Robbery were a branch of Greater Manchester Police’s Serious Crimes Division, and were formerly the Manchester Robbery Squad, whose original purpose was to investigate commercial armed robberies across the whole of the Greater Manchester area. However, the current age of cascading budget cuts had seen them reduced significantly in size and divided into smaller units which were now allocated to GMP’s various divisions. Highly likely even that wasn’t the end of it; as Beardmore had alluded to, with police expenditure still being slashed across the board, talk was rife that Crowley Robbery – like Salford Robbery, Rochdale Robbery, South Manchester Robbery and so forth – were luxuries that local law enforcement could not really afford, at least not currently.
Despite this, Crowley Robbery – or ‘Robbery Squad’ as they were still referred to in rank-and-file parlance – were highly valued by most CID officers, who saw them as an elite outfit. Headed up by the highly decorated Detective Inspector Kathy Blake and, in the short time they’d been operating from out of Robber’s Row, already responsible for taking down a number of high-profile blaggers, Lucy in particular had been fascinated that the fabled bunch of thief-takers were suddenly working only a couple of floors overhead.
Not that she wasn’t nervous in their presence, even with Beardmore by her side.
Though she’d passed various Squad members in the station corridors and the canteen, this was the first time she’d been up close to them, particularly to their mythical leader, whose desk she and Beardmore now stood in front of, though she also felt vaguely surprised. Lucy had half been expecting a policewoman with DI Blake’s reputation to be a real hard-bitten toughie. But in fact, she was attractive and looked rather refined. She was also surprisingly young. Lucy was thirty-one, but she doubted DI Blake was more than a year older than her, if that. In addition, she was short – perhaps no more than five-six, whereas Lucy was five-eight. She had long, honey-blonde hair, which she wore in a ponytail, and was ‘peaches and cream’ pretty, with a dusting of freckles and intense green eyes. In fact, DI Blake’s unblinking, laser-like gaze was something Lucy had heard about before; even the most rugged customers were said to have struggled to meet it during interrogation.
However, that intense gaze was now directed downward as she rifled through the heap of documentation that Stan Beardmore had brought up from CID.
Lucy glanced around the Robbery Squad office, while she waited. It was a big room, which had been put to lots of different uses in the past, but currently was cluttered with desks, tables, filing cabinets, VDUs and whiteboards covered in scribble, its walls adorned with paperwork and pictures. One thing she noticed in particular was an entire section of room that appeared to have been cordoned off with workbenches. Two detectives were currently in conflab there, discussing a series of blown-up CCTV screen-grabs pasted onto a Perspex screen and apparently depicting an armed robbery in progress: two figures in khaki fatigues and stocking masks were unloading money bags from a G4S security van on a shopping centre forecourt. The security staff lay face down, and were covered by two other masked figures, one wielding a pickaxe handle, the other a sawn-off shotgun.
DI Blake’s desk was at the opposite end of the room from this, set against the wall, to an extent lost among the desks belonging to the bulk of the lower ranks, and certainly no larger or grander. However, one thing that was different was the wall behind it, on which a series of large square photographs had been pasted in seven orderly rows. Each one depicted a face, the bulk of them ugly and brutish – clearly the headshots of known criminals, one or two of whom Lucy thought she recognised straight away – but approximately half of them defaced by a big red X, which had been drawn in vivid marker-pen, and with some vigour.
It fleetingly distracted Lucy from DI Blake herself. But not for long. While most of her team wore casual gear – jeans, sweat-tops, trainers and the like – the DI was almost formally attired in a neat grey skirt-suit, pearl blouse and heels. She tapped her pen on the desk as she checked through the last few pages that Beardmore had supplied her with.
‘Do you trust your informant, DC Clayburn?’ she suddenly asked.
‘I suppose so, ma’am,’ Lucy replied.
‘He’s no track record for giving you duff intel?’ Blake wondered.
‘Not so far. This one’s thin on detail though, I must admit.’
‘Well …’ Blake had another long think, ‘technically, these are robberies and that puts them in our ballpark.’ She glanced at Beardmore. ‘I think we can run with this for a couple of weeks, Stan. But we haven’t got the resources to cover every cashpoint in the borough.’
‘I anticipated that, ma’am,’ Lucy said, unfolding another sheet of paper, this one a street-map of central Crowley. ‘That’s why I suggest we focus on these particular cashpoints here.’ She spread it on the desk, indicating ten separate locations which she had marked with biro crosses.
DI Blake stood up to assess it properly.
‘Ten of them,’ she said. ‘Only ten?’
‘I guessed we’d have to concentrate our resources to a degree,’ Lucy explained. ‘So, these, to me, will be his most likely targets. I’ve chosen them on the basis that he’ll do his research. He’ll have to – he’s a stranger in town, or at least he’s not a resident, so he’s not going to be overly familiar with the layout.’
She glanced at Beardmore, who remained studiedly indifferent. She could imagine that he wasn’t best pleased at the amount of attention she’d clearly been paying to this particular case, when she was supposed to be concentrating on something else. On the other hand, he ought to be a little proud that she was now demonstrating to the head of a specialist unit just how thorough and professional his own divisional officers could be.
‘Go on,’ Blake said. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Well … all of these work in his favour, ma’am,’ Lucy said. ‘They’re all in areas extensively covered by CCTV, but he’s got a hood. And the fact it’s a mucky October means he can walk the streets with his hood drawn up and not attract any attention. So, he’s got that base covered. In addition, they’re all out in the open.’ She moved her index finger from one point to the next. ‘A high street, a junction with traffic lights, the edge of the market square …’
‘And that’s an advantage to him?’ one of Blake’s underlings asked.
Detective Sergeant Danny Tucker had been summoned over to join them by Blake as soon as she’d learned about the case. Lucy had spotted him walking around the station before, but hadn’t really known who he was. This was the first time they’d been up close together, let alone had spoken. It was perhaps a minor distraction that Danny Tucker was just about the best-looking guy Lucy had seen in the job for quite some time. Of West Indian extraction, but by the sounds of it born right here in Manchester, he was tall, about six-three, with hair cut short and an athlete’s build, which was visible even through his figure-hugging polo-neck sweater. He had a square jaw, high, strong cheekbones, and bright, intelligent eyes.
‘Well, yeah,’ Lucy said. ‘He attacks late at night, and not many people are likely to go out to a cashpoint late at night unless they feel relatively safe. These particular cashpoints, because they’re out in the open, will probably be deemed safer than most.’
‘So, if he hangs around these, there’s basically more chance he’ll get lucky,’ Blake said.
‘That’s my reading of it, ma’am, yes.’ Lucy’s finger roved further across the street map. ‘These points also benefit from having getaway routes everywhere. A side passage through to a pedestrianised shopping
