by Nick Oldham
The other two cars would split. One to the petrol station, to refuel and then take up position on the other side of the lorry park to give quick access back on to the motorway; the other car to park up well away from the Mercedes, but in a position to keep it in view at all times, even if no one appeared to be in it, just in case something happened; there might be a handover, or it might turn out that there was a third person secreted in it.
Flynn and Hoyle climbed out of their Vauxhall Vectra Sport, a car confiscated from a drug dealer in Newcastle, and strolled over to the building.
The two men in the Mercedes got out of their car.
Flynn clocked them, recognized one but not the other. The one he knew was a low level drug dealer, courier and enforcer from the Blackpool area, and he guessed the other one would be much the same level. If the cops moved in on them now, each could expect up to ten years inside, or more, based on the drugs they were (hopefully) carrying. The guy Flynn recognized was also known to carry firearms and other weapons, which would add to the sentence.
They were clearly a pair of dangerous individuals but, as Flynn strolled across the car park with Hoyle, he pretended to pay them no heed and saw that they did not appear to be interested in him and Hoyle. They were both craning their necks, checking the car park.
‘Jingle bells,’ Flynn said.
‘Yep,’ Hoyle agreed, meaning alarm bells were ringing for the detectives.
Like every member of the surveillance team, Flynn had a personal radio strapped out of sight in a sling under his arm with a ‘transmit’ button running up a sleeve from the set to the palm of his hand, operated by his thumb; the mike, looking like a small badge, was pinned to his jacket collar which could be hunched up by the side of his mouth to talk into. The earpiece was tiny, flesh-coloured. He pressed the ‘transmit’ button and spoke.
‘They’re eyeballing, guys … we could’ve been rumbled … be on your toes.’
That was all he said before discreetly removing the earpiece and tucking it inside his collar. It was small, but also visible close up. It would not stand up to any inspection and was an obvious giveaway to a jumpy crim. Hoyle did the same.
They walked into the services, closely followed by their targets.
Flynn even held the door open for them, but the only response to his smile was a surly scowl as the men shouldered their way in. Flynn returned the look and added, ‘My pleasure, guys.’
They heard but ignored the remark, and both turned into the toilets.
Flynn and Hoyle split up. The latter followed the two men into the gents. Flynn went into the café, ordered two large frothy coffees and took them to a table to await Hoyle’s return, quickly checking up on the status of the rest of the surveillance team. All were fine. They’d relieved themselves by their cars and Flynn knew they all had flasks of coffee and sandwiches.
‘Anything?’ Flynn asked Hoyle as he sat down opposite him.
‘Nah. One had a wee, the other went for a number two. Here they are now.’
Flynn raised his eye line past Hoyle’s shoulder and watched the targets enter the café and go to the servery for food and drink.
‘You know the other guy?’ Flynn asked, referring to the one he did not recognize.
‘No, but I picked up a London twang … could be interesting,’ Hoyle mused.
‘And we could be here for a while,’ Flynn said, watching them at the counter but not watching them. He sipped his coffee, wiping foam from his top lip and stubble that was close to becoming a moustache, the rest of it perilously close to becoming a beard. Both cops looked unkempt after four days on the road, practically living in their car like the other team members. Flynn needed a bath and some proper sleep but knew this was unlikely to happen over the next few hours until this delicate part of the operation reached its conclusion.
‘You OK?’ Hoyle asked him.
As ever, Flynn thought his partner looked pristine – even though he was as unshaven and weary as himself – the diamond to Flynn’s ‘rough’ in the partnership.
Flynn screwed up his face but said nothing. He wasn’t prone to opening up much, but Hoyle seemed to sense something was or had been troubling him.
‘What’s up?’
‘Dunno,’ Flynn said, scratching his untidy mop of hair, almost a necessity for a drug squad officer on the ground. Not long, just fashionably unkempt. Then he said, ‘Wife.’
Hoyle’s frothy coffee paused part way to his mouth, then got there. He took a sip, wiped his mouth with finger and thumb. ‘What do you mean, wife?’
Flynn shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Not sure. Something going on.’
‘Like what?’ Hoyle frowned. He leaned forward, concerned.
Again Flynn shrugged. ‘She just seems a bit different, distant …’
‘I haven’t noticed anything,’ Hoyle said brazenly. The relationship between these two men went beyond work and into friendship in their private lives. They were drinking buddies and often went out as couples with their respective spouses. They saw a lot of each other, on and off duty.
‘She’s always bloody cross with me, short-tempered, always in bed before me these days and asleep before I get in. Or at least she pretends to be.’
‘Just a phase,’ Hoyle said knowledgeably. ‘Women’re like that. Faye’s a good lass.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘When did you two last go away?’
‘When we went with you and Marge, that week in Majorca.’
‘Do you know how long ago that was?’ Hoyle said. ‘A long time ago … why don’t you sweep her off her feet and zoom away with her somewhere? Surprise her?’
‘Surprise isn’t in my armoury,’ Flynn admitted.
‘Maybe it should be. Get romantic with her.’
‘Mm, maybe.’ Flynn’s mind whirled with possibilities. His eyes lifted and he saw the two drug runners were getting towards the end of their snacks and brews. ‘Need to make a move.’
As they left the café, Flynn was on the radio to the other team members. Flynn was essentially running the show, so he decided that the plan was to get ahead of Tango One on the motorway with two slow-moving cars – Alphas One and Two – and leave the third surveillance car to slot in behind the target as it left the service area. That way there would be one behind and two in front and they could work on formation and changes from that position.
As Flynn and Hoyle stepped out into the night and Flynn tossed the car keys to his partner, rain began to blast down.
The torrential rain slowed all the traffic on the motorway right down and reduced visibility dramatically.
‘Alpha One, Alpha Three,’ Flynn called on the radio.
There was no response from Three, the double-crewed car that had remained in the motorway services in order to follow Tango One back on to the motorway.
Flynn’s car and Alpha Two had been on the motorway now for almost five minutes and had expected to have heard something from Three by now.
‘Alpha One to Alpha Two,’ Flynn tried. ‘You receiving this transmission?’
‘Loud and clear, Flynnie.’
‘Have you seen or had contact with Three?’
‘Negative.’
Flynn’s eyes narrowed. The team had done a quick comms check as the surveillance was about to resume from the service area and everything had worked fine. Flynn had expected an update as soon as Three eyeballed the target vehicle about to move, but there had been no further transmission. Occasionally communications did go down and that was a problem surveillance teams had to contend with. But it was quite rare with modern radios.
Flynn tried again. ‘One to Three, receiving?’
Nothing.
The next resort was the mobile phone. Flynn tried the numbers of both officers in Alpha Three, one after the other. There was no answer from either. Flynn looked at his phone and saw the signal was strong.
‘Odd,’ he said, but he wasn’t too worried at the moment. Everyone involved in this job was skilled and experie
nced, not just as surveillance officers but as cops. Flynn himself had once been out of contact for almost eight hours on an operation, but you just had to go with the flow.
They were now seven minutes north of Corley Services.
Alpha Two was a quarter of a mile behind.
And no matter how much Flynn reassured himself that the two cops in Three would be OK, he began to feel a huge sense of responsibility and disquiet – feelings compounded when Tango One overtook them in the fast lane, travelling at about ninety miles per hour.
‘One to Two, see what I see?’ Flynn called quickly over the radio.
‘Eyeballed it.’
‘Any sign of Three?’
‘Negative.’
‘Shit, don’t like,’ Flynn said to Hoyle, who was now driving and had increased speed.
‘Alpha Two to—’
‘One interrupting,’ Flynn said quickly. ‘End transmission,’ he barked. ‘Radio silence.’
He shuffled his mobile phone into his right hand and called up both officers in Alpha Three again and once more got no response. Next he called one of the officers in Alpha Two and got through immediately. ‘Burt, I want you to come off at the next junction, loop around and head back to Corley Services. I might be overreacting, but I don’t like this scenario. It might be nothing, and if it is, then it’s on my head.’
‘Will do … what about Tango One?’
‘Leave him to us.’ Flynn ended the call.
‘What are you thinking?’ Hoyle asked, and pushed up the speed of the Vectra a couple of notches.
Flynn’s jaw rotated. ‘Not sure, but we need to play it safe, Jack. If it’s worst case scenario, it’s possible these two guys have somehow neutralized Alpha Three and could be in possession of their radios, in which case they know at least two more cars are on their tail.’
‘Yeah,’ Hoyle agreed, grimly tightening his grip on the steering wheel.
The Mercedes cruised easily through the downpour in the fast lane.
Birmingham was on the left and they were headed in the general direction of Wolverhampton now, which, as the M6 curved due north, would soon be on their left too.
‘Whatever,’ Flynn said, ‘we’re on our own now.’
The Mercedes continued to travel quickly, relentlessly, into the weather, which worsened unremittingly.
At the wheel of the police car, Hoyle remained calm, his concentration total, while Flynn fretted about the whereabouts of and lack of contact with Alpha Three. He prayed something simple, mechanical, had happened, or maybe the radio had just packed up and the mobile phones, all at once.
One car, two radios, two mobile phones.
All at once.
He could not even begin to convince himself of that one, unless they’d been involved in a catastrophic accident as soon as they had rejoined the motorway. Not that he wished that to be the case; he just really needed an answer.
His mind was running riot with bleak possibilities.
Despite the speed, the time seemed to pass with excruciating slowness while he waited for an update. But as he and Hoyle drove relentlessly north, Flynn could not help but feel the threads of this operation unravelling. The next transmission over the radio simply confirmed this when a voice growled, ‘Fucking cop bastards.’
Santiago had taken a long time to fall asleep. She had cried a little for Jerry Tope in Flynn’s arms and he had cradled her until she finally dropped off into what Flynn could tell was a fitful doze.
He could not sleep again.
His mind was far too busy reliving that night, so many years before, sitting alongside Jack Hoyle as they followed a car full of drugs and money up the M6 in awful weather, and remembering the sudden breakdown in communication with one of the other surveillance cars.
In spite of the air conditioning on the boat, Flynn sweated as he recalled those dreadful words over the radio, though they weren’t the only bad things he recalled from that night in 2002.
The first thing was that he could remember exactly, word for word, syllable by syllable, the seemingly mundane conversation he’d had with Jack Hoyle in the motorway café while they watched the targets drink their coffees and eat their snacks. At the time it had seemed to be insignificant – just a reluctant Flynn opening up to his best friend over concerns about his wife and his worries about her behaviour. Just a mate talking to another mate, normal, everyday, innocuous.
Even now Flynn could see the look in Jack Hoyle’s eyes, because now he could interpret what he saw.
Lying there with Santiago, Flynn ground his teeth as in his mind, like a TV screen on pause, he stared at Jack Hoyle’s deceitful eyes.
‘Bastard.’ Flynn’s lips moved almost silently.
But then he shook away the image and moved on.
Jack Hoyle back at the wheel of the surveillance car. The rain. The target vehicle ahead with just the one rear light.
One hundred miles per hour. Speeding through a lake.
The motorway signs indicating Stafford.
Flynn’s mobile rang.
‘Steve, it’s Burt Tucker.’ Tucker was one of the pair who made up the team Alpha Two, the unit sent by Flynn to go back and investigate the reason for Alpha Three’s sudden breakdown in communication.
‘Fire away.’
‘We’ve found them, Steve.’
‘Thank God for that.’ Flynn’s relief was all in his voice.
The phone connection went silent. Flynn thought the signal had dropped, but it had not.
Burt Tucker said, ‘No, Steve, not thank God.’
NINE
They lost the car somewhere between Junctions 28 and 31 of the M6 when a combination of the terrible weather and volume of traffic brought the whole northbound motorway to a halt. At one point, Flynn and Hoyle were directly behind the target, nose to tail, uncomfortably so, with all three lanes at a standstill.
Flynn was raging.
‘I’m gonna get out and drag those two bastards out now,’ he growled. The fingers of his left hand touched the door handle.
‘You’ll get killed,’ Hoyle said, ‘either by them or by the traffic.’
Flynn was not listening.
He started to open the door, fury consuming him and his judgement; the red mist he could rarely control was now in front of his eyes.
‘We need to grab them.’
‘I know, I know,’ Hoyle said sympathetically. He too was bubbling but trying to remain sensible and rein in Flynn, who was well known for flying off the handle. ‘We’ve got traffic cars coming together further up the motorway on the M55. We’ll stop them there, we’re pretty sure they’re going that way.’
‘Pretty sure isn’t a certainty. Suppose our gen is wrong?’
‘It won’t be,’ Hoyle tried to reassure him.
‘I’m going,’ said Flynn impetuously.
He dragged open the door handle.
The men in the car – the identity of one known, the other not – were now hot murder suspects. They had gravitated from being drug runners to cop killers.
Burt Tucker, the detective constable, and his partner Jane Raw, who together made up Alpha Two, had done a turn-around back to Corley Services to try and discover why Alpha Three had gone off the grid. They had discovered the two-man team – Alpha Three – in the same spot where they had parked when they had come off the motorway and where they had stayed put with the intention of following Tango One back on to the M6.
Three had never moved.
Tucker and Raw from Alpha Two drew in behind the surveillance car and as their headlights swept across the car, they saw their worst fears confirmed.
Both detectives were dead, each shot brutally through the head, slumped down and sideways in their seats with terrible entry and exit wounds and blood-soaked sandwiches on their knees. The driver’s window was fully open and the first assumption to be made was that whoever had killed them had somehow enticed the driver – DC Dave Crump – to open his window to talk.
Flynn was certain
the offenders were in the car ahead.
Had to be.
On hearing the report from Burt Tucker, Flynn had immediately contacted the control room at Lancashire Police HQ and begun to arrange for traffic cars and Armed Response Vehicles to lay a trap somewhere ahead so the Mercedes could be pulled, the occupants arrested. When, shunting in the almost immobile traffic on the motorway, he and Hoyle had found themselves by accident directly behind the Mercedes, Flynn could not resist going for it.
Though he was unarmed and in an extremely dangerous situation, he was in a fury at the thought that two colleagues and friends were now dead, and a hundred per cent certain the killers were less than twenty feet away from him.
A man like Flynn could not do anything but act. It was in his DNA.
As his door opened, he cracked open his extendable ASP baton to its full length and was instantly drenched by a shower of heavy rain.
Then, as often happens in motorway traffic jams, a gap suddenly opened next to the Mercedes and immediately the car jinked sideways into it. Almost as suddenly the gap then closed tight and the middle lane moved on, leaving the fast lane at a standstill. Hoyle had no chance of following.
Flynn slammed his door shut and swore. ‘Make sure you don’t lose him,’ he growled at Hoyle.
‘I’m going nowhere,’ Hoyle said sullenly. Then the inside lane moved again, but the fast lane stayed where it was.
Peering through the dark blanketing rain Flynn saw the one-tail-lighted Mercedes swerve across into another gap that had opened up on the inside lane; then, as the middle lane shuffled forward again – but without any gaps opening up – he lost sight of the car.
Hoyle edged the Vauxhall across, indicating.
Flynn opened his window and leaned out, gesticulating at other drivers to let them in, but nothing much happened except that he got even wetter. It was hard for anyone to see at best and his rude gestures did not endear him to other drivers caught up in the jam.