by Nick Oldham
They worked in silence to steal the beast and resisted the temptation to rev the engine as it rolled off the drive. That pleasure was kept on hold until they were out of the cul-de-sac.
Then they floored the accelerator.
‘Can’t wait to see this one,’ Joanne Farmer said. She was the female officer in the police patrol dispatched from the station to investigate the drunk in the road at Broughton. ‘Always love a piss-head in skivvies.’
This made the PC at the wheel chortle.
He drove out of the police station yard up to the junction with the main road, the A6, which at that point was called North Road. He stopped and began to pull out, but slammed on as a speeding BMW shot past, just missing the nose of their car, heading north like a mini-rocket.
It was late, it was dark, but Joanne Farmer recognized the scowling face pressed tight against the front passenger door window and also the profile of the girl in the corresponding seat behind him.
The face of the young man was etched in her mind because Farmer had come on duty four hours before her night shift to deal with this lad, who had reported to the station on police bail to face an allegation of taking a motor vehicle without consent. A BMW.
Although she did not quite see the driver of the speeding BMW, she could guess that it was the lad’s best mate, who had also reported for bail earlier.
So, three hours before, the lad in the passenger seat, Wayne Dixon, and his friend, Billy Collins, charged with car theft offences, had been given bail to appear at Magistrates’ Court in two weeks’ time and a release. Then they had simply gone out and repeated the crime within hours, stealing yet another BMW and giving their girlfriends the ride of their lives.
‘Wayne Dixon, you little shit,’ Joanne Farmer said as the car flew past. The circle of life, she thought.
The PC at the wheel went after the car. It was going in their direction anyway.
Farmer was on the radio, at the same time clinging to her seat belt.
‘Suspected stolen vehicle, a BMW, heading north on the A6, North Road towards Garstang Road, just approaching the lights at Moor Lane. Four on board including Wayne Dixon, probably Billy Collins at the wheel and two females in the back seat. Excessive speeds.’
By the time the police car had turned on to the A6 proper, the BMW had shot through the red lights at Moor Lane, then Aqueduct Street, and was on the straight stretch that was Garstang Road.
The driver of the police car proceeded with more caution, even though the blue lights and, now, the two-tone horns were respectively on and blaring.
The lights at Watling Street Road were dealt with in a similar fashion by the BMW, which swerved to miss another car legitimately crossing the junction in front of it.
‘Speeds excess of eighty mph,’ WPC Farmer said into her PR.
Ahead she saw the flash of a speed camera on the next stretch of road, which was still in a thirty miles per hour zone.
Moments later the police car made the camera flash too and both cops cheered at that moment of sheer pleasure – legitimately breaking the speed limit.
The BMW did not slow for the next major junction with Sharoe Green Lane, though the police car did.
Less than a mile ahead was the motorway roundabout at Broughton, and thinking of this gave Farmer a sudden concern.
On her radio she interrupted the chatter of other patrols shouting up and making their way, and asked, ‘Has anyone managed to get to the guy at Broughton lights yet? Because if this BMW goes straight up, he could be in real danger if he’s still in the middle of the road.’
‘Negative,’ the comms operator responded, also seeing the danger. ‘No one there yet.’
As the police car sped through the next set of lights at Lightfoot Lane there was just a glimpse of the BMW, now with all lights out, screeching around the motorway roundabout and staying on the A6 northbound, less than half a mile to the next lights in Broughton.
‘Hope the idiot’s gone,’ Farmer said bleakly, ‘or this little bastard might wipe him off the face of the earth.’
But Terry Mulligan had not gone. He was still about two hundred metres from where Steve Flynn had pulled into a layby just north of Broughton, hauled him out of the back of the Punto and told him to walk home.
Mulligan had cried pitifully as Flynn drove away abandoning him in just his vest, underpants and socks.
He had tried to get a lift back towards Preston, waving down the next southbound vehicle. The driver had skilfully avoided him.
Distraught, Mulligan saw the traffic lights in the distance and thought that standing in the middle of the junction would give him more chance of bumming a lift.
He was wrong.
Eventually he was right in the middle of the junction, desperately windmilling his arms at any car, travelling in any direction (and they were few and far between at that time of night), crying, ‘Please give me a lift, please …’
No one did. A man in his vest and underpants was not an appealing sight or prospect.
Mulligan heard the scream of the engine coming from the direction of Preston. He turned to squint towards it.
Even in his half-inebriated state – he had sobered up somewhat after the journey in the back of the Punto – he could tell the car approaching was travelling fast but he saw the lights were on red, so surely it would stop. And when it did he would get into it, no matter where it was going. All he wanted to do was get warm and drunk again.
He began to spiral his arms once more.
The BMW hit him at eighty-two miles per hour.
Santiago slumped into the back of the taxi at the head of the rank in front of the terminal building at Las Palmas airport.
Despite all that was going on she had a grin of pleasure on her face, so pleased she had worked up courage to tell Flynn how she was feeling about him. They had been through so much in such a short space of time, some of it intense and shocking, but Flynn had been there for her and eased her through the pain and now it was time for her to be there for him – and she would be.
She could almost visualize the shock on his face when she’d said she loved him.
Total shock, in fact.
But it did make her wish she’d told him when they were face to face.
Her grin turned into one of lopsided pleasure and she settled in to the journey in the comfortable back seat of the Mercedes taxi as the car left the airport and headed south along the GC1, Gran Canaria’s motorway, towards Puerto Rico, where she and Flynn now shared a small apartment at the back of the resort. Before meeting him she had lived in Las Palmas but moving to Puerto Rico had been a natural progression for them both. Flynn had limited means of transport since his car had come to a sticky end a few months before and she was mobile with her work as a detective and did not mind driving to Las Palmas each morning, because she loved the journey back and the laid-back evenings in Puerto Rico with Flynn.
‘Come on, pass, you idiot,’ the taxi driver muttered in Spanish.
Santiago raised herself and glanced over the back seat. A car, headlights on full beam, was close up, tailgating.
‘Any closer and we’ll be lovers,’ the taxi driver said.
Amazingly the taxi driver had actually slowed down to let him pass but the car seemed intent on clinging to the bumper.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said to the taxi driver, ‘he’ll go when he’s ready.’
He lifted both hands off the steering wheel in a gesture of extreme frustration.
Santiago smiled, settled back down again.
They had reached a section of road parallel to the Punta del Corral outcrop of coast when the car moved out from behind and drew level.
Santiago had her eyes closed, beginning to dream.
She heard the metallic crash and scrape of a collision, felt the impact and lurch at the same time, opened her eyes instantly as the taxi veered out of control. The overtaking car, it seemed, had deliberately rammed the taxi. The driver fought hard to keep the Mercedes on the ro
ad, but the car connected again, smashing the taxi sideways.
The section of road had been well chosen.
There were no safety barriers, and this time as the taxi left the road it plunged into a steep, volcanic gully. Santiago grabbed her seat belt, but she was still thrown around inside the vehicle and then, as it rolled sideways on to its roof, she was somehow flung by the weird physics of centrifugal force out of the back window, which had exploded out of its seal in one piece.
She crashed bodily against a rocky outcrop, smashing the back of her head. She blacked out, regained consciousness, blinked, feeling the intense, furnace-like heat of agonizing pain searing through her skull. Her whole body felt out of line, something possibly fractured around the hip or femur, and pain radiated from the organs beneath her rib cage.
Her mind cleared.
She shouted for help.
Then she heard footsteps, someone making their way down the slope towards her, then the black shape of a man – her rescuer – standing over her. Laughing.
TWENTY-ONE
‘A very nice little team,’ Rik Dean said.
He and Flynn were in the CID office at Preston police station. Flynn wore a visitor’s badge, the first time he had worn any formal ID in almost ten years. He glanced around. A CID office was no different from any other office the world over. Desks piled high with paperwork and junk; waste bins full to overflowing; empty mugs, personal photographs, football team names, calendars. What, of course, made a CID office unique was the content of the files and the material on the walls – people and crime: wanted posters, intelligence bulletins, stolen property lists, and so on. Everything impacted on someone’s life.
Flynn felt a passing pang, but no more. Time had moved on for him and being a cop was now a different country for him. The organization had not wanted him, he had left under a cloud of suspicion, subtly hounded out by a detective called Henry Christie who would not let go, but who had later learned the truth: Flynn was completely innocent. A million pounds’ worth of drug dealers’ money had not gone into his back pocket as alleged.
By then it was too little and too late. The split was permanent with no chance of reconciliation.
Flynn’s face twitched, then he spotted a coffee filter machine gurgling away on top of a cupboard.
Now that was what he needed.
Dean noticed the look. ‘It’s for us,’ he said of the coffee.
‘Good … what do you mean, team?’
‘I’ll come to that in a second, but I’ll just bring you up to date with one or two things. My DS has been working the phones and found out a couple of things of interest.’
Flynn waited, but what he really wanted was coffee.
‘First off, Felix Loveday, supposedly released on licence because all convicted murderers are subject to this for all their lives, should immediately have reported to a probation officer. Didn’t show.’
‘Ahh,’ Flynn said.
‘Second, he was allocated a room at a bail hostel in Inskip. Guess what?’
‘Never checked in?’
‘Correct. And, as far as we can see, no one who should have been in contact with him has been. It’s all been reported.’ Dean winced. ‘He should have been circulated as wanted but … cock-up somewhere along the line between us and the probation and prison service … not done.’
Flynn laughed cynically and tried not to roll his eyes. ‘Not that it would have made much difference,’ he conceded, ‘because without everything else that’s going on, he’d just stay missing and no one would be any the wiser.’
‘Correct.’
The filter machine gurgled its last hiss of steam: the coffee was ready.
‘And a DNA sample was taken from the burned body, but it came back inconclusive … coffee?’
The two men walked over to the machine and found a couple of relatively clean, mould-free mugs on the way. As Dean poured the steaming brew he said, ‘So it’s looking more and more likely that Tasker staged his own death, as you thought.’
‘I’m blushing,’ Flynn said. ‘So what about this “team” business?’ He sipped the coffee, which tasted wonderful.
‘A bent prison officer and two convicts with special areas of expertise, one a doctor, one with a passion for fire.’
‘The arsonist?’
Dean nodded.
‘What have they said so far?’
Dean smiled a detective’s smile. ‘They’ve pretty much crumbled, but two are still being interviewed as we speak. I’ve just been talking to the prison officer and I’m going back after this break. He didn’t have a leg to stand on and became particularly perturbed when I mentioned bank accounts to him. Then he just hung his head and said, “Twenty grand.” I said, “What?” and he said, “If you check my current account you’ll see twenty grand deposited three days after Brian Tasker supposedly died.”’
‘So he definitely isn’t dead?’
‘Seems not … looks like Loveday is the victim, drugged up by the struck-off doctor and toasted by the arsonist, who made it look like an accident … cigarette burning, accelerant … in fact, I’m going to have a very long chat with him, because I know of several mysterious fires in which people have died that have never been properly explained. He could easily have committed more murders.’
‘I assume the prison officer facilitated it all in exchange for the said twenty Gs?’
‘He did, and this included getting Loveday to pre-sign all his release forms the evening before, “just to speed up the process”, he was told, and the tame PO then opened the front door for Tasker to walk out – after knocking the CCTV camera so it didn’t actually record who was leaving. They spent a few weeks setting it all up and then it happened. And the doctor and the arsonist happily gave false witness statements about the night, which were presented to the coroner. There was an inquest of sorts and the coroner ruled death by accident … a lazy investigation made lazier by just accepting what appeared to be the facts and not following the first rule of an unexpected death.’
‘Treat it as murder, then work back,’ Flynn said.
‘Exactly,’ Dean sighed.
‘Hey!’ Flynn said mock-brightly. ‘If a health authority can get away with not investigating twelve hundred unexplained deaths and the prison service can release over five hundred murderers by mistake, anyone can get away with anything if they’re clever enough. It’s only just begun to unravel and Tasker’s had three months’ start on us.’ He sipped his coffee ruminatively. ‘Trouble with prison is that it gives bad men too much time to mull things over.’ Then he thought fleetingly about Santiago, assumed she would now be tucked up in bed.
‘How did you get on with Mulligan?’ Dean said. ‘Let me rephrase that. When I say “How did you get on with Mulligan?”, I don’t actually know anything about it, if you get my drift?’
‘Yeah – I didn’t accidentally see his address on a piece of paper you accidentally let me see.’
‘And?’
Flynn’s face tightened. ‘Some unknown person contacted him and asked him to report on Craig’s comings and goings, to and from work. He didn’t know what it was about but guessed after hearing about Craig’s murder. Mulligan also has a friend in HR who gave him contact details for retired officers which he passed on to this unknown person. He was paid cash and the exchange was by a dead letter drop. Apparently my contact details aren’t on the HR system – which I need to check, of course. I’d hate to miss out on my pension when it’s due.’
‘You got the name of the HR person?’
‘Lizzie Dawn … she must have access to historical personnel records. She looks like being the source of my ugly mug on the wanted posters, too.’
‘I know her,’ Dean said. ‘She’s based at headquarters.’ He sighed sadly again. ‘I hate corruption, especially in public office.’
‘Me too.’
They sipped their coffee in philosophical contemplation.
‘So, where are we up to?’ Flynn said at length.
Dean’s head rocked from side to side – more contemplation. ‘I need to ensure these three are dealt with and get statements, admissions, off them, pin ’em down.’
‘Have you asked if they know where Tasker is?’
‘I have; they don’t – and I believe them. So, to answer your other question, there’s a few things running. I need to continue to investigate the murders of Craig and his family, Jerry Tope and Dave Carver, none of which, I believe, were actually committed by Tasker himself. I think, as you do, it’s a hired killer or killers and they are still out there, after you and Jimmy Blue, so I need to provide adequate protection for you and him … but what about your family, Steve?’
‘They’ll be OK. My ex is out of the country and my lad’s somewhere up a mountain in Asia. They’ll be all right for a while.’
‘Then we need to make sure Jimmy Blue’s OK and then start a manhunt for Tasker.’
Despite his reservations and commitments, Flynn found himself saying, ‘Can I tag along, somehow? In a non-involved, consultancy capacity … I’m very cheap.’
‘You can’t be hands on,’ Dean said, reluctantly and after consideration.
‘I get that, but I spent a long time chasing Tasker. I know a lot about him and I could be valuable, could possibly pick up on something you might miss.’
‘You can’t be in on any interviews but I’ll keep you up to date on everything we do, how’s that? You’ve already done enough, Steve, and it is appreciated. I can’t even begin to see why Henry Christie hated you.’
They both laughed sheepishly.
‘Tasker has killed people I cared for … I just want to be around, but not under your feet.’ Flynn knew he had to get back to Ibiza, but didn’t need to get a flight until next evening – which he still needed to book – so he would be at a loose end all day, which did not appeal to him. It would kill some time.
‘Fine.’
‘And if he comes for me with you around, I can use you as a human shield.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘Where do we go from here, then?’
Dean checked his watch. ‘I’m going to go back and interview the prison officer … there’s an A/V link just off the custody unit. You can watch and listen if you like.’
