Headhunter Read online

  All the fluid in Molly’s mouth instantly dried up. ‘What?’

  ‘Mark Carter? Big drug dealer?’ Connors said. ‘And two of his crony low-life gofers … looks like there’s been a turf war fallout and Carter and his goons’ve come off second best.’ Connor pointed his right hand at her and made a gun shape. ‘Bang, bang.’

  ‘Who … what? Suspects?’ she blurted.

  Connors shrugged. ‘Dunno. I’ve been down in the traps dealing with the dregs of Blackpool’s gene pool. Mr Dogsbody, me.’

  ‘Who’s heading it?’

  ‘FMIT. Rik Dean for the moment but I think he’s handing it over to another super ’cos’ – Connors tweaked the first and second fingers of both hands in invisible speech marks around his next words – ‘he’s “sooo busy”, the soft-arse. Wants to get his shit down to those cells. Now that’s busy.’

  ‘And Alan’s out with them?’

  ‘All hands on deck,’ Connors confirmed.

  ‘OK, ta.’ She walked away from Connors to the detective sergeants’ office in which there was a desk for each of the four DS’s in the department. Molly sat down at Hardiker’s and took his mobile phone from her shoulder bag. She looked at it with disgust, then dropped it on the desktop on his jotter pad, in front of his computer screen.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said quietly, then picked it up again, sighed deeply and slid it back into her bag.

  What she had discovered on Hardiker’s phone had made her feel physically ill.

  There were several voice messages from a woman named Laura and one from Tina (for fuck’s sake, Molly thought). Also a lot of explicit texts and a couple of Snapchat photos of boobs and female genitals, including a horrendous arsehole shot that must have been incredibly hard to take. Hardiker’s response to these in his sent folder were shots of his cock, more erect than Molly ever recalled seeing it.

  Molly had not looked at, listened to or read everything because she had become nauseous quite quickly, dropping the phone as if it was a turd.

  She considered leaving it on the desk for Alan but now realized she wanted to hand it back in person accompanied with a knowing look, so she stood up and wended her way out of the CID office, almost colliding with a young woman coming in clutching a handful of files. She was one of the members of the intelligence unit.

  Her name was Laura Mathers.

  Molly stood in front of her, the blood draining from her face as the identity of the woman called Laura on Alan’s phone dawned on her.

  Laura smiled innocently.

  ‘Laura? You seen Alan at all?’ Molly asked, keeping her face sweet.

  ‘Er, no. I think he’s out on a job.’

  ‘OK, no probs.’

  ‘Can I help at all?’ Laura offered.

  ‘No, no, it’s OK … He … uh …’ Molly hesitated, but then went for it because of the image seared into her mind like a branding iron of Laura’s cunt and arsehole on Snapchat. She held it together as she held up Hardiker’s phone and said, ‘He left his phone at my place last night. I was just returning it. I didn’t want to just leave it on his desk.’

  Laura’s perfect, heart-shaped lips made a little popping sound and Molly relished the comical expression on her face, one resembling a rabbit caught in the main beam.

  ‘I … I’ll give it to him if you like,’ Laura stuttered.

  ‘No, it’s all right, Laura. I think you’ve already given it to him, haven’t you?’ Molly’s eyes looked meaningfully into Laura’s as she continued, ‘I’ll give it to him personally.’ She walked stiffly past Laura who stepped aside, ready to be punched out. From the corner of her mouth, Molly couldn’t resist saying, ‘Nice Brazilian, by the way.’

  Flynn woke at about ten a.m., feeling fresher even though his leg was extremely sore. He made himself some more toast and another mug of tea and switched on the TV in the kitchen. There was a national news bulletin being broadcast, followed by a local update. Flynn sat upright when reference was made to the police in Blackpool attending the scene of a triple shooting at a drug dealer’s house. Details were scarce, the newsreader admitted. Flynn turned off the TV and sipped his tea thoughtfully, then glanced down at the phone Molly had given him, which began to ring.

  Molly took the lift, which rattled up to the sixth floor of the police station, and stepped out to join the queue of people in the dining room. A few folk asked her how she was and she made a little small talk, although she sensed people were a little wary. After all, she had shot someone dead and was being investigated. She got toast and coffee, found an empty table by a window and sat with her back to the room.

  She had a busy day ahead of her.

  First, she was due to see the chief inspector of operations who ran the armed response units, followed by a chat with her divisional commander, then another meeting with Rik Dean before the one with two detectives from West Yorkshire Police, who’d been briefed by the IPCC to interview her as part of the investigation into the incident. After all that she was going to visit the two surviving AFOs who were still being treated in hospital.

  It would be a challenging day, at the very least. She knew she had to get her story straight, keep it simple, a bit emotional and lie by omission rather than words.

  She was very screwed up about the issue of her phone and the late night/early morning tryst with Steve Flynn. As a good cop, she had always told the whole truth, but she wasn’t happy about the prospect of revealing that Flynn had taken her mobile phone, nor that he had asked her to name Blackpool’s biggest drug dealer, now murdered.

  She swore. Sipped her tea. Rubbed her forehead then looked at the phone she had retrieved from Flynn, having replaced it with one of her old ones.

  On top of all that was Alan Hardiker. And Laura. And Tina, whoever she was. The immature temptation was to start posting pictures on social media and really fuck the bastard up. A sore temptation and one she almost succumbed to.

  In the end she decided to hold on to the phone a while longer because it could come in handy as a bargaining tool.

  As for Flynn, she wasn’t so certain.

  She slid Hardiker’s phone away and then stared at her phone on the tabletop before picking it up and going through to the TV lounge which, as usual, was empty at this time of day, the TV on blaringly loud. She turned it down, sat on an easy chair and found the number last dialled.

  It was answered, but only by silence.

  ‘Flynn?’ she asked the void.

  There was no response.

  ‘I just had to know it wasn’t you.’

  ‘What wasn’t me?’

  ‘Three deaths. Tell me it wasn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  She sighed with guarded relief.

  ‘You shouldn’t call me … but now that you have … I really do need a favour.’

  Molly sat in front of a desktop computer in the report room, her mouth dry again. She was about to log on to her own page on the system, but stopped herself and then decided that a change of location would be sensible because she didn’t want to leave any cyber fingerprints that might come back and point at her. She uprooted herself and went back to the CID office, which was now completely devoid of staff, including DC Connors.

  She sat at Hardiker’s desk and typed in a password.

  Not hers. His.

  And then she sat back as the Lancashire Constabulary intranet network came online, welcoming DS Hardiker and automatically listed his last three searches on the system.

  Molly saw the name: Bashkim.

  She leaned forward, held the cursor over the name and clicked on it, opening an intel file that she personally did not have the necessary authorisation to access but which Hardiker, by dint of his rank and role, did.

  Molly’s bottom tightened as she leafed through extensive pages of information and intelligence about the Bashkim crime family, its known structure, wealth, its reach and suspected operations in Lancashire and the north of England. Molly skimmed through and sent a lot
of the information to the printer shared by the DS’s.

  All the while, she was asking herself one question: why was Alan even looking at the Bashkim file?

  Mere curiosity, just because he was allowed to?

  That, surely, could be the only answer. The Bashkims were the flavour of the day and she guessed a lot of cops suddenly wanted to know more about them.

  She collected the printout and slid the sheets into a folder. As she was about to collect her bag, Hardiker’s mobile phone rang in her pocket. She fished it out and looked at the screen, expecting to see Laura’s or Tina’s number, but it was neither. The caller ID indicated someone phoning from abroad.

  She answered it.

  A deep, accented male voice said, ‘Sergeant Hardiker?’

  ‘No, I’m answering his phone for—’ The line went abruptly dead before Molly could say the word, ‘him.’

  She shrugged. It could have been anyone calling.

  The appearance of a couple of detectives walking into the CID office hastened her to get a move on, but the sight of Alan Hardiker behind them made her come to a cold halt. She took a grip of the file and virtually marched out past him, ramrod straight, with a sneer on her face.

  ‘I’m going to see the IPCC now,’ she said. ‘We’ll speak later.’

  Hardiker’s eyes seemed to grow dark as they followed Molly’s progress out of the office.

  He walked into the detective sergeants’ office at the moment the printer came to life and spewed out one sheet of paper. Hardiker picked it up and looked at it. It was from a file on the Bashkim family, the last sheet from a report related to prostitution in Lancashire.

  Hardiker slumped heavily at his desk, trying to work this out, his brow deeply furrowed. He tapped a computer key and the screensaver de-pixelated. He had expected to see his log-in page, but the screen went straight to his personalized homepage. He was certain he had logged out before attending the triple murder. Positive, in fact.

  It was a gruelling day for Molly. She seemed to be passed from one person to the next and spent three hard hours being interviewed by the IPCC detectives who delved deeply into her version of events and were particularly interested in how Steve Flynn had acquired her Glock and, oddly, she thought, they probed into her relationship with Flynn. It was purely a fishing trip because up to that point there was no ‘relationship’ with him. She’d met him for the first time the other day when she’d Tasered him, then guarded him in hospital, then conveyed him halfway to Preston, when things became ugly.

  ‘So you gave a prisoner a gun?’ one of the detectives asked repeatedly, shaking his head in disbelief.

  ‘And released him from his handcuffs?’ the other added.

  ‘Yes to both. We were under attack and if I hadn’t done something drastic we would both have died. I don’t regret it, whatever you might think.’

  ‘Were you having an affair with Flynn?’ the first one asked. Molly couldn’t even recall their names.

  She laughed. ‘No … and what a stupid question!’

  ‘We have to ask,’ detective number two stated.

  It was at that point she named them, in her mind, Piss and Shit, Number 1 and Number 2.

  ‘So then he killed one of your attackers and you killed the other?’ Piss asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the others ran off?’ Shit asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so did Flynn – after stripping the clothes off the one he’d shot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t stop him?’ Piss then asked.

  ‘No, I’d just killed a man. I wasn’t feeling up to it.’

  ‘Please, don’t be facetious,’ Shit said.

  ‘You know you’ll never carry a firearm again, don’t you?’ Piss told her.

  Molly shrugged.

  She kept to her story and eventually Piss and Shit relaxed. For the time being they had gone as far as they could, and they allowed her to leave the interview room with a warning to talk to no one about the matter. Without telling anyone, she left the police station and took her Mini to a garage to get the rear window replaced. While waiting she went for a saunter through the streets of Blackpool to clear her head and slid into a greasy spoon caff, ordered a sausage barm and a mug of tea which she devoured at a table by the window, then made a phone call.

  ‘It’s me. I’ve got something you might want to read.’

  Flynn had hardly moved all day. He had set up a little living space in the kitchen at the back of Faye’s house, kept the blinds drawn, brought down a quilt and pillows from the bedroom which he laid on the floor and stretched out on while he watched the kitchen TV, the media frenzy and public outcry about the ambush, and quite a lot on the triple murder in Blackpool.

  He had been glad to rest up. He wasn’t certain of his way ahead but knew he would need all his strength and as much time as he dare take for the gunshot wound to heal before he got moving.

  He also knew that remaining holed up, literally on a blanket, as per the old mafia terminology, was inviting a knock on the door from the cops or other bad people. He wasn’t going to assume he wasn’t in the frame for the Mark Carter killings, having left three dead bodies in his wake, but at the very least he was on the run for escaping from custody and the murder of Brian Tasker; he would also have some explaining to do about taking Molly’s firearm and shooting one of the men out to get him.

  All those things, but not necessarily in that order.

  Bottom line: the police would be very happy to have him in their clutches.

  And if he was, then any thoughts of taking on the Bashkims would have to be shelved.

  So remaining at liberty was crucial but remaining where he was, at his ex-wife’s pad, was inviting trouble because they would eventually get to it.

  Flynn did have a fairly cynical view of the investigative abilities of cops. He remembered a PC he once knew years ago who said to him that if he ever lost his job, he would simply come back as a burglar because the police were virtually useless at capturing crims. It was a view that Flynn more or less shared. He knew that most offenders were caught because they were dimmer than the police. The ones with slightly more intelligence were rarely nailed.

  Not that he underestimated Rik Dean’s capabilities. He’d known Rik for a long time, from way back when Rik was a PC on patrol in Blackpool, and recalled him being one of the best thief-takers he had ever known. He had taken that ability on to CID with him … and because Flynn knew Rik, Rik also knew Flynn.

  It wasn’t as if they had been great mates or anything, just that each knew the other as a colleague and a little about each other’s personal lives.

  Flynn knew Rik had been a great charmer in his younger days, a legend at being able to lead ladies astray. In turn, Rik knew Flynn had been married to Faye, and because of that it would not be long before Rik came a-knocking just to check the address, and if there was any suspicion that Flynn was hiding here, doors would fly off their hinges.

  At least being solvent meant Flynn now had the option to move out and find somewhere in the jungle that was Blackpool, a place where anyone could go to ground and never surface if they so wished, or go further afield.

  For the moment, he decided to rest up a little longer, at least until he’d seen Molly again and read what she had managed to download for him.

  His eyes focused on the TV, on which he saw a familiar location and a reporter speaking earnestly to camera about the horrific discovery of three men shot to death in a basement flat in Blackpool, not far away from where Flynn was holed up.

  He turned up the volume just as Rik Dean came into shot for a quick soundbite to the camera. Flynn recognized it for what it was: a holding statement to keep the media at bay.

  Rik confirmed the discovery of the three bodies but did not identify them and said that it was the very early stages of an investigation, so the police were not jumping to any conclusions at the moment. It was a triple murder; the young men appeared to have been s
hot dead, money may have been stolen and there was the possibility of links to the underworld.

  The reporter, who obviously knew more details than he was allowed to reveal, asked if the premises in which they were murdered was actually a drug dealer’s counting house. Rik said he did not know at this stage. When pressed as to whether the police had any suspects, he again said he did not know anything at this stage.

  The reporter also asked Rik if there was any link to an arson attack on a Range Rover on the Shoreside estate, but Rik gave the same answer and said that more details would follow later, and then made a plea for any witnesses to come forward, call the police at Blackpool or speak to Crimestoppers. Either way, they would be protected.

  For a man who looked completely exhausted, Flynn thought that Rik did quite a good job. He turned the TV off and closed his eyes for a moment. He was hungry and thirsty.

  Molly Cartwright’s not-good day continued and then concluded with a trip back to the hospital to pay a visit on her partner, Robbo, and Mike Guthrie’s partner. Both were in the same side ward, sitting up. They looked battered but seemed in good spirits.

  Guthrie’s partner was surrounded by his family and Molly said a quick hello and gave him a sad hug before moving across to Robbo, who was alone but expecting his wife and kids to land any time.

  Molly, still whiplashed, gave him a gentle but extended embrace. They had been partners on the ARV for about eighteen months and worked well together. Molly perched on the bed and interlocked her fingers on her lap.

  Robbo’s injuries were not too serious: whiplash coupled with a broken rib, and a very battered face, having headbutted the dashboard. He expected to be able to leave hospital the next day.

  Molly updated him on her condition and the sort of day she’d had.

  After a short silence, Robbo said, ‘You know, you did very well, Moll.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘I just reacted, I suppose. Did what I had to do and all that.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could’ve done the same,’ Robbo admitted. ‘I’m almost glad I was unconscious. You are far fucking braver than me.’