‘I understand,’ said Banks. ‘But it’s the national angle I’m interested in. Maybe even international. Who knows? I mean, if someone steals a few sheep, the odds are he’s going to slaughter them locally in an illegal abattoir and sell the meat off the back of a lorry, especially with the price of lamb these days. But if he steals a tractor worth a hundred thousand quid or more, he’s going to whisk it out of the country sharpish. And for that you need organisation. Remember Tallinn?’
‘I do remember,’ Joanna said, with a tilt of her head. Then she laughed and touched his hand. ‘Whatever happens, Alan. We’ll always have Tallinn.’
Definitely not the Joanna Banks had known. She had changed. She would never have said something like that before.
‘But that was different,’ Joanna went on. ‘It was people we were dealing with, not sheep or pigs. Or tractors.’
‘We think the hangar might have been used as an exchange point,’ Banks went on. ‘You know, somewhere the local thieves deliver their goods, whatever they are, make the transfer, and get it on transport brought in specially for the purpose. Then it goes on its way to Bulgaria or wherever. For that, some of the people involved will have to drive up and down the A1. I understand you’re using ANPR to track the movements of suspects?’
‘You’ve been reading the papers, I can tell,’ said Joanna, leaning back in her chair and sipping her Coke. ‘OK, yes, that’s a part of what we do.’ ANPR stood for automatic number plate recognition, a system of software able to collect number plate data from converted CCTV units on all motorways, major roads, and in town and city centres.
‘So you must have some names for me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Some of your regulars. And don’t tell me Operation Hawk has yielded no results so far. There’s organisation involved here, Joanna. Palms to be greased, papers to be forged, that sort of thing. They might use locals for the jobs and for the scouting, but the whole operation’s got to be run by an organised gang. There has to be a brain behind it somewhere. And money.’
‘Fair enough. There’s a few people we’re keeping an eye on, though they’re hardly the ones who drive lorries up and down the motorways. We do liaise with the NCA, too, on a regular basis, as well as with other county forces.’ The NCA was the National Crime Agency, what the media referred to as the British FBI, which had replaced the Serious Organised Crime Agency. They weren’t primarily concerned with rural crime, as Operation Hawk was, but they were interested in almost everything else except counterterrorism, which remained within the Met’s remit. Slowly but surely, the technology was catching up with the criminals. ‘The problem is,’ Joanna went on, ‘that we’d need specific locations to know if a certain car or lorry has been regularly spotted on that route. And, as you can imagine, on somewhere like the M1 or the A1 there’s a hell of a lot of normal traffic flow to rule out.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Banks. ‘But if I give you the location of the hangar, and the closest access points to and from the A1, can you find out whether anyone’s been visiting the place regularly over the past year or so?’
‘We keep the ANPR data for two years, so yes, we can do that. I don’t know about the actual location itself, but certainly the general area. Have you thought, though, Alan, that if some organisation is using that corridor, as you suggest, then they’ll be smart enough to know about ANPR, and maybe even about Operation Hawk – it’s hardly a classified operation, after all. They could avoid detection by using different vehicles. Or different number plates. Or varying their route.’
‘Surely even you lot can spot a false number plate?’
Joanna laughed. ‘Sometimes. But there’s a lot of traffic. Not to mention all the foreign vehicles. We can liaise with Interpol and Europol if we need to, as well as with forces in specific countries, but that takes time and a finely honed sense of what you want. What you’re talking about just sounds too vague to me. I’m not saying we can’t help. Don’t get me wrong. Just telling you not to expect miracles.’
‘I never have,’ said Banks. ‘Not unless I’ve laid the groundwork for them.’ He finished his pie and sipped some beer, then swirled the pale gold liquid in his glass. ‘If I’m thinking along the right lines,’ he went on, ‘someone might have driven up on Sunday morning. At least that’s when one of our suspects received a text and left his flat in a hurry.’
‘Or down,’ said Joanna. ‘How do you know they didn’t come from Newcastle, or Edinburgh, Glasgow?’
‘Point taken. Or down. But one way or another we’re looking at placing a vehicle, or vehicles, at the abandoned airfield between, say, half nine and ten o’clock, which means they would have come off the A1 about a mile from the village of Hallerby five minutes earlier. Or from the junctions at Thirsk or Northallerton.’
‘You’d be surprised how much data that involves, but I’d say we could probably do it, yes. Remember, though, we’re only interested in specific vehicles. We’ve got a definite location and a specific time frame. What exactly are you looking for?’
‘In the first place, anyone on your list, any of your specific vehicles, anyone suspected of having even the remotest involvement in rural crime on a large scale being spotted at that place and time. Secondly, anyone you’ve been tracking for some time, anyone who seems to have made an inordinate number of trips up there for no apparent reason. Also, anyone with a criminal record of any kind, especially for violent offences.’
‘That latter request might be a difficult one,’ Joanna said. ‘It’s not really within our parameters to check all number plates for convicted criminals. Needless to say, we can’t actually tell you who was driving the car or lorry at the time, just that it passed such and such a location. And it’s not as if we’re out there writing down the numbers of all the cars that pass by. It’s a very specific operation, precise, targeted.’
Banks slipped out his notebook and gave her Michael Lane’s number plate. ‘It would help if we could know whether he’d been in the area or not, too,’ he said. ‘And we’re tracking down another number, a large van used for removals. We think it may have been involved in the theft of the tractor.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Joanna. ‘But, remember, some of these people are clever.’
‘Everyone slips up sometime. And it’s just possible that someone might have been in a hurry. It looks as if there was a shooting at the hangar, Joanna. It’s not just a stolen tractor or a few missing sheep now. It could be murder.’
Chapter 6
Caleb Ross had been driving around the dales farms for thirty-five years, thirty of them for Vaughn’s ABP, always the white vans with the high sides, covered and leakproof, in their various incarnations. He wouldn’t say he knew the roads the way he knew the gnarled veins on the backs of his hands, but he knew most of them well enough that he didn’t have to drive every inch; he could usually let the internal cruise control take over for a while. He was also used to people overtaking him. Everyone wanted to overtake him, no matter what speed he was travelling, so he had learned to stay at a reasonable fifty and to wave drivers on when he could see that the road ahead was clear. If anyone honked a horn at him, he never heard it because he was always playing his loud music, usually of the kind known as progressive rock, from Rick Wakeman to Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He liked the operatic structures of the concept albums and the fantastic stories they told – The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – they kept him interested as he did what was, most of the time, an extremely dull job. And an occasional puff or two on the old wacky baccy didn’t do any harm, either.