Countdown to Terror

Chapter Five

Chapter 5

Two young members of the football gang injured by Hussein were now out of the care of the local outpatients department and, whilst still mentally scarred, were starting to venture out and meet their fellow gang members again. They had yet to rejoin any nefarious activities.

What they had only recently discovered, though, was that on the day of the incident two other, clearly more resourceful members of the gang had followed Hussein. They had trailed him from Cheetham Hill Road, over the bridge behind Victoria railway station, down Corporation Street to the big wheel. Opposite the entrance to the Arndale Shopping Centre, the big wheel stood on the site of the area bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on 15th June 1996 in an attack that targeted the city’s infrastructure and caused widespread damage. Two hundred and twelve people were injured, but there were no fatalities.

Upon entering the Arndale Shopping Centre Hussein became twitchy; this sixth sense had kept him alive on many occasions. He wandered the malls for a few minutes, stopping at a Costa coffee shop to check things out. He was too good an operator to miss the young scumbags following him and trying not to look obvious. Deliberately pausing to look in a few shop windows, he led them through the lower level of the Arndale, then making a right turn he continued through TK Maxx, up the escalator and out into Market Street. At the top he crossed the Metrolink tram lines to Piccadilly, and then followed the tram lines to the right, and after traversing what was Piccadilly Gardens before it was concreted over, he crossed over the bus station and through the Piccadilly Tower arch, knowing this area was normally devoid of people, thus affording his followers nowhere to hide. They had to linger until Hussein exited the other side, then he darted across the street to the right and then down into George Street, where he quickly disappeared in the small side streets and alleyways of Chinatown.

Pressured by other gang members and parents, and with an eye on compensation, the injured members finally made a complaint at Bootle Street police station. The description of the assailant was duly logged, but no one appeared too hopeful of a result, especially as it was thought the injured thugs probably got what was coming to them.

Samir was bored. He was staring out of the window overlooking the River Mersey, which was swollen with water running down from the major river valleys of the Pennines. It was still was raining hard, as it had been all that week, and it was only Wednesday. He counted the arches of the Stockport viaduct – all twenty-seven of them, at the time of its construction it was the largest viaduct in the world, and it remained one of Western Europe's biggest brick structures. He was on a job with the audit senior of Anders-Lybert Accountants, a small engineering works in Stockport. The job was coming to an end, and now that he came to think about it, maybe the company as well. He had reconciled the bank account the day before, and the overdraft was even worse now than last year. It had risen steadily over the last eighteen months as the recession deepened until it was again over the agreed limits. The bank, one of those bailed out by the taxpayer, would not lend any more cash despite all the overtures from Prime Minister David (call-me-Dave) Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to banks in general to assist small business. “We are all in it together,” had been Cameron’s rousing cry at election time, but some like the family shareholders of CF Fabrication Engineers were in it deeper than most. Chairman Cyril Fordspike had nothing left to mortgage, and the continuing attacks on pension schemes left no hope there. It was showing in his demeanour and his regular hangovers. Cyril and audit partner Nils Lybert were due to meet with the bank again the following week at their palatial offices in Spinningfields, a new development in the central financial district of downtown Manchester. There was not much hope around Stockport at the moment; many small firms were going bust and the central part of the town looked dilapidated, with more charity shops and to-let signs appearing each week.

The senior had gone out to lunch with the director, leaving Samir to work on his own. They had attended the stock-taking that morning, an exciting project to rival that of snail-racing, left-handed angle brackets, right-handed hanging brackets, widgets and wodgets galore.

Samir yawned again, and forced himself to look down upon the scintillating charms of the company’s corporation tax computation. He tried again, for probably the fourth time. He looked up last year’s file to no avail: it might as well have been in Chinese. He wished now that he had paid more attention in classes at Manchester Metropolitan University, but the lecturer on taxation was hardly charismatic – frankly awful, in fact: bald and myopic, with a huge belly overhanging cheap trousers. He prefaced every topic with, “when I was an Inspector at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs – Inland Revenue, as it was known then – well, I could tell you a thing or two, I’ll say!” Samir heard voices, and began to scribble feverishly.