by Nick Oldham
The door to Ellis Clanfield’s flat was next to the tattooist, right on the pavement. Henry looked up, feeling constrained by his face mask, to the first-floor window above the shop which he assumed was the flat. Torn, grubby curtains hung down inside, and on the outside the glass was so dirty Henry could have made a trail through the grime with his finger.
‘Nice,’ he said.
Blackstone banged loudly on the door.
Henry visualized maybe a small vestibule beyond the door leading immediately up a steep set of stairs to the flat. Tight, steep, hard to negotiate, room for only one person at a time.
There was no reply. Blackstone banged again: louder.
Henry glanced up, caught a glimpse of movement behind the window grime, plus a twitch of the ragged curtain.
‘He’s in.’
‘I saw.’ Blackstone had looked up, too.
Henry was liking this, even if he was feeling slightly nervous. Although he’d fairly recently been involved in two interconnected, fast-moving investigations, they’d had a life of their own, a vortex he’d been sucked into and hadn’t had much time to reflect on; he’d been caught up in irresistible storms which eventually spat him out.
This was totally different.
Back to basic coppering. Within half an hour of walking into a new office, he was knocking on the door of a possible suspect, about to talk face to face, which he always firmly believed was the bottom line for a detective: speaking to people.
He was bloody excited by this prospect.
Blackstone rapped her knuckles on the door, which Henry noticed wasn’t the sturdiest of structures and looked quite susceptible to being kicked easily off its hinges. If necessary.
Something else he liked doing.
Booting doors down.
Blackstone bent over to the letterbox, flipped it up and peered through it with one eye, then put her mouth to it and shouted, ‘Mr Clanfield, this is the police. Please open up; we wish to have a word with you.’
She stood upright and said to Henry, ‘You got your cuffs and baton?’
Henry patted his pockets, pretending to look for the said appointments. She smirked.
‘I was hoping you’d have that sort of thing. I’m just a civvie,’ he said.
‘Fortunately …’ she began, but stopped talking abruptly. Footsteps on the stairs.
‘Who is it?’ a deep voice asked from behind the door.
‘Police. I’m DS Blackstone from police headquarters and this is … er …’ She turned to Henry, frowning as she tried to think of a way of introducing him. ‘Another detective.’
‘Quick thinking,’ Henry quipped.
It made her grin.
‘Prove it,’ the voice demanded.
‘Open the door and I’ll gladly show you my warrant card,’ Blackstone said.
‘Show me through the letterbox.’
‘OK – flip it open.’
The flap opened and Blackstone took out her ID and showed it to the gap. ‘Like I said, DS Blackstone.’
The flap clattered shut.
But there was no movement or noise to suggest the door might be about to be opened.
‘Mr Clanfield, please open up,’ Blackstone said with a steely hint of warning.
They heard footsteps going quickly back up the stairs. It did not seem as though he was going to comply with the request.
‘Stand back!’ Blackstone said dramatically. She scythed her arms back to give some space, lined up and flat-footed the door with the sole of her right boot. The door capitulated without almost any resistance and they caught sight of Clanfield’s heels disappearing into the door of the flat at the top of the flight of stairs.
Blackstone emitted a sort of roar and set off after him with a powerful surge, then a ‘Bastard!’ under her breath. Henry was close at her heels.
There was a tiny landing at the top of the stairs with two doors off it, one straight ahead and one to the left, which was the one Clanfield had run into and closed behind him.
Blackstone twisted in the narrow space while Henry held back four steps down to give her room. She rattled the door handle – locked – but the whole door frame rattled. Blackstone glared determinedly at Henry, then put her shoulder to the door and barged it open with ease, breaking a poorly affixed bolt and entering the flat.
Across the squalid bedsit, Clanfield had rushed to the settee and hefted up a laptop computer which he was balancing on the splayed fingers of his left hand while he dabbed desperately at the keyboard with the tip of his right forefinger.
Blackstone shot across to him as she realized he was trying to delete files.
Henry came in behind her to see Clanfield look up and hurl the laptop across the room with the intention of chucking it out of the front window. It was beyond Blackstone’s reach, but Henry dinked across and managed to deflect it from its trajectory so it landed on the floor. The lid unhinged itself from the keypad as it struck the hard laminate.
Blackstone tried to grab Clanfield but he swerved, avoiding her fingers, and ducked towards the door. Henry managed to push him aside, making him stagger against a small table on which Henry had seen a stack of photographs; a brief glimpse told him they were all obscene.
Blackstone turned quickly as Henry managed to pin Clanfield against the wall, holding the struggling man there as Blackstone took out her handcuffs. Between them they forced the man’s hands behind his back and cuffed him before Henry spun him around and manoeuvred him to face Blackstone who was adjusting her face mask which had gone cockeyed.
Henry held on tight as Blackstone looped the elastic around her ear, but it flipped out of her fingers. Clanfield spat into her exposed face and screamed, ‘I’ve got COVID, you bitch. I’ve got the fucking virus and now you have, too!’
From his point of view across the man’s shoulder, Henry saw the spittle shoot out of Clanfield’s mouth and spray across Blackstone’s eyes, nose and mouth.
She withdrew with an ‘Ugh!’ of utter disgust, wiping her face with her now scrunched-up mask and staring ferociously at Clanfield.
She didn’t stare for long.
Even so, Henry recognized her expression as one he’d seen on many a copper’s face before. It had probably been on his own face from time to time.
It was only the briefest, most transient of expressions, but one that said – and warned of – so much.
Henry wanted to shout, ‘No!’ but the world seemed to slow down and the word would not come out quickly enough, though as he gripped Clanfield’s upper arms as he stood behind him, he did manage to duck down and brace himself at the same time.
Blackstone hit Clanfield. Very, very hard. A direct punch to the face.
Clanfield’s head snapped back and Henry felt two things, one immediately after the other.
First, the shudder of Clanfield’s body as the shockwave following the punch shimmered through him; second, the splatter of blood from the busted nose which went both ways, back over Henry and forwards over Blackstone.
In spite of the hotspots across his face, Henry kept hold of Clanfield, whose head bobbed and rolled uncontrollably as Henry eased him down to the floor, while he looked up at Blackstone who stood there shaking, now wiping the blood splatter off her face with her mask, growling, ‘No fucker spits at me and gets away with it, especially not during a pandemic.’
‘Fucker!’
It was a word often repeated by Blackstone through her new face mask, even after assistance had been summoned and Clanfield had been dragged and dumped into the back of a police van to take him to Preston police station.
Two local detectives had turned up and taken over the scene to allow Blackstone and Henry to follow their prisoner, despite the guy’s continual bleating that he should be taken to hospital because he was a victim of police brutality. Blackstone wanted him booked into the system before that happened, so that a full record of her side of the story could be written on the custody record. She told nothing but the truth.
A
fter that there would be no choice but to have him taken to Royal Preston Hospital by uniformed officers, leaving Blackstone and Henry to chat to Rik Dean, who had been informed of the arrest (and the kerfuffle) and had hurriedly turned out from headquarters. He spoke to the pair in an empty office at the nick.
‘He fuckin’ spat at me, boss,’ Blackstone said, still snarling.
Rik looked at Henry, who said, ‘He did. Unprovoked. Under any circumstances, he got what he deserved; under the present circumstances, he definitely did.’
Rik took this in, weighed it up, then said, ‘OK, make sure it’s written up fully on the custody record, then get yourselves cleaned up and disinfected – whatever you need to do.’ He looked at Henry whose nice new, first-day-back-at-work suit now had specks of blood around the shoulder. ‘Have you got a change of clothing, Henry?’
‘In the back of my car.’
Then Rik looked at Blackstone, who was still visibly seething and covered in more blood than Henry. ‘You live down at the docks, don’t you?’
‘Yuh.’
‘Do you want to nip home, get a shower and a change of clothing? Then get back here. Clanfield’s going to be at RPH for a while, I think.’
‘Thanks, boss.’
‘Henry – I’ll run you back to Hutton Hall and you can shower and change up there.’
Henry was about to say OK, but Blackstone cut in, ‘I’ll run him up, boss, then back down to my place where he can grab a shower, too. Then we’ll head back here.’
‘Fine by me,’ Rik said. ‘Henry?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said a bit cautiously.
‘No need to worry,’ Blackstone said. ‘I won’t shag you.’
It was a good apartment, one of only two on the top floor of a converted warehouse overlooking Albert Dock. It had a large sliding window opening on to a wide balcony, large enough for a table, chairs and potted plants.
Blackstone had driven Henry up to HQ where he’d gone to his car and grabbed his change of clothing from the boot (one thing he hadn’t forgotten was that a detective – and even a civilian investigator – always had a spare set with them) and she took him back to her place on the docks and let him get a shower first.
He sat by the open balcony window while she then went in, emerging ten minutes later, muttering to herself; more disconcerting for Henry was that she came back into the lounge wearing only a pair of tight cropped trousers and a lacy black bra.
Henry averted his eyes.
But not before he had seen the myriad of tattoos on her arms and across her midriff and the swathe of something which ran like the map of a silver/red river and its tributaries from the front of her left shoulder, across the top of her chest with fingers shaped like spikes halfway up her neck. At first Henry thought it was another tattoo of some sort, but then he realized exactly what it was.
A very serious acid burn.
EIGHT
They were back at the station in time to be in the reception committee for Clanfield, who had, despite his continuing bad behaviour, been cleaned up at the hospital. His nose had been realigned by a burly, no-nonsense doctor with no time or inclination to mess about, who clamped the broken nose between the palms of his hands and straightened it with a gristly crunch that made the patient scream.
Henry and Blackstone watched Clanfield’s arrival back into the custody office, soon after which he was in a cell, demanding food, drink and a solicitor.
By then it was well into the afternoon.
Rik Dean had scarpered back to headquarters, so Blackstone and Henry briefed the local DI who suggested it might be better if a couple of his detectives interviewed Clanfield, which didn’t seem to bother Blackstone too much.
‘Way of the world,’ she said philosophically to Henry. ‘We do the graft and hand it over, as you know. They’ll interview him, take the DNA swab and probably bail him unless he coughs the job. When the sample comes back, if it’s positive, they can nail him as far as I’m concerned. As long as he ends up in front of a Crown Court judge, I’m happy.’
‘But you did the legwork.’
‘Whatev,’ she said. They were walking along the main corridor that formed the spine of the police station, Henry nodding at one of two folk he recognized from the past, including Chief Superintendent Lee, one of his old friends; they touched elbows. ‘God, you know people,’ Blackstone said. ‘And they even seem to like you!’
‘Very funny.’ He glanced at her, and his eyes dropped slightly as he saw the new scarf she’d wrapped around her neck as a replacement for the one splashed with Clanfield’s blood, which she had binned. Now he understood why it was on, what it was covering and that it wasn’t just pretentiousness.
She went on, ‘We’ll write up our part, and they can have it … but I do have one thing I’d like to do. I know his hovel’s being searched, but I want to go back and have a quick look around myself.’
‘Why?’
‘I have my reasons.’ She narrowed her eyes and waggled her eyebrows which, Henry saw for the first time, were tattooed. ‘One of which might actually keep him in custody.’
A Support Unit personnel carrier was parked on the street outside Clanfield’s flat. Henry and Blackstone had to ease their way up the stairs as two cops wearing overalls came down, one carrying three laptops in sealed plastic evidence wallets, bagged and tagged; the other had two large bin bags.
‘What’s in there?’ Blackstone asked him.
‘Photographs – thousands of them, found in a space in the ceiling.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I won’t bother guessing just yet.’
‘They’re grim,’ the cop said, his face tight with disgust and emotion.
In the living room – which had been turned upside down while being searched – Blackstone paused for a moment, then led Henry into the equally squalid bedroom. It was small and the three-quarter-sized bed almost filled it. The bed had been stripped, and eventually the bedding and mattress would be seized for evidence because, Henry guessed, there would be lots of traces of sexual activity that would be worth analyzing. The bedhead was made of pillars of cheap pine with a narrow shelf along the top, on which were several items including an overflowing ashtray, a pack of condoms (some had been used and were discarded in among the cigarette and spliff butts in the ashtray), a nasal spray and a small round tin with a push-on lid that had the words Boozy Chocolate Cake on the side of it.
Henry stood back and watched Blackstone stalk the room. He could tell she knew what she was looking for, and as she hadn’t yet revealed this to him, the new boy, he let her get on with it.
There wasn’t really too much room to stalk, though. Just enough to edge around the bed.
Henry could see her eyes continually returning to the small cake tin which was about three inches tall and maybe four in diameter with a small domed lid, something that might have been in a hamper at some stage.
Finally, she pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a pocket and snapped her hands into them, then picked up the tin and tilted it so she could see its base.
‘Chocolate and Champagne cake,’ she said, reading what was printed on the underside. ‘Got cherries on it.’
Gently, she shook it. Something rattled – definitely not cake, something metallic. She eased the lid off and peered into it.
Henry watched her face closely, saw the miniscule change of expression. A change he knew meant Victory!
She placed the lid down on the bedhead shelf, held the tin on the palm of her left hand, while the fingers of her right delved into the tin like a bird’s beak and came out with something between finger and thumb.
A necklace. A delicate open-heart shape embellished with tiny stones that could have been diamonds on a silver chain.
She held it up for Henry to see.
‘Not necessarily conclusive, but Melanie Wooton was wearing a necklace made by Pandora like this one, which the offender tore from her neck during the assault. There are several family photos of her wearing it. Her mum bo
ught it her for a birthday – and it could have her DNA on it still – and her blood, because when it was ripped from her, it cut her neck slightly.’
‘Trophies,’ Henry said.
‘And there are others in here,’ Blackstone said and shook the tin gently. ‘Which is a big worry.’
‘He will have some very tough questions to answer.’
Blackstone carefully put the tin down, rooted out an evidence bag from her pocket and eased the necklace into it, sealing the bag.
‘If I were you, which I’m not …’ Henry began.
‘What would you do?’
‘Well, bearing in mind we have semen samples from the rape and you now have this, I would get back to Preston nick, ensure we get some very fast-track DNA comparisons done and make damn sure that guy goes nowhere for a few days. Because if he walks out of that door in the next twenty-four hours, he’ll be on the wind.’
‘Sounds like a plan, old guy.’
She gave him a quirky smile.
By the time everything was coordinated, it was eight p.m. Evidence samples had been bagged up and submitted into the hands of a traffic motorcyclist who then blazed a trail to the necessary laboratories which were on standby to receive the packages.
As it happened – and although good evidence would be required for corroboration – Clanfield began to crumble towards the end of the first round of interviews.
Henry and Blackstone watched two very cool, experienced detective constables dismantle his story and his protestations of innocence bit by bit.
‘It’s like boiling a lobster,’ Blackstone commented at one point. They were in the CID office watching a live audio-visual feed from the interview room down in the custody complex. ‘Drop him into cold water, turn the heat up gently …’
‘And before he knows it, his goose is cooked,’ Henry said.
‘Not to mix metaphors,’ Blackstone chuckled.
Henry grinned and watched proceedings unfold. He’d taken a break to call Ginny and Diane at The Tawny Owl to check on how the first day was going; their response made him feel guilty. After a slow, hesitant start, the locals had poured back in for pre-booked food and drink; it had been very busy, but actually, because of the COVID measures in place, manageable.