Sleeper Cell (12 page)

‘Do you have a last name for her?’

‘No. I said, I hardly met her.’

‘Not good enough, I’m afraid. Mr Jaafar, you really don’t want to get caught in this net. If you know anything, you’d be wise to tell me now. We investigate your attack, you go home, everyone’s happy. Obstruct me, things might get more complicated. So, I ask you again, what was her name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Fine. We’ll do this the hard way.’ Leila turned to leave.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I know where you might find out.’

‘Go on.’

‘In my flat, at the back of the closet that’s built into the bedroom wall, there’s a safe. I keep my papers and cash there. Kalela asked me to keep her and her sister’s passports and so on. They didn’t have anywhere to keep them and they were terrified of being burgled.’

‘And you have Ghada’s papers too?’

‘I don’t know. About a week ago Kalela gave me a brown envelope, asked me to put it in the safe. It had Ghada’s name written in Arabic on the front.’

‘Lock or combination?’

‘Combination. 24-12-56,’ he said.

‘Thank you. We’ll look into it. Someone will come and take a formal statement from you tomorrow.’

She left without speaking to the guards on the door and walked quickly out into the hot night.

Leila phoned DCI Lawrence as she left the hospital. She gave him the safe combination and told him she’d be there in fifteen minutes.

‘We can handle that,’ Lawrence said. ‘There’s been another shooting.’

‘You think it’s connected?’

‘We can’t see why, but the MO’s similar. Inspector Davis asked for you and right now we can’t spare anyone else from here. If it looks to relevant, we’ll follow it up.’

‘Where?’

‘Flat in Broadwater Farm. I’ll send the address through to your system.’

‘What’s the situation on the ground?’

‘Still some running battles with the police, but not much. Seems most of it’s come in from outside the estate trying to relive the old days. So be discrete when you get there.’

‘Why?’

‘The dead are black. Mother and daughter.’

‘Then it’s nothing to do with what’s going on. It’s just a drug hit, isn’t it?’

‘Davis says it might interest you, so that’s good enough for me. Take a look. If you don’t agree, come back. Just be careful up Kingsland Road. We’ve still got a serious battle at the Turkish Centre. Gangs of youths on both sides and our lot somewhere in the middle.’

‘Noted. I’m on my way.’

She retrieved her car from behind the hospital and drove north. There were police road blocks half a mile from the Suleymaniye Mosque and palls of black smoke in the still damp air. Flames reflected off the buildings as she turned off the main road and made her way around the battle through deserted back streets. Without waiting to find trouble at the North London Mosque, she again took a slower detour through residential streets.

She arrived Broadwater Farm at 4.15am. It was mostly quiet, but if the gangs patrolling the estate’s streets got wind of a double murder of two of their own, that could change very quickly.

She passed two uniformed officers guarding the stairwell and ran up to the top floor where Davis was waiting for her.

‘Good work with Jaafar,’ he said.

‘They got the safe open yet?’

‘They have, and they’ve got a name. Ghada Abulafia. British passport, decent but not extravagant bank balance.’

‘Got an address?’

‘No, but we’ll find it.’

‘So what have you got here?’

‘Double execution. 9mm hollowpoint head and chest hits. Forensics have been in to photograph the scene and secure it, but they’ve not touched anything, except to put the light on in the bedroom. I wanted you to take a look.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Neighbour named them as mother and daughter Marie and Esther Shaw. Time of death is around midnight.’

‘Anything in the files?’

‘No, they’re clean. There’s a son too, Phillip, about eighteen. Odd chap by all accounts. Missing.’

‘Kidnap?’

‘He may have been in on it for all we know. Take a look at the scene, see what you think.’

Davis called the two forensics techs and SOC civilians out of the flat and motioned for Leila to enter. He did not follow.

The bodies were still in place. The older woman, Marie, lay face up in the sitting room. She was in her night clothes. Near her head was a broken picture frame and shards of glass. Leila peered at the glass. The frame had contained an ink-jet print and enough of the cheap colour had stuck to the glass to leave the ghosts of three faces. She didn’t touch it; she didn’t need to confirm who was in the photo.

Off the sitting room was a short corridor that led to a bathroom and two bedrooms. One was in darkness, but Leila could see two single beds arranged at ninety degrees along the far walls. The other bedroom was lit by a bare incandescent bulb that smelled of burning dust.

The daughter, Esther, was lying against the bed, again in pyjamas. One shot to the chest, one to the head. Leila leaned over the body. There was evidence of the third shot in her shoulder – the shot that got her talking. There were several pools of blood near the desk under the window.

This was not her bedroom. She would share with her mother and the brother would be in here. The only thing that suggested otherwise was that the room was immaculately tidy. There were no posters on the plain cream walls, no clothes strewn across the floor. The focus of the room was a long desk on which stood three computer monitors, one of which had been smashed. A computer stood on the floor with all the cabling neatly coiled and fastened together with black electrical tape. All but one cable went somewhere, no loose ends. An anglepoise lamp lay on the floor, its bulb smashed.

She stood for almost a minute staring at the desk. She could feel this boy, his obsession, the attention to an environment he could control. He didn’t use the computers for work: the lack of any paperwork mitigated against it. He wasn’t a gamer either. The monitors were small, mismatched, basic. The kit on the floor looked home-made, which suggested either someone with very limited means, or a requirement for the sort of system not available off the shelf. Or both. It was a classic hacker set-up.

She flinched when Davis entered the room behind her.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘Not the same MO.’

‘Head and chest executions… unusually low velocity bullets.’

‘By a single shooter this time. There were two gunmen at Vallance Road.’

‘Why do you think there was only one here?’

‘Mother is in the sitting room. Let me walk you through it. I’m still calculating…’

She led Davis back to the front door.

‘Door has been broken in,’ she said.

‘The call-in said he’d smashed the lock to get in.’

‘That fits. So there was no initial forced entry,’ she said. ‘The security chain is also intact, which means when the mother opened the door, she was expecting someone she knew and trusted. The Farm has a very low crime rate now, but that still seems highly incautious. Who would you open the door to without precautions at midnight?’

‘No one outside the family.’

‘Exactly. So I think we can say the boy was out, but expected back. But the person she sees when she opens the door is not him.’

‘Person, singular?’

Leila nodded. ‘I’m coming to that. One thing at a time.’ She walked back into the sitting room.

‘Gunman forces Mrs Shaw back here, asking whatever he needed to ask. She either yields or fights back. Either way, he has no further use for her so he kills her. Esther hears this and tries to escape.’

‘What makes you think she wasn’t being held by a second gunman? She would have had plenty of time to escape between the attacker, or attackers, entering the flat and the final shot unless she was being held.’

‘She’s got headphones around her neck. She’d have been oblivious to the initial entry. Anyway, two attackers would have brought the women together, played one off against the other. The leverage of torturing one would have yielded quicker results. Ester was shot in the shoulder, not fatally, but it happened in the boy’s bedroom.’

‘So he grabbed Esther as she makes a run for it. After her mother was dead.’

‘Yes. Note the single bullet to the chest. It’s execution-style, but not the kind of overkill we saw at Vallance Road. Your assassin here just wanted to kill them. So he gets Esther and she takes him to her brother’s bedroom.’ She led Davis along the corridor and into the room. ‘He’s the key to this. Whatever the gunman wanted, it’s something to do with the boy, and it’s something to do with this room. And whatever it was, Esther told him, or as much as she could.’

‘How do you know she told him?’

‘Because it all ends here. She was standing here when she was first shot. Single to the right shoulder, designed to inflict pain. Your gunman is left handed, incidentally.’ Leila stood against the desk with her back to the broken monitor. ‘He then pushes her out of the way, against the bed and shoots her twice more, fatally. Very quick.’

‘That agrees with what the witnesses tell us,’ Davis said. ‘There was a gap of about a minute and a half between the first and second groups of shots.’

‘They heard them?’

Inspector Davis shrugged. ‘The initial call-in was for muzzle-flash, seen from a flat over in Northolt tower. Witnesses closer in all say the same thing: they thought heard something, but they can’t be any more specific.’

‘Then they’re being willfully deaf. Low velocity bullets, yes, but no silencer. This guy likes to work close up and discretely. A five inch silencer on a five inch barrel, he couldn’t have got the angle needed to shoot down into her shoulder. Unless he was seven feet tall, and then I’d hope even here he might have been seen. Did anyone actually see anything?’

‘This is the Farm – what do you think? They keep crime low here by dealing with it themselves, not by talking to us.’

‘He was here maybe two minutes. He knew exactly what he was looking for.’

‘Impressive. Any chance you can you tell me what that was?’

‘I take it you’re being sarcastic, but yes, I can. Or some of it. Look at the void on the desk. There’s blood spatter, except here,’ she indicated a clear rectangle near the front of the desk.

‘Forensics saw it. There’s another smaller void at the back.’

Leila shone her torch towards the right rear of the desk. There was a light spray of blood droplets, then a space of about four inches, then another couple of tiny red marks. She leaned over and saw a firewire cable slumped on the floor – the only untidy cable down there. The computer had been moved and opened.

‘External hard disk,’ she said. ‘It’s what we would have expected. He probably stripped the internal one as well; you’ll have to get one of your techs to check.’

‘But you think this larger void is more important?’

‘Yes. There were papers here.’

‘Or a book.’

‘The boy doesn’t have any books. The void is the size of A4 paper. There’s a fast laser printer in the corner.’

‘OK. Paper.’

‘Which is curious. A computer geek is working on a something: what does he need to print out?’

‘Whatever he’s finished.’

‘No. A finished file has a purpose. It gets uploaded, or run, or shared. It’s done. He printed something he was still working on, something he needed to see in black and white.’

‘A complex bit of the programme he was writing? You think he needed to work something out on paper?’

‘Maybe. It might just have been a to-do list. But it was important to him, and it was important to whoever shot his sister and mother. The gunman took the hard disks; he also took those papers. And he made no attempt to disturb any of the other equipment, other than to break one monitor, which would have been just to intimidate the girl.’

‘Right. So the million dollar question is: do you think this was this one of the Vallance Road gunmen?’

‘I have no idea. It does seem to be too much of a coincidence that the methods are so similar, though the motivation was slightly different. At Vallance Road they were fast, triple-tap executions. That means there was a message being left. This is more like aggravated burglary. There was no intent to intimidate other people in this community, just to steal the computer kit and eradicate witnesses. Plus, there’s no obvious connection between the women who knew our bomber, and this family. And you say there’s no sign of the brother?’

‘No.’

‘Canvas the area. This doesn’t feel like a kidnapping. The most likely explanation is that he was absent throughout.’

‘Rioting?’

‘No. This boy’s a computer geek. Most of his friends, if he’s got any at all, will be on line. If he’s got any political leanings, they’ll be of the conspiracy theory type. He trusts his computer, not people. He won’t have gone far. He’s either hiding on his own or is being hidden close-by. And it’ll be dawn soon. He’ll move at first light.’

‘We’ll get onto it.’

‘Right now. If this is connected to the Vallance Road shooting, it’s connected to the attack on the hotel this morning.’

‘You think he stumbled onto the identity of the cell?’

‘It’s the only thing valuable enough right now to kill his family for.’

‘Why? Terrorists aren’t concerned with anonymity. They’ll tell us themselves who they are soon enough.’

‘This lot are going to a lot of trouble to conceal their identity, and there’s only one reason why they’d do that.’

‘Because this is an ongoing operation,’ Davis said. ‘Phillip Shaw’s a threat.’

‘Exactly. And your gunman took a picture off the wall. He knows what Phillip looks like now. We need to find the boy, and quickly. If we don’t find him before they do, there’ll be nothing to stop them.’