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‘Oh, right,' Henry said cautiously. ‘Should I be flattered?'

Carney chuckled, ‘Maybe, but there is a killer to this, if you'll pardon the expression.'

Henry waited.

‘They have someone in custody for the murders.'

‘That's good, isn't it?'

The chief inspector chuckled again. ‘You're going to like this.'

‘Go on.'

‘Ex-cop of this parish, Steve Flynn.'

‘The Steve Flynn?'

‘The one and only.'

‘Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs,' Henry said, almost laughing with glee.

‘There is something else that you might, or might not, need to know too.'

‘What's that?'

Carney told him and, just as he had finished, there was a terrible scream and a crash from inside the pub.

‘I'll call you back,' Henry said, whizzed his coffee dregs and ran inside to see what accident had happened in the kitchen.

Alison was holding Henry's iPad gripped tight between her hands as though she was attempting to snap the device like a huge bar of chocolate. The expression of horror on her face stunned Henry. ‘What is it, love?'

She was shaking terribly. Behind her stood Ginny, also speechless and terrified. Henry crossed to her and took her arm. ‘Babe, what is it?'

‘This … this man,' she said shakily. She tilted the iPad towards Henry. In the time he had been out for his morning coffee it had reconnected to the internet and continued to download the photograph Donaldson had sent, the one of Jason Hawke.

‘What about him?'

Henry glanced at the mug shot, instantly recognizing Hawke as definitely the man he had seen at Percy's house.

Alison could hardly get her words out and Henry could see she was having what he assumed was a panic attack. He prised the iPad out of her grip, laid it on the table, then gently manoeuvred her into a chair and went down on his haunches in front of her, holding her hands between his. Tears streamed down her face.

‘Henry, you really have to leave the job … I don't know if I can stand this happening again.'

‘Stand what, sweetheart?'

‘This … that man … you remember I told you about an American having breakfast here a couple of days ago?'

‘Yeah.' Henry felt a sudden thump in his lower belly.

‘It was him,' she said. ‘The photograph … it was him … he was here. In my pub … sitting over there.' She looked up at Henry with pleading eyes. ‘Henry, not again, please not again.'

F
lynn stared at his breakfast, a churro – a fried stick of batter liberally sprinkled with sugar. Churros are usually served with thick, hot chocolate, into which they are dipped, but the cuisine in the police station did not stretch that far. Flynn's was served with a steaming plastic mug of hot coffee, sweet and milky.

He devoured the churro – the first food he'd had since his arrest almost twenty-four hours before – and he was ravenous. Then, with the rough blanket a gaoler had provided for him after much complaining wrapped around his shoulders, he sat back on the bench alongside the curled-up figure of his new drunken cellmate and savoured the brew. It tasted wonderful.

Eventually, sadly, he finished it.

The man next to him farted wetly. It stank. Flynn wafted away the aroma but could not be bothered to move away. He felt stiff and very sore, the injuries from his assault and abduction seeming to ratchet him up tightly. He needed a shower and a proper sleep, but before those luxuries, he needed a lawyer.

With that in mind he forced himself to stand up, crossed to the wall and stuck his thumb on the call button.

Alison had previously been the target of a man Henry had been investigating, resulting in her suffering a serious assault. The image of her smashed-in face being held up against a car window to taunt Henry was always imprinted on his mind.

She had been chosen and targeted because of her connection to him, and had suffered dreadfully. In fact Henry had almost expected to find her dead and now, maybe, it was happening again.

Someone he was investigating had turned up on her doorstep and, unwittingly, she had chatted openly to him about her fiancé and their future.

‘And now you tell me this man is a friggin' hit man?' Alison's voice rose towards hysteria again. ‘A hit man? Sitting, eating my full English, talking to me? A fucking hit man!'

One thing Henry had noticed about her was that when she got upset or stressed, her use of language sank right down to gutter level. He tried to tell himself he loved it, that it was just another interesting quirk to her character.

‘He won't be back,' he started to reassure her.

She cut in, blazing. ‘Call me a cynic, but that's utter cock and bollocks. You cannot be certain of that.'

‘I can. I promise you he won't be back.'

Noticing that his language, too, had sunk to drainage level, Henry bellowed down the phone, ‘I'm fucking authorising it, that's who,' at the belligerent traffic sergeant in the Operations Department at headquarters. ‘No, actually, the chief constable is authorising it, so if you want to pop along to his office and ask him, then be my fucking guest.'

‘But sir—'

‘No
but
s, mate. It's happening … now give him the keys.'

‘Yes sir. When do you expect we'll have it back, then?'

‘When we catch a killer, that's when.' Henry slammed down the phone and, unfairly, said, ‘Moron.'

He could feel himself shaking like a volcano about to erupt, from his toes to his cranium, furious at himself, furious with everyone, furious with the world.

‘Here, darling.'

He turned. Alison stood there with a fresh mug of coffee in her hand, offering it to him. Unlike him, she had pretty much recovered from her earlier shock and upset, although she looked drained.

Henry took a steadying breath, reached out with a dithering hand and took the mug. ‘Thank you. I'm really, really sorry about—'

‘Hey, not your fault.' She moved in close and put the tip of her forefinger over his lips. ‘OK? He's a bad man and you're probably right, he wouldn't dare come back.'

He nodded, but knew different. What Alison had not seen was the detailed background on Jason Hawke that Donaldson had sent through as a file attachment. His obsessive, violent behaviour, his ruthless hunting down of people who had wronged him, his cold-blooded ability to kill people and leave no witnesses or evidence behind. Henry now knew he was on Hawke's list, and probably Alison and Ginny were too. Henry knew that Hawke was suspected of obliterating a family in witness protection he had hunted down for a crime boss. He had killed each one, father, mother and two young children.

At this moment in time, therefore, Henry and his new family were easy meat for this guy.

And at this moment, Henry was struggling to get anyone to help him and until he did, he wasn't going anywhere.

Protecting people was difficult at the best of times. It was complicated and, if done properly, very expensive in terms of staff hours.

So far all he had been able to achieve was snaffling a traffic car from Ops and getting someone to sit in it outside the pub, a uniformed presence. That had been the subject of the phone call he had just made to the uncooperative sergeant.

Henry had hit on the idea of assigning the underused PC Bill Robbins to this task. Bill had been a firearms officer until he'd had a nervous breakdown after some particularly nasty incidents and no one really wanted him on their staff, so he found himself mooching around various headquarters departments, basically killing time. Henry's idea was to put Bill in a traffic car and get him to drive to Kendleton, park in front of the Owl and act as a deterrent of sorts. Even that had taken threats and pulling rank.

Henry slid an arm around Alison's waist and they hugged, Henry trying not to spill his coffee. They were at the bar in the pub, close to the fire Alison had just lit with logs from the woods.

‘I've managed to get a traffic car to park up outside, but he's the best part of an hour away. I've also got an Armed Response Vehicle coming from Lancaster to drive past and a mobile to keep cruising as and when possible. It's just a stop-gap for the moment; then I'll get something more permanent – until we catch him.'

Alison stepped backwards. ‘You need to get in to work to do that, don't you?'

‘I do, but I'm not going anywhere until you and Ginny are protected. It would help if there was a local bobby, but we know there isn't.' He looked pointedly at her and she nodded. The last one in Kendleton had never been replaced; now the police house in the village was deserted and the people of the village did their own policing, up to a point. The nearest cops were in Lancaster, a good fifteen minutes away.

‘I'm sure I'll be fine,' Alison said. ‘You go in, get hunting.'

‘Not until that traffic car is parked up outside and I've seen an ARV drive by at least once, and a section mobile … only then and maybe not even then.'

Henry glanced past Alison's shoulder as the revolving doors swished and four men entered the pub, each one carrying a double-barrelled, twelve bore shotgun.

‘Oh my good—'

Alison smiled and said, ‘This is why I'll be all right.'

The relief that coursed through Henry was so intense he almost cried – but he kept it together.

‘Well?' the first man through the door demanded, brandishing his firearm. ‘Where is the bastard and where do you want us?' This was a local farmer called Singleton, also a regular in the pub, as were the three others. One was the local doctor, Lott; another a gamekeeper from the nearby estate owned by the Duke of Westminster; and the final one a young lad who worked in an abattoir. Henry knew each and every one of them well and, whilst they were not friends as such, they weren't a million miles away. He had served them all drinks from one side of the bar and drunk with them on the other. Each was a respected member of the local community. They supported their local hostelry with ferocity but, although their hearts were in the right place, Henry could not allow this, as much as he would have liked to.

‘Guys,' he said, ‘lower the weapons for a start.'

Singleton – flat cap, large ruddy face, a stereotypical farmer – took a menacing step towards Henry.

‘I knows what you're going to say, Henry, so don't even start. This lass –' fortunately he chose to point at Alison with an arthritic finger rather than with the barrels of the shotgun – ‘this lass is one of us now and we love her. This place belongs to the village and we protect each other out here, which you should know by now. We're all licensed to own and carry these guns, we know what we're doing with them and we're here to protect Alison and Ginny. Not that bothered about you, yet. Only if you arrest us will we back off. Otherwise –' he glanced at the three others, who came to a sloppy sort of attention – ‘we're here for as long as necessary, understand? And we've decided to call ourselves the Wild Geese.'

Henry blinked back his tear, then said, ‘You wonderful people.'

Two hours later, after a flurry of activity, Henry sat down at his desk in the MIR and checked through his ‘to do/have done' list. His finger worked its way down it until he reached the bottom two items: ‘Archie Astley-Barnes' and ‘Steve Flynn – murderer!'

He heaved himself out of his chair, went to the office door, leaned out, caught Pete Woodcock's eye and beckoned him in.

‘Close the door.'

Woodcock sat down across from Henry.

‘Archie,' Henry stated.

‘Boss?'

‘First impressions – I don't believe it's connected to Percy's murder, but I am willing to be proved wrong.'

‘I'll bet it is, somewhere down the line,' Woodcock said.

‘Absolutely … maybe, maybe not … however, I want you to run with it, Pete.'

The DCI's face lit up. ‘Really, boss?'

‘Yeah. I'll keep going with Percy and Lottie and we'll run Archie's death alongside them from here, just in case there is a link, and so we can keep an eye on everything. You pull a small team together in addition to those we've already got and we can share resources. I know it'll be a tight squeeze, but the HOLMES system is already up and running, so it'd be daft not to. But you run it, yeah? Chase down the blood samples from the house – those that don't belong to Archie – and the PM is down to you and that's later today.'

‘OK, thanks, boss.'

‘Scoot.' Henry flicked his fingers at Woodcock, who left quickly, closing the office door behind him.

Henry then glanced at the last item on the list. Steve Flynn. Arrested for murder in Spain. The one bright thing in Henry's horrific day and he couldn't help but grin at the prospect of Flynn being incarcerated in a Spanish hell hole.

Finally, he thought.

But before he did anything he made another call to the Tawny Owl.

‘Hi, babe, it's me.'

‘OK, Henry, enough is enough,' Alison said. ‘This is the third call since you left. I'm OK, OK? I'm surrounded by people who would lay down their lives for me. There's a cop car parked outside now, and I've seen two others drive past, flagged them down and fed them. I'll be OK, you just concentrate on catching the guy.'

‘OK, OK,' Henry said.

‘And I do love you.'

‘Me too, love you, that is … er, watch out for me on TV later … big press briefing in an hour, all channels I think.'

‘I will, so don't forget your lines.'

‘I won't … hey, don't give any of those gun-toting yokels any beer. They're likely as not to shoot each other, rather than a bad guy.'

Alison giggled. The phone call ended when Alison cut Henry off after about a dozen back and forth
Bye
s, like they were teenagers. Henry stood up and went into the MIR, which was buzzing with renewed activity. He passed from desk to desk, chatting to each person, asking how they were getting on.