by Nick Oldham
Eventually Hoyle crept into the centre lane.
Which stopped dead, no escape either side, although the lane he’d just left began to move.
‘Well, at least he won’t be going far either.’
Flynn could feel the muscles in his neck coiling like steel rope as he tried to keep himself from detonating.
He phoned control room, told them their position and what had happened. He was assured that traffic and ARV patrols were now hovering on the M55, waiting for the Mercedes to show up.
As he simmered, his radio came to life and the same voice he’d heard before taunted him with a cackling laugh and ‘Useless cunts.’
Flynn took a few breaths, then picked up the mike and said slowly, ‘I know who you are and I’m coming for you. Make the most of your freedom. It won’t last long.’
There was a further laugh, then the radio went dead and there were no more transmissions, even in response to more of Flynn’s threats.
The traffic jam broke up gradually as they approached Junction 28, the exit for Leyland. Hoyle began to make more progress until he was back in the sixty to seventy miles per hour region, about the maximum he could reach with the heavy traffic still around him.
Even so, they never saw the Mercedes on the motorway again and when they reached Junction 32 and bore left on to the M55 westbound for Blackpool there was no sign of it. Both traffic and ARVs reported that they had not seen it either.
That was the moment Flynn’s mobile phone rang and his boss, a DCI on the Serious and Organized Crime Unit, demanded to know what was going on and ordered Flynn and Hoyle to return immediately to headquarters and start to answer some pretty fucking nooky questions.
Flynn tried to explain, but the DCI – who apparently had the chief constable standing right behind him – gave Flynn no option.
‘You come in now, Steve,’ he insisted. ‘End of.’
‘Sorry boss … you’re breaking up …’
‘Don’t fuck with me, sergeant,’ the DCI said.
‘Can’t quite … hear … you … bad reception area …’
Flynn thumbed the ‘end call’ and looked at Hoyle, who demanded worriedly, ‘What the hell are you playing at?’
‘I don’t know about you, mate, but I want to catch the people who’ve just killed two cops, two of our mates.’
‘You can’t be certain it’s them.’
‘If it’s not, I’ll dust ’em down and send ’em on their way, even blow smoke up their arses.’ He looked dangerously at Hoyle. ‘But you and I both know it is … two cops sitting in a motorway service area eating their butties don’t just get their heads blown off randomly.’
‘But we don’t even know where to start looking.’
‘In that case,’ Flynn said, his right hand in a tight fist and making a twisting gesture, ‘let’s squeeze a few testicles to find out.’
Flynn and Hoyle had both started their police careers on the streets of Blackpool, on foot and mobile. They had been on separate shifts in their early days but knew each other well, and both had ambitions to become drug squad officers. To that end, they made it their mission to get to know as many people as they could in the big underbelly of that resort who were connected in any way to the drug trade – which was, and remains, rife.
Of course that meant almost all criminals they came across in their day-to-day duties, because virtually all low level acquisitional crime funded drug activity. Shoplifters stole goods in order to sell them to buy drugs with the cash; burglars’ ill-gotten gains were also used to buy drugs. And so it went.
Flynn had seen this early in his career and it was also very well documented.
He realized that arresting petty criminals, leaning on them and then perhaps letting them off for the crimes they had committed (completely unofficially) in exchange for information about drug dealers, and others further up the ladder, would be a good way for him to start to build a reputation both inside and outside the cops. This would eventually lead him to a job on the drugs squad and quite possibly the chance to bust some big time dealers. He spent a lot of time staking out locations for well-known street dealers and would often pounce, then bleed them for information.
It was a fairly ad hoc approach and not always successful, but it was something he enjoyed immensely.
Most people who bought drugs did not want to upset their supplier, usually because they were terrified to do so; most low level suppliers would not squeal on their line-supplier either, for the same reason. This became even more dangerous higher up the chain: a low level dealer might just beat up a junkie he was not happy with, but further up the chain the beatings got more serious, and a nasty death was always a possibility.
Flynn and Hoyle were quite patient, though.
They understood the hopes and fears of the people they were dealing with, most of whom existed on the bread line and were more afraid of their suppliers than of the cops. But occasionally they struck lucky and moved a rung or two up the chain of command and because the two cops treated the low levels with a reasonable amount of decency and respect they put together a very nice bunch of informants, or sources, from whom they occasionally got snippets of gold which led to decent arrests while also protecting the informants.
One informant they nurtured was called Janie Miller, a young lady who lived in a shit-hole of a bedsit and stuck dirty needles into her veins, but who actually came from a good family that could not control her. She had dropped out of college and begun life on the streets; she stole to feed an out of control drug habit that, if Flynn had not acted, would have killed her before the age of eighteen.
He met her when she had been living rough for just less than two years, although ‘met’ was perhaps not the best way to describe their first encounter.
Flynn almost killed her.
He was a patrol PC back then, working a response car in Blackpool Central, one of the busiest policing locations in the country, comprising the Golden Mile, Blackpool’s heaving sea front where the Tower could be found, and the immediate hinterland which was a hotspot of bars, clubs, theatres, amusement arcades, the bedsit world, shoddy hotels, drugs and violence.
Flynn loved it, revelled in it.
An eight- or twelve-hour tour of duty flew by, job after job pouring in, especially during the summer months when visitors surged into the resort in their millions. Long days, short hot nights. And wonderful to be a young cop.
The report of a robbery in progress on the street behind Blackpool Tower came in on the treble-nine system.
Cops in cars and on foot were dispatched, including Flynn, who at the time of the shout was in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant savouring a hot curry. He ran to his car, a liveried Astra, flicked on the blue light and sped out of the back alley in which he was parked.
He dinked through all the short cuts, criss-crossing town through all the rat runs he knew like the back of his hand way back then, some alleyways just wide enough, but only if he aimed his car correctly. When he was within spitting distance of the robbery he skidded into another back alley – the last short cut – which, as it was almost midnight, was black.
He drove his right foot down on to the accelerator, flipped the headlights on to main beam and saw the prostrate figure laid out across the alley just ahead of him.
With a scream and curse combined, Flynn slammed on and slithered to a halt on the oily cobbles. His front bumper rocked just an inch above the body.
Drunks splayed out in alleys were a common sight in Blackpool, and this is what Flynn thought he had encountered.
He beeped his horn and leaned out of the window, shouting angrily for whoever it was to get shifted.
No response.
He jumped out, intending simply to drag the inebriate to the side of the alley and get on his way. He had hoped to be first on the scene of the robbery and was maddened to think that that pleasure was now going to fall to one of his colleagues.
His eyes took in the shape under the glow of his headlights.
A thin, scantily clad young girl, maybe seventeen, white legs and arms, hair matted and caked over her face. She seemed to be dead.
Flynn saw the blood-filled hypodermic needle hanging loosely from the soft flesh inside her right arm, a belt used as a tourniquet wrapped around her bicep.
And the dribble of vomit from her mouth.
‘Shit.’
Flynn dropped to his knees beside her, turned her gently on to her side and stuck two fingers into her throat to clear her airway of the porridge-like sick. There was no retching and Flynn saw the girl wasn’t breathing at all. She had flopped like a shattered doll. He rolled her back on to her back, checked for a pulse: none.
For Flynn the next few minutes were an autopilot blur of using the CPR training that had been drilled into him, pounding her chest, breathing into her mouth, watching the chest rise and fall, checking the pulse, while at the same time shouting for an ambulance over the radio.
He was later told that the time which elapsed between his first frantic transmission and the arrival of the ambulance was twenty-two minutes. During that period, the passage of time for him varied considerably. Sometimes it felt as though he was being swept away in a vortex and the seconds raced by; other times were like treading through thick, warm Blackpool rock as time slowed, almost stopped, even seemed to go backwards.
He pushed. He breathed. He spat out her sick, retching himself, but he kept going, willing the girl to live and never once contemplating the medical implications for himself – the possibility of contracting a horrible disease or infection.
And a year later – or was it just seconds? – the ambulance did arrive, and still he kept going until the paramedics eased him away and took over with breathing devices, defibrillators and cool skills. Flynn liked paramedics.
He slumped back, watching, gasping for his own breath, feeling his pounding heart crashing against his insides like waves before eventually subsiding to normal, though he sat there in the alley feeling more exhausted than if he’d just completed one of his tri-weekly workouts.
The remainder of the shift was a blur of police activity. Flynn was run ragged by a succession of incidents, including bursting into a bedsit with other officers to arrest a suspected robber. While doing all this Flynn ensured that comms kept a check on the progress of the girl from the alley and kept him up to date since, unless something transpired that meant he had to go to the hospital on another job, he was too busy to get there and check himself.
He finished his tour at seven a.m., bleary-eyed and wanting bed. But first he decided to check on the girl. He drove up to A&E at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, tucking his car tightly into the space reserved for ambulances only.
Flynn was a well-known figure at the hospital.
He had purposely nurtured the A&E staff so he had a regular brew spot which could also double as a good source of information. Many of the nurses, male and female, went weak-kneed at the sight of him – and not just because he could be charming. He had also made it his business to get to know the very harassed and overworked doctors.
‘Heroin overdose,’ the junior doctor explained. They were standing in one of the cubicles looking at the girl whose life he had saved. She was linked to monitors reading her vital signs and drips were inserted via cannulas into veins in both her arms. She was not moving and had a deathly pallor and if the monitors hadn’t said otherwise, Flynn would have thought he was looking at a corpse. ‘And a lot of booze,’ the doctor added.
‘Thought I tasted whisky,’ Flynn said, making a smacking noise with his tongue and recalling spitting out a lot of unpleasantness. ‘Did I do OK?’ he asked.
‘You did exactly the right thing … well done,’ the doctor said. ‘You saved her life.’
‘That’s OK, then.’
The doctor checked her watch. ‘I’m off duty in ten minutes.’ She eyed Flynn lustfully. ‘You could save my life too, if you wanted.’
Inwardly he cringed. This was an ongoing, playful thing he had with this rather gorgeous lady doctor. Both knew it would never happen, even though they had exchanged numbers before.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Happily married.’
The older Flynn, the tough-as-nails sportfishing skipper, now recollected that comment with sad cynicism.
He had thought he was happily married; at that point in his life he was certain of it.
He had left Santiago sleeping again and was walking along the promenade in Santa Eulalia, unable to put his thoughts into logical order. The news of Jerry Tope’s death had completely smashed him.
He had got to thinking about Janie Miller, the zapped-out drug addict he’d saved from certain death in an alleyway in Blackpool, and her tenuous link to Operation Ambush.
After that night shift and ducking the advances of the lovely doctor, the young Flynn slept well for eight hours. In those days, he did sleep very well. He was up before four in the afternoon and before he began his next shift at seven p.m. he went back to BVH to check on the girl. He found she had been transferred to a ward.
She was propped up and looked very weak but better than when he’d found her. There was a tint of colour in her cheeks, but little else.
Flynn introduced himself. ‘Thought I’d see how you were getting on.’
‘You saved me,’ she whispered. Her voice had a rasp to it.
He shrugged modestly. Now, with fluids inside her, despite the prominent cheekbones – the result of addiction rather than bone structure – he saw she was pretty and had wonderful, deep blue eyes.
‘I assume it wasn’t an intentional overdose?’ he guessed.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Not sure. Could have been.’
‘At least you’re alive to fight another day.’
‘Whatever,’ she sighed. ‘How can I thank you? We can fuck when I’m out of here, if you want. Free.’
Flynn laughed. ‘No … you can thank me by going into rehab … I’m told counsellors are queuing up to see you. I know there’s a place at Marton Hall … please take it.’
‘OK, I will,’ she promised.
Flynn held her gaze. ‘But I do want something else.’
‘What?’ she whispered hoarsely, afraid, knowing.
‘The name of your dealer.’
She never told him, but she did become a good informant for him and although she did attempt rehab, she never kicked the habit either. She had a good in-depth knowledge of the local drug scene, who the low level dealers were, a few names further up the food chain, and she occasionally fed Flynn tasty scraps about dealers not directly connected to her.
She had been the one who, several years later, when Flynn had become a hard-arsed DS on the drug squad, had given him the information about a drugs pick-up in London, bound for Lancashire. She claimed her information had simply been an overheard conversation in a pub called Fat Billy’s and, though pressed, she had remained tight-lipped about names and identities.
She lived on the top floor of a council block on the Shoreside estate, one of Blackpool’s poorest, most deprived areas.
Since Flynn had first met her, Janie Miller had gone unsuccessfully through numerous rehab schemes, emerging clean and full of hope for a few days until she slid back into the life, then plunged downhill like a skier. She had lived with several abusive men and had three children by three different fathers; she was not sure which child belonged to which man, though she did not really care.
Flynn never gave up on her though he did realize she was a lost cause and beyond help, but when he burst into her flat on the night his two colleagues were murdered, his patience with her had all but evaporated.
As his six-three frame crashed through the flimsy door, kicking it off its hinges, her current man friend rose to the challenge of the intruder.
Flynn put him down with one blow – a cross punch – and stepped over his moaning body as the unfortunate man clutched his crushed nose. He grabbed Janie from the tatty sofa and carried her into the bedroom, slamming her against the wall,
which moved like dodgy scenery. ‘Names,’ he snarled into her face.
She begged for mercy, pleaded innocence, sobbing with big, body-racking gulps.
He slammed her again. Everything rattled, even the bones in her skinny body.
‘Two of my mates are dead, Janie … I need names, now.’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know …’
Flynn lifted her so their faces were aligned. He could smell her body odours, cheap perfume, her breath.
‘I fuckin’ swallowed your vomit to save your life. Names, Janie, or every shithouse drug dealer in this town will know you’ve been my snitch for the last ten years … two cops shot dead.’
‘Let me go, let me go.’
Flynn released her with a contemptuous flick of his fingers. She slithered down the wall, her tiny skirt rising up above her thighs to reveal a lack of underwear.
‘Fuck you,’ he said, turning away. No matter how much he wanted to, he could not hurt her.
As he reached the door, she gasped, ‘Brian Tasker.’
‘Who the hell’s Brian Tasker?’ He turned back.
‘Biggest drug lord in the country. He kills people.’
‘Tell me.’ Flynn squatted in front of her and dragged a pillow from the bed so she could cover herself.
‘He’s expanding … taking over … his gang, his organization, whatever you want to call it … honest, I did, I just heard a conversation … I was shooting up in a gents’ cubicle in a bog in a pub in town … they didn’t know I was there. They shoulda checked the shitters, but they didn’t.’
‘Who?’
‘It were Don Braceford and this Tasker guy … he’d been about a bit … he were a big deal. Half o’ what they said I couldn’t remember anyway, except the name of the yard because it were my name – Miller’s Yard. And I’d heard of Tottenham and I just passed it on to you. Rest were down to you. Said Will Carney were going down with Tasker.’
Flynn nodded. Carney was the low level shithead he’d recognized in the motorway service area – now one of the killers.
‘You won’t tell Braceford, will you?’