‘Sure, boss.’
Henry gave Donaldson a meaningful look, then jerked his head to the back of the van, hoping to hell he wouldn’t regret this. ‘Everything off the record between you — and no thumping him.’
‘You have my word.’
The van pulled away. Henry watched it with trepidation, then went back into the house where he found Bill Robbins at the top of the stairs inspecting the two bodies he’d shot. Donaldson had looked at the deceased men, but had been unable to identify them — neither, surprise, surprise, carried any ID — although he pointed to the unmasked face of one of them which was very swollen underneath an eye. Maybe a broken cheekbone from a fight in Malta?
Robbins looked distraught. Only to be expected, Henry thought sympathetically. His mind must be in a dreadful state. Henry was keen to get Robbins off-scene, both for evidential reasons and also to get him into the clutches of his firearms bosses, for a debrief and perhaps the start of the counselling process. ‘Bill, you OK?’
Robbins glanced at Henry, who then found out why his old friend was looking so put out. Not, it transpired, because of the ‘Oh shit, what the hell have I done; what the hell’s going to happen to me and my pension?’ thought. Or the ‘I’m so deeply affected by having killed two people that I’m going to have post-traumatic stress,’ thought either.
Robbins said, ‘All that friggin’ training and it comes to this.’ He pointed disparagingly at the bodies of the two men. ‘I aimed for their chests, their body mass, their hearts. I intended to get two bullets into each of them, but looking at this — pah!’ He threw up his hands in disgust. ‘This one, not too bad. Chest shots, I’d say, one in the heart, the other a lung shot… so, so, but the grouping leaves a lot to be desired. But this one! Jeez — a neck and shoulder shot. What is that? Just plain bad shooting. It’s a wonder he’s still not breathing.’
Henry blinked at him in astonishment. ‘You’re bothered about your aim?’
‘Well it’s what I train for, innit? If I shot like this on the range, I’d suspend myself.’
His eyes were malevolent, yet dead. As he sat back with his cuffed hands uncomfortably behind him, he kept them unwaveringly on Donaldson sitting on the steel bench opposite, virtually knee to knee in the tight confines of the cage. They rolled with the movement of the police van as it slowed, rounded corners and accelerated. The tough-looking constable accompanying them sat tucked in one corner, watching the dangerous prisoner for any sudden moves.
Blood dribbled out of Donaldson’s nose. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
‘Talk to me off the record. Tell me why, Don. It’s over now and you’ve nothing to lose.’
Don Barber, Donaldson’s boss, tilted back his head on to the cage wall and continued with the intimidating stare. Then his mouth curved into a smile and, as often happens with prisoners caught in the act, he said, ‘Nothing to say and you’ve got it all to prove buddy boy.’
The smile mocked Donaldson who, still with adrenaline pulsing through him, held back the urge to pound his fist into the face of the man who, he was certain now, had taken the law into his own hands and murdered people purely as an act of revenge. ‘And anyway, why are you so bothered? You and me, we’re just the same. Wolves in sheep’s clothing.’
‘No, you got it wrong there, Don. My actions are always authorized and necessary and right, or they protect the lives of others in immediate, life-threatening danger.’
He snorted. ‘Wrong, you fucking simpleton.’ Barber laughed harshly and shook his head.
Donaldson regarded him in the darkness of the cage. The streetlights ran continuous bars of yellow across his face as the van travelled. Then he sat back. ‘I will prove it all, Don,’ he declared. ‘From the moment Shark was killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, through every revenge killing you and your little team carried out. Right up to here.’ Donaldson’s index finger jabbed downwards. ‘To this point where you went beyond all comprehension and started to kill innocent people simply to protect yourself, and would have killed another boy just because he saw your face.’
Barber shrugged confidently. ‘I’ll be protected.’
‘No, you’ll be thrown to the wolves,’ Donaldson said. ‘No one will come near you with a cow-prod, even.’
‘We shall see.’
The van slowed, turned and pulled into the yard at the back of the police station. The momentum caused the two men to rock forwards and for a moment, their faces were an inch apart.
‘So getting into the van was a waste of time?’ FB said, annoyed at having been denied a punchline. ‘He admitted nothing?’
‘Yeah — nothing.’
FB looked worriedly at Henry. ‘But the stuff here, on our patch, we can prove that?’
‘Yes.’ Henry was certain. ‘When everything’s bagged together, so long as we do it all slowly, methodically and professionally, we have him. From the moment he killed the old man to the point where he held a gun to Mark Carter’s head, and everything in between. We’ll match clothing, fibres, firearms and vehicles. We found a Volvo saloon on false plates in a street behind Cleveley House and that’ll be a treasure-trove for the scientists, I suspect. There’ll be bits of the old man all over it.’
‘Good — make bloody sure,’ FB said.
‘I will,’ Henry said.
FB rolled his heavy body up to his feet and emitted a sigh. ‘Looks like you’ve got a hell of a lot of shite in your organization.’
Donaldson took the remark silently, but it hurt him badly and he fumed as he watched the Chief leave the room. As the door closed and he was certain the man had gone, he said, ‘Hate that guy.’
‘He obviously touched a nerve,’ Henry said, feeling slightly defensive of FB for once and not enjoying the sensation, so he added, ‘but I get your drift.’
‘Jeez.’ Donaldson touched his battered face gingerly. ‘He didn’t half hit hard. I have a horrible feeling he would’ve beaten me if you hadn’t turned up and zapped him. I owe you one. You are a bit of a Taser expert, I take it?’
‘Never used one in my life,’ Henry admitted. ‘Lucky I didn’t electrocute you.’
Donaldson shook his sore head and chuckled.
‘Coming back to the subject, I take it that it was the computer thing that put you on to him? You haven’t really had chance to explain
…’
‘Yeah. Nothing else, no suspicions whatever. Until I couldn’t get on to files I knew I had the right to access. These were the ones with detailed information about the Camorra killings, with weapon details and everything. I’d looked at the general stuff that anyone can access and noticed, as I said, there were some that didn’t seem quite Mafia-like. Truly professional hits. I told Don I was looking into the patterns, which he didn’t seem overly keen on, and that was probably when his radar started shitting itself. There was something else, too.’
‘What?’
‘I never told him the witness you had was a teenage lad. I never described the witness at all, but he let it slip that he knew the witness was a lad. Are you counting the number of times I said the word witness?’ Donaldson paused with a grin. ‘Anyway, when he said this initially, I didn’t pick up on it straightaway, it just kinda seeped into my brain. I assume he may have realized he’d made a blunder, too. Because he’d seen Mark, of course.
‘I guess if I hadn’t had access to Jerry Tope, I still wouldn’t be sure about anything. But Jerry hacked into the authorization emails that Don had sent to the IT guys, telling them to deny me access to these files. Then I found Don himself wasn’t at the embassy. All the time I’d been talking to him on his mobile, I’d assumed he’d been in London. Wrong. We also found emails booking three rooms at cheap hotels in the Blackpool area…’
‘Which we’ll have to search,’ Henry said. A phone desk rang. Henry scooped it up. He listened, said a few yeps, hung up. ‘He wants to talk.’
Don Barber was in a white paper suit and matching slip-on boots. His skin had been carefully swabbed and hair combed by a crime scene investigator. Samples had been taken, he’d been photographed, fingerprinted and a swab of saliva taken for DNA purposes. He was sitting in an interview room, still handcuffed, guarded by the same officer who had accompanied him and Donaldson in the back of the van.