Nightmare City (42 page)

She forced his jacket off his shoulders. He drew his arms out
of the sleeves. The garment dropped to the floor with a sigh of
air. Her fingers went to his shirt, fumbling impatiently with the
buttons, eventually ripping the last one off. She tugged the shirt
out of his jeans and her face went to his injured chest. She softly
licked the deep purple bruising over his breastbone and she
unbuckled his belt.

The pain ebbed away from Henry’s damaged body, replaced by a
wave of energy.

‘
Oh God, Henry, we need to do it,’ she said.

No. Say no, Henry, you complete fucking imbecile. Think of
Kate. The girls. Think about what happened last time.

‘
Yes,’ he said hoarsely.

He eased her out of her zip-up jacket and pulled her tracksuit
top over her head. She released her grip on his fly and lifted up
her arms obligingly to facilitate the movement. He tossed the top
to one side and his arms quickly carried out a pincer movement to
her back, his fingers meeting in the middle at her bra strap. It
was a smooth manoeuvre and the clasp was breached in a second and
the bra dropped to the floor.

He could feel her easing his jeans off, which ended up around
his ankles, then she pulled down the front of his
Y-fronts.

Another of those deep throaty groans broke from her lips when
she grabbed his hard, swaying cock and slid back the
foreskin.

‘
Aaah,’ he heard himself say. His hands went to her breasts,
her nipples erect against the palms. He looked down at them. They
were sweet, deep pink, long and excited.

‘
Come over here,’ she urged him.

They shifted to the settee like practising dance partners,
allowing Henry the chance to step out of his jeans and trainers. He
sat down quickly, removing his underpants and socks as he did so.
Siobhan stood over him, bending forwards, those beautiful breasts
hanging near his face. In a second she was out of her jeans and
knickers. Both of them were completely naked.

He had only a few seconds to appreciate her body before she
pushed him back onto the settee. He lay there without a fight. She
went on him immediately, devouring him in her mouth and he
surprised himself by not ejaculating there and then. She worked on
him with wonderful lips and a wet, wet tongue, constantly looking
up at him, judging his pleasure, until he could stand it no longer
- at which juncture he took hold of her and drew her up.

He sat up. She sat next to him. He dropped to his knees and
twisted round between her legs.

God, she smelled intoxicating.

For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes. Her mouth was
open and wet and hot as he clamped his over it and kissed her
fiercely. His fingers slid from her breasts and down between her
legs, searching for and finding her. She was soaking.

‘
I get very wet,’ she said.

‘
Apparently.’

She lay back, opening herself to him. His head went down, his
mouth working over her, tongue probing deftly, darting in, out,
around. She squirmed and moaned, rotating her hips as everything
built inside her. ‘Beautiful,’ she murmured appreciatively. ‘Henry,
come on, do it, fuck me. Come on; let’s fuck now.’

What? Maybe he was an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, but somehow
the word seemed so ... inappropriate. OK, it is what they were
about to do. But
fuck?
This wasn’t going to be a
fuck,
was it? Kate would never use
such terminology ... yeah, Kate.

He shrugged off the brief unease and helped Siobhan to lie
full-length on the settee. He clambered over her, holding himself
aloft, his elbow joints locked. She drew up her knees and Henry,
keeping his balance with one shaky hand, reached down and aimed his
prick towards her, knowing that within a matter of seconds he would
be in deep.

In deep ...
all of a sudden he
caught an image of himself in his mind.

He saw his jeans and underpants, socks and trainers, out of
the corner of his eye.

Then he visualised Kate and remembered the look on her face
the last time. The hurt, the pain. The despair, the tears. The
anger. Kate, the only woman he had truly loved. Who he never wanted
to hurt and who he had betrayed in the worst way imaginable. He had
done it once, and every day since it had been with him. The guilt.
Always ready to pop up at the most inappropriate moments and niggle
away at him like a cancer.

Yet here he was again. Once more with a younger woman. His
penis touching the fat wet lips of her vagina, ready to plunge in,
and fuck the consequences.

But this time there would be no consequences.

In that moment, when it could have gone either way, he made
the decision, with a little whimper.

‘
I’m sorry,’ he said, kneeling up, his penis curved up out of
his bush, touching his belly, swaying between them like an innocent
bystander. He reversed off the settee like a crab, leaving Siobhan
lying there stunned and unsatisfied, still wanting. ‘I can’t. It’s
lovely. It’s been really lovely. And I really would like to do it.’
He gulped for air. ‘But I can’t. I’m sorry. Just won’t work.’ He
scooped his clothes together and danced an impressive jig as he got
into his Y’s. The bulge of his penis remained highly
prominent.

Siobhan lay there for a few seconds in total, gobsmacked
disbelief. This was replaced by a look of scorn and hatred which
turned Henry’s soul cold. ‘You can’t do this, Henry. Starting
something and then leaving me in mid- fucking air.’ It was as if
another character had taken over her, someone slightly deranged. Or
maybe just completely pissed off, Henry couldn’t be sure. ‘So, come
on, fuck me. I want it. I want you. You can’t leave me in the air
like this.’

‘
Look, I’m really sorry, but I can’t go through with it.’ He
was struggling to get into his shirt and fasten it, finding one of
the buttons missing and a tear in the fabric where it had once
been. ‘It was a silly thing to contemplate. We’re colleagues, I’m a
supervisor and I’m married. It’d all go horribly wrong.’

She rolled off the settee and stood proudly before him,
seething anger hissing from every pore. Henry wasn’t so far gone
that he couldn’t appreciate what a wonderful body she had and he
was already regretting not completing the act.

‘
Is it me?’ she demanded. ‘Am I not good enough for
you?’

‘
No, it’s not you. I mean - oh damn! You’re great, brilliant.
I couldn’t think of anything better than making love to you. God,
it’s me. Definitely me.’

He was slightly off-balance, hopping about on one foot whilst
pulling a trainer on.

The hard, open-handed, perfectly-aimed slap which sent him
winging across the room, crashing into the cabinets, caught him
completely by surprise. It jarred everything that was hurting and
made the punch Anderson had laid on him pale by
comparison.’

‘
Jesus,’ he yelped, in a pathetic heap on the floor. ‘There
was no need for that.’

Still naked, quivering with resentment, she stood over him,
her eyes ablaze.

‘
I’ll tell you one thing you are right about, Henry fucking
Christie, you out-and-out bastard. It
has
all gone horribly wrong. For
you, that is.’

She stooped down, picked up her clothes and strutted into the
other office to get dressed.

They met, as ever, at the Country Club, all arriving at
different times. This, however, was purely a business meeting and
no time was spent in the pool. They had use of a small conference
room which had been swept for listening devices prior to their
arrival.

Drinks and sandwiches were laid on. All very
civilised.

Morton. McNamara. Conroy.

The three men who had met many years before, when each had
been at the beginning of their chosen career, and since then their
lives and fates had intertwined.

Morton and Conroy went back to 1960s Manchester. They had met
when Morton had been a Salford city beat bobby and Conroy was
running a couple of streetwalkers and a very iffy protection racket
on a few Pakistani shopkeepers. Each assisted the other to mutual
benefit. Morton made things easy for Conroy by feeding him
information about police activities which might impinge on his
business interests; in return Conroy offered up one or two
sacrificial lambs by way of good quality prisoners which enhanced
Morton’s professional standing.

Both had prospered.

Conroy grew as a criminal. Morton was promoted as a
detective.

Now Morton was close to retirement. At fifty-four he had
thirty-five years’ service, having been rotten for thirty-four of
them. At his rank he could have stayed until he was sixty, but
mid-fifties had always been his aim.

And fifty-five it would be.

When he said goodbye to the job next year he would step into a
world of secretly acquired wealth, amassed cautiously over the
years, in particular the last ten or so during the life of the
NWOCS when he became virtually autonomous, being able to operate
how he saw fit. And also Conroy had become much more profitable
over these years, mainly due to Morton’s protection.

Now Morton owned a villa in Spain, an apartment in Barbados
and a holiday cabin in Eire. The Spanish home came with a pool,
Porsche and maid; the Caribbean one with a Mini-moke, the Irish one
with a small lough, brimful of trout. All had been bought covertly
through third parties.

When he retired he intended to split his time between the
three, pretending they were rented if anyone should ask. His life
would be financed - on the face of it - from his police pension and
savings, and some legitimate stock-market dealings. This, in fact,
would only be pin money, the icing on the cake of a career of
corruption: his association with Conroy had placed £2.2 million in
Channel Island and Cayman Island bank accounts. He reckoned this
would provide him with about one hundred and fifty grand a year in
interest.

Life would be very sweet.

All he needed to do was see the next twelve months
through.

Multi-millionaire Sir Harry McNamara had come into the
equation in the 1970s during a shady land deal associated with
Conroy, which was fortunately being investigated by Morton who was
then on the Fraud Squad. By some wily manoeuvring, Morton
prosecuted some of the tiddlers and allowed the fat fish to swim
away. Craftily Morton made this appear to be a successful operation
through police eyes.

The land deal had been ratified by a certain local councillor
called McNamara, as he then was. All three men benefited from the
sale of the land which was purchased for an inflated fee by a
national company who built a multi-storey car park on it. The
spin-off in terms of building contracts were enormous. All from a
piece of scrubland that Conroy had bought for next to nothing from
an old bloke who needed to have a gun shoved into his mouth before
he signed the contract.

From that inauspicious start an empire grew.

Soon afterwards, Conroy started supplying McNamara with women
in payment for certain favours. A couple of these women
mysteriously disappeared. Conroy asked no questions, but warned
McNamara. No more disappeared - until Marie Cullen.

When McNamara became an MP and, for a short time, a big noise
in the Foreign Office, it wasn’t long before Conroy urged him to
look into the possibilities of dealing in guns. Towards the end of
the 1980s Conroy, who had always dabbled in the British underworld
scene of arms dealing, had a flourishing trade based on selling
arms stolen in America or bought in Eastern Europe to warring
African countries. He’d made a real killing selling to Ethiopian
warlords. They always seemed to have enough money to buy guns and
whisky.

In essence, McNamara used his position of influence whilst in
the Foreign Office to bring about arms deals, usually right under
the nose of the PM, who had a soft spot for him. There were many
photographs of the Premier shaking hands with overseas dignitaries
- usually African - whilst in the background McNamara could be seen
standing next to a government official, smiling, chatting,
arranging deals.

In his own constituency McNamara was a staunch proponent of
law and order and policing issues. When gang warfare came to
Lancashire and Manchester in the mid-1980s, it was McNamara’s
pressure and his mouth to the PM’s ear, that the Home Office should
fund a regionalised unit, an extension of the Crime Squads, to
tackle the problem head on.

And who better to run it, McNamara recommended, than that
excellent detective with a wealth of experience in dealing with
gangsters - Tony Morton, then a Detective
Superintendent.

Fully dressed, Henry said, ‘Which car are we going to
Blackpool in?’

‘
I don’t give a shit. Use which you want. They’ve all got
their keys in the ignition. I’m not coming with you.’

‘
Yeah. . . Look, I’m sorry, Siobhan. Nothing
personal.’

‘
Fuck off, Henry,’ she said sourly.

He nodded. Tight-lipped, hot and flustered, he went swiftly
down the stairs to the garage below. He opened the electrically
controlled doors and got in the first car he came to. There was a
piece of material in the driver’s seat which reminded him of a
bikini bottom. He tossed it into the passenger footwell and then
adjusted the driver’s seat which was pulled forwards for a short
person. Then he reached for the ignition key. It wasn’t there. He
checked the sun visors. Not there either.