Fear the Past Read online

  Caslin had to read it twice before he could fully process the information. He glanced at Hunter and then back to Holt. Hunter spoke first, “Your father?”

  “There must be a mistake,” Caslin said, briefly shaking his head. “He was uniform all of his life. He never went into CID.”

  “I thought so too,” Holt said. “But I checked and then I checked again. He was seconded from North Yorkshire onto the investigation team almost as soon as it was expanded. He remained there for a little over a year.”

  Caslin’s eyes narrowed, his expression accompanied by a deep frown. “He never told me that. Are you sure?” Holt nodded. “Where does he fit in… I mean… why would he be the target? I presume that’s where you’re going with this?”

  “If he wasn’t… then, it’s incredibly coincidental,” Holt explained. “My initial thought, as was yours I imagine, was Fuller was retaliating against you personally for targeting Carl and Ashton. Maybe that’s still the case. Perhaps Jody Wyer thought your father had some information he could use and went to see him or maybe his father knew yours. Did he ever mention Keith Wyer to you either in passing as an acquaintance or as a colleague?”

  “Not that I recall,” Caslin said. “This is all news to me.”

  “Regarding your father’s participation in the Manchester investigation, I’ve no information on that. I tried to find out what the scope of his role in the team was if he was desk-based or in the field. Who he reported to… that kind of thing but I’ve not had any joy? At the moment, he’s just a name on that paper in front of you.”

  Caslin slapped both hands down on top of the very sheet of paper, Holt was referring to. “Let’s keep it like that for now. This information doesn’t leave this room. Understood?” he asked, meeting eyes with both of them in turn. Holt nodded without speaking. Hunter appeared pensive. “If you have a problem with it, say so,” Caslin said.

  “No, sir,” she replied, “but we need to get this clarified as soon as possible. Otherwise…”

  “All right,” Caslin said quietly, covering his mouth and nose with his hands. “All right… I know.”

  “How do you want to proceed?” Hunter asked.

  Caslin thought on it casting an eye across the information boards erected all around them. “I want the two of you to stay here. Terry, you carry on trying to find out where my old man fits into the securities raid but… do so quietly. The key figures in this seem to be a step ahead of us at every turn, so let’s not tip our hand. Sarah,” he turned to Hunter, “Jody Wyer was deeper into this than we are and I’m finding it hard to believe the all-consuming passion he had for this case was kept secret from his lover. I should imagine the nameless redhead is either linked or related to someone in and around his investigation. He wouldn’t be dragging an innocent person into all of this, not someone he cared about. He knew how dangerous it was. That’s why he kept everyone in the dark… but not her. She’s involved somehow, I’m positive, and she’ll have information we can use. Find her!”

  “If they were onto Wyer, then it’s logical they may have been onto her as well,” Hunter suggested. “That might be why we can’t find her. She could be dead already.”

  “Then where’s the body?” Caslin said. “They weren’t too fussed about where they dumped Jody.”

  “She may have killed him,” Holt said, almost apologetically. “Would have been able to get close enough and knew what he was up to.”

  “Find her and we’ll ask,” Caslin replied.

  “Where will you be, sir?” Hunter asked him.

  Caslin took a deep breath, his expression one of thoughtful introspection. “I’ll be at the hospital.”

  ***

  Something caused him to wake with a start. Blinking furiously, he looked around trying to get his bearings. It was dark outside but the sky was changing. The night replaced by the brooding slate-grey of an overcast morning. His vision adjusted to the surroundings. His father slept six feet away, his breathing shallow and steady. He’d had a good night. Although not waking from his surgery, the staff seemed unconcerned and that was reassuring. The time to worry was when the medical team did so. Looking to the door, Caslin saw the outline of a figure standing on the other side. Sitting forward, he stretched out feeling a twinge in his lower back. He winced. These chairs weren’t designed for sleeping in. Standing up, he went to the door and cracked it open. The armed officer turned to him offering a smile and a nod in greeting. Caslin mirrored the gesture and closed the door, returning to his father’s bedside.

  The old man was stirring. Perhaps that was what had woken him, he didn’t know. Caslin helped himself to a cup of water from the jug placed on his father’s table alongside the bed. He wouldn’t need it for a while. The water had an aftertaste of plastic. It had been sitting there since the previous day. Looking at his watch, he wondered whether the visitor’s restaurant would be open yet. He’d kill for a cup of coffee.

  “You look dreadful.”

  Caslin realised his father’s unbandaged eye was open, watching him. For how long, he didn’t know. “You don’t look in great shape yourself, Dad,” Caslin replied, putting the cup down beside the bed. His father smiled faintly.

  “That’s good because I feel awful.”

  “You’re going to be okay,” Caslin said, bestowing as much confidence in the prediction as he could.

  “Then why does your face look like I’ve already died?”

  Caslin shook his head, “It’s complicated.”

  “There’s that word again,” his father whispered. “You’re a terrible liar, Son.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Then what? Lizzie and Sean!” he said, trying to sit upright as the memories flooded back through his mind.

  Caslin reached over and placed a firm but reassuring hand on his chest easing him back down on the bed. “They’re all right. I promise. No harm done.”

  “I couldn’t stop them…” his father said. “Damn it, I tried but…”

  “It’s okay. You did your best,” Caslin said calmly. “No one can ask anymore of you than that. Can you tell me about them?”

  His father sighed, rolling his head to the right and looking out of the window. “Three men… maybe four… I’m not too sure. It all happened so fast. They wore balaclavas. I couldn’t see their faces.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  His father shook his head. “Not that I recall. There was a knock on the door and I answered it. As soon as I cracked it open, they forced their way in. I tried to push back but… he was too strong. I shouted at the kids to run but… it all happened so fast. I’m so sorry, Son.”

  Caslin pressed his hand into his father’s, seeing tears welling in the old man’s eyes. He couldn’t recollect his father ever apologising to him for anything in his entire life. “It’s okay. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “What did they want? What did they take, do you know?”

  Caslin loosened his grip and turned sideways allowing himself to perch on the side of the bed alongside his father. “I need to ask you a few questions, Dad. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And I need you to be honest with me.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “You were seconded to a case back in the 80s. The raid on the Customs House at Manchester Airport, outsourced and run by a company called Manchester Securities. Do you remember? What can you tell me about it?”

  “That was a long time ago, Nathaniel. Why on earth are you asking me about it now?”

  “After I left yours yesterday, I couldn’t understand why we’d argued as we did. It felt like it came out of nowhere.”

  “Usually does when you’re involved,” his father said, turning his head and facing away. If he’d been able, Caslin figured he’d have left the room by now.

  “And today, that’s got me thinking. The mood change happened after I mentioned DCI Phil Bradley, didn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”
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  “You knew him,” Caslin said quietly. “More than that, you worked with him. Perhaps, even for him.”

  “So, what if I did?”

  “People are dying, Dad,” Caslin said, maintaining his composure for if he were to try and force the conversation, he knew his father would throw up the barriers and not allow him in. That was a trait they shared. “Sean and Lizzie were there.” At the mention of his grandchildren, his father broke down. The façade of indignation slipping away as quickly as it had been conjured.

  “I’m so sorry… so, so sorry,” his father repeated as the tears fell.

  “Did Bradley come to see you?” Caslin asked. His father wiped his cheek with the back of his free hand, the other was constrained by the drip. He shook his head.

  “I… I can’t…”

  “I’m going to get to the bottom of it, Dad. Whatever this is all about it is going to come out, I assure you. You have to talk to me. The time for burying your head in the sand and hoping it will all go away has passed.”

  His father took a deep breath, closing his one good eye as he did so. Opening it, he fixed his gaze on his son. Suddenly, he appeared frail again, much as when Caslin first set eyes on him in the hospital bed. “Okay,” he whispered softly, bobbing his head almost imperceptibly in agreement. “Bradley did come to see me but… he wasn’t the first.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “You have to realise what was going on at the time,” his father said, glancing nervously towards the corridor as the shadow of his armed guard crossed the threshold under the door and momentarily broke the shaft of light.

  “I’m listening,” Caslin said. “Take as long as you need.”

  “I was having a tough time,” his father explained. “A few months prior your mother had packed her bags and left taking both you and Stefan with her. No word. No discussion. You’ll not remember, or not realise, but I came home after a night shift to find you were all gone. Just a letter on the table telling me it was over.”

  Caslin shook his head. His memories of that day were very different. He wasn’t even a teenager at the time, barely into double figures. Their mother took both boys aside and told them they were going to miss school and head off on an adventure with her that day. Neither his brother Stefan nor himself had a clue that their mother never planned on them coming back. She had packed most of their clothes while they’d slept, rousing them early and ushering them out to the car where her friend waited. He was a decent man. One they grew to love in a strange sort of way despite his elevation into their mother’s affections, displacing their father and themselves along the way. Eventually, they would marry and live happily. Stefan and himself found their placement in the boarding house of the independent school quite challenging. It was far from what they were used to in York but they managed.

  As for his father, they’d never discussed the impact of his mother’s actions nor the causes that led her to do what she did. From a distance however, it was clear how detrimental the break up had been for him. His descent into alcoholism was fuelled by it but often his mother had hinted, over the years, that the drinking came first. The truth wasn’t known to him much like huge swathes of his father’s life.

  “I don’t remember much,” Caslin said, not wishing to revisit those days for they held pain he himself had never processed.

  “I kept going as you do but I struggled. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Anyway, I was drinking too much. I knew it. Everyone knew it,” his father said, his face contorting with the anguish of revisiting those feelings. “Until one day, I went into work… I was still hammered from the night before… and it wasn’t the first time.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was sent home on sick leave. I guess it’d be different now. I’d have been out on my ear,” his father said. Caslin didn’t comment. They had more in common than he’d thought for he, too, had rocked up at work in an unfit state on occasion. “Two days later, my superintendent paid me a visit at home. He suggested that I try something fresh. Get out of uniform for a while. He figured it might help bring me back. Anyway, they were assembling a task force to try and tackle the Manchester raid and some of the names being touted had associations with Yorkshire, York specifically, and that’s how I got involved.”

  “What were you focused on?” Caslin asked.

  “We knew a job like that took a lot of planning and needed a sizeable network in order to pull it off. The raid itself was carried out by a group of ten… and they were professional about it too. These weren’t DIY homeowner specials, they were skilled. But that was the easy part. To be able to fence that much cash, jewellery and gold bullion in particular, they needed expertise that just weren’t commonplace back then if ever.”

  “If you have a large organisation or businesses with a high turnover of cash, then the money can be dropped back into circulation relatively quickly,” Caslin argued, “but on the scale of what they took you’re right. The speed necessary to keep that number of people happy by paying them off quickly would’ve been challenging.”

  “And that’s just the money. When it came to fencing the remainder there aren’t too many people with the resources and know how to shift that volume. We knew they needed to call on countless others to process it and that’s where we figured we’d be able to pick them off. In many cases it worked too.”

  “You worked for Bradley?” Caslin asked.

  “I was assigned to his team and paired with another officer from Greater Manchester under the umbrella of a detective sergeant.”

  “Keith Wyer?” Caslin asked, putting two and two together.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Keith’s son was taking an interest in Bradley… and perhaps you as well.”

  “Jody,” his father said quietly. “A good kid.”

  “A dead kid,” Caslin replied. His father looked at him, nodding solemnly. “You met him?”

  “I did. After Jody paid me a visit, Bradley showed up shortly after.”

  “Had you met him before?”

  “No, not at all,” his father said, shaking his head. “But he was Keith’s son and apparently, his father spoke highly of me.”

  “Did you remain friends, you and Keith?”

  “Not really. I didn’t know he had died until Jody called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “To ask questions… get answers.”

  “About what? Bradley?”

  “Among other things. Neither of them knew what they were getting into. They thought they did. They thought they had it all figured out but they didn’t realise who they were dealing with. Is the girl okay?”

  “Which girl?”

  “Jody’s girlfriend. She is such a pretty little thing. I’d hate to think of her caught up in all of this.”

  “Redhead?” Caslin clarified. His father nodded. “I don’t suppose you caught her name, did you?”

  “Lovely young lady, very sweet. Louise, I think he introduced her as but I didn’t catch her last name.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Caslin said, making a mental note. “Can you go back a bit? Back to where you got involved in the investigation.”

  His father drew a breath as he sought to remember details from decades previously. “It didn’t take us long before we began to focus on a second-generation scrap merchant here in York.”

  “MacEwan,” Caslin confirmed.

  “Yes. You’ve heard of him?” he asked. Caslin nodded that he had but didn’t want to reveal everything he knew. It was an odd sensation, speaking to a relative as one would a potential suspect in a criminal investigation but these were rapidly becoming strange days. “A few of us had the long-held belief that he was part of the crew using his businesses to both store and ship the proceeds of the raid out of the country in his boats. He owned a boatyard up the coast in Whitby.”

  “I read in the case files that MacEwan was interviewed but released without charge and no further investigation was undertaken,” Caslin stated, a littl
e confused.

  “Yeah, that sounds about right. That was Bradley. At least, I think it was.”

  “Go on.”

  “This is when things started to go a little awry, Son,” his father said, eyes flitting around nervously, anywhere but meeting Caslin’s. “You have to realise I was a mess… vulnerable.”

  “What happened, Dad?”

  “I’m not sure how it came about. Genuinely, I don’t,” his father said. “We paid MacEwan a visit at his yard. It was just myself and Keith Wyer at this point. It wasn’t a raid. We didn’t have a search warrant or anything. At that moment, MacEwan wasn’t considered to be a key suspect. We were on a fishing expedition, running down the names we’d come up with as possibles. Imagine our surprise when we stumbled across the smelting operation.”

  “The gold?” Caslin asked.

  “Damn right!” his father said, sounding excited as he recalled it. “Turns out we were right in that MacEwan was fencing some of the proceeds but we had no idea he was one of those smelting down the bullion. Rendering it untraceable, he was then shipping it to his network of associates on the continent via his boats up the coast.”

  “None of this is in the files.”

  “It wouldn’t be. Keith and I managed to detain those present, there weren’t many, and called it in to the DCI.”

  “Bradley?”

  “The very same,” his father confirmed. “He came down to the yard to see us. I couldn’t believe it. A few months into my first CID investigation and it was going to make my career. Some guys work their entire lives without a collar like that.”

  “I know,” Caslin agreed.

  “Bradley’s eyes nearly popped out when he arrived. We’d rumbled the largest part of the operation pretty much by stumbling across it. A pure fluke. But he didn’t react as I expected.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to like this, am I?” Caslin said.