‘What happened?’ Flynn ignored the plea. ‘Why did your men come after Boone?’
‘They are not my men.’
‘Who gives a fuck whose men they are?’ He stepped across the room, towering over Aleef, who pressed himself back against the wall. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Boone… I hired him on behalf of someone else, to take someone up to the Canary Islands.’
Flynn held up a hand. ‘Just… just stop there. Tell me straight or I’ll get very upset with you. Straight is the only way you have any chance of surviving.’
‘I’m just a middleman,’ he wailed.
‘So you keep telling me.’ Flynn shoved the muzzle of the Glock into Aleef’s inner right thigh, angled it at forty-five degrees against the muscle. ‘Femoral artery,’ he said, looking directly into Aleef’s tearful eyes. ‘I shoot, you’ll bleed to death within minutes. You’ll feel your life being sucked out of you. Do you want that? Are you a religious man?’ Flynn could smell the sweat of fear pulsating from Aleef. ‘No, I didn’t think so, except when it suits, I’ll bet. Going to heaven’s not on your agenda, is it?’
‘You’ll kill me anyway, just like you killed them.’
‘I saw those men kill my friend, that’s the difference here. Then again, if I find out you sent them…’
‘I didn’t,’ he blabbered. ‘I swear I did not…’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Boone came back for more money, to my office. He’d found out who the passenger was and wanted danger money, plus ten thousand dollars extra, or he would be going to the police.’
‘And…?’
‘I could not afford that, but that wasn’t the problem. His problem was that one of those men — ’ he pointed to the heap of bodies in the living room — ‘was in the back office, listening. Boone only just got out of my office alive and they all went after him.’
‘So who are those men? Who do they work for?’
Aleef shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m just a middleman. I was asked to get a man from A to B and I found Boone to do it for me. I knew he took people and drugs, and his reputation was as good as any other. He just got greedy.’
‘Where is your office?’
‘Why?’
Flynn screwed the muzzle of the gun harder into Aleef’s thigh.
‘Just… just down the street.’
‘How much money do you have stashed away there?’
‘Why?’
‘If you ask why again, I’ll just shoot you.’
‘Forty thousand, mixed currencies, sterling, dollars, local,’ Aleef gabbled quickly.
‘That’ll do nicely.’
‘What? You’re going to steal from me?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Every last sou, you bastard.’ Flynn stood upright and gestured with the Glock. ‘Up… lead the way… do anything stupid and I’ll blow your spine apart.’
‘Y-you’re going to steal from me?’
‘Your money or your life… so tell me, who did those guys work for?’
Aleef struggled to his feet. ‘Al-Qaeda, I suppose.’
Flynn flicked open his mobile phone and redialled Henry Christie’s number.
Karl Donaldson reached Knutsford services on the M6 with tiredness overwhelming him. He pulled off the motorway and bought himself a large black coffee laced with sugar, and a doughnut, hoping the sugar rush would push him onwards.
It hit his system quickly, probably giving a greater high than a bag of street-bought cocaine could have done. He jumped into the Jeep and was on the motorway a minute later, not really knowing what he was setting out to achieve.
Henry Christie was a dyed in the wool Rolling Stones fan. His first memory of the group was grainy black and white TV pictures of them on 60s’ programmes such as Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops. He’d been hooked by their music and shenanigans since about the age of six and been with them ever since, his constant companions through all his own ups and downs, loves and losses. The cover of their mid-seventies album, It’s Only Rock and Roll, featured a painting of the Stones looking like they’d just staggered out of a night club at four in the morning, the worse for wear from every excess imaginable.
Which is how Henry felt when, two hours later, he and Rik emerged from the interview room after a marathon with a newly identified sex offender, Paul Driver, a police constable who used the position and freedom of movement that came with being a patrol officer to stalk, hunt, overpower and rape numerous women. His victims, all chosen at random, lone females walking home, had been subjected to brutal, sustained, degrading, terrifying attacks that would scar them for life.
Up until Henry inheriting the inquiry, only three victims were known about. Driver divulged fourteen more, all of them probably too scared to come forward. Nine of them in the Swindon area of Wiltshire.
Henry knew there would be even more.
Driver had been a cunning predator and had prepared himself for each attack in terms of clothing, a hood, gloves and even condoms. The detectives learned that he timed his attacks to take place every four weeks, to coincide with his shift system, the week when he would be on nights.
He used the correspondence run from Poulton to Blackpool in the early part of the week to search for victims. These were at times when the police, generally, were less busy and he could use his down time to attack — but not in his own division, always in Blackpool.
The reason why Natalie’s attack had been out of sequence was that Driver had volunteered to cover for a colleague that night.
Driver had still done the correspondence run, but it hadn’t been on his agenda to commit a crime that night.
He still took the opportunity to have a cruise around Blackpool and in so doing had encountered Natalie sitting on a kerb, obviously upset, bawling her eyes out, wiping away the tears with her silk scarf.
Driver stopped like a cop should have done.
His usual MO was to spot potential victims, park up in the plain car, get out of his uniform — under which he wore his anti-forensic clothing — pull on his gloves and mask, stalk, then drag the girl away to rape her.
But Natalie was out of sequence, unplanned, but impossible to turn down.
‘I wasn’t going to do anything, just be a good cop,’ he told Henry and Rik. ‘Help her, take her home… let comms know what I was doing… as you would, but once she was in the car, it all changed and I knew I had to have her.’
Henry said, ‘What did she say to you?’
He blew out his cheeks. ‘That she’d fallen out with her boyfriend, even after she’d had sex with him, and an older man, too… and let him watch… Jeez, that news went straight to my cock!’ He laughed perversely. ‘Even cut his hair for him,’ he added.
Henry saw Rik grip the edge of the table. Henry touched his arm.
‘Then it was a haze. Always is — and next thing I knew, I was holding her down and I’d done it and she was squirming. Problem was she knew I was a cop. I was still in uniform. I was in a cop car. I mean, how brilliant was that? She was in the car, she was wearing a skirt right up to her fanny, and she expected me not to do anything?’ Driver’s voice was incredulous.
‘You are a police officer,’ Henry said stonily.
‘And…?’
‘I think you know the “and”.’
‘Anyhow,’ Driver stretched and screwed up his face, ‘I had to kill her, just self-protection, really. Couldn’t afford for her to go blabbing. The others, you see, never knew I was a cop, but she did. She shouldn’t have been there. It was all her fault,’ he rationalized, and if Henry hadn’t realized it before, he realized it at that point: he was in the presence of a psychopath who would never legally set foot outside some sort of secure unit for the rest of his life. If Henry did his job right — and that’s what he fully intended to do.
