Family Reunion Read online

  Now, as he held onto the sobbing shell he had only recently come to realise had so influenced the course of his career, his thoughts turned to the papers now sitting in his bottom desk drawer. The ones he had finally managed to recover, after much haggling, from the force’s archive. He had already concluded that if his instincts were right, a spot of legwork and some discreet enquiries – given the SIO’s current position they would have to be very discreet – may prove productive, even after all this time. But his musings also brought on a resurgence of the anger he’d felt the first time he read through the file. If things had been done right to begin with, if the victims, not just Sarah but the others as well had been allowed some sort of closure, then perhaps things might have turned out different. She might even have-. He stopped. It was too soon for all that, and he was always careful about falling into the ‘if only’ trap. Things weren’t certain, and nor could he prove anything. Yet.

  But as he drew his sister closer to him, Carver knew he shouldn’t leave things too long. Despite his words of brotherly reassurance, things were clearly a long way from being, ‘alright.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Pain, like skewers being driven into his spine, lanced through Mikayel Kahramanyan’s back and legs. Stifling a scream – for all he knew the rebels could still be nearby, picking over the remains - he stopped trying to shift his weight off the concrete block digging into his ribs. His medical background meant he was only too aware of the horrific possibilities of such a fall. Forcing himself to ignore the aching afflicting the whole of his body, he took stock of his condition. But that he hurt so much, and could feel it in his legs especially, was a good sign – provided his backbone wasn’t fractured in a way that would sever his spinal-cord as soon as he tried to move.

  For the first time since managing to stay conscious more than a few seconds – several times he had come half-to, but each time the blackness returned swiftly - he tried opening his eyes. Blurred images of chaos and destruction filtered through the dust cloud that still shrouded the demolished building and he breathed a sigh of relief. That he could feel pain and still see was exceptional luck. His right hand was sticking up through the rubble in front of his face and he tried wiggling his fingers. They moved. Ignoring the pain it brought on, he tried his toes. He felt them shifting around inside his shoes. So far so good.

  For the next few minutes he checked out the rest of his battered body. By the time he was finished, and to his amazement, he deduced that his worst single injury was probably the one to his left arm and shoulder; either broken or dislocated. It didn’t matter. He was alive.

  But having come to that conclusion his thoughts turned to Gadara. The last he had seen was her flying towards him, reaching for the gun. And as the image came to him, another part of his brain fixed on the man who was the main cause of his being here in the first place. But like himself, he was either alive or dead in the rubble and right now Mikayel Kahramanyan didn’t give a damn.

  ‘Gadara,’ he called, weakly. He gathered his strength. ‘GADARA.’ The effort brought on a coughing fit which made everything hurt even more, but as it subsided the silence returned, his call unanswered. Desperation took over.

  Steeling himself, he rolled onto his side, hoping to shed some of the debris he could feel pressing on his back. The sky came into view and he realised again how lucky he was. He was lying almost on top of what had once been the Armenian State Special Psychiatric Institute and Correction Facility - now a heap of smoking rubble. Bit by bit, wincing in agony every time he moved his arm – not dislocated, but almost certainly broken - he pulled himself from the remains and rose slowly, first to his knees, then, shakily, his feet. Looking around, he saw that, with the exception of the south east corner where the remains of two adjoining walls still stood, the whole facility had been flattened. A direct hit. How in God’s name had he survived?

  ‘GADARA,’ he called again, hoping to hear some small cry to indicate that she, like him, had escaped with her life. He called several times without any answer before deciding he had no choice but to start searching, which would mean digging, broken arm or no.

  He looked down to check his footing before trying to move over what he knew was probably a dangerously unstable surface, which was when he saw her. She was half-buried, a foot or so beneath him. He had been lying almost on top of her all this time, her head and shoulders less than a metre from his. But the cold stare emanating from the now faded blue eyes confirmed what his instincts were already telling him. For one person to survive the blast that brought the building down was against the odds; two would have been miraculous. He reached down through the lumps of concrete and plaster to touch her face. There was residual warmth there, but not as much as there should be, and the lack of skin-tone gave final confirmation to his fear.

  ‘Oh Gadara,’ he cried. ‘I am sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  He dropped to his knees, and wept.

  How long he stayed like that he never knew. He didn’t try to reach her. She was jammed under too many layers of concrete and rubble for him to even think of digging her out, especially with only one arm. It would need lifting gear. But as the light started to fade and his reserve of tears emptied, his thoughts turned, inevitably, to Him; the man who Mikayel’s concern for public safety had told him must be prevented from escaping at all costs. Well the costs had turned out to be more terrible than he could ever have imagined. He cursed himself, over and over, for not insisting she leave when he had the chance. And right there, he determined that if nothing else, he would make sure her death wasn’t in vain.

  Doing his best to ignore the searing pain that every movement in his back and shoulders brought on – every so often he had to freeze, like a statue, until it receded - he rooted through the rubble. When darkness descended he carried on searching by the light of a flash-lamp he found in the remains of a store-cupboard. All the while, no-one came and he saw not a living soul. The shelling had already stopped when he regained consciousness and though he paused in his work several times, straining to listen, there were no sounds of the incursion in the distance, just a foreboding silence.

  It was nearing midnight when he came across it, on its side, half-buried in the remains of what presumably was once Ward G19, and covered by ceiling boards – which was why it took him so long to find it.

  Manufactured to be assembled on site, the cell was basically a box comprising six pre-formed sheets; four – of steel bars - that were the walls, and two reinforced concrete slabs for the ceiling and floor, both finished with metal sheets as added protection against an occupant digging their way out. A sturdy, solid construction, it was designed to withstand any possible escape attempt by its resourceful inhabitant. As such it had almost, but not quite, withstood the stresses imposed on it when it fell with the rest of the building.

  The walls were still locked together, the bars dented and twisted in places, but still intact and secure enough to stop anyone within getting out: even the door looked like it was still locked. But while the seals between floor and walls were unbroken, there was a hole in a corner of the ceiling, where something heavy had landed on it. The impact had ripped the covering steel plate away from the bolts that secured it to the walls, bending it inwards. It wasn’t a big gap, only half a metre or so. But it was enough for a man with a slim frame to squeeze through, and the Institute’s kitchen hadn’t been famed for its wholesome food.

  As he stood looking down into the cell’s dark emptiness, shining the flashlight around in the hope he was mistaken and that in some dark corner he would spy a body, Mikayel read the evidence.

  Protected within what was in effect a very adequate safety cage, the Monster would have survived the building’s collapse with relative ease. Bruised and battered like himself no doubt, but nonetheless alive. And the smears of blood on the metal ceiling sheet, near to the corner, showed where, cut and bleeding, he had worked to widen the opening until he had managed to squeeze through.

  But despite the indicatio
ns before him, Mikayel searched the surrounding rubble for another hour, until fatigue and despair sapped what little strength was left in him and the flashlight finally gave out. As it flickered one last time and died, he sank down on top of the rubble, exhausted.

  After finding the cell empty, Mikayel had clung to the desperate hope that even if he had got away, the Azerbaijanis would find him and, in their eagerness to kill any hated occupier of ‘their’ land, would carry out the sentence that the court should have imposed in the first place. But then Mikayel realised. In the hours he had been searching, he had neither seen nor heard anything that hinted of Azerbaijan. They had gone, focusing their efforts elsewhere perhaps, maybe even driven away by the Colonel’s gallant counter-attack. Either way, the result was the same. There was no one within ten, fifty miles maybe, capable of posing a threat to the man who would even now be putting as much distance as possible between himself and the place that had held him these past twelve years.

  As the dire truth sank in, Doctor Mikayel Kahramanyan shook his head. Vahrig Danelian was gone, freed by the same hellish chain of events that had taken Gadara and, very nearly, himself. The Monster of Yerevan was abroad again in the world from which he had been taken and where he could now return to the perverted missionary work that defined him as the monster he was.

  Mikayel gave out one last cry of despair before collapsing onto his back to lie on top of the ruins, utterly spent. There was no one around to hear his lamenting cry but it echoed and re-echoed round the valley of death for what seemed an age.

  ‘GOD HELP US ALL.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Deputy Chief Constable Geoffrey Able QPM, Chairman of the National Police Chiefs Council Crime Committee referred to his agenda.

  ‘Umm… National Crime Agency? European Protocol on Cross-Border Homicide?’ He glanced down the right hand side of the table to where Carver was sitting alongside his boss, Nigel Broom. ‘DCI Carver. This is you I believe?’

  Taking his cue, the detective whose exploits were known to most of those round the table, and not just thanks to the Sunday Times Magazine articles, cleared his throat and gathered his papers. He hated these policy forums and, after staying longer than he’d intended at Sarah’s and busting a gut to make it in time for his ten-thirty slot, intended to be brief. Especially seeing as he’d had to wait the best part of another hour while the twelve-strong committee tied itself in knots debating some obscure point contained within a paper headed ‘Investigation of Crime Within The Asylum-Seeker Community.’

  Carver had attended such NPCC committees before, several times in fact. He knew what to expect. Nevertheless it alway irked him to witness such a high-powered gathering wasting its time on what usually turned out to be little more than semantics. He hoped the paper he was about to deliver wasn’t set to get similarly bogged down. From what he’d been hearing, they needed to get things moving.

  Carver opened his mouth to begin when, having introduced him, the Chairman spoke again.

  ‘Most of us will have already read your paper Mr Carver,’ DCC Able said. ‘But there are a couple of in-locum members with us today. For their benefit, would you mind summarising the main points again?’

  ‘Just what I was about to do, sir.’ What did he think? I was going to read through all eleven pages?

  It took Carver less than two minutes to cover the issues he had been discussing for months with former colleagues at the National Crime and Operations Faculty and a dozen or so detective contacts on the continent - ever since the De-Mesa debacle in fact. Given the freedom of travel within the European Union, and ignoring Britain’s now unique position in this respect, it was clear that the incidence of Trans-National Homicide – once comparatively rare – was growing year on year. Already, and despite the structures that existed through which UK police forces shared crime intelligence, worrying numbers of murders and sex crimes, later found to be connected, were still managing to slip the net – hence the Government’s continuing obsession with police force amalgamations. But where crimes transgressed national boundaries, the chances of linking them in the vital early stages were slim indeed, which was why Carver and his colleagues were lobbying for the ‘Interim Special Measures’ outlined in the paper he was presenting.

  The key proposal - temporary until a more formal framework could be put in place - was simple. The Investigators were asking that a Euro-Intelligence Forum, essentially a Serious Crime ‘Swap-Shop’, be established. But unlike Interpol which, contrary to most people’s understanding is a mainly administrative body, Carver’s forum would comprise Operational Detectives. Meeting regularly – every two-to-three months seemed about right – they would share information on cases of murder and sex-crime where it wasn’t yet certain that the offender was ‘local’. They weren’t suggesting databases or anything yet, nevertheless Carver was confident that provided the right people got involved, it would greatly reduce the chances of another Luigi De-Mesa-type cock-up.

  The enquiry into how the itinerant Spaniard had managed to travel freely around Europe for fifteen years, kidnapping, raping and, in nine cases at least, murdering teenage girls, was still on-going. But from what they’d learnt already, Carver and his colleagues were agreed. Had such a forum as the one proposed been operating, De-Mesa’s depraved pattern of offending would have been picked up much sooner. Some of the girls would, undoubtedly, still be alive.

  But as he came to the end of his summation, Carver was surprised by the subdued response around the table. Given that there was nothing particularly controversial in it, he had been expecting a fairly positive reception. But as the eyes of those opposite swivelled to his left, in the direction of the one member of the committee Carver had met in an operational setting, a warning bell began to ring.

  Within his home force, Nicholas Whitely, Deputy Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, was regarded as capable, fair-minded and less prone than many senior officers who lacked physical stature to, ‘go off like a bottle of pop.’ It was unfortunate then that the circumstances under which they first met, were such as to give Whitely what he would probably consider good reason to harbour a grudge. Carver wondered if something had been said before he arrived. Certainly everyone seemed to be waiting for Whitely to speak. As if on cue, the DCC leaned forward, squaring the papers in front of him, like a television newsreader wary about relying too much on the auto-cue.

  ‘Chief Inspector.’ He looked up to see Carver waiting, and smiled. ‘Nice to see you again, Mr Carver.’

  Though Carver recognised the assassin’s smile for what it was, he acknowledged the man’s greeting with a courteous nod. But as he saw the look in the man’s eyes, the bell rang louder.

  ‘I just have a couple of questions concerning your proposal. If I may?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  The smile widened. Whitely was obviously at ease in an environment where there was no danger of encountering something that might test his Operational Command Skills - unlike the scene of the Right Honourable Alistair Kenworthy, MP’s murder.

  Carver could still remember the look on Whitely’s face when he arrested the dead Government Minister’s English rose wife for the crime - one of several she commissioned to preserve the inheritance she stood to lose if her puritanical father ever learnt of the sordid activities she and her husband had once engaged in. Whitely almost fainted on the spot. Only moments before, he had been promising her that he would do, ‘everything humanly possible to find your husband’s killer.’

  At the time, Whitely was already struggling over a member of the Government being found murdered on his patch, trying but failing to give the impression he was in control of things, as his Chief expected him to be. But never having worked CID long enough to learn much, Whitely had little experience of major crime. Instead of leaving things to Carver, which would have made sense, he panicked and started issuing orders - mostly nonsensical - to the detectives and Scene Managers beginning to gather, as if he knew what he was doing. And when Carver sud
denly exposed Anne Kenworthy’s conspiring, Whitley was left floundering.

  Whitely didn’t make anything of it at the time, but it would have been clear to those present that he had been caught out of his depth, lacking the operational experience needed to deal with such a sensitive yet serious situation. It was a good thing that Carver’s old boss, The Duke, was on hand or the whole situation could have degenerated into farce, particularly when Whitely tried to insist that Carver should brief a local DCI to there and then take over the investigation Carver had been running for several weeks. Carver had never intended to humiliate the man, but he doubted Whitely would ever see it that way. And such things weren’t easily forgotten.

  ‘This…,’ Whitely checked Carver’s paper again, as if having trouble remembering the phrase. ‘Euro-Intelligence Forum you propose. I assume someone would have to take a co-ordinating role?’

  Carver thought he could see where Whitely was going. He had discussed any possible ‘resource implications’ with his colleagues, several times.

  ‘That’s correct sir, but the feeling is, it wouldn’t involve too much work. I’ve discussed it with Mr Broom.’ He turned to his Director who nodded in confirmation. ‘And he supports the view that if, for example, I as the UK rep were to take on that role but using a cascade system through my opposite numbers in other countries, it shouldn’t interfere with my present duties. I know my colleagues abroad think the same.’

  ‘I’ve no problem with that, Chief Inspector.’

  Whitely’s casual dismissal of the point caught Carver by surprise. If he wasn’t out to undermine the proposal on cost grounds, then where was he headed?

  Whitely drew himself up in his chair as far as someone can who only comes up to most police officers’ shoulders.