by Nick Oldham
Contents
Cover
Recent Titles by Nick Oldham from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Recent Titles by Nick Oldham from Severn House
The Steve Flynn Series
ONSLAUGHT
AMBUSH
The Henry Christie Series
BACKLASH
SUBSTANTIAL THREAT
DEAD HEAT
BIG CITY JACKS
PSYCHO ALLEY
CRITICAL THREAT SCREEN OF DECEIT
CRUNCH TIME
THE NOTHING JOB
SEIZURE
HIDDEN WITNESS
FACING JUSTICE
INSTINCT
FIGHTING FOR THE DEAD
BAD TIDINGS JUDGEMENT CALL
LOW PROFILE
EDGE
UNFORGIVING
AMBUSH
A Steve Flynn Thriller
Nick Oldham
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
This eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD
Copyright © 2016 by Nick Oldham.
The right of Nick Oldham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8634-7 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-739-5 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-803-2 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
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To the memory of my brother, Peter. A true gent.
ONE
‘Oh, yeah, I’m a murderer, a mad axeman, actually. A double murderer at that. I killed two – my partner and his lover after I’d found out about their, y’know, affair.’ The man called Felix Loveday tweaked his fingers in invisible air speech marks around the word ‘affair’. He paused and frowned at the thought, the memory. ‘I didn’t know I had such rage in me,’ he continued. His voice was at a conversational level and as he spoke he pulled up his right shirtsleeve to display his forearm just above the wrist and the simple, home-inflicted tattoo that said the name ‘Trevor’. Loveday swallowed as he gazed at the name. ‘I found them both in bed, actually. Suspected something and there he was.’ He tapped the name on his forearm. ‘Up to his nuts, the maker’s name, in that utter whore who I thought was my friend, Jon Dunson. I can still see ’em,’ he recalled wistfully. ‘Obviously they didn’t expect me to turn up. I watched ’em through a crack in the bedroom door. I mean, even now’ – he splayed his right hand over his chest – ‘I can feel how my heart was pounding at the sight, how I couldn’t get my breath … and then’ – his eyes became evil, his voice dramatic – ‘that sudden, all-consuming rage that kinda poured over me like molten metal.’
‘Very descriptive,’ the man sitting opposite him said. The two were playing cards – pontoon – with two others, and they were listening attentively to the opening up and sudden honesty of Loveday.
Loveday picked up the two cards he had just been dealt and added up their value.
There was a pile of matches in the centre of the small card table and each man had a small stack next to him, the stakes for what appeared to be a fairly innocent game.
The man directly opposite Loveday, the one who had made the dry comment, was called Brian Tasker. At first Tasker had not been too interested in the confession and was just listening because he had nowhere else to go, no one else to play with.
And because all four men were in prison.
But as Loveday revealed all, Tasker frowned and became a little more interested. ‘What happened next?’ he asked.
Loveday inspected his cards. ‘Twist,’ he said to the dealer on his right, who flipped over a card. ‘Twist again,’ Loveday said. Another card was revealed and Loveday scraped both into his hand and pushed four matches confidently into the central pile. Each match represented a debt of some sort and the overall winner that night would be able to choose to call them in whenever he felt like it.
So far, the largest pile of winnings was next to Tasker.
‘What happened next?’ Loveday echoed, raising his eye line across the top rim of his cards. ‘I closed the door quietly, then I snuck downstairs and went into the shed and found the axe. In those days we had a wood-burning stove, so we were always chopping wood. Never once did I dream I’d use an axe for anything other than that. I remember picking it up and running my finger over the blade and thinking, “Not sharp enough” … so I sharpened it on one of those sharpener things.’ He looked at the other men. ‘What’re they called?’
‘An axe-stone?’ one suggested.
Loveday shrugged. ‘Something like that. Anyway, I sharpened it, then snuck back upstairs, and they were still at it.’ He shivered with revulsion at the memory. ‘Anyway, Trevor’s back was to the door … I can still see his naked arse … and I snuck in and went for it – his head, by the way, not his arse. I remember that first blow as if it was only yesterday. Right into the back of his skull. And it was one of those, y’know, like when you slam an axe into a log, then you can’t get it out because it’s stuck, and you have to rive it free?’
The other three card players visualized it, seemingly horrified.
‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, I got it out, then really started whacking him with it. Went bananas.’ He snorted a laugh. ‘Jon managed to do a runner – naked and shrieking like a woman down the stairs, running like a right pansy. Started off with a hard-on, too. Anyway, I went after him but he’d got to the front door and I was still on the stairs, so I had to chuck the axe at him. I suppose it could have gone either way, but I got lucky. If it’d missed him or hit him and bounced off, he would’ve got out on to the street. But God was on my side and I struck lucky.’ He chortled at his own wit. ‘It was almost the perfect throw. Like in a cowboy f
ilm, a Cherokee throwing an axe that whizzes through the air like a cartwheel. The point didn’t stick in him, but the blunt end embedded itself in the back of his head and he went down on his knees before he could get the door open. I just pulled it out, stood over him and started hacking like a lumberjack chopping wood. Blood fucking everywhere.’ He looked at his cards and said, ‘Twist.’
Tasker said, ‘Then what?’
Loveday gave a cheeky grin. ‘By the time the cops landed I’d dismembered and disembowelled both of them. I was sitting there with Trevor’s severed head in my lap, stroking his hair, covered in blood and guts, whimpering like a puppy with body parts all over the house. Bit of a mess,’ he admitted with huge understatement.
‘Shit,’ one of the other card players said, blanching and rubbing his neck.
‘I admitted it, got life – twice, concurrently. Judge threw away the key, called me a deranged individual,’ Loveday said.
Tasker’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. ‘How long ago was that?’ he asked, thinking Loveday would say ten or twelve years maybe.
‘Uh … 1985 … thirty years ago.’
‘You’ve been in clink for thirty years?’ one of the others said in disbelief.
Loveday nodded philosophically. ‘Yes. The judge said minimum thirty, which I thought was a bit harsh, but I don’t regret what I did. Both of the sneaky, cheating bastards got what was coming to them and I got what was coming to me. Yin, yang.’
‘So how old were you when you did it?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘Nineteen eighty-five, eh?’ Tasker said. He would have been fourteen years old that year. ‘Did they have DNA back then?’ he asked. ‘You know, cops sampling, like they do now?’
‘Nah. Fingerprints was about it. They took my blood, they could do that, but that was about it.’
‘And they never took your DNA then, swabbed your mouth?’
‘Nope.’
‘’Bout you, guys?’ Tasker asked the other two.
Both had had their DNA taken.
‘Yeah, me too,’ Tasker said.
‘After my time, DNA,’ Loveday said. ‘I’m a pre-DNA guy.’
Tasker’s bottom lip jutted out as he nodded and digested the information, realizing that big things often come from chance conversations. ‘But you’re up for parole now, I hear? After all these years.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And are you going for it?’ Tasker asked. ‘I mean, aren’t you institutionalized after thirty frickin’ years?’
‘Probably I am, but I’m going for it. Did the crime, done the time, now I need to find out how the world has changed while I’ve still got some breath in me. I reckon I’ve got a lot of years left—’
‘To shag some arse,’ one of the others quipped.
‘Oh, yes, baby … my final hearing’s next week. No reason why I shouldn’t walk,’ he said confidently. ‘I’ve been a good boy.’
‘No reason whatsoever,’ Tasker agreed. ‘Stick, by the way.’
In his hand he had an ace and a king. Pontoon.
Ten days later Tasker invited Loveday into his cell. Both men were smiling broadly.
‘Good news, I hear,’ Tasker said.
‘Yeah, yeah … all that good behaviour has paid off … just got to cross the “t”s and dot the “i”s, but it looks like I’ll be walking out through those doors this time next week.’
‘That,’ Tasker said, ‘is the best news I’ve heard in years. Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’ Loveday was becoming quite emotional.
Tasker turned around and picked up two plastic mugs from his bedside cabinet, handing one to his fellow inmate.
‘Illicit hooch, but good stuff,’ Tasker said. ‘To freedom.’
They touched mugs, a dull ‘thuck’ rather than a ‘dink’, and drank the bitter-tasting spirit.
‘Your family will be pleased,’ Tasker said, wiping his mouth.
‘No family. Parents dead, no brothers or sisters, no aunts, uncles.’
‘Oh, sad … so no one to greet you?’
‘Nah, but that’s OK … visit the probation office and that’s about it … as a lifer I’m on licence for ever, obviously. Anyway, to freedom.’ He raised his mug again, then swallowed the remaining liquor, which spread down into his chest like wildfire.
The same four card players assembled the night before Loveday’s release in Tasker’s cell. They settled down for a quiet couple of hours of poker and pontoon with some booze and cigarettes supplied by a tame prison guard.
It was the way Loveday wanted it, no fuss, just a bit of time with a few people he had come to regard as friends.
His moment of murderous frenzy thirty years before had been the only moment of complete madness in his life and he had paid his judicial dues quietly in several prisons across the north of England. This one – Lancashire Prison, just a few miles west of the town of Leyland – was to be his final one. He had spent six years here, existing fairly peacefully, causing no problems and getting on with his life behind bars, not making any waves. He had learned quickly how to survive, to cultivate non-sexual relationships, to kowtow to the duality of the prison hierarchy – the inmates and the staff – and never to flaunt his gayness in any way. Occasionally he took a considered chance with it, but only when he knew it was safe to do so.
All he wanted to do on that last evening of captivity was stay under the radar, unnoticed; spend time with a few other inmates he’d got to know, play cards, have a drink, then tootle back to his cell and, virtually, wake up a free man – bar the painful, bureaucratic procedure of being released.
The evening went to plan.
Cards were played, matches won and lost, and a variety of liquids consumed. Prison officers passed the open cell door infrequently; some looked in and genuinely wished Loveday well for tomorrow and the future, but none interfered with the civilized night until the lights out warning bell sounded at ten forty-five p.m. for the eleven p.m. lockdown.
The playing cards were stacked and all debts for that night were written off good-naturedly.
Then the four men stood around the card table and raised their mugs for the final drink and a toast to Loveday and freedom.
A prison officer appeared at the cell door and caught Tasker’s eye – at which precise moment Loveday’s eyeballs rolled back in their sockets and his knees buckled. He dropped his mug, swayed, but just before he pitched forward two of the card players grabbed him, one on each side, before he hit the hard cell floor, ensuring he did not injure himself.
The prison officer stepped in, pulled the door to but did not close it.
Tasker stepped aside as the drugged Loveday was eased unconscious on to the lower bunk and laid out on it.
Five minutes later, the scene was prepared and ready.
TWO
Three months later
Detective Chief Inspector Craig Alford was the first of the targets, the first of the five programmed to die.
There was no specific reason for him to be first; he just happened to be first alphabetically and also the easiest to find, watch, follow and, of course, kill.
But there was a specific reason why the last name on the list was the final one.
On the day he died, Alford had been at work since seven a.m., coordinating a series of drugs raids across the county of Lancashire from the new communications room at police headquarters situated in Hutton, about four miles south of Preston. Alford was on Lancashire Constabulary’s Serious and Organized Crime Unit (SOCU) based in the Pavilion Building at HQ (built, literally, on the site of the old cricket pavilion on the playing fields opposite the headquarters building, hence the adopted name).
That morning’s raids were the culmination of months of fastidious intelligence gathering, use of sources (aka informants) and good targeting. Alford had grafted hard to make the operation, codenamed ‘Aquarius’, a success. Drugs raids were ten a penny, most not having any effect on the trade, and Alford wanted his to be different – to mak
e a difference.
There would be no crashing through the bedsit doors of low level street dealers, smashing their soil pipes with sledgehammers to catch any drugs being hurriedly flushed down the bog, and then seizures of a few grams of coke and a few unhealthy cannabis plants.
Today Alford, as per his enviable cop history as a man hunter, was going to catch some very big fish and close down a massive drug-running operation – which, he knew realistically, would have an effect for a good week before the next drug lord stepped into the vacuum.
If, that was, all things came together.
He had four major, interlinked traffickers in his sights. The intel he and his team had gathered consisted of financial dealings, property ownership, legit fronts for illegal activities and, best of all, the prospect of catching all four main players with drugs, money and guns in their possession.
Alford could probably have struck much earlier and got a decent enough result, but he had resisted pressure from above and below because, as he succinctly summarized, ‘I can’t see the whites of their eyes yet.’ Had he bowed to that pressure he would always have known that he should have waited just a tad longer to strike.
It was like waiting for Jupiter to align with Mars, he insisted – hence the name of the operation.
Things had to come together, to converge.
Drugs had to be at a particular location. Money had to be there. The guns had to be there. The targets had to be there and the police resources had to be ready to jump. Fast.
The waiting all became worthwhile when, from his perch in the comms room, Alford listened to the radio transmissions on the secure encrypted channel being used exclusively for Aquarius, watched the live video/audio feeds from cop-cams attached to various officers’ shoulder pads and headgear and made on-the-spot decisions, finally giving the ‘Go, go, go’ order.
Four suspects. Four synchronized raids. Forty cops and support staff.
Jupiter, Mars.
‘Gustav Holst,’ Alford mused.
Twenty minutes after seven, twelve arrests had actually been made, because a few of the bit-part players were picked up along with the four main people, three men and one woman.
