Henry let his eyes wander as Bill drifted through the flat, but not touching anything. Later in the morning the CSI team would be in doing a full job on it.
‘Owt in particular?’ Bill asked.
‘Dunno.’ Henry scratched his head, aware that he did that far too often. He flattened his short hair down and wandered around the flat, feeling that the visit was probably useless. The he went round it again, that ‘something’ nagging at his mind.
On the third sweep, he had a Eureka moment, one of those moments that can affect the whole direction of a murder investigation when there is a realization that the most simple thing has been missed. Henry gave himself a contemptuous mental kick up the arse.
Ten
Henry was hard pressed to recall a time when he had been more exhausted, but the regular slush of adrenaline and/or caffeine pumping into his system kept him going through the night and into the morning, right up to the briefing with his Special Projects Murder Squad, now the ‘SPMS’ to the people in the know. It reminded Henry of something vaguely Roman.
Although his mind was a mush, he forced himself to present the bright-eyed bunch with the developments that had taken place overnight.
‘… but despite all that, this investigation continues until we ascertain whether or not Darren Langmead is Eddie Daley’s killer. Once we have done that, then, yeah, it’s over bar the paperwork, but we need to keep an open mind about it. Just because Jackie Kippax thought he killed Eddie doesn’t mean to say he actually did and we need to keep all lines of inquiry open.’
At first, the news of the shooting incident at the Class Act had deflated the team, but Henry’s belief that Eddie’s killer could still be at large reinstated their enthusiasm. There was something to aim for, not just a lot of paper sifting, which they did anyway.
Henry had managed to snaffle two cars from the HQ transport by sneaking into the office in the garage, purloining two sets of keys and then driving the cars to distant points of the car park so they would not be found that easily. He knew he could get into trouble for it, but he was past caring. The newly formed SPMS needed transport because he was intending to send them out to Blackburn to do some knocking on doors and digging around and there was no other alternative than to steal vehicles. He knew that the lack of staff numbers was a big drawback to the investigation, but he intended to achieve as much as possible in the short time he had left, by targeting them at a few important facets as he saw fit.
He dispatched two pairs and handed them car keys, sending them wide-eyed into the big, nasty world, and hoping they wouldn’t get into too much trouble. He deliberately held back the ex-detective Graeme Walling and the WPC with attitude, Jenny Fisher, to task separately. As they then departed, leaving Henry alone in the office, Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Anger entered, smirking.
Henry, lounging back in an office chair, purposely swung his feet up on to the desk and remained lounging. Anger sauntered over and balanced on the corner of the desk and adjusted his Gestapo-style spectacles.
‘The sick, lame and lazy murder squad, I understand,’ he said. Henry chose not to respond. ‘A bunch of seasoned incompetents, led by a major incompetent.’
‘Captain incompetent, if you don’t mind,’ Henry said, fancying a verbal joust. He was determined to stay calm.
‘Sounds like the job’s solved itself, which is a good thing. At least it means you won’t have egg all over your mush when you hand it over to a real murder squad after Friday — a team which, by the way, I’m starting to pull together now. As soon as the lovely Condoleezza Rice has gone, we’ll take over and start tying it up.’
‘Fine by me.’
‘Just make sure it’s all settled paperwork-wise, etcetera, etcetera … otherwise I’ll continue to humiliate you, even if you think you have Angela Cranlow’s ear.’
They glared at each other like a couple of savage dogs, each wanting to rip out the other’s throat.
Anger eased himself to his feet. ‘Good progress on your last case, by the way,’ he said, trying to rub a bit of salt in.
‘The TV appearance on Crimewatch?’ Henry chuckled. ‘You go on that programme when a job’s gone tits up, don’t you? And by the way, you look even porkier on the box.’
Anger chortled. ‘That could’ve been you,’ he taunted.
‘Nah … I would’ve solved it long ago.’
Anger breathed in unsteadily and Henry wondered if they would ever come to serious blows. He relished the thought of pounding Anger to a pulp, but knew it would never happen. And, regardless of his desire to stay cool, he was finding himself becoming more and more worked up by Anger’s presence and could not resist saying, though he knew it was childish, ‘In case it’s eating away at you, your missus does give good head.’ He immediately regretted it, particularly as Anger rushed him, grabbed his legs and with a remarkable burst of strength, tipped Henry backwards off the chair into the wall. He toppled off, catching his head on the rim of a metal wastebasket, caught napping by Anger’s speed.
Henry was quickly on his feet, ready to go for it, but Anger had already reached the door where he turned and growled, ‘You need to watch your balance, mate.’ Then he was gone.
Henry rubbed the side of his head, feeling ashamed of himself at falling to Anger’s primeval level. Not good.
Shaking his head in disbelief, he walked across to his office in the corner and sat behind his desk, determined to do some brainwork. Suddenly, though, his thinking became blurred with fatigue.
It was just after 10 a.m., so he swooped down to the canteen, constructed a crispy bacon sandwich from the self-service counter, washed it down with tea for a change, then felt himself begin to chill. He had about four hours before any of his team were due to report back and the post-mortems of Kippax and Langmead weren’t due to take place until after 5 p.m.
In the meantime, Henry knew exactly what he was going to do.
It was slightly strange and a little bit decadent to be easing himself into bed at ten thirty in the morning, but also fantastic. He had managed to appropriate one of the newly refurbished rooms in the student accommodation at the training centre, which even had an en-suite toilet and shower, a kettle and a TV. Truly luxurious in comparison to how the rooms were years before, when he came on courses. Then they were basic and uncomfortable and after a night on the razz the choice was either to pee in the sink in your room, or traipse all the way to the cold, tiled-floored toilets at the end of the corridor, then back again, shivering, possibly to find that the room door had mysteriously locked behind you. Henry had peed in many sinks in his younger days.
The sheets were crisp and cool and as he pulled the duvet over his head to muffle the sounds of the centre, he was soon asleep.
The reconstructed face of the murdered and horrendously burned female featured in Henry’s bleak dreams. He talked to her and she replied with tears in her eyes. The words were indistinct, but Henry could see the woman was happy, but worried at the same time. Then the torture came — the drowning, the strangulation, the beating, the flames and out of the fires emerged Dave Anger like a deranged phoenix who leapt into a Rover 75 and drove it at Henry, jarring him into reluctant wakefulness … but only for a moment before he slid back to sleep and the dream evaporated … until he found himself walking down a cell corridor, responding to the soft knocking of a prisoner in a cell. He opened the door, but the cell was empty … yet the knocking continued … until he realized it was not a dream and the tapping was coming from the other side of his own door.