second wedding. There was a Word document that listed a couple of hundred email addresses and passwords to access those. Patrick said that this list had been compiled over a long time and was something that they’d want a record of; there would be the question of what this was all about. Clarke had been downloading porn here at his desk too, though text-based porn – not images. He had plenty of this and that brought more strange looks from the policemen.

Only the list of email addresses among the files on the computer might be relevant to the YOUNG investigation – the rest was of no interest to Harriet.

Patrick moved onto the internet searches conducted by Clarke and within seconds had something: “Gotcha!”

“What have you found?”

“Can I print from here?” Patrick raised a finger towards Harriet (she hoped that this denoted a polite request for her to wait a second) and spoke to one of the policemen.

“You’ll see it; fifth floor west printer.”

“Now, let’s see what we got here.” Patrick got up and went over to a printer in the far corner of the room. He soon returned with a couple of sheets of paper. “It’s a long list, but it’s a complete record of internet activity.”

“We’ll need his work phone records too, please.” Harriet gave the policemen before her a smile as she asked for these. In theory, she could demand such a thing though that would be counterproductive. Whatever end game Clarke had in mind when he’d been here altering records, she had no idea. Maybe nothing they found here would matter, but it just might. Therefore, she needed the timely cooperation of the Metropolitan Police.

*

Patrick wanted to smoke before they headed back to Thames House this afternoon. He had been unable to have a cigarette during their time inside Scotland Yard and Harriet wouldn’t let him smoke in the car when they drove back to their office (Scotland Yard and Thames House weren’t that far apart, but there was no Underground service and the use of taxis was frowned upon by the Security Service).

The pair of intelligence officers thus left the building and went outside onto the pavement. They’d kept their temporary access passes because the car was parked within the building’s grounds and they’d need to get back in.

After he lit his cigarette, Patrick had a question: “So, what do you honestly think of all of this?”

“I honestly think that it’s a bit of a rubbish time to come out and have a smoke. My hair doesn’t like the rain, Patrick.”

Harriet knew exactly what Patrick meant, but she chose to mess with him a little by pretending that the weather was the only thing on her mind. She did this because she’d been stuck inside the building behind them for the past few hours among people who continuously gave her and Patrick unwelcoming stares. She’d dealt with many police officers during her work at the Security Service, and had never before seen such hostility. The people who worked in the HOLMES department – she’d learnt today what HOLMES meant after hearing the backronym before: Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – really hadn’t liked ‘damn spooks’, as she heard them whisper, being in their workspace.

“You’ll still look great no matter how much it rains.” Patrick gave her a wink after he said this in what Harriet saw as yet another failed attempt to flatter her though pretend that he was being ironic. Only a moron wouldn’t be able to witness how he was around her and say that he didn’t have an almighty crush on her.

“Hurry up and smoke will you!”

“I’ll be done in a minute.” This time, she witnessed a millisecond of annoyance at her chastising him. “Again, what do you think of all this?”

“Jamie was right in what he said yesterday: this could be very important.” Harriet was back to business now. “At the very minimum, what we have here is a major criminal act being undertaken by this Mark Clarke character. If he changed those records for his own end, to then tip of that journalist and earn some money, then it’s nothing to do with us and we should leave it to the police. But…”

“But he changed that information last Wednesday!” Patrick butted in, showing how he had listened too and understood what had been said.

“Oh, I guess there’s the chance that he is psychic and he knew that Emma Cartwright was going to kill Christopher Young two days later and he could make some money out of that. Yet, I doubt that.”

“And there’s a good chance that she didn’t kill him too.” Patrick spoke of a briefing that they’d been given this morning by the investigating murder Detective Inspector in Wandsworth where he reminded them of Cartwright’s prowler report the month beforehand.

“Let’s stick to what we know for sure.” Harriet sought to sort this all out in her mind by verbalising it. “To begin with, Cartwright files a police report last month about a suspected prowler in her garden: the police make note of this but do nothing.

Last Friday, she comes home from work and finds Young dead. A neighbour calls Nine-Nine-Nine and the police arrive. They at once suspect and arrest Cartwright even though they had circumstantial evidence at best.”

“Then Clarke calls his journalist friend that night and spins his lie.”

“Exactly. Afterwards, his newspaper puts that in print because of Young’s job. The police look into that because it doesn’t match the records that they have. They further discover that Clarke changed the records on the national computer, which is not something that can be done by accident. They then try to speak to him Monday, but he disappeared that morning. They have no trace of him since then.”

“Something spooked him and so he ran…” Patrick was thinking what she was.

“Do you remember what his wife told the police: he expected to see something in the Sunday papers – further accusations against Cartwright, probably based on his initial lie – but didn’t.

So, he then realised that something was up and decided he didn’t want to stay around to face the consequences. He’s been missing for four days now too, despite all efforts to find him.”

“Harriet,” Patrick dropped his cigarette and trod on its remains, “this is conspiracy at best, a real X-File.”

“That it is, yet…” She paused and thought for a second in an effort to sum this up as Patrick had. However, she couldn’t find the right words and moved onto her next thought. “But to what end? Clarke probably did this for money, but The Sun didn’t pay him. Who would have paid him? Did he know that Young was going to actually get murdered?”

“Away from our missing Clarke, who is behind this? What is their angle?”

“I don’t know.” Harriet couldn’t get her mind around the motives of the person or persons or unknown who had set this whole YOUNG investigation off. Nevertheless, she wanted to find out just what the hell this was all about and she told herself that she probably wouldn’t stop until she knew everything.

   James G ,

Chapter Ten – No Women, No Children
The City Council House, Birmingham – November 16th 2013


Baxter had heard the saying before ‘no women, no children’ used in films. On the silver screen, a hitman – the role that he was arguably preforming – would make the statement that they wouldn’t murder women or kids as a moral statement. That was all fine in fiction, but Baxter had to live in the real world.

In a few minutes time, he was about to take the life of a woman.

He told himself that he shouldn’t feel guilty about doing such a thing, but he couldn’t help it. A little voice in Baxter’s mind told him that he was doing the wrong thing here. Yet, at the same time, he knew that it had to be done. Sonia Patel was another name on his list which needed crossing off.

*

Saturday morning in Birmingham was extremely busy with shoppers. Baxter had been in Britain’s ‘second city’ since daybreak and once the city centre came alive when the shops opened, thousands upon thousands of people had crowded into it. He’d heard the distinctive Brummie accent over and over again and it had reminded him of former Birmingham native soldiers that he’d served with over the years.

Those were good memories.

Only for a while had Baxter been in the city’s shopping districts though; his mission had taken him on a walk to the Victoria Square and the civic centre there that housed the council offices. The time spent wandering had all been about waiting and also getting a little feel for the city. While he had been waiting, he had been in contact with Kevin via text message as his colleague shadowed the woman whose death both of them were about to bring about.

Miss Patel was the Council Leader for Birmingham. The politician had a mixed British and Indian background and a long career in local politics here. She led a terribly busy life both professionally and socially, though much of her social activity revolved around her work. She was rarely alone and thus had presented a difficult target to pin down in one place where she could be vulnerable to attack. An opportunity had opened up today for Baxter to strike and it wasn’t one that he was going to miss.

Baxter walked across the open square towards the council building. Kevin was inside and shadowing Miss Patel and Baxter went straight towards them both. He made sure that he avoided eye contact with people milling about, though he knew that he couldn’t hide from them… nor the CCTV cameras that he knew were everywhere.

There was a ceremony going on with the council building. A local sportsman was being given an award for his sporting and charity work; normally such a thing would have occurred on a weekday, not at the weekend. Yet that personality had a very busy schedule and so it was happening today. There were hundreds of interested locals around, members of the local media and dignitaries in attendance. The actual ceremony wouldn’t take that that long and would occur within the building. However, Baxter walked through the crowd of people that were outside and up the main entrance steps that led inside.

Far fewer people were inside and there was no sign of any security guards. Kevin had just sent him a message (they were using ‘throw-away’ mobile phones that would soon be ditched) saying that their planned distraction was in progress, one which would keep those few guards busy, but even then there had been only a few of them around today anyway. No one appeared to be taking notice of him as he approached a flight of stone stairs off to his left and started to go up them.

There was a camera up above that Baxter kept his eyes upon as he went upwards. It was a standard-issue CCTV device linked to a central display point. It should have filmed him going towards the building’s first floor, yet Baxter had come inside here because that camera and all of the others had only moments ago had their power supply deliberately cut. He still didn’t like being under its gaze, despite it being dead.

The layout of the first floor was something that Baxter had been studying for the past few weeks (he’d even been thinking about it when he committed his assassination yesterday in south-east London) and he reckoned that he knew it by hand. He went straight along a long corridor and turned into a shorter one. At any moment, he expected to see someone else coming either towards him or out of a door from one of the many offices and small function rooms up here. Baxter was poised to duck his head and advert his gaze should that occur, but he was lucky in this not occurring.

He got to the door that he was looking for: there would be two or three people behind it and none would be expecting him.

*

Baxter didn’t like the idea of using a silencer. The idea of that was just the same as ‘no women, no children’: all well and good in theory, but not so great in practise. A silencer made a gun longer and also slowed down a bullet. Neither of these was particularly good for good gunfire because it took longer to draw the weapon and also gave those who were fired upon what could be a few vital extra seconds to save their lives. However, with a building like this, its high ceilings and generally empty rooms that would combine to cause echoes, there was a need for it. The council building was a public place with plenty of people around who would hear and recognise the sound of gunfire.

He also knew that a silencer also didn’t make gunfire something that people couldn’t hear. Nothing could kill the sound of a gun going off apart from a vacuum. The pop was something that those who knew what they were listening for would understand.

All of this didn’t matter at this moment in time though because he had his pistol out as he walked through the door that he opened.

“Excuse me…”

“What the devil…?”

Two of the people inside the room greeted him with these comments. They saw him come into the room and looked around from over on the other side. The first to speak was a young man in a business suit whose face at first showed annoyance then great alarm. The other man was twice the age of the other and instantly scared. Neither posed any threat to Baxter. He turned his attention to the woman sitting at the desk behind the two of them and aimed his gun that way.

Miss Patel did exactly what Baxter thought that she would: she had been starting to stand up but stopped to freeze in a moment of terror. Her eyes locked onto his and her mouth dropped open. Compassion almost swept over Baxter because she was so helpless in the face of death that she could clearly see.

Yet, he had a job to do and pushed that emotion aside as he applied pressure to the cold metal object in his hand with his trigger finger.

Pop.

Miss Patel went backwards a few steps under the force of the impact of the bullet and then collapsed to the ground. She fell away to the left, exactly the same way that the younger man was moving. Baxter’s gun was already lined up on him before he had a chance to do anything and he again squeezed the trigger.

Pop.

“Please… don’t… please…” Seemingly involuntarily, the older man had dropped to his knees. Baxter had just shot the two other people with him directly in the forehead, yet the man directed all of his attention towards the man with the gun. His arms extended outwards and Baxter could see the man’s eyes reddening before tears.

The man had seen his face though, and that required an unfortunate death sentence.

Pop.

At the very last second, the third person that Baxter had shot in the past few seconds had moved slightly to the side. The bullet that was fired at him struck him on the right-hand side of the face. It caused him to fall down on his side and there was a lot of blood. Baxter knew that the shot hadn’t been fatal though and so he took a few steps forward so that he was right over him. He took careful aim at the back of the man’s head…

Pop.

Baxter checked both the other man and also Miss Patel. His shots with those two had been perfect and they were both very dead.

The gun was now dropped onto the floor as Baxter took his phone out of one of his pockets and he walked back towards the open door through which he’d come.

*

Once his pre-written (and innocuous) text message was sent, Baxter walked briskly back the way that he came. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest and was sure that he could hear himself breathing heavily too. This reaction was not in response to what he’d done, he told himself, but what was about to happen.

The building’s fire alarms went off as Baxter reached the top of the stairs. By the time he’d reached the ground floor, Baxter was joined by people coming out of other doors and all heading for the main entrance as he was. The blazing noise was unsettling though very necessary to bring this reaction from everyone nearby.

He was instantly lost in the crowd; Kevin would soon be too as he came out of another door on the other side of the large building.





Chapter Eleven – Silly Speculation
Portcullis House, Westminster, London – November 18th 2013


Maybe it was because he had spent a little too much time with Michael recently than he usually would, but Williams was starting to find the other man a tad annoying. He knew exactly what to say in an interview with the media and didn’t need any coaching. Snyder had been far too forthcoming in offering ‘help’ though and wanted to talk to Williams now moments before it was to begin.

Williams waved him away and as he did so he hoped that the reporter who’d come to talk to him wasn’t taking too much note of this.

“Can we begin, John?”

“Of course, Tim.” Williams gave the man a good-natured smile. “When you’re ready…”

“As you know, Mister Williams,” Tim Allen was back to the formalities, “the murdered Sonia Patel spoke before your committee last week and it was her last public appearance. Can I ask your reaction to her untimely death?”

“I am still rather stunned by it all, Tim. When I heard the news, Saturday night, my initial reaction was one of sadness for her friends, family and the people of Birmingham that she served for so many years. Later, that turned to outrage that such a thing should have occurred.”

“Can you expand upon that, please?”

Allen worked for The Times. He had been a senior political journalist there for many years and Williams had known him all the time that he’d been an MP. The reporter was currently inside Williams’ office and seated opposite his host; they were on the chairs to the side of the room and away from Williams’ desk. Allen had his notepad out and was scribbling away like the old-fashioned journalist that he was, though he had a miniature tape-recorder in his lap too. His article would go online tonight and then into print for tomorrow morning.

Williams knew that Allen wanted him to further elaborate on what he’d said. That had been one of Snyder’s issues and Williams watched the other man – seated over at Williams’ desk – open his hands in an exaggerated manner to display some sort of signal that meant Williams should elaborate.

Of course he was going to say more! Williams knew what kind of journalist Allen was. The man worked for a serious newspaper and his readers would expect more than just the little that Williams had already said.

“Political violence is something that cannot be allowed. It cannot be justified, it cannot be excused and those who undertook it cannot be permitted to get away with what they have done.

My outrage comes from that someone would dare to do commit an act like that.

Miss Patel appeared before my committee last week. Several of my colleagues disagreed with some of her actions as Chief Executive, yet that disagreement was discussed. This country is democracy where our leaders are accountable to the ballet box. Politicians work with each other and compromise.

Politics cannot be solved with violent means, and certainly not with the barrel of a gun.

I am certain that I speak for all of my elected colleagues nationwide, despite their political affiliation, when I say that there is a lot of anger at what occurred in Birmingham. No one has the right to take the life of another, especially not over politics and certainly not in such a cowardly manner as in the murder of Miss Patel.”

“As you know, Mister Williams, the police in Birmingham are still investigating the matter…”

“And I wish them all possible success in that endeavour.” Williams didn’t usually like interrupting people, but he thought that such was the right thing to interject there.

“So do we all.” Allen gave a serious nod to that that Williams hoped denoted his agreement with what had just been said. “As I was saying, the Birmingham Police remain at the council officers where Sonia Patel was killed. In a statement this morning, the officer leading the investigation stated that they were still looking for the person or persons unknown who committed this act and were appealing to the public for assistance. There were apparently thousands of people in the immediate area of the crime, yet so far they have no real witnesses.”

“Yes…?” Williams didn’t understand where Allen was going with this.

“Several Birmingham M.P.s have already urged their fellow citizens to aid the police in any way that they can. Will you be echoing that call?”

“Of course, Tim. If anyone has any information at all, they should assist the Birmingham Police… just as they would in any other criminal investigation.”

“There have been comments made to the media from unnamed Westminster figures, Mister Williams, that many people have rushed to judgement with regards to Sonia Patel’s murder.” Allen finally came to his point.

“I sometime wish that ‘unnamed figures’ wouldn’t speak behind the cloak of anonymity. The police have stated that the murder was politically motivated by the evidence that they have and that should be the end of that.”

“There were two other people with Sonia Patel when she was murdered and there is speculation that their deaths may not have been as inconsequential as they seemed.”

“I simply cannot agree with that statement!” Williams realised that he lost his temper as he spoke, but couldn’t stop himself. Strangely, he saw that Snyder – still sitting silently over at the desk – didn’t make a gesture in reaction but rather gave a smile unseen by Allen. “Those two men were civil servants of Birmingham City Council. They worked with Miss Patel in representing over a million people of the city and their deaths are not ‘inconsequential’: they had loved ones who are in mourning today.”

“Such thoughts are commendable, Mister Williams.”

Allen’s remark here was something that Williams couldn’t understand. He wasn’t sure if the journalist was being patronising and just shutting him up. The question about what people were saying anonymously had been something that Williams had no choice but to react to. Those fellow MPs were cowards who were trying to spin a conspiracy theory or such like about Saturday’s events in Birmingham and trampling on the memory of three public servants who’d been callously murdered; those who had suggested such a thing were almost as bad as whoever had committed the acts of violence in the first place. Williams had felt that he had to put his feelings on this matter across as forcefully as he could so that Allen (and thus the readers of The Times) knew that he wasn’t going to play those games.

Innocent people had died and it was no time for political games with that.

“The Home Secretary,” after a moment’s pause, Allen was back to the interview, “wrote yesterday in the Mail that Birmingham Police would be fully supported by the security services in their investigation. Do you agree with her that this is a matter of national security?”

“I do, Tim; I fully support this assessment and action. Our intelligence services are tasked to uphold democracy and clearly stopping acts of political violence – in essence: domestic terrorism – is vitally important.

We can clearly not allow this to happen again. As the Birmingham Police do, the intelligence services have my humble backing.”

“Thank you, Mister Williams. That is really all I have to ask of you today.”

“It was my pleasure.” It hadn’t been; Williams wasn’t happy with how the interview had gone. “If you have any queries, any follow-up questions, contact me here today or if you cannot reach me my secretary will find me.”

Williams knew that Allen would write up his piece later and only parts of what he’d said would be included. The journalists might have questions with regard to clarifications, though Williams actually hadn’t said much in the short interview.

He stood up so that he could shake Allen’s hand before the man left.

*

“What’s wrong, John?”

“I overreacted to what he said.”

“Don’t fret over that. I think that was what he wanted.”

“Explain…?” Williams didn’t understand what Snyder meant.

“I said that you should speak to him in particular for a certain reason.” Snyder hadn’t arranged the interview with The Times, though when Williams had been talking to his friend on the phone last night Snyder had stated firmly that he believed Williams should do it. “He was angry about what some people were saying. He didn’t like the silly speculation and was waiting for someone to speak out against it.

Which you did quite well too.”

“That whole thing is rather odd, don’t you think? Why would people like Peterson, Smith and Weston make up things like that?” Williams referred to a trio of MPs who’d been giving anonymous briefings to the media about the political murders in Birmingham.

“They have nothing better to do: silly little people.” Snyder dismissed them with an offhand remark.

“Do you have any plans for the rest of the day, Michael?” Done with the matter and trying to move on, Williams changed the subject.

Before he could answer, Snyder’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and Williams watched his friend seemingly read a text message. As he did so, Snyder’s face gave an odd expression.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing really, just gossip.”

“Oh…?” The success of Williams’ political career was heavily built on gossip.

“Just a friend telling me that Emma Cartwright has been released from police custody.”

“Who is Emma Cartwright?” Williams had heard the name, but couldn’t place it.

“The domestic partner of Chris Young: the former Labour spin-doctor.”

“I see.” That gossip wasn’t anything worthy of attention. “So, as I asked, what are you doing for the rest of the day, Michael?”





Chapter Twelve – A Tedious Man
Notting Hill, London – November 19th 2013


Lauren Carter was someone who could honestly say that she enjoyed her job. She worked hard and was often under much stress, all for little immediate reward too, yet Lauren found herself satisfied by her work. Her whole adult life had been about politics and she now had a position right at the top of the pyramid of British politics.

Home at her place in London’s Notting Hill this evening, with her feet up in front of the television, Lauren had left her office only an hour ago. It was eight o’clock now and on weekdays, she usually left the office around Seven after getting there eleven or even twelve hours beforehand. To survive her long days, Lauren survived on caffeine-laced coffee during the week and a lot of sleep at the weekend.

The pressures of working in Downing Street directly for the incumbent Prime Minister had forced many of her co-workers to quit for less demanding roles, but Lauren revelled in it. Every day was different; there was always something going on. She was there when important decisions were being made and even, at times, had a hand in influencing them.

Lauren was the deputy to Daniel Lincoln, the Chief-of-Staff to the Prime Minister. Daniel enjoyed the prestige of being in charge of the PM’s office a little too much as far as she was concerned, yet Lauren knew that she did the real hard work there. She worked well with Daniel but was hoping that one day soon she would get the chance to replace him and take his position. It was only natural, she would tell herself often, to want the top job.

The Conservative Party paid Lauren’s salary, despite her working for the Government at No. 10 Downing Street. She had a little office next to Daniel’s slightly larger one and both were within shouting distance of that of the PM himself. On a normal working day, she and Daniel would work extensively with the PM in his day-to-day tasks. Their enemies were civil servants who sought to curtail what they were trying to do: make sure that the country was governed in the right way and that everyone was aware that the PM was doing a superb job.

Special Advisors to Ministers reported to Lauren and Daniel and that was an important part of their job. So too was acting as gatekeepers to the PM; his diary was arranged by them. Many people wanted the attention of the PM but they decided who and what was important. There were policy decisions that needed to be made and the PM relied upon his two principle advisors for this.

The stress of Lauren’s job came from everything that could and would go wrong. Unexpected events occurred every day, things didn’t go as planned with Government actions and people messed up. Problems would need a quick fix and responsibility for dealing with these would often fall on Lauren’s shoulders. Sometimes there were days that nearly drove her insane, yet she knew that it would all be worth it in the end. As far as she was concerned, the job that she was doing kept the Government on track and the PM in office. As number two to his principle aide, she reaped the benefits of it all.

Even though she was at home at the minute, with dinner in her lap, Lauren was still working. She had BBC News 24 on the screen and was paying more attention to that than she was the dinner that she'd hurriedly cooked for herself. There was no time in her life for entertainment on the television and she only watched it for the news. She preferred the rolling news channel for the subjects that it covered and she could leave it on while she ate and then turned to doing some ironing.

Lauren watched and listened as the news covered several different stories, many of which she paid more than cursory attention to. There was a piece on the upcoming by-election in Norwich that concerned visits being made to the Norwich South constituency by senior Conservative & Labour Party officials. She gave an unconscious nod of approval when the reporter there casually mentioned that the Parliamentary seat was expected to be held by the Conservative Party. A sports story came on next and Lauren took that moment to take her plate to the kitchen where it joined the rest of the washing up that needed to be done. She came back into the living room of her basement flat and sat down again to continue watching the television.

The news had moved onto another story, this one concerning the latest national political polling figures. She saw at once that these were different to the ones that she had seen and which had been discussed today at work. BBC News 24 had more optimistic figures than she and the others at Downing Street had seen. The television said that her party was polling five points behind the Labour opposition; she’d been told earlier today that they were eight, maybe nine points behind. Again, she gave her approval to what was on the television. The PM had other people working for him who were effective at muddying the waters in public so that things didn’t look as bad as they were.

For the millionth time, Lauren told herself that she was smart. Politics were her main interest in life, yet she had never wanted to be a politician. She worked for politicians though wouldn’t want to be one. To put your future in the hands of thousands of nameless and disloyal voters was crazy! She couldn’t lie like politicians did nor could she pretend to be loyal to principles. It just wasn’t her. Though she wouldn’t admit it out loud, she didn’t like politicians either: they were untrustworthy.

Lauren kept these feelings to herself though.

A politician appeared on the television screen just as she was thinking this. She tried to recall the man’s name, but it escaped her. Thankfully, a caption appeared to help her with that: John Williams, M.P. (Con., Camb. S).

Lauren gave his image a sneer. She’d never met the man personally, though she didn’t like him. He was one of the people that made an effort to make her life a little difficult. Despite being a Conservative Party MP like her boss, he acted in a rather ‘independent’ manner. He was critical of the Government and had even had the nerve to turn down a post within it. Daniel had submitted the idea to the PM a few weeks ago, one which she’d supported, to make him a junior minister to silence his rather effective criticism of the Government by bringing him aboard. He’d turned that down though and that had reflected just a little badly on the judgement of not only Daniel, but her too.

The man was a pain in the behind.

She listened to him now as BBC News 24 broadcast a short segment of speech that he’d given today in Birmingham. Lauren asked herself what he was doing there (he was a backbench MP from Cambridge after all) before she actually listened to the rubbish he was sprouting. He was talking about that murder there at the weekend of the council leader. He made her want to yawn; he was so damn boring.

Lauren had been with the PM yesterday when he’d been given a briefing on that whole thing by the Home Secretary (another grade one bore) and the Director-General of the Security Service (a self-important little man). In her opinion, the whole thing was overblown. Yet, the Birmingham Incident, as people were now calling it, had gained national importance because the woman who was killed there – a Labour politician, not even a Conservative! – had been killed to make some sort of political statement. No one could say what that political statement was, as Daniel had quietly pointed out, yet that didn’t seem to matter.

Lauren wished that the whole thing would go away; the Government and the media needed to focus on more important things, like what a great job the PM was doing even with the country in the dire economic straits that it was.

The annoying Cambridgeshire MP was soon off the screen and the news moved on: she was glad of that and hoped that she wouldn’t hear any more of the tedious man.





Chapter Thirteen – We Have A Problem
Richmond, North Yorkshire – November 21st 2013


Lord North had had a very busy past few days.

He had completed the final negotiations needed in a long-term attempt to take control of a small general aviation company based up here in the North-East. It had cost him far more money than he’d planned, as well as more effort than he’d intended, though the Newcastle-based ‘Durham Air-Systems’ now belonged to him. His new enterprise would continue providing technical support to private airlines and civil authorities that operated aircraft.

In addition, Durham Air-Systems would continue to train people on the use of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs).

While in Newcastle, Lord North had been gaining control of another organisation too. For several years, he’d been on the board of the ‘Centre for Democracy’. This was a policy institute – a think-tank – that had its origins in the North-East. The think-tank was headquartered in London, yet this group of right-wing political theorists had started out on the Tyne before moving to the capital. He’d only ever had a passing interest in the work that the think-tank did until recently. Lord North had come to see that it could be important in aiding his future vision and so set about trying to replace board members with those who shared his interests. This had been finally done and in the future, when the think-tank commissioned and then issued scholarly political reports, those would represent the views that he wished to have put across to the right people.

Other recent travels of Lord North’s had seen him go down to Norfolk. The Conservative Party candidate standing there in the upcoming by-election was someone that he knew and who shared many of Lord North’s political views. The Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Norwich South was getting a lot of support from the national organisation, though he was remaining loyal to his long-term backer despite that. Lord North had shown his face there in Norfolk and made nice with other Conservative activists. He was certain that they had no idea of his own intentions nor while he was putting so much effort – and, more importantly, money – into the soon to be held election there.

Back here in North Yorkshire, Lord North had been holding meetings within the town of Richmond. He had many political connections to the town and had put a lot of money into local businesses there.

Richmond was one of the locations across North Yorkshire that would play host to an official royal visit early next month. The notable castle and the historic Georgian Theatre Royal would be graced by Her Majesty’s presence. With him being a well-respected local dignitary, Lord North was on the organising committee for the visit and this meant liaising with another Yorkshire native: George Tate, the Private Secretary to the Sovereign.

Throughout the year, Lord North had been making a great effort to get close to Tate. Tate was the principle adviser to the Monarch – a very modern courtier – and someone that Lord North wished to influence. However, Tate was no fool and wasn’t someone who could easily be persuaded to fall into Lord North’s camp.

“The theatre is…”

“… small but an important local institution.” Lord North interrupted his guest as the two of them sat within view of the Eighteenth Century listed building.

“Quaint was the word I was going to use, Edward.”

“That it is too.” Seated across from Tate inside a small restaurant within Richmond as the two of them had a light afternoon lunch, Lord North gave an agreeable nod.

“The visit by Her Majesty will bring about much public interest in the theatre and hopefully attract more patrons. Is that not what you would like to see, Edward?”

“It certainly is. The theatre needs more patronage that either I or other concerned locals can give it. Personally, making a visit there is one of my favourite pastimes. I would be unhappy to see it closed down.”

Lord North didn’t mean anything that he was saying. He was no fan of the theatre, this one or fancy ones down in London, yet he understood that many people were fans of the stage; many of which were important people too. Tate was one of those and Lord North had chosen this approach to gain the man’s favour. Next year, when Lord North would want something further from the man, then Tate would (hopefully) recall this meeting and all the rubbish that Lord North spewed about it. More would have to come to strengthen their relationship, yet this was the initial building block.

They would continue to sit here and talk about the theatre for the next hour as Lord North made as much effort as possible into keeping his visitor happy.

*

Later that evening, after his London visitor had left and before he himself could, Lord North had another (this time unexpected) guest come to see him. Michael Snyder had come all the way up from London and wouldn’t wait until Lord North arrived home; Snyder had come to a solicitor’s office in Richmond that Lord North occasionally used to conduct meetings.

“Edward, we have a problem.”

“Close the door.” Lord North didn’t like the fact that Snyder was talking with the door open to anyone who might be listening outside. He watched as Snyder did as commanded and then as the younger man came across the room to him with his concerned look back. “Couldn’t this wait, Michael?”

“No, it could not. Damn…” Snyder paused in what he was saying and let out a groan of apparent frustration as he sat down beside Lord North. “I’m not sure where to start…”

“Tell me what the problem is.”

“Okay, there is a policeman named Mark Clarke…”

Lord North listened with a growing sense of unease as Snyder related his tale. Clarke, he was told, was an officer with the Metropolitan Police and an old friend of Kevin Nye; the latter being a former policeman that Lord North knew well because the man had been in his employ in various functions for the past few years. Nye had been using Clarke to check information that Stevens & Co. had been receiving and the relationship between them had been cash based.

Snyder wasn’t sure what Clarke had exactly done, and why he had done it too, but it appeared that the policeman had been tampering with the police national computer. He explained to Lord North that he had changed some information there concerning Chris Young, a man that Baxter had gone and killed. Moreover, he tipped off a journalist with this false information so that the newspapers had declared that Young had been murdered by his girlfriend.

There had been an immediate internal police investigation – Snyder didn’t know why this had occurred so quickly – into Clarke and this false data in the police national computer. The Metropolitan Police had gone looking for Clarke, but he’d disappeared. Even worse, the police had been joined by MI-5 in looking for him as well. Snyder had no idea too how MI-5 had become involved, and to what end, but they were looking into Clarke and his activities.

“What does Nye say?” Lord North spoke up after Snyder finished with what he had to tell.

“He doesn’t know what Clarke was doing messing around with the police computer, or why his colleagues got onto him so quick either. He’s heard nothing from Clarke and doesn’t think that it would be a good idea for him to go looking either.”

“And Liz? You brought her in because of her service at Thames House: what does she think her former colleagues there will do?” Lord North had always been impressed with Liz Jackson: her intelligence, her insight and her investigative skills.

“She has no contact with anyone working there, yet she has theories on how they would get involved in a situation like this and possibly what they might do as part of an investigation.

Chris Young was a major political figure and once the Met. Police realised that someone had done what Clarke had, they would have seen some sort of conspiracy taking place. Add his position and that together, and someone high up at Scotland Yard decides to call in the spooks.

They have been looking for Clarke for the last week. Liz believes that if he hasn’t been found yet, then he’s either in hiding using a plan to run that he had long ago arranged, or he’s dead. Nye said that Clarke had a lot of personal problems and he might have killed himself.”

“Really?” Lord North could never understand suicide.

“The man’s world has come apart, so it is a possibility. In fact, from what Liz says, that would be most beneficial. He could tell M. I. Five many, many things – even lie to them – to get himself out of trouble. They’ll then come after Nye.”

“But, Nye is dead.” Lord North had long ago learnt to always cover his bases.

“Officially he is, yes. Like Liz is as well, they both have death certificates and graves.”

“Can we have our people find Clarke and silence him, if he is still alive?”

“I can look into having that done.”

“Do it. We’re doing something that is too important to risk exposure, Michael.”





Chapter Fourteen – A Night Out
Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire – November 22nd 2013


Patrick hadn’t known where Tewkesbury was. Harriet was amused at this; she had no idea where the town was, but it had been great to hear him admit that he didn’t know something. He fancied himself as some sort of walking encyclopaedia, yet he’d let himself down this morning.

The two of them had come out to Gloucestershire following the M-4 and M-5 motorways from London while driving a plain, unremarkable Ford Fiesta. Patrick had been at the wheel while Harriet had brought herself up to speed on the YOUNG investigation as they came here.

BBC Crimewatch had last night televised a brief appeal for information on the whereabouts of the missing Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke. The Metropolitan Police had put in this request, yet it was one originally made by Harriet and Patrick acting on behalf of the Security Service. Clarke’s name, age and occupation had been broadcast along with his picture. The programme stated that he was suspected in participating in ‘misconduct while in public office’ and for attempting to ‘pervert the course of justice’.

All sorts of calls had come into the programme itself, Crimestoppers and the national 999 service. Harriet had been amazed at what people rang up to say about the appeal for information on Clarke. There had been nutters and the misguided, as well as people who had called to give all sorts of information on Clarke’s long time spent with the police. Three particular calls though had been of value and all of them had pointed towards northern Gloucestershire.

*

A trio of Metropolitan Police officers (in their own vehicle) had come with Harriet and Patrick and they all met up at the Gloucestershire Constabulary headquarters building in Quedgeley. Quedgeley was located on the outskirts of Gloucester and not that far from Tewkesbury: a location where those three phone calls from ‘concerned citizens’ had pointed to Clarke being seen in recently.

“From what we know of Clarke, he likes a drink at the weekend whether he’s working or not. On Friday and Saturday nights in Walthamstow, he would pub crawl around several bars and often times he would be all on his lonesome too.” The lead policeman from London, Detective Inspector Lavelle, had spent the past week and a half learning as much as he could about the missing Clarke.

“Tewkesbury has more than a few pubs for him to choose from.” Harriet looked over at the Gloucestershire policeman who made this remark. He was a plain-clothes detective who sat when everyone else stood and gave off an uninterested attitude.

“He was apparently in the Golden Lion there last Friday night. The call came from a public payphone down the road from there saying he made a scene of himself and was remembered because of his London accent.”

“He said he was a policeman, but got into a fist fight.” A tut came with that. “It made him more than memorable.”

Two other Gloucestershire policemen seemed keener on helping their London colleagues – and the two people from ‘the Government’, as Harriet and Patrick had been introduced as – than the first one who’d spoke.

“The two other phone calls mentioned another pub: the Two Bells. If what I’m reading is correct, this one doubles as a bed-and-breakfast.” Patrick had thrown himself into the YOUNG investigation and had shown more interest in it than Harriet had expected. “If he was staying there, surely that might have been mentioned. Still, I reckon that that is another place we should check tonight.”

“There’s eight pubs in the town and we’ll have people visit each one tonight and tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Inspector Lavelle.”

“What is Clarke’s connection with Tewkesbury, if I may ask?” The first Gloucestershire policeman had a question. From what Harriet could gather, it was clear from his tone that he didn’t like the man being in his county.

“His mother originally comes from Ashchurch. It’s a little town…”

“Rather a village, to be honest.”

“A little village then, outside of the town and beside the motorway.” Patrick got back to what he was saying following the minor interruption. “He visited his grandmother there when he was a child and following his mother’s death too. Clarke probably has fond childhood memories and thought he would escape out here.”

Inspector Lavelle lifted a file folder as he spoke up: “We still have no idea what he’s doing for money. His debit card and bank account haven’t been touched. His phone hasn’t been active since he left his home the other week and we’ve had a monitor on his wife’s communications: phone and email.

Clarke has cut himself off from the world he had in London.”

“He’s starting anew here. I’d guess that he is trying to make friends – hence the pub crawls – and possibly try to begin a new life here. What we need to look into, if we don’t pick him up tonight,” Patrick, Harriet realised, was eager to get on with things, “is where he is staying. We should call, or even better, pay a visit to as many B-and-Bs in the area as possible. We’ll show his photo around because he won’t be using his real name. I doubt that he rented a car because you need valid I.D. and a debit card for that, so he probably paid cash for a second-hand one – that’ll be hard to check.”

“You’ve done this before, Mister Cole.” One of the other Gloucestershire policeman gave his acknowledgement to Patrick’s investigative skills using his alias.

*

The market town of Tewkesbury was just as busy as anywhere else on a Friday night in Twenty-First Century Britain. The pubs and restaurants in the town centre started to get busy after seven o’clock and within the hour many were full of patrons. Many youngsters went down to Gloucester and Cheltenham for a night out, yet still many locals chose to have a night out in their home town.

If Clarke had decided to come for into the town to drink tonight, Harriet knew that there wouldn’t be many places that he could be nor that many people around that he could hide among.

Patrick had made the decision for the two of them that he and Harriet would go to the Two Bells. They drove up to the small pub from Quedgeley and went into there just before eight o’clock. Patrick got himself a pint of bitter than he kept sipping at, while Harriet purposely made a comment at the bar about not drinking so she could drive and thus had a glass of cola. The young, but round and tattooed barmaid seemed to pay little notice to them apart from when they were at the bar. When they sat down at a corner table, Harriet noted that no one else directed their attention to them.

Harriet sat with her back against the wall and looked around. The pub had low ceilings and was dimly lit. There were small groups of people and a few lonesome drinkers in here. She spotted groups of work-friends, couples and married men out on their own. Most were seated at tables or standing in the open bar area, yet there were a few at the bar itself. There was a borderline drunk leaning against the bar who seemed to want to make conversations with anyone that he could; Harriet decided that when she went back to the bar she would humour him so as to not draw too much attention to herself.

Patrick took his pint outside with him when he went to smoke. There was a beer garden out there and they’d agreed on the way here that he would go out when he thought there were people out there, he could engage in conversation with. She knew that Patrick could pass for an easy-going, friendly chatterbox when he wanted to – he would gossip out there and make an attempt to bring up the recent presence of a passing outsider from London who might have been in here the week before.

A young, good-looking guy gave Harriet several glances after Patrick had temporarily left her alone. He was with two of his friends and stared at her while laughing with his friends. Harriet averted her gaze when she saw him looking in a manner that she hoped was interpreted as she not being interested. The young guy didn’t make an attempt to come over to her, and she guessed that it was down to Patrick only being outside.

Just as Patrick came back in from the beer garden, and a gust of cold air momentarily filled the inside of the pub, someone else came in through the front door.

It was Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke.

Harriet had looked at the man’s picture enough times in the past week to know it was him. She saw Patrick do a double-take as he sat down, yet she had no need to check. She recognised him past the moustache that he’d grown and the reading glasses he wore. His dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and pointy chin gave him away. He’d combed his hair different and possibly had it lightened in colour in another effort to change how he looked, yet that was him now going to the bar.

There was no music in the pub, only the noise of people talking, so she couldn’t clearly hear him order a drink at the bar despite straining her ears to do so. That final confirmation of a London accent wasn’t needed though.

“That’s him!” Patrick had leaned closer and hissed the remark to her.

“I know!”

“Get on the phone to Lavelle, Harriet. He’s at one of those other pubs up the High Street.”

Harriet took out her phone on Patrick’s command and instantly searched through her contact list for Inspector Lavelle. She found his number and pushed the call button as she raised the phone to her ear.

At the same time Patrick stood up from the table that he’d just sat back down at and went over towards the bar and Clarke.

The phone rang five times before Inspector Lavelle answered: “Hello?”

“This is Bishop,” like Patrick, Harriet had a simple-to-remember alias, “we have eyes on our London friend here in the Two Bells.”

“Give me a few minutes. Don’t do anything rash, will you?”

“We know what we’re doing.”

Harriet killed the connection and the put the phone back into her handbag. Her hand searched her bag for something afterwards though she kept her eyes upon Patrick and Clarke at the bar. Harriet soon found what she was looking for and slid it out while keeping it within her palm.

Meanwhile, Patrick had stood at the bar like Clarke was. They were separated by the drunk man that appeared to live in that position. Her partner from the Security Service was getting another drink from the barmaid (despite having a glass still a third full on the table where she was), while Clarke stood waiting for a barman to finish pouring his pint of Guinness.

What Harriet currently had in her hand was technically illegal to carry. It was miniature cattle-prod type device that would deliver an electrical charge from its end if utilised. She carried it for her own protection on the exceedingly rare occasions when she thought that she might need it to prevent harm coming to her. She had it out of her handbag now because she was a little bit nervous. Clarke was standing just before her with apparently no idea that either she or Patrick over there were here to assist in his arrest. They had no powers of arrest and the Gloucestershire Constabulary officers that should be hurrying their way here now along with Inspector Lavelle would do that.

Clarke might do something to stop that from happening and she wanted to be ready to protect herself should she find herself accidently in his way if he fled.

At the exact moment that she thought this, Clarke decided to do what she feared he would.

For a long time afterwards, Harriet would wonder what exactly caused Clarke to do what he did. She would be denied knowledge of what caused him to turn to the drunk man beside him and shove that man straight at Patrick. Both fell to the ground with arms and legs everywhere… and booze soaking each of them too. The later assumption would be that he saw Patrick looking at him the wrong way and overreacted. All she saw was him do that and then flee towards the back of the pub among the uproar that that caused.

Many people reacted to the sudden intrusion in their night out.

Harriet unconsciously stood up and went forwards as she lost sight of Clarke. There were shouts of annoyance – even some laughter that she would find odd – in the commotion that was caused by Clarke’s action. People got in the way of her moving towards Patrick as he tried to get up off the floor and they also tripped over each other.

Maybe someone watching from a distance in a detached manner would have found the whole scene amusing.

“The garden!” Patrick screamed in her direction and Harriet turned her head that way as she saw that the back door leading to the beer garden was open.

Moments later, four policemen including Inspector Lavelle walked into the hubbub inside the Two Bells. Clarke was long gone though.