‘How do you think this week will pan out?’
‘Dunno. Bit of a waiting game in some respects. First, Mum. I honestly don’t think she’ll last much longer, even though she rallied a bit yesterday. . just a feeling,’ he said sadly. ‘Then we’ll see if the Twixtmas Killer strikes again, and today I’ll need to pull a big investigation together to sort out the mess of the last couple of days. I’ll get in early, brainstorm a bit. Loads of things need covering. . locations, victims, offenders, post-mortems. . a manhunt for Terry Cromer and whoever was his partner in crime. . all sorts. Just want the first hour or two alone to get my head around it.’ As he talked he continued to dress, staring at the wall for inspiration, assuming that Alison was enthralled and intrigued by his work. ‘Surveillance branch, Intelligence Unit, Fraud, Uniforms. .’ When he glanced at her, she had turned over and seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘So, not really interested, eh? Bloody women. . That said, I did enjoy last night, especially when you flipped over onto your knees and I got behind-’
‘Oi!’ she interrupted without looking round. ‘Save your debriefs for work.’
Henry chuckled, leaned over, kissed her and left.
He was at his office in the FMIT building at HQ three-quarters of an hour later, working out the day ahead.
At 1 p.m. he had a team of detectives in front of him in one of the classrooms at the Training Centre, though not as many as he would have liked; by 2 p.m. they were on the road, fully briefed and tasked. Henry then spent an hour with the IPCC investigators being interviewed on tape, then he was back in his office where he had started pondering about the double murder and had called Bernadette Peters.
‘Surveillance Branch picked him up straight away,’ Rik Dean explained. ‘They’d recently done a job for NCIS on him and Terry Cromer that came to nothing. It seems that this guy and Terry had been doing a lot of to-ing and fro-ing together around the north-west and it’s possible he could be Terry’s partner in crime for the shootings.’
Followed by an irritated Jerry Tope, Rik Dean and Henry were scuttling across to the garage at the rear of headquarters to pick up one of the pool cars. They were moving quite rapidly and as Rik spoke, Henry scanned the paperwork he had been handed.
Kyle Clovelly was the name of the individual Rik was talking about, and he had been mentioned in Henry’s briefing. Late twenties, with a long history of crime behind him, including serious assaults, drug dealing and firearms offences. According to the intel he had recently hooked up with Terry Cromer, mainly it seemed, as a heavy and bodyguard. The information was fairly sparse but a few sharp-eyed cops (and Henry was relieved to learn there were still some out there) had seen him with Cromer entering and leaving clubs in Blackburn. It had been this information that had prompted an NCIS operation, but it had come to nothing, not least because Cromer and Clovelly were surveillance smart.
Since the briefing, a couple of surveillance officers had set off on their own initiative to see if they could track Clovelly down and they’d picked him up in a car driving through Blackburn. They followed him as best they could towards Accrington, the neighbouring town, where he had managed to shake the tail.
Undaunted, the officers had stuck to their task and found the car parked in the West End area of Oswaldtwistle, about a quarter of a mile from the house of a woman Clovelly was supposedly seeing.
‘They’re not one hundred per cent,’ Rik warned, ‘but he has been seen to enter and leave the woman’s house on a few occasions recently and they guess he’ll be there now. They reckon he was just being ultra-cautious about surveillance and they’re certain he didn’t actually clock them.’
Henry looked carefully at the photograph of Clovelly attached to the paperwork. He hadn’t personally come across the man before, but as he racked his brains and put himself back in Cromer’s house a couple of nights earlier, he was almost sure that Clovelly was one of the men glimpsed in the dining room when the door had been opened by mistake by Iron-man Grasson.
‘Right, good call,’ Henry said. ‘Let’s move as quickly as we can on this. Can you get someone in a plain car to keep nicks on Clovelly’s motor and keep the two surveillance bods on the girlfriend’s house, if possible. Front and rear ideally.’ Rik nodded. ‘Let’s convene at Accrington nick and put a quick plan together based on who we have available.’
‘I love it when a plan comes together,’ Tope muttered from behind them. Henry shot him a look. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ Tope said, holding up his hands in mock defeat.
The semi-detached council house stood in a small cul-de-sac off Thwaites Road in Oswaldtwistle. Clovelly had left his car on a nearby estate and it was still there when Henry, Rik and the small team they had managed to pull together arrived at the end of Thwaites Road. They were still working on the assumption that Clovelly was at the woman’s house.
It was almost two hours later. Henry had spent the time poring over intelligence reports, re-checking addresses, confirming the girlfriend’s address, and looking at maps and floor plans of similar types of council houses. He wasn’t expecting any surprises in the layout, but it was best to be certain.
‘I want to try and keep this low key,’ he’d explained to the officers he had cobbled together. This not being a public holiday, he had a few more to look at than over the last two days. ‘It’s not a racing certainty he’s there, but that’s what we’re working on. His car is parked nearby and he’s been seen coming and going at the address. We haven’t got the staff to go piling in, but if he is there — and he could be armed — I want to be in a position to deal with it.
‘I want a discreet perimeter using the support unit, but with every officer in a safe position. The firearms officers’ — Henry had two pairs of AFOs to deploy — ‘will be ready to move as necessary, once contact has been made and we know what the subject’s reaction is going to be.’
‘Who’s going to knock on the door?’ someone piped up.
As much as Henry Christie, detective superintendent, a senior manager in the force, had promised himself that he would delegate everything today, he could not stop himself from blurting, ‘That would be me.’ And then, internally, he called himself a complete arsehole.
Once they were all in position, Henry drove to the open end of the cul-de-sac, parked the pool car and climbed out. His colleague did the same and Henry watched DC Jerry Tope walk around the car to join him.
At the best of times Henry would have described Tope’s facial expression as hang-dog, but now he looked more like a dog that had been hanged.
‘Henry, I’m a desk jockey,’ he moaned. ‘You know, a headquarters shiny-arsed bastard that operational officers despise. . from the Dream Factory. . I interrogate computers, then the rufty-tufty squad go and kick down doors based on what I tell them. I don’t do dirty work, knocking on the doors of suspected armed killers.’
Henry grinned at him. ‘Yeah, me too.’
Both men wore Kevlar bullet-proof vests under their jackets, which bulked out their chests by a few inches.
‘You love it, you pervert,’ Tope said.
‘You’ll learn to love it again,’ Henry reassured him.
‘I won’t. My lair is my desk, my jungle the internet.’
Henry put his arm around Tope’s shoulders. ‘Stick with me,’ he said and ushered the DC ahead of him, along the pavement and up the cul-de-sac.
This was Henry’s jungle, had been for over thirty years. Council estates and houses. Some boarded up. One or two with well-kept gardens, but many with rubbish piled up, fridges and other white goods, old bikes and prams. Scruffy kids in the middle of the road, all with very new-looking bikes and mobile phones and designer trainers, scowling at the two intruders walking past them. Most of his business had come from places like this, most of the murderers he had arrested had grown up in such places, and most of the thieves. He knew that criminals were in the minority, but their influence was disproportionate to their numbers and they made others’ lives miserable. And sometimes the police didn’t help matters.