by Nick Oldham
Behind them, a car turned off the main road, headlights ablaze. Donaldson immediately pushed Henry to one side and both men dropped low on their haunches into a sodden ditch which was part of the grass verge. They watched the car drive past slowly, three people on board. It stayed on the road, did not go into the estate.
‘Make out any faces?’ Henry whispered. He could see the whites on his friend’s eyes in the available light.
‘No. . looks like a recce, though.’
Henry spoke into his PR, using the dedicated channel for the SIO team. ‘Jane, you receiving?’
‘Yeah — go ahead.’
‘If you haven’t done so already, move the car into a more discreet location, will you? We don’t want to spook anyone.’
‘Done it already.’
‘Good stuff.’
Henry and Donaldson were about to rise from their damp position when another car turned in from the main road.
‘Getting busy down here,’ Henry commented.
The car that had only just cruised by them moments before reappeared from the opposite direction. Instinct made the pair of detectives drop even lower, their bellies almost on the grass. The cars drove slowly toward each other and when they were alongside each other, only a matter of feet from where they lay hidden, they stopped.
Words inaudible to either Henry or Donaldson were exchanged by the people in the cars. Neither man hardly dared to raise his head an inch, but the temptation to have a look-see was overwhelming.
After a brief conflab, the cars separated. The one which had just turned into the road drove straight on into the industrial estate. The other executed a three-point turn and followed.
The two men rose from their secret place when they were sure the cars had gone.
Henry got on to his radio again. ‘Jane, call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I think it might be as well if we had some back-up here after all. It’s hard to say what might or might not be happening, but I’d rather have it coming and not use it.’
‘Yeah — what do you need?’
‘Whatever we’ve got closest to hand. At the very least get an armed-response unit on the way and see if there’s any support unit on in the Valley. You act as the RV point. Can you fix it?’
‘Yep. I take it you don’t want GMP telling.’
‘No — just use our people, OK?’
‘Roger, will do.’
‘And we will maintain radio silence for a while now. . we’re just going on to the estate.’
Crouching and running from shadow to shadow, they set off towards the Big City.
They discovered Lynch’s car parked up, unlocked, behind a block of industrial units some way from the Big City. One of the things Henry had always taken pleasure in doing was disabling cars belonging to criminals. He had often done it in his younger days just for fun. Now he took the opportunity to dive under the bonnet of Lynch’s motor and yank the spark-plug leads out, whilst Donaldson kept nicks. He knew it wasn’t a subtle thing to do, but it would be effective for a short time and might give Henry some advantage. Not knowing how things were going to pan out, he would be happy to gain any advantage. This done, the two detectives moved on, keeping to the building lines of the industrial units and using all cover available, their senses sharp, alert for anything. Both men were nervous, not having a clue what they were getting into.
They emerged from between two units and looked across a road to a huge, detached unit which seemed to go on forever. The bottom half of it was constructed of breeze block, the top half corrugated metal. It had no windows on the side they were looking at. ‘This is it,’ Henry said. ‘The Big City. GMP have it on lease for God knows how many years. It’s just like a little high street inside. I think there’s even a Burton’s shopfront. Lots of alleys, the works. What you’re looking at is the gable end, in effect, because the front entrance is round that side.’
Donaldson just nodded. Henry had noticed he had gone extremely quiet, but put it down to tension and circumstance.
They legged it across the road, flattening themselves against the outside wall of the Big City. There was a lot of cover next to the building, several builders’ skips, a couple of tractor units, an old van and piles of building materials, all typical of such an estate.
On a signal from Henry, they sidled up to the corner of the building where they crouched under the lee of a skip filled with what looked suspiciously like asbestos. They dropped to their hands and knees and, comically, peeked around the corner, one head above the other, so they could see down the front elevation. It stretched far and there was a big car park and a large porch on the front of the building.
Two cars were parked up. One being one of the two cars Henry and Donaldson had seen minutes before on the road.
Three people were getting out. Henry squinted in the growing darkness, trying to get a good look at them. ‘I recognize one of them,’ he hissed.
‘Mendoza,’ Donaldson gasped. ‘The guy on his left is Lopez. . the other will be Sweetman.’
‘Father, son and holy ghost,’ Henry said less than reverentially. Both men drew back out of sight.
‘Struck gold here,’ Donaldson said. ‘This must be the return of the drug consignment. . shit. .’
‘What?’
‘Don’t know about you, H, but I’ve never known something like this go smoothly for any of the parties. Tears are often shed.’
‘I want to see what’s going down.’
‘Me, too.’ Henry thought hard. ‘There are several emergency exits dotted around the building, one on each wall, I think. Maybe we could get in through one of them to watch things.’
‘Worth a try,’ said Donaldson, then clutched his chest. Henry thought he was having a heart attack, but it was actually the American’s mobile phone vibrating silently above his heart. ‘Shit. . let me get this.’ He scurried away a few steps out of Henry’s earshot.
It was rather like a badly built shopping mall, lit by massive, but not brilliant, lights suspended from the metal roof.
They met in the middle of the main street in the Big City.
Easton was flanked by Lynch and Hamlet, their breath visible in the chill air of the industrial unit. Three holdalls had been placed on a trestle table in front of them.
Sweetman, with Mendoza and Lopez at either shoulder and Grant behind them both, like a formation of fighter planes, walked slowly down the road, which had been named, appropriately enough, Ambush Alley by the cops in the public-order units which trained there regularly. Officially it was called simply ‘Main Street’. The four stopped, twenty metres away from Easton and his crew.
‘I thought we agreed only two assistants,’ Easton said.
‘He’s my solicitor,’ Sweetman said, thumbing a gesture at Grant. ‘He’s here just to oversee the legal niceties.’
‘Not a good start to proceedings.’
Sweetman shrugged.
‘Is that my property?’ He pointed at the holdalls.
Easton said it was, then, ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘You all step back twenty paces, leave the bags where they are and we pick them up. When we’ve gone, the matter is over. It’s that simple.’
‘Nothing is that simple,’ Easton said.
The seven men stared at each other.
Suddenly the tension was broken by a mobile phone announcing that a text message had just landed. It was Mendoza’s and he instinctively pulled it out of his pocket and thumbed the ‘read message’ button. That was the thing about texts. They were impossible to ignore, even in the most stressful of situations. Mendoza glanced at the display and skim-read the message, his face growing darker with each word he read, as it confirmed something which he had been suspecting for a long time now.
All eyes were on him, but as he replaced the phone in his pocket, looked up and shrugged, everyone’s attention returned to the task in hand. Mendoza’s mind was on other things as he sidled up to Lopez and smiled broadly at his second in command. He placed an arm a
round his shoulder and said, ‘Soon all our troubles will be over, amigo.’ He nodded in the direction of the drugs. Lopez frowned at this out of character display from Mendoza, and he never got the opportunity to put his plan into action. On his signal, he had intended that he and Grant would draw their weapons and start shooting. Grant would take down Easton, Hamlet and Lynch. Lopez would take great pleasure in wasting Mendoza and Sweetman. Then he and Grant would be in business.
The plan never came to fruition.
Mendoza’s left arm gripped Lopez’s shoulders, and suddenly there was a short-barrelled revolver in his right hand, rising from the pocket into which he had just placed his mobile phone.
Easton was first to see the gun. He opened his mouth and screamed, ‘Get down!’ He and his two sergeants started to dive, but Mendoza’s gun did not even consider them. ‘Double-crossing bastard,’ he screamed and placed the muzzle of the gun hard against Lopez’s right temple and pulled the trigger twice. The two soft-nosed bullets blasted through his brain and virtually removed the left side of his head as they tumbled out on exit. Mendoza’s left arm was covered in blood and fragments of grey brain. He let go of the already dead Lopez, threw himself to one side and scrambled for the protection of the shop frontages.
Easton, Lynch and Hamlet all had weapons in their hands now and opened fire at Sweetman, Mendoza and Grant.
Everything that happened from that moment on, until it was all over, lasted perhaps thirty seconds.
Lynch discharged the single barrel of his shotgun at Sweetman, catching him in the upper arm and neck, sending him spinning.
Mendoza fired haphazardly, missing everyone completely, as he dived through the front door of a florist’s shop just at the moment Easton fired at him and caught him in the upper thigh. Mendoza screamed as he landed and dragged himself behind the wooden panelling of the pretend shop.
Lynch ran up to the squirming Sweetman, blood gushing out of his neck. He stood over the criminal and racked another shell into the breech of the shotgun — a gun which was once owned by Keith Snell — then blasted his face off, killing him instantly.
‘Get the other guy!’ Easton yelled, pointing to the open shop door where Mendoza had managed to crawl. Lynch stepped across the bodies of Lopez and Sweetman, racking his gun again.
‘That’s far enough,’ a controlled voice shouted behind all three of the corrupt cops. They spun to see two masked men standing in combat stance not twenty feet away, each brandishing an MP5 machine pistol.
Lynch was the first to react. Teeth gritted, he swung round with the shotgun. One of the men loosed a burst of his MP5, almost cutting him in half.
Easton, outgunned, turned to run and was drilled with about a dozen bullets from the gun of the other man.
Grant and Hamlet remained frozen in time. Hamlet dropped his gun and held up his hands, but to no avail. Both masked men fired simultaneous bursts, lifting both Grant and Hamlet off their feet, spinning them like ballet dancers, before smashing them to the hard ground of Ambush Alley, the Big City.
Teddy Bear Jackman and Tony Cromer did not waste another moment, ditching their weapons, grabbing the three holdalls and running for the exit. They disappeared into the night.
The sound of gunfire was muted through the breezeblock walls of the building, however, it was unmistakable to Henry Christie and Karl Donaldson, who knew exactly what guns sounded like. They had worked their way to the back of the Big City building when they heard the first shot from inside. Neither hesitated, but gave up all pretence of finding another entrance and now hared round to the front entrance, Henry yelling down his PR to Roscoe that they were responding to the sound of gunfire.
By the time they reached the entrance, each man had tried to count how many shots had been fired. At first it had been easy, but when the rapid fire came, it was impossible.
The door was open.
With extreme caution they edged carefully into the warehouse, coming straight on to Ambush Alley. Despite seeing the bodies lying ahead, they moved tentatively towards them, always expecting the worst, both men having pinned their IDs on to the front of their jackets. Not that a badge would have stopped a bullet, but it was a degree of psychological protection.
Henry counted five bodies. One was twitching horribly. He bent down and looked into the man’s face. It was Lynch. He was still alive. . and then he was dead.
‘Shit!’ he said, then looked at Donaldson, who was hopping from one body to another.
‘Can’t find Mendoza,’ he said. ‘He must have done all this.’
‘Don’t think so. Not alone, anyway,’ said Henry, assessing the different wounds to each person. He had seen a lot of gunshot wounds in his time and could tell immediately that this was not the work of one man. ‘He might have been part of this, but he had help,’ Henry speculated. ‘This one’s been shot by a shotgun, this one by a pistol, or something, these three have been ripped apart by machine guns.’
‘I want Mendoza,’ Donaldson said. ‘Do not tell me he got away.’
Henry looked round. ‘Someone in there,’ he said, pointing to the florist’s shop. He had seen a splash of blood at the door. With Donaldson he walked carefully to the shop, and as he got closer he could see a man’s leg.
‘That’s him,’ Donaldson said, staring down unemotionally at the man who had haunted him for so long, someone he had dearly wanted to see in this position. ‘Looks like he’s been shot in the leg from here. Bullet must have travelled up into his innards,’ he guessed, seeing the vast amount of blood the Spaniard was lying in. He squatted down by the body and carefully lifted Mendoza’s jacket, his hand slipping in and coming out with the mobile phone, which Donaldson then slid into his own pocket, without Henry seeing the surreptitious move.
It would not have done for the police to check the phone and find out that the last text message the Spaniard had received had come from Donaldson’s mobile, now would it? Donaldson looked up at Henry, then back at Mendoza’s body, a cruel smile coming to his face. ‘What goes around comes around, eh?
Henry blew out his cheeks. ‘Yeah.’ He stepped back and looked along Ambush Alley. ‘Well, we’ve got the florist. I wonder if there’s an undertaker down here?’
Twenty
The inquest into the death of John Lloyd Wickson, husband of Tara Wickson, and others was convened four weeks later. The proceedings were held at Fleetwood Magistrate’s Court. It was a warm day, very clear, with fine views across Morecambe Bay towards the twin nuclear reactors at Heysham and further north to the hills of the Lake District.
Henry parked his car in the police-station yard and walked round to the court buildings situated on the seafront at Fleetwood. He paused and took in the view. It was not often this clear and he savoured the moment, wishing he was walking or fishing in the hills, instead of having to go through the agony of explaining Wickson’s death to the coroner, as well as the associated deaths which were even more difficult to describe and all quite gruesome: The death of the hitman, Verner, who had also killed Wickson and then been assassinated by the unknown sniper. Also in there was the death of another man, Wickson’s driver. This was the one that really worried him, because this was the death he had attributed to Verner when, in reality, Tara Wickson had pulled the trigger of the shotgun which had blasted the guy’s head off. He had done this for what he thought were the best of reasons — the man, Jake Coulton, had raped Tara’s daughter and it had been the anguish of that which had unhinged Tara’s mind. On reflection he had acted hastily — to say the least — and now he was going to have to go public with the story he had made up to cover the killing.
To say that he was nervous was an understatement.
If Tara cracked under pressure, all hell would be unleashed.
Dave Anger and Jane Roscoe appeared round the corner, walking from the direction of the car park. Both had been deeply involved in the investigation and their input into the inquest would be vital and telling.
They acknowledged Henry with curt
nods and walked past him into the court, leaving him gazing at the view. He could feel his right leg twitching and something building up inside him as powerful as a volcano.
‘Henry!’
He had not noticed her approach. He jumped, looked round and saw Tara Wickson approaching, dressed demurely and appropriately in a black suit. She looked stunning, the skirt clinging to her thighs, stopping just above her knees, the heels on her shoes accentuating the shape of her slim legs. Henry’s heart seemed to miss a beat as he thought back to the night he had slept with her. He forced the memory out of his mind and waited for her to get level with him.
He hadn’t spoken to her since the night he had left Rawtenstall police station and rudely ended a phone call with her. Something he was not proud of, but she had him running scared. That said, she had not tried to recontact him since.
‘Hello,’ he said stiffly. ‘How are you?’
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’m OK,’ she said at length. ‘You?’
He shrugged and admitted, ‘Worried.’
Her face softened. She reached out and touched his face with her fingertips, something she had done once before. Then it had led to sex. A warm sensation shot down his spine, in spite of himself.
‘You needn’t be,’ she said, looking him squarely in the eye. ‘When I phoned you and you hung up. . It was just to say I’d got my head together, that I was fine, that you’d helped me put things into perspective. I was going to thank you.’
He blew out his cheeks as though he was trying to get a sound out of an imaginary trumpet.
‘I’m a big girl now. I realized that Charlotte needs me out here, not in prison, and if I’ve got to tell a few lies, then so what? She’s the bigger picture and Jake Coulton got what was coming to him.’
‘I’ll have that,’ Henry said, feeling relief sluice through him.
‘Just a pity we’ll never be able to get it together after,’ Tara said. ‘I know you value your home life and I respect that. I won’t be hounding you, or anything. I’ll just be out of your life.’ Henry saw tears form in her glistening eyes. ‘But the love-making was wonderful.’