Hidden Witness hc-15

by Nick Oldham

  Two marked police cars and a police van were parked at skew-whiff angles on the car park, as though they’d just been abandoned. Uniformed cops milled around. An ambulance was parked further away.

  Henry said, ‘Who was the first officer on the scene?’

  ‘Her.’ Bent pointed to one of the constables. Henry stopped and beckoned to the lady, recognizing her but not really knowing her.

  ‘You were first to arrive, I’m told. What happened?’

  The officer was as completely soaked as anyone. Even her hat had lost its shape, the brim now corrugated. ‘Er, comms got a call on the treble nine saying someone’d been shot here. Caller refused to give details. I took the job.’ She shrugged. ‘Found the lad there… that’s about it, really. Drew back, cordoned it off, called the jacks in.’

  Henry nodded. ‘Do we know the deceased?’

  The PC said, ‘I’m not a hundred per cent. I haven’t been through his pockets or anything, didn’t want to spoil any evidence.’

  ‘When you say you’re not a hundred per cent, what do you mean?’

  ‘Looks like one of the Costain’s.’

  The name hit Henry. ‘Let’s have a see.’

  The scene had been cordoned off with tape strung from two broken lampposts, really nothing more than jagged stumps, a stack of bricks and a wheelie bin. A crude but effective first barrier for the time being. Henry, Bent and O’Connell ducked under the tape. The police cars had actually been parked at an angle to each other so their headlights bathed the scene until the arrival of something actually designed for the job of lighting up a murder scene. The lighting wasn’t too effective, therefore, but it was better than nothing for the moment and would have to suffice until the circus rolled in.

  The boy was lying on his side, facing away from them as they approached him. He looked for the entire world as though he’d just got down on the ground for a sleep. Henry pulled out his mini-Maglite torch and screwed the lens to switch it on. Bent was holding a much sturdier version that he also turned on. O’Connell had stopped and taken a torch out of her bag, one of those wind-up ones.

  Despite all the lighting, it was only when they were much closer to the boy that they could see the horrific injury to the head.

  Bent whistled appreciatively.

  Henry bounced down on to his haunches, his ageing knees cracking loudly, and shone his torch into the boy’s twisted face.

  ‘Two shootings on one night,’ he muttered. It might have been something everyone was thinking, but still had to be said out loud, although the additional question, ‘Are they connected?’ remained implicit.

  O’Connell was at his right shoulder, seeing the boy from his viewpoint. There was a gaping exit hole on the right side of his head that had removed his ear and upper jaw. The whole face was distorted.

  ‘Do you know him?’ O’Connell asked.

  The thin beam of Henry’s torch worked slowly across the remaining features, open, staring but blank eyes, the mouth contorted horribly, blood oozing out of it.

  Henry nodded. ‘I know him.’ He stood up, knees cracking again, and spoke to Bent. ‘He wasn’t alone, either.’

  He flicked his torch beam around the ground, seeing the scattered and disintegrating chips and other food, and noting the two sets of wrapping paper.

  All the lights seemed to be burning in the house, in spite of the late hour. Henry looked up through the rain-streaked driver’s door window of the Mondeo, his heart sinking.

  It was two hours later, two hours spent at the scene of the boy’s murder, ensuring all that could be done was done to secure and preserve evidence. Henry’s second murder scene of the night. The second shooting of the night. Blackpool had its fair share of violence, but two brutal acts of gun crime in one night took the biscuit, and even before Henry knew for certain there was a connection between the two, his gut feelings told him there was. He just knew that post-mortems, forensic and ballistic analyses would confirm his suspicion.

  O’Connell was in the passenger seat alongside him. She had done all she could at the scene, which was now covered and protected, and would later be combed by CSI and Scientific Support teams.

  Henry hadn’t wanted her to come with him, had said he would arrange for her to be driven back to the mortuary, but she insisted. She was coming with him.

  ‘You know this family?’ she asked.

  Henry nodded. ‘Oh aye,’ he said sourly. He slid his fingers around the door handle.

  ‘You don’t want me to come with you?’

  ‘Nothing personal, but not especially.’

  ‘I may be able to help, be able to offer comfort from a female perspective — maybe.’

  ‘That,’ he said pointedly, ‘is highly unlikely, but suit yourself, you’ll be in for a treat.’

  He opened the door and climbed out of the car, now hearing the dull thud of music coming from a downstairs room. The rain had abated — slightly — and he steeled himself, getting into the right frame of mind. In terms of murder investigations, the buck stopped well and truly with the SIO in almost every respect. That included the delivery of the initial death message to relatives. It was very much his job, one he would not shirk. The flip side of the coin was that, although he had to tread carefully, be sympathetic, empathetic, firm, caring, supportive and everything else that went with telling someone a loved one had died tragically, he also had to bear in mind that the person he informed, or maybe someone else in the house, could well be the killer. It wasn’t exactly unknown for an SIO to tell the actual murderer about the deed they had just done — which was why the SIO needed to do the task. The reaction from the family could be a vital clue to the whole investigation.

  It was a tricky balancing act.

  Particularly with the Costain family.

  O’Connell joined him and they went to the front door.

  The house was actually two semi’s knocked into one, previously council owned, but now private. They had been big houses to start with — four bedrooms, semi-detached — and now the house was effectively a mini-mansion on a council estate. Henry knew it had been bought for a knock-down price because no one else wanted to buy houses on this estate, one of the most deprived in the country.

  Henry paused at the door and rubbed his eyelids.

  ‘I sense hesitation,’ O’Connell chirped from behind.

  ‘You always hesitate before knocking on this door.’ The sound of laughter came from within. The music pounded away, an incessant, never changing beat. Henry raised his knuckles and rapped loudly. No one answered, so he turned his fist sideways and beat the door again, competing with the bass drum. Briefly the music turned down, then reverted to its original volume. Henry then kicked the door, which was flung open moments later by a teenage girl holding a bottle of WKD. She looked wild and unkempt, and was wearing a mini-nightie, had black hair that looked as though it had exploded in ringlets, mascara that made her look like a nocturnal bird and nothing on under the nightwear, leaving nothing to Henry’s imagination.

  ‘Fuck d’you want?’

  Henry had no idea from which section of the family this girl belonged, but she was definitely a Costain. She had the looks and attitude.

  ‘I need to speak to a grown-up.’ He said, flashed his warrant card and said, ‘Police.’

  She was an achingly pretty girl and reminded Henry of an actress from a film adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence novel he’d seen years ago and almost forgotten. That said, she

  sneered contemptibly at Henry’s ID.

  ‘Like I said, fuck you want?’ She started to close the door, but Henry stepped up like an old-fashioned door-to-door salesman, jammed his foot in the way, and surprised her.

  ‘I want to speak to an adult,’ he reiterated, now standing only inches away from her scantily clad body. She smelled of alcohol, sweat, cigarette smoke and cheap perfume — a heady mixture, no doubt. Behind her, the living room door opened and a male appeared, several years older than the girl. He was smoking and drinking from a b
eer can.

  ‘What’s going on, babe?’

  ‘This cop,’ she said, ‘yeah, wants to speak to an adult…’ She jerked her head in Henry’s direction.

  Henry took a steadying breath. It was never — never — easy at this household. It consisted of numerous relatives claiming descent from Romany gypsies and therefore stealing and hatred of authority ran in their blood. It was their default position. However, the Costains went far beyond simple theft. They were like a mini-Mafia family that existed by theft, yes, but also burglary, drug dealing, intimidation and violence. The Costains had a very firm grip on the estate, controlling much of the drug trade and acting as fences for stolen property. Henry had a very chequered history with them.

  ‘The first thing I’ll do,’ Henry said, ‘is exercise my lawful right to enter this property and rip the plug out of your hi-fi system, because you are causing a breach of the peace. Next, I’ll arrest you both for obstructing me, and then I’ll look into under-age sex.’ Here he gave a meaningful look to the young man. ‘And then, maybe, I’ll do what I came to do — which doesn’t involve arrests or anything like that.’

  ‘Oh just piss off… I can’t be arsed with cops,’ the girl said, unimpressed by Henry’s threats. She put her weight behind the door, crushing Henry’s trapped foot.

  He uttered a gasp of pain, pushed back hard, caught the girl, sending her staggering back down the hall, where she tripped over her own feet, lost her footing and thumped on to her backside in a very unladylike manner, revealing all.

  The young man fronted Henry with aggression, but Henry gave him a withering, daring stare and a tiny shake of the head, and growled, ‘If you’re over twenty-four you have no defence to having sex with an under-age girl.’

  The lad’s face dropped.

  ‘What the friggin’ ’ell’s going on down there?’ a huge, booming voice bellowed from the top of the stairs. A man large enough to carry the voice came down a few steps from the landing in a silk dressing gown, his black curly hair in disarray. He saw Henry. ‘You, you fucker.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Henry said, ‘I need to have words with you urgently, please.’

  It was old man Billy Costain, the ruthless patriarch of the family, the ruler of the roost, the father of at least seven Costain children, including Rory.

  The estate known as Shoreside was one of the most dispossessed, dangerous and crime ridden estates in the country. Many houses were boarded up, others frequently damaged by rampaging gangs. Residents tried desperately to be rehoused. Unemployment was about eighty-five per cent. Drugs were rife. Gang feuds were a constant. A row of shops within the estate was now a pile of rubbish. Cops, generally, patrolled in pairs.

  Henry knew it was a very complex social scenario, a build-up of issues over many years and although he couldn’t actually blame the Costains for the downfall of society on Shoreside, it was families like them — feral, ruthless and without conscience — that played their part and thrived, whilst other, decent, law abiding ones suffered greatly.

  And the master of all the Costain strategies and tactics was now sitting opposite Henry in one of the two living rooms in the interconnected home they owned. Billy Costain was head of the family, although describing him as an old man was not really accurate. He was about sixty-two, but still big and strong, a physical force to be reckoned with. He had a fearsome reputation as a pub brawler that age hadn’t diminished.

  The family’s claim to be descended from gypsies could have had a grain of truth to it. Certainly they had the looks of stereotypical gypsies and no doubt there was some of those genes in their bloodline. In fact their main ancestors were Irish, having come across to the north of England in the nineteenth century to make a living as navvies, digging canals and laying railways.

  Henry could not be sure when they came to Blackpool, but he knew they’d been here for at least thirty years and in that time had caused the police a mega headache from generation to generation.

  What none of the family knew was that Billy’s oldest son, Troy, had been an informant for Henry for many years. Henry had used him mercilessly after he had once arrested him and found that he suffered from severe claustrophobia and could not bear being in a cell. It drove him completely mad, terrified him, and Henry used this knowledge and the threat of incarceration in order to get Troy to pass him information. Unfortunately, Henry had used Troy once too often and the lad had ended up being murdered by a top-line crim Henry was investigating — and the Costains were still seeking answers about how and why Troy had met his untimely end.

  Henry glanced around the room. It was plush and well-fitted to the extreme, with a huge L-shaped sofa, a massive TV on the wall with surround sound, a state of the art hi-fi and many expensive looking pieces of garish pottery. He took in all the opulence, juxtaposed against the lack of employment and visible means of support.

  ‘You, pal,’ Costain said, jabbing a finger at Henry, ‘are the kiss of death to my family.’ His jowls wobbled. He looked at Keira O’Connell. ‘But you’re a bonny thing, lass. You a cop, too?’

  ‘Home Office Pathologist,’ she said.

  Costain’s eyes darkened. He looked accusingly at Henry. ‘Fuck d’you want?’

  Henry had been to the house on two occasions previously to deliver death messages, not including Troy’s. One had been for Troy’s brother, who had been murdered, and another time for a cousin who had been killed in a road accident in a car driven by another cousin who’d survived and gone on the run. Though Henry had nothing to do with these deaths, the family was quite happy to blame him.

  And now, here he was, about to deliver another blow, and as much as Henry knew Rory was a wild, villainous boy — a chip off the old block — he felt extremely sorry for the family.

  He and Billy were still standing, facing each other with hostility, on the living room carpet.

  ‘Mr Costain,’ he said softly, using calming hand gestures, ‘Like I said, I need to speak to you and what I have to say is very important.’

  ‘Do I need my brief?’

  ‘No.’ Henry shook his head, but avoided an impatient tut.

  ‘Please. Mr Costain,’ Keira O’Connell intercut with a soothing feminine voice, stepping between the men. ‘Please take a seat, and if we may, could we sit too?’

  Costain eyed Henry, then nodded begrudgingly and edged back into a leather armchair, slightly pacified by her words.

  O’Connell looked at the couple hovering in the hallway, keen to be part of this scenario. ‘We need a little privacy,’ she said and tried to close the living room door. The nightie-clad girl said, ‘Oi,’ to her, then, ‘Gramps?’ to Costain.

  ‘Bugger off,’ he told her, ‘both of you.’

  O’Connell closed the door, the girl eyeing her malevolently as the gap closed, mouthing the word, ‘Bitch.’ O’Connell merely smiled and arched her eyebrows, then she sat next to Henry on the sofa.

  ‘This better be good,’ Costain said.

  ‘Mr Costain, I’ll just cut to the chase… the thing is, Professor O’Connell and myself have just come from the scene of a murder on the car park behind the chippy just off Preston New Road. You know where I mean?’

  ‘Yuh.’

  ‘A young lad has been shot…’

  ‘Oh, aye, and you think one o’ my lads had something to do with it, don’t you?’ Costain concluded instantly, his blue touchpaper being lit. He leaned forwards. ‘Well I can vouch for all of my family, you vindictive bastard.’

  Henry simply stared at him, then said evenly, ‘Mr Costain, I’m pretty sure the victim is Rory, your youngest lad.’

  The words stopped Costain in his tracks.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘I’m genuinely sorry, but I think the dead boy is Rory.’

  From the hallway came a scream of anguish and suddenly Old Man Billy Costain seemed to age ten years.

  FIVE

  As stunned as he was by Henry’s revelation, Old Man Costain’s mistrust of the police, ingrained
and inflexible after fifty years of living on the wrong side of the law, made extracting any information from him a tortuous process. In spite of the reassurance that, for once, the forces of law and order were on his side, blood didn’t come easily from the stone that was William Patrick Costain.

  Eventually, Henry had had enough. Even getting Costain to tell him what clothes Rory had worn the previous evening had been hard work, but he was ninety-nine per cent certain now that the corpse of the car park was the aforementioned Rory. One hundred per cent would only come with a formal family identification, or a photographic and/or dental comparison, which Henry would have preferred. As much as Henry had ‘issues’ with the Costains, even he didn’t want to have to put Billy through the trauma of having to identify Rory’s body. The lad’s head was a disfigured mess and not something he would have wanted any family to see.

  But Costain insisted. ‘He’s my boy, I have a right.’ And despite the less than subtle warning from Henry, Billy was going to have his way.

  The ID took place at the public mortuary in Blackpool Victoria Hospital at six thirty that morning.

  Costain drove to the hospital in his huge old Mercedes, accompanied by his wife of many years, the adorable Monica. She was quite a bit younger than him at fifty and had once been a real stunner, a raven-haired, green-eyed beauty. But the carriage and birth of seven children (plus two stillbirths), heavy drinking, smoking and the long exposure to the sunshine of the Costa del Sol, had ravaged her looks and body.

  It had been a rush to get Rory’s body in a fit state to be gazed upon, an undertaking that entailed cleaning up the face without compromising any evidence, and then wrapping his head in a muslin towel to hide the horrific wounds on both sides, the entry and exit. All that remained to be seen were his distorted features. The creepy mortuary technician, who Henry noticed had a lazy eye, making him even scarier, carried out this prep. A hump would have completed the tableau wonderfully. He did the job under the supervision of O’Connell. The rest of the body was covered with a sheet and was then wheeled on a trolley into the viewing room, and positioned underneath the curtained window on the other side of which was an anteroom for relatives to gather in.