It was a cautious ‘Yep, why?’ from the American.
‘I’ve been upsetting people in Manchester. . result was I got forced off the motorway by a guy in a van. . a guy wearing a clown mask and driving a black Citroen van.’
Donaldson did not respond for a few moments, making Henry think the connection had been lost. He hated mobile phones.
‘You still there?’
‘Yeah. . Henry, I need to talk to you before I go snooping around with both barrels,’ he said decisively. ‘Where are you now?’
Henry told him. ‘You?’
‘M6 heading north, just before the M62 turn-off for Manchester. I’ll keep going. Should be with you in about twenty minutes, traffic notwithstanding.’
There was a knock on the hotel-room door. Henry finished the call and opened the door, revealing Dave Anger and Jane Roscoe standing in the corridor, both their faces set with cynical expressions and their non-verbals indicating impatience verging on infuriation. This told Henry that neither of them was a very happy bunny.
He greeted them warmly, holding back an urge to act like the lunatic they clearly thought he was. ‘Come in, please.’ They edged past him and caught sight of the man sitting on the bed in the adjoining room.
Anger turned to Henry. ‘Who the fuck’s that?’
‘A witness to a murder. . Keith Snell’s murder.’
Their faces changed dramatically, Henry saw with satisfaction.
To coin a phrase, Detective Superintendent Carl Easton was up to his neck in it, rather like standing in a midden.
The Sweetman trial had been bad enough and the fact that an outside force had been contracted to investigate was not great, but he had totally believed he could wriggle out of that one; what was now giving him more trouble than ever began when he received a phone call.
It came on a particular mobile phone, a number known only to a select few, so he answered it without hesitation. But the voice he heard and recognized within one or two syllables sent an icy spike down into his bowels.
The voice was calm and measured. It was Rufus Sweetman.
‘Hello, Carl, my friend.’
‘Who’s this?’ Easton demanded, reckoning he did not know.
‘You know who it is.’
‘How did you get this number?’
‘Contacts,’ Sweetman said smugly.
‘What do you want?’
‘My property back — that’s all.’
‘You got all your property back at court,’ Easton reminded him. ‘I gave it to you personally.’
‘I think you know which property I mean. . fell off the back of a lorry, so to speak.’
Easton gulped, fell silent.
‘Penny dropped?’ Sweetman inquired.
‘No, don’t know what you mean.’ He clicked the tiny red button on his mobile and terminated the call. He spun round to Lynch and Hamlet, his two detective sergeants, and stared at them, shocked.
‘Who was that?’ Lynch said. They were in Easton’s office at the Arena police station.
‘We’ve nicked Rufus Sweetman’s cocaine,’ Easton announced.
Hamlet whistled. ‘Way to go!’
Lynch said, ‘Effin’ hell.’
Easton raised his eyebrows. ‘He wants it back. .’ He smiled. ‘But he can’t have it.’ He had opened his mouth to say more when his mobile rang again. ‘Sweetman,’ he guessed, and answered it. ‘Yep?’
‘Put it this way,’ Sweetman’s voice said coldly. ‘All we want is our goods returned. . and if we don’t get ’em, one cop will die every day from now on. An innocent cop, that is, not a bent bastard like you.’
Click. Phone dead.
That had been two days before and no cop had died — yet.
One uniformed PC from the city centre was lying in intensive care after being approached by a man who asked for directions and then shot him in the lower gut, below the line of his ballistic vest; another officer had been treated for shotgun wounds to the arm after being ambushed in an alley by a masked gunman. Sheer luck and body armour had saved him.
Although the two incidents had not been officially linked, Easton knew they were. He also knew that the effect of the shootings was to terrify all patrol officers, all of them wondering who would be next to take a bullet.
Easton knew he was sitting on a terrible secret, one he could only share with a few people.
Easton had been a corrupt cop for nearly all his service. He took bribes as a uniformed constable back in the ’70s, then later accepted backhanders for turning a blind eye or falsifying evidence to suit the circumstances. It was way back then he had started dealing in drugs through his prisoners.
All the while though, he kept an eye on his career because he wanted to combine crime-fighting with corruption — the challenge of a lifetime. Along the way he had carefully nurtured other cops and several of his contemporaries had retired with hefty Spanish bank balances after a few years of working alongside Carl Easton. He had nicknamed his team the Invincibles, because no one had yet beaten them. No one was going to, either, Easton believed.
Also along the way he had destroyed the careers of many criminals, sometimes by fair means, often by foul. He loved sending people to prison, particularly when he had engineered their guilt.
His goal had always been to run two careers in parallel. The cop and the criminal. Ridding the streets of the real bad guys, whilst stepping into their business shoes when they were getting kitted out in prison uniform.
And one of the crims he had most desperately wanted to put away was Rufus Sweetman — a guy who had been operating right under Easton’s nose for years on his city-centre patch. He had grown to hate Sweetman — the way he held a middle finger up at the law — and also to covet everything he owned: the apartment on the Quay, Ginny Jensen, the fabulous-looking girlfriend, the house in the Bahamas, the cars, the money.
Sweetman had gradually become an obsession. The man Easton most wanted to destroy.
And whilst this obsession had been simmering, Easton had chanced upon an amazing supplier of drugs. A man he never met, only ever spoke to occasionally by phone. Obviously a Spaniard or an Italian, but someone who supplied Easton with cut-price drugs with which he cornered a market consisting of young professionals.
How the man knew of him in the first place, he did not know.
Just a phone call from nowhere, two years earlier. This followed by delicate negotiations, Easton drawn by the prospect of drugs which often undercut other wholesalers by 50 per cent. The business had grown using ‘his staff’ as he called them — the band of corrupt detectives and uniformed cops whose pockets he had lined with cash. Easton’s principle was that each arrest, particularly of a professional person (and there were plenty) had potential. Some arrests led into massive drugs markets which produced hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business.
And all the while, Sweetman hovered teasingly.
In the end Easton decided to bring him down in a way which would ensure that he was off the streets for a long, long time and would also bolster Easton’s own standing within the force, maybe even secure promotion. He fitted Sweetman up for murder.
The only thing was, there was no murder.
So Easton ‘engineered’ one.
The brutal death of Jackson Hazell, the unfortunate man who had fallen out big-style with Sweetman over a drug debt (something widely known in the Manchester underworld, and therefore by the cops, too). He had been kicked to death in an alleyway off Deansgate by three men, one of whom, it was alleged, was Sweetman.
In fact the three men who killed Hazell were Carl Easton himself, Phil Lynch and Gus Hamlet, Easton’s core team. They planted some forensic evidence in Sweetman’s trash, even verballed Sweetman up; they coerced false statements out of people who owed Easton a favour, which placed Sweetman in the right place at the right time.