by Nick Oldham
‘You won’t,’ Henry promised him.
‘I want a phone call.’
‘Who to?’
‘A friend.’
‘Which friend?’
‘Just a friend.’
‘Denied,’ Henry said.
‘I want a doctor.’
‘Alison will take a look at you.’
‘I said a doctor.’
‘She’ll have to do.’
‘And I want a brief.’
‘Who would that be?’
‘Jacobson in Lancaster.’
‘I’ll find the number for you.’
‘And I want a shower. I need to clean off this blood.’
‘That can be arranged.’
‘I want it now,’ Tom insisted and held up his connected wrists. ‘Cut these things off, please. I can’t shower with them on.’
Henry, Flynn and Alison were on the landing. Henry was weak and woozy, the pain in his shoulder severe. Tom had been allowed to use the shower in the en suite off the main bedroom, which was where he presently was. They could hear the sound of the shower running, hear the combi gas boiler firing up to heat the water. Henry leaned against the wall and glanced at his shoulder. Little flowering spots of red were blossoming through the clean shirt like tiny flowers as the peppered wound continued to seep.
‘Are you going to hang around and help out?’ The question was directed at Flynn. ‘Once I know, then I can plan a bit better.’
‘I’m staying,’ Flynn said. ‘He killed my friend.’
‘OK, but no rough stuff. I think he’ll continue to be a handful, but I don’t want any OTT reactions. Everything measured, everything justified. I want to hit him as much as you.’
‘Fine.’
‘Right . . . what I need to do is call all this in and bring control room up to speed, see what the latest weather forecast is and find out how soon we can get assistance. Then I think it’ll probably be easier to get Tom downstairs, cuff him to a chair in the office and keep an eye on both men in one location. Even though I’d like to keep them apart, it’ll be easier for us.’
‘I’ll have that,’ Flynn agreed.
‘Alison.’ Henry turned to her. ‘If you’d be good enough to dress Tom’s cut face, that’d be great. Then you can head back down to the pub. You don’t have to stay here and I imagine you’d rather be down there with Ginny anyway. You’ve done more than enough. Thanks.’
‘Are you saying you don’t want me?’ she said, mock offended.
‘Not at all.’
‘I’ll see. I’ll phone Ginny after I’ve seen to Tom.’
‘OK.’ To Flynn, Henry said, ‘Can you stay up here with one foot in the bedroom? When he’s finished showering, have him get dressed, then bring him down to the office.’
‘Will do.’
‘And thanks,’ Henry said genuinely.
Flynn shrugged modestly. He glanced at Henry and Alison, sensing something between them, which meant he didn’t stand a chance with her. He shrugged mentally as Alison smiled at him.
The two went down the stairs, leaving Flynn at the bedroom door.
In the hallway, Henry paused and turned to her. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound sexist, but I could really do with a coffee. Would you mind seeing if you could rustle something up in the kitchen? I know I sound a bit pathetic, but I need a shot.’
‘Not a problem.’
Henry glanced into the office and saw Callard on the floor by the radiator. After all the action, he had fallen asleep again and was snoring. Something else caught Henry’s eye, but before he could even begin to realize its significance, there was a knock on the front door.
He opened the door.
On the front doorstep stood a young woman, no hat, the snow covering her head and shoulders. She looked forlorn, lost and unsure. Henry thought there was something familiar about her, but could not quite place her. At the same time, his mind was elsewhere, nagging him about what he had seen in the office, and even as the girl was on the step in front of him, he knew he wasn’t giving her his full attention.
‘Yes?’ he asked sharply.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said apologetically.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Are you a policeman?’ Her eyes took in his appearance, widening as they saw his blood-speckled shoulder.
‘Yes.’
‘Please can I come in?’
‘Er, yeah, sure, sorry.’
She stepped into the hallway and stomped the snow off her boots. Henry put her at about twenty years old. She had a pretty face, spoilt slightly by an angular chin and a harsh look in her eyes.
‘What can I do for you?’ Henry asked, hoping it was nothing. He glanced distractedly into the office again, frowning.
‘My name’s Laura Binney.’
Henry forced his attention back to her. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Christie.’ Then he pointed at her and exclaimed, ‘You’ve been sat in the pub all day.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I’m looking for my boyfriend.’
‘Right . . . and?’ A domestic situation was the last thing Henry needed. He estimated it would only be a few more seconds before he was propelling her back out the door. ‘Look,’ he said apologetically, ‘I’m just a bit busy right now. Can it wait?’
Her eyes moistened and searched Henry’s face. Her mouth quivered. ‘No.’
‘I’m afraid it might have to.’
Without further warning, she burst into tears with a loud wail, surprising Henry. ‘Hey, what’s up? Surely it can’t be that bad. You had an argument with him.’
‘It is bad,’ she blubbered through a torrent of tears. ‘I think he’s dead, I think he’s been murdered.’
The words, important as they were, desperately as they had been spoken, did not really register in Henry’s distracted mind. The thing that had caught his eye in the office suddenly made sense to his worn-out brain.
‘Shit – sorry love, hang on one second.’ He held up his right hand, palm out, in an ‘I’ll be back’ gesture, and rushed into the office. There was a cordless telephone on a base on the desk and a tiny red light on the base unit was flashing – blink, blink – indicating the line was in use somewhere else in the house. ‘Sugar,’ Henry uttered, thundered back out of the office, past the emotional and bewildered young woman, who watched him slack-jawed.
Alison came to the kitchen door, a puzzled expression on her face. ‘What is it, Henry?’
‘He’s got a phone up there,’ he said, then yelled upstairs, ‘Flynn – he’s got a phone in there.’ He started to leg it up, jarring his injured shoulder painfully with each footfall.
By the time he reached the bedroom door, Flynn was already at the door of the en suite, trying the handle. ‘Locked,’ he said.
‘Boot it down,’ Henry ordered, crossing to him and glancing at the bedside cabinets, noticing the empty base of a cordless phone on one of them. Somehow Tom had managed to sneak the phone into the shower room.
Flynn stepped back. He had kicked down lots of doors in the past, loved doing it. Something he missed. He lined himself up and flat-footed the door by the gold-plated handle. It was a flimsy interior door and splintered spectacularly as it disintegrated and crashed back on its hinges, which only just stayed screwed to the frame.
Henry pushed his way past and found Tom, who had not even stepped into the shower, though he had turned it on in order to fool Henry. He had the cordless phone in his hand and his thumb was frantically pressing buttons. Henry strode to him.
‘Give me the fucking phone,’ he demanded and tried to snatch it.
Tom jerked it away, thumbed the last button, the phone beeped, and then he handed it calmly to Henry, with a sly grin of triumph.
‘Who’ve you phoned?’ Henry asked.
Tom simply gave a weak shrug. ‘Just exercising my legal right,’ he said smugly.
Nine weapons were laid out on the table. Four pistols, fou
r machine pistols. They varied in make, origin and quality. They had however been oiled, cleaned and loaded with ammunition that had been home produced in a back-street industrial unit in Manchester. Each gun had two spare magazines that had been emptied and reloaded so there was certainty that they were full, even if the quality of the bullets was occasionally suspect.
The ninth weapon was a five-shot sawn-off pump action shotgun, made in China, but with professionally produced cartridges.
Jack Vincent put down the phone. He looked at the other two men, Henderson and Shannon. ‘We’re one down, guys,’ he announced gravely. The men said nothing, their faces impassive. ‘But it makes no odds. We’re still going in because that fool Callard couldn’t do a simple thing, and then we’ll have another job to tack on immediately afterwards.’
‘And that would be?’ Henderson asked laconically.
‘To get the boss out of jail.’
EIGHTEEN
Henry scowled at the cordless handset with infuriation stemming from his stupidity in allowing Tom to sneak the damn thing into the shower with him. He kicked himself inwardly. He was fuming for letting himself be lax, for not doing everything he would have done normally with a prisoner, for being seduced into believing that because Tom was a cop he would play by the rules. Cops, he should have known by now, know how to break the rules. But above all, for not sticking to the motto he had adhered to for the last thirty years: trust no fucker.
‘He managed to delete the number he dialled, too,’ Henry said bitterly. ‘That means it’s not recorded on this handset and it won’t even redial the number . . . bastard!’
‘I don’t like this,’ Flynn said.
The men were sitting on the double bed. Henry had decided to allow Tom to have the shower anyway, but had insisted on making him strip in front of him, then go into the shower and leave the cubicle door open and the en suite door too, whilst he washed himself off. Tom had complied by removing his clothes slowly, dropping them on to a pile in front of Henry, then doing a twirl and making a disgusting remark about not having anything else on him, or would Henry like to have a feel up his arse? It was pretty standard prisoner fare, so Henry held his tongue and watched Tom get into the shower.
He collected the clothing and deposited it on the landing. He knew he was taking an evidential chance by allowing Tom to shower, but he was prepared to take it. Some evidence might get washed away, but in terms of the evidence Henry was slowly amassing, Tom was in a very bad place as it built up. Once Tom was in a proper cell, the work would begin in earnest. At the moment Henry was just making the best of a bad job.
‘I’m not keen either,’ Henry agreed. ‘He makes a call and deletes the number. What does that say?’
‘Come and help me?’ Flynn suggested.
Henry nodded. ‘It’s not exactly Colditz, is it? Tell you what, go and recover that gun from the car, will you, and lock the car up if you can. Then get back here and have a root around.’
‘For what?’
‘He must have had that pistol stashed somewhere, as well as the extra cartridges for the shotgun. Somewhere not too far away. Kitchen, probably. I’ll look after him until you’re back.’
‘Then what?’
‘Handcuffed downstairs, as I said, then batten down the hatches for the night and hope it stops snowing. We need a bit of help here, I’d say.’
‘There’s a lot of we’s in that. I could just piss off and leave you to it.’
Henry could not be bothered to get into this dispute again. ‘You do what you have to do. If you want to go, go. I can’t stop you. I’ve had enough of being wound up.’
The griping pain came again just as Donaldson was falling properly asleep in Ginny’s comfortable girly bed. It was as bad as ever and he sat bolt upright, cursing for even thinking the worst was over. Now he realized he should have starved himself and foregone the wonderful meal provided by Alison.
He gasped, sat up, and hoped it would pass. It did not, then suddenly there was an urgency to visit the toilet.
‘Damn.’
He crossed over to the en suite toilet and seated himself on the loo as the gripe creased him again. Never had he felt so ill and miserable.
Henry stood at the bedroom window and watched Flynn trudge back through the snow, a plastic bag in his hand which, Henry assumed, contained the pistol Tom had used. Flynn saw him, gave a wave and, raising the bag, made a gun shape out of his fingers and pointed at Henry. Having had to face too many guns that day, Henry almost ducked.
‘Henry,’ a voice came from behind. Alison was at the bedroom door, a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. She held it aloft for him and he went to her, took it with grateful thanks and sipped it. ‘Very nice,’ he complimented.
‘They have nice coffee in their kitchen. In fact, they have very nice everything. The kitchen must have cost an absolute fortune. It’s one of those German ones. Twenty thousand at least.’
‘Lucky them – but no more.’
‘No . . . how are you?’
Henry cocked his head and said, ‘Let me think about that . . . Mmm . . . stressed, tired, hurt and extremely worried that there’s more to come.’ She touched his cheek with her fingertips. ‘Other than that, hunky dory,’ he said brightly.
‘What about that young lady downstairs? I told her to sit in the living room, incidentally.’
‘Almost forgotten her . . . the one who thinks her boyfriend has been murdered? What the hell goes on in this village? She was in the Owl earlier. Do you know her?’
‘She was, and I don’t. She turned up today. I don’t think she’s local.’
‘I’ll speak to her once I’ve fastened Tom to a lamp post or something. I don’t really think I’ve time to deal with a domestic dispute, which is what it sounds like.’ The shower turned off, Alison backed out of the bedroom. ‘Thanks for the coffee . . . much needed.’
‘Pleasure.’
Henry stood at the door to the en suite as Tom stepped naked out of the shower and started to towel himself down.
Flynn recovered the pistol from the front passenger footwell of Tom’s Golf. He did a quick search of the rest of the car, found nothing of interest, so locked it up and left it embedded in the lamp post with hazard lights flashing. Another thing that would have to wait until the morning, or when the snow had eased and a recovery vehicle could get through. He handled the pistol carefully, made it safe, and placed it in a plastic bag he’d brought along, one he’d found in the kitchen. Flynn knew guns, having been in the army at sixteen, the Marines at eighteen and the cops at twenty-four. He had spent some time as an authorized firearms officer in the late eighties before gravitating to the drugs branch. He wrapped the bag around the gun and made his way back to the police house.
He spotted Henry observing him from the bedroom window, acknowledged him but grumbled – again – at the thought of the man who he blamed for basically forcing him out of the force. Back then, Flynn had even been to see a solicitor who specialized in employment law, and the guy had been eager to take on the case and sue the constabulary for constructive dismissal. Flynn had backed off at the last moment, a nagging feeling of doubt at the back of his mind. Henry’s earlier revelation about uncovering some real dirt about his past suddenly made Flynn realize in hindsight that it had been a good move not to take the organization to court. At least all those sleazy things had been kept under the carpet and the cloud he’d left under wasn’t actually a hurricane, as it could have been. Although it was bad enough to have been suspected of nicking a million pounds’ worth of drug dealer’s money.
Perhaps Henry wasn’t completely to blame after all.
Not that it made him feel warmer to him. He still disliked him intensely.
Flynn banged the snow off his feet and entered the house. He checked to see if Callard was still attached to the plumbing – yes – and noticed the young lady with the missing boyfriend now sitting primly in the lounge with a coffee in one hand and Roger’s sloppy head on her lap, as she
stroked the old dog.
He also noticed Henry and Alison sharing quiet words at the bedroom door.
Muttering something uncomplimentary about them both under his breath, he went into the kitchen, placed the pistol on the worktop next to the sawn-off shotgun and poured himself a coffee from the filter machine. He leaned with his back to the fridge, sipped the brew, eyes roving the room, wondering if Henry was correct.
Tom had been disarmed of the shotgun in the living room. He had then legged it into the kitchen, but Flynn hadn’t been right on his tail. He estimated that Tom may well have had a good thirty seconds or more alone in the kitchen before Flynn entered. So if Tom hadn’t had the pistol to start with – and Flynn was sure he hadn’t – he’d used that half-minute to get his hands on it. Therefore it must have been hidden within fairly easy reach.
Trouble was, a lot of places were in easy reach. Flynn scanned the room and tried to visualize in his mind’s eye what Tom might have been doing in those precious seconds. Flynn decided on a quick, structured, systematic search instead of trying to second-guess what had happened. Coffee still in hand he walked back to the open kitchen door and began a lazy search, one drawer, one cupboard, at a time; under the sink, in the tiny closet, and on top of the cupboards by climbing on to a chair and peering over the rim. He found nothing, frustratingly. He pursed his lips and placed his coffee down. This time he went through everything more thoroughly, taking his time, going down on his knees and actually moving stuff sideways, removing items to see properly. But then he thought, no. If Tom had managed to get a gun in those few seconds, he wouldn’t have had time to move pots and pans out of the way. He would have put his hand straight on it.
Flynn ran it all back in his mind, then started searching again, but now believing there was nothing to find.
Would he be so stupid as to have a weapon in the kitchen? Especially being married to a sharp-witted woman cop like Cathy, who had obviously stumbled on to something.
Flynn tried to put himself in Tom’s position.
‘If I had an illegal firearm, where would I hide it?’ he muttered out loud.
‘In plain sight?’ suggested a voice behind him. Alison was standing at the door. ‘Maybe somewhere a lady wouldn’t usually look?’
