A Time For Justice

by Nick Oldham

  Throughout all this, the officer who had decided to inflict as much pain as possible on Hinksman had more or less hung onto his man. When faced with overwhelming odds he sensibly let go of the cuffs.

  Hinksman held out his damaged hands. The saw neatly parted the cuffs.

  ‘Give me a gun,’ he said to one of the masked men.

  He was immediately handed a pistol.

  He turned on his captor and held the gun to the officer’s head.

  ‘No one gets away with causing me pain and aggravation,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘No one.’ He pulled the trigger twice and most of the back of the man’s head splattered through the cage onto the driver, passenger and windscreen.

  Then he turned on the other officer who had also been his gaoler. ‘Just remember what I’ve said - and pass it onto Henry Christie.’ He shot the man twice in the lower stomach, figuring that he would stay alive long enough to tell the story.

  ‘C’mon,’ the traffic-light man said, tugging at Hinksman’s sleeve. Hinksman nodded and jumped out behind him. They ran towards the traffic-lights and turned right where their transport awaited - a huge, powerful motorcycle with no rear number plate.

  Hinksman was handed a crash helmet. Moments later, as the backseat passenger, he and the traffic-light man were accelerating away from the scene down winding country roads.

  The rest of the ambush team had gone too. No one who saw the incident - and there were many witnesses - could exactly say where to. The men had gone, disappeared like ghosts, their shock tactics having had the desired effect.

  Only two police officers were uninjured - the ones in the front of the prison bus. They climbed slowly out when they thought it was safe, both covered in the contents of their fellow officer’s skull. One of them looked around at the carnage, sank down to his knees at the kerbside and allowed his head to flop into his hands. He was too numbed to cry. The other wandered up and down the road, peering into the cars, knowing that he could do nothing. He sat down on a wall, and lit a cigarette. In the distance was the sound of approaching sirens.

  One hundred metres further back, Lenny Dakin got into his XJS which he’d parked on a side street.

  That had been fantastic, he thought proudly. Fucking fan-tas-tic. Money well spent. Worth every fucking penny. The most exhilarating two minutes three seconds he had ever experienced.

  And Hinksman was free.

  ‘He has to die.’

  ‘I know, Joe, I know. I just don’t know if I can do it.’

  ‘It’s not a case of can, it’s a case of must. Don’t worry, you’ll be protected. I’ll be there - I’ll see you’re OK. Trust me.’

  ‘I don’t know... ‘

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Yes, I do, Joe.’

  ‘Don’t I give you everything you need? Don’t I feed your habit?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? I’ll look after you, Laura. He needs to die and we need to do it. He’s the enemy. The destroyer. The user. Every other way of dealing with him has been tried, but justice has failed. It’s failed you badly, it’s failed me badly. Now we’re going to administer the justice ... you and me ... you and me ... you.’

  ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘What’s he done for you? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He used Whisper, then killed him. He used you and you almost died. There are thousands more like you, thousands who need justice ... and just think what’ll happen when it’s over. You’ll get your baby back! The Social Services have promised me. And you’ll be free ... and that’s everything you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Joe. Me and my baby.’

  ‘And all the dope you need.’

  ‘Yes, yes ... have you got some?’

  ‘Only if you kill him.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes. When? How?’

  ‘Soon. Very soon, I promise.’

  ‘Here, take this.’

  It was a small plastic sachet containing white crystals of crack, one of the most addictive drugs known. And she was addicted. It wasn’t her baby she wanted, not really. It was crack. She would do anything to satisfy her need for it. Murder included.

  Henry had just taken a sip of his second pint of lager. It tasted good, as had the previous one. He was looking forward to the next ones. He felt good and was going to enjoy the celebration first and worry about getting back to the flat thirty miles away in Blackpool second. He glanced around the pub. It was small and narrow with a bar in the centre of the room. The atmosphere reminded Henry of pubs he’d visited in London. Most congenial.

  He saw the uniformed Constable appear at the front door, helmet on, a worried expression across his face. A roar of disapproval went up from the assembled detectives who’d all begun to front-load Boddington’s Bitter as though it was going out of fashion. The officer ignored them. His eyes roved the room and found their target. He walked quickly across to FB.

  Once more Henry had that bad feeling in his guts. He placed his beer down on the bar and watched as the Constable and FB drew to one side, out of the hubbub. The Constable began to talk earnestly to FB, whose face dropped in stages: happy and carefree, all the way, step by painful step, to serious, concerned, deeply unhappy, shocked.

  He patted the Constable reassuringly on the shoulder for the man seemed deeply upset by the information he’d imparted. FB then gave him some instructions, after which he left hurriedly.

  FB looked across the room, his face pale and drawn. His eyes met Henry’s, and he beckoned him over.

  ‘What is it, boss?’

  ‘Bad, very fucking bad,’ said FB gravely. ‘Hinksman’s out. Free.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s been sprung. The escort got hit at Galgate and the team that did it slaughtered nearly all the bobbies.’ FB was finding it difficult to breathe. ‘All but three are dead. That’s what the PC told me.’

  Henry made a quick calculation. ‘Fucking hell,’ he uttered.

  ‘I’m going to the scene now - there’s a car en route to pick me up. You come too, Henry.’

  Henry nodded.

  FB turned his attention to the detectives squashed around the bar.

  He cleared his throat, called for quiet, and with tears in his eyes, made an announcement.

  Laura was asleep now. Kovaks was relieved. What had been planned as a two-minute visit had taken him half an hour. And he had a partner waiting out in the car.

  Kovaks closed the motel-room door and locked it with his key. Laura would be out of the game for hours now. He would re-visit her at the end of his shift.

  Tommo was sitting in the Bucar, chain-smoking, eating a hamburger and sipping a coffee, all at the same time, whilst listening to a cassette which blared country music out deafeningly.

  Kovaks slid in beside him. ‘You’re a slob,’ he observed.

  Tommo screwed up his hamburger wrapper and tossed it out of the window. ‘Thought you said you’d only be a coupla minutes?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kovaks, offering no explanation.

  ‘So was she worth it?’

  Kovaks stiffened. ‘Tommo, just shut the fuck up and drive. As I told you, it’s my sister. She’s gotta few domestic problems and she’s holed up there to get her head together.’

  ‘My ass,’ snorted Tommo with a belch. He reversed the car out of its parking space and hit the road. ‘There was a radio call for ya, by the way.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Dunno. I said you’d radio in when you’d finished fucking your little sister. I said you’d be about two minutes.’ He cracked up with laughter.

  ‘Don’t push it, Tommo,’ warned Kovaks. He reached for the cassette player and switched off Dwight Yoakam. Then he called in.

  The radio operator was a sexy-voiced Texan lady.

  ‘Yeah, Joe, urgent call came in for ya, ‘bout ten minutes ago. Caller said he’d call ‘gain exactly on ten-thirty.’

  ‘Who was
it?’

  ‘Don’t rightly know. Refused all details - but he sounded scared. Thought I recognised the voice, but can’t place it.’

  ‘Received,’ said Kovaks. ‘I’m on my way in.’

  ‘You dickin’ that piece of ass too?’ Tommo asked with a leer. Kovaks gritted his teeth and decided to ask for another partner until Karl Donaldson came back from England.

  ‘Why the hell did they go via Galgate anyway?’ Henry asked.

  FB, pale, shaken, said, ‘It was the Chief’s suggestion. We had a meeting about it yesterday and we worked out the best route with the driver of the lead car.’

  ‘But surely it would have made more sense to get on the motorway north of Lancaster? It’s more direct. No winding, narrow roads. No towns to negotiate...’

  ‘The Chief’s argument was that if there was going to be any sort of attempt, they’d expect us to go that way. Going via Galgate was the less likely option, therefore safer.’

  ‘It was a fucking stupid decision,’ said Henry.

  They were both sitting in the back of a traffic car which was speeding them to the scene.

  ‘Not only that,’ persisted Henry, ‘whoever sprung the bastard was expecting the escort to go through Galgate. They were all set up and ready. They weren’t just hanging about on the off-chance. Something’s not right here.’

  ‘I know,’ said FB with a heavy sigh.

  ‘Who actually knew that the escort would be taking that route?’

  ‘Me, ACC Warner - Jack Crosby’s replacement, the driver of the lead car, and the Chief Constable. We were the only ones at the meeting yesterday. The idea was that everyone else involved - the rest of the officers on the escort and the ones manning points - would get about fifteen minutes’ notice just before the escort set off from prison.’

  ‘Quarter of an hour,’ mused Henry. ‘Not long enough to put that sort of ambush operation into effect. Which means someone blabbed, someone inside the police...’

  He looked at FB who had aged about ten years in the last ten minutes.

  ‘I’m going to think out loud now,’ said Henry, ‘and I’m going to say something pretty uncomfortable. It’s unlikely that the driver of the lead car talked to anyone because he’s dead now, so it’s either you, the ACC or the Chief.’

  The traffic car reached Galgate.

  FB and Henry did not immediately get out. They sat in silence for a few moments.

  Eventually FB said, ‘Well, I know one thing for sure.’ He reached for the door-handle.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  Kovaks was sitting at his desk poring over some surveillance reports on Corelli. There was nothing particularly interesting in them, nothing he didn’t already know about the man, but he looked through them anyway, just in case there was something important he’d missed. It annoyed him that Corelli wasn’t a man of regular habits. He needed to know where and when Corelli was going to be in a specific place and for how long, otherwise how could he plan his execution?

  Corelli had many favourite haunts, but he visited none of them at a regular time. He was a butterfly. Flitting here, landing there, then taking off again. This was one of the reasons why the FBI had never caught and prosecuted him successfully.

  Obviously he spent a great deal of time at his homes and places of business, but these were times when his protection teams were at their strongest and no one could get through the ring uninvited. For Kovaks’ purpose, he needed to be away from these places, out in public.

  Kovaks drew up a list of the places in Miami where Corelli ate and the amount of time he spent at each one. Then he averaged the times out.

  In most places he spent less than an hour. But in two restaurants he had a tendency to linger for about three hours at lunchtimes. The problem was that he hardly ever visited them. He’d been to both four times in the last two years.

  It did seem, though, that whenever he did, he took his time.

  Kovaks raised his eyebrows. ‘Interesting,’ he whispered to himself. ‘If I knew when he was visiting one of them, things could maybe start rolling.’

  Suddenly, for no accountable reason, the image of Sue’s badly mutilated body snapped vividly into his mind’s eye. The cops had still failed to track down Damian. Why didn’t he come forward? Could Damian really be a murderer?

  Kovaks found that very difficult to believe...

  The phone rang, interrupting his musing.

  ‘Special Agent Kovaks, can I help you?’

  ‘Joe?’ came a quiet, frightened voice.

  ‘Yes, who’s that?’

  ‘It’s me, Damian.’

  ‘Damian!’ Kovaks spluttered. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘Joe, I need to talk to someone I can trust. Can I trust you?’

  ‘Yeah, sure you can. Where are you? I’ll come and-’

  The line went dead; Damian had hung up. Kovaks looked sourly at the phone in his hand. He slammed it down and swore.

  ‘This is the saddest tragedy that the Lancashire Constabulary has ever faced and mark my words, we will spare no cost and no effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. We will be relentless in our pursuit and everyone of those responsible will be caught - every single one. Now, if you gentlemen will forgive me...’

  An emotional Dave August wiped a tear from his eye, and ignoring the barrage of questions from the assembled press and TV men, he strode towards the scene.

  The whole of the centre of Galgate had been cordoned off in a 200 metre radius of the incident on the road. On the railway line, all trains had been cancelled for the foreseeable future. High screens had been erected around the crime scenes so that no prying eyes or lenses could see anything they shouldn’t as the forensic teams, Scenes of Crime officers and search teams began their gruesome tasks. None of the bodies had been moved yet.

  August was in full uniform, looking proud and erect. He walked behind one of the screens and saw what lay beyond.

  Nothing he had heard prepared him for what he saw.

  What have I done? he thought frantically. Oh Christ, what have I done?

  Clearly devastated by what he’d seen, he sank down to his haunches, removed his cap and wiped his sweating forehead with his sleeve. He wanted to cry. He wanted to run away. He wanted to bury his head in sand.

  ‘Boss?’

  August looked up. ‘FB ... this is awful. My men, slain in the streets like it’s the fucking Middle East, not the north of England ... Christ!’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said FB. ‘But can I just have a quick word with you about something else?’

  ‘By all means,’ August said, rising to his feet, his knees clicking, glad of the change of subject.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point. It’s already been mooted that this is an inside job, that information about the escort route was leaked from either me, you or Mr Warner. I know it’s all bullshit, that it must have got out some other way, but we should be prepared to be investigated, to allow whoever follows this up whatever access they need to our private lives, don’t you think?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said August, and thought: Is this where the shit hits the fan?

  He gave FB an odd look which FB interpreted as follows: Hellfire! He thinks I did it!’

  Henry stood by the front car of the escort with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, half-watching the conversation between FB and August, but not able to hear.

  He stared vacantly at the killing field in front of him. This was a scene from Chicago, from the Bronx, not from Galgate, a one-horse place with a community copper who was wandering around the periphery of the scene as distraught as anyone.

  His thoughts were curtailed by the arrival of FB who strutted up to him. He was unsettled, Henry thought.

  ‘Y’know - I think the Chief thinks leaked this!’

  Henry chuckled, despite the situation. ‘So, what’s the plan of action for this?’

  ‘Twofold, as I see it. One to recapture that bastard Hinksman
and one to track down the people --who did this.’ He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.

  ‘They’re obviously pros,’ observed Henry. ‘I’ve heard there’s an international team operating who specialise in this sort of job. Pulled that one early this year down south when that IRA man got sprung. To the best of my knowledge the cops in Hampshire haven’t got the sniff of a result on that. It was much the same MO - but fewer dead cops. I think they did something in France too, just before Christmas.’

  ‘Great,’ said FB despondently. ‘Anyway, I want you to take on the task of getting Hinksman back - if he hasn’t already left the country.’

  Henry held back a smile. It was just what he wanted. ‘Can I pick one or two members for my team?’

  ‘Yeah, why not. Who’ve you got in mind?’

  ‘Karen Wilde and Karl Donaldson.’

  Henry didn’t have to wait long for FB’s reaction. He boiled over immediately.

  ‘No fucking way, Henry. That bitch killed Jack Crosby and I won’t forgive her for that. And as for that Yank, the supercilious bastard he isn’t even a cop.’

  Henry waited for the outburst to subside. Calmly he said, ‘Jack Crosby killed himself. He smoked too much, drank too much, he was overweight, didn’t take any exercise, worked too hard and pushed himself too far. It wasn’t her fault he died. It was his own.’

  ‘Hm,’ snuffled FB, unimpressed.

  ‘And she nearly caught Hinksman last time. If she’d got the support she deserved, he would have been caught much sooner and maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t have this...’ Henry let his words sink in.

  FB put his head to one side and said, ‘You’ve changed your tune about her, haven’t you? Don’t forget, she disciplined you and kicked you off the initial enquiry.’

  ‘I don’t mind learning things about people,’ Henry admitted. ‘She knows as much as anybody about Hinksman, and Karl Donaldson is encyclopaedic. Let me have them. Give them a chance.’