Facing Justice (3 page)

‘Here, you're going to need this.'

Flynn was parched but he took the bottle cautiously and sipped the wonderful brew, rather than pouring it all down his throat in one, which was his instinct.

‘Look boss,' he said, ‘the guy went for me and I just reacted in self-defence. He'd been an arsehole all the charter; even his girlfriend was up to here with him.' Hell, his throat was dry and he spoke croakily, but necking the beer still seemed a little inappropriate to the circumstances. He was shocked by what Castle had to say next.

‘I don't really give a monkey's about him, and I believe you, Steve – so as far as I'm concerned, there's no problem there.'

‘Oh?' Flynn's eyebrows furrowed. ‘So what's this about – the face and everything?' He wrapped his right hand around the bottle and lifted it to his cracked lips, deciding that a long slurp – not too long to be rude – was now OK. The ice-cold beer spread gratifyingly down into his chest.

Castle looked very troubled. He was chewing his bottom lip and shaking his head sadly.

‘What is it, boss?' Flynn liked the guy. He had been very good to Flynn when he'd landed penniless on the island almost five years before. Had given Flynn a job on a boat, and Flynn had repaid him by becoming the best sportfishing skip on the islands. Flynn had grafted, learned his trade and applied his instinctual knowledge of hunting down the big fish, something that was innate and something most of the other charter skippers didn't have. Flynn also took out day safaris inland up into the mountains in the centre of the island and worked the doors of Castle's two night clubs when necessary. He had a lot to be grateful for to Castle.

‘Don't know how to say this, pal . . . credit crunch and all that.'

Flynn ingested the words and his insides went even icier than the beer.

He went on, ‘I'm a bit over-extended and I need to pull in the reins a bit, so I'll be mothballing the boats for two months because we haven't got one firm booking for that period and I can't rely on walk-ons.' He was referring to the ad-hoc customers who simply appeared at the boat, such as Hugo had done. ‘Especially if you knock them all out,' he added lightly, but there was sadness in his voice. Castle had diverse business interests but particularly loved sportfishing. Flynn felt sorry for him.

‘Every boat?' Flynn asked. There were half a dozen of them dotted around the Canaries.

‘I won't lie to you – all but Orlando's in Tenerife. Business isn't quite as bad there, but everyone else will be out of the water.'

Flynn went hollow.

‘I know you're ten times better than him, but Tenerife isn't suffering as much as Gran Canaria and you're here, not there. If it was the other way around . . .' Castle left the words unsaid. ‘I'll review the position at the end of January.'

‘So I'm out of a job?'

‘For the time being. If you want to try and find work with any of the other charters, I'll understand.'

Flynn scrunched up his face. ‘What about Jose? He has a wife and kid to look after.'

Castle shrugged. Not as if to say ‘Whatever,' but as though the whole thing was tearing him apart. ‘I'm closing down two of the bars, too. It's like a ghost town on the Centre, but I'll keep the Irish-themed bar ticking over. You can do the door there, if you like. And if I get any bookings for the jeep safaris you can take them out. I'm keeping the travel agency open.'

Flynn inhaled deeply and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘You going to tell Jose?'

Castle nodded, finished his beer and rose from the table. Flynn watched him wend his way back to the quayside, shoulders slumped, then head towards
Faye 2
. Flynn ordered another beer, this time in a glass, and sipped it slowly, his mind working the angles. So for at least the best part of two months he would be ashore and effectively out of work. Chances were the Irish wouldn't open every day of the week and the money from doing the door would be spasmodic at best.

He mulled over the possibility of approaching another charter boat but could not convince himself it was a good idea. They were all struggling with a shortage of demand. Even the annual regulars weren't re-booking. And he'd feel uncomfortable on another boat. He had a history with
Faye 2
. She had been his choice of vessel when the original
Lady Faye
went up in a ball of flame and exploding gas bottles. He had worked with the replacement and knew her intimately, her foibles, her strengths, her weaknesses. And he worked well with the Spanish curmudgeon that was Jose, even though their relationship was often fraught. So even if he could, he probably wouldn't go to another boat.

The ice in the beer glass rose languidly to the surface. Flynn watched it as he also mulled over the financial aspects of the situation. He had very little money stashed, had recently moved to a small apartment which required him to fork out a nominal rent. Probably had about four months before he needed to start looking seriously for work, six before times would become desperate.

He uttered a short internal laugh and took a long draught of the beer. In spite of the circumstances he felt in reasonable spirits. Things weren't half as bad as they had been five years earlier when he'd been effectively drummed out of the cops with a very black rain cloud hovering over his head, been thrown out by his wife who afterwards had shacked up with his best friend and prevented him from making any contact with their son Craig, then ten years old. Those had been bleak times and he had come through them, more or less, even if his past had managed to creep up on him in a most unpleasant way about a year ago.

Flynn wondered if the bleached bones of the two men would ever be discovered in that inaccessible gully near the Roque Nublo up in the mountains. He doubted it. He smiled grimly at the memory, then shrugged it off and thought that something would turn up.

He fished his mobile phone out of his pocket, switched it on and waited for it to find a signal. It bleeped, telling him he had received a voice message whilst the phone had been switched off. There was no number or name recorded but it did state it had come from an international number.

Flynn grinned with pleasure. He expected it would be a message from Craig. Following the events of the previous year, contact between the two had been re-established with the consent of Flynn's ex-wife. Craig had even been allowed to come out to the island for two weeks over the summer holiday when they'd worked together on the boat. It had been a wonderful fortnight and he'd re-bonded with Craig. When the lad had returned to the UK, both had been heartbroken.

He dialled the answerphone service and waited for the connection, fully expecting to hear Craig's still childlike voice.

But the voice he heard was not that of his son.

It was a thin, desperate-sounding female voice, one that Flynn recognized immediately.

‘Flynnie? Flynnie? It's me . . . Cathy . . . hi, hope you're OK, big guy.' Flynn heard what he thought was a sob. ‘Sorry, sorry . . . look, Flynnie, can you give me a call? I'm . . . I don't know what to do or who to turn to . . . God, it sounds so pathetic, but' – another sob – ‘it's just going all wrong, everything, please . . . gimme a bell . . . I know you're two thousand miles away . . . need someone to talk to, to talk it out . . .'

The robotic voice of the answerphone lady came on. ‘End of messages. To play this message again, press one . . .'

Flynn pressed one and listened hard to the message again. The phone then beeped and the screen display told him another voice message had landed from the ether. He listened to the new one.

This time the voice was even more fraught. ‘Flynnie, it's me again, Cathy, you're probably getting sick of hearing me by now. God, this must be the eighth time of trying . . . need to see you, talk to you, mate . . . please, please call me.'

The message ended but before Flynn could do anything more, four more landed in quick succession.

THREE

P
reston Crown Court. Court Number One. Shell-shocked and evidence weary, the jury of eight men and four women shuffled back into the court room for the last time, having reached their verdict after four days of heated deliberation. They sat meekly, avoiding eye contact with the accused.

Detective Superintendent Henry Christie noted the body language and as usual, when he became excited at the possibility of a result, his bottom clenched tightly. He exchanged a very quick glance with the detective inspector sitting next to him, Rik Dean. A glance of triumph. Both men could smell it. Surely this had to be a guilty verdict.

The investigation had been long and difficult, understaffed and fairly low-key, even though the police were hunting a professional killer who had executed a gangland lord by the name of Felix Deakin. Having escaped from custody, Deakin himself had been on the run from the police; tracked by the cops to an isolated rural farmhouse, he had been re-taken into police custody but before the police had even managed to put him in the back of a van, the hit man had struck. From his hiding place up on the moors, almost a mile away, he had expertly blown Deakin's head apart with a high-powered rifle. He had escaped before the stunned police could react.

Henry was convinced the killer had been hired by one of Deakin's rivals, a man called Jonny Cain, because Deakin had volunteered to give crucial evidence against Cain in a murder trial. Although Henry was certain of this, certainty didn't mean evidence, but it was a starting point for what was only part of a complex investigation with many threads.

Setting a small team to work consisting of experienced detectives, intelligence and financial analysts and firearms officers, Henry let them get on with the job. Five months down the line they had a name. From the name came various aliases. From the aliases, bank accounts across the world, complex travel arrangements, forensic tie-ins – and then the location of the individual.

Working with Interpol and the Cypriot police, an armed raid was carried out on a secluded villa near Paphos and a man arrested without any bloodshed or drama.

Three months later, after much solid detective work assisted by a forensic team that managed to link the man in custody to the position he'd laid up in with his rifle (not recovered) on the bleak moors of Rossendale, he was in crown court facing a murder charge, even though he had not said one word whilst in custody. But that didn't matter.

And now the jury was back.

Henry held his breath as the clerk of the court asked the jury foreman if they had reached their verdict.

The man stood nervously, as though his back was killing him. His eyes did not look into the steel-grey impassive eyes of the killer in the dock. He said, ‘Yes we have, Your Honour,' addressing his reply to the judge.

Henry glanced at the defendant. He was ex-army, had been a sniper in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan – a superb one – and had left the services and offered his killing skills to the highest bidder. He had an exemplary service record and no previous convictions, facts referred to many times by the smooth defence barrister. But Henry knew he had carried out at least four other assassinations in African republics that had netted him about a million and a half pounds, probably foreign aid money. The killing of Felix Deakin had brought him two hundred thousand, money that was still being tracked by the financial experts, but it was proving tricky to find the source.

The man, who was called Mike Calcutt, allowed his gaze to take in the jury foreman and Henry – pausing just a little too long for comfort on the detective – before looking back at the jury.

The clerk asked if the verdict reached was unanimous or by a majority.

‘Unanimous.'

A whisper of amazement flitted around the public galleries, which were packed with gawping public and greedy media.

The clerk then read out the murder charge against Calcutt and asked if the jury found him guilty or not guilty.

For a brief moment, as the foreman paused, Henry thought he was witnessing some reality TV show, where contestants were voted off.

‘Guilty.'

Henry's eyes swept to Calcutt. He did not flinch. Cool, cool bastard, he thought. But we got you in the end. If only we could get the bastard who hired you in the first place.

Henry, Rik Dean and four other detectives involved in the case had gathered in a loose congratulatory circle in the public waiting area outside the court-room doors. They all beamed wide smiles and there were lots of handshakes and high-fives amongst them. The kind of euphoria that comes after a protracted, successful investigation that nails a killer.

‘Well done everyone,' Henry said, checking his watch. He meant what he said, because he'd very much taken a back seat and had only put his twopenn'orth into the machine when asked. Now that he was a detective superintendent he was trying to delegate more and not get involved in day-to-day investigating. It went against his natural instinct, as was the case with most high-ranking detectives who loved to get down and dirty with the lads. Problem was that it was easy to lose sight of the overview and at his rank, as he was learning, that was not something he could afford to do. He had now become a professional plate spinner and this major inquiry was just one of many he had to manage.

‘Drinks?' Rik Dean suggested. There was an eager gaggle of yeses from his colleagues, who wanted to celebrate in the traditional way. This was although the defendant had yet to be sentenced by the judge. Once the jury had informed the court of the verdict, the defence had immediately leapt up with a desire to make submissions, so the judge had adjourned proceedings when he would hear further bleating from Calcutt's defence. Then he would sentence him to life imprisonment, the only available option in the case of murder.

‘You guys go ahead.' Henry delved into his jacket, extracted his wallet and pulled out fifty pounds, which he gave to one of the jacks. ‘Have a round on me. I need to—' He was interrupted by the arrival of a court usher.