Ambush (30 page)

‘Sorry, Flynn,' Blue said darkly, and as he spoke he pushed Flynn hard through the door into the barn, causing him to trip and stumble to his knees. Blue came in behind him and closed the door.

Flynn was on his hands and knees but was raising his head to complain when another man came on his flank and smashed him hard on the side of his head, stunning him. He rolled sideways, clutching his head, knowing that whatever had hit him had been hard and metallic and had caused a deep cut on his scalp-line.

‘Sorry, sorry, mate,' Jimmy Blue said, and knelt down next to Flynn, ‘I kinda tried to warn you.'

Even through the haze that was his brain Flynn understood what was being said, and he replied with a moan, ‘I'm not a fucking farmer.'

‘I know. I'm sorry.'

‘What's going on?' Flynn asked. His vision was a little blurry and he moaned again as he moved and took his hands away from his face to see blood in his palms from the wound.

Blue eased Flynn into a sitting position. His head and vision cleared and he looked around the barn. Then everything really did slot into place.

Rik Dean had made his phone call to Flynn after he had conducted two fairly swift briefings and had returned to Preston cells to see how the interviews were progressing with the contingent from Lancashire Prison. One of the items on Dean's to-do list was to put a call through to Jimmy Blue. He had intended to back up the call by getting a local bobby to pop around to check that all was well with Blue, but because of pressure of work he hadn't quite got around to it. He would have made the call after talking to Flynn, even if Flynn hadn't dropped the bombshell that Jimmy Blue had already been visited by the local police.

At first Rik Dean thought that maybe someone else had made the call, and after he could not reconnect with Flynn he'd called the Major Incident Room at headquarters and asked the office manager whether someone had made the call to Blue without telling him. The man assured Dean that no one from the MIR had contacted Jimmy Blue.

Stalking down one of the cell corridors with his mobile phone to his ear, Dean redialled Flynn's number. It rang out but was not answered and then clicked on to voicemail. He left a brief message for Flynn to call back as soon as possible. Next he keyed in Jimmy Blue's home number which had been lifted from his old personnel record. But there was no reply. There was no other contact number listed for Blue.

He strode back down the corridor with a horrible creeping sensation in his guts.

‘Boss, boss.' One of the prisoners rapped on his inspection hatch. Dean stopped and looked at the name by the door, but did not drop the hatch. The inmate was called L. Digson. Dean knew he was one of the Aquarius prisoners on remand, one of the big drug dealers caught by Craig Alford's textbook operation. He ignored him and carried on back to the custody office where he scooped up a phone from a desk and dialled an internal number connecting him to the patrol sergeant based at Rossendale police station, now the only cop shop covering the whole of the valley.

‘Sorry, Flynnie,' Jimmy Blue said. ‘They were going to kill my family if I didn't.'

Flynn said sourly, ‘I get it.'

He wiped blood from his eyelids and looked at the hooded man who had smashed him on the head with a heavy calibre pistol. Slim – young, he guessed. Flynn gave the man a venomous look, then tore his eyes away and looked beyond, around the barn, at a situation which reminded him of the photographs he had seen over the years of Nazis and their atrocities.

Three people were on their knees in a line, facing towards Flynn. Their hands were bound behind their backs and duct tape had been wound around their lower faces, over their mouths, over their noses, round and round their heads.

Jimmy Blue's family. Flynn recognized his wife, Ruby, and assumed the other two were his teenage children, a girl and a boy. Flynn could see abject terror in their eyes as well as disbelief.

All that was missing was a grave for them to fall into.

Another man stood behind them, a gun in his hand resting at his side. He was dressed in similar attire to the one who had struck Flynn, dark clothing, zip-up jacket, black jeans, lightweight black boots and a balaclava pulled over his head with eye and mouth slits.

Both guns, Flynn noticed, had some kind of mini telescopic sights affixed along the tops of the barrels, at least that was what Flynn assumed them to be.

‘I did what you asked, I got him here,' Jimmy Blue pleaded to the men. ‘Now let them go, please, please.'

Each of the three hostages was crying; tears rolled down the outside of the duct tape. Flynn felt outrage course through him because he knew that no one in this barn was going to live. Brian Tasker had achieved his revenge.

‘Let them go,' Flynn said. ‘They've done nothing.'

The man nearest to him simply shrugged, rotated his head slightly and nodded to the man behind Blue's family.

He moved quickly, without hesitation or warning, and with cold precision.

Three shots, loud and echoing in the confines of the barn, one fired accurately into the back of the head of each kneeling family member. Their bodies pitched forward one after the other, legs twitching in death, and the man then coldly leaned forward with the gun and repeated the move, firing one more shot into their heads; then none of the three moved. He stood back.

Jimmy Blue must have been too shocked to react for a moment, but then he exploded.

‘You bastards!' He went for the man closest to him, his arms outstretched, but the man simply raised his gun and fired into Blue's face three times, the bullets entering around the vicinity of his nose and cheekbones and exiting horrifically through the back. Jimmy dropped to his knees and slumped forward and the man put two more into his neck.

Flynn recoiled as Jimmy Blue's blood and brain matter flicked across him, but he made no other move as the man slowly revolved and pointed the gun at his face.

Flynn looked deep into the muzzle. The man leaned towards him and shoved the gun into his forehead, screwing it tightly into Flynn's skin.

‘If you're going to pull it, pull it,' Flynn growled.

The man stopped the screwdriver motion, then slowly drew the weapon across Flynn's face, stopping at his mouth. Flynn gritted his teeth as the man, using the muzzle, parted Flynn's lips and tapped the gun against his teeth, sending a reverberation around his skull. Then he continued on the journey down Flynn's chin, and underneath into the soft flesh of his neck where he twisted the gun again before placing the muzzle against his Adam's apple.

Flynn braced himself as he stared into the man's eyes behind the mask.

The other man had joined his colleague and was standing about ten feet away, covering Flynn.

‘Shoot me, you fucker,' he said.

He could tell that the man was smiling.

The gun continued to pass downwards across Flynn's body, pausing over the heart, then down across his stomach to his groin, where the man jabbed the muzzle a few times into his cock and balls before moving on and stopping on the hard muscle of Flynn's outer right thigh, where once more the man shoved the muzzle in and then fired the gun.

Flynn screamed and rolled away, clutching his leg as blood pulsed from the wound between his fingers.

The last thing he remembered was the stunning blow to the side of his head and the feel of a hypodermic needle being inserted into his neck just below his left ear, before complete blackness engulfed him but did not take away the pain.

‘Six-three-seven receiving?'

‘Yep, go ahead,' PC Dale Allen responded to the radio call from his patrol sergeant. Allen's beat that morning, with only one other mobile patrol out and about, was to cover the east side of the Rossendale Valley, the towns of Bacup and Whitworth, with just a smidgen of Waterfoot thrown in for good measure. It had been a steady morning, two break-ins and a minor road accident, giving Allen a bit of spare time to follow up on some other burglaries he had attended the day before and was investigating. He had a pretty good idea who the offender was, but proving it was just a tad difficult.

‘Are you free, Dale?' his sergeant asked.

‘I'm free.'

‘Good … got a little job for you … just a welfare check, if you don't mind.'

‘No probs, fire away.'

They bundled a now loose-limbed but still heavy Flynn into the back of a Renault van. His hands were now bound behind his back with tape, as was the whole of his face, the tape wrapped around from his chin to his forehead with just a gap under his nostrils. An Adidas polyester school pump bag had been forced over his head and the string drawn tightly around his neck. His ankles were also bound together and he was trussed up, his ankles taped to his wrists.

He lay on his side – there was no other way to lie – and the van set off from the farm.

PC Allen took the same route as Flynn up the very narrow Bacup Old Road to Cunliffe Clough Farm and did the same thing with the police Astra as Flynn had done with the Punto, bottoming the sump with a clunk on one of the diagonal water run-offs. The grounding of police cars in Rossendale was a perennial problem, though few police drivers actually admitted it when it happened.

Allen found the turn-off and drove slowly down the even tighter track, arriving at the farm a minute or so later.

He pulled into the farmyard behind a Fiat Punto – Flynn's hire car, although Allen did not know that at the time. There was also a Land Rover parked next to the barn and a small tractor by the farmhouse.

To Allen, it all seemed too quiet.

He got out of the Astra, fitted his flat cap – he was a smart cop – and walked across to the front door of the farmhouse. He knocked on it: a hollow, no one home sound. He tried the door handle and it opened. He did not go too far because the snout of a seemingly friendly sheep dog snuffled in the gap; although he could see the waft of the tail, Allen never trusted dogs.

He called through. No reply. He drew the door shut behind him and looked around the farmyard again. He set off over to the barn.

Rik Dean sat in the inspector's office at the police station with a feeling of dread beginning to enshroud him, hoping that he was completely wrong. That Flynn's phone had just run out of battery life, that Jimmy Blue was not answering his phone because he was in the fields, shearing sheep or something.

The custody sergeant poked his head around the door.

‘Mr Dean?'

He nodded.

‘That prisoner in number eight wants to speak to you. He says it's urgent.'

‘Oh, that Digson guy?'

The sergeant nodded.

‘What's it about?'

‘Won't say, other than it'll be beneficial for you.'

For a few minutes, Rik Dean had nothing better to do.

‘What?' Dean said through the closed hatch in the cell door.

‘You the guy in charge?'

‘Depends what you mean.'

‘In charge of the thing that's going on?'

Irritably, Dean said, ‘What thing?'

‘The prison thing.'

‘Yeah … and?'

‘Can you drop this hatch?' The man's mouth was at the air vent in the door, a circle of holes drilled into the metal, and Dean could see his lips moving.

‘Why? I'm pretty busy.'

‘I can help you.'

‘How, exactly?'

‘Drop the fucking hatch and I'll tell you.'

Dean closed his eyes with frustration, took a breath and lowered the hatch. Digson pushed his face up to it. ‘What?'

‘C'mere,' Digson whispered.

‘What, so you can spit in my face?'

‘No … c'mere, so only you can hear.'

Dean leaned forward slightly. ‘Close enough for me.'

And close enough to hear the words ‘I have some good information for you' come from the man's lips.

Dean was about to respond when the custody sergeant appeared at the top of the cell corridor and shouted, ‘Boss – urgent.'

‘H
ow many bodies?' Rik Dean asked.

‘Four. Two male, two female,' PC Allen replied.

‘Are any known to you?'

‘The older male, yes … he used to be a detective: Jimmy Blue. He owns this farm … it's a bit of a brew shop for one or two of the older PCs around here.'

Rik Dean sat back and rubbed his neck. ‘The other male?'

‘His son, Aaron … and the young lass is his daughter, Megan. The older woman is the wife, Ruby. I know who they are, but I don't want to spoil the crime scene by clambering around.'

‘Yeah, sure. Anyone else?'

‘No, not that I can see, certainly not in the barn.'

‘Right, OK.' Dean's mind worked overtime. He was not liking being on the phone to Allen because, although the officer had described the scene well, to be there physically would be better – and he knew he had to get there sooner rather than later. ‘Have you had a look around the place?'

‘Again, yes, but I don't want to disturb anything, just in case. Can't see anything, though, or any other bodies.'

Dean was back in the inspector's office at Preston, in contact with Allen thirty miles away in Rossendale. Allen was talking over his personal radio which, like all modern PRs, was equipped with the facility to call landline and other mobile numbers directly. The desk phone was on loudspeaker.

‘OK. And you say there's a Fiat Punto in the yard?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you looked through it?'

‘Do you want me to, boss?'

‘Just see if you can find anything of interest in it, such as an ID – but before you do that, have you got your own mobile phone with a camera?' Allen said he had. ‘Take some shots of the scene and send them to me, will you … just to me. Nothing fancy, just so I can get a perspective.' He gave Allen his mobile number.

‘Will do, boss … but if you don't mind me giving my two penn'orth, it looks like a gangland execution.'