The body on the moor, p.1
The Body on the Moor, page 1
The Body on the Moor
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One September
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four Four months later
Chapter Five
Chapter Six Four months earlier
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight January, the day of the murder
Chapter Nine Two months earlier
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve January, Friday
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four Wednesday morning
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven Six months later
Afterword
DCI Craig Gillard Crime Thrillers
Canelo Crime
About the Author
Also by Nick Louth
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Louise, as always
Prologue
Last night I dreamt I returned to Longstone Moor. I saw the lonely single-track road winding across the top under the slate grey sky, felt the keening wind and the stinging horizontal sleet. It wasn’t the first time. Each of these recurring dreams is the same, a cold twilight and the same illicit task. I know this bony Derbyshire land, above High Rake, the straw-coloured tussocks and the blasted stones, the clack of crows scrutinising every movement from dead hawthorn branches. We’ve come a long way to be here. The ancient road sign by the last cattle grid is barely legible, its warning of disused shafts just a corroded etching. Beyond it, scattered tombstone fragments of dry stone wall lead off to the high top, only its crown of rusted barbed wire surviving. This is close to where I met him, that fateful day almost twenty years ago. And in the dream it is his body that we are carrying from the boot of the car. His lifeless corpse, so heavy already, gets weightier with guilt and regret at every step. In the exterior knowledge that a dreamer often has, I know this is the wrong body. It is the one that I wanted to bury for ever, but not the one that I did.
I have the legs, and she the arms, but the corpse still drags on the wet grass, his clothing snagging on the rusty wire. One hundred yards to the old lead shaft and it feels like a hundred miles. In this recurrent nightmare it is always like this, a lifetime’s burden. But finally, we see the shaft and its ring of downtrodden fence, the barbs snagged with tufts of wool from errant sheep. The wooden warning board is tilted on its rotted post. We have to descend on the spongy grass for several feet until we see the shaft. It is a struggle to carry him without tripping. Finally, we feel as much as see the abyss, hear its sibilant whisper, crooning a welcome. We swing and release, and then the burden is gone, down, down, swallowed silently by the darkness.
And then I awake, drenched in a guilt that will never go.
Chapter One
September
Almost four o’clock in the morning. Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard was in the upmarket Surrey town of Esher standing in the bedroom of a third-floor flat with the lights off. The curtains were closed, except for a small gap through which he was peering with binoculars. Next to him, at a partially opened window, were two marksmen from the firearms unit with sniper’s rifles. Eighty yards away, uphill, they could see the back view of a newly constructed seven-bedroom home belonging to one of Britain’s most dangerous criminals.
Terrence Joysie Bonner, forty-three. Accused of murder, GBH, and trafficking class ‘A’ drugs.
This home had been under surveillance for a week as part of Operation Whirlwind, a coordinated attempt by the National Crime Agency to take down one of the largest drug distribution networks in the UK. In less than ten minutes’ time, in more than sixty locations across the UK, police officers would be raiding the homes, offices and vehicles of those suspected of being involved.
Nothing had been left to chance. In the street on the far side of the house were eight uniformed officers in an unmarked transit van. In a cul-de-sac at the right-hand rear were two more unmarked vehicles with four officers in each, and at the end of the road leading to the estate a second firearms unit. In the garden of the house a plainclothes officer was hiding behind a shed, and a female plainclothes officer walking a dog was on waste ground adjacent to the target home. Every side was covered.
The only lights on at Bonner’s house were two carriage lamps outside the back door. The interior was dark. With luck, he would be asleep. Gillard had arranged with the local authority for the streetlamps to be gradually dimmed in the minutes leading up to the raid as the police arrived, and then turned on maximum once it began.
Every single officer had been briefed about how to tackle Bonner. The sometime nightclub doorman had a well-deserved reputation for violence, brought to public attention by the horrific case of the body parts of a man being strewn along the hard shoulder of the M4 motorway. Bonner was the enforcer for the gang, and the victim of this crime was an underling. Bonner was assumed to possess a firearm, but the idea was to catch him while he was asleep.
All the officers were on the same police radio frequency. One of the officers, listening in on a bug placed inside the house, was ready to give the signal to move in, once the senior NCA officer in charge in Manchester, where the main raids were taking place, had given the signal.
The countdown began. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…
A light went on in the house, upstairs.
Too late to call it off.
Gillard gave the signal. Five seconds early.
* * *
The crackle over the radio indicated the door team were on their way to the front door at the far side of the house. Gillard heard the bellowed warning of ‘Armed police!’, and soon after the crack of the door ram. A second light went on upstairs and a burly silhouetted figure threw open a window.
Bonner.
Gillard picked up the radio and called: ‘Target emerging from rear upstairs window. Team Bravo hold position.’ Three uniforms, two male, one female, were in the shadows behind the high rear fence of the house and acknowledged the order.
Bonner jumped from the upstairs window and dropped into the shadows with a soft impact. He seemed to be wearing a T-shirt, underpants and a pair of Crocs. He had a phone in his hand. A few seconds later he shot into the light of the rear lawn, sprinted down the garden and hurled himself over the fence. He landed neatly on the footpath.
Behind the three uniforms.
‘Team Bravo, quarry is behind you,’ Gillard said. The female officer was the first to react, but as she turned to Bonner, he picked her up as if she weighed nothing and threw her into her two colleagues. They all fell sprawling across the pathway. Bonner ran off in the opposite direction, towards the cul-de-sac where Team Charlie were waiting in two unmarked vehicles. For a man dressed in little more than his underwear he made a good turn of speed. Gillard was aware, because they kept telling him, that the armed officers next to him had a bead on Bonner. They could not open fire unless an officer or member of the public was in imminent danger. It was a finely tuned decision, constantly subject to change.
As Bonner ran into the street, eight uniformed officers emerged from two vehicles. The fugitive came to an abrupt stop, losing a Croc, and then reversed, sprinting left. From behind the officers, a motorcycle raced into the cul-de-sac, the dark-clad rider hunched over the tank as it mounted the pavement at speed, heading for Bonner. The uniforms, some brandishing Tasers, turned to the speeding bike, unsure whether it was a police rider. Once it was clear that it was not, their reactions were too slow to do anything other than scatter as it swept through. Ten yards ahead, Bonner ran alongside the motorbike, which slowed down just enough for him to climb on the pillion. With eight cops in pursuit it headed left along the alleyway following the edge of Bonner’s back garden fence, and past the entrance to the block of flats Gillard was in.
Only one of the pursuers was in with a prayer. Tiana Clore – a tough Barbadian, built like Serena Williams – had represented Barbados in the heptathlon in the London Olympics, where she ran the 200 metres in just over twenty-two seconds. She left her colleagues for dead, sprinting left along the alleyway after the bike and out of Gillard’s field of view.
Shouting instructions into his radio, Gillard ran from the bedroom into the next room left, which had a balcony overlooking the footpath which curved round left beneath it and after seventy or so yards emerged into a residential street. The motorcycle was thirty yards ahead of Tiana, but slowing to negotiate a cycle barrier, a pair of offset metal railings at the end of the alley. It was only five yards ahead when Tiana hurdled the barriers and with unbroken stride got almost within touching distance. The bike slewed right, to avoid a parked car blocking its exit, while Tiana slid across the bonnet, to cut off its escape. The rider saw her approaching from the left, wobbled one way, then the other, gunned the engine, the front wheel lifted and Terrence Bonner tumbled off the back, his unprotected rear skidding on the gravel.
Tiana landed on him like a missile, and in the following thirty seconds gave as good as she got. As the motor
Gillard was quickly into Bonner’s home. The newly acquired property had been expensively furnished, but the gangster hadn’t really had the time to put his own imprint on it. While he watched uniformed officers loading electronic items into clear plastic bags, Gillard already felt that the case against this most dangerous man, like all gangland prosecutions, would come down to whether key witnesses could be persuaded to give evidence.
* * *
Gillard got his first close-up look at the prisoner at eight o’clock in the cells at Staines police station. Through the CCTV monitor into the suicide-watch cell he saw the gangster lying apparently relaxed on the blue plastic-covered mattress. Despite the shoe-sized dressing on his grazed buttock, and the bruise on his cheek from Tiana’s fist, Bonner remained an intimidating sight. Clearly gym-fit despite being overweight, he was extensively tattooed right up to his shaven head. Though arrested in just a T-shirt and skimpy underpants, he was now wearing a pair of boxers retrieved by police for him from his own bedroom. They bore a legend printed across the crotch: ‘May contain nuts.’
It was down to the National Crime Agency to pursue the case, on which it had been working for more than a year, but Gillard wanted to ask Bonner a few questions about some unsolved drug-related assaults in Surrey before he was transferred up to Nottingham that afternoon to face the main charges. He was brought to an interview room, where he sat, huge arms folded, oaken thighs apart. His neck was so short that the lobes of his ears sat sideways on his massive shoulders. Vince Babbage, the desk sergeant, had already booked him in with three serious charges relating to drug-trafficking and assault.
The duty solicitor arrived, a tall, slender and bespectacled young woman named Emily Harper, who looked like she’d only woken up a few minutes ago. Ms Harper was so pale and youthful that it hardly seemed possible she’d had the time to be qualified to drive a car, let alone become a solicitor. Gillard briefed her on the charges against her client before they went in, but as they entered the interview room he was aware of her shrinking behind him as she got her first glimpse of Bonner, who looked up with a grin on his face.
‘Kind of yer to offer me your daughter.’ When he lifted his chin to speak his lumpy head squeezed rolls of flesh from the back of his neck.
‘Don’t speak to her like that,’ Gillard said. ‘She’s on your side.’
‘I’ll speak to her any way I fucking well please.’ Bonner then unleashed a torrent of invective at Gillard, before adding, ‘Get this schoolgirl out of here before I get some ideas. I want a proper lawyer. Now, you, cunt-stable, bring me some breakfast before I get my mates to go round and give your wife a sausage sandwich through the back door.’
There was a time, back in the seventies and early eighties, before Gillard began in Surrey Police, when awkward customers like Bonner could be taken to a cell and given a right seeing-to by officers who knew where to kick, stamp and punch that wouldn’t leave too many bruises. Resisting arrest, attempting to escape, assaulting an officer were all charges that were rarely challenged by magistrates when there were three or four official accounts against one from a previously convicted felon like this one. But everything was different now. CCTV, bodycams, and above all changed attitudes within the criminal justice system. Criminality was considered a disease of society, in which miscreants were not bad but vulnerable, not villains but merely ‘differently moralled’. Offenders were themselves considered the victims of poor upbringing, broken homes, inequalities of wealth and background, and a lack of parental love.
All of which was often true. Gillard knew that much, but it didn’t help when you were at the sharp end. Having some thug threaten to rape your wife, and then demand breakfast – which Bonner knew under the regulations he was entitled to – infuriated officers. The menu at Staines today was lamb hot pot, Caribbean jerk chicken, an all-day breakfast, pizza or vegetarian lasagne. Detainees could choose from a selection of options – vegan or vegetarian, halal or kosher – all checked for allergens. Most of the food was takeaways, which often meant some poor uniform having to go and fetch it, at further cost to the public purse. Gillard had heard tales of prisoners repeatedly sending back food because it wasn’t hot enough, or was too salty – ‘I’ve got a heart problem, see’ – giving some inexperienced PC the run-around.
Sometimes it made his blood boil.
There were still things that could be done. Bonner was returned to his cell unfed. Gillard would get Babbage to post a cereal bar through the door later. Much later. That would be deemed an adequate breakfast when they were short-staffed, a permanent state of affairs. More concerning was the young solicitor, who was trembling at the lurid suggestions Bonner had made as he was being manhandled out of the interview room, about how she might more usefully earn a living on her knees in front of him.
‘Are you okay?’ Gillard asked her, once the prisoner was banged up again.
She nodded and blew her nose. ‘I’ve been doing this for three months now, and never had anyone speak to me like that before,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t take it personally. We can get you a coffee. If I were you, I’d sit down for ten minutes, because I don’t think you’re in any condition to drive right now.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s one client I’m happy to pass to the barrister ASAP.’
Chapter Two
Julia McGann was already running late when she made her final check in the hall mirror. She brushed her dark bob, applied mascara under her large blue-grey eyes and pouted for the crimson O. Looking reasonable, she thought. Thirty-nine, yes, but still as petite as when she left school. Then she spotted her tights. She groaned to herself. Straight out of the packet today. Bloody pound shop rubbish, a false economy. A small tear would have been okay until she had a chance to change at chambers. But this was a monster rip, the kind of ankle-to-thigh ladder suitable for rescuing the occupants of high-rise buildings.
Not today, of all days.
Cursing to herself, she ran back to the bedroom and rifled through the underwear drawer with the speed of a crack-addled burglar. Finally, a pair of old reliables: dark, woolly, thick and yes, a little baggy, but nothing an extra tug to the waist and an extra notch on the belted skirt wouldn’t fix. A ten-second wriggle and she was ready, grabbed her briefcase and fled for the bus stop.
That two-minute delay cascaded.
She missed the bus, then caught another less direct service five minutes later. The best stop still left her a ten-minute walk. She could hardly believe that at her age, a practising barrister for almost four years, she was still struggling with the basics of earning a living. While still on the bus she rang in, hoping against hope that Hogarth wouldn’t pick up. She was in luck. Receptionist Veronica answered, her vowels crisply enunciated.
‘V&I Barristers, good morning.’
‘Veronica, it’s me. I’m running late.’
‘Oh dear, filthy Duster let you down again?’ she giggled, a delightful tinkle. Julia’s car, an ancient and grubby yellow Dacia Duster, was still in a garage in Surbiton after breaking down a week ago. The cost of the repairs exceeded the vehicle’s value, but she needed it fixed and she had maxed out both credit cards. The question was, where was the money to come from?
‘No, missed the bus. The Duster’s out of commission for now. How’s his mood?’
‘Hogsy’s not a happy bunny, I’m afraid.’
The dreaded Clive Hogarth, chief clerk.
Only in his mid-forties, Hogarth had the wattles and paunch of a Dickensian uncle. He wore exactly the same grey suit and a pale blue shirt every day, with tightly laced Oxford shoes, polished to a regimental shine, his swollen ankles spilling over the top. And he had a spiteful demeanour. Never judge a man by his title. In many occupations, a clerk is a lowly creature. But in the world of barristers, the chief clerk is king. Hogarth, a great obese warthog of a man, controlled every aspect of V&I, which stood for the Latin veritate et iustitia, truth and justice. The staff considered it a pompous overstatement.
