Ambush (6 page)

‘Know what?' Flynn asked, immediately thinking,
Heart attack
. Alford liked food and booze, but it was just an assumption on Flynn's part. He hadn't seen or heard from Alford in over ten years. For all he knew he could be slimmer of the year and running marathons now.

‘Dead,' Tope blurted.

‘Oh, God, sorry to hear that, mate.' The news did not really hit Flynn hard. ‘What? Did he keel over, have a thromb?'

‘No,' Tope gasped. ‘Murdered. His whole family murdered, executed … looks like a gangland hit … excuse me.'

Flynn heard a rustling noise, the sound of footsteps, then a retching sound he guessed was Tope honking up his stomach contents. The connection went dead.

Flynn glowered at his phone, then looked up at Santiago, who had just finished her call. She was looking at the screen of her mobile, a smart phone, much more advanced than Flynn's little block of antiquated electronics. He recognized the sound of a text landing and saw her reaction to whatever it was: a sudden look of horror as her lips popped open and she pivoted her head to look at him.

‘Uh, yeah?' he said.

Carrying the phone as if it was a block of gold, she came up to Flynn.

‘That was the detective investigating the robbery at the shop. He found the apartment rented by the lads in San Antonio.'

‘OK.'

‘He sent me a photo of one of the items found.' She turned the phone around and showed him the full screen.

It was a photograph of a photograph.

And that photograph was of Steve Flynn.

About the same time as Flynn squinted, puzzled, at his picture on Santiago's phone, a series of photographs and a short video landed on another phone.

The recipient smiled grimly and with satisfaction at the images of four dead bodies, ruthlessly dispatched, then piled on top of each other like trash – exactly as the man had ordered, because that was what he believed. DCI Craig Alford and his family were garbage and needed to be put down like the dogs they were, but Alford himself had to witness the deaths of his family members first, before he himself was executed.

That was how true justice worked, the man thought.

And it had been a long time coming. Even so, it still felt fresh and tangy.

But it was just the beginning. More had yet to die.

The message underneath one of the photographs read, ‘Instructions complied with. Continue?'

The man thumbed his response. ‘Continue.'

‘W
ho was he to you?' Santiago asked Flynn.

They had decided to forgo bed for a little longer and were sitting on the rear deck of the boat, the night still warm enough for T-shirts and shorts, accompanied by a measure of decent whisky this time, watered down ever so slightly to bring out the flavour of the malt.

Flynn considered the question, screwed up his face, shook his head.

‘To be fair, not a lot,' he admitted. ‘He was a DI – detective inspector – when I was back in the job. I knew him reasonably well, we got on all right, but I wouldn't call him a friend as such. We worked on a special task force, two thousand two, three, for about six months. I was a drugs branch DS and he headed a small unit.' Flynn shrugged his shoulders. ‘Beyond that, nothing … I suppose Jerry just wanted to tell me … he was part of that unit too. Even though Alford and I weren't close, it's still a big thing when a colleague dies, especially in such circumstances, as you know.'

Santiago nodded and delicately sipped her spirit. The effect of the Black Russians seemed to have worn off and both were now stone cold sober, not feeling the need for sleep.

The boat bobbed gently on the water. The resort of Santa Eulalia was shutting down for the night now. It was nothing like its vibrant, drug-fuelled sister, San Antonio. Santa Eulalia was aimed at young families and middle-aged people and did its job very well, but it also meant it was a much more subtle, gentle place, with a pace to match.

‘Jerry isn't good at real life crime.' Flynn grinned. ‘I can imagine the effect it would have had on him. He's got a queasy tum at the best of times.'

‘I can imagine, too,' Santiago said. She knew Tope and had liaised with him earlier in the year over crimes and criminals in the Canary Islands – and had survived the same car bomb attack at the hands of the vicious Albanian gangster, Aleksander Bashkim.

Flynn sipped the whisky and said pensively, ‘Craig Alford, dead.'

‘Did you ask Jerry what Alford was currently investigating?'

‘Didn't get a chance, but not really my business, I suppose.'

‘Sounds like he's into something, ruffled some feathers.'

‘It does,' Flynn agreed.

‘And moving to the other issue of the night … why would a scumbag armed robber have a photograph of you in his apartment?'

‘Let me look again.' Flynn waggled his fingers at Santiago, who picked up her phone, found the photo, handed it over.

It was definitely a photograph, a head-shot of Steve Flynn, about passport size. It was quite old, well over ten years. As he looked at it, something dawned on him.

It showed him with quite long, slightly unkempt hair, wearing an open-necked shirt and with very obvious stubble around his chin.

‘This is an old warrant card photograph,' he declared, ‘from my drug squad days – hence the haircut, clothes and lack of shaving—'

‘And style,' Santiago quipped.

‘That too,' he agreed. ‘So the mystery is not only why did he have it, but also how did he get it?' Flynn pondered and tried to get his mind to work. It did not seem to want to solve anything. He'd had a long day with a charter, then the evening excitement of busting up a robbery had made it all drag out even more. He had a day trip later that morning, so he knew he needed to be properly rested for it. The party was due on board at ten until four, and before they even set foot on deck he had to prepare the boat. The latest he could start was eight a.m.

‘There was a phone number scribbled on the back, a mobile,' she said.

‘Did the detective ring it?'

‘Yes … dead. A burner, probably,' she said, meaning a pay-as-you-go disposable.

‘Right.'

Santiago watched Flynn's face, saw his eyelids droop.

She took her phone back and said, ‘Bed.'

‘Anything?'

Jerry Tope looked over his shoulder at Rik Dean, who was standing in the doorway of Craig Alford's tiny study on the first floor.

Tope was sitting at the desk, still in his forensic gear, latex gloves on, with Alford's personal laptop open in front of him. Four other laptops, two iPads and four iPhones had also been found in the house, belonging to the various members of the family. They were stacked on the desk and had been bagged as evidence for Tope and other techies to look at later. For the time being he had occupied himself with what he assumed was Alford's own laptop. Tope knew the DCI also had a desk computer, laptop and iPad at work which would all need investigating.

Tope shook his head in answer to Dean's query. ‘This looks like a computer the family all had access to,' he said. ‘Thousands of photos stored on it, holidays and such like … and it looks like Craig was trying to write a novel, working title
The Great British Cop Thriller
. Done one chapter … looks pretty good,' he said sadly. ‘I've glanced through his personal emails, but nothing of interest stands out just yet, all crap and spam, mainly.'

‘When was the computer last accessed?'

‘Five p.m., day before yesterday.'

‘No one's been on it since?'

‘Not that I can tell.'

‘Do you think this has anything to do with Operation Aquarius, Jerry?' Dean asked.

‘Has to be a possibility, I suppose … we've been following some really bad people, but until yesterday morning none of them would or should have known that, unless we've got a mole in our midst. And even then,' – Tope's face looked pained – ‘just seems so far-fetched, and to arrange something like this in that time scale … doesn't seem feasible to me.'

‘Mm … we need to look at what else he's been involved in,' Dean said, musing out loud. ‘You'd think it was connected to his job … maybe corruption.' Tope shot him a sharp look. ‘Just surmising, Jerry, but it'll need following up.' Dean was trying to juggle together an investigative strategy, looking at all possible angles – and there were many, even at such an early stage. ‘You keep looking, give it another half-hour, then go home, get a bit of kip, and we'll reconvene at HQ at eight. I'm going to run this from the Training Centre, it's as handy as anywhere.'

Dean turned, leaving Tope at the computer.

The screen in front of him was actually the one he had mentioned to Dean, the files containing thousands of downloaded digital or scanned photographs, all in separate folders, hundreds of them.

Tope had clicked on a few, and no doubt over the coming days as the murder investigation got under way, he – or preferably someone else – would have to skim through each file and photo.

He sighed, tabbed through the screen and was about to move on when he spotted something that stood out to him. A file named ‘Ambush'. He hovered over it with the cursor and pressed ‘open'.

There was only one photograph in the file and it was not a digital download as such, but a scanned copy of another photograph.

Jerry Tope remembered the picture being taken.

‘Shit,' he said sadly, looking at the faces of the six men in it.

One of them had died two years earlier from cancer but the other five, to the best of Tope's knowledge, were still very much alive – with the exception now of Craig Alford, who stood in the centre of the smiling group.

‘Those were the days,' Tope thought.

Tope himself was one of the group, as was his old colleague – he hesitated even to think the word ‘friend' – Steve Flynn, whom he had phoned earlier to tell him about Alford's death. He had thought Flynn would have wanted to know because, after all, this lot had been through some things together.

But that was all a long time ago.

People had died since then, people had moved on, people were different, not least Flynn. That said, the photograph on the screen, one Tope had not seen for a very long time (although he had a copy of it in an album somewhere), evoked memories, a certain time, a certain place.

He printed off a copy, folded it and slid it into his back pocket, just for old times' sake.

It was three a.m. by the time Tope had finished his initial trawl through the computer, having found nothing of interest. He would need the actual thing in front of him at his work desk before he could dig deeper and find any hidden information or deleted files, though in all honesty he did not expect to find too much, and certainly nothing that would link to Alford's death. Even the visible browser history reeked of dull. Lots of searches about running a bed and breakfast or
gîte
in France, obviously Alford's retirement dream.

One which would never now be realized.

With sadness overwhelming him, Tope closed it down and reluctantly made his way downstairs, which was still a hive of police and forensic activity. He tiptoed out of the house without having to look into the lounge.

Outside he stripped off his forensic suit, bagged it and signed it back to the CSI van, then made his way back to his car. He sat in it for a long time before starting up and heading towards home.

With the air conditioning just ticking over, humming low, the boat was cool and comfortable but, even so, Flynn could not find his ‘off' button.

Santiago slept soundly, almost instantly, emanating a cuddly purring sound that Flynn had learned to love and could usually fall asleep to. Usually.

He lay on his side and in the darkness of the stateroom watched Santiago sleep, hoping he wasn't being too creepy. He knew of men who sat up watching their girlfriends, wives, whoever, sleep, and found it quite unsettling, but the only reason he did it that night was because his mind was tumbling and criss-crossing with thoughts which would not settle.

First, about Santiago and how lucky he was to be lying here by her side … he recalled several months before leaning on the railings of a café in Puerto Rico, watching her drive away with Jerry Tope, and not many seconds later standing next to the man who was pressing ‘send' on a mobile phone, an electronic message to a detonator inserted into a block of Semtex stuck under the car.

Cruelly, that man made Flynn watch and listen to an explosion maybe a quarter of a mile away in which Flynn believed the car Santiago was driving had exploded with her and Tope in it.

Flynn had then assumed he was about to die himself, the last thing on his mind as that man had pointed a gun at his head being the thought that he had lost Santiago. But before the man could pull the trigger he had been taken down by FBI agent Karl Donaldson.

Flynn had flinched, certain he was about to be killed, as the bullets from Donaldson's gun had been fired, but it had been the Albanian gangster who slid to his death in front of Flynn's eyes, the culmination of a terrible scenario involving Flynn, gangsters, corrupt cops and Santiago.

She was a Spanish detective, recently transferred to the Canary Islands, and had met Flynn as he was arrested and framed for a murder he had not committed. As the truth unravelled Flynn and Santiago had fallen in love and when her car blew up, Flynn truly believed that once again he had lost a woman in tragic circumstances just because she had been involved with him.

Donaldson melted away immediately after his execution of the gangster, and Flynn had launched himself towards the rising, crackling flames and smoke.

Santiago turned in bed, murmured something in her sleep, a Spanish word Flynn did not recognize.

He grinned in the darkness, recalling running the fastest quarter mile in his life, along the Doreste y Molina towards the town centre, running against a tide of people surging in the opposite direction, away from the explosion, until he skidded on to Avenida del Valle and there, in the middle of the road, was the car, blown to smithereens. Smoke rose from what little was left of it, the chassis and engine block, just a burned-out, almost unrecognizable shell of tangled, scorched metal. No one inside the car – or standing near it – could have survived the blast.