Harte

by Robert Innes

  Harrison grinned. “I know, I know. How’s Sally? Is she getting much of a birthday?”

  “Not really. She’s not in yet though, she’s late. Knowing Sally, she went for a quick one last night that turned into her rolling in at four in the morning.”

  “So, dare I ask how long you’re going to be in Manchester for?” Harrison asked. “I’m guessing it’s going to be longer than just the weekend with all that’s going on?”

  “God knows. I’ll keep you updated. It could be a while though, it depends how long it takes for us to find Frost.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Harte!”

  Blake nearly jumped out of his seat at the sound of Gresham’s voice. He was standing in the doorway to his office, glaring at Blake furiously.

  “I better go,” Blake said to Harrison.

  “Is that that grumpy old git, Gresham?” Harrison asked.

  “I heard that!” Gresham snapped.

  “You were supposed to. Bye Blake!” With a cheeky smile, Harrison hung up.

  Blake supressed a snigger of laughter, then put his phone is his pocket and looked up at Gresham. “And a good morning to you.”

  “Harte, it’s bad enough that you’re even here in the first place,” Gresham grumbled, “but my station is not the place for you to be chatting to all your boyfriends!”

  “One,” Blake replied flatly. “I have one boyfriend.”

  Gresham snorted in derision and walked across the office to Blake’s desk, glaring furiously around. “Where’s Matthews?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Why? She’s late!”

  “She’s on her way,” lied Blake. “She’s stuck in traffic.”

  “More like she’s nursing a hangover,” Gresham spat. “The second she walks in, I want her in my office. As for you,” he dropped the pile of papers he was carrying on the desk and gave Blake a smirk. “You can go through all these.”

  Blake glanced down at the pile of paperwork. “What are they?”

  “They, Harte, are the various reports and files from Frost’s prison records. All his visits, all his correspondence with anybody outside the prison, all the details of his various transfers. I thought you would be the perfect person to have the job of going through them.”

  “Doesn’t Fox want me interviewing? What about Samuel? He was brought in last night.”

  “I am aware of that, Harte, perfectly aware. Detective Inspector Fox will be doing that on your behalf. I thought it was best that you were kept out of the way of the most sensitive parts of this investigation.”

  “You do realise that you aren’t my boss anymore, don’t you?”

  Gresham smiled gleefully at him. “That’s where you’re wrong, Harte. With DI Fox out of office, as it were, I’m in charge of anything that goes on in this department, including you. Don’t worry, you can talk to the prison officer when he comes in to give a statement later. Wouldn’t want you too bored, now, would we?” He leaned in and leered gleefully at Blake while giving the pile of paperwork a hefty pat. “Best get started. Remember, I want Matthews in my office the second she stumbles in!”

  And without another word, he walked back into his office and slammed the door behind him.

  As the door rattled in its frame, Blake glared at where his old boss had been standing and with a huge sigh, set to work on the first report on the pile.

  As the morning dragged on and the pile of paperwork slowly began to decrease, Blake became more and more bored and frustrated. Gresham had neglected to tell Blake that the reports and records of Frost’s time in prison detailed a lot more than what might be considered relevant to the investigation. There were food reports, cell inspection records, letters from crazed fans of Frost that wanted to propose to him, details of fights he had had with cellmates from three prisons ago, interviews relating to any misdemeanours from each prison as well as receipts from anything he had purchased with his points card in each prison. Each document, while important to be discounted as potential evidence, should have already been vetted by another officer before Blake had been given any of it, but Gresham was clearly enjoying flexing his authority over him once again.

  He ran his finger down the list of locations that Frost had been held in and noted that he had been in Strangeways before his court case had even started, after which he had been moved to his first prison to begin his sentence. Blake remembered all too well the media attention at the time of his trial and even then, with the verdict a foregone conclusion, there had still been some news outlets accusing the police of not doing a thorough enough job in the investigation.

  As well as feeling that his time would be far better spent doing more practical things like interviewing Samuel or being out trying to find some sort of leads as to Frost’s whereabouts, Blake was also becoming worried about Sally, who, by mid-morning, had still not arrived at work.

  Blake put down a scanned letter from a woman who was asking Frost for an interview for her dissertation on ‘Modern Day Serial Killers,’ and pulled his phone out of his pocket. After he had checked that Gresham was out of earshot, he rang her up and waited for her to answer, sighing in frustration when her voicemail kicked in instead.

  “Sally, where the hell are you?” Blake asked her. “Gresham is going to do his nut at you when you get here. Did you go out last night or something? Just ring me, I can cover for you, but I need to know where you are first. I have your present here.”

  He hung up with a concerned glance up at the clock. He was trying to avoid thinking about the previous night when he thought he had seen Frost standing behind the car.

  “She’s fine,” he said to himself as he put the phone back in his pocket.

  His annoyance at the amount of paperwork still to get through was preventing him from really concentrating on what he was doing, so instead, he put the letter aside and went on the local news site on the computer to see if there were any updates from the media on the interview he had given the night before.

  As he predicted, it seemed Theresa Bowen’s interview technique had had the desired effect in some media circles. The website he was currently on had Blake’s interview as the top story under the heading ‘Police have NO CONTROL over Frost’s movements.’

  Blake rolled his eyes and clicked off the page. He knew well enough that stories like that were merely clickbait and that the interest in them would be gone as soon as there were further developments in the case, although it was quite likely that articles praising the police would be a lot harder to find at this stage.

  A few more clicks, and Blake found himself on another page, with a slightly less biased view on things, detailing all the facts that had been released to the public so far, underneath an obituary on Helen Beauchamp and her political career. Blake skim read the article until he came to the bottom where the two videos of Frost’s apparent departure from Strangeways and his supposed arrival at Belmarsh had been included.

  Blake clicked on the first video and watched as Frost was led out of the prison doors by the two prison officers. Blake paused the video and stared at their faces, trying to see if he vaguely recognised them from his visit to Strangways. He pulled out his notepad and wrote ‘who are the officers???’ before clicking play on the video again. Frost, his hair all over his face as usual, was hidden from view behind the doors of the van, and again, Blake paused the video, staring intensely at the screen, trying to see some way, any way, in which Frost could have been hidden from view, but as he peered at the screen, he realised that Frost’s feet were actually just visible under the doors and he quite clearly stepped inside the van. With his head starting to hurt and his only vague theory as to how the disappearance may have been accomplished disappearing, he pressed play again and watched as the van made its way out of the prison, with the police soon following afterwards. Then, once they had all passed, Theresa stepped back into shot, concluding her report over the sound of the crowd’s protests.

  B
lake sighed heavily and clicked onto the second video which featured the prison van’s arrival at Belmarsh in London. As Theresa began giving her second report, Blake was faced with a question he had forgotten he had since he had first seen this second report and scribbled it down on the notepad: ‘How did Theresa get to London so quickly???’ He stared at it for a few moments and then drew a line through it, realising that it was probably a completely irrelevant question.

  Then, he pressed play again and watched as the van came into view at Belmarsh, the crowd shouting and screaming over the sound of Theresa’s voice, much louder than in the first video. He watched as the van drove around the crowd and through the large gates of Belmarsh with the camera quickly zooming in to watch the discovery of Frost apparently missing from the van.

  Blake leant back in his chair and exhaled deeply, cursing his brain for not making any sense of what he was watching.

  “Harte!”

  Blake cringed at the sound of Gresham’s voice and lifted his head up to glare at him. “What?”

  “Keeping you awake, are we?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Well, God help us all. Where’s Matthews?”

  Blake opened his mouth to reply, his brain whirring for an excuse.

  “Oh, so she’s skiving, is she?” Gresham snapped. “I explicitly told her that nobody was having time off while that psycho is out there!”

  “She’s probably been held up,” Blake replied, clicking off the news reports. “There’s no need for you to get your blood pressure too high.”

  Before Gresham could reply, there was a knock on the door and PC Fletcher poked his head into the room.

  “What is it, Fletcher?” Gresham growled.

  “Sir, Nigel Hawthorne is here to make his statement,” Fletcher replied.

  “Excellent,” Blake said, throwing the paperwork on the desk and standing up.

  “And where do you think you’re going, Harte?” Gresham asked him.

  “To talk to Nigel Hawthorne,” Blake replied, walking out the door. “I’m getting to the bottom of how Frost got out of that van if it kills me.”

  “What about this paperwork? I’ve given you a job to do and you’ll bloody well do it!”

  But soon, Blake was too far down the corridor to be able to hear his ranting ex-boss, his voice finally fading away as he turned the corner towards the interview room.

  Try as he might, Blake could not help but feel strange walking into the same interview room that he had interviewed Frost in all those years ago. As he stood behind the glass, watching Nigel Hawthorne waiting for him at the desk, Blake was reminded of he and Sally watching Frost before walking in to try and interview him and make some sense of how a man could do the things he had.

  Blake gathered his paperwork together as well as a tablet that he could use to bring up the video of Frost being put into the prison van. If Nigel Hawthorne thought he was just making a simple statement, he was very much mistaken.

  “Right, Mr Hawthorne,” Blake said, strolling into the interview room. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  “Yes, if we could,” he replied. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”

  “Have you?” Blake asked casually. “Oh, yes! Germany! Nice little holiday. Lucky you. My time in Manchester was supposed to be a holiday, but then, you know, a dangerous serial killer escaped from your prison, so that rather put a stop to that.”

  “How did you know I was going to Germany?”

  “You had plane tickets on your desk yesterday.”

  Hawthorne looked mildly put out. “Actually, it’s not a holiday, I’m taking my wife there for a…” He paused, swallowed, and then cleared his throat. “For a consultation.”

  Blake frowned. “Oh, yes, I remember. You said she wasn’t well.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Still, that’s not why I’m here, is it?”

  Blake shook his head.

  “What would you like me to put in my statement?”

  Blake leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “The truth.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You see, Mr Hawthorne, I’m not entirely sure I believe everything you’re telling me.”

  Hawthorne stared at him, looking confused.

  “Look at it from where I’m standing. You told me those prison officers that loaded Frost into that van were on placement. Where from though? I can’t find a thing about either of these guys in any of the records I’ve checked. In fact, it seems that nobody in your prison can give us any help at all as to what went on there yesterday morning, which means, in my eyes, one of two things. Either you’re all in this together and somehow all conspired together to work out a way to get Frost out, or you’re the one that’s had the biggest role in it. Whichever one it is, you’re still lying to me.”

  Hawthorne shuffled in his chair. “I don’t like being called a liar, Detective Sergeant.”

  “And I’m not a huge fan of being lied to,” Blake replied. “So we can keep each other perfectly happy if you start telling me the truth.”

  Hawthorne stayed silent, so Blake picked up the tablet and played him the video of Frost apparently leaving Strangeways.

  “It all looks perfectly in order to me,” Hawthorne said, looking down at the screen briefly.

  “Of course it does,” Blake replied. “It’s meant to look perfectly in order, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking you how he got out.”

  “What makes you so sure that it had anything to do with the prison? He was travelling to London! That’s over two hundred miles. Two hundred miles in which the van could have been stopped, he could have done something within the van to get out, anything is possible!”

  “Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” Blake replied. “Let’s go through some of those theories, shall we? Let’s say, out of those two hundred miles, at mile one hundred and twenty-five, the van stops and lets him out. They’ve pulled into the side of the road or whatever, and he’s free to then run into the bushes while the van continues on, now without a passenger, to London.”

  “There you are then.”

  “Except that isn’t what happened, firstly because Frost has apparently killed somebody in Manchester since his escape, so that can’t be it. Secondly, doing the job you do, you’ll be all too aware of the public’s reaction to these types of prisoners. It evokes emotion or at the very least, interest. Let me show you something else.”

  He flicked around on the tablet and then pulled up a video that somebody had posted of a prison van driving through the streets of Liverpool, surrounded by police escorts, all with their sirens blaring.

  “This was posted about three years ago. Now, in this van are two men suspected of murdering a child, and they’re on their way to court to receive their sentence.”

  Hawthorne frowned. “So?”

  “As you can, it’s quite the procession. There’s, what, about ten patrol cars? Motorcycles, all with their sirens blaring, clearing a path for the van, very similar to what apparently left Strangeways yesterday morning, all of them driving through the streets of Liverpool, so there’s little wonder that there’s videos posted online of the journey. It’s quite a sight.”

  “What is your point, DS Harte?”

  “My point, Mr Hawthorne, is why aren’t there any of Frost’s journey yesterday? Trust me, I’ve looked. Not a single one. In over two hundred miles, the only video evidence we have of Frost’s journey is the van leaving and the van arriving. Nothing in between.”

  Hawthorne stayed silent.

  “Do you know what really unnerves me though?” Blake continued, placing the tablet back down on the desk, “the patrol cars that were supposed to be around the van at all times to make sure that he has no way of escaping. I mean, Frost is precious cargo. Nobody wants him back on the streets. So, if it had nothing to do with you, then we’re into slightly more scary territory, because it means that all those police must have been in on it, or at the very least, the ones immediately behind him. Somebody must hav
e seen something, but nobody can tell me anything. I took a long hard look at that van when I was in your prison yard, Nigel. Those things are impenetrable. They are physically impossible to escape from, that’s the whole point, so how did Frost get out?”

  “You seem to be asking me to do your job here,” Hawthorne told him.

  “Well, you can’t be any worse at it than you are at your own,” Blake replied coldly.

  “Look, are we taking this statement or not? I take it I have the right to leave whenever I like?”

  Blake shrugged. “Absolutely, but there’s no point in you writing a statement that we both know is complete and utter lies, is there?”

  “You have no evidence of that.”

  Before Blake could reply, there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The door opened and Fletcher leaned in, holding one of the folders Blake had left him to go through.

  “Excuse me, DS Harte, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I thought you might want to see this.”

  “Not at all, Fletcher. Excuse me, Nigel. I won’t be a moment.”

  Hawthorne did not reply. He merely watched Blake leave the room, the side of his mouth twitching slightly.

  Once the interview room door was closed, Blake indicated that Fletcher should follow him into the side room so that he could keep a close eye on Hawthorne. As they looked through the glass at him, Hawthorne leant his head back, rubbing his eyes, exhaling deeply, before clasping his hands together and wringing them.

  “How does he look to you?” Blake asked Fletcher.

  “I’ve not got a lot of experience with suspects yet, Sir,” Fletcher said, looking slightly embarrassed.

  “That’s alright,” Blake said kindly. “We’ve all got to start somewhere, no matter what Gresham says. So, go on. Take a look at him. If you had to give an opinion, what would you say?”

  Fletcher stared at Hawthorne for a few moments. “I’d say he looks nervous. Like he’s hiding something. I mean, I’m not sure, but you’d think that someone who was in charge of a prison like Strangeways would be a lot calmer in a situation like this, wouldn’t you?”