Forty-One
Nobody was dawdling, far from it, but with a complex survei-llance strategy to be planned and implemented as well as a -firearms team to mobilise, this was never going to be a shit-and-shiny-shovel-paced operation.
Caution was paramount as they got closer to that potentially life-saving moment about which Amar Chopra had been so full of himself.
Which was why it was almost dark by the time the first few members of the firearms unit began to creep along the wall at the side of Barry Cheshire’s house.
‘Do you think they have to train specially for that?’ Miller asked. ‘The creeping? Yes, obviously the shooting’s the most important thing, but they also have to be seriously good creepers.’
Miller and Xiu had been sitting in an unmarked car for more than an hour, watching officers moving slowly into position.
Looking for signs of movement at the target address while listening to the status updates from the Tactical Firearms Commander, broadcast in staccato bursts from the radio on Xiu’s lap.
Code Amber, standing by on Red, all that jazz.
‘It’s like it was with Driscoll, remember?’ Miller said.
Xiu grunted. She obviously did remember, but was clearly not in the mood to reminisce.
‘Suit yourself,’ Miller said. ‘Just making conversation. Trying to pass the time.’
It was only a matter of months since they’d been playing a similar waiting game outside a boarding house on Freckleton Street.
A multi-unit operation to apprehend a hitman whose involvement with the Cutlers did not end up nearly as well as he might initially have hoped, nudging him, as it did, into the orbit of a lunatic named ‘Torchy’ Molineux.
The whole ‘welded to a fridge’ thing.
Driscoll had not been where they’d thought he would be that day, and Miller was not convinced that Justin Cutler would still be, either. The intelligence from the A/V lab meant he could at least be certain they were in the right place, that this was where the videos had been recorded.
‘It was the Sibelius violin concerto,’ he said. ‘I’m well aware that you haven’t asked, but I thought you’d want all the information at your fingertips. I know you’re very much a details person, Posh.’
Xiu looked at him, but said nothing.
‘That’s what the woman a few doors up was playing. What she was practising in her cellar. It’s quite famous, by all accounts—’
‘Why are we here?’
Miller considered it for a few seconds, then said, ‘That is a very fair question. It’s the final part of a ridiculously dramatic Four in a Bed tonight, so I know where I’d rather be.’
‘No, I mean here.’ Xiu turned to stare across at the target address; one she’d last visited a fortnight ago, the morning after the murder of Darren Grant. ‘Why are we sitting outside this particular house? What’s Barry Cheshire got to do with any of this?’
Miller had been asking himself the same question, but before he could admit to being utterly clueless the voice of the firearms commander crackled from the radio, announcing that his team was now at Code Red and shouting ‘Go, go, go’ as if he was in an episode of Line of Duty.
Personally, Miller thought that Code Green would be a more appropriate signal to go go go, but it didn’t feel like the right time to quibble, and he and Xiu watched as officers approached, then swiftly breached the front door with the aid of a short metal ram.
‘I reckon they probably have to do a creeping course and a ramming course,’ Miller said.
In less than a minute, an officer had reappeared, taken off his helmet, and was walking back towards the road shaking his head and giving a thumbs-down signal.
‘Doesn’t look promising,’ Miller said.
‘Not especially,’ Xiu said.
There was, of course, the grave possibility that they had gone in only to discover that the kidnappers had fled, having already murdered Justin Cutler, but that would have made the officer’s behaviour somewhat blasé, not to say downright callous.
So Miller had to assume that the place was simply empty.
‘Right, then.’ Xiu opened the car door, walked round and retrieved her forensic coveralls from the boot. ‘Let’s get in there.’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt they were here,’ Xiu said.
‘We know they were here,’ Miller said. ‘The violin thing.’
‘Right, but now we’ll have physical evidence.
’ She walked towards the chair Justin Cutler had been tied to in the second video, in front of the wall against which he’d been slumped in the first. Photographs were being taken and CSIs were busy on their hands and knees, scraping and taping and putting samples into plastic bags.
‘Yeah, obvs, but the violin’s important, too.
Maybe when the time comes, that woman can come along and play it in court.
’ Miller followed Xiu to the far end of the cellar, opposite the slightly wider end which Barry Cheshire had called home and around which Miller had been given a grand tour, back before the murders and kidnappings.
When it was all just about someone who’d fallen into a lake.
Those ramshackle fixtures and fittings were still there; the crappy portable TV and the microwave, the ratty chair and the dog bed.
Miller thought about that.
‘So what’s the next move?’ Xiu asked.
‘Well, wherever they’ve taken Justin now, I suppose the ransom demand still stands,’ Miller said. ‘So Jacqui Cutler carries on putting all her drugs into a mahoosive bag, while I get back out on the streets with Finn and we try and get a fix on who those drugs will be getting delivered to.’
‘Where’s Finn now?’
‘I told her to head back to my place. She knows where the spare key is.’
‘How’s she doing?’
‘Oh, you know.’
They turned and walked back to the end of the cellar where Cheshire had bedded down. ‘You think there’s any chance he’s our kidnapper?’ Xiu asked. ‘Cheshire?’
‘Do you?’
‘No, I don’t think so … but he must be involved somehow. He’ll certainly need to explain why a kidnap victim was being held at his house.’
‘Yeah, there’s no dodging that one.’ Miller no more believed that Barry Cheshire was a kidnapper than he’d thought he was a killer. Now, though, even he was forced to admit that the man did have an unfortunate habit of popping up whenever such things were happening.
What had Sullivan called him? ‘Bad Luck Barry’.
‘He was definitely here,’ Miller said. ‘Until recently, too.’ He walked towards a corner and pointed down to a sausage-dog-sized turd nestled against the wall. ‘That’s not old,’ he said. ‘Which means Cheshire was almost certainly around when those videos were being made.’
Xiu beckoned the photographer, who immediately crouched to take pictures of the evidential turd, grumbling to anyone willing to listen as he did so. ‘Why do I never get to photograph flowers or sunsets … ?’
‘There’s no way he wouldn’t have cleaned it up though,’ Miller said. ‘Not unless he didn’t have time. He left the dog bed behind too, which tells me that, for whatever reason, he grabbed his dog and got out of here in a hurry.’
‘Let’s put a description out to every station in town,’ Xiu said. ‘See if we can get him picked up.’
‘Make sure they’ve got a description of Ruby, too.’
‘A description of … ?’
‘A description of the dog, yes. I’d suggest going with, “small, brown and wobbly”, but feel free to come up with something of your own. Either way, I can guarantee that if you find that dog, you find Barry Cheshire.’