‘I’m sorry, she’s on annual leave today. Can anyone else help?’
Shit. Taking a chance Mariner asked to be put through to Helena James. This time luck was running for him. She remembered the case. ‘We all do,’ she said. ‘He was a persistent character. And it was unusual from the start because he himself kept phoning up from prison in person instead of leaving it to his brief. But then he was relatively articulate. He was on a burglary conviction that looked sound, but he kept insisting that Sir Geoffrey would want to help.’
‘Did he give a reason?’
‘He claimed that Sir Geoffrey was a personal friend of his mother.’
Mariner’s heart thudded. ‘His mother? You’re sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you refer him to Sir Geoffrey?’
‘I had to in the end because the chap was making such a fuss.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Sir Geoffrey threw the case out, as I knew he would. He said there was nothing to suggest that the conviction was unsafe, whoever he might be.’
‘Did he acknowledge knowing Foster-Young?’
‘He certainly had no interest in speaking to him. Sir Geoffrey said if he ever had known the man’s mother it must have been a long time ago. I wasn’t surprised. I know one shouldn’t make judgements, but I couldn’t imagine Sir Geoffrey associating with anyone like him.’
‘Why is that?’
‘There was an incident. Foster-Young came to the Commission demanding to see Sir Geoffrey. As it happened Sir Geoffrey was out that afternoon so couldn’t see him. But he was like a street person. He was a mess; pale, skinny, sunken eyes. It was the look of an addict. I remember the smell, too. It was quite a warm day and he was filthy dirty and smelled awful. I remember wondering how anyone related to this man could possibly be a friend of Sir Geoffrey.’
‘When was this?’ Mariner asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. About a year ago last spring I suppose.’
‘But if he’d already been released what did he want?’
‘Justice I suppose. He was angry.’
‘How old would you say he was?’
‘It was hard to tell. Quite old. About forty or fifty I’d say.’
Thanks, thought Mariner, himself moving from mid to late forties. But her estimate may not be entirely accurate. If Foster-Young was a junkie it wouldn’t do much to enhance his youthful appearance. Mariner had seen twenty-year-olds who looked as if they were pushing retirement age.
‘How did Foster-Young react when you told him Sir Geoffrey wasn’t there?’
‘He was verbally abusive, so nothing we’re not used to. But he didn’t give up. For some time after that he used to phone every couple of weeks asking to speak to Sir Geoffrey. Then suddenly, nothing.’
‘He never came back again?’
‘No.’
‘So Sir Geoffrey never spoke to him?’
‘Not to my knowledge, though of course I can’t be certain. In the end we just had him down as a harmless head case.’
‘Do you still have his details? Is there any chance you could get me his date of birth?’
She hesitated. ‘I’m not really sure if I should—’
‘Helena, were you aware of Sir Geoffrey’s betting habit?’
A beat of silence. ‘I knew that something was going on.’
‘I’m not convinced that it had much to do with horse racing.’
‘You think it could relate to this man?’
She was filling in the blanks herself. He wouldn’t stop her. ‘I’ve come across the name before. This is important, Helena, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.’
‘I’d have to go and look out the file, but I might have time to fax it through later today.’
Mariner didn’t want the information coming through to Granville Lane while he wasn’t there, so he gave her Anna’s fax number.
Ending the call, Mariner saw the flashing bar of Carl’s breakdown truck coming along the driveway. He picked up the database and went out to meet the mechanic. It only took a couple of minutes to confirm the problem; a split brake cable. ‘But I can’t fix it here,’ Carl said. ‘I’ll have to have it in the garage.’
Mariner climbed up into the cab to wait while Carl hooked his car to the towbar. Jumping in beside him minutes later the mechanic passed him something. ‘You may want to hang on to this.’
Mariner took from him a black plastic box the size of a personal stereo. It had a heavy duty magnetic strip down one side and looked vaguely like something Mariner had seen before. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a CPS tracking device.’
‘A tracking device?’
‘Yeah, people stick them on in case of theft, so that—’
‘Yes, I know what it’s for.’ They used them all the time in the job. He’d seen the techies fitting them. ‘I’m just wondering what it’s doing on my car.’
‘You didn’t put it there?’ Carl grinned. ‘Maybe your missus is keeping tabs on you.’
Preoccupied, Mariner barely cracked a smile. ‘Could it have been the previous owner?’ he asked.
‘Nah. Too new for that,’ said Carl. He started up the truck and they moved off. Mariner pocketed the device, wondering again about the Harlesden officers who’d watched him go and not liking the implications a bit. Carl dropped Mariner off at Granville Lane where he booked out a pool car. Strictly speaking it should only have been used for official business, but the delay already meant that he was pushing it to get to the motorway services as planned, so there wasn’t time to wrestle that particular dilemma. Besides he was on police business, Mariner told himself, just not a case that was assigned to him. Fortunately the motorway was quiet, but he drove south into low cloud, the first sleety rain starting to fall as he pulled into the services ahead of his appointment. A quick scan around the car park told him that Baxter hadn’t yet arrived.
Chapter Thirteen
Through a sheet of icy rain Mariner watched the green Discovery pull in and park. He allowed Baxter a couple of minutes, then, turning up his collar against the downpour, went and knocked on the passenger window. The door clunked open. Mariner’s first impression was that Baxter didn’t much look as if he’d been in an accident. Short and bulky, his grey hair cut close to his skull, he filled up most of the driver’s side of the car.
‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me,’ said Mariner, ducking in out of the sleet and slamming the door. ‘I didn’t expect it to be so soon. Jayce seemed to think you were going to be off for a while.’
Baxter chuckled. ‘Wishful thinking on his part. Leave him on his own for too long and chances are I wouldn’t have a business to go back to. Also I checked you out with Helena James. She seemed to think it was reasonable that I speak to you.’
Funny, Helena hadn’t mentioned that. ‘Did Jayce tell you what I wanted to know?’
‘George Hollis and Steve Jaeger, right? A charming pair.’
‘What more can you tell me about them?’
‘Plenty. Hollis has quite a pedigree. You know that he worked out of Harlesden nick during the early eighties,’
‘Special Incident Squad, Jayce told me.’
‘You know the score on those units. They were completely results driven,’ Baxter went on. ‘Always a dangerous objective, in my book. Minor considerations like truth and justice tend to get sidelined. Hollis was young and hungry when he joined the squad and presumably impressionable. He would have learned a lot from the more experienced officers on the squad and not all of it good. We know that a number of dubious practices were rife among those élite squads at the time.’
Mariner had grown up with the folklore; unrecorded evidence taken in cars en route to the police station, the ‘correction’ and fabrication of information recorded in pocket books, the use of intimidation and physical violence during interviews. The bad old days. ‘I understand Ryland had linked Hollis to a number of miscarriages, including Joseph O’Connor’s,’ he said.
‘That was classic Hollis, and the first hint we had that there was more going on. O’Connor’s was one of the first cases that the JRC handled. His brief was referring the case on the grounds that his client’s statement had been coerced. When Geoff looked at the transcripts, this was borne out. He’d talked to Joseph O’Connor and could see that there were words and phrases that he just wouldn’t have used. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.’
‘So how did you get involved?’
‘Geoff and me go way back when to he was a prosecutor, and bloody good he was too. We’d been involved in a couple of corruption cases before and he knew my views. In the end it’s what compelled me to leave. I’d just set up in business, mainly working with the complaints authority to support the drive against police corruption. As part of the investigation into Hollis, Geoff got us to trawl back through transcripts of other cases that he’d had been involved in, some of them going back years.
‘Geoff had a nose for a bent copper and he could tell that O’Connor wasn’t just a one-off. Naturally, as part of the enquiry we looked deeper into the circumstances surrounding O’Connor’s arrest, and that was when we learned that Marvin Jackson had been arrested along with O’Connor but released without so much as an interview. It didn’t make any sense, especially when he was the one with the history, so we started to explore the possible reasons for that. The one that leapt out and smacked us in the face was that at about that time Jackson was registered as an informant, with Steve Jaeger as his handler and supervising officer—’
‘George Hollis.’ Mariner was ahead of him.
‘But given the length of time that Jackson was on the books there were surprisingly few results arising from information he’d supplied, in fact the luck seems to have all run the other way.’
‘That was a hell of a risk for Hollis to take.’
‘He’d been at Harlesden for a while by then and he was a powerful figure. We put him under surveillance and found that there seemed to be something more than a professional relationship between him and Terry Brady. It wasn’t hard to figure out. Hollis was taking a cut of Brady’s dirty money in return for keeping him out of trouble, giving him information on raids that were going down, that kind of thing. Hollis got complacent, took to holidaying on the Costa del Sol in one particular villa, owned by Terry Brady. He even had the barefaced cheek to meet him out there a couple of times.’
‘That’s when you took those photographs.’
Baxter smiled. ‘This job isn’t all about sneaking around in car parks in the pouring rain you know. There is some glamour.’
‘It looks to me as if you had a strong case.’
‘It took us a while to assemble the evidence and Geoff was thorough. You know what it’s like. Corruption amongst police officers, like miscarriages of justice, is a big thing. You have to get it right. There was another complication too. The Home Office was breathing down our necks because they didn’t want another corrupt police officer scandal.’
‘So what happened?’
‘To be honest I don’t really know. We were all set to move on it the middle of last year. Hollis was coming up to retirement anyway. He was just over fifty at the time and was planning to go out in a blaze of glory. I think it was that more than anything that rankled with Geoff; that this guy was about to be held up as an exemplary officer when in truth he was anything but. But just as we were due to subpoena Hollis’s bank details he slipped out of sight. He got to take early retirement due to so-called “ill health”.’ Baxter spat out the words with contempt. ‘Bastard jumped before he was pushed.’
‘Do you think someone tipped him off?’
‘He got wind of it somehow. Hollis was popular. There would have been plenty of people watching his back.’
‘So that was the end of it?’
‘Geoff wanted to go ahead with an indictment anyway but the Home Office had been unhappy from the start and wanted it over. No point in stirring up more bad feeling against the police when they were just beginning to recover their reputation. As far as they were concerned the corruption had ended and Hollis’s retirement put a stop to Brady’s activities, or so they thought. Shortly after that it was rumoured that he’d moved permanently to Spain. When Hollis left there was a big shake up at Harlesden, a lot of dead wood was cleaned out and Jaeger moved on to pastures new.’
‘And you were happy with that?’
‘Not much choice. But it rankled with Geoff and I don’t think he ever quite let it go. He’d have loved to have got at Hollis somehow.’
‘Would he have exposed Hollis in his memoirs?’
‘It’s possible, though I’m not sure how happy the publishers would have been. If he told the full story, it’d leave a number of people with egg on their faces, including the Home Secretary.’
‘You think the Home Office were so desperate to keep it quiet that
they
tipped off Hollis.’
‘It had to be a possibility.’
‘Do you know what happened to Hollis?’
‘He’s decamped abroad himself from what I’ve heard.’
‘And Jaeger?’
‘Redemption. He went through internal disciplinary proceedings and appeared to learn from it. He was working as a DI in Cumbria when I last heard. What’s all this about?’
Mariner felt slightly foolish now.
‘I’m peripherally involved with the investigation into Geoffrey Ryland’s death.’
‘Well, Brady’s fingerprints are all over it, metaphorically speaking. I hear he was back in the country at around that time, and Ryland was pretty well responsible for breaking up his operation. And Brady is that kind of guy. Doesn’t like to be messed around.’
‘So why is everyone hell bent on blaming Joseph O’Connor?’
‘Because it keeps the good names of the police and the Home Office out of it. And if a bad guy is caught in the end, what does it matter?’
‘I don’t imagine O’Connor’s widow would agree with you. And if it’s that clear, why hasn’t Brady been arrested?’
‘I would guess that there’s no material evidence yet to connect him to the scene. And with him being out of the country most of the time, it must be hard to even link him to any associates.’