by Nick Oldham
‘What is it?’ Tope asked bluntly, sitting down heavily on the settee in the lounge.
‘Serious stuff. I need some information.’
‘I will lose my fucking job,’ Tope hissed. He looked around to check he wasn’t being watched by the surveillance branch.
‘Not on this one, you won’t. This time it’s commendations all round.’
‘Not with you, Steve.’ Tope’s voice rose towards hysterical.
‘OK – how does this grab you as an opener? Where is Jamil Akram?’
The phone went silent as Tope digested this. ‘Who?’
‘Don’t fuck with me, Jerry, or I’ll catch the next flight to Blackpool and come knocking on your door.’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘Does anybody?’
‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’
‘He managed to get out of the UK and disappear, didn’t he?’
‘Common knowledge.’
‘After he’d set up two stupid lads as suicide bombers.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do. Look, I’m not screwing around here,’ Flynn growled. ‘What would you say if I told you I knew where he’d run to, where he was less than forty-eight hours ago and where he probably is now?’
‘I’d say talk to Henry Christie.’
‘That twat?’
‘First name that came to mind . . . er . . . er . . . yes, him. If you purport to know so much, you’ll know he had some serious involvement with one of the suicide bombers. He’s a good port of call.’
Flynn closed his eyes in despair. Being told to speak to Henry Christie was like being told to stuff razor blades into his mouth – painful. Ever since he had left the cops under a cloud of suspicion, Flynn had harboured a festering dislike and distrust of Henry, who he saw as the person who’d pushed him out of the job. Not that Flynn really had evidence to back that up, but Henry was a good target for his ire.
‘Give me his number.’
Tope did so and Flynn ended the call.
Flynn was still in the bedroom of the house in Banjul. Four dead men lay in spreading pools of blood in the living area and Aleef, the middleman, sat shaking in one corner of the room, his face a bruised, swollen and bloody mess. He nursed his left hand, the little finger of which had been bent backwards and snapped like a dry twig by Flynn. He had been prepared to go for every single finger, one at a time, but Aleef had screamed, pleaded for mercy and promised to tell him everything he knew. Just let him live.
Flynn turned slowly back to him like the devil and Aleef whimpered under his gaze.
Over three thousand miles to the north of Flynn’s position, a communications operative/intelligence analyst based at the government listening station, GCHQ, in Gloucestershire sat back in his comfortable chair and removed his earphones. He held up a finger and signalled to his supervisor, who rushed down from her raised dais and leaned over his shoulder.
‘What’ve you got?’ she asked.
Interview room one. Henry and Rik sat on one side of the bolted down table. On the opposite side sat Driver and the duty solicitor. The audio and video tapes were running, the camera recording the interview was fitted high in one corner of the room, protected by a fine mesh grill. Rik had done the introductions and made it clear that the interview was being carried out at this time of day with the consent of the accused and his solicitor.
Henry watched this introductory phase. His mobile phone was in his jeans pocket. It vibrated. He removed it and surreptitiously checked it, but the caller ID said, ‘Unknown number’.
He frowned, slid it back, then focused on what was being said, before remembering he’d told Alison he’d be home by now.
Rik folded his arms. ‘You know why you’ve been arrested, you’ve agreed to talk to us; what would you like to say?’
Driver was in the spacious zoot suit, the billowing paper forensic suit and slippers, provided for him after his clothing had been seized. He sat with his hands clasped between his thighs, rocking slightly, a hunted expression in his eyes.
‘No doubt you’ve found it,’ he said.
‘Found what?’
‘The scarf.’
‘Which scarf?’
‘The one in the holdall.’
‘You need to explain its significance,’ Rik said, revealing nothing. It was always better to let the prisoner do the talking. Let them fill in their own gaps.
‘It’s the one I took from Natalie Philips.’
There was a beat. Henry’s arse twitched. Rik said, ‘Go on.’
Driver shrugged pathetically, beaten and knowing it. ‘I was on a corrie run –’ he uttered a little snort – ‘I saw her sitting on the kerb, carrying her shoes, barefoot.’ He sounded wistful. ‘She looked upset. I stopped to see if I could help her, y’know, me being a cop and all that.’
Henry’s chest cavity seemed to tighten up as if a corkscrew was winding his insides around. His phone vibrated again.
‘Anyway, she got in the car. I said I’d take her home.’ Driver’s voice was now monotone and emotionless. ‘I knew I was going to rape her.’
Silence in the room.
‘And after I raped her, I knew I had to kill her. You see,’ he raised his face as though he was explaining something simple and straightforward, ‘she was the only one who knew I was a cop. That’s why she had to die. The rest didn’t know – like her tonight. She wouldn’t have known I was a police officer. Change of clothing. Plain car. Radio off. Mask on.’ He tapped his nose conspiratorially and Henry had to stop himself from flying across the table and beating the little shit to a messy pulp.
‘How many more are we talking about?’ Rik asked.
‘Seventeen.’
Flynn looked at his phone angrily, then at the still cowering Aleef, nursing his finger, now swollen to tennis ball size around the joint.
‘So what happened?’ Flynn said.
‘I need medical attention,’ Aleef bleated.
‘What happened?’ Flynn ignored the plea. ‘Why did your men come after Boone?’
‘They are not my men.’
‘Who gives a fuck whose men they are?’ He stepped across the room, towering over Aleef, who pressed himself back against the wall. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Boone . . . I hired him on behalf of someone else, to take someone up to the Canary Islands.’
Flynn held up a hand. ‘Just . . . just stop there. Tell me straight or I’ll get very upset with you. Straight is the only way you have any chance of surviving.’
‘I’m just a middleman,’ he wailed.
‘So you keep telling me.’ Flynn shoved the muzzle of the Glock into Aleef’s inner right thigh, angled it at forty-five degrees against the muscle. ‘Femoral artery,’ he said, looking directly into Aleef’s tearful eyes. ‘I shoot, you’ll bleed to death within minutes. You’ll feel your life being sucked out of you. Do you want that? Are you a religious man?’ Flynn could smell the sweat of fear pulsating from Aleef. ‘No, I didn’t think so, except when it suits, I’ll bet. Going to heaven’s not on your agenda, is it?’
‘You’ll kill me anyway, just like you killed them.’
‘I saw those men kill my friend, that’s the difference here. Then again, if I find out you sent them . . .’
‘I didn’t,’ he blabbered. ‘I swear I did not . . .’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Boone came back for more money, to my office. He’d found out who the passenger was and wanted danger money, plus ten thousand dollars extra, or he would be going to the police.’
‘And . . .?’
‘I could not afford that, but that wasn’t the problem. His problem was that one of those men –’ he pointed to the heap of bodies in the living room – ‘was in the back office, listening. Boone only just got out of my office alive and they all went after him.’
‘So who are those men? Who do they work for?’
Aleef shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m just a middleman. I was asked to g
et a man from A to B and I found Boone to do it for me. I knew he took people and drugs, and his reputation was as good as any other. He just got greedy.’
‘Where is your office?’
‘Why?’
Flynn screwed the muzzle of the gun harder into Aleef’s thigh.
‘Just . . . just down the street.’
‘How much money do you have stashed away there?’
‘Why?’
‘If you ask why again, I’ll just shoot you.’
‘Forty thousand, mixed currencies, sterling, dollars, local,’ Aleef gabbled quickly.
‘That’ll do nicely.’
‘What? You’re going to steal from me?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Every last sou, you bastard.’ Flynn stood upright and gestured with the Glock. ‘Up . . . lead the way . . . do anything stupid and I’ll blow your spine apart.’
‘Y–you’re going to steal from me?’
‘Your money or your life . . . so tell me, who did those guys work for?’
Aleef struggled to his feet. ‘Al-Qaeda, I suppose.’
Flynn flicked open his mobile phone and redialled Henry Christie’s number.
Karl Donaldson reached Knutsford services on the M6 with tiredness overwhelming him. He pulled off the motorway and bought himself a large black coffee laced with sugar, and a doughnut, hoping the sugar rush would push him onwards.
It hit his system quickly, probably giving a greater high than a bag of street-bought cocaine could have done. He jumped into the Jeep and was on the motorway a minute later, not really knowing what he was setting out to achieve.
Henry Christie was a dyed in the wool Rolling Stones fan. His first memory of the group was grainy black and white TV pictures of them on 60s’ programmes such as Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops. He’d been hooked by their music and shenanigans since about the age of six and been with them ever since, his constant companions through all his own ups and downs, loves and losses. The cover of their mid-seventies album, It’s Only Rock and Roll, featured a painting of the Stones looking like they’d just staggered out of a night club at four in the morning, the worse for wear from every excess imaginable.
Which is how Henry felt when, two hours later, he and Rik emerged from the interview room after a marathon with a newly identified sex offender, Paul Driver, a police constable who used the position and freedom of movement that came with being a patrol officer to stalk, hunt, overpower and rape numerous women. His victims, all chosen at random, lone females walking home, had been subjected to brutal, sustained, degrading, terrifying attacks that would scar them for life.
Up until Henry inheriting the inquiry, only three victims were known about. Driver divulged fourteen more, all of them probably too scared to come forward. Nine of them in the Swindon area of Wiltshire.
Henry knew there would be even more.
Driver had been a cunning predator and had prepared himself for each attack in terms of clothing, a hood, gloves and even condoms. The detectives learned that he timed his attacks to take place every four weeks, to coincide with his shift system, the week when he would be on nights.
He used the correspondence run from Poulton to Blackpool in the early part of the week to search for victims. These were at times when the police, generally, were less busy and he could use his down time to attack – but not in his own division, always in Blackpool.
The reason why Natalie’s attack had been out of sequence was that Driver had volunteered to cover for a colleague that night.
Driver had still done the correspondence run, but it hadn’t been on his agenda to commit a crime that night.
He still took the opportunity to have a cruise around Blackpool and in so doing had encountered Natalie sitting on a kerb, obviously upset, bawling her eyes out, wiping away the tears with her silk scarf.
Driver stopped like a cop should have done.
His usual MO was to spot potential victims, park up in the plain car, get out of his uniform – under which he wore his anti-forensic clothing – pull on his gloves and mask, stalk, then drag the girl away to rape her.
But Natalie was out of sequence, unplanned, but impossible to turn down.
‘I wasn’t going to do anything, just be a good cop,’ he told Henry and Rik. ‘Help her, take her home . . . let comms know what I was doing . . . as you would, but once she was in the car, it all changed and I knew I had to have her.’
Henry said, ‘What did she say to you?’
He blew out his cheeks. ‘That she’d fallen out with her boyfriend, even after she’d had sex with him, and an older man, too . . . and let him watch . . . Jeez, that news went straight to my cock!’ He laughed perversely. ‘Even cut his hair for him,’ he added.
Henry saw Rik grip the edge of the table. Henry touched his arm.
‘Then it was a haze. Always is – and next thing I knew, I was holding her down and I’d done it and she was squirming. Problem was she knew I was a cop. I was still in uniform. I was in a cop car. I mean, how brilliant was that? She was in the car, she was wearing a skirt right up to her fanny, and she expected me not to do anything?’ Driver’s voice was incredulous.
‘You are a police officer,’ Henry said stonily.
‘And . . .?’
‘I think you know the “and”.’
‘Anyhow,’ Driver stretched and screwed up his face, ‘I had to kill her, just self-protection, really. Couldn’t afford for her to go blabbing. The others, you see, never knew I was a cop, but she did. She shouldn’t have been there. It was all her fault,’ he rationalized, and if Henry hadn’t realized it before, he realized it at that point: he was in the presence of a psychopath who would never legally set foot outside some sort of secure unit for the rest of his life. If Henry did his job right – and that’s what he fully intended to do.
Henry said, ‘Did she scratch you?’
‘Oh yeah, fought like a cat.’ Driver tilted his head and Henry saw four fingernail trails, now faded somewhat, in the skin of Driver’s neck, just under his left ear. He recalled how, at the scene, Driver, playing the part of the deeply affected cop who’d stumbled on a murder, had been rubbing his neck with his hand in a gesture that was obviously part act and which in reality was just to cover up his injury.
‘What about DNA?’ Rik had asked. Driver shrugged. ‘You’re on the database, every cop is. Sooner or later . . .’
Driver shook his head. ‘Lancashire haven’t got my DNA yet, since I transferred in from Wiltshire.’
‘They would have eventually.’
‘A bridge I’d cross when I got to it,’ Driver said. ‘Like I did when I was in Wiltshire.’ He grinned smugly. ‘It was easy enough to substitute someone else’s and I would have found a way of doing it. I just would.’
Psychopath equals deceiver, equals manipulator, equals planner, equals problem solver, equals dangerous, Henry thought.
It was at Henry’s insistence that the interview was terminated, much to the relief of the ashen-faced duty solicitor, clearly out of his depth, who must have been rueing being on that night’s call-out rota. He could not have imagined he would end up representing a monster.
When Driver was back in his cell and under supervision, Henry and Rik leaned on the custody desk, both exhausted.
‘Result?’ Rik said. ‘And I hold my hand up about Carter.’
Henry shrugged wearily. ‘Result – but a million miles away from what we – I – thought had happened to her. I was sure she’d been murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist. I just thought that was it. But I’m still not completely clear on what went on there.’
‘We might never know.’
‘But we have to find out,’ Henry said, knowing that side of the investigation still needed sorting – Natalie’s relationship with Zahid Sadiq and Jamil Akram. He yawned, his brain now officially mushed out. He checked his watch and grunted. Almost six. ‘Talk about goosed.’
‘Mm. Where do we go from here?’
‘Let’s make sure he get
s his rest quota. That’ll give us some time to get our heads together and sort everything out, including speaking to Wiltshire about any undetected rapes down there. By teatime we’ll have enough to charge him and get him to court for a three day lie down. If we plan it carefully, we’ll nail the bastard to the wall.’ He scratched his head, feeling gritty.
Rik was nodding and yawning.
Once again, Henry’s phone rang. This time he answered it.
‘Henry? It’s Karl. You’re not at home?’
‘No, still at work. Blackpool nick.’
‘Good. I can’t sleep. Did you manage a CSI – and a plumber?’
‘No, sorry, pal. I’ll turn out a CSI now. Got a bit distracted. As for a plumber, what do you need?’ Henry’s eyes locked on to the man in blue overalls just entering the custody suite, whistling tunelessly. He wasn’t sure of the man’s official job title, but he was basically the odd-job man for the station, who carried out minor bits of decorating, cleaning, electrical and plumbing repair work. He was a janitor, in other words, and of course went under the nickname of Hong Kong, derived from Hong Kong Phooey, the police janitor in the cartoon Henry used to watch years ago. The janitor in that was actually a dog.
‘Not much really . . . a handyman might suffice,’ Donaldson said. ‘Equipped with things for loosening bolts, I guess.’
‘Spanners, wrenches, that sort of thing?’
‘Those are the ones.’
‘I’ll see what I can rustle up,’ Henry said, trying to hide the miserable tone of his voice. Bed was what he needed, not rooting about in some pipework underneath a sink. DIY had never been his strong point, much to Kate’s chagrin. She was far better at it than him.
Rik had been listening. ‘Want some help on that?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I could sleep right now, a bit adrenaline fuelled.’
Henry folded his phone. ‘Any good with a monkey wrench?’
SEVENTEEN
Flynn hadn’t meant to kill Aleef, but his hand had been forced.
