Ambush

by Nick Oldham

‘I can imagine, too,’ Santiago said. She knew Tope and had liaised with him earlier in the year over crimes and criminals in the Canary Islands – and had survived the same car bomb attack at the hands of the vicious Albanian gangster, Aleksander Bashkim.

  Flynn sipped the whisky and said pensively, ‘Craig Alford, dead.’

  ‘Did you ask Jerry what Alford was currently investigating?’

  ‘Didn’t get a chance, but not really my business, I suppose.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s into something, ruffled some feathers.’

  ‘It does,’ Flynn agreed.

  ‘And moving to the other issue of the night … why would a scumbag armed robber have a photograph of you in his apartment?’

  ‘Let me look again.’ Flynn waggled his fingers at Santiago, who picked up her phone, found the photo, handed it over.

  It was definitely a photograph, a head-shot of Steve Flynn, about passport size. It was quite old, well over ten years. As he looked at it, something dawned on him.

  It showed him with quite long, slightly unkempt hair, wearing an open-necked shirt and with very obvious stubble around his chin.

  ‘This is an old warrant card photograph,’ he declared, ‘from my drug squad days – hence the haircut, clothes and lack of shaving—’

  ‘And style,’ Santiago quipped.

  ‘That too,’ he agreed. ‘So the mystery is not only why did he have it, but also how did he get it?’ Flynn pondered and tried to get his mind to work. It did not seem to want to solve anything. He’d had a long day with a charter, then the evening excitement of busting up a robbery had made it all drag out even more. He had a day trip later that morning, so he knew he needed to be properly rested for it. The party was due on board at ten until four, and before they even set foot on deck he had to prepare the boat. The latest he could start was eight a.m.

  ‘There was a phone number scribbled on the back, a mobile,’ she said.

  ‘Did the detective ring it?’

  ‘Yes … dead. A burner, probably,’ she said, meaning a pay-as-you-go disposable.

  ‘Right.’

  Santiago watched Flynn’s face, saw his eyelids droop.

  She took her phone back and said, ‘Bed.’

  ‘Anything?’

  Jerry Tope looked over his shoulder at Rik Dean, who was standing in the doorway of Craig Alford’s tiny study on the first floor.

  Tope was sitting at the desk, still in his forensic gear, latex gloves on, with Alford’s personal laptop open in front of him. Four other laptops, two iPads and four iPhones had also been found in the house, belonging to the various members of the family. They were stacked on the desk and had been bagged as evidence for Tope and other techies to look at later. For the time being he had occupied himself with what he assumed was Alford’s own laptop. Tope knew the DCI also had a desk computer, laptop and iPad at work which would all need investigating.

  Tope shook his head in answer to Dean’s query. ‘This looks like a computer the family all had access to,’ he said. ‘Thousands of photos stored on it, holidays and such like … and it looks like Craig was trying to write a novel, working title The Great British Cop Thriller. Done one chapter … looks pretty good,’ he said sadly. ‘I’ve glanced through his personal emails, but nothing of interest stands out just yet, all crap and spam, mainly.’

  ‘When was the computer last accessed?’

  ‘Five p.m., day before yesterday.’

  ‘No one’s been on it since?’

  ‘Not that I can tell.’

  ‘Do you think this has anything to do with Operation Aquarius, Jerry?’ Dean asked.

  ‘Has to be a possibility, I suppose … we’ve been following some really bad people, but until yesterday morning none of them would or should have known that, unless we’ve got a mole in our midst. And even then,’ – Tope’s face looked pained – ‘just seems so far-fetched, and to arrange something like this in that time scale … doesn’t seem feasible to me.’

  ‘Mm … we need to look at what else he’s been involved in,’ Dean said, musing out loud. ‘You’d think it was connected to his job … maybe corruption.’ Tope shot him a sharp look. ‘Just surmising, Jerry, but it’ll need following up.’ Dean was trying to juggle together an investigative strategy, looking at all possible angles – and there were many, even at such an early stage. ‘You keep looking, give it another half-hour, then go home, get a bit of kip, and we’ll reconvene at HQ at eight. I’m going to run this from the Training Centre, it’s as handy as anywhere.’

  Dean turned, leaving Tope at the computer.

  The screen in front of him was actually the one he had mentioned to Dean, the files containing thousands of downloaded digital or scanned photographs, all in separate folders, hundreds of them.

  Tope had clicked on a few, and no doubt over the coming days as the murder investigation got under way, he – or preferably someone else – would have to skim through each file and photo.

  He sighed, tabbed through the screen and was about to move on when he spotted something that stood out to him. A file named ‘Ambush’. He hovered over it with the cursor and pressed ‘open’.

  There was only one photograph in the file and it was not a digital download as such, but a scanned copy of another photograph.

  Jerry Tope remembered the picture being taken.

  ‘Shit,’ he said sadly, looking at the faces of the six men in it.

  One of them had died two years earlier from cancer but the other five, to the best of Tope’s knowledge, were still very much alive – with the exception now of Craig Alford, who stood in the centre of the smiling group.

  ‘Those were the days,’ Tope thought.

  Tope himself was one of the group, as was his old colleague – he hesitated even to think the word ‘friend’ – Steve Flynn, whom he had phoned earlier to tell him about Alford’s death. He had thought Flynn would have wanted to know because, after all, this lot had been through some things together.

  But that was all a long time ago.

  People had died since then, people had moved on, people were different, not least Flynn. That said, the photograph on the screen, one Tope had not seen for a very long time (although he had a copy of it in an album somewhere), evoked memories, a certain time, a certain place.

  He printed off a copy, folded it and slid it into his back pocket, just for old times’ sake.

  It was three a.m. by the time Tope had finished his initial trawl through the computer, having found nothing of interest. He would need the actual thing in front of him at his work desk before he could dig deeper and find any hidden information or deleted files, though in all honesty he did not expect to find too much, and certainly nothing that would link to Alford’s death. Even the visible browser history reeked of dull. Lots of searches about running a bed and breakfast or gîte in France, obviously Alford’s retirement dream.

  One which would never now be realized.

  With sadness overwhelming him, Tope closed it down and reluctantly made his way downstairs, which was still a hive of police and forensic activity. He tiptoed out of the house without having to look into the lounge.

  Outside he stripped off his forensic suit, bagged it and signed it back to the CSI van, then made his way back to his car. He sat in it for a long time before starting up and heading towards home.

  With the air conditioning just ticking over, humming low, the boat was cool and comfortable but, even so, Flynn could not find his ‘off’ button.

  Santiago slept soundly, almost instantly, emanating a cuddly purring sound that Flynn had learned to love and could usually fall asleep to. Usually.

  He lay on his side and in the darkness of the stateroom watched Santiago sleep, hoping he wasn’t being too creepy. He knew of men who sat up watching their girlfriends, wives, whoever, sleep, and found it quite unsettling, but the only reason he did it that night was because his mind was tumbling and criss-crossing with thoughts which would not settle.

  First, about Santia
go and how lucky he was to be lying here by her side … he recalled several months before leaning on the railings of a café in Puerto Rico, watching her drive away with Jerry Tope, and not many seconds later standing next to the man who was pressing ‘send’ on a mobile phone, an electronic message to a detonator inserted into a block of Semtex stuck under the car.

  Cruelly, that man made Flynn watch and listen to an explosion maybe a quarter of a mile away in which Flynn believed the car Santiago was driving had exploded with her and Tope in it.

  Flynn had then assumed he was about to die himself, the last thing on his mind as that man had pointed a gun at his head being the thought that he had lost Santiago. But before the man could pull the trigger he had been taken down by FBI agent Karl Donaldson.

  Flynn had flinched, certain he was about to be killed, as the bullets from Donaldson’s gun had been fired, but it had been the Albanian gangster who slid to his death in front of Flynn’s eyes, the culmination of a terrible scenario involving Flynn, gangsters, corrupt cops and Santiago.

  She was a Spanish detective, recently transferred to the Canary Islands, and had met Flynn as he was arrested and framed for a murder he had not committed. As the truth unravelled Flynn and Santiago had fallen in love and when her car blew up, Flynn truly believed that once again he had lost a woman in tragic circumstances just because she had been involved with him.

  Donaldson melted away immediately after his execution of the gangster, and Flynn had launched himself towards the rising, crackling flames and smoke.

  Santiago turned in bed, murmured something in her sleep, a Spanish word Flynn did not recognize.

  He grinned in the darkness, recalling running the fastest quarter mile in his life, along the Doreste y Molina towards the town centre, running against a tide of people surging in the opposite direction, away from the explosion, until he skidded on to Avenida del Valle and there, in the middle of the road, was the car, blown to smithereens. Smoke rose from what little was left of it, the chassis and engine block, just a burned-out, almost unrecognizable shell of tangled, scorched metal. No one inside the car – or standing near it – could have survived the blast.

  He had stared mesmerized in agonizing shock at the wreckage.

  The occupants would have been incinerated instantly.

  Flynn had sagged slightly, a shroud of nausea enveloping him.

  Then he became aware of someone on his right hand side.

  Aware of shaking slim fingers intertwining with his.

  A ghost. Had to be.

  And also someone else standing just by his left shoulder, then the sensation of a hand resting on it.

  Another ghost.

  Slowly Flynn’s head rotated to the right.

  Santiago, pale, ashen in spite of her dark Mediterranean complexion, stood there and she was no phantom, but a living, breathing human being.

  The hand on his shoulder patted him.

  Flynn’s head cricked left to see Jerry Tope – the man who had been in the car alongside Santiago – standing there, equally shaken, his already pale colour now pure white.

  ‘Fuck me, mate, that was close,’ said Tope, trying to laugh, failing dismally. It came out more like the sound of a cockroach being crushed under a boot.

  Santiago moved in the bed again.

  From the rhythm of her breathing he could tell she was awake and her eyes opened, the glint of what little light there was reflecting in them.

  ‘Are you looking at me?’ she said softly.

  ‘If the light was on, I would be.’

  She shuffled towards him, pressing her hot naked body against his. He revelled in the wonderful sensation of her breasts crushed against his chest, could feel the hardness of her nipples.

  ‘Cannot sleep?’ she asked.

  ‘Mind whirring a bit.’

  ‘About your colleague dying or something else?’

  ‘Something else entirely – you.’

  But that was not strictly true because in the tumble of his thoughts he had not been thinking exclusively about her. He had been thinking about Craig Alford and was trying to get his head around the enormity of the murder. A whole family. Who, what sort of a bastard, killed a whole family? What could Alford have been involved in to bring about retribution of that magnitude?

  The other slightly worrying thing preying on his mind was why his own mug shot should be in the possession of a toe-rag armed robber in Ibiza. That did not make much sense to him, though he speculated it might have had some connection with the Albanian gangsters he’d had a run-in with. But even that seemed unlikely. A low level crim from Lancashire, a nobody, having those connections seemed a bit ridiculous.

  Santiago wriggled against him. He gasped when she took hold of him, rolled him on to his back, then sleepily straddled him.

  In a time zone one hour behind the one Flynn was in, another person unable to sleep was Jerry Tope.

  He had driven home, poured a large whisky, then sat in the living room staring blankly at the TV, sipping the fire-water, unable to rid his mind of the image of four stacked bodies, the lake of blood in which they lay, their own blood, creeping across the wooden floor.

  He considered going to bed, yet, weary as he was, the prospect of climbing between cold sheets and into an empty bed was not enticing.

  Instead he decided he needed air.

  He placed his glass down – he would return later for the unfinished drink – stood up, grabbed his jacket and went out to the car.

  They made love slow and easy. Soon after she was asleep again, rolling to the far edge of the bed, putting some distance between them in what was essentially a large, triangular bed. This allowed Flynn to slide out without disturbing her, pull on his shorts and head out to the rear deck, where he stretched out on the cushioned bench and closed his eyes. In moments he was asleep.

  Tope drove down to Preston Docks, less than two miles from his home, feeling a need to clear his head. He pulled up in the car park at the Morrisons supermarket, then walked across Mariners Way on to the wide promenade that ran all the way around the big old rectangular Albert Edward Dock, part of which was now a small marina for leisure craft.

  Tope leaned on the railings and looked down into the still water, which was a fairly unpleasant shade of green because the whole dock was infested by dreaded blue-green algae which discoloured the water and made it unsafe in several ways, for both animals and humans.

  However, as dawn slowly approached, the water was actually looking good. Tope thought if he took a little exercise by walking swiftly around the perimeter of the dock it might just help him sleep.

  He set off, turning right and heading west, crossing the dock via the swing bridge over Navigation Way, then walking past the series of converted warehouses, now apartments, along the southern edge, then past the multiplex cinema at the far end and turning back more or less to his starting point. There he paused again and leaned on the rails, feeling fresh in the cheeks now, watching the aerial acrobatics of some black-headed gulls.

  His mind churned with the night’s activities. He pulled out the photograph he had printed off, the one with the line-up including Alford, Flynn, Tope himself and other detectives. He unfolded it carefully, then took out his mobile phone and with the inbuilt camera took a photo of the photo.

  He was concentrating on this task and never heard the soft-footed approach from behind.

  As he pressed ‘send’ on his phone, he felt the muzzle of the handgun at the bottom of his skull, the point where his cranium rested on his spine.

  He would never know it, but the barrel of the gun was angled slightly upwards so the trajectory would take the rounds up through his head, through his brain, and the hollow-pointed bullets would exit somewhere around his hairline. Which they did.

  Tope had no time to react because, in the world of professional killers, conversations are rarely entered into. They are given a job. Sometimes they know the background of the target, sometimes not.

  As it happened,
the man who had sneaked up silently behind him did know the provenance of the contract, but even so it was not his job to chat about it.

  His job was to kill efficiently, to exact revenge.

  He fired two very quick shots into the back of Tope’s head, both of which exited through his forehead, ripping away the top half of his face.

  Tope slumped across the railings.

  The killer had hoped he would somersault over them, but that wasn’t to be. People being shot rarely respond spectacularly, and Tope simply fell limp across the railings, then slithered to the ground.

  The killer kicked him over into the murky, infected water of the dock. His body slapped into it with a muted splash.

  The photograph Tope had been holding had flapped to the ground. The killer picked it up, gave a short laugh and dropped it into the water, where Tope’s body had already splayed out face down on the surface.

  The photograph, purely by accident, floated down and rested on Tope’s back like a leaf falling on an autumn day.

  Very quickly the killer leaned over and took a few shots with his mobile phone, then was gone.

  The sound of a message landing on his phone roused Flynn. He stirred and groaned. The Black Russians, the lovemaking and the excitement of the previous evening, which had initially made him unable to sleep, were now having the opposite effect and he was in a stupor as he fumbled for the phone and looked through bleary eyes at the message. It was just a photograph – no accompanying text – from Jerry Tope.

  Flynn sat up, his head throbbing, and looked at the image.

  He gave a short laugh and thought, ‘Memories.’

  At the same moment, a series of photographs and a short video landed on another phone.

  A message underneath one of the photographs read, ‘Second instructions complied with. Continue?’

  The man thumbed his response.

  ‘Continue.’

  SIX

  Flynn’s response to Tope’s photograph was to take and send a photograph of his own on his ageing Nokia, a view from the back of his boat, capturing the twinkling lights of the resort. He then tossed his phone down on to the sofa he’d been sleeping on.