Nightmare City

Chapter Twenty

There was an air of jubilation in the murder incident room next day when Tony Morton announced that all three men arrested yesterday were going to be charged with the murder of Geoff Driffield and the other people in the newsagents. The one they had failed to arrest would be circulated as wanted.

In just one week they had a major result, and all the detectives and uniformed police officers involved in the case were invited to a celebration that evening in the club upstairs. 5 p.m. start. It would be a long, boozy evening.

Henry experienced a certain degree of satisfaction. He had been instrumental in the arrest of the gang leader, Anderson, and had nearly died for his trouble.

As the officers cleared the room, Henry caught sight of Siobhan talking earnestly to Tony Morton, occasionally glancing across at him. She looked upset, on the verge of tears. Henry wondered if she’d had some distressing news or something. He did not even begin to think she could be upset about last night and the coitus interruptus. He had reflected on her behaviour and concluded he did not really blame her

… but on the other hand she had said some nasty things. Threats, almost.

She and Morton walked out of the incident room towards the office he had been allocated for the duration of the investigation.

Henry went to the CID office and sat at his desk where he re-read a photocopy of the post-it note Derek had left for him on the night of his brutal murder. What the hell did he want to see me for? Henry asked himself. Was it the reason why he was murdered? Henry could only speculate. The note was bare and said little…

His mind wandered back to the previous evening when he had called in to see Annie Luton on his way home. She had given him a whole package of work-related stuff that Derek had taken home over a period of time. It was all in a carrier bag.

‘ There’s everything there he ever brought home in relation to work,’ Annie said. ‘I’ve been round the house from top to bottom, gathering all this together. It was all over the show… he was so untidy. I even found some under our bed.’ Her eyes moistened as she talked.

Henry glanced casually at the contents. None of it seemed to be of major importance. Copies of reports, statements… the type of bumf most young officers probably had at home. Henry had been like that years ago. Taking work home. Feeling the need to write up reports off-duty so he could spend more time out on the streets when on-duty. Yeah, he could relate to that.

These days he took nothing home.

He had spent about half an hour with Annie. She was very rational and together, though a desperate and tragic figure. Henry saw resilience in her and guessed that sooner rather than later her life would be back on track.

He left with a hopeful, positive feeling inside him. The carrier bag she had given him was dumped on the back seat of his car, forgotten.

Then he went home to Kate.

He could hardly bring himself to look at her, so ashamed was he of his actions with Siobhan. Did Kate pick up his body language? Could she see right through him? Did she intuitively know that not long before, he had literally been on the verge of making love to another woman?

Henry would not have been surprised.

Wives were so perceptive about their husbands’ every little transgression.

Thankfully she seemed far more concerned with his injuries and getting him into a hot, soothing Radox bath and subsequently to bed. She fussed around him like a mother hen, or at least someone who cared very deeply for him and to whom his wellbeing was her main concern. Inside, he boiled angrily with himself whilst on the outside he revelled in the blue water and the glass of Jack Daniel’s which Kate placed in his hand as he lay back and soaked his soul.

He was beginning to think he had the makings of a serial adulterer, but maybe he was exaggerating the problem.

His daughters, Jenny and Leanne, were another reason for this self loathing. With the soap bubbles covering his rude parts, they sat on their knees next to the bath, whilst Kate took a back seat on the lid of the loo, and listened wide-eyed at the story of his day, culminating in him being shot and the fight in the clothing displays of M amp; S. He proudly displayed his chest-wound for them to see. It had turned the colour of black grapes. He also carefully removed the bandage on his ear to show them how chewed it was.

He was their hero and although he knew the truth — he had been completely terrified most of the time — he never revealed it to them. Their dad. The hero.

The serial adulterer.

Kate ushered them out of the bathroom after the story.

She sat back on the loo, looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘I think you’ve got something to tell me.’

The words hit Henry harder than the bullet.

‘ How did you know?’

Were there claw-marks down his back he hadn’t realised Siobhan had inflicted on him? Teeth-marks around his foreskin?

‘ The fact you were in Lancaster for one thing. Then you had a gun. And you were arresting people for that multiple killing job. You’ve already moved onto, what’s it called, North-West Crime something or other?’

‘ North-West Organised Crime Squad,’ he corrected her, trying to cover the relief in his voice. ‘No, I’ve just been helping them out, that’s all, so they can look at me and I can look at them. See if we like each other.’ He went on to explain the possibility of a six-month secondment, followed possibly by a full transfer, and how right he thought the job was for him.

He didn’t mention Siobhan at all.

‘ OK,’ Kate said, tilting her head. ‘If that’s what you want — chasing criminals with guns all over the place, fine by me. If you’re happy at your work, I’ll be behind you. Just please don’t let it get in the way of us this time, Henry. That’s all I ask.’

‘ I won’t,’ he promised meekly.

And once again, Kate, his wonderful, beautiful wife, had surprised him with her generosity. And through no fault of her own, made him feel like an absolute bastard.

Maybe that’s my lot in life, he’d reasoned.

Henry was brought bang into the present as the phone went, interrupting his recall. It was Karl Donaldson.

‘ Karl, how you doin’?

‘ OK, buddy,’ Donaldson said, but Henry picked up a bum note in the American’s voice. ‘I need to see you pretty urgently, Henry.’

‘ About what?’

‘ Not over the phone. Face to face. I’m gonna travel up, bring Karen along too. Settin’ off shortly. Looking at four-five hours maybe with traffic and weather. Can you accommodate us?’

‘ Sure, sounds important. Nothing over the phone?’

‘ No clues, bud.’

‘ I’ll see you at home then.’

The phone went dead. Henry hung up, mystified and slightly worried. He had no time to ruminate, however. The phone warbled again.

‘ DS Christie — get up into my office now.’

Rather like Siobhan’s open-handed slap last night, Henry was caught unawares by what happened next.

He meandered down the corridor towards Morton’s office. When he was a few feet away from the door, it opened dramatically and Siobhan burst out, virtually into his arms. Tears were streaked down her face and she was heaving with loud, gut-wrenching sobs. She looked up at Henry and reacted instantly as though she had walked into the monster from hell.

‘ Get off me, get off me!’ she screamed, making a great show of disentangling herself from him. She was not entangled by any stretch of the imagination. She drew back, slapping the air like she was trying to free herself from Spiderman’s web. ‘Leave me alone. You’ve done enough damage.’

‘ Siobhan!’ Henry was wrong-footed completely. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘ You bastard! Don’t come near me again.’

With that she ducked to one side, swept past him and scurried off down the corridor towards the ladies toilets. Henry watched her retreating back with shock. He turned. Tony Morton was standing in the doorway of his temporary office.

‘ What was all that about?’ Henry asked, nonplussed.

Morton said nothing for a moment, but surveyed Henry with a calculating look which made him shiver.

‘ Come in and sit down.’

Morton stayed by the door. Henry slid by him into the office. He sat down, intertwining his fingers on his lap in a gesture of submission.

Morton closed the door softly and walked to his seat behind the desk, putting a large space between him and the Detective Sergeant and peering down at him from a greater height. Henry could not help but be awed by the old-fashioned power psychology. It always worked on him.

What the hell was going on?

Morton did not speak for a few moments, but allowed Henry to savour the atmosphere.

Then he dropped the bomb.

‘ DC Robson claims that you have sexually harassed her and this has culminated in a serious sexual assault. Namely rape.’

Three items appeared on Karl Donaldson’s desk just as he was in the process of packing his briefcase.

The first was from Madeira and had come by DHL. It was the sample of human tissue taken from under Sam Dawber’s fingernails. It was in an airtight container, with Santana’s signature across the seal as well as the doctor’s who had performed the post mortem.

The next item was a statement from an FBI scientist which contained the DNA profile resulting from the sample taken from under Sam’s nails at the second autopsy. There was a computer print-out attached which meant nothing to Donaldson. It went on to say that the FBI DNA database had been searched, but no match had been made.

He assumed that if he got the police here to DNA test the sample from Madeira, the result would match up with the one from the States.

He slid both items into his desk drawer and locked it.

They would have to wait.

He wanted to get on the road to see Henry, ASAP.

However, the next item caught and held his attention.

It was the photograph of Wayne and Tiger Mayfair taken on their arrival at Madrid Airport a couple of days before. Donaldson had already received a brief written report about the arrival from a field agent out there. They were good quality photographs and Donaldson was pleased by the high resolution. But it was the report which accompanied it that made him sit up. Again, from the same field agent, a guy named Moody, who had been doing a bit of digging. It briefly said that, under assumed names, the Mayfairs had now left Spain en route by air to Paris. The agent had also discovered that they had flown into Madrid from Lisbon.

And into Lisbon from Madeira.

Donaldson looked at the photograph again. Something odd about Tiger Mayfair.

He rooted around his stationery drawer and found a magnifying glass which he held over Tiger’s head.

Yes, there was no mistaking it.

Donaldson laid the photo down and breathed deeply.

Scratch-marks down his left cheek.

Henry stumbled out of Morton’s office with a face of granite and all-pervading waves of cold fear gripping his intestines.

Allegations of sexual harassment, followed by indecent assault and then, possibly, rape, were dreadful to be levelled at anyone. Especially when they were untrue.

And that is what Siobhan had alleged against him.

She had said that from the first moment they’d met, he had constantly made lewd comments to her, sexual jokes and innuendo and he had leered at her virtually all the time. ‘Active mental groping’ was the term used.

She had gone on to tell Morton she had become physically sick as a result of his behaviour, but she felt powerless to do anything about it. After all, he was a Sergeant, she was only a Constable. But above all he was a man.

To Morton she said that Henry had forced her to kiss him at the NWOCS office in King Street when they had been there alone, collecting equipment. He had rubbed his body up against hers but she’d managed to struggle free and tell him not to touch her again. That night, she claimed, she’d gone to bed and cried herself to sleep, petrified at the thought of doing observations with him the following morning in Lancaster.

Things got worse after the shooting incident when, in the casualty department of all places, he had enticed her into the cubicle where he was receiving treatment and exposed himself to her.

It all culminated at King Street, again when they were alone. This time, she alleged, Henry forced her to undress and tried to rape her. He failed to penetrate her and ejaculate because he could not maintain an erection.

She had been terrified. Put through an horrendous ordeal by a man with power.

And now she wanted some action taken against him.

As the story was revealed to Henry, he simply sat there open-mouthed, unable to believe what was being said. It was all nonsense, of course. Both had been willing participants in the engagement until Henry’s head had cleared and he realised how foolish he was being — which was at the point where his very erect penis had brushed up against the lips of WDS Robson’s vagina.

Henry ran quickly through the legal definition of rape in his mind. Only the slightest degree of penetration needed to be proved, neither did the emission of seed have to take place. The other main thread to the offence was the question of consent. Was there true consent to the act of intercourse, or was it obtained by fear, force or fraud? Henry had dealt with enough rapes to know the pitfalls of proving it to a court; Siobhan would struggle to convince a jury she had been raped.

It was the others elements of her allegation which worried him.

Sexual harassment.

Indecent assault.

The former was strongly condemned by the police service and many male officers had lost their jobs because of it; the latter was a serious criminal offence which was often used in place of rape because it was easier to prove. It could lose him his job too — especially if he was in prison.

And I stopped myself from shagging her just to prevent future repercussions, he thought. Now I wish I’d carried on. What the hell was behind this?

Henry calmly relayed his side of the story.

‘ Whatever the truth of the matter,’ Morton said when Henry had concluded, ‘and I don’t suppose we’ll get to it anyway, this is a very serious matter, Henry. Very, very serious.’

‘ I realise that.’

‘ It affects so many others, directly or indirectly — the job, the squad, your wife, kids… God, the effect it could have on them beggars the imagination,’ Morton emphasised, making Henry squirm. ‘Your friends, colleagues. Mud sticks, old lad, even if these allegations prove to be unfounded.’

And wives divorce you.

And friends snub you.

Oh, shit.

‘ But at the moment,’ Morton explained, ‘no one but we three know about this. Maybe there is a solution. Let me have a think about it.’

His mind reeling, Henry made his way back to the comfort zone of his desk and slumped heavily down in the chair. His first reaction had been to find Siobhan and demand of her what the hell she was playing at, but he’d been severely warned against this course of action. Anything which smelled of intimidation or victimisation would be dealt with harshly, Morton had said.

Henry’s thoughts were bleak. He had never considered himself to be a sexual harasser. The notion made his skin crawl. Maybe he always had been, but hadn’t recognised it. Maybe he was so immersed in the sexist white heterosexual culture, he couldn’t see when he was harassing a woman. Could he be one of those men who made his blood boil? Those who constantly touched women, patted their arses, brushed against their tits? Perhaps he was.

Kate!

She would go ballistic. His eyes closed in a shudder of despair.

Two years of getting his marriage back on the straight and narrow. Working hard at it. Putting family first. It had taken a lot of dedication and love.

Once again through his own foolishness it was very likely to come tumbling down around his ears.

How the hell could he keep this quiet?

Just then, his day took a further turn for the worse. In stalked Superintendent Guthrie from the Discipline and Complaints branch.

Henry suddenly felt weaker than alcohol-free lager.

For the second time that day, Henry came out from an interaction with a higher-ranking officer with his head in a spin. Again he had difficulty taking in what was told him. This time things were in his favour, but even so it did not feel like a victory. It simply added to his overall confusion.

Shane Mulcahy had been into the police station earlier and retracted his complaint of assault, saying that everything was his fault. He’d pulled a hidden knife on the detective and the officer had acted in reasonable self-defence. In other words, Shane admitted he deserved what he got — a knee in the bollocks.

And to add weight to the retraction, Superintendent Guthrie said he had checked the custody record and found it backed up Henry’s description of the fight in the cell corridor.

‘ What?’ Henry had said, totally perplexed. ‘You mean the custody record says..?’

‘ That you acted in self-defence, yes.’ The Superintendent winked at Henry. ‘I knew things would work out for you. They always do when it’s a flimsy allegation. So, all I need to do is tie the loose ends up and write the whole unpleasant incident off. And I hope you learn something from the experience.’

‘ I’m sure I shall.’

On leaving the room Henry made his way quickly to the custody office where he looked up the relevant custody record.

It was true.

Eric Taylor had written that he’d observed the tussle between him and Shane, and had entered it onto the custody record.

Except it wasn’t the original entry, as Henry well knew. Because he’d checked the custody record last week and been in despair that firstly he’d forgotten to make an entry himself, and secondly that Eric Taylor did not leave him any space to write something in later.

Henry knew that Taylor was a good custody officer. Very fair in his dealings with prisoners and police officers alike. So why had he changed the entry in Henry’s favour?

Not something Taylor would have done in a million years.

He replaced the custody record binder on the shelf and sauntered back up to the CID office, trying desperately to get a grip on what had happened. He found it impossible and very disturbing.

‘ We need to judge this just right,’ Morton was saying. His audience consisted of Gallagher, Tattersall and Siobhan Robson. ‘Henry’s a dangerous individual because, basically, he’s honest. He might bend the rules to get a conviction, but you can bet it’ll be watertight in the end and will survive even the most ruthless scrutiny. So, people, how do we proceed?’

Gallagher replied, ‘He might be honest, but he’s not stupid. He’ll know when the cards are stacked against him and I’m sure he’ll hold his hands up.’ He laughed.

‘ Siobhan?’ Morton raised his eyebrows to her.

‘ Go straight for him,’ she said in a brittle tone. ‘Lay it on the line. He’ll realise he hasn’t any choice and he’ll stick with us. He’s not stupid, as Gallie says.’ She nodded towards the DI. ‘He doesn’t want to lose his job and his wife.’

There was a knock on the door. ‘Come,’ said Morton. Superintendent Guthrie, Discipline and Complaints, poked his head through the door. He held up a finger. ‘Done and dusted,’ he said.

‘ Thanks, Will,’ Morton said. ‘See you later about it.’

Guthrie closed the door.

Morton clamped his fist tight triumphantly. ‘Right! This will be a difficult time, for us and him. His first reaction may be to go running to someone else and blurt everything out. If he does that, we need to be watertight. Are we?’

‘ I am,’ said Siobhan.

‘ Me too.’ Gallagher.

The laconic Tattersall merely nodded.

‘ Right. Let’s wheel him in, drop a few more bombshells on him, then see where we stand.’

Henry tapped without confidence on Tony Morton’s door. He had been summoned once more, probably, he guessed, to receive an update on the Siobhan affair. ‘Come,’ he heard Morton call out.

Henry pushed the door open, expecting to see only Morton. It knocked him sideways when he firstly saw Siobhan, then Gallagher, then Tattersall, sitting in there too. They were in a semi-circle facing Morton’s desk. At the open end of the semi-circle was an empty chair.

Henry had a quick look round for The Four Horses of the Apocalypse.

Overcoming an urge to run away and hide in a toilet, he entered the room. If he’d had a tail it would have been between his legs. His eyes avoided contact with Siobhan’s; his mouth was arid extra dry. Tattersall stood up and approached Henry. ‘Let me search you.’

‘ Eh?’

‘ You heard.’

Gallagher rose from his seat and without warning he and Tattersall hurled Henry against the wall.

‘ What the fuck’s going on here?’ Henry demanded. He flicked around and tried to pull himself out of their grasp.

Gallagher punched him hard in the chest with the base of his hand.

Henry bent double as the pain from the bullet-wound corkscrewed out through his heart and lungs.

Gallagher and Tattersall hoisted him up against the wall and searched him quickly and expertly. They then manhandled him to the chair and threw him onto it. His arms crossed over his breast and nursed the pain. He looked up at Morton, unable to speak for the moment.

Gallagher seized a handful of Henry’s fine hair and pulled his head back. He looked down at him and said, ‘That is to show you we are not pissing about, Christie.’

The two detectives sat down.

‘ What the fuck’s going on here?’ Henry struggled to say.

Morton took a deep sigh and stared coldly at him before he began sombrely. ‘There are a few things that have been brought to my attention since this morning’s complaint from DC Robson here.’

There was a sheet of paper on the desk top. Morton held it up for Henry to see. His watery eyes found it hard to focus. ‘This a photocopy of the firearms authorisation sheet used by the NWOCS. It clearly shows you booked a firearm out without my signature to authorise it.’ Morton indicated the offending blank space on the form.

‘ But she said,’ he turned hopelessly to face Siobhan, ‘it was OK to do that. That you’d automatically sign the form later.’ He looked at Morton again. Then back to Siobhan. ‘Come on, tell him. I did what you said.’

A warm trickle ran down Henry’s neck. He wiped it and saw blood on his hand. His ear had started bleeding again.

She remained silent, her eyes as cold as ice cubes.

‘ This is fucking outrageous,’ Henry spat, and got to his feet. ‘What the hell is this?’

Tattersall moved quickly, followed by Gallagher. A well-aimed blow to the kidneys from the DS brought Henry to his knees in front of Morton’s desk. Gallagher forced his head onto the desk, holding his cheek to the wooden surface, squelching his features, but allowing him to look up at Morton.

‘ A very serious discipline offence,’ he heard the Chief Superintendent say. Morton’s eyes lifted and looked at Gallagher. ‘Put him back on the chair.’

Two pairs of hands lifted him bodily back and deposited him like dumping a sack of rubbish.

‘ I don’t know what’s going on here, but as soon as I get out of this room every one of you is in deep shit.’

Morton laughed. ‘Henry, you’re splitting my sides. If you do anything like that, I promise you’ll face a charge of rape as well as a civil litigation suit for harassment. Both will stick. That’s a promise too.’

Henry had lost all sense of comprehension. His mind was being blown, like he was on some kind of hallucinogenic drug, and he was adrift on the Sea of Unreality.

‘ How did your D amp; C interview go?’

‘ What’s that gotta do with anything?’ As he was speaking he analysed the question. ‘You!’ he said.

‘ No, not quite,’ Morton said affably. ‘In essence, yes. But in reality — no. You did it, Henry. It was all your work. Bribing that poor custody officer to change the record so it read in your favour. You beat the living shit out of that defenceless young man — what’s he called — Shane. Just so he would retract his statement. All in all, you’ve been a very busy and naughty boy, Henry. What do they call it? Perverting the course of justice.’

‘ I deny it.’

‘ Well, you would, wouldn’t you? But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that we’ — here Morton indicated everyone in the room, including himself — ‘could, if necessary, prove you did. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it? So all in all you’re well and truly stitched up, as they say.

‘ Let’s look at it. Firstly there’s sexual harassment. Then there’s rape, or indecent assault at the very least. And we can find the necessary witnesses if we have to. Then there’s the discipline offence re the firearm. That in itself could lose you your job. Then there’s perverting the course of justice and, of course, planting evidence.’

‘ What the hell are you talking about?’

‘ Those guns found in Anderson’s Shogun. You were left alone with the car for a few short minutes and lo and behold, guns appear. Very neat, wouldn’t you say?’

Henry thought back to the incident. How Siobhan had gone to the toilet, leaving him to start the search of Anderson’s vehicle. And then him finding the guns.

‘ Fucking bad news all this,’ Morton said. ‘Individually they’re horrendous. Put them all together, pal, they’re devastating. You are a very corrupt and perverted individual, and we have done well to unmask you, wouldn’t you say? You will never recover from these allegations professionally or personally, once they start being investigated. What d’you say, Henry? Cat got your tongue?’

‘ I’m not guilty of any of those allegations,’ Henry replied stubbornly to Morton’s prodding.

‘ Doesn’t matter whether you are or not. I mean, I know you’re the cleanest cop in the world. Bet you don’t even have skid-marks on your undies, do you? What matters is that we will make sure that, at the very least, you will lose your job and your private life will go to rat-shit.’ The matter-of-fact way in which Morton spoke the words hit Henry like a hodful of bricks.

A hush descended on the room.

Henry stared past Morton’s left shoulder out of the window where he could see Blackpool Tower, now painted a garish blue colour to promote a fizzy drink. It was raining hard, driving against the glass, obscuring the view, distorting the Tower.

He blinked, brought his vision back to focus and said, ‘Why?’

‘ If you haven’t sussed that out by now,’ said Morton, sounding a little exasperated with him, ‘you’re not the great detective I thought you were.’

‘ Dundaven and Marie Cullen,’ he stated. His brain cells shuffled through the incidents of the last week. ‘Marie Cullen I can see. You have some connection with Harry McNamara and I suppose you’re protecting him because he’s as guilty as fuck. I can only speculate about Dundaven. Must have something to do with the guns. Presumably you’re protecting somebody else and I was getting too close to them, and they — or you didn’t like it.’

‘ By Jove I think he’s got it,’ Morton chortled patronisingly. ‘But that’s enough of the speculation. You don’t need to know anything further, other than you were beginning to worry some people and they needed to be… reassured. Remember when you said a little dickie bird would tell you when you’d gone as far as you could with those enquiries? Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep. It’s me. I am that bird.’

‘ You bastard!’ Henry had a sense of being trapped in a cage.

‘ You should know that certain people want you dead, Henry. I saved your life. You should be thankful to me, not call me names.’

‘ Big deal. What’s to stop me walking out of that door, going straight to my Chief Constable and blowing the whistle on you?’

‘ You still don’t get it, do you? Your life will be worse than hell. We will drag you through the mire. We’ll come up smelling of roses and you’ll just smell like cowshit. You’ll lose. We won’t. Simple as that. We’ve had problems like this before and dealt with them accordingly.’

Henry stood up without warning.

Morton drew back defensively. Gallagher braced himself and Tattersall was half off his seat.

He walked to the window and stared out blankly through the rain.

He had nothing on these people. They had everything on him, twisted and perverse though it was. And they were prepared to use it, should Henry make a stand.

They had power and organisation. He could not even begin to guess the scope of their activities.

Standing there he was isolated — and beaten.

He turned slowly from the window, a look of defeat on his face. ‘So what’s the score?’

‘ I’ll lay it on the line, Henry, then you know exactly what is required of you. Firstly, you must ensure that to the best of your abilities those two investigations get nowhere.’

‘ That may not be within my power. Other people work on them.’

‘ In which case you must keep me informed of any progress, you must destroy or contaminate evidence without drawing attention to yourself, and you must pull your weight in terms of making enquiries hit dead ends. Otherwise you’ll suffer.’

‘ And secondly?’

‘ Keep a watching brief on the Derek Luton case and let me know how that goes.’

‘ Why?’

‘ Because I’m interested. And thirdly, before you go back to your normal duties, we may have something else for you to do.’

‘ And what’s that?’

‘ All in good time, Henry.’

‘ So you’ve got me by the bollocks.’

‘ Only if you value your life and how you lead it.’

‘ Is that it?’

‘ No,’ said Gallagher sharply. ‘You were given some documents by Annie Luton last night, I believe.’

‘ How do you know?’

‘ Telephone. Hand them over to us now.’

‘ I left them at home,’ Henry said quickly. ‘I’ll bring them in this afternoon.’

‘ Make sure you do.’

‘ Can I go now?’

‘ Yes, you can. Go away and reflect on things. Consider your position very carefully, but realise one thing: you now belong to us and basically you’ve no way out of that.’

Tight-lipped, Henry strode angrily to the door and wrenched it open. He stopped for an instant, turned quickly and uttered the word ‘Cunts!’ before storming out, slamming the door behind him with a ferocity which nearly brought it off its hinges.

Morton regarded the other three with raised eyebrows.

‘ I don’t trust him,’ Siobhan said.

‘ Nor do I,’ Gallagher agreed.

Tattersall said nothing.

‘ Me neither. Make sure he’s followed. We really don’t want him to do anything stupid, do we? Jim?’ Morton looked towards Tattersall.

‘ I’ll see to it, boss.’