Nick Oldham - Nightmare City

I can hear them outside the door. They’ve gone quiet.

Sweat drips down the forehead, collects in the eyebrows, then dinks onto the eyelids…

And not two feet away lies a bullet-riddled body…

Fuck, the door is opening!

And suddenly Henry is very calm.

Wayne came in first, low, rolling across the room to the left. Tiger second, the opposite way.

As Wayne came up into a shooting position, Henry fired, remembering everything in that split second: don’t anticipate the kick, don’t snatch, aim up, slightly right, just below the chin… He didn’t even wait to see if he’d hit the man — he knew he had — and he turned his attention to the second man, who had disappeared…

The calmness inside began to evaporate.

There was an old desk over there — the only cover he could be using.

Henry focused on the desk. Yes, he must be behind it.

Silence.

Then, to Henry’s right, there was a groan and a movement as Wayne rolled in his final death-throe.

Tiger roared something incomprehensible in anguish and stood up from behind the desk, Sig in hand and fired repeatedly in the direction of his already-dead brother.

Henry got a bead on him immediately and fired the last bullet. Click.

A dud.

Tiger laughed uproariously.

Henry dropped the gun and lay there with his head on the floorboards hoping death would be quick, painless and a better place than where he was at that point of time.

After several light-years of uncertainty, Henry decided to face his attacker. He pushed himself onto his knees and watched the dark figure of Tiger Mayfair step menacingly towards him — and then disappear through the floorboards with a screech, plummeting thirty feet onto the dance floor below, half-landing on one of the tables, smashing his hip and crushing his right arm.

Henry stared open-mouthed at the hole in the floor.

He was still staring when Donaldson found him.

Henry was out of it for two whole days. He spent these hours as if in his perfect dream: in bed, being tended to by a series of concerned and beautiful nurses.

He woke with a start on the third day, feeling almost normal after a fifteen-hour mammoth session of drug-induced sleep.

He blinked, then had a slight regression when he saw FB parked on a chair next to his bed.

‘ Am I dead?’ Henry asked. His mouth was parched dry and the words came out croakily.

FB smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. How are you feeling, mate?’ he asked quietly.

Henry shook his head and yawned. He rubbed his caked-up eyes and felt groggily for his ear. There was a big bandage on the side of his head.

‘ They’ve refitted it,’ FB informed him. ‘Eighteen stitches this time.’

Henry nodded. He sat up stiffly. ‘What’s happening then? Last thing I remember is shooting someone.’

‘ And killing him.’

‘ Shit. You’ve come to arrest me for murder.’

‘ Hardly,’ FB said with a snort. ‘I’ve come to pat you on the back, and explain one or two things.’ The Chief Super’s eyes dropped awkwardly. ‘And I’ve come to apologise to you.’

Henry frowned. His head was still hurting.

FB sighed deeply. ‘I’ve got to admit — I used you. I’m not happy about it, but,’ he shrugged, ‘needs must.’

Henry waited.

Uncomfortably FB said, ‘Me and a Detective Superintendent from Northumbria have been investigating the NWOCS for about two years now. Not overtly, but discreetly. We knew they were all as bent as nine-bob notes, but we were struggling to prove anything because they were so tight. It was a major coup for us to get Geoff Driffield on, because they only usually choose who they think will fit. So we made Geoff look like the ideal candidate.’

‘ Bent, you mean?’

‘ Exactly. Anyway, he was working undercover for us. He was a success initially, but then Morton cottoned on and Geoff got careless and they caught him. Which is why he ended up dead.’

‘ Why kill everyone else in the shop, though?’

FB shrugged. ‘I think the rationale was that a dead witness is better than a chatty one.’

‘ And they were going to pin it on Terry Anderson and his motley crew.’

‘ That was their idea. Obviously it would have been far easier if Anderson hadn’t robbed the shop in Fleetwood. That was very inconvenient. It meant they had to put in extra work and fix the statements. Sadly for Derek Luton, he discovered their scam… to his cost. Tattersall killed him on Morton’s orders.’

There was a pause.

‘ I was back to Square One and, I’ll be honest, Henry,’ FB admitted, ‘when Morton asked for you specifically, it seemed too good a chance miss. I went along with him. I didn’t exactly know why he wanted you but I suspected something was bubbling. So I used you, hoping you’d come up trumps. Sorry.’

‘ And you didn’t even brief me,’ Henry sputtered. ‘You didn’t give me an inkling. I could’ve been killed — I nearly was!’

‘ You might have refused — then where would I have been? I was just doing a bit of risk management, that’s all.’

‘ Risk management is about taking risks with finance and paperwork — not lives. You know what? I think you are a complete bastard, FB.’

Once Henry had given more free and frank feedback to FB, he felt much better. FB took it all on the chin because he recognised how badly he had acted. No words could adequately describe how guilty he was feeling. However, given the same circumstances, he would have done it all again. Henry was right. He was a complete bastard.

Morton could not shut up. He blabbed for England and incriminated just about everyone he could think of. He openly admitted his last thirty odd years of corruption, readily talked about Conroy and McNamara and their criminal dealings, all driven by greed.

McNamara was a brooding, angry man, difficult to interview. He gave little away at first, but as time passed and the officers skilfully persisted, he cracked. He admitted his part in the gun running as well as the murder of Marie Cullen.

Henry’s ears pricked up. FB related to him how McNamara had confessed to trailing Marie to Blackpool late one evening, where she had fled following a violent argument in which she had threatened to reveal their relationship to the press. McNamara had tracked her down to a grubby bed-sit in South Shore, enticed her into his car then driven her to the sea front ‘to talk things over’. They had argued again and she had demanded money from him to keep quiet. That was when he dragged her onto the beach and murdered her.

Hamilton and de Vere were different. They said nothing. However, the police in Madeira raided the Jacaranda and seized everything they could lay their hands on. Long study of the documents revealed a money laundering operation achieved by creative accounting: selling and reselling non-existent timeshare apartments. Something like four million pounds a year was coming through Hamilton’s books on behalf of Conroy, McNamara and their illicit drugs and gun-selling businesses. That was the beauty of accountants. They found it impossible not to keep records.

These records also showed that Hamilton had arranged a massive burglary at a gun warehouse in Florida; the guns were transported across the Atlantic to Madeira using McNamara’s haulage company. A small proportion of the weapons had apparently been sent by ship to England so that they could be used as samples to impress buyers.

De Vere was hard to pin down. Very little could be proved against him. But with Morton’s testimony, the cops threw conspiracy at him. It stuck.

Siobhan was easy to deal with. She confessed all, from being the driver of the getaway car after the murder of Geoff Driffield right to the false allegations she made against Henry Christie.