Henry juddered a short breath. No, he didn’t want either call. . what he wanted was a full night and a long morning in bed for once, and for nothing to happen. . but the Force Incident Manager’s voice made this one infinitely more preferable to the call he could have got. The FIM was calling from Lancashire Constabulary’s HQ Communications Room at Hutton, four miles south of Preston. It was the FIM who managed the call-out rotas for the force, deciding which specialist, if any, needed to be turned out to deal with an incident.
Not that Henry was even on a rota that week.
That week — the week between Christmas and New Year — he was technically off duty. Nevertheless he had been out and about all week, from Christmas Eve all the way through to New Year’s Eve. He had been involved in a series of incidents that meant what should have been a week of rest and relaxation had been completely ruined by both work and personal business. He’d had less sleep than ten fingers, he claimed. . at least it felt that way. And he had been waiting for a call each night, and now, on New Year’s Day morning at 3.48 a.m., it had come.
Henry listened. Very fleetingly he wondered if the FIM was visualizing him. Did she see a man too quickly approaching his mid-fifties, standing in a chilly shower room, goosebumps all over his naked body, jotting down notes on the writing pad he’d purposely left on the toilet cistern? Probably not. . the FIM was far too busy to allow such trivial thoughts to enter her head, Henry guessed.
Henry asked questions, clarified any possible misunderstandings, asked her to repeat the location twice. Then he gave some specific instructions to the FIM, who very professionally reconfirmed them, and Henry gave her his estimated time of arrival.
Call over, Henry turned on the shower and stepped into it for a two-minute freshen up, then a shave.
His clothes were already hanging on the door of the en suite in anticipation of the call. It wasn’t formal wear — jeans, a shirt, a sweater and leather jacket (with a tie rolled up in the pocket, just in case a degree of formality was required at some stage), thick socks and practical footwear, a cross between trainers and walking shoes.
When fully dressed, he emerged from the room.
He had hoped not to disturb Alison Marsh, his lady friend, but she was fully awake and propped up on one elbow, bedside light on a low setting. She had a concerned look on her face. Henry felt bad about waking her. She had only been in bed two hours and he knew she was as exhausted as he was by the previous week.
‘Sorry. Thought I was being quiet.’
‘And I thought a gorilla had broken in and was smashing the place up.’
‘Sorry. . I need to go, love.’
‘Which one is it?’ she asked quietly.
‘Work.’
She exhaled. ‘Take care.’
He walked to her side of the bed and kissed her cheek.
Henry made his way through the pub, grabbing his Karrimor Chatsworth jacket as he went, knowing it would be cold outside. He let himself out through the front door into the icy blast of the morning in the north Lancashire village of Kendleton. Up until a couple of hours before the place had been heaving with festivities and the pub, the Tawny Owl, being the only hostelry in town, had been the centre of it. And very well it had performed.
Now it was eerily silent. The only visible remnants of the celebrations were streamers, party poppers spider-webbed out across the car park and several of the cars and a few balloons tied to wing mirrors. On the village green across the road, the embers of the bonfire still glowed and smoked and Henry could smell it.
Henry inhaled the chilly air, feeling it sear into his lungs. He shivered, locked the pub doors and trudged over to his car, making the first footprints in a light dusting of snow. The vehicle was a new Audi convertible, the replacement for his previous car which had met its doom in a very ugly incident on the road into Kendleton six months before. That one had been a Mercedes which Henry had loved, and he was now slightly regretting the brand change.
That said, he acknowledged that the Audi was also a great car.
He slid into it, started up and within moments the efficient heating system was belting out hot air. A heated driver’s seat also helped matters. Then he was on the road.
Geographically speaking, in terms of the county of Lancashire he was about as far away as he could be from his destination that morning.
Kendleton was tucked away inconveniently in the very north of the county and he had to travel well into the east, but it wasn’t a straightforward journey. First he had to get onto the M6 at the Lancaster north junction, then it was pretty much motorway all the way. Head south down the M6, cut briefly onto the M61 at Bamber Bridge, then onto the M65 to travel east into the depths of the county, exit at junction 5, then plough even further east onto the bleak moors above Blackburn on which perched his destination. The village of Belthorn.
Henry didn’t need to use a SatNav, and not just because Belthorn had been pretty much his focus of attention for the last week. He hardly ever needed to use one when travelling around the county, except for possibly the last few hundred metres of a journey. Over thirty years of policing the area had given him detailed knowledge of it and its denizens, particularly the criminal variety.
He knew exactly where he was going on that dark, cold morning, the first day of the New Year. He settled down to enjoy the drive along deserted roads. . and wondered, not for the first time, why he hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to the chief constable and refuse the job in the first place, the one that had been the launch pad for everything else that followed over the week. He should have been more assertive and the chief would have had to delegate it to someone else. But he was playing on Henry Christie’s weakness.
The bait: two unsolved murders. And like a dim-witted carp attracted by a wriggling worm, there were some things Henry Christie could not refuse, even though his gut instinct was to tell the chief constable to find some other sucker.
He bit the worm, because the challenge of catching a killer was impossible for Henry to swim away from. .
‘Half a bloody job,’ Henry had said bitterly. ‘Half a bloody job.’
‘I know, I know,’ the chief constable had responded, accompanied with a ‘so what?’ kind of shrug. His name was Robert Fanshaw-Bayley, known to most people as FB, although no one of lower rank would ever be so familiar to his face. Therefore, by default, as everyone else in the Lancashire Constabulary was of lower rank, he was always referred to as ‘sir’ or ‘boss’, and occasionally — by his deputy or the assistant chiefs — by his first name, when he wasn’t chewing their backsides off.
It was possible that Henry Christie, though a mere detective superintendent, could have got away with the informality. He and FB had known each other touching thirty years, ever since Henry had been a PC on the crime car in Rossendale and Fanshaw-Bayley the young, thrusting, obnoxious DI in that neck of the woods, the smug ruler of the roost. Henry, therefore, knew he had certain privileges with FB that others did not, given their intertwined history, but never pushed it. He liked to keep FB at arm’s length, as the prospect of cosying up to him in any way made him nauseous.
Because of their shared history — weighted mainly in favour of FB — Henry could have made a stand against the rotund chief. He had done so often, though he rarely gained any advantage from it. He could have said ‘No’ on this occasion, but FB had the trump card: murder.
They were in FB’s office on the middle floor of police headquarters at Hutton, overlooking the sports pitches and the huge building — known as the Pavilion — that housed the Major Crime Unit, and beyond that the wooded campus in which the force Training Centre was located.