Seizure (20 page)

Twenty minutes after the briefing the team was ready to strike, but not until they got the word from Flynn, who had sneaked into an empty house opposite the target address where an observation point had been established. Two detectives manned the cameras and binoculars.

‘He's not landed yet,' one informed Flynn.

Flynn settled down for a wait. The world of drug dealing and counting ill-gotten gains does not necessarily run to a timetable and the strike team had been warned to expect delays. But Flynn was certain Deakin would be coming. Because even though he probably hadn't realized it, Deakin had slotted into a routine, albeit one that may have come about accidentally. Flynn and Hoyle had seen it, a pattern of visits, one confirmed by an informant of Hoyle's working on the periphery of Deakin's business.

Flynn didn't get time to make himself comfortable.

He was about to reach for a flask of coffee and pour himself a much-needed slurp when the detective with the binos said sharply, ‘He's landed.'

Flynn lurched to the window and peeked through the black net curtains to see a big Audi move slowly along the road and drive past the house. It disappeared, then returned two minutes later. Flynn pegged this as the recce car, the front-runner vehicle for Deakin, checking out the neighbourhood, getting a gut feeling for how the land lay. The car did a couple more passes, then left the scene. It would be returning to a meeting point where the occupants would report their findings and feelings to Deakin.

Flynn hoped the cops had been good enough. That the strike team was parked far enough away and hidden well enough not to arouse suspicion. The next minutes would be critical. Flynn's arm jerked nervously as he poured the coffee from the flask. There was just time to take a few mouthfuls. He tried to control his breathing.

This was the culmination of a long investigation, during which he had done everything right, totally by the book. Flynn was proud of the way he'd pulled it together, the biggest hit of his career. He just hoped he hadn't overstepped the mark with this little operation, which had not been rubber-stamped by his bosses.

Flynn snorted a laugh and glanced around the bar, his thoughts back in the present. Suddenly Gill Hartland walked into the bar. He snapped upwards, ready to call out her name, but the woman turned and it clearly wasn't Gill. Gill was dead – murdered – and his mind was starting to play tricks.

‘Tosser,' he admonished himself, settling back with a scowl of self-loathing, still recalling that night in Blackpool.

The headlights came down the street. Two sets, one on the lead Audi, the scout car, the second set belonging to Deakin's 4x4 Lexus.

‘He's back,' one of the observers said.

‘Let him get into the property,' Flynn said. He wanted him literally red-handed, fingers on the money.

The cars drew up. A passenger from the Audi leapt out and ran to open the rear nearside door of the Lexus. Deakin hopped out, pulled his jacket tight, tucked his head down and crossed the pavement to the front door which, rather like 10 Downing Street, opened just at the moment of his arrival. He ducked in with the passenger from the Audi. The drivers of both vehicles stayed with the cars.

Deakin was expected to be inside for up to sixty minutes. Flynn gave him five, then said, ‘Go,' into his PR. The strike team rolled into action.

Eight officers, plus Flynn, Jack Hoyle and the dog man, raced to the front of the house.

Four others emerged from shadow and smashed the windscreens of the two cars with pin-hammers. Their job was to neutralize the drivers as quickly as possible to prevent them from warning the occupants of the house. They did the job well. Surprised and overpowered, the drivers were dragged out and pinned to the ground.

Those with Flynn and Hoyle charged at the front door, expecting to have to smash it down, but they discovered that even drug dealers get careless. The door was unlocked.

Flynn burst in, followed by the strike team, and chaos broke out.

A man appeared in the hallway. A uniformed officer went for him and rugby-tackled him down. Flynn leapt over the tussling bodies and turned into the front room, which he knew was the counting room. He was dimly aware of Jack Hoyle running upstairs . . . And as he relived those moments while getting drunker and drunker in a bar in Puerto Rico, he scowled even more. Why had Jack done that? That wasn't part of the plan, was it? He tried to remember.

But it was gone.

And Flynn was in that front room of a terraced house and face to face with Felix Deakin for the first time ever. Deakin was standing at a trestle table at which two women sat counting untidy wads of notes. First estimate, forty grand. On the floor beside them were buckets full of so far uncounted notes and coins.

Deakin's face registered shock.

Flynn could hardly keep the triumph out of his voice as he slammed Deakin against the wall.

‘Fuckin' nicked,' he yelled in Deakin's ear as he pinned him there. It was a phrase that, in a subsequent written statement, would morph into, ‘I told him he was under arrest for supplying and distributing controlled drugs. I then cautioned him and he replied . . .'

Deakin said, ‘Cunt.' That word did appear in the statement.

Flynn cuffed him in a flowing, expert motion and the two female officers who had accompanied the arrest teams dealt with the women tellers.

But then Flynn's heart sank as he heard a plaintive, ‘Put the gun down,' from one of the officers in the hallway.

A man had appeared unexpectedly from the back room, drugged up and brandishing a revolver.

Which was then fired.

Flynn winced at the memory. He took a drink of the locally produced whisky he'd acquired.

‘Man down! Man down!' were the words he could hear ringing in his ears.

Being averse to confrontation, Henry decided to bypass Kirkham on his way home and head straight for Blackpool instead. It was late when he arrived at the hospital, and the corridors were strangely deserted and spooky as he made his way to the cardiac unit. He was allowed into the room in which his mother lay and wearily took a seat next to the bed.

She was sleeping, her mouth open, false teeth removed, and dribble eked out of the corner of her mouth.

A nurse gave him a quick overview of the current situation: still very poorly, but comfortable (whatever that meant). Henry sighed deeply and listened to her mild snoring. She looked old, ill, and Henry was depressed by the thought he might soon be an orphan.

It was a curiously strange sensation to think there was a good chance he might have neither parent soon. He'd been close to both of them, his father more so than his mother, and when his dad had died a few years earlier Henry had been devastated for a long time. But he only ever remembered crying once.

He wondered why. Wasn't grief supposed to be some massive outpouring, tears, screaming, all that shit? Henry often castigated himself for not showing more emotion but he knew it was bottled up inside him. One day he expected an explosion, but it never seemed to come.

He looked at his mother and took her right hand, the one without the intravenous drip. It had originally had a needle in it, but sometime the hand had been swapped. Henry saw that the hand was flecked with liver spots and heavy bruises.

She stirred, but did not waken.

He sighed again and let go of the hand, feeling dithery.

Suddenly he wanted some form of solace. He needed something, someone. And for a terrible reason he could not explain, he didn't want it to be Kate.

‘Shit,' he breathed quietly.

He did not want to talk, didn't want anything other than bodily contact and an escape from the reality of this moment. He pulled out his mobile phone, which was on silent. The display told him he had two missed calls, both from Naomi Dale. He blinked and his lips tightened as his thumb hovered over the keypad.

As he looked at the phone, the screen changed to announce an incoming call.

It was a crap Eastern European gun, with crap home-made ammo, brandished by a man more frightened than the cop staring down the business end of the barrel. But that didn't stop it blowing off most of the cop's left shoulder, chunks of it splattering around the hall. The cop staggered backwards, screaming with pain; in a panic, the goon tried to fire again but the hammer hit a dud, and Jack Hoyle and another cop floored him and beat the living daylights out of him.

In terms of arrest and seizure, the raid should have been judged a success. Forty-eight thousand in cash was confiscated and two kilos of high-grade cocaine recovered, a small fortune in itself. Deakin was arrested (and found to be armed) and his drugs empire was taken apart at the foundations.

Two things completely overshadowed these points.

First, the shooting of the cop, which resulted in an injury that meant the guy could no longer work. This was followed by a huge civil claim against the police for negligence (upheld) and a hefty sick pension payout.

Second was the missing money. The alleged missing money. Not the forty-eight grand. That was all accounted for.

But the million pounds. The alleged million pounds.

Not one penny of that was accounted for.

Henry's mind was a blank as they made love. He had withdrawn into a world where nothing mattered other than to be engulfed in a physical encounter, hardly any words being spoken, just an exchange of looks of passion as the two of them moved around the bed from position to position. Henry lost himself in her and she in him, and although he could not manage it for them to come together, she came first in a series of gasping thrusts and he came a minute later with a judder that shook the both of them to the core.

Then he stayed where he was, slowly taking every last drop of sensation until he withdrew and rolled next to her, sweat rolling through his scalp and down his neck. He blinked until he fell asleep.

ELEVEN

F
lynn woke with a sense of foreboding. He blinked at the ceiling and watched a tiny lizard emerge from a crack in the wall and stop in a glint of sunlight coming through the blinds. For a moment he thought someone was in the bed next to him. Wrong. Imagination playing up again. He pushed himself up, aware he had been sweating heavily all night and that his sheets now reeked like a dog basket. He was past caring.

He heaved himself out of bed and fell towards the bathroom. After peeing for an inordinately long time, he checked the mirror and didn't like what he saw. He could not be bothered to do anything with it, though. Unshaven and smelly was what the tourists would have to bear that day.

His battered Nissan Patrol with fitted bench seats was parked under the awning at the back of the villa. It was dirty, caked with mud from the last jeep safari he'd done for Adam's company up in the mountains.

He'd bought the vehicle a couple of years earlier from a fisherman in Las Palmas knowing it would add another string to his bow in terms of getting work. He now did occasional safaris for other companies as well as Adam's and enjoyed the experience. This was mainly because he had never yet taken out a safari without getting laid. He was the tanned, muscled, good-looking bastard of a tourist guide with the gift of the gab and a breathtaking tour that always got the ladies' hearts a-beating.

Not today, though.

He eased himself stiffly into the driver's seat, slotted the key into the ignition and fired up the sluggish-sounding 2.4 litre diesel engine. He reversed carefully out of the tight parking space, then drove up to the centre of Puerto Rico close to the bus station, the usual meeting point for safaris.

To be honest, Flynn enjoyed taking out safaris. Not as much as skippering a boat, but it took a creditable second spot. Most tourists visiting the island rarely saw its stunning interior and Flynn felt honoured to be able to drive up into the mountains to show people exactly how fantastic it was. The mix of lush valleys, sleepy villages, rough peaks and fabulous views all interconnected by dusty trails, often clinging to the edges of dramatic vertical drops, always drew awed gasps of appreciation from the clients.

As he drove, his spirits began to lift.

Maybe today would turn out to be a good day. Having to concentrate on something entirely different from the fates of Gill,
Lady Faye
and himself was a good distraction after a couple of days in a bottle, trying to work out exactly in which direction to travel, metaphorically speaking.

The options were limited, but they still gave him a headache.

Maybe a day of not dwelling on things would clear his mind.

As he pulled up at the meeting point, things definitely took a turn for the positive. Lounging idly by the roadside were his two passengers. Female, early twenties, dressed in hardly anything, legs on display, tummies showing . . . Flynn's mind flashed to a grainy image of three in a bed. Suddenly he regretted the lack of a wash and a shave, though as he caught a glimpse of himself in the rear view mirror, he thought he looked like a rakish tomcat, especially when he flashed his most charming smile and leapt athletically out of the Nissan.

‘Ladieees!' he beamed and approached them, rubbing his hands together and adopting his best lounge lizard look. ‘I take it you are waiting for the arrival of the Castle Tours Jeep Safari?'

They shared a secret glance with each other, giggled, and tiptoed towards him. Flynn knew that a triple-whammer was not out of the question. Already he had the day mapped out in his mind. An exciting safari, lots of shrieks from the rear, lunch at a romantic hillside restaurant, then back down through the hills to an unused, but still flowing, mountain water irrigation channel where they could strip down and bathe. After that back down through the hills to a bar in Maspalomas for a few drinks, a drop-off back here and make arrangements for a meet-up later in a beach bar. Shelling peas, he thought.

‘My boss says you asked for me specifically,' Flynn said over his shoulder as he gunned the Nissan out of Puerto Rico towards Puerto Mogan. The wind blew warmly and the two girls in the back of the vehicle clung to anything they could as Flynn flung it around the tight bends. Already their hair was everywhere, blowing in the wind; although they fought desperately with it, the battle was already lost. Hairstyles were the first casualty of any jeep safari. Flynn's voice was lost in a combination of the wind and a double scream from the girls as he took a corner too quickly, both lost their grip and slid down the bench seat. It felt like a dangerous manoeuvre, but Flynn knew exactly what he was doing. No one got hurt on his safaris. He concentrated on his driving, feeling undeniably happier.