Nick Oldham - Instinct

‘What’ve you got?’ she asked.

Interview room one. Henry and Rik sat on one side of the bolted down table. On the opposite side sat Driver and the duty solicitor. The audio and video tapes were running, the camera recording the interview was fitted high in one corner of the room, protected by a fine mesh grill. Rik had done the introductions and made it clear that the interview was being carried out at this time of day with the consent of the accused and his solicitor.

Henry watched this introductory phase. His mobile phone was in his jeans pocket. It vibrated. He removed it and surreptitiously checked it, but the caller ID said, ‘Unknown number’.

He frowned, slid it back, then focused on what was being said, before remembering he’d told Alison he’d be home by now.

Rik folded his arms. ‘You know why you’ve been arrested, you’ve agreed to talk to us; what would you like to say?’

Driver was in the spacious zoot suit, the billowing paper forensic suit and slippers, provided for him after his clothing had been seized. He sat with his hands clasped between his thighs, rocking slightly, a hunted expression in his eyes.

‘No doubt you’ve found it,’ he said.

‘Found what?’

‘The scarf.’

‘Which scarf?’

‘The one in the holdall.’

‘You need to explain its significance,’ Rik said, revealing nothing. It was always better to let the prisoner do the talking. Let them fill in their own gaps.

‘It’s the one I took from Natalie Philips.’

There was a beat. Henry’s arse twitched. Rik said, ‘Go on.’

Driver shrugged pathetically, beaten and knowing it. ‘I was on a corrie run — ’ he uttered a little snort — ‘I saw her sitting on the kerb, carrying her shoes, barefoot.’ He sounded wistful. ‘She looked upset. I stopped to see if I could help her, y’know, me being a cop and all that.’

Henry’s chest cavity seemed to tighten up as if a corkscrew was winding his insides around. His phone vibrated again.

‘Anyway, she got in the car. I said I’d take her home.’ Driver’s voice was now monotone and emotionless. ‘I knew I was going to rape her.’

Silence in the room.

‘And after I raped her, I knew I had to kill her. You see,’ he raised his face as though he was explaining something simple and straightforward, ‘she was the only one who knew I was a cop. That’s why she had to die. The rest didn’t know — like her tonight. She wouldn’t have known I was a police officer. Change of clothing. Plain car. Radio off. Mask on.’ He tapped his nose conspiratorially and Henry had to stop himself from flying across the table and beating the little shit to a messy pulp.

‘How many more are we talking about?’ Rik asked.

‘Seventeen.’

Flynn looked at his phone angrily, then at the still cowering Aleef, nursing his finger, now swollen to tennis ball size around the joint.

‘So what happened?’ Flynn said.

‘I need medical attention,’ Aleef bleated.

‘What happened?’ Flynn ignored the plea. ‘Why did your men come after Boone?’

‘They are not my men.’

‘Who gives a fuck whose men they are?’ He stepped across the room, towering over Aleef, who pressed himself back against the wall. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Boone… I hired him on behalf of someone else, to take someone up to the Canary Islands.’

Flynn held up a hand. ‘Just… just stop there. Tell me straight or I’ll get very upset with you. Straight is the only way you have any chance of surviving.’

‘I’m just a middleman,’ he wailed.

‘So you keep telling me.’ Flynn shoved the muzzle of the Glock into Aleef’s inner right thigh, angled it at forty-five degrees against the muscle. ‘Femoral artery,’ he said, looking directly into Aleef’s tearful eyes. ‘I shoot, you’ll bleed to death within minutes. You’ll feel your life being sucked out of you. Do you want that? Are you a religious man?’ Flynn could smell the sweat of fear pulsating from Aleef. ‘No, I didn’t think so, except when it suits, I’ll bet. Going to heaven’s not on your agenda, is it?’

‘You’ll kill me anyway, just like you killed them.’

‘I saw those men kill my friend, that’s the difference here. Then again, if I find out you sent them…’

‘I didn’t,’ he blabbered. ‘I swear I did not…’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Boone came back for more money, to my office. He’d found out who the passenger was and wanted danger money, plus ten thousand dollars extra, or he would be going to the police.’

‘And…?’

‘I could not afford that, but that wasn’t the problem. His problem was that one of those men — ’ he pointed to the heap of bodies in the living room — ‘was in the back office, listening. Boone only just got out of my office alive and they all went after him.’

‘So who are those men? Who do they work for?’

Aleef shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m just a middleman. I was asked to get a man from A to B and I found Boone to do it for me. I knew he took people and drugs, and his reputation was as good as any other. He just got greedy.’

‘Where is your office?’

‘Why?’

Flynn screwed the muzzle of the gun harder into Aleef’s thigh.

‘Just… just down the street.’

‘How much money do you have stashed away there?’

‘Why?’

‘If you ask why again, I’ll just shoot you.’

‘Forty thousand, mixed currencies, sterling, dollars, local,’ Aleef gabbled quickly.

‘That’ll do nicely.’

‘What? You’re going to steal from me?’ he asked in disbelief.

‘Every last sou, you bastard.’ Flynn stood upright and gestured with the Glock. ‘Up… lead the way… do anything stupid and I’ll blow your spine apart.’

‘Y-you’re going to steal from me?’

‘Your money or your life… so tell me, who did those guys work for?’

Aleef struggled to his feet. ‘Al-Qaeda, I suppose.’

Flynn flicked open his mobile phone and redialled Henry Christie’s number.

Karl Donaldson reached Knutsford services on the M6 with tiredness overwhelming him. He pulled off the motorway and bought himself a large black coffee laced with sugar, and a doughnut, hoping the sugar rush would push him onwards.

It hit his system quickly, probably giving a greater high than a bag of street-bought cocaine could have done. He jumped into the Jeep and was on the motorway a minute later, not really knowing what he was setting out to achieve.

Henry Christie was a dyed in the wool Rolling Stones fan. His first memory of the group was grainy black and white TV pictures of them on 60s’ programmes such as Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops. He’d been hooked by their music and shenanigans since about the age of six and been with them ever since, his constant companions through all his own ups and downs, loves and losses. The cover of their mid-seventies album, It’s Only Rock and Roll, featured a painting of the Stones looking like they’d just staggered out of a night club at four in the morning, the worse for wear from every excess imaginable.

Which is how Henry felt when, two hours later, he and Rik emerged from the interview room after a marathon with a newly identified sex offender, Paul Driver, a police constable who used the position and freedom of movement that came with being a patrol officer to stalk, hunt, overpower and rape numerous women. His victims, all chosen at random, lone females walking home, had been subjected to brutal, sustained, degrading, terrifying attacks that would scar them for life.

Up until Henry inheriting the inquiry, only three victims were known about. Driver divulged fourteen more, all of them probably too scared to come forward. Nine of them in the Swindon area of Wiltshire.