The Dealer and the Dead Read Online Free PDF

meant they had no wish to intrude into his grief. The firearms officers were at the door and in the hallway; most seemed to chew gum and had the look of men, women, whose burden was to walk alongside idiots.
    He stood. He took his mobile from his pocket and was about to hit the keys. The board was below his feet and under the thin carpeting. Suzie’s tiny feet were on the same board, and Bill’s massive shoes. She started, Bill followed, like a shuffle dance. They eased weight from toes to heels and were looking at him. Was he an idiot? Slow on the uptake? He bent down, took a corner of the carpet and dragged it clear. It came too easily, and his heart was doing big drumbeats. The board had little scrape marks at the edges. She used the claw hammer, was crouched over the board, and heaved. It came up. Her eyes were wide with excitement, Bill’s tongue wetted his lips, and Mark Roscoe let loose a gasp. He waved one of the firearms crowd over to them and stood back.
    Not an entirely wasted day. The weapons were individually checked for safe handling and the evidence bags spread out on the kitchen table. The expert reeled off a monotone identification of what they had. ‘One Beretta 9mm calibre automatic, one Ingram sub-machine pistol with silencer attached, one Colt .25 pistol with silencer attached, one Walther PPK … An estimate, one hundred rounds for the Colt, one filled magazine for the Beretta, some fifty rounds for the Ingram. Two balaclava face masks. That’s about it, boss.’
    Rather shyly, Suzie congratulated him. With a great clap on the back, Bill told him it was a ‘bloody top grade’ result, and he could see that he had won the respect of the firearms officer. Ridiculous, but it seemed to matter. The uniforms were told to get a roll of crime-scene tape round the front garden and down the shared drive to the garage. So, the Covert Human Intelligence Source had come up, bar a location error of a few miserable inches, as a star. Mark Roscoe would have the plaudits of his peers, and the chance of the house owner staying out of custody for more than a few hours was remote. A contract killer’s kit was bagged and would be photographed, and the rifling in the barrels of each weapon would go to the National Ballistics Intelligence System to be tracked against bullets gouged out of cadavers’ bodies. It was, indeed, a hell of a good result.
    The unit that Mark Roscoe served with was one of the mostsecretive in the Metropolitan Police. It was charged with targeting the increasing threat in the capital city posed by well-rewarded and capable hired hitmen. He found a toilet upstairs, used it, flushed.
    And the result would get better. In the garage they found a performance motorcycle, crash helmets and boiler suits that would, with the balaclavas, offer DNA traces. He called in, told his operational commander what they had found.
    Another day done. It wasn’t about driving contract killers, hitmen, off the streets – or about destroying that culture of cheap killings. It was about holding a line.
    They stopped at a fast-food joint and took away chicken pieces, fries and Coke. That part of the Flying Squad, his team, was on call twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, when overtime allowed, and each of them knew the McDonald’s, Burger Kings and Kentuckys better than they knew their own kitchens. It was a life, of a sort.
    Suzie drove. He took the back seat. The heat in the car emphasised the failure of the cooling system and sweat from his forehead mixed with the sauce on his lips. He cursed.
    Bill said, ‘Come on, boss. It’s wonderful – blue skies and no clouds, we have a result and the world’s at peace, you know what I mean.’
    She turned to all of them, faced them from the door. ‘You will do it. You will find them. You have to.’
    She was the Widow: not a name she had sought but one that had been given. There were others in the village community who were widows and some who were widowers, and