by Nick Oldham
‘Naked?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Completely,’ she said.
The inflatable beds came with inflatable pillows and two pushed together worked very well as a double, as did two sleeping bags, unzipped, then zipped together to form a wide blanket.
The make-do approach certainly sufficed for Flynn and the paramedic, two people who also made love in a fairly unusual location. This time, though, the upstairs storage room above the chandlery.
In fact they had a wonderful time, laughing intensely as they screwed with abandon, taking their joining to new levels of intimacy on the air beds, flipping from one position to the next and back again, not forgetting other forms of stimulation either.
They finished in a blur of orgasmic speed and loud moans before flopping back, exhausted and laughing.
Flynn managed to stay awake for a few minutes of blown-up pillow talk, but then, shattered, he was asleep.
Flynn slept deeply until six-thirty when he rolled off the bed onto the hard, uncarpeted floor of the storage room and banged his forehead. He lay there face down, staring at the grain of the exposed wooden floorboards. Then he eased himself up, blinking the sleep out of his eyes and wondering, for a moment, where he was. Over the years he had woken up in many peculiar places.
He sat up, glanced across and saw that Liz, the paramedic, had gone. He vaguely recalled her saying something and him responding and presumably making some sense. She had probably been saying goodbye, he thought muzzily.
He exhaled, scratched the back of his leg and tried to get his mind to function. His body was stiff and sore and creaky but he forced himself up to his feet and padded naked and shivering into the tiny toilet where he relieved himself, a function that seemed to last a very long time.
Empty of bladder he came back and got back on to the inflatable bed, pulling up the sleeping bag. He lay on his side, blinking, thinking about the day ahead.
The crown of his skull was quite close to the wall and from where he was he could see along the skirting board running along the bottom edge of the wall, where it met the floorboards at ninety degrees. It wasn’t a well-fitted skirting board, not helped by the unevenness of the floorboards themselves, several of which were loose, as he had discovered.
He wasn’t really looking for anything. He was thinking about running a shop. Quite looking forward to it. Trying to remember how to use the till. Still feeling quite sleepy. But also looking along the bottom edge of the skirting board, which narrowed as it reached the corner of the room because of his perspective.
And then he saw something wedged underneath it in one of the gaps made by a loose, badly fitted floorboard. At first it didn’t seem like anything. Something off-white, cube-like. He didn’t even care what it was.
Just a bit of rubbish, an offcut from a piece of wood, perhaps. Smaller than a sugar cube. A broken piece of tile?
He could not tell… in his mind he was still visualizing how to use that till and asking an imagined customer to enter his PIN number.
Then he remembered… Liz wasn’t saying goodbye, she was saying, ‘See you later. I have to be in work by eight. I finish at four today… can I see you tonight?’ Flynn remembered saying yes, absolutely. He also remembered the night. And smiled contentedly. And he looked along the skirting board again at that small object wedged under it.
He yawned and flipped on to his back, still smiling. A paramedic. Fancy. He’d always liked paramedics… he kept smiling and remembering… and then his face creased into a frown as he suddenly realized what the object was underneath the skirting.
In disbelief he scrambled off the bed and scuttled along the floor and tried to prise the object out from where it was by using his thumb and forefinger to grip it. He couldn’t quite… He cast around and saw Alison’s car keys which he grabbed and using the ignition key he started to gently tease the object out. It was tightly stuck in there, but eventually it came out with a pop and rolled a few inches across the floor like a dice. Flynn stared at it, then picked it up, sat back on his naked bottom, and held it up to the light filtering through the curtained window, like it was a precious diamond.
It wasn’t a gemstone, though. It was a tooth. A premolar with a gold filling.
SIXTEEN
As Flynn was frowning at the tooth and twirling it around between his fingers, Henry Christie was pulling up on the driveway of Harry Sunderland’s house on the banks of the River Lune at Halton.
For five and a half hours, Henry had slept soundly — the culmination of exhaustion and exertion. He had risen as fully rested as possible — he rarely slept more than six hours anyway — and had a shower, kissed a sleepy Alison, and set out on the road in the Vectra for what he knew would be a hell of a day, one way or the other. He was relishing it.
His journey took him, once more, past the point where his Merc had been forced off the road. He stopped for a couple of minutes, got out of the pool car and stood by the roadside, hands on hips, considering just how lucky he had been to survive, first the accident, then what happened after.
He didn’t dwell on it, although the horrendous bureaucratic repercussions yet to come did weigh heavily on him.
A man had died, killed in self-defence and quite deservedly so, but one could never predict what a coroner or the CPS might conclude from it. Henry knew that Steve Flynn had done absolutely the right thing, others might be swayed to think differently. Henry knew there was going to be a mighty judicial battle ahead. But he was up for it.
He arrived at Sunderland’s house just a short time later.
The room in which Flynn had spent the night was the first-floor store room above the chandlery and he had made room for the makeshift double bed between various stacked boxes and equipment. The bed had gone on the only space on the floor.
Still naked and holding up the tooth, Flynn glanced around the room.
He shivered, placed the tooth down and decided to get dressed, so he pulled on his clothes and started to rearrange the room.
The support unit search team had already arrived, together with a dog handler, Henry was pleased to see. These kinds of cops were a keen bunch, very professional, and Henry had a lot of time for the specialists.
The sergeant from the previous night approached him with two brews in hand from the urn that the support unit always seemed to have with them on their travels, topped up with boiling water from some source or other. It seemed to Henry that the job description for the sergeants must include having the skills, abilities and resourcefulness of a spiv.
‘Took a chance, boss,’ he said, handing Henry a Styrofoam cup. ‘Coffee, milk, no sugar… real coffee, by the way.’
‘Nail on head, Dave. Cheers.’ Henry took a sip of the drink and it tasted wonderful in the circumstances. For some reason he had never had a bad brew whilst out on a police operation.
‘We’ve already started,’ the sergeant updated Henry. ‘In the house and I got the dog man in just to have a quick skim along the river bank with Fido and also to work out how best we can fingertip-search it later and to see if there’s any likely point at which Mrs Sunderland might have gone in. I dunno,’ the sergeant said, ‘maybe signs of a scuffle of something.’
‘Sounds good,’ Henry said, pleased they’d got things going so quickly. He sipped the coffee and two things happened simultaneously: his own mobile phone rang and the sergeant was called up on his PR.
Henry flipped open his phone.
The sergeant turned away and said, ‘Go ahead,’ into his radio.
Before Henry could finish saying his name, the voice at the other end of the phone said immediately, ‘Henry, it’s Rik — you need to get yourself down here pretty fuckin’ quick.’ It was Rik Dean calling from Blackpool police station.
‘Why, what’s going on?’
‘High-falutin’ briefs putting pressure on the custody sergeant and the divisional chief super is what is going on! Where the hell’ve you been? I’ve been calling you for the last hour.’
Henry said calmly, ‘Just tell me what’s happening, bud.’
‘These two — Sunderland and Barlow — are walking unless you can convince the custody officer and chief super otherwise… there’s talk of unlawful arrests and all sorts of shit, so you need to get here, Henry.’
‘I’ll be at least half an hour at the soonest,’ Henry said, now feeling bile in his throat. Solicitors and a chief superintendent up and about at this time of the day did not bode well. He had one of those horrible in-body feelings, where the sensation was like all the blood was draining out of his legs. He threw his coffee onto the driveway. ‘Is the chief super there?’
‘No, he’s in a conflab with these solicitors and I’ll tell you, they’re two smooth fucking reptiles.’
‘What’s their beef?’
‘Uh — speculative arrests, neither man should have spent a night in custody. They should have been bailed. You’re not working quickly enough — like, y’know, going home for the night.’
‘The chief super’s falling for that?’ Henry said in amazement.
‘He’s dithering, I know that. They turned him out at five this morning.’
Henry spun as he thought quickly. ‘Tell him not to let them go. I’ll be there as soon as I can and in the meantime get him to call me and I’ll try and speak to him. I’ve got his number. Oh, why are you there so early?’
‘I came in early to clear some of my paperwork,’ he said.
‘OK.’
The sergeant had had a shorter conversation over his radio and was waiting for Henry to finish.
‘Boss?’ he said quickly.
‘What?’
‘Dog man down by the river — his dog has found something.’
Henry waited for the revelation, encouraging the sergeant with his body language.
‘A Wellington boot… and there’s something in it.’
‘What?’
‘A camera-phone.’
Henry had been on the point of rushing off to deal with the custody office emergency in Blackpool, but he knew five minutes wouldn’t change anything. ‘Let’s go see.’
He traipsed after the sergeant across the wide lawn of Sunderland’s garden, onto a path winding through some rhododendron bushes which then sloped down to the river which was running high and fast. Henry could imagine someone falling in and instantly being swept away to the coast and drowned.
The dog man, a support unit constable and the German shepherd dog, full name LanConBertie, were clustered by a bunch of low-growing bushes, chattering.
‘What’ve you got?’ the sergeant asked them.
‘It’s behind there,’ the dog man said and led Henry and the sergeant around the bush where, seemingly tucked out of sight, was a lone pink-and-grey polka-dotted cut-off Wellington boot, for the left foot.
Henry had one of his wonderful, arse-twitching moments, completely the opposite of what he’d just felt on hearing the news from Blackpool. He recognized the boot instantly: the match to the one that Jennifer Sunderland had been wearing when Flynn pulled her out of the river. He swallowed drily.
‘It was actually under some leaves,’ the dog man said, ‘so we moved it a bit and stood it upright.’
Henry nodded. Fair enough.
‘And I also looked into it,’ he went on. ‘There’s a mobile phone in there, but I haven’t touched it.’
‘Brilliant,’ Henry enthused. He squatted down by the boot and peered into it, saw a mobile phone of some description inside, laid flat. Temptation nearly overcame him. He wanted to grab it, see if it worked, see what was on it that was so bloody urgent. Clearly this is what the fuss was about, the item that Mrs Sunderland was believed to have had in her possession, and which resulted in the violent incident in the mortuary and the failed attempt to kill Steve Flynn on the canal boat.
‘Right,’ he said, addressing the sergeant. ‘Turn out a CSI now — on my say-so — get photos of it in situ, then I want the boot and the phone bagged separately and securely. I want both items to be put into the safe at Lancaster nick. No one must mess about with the phone — understand?’ The sergeant nodded. Both men knew that the curiosity of cops could be the downfall of a case. Hell, even Henry wanted to have a go at switching it on here and now. ‘If I find out that anyone has had a go at doing this, I’ll have ’em, and I mean it. So — bagged, sealed, tagged and in the safe with specific instructions to the duty inspector that only I am allowed to handle it.’
‘Got it, boss.’
‘I need to get to Blackpool and head some bastards off at the pass.’ He turned to the dog man. ‘Well done.’ Then he looked at Bertie, who had actually done the finding, and reached out to pat him on the head, but a warning growl made him snap his hand away. Being savaged by a police dog would just be the icing on the cake.
He knew that time was of the essence, so he turned and started to walk briskly back to the pool car.
Fully dressed, Flynn heaved, pushed and re-stacked and rearranged the stock boxes so they were against three of the four walls of the stock room, leaving the fourth wall free, the one against which he had laid the air beds (now deflated), and found the tooth wedged under the skirting. By doing this he also exposed as much of the floor space as possible, which wasn’t much. Perhaps seven feet by four of bare floorboards.
It had been a long time since he had been a detective and though obviously rusty and not up to date, some fundamental things never leave. He still had the instinct. Not that he needed much at this juncture. Nor imagination, nor skills, as most people of sound mind and intellect could probably hazard a guess and identify blood stains.
Flynn therefore knew exactly what he was looking at: a crime scene.
‘Boss! Boss!’ the support unit sergeant called to Henry at the moment he yanked up the car door handle.
Henry turned with irritation as the sergeant almost skidded into him. He tried not to let it show because this man and his team were doing a bloody good job and Henry appreciated it. He forced a smile, well, more a grimace.
‘Sorry, I know you’re in a rush, but I think we’ve found something else. In the house and the guys really want you to have a quick look.’
Henry took a deep breath. ‘Quick one,’ he said.
He trotted behind the sergeant up to Sunderland’s lovely house and followed him inside into a huge entrance hallway, then up a wide staircase to the first floor. He was led along the landing, through a door that opened on to another set of stairs which were much tighter and steeper than the main set.
‘Up to the converted loft,’ the sergeant explained. ‘There’s a couple of extra bedrooms up here, a shower room and a large sort of lounge, all built under the eaves.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Henry said.
They emerged on to a long landing corridor, a door either side, one a little further on and a door at the far end.
The sergeant pointed at the end door. ‘That one goes into the lounge, these doors are to the bedrooms, and that one is to the shower room, toilet.’
‘OK,’ Henry said, taking in the geography. He might have been a detective, but he wasn’t keen on mini-mysteries and was aching for the sergeant to get on with it and tell him why he had been dragged up here. It had better be good, something to match the Wellington boot and mobile phone. He hoped his face hid how he was feeling. He suspected it did. Being battered and bruised and swollen hid most things, except pain.
The sergeant opened a door.
Inside was a pair of constables going through items in a chest of drawers. They stopped their work.
Henry glanced quickly around a fairly small, sparsely furnished bedroom, with a three-quarter-sized bed that took up a lot of the floor space, the chest of drawers, a narrow wardrobe and one bedside cabinet. The bed was unmade and several items were strewn on it, including men’s clothing.
The sergeant said to one of the PCs, ‘John, what have you got?’
John nodded eagerly. He crossed to the bed saying, ‘Various things, but these in particular.’ He lifted
a grubby shirt, underneath which were four passports, which he picked up and came to Henry’s side. The PC was wearing latex gloves, so he kept hold of the passports and opened the first one of them for Henry to see, so he didn’t have to touch it. It was Russian and on seeing the holder’s photograph, Henry went icy cold. He looked at Henry for a reaction.
‘Next one,’ Henry said.
The PC did the same for that one and the next two. There was another Russian passport, an EU one from Malta and a Turkish one. The photographs were all of the same person, all slightly different, and the names were all completely different.
They belonged to the man who had forced Henry and Flynn off the road and then tried to murder them by spraying them with bullets — but had met his own violent end at the hands of Steve Flynn.
Henry’s lips parted with a pop: ‘Vladimir Kaminsky.’
‘There are two guns underneath the bed with ammunition.’
Henry said, ‘The room opposite?’
‘Three passports from three different countries, all belonging to the same man — but not this one.’
‘Let me see.’
Henry crossed the corridor into the opposite bedroom and inspected the find.
Three passports, two more guns. Each passport with a different name, but all belonging to the man who had killed Joe Speakman, wife and dog, and who had almost blasted Henry to pieces, had it not been for Steve Flynn. Yuri Gregorov.
‘Brilliant job, guys,’ Henry said. He turned to the sergeant, beaming like the father on the day that his son scored his first hat trick for the school football team. ‘Same applies to these passports, as the mobile phone; bagged and sealed in the safe, only me to access. Deal with the weapons as you would normally.’
Henry then rushed out to his car.
The floorboards in the store room were unsealed, planed wood, which is why it had been virtually impossible to clean away the blood that had soaked in. And there had been a lot of it.