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

Chapter Twenty – Mission: Failure
Cosham, Portsmouth – November 30th 2013


This afternoon’s mission was going just as all of them had gone for Baxter: successful. The planning had been spot on and there had been no untoward surprises that would threaten its conclusion. Very soon, he would be finished with what he had to do here inside this house down on the South Coast and could get away.

He’d entered the house in suburban Cosham, on the northern outskirts of the city of Portsmouth, via the back door. Baxter had a skeleton key with him designed for this particular lock and so entered the house with ease. The ground floor of the shared house had been crossed and Baxter had gone up onto the first floor. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom here in this three storey building, with another bedroom above him. He’d stayed on the first floor though because that was where he had work today.

This was an old house that had recently had much work done to it. Baxter knew that years ago a family would have lived here before someone had brought it as a buy-to-let purchase. The loft had been converted into another, larger bedroom and then the house rented out through a letting agent to individual, single tenants. These were low-paid workers who might as well have lived alone apart from the shared kitchen and bathroom. During that internal remodelling, the building’s electrical wiring had been replaced and the infrastructure to that relocated from a sensible location on the ground floor up to a cupboard in the hallway on the first floor. It was before that cupboard that he crouched now, hard at work.

Baxter had recently spent a little bit of time learning how to do this. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but with a bit of basic knowledge and a malicious intent, it could be done. His aim was to cause an overloading of the electrical circles here in the house so that the usage of multiple electrical appliances at once could cause the system to become dangerously overloaded. In conjunction with his intent to soon go back downstairs, do other work to the wiring around household appliances down there before turning them on, Baxter was soon about to commit a major piece of arson here.

He could hear noises above him. That bedroom in what was once the loft contained to people who, by the sounds of it, were having passionate sex up there this afternoon. There were grunts, groans and the excessive creaking of a bed. He’d watched one of those people doing that arrive only ten minutes ago and before that had carefully made sure that the other person up there, the young male tenant with the name of Paul Plummer who rented the bedroom, hadn’t left. Every other week, he could greet the man who came to visit him for a few hours on the Saturday afternoon at the front door and go upstairs with him to do as what they were doing now. The two of them never met anywhere else but here and were never together for very long.

There were lots of reasons behind this, primarily because the elder visitor was a married man and a locally-known famous face: the MP Clive Valance.

The continuation of the noises told Baxter that he still had plenty of time to do what he was. He’d come to look at this electrical system earlier in the week and taken away a short video recording that he’d made of it for reference. Yet, this was all still something new to him and was nowhere as easy as he’d expected it to be. There was the worry in his mind of it all going wrong and also the ever-present danger that he might accidently electrocute himself.

He was rushing despite knowing that he had time to spare.

The opening of the door on the landing above him made him jump. It came all of a sudden: without any warning. He momentarily froze before his mind commanded his body to move backwards as fast as possible.

“Give me a second, will you? Jesus…”

Baxter was trying to scamper backwards into the shadows as light from the bedroom door upstairs lit the hallway. There was nowhere for him to hide though and he also realised that the electrical cupboard was open.

Before he could think of what to do, there was movement on the stairs to follow the spoken remark. He knew at once that it was the young tenant and within seconds the twenty-something lad was going to come face to face with him.

Baxter silently swore before beginning to stand up.

Plummer reached the hallway on which Baxter was standing very quickly. He clearly wasn’t paying enough attention to his surroundings and almost ran straight into the intruder into his home. He stopped his brisk walk down towards the bathroom just in time to understand that someone was here who shouldn’t have been.

“Who the hell are you?”

There was a fear in the young man’s voice. He had a towel wrapped around his face and wore nothing else. Plummer was as helpless as a baby and sounded just like one too.

Baxter had had just enough time to pull out his gun before being confronted as he was. He chose to say nothing and instead directed the barrel of that towards Plummer’s face before pulling the trigger.

There was no silencer attached to the gun because Baxter hadn’t come here with the intention of using it unless he faced an extreme emergency as he was now. There was an almighty BANG that at once set about echoing throughout the empty hallways and the stairs.

Baxter had stepped back as he’d fired because he knew that his gunshot was going to make an almighty mess out of Plummer, yet he had still felt his partially-covered face being hit by fragments. This would be blood, brain tissue and tiny bits of skull bone. He’d shot Plummer with a high-powered 9mm automatic pistol from the distance of a few feet and that wasn’t going to bring about a pleasant experience. He was thus left covered with bits of the young man.

There was a near-overwhelming Baxter urge to wipe his face, but Baxter didn’t have time for that. The mission had gone wrong yet it still had to be completed. The real target was still upstairs and would have in no doubt heard the shot and realised that danger was fast coming his way. There wouldn’t be anything that Valance would be able to do about that, but Baxter wanted to be up there before he tried to do something.

The mission orders were not for Baxter to kill him in the manner of which he set out to do as he raced up the stairs two at a time towards him, but there was nothing else to be done. He would shoot him like he’d shot his young, secret lover and then get out of here as fast as he could.

Seconds before he reached the top of the stairs, Baxter heard an almighty crash that almost rivalled that of his gunshot moments before. He realised that something big had been through across the open doorway. Whatever it was – furniture, maybe? – it was blocking much of the daylight that had lit the top of the stairs.

Baxter swung his pistol towards the doorway as he reached the top of the stairs. He kept his attention focused ahead of him though also quickly looked down to see wood and clothes blocking his entrance into the bedroom. Valance had clearly used what must have been a lot of strength to push over his young lover’s wardrobe so that he had a little more time to live.

“Show yourself. I mean you no harm.” Baxter, of course, meant Valance immense harm. He didn’t suspect that the man would believe him; he spoke so that his target would stop what he was doing and thus unwillingly give Baxter more time to get at him.

No vocal response came, but there was another noise. There was another crash and this one sounded like a lot of glass being broken. Baxter attempted to get his footing right so he could step over the destroyed wardrobe while his mind tried to dismiss the crazy idea as to what Plummer was doing inside the bedroom ahead.

He told himself that there was no way his suspicion was correct…

… Clive Valance wouldn’t have jumped out of a three storey window!

*

Baxter still couldn’t get his head around the idea of what had occurred when he reached the car that Liz was sitting in. She started to drive away the moment that he’d closed the door and before he’d even sat down properly. The result of this was that he whacked the side of his head against the window – this one didn’t break – before he could reply to her urgent question of ‘what happened’.

“They caught me in the house unawares and I had to shoot Plummer.”

“Not Valance?”

“I never got the chance, Liz.”

“What happened to him then?

“He jumped out of the window two storey’s up!”

“Could he have survived that?”

“I don’t think so; I took a look at him.” After Valance had done what he had, Baxter had shot out of the house to see what he become of the man before the neighbours started showing up. “He was dead.”

“That’s good news at least. It’s not the way we wanted things, but it’ll still do for now.”

Baxter opted to say nothing in reply. Liz appeared happy enough as she drove the car towards the A3(M) motorway, but he wasn’t. He considered today’s mission to have been a failure no matter the end result had been that the target Valance had lost his life.





Chapter Twenty–One – The Other Woman
Cosham, Portsmouth – December 1st 2013


Jane Snyder knew that this was going to be a fantastic story.

Everything that she’d found out so far was set to make sure that when this was written, her story would be talked about and get her noticed. If she was lucky enough, she might even get away from the career low point that was The Daily Express.

She was currently standing outside the Queen Alexandra Hospital in north Portsmouth. There were other journalists here too; all of them were waiting in the rain for a statement to be made by the hospital concerning a patient of theirs. Checking her watch, she saw that it was just coming up to ten o’clock. Any minute now, one of the Queen Alexandra’s senior administration people (someone who had been making anonymous statements to the media since yesterday) would be coming out. Jane had spoken to that man on the phone and had already quoted him – as ‘a senior hospital source’ – commenting upon the patient inside. The man had given her and others some good information; this had been much better than what the media had been able to get from Hampshire Constabulary.

What was soon to be said would only form a minor part of the story Jane was soon to write, yet it would be needed for overall balance.

When the hospital administrator walked out of the main entrance, he was flanked by two civilian security guards. There had been several attempts by the media to enter the Queen Alexandra, and the guards had been deployed inside the doors along with a trio of police officers outside them too. Both sets of security people parted like the Red Sea before the well-dressed man who approached the media throng.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for waiting patiently. I have a short statement to make and, unfortunately, will not be able to answer any of your questions.

A thirty-nine year-old man was admitted to the Queen Alexandra yesterday afternoon after being brought here by South Coast Ambulance Services. He had fallen from a window three stories high in a suburban property not far from the hospital itself.

It was subsequently confirmed that this man was Clive Valance, a resident of Alverstock in Gosport. Mister Valance is a Member of Parliament and a noted local citizen.

He suffered multiple injuries from his fall. For privacy reasons, I cannot go into details, but I am allowed to inform you that he had grave internal injuries as well as breakages and fractures to several bones. He is currently unconscious and members of his family are with him.

With assistance from Hampshire Constabulary, a second person was found within the house from where Mister Valance fell by South Coast Ambulance Services. This man had sadly passed away from injuries that he sustained. I cannot comment further on that matter and would request that you in future direct any media enquires with regard to him to Hampshire Constabulary.

Mister Valance himself is in a serious condition and needs further medical attention. I urge members of the media to please refrain from attempting to enter the Queen Alexandra, trying to talk to staff from here and harassing people who they suspect of being relatives of Mister Valance.

That is all that I have to say… thank you.”

Nothing at all that she didn’t already know had been said and Jane was annoyed at having to wait around for such a statement, but that was all part of her job. As she finished scribbling up her notes of what had been said, she couldn’t help but smile to herself at the admonishment delivered to the media. The man was a right fool: didn’t he think that one of her colleagues would later allude to his behaviour after they had no more use for him?

Jane pushed her notepad back into her bag and then dropped her pen in there too. She had finished here and was now planning to go into Portsmouth proper to the headquarters of the police in the city. There was another press conference there in an hour – one which would probably be less informative than this one, she reflected – and she had to go find a taxi. As she turned away from the hospital entrance, journalists all around her were departing too and she bumped into one of them.

“Hello, Jane.”

“Oh…”

“How are you?” It was Lisa Williams: the other woman.

*

For sixteen years – half their lives – the two of them had been friends. They’d met on their second day at university and been near inseparable since. First through their three years at Imperial College London, then their careers, their marriages and their children they’d stayed firm friends. Their husbands had become as close as they were because Jane and Lisa shared such a close bond. They’d said that Lisa’s son and Jane’s daughter would end up getting married.

Then they’d fallen out.

Jane’s husband was a good man, but had flaws like everyone. Michael’s was that he couldn’t keep his flies done up. She’d long ago just got over it and ignored it: Michael was a great father and husband otherwise. Then, Michael had gone and jumped into bed with Lisa over the New Year. Lisa had confessed at once to her friend (but not her husband) and they’d both tried to pretend that it hadn’t happened. Jane had never had Michael go to bed with someone that she’d known before and the fact that Lisa had been his latest conquest had irked her. She had been secretly furious at Lisa for doing such a thing: Lisa knew what Michael was like and shouldn’t have put herself in a situation where she’d allowed him to do that with her.

Lisa’s birthday had fallen in late April and the four of them had got together as they usually did. The two betrayers had given no signs away to suggest that they’d both done what they had and Jane was certain that John had no idea of what his wife and friend had got up to. Jane had spent that whole night angry though. She hadn’t liked seeing the two of them seated opposite each other in the restaurant and had to suppress her boiling rage.

Her best friend had betrayed her and every time she looked at her, Jane could picture Lisa having sex with Michael.

John had been the innocent one in this situation and Jane hadn’t wanted to hurt him. The two of them had never been close but he was a nice enough guy. Moreover, he practically saved the life of Jane and Michael’s daughter Emily when the youngster was very young. The then three years-old Emily had almost drowned when the four adults and two children had all taken a holiday together in Crete. John, then working a political researcher for an MP as Michael was, had given her mouth-to-mouth and restarted her breathing.

After that, Jane could never imagine even doing anything small to upset John because her daughter was still alive because of him.

Jane had decided to move on from Lisa. She hadn’t caused any drama – just ended their friendship. She had refused to take her former friend’s calls, stopped meeting her for coffee and then left The Daily Telegraph. Though he hadn’t said anything, Michael had known why this had occurred. On the other hand, as far as she knew, Lisa’s husband was only passingly aware that his wife and Jane were no longer friends.

Not since May had Jane spoke to Lisa… until today.

*

“You’re looking good, Jane. Have you lost weight?” Jane hadn’t responded to Lisa’s first question and Lisa had followed it up with another one.

“No, not really.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Are you going down to Southsea – to the police station there?”

“I guess.”

“How are you getting there? Knowing you, I bet you don’t have your car with you.” Lisa wasn’t letting up. “I have mine with me. Come on, I’ll give you a lift down there. Getting a taxi down from here won’t be easy: it isn’t like London here.”

“Erm…” Lisa’s behaviour had thrown Jane.

“Come on, I’m parked not far from here. It’s a two minute walk, if that.”

Jane wasn’t strong enough to resist.

Lisa was now driving a year-old silver Mercedes. Jane cast an admiring glance over it as she got into it and wondered how much it had cost Lisa and John.

“I like the car, Lisa.”

“John got it for me.”

“How is he doing?”

“He’s okay.”

Jane noticed how quickly things had turned. A few minutes ago, she hadn’t been able to shut Lisa up; now the other woman was killing off conversation starters. She couldn’t not talk though as they headed into Portsmouth and the Central Police Station where they both were going to have to go for work purposes.

“What do you think of this whole thing with Valance?” Jane thought that she’d be best talking about work.

“There’s more to it than him falling out of a window.”

“Yes, I know.” Michael had told her some really interesting gossip that he’d picked up about the grievously-wounded MP.

“The young guy in the house was shot in the face wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. The police found condoms and… stuff there; they were lovers.”

“Michael told me…” Jane noticed how the mention of her husband’s name caused Lisa to stiffen a little so she stopped herself mid-sentence.

“He said what, sorry?” Lisa recovered very quickly.

“He told me that the security services think Valance jumped out of the window because whoever killed his boyfriend was there to kill him. He landed in a bush otherwise he’d be dead.”

“How does he know that?”

“You know him, he has friends everywhere.”

A pregnant silence followed this remark. Lisa didn’t have a reply and Jane had run out of things to say. It was talk of Michael that caused this.

After a few minutes, when they got stuck in a little bit of mid-morning traffic along the M-275 that lead into the city, Jane thought of a way to move the conversation on again: “What do you think the police will have to say? Will we get anything more than that near nonsense back at the hospital?”

“No, they’ll say as little as possible. If it’s right what you say, with the security services being involved, then the police will say very little indeed.”

“Did you ever meet Valance?”

“No, Jane, I didn’t. Did you?”

“Once. He knows my editor from university – Exeter, I think – and we briefly met. He was not a nice man. Tribal politician through and through, who thought any Conservatives were ‘Servants of Satan’ – that’s the term I think he used.”

“John said something similar about him when I asked.”

“Did you know about his previous on-the-record remarks about homosexuals?” Jane had read through some of these comments that Valance had made over the past few years concerning homosexuals and gay marriage. None of it was nice and it was all quite ironic, in a sad way.

“I did.” Lisa gave a firm nod. “You’ll put them in your story, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course. I know you will too.”

“If he ever gets out of the hospital, his career is over.”

“That’s a given, Lisa.”

“Yes, John will be happy – he never liked him.”

Again, the conversation came to a halt. This time, Jane didn’t try to think of anything more to add. Instead she looked out of the window towards the urban landscape of the city as they entered it via the motorway. Portsmouth Harbour was over on Lisa’s side; Jane’s view was just of buildings.

She wasn’t concentrating on them nor any longer about the story with Valance. Her thoughts instead were about being with Lisa and talking with her again after so long. She was pleasantly surprised that it hadn’t been as terrible as she feared.

Maybe they could be friends again…?





Chapter Twenty–Two – Hidden Agenda
Downing Street, Central London – December 3rd 2013


Today should have been a great day, yet it had been the opposite. Like all days that started out going good and then went bad, what had caused all of the problems that Lauren had to deal with had come so unexpectedly that no one in the PM’s office could have expected it.

Lauren’s job was to anticipate these things though: that was what Daniel said though after he finished shouting.

*

The stressful day had been brought about by revelations that emerged today concerning Joanne Miller. The Home Secretary was going to be accused by The Times tomorrow of personal financial misconduct that amounted to public fraud. A Government-friendly source at the newspaper had tipped off Downing Street at lunchtime that another journalist there was in the final stages of completing a front page story on this. It had been kept hush-hush for a long time, and he’d only just cottoned on to it.

His lead was firm though.

Home Secretary Miller had been a high-profile businesswoman before entering Government. Before she’d become an MP, she made a lot of money in the property market. She had her own eponymous company and had maintained control of it while in the House of Commons and also when serving on the Opposition Front Bench. There had always been negative comment on this and only one year before she entered Government – and since then too – her husband had been in control of her valuable, nationwide business empire. The Home Secretary was one of the richest members of the Cabinet.

The Times was alleging that she’d subverted her company accounts with regard to local business rates as well as VAT payments. From what Downing Street’s sources could gather, there was evidence to this that had been verified by a leading tax legal firm from The City.

When the news hit Downing Street through Daniel, he had informed the PM. In turn, the PM had spoken to Miller: she had denied everything. The Home Secretary had apparently no knowledge of any wrongdoing and stated she was ready to sue should anything be alleged against her.

In a quick working conference with Daniel, Lauren had been set to work. The Times wasn’t the type of newspaper to make wild, unsubstantiated allegations – especially against a Cabinet member. The journalist who was on the story was a clever professional too; Tim Allen was a well-respected figure. Lauren had agreed with her boss that there had to be something to the story and they would have to work fast to try to kill it before it became a scandal that could threaten the Government and, more importantly, the PM himself.

Just as they’d feared, the story wasn’t rubbish.

As the afternoon wore on, Lauren had been able to get enough information to understand that The Times was onto something with Miller. The legal firm in The City had an executive board member who was a personal friend of Daniel’s and that executive had quickly come back to Lauren with what he could find. Tim Allen was working with one of the senior partners at the legal firm to make sure that his story about Miller had all the necessary legal details for not only publishing, but enough to stand up to legal scrutiny too. Lauren had understood that by telling her this, the executive was breaking confidentially, yet the man was talking to her because she worked for Daniel and thus the PM.

The executive would expect the favour to be one day returned.

The Home Secretary had a Special Adviser by the name of Peter Grant. He and Lauren had worked together within the Conservative Party for top officials over the years and it was he who had called Lauren this afternoon first before she could reach him. Like her, he was always thinking of job security and had a loyalty to no one. In public he was loyal to Miller, but in private he was out for himself and had no intention of ever being tied to a dead horse.

According to Grant, he had overheard Miller talking to her husband on her mobile phone straight after she’d spoken with the PM. She’d made this call from the toilets within the Home Office and been whispering, yet Grant had been able to listen in to some of that. Miller had made remarks such as ‘we are busted’, ‘we are going to go to jail’, ‘get rid of everything’. Clearly what Grant had overheard would be enough for a court case, but it was plenty for Lauren.

The Home Secretary was guilty of what The Times was going to accuse her of and that was a big problem.

A further, longer meeting took place in Downing Street after Lauren had spoken with Grant. Daniel took Lauren into see the PM and that meeting was attended too by Rachel Gallagher from CCHQ. Once Lauren had reported what she’d been able to find out in the short space of time that she’d been looking into it, the discussion at once moved to what to do. Gallagher as the representative of the wider Conservative Party made it clear that she believed that Miller would have to resign from her position as Home Secretary and probably as an MP too. Once The Times ran their story, there would be intense interest from other sections of the media. There would be an immense hostile reaction from the public too, let alone and investigation by HM Revenue & Customs. Miller could not serve as Home Secretary and even as an MP afterwards because she’d cause the Conservative Party immense damage by remaining.

Daniel had agreed with Gallagher. He told the PM that Miller had to be made to resign at once and if she refused, she would have to be fired. If the PM tried to stand by her, his credibility would suffer and he would long be linked with her actions as they would drag on and on through the media and maybe into the courts too. Furthermore, Daniel recommended that the PM act firm and fast. He should waste no time and get rid of Miller today; the longer it took, the worse things would get.

Lauren’s opinion had not been sought during this meeting. She would have said what both Gallagher and Daniel had though: the Home Secretary needed to be forced to resign.

*

The BBC’s Newsnight was currently on the television in Lauren’s office. She was here gone half ten at night with Kenny Timmons standing over in the corner against the wall. Her indispensable aide had had a busy evening liaising with the media on Lauren’s behalf. She had been delivering ‘anonymous’ quotes from a ‘senior Government official’ all evening to the various newspapers and television news outlets and her aide had made sure that her name wasn’t to be mentioned in any of those.

The titles had been run and then the headlines, while Newsnight had now turned to their main story of the night: the resignation of Joanne Miller, the (former) Home Secretary.

Lauren listened to the show’s presenter as he covered the statements issued by Miller and then the PM’s office. He went onto explain the basics of the now-modified story that The Times was to run tomorrow. She caught his offhand remark at how Downing Street had been ‘quick to move to separate itself’ from Miller and allowed herself a smile. She was glad that her hard work had paid off and those watching the programme like she was would understand that the PM wanted nothing to do with Miller now that she was toxic.

Newsnight moved on to camera footage of Miller leaving the Home Office and then this building when she’d come to be personally dismissed by the PM. There was other footage from outside the Miller family home in her Northamptonshire constituency as those reporters there had sought to talk to her husband. He’d given them nothing but ‘no comment’ and closed the front door that he’d unwisely opened to them.

Not far from where Lauren was, she knew that Daniel was in with the PM in the latter’s office. They wouldn’t be watching television like she was but rather meeting with other Cabinet members and Conservative Party officials as they tried to find a replacement for the departed Miller. She could think of a few names that they would be considering, but she didn’t know who they would select as the new Home Secretary.

Over there they could all be glum. Lauren wasn’t though, despite her terrible day. She believed that the PM and Daniel should be as glad as she was that Joanne Miller was gone. Notwithstanding the scandal that had brought her down – one in fact which they’d worked hard to stop becoming a full-blown scandal – Miller’s departure was a good thing. Many media people had openly speculated that she was a PM-in-waiting should a crisis or scandal cause the PM to fall from office. Until today, Miller had had her supporters in the House of Commons too among her colleagues for her eventually taking such a position.

Should things have gone that way, people like Lauren and Daniel would have been forced out of here. That wasn’t going to happen now: Miller was gone and Lauren remained.

This brought a sly smile to Lauren’s lips. She wished that she, and not Tim Allen from The Times, had brought Miller down. Then another thought struck her and it was one that wiped away that smile.

She remembered that the friendly source that they had at The Times, the other journalist who’d tipped off Downing Street as to what was coming, had mentioned that someone had been feeding Tim Allen what he had. Whoever that was had kept their identity carefully hidden. Someone out there had been able to topple a senior Cabinet member and hadn’t done it for altruist reasons.

That nameless person had some sort of hidden political agenda that clearly wasn’t favourable to the Government.





Chapter Twenty–Three – Special Project
Near Driffield, East Riding of Yorkshire – December 4th 2013


Lord North was certain that there were no secretly-placed recording devices placed within his home. He had it swept daily by members of his trusted security personnel, many of whom had experience in placing electronic devices beforehand in their careers in the police or intelligence services. They would go over the whole of his house looking for anything that would have been inserted to broadcast or record the humdrum and irrelevant conversations that took place inside.

Nevertheless, Lord North still held his meeting with Michael Snyder today out in the gardens. What the two of them were talking about was too sensitive to risk that his security had missed something or that someone he ‘trusted’ was attempting to overhear what they were saying.

His home came with extensive grounds that Lord North employed people to maintain. None of those were working on this cold winter morning and he could see none of his security people anywhere near the path through the manicured lawns that he led Snyder along as he requested a briefing on the progress of their ‘special project’.

“Bring me up to date, Michael, will you? Start with what Baxter has been doing; I’m interested in what happened in Portsmouth.”

“Baxter had a little bit of bad luck there. His orders were to get rid of Clive Valance in the way that the majority of those who have been targeted have been: to make the assassination look like anything but an assassination. From what Kevin Nye told me, an arson attempt was made at a house that Valance was visiting.

Valance was supposed to die in the fire along with his much younger male lover. Baxter found himself confronted by the younger man instead and so made the decision to… well… kill that unfortunate person as well as Valance with immediate effect.

He shot the young man and then attempted to do the same to Valance.”

“So Valance didn’t jump out of that window as the news said he did?”

“Oh, no, Edward, he did. Baxter was going to shoot him, but Valance chose to escape by leaping from a great height.

Baxter sent his apologies via Kevin, yet… the actual circumstances might have worked even better to our favour. Yes, there is a police investigation – and one by the security services too – into what happened, one which they have no evidence to guide them, but that consists of no danger to us or our aims.

The focus of attention is on Valance and his double life. Several tabloids have created wild conspiracy theories…”

“I assume you mean The Sun and The Daily Star?” Lord North didn’t read such newspapers of course, yet he’d heard about what they’d printed with regard to the comatose Portsmouth MP – and been forced into laughter.

“Yes, that is the case there. Apart from those, other mentions in the media have been of his double standards concerning homosexuality. His political career is effectively over and he no longer poses any vocal danger to what we are doing.”

“Michael, do you still stand by your earlier view that we could have got him out of the way by just revealing his secretive sexual behaviour?”

“I do, but…” Snyder didn’t finish what he was saying here. Lord North had chastised him for questioning his employer before and clearly didn’t fancy more of that. Such behaviour then had been admirable, even if wrong. To refuse to speak up again wasn’t another case of the former.

“Let’s move on from that, shall we? Valance is finished.

So, Baxter had a stroke of misfortune but it all turned out well in the end: good news indeed. He is still actively out on the hunt?”

Lord North worried over Baxter.

The man was going up and down the country killing people without stopping. Should he be caught, all of them were going to be in a lot of trouble… to say the least.

“He is. I liaise with Kevin and Liz on a regular basis, but I try not to concern myself with every detail. They tell me that Baxter has no qualms about what he is doing and remains firmly committed to his mission. He asks no questions and expresses no dissatisfaction. They can’t point to any failings on his behalf.”

Back in October, when they were here too, Snyder had unnecessarily ‘sold’ Baxter to him. Lord North winced in annoyance at how he was doing it again. Snyder was an exceptionally effective employee, but he had his negative points.

He moved onwards: “And the other side of things – politically. How is everything there?”

“As you know, Edward, the B.O.R.M hasn’t stricken out with as much success as we hoped. Valance would have been a very clear vocal opponent of it, but he was only going to be one of many political figures who are opposed to everything that the campaign stands for. Friendly media coverage has been assured in places, yet it is never going to capture the public imagination.”

“That was never my intention, Michael.” He’d explained this all before. “What they call ‘baby steps’ is what I wanted with that. We had to get it moving, then we’ll use it effectively.”

“I see.” But, he clearly didn’t.

“We have accumulated all of that evidence that we have on political figures: the former Home Secretary is a case in point. With Miller, we had her resign. That occurred faster than I wished it to and so I want you to bring the B.O.R.M into the matter.”

“How so, Edward?”

“She hasn’t resigned her Parliamentary seat, just her Cabinet post. Part of the manifesto for the B.O.R.M concerns what the Americans call ‘Recall elections’. We’ll publicise that and use it against her.”

“She won’t resign her seat in the Commons.”

“Good.” Lord North gave what he knew would appear to Snyder to be a devilish grin. “The more she stays stubborn, the harder we can turn the screws against her. The B.O.R.M should call for her resignation and that will hopefully bring out local support for that in her constituency.”

“Ah…” Now, Snyder was understanding him.

“And as I said, we have all that other information collected. I’ve had people investigating many politicians all year. They have got hold of a lot of information on many, varied public figures. Let us start releasing it.”

“Tim Allen is eager for more.”

“Mister Allen is a valuable asset, I agree. However, let us work with other journalists too.”

“I will see to that when I get back to London, Edward.”

“Excellent. You’ve done well cultivating people, now it is time to put all that early hard work to use.” Like an obedient child, Snyder needed praise and Lord North had no issue in giving it because he wanted Snyder to do his bidding with as much gusto as possible.

“I have an idea I’d like to bring up concerning this…”

Lord North had thought that they were done, but, alas…: “Yes?”

“We should bring Williams into some of this. He can help a lot.”

“I can agree with that, Michael. It is time for him to start taking a more active role in matters. You’ve done well with him too, I must say.”

“Thank you.” The appreciation for the praise sounded as genuine as possible despite Lord North knowing that his employee was an accomplished and effective liar. “John will not allow himself to be played like a puppet, but I have the measure of him. I know which buttons to push there.

He craves the media attention. What better way to bring it, I suggest, than have him at the forefront of denouncing corruption among his colleagues? He personally despises such a thing and wouldn’t need much of a push to do it.”

“Figure out a way to do that, Michael, so he doesn’t realise it’s all come from you. I want you two to remain as close as possible, but from what I know of him,” Lord North only knew Williams a little, “he’s temperamental. He won’t like to be forced into things.”

“That’s exactly my point, Edward. He is the best man to do something like this because his reputation as nobody’s fool is well known.”

“What I mean,” Lord North was struggling to get his point across to Snyder here, despite not usually having that problem with him or anyone else, “is that I have more plans for him. I want him to get a bigger public profile, yet I do not want him to be damaged by the media in the eyes of the public. You have enemies in the media, Michael, and they could turn against him too.”

“We can deal with any threats to him though.”

“Yes, we can, but let us not move ahead of ourselves here. Use him sparingly and carefully. When the time comes, we want him positioned perfectly.”

“I will do as you wish.”

Their conversation ended there and both continued walking onwards through the grounds of Lord North’s country estate. He had no idea what Snyder was thinking after all that had been said, though Lord North was happy enough with all that they had talked about. His vision was still on perfect tracks to becoming a reality and though his principle employee in making that happen had his own ideas, Snyder was ready to accept that his employer knew better.

Therefore everything was right in Lord North’s world at the moment.





Chapter Twenty–Four – Hit List
Thames House, Central London – December 6th 2013


It was not the done thing for intelligence officers to bring cases to their superiors and ask to work them. They were supposed to be assigned investigations, not create their own. Harriet knew this and understood the reasoning. Yet, she and Patrick had agreed that their actions on this were more than necessary.

Moreover, they could argue that what they wanted to look into on behalf of the Security Services could be considered to be already part of the stalled YOUNG investigation.

When the two of them went into see Jamie Trent this lunchtime, she wouldn’t have ever dreamed that it would have come about by something she’d read in the paper first thing this morning.

*

Harriet hadn’t woken up this morning in her own bed.

After her third date in less than a week with Martin, she’d accepted his offer to go back to his house with him and spend the night there. With today (a Thursday) being her day off – Harriet had to work Sundays to do a five day week –, she had told herself that she could sleep there and go home early in the morning rather than having to worry about work.

Of course, she and Martin had done more things than just sleep when together in his flat.

Martin had woken her up when he’d got up for work at seven. He’d had to get to Scotland Yard from his place in Isleworth for Nine and, politely, ushered Harriet out before then. She hadn’t taken offense because he was a likeable guy who had treated her well and clearly had a busy work schedule.

Being dressed in the clothes that she’d worn the night before and having to travel in them wasn’t something that Harriet had been happy with, yet she had no choice in the matter after making the choice on that the night before. Martin had called her a cab to take her across to Hounslow East tube station and she’d kissed him goodbye… they’d promised to meet again on Friday night.

Harriet had crossed London with the morning commuters as she made her way home. She’d seen the smile on her face in various reflections of windows and hadn’t been ashamed of herself. She was a grown woman who was unattached and there was nothing wrong in what she’d done with Martin. It had been an evening and a night of fun; she hoped to do it again, though next time with a little bit of forward-thinking of what would happen the next day.

Crossing beneath London, Harriet had soon got to Liverpool Street. There was a little bit of a wait to get a train (they were of course more frequent running into London than out in the mornings) and she got herself a newspaper. She wasn’t an avid reader, but when she did, she would more often than not get The Independent because of its lack of political slant to its stories.

London to Chelmsford had a journey time of just over half an hour. Harriet was a fast reader but she was never going to get through the whole of the newspaper in that short space of time. If the particular story that had made her suddenly take a sharp intake of breath when the realisation hit her had been further inside, she might never have seen any significance in a very short piece written about the ‘accidental death’ of a woman named Gloria Quinn the evening before.

*

“Tell me who Gloria Quinn is then?” Trent clearly had no recollection of the name despite Harriet and Patrick handing him a progress report containing the woman’s name on Monday.

“She is… sorry, was, the head Press Officer for the Socialist Workers Party. Quinn was someone that Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke had shared information about to that email address that we had no luck running down.”

“She was killed when she was knocked off her bicycle last night in Southall.” Harriet quickly followed up Patrick’s comment as she was eager to get the urgency of this across.

“I remember now.” Trent’s tic kicked in as he spoke and Harriet’s stare was drawn to it no matter how much she tried to avert her eyes from his jerking arm. “There were four names, yes? One of them was an M.P who died of natural causes, the second was Christopher Young, the third was Gloria Quinn and the fourth was…?”

“Mohammed Salem.”

“He is the leader of the Muslim Association of Britain, Chief. Harriet and I believe that what we originally looked at was a Hit List that Clarke had in his possession. We believe that it is necessary to put protective surveillance upon Mister Salem at once.”

“Hold on both of you.” Trent didn’t raise his voice, but it was clear from his firm tone that he wanted both Harriet and Patrick to stop what they were saying.

She realised at once that they two of them had been so caught up in the moment that they had failed to properly plan out how they would talk Trent through what they had.

“I must interject here. I don’t think that you have a ‘hit list’, as you call it. You have four names on an intercepted email and a certain link between one of them to Mark Clarke. Yet, we know that Clarke didn’t kill Christopher Young because, as the evidence you brought me showed, he was at work in Scotland Yard when that murder occurred. He was involved in that man’s death, but it cannot be said he was directly responsible for it in any way.

Now, with Gloria Quinn, from what you are saying, the Met. Police are not yet even investigating her death as a murder. Before you can link her to Clarke and the suspected ‘hit list’, you’d need to find evidence – maybe circumstantial evidence – that she was actually deliberately murdered.

I move onto the M.P.: Roger Mayfield. I recall that the V.I.P Security Investigations Desk looked into his death after his heart attack last month and they found nothing at all to suggest that there was anything suspicious there.

I cannot agree with either of you, Harriet, Patrick, that what you have is a ‘hit list’.”

Hearing it all summed up like this, put an immediate dampener on Harriet. She at once saw the sense that Trent was saying. He was perfectly correct in his judgement that they had nothing concrete to offer him. As if she had been pricked with a pin, she felt a deflation in her.

Patrick appeared to be of the opposite persuasion: “Jamie, we need to look at what happened last night out in Southall. Quinn was a minor figure compared to Young, Mayfield and Salem; she has none of their public image. Nevertheless, her name is on the list that we know Clarke sent out in that email along with basic personal details about her and the others. Three of those people are now dead: in one instance we have evidence that points to a conspiracy to kill him.

Young is murdered and now Quinn dies… then there is Mayfield too.

I’d like permission for me and Harriet to go up to Southall and work with the police there. Moreover, I’d like to have another look taken at the heart attack that apparently killed Mayfield.

I really do think that this is necessary.”

Patrick was really nice guy. He was laid back and friendly. Harriet knew that he was a serious professional spook though with many years of experience. She had never heard him speak like this before and caught a glimpse of the fixed look of determination in his face as he for all intents and purposes demanded of their superior that the two of them greatly expand the YOUNG investigation.

“Is there anything new on the inquiry into Clarke’s murder?”

“There’s nothing there. Gloucestershire Police still have no idea of any further movements on his part after we missed him in Tewkesbury that night, and no clue as to who killed him and dumped him in the River Severn.”

Harriet wished that she had something more to give Trent on this, but there was nothing. Clarke had been a ghost when out in Gloucestershire. She reckoned that her superior was asking this because he was titling towards doing what Patrick had asked and wanted an incentive to change his mind a little.

“I need something here, Patrick.”

“I understand that, Chief.” Patrick had relaxed some and lessened his tone. He fidgeted uneasily in his chair opposite his superior and beside Harriet.

“The investigation into Mayfield’s death was carried out by your colleagues. Should I request that it be reopened, moreover that I involve you two in that, such an action will ruffle a lot of feathers.

I cannot do that based on an email with four names within it.” Trent was firm with this statement, but Harriet detected an opportunity.

“Can we look into Quinn’s death? If we can bring you evidence that she was murdered, especially in the same sort of manner as Young was…”

“As if someone tried to make it look like it was accident when it wasn’t…”

“Yes, like that, then can we go back to Mayfield?” Patrick had interrupted her as he clarified what she was saying and Harriet continued on from there. “Then we will have something to work with, won’t we? You’ll be able to go to upstairs with that, yes?”

Trent said nothing for a moment though his arm jolted as it rested in his lap. Harriet tried to mentally will him into accepting what he was saying.

“I’ll contact Special Branch and they can lead an inquiry into Quinn. I’ll request that Inspector who has been on the Clarke investigation. You two will unofficially aid his investigation, then come back to me with what you find.”

Subconsciously, Harriet let out a sigh of relief.

“There is still Mister Salem in Bradford, Chief…” Patrick hadn’t forgotten about the fourth name on the Hit List.

“West Yorkshire Police should be contacted – you do it – and asked to assess his personal security. For now, let’s concentrate on Quinn, shall we?”

*

When they came out of the meeting with Trent, Harriet and Patrick spoke at her desk.

The two of them agreed that the meeting with their superior hadn’t gone as well as they had wanted it to, but it could have gone worse. Trent, Patrick said, was hesitant to act on speculation and also didn’t want to question what another Desk had done with regards to the deceased Mayfield. Harriet let her colleague know that she could understand such a reaction, but still expressed her frustration that they couldn’t act as they wished.

Still, they had been given instructions on what to do.

Harriet had rushed back from Chelmsford after racing inside her flat to get changed; she’d driven back to London as fast as possible rather than take the train again. She was still officially not working today either. Patrick said that he would go out to Southall – Harriet reflected at that point that she had been in nearby Isleworth last night when Gloria Quinn had died – to talk to the police there this afternoon. He suggested that she stay here at Thames House and talk by telephone to West Yorkshire Special Branch. Moreover, seeing as Trent had brought up Clarke’s demise, she should also again contact Gloucestershire Constabulary and harass them for any titbit of information they might have forgot to tell the Security Service about.

Afterwards, Patrick left for Scotland Yard and from there he told Harriet he would be off to Southall.

*


Later in the day, Harriet had a long telephone conversation with Patrick after he’d spent the afternoon ‘out in the field’ while she’d been busy making other calls.

He was with Inspector Lavelle in Southall – who passed onto Harriet a simple ‘Hello’ through Patrick – looking at what had happened there. The evening beforehand, a car had been stolen from a council housing estate and then used to smash into Gloria Quinn when she was out riding her bicycle through the suburban district. The dead woman apparently did this every evening as she rode home from her work in Central London. On her last journey, the car had hit her from behind and sent her into the side of a parked lorry beside a main road. There was low-quality CCTV footage of the incident and the Met. Police had later found the stolen car afire within a deserted industrial estate in nearby Ealing.

There had been a few witnesses to the ‘accident’ that had occurred and an ambulance had been quickly called. Gloria Quinn had suffered major head and brain trauma during the incident though and had been dead by the time paramedics had got to her, let alone taken her as they had to Ealing Hospital.

Initial police thinking had been that the car had been stolen by teenage joy-riders and had struck her by accident; that had been what Harriet had read this morning in The Independent. The arrival of Inspector Lavelle and a Special Branch colleague of his in Southall, complete with ‘a man from a Government department’, had changed that. They had reminded the police of one of the statements from the various witnesses that had contradicted the others. In that, it was stated that the car had purposely struck the cyclist. Furthermore, that particular stretch of road where it had occurred seemed to have the worse CCTV coverage in all of Southall.

The latter matter was quickly not seen to be a mere coincidence.

Patrick was working with Inspector Lavelle to talk again to that particular witness, get access to other CCTV cameras that might have caught the incident and also get access to the burnt-out car.

Everything that he said furthered their mutual earlier suspicion that the death of Gloria Quinn was certainly linked to the YOUNG investigation.

She reported back to Patrick what she had been doing. Gloucestershire Constabulary still had nothing at all on Clarke. They couldn’t point to where he’d been staying, any more movements of his than they already knew nor any clues as to who had killed him. In a conversation she’d had with a Superintendent of the West Yorkshire Police, she hadn’t had much luck there despite them confirming who she was and who she worked for. The senior policeman in Wakefield informed her that as a high-profile figure, the public spokesman of a large organisation such as the MOB, Mohammed Salem’s safety was something that they monitored. He had his home in Bradford fitted with a panic button that linked to his local police station and they had a community liaison officer who had infrequent contact with him. There was no direct threat to him that they knew and what did the Security Service want them to do: put an armed guard on his person?

Harriet had been forced to hold her temper over the phone at that comment. She realised that cooperation with the West Yorkshire Police would have to be based on something more that she gave them than what she’d been told over the phone was ‘just a hunch, not proper police work’.

*

Later, after she’d finished with her phone calls for the day, Harriet set about going home for the second time today. She planned to meet with Patrick tomorrow and talk over what they had. She expected that they both might go out to Southall if any new developments occurred there overnight.

In addition, she wondered over whether she’d see Martin again tomorrow when doing that…

Meanwhile, as she started her journey home, her mind pondered over the Hit List that they’d stumbled upon. She wondered what the link was between those four people – three of whom were now dead of various causes – that made an unknown person want their deaths. Her foremost consideration was solving that mystery, though she also worried over Mohammed Salem up in Bradford: a man she’d never met and who had no clue that his name was besides those of three others who had very recently departed this world.

To those who looked at the death of Mayfield at the start, everything looked 'okay'. It wasn't but - as in one of the updates below - there are people who don't want to admit they are wrong because they are stubborn / their careers are at stake / they are just being idiots.
Lord North already has political enemies, yet, he isn't suspecting people to have some idea of his schemes. Far too often, he is being too clever for his own good.
IIRC, that is the end of it with Valance. A by-election for Valance's seat would have favoured the overall plan but he's been disgraced in public and that will do for second best.
Williams is clueless to everything. Lord North has this intention of having him as a 'clean figure' at the end of it all.
Baxter will pose a real problem for Lord North come the end of the story!
Those dates with the updates are exactly when I wrote them. Most of it was done in the wee hours of the morning one winter.

Chapter Thirty – Jumper
Manchester City Centre – December 13th 2013


Police Constable Phil Cobb listened to the radio report that there was a dead body in Piccadilly Gardens and turned to give his partner Julie a nod. She returned the silent comment with one of her own and then he answered the call with an acknowledgement that they would be attending at once.

The two officers from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) were over on Liverpool Street when they first started moving and Cobb took them and their Vauxhall patrol car the short distance across the dark city centre. The small computer fitted to the patrol car said that it was just after six o’clock, he noticed when he glanced across it, and Cobb told himself that this was going to be a long morning.

With the city centre being empty of other cars and pedestrians alike at this time, he quickly crossed the middle of Manchester. Cobb drove them up Deansgate until he reached St. Mary’s Gate. He had the lights flashing but no siren on – Cobb had once lived in a small city centre flat here and so he wouldn’t put on the sirens and wake the sleeping unless it was necessary – as he took a right turn and then followed the road as it became Market Street. Following that road, he soon came across Piccadilly Gardens: the landscaped green space in the heart of the city around which much of the centre shopping district was located.

Julie told him to take a left turn and to go over to where the bus stops were. Cobb cut across the tram lines that were almost flush with the road itself, though he felt the bumps in doing so, and he drove over there. He saw several people gathered there and so he (only momentarily) hit the siren to alert them to his presence; the last thing he wanted to do was hit an unwary fellow Manchurian.

The people standing around turned out to be a mixed collection of locals. There were a few bus drivers, one of which had called 999, there along with people who were apparently on their way to work and who had been drawn to the crowd. As a young, but well-experienced policeman, Cobb knew that crowds would gather wherever there was anything to see time nor place notwithstanding. He and Julie cut through the crowd of a dozen or so people to get to this body…

What they found on the pavement right in front of a few shuttered shops was a horrible sight. They found what once had been a man there on the pavement.

Cobb at once wished that he hadn’t taken the call. The sight of this splattered body was certainly going to stay with him for a long time.

Julie said that there was an ambulance on the way and Cobb at once heard the sirens of that in the near distance. There would be nothing that the paramedics could do once they got here; they would be as useful as he was.

As the two GMP officers got to work in moving the people back from the blood and gore smeared on the ground, that bus driver who had alerted them all to the body on the ground stepped forward to identify himself as the man who had called 999. Cobb spoke to him just out of earshot of the other people and he had a quick story to tell.

At a quarter to six, the bus driver had pulled his empty vehicle into the bus stops here to wait to begin his route. He’d stepped out of his cab for a quick smoke and been standing around aimlessly as he did so next to his bus. Just as he’d finished his smoke, a shout had come from somewhere and he’d looked around, but not seen anything. Within seconds, apparently, he’d heard a thud, maybe a crunch, and also caught movement out of the corner of his eye: there was then a body on the ground. He pointed to the City Tower that loomed above him and Cobb now.

The bus driver said that the man had come off that building.

The City Tower was a thirty-storey building that rose above the city centre. It had been built in the Sixties, though had been refurbished in the past few years. Cobb knew that it was full of office space for many organisations. He looked up at it after he was told the bus driver’s story. Even though it was still dark, from what he could see of it now and what he knew of it too, it wouldn’t have been easy for someone to fall off or even jump from it. Moreover, who would have been up there at this time of the morning to come off it?

The mess that was the man on the ground clearly gave the impression that the bus driver had his facts straight. Cobb had seen the body of a ‘jumper’ before: he’d been on the scene of a drug-addicted young mother who’d come off a residential tower block down in Wythenshawe last year. That body had looked like this one did, one which was smashed to pieces.

When the ambulance arrived, it’s crew got quickly to work. They worked fast and frantically, but there was nothing that they could do to help the body of what had once been a man. Cobb gave them plenty of room nonetheless and then spoke to them after they had finished in their failed attempt.

In addition, into Piccadilly Gardens came several other police officers to join him and Julie. Another pair of patrol cars had turned up and the officers from both started to clear a wide area around where the body was. Cobb would see that this was going to cause much disruption as the morning rush hour approached, but there was nothing to do: this was a crime scene. Following on from his fellow junior officers, into Piccadilly Gardens also came senior officers: sergeants and detectives. Cobb’s shift was due to end at Eight, but he reckoned, because he had been the first officer on the scene, that he’d be needed for longer than that.

So much for his plan to get home soon and get some sleep after a busy night…

*

Cobb was still on scene gone Ten. By that point, the body was soon to be removed from Piccadilly Gardens. He was sitting in the back of a police car, with the door open and his legs on the ground outside as he had yet another cup of coffee. His excessive consumption of hot drinks this morning (from plastic disposable cups) was keeping him awake. His Sergeant had told him a while ago that he could go home, but Cobb had wanted to wait around. Julie had left, but Cobb felt that this was ‘his’ body. He wouldn’t go until the deceased man had been identified.

He had a strange feeling that he couldn’t leave it until it had a name to go with it. Only then, he believed, should he let his body become someone else’s. His fellow officers had been understanding; this sometimes happened with first responding officers and unidentified corpses.

When his Sergeant came back to him, Cobb was given the news that he’d been waiting for. The deceased man, who appeared to have jumped off the City Tower for as yet undetermined reasons, had been called James Mortimer. He lived down in Cheshire and worked at the BBC across at MediaCityUK in Salford: Mortimer was a news executive of some sort.

As to what he had been doing in the middle of Manchester, jumping off a building to his death at Six in the morning… there was no clue as to that yet. Cobb was told not to worry about that though and get home to sleep. Everything was in the hands of his fellow GMP detectives now.





Chapter Thirty–One – Questions
Thames House, Central London – December 14th 2013


Harriet didn’t mind working Saturdays. She was still relatively junior within the ranks of the Security Service and its National Security Directorate (NSD) and so her presence was required at the office today while more senior people had the whole weekend off.

She was working because she had an active X-File to work on too.

Because of the recent developments in the YOUNG investigation, the X-File had been greatly expanded. Trent, while still overseeing Unusual Enquires, was now directly supervising what was now called MATCH: the randomly-assigned name now given to what had grown from the initial YOUNG enquiry.

She, Patrick and Trent had been joined by two of Kerrie Parks’ people, though not the head of the VIP Security Desk. Harriet had been quietly informed by Patrick that Parks had been reassigned after repeated attempts to derail the MATCH investigation to deflect blame from the initial failure to see that there was much more to the death of Roger Mayfield. Further investigation in Norwich had determined that there had been many ‘irregularities’ there: little things had been overlooked including the death threats made against the Government Minister during the summer.

Those threats had come in the form of not only two letters that Mayfield had received addressed to him at his home in Norfolk, but also telephone calls and, to top that off, a personal visit to his constituency office too. The source of those threats came from someone whose MOD file that Harriet currently had on her desk.

She was looking at the official records of a retired soldier named Neil Baxter.

Only the personal intervention of the D-G had apparently managed to secure this file from MOD records. Harriet had been informed that they had refused to allow Trent to see the file when he’d requested it and also turned down the same request from the head of the NSD too; something that she’d never expected to hear.

Looking through it as she sat yawning at her desk this afternoon, Harriet couldn’t understand why. There was nothing secret within this record of his military service or anything that had been redacted. The man had not been anywhere near any secret projects and had minimal contact with the SAS. The file had been handed to Thames House too; Harriet and her colleagues were the last people to do anything silly like leak it to the media.

The only reason that she could understand for the MOD not wanting the Security Service to see Baxter’s military record were the circumstances surrounding his departure from the British Army. Such a thing was hardly touched upon within the file anyway.

Trent had had to inform her and the other intelligence officers working the MATCH investigation the details of that from what he knew personally.

What was in the service record wasn’t much.

There was only what Harriet would expect to see in the file of any former soldier. There was a portrait file of the man, biological details, training and assignment lists, a medical report and reviews written by officers under which he’d served during his career. One of the latter included something that Harriet hadn’t expected to see after hearing about the manner in which he had been forcibly retired.

There was a letter of commendation in the file from the Director of UK Special Forces. The Major-General who had written it (this was a post always assigned to British Army officers despite his command of certain Royal Navy and Royal Air Forces special forces trained detachments) had excelled himself at selling Baxter’s attributes and potential. During the conflict in Afghanistan – no one within the MOD or Government at-large called it a ‘war’ –, Baxter had attracted the attention of this senior officer by his conduct in combatting the Taliban. Only from a distance had this been observed, because Baxter hadn’t been tasked to work directly with either SAS or SBS units on the ground there.

Nevertheless, he had been described as being someone who would do well should be complete the training to join the SAS. That had never happened though due to events in Libya.

Harriet was no military expert, but from what she read of the mission report, Baxter had done nothing wrong there during the failed rescue mission of those diplomats. In contrast, Baxter’s military file contained a copy of the official post-mission report – one written by senior people at the MOD – that blamed him for the deaths of ‘innocent civilians’ there.

This paperwork, and from what Trent had told her, lead her to the conclusion that Baxter had been screwed over by his Government. She knew it… and so did he.

All of which led to his behaviour this year in relation to Mayfield.

From what the deceased MP had told Norfolk Constabulary, he had been concerned about Baxter. Mayfield had felt that the former soldier was stalking him a little and he had feared for his safety. Baxter had blamed the Armed Forces Minister for everything that had gone wrong with his life and had expressed a desire to get his revenge.

Putting this all together, Harriet could see that Baxter had a motive to kill Mayfield. He was a trained soldier and knew how to take a man’s life. Yet, neither she nor any of her colleagues on the MATCH investigation could see how he could have done it. There was no physical evidence linking him to Mayfield’s death and the MP was still officially deemed to have had a heart attack.

Moreover, as one of Parks’ people had pointed out, even if Baxter had killed Mayfield, why had he one and killed Christopher Young and Gloria Quinn too? Where was the man’s motive for the murder of each of them and what did either of them have to do with either Mayfield or Baxter himself?

With regard to both of those killings, there was only the suspicion that he’d gone and murdered them based on that email from Mark Clarke. Patrick had pointed out that the former soldier’s physical description matched that given by Young’s girlfriend and it could possibly be the same as that given of the man seeing driving the car that had knocked Quinn off her bicycle in Southall. There was CCTV camera footage from a cash machine that showed a car purposely smashing into Quinn and a witness there who had given a description of the car’s driver, but none of that was enough for Harriet to say that Baxter had definitely been involved in either of those deaths.

The question that they kept coming back to there with this X-File was the why.

As to Baxter himself, the Security Service had been trying to locate him since Monday. The MOD had supplied an address for him down in Sussex. She and Patrick had travelled to his house in the village of Hurst Green three days ago with the cover as civil servants from the MOD looking into his pension arrangements. They had brought with him the necessary documents and plausible excuse to meet with him and get him talking. Baxter hadn’t been at home though.

They’d soon found out that he’d left the country on October 24th and flown from Heathrow to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. He’d travelled more than four thousand miles into the heart of East Africa to take up a job with an international private security company. Harriet had afterwards seen the documentation that backed that up. Baxter had a role as a security consultant for ferries crossing Lake Victoria; he and other Westerners with military background were making sure that these weren’t targeted by pirates or terrorists.

This information put Baxter almost on the other side of the world before either of the three deaths that the MATCH investigation was focusing on had occurred. Further checks with the Border Force – an agency of the Home Office – showed that he had yet to return from Kenya. Checks on Baxter’s finances showed that his employer was paying him a reasonable monthly wage and that money hadn’t been touched, his UK debit card hadn’t been used since he’d left the country and Baxter had left his Sussex home in the care of a residential letting agent to be rented out while he was out of the country.

Harriet had agreed with both Patrick and Trent that it was quite a coincidence that the previously-unemployed Baxter had managed to secure himself a well-paid job out of the country a week before Mayfield was murdered. In their job, they were taught not to believe in coincidences.

But… what could they do? There was no Baxter for them to talk to.

Trent had spoken with their ‘sisters’ at the Secret Intelligence Service. With East Africa being the scene of several instances of international terrorism, MI-6 had some of their people based in Nairobi. They had promised to get confirmation that Baxter was actually in Africa; they had probed for a reason as to why Thames House was interested in the former soldier, but Trent had evaded those questions.

While thinking of all of this, Harriet had been staring at Baxter’s photograph within his MOD file. Letting her mind drift off for a moment, she realised that he was a rather attractive looking man who reminded her in many ways of her current boyfriend Martin Lavelle with his short, dark hair and his blue eyes.

Back on subject, she recalled how Patrick had showed this image to both Young’s girlfriend and well as the witness to Quinn’s death. Neither of those two people had been able to place him at the either murder scene, though each had pointedly refused to say that they were certain that he wasn’t the man that they’d seen either.

Just as the YOUNG investigation had been since it had first begun, the MATCH enquiry was going nowhere too. Harriet was still left with many more questions than she had answers.

How much had Baxter truly wanted to hurt Mayfield?

How had he wangled the job that he had taken?

If he had killed Mayfield, how had he done that?

What was the connection (if there was one) between him and Mark Clarke?

If he had killed Young and Quinn, what was his motive for those acts?

Where was the MATCH investigation going to go next should Baxter be innocent of all of this?

Harriet groaned in frustration at all of these questions because she knew that there were answers out there to them, but she was unable to locate them.





Chapter Thirty–Two – Danger
South Kensington, Central London – December 17th 2013


Williams had hoped that the birthday party that his wife had thrown for him wouldn’t attract that many people because it was a Tuesday night. Lisa wanted to make a big deal out of his fortieth, yet he would have quite happily done what their done recently for their wedding anniversary.

Lisa had made it clear that there was to be a party though.

Their favourite restaurant, the one down in South Kensington from where Lisa liked ordering food, had a large upstairs dining room that she’d hired out to host the event. She had arranged a guest list and sorted out the food and drink. His wife knew that he wouldn’t want any loud music and she’d made sure that that wasn’t present either.

Sitting down now with the invited guests as they all got ready to eat, Williams looked around at all of those present. He and Lisa had greeted them all personally when they arrived with smiles on each side, but he wanted to see them now when they were unaware of his gaze. There were more than a few people here that he wouldn’t have asked to attend had it been up to him rather than his wife.

Those attending his party were sat around three tables. Lisa had invited fifteen guests alongside the two of them and their son. At this table with him and his wife were his sister Claire, Claire’s husband as well as Michael and Jane Snyder. On the table over to the left, there were another six people: two more couples of friends of theirs along with Nathan and his cousin Grace, Claire’s daughter. Finally, on the third table were another three couples who both Williams and his wife knew from politics or the media. Within that group were Lisa’s friend Debbie Parsons and her husband Colin. Debbie was a civil servant and the head of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) while Colin was the new Home Secretary.

Williams watched his fellow politician holding court over there. The political lightweight was telling a story and entertaining those seated with him while the man’s wife looked on approvingly.

Parsons had no idea that Williams was watching him with contempt.

The man shouldn’t have been here. Williams never had much time for Debbie Parsons anyway and was certain that she and Lisa weren’t that close since the ONS had moved out of London and to South Wales. As for Colin Parsons… Williams recalled with anger at the times when he had been before the Home Affairs Select Committee (when he’d served as the Home Office Minister for National Security) and given them fluff for answers. He’d only recently been promoted from outside of the Cabinet into one of the Great Offices of State despite being an incompetent fool. Parsons’ loyalty to the PM had made that happen, but the man was going to cause danger to his country now because he had no moral compass and not one iota of decency.

Williams was still directing unseen daggers with his eyes at the man when Lisa nudged him: “The wait is a bit long, isn’t it? I’m starving!”

Lisa was a little bit drunk and sounded quite keen to get some food into her. In contrast, Williams was of the opposite opinion. He didn’t think it had been that long before the last of the guests had ordered and he knew that the restaurant would want to bring out dinner for everyone at the same time. He also wasn’t even that hungry. Still, Lisa had said what she had and Williams was in a pleasant enough mood to humour her.

“It won’t be long; have some more wine.”

“I’ve had too much already!”

“There’s never enough wine, Lisa.” From across the table, Williams observed Jane give Lisa a wide smile as she made this remark. The two of them had recently made up – he was still in the dark as to why they had initially fallen out – and were seemingly back to being best friends again.

“I must agree with my wife there.” To add to his statement, Snyder took a big gulp of his own wine and then playfully moved one of his wife’s hands towards her own glass.

Williams gave the two of them a grin, but the returned his attention to looking around. He caught the eye of the husband of his constituency association chair; Steve raised two fingers to his mouth but Williams briefly shook his head. He could have done with the cigarette that his friend suggested, but he was keeping his word to Lisa that he had given up for good. There was a shoulder shrug from Steve who then whispered something to his wife before standing up and heading for the terrace that Williams knew the restaurant had outside. Steve’s wife Michelle then gave Williams an exasperated stare at her husband’s habit and so he smiled back at her.

Lisa had invited Michelle and Steve along as friends because she knew how important the former was to her husband. With the ever-present support of his local constituency association, Williams wouldn’t have a political career. Williams’ wife was good at that sort of stuff.

He looked around at some of the other people that she’d chosen to invite too.

There was Liam Kenyon over there with his latest girlfriend. He and Liam had been friends since university and while Williams had gone into politics, his former housemate from Bath had risen high within the international oil industry. Liam had worked all over the world, though was back in London now working in The City. Never one willing to settle down, Liam had ‘a new girlfriend every six months’ in Lisa’s words; something that wasn’t exactly true, but close enough. Later on, Williams would catch up and get a proper introduction to her. She’d been briefly introduced as a reporter (Williams had long ago realised that just like him, his male friends always seemed to be involved with journalists) named Kate Something-or-other.

In addition, on that table with Liam was Lisa’s editor from The Daily Telegraph.

Having his wife working at that newspaper made sure that Williams always had a good relationship with The Daily Telegraph. He knew many of the senior reporters there and no journalist there was going to write a negative story about him unless he deserved it. There was also a connection between Snyder and Lisa’s editor that Williams knew existed in some sort of dubious form, but details of which he had no idea.

There was a third MP here alongside Williams and Parsons. Lisa had invited along Susan Norton from Williams’ committee. The Conservative MP from Suffolk was becoming a useful ally of his in Westminster and Lisa had recently ran a featured article about her. She was a well-respected backbench MP with many friends in Parliament and someone with whom Williams worked well with. Soon enough, once he’d talked her into it, Williams planned to bring her into the BORM to help with the campaign’s progress into making it what he and Snyder agreed that it could be.

Williams took his mind off her as the waiters and waitresses started bringing out the food.

*

Later in the evening, Williams took a wander out onto the terrace where the smokers were. On his way he had passed Nathan chatting away to his cousin. The two of them had been standing pretty close to each other and Williams had been a tad disturbed by that image. Like he was at that age, he knew that his son was full of raging hormones. Grace was Nathan’s first cousin though; Williams would talk to his wife about that.

As expected, Steve was out there smoking what could easily have been his twentieth cigarette of the night. Williams had barely seen him inside and that hadn’t impressed Michelle at all.

“Are you having a good time, pal?”

“I am, thank you.”

“I bet you’re feeling old!” Steve gave a good natured laugh and blew out smoke; what Williams had come here to inhale. “I remember my fortieth…”

“I think I do too.”

“Oh, yes, you came, didn’t you? I’d forgotten about that.” He laughed for a second time and Williams wondered how much he’d had to drink.

“John, get yourself over here.”

“Hello, Liam.” Williams wandered over to where Liam – another smoker – was standing.

“You remember, Kate, don’t you?” Liam was all smiles.

“Happy birthday, Mister Williams.” Kate the journalist said the exact same thing that she had when they first met earlier in the evening.

“Thank you. It was nice of you to come along.”

Williams had only drunk two glasses of wine and had a full stomach. Unlike his wife, he hadn’t allowed the booze to get to him. He was perfectly aware of everything going on and how to behave around people… especially potentially unfriendly journalists.

“I’ve always wanted to come here and Liam,” she gave Williams’ friend a loving glance, “said that I had to come because it was your birthday.”

The gushing statement was uncomfortable. It was more than just a polite fib: the woman was telling a real lie.

“Liam knows all the best places to take a young lady.” Williams knew how to play along with a lie after his many years in politics. “Lisa didn’t say how long you two had been together…”

“Oh, a whole month now.”

Kate sounded like she was Nathan’s age.

“Lisa will be wondering where I am; I better get back in. Liam, hurry up and finish that and we’ll get back into the warmth.”

Williams was immensely worried about this woman. The first opportunity he got, he’d make sure that he got her last name from Lisa and then he’d talk to Snyder about her. There was something very wrong with her turning up here with his best friend and playing the gooey-eyed fool.

He smelled danger over the cigarette smoke.





Chapter Thirty–Three – A Bit Strange
Ashtead, near Leatherhead, Surrey – December 18th 2013


Forcing herself to refrain from just curling up in a ball and going to sleep somewhere, Jane kept focusing on the scene before her out here in Surrey this morning. She’d drunk far too much last night to be working today. Leaving here and going to somewhere dark and quiet to drift off wasn’t an option though, she had work to do.

The police were keeping the small crowd of reporters and curious locals back at least a hundred feet from the level crossing. They had run a line of reflective tape between lampposts, tree trunks and their vehicles to set up an exclusion zone that no one was allowed to get past. Surrey Police officers kept watch over this line as well as standing out on Woodfield Lane to turn back traffic and redirect them away too.

Jane could see a fire engine up ahead there where the road crossed the railway line. There was no sign of an ambulance there, but from what she’d been told, there had been no need for one when several 999 calls had requested the ambulance service at three o’clock this morning. She’d been home not long at that point though fast asleep rather that rushing out to this little suburban location in the vain hope of saving a life.

Up ahead there, a man had lost his life seven hours ago. Jane didn’t know the man who had passed away in the dramatic fashion that he had, yet she did feel rather sad for him and his friends and family. While she didn’t consider herself a sentimental person, the loss of a life was always terrible.

Information on what had occurred was still rather incomplete, yet Jane and the other members of the media here had a rough idea of what had happened. A civilian vehicle with one occupant inside had stopped on the level crossing and been hit by an oncoming freight train.

The reason for that was so far unknown, but the train had impacted the stationary vehicle while travelling at speed and smeared the remains of the vehicle all over the place. It was a train carrying a heavy load (apparently a mixture of sand, gravel, rocks and scrap metal on its way somewhere from somewhere else) coming from the South Coast in the general direction of the London area and had hit the car halted on the road just outside this railway station. The emergency services had responded, but there had been no hope for the driver of the vehicle. As to the train itself, it had fortunately managed to stay on the tracks and not derail. Its driver had been taken across to the nearby Epson General Hospital, though he was apparently not seriously hurt.

Jane could no sign of the train itself. She knew that freight trains, which usually travelled at night across the country’s rail network to avoid causing delays to passenger trains, were rather long and contained multiple carriages. She’d thought that she would have been able to see at least the rear of the train and so too had the camera crews here. Alas, it had travelled too far past the accident scene to be visible to her and the other media people.

There was a helicopter making much noise in the sky above and Jane guessed that it was getting those pictures for another media outlet.

“Jane…!”

Turning around, Jane saw Lisa Williams walking up towards her. “How are you this morning?”

“Hung-over!”

Lisa eased through the group of people here so that they could talk to each other without having to nearly shout. The helicopter above was very loud and other people here on the ground were talking to each other too.

“Lisa, I’m claiming this as an exclusive.”

“Witty, very witty, Jane.”

The two journalists stood next to each other with both now looking up ahead. Jane wondered why her friend had come out here this morning. Her semi-editorial role at her newspaper wouldn’t demand that she attend such a scene. In Jane’s opinion, Lisa should probably have been back in London covering the coming political reactions to this rather than standing out here in the cold looking at what little there was to see.

There would be a political reaction back in London, she knew, because of who the man who had been killed at this level crossing was reported to be.

Sitting within the car that had been struck by the train was a high-ranking British Army officer by the name of Leftenant-General Alexander Lynch. Jane had learnt that his position was that of ‘Commander, Land Forces’ and he was (in practise) the second most senior British Army officer in the country. Lynch had run day-to-day operations out at Army Headquarters in Andover and his responsibilities were apparently immense. Jane had of course heard of him before due to his media appearances when the British Army was in the news.

Now his car was wrecked up ahead and his body was waiting to be removed from there.

“How far away is Andover, Lisa?”

“A long way? A hundred miles maybe?”

“Then what was this General doing out here at Three in the morning?” Jane had been asking herself that question all morning and been waiting to ask it of someone else too.

“I have no idea. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it?” As Lisa said this, Jane watched as her friend gave a friendly nod to another journalist here. Jane recognised the man as a reporter from The Times. She couldn’t recall his name, but she guessed she was going to find out as he came over towards them.

“Jane, this is Matt Pickering from the Times.”

“Hi, nice to see you.” Jane took the offered hand and gave it a quick shake. She was jealous of Pickering and his warm-feeling gloves; she hadn’t brought hers out with her this morning.

“Matt, Jane was just asking me how far away Andover is from here. That’s over in Hampshire, yes?”

“It’s about sixty miles or so, ladies.” He gave them both a smile. “Around the M–Twenty–Five until you reach Junction Twelve and then down the M–Three. Are you planning on taking a drive down there?”

“No, Jane and I were just wondering what General Lynch was doing out here so far away from there.”

“He was on temporary leave. He has been ill – some sort of kidney complaint – for a while and thus away from Army Headquarters. He lives on base so… yes, you’re both correct, it’s a bit of a surprise that he’d end up out here.”

Jane noticed how Pickering was still talking about the deceased Lynch as if he was still alive. She remembered him now from a previous meeting; Pickering was the chief military correspondent with The Times and so it wasn’t that much of a surprise that he knew more about Lynch than either she or Lisa did. He was a bit of an odd fellow too sometimes confusing behaviour that ranged from the friendly and helpful to the rude and arrogant.

Today, Pickering was being nice.

“Do we think that he killed himself? That he drove onto the tracks there and waited for that train?” Jane wanted to keep the conversation going because she was convinced that talking was helping her to warm up a little and also taking her mind off her hang-over.

She was also just idly speculating.

“The police won’t say so, but I think so.”

“I’d have to agree too, Jane.”

Both Pickering and Lisa were in verbal agreement with here on her theory on what had happened here.

Jane tried to ponder over why Lynch might have done what he’d done. She considered that he might have been seriously ill and didn’t want that suffering to continue. Maybe he had problems at home or with his career…

But she didn’t know anything for sure apart from him to kill himself in such a manner, this far away from where he lived and worked, was actually more than a bit strange; it was weird… and therefore certainly newsworthy once she had something more than the zero she currently had to go on.





Chapter Thirty–Four – Brainstorming
St. Albans, Hertfordshire – December 19th 2013


Baroness Amanda Vaughn was proving more than a challenge for Baxter to get rid of. Snyder had made it clear to him, Kevin and Liz that he wanted the woman to be (in his words) ‘eliminated with great haste’, but the unawares Baroness wasn’t playing along. She was refusing to put herself in a situation where Baxter to take her life.

The instructions from Snyder weren’t helping either.

Out of all the people that he had stated that he wanted getting rid of, he had only been specific surrounding the circumstances of two of them: Roger Mayfield and Sonia Patel. As to everyone else on his ever-growing list, he left the method of murder up to Baxter and his two cohorts. Snyder was happy that as long as those targeted died – whether by suicide, a fatal accident, a murder committed in a random manner etc. – in a manner which wouldn’t raise too much suspicion.

The problem was that Baxter couldn’t see a way for any of those to work with the Baroness.

Standing here in their St. Albans base of operations, with their detailed file on the woman laid out before them on Liz’s desk, neither he nor Kevin and Liz could figure out how to get the mission done with her. They had details of her movements, plans of her house up in Derbyshire and the data from the tracking device attached to her car weeks ago.

The Baroness was a life peer in the House of Lords. She had a lifelong allegiance to the Conservative Party and had long been attached to the ‘centralist, modernist’ wing of the party. While never directly elected to any public office, the Baroness had held a variety of important public offices with all sorts of responsibilities. The PM had recently appointed her as a whip within the House of Lords and she was a key Downing Street ally in the upper chamber of Parliament.

“The woman is a damn workaholic!”

“Does she ever get a day of rest? Where she stops and does nothing?”

“If she did, we could make our move.”

“I can’t see how we’re going to do this, Liz.”

Baxter said nothing as Kevin and Liz went back over again the problems that the Baroness was causing them. They were here to brainstorm a solution to the issue with her, but all that they were managing to do was to go over old ground.

Kevin stepped away from the table and wandered over to his own desk. Baxter saw how Liz took no notice of him walking away and continued to stare down at the file that they had on their target. For his part, Kevin went and got his cigarettes. The former murder squad detective, whose business now was planning murders in a manner which that he wouldn’t be caught by his former comrades, then opened the window before lighting up.

Baxter didn’t have to wait long for the sparks to fly.

“Jesus, Kevin, do you have to smoke!” Liz practically screamed at the man.

“It helps me think.”

“No, smoking is a sign that you don’t think enough.”

The two of them had had this argument many times before. Liz was an ex-smoker herself – in Baxter’s experience they were always the most passionate anti-smoking Nazis – and just a whiff of cigarette smoke was enough to cause a reaction in her like nails being dragged across a chalkboard in most other people.

Baxter had no opinion on the issue and just wanted them all to focus on their mission: the Baroness.

“Kevin, Red, how do we get this woman?”

“All I can think of is that we go after her when she’s driving.” Liz was over by the other window and straining to open it. If Baxter had been in gentlemanly mood, he would have gone to help her; he wasn’t though. “She’s got that shiny new Jaguar that she likes to drive.”

“If we do something to it – cut the brake fuel lines or something like that – then Scotland Yard will have people all over it and see what’s been done.”

“We’d have to be more clever than that.” Liz was still angry at Kevin for feeding his habit.

“But it’s something to go with.” Baxter was starting to see some possibilities here and wanted to keep the train of thought going. “We know in real-time where she’s going and that has got to help us somehow.”

“You’re thinking that we shouldn’t be looking at where she is going, but how she is going there. Am I correct, Neil?”

“Yes, she likes driving down those country roads.” Liz cut in.

“So… we do something when she’s out alone at night in her car. But, what?”

After his remark, Kevin sat himself up on his desk with his legs swinging free for a moment. He took an immensely long puff as (presumably) his mind ticked over what they were talking about.

“I hope you’re not thinking of trying to run her car off the road, Kevin… far too dangerous.” There was concern in Liz’s voice at her own suggestion.

Baxter didn’t think that that was a good idea either.

“No, no… I’m thinking ‘Tonbridge’.”

“What’s that?” Liz gave Kevin a very quizzical look.

“Two Thousand and Six, Tonbridge in Kent. There was a well-planned armed robbery at a cash depot down there. My partner was seconded to the investigation: she supervised the family liaison effort with the family of the manager involved.

He was kidnapped the night of the raid when he was driving home from work. The armed robbers disguised themselves as police officers – uniforms, blue lights behind the front grill on their car – to get him to pull his car over before using him to get into the cash warehouse.”

“I see where you’re going with this now; I like it.”

“So,” Baxter begun to summarise what Kevin had sketched out, “we use that ruse to get her to stop her car somewhere quiet and lonely. We’ll need all the get-up, but it’s doable.

What do we do with her then?”

“Well… we… you know…” Despite everything, Kevin was still a policeman at heart and couldn’t actually put into words what everyone knew that they’d have to do once they got their hands on the Baroness.

“Something quick and quiet, I think; she’s an old lady.” Liz made reference to the Baroness’ advanced years (their target was sixty-three yet had a flash Jaguar – Baxter was amused at the irony) and her sympathy for the aged.

“Then we get rid of her.”

“I thought that’s what we were talking about.” Liz was confused at Kevin’s remark there; so too was Baxter.

“I’m thinking that we don’t leave her body to be found there. With the General the other night, Neil, you left it on those tracks for that train to hit it. You said you wanted the impact of the freight train to help get rid of the evidence, didn’t you?

Let’s do something similar here, but change tack a little.”

“How so?”

“We take her away with us and dispose of the corpse somewhere that it won’t be found for a little while. When the police come across the car, their first and most important action will be to find her. I think that we should leave no sign of her actual death there: make it a missing person’s enquiry. It cuts down on the media focus and also distracts them from looking for her killers.”

“A missing person,” Liz displayed positive signs of agreement with her smile towards (the still smoking) Kevin, “gets far less attention than a murder.”

“I like this. Let’s get doing it as soon as possible.”

Baxter was relieved. Their brainstorming, which had started out as frustration before moving to an argument, had suddenly given them an excellent plan of action to go along with. Liz’s final statement on the matter made it even better; he wished they’d thought of doing something like that with other missions too.

Chapter Forty – Dragons
London Zoo, Regent’s Park, London – January 6th 2014


Jane had been told to travel to the London Zoo and visit the enclosure where the Komodo Dragons could be seen. Mister Cole, her husband had told her this morning, would approach her when she got there at half past one.

The weather report earlier had said that rain was forecast for the early afternoon and so Jane had taken an umbrella with her when she left the offices of The Daily Express and travelled up to Camden Town underground station. She kept it in her handbag as she then strolled across Regent’s Park and into London Zoo; there were clear skies and no sign of that threatened rain.

As she searched for the place where she was to meet the source that Michael had set her up with, she pondered over how much her boss Nick Wilson had believed her when she said she had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. She reckoned that he’d probably thought that she was off to attend an interview elsewhere rather than actually working. As when she had before she’d spoken to him, she again pondered over whether she should have told him the truth about what she was up to.

He was too much of a demanding and interfering editor for that though. Nick would have wanted to know far too much about the extraordinarily little that she had on the current story that she was working on.

*

Just before Christmas, Nick had assigned her to look into the matter of the why the remains of the deceased former Armed Forces Minister Roger Mayfield had been dug up from his grave in Norwich. He’d still been pleased with her for the story that she’d done on Richard Hamilton – the Government Chief Whip before he’d been forced to resign –and handed to her the assignment of finding out what was going on with Mayfield as some sort of Christmas gift.

Jane hadn’t found it much of a gift. The D-Notice that the Home Office had issued with regard to the matter had only requested that the media not publish anything about Mayfield, not that they cease to investigate it for a future story. The problem was that there was nothing to look into. There had been no one that either Jane or anyone she spoke to at other newspapers could find out. No leads were available to them as to why Mayfield’s body had been taken out of the ground, who had exactly ordered that done and whether there were any results from any tests presumably carried out on the corpse.

Nick had moved onto new things and given her other assignments and she’d nearly forgotten the whole thing until she’d briefly spoke with her husband about it when they’d shared a bath together (a regular thing for them) on New Year’s Day morning. He’d been quite interested in the near-nothing that she had with the story and offered to help her out. Michael had said that he reckoned that only the Security Service would be going around digging up bodies of former MPs long after they’d died. Moreover, he’d told her, he had a contact within the Security Service.

Over the weekend just gone, Michael’s contact had given him the name of another Security Service employee that his wife could talk to; the Mister Cole who she was here to meet today.

*

“It’s not a pleasant day, is it?”

Jane briefly gave the man who’d suddenly appeared beside her a glance, but chose not to reply to what he said. She didn’t like the way that he smiled at her when she’d looked around to see who was trying to talk to her. She was too busy trying to work out whether the creatures before her were these ‘Komodo Dragons’ that Michael had spoken of or just some other large lizards; there was no time to humour some creepy man who wanted to approach women in zoos.

“You’re Missus Snyder, yes?”

Oh fuck, he’s not some creep after all.

Jane silently cursed at her own silliness, before turning back to face the man and replying: “You don’t look like a spy.”

“I’m not.”

“But you’re Mister Cole, aren’t you?”

Imagine if I’m wrong… how embarrassing.

“I’m an intelligence officer in the service of the Crown: spies are foreign agents.”

“Okay…” Jane wasn’t impressed by this patronising man.

“Do you like the dragons?”

“I guess so.”

“I do. As a boy, they were my favourite animals to read about, to dream about. My mother couldn’t get any toys depicting them, no matter how much I bugged her. In fact, I remember my father once bringing home a stuffed dragon that had a rider on the back. Do you know what I mean? Like something out of a fantasy film or such like.

That wasn’t a Komodo Dragon though. To a six year-old, such a distinction is particularly important.”

“I see.”

Jane took her cigarettes out of her bag and quickly lit one up. Cole had diverted his attention to the dragons on display while she tried to get a feel for the man. His irrelevancies had been annoying, but she guessed that he was trying to feel her out too.

Their ‘mating ritual’ had to continue though if this afternoon wasn’t going to be a waste of time.

“What can you tell me about Mayfield?”

“What do you want to know?”

“What happened?”

“With what?”

Jane had an urge to punch the man in the side of the face. He was still standing beside her though staring forwards at the dragons ahead and thus not speaking directly to her. Worse than that rudeness was his failure to answer her questions and instead giving his own.

“I’ve been told that you know why his body was dug up three weeks ago and taken away for some sort of examination.”

“Who told you that I knew such a thing?”

“I can’t tell you that, Mister Cole.”

“Why can’t you tell me?”

“Because I just can’t.” Jane wasn’t about to give Cole the name of Michael’s contact at Thames House; such things weren’t done.

“What else is there to talk about then?”

“Excuse me?”

“I can’t tell you about Mayfield if you won’t tell me what I want to know.”

Jane took a deep puff of her cigarette and considered how this meeting was going. Cole had yet to give her anything and was being deliberately obtuse in his own demands for information. She had been told that he was willing to talk to her, that he wouldn’t ask for anything too (not even money) and that she’d learn something here today.

Well… she’d been told wrong then and nothing now.

She remained silent and turned her gaze to the animals before her.

“The females fight before they let the males mate with them.” Cole was back to what appeared to be his favourite subject. “Did you know that the females don’t always need a male to reproduce? Do you remember Jurassic Park and the dinosaurs increasing in number? That was down to parthenogenesis. A few Komodo Dragons in captivity have been shown to reproduce without fertilization from a male.

A Virgin birth, if you’d call it such a thing.”

Jane made a groan in reply that she hoped would denote her lack of interest.

“So… you wanted to know about Mayfield, yes?”

“I did.” Finally…

“He was murdered. No one is sure how or why, but he was purposely killed and his death staged so that it looked like heart failure.

There are all sorts of little clues that point to this, though none of which stand out on their own, but need to be looked at together. His daughter – just a teenager – was the one who discovered the body the morning after he passed away: the bedroom light had been left on as if someone had been up in the night when he was found in his bed when he should have been asleep.

There were chemical traces from around his mouth recovered that point to some sort of ‘wet-wipe’ being used to clean his mouth area; no such item was recovered within his house, car or office.

His house alarm had been tampered with: someone had used a disarming code to it at some point before his death.

His medical condition was serious and life threatening, but not enough to kill him as it ‘apparently’ did. A very capable doctor has looked into what exactly he died from and believes that it wasn’t bad enough to have the fatal effect that the initial coroner said it did.”

Cole still hadn’t looked at her since that first creepy smile. His attention was on the dragons and when he’d said all that he had, he’d remained looking forward and talking seemingly absent-mindedly.

“Who could have done such a thing? And, why?”

“As I said, Missus Snyder, there is no ‘why’ that anyone yet knows.”

“What more can you tell me?” Jane asked him as she dropped her finished cigarette and stubbed it out on the ground.

“Smoking within the zoo grounds is not allowed; they’ll probably fine you. So, if I was you, I’d pick that butt up and drop it in a bin somewhere.

Mayfield’s name was on a ‘Hit List’ alongside two other semi-public figures who have recently died under sort of similar circumstances. Before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell you their names or anything about how they died.

In addition, and this you’ll really find interesting, this whole information is being closely held. The new Home Secretary is at the top of the pyramid, with regard to Mayfield. Downing Street knows truly little apart from the D-Notice request. I don’t know how you’ll interpret that, but I know how I do.”

“What do you mean?” She didn’t understand Cole’s point there.

“Go away and think about it; it’ll sink in later.”

“Is there anything else, Mister Cole?”

“What more do you want to know about Komodo Dragons?”

Jane didn’t give a reply to that and instead took her umbrella out of her bag: it was starting to rain.





Chapter Forty–One – Silence
Paddington Green Police Station, London – January 7th 2014


“I want you to listen to me Amy and what I have to say. You don’t mind if I call you ‘Amy’, do you? Missus Perry doesn’t easily role off the tongue and you weren’t a Missus for very long, were you? Where I come from, three months isn’t much of a marriage.

Anyway, back to what I was saying… Do you have a thing for coppers, Amy? Your father was one, so was your brother, your husband of ninety-five days and your on-off married boyfriend too.

I’m not a psychiatrist – thank God – but I find the whole thing that you have with male policemen a little bit disturbing. I guess that a crude person, take my colleague Inspector Lavelle here as an example of that, would make some comment about truncheons or such like.

What is it, Amy? What is it about male policemen that does it for you?

And, when do you want to start cutting out all the crap and telling us about Mark Clarke? I want to know what you and him talked about after he’d done a runner.

When you start telling me this, and stop lying to us, then things will go a lot easier for you. So, come on, start talking: the truth this time please, Amy, yes?”

Harriet stood behind the one-way mirror in the darkened passageway behind the interview room on the other side. The speakerphone here in the basement complex below Paddington Green Police Station allowed her to clearly hear what Martin’s colleague Ellie Lang was saying to the woman that the two Special Branch officers had arrested earlier today.

Lang pulled no punches and was a tough-talking lady. Harriet hadn’t been able to see before that that was the type of woman she was because Lang had come across as very sweet natured and softly spoken. She should have known better though. No woman was ever going to become a Chief Inspector within the ranks of the Met. Police being the shy and retiring type.

There came absolutely no response from Amy Perry.

The twenty-eight year-old woman from Hackney looked like she was holding back tears, but she was keeping her mouth firmly closed after Martin had earlier picked apart and destroyed the lies that she’d tried to first spin when they got her in here. There were no more demands that she be allowed a solicitor and she’d stopped denying that the mobile phone that they’d found up in her loft was hers.

In addition, she was no longer claiming that she hadn’t been in contact with Mark Clarke since he’d fled London in November and turned up dead not long afterwards out in Gloucestershire.

Amy Perry was just starring right ahead and, from what Harriet could determine from her posture, those tears were being held back behind a faked defiant stare.

Harriet let out a yawn when her eyes went to the clock mounted on the wall within the interview room. She saw that it was coming up to midnight now. That meant that she’d been here at Paddington Green for the past nine hours. It was late now and that had also been a long time; she could really do with a coffee to keep her alert.

Alone here in this observation point, Harriet wished that she had Patrick here to talk through her impressions of what she was witnessing and also the circumstances leading up to Amy Perry being arrested and taken here. He was taking some owed holiday because the MATCH investigation had come to a stall – before today – and so wasn’t here to offer his insight. Martin was in there with the woman who could potentially give them many answers and while she’d spoken to him on the several occasions that he’d left the interview room, those had been brief chats.

Harriet needed someone to bounce off her thoughts on the matter.

Amy Perry had been the girlfriend of Mark Clarke before ‘he had done a runner’, as Lang had so elegantly put it. She lived in a small flat in Hackney not far from where Clare had had his home in Walthamstow and worked as a secretary for a legal firm based in The City. Harriet knew that legal secretaries almost always had to have a law degree before any medium or big sided law firm would even consider hiring them, but Amy Perry worked for a big one despite only barely scraping together a few GCSEs before she’d left school at sixteen.

The ‘connections’ that her father and brother had, both of them being policemen, must have made that happen, she assumed. It was strange though.

Yet so too was much of what she knew about Amy Perry.

Back in mid-November, when Amy Perry had first come to the attention of those on the MATCH investigation (actually when it was still the YOUNG inquiry), she had seemed not very important. Martin’s people came across telephone contact between her and Clarke and after seeing some of the transcripts of text messages sent between them, it had been clear that they had been having an affair. Clarke was married, but that hadn’t stopped him seeing Amy Perry on a regular basis for what seemed like sexual liaisons at either her flat, in his car or in cheap hotels across London.

Physical and electronic surveillance had been put on her in case Clarke had tried to get in contact.

Then Clarke had turned up dead in the River Severn and nothing more had been done with Amy Perry.

That was until the mobile phone found on Clarke’s body had been finally ‘repaired’ by Harriet’s colleagues. That device had been recovered with Clarke’s body, though it had severe water damage and was also missing a SIM card. Nothing could be found out from it, the contents couldn’t be recovered, until some bright young chaps assigned to Thames House’s technical services office had done their magic. They had finally got information from it, despite it not having a SIM, and that had led them to calls made to only one number during the time Clarke had been using it – which had been during the period he’d been in Gloucestershire. It had been shown that the number he had called was assigned to another over-the-counter SIM card, using a different network provider too, and used in a phone active only in a certain area of Hackney.

Quickly, the phone had been narrowed down to Amy Perry’s address and her initial denials back last year that she hadn’t been in contact with him shown to be false.

When Martin had first called her at work earlier today telling him this and that he’d arrested Amy Perry, she had gathered that he’d assumed she would take note of what she’d said and wait for him to update her tomorrow or the day after. He appeared not to have thought that she would have wanted to come to Paddington Green and the underground portion of the building where terrorism suspects were usually held just on the basis of a pair of recovered phones.

She had come though because maybe some answers to the MATCH investigation could come from Amy Perry.

Since the whole inquiry had started, when the Security Service had been called in because of Clarke’s initial actions with the police national computer, the investigation had been going everywhere but nowhere at the same time. All it ever brought Harriet was questions, so many questions.

Even when she and Patrick had thought that they might be onto something with the soldier Baxter in December, they had soon been disappointed there when their ‘sisters’ at Six (the Secret Intelligence Service) had stated that an operative of theirs in Kenya had confirmed that Baxter was actually there in Africa and not here in the UK killing people. It had been the same with the pathologist who’d looked at Roger Mayfield’s body; he’d said that his suspicion was that someone had killed that MP, but he had no idea as to how that had been done.

All Harriet got with the MATCH investigation was frustration. Thus she had practically jumped at the chance to come here and hear what Amy Perry had to say.

The problem was that the woman on the other side of the glass was still keeping silent.

“C’mon, Amy, talk to me, will you? They say ‘the truth will set you free’. Well… Inspector Lavelle makes comments like that and he always knows what he’s talking about. Do you know how clever he is?

Earlier, when you were lying to him, you had no idea that he already had the truth to your lies discovered. So, when you do start talking again, remember not to bother lying because he’ll know whether its crap or not.

Maybe, you don’t want to talk when he’s here. Is it that? Shall I ask him to put his fingers in his ears – he can’t leave the room: that’s not allowed – but he can do that so he won’t hear what you have to say. We can have a girly-chat. You can tell me all about this thing for male coppers that you’ve got and then tell me about what you and Mark Clarke talked about when he was on the run.

Now, what do you have to say to that deal?”

Harriet listened in amazement to what Lang was saying to Amy Perry in that interview room. She was trying to break her and going about it in an interesting way. Martin’s colleague was still having no luck though because the woman whose resistance she was trying to shatter was keeping silent.

“I knew your brother, did you know that? Martin here didn’t, but I worked with him a few years ago. I remember hearing about his death and being a little upset at that news.

You brother was a nice guy. If I’m honest, and forgive me for this, he wasn’t the best of coppers, but that isn’t to detract from him as a person.

As to your dad and ex-husband… I’ve never met either of them. Do they know about you and Mark Clarke… your affair with him? I wonder what they’d think now about you, Amy, sleeping with a married, bent copper. They are going to be unhappy when they hear that, aren’t they? It’ll probably affect their careers; nothing official, of course, but people will doubt their judgement and integrity after they hear that you were involved with someone like Clarke.

The world is unfair like that.

What could your brother say if he was hear right now, Amy?”

Lang was relentless. Harriet almost felt sorry for Amy Perry as she suffered the tongue-lashing that Lang was giving her.

Martin had told her earlier that Lang, his superior at the Special Branch, had made her career out of getting confessions out of terrorism suspects. She’d had a lot of luck earlier in her career with Irish terrorists and had also given some advice on the subject to Six too on approaches to take with Islamic terrorists now in the modern era.

Harriet reflected that if she had something to hide and Lang wanted to know it, she wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. Certainly not locked down here in this basement complex and cut off from the world as Amy Perry was, even for this (relatively) short space of time.

The problem was, Harriet realised, was that Amy Perry was still showing no sign of cracking under the pressure. Her familial and sexual relationships with police officers, as well as working at a big solicitor’s office, gave her a little understanding of the situation that she was in. She probably knew that they couldn’t hold her like they would a terrorist and deny her access to a solicitor of her own.

If Amy Perry was clever (or maybe just as stubborn as she appeared) all she had to do was stay as silent as she was. Her silence was defeating Lang… and so too Harriet in her search for some answers to those questions that she’d had for months now.





Chapter Forty–Two – Importance
Downing Street, Central London – January 8th 2014


The PM called for Daniel to come into his private office at once, but Daniel wasn’t here today.

“He’s with his daughter,” Lauren informed the PM’s secretary, “she’s still very poorly.”

Within a minute, the secretary came back on the line: Lauren was to come to see the PM in Daniel’s place. She was told that it was of vital importance that she attended on the PM.

Lauren found that within the PM’s office along with the nation’s Head of Government were two other men: the Home Secretary and the Director-General of MI-5.

“How is Holly?”

“Sorry, Sir: ‘Holly’?” Lauren had no idea who the PM meant.

“Daniel’s daughter. She’s eight, isn’t she, and they think it might be leukaemia…?”

“To be perfectly honest, Sir, I’m unsure.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence followed Lauren’s embarrassing answer. She worked with Daniel almost 24/7 yet had forgotten the name of his seriously ill daughter. In contrast, there was the PM, the most important man in the country, remembering the little girl’s name, age and what was wrong with her.

“Shall we get back to what we were discussing?” The tall chief spook, Sir Williams ‘Bill’ Hunt, Lauren noticed as she looked his way following his comment, was standing over in the corner whereas everyone else (including her now) was seated on chairs around the low coffee table in the middle of the room. He sounded more than a little impatient with his remark.

“Oh, yes, of course. Carry on, please, Bill…”

“Thank you, Prime Minister. Now, as I was saying… Baroness Amanda Vaughn went missing near her home in Matlock – up in the Derbyshire Dales – on the evening of December Twenty-Second. She hasn’t been seen since she left her house and drove away for a few hours in what appears to have been a regular habit of hers.

Derbyshire Police found her car the next day about ten miles off, on what I’ve been told was a very lonely stretch of road, but there was no sign of her. They soon called in a pair of my field officers because their assumption was that she had been kidnapped and there might be a political motive to this.”

“Sorry, Bill, can I just interrupt here for a second?” Colin Parsons, a nauseating man whom Lauren personally despised, didn’t wait for a response to his question (re: demand). “Prime Minister, when Bill says that his people were looking at the notion that she had been taken for a ‘political motive’, he doesn’t mean a domestic motive, but rather an international one.

The fear was that she might have been taken by Islamic extremists because of her previous high-profile role as Chair of the joint Commons and Lords Intelligence and Security Committee.”

“Yes, that was exactly what I was about to say. Thank you, Home Secretary.”

Lauren looked across at Bill Hunt as he gave his reply to what the Home Secretary had said and caught a flash of ‘dagger-eyes’ that the former momentarily directed at the latter. Parsons was technically responsible for the work done at Thames House, though the spooks who worked there didn’t like that one bit. From what Lauren knew of them, and MI-6 down at Vauxhall Cross too, no professional intelligence officer wanted to have someone like Parsons acting as an overseer of their work.

She didn’t blame them.

“We kept the whole issue low-key, Prime Minister,” Bill Hunt continued, “and secured cooperation from the media as to not publish anything. We contacted our allies – the Americans, the French etc. – to see if they’d heard anything. I had my best anti-terrorism people take a deeper look at suspects who might be capable of pulling something like this off.

Then we waited… and waited.”

“Until this morning, yes, Bill?”

“You are correct, Prime Minister.” Bill Hunt had now come across to Lauren, Parsons and the PM and he finally took a seat among them. “Police officers in East Staffordshire discovered a body this morning just across the county line from Derbyshire. From what I’ve been told, the body that they found outside the village of Marchington is that of the missing Baroness.

Two children on their way to school came across the body in a thinly wooded area. My officers who responded state that it is their belief that the Baroness was killed not long after she had been snatched – she was shot to dead – and her body then hidden near Marchington. They’ve had a lot of bad weather up there recently and the feeling is that this may have uncovered her remains to be stumbled across as they were rather than remaining hidden as the suspicion is that they were meant to be.”

“This is… well… this is bad.”

Lauren made a deliberate effort not to make any reaction to what Parsons just said after Bill Hunt’s narrative. She wanted to laugh at the man. He had been invited to this meeting because he was important and so too was the matter at hand, but he appeared to be cursed with a constant nagging internal doubt that no one knew of his importance. Thus, he wanted to show off all the time that he was worthy of his role by making serious statements. This time, he had spoken too quickly and had ended up saying nothing but rubbish.

What a fool.

“Yes, Colin, it is.” The PM had his sardonic tone that Lauren had heard him use before on as he spoke briefly to his Home Secretary; he dropped that as he returned to Bill Hunt. “What is being done now?”

“Prime Minister, I have my best and brightest people on this right now and they’ll be working non-stop until we get to the bottom of this.

They are working with both Staffordshire and Derbyshire Police to oversee the civilian enquiry there. In addition, they are conducting close surveillance of and, in certain cases interviewing, terror suspects. Investigation will also be undertaken in the Baroness’ movements before she was kidnapped.”

“I’ll let you get back to that, Bill, and I’ll expect you to keep me updated. Colin, can you contact the chief constables in both Derby and…”

“Stafford, Prime Minister.”

“Yes, in Stafford too, thank you, Bill. Make sure, Colin, that they provide Bill’s people with every assistance that they need.”

“And the media, Prime Minister?”

“Keep them silent on this, will you? Thank you, gentlemen.” Both Bill Hunt and Parsons stood up at this point and Lauren did so too.

“Lauren, stay with me for a few moments, will you?”

Once the two men had gone and the door was closed behind them, and after Lauren sat back down, the PM turned to her and gave her something unexpected: an exasperated look.

“That bloody man! He’s a thorough and complete idiot, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Sir.”

The PM didn’t say anything for a moment afterwards. Lauren kept quiet herself. She suspected that the PM wanted more of her than to just complain about what an idiot Parsons was.

“Tell me, Lauren, what do you think of all of this?”

“I’m amazed, Sir.” She really was. “I had no idea that Baroness Vaughn had gone missing; Bill Hunt did quite a job of keeping the media quiet on the whole issue. I suppose with the Parliamentary session being suspended for the Christmas and New Year’s holiday she wasn’t missed that much and word didn’t get out that she’ll disappeared…”

“She’s someone who really will be missed, Lauren. You are aware of my plans for this year and all the new legislation that I intend to have passed? Amanda would have been of great value in helping that pass through the Lords with as little fuss as possible. It can be done without her, but she ran a tight ship there.

Whoever killed her, for whatever reason – did you notice how Bill had nothing concrete? – has really taken away someone of great importance to my Government.”





Chapter Forty–Three – An Alliance
Blackheath, South London – January 10th 2014


The ‘lunch date’ with his colleague had been arranged for half past One. Williams had given himself plenty of time to get across from Portcullis House down and into South London. A taxi was arranged to collect him from his building and once in that, it went across the river and along the Old Kent Road.

There was the usual Friday afternoon traffic – many people always tried to get a long weekend by leaving work early at the end of the week – but Williams had anticipated that with his timing. He read a newspaper, The Times, as the black taxi eased through the traffic as it headed for suburban Blackheath.

“Do you know where exactly this place is?”

“Sorry… I didn’t catch you?” Williams had been lost in his ‘paper and looked up when the taxi driver spoke. He saw that they were coming across Blackheath itself and towards the big church that stood high above the actual ‘village’ where he wanted to go.

“This restaurant that you wanted, Mister: do you know exactly where abouts it is?”

“No, I’m sorry. All I know is that it is new.”

Williams folded his newspaper up and stared forwards. The driver was seated there behind the Perspex glass and Williams reckoned that the man would have a confused look on his face like his tone had been too. The roughly-spoken taxi driver had slowed the vehicle down as they came off the famous old common and prepared to drop down into Blackheath Village itself. The area around here was no longer a village – it was now part of an urban sprawl that went all the way out as far as Kent – but the old name stuck. There were countless little restaurants and bars in the village and Williams knew that the one that he and the taxi driver were both looking for probably wouldn’t be easy to spot.

The traffic was denser down here in the village. Up on the common, which served as a major transport artery for much of south-east London, they had been moving faster. Here as the taxi went downhill, they crawled along at about twenty odd miles per hour. Williams was fine with that because it allowed him to keep his eyes peeled.

To his surprise, the taxi driver saw the restaurant first: “There it is!”

Williams looked to the left at first before turning his gaze to the right… and seeing a sign that read ‘Orange Sunday’.

“I’ll just pull up, mate.”

Quickly enough, the taxi stopped beside the kerb. Williams reached for his wallet while also reading the meter. He gave the driver £30 and told him to keep the change. In addition, Williams didn’t ask for receipt as he would usually do. He wasn’t going to claim this trip on parliamentary expenses because he wouldn’t truthfully be able to state that he was on official House of Commons business.

He was now out of the taxi and strolled across the pavement the short distance to the restaurant when Colin Parsons would be waiting inside for him.

*

Once Williams had got past one of Parsons’ security people – the officer from the Met. Police’s Specialist Protection branch (SO1) had reassured himself that the MP entering the restaurant wasn’t an assassin – he found the Home Secretary waiting for him and in a somewhat jovial mood.

Parsons welcomed Williams as if the two of them were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while. He called over the waiter and insisted that Williams had a drink with him. Moreover, there was also a demand that Williams ‘open up’ to him and ‘talk through’ all that was on his mind.

Seated opposite the Home Secretary, Williams silently cursed Michael Snyder for all of this. It had been his insistence that Williams come here today to have a meeting between them; he’d set it all up but then, unexpectedly, dropped out at the last minute because something else had come up. Williams was certain that his friend was playing matchmaking games between him and Parsons… yet it was a game that he really didn’t want to play.

He really should have called off the lunch meeting too.

“I’ve always thought that two of us could have worked together better than we have in the past, don’t you agree, John?”

“Sorry…?” Just like when back in taxi, Williams’ mind had drifted off so that he hadn’t been able to fully catch what was said to him.

“I was saying, John, that the two of us should have worked better together in the past instead of clashing as we often did.”

“Oh, I see.” Purposely, Williams gave the most non-committal answer to that that he could.

“Working under Joanne, I often found myself constrained in what I was able to achieve as National Security Minister. Now, after assuming her role, after her… departure, let us call it that, I will be able to work much closely with your committee. I believe that we have many of the same goals, John, wouldn’t you agree?”

“How is Joanne? Have you spoken to her recently?” Again, Williams was careful in his choice of words: he didn’t answer Parsons’ question or agree with his point and also moved to change the subject.

“I was never close to Joanne, we could never get on. So… no, I haven’t. I honestly have no wish to either. After finding out what her and her husband had been up to when she was supposed to be representing her constituents, I was rather disgusted at her behaviour.”

Parsons took a sip of his wine – Williams had so far left his own glass untouched – after making this reply. Williams looked across at the Home Secretary and was then struck with a recognition of what the Home Secretary had just said.

Parsons had just repeated almost word-for-word a statement that he, Williams, had given to the media on the matter of Joanne Miller being exposed for corruption late last year! The man was stealing his words and passing them off as his own… to him too!

“I hope you’re hungry, John,” Parsons was ignorant to Williams’ silent outrage, “they do big meals here.”

“I am.” Williams was letting Parsons’ behaviour pass for now; he’d talk to Snyder about it later.

“They only opened just before Christmas and have been very busy ever since. You should see this place later tonight, say about Eight: rammed full.”

“When Michael told me that we were meeting in Blackheath today, I assumed…”

“No, Michael’s not been here before, not to my knowledge at least. He regularly dines up in the West End. Didn’t you know I have my London home right near here? Of course, with my constituency being all the way up in Cumbria, I need a London home and Blackheath is where I am.”

“I see…”

Williams cottoned-on to something that Parsons said there and it explained a few things. He had just learnt that Parsons had met with Snyder beforehand; for a meal, maybe on more than one occasion, in the West End. The two of them seemingly knew each other more than Williams had suspected.

“Can I go back to what I was saying before, John?” Williams gave a nod and Parsons continued: “Now that I am at Marsham Street, in the ‘Big Chair’, so to speak, I would like that the Home Office and your committee work better together. That is why I requested that Michael arrange for a little get-together between us. It is a shame that he was unable to make the meeting, but I guess that such a thing is a double-edged sword.

I see that you don’t understand what I mean; let me explain better.

We can… you and me, I mean, as those who are in charge of both, can make that happen. We barely know each other, but I want that to change. Let us draw a line under everything that has happened before. I am sure that we were both just posturing for respective bosses – Joanne for me and the media for you – when we clashed before.

There is so much that can be achieved if we could just work together instead of in opposition, don’t you think so, John?”

“There are some valid points, Colin, which you have raised there; all which need consideration.”

After making his (very short) reply, Williams silently congratulated himself on what exactly he’d said. There was nothing that Parsons had said that he could agree with, though it suited his purposes at the minute to not fall out with him here today.

He could certainly be speaking with Snyder later after all of this. Williams thought back to what Adam Hutchinson had told him on New Year’s Day and his friend’s suspicions of Snyder being up to something. Whatever it was, it clearly involved him trying to build an alliance between Williams and Parsons.

That was an alliance that Williams had no interest in being part of: not with this idiot anyway.





Chapter Forty–Four – A Hero
Oxford, Oxfordshire – January 11th 2014


The task was to follow the next target on their list around for a day so that they could get a good feel for the man. In this instance, unlike with the others, there was little background information on the man. In addition, Baxter – along with Liz and Kevin – felt that it was better to see things for themselves too away from the bland reports written by amateur private detectives.

The ‘lay of the land’ was best seen by eyes, not words on a page.

Kevin had been meant to come with Baxter and Liz up to Oxford today, but at the last minute it was decided that he should instead do some similar groundwork on yet another target. The two of them could handle this reconnaissance mission alone; it really didn’t need three people.

The target lived on the edges of the city, though the information that they had pointed to him spending almost every Saturday morning and afternoon within the city itself. With the two of them still not being exactly sure how and where they were to eliminate the man, as per their instructions, both Baxter and Liz saw fit to look for any opportunity that presented itself. Next Saturday was their chosen date to get rid of the man and he was supposed to be a man of regular habits apparently.

This morning, the target had come into the city centre along with his wife and young child. Baxter had read that the man had a three year-old daughter, but that hadn’t made much of an impression upon him until he actually saw the child.

The little family were wondering down one of the main shopping streets in the middle of Oxford. The child was out of her buggy and walking along with her father holding on of her hands; the mother was pushing the empty buggy. They made slow progress because the child couldn’t walk that fast.

Baxter struggled to maintain a pace with them as he tried to keep a distance of about twenty feet behind. The child was distracted by things she saw in the shop windows, things on the ground, other people walking along and anything and everything else. Baxter observed her father as he tried to keep her walking to wherever they were going as well as carry on a conversation with his wife.

He saw that Liz on the other side of the street was also appearing to being having difficulty in walking the slow speed that was required. She was watching the family too, though also Baxter. If there was a need for Baxter to drop out of close physical surveillance – for example if the target or his wife suddenly took notice of him (however unlikely that that was) – she would take over.

The knowledge that he was going to be the cause of that little girl growing up without a father was upsetting to Baxter.

It was a cold and wet day in Oxford, but there were still many people out shopping, or at least window-shopping, today. Baxter tried to maintain anonymity among the crowds and told himself that he was doing a good job. Neither the target or his wife should have any suspicion that anyone was following them as they went about their usual Saturday routine and they certainly weren’t looking around behind them at the man there.

The target and his family came to a stop at some traffic lights to cross the road. Baxter saw that they probably intended to go into the small shopping centre on the other side of the road. He swung his gaze quickly across the road at Liz and saw that she was heading that way too.

Everything was going perfectly to plan…

… before everything fell apart.

The scream came from nowhere. Baxter’s head turned left and then right, but he couldn’t immediately place where the woman’s scream came from. Instead, his eyes followed those of everyone else: people stared ahead.

Baxter still fought of himself as a soldier. He would have the most vivid dreams of being back in uniform and in combat too. Thus his reaction, he would later realise, had been automatic and due to all of those years of training. He charged forwards right towards the long-haired man who was covered in blood and holding that knife.

He couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

The man went down under his rugby tackle. As he crashed into the main, he was struck with a thought that came far too late for his liking: where was that knife exactly?

It was too late for that though. Baxter was atop of the man as they sprawled across the hard pavement. He was trying to pin the man down. Baxter tried to get the man’s arms across his chest and also keep him on the ground.

All the while that woman’s scream continued.

The man tried to bite him. Baxter faced growls and then attempted bites. The man’s hair, set in a ponytail fashion, hit him in the face… where those teeth couldn’t reach.

Is this nutter on something?

Baxter felt a sharp and sudden pain in his groin and it took all of his strength not to react to that. He was thinking a lot more clearly now and realised that hundreds of people must be looking at him – so much for remaining anonymous today! – but what else could he do? This crazed man had to be stopped.

“Hit him! Kick him!” Baxter heard the aggressive demands being made by a youngish-sounding man behind him, though he didn’t know what they were exactly about. He was too busy to do anything like that; it was taking all that he had to keep the man beneath him pinned down.

A fist came out of nowhere and landed in the face of the man on the ground. Then it was returned for a second time. Baxter thought that he heard the crunch of bone – maybe a nose breaking? – and then realised that he had assistance from someone else.

Following that pair of well-delivered punches, the struggles eased off a little bit. He now had a better grip of the man and he was sure that he had the situation under more control.

The problem was though, what was the situation that he’d intervened in?

“Someone call Nine-Nine-Nine!”

“Is she still alive?”

“Kill the weirdo bastard!”

“Call an ambulance!”

The earlier scream had come to a stop and instead Baxter now heard demands coming from the people who he could see all around him. There was a circle of people standing here around him and the man he still had pinned beneath him. That man now had a bloody face and was completely still.

Baxter hoped that he wasn’t dead while also still wondering just what the hell was going on here.

“You did well, mate. He stabbed that woman and was going for the kid too before you got him down!”

“You’re a hero!”

Baxter realised that the comments were now being directed towards him from faces among the still-growing crowd.

“Scumbag bastard!”

With this shout from someone else, Baxter witnessed a kick that was delivered to the side of the head of the man on the ground. There was a horrible crunch with that followed by a man’s shout of sudden pain; Baxter knew that kicking someone in the head was never a good idea.

“The police are coming!”

“Has someone called an ambulance?”

“There’s one coming with the coppers!”

“Let me get at him! Let me help you hold him down, mate?”

Baxter assumed that this voice belonged to someone trying to help. He turned to look at who was attempting to aid him and saw a muscle-bound teenager complete with a tank-top – in this weather! – moving in with his immense arms.

The youngster pushed one arm down over the throat of the man on the ground and Baxter moved slightly as that teenager pushed the other arm onto the man’s chest.

“What’s your name?”

“Neil.” Baxter answered without thinking.

“As they said,” the ‘they’ must have been the crowd, Baxter thought, “you’re a hero! You got him good. I’m Steve and I’m glad to meet you.”

Baxter had no answer for that. He was in shock at his own stupidity in giving away his name; he was also aware that this youngster, along with everyone else, was looking right at him.

There were sirens now. A wailing noise was what he could hear and it sounded like it was coming closer. People all around him were still talking, but Baxter was ignoring them as he tried desperately to think of what to do next.

There was a tug at his shoulder and Baxter looked that way. It was Liz. There was concern written all across her face. Baxter started to get up in reaction to this.

“Don’t worry, Neil, I got hold of him now.” The pride in the youngster’s voice at being given the ‘responsibility’ of holding down the knifeman was evident.

Baxter paid no more attention to him though: Liz was dragging him through the crowd and away.

*

Baxter had recovered his senses as he ran through the alleyway behind Liz.

The noise from her heels as they clattered off the pavement and echoed down the narrow passageway couldn’t distract him from silently repeating one thing over and over in his mind.

What did I just do?

What did I just do?

What did I just do?

When they reached their car, Liz started it up and started to pull away from where she’d parked it before he’d even finished closing his door. In here though, his sense was returned to him.

And Liz ‘helped’ with that too.

“Why did you do that?” She was short of breath, but there was incredulity and anger evident there.

“I didn’t see that I had any other choice.” Baxter didn’t give her an entirely honest answer because he was ashamed of the truth. He didn’t want to admit that he’d acted without thinking.

“It had nothing to do with us, Neil!”

“What happened?” He still didn’t know exactly what had gone on.

“That guy with the knife came from nowhere and went straight after our target. Or maybe he was aiming for the wife to start with. Either way, he stabbed her right in the chest then turned towards our man and the little kid.

Then you were on top of him.”

“I had to do something. I just couldn’t…”

“No, you could have just done nothing as I was going to do! Why get involved?” She was breathing almost normally now as she drove fast and out of the city centre, but Liz still had her angry tone. “Do you know how many people were taking pictures – maybe even filming! – with their phones? The police were coming too and you were just there in the middle of all of that.

What is wrong with you, Neil?”

At this point, the adrenaline noticeably wore off and Baxter started to feel an immense pain where he’d been kneed right in the crutch. He couldn’t answer her question – if there was an answer, he didn’t have one – because his hands went there and he tensed up in pain.

“There’s blood on your face. You’ll need to get that off.” Liz spoke again in a less angry tone after a minute or two of Baxter’s pain.

“Why did that happen?” Baxter was now starting to try to reflect on what just occurred.

“I’m guessing here, but someone tried to kill our man because of who he is.”

“Why?”

“Maybe for similar reasons that we were. Oh, he was taking a different approach, but for the same sort of reason.

By the way, we’re totally fucked!”

Baxter couldn’t respond to that. He was still hurting and Liz was so very correct in what she had just said too.

   James G ,