Firetrap

by David Hodges

  For several years after that he simply drifted, claiming social security benefits, while working – first for a Manchester villain as an enforcer and then as a so-called security officer for a dodgy night club in Liverpool. Despite all the efforts of the then regional crime squad to nail him, he was never tied in to any of the crimes he had committed, but ironically, like Al Capone, he was finally indicted for fraud – in his case for evading income tax and dishonestly claiming benefits while employed by the night club – and he received eighteen months inside as a result.

  But prison had no effect on him and following his release, he returned home, ostensibly to support his father who was developing Parkinson’s disease. Instead, within three months he had smothered the old man in bed to enable him to take over the family business. The death had gone down as natural causes, of course, despite police reservations, and he had initially congratulated himself on a pretty smart move. But that was before he had run the business into the ground and put himself in the position he was in now – no money, a precarious future and a termination contract that had gone badly wrong – something he had to rectify PDQ if he was to maintain his own self-respect as the ultimate killing machine.

  His father’s face and the faces of the rest of his many victims now floated before him like gossamer on a breeze, or foam on a slow-moving sea current. Not that he was distressed by them – psychopaths like him were not troubled by conscience. Instead, he saw those past hits as ‘friends’ who accompanied him on his journeys, a spectral entourage he was confident Kate Hamblin would soon be joining, just as soon as he had worked out the detail on the deadly new plan that was forming in his twisted brain.

  Jury’s was not actually in Bridgwater itself; it was some way outside the town, within a short distance of the curiously named Dumball Wharf. The former petrol station had become a graveyard for crashed motor vehicles and its two to three acres of flattened scrub held several hundred broken shells waiting to be consigned to the huge crusher Ray Jury had installed at the far end of the property.

  Dusk was creeping in across the misty fields that enclosed the place as Lewis carefully eased his Jaguar through the half-closed iron gates and pulled up before the caravan that served as an office.

  Ray Jury was a fat little man, almost as wide as he was tall. He was dressed in a woollen hat, an old donkey jacket, corduroys and what looked like oversize wellington boots. His florid face wore a perpetual frown and his unlit cigarette stub seemed to be stuck permanently to his bottom lip, even when he was speaking in his thick Somerset accent.

  He took in Lewis’s old Jaguar with a look of hunger and seemed disappointed when Hayden’s opening shot revealed that they had not come to dump his car, but to look at Kate’s MX5.

  The sports car was parked with half-a-dozen others on a concrete apron, away from the car graveyard. ‘We close at five,’ Jury warned, after leading them to the vehicle. Then, seeing there was no new business to be had, he waddled away, shaking his head.

  ‘Bit of a mess, eh?’ Lewis commented unnecessarily, looking critically at the crushed bonnet and front wings. ‘You were lucky to get out of this in one piece.’

  But Kate was not interested in his assessment and immediately turned her attention to the gaping hole where the passenger door had once been. The fire service had done a thorough job as usual. Not only had the door been removed, but part of the nearside rear panel as well and most of the hard-top roof had also been cut away. She found her leather coat almost at once, badly ripped, as Hayden had said, and dumped in the passenger foot-well, and her heart was pumping madly as she checked the pockets. She recovered her mobile immediately, apparently intact and still switched on, but when she slipped her hand into the same pocket, she found nothing save a small tear in the lining. She was on the point of withdrawing her hand and checking the other pocket when her probing fingers touched crumpled paper.

  Her heart pounding even harder, she carefully extracted the piece of paper, then, making sure Hayden was still fully occupied, peeled it open and glanced at the contents. At once she breathed a sigh of relief. Thank heavens. It was what she had come for. Panic over.

  ‘What have you got there then?’

  Lewis was standing directly behind her and she quickly slipped the note into her pocket with the mobile. ‘Oh, nothing. Just my mobile and a bill I left in my coat,’ she lied.

  As she straightened up, she saw him frown. ‘Don’t you want your coat then? You came all this way for it.’

  She shook her head. ‘No point. Pity, but it’s ruined. And there’s nothing else here that I want.’

  He threw her a quizzical look, plainly not satisfied with her answer, but he did not pursue it, instead holding out his gloved hand with theatrical aplomb. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Kate,’ he contradicted politely. ‘I found this attached to one of the frame members.’

  Peering into his palm, she found herself staring at a badly split black oblong box, maybe 5x2x1¨ in size, with part of a silvery disc that looked very much like a battery visible through the split. ‘Whatever is that?’

  He grunted. ‘Well, I’m no technical whizz kid, but I have seen something similar to it before and I would say it’s a bug.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Most likely a magnetic GPS tracking device,’ he added, staring about him uneasily.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘Oh I’m serious enough.’ He studied her fixedly. ‘It seems that someone has been keeping very close tabs on your movements, old girl, and I think you owe me an explanation, don’t you?’

  Twister pulled up in front of the padlocked gates and stared sourly at the sign, ‘Jury’s Auto Recoveries’, which seemed to be mocking him in the headlights trained on the seven-foot-high chain-link fence. He was too late; the bastards had gone home. Still, that wasn’t too much of a problem – padlocked gates had never been a barrier to him in the past and they were not going to be now – but he needed to check for any possible opposition first, even though the arrival of the Land Rover, with its headlights blazing, should have been enough to advertise his presence already.

  Leaving the engine running, he climbed from the vehicle and walked right up to the gates, shaking them as noisily as he could several times. Nothing. No sudden blaze of a flashlight, challenging shout from a security officer or growls from a roaming guard dog and the caravan just inside the compound was fast fading into the deepening gloom of early evening, suggesting that the place was as deserted as it looked. Maybe Jury just wasn’t used to receiving nocturnal visitors, so didn’t worry about security.

  Returning to the Land Rover, he opened the back door and rummaged among the selection of tools he kept in the old army ammunition box hidden beneath a couple of tarpaulins. The bolt cutters were old, but still serviceable and it took him just a few minutes to find a weak spot in the padlock chain and snap it in two.

  The gates shuddered as he pushed them open and seconds later he drove through and parked out of sight behind the caravan, switching off the engine and lights and opening the driver’s door to listen again. Still nothing, save the distant drone of an aircraft. For a few moments he watched the flash of the plane’s red navigation light as it dropped towards Bristol Airport on its final approach, then climbed out of the vehicle with his torch and began his search.

  He found the MX5 almost immediately, parked as it was on a concrete hard-standing away from the alleyways of wrecks that stretched right to the back of the site, and it took him even less time to discover that the tracking device was no longer attached to the sports car or lying underneath it. Shit! Either the thing was in the rhyne or had dropped off somewhere en route – was maybe even lying on the floor of the breakdown truck itself. He scowled and lit a cigarette, considering his next move, but he only managed a single pull on the filter-tip before the voice rapped at him from behind. ‘OK, mister, you stay right there!’

  He turned slowly into the flickering beam of a torch – maybe someone should have told his challen
ger to change his batteries – and glimpsed a short, fat figure behind the light.

  ‘I been watching you,’ Ray Jury said triumphantly. ‘You come back here screwing once too often. I’ve already rung the police.’

  ‘Have you indeed?’

  ‘Yeah, an’ you better stay put. I got a shotgun here.’

  The torch was lowered briefly to reveal the barrel of the weapon and Twister took another pull on his cigarette and smiled. ‘So are you going to shoot me?’ he queried and flicked the still glowing ember into the gloom.

  For a second the torch wavered as Jury was briefly distracted by the red spot trailing away into the darkness and that was enough.

  Twister was on him before he realized it, knocking the length of pipe, which had served as his ‘shotgun’, out of his hands and bowling him over on to the concrete hard-standing.

  ‘Now, my friend,’ his antagonist breathed, sitting astride him with one steely hand gripping his throat, ‘you’re going to tell me all you know about that MX5. And as you say the police are on their way, you’ve got exactly two minutes to talk before I kill you.’

  chapter 14

  ‘RIGHT, KATE, WHAT’S really going on?’ Hayden Lewis demanded, dropping into the single armchair and studying her expectantly as she slumped among the cushions on the settee opposite. ‘I have to get back to the nick soon or there’ll be questions.’

  Kate didn’t answer him, instead allowing her gaze to travel round the low-ceilinged living room in which they were now closeted.

  With its oak beams, open log fire and thick pile carpet, the one-bed thatched cottage in the tiny village of Burtle was exactly the sort of place she had always imagined someone like Hayden would choose for his pad. Horse brasses and other ornaments winked from the hearth and chimney breast and on the bowed shelves of the bookcase occupying the whole of one wall, leather-bound books charged into each other in the glorious confusion of a routed army. Outside on the Levels it was now sleeting and the leaded-light windows rattled under the onslaught of a filthy night that funnelled its icy detritus down the wide chimney, spitting into the maw of the open fire with the continuous ‘phut, phut’ of a silenced pistol.

  Kate cradled her half empty brandy glass in both hands, still feeling the warming effects of the fiery spirit spreading through her body. She knew she shouldn’t be drinking after what she had been through – especially at this early hour – and Hayden himself had been unhappy about giving her the brandy in the first place, but, as she had pointed out, it was her body, so her decision. What the hell was she doing in his cottage anyway? She should have gone home straightaway instead. Trouble was, passing out in his car and refusing to return to the hospital for fear of running into Roz Callow had left her with little alternative but to humour him and accept his offer of hospitality. But for how long, that was the point? Not that she was given much time to ponder the point.

  ‘Well, are you going to answer my question, or not?’ Lewis snapped, breaking in on her reverie. ‘What is going on?’

  Kate’s gaze returned to his face and after a moment’s hesitation, she rummaged in her pocket and produced the note she had retrieved for Terry Duval, holding it out limply in front of her.

  He leaned forward to take it, looking puzzled even after he had read it twice. ‘I – I don’t understand,’ he said.

  Kate took another gulp from her glass and wriggled painfully into a more upright position. ‘You will,’ she retorted and quietly – at first tremulously but gaining in strength as she progressed – she told him everything.

  There was an awkward silence for several long seconds after she had finished and Lewis’s face was white in spite of the heat of the room as he sat rigidly in his seat gaping at her.

  A log on the fire exploded and sprayed burning embers on to the wide stone hearth. Neither of them took any notice.

  Lewis finally closed his mouth and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Kate, what on earth have you done?’ he whispered. ‘You could be crucified for this.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ she choked, then clenched her teeth tightly together in frustration, as she leaned forward. ‘But what was I supposed to do? Bloody Nora, Hayden, the knives were out for me – I had to do something.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’m just sorry I had to involve you.’

  He made a face, drained his glass and refilled it from the bottle on the coffee table. ‘So am I, old girl,’ he said, wheezing slightly as the spirit went down a lot faster than he had intended. ‘But what’s done is done. It’s what we do now that matters.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  He took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘I really don’t know. The best thing would be to unload the whole lot on Davey and seek forgiveness.’

  She emitted a short laugh, instantly regretting it as pain gripped her chest again. ‘Oh you mean, hang myself out to dry. No thanks, Hayden. That isn’t even close to a solution.’

  He frowned and, reaching in his pocket, produced the broken tracking device. ‘I must admit,’ he said, ‘I am more than a bit curious about this little baby. After all, Davey or Callow may privately believe you – er – let your team mates down—’

  ‘Thanks, Hayden.’

  He flushed again. ‘Well, you know what I mean – but that wouldn’t justify putting you under electronic surveillance.’

  She shook her head. ‘This has nothing to do with them, Hayden. The person who put that tracking thingumajig on my car is obviously the same one who tried to run me off the road; that’s how he was able to keep tabs on me in the first place.’

  He looked even more worried now. ‘Then that certainly raises the stakes, old girl. This chap must be someone with a pretty good knowledge of electronic surveillance kit and, more importantly, he must want to snuff you out pretty badly.’

  She nodded now and stared at him. ‘Which proves my point, doesn’t it? The killer isn’t Duval at all. He was telling the truth when he said he was set up.’

  He still looked more than a little dubious. ‘Well, it goes some way towards it, I agree, but Duval could still be our man; might even have written this note himself as future insurance.’

  ‘I’ve already considered that possibility, but it doesn’t hold water. Why didn’t he just write the note after absconding and hand it to me when we met? Sending me back to his place to retrieve it was just too elaborate to be a fix.’ Sensing his continuing scepticism, she raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Look, Hayden, we went through all this at the hospital. I actually saw the driver of the Land Rover when he cannoned into me, remember? And, as I said before, he was nothing like Duval to look at and he had a full beard.’

  ‘But why would this chap want to kill poor old Andy Seldon and Alf Cross in the first place?’

  ‘If I knew that, I’d be halfway to solving the bloody crime. Anyway, I’m not so sure it is just him.’

  ‘What the devil do you mean by that?’

  She stared at him, hesitating for a moment. ‘What if he’s just the hired killer? What if someone else behind the scenes is actually pulling the strings?’

  ‘Like who, for instance?’

  She shrugged. ‘Could be an organized crime thing – someone either Andy or Alf upset. But, more importantly, how come the killer knew the surveillance van would be there at that time on that particular night?’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Oh come on, Hayden, think! Someone within the organization must have blabbed about the job. We’re dealing with a serious leak here – a hit set up on the basis of intelligence given out either deliberately or unintentionally by someone in the know.’

  Lewis snorted. ‘You mean a member of the team? Do me a favour, Kate. Let’s keep this thing in perspective, shall we? Not venture into the realms of fantasy.’

  ‘Why should it be fantasy? Gangland killings go on all the time and institutional corruption is often a contributory factor.’

  ‘Not in rural Somerset it isn’t. As far as I’m aware, neither Andy or A
lf have ever worked on anything other than local crime stuff – and certainly not any NCS or SOCA2 investigations. And as for the idea that someone at Highbridge nick could be in league with our killer that is too ridiculous for words.’

  She made an irritable face. ‘Ridiculous or not, I think there’s a lot more to this affair than a local grudge killing. In fact, it has all the hallmarks of a professional hit.’

  He sighed his exasperation. ‘You’d be well advised to come up with something a bit more rational than that, Kate,’ he warned, ‘especially if you’re to keep Roz Callow at bay. Once she gets her claws into you, you’re done for.’

  ‘Not if I can bring home the bacon, I’m not.’

  ‘What, Duval, you mean?’ He gave a cynical laugh. ‘You don’t seriously believe he will hand himself in once he has the note, do you?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. It’s no good to him otherwise.’

  ‘It’s not much good to him on its own anyway. I’m just surprised he thought it would be.’

  ‘Does that matter? As long he thinks it could get him off the hook, he has a reason for turning himself in.’

  ‘I admire your faith.’ Lewis picked up the tracking device again. ‘And this? What do we do with this? Ideally, we should hand it in for forensic analysis—’

  ‘No way. That would really get Callow’s nose going and the whole thing could unravel around me.’

  Lewis nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right, but we do need to have it checked out. There might be a print or two on it – apart from mine, that is. Could help us to identify your would-be assassin.’ He sighed and slipped the device back into his pocket. ‘Leave it with me. There’s someone in SOCO who owes me a favour….’

  Suddenly the worry was back in her eyes. ‘Do you think that’s wise? You could drop yourself in it.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m already “in it”, as you put it, Kate. Might as well go the whole hog. But, more importantly, what are we going to do about your present situation? I don’t like the idea of you being in that flat on your own with this character on the loose.’