Seizure (35 page)

‘What?' he asked, irritated.

Flynn had formed a pleasant smile on his face. ‘I've come about your satellite dish,' he said.

Then Henry rotated into view. ‘And so have I.'

Baron's face was one of those pictures to behold, the face that speaks a thousand words, as he instantly recognized Henry and reacted by slamming the door in Flynn's face. He managed to twist the key in the lock before turning and running through the house with a scream of warning.

Henry glanced up, catching a fleeting glimpse of Naomi Dale's face at a crack in the curtain – and a bare shoulder.

‘He's going out back,' Flynn said, thrusting Henry out of the way and tearing around the corner of the house. Henry let him go and called the three other officers to come and join him. Then he knocked patiently on the door.

Baron fled through the house, out of the kitchen door, grabbing a knife from a wooden block. He ran across the lawn, diving through the hedge at the back of the garden and tumbling down the banks of the River Irwell.

Flynn saw him disappear into the trees and followed, unaware of the knife.

The door opened. Naomi Dale faced Henry Christie. She was buttoning up her blouse, a guilty but resigned expression on her face. They regarded each other for a long, awful moment.

‘I love it when people panic when the cops come a-calling,' he said.

Somewhere in the distance Henry heard the sound of two cars approaching at high speed.

‘You've got nothing on me,' she said coolly.

‘I'll say this before anything formal gets spoken,' Henry said. ‘I don't know what's going on here, but I'll lay odds that I find evidence in this house of the whereabouts of Felix Deakin and the young lad he's kidnapped. Mobile phones will be a good start,' he gambled. ‘Whatever, you're going to have to get your thinking cap on PDQ, lady, because when Mr Baron gets gripped, I guarantee he'll squeal like a piggy.'

She eyed him, then suddenly turned and rushed into the house, cutting right into the living room. Henry was behind her as she dove for her handbag and tipped it upside down, scattering its contents on the carpet, falling to her knees and trying to get hold of her mobile phone. She grabbed it, but Henry wrested it from her grip.

‘Mine, I think.'

Then he saw a folded piece of yellow paper in among her clutter. A memory came to him – Deakin passing something to Baron in the prison interview room. A yellow Post-it note. Henry picked it up and folded it open, reading the words, ‘Get her to fuck him', scribbled thereon. An instruction from client to brief.

Flynn burst through the hedge like a rhino charging through a thornbush and was immediately faced by the almost perpendicular bank of the river. He was travelling so quickly and came across the slope so unexpectedly that it was all he could do to stop himself plunging headlong into the gurgling, but shallow water ten feet below. He skittered sideways down the bank, just about staying upright, and finished up with his feet in the water.

Baron was running along the bank, one foot in, one foot out of the water, some fifty metres ahead of Flynn. Then he turned ninety degrees and scrambled up the bank on all fours.

Flynn went after him, trying to keep on the bank, but because it was so steep, he found it hard to stay out of the river. At one point his foot slipped on a slimy rock in the water, but he stumbled on, his momentum keeping his balance. Then he turned up the banking in Baron's tracks.

Flynn fully expected to find himself on a road or farm track, but as he emerged he was surprised to discover he was on a single-track railway line. He didn't know this, but it was part of the East Lancs Railway running from Rawtenstall to Bury, via Irwell Vale.

Baron was now well ahead of him, running along the tracks.

Flynn's mouth curved into a sneer as he set off at a loping run. His long legs stretched easily across two sleepers at once, eating up the distance between him and his quarry in no time – assisted by the fact that Baron was clearly flagging now. Flynn could see it in the way he was running, his legs looking like lead.

Flynn was hardly out of breath and there was perhaps twenty feet between the men when they reached a bridge spanning the width of the Irwell over a tight, steep gully, with maybe a thirty-foot drop to the water below.

It was here that the exhausted Baron turned and dropped into a combat stance. He flashed the knife and confronted his pursuer.

‘Come any closer and you're dead. I'm an ex-Marine and I know how to kill.'

Flynn stopped running, his eyes taking in Baron. Ex-Marine he may have been, and he may have looked pretty tough, but Flynn could see the guy was totally unfit. He approached Baron slowly.

‘Who the fuck are you anyway?'

‘I'm Steve Flynn – also an ex-Marine,' Flynn said, unfazed by Baron's revelation about his background.

Baron's eyes widened with horror.

‘Yeah, that Steve Flynn. Felix Deakin kidnapped my son,' he growled, ‘and I have nothing to lose here.'

‘I have everything to lose.'

‘You chose your track, pal, not me.' Flynn took another step. Baron jerked the knife threateningly. Flynn snorted derisively. ‘You are joking, aren't you?'

‘No, I'm not.'

‘Where are they?'

‘Who?'

‘Deakin and my son.'

‘Don't know what you mean.'

‘You idiot. It's too late for that, don't you get it? You're finished. You can go down with a fight if you want to, but you will be going down. I'll have that knife out of your hand within a second and an elbow in your throat.'

Baron hesitated.

Flynn moved closer. Three more steps would put him within striking distance. ‘Drop the knife, because if you don't I've decided I'll break your wrist and then hang you over the side of this bridge by your ankles. I might do that anyway.'

Baron considered the options, then opened the palm of his hand. The knife fell to the ground. Flynn moved in like a flash. Before Baron knew what had happened, he found himself looking down into the River Irwell.

Henry's mind worked quickly as he skimmed through the numbers on Naomi's phone. He looked at the calls made and received – many to and from ‘Barry My Luv' – and the texts, which were obscene in content.

She was cuffed now, sitting in the back of the Scorpio. Henry was standing by the car door, tabbing through the phone.

‘How long?'

‘How long what?' She had been particularly obnoxious and resistant to anything asked of her.

‘You and Barry-My-Love?'

‘Fuck off,' she said and turned away disgustedly.

‘What was it – lonely woman syndrome, looking for excitement? You've been feeding him information about everything we've been doing, haven't you? And it was down to you that Deakin got the chance to get to court, wasn't it? Something that resulted in the death of a good cop.'

She shrugged.

‘And something that was bugging me, too – how Baron knew so much about the weakness in the case against Cain. He could only have got that from you.' She shrugged again. ‘If you've any compassion about you, you'll tell us where we can find Deakin now. There's a kid's life at stake.'

Henry turned and saw two bedraggled figures in torn, wet clothing coming down the driveway towards him. Baron was being herded along by Flynn, who kicked and pushed and dragged him by the scruff of the neck. He roughly deposited him on the ground next to Henry's feet.

‘Meet the man who snatched my son off the street,' Flynn breathed, ‘the man who's going to tell us exactly where he is. Aren't you, mate?'

Flynn kicked him hard in the ribs.

It was a textbook rescue. Acting on the information provided by Baron – and eventually Naomi Dale – the police surreptitiously surrounded an old farmhouse on the moorland between Rawtenstall and Burnley and Henry handed everything over to trained hostage negotiators. The farmhouse, it transpired, was one still owned by Deakin and had been overlooked in the seizure of his assets, although it was listed in Flynn's unofficial file.

If anything, Deakin was a realist. The sight of armed police, dog men and uniformed officers surrounding the farmhouse made him walk out within about fifteen minutes of being contacted by the negotiators.

Craig was allowed to run out first into the arms of two uniformed constables. He was bustled quickly away to safety. A few minutes later, Deakin stepped out, hands held high, defeated.

He was probably one of the best assassins in the world. A former SAS sniper who had seen action in many fields of war, his skills with a rifle were much sought after when he discharged himself from the army and set himself up as a gun for hire.

His usual targets were politicians or businessmen, but his target that day, for which he had been paid a serious amount of money, was Felix Deakin.

From his position over a mile away from the farmhouse, secreted in a dip, but in an elevated position looking down and across to the building, he watched the hostage negotiations taking place. He had arrived many hours before the police, and their arrival, while unexpected, did not faze him. He had a job to do, had a good escape route and had been paid. He knew he would escape. And in fact, the police turning up was a bonus that made his job so much easier. He had expected to be waiting for hours, maybe days, for his target to present itself, so the cops doing their job saved him a lot of time.

He saw the release of the young boy.

Minutes later, Deakin himself emerged and was instantly surrounded by police officers. They spent some time cuffing him, then led him to a police van that had drawn up outside the farmhouse.

The sniper relaxed. The shot would come. He wouldn't have long to make it, but he was confident it would happen.

And it did.

For a few moments, Deakin stood handcuffed at the side of the white van while the rear doors were opened. The van provided a superb backdrop, highlighting his target brilliantly.

The sniper looked down his sights at the cross-hairs and fired.

The bullet ripped through Deakin's head, almost slicing it in half, killing him instantly.

The sniper did not wait around to watch the chaos a mile away. He collected the spent shell, withdrew unhurriedly, and moments later was in his Land Rover, freewheeling away down the hill until he reached the road, when he let out the clutch and engaged the gear. By the time the cops found out where the shot had been fired from, he had changed cars twice and was at Manchester Airport climbing aboard an EasyJet plane to Barcelona.

He did not know why he'd been hired to kill Deakin. He was not bothered either, though he thought it might have had something to do with him having given evidence against another man. Whatever. He smiled at the stewardess and asked for a coffee when she was ready.

TWENTY

T
hree weeks later, the review panel was much more lenient on Henry Christie, and listened with interest as he gave them a blow-by-blow account of the investigation into Felix Deakin and everything else that surrounded him.

It had taken Henry that long to pull it all together, for him to keep a strategic eye on its progress (as he was keen to point out) and to say where it was all going.

He started at the beginning with the murder of the security guard at the supermarket. Some dogged police work by a couple of detectives on the murder team had resulted in the arrest of a gang member, who instantly pointed the finger at Richard Last as the man who had pulled the trigger and killed the guard. Further arrests were imminent, he assured the board.

In relation to the double murder of Richard Last himself and his partner Jack Sumner, Henry told the board the murderers were Teddy Bear Jackman and Tony Cromer; they had been contracted by Barry Baron, Deakin's solicitor, to get information about the whereabouts of the money from the supermarket robbery, because it had not been paid over. Baron claimed he did not want the men killed, but Jackman and Cromer had been overzealous and had failed to elicit the required information anyway. Jackman and Cromer were posted as wanted, but their whereabouts remained a mystery. He added they were also wanted for the unrelated murder of a British woman in Gran Canaria during an unsuccessful robbery.

Felix Deakin, he went on, had been getting money together to finance a life on the run. Working with Baron and a CPS solicitor called Naomi Dale, they conspired to get Deakin to court to give evidence. Deakin, again through Baron, hired a professional gang to spring him from court, which they did. But because he did not have the money he needed for his life on the run, in desperation he kidnapped the son of an ex-police officer who he mistakenly thought had stolen money from him in the past. The kidnap was successfully resolved, but an unknown gunman killed Deakin as he was being arrested.

Henry said he thought this was in retaliation for Deakin's offer to give evidence against Johnny Cain in the murder trial that subsequently collapsed, even though that offer was simply a means to give him chance to escape. Cain, ironically of course, did not know this. That was a line of inquiry that was being pursued, but as Cain's whereabouts were now unknown, it was problematic.

He made mention that Barry Baron, Deakin's solicitor, was being extensively investigated for his role in these matters, as was Naomi Dale, who was Baron's lover and had obviously been under his spell for some time, passing on sensitive information.

He wound up the review by saying that the gunman who had taken a shot at him and DI Dean at Blackpool Victoria Hospital was still being sought, and the incident may or may not have any connection with the cases Henry had been dealing with.

He got a round of appreciative murmurs and a wink of approval from FB. He left on a high, returning to his office with a smug look on his face. All the right notes, he thought . . .

Sitting down at his desk he saw the little red light flashing on his desk phone, indicating a voice message had been left. He picked up the phone and dialled the service.