The telephone call the day before from Billy Crane had come unexpectedly. Tersely, Crane had instructed Loz to pick him up from Los Rodeos Airport in the north of the island where he had just landed from Madrid. Loz drove there straight away in the Ssang Yong.
Crane looked very tired, had little to say and indulged in no small talk until Loz said conversationally, ‘Had a wee bit of a problem while you were gone, but I’ve sorted it.’
‘ Oh?’ Crane looked stone-face at Loz.
‘ A detective from England came nosing around — a woman.’
Instantly alert, Crane said, ‘When, exactly?’ thinking the cops had moved damn quick to be sniffing around Tenerife already. ‘Two weeks ago, something like that.’
Crane relaxed a little. That was before the robbery, but after the killings in Blackpool. ‘What did she want?’
‘ She didn’t come to see you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Came to see that ex-cop, Gillrow. Something to do with a guy who’d been wasted in Blackpool… can’t remember his name.’
‘ Malcolm Fitch,’ whispered Crane, more to himself than to Loz.
‘ Yeah, that’s the name. He used to be one of Gillrow’s snouts, apparently.’
‘ What did he tell her?’
‘ Nothing, other than to piss off out of it, but he came simpering around to me, shitting bricks about it.’
‘ And?’
‘ As you weren’t here, I sorted it.’
Crane examined Loz’s profile. ‘Sorted it? What does that mean?’
‘ Oh, nothing much — just put the frighteners up her.’
‘ How?’ Crane’s nostrils flared.
‘ Gave her a bit of a slapping and told her to back off — but tactfully, like. Y’know, I wasn’t specific, just made sure she knew what I meant.’ He did not care to admit the truth of the matter in that the slapping had not gone quite as planned and the tables had been turned.
‘ Good, good, well done.’ Crane patted his shoulder. Loz smiled, thinking he had done well. Maybe he had wormed his way back into Crane’s good books.
‘ What have you been up to?’ Loz enquired now that Crane seemed to have chilled out.
‘ This and that,’ he said vaguely.
They drove on in silence for a while until Crane could stand it no longer. He stretched. ‘I could do with a leak. Pull off here, will you? Too much to drink on the plane.’ He pointed to a junction which led up to San Isidro.
Unsuspecting, Loz hung a right, looped off the highway and stopped in an appropriate place. Crane got out, saying, ‘Have a smoke, if you want. I think this’ll be a long one.’ He walked down a slight, rocky incline where he urinated on some bushes that looked like they need the liquid. Behind, Loz leaned against the high vehicle and lit up.
Crane, having finished, came back up the gradient to the car and stood next to Loz for a moment before punching him as hard as he could in the belly. The cigarette shot out of Loz’s lips like a small rocket and he doubled up as the breath whooshed out of him. Crane followed that up with a couple of fist blows to the side of the head which felled him. Then Crane dragged him back to his feet, pinned him against the side of the car and growled, ‘You stupid fucker! You don’t have the sense you were born with, do you? You’ve alerted the cops and warned ‘em off Warned ‘em off! You don’t do that to the cops — they just come back mob-handed, dickhead.’ He drove his knee up into Loz’s groin. A scream of pain came out, but Crane did not let him go, slamming him hard against the car. ‘You have no conception of what you’ve done, have you?’
‘ Billy, why? What’s going on?’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know.’
‘ I’ll tell you, shall I? That fucking girl and her stupid boy friend who lost me fifty grand got taught a lesson. I did ‘em both in. At the same time I did a personal one on another guy who’d caused me grief previously — Malcolm Fitch. Now I’m back having just pulled the biggest fucking all-cash job ever — in which eight people got killed and I walked away with twenty million — and the last thing I want is cops. Does that make sense to you? I’m probably the most wanted fucker in Europe at this moment in time. The only reason I don’t fucking kill you now is that I need you to do something for me. Do you think you can?’
‘ Yeah, yeah, whatever…’
But Crane had not finished his assault. In a final spasm of rage, he head-butted Loz who crumpled to the ground like a sack.
So now here he was, battered and bruised once more, still looking after Nero and keeping an eye on the business while Crane had done a runner to lie low in La Gomera. His boss had left strict instructions for Loz, to inform him immediately if any cops turned up sniffing around, to get some goons to watch the ferry terminal at Los Cristianos for signs of any cops, Spanish or English, and to keep things ticking over — and not to do anything stupid or thoughtless! Crane had said he would always be on the end of a mobile, but just in case he couldn’t be contacted that way, Loz had to e-mail him from the office at Uncle B’s.
The instructions had concluded with an ominous warning for Loz. Since divulging his crimes to him, Crane had had serious misgivings; Loz was a weak and stupid man, wide open to temptation. A liability.
‘ Let me make something very clear to you, old mate,’ Crane said, his eyes never once leaving Loz’s. ‘You know some major shit about me
… am I right?’
Loz swallowed what felt like a rock and nodded dumbly.
Crane spoke the next words slowly, forming them with exaggerated movements of his lips. ‘Don’t do anything you might regret.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Otherwise you are dead — and no-one’ll ever find your body, unless they analyse what comes out of a lion’s arse-hole. Understand?’ he whispered.
But Loz had had enough of the other man pushing him round, beating him up when he felt like it, shoving his hand into Nero’s cage, treating him like a piece of shit. Enough was enough. A man can only take so much. He had his dignity, his basic human rights and they had been well violated. If he, Loz, could handle things just right, there would be nothing to worry about.
‘ This is how it stands.’ Henry was addressing FB and Rupert Davison, though his eyes continually strayed to the latter. Danny sat at the back of the office, looking supportive1y at Henry. ‘We have ascertained by means of the tachograph fitted to the security van that the robbery took place on Lancaster Services on the M6, southbound. A search of the car park found blood on the tarmac and this has since been matched to one of the victims. No witnesses have yet been found, probably because there was a row of builders’ portacabins outside the services themselves which obscured views from the shops across the lorry park.
‘ At the scene of the shooting at the White Lund industrial estate in Morecambe, the forensic people — who have worked their backsides off for us — have matched blood found on two sets of overalls found there with all four of the dead security guards. We can be sure, therefore, that the people found dead at the warehouse are the ones who committed the robbery and murdered the guards. This is further confirmed by the guns found there, too. Ballistic matches have been made with the bullets found in the bodies of the security guards. The owner of the warehouse, a very dodgy importer, who, incidentally, reported the job, hasn’t been very helpful yet, but we’re keeping up the pressure on him. He’ll crack, but I don’t think he was involved directly with the robbery or the shooting afterwards.’
‘ Conclusions so far?’ FB interrupted.
‘ That the robbers had a falling-out over the division of the money, and one or more of them got away with it.’ Henry took a breath. ‘We’ve had some interesting work done by the financial and intelligence analysts, which I’ve just received from Danny. Don Smith, one of the dead villains in the warehouse, seems to have been pretty careless up to a point. We have records of several recent mobile-phone calls to a number in Tenerife and also spending on his credit card for a flight to Tenerife from Manchester and back via Lisbon and Paris.’
‘ Why do you say up to a point?’ FB asked.
‘ Because we haven’t managed to trace his home address yet. The address for his credit cards and telephones relate to a rented office in Blackpool, which is scrupulously clean, a shell,’ Henry explained. ‘What is obvious, therefore, is that a robbery has taken place, there’s been a fall-out big style between the offenders, an OK-corral-style gunfight, and the survivors have skedaddled with the dosh — and these are the people we need to nail.’
