Four Below (2 page)

McLusky jumped out and ran back the few yards to where the young man was still on the ground, groaning. He had dropped the sword. The DI kicked it under the nearest car, then thumped a heavy
knee into the suspect’s back and twisted his unbroken arm back.

This wasn’t popular. ‘Ah! Get off me! You broke my arm! You broke my fucking arm! You fucking arsehole broke my arm! Get off me! I need an ambulance!’

‘You need to shut up. Of course it may harm your defence …’ McLusky rattled off half the caution, but stopped when he felt a wave of nausea travel up from his stomach. He
thumbed the orange button on his airwave radio. ‘Alpha Nine, can I come in please …?’ He gave his position and asked for backup, while the suspect kept up a rich mixture of
pleading, insults and threats. Feeling in danger of losing his supper and with no handcuffs to secure the suspect, McLusky was extremely grateful when he saw PC Hanham, who had got his breath back,
come marching up the road.

‘You can’t cuff the other wrist; I think he broke his arm in the fall,’ McLusky explained.

The swordsman twisted his head back and yelled his protest at Hanham. ‘He ran me down with the fucking taxi, that’s what broke my arm, you wankers!’

‘Good effort, sir. Did you see what he did with the sword?’ the constable asked.

‘Under that car. You’d better arrest him properly; I may have burped a few times during the caution. Better make sure.’

‘Will you take him in?’

‘Me? I got a taxi waiting with the meter running. No, he’s your man, Constable.’

Hanham loudly cautioned his blaspheming prisoner while watching the DI get into the cab. Half-arresting suspects, then swanning off in a taxi all casual.
McLusky
. Where on earth did they
find him?

McLusky made the driver stop at a convenience store so he could stock up on light bulbs, mineral water and indigestion tablets before letting himself be driven back to Albany
Road. By the time he was carrying his purchases along the corridor towards his office, he no longer felt sick, but the curry still sat acidly right under his solar plexus. Definitely the vegetable
biryani next time.

DS Sorbie watched McLusky come past the CID room. He checked his watch. If he himself were to take lunch breaks this long, he’d soon get an earful from DI Fairfield. The man had been
shopping too, by the looks of it. Unbelievable. And that could so easily have been, should have been, him. If Avon & Somerset hadn’t seen fit to import the DI from Southampton, there
might have been room round here for long-overdue promotion.

McLusky firmly closed the door of his office behind him and let himself fall into his chair. He didn’t have far to fall. The office they had found for him at the very end of the corridor
was minute. At first he had suspected it to be a converted cupboard, but he had been assured that it was DI Pearce’s old office. Sometimes McLusky thought it had probably been responsible for
driving Pearce to retire early. With a large haul of drugs money. Not that ‘renegade cop Pearce, 46’ (
Bristol Herald
) had enjoyed it for long. The Spanish police, with the help
of DCI Gaunt, had scooped him up before he had a chance to spend much of it.

The only good thing about the office was that the enormous radiator under the window, obviously designed for a much larger room, heated the place to tropical temperatures. Not quite the only
thing, he reminded himself now. The fact that his window opened on to the back of the station, away from the prying eyes of colleagues and punters, meant he could afford to smoke the odd cigarette
without attracting attention. Albany Road, along with every other police station, of course, was a no-smoking area. A recent decree issued by Superintendent Denkhaus had also strictly outlawed the
‘abhorrent practice’ of smoking near the entrance or in the staff car park.

McLusky opened the window. It looked out over roofs and the neglected backs of nearby buildings. McLusky preferred the backs of houses. He invariably found them more revealing than their
better-kept fronts. The rear was not just where illicit cigarettes were smoked. It was where suspects tried to leave when the heavy knock came at the front. The rear of a house was the natural
hiding place for drugs, money, weapons and the occasional body.

An illicit cigarette was exactly what he needed now. Last one in the packet, how annoying, and he’d been in the shop not ten minutes ago. Smoking was said to aid digestion, and he could do
with all the help he could get. The scarcity of tobacco made the first drag even more luxurious.

It had been a quiet week, apart from the endless paperwork, of course: report-writing, form-filling, box-ticking, assessments and memos. Earlier in the year, Atrium, the anti-drugs operation,
had taken Ray Fenton out of circulation, a major drugs baron who would never again see his naff sports car, ostentatious penthouse or tasteless motor yacht. But even in the midst of the
celebrations, they all knew what it meant, what the next few months would bring: a vicious little war fought in the resulting power vacuum. In supply-and-demand economics there would always be
drugs barons as long as there were customers for his wares, and Bristol was the hub that supplied drugs to much of the West Country. The business was so ridiculously lucrative that new dealers
constantly tried to move in, at the risk of all-out war with Yardie and Asian gangs and established dealer networks. Over three hot summer months there had been stabbings and shootings; one
drive-by shooting had injured two innocent bystanders while completely missing the target. Yet there was nothing concrete; there had been plenty of hints and rumours, but all had failed to
solidify. By autumn, everything had gone quiet. A new kingpin was securing the hub now, only so far McLusky had no idea who he was. There were rumours, of course, and the rumours weren’t
good. Give it time. He knew that the quiet was deceptive, the short lull before business as usual resumed. Like a quick illicit cigarette break before the return to work.

He flicked the fag end out of the window towards the wheelie bins below. The phone on his desk rang and he answered it. On the other end was DS Austin. McLusky had been right.

They were back in business.

On the night shift, planning was important. Without a plan, you ended up like an opportunist junkie thief, climbing into houses and then staggering along the road carrying some
crap that was enough to get you put back inside but not enough to buy you a kebab. Tricky, of course. All the good stuff sat where there was tons of security. Neighbourhood Watch, those were the
days. Now it was all high-tech; no one needed to twitch their curtains, they all got security cameras, CCTV, SmartWater, alarms. If you strayed into the wrong neighbourhood, they would have you
taped before you’d got your tools out. Taped? What an old-fashioned expression. It was all electronic now. At least in the old days they’d record over the same cassette a million times
so when something worth seeing happened the quality was so crap it could have been anyone ghosting through the frame. Either that or they’d already taped over it. Morons. Now it was hard
drives and crisp images and as much recording time as you liked.

Not in your league, that, anyway. Not on your own, either, not with one eye and one ball and an old motor that stuck out like a sore thumb. Mind you, he always made sure he looked after the van,
and there was nothing the rozzers could pull him over for. Tax, MOT, insurance, all the paperwork. No point in drawing attention to yourself. Clean driver’s licence, too. As for
housebreaking, it was the lower-middle ground you wanted, the up-and-coming, upwardly mobile, what they used to call yuppies. Thirty-something couples just starting out together, twenty-five grand
a year each, first house. Lots of money for stuff and gadgets to plonk on every surface but not enough for a five ninety-nine window lock. Lava lamps. Digital photo frames. They’re the ones.
Hard-working morons. Not a care. Pick one. Clean them out. All insured. Come back three months later and lift all the brand-new replacements. Nine out of ten still hadn’t fitted any security,
even then. Idiots. He was the lightning that struck twice. Of course most of the junk people had in their houses was worth next to nothing. All the usual stuff was now so cheap to buy in the first
place that it wasn’t really worth pinching. You hardly got a thing for it, especially if you used a fence. After all, why spend a hundred and fifty on a netbook you know is probably stolen
when you can get a new one for two-twenty? With a year’s guarantee?

But at last he had struck it lucky; not a bad haul, this. In fact it was so good he had made two trips to the van, breaking his iron rule not to get Aladdined. Getting greedy and hanging around
too long gave people time to notice you, to get on the blower and arrange nasty surprises. But it had been worth it. Not a load of catalogue showroom rubbish this time. Top-of-the-range equipment,
this. Professional gear, all photography stuff. Two digital SLR cameras, long lenses, two printers – he’d lifted the bigger one – all the chargers and a laptop. State-of-the-art
laptop. Top spec, latest model. Must have cost a fortune. He flicked on the ultraviolet bulb. Not one item was security-marked.

He used to quite enjoy taking pictures. Never had a decent camera, though, just happy-snappy things. Send the pics off to Prontoprint and get them back a week later. Most of them went straight
in the bin, but some were good. Some were priceless. No idea where they’d got to. Lost in one of the endless moves or disappeared when his last girlfriend ran off. Took a few good ones of
her.
He had quite an eye for taking photographs. Let’s hope it wasn’t the eye he’d lost. Ha. First eye joke that made him smile, good one. Might take a bit longer for the
first ball joke, of course. He was tempted to keep one of the cameras. And the printer. But perhaps not the laptop. Too expensive, he could never explain that away. Flog it, then buy a cheap one
and keep the receipt. That’d unnerve the rozzers if they came calling. A
receipt
.

Of course, before you could sell a knocked-off computer you had to wipe everything on it or whoever bought it in a pub car park wouldn’t be able to pretend that he didn’t know it was
nicked. A shame with this one, because the pictures on it were fantastic. Really good. You could tell the last owner knew what they were doing. Folder after folder. This lot, for instance, the
pictures in the woods in autumn. Taken at the crack of dawn or else just as it got dark. Some of the shots were amazing. Mind you, some of the pics had a weird mob in them; the bunch this
photographer hung out with didn’t half look nerdy. All with little cameras. One of them in a wheelchair, even. How did they get
him
into the woods? But the pics without people in them,
the atmospheric ones, he’d keep some of them. These ones with the lights in the trees looked spooky, like from a fantasy movie. And the pictures had so many pixels you could probably have
them blown up big as posters. And you could zoom right in on the spooky lights … and keep zooming in … and …

It was difficult to believe what he was seeing. His mouth had gone dry and his heart was hammering. His palms were sweaty. And this was just a picture of the bastards. It must have been taken
with a long lens. Or did he mean long exposure? The big man must have stood still, because he wasn’t blurred at all. Neither was the car. The very Merc he sometimes used to drive him around
in when he was drunk, he was certain. But the figure with the bag over his head was a bit out of focus, and so was Ilkin. Though you’d recognize him if you knew it was him. He was hard to
forget. However much you’d like to.

He got up and started pacing the room, leaving the image on the screen. How was it possible that he had found this very picture? Or was it the other way around? Had the picture found him?
Whoever took this picture couldn’t have known what they were photographing. The big man couldn’t have known, or this photographer would already be six foot under. What he needed now was
a drink. And time to think. This could be it, his one chance of revenge. This picture could be his ticket. He would have to move house first, of course, no question about it. The big man would pay
a lot to keep this picture out of the papers. Of course he would also happily have him killed – slowly – by Ilkin while he watched from the comfort of his car.

Chapter Two

‘This could turn out to be complete nonsense, of course. Bound to, in fact.’ McLusky was possessed of a profound cynicism where the observational skills of the
public were concerned. ‘Once we’re across the bridge, you’ll have to give me directions.’

DS Austin made himself taller in the passenger seat and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the river below. ‘Okay, will do. It’s a great view from up here.’

McLusky, who didn’t like heights much, gave an all-purpose grunt and kept his eyes to the front as they crossed the Clifton suspension bridge going west. ‘Someone moves their
dustbins out of alignment and we get a detailed description of the perpetrator, but you can carry a headless corpse through town and no one sees a thing. I can guarantee it.’

‘The woman was quite adamant. A fox with half a human face in his jaws. Or words to that effect.’

‘Half a cheese sandwich, more like.’

‘She was walking her dog early this morning. Turn right when you’re past the sports club.’

‘Where would we be without dog-walkers?’

‘Back at the nick in a warm office? No offence, it’s a stylish car and all that, but the heating is pathetic.’

McLusky knew Austin was right. The old Mazda had been an impulse buy, and the longer he drove it, the more faults showed up. Terrible suspension was one of them. A feeble heater another. But he
liked it and felt defensive about it. ‘It gets warm eventually.’

‘I’ll have to take your word for it.’

McLusky turned on to what looked like a forester’s track into the bleak woods they had been skirting for a while. ‘What is this place, anyway?’

‘Leigh Woods. Have you not been here before?’

‘I’m not the outdoorsy type. And look at it, why would anyone?’