officers and support staff — for the enquiry. He stopped in the yellow hatch markings outside the front door and abandoned the dirty Mondeo there. Inside he went directly to the main room which was being used for the incident. Danny and several others were working away, heads buried in masses of paper.
‘ Danny,’ he called across the room. ‘Got a minute? Pretty urgent.’
She grimaced and held her hands wide as if to say, ‘I am busy, you know.’
‘ Aren’t we all,’ he said. ‘Come on,’ and gestured her out.
‘ OK, boss,’ she said with resignation.
‘ And bring everything,’ he instructed as an afterthought — although he wasn’t specific as to what ‘everything’ actually meant. He ducked out of the room and went to the one he had claimed as his office, throwing his jacket over a chair and helping himself to a coffee from the filter machine. He thudded down into his chair, mind churning.
There was a light knock and Danny entered, carrying a few sheets of printed paper. She clicked the door lock behind her and leaned against the door, adopting a provocative pose.
‘ If you were any sort of boss,’ she pouted, ‘we’d be screwing on that desktop right now.’
Henry perused her from head to toe. His teeth grated together with the memory of her body. He shifted uncomfortably to allow a surge of blood to pass into his loins.
‘ I only have to look at you to get a hard on,’ he said.
‘ And I only have to look at you to want you inside me.’ Breathless.
Henry stood up slowly, maintaining eye-contact with her. He walked towards her. She raised her chin, exposing her long neck, looking down her nose at him with a ‘let’s do it now’ expression.
He stopped inches away from her, his fingers at his trouser fly. Then, unable to maintain the charade, he burst out giggling. She did the same.
There was no way either of them would compromise themselves or their jobs by doing anything so foolish as frolicking in the major incident room. It would have been Henry’s luck to have FB walk in just as he was table- ending Danny across one of the HOLMES consoles.
Danny flicked open the door lock. ‘You look worried,’ she remarked.
He returned to his chair and loosened his tie, about to speak.
‘ Oh, by the way,’ she said before he could begin, ‘FB said he’d be here in an hour for a rundown. To quote a phrase, he said, in typical FB terms, “I’ll want to know when he intends making an arrest and how he intends getting back that twenty million quid — and if he can’t tell me, he might as well pick up his P45 on the way out”.’ Danny mimicked FB’s voice and manner with uncanny accuracy.
Henry drew a breath. He knew FB was going to show at some time that day, having previously made the arrangement with him. ‘We’d better be in a position to tell him something.’
With a flourish, Danny held up the pieces of paper she had brought with her. ‘Maybe these will help.’ She came over to the desk and placed all but one of them carefully in front of him. She watched him as he read.
‘ The stuff from the financial analysts,’ he said, concentrating.
Danny could not keep a wide smile from her face as she enjoyed the jittery feeling in her tummy she got from being with Henry. It was something she had only ever experienced once before — and not with Jack Sands, her previous lover. It was a sensation which told her she was deeply, ecstatically in love.
She closed her eyes, shook her head and opened them again. The feeling had not gone away.
Danny had been poached by Henry to act as the office manager in the MIR, effectively removing her from the triple murder at Blackpool. But because she was well into that, she was also the main liaison between the two enquiries because of the common denominator: Billy Crane.
Over the previous two days she and Henry had worked very closely together, doing sixteen-hour shifts. At the end of each one they had raced — discreetly — back to her house where they had made frantic love. Henry had then gone home to sleep with Kate, dropping exhausted into the marital bed, leaving Danny alone and unhappy.
Maybe once the investigation was over, something would come of the relationship, Danny hoped, but had a horrible premonition it would all end in tears — hers. She wanted Henry badly, so badly she was prepared to live through a difficult separation and divorce to get him. But did he love her enough to commit this sacrifice? There had been occasions during their lovemaking when he had seemed on the verge of saying the three little words, but held back. She was not going to push him, but desperately wanted to hear them whispered in her ear. As soon as the time was right, they needed to sit down and discuss things before the whole scenario blew up in their faces. Danny did not want to enter a difficult relationship without payback.
Henry looked up at her. ‘These are very interesting,’ he remarked. No doubt about it, he thought, financial analysts can make an investigation.
‘ And here’s another one which may be of interest to you.’ She handed him the other sheet of facts and figures, which he started to read. ‘All about Barney Gillrow.’
‘ Wow — you have been busy.’
‘ Yes, I have, and so have the analysts.’
Henry looked across the desk, thinking Danielle Louise Furness was the most breathtakingly beautiful woman he had ever known. Her eyes were to die for. Her lips needed kissing and biting every day without fail. She needed to be made love to frequently. She had to be his.
‘ Remember when we first made love?’ he asked.
She blushed endearingly. ‘How could I forget?’ she said softly.
‘ I was going to tell you something when you very rudely interrupted me by forcing me to make love to you again.’
‘ Oh, I’m sooo sorry,’ she said. ‘What was it?’
‘ I-,’ he began and stopped abruptly when the office door burst open and FB marched in, trumpeting, ‘Right, Henry, come on. What the hell’s going on? Don’t give me any tactical crap. Give me strategy — now. I want the big picture.’
Behind him stood Rupert Davison.
Tenerife was roasting. Loz was sitting under a sunshade on the private roof terrace of Uncle B’s English Bar and Disco, a large whisky in his good hand. He groaned, winced and opened his mouth to feel the loose teeth at the front of his lower jaw. ‘Shit,’ he muttered angrily. He gingerly touched the bridge of his nose which had a bruise right across it, then laid a fingertip gently on the puffed-up left eye, which was swollen and weeping. They were all new injuries to add to the ones which had only just healed up from his previous battering.
He necked the whisky with one gulp and slammed the glass down on the table. Holding his breath against the pain, he unravelled the bandage from his left hand, the one Nero had snacked on. It was a mess, looked infected, greenish. There was a musty stench to it which worried Loz, as did the gradual blackening of his little finger.
In the cage at the other end of the roof, Nero paced relentlessly. Loz stood up and walked over to him. As his previous weapon, the bamboo pole, now layout of reach on the floor of the cage, Loz picked up a broom-handle and shoved it through the mesh, trying to jab at Nero’s flank as the beast walked past. Nero was wise now, however, and easily swerved away with a snarl and clawed the stick. Loz continued to prod and tease, a look of sheer hatred on his face.
‘ Yeah, you heap of crap, nothing you can do now, is there, now your master isn’t here to help you.’ He rammed the stick at Nero’s face; the lion deflected it with a big paw. ‘Look what he’s done to me again.’ Loz pointed at his own face. ‘Bastard. If he thinks I’m looking after you, he’s fucking well wrong. You can starve for all I care, you smelly, mangy piece of meat.’
Loz, tired of the abuse, flicked two good fingers up at Nero and went back to the table.
On it, besides the whisky, was a whole sheaf of British newspapers, going back over the last two days. He picked up a copy of the Mail and read the headlines for the tenth time.?20 MILLION STOLEN: EIGHT DEAD they proclaimed. MASSIVE POLICE HUNT.
The story dominated the whole of the first three pages and contained a photograph of the officer leading the enquiry, DI Henry Christie, and lots of bland quotes from him. There were articles about gangland, the Russian Mafia and suggestions of a link to an earlier multiple killing in Blackpool. A huge reward had been posted by the banks — ?200,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction etc.
Loz laid the paper out on the table…
