The Final Cut Page 2

  MacDowell had become a real pain in the arse for Manchester police since his release from prison eight years earlier. He had been an up-and-coming young star amongst the criminal underworld, prior to his imprisonment for murder in the late 1990’s. At his sentencing, MacDowell was mocked openly by the judge and jury. He was described as “the Frank Spencer of the crime world” and at the time, he became something of a figure-of-fun amongst the city’s gangsters, who always had comical stories about Marco MacDowell.

  But that was then. Things had changed dramatically since that time. Maybe it was the fact that he was viewed with such amusement when he’d entered Strangeways prison in 1998, that he went on to become the most feared and respected inmate in there, and had managed to build an empire of power outside the prison walls, on the streets of Greater Manchester, from his prison cell. He went in as a joke, but he came out of there as a serious gangster. One who had made himself into a house-hold name in the region.

  Today, MacDowell was running everything on the east side of Manchester. From Middleton to Mossley, and from Rusholme to Oldham, Marco MacDowell was the man who controlled the gangs, the drugs, the guns and the clubs. It was a hell of an empire, and one which he was extremely pleased with. He was more interested in the prestige of the title, rather than the wealth and the power. Going away to prison as the biggest joke in the north had been the making of him, he’d spent every single day since then, working hard to readdress the balance. His driving force was to make sure that everybody knew that he was not a joke, and he certainly wasn’t to be messed with.

  Marco MacDowell had started in the crime world by selling a bit of weed as a teenager, making just enough money to get by. But as the money came in, he began to realise that there could be more to life than simply “getting by.” He felt that he worked hard selling the weed, and he was taking most of the risk, but he was passing most of the money on. His portion was tiny compared to the money he was passing on to his suppliers. He decided that he was going to cut out the middle-men, and grow his own. He saved up, and bought his first hydroponics set-up, making sure that with each new batch of weed from his suppliers, he was keeping the best seeds for himself.

  That first set-up gave him enough cash to invest further. And so it went on, for a couple of years. If drug dealers and weed farmers had ever held an awards evening, Marco MacDowell would surely have walked away with an award for “up and coming entrepreneur.”

  As the nineties were drawing to a close, it was rumoured that Marco was supplying twenty-per-cent of the weed that was being smoked in Greater Manchester. And for anybody who has never smelt how much weed gets smoked around this part of the world, it’s a lot.

  But just when things were going so well, his success was to come crashing down. And it was all his own doing. Marco had turned his weed-growing into an industrial operation. Quite literally, he had taken over a small industrial unit close to the canal in Hyde, and cultivated almost a thousand plants, the flowers of which had a resale value of over a million pounds. But his success wasn’t going unnoticed amongst the most serious gangsters, and word was going around Manchester about the new kid on the block.

  Marco MacDowell had known what to expect. He was successful at what he did because he had studied and worked hard. He knew everything there was to know about the plants, and how to grow them to the highest standards. He was also very astute at developing a trusted network of wholesale dealers. He had recognised early on that dealing with other growers and dealers would be the riskiest part of the enterprise.

  However, the way that Marco planned to sort this part of the business development strategy was about to end his emergent career, and land him in the big house for a ten stretch. Marco had been getting attention from the wrong people, as word of his little factory got out to other dealers and growers. The dreaded gypsy firm of Gorton, the Desmond family were sniffing about a bit too much, and Marco knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before they turned up mob-handed at his weed factory, to take it over. Traditionally, the only way to fight these kinds of people, was to have a bigger, braver, harder mob. But that wasn’t how Marco wanted to play it. He didn’t want to give all his cash away paying a gang of knuckleheads just to protect him and his investment. He was making a great success of things with a very small team, and now that the Desmond family were acting the goat, he needed to show them that he wasn’t scared, and that he’d kill them if they ever tried to take one plant out of his factory. It was a simple case of kill, or be killed as far as MacDowell was concerned.

  Instead of spending money on a large group of mates, who would ultimately let him down anyway, Marco invested his money on security. He had huge steel gates put up around his unit. He invested heavily in surveillance equipment, and he bought himself a gun, and made sure that everybody who needed to know, was fully aware that he’d bought it.

  “Anyone wants to come and fuck with me, they’ll rue the day!” He’d say to other underworld figures, mixing some aggressive street-talk with a phrase he’d borrowed from his nan.

  The fact was, Marco wanted trouble. It was an integral part of his business development strategy. The bigger the trouble, the better. And the sooner it came, the better. To step up a division, you had to make yourself known.

  It didn’t take long until the Desmond family turned up, and tried to figure a way to get their three cars past the giant, expensive steel gates, and into Marco’s yard.

  Marco was standing on the roof, shouting down at them.

  “What do you want?”

  “We’ve come for a brew!” Shouted Danny Desmond. “See how you’re getting on with the new factory!” he shouted over the giant gates. His gang were looking around the perimeter, trying to find a way in. But Marco had secured the place like a fortress. The steel, spiked perimeter fence had razor wire and barbed wire all around the top.

  “No milk, sorry, and I’m out of biscuits. Phone me next time you’re planning a visit, eh? I’ll make sure I’ve been down the Kwik Save.” shouted Marco. He took his phone out of his pocket, and started writing a text message. It took a few moments, this was back in the days of pressing the buttons a few times to get the correct letter you wanted. Back when Snake was the best game you could get on a phone.

  After what seemed like a minute, he sent it.

  Danny Desmond’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out, and saw that he had received a text message from Marco. It read “Go now, or I’m going to shoot you in the tit.”

  Danny laughed loudly, and shouted his companions around him.

  “Hee-ya lads, come and have a look at this. I think Marco’s getting a bit fucking cocky!” Danny was shouting loud enough to be heard by Marco. His team were laughing loudly, mockingly.

  “He must have been on the brave pills!” announced another Desmond brother, Daz. There was a roar of laughter, and the nine men were making a racket, acting like football yobs on the way to a game.

  “Come on Marco, let us in. You know what’s happening. You can’t stop the sun from rising in the east tomorrow morning, and you can’t stop us from becoming your business partners today. Now come down and open the fucking gates, you turnip.”

  The newest member of the Manchester criminal underworld pulled his handgun out of the waist-band of his trousers, and opened fire, firing six bullets at the group of men. They absolutely shat themselves, throwing their bodies down onto the floor, their laughter had been replaced with a real fear, as the bullets whizzed by, inches away from them. How nobody had been caught was anybody’s guess. As they lay there, hiding, wondering how to reverse their cars away without being shot, Marco was reloading his handgun with another six bullets.

  He fired again at the huge steel gates, shouting “yee-haaaa!” as each bullet pinged off with a deafening bang. The Desmonds crawled away into the undergrowth, leaving their cars where they were. It was a humiliation that none of them wanted to speak about.

  “And don’t come back, you pikey twats!” Shouted Mar
co, firing his last bullet into the air, and shouting “yee-haaaa!” once more. He never did hear from the Desmond family again. Presumably they decided that this nutter was going to be more trouble than he was worth. They didn’t even return for their cars.

  The word soon started going around that Marco MacDowell was a maniac. And as long as it’s the right people who are saying it, that is a very positive reputation if you want to be a major player. There were other scrapes and confrontations with other gangs, and MacDowell always seemed to outwit them, or just freak them out so they’d follow the Desmond family’s lead, and just leave him well alone.

  But Marco wasn’t happy with that. In order to achieve his big dreams for his weed growing venture, he wanted his enterprise to be known as a total no-go zone. He felt that needed to kill somebody connected to the underworld, to state his claim as one of the city’s “main heads.” After a lot of thought, he decided that he would kill the ex-police detective, turned criminal-advisor, Geoff Walsh. Walsh was a rotten piece of work, and although he provided sound advice on police procedures to the people who wanted to learn ways around the system, there were suspicions that he was batting for both sides. All too often, a criminal who had sought Walsh’s advice, and had paid him his fee, ended up in a police van not long after. It had happened too many times for it to be a coincidence.

  It had taken Marco a while to decide that Geoff Walsh was going to be his best target. And once he’d set his mind on the idea, the more enthusiastic he became. The way he saw it, he would be doing the crime lords of Manchester a favour by eradicating a seriously weak link in the chain, whilst also bolstering his own reputation. It was an extremely good idea, and Marco decided that his legend status would be immortalised if he killed Walsh with his bare hands.

  Marco began working on his upper-body strength, it became an obsession. He also became obsessed with watching Walsh, learning his routines, observing his domestic situation. Marco became fascinated by planning. When he did this, he was going to make a great success of it, he was going to tick every box, he was going to make sure that plenty of people knew that he’d done it, but there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence that could prove it. He would kill Geoff Walsh inside his own home, throttling the dodgy, double-dealing bastard with his own hands, and then set fire to the house. He’d let it be known that Walsh had crossed him, in the hours before his murder was announced. It was all planned.

  But the reason that Marco MacDowell went to prison as the biggest joke in Manchester was because he got his audacious plan wrong, in spectacular fashion. He killed Walsh, as planned, and dragged the body up the stairs, before laying the man’s body out on his bed. He then set fire to the bedroom, and ran away from the property, wearing his balaclava, and laughing loudly as he did so, for added effect.

  However, Marco could have had no idea that Geoff Walsh’s house had a top of the range fire alarm installed, which included a sprinkler system. As soon as he’d left that bedroom, the smoke alarm had detected the fire, and it was extinguished, almost instantaneously. And unfortunately for him, Geoff Walsh’s body lay there intact, absolutely loaded with forensic and DNA evidence from Marco MacDowell.

  As he was sent down, the word began going around Manchester, and the jokes began about Marco MacDowell’s ill-fated attempt at getting away with murder.

  But in MacDowell’s mind, in the grand scheme of things, that oversight, of checking whether Walsh had installed a state-of-the-art sprinkler system, or not - wasn’t really the issue. He felt he’d been unlucky, that’s all. He certainly didn’t think that he was the biggest joke in town. He knew, deep down that everybody who was taking the piss, would be laughing on the other side of their face when he got out, and he dedicated every one of the three and a half thousand days inside planning it, and building his empire.

  But now, eight years after he was released, Marco MacDowell was getting a bit too big for his boots, as far as DCI Miller and his superiors at Manchester City Police were concerned. He had built an even bigger weed factory, and he had made the building even more secure than his first. He had bought a huge old mill, which he had once again turned into an impenetrable fortress.

  Miller had been making very good progress, following seven separate lines of enquiry, including extortion, kidnapping and murder. If these inquiries all worked out and turned up some incriminating evidence, this would turn out to be a very good piece of police work. Miller was gutted that he had to close this file for the time being, and lock it away in his cupboard for the foreseeable future.

  But as he did so, he felt confident that he’d soon get this DWP business sorted out, and he could get back to it, and take Marco MacDowell off the streets of Manchester for good.

  Chapter Three

  At 2pm, Miller was standing in the sports hall of Manchester City police’s HQ. He was facing a team of twenty-eight police officers. Some were in uniform, but most were not. These officers had been sent urgently to HQ, to assist with Miller’s enquiry. It was an excellent result, the officers had all been surrendered by their senior officers, from police stations across the city.

  “Okay, good afternoon, and thank you for making yourselves available, and getting here at such short notice.” Miller looked out at the men and women who were all standing to attention, many of them desperate to know what was about to happen. DCI Miller was Manchester’s best-known detective, he was always on the news, always caught up in the area’s most talked-about cases. It was a thrill for many of these officers to be given this opportunity to work with the celebrated SCIU team. “Stand at ease.” Instructed Miller, and the officers’ spread their feet apart slightly, and clasped their hands behind their backs.

  “Right guys, listen up. We are faced with a major challenge this afternoon. We need to attend an address in Stockport and carry out around forty, that’s four-zero interviews with suspects in an office block setting. We need to be fast, and friendly, and most of all extremely considerate towards the people that we are interviewing, or else we’ll have more complaints in, than we will have time to deal with. Okay?”

  There was a loud chant of “Sir!” from the officers, the sudden burst of sound reverberated all around the gymnasium walls.

  “Now, some background. We currently have two very seriously injured people in hospital, both have suffered life changing injuries in the past week. And both of them work in the same office. That’s where we’re going now. We need to figure out if the two injured parties have any enemies at work, do they have any rivalries or arguments with any particular colleagues? Is there anything at all that the staff know about their injured colleagues that could explain why somebody might attack them so viciously? One of the victims has lost the use of her legs. The other has been paralysed in his arm.”

  Miller saw that all of the officers, male and females, ranging in age from early twenties to early fifties were fully engaged in what he was saying. This pleased him, as you could sometimes get the worst dickheads sent over on these short-notice requests for support. But these all looked alright, which would be an advantage.

  “I have produced a briefing memo for you all, so please pick one of these up and read it on the coach as we head down to Stockport. I want complete silence on that coach please, all I want to hear is you reading my memorandum, and revising the list of questions that you will be putting to each of these office-workers. We need this doing quickly, at the same time, before anybody gets the opportunity to collude with others. Okay, attention!” The officers moved their heels back together, the sudden sound clapped loudly with the echo around the room.

  “Dismissed.”

  *****

  Miller and his team travelled on the bus with the others. The seven-mile journey look just under half-an-hour, progress was slowed by the constant stop and start as the traffic lights halted their progress every two-hundred yards or so, as the coach meandered along Stockport Road through Ardwick, Longsight and Levenshulme. The silence that Miller had requested was being observed, every singl
e officer had their head down, studying the paper-work which DCI Miller had produced for them.

  Miller’s small, but eternally productive team were glad of the extra bodies. Interviewing thirty-six potential suspects in a timely fashion was going to be a tall-order, especially when the suspects would be in their work-place, and attending these interviews in a voluntary capacity.

  The big, white police coach was usually only seen when there was a big demonstration, or a major event taking place. It looked quite odd on Wellington Road, as it pulled up alongside the DWP building. “Okay, SCIU staff, come here,” shouted Miller, standing at the front of the coach. “The rest of you stay put for a couple of minutes and await instruction.”

  Miller stepped off the bus, and was followed his DI, Keith Saunders, and then DC Jo Rudovsky, DC Bill Chapman, DC Mike Worthington, and finally, DC Helen Grant. Miller looked up at the building, Wellesley House, as he walked towards it. This seven-story office block on the very fringe of Stockport town centre was the place where the two victims of the violent attacks worked. It was an impressive, 1960’s government building which looked out directly across the old, red-brick factory chimneys, and the impressive 27 arch railway viaduct which dominates the Stockport sky-line.

  Miller’s team gathered around him as he stood at the doors of the office-block. “Okay everyone, as we discussed earlier, you are each going to be in charge of a team consisting of four of the temp officers. The idea is to get this done as soon as possible, reducing the opportunity for alibis and stories to be manufactured, and so that all these people can leave work on time. The one thing we don’t want is to get loads of flack. Now, remember, someone in there knows what’s gone on with these two attacks. There’s a pretty good chance the attacker is sat in there right now, so let’s fuck his day right up. Okay?”