by Nick Oldham
He leaned back creakily and rubbed his neck.
‘I’m not cut out for this crap,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Desk jockey.’
All this close-up work was playing havoc with his eyes too. He had a horrible feeling he might need spectacles soon. In his book that was the ultimate concession to the onset of middle age. That and a beer gut.
He ran a hand carefully over his face, touching the chain-mark, black eye and swollen jaw. The combination pulsated continually, even though he’d now succumbed to Nurofen. Suffering pain wouldn’t bring Sam or Francesca back to life.
He had almost reached the foothills of the mountain of paperwork. He quickly signed off an Intelligence bulletin from Madrid without reading it too carefully, then a name in one of the paragraphs caught his eye.
It was a surname: Mayfair.
The item referred to the fact that a sharp-eyed FBI operative who happened to be on a surveillance job at Madrid Airport had spotted two people whom he believed were the Mayfair brothers, Tiger and Wayne. They had arrived on a flight from Lisbon, both using assumed names and not travelling together. It was an unconfirmed sighting but the agent was reasonably sure it was them ... the two men believed to be responsible for a number of contract killings throughout the US and Europe. Wherever they went, death seemed to follow, but as yet no law-enforcement agency had tied them evidentially to actual murders.
The item went on to state that a photograph of the two was to follow, taken by airport security cameras. Donaldson skimmed through the most recent Interpol bulletins from Portugal and saw nothing which would indicate that the Mayfair brothers had been active professionally.
He took a photocopy of the bulletin and updated the office file on the Mayfair brothers as this was his responsibility.
Next on the pile was a teleprinter message. Donaldson read it and his eyebrows rose with pleasure on reading the name of the originator. . . Acting DI Henry Christie . . . which was why he read the whole thing a second time. He was glad he did. He picked up the message, cleared a space on his desk, pulled his portable PC towards him and logged into the FBI system.
‘The way I see it,’ Morton said pensively, ‘this is a three-sided thing. Firstly, Harry, there’s your angle: Christie’s a digger, a stubborn guy who doesn’t mind who he upsets. This means he’ll be on your case until he cracks it, or it defeats him. My guess is that he’ll crack it because it’s nothing more than a run-of-the-mill murder case. He will get you, given time.’
McNamara winced and drew on his cigar.
Conroy cackled with laughter, which ceased as soon as Morton turned to him and said, ‘And in your case, as Christie himself stated to me, he doesn’t like people taking pot-shots at cops. If only for that reason he’ll net you along the way.’
‘Not a fuckin’ chance.’
‘He will,’ Morton assured him. ‘He’s already searched all those premises and-’
‘And found nothing. He’s way off the mark.’
‘Just practising his aiming.’
The three men were all now seated, in positions where they could easily see and hear one another. There was invisible tension in the room, caused mainly by Morton’s assessment of Henry Christie and his abilities.
‘And how does he affect you?’ McNamara pointed at Morton.
Morton sat back and thought for a moment. ‘Firstly, I’m pretty sure it was Christie who put the seeds into the mind of the unfortunate DC Luton about there being two gangs operating. Luton brought it up, but we laughed him out of the office. But it worried us. Then, last night, we found Luton reading through the witness statements we’d amended. I’m sure he was dealt with before he spoke to anyone else. Having said that, he seemed to be expecting Henry Christie at his front door, but that says to me they haven’t yet talked.
‘Which means that Christie doesn’t actually know shit about anything yet, but him being the person he is, it won’t take him too long to make connections. . . and then he becomes a problem for me, Harry, in answer to your question.’
‘Then top him,’ said Conroy. ‘If he poses a threat, do him.’
‘Yes,’ McNamara agreed. ‘We’ve done it before.’
‘No,’ said Morton firmly. He stood up and paced the room. ‘We only take out police officers in exceptional circumstances. That’s always been agreed. It causes too much interest. Too many people want those sort of murders solved. We only get rid of the people who know too much and who are likely to cause us immediate damage. People like Geoff Driffield and Derek Luton. They were both too near.’
‘But you said he’d find out,’ complained McNamara.
‘Look, at this stage he knows fuck all,’ the detective said. ‘And if we kill him now there’ll be so much heat that some bugger might crack. Two cops are already dead in Blackpool; one is still in ICU. If another one gets it . . .’ He left the implication floating in the air like a bad smell and shook his head.
‘Accident?’ suggested Conroy.
‘They need to be arranged,’ Morton pointed out. ‘Not easy to do without arousing suspicion.’
‘Pay him off then,’ said McNamara. ‘Pay him to look the other way.’
‘Mmm, I thought about that ... but I know a little about Henry Christie because of that big mafia case he was involved in a while back, and I don’t think money would work. He once turned down an offer of several million dollars to look the other way. He arrested the man who made that offer, saying he liked to be offered bribes because he enjoyed locking up the people who made them. So, no. That won’t work.’
‘Put the fear of God into his family.’
Morton looked sharply at Conroy. ‘We don’t intimidate wives and kids,’ he said.
‘So what then?’ asked an increasingly irritable McNamara. ‘I want the cunt off my back - now.’
‘Well,’ said Morton, ‘he’s a very talented detective.’
‘Yeah, Detective Sergeant Perfect by all accounts,’ said Conroy snidely.
Morton went on, ‘A good investigator, bit of a ruthless touch, but straight as a dye ... Think about it.’
Conroy was first to catch on. ‘Just the sort of honest detective you’d want on your elite squad.’
‘Exactly - and funnily enough, we have a vacancy for a Detective Sergeant right now. The last one died on the job.’
Chapter Twelve
Henry Christie’s ears were not burning. He was far too busy to even contemplate that others could be talking about him, as once again his sleep pattern had been very much interrupted. It was past midnight when he finally got into bed, having spent much of the evening cruising the streets, seedier pubs and guest-houses in Blackburn with Lucy Crane to try and find some of Marie Cullen’s colleagues who might be able to add a bit of background to the dead girl. It was a fruitless and frustrating night.
A uniformed cop knocking on his front door at 6.30 a.m. had been the precursor to another horrendous day in Blackpool.
Henry, in a deep, dreamless sleep, had been the only member of his family to hear the knocking, or at least the only one to respond to it. He dragged himself downstairs, feeling like the man in the toothpaste advert with halitosis-laden germs dancing a jig on his furred tongue.
When he opened the door his heart dropped. He thought he was about to be given bad news concerning Nina. He had phoned the hospital from home before going to bed and was told she had taken a turn for the worse: critical-likely to prove. Henry assumed the Police Constable was here to tell him the news personally. He steeled himself for the punch.
He expected an upper cut from the right.
The head-butt to the bridge of his nose caught him completely by surprise and toppled him over, figuratively speaking.
He had to make the PC repeat it three times because his brain refused to take it in.
Derek Luton dead? Found shot to death on his front doorstep? Looks like his brains have been blown out? Wife almost catatonic? Derek Luton?
Dead?
Henry couldn’t get
his head round the enormity of it. Not enough sleep. Head’s a shed. Too much going on in too short a space of time.
Degsy Luton dead?
Henry finally raced upstairs, threw on yesterday’s gear, underwear included, then got into his car and drove directly to the scene, Luton’s house in Blackpool north shore, which had not yet been touched by scenes of crime.
Yep, Henry could confirm it. He had had his brains blown out. What a fucking mess. Henry had to steady himself as a flash of memory snapped into his mind’s eye - another world away, but still vivid and recurring - of a man who had had his brains shot out right in front of him.
He took a deep breath, pulled himself together and got to work - directing, delegating, informing those who had to be told, going into automatic crime-scene management. He was aware, again, that his acting rank meant that everyone was waiting for him and that as senior detective on the scene, he was in charge. It gave him a slight feeling of excitement and, if he’d been questioned about it, he would have admitted enjoying it. The role, that is. Not this particular situation.
Once everything was underway, he went next door to where Annie was being comforted by a policewoman and a neighbour. A GP had administered some calming drugs to her, with a prescription for more. The doctor was just leaving when Henry arrived.
He sat down next to Annie on the edge of the settee. Luton’s widow stared blankly ahead, her fingers twisted into tight fists. A mug of tea, untouched, was on the coffee table.
‘Annie,’ he said softly. He placed an arm around her shoulder. She jumped as if she’d been pinched, looked at Henry and realised who he was. She turned into him, gripping him, burying her head into his chest. She released a wail-cum-scream which shook her whole being from head to toe and held on tighter to Henry as the tears began to pour out. Henry held on, too, making reassuring noises, stroking her hair and trying not to cry himself.
He spent much of the morning with her, not wishing to delegate this particular unenviable task to anyone else. Not that he was a great one for dealing with grief. Actually he was very poor at it.
In over six hours’ gentle coaxing, Annie did not say anything which was of any use to Henry. She was a bubbling wreck, unable to string two words together without bursting into tears. Henry did not push. That would have been counter-productive. By the same token it meant the police were getting nowhere at a fast rate of knots. And Annie was the only witness they had at that moment in time.
Whilst Henry was grappling with the problem of having to draw information out from a distressed witness, another problem which he had wrongly assumed might have gone away reared its head in the form of an ugly skinhead called Shane Mulcahy.
Since his discharge from hospital, Shane had spent the last remnants of his and his girlfriend’s dole money on a concoction of drink, drugs and a Chinese takeaway - this despite her protestations that they needed the money to buy food for them and the baby. He’d simply smacked her open-handed across the face, then given her a kick up the arse when she hit the floor. ‘Don’t fuckin’ tell me how to spend our money.’
For fourteen hours he had been in a state of inebriation coupled with the combined whizz-bang effect of amphets and the monosodium glutamate in the sweet-and-sour chicken. ‘Near total bliss’ would have been Shane’s poetic attempt to describe his condition; however, there was little that was poetic about Shane and he chose to describe it as, ‘Great, been outta my fuckin’ ‘ead.’
He awoke face down on the bare floorboards of the bedsit he shared with Jodie Flew and their offspring. His nose was pressed against the hard wood with dribble having collected in a pool around his cheeks. He wiped his face as he pushed himself into a sitting position. He felt rougher than a bear’s arse - a comparison he often used because it suited his sense of humour - and in his mouth there was a taste he could not quite place: somewhere between vomit and sugar. A pain bolted across his head behind his eyes, like a surge of electricity between two electrodes. He swore.
It did not occur to him to wonder why he was on the floor. It was a position he often awoke to.
Jodie was asleep on the mattress.
The baby gurgled happily in a cot in the corner of the room. Shane heard it fart.
He tried to stand up. When he moved he winced. His lower abdomen felt as though a scalpel had been left in by the surgeon. But in comparison to the previous day, the pain was ebbing.
He dressed himself in the jeans he’d worn for the last two months – he was proud of their unwashed state - found a crumpled T-shirt underneath the TV set and put his denim jacket and stolen Doc Marten boots on. Ready for the day ahead. He left the meagre living accommodation without bothering to disturb Jodie or the baby. He didn’t really want to have anything to do with either of them.
Next stop was his solicitor.
The stop after that was Blackpool Central police station.
It was busy at the enquiry desk. Lots of press and TV people seemed to have camped out there, covering the spectacular crime wave which was coursing through Blackpool that week.
Shane and his legal representative were kept waiting for twenty minutes. The skinhead became increasingly agitated. When at last the Civilian Public Enquiry assistant beckoned to him, he stalked across, leaned on the counter and put his aggressive face right up to hers. His red-raw eyes were wide and menacing, his features distorted into a snarl, examples of which had been captured by media photographs of skinheads many, many times over the years. ‘I want to make a complaint of assault against the police, luv,’ he said.
She recoiled in disgust from his pungent breath and body odour and the threat of violence. ‘I’ll get the Duty Inspector,’ she said. Her nose was screwed up because there was a bad smell under it.
‘So that leaves Munrow,’ Conroy said. ‘I mean, what’s the fucking judicial system coming to these days? That bastard got nineteen years, f’fuck’s sake. Shouldn’t nineteen mean nineteen? The guy is a menace to society - and that’s a quote direct from the judge himself.’
‘That’s what you paid him to say,’ interjected McNamara with a laugh. He was feeling better now that some action was going to be taken on his problem.
‘Yeah, he did a good job, God rest his soul. Pity we didn’t have any influence on the prison board,’ whined Conroy. ‘So,’ he said, turning to Morton, ‘come on, Mister Problem-solver Extraordinaire - put your mind to this one.’
‘He either needs to be brought into the fold, rather like Henry Christie, or possibly paid off - or eliminated,’ Morton responded, counting his fingers as he ticked off the choices.
‘Well, I can’t talk to the man. He makes me wanna stick an iron bar around his head as soon as I see him, so the first one’s out of the question,’ Conroy replied, using his own fingers. ‘Secondly I don’t want to pay him one single chuffin’ cent, so you can forget that one.’ He held up three fingers. ‘I like the sound of the third option - kill the cunt.’
‘But you’ve already said you haven’t got anyone capable of going up against him,’ McNamara pointed out.
‘Doesn’t mean I don’t want the bastard rotting in hell,’ Conroy said sullenly.
Silence descended on the room and the three men watched each other thinking.
‘He does need to be sorted,’ Morton said. ‘One way or the other, for the sake of credibility. No one’s going to do business with us if we can’t keep our house in order.’
They fell silent again.
McNamara lit another cigar. Morton poured a coffee. Conroy bit his nails and played with his pony tail.
‘How about a professional?’ suggested McNamara.
‘Be just my luck to hire an undercover cop. To be honest with you, boys, I don’t actually know any professionals, believe it or not. I know people you can pay as little as five hundred dabs to. They’re ten a penny in Salford, and any nigger in Moss Side’ll have a crack - but they’re all so fuckin’ unreliable. Munrow would probably drop them first. The only person I know who could do it properly
, if he was wound up enough, would be John Rider. But he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s gone completely cuckoo. In his day I would’ve put him on a par with Munrow, maybe above for being a violent sod. Now he’s a bit of a wreck, really.’
‘He saved your life,’ McNamara said.
‘True, true.’
‘If he had a reason to kill Munrow, do you think he would?’ Morton asked.
‘What d’you mean?’ Conroy looked puzzled.
‘What I’m saying is - give him a reason and he might just do the job for you. But give him a reason. Quick.’
‘This is getting to be Nightmare City,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent Fanshaw-Bayley. He and Henry were walking down the rear yard at Blackpool police station. ‘I appreciate you’ve got a lot on your plate at the moment, Henry, but you need to pull out the stops and solve this one PDQ. The Chief Constable is going berserk. Seems to be an open season on cops in this town this week and she wants results, like yesterday. And she’s ordered two more ARVs into town to go high profile. I’m gonna bring Ronnie Veevers in to head this one.’
‘You’d better throw resources at it,’ Henry said. He’d once been the victim of FB’s penny-pinching ways (or so he thought) and this time he didn’t want to start out at a disadvantage. ‘That’s the only way you’ll make progress on this one.’
‘Is there any reason to think all these shootings are connected?’ asked FB. They entered the ground floor of the station and walked towards the lift.
‘It shouldn’t be ruled out,’ Henry ruminated, ‘but so far I can’t see a link.’ The lift arrived eventually and they stepped into the small space. ‘The DS in the newsagents; I don’t know a great deal about it, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with what I know, but it’s not my pigeon, thank God. Then Nina getting shot by Dundaven . . . now Derek. What could be the link? The only one I can think of is the North-West Organised Crime Squad. The DS was on it, Nina was shot by someone who was one of their targets and Derek was working along with them. And let’s not forget the gorilla in the zoo which has generated more media interest than all three of those put together. Poor old Boris. Shot out of his tree.’