Ambush (11 page)

In spite of the air conditioning on the boat, Flynn sweated as he recalled those dreadful words over the radio, though they weren't the only bad things he recalled from that night in 2002.

The first thing was that he could remember exactly, word for word, syllable by syllable, the seemingly mundane conversation he'd had with Jack Hoyle in the motorway café while they watched the targets drink their coffees and eat their snacks. At the time it had seemed to be insignificant – just a reluctant Flynn opening up to his best friend over concerns about his wife and his worries about her behaviour. Just a mate talking to another mate, normal, everyday, innocuous.

Even now Flynn could see the look in Jack Hoyle's eyes, because now he could interpret what he saw.

Lying there with Santiago, Flynn ground his teeth as in his mind, like a TV screen on pause, he stared at Jack Hoyle's deceitful eyes.

‘Bastard.' Flynn's lips moved almost silently.

But then he shook away the image and moved on.

Jack Hoyle back at the wheel of the surveillance car. The rain. The target vehicle ahead with just the one rear light.

One hundred miles per hour. Speeding through a lake.

The motorway signs indicating Stafford.

Flynn's mobile rang.

‘Steve, it's Burt Tucker.' Tucker was one of the pair who made up the team Alpha Two, the unit sent by Flynn to go back and investigate the reason for Alpha Three's sudden breakdown in communication.

‘Fire away.'

‘We've found them, Steve.'

‘Thank God for that.' Flynn's relief was all in his voice.

The phone connection went silent. Flynn thought the signal had dropped, but it had not.

Burt Tucker said, ‘No, Steve, not thank God.'

T
hey lost the car somewhere between Junctions 28 and 31 of the M6 when a combination of the terrible weather and volume of traffic brought the whole northbound motorway to a halt. At one point, Flynn and Hoyle were directly behind the target, nose to tail, uncomfortably so, with all three lanes at a standstill.

Flynn was raging.

‘I'm gonna get out and drag those two bastards out now,' he growled. The fingers of his left hand touched the door handle.

‘You'll get killed,' Hoyle said, ‘either by them or by the traffic.'

Flynn was not listening.

He started to open the door, fury consuming him and his judgement; the red mist he could rarely control was now in front of his eyes.

‘We need to grab them.'

‘I know, I know,' Hoyle said sympathetically. He too was bubbling but trying to remain sensible and rein in Flynn, who was well known for flying off the handle. ‘We've got traffic cars coming together further up the motorway on the M55. We'll stop them there, we're pretty sure they're going that way.'

‘Pretty sure isn't a certainty. Suppose our gen is wrong?'

‘It won't be,' Hoyle tried to reassure him.

‘I'm going,' said Flynn impetuously.

He dragged open the door handle.

The men in the car – the identity of one known, the other not – were now hot murder suspects. They had gravitated from being drug runners to cop killers.

Burt Tucker, the detective constable, and his partner Jane Raw, who together made up Alpha Two, had done a turn-around back to Corley Services to try and discover why Alpha Three had gone off the grid. They had discovered the two-man team – Alpha Three – in the same spot where they had parked when they had come off the motorway and where they had stayed put with the intention of following Tango One back on to the M6.

Three had never moved.

Tucker and Raw from Alpha Two drew in behind the surveillance car and as their headlights swept across the car, they saw their worst fears confirmed.

Both detectives were dead, each shot brutally through the head, slumped down and sideways in their seats with terrible entry and exit wounds and blood-soaked sandwiches on their knees. The driver's window was fully open and the first assumption to be made was that whoever had killed them had somehow enticed the driver – DC Dave Crump – to open his window to talk.

Flynn was certain the offenders were in the car ahead.

Had to be.

On hearing the report from Burt Tucker, Flynn had immediately contacted the control room at Lancashire Police HQ and begun to arrange for traffic cars and Armed Response Vehicles to lay a trap somewhere ahead so the Mercedes could be pulled, the occupants arrested. When, shunting in the almost immobile traffic on the motorway, he and Hoyle had found themselves by accident directly behind the Mercedes, Flynn could not resist going for it.

Though he was unarmed and in an extremely dangerous situation, he was in a fury at the thought that two colleagues and friends were now dead, and a hundred per cent certain the killers were less than twenty feet away from him.

A man like Flynn could not do anything but act. It was in his DNA.

As his door opened, he cracked open his extendable ASP baton to its full length and was instantly drenched by a shower of heavy rain.

Then, as often happens in motorway traffic jams, a gap suddenly opened next to the Mercedes and immediately the car jinked sideways into it. Almost as suddenly the gap then closed tight and the middle lane moved on, leaving the fast lane at a standstill. Hoyle had no chance of following.

Flynn slammed his door shut and swore. ‘Make sure you don't lose him,' he growled at Hoyle.

‘I'm going nowhere,' Hoyle said sullenly. Then the inside lane moved again, but the fast lane stayed where it was.

Peering through the dark blanketing rain Flynn saw the one-tail-lighted Mercedes swerve across into another gap that had opened up on the inside lane; then, as the middle lane shuffled forward again – but without any gaps opening up – he lost sight of the car.

Hoyle edged the Vauxhall across, indicating.

Flynn opened his window and leaned out, gesticulating at other drivers to let them in, but nothing much happened except that he got even wetter. It was hard for anyone to see at best and his rude gestures did not endear him to other drivers caught up in the jam.

Eventually Hoyle crept into the centre lane.

Which stopped dead, no escape either side, although the lane he'd just left began to move.

‘Well, at least he won't be going far either.'

Flynn could feel the muscles in his neck coiling like steel rope as he tried to keep himself from detonating.

He phoned control room, told them their position and what had happened. He was assured that traffic and ARV patrols were now hovering on the M55, waiting for the Mercedes to show up.

As he simmered, his radio came to life and the same voice he'd heard before taunted him with a cackling laugh and ‘Useless cunts.'

Flynn took a few breaths, then picked up the mike and said slowly, ‘I know who you are and I'm coming for you. Make the most of your freedom. It won't last long.'

There was a further laugh, then the radio went dead and there were no more transmissions, even in response to more of Flynn's threats.

The traffic jam broke up gradually as they approached Junction 28, the exit for Leyland. Hoyle began to make more progress until he was back in the sixty to seventy miles per hour region, about the maximum he could reach with the heavy traffic still around him.

Even so, they never saw the Mercedes on the motorway again and when they reached Junction 32 and bore left on to the M55 westbound for Blackpool there was no sign of it. Both traffic and ARVs reported that they had not seen it either.

That was the moment Flynn's mobile phone rang and his boss, a DCI on the Serious and Organized Crime Unit, demanded to know what was going on and ordered Flynn and Hoyle to return immediately to headquarters and start to answer some pretty fucking nooky questions.

Flynn tried to explain, but the DCI – who apparently had the chief constable standing right behind him – gave Flynn no option.

‘You come in now, Steve,' he insisted. ‘End of.'

‘Sorry boss … you're breaking up …'

‘Don't fuck with me, sergeant,' the DCI said.

‘Can't quite … hear … you … bad reception area …'

Flynn thumbed the ‘end call' and looked at Hoyle, who demanded worriedly, ‘What the hell are you playing at?'

‘I don't know about you, mate, but I want to catch the people who've just killed two cops, two of our mates.'

‘You can't be certain it's them.'

‘If it's not, I'll dust 'em down and send 'em on their way, even blow smoke up their arses.' He looked dangerously at Hoyle. ‘But you and I both know it is … two cops sitting in a motorway service area eating their butties don't just get their heads blown off randomly.'

‘But we don't even know where to start looking.'

‘In that case,' Flynn said, his right hand in a tight fist and making a twisting gesture, ‘let's squeeze a few testicles to find out.'

Flynn and Hoyle had both started their police careers on the streets of Blackpool, on foot and mobile. They had been on separate shifts in their early days but knew each other well, and both had ambitions to become drug squad officers. To that end, they made it their mission to get to know as many people as they could in the big underbelly of that resort who were connected in any way to the drug trade – which was, and remains, rife.

Of course that meant almost all criminals they came across in their day-to-day duties, because virtually all low level acquisitional crime funded drug activity. Shoplifters stole goods in order to sell them to buy drugs with the cash; burglars' ill-gotten gains were also used to buy drugs. And so it went.

Flynn had seen this early in his career and it was also very well documented.

He realized that arresting petty criminals, leaning on them and then perhaps letting them off for the crimes they had committed (completely unofficially) in exchange for information about drug dealers, and others further up the ladder, would be a good way for him to start to build a reputation both inside and outside the cops. This would eventually lead him to a job on the drugs squad and quite possibly the chance to bust some big time dealers. He spent a lot of time staking out locations for well-known street dealers and would often pounce, then bleed them for information.

It was a fairly ad hoc approach and not always successful, but it was something he enjoyed immensely.

Most people who bought drugs did not want to upset their supplier, usually because they were terrified to do so; most low level suppliers would not squeal on their line-supplier either, for the same reason. This became even more dangerous higher up the chain: a low level dealer might just beat up a junkie he was not happy with, but further up the chain the beatings got more serious, and a nasty death was always a possibility.

Flynn and Hoyle were quite patient, though.

They understood the hopes and fears of the people they were dealing with, most of whom existed on the bread line and were more afraid of their suppliers than of the cops. But occasionally they struck lucky and moved a rung or two up the chain of command and because the two cops treated the low levels with a reasonable amount of decency and respect they put together a very nice bunch of informants, or sources, from whom they occasionally got snippets of gold which led to decent arrests while also protecting the informants.

One informant they nurtured was called Janie Miller, a young lady who lived in a shit-hole of a bedsit and stuck dirty needles into her veins, but who actually came from a good family that could not control her. She had dropped out of college and begun life on the streets; she stole to feed an out of control drug habit that, if Flynn had not acted, would have killed her before the age of eighteen.

He met her when she had been living rough for just less than two years, although ‘met' was perhaps not the best way to describe their first encounter.

Flynn almost killed her.

He was a patrol PC back then, working a response car in Blackpool Central, one of the busiest policing locations in the country, comprising the Golden Mile, Blackpool's heaving sea front where the Tower could be found, and the immediate hinterland which was a hotspot of bars, clubs, theatres, amusement arcades, the bedsit world, shoddy hotels, drugs and violence.

Flynn loved it, revelled in it.

An eight- or twelve-hour tour of duty flew by, job after job pouring in, especially during the summer months when visitors surged into the resort in their millions. Long days, short hot nights. And wonderful to be a young cop.

The report of a robbery in progress on the street behind Blackpool Tower came in on the treble-nine system.

Cops in cars and on foot were dispatched, including Flynn, who at the time of the shout was in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant savouring a hot curry. He ran to his car, a liveried Astra, flicked on the blue light and sped out of the back alley in which he was parked.

He dinked through all the short cuts, criss-crossing town through all the rat runs he knew like the back of his hand way back then, some alleyways just wide enough, but only if he aimed his car correctly. When he was within spitting distance of the robbery he skidded into another back alley – the last short cut – which, as it was almost midnight, was black.

He drove his right foot down on to the accelerator, flipped the headlights on to main beam and saw the prostrate figure laid out across the alley just ahead of him.

With a scream and curse combined, Flynn slammed on and slithered to a halt on the oily cobbles. His front bumper rocked just an inch above the body.

Drunks splayed out in alleys were a common sight in Blackpool, and this is what Flynn thought he had encountered.

He beeped his horn and leaned out of the window, shouting angrily for whoever it was to get shifted.

No response.

He jumped out, intending simply to drag the inebriate to the side of the alley and get on his way. He had hoped to be first on the scene of the robbery and was maddened to think that that pleasure was now going to fall to one of his colleagues.