by Conrad Jones
Ashwan reached the centre of the bridge supports, and he could see a ledge about two feet wide. He stepped onto it where it met the embankment, and began to sidestep his way beneath the structure. His progress was steady, and he looked down. He was directly above the rail tracks. The distant engine noise was becoming louder by the minute. He looked to the east and he could see the lights of an approaching diesel tractor unit. The engine noise was booming, louder and louder as it neared. Ashwan couldn’t understand why the train carriages that it pulled were in darkness. He could see the train behind the engine, yet it was black. The train seemed to be moving in slow motion, sluggish and certainly in no rush to keep to a timetable. The mobile phone beeped and vibrated. He reached for it and looked at the screen.
DROP THE BAG ONTO THE FIFTH CARRIAGE. TOUCH THE PHONE AND HE DIES.
“What about Mamood?” Ashwan shouted in the darkness. His voice was lost as the diesel locomotive trundled towards the bridge. As he stared at the train, he could see that the carriages were open and piled high with a black substance. “Coal? The train is full of coal.”
Ash laughed nervously in the dark. His mind raced through his options at a million miles an hour. The engine roared beneath him and his mouth and nostrils filled with fumes.
“Where is my son?” he screamed into the night. The second wagon went by. If he dropped the money then it was irretrievable, and the kidnappers hadn’t told him where Mamood was. If he didn’t drop the money then his son would be killed, he had no doubt about that. The third wagon full of coal roared beneath him. He slipped the rucksack off, and lowered it towards the train. “Where is my son?” Ash shouted as he dropped the bag of money onto the fifth wagon. It disappeared from his sight in a second, and he was left alone in the darkness as the train rattled on into the night.
Chapter Forty-Five
Lana Pindar
Lana twisted her wedding band and turned off the flat screen television with its remote. The wind and rain hammered at the bedroom window. The howling wind intensified the feeling of emptiness and loneliness that she felt. Mamood was missing and Ashwan was out there trying to find him. The death of his business partners was still sinking into her already befuddled mind. They had known each other since their school days and stayed together through their adult lives, with Malik as the lynch pin. The police had arrived at her front door looking for Ashwan yesterday morning. They had an arrest warrant, but they wouldn’t tell her why they wanted to talk to him. She told them he had gone away for a few days. She didn’t know why she lied, but she did. She knew that he was with Malik; that’s where he always was. Ashwan was the only hope she had of getting her son back alive, and he was no use to her in a police cell.
If that wasn’t bad enough, they returned with bomb squad officers and searched her car for explosives. They even checked her mobile phone for a bomb. They looked for a bomb in her car or her phone; what was going on? Whoever Ash really was, she wanted nothing to do with it. They were finished, of that she was absolutely certain. She planned to see a solicitor and file for divorce.
‘Why do you want a divorce, Mrs Pindar?’
‘Oh, that’s an easy one to answer. I’ve just found out my husband is a gangster. He sells drugs, pimps prostitutes, smuggles arms, and he can also have dead teenagers removed from our lawn,’ she thought.
She checked her mobile for the tenth time in as many minutes. There were no missed calls or messages. Mamood was missing, her husband had been questioned by the police, and his business associates were being systematically blown up. A tear ran down her cheek as she put her head on the pillow. She lay fully clothed on the bed that she had shared with her husband for nearly twenty years. A man she had loved and respected, once, but no longer. He was an imposter, a liar, a murderer even?
The doorbell rang and she sat up so fast that she felt dizzy. Her stomach tensed and filled with butterflies, and her throat felt dry suddenly. She looked at her watch. It was an Armani, a present from Ashwan for her wedding anniversary one year. The time was three in the morning. Ash still had his keys. She could tell that he had been home that afternoon sometime: his dirty washing was in the laundry basket. Would the police call this late at night? If they had bad news, they would.
Lana jumped off the bed and headed for the bedroom door. Ashwan’s dressing gown was hanging from it. The smell of Aramis drifted to her as she walked by. She switched on the lights in the hallway and looked towards the front door. There were no silhouettes or shadows there. She ran down the stairs and looked through the glass. Her heart sank and she felt weak at the knees. She wanted to cry out but she couldn’t. Her throat restricted and she felt nauseous. Lana pulled the bolt on the door and threw it open.
“Mamood,” she screamed, eventually finding her voice.
“Mum,” he said. He stood with a blanket wrapped around him. He was soaked to the skin and the wind threatened to rip it from his shoulders.
“Are you hurt?” She held his face in her hands, and pulled him inside out of the elements.
“No, Mum,” he sobbed. He was still in shock. “They said bad things about my dad.”
“Where is he?” Lana asked herself. “How did you get back here?”
“They put me in a van and then dropped me off down the road.”
“I wonder where your father is?” Lana didn’t think that she should care anymore, but she did. She looked across the lawns and down the road, but Ashwan wasn’t there.
Chapter Forty-Six
Ashwan
Ashwan Pindar climbed out of the tunnel and he looked at the mobile phone the kidnappers had given to him. There were no messages to tell him where his son was. The money and the crack were gone, but there was no sign of his son anywhere. They had stuck to their part of the deal, and delivered the money and drugs. Where was his son? He had to get out of there quickly. The rain drilled into him as he emerged, and he climbed up the steep embankment towards the motorway. He couldn’t stumble back across the fields; it was too far and too dark. Exhaustion had caught up with him. The motorway above him was the easy answer. He reached the barrier and tumbled over it. Headlights glared at him from both directions. The traffic was relatively light but the noise of the engines was still deafening.
Ashwan knew that the next exit was about a mile away to the west. That was the nearest point that he could be picked up. He dialled Malik.
“Where are you?” Malik answered. He sounded annoyed.
“I am on the hard shoulder of the motorway, about a mile from junction nine.”
“Why didn’t you tell us where you were?”
“They said they would kill him if I touched the keypad.”
“Where have you left the money and the drugs?”
“I had to drop it onto a coal train from under a bridge. It must be headed for Fiddlers Ferry power station.”
“Did you get Mamood?”
“No.”
The line went dead as Malik smashed his iPhone to pieces on the dashboard of his BMW. He wasn’t angry about the money and the drugs; it was the fact that they had been tricked again, and they’d missed the opportunity to trap his tormentors.
Ashwan put the handset into his pocket and headed west towards the exit. His own mobile was inside his jacket, and it began to vibrate. He pulled it out and checked the screen. It was his wife, Lana.
“Lana, thanks for ringing,” he began to waffle. He took the fact that she’d called as a sign that she was coming to terms with the situation, but he was wrong.
“Mamood is home, Ash, and I want a divorce. This will never happen again.” Lana had never been more determined in her life. The safety of her son was paramount.
“He’s home?” Ashwan looked to the sky and said thank you. His relief was indescribable. “Lana, I can make this right.”
“Your son was kidnapped because of who you are and what you do. Your partners are dead. What will happen next, Ashwan?”
The line went dead and he stared at the screen for a while before
trying to redial. It clicked straight to answer phone. He tried again, same thing. Ash clicked Malik’s number and dialled him: at least the news that Mamood was safe might calm him down a bit. The call didn’t connect because Malik’s handset was smashed to smithereens in the footwell of his BMW. He would have to deal with Malik when he returned. Mamood was his priority now. Mamood and Lana. He had to try to rebuild things back to the way they were. He jumped as a horn blared loudly behind him. Headlights approached him, but they weren’t on the main carriageway. They were on the hard shoulder. The vehicle slowed down as it approached and he squeezed against the barrier to let it draw level with him. It was marked with green chevrons down the side panels, and Highway Patrol was printed above them. It was a transit van, with a crew cab at the front and a sliding door at the side which accessed a van section. The passenger window went down and the driver touched his peaked hat as he spoke.
“Are you okay, sir?”
“I’m stranded, it’s a long story.”
“Breakdown?”
“Something like that,” Ashwan replied.
“Do you want a lift to the next exit?”
“Yes please.” Ashwan was relieved. He opened the passenger door and climbed in to the van. The driver was fat. “Thanks for your help.”
“Oh, it’s my pleasure.” Richard Bernstein put the vehicle into first gear and pulled away from the hard shoulder.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The Major Investigation Team
“Sorry to wake you at this time in the morning, guv,” Will Naylor sounded like he had just woken up too. His voice was thick with sleep. “We’ve got reports of another explosion.”
“Where?” Alec reached for the glass of water that he kept on the bedside table and he checked the time on his watch.
“Up at Sutton Manor colliery. They think it was near the site of The Dream, guv.”
“What the bloody hell is going on?”
“That’s not all, guv. I’ve called the DI at the scene, Tom Chance from the St Helens nick.” Will paused.
“I know him.”
“They got reports of an explosion from residents nearby and several calls from drivers on the 62 reporting a fireball shooting into the air above the statue.”
“Well, it sounds like an explosion.”
“They are bringing in portable lights to help search the area.”
“Have they found anything?”
“Not yet, it’s too dark and the rain isn’t helping, but there is a Porsche parked in the car park at the bottom of the hill, guv. It belongs to Ashwan Pindar.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” Alec tried to make sense of the pieces of the puzzle, but it was a mess. They were missing something. His wife moaned and sat up. She was used to these late night phone calls. It was one of the downsides of being married to a police detective. She climbed out of bed and pulled on her towelling robe. Alec noted that her legs were still in good shape, and her behind was still firm. All that time and effort in the gym had paid off. She went downstairs and put the kettle on. Alec wouldn’t go back to sleep now that he had been disturbed. His mind would be too active to sleep. She grabbed two mugs and made decaffeinated coffee for her and a strong regular brew for Alec.
“There’s no sign of him yet, but listen to this. We put an officer on the Pindar residence today. In the early hours of this morning, he called in to say that a teenage boy had walked into the front garden and knocked on the front door. He was soaking wet and wrapped in a blanket.”
“Pindar has a son, right?”
“Right, guv. Mamood Pindar.”
“Did he speak to the mother?”
“She wouldn’t speak to him, guv. She said everything was fine and slammed the door in his face.”
“None of this makes any sense, Will.”
“What time are you going in?” Will asked, already knowing what the answer was.
“I’m on my way to The Dream, it’ll be light in an hour or so.”
“I’ll meet you there, guv.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Nick
Nick waited patiently as the coal train approached. It was taking fuel to Fiddlers Ferry, a huge coal-powered electricity-generating station situated on the banks of the River Mersey. The rail track was dedicated to keeping the furnaces burning. The coal train slowed down as it neared and the brakes squealed as they struggled to stop a thousand tons of moving steel. The wagons clanked as they rolled over the points. A signal showed red. The power station was fed by a single rail track. That meant that there was a siding where arriving trains, fully loaded with fuel, parked so that departing empty wagons could be shunted away. Nick waited for the train to stop completely before making his way to the fifth wagon. He reached into the long grass, which grew on the embankment, and retrieved an aluminium ladder. The ladder had been hidden months earlier when they were prepping their plan. It took mere seconds to retrieve the haversack and hide the ladder back in its place.
Nick climbed halfway up the embankment and disappeared into the long grass. To anybody watching it was as if he’d been swallowed up by the grassy slope. He ducked low and walked through a concrete tunnel that led to a storm drain under the embankment. The huge drain ran through concrete pipes four metres in circumference for half a mile, where it joined the river beneath the colossal cooling towers at the power station. The water ran fast, but it was only a metre deep. Nick slipped a head torch on and switched on the light. He slipped the haversack on and dragged a plastic resin canoe towards the water. Twenty minutes later, he was in the Highway Patrol van with the Bernstein brothers. The unconscious body of Ashwan Pindar was laid out and handcuffed in the back of the van, and there was a faint whiff of chloroform lingering in the air.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Dream
Alec Ramsay pulled into the car park that serviced the old colliery. A uniformed officer stood guard at a yellow tape, trying hard to keep back a growing throng of reporters. The Shah Corporation bombings had hit the news, and every satellite channel and red-top newspaper in the country was carrying the story. It was fast becoming the hot story across the globe, as the press blamed right-wing extremists for the anti-Muslim bombing campaign. Alec was under growing pressure from the commander to come up with a line of enquiry that he could communicate to the press. Right now Alec didn’t have one to give him. Malik Shah was the victim in the press, yet Alec knew that he was the cause of the problem, everything revolved around him. As he crawled through the reporters, camera flashes were like strobe lighting in the dawn glow. The sun was coming up.
Alec ignored the questions shouted at him through the glass, and he waved at the constable as he lifted the tape. Across the car park he spotted Pindar’s Porsche. Forensic officers were crawling all over it and a white gazebo was in the process of being erected above it to shield it from the prying cameras. At the top of the hill, The Dream hung above the trees, almost floating in the dawn mist. Alec sighed as he brought his Shogun to a halt. Whatever the missing pieces of this puzzle were, he needed to identify them quickly. The case was getting away from him. Will pulled up in his Audi TT convertible. It suited him down to the ground.
They exited their vehicles and DI Tom Chance spotted them and headed towards them. He grabbed a couple of paper suits from a crime-scene support vehicle and jogged over to them.
“Superintendent,” he greeted Alec with a handshake.
“DI Chance,” Alec returned the greeting. Will and Tom exchanged handshakes and nodded a silent hello. The detectives struggled into their protective clothing while DI Chance briefed them. “The Porsche belongs to Ashwan Pindar, as you know. We’ve spoken to his wife this morning, and she says that he isn’t home.”
Alec looked up the hill and wondered if Ashwan Pindar was up there somewhere. Was it his teenage son that had arrived back at the family home in the early hours of the morning wrapped in a blanket? Why would Pindar visit the statue at night unless he was meeting somebody subversively? What
was he doing there in the first place, and why would anyone plant a bomb there? They walked towards the Porsche.
“There’s nothing untoward about the Porsche so far, except that the driver’s seat was left forward. Either a passenger climbed out or the driver removed something from the backseat. It’s a different story up the hill though.”
“What have you got so far?” Alec was keen to start slotting the evidence into the relevant boxes in his mind.
“We’ve found one fatality, but we can’t identify him yet because of his injuries.”
“Is there any ID on the body?” Alec asked.
“We haven’t found the body yet, guv. Well not all of it.”
“What have you found?” Will pressed the issue. He was as frustrated as the superintendent was about their lack of progress. Every avenue they went down was a dead end.
“We have an arm, and a left foot. The skin is dark, probably Asian or Middle-Eastern ethnicity.” Tom Chance pointed to the Porsche as they climbed the hill. “At first I thought the chances are that it’s Pindar, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Why?”
“See the markers there?” Tom pointed to numbered yellow markers that were dotted along the path. “There are nine millimetre shell casings all over the place.”
Alec stopped and looked around. There were dozens of markers, clumped in six or seven different parts of the hill. It appeared that multiple gunmen had stood still and fired up the hill at an unseen enemy. As they reached the clearing, the markers became more numerous. The giant bust towered above them as they neared it. The white face was scarred with a black scorch mark the shape of a candle flame. It stretched from the chin to just above the forehead.
