by Nick Oldham
He was on firmer ground when asked about his best arrest and who he thought was the top criminal in Lancashire. And he knew his legal definitions by heart so he could answer any questions about criminal law.
He was perspiring heavily by the end and was glad to get out of the room and down to the canteen for a cup of tea, which he took over to an empty table. He had sat down shaking, convinced he’d failed.
He’d been staring out of a window at the headquarters social club, clasping his brew for comfort, when he became aware of a figure standing to one side of him: FB.
‘Hello, sir.’
‘Thought I might catch you here, lad.’
‘Just settling the old nerves,’ Henry admitted.
‘Well, you got through.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Wow – thank you, sir.’
‘Obviously, I fought against it all the way, but y’know, democracy and all that, so I had to capitulate. You start at Blackpool CID in two weeks’ time or thereabouts, and you’ll get an initial detective course sometime later in the year. Is that OK with you?’
‘More than OK. Thank you again.’
‘Don’t thank me; thank the ACC. He saw something in you I didn’t. The paperwork’s in the correspondence,’ FB said, and with that he rotated on his heels and walked away with the metallic clipping noise Henry had come to associate with FB who had steel heel protectors on his winkle-picker shoes, which, Henry realized, meant he must have sneaked up on him.
And even as he sat facing him three weeks later, Henry wasn’t certain if FB had meant any of the things he’d said in the canteen. Did he really not want Henry on the CID?
‘Yes, yes, you did it,’ FB repeated gravely. ‘But the thing is, now you’re on your probationary period, so it’s only fair you should know what I expect of you.’
Henry nodded.
‘OK, keep your head down, make arrests – lots of them. I want to see burglars of all shapes and sizes in those minging cells downstairs. That’s your focus – fuckers who wreck people’s lives. Anything else is a plus, OK?’
Henry nodded again. Burglars it would be.
‘You’ve got to be a team player, not go off doing your own thing whenever you please. So, burglars, clear-up rates and team player.’
Henry nodded. Team player. Got it.
‘And if you do all that, you can call me boss, now, OK?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘All that said, head back down to the CID office and liaise with the DS. There’s a search warrant being executed this morning; your ex-mates from the Support Unit are assisting.’ FB checked his watch. ‘They’ll be briefing about now, so get your skates on.’
‘OK, boss.’ Henry began to rise.
‘One thing – piece of advice from a seasoned detective to a tyro – never wear a suit you don’t want to get shit up. And definitely shave that tache off … it’s unpleasant to look at. Oh, and that haircut … do they call ’em mullets, or something … meh!’
Henry returned to the CID office less than motivated by FB’s welcome speech, which felt more like a warning than anything, but he tried to shrug it off as he threaded his way through the narrow corridors of the police station, which was now his home base at last, favouring the concrete stairs rather than the lift, although, even if it never felt quite safe, he was pretty sure no one had ever been trapped in it. There were actually two lifts in the station, neither of which seemed fit for purpose.
When he arrived in the office, it was almost deserted.
The only person remaining was DC Brand, the detective Henry had liaised with when he should have been interviewing Tommy Benemy. Brand was sitting back, expertly blowing smoke rings.
‘Where is everyone?’
‘If you leg it down to the garage, you might just catch ’em before they set off,’ Brand said. ‘They got sick of waiting for you.’
Henry was almost on his way before Brand had finished speaking, rushing – not running – down to the garage where a small convoy of police vehicles was about to set off, including the personnel carrier used by his now former SU colleagues assisting that morning’s raid.
Henry heard a muffled cheer from the van as he tried to jog as quickly as possible across the garage without appearing to be stressed out or concerned he was going to be left behind for his first ever job as a DC.
He saw the DS and another DC pull out of a parking space in a plain car and drive towards the exit, followed by the section van, so it was pretty clear his new workmates weren’t about to wait for him.
Fortunately, his old ones saw his predicament and the side door of the van slid open for him and several pairs of hands gestured for him to hurry up and jump aboard as the vehicle started to roll.
He was heaved in, the door slammed shut behind him.
‘Thanks, guys.’
He then had to endure a journey full of good-natured abuse about his new status, new suit, haircut and moustache (which they hadn’t seen because he’d grown it secretly while on leave for the past two weeks). He took it all in good heart. His posting on to the Support Unit had been more by accident than design, but he’d hugely enjoyed it for many reasons. The camaraderie had been great, the varied work fun, and, not least, it had taken him to parts of Lancashire he would probably never have visited if he’d stayed as a response PC. His knowledge of the constabulary had increased significantly; in a fairly short space of time, he had been to almost every police station in the county.
The carrier followed the two local vehicles on to the promenade where the convoy turned left and made towards South Shore, an area which, behind the façade of the seafront, had a grim reputation for drug dealing, violence and general criminality. Henry knew that this was a place he would come to know intimately as a DC in Blackpool.
He was looking forward to the relationship.
They veered left off the prom on to Lytham Road and drove towards the maze of streets behind the Pleasure Beach, drawing to a halt under the shadow of the railway bridge where the DS and the DC got out of their car and walked back to the Support Unit with street maps in their hands. The carrier door slid open and the DS, whose name was Ronson, came to the opening, slightly surprised to see Henry in among the unit, who were all kitted out in dark-blue overalls.
‘You made it, then?’ he said to Henry.
Henry would have quipped something back, but just nodded.
‘OK, folks,’ Ronson said. ‘You know the drill. The house we’re going for is down the next street’ – he jerked his thumb over his shoulder – ‘number thirty-five, on the right, three doors down. It’s divided into flats and the one we’re interested in is the basement, so that makes it easy for us. Three of you to the back yard, two to deal with the soil pipe and a third to watch the back door to deal with anyone who scarpers. Everyone else, down the steps at the front and in through that door. OK?’
Henry assumed that he’d missed the main briefing at the station and this was just a reminder for everyone.
Hesitantly, he held up a hand.
Ronson said a slightly contemptuous, ‘What?’
‘What are we looking for, just so I know?’
‘Anything we can find. Mainly drugs and money, possibly firearms.’
‘Cheers.’
Ronson didn’t have to ‘tut’. It was in his eye-roll.
It would be wrong to say that cops don’t like kicking down doors: they do. Henry had grown to love it while on the Support Unit. The unit had quickly become specialists at entering properties, constantly practising and refining the art, and during his time on the unit Henry had been part of teams that had entered numerous houses, flats and business premises.
Sometimes a knock on the door was sufficient. People often just opened up and let the police in; sometimes, because of the nature of the warrant and especially when drugs or guns were involved, there had to be a direct quick entry. Drugs often ended up being flushed away; hence the cops covering the back today, th
eir task to smash the soil pipe – the thick downward pipe that was the toilet outlet – and get a sieve under it. It could be a messy affair. Henry knew that drug dealers often left their shit in the toilet bowl in case they were raided, just so the sieve would end up full of it, as well as drugs.
That was the less sexy part of a house raid.
‘Henry, you go with the guys doing the back, will you?’ Ronson instructed him as the team climbed out of the carrier with their gear.
In spite of the possibility of actual shit being mixed with the drugs, there was also the chance that a suspect might do a runner.
Hiding his disappointment at not being able to go through the front door, Henry tagged along with the three cops tasked with the rear-end job, one of whom carried a sledgehammer and another a fishing net. They jogged down the back alley, crouching by the wall behind the target property, waiting for the ‘Go’.
Which came via the PR about thirty seconds later as the team went to the front door.
Henry stood aside and let the ‘shit collectors’, as they were colourfully known, run up to the rear of the house to deal with the soil pipe, although they were slightly flummoxed to discover there was no such thing. As it was a basement flat, the soil pipe as such was inside the property – so no shit, no drugs, and no one did a runner.
They had to stand around and wait for the back door to open, revealing the face of Ronson who beckoned them inside.
‘Two arrested, man and woman. Drugs and money by the bed, plus a knackered revolver, still capable of blowing your head off.’
‘Nice one,’ Henry congratulated him.
‘Yep, good result.’
Henry followed Ronson into the flat which consisted of a kitchen and toilet at the rear, leading through to a bed-sitting room at the front, which was below the level of the road outside, accessed by steps. Two handcuffed prisoners, looking the worse for wear, were being led out by Support Unit officers, and Henry only glimpsed them.
The bed they had been caught on was nothing more than a very old, used, lifeless mattress laid directly on the floor, covered in a grubby sheet with stained pillows; it all reeked of weed, the stench of stale sex and cigarette smoke – the usual aroma of a type of property Henry was already familiar with.
‘Scenes of crime are on their way,’ Ronson said. He squatted down and carefully lifted the corner of the mattress so Henry could see underneath. The mattress was on floorboards and he could make out a hatch of some sort in the floor. ‘I’m interested in what might be down here, Henry. Looks like a cellar, maybe,’ Ronson said. ‘You hang on here and wait for SOCO, then have a look down with a proper lighting rig.’
‘You reckon there’s a stash down there?’
Ronson shrugged and pointed to a set of shelves by the wall on which were a set of weighing scales and several Tupperware containers that looked to be packed with green foliage. ‘Even if there isn’t, there’s enough here for a supplying charge. I’m going back to the nick to book the prisoners in. You stay here and manage the scene search, will you?’
‘Sure.’
Ronson let the grimy mattress fall back into place, then stood up, gave Henry a wink and said, ‘Welcome to the CID … we’ll speak later.’
Searching property was a fairly logical process – ceilings, walls, floors, cupboards – and Henry ensured it was done in order and thoroughly when a scenes of crime officer arrived. They found a lot more than just what was in the Tupperware containers. Bagged-up cocaine, more cannabis, amphetamines and a lot of cash stashed around the flat – almost £10,000 in crumpled notes. He also found another gun – a sawn-off shotgun and ammunition – so this really was turning out to be a good arrest, and the couple, whoever they were, had an awful lot of awkward questions to answer.
When Henry was finally happy everything had been done, it was time to slide the mattress to one side and raise the hatch underneath, which was flush with the floor by means of a ring-pull imbedded in the surface of the hatch itself. Henry hooked his finger in and slowly began to raise the hatch which was about two and a half feet square.
It came easily, but even when it was only open a crack, the stench that poured out invaded his nostrils, made him rear back and cover his nose by cupping his free hand over it.
He knew the smell.
Rotting flesh.
He glanced up at the SOCO and the cluster of Support Unit officers who’d gathered to observe. They had all taken a few steps back at the smell and reacted in the same way as Henry by covering their faces and uttering various expletives.
This was a heightened version of the gases released when a pathologist sliced open a cadaver at the beginning of a post-mortem of a body that had been dead more than a couple of days. In his service as a uniformed patrol officer, Henry had attended numerous PMs and he knew the smell well.
He removed his hand from his face and continued to lift the hatch on its hinges, laying it back flat.
‘Torch.’
Someone handed him a Maglite which he switched on and pointed down through the hatch into the cellar below. Henry guessed this was probably where coal had been delivered in the not-too-distant past – what he would have called the ‘coal-hole’.
He crouched, leaned in slightly and flashed the strong beam into the space below, which was accessed by a metallic ladder affixed to the edge of the hatch.
At first there seemed to be nothing, just the horrendous smell of putrefied flesh which had lost some of its initial intensity now that the hatch had been open for a few seconds. It was as though it had wanted to escape, to be released from whatever horror it emanated from.
The torch beam criss-crossed the cellar.
Then stopped suddenly and retraced its arc slowly.
Henry’s stomach tightened as he moved the beam back and saw what the horror was.
He didn’t say anything even though ‘Shit!’ was on the tip of his tongue.
He glanced at the SOCO who, peering down, had also seen what the torch had illuminated.
‘Start taking photos and video,’ Henry told him, ‘as I climb down the ladder and describe what I see when I get to the bottom, OK?’
The SOCO gulped, nodded, tried to manage his horror.
Henry decided to go down the ladder on his heels, facing into the cellar, treading carefully until he reached the bottom rung and stepped off. Above him, the SOCO filmed him with the unwieldy video camera.
Henry flashed the torch around the dark room.
He had already become immune to the stench and no longer needed to cover his nose. The smell was no longer important.
As a cop, he’d learned the ability to reset himself immediately after a shock. That’s how it was. Otherwise, he knew he would be of little use to anyone requiring his help.
Time for reflection and introspection could come later.
Finally, he stopped with the torch and aimed the beam on to the two figures he had seen when he’d opened the hatch.
Two corpses now.
Young kids chained to the wall with manacles on their wrists and ankles. He thought maybe twelve, fourteen years old at most.
Both sitting on their backsides by the cellar wall, their arms chained high above them like prisoners in a medieval dungeon. Both were naked, and Henry could not be a hundred per cent sure if he was looking at a boy and a girl, or two boys, or two girls.
Their faces, necks, chests, stomachs and groin areas had been eaten away by rats, and all Henry could now see, closer up as he shone the torch, was a horrendous mass of squirming maggots devouring what remained of the flesh of these two kids. Even though he knew maggots in themselves were silent creatures, he could actually hear the collective noise of them, hear the disgusting squelch of them as they writhed en masse and intertwined with each other with a kind of slurping, water-slushing, saliva-swallowing kind of noise that belonged in a horror movie.
Instead, it was here … in a cellar in Blackpool South Shore.
Henry watched, transfixed.
&
nbsp; ‘Are you OK, Henry?’ the SOCO called down.
‘I am,’ Henry replied. ‘Fine and dandy.’
The words suppressed the dreadfulness of what he was looking at and the cold rage that had already begun to fester inside his chest.
FIVE
Ronson shook his head.
‘And you needn’t look at me like that,’ he said to Henry, whose expression was a gnarled mash of anger and frustration, even though he was trying to control himself and stop himself from exploding.
‘I was first down that ladder. I was first to see those two kids. I want to get into the ribs of both those bastards in the cells. I want to have that chance,’ he pleaded.
Ronson smirked.
Henry could already tell that he and the DS were unlikely to become a smoothly flowing crime fighting duo – just something in the air between them.
‘Henry, it’s your first day as a detective, for a start. And even I won’t be interviewing these two … a couple of Murder Squad detectives are being brought in to run it, so us locals are pretty much out of the picture anyway. This is serious stuff and not something to get cocked up by a rookie jack baying for blood.’
Henry seethed. He knew he was seething, could feel himself seething because his jaw was clenched and the air hissed out of his dilating nostrils. Not only that but he felt his hands start to bunch into coiled fists, which even he knew wasn’t a good sign. He needed to control this shit very badly – and he knew that, too.
‘OK,’ he conceded.
‘I get it. I get you want to interview them.’
‘It’s not about getting something over someone else, Sarge, or getting to the front of the queue … it’s about …’ Henry struggled to find the words without sounding trite and pathetic, to say that he wanted to be there for those two dead kids, to fight for them and be part of giving them justice.
‘Tell you what, go chill. I can see you’re having a control issue here. Go and have a walk on the seafront, let the wind blow some sense into you and, more importantly, let it blow away the reek of death from your shiny new suit … yes, you smell like a mortuary. Be back here in an hour and I’ll give you your first job as a detective on my team – some burglaries to look at.’