by Nick Oldham
‘You promise? I haven’t heard from the cops in six months.’
‘I promise.’
Henry had brought his PR along with him, slotted loosely into his inside jacket pocket with the volume turned down, but now, as he was conditioned to do so, he still kept an ear to what was going on, which is how he heard the urgent transmission from comms: ‘Patrols town centre, report of a building on fire in Abingdon Street off Talbot Road, exact address not known but fire brigade in attendance … repeat, building on fire, Abingdon Street.’
Henry took the radio out and transmitted, ‘PC … er, sorry, DC Christie to Blackpool. I’m on foot just near the Winter Gardens … am I close by?’
‘If you stand at the Winter Gardens front entrance and look north, you’re looking along Abingdon Street. You might see the smoke from there.’
‘I’ll make my way.’
‘Roger that.’
Henry heard other patrols responding, including WPC Clarke who was also on foot in the town.
‘Look, got to go, Trish. Go home, pamper yourself if you can and leave Tommy to me for a few days, OK?’
She nodded.
Henry gave her a couple of pounds and left her in the café to make his way along Abingdon Street. He could see smoke rising and, in the distance, he heard the mixed sound of police and fire engine sirens getting nearer and nearer.
SIX
The flames ripped up the front of the house, whooshing out of the front window, and as Henry ran up the street, he could feel heat pulsating towards and over him, even though the house was at least another hundred yards ahead.
The fire brigade had arrived – two tenders – and as Henry jogged towards the scene, his Support Unit colleagues had also arrived. Some immediately began to feed cordon tape across the road to keep the quickly growing crowd of onlookers back; others rushed to nearby houses to try to evacuate them.
Henry pretty much had to let it happen, just stand back and watch proceedings.
The firemen – they were all blokes – arrived kitted up and within moments were dousing the flames with forceful jets of water from two hoses.
Two local mobile patrols were also on the scene, plus the patrol sergeant. Henry sidled up to him. He knew the sergeant, not well, but was aware he’d been in Blackpool for most of his service.
They stood and watched the fire brigade try to extinguish the fire, but it had taken hold with ferocity and the flames now licked out of the front window of the middle floor of the three-storey house.
Henry nodded and said, ‘Hi, Sarge,’ to the PS.
‘Ahh, DC Christie – new kid on the block.’
‘New but already slightly tarnished.’
‘Hmm – quite a find this morning,’ the sergeant said.
‘You could say that,’ Henry agreed. ‘You know anything about this house – occupants, et cetera?’
The sergeant shook his head, making his jowls wobble. ‘Derelict, I think. Was a DSS doss house, but I think it was in the process of being done up as flats – the ground floor was boarded up, but it could easily have been a haunt for the homeless crowd to bed down in.’
‘Anyone likely to be inside now?’ Henry asked.
The sergeant shrugged. ‘Not sure, but I bloody hope not.’
Despite the best efforts of the fire brigade, a new set of flames whooshed out of a top-floor window, confirming the whole building was ablaze. The heat was incredible, like standing in front of an open furnace door.
Mesmerized, Henry watched for a while before turning to the sergeant and saying, ‘Leave it with you.’
‘No probs,’ the sergeant said.
Henry began the walk back to the station just as he was called up on his PR. It was FB. ‘DCI to DC Christie, receiving?’
‘Go ahead, boss,’ Henry replied, knowing he was pushing the ‘boss’ aspect of their relationship maybe too much.
‘Get back in here now – my office,’ FB said tersely, straight to the point, adding, ‘and it’s “sir”, not “boss”.’
And with those words, Henry guessed he was in the mire.
Henry knocked a bit timidly at FB’s office door.
He had put a spurt on to get back to the police station from the fire and now was sweating heavily in his nice new shirt under his nice new suit, agonizing over what FB could want from him; maybe he was always so offhand on the radio. That would not have surprised Henry based on his experiences of the guy so far.
‘Enter.’
Henry opened the door and stepped into FB’s domain.
The DCI was at his desk with his head in his hands, bringing his face up slowly and dragging his loose features with his fingertips.
‘Boss?’ Henry said.
FB considered him, jaw rotating and teeth grating. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Just on the town … been to that house fire.’
FB nodded. ‘Before that?’
‘Here – in the nick.’
‘What did you do in the nick?’
‘Boss? What are you getting at?’
‘I want to know exactly what you did in the nick.’
Henry was still frowning, confused. ‘What do you mean?’
FB rose slowly from the chair, which creaked with relief. ‘It’s a simple enough question, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Tell me. Exactly. What. You. Fucking. Did!’
Henry wracked his brains. ‘Er … got back from the search warrant job and, uh …’ Henry began, finding this quite hard, feeling some unaccountable pressure without knowing why.
‘And “uh” what?’
‘Spoke to DS Ronson who told me I wouldn’t be taking any part in the investigation, who then told me to go and chill out.’
‘So – you were angry? At finding those kids?’
‘Yeah, suppose so … boss, what is this?’
FB tilted his face. ‘I think we can definitely return to the “sir” situation, don’t you?’
Nonplussed, Henry said, ‘Sure, sir.’
‘OK – what did you do between speaking to DS Ronson and going out for this “chill”, as you call it? Something, I might add, no one else around here seems to have time to do.’
‘I went to look in on the two prisoners, Terry and Cressida Leyland.’
FB’s already broad nostrils flared. ‘What did you say to them?’
‘Why?’
‘Answer the question.’
‘Nothing to Cressida. I told Terry I wanted to see his face. He told me to fuck off. That was it.’
‘Anything else?’
Henry shook his head.
‘You sure? What did you give them?’
Henry shrugged. ‘Like what?’
‘Let me take this back a step,’ FB said, making an anticlockwise circle with his finger to indicate what he was saying.
‘Hang on, sir – take what back?’
‘How much did you hate those two prisoners?’
‘Hate? I didn’t hate them.’
‘I think you might have done,’ FB insisted.
‘Right, sir,’ Henry said firmly, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, so perhaps you should be upfront with me and then we can take it from there, because just at this moment, I feel like you’re trying to trick me into saying something to suit your agenda, though I have no idea what that agenda is.’
FB’s face, from being flaccid, suddenly went rigid. ‘You’ll answer my questions, sonny.’ His voice was nasty, authoritarian.
Henry remained silent, but inside everything was tightening up, with the exception of his heart which was expanding, ready to split open with every beat.
FB finally, dramatically, revealed all. ‘Those two prisoners are now both dead. The woman slit her wrists with half a razor blade and bled out in about a minute. The man hanged himself from the cell door hatch with a length of garden twine.’
Henry was dumbfounded. ‘What? You think I gave them string and a razor blade so they’d kill themselves?’
> ‘Did you?’ FB’s face was uncompromising.
‘No!’
‘They came into this nick and they were searched thoroughly. Their clothing was removed and replaced with forensic suits and slip-on shoes. There was no way they could have taken anything into a cell with which they could have committed suicide.’
‘So I gave him a length of garden twine, and her a razor blade? Not being funny, but either of those items could already have been in the cell before they landed.’
‘Both cells were searched before the prisoners were put in them.’
‘In that case, they had the items secreted on their persons.’
‘Nah – they were searched.’
‘Underpants, knickers removed? Bra? Arse cracks, vagina, mouth cavities?’ Henry said. He had searched enough people to know that concealing objects, drugs, money and almost anything else they might use to self-harm or as a weapon to harm others was an art in the criminal community. Only the most diligent and sometimes intimate searching could find such things … so unless an intimate search was ordered, which was not a common occurrence, items could easily be hidden.
‘You were the only non-custody person to visit them both,’ FB said.
‘And I gave them the tools to kill themselves?’ Henry said cynically. ‘Course I did. I wanted to see both of them dead for what they did to those kids.’
‘I fucking knew it!’ FB said triumphantly.
‘Duh – no, I didn’t.’ Henry put him right. ‘This is fucking preposterous. I’ll tell you what I wanted for those two child killers – for them to go through the justice system, to face evidence that would put them away for life; not to let them kill themselves, because that’s too good for them.’
He and FB stared hard at each other.
Henry could see a pulse thumping wildly at each of FB’s temples.
Then FB relented. ‘I had to ask, put you under pressure.’
Although relief flooded through him, Henry was still wary and did not like FB’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach one bit.
He said simply, ‘No, you didn’t. You just had to ask me a straightforward question which I would have responded to in a straightforward, honest way. Instead, you bashed me around the head.’
FB shrugged. ‘We do things my way around here.’
‘My way or the highway?’
‘Very definitely.’
There were more tense, stand-off moments between them then. Finally, Henry nodded, then said, ‘I get that. So what happened?’
‘They killed themselves between cell visits. He strung himself up to the hatch and she slit her wrists.’ FB held out his left arm and turned it out so the forearm was uppermost. ‘But not just slashing across the wrists, oh no.’ He demonstrated by slicing the soft edge of his right hand across his wrist in a sawing motion. ‘She went for the professional approach.’
Even before FB’s demonstration of that, Henry knew what he meant.
Suicide attempts by wrist-slashing were not always successful and were more often than not just cries for help anyway.
However, someone serious about taking their own life would slash upwards, cut deep into the wrist and follow the line of the veins up the arm, like slicing a sandwich baguette; even if they were discovered quickly, the damage done was so severe that quickly applied first aid might not be enough to save life.
That was the professional approach.
‘They were on fifteen-minute visits,’ FB said, ‘and both timed it just right so by the time they were visited again, she’d bled out and he’d strung himself up and garrotted himself.’
‘Shit,’ Henry said.
‘Indeed. Two deaths in police custody – not a good look. Independent Police Complaints Committee already on the case.’ FB was trembling, very annoyed. ‘Anyway, anything in that fire?’
‘Just a derelict house. Hopefully, no one was inside.’
‘OK – dismissed.’
And that was it. He waved Henry away with a contemptuous flick of the fingers.
Henry backed out of the office, sidestepped and went up to the top floor of the building to the canteen where he grabbed himself another coffee to take down to the CID office in lieu of the one he’d left behind in the café in town: another thing he had promised himself was that his time on CID would never, ever be short of coffee. He decided it was time to do a bit of nest-building at his new-old desk in the grotty corner of the office.
There was a short queue at the counter, which gave Henry a little time to glance around and see WPC Clarke sitting in one corner, huddled over a mug of something, staring dejectedly down into the liquid.
Henry bought his coffee and wandered over to her. She didn’t look up or even seem to notice him.
‘Join you?’ he asked. She seemed deep in thought, and Henry could take a stab at why.
She raised her head as if she had not properly heard him, then recognized him. ‘Henry! Yeah, yeah.’
He slid into the chair opposite and looked at her.
She was pale and shaken.
She explained: ‘Just trying to get my head around what happened in the cells,’ she began, Henry guessing that she assumed he knew what she was talking about. ‘I just … can’t believe it. On my watch, too.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘I’d just come back from my refs … God, so much blood – it felt like I was wading through it to get to her. She was on the bed, her arm dangling down and’ – here she closed her eyes tightly, reliving the dreadful scene – ‘she’d just cut herself open so badly it had cascaded out of her.’
‘Hey,’ Henry reached across and touched her arm. ‘You’re not to blame.’
‘I will get blamed, though. Not a thorough enough search, they’ll say – even though it was, as far as I could do.’
‘If you know you did a good job, it’ll work out fine. Hindsight is what us cops always get battered with … I’ve more or less been accused of giving them both the tools do themselves in.’
‘Really?’ She looked Henry in the eye, appalled.
‘FB launched into me – all bollocks, obviously.’
‘But you did go and see both of them, didn’t you?’
‘Uh, yeah – don’t you start – but I didn’t give them anything. They sneaked the twine in and the razor in – those people have stuff like that on them all the time … they bloody practise hiding it just in case they get nicked.’
‘Yeah, suppose so. God – weird.’
‘Anyway, I’m sure you’ll have nothing to worry about, Julie.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Hey, I bumped into Tommy Benemy’s mother in town.’
Clarke frowned.
‘The lad I chased after he’d nicked all that perfume.’
‘Ahh, one of the ones who assaulted you?’
‘One and the same.’
‘He went missing, didn’t he?’
‘And never turned up, case never solved … one I’ll have to put down to experience,’ Henry said philosophically. ‘His mum was in town showing pictures of Tommy to people, stopping them in the street.’
‘For real?’
Henry nodded.
‘So you reckon she wasn’t just covering for him?’
‘If she was – is – then she’s taken it a bit too far. No, I’m sure he’s genuinely gone missing, gone off the grid, which is more than a tad worrying for a thirteen-year-old. I told her I’d look into it, keep checking.’
He was about to say something more when comms called him over the air: ‘DC Christie – can you make back to the house fire, please?’
‘Affirmative – but for what reason?’ Even as he asked the question, he realized it was a bit of a daft one. It meant the fire was not accidental, that it was arson maybe or perhaps a body had been found, and in both cases he would be required to attend.
‘Where are you now?’ the operator asked him.
‘Station – canteen.’
‘I’ll ring you.’
The fact that the operator didn’t want to
say anything over the air was another clue.
The internal phone on a table in the far corner of the canteen rang almost immediately.
Henry gave Clarke a thin smile – the weary look of someone who was always busy – pushed himself up and went to pick it up.
Henry leaned back against the wall of the public mortuary with his arms folded across his chest, wondering if his new suit would actually have to be binned when he finally got home sometime later that evening – the right side of midnight, he hoped.
So far the lovely material had been permeated with the aroma of two dead children (whose bodies were now lying in a chiller in an adjoining examination suite), the reek of smoke from the house that had burned down and the smell of charred human flesh from the body that, once the flames that had consumed the house had been extinguished, had been discovered in a ground-floor room.
Now the material was about to be assailed by a further stench of death as the Home Office pathologist got to work on that particular body to perform a post-mortem.
Henry knew it would stink.
Death did.
At that moment – eight fifty-seven p.m. according to the large clock on the wall above the door – the body on the slab was being circled by the pathologist, a spindly young man with very large ears (like the FA Cup, Henry thought), who seemed to be stalking the unmoving body as he made his verbal observations first, watched by Henry, WPC Clarke and a mesmerized mortuary assistant who had obviously not seen a pathologist move in such a manner before.
The pathologist was called Professor Baines and he didn’t seem much older than Henry. The two men had never met formally.
The body on the slab was that of a male, about five feet eight inches tall, medium build. He had been severely burned and reminded Henry of someone putting up their mitts for a fight.
‘What’s all that about?’ Henry had asked Baines, pointing to the dead man’s arms.
‘Ah,’ the young professor answered, ‘the pugilistic attitude.’