‘ Hey, you know him?’
‘ You could say that. The guy next to him is Sir Harry McNamara, ex-MP.’
‘ But we can’t get a make on the last one of the group.’
‘ I know who he is. He’s called Ronnie Conroy. Into everything that makes money illegally. Once ran a surveillance on him about four years ago when I was on RCS… it got nowhere. Just seemed he knew everything we were going to do.’
Henry looked up, his eyes suddenly alert.
‘ He was suspected of dealing in guns, selling them to the London underworld and also out of the country — to Africa, I think. Now I know why we got no result!’ His eyes met Donaldson’s. ‘Corruption. The best fucking police unit in the country is corrupt and it does deals with criminals. It protects them with information about police operations, and fuck knows what else it gets up to. Karl, I have something to tell you which may go some way to explaining why I’ve been such a bad-tempered git.’
‘ What about Kate? Perhaps you should tell her.’ That was Donaldson’s suggestion after he had listened to Henry’s story — which included everything that had happened — and they had discussed it for a while. The American was clearly shocked by what he had heard.
It was an idea that did not go down well with Henry.
‘ No. It’d be the final straw for her. I just feel that I need to fight this without her knowing.’
‘ Does she have to be told all the gory details?’ Karl said delicately. ‘You may need her support with this. She’s not a fool, Henry. It might be a rough ride, but you’d make it. You two are very strong now.’
‘ No.’ Henry was adamant.
‘ Fine… but what do we do now?’
‘ We?’
Donaldson nodded. ‘Yes, we. I’m involved in this from the Sam Dawber point of view. Karen can help out, too. She won’t tell Kate anything — it’d be cop business. But I do know something, Henry old pal — you can’t handle this alone. No way. You need help if you’re going to fight it.’
Henry gazed at his fingernails, wondering where he should begin.
‘ Hang on a sec!’ he said to Donaldson, remembering something. He leapt from the sofa and rushed through the house and out to his car, from which he grabbed the package Annie Luton had given him. He ran back to Donaldson.
‘ They want this lot for some reason,’ he told the American. ‘They even went as far as searching Derek Luton’s house but failed to find it. Maybe there’s something useful here.’ He wasn’t particularly hopeful but nevertheless tipped the contents out onto the coffee table.
There was a lot of dross which he quickly sorted through and discarded. ‘Degsy left me a note the night he was murdered, asking me to come and see him. I didn’t get it till too late. I wonder if…’ He found four statements which had been crumpled up and straightened out. They were photocopies, not originals. Henry ran his hand over them to flatten them. ‘These are recent,’ he said, noticing the dates. ‘Last Sunday.’
There were yellow highlight lines over certain areas in all the statements. A quick glance confirmed to Henry that they were all statements taken in connection with the armed robbery in Fleetwood which had preceded the massacre in the newsagents. The highlighted areas included the time of the robbery, and descriptions of the people involved. Question marks, also in highlighter, had been placed in the margins. Henry noted that the officer taking the statement was DS Tattersall, accompanied by DC Luton.
The two detectives perused the statements.
‘ Henry, I don’t know what this means,’ the American admitted.
The Detective Sergeant’s brow was deeply furrowed. ‘Nor me. These are photocopies of the original handwritten statements. They would have been subsequently typed up.’ Henry was thinking out loud. His eyes went to the statements again. Then something clicked. ‘When I was at the scene of the murder last Saturday night, Derek told me that the gang had pulled an earlier robbery in Fleetwood. He mentioned a time.’ Henry willed himself to recall the conversation. It came to him. ‘Seven-ten, seven-fifteen.’
‘ And these statements highlight those times,’ Donaldson observed.
‘ Yeah, but why?’
Donaldson shrugged and pursed his lips.
‘ And why the question marks in the margins?’ Henry nagged.
‘ Maybe your dead pal found something out,’ Karl suggested. ‘Such as these statements having been altered at some stage. These are probably his highlights, marking the areas which’ve been changed.’
‘ And Derek got caught finding this out.’
‘ And it worried someone bad enough to put a bullet through his head.’
‘ No,’ said Henry firmly. ‘I can’t believe this. I don’t want to believe it.’
‘ Henry, buddy, from what you’ve told me, and from what I can gather, we are dealing with ruthless people here. They will do anything to stop those who get in their way.’
‘ Even murder a cop?’
‘ What about the cop in the newsagents? How come he died?’
‘ Rogue. Loner. Guy thought he was Dirty Harry…’ Henry’s thoughts turned to Siobhan and her assertion that Geoff Driffield had come on duty alone and disappeared alone. Yet the books he had seen at the NWOCS — the duty states, the radio book and the firearms book — showed he had come on with four other people. The four Henry had encountered not very long ago.
‘ Or did he get set up too?’ Donaldson said presciently.
Silence. The words hung in the conservatory air.
‘ Let’s apply some creative thinking here, Henry,’ the FBI man said assertively. ‘I know it could be well off the mark, but have a listen to this: Geoff Driffield thought he was going on a stake-out to catch a gang of armed robbers. He found himself alone in a shop, having been told that the gang would strike there that night. He was kitted out and tooled up. Maybe it wasn’t unusual for him to be alone, and so he suspected nothing. Meanwhile, his four colleagues dress up as this gang and hit the shop and kill Geoff Driffield and any other poor son of a bitch who happens to be there. What they don’t plan for is the real gang robbing a shop in Fleetwood eight miles north, and they’ve gotta do some real fancy footwork to make it look like the gang did both jobs. It was their intention to frame this gang anyway, to blame them for Driffield’s murder… I’m just thinking out loud, you understand.’
‘ No, can’t be.’
‘ Sit back, think it through. Even on the night of the shootings, as you told me, you were sceptical about the two crimes having been committed by the same gang. Even then, you had doubts. Now does it seem that, maybe, just maybe, your first reaction was the right one?’
Henry acknowledged this with a reluctant, ‘Yes.’
‘ You’re dealing with a very violent, nasty cabal here who have gone out of control and who will do anything necessary to achieve their own aims.’
Henry stared into space. ‘And not only that,’ he said, ‘I think that Fanshaw-Bayley and Guthrie are involved too.’ Henry couldn’t shake the memory of FB and Morton together, colluding, conspiring to set him up. He felt physically sick. ‘Which means that the top detective in this force is corrupt. Where does it end, Karl?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Where do I go from here?’
‘ I have an idea,’ Donaldson said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was approaching 3.30 p.m. by the time Henry returned to work. Technically his lunch-break should have been only three-quarters of an hour long, but he couldn’t care less about that. Being caught out for taking a long lunch was way down on his worry list.
He found a tight space for his car in the almost overflowing car park at the rear of the police station.
Hoping that none of the NWOCS spotted him, he jogged down the rear yard with the carrier bag Annie Luton had given him in his hand. Once inside he opted for the stairs in preference to the lift and climbed them slowly,
