by Nick Oldham
‘Procedural call, actually,’ Henry corrected him.
‘I like to be kept up to date.’
‘OK, fair do’s,’ Henry acceded, seeing no mileage in annoying Anger any further. He’d made his point. ‘I’ll tell you in future.’ He did not have the willpower to carry on an argument at that moment in time.
‘So it’s sorted?’
‘Yes. . I’ll go back across in the morning. We’ll have the offender in court by the afternoon.’
‘OK, fine.’ Anger hung up.
‘Twat,’ Henry uttered, feeling himself flush red. He took a deep breath and put his foot down. The motorway was quiet and, just to be awkward, he moved out to the fast lane and stayed there.
The second call he received on his mobile was totally unexpected. He received it as he looped round on to the M6 northbound. The display on the phone told him that the person calling had withheld their number. He assumed it would be control room contacting him with another death, perhaps, as all calls from police numbers were automatically withheld.
‘Henry Christie.’
At first all he could hear was a hollow, metallic emptiness. He repeated his name.
‘Hello. . hello. . Henry?’ came the female voice he recognized instantly.
‘Tara?’
‘Henry — hi.’
He did a double-check of the time on the dashboard clock.
‘Tara — hello.’
The connection seemed to break and then re-establish itself. He knew why it was a poor line. She was calling from Lanzarote.
Her name was Tara Wickson and it was because of a request from her that Henry had become involved in something whilst suspended from duty. A little something, a favour that had ended up in a complex and murderous investigation into Mafia activity and connections across the world. Henry had foolishly become embroiled because he had been bored witless whilst on suspension, then the whole kit and caboodle had got completely out of hand. He could trace his involvement back to the fact that Tara was a very attractive and sexy woman, appealing full-on to Henry’s main weakness in life: the female of the species.
After it was over, Tara and her daughter had gone away to help them recover from the trauma they had undergone.
‘What’s up?’ Henry asked.
‘I’m sorry to call. I half-expected your phone to be off. . I was just wondering how things were going,’ she said weakly.
Why at this time of day, Henry wondered. ‘Oh, slowly,’ he said. ‘It’s all very complicated. Another of my colleagues is actually dealing with it. I’m involved, obviously, but it’s not my job, if you know what I mean?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ She sounded distant. More than just in a geographical way.
‘What’s the matter, Tara? How are you?’
‘OK — ish. Physically battered, as you know; mentally fucked up, feeling guilty.’
‘Don’t,’ Henry counselled her quickly, firmly. ‘There’s a lot to get over, a lot to come to terms with, but you can do it. I have total faith in you.’
Once again, the line seemed to go dead. Then Tara’s voice came back. ‘No one has ever said they have faith in me,’ she said tearfully.
This time it was Henry who hit the pause button. He gulped. ‘How’s Charlotte?’
‘Bearing in mind what she went through, pretty good.’
‘Nice to hear that.’
‘Henry?’ Tara’s voice faltered. ‘I’m really sorry to bother you. . it’s just that I can’t stop thinking about you. . and what you did for me.’
‘Don’t. . it’s OK,’ he insisted.
‘But I can’t stop thinking about you. . you put yourself out for me and you did something that has deeply affected me. . shit!’ The line then did go dead, leaving Henry open-mouthed, hurtling along at ninety miles per hour, his mind not on the driving, and he almost missed the Blackpool exit off the M6. He could easily have landed in Lancaster, but he veered left just in time and gunned the car west towards the coast, wondering what the hell Tara had meant.
Was it that she had fallen for him?
Or was it that she’d been thinking about what Henry had actually done for her and she was now having mega problems in coming to terms with it?
The former thought was reasonably pleasant; the latter made him shudder, because if Tara bottled out, Henry would be finished for good. He could say ‘ta-ra’ to his pension and possibly ‘g’day’ to a prison cell.
The third call on his mobile was the one that kept him from hysteria. It was another job, this time much closer to home.
In some ways, Henry was relieved. This, too, looked as though it would be pretty straightforward to solve: stolen car, pursued by police, driver crashes and legs it, one dead passenger in the car. They knew who the felon was — local toe-rag, prolific offender — the only problem being tracking him down. Only a little problem, because people like Roy Costain are creatures of habit and sooner, rather than later, he would be caught. This would be an easy one to bottom, Henry thought as he surveyed the wreckage. The hard part here would be dealing with the media uproar that would be caused. Another fatality caused by a reckless police chase. Henry could visualize the headlines now.
Bugger, he thought.
He walked round the stolen Ford Escort, now mashed sideways on to the front end of a black cab. Stopping at the front passenger side window, Henry bent down and looked at the young girl, the body not yet having been removed from the scene.
Henry knew Renata, just as he knew Roy and the rest of the Costain family, which had a notorious and fearful reputation in Blackpool. He had encountered Renata a couple of times. Young though she was, she dallied on the periphery of the main activities of the Costains; bit of a shoplifter, bit of an assaulter on other girls, bit of an old-lady mugger. Her future was pretty much mapped out: crime, unwanted pregnancies, abuse. . probably. Who was Henry to say? Maybe she would have turned her back on it all, become respectable.
Whatever, her death was a tragic waste. Henry hated it when young people died.
Standing upright, he turned. Looking north up Dickson Road he saw the figure of a man hurtle across the road as though his life depended on it.
‘Mr Christie?’
Henry’s puzzlement about what he had seen was curtailed by the appearance of the local road policing sergeant. But before he could respond to the officer, another figure raced across the road, as though in pursuit of the first one.
‘Boss?’
Henry’s attention twisted to the sergeant. ‘Yep?’
‘Can we get the body moved now?’
‘I think so, yeah. . I need to speak to the officers in the vehicle which chased this one as soon as; but before that I’ll need to contact your divisional commander and my super. Both will want to have a handle on this,’ he said, ever so slightly troubled by the image of the dark shapes running across the road. Why he was affected, he could not really say. Blackpool is Blackpool, he thought wryly, one of the weirdest places on planet earth. He shrugged. Bollocks to it. He had more on his plate to think about than two idiots running around town in the early hours.
Renata’s dead, but wide-open eyes seemed to catch his, sending a shiver down his spine.
‘We’ll catch him, lass,’ Henry said under his breath, ‘but you shouldn’t have been here in the first place.’
As he walked back round the Escort, something in the glint of the streetlights reflecting on the front windscreen made him stop. He stopped, puzzled, eyebrows meshing together.
The sergeant, who had been standing next to him, saw the hesitation.
‘Summat up, boss?’
Henry tilted his head, peering at the windscreen. Above the domed bulge made by the impact of Renata’s head in the glass, just on the edge of the screen, he had spotted something unusual. ‘What is that?’ He pointed.
The sergeant followed the line of the pointed finger, then his own eyes widened. He stepped in for closer inspection.
‘Well,’ he drawled without too much commitm
ent, ‘I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it, but I’d say it was a bullet hole.’
The close proximity of cops just down the road made Lynch uncomfortable. Justifiably so. After all, he had blasted someone to death in an alleyway not very far away from a dozen boys in blue.
After shooting Snell, he had dragged his body to one side, to lie in shadow, then returned to the guest house.
The police were very busy, dealing with what looked like a nasty accident. Blue lights, ambulances, the works. But Lynch, though uneasy, smirked: not half as nasty as the ‘accident’ in the dark alley behind the prom, prom, prom.
As he crossed back over Dickson Road, he was tense, but exhilarated.
He made it unscathed.
At the guest house, Bignall was lying in Snell’s recently vacated room, bleeding from the wound to the upper arm inflicted by the fleeing thief. He had ripped a dirty bedsheet into strips, then bound the injury with it, afterwards slumping weakly on to the metal-framed bed, pale, dithering. Blood seeped through the grubby material like spilled ink on blotting paper. He attempted to sit up when Lynch returned, but did not have the strength.
‘Not good,’ the wounded man rasped. ‘Not good at all.’
‘You’ll be right,’ Lynch breezed without concern. ‘Bloody body armour didn’t do you much good, did it? Anyway — look! Success!’ He held the blue sports bag aloft triumphantly. ‘Got the dosh back.’
‘Great.’ Bignall winced with pain. ‘I need a quack. I think I’m bleeding to death.’
‘Rubbish,’ sneered Lynch. ‘I’ll get you to one when we get back, OK?’
‘Did you shoot him?’
‘Right between the shoulder blades,’ Lynch nodded. ‘Went down like a sack of spuds.’
Bignall shuddered. He knew he was involved in a deadly game now, but just how ruthless and nasty it was, was only just dawning on him as he lay there feeling strength ebb out of him. It had just spiralled out of control and suddenly he felt very foolish and vulnerable. Shit, shit, shit, his mind whirred. Get me out of this now.
‘We need to get him back to Manchester.’
‘Who?’
‘Snell.’
‘Why?’
Lynch looked despairingly at his wounded partner in crime. ‘Control. . it needs to be controlled and we can only do that if his body turns up within the environs of the city. . yeah?’
‘Fuck!’ Bignall muttered. A searing pain radiated out from his arm. ‘Hell!’ he grimaced, gritting his teeth.
‘And there’s no way on God’s earth that you can see a doctor around here, mate. That needs controlling, too. Fancy getting bloody shot!’
‘Yeah, fancy. Just what I wanted. How the hell am I going to explain this away?’
‘We’ll think of something.’ Lynch’s nostrils flared as his mind cogitated. ‘Let’s get Snell-boy sorted first.’
Henry took a great deal of wicked pleasure in telephoning Detective Superintendent Dave Anger. He left it until the last possible moment when he thought he could get away with it. . then rang him.
It was five thirty a.m.
He had waited at the scene of the accident after Renata’s dead body had been removed to the mortuary and then until the local rota garage had turned up to remove both cars. He watched the vehicles being pulled apart with an ugly-sounding tearing of metal, then winched into place on the back of the recovery truck. He knew the garage had a secure compound in which the cars would be stored. He instructed the recovery driver to ensure that no one, other than himself and crime scene investigators, had access to the cars. Henry wanted to see if a bullet could be dug out of the stolen Escort.
He phoned Anger as the fully loaded recovery vehicle was driving away. It was a very satisfying moment to hear the sleep-jumbled voice at the other end of the line.
Just following orders.
Well in that case, Mr Anger, I’ll follow them to the letter, Henry thought.
His smile was warped as the conversation ended and Henry folded up his mobile phone.
‘Right,’ he then said to himself, suddenly feeling a chill from the Irish Sea. ‘Let’s go and knock on a door.’
Lynch and Bignall drove across the breadth of Lancashire and back into the Greater Manchester area without incident. Both men were at cracking point on the journey, not surprising as the dead body of Keith Snell, low-level low life, was folded up neatly inside the boot of their motor, covered by an oily blanket. One pull by a curious cop, one pull by a cop who wasn’t impressed by their credentials, would have ended the game for them there and then. Such a cop would have found a murder victim, the best part of 25,000, an injured passenger, a revolver and a shotgun. It would have made the cop’s career.
But their journey was uninterrupted and no cops were even spotted.
Lynch, at the wheel, mumbled angrily to himself for much of the way. He was annoyed at having to heave Snell’s body into the boot of the car with no assistance from his partner, who claimed that his injury prevented him from doing anything other than sitting there like a spare part, or as Lynch said, ‘Spare prat.’
As spindly and light as Snell might have been, he still seemed to weigh a dead ton. Manoeuvring, dragging and heaving him into the car required a lot of effort and more time than Lynch would have liked to spend on the job.
He was sweaty and panting when he finished and did not let up on reminding Bignall that he was a ‘soft, lazy, mardy-arsed twat’ for most of the journey.
Wounded, hurting badly, pain increasing all the time, Bignall did not care. All he wanted was a doctor and some drugs.
Lynch drove the full length of the M55, turned south on to the M6, then bore left towards Manchester on the M61. At the first junction he left that motorway and headed down to the M65, making Bignall stir from his torpor.
‘Where we going?’
‘We need to dispose of our chum in the back, don’t we? We’re not gonna take him home with us, are we?’
Bignall groaned. ‘OK, OK.’
‘I know just the place,’ Lynch declared.
‘But you’re driving into Lancashire,’ Bignall said, protesting mildly.
‘Yeah, but I’m gonna drive into Manchester another way. . to somewhere quiet where we can dump him and then set fire to the fucker. . I know just the place. . Deeply Vale. . peace guaranteed. . which reminds me. . need to get some petrol. .’
Bignall slumped down, now in agony. It was as though electrodes were being applied to him with shots of a million volts. He swore, felt weak. . and passed out.
Lynch shook his head with annoyance. Bignall was turning into a liability now. He sped quickly down the M65, exited at junction 8 and headed across the moors to the Rossendale Valley along the A56, a good fast dual carriageway taking him high above the old mill town of Accrington and towards Bury, which was back in Greater Manchester. Rain began lashing down as the car descended into Rossendale, driving as hard as the car, and also annoying Lynch.
Before the A56 merged to become the M66 — a motorway which speared into the heart of Manchester — Lynch came off and drove towards Bury.
He was back on home turf. Disposing of the body and dealing with the aftermath would now be a simple matter.
Lynch relaxed. Control had reverted to him.
Four
Henry Christie knew a large number of criminals. He had been a cop over twenty-five years and had worked right across the county of Lancashire, east, west, north and south, though the majority of his latter service had been on the Fylde coast around Blackpool or at headquarters in various departments. Over that time he had come to know and deal with petty thieves and drug barons, drunks and murderers. He had put many of them away, never having tired of the process, nor the feeling of elation to see a bad guy get his comeuppance.
He had known the Costain family who lived on the Shoreside Estate in Blackpool for many years. They had been a thorn in the side of the police ever since they had landed from God knew where in the sixties and taken up residence. They were bo
rn troublemakers and law breakers and had established themselves as burglars, handlers of stolen property, loan sharks and protection racketeers, and, as Henry knew, more recently as drug dealers.
They were never an easy family to deal with. He did not know of one occasion when the police hadn’t been given a rough ride by them — even when one of the Costain brothers had been murdered and Henry had solved the case. They still hated Henry with a vengeance because they were unable to make themselves see the police as anything other than the enemy.
Not that Henry gave a stuff. A jousting match with the Costain clan was always a bit of a wheeze. . and he always had an ace up his sleeve when dealing with them.
Driving on to the Shoreside Estate brought back myriad memories for Henry, some minor, some major — such as the racially fuelled riot (caused by the Costains) he had once quelled; he drove on past a row of derelict shops, all now burnt out and dilapidated, never to be resurrected. The local hooligans had systematically destroyed them and all the shopkeepers had been driven off the estate, ensuring that law-abiding residents no longer had local services. It was now a car or bus journey to the local supermarket, though even the bus service to the estate had been severely curtailed. Too many drivers had been attacked and injured, too many buses had been trashed.
Some people on the estate seemed intent on making it even more depraved than ever. Its future, Henry thought, was bleak.
Even cops had to tread carefully. It wasn’t quite a no-go zone, but it wasn’t far off.
If the millions of tourists who poured annually into the resort only knew about the crime-ridden, poverty-stricken hinterland just behind the tacky, money-driven seafront, Henry thought. . then smirked. . they wouldn’t give a monkey’s.
He drove slowly along a debris-strewn avenue, no streetlights working (all smashed), and pulled to a halt behind another car. The occupant of this one climbed out and walked back to Henry, who lowered his window. It was the on-call detective sergeant, Rik Dean.
‘Hi, boss,’ said the tired-looking sergeant, groggy from recent sleep.
‘Rik,’ Henry acknowledged him. He knew Dean well, had been instrumental in getting him on to CID in the first place. Dean was a good thief-taker, had an instinct second to none. ‘You know the score, pal?’