‘Nice dogs,’ he commented.
‘Through here.’ She pointed up the hallway to a door on the left which led into a large kitchen. Henry passed another door on his left, from behind which he heard raised male voices.
He went into the kitchen, which was expansive and expensive-looking. There was a double-sized range cooker and a large island unit in the centre of the room on which were the remnants of a buffet. A few plates with sandwiches, bowls of crisps, breadsticks and dips and a wide array of bottles, wine, beer and spirits. Looked like a family Christmas get-together, Henry thought, and maybe the family was in the other room he’d walked past — at least the male members, because here in the kitchen were four ladies. One looked old and wrinkled, two were perhaps mid forties and the fourth in her twenties. All sat at the table, each with a glass of wine in hand.
Their eyes spun to him, this interloper. He flashed a thought: crims’ wives, crims’ mums — crimwags — then forced a thin smile and said, ‘Merry Christmas, ladies.’
Not one of them looked either happy to see him, or happy in themselves. Their faces were all deadly serious, as Henry had seen in the moment before they had turned to him. Each had anger and concern across their faces, but that didn’t stop them from regarding him like prey.
‘This is Detective Superintendent Christie,’ Janine announced. ‘He’s come about Freddy’ — and the tone of her voice meant that she didn’t need to add, ‘If you believe that!’
One said, ‘Well fuck-a-doodle. Just what we need — a cop. Shall we gobble him up?’
Henry’s forced smile remained fixed as he quickly tried to work out who was who. The oldest woman was easiest — Granny Cromer, clan matriarch, all-round vicious cow. He knew her face because he’d seen the mug shots a few times, but not recently. She had a long history of violence and debauchery. Knocking seventy, her hell-raising days were over, but only just. This, Henry thought, was Freddy’s mother.
The other women were not so easy to pinpoint. One had a Cromer look about her: angular, dark eyed, pretty in an austere sort of way. Henry thought she could be Lizzie — who had once been convicted of attacking another woman with an axe and was known as Lizzie the Blade — but he was not certain. She looked like Granny, maybe was her daughter, maybe Janine’s mum. He would have to look at the family tree on his next visit to the Major Crime Unit. The others didn’t have any family resemblance and Henry could not place them. Maybe they were friends of the family.
So he thought Janine could be Lizzie’s daughter. Janine certainly had a similarity, but now that Henry saw her in proper light, she had a softer edge to her features.
‘So why’ve you turned up?’ Granny Cromer asked, interrupting his recollections. She was smoking and blew out a lungful as she spoke, her voice rasping like sandpaper. ‘Snoopin’? ’Cos this isn’t a job for a detective superintendent. My son’s gone missing and I’m worried about him because he hasn’t taken his freakin’ psycho tablets with him. That’s all.’ She scowled like a witch.
‘Professional service,’ Henry said.
‘Have we ever had anything to do with you?’ she asked, peering suspiciously at him. ‘Personally, like?’
‘Yes, you have,’ Henry said, and caught the look of realization on Granny’s face.
‘You’re the bastard who put Jimmy away!’ she accused him.
‘It doesn’t matter what my past involvement with you was,’ Henry said equably, aware that he had entered a nest of vipers. ‘I’m here to help now, that’s all.’ He opened his hands in a gesture designed to say that he was here to offer peace, not war. All he was short of were the butterflies.
Granny’s old head shook and her thin corrugated lips sneered at him. ‘Yeah, fucking right.’
‘So who can I talk to?’ Henry asked. ‘I mean, you’re clearly concerned about Freddy. .’
‘No we’re not!’
Henry rotated slowly at the voice and looked at the man now framed in the kitchen door.
Terry Cromer, undisputed head of the Cromer family.
‘We’re un-reporting him,’ he said firmly. ‘Thanks for your concern but we don’t need any police involvement. We’ll find him ourselves.’
‘Can I have a word?’ Henry said, knowing who he was speaking to and aware that, not two years ago, Henry had put his son away for life on a murder charge.
Henry Christie had been a member of Lancashire Constabulary for over thirty years and he had known about the Cromer family and their activities for most of those years.
Henry’s first posting had been as a PC to Blackburn and, at nineteen, he’d had plenty of run-ins with the wild, out of control Cromer family. They had various homes throughout the east of the county and although the core of the family came from Belthorn, some were based on the Shadsworth council estate in Blackburn, an area they ruled with intimidation and havoc, continually at war with other families and criminal factions. Henry had come face to face with a few of the younger Cromers, usually for minor offences and public order incidents.
As they had matured, their activities became more subtle and old father Cromer — Granny’s husband — took a grip of the family and realized the potential of drug dealing, especially as he could call on some of the more dumb, but violent members of the family to act as enforcers. He harnessed one of his two sons and they moved into the nightclubs of Blackburn and other towns, taking control of the doors — and therefore the drugs trade — and eventually some of the clubs themselves.
The business expanded quickly, but even old man Cromer could not stop the onset of cancer, which killed him as ruthlessly as any bullet, leaving the son — Terry — in charge of the business.
Terry was the favoured son because the other, Frederick, was always a liability. Weak-willed, mentally unstable and prone to outrageous violence, even against his own family. Nor did it help that he was built like a brick shithouse. Freddy was farmed out of the way to live in Rossendale with an aunt, but his isolation from the family only increased his paranoia.
Henry had come across Freddy in the mid eighties when, as a teenager, he tried to strangle his aunt, then attempted to kill Henry. It was during Henry’s days in uniform, working on the crime car in the Rossendale Valley before he moved on to CID
Frantic neighbours had called in the job after every window of the council house in Rawtenstall was smashed from the inside, closely followed by items of furniture being jettisoned into the garden — and, as Henry drew up in the police car, Freddy’s aunt joining the broken furniture from an upstairs window.
Henry was alone, not unusual for a cop down the valley, and he just missed catching her as she slammed down hard and awkwardly onto her pelvis, which he distinctly heard go crack, and which he later learned had shattered into six brittle pieces. He had been doing the obvious, caring thing and bending down on one knee to check out the moaning lady, when Freddy leaned out of an upstairs window and fired an air rifle at him. The pellet thudded into his chest, hitting the personal radio swinging around his neck, one of those Burndept things made of tough plastic, about the size of half a house brick slit lengthways.
Incensed, the younger, angrier Henry kicked open the front door and barged through, only to meet Freddy leaping down the stairs like a silverback gorilla, uttering a terrible demented scream. He launched himself at Henry from the fourth step, landing on him and driving him backwards out of the door, catching the raised threshold with his heel. Henry tipped over, cracked the back of his head — which split — and Freddy straddled and started to strangle him with big, thick thumbs and fingers, about the circumference of pork sausages.
Henry struggled, punching young Freddy on the side of the face repeatedly and as hard as he could, but even though Freddy was only a teenager, he was impossible to dislodge. Freddy’s red, rage-filled face still often came to Henry in nightmares, the wild eyes bulging, the sweat dripping, the jagged but smooth-surfaced lines of a burn mark down the side of his face.