Nick Oldham - A Time For Justice

Dakin looked flustered and agitated.

‘ It’s tomorrow. The ship’ll be coming through tomorrow. We’ll meet it in the Irish Sea, collect my consignment and hand you over. From there it’ll sail to Eire and you’ll be able to get a flight from Dublin to Paris, then to New York. It’s all arranged — false passports, money, everything.’

‘ Good.’

‘ What a fuckin’ day I’ve had,’ breathed Dakin. He helped himself to a Scotch and soda. ‘I’ve had cops crawling all over my property looking for you. It’s a damn good job I didn’t put you up at the farmhouse.’

‘ Have they got you all worked up?’ Hinksman chided.

‘ You bet they fucking have!’

‘ I thought you were a no-nonsense big-time criminal who could handle the pressure,’ he teased.

‘ I can handle the pressure when necessary, but this isn’t. You are a right royal pain in the arsehole at the moment and I’ll be glad to get shut of you. You be here at nine tomorrow and you’ll be picked up, OK?’

‘ No.’

‘ No? What the fuck do you mean?’

‘ Things to do, people to see… lives to wreck,’ smiled Hinksman sweetly. ‘You just tell me where and when you’ll be sailing and I’ll be there, probably with a passenger.’

‘ What?’ screamed Dakin. ‘Who? Are you fucking mad?’

Hinksman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t call me mad.’

By the time Dave August got back to his office at police headquarters it was midnight. He’d had a long, tiring day visiting grieving relatives, being bombarded with tears, questions and disbelief. He was worn out by the effort of appearing sympathetic on the surface whilst having to deal with his own inner turmoil at the same time. Once or twice he’d had the urge to blurt out, ‘Blame me — I’m the one responsible.’

He’d been informed of John Abbot’s death during the evening but had left it to FB and the ACC (Operations) to deal with. He’d look at it tomorrow. He couldn’t believe it — what the hell else could happen? He was presently the head of a police force under mounting pressure and it didn’t help that he was going through his own agonising crisis.

August sat down at his desk. He pulled a small bottle of Bell’s out of a drawer and took a sip. The heat of the spirit seemed to revive him. He looked at the large pile of papers in front of him which constituted Hinksman’s file. He opened the first folder and began to read by the light of his table lamp.

Somewhere in here, he hoped, was the answer.

At five minutes past midnight, a delayed flight from Miami touched down at Manchester Airport. It was some eight hours behind schedule, held up by ‘technical problems’ — a vague term which did not endear the company to the passengers in any way.

Tired and disgruntled, they disembarked and filed woodenly through the terminal building towards Passport Control.

Near to the front of the queue was a middle-aged woman who was in heated, but subdued, conversation with her timid husband. They were having a disagreement of sorts. She wanted him to do something, and as usual he didn’t want to get involved. All he wanted to do was I get home and get to bed.

‘ You are useless!’ she told him — and not for the first time.

When they reached the desk and handed their passports over, the woman said icily to her husband, ‘Well, if you won’t, then I shall have to.’ She looked at the Customs officer and leaned towards her with a conspiratorial air. ‘Is there someone I can talk to?’ she hissed, so that other passengers would not overhear. ‘In confidence?’

‘ Yes, of course, what about?’

‘ One of the other passengers, who I think is on drugs.’

Henry Christie and Karl Donaldson completed their witness statements relating to John Abbot’s death at about one o’clock that morning. The process had taken a couple of hours over numerous cups of sweet white coffee. Both men were exhausted, Henry in particular. He hadn’t slept properly for almost two days and his mind was beginning to play tricks with his eyes.

He finished rereading his statement, blinked repeatedly and said, ‘I’ve got to get some kip. My head’s a complete shed.’

‘ Me too,’ agreed Donaldson, yawning and stretching. His clothing reeked of smoke.

They were sitting at desks in the deserted CID office at Blackpool Central. Karen had left them about an hour before, completely wrecked herself.

Henry stood up. His joints creaked and clicked like an old man’s. He walked across to a window, rolling his shoulders. He watched his reflection as he approached; he hardly recognised himself, wasn’t sure I who he was seeing. A stranger. Someone who had changed drastically in the last eight months. A man who’d gone from being happily married with two beautiful daughters and a beautiful wife, a contented lifestyle and good job, to a rundown adulterer who hardly saw his kids and lived like a hermit in a shit-hole of a flat that smelled of cat piss.

The only constant was that he still had the same job.

He tried to pinpoint the exact moment at which his life had changed for the worse. He reckoned it was that bomb on the M6.

He gazed blankly out of the window; in his mind’s eye was every detail of that explosion and the faces of those kids. He knew now they were images that would stay with him for ever. And now he’d come full circle. Another explosion. Another motorway. And the link was I the same two men: himself and Hinksman.

You’re out there somewhere, he thought, and I want to find you. I want to hunt you down, but I don’t know where to start.

He sighed and turned back to Donaldson. ‘Where do we go from here?’

Before the FBI man could reply, the phone on the desk where he was sitting started to ring. Henry walked across and answered it. Two minutes later he hung up.

‘ Delete that last question,’ he quipped. ‘I might just have the answer to it. C’mon, grab yer coat.’

‘ Just one of those lucky things, really, if it turns out to be of any use that is,’ the detective said to Henry and Donaldson as, forty minutes later, he led them through Manchester Airport to the police holding area.

‘ Initially we just thought she was a run-of-the-mill punter — y’know, trying to get a bit of stuff through. We searched her luggage and found some coke, a bit of crack, some heroin. Then we searched her body orifices. Well, not me personally, but I’m told there wasn’t anything there that shouldn’t have been.’

‘ So why call us?’ Donaldson asked. He was beyond exhaustion. Really irritable.

The detective wasn’t to be fazed. He had a bit of a story to tell and he was going to tell it, no matter what. ‘Anyway, it was while a couple of female officers and a doctor were trying to search the girl that she started dropping names. She was scratching, kicking, all that shit, see, and she had to be forcibly restrained. Now she’s threatening them, saying they’ll get wasted for this, that she knows a hit man. A lot of rubbish on the face of it, but not when the names start coming.’

‘ Names like?’ asked Donaldson.

The detective smiled. ‘Hinksman? Well, we didn’t attach much importance to that one. Every bugger in Britain knows his name. But then she was bawling about Corelli, Dakin, Stanton, you, Sergeant Christie, someone called Kovaks and you, Mr Donaldson.’

‘ Oh,’ Henry and Donaldson said together.

‘ Starting saying things like the Mafia are giving you the run around. It was a lucky chance, really — she could easily have slipped into the system. It’s just that one of the female officers she was wrangling with remembered the names from the last time you two guys were down here.’

‘ And what’s the prisoner’s name?’ Henry asked.