Psycho Alley

by Nick Oldham

  Henry was tossed into the middle of this, limping through a melee of smelly people to find his way, eventually, to a stern-faced triage nurse, who he did not know. She quickly assessed him – ‘You walked in, can’t be that bad, can it?’ – handed him two paracetamols and dispatched him to X-ray. Jane snaffled a stray wheelchair for him, which seemed to have a mind of its own, and pushed him through the corridors. It took half an hour to get that sorted, then he was pushed back to the main waiting room where Jane reversed him into a tight corner. He glowered in a depressed way when he saw the scrolling LCD message announcing that the minimum wait for treatment was two hours.

  ‘Drunken fucking pissheads,’ he moaned.

  ‘Now, now,’ Jane admonished him. ‘This is your community. The people you serve.’

  He grunted and shook his head. ‘I need to call home.’ He eyed Jane hesitantly. She nodded and walked away.

  ‘Tell her I’ll run you home,’ she said over her shoulder. Henry opened his mouth to protest. ‘No … it’s all right,’ she said. ‘If you give me your car keys I’ll get one of the section lads to pick your car up from Fleetwood and get it dropped off at your house.’

  ‘Thanks … you don’t have to, y’know?’

  ‘I know I don’t.’ Jane left him.

  Henry fumbled for his mobile phone, called home and spoke to a sleepy Kate Christie. She was still his ex-wife, actually, the mother of his two daughters. He lived with her and was trying to keep to the straight and narrow, trying to get his wayward life into some semblance of order once and for all.

  As he talked to her, he heard his name being called by a nurse. At first he thought he had misheard. When it was called again, he shouted ‘Here!’ as though he’d just won a full house. The stressed-out, pretty nurse, who was holding his notes, walked towards him with a look of resignation on her face.

  ‘I thought I’d be here two hours at least.’

  She regarded him and sighed. ‘The doctor knows you, apparently,’ she said in a way which made Henry believe she was somewhat pissed off at him.

  SATURDAY

  Two

  ‘Henry, it’s me, Jane. Sorry to wake you at this time.’

  Henry Christie closed his good eye tightly and rubbed it, feeling woozy and confused. Kate had actually handed him the bedside phone, having answered it by reaching across him, then shaking him awake from a deep, drug-assisted sleep. He had not heard it at all, hadn’t even moved, even though the thing was only inches from his ear. He tried to look at the clock, focusing his uninjured eye, unable to do much with the one Jane had punched, which was swollen and caked up. It was five fifteen. At first Henry thought he’d been in bed over twelve hours, then his heart sank when he realized it was more like four. It was five fifteen in the morning.

  His voice sounded disconnected to him when he replied, ‘It’s OK, what is it?’

  ‘I deleted your name from the scratch pad, put mine down instead,’ Jane explained, meaning she had amended the call-out rota at HQ comms so that her name was on first instead of Henry’s. Had she phoned to tell him that? Very nice and thoughtful, but …? ‘So they’ve called me out,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ he said dubiously, brain groggy, not with it at all. He sat up slowly, the pain in his leg numbed by the strong analgesics doled out to him at A & E.

  ‘They’ve found the car.’ Henry did not respond to this statement. ‘The one Uren was driving, the Astra, the one that clipped you. Been found burned out.’

  ‘Oh great.’ To be one hundred per cent honest, he wasn’t completely interested. He wanted to be asleep. Desperately. ‘And? Have they caught him?’

  ‘No, but I presumed you’d want to turn out with me … I know we’ve had bog all sleep.’

  ‘Why do we have to turn out for an abandoned car?’

  ‘Because your instinct about Uren was on the button,’ she said.

  ‘Explain.’

  Briefly, she did.

  ‘In that case, I’ll come. Are you en route to the scene?’

  ‘Er, sort of … if you look out of your window, you’ll see me.’

  Henry stood up and staggered to the window with the cordless phone, pulled back the curtain and saw Jane outside in her car in the grey dawn looking up at him. Her mobile phone was clamped to her ear. She smiled and tinkled her fingers at him. He waved, dropped the curtain.

  ‘Be with you soon,’ he said and thumbed the end-call button.

  Kate was propped up on one elbow, her pretty mouth twisted sardonically. She was wearing a long tee shirt bearing a slogan about how dangerous women can be when their hormones are in the ascent. Her hair was ruffled. She looked sleepy and gorgeous.

  ‘Mm?’ she said.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said glancing down at his naked and rather sagging body. Too much time spent on long investigations wreaks havoc with diet and fitness regimes. There was a massive, ugly bruise which had spread in an oval shape around the outside of his thigh, almost up to his waist and down to his knee. It looked worse than it was, the A & E doctor had assured him, but it felt pretty bad just at that moment. He crossed the bedroom and began to dress, pulling on the exact same clothes he had divested earlier. When dressed he bent over and gave Kate a kiss, inhaling her intoxicating night body aroma which often drove him crazy. ‘See you later, honey.’

  ‘Ho-hum,’ she mumbled. ‘Don’t wake the girls.’ She flopped back into bed, asleep before Henry had even closed the bedroom door.

  ‘How did you explain the shiner?’ Jane asked with a smirk.

  Henry shrugged. ‘Winged it.’

  ‘You do a lot of that, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Winging it. “Wing” could be your middle name. Henry “Wing” Christie.’ There was a brittle edge to her voice.

  Henry stayed silent, his head resting, eyes closed. Jane gripped the steering wheel, her mouth twisted down with disapproval.

  ‘You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know,’ Henry said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You know – work with me. You’ve got Dave Anger’s lug-hole … there’s no need for you to be working the same cluster as me, is there? You could influence him easily enough.’

  ‘I didn’t have any choice … we all got posted around the county when the SIO team became FMIT. As much as possible people were posted where it didn’t cause too much inconvenience.’ She shrugged. ‘I live in Fulwood. Not too much of a hardship to get into Blackpool down the ’fifty-five.’

  ‘Or Preston, or Blackburn, come to that,’ Henry pointed out. ‘Or is it that you’re still spying on me … Anger’s little mole?’ He squinted through his good eye.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, her neck reddening.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said tiredly, past caring.

  Jane had driven from Henry’s house, down through Blackpool on to the promenade, then turned north, the sea on her left. The tide was a long, long way out and the clearing dawn was windless and tranquil, the weather having eased since last night. The huge expanse of beach looked for all the world like something from a glossy travel brochure. There were times when Blackpool actually looked beautiful, but Henry did not cast a glance to his right so as not to spoil the illusion. The tacky Golden Mile would bring anyone crashing back to earth. Instead he tried to imagine he was somewhere tropical.

  ‘Shit.’

  Jane slammed on the brakes. Had it not been for his seatbelt, Henry would have been catapulted through the windscreen. He was literally jolted back to reality, brought back from his dreams of distant shores.

  A scruffy black mongrel dog trotted across the road, a dirty look directed at Jane’s car. She had managed to avoid flattening it more by luck than judgement.

  ‘County dog,’ Henry remarked, referring to the semi-mythical creature which had been used ruthlessly as the explanation for many otherwise inexplicable police vehicle accidents: ‘It was a dog, Sarge, a big black one, came from nowhere.’

  ‘I didn’t see
it coming … I was almost asleep,’ Jane admitted, sounding cross with herself. She set off again with a long exhalation of breath.

  Henry sat up straight, aware that tiredness could get you killed. ‘Whatever happens today,’ he announced, ‘we’ll both take a couple of days off …’ But even as he spoke he had one of those pit-of-the-stomach premonitions that indicated to him there would be fat chance of that happening. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, hoping to keep Jane awake by way of discussion, ‘what else do you know about Uren’s car?’

  ‘Other than the body in the boot, you mean?’

  She drove north through Bispham, then Cleveleys and up into Fleetwood. All charming, romantic-sounding names, Henry thought sardonically, rather like the names of the towns along Route 66. Jane threaded through the streets of Fleetwood and emerged at the roundabout where Henry had originally spotted Uren and his unknown companion in the Astra not many hours before. Just off the roundabout was newly-built superstore, next to which was Fleetwood’s well known retail outlet, Freeport, which sold brand names at much reduced prices. Henry had been there a few times as a customer, but in the many clothing stores on the site he had never yet found anything that actually quite fitted him. He always ended up back in Asda or Debenham’s.

  Jane spun round the roundabout, now heading out of Fleetwood, Freeport on her left. Just beyond Freeport and a few large, untidy warehouses, she turned left into a service road which ran towards Fleetwood docks. This led through a series of tatty, run-down buildings which were once fish-packing sheds and other warehouses, all bearing the hallmarks of a once thriving fishing industry.

  A couple of serviceable trawlers were berthed in the dock itself, but the quayside was littered with several rotting hulks of fishing boats which had once provided a living for the people of the town, together with huge chunks of unidentifiable scrap metal. The place looked and felt desolate, overseen by the ghost of a bygone age of profitability. Jane drove past a scrapyard, at the gate of which stood the classic, stereotypical scrapyard hound; a mean-looking mongrel, a cross between the Hound of the Baskervilles and Scooby-Doo, all bones and bollocks. Then there was a caravan storage facility behind high, chain link fencing.

  After the dock, Freeport could be seen away to their left, and between was a newly refurbished marina in which was berthed an array of yachts and motorboats. Henry was struck by the juxtaposition, old and new, poor and wealthy, clean and shite. A microcosm of Lancashire, he thought.

  Jane drove on. Out to their right was the mouth of the River Wyre. The road narrowed to a cracked, concrete track, then bore right towards the river itself. Ahead of them was a police van with two uniformed constables lounging tiredly against it. Jane drove up to them and stopped. She got out, flashing her warrant card. Henry stayed where he was, looking out across the estuary. With the tide out, huge, dirty-looking mud bars were exposed. The area was wild, rugged, quite barren, the silence broken only by the call of gulls.

  Following a brief conversation, during which the officers pointed directions, Jane returned to the car, shivering.

  ‘Surprisingly cold out there.’

  She continued the journey, taking the car along an ever-narrowing track, past the remnants of old buildings, their foundations now merely outlines in the earth, some areas of flat concrete, some bricks that had once been part of walls, reminding Henry of the remains of a Roman fort. Maybe one day this area would be of historical and architectural interest.

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Another hundred yards and this track stops, then we’re on foot. You up to it?’

  ‘Aye,’ he nodded.

  Jane pointed. ‘Across that hillock, between those trees, then almost down to the edge of the river, apparently.’

  Looking to where the track petered out, Henry saw two more vehicles, one a liveried cop car, the other plain, probably belonging to the on-call local detective. They were parked nose to tail.

  ‘Let’s stop here, walk the rest of the way.’

  Jane stopped the car. She knew Henry liked to stroll up to major crime scenes from a distance: ‘With the sun at my back,’ he would say. He always thought that such an approach gave him and edge, although he could never quite qualify or quantify that with any tangible evidence. But as Jane knew, when dealing with a crime and any subsequent enquiry, gut feeling was not always to be sniffed at.

  Henry climbed out stiffly, his leg hurting, his eye throbbing. It was cold out here at dawn, near the banks of the river, a cutting if intermittent breeze coming in from Morecambe Bay. They walked to the point where the track disintegrated and became part of the scrub; then they continued up the small hill Jane had pointed out between some trees. At the top of this rise they paused and took stock. The land ran away from them, harsh grass and scrub, then became muddy sand at the edge of the river, intercut by a number of narrow and, at that moment, waterless creeks. The tide being out, the main channel of the river was the only water to be seen as they looked up towards the big ICI works a mile or so north.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Jane commented.

  ‘Spooky.’ Henry was momentarily mesmerized by three more hulks of trawlers abandoned in the mudflats, lying there like the rib cages of some giant, mythical monsters. It all seemed very Dickensian, and if there had been mist or fog rolling in, Henry could have believed he was in the opening chapter of Great Expectations. He almost expected to see the fleeing figures of escaping convicts and hear the rattle of manacles.

  Away to their left was where police activity was taking place. They made their way toward it. Three police officers were huddled together in a conflab near Uren’s burnt-out Astra, which had been abandoned there; two uniformed, the third a detective who, when she saw Henry and Jane approaching, broke away and came to meet and greet.

  ‘Hi, boss,’ she said to Henry. Her name was Debbie Black. She was one of Henry’s protégés, having worked with him when he was on CID at Blackpool. She’d done a spell on Child Protection and Special Branch; promotion to sergeant had brought her to Fleetwood, where she was a DS. She noted his eye and limp, but, diplomatically, said nothing. After acknowledging Jane with a curt nod, she said, ‘Not good, this.’

  ‘What’ve we got?’

  ‘Well, you circulated this car last night.’ She pointed to the Astra. ‘So our patrols have been keeping an eye out for it.’

  ‘Splendid,’ Henry said.

  ‘About an hour ago we got a call from a man walking a dog on the opposite side of the river.’ Debbie pointed across to Knott End. ‘Said he could see a car on fire here … Fire Service turned out and doused it down before we got here, then they popped the boot, hatchback,’ she corrected herself, ‘and found the body.’

  ‘Fire brigade been and gone?’ Jane asked.

  Debbie nodded. ‘They got called to a house fire in Cleveleys, but they’ll be back.’

  ‘What are your initial thoughts?’ Henry asked. As much as he was eager to go rooting about, he liked to gather facts and opinions as he went along.

  The DS shrugged. ‘If there hadn’t been the body, it’s a pretty normal run of the mill thing. Abandoned car gets torched. We get quite a few dumped here. It’s a popular spot for it. Another unusual thing is that the fire brigade said the car had been set alight with incendiaries of some sort, plus accelerant, probably petrol.’

  ‘Incendiaries?’ said Henry thoughtfully. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘Which route did the car take to get here?’ Jane put in.

  ‘Same way as all of us, we think, except that where the track disappears, he kept on driving. It’s bumpy, but driveable, until you reach the sand and mud, that is.’

  ‘Have you organized a search of the area yet?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Not yet. The lads’ve had a scout round, but nothing structured.’

  ‘Was anyone seen at the car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the area?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What’ve you done about securing the scene?’ Jane asked.

  Debb
ie looked squarely at her. ‘I’ve only just arrived.’ If she’d said it any slower it would have been spelled out. The two women regarded each other coldly and a confused Henry decided it was best to step in.

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Debbie spun haughtily and set off towards the Astra, Henry and Jane in tow.

  ‘You got some sort of downer on her?’ Henry hissed. ‘Why are you bustin’ her balls?’

  Jane’s head turned and she gave him a cynical look. ‘Why are you defending her? Is she another of your conquests? I thought I was asking reasonable questions about crime scenes.’

  ‘Jane,’ he said bristling, ‘I have not shagged every policewoman in Lancashire, no matter what you might believe.’

  ‘Just two-thirds of them.’

  ‘And anyway, what business is it of yours?’

  ‘None, I suppose,’ she snarled.

  ‘Exactly.’

  The vehicle, although still recognizable as a Vauxhall Astra, had been burned to a crisp. The fire had gutted it. Everything that could have been burned had burned. The tyres had melted. The seats were just springs and metal frames. The dashboard was a gooey mess, the windows molten glass. Henry had seen numerous torched cars and was not surprised to see how little remained, just a charred metal shell. Cars burned extremely well.

  The hatchback was open. Henry assumed the Fire Service had done that, which was something to check on – and the body was inside there. Debbie Black led him up to the car and, keeping his hands in his pockets – an old, but trusted approach to a crime scene – he peered in.