Enquiries at the local village shop had added gossip about two daughters at an expensive boarding school, exotic holidays and weekends away, with the description of a coastal villa in Portugal thrown in for colour. Even allowing for local petty jealousies and rumour, it was an impressive portfolio. Riley would have to check out the facts anyway, along with Creeley’s credit ratings, but even this low-level study revealed a man living well above the salary of a National Health Service employee.
She checked her map. It was too late to start on the fruit pickers assignment. Their base was in Huntingdon, giving their teams easy access to work sites in Kent, East Anglia and the east Midlands. But clocking the people involved would necessitate an early morning start to identify the various faces, and she guessed she would need Palmer to help with that one. According to Donald’s information, the gang masters who brought in the foreign workers each year were deeply suspicious and possessed of an acute radar for signs of anyone taking too close an interest in their operations.
She headed for home, trying Palmer’s number on the way. It might be worth getting together with him before their dinner date, so he could make a start on getting close to the Huntingdon site. She had no doubts that it would be difficult penetrating the gang’s operation, but if anyone could find a way in, it would be Palmer.
Chapter 5
Palmer yawned and slid down in his car seat, jockeying for a more comfortable position as he watched the office block. He winced and retrieved his mobile, which was digging into his hip, checked it was still switched off and dropped it on the passenger seat. Next to it lay a barely-touched flask of coffee and the insipid remains of a chicken sandwich bought from a passing snack wagon an hour ago. It was as much to help break the monotony of a lengthy surveillance session as any desire to eat. In any case, drinking while on any kind of stake-out usually led to the need for regular exits from the car, which meant running the risk of being spotted by your target, or worse, having them disappear while you were otherwise engaged.
Seeing the familiar face in the lift the previous day had unsettled Palmer more than he cared to admit. Having shrugged it off after leaving the building, dismissing it as one of those odd coincidences in life, he’d found the image returning with the persistence of a nagging toothache. He felt bad about not confiding in Riley, because she deserved better. They had become close while working together, and while there were not many people Palmer had learned to trust over the years, Riley was high on the list. Indeed, she had once saved his life at considerable risk to her own, and that was something he could never repay. But until he could come up with something solid to show it wasn’t just a figment of his imagination, he decided to keep it to himself. Time enough to tell her when he was certain.
Lounging at his desk with his feet up the previous evening, he had cast his mind back over the years, shuffling through his mental filing system of faces and names, searching for a hint of where he might have seen the man before. To help his thought processes, he reached for a notepad and doodled.
Three cigarettes and a coffee headache later, he sat bolt upright, spilling ash down his front. His trawl through the mental archives had unleashed a leaden feeling in his stomach, followed by a flurry of images that began to unravel as the memories grew clearer. He stared down at the notepad, on which he’d made some random jottings. If he was right, and his memory wasn’t playing tricks, this went even further back than he’d thought. He shook his head. This was insane. But even as he thought it, he knew there was no mistake. Germany, 1989.
He lit another cigarette and mulled it over. The older man’s face belonged to a time when Palmer had been a young and inexperienced member of the RMP, on his first posting to Germany. Assigned to a forward base close by the East-West border, Palmer had been hooked up with a veteran, Sergeant Reg Paris, where he was expected to settle in quickly and start learning on the job. Fortunately, Paris had been a good teacher, because the learning curve had proven a lot steeper than either of them had imagined.
Several mornings into the posting, a coded phone call had come in to the base security post. It was very early, still almost dark and with the cold bite of winter hanging in the air. There had been a fatal shooting along the border, the caller had coolly informed them: a runner had been spotted crossing to the west, and failed to stop when ordered by the Eeast German border guards. Now his body was lying just inside West German territory and needed to be retrieved. Reg Paris had been sour-faced with scepticism; it happened every now and then, when some poor soul made an attempt to escape to the affluent and free West and tried to run the gauntlet of mines, dogs and security alarms. They failed more often than not, and the civil police usually dealt with the tragic results. But this one was different. The caller was asking for RMP backup, and quoting an authorisation code with which there was no arguing. Minutes later, Palmer and Sergeant Paris had buckled up and were driving out to secure the scene.
Two days later, Reg Paris was dead, the victim of a freak autobahn accident which had reduced his pool car to a tangled mess of crushed metal. And with him, seen climbing into the car by Palmer himself, had been the man he had just seen in the lift in Harrow.
But that was impossible.
He adjusted his thinking, reverting to cool logic. Once you took out all the variable explanations of a problem, he reminded himself coolly, you were left with either an absurdity which took you nowhere, or alongside it and most likely well hidden, the only possible explanation. The trick was spotting the difference.
He decided to go back to basics, which meant, when in doubt, re-visit what you know. Since he could hardly return to the scene of the car crash, it left him with examining the most recent information he possessed, which was visual. Taking another look at the man he had seen might at least confirm that he wasn’t imagining things.
Now, from his position in the shade of a generous elm tree, and with the freshness of a new day to help him, Palmer had an uninterrupted view of the rear of the office building. It included a private parking area with space for a dozen vehicles, a narrow loading bay with double doors, and two rubbish skips. There had been little movement in the area so far, save for the occasional arrival or departure of cars, postal deliveries and a sandwich vendor, and the irregular appearance of a figure in a dark uniform and blue shirt, walking unhurriedly around the site, checking the doors and windows and pausing for a cigarette break. Palmer recognised the security desk man from their earlier visit. He was replaced later by another man of similar appearance, who moved in the same measured, purposeful manner. Neither gave the impression of being particularly zealous in their routine, but Palmer doubted they would miss much between them.
He checked his mirror for signs of a traffic warden or a roving community support officer. He had discreetly fed the meter, but there was always a risk that an eagle-eyed resident might have noticed his presence and phoned it in. Arguing with a uniform about his right to use a parking space for longer than the allotted time was hardly guaranteed to help in discovering more about the men on the first floor of the office building down the street.
The loading bay doors opened and a figure in a dark suit appeared, carrying an armload of packaging material. Palmer felt a prickle of interest. It was the youngest of the three men he had seen in the lift.
The man walked to the edge of the bay and threw the packaging into the nearest skip. Brushing off his hands, he stood looking around as if taking in the fresh air.