Demolition, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Nick Oldham From Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Also by Nick Oldham from Severn House
The Henry Christie thriller series
CRITICAL THREAT
SCREEN OF DECEIT
CRUNCH TIME
THE NOTHING JOB
SEIZURE
HIDDEN WITNESS
FACING JUSTICE
INSTINCT
FIGHTING FOR THE DEAD
BAD TIDINGS
JUDGEMENT CALL
LOW PROFILE
EDGE
UNFORGIVING
BAD BLOOD
BAD COPS
WILDFIRE
BAD TIMING
SCARRED
TRANSFUSION
The Steve Flynn thriller series
ONSLAUGHT
AMBUSH
HEADHUNTER
DEMOLITION
Nick Oldham
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Nick Oldham, 2022
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Nick Oldham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0694-7 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0697-8 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0696-1 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire, Scotland.
For Belinda
ONE
A few years ago, Marcus Durham kidnapped a business rival. It was just one of those incidents – minor incidents, Durham argued to the Crown Court judge – designed to teach someone a lesson. It wasn’t meant to be anything more than that, he insisted further in his defence, throwing himself on the mercy of the court. There was no ransom demand or whatever, so it wasn’t like a real kidnap – except, of course, it was. Durham had picked two of his best men, who he knew could be trusted, who liked to kick and punch people and keep their gobs shut, and with them by his side, he went to Josh Price’s house, crashed through the front door with sledgehammers and dragged Price out, screaming and writhing, just as he was eating his tea with his wife Maggie, daughter Hannah and spaniel Poppy; the former two screamed a hell of a lot and the dog, squealing, went to hide under a chair.
They trussed him up, blindfolded him, hurled him into the back of a van and drove to Durham’s building yard out in the sticks in the Ribble Valley, where they manhandled the petrified man into a shipping container and sat him on a chair on a plastic sheet – for effect, sir, Durham had pleaded to the unimpressed judge – and gave him a vicious beating to within a whisker of his life before locking him in the container to bleed, suffer and repent at leisure on his misdemeanour.
Price had been naive enough to outbid Durham at an auction for a derelict barn located between Garstang and Longridge on the slopes of Beacon Fell. Durham had intended to buy and renovate the property for himself, and prior to the auction he’d put the hard word around the building community that the place was his and he fully expected to get it at the reserve price and not a penny more.
Clearly, that was a memo Price didn’t get.
Not that he would necessarily have taken any notice of it because he and Durham didn’t get along anyway, so he gleefully outbid Durham by £20,000 and the smug ‘Fuck you’ look he’d given Marcus when he held up his bidding paddle pretty much secured his fate.
No one – no one – got away with looking at Marcus Durham like that.
‘I’m sure you get where I’m coming from, Your Worship, don’t you?’ he’d said to the judge. ‘It’s a matter of respect, isn’t it, boss?’
Even that did not impress the judge, who, being of the Crown Court, should have been addressed as ‘Your Honour’ and certainly not ‘boss’.
However, Price’s kidnap following the property auction wasn’t a very well-thought-out plan, not least because it was obvious to all concerned, despite the use of balaclava hoods, who had kidnapped him. Plus Durham didn’t really have an endgame worked out as regards Price’s fate. All he really wanted to do was scare him shitless, make him sign the property deeds over to him (for which he would willingly have paid him that reserve price, less ten per cent for all this inconvenience) and let that be a warning to him: tread on my toes again, scumbag, and next time my steel toe-capped work boots will kick you into a vegetative state and you’ll spend the remainder of your life sucking soup up through a straw.
Durham never got as far as having the property signed over to him and releasing Price because about an hour after delivering the beating and incarcerating Price in the container, the cops turned up en masse at the builder’s yard as Durham was stepping out of his office in the Portakabin. Two Heckler & Koch MP5s were rammed into his face and firearms officers were screaming at him and his two guys to hit the deck.
Which they did – face down. Fast.
Durham twisted his head to see a smart-arse detective superintendent called Christie lean over him and take great pleasure in arresting him with very much that same smug look on his face as had been worn by Price in the auction house, the look that said he’d got one over on Durham.
In spite of his heartfelt pleas to the Crown Court and a pretty wily barrister, Durham’s tale of woe fell on deaf ears, and the judge sentenced him to eight years, meaning that because of the vagaries of the British justice system, he was out in four and wore an ankle tag for two years after that.
As far as the parole board and his probation officers were concerned, he emerged from prison a reformed character.
Actually, he didn’t.
He went straight back into his property renovation and restoration business with a canny new partner, but not before revisiting Josh Price (after the ankle tag had been removed, obviously) and making him disappear – a neat trick he’d learned from a London-based gangster with whom Durham had shared a cell for a few interesting months in Manchester Prison, a guy who had a great sideline in making people vanish into thin air for good.
The trick, of course, was that Josh Price’s disappearance could never be linked to Marcus Durham in spite of any speculation.
But the best thing of all for Durham was that his new partner was able, through a series of shell businesses, to acquire the property that had been so humiliatingly snatched from his grasp by Price, obviously at a cost well below market value because Price’s widow (although she didn’t yet know she was legally a widow as the seven years required by law had not passed; all she knew was that her husband had disappeared off the face of the earth) desperately needed any cash as Price’s own business dealings were far from straightforward. He was just as much a rogue as Durham in many ways, though much less violent, and he certainly hadn’t deserved to be kidnapped initially and then, some six and a half years later, be fed into a stone crusher where his bones were ground to ash to become part of the hardcore underneath the HS2 railway that was under construction from London northwards.
Rumour had it that at least four other bodies were under the tracks already.
Durham then spent a considerable amount of cash renovating the coveted property because he had always intended it to be his home.
And now it was, and no one could prove he’d acquired it other than legally and above board.
At six thirty that Monday morning, as he dipped his toe in the water of the swimming pool he’d built outside the house, he had thought fleetingly about the chain of events that had led to the pro perty eventually – and rightly, he thought indignantly – becoming his. He was not troubled by any of these recollections because Marcus Durham didn’t do conscience.
He looked across the expanse of the heated blue water, one of the very few infinity pools in any property in Lancashire; in fact, Durham didn’t know of any other personally and, being in the business, he thought he would have heard.
One thing he was certain of was that there was definitely no other property with such a pool that had such stunning views as this: sweeping way down from Beacon Fell, across the wide-open plain of Lancashire, west to the coast some twenty miles distant. From here, on a clear day – and today was such a day – Blackpool Tower was visible directly ahead; to the north were the clearly defined mountains of the Lake District and to the south the mountains of North Wales.
A seriously perfect location.
Durham sighed contentedly.
The weather was good and today would be the hottest day of the year – he was going to fucking well enjoy it to the max.
He dragged off his sweat-stained T-shirt, damp from a decent workout in the home gym, then slid off his shorts to stand there completely naked on the edge of the pool, hands on hips, proudly displaying his manhood and well-muscled body, salon-tanned as there had been no holidays abroad this year. He hoped there was some nosy parker out there in a house, equipped with binoculars, watching him.
Good luck to them, he thought, giving his groin a jaunty jerk before diving smoothly into the perfect water, loving the way it seemed to caress his heavily tattooed skin.
For a guy in his mid-forties, he was proud of his fitness, and the twenty-metre-long pool provided him with a good follow-up workout after the gym.
Twenty minutes later, he came to a stop and swam across to the long edge of the pool, where he contentedly rested his chin on his hands and surveyed the wonderful view down to the coast.
Yep, he thought, people could call him a heathen, a fly-by-night chancer, a rogue always on the lookout for a good deal; yes, he was a bit reckless with the dosh and unforgiving to those who got in his way, and yes, he was pretty lucky to have fallen in with his current business partner who did an excellent job of controlling him … Marcus Durham knew all these things, but he also knew that he must have some kind of arty-farty streak within him to be able to appreciate this awesome view. So he wasn’t a heathen, after all.
He was so preoccupied in picking out the landmarks on the coast – the tower, the windmill at Lytham – that he failed to hear the soft, padded approach of the person who was dressed from head to toe in a forensic suit with a hockey goalkeeper mask covering the face.
‘Mr Durham?’
With a splash of surprise, Durham spun in the water.
‘Fuck’re you?’ he demanded, instantly registering the forensic suit and mask and just as immediately understanding its meaning – particularly so when the person’s right hand came up and in it was an ugly-looking black pistol held by a hand in a latex glove, a hand also encased, as was the gun, in a clear plastic bag.
Durham reacted instinctively and dived under the water, knowing that, in spite of what appeared in films or TV crime dramas, the truth was that bullets fired into water of any real depth were quickly sucked of their energy and propulsion, and anyone on the bottom of a swimming pool would be unlikely to be killed by a slug from a handgun. Already, as he went under, he prayed that whoever this intruder was would waste at least some bullets trying to kill him underwater and that maybe – somehow – he would find the strength to launch himself out like a killer whale and tackle this person.
As he dived with his eyes open, he heard the gun fire twice. He twisted his head to see the trail of the bullets in the water close to his face, but obviously losing their killing force and momentum as they crashed into the density of the water.
Durham powered his way to the bottom of the pool, the deep end being just short of two metres, and he held himself, paddling madly to keep himself down while looking up and seeing the shape of the intruder, gun in hand, clear yet shimmering at the edge of the pool.
Durham knew he didn’t have much time.
Before diving, he had not managed to inhale a complete lungful of air and already he was struggling as the combination of stress, fear and adrenaline increased his heart rate and took their toll on the small amount of oxygen in his system.
Keeping down, he pushed himself away from the deep end, propelling himself with a desperate surge towards the shallow end, in the vain hope that if he moved quickly enough, he might out-manoeuvre his hunter.
In truth, he wasn’t really thinking straight now. He was just reacting to the situation, floundering, his brain a swirl of confused thoughts and strategies and possibilities, all with one simple aim: survival.
As his fingertips touched the wall at the shallow end, he knew he didn’t have anything left in his lungs and that either his next breath would be an intake of warm water or he would have to shoot upwards and draw air – and he was already realizing that his brief hope of rising with the deadliness of a killer whale was a forlorn one.
He twisted.
His lungs burned.
He saw the menacing shape of the forensic-clad figure had simply walked along the edge and was still there, biding time.
As his lungs tightened, he knew he would have to go up now or take the first breath of a drowning man.
Durham braced himself like a sprinter at the starting blocks.
Then he went for it, had to. His plan was to go for the attacker’s legs, whip them from under whoever it was, topple them, disarm and overpower them.
One thing was certain: Durham wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
He counted.
On ‘three’ – the very last moment before his lungs filled with water – he surged up out of the pool and dived for the legs of the intruder, floundering like a wet seal as he came out and completely missing as the person simply stepped back out of reach.
Durham lunged again – missed again – and somehow found himself to be utterly exhausted by the stressful experience which, so far, had probably lasted only a maximum of ninety seconds, as the fresh air rushed down his gullet to his greedy lungs.
Wearily, he drew himself up on to all fours, his closely shaved head hanging between his arms. He coughed, spluttered and finally raised his face to look up.
‘Fuck’re you?’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Fuck d’ya want? I haven’t done owt. Who the fuck’re you, ya—’
His words stopped abruptly as the intruder loosened the cord that had pulled the forensic hood tight around their face, then pushed it back.
The hockey mask was slowly removed, then dropped on the concrete.
Durham squinted. It took more than a few moments for recognition to take place as the intruder glared into his eyes and waited for it to dawn on him.
He swore again, gulped and took another breath before saying – in very much the same pathetic, weedy tone of voice he had used when speaking to the Crown Court judge some years earlier – ‘Look, c’mon, we can sort this out, OK?’
‘In what way, exactly?’
The intruder raised the automatic still encased in the plastic bag. Durham could see the two ejected shells side by side in the bottom of the bag.
This time he swore inwardly.
That little touch, the bag around the gun, plus the forensic suit, meant only one thing: a professional approach, someone who wasn’t going to leave a trail for anyone, someone intent on not getting caught … yet he knew that if he couldn’t get out of this alive, there would be bullets in the pool as well as in him. It was just the empty shell casings that would not be found.
And then he thought it wouldn’t matter either way.
Because the cops thought he was a shit-bag to start with and they’d put no effort into finding this person who was about to execute him.
‘Stand up!’ The gun jerked. ‘Stand on the edge of the pool, facing me.’ The voice was resolute, unwavering.
Slowly, Durham got to his feet. Naked, he stood upright, but this time he felt totally vulnerable in his birthday suit, not like he had only a few minutes before when he’d waggled his penis to the world. His hands covered his cock and balls. ‘Come on,’ he whined, ‘surely we can put this right. I’ll do anything. Please.’
