KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (10 page)

Clint picked up the massive assassination kit with no strain at all and the three of us tramped back to Topfield Farm. Watching him I realised that I hadn’t a chance of saving myself, let alone my family, unless I got help.

I needed people to work with me.

‘Tony,’ I said, making my pitch in a suitably tentative manner, ‘how do you fancy hanging around with me for a while? Do you think Bob could spare you?’

‘Spare me; I think he’ll be glad to see the back of me.’

‘Oh? You’ve been with him practically since he started.’

‘Yeah, and that’s all that’s holding him back but I know. Me and Lee both, he wants rid. I can tell. He’s already told me off for reading a book on his time.’

‘That’s harsh,’ I murmured, implying that I’d never be guilty of such a crime against self-improvement.

We squelched on across the field in silence for a while. We reached the boundary of my property and I clambered over the fence.

‘Mr C, er Dave,’ Tony said when Clint had lifted him over and deposited him next to me. ‘Are you serious about me hanging around with you? Working for you might be interesting.’

‘Bombs in my living room aren’t an everyday occurrence.’

‘No, but somebody’s out to do you and I don’t think they’ve finished yet. An extra pair of eyes could come in useful.’

‘Too right,’ I said looking up at the camera on the barn wall, ‘but it would only be a temporary job. I’ve made a rule not to hire permanent staff.’

‘I don’t mind temporary but there’s a condition.’

‘What?’ I asked cautiously, aware that he had every right to expect my gratitude.

‘I’ll work for you temporary as long as Lee comes too.’

‘Well, we all have our cross to bear. Are you sure?’

‘He’s not so bad. He’s been my mate for a while.’

‘He’ll have to do what he’s told.’

‘I’ll keep him straight.’

‘That’s more than anyone else has been able to do.’

‘I will,’ he insisted.

‘What is it with you and Lee? You’re not in a civil partnership are you?’

‘Mr Cunane!’ he said indignantly, ‘I told you I’m as straight as one of them giant spirit level thingies and I meant straight in every way. I’ve had girl friends, lots of them. He’s just my best mate.’

‘Who’s your current girl friend?’

‘I’m between relationships at the moment.’

I took that to mean that he and Lee were in the closet and staying there. It was none of my business but I needed to know more.

‘Look, Tony, if I’m taking you both on I’m entitled to know the whole story.’

‘Do you want the long version or the short version?’

‘Short will do. You can save the long one for some dark winter evening when we’ve nothing else to do.’

‘Right, well Lee’s dad was the Wythenshawe Telly Man and he was my dad’s best mate.’

‘Tally Man? In the collection business like you?’

‘Telly Man, he used to hang out in this pub in Wythenshawe. This was back in the days when colour tellies were rare and expensive. Everybody wanted one.’

‘And didn’t want to pay for one?’

‘That’s right. So my dad heard he’d nicked some gear and went to see him. Telly Man took him to his mother’s house. He had tellies stacked up to the ceiling in a back room and he tells my dad to pick one. So he does, only when he got it home it didn’t work. They went through another four and none of them worked.’

‘So?’

‘So, my old man got pretty damned annoyed. He started quizzing Lee’s dad and it turned out that the daft bugger had nicked the tellies from a TV repair business and he’d taken the ones waiting to be repaired instead of the ones that were working.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘Yeah, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the box was the Telly Man but my dad turned him round, gave him a good business plan, like. The pair of them started nicking tellies to order. People would go to the Telly Man and order their telly. He’d tell the punter the price was fifty pounds and then he’d say the telly will be at the back of a certain car park in Wilmslow at six a.m. on Saturday morning and my dad would make sure it was there. He handled the delivery side of the business and the Telly Man took care of supply.’

‘I see.’

‘But then things went wrong. Telly Man got nicked. He was sentenced to a year for a first offence and he only had a month left to go when he broke out of prison.’

‘The idiot!’

‘Well, I said he wasn’t sharp but there’s worse.’

‘Go on.’

‘Yeah, well he was on the run and the police caught up with him and he took this family hostage, a family with kids, so instead of a month to serve he got twenty years and ended up in a maximum security prison sharing a cell with this nonce who’d killed two little girls. Not that he was a nonce himself like, just a total wipe out in the brains department.’

‘I still don’t see why that means you have to be joined at the hip to Lee.’

‘It’s awkward, I don’t like to say Mr Cunane … er … Dave, but I promised my dad before he died.’

‘Promised what?’ I said irritably.

‘That I’d look after Lee. Dad had loads of form and would have got a lot more than twelve months if the Telly Man had grassed him up. Then after he escaped and was banged up with the nonces, Dad was the only one who knew just how stupid the poor guy really was and still believed in him. So he made me promise to keep Lee out of trouble. Dad visited him regular before the poor guy topped himself.’

I studied Tony’s sadly broken face. This was the man who was keeping someone else out of trouble. He stared straight back at me.

The story was crazy enough to be believable.

‘So there is honour among thieves then?’

‘Hah! Some, but it’s pretty rare,’ Tony agreed. ‘There’s a lot more stuff went on but that’s the bones of it.’

‘Just one thing, what’s Lee’s last name?’

There was no reply.

Tony looked stricken in so far as it was possible for him to have a facial expression.

‘Go on, what’s his name?’

‘Sheerman-Holmes,’ he said almost inaudibly, ‘but you’ve not to use it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he goes mad if you do.’

‘He’ll just have to get used to it.’

‘No, you don’t understand. He really goes mad, foams at the mouth and rolls about on the floor kicking and screaming. Something horrible happened to him when he was a kid and that name sets him off. Please don’t say it, Boss … er … Dave. He’ll know I told you.’

‘Fair enough,’ I muttered, wondering why Lee hadn’t changed his name if it upset him so much.

‘Thanks, Dave.’

‘Right, you’re hired! I’ll consider the bomb disposal job as your aptitude test.’

‘Funneeee, Dave!’

I spent the next few minutes negotiating wage rates. There may be honour among thieves but loyalty comes at a price and I wasn’t so naive as to believe that this ex-convict with a reconditioned brain would work for the pleasure of my smile and a pat on the head. I made him a generous offer which he accepted.

‘Right first job,’ I said, ‘tidy up the farmyard. Get the big guy to help you and see if you can move the Land Cruiser into the barn on three wheels, then get the hose on all that foam. I’m going for a shower.’

‘Right Boss!’

After collecting the C4 from the BMW I went round the back of the house out of sight of my sharp
-eyed employee. I opened the shed where Janine keeps her gardening tools and taking a spade quickly dug a hole in the back of a flower bed. I found some empty plastic fertilizer bags and put the C4 and the Desert Eagle in them. Jan had covered the flower bed with a thick layer of mulch. I scraped it back and buried the bags, carefully raking the mulch to make the bed look undisturbed.

The assassination kit was another problem. While they were in the garage I lugged it into Jan’s tool shed and covered it up with sacks of compost.

12

Tuesday: 7.30 a.m.

It was seven thirty and I was skulking round the phone box at New Bailey Street on the Salford side of the Irwell waiting for Cullen’s call.

Brendan Cullen is one of my oldest friends and the only friend I still have in the police ranks.

That has made our relationship fraught recently.

Various senior officers have tried to have me listed as a person of ill-repute officers are barred from associating with. They failed but they still connect Bren with me to his disadvantage. His face is too much of a reminder of past mistakes for some. They’ve moved him away from HQ into the Counter
-Terrorism unit so they don’t have to see him very often.

There was no ring.

I waited for five minutes.

I decided there must be some good reason why he hadn’t called.

I turned back along New Bailey Street and walked slowly. I had a lot to think about. Brendan’s new home was only a few hundred yards away at Left Bank in Spinningfields. I only had to cross the road and I could be there in minutes. I decided not to. I carried on along New Bailey giving a nod to the statue of Joseph Brotherton, Salford’s first MP and an early campaigner against the death penalty. What would he make of the pickle I was in? Things were much simpler in his day with no police force worth mentioning and a virtually unlimited right of self defence.

I crossed the Irwell into Bridge Street and turned into the street called St Mary’s Parsonage heading for the bollards at the narrow end of Back Bridge Street which would bring me to my office but when I turned the corner a man jumped out of the shadows, grabbed my arm and plucked me into a doorway.

It was Brendan Cullen.

‘Cunane!’ he snarled, ‘get in here.’

He pressed me against the door. He was seething with anger. He pulled me so close that I was able to focus on the individual bristles of his designer stubble.

‘Are you deliberately trying to get me kicked off the job or is this caper just your usual stupidity?’ he said.

‘What caper?’

‘The caper where you got me to send a copper to Sir Lew Greene’s door and then inform an involved party by phoning him on an open landline.’

I pulled myself free and pushed him back.

‘Involved party? What are you on about?’

‘Your father, stupid.’

‘So? What’s he involved in?’

‘The fact that his cousin’s been murdered makes him involved.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know he’s been murdered.’

‘I didn’t know. I guessed after what happened to me … but he was ill, terminal cancer. He could have been in a coma or something.’

‘Yeah, ’appen. So what happened to you, sunshine?’

I quickly filled him in. He was as impassive as a Red Indian chief when I told him about the petrol bombs and the high explosive.

‘And Sir Lew Greene left you a notebook with the bad guy’s name in it? Are you sure you didn’t imagine that part?’

‘He did.’

‘And you haven’t looked at it? Unbelievable, except that with you Dave, the wildly improbable is always believable.’

‘I told you. My receptionist witnessed him dropping it in the safe.’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s in a Eurograde level five safe. That means …’

‘I know what it means. I’m a policeman, remember.’

Brendan shook he head wearily. He studied me with an expression that was midway between loathing and exasperation. I stared back. His cool Italian suit was showing signs of fatigue, as
was he. The days when he was a detective sergeant on the Drug Squad hunting down dealers dressed in a purple shell suit are a very distant memory.

Nowadays he looks every inch the senior copper. The suits are genuine, bought new at Emporio Armani not second-hand at Elite.  I wondered if he might run me in. Every relationship has its tipping point and I might have reached mine with Detective Chief Inspector Brendan Cullen. Bren was never wildly ambitious before but now he’s remarried to a younger woman he seems much more attached to his career and to his salary than when he was drinking a bottle of whisky a day.

Billy-Jo is Bren’s new wife.

She’s a good ten years younger than Bren and just as curvaceous as the Jaguar he now drives round in. She’s been married before and the Jag’s second hand too. It isn’t a red ‘Morse type’ 1960 Mark 2. It’s a newish silver XF estate with room for his golf clubs. There’s nothing retro about Bren.

Yeah, moving up, is Bren Cullen from the backstreets of Gorton.

‘How?’ I croaked.

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

I nodded.

‘I’m sorry Dave, but there’s no way to make this nice for you. The old guy was beaten, tortured and then decapitated.’

‘Oh God!’

‘Yeah, it was bloody gruesome. I’ve seen some gory messes where the bad boys have been having fun with shotguns and machetes but this one beats the lot. There wasn’t a particle of that room that wasn’t soaked in blood: walls, ceiling and floor. It was either terrorists or, and this is where you come in, someone who wanted to make it look like terrorists.’

‘How do I come in? Are you trying to tell me I had a reason to kill him?’

‘It turns out that both you and your father could have been involved because you do have a motive, a bloody big one.’

‘What?’

‘You have a motive all right, Dave. It was right there in his office. A copy of his will. He changed it recently and made you his sole heir. You get the lot; the house, the investments, the villa in Tuscany, thousands of acres of prime farm land belonging to his deceased wife’s estate at Weldsley and an ice cream with raspberry sauce on top I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Listen, Bren, you’ve got to believe me. The first I knew about that money was last evening when Paddy told me. Bloody hell, I’ve been on his shit-list for years. I was going to tell the old bugger that I couldn’t help him and if he wanted to leave his money to someone else too bad. I couldn’t let him buy me.’

‘Christ, Dave, spare me the choirboy stuff. I think if he’d offered me that fortune I’d have obliged him.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

‘Some people might find that hard to believe.’

‘It’s true. Paddy and Eileen knew he’d changed his will in my favour but they didn’t think it was right to tell me until he told me himself. Presumably he’d have told me when I agreed to arrange for his bogeyman to be bumped off.’

‘And you’d turn down the chance to go from being the proprietor of a dead-beat detective agency to millionaire landowner in one sweet move? As I say, that’s hard to swallow.’

‘Bren I was banged up for crime I didn’t commit. I won’t take the chance of being banged up for killing Lew’s bogeyman. You can’t spend money in prison.’

He gave me a long searching look then his expression changed to what he probably regarded as a smile but which came out as an ugly leer.

‘OK, Dave,
I
believe you but there are lots of coppers who won’t, especially as it’s you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘This is what they’ll say. Lew Greene called on you yesterday morning, and they already know that, don’t even ask me how … He told you he was cutting you out of his will …’

‘I didn’t even know about the will until yesterday evening. He hadn’t spoken to me for years.’

‘Paddy knew. Whatever he says they won’t believe he didn’t tell you as soon as he heard.’

‘Oh, damn.’

‘I’m telling you how the suspicious minds of some of my colleagues are putting things together at this very moment, and where you’re concerned they’re ultra-suspicious …’

‘I’ll sue them again. I’ll …’

‘Cut the bluster and listen. Lew told you he was disinheriting you so you went round and topped him before he could, simple as that. You knew he was on this EJA Inquiry so you rigged the killing to look like it was done by Islamists.’

‘Tell me why Islamists would kill someone who might have been about to deliver a big propaganda boost for their cause?’

‘Dave, when did logic ever bother some people where you’re concerned? Anyway, we don’t know he was about to criticise the Security Services.’

‘So I’m in the shit with a bunch of killers and the Fuzz as well?’

He shrugged.

‘That’s normal for you isn’t it, Dave? I needed to have a word to make sure that you get your details straight.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re already up to your armpits in sewage. There’s no need for me to jump in it with you.’

‘So this is all about you. Thanks mate.’

‘Shut up and listen. I’m a lot more use to you as a functioning copper than I would be if I was suspended for associating with a person of dubious reputation. You need all the friends you can get so don’t get snarky with me, right?’

I nodded.

‘OK, this is your story. You know nothing about what happened to Lew. You don’t even know he’s dead. Nothing’s been released to the Press. They claim it might cause riots, fat chance of that. If they cancelled Coronation Street or shut down Manchester United there might be riots but killing a judge! Anyway, this is my get out … your old man was worried.

He’d called Sir Lew several times and got no answer. He didn’t send you round because he knew you wouldn’t be anxious to leave your pregnant wife. He phoned me as a helpful and discreet copper he knew from his days in the police service and I sent a woodentop to check on Sir Lew. The man was one of Her Majesty’s senior judges so there was no reason why I shouldn’t make enquiries. You weren’t involved in any of that, right?’

‘Right, but Paddy…’

‘He hasn’t phoned you or told you anything because I told him not to. He was pretty shaken.’

‘He went to Lew’s house?’

‘Yeah, he was needed to identify the deceased. Fortunately he has a good alibi for himself. He was doing some plastering in a neighbour’s house until ten and they reckon Sir Lew was topped in the early evening. We needed him to make the identification because there were no servants there, bloody odd, that. Anyway, my guess is that he intends to clear off for parts unknown with your mother and frankly if I didn’t know it would kick off a major manhunt I’d advise you to do the same.

‘Janine and kids have done a midnight flit but I’m not budging.’

‘Fine, now you’ve had the bad news here’s the good news.’

‘What?’

‘The Security Service is all over this investigation. If it had been up to us plain old fashioned rozzers you’d probably have been charged by now, but it isn’t.’

‘MI5?’

‘Yeah, Dave
, M - I - 5
, M for Motherf**kers, I for Idiots and 5 for F**k all! The spook brigade, what part of that don’t you understand?’

‘I understand none of it.’

‘The good part for you Dave is that they go softly, softly: not like us plods in our big boots. It’s all highly intellectual, you need a degree in symbionics, or whatever it was that smart arse professor in the
“Da Vinci Code”
had, to even start off at square one with those folk.’

‘It’s symbology, Bren.’

‘There you go. See what I mean? These people are on a high level, like you Dave. Just say nowt to them and make sure you don’t drop me in it and you should be fine.’

‘If you say so.’

‘And for the rest, keep your big yap shut about what Sir Lew told you. He called on you for a friendly visit, right? You talked about cricket, nothing about evil conspiracies.’

‘But there is a conspiracy!’ I protested.

‘And you’re going to leave that to the professionals.’

‘But it’s me this traitor’s trying to kill.’

‘Then you’ll just have to be bloody careful until this gets sorted and believe me it will.’

‘Bren! Weren’t you listening when I told you? They left a bomb at the farm … remote control. I might not have the time to wait for your professionals.’

‘A bomb,’ he muttered rolling his eyes. ‘That’s all I need, a bomb under my arse.’

‘The bomb was for me, not you.’

‘Same difference, a known associate of mine gets blown up, so does my career … criminal association … ’

‘Shut up about yourself for a minute.’

‘Yeah, sorry, who’ve you told about the mysterious traitor?’

‘Apart from Janine and Paddy you’re the only one who knows. Not counting the bombers themselves of course.’

‘They must have been amateurs if you defused it.’

‘Thanks, Bren. I’ll try to get real professionals to kill me next time.’

I didn’t bother telling him about Tony Nolan.

‘Look, Dave I know this is hard but can you keep the bomb and all that under your hat, as it were, for now? I’m sure that if we get the guys that did the Judge they’ll turn out to be the same ones who’re trying to do you. Bringing you into this will only complicate things.’

‘Complicate them for you, you mean.’

‘Precisely,’ he agreed.