Nick Oldham - Facing Justice

In the ‘From’ section, she had written, ‘Anon.’

In the body of the message she’d written, ‘Poachers on Mallowdale House land again.’

And that was it, very bare bones. Flynn could only imagine the conversation. He guessed the phone must have rung in Cathy’s office and she’d answered it: ‘Hello, police at Kendleton. PC James speaking. Can I help?’ It would have started something like that. Professional, courteous. Then, whoever it was had said, ‘There’s poachers on Mallowdale House land.’ The phone call would have ended abruptly, or she would have quizzed the caller further, asking who was calling, asking for a description of the poacher or poachers, any vehicle, any accompanying animals — such as a dog. But the message was from Mr Anon. It was dated yesterday, timed at 16.30 hours. The words PC James attending were scribbled on the bottom of the form.

But Flynn was only guessing. All he had was a sketchy message about poachers from an anonymous source, and no doubt Cathy would have seen it as her duty to investigate, even though yesterday was actually her rest day. What it did was tell Flynn that Cathy had taken a message yesterday afternoon and that Tom was possibly telling lies about having seen her at home. How true was his claim that he hadn’t seen her for a couple of days? Or perhaps he wasn’t fibbing and they’d just had a big spat that wasn’t any business of Flynn’s, perhaps everything she’d told Flynn over the phone was just a woman’s scorn? Perhaps she was just making things up to get at Tom for something else. What Flynn didn’t like, though, was Tom’s attitude.

Flynn scratched his head, not really knowing what to think, but he did know that policemen had occasionally come a cropper investigating reports of poachers. He remembered a PC even being murdered. These days poachers weren’t jolly characters feeding their families, they were often organized, ruthless gangs and big money was involved, depending on what they were hunting.

He sighed, thinking he should just get the hell out of here before he got trapped.

‘I’m curious… sorry…’ Alison interrupted his jagged train of thought. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

‘About what?’

‘Mallowdale House… you’re not the first person to ask about it today.’

Flynn pouted. ‘And?’

‘Like I said, I’m curious.’ She leaned on the bar again, pushing her breasts tightly against her jumper in a move with obvious consequences for the male of the species, a fact Flynn was certain she was fully aware of.

‘To be honest I’d never heard of Mallowdale House until about twenty minutes ago,’ Flynn said. His eyes registered the fact that the third finger of her left hand bore no ring of any sort.

‘Well, you wanna keep away.’

Flynn blinked. ‘You said that without moving your lips,’ he said, and he and Alison grinned briefly as both of them turned to the origin of the voice — the old-timer sitting on the stool at the end of the bar, apparently engrossed in his newspaper but actually earwigging. ‘What do you mean?’

The man, bearded, dressed in ancient tweeds, raised his chin and said, ‘Just an observation, is all.’

Flynn waited for more. Nothing came. He glanced back at Alison and arched his eyebrows.

‘They’re not that friendly, that’s all,’ she said, ending the subject.

‘Do they have a poaching problem?’

She guffawed. ‘Anyone who goes on to Mallowdale land does so at their own risk. The poachers have a problem with the owners, I’d say.’

‘Is that a long way of saying no?’

‘You work it out.’ Clearly the tone of her voice implied that she’d said enough.

Flynn exhaled and thought, ‘Bloody villagers.’ He was half-expecting to hear banjos being plucked in the background. ‘I see the “No Vacancies” sign is up.’

‘Yeah, sorry. I’ve only got two rooms, both booked for the night. I have actually got six, but the rest are all being renovated and are uninhabitable.’

‘Have the guests landed yet?’

‘Not so far.’

‘Think they will?’ He gestured at the weather through the window.

‘Why, do you need a room?’

‘Considering.’

‘I have to give them time to arrive. If they’re not here by eight and I haven’t heard from them, I’ll assume they won’t be coming and maybe re-let — if that’s any good to you?’

‘Sounds half promising.’ He threw back the remainder of his coffee and wiped his lips with the paper napkin. ‘Nice brew. Maybe see you later.’

Alison leaned on the bar again in the way that stretched her jumper tight. ‘Maybe… ooh, speak of the devil.’ She looked past Flynn’s shoulder through the window. ‘These are the people who asked about Mallowdale House.’

The blood drained from Flynn’s face. Outside, a black Range Rover that Flynn immediately recognized had pulled up in the car park. The one with the impatient driver that had taken off his and another car’s wing mirrors. Two men got out. Flynn slid off the bar stool and walked to the door, zipping up his jacket, then stepped back into an alcove as the two men came in through the pub door with a crash and headed to the bar without apparently noticing him.

Flynn noticed Alison’s eyes had become wary. The men unzipped their top coats and stomped their feet on the floor to dislodge the snow they’d picked up.

Flynn’s mouth went dry as his inner sluice gates opened and adrenalin gushed through his body. In the five years since he’d been a cop, his memory had not dimmed with the passage of time. He recognized that two dangerous men had just entered this out-of-the-way country pub.

Before his departure from the organization he loved, he had spent a good number of years hunting down professional criminals who made their grubby but lucrative living from dealing drugs and causing misery. Not the gofers or the toe-rags on the streets, but those who organized the importation and distribution of the substances had been Flynn’s targets. Flynn, as a detective sergeant on the drugs branch with Lancashire Constabulary’s Serious and Organized Crime Unit, had successfully targeted some of the leading crime lords in this genre.

Sometimes, of course, he’d been unsuccessful. Often cases built up meticulously over months or years came crashing apart for a variety of reasons.

One such case that he’d been involved in was against a very high-ranking villain called Jonny Cain, maybe one of the richest dealers Flynn had ever encountered. His wealth had been estimated to be somewhere in the region of twenty million. But Cain, a sly, devious man, had eluded the clutches of the law by surrounding himself with layers of protection and operating his business on a cell-by-cell basis. Above all, though, his ruthless approach to anyone who might be a threat to him ensured that few people had the courage to testify against him.

Flynn knew that about a year ago, the police had got Cain as far as a crown court trial for murder, but that had collapsed. Flynn also knew that an unlikely potential witness against Cain — another gangster — had ended up with his brains blown out by a professional assassin. As far as he knew, it had been impossible for the police to prove a definite link between Cain and that killing (although everyone knew it to be the case).

Flynn recalled all this in the moments standing in that alcove because the two men who had just walked into the Tawny Owl, and changed the atmosphere completely, were two of Jonny Cain’s most trusted minders.

Flynn had a quick flashback to the Range Rover incident — the slicing off of his door mirror — and bored into his recall of it. Even though the vehicle’s windows had been smoked out, he was sure there had been four shapes within and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that one of those shapes could well have been Jonny Cain.