Nightmare City hc-2

by Nick Oldham

  ‘ Kate — you don’t know the damned half of it.’ Henry’s voice was hard and unyielding. ‘And don’t talk about me like I’m not here.’

  He stood up without a further word and left them. Donaldson found him in the conservatory, sitting on the bamboo sofa. Rain streamed down the windows. The garden was waterlogged and there seemed nowhere for it to drain away.

  ‘ Mind if I join you?’

  ‘ Help yourself.’

  Karl placed himself next to Henry and gave a little shiver. ‘That’s the trouble with these places. They look darned good, but they’re too cold in winter, too damned hot in summer.’

  ‘ Mmm.’

  ‘ Can you talk to me, H.? Kate’s really upset in there.’

  Henry leaned back. He stared up at the glass roof and shook his head. ‘Big problems, Karl. But mine at the moment. I need to think them through.’

  ‘ OK.’

  Henry sat up. ‘What’ve you come up for, Karl? It’s a hell of a day to travel. Must be pretty important.’

  ‘ That occurrence in Madeira with Sam — I think she was murdered by a guy she’d seen out there, name of Scott Hamilton, or at least murdered on his orders. I have an idea on that score, but that’s another story. Anyway, the cops in Madeira were eventually interested enough to put a tail on this guy. He hopped on a plane to Manchester yesterday.’

  ‘ And you want some help tracking him up here?’

  ‘ Naw. I got on to MI5 to help me out. They’re so under-employed these days they’ll jump at the chance to do anything. So I asked ‘em to pick up Hamilton’s tail in Manchester, stick with him, take some mug-shots and stay within eyeball until he got back on the plane home. Which is what they did. Real pros, they are. Pity they don’t know what the hell their role is any longer. I got the surveillance photos pushed through my door late last night — and that’s why I’m here. Take a look at these.’

  Donaldson had brought a briefcase with him which he placed on his knees and opened. ‘I had problems identifying the man Hamilton met until Karen looked over my shoulder and said, "Ooh, I know him. He was in one of my classes once".’

  Henry looked sharply at his FBI colleague.

  Donaldson handed him an eight-by-ten black and white photograph taken on the steps of some grand-looking house. The time and date were imprinted in the bottom right-hand corner.

  It showed four men standing, talking to each other. Their faces were clearly visible, even though it was apparent the camera was some distance away.

  ‘ This is the only one of them all together and the photographer had to be dam quick to get this. They appeared literally for an instant and then split, as if they didn’t want to be seen together.’

  Donaldson pointed to one of the men. ‘Scott Hamilton.’ His finger moved to another man. ‘He’s-’

  ‘ Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Morton, Head of the North-West Organised Crime Squad.’

  ‘ Hey, you know him?’

  ‘ You could say that. The guy next to him is Sir Harry McNamara, ex-MP.’

  ‘ But we can’t get a make on the last one of the group.’

  ‘ I know who he is. He’s called Ronnie Conroy. Into everything that makes money illegally. Once ran a surveillance on him about four years ago when I was on RCS… it got nowhere. Just seemed he knew everything we were going to do.’

  Henry looked up, his eyes suddenly alert.

  ‘ He was suspected of dealing in guns, selling them to the London underworld and also out of the country — to Africa, I think. Now I know why we got no result!’ His eyes met Donaldson’s. ‘Corruption. The best fucking police unit in the country is corrupt and it does deals with criminals. It protects them with information about police operations, and fuck knows what else it gets up to. Karl, I have something to tell you which may go some way to explaining why I’ve been such a bad-tempered git.’

  ‘ What about Kate? Perhaps you should tell her.’ That was Donaldson’s suggestion after he had listened to Henry’s story — which included everything that had happened — and they had discussed it for a while. The American was clearly shocked by what he had heard.

  It was an idea that did not go down well with Henry.

  ‘ No. It’d be the final straw for her. I just feel that I need to fight this without her knowing.’

  ‘ Does she have to be told all the gory details?’ Karl said delicately. ‘You may need her support with this. She’s not a fool, Henry. It might be a rough ride, but you’d make it. You two are very strong now.’

  ‘ No.’ Henry was adamant.

  ‘ Fine… but what do we do now?’

  ‘ We?’

  Donaldson nodded. ‘Yes, we. I’m involved in this from the Sam Dawber point of view. Karen can help out, too. She won’t tell Kate anything — it’d be cop business. But I do know something, Henry old pal — you can’t handle this alone. No way. You need help if you’re going to fight it.’

  Henry gazed at his fingernails, wondering where he should begin.

  ‘ Hang on a sec!’ he said to Donaldson, remembering something. He leapt from the sofa and rushed through the house and out to his car, from which he grabbed the package Annie Luton had given him. He ran back to Donaldson.

  ‘ They want this lot for some reason,’ he told the American. ‘They even went as far as searching Derek Luton’s house but failed to find it. Maybe there’s something useful here.’ He wasn’t particularly hopeful but nevertheless tipped the contents out onto the coffee table.

  There was a lot of dross which he quickly sorted through and discarded. ‘Degsy left me a note the night he was murdered, asking me to come and see him. I didn’t get it till too late. I wonder if…’ He found four statements which had been crumpled up and straightened out. They were photocopies, not originals. Henry ran his hand over them to flatten them. ‘These are recent,’ he said, noticing the dates. ‘Last Sunday.’

  There were yellow highlight lines over certain areas in all the statements. A quick glance confirmed to Henry that they were all statements taken in connection with the armed robbery in Fleetwood which had preceded the massacre in the newsagents. The highlighted areas included the time of the robbery, and descriptions of the people involved. Question marks, also in highlighter, had been placed in the margins. Henry noted that the officer taking the statement was DS Tattersall, accompanied by DC Luton.

  The two detectives perused the statements.

  ‘ Henry, I don’t know what this means,’ the American admitted.

  The Detective Sergeant’s brow was deeply furrowed. ‘Nor me. These are photocopies of the original handwritten statements. They would have been subsequently typed up.’ Henry was thinking out loud. His eyes went to the statements again. Then something clicked. ‘When I was at the scene of the murder last Saturday night, Derek told me that the gang had pulled an earlier robbery in Fleetwood. He mentioned a time.’ Henry willed himself to recall the conversation. It came to him. ‘Seven-ten, seven-fifteen.’

  ‘ And these statements highlight those times,’ Donaldson observed.

  ‘ Yeah, but why?’

  Donaldson shrugged and pursed his lips.

  ‘ And why the question marks in the margins?’ Henry nagged.

  ‘ Maybe your dead pal found something out,’ Karl suggested. ‘Such as these statements having been altered at some stage. These are probably his highlights, marking the areas which’ve been changed.’

  ‘ And Derek got caught finding this out.’

  ‘ And it worried someone bad enough to put a bullet through his head.’

  ‘ No,’ said Henry firmly. ‘I can’t believe this. I don’t want to believe it.’

  ‘ Henry, buddy, from what you’ve told me, and from what I can gather, we are dealing with ruthless people here. They will do anything to stop those who get in their way.’

  ‘ Even murder a cop?’

  ‘ What about the cop in the newsagents? How come he died?’

  ‘ Rogue. Loner. Guy thought he was Dirt
y Harry…’ Henry’s thoughts turned to Siobhan and her assertion that Geoff Driffield had come on duty alone and disappeared alone. Yet the books he had seen at the NWOCS — the duty states, the radio book and the firearms book — showed he had come on with four other people. The four Henry had encountered not very long ago.

  ‘ Or did he get set up too?’ Donaldson said presciently.

  Silence. The words hung in the conservatory air.

  ‘ Let’s apply some creative thinking here, Henry,’ the FBI man said assertively. ‘I know it could be well off the mark, but have a listen to this: Geoff Driffield thought he was going on a stake-out to catch a gang of armed robbers. He found himself alone in a shop, having been told that the gang would strike there that night. He was kitted out and tooled up. Maybe it wasn’t unusual for him to be alone, and so he suspected nothing. Meanwhile, his four colleagues dress up as this gang and hit the shop and kill Geoff Driffield and any other poor son of a bitch who happens to be there. What they don’t plan for is the real gang robbing a shop in Fleetwood eight miles north, and they’ve gotta do some real fancy footwork to make it look like the gang did both jobs. It was their intention to frame this gang anyway, to blame them for Driffield’s murder… I’m just thinking out loud, you understand.’

  ‘ No, can’t be.’

  ‘ Sit back, think it through. Even on the night of the shootings, as you told me, you were sceptical about the two crimes having been committed by the same gang. Even then, you had doubts. Now does it seem that, maybe, just maybe, your first reaction was the right one?’

  Henry acknowledged this with a reluctant, ‘Yes.’

  ‘ You’re dealing with a very violent, nasty cabal here who have gone out of control and who will do anything necessary to achieve their own aims.’

  Henry stared into space. ‘And not only that,’ he said, ‘I think that Fanshaw-Bayley and Guthrie are involved too.’ Henry couldn’t shake the memory of FB and Morton together, colluding, conspiring to set him up. He felt physically sick. ‘Which means that the top detective in this force is corrupt. Where does it end, Karl?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Where do I go from here?’

  ‘ I have an idea,’ Donaldson said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was approaching 3.30 p.m. by the time Henry returned to work. Technically his lunch-break should have been only three-quarters of an hour long, but he couldn’t care less about that. Being caught out for taking a long lunch was way down on his worry list.

  He found a tight space for his car in the almost overflowing car park at the rear of the police station.

  Hoping that none of the NWOCS spotted him, he jogged down the rear yard with the carrier bag Annie Luton had given him in his hand. Once inside he opted for the stairs in preference to the lift and climbed them slowly, emerging on the floor where the murder incident room was situated.

  This was the problem area.

  He needed to get into the incident room unseen, find the typed statements and photocopy them. He also had to make copies of the written statements in the carrier bag.

  He pushed the stairs door open wide enough to allow him to peep through the crack into the corridor.

  Empty.

  He stuck his head out and looked both ways. Clear.

  All the while he expected Gallagher or Morton to appear. If they caught him before he completed his task, he was finished.

  He stepped into the corridor.

  Morton’s office was around the corner. The door to the incident room was directly ahead. Three strides saw him inside.

  Two HOLMES operators were working at their computers. Neither looked up. No one else was in the room.

  First things first.

  Whistling tunelessly, he walked confidently to the copier. He almost screamed when it sensed his approach, clicked on and the message on the control panel told him he had to wait five minutes for the warm-up. A wave of frustration jittered through him. Five minutes is a long time to stand next to a machine, looking guilty.

  Better fill the time constructively.

  He slid across to the statement reader’s desk where there were three big fat ring-binders bursting with statements. He grabbed one of the folders marked Fleetwood and went back to the copier.

  Please wait 4 minutes. Warming up.

  Henry snarled at the machine then set to work scanning through the folder. He found one of the statements very quickly and removed all four pages.

  Please wait 3 minutes.

  ‘ Bastard,’ he hissed. He continued to flick through the pages, knowing that each passing second put him in greater jeopardy. He found another, three pages long, and yanked it roughly out of the binder.

  2 minutes, the copier taunted.

  Henry twitched. Somebody walked past the door.

  He found the third and fourth statements he was looking for.

  Ready, the copier declared with a prim beep.

  ‘ At last,’ he breathed.

  He stacked the four statements to one side and picked up the plastic bag, pulling out the creased photocopied originals. Because they had been screwed-up and flattened out, Henry did not dare feed them into the copier for fear of causing a jam. He would have to do each sheet one at a time. A slow process, especially when there was a total of nine one-sided and four double-sided sheets.

  When the paper tray ran out halfway through the third statement, Henry nearly sank to his knees and cried.

  He looked around wildly for more paper and saw a stack of it in one corner of the room, behind a flip-chart stand.

  As he was unwrapping a ream, Gallagher appeared at the door.

  Henry quickly leaned sideways, putting the flip-chart stand between him and his tormentor, became still and prayed.

  Gallagher called something to one of the HOLMES operators, who laughed.

  Then he was gone.

  Shaking, Henry ripped the wrapping paper away from the A4 sheets, returned to the copier and stacked the paper in the relevant tray, which he slammed back into place.

  ‘ C’mon, y’bastard — work,’ he hissed at the machine.

  Moments later it was ready to restart.

  Henry fed the remaining sheets through.

  He placed the new copies into the carrier bag, slotting them in amongst all the other papers.

  He had originally intended to photocopy the typewritten statements too, but decided to steal them from the binder and hope they would not be missed. He slid them and Derek’s highlighted copies into anA4 envelope, together with a batch of blank statement forms.

  As he turned out of the room, Gallagher was coming towards him. ‘Henry. I thought I saw you come in. What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘ When — now? Or over lunch? If you mean over lunch I’ve been crying in my soup, if you must know. Just now I’ve been to the accounts department to drop my expense sheet off for last month. It’s overdue, you see, and they’ve been on my back to get it in as soon as poss. Life goes on even when you’re corrupt, you know.’

  ‘ Let’s hope you’re not screwing the system. I’d hate for you to make false claims about anything.’

  ‘ Gallagher, why don’t you just shove it. You’ve got me by the balls, I accept that, but unless I have to, I don’t really want to have to talk to you.’

  ‘ You ain’t got much choice, pal.’

  Henry eyed him. He wanted to hit him very hard. Instead he shoved the plastic bag into his chest and said, ‘Here, I believe you wanted this stuff’?’

  Gallagher took it from him.

  ‘ Have you been through it?’

  Henry took a deep breath. ‘If there’s anything in there that tells me more about your squalid little set-up, then I don’t want to read it. I know more than enough now, thanks.’

  ‘ Hey, this is just the beginning, Henry,’ the DI sneered. ‘You’re on board now, one of us. You’ll get to like it. Then you’ll start reaping the benefits. It’s not all bad.’

  ‘ Yes it is,’ said Henry. ‘I hate bent cops.’


  ‘ Then you must really despise yourself. I mean, all those nasty things you’ve done in the last few days. Makes me look like a beginner.’ Gallagher snorted.

  Henry had had enough. ‘Finished?’

  ‘ Tony Morton wants to see you. Got a little job for you.’

  ‘ He’ll have to wait.’

  Henry shouldered his way angrily past the smirking DI and made his way to the stairs. Gallagher was delving in the carrier bag, not watching Henry, who twisted into the stairwell, then ran down to the public enquiry counter. He opened the security door and handed the envelope through to Karen who was waiting on the other side. She gave him a forced smile, deep concern visible behind her eyes, then left.

  With an empty feeling, Henry turned back into the police station and dragged himself unwillingly up to the murder incident room, dreading what might be in store for him next.

  ‘ Something odd happening, boss.’ It was the voice of an NWOCS detective called Hunt who had been told to keep Henry under surveillance. He had trailed Henry home and then back to work after lunch. He was now parked up outside the police station, talking on a mobile phone to Morton, who was in his temporary office.

  ‘ What do you mean, odd?’

  ‘ I followed him home and waited for him to reappear. There was another car in his drive when he arrived. Later he came out with two other people, a man and a woman — not Christie’s wife. Christie got into his own car, they got into the other and followed him back to the nick. The guy stayed in the car. The woman went to the enquiry desk and reappeared after about ten minutes with a large envelope in her hand. Whoa, the car’s just moving off now… What d’ya want me to do?’

  ‘ Could be nothing. Stick with them. Let me know what they’re up to.’

  The call ended at the exact moment Henry knocked on the door and entered the office.

  Morton clicked off his mobile.

  ‘ You wanted to see me?’

  ‘ Yes, got a good job for you, Henry.’

  John Rider stood on the Promenade at South Shore. He wasn’t dressed for the weather, being in jeans, trainers and a flimsy blouson. The rain was plastering his hair flat on his head and rolling down his face, intermingling with the tears he had thought himself incapable of crying.