CHERUB: Brigands M.C. - Robert Muchamore Page 0,45

or six hours.

The corn was chest high, so all he could see without standing were treetops and sky. A belch came up his throat and a night on tex-mex food, Sol lager and tequila shots sent burning acid up his throat.

Neil had lost blood and felt weak. But he found his feet, and as he turned around he realised what the Führer had done. Two hundred metres down a mild slope stood a house. Its new owners used it as a holiday home and had spent a lot of money on refurbishment, but Neil recognised it from police photographs and news reports.

It was the scene of the Scott family murder. Bringing Neil out here and staging a mock execution was the Führer’s way of telling the police that he thought he could get away with anything.

‘Arrogant little prick,’ Neil muttered to himself, as he headed towards the house.

*

While Neil Gauche and his two man backup crew waited in a Devon casualty unit, the rest of the NPBTF team had been put on alert and arrived in their office at Hornsey police station before 9 a.m.

Ross Johnson was a trained psychologist. He wasn’t prone to strong emotions and this was the first time many colleagues had seen him lose his cool. A slim female sergeant came into the office as Ross stood brooding by his window.

‘Coffee,’ she said, placing a cup on the table.

‘Cheers, Tracy,’ Ross said curtly. ‘I need you to get on to Scotland Yard. The Brigands use private investigators. They know Neil’s bike was delivered here and for all we know they have us under surveillance. We need new offices. I don’t care if it’s a rat-infested basement somewhere, but we can’t run a covert operation when our enemy can watch us coming and going.’

‘If they’ve had us under surveillance, they could know George Kahn’s identity too,’ Tracy pointed out.

‘Possibly,’ Ross nodded. ‘But he’s only been with us three weeks and there are a lot of Asian men coming and going around here.’

‘I’ll call the property office as soon as they open and try to get an emergency relocation,’ Tracy said. ‘What’s happening down in Devon? Are we going to arrest the Führer for assaulting Neil? Maybe a firearms charge?’

Ross shook his head. ‘It’s tough to prove who did what, especially when you’re up against the kind of heavy lawyers that the Brigands always use. And the Führer’s not stupid, he won’t have left any clues, we’ll never find the gun and he’ll have a dozen witnesses willing to swear that he was with them at the time of the incident.’

‘It’s like he’s above the law,’ Tracy sighed. ‘What about the bike?’

Ross sighed harder, then grabbed his coffee. ‘Neil could have been killed, but if we start a formal investigation into who purchased his Harley in such an obvious way we’re going to get bogged down with months of bad feeling. Put the word out: I want the officer who purchased the bike to own up. If they’re still part of my squad, I want them to come into this office with a completed transfer request form before the end of today.’

‘Yes, guv,’ Tracy said. ‘What if nobody owns up?’

‘Let’s not go down that road unless we have to. It wasn’t you was it?’

‘No,’ Tracy said.

Ross smiled with relief. ‘Thank Christ for that. You and Neil are my two best people.’

‘Does my head in thinking how close we came to a dead officer,’ Tracy said. ‘So what do we do now? Our whole operation relied on George making a big gun purchase and Neil being on the ground in Salcombe trying to sniff out how the Brigands brought the weapons into the country.’

Ross ran a hand through thinning hair. ‘Maybe I should have stuck to my job interviewing child witnesses. Do the interviews, write a report, then pass the whole thing across for the detectives to tie up all the loose ends. Did I ever tell you that it was the Scott family murder that first got me interested in outlaw bikers?’

‘When I first came over from drug squad,’ Tracy nodded. ‘You even had the boy who survived living with you for a while, didn’t you?’

‘Dante was a great little kid,’ Ross remembered. ‘Absolutely tragic. He still e-mails my daughter Tina once in a while.’

‘It’s game over unless we can find another way to infiltrate the South Devon Brigands quickly,’ Tracy said. ‘No disrespect sir, but I think you should go out and give the team a pep