Dead Heat

by Nick Oldham

  Henry lay next to her, also naked. Both of them were well tanned from frequent forays to the sun during his time of suspension. Both were trim and fit-looking. Henry ran a hand up the underside of her thigh, stopping at her buttocks. He allowed a finger to touch her sex. She shivered involuntarily and closed her eyes.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said weakly. ‘That won’t change my mind. I don’t think you should get involved in anything, whatever it is, love. You need to keep focused on clearing your name, nothing else. Clearing your name and getting back to work.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He rolled on to his back, slid his hands behind his head. ‘Just sounded like . . . summat to do.’

  ‘The front room needs redecorating.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ He shut his eyes and curled his lips sardonically. Suddenly Kate planted a kiss on his mouth, hard, then let it dissolve into a wet mush of tongue, saliva and teeth, gums and the insides of each other’s mouths. She reached down and grabbed hold of him, forcing a grunt to escape from his throat. She eased a leg over him, slid him inside her and moved over him, rotating her hips slowly. She was very good at this.

  Henry did not admit it to her, but he would not change his mind either. He had stubbornly decided to himself that he would be taking a look into Tara Wickson’s mutilated horses, no matter how much sex he had on a plate.

  Verner unlocked the tack room by jemmying the hasp off, and was inside quickly. The aroma of cleaned leather greeted him. Down one wall were complete tack sets for eight horses – saddles, bridles, blankets, everything required to kit out a horse. They smelled lovely, he thought. What a shame.

  He started at the far corner of the room, splashing out the petrol on the floor and as high up the wooden walls as possible, and on the equipment. The smell of accelerant soon replaced that of leather. He breathed it in and it sent him slightly dizzy.

  He tossed a lighted match into the room. The fumes caught it immediately with a hissing boom as air got sucked into the flames. The man smiled and stepped smartly out of the tack room, leaving the door ajar to help with airflow.

  The wooden structure was ablaze within seconds.

  Henry Christie waited in the corridor. Which corridor it was, he could not be certain, but he was waiting his turn, elbows on knees, hands interlocked, fingers twiddling. His stomach churned. He felt sick. He was waiting to go into the hearing, to be called into the internal discipline proceedings which would seal his fate.

  Someone drifted by in front of him. He looked up. A woman’s face sneered at him.

  ‘No chance, Henry . . . you’re going . . . going . . .’ Then she was gone.

  Henry suddenly noticed he was not wearing any socks or shoes. He was barefoot and his feet were in sand. He wriggled his toes. The sand was warm.

  A bell began to ring.

  Henry knew it was his summons to the beginning of the end of his career.

  The bell continued to ring.

  Henry shook his head. Kate dug him in the side. ‘Answer the phone,’ she muttered groggily.

  The ringing continued and somewhere between sleep, dreams and wakefulness, Henry reached out to the bedside phone, fumbling in the dark, almost knocking the lamp off the cabinet.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and the word was more a snorted breath than a properly formed sound.

  ‘Is that Henry Christie?’ a female voice asked, sounding worried.

  Henry propped himself on to an elbow and squinted at the red figures of the digital alarm clock. 03:40. God, it was just like being in the cops and being on call, he thought fleetingly.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’m really sorry to disturb you. This is Tara Wickson, we spoke yesterday at the riding school?’

  Henry recognized the voice and thought, Twenty to bloody four in the morning! It was the first time for a long time that he’d been woken at this time, other than because of his state of mind. This better be good.

  ‘Yeah, it’s OK.’ He found his voice. He switched the bedside light on. ‘What is it? Something happened?’

  ‘You could say that. Someone’s tried to burn down the stables. Could you please come? I’m really sorry it’s such a crap time and even though the police are here, I’d really like you to come and have a look and help.’ She sounded desperate, close to tears and hysteria, just keeping a lid on it. ‘One of the horses has been mutilated, too, others have . . .’ There was a sob in her voice as she failed to complete the sentence. ‘Oh God, it’s awful.’

  Henry glanced at Kate. She was awake now, listening and glaring.

  ‘No,’ her lips formed silently. ‘NO WAY.’

  Henry dithered. He was stuck between the strong desire to poke his nose into other people’s business and his wish to appease Kate. Both had their pros and cons, but what swung it for him was the arrogant belief that he could talk his way round Kate and make it OK. After all, he had done it so many times before.

  He turned away from her and spoke into the phone.

  ‘Give me half an hour.’

  ‘Thanks, thanks,’ Tara gushed.

  He hung up and swivelled very, very gingerly to Kate. ‘Sorry,’ he said pathetically. She slumped back angrily, defeated, and pulled the duvet over her head.

  ‘I despair,’ she said.

  ‘I knew you’d understand.’ He reached for his underpants, a glimmer of a smile on his lips.

  His excitement was almost uncontrollable. Adrenalin rinsed through his veins as he drove out towards the Wickson household just as a reluctant dawn was beginning to crack the night sky open. That same old feeling of trepidation and anticipation came back: approaching the unknown, wondering where it would all lead, who he would meet, who he would have conflict with, what would it show him about human nature and – most of all – what it would reveal about himself. It was fantastic, nothing could ever touch it.

  The Wickson place was on the outskirts of Poulton-le-Fylde, one of Blackpool’s more salubrious neighbouring towns.

  As the sky grew a slightly lighter shade of pale, he could see smoke rising in the distance.

  Henry’s throat was parched, mainly because of the beer he had drunk in the pub before bed. He should have thrown some coffee down before setting off, but he had been eager to get going. To get, for the first time in months, to the scene of a crime.

  Three

  The old feeling stayed with him as he drove down the long driveway towards the house, which was dead ahead of him, and the stables, which were to his right.

  Looking across he could see a lot of chaotic activity. Two fire engines, two marked police cars and an ambulance, as well as other vehicles. Blue lights rotated a-plenty. Dozens of people, it seemed, scurried about and the reflective jackets of the uniformed services glistened against the blue lights, headlights and the approaching daylight.

  Henry parked outside the house, not wishing to add to the confusion of vehicles and bodies down at the scene. This was an old habit of his. Whenever and wherever possible he liked to approach any crime scene from a distance. ‘I like to come from downwind, with the sun at my back,’ he was fond of saying. He always felt it gave him an advantage . . . somehow. It allowed him to make assessments and start shuffling the pack of cards in his head that was his combination of experience, skills and abilities of being a detective.

  Not that he was a detective at present, just a cop on suspension.

  So what the hell was he doing here?

  The question hit him hard as he pulled up and parked on the gravel at the front of the Wickson house. He sat with his hands resting at the ten to two position on the steering wheel and thought seriously about withdrawing.

  Curiosity got the better of him.

  He looked at the house in front of him, a big, double-fronted, extensively extended and modernized former farmhouse. All the lights were on, the front door open. It was a house that oozed wealth. To the left side of it he could now make out a tennis co
urt and beyond that a helicopter landing pad. He thought it would be safe to assume there would be a swimming pool out back somewhere.

  All in all, very nice. The domicile of a rich and successful person, as Henry knew John Lloyd Wickson was. Henry, an avid reader of the county magazine Lancashire Life – mainly to gawp enviously at the property pages – had seen Wickson several times in the social pages. He was always attending charity events, race meetings and had been profiled on a couple of occasions by the magazine’s money section. Henry thought he should re-read one of the profiles sometime. But he did remember enough to recall that Wickson’s wealth was estimated somewhere in the region of about fifty million. Not bad for somebody who began his working life as a bricklayer, or so the story went.

  As he got out of the car, he glanced at the other cars parked on the gravel. One was the Mercedes Tara Wickson had been driving, another was a huge Bentley, a lovely car which Henry estimated would cost over a hundred and twenty grand. He was surrounded by big bucks, that much was obvious.

  He turned away from the Bentley, then stopped dead in his tracks. There were another three cars on the gravel. One was a Ford Focus with a blue light clamped to the roof. Henry thought it probably belonged to the senior Fire Officer on scene, another, he guessed, was a plain cop car, but it was the third one which he instantly recognized and made him think, Oh bollocks! It was Jane Roscoe’s car.

  The sight of it almost made him jump back into his car and tear-arse away immediately. But, valiantly, he braced himself and trudged onwards.

  The stables, some 200 metres to the right of the house, were accessed by means of a narrow lane just wide enough to allow passage for one vehicle, with drainage channels and fields on either side. Henry stepped aside to let the ambulance drive away. It did not seem to be in much of a hurry, so he guessed there were no patients on board. Perhaps it had been called as a precautionary measure. He walked on into the stable yard, the ever brightening dawn allowing him to get his bearings and make sense of the geography of the area. It was with a surprised jolt that he realized that the banks of the River Wyre were perhaps only a hundred metres away to his left as he walked to the stables.

  It was very apparent where the seat of the fire had been.

  There was a huddle of people scrummed down near the bonnet of one of the police cars: cops, fire fighters and Tara Wickson. Tara was gesticulating wildly. One of the cops was trying to keep her calm, using soothing hand movements. Henry recognized one of the uniformed cops, and another of the plain-clothed variety.

  He held back a second, made up his mind, and approached the conflab.

  Tara Wickson saw him coming and the frustration and exasperation in her body language seemed to wither and die. Her shoulders drooped. She broke away from the group of officials and made toward him. She stopped in front of him, her face a brave mask, which immediately crumbled. She bowed her head and started to sob in big, raking breaths which rattled her small frame.

  ‘Get hold of me, Henry,’ she pleaded. ‘Squeeze me.’

  Making sure there was no possible sexual connotation to this act, he put his arms around her and did as she wanted, though for the life of him he did not know why he did it. Instinct? He patted her back and almost said, ‘There, there.’

  The detective Henry had recognized came and stood behind Tara, a disgusted expression on her face. She grimaced at him over Tara.

  ‘Henry, what the hell are you doing here?’ She surveyed him, head tilted back, eyes looking down her nose.

  Henry managed a shrug. ‘Hello, Jane.’ Tara stepped back and wiped her hands down her tear-stained face.

  DI Jane Roscoe shook her head in disbelief.

  This, Henry thought sardonically, was always going to be the problem: the distinct possibility of doing some unofficial digging on behalf of someone and bumping into the real cops who would get very shirty at any encroachment on to their patch. And in this case, to make matters worse, a real cop with whom he had recently been ‘involved’ and who was also a witness in the internal discipline proceedings being brought against him.

  With a bit of soft prodding and cooing words, Henry managed to steer Tara Wickson back to the house, where in the kitchen he made a pot of tea for her and left her in the capable hands of a policewoman who looked pretty bloody annoyed to be doing such womanly work. ‘Does it have to be a woman looking after her?’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘This is so sexist.’ She folded her arms underneath her ample bosom.

  ‘It’s called caring for victims,’ Henry told her in reaction to the expression on her face.

  The policewoman almost sneered at him.

  ‘Someone’s got to do it,’ he added. Political correctness interfering with the practicalities of policing often irked him intensely. To Tara, he said, ‘I’ll be back to have a chat once I’ve had a word with the detective inspector, OK?’ The proximity of the policewoman made him aver from adding the word ‘love’ at the end of his sentence. She would probably have thought it sexist and patronizing.

  Jane Roscoe was still in discussion with the Fire Service when Henry got back to the scene. She was deep into it and Henry did not interrupt.

  He took the opportunity to have a closer look at the seat of the fire – in a row of loose boxes now completely flattened, charred and blackened. There were a couple of fire fighters still damping down and ensuring the fire would not reignite, spraying copious amounts of brown water on the debris from hoses they had run all the way down to the River Wyre. They were pretty much destroying any chance of recovering any useful evidence. Henry did not comment. Not his problem.

  It was a mess. Out of a block of six stables, three had been completely destroyed, one partially burned down, the two remaining seeming relatively untouched. A building adjacent to the block had also been razed to the ground. Henry stood back and let his eyes wander around the devastation. He sniffed the air. In the smoke there was the unmistakable reek which Henry recognized straight away. One of those smells that, once inhaled, is never forgotten: the smell of burned flesh.

  In this case, he assumed, horse flesh.

  He gagged a little at the combination of the smell and the thought. The memory of the severed ear came back vividly to him.

  Jane Roscoe was nodding at the Chief Fire Officer in such a way as to indicate their conversation was concluding. She shook his hand, broke away and walked to Henry. He watched her and, under his scrutiny, she dropped her gaze and looked away until she reached him. She stood a couple of feet away from him, raised her face and stared challengingly at him.

  ‘Hello, Henry.’

  ‘Jane.’ He nearly bowed.

  ‘Nasty business,’ she observed.

  He was not completely certain what she meant. There could easily have been a double meaning in her words because of their past history.

  ‘This, you mean?’ He jerked his head towards the remnants of the stables.

  ‘What else would I be referring to?’ she said flatly. ‘Of course I mean the bloody fire.’

  ‘Fair dos,’ he said, backing off. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The stables have burned down.’

  Mmm, he thought weakly. This was plainly not going to be easy. It was blindingly obvious Jane was still very prickly about the way things had ended between them and she wasn’t going to give him an easy ride.

  ‘I’ll have that. But why have they burned down?’

  ‘Because they’ve been set on fire?’

  ‘Stop it, Jane.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘What’s it got to do with you anyway?’

  ‘Mrs Wickson has asked me to do a bit of poking around for her.’

  Jane snorted. ‘Poking around for her? Or poking around in her?’

  ‘Stop it,’ he warned her again.

  ‘OK, OK, OK, I’ve stopped. Honest.’

  ‘Apparently some of the horses have been mutilated in the past and the police haven’t been very, let’s say, result-orientated. She asked if I’d do a bit of snooping for her, see
if I could turn anything up . . . then this happens even before I come and do an initial inquiry.’

  ‘You being a detective on suspension with no powers and no backup and plenty of time on your hands?’ Jane interrupted.

  ‘Something like that,’ Henry said. His voice was beginning to betray his growing annoyance, which seemed to please Jane by the look on her face. He guessed she might just enjoy some sadistic pleasure in winding him up.

  ‘Is that such a good idea?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Probably not, but I’m doing it as a favour for her and I’m not getting paid for it in any way, shape or form,’ he said pointedly, ‘and because the local plods haven’t really done anything much to help in the past, is there anything to suggest things are going to be different just because there’s been a fire here? I can’t see I’ll be treading on anybody’s toes, because it’s more than likely there won’t be any cops walking around here, doing their jobs, will there?’ He sounded like Mr Moaner from Whinge Crescent, Cops ’r’ Crapsville – and he quite liked his little tirade from the other side of the fence.

  A smoke-filled silence descended between them, broken when Jane said, ‘I miss you, Henry.’

  ‘And I miss you, too, Jane, but we need to move on.’ It sounded hard and the words did not come easily out of his mouth.

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘Maybe . . . but can we get on with this? If you’re going to help me, fine. If not I’ll just dig around for info by myself. Actually, we might be of benefit to each other. I’ll let you know what I find out, if you do the same for me.’

  ‘I’ll see,’ she relented.

  ‘I take it you’re the night cover DI?’

  ‘For my sins – and they are plenty.’ She gave Henry a long, appraising look, swallowed and nodded, as if accepting the icy situation between them. It was obviously over and out.

  ‘Is this an accident?’ Henry asked about the fire. He sniffed up, smelling the petrol fumes.

  ‘The Fire Brigade don’t think so. They reckon accelerant has been used. The seat of the fire was in this building which used to store the tack. It burned down a treat and caught the adjoining stables. Have a look at this.’ Jane moved to the first of the stables, now a dirty, ashy-grey, muddy mess. She pointed to the floor. Henry followed the line of her finger and, initially, could not make out what she was pointing at.