Dead Heat

by Nick Oldham

  Henry ducked low and watched the Cavalier glide slowly past down Red Bank. He kept hidden behind a Transit van. The driver of the Cavalier strained to look across the car park and Henry saw his face quite clearly. Some relief flooded into him. It was not Verner. That was reassuring, but nothing else was. He thought he recognized the driver, but was not sure. He wondered if it had anything to do with John Lloyd Wickson.

  The Cavalier went out of sight. Henry stayed where he was, the Transit keeping him out of sight of the road.

  A couple of minutes later, it reappeared, cruising slowly. It went past the car park and pulled in fifty metres up the road.

  Henry wiped a nervous hand across his face.

  Decision made.

  He vaulted the low wall separating the supermarket car park from the footpath and walked smartly up Red Bank towards the prom.

  Straight in, he thought. He did not have time to mess about.

  Within seconds he was at the rear nearside of the Cavalier. Two more strides and he was at the passenger door. He tried the handle – locked – and contented himself by squatting down on his haunches and tapping on the window with his knuckles and giving the driver one of his best, nastiest smiles.

  Henry could not have had a better reaction if he had cattle-prodded the occupant. He literally leapt in his seat, then pulled himself together and tried to brave it out. His face seemed familiar to Henry. He was sure he had seen the young man quite recently.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ Henry said through the glass.

  The window descended electronically a couple of inches.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Why are you following me?’

  ‘Whaddya mean?’

  ‘I mean, why are you following me?’

  The man bit his lip, his head flipped back and hit the head rest. ‘Shit,’ he said, cracking suddenly.

  Henry then recognized him. He was the cop at the GMP surveillance unit who had let him in to see Al Major that morning.

  ‘Bit off your patch, aren’t you? And not that good at following people, either, not for a surveillance cop, that is.’

  ‘If I’d wanted to follow you without being seen, I would’ve,’ he defended himself proudly, realizing he had been well and truly blown out.

  ‘Fine. Now tell me why you’re following me and let’s talk other than through a glass partition, shall we?’

  The officer reached across and unlocked the door. Henry dropped in beside him.

  ‘Is there just you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you doing a favour for Al Major?’

  ‘No, am I fuck!’

  ‘What then? I’ll tell you now, I don’t like being followed. Makes me nervous and prone to rash acts of violence.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ He placed both hands on the wheel and gripped tightly. ‘I needed to talk to you. I found out where you lived, waited for you and was trying to pick up courage, OK?’

  Henry nodded. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ken Sloane.’

  ‘OK, Ken Sloane, what’s this all about?’

  ‘You came to see Al Major this morning, yeah?’

  ‘You let me in.’

  ‘About Jo and Dale?’ Henry said yeah again. ‘I’m not proud of this, but I earwigged your conversation.’

  ‘Ahh . . . and?’

  ‘I’m not happy about it.’

  ‘What, our conversation?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, bowed his chin on to his chest. ‘The cover-up. I’m not happy about the cover-up. It’s been nagging and gnawing away at me like a rat.’ He sighed and raised his head. ‘I was on duty the night they went missing.’ He stopped, unsure how to continue.

  Henry prompted him with a gesture.

  ‘None of us should’ve gone out that night. Some of the team were off sick, others on leave, the motorcyclist crashed on the way out and the radios didn’t fucking work.’

  ‘I presume the investigation team have inquired about all these things?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Where’s the cover-up, then?’

  ‘Al Major, the bastard.’ Sloane scratched the back of his neck as though he was trying to get through to his brain. ‘He told us to say nothing about the radios not working. He couldn’t cover up the lack of numbers or the biker coming off his machine, but he covered up the radio bit. He threatened some of us and said we’d lose our jobs if that came to light. And you know what, like tarts we all went along with it. What a shower of shit we are. He’s a shit sergeant now and harasses and slags off all the women who come on to the branch if they don’t let him sleep with them. But there’s others like him too, his mates on the branch. It’s obscene. They all stuck together for him and no one got any blame for Jo and Dale. I’m not saying he had anything to do with ’em disappearing, but it wouldn’t have happened if we’d had a full team and proper equipment.’

  ‘Was he having an affair with Jo?’

  ‘Yeah – but she saw through him quick style and dumped him. He couldn’t let it go and had to keep on at her, the bastard.’

  Henry looked at Ken, who was now allowing years of resentment to burst out.

  ‘He sent us out poorly staffed and with no fucking radios to find one of the city’s most dangerous crims.’

  ‘Andy Turner.’

  ‘Yeah – and Jo spotted him, trailed him, and then we lost contact, sort of.’

  ‘Major says she lost him, then he told her to come back in.’

  ‘I think she found him again. She didn’t let go, that one. I’ll bet she found him again, couldn’t get through to us and I think Turner murdered them.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Turner went to ground, didn’t he? Hasn’t been seen for years, now, no intell, no info, nothing. I bet they stumbled on him and he whacked them. Has to be.’

  ‘What if they didn’t stumble on him? What if they decided to do a bunk together? Quit the rat race, go live on a beach somewhere? It has happened.’

  ‘And leave everything behind? Their cars, their pads? Money in their bank accounts?’ Sloane said in disbelief. ‘No way. They were murdered, Turner did it and he did a runner after covering his tracks.’

  ‘Interesting hypothesis,’ said Henry. ‘Never been proven, though. Even the police car they were using that night’s never been found. Where the hell did that go?’

  Sloane shrugged. ‘You know as well as I do that it’s easy to dispose of a car. It’s either been crushed and recycled, or it’s in a flooded quarry somewhere. But there is one thing I do know – Al Major should never have sent us out that night, knowing the radios weren’t working. They’re our lifeline.’

  ‘The fact remains he did, though, Ken.’

  ‘Well, I want something doing about it. I’ve sat on this for far too long and it’s fucking me up.’ He turned and looked pleadingly at Henry, his face distorted with distress. ‘Help,’ he said pitifully.

  ‘Maybe the time’s come to make a stand, Ken.’

  ‘Jeez,’ said Henry to himself, walking back to his car. ‘Jeez,’ he said again, trying to work out the implications, if any, of what Ken Sloane had told him. The same Ken Sloane who thought he was talking to an officer of a higher rank who wasn’t suspended from duty. ‘Jeez,’ he said once more for good luck and got into the Astra.

  He had sent Sloane off with the promise he would take the matter forward. The only way he knew that would happen would be for him to tell somebody in GMP, but Sloane did not want that to happen. He did not trust his organization. He wanted an outsider to look into it and at that time there was no one more on the outside than Henry. He was so far outside, he was out of bounds. But Sloane did not know that.

  He drove back to the Hilton Hotel on North Promenade, glad to see that Tara Wickson’s car was still there. She was probably killing time with friends in the bar, he guessed, until it was time to pick Charlotte up from the disco. Henry wondered if there was any value in hanging around to see her. He drove around the hote
l car park and decided not to stay. He was going to go and do what he intended to do that evening, when Tara emerged from the front door of the Hilton, hand in hand with a man Henry did not recognize. He swerved into a parking bay and adjusted his rear-view mirror to watch the couple walk across to Tara’s Mercedes.

  Suddenly she broke away from the man.

  They spoke a few words.

  Seconds later they were in her car, kissing, silhouettes from Henry’s viewpoint. Then her reversing lights came on and the Merc reversed quickly out of the bay. She drove north along the prom.

  Henry followed. She went through Bispham, continuing north through Cleveleys and up into Fleetwood, working through the streets of the old fishing town before stopping outside the North Euston Hotel on the front. Tara and her man went arm in arm into the hotel and Henry let it go at that. He did not have the time or inclination to stay with her, as interesting as it was, though not, he thought, all that surprising. Tara had a lover. Whoopee-do, fancy that.

  In a puff of black smoke he shot past the North Euston and headed back to his happy hunting ground of Blackpool and, in particular, to the drug-infested South Shore.

  He felt comfortable here. It was like putting on an old pair of slippers. He had done much of his police work on the streets of South Shore. He had dealt with dozens of people around here, arrested lots of them, protected many of them. When he got out of his car it struck him he wasn’t actually far from being one of them. As a cop he had been part of the fabric of life here, a denizen of the jungle.

  The thought made his stomach churn. At least he was one of the predators, though.

  It was 8.45 p.m. He had wasted an hour and a half already. He would have to leave the area by 10.45 p.m. at the latest to be in time to pick up Leanne from the youth club. Two hours. Not much time to mooch around, show his face, ask a few questions, ruffle a few feathers.

  The evening had gone chilly. That good old Blackpool wind was starting to whip in from the Irish Sea as the tide came in; spats of rain were dripping in from a cloudy sky. He hunched down into his denim jacket, hands thrust deep into his chinos.

  He started to wander.

  The streets were as cold as the night, the dark skyline dominated by the structure that was the Big One on the Pleasure Beach, one of the world’s most terrifying roller-coaster rides. A light at the top of the framework blinked its warning to planes wishing to land at nearby Blackpool airport: ‘Don’t hit me, it’ll hurt.’

  Henry sauntered along a few terraced streets. Much of the housing was now given over to customers of the DSS. There was a high level of unemployment in the area, which was one of the country’s most deprived.

  Near a corner shop, Henry paused in shadow. A group of teenage kids, some on mountain bikes, hung around outside the door, harassing customers who looked like easy targets, and generally behaving badly. Henry thanked his lucky stars his two girls hadn’t gone down this route. He had been fortunate with his kids, despite his neglect of them over the years. Kate had done a fine job with them.

  He watched the group. He would have liked to go and remonstrate with them, but it would have been useless and possibly dangerous. Good people had been killed making a point.

  A scruffy-looking cop car – obviously from the same stable as his borrowed Astra – crawled past, two officers on board. The youngsters stopped and watched and when it had gone, behaved even more outrageously than before, dancing around as though on the grave of law and order. Why hadn’t the cops stopped and spoken to them? Henry wanted to know. His mouth turned down with distaste. Were they afraid?

  Another pedal cyclist appeared from around the corner. This was an older youth, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He cycled towards the group by the shop. One member detached himself from them and met the newcomer.

  It happened quickly. The handover. The payoff. A drug deal completed in less than the blink of an eye. Then the older boy – the street dealer – was away on his bike whilst the younger lad – the buyer – sauntered calmly back to the main gang, smirking as though he’d won the lottery.

  Street life, Henry thought.

  The dealer had disappeared from the scene. Henry knew who he was and maybe what he had witnessed would come in useful at some later date – if he ever got reinstated.

  He did not know the name of the buyer, but watched as he now became a street dealer, handing out tiny packages to several outstretched hands. Henry doubted it would go any further than this. These guys would be the end users. The consumers of a product which could well have originated on the other side of the world. Passed through countless hands, making huge amounts of money along the way for the suppliers, middle men and deal makers. But not the users. These were the ones who ultimately provided the money on which the whole business was based. And where did that money come from, Henry thought cynically. High-volume crime: auto theft, burglary, street robbery. Crime that had spiralled out of control and there was nothing the police could do to stem its relentless progress.

  Truth was, as Henry knew, that the government had missed the opportunity through a very short-sighted approach. Performance targets were easy in terms of crimes such as stealing from vehicles, and police forces had been bullied into dealing with this type of crime by the Home Office. The reality was that, on the whole, crimes like these were purely driven by one thing: drugs.

  Now it had hit home that drug abuse was the actual cause of the problem, it was to late too do anything meaningful about it. The drug trade was so sophisticated that when a dealer or supplier was taken out, a replacement was operating in a matter of hours, or less.

  Because the boat had been missed by not disrupting the trade twenty years ago, it was now impossible to claw anything back. Society was stuck with it.

  Henry shrugged. Not his problem. He stepped out of the shadow and walked purposely through the cluster of youths outside the shop. They watched him with suspicion and their loud chatter ceased. They did not hassle him, stepped aside and let him pass.

  He walked on and turned into the first pub he came to, the King’s Cross. Not long ago a gangland killing had taken place here when three drug dealers lost their lives. The place had closed down for a short time after that, reopening with the fanfare of high expectation. Within weeks it had reverted to what it always had been: a hang-out for losers, druggies, prostitutes and gays.

  Henry eased his way to the bar. Heavy-metal rock music pounded out from speakers hung from the ceiling. The smoke-filled atmosphere reeked of cannabis and human sweat. Henry had a bottle of Bud, ignoring the grubby glass proffered by the barman, choosing to sip from the bottle. It tasted sweet and light. He leaned on the bar. He recognized about a dozen people. Some he’d arrested. Others he’d dealt with under different circumstances.

  Some eyeballed him.

  He smiled at one man in particular, raising his bottle to him. The man single-fingered Henry and turned away in disgust. A cop in the place!

  Henry didn’t give a fuck. The guy he was actually looking for was not in. He necked the Bud and continued the trawl.

  The next pub was smaller, but catered for a similar clientele. Except for gay people. It was a venue notorious for queer-bashing and some homosexuals had been severely beaten in the pub’s car park. One had been raped by four heterosexual men. Nice folk, Henry thought as he recalled the incident. He had caught all the men responsible. Their prison sentences had been derisory.

  There was just a smattering of people inside. A big screen had been pulled down and a live football match was being televised.

  At the bar he had a Coke this time – again in the bottle. He distrusted the glasses in these places, liked to see bottle tops being removed if possible. This time he gravitated to a table in one corner from which he could see all entrances and exits. It was 9.30 p.m. He thought he could either sit tight and hope for the best, or continue on what could be a fruitless tour. Sitting and waiting now suited him. At least he could watch the football. This was a watering hole and sooner or later b
oth predator and prey came to drink. If he was lucky, in the next hour or so, his prey would show and he would pounce.

  He sipped the Coke. Finished it, got another, sat and sipped. He was reminded of a Rolling Stones’ song, ‘The Spider and the Fly’: ‘Sitting, thinking, sinking, drinking . . . Jump right ahead in my web.’ It worried him slightly that he could relate many situations in which he found himself to the lyrics of songs.

  ‘Come on, fly. I’ve got a daughter to pick up,’ he mumbled.

  9.50 p.m.

  The door opened and a gaggle of half-drunk, half-stoned girls stumbled through. Short skirts, micro tops, tons of smeared make-up. His guts lurched. Did his eldest daughter Jenny do this sort of thing? They looked and behaved awfully.

  Then a young man walked in, closely followed by another.

  The first one interested Henry. He was dressed slickly. Designer gear, making Henry raise his eyebrows.

  This was his prey. Troy Costain.

  The man walked straight up to the girls. They were ecstatic to see him. Two of them draped themselves around his neck, kissing him as his hands felt them up without any complaint from them.

  Henry smirked. ‘You’ve come up in the world, Troy my laddie,’ he said to himself.

  Costain bought a round of drinks. The young man who had come in with him smooched with one of the girls. The drinks came. Alcopops.

  One of the girls sidled up to the main man and whispered something in his ear. Her hand cupped his genitals, giving them a playful squeeze which almost made his eyes shoot out of their sockets.

  Costain and the girl discussed something, then both turned and walked hand in hand towards the toilets. Costain touched his friend on the shoulder and mouthed a few words in his ear, causing him to leave the girl he had been getting intimate with to follow the couple out.

  Henry waited a minute and then downed his Coke thinking, I’m going to end up in some grotty bogs again here. He followed the trio down towards the toilets.

  Above the door marked ‘Toilets’ was also an exit sign. Henry knew that beyond the door was a corridor off which were male and female loos and at the end was the doorway out on to the car park.