The Last Big Job (24 page)

Music, occasionally muted, blaring mostly, emanated from the
licensed premises, betraying their characters: heavy rock, disco,
jungle or pop. The smell of greasy fast food invaded Henry’s
nostrils as well as the acrid scent of grass.

Everyone was ecstatic. There was not the ever-present lurking
atmosphere of violence that was so apparent in other big cities.
People were out here to enjoy themselves, though maybe the highly
visible cops played their part too.

Henry threaded his way through the city centre until he
arrived at the front door of ‘Angel’s Silver’ off Cross Street. It
was close to midnight and a long queue waited patiently for
admission into the night club. Some people had a horrendously long
wait ahead of them as the doormen were allowing only a couple or
three people in at a time. Henry knew this was a good club and had
he been twenty-odd years younger, he would have meekly joined the
queue.

Frank Jagger did not have the time to hang around.

He sauntered down the line, aware of eyes following him,
mostly angry ones because they could sense he was about to jump the
whole lot of them and walk straight in. He ignored the looks,
keeping a thin smile on his face.

When he reached the front, he waited patiently as the doors
were opened and a giggling couple admitted. The doormen turned out
towards the queue, both dressed in black trousers and dark red
T-shirts, probably to hide the bloodstains, Henry
thought.

They looked formidable. Non-nonsense bastards. They sneered
down their noses at Henry, arms folded across their chests, aware
that they could make or break people’s nights out.

‘
What?’ one said. He had a shaved head, goatee beard, earrings
and forearms as thick as car tyres, plastered with very tasteful
tattoos. He did not wait for an answer from Henry. ‘The back of the
queue is that way.’ He raised a forefinger. ‘So fuck off and find
it. There’s no favours here, pal,’

Henry moved in close to him. The guy tensed up, expecting
violence. ‘I’m here to see Gary Thompson and Gunk Elphick. They’re
expecting me. I’m Frank Jagger.’

The bouncer deflated and opened the door with a quiet,
‘Sorry.’

Henry entered the club, accompanied by cat-calls from the
patient queue. He gave them a middle-finger salute.

In the steamy seaside resort of Blackpool, someone else was
entering a night club at exactly the same time as Henry.

Danny Furness had attended the evening debrief and listened
intently as investigating officers brought the SIO team up-to-date
with progress so far. In a nutshell there had been none. Although
Danny knew she should not have been pleased by the news, in a
wicked sort of way she was glad everyone else was getting nowhere.
Just like her.

She had been very tired and had made a commitment to herself
that she would go straight home to bed.

Her willpower was tremendous.

At the very moment one of her fellow detectives asked her if
she wished to join him and a few others for a bevy in a local pub,
her resolve to go home came down faster than the Berlin Wall. She
said yes. All of a sudden her taste buds were demanding that a cool
Stella Artois and lime should be showered over them. Once that
image was fixed, there was no turning back for Danny.

It was about time she went out with a group of people from
work, she justified to herself. Up to now, since Jack had killed
himself, she had only been out with close friends on sour,
introverted nights, often ending in tears. She had never let her
hair down, hiked up her skirt and had a good laugh.

Danny needed a bit of a bender. She had to move on, stop
thinking about the past, stop moping about Henry Christie, get on
with her life, get it lived.

And the way to kicks tart it might just be a couple of drinks,
a few ciggies, and a belly laugh or two at some inappropriate
jokes.

Even before leaving the police station, her intended alcoholic
intake had doubled. Still, what was the harm? A couple or three
halves ... she could easily drive home on that. Well under the
limit. No problem.

The Murder Squad were in good fettle. Despite their lack of
progress they were all buoyant and cheerful. It was early days,
there were so many things to go on and all were confident of a
quick result. And a good team-building session was exactly what was
needed to keep the momentum going - that and the fact that for at
least another week, overtime was not an issue.

By the time Danny had consumed her fourth half-lager, moved on
to dry white wine and soda and fired up her sixth cigarette on the
trot, the determination to keep consumption down had disappeared
into the smoky atmosphere. She was well into the dynamics of the
session, which looked like being a good one and she didn’t give a
flying fuck about anyone or anything other than getting
‘rat-arsed’, going to a club for a dance and then getting a
mouth-charring Vindaloo.

Which is why she found herself, surrounded by half a dozen
male detectives, heaving her way to the front of a queue outside a
night club in the resort, ignoring shouts from the people who were
waiting, huddled against a fierce biting wind swirling in from the
sea and being allowed in on the production of what is
affectionately referred to as the ‘International Club Card’ -
otherwise known as a warrant card.

The fact that every other detective was a man, each one of
them with designs on getting into her knickers, did not put Danny
off at all. She was going to thoroughly enjoy the night and tease
all their pricks and egos if need be . . . unless one of them
really took her fancy and she did more than tease.

Colin Hodge was more afraid than he had ever been in his life.
The fear gripped him like a beast, tearing at his intestines and
his chest. He was literally shaking with it. He even held his hand
up to confirm it; it vibrated visibly. He reached out and clicked
the bedside light off, plunging the room into total darkness for a
moment or two before his eyes adjusted.

He rolled off the bed and stood up. His legs were weak. He
walked slowly towards the window and pulled the curtain back half
an inch. Outside was the garden, big and well-tended. Beyond a line
of lime trees was a high wall, illuminated by upward-facing lamps
set into the ground. Several lines of razor wire ran along the top
of the wall, keeping people in as well as out.

His eyes focused on the ornamental bars just outside his
window. It was possible to open the window, but there was no way to
climb out and drop the fifteen or so feet to the gravel path and
escape.

A movement in the garden caused him to raise his eyes. He
frowned as he caught sight of a dark shape moving slowly through
the shrubs and trees. Hodge watched the figure carefully, then
clocked another figure padding along close behind. A man and a very
large dog. The man - Hodge recognised him as the driver of the
Mercedes from earlier - clutched something across his chest. A gun
of some sort.

Hodge winced. His heart surged and a pain shot across his
shoulder, then was gone. Indigestion caused by stress. He let the
curtain slip back into place.

He walked across the room, tried the door handle
again.

Locked.

He returned to the bed and sat down, dropping his head into
his hands.

A prisoner.

The booze and the atmosphere turned Danny into a flirt. She
danced shamelessly with each of the men in her party, moving her
butt and breasts provocatively to the rhythm of ‘Disco Inferno’ and
other such classics. Often she draped her arms around the neck of
her dancing partner. Often she ground her pelvis against their
hips. In a fairly short time she got every one of them thinking
they were in with a chance. The truth was, not one of them did
anything for her.

And then she spotted Detective Rik Dean across the other side
of the dance-floor. He was watching her antics with a wry smile on
his face. Danny knew Rik had a mega-reputation as a seducer of
policewomen and she knew why: he was charming, good-looking, with
dark eyes which reminded her of Elvis Presley, a nicely toned body
with a rear end she would have loved to dig her fingernails into,
and (reportedly) he always let the lady come first.

Rik had only recently been transferred on to the CID and
normally worked in Preston, though he lived in Blackpool. He had
then been seconded temporarily to the Conference Planning Team at
Headquarters, the team specifically dedicated to organising the
policing operation of the Labour Party conference held later in the
year in Blackpool. Rik was on the vetting team.

Drink, that wonderful stripper of inhibition, ensured that
Danny weaved unsteadily across the dance-floor and presented
herself in front of Rik like a debutante - but without the class. A
naughty smile played on her lips. Rik’s wonderful eyes regarded her
with a mixture of
warmth and humour. They
were definitely ‘come to bed’ eyes.

‘
Hi,’ she said, suppressing a hiccup.

Rik nodded.

Danny briefly cast her eyes back to the table around which
the Murder Squad were huddled. They glared back, each one with a
face like thunder as they saw their chance of
a sexual conquest slip through their fingers like
sand.

‘
You with anybody?’

‘
Only my mate,’ Rik replied.

‘
Good,’ said Danny firmly. She took a long drink and handed
her empty glass to him. ‘White wine and soda.’

Henry lounged indolently at one of
the bars in the night club. He surveyed the action taking
place in front of
him. In his hand was a
pint of
lager which he sipped very slowly
because it had cost him £4.00. He was going to make it last, even
if it had been bought on expenses.

‘
Angel’s Silver’ was a big club with several dance-floors
dotted around the ground-floor level, accompanied by a number
of
themed bars. A huge light, sound and
video system hung from the ceiling like a clinging insect, thumping
out bass lines capable of
mushing
brain-matter into pulp. Several sets of
stairs led up to the first-floor level where there were more
bars, a separate dance-floor playing smoochy music, and a
restaurant serving anything from burgers to
a la carte;
several places offered
good vantage points down into the lower disco area.

Then there was another set of
stairs
which led up to the second-floor offices. Henry was positioned at a
bar near to these.

On entering the club he had mooched around the place, unable
to see Thompson or Elphick. It was simply a matter of
waiting. They would show up sooner or
later.

He sipped his drink. It tasted as if it had been diluted by
tap water, warm tap water at that. Not that he was a beer
connoisseur, but Henry knew enough about the stuff to realise when
he was drinking shite.

He was desperately trying to keep on track in the role of
Jagger, but he was struggling because of the turmoil he had
experienced at home over the last couple of days.

To say that his wife, Kate, had been unresponsive to his
flowers and sexual advances as a form of appeasement was an
understatement. She had not even been at home for him to try
initially and he had waited in all that first afternoon wondering
where the hell she was on her day off. He learned when his
daughters came home from school.

‘
Mummy has gone into full-time work,’ Leanne, his younger
daughter, announced to him. ‘She said she might as well because
you’re never home’.

‘
And,’ said Jenny, the elder, now in her first year of
A-levels, ‘she’s really pissed off at you, Dad.’

That evening, when Kate landed home, tired and irritated, a
major row erupted which Henry did not handle well at all. ‘What
about the kids?’ he had demanded at one point. ‘You should be at
home when they get in from school.’

‘
Should I?’ Kate said. ‘You never have been.’

‘
And what’s all this about full-time work? We don’t need the
money. It’s stupid.’

‘
Stupid?’ Kate picked up on the inadvisable word. ‘You’re
telling me I’m stupid, are you?’

‘
No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just not necessary for you to
work full-time, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘
I wouldn’t work full-time, if you were at home when you
should be. I’ve had enough of this. I’m off out to my
dance-class.’

‘
Dance-class?’ Henry had exploded. ‘When did you start
that?’

She didn’t even bother to reply and did not come home until
gone eleven, by which time Henry was in bed, fast
asleep.

And that set the tone for his break at home.

A lump of bile rose in his throat. He took another drink of
the weak beer, this time a long draught, and realised he should not
be here. He should have been at home, sorting out his domestic
problems. And yet, there was something inside him that kept him
back from going home, and it wasn’t just the job...