Scream Blue Murder: an action-packed thriller

by Tony J. Forder

  I felt myself smile, despite my misery and simmering fury. Terry and Mel were like oil and water, and she had not appreciated being referred to as ‘baggage’. I sensed she genuinely understood his honest intent, just that it was in her nature to object. As it was in his not to care if she did.

  My own impressions of Mel had altered as our time together increased. For a young women she had great presence, knew her mind and was unafraid to express opinions. That did not mean she was always right, but I knew Terry would appreciate her honesty as much as I did. Mel’s allegiance to Charlie was obvious. It went beyond loyalty and devotion. The nanny loved her charge, and as the day had worn on I saw several examples of those feelings being reciprocated.

  We were a collective, with collective responsibilities. Misfits thrown together by a series of events over which we had no control. Yet a bond had formed, in spite of our many differences, and I felt it growing tighter even as I sat there contemplating what might lie ahead for all of us.

  Dragging my weary frame up off the sofa, I made my way upstairs to check on my baggage. The bedroom door to the left was ajar. Melissa stood with her back to the wall, gazing down at the sleeping child. There was a great deal of affection in that look, I thought. A tumult of warm emotions encapsulated within those eyes.

  Melissa turned her head at my approach. I offered a tentative wink. “We’ll be fine now,” I assured her. “Here, I mean. Terry was serious. You, Charlie and me are all his baggage now, and he will take good care of us.”

  Melissa’s eyebrows arched. “You’re mellowing. You called her Charlie.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, well she’s still a pain in the proverbial, but it is her name.”

  “It’s nice to hear you use it without anger or irritation in your voice.”

  “I’m in a different place now. In more ways than one. And my bark is far worse than my bite. Back in Chippenham you suggested that I erected barriers, even pushed people away. You were right. But that’s nothing more than a defensive mechanism. It’s not really my true nature. Anyhow, you doing all right, Mel? You feel safer now?”

  She gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. For a moment she said nothing, seeming to search deep within herself. Eventually she nodded and said, “I think everything will be okay now, yes.”

  I didn’t quite know why, but the look concerned me. Perhaps she was still scared. I wondered whether she still did not trust me. Even if that were the case, surely, she had to have some faith in Terry Cochran. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Melissa had been through an awful lot. Myself and Terry were virtual strangers to her, yet she was being asked to put her life in our hands. She had every right to still feel both cautious and afraid. We all did.

  “You turning in?” I asked.

  “No, not yet. The bath soap I found was horrible, so I’ll wait until Terry gets back and then I’ll have a nice long soak.”

  I made a show of sniffing my own armpits. “I think I might hit the shower later myself. Starting to get a bit ripe.”

  Melissa took a step towards me. Her eyes met mine. “Thank you, Mike. I’m still not quite sure what kind of person you really are, but you’ve not let us down. Quite the opposite, in fact. And at a huge personal cost, both in losing one friend and calling in a debt from another. I get the impression that there is something solid and good beneath that veneer you wear. When this is all over, I’ll make sure people understand that.”

  I was going to brush away her comment with a quip, but at that moment I thought my voice might break if I attempted to speak. Instead I just nodded and headed back downstairs.

  26

  When Terry returned, he and I unpacked the groceries in the small, but well-appointed kitchen. Ignoring the boiled kettle, Terry took two bottles from a six-pack of Stella Artois, uncapped both and handed one to me.

  “No, thanks.” I waved the beer away. “I’m on the wagon and this isn’t the right time to fall off.”

  “Fair enough. I got tea and coffee and some milk. Oh, and a bottle of juice. Make whatever you want. How are the hostages?”

  I laughed and started opening a box of tea bags. “Don’t let Mel catch you calling them that. Charlie is still asleep. Thankfully. Believe me, you’ll know all about it when she’s not. I think Mel is just gathering herself and waiting to have a bath.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot to take in,” Terry observed. He gulped his way through half the beer and backhanded foam from his lips. “Melissa looks as if she doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.”

  “From what she tells me, Dawson kept his home life and his business completely separate. She’s not been around this sort of thing before. Not this close, anyway.”

  “Few people have.”

  I poured hot water into a mug. “Thankfully.”

  Melissa padded barefoot into the kitchen. Her shoulders were slumped, hair dishevelled. Dark rings had settled around her eyes. I could empathise.

  Terry handed her a carrier bag. “Toiletries,” he said.

  “Thanks. What do I owe you?”

  “We’ll settle up later. You want a beer and something to eat before you go back up?”

  The look she gave him was hollowed out. “No, thanks all the same. I’m all in. I need a soak and then I’m going straight to bed.” Mel turned to me and said, “Would you watch Charlie for me? If she wakes up while I’m in the bath, she’ll panic.”

  “Sure, no problem. You go up. I’ll get some of this tea down my neck and be right behind you.”

  I felt myself unwind as the hot tea worked its magic. The past twenty-four hours or so had been traumatic to say the least. That I, Mel and Charlie were here, alive and well, suggested I had not done too badly. I knew I would forever question some of the decisions I’d made, but that depth of self-examination went with the territory.

  As if reading my thoughts, Terry said, “Don’t do that, Mike. Don’t second guess yourself. It’s futile, pal. No one ever really knows what they would do in situations like this. In my view, you handled yourself well. If you made mistakes, you have to learn to live with them.”

  “Easy to say, Terry. Not quite so easy to do.”

  “I understand that. Doesn’t make it less true. You can’t change it. And no good will come of self-recrimination.”

  I could not quite get a handle on the way it all went down regarding Susan. Although I had warned her of the risk involved, had I not actually believed in the possibility of her coming to harm, or had I ignored it because I wanted her there? Needed her there. I did not recall at any stage thinking she might be in any real physical danger, but if that’s really the way it happened then I had to question how I could have been so badly prepared. This much I revealed to Terry.

  He reacted pragmatically. “From everything you’ve told me, Mike I don’t see how you could have foreseen what happened. Logic suggests it was Susan who was followed. Could you have predicted that her number was being monitored, or that she herself was being watched? I don’t think so. Either way, you can’t change a damn thing. It’s done. You move on. It’s the only way you’ll cope.”

  Moments later, I drained my mug. “You turning in?” I asked. “I’m guessing a sadist like you has an early start planned.”

  Terry grinned. “Tomorrow we’re all up when we’re up. No schedules to keep here. Not yet at least. Best if we all get the rest we need.”

  “I’ll hold you to that. I’m popping upstairs to sit with Charlie until Mel is ready, then I’ll come back down and join you for another drink and something to eat. I’m famished.”

  “Sounds good to me. It’ll be good to catch up, Mike. Been too long.”

  I sat for only ten minutes or so watching the child sleeping, but it nonetheless carried me back in time to when my own daughter was the same age. To me there was nothing quite as vulnerable as a sleeping child. I felt myself becoming anxious whilst contemplating once again all that Charlie had yet to go through, especially after she learned of her father’s death. Charli
e was only a kid, but old enough to comprehend, old enough to be devastated, to feel the pain of loss tear right through her.

  I knew all about such loss.

  Never being given the opportunity of saying goodbye to my parents was one of the many sorrows in my life. To have those two good people ripped away from me in a senseless accident left me wandering in the wilderness for a long time. I did not have the tools to cope with such loss. I became immersed in misery, allowing it to dominate my life in a way that sent me spiralling downwards. Everyone I knew and cared about got caught up in the whirlwind of wretchedness I created. I was a stain, a blight, tainting the world and the lives around me. I emerged a weaker man; that much I could acknowledge.

  It should not have taken murder and chaos to start bringing me back. Yet it had, and that journey had begun at last. I did not know what my destiny would be. The only thing I was sure of is that I would have a hand in shaping it.

  When Mel stepped back into the room she had a towel wrapped around her, wet hair coiled and glistening against the nape of her neck and back. The sight of her bare shoulders and legs sent a swift jolt through me, and I jerked as if prodded with a taser. Until now I had not been able to see past our situation. Suddenly I was acutely aware of Melissa’s sexuality.

  “You’ll… you’ll be fine here, yes,” I stammered. I nodded to myself and looked everywhere but directly at her.

  “We will. Now all I really want to do is sleep.”

  “Yeah. You do that.” I flashed a quick smile and got out of there.

  “Any bright ideas how we extricate ourselves from this mess?” I asked my friend a few minutes later. We had eaten toasted cheese sandwiches that Terry had knocked up, and a second cup of tea had sated my thirst. We sat on the sofa, side by side. Terry upright, me slouched, my body craving slumber.

  “Not as such,” he said. “I think we can dismiss Chris Dawson and his crew to a certain degree. If we absolutely had to, I could find a way to reach them and let them know precisely what went on, but at the moment there’s no real benefit to them becoming directly involved. I can be convincing, but with no obvious advantage I say we push them to one side. Your main problem is obviously the police. For me the biggest concern is whether this Hendricks guy is working alone or is part of a bigger problem. The shooting of your friend bothers me for more reasons than the obvious. You have to ask yourself how likely it is that this one cop who took Ray Dawson out at close range also happens to be proficient with a rifle? How could this one man have tracked and traced Susan?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t see it. He has to be getting some help.”

  “Agreed. So then, we have to wonder whether that help is official or off the books.”

  “The NCA would never sanction taking Susan out like that. Me, perhaps, if they believed I was armed and a danger to the public, or at least if Hendricks had somehow convinced them I was. But to kill an innocent in the hope that I would bolt for Mel and Charlie which would then allow them to follow me…? No chance.”

  “Well, we know that they do believe you to be armed and dangerous, because this bent cop has managed to persuade them of it. Even so, ordering an action to take you out seems most unlikely, let alone Susan. But let’s just say the order on you was given, perhaps on the basis that you were an imminent threat to your friend. If handled and spun a specific way, her death might later be explained away as an accident during the hit on you.”

  “Okay, I can follow that line of argument.”

  Terry nodded and pushed on. “But if it was official then a specialist armed unit would have been called in. No way they’re going to tell this lone cop he has the green light to take you out. I don’t believe the NCA even has that kind of reach. So, either an entire armed response team is also in on whatever is going on here, or Hendricks is working both off the books and not alone.”

  The two of us were silent for a while. I ran through the permutations. The variables were numerous. Then I said, “All of which leads us back to the biggest question of them all, Terry. However, we ended up here with you in this house, just what the hell started the whole chain of events?”

  And that was when the beeps started coming from the surveillance equipment in the cupboard.

  27

  “How many?” I asked.

  Terry was standing in the cupboard beneath the stairs, whilst I remained by the door. He took a few seconds to study the night-view cameras, in addition to the two Silent Sentinels picking up thermal sources.

  “Two out front, two out back,” he replied. “Standard formation. By the book.”

  “Not ideal odds,” I said.

  “Not for them, no. They’re taking their time, though. Approaching with a great deal of caution. My gut says this is a recon, getting the lie of the land, looking to identify what’s going on in here before regrouping elsewhere to plan the strike.”

  I understood what he meant. There were many playbooks in combat situations, and you used whichever best suited individual purposes. There was no heat of battle raging here. All was still, and whoever was out there had to use stealth.

  “They won’t want to announce their presence to the whole area with a violent breach,” I said. “I know your neighbours are not exactly close by, but across this open terrain the sound will travel far.”

  Despite the circumstances, Terry turned and flashed a grin at me. “Once a Marine always a Marine, eh Mike?”

  “Up here, maybe,” I responded, tapping the side of my head.

  “That’ll do for me. So, listen up pal. On this floor there are three rooms, two entry or exit doors, five windows. We can’t cover them all if they go for a multi-personnel ingress and they will. But there is only one staircase.”

  “We go for the high ground,” I said.

  “As always. So, you set yourself up on the landing at the point where it dog-legs back. I’ll stick with the surveillance until I know for sure what they’re planning. If they’re using suppressors like us then it’s a reasonably safe bet there’ll be no flash-bangs or stun grenades coming our way. As you said, they’ll be aiming for a swift and silent operation.”

  “What about their tactics?” I asked.

  Terry was unlocking a cabinet in the cupboard. I guessed it held more weapons. “I think they’ll wait for the house to go dead, so I’ll kill the lights one by one. I reckon they’ll give it thirty minutes. So after this, no more chat. If I’m them, I’ll plant a listening device on one of the windows, and I have to assume they think like me.”

  “Do we warn Mel? Tell her what to expect?”

  “Let’s see how it goes in the next few minutes. Panic is the last thing we need right now. Especially with a child in tow.”

  I nodded. Without another word, I picked up the weapon Terry had given me, twisted the suppressor onto the barrel as I stepped out into the short passage and then climbed the first rise of steps. The calm exterior I hoped I was presenting was for the benefit of my friend. I wanted him to believe in me, to feel confident of my part in his plan. Inside I was screaming. My three years of service were a long way back in the past, and whatever training and experience had been ingrained was long forgotten now. These days I was a mere civilian. And I was scared, just as any other civilian would be. But Terry was my friend, I had got him into this mess, and I would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the man.

  A few minutes after I had secreted myself low in the tight corner of the landing, the downstairs lights were extinguished and Terry appeared moments later out of the darkness. He switched on a small pencil-beam torch with an amber bulb, illuminating a sheet of paper on which he had written ‘ALARM BYPASSED. SILENT BREACH FRONT AND BACK IS MY BEST GUESS. LET THEM COME AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. WAIT FOR ME.’

  The torch beam rose and I nodded my understanding. Our unwelcome visitors would not have bothered bypassing the alarm if they had intended on coming in heavy. It was likely that these people had no idea who was inside the house other than myself, Mel and Charlie. Whilst we were takin
g every precaution, I doubted they would be expecting any kind of retaliatory response. Let alone an armed one.

  The beam flashed upon another note. ‘WILL PASS MESSAGE ON TO M TO MOVE INTO BATHROOM WITH C, LOCK UP AND STAY SILENT. WILL KILL LIGHTS UPSTAIRS. BACK BEFORE YOU KNOW IT.’

  Terry forced something bulky into my free hand. A pair of Cobra Optics Storm Pro night-vision goggles. Then he was gone. In the darkness and relative silence that followed, time dragged. I wanted no part of this, but at the same time I wanted it over and done with. Most of all, I wanted payback for what had happened to Susan. Terry and I were outnumbered, but the element of surprise and my friend’s ability in a firefight would be enough. Had to be. It was crucial that every shot found its target. That way we might even end it before it had really begun. If not, I would put my faith in my friend.

  Minutes ticked away, and then I was aware of Terry coming back down to the landing and setting up to the front and right. I pulled on the goggles to allow time for my sight to adjust, then hunched down and waited in the gathering silence. I did not have to wait long.

  When it came, the sound of the breach was almost disappointing. The back door was too far away for any sound to be audible, but the noise of the front door being forced open was both muffled yet impossible to miss if you were listening for it. I ran it all through in my mind. We had to allow the men to reach the passage and start heading for the stairs. I had no doubt they would be wearing their own night-vision, and once they hit the stairs they would see they were not alone. We had to hope they would not notice anything untoward beforehand. It was all about timing. I had to stop myself from jerking on the trigger, silently telling myself just to wait for Terry to fire the opening salvo.

  The entry team were good. I had to strain my ears to hear the soft scuffing of boots on the carpet and kitchen linoleum. I could not have been more focussed. It was curious, but whilst I had been close to hyperventilating just a few minutes earlier, I now felt no fear. An inner edge, a strength long forgotten, had somehow returned. I listened intently. I could hear their advance moving closer from either side of the stairway.