by Frank Lean
He slung the case into the boot and moved to the driver’s door still retaining the pistol in his right hand, cautious bastard that he was.
I was on him in a flash, pressing the muzzle of my gun into his head.
‘Cunane,’ he said, ‘how very unsurprising. My mistake all along has been to underestimate you. I should have moved heaven and earth to eliminate you on the very first day.’
‘Move away from the car,’ I ordered.
He stepped back two paces.
‘Shut the door with your foot.’
He complied. I knew he was calculating how to deal with an amateur like me who was breaking rule number one in taking a prisoner at gunpoint by standing too close. I had the drop on him but only just.
‘We can still work something out you know. After all, with your inheritance you’re virtually one of us now. I can get your son down for Eton with a click of my finger. Name it, a title, whatever you want and it’s yours.’
‘Keep moving,’ I ordered.
I shifted position from his left side to his right but I could tell he was tensing to whirl and shoot me. He must have thought I was crazy not to have disarmed him.
He moved at my direction but now only needed to flick his hand up and I’d be dead.
I leaned forward and shot him in the right temple at close range.
He went down face first and sprawled on the macadam drive, quite dead. His rimless specs slipped off his nose. There was powder stippling round the hole in his right temple. A gaping exit wound on the other side marked where the slug had passed through his evil brain. His own gun was still clutched tightly in his right hand and no suicide could ever look more convincing.
I stood and drew several deep breaths.
This is where some killers get caught. They forget a tiny unconsidered detail and the whole thing unravels. No unconsidered detail was ever going to unravel for me.
The fatal bullet: that could be it, my own fatal error.
If it was found they’d quickly discover that Hudson-Piggott wasn’t killed with his own gun.
I stood close to the position I’d killed him from. My eyes scanned the wall. The bullet hadn’t struck the car. I wondered by how much the bullet would be slowed by the journey through a human skull. Very little, I decided. I was patient. I kept looking; the possibility of years in prison riveted my attention to that wall.
Finally I spotted it.
It had struck the brickwork on the porch and ricocheted into the thick mortar between the stone courses on the main wall. It must have lost energy after the first strike because I was able to pull it out from the dense lime mortar with my fingers. I rubbed the spot until it didn’t stand out.
I wasn’t satisfied.
There had to be more.
What was so important to Hudson-Piggott that he had to come back here and change into his suit? There was the car but he could have sent someone for it. It had to be something else. It was Plan B. There must be information he didn’t want to leave lying about; a laptop, a tablet, files. It had to be in the case.
The boot wasn’t locked. I took the case out. There was a laptop inside. I propped it by the Jag and dashed to the garden shed. Satisfyingly, my shoe was there in plain view just where I’d kicked it off.
I wasted time putting my own shoes on. I left the shed and then paused. Something had caught my eye. I went back. The jacket I’d been wearing when they picked me up was hanging from a nail behind the door. How could I have missed it? It had my wallet and my ID in it. I put it on.
I picked up the case and set off down the road. I still had no idea where I was. The ‘zombie’ cul-de-sac, which was actually called Acheron Close, Tameside, was appropriately silent. It was still early and observation cuts both ways. If you surround your property with privets and Leylandii so people can’t see in, it follows that you can’t see out. All the bedroom curtains were still drawn.
I reached the main road and caught a bus into Manchester. I was home free.
Home free except that Clint and Bren and his oppos were dead. That was far, far worse than the prospect of telling Jan that we were homeless.
When I reached Piccadilly Gardens I was still unsure what to do. I bought a prepaid mobile at an all night shop in the station and phoned Jan.
She picked up immediately.
I barely had time to croak ‘hello’ before she spoke.
‘Dave! You’re alive, oh thank God, thank God!’
‘A devout atheist thanking God,’ I commented, ‘that’s a turn-up.’
‘Oh, don’t you go on. I’ve had your mother on continually threatening to start a novena, whatever that is, for your survival and Bren’s got half the police force out scouring the whole of Greater Manchester for you. I honestly think they’re expecting to find your body but I never lost faith in you. How did you get away?’
‘That’s a long story. Tell me about Bren.’
‘No you first.’
‘I can’t. A phone’s a radio, remember?’
‘You are so infuriating at times Dave.’
‘Sorry.’
There was a brief pause.
‘When you were kidnapped one of Bren’s men was grazed in the arm, nothing serious.’
‘But they fired hundreds of bullets, I heard them.’
‘Mainly into the air or at Bren’s vehicle, apparently.’
‘But they killed Clint.’
‘Wrong again, Dave. His back and chest are badly bruised but he’s fine. He’s with those two new assistants you recruited.’
‘Tony and Lee.’
‘Yes, listen Dave, is it all sorted now? Can we come home?’
‘It’s all sorted Jan but . . .’
‘Dave, I know about Topfield. By ‘come home’ I mean come back to you. I don’t care about the house. I’ll live in a squat in Miles Platting as long as it’s with you.’
Afterword
Hudson-Piggott’s laptop was doubly protected by an impenetrable password and encrypted text. However Tony Nolan made cracking it a personal challenge. He worked on it in intervals while running Pimpernel Investigations so progress was slow even for the reconditioned brain. Still, Tony has more time on his hands now that Lee is attending a sort of boarding school/boot camp for young adults in an attempt to repair the defects of his education.
I believe Tony hired time on an American supercomputer to crack the encryption. He sFaid he’d crack it and crack it he did.
It was from Tony that I finally gleaned a few more details of the fate Hudson-Piggott had been planning for us all.
MOLOCH, actually called Operation Restore, was originally timed so that the radiation would begin hitting the ground just when afternoon prayers were taking place in the mosques of Northern England. In the ensuing panic it was hoped, and no doubt arranged, that there would be ‘spontaneous’ attacks on the Muslim community: the long dreaded ‘backlash’.
The full awfulness of his plan comes out best in one page of notes among the many pages of his ‘operational plans’.
The De Facto Civil Disorder Planning Group
A group of senior civil servants, security officials and police began planning what would happen if there is a major breakdown in civil order in this country following a period of sustained Islamic terrorism. Incidents triggering this would be nuclear bomb in major city, dirty bomb, poisoned reservoir, massive armed attack on civilians at say football match, assault and assassination of several members of Royal family and/or government at once.
Their final recommendations were
1) Suspension of Parliament. Interim rule by a special troika of soldier, security man, politician. Suspension of constitution.
2) Emergency Powers Act enabling detention without trial of many thousands of suspected Islamic militants and extremist Imams or of any persons who demonstrate sympathy for them including journalists and media figures
3) Interrogation of suspects using enhanced techniques
4) When Muslim community responds to thi
s with massive rioting in urban areas, said areas to be cordoned off by army, police and ‘volunteers’. Residents taken to special ‘concentration areas’ where they will be interned under increasingly severe conditions until they agree to return to their countries of origin or in effect renounce their allegiance to Islam
5) Timescale for these events 1 – 2 years. Following the crushing of disorder there will be a supervised referendum to ask the electorate if they are prepared to indemnify members of the troika.
I believe that Lew was informed of this by Alban Pickering in the meeting at Bluewater and that when that meeting was followed by a visit from Hudson-Piggott and Lansdale, Lew knew his time was short. He’d held on hoping to glean more details and hence the word MOLOCH scratched into the table where the bastards tortured him.
Brendan Cullen attempted to investigate the recycling area and the house on Acheron Close. On both occasions he tried he was warned off by armed Ministry of Defence security men. His career didn’t suffer. He was promoted to Detective Superintendent very soon after. He still talks to me.
The police didn’t contact me, not even by a phone call. I never heard from Claverhouse again but guessed she’d been thoroughly debriefed by Sir Freddie Jones who must have decided it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. I believe he knows that I have Hutton-Piggott’s laptop. It’s my insurance. Certainly the great British public were never told anything about the attempt on their liberties. They will learn all about it if anyone interferes with me. Tony only has to press a button and every page will be on Wikileaks.
As for me, I’ve taken my family, my parents and Jan’s mum off to Italy for a protracted break at the Villa Arabella while builders make a start on the restoration of Topfield. Paddy’s already begun several minor improvements to the Villa. We intend to return to England for the birth of our baby. We like the Villa, especially the swimming pool overlooking our vineyard and the rolling Tuscan landscape.
The End
Other ‘Dave Cunane’ books in sequence
Red for Rachel
Nine Lives
The Reluctant Investigator: shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger
Kingdom Gone
Boiling Point
Above Suspicion
Raised in Silence
Other Frank LeanNovels
Irish Jack’s Women: a murder investigation by renowned English railway engineer Joseph Locke during the Irish Famine. One of Dave Cunane’s ancestors is involved in a minor role.
Asking For It: pathologist Professor Jack Preston removes murderers before they provide him with victims to investigate
Murder in a Hollywood Motorhome: an improvisational murder mystery play for 12 actors
Children’s Books
Haunted High School Series: children’s fantasy involving ‘special powers’. A boy stumbles on a long forgotten ‘force of nature’ with the power of speech. This invisible being decides that the boy, Peter Scattergood, is an ideal candidate for reform in preparation for some special task the purpose of which it doesn’t yet know!
(1) Peter Scattergood and the Panic Horn
(2) Peter Scattergood and the Owl King
(3) Peter Scattergood and the Dark Force
Cover Photo Manchester Town Hall from Brazennose Street © Frank Lean
Table of Contents
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Afterword