‘Don’t push it, Henry. You might well be up FB’s shitter, but that doesn’t mean to say you’re untouchable,’ Anger responded with a dangerous undertone. ‘You haven’t informed me, that’s the point I’m making.’
‘Only because it’s a straight-up, no complications murder. All angles covered. One body, one offender — who is too drunk to be properly interviewed now. You don’t need to be told. The morning would suffice.’
‘Judgement call, eh?’ Anger sneered. ‘We all know about your judgement calls, don’t we?’
‘Procedural call, actually,’ Henry corrected him.
‘I like to be kept up to date.’
‘OK, fair do’s,’ Henry acceded, seeing no mileage in annoying Anger any further. He’d made his point. ‘I’ll tell you in future.’ He did not have the willpower to carry on an argument at that moment in time.
‘So it’s sorted?’
‘Yes. . I’ll go back across in the morning. We’ll have the offender in court by the afternoon.’
‘OK, fine.’ Anger hung up.
‘Twat,’ Henry uttered, feeling himself flush red. He took a deep breath and put his foot down. The motorway was quiet and, just to be awkward, he moved out to the fast lane and stayed there.
The second call he received on his mobile was totally unexpected. He received it as he looped round on to the M6 northbound. The display on the phone told him that the person calling had withheld their number. He assumed it would be control room contacting him with another death, perhaps, as all calls from police numbers were automatically withheld.
‘Henry Christie.’
At first all he could hear was a hollow, metallic emptiness. He repeated his name.
‘Hello. . hello. . Henry?’ came the female voice he recognized instantly.
‘Tara?’
‘Henry — hi.’
He did a double-check of the time on the dashboard clock.
‘Tara — hello.’
The connection seemed to break and then re-establish itself. He knew why it was a poor line. She was calling from Lanzarote.
Her name was Tara Wickson and it was because of a request from her that Henry had become involved in something whilst suspended from duty. A little something, a favour that had ended up in a complex and murderous investigation into Mafia activity and connections across the world. Henry had foolishly become embroiled because he had been bored witless whilst on suspension, then the whole kit and caboodle had got completely out of hand. He could trace his involvement back to the fact that Tara was a very attractive and sexy woman, appealing full-on to Henry’s main weakness in life: the female of the species.
After it was over, Tara and her daughter had gone away to help them recover from the trauma they had undergone.
‘What’s up?’ Henry asked.
‘I’m sorry to call. I half-expected your phone to be off. . I was just wondering how things were going,’ she said weakly.
Why at this time of day, Henry wondered. ‘Oh, slowly,’ he said. ‘It’s all very complicated. Another of my colleagues is actually dealing with it. I’m involved, obviously, but it’s not my job, if you know what I mean?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ She sounded distant. More than just in a geographical way.
‘What’s the matter, Tara? How are you?’
‘OK — ish. Physically battered, as you know; mentally fucked up, feeling guilty.’
‘Don’t,’ Henry counselled her quickly, firmly. ‘There’s a lot to get over, a lot to come to terms with, but you can do it. I have total faith in you.’
Once again, the line seemed to go dead. Then Tara’s voice came back. ‘No one has ever said they have faith in me,’ she said tearfully.
This time it was Henry who hit the pause button. He gulped. ‘How’s Charlotte?’
‘Bearing in mind what she went through, pretty good.’
‘Nice to hear that.’
‘Henry?’ Tara’s voice faltered. ‘I’m really sorry to bother you. . it’s just that I can’t stop thinking about you. . and what you did for me.’
‘Don’t. . it’s OK,’ he insisted.
‘But I can’t stop thinking about you. . you put yourself out for me and you did something that has deeply affected me. . shit!’ The line then did go dead, leaving Henry open-mouthed, hurtling along at ninety miles per hour, his mind not on the driving, and he almost missed the Blackpool exit off the M6. He could easily have landed in Lancaster, but he veered left just in time and gunned the car west towards the coast, wondering what the hell Tara had meant.
Was it that she had fallen for him?
Or was it that she’d been thinking about what Henry had actually done for her and she was now having mega problems in coming to terms with it?
The former thought was reasonably pleasant; the latter made him shudder, because if Tara bottled out, Henry would be finished for good. He could say ‘ta-ra’ to his pension and possibly ‘g’day’ to a prison cell.
The third call on his mobile was the one that kept him from hysteria. It was another job, this time much closer to home.
In some ways, Henry was relieved. This, too, looked as though it would be pretty straightforward to solve: stolen car, pursued by police, driver crashes and legs it, one dead passenger in the car. They knew who the felon was — local toe-rag, prolific offender — the only problem being tracking him down. Only a little problem, because people like Roy Costain are creatures of habit and sooner, rather than later, he would be caught. This would be an easy one to bottom, Henry thought as he surveyed the wreckage. The hard part here would be dealing with the media uproar that would be caused. Another fatality caused by a reckless police chase. Henry could visualize the headlines now.
Bugger, he thought.
He walked round the stolen Ford Escort, now mashed sideways on to the front end of a black cab. Stopping at the front passenger side window, Henry bent down and looked at the young girl, the body not yet having been removed from the scene.
Henry knew Renata, just as he knew Roy and the rest of the Costain family, which had a notorious and fearful reputation in Blackpool. He had encountered Renata a couple of times. Young though she was, she dallied on the periphery of the main activities of the Costains; bit of a shoplifter, bit of an assaulter on other girls, bit of an old-lady mugger. Her future was pretty much mapped out: crime, unwanted pregnancies, abuse. . probably. Who was Henry to say? Maybe she would have turned her back on it all, become respectable.
Whatever, her death was a tragic waste. Henry hated it when young people died.
Standing upright, he turned. Looking north up Dickson Road he saw the figure of a man hurtle across the road as though his life depended on it.
‘Mr Christie?’
Henry’s puzzlement about what he had seen was curtailed by the appearance of the local road policing sergeant. But before he could respond to the officer, another figure raced across the road, as though in pursuit of the first one.
‘Boss?’
Henry’s attention twisted to the sergeant. ‘Yep?’
‘Can we get the body moved now?’
‘I think so, yeah. . I need to speak to the officers in the vehicle which chased this one as soon as; but before that I’ll need to contact your divisional commander and my super. Both will want to have a handle on this,’ he said, ever so slightly troubled by the image of the dark shapes running across the road. Why he was affected, he could not really say. Blackpool is Blackpool, he thought wryly, one of the weirdest places on planet earth. He shrugged. Bollocks to it. He had more on his plate to think about than two idiots running around town in the early hours.
Renata’s dead, but wide-open eyes seemed to catch his, sending a shiver down his spine.
‘We’ll catch him, lass,’ Henry said under his breath, ‘but you shouldn’t have been here in the first place.’
As he walked back round the Escort, something in the glint of the streetlights reflecting on the front windscreen made him stop. He stopped, puzzled, eyebrows meshing together.