Backlash

by Nick Oldham

  Bellamy started ranting. Makin fast-forwarded the tape, commenting, ‘The guy is barking mad, of course, but very believable.’ She pressed play again. Bellamy now sounded proud. He was boasting.

  ‘Mastermind? Yes, I suppose so. I see the big picture. It was necessary to start a war of subtle attrition to support the overt war on the streets.’

  ‘Is that where David Gill came in?’ Makin asked on the tape.

  ‘A one-man killing machine, wound up, pointed in the right direction and set off. I gave him the targets and he struck – people who are part of the corrupt system which supports the injustice, people who had to be picked off one by one, anyone who helped the blacks, the women, whoever, anyone who had a hand in taking away the God-given rights of white men –’

  ‘At which point my blood was boiling,’ Makin said

  ‘The pièce de résistance was to dispose of the black wife of the prime minister, but Gill obviously got careless, got caught, killed himself – a pity.’

  ‘How did he intend to kill her?’

  ‘He had access to the Imperial Hotel. He was going to enter their bedroom suite and kill her – simple as that.’

  ‘And did this politician of yours know about this?’

  ‘And approved. Saw it as a way to step into the breach.’

  ‘Shit,’ said the prime minister.

  Everyone looked quickly at him.

  ‘What is the name of this man again?’ Makin asked on tape.

  There was a pause on tape long enough for Henry to zoom in on the prime minister’s reaction.

  Vincent Bellamy named a name.

  ‘And this man,’ Makin cut in quickly, switching the tape off, ‘was one of the few who knew that there was an undercover police officer working in Hellfire Dawn. He knew because of his position in government, because he’s informed of all undercover police operations in the country. He must have passed that information on to Bellamy.’

  The PM rose from the table. ‘It is apparent that I have been betrayed. Excuse me,’ he said. He ran across the restaurant, pushing his security men out of the way and dashed into the nearest male toilet where he was violently sick. He returned a few minutes later, after washing his face, and said to one of his guards, ‘I want to see Basil Kramer now.’

  Epilogue

  ‘Hold my hand.’

  Henry took the small, weak hand, squeezed it gently.

  ‘Now kiss me again . . . but nothing sexual, you understand – I’m not up to that.’

  He laid a soft kiss on her fragile lips.

  Roscoe sat back. She tucked the blanket in under her knees. She and Henry were in the conservatory built onto the back of her house in Fulwood, near Preston. It was a week after the end of the conference. Roscoe had spent a couple of days in hospital after she had been found, now she was recuperating at home with the assistance of all the welfare support systems Lancashire Constabulary could offer, plus her husband who had stopped work indefinitely to care for her. She was being well looked after.

  It had taken a full day for the search teams to find her in the Winter Gardens. The two night teams who had started the search had refused to go home and had continued searching when their day-shift colleagues came on.

  It takes many weeks to search the Winter Gardens prior to a conference, so it was never going to be a doddle finding her, especially when every seal on every door, hatch, window, cupboard – whatever – had to be broken and everything searched again. To find her quickly would have been a matter of luck.

  The Winter Gardens is an immense complex, much larger than most people imagine. It consists of theatres, ballrooms, play rooms, amusement arcades, bars, shop, plus an under-complex which the public never see which itself is a maze of corridors, passages and heating systems big enough for a grown man to walk through – the place was a nightmare.

  As the teams got on with their job, Henry was baffled as to how Taylor had actually been able to get Roscoe smuggled into the place. Taylor himself could come and go at any time he got the opportunity, whether on or off duty, because he had kept hold of his official pass which he should have handed in after he had finished his pre-conference search duties. He could enter through the security checks with impunity, but how he had got Roscoe in was a puzzle which made Henry’s mind whirr and click.

  But as Henry followed and chided the search teams – after he had showered and cleaned himself of the blood and gore from Captain Blackthorn’s eviscerated body – he thought he might have found the answer.

  Eventually they found her.

  Taylor’s arrogance astounded Henry. He had been holding her in a storeroom underneath the main stage in the main Winter Gardens theatre in which the conference had taken place. She had been wrapped up twenty feet away from the prime minister’s seat on the stage in a room no bigger than a police cell.

  She had been in a bad way, but Henry admired her spirit when the first thing that she said when the parcel tape was pulled gently off her mouth was, ‘Stop him, he’s going to kill the PM’s wife.’ After that effort she lapsed into a semi-comatose state.

  Henry regarded her now, a week later. Frail was too strong a word to describe her: her ordeal had totally sapped her of her energy; her skin was almost transparent.

  ‘A sick, sick man,’ she said vehemently.

  ‘Certainly. We’re still delving into his history. It’s a confusing picture. He was controlled by Vince Bellamy, and Bellamy’s claim to be a mastermind was pretty accurate. They met at university and Bellamy steered him into the police, where he was almost like a sleeping agent. He’d been a cop for nearly twenty years and wheedled his way from his original posting at Preston to serve at Blackpool and therefore be at the hub of the party conference, getting access to many aspects of it. Very clever stuff. I think Bellamy recognised both his potential as a killer and his mental sickness, filled his then juvenile mind with right-wing clap-trap, brainwashed him almost, and used him. Taylor was very malleable.’

  ‘Where does poor David Gill come into the picture?’

  ‘He wanted Gill’s personality. Again, arrogance combined with sickness. Gill was an ideal candidate for him. Taylor got to know him, arrested him, substituted his own fingerprints so if he ever made the mistake of leaving one at the scene of a crime, the police would target David Gill and give Taylor a chance to cover his tracks. And, of course, he knew that the fingerprints of police officers – which he obviously had to give when he joined the job – are not checked as a matter of course, only in very exceptional circumstances. The ones he submitted as David Gill’s have since been checked against his own and they match. In a way it was a bit like an undercover cop taking on an identity to cover his tracks – with the exception that undercover cops don’t kill people to steal their IDs.’

  ‘And he made the mistake of leaving a dab at the scene of a murder.’

  ‘And the mistake of using Gill’s Transit, which Captain Blackthorn recognised and told you about. If he hadn’t done that, we probably would never have caught him and bad things wouldn’t have happened to you and Mark.’

  Roscoe’s chest rose and fell. ‘And he killed the old man.’

  ‘He killed people who wronged him. If he’d managed to kill me – and if that shock baton he used hadn’t had an intermittent fault, I would be well dead now – then you, then the PM’s wife, he would have disappeared, I think. He would never have been caught.’

  ‘And Mo Khan’s death was the start of it all?’

  ‘Yeah, as a cop Taylor knew the situation between the Khans and the Costains. According to Bellamy, Hellfire Dawn used Joey to inflame the situation by going out with Naseema Khan, the daughter. Taylor finished off Mo after Joey had beaten him up to provoke further trouble during conference week. Nothing works better to inflame a situation than a death, does it? But we don’t know that for sure. It was to be the start of the big push on the streets. The only good thing about him was his taste in music which I never got round to discussing with him, unfortunately.’<
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  Roscoe looked puzzled by the remark but was unable to ask the question as, behind them, there was the rattle of teacups. Roscoe’s husband came in with a tray and deposited it on the glass-top table and left, smiling at Henry, who did the honours.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be coming back to work,’ Roscoe said.

  Henry must have looked startled.

  ‘Jamie and I have had some long talks. What’s happened has made us both realise we don’t want to lose what we have. We want to spend some time together. I might take a career break, and try for a baby before it’s too late.’

  ‘Good luck to you.’ Henry raised his cup.

  ‘Thank you.’ She sipped her tea. ‘How’s Dave Seymour?’

  ‘Getting better, but not out of the woods yet. His biggest problem is that he was saved by a woman – yuk! – and an Asian, Rafiq Khan who extinguished the flames – even yukker! – two types of people he can’t cope with. He won’t come back to work either, but he’ll live. And his long-lost daughter has made contact, so that’s good news.’

  ‘Good. Andrea Makin? Did she get into your pants?’

  ‘Sadly, no.’ Henry smiled sheepishly. ‘She’s back down at the Met, sorting out Hellfire Dawn.’

  ‘And hunky Karl, the all-American boy?’

  ‘Interestingly he has been recalled to the States to spearhead the FBI investigation into the bomber who we singularly failed to catch. Recalled at the behest of the president, no less.’

  ‘Oooo,’ Roscoe said, impressed. ‘That won’t please his wife.’

  ‘They’ll survive. They have an airtight marriage.’

  ‘Lucky sods . . . and what about you, Henry?’ She tilted her head and smiled affectionately.

  He shrugged. ‘Well, FB’s got his much sought-after HMIC job and he’ll be going soon, which will be nice. His leaving present to me is to get me on the senior investigating officer team at headquarters which suits me very nicely.’

  ‘And in your private life?’

  ‘Who knows.’ He finished his drink, checked his watch. ‘Time to hit the road – it’s all paperwork now.’

  Roscoe insisted on accompanying him to the door. In the hallway she said, ‘You still haven’t told me how Taylor got me into the Winter Gardens. I don’t recall anything about getting there. I have no memory of it at all.’

  ‘He dealt with a date-rape case about twelve months ago and the offender got off in court – a white guy on an Asian girl, so no surprise there – and the offender used scopolamine, which makes people very compliant and leaves them with no memory of what they’ve done. I checked the property store for the drug, but it wasn’t there. I think he used it on you and simply walked you into the Winter Gardens and through security at a time when no other bobbies were around who could identify you. The security people wouldn’t have known you from Adam – or Eve. Once inside, he just steered you down into the basement to that room which he’d discovered during the pre-conference search. He could come and go pretty much as he pleased, without anybody questioning him. We found your warrant card cut up in his flat and he’d stuck your photo on a conference pass he’d stolen and Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘Ahh, I see.’ She looked up at Henry. Once again, he was in a hallway, face to face with a woman. She reached up, kissed him, then they embraced and said goodbye.

  Henry drove away, glancing quickly over his shoulder to see Roscoe and her husband watching from the front door.

  Back in the conservatory, Roscoe settled down on the pine settee and picked up the newspaper. The headlines told her of the shock resignation of the home secretary for ‘personal reasons and political differences’ and the intimation that the police were investigating his right-wing connections. It looked like a story with much more to come. There was also the parallel story of the fast-track appointment of Basil Kramer into the vacant position. There was a photograph of Kramer shaking hands with the PM and a few quotes from Kramer about what he would be doing in the future, in particular with regard to law and order, pledging more money to forces and promises to put more cops on the streets, where they should be.

  Before Henry reached the motorway, he pulled into the side of the road and picked up his mobile phone, thinking, ‘Sod the paper work.’ He knocked a number into it. It was answered quickly.

  ‘Kate? It’s me, Henry . . .’

  Boston, six months later

  Another rooftop, this time in Boston, looking down towards a gay bar, his next target. The bomber sat on his favourite fishing stool, remote control in hand, waiting for the most appropriate moment to blow the shit out of the bastards.

  He felt good. He had done his bit for society by providing tools of terror for right-wing groups across Europe, and now he was back on home ground, about to take up the mantle again in his home country. Maybe next year he would do another tour of Europe.

  He checked his watch. Through his binoculars he watched the sickening activity spilling out of the bar onto the sidewalk. The perverts in their tight white vests, leather trousers, their bulging muscles and ridiculous moustaches. Did they not know how obscene they were to decent, right-minded folks? Disgusting.

  He picked up the remote control. Time to kill.

  Then he felt something cold, hard and round being pushed into his neck. The muzzle of a pistol. The bomber swallowed, his thumb hovered over the red button. A voice whispered in his ear.

  ‘My name is Karl Donaldson and I am an FBI agent, just like yourself. You have a choice. Place the remote down slowly and live; press the button and you die – make me even think you’re gonna press the button and you die. Which d’you fancy?’

  Over the past six painstaking months, while heading the investigation to bring him to justice, Karl Donaldson had got to know this man intimately. He knew what drove him, what motivated him, what his beliefs were and what he would die for. The only thing he had not known about him was his identity, but now he even knew that. He also knew that the bomber would feel he had no choice. He would believe he had to carry on destroying people to the end.

  The thumb twitched.

  Karl Donaldson did not have a choice either.