KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (38 page)

My eye was drawn to the far end of the lengthy building. Massive green and black flags had been draped over the wall. Beneath them there was a low table with indistinct objects on it. The buzzing sound appeared to be coming from there.

There was a smell of diesel and petrol and dust but mixed with those scents there was something else, something rank and rotten.

We spread out and advanced to the rear of the warehouse. As we neared the table we saw what was causing the droning sound.

A cloud of bluebottles buzzed nauseatingly into the air.

The object they’d been settled on was a bloody and raw human head.

The entire table top was layered in coagulated blood. As I watched I saw movement. It was seething with maggots. I winced. The human body contains ten pints of blood and someone had spilled all of it on that table top.

Under the table there was a headless body, the neck open and gaping towards us, the white bone of the vertebra clearly visible. Maggots were wriggling about in the inner spaces. Lying alongside was a curved Islamic scimitar. Copies of the Koran and posters with Arabic or Urdu writing were scattered about the area.

I recognised the bearded mug of Osama bin Laden on a large poster.

My companions drew back but Bren took a few steps forward and looked closely at the severed head.

‘It’s Alban Pickering,’ he said, ‘I recognise him from the photo they put out. Right, out of here you lot. We’ve disturbed the scene enough. Smithy, get the SOCOs up here. Warn them the place might be as radioactive as hell.’

‘They collected the hospital waste here and shifted it yesterday probably to where they’re going to start this radioactive bonfire.’ I said.

Bren’s disappointment was tangible.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘nice to see that one of us is still thinking like a detective,’ he said, clapping me on the shoulder as we reached daylight. ‘I don’t suppose you know where?’

I shook my head.

With a grim expression on his face he took out his phone to relay the bad news to London. I left him to it. Police sirens were screaming in the distance.

39

Friday: 2.15 p.m.

Our constabulary friends gathered for a powwow outside the open warehouse. There was considerable head shaking and I guessed some dispute. All four used their phones to speak to third parties. Then quite suddenly they were done.

Weirdly and simultaneously Bren, Lennon, Temple and Smith put away their phones, stopped talking to each other and began staring across at us. 

‘Uh, oh!’ Lee said. He was tensed for flight with his car keys in his hand.

‘Keep
caaaalm
, Lee,’ I said in my best mock-Scouse, ‘keep
caaaalm
. They’re not going to arrest you.’

Neither Lee nor Tony thought my stab at comedy was funny enough for a laugh. They watched Bren approach in grim silence.

Bren reached us.  He put an arm round my shoulder and drew me apart from Tony, Lee and Clint.

‘Er, Dave …’

‘Yes, Bren.’

‘You know that I love you like a brother?’

‘Never doubted it.’

‘And you heard me mention your name to the Cabinet Secretary?’

‘I did, Bren. I was gratified.’

‘Sure you don’t mean grafittified? You know … had stuff written all over your property by your little friends? Lee got his first ASBO for that.’

‘No Bren, I was gratified and, whatever those two were, they aren’t vandals now.’

‘
Gratified
, nice word; anyway back to the real world. If there had been a dirty bomb here and we could draw a line under this MOLOCH business, I’ve no doubt Sir Garrett would put you down for an MBE to show you how
gratified
he is …’

‘… and an OBE or even a CBE for you.’

‘Yes indeed, whereas, in actual fact …’

‘No medals but he has reinstated you.’

‘Correct. He’s ordered me to be reinstated. This isn’t …’

‘This isn’t likely to
gratify
your bosses, who aren’t very
gratified
with themselves for the way they’ve behaved. They were too quick to act and now they’ve got egg all over their faces ’

‘True. I doubt that I’m on the Cop of the Month list down at HQ but we’ve found out what happened to poor Pickering and that has to count as a partial result so they can’t shitcan me again, at least not straight away, but you and your playmates …’

‘Are inconveniences that are better out of the way … is that it?’

‘Yes, I’d be highly
gratified
if you’d remove yourselves pronto!’

‘Enough said. Can I have Lew’s notebook back?’

‘No, I already told you, I need it.’

‘OK.’

I rejoined my ‘playmates’.

‘He wants us out before the Top Cops arrive,’ I said.

Tony and Lee didn’t need an invitation to leave before a visit by high ranking coppers. They headed for the gate and were round the corner to where the Ford was parked at a swift trot. Life had taught them the value of making themselves scarce.

Clint was different. There was much more of him to vanish and he didn’t run much at the best of times.

‘It’s not fair, Dave,’ he grumbled. ‘They would never have found that man’s body if it wasn’t for you.’

‘That’s right, but it’s not something I want the credit for.’

‘It was those men who fired at us who did that to him, wasn’t it Dave?’

‘I think so.’

It was quite a stroll to the entrance. The sirens sounded nearer but there was no way I was going to run.

‘Shall I put the chain and padlock back and lock them in?’ Clint asked when we reached the gate. He picked them up.

‘It’s not DCI Cullen’s fault,’ I said. ‘He’s just doing his job.’

‘All right, Dave,’ he agreed, pausing at the screech of wheels as several vehicles raced round the corner towards us.

They slammed to an emergency stop right in front of us, three of them: large windowless black vans without police decals. OK, I’d seen Bren’s men roll up in a private ambulance and so I was slower off the mark than I should have been.

Unfortunately, they weren’t.

The doors swung open and a swarm of armed men in black coveralls and balaclavas poured onto the street. They were carrying sub-machine guns. Clint was quicker than me. He hurled the heavy padlock, knocking one of them over and swung the chain, bringing three down. I was surrounded, pummelled and dragged down. Clint continued to struggle. They couldn’t control him.

‘Lose him!’ someone ordered.

One of the goons stepped in front of Clint. The others scrambled clear. Clint had the chain raised above his head in both hands for another swing. The goon aimed and fired a burst into Clint’s chest. Clint sank onto his knees, moaning. He struggled to get to his feet, still holding the chain. The killer skipped behind Clint, kicked him so hard that he fell flat on his face and calmly and deliberately fired another burst into the big man’s back.

All this happened inside the space of a very few seconds. I wasn’t timing it but they were professional. Four of them picked me up and I caught a glimpse of Bren and his men running forward with pistols ready. Then there was a rattle of automatic fire from the hostiles. Before I could crane my neck to see the effect I was clouted over the head with the butt of a gun.

The lights went out.

*

When I came round my face and the right side of my jaw were in agony. I was on my back. I tried to explore my facial injury and discovered that my hands were fastened behind my back with plastic handcuffs. I also discovered that my whole body was one mass of aches and that I was in darkness.

I groaned loudly.

That was a mistake.

The door of the garden shed into which I’d been flung was thrown open and two of the thugs in black coveralls and balaclavas dragged me out. I struggled to focus my eyes in the bright sunshine. Appropriately enough I found myself looking at a neatly maintained garden, lawn, borders, overhanging trees … the lot. I didn’t get long to admire it.

‘Wake him up!’ someone out of my line of sight ordered.

At once the pair holding me let go and I fell face down onto a gravel path.

They began kicking me. I felt one of my ribs go. The pain was agonising. I yelped.

‘Not that way! I need him able to talk,’ the voice shouted.

The kicking stopped and one of the two cursed in a foreign language. Jan and I had honeymooned on the Dalmatian coast and the words sounded familiar from that time. I was in too much pain to recollect what was spoken there.

‘You tell these idiots what I want,’ the tormentor’s voice said, speaking to another person.

‘
Voda
, we need
voda
,’ a woman’s voice said. I knew her voice but the mental effort needed to recall who she was was beyond me at that moment. 

Seconds later I heard a bucket being filled from a tap. It seemed to take forever. The pain went on. My face and jaw throbbed. I knew I was bleeding where my face had struck the sharp gravel.

Then I was grabbed by the hair and turned onto my back and very cold water was poured onto my face. I coughed and spluttered and struggled for breath but one had his foot on my chest and I couldn’t turn away. Strangely enough I felt better after the drenching and my mental reflexes began functioning.

Clint was dead. Bren and his mates were probably dead as well. I’d allowed myself to become a prisoner and the woman who knew Serbo-Croat was Molly Claverhouse. I assumed the tormentor was charming Rick Appleyard who’d so conveniently ‘forgotten’ to warn me a few hours earlier that the hunt for me was off but had remembered to send his snatch-squad to Ridley Close.

I understood that I was very close to death.

Regret, not fear was the dominant emotion in my mind. Regret that I’d got Clint killed. If only I’d sent him ahead with Lee and Tony he’d have been round the corner in the Ford when the killers arrived but I had to let him play the bodyguard.

Regret that I would never see Jan and the children again.

Regret that my unborn child would never know me.

‘Get him on his knees,’ the tormentor directed.

I was wrenched upright and propped up on each side. Now I faced the man giving the orders. He was tall and slim but like the others was wearing a balaclava. Irrelevantly, I remembered what the name of the material their masks and coveralls were made from was. It was Nomex, a fireproof fibre used by Special Forces and firemen. The slim man couldn’t be Rick Appleyard. He definitely wasn’t a rugger-bugger and his speech was unaccented, educated English.

A thought about his identity stirred in the back of my mind but it was the person standing next to him who had all my attention.

Molly Claverhouse stared back at me.

I gazed at her intently. In the old days of capital punishment, which have never really gone away for some of us, the prisoner in the death cell always got a look at his executioner when the genial Pierrepoint popped in to measure him for the drop. I felt her cold hazel eyes were measuring me up for mine.

She was wearing a dark grey Paul Smith trouser suit in pure wool. I knew that because I’d been with Jan when she priced one. She also wore a pink butterfly print blouse and black patent leather shoes with a medium heel.

She gave me a strange look and shook her head very slightly. There was a message for me there but I was in too much pain to interpret it. I wanted to speak, to call her names but my lips were too sore to waste my breath on her.

‘So Cunane, I understand you’ve been trying very hard to uncover my identity. It seems a shame to deny you that pleasure now that you’ll have so little time to enjoy it but I will preserve my anonymity a while longer. Accept my condolences for the death of your large friend.’

I didn’t answer, partly because my mouth was so sore and partly because conversation was inappropriate.

‘What? No jokes Mr Cunane? I shall have to see if I can loosen your tongue because I want the answers to some questions.’

My mind was working slowly but it was still working, just about. Of those who’d recently chided me for my sense of humour one stood out. Harry Hudson-Piggott, the ‘bug-hunter’, a man I’d assumed was Claverhouse’s subordinate: wrongly assumed. How could I have been so blind? He was the one pulling their strings not the other way around.

‘No jokes for you Hudson-Piggott,’ I grunted.

‘Ah, thank you so much for confirming that you are fully back with us, Mr C. I was beginning to be afraid that my contractors had kicked you completely senseless. It can happen you know.’

‘Bastard!’

‘Ah, defiance, an admirable trait but what I require from you is compliance. I assume that as an intelligent man you’ve already worked out what your fate will be?’

‘You’re a killer. You’ll do what killers do.’

‘Yes, but now I’m tidying up. The amount of killing involved in that depends on what you tell me.’

I may have given an uncomprehending grunt. I knew it wouldn’t have mattered to him if I’d begged and pleaded for my life. He was as determined to have the last word as he was to kill me.

‘Yes, Cunane, we are on the eve of great events, major changes in the course of world history.  An essential ingredient in the success of these changes is that the back story is absolutely unimpeachable. For instance, how many would have followed Churchill in 1940 if some newspaper had come up with irrefutable evidence that he’d been in secret talks with Hitler for years? Damn few!’

He pulled the Nomex hood off. As he fiddled about getting his rimless specs back on there was that cold, ultra-clever look on his face that had reminded me of an entomologist collecting insects. Why hadn’t I twigged his role earlier?

It crossed my mind that the longer I kept him talking the longer I’d delay whatever horrors he had in mind for me.

‘Did he?’ I asked.

‘What,’ he sneered.

‘Churchill, did he have secret talks with Hitler?’

‘Of course not, you fool. I merely invented that as an example of how important getting the back story straight is. In the present case there can never be the slightest hint that Islamic terrorists weren’t responsible for such prior measures as the killings of Greene and Pickering and of course tomorrow’s event.’

‘Oh, how dense of me.’

‘Right, this is what we’ll do. I’ll ask you a question and if you fail to answer to my satisfaction then you’ll be compelled to answer.’

‘Is the word torture too blunt for you?’

‘I prefer the milder term. It makes little difference but fewer eyebrows are raised at the word compulsion. Unfortunately even such a harmless word alerted your late relative to my activities thus ensuring his demise.’

I couldn’t follow what he was saying and in his cold clinical way he noticed.

‘A gentle smack on the face, I think,’ he said to one the henchmen holding me on my knees.

The burly thug holding my right arm’s idea of a slap went far beyond what the teachers of my childhood would have considered acceptable. My head rang and I flickered in and out of consciousness.