Headhunter Page 18

  ‘Their safety. You know how it works. The more people who know, the more likely a leak and a beheading.’

  Flynn shrugged acceptance but not happiness. It meant things were happening without his knowledge.

  ‘We have something else, too,’ Rik Dean piped up. ‘But not sure how we can use it to our advantage.’ He looked at Molly as he spoke, then his eyes shifted to Flynn.

  Before anything could be revealed, there was a knock on the door. The man who had just brought the coffee stuck his head around and addressed Donaldson. ‘Sorry to interrupt but I need a word, Karl. Urgently.’

  Donaldson rose from his chair, saying to Rik, ‘Tell him,’ and to Flynn and Molly, ‘I’ll be back.’

  He left the three behind.

  Rik Dean looked quite ill. Flynn said, ‘Sorry,’ meekly, in reference to his injuries.

  ‘Whatever … Anyway, one or two things have come together.’

  Molly said, ‘He’s talking about Alan Hardiker.’ She rubbed her neck gently on saying the name.

  ‘Who is still being treated at A and E and may be there for some time … NHS waiting times and all that. The first thing that’s helpful in this situation is that he didn’t see you coming down the stairs and is convinced that it was Molly who punched him, so that’s good.’

  ‘He didn’t see me?’ Flynn said.

  Rik shook his head. ‘He has no idea what really happened.’

  Flynn smiled broadly at Molly. ‘You must pack a good punch.’

  ‘I do,’ she said proudly, ‘so watch out.’

  Their eyes intermingled. Rik saw something affectionate pass between them and coughed to break the moment. They looked guiltily at him.

  ‘Like I said, some things have come together,’ he said. ‘First is that when I was checking the custody records for the two unidentified lads in custody who were with Brian Tasker, and who we believe are Bashkims, neither of whom are still saying anything, incidentally, I saw that one of them had been taken out of his cell for fingerprinting, DNA and photographing.’

  ‘Not unusual,’ Flynn said.

  ‘It is when it’s an officer completely unconnected to the case who does it, unless having been instructed to do so.’

  ‘Hardiker,’ Flynn said, feeling his stomach churn.

  Rik nodded, then looked at Molly, who picked up the tale. ‘He left his personal mobile phone in my flat by mistake. Other than the obscene photos and texts to and from his various lovers, there were also texts to an overseas number and a voicemail from an unidentified male.’

  ‘Which said?’

  ‘Something along the lines of, “Your information has been gratefully received”. Then I found out he’d been accessing force intel on the Bashkims through his police computer.’ Molly shrugged. ‘Not that it necessarily meant anything in itself.’

  Rik went on, ‘Molly gave me the number of Hardiker’s personal phone and I found that a call was made on it from Blackpool nick at the time he was in the fingerprint room with the prisoner. Obviously we can’t pinpoint the exact location it was made from, but it does link with the time he was in with the prisoner.’

  Donaldson had re-entered the room during this conversation.

  ‘Who did he call?’ Flynn asked.

  ‘A mobile phone on Viktor’s boat in Zante,’ Donaldson said, picking it up. ‘It’s not a number we know – the Bashkims drop and change their cell phones like their underpants – but the call from the cells in Blackpool was made to a phone on the boat.’

  ‘Shit,’ Flynn said.

  ‘He’s made others, too, and sent texts to various phones, all on the boat,’ Rik said. ‘And received calls also from on-board the boat.’

  ‘He’s the police source then,’ Flynn said.

  Rik nodded gravely. ‘Also, we’ve been reviewing CCTV footage from the cameras on the multi-storey car park at Blackpool Victoria Hospital. Hardiker was seen to drive on to the car park half an hour before you were taken to Preston and he went shortly after the escort left the hospital. We don’t know what he did in the car park, but he could have used one of the upper floors as a vantage point. There is footage of him driving off the car park shortly after the escort set off. And he made a phone call from that location to another mobile phone in Zante at the exact time the escort moved away from the hospital.’

  Flynn gave a sharp laugh and tapped his hands together in a nervous gesture.

  ‘He’s in debt, like I told you,’ Molly said. ‘Maybe he saw it as an easy way to make some money back.’

  ‘Do we know if he received anything?’ Flynn said.

  Rik looked at Donaldson, who nodded. To Molly, he said, ‘You don’t know this, but he received a wire transfer from a bank in Paris to his personal account at Barclays … £2,000. We’re still trying to trace the named holder of the French account, but it’s likely to be one of the legitimate accounts fronting the Bashkims.’

  Flynn looked at Molly. ‘Served you up on toast. And me.’

  ‘I know,’ she said softly.

  ‘One of our own,’ Rik said bitterly.

  ‘Question is now on a practical level – how do we play him to our advantage, because at the moment he doesn’t know that we know anything about any of this,’ Rik said. ‘He just thinks he went round to Molly’s flat to harass her and get his phone back, and she punched his lights out.’

  ‘I think he had something worse planned,’ Molly said. ‘Why wear latex gloves?’ She shivered.

  ‘Again, let’s not divulge we know anything about the gloves,’ Rik suggested. ‘I think we play it all down, give him a bit of an unofficial warning with a nod and a wink – all guys together kind of thing – pretend to smooth it all over, tell him he got what he deserved and he’s lucky you’re not making a complaint … that sort of thing, and then have him and his phone under twenty-four-hour scrutiny, maybe feed him a few morsels about you, Flynn, and see what he does. Just spit-balling here, folks. All ideas gratefully received.’

  ‘I like the sound of it,’ Flynn said. ‘Letting him hang himself. Molly?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I can go with it … paint me as the hysterical female in all this.’

  ‘If the cap fits,’ Flynn quipped, and got a punch in his shoulder for it.

  ‘And there has been another development,’ Donaldson announced, ‘which might affect matters.’

  ‘You ever heard about this place?’ Flynn asked Molly.

  They were taking a fifteen-minute comfort break, the excess coffee taking its toll on their bladders.

  Donaldson had given the nod for Flynn to go get some fresh air and Molly had accompanied him up a set of metal stairs on to a flat roof area, screened from any onlookers by a smoked-glass barrier and covered by a fine wire mesh. It reminded Flynn of an exercise yard, although he doubted if any of the transitory detainees filtering through this facility were accorded such privileges or dignity.

  He still hadn’t been told exactly where he was, but he could hear the close hum of early rush-hour traffic and still thought they were on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Blackburn, possibly in the Whitebirk area by the arterial road.

  ‘I don’t even really know where I am,’ she admitted. ‘One of Donaldson’s guys brought me over.’

  ‘It’s probably best to expunge it from your memory,’ Flynn advised. ‘How are you? Recovered from your ordeal?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Flynn hesitated. ‘You thought it was Rik Dean at the door, didn’t you?’

  A little chastened, she nodded. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You were saving your skin. You’ve got a career and a pension to think about. You have to make moves to protect those things.’

  ‘Maybe, or maybe I was just being a coward, but the Mark Carter thing got to me. I gave you his name, next thing he’s dead!’

  ‘Coincidence.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  He nodded, not having a career or pension to think about.

  ‘So are you going to do this?’ Molly a
sked.

  ‘Their dirty work?’ he said. ‘Fortunately, it’s very similar to my dirty work.’

  On their return to the briefing room, Donaldson and Rik were looking grim, discussing something quietly with a sheet of paper between them. Flynn sat with Molly next to him, still not certain as to her role in all this. She hadn’t been forthcoming during their little sojourn to the roof and he hadn’t pushed her.

  Donaldson clicked the remote mouse and the smartboard came to life, showing the home screen of the laptop.

  ‘I mentioned a development,’ he said. ‘You might want to watch this.’

  Flynn saw the cursor on the screen hover over an icon and then a new PowerPoint opened. There was no title to it and the first slide was blank.

  Donaldson said, ‘I showed you photographs of my agent floating in Grand Harbour … these are some more images I think you should see. Brace yourselves.’

  He clicked the mouse.

  The next slide contained a gruesome crime scene of two people decapitated in a back alley.

  ‘Paris, Latin Quarter, last year. These two were business rivals of the Bashkims. Beheaded, as you can see,’ Donaldson explained.

  Flynn took in the horrific image.

  The next few slides were more angles of the same scene. Huge amounts of blood, wheelie bins, litter, sleaze.

  Then there was another. A dead man on a sandy beach. Headless and naked, feet in the water. More shots of the same scene followed. ‘Benidorm, six months ago … Lots of organized crime in Benidorm. This man was also a rival of the Bashkims.’

  ‘Head?’ Flynn asked.

  ‘Never found.’

  Donaldson carried on with two more similar executions, one in Oslo and one in London, until Flynn said, ‘OK, we get the gist. Where is this leading, Karl? I accept that Maria met her death in a similar fashion and obviously there’s someone out there who gets their kicks by chopping people’s heads off.’

  ‘Where am I going with this?’ Donaldson posed, angling his face to Flynn. ‘Our intel suggests that the same people committed these crimes on behalf of the Bashkims. I mean, it takes some doing to chop someone’s head off. Putting a bullet into someone is one thing but hacking off their head …’ He was lost in a moment of thought. Flynn’s feet twitched impatiently. ‘We had a message from our source on Halcyon to say that a couple fitting the description we have of the suspects in these killings arrived on the boat a day or so ago.’

  ‘A couple? What, two men?’ Flynn asked.

  ‘No, a couple as in a man and a woman,’ Donaldson corrected him.

  ‘So we’re thinking the people who might have murdered Maria are on Viktor’s boat right now,’ Flynn said animatedly.

  ‘Were, but not now.’

  ‘What d’you mean, not now?’

  ‘They’ve left the boat, seemingly in a hurry following a short meeting with Viktor. My source has heard only snippets of the conversation, but your name was mentioned and I can only guess at the context.’

  Flynn jolted upright.

  ‘There are a lot of imponderables in this scenario,’ Donaldson warned, ‘but I think they’re coming for you, so maybe we should serve you up on a plate.’

  FOURTEEN

  Flynn sat alone in a cell at Blackburn police station, staring blankly at the point where the off-white wall met the off-white floor. Some wag had managed to etch ‘fuck all cops’ into the wall, a sentiment Flynn wholeheartedly agreed with. He had been incarcerated for eight hours – long enough for someone to jet halfway around the world if they so wished – and he was getting irritated.

  He needed to get going, be on the way, and going through this rigmarole was interminable.

  A key turned in the door. He watched the inside of the lock turn and the door opened outwards – cell doors always opened outwards to prevent prisoners being able to barricade themselves inside – and the civilian gaoler stood there. He jerked his head.

  Flynn stood up. The gaoler stood aside and Flynn sidled past along the corridor towards the custody office, where he took up a position at the desk and faced the sergeant opposite.

  Flynn looked sideways as Rik Dean came alongside. Flynn smiled.

  ‘You’re going to be released without charge for the moment, Mr Flynn.’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  ‘However, enquiries are still ongoing and I have no doubt that at some stage in the not-too-distant future I will have amassed enough evidence to re-arrest and charge you.’

  ‘Look forward to it.’

  The sergeant listened to this exchange and wrote it on the custody record. Flynn signed for his property, including all the items that had been seized from his hire car. He was relieved to see his passport coming back his way plus a holdall containing clothes and paperwork and the e-tickets for the flight he had booked – and missed – for his intended return to Ibiza that had not happened. But soon he would be on the way there to collect his boat.

  His boat named Maria.

  He was eager to get going to reconnect with one of the loves of his life, sail out of the marina at Santa Eulalia and head back to the Canary Islands where he lived. It was a journey he was anticipating, a journey on which he would grieve for Maria and be at one with the sea. If he got the chance. And at the end of that journey, put himself out as bait, like a tethered goat, for the two killers who had murdered Maria. He was sure they would come. He was looking forward to it.

  He signed on the line, as requested by the tapping finger of the custody sergeant, and heaved the holdall over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll show you out,’ Rik said.

  Flynn followed him out of the custody office and through a door leading to the side of the police station where a black van was waiting. Rik opened the sliding door and Flynn clambered in. There were three rows of seats and Flynn slid into the centre one next to Molly Cartwright.

  Donaldson was in the front row and Rik climbed into the back one.

  The driver and front-seat passenger were the two guys who had originally driven Flynn from Bispham to the secret FBI facility. He was getting to like them, though they weren’t the most talkative chaps in the world.

  Donaldson was sitting sideways, his left arm draped over the seat back.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

  ‘The cops had nothing on me,’ Flynn said.

  ‘Good. I knew it would end well.’ He elbowed the back of the driver’s seat and the van moved off, joining the early evening traffic on Whitebirk Drive. He went right and picked up the M65 motorway for Preston and ultimately Blackpool.

  Flynn had no desire to talk. He leaned back, closed his eyes, pulled up the shutters and went immediately to sleep.

  ‘I find it very hard to come to terms with this,’ Rik Dean confessed to Flynn. ‘Letting a murderer walk whatever the circumstances.’

  Flynn patted him patronizingly on the shoulder. ‘You’ll get over it.’

  ‘I have a lot of things to fudge,’ he said, miffed.

  ‘But a lot of things to keep you busy,’ Flynn said.

  Rik shrugged. Very unhappy. As much as possible, he had always tried to do all police work by the book and had been a good cop. ‘Henry Christie once confided to me,’ Rik said, seeing Flynn’s face twitch at the name, ‘that if you can bring a murder charge against an individual, then you can sure as hell do the opposite.’

  ‘So I’ve got him to thank?’

  ‘No, you’ve got Karl Donaldson and this whole scenario to thank, but if it goes tits up and looks like an alligator’s snapping at my arse, things might change.’

  ‘I think you were mixing your metaphors then,’ Flynn chided him, even if he only had a vague idea himself what a metaphor was. English language wasn’t his strongest subject, closely followed by maths.

  Rik shook his head sadly at him.

  Flynn, Rik, Donaldson and Molly were clustered around the car Flynn had been using, the one supplied by Sue Daggert which she claimed was clean, but Flynn was ever so slightly ner
vous about it in case Rik ran it through the Police National Computer and it came back of interest, or if a car of a similar description had been seen in connection with the Mark Carter killings, in which case he might change his mind about letting Flynn slip through his fingers. There was nothing worse for a cop than watching a good job walk away – and if Rik suddenly chose to have a quick root through it, the forty grand in two rucksacks stashed in the boot might also sway him.

  The car was still where it had been parked when Donaldson had lifted Flynn, just around the corner from Molly’s flat.

  ‘Anyway,’ Rik relented begrudgingly, ‘good luck. You’re going to need it.’ He thrust out his right hand and they shook.

  Donaldson, who had been leaning on the car, pushed himself upright and shook hands too.

  ‘You asked about Molly’s role in all this?’ Rik said.

  ‘Yeah, she’s never been fully explained to me.’ Flynn grinned at her.

  ‘She’s off sick at the moment with stress and whiplash injuries, and that’s how I want her to remain,’ Rik said. ‘Slightly off-grid.’

  ‘I’m going to fix her up with a super-duper new computer with access to certain areas, shall we say, in order that she can do some research,’ Donaldson said. ‘She will be your point of contact. She’ll be able to track your phones and remain the conduit through which we stay in contact and feed you any information you might need to know.’

  ‘What phones?’

  ‘You’ll be given two when you reach your destination, both with tracking devices installed. Please keep in touch, Steve … Don’t go rogue, otherwise we’ll not be able to protect you in any way, shape or form.’

  Flynn almost choked on his chuckle.

  ‘Molly will drive you to the airport,’ Rik told him. He slapped the roof of the car and declared, ‘Well, that’s me … bed … Good luck.’

  Donaldson slapped Flynn on the arm then left with Rik, both climbing into the van with sliding doors, leaving him with Molly.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Flight’s in six hours. I’ve been told to give you this.’ She handed him an envelope which he peered into, seeing a thick wad of euro notes. ‘Two thousand. Operating costs, apparently.’