Nightmare City (62 page)

Tiger roared something incomprehensible in anguish and stood
up from behind the desk, Sig in hand and fired repeatedly in the
direction of his already-dead brother.

Henry got a bead on him immediately and fired the last bullet.
Click.

A dud.

Tiger laughed uproariously.

Henry dropped the gun and lay there with his head on the
floorboards hoping death would be quick, painless and a better
place than where he was at that point of time.

After several light-years of uncertainty, Henry decided to
face his attacker. He pushed himself onto his knees and watched the
dark figure of Tiger Mayfair step menacingly towards him - and then
disappear through the floorboards with a screech, plummeting thirty
feet onto the dance floor below, half-landing on one of the tables,
smashing his hip and crushing his right arm.

Henry stared open-mouthed at the hole in the floor.

He was still staring when Donaldson found him.

Epilogue

Henry was out of it for two whole days. He spent these hours
as if in his perfect dream: in bed, being tended to by a series of
concerned and beautiful nurses.

He woke with a start on the third day, feeling almost normal
after a fifteen-hour mammoth session of drug-induced
sleep.

He blinked, then had a slight regression when he saw FB parked
on a chair next to his bed.

‘
Am I dead?’ Henry asked. His mouth was parched dry and the
words came out croakily.

FB smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. How are you feeling, mate?’ he asked
quietly.

Henry shook his head and yawned. He rubbed his caked-up eyes
and felt groggily for his ear. There was a big bandage on the side
of his head.

‘
They’ve refitted it,’ FB informed him. ‘Eighteen stitches
this time.’

Henry nodded. He sat up stiffly. ‘What’s happening then? Last
thing I remember is shooting someone.’

‘
And killing him.’

‘
Shit. You’ve come to arrest me for murder.’

‘
Hardly,’ FB said with a snort. ‘I’ve come to pat you on the
back, and explain one or two things.’ The Chief Super’s eyes
dropped awkwardly. ‘And I’ve come to apologise to you.’

Henry frowned. His head was still hurting.

FB sighed deeply. ‘I’ve got to admit - I used you. I’m not
happy about it, but,’ he shrugged, ‘needs must.’

Henry waited.

Uncomfortably FB said, ‘Me and a Detective Superintendent from
Northumbria have been investigating the NWOCS for about two years
now. Not overtly, but discreetly. We knew they were all as bent as
nine-bob notes, but we were struggling to prove anything because
they were so tight. It was a major coup for us to get Geoff
Driffield on, because they only usually choose who they think will
fit. So we made Geoff look like the ideal candidate.’

‘
Bent, you mean?’

‘
Exactly. Anyway, he was working undercover for us. He was a
success initially, but then Morton cottoned on and Geoff got
careless and they caught him. Which is why he ended up
dead.’

‘
Why kill everyone else in the shop, though?’

FB shrugged. ‘I think the rationale was that a dead witness is
better than a chatty one.’

‘
And they were going to pin it on Terry Anderson and his
motley crew.’

‘
That was their idea. Obviously it would have been far easier
if Anderson hadn’t robbed the shop in Fleetwood. That was very
inconvenient. It meant they had to put in extra work and fix the
statements. Sadly for Derek Luton, he discovered their scam . . .
to his cost. Tattersall killed him on Morton’s orders.’

There was a pause.

‘
I was back to Square One and, I’ll be honest, Henry,’ FB
admitted, ‘when Morton asked for you specifically, it seemed too
good a chance miss. I went along with him. I didn’t exactly know
why he wanted you but I suspected something was bubbling. So I used
you, hoping you’d come up trumps. Sorry.’

‘
And you didn’t even brief me,’ Henry sputtered. ‘You didn’t
give me an inkling. I could’ve been killed - I nearly
was!’

‘
You might have refused - then where would I have been? I was
just doing a bit of risk management, that’s all.’

‘
Risk management is about taking risks with finance and
paperwork - not lives. You know what? I think you are a complete
bastard, FB.’

Once Henry had given more free and frank feedback to FB, he
felt much better. FB took it all on the chin because he recognised
how badly he had acted. No words could adequately describe how
guilty he was feeling. However, given the same circumstances, he
would have done it all again. Henry was right. He
was
a complete
bastard.

Morton could not shut up. He blabbed for England and
incriminated just about everyone he could think of. He openly
admitted his last thirty odd years of corruption, readily talked
about Conroy and McNamara and their criminal dealings, all driven
by greed.

McNamara was a brooding, angry man, difficult to interview. He
gave little away at first, but as time passed and the officers
skilfully persisted, he cracked. He admitted his part in the gun
running as well as the murder of Marie Cullen.

Henry’s ears pricked up. FB related to him how McNamara had
confessed to trailing Marie to Blackpool late one evening, where
she had fled following a violent argument in which she had
threatened to reveal their relationship to the press. McNamara had
tracked her down to a grubby bed-sit in South Shore, enticed her
into his car then driven her to the sea front ‘to talk things
over’. They had argued again and she had demanded money from him to
keep quiet. That was when he dragged her onto the beach and
murdered her.

Hamilton and de Vere were different. They said nothing.
However, the police in Madeira raided the Jacaranda and seized
everything they could lay their hands on. Long study of the
documents revealed a money laundering operation achieved by
creative accounting: selling and reselling non-existent timeshare
apartments. Something like four million pounds a year was coming
through Hamilton’s books on behalf of Conroy, McNamara and their
illicit drugs and gun-selling businesses. That was the beauty of
accountants. They found it impossible not to keep
records.

These records also showed that Hamilton had arranged a massive
burglary at a gun warehouse in Florida; the guns were transported
across the Atlantic to Madeira using McNamara’s haulage company. A
small proportion of the weapons had apparently been sent by ship to
England so that they could be used as samples to impress
buyers.

De Vere was hard to pin down. Very little could be proved
against him. But with Morton’s testimony, the cops threw conspiracy
at him. It stuck.

Siobhan was easy to deal with. She confessed all, from being
the driver of the getaway car after the murder of Geoff Driffield
right to the false allegations she made against Henry
Christie.

Gallagher and Tattersall tried to kick against the pricks, but
in the end it didn’t matter how tough they wanted to be. There was
enough evidence against them to sink a bloody
battleship.

Tattersall was charged with Derek Luton’s murder, and he and
Gallagher were both charged, alongside Morton and Siobhan, with
Geoff Driffield’s murder and the unlawful killing of the people in
the newsagents.

Henry listened to FB talk whilst he consumed a hospital
meal.

‘
Which brings us to the dead people,’ said FB. ‘The Mayfair
brothers - Tiger, the one who fell through the roof - died of an
embolism in hospital a day later, by the way. They won’t be missed,
couple of bastards. They’ve been killing people around the globe
for years. A DNA sample ties him into the death of that FBI agent
in Funchal.’

‘
Sam,’ Henry said.

‘
We’ll never know what she discovered. Hamilton won’t tell us,
but whatever it was, it was enough to get her killed.’

‘
Conroy?’

FB shrugged. ‘We’ve raided all his drug-supply houses and
scored a few good hits, but the fight goes on. Some other sod will
take his place. Drugs don’t stop coming in just because a major
player dies.’

‘
John Rider?’

‘
Cremated next Monday.’

‘
And how is Nina?’

‘
Still hangin’ in there. She’s a bit of a tough nut. I think
she’ll make it.’

They met at the zoo.

Isa looked across the wall at the Silverback gorilla sitting
proudly on the tree with a mass of bandages around his left
shoulder area.

Henry stood next to her, gazing at Boris, wondering why she
had asked him to meet her there.

‘
Do you think John knew he was going to die?’

‘
It’s always a possibility,’ Henry said, ‘but I don’t think he
wanted to. He had a life ahead of him.’

Henry looked sideways at Isa, who was crying. Down by her feet
was a carrier bag.

‘
I think he knew he’d die. That’s why he came to the zoo after
getting out of hospital and donated all that money specifically to
Boris here. Ten thousand pounds. Like one last, grand
gesture.’

‘
He said he hated animals to suffer.’

‘
He blamed himself for Boris getting shot.’

‘
He looks all right now,’ said Henry, eyeballing the beast who
stared back at him with a look of contempt.

Isa bent down and rooted in the carrier bag, then stood
upright with an urn in her hand.

And Henry nearly died of embarrassment when she began to
scatter John Rider’s ashes in Boris the gorilla’s
enclosure.

At the same time as this ceremony was taking place, a lady was
walking her Golden Retriever down a country lane in Heysham, near
to Morecambe, in the north of Lancashire.

In comparison to the rest of the county, little snow had
fallen in that area. Instead, the weather had been horrendously
wet.

On either side of the lane were drainage ditches about three
feet deep which caught the water from the lane and the
fields.

Ollie, big, healthy, and full of bounce, enjoyed getting dirty
and rooting through the undergrowth, even in the worst of weather.
And it was pretty filthy that morning.

He and his owner walked down the lane. She avoided the
puddles, but Ollie splashed heartily through them, regardless. It
was not unusual for him to disappear over the edge of the lane into
the drainage ditches and he did that about fifty metres ahead of
his owner.

When he started barking in a strange, unnatural, slightly
hysterical pitch, his owner immediately raced up to him.

He was belly-deep in the dirty water at the bottom of the
channel. His tail twitched unsurely. He emitted that rather
disturbing sound through bared teeth. His ears were pinned back and
his eyes were showing their white edges. His attention was focused
on something in the water ahead of him.

The owner put her hand to her mouth to stifle a
scream.

In the water, half-submerged, was a body, face
down.

Suddenly Ollie lurched and grabbed at the body’s clothing
before the owner could stop him. His teeth snagged in the shirt the
body was wearing and the dog pulled. The body of a young man
slurped round in the water, an arm swinging in an arc, terrifying
Ollie who, with a shriek, leapt out of the ditch and tried to jump
into his owner’s arms.

As Henry had predicted, Jonno’s body had turned up in a
ditch.

For more information about Nick and his books visit
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Also available by Nick Oldham as e-books in the ‘Henry
Christie’ series:

A Time for Justice

One Dead Witness

The Last Big Job

Seizure

Hidden Witness

Facing Justice