by Nick Oldham
But maybe Melanie would have something for him.
He pulled up just up the road from the address, which was on a pleasant avenue. Her Porsche was parked a little way down the road.
He had regained control of himself now, got over the emotion, and was working out how to rescue the case. He walked to the front door, knocked and was greeted by Melanie. Instantly he saw terror in her eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Mr Christie… please come in. Thanks for coming so quickly.’
She stood aside, let him pass and gestured for him to turn right into the lounge. He walked by her, unable to take his eyes off her face, wondering what the hell she had found out that was so important and fearful.
‘What is it?’ he asked, concerned.
‘Please, please, sit,’ she gestured with a dithery hand. He perched himself on the edge of a chair, whilst she remained standing awkwardly. ‘There’s someone I need you to meet,’ she said, turned slightly to the still open living-room door.
Henry’s mobile began to ring.
‘Sorry,’ he said, extracting it from his jacket pocket. The caller was Steve Flynn. He said, ‘I probably need to get this.’ He put the phone to his ear and angled away from Melanie.
‘I’ll have that!’
Henry turned back, the phone coming away from his ear as he saw the left hand of a man gesturing by wriggling his fingers. Henry’s eyes jerked upwards and took in the whole shape of the figure who had just entered the room and snaked an arm around Melanie’s shoulders. She seemed to shrink. In the man’s right hand was a snub-nosed revolver, six shot, of the type that used to be known as a detective’s special. It was pointed at Henry’s head. ‘No — don’t get up, Henry.’
‘Ralph,’ Henry said. He could hear Steve Flynn’s echoing and tinny voice coming from the mobile phone, saying, ‘ Hello? Henry? Hello? ’
Henry folded the phone shut, ending the call.
He reached out with the phone, handing it to Ralph Barlow, who switched it fully off — all the while keeping the gun pointed at Henry — and slid it into his pocket. He moved behind Melanie and slid his left arm around her shoulders, his hand hanging over her left breast in a curiously intimate gesture — but not a move that was reciprocated, as Henry could see from her eyes.
‘What’s going on, Ralph?’
Barlow smirked at Henry, who hadn’t moved from his perch, an eye on the gun, an eye on the people. Barlow curved his forearm around Melanie’s neck and started to apply pressure to her windpipe. Her fingers circled the arm but could not pull it away. Barlow then placed the muzzle of the gun against her temple and a muted scream escaped from her lips. It was easy for him to hold on to her, his strength and weight outmatching her small stature. All the while, his eyes were on Henry, his mouth twisted.
‘Great detective, eh? Another judgement call gone to rat shit.’
‘I said, what’s going on, Ralph?’ Henry’s eyes moved up and down, from Melanie to Barlow.
Barlow ignored him, keeping a tight hold of Melanie. ‘You never actually told me what it was, Henry. That thing that put you on to me.’
He screwed the muzzle deep into Melanie’s skin, making her emit a squeak of pain.
‘And that wink — fuck me, that irritated me. Winking at me, you cocksure bastard. Trying to keep the mystique alive. So what was it?’
‘Harry Sunderland could not have known that his wife ended up in the River Conder, yet somehow he did, Ralph. And he said it when we went to see him.’
Henry saw the realization flood into Barlow’s eyes. ‘And from that you decided to access my phone records?’
‘And all the other illegal stuff you were up to. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re a detective, brilliant or otherwise,’ Henry said, hoping the word brilliant would serve to wind up Barlow. ‘You dig, you uncover corruption and wrong-doing.’
‘Bloody hell, Henry. I bow to you. You really are good, although it pains me to say it. You don’t miss anything, do you?’
‘I missed Tom Gledhill,’ he said.
Barlow gave a short laugh. ‘Friends in high places come in useful.’
‘So he’s part of this whole… whatever the hell it is?’
‘Duh — yeah.’
Then Henry remembered. ‘He was a friend of Joe Speakman’s.’ Drunk though he was at the time, Henry now recalled seeing Joe Speakman at Melanie’s twenty-first-birthday bash. But there were a lot of other cops there too. And he was smashing his head with a tea-tray.
Barlow clicked his tongue and gave Henry a wink. ‘Now then, Henry, you’ve been a bit of a clever boy, haven’t you?’
‘Probably. But I never know just how clever until the life sentences are dished out.’
Barlow guffawed. ‘Nice one, but somehow I don’t think this is going to end quite like that. Don’t get me wrong, it will end horribly for you.’
Melanie squirmed, then her eyeballs rolled backwards in their sockets and she fainted in Barlow’s grip. He simply let her fall into an untidy heap at his feet, stepped back from her. Henry moved to get to her, but Barlow said, ‘Leave the bitch.’
Henry ground his teeth.
‘I’m reliably informed you found certain items of property at Harry’s house.’
Henry tried to disguise the physical lurch in his guts. He said nothing.
‘I need to recover them,’ Barlow said. ‘To, um, liberate them from the safe at Lancaster nick, which is why we’ve come to this.’
‘What’s on the phone?’ Henry asked.
‘Nothing I need to describe to you,’ Barlow said. ‘My problem is that you, cheekily, left specific instructions that only you can sign out the property, the phone, the passports… I’m not fussed about the guns, obviously.’
‘I’m not going to sign them out for you, am I, if that’s what you’re thinking? So it’s kind of a fuck up for you, isn’t it?’
‘Not as much as you might imagine.’ He aimed the two-inch barrel of his revolver at Henry, then pointed at the front window — indicating that Henry should turn and look outside.
The life of a landlady/hotel owner is far from glamorous, as Alison Marsh had discovered when she took over the virtually dilapidated business that was the Tawny Owl in Kendleton. The hours are horrendous, the work unremitting, the holidays non-existent, and it isn’t a gold mine. In fact, it sucked money. But it was just what she needed when she left the army some seven years earlier following the death of her husband, also a soldier, in a horrific incident in Afghanistan.
She wanted to get out of the forces and do something that would be a long-term challenge and would keep her busy from dawn till dusk and beyond. The Tawny Owl had done that.
She bought it outright using savings and her husband’s insurance payouts and dragged the pub right back into the heart of the community.
It had been a hard slog and included bringing up her husband’s daughter, Ginny — Virginia — who was only twelve at the time.
But the slog had been worth it. It had been hard and emotional at times. There had been occasions when she would gladly have walked away, but her drive and determination had turned a failed business into a resounding success.
All the while she had kept men at arms’ length.
There had been a couple of weak moments, but nothing serious until Henry Christie came along and changed everything. Not that he had been the one to make the running. It had been her doing, but that said, if Henry’s wife Kate had still been alive, Alison would not have been with him. She wasn’t a marriage-wrecker. But it was her who had made the first, tentative approach a few months after she’d learned of Kate’s death. Things took off slowly from there, going from strength to strength.
What she hadn’t bargained for were the horrendous hours that Henry worked, nor his passion for the job and his inability not to get involved. But she loved those things about him, too. And especially the way he often spoke with such feeling about seeing it as his job to fight for the dead, b
ecause they had no one else to do it for them.
She was thinking about Henry that morning after getting up slightly later than him and spending a grim hour in the cellar, playing a form of chess with the beer barrels.
She emerged into the bar area — where she and Henry had made love at midnight — and then went into the kitchen to fire up the cooker and grill for breakfast.
There were only two guests in overnight (she had fibbed to Henry, knowing that he definitely would not have got intimate in front of the fire had he known that people were staying) and she thought they would be last-minuters. She made herself a coffee and some crusty toast which she took out and ate whilst leaning on the bar and surveying her domain, working through the day ahead.
The front door of the premises was unlocked and a man entered.
Alison smiled and greeted him, unperturbed. People came and went at all hours and a visitor at this time of day was not unusual.
‘Good morning,’ she said and placed down her coffee.
‘Good morning,’ the man replied and Alison picked up an accent of sorts in the words.
‘Can I help you?’
The man was in his mid-forties, slim, extremely handsome in a chiselled, harsh sort of way. He had black hair and a nicely trimmed moustache, a hook nose and dark complexion.
‘Yes, I think so.’ The accent again. Think said as ‘zinc’. ‘You are Alison Marsh?’
‘Yes,’ she said brightly.
‘Good.’
He stepped towards her. He was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket, a T-shirt, black trainers and black leather gloves. There was no warning of it. He smiled. His teeth were beautiful and white and even. Obviously he had a good dentist. He pulled up each glove in turn at the wrist, tightening them on his fingers.
Then he hit Alison once. A driving, powerful blow of his right fist, into the centre of her face. She did not see it coming, but it landed with the force of a sledgehammer, crushing her nose and cheekbones, breaking them. It felt as though her whole face had imploded as she staggered back, shocked, disorientated, clutching at her face as blood flooded out of her broken nose.
She swooned.
The man stepped towards her again and delivered a second blow on the exact same spot, equally forceful.
Then her knees buckled and she collapsed on the spot like she was falling into a hole that had suddenly appeared beneath her feet, unconscious before she hit the floor.
Henry lurched to the window, the palms of his hands on the glass panes, unsure initially what he was looking at, then horror-struck by the realization.
A large black Mercedes saloon car had drawn up on the road outside.
For a moment it looked as though a decapitated head was being held up against the window at the back nearside passenger door, a terrible, bloody, and distorted mess, being displayed triumphantly by the man in the back seat whose tightly fisted hand had wrapped the long hair of the head around it and he was holding it pushed against the window, smearing the glass with blood like some sort of medieval war trophy.
Except it wasn’t a decapitated head.
Nor was it some gruesome toy bought at the gift shop of a medieval torture museum.
It was a real head, attached to a real body, and it belonged to Alison Marsh, the woman Henry Christie loved.
Her features had been pounded almost beyond recognition. Nose flattened, both eyes black and swollen, lips cut and bleeding, and looking dead. Then just to reinforce the message, the man smashed Alison’s head against the window again, making the glass vibrate with the impact.
Henry roared with rage, spun away from the window and stepped dangerously towards Barlow, fists clenched, his face a vision of fury.
Barlow had been anticipating the reaction. The gun came up and he aimed it directly at Henry’s forehead, stopping him dead.
‘What the fuck?’ Henry growled, his anger rising beyond anything he had ever known, and way beyond the fear he had felt at being confronted by Barlow and a gun. Now he realized he had walked stupidly into a trap manufactured by Barlow and Sunderland, two men desperate to save their own skins by any means possible, having used Melanie Speakman as bait. He took another menacing step, but Barlow flicked the gun, his finger tightening on the trigger.
‘I’ll tell you what the fuck is, Henry… this is deadly serious stuff… No, no,’ Barlow warned him as Henry’s body language telegraphed another move, ‘I’ll shoot you dead here and now and think of another way through this if you do anything stupid.’
At Barlow’s feet, the blood must have worked its way back to Melanie’s brain. She stirred and opened her eyes, uncomprehendingly. Then they focused, she realized where she was, and they closed again.
Barlow took a pace back. ‘Now then, Henry old son, I want you to drag this nice lady into the kitchen and lay her out there. Don’t want any nosy postman peering in, do we.’ Barlow waited. Henry did not move. ‘Do it, Henry.’ He stepped back further and Henry moved behind Melanie, hooked his hands under her armpits and slid her gently backwards out of the living room, into the hallway, then into the kitchen.
Reversing in, Henry didn’t at first notice the other body by the back door, but as he laid Melanie out, he turned and saw another woman, shot in the head, her body crumpled up on the floor, lying in a large pool of deep, red, almost black, blood, obviously dead.
‘Oh, Jeez! What the hell are you doing, you complete…’ Henry guessed this was the body of Melanie’s friend, the owner of the house.
‘Stand back,’ Barlow warned and waved the gun, then straddled Melanie and shot her in the head, twice.
Henry staggered back against the sink, dumbstruck by the excessive and casual violence, noticing that the bottom half of his trousers had been splattered by Melanie’s blood. It was as if everything had been squeezed out of him.
Barlow stood upright, but still standing over Melanie. ‘Now then, Henry, where were we?’
‘You murdering bastard. What has she ever done to you? You utter cunt!’
‘Words, Henry… now then,’ he said as though he was simply changing the subject of discussion about world affairs or pop music. ‘Ahh, yes, property… it was very sneaky of you to make sure only you could access it.’ Henry waited, boiling inside, wanting to leap at Barlow and take his chance, but knowing that was a stupid move. He had to stay with this for Alison as he realized that this lack of concern for human life would also apply to her and the image of her dead tore at Henry. He could not shake the sight of her battered head being held against the car window outside. Suddenly hot rage was replaced by ice-cold calculation.
‘So what do you want?’ Henry asked.
‘That’s better,’ Barlow said triumphantly. ‘We need to go for a little ride and retrieve it. All nice and friendly, like, and when you’ve given it to me, we’ll see where we are with things.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I get the stuff, your little landlady goes free… as for you, dunno yet.’ Barlow smirked as Henry looked at Melanie, still in death, but the blood from the terrible wound in her head still collecting and running across the kitchen floor to join up with the coagulating blood of her friend to form a lake.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Henry said.
EIGHTEEN
They were in the pool car, Henry driving, Barlow sitting alongside, his body turned slightly towards Henry, the revolver pointed at Henry’s left hip. Henry’s mouth was clamped tightly shut as he steered the vehicle, as per Barlow’s directions, towards the M55 motorway.
‘Now, you drive sensibly, don’t do anything rash, keep to the speed limit, don’t draw attention to us, because if you do, she’s dead — and then you are, too. Got that?’
Henry nodded, re-gripped the steering wheel with his sweaty hands, controlling the urge to back-hand Barlow.
‘Good man. OK — M55, then M6 north, off at junction 33, drive up the A6 into Lancaster, pull in at the nick, then we do the business and after that, who knows? But no shenanigans o
r I’ll… well, you know, don’t you?’
Henry sped on to the M55, heading east out of Blackpool.
The Mercedes with Alison in it had shot away from the front of the house as Henry and Barlow got into Henry’s transport, but as he drove onto the motorway, Henry saw it was behind them.
‘And just to confirm matters,’ Barlow said, ‘just drive along in the inside lane at about fifty for a while.’
Henry did that and the Mercedes pulled out from behind into the middle lane and drew level with them. Henry glanced to his right, saw the profile of the driver, then the Mercedes accelerated slightly so it was a nose ahead of the pool car and for a few seconds the man in the back seat held Alison’s face up to the window again, squashing it against the glass.
Then the Mercedes decelerated and dropped back into a following position.
‘Now you can achieve the national speed limit, seventy,’ Barlow said.
Henry took the car up to this speed, seeing the blue smoke trail behind. Waves pounded through him, his skull doing a dull thu-dud, his vision seeming to have contracted into a tunnel. He did not dare to even glance at Barlow, because if he did, he knew he would lose it and probably kill them both in the process. The by-product of this would be to ensure that Alison also died.
He had to keep himself in check. Do as they said. Bottle his rage. Use his brain and figure a way out.
First thing: get a grip.
With this in mind, he told his body to relax, take it down a notch. Stop the beating heart that felt like an alien trying to explode out of his chest, get rid of the awful noises in his head.
There was at least a half-hour journey ahead. Use that to his advantage, and learn what this was all about.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t even want to get involved in Jennifer Sunderland’s death. As far as I was concerned it was a job for the uniform branch, not FMIT.’
‘So why did you?’
‘I was asked to attend and then I got interested… and even up to the point of getting her to the mortuary, I wasn’t that interested. It was just a drowning, f’God’s sake. If those guys hadn’t shown up, you’d still be in charge of it.’