Condemned, R.C. Bridgestock [most romantic novels TXT] 📗

doors that lined each side of the empty, brightly lit corridor. Two doors had been left open. Inside she saw a toilet without a seat, and a wooden bed base with a thin plastic mattress on top. Charley shuddered. A windowless room with a locked door was her worst nightmare.

As she made herself comfortable in the back office in the custody suite which was situated directly behind the custody desk, Charley planned to watch the prisoners being brought before the Custody Sergeant Percy Shaw. Here they would be booked in at the desk and asked to hand in their personal property.

‘Place them as far apart as you can, will you?’ she had asked the custody staff. She didn’t want to give Thomas or Raglan any opportunity to speak to each other, by shouting down the corridor in the cell area. Though she thought it wouldn’t harm to let them each know that the other had been apprehended.

When the buzzer announced the arrival of a prisoner at the back door, it made her jump, such was her concentration on the file she was reading. James Thomas appeared through the door. The arrogance that he had displayed at Crownest was gone, as anticipated. His grey, puffy face looked bewildered, he was shaking and extremely upset. When it came to having his personal property taken from him, he asked, very politely, if the officers would be careful with his sovereign ring, which meant a lot to him.

‘Do you understand why you have been arrested?’ said the Custody Sergeant.

Thomas replied, ‘I do, but it wasn’t me.’

The Custody Sergeant was typing up his comments onto the computer. ‘Oh, I wish I had a penny for every time someone told me that,’ she said, when she turned to face him. Her forced smile quickly dropped from her lips. ‘Cell twelve,’ she said to Ricky-Lee. ‘Take him away.’

As James Thomas turned, Charley stood, and walked towards him. ‘We will be speaking to you soon, but in the meantime you will need to talk to your solicitor,’ she said.

The backdoor buzzer sounded again, noisily. Ricky-Lee began ushering Thomas down the corridor to his cell, as Jonathan Raglan was brought in, bleary-eyed. He was clearly agitated, struggling, and kept shrugging off Mike’s steadying hand from his elbow as they reached the desk.

‘This is preposterous! Heads will roll!’ Raglan roared at the Custody Sergeant. ‘I know the Chief Constable!’

‘Coincidentally, I do too.’ Charley chuckled. Quickly her face turned serious. ‘I couldn’t begin to imagine how many times I hear that in a day, either. Do you understand why you’ve been arrested, Mr Raglan?’

Raglan stood at the desk, as still as he was able to manage whilst under the influence of drugs. ‘Get me Duke Coggins, my solicitor!’ he said. ‘He’ll sort this out, and you’ll be grovelling at my feet with an apology, before this day is out,’ he said, with a quivering voice.

Raglan’s attitude was no different from what she remembered.

‘Cell two,’ Percy Shaw said. ‘Take him away.’

By late afternoon, the officers had started to return to the police station with bags of exhibits from the different sites of investigation. By the time the majority of the team were back in the Incident Room office, it was time for the debrief where they would share the information from each address, and find out what evidence had been seized.

With a silent room, full of tired bodies, the debrief began.

‘Let’s start with James Thomas, shall we?’ asked Charley.

‘Twenty grand has been recovered from a holdall, found behind a panel in the house, thanks to police dog Oscar,’ reported the dog handler.

‘Yes, and we’ve discovered a load of paperwork; we’re working through it with the financial team, who will scrutinise it to see if it is relevant,’ said Ricky-Lee.

‘No evidence of drugs?’ asked Charley.

Ricky-Lee shook his head. ‘No, clean as a whistle.’

‘Anything from his car?’ asked Charley.

Again, Ricky-Lee shook his head. ‘Nope.’

‘I suppose we haven’t found a firearm?’

‘No, boss, but the firearms sniffer dog is presently searching the building, so there’s still hope.’

‘Target Two?’ Charley asked Mike.

‘Jonathan Raglan was asleep on his settee, fully clothed, when we entered the property. There was a fruit bowl on the coffee table beside him that contained several wraps of cocaine. Apart from being, shall we say, three sheets to the wind, he was otherwise co-operative. We’ve recovered items of a financial nature from a set of locked drawers in bedroom two, and at the estate agency, we’ve also recovered five grand in cash.’

‘Owing to the amount of paperwork we have recovered, I can say from the off that this is going to take us quite some time to get through, but as soon as we find any discrepancies, you’ll be the first to know,’ said Martin Jones, the leader of the Financial Investigations Unit.

‘Let’s get all the exhibits booked in, and then we can assess what we have to work with.’ Charley was eager to move forward. ‘I’ll speak with the National Crime Agency regarding the cocaine seizure to see if Jonathan Raglan’s name features in any of their known distribution chains. It would be easy to go off at a tangent here, but we have to remain focused on our objective, which is to convict the murderers of Faisal Hussain. One thing to remember, from the time the prisoners were booked in, is that their custody clocks are now ticking and we will need to start speaking to them as soon as we possibly can.’ Charley turned to Mike. ‘An initial interview this evening would be good.’

At the close of the team briefing, Charley’s mobile phone demanded her attention, and she shared the contents of the text with the team. ‘Jonathan Raglan has been medically examined and is pronounced fit for interview.’ She looked up from the screen. ‘That’s good. DC Ricky-Lee, DC Annie Glover, if he’s been fed and watered, first interview please, and I think we’ll leave James Thomas until a bit later, make him sweat a little longer, what do