Bad Tidings

by Nick Oldham

  The floor of the coop was constructed of roughly hewn planks, nailed together to form floorboards. Not a great job – sturdy, as was the rest of the construction, but there were gaps of varying width in the floor, and the whole shed-like building rested on a series of breezeblocks to keep it off the cold, wet ground.

  Freddy didn’t blame the animals at that moment. They were not part of the conspiracy. He held a kitten in one hand, a chick in the other, rubbing his face with their soft down and fur, feeling their vulnerability.

  His anger rose at the thought of Terry.

  Next moment, somehow, the kitten was dead. He dropped it onto the floor in disgust. And so was the chick, squeezed to death in his huge hands. He dropped it too and stared blankly at the two corpses.

  Then he sniffed something and saw smoke curling up through the gaps in the floorboards. Freddy watched it, again not quite understanding what he was seeing.

  Smoke. It rose. Then he felt heat underneath his bottom. And there was a glow and a flicker of flame, licking up through the gaps. The heat became intense. Freddy threw himself at the door, expecting it to be open, as the fire, set from below – the stuffed paper, dried straw and firelighters, all prepared in advance by Terry – quickly engulfed the chicken coop.

  ‘I was at the school that day. Took a short service for the kids, as it happened,’ the old man explained, as Henry and Tope sat back, stunned by the story. ‘Back then I was a bit of a twitcher, though they didn’t call birdwatchers twitchers back then, just anoraks. And, as I’d finished my work at the school, my dog collar came off, my anorak went on, with my boots, the bins went around my neck, and I went birdwatching on the moors. I wanted to see if I could clock some harriers that had been seen up there. No luck. As I trudged back I saw smoke rising from the old coop and heard Freddy banging and screaming in terror from inside. I managed to prise the door open with a bit of old piping, I think. He got some minor burns, his face and the back of his legs, I think . . . but he could have died very easily.’

  ‘And was this reported to the police?’ Henry asked.

  ‘No. Hushed up.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was put down as an accident . . . the reality being I actually saw Terry running away from the coop with his friends and I’m convinced he tried to burn his brother to death.’ The old man looked at Henry. ‘Freddy might be the mad one, but Terry is the evil one. His family said they would deal with it. They were a criminal family even back then and Mr Cromer told me he would burn my church down if I said anything. Even a man of God can be a coward,’ he admitted. ‘But at least I saved Freddy’s life, although from what I gather, he’s not had much of one since.’

  Henry exhaled. ‘Possibly explains Freddy’s more extreme behaviour . . . that on top of his mental health problems. Not a good combination.’ Henry thought back to the dead animals he had found strung up and laid out in the bedroom at his aunt’s house in Rawtenstall on the day Freddy had had his first attempt at strangling Henry. A gruesome, unsettling find.

  ‘Would you give a statement about it now?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I would. Chances are I’ll have turned my toes up by the time it gets anywhere near a court anyway, so what have I to fear? Just an audience with the Lord, which I’m kind of looking forward to.’

  Henry twitched his eyebrows at Tope, who said simply, ‘Revenge.’

  ‘Simmering for years,’ Henry agreed. ‘One thing for certain, we need to speak to Freddy properly now and make sure we pre-plan everything, see what he has to say about it. I’ll bet he’ll be an easy can of worms to pry open.’

  Already Henry was mentally rubbing his hands together.

  ‘I’m just surprised he hasn’t gone for Terry yet.’

  ‘Maybe saving the best till last,’ Henry said. ‘Who knows . . . let’s find out.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Since leaving the company of the old, retired vicar in Oswaldtwistle, having listened to his astonishing story, the following days had been monstrously busy for Henry, and other than the cloud looming over him that was his hospitalized mother, he had enjoyed himself immensely.

  He had been at the helm of a complex, multi-layered police operation which involved lots of doors being kicked down and gang-related arrests made, alongside various media appearances for which a range of sound bites were prepared. These appearances included an early morning visit to Media City in Salford, where by chance he had shared a sofa on the BBC breakfast show with an ageing pop star he had longed to meet and who was on a comeback tour that had hit Manchester the night before. Henry was there to talk about the Lancashire manhunt, which had captured nationwide interest, and the meeting with the old rocker had been a bonus. Henry had got the man’s autograph in his pocket notebook and had excitedly phoned Alison with the news, although she huffed at it, unimpressed. He was also given a pair of tickets for a London concert later in the week, but doubted he would be able to make it.

  Despite the police activity, which was very intrusive to a lot of criminals in Lancashire, Terry Cromer remained at large, as did Freddy.

  Henry knew they would come. Just a matter of time.

  He was also keeping an eye on missing persons, but none who were reported seemed to fit the victim profile he was interested in. One misper did turn up floating in a reservoir, but his demise had no connection to Henry’s inquiry.

  They reached New Year’s Eve without any real success and Henry’s team was dismissed to enjoy the festivities, have the next day off and come back on the second of January ready to get stuck in again.

  That day’s debrief had taken place at 4 p.m., after which Henry and Rik headed across to Blackpool – Henry to visit his mother, who had been watched over by Lisa for most of the day; Rik to pick Lisa up.

  As Rik and Henry walked through the hospital corridors up to the cardiac unit, Henry had said, ‘I’m not saying you can’t have a drink at midnight, but I’d rather you erred on the side of caution.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Rik had been looking forward to getting plastered with Lisa.

  ‘Dunno . . . instinct? We’ve had a quiet few days . . . I know the crims have had cops up their backsides all week and we’ve ruined a few New Years, but something might kick off tonight and I’d rather have one or two of us capable of reacting in a sober fashion.’

  Rik shrugged an ‘OK’. He wasn’t about to argue. Henry’s influence had managed to get his love life back on track and secure him a promotion, albeit temporary. He needed to keep on Henry’s good side.

  His mother looked like a shadow in the bed. After a brief resurgence of health, she had gone downhill fast and life was something she now clung onto only tenuously.

  Lisa crossed over and gave him a hug, then kissed Rik.

  ‘How is she?’

  Lisa shook her head, unable to find words. Henry touched her shoulder tenderly. ‘You go, I’ll stay for a few hours. Not a problem.’ A day earlier Henry had pinned her down and they’d had the unpleasant DNR conversation, sadly concluding that their mother’s wishes should be followed. Henry thought with a hint of cynicism that Lisa had reached that decision a bit too quickly, but immediately chastised himself, for being mean spirited and judging her as the old Lisa, the selfish, self-centred Lisa who only cared about herself, the daughter who saw her mother only as a pain in the neck. Even though it was early days, a great change seemed to have come over his sister since making peace with Rik and rekindling their relationship. She was much more serene and laid back now, as if she accepted that her unstable past was over and her future was with Rik. For ever. And she was happy about it.

  Henry sat next to his mother, who lay there as if she was already in her coffin, hands folded across her chest, legs out straight. She wore an oxygen mask, but her breathing was ragged and unsteady. Before he settled down, he decided to buy himself a coffee and a sandwich, returning a few minutes later with his goods and laying them out on the bedside cabinet. He ripped open the sandwiches, a noise that seemed to wake his moth
er, who opened her eyes as though she’d been prodded and ripped the mask off her face in a panic.

  ‘Hey, Mum, it’s all right.’ Henry gently helped remove the mask and plumped up her pillows to raise her slightly. He could hear her chest rasping as she breathed.

  ‘Not long now, eh?’ she said.

  He stayed with her until nine that evening and left her sleeping. As ever he made certain the nurses had his phone numbers – that of the Tawny Owl and his mobile – on their information sheets. Then he drove back to Kendleton and entered the crazy world of New Year’s Eve at the Tawny Owl, where at midnight he allowed himself a small glass of champagne and bawled out ‘Auld Lang Syne’ without any thought for melody.

  He and Alison stepped away from the crowd in the bar and went outside into the chill of the night, where most of the population of Kendleton were singing and dancing and a bonfire and fireworks were lighting up the New Year.

  They stood side by side, watching the flames and the rockets, Henry’s arm around her slender waist. He said a few romantic words to her, which had the desired effect, and they shared their first proper public kiss, although hardly anyone saw it.

  Not long afterwards he was in bed, alone. Alison slid in about 2 a.m. after shooing out the last of the revellers.

  At 03:48 the bedside phone rang.

  Henry walked a few metres after he had ducked under the cordon tape, then stopped and breathed in the cold New Year’s Day air. Further down the track he could see the side of a factory unit and the car park next to it, the police cars drawn up, blue lights rotating unnecessarily.

  The phone call that had awakened him just over an hour earlier could have been either one thing or the other – his mother, or work. It could easily have been from BVH informing him of the worst.

  But it had been the FIM – who, having been on duty for most of the previous week, knew what was happening and what Henry was interested in. Hence her opening gambit, ‘Boss, I think this could be one of yours.’

  It was now that Henry found himself standing in the en-suite shower room, half-wondering if the FIM was visualizing him naked.

  He hunched down into his jacket – a surprise extra Christmas present from Alison, one that was of immediate use – and was about to set off towards the unit when he heard another car pull up on the main road. He turned to see that Rik Dean had also arrived and parked behind the Audi, and was now walking quickly towards him, flashing his warrant card at the PC guarding the entrance and ducking under the tape.

  Rik was wrapped up in a thick outer coat.

  ‘Henry,’ he said in acknowledgement. ‘Looks like you were right. What’ve we got?’

  ‘I probably know as much as you,’ Henry said. ‘Let’s see.’

  They started to walk. Rik said, ‘How was your New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘Nice, but short of alcohol. Yours?’

  ‘Ditto – no sex either.’

  Henry and Rik were making their way to a light industrial unit at the bottom of the village. Though disused it wasn’t old; built of breezeblock and panelled metal, it was the end one of four units. The other three were in use: one as a garage, another by a storage company, the third by a manufacturer of window blinds. All, though, looked dilapidated.

  The night duty detective emerged from a personnel door in the wall of the unit, adjacent to a roller shutter, and walked across the car park to meet Rik and Henry. They all knew each other. DC Oxford was a steady detective in the middle years of his service who had the possibility of making DS if he wanted. He briefed them, they fitted their latex gloves and snapped elasticated paper coverings over their shoes, then followed him inside.

  It was quite a large unit – Henry would have to be told its cubic area, he couldn’t even begin to guess the figure. But as he entered the unit proper through the door, then a small vestibule, he stopped, astounded and almost overwhelmed by the thick aroma that seemed to clog the steamy atmosphere.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

  ‘Just had a quick count-up and I reckon there’s about eight hundred,’ said Oxford.

  Henry and Rik blew a low whistle each.

  There were rows and rows of them. Eight hundred cannabis plants, all very healthy-looking, with overhead lighting and heating and a sophisticated hydroponics set-up to water and feed them.

  Henry was no great whizz at maths, but he knew that the street value of each plant was somewhere in the region of five hundred pounds. Multiply eight by five and add the zeros – that meant he was looking at somewhere in the region of four hundred thousand pounds’ worth of illegal drugs. He blinked. Good money.

  ‘Who found them?’ he asked.

  ‘Local couple came down here in a car for a bit of nookie,’ Oxford said. ‘Parked up outside to get down to business, security lights came on and they noticed that the door we just came through was open . . . through their steamy windows. They called it in, and the lad says they didn’t even look inside, which I’ve no reason to doubt.’

  Henry nodded, his eyes scanning the jungle of leaves, his head shaking at the enormity of the find.

  Which was not the reason he was here.

  ‘One of the Oswaldtwistle patrols eventually made it up here to check it out and wandered through and poked his head in the office down there.’ Oxford pointed to the office at the far end of the unit, door open, light on. ‘And that’s where he is. This way.’

  Oxford led the two detectives around the perimeter of the unit, using the route that everyone attending would now have to follow. Reaching the office door, he stood aside and let Henry and Rik sidle past him.

  Henry stood at the threshold and let his eyes do the walking, as he experienced the strange feeling of dread and excitement that always engulfed him at such a scene.

  In terms of an office, there was a desk and a chair and a laptop computer but little else. The walls were bare. His eyes roved. He saw the rucksack propped against the wall, a stack of clothes, the Primus stove with a small saucepan on top of it. There was half a loaf of bread, some cans of soup, a cheap- looking kettle, a carton of milk, a jar of coffee and a mug. Two newspapers were folded up next to two pillows. There was also a small two-bar electric heater of a type he had not seen for years, and a couple of raggy-looking blankets and a stack of clothes.

  Someone had been living here, hiding out.

  And that person now lay splayed like the letter X on an unzipped sleeping bag on the cold office floor. The head wound was dreadful. The entry of the bullet on the right side of the face was about the size of a five pence piece, the exit wound on the left had removed about a quarter of the skull, most of which was splattered against the office wall. The sight made Henry’s lips twitch. Even so, the man was easily identifiable. And very obviously dead.

  ‘Jeepers,’ Rik said. He was looking over Henry’s shoulder.

  ‘Jeepers indeed,’ Henry agreed.

  ‘So this is where he’s been hiding out,’ Rik said.

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Oh dear, Terry Cromer,’ Henry said. ‘What a terrible end, even for a man as villainous as you.’

  Henry stepped back into the unit, easing Rik back a step with him.

  He looked at Oxford. ‘Who’ve you got coming?’

  ‘Scenes of crime, and I’ve turned out a pathologist . . . seemed pretty obvious he was dead. And a couple more uniform patrols, just to get the scene sealed properly.’

  Whilst Henry couldn’t disagree with that diagnosis, he always felt it prudent to get paramedics on the scene. Cops could make mistakes in assuming that people were dead when actually they weren’t . . . But he let it slide. He would bet his commutation that Terry Cromer was dead. ‘Have you checked the rest of the unit?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Henry looked across the hundreds of plants – clearly one of the Cromer family’s cash cows as cannabis was still very, very popular and its possession hardly even merited a slap on the wrist. It was always the importer and distributors the police were interested
in cracking down on, not the end users. Along one side of the unit was a set of steps leading up to what appeared to be another office, supported by a metal framework, which would give a supervisor a view across the unit.

  ‘What you thinking, Henry?’ Rik asked.

  ‘Er, nothing, nothing really,’ he said absently.

  ‘Looks like the Costains found him before we did,’ Rik said. He looked back into the office. ‘Also looks like he’s been living like a tramp.’

  Henry said nothing. He always found it best to ingest serious crime scenes slowly. Soak them in, let ’em permeate; start hypothesizing but don’t reach any conclusions. Too early for anything like that. But it did certainly look like this was the place where the fugitive Terry Cromer had been hiding out and living rough, no doubt fed and watered by his family and other members of his organization. Even for someone like Cromer, this was an existence that would have been short- lived, unless it was just a stop-gap before leaving the country. And it was the place where he had met his maker . . . but already Henry had his misgivings.

  The Costains were on the warpath and killing Terry Cromer was no doubt high on their agenda, yet it seemed unlikely they would have discovered his whereabouts, unless someone in Terry’s set-up had betrayed him. That was a likely scenario in a world where allegiances were fickle, and it would be one line of enquiry . . . but Henry wasn’t convinced.

  The yellowish glow of the lighting suspended above the cannabis plants made for an eerie radiance, not really suitable for searching properly – that would have to be carried out in daylight, with proper lighting rigs. But before focusing on the body in the office, he wanted to have a quick look around the place without spoiling any evidence there might be to find.

  He switched on his Maglite torch and began to edge around the perimeter of the unit, right up by the wall, until he reached the steps that led up to the elevated office. He stopped here and shone his torch up at the office door, which was closed. From this position he looked across the bushes, most of which were as tall as he was, then flashed his torch up the wooden steps again, to the door above him.