by Nick Oldham
He swivelled round in the inspector’s desk chair and squinted through the narrow floor-to-ceiling window out to the public car park in front of the police station and beyond to the entrance to the shopping centre.
‘Have I covered everything?’ he asked himself out loud. ‘Have I done as much as I possibly could in the circumstances?’
He thought deeply about the questions, his mind tumbling, revising it all again.
He supped the last of his coffee, now gone cold.
‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘I bloody have. Come and scrutinize me, Mr Anger, if you dare.’ But he sighed deeply as he got to his feet, collected his paperwork and prepared to leave the office as he had found it. ‘A little breakthrough would be nice, though. .’
Which was very much the thought that Rufus Sweetman was having at that moment in time, as he glared angrily at Tony Cromer and Teddy Bear Jackman. They had spent the last two days heaving their considerable and justified reputations around the city of Manchester in an effort to unearth information which would reveal to them who had stolen the property belonging to their boss.
It had not been a pretty sight.
Blood had been spilled and left in their wake. Snot, vomit too. Shit and piss also, and burnt flesh. They had visited many people, most of whom had been more than willing to divulge what little they knew. Some folks, however, had been truculent and not a little belligerent. Foolish people.
Jackman and Cromer were at the top of their game, a game which they loved and revelled in. One seemed to know what the other was thinking and they acted with the precision, if not the grace, of ballet dancers. And, whenever possible, they took turns, because there was great satisfaction in hearing someone scream when a steam iron, on its hottest setting, was placed on their skin as though they were branding a calf. It was an unworldly sound, but music to their ears.
‘Nothing, you say?’ Sweetman said.
‘Fuck all,’ Jackman confirmed to the boss.
Sweetman looked at Cromer, who also confirmed, ‘Fuck all.’
‘I don’t fucking believe it!’ roared Sweetman. ‘You are telling me that you’ve been out and about and no one has heard a damn thing? There’s millions of quids worth of cocaine been stolen, twenty dagos have snuffed it, and no cunt’s heard a thing? No names, sod all?’
‘Sorry, boss.’
Sweetman smashed a fist into the wall of his apartment and strutted across to the huge floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Lowry Museum on Salford Quays. He kicked the window, but it was made of thick, bulletproof glass and did not even tremble.
‘Bollocks,’ he uttered, spun fiercely on his heels and faced his two rather sheepish men, who both recoiled miserably. As tough and as hard as they were, they still feared the wrath of Sweetman. He left them standing when it came to violence.
‘There is a whisper, though.’
Sweetman became very still, waited for Cromer to continue.
‘Just a whisper, that’s all. . that a big player is on the streets, someone new, someone untouchable, but no names, nowt.’
‘And. .?’
‘Supposed to be targeting rich kids, university lot, young bankers, accountants, teachers, even. . no street dealing, just in good class pubs, clubs and offices and on the university campus.’
‘And. .?’ Sweetman insisted again.
‘Er. . that’s it,’ Cromer said inadequately.
‘That’s it? You two are a pair of wankers!’
They coloured up wretchedly.
‘I wish I was still inside,’ Sweetman blasted, shaking his head, his fists clenched. ‘Right, right, right. .’ He paced up and down the thick, cream carpet, thinking hard, pounding his head with his fists, trying to get his brain working. ‘It’s fucked my head up being in the slammer, can’t fuckin’ think straight, can’t get it right.’
He was still pacing when the solicitor, Bradley Grant, entered the room and gingerly took a seat, crossing his legs and raising eyebrows at Teddy Bear and Cromer, gesticulating a question with a shrug of his shoulders: ‘What’s going on?’
Teddy Bear began to speak. ‘We didn’t find anything. .’
‘What?’ shouted Sweetman, looking up abruptly, stopping in his tiger tracks, his thoughts interrupted. He seemed to notice Grant for the first time. ‘Did I say you could speak?’ he snarled at Jackman.
Teddy Bear shook his head like an admonished kid.
‘No I fucking didn’t. I’ve lost four or five million quid’s worth of coke that doesn’t belong to me and you make small talk. I’m tryina work out where it’s gone, who had the bottle to nick it. . I wanna get all the players in and I want to hang the twats out to dry until one of them spills his guts. . like in that film, y’know. . that one with Bob what’s-his-name. . the gangster thing. . c’mon, what’s it called?’ He clicked his fingers rapidly.
‘The Long Good Friday,’ Grant offered.
‘Yeah — that one. I think that’s what I’ll have to do, hang ’em upside down.’
Grant coughed nervously.
‘What’s that for?’ Sweetman demanded savagely.
‘Not a good idea, boss. Recriminations afterwards.’
Sweetman was on Grant before he knew what was happening. He spun fast and grabbed the solicitor’s face between the fingers of his right hand, squeezing the man’s face, digging his nails into the soft skin of his cheeks, puckering his mouth, distorting it and making him whimper fearfully, his eyes almost popping out of his skull.
‘Never, ever, question my decisions,’ he whispered into Grant’s face. He was almost nose to nose with the solicitor, his own eyes glaring and wide. He let go with a flick, stood up and started to pace the room again, trying to control his breathing. Grant rubbed his face, which now bore the deep, half-moon-shaped marks of five fingernails. ‘But maybe you’re right,’ Sweetman conceded. ‘It wouldn’t do to upset them all at once, would it?’ It was a rhetorical question, made even more so by the reluctance of anyone else in the room to answer it.
Having composed himself, Grant spoke hesitantly. ‘What about your thoughts on Superintendent Easton?’
Sweetman sneered derisively. ‘Hm, been giving it a bit of thought, yeah, but I don’t see a detective superintendent dealing a few million quid’s worth of coke, do you? Or robbing it in the first place? Naah,’ he dismissed the idea. ‘He got into my ribs as a coincidence, I reckon. Just got a downer on me.’
‘Enough to frame you for a murder you didn’t commit?’
‘Cops do shite like that. I’m a good target, they want me off the streets, yeah? Nothing else.’
‘OK, so who committed the murder you were framed for? That has to be answered, hasn’t it?’
‘Not my problem,’ said Sweetman. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t finished with Easton yet, I just don’t think he’s capable of being a drugs dealer, do you? Mr Big? I don’t think so.’
Grant shrugged.
‘I’m gonna back-shelf him for a while, come back to him later and get this sorted. My first priority is to find out who’s got my gear, because it’s mine and I want it back and if I don’t get it back, I’ll be under the hammer.’ Sweetman exhaled as though he had just gone ten rounds. He turned back to his two negotiators and influencers. ‘Do you think you’re up to this, or do I hire people in from the Smoke?’
They looked at each other, their professional pride dented. ‘We’re up for it,’ Cromer assured him. ‘Big style.’
‘OK,’ Sweetman said, accepting this. ‘I want to send out a big message, boys. I want to root out the do-badder, here. I want people to come out screaming, “It’s him, it’s him,” because they think they might be the next ones on your list. It’s time to stop treating people nicely and time to start cutting bollocks off.’
Henry was back at the scene of the murder. It was still sealed off tight as police officers, CSIs and forensics continued to comb it for clues. Not much of interest had been found, actually. A partial tyre track had been lifted and was now being anal
ysed down at the forensic science lab near Chorley. Little else found seemed to be of much evidential use.
Being a fantastic detective, Henry guessed — not too smartly — that the body had been set on fire by someone dousing the victim with petrol from a can. No great intellectual leap there. Further to that, he speculated that, maybe, the can could well have been bought specifically for that purpose, so he already had detectives visiting petrol stations in the locality to see if any cans had been sold recently. A long shot, maybe, but one worth trying, especially as most garages were equipped with CCTVs and video-recording facilities.
He gazed around almost from the spot on which the body had been discovered.
‘Why here?’ he asked himself again. He narrowed his eyes into the sunshine as the cogs in his mind whirred and clicked. Deeply Vale was not that well known a place. Whoever brought the body here could not have done so by accident, Henry believed. So what was it that linked the killer to the victim and to this location? That was always the puzzle, those three elements in every murder: killer, victim, location. Always a connection, always a reason.
A support unit personnel carrier, windows darkened, riot grilles tilted back in place on the roof, was parked a hundred metres from where he was standing. It was the vehicle in which the support unit team doing the scene search had arrived. A number of officers in their blue overalls were gathered around the open back doors of the van, sipping tea from the urn they had brought along with them. Hm, Henry thought, and sauntered across. They parted as he reached them.
He nodded at a few faces he recognized and said, ‘Any chance of a wet?’
‘Sure, boss,’ a PC responded, grabbing a polystyrene cup and filling it with hot, dark-brown liquid. ‘Milk, sugar?’
‘Just a drop of milk, thanks.’ Henry took the brew and sipped it. The metallic taste evoked many memories for Henry. Days and nights spent at the Toxteth riots on Merseyside in ’81, the Messenger dispute in Warrington and, of course, the famous miners’ strike in ’84. Milestones in Henry’s career in terms of massive social and industrial unrest. The tea always tasted the same. You’d throw it away at home, but somehow its appallingness was a comfort in these circumstances.
‘Your sergeant about?’ Henry asked the PC who had served him.
‘In the front seat.’
‘Ah, so she is.’ Henry spotted the officer sitting alone in the front of the carrier, head down, concentrating on something. Henry walked along the vehicle and tapped on the window. The sergeant looked up, startled. She had been completing the search logs which were spread out on her knees. A large-scale map of the area was on the seat next to her. She put the logs to one side, opened the door and swung her legs out.
‘Boss.’
‘Hello, Hannah,’ Henry said. He knew her reasonably well. She had been originally posted as a PC to Blackpool probably ten years before, promoted after about six years’ service. She had spent a short time on CID, which is where Henry knew her from. She preferred the uniform side, though, and as she was a bit of a tomboy, graduated to the rufty-tufty life on support unit, or the ‘bish-bash-bosh’ squad as they were often called, or even ‘Ninjas’ because of their skills in defensive tactics. ‘How’s the search going?’
‘OK — but nothing much has come of it.’ She sounded apologetic. ‘I think we’ll have finished later today, to be honest.’
Henry knew the support unit were meticulous in their approach to jobs like this, very proud of their professionalism, so he did not doubt her word. . but he had been part of search teams in the past and knew how easy it was to miss things. Even objects like knives and guns. ‘Will you do me a favour?’ he asked, because he hated searches which uncovered nothing. Hannah, the sergeant, nodded. ‘Redo the scene, say to a radius of fifty metres?’
She took it in her stride. ‘Sure.’
‘Thanks, appreciate it.’
The afternoon heat was stifling at Alicante Airport on the Costa Blanca. The asphalt on the roads and the concrete of the multi-storey car park burned to the touch. The hundreds of tourists disgorging from the terminal buildings seemed to put the heat even further up, but inside the structure itself the air conditioning actually made Lopez shiver.
He was standing at the bottom of the dog-leg concourse, down which arrivals walked in order to reach awaiting tour reps, buses, taxis and car-rental firms. He lounged idly behind the array of people who were meeting and greeting — friends, businessmen, reps. His eyes roved continuously, checking and rechecking every face, every movement, because you could never tell when it might come. The arrest or the bullet. He had to keep keen and vigilant.
A mass of bodies had just swarmed through the airport, having alighted a plane from Liverpool. They had been noisy, badly behaved Brits, all displaying the stereotypical lager-lout mentality — or so it seemed to Lopez — though in reality it was probably only a small minority who were chanting football songs.
The plane he was waiting for, from Rotterdam, had just landed. The passengers were due through shortly.
Lopez found himself thinking about Mendoza, his boss, and the predicament he was in at the moment.
Many people wrongly believe that top criminals are rolling in money. Sometimes it was true, but like other businesses in the legitimate arena, even crime has its ups and downs. Sometimes there was solvency, sometimes not. Sometimes there was loads of cash, other times it was tight. Sometimes you could loan, sometimes you needed to borrow. Sometimes business was good and sometimes it was muy mal. Feast or famine.
And just at that moment for Carlos Mendoza, life was looking rather grim. He had lent money — other people’s money — and failed to get it back. Case in point was the second-rate gangster from the north of England who had borrowed money from Mendoza to initiate criminal activity. The guy had been a loser, a no-hoper — the money never came back and Mendoza had resorted to having him wasted and had transferred the debt to his more successful brother. . who now languished in prison, unable to pay a bean, even if he had wanted to. The problem would have been manageable had Mendoza not compounded it by then borrowing a huge amount of money himself to purchase cocaine from a Colombian cartel for a deal he had set up in England. That massive consignment had now been stolen and Mendoza found himself in hock in excess of two million pounds sterling without any conceivable way of paying it off, because the majority of his wealth was tied up in building sites and half-built properties around the Costa.
It wasn’t as though the debt was with a respectable clearing bank, either. Not the Bank of Santander, not Telebanco.
But the Cosa Nostra. They were his financiers.
Lopez knew that interest payments were already overdue and no one, not even someone of Mendoza’s stature, would be allowed to welch.
Mendoza had already received a polite phone call from a ‘business partner’ in Sicily, enquiring as to how the deal was progressing and looking forward to the first instalment.
It was a call that Mendoza had reacted to with horror, making him recognize that, as big as he was in the world of organized crime, he was nowhere near the players who lounged around in the sun in Palermo. All he was, was another fairly minor cog in their engine and they had the power to change gear whenever they wanted.
The illegal-immigration side of Mendoza’s business was going well, but even the profits from that were not as great as the media claimed. So many people were involved in the chain of events who needed paying, that by the time Mendoza received his cut, whilst considerable, it was not as great as people imagined and nowhere near enough to clear his debts to the Mafia.
In short, Mendoza was in a critical condition and if he wanted to save himself, he needed to act swiftly, decisively and ruthlessly.
Which was why Lopez was at the airport.
He chuckled to himself as he stood there
The passengers from the Rotterdam flight filtered peacefully through the airport until there was just a dribble left.
Lopez grinned as the man he was waiting
for appeared. They glanced at each other, nodded almost imperceptibly. Lopez turned and walked out ahead of him, stepping into the oppressive heat of the day, crossing the road and making for the multi-storey car park where he had parked the car he had arrived in, an unspectacular-looking Seat. A driver sat in it, waiting patiently. Lopez paused at the car and waited to greet the man who had discreetly followed him.
His face broke into a wide smile as they shook hands, embraced, and indulged in a lot of hearty back-patting. ‘Ramon, my friend, it is good to see you. Very good.’
‘And you, and you,’ Ramon responded ebulliently. ‘Como esta?’
‘Muy bien. . come, we need to get out of this heat. . you sit in the front next to Miguel. .’ He opened the door for Ramon, the guy who headed Mendoza’s operations at Zeebrugge. The chill from the air-conditioning system whipped up.
Ramon hesitated, almost stepped backwards. His smile dropped and he eyed Lopez suspiciously. ‘What is this?’
Lopez laughed, sensing quickly what Ramon was worried about. ‘Ahh, the front seat,’ he said knowingly. ‘The death seat. . the bullet in the back of the head seat. . do not worry, my friend. . it is nothing like that.’
Ramon was not convinced. He knew of too many people who had been foolish enough to be suckered into climbing into front passenger seats of cars for innocent journeys, only to have their brains blown out or their throats slit, or to be strangled with piano wire.
‘Are you sure?’
Lopez smiled, but was irritated. ‘Of course. We have urgent business. . but I have a laptop in the back seat, and papers which I need to work on. Come, my friend, have you heard of anyone being beaten to death by a laptop computer? No, I think not. . please. .’
Spinks was the name of the big man operating on the Rochdale side of Manchester. He owned pubs and clubs, controlled all the town-centre drugs trade via his bouncers on the doors. Control the doors, control the drugs. That was the saying. He lived a flash lifestyle with good cars, clothes and good-looking women. He was brazen and open and did not mind who knew just how wealthy he was, which was partly his downfall. The other ‘partly’ was that he had once called Rufus Sweetman a ‘no-good shit’ and threatened that one day he would ‘take everything he owned away from him’.