Free The Score by Howard Marks

the centre. It looked like a farm, not a large place. The satnav’s map showed it to be surrounded by wooded areas and a couple of miles from the mine.
    It didn’t take her more than ten minutes to get there. There was little traffic. She had to stop only once as a herdsman helped his Friesians across the road from their field. The size of their udders suggested that they were off to be milked; their legs bowed under the weight, their teats like the fingers of huge latex gloves.
    The farm was signposted, a warped hardboard with the name roughly painted in black. A sharp sweep left off the road took her into a yard piled with manure and feed bags.
    She kicked out the Laverda’s stand, took off her helmet and gloves. To the right a shed contained an old tractor, its paintwork flaked and peeling. To the left there was a cavernous barn with milking equipment in it. She took a muddy path up an incline at the side.
    Thomas was standing by a pile of wood stamping his feet, hand cupped around a cigarette. In the other he held a stick. He was staring down at something in the mud at his feet. Beyond him, the ragged line of the police search team was moving slowly over the land. Mostly it was open pasture, there was little ground cover. The cottage they had visited the night before was just visible, maybe a mile or so further over to the right. Arranged on top of the hill opposite were some small, free-standing barriers which the army used for target practice.
    Thomas had disturbed a blackbird, which showed its disapproval with a loud rattle. She walked over. The mud at Thomas’s feet was covered in a series of wavy lines. Some were already losing definition in the ooze, but she saw he had been trying his hand at Kilroy cartoons. They had the same droopy nose and peeping eyes as the figure on the wall. They were the sort of eyes that seemed to follow you as you passed.
    He acknowledged her presence with a wry nod. He looked as if he’d been up most of the night, the skin around his eyes dark and drawn.
    ‘Someone’s trying to mess with our heads, Price.’
    He pointed down at the figures, and passed her some crumpled sheets from his jacket. They were printouts from the internet, short histories of the Kilroy image. Some of it was already familiar from her own reading the previous night. It seemed the original Kilroy of
Kilroy was here
fame had been an American rivet inspector. He’d marked work he passed with the famous line, which had then appeared in inaccessible parts of the ships carrying the troops over during the Second World War, high up on hulls, on chimney stacks and down in the bowels of the ships in crevices no person could reach. The idea caught on and a graffiti craze spread. The cartoon of the figure with the eyes had originally been British, its origin was obscure, but when British soldiers took up the craze they had yoked the two traditions together. The man with the eyes had become the ubiquitous Kilroy.
    ‘These little fellows don’t mean much in themselves,’ he said. He was giving her a knowing, apprehensive look. ‘But do you remember Operation Plato?’
    It was a rhetorical question. Any Wales copper who had anything to do with drugs had come to hear of the operation. It had been perhaps the most embarrassing in a long string of failed attempts to capture Griff Morgan prior to the marina bust. Cat had not been in Drugs then but she knew the basics: reliable intelligence had placed Morgan alone in a remote cave on the Pembrokeshire coast. A rival drug lord had got the details through a leak from Morgan’s gang, and passed them on. Morgan was said to be waiting in the cave while the Tulle brothers and minor soldiers unloaded cargo somewhere further up the coast. The intelligence had been precise on the location of the cave, and that Morgan would be there alone. It was a particularly inaccessible spot, halfway up a cliff. The escape routes had been cut by land, air and sea, and the area tightly encircled: