Nick Oldham: Nightmare City

Gallagher and Tattersall tried to kick against the pricks, but in the end it didn’t matter how tough they wanted to be. There was enough evidence against them to sink a bloody battleship.

Tattersall was charged with Derek Luton’s murder, and he and Gallagher were both charged, alongside Morton and Siobhan, with Geoff Driffield’s murder and the unlawful killing of the people in the newsagents.

Henry listened to FB talk whilst he consumed a hospital meal.

‘ Which brings us to the dead people,’ said FB. ‘The Mayfair brothers — Tiger, the one who fell through the roof — died of an embolism in hospital a day later, by the way. They won’t be missed, couple of bastards. They’ve been killing people around the globe for years. A DNA sample ties him into the death of that FBI agent in Funchal.’

‘ Sam,’ Henry said.

‘ We’ll never know what she discovered. Hamilton won’t tell us, but whatever it was, it was enough to get her killed.’

‘ Conroy?’

FB shrugged. ‘We’ve raided all his drug-supply houses and scored a few good hits, but the fight goes on. Some other sod will take his place. Drugs don’t stop coming in just because a major player dies.’

‘ John Rider?’

‘ Cremated next Monday.’

‘ And how is Nina?’

‘ Still hangin’ in there. She’s a bit of a tough nut. I think she’ll make it.’

They met at the zoo.

Isa looked across the wall at the Silverback gorilla sitting proudly on the tree with a mass of bandages around his left shoulder area.

Henry stood next to her, gazing at Boris, wondering why she had asked him to meet her there.

‘ Do you think John knew he was going to die?’

‘ It’s always a possibility,’ Henry said, ‘but I don’t think he wanted to. He had a life ahead of him.’

Henry looked sideways at Isa, who was crying. Down by her feet was a carrier bag.

‘ I think he knew he’d die. That’s why he came to the zoo after getting out of hospital and donated all that money specifically to Boris here. Ten thousand pounds. Like one last, grand gesture.’

‘ He said he hated animals to suffer.’

‘ He blamed himself for Boris getting shot.’

‘ He looks all right now,’ said Henry, eyeballing the beast who stared back at him with a look of contempt.

Isa bent down and rooted in the carrier bag, then stood upright with an urn in her hand.

And Henry nearly died of embarrassment when she began to scatter John Rider’s ashes in Boris the gorilla’s enclosure.

At the same time as this ceremony was taking place, a lady was walking her Golden Retriever down a country lane in Heysham, near to Morecambe, in the north of Lancashire.

In comparison to the rest of the county, little snow had fallen in that area. Instead, the weather had been horrendously wet.

On either side of the lane were drainage ditches about three feet deep which caught the water from the lane and the fields.

Ollie, big, healthy, and full of bounce, enjoyed getting dirty and rooting through the undergrowth, even in the worst of weather. And it was pretty filthy that morning.

He and his owner walked down the lane. She avoided the puddles, but Ollie splashed heartily through them, regardless. It was not unusual for him to disappear over the edge of the lane into the drainage ditches and he did that about fifty metres ahead of his owner.

When he started barking in a strange, unnatural, slightly hysterical pitch, his owner immediately raced up to him.

He was belly-deep in the dirty water at the bottom of the channel. His tail twitched unsurely. He emitted that rather disturbing sound through bared teeth. His ears were pinned back and his eyes were showing their white edges. His attention was focused on something in the water ahead of him.

The owner put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.

In the water, half-submerged, was a body, face down.

Suddenly Ollie lurched and grabbed at the body’s clothing before the owner could stop him. His teeth snagged in the shirt the body was wearing and the dog pulled. The body of a young man slurped round in the water, an arm swinging in an arc, terrifying Ollie who, with a shriek, leapt out of the ditch and tried to jump into his owner’s arms.

As Henry had predicted, Jonno’s body had turned up in a ditch.