by Nick Oldham
He raced into Edenfield, where because of parked cars on either side the road narrowed, just about wide enough for two cars to pass, and the speed limit dropped back to thirty, not really a village to hurtle through.
Henry touched sixty.
The Rover was still in view and Henry speculated what the plans of its occupants might now be. They were being chased by a lone cop and as the border with Greater Manchester loomed, and patrols in that area were hopefully being alerted by Rawtenstall comms, Henry thought they might try and ditch the car and try to escape on foot. But then again, maybe not. Henry knew there wouldn’t be many patrols to deploy over the border and the police over there would have to drop everything and converge on the chase, all of which took time.
The sergeant called Henry, who replied, ‘Go ’head.’
‘The Rover was reported stolen in the early hours of this morning from Failsworth, Manchester.’
Henry ingested this information. That fitted more or less with what he knew of this gang’s MO. Steal two cars from Manchester, use one to commit the robbery, ditch and burn it, then jump into another stolen one which is then abandoned. He guessed that the smoke he had been about to investigate would be the car used in the robbery.
A look of grim satisfaction came onto Henry’s face. It had been worth leaving the checkpoint.
He smacked the steering wheel in triumph, then succinctly brought comms up to speed with his current location and situation.
The Rover was still ahead and in sight. Once it had passed through Edenfield centre it veered right and headed towards the roundabout that formed a junction with the bypass, at the point where that road became the M66 motorway, but there was no actual slip road onto the motorway which meant that the driver’s options were becoming limited.
The Rover careened onto the roundabout, narrowly avoiding other traffic, and rocked dangerously as the driver forced the car into a tight left turn straight off the roundabout and back up towards Edenfield again.
Henry stuck with it, part of his mind trying to recall why the Rover seemed familiar, and on this stretch of road he gained on the Rover, which appeared to have lost some power, or maybe the driver had missed a gear or two. At the next junction, Henry expected the car to go right, but to his surprise it skidded sharp left, towards Edenfield. As the car screeched around this corner, the rear nearside passenger hung out of the window and blasted both barrels of his shotgun at Henry.
Instinctively, Henry ducked and once again felt the splatter of lead shot against the front of his car. He pulled his foot off the accelerator, relaying his position to comms again – still trying to keep the fear and excitement out of his voice. He was told that a section patrol and a traffic car were en route, as was DI Fanshaw-Bayley from the scene of the robbery, and to keep the car in sight if possible, but not to engage the occupants in any way. Bit too late for that, Henry thought wryly.
The two-car chase shot back through Edenfield village, traffic coming towards them along the narrow road, being forced to swerve out of the way and slam on.
Henry clung on and, as the adrenaline flooded into his system, he did not once have the thought that he might be being foolhardy. Even though he had now been shot at twice, it never occurred to him to abandon the pursuit or that he might lose his life. All he wanted to do was catch criminals and this was one hell of a way to do it. Combining danger, adrenaline, excitement and screeching tyres. Things couldn’t get much better and this was the beauty of a cop’s life: the humdrum followed by the intense rush. If he could have thrown sex into the blend, it would have been perfect for him … though perhaps that could come later.
They cleared the built-up area in a haze of speed and at the traffic lights where Henry had been first shot at, the Rover bore left, forking towards Haslingden and dropping underneath the bypass towards a tiny settlement called Ewood Bridge.
Henry relayed the change of direction to comms, just as the Rover braked sharply almost at the bottom of the hill and came to a slithering stop.
Henry slammed on. He later reflected that he could have taken the opportunity to smash his car into the back of the Rover, but he didn’t, and what happened, happened.
Once again the rear doors of the stolen car opened and the two still-masked men jumped out, wielding their shotguns.
Henry crunched his car into reverse, but the robbers sprinted up to him, one either side of the police car before he could put any distance between him and them. One blasted Henry’s front nearside tyre which immediately deflated with a sickening lurch.
The man on Henry’s side then took a further two steps up to the driver’s door window and placed the muzzles of both barrels up against the glass at the level of Henry’s head.
Then, Henry felt real terror for the first time.
He looked at those black side-by-side holes, like the eyes of death staring at him. Something inside him churned all his organs into a quivering mush, his heart, lungs, kidneys, the whole of the inside of his chest seemed to drain away.
Then the man swung the weapon like a pendulum and drove the barrels through the window, smashing crumbled glass all over Henry. He leaned in and forced the weapon into Henry’s face.
‘Your lucky day,’ the man growled, his eyes burning behind the two holes in the balaclava. He reared away from Henry and ran back to the Rover with his accomplice. They bundled themselves back in and the car sped away down the hill.
Henry watched it, almost catatonic in fear.
Then his vital signs clicked back in. He breathed in and shook himself out of his trance, then exhaled very slowly and unsteadily, both hands gripping the steering wheel, pulling himself together. He answered his radio to a desperate-sounding comms, demanding his current position and situation report, which he relayed with a distinct tremor in his voice.
The two-tone brown Rover was never seen again – at least not in working order. It turned up in Salford, Greater Manchester, having been set alight on a recreation ground and burned to nothing more than a blistered shell, of no forensic use whatsoever.
It also transpired that the fire Henry had been driving to investigate on the industrial area was the getaway car from the robbery. By the time the fire brigade arrived, it too was just a blackened shell. That car had also been reported stolen in Manchester earlier that day.
Henry peered over the cracked rim of his mug of tea. The DI had taken a seat opposite, his wide frame only just supported by the plastic chair. The two men eyed each other suspiciously.
‘What I don’t get,’ the DI said, as though it was painful to say, ‘is why you were in Edenfield in the first place. If my memory serves me correct, you should’ve been on a checkpoint in Queens Square.’
‘Ahh,’ Henry said. Rumbled. This was the question he had thought he would not face – why did you leave your checkpoint?
‘And remember this, PC Christie,’ Fanshaw-Bayley waggled a stubby finger at him, ‘you can’t kid a kidder.’
‘I got bored,’ Henry admitted. He placed his mug down on the table. The two men were in the refreshment room on the first floor of the police station. Henry had stolen a teabag and liberated someone else’s milk from the fridge to make himself the brew. He had wanted to sit down alone for ten minutes, just to pull himself together, to regroup.
He had charged into the incident without any thought, really, and it was only on reflection – and ‘reflection’ wasn’t something the young Henry Christie did willingly – he realized he should have backed off. Maybe. Most car chases don’t end up with a shotgun being stuffed up the nose and he would argue that he wasn’t to know it would culminate like that.
‘I got bored and went to check out any likely areas where they might dump the getaway car. I thought that if they were going to pass me at the checkpoint, they would have done so … so I went for a mooch.’
‘Against explicit instructions.’
‘If that car had driven past me at the checkpoint, the result would have been the same. I’d’ve gone after
it.’
‘There’s a flaw there.’
‘I know,’ Henry admitted. ‘The Rover wasn’t the one they used as a getaway from the scene. It was the Vauxhall Ventora burned out down Holme Lane. But that car did not drive past me, which also means they had some local knowledge because they must have come off the main road and found their way to Holme Lane via the back roads – and that isn’t a straightforward journey. You need to know your way around to do that.’
Fanshaw-Bayley considered Henry. ‘You think they have a local connection?’
‘Probably.’
The DI nodded, then changed the subject. ‘I’ve had all the top brass ringing me to see how you are.’
‘I’m deeply moved. None of the calls seem to have found their way to me, though.’
‘That’s because I want any credit for catching these bad guys,’ Fanshaw-Bayley said and blinked like a reptile. ‘Not a jumped-up PC with attitude.’
‘At least you’re honest,’ Henry said.
Fanshaw-Bayley smirked as though he had heard something mildly amusing. ‘I’m a detective.’
Henry nodded knowingly. Some, not all, of the detectives he had so far encountered in his short career were not especially honest, other than in their quest for self-aggrandisement and plaudits. They seemed manipulative schemers only interested in themselves and were held in poor regard by other members of the constabulary. But the CID was a very powerful branch and had very influential people right up to the top of the organization who wielded a lot of clout. Henry wasn’t sure how healthy that was for the force but he did know one thing – none of that made him want to be a detective any less. He was just certain that if he ever became one, he would be different. He would treat the uniform branch with respect, not disdain; he would share knowledge and information.
‘Anyway, that said,’ the DI continued, ‘I can see a spark of something in you. I think you have a bit of work to do on your reasoning and your obvious dislike of being told what to do, but you’ve got a bit of an instinct in here.’ He tapped his own forehead. ‘So maybe one day you might make a jack … but you cannot go about raising your hackles to your superiors, nor can you go about not following orders. Get that?’
‘Even if it means almost catching a violent gang?’
‘Even if it means that … but, well done. It could have come out a lot worse, but you’re still here to tell the tale. Not many of us have that sort of experience.’
‘Not sure I want it again.’
‘Sometimes it comes with the territory.’
Henry picked up his mug and sipped his tea, now going cold and unpalatable.
‘Fancy a job?’ Fanshaw-Bayley asked. ‘Bit of a jolly?’
‘Suppose so. What job?’ he asked with caution at the sudden change of subject.
‘Wait here … I’ll get back to you.’ He pushed himself up, but then leaned over Henry, who could smell garlic on his breath and see a crumb in his moustache. ‘Do you know people call me “FB” for short?’
‘I didn’t – but it makes sense.’
‘Fanshaw-Bayley being a bit of a mouthful?’
‘Uh, yeah, suppose.’
‘Wrong. Think about it.’ He stood upright. ‘Hang on here.’
Henry went to find another teabag – he had discovered somebody’s secret stash at the back of a cupboard in the tiny galley kitchen – and made himself another mug, using someone else’s milk also. Then he went to settle himself down on a settee in the lounge area where his intention was to savour his drink in silence, then get back out on the streets. He knew that the DI – ‘FB’ – had mustered a few cops and was getting them to do a house-to-house in Crawshawbooth, whilst Henry wanted to get down to the industrial area at the bottom of Holme Lane and do some of his own enquiries around there to see if anyone saw the Rover being parked there before the robbery, and then if anyone saw the actual getaway car, the Vauxhall Ventora, being dumped and torched there, and the transfer of the offenders from car to car.
Whatever plans FB had for him, Henry was determined to get as involved as possible in the hunt for this very bad set of villains (‘villains’ was a word he loved) because he knew that if they weren’t stopped – and soon – someone was going to get in their way and get blown away. They had fired a handgun at the robbery scene, then fired a shotgun at a police officer, even though Henry realized they were really warning shots and he had been lucky that they were feeling lenient today. These guys were well down the violent-crime continuum and in the near future some poor sod, maybe a cop, would get his or her head blown off.
A fresh shimmer of dread ran through Henry’s body as he re-lived the shotgun moment, his mind’s eye visualizing the gun pressed against the window next to his head. It would only have taken a nervous jerk of the masked man’s finger and Henry would have had no head to speak of.
He placed his mug of tea down, stood up and on very dithery legs he left the lounge, walked along the corridor and turned into the gents’ toilet. He entered the single cubicle and locked the door.
Then he knelt down in front of the toilet bowl, hung his head over it and convulsed from his guts upwards.
Afterwards he washed his very pale face and returned to the lounge to continue drinking his tea.
When he next glanced up, WPC Jo Wade, the new-ish policewoman who had been working comms and the front desk earlier, came in, beaming, holding up a sheet of paper that had been ripped from the teleprinter.
Henry managed a sad half-smile in return.
She sat alongside him on the settee and declared, ‘You and me are going to spend the night together.’
FIVE
Henry James Christie had been born and bred in East Lancashire and lived with his parents there until his very early teens before moving across to the Lancashire coast – Blackpool – for his father’s job. He was still living there when he joined the police at nineteen.
In the 1970s the organization still had a much skewed, authoritarian view on how it treated its employees and had an unwritten policy that all new recruits should be posted as far away from their homes as possible. This could not be applied to every rookie cop, but where possible it was.
Therefore Henry’s first posting was to Blackburn, thirty miles away. It made no sense, but it was a time when decisions made in the higher echelons of the force were never questioned or criticized.
It was believed it was the best thing for new officers to work in a completely strange and unfamiliar environment because there was less chance of them fraternizing or being abused by people they knew, nor could they ever be influenced by their own local knowledge.
It was completely ludicrous, of course, but it was a policy that was ruthlessly applied for many years.
So Henry – who considered himself a ‘sandgrown ’un’, as the denizens of Blackpool are known – found himself transported from the bright lights of the world’s busiest holiday resort to dark satanic mill-land where, much to his surprise, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in the busiest town in Lancashire. What he didn’t expect was to be then posted even further afield to Rossendale, which to him was then an unfamiliar area of green valleys, harsh moorland, derelict mills and unused railway lines and a population, half of which it was rumoured had never set foot outside the valley.
Whereas Henry had never set foot in it.
He still vividly recalled the morning he was told he was being posted to Rawtenstall. It was during his refs break on an early shift in Blackburn and his patrol sergeant came to sit next to him as he wolfed his full English breakfast in the station canteen. He could tell the sergeant was uncomfortable as he imparted the information that due to ‘operational reasons’ Henry was to be transferred with immediate effect.
‘Rawtenstall?’ he blurted. ‘Where’s that? And why … I’ve only just got here, really.’
The sergeant shrugged. Back then, young, single cops were fair game for transfers, and Henry fitted that bill. Rawtenstall was desperately short of staff for various reasons a
nd he was just the officer to plug that gap.
After his breakfast – which stuck in his gullet – he went to find a map of the county to find out exactly where he was going, his head still in a mush from the news. Sitting in the comms room at Blackburn nick, he unfolded a map and stared unbelievingly at it until he pinpointed Rawtenstall and try as he might, he couldn’t even begin to work out a route to the place, which seemed isolated, wild and a little scary. There didn’t seem to be any main roads to it, although he was sure there would be.
He emerged pale-faced from comms, shell-shocked at his fate: to be cast into the wilderness where, he had been told, men were men and sheep were very cautious. And not only that, it was rumoured that because the sides of the valleys in that part of the world were so steep, the sheep had shorter legs on one side of their body than the other, just so they could balance on the gradients. They could not, however, turn to face the opposite direction or they would topple over.
Despite what the sergeant said about ‘immediate effect’, he had just over a month to get used to the idea, during which time he drove to Rawtenstall a few times so he could get the location fixed in his head.
In that time he also had to find new lodgings – or ‘digs’ – as it would be impractical to travel every day from Blackburn, especially in winter when the journey could be treacherous – plus Henry didn’t like having to travel too far to work. He was given a few addresses to check out and settled on a landlady who lived in a terraced house in Rawtenstall. She reminded Henry of the brassy landlady in the film Get Carter who took in and then screwed the Michael Caine character. Henry harboured hopes of the same thing happening to him, being taken in by an older, experienced woman, but it never materialized. Their relationship was purely professional and just a bit chilly. He lived in a single bedroom, bathroom down the hall, breakfast and tea provided with access to the living room to watch TV. There were strict rules on hours and visits by members of the opposite sex, which Henry broke regularly.