Nightmare City

Chapter Twenty-Eight

They were out of the immediate area within minutes, working their way cautiously through the industrial estate towards the retail end which was nearer to the town centre.

Henry held his left hand over his ear which was bleeding profusely through his fingers.

They skirted past a drive-thru McDonald’s and scurried through the dark car parks of Texas Homecare and Morrisons, with what used to be the docks on their right. They stayed in the blackest shadow, ducking when a car approached, rising slowly when it passed.

Henry Christie, fugitive. Unreal, surreal. He was floating through a different world and was struggling to remind himself that this was reality.

A few minutes later they were in the car park of the Ribble Pilot, a modem pub right on the dockside. Rider crouched down, pulling Henry with him. They worked their way around the parked vehicles and Rider tested every door.

One opened.

It was an old Ford Granada.

‘ I loved these motors,’ Rider whispered. He slid in and fumbled around in the wires underneath the steering wheel, until his hands expertly found the ignition wires. He ripped them out, yanked two apart to expose their metal ends, touched them and they sparked and — voila! — the engine started first time.

Henry remained on his haunches outside the car.

‘ Get in.’ Rider reached across and flicked the catch on the passenger door.

‘ We’re gonna steal a car?’ He could not believe it. This was getting all too much.

‘ Yep, and if you don’t get in, I’m going to drive off without you.’

‘ Oh my Christing God!’ Henry chunnered. He went round to the other side of the car and got in.

It was an automatic. Rider slotted it into Drive. Moments later they were back on the A583, heading towards Blackpool. Henry cowered down in the passenger seat. Aiding and abetting the unlawful taking of a conveyance. He was having grave problems coming to terms with this additional responsibility, on top of everything else. His brain was due for implosion.

‘ Let’s just hope the owner’s set in there for the night… give us a head start,’ Rider was saying.

Henry made a feeble attempt to pull himself together. He sat up, tugged down the sun visor, flicked on the interior light and inspected his ear. What he saw made him whimper.

It was hanging on by a thread of gristly skin, swinging like a sign outside a pub. He moaned. Blood flowed onto his left shoulder and dribbled down his chest.

‘ It’s a fucking mess,’ he blurted out, almost crying.

‘ It’ll be all right,’ Rider comforted him. ‘ So long as you get some medical treatment fairly soon. Better than a bullet in your brain at any rate.’

‘ I don’t mean that,’ Henry said churlishly. ‘I mean everything — the whole fucking shooting match. What the hell are we running for? I’ve done nothing wrong.’ He was rambling a bit as he tried to unscramble his brain. ‘Let’s just give ourselves up, John. We’ve nothing to fear.’

Rider took a left at Three Nooks and headed towards Lytham.

‘ They’ve just tried to kill us, mate — that’s what we’ve got to fear. What we need is some breathing space so we can reorganise ourselves and plan ahead. Presenting ourselves at a police station isn’t the answer, not to my way of thinking. If we do that, they’ll simply say we escaped from custody and we’ll be fucked again.’

Christ, the pain.

‘ Right, OK,’ said Henry in an attempt to be positive. He was thinking now… slowly, but at least he was thinking. ‘We need to get our act together, get the evidence together and then hit the bastards with it. We could go to my house-’

‘ Like fuck we could. They’ll be watching and waiting, just like they’ll be watching and waiting at my flat. I have a better idea — somewhere we can crash out for the night, then see how things look in the morning.’

Henry slumped back in the big comfy seat. ‘Whatever,’ he said dejectedly.

They did more than watch Henry’s house. On the stroke of midnight they raided it.

A mean-tempered Gallagher with a bandage wrapped around his right arm and an ugly-looking swelling by his right eye, banged angrily on the front door.

Tattersall and Siobhan were directly behind him. Three other NWOCS detectives hovered behind them, looking hard and uncompromising, like they’d never smiled since joining the cops.

Kate raced to the door. She and the Donaldsons had been sitting in the lounge, tense, awaiting any developments. Karl stood with her at the threshold.

‘ Is Henry Christie here?’ Gallagher demanded.

‘ No, I-’

Before Kate could say anything more, Gallagher interrupted. ‘He’s wanted for assault, allowing a prisoner to escape and other corrupt practices, including rape and sexual assault. We’re gonna search the house.’

Donaldson stepped forwards. ‘Now hold on a moment, buddy.’

‘ By force if necessary,’ Gallagher warned him.

‘ Where’s the warrant?’

‘ Under English law we don’t need one. Now step aside and let us in, or we’ll gladly kick the fuck out of you.’

The officers poured in to the house. They pushed past Kate and one went straight through to the back door which he opened to allow three more detectives in. They had been watching the rear to prevent Henry escaping out back.

‘ What do you mean, rape and sexual assault?’ Kate cried. She was confused and on the edge of tears.

Gallagher sneered evilly at her. ‘Your husband can’t keep his hands off other women, can he?’ he said with extreme cruelty.

‘ Shut it, asshole,’ Donaldson warned him, and stepped forwards menacingly. Gallagher and he were much of the same height and build. It would have been an interesting conflict.

‘ Go on, do it,’ Gallagher invited.

Donaldson gritted his teeth and held back.

The moment passed.

‘ Now I suggest you get everyone in the house assembled in the living room,’ said Gallagher.

They parked the Granada in a badly-lit street in South Shore, and sat there hoping not to draw attention to themselves.

Henry found an oily cloth in the glove-box and pressed it to his ear. The bleeding had lessened. Coagulation was taking place.

They had another brief argument about presenting themselves at a police station. Henry’s instinct told him this was the way forwards. Rider laughed at him.

‘ That’s what comes of never having been on the wrong side of the law,’ he sneered. ‘You wanna look at it from a crim’s perspective occasionally. When a cop’s out to get you, it’s a godawful feeling when you know you can’t trust anyone. And for some, that’s what it’s like. A police station can be a place where everything you do or say is twisted.’

Which was hard for Henry to perceive. He had always — truly — believed that if he was in trouble he could go to the law and be dealt with fairly and justly. In a matter of days his world had been up-ended. Now he didn’t know who to trust, who to turn to, where to go. The badness of this squad seemed limitless, its influence phenomenal. Who could he go to who wasn’t touched by it?

Sitting there with a bleeding ear, a thumping head, in soaking wet clothes, he felt very much alone. He knew he could trust Karl Donaldson — but how could he get to him? And he knew he had to trust John Rider.

There was a silence between the men, filled by the engine ticking over. Warm air blew out of the vents.

‘ So did you kill Munrow?’

Rider turned his whole body in his seat to look at Henry. A slash of yellow light fell across his eyes. The rest of his face was in darkness. He said nothing.

‘ I thought so,’ Henry concluded.

The search had been thorough. An hour after starting, the police withdrew, taking nothing away with them despite having visited every nook and cranny.

Gallagher looked cheated.

‘ What did you expect to find?’ Donaldson asked him. ‘He ain’t done nothin’ wrong, bud — unlike some people I could mention.’ He looked knowingly at Gallagher then gladly closed the front door behind him.

Donaldson returned to the lounge where the two exhausted daughters had crashed out on the settee and the two weary women, hollow-eyed, looked tiredly at him.

Kate had gone beyond crying.

‘ Is it true?’ she begged desperately. ‘Can Henry really have helped a murderer to escape? And rape? What does it mean?’

‘ You can take it from me that Henry has not raped anyone, nor has he helped a murderer to escape,’ Karl hissed quietly, one eye on the two girls. This was a conversation they didn’t need to overhear. ‘Henry’s as straight as an arrow; he’s just become involved with people who aren’t.’

‘ What do we do now, Karl?’ Karen asked.

‘ Wait,’ said Donaldson. ‘I’m sure he’ll contact us when he can. In the meantime, let’s have a cup of tea and get these little ladies back to their beds.’ He winked at Karen and gestured for her to follow him into the kitchen.

‘ They were after those statements as much as anything,’ Donaldson said quietly to her. ‘What did you do with ‘em, babe?’

‘ They’re down my knickers — almost. As soon as I heard them at the door I grabbed the paperwork and folded it down the front of my jeans.’

Donaldson’s face turned into a wide smile. ‘Now I know why I love you,’ he said. ‘Any chance of me removing them with my teeth?’

She punched him gently on the arm. ‘Every chance.’

Henry was wet and shivering again, the dryness of the car having been left behind ten minutes ago.

He and Rider were, once more, in dark shadow. This time they were fifty metres down the road from the front of Rider’s club, watching the last of the stragglers stagger away from the doors.

At last the place closed up and the lights went out.

The street was quiet. Nothing moved.

Ten minutes later the door opened again and the staff left en masse, a small posse of people probably on their way to a curry house.

The door closed.

‘ Jacko should be leaving soon, then we’ll have the place to ourselves.’

Ten more minutes.

No Jacko.

‘ I don’t like this.’

‘ Perhaps he’s robbing the till.’

Rider ignored the remark. ‘I didn’t see the bouncers, either. They usually leave with everyone else.’

He nudged Henry. Both of them trotted across the road and into a high-walled alley which ran down one side and the rear of the club. They stuck to the building line and at the point where the alley took a right-angled turn, Rider pressed Henry and himself into a doorway.

‘ Two minutes here, just in case,’ Rider whispered into Henry’s good ear.

The rain continued to fall, straight down, like thin steel rods. Unrelenting. Cold.

For Henry the wait was interminable. He needed to lie down. Here would do, but preferably in a hospital bed with lots of nurses fawning over him.

Rider tugged his sleeve.

They stepped out of the doorway and almost immediately there was a scuffling noise and a cough behind them. Rider flattened himself against the wall, dragging the slow-witted Henry with him.

A man walked down the alley, back-lit by street lights. He had that peculiar stagger which denotes someone pissed out of their heads who firmly believes himself to be sober.

The man paused unsteadily in mid-step, looking in their direction, peering towards them in the gloom. He was ten feet away. Henry could smell the beer and spirits on the man’s breath.

The man unzipped his flies, turned to face the wall. With both hands he directed his urination up and down the wall, making fancy patterns. He belched, broke wind, then vomited through the arc of piss. He spat the remnants of the Chinese meal out and finished his bodily function. He shook the drops off and slid the member away.

Henry’s stomach turned.

The man wiped his mouth on his sleeve, turned and wandered happily back out of the alley, muttering something.

They let him go before moving again.

Rider located the gate which led into the back yard of the club. It was locked.

‘ We’ll have to go over.’

‘ Fine, fine,’ acceded Henry.

‘ Give me a leg up,’ said Rider, seeing Henry did not seem able. ‘I’ll open the gate from the other side.’

Henry nodded. He intertwined his fingers, crouched low with his back to the wall, braced himself and hoped Rider hadn’t stepped into any dog muck.

Rider put his right foot into Henry’s hands, counted softly and on ‘Three!’ Henry heaved up, propelling Rider who got his left foot onto Henry’s shoulder and a moment later was lying astride the top of the wall. He shuffled his legs over and dropped into the yard.

Uncaringly, Henry wiped his hands down the sides of his trousers, dog shit or not.

The gate opened. Rider beckoned him through into the yard, which was not particularly big and was full of empty beer barrels and all the paraphernalia associated with the waste from licensed premises.

The back door to the club was a huge steel panel, riveted to the brickwork.

Henry studied it despairingly. ‘How the hell do we get in here? We’ll need bloody cutting gear.’

‘ We don’t — we get in up there.’ Rider pointed up to a window at first floor level. ‘We’ll stack up some barrels and climb up. It should open OK. This place is about as secure as Buckingham Palace.’

‘ I’m surprised you haven’t had it screwed.’

‘ We have. Security’s crap on the outside, but the bar area’s pretty tight.’ Together they manoeuvred two barrels on top of three others and Rider climbed cautiously onto the top one to find his head and shoulders more or less on a level with the window. He heaved at the window. Nothing gave. He tried to lap his fingers underneath the frame, which was rotten, and he started to ease it away. With great effort and persistence there was some movement. But the window remained firmly shut.

Using the initiative which seemed to have deserted his recent actions, Henry scoured the yard to find some kind of implement to assist.

More by luck than judgement he kicked against a rusty hand-trowel of the type used by builders. He handed it up to Rider who jammed it between window and frame and applied leverage.

With painful slowness the window moved. Eventually it was wide enough for him to get his fingertips in properly, and he completed the task with a loud, splintering crack, nearly overbalancing off the barrels at the same time.

Seconds later he was inside the club.

Henry followed, dropping down behind Rider into what was a long disused lavatory.

‘ Thank God for-’

‘ Shh!’ Rider warned him hoarsely. ‘You never know — cops could be at the bar, waiting for us to show. Let’s take it one step at a time.’

Chastened, Henry nodded silently. He followed Rider out of the toilet and into a dark corridor. With soft footfalls, they made their way along.

‘ What we can do,’ Rider whispered over his shoulder, ‘is get some sleep up here. We won’t be disturbed. Then tomorrow…’ His words drifted.

‘ Yeah, tomorrow,’ said Henry sourly.

They stopped at the first door they came to. There was a bolt on the outside which Rider slid back. He placed his hand on the doorknob and suddenly the door seemed to have a life of its own and exploded open.

A huge form careered out of the blackness, brandishing a chunk of wood which was about the size, weight and length of a pick-axe handle.

The wood swished down into thin air, slicing through the point where a split-second before Rider’s head had been.

Rider crimped himself out of the way and the blow was completely ineffective. In a continuation of the same movement, Rider swung back, and landed an iron-hard punch into the guts of the attacker. The wooden weapon dropped out of his hands and bounced on the floor as the impact of the fist whooshed the wind out of the man, who sank down to his knees, clutching his stomach.

Rider stepped behind the figure, clamped his right hand across the man’s mouth, yanked him upright and growled, ‘Jacko, you dumb stupid bastard, it’s me!’

From what they could see of him in the darkness, Jacko looked a mess. Conroy’s men had not been nice to him. His nose was knocked out of shape, and one eye was cut, swelling and oozing some sort of unpleasant looking greasy substance. A tooth was loose and his ribs and stomach were a welter of bruises and grazes.

The three of them were in the room in which Jacko had been imprisoned. Henry stood on guard at the door, cocking his head down the corridor and half-listening to Jacko who was giving Rider the lowdown. Rider listened without interruption.

‘ Six of them, you say?’ he asked finally.

‘ That’s all I saw. Could be more.’

‘ They came in, took the place and they’re still here. I wondered why we didn’t see our door staff leaving. What d’you make of it, Henry?’

‘ Conroy… the guns?’

‘ Yeah, makes sense, taking the place over. But why, tonight, unless he needs the place now, or later today for something. Jacko, did they mention anything that could give us a clue?’

He wracked his brains. Couldn’t think of anything.

‘ What’re they doing now?’ Rider asked.

‘ Just hanging about, I think. I got dumped here and haven’t seen any of ‘em since. I couldn’t hear anything because we’re so far away nom the front of the club here.’

Rider looked up at Henry again. ‘They’re here for a reason and it’s nothing to do with selling drugs, because there ain’t no one here to sell ‘em to. I think you’re right, it’s connected with the guns. Let’s go and have a look what they’re up to.’

Exhausted, Henry’s heart dropped.

‘ Jacko — you leg it out of the window and stay low. We’ll lock this door and if they check up on you it’ll look like you’re still in here.’

‘ Anything you want me to do?’ Jacko asked.

‘ Yeah — gimme your fags and matches and don’t get involved. Henry

… let’s go looksee.’

‘ This place used to be a casino, closed early sixties. When I bought it, though it was being run as a club, it was in a pretty dangerous condition once you got beyond the public areas. So were some of the public areas, come to that. The ceiling over the dance floor is not the most secure in the world. I keep expecting the rotating silver ball to crash to the floor and kill some poor bastard underneath.’

‘ Any electric up here?’

‘ No, only on ground level.’

Rider was leading Henry along an endless maze of dark, dusty corridors populated by spiders’ webs, dust, planks and other miscellaneous pieces of rubbish which made quiet progress difficult and walking hazardous. The lack of lighting made it all much worse.

‘ What you see downstairs is only a fraction of what there is,’ Rider continued. ‘There’s two floors over that. Lots of rooms have been bricked off for whatever reason. It’s just incredible, really. You don’t appreciate what there is until you start looking.’

Rider struck a match which flared briefly, lighting up his face and also what he wanted to see — a door.

‘ I think we’re here.’ He extinguished the match, but before he threw it down ensured its tip was cold. ‘It’s so dry in some places, wet in others, don’t want to chance a match anywhere. The place could go sky high. Fire hazard, really.’

‘ Sounds a peach of a building.’

‘ It will be, it will be,’ Rider said, seeing his dreams for a moment. ‘We need to be real quiet now. If I’m right we should be over the main part of the club once we go through the door. I think the floor’s… not good, shall we say?’

‘ So I could drop through.’

‘ Distinct possibility.’

Henry thought about two broken legs. It would round things off nicely.

‘ Why are we going in here?’

‘ I’ll show you. Tread carefully.’

Rider pushed the door open and edged into the room. It was large and expansive. There were windows but all were boarded up and blocked out any light. Henry stuck behind him but found that he could see quite well; his eyes were taking advantage of all available light.

Rider went down onto his hands and knees in a movement so swift that Henry thought he’d gone through the floor.

‘ Look at this.’ He had found a trapdoor which he hauled open. Henry bent down onto one knee and peered into the hole.

‘ This room is directly above where the main part of the casino used to be. There’s a few of these trapdoors in this room. I think the management used them to keep tabs on the tables below, using one-way glass.’

‘ Bit primitive.’

‘ Before the days of CCTV.’

Henry looked into the void. It was black. ‘Can’t see anything.’

‘ No, you won’t be able to. That’s a false ceiling you’re looking at, and below that there’s another suspended ceiling. If we’re careful, we could remove a panel from this ceiling and try to move a panel from the suspended one, then maybe we could see down into the club, find out what’s going on.’

‘ Risky, but what the fuck.’

Rider reached into the space and fumbled about. ‘Got it.’

Henry fully expected Rider to come back with a ceiling panel in his hand, but he got the shock of his life when the other man produced a revolver which had been hidden in the space between floor and false ceiling.

‘ We may need this.’

‘ I suppose you shot Munrow with that, did you?’

A beat passed between the two men which sent a tingle of apprehension down each one’s spine.

‘ Thought so,’ said Henry, feeling sick.

‘ There’s two bullets left…’

After a whispered debate they decided that the best time to do any messing with the ceiling would be round about 4 to 5 a.m. From Henry’s experience, this was when people were at their lowest ebb. In the meantime, they tried to get some sleep — after Henry had set the alarm on his Casio wrist-watch.

Completely drained though he was, Henry could not sleep on the dusty, uncomfortable floor. His mind whizzed and banged as it thought through his predicament from every angle.

He made one incontrovertible decision. In the morning he would seek out Karl Donaldson and with his protection he and Rider would go to Police Headquarters and demand to speak to the Chief Constable. She was his only hope of salvation and fairness. Karl was his only hope of staying alive.

He knew he could not go on the run. No doubt Rider would be able to guide him through the low-ways and by-ways of the underworld, but it wasn’t for Henry.

He believed in justice. Old-fashioned though that belief was, it had seen him through twenty-one years as a frontline cop and he wasn’t about to have those values shattered by a corrupt squad which believed itself to be beyond the law. At whatever cost he would fight. Even if it meant becoming a protected witness, a change of name and address and that job in Asda stacking shelves. He would win… because they had made him angry. He almost laughed at the triteness of it: ‘They have made me angry.’

Talk about a fucking understatement.

As for Rider — he could do whatever he wanted.

‘ Henry… time?’ Rider asked.

In the darkness Henry could see the tip of a burning cigarette brighten as Rider sucked.

He checked his watch. ‘Four-fifteen.’

‘ I take it you can’t sleep?’

‘ You guessed.’

‘ Ten minutes, then we’ll do some joinery.’