Free The Score by Howard Marks Page A

it looked like they had finally snagged him.
    But the operation had proved a damp squib. The AR squad found the cave empty, except for some recently smoked cigarettes and a half-eaten snack. An exhaustive search of the area failed to find him. After the marina bust, during a long grilling Morgan had finally admitted being in the cave alone that day. It turned out they had missed him by only half an hour.
    At the time of the op, Cat remembered, Della Davies had still been press officer at Cathays. As the affair had been a costly failure, she had run a press blackout afterwards, and no details of the operation had ever reached the public.
    Thomas was staring at Cat intently. She had a horrible feeling she already knew where this was going. Tentatively, he passed her a faxed photograph. She recognised the old evidence sheet numbers from five years back. She was looking at a photo from the Operation Plato evidence file. It wasn’t that well defined, but the basics were clear enough.
    ‘Last night, when I saw the wall,’ he made a clicking sound, ‘it reminded me of something, then I remembered this.’ He hesitated. ‘At the time no one really made much of it. Everyone was too pissed-off at having missed Morgan.’
    The focus of forensics at the time had been the objects recovered at the cave and not the place, so the picture was not a close-up. It showed the narrow base of the cave, about six feet across. Among black pools was a dry patch with some cigarettes stubbed out on the rocks, some sandwich wrappers and a couple of empty water bottles. On the wall above was a solitary Kilroy, smaller than the one on the wall, but visibly in the same style.
    ‘I’ve scoured online,’ Thomas said. ‘All the true-crime sites, but there’s no sign any member of the public has ever seen this picture. Difficult to imagine how they could since it’s locked away in the evidence vaults under Cathays. No one has looked at this file for years.’
    Cat remembered vague rumours going around at the time about how Morgan had someone on the inside. This had been floated as the reason that he was always one step ahead of all the attempts to snatch him. The Kilroy looked like Morgan was taking the piss out of the officers he knew were coming for him. Could it mean something else? She wasn’t sure. Despite exhaustive investigations, no inside man in the force had ever been identified as having assisted Morgan, and under questioning he had never admitted to having one. The inside man was likely a myth, the paranoid reflex of a provincial force that had repeatedly failed to catch their man. But over years the rumours of one had created an ever tighter information loop around any Morgan-related operations. The day of Operation Plato, only Kyle and a few trusted officers close to her would have known who the target was. These were the same officers in on the marina bust, and Morgan had not got away that day.
    She glanced back at the picture. The eyes seemed to stare back at her, mocking. If someone wanted to fuck with their heads, they had found a good way to do it. The graffiti, she reckoned, had been phrased to be understood as a plain statement of fact. The Kilroy figure had been offered as proof of its bona fides. Whatever its original private significance to Morgan may have been – if it had any – it came over as a crudely territorial gesture, like a piss on a lamppost, or a notch on a tree.
    They were being taunted.
    ‘The only person we can safely say at this stage did not kill these girls is Morgan,’ Thomas said. He paused. He looked visibly shaken. ‘I checked in with the governor at Belmarsh. He thought I was short of a deck for even asking. He assured me Morgan had been in the secure unit and had no day releases. The last few months he’s been so unwell he could barely walk more than a few paces unaided.’
    Cat took this in. None of it was any great surprise. She knew all security protocols in Category A prisons were rigorously