Fighting for the Dead

by Nick Oldham

  ‘I think I’m eating up your profits . . . I will pay you back.’

  ‘Steve, we don’t make a profit, not yet anyway.’

  They strolled back to the hospital, where Diane met up with her sister, at whose house she was going to stay, and Flynn made his way to Alison’s car on the car park. His mobile phone rang as he reached it.

  ‘Steve, it’s me,’ a female voice said. ‘The woman who saved your life.’

  ‘My very own paramedic,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘One who has a rare night off. Can you come around?’

  ‘It’s a really nice offer . . .’ he began.

  ‘But? You dumping me already?’

  ‘It’s not an offer I want to refuse.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’d really like to see you, honestly . . .’

  ‘But!’ The ‘buts’ were getting pithier.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ he revealed. ‘Why don’t you come down to Glasson and take me for a drink, see what happens from that point onwards.’ Even as he said it he knew it sounded awfully egotistical. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she told him to go to hell.

  She didn’t.

  Henry’s resolve faltered at the first hurdle. His intention had been to spend the night at his own house in Blackpool so he didn’t have a long journey to the cells in the morning. He was going to zip down the motorway, but as he reached junction 34, the magical allure of Kendleton and a certain landlady wafted to him and he couldn’t resist. So he went straight on instead, driving to Kendleton, passing the point where he’d been forced off the road – and trying not to think about it and his poor car.

  Twenty minutes later he was propping up the bar with a couple of the locals, a doctor and a farmer, both solid-gold inebriates, he had come to know and love.

  By midnight the place was closed and deserted, just himself and Alison sitting side by side in front of the fire in the main bar. It had been roaring earlier, but was now just red embers, emitting a lovely but dwindling and sleepy warmth. They had a Glenfiddich each, doubles, one ice cube so as not to spoil the flavour. Henry’s face began to glow.

  He had told Alison as much about his day as he could and also bemoaned the death of his fancy car, but was also philosophical about it. He had managed to have a couple of fleeting conversations with his insurers and knew they were going to write it off.

  ‘In some way it might be a good thing,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Alison said in disbelief.

  ‘I bought it in some kind of response to Kate’s death, something to cheer me up.’ Henry looked sideways at her. ‘That moment has passed, it was just a phase of grieving. When it’s all sorted money wise, I think I’ll just buy something more sensible. I don’t need a fancy motor to make me happy now, just one that gets me from A to B. You’re what makes me happy,’ he purred.

  She pretended to consider his words. ‘Don’t make it too sensible,’ she laughed. ‘I quite like fancy cars.’ She slid off her chair and knelt down in front of him, laying her forearms along his thighs. ‘I never thought I’d be happy again.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  He leaned forwards and they kissed lingeringly. She really has the most wonderful lips, he thought. They needed kissing a lot.

  Suddenly she broke off the kiss. Her eyes played lustfully over his face.

  He picked up the less than subtle meaning. It was a look he had learned to read very well over the past few months. ‘No way!’ he said, pretending to be shocked. ‘No way! Here? Now? What about Ginny . . . she might walk in!’

  ‘In bed, all tucked up, fast asleep. Front door’s locked, blinds are drawn . . . no paying guests . . . this rug is nice, soft and fluffy . . .’ Her hand moved up his thigh and came to rest on his groin, which had already begun to strain. She gripped him through his trousers, keeping her eyes locked into his.

  ‘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 d
iamond.

  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 t
hat 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.