Authors: Robert Muchamore
Dave was satisfied. He couldn’t push further without seeming suspicious, though he’d fish for more later.
The Irishman looked at Dave, with the bloodshot eyeballs of a man with a serious taste for drink. ‘Why do you think that boy killed himself?’
‘How should I know?’ Dave shrugged. ‘I just moved here, so I never even met the guy.’
‘But you’re a young person,’ the Irishman explained. ‘So I thought you’d know how these things go.’
‘Drugs killed him,’ Leon interrupted, with the authority of a man who weighed over a hundred kilos. ‘Whether he fell, or whether he topped himself, it was the drugs messing with Will’s mind that made all the problems.’
Both the old men nodded sincerely. ‘It’s true. It’s terrible what these young fellows pump into themselves.’
The cook was weaving between the tables holding Leon and Dave’s breakfasts. ‘There you go boys. Enjoy.’
‘Cheers, Joe,’ Leon said, as he grabbed the salt and showered it over a set breakfast, with extra sausage, extra fried egg and four slices of toast. ‘I’m absolutely famished.’
The cook looked at Dave. ‘Course, you know the real reason why Leon doesn’t like kids doing drugs?’
Dave shook his head. ‘Why?’
‘ ’Cos he wants all of
yous
in his pub, drinking his beer and smoking his cigarettes.’
Dave smirked, but the two old geezers at the next table started wailing like it was the funniest thing ever. One of them pounded the table so hard that the brown sauce bottle tipped over and rolled on to the floor.
‘That’s a good one. He wants them in his pub …
hahaah!
’
The other old man exploded into a machine-gun laugh, right in Dave’s ear. ‘Leon’s beer and fags,’ he snorted. ‘Good one Joe.’
*
James lugged his stuff to the laundrette and spent twelve quid washing the smell of smoke out of clothes and bedding. He got into a tedious conversation with the manageress.
She rambled on about her son, who was in the army. She told James it would be a good career for a handsome boy like him. James didn’t mind answering the first couple of questions, but when it started to seem like the woman wanted to know his entire life story he got ratty. He leaned forward and lowered his voice.
‘You know, I can’t really talk to you,’ James grinned. ‘You see, I’m a secret agent. I work for an undercover organisation called CHERUB and if I told you any more, I’d have to kill you.’
‘You don’t have to be bloody sarcastic,’ the woman said sourly, crossing her arms as she stormed off in a huff. ‘I was only making a bit of conversation to pass the time.’
James felt like an asshole. He’d only made the comment out of boredom, but the woman looked really upset. Then the door jammed on one of the dryers and he had to go and ask her for help. The manageress did her job switching off the power to reset the machine, but the look on her face as she refunded James’ coins could have cracked a boulder.
Two and a half hours after entering, James emerged on to Palm Hill High Street holding four giant carrier bags of dry washing. He threw them into the back of Dave’s car, which was parked on a double yellow.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Dave asked, as James slumped miserably into the passenger seat beside him.
‘I’d sooner have spent the morning in school,’ James huffed. ‘
That’s
how bad it was.’
Dave didn’t look sympathetic. ‘Yeah? Well I just spent a morning washing and
hoovering
out cars. This woman brought in a part exchange. Her kid must have spat about fifty lumps of gum into the ashtrays and I had to chip it all out.’
‘Gross,’ James gasped, screwing up his face. ‘I guess that
is
worse
than doing the laundry.’
Dave smiled. ‘I signed up for parachute jumps, exotic islands and getting chased down mountains by masked men on snowmobiles.’
‘Yeah,’ James giggled. ‘And what do we get? Chewed-up gum and laundry duty.’
‘Anyway, the Chairman was heading down to Whitehall for some meeting and John hitched a lift in the chopper. So we’re meeting up at Millie’s house for a conference. It’s ten miles out, over Romford way. Get the map book from under the seat. I know how to get out there, but I’m not sure about the local streets when we arrive.’
*
Millie lived in a semi-detached house, with a Toyota RAV4 finished in a girlie metallic purple on her driveway. She opened her front door as they pulled up and the boys walked down a hallway and through to the kitchen. John Jones sat at a knotted pine table, with two plates of sliced cake set out in the centre.
James and Dave both used the toilet before settling down and grabbing chunks of Battenberg while Millie made the tea.
‘I bumped into your sister early this morning,’ John said, looking at James as he bit the marzipan off the edge of his cake. ‘She’s just got back from the summer hostel.’
James nodded. ‘Did she say anything?’
‘Not much,’ John said. ‘She’s looking very tanned and she asked how you were. I told her you’d give her a call when you got the chance.’
‘Cool,’ James nodded. ‘I’ll ring her after she’s finished lessons.’
Millie put the boys’ mugs on the table and sat herself down. James read his mug before his first mouthful:
Metropolitan Police Squash Club
, written beneath two crossed rackets.
‘OK,’ John said, gently rapping his hand on the table to get everyone looking his way. ‘First of all, good work last night, lads. I know there was a hefty chunk of luck involved in your discovery, but you deserved a break after doing such a bang-up job getting yourselves involved with the natives.
‘I passed the casino data on to MI5. They had some difficulty with the accounting software, but I got their initial report through twenty minutes ago. I’ve also asked to be sent all of the documentation on the Golden Sun Casino robbery. It should be coming over from Abbey Wood serious crime squad within the next couple of hours. Now, I’ve only had a few hours to get cracking, but I’ll run you through everything we’ve discovered so far.
‘First off, there’s the discrepancy between the amount of money Leon made and the amount that was stolen from the casino. I spoke to the inspector in serious crime at Abbey Wood. The Golden Sun Casino only has a licence for fifteen table games and thirty slot machines. However, the police believe that a lot of illegal high-stakes baccarat gets played in two suites on the upper floors that aren’t licensed for gaming.
‘The amount stolen from the casino was probably much greater than the ninety grand that got reported to the police, but the casino owners couldn’t report having a larger amount of cash on the premises without running the risk of losing their gaming licence. I can also confirm that it was an inside job. The thieves knew the code for the burglar alarm and the combination of two safes.
‘Secondly, the data James e-mailed to campus contained a full membership list for the Golden Sun. Leon and
Sacha Tarasov
were both members. Leon’s account showed that he owed the casino over six thousand pounds when the records were stolen on May sixteenth last year. He was briefly investigated in connection with the robbery.’
‘How come the cops didn’t make any link to Leon?’ James asked.
John shrugged. ‘The Golden Sun had over a thousand members, seventy or eighty staff and a few hundred others who’ve worked there in the past. It would have taken a team of a dozen officers more than a month to track down and investigate every single suspect. The police just don’t have that sort of manpower. Abbey Wood serious crime squad has four or five officers and they probably deal with two or three incidents per week. They might have pulled up Leon’s criminal record at some point, but it’s featherweight. There’s nothing there that makes him look like a suspect in a major robbery.’
James smiled. ‘On TV you always see a whole roomful of officers investigating one crime.’
Millie nodded. ‘That’s right James. But in real life – unless you’re talking about something like murder or child abduction – you’re more likely to find one or two officers investigating dozens of cases. At Palm Hill we’re twelve officers short and we don’t even have enough vehicles to go around. You have to book them out weeks in advance.’
John resumed his briefing. ‘Thirdly, MI5 are still analysing the data, but they believe the two passwords written on the CD belonged to employees called Eric Crisp – a part-time security guard – and Patricia Patel who is a croupier.’
Millie looked like she’d been hit by a rock. ‘
John
, are you winding me up?’
John straightened up in his chair and looked mildly offended. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Patricia Patel is married to Michael Patel, the officer who thumped James on Saturday night. Pat
Pat
is Michael’s nickname for her. I’d never even heard of the Golden Sun until this morning, but I knew she worked nights as a casino dealer. I baby-sat their daughter a couple of times last year when Patricia’s mum was sick.
‘I also had an officer called Eric Crisp on my squad. He moved out to Battersea when he got promoted to Sergeant a couple of years back. He was best man at Michael’s wedding. Then he picked up a nasty back injury and got invalided off the force.’
Everyone around the table exchanged shocked glances.
‘Oh-
kayyy
,’ John said, drawing a sharp breath. ‘I was
about
to say that the next task for this investigation was going to be finding out who Patricia Patel and Eric Crisp were and establishing their links with Leon
Tarasov
; but it looks like Millie just filled in most of those gaps.’
‘What about Will?’ James asked. ‘Where does he fit in with the robbery?’
‘That software was out of the ark,’ Dave said. ‘It was obviously copied and stolen because it contained information that the robbers needed, on staffing, or security, or whatever. My guess would be that Patricia Patel or Eric Crisp copied the information across, which is easy. But they
didn’t
have the expertise to get the software running on a modern computer, so they called in Will and he sorted them out.’
‘It’s interesting that Will kept the data hidden inside the computer though,’ Millie added, still sounding shell-shocked. ‘You’d have to be scared of someone or something to hide the information, rather than just delete it.’
‘Maybe Leon, or whoever, didn’t tell Will what they wanted the data for,’ James suggested. ‘According to Hannah, Will was a complete nerd, so he would have shat himself if he saw news about the robbery and realised he was an accessory to a major crime.’
Dave nodded. ‘Especially if he was smoking a lot of dope. That stuff makes you
so
paranoid – or so I’ve been told …’
‘The thing is,’ James added, ‘when I spoke to Hannah she was all like:
Will was just a harmless geek, he either killed himself or got so stoned that he fell off the roof
. But if he got mixed up in a giant robbery and
Tarasov
was scared that he might go to the police, couldn’t he have got someone to go up on the roof and give him a little shove?’
John nodded. ‘James is absolutely right, of course. We
must
now
face the possibility that Will was murdered by someone linked to the casino robbery.’
‘Mind you,’ Dave said, ‘if he was smoking loads of dope and stressing out over the cops nabbing him for the robbery, that might have been what drove him to suicide.’
‘Another valid theory,’ John nodded. ‘I’ll get hold of the coroner’s report and police records relating to Will’s death. We’ll have to broaden the focus of this operation and try to learn everything we can about Michael and Patricia Patel, Eric Crisp and Will Clarke.’
‘We don’t have an awful lot of resources though,’ Millie said. ‘We’ve been stretched thin just looking out for
Tarasov
.’
John nodded. ‘I know, but now we’re looking at bent coppers and a potential murder investigation, rather than a local villain with too much money on his hands, I’m sure Zara will spare the resources to crank things up a notch.’
James spotted a tear welling up in Millie’s eye. ‘Hey, are you OK?’ he asked, reaching across the table and touching her wrist. He thought she was about to cry, but she rubbed the moisture away and exploded with anger.
‘No, I’m
not
OK,’ Millie yelled, scraping her nails across the tabletop. ‘I’ve been out hundreds of times with Mike and Eric covering my back. I was their superior … I wrote their appraisals.
Glowing
appraisals. I lent Mike money when he was having a struggle after the baby was born, I pushed Crisp into taking his sergeant’s exam. Those two must have been having a right good laugh behind my back the whole time.’
John tried to calm Millie down. ‘Hey, there are a lot of bent cops around, you know? I was on the force and I’ve served alongside a few myself.’
‘They’ve made me look
such
a fool,’ Millie glowered. ‘It’s no wonder nothing ever sticks to bloody
Tarasov
if he’s got half the cops in Palm Hill in his pocket.’