Ambush (2 page)

‘Nah, but that's OK … visit the probation office and that's about it … as a lifer I'm on licence for ever, obviously. Anyway, to freedom.' He raised his mug again, then swallowed the remaining liquor, which spread down into his chest like wildfire.

The same four card players assembled the night before Loveday's release in Tasker's cell. They settled down for a quiet couple of hours of poker and pontoon with some booze and cigarettes supplied by a tame prison guard.

It was the way Loveday wanted it, no fuss, just a bit of time with a few people he had come to regard as friends.

His moment of murderous frenzy thirty years before had been the only moment of complete madness in his life and he had paid his judicial dues quietly in several prisons across the north of England. This one – Lancashire Prison, just a few miles west of the town of Leyland – was to be his final one. He had spent six years here, existing fairly peacefully, causing no problems and getting on with his life behind bars, not making any waves. He had learned quickly how to survive, to cultivate non-sexual relationships, to kowtow to the duality of the prison hierarchy – the inmates and the staff – and never to flaunt his gayness in any way. Occasionally he took a considered chance with it, but only when he knew it was safe to do so.

All he wanted to do on that last evening of captivity was stay under the radar, unnoticed; spend time with a few other inmates he'd got to know, play cards, have a drink, then tootle back to his cell and, virtually, wake up a free man – bar the painful, bureaucratic procedure of being released.

The evening went to plan.

Cards were played, matches won and lost, and a variety of liquids consumed. Prison officers passed the open cell door infrequently; some looked in and genuinely wished Loveday well for tomorrow and the future, but none interfered with the civilized night until the lights out warning bell sounded at ten forty-five p.m. for the eleven p.m. lockdown.

The playing cards were stacked and all debts for that night were written off good-naturedly.

Then the four men stood around the card table and raised their mugs for the final drink and a toast to Loveday and freedom.

A prison officer appeared at the cell door and caught Tasker's eye – at which precise moment Loveday's eyeballs rolled back in their sockets and his knees buckled. He dropped his mug, swayed, but just before he pitched forward two of the card players grabbed him, one on each side, before he hit the hard cell floor, ensuring he did not injure himself.

The prison officer stepped in, pulled the door to but did not close it.

Tasker stepped aside as the drugged Loveday was eased unconscious on to the lower bunk and laid out on it.

Five minutes later, the scene was prepared and ready.

D
etective Chief Inspector Craig Alford was the first of the targets, the first of the five programmed to die.

There was no specific reason for him to be first; he just happened to be first alphabetically and also the easiest to find, watch, follow and, of course, kill.

But there was a specific reason why the last name on the list was the final one.

On the day he died, Alford had been at work since seven a.m., coordinating a series of drugs raids across the county of Lancashire from the new communications room at police headquarters situated in Hutton, about four miles south of Preston. Alford was on Lancashire Constabulary's Serious and Organized Crime Unit (SOCU) based in the Pavilion Building at HQ (built, literally, on the site of the old cricket pavilion on the playing fields opposite the headquarters building, hence the adopted name).

That morning's raids were the culmination of months of fastidious intelligence gathering, use of sources (aka informants) and good targeting. Alford had grafted hard to make the operation, codenamed ‘Aquarius', a success. Drugs raids were ten a penny, most not having any effect on the trade, and Alford wanted his to be different – to make a difference.

There would be no crashing through the bedsit doors of low level street dealers, smashing their soil pipes with sledgehammers to catch any drugs being hurriedly flushed down the bog, and then seizures of a few grams of coke and a few unhealthy cannabis plants.

Today Alford, as per his enviable cop history as a man hunter, was going to catch some very big fish and close down a massive drug-running operation – which, he knew realistically, would have an effect for a good week before the next drug lord stepped into the vacuum.

If, that was, all things came together.

He had four major, interlinked traffickers in his sights. The intel he and his team had gathered consisted of financial dealings, property ownership, legit fronts for illegal activities and, best of all, the prospect of catching all four main players with drugs, money and guns in their possession.

Alford could probably have struck much earlier and got a decent enough result, but he had resisted pressure from above and below because, as he succinctly summarized, ‘I can't see the whites of their eyes yet.' Had he bowed to that pressure he would always have known that he should have waited just a tad longer to strike.

It was like waiting for Jupiter to align with Mars, he insisted – hence the name of the operation.

Things had to come together, to converge.

Drugs had to be at a particular location. Money had to be there. The guns had to be there. The targets had to be there and the police resources had to be ready to jump. Fast.

The waiting all became worthwhile when, from his perch in the comms room, Alford listened to the radio transmissions on the secure encrypted channel being used exclusively for Aquarius, watched the live video/audio feeds from cop-cams attached to various officers' shoulder pads and headgear and made on-the-spot decisions, finally giving the ‘Go, go, go' order.

Four suspects. Four synchronized raids. Forty cops and support staff.

Jupiter, Mars.

‘Gustav Holst,' Alford mused.

Twenty minutes after seven, twelve arrests had actually been made, because a few of the bit-part players were picked up along with the four main people, three men and one woman.

Eight million pounds' worth of cocaine was seized, and maybe about one million in drug-tainted sterling and euros plus four Heckler & Koch machine pistols, two Glock handguns and several Russian-made pistols, with ammunition and lots of documents.

The comms room, now known as the contact centre, was newly opened, and Alford's manic dance and high-fives with some members of his team were the first to be enacted on the new carpet, around the consoles of several bemused, wide-eyed comms operators.

None of this was of any interest to the man parked in a layby on the dual carriageway, the A59, that ran past the police headquarters campus, Preston to the north, Liverpool well to the south.

The man had been sitting there patiently since four p.m., had brought a flask and sandwiches with him, knowing that Alford usually finished work around five thirty, though occasionally he left at five. Often he stayed in until seven or eight p.m.

It was now just after eight p.m., but the man was certain Alford was still in work. He knew there was a pretty big police operation going on and had been expecting, but not assuming, that Alford would stay late.

Although there was always the faint possibility of the detective using another route when he left, Alford had driven out of headquarters this way on every other occasion this man had watched and waited, and although he was working later than normal, the man in the car did not think Alford would change his route home that day. Alford lived in a nice house on the north side of Preston, but because there was no right turn out of HQ on to the dual carriageway he would have to turn left towards Liverpool, then exit about quarter of a mile up, loop under the carriageway and rejoin it to travel north towards Preston. It was a pain for all the staff working there. Many years before, it had been possible to turn right through a gap in the central barrier, but the A59 was a straight, fast road at that point, and because of the number of serious and fatal crashes and near misses the Highways Department had decided to close the gap.

The man in the car had only been given a short brief: watch and report using a new pay-as-you-go mobile phone on each occasion. He had been instructed – over the phone, by someone he had never seen, did not know – to wait for Alford to drive past, then text the word ‘YES' to a particular number and discard the phone carefully.

That was all. He didn't even need to follow the cop.

A hundred pounds a shot.

Ten shots so far.

Easy money.

So he sat back and waited, knowing this would be the last time of doing this, though he did not know why he was doing it. But he did not give a shit. A grand was a grand.

The day had been long, intense, nerve-racking and tiring, requiring complete concentration, and by the end of it Alford was ready for home. Aquarius had been a resounding success. A dozen arrests and all the prisoners scattered around police cells in Lancashire to keep them separate, now being attended to by well-briefed, experienced interview teams. Alford knew the raids were actually only the beginning of a long process of interviews, house and business premises searches, forensic and financial checks, liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service and numerous court appearances. He had to be totally on the ball for the next two weeks but was confident everything was covered. These drug dealers would not set foot on the streets again for at least fifteen years. That was his ultimate aim: disruption and incarceration.

As he pulled out of headquarters at eight fifteen p.m., then turned left on to the dual carriageway, Alford took a few moments to call home. His wife was also a detective, a DC based on a child protection unit. There was no response on either the home landline or her mobile phone, though this did not unduly trouble him. He knew she was busy with a particularly nasty case of child neglect and cruelty. At the moment their lives were not in synch, but everything always came back on line and they had plans for the weekend, staying at their favourite little pub in Arnside and doing some walking. Nor was he concerned that neither of the children answered the home phone. They were plagued by Payment Protection Insurance callers and the girls, now seventeen and nineteen, ignored the phone unless they happened to be standing by it and saw that the caller display showed a number they recognized.

He flicked off the Bluetooth and his Jaguar sped up the road, turning left and then looping back under the bridge to come back down towards Preston. He never even noticed the car in the layby because, as soon as he ended his attempts to call home, his mind whirred with everything ‘Aquarius' and with what needed sorting next day, which, he had already decided, would commence at six a.m.

The man in the car sank low in his seat as Alford's sleek black car zipped by. Then he sent the text – just a simple ‘YES' – and immediately began to dismantle his phone.

Alford's house was on the A6 north of Preston, just beyond the village of Broughton. Detached and standing in its own grounds, it was hidden from the busy main road by high fencing and hedging and was not overlooked by any of the neighbouring houses.

The hooded man heard the text drop on to his phone. He drew it out of his back pocket and read it, just that single word, ‘YES', then slid the phone back in and smiled down at the three people lying in front of him, their hands bound with duct tape around their backs, ankles also bound and a J-cloth stuffed into each of their mouths and then taped over.

‘Not long now, ladies,' he said. What he did next indicated that none of them would leave this scenario alive.

He pinched the top of his hood firmly between his finger and thumb and slowly pulled it off, revealing his face.

Now they had seen him.

Now they would die.

Alford's route home took him around the western perimeter of Preston, using Tom Benson Way, an old railway line which was now an arterial road connecting with the A6 north of the city. Then he was under the motorway bridge at Broughton, through the crossroads, and about a couple of minutes later he slowed down, indicated right and turned into his curved driveway. His thoughts about Aquarius were now dismissed and he was eagerly looking forward to chilling and eating with his family, whom he adored.

He did give a brief pout of puzzlement when he saw his wife's car was on the wide drive, behind the two cars belonging to his daughters. He wondered why none of them had answered the phone.

He shrugged and climbed out of the Jag. It was almost six years old but still a quietly magnificent car. He walked to the front door of the house which, twenty years earlier, when he'd been a detective constable and his wife had been in uniform, had almost crippled them with mortgage repayments, but which was now worth probably four times what they had initially paid for it. He was immensely proud of it and his family, and of what he and his wife had achieved over the years through hard graft and working at a brilliant marriage.

He stopped abruptly at the front door, which he saw was ever so slightly open, just resting on the door frame.

At first he wondered if it was a birthday or anniversary he had forgotten, or maybe there was a surprise waiting inside and they were all about to ambush him. Just a fleeting thought. He knew there was nothing pending, and he did not miss stuff like that anyway.

But for some reason the open door was slightly unsettling, though he could not say why.

It wasn't a feeling based on evidence, just a cop's instinct.

His mouth went dry. He pushed the door open with the tip of his right forefinger.

It swung noiselessly.

There was no one in the tiled hallway.

The kitchen door at the far end was open, lights on.

The door to the lounge on the left was closed.

The house was silent.

Unusual. He frowned.

Normally the place was throbbing with life and the aroma of good cooking because the ladies of this house were bubbly, exuberant people who always had food on and music blaring. They looked after him, he looked after them.