by Nick Oldham
He pulled the trigger back at the same time that McNamara shot Conroy in the throat.
The bullet from the Ruger slashed into Conroy’s Adam’s apple and exited through the back of his neck, creating a huge hole. Conroy stood where he had been shot, astounded - it seemed - that someone should have the effrontery to even point a gun at him, let alone fire the thing.
For a moment, McNamara could see daylight through the wound, but he didn’t peer through it. Instead he put another couple into Conroy’s chest. These two went right through him, leaving a swathe of organ destruction behind them.
Henry saw - sensed - something was wrong below, then glimpsed the AK swinging upwards.
He shouted something which stuck in his dry craw and rolled away from their viewing aperture as a spray of armour-piercing bullets exploded through the ceiling.
Rider had not moved. He took two full in the face and as the shells came up through the floor, took another seven down the whole length of his chest and stomach, making his body twitch like it was being given a series of massive electric shocks.
Wayne continued to hold down the trigger and kept firing through the ceiling in no particular pattern. The magazine was empty within two seconds, some thirty bullets having been discharged.
Henry rolled and scrambled across the unsafe floor to the edge of the room where he curled into a ball, hands covering his head, as if this protective gesture would fend off bullets.
The sound of the shooting died away.
On the dance floor Conroy’s body lay twitching, floundering in a pool of blood like a stranded fish on a deck.
McNamara stood impassively over him.
Wayne stared at the ceiling and smiled when a gob of blood blobbed down through the gap. He glanced triumphantly at Tiger, grabbed another magazine, discarded the empty original and slammed the new one home.
Morton stared, transfixed by the sight of Conroy and McNamara’s smoking gun and the pool of blood.
Everyone else in the room was petrified, as in stone, trying to make sense of what had just taken place.
Wayne raised the AK again and gleefully pulled the trigger.
It was as though intercontinental ballistic missiles were coming through the wooden floor as the deadly shells forced their way all around Henry.
He stayed rigid; one tore through the boards perilously close to his head.
Then they stopped again.
The gun was empty.
‘We’re going hunting,’ Wayne said to Morton.
He threw the AK down, grabbed another Sig and the two brothers ran to the door at the back of the ballroom and disappeared through it.
‘I love her ... I loved her,’ McNamara wept over Conroy’s body. ‘I treated her badly, but I loved her. I did.’ He sank to his knees.
‘Get these fucking guns together and let’s get out of here,’ Morton screamed at his officers, shaking himself and them out of their trances. They reacted instantaneously.
Hamilton grabbed de Vere’s arm.
They walked quickly towards the door but were stopped in their tracks by the sight of Gallagher, Siobhan and Tattersall accompanied, and covered by, two firearms officers, guns drawn and pointed with menace.
Four more officers sprinted into the club, followed by FB and Donaldson, then Summers and six of his team.
‘Where the fuck d’you think you’re going?’ Donaldson said, standing in Hamilton’s path. Hamilton took a swing and gave the FBI agent the most pleasure he’d had in ages when he decked the other man with a perfectly weighted right which sent him staggering back over the tables.
Henry breathed out, removed his hands from his head and looked across to Rider’s unmoving body. Henry struggled to see the damage. He dragged himself silently and unwillingly towards him. When he was only inches away, he gasped. Rider’s head looked as though he’d been chewing a grenade.
Henry needed to vomit. He retched.
Then he heard the sound of footsteps running down the corridor. They came to a halt. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ he heard a man sing out playfully - Jack Nicolson style.
‘Wherever you are, you’re fucking dead,’ came another voice. Less tuneful, less playful.
Two voices. Two men. Two killers.
Only one Henry.
Henry had the advantage. He had been in the dark for several hours. He could see everything very clearly in the room. The broken furniture. Planks of wood. An old desk. Rider’s body. . .
He also had a blood-soaked gun which he had prised out of Rider’s clammy, dead hand which didn’t seem to want to let go.
And, supposedly, there were two bullets in the gun.
So, yeah, technically, he had the advantage.
Except he was a crap shot. His hand was shaking like mad. They were probably armed to the back teeth and no doubt ex-SAS members, with the ability to kill with deadly efficiency in a darkened, smoke-filled room whilst fighting off Dobermans at the same time.
So if he didn’t make the bullets count, he was dead.
If he missed, he would have betrayed his position.
And he would be dead.
He lay on the floor, desperately trying to remember the intricacies of the prone firing position. Flat out on your stomach, legs together, gun in right hand (of course), supported by the left, forefinger on trigger - just the tip of it - breathing, watch the breathing, for fuck’s sake. . .
I can hear them outside the door. They’ve gone quiet.
Sweat drips down the forehead, collects in the eyebrows, then dinks onto the eyelids. . .
And not two feet away lies a bullet-riddled body. . .
Fuck, the door is opening!
And suddenly Henry is very calm.
Wayne came in first, low, rolling across the room to the left. Tiger second, the opposite way.
As Wayne came up into a shooting position, Henry fired, remembering everything in that split second: don’t anticipate the kick, don’t snatch, aim up, slightly right, just below the chin. . . He didn’t even wait to see if he’d hit the man - he knew he had - and he turned his attention to the second man, who had disappeared. . .
The calmness inside began to evaporate.
There was an old desk over there - the only cover he could be using.
Henry focused on the desk. Yes, he must be behind it.
Silence.
Then, to Henry’s right, there was a groan and a movement as Wayne rolled in his final death-throe.
Tiger roared something incomprehensible in anguish and stood up from behind the desk, Sig in hand and fired repeatedly in the direction of his already-dead brother.
Henry got a bead on him immediately and fired the last bullet. Click.
A dud.
Tiger laughed uproariously.
Henry dropped the gun and lay there with his head on the floorboards hoping death would be quick, painless and a better place than where he was at that point of time.
After several light-years of uncertainty, Henry decided to face his attacker. He pushed himself onto his knees and watched the dark figure of Tiger Mayfair step menacingly towards him - and then disappear through the floorboards with a screech, plummeting thirty feet onto the dance floor below, half-landing on one of the tables, smashing his hip and crushing his right arm.
Henry stared open-mouthed at the hole in the floor.
He was still staring when Donaldson found him.
Epilogue
Henry was out of it for two whole days. He spent these hours as if in his perfect dream: in bed, being tended to by a series of concerned and beautiful nurses.
He woke with a start on the third day, feeling almost normal after a fifteen-hour mammoth session of drug-induced sleep.
He blinked, then had a slight regression when he saw FB parked on a chair next to his bed.
‘Am I dead?’ Henry asked. His mouth was parched dry and the words came out croakily.
FB smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. How are you feeling, mate?’ he asked quiet
ly.
Henry shook his head and yawned. He rubbed his caked-up eyes and felt groggily for his ear. There was a big bandage on the side of his head.
‘They’ve refitted it,’ FB informed him. ‘Eighteen stitches this time.’
Henry nodded. He sat up stiffly. ‘What’s happening then? Last thing I remember is shooting someone.’
‘And killing him.’
‘Shit. You’ve come to arrest me for murder.’
‘Hardly,’ FB said with a snort. ‘I’ve come to pat you on the back, and explain one or two things.’ The Chief Super’s eyes dropped awkwardly. ‘And I’ve come to apologise to you.’
Henry frowned. His head was still hurting.
FB sighed deeply. ‘I’ve got to admit - I used you. I’m not happy about it, but,’ he shrugged, ‘needs must.’
Henry waited.
Uncomfortably FB said, ‘Me and a Detective Superintendent from Northumbria have been investigating the NWOCS for about two years now. Not overtly, but discreetly. We knew they were all as bent as nine-bob notes, but we were struggling to prove anything because they were so tight. It was a major coup for us to get Geoff Driffield on, because they only usually choose who they think will fit. So we made Geoff look like the ideal candidate.’
‘Bent, you mean?’
‘Exactly. Anyway, he was working undercover for us. He was a success initially, but then Morton cottoned on and Geoff got careless and they caught him. Which is why he ended up dead.’
‘Why kill everyone else in the shop, though?’
FB shrugged. ‘I think the rationale was that a dead witness is better than a chatty one.’
‘And they were going to pin it on Terry Anderson and his motley crew.’
‘That was their idea. Obviously it would have been far easier if Anderson hadn’t robbed the shop in Fleetwood. That was very inconvenient. It meant they had to put in extra work and fix the statements. Sadly for Derek Luton, he discovered their scam . . . to his cost. Tattersall killed him on Morton’s orders.’
There was a pause.
‘I was back to Square One and, I’ll be honest, Henry,’ FB admitted, ‘when Morton asked for you specifically, it seemed too good a chance miss. I went along with him. I didn’t exactly know why he wanted you but I suspected something was bubbling. So I used you, hoping you’d come up trumps. Sorry.’
‘And you didn’t even brief me,’ Henry sputtered. ‘You didn’t give me an inkling. I could’ve been killed - I nearly was!’
‘You might have refused - then where would I have been? I was just doing a bit of risk management, that’s all.’
‘Risk management is about taking risks with finance and paperwork - not lives. You know what? I think you are a complete bastard, FB.’
Once Henry had given more free and frank feedback to FB, he felt much better. FB took it all on the chin because he recognised how badly he had acted. No words could adequately describe how guilty he was feeling. However, given the same circumstances, he would have done it all again. Henry was right. He was a complete bastard.
Morton could not shut up. He blabbed for England and incriminated just about everyone he could think of. He openly admitted his last thirty odd years of corruption, readily talked about Conroy and McNamara and their criminal dealings, all driven by greed.
McNamara was a brooding, angry man, difficult to interview. He gave little away at first, but as time passed and the officers skilfully persisted, he cracked. He admitted his part in the gun running as well as the murder of Marie Cullen.
Henry’s ears pricked up. FB related to him how McNamara had confessed to trailing Marie to Blackpool late one evening, where she had fled following a violent argument in which she had threatened to reveal their relationship to the press. McNamara had tracked her down to a grubby bed-sit in South Shore, enticed her into his car then driven her to the sea front ‘to talk things over’. They had argued again and she had demanded money from him to keep quiet. That was when he dragged her onto the beach and murdered her.
Hamilton and de Vere were different. They said nothing. However, the police in Madeira raided the Jacaranda and seized everything they could lay their hands on. Long study of the documents revealed a money laundering operation achieved by creative accounting: selling and reselling non-existent timeshare apartments. Something like four million pounds a year was coming through Hamilton’s books on behalf of Conroy, McNamara and their illicit drugs and gun-selling businesses. That was the beauty of accountants. They found it impossible not to keep records.
These records also showed that Hamilton had arranged a massive burglary at a gun warehouse in Florida; the guns were transported across the Atlantic to Madeira using McNamara’s haulage company. A small proportion of the weapons had apparently been sent by ship to England so that they could be used as samples to impress buyers.
De Vere was hard to pin down. Very little could be proved against him. But with Morton’s testimony, the cops threw conspiracy at him. It stuck.
Siobhan was easy to deal with. She confessed all, from being the driver of the getaway car after the murder of Geoff Driffield right to the false allegations she made against Henry Christie.
Gallagher and Tattersall tried to kick against the pricks, but in the end it didn’t matter how tough they wanted to be. There was enough evidence against them to sink a bloody battleship.
Tattersall was charged with Derek Luton’s murder, and he and Gallagher were both charged, alongside Morton and Siobhan, with Geoff Driffield’s murder and the unlawful killing of the people in the newsagents.
Henry listened to FB talk whilst he consumed a hospital meal.
‘Which brings us to the dead people,’ said FB. ‘The Mayfair brothers - Tiger, the one who fell through the roof - died of an embolism in hospital a day later, by the way. They won’t be missed, couple of bastards. They’ve been killing people around the globe for years. A DNA sample ties him into the death of that FBI agent in Funchal.’
‘Sam,’ Henry said.
‘We’ll never know what she discovered. Hamilton won’t tell us, but whatever it was, it was enough to get her killed.’
‘Conroy?’
FB shrugged. ‘We’ve raided all his drug-supply houses and scored a few good hits, but the fight goes on. Some other sod will take his place. Drugs don’t stop coming in just because a major player dies.’
‘John Rider?’
‘Cremated next Monday.’
‘And how is Nina?’
‘Still hangin’ in there. She’s a bit of a tough nut. I think she’ll make it.’
They met at the zoo.
Isa looked across the wall at the Silverback gorilla sitting proudly on the tree with a mass of bandages around his left shoulder area.
Henry stood next to her, gazing at Boris, wondering why she had asked him to meet her there.
‘Do you think John knew he was going to die?’
‘It’s always a possibility,’ Henry said, ‘but I don’t think he wanted to. He had a life ahead of him.’
Henry looked sideways at Isa, who was crying. Down by her feet was a carrier bag.
‘I think he knew he’d die. That’s why he came to the zoo after getting out of hospital and donated all that money specifically to Boris here. Ten thousand pounds. Like one last, grand gesture.’
‘He said he hated animals to suffer.’
‘He blamed himself for Boris getting shot.’
‘He looks all right now,’ said Henry, eyeballing the beast who stared back at him with a look of contempt.
Isa bent down and rooted in the carrier bag, then stood upright with an urn in her hand.
And Henry nearly died of embarrassment when she began to scatter John Rider’s ashes in Boris the gorilla’s enclosure.
At the same time as this ceremony was taking place, a lady was walking her Golden Retriever down a country lane in Heysham, near to Morecambe, in the north of Lancashire.
In comparison to the rest of the county, little snow
had fallen in that area. Instead, the weather had been horrendously wet.
On either side of the lane were drainage ditches about three feet deep which caught the water from the lane and the fields.
Ollie, big, healthy, and full of bounce, enjoyed getting dirty and rooting through the undergrowth, even in the worst of weather. And it was pretty filthy that morning.
He and his owner walked down the lane. She avoided the puddles, but Ollie splashed heartily through them, regardless. It was not unusual for him to disappear over the edge of the lane into the drainage ditches and he did that about fifty metres ahead of his owner.
When he started barking in a strange, unnatural, slightly hysterical pitch, his owner immediately raced up to him.
He was belly-deep in the dirty water at the bottom of the channel. His tail twitched unsurely. He emitted that rather disturbing sound through bared teeth. His ears were pinned back and his eyes were showing their white edges. His attention was focused on something in the water ahead of him.
The owner put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.
In the water, half-submerged, was a body, face down.
Suddenly Ollie lurched and grabbed at the body’s clothing before the owner could stop him. His teeth snagged in the shirt the body was wearing and the dog pulled. The body of a young man slurped round in the water, an arm swinging in an arc, terrifying Ollie who, with a shriek, leapt out of the ditch and tried to jump into his owner’s arms.
As Henry had predicted, Jonno’s body had turned up in a ditch.
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