Nick Oldham - Facing Justice

Bispham was thin and wiry, built like a scrapyard dog, all bones and bollocks, and he was light enough for Donaldson — much bigger and stronger and fitter — to manage easily. He forced one arm up his back, trapping the hand between his shoulder blades. Donaldson twisted the man’s ponytail around his other fist and could easily have torn it out of his skull by the roots.

Holding him thus, like a Roman shield, he manoeuvred him out of the door into the corridor. Directly opposite was the door to Alison’s bedroom and Ginny, disturbed by the commotion, had emerged sleepily in her jim-jams, her face falling with shock at the sight of Donaldson coming out of her room carrying Bispham in front of him.

‘Night-time visitor,’ Donaldson said, turning left and marching him along the corridor, Bispham’s toes hardly touching the floor. He led him to the door that opened out to the bar and noticed the splintered wood around the lock, answering a question in Donaldson’s head. Bispham had jemmied his way into the living accommodation, naughty man. Donaldson pinned him to the wall and toed the door open. He said, ‘Gonna be a cold, cold night for you, buddy boy.’

The man’s bloodied face was crushed up to the wall and he could not respond. Then, as the door opened, Donaldson reaffirmed his grip on the ponytail and the hand, and pushed him out of the door so they emerged into the pub, the bar to their left.

It was fortunate for the American that he was holding Bispham up like a shield because he was faced with three masked and armed men who, in turn, were surprised by his sudden appearance.

The men were in a V-shaped formation. The lead man, the point of the V, was armed with a pump-action shotgun and he swung it around and pointed it at Donaldson’s writhing captive, who had also seen what was in front of him.

Donaldson had little time to react. Just enough for him to take in the situation — the weapon coming around in his direction — so he drew himself in as tightly as he could behind Bispham and held him forward like an offering.

And the shotgun was discharged from a distance of about ten feet, not giving the cartridge load the space to spread before it slammed into Bispham’s chest, right on the sternum, blowing a fist-shaped hole in him.

Donaldson held on, even though the force of the blast waved through his arms, and Bispham suddenly went limp. Dead.

He heard the cartridge being ejected, the weapon being racked as a new round slid into the breech. He held Bispham slightly to one side, now literally a dead weight, and saw the man racking the shotgun was blocking the way of the other two, causing them to hesitate unless they shot their colleague by mistake.

Using Bispham like a battering ram, Donaldson emitted a warlike roar and charged the intruders, driving the dead man into the shotgun guy before he could fire the next round, then barged on, using all his power to force him backwards, before with one last heave he threw Bispham ahead of him like a demented zombie.

Donaldson knew he had only seconds.

The element of surprise, both ways, had gone.

He turned, moving quickly, and before the men could regroup and work out what had hit them, he threw himself back through the door into the living accommodation, slammed it shut and slid the three big old bolts across.

Ginny was standing in the corridor.

‘Get down,’ he screamed, gesticulating wildly — but she was affixed to the spot, still did not know what had happened. He ran towards her, keeping low, and, being as gentle as he could about it, tackled her and carried her through into her bedroom. The door behind them seemed to explode as two shotgun cartridges ripped into it. But the door was almost as old as the pub, constructed over a hundred years before of thick oak and fitted together by craftsman-made joints and pride. It held well against the shotgun blast and the bolts made the thing virtually impregnable.

He gave Ginny a ‘shush’ gesture and on his belly he wriggled into the hallway and along to the door, keeping to the edge of the corridor, moving like a lizard, or maybe a crocodile.

At the door he stopped, listened hard, but could hear nothing and he knew why.

The intruders were not remotely interested in anything on this side of the door. They had not broken in for him or Ginny.

Entering the Tawny Owl had been easy, simply because the front door next to the revolving door had been left unlocked unwittingly by Danny Bispham, whose mind had been on other things. They had parked their vehicles down the road and run silently through the snow, each of the three men in black, ski masks pulled down over their features, had gone in through the front door and into the bar which was in darkness, other than for the faint glow of some low-level security lighting. The bar itself was secured by a roll-down metal mesh, and all the chairs had been upended on to tables for cleaning purposes.

The men halted just inside the pub, allowing their vision to become accustomed to the relative darkness and the geography of the place.

Jack Vincent was lead, shotgun ready, fingertip laid across the trigger. He also had a semi-automatic pistol tucked into the waistband at the back of his black jeans.

‘OK guys,’ he said and began to move them forwards to the door which led up to the first floor accommodation. That was when the staff-only door had been flung open and the blood-soaked figure of Danny Bispham came out, dancing like a drugged-up raver. Vincent’s mind didn’t fully compute what it was seeing, the fact that Bispham was being held by someone else, but he reacted in the only way he could, by pulling the trigger and blowing a hole in Bispham’s chest.

Bispham’s absence was only noticed by Sim Riddick when he sat up on the double bed in urgent need of a piss.

The pair of them, Riddick and Bispham, were sharing one of the bedrooms that the group had muscled into and intimidated the landlady into allocating to them. Napier and the boss, Jonny Cain, were using the other — sort of. Cain had instructed his men in no uncertain terms that they had to keep awake and alert just in case Jack Vincent should try anything else. Napier had been posted outside Cain’s bedroom to keep guard on his boss. Out there in the corridor, miserable, Napier had slithered down the wall, knees drawn up and his forehead wedged on them. He’d had too much to drink to be much use as a watchman, as they all had, and he had fallen quickly asleep, annoyed by the thought of Cain lording it in comfort in the double bed. ‘Boss’s privilege,’ he muttered. The gun wedged in his waistband caused him discomfort but did not prevent his eyes from shutting, and he quickly nodded off.

In the other bedroom, Cain had ordered at least one of the men to keep watch from the window which overlooked the front of the pub, whilst the other crashed out. So long as one of them kept nicks, it didn’t matter if the other was snoring. They worked it out between them: Bispham would take the first couple of hours and Riddick could get some sleep.

All four men had been anticipating action that night, but Cain had knocked any thought of reprisals on the head because of the presence of the cop, Christie. Cain decided that his revenge could wait another day and take place in another arena, but he couldn’t say the same for Jack Vincent, which was why he ordered his men to keep on guard.

Bispham had pulled a chair to the window and lit up, despite the no smoking rule of the premises. He opened the window a crack and blew his smoke out of it in order not to activate the ceiling-mounted alarm and rouse the whole establishment.

He was also fuming internally. His humiliation at the hands of the big fucking American who had knocked him on to his arse and almost broken his nose was making him seethe with fury. Most people he met and had confrontations with either backed down with their tails between their legs, or he took them on and beat them mercilessly. Despite his stature — he wasn’t a big man — he had an evil temperament coupled with an innate joy at inflicting violence and had often pounded people to the ground, smashing them down, making them beg. He especially enjoyed abusing women.