‘I need a week. Give me a week,’ Marcie begged.
‘Five days,’ Cosmo said.
‘Seven … come on, man, seven. Please.’
‘Six.’ He relented.
They were still in the office within the industrial unit. McCabe had been released, his clothes flung at him. He had dressed hurriedly, still shivering, furious with Cosmo, his eyes blazing at the older gangster. Cosmo caught the look and went up to him, grabbed his face between finger and thumb, squeezing his cheeks hard.
‘Don’t get any dumb ideas about what you want to do to me, son. I see it in your eyes. I see the hatred, the humiliation, but I also see that you’re alive and well and don’t have a bullet in your head, so just remember that.’ He cocked his head towards Marcie who was scrambling into her clothes. ‘If she comes good, you’ll both be breathing, and that pug-ugly kid of yours might live to have parents.’ He flicked McCabe’s head away and pointed at him. ‘Do not try anything.’
‘We won’t,’ Marcie called, hitching her jeans over her hips.
Henry and Jake ran to the security gate, Henry thinking, Shit, I’ve just got someone stabbed.
‘There’s been a stabbing,’ Henry told the prison officer at the reception, the same one who had allowed him in earlier. ‘I’ve been asked to return.’
The officer said, ‘Yeah, but you’re in the wrong place – you need to be on the adult side, there’s nothing happened on this wing.’
‘Really? I thought …’ Henry’s assumption had been that the incident was connected with his visit to Jamie Costain who, he’d thought, must have been set upon as soon as he’d returned to the bowels of the YOW.
‘But we can take you through, if you like.’
‘Have you any details?’
‘Not as yet.’
Henry became slightly deflated. He had no desire to be sidetracked, but felt that even though he was no longer a cop as such, he had some responsibility to cover and protect the scene until the actual investigating officers landed and took over.
He and Jake were led quickly through the interconnecting corridors until they were finally allowed into the last secure chamber, which reminded Henry of passing through an airlock into a spaceship in a science fiction film. No prisoners were ever allowed through it, either way, for any reason.
They were handed over to a pair of tough-looking prison officers – a man and a woman of equal dimensions – who led them through further corridors, up on to landings, past locked cell doors and into a short section of corridor leading to a shower and toilet area.
Henry guessed that whatever had happened had taken place in the showers. It was a bit of a cliché, but the truth was that many assaults in prisons did take place in such areas where inmates were often at their most vulnerable and unprotected; more often than not because of well-meaning but misguided privacy laws, there was a lack of security cameras and direct supervision.
The corridor had been cordoned off at either end.
A prison officer stood guard at each end, too. There was a hubbub of activity and stressed-out faces on the staff, but particularly on a woman in a smart trouser suit who Henry knew was the prison governess. She looked likely to explode at any moment. Her eyes lit on Henry and Jake; although she had met Henry when he’d been a cop, she showed no sign of recognizing him, but she did nail them as police.
‘Officers, so glad you could make it so quickly.’
‘We were on site,’ Henry said.
‘And you are?’
‘Henry Christie.’ He didn’t bother to go into the intricacies of how he wasn’t in the police anymore.
‘Jake Niven.’ He didn’t reveal he wasn’t a detective, although he was in plain clothes.
Henry had glimpsed the body of a naked man between other people’s legs. He also saw blood. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked the woman. He hadn’t been able to recall her name, and she hadn’t introduced herself either, but her ID lanyard swinging around her neck reminded him that her name was Daphne Crossjack.
‘A stabbing. I’m afraid he’s dead – confirmed by our in-house medics. A blade from behind, in the ribcage underneath the arm; stabbed many, many times. He’d bled out before any of our staff even found him, which could only have been a matter of a few minutes.’
‘Has the offender been detained or identified?’ Henry asked, already dreading the answer.
Crossjack shook her head. ‘This has always been one of the weak points in the prison. It’s usually well supervised,’ she added, then looked as though she would like to eat her own words.
Henry picked up on that. ‘I sort of wish you hadn’t said that.’
‘I’m sure it was just an accidental oversight,’ she said defensively.
‘Or a deliberate one,’ he countered, ‘but that’ll be something for the investigation team to look at.’
When something was ‘usually’ done and then it wasn’t, it ‘usually’ meant that people were looking away when they shouldn’t have been.
‘May we have a look?’ Henry asked. ‘We’ll keep to this side of the tape until we get suited and booted.’
‘Yes, go ahead,’ Crossjack said. Henry could almost see the cogs of her brain whirring as she mulled over the implications of a murder on her patch. Some very important, searching questions were going to be asked.
Henry eased his way through, with Jake just behind, until they were at the tape stretched across the corridor at waist height. It was only a fairly short, narrow passageway, a link from the landing into the showers – maybe six feet wide, twelve feet long – meaning that someone had timed, planned and executed an ambush to perfection.
He looked at the body, which he hoped – apart from an inspection for vital signs by the medical staff – was more or less in the position in which it had fallen.
And from what he could see and surmise, because the body was lying with the head towards him, he had been attacked leaving the shower and returning to the cells.
A white male, completely naked, with a blood-drenched towel just covering his feet. He was face down, ironically in the recovery position, with one knee drawn up and in a wide pool of blood from the multiple stab wounds into the ribcage just below his right arm.
The hair was blond and blood-stained.
Henry glanced over his shoulder at Crossjack who had come with him. She looked pretty queasy, although Henry wondered if that was more to do with the prospect of her career plummeting than anything else.
‘No sign of a weapon?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘By now it will have passed from prisoner to prisoner and been disposed of or hidden for next time. I hold out little hope …’
‘Where there’s some hope,’ Henry said. He looked back at the body and frowned. He could not see the young man’s face, yet there was something vaguely familiar. ‘Who is it?’
‘A prisoner on remand. Thomas Costain,’ Crossjack answered.
Dunster Cosmo’s mobile phone beeped as a text landed. He removed it from his pocket and glanced at Marcie and McCabe, who looked like two folk who’d been dragged backwards through the proverbial hedge.
‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ he said, pressing the key to open the text menu.
‘We’ll go, then,’ Marcie suggested.
‘No … you’ll wait.’
Cosmo read the text and then looked at the four graphically violent photographs that had arrived, his face registering increasing pleasure as he scrolled through the images a few times, enlarging a couple of them with his finger and thumb to inspect detail. Finally, his face broke into a wide smile of triumph, until he looked at Marcie and McCabe again, and his humour disappeared and his eyes became stone-cold grey.
‘This man – one of a gang – tried to muscle in on some of my business,’ he said, jiggling the phone. ‘Two of that gang are already dead … they’d been foolish enough to come down here and threaten me, so I did what needed to be done with them.’
‘The ones we disposed of for you?’ Marcie guessed.
‘Correct-a-mundo,’ Cosmo said. ‘But what I want to point out to you is this.’ Cosmo turned the phone screen towards the couple. ‘I don’t want you to go thinking you can leg it or diddle me out of my money, because I have a very, very long reach. I can get into places only a cockroach can get into. This man is another member of that gang, one of its leaders. He was in prison. Now he’s dead. So let that be a warning.’
Marcie took the phone and held it so McCabe could see the screen, too. She flipped through the photographs with her fingertip, then handed the phone back to Cosmo who split the device in two and removed the SIM card. He dropped the phone on to the floor and stamped on it with his heel before snapping the SIM card and placing the two halves in his pocket. He intended to dispose of those bits later.
‘Now go! Shoo!’ he instructed the pair. ‘And be back in five days, bearing all my money.’
‘We agreed six,’ McCabe pointed out.
‘Did we? Well, it’s five now. I’m unpredictable like that, so you’d better get a move on.’
‘You need to isolate Conrad Costain, this guy’s grandfather. He’s also on remand here,’ Henry told Crossjack urgently. ‘Get him into solitary or something. He’s in danger – if he hasn’t already been stabbed.’
‘No can do.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘He isn’t here.’
‘What? Where is he?’
‘We transferred him out yesterday. He was causing too much trouble, was on his third warning.’
‘He’s eighty fucking years old,’ Henry exclaimed.
‘And a total bastard to supervise.’
Henry and Crossjack had moved back from the throng around the body and were in a huddle further along the landing.
‘He was almost impossible to control from the moment he arrived, obviously in cahoots with his grandson. We had to split them up, even though they were being kept in separate cells here. He was causing real ructions, pretending he had Alzheimer’s, for one thing, even though he clearly hasn’t.’
‘So where is he?’
‘Manchester.’
‘Strangeways?’
‘As was,’ Crossjack confirmed.
‘You need to get on to them now, get them to lift him out of the general population and bung him in solitary – but don’t tell him why or allow him to find out about this.’ Henry was doing some calculations in his head.
‘Why ever not? Bastard that he is, he should still be told. This is his grandson.’
‘I get that – but let me do it. Get Manchester to grab him, lock him down, no access to phones, TV or any communication devices – and I’ll be there in less than an hour.’
‘But his human rights—’
‘Should’ve been shelved when he ordered the murder of a man and his wife who had done him no harm, just because he was feeling peeved. I can be there in under an hour, so can we just get on with it, please?’
Crossjack pursed her lips. ‘Why?’
‘First to save him from the same fate as his grandson; second to use Tommy’s death as a lever for vital information,’ Henry explained. ‘Look – he’ll be incommunicado for less than sixty minutes, that’s all.’
‘I’ll do it now,’ she said and strode away, presumably to her office.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ Henry said. He turned to Jake. ‘We need to get moving.’
Jake was one of those fantastically practical street cops who had done almost every available ‘hands-on’ course, from a basic driving course to advanced, security escort driving, an HGV course, even – plus all the courses related to firearms, short of being an instructor.
So, having led a fairly sedentary life in the backwoods of Kendleton for a few years, driving the rickety old Land Rover (that he’d come to adore), being behind the wheel of something that had legs was a pleasant change.
He put his foot down, aimed the BMW at the M61, entering at Bamber Bridge, and sped towards Manchester while Henry worked his phone.
The first call was a quick one to Steve Flynn who had been sitting in Henry’s Audi in a layby about a mile away from Lancashire prison, awaiting instructions. Henry told him to begin making his way to Manchester prison, no further explanation given.
Next, he spoke to Rik Dean, bringing him up to speed with the situation he had just left in his wake, and asking for the prison liaison officer to warn Manchester that Henry was en route.
Rik was cool and efficient, said he would do this.
Henry said, ‘It’s taken a bit of a twist, this.’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘Let’s just keep on its tail,’ Henry said, ‘Follow it down the hole.’
‘Yeah, OK. Look, I have some updates for you regarding DNA, but you get Conrad sorted first and see if he comes up with anything.’
Henry’s interest was piqued by the DNA teaser, but he decided not to ask. Instead, he asked Rik to instruct the telephone unit to contact mobile phone providers and see if any calls had been made from the prison around the time of or just after Tommy Costain’s death. He said he would.
Next, Henry called Flynn again. ‘Location?’
‘Right behind you.’
Henry glanced at Jake, who grinned. The speedo showed a hundred miles per hour. Then he looked over his shoulder to see his Audi almost on the back bumper of the BMW with Flynn at the wheel, who gave Henry a little wave.
Henry flipped to face front again and made another call. This time to Royal Lancaster Infirmary.
They were at Manchester prison twenty minutes later. Ten minutes after that Henry was being shown into an interview room where he sat and waited for Conrad Costain to be brought in.
While a cop in Blackpool, Henry had had extensive dealings with the Costain family of miscreants, a family that had become an organized criminal enterprise, but he had never encountered Conrad in that time. Not that it particularly surprised him. The Costains were a widespread, extended family, and many were involved in the criminal side of things. Henry had wanted to dismantle and disrupt them before he retired, but he held his hand up: he had failed.
Along the way he had arrested many of them, chipped away at them, had one as an informant even, but he had never successfully managed to crack the hierarchy.
Even when old man Costain came into the picture.
He had been involved in contracting the two ‘hitmen’ travellers who had murdered the Yorks, but beyond that Henry knew very little about Conrad, other than realizing that he was probably the kingpin of the whole organization. Even though the guy was actually over eighty, he was still fair game for Henry, who was eager to be having another shot at the family as a sideshow to the investigation he was embroiled in.
Henry’s whole career had been built around defending the rights of, and fighting for, the dead, and he wished no one the kind of demise that Tommy had just suffered, but he hoped that his death might prove to be the catalyst for opening up Conrad Costain’s old, thin-lipped mouth.
The door opened.
Conrad, his wrists bound by handcuffs, was led in. The cuffs were removed, and he was pushed on to the chair across the table from Henry, the feet of which were screwed to the floor. Henry gave a nod to the prison officer, who retreated to the corner of the room and put in earphones to listen to music but kept a wary eye on Conrad.
Conrad looked considerably older than when Henry had first met him, which was only about a month ago at the time of his arrest. Henry could see the physical decline of the older man even in that short space of time. Life inside was hard for a guy his age, even if he was a tough guy. His cosseted existence in a luxurious static caravan (under which Henry had discovered the cash stolen from the Yorks, plus an escape tunnel) on a fairly quiet, under-the-radar travellers’ site had been taken from him. He was now in a small prison cell, banged up for eighteen or more hours each day, and even if he threw his weight around and was a disruptive fucker, he had lost everything. Chances were, if the police successfully prosecuted him, he would spend the remainder of his days stewing behind bars.
Conrad stared at Henry as though he was a turd. ‘You again.’
Henry nodded.
‘I always knew of you,’ Conrad told him. ‘Even though you never knew of me.’
‘I was a famous cop.’
‘You were a pain in the backside.’ Conrad shrugged. ‘But just one of those things to endure. A nosy, annoying cop. Never intimidated by us. That half impressed me, although it did make me think you were perhaps a bit simple.’
‘I was famous for being simple.’
Conrad leaned forward. ‘But do you know one thing?’
‘What would that be?’
‘I once put a contract out on you.’
Henry heard the words. Ingested them. Understood them. His mouth went dry.
‘But I rescinded it,’ Conrad said. ‘Not because I wanted to – I really thought you should be dead – but because Troy Costain begged me not to have you mown down like a dog in the street.’
‘That was kind of him … and such a classy way of killing someone.’ Henry could feel his heart thumping as he regarded this dangerous old man while also thinking about Troy Costain, who had – unknown to the Costains – been Henry’s informant way back.
‘I didn’t know why he didn’t want you dead.’
‘Practical reasons, I would guess.’
‘Because eventually it was his relationship with you that got him killed – ironically.’
Henry didn’t comment, but it suddenly felt as if he was the one on the back foot here, as if he was the one under scrutiny. Interview rooms were his hunting grounds, places he controlled, where, more often than not, with patience and skill, he nailed wrongdoers to the wall – metaphorically speaking. Now he felt as though he was losing his touch. Retirement must have blunted his cutting edge.
Conrad had a smirk on his lips. ‘Perhaps I’ll put that contract out again.’
‘You might have a problem with that, Conrad.’
‘How would that be?’
‘You’re running out of people capable of delivering even a newspaper for you.’
Conrad folded his arms, sat back.
Henry placed the file he had taken in for Jamie Costain to look at on the table between them. Conrad looked at it for a moment.
Henry then put his mobile phone on the table.
‘You’re boring me, Henry. I’m too old to be bored. Or intimidated – if that’s what you’re trying to do.’
‘No, it’s not. Look, Conrad, I’m truly sorry about this and if you really do know anything about me, you’ll know this is true. I am sorry.’ Henry picked up his phone and found the photo file. ‘Though I’m no longer a cop as such, I’m doing some work for them and I was asked to attend an incident earlier this morning at Lancashire prison.’ Henry decided to keep more or less to the truth. ‘On my arrival, I accompanied prison officers up to a corridor leading to a shower area where there had been a fatal stabbing.’ Henry paused. He had delivered more death messages than he could count. There were many different causes, but one thing he knew, one thing that had stuck in his mind ever since his initial training all those years ago, was that, however tenderly or forcefully the message was delivered, there had to be no uncertainty. You could not tell the recipient that their loved one had ‘passed on’ or ‘gone to a different place’ or mince words in any way that could be misinterpreted. They had to know for sure that death had occurred and that the person would not be walking back through the door. Ever. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, Mr Costain, that your grandson, Thomas Costain, was the victim. He has been stabbed to death and I am genuinely sorry.’
‘Lying fucker!’ In a sudden reaction, Conrad angrily crashed his fists on the table.
Henry didn’t flinch. The prison officer yanked the earphones out and put a hand to his baton. Henry indicated for him to keep cool.
‘This is a lie. Part of a conspiracy. You’ve moved me here so you can manipulate us to get us to talk to you, to confess. I suppose there’s cops over there saying the same thing to Tommy right now – that his grandad is dead. You’re a bunch of toss-bags if you think I’m going to fall for that.’
‘Conrad, it’s true. I’ve seen his body, I’m afraid. He’s been stabbed multiple times.’
‘Liar.’ Conrad wasn’t having any of it.
Henry tapped the screen of his phone. Now for the really brutal bit. ‘I have some photographs. They’re unpleasant and they’re not staged. You can see them if you so wish, but what I’m telling you is the absolute truth. Tommy is dead.’
‘OK, show them to me.’
‘You’re sure?’
Conrad nodded.
Henry set up his phone and slid it across the table.
Conrad took it and swiped slowly through the photographs several times before placing the phone back down and shoving it back.
In the space of seconds, Henry had watched him wither even more.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Did they get who did it?’
‘Not yet. It looks as though he was ambushed on his way from the shower.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Who could have done this, Conrad?’
The old man’s head twitched. A tear rolled down his cheek.
‘Who ordered it?’ Henry probed.
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘OK. In that case, who ordered the killings of these two young men?’ Henry pulled the photographs out of the file. ‘These are photographs of the two young guys I found up at the Yorks’ farmhouse. You haven’t seen them yet because you’ve been so uncooperative, but I’ll lay odds you know who they are. Both were shot in the head.’
Ruthlessly – and he knew he was piling it on – he shoved the photos across, the actual ones of the dead men and the mock-up drawings done by a police artist.
Conrad looked at them with a glower, but it was obvious that emotions were churning inside him. He said, ‘Is it really true about Tommy?’
‘Yes, it is.’
Conrad nodded, then looked more closely at the images.
As with Jamie before, Henry studied Conrad’s face and, even if he tried not to show it, Henry could tell that he recognized the two men.
‘Found in a wall space at the farmhouse.’
‘I’d heard.’
‘Who are they?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Or won’t?’
Henry kept watching him. He could see the old man was fighting to keep control of everything.
‘These men were brutally murdered in what looks like a gangland-style execution,’ Henry said calmly. ‘This morning Tommy was also brutally murdered in what looks like a targeted attack.’
Not, of course, Henry thought, that you yourself don’t order people to be just as brutally murdered. The two men who had murdered John and Isobel York had been ordered to do it and had committed an horrific crime, one of the worst Henry had ever seen in his life, as well as killing the family dog which was additionally unforgivable. Henry was pretty sure that had all been done on the orders of this old man sitting opposite him.
So, in some respects, he had no sympathy for him.
In others, Henry’s inbuilt conditioning to bring killers to justice made him desperate to bring Tommy’s murderer to book, as well as whoever had killed these two men.
Plus, as part of this whole, complex scenario, a good cop was lying on the brink of death because of something that involved Conrad Costain.
Henry said, ‘This all has to stop, Conrad. Whoever is behind all this – the Yorks, these guys’ – he indicated the photos – ‘Tommy, too – it all has to stop. And I’ll bet you have the key to it. OK, maybe you can’t or won’t tell me the names of these men, but what you have to do is give me a name, the name of the guy you’re at war with in London over the county lines thing …’
At that Conrad looked up sharply.
Henry said, ‘Yes, I know what all this stems from; what I don’t know is who is involved, and you need to tell me now, Conrad.’ He went on, laying it on thick, and concluded by saying, ‘But what I do know is that there is every chance you too will get a knife in the ribs, because even in here, even if you’re isolated, in solitary, someone will get to you. All you have to do is give me one name and let me take it from there.’
Silence.
‘The thing is, Henry, retribution is a two-way street,’ Conrad said.
‘Maybe, but you’re a sitting target in here, and I’ll guess that there are at least one hundred men in here willing to shiv you to death for a couple of grand in their family’s coffers. But he is out there – whatever his name is that you won’t reveal; a moving target, probably with protection. And he’s already shown how to deal with a situation he doesn’t like, by getting someone in a prison two hundred and fifty miles away from London to kill.’
Henry tapped the photos, tapped the phone.
He added, ‘And part of me thinks that if you hadn’t been moved from Lancashire prison to here, you would probably have been knifed to death sitting on the bog this morning. So no, you were moved here because you are a disruptive fucker, not so we could manipulate you. You got lucky this morning. Your luck won’t last, Conrad.’
Costain looked at Henry. ‘One name. I say it once. If you don’t hear properly, I won’t say it again. Understand?’