Nick Oldham - Instinct

If the bad guys were thinking about coming for him, the trail he’d left could have been followed by a child and he didn’t want to take the chance of them turning up. He jumped on board with the mooring rope, turned the hidden cut-out toggle and started the engines. They came to life first time. Then, with a wistful glance at Shell, Flynn crept out of the creek and into the main river channel, setting out west towards the estuary and open sea. Once there, he steered north and fixed the autopilot that would take him right to the harbour mouth at Puerto Rico, and would automatically steer a safe route through any other shipping they might encounter.

Guilt burned away at him like a laser for leaving Michelle to her fate, which, he thought bleakly and in a cliched way, would be worse than death… followed by death. But he knew he could not have saved her without being killed himself.

He stripped off in the cabin, and seeing his blood dripping on the floor reminded him of how Boone had failed to clean the blood on Shell, the boat he’d named after the love of his life. Flynn thought of the irony of the name of his boat, Faye2. Faye was his ex-wife’s name. Not the love of his life.

Then he stepped into the narrow shower to clean himself off and treat the wound, hopefully discover it wasn’t life threatening.

It had been a terrible thing to leave Michelle behind. The expression on her face as the men approached her was already etched in Flynn’s mind. As was the image of Boone’s face as it exploded after being shot in the back of his head. Flynn cleaned himself mechanically, thoroughly… knowing that he would return to the Gambia sooner rather than later, and that his friends would be revenged.

They had been too late.

After the HQ dining room meeting with the chief constable, Henry, Rik Dean and Donaldson had driven quickly back to Blackpool and to the flat that Sadiq and Rahman had been using in North Shore. It had been stripped clean, like vultures had been on a wildebeest carcass. Everything had gone, every scrap of furniture, every strip of carpet ripped up and taken away, along with all the food, crockery, cutlery and toilet rolls. All that remained were the bare bones.

Henry had not been surprised. The forensic scientists who worked for the security service would take all the stuff and recreate the rooms based on their notes, photographs and videos, at some secret location outside London, and they would be able to take their time in assessing what they had. Everything would be combed, read, tested, analysed and the results fed back to MI5.

He had wandered through the tiny lounge, the one bedroom, the kitchenette, the toilet, hoping that something had been missed. He tried pulling up floorboards, easing skirting boards away from the wall with his fingertips, looking into what fitted cupboards remained, those things that were part of the fabric of the flat that could not be removed.

Donaldson, exasperated, simply stood at the door with his hands on his hips, shaking his head and continually telling Henry that it was no use. He had experienced the scientific thoroughness of the security services before and knew, to their credit, they were beyond excellent. They wouldn’t have missed anything. Where their professionalism fell down was on the operational side of things, the intelligence gathering, dissemination and use. That was where it all turned to shit.

‘I know, I get the picture,’ Henry said when, for the zillionth time, Donaldson had said, ‘It’s no good.’

Donaldson had eventually mooned around the flat, as though someone had stolen his puppy. In the tiny toilet he had leaned on the wash basin and looked at the square above it on the wall where a mirror had been fixed, but had also been taken away, leaving an unpainted rectangle of paint. He blinked as something crossed his mind, but was then gone. He tried to chase it, but the thought was elusive and probably meant nothing.

They left the flat muted, returning the key to the landlord, who said he hadn’t even been in it himself since and wasn’t looking to re-let it any time soon. Apart from anything else, he wanted the furniture back from the spooks.

‘Well,’ Henry breathed, ‘what next?’

The ‘What next?’ turned out to be frustration upon frustration. Despite FB’s representations, Beckham, the MI5 man, refused to let anyone near Sadiq, who he described as a prized and vulnerable asset. There was also the suspicion that he wasn’t even being held at Paddington Green police station any more.

FB, to his credit, did keep up the pressure until Beckham relented slightly a week down the line.

Henry had been sitting in his own office in the FMIT block at headquarters, looking forlornly at the dry-wipe board on the wall. The problem for him was that, although Lancashire wasn’t the murder capital of the world, people still had a nasty habit of killing other people, as well as committing other serious crimes that came under the remit of FMIT.

Since Natalie Philips’s body had been discovered, Henry was now dealing with two other murders and what looked to be a series of brutal rapes that seemed to be connected. Each of these offences required time and effort, and a very straight dose of panic-free thinking. It was just as important to find the villains in these new cases as it was to discover who murdered Natalie.

And Henry was wobbling a bit.

It did not help that he was being distracted, in a good way, by Alison Marsh. He had met up with her a couple more times and they had ended up fucking each other like the world was about to end. He was still very confused about his feelings for her, and although both of them were simply happy shaggers at the moment, he suspected that in the not too distant future there might be the requirement to ratchet the relationship up a notch, from lust to lurv. He wasn’t sure he was ready for that and as such their trysts had remained clandestine.

He was also having constant run-ins with Leanne and her on-off boyfriend. His daughter wanted the ‘lowlife shit’ — Henry’s description — back in her life, but Henry was dead against it. He refused the guy access to his house and it was getting to the point where he was going to have to ask her to up sticks and move out. It was another thing he didn’t really want to have to deal with because Leanne had been totally there for him after Kate’s death.

And now there were new cases to deal with. The murders were fairly straightforward domestic ones, but still needed steering and overseeing. The rapes he had inherited from a DI in Blackpool who, the rumour was, on discovering he had a serial rapist operating on his patch, had gone on stress leave never to return to work. Henry thought there would be a need to jack up a full-time team to crack them… which seemed like a good job for Rik Dean.

He looked back down at his computer screen, logged on to his e-mail. It showed eighty-five unread messages, many tagged with ‘urgent’ flags. He ignored them, minimized that screen and opened a file on the desktop marked ‘Retirement’.

He opened it and read the few lines.

He could re-date it, print it out, sign it and submit it, and would probably be pulling a police pension in six weeks. Get out of this mind-blowing situation. Draw the pension — half his salary, more than most other people earned — draw the lump sum and simply fuck off. Maybe go live with a woman who owned a very nice pub in a nice village that got snowed in every winter.

He sighed, glanced at the board again and thought about what Donaldson had said to him. And knew he would have to be pushed to leave the job.

He closed the file just as his office door clattered open — no knock — and FB bundled in without warning. Henry, who had a view from his office window across to the front of headquarters, was a little miffed. He’d been so engrossed in his internal monologue that he’d failed to spot the chief trundling across. If he had done, he would have made certain he wasn’t in the office.