by Nick Oldham
‘How?’
‘I’ll find out – trust me.’
Silence descended again. He could have told Donaldson he had something up his sleeve to identify the car wrecker(s), but it was something he wanted to keep to himself for the time being.
Donaldson joined the M65, heading in the direction of Blackburn and Accrington.
‘It’s over three years since I spoke to Mark Tapperman’s wife,’ Donaldson said thoughtfully.
‘You never told me he’d been murdered.’
‘No real need. I knew you didn’t know him, so he would’ve meant nothing to you. I don’t tell you everything I know, pal.’
‘And I thank God for that … but there was the Danny Furness connection.’
Donaldson shrugged. ‘He helped her out, is all.’
‘Whatever.’
‘He was a good cop, Tapperman. It must’ve taken someone very evil to get the better of him.’
‘It’s always the routine jobs that catch you out,’ Henry said. ‘Next junction.’
The Dunkenhalgh was a nice hotel, set in lovely wooded grounds close to the motorway. It had even been the location of several of Henry’s drunken excesses during the earlier years of his service. He’d been to quite a few police functions there. He’d even had to work there on police business occasionally. Once, during the mid-eighties when he was on Support Unit, he’d spent a night there policing the local annual hunt ball at a time when anti-hunt protesters were causing a lot of problems. In the end, nothing happened that night, except that Henry and a couple of his wilder colleagues got drunk on duty and, to his everlasting kudos, Henry actually ended up getting a blow job from one of the lady hunt members on a four-poster bed in her room. It had been an exciting indiscretion, made all the more hazardous because her husband was on the dance floor and Henry’s sergeant, a vindictive little man who despised Henry, was trying to find him.
Heady days, very special times, he thought as Donaldson drove up the long driveway to the hotel. How the hell he got away with some of the things he did he would never know. It was a classic notch on his headboard, one he occasionally relived with much pleasure and, sometimes, a cold sweat.
In those days of pre-marriage, he had often been wild and reckless. So what’s changed? he asked himself, then realized at that exact moment, on a complete tangent, why Jackie Harcourt’s voice was so familiar over the phone: she had been the crying woman.
Ms Jackie Harcourt was waiting in the conservatory, a mineral water in front of her. She looked perplexed when she saw Henry had brought a colleague with him, and Henry saw her face drop. He introduced Donaldson and explained he was simply the taxi service, and that seemed to appease her. Donaldson took the hint.
‘I’ll get me a coffee,’ he said, backing away.
‘Do you want one?’ Ms Harcourt asked Henry. He nodded. A waiter came over and took his order as he sat down on the opposite end of the comfortable sofa on which she was seated.
Her eyes did not meet Henry’s, but she asked, ‘Can we wait for the coffee to come before we start?’
‘Sure,’ said Henry, wishing he’d asked for a water now. He’d had so much coffee that morning, he was starting to shake.
He looked at her, reaffirming that she was a lovely-looking lady, even if her lines were slightly angular. She was wearing a black trouser suit with a buttoned-up peach blouse, no visible jewellery. ‘Nice spot here,’ Henry said.
‘Mm. I use the fitness club …’ she said quietly, looked down at the carpet. ‘Or did … kinda let myself go to seed a bit recently.’
Henry would have disagreed.
The coffee came. Rich, dark, Brazilian, probably containing a double shot of caffeine. He sipped it and it hit the spot with a frisson. ‘Now then, you have something for me?’ he ventured. She nodded, still avoiding his eyes. Henry waited a couple of beats. ‘And?’
Ms Harcourt sat up, fidgeting, pulling at her earlobes, her head bobbing as though an internal wrestling match was taking place. Finally she sighed whilst smoothing down her trousers.
‘Remember you told Walter Pollack you’d come back to haunt him?’
‘Yes – not my exact words, though the sentiment is about right.’
‘I said it was a frightening thing to say.’
‘So I recall.’
She paused. Her lips went tight, thin, bitter-looking. Her nostrils flared and she took an unsteady breath. She pinched the bridge of her nose.
‘What is it, Jackie?’ Henry said quietly.
Now she did turn and look at him. ‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ she said passionately. ‘So, so glad.’
‘I take it you’re referring to George Uren?’ Henry said.
She nodded. ‘But even so, the nightmare’s not over.’ Her voice was barely audible now against the background. She inspected her fingernails. ‘Not for me, anyway.’
‘Something happened between you and him,’ Henry guessed.
‘It did.’
Another pause ensued in what had become a very stilted conversation, but Henry knew not to push anything in case it all fell apart. It was an understatement to say his inquisitiveness was burning him up, but something was telling him he had to play this very cagily.
She continued. ‘Whilst he was at the hostel I could sense he had a “thing” about me.’ She tweaked her fingers on the word ‘thing’. ‘And it wasn’t an ego thing on my part, God forbid,’ she said defensively. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone in that place to have a “thing” about me, particularly him. Fact is, most offenders who come to the hostel don’t even give me a second glance. They’re all usually pathetic cowards, anyway. I’m just another authority figure and most of them despise me. But Uren …’ She closed her eyes. Her body shuddered. ‘The looks he gave me, the one-off comments, the sneer in his expression … he made me feel very uncomfortable and vulnerable.’
‘Did he ever do anything?’
‘Not while he was at the hostel.’ She shot Henry a look of warning not to interrupt. ‘Let me finish.’ He nodded. She sipped her drink, hands quivering. ‘When he did a runner, I was glad. He really, really made me scared, not like the rest of them. I was happy he’d gone.’ She did more fiddling about, hesitating unsurely. ‘He had a visitor once, a creepy guy who gave some details – all visitors have to sign in, but I didn’t tell you that the other day because I was annoyed with you. I’m pretty sure the details are false, though. I’ve got the book with me, if it’s of any use.’
‘Why would it be?’
‘Because George Uren came back to the hostel. He came back with the guy who’d visited him that time.’
Henry now knew what the punchline was going to be.
‘They came back together, one night. I was on sleepover week with another staff member … there’s always two of us. We have lockable en-suite rooms at the back of the hostel. The other member of staff was asleep in his room … it was about two in the morning, something like that, my door opened, even though I knew I’d locked it, and Uren and his friend came in. They were on me before I’d even woken up properly.’
She sniffed. A tear appeared in the corner of her eye, balanced there for a moment, then rolled down her cheek. ‘They put parcel tape over my mouth, tied my hands to the bed with it, and took it in turns to rape me,’ she said simply. ‘I’ve never told anyone.’ Then she burst into a torrent of tears, a loud wail starting to build up inside her. ‘I feel so dirty,’ she sobbed. ‘Unclean, ugly …’
Henry’s face had set hard as her words were spoken. His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding with anger. This moment was always the most difficult to judge. Does the victim need the reassurance of the human touch, or does she want to be left alone, untouched? He slid along the sofa and went for option one.
The right one.
The rain had stopped and the grounds of the hotel glistened with droplets of water as the sun poked through and the clouds dispersed. Henry and Jackie Harcourt were walking on damp footpaths under the trees and she had, amazingly Henry thought
, linked her arm through his. Her initial bout of upset had lasted a good ten minutes, but then she had got a grip on her emotions and said she needed air.
‘I once went to a police-run awareness class about rape,’ she told him. ‘One of those “safe-women” things … don’t seem to hear much about them, these days. One of the questions asked was, would you rather be slashed on your face with a knife and scarred forever, or raped? At the time I thought I would rather have been raped; now I know that a knife scar is only skin deep. Being raped wounds you deep down for life. I’d rather be dead, actually. I just can’t get my life going again.’
She stopped and looked at Henry, as if daring him to challenge her.
All this, he thought, coming from a woman who was successful in her career, was good-looking, confident, seemed to have everything going for her. But Henry empathized with her. He, too, knew rape.
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Do you?’ Her bright eyes played over him.
‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘I do.’
She held his gaze and maybe saw some pain in him, too. She nodded, they walked on.
‘They were silent and efficient, like they did it all the time. They didn’t disturb the other member of staff next door, just held me down, raped me, took the tape off my mouth and forced themselves into my mouth, made me kneel down … they must have had keys – to get into the hostel and then into my room. Uren must’ve had them cut before he absconded, knowing he’d come back.’
The M65 was less than a hundred metres away, but the drone of the traffic seemed a million miles away from the world Henry and Jackie Harcourt were now inhabiting.
‘After they’d finished, they gagged me again and tied me back to the bed, then they made themselves a cup of tea each, sat there drinking it, talking quietly to me, and then they left … but not before Uren’s mate said that unless I stayed quiet, didn’t tell anyone, they would come back and murder me. He even described how he would do it.’
‘Who was his friend?’
‘I don’t know. A thin, weasel-faced man.’ She stopped, closed her eyes and thought hard. ‘Uren called him Lou, I think.’
‘Lou? For definite?’
‘When he came to visit Uren, and signed in, what name did he use?’
‘It’s here.’
She unfastened her shoulder bag and took out a hardback A4 size book. There was a marker tab in one of the pages. She opened it to that page and showed Henry, who read the name and tried not to blink: John Stoke. It was the second time in a matter of hours Henry had come across that name.
‘I did something else,’ she said. ‘They left me tied up and I had to wriggle out of the parcel tape myself after they’d gone. I kept the tape.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought that if I ever built up the courage to do what I’m doing now, telling the police, it might have their fingerprints on it. They didn’t wear gloves, you see.’
‘Good thinking.’
‘I did something else too.’
‘Shock me.’
‘I didn’t wash the cups they used when they were drinking tea. I kept them in a cupboard, still with the dregs of tea in them.’
‘Why?’
‘DNA? And fingerprints on the cups … dunno. Did I do right?’
Henry regarded her with awe. ‘You had the foresight to do that? That is brilliant, so fantastic, Jackie.’
‘They’re in the back of my car for you to take away.’
‘That is remarkable,’ he said.
‘Bet you thought I was a bitch, didn’t you?’
‘I thought there was something lurking under the veneer, actually, but could never have guessed this was it.’ They stopped and looked at each other. ‘Why have you done this?’ Henry asked. ‘Why now?’
‘Because it was killing me. It was ruining my life, socially and professionally, even though I did my best to cover it up. I’m as close as can be to a breakdown, I think, and I had to act to save myself.’
Henry stood over the CSI in the her office in the Pavilion Building at headquarters as she carefully examined the cups and the twisted parcel tape Jackie Harcourt had given him. She dusted them and lifted prints and also swabbed the cups for DNA, though she warned Henry a hit wasn’t guaranteed. The fingerprints from the cups were good quality, though. The CSI transferred the lifted prints on their transparent tape on to the relevant form, which she handed to Henry after booking them into her record system.
He almost ran down the corridor to the fingerprint department where a senior fingerprint officer was waiting for him. Donaldson loped behind him, just as excited.
The SFO took the form and booked it into his system. ‘Give me fifteen minutes.’
‘Fifteen bloody minutes!’
The SFO eyed him.
‘OK, fifteen minutes, but not one second longer.’
‘Get a brew or something.’
‘I’m all coffee’d out. C’mon,’ he beckoned Donaldson. ‘Let’s have a stroll.’
Henry led the American out, emerging on to the edge of the sports field which lay between the MCU building and headquarters. The day was improving all the time.
‘I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, but, bloody hell, aren’t fingerprints fantastic? You think crims would have learned, but prints come up trumps time after time. Amazing. One of those fantastic things in life – like a banana.’
‘Eh?’
‘Well, a banana’s fantastic, too, isn’t it? I mean, why a banana? It just doesn’t make sense, but it’s brilliant.’
‘You’re over the edge, buddy.’
Henry’s mobile rang. It was the garage telling him how much the cost of repair to his car would be and that they wouldn’t be able to start work until Wednesday next week. His enthusiasm waned slightly. ‘Looks like I’ll be in a pool vehicle for a week.’
He and Donaldson strolled around the perimeter of the sports pitch. His phone rang again and he took a message from the John Walker, the technical support officer, and made an arrangement to see him later. The pair walked on until Henry said, ‘I wonder if Dave Anger’s in?’ They had reached the avenue which led from headquarters to the Training Centre, the residential student blocks nestling in the grounds underneath the trees. The FMIT block was one of these. ‘Let’s have a look.’
A couple of minutes later they were walking along the middle floor corridor towards Anger’s office. The whole floor seemed deserted. Henry knew a murder had come in from the south of the county, so it was possible everyone was down there.
Certainly Dave Anger was not in residence. His office was empty. It was much as Henry had last seen it – tidy, with photos and certificates adorning the walls and his desk. Henry picked up the wedding day snap, which was actually laid face down on the desk. He showed it to Donaldson.
‘I’m supposed to have slept with this woman,’ he said.
‘She looks nice. Good on you, as they say. Look at his sideburns, though.’
They were indeed comical viewed from the present day.
‘And those lapels,’ Henry smirked. ‘And the kipper tie,’ he added, and was going to say something about the brown suit and bell-bottomed trousers, when his eyes truly focused on Dave Anger’s bride. He brought the photo up close.
‘What is it?’ Donaldson asked.
Henry continued to look at the young woman, then slowly placed the wedding photo down, took a step sideways and bent to inspect the photograph of Dave Anger’s passing-out parade at Bruche, 1978. He peered closely at each female face.
‘Henry?’ Donaldson asked.
The hairs on the back of Henry’s neck crept up as though Dave Anger had just urinated on his grave.
‘Shit,’ Henry whispered, realization dawning. He turned slowly to Donaldson, was on the point of speaking when his mobile blared out ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ again.
He answered it curtly, his eyes still on the photo.
It was Debbie Black speaking from Harrogate.
‘Henry, can you talk?’
‘Yep, go on,’ he said absently, the photograph still in his hand.
‘I did what you asked, showed Grandmother Greaves those mugshots.’
Henry had to think for a moment. ‘Oh yeah, any luck?’
‘She’s a pretty good witness, actually – for her age.’
‘Cut to the quick, Debs.’
Sounding slightly offended, she said huffily, ‘She picked out Uren as one of the guys responsible for stealing from her.’
‘Oh, brilliant,’ Henry said, changing his tone. ‘Starts to confirm our thoughts about how he had been making a living.’
‘There’s something else, though.’
‘Hit me with it.’
‘I showed her a range of faces, obviously, as you have to … and she picked out another one, the guy she says was with Uren when he committed the burglary. She said he looked younger on the photo and he’d changed a bit, but she was adamant it was him.’
‘Who?’
‘You’re not gonna like this,’ she said and gave him a name which sent a shockwave down his spine. Henry went cold. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘make sure the ID is properly recorded, then get yourself back across here asap.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ll be briefing at five,’ he decided on the hoof and finished the call. To Donaldson he said, ‘Let’s go and see if the fingerprint meister has struck gold.’
He had.
‘There are prints on the cups that belong to Jackie Harcourt,’ he said. Henry had had the foresight to take a set of elimination prints from her at Accrington police station. ‘There are other prints on one of the cups that belong to the deceased, George Uren.’
‘Anything on the other?’
‘Yeah – there are prints on the other cup belonging to this man.’ He uncovered a descriptives form. ‘I checked them on the automatic system, then did a proper job with my own eyes, just to confirm what the computer told me.’
Henry stared at the forms, which also contained a mugshot of the man. He picked them up, his hands shaking visibly. To Donaldson, he said, ‘If I remember right, last night you told me Mark Tapperman had been investigating a guy called John Stoke. This morning, Jackie Harcourt showed me the entry in a visitors book to the probation hostel she manages. Someone using the name John Stoke.’