Nick Oldham - The Last Big Job

Henry simply wanted to wish him one last thing.

‘ Rot in hell, you evil bastard.’ Childish, he knew. Nor did it achieve anything. But it made him feel much, much better.

With a signal from one motorcyclist to the other, the police escort pulled away from the mortuary. Henry and Dave Seymour watched it leave.

‘ Let’s get back to Headquarters,’ Henry said quickly and climbed into the firm’s Mondeo.

In the back seat of the traffic car, Alexandr Drozdov spoke quietly into the ear of his bodyguard, whispering two words. ‘Yuri Ivankov.’

Less than three-quarters of an hour later, the two detectives drove into police Headquarters. Henry, at the wheel, drove past the front of the HQ building on his right, the sports-field on his left. The grass still bore the charred, vivid scars where the Force helicopter had been destroyed. The wreckage had been removed piecemeal to the Forensic Science Lab down at Euxton, near Chorley, and was being examined by experts there. First indications fed to the MIR were that a couple of grenades were responsible for blowing the machine to smithereens.

Henry drove over the speed ramps too quickly, jarring the unsuspecting Seymour out of his seat, and headed towards the LEC building which had been commandeered by Henry and his Murder Squad — now totalling forty officers and support staff — for the enquiry. He stopped in the yellow hatch markings outside the front door and abandoned the dirty Mondeo there. Inside he went directly to the main room which was being used for the incident. Danny and several others were working away, heads buried in masses of paper.

‘ Danny,’ he called across the room. ‘Got a minute? Pretty urgent.’

She grimaced and held her hands wide as if to say, ‘I am busy, you know.’

‘ Aren’t we all,’ he said. ‘Come on,’ and gestured her out.

‘ OK, boss,’ she said with resignation.

‘ And bring everything,’ he instructed as an afterthought — although he wasn’t specific as to what ‘everything’ actually meant. He ducked out of the room and went to the one he had claimed as his office, throwing his jacket over a chair and helping himself to a coffee from the filter machine. He thudded down into his chair, mind churning.

There was a light knock and Danny entered, carrying a few sheets of printed paper. She clicked the door lock behind her and leaned against the door, adopting a provocative pose.

‘ If you were any sort of boss,’ she pouted, ‘we’d be screwing on that desktop right now.’

Henry perused her from head to toe. His teeth grated together with the memory of her body. He shifted uncomfortably to allow a surge of blood to pass into his loins.

‘ I only have to look at you to get a hard on,’ he said.

‘ And I only have to look at you to want you inside me.’ Breathless.

Henry stood up slowly, maintaining eye-contact with her. He walked towards her. She raised her chin, exposing her long neck, looking down her nose at him with a ‘let’s do it now’ expression.

He stopped inches away from her, his fingers at his trouser fly. Then, unable to maintain the charade, he burst out giggling. She did the same.

There was no way either of them would compromise themselves or their jobs by doing anything so foolish as frolicking in the major incident room. It would have been Henry’s luck to have FB walk in just as he was table-ending Danny across one of the HOLMES consoles.

Danny flicked open the door lock. ‘You look worried,’ she remarked.

He returned to his chair and loosened his tie, about to speak.

‘ Oh, by the way,’ she said before he could begin, ‘FB said he’d be here in an hour for a rundown. To quote a phrase, he said, in typical FB terms, “I’ll want to know when he intends making an arrest and how he intends getting back that twenty million quid — and if he can’t tell me, he might as well pick up his P45 on the way out”.’ Danny mimicked FB’s voice and manner with uncanny accuracy.

Henry drew a breath. He knew FB was going to show at some time that day, having previously made the arrangement with him. ‘We’d better be in a position to tell him something.’

With a flourish, Danny held up the pieces of paper she had brought with her. ‘Maybe these will help.’ She came over to the desk and placed all but one of them carefully in front of him. She watched him as he read.

‘ The stuff from the financial analysts,’ he said, concentrating.

Danny could not keep a wide smile from her face as she enjoyed the jittery feeling in her tummy she got from being with Henry. It was something she had only ever experienced once before — and not with Jack Sands, her previous lover. It was a sensation which told her she was deeply, ecstatically in love.

She closed her eyes, shook her head and opened them again. The feeling had not gone away.

Danny had been poached by Henry to act as the office manager in the MIR, effectively removing her from the triple murder at Blackpool. But because she was well into that, she was also the main liaison between the two enquiries because of the common denominator: Billy Crane.

Over the previous two days she and Henry had worked very closely together, doing sixteen-hour shifts. At the end of each one they had raced — discreetly — back to her house where they had made frantic love. Henry had then gone home to sleep with Kate, dropping exhausted into the marital bed, leaving Danny alone and unhappy.

Maybe once the investigation was over, something would come of the relationship, Danny hoped, but had a horrible premonition it would all end in tears — hers. She wanted Henry badly, so badly she was prepared to live through a difficult separation and divorce to get him. But did he love her enough to commit this sacrifice? There had been occasions during their lovemaking when he had seemed on the verge of saying the three little words, but held back. She was not going to push him, but desperately wanted to hear them whispered in her ear. As soon as the time was right, they needed to sit down and discuss things before the whole scenario blew up in their faces. Danny did not want to enter a difficult relationship without payback.

Henry looked up at her. ‘These are very interesting,’ he remarked. No doubt about it, he thought, financial analysts can make an investigation.

‘ And here’s another one which may be of interest to you.’ She handed him the other sheet of facts and figures, which he started to read. ‘All about Barney Gillrow.’

‘ Wow — you have been busy.’

‘ Yes, I have, and so have the analysts.’

Henry looked across the desk, thinking Danielle Louise Furness was the most breathtakingly beautiful woman he had ever known. Her eyes were to die for. Her lips needed kissing and biting every day without fail. She needed to be made love to frequently. She had to be his.

‘ Remember when we first made love?’ he asked.

She blushed endearingly. ‘How could I forget?’ she said softly.

‘ I was going to tell you something when you very rudely interrupted me by forcing me to make love to you again.’

‘ Oh, I’m sooo sorry,’ she said. ‘What was it?’

‘ I-,’ he began and stopped abruptly when the office door burst open and FB marched in, trumpeting, ‘Right, Henry, come on. What the hell’s going on? Don’t give me any tactical crap. Give me strategy — now. I want the big picture.’

Behind him stood Rupert Davison.

Tenerife was roasting. Loz was sitting under a sunshade on the private roof terrace of Uncle B’s English Bar and Disco, a large whisky in his good hand. He groaned, winced and opened his mouth to feel the loose teeth at the front of his lower jaw. ‘Shit,’ he muttered angrily. He gingerly touched the bridge of his nose which had a bruise right across it, then laid a fingertip gently on the puffed-up left eye, which was swollen and weeping. They were all new injuries to add to the ones which had only just healed up from his previous battering.