Ambush (7 page)

He had stared mesmerized in agonizing shock at the wreckage.

The occupants would have been incinerated instantly.

Flynn had sagged slightly, a shroud of nausea enveloping him.

Then he became aware of someone on his right hand side.

Aware of shaking slim fingers intertwining with his.

A ghost. Had to be.

And also someone else standing just by his left shoulder, then the sensation of a hand resting on it.

Another ghost.

Slowly Flynn's head rotated to the right.

Santiago, pale, ashen in spite of her dark Mediterranean complexion, stood there and she was no phantom, but a living, breathing human being.

The hand on his shoulder patted him.

Flynn's head cricked left to see Jerry Tope – the man who had been in the car alongside Santiago – standing there, equally shaken, his already pale colour now pure white.

‘Fuck me, mate, that was close,' said Tope, trying to laugh, failing dismally. It came out more like the sound of a cockroach being crushed under a boot.

Santiago moved in the bed again.

From the rhythm of her breathing he could tell she was awake and her eyes opened, the glint of what little light there was reflecting in them.

‘Are you looking at me?' she said softly.

‘If the light was on, I would be.'

She shuffled towards him, pressing her hot naked body against his. He revelled in the wonderful sensation of her breasts crushed against his chest, could feel the hardness of her nipples.

‘Cannot sleep?' she asked.

‘Mind whirring a bit.'

‘About your colleague dying or something else?'

‘Something else entirely – you.'

But that was not strictly true because in the tumble of his thoughts he had not been thinking exclusively about her. He had been thinking about Craig Alford and was trying to get his head around the enormity of the murder. A whole family. Who, what sort of a bastard, killed a whole family? What could Alford have been involved in to bring about retribution of that magnitude?

The other slightly worrying thing preying on his mind was why his own mug shot should be in the possession of a toe-rag armed robber in Ibiza. That did not make much sense to him, though he speculated it might have had some connection with the Albanian gangsters he'd had a run-in with. But even that seemed unlikely. A low level crim from Lancashire, a nobody, having those connections seemed a bit ridiculous.

Santiago wriggled against him. He gasped when she took hold of him, rolled him on to his back, then sleepily straddled him.

In a time zone one hour behind the one Flynn was in, another person unable to sleep was Jerry Tope.

He had driven home, poured a large whisky, then sat in the living room staring blankly at the TV, sipping the fire-water, unable to rid his mind of the image of four stacked bodies, the lake of blood in which they lay, their own blood, creeping across the wooden floor.

He considered going to bed, yet, weary as he was, the prospect of climbing between cold sheets and into an empty bed was not enticing.

Instead he decided he needed air.

He placed his glass down – he would return later for the unfinished drink – stood up, grabbed his jacket and went out to the car.

They made love slow and easy. Soon after she was asleep again, rolling to the far edge of the bed, putting some distance between them in what was essentially a large, triangular bed. This allowed Flynn to slide out without disturbing her, pull on his shorts and head out to the rear deck, where he stretched out on the cushioned bench and closed his eyes. In moments he was asleep.

Tope drove down to Preston Docks, less than two miles from his home, feeling a need to clear his head. He pulled up in the car park at the Morrisons supermarket, then walked across Mariners Way on to the wide promenade that ran all the way around the big old rectangular Albert Edward Dock, part of which was now a small marina for leisure craft.

Tope leaned on the railings and looked down into the still water, which was a fairly unpleasant shade of green because the whole dock was infested by dreaded blue-green algae which discoloured the water and made it unsafe in several ways, for both animals and humans.

However, as dawn slowly approached, the water was actually looking good. Tope thought if he took a little exercise by walking swiftly around the perimeter of the dock it might just help him sleep.

He set off, turning right and heading west, crossing the dock via the swing bridge over Navigation Way, then walking past the series of converted warehouses, now apartments, along the southern edge, then past the multiplex cinema at the far end and turning back more or less to his starting point. There he paused again and leaned on the rails, feeling fresh in the cheeks now, watching the aerial acrobatics of some black-headed gulls.

His mind churned with the night's activities. He pulled out the photograph he had printed off, the one with the line-up including Alford, Flynn, Tope himself and other detectives. He unfolded it carefully, then took out his mobile phone and with the inbuilt camera took a photo of the photo.

He was concentrating on this task and never heard the soft-footed approach from behind.

As he pressed ‘send' on his phone, he felt the muzzle of the handgun at the bottom of his skull, the point where his cranium rested on his spine.

He would never know it, but the barrel of the gun was angled slightly upwards so the trajectory would take the rounds up through his head, through his brain, and the hollow-pointed bullets would exit somewhere around his hairline. Which they did.

Tope had no time to react because, in the world of professional killers, conversations are rarely entered into. They are given a job. Sometimes they know the background of the target, sometimes not.

As it happened, the man who had sneaked up silently behind him did know the provenance of the contract, but even so it was not his job to chat about it.

His job was to kill efficiently, to exact revenge.

He fired two very quick shots into the back of Tope's head, both of which exited through his forehead, ripping away the top half of his face.

Tope slumped across the railings.

The killer had hoped he would somersault over them, but that wasn't to be. People being shot rarely respond spectacularly, and Tope simply fell limp across the railings, then slithered to the ground.

The killer kicked him over into the murky, infected water of the dock. His body slapped into it with a muted splash.

The photograph Tope had been holding had flapped to the ground. The killer picked it up, gave a short laugh and dropped it into the water, where Tope's body had already splayed out face down on the surface.

The photograph, purely by accident, floated down and rested on Tope's back like a leaf falling on an autumn day.

Very quickly the killer leaned over and took a few shots with his mobile phone, then was gone.

The sound of a message landing on his phone roused Flynn. He stirred and groaned. The Black Russians, the lovemaking and the excitement of the previous evening, which had initially made him unable to sleep, were now having the opposite effect and he was in a stupor as he fumbled for the phone and looked through bleary eyes at the message. It was just a photograph – no accompanying text – from Jerry Tope.

Flynn sat up, his head throbbing, and looked at the image.

He gave a short laugh and thought, ‘Memories.'

At the same moment, a series of photographs and a short video landed on another phone.

A message underneath one of the photographs read, ‘Second instructions complied with. Continue?'

The man thumbed his response.

‘Continue.'

F
lynn's response to Tope's photograph was to take and send a photograph of his own on his ageing Nokia, a view from the back of his boat, capturing the twinkling lights of the resort. He then tossed his phone down on to the sofa he'd been sleeping on.

He stood, stretched and yawned, rolling his neck muscles in an effort to eliminate the headache.

Everything seemed to have worked against him getting a half-decent night's rest and already there was more than a hint of dawn in the eastern sky. He knew it was pointless trying to sleep now.

He pulled on his ragged basketball vest and then his equally ragged trainers, took a long swig of water from a bottle, then with another, smaller, water bottle in hand crossed to the jetty and began a slow jog. He had it in mind to head along the coastal path in a north-easterly direction up to Es Canar, the resort where the famous weekly hippy market took place, and then back, a distance of about eight miles over variable terrain.

He knew it was the only way to get his blood pulsing, to clear his head for the coming day's work. By the end of it he knew he would be exhausted, but at least on the far side of it, and this time he should get a good night's sleep.

Moments later he was cutting past the Punta de s'Església Vella – the Old Church Point – and heading towards the bay known as Ses Roquettes.

Already his head was beginning to clear.

Rik Dean had always wanted to be a detective superintendent, his career goal to be a Senior Investigating Officer on FMIT. He had never imagined it would be as stressful as it turned out to be.

Being in charge of murder investigations was one thing, and he revelled in that. It was the other dross that came with the rank and role that dragged him down. The constant pressure from the hierarchy to get better results, the endless strategic and tactical meetings, locally and nationally, and then stuff like the Women's Institute and other such bodies constantly sucking him dry of time.

He often wondered how his predecessor had coped.

As much as Dean was horrified by the enormity of the brutal call-out to the killing of Craig Alford and his family – and Dean knew Alford well – there was also a frisson of excitement in him, because he knew this was a very big deal indeed. The execution of a police officer and his family by what seemed to be a professional hitman. Dean was savvy enough to know that a successful conclusion to it could define his career – just as failure could.

But Dean was in no mood to fail.

He had decided to run the investigation out of the force Training Centre at Hutton Hall, to commandeer a couple of classrooms and convert them into a major incident room. He could have chosen to run it from Preston police station, which was geographically closer to Alford's house, but for the sake of a few miles, the Training Centre offered easier access for vehicles coming and going, and specialists, such as the intel unit, were pretty much on tap.

Once he had done what he could at the scene, then entrusting it to an experienced crime scene manager, Dean returned to his office in the FMIT building at the Training Centre – a converted, refurbished accommodation block – and set about pulling his murder squad together while, with a DI, board-blasting the initial investigative strategy.

By ten a.m. on the morning after the Alford family murder he had secured two interconnecting classrooms on top of a training block close to FMIT, one of which would serve as a briefing/tasking room, and a mixed bag of cops had assembled in front of him.

Dean had watched them all filter in, trying to remain calm and composed on the surface and also wondering where Jerry Tope had got to. Dean knew Tope's computer-based investigatory skills would be invaluable.

He rang Tope's mobile number from his smart phone and got no response; it, and Tope's home number too, clicked on to voicemail. Dean left a terse message on both – a ‘Where the fuck are you, Jerry?' kind of terseness – then dialled through to the intel unit based in the headquarters building a short distance away. No one there had seen Jerry and his desk, apparently, looked the same as it had done when he'd left it: pristine.

‘Fuck is he?' Dean muttered to himself and looked up across the gaggle of officers, all waiting patiently with serious faces, some sitting on the chairs provided, some lounging against the walls.

Two of their own had been taken and all wanted to catch the killer.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,' Dean said after clearing his throat. ‘I'd like to say welcome but you all know why you're here, and welcome doesn't seem an appropriate word to use. Two of our police family, DCI Craig Alford and his wife, the very popular DC Carrie Alford, and their two lovely children have been brutally – callously – murdered and it is our job to catch a very dangerous killer …'

Dean stopped his opening, unrehearsed, speech.

The door at the back of the classroom had opened and someone was edging through the assembled officers saying quietly, ‘Excuse me, pardon me,' until he reached the front.

Dean scowled at the interruption by one of the detective constables who worked for him on FMIT, then his expression changed to one of puzzlement at the grim look on the younger man's face. He had a piece of paper in his hand which he held out to Dean.

‘Boss … sorry to butt in,' he began.

Because Jerry Tope's body had floated tight up to the side of the dock wall, it was an hour before a passer-by, a man out walking his dog, paused for breath and happened to spot Tope's legs in the water below him. The police were on the scene less than ten minutes later, but after that it took some time to retrieve the body because the waterline of the dock was about ten feet below the level of the surrounding walkway. It was impractical to reach down with hooks or ropes, plus the first officer on the scene, having peered perilously over the edge, saw the wounds to the back of the floater's head and realized this could be something more than a simple drowning. His first thoughts were that the body of the man could have been the victim of a mugging.

Tope's body was eventually recovered by use of a Rigid Inflatable Boat owned by the chandlery at the opposite end of the dock and two CSIs and two uniformed constables dragged Tope on board and then brought him ashore on to one of the wooden jetties in the marina, which was then secured and cordoned off as a crime scene.