There were worse places in the world to spend an evening than Greenwich, which was bustling and pleasant. They ate at the Cutty Sark pub which, understandably, had a good view of the Cutty Sark itself, the old tea clipper preserved forever near the Thames, and much bigger than Henry had imagined from his school history lessons.
All three had fish and chips and a couple of pints before strolling to the riverside to take in the spectacular view of the city, then walking back to the hotel where they weakened and had another couple of pints at the wine bar next door before returning to their rooms.
Henry phoned RLI again before sliding into bed: no change with Diane.
He slept well enough, and after breakfast they caught up with the progress of the investigations into the deaths of the migrants and how things were going with Gerald McCabe. The latter, it seemed, could simply not stop admitting offences; with regard to the former, Ted Sandford told Henry that Dunster Cosmo was tight-lipped and hard work; told him to call back in a couple of days to try to arrange an interview, but not before.
In effect, that left the trio with nothing to do in London other than hope the Met did the job properly.
It was a strange feeling for Henry because it made him feel slightly powerless.
Had he been a fully fledged detective super, he would have stayed around, annoying people, butting in, but being a civvy stripped away this right. It was hard to accept but he had to go with the flow. Not only that: a big part of him wanted to get back up north now, work the cases from that end – because capturing Darren McCabe was his priority now – and also be in a position to be by Diane’s bedside when she woke up. Or didn’t.
They ate a leisurely breakfast.
Flynn was feeling better, though still sore.
Jake just wanted to get home. Some sort of domestic crisis was now going on between his wife and son, and there was a stack of jobs on the rural beat that needed his attention.
When they jumped into the cars, they were all glad to be on the road.
Henry travelled with Flynn in the Audi, sharing the driving.
And it was a tedious journey to say the least.
Traffic in London was horrific due to a combination of a terrorist incident in Westminster – which had an enormous knock-on effect of completely blocking traffic flow on every road north and south of the river – and the normal volume of traffic. So, having looped out of Greenwich around on to the A202, they found themselves in standing traffic by the Kennington Oval; Henry’s off-the-cuff plan to head west towards Wandsworth to try to link up with the M25 instead of crossing the Thames at Vauxhall was just as much a dead end.
They finally crawled on to the M40 just before noon but hit more standing traffic in the Midlands, so that by the time they were on the M6 north of Birmingham it was three o’clock, with at least another couple of hours’ travel remaining. To turn on to a service area for the loo and a brew was a relief for the pent-up stress they were feeling.
It was here Henry had a call from Rik Dean.
‘So, where are you?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Henry said. ‘I could have walked quicker. More importantly, where are you up to?’
‘McCabe is circulated as wanted,’ Rik told him. ‘When we’ve spoken face-to-face, I’m thinking we get a team together and head down to the Met to root him out … What do you say, Henry?’
‘That sounds good. What’s happening with the prison job – Tommy Costain?’
‘Well, one thread of it is obviously Dunster Cosmo, as you know, but we are being held at arms’ length by the Met from speaking to him regarding his involvement; at least the guy isn’t going anywhere fast.’
‘Good. And Diane?’
‘We’ve managed to contact her brother at last. He’s in Uganda on some charity project or other and he’ll be flying back in two days.’
‘That’s brilliant. If he’s struggling for somewhere to stay, I’ll put him up at Th’Owl for as long as necessary.’
‘Right … uh …’ Rik hesitated.
Henry sensed it. ‘What?’
‘Erm, you and Diane? I know you work well together … but is there anything more I should know about?’
It was Henry’s turn to hesitate. ‘Possibly.’
‘You old dog!’
Henry just grinned. ‘Friends with benefits.’
‘Henry, you don’t work that way. You fall in love … that’s always been your problem, mate.’
‘Might be some truth in that … anyway, never was your problem.’
Henry was referring to Rik’s wild days as a serial womanizer up to the point where he met Henry’s equally wild younger sister, Lisa. Despite an often tempestuous relationship, the two of them had lived happily ever after in some sort of marital bliss.
‘No, it wasn’t … hey, talking of which, I’m looking at the clock now … that chicken casserole’s in the slow cooker, mate – with enough for Flynn, too – and we can’t wait for you to land. Rice, potatoes, peas – you know it makes sense.’
‘Sounds great. We’ll be there,’ Henry promised and hung up.
The three men dawdled and chatted over their coffees. Henry decided that he probably did not need Flynn at his back any more. He told him he would pay him as promised and release him, which suited the big man who needed to get back to Gran Canaria as he’d had some enquiries for his fishing charter and did not want to let anyone down.
The rest of the journey should have taken a maximum of two hours, but as they rejoined the M6 it was pretty much a car park and it took four hours, by which time all three men were tired and irritable.
Henry really wanted to get home – via a visit to see Diane – but he felt obliged now to visit Rik and Lisa. He toyed with the idea of taking a rain check, but wimped out, not wishing to incur their ire.
Henry and Flynn left the M6 at junction 32 and picked up the M55 to take them towards the coast while Jake stayed on, flashing his headlights as he passed. At the end of the M55, Henry and Flynn came off and headed to Lytham.
For Lisa Dean, née Christie, Henry’s once flaky sister (as he used to describe her) and now Rik Dean’s wife, that day had begun well. After Rik had gone to work, she had prepared the chicken casserole and chucked it in the slow cooker, feeling quite excited about seeing Henry who had become a bit of recluse recently. To be fair, she and Rik had been focusing on their new house on the front at Lytham, and she had concentrated a lot on her own business, making bespoke jewellery for clients who were willing to pay outrageous prices for one-off pieces. Her average price was in the £3,000 area and she tended to make a couple of items each month, so between them, their income was pretty healthy – Rik earned around £73,000 – which is why they’d splashed out on the house.
Once the chicken was in, she made her way upstairs to the bedroom at the front of the house, overlooking Fairhaven boating lake, which was now her work room. She settled at the desk, adjusted her hands-free magnifying glass and began work on her latest creation which was something different and unusual for the wife of a local millionaire and had been quoted at £10,000.
It was coming along well and would be worth the money.
The work consumed her, as she delicately built up the frame, shaped like the wings of an egret, and then added and set into place the tiny diamonds. A real work of art and she was proud of it.
Two hours later, with aching eyes and an aching spine, she leaned back in her chair and stretched, deciding she needed a break. Glancing outside, the weather was blustery but she quite fancied getting her hair windswept and maybe calling in for a milky coffee at the café by the lake.
She went down to the kitchen and checked the casserole (without removing the lid) and then looked for her duffel coat under the stairs, at which point someone knocked on the front door.
‘Coming,’ she called, pulling on her coat. She opened the door to find a woman standing there with a baby in a sling clutched to her chest. She did not recognize her and immediately thought that although she looked quite well turned out, she was probably a Romanian beggar on the con. Rik had told her that there had been a few incidents recently in the area with people thought to be from Romania and that the women involved often used babes in arms as a distraction technique. ‘Can I help you?’ Lisa asked.
The woman smiled. ‘I am really sorry to bother you …’
The woman looked to be on the verge of tears, but Lisa was wary of being drawn into any kind of trick. All that changed in an instant when the woman’s right hand, which had been hanging down at her side just out of sight behind her, appeared in view.
There was something in the hand which Lisa thought was a mobile phone, but the hand came up quickly towards Lisa’s upper chest and whatever she was holding touched her.
The pain was incredible as the compact handheld stun gun – which was disguised to look like a phone – released its electroshock charge into Lisa’s body, jerking her backwards into the hallway, momentarily paralyzing her with the electrical discharge which overrode her muscle-triggering mechanism.
The woman bustled into the house followed by a man whom Lisa hadn’t noticed and must have been hiding. The man slammed the front door, grabbed the stun gun from the woman and applied it once more to Lisa’s neck for good measure.
Moments later, Lisa had been flipped over, her hands bound with plastic ties, and dragged through to the kitchen and flung roughly into a corner. A piece of tape was thumbed into place over her mouth by the woman, who patted her face and smiled down at her.
‘Hello, Mrs Detective Superintendent Dean,’ she said.
Lisa was convinced the two people were here to rob her of the diamonds she had upstairs in her work room which were probably worth around £20,000.
She was wrong.
Marcie Quant and Darren McCabe glanced at each other and smiled. They were here for much, much more than that.
Rik Dean finished work around five, a short day by his usual standards, but he wanted to get home more or less in time for Henry (and Flynn), just to chill and catch up and make up with someone he had known for all his police service and to whom he had a great deal to be grateful for, even if Rik had ended up stepping into Henry’s shoes when he retired.
He was pleased by the progress made on the murder investigations and felt it would only be a matter of time before Darren McCabe was arrested. The guy’s name and photograph were now all over the news media, and unless he was already abroad, which was possible, he would soon be in custody. Rik was looking forward to interviewing that bastard and putting him down the hole for a long, long time.
There was no real shortcut from Lancaster to Lytham, so Rik settled himself for the journey via the motorway, settling back and listening to Sinatra again.
He was surprised that Henry’s car wasn’t at the house when he arrived home and pulled up in the drive, parking behind Lisa’s car. But Henry had said that traffic was bad, so no doubt he would be here in due course.
He climbed out of his car and looked proudly at his new house. He and Lisa had worked hard for it.
He slid his key into the lock and pushed the front door open, announcing, ‘Honey, I’m home … the eagle has landed,’ as he did every time he came home at a civilized hour.
The stun gun brandished by McCabe, forced into his neck, dropped him to his knees instantly.
‘You are out of your fucking minds,’ Rik said, staring sullenly up at Darren McCabe. ‘You need to let us go now and you need to start running fast because your time is running out, mister.’
Almost as soon as Rik had entered the house and been incapacitated by the stun gun, three more men had arrived on the driveway in two small vans and joined McCabe and Marcie, helping to drag Rik into the dining room which overlooked the back garden. The curtains had been quickly drawn. Rik’s hands had been tied together, as had his feet, and he’d been heaved into one corner of the room and had watched with bile rising inside him as Marcie brought a clearly distraught Lisa in and placed her on one of the dining chairs. Rik’s wife looked beyond exhausted, her eyes sunken with dark rings around them, and Rik knew she’d had a terrifying day at the hands of this pair of monsters.
On Rik’s words of warning, McCabe said to Marcie, ‘Zap her.’
Marcie touched Lisa’s neck with the stun gun again and the shock spun her off the chair. She fell to the floor in a writhing heap. Marcie screamed with laughter, and Rik could tell that both she and McCabe were on drugs – speed or cocaine or both.
Rik moved in fury. ‘You bastards – leave her be.’
‘One thing you don’t do,’ McCabe said, leaning into Rik’s face, ‘is even think about telling us what to do.’ McCabe had the Browning in his hand and he touched it to Rik’s cheek. ‘Any idea what this can do?’ he asked. ‘Any idea of the damage it can do?’
‘I’ve seen what it can do,’ Rik said coldly.
‘Ah, right … so you know?’
‘I know a lot about you, McCabe.’
McCabe’s mouth twitched. ‘Anyway …’
‘Anyway what? I can’t help you. You might think I can, but I can’t.’
A laptop had been set up on the dining-room table. Marcie pressed a button and the screen came to life. She turned the device around so Rik could see the screen. She pressed play and ran a news item from BBC North West showing Rik Dean talking to a reporter. In the background was a table displaying the vast amounts of money that had been seized from Hawkshead Farm and the subsequent police raid on a travellers’ site in Blackpool. Millions of pounds, dollars and euros were stacked up. Two uniformed constables stood either side of the table guarding the cash.
‘Remember this?’ Marcie asked Rik. The baby was still in the harness.
‘Obviously.’
‘Where is this money now?’ she demanded.
‘It’s locked away in secure storage.’
‘On police property?’
Rik hesitated. ‘Yes, headquarters. There’s a special storage facility for this sort of money.’
‘And you have access to it?’
This time he did not speak. Suddenly, he knew where this was going.
‘Well, this is very simple, Detective Superintendent,’ Marcie said. ‘We are going to have a very civilized evening and night, and then, tomorrow morning, Mrs Dean will stay with me – not here, somewhere else, of course, somewhere you won’t know – and you will go to police headquarters and wherever this money is stored, and you will fill in the necessary genuine paperwork to authorize its transfer to the National Westminster Bank in Preston. I’m sure you’ll be able to do that. A genuine-looking security van will then turn up, be allowed access to headquarters and collect the money, and then your job will be done. After this, and as long as I am satisfied, I will release Mrs Dean unharmed. If this money transfer does not happen, or you do something stupid, brave or decent or unnatural, then I’ll cut her tits off and stuff them into her mouth, I’ll shove a knife up her cunt and then I’ll stab her to death and throw her out of a moving vehicle on to the motorway.’ Marcie grinned. ‘Is that clear?’
Lisa made a terrified squeak.
One of the other men poked his head around the door and said, ‘Those pizzas are here.’
‘So you’ve never been to your sister’s new house?’ Flynn said to Henry. ‘Never once?’
‘Nah … I know I should have done, but I don’t know …’ Henry couldn’t really explain it, didn’t even want to try really. Not to Flynn, anyway.
‘Other than you’re an antisocial, anti-family kinda guy?’ Flynn teased him.
‘Hit the nail on the head there,’ Henry conceded. He was in the passenger seat, lounging back. He sighed; he couldn’t be bothered.
‘You’ve only got one family, you know,’ Flynn went on.
‘Let it go, pal.’
Flynn chuckled. He got a lot of pleasure from winding Henry up. It was a good sport.
The evening was drawing in as they drove east down Squires Gate Lane towards the sea, with Blackpool airport on their left. When they reached the point at the end of the road where the choice was right into Blackpool, left to St Annes or straight ahead into the sea, Flynn went left. He turned off after about a mile so that he was driving along the sea front at St Annes, eventually reaching Lytham, the affluent, genteel resort, passing the café on the beach which Henry had used occasionally during his police career to meet informants. He’d been a few times since just to enjoy its good food and drink. They passed King Edward VII and Queen Mary School on the left, then Fairhaven Lake on the right, where, looking across, Henry spotted the Spitfire memorial – a full-size replica of a Spitfire warplane stuck on a pole next to the lake.
Henry said vaguely, ‘The house is just along here on the left somewhere,’ and turned his attention to finding Rik and Lisa’s house, straining his neck to look at the numbers. Then his eyes narrowed. ‘I think this is …’
Flynn was slowing down to a crawl.
‘Keep driving, keep driving,’ Henry said urgently. ‘Right, right, pull in here.’
Flynn complied with the rushed instructions, parking maybe another hundred yards past the house.
‘That was their house for sure,’ Henry said. He had recognized Rik’s and Lisa’s cars in the driveway, but not the two scruffy vans parked behind them, clustered into the drive. Nor had he recognized the man standing at the open front door.
‘Problem being?’ Flynn asked, slightly perplexed.
‘I thought we were on chicken casserole for tea, not pizza.’
Apart from seeing the stranger at the door, Henry had also seen a pizza delivery van on the road and the stack of pizzas being handed over to the man.
He picked up his phone from the footwell and called Rik.
Rik’s mobile phone and the rest of his belongings from his pockets had been dumped on to the dining-room table. The phone began to ring and McCabe picked it up to look at the screen.
‘Who’s “HC”?’
‘Brother-in-law. You want things to be natural, so I should answer it. He’s supposed to be coming round this evening.’
McCabe pointed the Browning at Rik’s face and gave him the phone. ‘Anything stupid, I’ll blow your wife’s head off, OK? Now put him off and tell him not to come.’
Rik nodded.
McCabe pressed the answer button, turned on the speakerphone and held the phone at an angle in front of Rik’s face so he could speak into it.
‘Hi, HC, you’re on speakerphone … how’s it going?’
‘Hi, Richard.’ Henry’s voice came over the phone. ‘Sorry, we’re running a bit late, traffic and all that. I reckon we’re a good half hour away. Hope nothing’s spoiling … how’s that casserole coming along?’
‘Casserole’s doing all right … but, hey, mate, I’m really sorry about this, but can we cancel? I know it’s short notice, but Lisa’s feeling really rough – got some sort of vomiting bug. I’m really sorry, was looking forward to see you.’
‘Hey, Richard – can’t be helped. I’ll just head off back home, no problem.’
‘Right, see you.’
McCabe ended the call and stared hard at Rik, who said, ‘What?’
McCabe turned away, walked to Lisa and with a brutal blow smashed the Browning across her face, knocking her off the chair. Then he looked ferociously at Rik.
‘That is for telling him he was on speakerphone.’
‘Why would he tell me I was on speakerphone?’
‘To warn you not to speak out of turn?’ Flynn ventured.
Henry thought about it. ‘And he called me “HC”. Which he never has done, ever.’ He looked at Flynn. ‘Am I reading too much into this? Maybe they really don’t want me around.’
‘And they’re having a pizza party instead?’
‘Maybe they’ve got workmen in?’ Henry guessed.
Flynn looked squarely at him. ‘Tell you what, just to make you feel better, let’s go and have a look.’
Flynn switched off the engine, and both men got out and crossed the road to the boating lake and trotted down the steps to the lake itself. They walked quickly around it, cut across the skateboard park and came up on the grass verge directly opposite Rik’s house, keeping down low behind the concrete cast wall that surrounded the park in which Fairhaven Lake was situated.
Henry peered through a crack in one of the fence panels, from where he could see the entrance to Rik’s drive and the rear number plate of one of the two vans parked behind Rik’s and Lisa’s cars.
The light was going quickly now as night drew in, and although the road was well illuminated by the streetlights, Henry struggled to make out the registration number of the van.
Flynn’s eyes were better. He could see the number.
‘So much easier when I could just call these things in,’ he said, dialling Jake Niven’s mobile number. Jake answered quickly, and from the echo and delay, Henry could tell he was still in the car and using a Bluetooth connection. ‘Jake? Get a PNC check done for me, will you?’ Henry said without preamble. He’d decided that calling Jake would get a quicker result than trying to contact the actual police; even if he got through, which would have been a miracle, there would be the rigmarole of explaining who he was and what he wanted; doing this via Jake, he knew, would be simpler.
Jake didn’t even ask why, just said, ‘I’ll get back to you.’
Henry and Flynn waited with their eyes looking through the slit.
There was no movement at the front of the house now.
‘Just odd, is all,’ Henry muttered. ‘Probably nothing.’
His phone rang. ‘Hi, Jake.’
‘Henry, what the hell are you looking at?’
‘I’m looking at a Renault van of some sort, parked in Rik Dean’s driveway.’
‘Actually, you’re looking at a vehicle that was stolen in London about six weeks ago and has been used in several robberies across the Midlands since – that’s what you’re looking at.’
‘Shit. Where are you, Jake?’
‘Almost home … but I’m going to spin the car round.’
‘Yeah – start making for here, will you? Inner Promenade at Lytham, opposite Fairhaven Lake.’
‘I’m on my way.’
Flynn had overheard the conversation. He said, ‘Are we going to take a chance and check this out?’
They were three guys McCabe had known a long time, trusted and would be glad to share some percentage of any takings with. In his younger days, following his dishonourable discharge from the army for toasting his sergeant’s fingers, McCabe had come across the trio in Redditch when he was drifting around building sites looking for labouring and security work. They were working the sites as well, mainly as security guards. He had fallen in with them for a while and tagged along, helping out with some of the security issues they had been tasked to deal with – mainly breaking bones and warning people off – and also a couple of cash-in-transit robberies they had committed.
McCabe had drifted away from them eventually, but knew they had continued to make their living from robbing anyone and anything that had money in it, from simply using JCB forklifts to ripping ATMs out of walls to quite complex jobs that needed careful planning and logistics. He knew they had a couple of Ford Transit vans that had been resprayed to look like genuine armoured security vehicles and had used them as decoys in a couple of their robberies. One of those vehicles was now parked in a side road close to Rik Dean’s house with the fake security company logo covered by removable stick-on signs that related to a bogus utility company.
When Dunster Cosmo had released him and Marcie and demanded his money back, Marcie had proposed her scheme to steal the money that had been seized from the Yorks’ farmhouse. She’d had to convince him that it was feasible if done the right way – by holding a hostage – and when he had eventually nodded that it could be done, he knew they would need some help and turned to the three robbers he knew: Dagger, Santer and North. He also knew these guys would use any amount of violence necessary and were not remotely intimidated by cops. They were only interested in money, spending that money, then accumulating more, and when McCabe promised them a bumper payday, they were more than happy to run with him and Marcie.
It was a fairly straightforward plan. Simply force Rik Dean to do their bidding by holding his wife hostage and under threat of death, move the money into the back of the mocked-up security van provided by the three villains and then disappear with it – and probably murder Dean’s wife, but that was by the by.
When to move in had been an issue for discussion, but it had been decided that it would be easier to get into the cop’s house during the day and hold the wife hostage until he arrived home from work, then hold them both until the next day when the wheels would be set in motion to acquire the money. It would be a long night, admittedly, but with five of them, they could share keeping watch.
Dagger, Santer and North were not privy to the discussions between Marcie, McCabe and their captives. They weren’t interested in that side of things, just in the excitement of committing the crime and then spending the money in Spain afterwards. They had ordered pizzas after devouring the chicken casserole and were now sitting around the kitchen table with five half-eaten pizzas in their boxes in front of them. Also on the table were three handguns.
North folded a whole slice of pepperoni pizza into his mouth and stood up, wiping his hands down his jeans.
‘Going for a fag.’
Leaving the other two guzzling the pizzas and half watching the TV that dropped down from under a kitchen cabinet, he picked up one of the guns and slid it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, went to the back door and stood on the patio, where he lit up and blew smoke up into the night sky. He wasn’t too worried about being seen because the large garden was surrounded by tall trees on all sides and not overlooked by any of the adjoining properties.
As he smoked, he walked to the edge of the patio and down the steps on to the back lawn, strolling across the nicely cut grass to the border where he put his cigarette between his lips and decided he needed to piss.
Henry and Flynn scurried across the road and slithered over the corner of the front garden wall, dropping into a flower bed and keeping low, using the cover of overhanging bushes and trees as they sneaked down the side of the house, taking a chance to try to peer through the side windows as they crept along. The first one gave a view into the entrance hallway behind the front door; next along was a smaller frosted window which could have been for a downstairs loo. Then there was a much larger window, again with the curtains pulled across and just the smallest gap between them. By twisting his head to alter the angle at which he looked through, Henry could make out the people in there. He could see Lisa, strapped to a chair, the side of her face bleeding badly. He saw Marcie Quant with the baby on the sling and then he saw Darren McCabe standing up, talking down to someone – that would be Rik – whom Henry could not quite see.
Henry drew back to allow Flynn a look.
‘What’s going on, Henry?’ Flynn whispered.
Henry shook his head, incandescent with a burning rage. ‘I don’t know, but Lisa’s badly hurt, and Rik could be, too.’
Flynn jerked his head and they moved on to the next window at which there was a blind drawn, but Henry and Flynn could just about see underneath this into the kitchen beyond where the three men sat at the table with the pizza boxes open in front of them. And three handguns.
‘Hired help,’ Flynn said.
One stood up, took a gun, walked to the back door.
Flynn edged along to the corner of the house, flattening himself against the brickwork, with Henry just behind him. With one eye, Flynn watched the man light a cigarette and, after a few drags of it, set off down the steps and left towards the edge of the lawn where his urination started.
Flynn had no compunction about taking a man halfway through a piss.
The man was about twenty feet away. Flynn moved silently at first, but after that there was no grace, just accuracy and astonishing power as he drove a superbly aimed punch with his big right fist into a point on the side of the guy’s head by his left ear where the jaw hinged on to the skull.
The guy went down instantly, his knees buckling. Flynn caught him and eased him to the grass, then grabbed his collar and dragged him out of sight around the corner of the house from where Henry had watched.
Flynn pulled the handgun, a snub-nosed revolver, out of the guy’s waistband, checked it was loaded – it was – and handed it to Henry.
‘We have a plan?’ Henry asked.
‘This guy will start to come round in about four minutes. He’ll start moaning and groaning and alerting everyone else. So before then you need to be knocking on the front door with that’ – he pointed at the gun – ‘hidden behind your arse. I’m going to go for the two guys in the kitchen as soon as I hear you knocking.’ Flynn paused. ‘We’ve started, Henry; we either run away now or finish whatever’s happening. This is our play at the moment.’
Henry nodded, split off and crept quickly back to the front of the house.
Flynn hauled the guy under a bush in the flower bed, then edged his way to the back door where once again he flattened himself against the wall and waited.
At the front door, Henry knocked.
‘Who the fuck is that?’ McCabe demanded.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said you weren’t expecting anyone.’
‘I’m not.’
The doorbell rang, followed by another impatient knock.
Rik said, ‘We need to answer it. It’s obvious someone’s home, isn’t it? Our cars are in the drive, yours too, and the fucking lights are on.’
Flynn twisted into the back doorway and stood on the threshold. The two men at the table had risen cautiously on hearing the knock at the front door, putting down their pizza slices and picking up a gun each. They were facing away from Flynn into the house.
Flynn then did something he had always had a hankering to do.
The men were not of a big build, not tall, but quite wiry. Each had a shaved head and they were standing shoulder to shoulder, both about the same height.
He went for them in a rush.
His hands reached out, one on either side of each man’s head, and he did the thing that a chemistry teacher had once done to him and another miscreant at school – he banged their heads together. Hard. The noise was an incredible hollow ‘thuck’ as their skulls collided, but he did not stop there, because he readjusted his hold so that his large hands gripped the top of each man’s head as if he was holding two bowling balls and he then slammed both heads face down into the table top, busting each man’s nose into their pizzas.
Flynn then swept their feet from under them, one to the left, the other to the right, and, unconscious, they fell on to the hard tiled kitchen floor with blood spouting from their faces.
Flynn grabbed the guns, one in each hand, crossed to the kitchen door, sidestepped into the hallway and sidled behind a grandfather clock.
Rik Dean stumbled out of the dining room, pushed in the back by Darren McCabe who growled, ‘Answer it and tell ’em to fuck off.’
Rik walked unsteadily to the front door and unlocked it while McCabe kept a step back, pointed his gun at Rik’s head, then turned slightly and shouted towards the open kitchen door, ‘You guys! What the fuck are you doing?’
Flynn had ducked back against the wall, hoping not to be seen, but McCabe saw the movement.
‘Shit!’ McCabe spun and fired twice at Flynn, splintering the highly polished woodwork of the old clock. Flynn darted back into the kitchen just as the front door opened to reveal Henry standing there with the gun in a firing position.
McCabe pivoted just as Rik dived across the doorway, leaving Henry with an open shot of McCabe who swivelled back, bringing his weapon around towards Henry.
Who fired twice. One slug tore a huge chunk of McCabe’s neck away, the other ripped his left ear off.
McCabe dropped his weapon and crashed to his knees, clutching the neck wound from which huge amounts of blood poured through his fingers.
‘Cunts!’
Henry looked up from what he’d done to see Marcie – with the baby strapped to her – frogmarching Lisa out of the dining room with one hand holding the collar of her blouse and screwing a small revolver into her right ear.
Henry kept his position, with one eye on Flynn at the kitchen door.
‘Drop your gun,’ Henry told her.
‘Cunts! You fuckers!’ she screamed, shaking the terrified Lisa and waking the baby who began to scream deafeningly.
‘I said drop your gun. You’re not going to get out of here, Marcie.’
The use of her name jarred her for a moment, then she shoved Lisa aside and screamed, ‘Are you going to shoot a mother with a baby?’
She raised the gun to fire at Henry just as Flynn stepped out of the kitchen and, aiming low with the handgun he was holding in his right hand, shot Marcie Quant twice in the upper legs.
Henry watched her drop to her knees, screaming and clawing at her legs, but he ignored her and walked over to McCabe who had blood gushing out of his neck wound. Henry stood over him, pointed the revolver at his head and thumbed back the hammer.