A Time For Justice

by Nick Oldham

  Dakin held out his glass. Corelli chinked his against it.

  ‘Here’s to the future and shared prosperity,’ said Dakin.

  They each took a sip of their drinks.

  ‘There is, however, one problem to be resolved,’ Corelli said thoughtfully.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dakin sounded guarded. ‘I thought we’d covered everything. ‘

  ‘Oh, we have, businesswise. Now, the man the police arrested ...’

  Hinksman,’ nodded Dakin.

  ‘As part of our arrangement, and to show your good will towards me, I should like you to ensure that he does not remain in the custody of your fine police department any longer than necessary - if you see what I mean.’

  Donaldson was still awake when the knock came on the door of his hotel room. He was savouring the feel and warmth of a woman in his bed, even though she was virtually a stranger. But that didn’t matter to him at that moment. He felt good and relaxed and proud that he’d been able to perform so well after all this time.

  The knock came again.

  He wasn’t sure whether he’d actually heard it the first time, or even if it was his door. He glanced at his watch. Just gone four. Puzzled, he eased his left arm gently from under the sleeping shoulders of Alex and sat up slowly on the edge of the bed so as not to disturb her.

  There was another knock, louder, slightly more urgent this time. He pulled on a pair of shorts and went to the door. He opened it to see Karen standing there in the corridor.

  She was crying. Her eyes were pools of clear water. Streams ran down her cheeks. She looked lost and beautiful. Donaldson’s heart went out to her when he saw how misshapen her mouth became as she cried and tried to hold it back, and how much her shoulders juddered with each sob.

  ‘Karen,’ he said.

  ‘Karl, I’m sorry - I just needed someone. I need to talk to somebody. . . I haven’t got any friends.’ She almost choked on the word friends. ‘I feel so alone ... I want to talk to you. I’m cracking up, I think. My head, it’s just spinning round and round ... won’t stop. I need someone to hold me. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ But he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder back into the room.

  Karen saw the glance and followed it with her own eyes.

  Disturbed by the noise, Alex was sitting up in bed yawning. The sheets had tumbled to her waist.

  ‘You’ve got someone in there,’ said Karen. It wasn’t an accusation. There was sadness in her tone.

  ‘Yeah,’ Donaldson said. ‘I mean ... she’s nothing. I’ll get rid of her - she can go.’

  Karen suddenly took control of herself. She shook her head. ‘Don’t bother, Karl. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come without phoning first. It was stupid. But I expected ... Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  She turned and walked towards the lift.

  ‘Karen - wait!’ He started to panic.

  The lift doors opened immediately. Half-naked at his doorway, Donaldson watched helpless as she left.

  ‘Karen,’ he shouted. ‘Karen, I love you.’

  As though she hadn’t heard or didn’t give a damn, she stepped into the lift, but did not turn round to face him. Her back stayed towards him.

  The doors closed. The lift hissed and began to descend.

  Donaldson closed his eyes and dropped his head forwards into the palms of his hands.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Henry slithered into work at nine the following day, not feeling particularly well nor particularly proud of himself. He’d got home just after 4 a.m. and sneaked into bed in a drunken stupor in the belief that he’d managed it without waking his wife; as the reality of the sober world hit him he realised there was no way this could have been the case.

  Kate, however, hadn’t said a word. She’d been her normal cheerful self, waking him up prior to setting off for her own work. She’d kissed him gently and placed a glass of orange juice on the bedside cabinet.

  With his aches and pains and breakages, it took him about twenty minutes to get dressed.

  He grabbed a coffee in the canteen which he intended to drink in the office. On his way to the lift he was waylaid by Natalie in police uniform. Henry took comfort from the fact that she looked worse than him - but she was on the early shift and could have only managed an hour or so’s sleep at most. It didn’t stop her being gorgeous though. And that perfume...

  ‘Did you enjoy last night, hero? I did,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes I did,’ Henry coughed. He vividly remembered the sex in the car. It was a long time since he had fucked in a back seat. He’d forgotten how difficult it was. But it had been good, fast and exhausting. Different. A change.

  ‘What about tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Commitments, y’know?’ He knew he should have said no, quashed it there and then, but could not bring himself to do so.

  She nodded understandingly. ‘Give me a call if you get free. I’ll be in all night.’ She tiptoed up and gave him a less than subtle peck on the cheek which was witnessed by several others.

  I can handle this, he thought as he made his way to the office. No probs. I can handle this.

  Donaldson was already in the office, sifting through paperwork, a visitor’s badge on his lapel. Much to Henry’s disgust he looked positively healthy.

  ‘Mornin’,’ Henry croaked and sat down heavily, jarring his ribs painfully. ‘I feel about nine thousand years old.’ He rooted through the drawers in his desk for an aspirin. He knew they were there somewhere.

  ‘Howdy,’ said Donaldson.

  ‘Good night?’ Henry enquired of him, knowing he’d taken Alex back to his hotel room.

  ‘So so,’ he said. ‘Good points and bad points.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Henry. He couldn’t work up the energy to pry. He found and devoured two pills, swallowing them with his coffee. He wiped his mouth and said, ‘To business. Let’s try and find out what Mr Dakin’s been up to recently, and also where he and Mr Corelli are holed up.’

  ‘I have an idea where they might be today,’ said Donaldson.

  ‘Oh?’ said Henry. He was about to ask when the phone rang.

  ‘DS Christie - can I help you?’ It wasn’t a good line for some reason. ‘Sorry, just hold on a second.’

  Some of the other detectives in the office were laughing and talking quite loudly, making it difficult for him to hear. He shouted, covering the mouthpiece first: ‘Will you lot shut your gobs! I can’t hear a fuckin’ word. And it is the Chief Super on the line.’ Silence clamped quickly down. Henry returned to his phone conversation. He wrote furiously and listened intently.

  A few moments later he hung up.

  ‘Well, Karl, sorry about this, mate, but I’ve been taken off this investigation as of now. We’ve got another murder - a double one, in fact.’

  Henry drove all the way east across the county of Lancashire to the Rossendale Valley. He had two Detective Constables from his office as company. All three men had been assigned to the Murder Squad.

  On the moors above Rossendale there are many quarries, both used and unused. These workings scar a bleak but beautiful landscape. It was to an old stone quarry above the town of Whitworth in the most easterly part of the valley that Henry drove that day.

  He knew the way well. He’d served in that part of the county as a young uniformed PC on the beat and returned occasionally, to see friends made in that era of almost twenty years ago. It was an area he knew quite well and missed. He often thought of it with the affection of distance and time. The harsh winters, the placid summers, the contrast of hill and valley - all things lacking in the western half of the county.

  The road he took now was rough and pot-holed. Only cautious driving prevented the bottom being ripped out of the car. However, they arrived at the scene without mishap.

  It was a bustle of hectic police activity - cars, vans and cops milling everywhere. But thankfully no blue flashing lights. Henry did not wish to add to
the apparent chaos and parked well away, walking the remaining distance, much to his companions’ muttering annoyance. The only place a detective likes walking to is a pub.

  A Detective Chief Inspector from the Division strode out from a cluster of worried CID men and greeted Henry, shaking hands. ‘Oh good, my Murder Squad,’ he said. However, he seemed more concerned with money matters than catching a killer.

  ‘Bad do, this, lad,’ he said glumly in his cloth cap accent. ‘The bloody division’s on its last legs financially and I don’t know where the money’ll come from to finance this. Bloody bankrupt us, it will. Headquarters’ll have to dig in for this.’

  The economic aspects of the affair didn’t particularly concern Henry. If he’d wanted to juggle figures, he’d have become an accountant. That was his argument. All he knew was there had been an alleged double murder and he wanted a chance at catching the culprit. The money would come from somewhere. It always did. It had to.

  He commiserated with the DCI. Then: ‘What’ve we got, sir?’

  ‘Two mutilated bodies down disused quarry workings,’ said the DCI. ‘Found a couple of hours ago by a man who’d been shooting rabbits in the area. No idea, as yet, who they are. Man and a woman by the looks. Doctor says they could’ve been here for up to a week. Decaying quite quickly now, apparently. Trail’s cold here, I’d say.’

  ‘What about the mutilation?’

  ‘They’re both face down at the moment, but it looks pretty extensive from what we can see.’

  ‘Jealous lover?’

  ‘Nope, looks like a professional job.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Henry, heart sinking. ‘Makes it more difficult.’ Then his spirits soared again. ‘Never mind, the cost might ruin the county for good and we’ll all be made redundant so it won’t matter anyway.’

  ‘Very funny,’ murmured the DCI. But there was the glimmer of a smile on his face.

  He led Henry towards two disused workings which had been dug side by side many years before behind a dilapidated redbrick stone-crusher. Both workings were roughly the shape of huge upturned and sunken ice-cream cones, about 30 metres across. They were partially filled with rainwater, old tyres, junk and the rotting hulks of abandoned cars that had been pushed over the edge.

  The two bodies had been discovered in the right-hand excavation in relation to Henry’s approach.

  He carefully went to the edge and looked over.

  From where he stood it was a sheer drop to the water’s surface, but to his right was a grassed pathway clinging to the inner circumference of the working which led down to a ledge about twenty feet below the rim. It was a wide ledge and he could see it clearly. It was the scene of the crime.

  ‘This area is used a great deal by kids on scramblers,’ said the DCI into Henry’s ear. ‘Surprises me they haven’t been found earlier.’ Henry raised his eyebrows. ‘If you don’t look, you don’t see.’

  ‘No, suppose not,’ admitted the DCI.

  There were the only two living people on the ledge at the moment. One was the Scenes of Crime photographer, who was combining stills and video shots of the scene. The other was the Home Office pathologist, Dr Baines. He was dressed in an all-in-one disposable paper suit, with plastic gloves and plastic shoes. He looked like a painter and decorator.

  The bodies themselves were tucked virtually out of sight under the bonnet of the decomposing shell of an old car which was on its roof. As Henry looked at the scene all he could see clearly was a naked foot, half-covered in grass.

  ‘Have a look,’ urged the DCI. ‘The pathologist should have completed his initial by now. Time to go and get them turned over.’

  At the top of the path stood a uniformed PC with a clipboard and pad. On the ground next to him was a supply of paper suits, plastic shoes and disposable gloves. He issued Henry and the DCI with a full set each and instructed them to put them into evidence bags when they’d finished at the scene. This way there was less chance of any vital evidence being carted away on the clothing and shoes of heavy-footed coppers.

  It was not a simple task to get the suits on over normal clothing. Henry and the DCI jigged about comically for a while. Once dressed, Henry led the way down to the scene.

  On the ledge he nodded at the doctor who, on recognition, smiled broadly at the detective. They had previously spent several revelrous nights together.

  ‘Henry, you old bastard!’

  ‘You not been struck off yet?’ Henry asked lightly.

  ‘No ... the dead tend not to complain.’

  They shook hands, despite their disposable gloves.

  ‘So what d’you think?’ asked Henry. ‘Suicide pact?’

  Baines chuckled. Then he became serious. He moved his large head from side to side, pursed his lips and thought for a moment or two.

  Henry liked him very much. He was young, just forty, and for the position he held that was good going. He knew his job well, so well in fact, that Henry felt in awe watching him work. Henry enjoyed being in the presence of people who knew their specialised fields intimately and he was honoured that Baines classed him as a friend. Henry looked upon himself as a jack-of-all-trades. Their friendship also assisted their professional relationship no end when at the conclusion of an investigation they knew they would be out together on the town, celebrating success (or failure) in some dive of a nightclub. But now, in all seriousness, they both became the two pros they were.

  ‘From here,’ the doctor said, ‘I’d say they’ve been rolled down that slope behind you.’ He pointed to the steep side of the quarry. ‘Or maybe pushed out of a car.’

  ‘We’ll get it checked for tyre-tracks,’ the DCI cut in. ‘Forensic can do that. They’ll be here soon.’

  ‘And they’ve come to rest under this car,’ Baines concluded. ‘And ...?’ Henry urged.

  ‘Can only see one of them really, and not very well. A male. I’d say the other’s female, but that’s to be confirmed. He looks like he’s had his brains blown out. Not pretty. Been butchered too. Can’t say an awful lot about that either, yet.’

  ‘Bloody messy,’ commented Henry.

  ‘So how do you want to recover the bodies?’ the doctor asked. His question was directed at the DCI.

  All three men turned to consider the problem.

  The bodies had rolled down the slope and come to rest underneath the bonnet of an overturned car which looked like it had been there for years. It was badly rusting, had no windows intact, no wheels and probably no engine. It might once have been a Vauxhall of some sort, Henry thought, one of the bigger ones, but he couldn’t be sure. They had wedged next to what used to be the front windscreen.

  Henry knelt down and looked. The bodies were face to face, both naked, trussed up together in a large polythene sheet. One arm had come free and protruded into the cab of the car through the windscreen.

  Henry noticed that there was no hand on the end of it. For a brief moment he was stunned. He pulled himself together.

  Baines squatted down next to him. ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘there’s three options. One - drag them out by hand. Two - get your lads down here to do the heave-ho and roll the car away ...’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘Get a crane to lift the car away inch by inch,’ said Baines. ‘But,’ he admitted, ‘there are problems with each.’

  Henry waited.

  ‘The first one will be very messy and unpleasant - and we might do something silly like pull one of their legs off, or head off, or something. Fraught with danger, as they say. The second one is OK, but as you can see, from where we are, as soon as the car is rolled over, it will topple down the quarry on top of all those other cars which is a good sixty-foot drop. So if there’s any evidence in the car, it’ll be a pain recovering it.’

  ‘And what about option number three?’ asked Henry. ‘It’s like a TV game show, this.’

  ‘Best of the lot,’ enthused Baines.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Everything is preserved. The only problem
is that the crane might destroy any tyre-marks which are up at the lip of the quarry. ‘

  ‘Unless we get forensic to move their arses and do the business up there ASAP,’ said Henry. ‘Yep, I’m for that one.’

  They stood up simultaneously.

  ‘I don’t want to put a damper on this,’ said the DCI, ‘but where the hell do you intend to get a crane from? It’ll cost a fortune to hire one.’

  ‘No problem,’ said the doctor. ‘There’s a working quarry half a mile up the road from here. Plenty of cranes there. I’m sure if you ask nicely enough they’ll oblige.’

  ‘Something tells me,’ said Henry with a smile, ‘this is a decision already made.’

  Donaldson knocked hard. There was no reply. He looked through the downstairs windows, shading his eyes with his hands, then went round the back of the house to check the rear garden, but it was clear there was no one at home.

  Next he tried the neighbours. No one could help him.

  Then he sat in his car on the road outside the house. He felt an incredible empty sadness pervading his whole being. She was gone. He had lost her. She didn’t want to see him now.

  And there would be no time to tell her what he felt.

  He swore at the girl from the London office of the FBI who had contacted him that morning to tell him the news: he had been recalled to the States. The British cops didn’t need him any more. He had done his job. His flight had been booked from Manchester for the following day. He was expected to be on it. It gave him just enough time to attend Ken McClure’s funeral.

  He punched the centre of the steering wheel in abject frustration, and cursed aloud.

  Fanshaw-Bayley arrived at Rossendale’s public mortuary. He looked a worried man. With good cause, as Henry was soon to find out.

  After a cursory inspection of the two bodies which were laid out on the slab, still encased in their polythene coffin, he beckoned Henry and the DCI outside.

  He sighed before he talked. ‘Severe money problems here,’ he began. ‘And manpower.’