Critical Threat

by Nick Oldham

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come up and see you in Special Projects, yet,’ she apologized.

  ‘Why would you?’

  ‘Oh, you might not know – the chief officer portfolios have recently been shuffled around and I’ve got you … in my portfolio, that is, amongst other things, of course.’

  ‘Oh, right. I didn’t know.’ Chief officer portfolios were shuffled like cards, constantly changing.

  ‘So I’m your new line manager, sort of … and I intend to come and see you and your team soon.’

  ‘That would be good,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway, I just want you to know you did a good job today, Henry, and I’m very pleased, as is the chief.’

  ‘Believe it or not.’

  ‘No, he is,’ she defended FB.

  ‘Me and him go way back when,’ Henry said.

  ‘I know – I’ve had a look at your personal file.’

  ‘Interesting reading?’ Henry said, feeling uncomfortable.

  ‘Yes, it is … quite a history.’

  ‘I try to put myself about a bit.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, Henry, I think Dave Anger has got away with murder and you’ve been shabbily treated. I’m aware of all the problems there.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said pensively. ‘I got that extra pip, bit more on the pension, nice office, cushy job, nine to five …’

  ‘It’s not about that, though, is it?’

  ‘You tell me, ma’am.’

  She smiled sweetly. ‘You’re a detective, a jack. It’s in your blood. You should be on FMIT or Major Crime or be a divisional DCI, or maybe NCIS. But not Special Projects!’

  ‘I’m getting acronym overload.’

  ‘But it’s true, isn’t it? You shouldn’t be getting shiny pants, not really. I want someone in Special Projects who wants to be in Special Projects …’

  ‘But no one wants to be in there, they get chucked there cos there’s nowhere else to shove them.’

  ‘I want to change that.’

  ‘Ahh,’ Henry said, thinking he realized where she was going. ‘You don’t want me in there, do you? Anger doesn’t want me on FMIT. None of the chief supers want me. Makes me kinda stuffed, doesn’t it?’

  She reared back with a chortle. ‘Wrong end of the stick, Henry. Know your problem? Paranoia.’ She dipped her face so that her eyes looked up at him in a rather seductive manner, which sent a rattle through him. ‘I do want you, actually … but that’s another story … but I don’t want you in Special Projects. Round pegs, round holes is my philosophy.’ She bit into her butty, wiped a dribble of butter off her chin with her forefinger which she pushed into her mouth and sucked clean.

  Henry swallowed, wondering what the hell was happening here. Was she giving him a come-on? Was she toying with him? Or was he, as usual, living in a fantasy world?

  Just in case, he kept his lips tightly closed. The worst thing he could do now was to make a flirty remark to a pretty deputy chief constable because he’d misread the signals. That would truly curtail his career.

  She gave a half-grin which he found extremely alluring and it was all he could do not to say anything stupid.

  ‘What I mean is … I’ll see what I can do for you … I want the people who work for me to be totally committed, not cruising, not put somewhere because that’s the only place there is. I do have some clout as a DCC, even if I am a woman … so I’ll look out for you, if that’s OK.’

  ‘I get your drift,’ he said with relief. His dithering hand picked up his mug and he took a swig of coffee.

  Six

  One week later

  The man was dead – that was for sure. The almost perfectly formed circular bullet hole about the diameter of a five-pence piece just above the bridge of his nose was a good clue. The additional fact that the bullet had then somersaulted through his cranium like a mad circus acrobat on speed, then exited spectacularly out of the back, taking with it a mush of skull and brain, splattering it all over the wall, was a further, even more conclusive clue.

  Even a no-good detective could have deduced that, in all probability, and ruling out suicide, this man had been murdered.

  Whilst a very rusty Henry Christie was painfully aware of his limitations – and strengths – as an investigator, he knew he was a few rungs above ‘no-good’.

  He was confident he would quickly pull together a few known facts, mesh them loosely with a fairly bog standard hypothesis, and come to some early conclusions. All good, routine stuff, which could easily kick-start a murder investigation and get detectives knocking on, or kicking down, a few doors sooner rather than later. Although Henry knew his resources would be severely limited on this one, he had a strip of confidence in him about it which boded well.

  He checked his watch, 02:35, mentally logging the time because his arrival at the scene was crucially important. He had known some seemingly rock-solid cases dither at subsequent court hearings just because a sloppy SIO couldn’t remember what time he’d arrived at the crime scene. Evidentially it didn’t usually matter that much, but an uncertain SIO gave a good defence lawyer something to chew on and spit out: if the SIO couldn’t recall exactly the time, what did it say about the rest of the evidence, hm? It was one of those simple things easily overlooked in the vortex of a murder inquiry. And Henry, who knew he’d be under the microscope on this one, as ever, wasn’t about to make mistakes by forgetting the bread and butter.

  The call-out had come at 1.15 a.m.

  Henry had been at home with his ex-wife, Kate, and the evening had ended on a high note.

  Both daughters were out with friends and boyfriends, leaving the parents to their own devices for a change. They had sat through a triple dose of soap operas with Henry whining his way through them, annoying Kate by constantly asking about plotlines and characters and grunting angrily at the ridiculous things they did. ‘Why the hell don’t they just go to another pub?’ was one of his gripes. ‘That way they wouldn’t keep meeting people they didn’t like, would they?’

  ‘Dear, it’s drama,’ Kate had said irritably. ‘If they did that, there wouldn’t be anything to watch, would there?’

  However, when Crimewatch UK came on at nine, he called for hush, sat glued to the screen and refused to speak because this was ‘his’ programme. It didn’t seem to matter he had spoiled her viewing.

  Actually, Crimewatch wasn’t something he watched regularly. He found it made him angry at the bad things people could do to each other through either passion, perversion or profit, and even though he had been steel-hardened over the years, some of the reconstructions made him queasy and furious at the same time, particularly those in which lone women or old people were the targets.

  However, Henry had a vested interest in that evening’s edition of the show because he’d heard that Dave Anger was taking a starring role to make an appeal about the unsolved murder of a female whose body had been burned to a crisp in the countryside near Blackpool – Henry’s last job as an SIO, the one Dave Anger had gleefully snatched from under his nose and handed to DI Carradine, one of his sycophants.

  And they hadn’t solved it. Ha! Six months down the line and they hadn’t got anywhere and as much as Henry liked justice to be done, he did have a smug look on his face as he watched Anger make an appeal for information to the great British public.

  ‘Your expression is extremely irritating,’ Kate informed him, sipping from a recently poured glass of Blossom Hill red, her favourite.

  ‘It’s one of superiority … now if you don’t mind, I’m listening.’

  There wasn’t a reconstruction of the crime as such because there wasn’t much to reconstruct, but the crime scene itself was shown and a few theories were put forward, but it was all clutching at straws in the vain hope that someone, somewhere might have spotted something.

  ‘Be lucky to get anything,’ Henry said gruffly. ‘Should’ve kept me on it … their loss,’ he finished with a sneer.

  Kate muttered som
ething disparaging and Henry shot her a look.

  Back in the studio they cut to Dave Anger, sweating profusely under the hot lights.

  ‘Look at the twat,’ Henry had muttered, getting a punch on the arm. There were actually some things of interest which could help to identify the victim, Henry had to grudgingly admit.

  First there was an unusual pendant on a twisted gold chain which had been found on the victim’s body. ‘No it wasn’t,’ Henry said, puzzled, wondering where it had appeared from. If anyone watching knew the victim, they might have seen it dangling around her neck. Henry generously upped his estimate of the number of calls they might receive – from zero to two – and was still mystified where the jewellery had appeared from. It definitely had not been on the woman’s body.

  Next along was a facial reconstruction, a bust of the dead woman’s head and shoulders on a plinth, which Anger revealed with a flourish. Constructed by some whizzo scientist at a university, it was of a woman of Asian descent, who, in life, had probably been a stunner.

  ‘Maybe they’ll get a few more calls,’ Henry conceded.

  The final piece of information that Anger revealed was that the bones of the dead woman had been geologically examined and from their mineral content it had been established that she had been brought up in Blackburn, Lancashire. It was a stunning piece of analytical wizardry carried out by another university, which had the presenters cooing appreciatively and which, Henry had to acknowledge, was a huge step forward in the investigation. A clincher, maybe.

  His expression altered to one of jealousy. ‘Bastards!’

  Three superb bits of evidence. A piece of unusual jewellery, a face and a place.

  On the phone lines behind Anger, Henry spotted a cluster of high-ranking Lancashire detectives wearing headsets, ready to answer calls – something they studiously avoided in the real world. He guessed they’d all trooped to London with first-class train tickets and knew that once the phone lines had closed, they’d all probably be hitting Spearmint Rhino, consuming much beer and curry … and the idea consumed him, ate him up. It was his job. Snatched away. His face tightened enviously. He should be down there getting shit-faced, not them.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t stand up and sing “It Shoulda Been Me”,’ Kate chided.

  As the programme drew to a close, the cool presenter warmly told viewers not to worry too much about crime because statistics showed that most people never became victims.

  ‘Tell that to the bloody victims,’ Henry yelled at the box.

  He could have necked a beer, but was not drinking that night because this was another on-call week, and he had to satisfy himself with flavoured water whilst Kate worked her way through the wine, muttering, ‘Someone has to do it,’ following one of Henry’s scathing glances.

  As the show’s signature tune faded, Kate said bluntly, ‘Are we going to bed then, or what?’

  Instinctively Henry’s eyes moved to the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s only ten.’

  ‘So?’

  Henry looked at her. The wine had flushed her cheeks, made them rosy, moistened her wide eyes, dilated her pupils. ‘OK,’ he said, not needing much persuasion. It wasn’t often they had the house to themselves, so the chance to indulge in a bout of noisy lovemaking was a rare treat, whether he was on-call or not. There was nothing in the rules about denying yourself sex, just alcohol. And Henry knew from past experience that it only took a drop of booze inside Kate to turn her from a sometimes hesitant lover into an unleashed tigress … something not to be missed. With that thought uppermost in his mind, Henry was upstairs with her moments later, tearing off clothing with abandon.

  It was wonderful, tender, hard, loving, coming to a headboard-crashing finale half an hour later, both of them exhausted by the exertion. Kate rolled off him and quickly drifted into a gentle, purring slumber. He lay awake, deciding whether or not to go for a pee.

  He was dreaming about Dave Anger and the reconstructed head of a murdered woman when the phone by the bed rang at one fifteen. The dream evaporated immediately as he fumbled to answer it, muttering a thick ‘Henry Christie’ without any enthusiasm.

  ‘Henry, it’s Angela Cranlow.’

  He sat upright, quickly clearing his mussed brain. ‘Hello ma’am.’ It was more than a surprise to get a phone call from anyone of such rank at any time of day, let alone in the early hours. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Said I’d look out for you, didn’t I?’ Before he could answer, she said, ‘Fancy dealing with a murder?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ All vestiges of the shackles of sleep were shaken off. He swung his legs out of bed, turned on the touch light – three taps to the brightest setting – and reached for the pad and pen on the cabinet.

  ‘There’s a shooting just come in from Blackburn … details pretty sketchy at the moment … as I’m on county cover, I’ve asked to be informed of all serious crimes before anyone else, then I can decide who deals … and also because every detective and his sidekick are in London doing Crimewatch, I can wangle this one for you – if you’re interested, that is?’

  ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ Henry stood up, naked, and gave a salute to the new deputy chief constable. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Call the force incident manager for details.’ She hung up without another word.

  Henry traipsed groggily along the M55, slicing across Lancashire, then cut down on to the M6 and on to the M65 towards the sprawling former mill town of Blackburn. He exited at junction 4 on to the A666 – the Devil’s Road – past Ewood Park, home of Blackburn Rovers. He was a couch-fan of the Rovers, watching their fortunes with interest, but it had been a long time since he had ever willingly gone to see them perform. Half a mile on the town centre side of the ground, he turned right, cutting his way up through a series of terraced streets past Blackburn Royal Infirmary towards the Fishmoor council estate, which clung precariously to the harsh moorland above Blackburn.

  He was experienced and well travelled enough to have visited Fishmoor on many occasions during his career. It was a sprawling sixties/seventies monstrosity of an estate and like many of that era probably looked spiffing on the plans, but the reality of living in a place that was a haven for the wrongdoer was much less fun. It was an estate that had had a whole bunch of trouble, mainly based around drugs, ‘acquisitive’ crime and intimidation by gangs of wild youths who kept whole communities in lockdown with their ruthless tactics. It was a busy place for cops and since the advent of the Crime and Disorder Act, also for the local authority and other agencies now obliged by law to get involved in things they had previously avoided.

  Henry found the address easily – a grotty office over a Spar shop on the edge of the estate. He remembered the row of shops from years ago when he had done a spell on Support Unit in the mid-eighties. As part of a mobile, go-anywhere, crack heads/kick shins team, he had spent many a head-banging weekend in the vicinity in the days when he’d thought it great sport to go around winding people up, then arresting them just for the hell of it with a bunch of like-minded knuckle-heads. The row of shops had been a magnet for badly behaved juveniles and there had been regular police operations to combat it and, Henry thought as he pulled up, probably still were.

  His only surprise as he drew to a halt in the Rover 75 was that the shops were still standing, still trading. It was often the fate of such businesses to end up firstly trading behind steel bars and mesh, then for the owners to call it a day because they couldn’t stand the heat of the local kids making their lives hell. Only the strong survived.

  He parked a good way down the road and spent a few moments savouring the police activity, which, despite the time of day, had already attracted a gaggle of onlookers, mostly kids. Mind you, he thought, four marked cars, one section van, an unmarked car – which he immediately categorized as that of the night duty detective – and a little white van marked ‘Scientific Support’ were bound to attract the public at any time of day.

  The climb out of the car was a l
ittle stiff, but he stretched, adjusted his tie, then approached the mayhem, his mind already back in SIO mode, even though he was no longer one.

  The zoot-suited night duty detective had obviously been keeping an eye out for Henry and strode up to him as though he wanted to cut him off at the pass.

  ‘Morning, boss,’ said the DC. His name was Hall.

  ‘Trevor,’ Henry said, a shiver making his spine judder when a blast of cold air from the moors swirled around him. Henry had known Hall for a long time. He was a career DC who kept his nose just above water, was competent, but hardly a Poirot. In fact he was a blueprint for many of the older detective constables in the county. Henry liked such people, in a way. They were reliable, knew their jobs, had a regular number of arrests, knew a lot of people, often had good informants, but didn’t break any pots. ‘What’ve we got?’

  Hall shivered too. No doubt he had been dragged out of a warm CID office. But he smiled. ‘I was glad when I heard it was you turning out. A blast from the past, a rave from the grave, you might say … someone you know well – knew well, I should say.’

  Henry’s paper suit was about two sizes too big for him, but at least the elasticated paper shoes fitted reasonably tightly over his shoes. He climbed the dingy, poorly lit steps behind Trevor Hall, and on the landing followed him down a short, uncarpeted hallway to an open door that led to the crime scene.

  ‘Unfortunately there’s only one way to get in and out of the scene,’ Hall said over his shoulder, ‘but so far there’s only been me, you, CSI and the PC who found the guy, plus the witness, who’ve been to the scene. It was pretty quickly secured.’

  One of the problems with a murder scene inside premises was often the ingress and egress, meaning that valuable evidence could potentially be lost because of an army of size elevens tramping back and forth along the route probably also used by the offender. Hall’s rundown of the people who had already been to it was discouraging, but inevitable. Henry decided that once he’d had a quick look, no one else would be allowed up until all the scientific work had been done.