Stolen

by Paul Finch

  At last, O’Grady allowed himself to relax, but only a little. He turned and peered through the back window. Like all the others, it was ingrained with dirt, but he could just about fix on the entrance to the arched passage he’d emerged from. There was no one there. Likewise, he hadn’t heard anyone else climbing aboard while he’d been waiting here in his seat. The bus jolted again, vibrating noisily as it ascended through the gears, picking up speed along the empty road. His relief grew. Inevitably, it slowed again as it approached the first set of lights, but he was already several hundred yards from where he’d begun, and anyway, the light changed to green as they drew close, and they rumbled through, picking up more speed.

  O’Grady had no clue which direction they were headed in. This was one of the night services, so no doubt its final destination lay in some distant part of Greater Manchester. But he was okay with that. Anything to get away from the centre of Crowley.

  The problem was, now that he considered it, what did he do afterwards?

  Feeling rested a little, he tried to get his thoughts in order. Grabbing himself a taxi, assuming he could even find one at this late hour, would probably be a no-no. As an ex-copper, he knew that many organised crime groups had their hooks into mini-cab firms, so that would be a trail they could follow. He thought about catching a train, though again that depended whereabouts on the outskirts of town he finished up.

  He glanced through the window, unable to identify the route. They were still in the town centre, passing Crowley Little Theatre on the right, and then Telson’s Van Hire. He sat back, still trying to think. There’d be no local trains running until six o’clock at the earliest, but that wasn’t a disaster. There were plenty of unmanned stations in Manchester’s suburbs, and if he ended up near one of those, there’d be nothing to stop him going onto the platform, crashing on a bench and grabbing the first service that came along, riding whichever way it took him and hooking up with a national line later on. He’d be down at the other end of the country by noon.

  O’Grady had now earmarked a couple of country hotels where he might lie low. Places down in the Cotswolds and the West Country, where he’d spent time as a boy. Fleeting memories of happy holidays during his youth came back to him – only for the bus to lurch violently as it swung a right-hand turn, almost toppling him into the aisle.

  He levered himself upright, grabbing hold of the bar at the top of the seat in front. Glancing through the window on the right again, he saw a spread of playing-fields. He raised himself higher, to look through the windows on the left, and there spied another of those bleak, depressing housing estates for which Crowley was so famous. God, it was a crap-hole, this place. No worse than many other parts of Manchester, if he was truthful, despite its reputation, but so typical a slice of modern urban Britain with its gridlocked traffic, boarded shops and desolate blocks of flats.

  They swung around another sharp corner, this time heading left. They were now onto the estate, it seemed, and O’Grady was puzzled. Another sharp left followed, and then a sharp right. He was jarred from side to side as the heavy vehicle negotiated narrow streets rendered even narrower by double parking. A hefty clunk echoed up from the lower deck. If O’Grady didn’t know better, he’d have fancied they’d clipped a car.

  He moved to the window again, seeing medium-rise apartment blocks sailing past at what felt like reckless speed.

  What the hell was going on?

  Though he’d wanted to keep a low profile, to the point that he’d let the bus take him wherever it needed to go, he now knew that he had to find out where that was. He made his way along the aisle, swaying as the bus again veered around corners. Near the top of the stairway, he halted, glancing outside. A street-sign had just flickered by: Turton Avenue.

  If that was the same Turton Avenue O’Grady knew, it meant they were on Hatchwood Green, which was probably the best example of a sink estate in Northwest England, and beyond which lay only the Aggies, a district of post-industrial spoil land once belonging to Darthill Colliery. If memory served, there was a bus terminus over that way, at the bottom of Pimbo Lane, close to the ruins of the old Bleachworks. And if that was where O’Grady would have to get off, he’d be a long way from a railway station. He’d be a long way from anything.

  Irritated as well as confused, he continued along the aisle.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, trying to draw the attention of the guy at the front.

  This chap was obviously heading somewhere, so maybe O’Grady was wrong. Maybe the bus would bypass the Aggies and head on into Bolton. But he had to know. He couldn’t just keep making and breaking plans on a whim – not when his life depended on it.

  ‘Hello.’ He came up next to the passenger at the front. ‘I need to know …’

  The words died in his throat.

  The guy was early middle-aged, with short, spiky, grey hair and a bristle-covered jaw. He wore a brown uniform, but the tunic, which had bus driver identification badges down its left lapel, hung open on a crumpled, spittle-stained shirt. His eyes, reddened with broken capillaries, bugged horribly from their sockets, and his mouth, still coated with bloody froth, yawned at impossible width. As the bus changed direction again, his head lolled, exposing a livid bruise, so purple in parts that it was almost black, completely encircling his neck.

  Even though O’Grady had seen death before, he couldn’t help screaming. It wasn’t so much the horror of what had been done to this guy, it was the horror of what it meant.

  He descended the spiral stair in leaps, and at the bottom almost fell over. The bus had now emerged from the housing estate and had already passed the point on Darthill Road where it became Pimbo Lane. They must be doing 50mph, the vehicle rattling and banging and bouncing over dips in the road. O’Grady staggered towards the front, shouting incoherently, where, to his astonishment, he saw that the driver was a young girl, no more than nineteen years old. She wore black military-style apparel, her blonde hair hanging in sweaty ringlets over a face that was puffy and swollen.

  ‘What in God’s name?’ he shouted, unsure whether he could be heard through the Perspex wall shielding her from the passenger area.

  She grinned slyly as she turned the heavy wheel, the bus screeching around a wide bend. It was all O’Grady could do not to fall full length. He steadied himself and shouted at her again. ‘Stop this crate! Stop this damn crate!’

  She didn’t even look at him, just grinned all the more.

  He pulled the Taurus and pointed it at her with both hands. ‘Stop this bus now, or I’ll kill you.’

  She ignored him. She wasn’t to know that he lacked bullets, of course, but maybe was taking a chance that the Perspex had been reinforced against robbers and other hoodlums. Only a narrow slot, where money was exchanged, allowed actual access, and that was at waist-level, so he could hardly point a gun through that.

  ‘Stop the damn bus, you bitch!’

  Again, as often had been the case in O’Grady’s life when his blood was up, he made errors. On this occasion, as he raged at her and hammered the butt of the pistol on the Perspex, he didn’t notice the drape on the under-stair baggage compartment slither back and a second female slide out from it while at the same time drawing a taut wire from the big, chunky ‘KGB watch’ that she’d purchased on the Dark Web.

  He only realised she was there at all when she looped the high-tensile necklace over his head – and cinched it tight.

  Chapter 32

  ‘Lucy, you going home?’

  Lucy saw Stan Beardmore crossing the hospital car park towards her. The truth was, she wasn’t sure whether she was going home or not. She glanced at the Mondeo she’d taken from the CID car pool earlier. She supposed she’d been about to get into it, but Mick Shallicker had only dropped her off two minutes ago, and she was still in a daze.

  ‘I’m sorry, Stan … what?’

  ‘I said, are you going home?’

  ‘Erm … maybe.’

  ‘And maybe not.’ He seemed uncharac
teristically flustered. ‘I’m sorry about this, Luce, but none of us are going home yet.’

  ‘Okay …’

  ‘You’ve heard there’s been another shooting?’

  ‘Erm … no.’

  ‘It’s almost certainly a sequel to the one at the restaurant. Gunshots reported in the vicinity of the bus station, no actual details. But the firearms unit who were on their way here have now been diverted there.’

  ‘Okay …’

  ‘You all right?’

  Lucy was still so fazed by the revelations of the last few hours, and the new round of subterfuge it would plunge her into, that the full gravity of the DI’s words hadn’t yet struck home.

  ‘Yeah, sure … it’s just been a long day.’

  ‘Well, like I say, we’ve no firearms on the plot at present, so I’m getting extra uniforms in to cover the hospital perimeter. I could use you too, so get it together. Come on then.’

  She hadn’t noticed that he was already walking back towards the hospital. She followed him, trying to put everything else out of her mind, though it wasn’t easy.

  ‘I thought it’d kick off as soon as I heard it was McCracken who’d been shot,’ he said.

  ‘Have you let Mr Mullany know?’ Lucy asked. Chief Superintendent Charles Mullany was November Division’s overall commander.

  ‘I have,’ Beardmore confirmed. ‘For all the bloody use he’ll be.’

  ‘Should help us get everyone mobilised more quickly.’

  ‘Yeah, when he eventually gets here.’

  They rounded the corner of the building. It was vaguely disconcerting, now that Lucy knew what was happening, to see no police presence in front of the Intensive Care entrance.

  ‘Brentwood and Tooley are checking the other doors,’ Beardmore said, as though reading her thoughts. ‘This place is a sieve in security terms. At least one of them’s coming back here at the first opportunity, though, to give you support. In the meantime, go through into ICU. It’s got an internal security door, which works. You don’t have to let anyone in you don’t like the look of.’

  ‘Is there a way through to IC from other parts of the hospital?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Yeah, but, like I say, we’re currently making sure everything’s locked down.’

  They entered by the main door and walked through the waiting area, passing the chairs where Lucy had held her tense conflab with Cora.

  ‘We’ve still not updated the news outlets on McCracken’s progress,’ Beardmore said. ‘As far as they know, he could be stone dead. That’s probably a good thing. Lessens the chances of whoever hit him the first time coming back for another pop. Least, I hope it does.’

  The night nurse, whose name badge read ‘Janice Reynoldson’, was waiting on the other side of the glass door. On seeing Beardmore, she hit a buzzer and the door clicked open. Beardmore passed through, Lucy in tow. He made sure to close the door behind them.

  ‘Janice,’ he said, ‘this is DC Lucy Clayburn. I’m posting her in here with you till we get additional units. You okay with that?’

  Nurse Reynoldson looked wide-eyed and frightened but nodded.

  ‘Like I said before,’ Beardmore added, ‘the chances of anyone turning up here are highly unlikely. No one even knows that McCracken and his lady friend are being cared for in this unit. So all you guys need to do is make sure they don’t find out. Any phone-calls, don’t say anything. If there are any, they’ll most likely be the press – and they’ll be easily dissuaded, because they’ll be trying every hospital in Manchester, just to see. If anyone does turn up here, anyone you’re not sure about … in fact anyone at all who you don’t recognise, Lucy, don’t let them in. It’s that simple.’

  ‘Suppose, I mean …’ Nurse Reynoldson’s eyes widened even more as she wrestled with the potential problems that might still arise. ‘I mean … if they’ve got guns?’

  Beardmore turned to the glass door. ‘Is this thing shockproof?’

  ‘Yes,’ the nurse said. ‘I mean, if someone bangs a trolley into it, or throws a chair. But bullets … I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s very unlikely it’ll come to that.’ But Beardmore’s expression was grave, and he hadn’t summoned a police firearms team to the hospital for nothing.

  ‘If someone tries to shoot their way in here, it won’t happen quickly,’ Lucy cut in. ‘We’ll easily have time to get on the blower.’

  ‘That’s true,’ the DI agreed. ‘Okay … I’m going to find out what everyone else is doing.’ He buzzed the door back open and stepped out into the waiting area. ‘You’ve got an alarm button behind your desk, I take it, Janice?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Good … don’t hesitate if anything bothers you. I know that’ll only call your own security personnel, but they can get a message to us quickly.’

  ‘But we won’t need to,’ Lucy said, attempting reassurance. ‘I promise you, Janice … no one in the history of Britain has ever tried to shoot their way into a hospital.’

  Beardmore nodded again, pleased that Lucy was taking charge, then walked away. Lucy shut the glass door behind him and ensured that it was closed properly.

  She turned back to the nurse. ‘Any chance of a coffee, or something?’

  The nurse regarded her with a strange kind of fascination, as if she couldn’t quite believe that Lucy was being so calm.

  ‘Seriously,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s the middle of the night and I’ve been on all day. I need something to pep me up.’

  Still not smiling, the nurse nodded and sidled around her desk, passing through a door into a back room. Lucy turned and scanned the reception area. It wasn’t hugely different from other parts of hospitals she’d visited: pale cream-coloured walls, a floor that was tiled in light green, handwash dispensers at every corner. The air was scented with disinfectant, but it wasn’t overpowering.

  Right of the nurse’s station, an archway led into a darkened passage. Signposts above it pointed in various directions, reading Neonatal, Paediatric, Coronary. But to the left, the corridor passed a number of doorways, most of which stood open on well-lit rooms. Lucy strolled to the first one and glanced inside. Even with everything she knew and felt about Frank McCracken, it was a shock to see him propped up on a pillow between banks of machines. His face was pale, his eyes sunken and closed. A breathing tube had been inserted into his nostril, while a drip fed painkillers and antibiotics into his arm.

  She advanced a couple of steps. The room was windowless and warm, but blankets had been drawn up to the patient’s bare chest, revealing that the top of his left shoulder and the left side of his neck were buried under a mountain of gauze and surgical padding. A slow steady bleep from one of the monitors sounded as if it meant that everything was okay so far.

  She went back into the reception area. There was no sign of Nurse Reynoldson, though what sounded like a kettle was bubbling. Lucy glanced through the glass door, happy to see the waiting area still deserted.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a voice asked.

  She spun around, to be confronted by a burly, beefy-faced man with bright red hair, wearing black trousers and a white, open-collared shirt with black epaulettes on the shoulders.

  Lucy flashed her warrant card. ‘DC Clayburn.’

  ‘Oh.’ He didn’t look relieved to discover that she was a police officer. No doubt, on hearing that a cop would be posted on this door, he’d been hoping for someone a little more like himself. ‘Hawcroft. Hospital security. Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Could be worse,’ Lucy replied. ‘We’ve no fatalities yet.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Again, he seemed unimpressed – he was probably struggling to work out how Frank McCracken being dead was a worse scenario than Frank McCracken being alive.

  ‘How many guys have you got on site?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Well … there’s just me on this wing, while the rest are spread around the whole hospital. I mean, it’s nights, plus it’s midweek, so we’ve not got as many staff on as usual. To be honest, th
is is the least vulnerable area.’ He pointed into the unlit section of corridor. ‘Our office is about fifty yards around that corner. I only came out to see who you were because I spotted you on one of our surveillance screens.’

  ‘How many patients have we got in ICU at present?’

  ‘Erm …’ He sounded unsure. ‘Four, I think.’

  That wasn’t as many as it could have been, she thought, which was probably a good thing.

  ‘Just to let you know,’ he said. ‘There’ll be staff coming and going during the night. These patients require regular treatment, medication and so on.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Lucy moved back along the passage towards the patients’ rooms. ‘I’ll get in the way as little as possible.’

  ‘Like I say, I’m just around the corner if you need me,’ he said.

  She nodded, walking slowly, checking each room. All the patients were the same: lost under bandages, facemasks, breathing apparatus and such, each deeply unconscious, their vital signs constantly monitored. There weren’t four of them, as it turned out, but three, counting McCracken. It didn’t look as if Carlotta Powell had been brought here yet. She might still be in surgery, for all Lucy knew. The last room was empty. Beyond that, at the end of the corridor stood a frosted-glass fire-door, which was locked and alarmed. Everything seemed to be satisfactory so far.

  ‘DC Clayburn!’ a panicky voice called. It sounded like Janice Reynoldson. ‘DC Clayburn!’

  Lucy hurried back down the passage.

  The night nurse had appeared from the back room and now stood rigid behind her desk, a mug of coffee in either hand, staring at the glass door. Lucy sensed the group of figures on the other side of it before she even saw them. Six men, all in suits, all of them brutish and scar-faced, a couple pulling on black leather gloves.

  ‘Hit the alarm,’ Lucy said. ‘Call Officer Hawcroft back!’

  ‘I don’t know any Officer Hawcroft,’ the nurse stammered.

  ‘Your security chief.’

  The nurse looked appalled. ‘We don’t have an Officer Hawcroft. Imran’s in the security booth tonight.’