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  Phil walked slowly back to his office. He spotted new files in his in-tray and an urgent email from his boss. Something must have hit the fan at a great rate of knots. The all-important meeting his boss had summoned him to would give him more than enough to think about in the coming weeks. Indeed, the entire Avon & Somerset police would be stretched to the limit and the repercussions of that would send tremors across the whole of the country.

  CHAPTER 4

  DS Phil Hounsell joined the rest of the team in the incident room. The Assistant Chief Constable was present. This must be something big, Phil thought.

  The rumour mill he was obviously not a party to these days had already filtered news through to several officers present; a few of them were his superiors and even his close colleagues appeared to know more than he did.

  Phil could tell by their ashen faces that there at least one death must have been suffered on their patch. Maybe being ignorant was a good thing. While a few late-comers arrived he wondered what this all-important incident could be. If it was another ram raid, then clearly they weren’t talking about a few dozen designer bags or a couple of trays of jewellery.

  As soon as the ACC began to speak that sickening feeling that everyone experiences when receiving terrible news found its way to the back of Phil’s throat. It was bad; really bad.

  The story began a few weeks earlier in Maidenhead, Berkshire; but at this stage, the police were oblivious to that fact. Their officers were merely looking at the first violent attack that the successors to the ram-raid gang had carried out.

  The five members of that original outfit were English nationals who had been in and out of trouble with the law ever since they’d been teenagers. Year in year out from the early nineties they turned their hand to various sorts of thieving, with mixed results. Eighteen months in prison, two years on the outside, then another spell in prison. Just thieving, never any ‘violence against the person’. A few harsh words perhaps to keep the victims in line, but neither of them listed an ABH or a GBH anywhere on their CV.

  They were on a slow road to nowhere. No qualifications to mention, unless you count getting into your car inside ten seconds, high-speed getaway driving skills and being able to strip the lead off the church roof in the time you knelt indoors taking communion. Deep down, though, if you asked the policemen that met up with them on a regular basis, they would tell you they might be career criminals who could be a bloody nuisance, but there was no real harm in them.

  The gang didn’t deserve what happened.

  They had disappeared two weeks ago, straight after the Taunton job.

  Several pairs of eyes had been following them for a while. The watchers soon established the gang’s modus operandi. They were impressed with the outbuildings they rented from a local farmer near Windsor. The farmer welcomed the money; it saved him thinking of diversifying for a while. Times were hard for farmers, as usual, if it wasn’t the English weather then the European Union and its constant interference got the blame. He didn’t have a clue what the lads got up to in his outbuildings for, and he cared even less.

  In one building the gang assembled a fleet of stolen vehicles ranging from family saloons with quite a few miles on the clock to high-performance, top-of-the-range luxury brands. They cherry-picked from their stock. Selecting an alternative model for each trip along the M4 to join the M5 and pay a lucrative visit to a different West Country town on each occasion. A trip to ram a shop front, first make a quick getaway, then switch to a more comfortable ride on the way home.

  As they used up two cars on every job; one left in the shop during the raid itself and the other burnt out after the rapid transfer back to the motorway, they wanted a constant delivery of expendable transport. That was where the second outbuilding came into its own. They kitted it out with everything they needed to run a ‘chop shop’. There were always friends in the game that wanted to offload stolen cars. The ram-raiders set up a ready supply from the London region. It proved to be a lucrative trade.

  The gang did a rapid turnaround on cars left with them and after good clean up and welding, they generated dozens of untraceable vehicles. Several were then sold on to contacts overseas in places such as Poland or the Czech Republic; others became available for those quick trips to the seaside to snatch trays of bling or carry home an ATM to be opened in the outbuilding at their leisure.

  Bulgaria had been a member of the European Union since January 2007; the British government placed transitional restrictions in force which over the years had been extended and many thousands now lived in the London area. In its naïve appreciation of the real effects of unrestricted immigration, the English authorities imagined these newcomers to be either students or hardworking individuals seeking to improve their lot. That naivety resulted in lots of innocent lives being lost in this case.

  Organised crime in Eastern Europe isn’t something new. Across the region, there are groups involved in a wide range of activities, including the trafficking of drugs and humans, kidnapping, prostitution, extortion, car theft and the arms trade. Three years before the EU in its wisdom agreed to admit Bulgaria and Romania there were believed to be more than one hundred organised crime groups in Bulgaria alone.

  Among those who travelled to the UK for a fresh start were five men in their late twenties. Arriving separately, during 2011 and 2012 with other family members, they soon got in contact with one another and resumed the activities they were involved in back home.

  Dimitar Marinov, Iliya Todorov, Nikolay Iliev, Georgi Bonev and Zlatko Yankov were thugs. The five men bore the traditional ‘look’ of a ‘mutra’ or mafia mug. Sturdy and with a muscular build, they favoured close-cropped hair and wearing expensive dark suits, with lots of gold jewellery. They drove around in flash cars. These things don’t come cheap, even in the UK, and somehow these five found the funds to manage this without apparently having a full-time job.

  By the summer of 2013, the gang became well established in the trafficking trade; both drugs and girls. They were amazed at the appetite for both that the British public demonstrated. Once a thug always a thug and Dimitar Marinov decided that he wanted a bigger slice of the pie. He felt it was time to up the ante. After a couple of years in the UK, he considered the police and the courts ineffectual. Indeed, he learnt that the whole system was on a tipping point and on the verge of falling apart. He reckoned that he was ready to introduce the UK to a few of the activities that worked so well for his fellow criminals back in the old country.

  Once Dimitar and his colleagues established the routine for the ram-raid gang using the outbuildings at the farm, they moved in on them. As the five members of the ram-raid gang prepared their vehicles for the next job, they were interrupted by the sound of the arrival at the doorway of a JCB mini-digger. At first, they thought it could be the farmer and started to think of answers to his expected questions about what the heck they did with his premises.

  Four other men emerged silently behind them and as the poor devils stared at the driver of the digger, checking out his suit and dark glasses, a volley of bullets from silenced automatics quickly dispatched them.

  “Start digging, Nikolay,” ordered Dimitar Marinov.

  The compact mini-digger set to work. One advantage of having lots of spare cash, legally or otherwise, is that you can lay your hands on just the right piece of kit for the job you need. Dimitar knew that the one-tonne digger wouldn’t attract a lot of attention from the farmhouse, as that was quite a distance from the barns. He knew too that it was more than capable of digging two metres into the floor of the barn. It was ideal for the task despite the space restrictions. The bodies could be disposed of efficiently and with little delay.

  Phase one of his plan had been successfully completed. He and his gang now controlled the transport section of the now-defunct ram-raid gang. Phase Two of his plan could be put into action.

  Clevedon is a beautiful Victorian seaside town overlooking the Severn estuary. It takes around one and three-quart
er hours to drive there from Maidenhead. Dimitar chose two of the high-performance cars now at his disposal and he and Iliya Todorov drove the gang members towards their first target.

  They weren’t looking to visit the old Pier or stroll along the seafront; none of the many attractions that entertained visitors to Clevedon throughout the year held any interest for them. These day-trippers were interested in one particular spot, The Triangle where branches of several banks stood within yards of one another.

  The gang brought along extra enforcers for the ride. Anton Dobrev and Boris Tsankov were both experienced assassins. A little older than the rest of the gang, they were already responsible for over twenty kills between them in the mid-1990s back in Bulgaria.

  The drive from Maidenhead to Clevedon had been pretty much travelled in silence. When they got closer to Junction 20 on the M5, Dimitar Marinov checked with his passengers that they knew exactly what to do. He then called Iliya Todorov and told him to brief his fellow gang members.

  The two banks were struck simultaneously at ten-fifteen in the morning. Dimitar and Iliya remained outside in the cars while the enforcers separated. Anton Dobrev followed Zlatko Yankov into Lloyds Bank while Boris Tsankov accompanied Georgi Bonev into the NatWest Bank branch a few yards further up the road. The four men donned balaclavas as they strode quickly to the doorways.

  Nikolay Iliev stood on the pavement between the branches, watching the cars and poised ready to act if a traffic warden or a policeman arrived on the scene.

  As soon as the doors burst open and the gangsters burst into the bank, each man grabbed a customer and started shouting. The handful of other customers in the banking hall were ordered to lie face down on the floor. The men told them not to utter a sound. Gang members held guns to their hostage's heads and shouted at the counter staff to open the security door. They told them to stand away from the tills and that if anyone pressed a silent alarm, they would start shooting.

  Within two minutes they had access to large amounts of cash. Nobody behind the counter wanted to be a hero. It wasn’t their money. Zlatko and Georgi left the two assassins in the banking halls to keep watch on the panicked and frightened customers. The two thugs swept up as many notes as they could and they prepared to leave. This wasn't about the money. Their orders had been to get in and out as quickly as possible. The message this raid gave was always the most important element of this trip.

  Zlatko and Georgi then stood at the door of their particular Bank and glanced out. All appeared quiet so far. As instructed by Dimitar they then both nodded towards their comrade inside the branch. The assassins shoved their hostages to the floor and opened fire.

  The rattling sound of their Uzi’s as they raked the banking hall was deafening.

  Seconds later the four men were leaving. The two cars purred into position to pick up their passengers. Anton and Zlatko were just exiting the Lloyds branch when a girl from the jewellers around the corner arrived to pay in Monday’s takings. She screamed as Zlatko cuffed her with his pistol and grabbed her cloth bag containing close to two thousand pounds. Every little helped.

  Boris and Georgi left NatWest without anyone else getting in the way. Nikolay Iliev remained fully alert as he watched his colleagues piling into the cars. He saw a PCSO waddling along the pavement and spotted that she started to take an interest in what was happening. Claire Ricketts was forty-three, overweight, and married with two teenage children that would miss her. She had been doing this job for only twelve weeks.

  Before she found time to call for help or work out why a young girl was sobbing her heart out on the steps of Lloyds Bank and wiping the blood from her forehead, Claire had taken three bullets to the chest from Nikolay Iliev’s gun and sat back against a charity shop window staring blankly across the road.

  A few morning shoppers stopped and stared when four hooded men ran across the street to two waiting cars. They watched as another big man in a suit, wearing sunglasses and waving a gun, ran towards the front car and was dragged into the back seat by a passenger. The cars were on their way out of Clevedon before Claire Ricketts was being checked over by a volunteer staff member from the charity shop. The gang rejoined the M5 before any police vehicles or ambulances arrived on the scene. Local officers were shocked to find one of their colleagues dead on the pavement.

  At Lloyds and NatWest, the banking halls were scenes of carnage. The walls and ceilings were pock-marked with bullet holes. The glass partition that separated the public from the staff had been shattered. Management and bank clerks wandered around shell-shocked and traumatised. All they could see in front of them on the floor in each branch were dead and wounded customers.

  When the emergency services finally entered the banks, at only a few minutes after half-past ten, they were as stunned as those inside still standing. Gradually, their training kicked in and a degree of control established.

  Portishead Police HQ stood less than twenty minutes away. The local station received updates from their officers on the scene and news of the double strike on the seaside town eventually transmitted to the region’s senior staff. As the full details were relayed to the ACC and others, Dimitar Marinov and his gang had travelled more than a few miles on their way back to Maidenhead. It was just after eleven o’clock when DS Phil Hounsell and the others in the incident room heard the latest information on the casualties.

  The ACC reported that a violent and ruthless gang struck two banks in The Triangle, Clevedon around forty-five minutes ago. The cash stolen had been estimated at less than eighty thousand pounds. The men involved were heavily armed. Those inside the banks spoke with Eastern European accents; they wore balaclavas and dark casual clothing. Despite the staff from both branches co-operating fully with the shooters’ demands they murdered five customers and injured seven more. Another gang member in a dark suit and sunglasses shot dead an unarmed PCSO as he made for one of the two getaway cars. A BMW and a Lexus were seen leaving Clevedon at speed in the direction of the M5.

  Checks were being carried out in both directions, north and south. More searches would be being undertaken in neighbouring forces to track journeys being made by this make of vehicle heading for South Wales, the Midlands or towards London via the M4. At this stage, there were no clues to the registration of either car. Nor did anyone have a reliable description for either of the perpetrators.

  Phil Hounsell knew several things without venturing to suggest any of them to his overwrought ACC. Firstly the two cars would have split up as soon as possible. This crew wasn't going to be conveniently travelling in convoy inviting the police to arrest them. Secondly, at least, a million BMW’s travelled on the UK roads, if not considerably more. Stopping each one that traffic spotted on the motorway network wasn’t an option. You might be lucky to spot a pair of hoods in a Lexus because there were only a couple of hundred thousand of those currently on the roads. Even so, Phil wouldn’t want to put any money on traffic finding the right car. What a nightmare.

  As Phil surmised, Dimitar Marinov and Iliya Todorov had kept well apart on the motorway. They only stopped on the highway until the next junction and then headed across country towards Swindon. Dimitar stayed on the A4 until he reached home territory. The BMW safely tucked away in the farm outbuilding well before one o’clock.

  Iliya drove the scenic route via Cirencester and Oxford, which took somewhat longer but the Lexus was extremely comfortable to ride in, so his passengers never complained; in fact, they slept most of the way home. Once they arrived back at the bar they used as a meeting place, Dimitar ran through their morning’s work.

  “The seventy or eighty grand we picked up will be useful,” he grinned “but the real payback from this attack might be the millions we could extort from the Head Offices of the two banks. We may need to find a computer genius to contact the main men at the top. Then we tell them what it will cost them to stop us from carrying out further attacks. They won’t know where or when we will strike. What they know for certain is that we’ll no
t think twice about killing people on their premises. Not paying up wouldn’t be sensible.”

  “Do you believe it will be that simple, Dimitar?” asked Nikolay Iliev “The police will be lying in wait next time we go to Clevedon.”

  Dimitar laughed. “You fool, Nikolay, no wonder you only stand guard and dig holes for me; thinking isn’t your strong point my friend. We won’t be calling on Clevedon again. We might hit Bridgwater or Cheltenham next. Somewhere with more money and more customers.”

  Dimitar told his team to enjoy their evening. To spend the money he gave them wisely. Contact would be made when he had planned the next attack in detail and everything set to go. He told them not to worry about the police. They wouldn’t be bothering them from the few scraps of clues they left behind.

  At Portishead, the ACC emerged from the HQ’s building to talk to the press around lunchtime. The media were all over the carnage not just locally; this was worthy of national and even international coverage. The personal stories of those that had been slaughtered were slowly emerging; together with details of injuries suffered by those lying in hospital beds across the region. One or two were serious, others merely walking wounded and capable of being interviewed. None of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening.

  Claire Ricketts’ family sat at home grieving, with journalists from the League of Nations on their doorstep. The nearest and dearest of the murdered PCSO weren't up to giving them any sound bites for their readers or viewers. The press always hung around like vultures hovering over a corpse in the desert.

  Zara Wheeler soon discovered that her interview with the Divisional Commander and the ACC had been put on hold. When she heard the reason for the postponement, she knew that it wasn’t anything to get annoyed or frustrated over. What happened at Clevedon was horrible. Something that rarely occurred in the UK. It was Dunblane, Hungerford or a motorway crash in the fog that created this degree of hysteria. The London bombings in 2005; the terror attacks at the Olympics or the Royal visit to Bristol last November.