Authors: Robert Muchamore
She cleared a space around the chunky metal box, then slid out her digital camera and took two photographs. The first was of the front of the safe. The second was a close-up of the sticker on top that had the name of the manufacturer and the serial number on it.
After a brief rummage through a chest of drawers, Lauren moved to the final room on the upper floor: the bedroom where the
Patels
’ daughter, Charlotte, slept. She tipped out a few boxes of toys and games, but didn’t have the heart to smash up the property of a three-year-old and headed back downstairs to find Kerry. She was kneeling on the living-room floor surrounded by piles of paperwork.
‘I don’t know how long we’ve got,’ Kerry gasped, as she ran the portable document scanner over a credit-card statement, before hurriedly folding it and stuffing it back in an envelope. ‘But we won’t get all this junk copied, even if the
Patels
stay out till midnight.’
Lauren knelt down beside Kerry.
‘Help me sift through,’ Kerry said. ‘We want credit-card statements, bank statements, phone bills, large invoices. Ignore the rubbish, like gym memberships and stuff.’
For the next hour, the girls were like robots, repeating the same task until their backs and shoulders hurt. Lauren sifted through documents. Anything that looked interesting got put into a pile for Kerry to copy with the handheld scanner.
The other eighty per cent got stuffed back into the cupboard. The sorted pile was twice the size of the unsorted when John Jones called from his car at the top of the road. Kerry grabbed her mobile.
‘I don’t know what you ladies are still playing at, but Mrs P. has turned into the top of the road.’
‘Roger that John, we’re out of here.’
Kerry snapped her phone shut, jumped up and began stuffing the document scanner into her pack. Lauren kicked the papers around the room, upended the coffee table and stole a couple of DVDs. They were about to step out through the bay window when they spotted Patricia pulling up the driveway in a silver BMW.
‘Tits,’ Kerry said. ‘We’ll have to go out the back.’
The girls sprinted through to the kitchen. Kerry pulled down on the back-door handle, but the door on to the garden was deadlocked, just like the one at the front. Lauren reached across a kitchen cabinet and swung open a window as Patricia Patel screamed at her daughter:
‘Charlotte, no,
sharp
. Please don’t touch that, baby, it’s broken glass.’
Lauren glided across the kitchen cabinet, passed through the open window and dropped on to the
Patels
’ shabby back lawn. Kerry followed a couple of seconds later. The garden was surrounded by overgrown bushes and a high wooden fence, which meant the only easy way out was around the side of the house.
As the girls moved, they could hear Patricia sobbing into a mobile phone. ‘… I don’t know, honey. I daren’t go inside, they might still be in there. I can see paper all over the living-room and I think I heard some noise … OK, I’ll call the police. But you’re coming right home, aren’t you, Michael?’
They poked their heads around the front of the house. The sight of Patricia crying and the bewildered toddler staring up at her mother made both girls feel rotten. Patricia hung up on her husband and dialled 999, as Kerry leaned against the side of the house and whispered to Lauren:
‘I don’t think she’ll chase us. She’s can’t abandon the kid.’
Lauren nodded. ‘OK, let’s run for it.’
The two tracksuit-clad girls sprinted out from the side of the house, passing within a couple of metres of Patricia’s grasp.
‘Oh my god, they’re right here,’ Patricia yelled into the phone, as Lauren and Kerry turned left and began sprinting towards the top of the road. ‘Can you send a car quickly? They’re two girls with long black hair, and they’re running towards the top of
Tremaine
Road, right now.’
John was parked around the corner in the next street with the back door of the car open. The girls clambered inside.
‘That poor little girl,’ Kerry said sadly, as John pulled away from the kerb. ‘I know we had to do it and I know it makes it realistic if we trash the place, but her mum was crying and she looked really worried.’
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Lauren said, repeating a phrase that often came up during CHERUB training; though she now felt guilty about the amount of fun she’d had trashing the bathroom.
‘So what did you get?’ John asked. ‘You were in there for long enough.’
‘Financial stuff mostly,’ Kerry said. ‘About four hundred pages’ worth. It took ages because nothing was filed. Half of it was still stuffed inside envelopes.’
‘And the computer?’
Lauren nodded. ‘I copied all the data, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything useful, unless you get a sudden urge to
play
Jimmy Bear Learns His ABCs
.’
John was now working the
Tarasov
mission full-time. He had no intention of driving between London and campus every day, so he’d booked a two-bedroom suite at a hotel overlooking the river Thames.
Lauren and Kerry were on attachment, which meant they were assigned to the mission, but would go back to campus when they weren’t needed. John picked up swipe cards at the hotel reception, stepped into a glass-sided lift and went up to the seventeenth floor with the two
tracksuited
girls.
A vanload of paperwork and equipment had beaten them to the scene and Chloe Blake – an ex-cherub who’d recently taken a job as an assistant mission controller – was busy stacking papers into filing trolleys and setting up the laptop computers and the satellite link to campus. Kerry and Lauren unpacked a few personal items in a room with two double beds, then took showers and changed into hotel robes before ordering a Thai curry from room service.
The girls were lying back on their beds watching MTV when John came after them.
‘Come on, ladies,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re here on a mission, not to loaf about. Kerry, I want you to print off all the documents you scanned and try making sense out of them. Lauren, e-mail the
Patels
’ computer data to campus.’
‘Yes, boss,’ Kerry puffed.
‘Don’t give me that look,’ John said stiffly. ‘This isn’t a hotel, you know.’
Lauren started to giggle. ‘Actually, this is a hotel.’
John was usually mild-mannered, but he didn’t appreciate Lauren’s cheek. He went into the living-room, grabbed a picture of Will Clarke’s body from one of the files and held it up in front of the girls. Neither of them had seen the picture before and they both winced.
‘I’m trying to catch the people who did
this
,’ John said. ‘I was hoping you two would want to see them go to prison as badly as I do.’
‘Sorry, John,’ Kerry said defensively, standing up quickly and grabbing a pair of jeans from her wardrobe.
Lauren looked sheepishly down at the carpet. ‘Yeah, sorry. We’ll get right on it.’
*
John called everybody together for a 9 p.m. conference. James and Dave parked up underneath the hotel. They got into the lift at the parking level and bumped into Lauren and Kerry when it stopped two floors further up. Both girls wore robes, pool shoes and had streaks of water running out of their hair.
‘Nice cushy mission for some,’ Dave grinned. ‘Swimming in the hotel pool while me and James have to live in a slum.’
‘James likes slums,’ Lauren grinned. ‘They’re his natural habitat. And I’ll have you know that me and Kerry spent four of the last five hours doing our brains in trying to make sense out of the
Patels
’ financial records. John told us we could take a break and go for a quick swim before the meeting.’
James could smell the chlorine on Kerry’s skin as the lift moved upwards. He hadn’t given her a lot of thought since he’d met Hannah, but she’d really grown up since they were thrust upon each other as basic training partners nearly two years earlier. James thought she looked more attractive than ever as he imagined leaning forward and kissing her damp cheek.
‘Seventeenth floor,’ Dave said, stepping into a drab corridor and heading for the suite.
John and his assistant Chloe were in the room, as well as a bearded lawyer called Mr Schott. He was one of CHERUB’s legal advisors and also a member of the ethics committee that had to approve every CHERUB mission. Millie turned up last. Dressed in police uniform, she entered as Lauren and Kerry emerged from their bedroom in shorts and T-shirts.
The four cherubs and four adults arranged themselves into a circle in the living-room, using a hotchpotch of sofas, dining chairs, a footstool and a long coffee table.
‘OK,’ John said. ‘Glad you could all make it. We’ve had a flood of information coming at us from different sources since James and Dave made their initial breakthrough with the computer a couple of days back. Chloe and I have spent the last few hours trying to make sense of it, with some valuable assistance from the girls. Now everyone is here, I’ll give you a quick rundown on the situation. Feel free to butt in with questions, or if I miss anything out.
‘First of all, we’ve established that Leon and Michael Patel were both members of the Golden Sun and owed the casino significant sums of money. We already knew that Leon had debts. According to the paperwork the girls copied at the
Patels
’ house this morning, it appears that Michael and Patricia were months behind with their mortgage repayments and owed more than thirty thousand pounds on credit cards and two car loans. In other words, both men were desperate for money.
‘According to the police file on the robbery, on May sixteenth last year, a member of staff at the Golden Sun Casino went into the computer room and stole a back-up tape containing all the casino’s data. We don’t know who stole it, but when a copy was later passed to Will Clarke, it was accompanied by passwords belonging to Eric Crisp and Patricia Patel.
‘Three weeks later, on June seventh at about five p.m., casino manager Ray Li called out an engineer to report that the CCTV system inside the casino had gone wrong. The engineers didn’t turn up until after the robbery. They found that several wire connectors had been twisted and broken off, making sabotage the only likely cause.
‘Eleven hours after that, Eric Crisp was the only security guard on duty after the casino shut its doors at four
a.m
, June eighth. At some time between four and six a.m. two masked men entered the staff entrance at the rear of the Golden Sun Casino using keys. Eric claimed that he went downstairs to investigate a noise and that the two men overpowered him. He said they tied him up and coshed him over the head. Of course, none of this was recorded because the CCTV system had been sabotaged earlier in the day.
‘The police commandeered the surveillance tapes from surrounding buildings after the robbery. I’ve got the tapes here, but I very much doubt they’ll be of much use. The cops at Abbey Wood would have tried already.’
‘Typical,’ James tutted.
John continued his rundown of the facts. ‘The two masked men then used codes in their possession to open two safes and steal a sum of cash reported to be ninety thousand pounds, but now believed to be significantly greater, perhaps as much as six hundred thousand. Eric claims he regained consciousness two hours later and reported the robbery to the police as soon as he came around.
‘Crisp was later treated in hospital for a minor head wound and rope burns on his wrists and ankles. The security guard is always the first person suspected in a big robbery, in the same way that a spouse is always the first person suspected in a murder. Eric was questioned extensively about the robbery, but as you’d expect from an ex-cop, he knew how to handle himself in an interview room and stuck to his story.
‘In the months following the robbery, the behaviour of our suspects was consistent with people who’d just come into a large sum of money. Eric Crisp sold his house in Battersea, quit his job in the casino and moved abroad; we know not where. Leon
Tarasov
paid off his outstanding debts and purchased the Queen Of Russia pub. Michael Patel paid off all his debts, took his wife on a luxury Caribbean cruise, gave his mother fifteen thousand pounds towards buying her council flat and – this is my favourite detail – purchased a seventeen-thousand-pound BMW from
Tarasov
Prestige Motors.’
Everyone around the table exchanged looks and smiles.
‘Well John, you’ve got me convinced,’ Dave grinned. ‘But would that stand up in court?’
John looked at the bearded man straddling a coffee table. ‘Mr Schott, you’re the legal eagle, would you care to take that question?’
Schott leaned forwards, sucked in a lungful of air and waved his hand in front of his face. ‘There’s no clear evidence, like video or fingerprints, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. If we passed the information we’ve gathered to the Abbey Wood serious crime squad they’d pull
Tarasov
, Crisp and the
Patels
in for questioning. Then they’d get search warrants and tear up their homes and workplaces.
‘Patricia Patel would probably be the key to the whole thing. Michael, Eric and Leon all know how the cops break a suspect down and won’t play ball, but Patricia has never even had a speeding ticket. If you get the mother of a young child, scare the wits out of her and then offer her a deal that enables her to stay out of prison and hang on to her kid, she’ll usually crack.’