Dead or Alive (6 page)

‘Mr Lee fucking Dench,' said Sharky, pointing the shotgun at Lee's face. ‘Why d'yer grass Mr Formosa to the police?'

Lee's eyes sprang open wide with terror. ‘I … I … I … didn't, man,' he sobbed. ‘No, not me. I wouldn't grass him up. Please, yer've gotta believe me, man.' He inclined his head towards Chantelle. ‘She's the one yer after.'

‘It wasn't me, it was Lee!' screamed Chantelle. ‘I don't know anything!'

‘Yer lyin' bitch!' shouted Lee.

Sharky seemed to give this a moment's thought, then shook his head, saying, ‘Hmm, I'm inclined to believe the bitch,' He looked at Spud. ‘Who d'yer believe, him or the bitch?'

‘Not him,' said Spud.

‘Anyone want to see what happens to people who grass Mr Formosa up?' Sharky enquired.

They all just stared at him, not knowing how to react. Lee collapsed to his knees. Sharky aimed the shotgun at the top his head and pulled the trigger. Lee's head exploded. Blood and brains and bone sprayed all over the room. The two women screamed. Chantelle's scream was choked off as Spud stuck his handgun in her open mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet lodged deep in the wall behind her, along with parts of her brain and skull. The surviving woman fainted, two of the men vomited. Sharky looked down at the remains of Lee Dench and remarked, ‘Very thin legs for a man.'

‘Yours are thinner,' said Spud, retrieving his bullet casing from the bloody mess on the floor and sticking it in his boiler-suit pocket. Losing the casing would have meant getting rid of his precious Glock lest a connection be made.

‘What? I ain't got thin legs. My legs is wiry, that's all.'

The woman was just coming round from her faint. Spud said, ‘OK, show her your legs, see what she thinks.'

‘Bollocks!' said Sharky.

‘No, just yer legs.'

Sharky ignored this and turned his attention to the four survivors. ‘If y'ever describe us to the police we'll know about it an' someone will come and deal with y'all.'

‘An' that includes describin' his thin legs,' added Spud.

No one saw any humour in this, certainly not the men, who were Romanian. Sharky glared at his partner as he loaded another two cartridges into his now empty shotgun. ‘What d'yer think? Maybe we should we waste another one?'

The Irishman took his time looking from one to the other, as if making up his mind which one Sharky should kill. The woman fainted again.

‘Nah,' decided Spud, after a long moment, ‘two's plenty. Like yer said, we're civilized people, not fuckin' animals. I tink they get the message.'

The room was heavily spattered with blood from floor to ceiling. There were two naked bodies on the floor, one man weeping, another man vomiting, and a woman in a dead faint beside the dead bodies. Satisfied with their work, Spud and Sharky strolled from the house in the manner of a couple of insurance salesmen who had just sold the occupant a lucrative life policy. Neighbours, alerted by the shooting, were coming to doors and windows to watch the car being driven sedately away. But they weren't neighbours who would ever be much help to the police. Talking to the coppers had never done any of them any good. They watched but they wouldn't see anything. Half a mile away the two men swapped cars in a large, lock-up garage out of sight of prying street cameras. They took off their boiler suits and stuffed them into plastic bags.

‘Why d'yer shoot the whore?' said Sharky, looking in the driver's mirror and wiping blood from his face with a wet wipe.

‘I thought we agreed I could do Dench. It was my turn,' Spud told him.

‘Jesus, man! Yer've got some sort of crap memory you have. It was my turn. You shot the Italian last month. So, you wasted her because you thought I went out of turn? That's just fuckin' childish, that is.'

‘Dench might have been telling the truth,' Spud pointed out. ‘It might have been her what grassed.'

Sharky gave this a second's thought and shook his head. ‘Nah. You were just pissed off because you thought I went out of turn. I thought she looked quite tasty. Big girl. I thought we might bring her with us and have some fun before we wasted her.'

‘Agh, we gotta stay professional. She was a fuckin' gypsy anyway. They all were.'

‘Professional? You were making fuckin' jokes about my legs in there.'

‘Yeah, but we showed 'em that we're ruthless bastards as well as comedians. People find that very scary.'

‘You think so? Man, that lot were high on skunk.'

‘High, but not out of it,' said Spud, turning the mirror his way and wiping his own face. ‘Dope'll distort and magnify their memories of what went on, as if it needs any magnifyin'.'

‘Jesus Christ!' said Sharky, impressed, ‘where'd yer read that?'

‘I make it my business ter know stuff about drugs.'

‘Could be they don't remember much at all,' said Sharky, ‘but I still think we should have worn masks.'

‘Why?' said Spud. ‘We ain't gonna be around no more after this job.'

Sharky grinned. ‘True man. We's on our Fiji island livin' like kings. Anyways, I doubt if any of 'em'll be able to describe us to the polis. It's hard to take notice when ye doped up and shittin' yerself. Plus nobody who hears about dis'll want to be on the wrong side of mad bastard comedians like us. They'll tell the cops I was a Frenchman and you was an Eskimo.'

‘Good point, man. We're real ruthless dudes.' Sharky looked down at his shoes. ‘Do I really need to burn these shoes? They've got blood on 'em but they're Guccis, which are not cheap. I should just give 'em a real good clean.'

Spud looked at his own blood-spattered work boots. ‘We burn everything as usual. Yer a fucking eejit fer comin' ter work in dem shoes. What man in his right mind goes to work in his best shoes?'

‘Jesus, man! You're wearin' bogtrotter boots. These cost me four hundred notes. Surely I can clean a few spots o' blood off.'

‘I see a lot more blood than leather. Ye might tink ye've cleaned off all the blood but if any o' dem forensic fellers get their hands on 'em wid their magic fuckin' microscopes, ye'll know different soon enough.'

‘Well I think they'll clean up good.'

‘Man, we just got us a future lined up and you wanna risk it fer a pair o' fuckin' shoes! Just burn the bastards ye big black gobshite!'

‘OK, OK! No need to go all fuckin' racist on me. It's against the law that! You start talkin' like that on our Fiji island and they'll string you up by your Irish bollocks!'

‘I'm not a fuckin' racist. I'm an ethnic minority, same as you.'

‘An' yer've got no business telling them people I've got thin legs! A man's legs are his own private business!'

They cleaned any possible fingerprints off the Mondeo and removed any possible DNA evidence; then they left in another car, never to visit the garage again. They headed towards the eastbound M62 and towards Hull where they both lived. But not for long.

T
he whole street had been cordoned off. The house itself was taped off and a plastic canopy had been erected over the front door. The press had arrived, as had TV cameras. Curious neighbours were conspicuous in their absence – none of them wanted their faces to be seen on TV by whoever had done this. None of the house's occupants had called the police. That was left to a neighbour who'd heard sufficient screaming and wailing coming from the house to last her a lifetime, but even then she rang from an untraceable pay-as-you-go mobile and didn't leave her name.

‘I think the police had better go to number 17 Ackroyd Street. It all kicked off about an hour ago. I don't know what's gone on there but it's not good. I think they might need an ambulance as well.'

Detective Inspector Lenny Cope had arrived with a detective sergeant after being alerted by the two uniformed officers first on the scene. One of them, a sergeant, stepped up to appraise him of the situation.

‘It's like a charnel house in there, sir. Two dead of gunshot wounds, four in a state of shock. There's blood, brains, ears and eyeballs all over the floor.'

Cope winced. ‘Great. Is the forensic medical examiner here?'

‘She's here with a photographer.'

‘She? Is it Jane Duffield?'

‘It is, yes sir. And there's a forensic team on their way.'

‘I assume no one's contaminated the crime scene?'

‘
We
haven't, sir. But the occupants stayed in the house for about an hour before we got the call. Even then it wasn't any of them who called us. We've got them all in cars right now.'

‘Do we have names of the deceased yet?'

‘A man named Lee Dench and a woman named Christine Prisk who calls herself Chantelle when she's working the streets.'

‘Both known to us?'

‘They are, sir.'

‘And did the four occupants witness this?'

‘Well, I assume so, but we can't get a word out of any of them. They're too shocked to talk.'

‘Right. We need to take them all in for questioning and we need to do a house-to-house to find out what the neighbours saw.'

‘We're already doing that, sir, but there's no one behind most of the doors.'

Cope glanced up and down the dilapidated street. ‘Hardly surprising. Anyway, we'd better take a look at the crime scene. Bad, is it?'

‘Dench had the top of his head blown off, probably with a shotgun. Most of the mess comes from him. There's bits of him all over the room. The woman was shot once through the mouth with a handgun as far as I can tell.'

‘Did you find the casing?'

‘Not so far. Despite it being messy it looks like a pro job, so they probably picked up their brass. There's plenty of double O shot around the room but that stuff leaves no forensics behind.'

‘And Jane Duffield's in there now is she?'

‘Yes.'

‘Rather her than me by the sound of it.'

‘And me, sir.'

‘Has she left anything we can cover our feet with?'

‘There's a box of stuff in the entrance hall. She'll want you to cover up completely, sir – and so will you when you see what's in there.'

‘Great. I only had fish and chips half an hour ago.'

Ten minutes later the inspector was back outside. His face white under the street lamps. His detective sergeant had gone inside and came straight back out to throw up.

‘Sorry about that, sir. I've never seen anything quite like it.'

‘Well, it's not something you see every day, even in this job. Anyway there's really nothing in that room that needs my attention right now. It looks like a professional hit so I doubt if they left much behind for us. I should think the four occupants'll fill us in on what happened once they've recovered.'

‘I can't say I'm surprised that they're in shock, sir.'

‘No, quite. Hang around here for a while – I need to make a couple of calls from the car.'

Cope went back to the car and called the station to appraise his DCI of the situation and to ensure the forensic team knew what they were up against. ‘I've got four probable witnesses on their way in, all of them in shock. We need to get them checked out by a doctor before I question them.' When he finished the call he stabbed in another number. It was a brief conversation. A sharp voice, having recognized the caller's number on his screen said, ‘Yes or no, do I have anything more to worry about?'

‘No.'

‘H
ow the hell did Formosa get to know about Dench?'

‘I don't know for sure, sir, but I assume Dench's girlfriend knew exactly what he was up to. She told one of the witnesses that she and Dench were planning to leave the country any time soon. A loose tongue like that would soon make its way to Formosa.'

Cope was standing because Detective Superintendent Ibbotson hadn't offered him a seat. ‘So the girl opens her mouth and Formosa's hitman puts a bullet in it. Which means she was either screaming or he pushed the gun into her mouth. We really need to catch this man.'

‘Yes, sir. According to Jane Duffield her teeth were intact, and there were two hitmen.'

‘Descriptions?'

‘They vary from witness to witness, sir. The only constant being that they were both white with local accents.'

‘And the witnesses are all terrified?'

‘Yes they are.'

‘So, we can probably discount those descriptions. Did the assailants actually know Dench was about to give evidence against Formosa?'

‘One them – the woman – mentioned something about Dench being punished for grassing up Vince Formosa.'

‘Would she say that in court?'

‘Doubt it, sir. Not after witnessing Dench's head being blown off.'

‘Well, her evidence would be tenuous to say the least and I wouldn't give much for her chances when Formosa's found not guilty and back on the streets.'

‘We still have our safe house witness, sir.'

‘Not for much longer. His evidence alone won't be nearly enough. In support of Dench's evidence we had Formosa bang-to-rights, but he'd be signing his own death warrant if we put him in court. I'll notify the Crime Prosecution Service. They'll drop the case.'

The police had put word out through various underworld connections that an amnesty was available for anyone who could provide help with the recovery of the abducted children. A member of Formosa's gang had responded and had been persuaded to give evidence in court against his old crime boss in exchange for complete freedom from prosecution for a list of crimes he'd committed whilst working for Formosa. Unfortunately this didn't include the abduction. They'd been relying on Dench's evidence for that.