High Force: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 5)

by LJ Ross

  “You’ll get your money,” Edwards lied. “And Ryan will get his just deserts.”

  “You’re playing for time,” Moffa rasped. “But you won’t play me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, so we know where we stand. If you fail to provide the money within three days, I will tell the police all about your dirty, dirty little secrets. I’ll tell them all about the real Keir Edwards. I’ll tell them about the escape plan and I’ll say that you threatened to kill members of my family if I didn’t help you. I’ll tell them about your solicitor, all about how she passed messages between us. I will spill my guts and I’ll have a steak dinner while they chuck you back in prison, love, but before then I’ll ask Tony here to pay you a little visit, with my compliments.”

  Edwards didn’t like his tone. No, not one little bit.

  He cast a cursory glance towards the man standing half a step behind Moffa, categorised him instantly as lightweight and looked back at Moffa with a mocking smile.

  “I don’t like it when we quarrel,” he crooned, placing the rifle gently on the ground. He held both hands up, palms facing outward in a non-threatening gesture.

  Both men braced themselves as he moved towards them, his dark eyes twinkling like stars through the dusky evening.

  “That’s far enough,” Moffa snapped, but he found himself mesmerised.

  Edwards was an expert at reading certain types of behaviour. He might not be able to empathise with his fellow man, but he could read them like a book and this one had just become a lot more interesting.

  Jimmy Moffa, a hardened gangster feared by many, was hot under the collar. He was breathing quickly, his chest rising and falling beneath his tailored suit and Edwards could almost smell the pheromones. If night hadn’t fallen, he was sure there would be tell-tale signs of sexual attraction written all over his face.

  “Well, well,” he murmured. “This is a delightful surprise.”

  Tony watched the exchange with wide eyes and wondered whether he should have stepped in by now. Neither man said much, but there seemed to be plenty of conversation flowing in other ways and the young man flushed with embarrassment and surprise.

  Moffa could only think that it was like being hypnotized by a snake. He had seen and done many things in his short life, few of which he could be proud of. He ran one third of a growing criminal empire but he would always be the youngest brother no matter how many times he proved himself. Faces of the men he had killed often haunted him at night but they did not frighten him, or fascinate him, half as much as the man standing in front of him right now. With the possible exceptions of Ryan and Phillips, every other man he met was intimidated by his reputation. But not this one. Edwards stood in front of him without any pretence about the fact he was a murderer, a killer, an assassin.

  Equals.

  And it made him feel like a fumbling, rock-hard teenager again. A part of him wanted to roll the dice and see where they would fall; to play Russian Roulette with his own life, if it meant having one taste of the utopia he could see with this man.

  “I said, that’s far enough,” he repeated, but even to his own ears his voice sounded weak.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Edwards purred. “Why don’t we talk about it back at your place?”

  There was a short, tense silence before Moffa spoke again and, when he did, his voice shook with excitement.

  “Tony, get the car started.”

  * * *

  Ryan and Lowerson found their friend sitting listlessly in the back of a squad car. The knuckles on his left hand were grazed and his right hand was completely bandaged up. There were a couple of smaller nicks and cuts on his face and his shirt was speckled with blood that wasn’t his own.

  In short, he looked awful.

  “Jack, do me a favour and grab us a couple of coffees, will you?”

  Lowerson read the meaning in Ryan’s eyes and nodded.

  “No problem.”

  Ryan opened the car door and rapped his hand against the roof.

  “Time to go, champ.”

  Phillips moved as if in slow motion, not saying a word. Ryan put a firm hand in the small of his back and propelled him onward, not stopping to talk to the stragglers hoping to catch a final quote for the early morning edition.

  Only when they were safely ensconced in his car did Ryan put both hands on the wheel and turn to his sergeant.

  “Tell me you had a good reason to go in there, Frank. If there’s anything you need to get off your chest, do it now and do it quickly.”

  Phillips lifted his chin and then did something that Ryan had not expected.

  He covered his face with both hands and began to weep.

  Ryan stared at him much as he might stare at a carnival oddity, and if Phillips had been his usual self he would have bellowed with laughter. Ryan wore an expression falling somewhere between constipation and panic, as he wondered what the hell to do. He had cried himself, of course he had. But it was always in private or, very rarely, in front of Anna. Over and done with quickly and not spoken of again.

  Well, it wasn’t encouraged, was it?

  Boys were supposed to keep a stiff upper lip and the story was no different when they grew up to be men. People said there was no shame in it, that it was a healthy expression of emotion and all that, but life experience had taught him differently.

  Cry baby. Wimp. Pussy.

  Maybe life had taught him the wrong lessons, Ryan realised, and pulled the man in for a hard hug.

  “Alright, Frank. It’ll be alright.”

  Phillips let himself be held by a friend and poured out the heartache he’d tried so hard to contain.

  “Denise is gone. I know it. She’s gone.”

  Ryan clutched him in a bear grip and didn’t move a muscle when Lowerson returned with three steaming hot cups of coffee.

  “No, she’s not. She’s a born fighter, just like you.”

  * * *

  Chief Constable Morrison was waiting for them when Ryan finally turned his car back into the car park at CID Headquarters. It was late, past eleven, and they had lost track of the last time they ate or slept in their own beds. Phillips had purged himself, pouring out the whole sorry tale of what had happened to take him into the viper’s nest, but the damage was already done and it was written all over Sandra Morrison’s face. Her tired eyes passed between them and she didn’t smile; she didn’t even say a word.

  She simply led the way upstairs to her office.

  Once the door closed behind them, she didn’t sit down, nor did she invite them to. Her voice was remote, impersonal, and her words fell like a death knell.

  “Detective Sergeant Phillips, I am formally placing you on suspension pending a full disciplinary inquiry into allegations of gross misconduct and serious breaches of professional standards of behaviour. Your behaviour this evening has discredited our department, the police service, and may have damaged public confidence in the service that we provide. You have not been issued with a police caution but an investigation is ongoing. In the circumstances and until further information comes to light, I am ordering an immediate suspension until further notice.”

  Ryan vibrated with anger but it was no more than Phillips had expected.

  “This is bollocks!” Ryan stabbed a finger in her general direction. “Take a look at his hands. Just look! Moffa has an injury on the right side of his head but Phillips is left-handed for God’s sake! The man pushed a broken glass into his palm to smear it with blood and then smashed it into his own head. He’s deranged!”

  “And the bouncer at the door?” Morrison enquired, without rancour.

  “Threw the first punch!” Ryan said. “And the CCTV will prove it, unless that mental defective has wiped it.”

  Morrison turned to Phillips and felt a tug at her heart strings, but she hadn’t climbed the police hierarchy with a reputation for being a soft touch. She believed in good practice, in order, and in fairness. If she made exceptions for old friends, she would lose the respect of he
r staff.

  “Frank? What do you have to say?”

  Unlike his younger friends, Phillips had lived more of life and developed a certain realism to temper his natural idealism. It meant that he was unsurprised by her decision, and had prepared himself for this outcome hours ago when he had sat quietly in his car outside Buddle’s. He had no regrets; his violence had been controlled and, in his opinion, it had been necessary to obtain the information he now had in his possession. Given the choice, he would do it all over again. But he understood there was a price to pay for everything and it was Morrison’s job to collect.

  There was no price he wouldn’t pay to bring Denise safely home, and that included sacrificing a career he had spent over thirty years building. What was a job, compared with the woman he loved?

  “I’ve nothing else to say, ma’am. I’ve given a full statement to Tyne and Wear Area Command and I place my trust in them to complete a thorough investigation. I went to The Diner to speak to the man who financed The Hacker and I walked away having achieved that.”

  Morrison waited while she swallowed the lump in her throat, until she was sure that her voice betrayed nothing of her inner turmoil.

  “Very well,” she nodded, while Ryan rocked back on his heels in shock and Lowerson stared at Phillips in dumbfounded confusion.

  Morrison directed her parting comments to them.

  “I hardly need to add that there are strict protocols regarding information sharing. If I find out that any of them have been breached, I will not hesitate to instigate further investigations of misconduct. I now have the task of re-building confidence in this department, while the public is already terrified that a killer is on the loose. To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. Don’t give me reason to be even more disappointed.

  “You have been warned.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Jimmy Moffa preferred not to shit in his own backyard. He made a habit of conducting business in the city and commuting home in the evenings, where he could pretend he was an upstanding member of the community and play golf at the weekend. He lived in an elite neighbourhood known as ‘Darras Hall’, on the gentrified western edge of Newcastle and a mere stone’s throw from Northumbria Police Headquarters. It brought him an odd sort of comfort to know that the blues were so close at hand and that his high-tech panic alarm system was rigged up to their offices. They would have to come running if he so much as accidentally tripped the switch, which was a source of endless amusement to him. It thrilled him to know that he walked among the pigs, taunting them with his presence.

  So near, yet always so far away from lock-up.

  In the seventies and eighties, Darras Hall had bloomed into a colony of sorts, where the nouveau riche could help themselves to a taste of the good life. Footballers, entrepreneurs, career criminals, their wives, their husbands, their mistresses and their children mingled with entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and property developers.

  A lot of property developers.

  Not that he minded the blokes who over-extended themselves on bad credit. He’d picked up a brand new, neo-classical mansion with an acre of manicured gardens thanks to a slump in property prices and the greed of one such local businessman, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Moffa’s home was his showpiece, his retreat and most importantly the physical evidence of how successful he had become. He was still young enough to remember the two-up, two-down where he’d been born in Manchester. He remembered the hand-me-downs, the threadbare carpet and the cheap food. The house was always cold and everything had seemed to be an ugly shade of grey; the kind of sepia hue that filmmakers used in artsy films about poverty, written from the comfort of a panelled study.

  His father did what he could to better himself and his family, but the old man had been careless. He’d taught his boys how to hate, how to steal and how to kill, then he’d promptly gone and got himself killed instead.

  Careless old bugger.

  Jimmy could see that same carelessness in his elder brothers. They snorted too much powder and it made them sloppy and arrogant. They lived off the fat of the land, their men grew lazy and mistakes were made while they looked the other way and partied on a yacht in Ibiza. But that wasn’t his way. He never touched anything other than sparkling water and milky coffee. He was known for it, but nobody would dare mock him within earshot and expect to leave without two broken legs.

  Yet, after so many careful, cautious years, he found himself ready to open the enormous lead gates of his new-build mansion to a man who threatened the equilibrium he had worked so hard to maintain. They sat side-by-side in the back seat of his Porsche while Tony pulled into the driveway and Moffa could feel sweat beading his face and neck, for the first time in years.

  What was he doing?

  Keir Edwards was adept at exploiting people’s weaknesses. Since it was a talent they both shared, that made it easy to recognise. Moffa didn’t flatter himself that Edwards wanted him. He was under no illusions that the man hoped to talk his way out of payment or talk his way into a different kind of partnership, perhaps to squeeze him for more money or a ticket out of the country. He suspected the man wasn’t even gay or at the very least bisexual like himself; Edwards was just an opportunist who wasn’t fussy either way.

  But when he looked into those deep midnight eyes, all doubts and sense of self-preservation flew merrily out of the window. He needed to know what it felt like to be with someone of his own distinction. Just once in his life, he wanted to be on equal terms with a man who wasn’t there because he was too frightened to refuse.

  He supposed that made him careless, too.

  * * *

  Anna drove along winding country roads towards the picturesque village of Blanchland, beneath a sky that was speckled with stars. The task force assigned to Operation Ireland was buckling under the strain of an ever-increasing workload, even though much of the grunt-work had been farmed out to neighbouring divisions. It was not just that they hunted a dangerous man who seemed proficient at staying beneath the radar, or that they were tasked with investigating the death of a teenage girl who had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. They faced a loss of public confidence, internal politics within the police hierarchy and the constant knowledge that one of their number was still very much missing.

  Against that backdrop, Ryan remained at the helm to work throughout the night, for the second night in a row. Exhausted and wrung out, Anna had volunteered to drive Phillips home to the temporary accommodation they would all share. She knew that, despite everything that had happened, Ryan trusted nobody more than Phillips and he could rest easy in the knowledge that she would be safe in his hands.Anna had almost given up trying to convince Ryan that she didn’t need protecting or that she was more than capable of fending for herself. It wasn’t a question of gender, or about being a mere civilian. It was a question of survival against an unpredictable foe and she was intelligent enough to know that two heads were better than one when dealing with a threat like that.

  Even better yet, several heads with specialist firearms training.

  “Almost there,” she said quietly, blinking through the darkness to remain alert as she swerved and braked for the hefted sheep that roamed freely through the hills. She had read somewhere about sheep that had never known the indignity of a pen, but had been reared through the generations to keep to a certain patch of land. Sometime over the years a road had been built, cutting directly across the North Pennines, but the sheep didn’t seem to mind the encroachment on their turf.

  “Aye,” Phillips mumbled, lost in thought.

  “What are you going to do now, Frank?”

  Phillips watched the passing landscape and felt insignificant in the universe, a tiny speck in the enormous fabric of life. What would he do? Everything that he could.

  “I’ve been taken off the investigation,” he reminded her, for appearances’ sake.

  “Mm, but nobody said anything about where you could, or couldn’t live.
Did they?”

  Phillips rubbed a hand across the stubble on his jaw and the bristle snagged against the bandage on his hand, reminding him of how he had come by it.

  “I don’t reckon they did.”

  “That being the case, it would hardly be your fault if you, let’s say, accidentally stumbled across some files that Ryan left out. On the kitchen table, for example.”

  Phillips grinned at the passing fields and turned to cast an appreciative look in her direction.

  “I’m sure it happens all the time,” he agreed.

  “And, if you were to read them, it wouldn’t prejudice the investigation because you wouldn’t be obtaining evidence or anything like that, now would you?”

  “You’re a crafty lass,” Phillips said. “I’ve always liked that about you.”

  Anna chuckled, then reduced her speed as they passed a signpost telling them they had reached Blanchland. They admired the shadowed houses and ancient church lit by powerful uplighters, keeping a comfortable silence until Anna pulled up in front of a stone cottage with a painted burgundy door to match all the others in a neat row.

  They got out of the car, stretched their aching muscles and Anna walked around to open the boot.

  “Frank? Give me a hand with this, will you?”

  Phillips loped across and glanced down into the boot, which was filled to the brim with copies of the old case files relating to Keir Edwards, alongside newer files pertaining to the current investigation.

  “When did Ryan get time to swipe these?”

  “He didn’t,” Anna corrected him. “But he did ask me to run up some copies. Luckily for both of you, I wasn’t in the mood for reading about Viking raids today.”

  “Thank Odin,” Phillips declared.

  * * *

  Pizza boxes and empty cans of sugary pop were piled high in the corner of the Incident Room, next to a bin overflowing with rubbish accumulated over the last twenty-four hours. Ryan knew he was already expecting too much of his team to continue working indefinitely; to expect them to do it on an empty stomach would be adding insult to injury. He therefore put a call through to the pizza delivery shop and ordered ten extra-large stuffed crust, fully loaded. It might not be the healthy or nutritious option but when one was engrossed in the task of finding a killer, salad just didn’t cut it.