The Nothing Job

by Nick Oldham

  He must have been a terrifying figure to behold, his face smashed and billowing out with the swelling, blood down his shirtfront as well as down his back.

  One of the female comms operators looked sideways at him and screamed, ‘Oh my God!’ making Anger turn.

  Henry’s figure must then have become even more fearsome, as, with a howl of rage, he leapt over one of the radio consoles, slithered across it leaving a trail of his blood and went for Anger, who, taking in what was happening, shoved Corrigan away from him and ran for the door at the far end of the room which led to the stairs on the opposite side of the building.

  Another operator screamed. The sergeant pulled her earphones off and rose to her feet, only to be knocked back down by Henry as he used her to help propel himself after the retreating Anger.

  ‘He’s yours,’ Henry shouted to Donaldson, and pointed to Corrigan, who had been pushed into a corner of the room.

  Anger had disappeared down the steps, but Henry was not far behind him, throwing himself recklessly down, not taking any note of the pain in his body, being so focused on capturing Anger.

  They raced down three flights. Henry gained on him all the time, until they reached the footwell in the basement, where Anger barged into the double doors, expecting them to be open, but they were locked and he was trapped as Henry reached the top of the flight of steps and stopped, knowing he had his man.

  Anger’s back was to the doors.

  Henry came down the steps one at a time, a terrifying expression on his battered face.

  ‘Just you and me, now, Dave,’ he said quietly on reaching the last but one step.

  Anger did not reply, but launched himself into Henry. They both fell backwards on to the concrete steps, Anger raining punches into Henry’s stomach and ribs as they rolled and fought. Henry’s arms wrapped around Anger, trying to halt the onslaught, holding him tight. But it was like fighting a demon and they rolled off the stairs on to the landing, crashing against the locked doors.

  Anger broke away and scrambled to his feet and as Henry tried to do the same kicked out desperately, his foot connecting with Henry’s side, hurling him over. Henry scrambled to the corner of the landing as Anger came at him – then he turned in the confined space and dived at Anger’s midriff, using all the strength he had in him to topple the chief superintendent over.

  Even as he fell backwards, though, he caught Henry a stunning blow on the face which sent him reeling away and before Henry could recover, Anger was on him again, punching hard and repeatedly, and Henry felt his legs go to jelly and he knew he was going down.

  But he also knew that this was not the way it was going to be. Drawing on something from the depths of his whole being, he roared like a bear and broke through the pounding of Anger’s fists. His forearms forced Anger’s arms away from him, opening the man up, and with the millisecond he had to take advantage his hands came out wide and with as much power as he could muster, he clapped his hands hard. Only thing being was that Anger’s head was between them and the slightly cupped palms smashed down on Anger’s ears. The force of the blow sent a ripple of agony through his ears. The effect was to burst one eardrum.

  Anger screamed and reeled away, but Henry paid no heed and went for him. He went for him with a frenzied attack. By hauling strength from deep within he beat Anger down to his knees and then to the floor. He did this until every ounce of power dissipated out of him and he sank to his knees, then on to all fours, next to Anger, who lay there moaning, beaten and defeated, drifting in and out of consciousness, his glasses lying discarded by his side.

  As a final symbolic act, Henry got to his feet, stood on them and crushed them.

  TWENTY

  Once, long ago, this same terrible thing had happened to Henry Christie – he had woken up in a hospital to find Robert Fanshaw-Bayley sitting on a chair next to the bed, looking anxiously at him as though he cared. Back then FB had been a detective chief superintendent and Henry had just survived the attentions of a hit man called Tiger Mayfair, but only just. He’d been in hospital to recover from his injuries and waking up to see FB had almost been a setback to speedy recovery.

  ‘We can’t keep meeting like this,’ FB said, this time. He too apparently remembered the previous occasion well.

  Henry, who had spent a day and a night at the Royal Preston Infirmary purely for observation, and pumped up with nice pain-relieving drugs, eased himself into a sitting position. He had nodded off but didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. Could have been five minutes, could have been five hours.

  ‘Time is it?’

  ‘Three.’

  He squinted with his good eye. ‘Am I right in thinking Kate’s coming to collect me at five?’

  ‘Yeah – apparently the doctor thinks you’ll be all right.’

  ‘Nice doctor.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘You gave Dave Anger a hell of a pasting.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He’s still in hospital – down the corridor, here.’ FB jerked a thumb. ‘Being looked after by two uniformed cops.’

  Henry was stiff and sore, despite the pain relief. His face was a bloated mess, his head had one deep cut in it, now stitched, and was a mass of swellings the size of eggs, but nothing, other than his cheekbone, was broken. Again.

  ‘He’s making a complaint of assault against you.’

  ‘His prerogative, he can do what he wants. I’ll counter-sue,’ Henry mumbled as he spoke through thick lips, because that was the best he could do.

  ‘I don’t think his claim will be going anywhere under the circumstances,’ FB reassured him. There was a pregnant pause, then FB said, ‘You think you’re up to being told what’s happening in the big wide world?’

  ‘Pass me that water, will you?’ FB reached for a glass of water on Henry’s bedside cabinet, which he handed to the patient who took a sip through cracked lips. ‘Ugh – it’s warm, and there’s no whiskey in it.’ He took some more, then said, ‘Fire away.’

  FB gathered his thoughts. ‘As you can imagine, they’re not a very talkative bunch, but we’ve got some good detectives drafted in from GMP doing the business on them and, bit by bit, a picture is forming of what it’s all about. We haven’t been able to talk to Anger yet, because he’s been in hospital since you threw him down a staircase and jumped on him.’

  ‘Take it one step at a time. I don’t yet have a fully functioning brain.’ Henry held up a finger to prevent FB from making a smart retort.

  ‘It can probably be traced back a number of years,’ FB began. ‘And all this shit stems from a protection racket that Dave Anger and his Merseyside mates were running, allowing criminals to operate brothels and street prostitutes, which was a very lucrative addition to a cop’s salary.’ Henry shook his head sadly. He hated bent cops. ‘The racket was run mainly in Liverpool, but a bit of trading was done up here in Lancashire. Scartarelli was involved in it, but he apparently had a bit of a temper where the women were concerned and unfortunately this led to him killing one who’d been plying her body in Blackburn. Don’t know why he did it, but he did, possible she might’ve wanted out. Unfortunately for him, the girl named him before she croaked. Fortunately for him, the murder investigation was headed by Dave Anger and Jack Carradine, both still involved in the protection racket in Liverpool, even though they were Lancashire officers. Extra pocket money.’

  FB looked distressed and Henry could guess why: he had been responsible for bringing Anger into Lancashire from Merseyside to head up the FMIT team. It must have hurt to know he had selected and employed a very corrupt officer.

  ‘They were able to manipulate the enquiry and although they had a named suspect in Scartarelli, they didn’t pursue him as vigorously as they might have done, mainly because they knew him and he was running the racket they were involved in protecting.’ He paused. ‘With me so far?’ Henry nodded. ‘They let him get away, basically, but for anyone looking at the investigat
ion from the outside it would have seemed as though they were doing the best they could.’

  ‘So more recently, where did Jonny Motta fit into this?’

  ‘He was trying to muscle in on the business, not knowing that the cops were involved in protecting it.’

  ‘Why kill the prostitutes in Preston, though?’

  FB sighed. ‘Probably something we’ll never get to the bottom of. Why do blokes kill prostitutes anyway? We think he was trying to get them to work for him, coercing them by violence, and it went too far, unfortunately for them.’

  ‘And for him, too,’ Henry said. ‘Because how was he to know that the protection racket included some members of the police firearms team?’

  ‘You know that bit?’ FB sounded surprised.

  ‘It’s something I covered in discussion with Jack Carradine before he started kicking the shit out of me.’ Henry leaned back, feeling groggy. ‘Head’s pounding like a jackhammer.’ He snorted. ‘I suppose I must consider myself lucky. I mean, Dave Anger could well have had me killed for sleeping with his wife, couldn’t he? Even though she wasn’t his wife when I slept with her,’ he added as a rider.

  ‘Lucky break there, Henry,’ FB agreed.

  Henry rolled his neck, massaging it with both hands. His brow furrowed. ‘Where does Corrigan fit into all this and why was Scartarelli killed?’

  FB shrugged. ‘Corrigan is the man behind it all, according to your chum in the FBI.’ He said ‘chum’ quite dismissively, because he didn’t really like Karl Donaldson very much. ‘He’s the guy who arranges for the prostitutes to come across from Eastern Europe, Albania and the like, sorts out their passage and where they’re going when they get here and who gets them. Basically, Scartarelli worked for him. But the train of thought is that Scartarelli has been trying to oust Corrigan, even to the point of using his villa in Cyprus without his permission. That’s why Corrigan wanted him killed – we think. No one’s saying very much, though. That villa, by the way, is actually owned by a legit holding company in the States linked to the Tantini crime family, who I think you’ve heard of.’

  ‘How’d you find that out?’

  ‘Sent Jerry Tope searching online. He’s a bit of a whiz at it.’

  Henry smiled. ‘He’ll get himself into trouble one of these days.’ He leaned forward and squirmed himself into a better sitting position. ‘Plump up my pillows, will you?’ he asked and FB, a grimace on his face at becoming a nurse, pulled Henry’s pillows up as requested. Henry enjoyed the attention. It wasn’t often FB did something for him.

  The two men didn’t speak for a while. Henry had had his brain knocked about a bit and his thoughts were jumping all over the place, not much logic to them, his brow constantly knitting together as he thought through something, wondered whether to ask a question, then didn’t bother because it was too much like hard work. However, eventually he spoke.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said to FB at last.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How are Anthony Downie and Jane Kinsella connected to all this?’

  ‘Not sure what you mean – Downie was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and got a bullet in the brain for it. The best witness is a dead witness. No great loss. Who’s Jane Kinsella?’

  ‘Operation Wanted?’ Henry reminded him.

  ‘Ah, that Jane Kinsella.’ FB shook his head. ‘No connection at all, I don’t think.’

  ‘Can I ask you something else?’ Before FB could say yes or no, Henry said, ‘When you gave me those jobs to do, catching those wanted persons, did you have any inkling whatsoever about all this? Did you know about what Anger and Carradine were up to?’ Henry craned his neck to look into FB’s eyes. They told their own story. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ His mouth pursed, he closed his eyes and rested his sore head back. Eyes still closed, he said, ‘You fucking knew or suspected something was going on, didn’t you?’

  ‘OK, I did, as did the Chief Constable of Merseyside. Shafer and others have been suspected for a long time of being involved in various criminal activities. So what better man to get involved in it than you? We’d been looking for a way to get into it for quite a while now and when I got that rocket from the Police Authority, it just seemed to slot into place. I knew that when you started delving, something could well happen. Always does with you. The other two wanteds were just so you’d think I wasn’t pushing you in a particular direction.’

  ‘So I wouldn’t suspect anything. You complete and utter bastard,’ Henry said.

  ‘And then when Motta was killed … gold dust,’ FB said brightly. ‘I have got a real sweetener for you, though.’

  ‘What would that be?’ Henry said bitterly.

  ‘After the shit has settled on this, I’m going to put a superintendent in charge of FMIT rather than a chief super.’ He paused dramatically. ‘It’s yours if you want it – unless you want to retire instead, that is?’

  ‘You think that offering me promotion will be a sweetener?’ Henry asked incredulously … but even as he spoke, his mind started to work out the big difference between a superintendent’s pension and a chief inspector’s pension. He said, ‘You could be right.’

  The surprise was that when Dave Anger was released from the hospital into police custody proper, he wanted to talk, and talk he did. He had formed the impression that Carradine, Shafer and Corrigan had been confessing all, an impression that wasn’t corrected by the detectives tasked to interview him.

  In the end, with the half-stories from Shafer and Carradine, nothing from Corrigan, and more than enough from Anger, it all started to come together.

  With regards to the shooting of Jonny Motta, the detectives learned that the IPCC investigator, McKnight, had been a bit too good and had stumbled upon several bank accounts owned by the police officer who pulled the trigger. They showed regular amounts dripping in and accumulating. Investigating further, he discovered more accounts belonging to firearms officers that did not seem quite right. He never knew for certain whether these finds were or were not connected to the shooting, but he knew they had to be investigated.

  When Shafer got wind of this, he arranged for a fatal accident to occur to McKnight, who was under the impression he was going to meet a secret witness with information about the shooting. Shafer had then brazenly spoken to and sympathized with McKnight’s grieving widow and been handed all her husband’s work-related documents, including a notebook detailing all his finds.

  And, finally, Anger named the people responsible for killing Scartarelli in the court cells: three firearms officers from Merseyside, also implicated in the protection rackets and who had taken part in the raid on Motta’s flat.

  Lancashire officers, who also arrested the firearms PC who had shot Motta and claimed he was acting in self-defence, arrested them in dawn raids – and when those four were in custody, everything crumbled.

  ‘Yeah, that’s where we’re up to,’ Henry Christie said. It was four weeks later and he was on the phone in his new office in the FMIT building across the sports field from the headquarters main building. Sat opposite him, feet up on the other side of the desk, was Karl Donaldson. Henry was on the phone to DI Georgia Papakostas of the Cyprus Police. He was giving her the regular update of the progress of the investigation, even though he was not actively involved in it himself, merely a witness. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, ‘still no name for the sniper. Sorry about that, but we’ll keep digging if you will. It would be tragic not to get someone arrested for killing a cop, even if it was by accident. Good luck with it. Yeah, I’m doing fine, thanks … OK …’ The conversation was drawing to a close. Donaldson dropped his feet and mee-mawed for Henry to give him the phone. Henry snarled at him. ‘Someone here who wants to speak to you …’ He gave him the phone.

  ‘Hey, babe, how y’all doing?’ he said, thickening his accent. ‘Me, fine, I’m fine … what about you? When do I get to see you again?’

  At that, Henry stood up, annoyed. He gave Donaldson a middle finger and st
alked out of the office into the corridor and looked up and down at what was to become his new kingdom – FMIT. He hadn’t yet been promoted, as FB promised, but had been allowed to move into the office on the middle floor of the block pending this. He had taken great delight in getting the labourers to gut what was once Dave Anger’s domain. Now it was his and would be for as long as possible.

  Donaldson appeared at the office door and regarded his British friend with a half-smile.

  ‘You think we really did it, pal?’

  Henry returned the inspection, looking his American friend up and down, considering the question. He shrugged. ‘She’s a very beautiful woman.’

  ‘Not as beautiful as my wife,’ Donaldson said.

  ‘But you let me think, for all these weeks …’

  ‘I was enjoying myself.’

  Henry’s desk phone rang and he moved Donaldson out of the doorway to get in and answer it. He listened then said, ‘Be there in a few minutes … see you.’ He turned to Donaldson. ‘Fancy watching a real cop in action?’

  ‘Is there one around here?’

  ‘If you were much smaller, thinner, lighter, wore thick glasses, had false teeth and one leg, I’d smack you very hard and then run … Come with me, I have things to do.’

  Henry, Jerry Tope and Donaldson strolled into the accounts department on the middle floor of headquarters where Madeline Rooney sat at her desk. She was sporting a wonderful tan from her recent holiday in Florida and it was set very nicely against the new expensive and very low-cut dress she wore.

  ‘You two guys stay here,’ Henry told his companions, then crossed the office to Madeline’s desk, taking a seat at the end of it. She hadn’t seen him approach, being quite engrossed in her nails that looked as though they had been recently manicured.

  ‘Henry, darling,’ she said brightly. She lowered her eyes and tilted towards him, displaying a wonderful view of her chest, which Henry remembered well, despite the intervening years.

  ‘Hi.’ He smiled.

  ‘What can I do you for? Remember I’m a happily married woman now, but there could be one exception to the rule.’ The breasts wobbled enticingly.