‘Steve Flynn.’
‘Flynnie… Flynnie… oh, thank God I got you.’
‘Cathy? What the heck’s going on? I tried to call you back loads of times. Are you all right, love?’
He heard her choke. ‘No, no, not really.’
‘What’s up then?’
‘Steve, can you come back? I know it’s a big ask… but I need to talk to you. I need a friend I can trust.’
‘Cathy, what is it?’
‘Look, I can’t talk over the phone. Steve, it’s Tom.’
‘Is he OK?’
‘Flynnie, I don’t know who to turn to.’
‘Cathy, what’s happening?’ he asked firmly.
‘I think… I know… oh, God…’
‘What do you know?’
‘Flynnie, I think Tom’s on the take.’ She paused. ‘I mean big style. He’s a bent cop.’
FOUR
It was one of those slightly potty middle-aged-man ideas that usually don’t get anywhere. A product of a conversation loosened by alcohol which no one took seriously at the time but which planted a seed and was remembered.
The main problems were of logistics, workload and opportunity.
Both men were horrendously busy.
Henry Christie, as joint head of FMIT, had many serious enquiries to oversee, committees and working parties to attend nationally and locally. All that in itself would have been fine if the world stood still, but it didn’t, it continued to revolve relentlessly. People did not stop murdering others; long-running investigations didn’t suddenly get cleared up and there was always some new initiative that needed the presence of someone at Henry’s rank to make it happen.
Karl Donaldson, Henry’s American friend, worked as an FBI legal attache at the US embassy in London. He, too, was overwhelmed with work. Fundamentally he was an analyst and liaison officer, making and forging links between law enforcement agencies across Europe, from the UK to Russia. At the same time he often made forays into the field, sometimes finding himself in dangerous situations, whether coming face to face with a wanted terrorist or dealing with corrupt factions in his own organization.
The two men had first met over a dozen years before. Their paths had crossed when Donaldson, then a full-time FBI field agent, was investigating American mob activity in the north-west of England. Henry, then a detective sergeant, had encountered the Yank when an investigation he was pursuing became explosively intertwined with Donaldson’s. They had made friends hesitantly at first, but as their personal and professional lives continued to criss-cross over the years, they became good pals.
It also helped that Donaldson had met, fallen in love with and subsequently married a Lancashire policewoman. Even though she had subsequently transferred to the Metropolitan Police to be near Donaldson’s work in London, her northern connections often brought the both of them up past Watford regularly. His wife, Karen, also became good friends with Henry’s on-off-and-on wife, Kate.
A couple of months earlier, Donaldson had been in Lancashire on business — something hush-hush he could not even begin to reveal to Henry — and when it was completed he had stayed on at Henry’s for a couple of nights. On one of those nights, they had hit Henry’s local, the recently refurbished Tram amp; Tower.
They’d reminisced over a few pints, Donaldson becoming increasingly garrulous after his intake: he was a big man, six-four, as broad as a bear, but he couldn’t hold his drink. Anything over two pints and he started to lose control. Henry, on the other hand, raised in the seventies and eighties culture of the cops, always remained steady, although he didn’t actually drink much these days as he grew older.
‘Y’know, man,’ Donaldson slur-drawled in his soft American accent, ‘I love ya, man.’
They were seated in one of the newly constructed alcoves of the pub, chatting and paying passing attention to the newly introduced ‘Kwiz Nite’ hosted by the landlord, Ken Clayson.
Henry squinted at Donaldson’s revelation.
‘No, I mean, you’re a guy who’s always on the edge, but I kinda like that.’
‘Right.’ Henry drew out the word.
‘Hey! You thought about having any more kids?’
Now Henry screwed up his face. ‘That’s a resounding no.’
‘God, I can’t wait,’ Donaldson said, misty-eyed. He had — accidentally — made Karen pregnant but now he couldn’t wait to be a father again, even though they already had two kids who were just into their teens.
‘I’m too old, and so is Kate,’ Henry said. ‘We’ve only just got rid of the two daughters as it is — and they keep bouncing back like they’re on elastic bands. It’s chill time, pal.’
‘Karen’s no spring chicken,’ Donaldson pointed out.
‘How gentlemanly,’ Henry remarked. ‘Is everything going OK?’
‘Aw, hell yeah. Child-bearing hips, y’know. She’s blooming — and the pregnant sex is awesome.’
‘Whoa.’ Henry made the number one stop sign. ‘Too much. Anyway, glad to hear things are fine, but it’ll put the brakes on everything else,’ he warned his companion.
Donaldson sipped his third lager ruminatively. ‘Guess so.’ His voice was wistful. Then, ‘Hey! I have an idea.’
‘Go on.’
‘Before she gives birth, how about you and me sneaking away for a night or two of debauchery? Wet the baby’s head before it arrives.’
‘If I recall, the last time you were off the leash, you debauched a little too much.’
Donaldson looked sheepishly at Henry, his mind full of the one and only time he had been unfaithful to Karen. In a hotel room in Malta with a Scandinavian lady who had subsequently bombarded and terrified him with obscene e-mails with photographic attachments. ‘I was thinkin’ more of a guy thing. Not sure what, though.’
‘Whatever, it would have to be short and sweet, I guess. How about a walk and an overnighter?’
‘A walk? Do you walk?’
‘I’ve been known to put one foot in front of the other occasionally. We could set off over the hills one day, overnight in a village pub somewhere, then walk on. Park a car at either end, something like that.’
Donaldson thought about it. ‘Lake District, you mean?’
‘Possibly,’ Henry shrugged.
‘And now for round two of our Krazee Kwiz Nite.’ Their conversation was interrupted as the voice of Ken, the landlord, boomed out over the PA system. ‘Pens and answer sheets at the ready. Next ten questions are on the hits of the sixties.’
‘Ahh,’ Donaldson said, ‘your era.’
‘You ain’t far behind, pal.’
There was no more talk that night of a boys’ break, but it was a thought that remained with them, nagging away at the back of their minds.
Jack Vincent sat in the battered chair at the battered desk inside the stolen mobile cabin that doubled as his office and a refreshment area for the workers in the quarry that deeply scarred the hillside a quarter of a mile away. Vincent’s cruel face set hard as he shivered and hunched himself deeper into his thick donkey jacket. The gas heater was on, but fighting a losing battle against the harsh north-easterly wind that swooped down from the moors above the village of Kendleton in north Lancashire. Keeping any warmth in the cabin was a constant battle as the outside temperatures continued to tumble with the approach of evening.
From Vincent’s position, looking out from the cabin, he could monitor any traffic approaching the quarry up the steep winding lane from the main road. He could watch his heavy lorries as they reached another cabin where they booked in and then were sent on the right-hand fork through the gates into a steel-walled compound. Here any ‘necessary changes’ were attended to by Vincent’s fitter, before they were sent on towards the loading area, where the crushing and filtering machines smashed the rock that had been blown out of the quarry face, then graded it to customer requirements. The lorries were then refilled and sent back out on the road.
At the moment, Vincent’s main customer was a huge multinational road-building company subcontracted by the Department of Transport to widen a stretch of the M6 near Stafford. It was a government contract worth several million pounds and Vincent had manoeuvred brutally to get his piece of it. There had been the necessary payoffs, a bit of very heavy intimidation against his rivals — because a well-paid contract like this was always hard fought for by the minnows — and one particularly nasty incident where Vincent and his silent partner had been forced to resort to whacking the edge of a shovel into a man’s head. There was now nothing left of that man. He had been fed limb by limb into a crusher, mixed in with a few tons of hardcore, and was buried underneath a bridge pillar on the stretch of motorway he had, ironically, been so keen to build.