by Nick Oldham
Henry knew he had to act quickly, before the alcohol in Don’s system made him insensible. ‘Will you do me a favour?’ he said quietly into Don’s large, cauliflower ear.
Lanky Man was ordering the steak-and-ale pie. As he did so, his eyes roved up and down Alison’s body as she wrote down the order. She noticed the appraisal and squirmed inside but tried to ignore it. Sometimes it was what customers did. However, Lanky Man looked guiltily at Henry when he came up behind her with Don Singleton in tow. Lanky Man’s lustful thoughts towards Alison were instantly shelved by caution.
‘Lasagne for me,’ Tight Fit said. ‘With salad. No chips.’
‘OK, thanks for that, gents.’ Alison collected the menus, then turned to Henry, who she hadn’t noticed creeping up behind her.
‘Hi, sweetie,’ he said, sidestepping to allow her past.
The two visitors eyed him shiftily.
Henry said, ‘Apologies for this, I know this is just a pit stop and you’re on your way back to wherever “back” is, but I just mentioned to Don here’ – he indicated the farmer now alongside him – ‘who’s a farmer, incidentally, that you were John Deere reps. I know he’s interested in that make. Just wondered if you could have a chat with him, maybe talk through some options.’ Henry leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered, ‘He’s loaded, by the way.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Lanky Man said stonily.
‘But …’
‘Work’s done for the day. We haven’t really got time to chat. We need to eat and go. Got a bit of a journey ahead.’ He tried to sound apologetic.
‘What about all that commission?’
‘We don’t work on commission. We’re salaried,’ Tight Fit said.
‘Oh, OK,’ Henry said. He was trying to sound taken aback. ‘That’s a shame. However, could you leave Don your card? He really is interested. And maybe when you’re next in the area …’ He arched his eyebrows.
‘Run out of business cards,’ Lanky Man said firmly. ‘And to be fair, we’re not really interested.’
‘You must be the only reps in the world not interested in making a sale,’ Henry remarked.
Lanky Man shrugged. Tight Fit looked at Henry coldly.
‘Whatever.’ He shrugged and drew Don back to the bar.
‘Shit,’ Hawkswood said through the side of his mouth. ‘Bad fuckin’ idea, this.’
Silverthwaite’s mobile rang. It had a weak signal by virtue of him being in the bay window.
He answered.
‘Where are you now?’ Runcie demanded.
‘Just about to eat,’ he said, keeping it vague.
‘Where’s Henry Christie?’
‘Er … we know where he is … not a million miles from where we are.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘That we know exactly where he is, OK?’ His voice was tetchy now.
‘You haven’t made contact with him, have you?’ she asked.
‘Kind of,’ he admitted sheepishly.
He heard Runcie emit an exasperated grunt at the other end of the line. ‘So he knows who you are?’
‘No, no, we spun him a yarn.’
‘And you think he swallowed it?’
It was a doubtful, ‘Yes,’ although Runcie’s forthright response wasn’t doubtful at all as she castigated him.
‘Sorry, boss.’
‘I told you to hang fire.’ Silverthwaite could tell she was seething between gritted teeth, and he could imagine the ferocious look on her face.
‘What’s the problem, though?’
‘The problem is that our chief constable has asked Lancashire’s chief constable, Fanshaw-Bayley, to send someone over and review our two unsolved murder cases – that someone being Henry Christie – and you two, by not fucking listening, have revealed your identities …’
‘No, we haven’t,’ he protested.
‘You might as well’ve done, you imbeciles!’
‘He thinks we’re sales reps.’
‘And you think he’s a gullible idiot. Let me tell you something – he isn’t.’
A few moments of strained silence descended on the line, broken by Runcie. ‘We’ll just have to keep you two out of the way if he does actually get across here, I suppose.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means you might have to put him out of action. But first things first – our gung-ho chief constable needs sorting.’
‘You want us to do that?’ It was both a question and an offer.
‘I’m just thinking out loud here,’ Runcie said. ‘A review might just disappear, or at least get put on the back burner if the chief somehow doesn’t make it back across the Pennines and if Henry Christie … I dunno … breaks a leg, say?’
‘Or two.’
‘Or two,’ Runcie confirmed.
‘Where is Burnham now?’ Silverthwaite asked. ‘I thought he’d be back in the force.’
‘No, no, he isn’t, but I know more or less where he is.’
Alison brought out the meals for the two travelling salesmen, then went to the bar where Henry was propped up, chatting to Don Singleton, who had been joined by his usual drinking companion, the local general practitioner, Dr Lott. Between the two of them, they consumed a considerable amount of beer and spirits, and it was rumoured the profits from sales to them were solely responsible for saving The Tawny Owl from bankruptcy. This wasn’t true, just a product of the village rumour mill.
‘They seem nice guys,’ Alison said to Henry. ‘One’s a bit leery, though … Still, that’s blokes for you.’
‘They’re liars,’ Henry said.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. Tell you later. Need me to do anything?’ Although technically against police regulations for Henry, as a serving officer, to either live or work in licensed premises, this did not deter him from helping out. His ultimate aim was to become co-owner when he retired anyway, so the powers that be didn’t look too closely at his involvement. ‘But I am still on light duties,’ he reminded her.
She tutted and rolled her eyes so far back, Henry thought they would do a full three-sixty in their sockets.
‘Mm, let me think … How about checking the back door of the cellar? The drayman whinged it was sticking again. Maybe it just needs some WD40 or something. A man’s job,’ she teased him. ‘Can you handle it?’
‘I’ll have a look,’ Henry said. She patted his shoulder – gently – and disappeared back into the kitchen.
It took a while before he prised himself away from the bar – noticing the two reps had left – and walked out of the pub into the increasing darkness and chill of the early evening. It had become quite cold quite quickly, and Henry shivered as a little nip of breeze caught him as he stepped out through the front door. Spring might well have been on its way, but winter was keeping a grip.
Henry actually said, ‘Brr.’
From the doorway, he turned left and walked along the front of the pub, then turned left again at the gable end to the back corner, where there was a turning circle for brewery wagons to deliver crates and kegs filled with all types of liquids that Henry liked to imbibe. The vehicles preferred to reverse up to the circle and park next to the gentle slope leading down to the wide double doors of the cellar, which stretched right under the whole of the pub – a vast, dank warren of interconnecting rooms.
Next to the slope was a set of steps. Henry paused at the top one. There were fourteen, he knew, having been up and down them countless times.
He frowned, sensing something amiss.
A movement – a blur behind him.
Then he felt the push in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades. He reached to grab the handrail, missed, then spiralled down the concrete steps, everything blurred, his injured shoulder glancing on a step, his head grazing the wall as he whirled down as though caught in a vortex, coming to a crashing stop at the foot of them, glimpsing a figure at the top of the steps, who was there, then gone.
F
IVE
‘Would you like me to give you a hand to get out of there?’
Henry Christie opened his eyes – he’d almost fallen asleep in the hot bath – and looked down the length of his body, seeing it reflected uncomfortably in the chrome plug turner on the end of the bath, just underneath the taps. He looked up at Alison and gave her a crooked, lazy grin.
She was standing by the bath holding a huge bath sheet spread between her hands.
‘I was concerned. Thought you’d drowned.’
‘I’m OK,’ he said, groaning as he pushed himself up into a sitting position, the water and suds sluicing off him. He looked down at his left arm and left leg, the limbs that had taken the brunt of his tumble. Both displayed a series of bruises like a zebra, plus a swelling on his left elbow.
‘And I ask again – what were you thinking?’
He cricked his neck painfully. ‘I remind myself of that old joke.’
‘Which is?’ Alison asked reluctantly. His jokes were rarely laugh out loud, mostly cringeworthy in the extreme.
‘Who discovered Victoria Falls?’
‘I don’t know – who discovered Victoria Falls?’ Alison went gamely along with the gag.
‘The person who pushed her.’ Henry gave the weak punchline. ‘Bu-bum!’
At least Alison didn’t roll her eyes at that one, though her lips twisted disdainfully. ‘You’re saying you were pushed down the steps?’
He raised his eyebrows painfully. Even they were hurting. ‘If I’m honest, I’m not sure now. I thought so at first; now it’s a bit of a haze.’
‘More likely you should have taken a torch with you and watched out for the green mould on the top step. You slipped and went A over T, simple.’
‘I think I was pushed,’ he insisted.
‘OK, you were pushed. But by whom, and why? Makes no sense.’
‘Tell me about it.’ He heaved himself up and gingerly stepped out of the bath into the waiting folds of the fluffy sheet that Alison wrapped around his middle.
‘I’m assuming there will be no chance of any … y’know?’ she said, glancing down at his genitals before they went out of sight behind the sheet.
Henry said, ‘There’s no chance of me even thinking about it.’ Then he had second thoughts about the matter. ‘Unless, of course, you are very, very gentle with me.’
‘I’m never gentle – you know that.’
‘I could hardly hang around to see if he was OK or not, could I?’ Hawkswood said. He was on the mobile to Runcie. ‘I saw a chance and took it. He didn’t see me – no one did. Just snuck up behind him and gave him a good push.’
‘You don’t know how he is?’
‘I couldn’t nip down and check his pulse. Might’ve given the game away,’ he whined, frustrated at Runcie’s questions. ‘Even if he’s dead, or uninjured or unhurt, there’s nothing lost, I promise you. And if he is unhurt, then I’ll just go back and do some real damage as and when necessary.’
‘OK, OK,’ she relented.
‘He was reading the murder books, though. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what he had in front of him.’
‘The murder books?’
‘That’s what they looked like. He put his hand over the cover, but I could see our force name and crest.’
‘That means Burnham got them somehow and passed them on to him.’
Hawkswood did not comment, but waited for Runcie to continue.
‘I now know the exact address where Burnham’s staying tonight,’ she said.
Suitably drugged up with analgesics, Henry poured himself a more-than-generous shot of Macallan Fine Oak twelve-year-old whisky – just to help the over-the-counter drugs to ease his aches and pains more effectively – and settled himself at the desk in one corner of the living room, placed the two murder books down, one on top of the other, and connected his laptop to the internet.
He logged on to the website of the Central Yorkshire Police, just to get a better idea, geographically, of where it was and where he was going to have to go to see the town in which the murders had taken place.
Looking at the map of the force, Henry was amazed it hadn’t been amalgamated, divvied up into the other two big forces surrounding it. It was thin and elongated, with its own stretch of coastline, and reminded Henry of the Gambia, the tiny West African country he’d once visited for a holiday with Kate many years before. That, too, was surrounded by its neighbours, except for a stretch of Atlantic coastline. Like the Gambia, Central Yorkshire was essentially situated on either side of a river, in this case the River Wilton which ran from its source in North Yorkshire and poured through Central Yorkshire, spewing out into the North Sea at Portsea, the largest city in the county. It straddled the estuary of the river and was a busy working port which had been in existence since Roman times.
Unlike the Gambia, it was not tropical.
Henry had a further look at Portsea on Wikipedia. It was the name of the port he couldn’t quite remember when he’d been talking to the two chief constables. He saw that it was actually a city now, having only recently achieved that status.
But the important thing for him was to get some kind of grip on the location where the murders took place. An old, thriving, east coast port. The question already lurking in his mind – just one of the many an SIO should have at the back of his or her mind – was is this location in any way connected with these deaths? And will this help me to make sense of them better? Any SIO worth their salt would be immediately asking that in order to start to build up a picture and ensure that logic would drive the investigative process, even if the mind of the offender might be less than logical. That said, Henry knew only too well that even apparently bizarre actions by offenders may well be rooted in deep-seated motivations and consistent with them.
The problem Henry had was that he was coming in cold to review two murders that were months old, and getting the ‘feel’ of them would be hard. Nor did it help that the SIO was no longer available – he was dead. Jack Culver’s thought processes would have been useful to mine but Henry wasn’t going to get them – unless there was something in the murder books other than just a blow-by-blow account of the investigations. Henry would also have to rely on the cooperation and support of the officer who had inherited the investigations.
That, too, Henry knew, could be delicate. Probing questions could easily upset them, and they could feel that they were being sidelined if he didn’t tread carefully.
Looking at the cover sheets of the murder books, he saw that the lead investigator in each was the same person, DCI J. Runcie, who ran Portsea’s Serious Crime Team.
That would at least simplify some aspects of his enquiries. One single point of contact for both who, he hoped, would play ball with him and not make him feel he was having his nose shoved out of joint.
He would be gentle with the guy.
Henry reopened the murder book relating to Mark James Wright, which chronologically recorded the progress of the investigation from the notification of the crime. He jotted down some notes on a pad as he read through under the headings of ‘Location’, ‘Victim’, ‘Offender’, ‘Scene Forensics’, ‘Post-Mortem’, ‘Method of Investigation’ and ‘Fast-Track Options’.
It was all fairly basic stuff for an experienced detective, let alone an SIO. The key was never to take anything for granted, not to get tunnel vision.
‘So, Mark James Wright,’ Henry said to himself, ‘what got you murdered?’
An almost forty-year-old man had, seemingly, been dragged out of his vehicle on a lonely country road and stabbed to death in a brutal, frenzied attack. He’d had thirty-eight puncture wounds in him, the fatal ones being six to his heart. A horrible, painful death.
Wright was a single, divorced man from further up the coast in Sunderland. He ran a small business hiring out diggers and screeners and all sorts of other heavy machinery associated with the excavation and reclamation of stone and rubble back into hard core, usually from buildings that were
being demolished. It was the sort of trade Henry knew little about, one of those businesses that was very much under the radar for the general public, but lucrative nonetheless.
Wright had been found on a country road, lying in a field close to a lay-by in which his car was parked, engine still running. It appeared he’d been forcibly taken from the car and killed, his body then dumped over a low hedge. The road was a minor one which led north from the docks at Portsea, next stop Sunderland.
There were no witnesses, no CCTV cameras, and no sign of Wright’s mobile phone, although Henry guessed he would have had one. He was in the kind of business where one would be an invaluable tool of his trade.
Wright’s movements prior to the discovery of his body were unknown.
No actual motive for the murder had been uncovered either.
Yet while Henry already appreciated the difficulties inherent in the location of this murder, he knew that no one gets dragged out of a car in the middle of nowhere and then mutilated without having upset someone somewhere along the line.
The other two adages Henry always applied to murder investigations, though he acknowledged they were slightly corny, were also flashing across his mind like a neon sign.
Firstly: Why + when + where + how = Who.
Secondly: Find out how a person lived and you will find out why and how they died.
The old ones, he thought, were the best.
Henry read on, then moved to look at actual crime-scene photographs and a report from a pathologist who had visited the scene and subsequently carried out the post-mortem, which identified the type of knife used to murder Wright: a seven-inch one with a serrated blade, probably a kitchen knife, never found. He read further details of the progress of the investigation, which seemed to have gone nowhere fast.
Wright’s personal and professional business lives seemed to have been delved into quite deeply, but had turned up nothing – no suspects, no witnesses.
Henry’s mouth turned down at the corners, unimpressed by this.
He began to stiffen up, the combination of the fall and the half-healed bullet wound seeming to intensify as he sat there. He groaned as he moved, then flicked back through the crime-scene photographs.