Substantial Threat (11 page)

It was 8 p.m. by the time the briefing finished. Henry and Jane returned to her office to discuss the briefing which would take place the following morning and get everything prepared for it. They had numerous phone calls to make, trying to pull a team together. It did not help that other murders were being investigated across the county and that the majority of the people Henry would have liked on his team were already gainfully employed.

After an hour, Henry hung up the phone for the last time and wiped his brow in mock exhaustion.

‘Just one more call to make, if you'll excuse me.' He stood up and took his mobile phone from his jacket pocket, leaving the room as he dialled Kate.

Out in the corridor he filled her in on what was happening. She already knew a lot because he had spoken to her earlier, but as part of the communication package between them he had felt obliged to call her again and tell her he was going to be very late coming home. Then, not really knowing why, he added that it might be better if he spent the night at his flat because it was so central, handy for the police station, and he would not disturb Kate or the girls by coming in late.

It was all rubbish, of course, but that ‘certain something' had crept into Henry's brain again. He experienced a vicious stab of guilt when Kate happily accepted what he was saying at face value, told him she loved him and asked him to ring her if he could – any time.

He ended the call with an irritated frown on his face. He returned to Jane's office, replacing the expression with a more positive one.

‘Ready?'

She grabbed her coat. Henry was going to take her on the town in the hunt for an informant or two. As they descended the stairs, Roscoe asked, ‘Was that Kate you were talking to?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Oh,' she said, and clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth.

By 9 p.m. Ray Cragg, Marty and Crazy had made their way to the counting house. When he was there, Ray always thought of himself as the king counting out his money. Or to be more accurate, overseeing while others counted out his money for him.

The counting house was in the middle of a short dead-end terraced street in the town of Rawtenstall in east Lancashire. The houses had been built towards the end of the nineteenth century to accommodate workers at the nearby cotton mill on the banks of the River Irwell. Over a hundred years later the mill and the cotton business were long since gone. After having been abandoned and allowed to decay through non-use and vandalism in the decades following the Second World War, the shell of the mill had finally been flattened in the early 1990s. The demolition of its massive chimney had made national TV news. A new industrial park had replaced the mill and the cotton trade itself had been replaced by a variety of businesses and services, none of which would last half as long as cotton had done.

But the street remained. Two rows of houses with back yards and outside toilets, clinging perilously to the side of the Rossendale Valley. Even its original cobbles remained, now shiny and worn with age, use and weather. On damp, dank, foggy days it did not take too great a leap of the imagination to visualize those bygone days when cotton ruled: clogs clattering on cobbles, the mill chimney belching plumes of unhealthy smoke into the atmosphere, cholera and typhoid.

However, it had been touch and go for the survival of this street. Most of the surrounding streets had been demolished, grassed over, never to be rebuilt in any shape or form. The bulldozers had been ready to roll to flatten this last one. The required compulsory purchase orders had been served and all the residents, bar one stubborn old lady – ninety years old, who had lived in the street all her life and had never been further than Blackpool – had been evicted and rehoused. It was only a matter of time before the old lady popped her clogs and the bulldozers waded in. The council had been prepared to wait.

The street had been saved by Ray Cragg. He had spotted its location and potential, and had slipped some fairly hefty backhanders in the form of cash and B-list celebrity blowjobs to a couple of councillors ripe for the plucking.

It would be a crying shame to flatten the street, destroy history, wipe out our heritage . . . at least that's how the councillors lobbied on Ray's behalf. The council were informed that a local businessman and general do-gooder (no name mentioned, obviously) wished to preserve the street, yet also modernize it and let out the properties to the local community at low rents.

What the council did not hear was the truth: that Ray Cragg had seen the street's potential. A nice, little nondescript location, tucked out of the way, affording the privacy he craved, close to a motorway link giving him fast access to Manchester in one direction and the whole of Lancashire in the other. It was also extremely cheap.

Neither were the council told that he wanted to relocate his counting operation from Blackpool to Rawtenstall, somewhere easily guarded and controlled, away from the prying eyes and greedy intentions of his business rivals, where he knew who the neighbours were – somewhere like Balaclava Street, Rawtenstall.

The first job Ray had done when it became his was to ensure that the stubborn old lady died in the house she had been born in. He had enjoyed doing that himself, breaking into her house in the middle of the night, sneaking up to her bedroom, his face covered – appropriately enough – with a balaclava. His intent had been to terrify her to death, something he thought would have been easy. It did not happen as quickly as he had anticipated.

Her valiant old heart only packed in after he had dragged her from her bed, torn off her winceyette nightie, thrust the barrel of a revolver into her toothless mouth and told her he was going to rape her.

‘That is, unless you die, you old bitch,' he'd growled into her hearing aid. ‘Die, die, die.'

She'd complied and Ray had placed her back into bed, covered her up and left her to be discovered by relatives three weeks later. It had been one of Ray's proudest moments.

‘What are you smiling at?' Crazy asked him.

‘Oh, nothing.' Ray chuckled, shaking his head to rid himself of the memory of that night in the old biddy's room. He had really enjoyed making her die. And no one, not even Marty, knew he had done it. It was his little, proud, secret.

Ray's eyes roved round what had once been the living room of one of the terraced houses, but was now where the counting took place. There was no front window any more. A large piece of hardboard had been fixed on the outside of the window to make it appear as though it had been boarded up. Behind the board was a thick sheet of steel pock-riveted into the stone window frame. The rest of the room had been gutted. Four tables had been brought in, similar to decorators' pasting tables, and one person sat at each of the tables.

Ray moved and stood behind one of these people, a woman by the name of Carmel. He watched her counting.

The week's takings were looking very healthy indeed. Spread out on the four tables were four very large piles of cash. At each of the other tables was also a woman studiously separating the notes into respective denominations, piling them neatly and then counting them.

Ray Cragg glanced appreciatively at the stacks of cash, feeling a flush of excitement. A quarter of a million, he guessed. All in used notes. Not a bad week's work by any standards. A million a month. Twelve million a year, conservative. All his hard work over the past four years had been worth it. The violence, the intimidation, the planning, the homework and the killing where necessary. He now virtually controlled the supply of drugs from Merseyside to Cumbria, and from Manchester north to Blackpool.

Sure there were a few gaps in the map, but he intended to plug them in time and become the undisputed king of the north.

And drug dealing wasn't the whole picture. It was a vast part of his empire, but the running of illegal immigrants into the UK was becoming far more lucrative and far less dangerous.

He intended to have a couple more years with the drugs, but to keep building on the people-movement side of the business for another four years on top of that, then he would retire, maybe with thirty million stashed away. That was the figure, he estimated, that would see him out. He would take his mother to Florida and live a lazy lifestyle down on the Keys. Nothing too flashy – that wasn't his style – just live off the interest, want for nothing, and chill.

He had been planning this since the age of sixteen.

He checked his watch and frowned. It was getting late and not all the money had arrived.

Marty and Crazy were sitting reading magazines by the front door, keeping a check on the CCTV monitor fixed discreetly over the front and rear doors of the premises. The street outside was deserted.

‘Haven't heard from Dix, yet,' Ray said. ‘He's usually pretty good.'

‘Maybe he's done a runner with the loot.' Marty chuckled, not lifting his head from his magazine.

Ray grabbed Marty's face and squeezed it hard. ‘Not fuckin' funny,' he snarled.

Marty jerked his head out of Ray's fingers and glared at him.

‘Hey, hey, hey,' cooed Crazy soothingly. It was apparent that both brothers were still up in the sky and agitated from the day's events. Even Ray, despite having got laid, was still buzzing and could not stay still. On the way over from Blackpool he had relived the shooting time and time again for Crazy's benefit. Crazy had listened calmly, wondering if he was the only one with a cool head, even though he was called Crazy. But he did realize that he was the only one of the three with no direct blood on his hands, so he could be chilled . . . to a degree.

‘He'll be here soon. Dix is a good lad,' Crazy said.

‘Yeah, you're right. Sorry, Mart.'

‘Whatever.' The younger man's eyes returned to the magazine, but inside he was seething. Apart from the congratulation after the shooting, Ray had said nothing more to his half-sibling. It was as though Ray had done all the work, and yet hadn't he, Marty, also wasted one of the miscreants? Marty's teeth grated like sandpaper, but then he glanced up from his reading and became entranced by the sight of the wads of money being counted in the room. His breath shortened, his heart raced.

An hour later all the money was counted, stacked and wrapped in thin bricks of a thousand, each wad put into a plastic wallet. Ray's earlier estimate of a quarter of a million was about right. In fact there was just over that amount, all neatly piled up, ready to be packed into one large sports bag for the next stage of its journey. The women who had done the counting were paid off, warned to keep their mouths shut – a warning received every time they counted – and sent on their way. The only people left in the place were Marty, Crazy and Ray.

And they were still short of the money that Dix should have collected and dropped off by now. Ray strutted angrily round the room. Marty and Crazy watched him nervously. He looked as though he was about to explode.

‘Where is the fuck?' he demanded.

‘Ray, c'mon, cool it,' said Crazy. ‘Gimme your phone.' He waggled his fingers at Ray. ‘Let me call him.'

‘He shouldn't need bloody calling. He should be here NOW!' Ray jabbed his finger towards the floor. ‘Here.'

‘Phone,' Crazy said. ‘Gimme.'

Ray wrenched it out of his back pocket and tossed it over to Crazy. ‘Make sure you dial one four one first.'

‘Yeah, yeah, I know.' It was the first rule of making a phone call when you were a crim. Make sure your number doesn't end up on anybody else's phone. ‘He'll be here,' said Crazy confidently as he dialled. ‘He's with Miller anyway, so there'll be a good reason for being late . . . bet you.' He put the phone to his ear and listened to it connect.

Because Jane Roscoe had only been posted to Blackpool for a short time, she'd had little opportunity to get to know any of the town's high spots. When she had been transferred there several months earlier – unwittingly taking Henry Christie's position as DI – she had been immediately embroiled in the murder enquiry which had resulted in her kidnap, then had subsequently decided to take a career break. On her return to work she had been very fortunate to get straight back as a DI at Blackpool, because no guarantees were ever made to officers returning from such breaks that they would get their old jobs back.

Henry, who had spent more years than he cared to remember trawling through the jungle that was Blackpool, knew all the best places, all the best people and he saw that evening as a bit of an educational opportunity for Roscoe.

He was also on the lookout for one of his best-kept secrets – an unregistered informant by the name of Troy Costain who might be able to tell him one or two things if the price was right, or pressure was exerted where it hurt.

With those things in mind, he dragged Jane on a whistle-stop tour of the less salubrious hostels in South Shore.

Obviously Jane knew a lot of detectives, many of whom bathed in the afterglow of their reputations, real or imaginary, but Henry Christie was different from anyone else she knew because he really did have a reputation which preceded him like a fanfare, but seemed unaffected by it. She knew that he'd had to kill a man, that he had battled, and won, against the Mafia, a KGB hit man, dishonest cops and child killers, yet none of it seemed to affect the way that he was as a person. He remained quiet, unassuming and, on the face of it, very ordinary. Those were some of the qualities which attracted her to him. He was the main reason she had returned to work so quickly. There was just something about him and she had fallen in love with that ‘something'. She had thought about him constantly, and her desires often made her shudder at their implications.

Now here she was, investigating a murder with him – and loving every moment.

The first pub Henry took her to in South Shore was a huge double-fronted monstrosity, with a rock band pounding out some up to date guitar music. The place was heaving and Henry had to jostle his way through to the bar where he had to shout for two halves of lager.